Faith Improvised

A few recent conversations have sparked some thoughts about going to church as a critically-engaged exegete.

Biblical exegesis is all about critical analysis of the details of a text and critical scrutiny of other exegetes’ work.  Several times after intense and involved class discussions, someone has commented that it must be tough to go to church.  If you’re analyzing the nitty-gritty of a text so closely, emphasizing each feature as crucial, how do you put up with sloppy preaching?

Good question.

Here are a few scattered thoughts, in no particular order.

First, there’s a world of difference between a critical mind and a critical spirit.  A critical mind is essential for the classroom and important for life.  A critical spirit, however, is soul-corrupting and community-destroying.  Hopefully, as I mature, I’m cultivating the first while avoiding the second.

Second, I don’t expect a classroom experience in church or an academic paper from a preacher.  Further, my attention span on a Sunday morning is about eight minutes.  The kid sitting in front of us usually reads Berenstain Bears books during the service, so I have to fight the urge to lean forward and find out what’s making Papa Bear freak out.  Rather than a complex treatment of interpretive options, I love hearing someone trace the broad contours of a text to provide a sweet and simple glimpse into the grace of God in Christ.

Third, when I hear something I haven’t heard before, or even something I’ve previously dismissed as unworkable, I don’t pass judgment and shut down.  I take it up and consider it.  I look again at the biblical text and ask if it fits.  Such opportunities force me to re-examine the text more closely and that’s always a good thing.

Fourth, ministry is hard.  It’s lonely.  Pastors hear far more criticisms than encouragements.  Rather than an exegetical critique on the way out, what a pastor needs to hear at the end of a service is, “thank you.  I appreciate that.  I hope you have a good week.”

Finally, I go to the weekly gathering of my church family as a Christian.  That is, my aim must be God’s aim, and his priority for my church is for it to grow in unity and love as a people called and brought together by the Spirit of God in Christ.  That aim must orient my behaviors.  So, when I’m at church, I try to have one or two good conversations, asking someone some good questions about how they’re doing.  I try to have some good laughs.

Criticizing the sermon simply is not on the agenda.

Exegetes, new and experienced, how do you approach the Sunday gathering?

Pastors, what are your experiences with professors in the pew?

Once again, it’s Masters Week, the unofficial beginning of the year for golfers.  The tournament begins tomorrow and several of the top players are in good form.  Anything at all can happen, however, in this very unpredictable first major of 2013.

Phil Mickelson was on his way to winning it last year when a triple bogey on the par-3 fourth hole derailed him.  Will he redeem himself this year?  I like his chances, especially because the newer technology favors left-handers at Augusta.  Righties need to draw the ball on several key holes, but the newer technology makes it more difficult to do that, whereas lefties can hit power-fades more easily.  Is it any wonder that lefties have won five Masters in the last decade?

Tiger Woods has returned to the top of the world rankings, but hasn’t won a major since the U.S. Open in 2008 (nor the Masters since 2005).  He always plays well here, but his putting has let him down in recent years.  He seems to have it figured out, but we’ll see if he can add to his majors total and further his pursuit of Jack Nicklaus’s record of 18 professional titles.  I’ve argued here and here that he won’t get there, though it’s hard to believe he won’t win some more before he’s done.

At the end of last year, Rory McIlroy seemed poised to dominate golf for the foreseeable future, but then he switched his clubs and hasn’t been the same since.  He nearly won last week, so he, too, seems set for a good run at yet another major championship title.

Of course, there are plenty of other players who’ll have a say in how things go, and we just may end up with a completely unpredictable champion.  I’ve got loads to catch up on after several very busy weeks, but I’ll be keeping a close eye on things beginning tomorrow.

In a number of passages in his letters, Paul casts non-Christians (or, humanity outside of Christ) in pretty dark terms.  Just read Romans 1:18-3:21, or Ephesians 2:1-3 and 4:17-19.

When Paul writes to his churches about life outside the Kingdom of God community, he puts it in terms of idolatry, alienation from God, enmity with God, subjection to Sin and Death, and eventual judgment and eternal destruction.

Pretty severe.

Here’s my question: are such passages meant to inform how Christians regard non-Christians?  Should they shape the way we relate to them?

The question is complicated by Paul’s exhortation to his churches to “Be wise in the way you act toward outsiders, redeeming the time. Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone” (Col. 4:5-6).

Paul imagines churches treating outsiders with kindness and consideration, being wise so that their presence is gracious and their speech is reasonable.

Might it be that the passages darkly portraying life outside of Christ are directed toward some other end than informing churches how to regard non-Christians?

What do you think?

We’re nearing the time for college and university graduations and a bit after that, high school graduations.  I’ve been asked to speak at a high school graduation in a few months and so I’m giving some thought to what I’ll say.

What’s the best commencement or graduation speech you’ve ever heard?  Do you remember what was said at your graduation(s)?

It seems to me that these can be memorable for good reasons (thoughtful, funny) or one main bad reason (too long).  At my doctoral graduation, the university gave three honorary doctorates, the speeches for which each lasted 30 minutes!

What would you say if you had to speak to high school or college graduates?

I thought this advice was pretty interesting.

Sarah and I enjoyed a fun weekend at the Wheaton Theology Conference.  The excellent presentations left us with much to reflect upon and we were happy to catch up with some good friends.

In my paper, I argued that a narrative approach helpfully illuminates Romans 13:1-7.  Paul’s instruction here has the same basic shape as Jeremiah’s instruction to the exiles in Jeremiah 29. The exiles in Jeremiah’s day needed to grapple with their identity as the people of God in an unfamiliar situation, embracing the role of a vulnerable community in a threatening and hostile environment.  Paul’s exhortations to the Roman church are in continuity with Jeremiah’s instruction to the exiles.

Jeremiah’s and Paul’s instruction have the same direction and intention.  Jeremiah’s exhortation to seek the peace of Babylon is intended to shape the character and outlook of the exiled community as it considers how to make a way forward.  It is not an endorsement of the goodness of the Babylonian empire or the rightness of its actions.  If the prophet intended to speak of the Babylonian empire in itself, he would reflect prophetic critiques found elsewhere, referring to beasts with voracious appetites heading for destruction.

In the same way, Paul’s instruction to the Roman church is intended to shape its character and outlook as it considers its future.  Paul is not validating Rome’s conduct in any way, affirming neither the empire’s goodness nor the rightness of its actions.  If he were to speak of the character of the empire in itself, he would likely take up the prophetic critique (as John does in Revelation) and make reference to beasts that devour and are headed for destruction.

Two fairly huge implications flow from this.

First, when American Christians theologize about the modern secular state, they must remember that Romans 13:1-7 is only part of a larger biblical vision.  Christians who start with Romans 13 will typically end up with an inappropriately positive conception of the state, a vision in which the church ought to be supportive of the government and its policies, and being a good Christian means being patriotic.

Second, I think that contemporary evangelicals—especially those who imagine America is or ever was a “Christian nation”—should give sustained attention to the character of God’s people in exile.

This notion has received little attention in evangelical discussions of politics.  I suspect that’s because it runs counter to desires to influence policy, control the levers of power, and determine the course of national history.

I concluded my paper with this paragraph:

American evangelicals would do well to consider how Israel’s exile shaped Paul’s conception of the church—his vision of a weak and vulnerable wandering people among the nations.  We feel that we’re losing power, influence, access, our former position of political leverage and cultural dominance.  We grow worrisome, anxious, nervous about the sort of future our churches will face and the conditions our children will encounter.  I’ll just suggest to you that this might be a strategic moment for us to embrace our identity as God’s wandering people among the nations.  It just may be that this emerging moment of cultural weakness is God’s gift to his church.  What if it’s an opportunity for the God revealed in the crucified Jesus to press his people into the shape of the cross?  What if the Lord of the church is grieved when we strive for power and agitate to control the course of history?  Do we risk being blind to Paul’s vision for the polis of Jesus because we’re overcome by cultural resentment fueled by memories of former days when our opinions held sway?

The Gospel reading today was John 20:19-31, John’s account of Thomas’ doubt and eventual confession of Jesus as his Lord and God. The choir sang this lovely piece, written by Thomas Troeger, called, “These Things Did Thomas Count As Real.”

*Given at Midtown Christian Community, April 25, 2009

O God, whose blessed Son made himself known to his disciples in the breaking of bread: Open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work; who lives and reigns with you, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.

Micah 4:1-5
Acts 4:5-12
Luke 24:36b-48
Psalm 98

We are a week into the Easter season, when we celebrate God having raised Jesus from the dead.  The resurrection of Jesus is the climactic moment of God’s great work of salvation and it’s significant in many wonderful ways.  In the death and resurrection of Jesus, God defeats sin and death.  Death, of course, our great enemy, is unable to hold onto Jesus, powerless to keep him in the grave.

Our horrible enemy is now defeated—that’s good news!  The death and resurrection of Jesus is also significant because it is God’s confirmation that he really means to do what he has said he’s going to do.  God promised that he was going to make all things new, renew the world, end suffering forever, remove the curse from creation.  No more hunger, no more betrayal, no more poverty, no more hatred and fighting, no more broken hearts.  When God’s kingdom comes, all our hopes for a world made new will be fulfilled.

Well, where is it!?  Where is this new world!?  That’s the right question.  We want it now, God!  That’s the proper prayer, though we usually say it like this—“may your kingdom come, may your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

It isn’t here yet, but Easter teaches us that it’s on its way.  Paul says that Jesus is God’s “yes” that his promises are indeed on their way to being fulfilled.  It’s been so long that humanity has waited for these promises to come true, but when God raised Jesus from the dead, it was his way of saying to all of us, “It’s coming.  The new world is on its way, with Jesus as King.  Be patient; only a little while longer.”

And God has begun to fulfill his promises in the church.  When Jesus ascended into heaven to sit on his throne, he sent his Spirit to dwell among us.  God’s kingdom has broken out among us, God has created us to be the Kingdom of God and he has done so by his own resurrection power.  The same power that raised Jesus from the dead is at work among us and in us to truly fill out and understand and explore and perform that reality called The Kingdom of God.

It is vital, therefore, that we live in the shadow of Easter Sunday.  The resurrection must dominate our community, our lives, our relationships, how we imagine who we are and what we’re supposed to do.

There’s a small problem, however.  We find that living in the shadow of the resurrection isn’t all that easy to do.  It’s one thing to believe in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, but an altogether different thing to know how that changes anything.  What difference does it make?

We are not at all used to seeing the world differently in light of the resurrection.  It’s far easier to confine the resurrection to something we talk about once a year.  It’s natural to live as if other things are more real and far more significant—we’re just used to it.  It’s difficult to truly see God’s salvation in action.

We find ourselves to be a lot like the disciples in the Luke passage.  Just before Jesus showed up in their midst, they were talking excitedly about how Jesus had risen from the dead.  Unbelief is not the problem here.  They truly believed it.  But when Jesus actually showed up among them, they were gob-smacked and had no clue what to do.  When he appeared they thought he was a ghost, they were afraid, startled, and terrified, and were even doubting.

We find ourselves to be just as clueless, if not more so.  Believing in the resurrection is one thing.  It isn’t difficult to affirm it as an article of faith.  But knowing what we’re supposed to do in response to it, in light of it—that’s an entirely different thing.

But this is the role of the church; this is our task—to see the world anew in light of what God has done in Jesus.  We are called to imagine the possibilities created by the resurrection of Jesus Christ.  This is how God actually wants to change the world here and now—through a church that sees the possibilities in peoples’ lives in light of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

That’s a high calling.  But that’s why we just prayed together the collective prayer; “open the eyes of our faith, that we may behold him in all his redeeming work.”  This is a prayer for greater and more effective faith.  We need a clarified vision to always be seeing the reality of the resurrection more clearly and to always be knowing how it changes everything, because that’s hardly ever obvious and hardly ever straightforward.

We see the prophet doing this in Micah 4.  Micah looks forward to the future when all the nations of the world will stream to Jerusalem and will worship the God of Israel—the one true God.  He rejoices in this and draws strength from it.  He needs that strength because that reality isn’t there yet for him.  The passage ends on a wistful, slightly tragic note.  “Things will be awesome in the future . . . ,” but then the heavy sigh “. . . we’re not there yet.”

He longs for that day because right now all the nations are walking after their own gods, not the one true God.  And of course this leads to all sorts of oppression and injustice.  But he holds on to that vision so that he can have the power to live in light of it.

So, God has raised Jesus from the dead—everything’s changed!  And we must embody that reality in our lives and in this community.

How?  What on earth might that mean for us at Midtown?  How do things change in light of the resurrection.  I’ll mention just a few possibilities from our passages.  If these provoke further suggestions, let’s discuss those, too.

First, we’re a community of healing and restoration.  We see this obviously in the Acts text with the man born lame.  This is one of our most basic tasks—to do good in the name of Jesus.  To look at ourselves and this neighborhood, take an honest assessment, identify needs, and then come up with creative and imaginative ways to bring about restoration and healing—seeking to get people back up on their feet.  And we don’t do this in order to get a hearing for the gospel.  Doing creative acts of restoration and healing is the gospel.  We carry out redemptive acts that signal that God is making the world new, because these are the kinds of things we’ll be doing all the time when the world is made new.

And, just like in Acts, when we have the opportunity to do good, we mention plainly that we’re doing these things in the name of Jesus, whom God raised from the dead.

We’re also a community that gives praise to God.  Praise dominates the Micah text, the psalm, and Acts.  When we praise God we’re doing several things.  We’re pondering the great things that God has done—it’s educational.  We’re re-learning and remembering what God is like and how gracious and good he is.  But we’re also training our emotions to love and prize God, and to long for his creation to be made new, just as he’s promised.

The Apostle John draws several implications from what God has done in Christ.  In the 1 John text, we see that we must be a community that confesses our sin to one another and to God.  If we deny our brokenness and our being sinners, we are liars, refusing to recognize our need of God—refusing to live in reality.  We must confess our condition as sinners, always owning our need of God in Christ.

We must be a community that confesses our sins.  This isn’t easy.  When we sin against one another, what do we typically do?  We typically seek for ways of getting out of the situation while preserving as much of our dignity as possible.  If we need to maybe apologize a little, we’ll do it grudgingly.  But doing that doesn’t lead to restoration and to community wholeness.  Only when we sit before a person  and name what we’ve done, recognizing the damage that we’ve done with our words or deeds, and asking for forgiveness, do we actually enjoy complete restoration with a person we’ve wronged.

We must do the same before God.  When we’ve sinned we must trust God that if we speak honestly and plainly to him that he will do what he says he does, and pardon our sins and forgive and cleanse us from any and every stain.

These are just a few indications of how the resurrection re-defines a community.  We are not some random community group.  We are the church, owned, claimed and oriented completely by the death and resurrection of Jesus.  Because that’s the case, we must take up the wonderful task of seeing the world anew, always asking for grace from God so that our vision may be renewed and restored for the glory of the risen Lord Jesus.

The Creator God is the God of wonderful reversals.  He grants a child of promise to old and decrepit Abraham and Sarah; he delivers a nation of slaves from the world’s most powerful empire by making a pathway through the sea; he defeats the champion warrior Goliath through David, the shepherd-boy; he crumbles the walls of Jericho through songs of praise.

And God performs his ultimate reversal by raising Jesus from the dead.  At the very darkest moment in human history, when humanity committed its most outrageous injustice, when the creation killed its Creator, when all hope was lost, God brings about his greatest triumph and radically alters reality forever.

God raised Jesus from the dead!

Father in heaven, God of reversals and redemption, we praise you for sending Jesus into the world to die for sin and for raising him from the dead to conquer sin and death forever.  Thank you that we have the promise of new life even though we may pass through death.  We praise you, Father, that you have unleashed on the world your resurrection power.  Give us grace to walk in your love so that we might experience that power in our lives, for the glory of Christ and for the good of the world. Amen.

*Given at Midtown Christian Community, April 4, 2009

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Isaiah 45:21-25
Philippians 2:5-11
Mark 14:32-15:47
Psalm 22:1-21

This weekend we celebrate Palm Sunday, the day when Jesus is welcomed into Jerusalem.  Palm Sunday is a day of celebration and rejoicing—the crowds shout, “Hosannah, blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!”

And next Sunday is, of course, Easter Sunday—another day of celebration.  We celebrate the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.  Much like the Christmas season, Easter is a season of celebration.  We celebrate Advent leading to Christmas—the arrival of the Son of God into the world.  And we celebrate Palm Sunday leading to Easter Sunday—the triumph of God over death and sin, accomplishing salvation.

Much like the Advent season and Christmas, however, the Easter season provides some surprises.  We remember at Christmas that almost nobody noticed when the God of the universe arrived on the scene.  Humanity had no room for him.  He was born under a cloud of shame and suspicion.  And he was born, as we remember, in a barn.

In the same way, the story-line of this week takes some surprising turns.  There is more going on during Easter week than celebration.  The unfolding drama of Holy Week contains human fickleness, rejection, betrayal, violence, revenge, loneliness, fear, God-forsakenness, and death.

One of the most surprising things Easter week teaches us—and what these passages teach us—is the actual shape of the gospel.  Because we are humans we are in constant need of being reminded of the truth of the gospel.  For some reason or other, we are always bending and morphing the glory of the gospel into shapes that make sense to us.  When we do that, however, we unintentionally eliminate the true glory and grace of God.  We’re always wanting to “package” the gospel in some way or other, but we don’t realize that we’re often turning the gospel into something completely different—something that might not be “gospel” at all.

Don reminded us last week that Jesus had to keep telling people that his hour had not yet come.  When Jesus did something impressive—a miracle—surely that was it, right?  His hour had come!  But none of the impressive things that Jesus did demonstrated the true glory of God.  God is glorified, of course, in the cross.  Jesus being “lifted up” makes perfect sense, until we remember that it’s Jesus being lifted up as a disgusting and disfigured corpse.

In the same way, these Palm Sunday passages call us to repent of our wrong understandings of the gospel.  We sometimes articulate the gospel as a transaction—God did some things for us, so we do some things for God and now our relationship is one of peace.  Or, closer to home: Our relationship is one that is broken—there’s a gulf between us and God; God sends Jesus so that now there is a bridge that we can cross to get back to God.  God now welcomes sinners to find their way back to God, and the cross is a bridge across the chasm that separates God from sinners.  As we’ll see, however, this way of talking is not the gospel, and it is not faithful to the gospel that Easter teaches us.

Let’s look at our passages for this week and discover the Easter logic that they reveal.  As we do, we will see that Palm Sunday shows us the glory of the God-forsaken God.

Our first passage, from Isaiah, depicts God as highly exalted and transcendent.  He declares things that will happen before they come to pass.  He sees the future as clearly as the past and stands in judgment over all peoples and all things.  He alone is the source of salvation—there is no other god comparable to the Most High God—to this God alone “every knee will bow and every tongue will swear.”

God is exalted!  God is in the heavens and you, O man, O woman, are on the earth!  We are all radically unlike God and very distant from him—he rules from on high and we are nothing.

This is actually pretty familiar, isn’t it?  It doesn’t take too much imagination to get our heads around this.  We feel it.  We are not God.  We do not feel in control.  God is God and we are not.  Amen.  This is a truth to which we all give hearty affirmation.

The Psalm 22 passage is also familiar to us.  We get this, too.  The psalmist is rejected and alienated.  He has no one to turn to for help, and is despised and in distress.  Like us, he has a pretty good understanding of the sovereignty of God—God is exalted, enthroned upon the praises of Israel, ruling from the heavens, highly exalted far above all gods!

But life hurts.  Things are not working out at all.  He feels miserable, that God is far off.  He’s in trouble and God is busy, gone, unavailable.  He is off God’s radar completely.  He feels God-forsaken, which doesn’t make any sense!  And his friends, far from giving him well-meaning but shallow advice, like, “well, you just need to trust the Lord,” or, “I’m sure things will work out.”  They’re actually mocking him!!  “Hey, call on the Lord, maybe he’ll deliver you!”

As I said, to this point things make sense to us.  This world is full of pain and sorrow and disappointment.  This is indeed a God-rejected world and we know that well.  Life often hurts pretty badly and we often feel that God has rejected us.  We feel a bit guilty saying this, and we try to put a nice tidy package around our pain and soul-torture by saying things like, “well, God’s just teaching me right now that . . .”  But we secretly wonder if God is thinking, “Yeah, whatever . . . , who are you again?”

We’re familiar with pain.  We know well the experience of hurt from friends, of being mistreated, betrayed, rejected, having dreams shattered and hopes crushed.  It doesn’t take much imagination to look at our world and our lives as God-forsaken.

You might think at this point that you know where the Easter logic is going.  “Life hurts, and the good news is that God is not only sovereign, but he’s actually a God of compassion as he’s exalted in his heavenly throne.”  But that’s not the Easter logic.

The glory of Easter is seen in the dramatic reversal that takes place.  God is not merely caring about the God-forsaken one; God actually becomes the God-forsaken one.

In the Philippians text, we see that Jesus is God himself, enjoying the glories of heaven and the highly exalted status of being the God of the universe.  But he did not use that status as something to be used for his own advantage or for his own comfort—“he did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited.”  “Hey, I’m God, I’m going to create a heavenly leather couch and sit around and be waited on, hand and foot.”

Nor did Jesus merely do something on behalf of the God-forsaken ones.  Jesus actually became the God-forsaken one.  Jesus entered our enslaved situation, took on humanity, became a servant, went to the lowest place, was treated as a common criminal, was despised and rejected.

He fully entered into and traveled the human journey of pain and sorrow and trouble and rejection.  His family misunderstood him, his friends deserted him.  He cried out, “my God my God why have you forsaken me?”  God knows what it’s like to be rejected by God—to feel that you’re completely off God’s radar; that he’s far off, that you’ve been abandoned.

What is fascinating about this Philippians passage—look at it—is the “therefore” in v. 9.  Because Jesus did this—because Jesus traveled this journey of God-forsakenness and rejection, God highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name—the name of God himself, “Yahweh,” so that at the name of Jesus every knee will bend and every tongue will confess that Jesus Christ is Lord.

What does it mean that Jesus receives the name of God?  It is a powerful thing that may take some time to sink in.  It means that God looks at the journey traveled by Jesus and says, “that is what ‘Yahweh’ means.”

Jesus is the revelation of God in that God is revealed as the God who is God-forsaken.  God says that the way of the cross is the way of God.  Just as God is revealed in the corpse hanging on a Roman cross; God is revealed in the God-forsakenness of Jesus.

God is not only compassionate towards those who feel God-forsaken; He became God-forsaken and knows exactly what that is like.  The cross, therefore, the God-forsaken path, is an essential part of what it means for God to be God.

Let’s talk about some implications of this.

It seems to me that though we often feel that we are God-forsaken we also feel guilty that we feel this way.  We tend to think that if we feel this way, there’s something wrong with us.  We feel that we’re wrong if we say out loud, “God has forsaken me,” or, “God isn’t anywhere,”  or, “God is gone—this is a godless world and I hate it.”

But we forget that Jesus says these words.  Because in many ways, this is a godless world.  This is not God’s world in the way that it is supposed to be.  Things are not normal.  Nothing is working the way it is supposed to.  By God’s design, this world was meant to welcome God and we were supposed to encounter God constantly and physically.  In the garden of Eden, God came down and walked with Adam and Eve, asking questions, sharing about God’s beautiful world.  They enjoyed one another.

We were not designed to be able to handle alienation, loneliness, pain, rejection, confusion.  This world is not being the world it is supposed to be, and we are not in the condition that we were designed for.  It is all messed up and it feels like God is a long way off, that he’s absent, that we’re stuck in this miserable God-less existence.  And it hurts.  It hurts like hell, because it’s a kind of hell, a place and a form of existence that is completely and absolutely god-less.

One implication, therefore, is that it is right to say about this current condition that it does indeed hurt, that it does indeed feel that we are forsaken by God.  If we give voice to that feeling, we’re not being disobedient—we’re walking in the way of Jesus.  There is more to the story, of course, but if we fail to speak the truth about the pain this world feels, we’re not speaking the whole truth.

Another implication is that God is truly sympathetic.  We truly do have a sympathetic high priest.  Many of us are blessed with good friends and good family.  By God’s grace, many of us won’t know the kind of pain and hurt and rejection that Jesus felt.  But others of us have been hurt, and hurt very deeply.  We’ve been rejected, humiliated, betrayed, exploited, burned, and it hurts badly.

We feel bewildered and lost, utterly hopeless.  Easter teaches us that Jesus has been to that place and knows it well.  God knows it well.  God did not say to Jesus, “phew, that’s over, now get out of there and clean yourself off and get back up here to heaven.”  The God of Israel, the God of all creation, gave Jesus his own name, indicating that the journey that Jesus took through rejection and betrayal and God-forsakenness is a revelation of the very character of God.

God knows rejection and brokenness, so when we come to God as seriously broken and wounded people and we feel like we have nothing to offer God because we’re way too messed up, we must remember that we’re exactly what God is looking for.

When we come to God as broken people we will not hear, “oh geez, what a mess!”  We will hear, “I know.”  Or, “you, too?”

A third implication is a reminder of what the church is all about.  John Mortensen has said in the past that the church’s mission is to find the places in God’s world that are in pain and to go there and abide, and to pray.  There are indeed places in God’s world that are in pain—we might call them “God-less places” and we’re tempted to avoid them.  It is natural to seek out comfort and to avoid pain.  But Palm Sunday—and the Easter season, along with these passages—teaches us that we will only find Jesus in the God-less places, in those places that are in pain.  Jesus traveled the God-forsaken path in his incarnation and he teaches us that this is the way for the church, the path that we are to walk.  It’s the only place where we’ll find Jesus.

A final implication is that the God-forsaken path is the only path that ends in resurrection.  Philippians 2 teaches us that because Jesus walked in this way, God highly exalted him and gave him God’s own name.  In the same way, we will share in eternal glory—we will be raised from the dead—when we make ourselves servants to those who feel God-forsaken, when we make ourselves the agents of God’s love to those whose lives hurt like hell.

I’ll close with our collective prayer:

Almighty and everliving God, in your tender love for the human race you sent your Son our Savior Jesus Christ to take upon him our nature, and to suffer death upon the cross, giving us the example of his great humility: Mercifully grant that we may walk in the way of his suffering, and also share in his resurrection; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Almighty God, we pray you graciously to behold this your family, for whom our Lord Jesus Christ was willing to be betrayed, and given into the hands of sinners, and to suffer death upon the cross; who now lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.