“Do not fear”

The words of the descending angels announcing the birth of the Christ child.

“Do not fear”

The words of the angel at the empty tomb to the women.

“Do not fear”

The words of Jesus to his frightened followers who had fled and later gathered
together.

With today’s headlines of brutality, people are fleeing in fear of their lives in many places in the world.  With the decline of commodity prices, people are fearful for their employment.  With those that have lost their jobs, fear resides in the mind, if not the heart, about how they and their loved ones may survive.

With the news of an undesired diagnosis, test results, or a fall, fear permeates life as one may face the end of life or diminished minds or mobility.  Change can bring opportunity, but, more often than not, change’s uncertainty creates fear.

Fear impacts emotions and perceptions.  Into our worlds of darkness is where Christ comes.  This is the Christmas declaration.  This is the Easter declaration.  This is the promise that comes to us in baptism.  This is the proclamation when we gather to worship.

“Do not fear….for I am with you always.

Thanks be to God!  Blessed Christmas and a blessed day to us all.

Amen

    The recent accident taking a young man's life shook our community.  An untimely death punctures anew our sense of how life is supposed to flow.  We live an illusion that says as long as someone in my family is older than I am, I do not need to worry about death.  Thus, a child's death bursts the illusion and drags us unwillingly to realize life is neither fair nor orderly.

    A noted caregiver, Paul Tourneir wrote in his book, 'A Listening Ear' that "Suffering is immense. We do not know where it comes from, but God is not indifferent to it."

   The Christian in face of the suffering of others is the person called by God, through the bond of faith, to go and help others to relieve or to share their suffering.  We may share our goods, our time, or some words.  At times, simply being a quiet presence or allowing a person some space is highly valued by the person(s) experiencing great grief.

   When we find ourselves faced with situations in which words and logic seem inadequate, one step to begin a journey forward is to focus on what one knows. For the Christian, it begins with "I believe...". Expressing belief does not mean nor should it imply that one has all the answers or has it altogether. It does imply trust and that one is not alone.

Pastor Roger Dennis

In the midst of uncertainty, people of faith turn to the promises God gives through the person of Jesus, the Christ.  For the people of St. John, these promises are both celebrated and remembered through the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion.  Forgiveness of sins, being one of God's beloved family members, salvation, eternal life, and having our lives nurtured with hope and the constant reminder that we are loved are contained within the sacrament.

In the past few weeks I have been asked by a variety of people what is Maundy Thursday? What happens on this day set apart from others?

While Jesus was no stranger to eating with people this was a special meal. From personal experience I have noticed that something happens when you share a meal with someone, you aren't just nutritionally strengthened and nourished but often the relationship is as well. It is over pot lucks, soup suppers and coffee that I have gotten to know people and it is in the sharing of a meal I have been invited into people’s lives.

This last supper is unique as it unites those at the table into one community. “On the last super before his death, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul all say that he established the meal of bread and wine as permanent signs of the covenant God made with us through Christ. The meal makes Christ present, and throughout the ages his followers could receive the benefits of his suffering, death, and resurrection in their sharing of the meal.”[1] In other words Christ’s death and resurrection comes with God’s promise of salvation, forgiveness and being restored to a right relationship with God , this is all made real and tangible as we take part in sharing the bread and wine.

In Matthew, Mark and Luke the last supper also takes place at the same time as the Passover meal. The gospels may be trying to make the connection to the long celebrated festival of unleavened bread, aka Passover, in which the people of God remember being liberated from Egypt. In the Passover, “the lamb signified God’s covenant of life, and the unleavened bread recalled ‘the bread of affliction’ of their sufferings during slavery. For the Christian community, the lamb is Christ himself. The bread of affliction is the body of Christ, and the blood on our doorposts the sign of God’s salvation.”[2] 

It is in the sharing of the meal, coming to the table that we become united in the body of Christ. John however adds an extra element, foot washing. Jesus performs the task of a house servant as he washes the feet of the disciples. Personally, I am not a fan of feet. To me they are really strange limbs. I also don’t want anyone to touch my feet unless they are giving me a pedicure or I have recently had a pedicure. I believe in today’s society it is a vulnerable thing to let people that close to your toes when you are not even in a sandal wearing season. Yet Jesus humbles himself to wash the disciples feet and in doing so establishes the kind of relationship Christ has to all people and the kind of relationship we are to have with one another, a relationship of humble service. Jesus also provides the greatest commandment in which we are to love one another.

So what sets this day apart, the meal and the command which in Latin means Maundy. It is a day of which we gather as a community, share in the meal and promise of God’s love and forgiveness not just for us the individual but for all who come to the table. It is a day to remember how Jesus humbly served by washing feet and through his death on a cross.  It is a day to remember that we too are asked to love as he did. 


[1] Keeping Time: Evangelical Lutheran Worship. Augsburg Fortress. 2009, (98)
[2] ibid 98.

This post is an excerpt from the book Keeping Time: Evangelical Lutheran Worship pages 93-94. The book itself looks at the different festivals and season of the church. I was hoping to write a post with a bit of background on Holy Week and realized in the process of researching, Keeping Time says it best.



Passover: 
The promise of spring and the remembrance of the Israelites' liberation

“In the ancient Mediterranean world, the spring equinox was celebrated as a central religious event. Winter and its threat of starvation were over; plants were coming back to life; night and day were equal. Most religions attest that there is no birth without pain, no meal without the death of animals and plants. So some nomadic peoples took the occasion of the hinge between winter and summer to offer to the deities a lamb from their flock. With this perennial gesture of a burnt offering, they expressed their joy at having survived another winter and their hopes for the life of the earth and their own flocks and herds. The Canaanites celebrated an agricultural springtime festival at the time of the barley harvest, the new crop of food symbolizing the fruitfulness of the new year.”

“The Bible describes Passover as the way the Israelites kept the spring equinox. On the first full moon after the spring equinox, each household was to slaughter a lamb and share a festival meal. By this domestic ritual they recalled that God had saved them, not from winter of starvation but from slavery in Egypt. Memory has been layered on top of cosmology. As well, for a week in spring only, bread baked from the new barley was eaten, and no leaven left over from previous year was used. All was new.”

“The Bible says that Jesus was executed at Passover and rose from the dead on the Sunday after the Passover. By the middle of the second century, some Christians had layered onto the Jewish Passover the primary celebration of their identity, which was rooted in the death and resurrection of Christ. The word Pascha, actually relating to the Hebrew Pesach, meaning Passover, was thought to connect with th passion.’ Jesus, the lamb sacrificed for the life of the world, replaced the paschal lamb described in Exodus 12. This Christian observance, observed on the Jewish Passover, might fall on any day of the week.”

Early Churches’ Holy Week Tradition

“In the late second and third centuries, the festival evolved into an annual celebration of Christ’s resurrection and the primary occasion for baptisms. The word pascha became connected with the idea of passage through the sea, for through Christ’s resurrection all the baptized are brought through the waters into the new life of the Spirit. The narrative of the crossing the sea in Exodus 14-15 became central to the celebration. Since Sunday is always the day of the resurrection, Christian Pascha came to be scheduled on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. Because Christian ritual took place in the assembly rather than in the family, the domestic Passover meal had been replaced with a celebrative sharing of the bread and wine within the whole community of the baptized. Thus had the Jewish seder evolved into the Christian vigil of Easter.”

“By the fourth century this annual festival of the resurrection was spread out over the Three Days all through the Mediterranean world. In part, Christians are commemorating the events in the life of Jesus by meeting on the dates of his last supper and foot washing, his death, and his resurrection. However, since each of these separate events finds its meaning only by attending to the three together, the rituals of the Three Days were the culmination of the catechumens’’ preparation for baptism, and the baptisms were an essential part of the Easter Vigil. Augustine, whose writings became so important throughout Christian history and especially to Martin Luther, was baptized by Ambrose at the Easter Vigil in 387.”

Since then...
Over the centuries and as Christianity spread the tradition of remembering the Three days of Holy Week – Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter – was lost and new traditions began like the Tenebrae and focusing on the Station of the Cross.  Within the 20th century many have begun to reclaim the Three Days of Holy Week. 

 What is the difference between doing church and being the church? 

This past month I met with other clergy and this distinction was made, the difference between doing church and being church. As we waited for the homemade pizza, it was suggested that we must change how we do church. This was followed by another responding and qualifying her comment by saying that we need to stop doing church and begin to be the church.  Before I can begin to understand the unique distinction, I need to go back to the beginning and remind myself what it means to be the church.

Here is the church...
The first thing that comes to mind when thinking about the church is the children’s song about the church, the steeple and inside you would find all the flailing phalanges, also known as all of God’s people. So often we associate church with brick and mortar. That it is a building with stained glass windows holding people worshiping on Sundays.  Yet the church is not a building it is a body of people gathered into one through Christ.

As water sprinkles on our foreheads in baptism we become a member of the expansive body of people who have followed Christ for the last thousands of years. In the midst of receiving God’s grace and forgiveness, we are also entered into an everlasting fellowship with Christ and our church community. As Paul says in his letter to the Romans, "You have not received a spirit of slavery leading to fear again, but you have received a spirit of adoption as sons by which we cry out, 'Abba! Father!'" (Romans 8:15). Adoption in Paul's lifetime was more powerful than any familial ties and connections you were born into.  For if you were adopted the parent chose you and could never choose to disown you.  With the word of God and a few droplets of water we have been adopted into the larger family of Christ, an expansive church spanning oceans. 

The church IS a people so we gather
The early church gathered in homes, in places of secrecy to share in meals and conversations, to hear the Good News, dwell in the word and to worship God. It was illegal and life threatening to be a Christian. Today, we gather for many of the same purposes but have the privilege of gathering publicly. It may in the brick and mortar buildings our ancestors worked hard to establish or it may be in the community at Waudby's.

However, the church is still not a building but it is a people, “a body created and sustained by its very act of worship.”[1]  It is the body of Christ brought into one through baptism and the sharing of the Lord's Supper. We gather as the early church because in gathering on Sundays and during the week we trust in the promise that the Holy Spirit is especially at work among us, sustaining us, feeding and nurturing us as we gather to praise God, dwell in the Word and hear the Good News. It is in gathering that we return to God, refocus on God's voice calling to us, remember God's love for us and regain the strength for another week living as the church in God's world.

God's story, our line.
Together in baptism we all, each individual, collectively share in the holiness we receive in Christ as well as a collective mission in Christ. God has had a love story with God's people for generations upon generations and in Christ we have a part in that story. Not only are we recipients of God's love but we are invited to co-write a few lines, chapters even as we share God's love story in the world. Our mission, our story, is to share the Good News, in which “the holy catholic church is the community in which divine love is embodied and which carries that divine mission of announcing and enacting this love in all the world.”[2]

Living out this mission is not always easy. Living out God’s love in the world will not always be welcomed; it may challenge our friends and family as we follow Christ to the point of the cross. Sometimes there will be consequences, consequences as a result of our faith. Following Christ as a church and community, being a part of Christ’s mission in the world is “both a gift and task from the divine Spirit.”[3]

Which brings me to my original quandary and ask that we all share in this question as the collective body of Christ; in fact, I encourage you all to share your thoughts and reflections with me and each other. Add your comments to this blog, What do you believe is the difference between doing church and being church? 



[1] Justo L. González, A Concise History of Christian Doctrine, (Nashville: Abingdon 2005), Kindle, 2392.
[2] Theodore W. Jennings, Loyalty to God: The Apostles' Creed in Life and Liturgy, (Nashville: Abingdon, 1992), 191.
[3] Jennings, 192.

“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” 

These words echo through time as we receive the imposition of ashes upon our forehead. We are starkly reminded that we are indeed mortal. That Adam was made out of the earth, out of dust. Even the name Adam coming from the Hebrew adamah means soil, earth. We have been brought to life through the breath of God and we end our time here on this earth by returning to dust, returning to the soil. These words “that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” have even been said at the graveside of our loved ones. On Ash Wednesday we are confronted with reality and how we will die.

The imposition of ashes serves an additional role rooted in Israelite tradition. By ritually placing dust or ash on ourselves we acknowledge that we are sinners and need to repent. We lament that we are rebellious towards God and participate, contribute to this fragmented hurting world. In the wearing of ashes we identify ourselves as a broken people.

Yet in light of this brokenness and faced with our mortality we can have hope in the cross framed ash. The ash is not simply marked on your forehead but placed in the form of a cross. That same cross is made on our forehead when we are baptized and claimed as a beloved and forgiven child of God. Our sinfulness, the ash we carry is washed clean in the baptismal water.

Lent is a season of which we are unavoidably confronted with the darkness of life and the darkness within ourselves. It lasts forty days like that of the flood of Noah, Moses’ visit with God on Sinai, Elijah’s walk to the mountain of God and Jesus’ temptation in the dessert. Many have used Lent as a special season for special giving of alms in which one supports the outcasts, the poor and the disenfranchised. Some focus particularly on prayer while others fast from self-indulgences. Whether it is a fasting from technology or chocolate, the spiritual practice of fasting is a way to show solidarity for the poor, as a means of repentance or as a way to recognize the contrast between Lent and that of the bountiful Easter.

Although within the midst of the forty days of Lent there is the exception, Sunday. Sunday is our mini Easter that we celebrate weekly throughout the year. It is not traditionally considered or counted within the forty Lenten or fasting days but is instead the day in which the promise of life, resurrection, healing and wholeness break into the darkness.

This season, I invite you to take forty day where you take special care to focus on you and God. You may do that through alms giving or fasting or perhaps instead of giving up something you focus on the addition of another faith practice; for example, prayer or Bible studies. Use these forty days as a time to witness to how God is working in your life, wrestle with how you need God and reflect on the ash made cross we bear daily.  

             “Change is constant in our lives.  Some changes mark gradual transitions, as when daytime shifts toward twilight.  Others happen in a blink of an eye, separating time into “before” and “after”.  We choose to undergo some changes after careful consideration, while others are forced upon us.”  --Sundays and Seasons 2014.

            God is also constant in our lives, however, we do not always acknowledge or recognize God’s great promise in Jesus.  Thus, on Wednesday evenings at 7:00 pm during the season of Lent, Vicar Stephanie and Pastor Dennis will reflect upon “Change and Faith”.

            March 12         Change of Season

            March 19         Change of Habit

            March 26         Change of Circumstance

            April 2              Change of Heart

            April 9              Change of Plans