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It makes a difference how you picture Jesus. I’ve discovered how you can go to “Google Image” on the internet and type in “Jesus” and instantly have before you tens of thousands of images to check out.

Since pretty early on, there has been a tendency to picture Jesus as either something of a “superhero“, with bulging biceps, or with an untouchable serenity, even placid, as though nothing ever really disturbed him.

When you read the Gospels in any depth, you can’t help but let go of these image of Jesus. Especially in Matthew, Mark and Luke, you encounter a Jesus who gets both angry and sad. You see a Jesus who in the Garden of Gethsemane is truly suffering over the death that lies before him. And in Mark’s Gospel, you even hear Jesus crying out on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”

In other words, you get a Jesus who suffered not only physical pain, but severe emotional and spiritual pain as well.

When you turn to John’s Gospel, you find a Jesus with a theological overlay that can make him appear at times as though he is “above it all.” But even John seems determined to let us know that Jesus did in fact suffer in his spirit. It’s John’s Gospel that gives us the unforgettable, “Jesus wept.” And although there is no “Garden of Gethsemane” scene in John’s Gospel, in the passage we read this morning we do hear Jesus unequivocally declare, And the author of the letter to the Hebrews makes the same point when he writes,

with loud cries and tears…”

Back in the 70s, Elizabeth Kubler-Ross began studying an area that until then had been largely ignored (or avoided — understandably so, perhaps) — the psychological process of dying. She spent countless hours over many years listening to people who were dying with a terminal illness. She identified five stages that a person typically moves through in approaching death: denial, bargaining, anger, depression, and finally acceptance.

She made it clear that the stages aren’t neat and tidy, and that a person can jump back and forth between the various stages. But the larger point she established is that there is no short cut to acceptance. There is a process involved in reaching acceptance that unavoidably involves pain and struggle.

Over time, it became apparent that the stages Kubler-Ross identified in the process of dying were also in play regarding other experiences of loss; the process by which a person grieves the death of a loved one, or the loss of a relationship, a vocation, a home, or a hope. The truth of the matter is that life involves lots and lots of smaller deaths that prepare us for dying itself.

The process takes time. A person can dig in their heels in an attempt to avoid the process altogether, but generally speaking all they will manage to do is prolong the process. A person a can try as best they can to be open to the process, but that doesn’t mean the trip will become easy.

I am by nature a pretty shy guy. This was a particular problem in the years of my early adolescence, when I became aware of girls, and that powerful desire to “find somebody to love.” Through junior and senior high school, I essentially sat on the sidelines and watched as my peers went through the mating rituals involved with dating.

“Now is my heart troubled.”

A sermon preached on March 22, 2009 based upon John 3:14 – 21, entitled “Why the Good People Killed Jesus”

Last week I talked about the ultimate reference point in our moral decision making. This morning I want to again ask about our “ultimate reference point” when it comes to answering that most basic of questions: specifically, “How do I say ‘yes’ to my life?” How do I find the capacity to get up out of bed in the morning and embrace my particular life with its unique mixture of burdens and opportunities?

The standard reference point in answering this question is so broadly practiced, so unquestioned, so commonly practiced, that it can be difficult to even imagine an alternative reference point. It is, of course, me, myself. I take the place of the judge, the value-assessor of my life.

In the role of the judge of my life, where do I look for evidence to render my verdict as to whether or not my life is worth saying yes to? Well, I look to other people, and I compare myself to them. Comparisons become everything. I render a positive verdict when I look to at other people and what I see leads me to conclude that I am smarter, better looking, more successful, just plain better — whatever the particular criteria that seems to matter most in the present moment.

I render a negative verdict about my life when I look at other people and they seem to be “better” than me — again, in terms of the particular critieria of the moment.

When we function out of the standard reference point, there is a tendency for us experience a fluctuation in our judgments. At one moment we’re feeling pretty good about ourselves, but then something shifts in the evidence being considered, and suddenly we find ourselves feeling really bad about ourselves.

Over time, though, as we function out of the reference point of ourselves, we tend to gravitate towards either seeing ourselves basically as a “winner”, or, as basically a “loser.“ The “winners” have moments, of course, when they question the verdict they have pronounced upon themselves, but generally speaking, they do what they can to distract themselves from dwelling for very long in such thoughts.

Generally speaking, neither the “winner” verdict or the “loser” verdict is very reality based; the lives of all of us are a great deal more ambiguous than that.

We take it for granted that the mark of a successful life is when a person can compare themselves with other people as come to the conclusion they are one of the “winners” or the “good people.” When we raise our kids, effective parenting is generally considered manipulating our children’s life in such a way that they get abundant opportunity to experience themselves as a winner so they can cultivate that “winner” identity.

So it turns out there is a “dark side” to being what is generally thought of as a “winner.” If I rely on being a winner in order to say yes to my life, then there will be this sinister way in which I will need others to be “less than” me; I will need others to be “down” so I can feel “up”.  On the one hand, Jesus just wouldn’t buy into the distinctions that the successful people relied upon to feel good about themselves. In Jesus’ mind, there weren’t any“good people” who had the right to look down on “bad people”; in Jesus’ mind, we’re all in this thing called life together. (Once, in response to someone calling him “good teacher”, Jesus said, “Why do you call me ‘good.’ No one is good but God alone.”)

On the other hand, the transparency of Jesus to the light of God was so extraordinary that he did in fact walk on an altogether different plain in regard to “righteousness.” His goodness was the real deal; there was “no play acting” involved for Jesus. He was the embodiment of God’s love, and in comparison, everybody else’s love paled in comparison.

Jesus was, as John says, “the light of the world” and light is a funny thing. It is, of course, good and essential. We’d be lost without light. But light also reveals the darkness we would rather keep hidden away.

There is this strange story in Luke’s Gospel where Jesus is teaching from Simon Peter’s boat, and when he is done, he commands Simon to lower his nets into the sea, which he reluctantly does. To his astonishment, Simon catches this tremendous load of fish overflowing his nets, at which point he falls down at the feet of Jesus and cries, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man!” In other words, in the moment in which Simon recognizes the holiness he is in the presence of, he simultaneously has his own darkness revealed to him as well.

The greatest surprise of all for Simon when he quickly realizes that this holiness isn’t rejecting him; no, it is calling him — wants to use him, despite the fact of that there is yet much darkness within. (Apostle Paul discovered the same amazing grace on the road to Damascus.)

So 2000 years ago you had these “good people” feeling pretty pleased with themselves, feeling like “winners” in the righteousness competition. But when Jesus comes to town, they felt this distressing pressure within themselves to look at parts of themselves that they would very much prefer looking at — their self-righteousness, say, or the ways in which they were deceitful, or hardened their hearts, and their feeling was, “If we go to these places in our hearts, we will lose the capacity to say yes to our lives which we’ve worked so hard to build.”

So without thinking through what they’re doing, they conspired to put out the light, which is exactly what John is getting at when he tells us in this morning’s Gospel lesson that although “God did not send Jesus into the world to condemn the world, but to save it, the verdict was nonetheless this: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light.”

The coming of Jesus really was good news, which John sums up by saying,

“God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

There is wonderfully good news expressed in this famous verse, but I think the good news often gets obscured. First off, when John says, “whoever believes in him,” we miss what he is talking about if we reduce this to “knowing the creed”, knowing the formula, and being able to recite it like a parrot, which too often is what Christianity has been reduced to.

No, what is being talked about here is that we are given a gift — an unconditional love which gives us an altogether different reference point, out of which we are empowered to say “yes” to our lives. To “believe in him” a willingness to receive the gift — to put our trust in this gift.

Another way this verse gets misunderstood is by interpreting the words “perish” and “eternal life” as referring to an after-life destination of either hell or heaven.

Eternal life, as John refers to it, is a quality of life that begins right now, and yes, it will continue beyond death, but it begins in the here and now. It means being delivered from the vicious death trap of self-justification, of never quite being “good enough”, and being dependent on putting others down so that we can be up.

How many marriages, work places, churches families, etc. etc. have been torn apart by this compulsive need to negate others so that I can affirm myself?

There is this weird verse that began our Gospel lesson that you probably responded to with a “huh?” when you heard it:

“Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the desert, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believed in him may have eternal life.”

It references a bizarre story in the Old Testament in which the people sin and God punishes them by having snakes bite them with a fatal venom. As an antedote to the poison, God has Moses hold up a bronze snake for the people to look at, the sight of which brings healing.

It’s a bizarre little story indeed, but John uses it to make the point that when Jesus is lifted up on the cross, we are allowed to see the inevitable outcome of all our vain attempts to justify ourselves through the bottomless pit of comparison with others, and thereby saved from this destruction.

Moving into this wholly-other reference point by which we find the power to embrace our lives isn’t something we can just think our way into. Nicodemus got frustrated when Jesus used the imagery of being “born from above” to describe this shift in consciousness: “What am I supposed to do, climb back inside my mother’s womb and get myself ‘born again’? He had that much right. You can’t birth yourself. It is a work of the holy spirit, that blows where it will.

All you can do is to know of the possibility of this shift in reference point, and be open when the spirit starts to move in your life.

I went to a district gathering of clergy this week, and at one point the speaker had us turn and share the story of our calling to ministry with a neighbor. A woman I hadn’t know shared how when she was just seven, she had fallen out of a car driving at a high speed, and amazingly survived without sustaining any serious injury. The experience had been a trigger for her, leading to a great deal of reflection on the meaning of her life.

This in turn led me to share the story I have told a number of times before, regarding how when I was nine, I went one summer afternoon with a friend to swim in a “man made lake”. I wasn’t a very good swimmer. At one point I was swimming alone, with my eyes closed because of the murky water, when I somehow crossed over the rope that marked the sharp drop off into the deep water. When I went to stand up, there was no bottom beneath my feet, and I proceed to sink into the deep water. I panicked, thrashing my arms about, which simply made the situation worse. I would have drowned, except for the fact that a stranger saw me and saved me, grabbing hold of me and taking me to the shore where he deposited me. He disappeared, and I sat there coughing out the water. No one seemed to have noticed, and finding the experience so distressing, I told no one about it either.

In some ways the worst part of the experience was the weeks and months that followed. Whenever I would be alone with my thoughts, I would obsess over the fact that I had almost drowned. At night, lying alone in my bed, waves of anxiety and dread would flow over me, as I thought about the fact that I had come so very close to having my life snuffed out and my body buried in the earth in a coffin.

And then one night in a cold sweat, not being a particularly religious kid, I cried out in desperation to God, and suddenly the anxiety and dread left me, never to return. At the time I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about who it was that had answered my cry — I was a kid and just relieved to be able to get back to being a kid, free from anxiety and dread. But I thought about it as the years passed.

In that moment, I caught a glimpse of that ultimate reference point. It’s not all about me. There is this God who made me and along with the sparrow and every other living being, has his/her eye upon me. This God loves me, and whether I live, or whether I die, I’m in the hands of God.

We sang this old verse before I began preaching this morning. The imagery speaks of Christ being a solid rock. It declares that apart from the love that he reveals, we will ultimately sink. Let’s finish with that verse again:

“When darkness veils his lovely face, I rest on his unchanging grace. In every high and stormy gale, my anchor holds within the veil. On Christ the solid rock I stand, all other ground is sinking sand; all other ground is sinking sand.”

Although there are a lot of differences from culture to culture regarding what a moral life looks like, there are some basic universal principles. For instance, every culture has some version of the golden rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”  An awareness of these moral principles shows up at a very early age in children. I recently heard about a study regarding the moral understanding of children in pre-school programs. The researchers asked, Who makes the rules?

“The teachers,” answered the children.  Can the teachers change the rules? asked the researchers.

In response the children showed a remarkable capacity for nuance:

“Well… it depends,” said the children.  “If a teacher wants to change the rule about how we have to sit in the circle during story time, they can do that. But the ‘no hitting rule,’ that one can’t be changed.” Why not?

“Because we have skin, and skin hurts when you hit it.”

Some rules teachers can change. Others they can’t. Whether or not kids have a concept of God, they realize that some rules come from a deeper place than the “sit in the circle at story time” rule.

At Mt. Sinai that deeper place was identified as God, the creator of the universe.

As we grow up, moral decision making becomes all the more confusing.  I remember that when my kids all had their graduation ceremonies from elementary school, the drug prevention program “DARE” was incorporated into the program. With the police officer looking on, certain kids were invited to give little speeches in which they spoke for all their classmates regarding how convinced they were of the rules the officer and their teachers had taught them concerning how using drugs, including cigarettes and alcohol, were bad choices, and they assured us that we would never catch them using such terrible things.

And yet I knew even then that in just a couple of years, many of these same kids would come to question the rules they had been taught, in large part because in their growing sophistication they would become aware that there are lots of adults who use cigarettes, alcohol and even drugs, and lightning hasn’t struck them dead, in fact, they seem to be enjoying these things.

It gets pretty confusing out there, to say the least.

If we are brave enough to broach the subject, we teach our kids that sex is a good and beautiful gift given to us from God, a gift given to express a deep and committed love between two people. Perhaps we warn them just how powerful sex is and how outside the proper bounds it can cause great damage to human spirits — all of which is implied in the commandment, “Thou shall not commit adultery.”

But soon enough the kids are watching t.v. shows and movies and seeing advertisements and reading articles in magazines at the check out lines, all of which seem to offer quite a different image of sex, and, well, the moral waters regarding sex begin to appear rather murky. 

As Christians, we look to Jesus to be our moral guide, but in certain ways Jesus seems to cloud the waters even further. He was constantly in conflict with the public moralists of his day, the Pharisees, who saw things pretty black and white in terms of following the rules.  He seemed to see “self-righteousness” as a more dangerous sin than the more publicly acknowledged sins.

Jesus had relatively little to say about sex and drugs — perhaps because there already was plenty being said about these things — but he had a lot to say about the moral decisions involved in our use of money, which often have been harder for Christians to listen to.

The primary reason that we are in the present economic crisis is our failure to recognize the moral choices that were involved in our daily economic life. People in positions of power and authority broke the commandments about stealing and bearing false witness. The rest of us were routinely seduced into breaking the 10^th commandment, which, since it gets so little attention, I suspect most of us would be hard pressed to name. Anybody want to try?

Too often we have bought into the world’s measure of a person, which has to do with whether we find ourselves among the envied or the envious?  When we counsel our young people in regard to what they will do with their lives, the primary question we tend to ask in considering a particular kind of work has been, will it make you good money?  Only secondarily do we ask, a) will this work enable you to make a contribution to the world? or b) will this work utilize your God-given passion and gifts?

On our money it says, “In God we trust.”  But our money lies; more often than not it is money in which we trust.  The idol of money has been letting a lot of people down lately.

In the end, the real question is this: what is the ultimate reference point when it comes to deciding what’s right and wrong?  More often than not, the ultimate reference point is seen to be me, myself. When we seek to determine whether I should do something or not, the answer is generally found in: will I benefit in taking this action?

It does get confusing.  Generally speaking, God does have what we commonly think of as “our best interests” at heart.   What is in our best interests, and what is God’s will, may often be the same thing.

The problem arises when our self interest and the will of God come in conflict.   If I am the ultimate reference point, then all kinds of things can be justified – lying, stealing, adultery — it’s all okay as long as I don’t get caught. If I cover my tracks, and nobody ever finds out what I did, well, what harm is done?

Even killing can be justified when me and mine are the ultimate reference point.  If we decide certain people have no value whatsoever; that indeed, their presence on this earth has become a problem for the rest of us, what’s to keep us from taking the prerogative of God and removing them from the land of the living?

One thing that really set Jesus off was when people gave lip service to God while making themselves the ultimate reference point of their actions, turning God into nothing more than a servant boy for what I want.

This past week I was listening to the radio when they interviewed a woman who had just bought a new house at bargain basement prices at a public auction.  Although she made a perfunctory nod towards the person whose suffering — a home foreclosure — had brought about her good fortune, it was clear that she didn’t want to tarry there. Basically, she was gleeful, and I was struck by her precise words: “I just believe God wanted me to have this house.”

Now I’m not necessarily taking a position here on whether it is right or wrong to buy a home from a public auction — the moral waters are often murky. But for God’s sake, let’s not use God to justify our actions! Remember the 3^rd commandment: “You shall not make wrongful use of the name of the Lord your God.”

All four Gospels agree that the first thing Jesus did when he arrived in Jerusalem was go to the Temple where he drove out the money changers and those who were selling the animals, ripping off the poor, all in the name of God. “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”  In doing this, Jesus wasn’t acting in his own self interest. It was the action that, more than any other, got him nailed to the cross. But some things are more important than mere self-interest.

Jesus was outraged by the pollution he witnessed in the holy temple. The purpose of a temple — a sanctuary — is to remind people that, in this often confusing, chaotic world, there really is an absolute reference point: the holy one, the living God, the one who gave us life and called us on this journey, the one who ultimately judges our actions.

God is God and we are not.

Christianity proclaims the good news that in Jesus we know the Holy One is also the merciful one. Jesus is the friend of sinners. Even as God is righteous, God is also the good shepherd who leaves behind the 99 sheep safely in the fold to go at great risk to himself to search for the lost sheep; not if, but until he finds the lost sheep out there in the wilderness.  And the fact is that the wilderness is where God finds all of us.   We have all fallen short of the glory of God, whether by some easily recognizable public sin, or by the more God-resistant sin of a hardened, self-righteous heart. 

Jennifer also called my attention to the fact that Wally Lamb had edited an anthology of the writings of women inmates entitled, “I Couldn’t Keep it to Myself”. The title was taken from a Gospel song, and the writings were generated in a writing workshop Wally led for women inmates at a prison in Connecticut near where he lives.

I quickly got my hands on a copy of the book and have begun reading. Twelve different women tell portions of their personal stories, and their accounts are deeply moving. These women have served — and in some instances are still serving — sentences for crimes ranging from murder to credit card scam. They are women the world finds it easy to look down upon, but when you take the time to read their stories, it seems to me you can’t help but feel compassion for them, and indeed admiration for them as they tell the story of their struggle. There is the recognition that these women are our sisters, with that sense of “there but for the grace of God go I.”

The words of Jesus this morning end with reference to a word variously translated as “life” or “soul.”

At his first formal group fifteen women showed up. Wally describes a woman named Diane, who

Life is full of paradoxes. This is one. It is only in finding our own unique voice — our own unique soul — that we find the deep underlying connection that God has created between all souls, all honest voices.

The world we live in conspires to repress our unique voice. In Middle School, we learn not to be different, the pressure continues in various ways throughout our lives. We learn to make small talk, wall paper conversation rather than speak from our depths.Jesus wouldn’t do that. What he said was honest — always honest. And he intended his church to be the same, which explains why the only time Jesus called a flesh and blood person “Satan” was when Simon Peter, the representative of the church that would follow after him, tried to peddle dishonesty. “Get behind me, Satan.” Which leads us to another paradox that Jesus calls our attention to:

Today’s Gospel lesson recounts the first of three times Jesus tells his disciples that he must suffer and die, and every time you get the impression it makes them uncomfortable and they want to change the subject. The whole last half of the Gospel of Mark is preoccupied with the fact that Jesus is headed to his death.

Wally Lamb recounts how over time Diane suffered a re-occurrence of her cancer, and eventually the cancer took her life. It was clear to Wally, however, that Diane died with a peace that she would not have know had she not taken advantage of the opportunity that writing provide her with to claim her life.

Jesus tells his disciples he must suffer and die, just like every other human being who every lived on the face of this planet, and Peter says, “No, not you Jesus, you’re special.” We try to make distinctions, but Jesus reminds us, we really are in this thing called life together with every other human being who has ever lived upon this earth.

Peoples’ stories vary greatly in the details, but there are certain basic experiences that link us all together. The quest for love, for love for one.

The fact that we must die, for another. Here’s something I think about from time to time. I have yet to do the hardest thing I will ever do in my life.

In little ways here and there throughout my life I have gone through dress rehearsals of the hardest thing, but I haven’t yet done the hardest thing in the final, full way that will one day be required of me.

And of course I’m talking about dying. How does a person die? Having not yet done it myself fully, completely, as one day will be required of me, there’s a certain sense in which I can not really fathom it. How does a person let go of absolutely everything that is familiar; and go to stand before God without any kind of pretense, disguise or crutch?

On a certain level, I don’t have a clue.

And yet, at this point in my life I know hundreds of people who have died, and dozens of people who were part of my church family who in some sense I accompanied as they traveled that final valley in this life. Who were these people? They ranged incredibly. They were fat, skinny, rich, poor, old, young, respected, or not.

The one thing they all have in common is that whether they did it well or not, whatever that means, everyone of them has already done the hardest thing — that which I have not yet done. And as such, I feel a certain admiration for them, as well as a connection to them, and with Jesus as well, who also walked through the dark valley, and is now with us as we enter it as well.

I’ve said this before; let me say it again. One of the greatest privileges of being a pastor is the opportunity it gives me to hear peoples’ stories, and by stories, I mean the unvarnished truth, the honest stories, not the cocktail party stories.

People have a lot of misconceptions about pastors, but one thing that seems to hold up pretty well that I believe is pretty much on the mark in regards to this peculiar vocation we pastors have embraced is that we are supposed to be people you can tell the truth to; make your “confession” to, if you will.

And so I get to hear a lot of the stories that go unspoken in other settings, and here is what I have discovered, and from my limited experience, conclude to be true in all cases:

If a person — any person — can find the courage to tell the truth regarding their lives, the deepest burdens and fears and struggles as well as the greatest loves and joys, than you can’t help but feel compassion for them; you can’t help but love them.

Why do we avoid listening to the honest stories of one another in this world? Perhaps in part because deep inside we know that in doing so, we would have to let go of the judgments, the neat little divisions we create between people in order to feel superior. We’d have to recognize that we really are all in this together.

Jesus is the one who has the courage to listen to every story with an open heart.

A sermon preached on March 1, 2009 based upon Mark 1:9 – 15, entitled “Embracing the Barren Place.”

Mark’s Gospel moves very rapidly. In the short passage we heard this morning we move from quickly from Jesus‘ baptism by John during which he heard the voice of God call him “the beloved son”, to Jesus’ time alone in the wilderness being tempted by Satan, to the beginning of his preaching ministry, announcing the kingdom of God is at hand.

Life inevitably involves a rhythm of mountaintops and valleys. We would prefer only mountaintops, but we are told that it was the Spirit that drove Jesus out into the barren wilderness for this time of testing. There is something that needs to happen in the hard times.

If the larger purpose of our lives is for God to grow our souls, to make us, in a word, “Christ-like” than mountaintops alone won’t do. We need both parts of this rhythm.

And the passage also reminds us that as wonderful and important as human companionship can be, there are certain experiences that we must undergo alone.

The old Gospel song has it right:

“You must walk that lonesome valley, you got to walk it by yourself. Nobody else can walk it for you. You’ve got to walk it by yourself.”

The occurrence of what is called “synchronicity” — strange coincidences in space and time of events that have no direct causal relationship — are times when we are called to pay attention. God is trying to say something to us.

At Christmas a member of our congregation gave me a gift of Barnes and Noble gift certificate. I went online like a kid in a candy store to see what I books that I might purchase with my gift. Although I read a great deal, I rarely read novels. I am a rather slow reader, and I don’t generally have the patience required to get into and then stick with a novel.

I was struck by the title of a novel, “The Hour I First Believed”, which I recognized from the hymn I love, Amazing Grace. I wasn’t really familiar with the author Wally Lamb, but on a whim I purchased the book, and was a bit intimidated when the book that arrived contained well over 700 pages. The book quickly captured my attention, however and it became my bedtime reading for the next two months. (At one point my wife borrowed the book from me and read it in two nights.) The narrator of the story is a man about my age, a school teacher married to a school nurse named Maureen. A great deal of ground is covered in the course of the story, including a lot of heart wrenching stuff that would test the faith of anybody. They endure the horror of Columbine high school, with Maureen particularly traumatized by the violence she witnesses close at hand.

Years later Maureen gets behind the wheel of a car high from the anti-anxiety medication to which she has become addicted, and accidentally takes the life of a young man. She ends up sentenced to five years in prison — the very prison that her husband’s ancestors had been instrumental in starting a century earlier. The women’s prison, you see, plays major role in the novel, and this is where synchronicity comes into play.

I had never been inside a women’s prison, but after I was well into the book, an invitation was extended to me to visit the women’s prison in Clinton, New Jersey, which I did, attending something like a graduation ceremony for fifteen women inmates who had completed a four month life skills course offered by a professor from Rutgers. The course was clearly far more than an ordinary class — functioning as something of a spiritual support group for the women, affecting all of them deeply in a very life affirming way. I was very moved by their testimonials at the ceremony, and by the opportunity I had to speak with each of them individually afterwards.

I met a lovely woman who told me that she was finishing a five year sentence that resulted from having gotten behind the wheel of a car when she was intoxicated. She said that in prison she had come to terms with her alcoholism, and spoke passionately to me of how important her faith had been to her in prison.

The week after my visit to the prison, I was finally coming down the homestretch of the novel. Maureen had gotten involved in the prison hospice program, visiting with inmates as they make their final passage from this life to the next. She begins attending Catholic mass, in which she finds great comfort. In prison, of all places, she finds a peace and a sense of meaning to her life, undergoing something of a conversion.

An unusual family mass is held, in which the loved ones of inmates are invited inside the walls of the prison. Maureen’s husband attends. He describes how during the mass Maureen read a story from the book of Acts about how the apostle Peter is visited by an angel in prison. At first Peter doesn’t know whether the angel is real or merely a vision, but the angel leads him safely past two prison guards and out through a locked gate.

The priest proceeds to give his homily, of which I’d like to read the conclusion.

“We all have the power to free ourselves have the power to free ourselves from prisons of our own or others’ making, but doing so depends on our willingness to take that crucial leap of faith and realize that angels are real, not merely the products of wishful thinking, and that they are all around us. We are, my friends, or can be, angels for one another. But this is real life, not La-La Land. And as we heard in the passage that Maureen read to us, the angels can lead us to freedom. But then they will leave us to chart our own path toward righteousness. And that, my friends, is a solitary journey . Each of us passed individually through the birth canal when we came into this world, and each of us will be alone once again at the hour of our death. ‘From dust we came to dust we will return.” What matters is how, in the interim, we treat each other.” (p. 701)

When I finished reading this passage, having just recently visited a women’s prison myself where I witnessed much amazing grace, I felt like God was handing me a highlighter.

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Mark’s version of the temptation of Jesus is remarkably succinct:

Jesus is driven out into the wilderness, this seemingly barren place. He could have rebelled against this harsh setting into which God has placed him, but instead he embraces it, and in doing so, the wilderness becomes a place of blessing where he is “with the wild beasts, with the angels waiting on him.”I was reminded by the words written by Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman living in Holland when the Nazi soldiers invaded. Eventually Etty ends up in a prison camp where she lost her life, but along the way she kept a journal full of extraordinary insights that could have only come in such adversity. Her world is falling around her, but he soul becomes radiant. Our Gospel reading reminded me of one passage in particular:

“I now realize, God, how much You have given me. So much that was beautiful and so much that was hard to bear. Yet whenever I showed myself ready to bear it, the hard was directly transformed into the beautiful.” (

Etty Hillesum, “An Interrupted Life”)

“Playing the Part of Jesus”

A sermon preached on February 22, 2009 based upon Mark 9:2 – 9, and on the occasion of the baptism of Kylie Collins, daughter of BI and Nancy.

About thirteen years ago, an enchanting image began to show up in my imagination; a character actually: A little girl who could see Jesus. Misunderstood by most everybody, she derived great comfort from her friendship to Jesus, with whom she would talk over what was happening in her life.

I gave the girl the name Lydia, and soon thereafter a grandmother came along as well, an old woman wise with her years, who apart from Jesus, was the only person in Lydia’s life who really “got her.“

The grandmother, however, was dying, confined to a hospital bed in the living room.

I realized I had the seeds of a play, and when I sat down to write, late at night when, Bobby an infant at the time, was asleep, the words just flowed, as well as other characters. A single mother so stressed out she doesn‘t know which way is up, an angry older brother, a protective pit bull of a home health aid, a Methodist minister, stuck in the routines of his work life, a street person, befriended by Lydia.

As the story unfolded, all the characters undergo a life-giving transformation, brought on by their encounter with Lydia, or perhaps Jesus through the channel of Lydia, including the grandmother, who in the final scene undergoes the ultimate transformation from this world to the next.

As I wrote the characters, I thought of people to play the parts. My daughter Kate would play Lydia, my mother would play the grandmother, my best friend David would play Jesus, my wife Sarah would play the mother, Tim Booth would play the angry older brother, Gail Booth the home health aid, and, this was a stretch, myself as the Methodist minister. 

There are times in life when everything seems to fall into place, where doors mysteriously open, where life flows unobstructed, and the presence of they holy spirit seems indisputable, and this was one of those times. The script was written within a month, and everybody I asked accepted my invitation to be in the play. We produced the play here at the

church, and the response was overwhelming. The DS came, and liked the play so much, he had us reproduce it 8 months later at Centenary College before the Bishop and the entire annual conference.

It was pretty awe inspiring, and the feeling I had was that something had happened through me, and not so much by me.

Ten years later, it seemed time for a revival, and with the help of David Cicchelli and the College of William Paterson, an altogether new cast was assembled, made largely of people from beyond our church family. There were, however, two people who were cast from our congregation.

Kayla Hook played Lydia, and for Jesus, I asked BI, who was new to the church to take the part.

As you would expect from anybody with some measure of humility, BI expressed feelings of inadequacy in regard to playing Jesus, but nonetheless he enthusiastically embraced the challenge of embodying the part, and he did a wonderful job. As you might expect, he played a different sort of Jesus from the one David had played, and should the play be reproduced a million different times, there would be, of course, a million different interpretatinos of Jesus, which is it should be.

Good things followed BI’s venture onto the stage. He fell in love with wonderful Nancy. And now a little more than two years later, BI and Nancy have their own enchanted little girl named Kylie.

And in certain sense, its dejavu all over again. BI embraced the role of father with that same mixture of humility and enthusiasm.

Such a gift, but also such an awesome responsibility.

There is a certain sense in which every father and every mother is called to play the part of Jesus for their child. To be our best possible self, to set aside our own needs — our own egos aside — and be there steadfastly, for the child.

There is also a sense in which every child plays that part of Lydia, the enchanted one who reminds the adults around her of unseen realities so easily missed in the daily grind of this world.

The story of the transfiguration of Jesus up on the mountain with the disciples Peter, James and John is one of my favorites. Unexpectedly, the disciples find themselves gazing into the awesome wonder of eternity, as divine light shines through Jesus. They gaze into what we call heaven, with Moses and Elijah appearing from the realm of those who have passed over. The disciples are filled with feelings similar to those that a parent feels at the birth of a child and the outset of taking on the responsibilities of parenting a child: Fear, a sense of inadequacy, but also absolute enchantment. Peter begins to babble, “Master, it is good that the boys and I are here, we can build three little shacks up here for you, Moses, and Elijah to dwell in, and we can stay up here forever!”

A holy cloud overshadows the mountaintop, even further intensifying the sense of the presence of God, and the disciples fall on their faces. The voice of the Lord is heard: “This is my beloved son, listen to him.” The cloud passes, they look up, seeing only Jesus.

Jesus leads them back down into the valley to engage this broken world in his compassionate ministry. The words they have heard, “This is my beloved son; listen to him,” remain with the disciples. This is what life is about, following directions from Jesus, embodying his spirit in our own particular life.

The Transfiguration story says two truths simultaneously which need to be held together. First, heaven is real. There is another dimension beyond the ones we encounter with our senses that is eternal, where there is only love and no death. Trust the reality of this other dimension, especially when the inevitable decay of this world — the fact that all flesh is destined to pass away — tempts us to despair.

The second thing the story tells us is that this world matters more than we know. The disciples wanted to stay up on the mountain, but Jesus led them back down the valley into the world that God loves so. It matters more than we know how we live our life moment by moment in this world. We are here to practice love, which, in the end, is the only thing that doesn’t pass away. Sometimes the lessons in loving that life in the valley presents are extremely hard, involving great suffering. But in the end, learning how to love is all that matters, and we get to try again each time we stumble, and we surely stumble often.

Kylie is at the outset of her journey, and we can say with confidence that in the course of her travel through life she will lose here way, because this is what we humans do. But we are here to witness this day that there will always be a way back home, and to commit ourselves to being there for her to help her find the way back.

There are moments as we make our way through this life when we encounter what can be called “portals”, where suddenly we can see more clearly that which we routinely miss about what life is all about. The transfiguration story is the supreme example of a portal, but other moments come to us as well. The experience of both birth and death usually provide such moments. Kylie’s baptism is such a moment, if we have but eyes to see it.

What is the meaning of life? It is, in our own unique way, to play the part of Jesus.