Re-living the Passion

Re-living the Passion

“I saw the spot Our Lady met thee carrying thy cross. She swooned and fell. I saw where thou didst wash the dusty feet of those who, when the soldiers came to haul thee off to death, took to their well-washed heels. With a candle in my hand I climbed the hill on which they nailed thee to a tree, thy tender flesh so rent and torn it was more full of wounds than ever was a dovehouse full of holes. In a round-shaped church of stone where knights kept vigil, I saw thy Holy Sepulchre itself, the very shelf they set thy body on.”

—Frederick Buechner in Godric.

We are approaching one of the holiest times of the Christian year, appropriately named Holy Week. In preparing for this time, our tradition suggests the sacrament of the reconciliation of a penitent. So today, I share the rough draft of my confession of the ups and downs of my relationship with God, looking through the lens of the Stations of the Cross.

Today, on Palm Sunday, we will read the Passion Gospel in Mark; on Good Friday, we will hear the Passion Gospel from John.

I imagine myself as one of the many players in this extraordinary drama in all the gospel stories. Come with me and see if you also have a part to play. I have been Judas and betrayed Jesus for politics and money. Yet, at the same time, I have also had the privilege for over twenty-two years preparing Christ’s supper. Jesus has washed my feet. I have sung hymns with him on the way to mountaintops. I have publicly declared Jesus as my God in front of large groups of people. I have prayed with Christ and fallen asleep, literally or by staying unconscious to the present moment. I have figuratively cut off ears defending him in my zeal.

I have been Nicodemus coming to him secretly at night and speaking out for him in ways that would keep me safe. I have given false witness against him by making my plan his plan. I have been Peter and denied my God more than three times. I have spat on him and mocked him with my actions. I have been Pilate’s wife, receiving dreams telling me God is among us. I have been Pilate and washed my hands of situations when I should have spoken out for what I knew in my heart was wrong.

I have been Barabbas, the freed criminal, and did not have to face the consequences of my sins. I have been privileged to wipe the face of God present in so many others in pain. I have perhaps been Simon of Cyrene and carried another’s cross for brief periods of time. I have been among the women who followed Jesus from Galilee and looked helplessly at his crucifixion from a distance. I have been the thief on the cross, crying out for God’s mercy in my distress. I have been the other thief on the cross, still trying to tell God what God should do to relieve my pain.

I have been the centurion at Jesus’ death, finally recognizing God in the lives of so many only after they have died. I have been Joseph of Arimathea and found a resting place for Jesus. I have been one of the spice-bearing women at the empty tomb, still looking for God. I have been Mary Magdalene in the garden, searching for God and not recognizing him.

This is an invitation to walk this Holy Week journey again together. I hear there is a surprise ending.

We will never forget the Holy Weeks of the last several years. This week, we will again have an opportunity to walk with God and many others, as we have never done before. We pray for those injured in Arkansas, especially in the tornado Holy Week of last year.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com   https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Hope out of Shameful Acts

Hope Out of Shameful Acts

“In the Cross and the Lynching Tree, James Cone highlights a paradox of the gospel: out of the shameful and humiliating act of crucifixion comes hope.”—Debra J. Mumford, “Living the Word” in The Christian Century (3/14/2018).

We drove through Montgomery, Alabama, a week before opening The National Memorial and Museum for Peace and Justice—better known as the Lynching Memorial and Museum. We think we caught a glimpse of it in the distance. We felt a call that we must return to Montgomery to visit both parts.

Between 1950 and 1877, more than 4400 African American men, women, and children were lynched by being burned alive, hanged, shot, drowned, or beaten to death. The memorial structure at the center of the site is made of more than 800 steel monuments, one for each county in our country where a racial lynching occurred. The adjacent museum is built on the site of a former warehouse in which enslaved Black people brought in by boat or rails were imprisoned before going to the slave market.

Ironically, James Cone, one of America’s best-known advocates of black theology and liberation theology, died two days after opening this memorial and museum.

In her Good Friday message in The Christian Century, Debra Mumford reminds us how the horrific lynching of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta in August 1955 sparked national outrage. This led Rosa Parks to move from the back to the front of the bus in Montgomery that December. Her arrest began the 381-day Montgomery bus boycott, a groundbreaking event in the civil rights movement.

The Lynching Museum and Memorial, this year’s Black Lives Matter Marches, and the Good Friday services in which we will soon participate can remind us of the shameful acts that did and still take place in our world.

We are to remember this on Good Friday and remind each other, especially our spiritual friends, that our hope, our small part, is not unlike that of Rosa Parks. We are to change the world by remembering the cruelty and standing our ground with trembling hearts in love wherever we see social and racial injustice, as has happened so much this past year.

Cone and Mumford remind us that when we talk with spiritual friends, at some point, we are also to remind them that our traditions teach us about great hope that can follow horrendous and unjust tragedies.

This is part of the problematic walk we will soon walk in Holy Week. The hopeful part is that our president signed into law that lynching was a federal hate crime. The horrendous part is how long it took for this to happen.

Joanna. joannaseibert.com. https://www.joannaseibert.com/

Barbara Brown Taylor: Spiritual Practices

Barbara Brown Taylor: Spiritual Practices, Movies, Short Stories

“Anything can become a spiritual practice once you are willing to approach it that way—once you let it bring you to your knees and show you what is real, including who you really are, who other people are, and how near God can be when you have lost your way.”—Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World.

 I have been in groups that watched for the presence of God in movies, not necessarily religious films. One of my favorites is Places in the Heart, where Sally Fields is a recently widowed farmer’s wife in rural Texas during the Depression. She takes in a blind boarder, John Malkovich, and with the help of an African American drifter, Danny Glover, raises and picks cotton to keep her farm. Stop here if you do not want to know more, but the movie ends with all the characters, living and dead, black and white, murdered victim and murderer, kind and unkind, faithful and unfaithful, passing communion and love to each other at their local rural church.

I am in another group that reads contemporary short stories to find the voice of God. We have used a four-volume series, Listening for God, edited by an English professor from Yale University, Paula Carlson, and a religion professor, Peter Hawkins. One of my favorite stories is A Small Good Thing by Raymond Carver, about a couple whose child dies and the baker who had made him a birthday cake. Spoiler alert! This story also ends with the three of them having a form of communion late at night at the baker’s shop.

We find communion and spiritual practices in our daily lives that lead us to that connection to God that is always there. We only need to open our eyes to see and tune our ears to hear. We can then live in the present moment, where God lives within us, around us, above, and in our neighbor.

Joanna joannaseibert.com https://www.joannaseibert.com/