Electric Circuit Rider

“Friday isn’t the worst day”, he said, “On Friday, everything is decided and you just go through it. Thursday is the worst day”, he said, “On Thursday, you have the hope that something will change the inevitable and you know, at the same time, that it IS inevitable.”

That’s what a friend of mine told me the day before his wife moved out. He was a minister, too, so his allusions to Good Friday and Holy Thursday were to be expected and I got them. He knew she was moving out. The marriage had been unraveling for a long time. She had a place to go to. The moving van was scheduled. It was all very civilized and normal.  But he, like Jesus in the Garden, was praying, “Lord, if it be thy will, let this cup pass from me.”

Only in his case, I suspect it was more like, “Please, please God, make her change her mind”, knowing full well that she wasn’t going to change her mind.

I’ve often thought about his observation that Friday isn’t the worst day, it’s Thursday. It’s not the day of the funeral, it’s the day you get the call from someone you love like life itself; “They say it’s cancer, and they say that it’s too far advanced for them to do anything about it.”

It’s not the day they make you clean out your desk and escort you out the door, it’s the day you get the 60-day notice that the company will be down-sizing and you look around and know you were the last person hired.

It’s not the day the sheriff comes to escort you out of the house, it’s the day you add up what you have and what you owe and the second figure is so much bigger than the first that you can’t ever, ever make them come out even.

It’s not the day your name gets splashed all over the news as the scandal du jour. It’s the day you realize that soon everybody is going to know what you have been hiding all these months.

It’s not the day you die, it’s the day you realize that the slope you are sliding down physically is only going to end in one place.

It’s not the day they close the church and merge the congregation with the one across town. It’s the day you know that no one in their right mind is going to make a decision other than that.

The Fifth Sunday in Lent is a good time to contemplate Thursday faith. Thursday faith anticipates the worst by believing – or to use Paul’s wonderful phrase “hoping against hope” – that even if the worst happens, good will come out of it.

Both Jeremiah and Jesus have this faith.

Jeremiah is watching his nation’s leaders persist in a course that has already brought them to the edge of utter ruin and it is like watching a train wreck. The outcome is inevitable and disastrous in a way that you and I can barely fathom. The Babylonians were going to destroy Jerusalem and its Temple and the result would be not only the political end of Judah but the end of the religion that Jeremiah’s people had followed since Abraham and Sarah left Ur to go to the Promised Land.

Yet, Jeremiah looks ahead and sees a vision of a new faith arising out of the ashes -  a new and renewed relationship with God that didn’t need a Temple or priests or prophets because “everyone will know the Lord, from the least of them to the greatest” and the Law will be “written upon their hearts”.

Now that he is a “celebrity” who is drawing the interest even of the Greeks, Jesus knows the Powers-that-Be can’t afford to ignore him anymore. They will do everything in their power to discredit and eliminate him; something that crucifixion does quite neatly. Yet, Jesus says that it will be his martyrdom – his being “lifted up (on to a cross)” – that will draw all people to him.

Last Saturday, I was listening to a webcast from the BBC of an interview with Sister Frances Dominica who helped found a hospice for children.  In the interview she talked about a mother whose child was a guest at the hospice who said to her, “A friend of mine visited recently and said to me, ‘your faith must be a great comfort to you in a time like this.’ And I said that it was NOT. But what really helped me was another friend who said, ‘Almighty means that there is no evil out of which good cannot be brought.’”

My friend’s separation from his wife and subsequent divorce almost 20 years ago was really sad and tough on their kids. But both of them have found new lives and new, very fulfilling relationships – and one of their kids recently said to both of them, “You know, in spite of everything, both of you did a really good job.”

It’s really hard to believe on Thursday that Sunday is coming. It’s hard to believe on Thursday that after the pain and the endings there will be new life. It’s hard to believe on Thursday that good will come out of whatever is going to happen on Friday. But remember that you are a child of Almighty God and Almighty means that there is no evil out of which good cannot be brought.

 It’s a mystery about that bronze snake that the Bible mentions and why the symbol for the Greek god of healing, Asclepius, is a snake wrapped around a pole. I’ll bet if you look around your doctor’s office you will see a picture of it.

Why would something poisonous and treacherous become a symbol for healing? Why would the whole world look to a man hanging on a cross? What is there about looking at the very thing you don’t want to look at that becomes healing when you do?

Why is it, for example, that one of the 12 Steps of AA involves making an inventory of all the violations of your own moral values that you committed in service to your addiction? Why is it that people who have suffered some kind of trauma, such as abuse in childhood, often find it healing to go back and face the very things that they may have spent a lifetime trying to forget?

Why is it that the pattern of Christian worship usually involves our coming into the presence of God with prayer and singing and then, almost immediately, forcing us to confess our sins? Why is it that, in fact, the only way to enter the kingdom of heaven is to first of all, admit that we are sinners?

Why is it that, in order to save the world, God sent his only Son to become sin for us? That’s the way the Bible describes the crucifixion. Jesus becomes sin for us. He becomes the snake on the pole.   When Adam blamed Eve for causing him to sin, Eve blamed the snake for being the cause of it all. Funny, how, from the very beginning, nobody takes responsibility for doing anything wrong. It’s always somebody else’s fault. And somebody, somewhere, always has to die for our sins – not to satisfy the honor of a pure and holy God, but to satisfy our consciences that we are not at fault.

When we look at Jesus, hanging on a cross, that is what we see. We see the guy who’s responsible for all the problems in the world – hurricanes and wars and disease. We see the guy who made the poisonous snakes and the guy who led the simple people into idolatry. We see the guy who made people the way they are – never satisfied, always complaining, even when they have it good.

But when we wake up one morning and realize that we hurt like hell and that we are dying – if not physically, then spiritually – and we realize our life is out of control because of our addictions or our bitterness or our dishonesty or our greed or our self-centeredness or any of the dozens of other forms that sin takes in our lives, and we wonder how we can be healed? How we can get rid of the poison that is killing our souls. The word comes to us. “Look at Jesus, just look at him.”

But it seems too easy, too simple; it’s what superstitious people do. It’s what Holy Rollers do. It’s what TV evangelists do. It’s what people who have a simple explanation for everything do. I don’t want to engage in that kind of superstitious idolatry. I’m too sophisticated for that. I know too much theology for that. People in my church don’t do that.

And yet, “For God so loved the world that God gave God’s only son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life.”

“Believes . . .”

Does that mean that I have read all the books of theology and I have an intellectual understanding of who Jesus is?

Does that mean that I consciously and successfully live a Christ-like life everyday?

Or does it mean that, when I am at the end of my rope, when I am dying of the spiritual poisons that have been injected into me by the snakes of hatred and desire and even, religiosity (the snakes in the story are called literally “Seraphic serpents”), I can look to the Man on the Cross for healing and redemption?

When the woes of life o’ertake me,

Hopes deceive and fears annoy,

Never shall the cross forsake me.

Lo! It glows with peace and joy.

(“In the Cross of Christ I Glory” words by John Conker United Methodist Hymnal #295)

During Lent, I have been reading 40 Day Journey with Parker Palmer, a collection of daily readings taken from the writings of a noted Quaker author and educator. The readings keep directing us to look at the contradictions or paradoxes in our lives. Some of these are irresolvable, such as the tension we all feel between our desire for security and our desire for challenge and adventure. Others are real hypocrisies, as when we project an image of hard-edged arrogance to cover feelings of deep insecurity inside.

Yesterday morning, I read a particularly challenging meditation on how we sacrifice our authentic selves to our need to be “successful” and accepted. And then last night, my colleague, Dianne, and I led a class on “Practicing Prayer”. The focus last night was on “Lectio Divinia”, the practice of praying while reading scripture.

My part of the class was to lead everyone in an experience of “entering the story”. So, I read to them the gospel for this Sunday, John’s account of the cleansing of the Temple. I suggested that they imagine Jesus entering the Temple of their own lives: the sum total of their environment, relationships, values, memories, etc. and imagine him getting angry about something there with a holy, loving anger, because whatever it is, it is hurting them – destroying what they were meant to be as the image of God.

Several people reported difficulty in experiencing this and I can imagine several reasons for that – not least because we often equate Jesus’ love with gentleness. But, I had tried this same meditation myself in the afternoon as I was preparing for the class and found it immensely meaningful. There is a deep contradiction in my life between who I pretend to be on the outside and who I am on the inside. And I could see Jesus entering my life and heading straight for that contradiction.

What surprised me is that, like the priests in the Temple, I challenged Jesus – in a sense, asking him what right he had to destroy this thing in me. And what surprised me even more are the words that escaped my lips: “I’m doing this for you.”

I was deeply shaken by this experience. I realized that many of the worst things in my life are there because I think, somehow, that Jesus wants me to be that way. I am, after all, called to project an image of holiness, caring, and faithful hopefulness even when I don’t particularly feel any of those things.

It does no good to deplore that fact or to go into all the contradictions between who I really am and what I pretend to be retailing them for public consumption. Most religious people, and especially clergy, will recognize them. The point is that the anger of Christ was directed precisely at those things in me – even at the “sacrifices” I have been making to Him and for His sake.

That is precisely the issue in John’s account of Jesus cleansing the Temple. The money changers and sellers of animals were making “sacrifice” possible. But the real sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit that leads to a more authentic life and more authentic discipleship.