LENT 2020: Day 35

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• Monday, April 6, 2020: Monday of Holy Week
  Isaiah 42.1-9; Psalm 36.5-11; Hebrews 9.11-15; John 12.1-11

          Thus said God, the LORD,
              Creator of the heavens...
    The first things, look, they have happened,
          and the new things I do tell,
              before they spring forth I inform you.

As rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel observes in his book on the prophets, the Hebrew God is a god of pathos, a god who experiences emotions, a god who suffers.

This is in contrast with the Greek idea of god as unmoved and unchanging, as lacking pathos, as a-pathos, as apathetic.

Apathetic.

If you don’t experience emotions, if you are incapable of being moved and changed by experience, if you don’t suffer, then you are apathetic. You lack pathos.

And that’s not consistent with the God of the prophets.

An apathetic god, I might add, is not worthy of worship.

Here in Second Isaiah, the LORD suffers with and for a people in exile — and announces that a new day dawns.

And immediately following our reading, the prophet says this:
    Sing to the LORD a new song.

“The old songs,” writes Walter Brueggemann, ”spoke about all that had failed. But new song time is a way to sing a new social reality.”

When “the funeral is ended...it is festival time.”

It is still funeral time, and we must grieve now. It is good and right and necessary to do so.

But we long to sing a new song. And we can trust the LORD that festival time is coming, so we are not “fated to despair.”

LENT 2020: Palm Sunday

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• Sunday, April 5, 2020: Liturgy of the Palms
  Psalm 118.1-2, 19-29; Matthew 21.1-11

     A very large crowd spread their cloaks on the road,
          and others cut branches from the trees
              and spread them on the road.
    The crowds that went ahead of them
          and that followed were shouting,
    “Hosanna to the Son of David!
          Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the LORD!
              Hosanna in the highest heaven!”

“Jesus’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem is an unmistakable political act,” writes Stanley Hauerwas. “He comes to be acknowledged as king.”

And this is a scene anyone in the first century ancient Near East would recognize — it’s straight out of the Maccabean Revolt. Literally.

Rome would have understood.

The scene is somewhat humorous, though: “Victors in battle do not ride into their capital cities riding on asses, but rather they ride on fearsome horses.”

Imagine the scene!

But Hauerwas adds: “This king does not and will not triumph through the force of arms.”

It’s a good story, but it’s important to recognize that Jesus’s triumphal entry does not end well.

For Hauerwas tells us “Those in power know what they must do to protect themselves from one like Jesus. They will not be challenged without a fight.”

And we know what happens just a few days later: Jesus is arrested and executed by the state.

LENT 2020: Day 34

• Lent 2020: Day 34 Saturday, April 4, 2020:
  Psalm 31:9-16; Lamentations 3:55-66; Mark 10:32-34

     I called on your name, O LORD
          from the bottomless pit.
    My voice you have heard
          Do not shut your ear to my sigh, to my cry.

Lamentations is not a book we flip to very often, in large part because our lives are pretty good. But we also tend to avoid the negative, preferring to look on the bright side, often in order to disguise our pain and to keep from being vulnerable.

As a result, though, we lack the skills needed to grieve well. 

Of course, we experience pain and sorrow regularly, but most of the time we can get by. But when a crisis hits, we don’t know how to respond.

According to Walter Brueggemann, ancient Israel faced the same reality following the destruction of Jerusalem in 587 BCE.

And Brueggemann argues that the prophets responded in a threefold way — first with REALITY, then with GRIEF, and then finally with HOPE.

Those three responses to crisis, he says, are needed today:

• “the articulation of reality that is too often disguised by our ideology of exceptionalism,
• the performance of grief about loss in response to the denial that the denial of exceptionalism is unsustainable,
• articulation of hope in response to despair that variously produces moralism, hedonism, and violence.”

As we confront this pandemic, hope is needed. But hope is hollow if it is not based on reality and does not allow for grief.

We would do well to turn to Lamentations, which Brueggemann calls “the most compelling performance of grief that precludes denial in the ancient tradition.”

LENT 2020: Day 33

• 
• Lent 2020: Day 33 Friday, April 3, 2020:
  Psalm 31:9-16; Job 13:13-19; Philippians 1:21-30

     Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.

These words immediately take me back to Mercer University, and the year 1999. I can hear the voice of Joseph Millard “Papa Joe” Hendricks, his South Georgia drawl booming, as he quotes the King James Version. And I can feel the weight of his strong farmer’s hand slap down on my back, taking the breath from me.

     Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.

Papa Joe was an icon — is an icon — as well as an outlaw. His role in the desegregation of Mercer and the broader civil rights movement is documented by another Baptist outlaw, Will Campbell, in The Stem of Jesse and Forty Acres and a Goat.

     Though he slay me, yet I will trust in him.

Papa Joe would bellow these words often — they were central to his theology, which can be summed up by the time he took a stick of chalk and wrote, “God is God is God is God is…,” all the way around the classroom. And if that didn’t hammer home the point, he went out into the hallway and continued writing on the wall between the two doors.

     Look, he slays me, I have no hope.

This is Robert Alter’s translation of Job. I trust Alter more than the King James translators, but I don’t think he would disagree with Papa Joe’s understanding, for he emphasizes the Book of Job’s “radical rejection of the anthropocentric conception of creation.”

     Look, he slays me, I have no hope.
          Yet my ways I’ll dispute to his face.

God is God, but Job is Job. And that means human agency to protest, to call God to account. Note, too, that Job brings his dispute to God, rather than turn away.

May we do likewise — or, as Papa Joe would say, “Carry On!”

LENT 2020: Day 32

• Lent 2020: Day 32 Thursday, April 2, 2020:
  Psalm 31:9-16; 1 Samuel 16:11-13; Philippians 1:1-11

     Grant me grace, LORD, for I am distressed.
          My eye is worn out in vexation,
               my throat and my belly.
     For my life is exhausted in sorrow
          and my years in sighing.

These words from the Psalmist are ever relevant today, for we are indeed distressed.

And notice just how physical the Psalmist’s distress is. From the eyes to the throat to the belly, the whole body aches and is worn out. Sorrow and sighing has brought exhaustion.

Yes, LORD, this is how we feel.

As we look at the world around us, it is too much. And we can’t find the words.

But it is just for that reason that the Psalmist’s words have been preserved in scripture. For thousands of years, people of faith have reached for these words when they couldn’t find their own. For thousands of years, people have looked to these words to learn how to speak when words seem to fail.

And the words of the Psalmist teach us that it is right to feel pain, it is right to feel grief, it is right to be overcome with sorrow.

The Psalmist teaches us as well that it is right to ask for God to grant us grace.

It is right, too, for us to ask for grace from each other — and to give grace to each other — now more than ever.

When we experience anxiety, it impacts the way our brain functions. As a result, we may say things we don’t mean. And we may say them in ways we don’t mean to.

Know that. And extend grace to your kid, your spouse, your friend, your colleague.