Holy Saturday Devotion

Lessons from the Daily Lectionary – Saturday, April 11, 2009

Psalm 63; Job 19:21-27a; Hebrews 4:1-16; Romans 8:1-11

Meditation: The lectionary has no Gospel reading for today. I don’t believe that I have ever read the daily lectionary on Holy Saturday, to have noticed that before. The Hebrews passage gives the clue to why this is so. It’s because on the Sabbath day, when Jesus’ body lay still within the grave, God entered into that long-mandated and chosen rest. God rested on the seventh day – so watch out on the eighth day because God will come back full of life!

Easter Sunday has been called the eighth day of the week, by some. An anonymous donor has an order in for a new baptismal font for St. Andrew at present. It’s to be an eight sided font. Easter Sunday is the new day, starting a new creation with Jesus’ resurrection. When we are baptized into Christ, we rise with him as those who are children of a new day. But today, it’s the Sabbath day. In the tomb, Jesus is asleep. In the heavens, God is at rest. In the future, we are promised to set aside our labors and enter into a wholeness of life with God.

Eugene Peterson speaks of the Saturday before Easter as akin to Jonah in the belly of the whale (okay, the big fish!). He names the term for this retreat, if you will, as askesis. Askesis is a Greek word for training. Peterson suggests that Jonah is in training for spiritual renewal in the belly of the whale (okay, okay, then, a really huge bass!). The training is in very tight quarters where his own resourcefulness and strength is constrained to such an extent he can do nothing else but pray. He’s buried in the fish. He’s unable to move arm or leg, his scream can register only silent muffled noises. But he can pray. So, what’s left is that he can pray.

Today is the last day of Lent. As I end these daily devotions, I want to thank Jessica McClure Archer for sharing the duty of writing these devotions through these forty days. Thanks also to Rynzelle for sending them out for us. More than that, I am most thankful for our readers. We are glad that you took this Lenten journey with us and hope that it gave you some opportunity for askesis, for some attention to God’s presence in your lives and for how our daily lives can be affected by the revelation of God in scripture.

Keep your Sabbath rest today. God rested on the seventh day. Jesus, in the tomb, stayed still on that Holy Saturday long ago. An enduring Sabbath rest awaits us all as God’s good pleasure for us. The Gospel lesson will be back tomorrow. Rest now so that you can rejoice in it and go forward proclaiming and living by it.

Prayer: We bless you for this time of askesis, dear God – a training in finding your presence in the world so that we can respond to your activity in the love we share with one another. Bless our day of rest today. Bless it with the holy presence of Jesus Christ. He is the King of glory. Ready us to be renewed in him on Easter morning and in the days that follow towards eternal life. Amen.

Good Friday Devotion

Good Friday Meditation – April 11, 2009

John 19:25b-27

Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdelene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home.

Meditation: For me, the one redeeming moment of Mel Gibson’s overly brutal and bloody, The Passion of the Christ, came in the Pietà moment in the film. It was that moment two hours later than the scene we just heard about in the reading from John about the exchange between Jesus, his mother and the beloved disciple – “Woman, here is your son.” “Disciple, here is your mother.” Michelangelo has so beautifully captured that love between mother and son in his Pietà, where Mary cradles the dead body of Jesus as he is lowered from the cross. The good Catholic, Gibson, didn’t dare miss the opportunity of replicating the moment in his film. And to be honest, I was glad of it. I appreciated the tenderness and poignant grief that was left bare. It ennobled the human drama in the crucifixion, not only with regard to Mary, but most especially in the mother-child relationship with regard to Jesus.

I see such moments when I am with Bonnie as she says goodbye to our children on their visits home. Her motherly love overwhelms her (and usually affects me so deeply, I get emotional as well). While I keep hoping for the day when we can not embarrass ourselves in saying our goodbyes, yet at the same time, I find it deeply moving to know how much this mother loves her children. When I see Jesus on the cross reaching out in similar appreciation to his mother (and to one who he selects as her caregiver), I can’t help but playing over scenes at airports and driveways that I have witnessed up close and personal. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is always putting things on a spiritual plane. Yet, as this moment also says: the spiritual is not divorced from everyday life. Quite the opposite is true. When the Word of God takes on human form, God moves into the neighborhood. The realm of the spirit is among us and evident most compellingly in the love we are to share with one another.

The French mystic Simone Weil makes a most helpful observation about love. She speaks of it as having two qualities: distinctiveness and the bond. We recognize these two qualities at perhaps contrary moments. Sometimes it is the moment when we are apart from the one we love (from our friend) that we best understand the strength of the bonds we may feel with one another. Turned around, it is in the moment when we are with our beloved, with our great friend, that we often revel in the uniqueness of the other. The dignity of Jesus’ mother and the trust given to the beloved disciple in this second last word of Jesus speak to us of where the Spirit of God is in our own midst. It is in the bonds we feel when, in our human experience, that separation cannot take away from us. It is in the uniqueness and worthiness of each person with whom we are present.

Let us take a moment to extend the peace of Christ to one another, remembering that Jesus cared about our relationships with one another in the way he commended his mother and his follower to one another as one of his chief duties on the cross.

Maundy Thursday Devotion, April 9

Lessons from the Daily Lectionary – Thursday, April 9, 2009

Psalms 23, 79; Jeremiah 20:7-18; 1 Corinthians 10:14-17, 11:27-32; John 17:1-11

Meditation: Today is Maundy Thursday. I used to think it odd that we would have a Thursday conflated with another day of the week – “What’s the deal with Monday-Thursday?” Either at seminary or one probably at a church I learned differently, that Maundy means “Commandment.” We call this Maundy Thursday because it was at the Last Supper that Jesus gave his disciples a new commandment: “Love one another” (John 13:34).

It is fitting that this new commandment is given at the table, Jesus with his twelve disciples for the last supper. Christians have carried this commandment forward at tables ever since. Two undying characteristics carry through history in churches. One, we sing. Two, whenever we gather we bring food! In other words, history records that table is a metaphor for the love and fellowship which marks Jesus’ continuing presence with us.

Our readings from 1 Corinthians have this in the background. Yes, there’s a hullabaloo going on there at First Church of Corinth. Paul seems almost threatening in how he writes about it. “You have not discerned the body of Christ, so some of you have become sick or are even dying!” If we were magically minded we would say that some of the Corinthians weren’t pious enough about receiving the Lord’s Supper. Magical mindedness about the elements of bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Christ lead to a misunderstanding of the issue. If we go back to the meaning of “Maundy” (Commandment) Thursday, we better understand Paul’s point. In other words, we need to be clear on Paul’s precise point about not “discerning the body of Christ.” He means that they are not living up to the commandment to love one another in the body of Christ. He’s saying: “You’re not taking care of one another well enough – so some have become sick and even died.”

The early church celebrated the Lord’s Supper in a setting not unlike how we will share it tonight for our Maundy Thursday dinner. We will come bringing our appetites and some will bring food and drink. In the early church, congregations met for worship at potluck suppers. They were called “Agape Feasts.” “Agape” means “love.” In the Corinthian church, some were bringing special and ample foods and drink to these love feasts, but exclusively for themselves and their own. They were not sharing what they brought with other church members. Can you imagine the gall? How would that be a fulfillment of the commandment to love one another? It wasn’t.

Here’s what we are invited to see, then. If the Corinthians embodied a negative example of Maundy Thursday, we are invited to embody a positive example of it. Imagine our tables as a gathering anticipating the great banquet when all God’s people will sit down to eat and drink together in a fellowship of love and joy. This is the great banquet that is hoped for. We taste this hope even now at our own fellowship gatherings. Come join in on the festival of love. Make this a way that the whole church gathers together to eat and drink lovingly with one another.

Prayer: God of hope, you give us the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper at a table. We are invited to come with thanksgiving (eucharist), not only for the elements on the table which renew the message of Christ’s loving self-offering in us, but also with a thanksgiving for our fellowship, with marks of love that we exchange with one another. May the whole world find a way to this great banquet, that all may be discerned as a body, as Christ’s body, broken and yet risen to be shared with those who hunger and thirst. Bless you, Lord. Amen.

Devotion for Wednesday, April 8

Lessons from the Daily Lectionary – Wednesday, April 8, 2009

Psalms 58, 138; Jeremiah 17:5-10, 14-17; Philippians 4:1-13; John 12:27-36

Meditation: Today’s scriptures oscillate between something akin to the psychologist’s “total positive regard” and “wrath-of-God-hell-fire-and-damnation.” Whew! Hard to get a handle on these polar opposites!

That’s not to say that everyday life is full of similar kinds of oscillation. We can be righteously indignant about taxes, the intolerant attitudes, prices at the grocery store, or our boss’s latest tirade. Yet, the next moment, we find ourselves touched by concern for another, or finding solemnity in prayer or in nature so that butter wouldn’t melt in our mouths. David Tracy once wrote a theology book called Blessed Rage for Order. Maybe it is resolution we crave (either good or bad) that gets us swerving so from side to side. The resolution could be full of mercy and kindness, or maybe it’s about wiping the slate clean and starting over.

Paul’s letter to the Philippian church is all over this subject. If I was to put my finger on a theme, I’d say that it was: “Have this mind among you that was in Christ Jesus.” In chapter 2, Paul spells this out by singing a hymn current in his day which spoke of Jesus emptying himself of heavenly glory so that he could embrace our human condition and bridge the ugly ditch left between us and God. Indeed, the words to this great story need to be in a hymn because they are too lofty only to be spoken. They deserve to be sung.

Yet, Paul is also careful to bring such language down to earth. As enthusiastic and lofty as may be his famous words, “Rejoice always (and again I say, Rejoice)” and about “the peace which passeth understanding,” he also takes time to encourage a reconciliation between Euodia and Syntyche, two women in the Philippian church. He understands that having hope from the Gospel doesn’t always sit well with those who are missing the point of it. So, he turns to salve the wounds of those who have been fighting the good battle. He asks another church member to bring the two Christian sisters together back into their common purpose, into having “the same mind among them that was in Christ Jesus” who “emptied himself” and “took on” our condition. Perhaps what he is really saying is that if we can work things out with one another here on earth, we are embodying what Christ has brought us from heaven. Wouldn’t that be a fine resolution of it all? Our hope calls us to this daily action.

Prayer: Reconciling God, do you jerk from wrath to graciousness like we do? Do you get upset with us so that you’re like a parent at the end of a rope, a judge who has seen a defendant one too many times, a teacher who sees one bad answer copied wrongly by too many students from one another? Are you always full of that peace that passes our understanding, a benevolence that is more awesome than the view from the rim of the Grand Canyon? Did you get it all worked out through the coming of Jesus Christ? Help us to consider the things that are true, honorable, just, pure, pleasing and what is commendable this day. Perhaps we can take some small step toward having the same mind that was in Christ Jesus in us. Hear our prayer, O Lord. Amen.