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En el nombre del Dios: Padre, Hijo, y Espiritu Santo. Amen.
When our kids were little, they honestly believed that Steve and I could help them understand any mystery they confronted, or solve any problem that arose in their lives. Then they became teenagers and we suddenly knew nothing – until they got to their twenties, when we became smart again!
God alone is steadfast in faithfulness, compassion, grace, and mercy, and deserving of our total trust. In our relationship with God, we strive for the kind of innocent faith that knows absolutely that, even knowing our weaknesses and mistakes, God loves us, and is willing and able to help us anytime… every time we need it.
Lent is the time we trust God enough to examine the mysteries that confound us as Christians, as people. It’s the time we trust God’s compassion enough to re-examine our own approach to people or situations in our world and hold our response up to God’s response to us. Are we as compassionate, merciful, and generous to them as God is to us?
This week we have all been grieving the deaths of 17 children killed by a mass shooter in southern FL. This is just the latest chapter in a horrible story of the sin of mass murder to which our country needs to respond. Like most of the mass shootings in our country, it’s us killing our own.
Have you been watching the responses online? It’s a bit dizzying and (for me, at least) soul-killing to hear the vitriolic, hate-filled responses when a person puts their opinion out there on social media. It doesn’t even matter what side of the fence their on, someone will attack them for it.
So what do we do? How do we confront this moment and address this problem? Where is our all-knowing parent to make sense of our collective chaos?
God is present with us always, even to the end of the age, so we go to God who speaks to us through Scripture, tradition, and reason, as theologian Richard Hooker used to say, and in the divine providence of God, our Scripture today is revelatory to our current circumstance. Today’s reading from Genesis is a reminder of God’s covenant relationship with us. To understand this covenant, however, we need to go back for a minute to the creation stories in the beginning of the book of Genesis. In the beginning, the chaos waters covered the earth and God calmed them, and brought order to the chaos. (Gen 1:6)
In the story of Noah, the chaos waters are again covering the earth, destroying everything. The chaos waters symbolize the consequence of human sin.
The Creator looks upon the devastating effect of sin on creation and brings order to the chaos again, because that is the character of God. As the psalmist reminds us: God is “gracious and upright,” God “teaches sinners” the way to go and “guides the humble” (that is, those who will let God be God), onto the right path. And the psalmist continues: “all the paths of God are love and faithfulness” to those who keep their end of the covenant. (Ps 25)
So God, seeing the destructive effects of sin on creation, breathes the breath of life over the earth again, calming the chaos and removing the power of sin to destroy. Then the Creator invites the created to renew the covenant – which is simply this: I will be your God, and you will be my people. Then God puts a rainbow in the sky as an everlasting reminder of this covenant. (Gen 1:14-15)
Doesn’t your heart sing just a little every time you see a rainbow? Mine does! I think heaven rejoices in me just a little when I see this everlasting reminder of our covenant.
On Ash Wednesday, the prophet Joel called us to open our hearts so that we could let God in. Now God is doing the same. As Jesus comes up out of the water, God opens heaven and lets us in. In this baptism, humanity and divinity were joined one to another, not just ritually, or conceptually, but actually - in Jesus. This is where Jesus becomes the first-born: the first time the divine and human co-exists in a human body. We are the next born through him. Think about that…
Immediately after his baptism, the Spirit of God drives Jesus into the wilderness where he is tempted by satán, who opposes God, and where the wild beasts threaten his very survival.
That is exactly what we are called to do during Lent: to go into the wilderness, knowing that we will be tempted, and trusting our survival to God. We’re called to devote time to be in the presence of God in the fullness of our humanity, so that we can remember who God is to us, and who we are to God. In this wilderness, we’re called to remember what tempts us to sin, and repent of it.
Medieval mystic, Julian of Norwich, calls sin “a wretched and continual contrariness to peace and love.” (John Skinner, ed., Revelation of Love, Julian of Norwich, 137.) Julian likens a sinner to a headstrong toddler who, she says, must be free to run and explore her little world if she is to grow to maturity, but who inevitably falls, tearing her clothing and becoming hurt and dirty.
[The child] cries out – not to a God of punishment but to a loving mother Christ. (This was a revolutionary concept for the Middle Ages – Christ as a loving mother!) The loving mother [Christ] picks up the toddler, cleans and comforts it, then holds it close again.” (Margaret Guenther, Holy Listening, the Art of Spiritual Direction [Cambridge, Cowley Publications, 1992]) 27.
That is the gift and fruit of repentance: being held close in the loving embrace of God. Repentance means choosing to lay aside our shame and guilt, and asking to be lifted up so we can rest in the lap of our Creator.
As we grieve the 17 children lost in Parkland, FL, and the children and educators at Sandy Hook, Virginia Tech, and on and on… we, as a nation, are confronting our contrariness to peace and love, our sin. This is the wild beast that threatens our survival. As comic strip character Pogo once said so wisely: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
As long as we humans live, we will fall into sin. As we do, we must look at ourselves and our responses in this chaotic moment. Are we trusting God and participating as people of God? Have our responses to others as they react or respond (which are different things) been compassionate, gracious, and merciful? Have we noticed our own internal responses and risked laying aside our shame and guilt in order to listen and act to restore peace and love?
We are all culpable, and we are all suffering, because we are all one.
Each child lost in Parkland FL is our child. Each teacher who gave their life protecting the children, is our sister or brother. Even the shooter, who is 15 years old, is our child. We are, all of us, children of God; one family, one people.
God has lost children this week and God is grieving. And so are wel We are hurting, confused, angry, and confounded about how to go forward. This is when we run like the headstrong toddler Julian described, back to the lap of God, with our knees skinned, and our egos bruised.
This is when we remember the covenant and trust that God our Father is able and willing to save; and Christ our Mother will lift us onto his lap, clean us off, comfort us, and give us a divine hug that will fill us with divine peace and love and grace and mercy. Then we jump off the lap of God and bear those divine gifts into the world which so desperately needs them.
Let us pray…
Gracious and merciful God, as we rise from the chaos waters, fall gently upon us; we ask you to lift us up and embrace us, fill us to overflowing with your divine presence, that we may trust you to be our God and recommit ourselves to be your people, in the name of Jesus, the first-born of our race, with whom you are well pleased. Amen.
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