Last week, in the run-up to Mother’s Day, the New York Times published a wonderful series of anecdotes from people remembering their “second mothers,” those wonderful alternate mother-figures some people are blessed to have in their lives.^[1]

Here’s one: 

Ruth lied to my parents. When she interviewed for the job of taking care of my four older siblings and me, she said she had lots of experience caring for children. Truth was, she’d never held a baby before in her life. She let me stay up late on Sunday nights, curled up next to her in an overstuffed chair, watching our favorite television shows. She let me “drive” her old green Ford, holding me on her lap while I steered. She taught me to make Norwegian wreath cookies and Swedish meatballs from scratch. She taught me that nobody is perfect. I experienced unconditional love and so did she. (Judith Shapiro, 73)

Another remembered: 

I come from a multicultural background, but the Puerto Rican side of the family lived far away. Alina, my best friend’s mom when I was in the third grade, taught me so much about my culture. Going to the store was a lesson in salsa music, visiting a theme park was a vocabulary lesson (“Fallon, ven aqui!”), taking a shower was a lesson in how to care for my hair and holidays were a lesson in large family gatherings and delicious food. All of these little things added up to a more full picture of my culture. Without Alina, I wouldn’t know a part of myself. (Fallon Alvarez, 35)

And this one was my favorite: 

My sister Rita was born six years before I was. If I had a nightmare and woke my mother up, she would tell me to climb into bed with Rita. I loved my mother, who was sweet but overwhelmed with raising four children while my dad worked long hours six days a week. Rita was always there, always loving. She introduced me to the library and cleaned me up when I was in second grade and had an upset stomach in the school bathroom. I was the maid of honor at her small wedding, and she was my matron of honor. Once, my fiancé and I were in a movie theater watching a comedy. After a few minutes, I leaned over to him and said, “My sister is here.” I could detect her laughter even in the crowded theater. (Harriet Liss, 83)

I love these stories. 

You can just picture the people they’re talking about—as you hear them, maybe they even bring up someone in your own life who played a similar role.

Most of us could probably do a better job at remembering and giving thanks for those people.  

Sometimes we don’t have even a single picture of them, which is particularly odd because, so many years later, we still feel their presence. 

Like the memories those people shared in the Times, we still remember the sound of someone’s laughter in a crowded theater…or how they taught us to take care of our hair…or what it was like to drive their old Ford. 

It makes me wonder what the disciples most remembered about Jesus.  

Scripture is careful to record the big things, right?  

Who could forget being on that boat in the hurricane with Jesus lying there asleep like a guy in a hammock under a palm tree?  

Or how he told them to feed all those people with five loaves and two fish, which they figured would only serve the first couple of rows…but they just kept watching as the baskets kept getting passed and passed and passed…and that day, everybody ate.  

Who could forget Easter? 

They wrote those stories down to make sure nobody ever would.  

But I wonder if really, there were other things, smaller and more personal memories, that made them especially feel his presence. 

The memory of his laughter, maybe. 

Maybe the particular way he broiled fish. 

How he could be tough in a debate with a grown up, and then turn and be utterly gentle with a kid.  

Make no mistake: the disciples staked their lives on following the things he taught.

But as is so often the case, the real source of transformation, the source of what the church has learned to describe as the new life in him, lay elsewhere. 

It came from knowing something of the way he was and coming in a million different ways to feel his presence.  

In his prayer for them in this morning’s Scripture, what he’s trying to say is that, even though everything between them is about to change, they will still feel that presence. 

It will be something far more true and far more real than just their memories, powerful as those memories are sure to be.  

Love is so much more than the memory of happy moments in a time gone by, or all those feelings that we used to have. 

Love teaches us to see the world and to understand ourselves differently, in ways that continue to shape us. 

It is not just who we become, but also how we become: it’s the engine of our becoming. 

Through all the changes that are part of any life, even a relatively quiet one, love stays with us.  

In all that lay ahead for them, they would still feel his presence. His love.  

Best of all, this would empower the disciples to be a new generation of second mothers, in their own way— miraculous people who came alongside others in the midst of very different lives in very different places, offering from their own abundant souls the fruits of unconditional love, self-knowledge, and recognition. 

They would change those lives forever by bringing Jesus there. 

And so it is for us. 

Each act of kindness or gesture of noticing is a form of grace – a gift that makes loving and being loved a bit more real for someone.  

Each one, in its own way, brings Jesus here and ushers in the Kingdom.  

Whenever that happens, if you listen, you can hear the sound of his joy.  

Amen. 

---

^[1] Catherine Pearson, “An Ode To Those Who Mother Us” NYT May 9, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/05/09/well/family/mothers-day-mom-figures.html?searchResultPosition=1

Dear Friends of Second Church,

This week, I’ve been reading a bit about L’Arche communities, a network of small houses throughout Europe and the Americas in which abled and physically handicapped/neurologically atypical people live together in Christian fellowship.  While most of the physical care is done by the abled, the emotional and spiritual care is shared by all, and the relationships are tremendously powerful and, at their best, profoundly holy.  

That’s not to say it’s easy.

As we all know, true community never is.  

Many of the handicapped members of these houses come to them only after difficult or even traumatic experiences in other institutions or in their own family homes, and learning to trust is a long process.  This means that quite often, the community is tasked (in the words of one volunteer) with “waiting for the beauty in each person” to emerge.  

I’ve been turning over that phrase in my mind for the last few days, thinking about how that is a good description of the work of churches, at our best.  

Not only do we see and celebrate the true beauty in people, but we are also prepared to wait alongside them as that beauty begins to emerge, however slowly that may be — as the grinding depletions and exhausting expectations of life’s challenges and past history have time and space to heal.  

We don’t always acknowledge how hard it can be to let our guard down.  

Sadly, some churches don’t offer a safe place in which to do so.   (Don’t get me started….)

But it’s a different sort of sadness to realize that the idea of doing so may not actually occur to many who do come.

And yet for some, admitting vulnerability has become so unthinkable that they don’t seek shelter for it among the gathered people of the church, kind as so many of those church people may seem.  Shelter isn’t even what many visitors come for, at least consciously.

We need to do better at making sure they find it, anyway. And quickly.

I can’t help but think how puzzled and relieved they would be to discover, first that shelter, and then the beauty within them that shelter can finally coax into view.  

With all that we offer and all that we wish we could, our primary task is to be a place where God’s love can do its thing.    

When it does, the lives that follow are beautiful, indeed.  

See you in church,

Believe it or not, it’s actually kind of difficult to learn much about modern shepherds from the Internet. 

Of course, that information must be out there, somewhere.  

I really tried.  

I really wanted to come in this morning and tell you about the blog I’d found – or the chat room where the shepherds all go to compare notes, but no such luck.  

If you Google “shepherd,” what you get is screen upon screen upon screen of sermons about the passage you just heard, and then screen upon screen of blog posts about pastors…particularly as written by pastors.  

As you might guess, this all goes south soon enough.

For example, I learned that there is a whole argument out there between Evangelical writers about whether a pastor is supposed to be a “shepherd,” or more like a “rancher.”  

And when I say it’s an “argument,” I mean it.

From what I could gather, a lot of people who went to seminary in the 90s were told they should strive to become ranchers.  

Management consultants apparently came in the schools to tell them this.    

But as one pastor responded, a “successful rancher is someone who checks out his flock from a helicopter via helicopter and satellite. He has hired hands, who actually handle the flock and its problems.”^[1]

Another made a point of the fact that the Bible has a few words for shepherd, but none that really correspond to rancher.  

Depending on how you read your Bible, that can be a real put away shot—and I got the feeling as I was reading it that the author most certainly thought it was.  

I didn’t really find any current spirited defenses of being a rancher, although I gather there must be some.  

Hold that thought for a minute.  

Now, shifting gears in order to come at shepherding another way, I did read, somewhere, that in 2005, a Turkish newspaper reported 1500 sheep had ran over a cliff, exhibiting a behavior known as “flocking.”  

You can probably guess what that is.  

When it happens, things can get pretty bad, pretty fast.  

Apparently, if even one sheep shows a little gumption or moves quickly for whatever reason, it can trigger this “flocking” instinct, even to the point of luring the others right over a cliff before anyone knows what’s happening.  

You’ll be glad to know that in the case of the Turkish sheep, only 450 of them died, because as it turned out, the ones on the bottom of the pile cushioned the fall for all the rest.  

I mention it because the danger of “flocking” might suggest why shepherds are so attentive to the ones that wander away.  

Maybe the problem isn’t just how vulnerable a sheep becomes if it wanders off alone and gets lost (though that’s true, too). 

The problem with a wayward sheep is also about how quickly and catastrophically everything can unspool if the others follow.  

When you put it that way, it sounds as if shepherds can’t drop their attention for a second.  

They can’t because the sheep sure won’t drop theirs… they won’t stop to figure out what’s happening…they won’t stop to ask who’s leading this charge… they won’t stop to google monthly wolf sighting statistics for their particular geo-location. 

They just react.  

Doesn’t it make you wonder about what it’s supposed to mean when Jesus refers to us as sheep? 

I always thought he was naming how he sees something lovely and innocent in us – and maybe he is.  

That’s part of what he sees in us. 

But all that notwithstanding, in calling us his sheep, I wonder if he isn’t also reminding us about just how powerful, and even dangerous, our reactivity can make us. 

At the drop of a hat, the snap of a twig, the glitter of something over there that happens to catch our eye, we can turn into a menace for ourselves and others, no matter how big or small the flock might be.  

That’s also part of what it means to be sheep.  

For one thing, this goes a long way to explaining why we need him. 

He’s not just a broad source of inspiration or even comfort, but the guide we need to listen and look for, particularly whenever we are overwhelmed.  

…Particularly when that may be hardest for us to do….

It may be that coming to believe in ourselves (in the best sense) is actually to learn not to trust ourselves entirely – we need to remember just how quickly we are capable of leading ourselves astray and taking others with us as we go. 

Instead, we need to take our cue from Him. 

Because the point is not just that we are sheep, but also that we’re his sheep.  

And this is where I can identify something worth taking away from my Internet research this week.  

Because the world seems to imagine God as a rancher, somewhere way up there, flying around in a helicopter, or vaguely following us by satellite. 

And what Jesus wants us to know is that he’s the shepherd. 

He’s down here at our level to handle us and our problems, even if and even when that means crawling through the muck to save us, most especially from ourselves and from our own worst instincts. 

The challenge for us to learn to listen for his voice, to wait for his guidance, to trust when we go astray that he is already coming in search for us…that he already knew we were missing even before we did. 

It’s a story that the Church tells after Easter, just as the disciples were first grappling with what it would mean to listen for Jesus in this new way, and to call the world to flock to him.  

It’s a lesson we might learn (or learn again) with every comment we soon realize that we were too quick to make, with every email we were too quick to send, every suspicion that were too quick to indulge, every bad report we were too quick to take at face value, every fear we were too quick to make into a wolf about to strike.  

We see the power of that pull away from what is lovely and innocent and kind and giving in us.  

We can’t entirely help it. 

But while we may be sheep, the point Jesus wants to make is that we’re his sheep.  

He’s calling to us…looking for us…crawling right into whatever brambles we’ve managed to get ourselves stuck in, working to bring us back to green pastures and still waters…to the places where all may safely graze. 

As the Psalmist says “Oh, that we might listen for his voice….”  

Amen.

---

^[1] R. Scott Clark, “Choose Your Metaphors Carefully,” The Heidelblog. https://heidelblog.net/2019/04/choose-your-metaphors-carefully-the-church-is-a-pasture-not-a-business/.

If you ask me, lately nature has become decidedly unnatural.  

We’ve been gearing up for the eclipse tomorrow (Monday).  I don’t know how much of it we’ll see here, but my understanding is that people from Texas to Maine will be able to see the whole thing, weather-permitting. 

Of course, if you were inclined to wonder just what the weather may or may not be inclined to permit right now, you would have cause to do so.  

In addition to the eclipse, I understand that there is snow in the forecast, and maybe a lot, for this coming week.  

Also, here in April, apparently 1 trillion cicadas are expected to hatch.  

That’s about 999.999 billion more cicadas than I need, myself.  

And on Friday, you’ll recall, we had that earthquake.  

Of course, for all the things that seem unnatural – suddenly unpredictable and foreboding – there are the consolations of other things which do not change.  

For example, I was troubled by the earthquake, especially when I thought it wasn’t an earthquake, but was the church boilers somehow all exploding at once. 

To be honest, when you put it that way, I was relieved that it was only an earthquake.  

But I was more relieved when I read that by midafternoon yesterday, a New York City store was already selling t-shirts that said, “I Survived The NYC Earthquake, April 5, 2024.” 

Don’t go changin’, oh my city.  Don’t go changin’.

In Scripture, of course, there are descriptions of earthquakes and eclipses and, for that matter, plagues of insects.  

Matthew and Luke’s Gospels talk about Good Friday with some references along those lines.  

When Jesus dies, Matthew reports that “the curtain of the Temple split from top to bottom.  And the earth shook, and rocks split, and tombs opened,” (27:51-52). 

According to Luke, as Jesus dies, “darkness fell on the whole earth…the sun’s light failed, and [again] the curtain of the temple’s inner shrine split in half,” (23:44-45).

All Creation seems to be proclaiming the Creator’s anguish and displeasure at the death of the Son, although soon enough, the weather conditions appear to have returned to their regularly scheduled program. 

Life went on. 

Most of the people were probably looking at one another, grinning a little sheepishly.  

“It was only an earthquake…”. 

“You know, for a second there, I thought it was…”

“Yeah. Me too. Me too.”  

Just what had changed and what had not were questions preempted by the return of nature’s regularly scheduled program. 

For us, too, it will not take long before a t-shirt may be the only memory we still have of all this unsettled and unsettling weather, and we’ll be able to shirk its questions just as seems the people on Good Friday did.  

What did you think was happening?  What seemed suddenly more precarious—less trustworthy—than you’d ever actually paused to consider before?  

What are the “’unsinkable’ Titanics” of our lives: those truths we hold that are just one iceberg away from a painful revelation that seems like it could send us to the bottom of the sea? 

All that aside, whom did you call first when it was over—who called you?  

There are many things we might ask and try to wrap our heads around. 

It’s all good now, and we don’t have to.  (Shrug.)

What if we didn’t shirk the questions? 

This is why I love The Gospel of John’s story about Thomas, the guy who is so famous for his doubting.  

John always sets his really good stories about doubts and questions at night, as if darkness could not help but make us yearn for light and clarity.  

At the beginning of his gospel, the story about Nicodemus is like that.  

So here, close to the end, night falls again, and with it, the questions return.  

We’ve learned to berate Thomas for his doubting—John suggests that even Jesus does. 

Personally, though, I see it as a blessing. 

It’s a blessing for anyone who decides that they cannot, will not shirk life’s questions, or simply swallow even faith’s most pious answers.  

Thomas is not resisting the good news because faith is unimportant to him, but precisely because it is.  

…Because it’s not enough to want something to be true, no matter how much you want it, or why, even if it’s for the best of reasons. 

Following the path that winds along through our fondest illusions is exceedingly hard to do; pretending that we don’t have to may be the fondest illusion of all.  

But not for Thomas, and God willing, not for us. 

The wonderful Irish Catholic theologian, Enda McDonagh, warns: “All believers are open to the temptation to domesticate God.”^[1]  

Yet, as he adds, “The unbelief which shatters our easy grip on a reduced God is the beginning of growth…Breakdown will occur.  But breakthrough is on offer.”

What is Easter, if not a story that begins with breakdown but continues along to breakthrough? 

The story of Thomas offers us this powerful example of someone earnestly seeking to live an Easter kind of life for themselves, even if doing so means risking both the power of his enemies and the displeasure of his friends.  

But the power of God – the lure of God – is just that strong.  

Thomas goes to a place where what is obvious and what is not come before him in a way that nobody else can really speak to, and it’s there that Jesus comes to meet him. 

Honesty says that we shouldn’t shirk life’s questions. 

Easter replies that we never have to, because even if it seems as if breakdown may loom, with God, it’s breakthrough that’s on offer.  

The earth may shake, the darkness may descend, there may be enough cicadas about to hatch so that each person on the face of earth can have their very own.

But the shattering of our illusions and our idols is the shattering of our shackles.

And the One that Thomas teaches us to call Our Lord and Our God is there to greet us, finally free. 

Amen.

---

^[1] Enda McDonagh, “Gospel and Culture,” in Between Chaos and New Creation, 28. 

Last fall, one of our sister churches in Ridgefield, the Ridgebury Congregational Church, did a curious thing. 

They found a small, secluded spot in a grove of trees on the church grounds, did a little bit of landscaping, and set up a box on a pole with an “old, cream-colored rotary phone.”^[1]

Did anybody else grow up with one of those?  

My grandmother’s was teal on the way to blue or blue on the way to teal. This is a matter of some debate for me and my cousins.

Can you picture it? 

Those phones always came with a long cord, right? 

If memory serves, the cord was long enough for a teenager to walk the receiver entirely out of the kitchen and mostly out of earshot so they could lean against the wall and transact all the social business of the day, however long that took and however many calls it might require. 

The cord was long enough for someone actually cooking in the kitchen to be on the phone while they moved around the room.  (Remember this? [MG crooks an imaginary phone])

If that sounds familiar, rest assured, this old, cream-colored rotary phone was properly equipped with just such a cord.  

The only thing it didn’t have was an actual connection to a telephone line.  

It’s what they call a “’wind phone,’ a disconnected phone that people can use to have one-way conversations with their loved ones who have died.” 

As the pastor of the church explained, it offers a way to “have the conversations that you didn’t get to have – the good, the bad, and the ugly.” 

Apparently, these phones are all across the world.  

The first one was set up in Japan in 2010, and there is a website, mywindphone.com, that lists all the places in the U.S. where you can find one.  

They offer a creative response to some powerful needs: our need to grieve and our bewilderment about how we’re supposed to do that; our need to feel a connection that survives, at least in the heart; our need to say the words we need to say whenever we finally find those words and the courage to speak them, and to say them without a sense futility that those words have arrived too late.  

Too late for what? 

Too late for a little more understanding, if not forgiveness? 

Too late, maybe, for anything to be different, or for a new chapter to begin for any of us?  

The hope that Christians find on Easter Sunday can be difficult to explain, and those who don’t believe can find its claims naïve and baffling.

But you don’t need to be Christian to understand Holy Saturday – the day when Jesus was gone, and in the language of the Apostles’ Creed, “he descended into hell.”  

Grief gives any of us a good enough sense of that.

From my own experience of grief, it is a mystery to me how the women Mark describes in his gospel are putting one foot in front of the other, much less where they find the strength to go see and touch Jesus’ broken body. 

Yet when there is nothing else we can do, there is comfort and meaning in receiving those we love into the rituals of our people, especially in tender moments of farewell.  

As Joe says to Pip in Great Expectations, “Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded together…Diwisions among such must come and must be met as they come.” 

Now that it has come, the women rise to meet this moment of division in the prescribed ways.  

They go to the tomb to undertake the practices of goodbye on behalf of all those who loved him.  

As they walk to the tomb, surely they are formulating their own personal final words to him, the ones they must speak now or forever hold. 

Except that, suddenly, it becomes clear that something has happened.  

Something.  

In the moment, it is hard to say just what. 

The stone has been rolled back, and someone who is not supposed to be there, is, and the body that is supposed to be there, isn’t.  

The other gospels come into the church’s life a bit later, and they describe the scene in far great detail—filling in the blanks, to some extent. 

In John’s understanding, Jesus himself appears.  

In Matthew and Luke, the arrival of the other disciples and their astonishment get extended treatment, so much so that the initial experience of the women can almost seem like a prologue.  

Not so, in Mark. 

His version focuses mostly on the women and their a-ha moment of discovery, rather than on the parts that come later, such as telling the others, or the whole group’s astonishment, or the later encounters with the risen Jesus. 

Actually, I really appreciate that about Mark.  

He seems to understand that faith is not some sort of obvious thing—that’s it’s not just a simple marshalling of the evidence, as if anyone who had been there would have had to become a disciple if they’d seen what was happening, because duh.  

The way he tells it, these disciples see what they see, but they don’t know what’s happening. 

Something internal has to happen so they do.  

Certainly, they don’t get (yet) that the inevitability of death has been overthrown. 

They don’t get (yet) that a new way of life is being established. 

They don’t get (yet) that for those who find new life in Jesus, the promise of God’s healing will forever seek to respond to the breakage of injustice and sin.  

These are all things that the church would learn to say about Easter and becauseof Easter.   

Instead, because Mark’s account leaves room for something internal that has to happen within each of us, it may come the closest to offering us actual Easter.

It makes space and trusts God to use it.  

Because these things aren’t obvious. 

How could they be?  

And yet, for every person who crosses paths with a wind phone in some random churchyard and rolls their eyes, there’s somebody else – somebody who notices that phone and greets it with a laugh of recognition.

Almost in a dream, they pick up that heavy, old-school receiver, dial a phone number they haven’t thought of in years, walk the full scope of that long cord, plotz down on the ground, and speak themselves into a measure of peace.

Something internal happens.  

Faith’s understanding is that God comes into that space. 

No wonder, then that some spark of hope, some recognition of enduring connection catches up with them and fills that moment.  

The whole thing could not be less obvious and yet more real…more utterly true.   

Easter is like that.  

It’s a story about how God comes into the space of a lonely tomb and fills it with the power of new beginnings.  

It reminds us that the cords that bind us to life and to one another may be invisible, but they are unbreakable and far more than just our partings, welded together.    

Easter challenges us to start acting accordingly, most directly by making space for God’s healing and peace to touch all people and all things.  

In the days that followed that first Easter, the women who had visited the tomb would be filled, reminded, and challenged, too. 

Their own new beginning took shape as they came to find their voices and their Lord.  

As we celebrate Easter again this morning, may the same be said of us.  

Amen.  

---

^[1] The quotations about the wind phone are all from Meg Dalton, “Connected By Love,” on the Connecticut Public Radio website, October 6, 2023.  

Mostly, tonight is about telling the story of the Last Supper and the arrest of Jesus.  

We celebrate Holy Communion as we tell the story of the night when Jesus first did. 

This should remind us of just how much some of the story of Maundy Thursday – one key portion of it – offers language and gestures which are central to our faith all throughout the year. 

Where would we be without it? 

Just what would going to church entail?

We don’t quite know.  

Of course, that makes it all the more important for us to put that part of the story more squarely back in context. 

We want to be sure we’re telling it correctly and getting what it’s trying to teach us.  

Tonight’s service is about receiving a fuller story, and a fuller message rather than trimming them down to suit.  

When you do that, it becomes clear almost immediately that we need to think much more carefully about the place of grief in this story.  

Because, actually, grief is the story.   

The Last Supper – the founding of Holy Communion – is a practice of hope and connection that will only truly make sense once Jesus is taken from the disciples and from the world, which he’s about to be.  

Jesus is the only one who knows, but knowing it is terrible and unspeakably lonely.  

This shapes the whole evening.

As people reading the gospels later, we can see that. 

This is most clear after the supper, when Jesus and the disciples go to pray in the Garden of Gethsemane.  

Jesus wrestles with what lies just ahead and goes off a distance by himself to pray.  

He asks God for some other way forward before it is too late.   

He asks the others to stay nearby and to pray, too, although he does not tell them why.  

As we see, his grief is almost overwhelming.  

Then, after praying alone for a while, he goes back to where he left his friends, only to find them fast asleep: a horrible discovery. 

It’s then that Jesus realizes just how truly alone he is. 

It’s like someone standing at a payphone trying to call for help, calling every number they know, flipping through the little pages of the address books we all used to have in our pockets—remember those?—but nobody picks up.  

Nobody’s home.  

In the movie, “Dead Man Walking,” a nun, Sr. Helen Prejean, begins a ministry to death row inmates at Angola Prison and to families—both those of the inmates and those of their victims.  

She offers herself as a spiritual advisor.  

But what this will really mean only becomes clear when one of the inmates loses his final appeal, and it is time to help him prepare for his execution.  

He is guilty of the crime, a fact that he admits only reluctantly, even to himself.  

But eliciting this confession is not the point of Sister Helen’s ministry, even if it might provide a degree of consolation to some, and even the man himself.  

Sister Helen’s real contribution turns out to be less abstract. 

She learns that his family will not be there to witness the man’s execution.  

And so she decides that she will be there.  

She says: “I want the last face you see in this world to be a face of love. So you look at me while they do this thing. I’ll be the face of love for you.”  

That points to what is so shocking about tonight’s story of Jesus in his grief.  

Because in the midst of this ordeal, nobody has been prompted…moved…compelled to offer themselves as the face of love for Jesus.  

Nobody has been looking carefully enough to notice his struggle.  

The only kiss that’s offered in the garden is a sign of betrayal.  

Somewhere, I’ve read speculation that the arrest in the Garden would have been worse, and even more painful for Jesus than his crucifixion at Golgotha the next day.  

There’s no way to know, of course.  

However, it is true that the next day, when he dies on Friday afternoon, there would be faces of love distinct among the jeering crowd. 

We know the disciples were there. 

We know that Mary, Jesus’ mother and some of the other women were not just there, but actually closer to him than any of his other followers dared get. 

He did not die alone.   

But the night before, in the garden at his arrest, few had remained for very long.  

By the time the Romans lead Jesus away, there’s nobody else standing there for them to arrest with him—there are no co-conspirators on hand for Judas to identify.  

Jesus’ abandonment is complete.  

We need to sit with that for a moment.

As we tell the story more fully, it’s important to pause to receive that grief.  His grief. 

And yet, something deeper is still at work.  

Because wherever each disciple goes that night after they scatter, the next morning finds them gathered once again. 

Sometime after dawn the next day, they’re back, standing among the crowds along the Via Dolorosa, and then even at cross itself…even if it means they might be next.   

It’s a risk they’re now willing to take.  

Something else inside them has taken hold.  

It might be that they remembered the words Jesus had said at the meal – his promise that he will never abandon us, that he will forever be with us in our trials, and that all who find new life in him will be part of him and he of them.  

After all, this is what Communion affirms.  

That he will always be a face of love for us, and a source of strength as we seek to show the world a face of love.  

It’s only as we step out into the dark night that we learn if this meal provides something that can actually sustain us, or if it’s just junk food.  

Unless it equips us to offer the world a face of love, then we have missed its purpose.  

And tonight, in coming together to hear the story in a fuller form, that’s what we practice.  

We’re here to offer faces of love to Jesus as his final hours begin. 

May it teach us to love the world as he did, and for his sake.  

Amen.  

Dear Friends of Second Church,

I don’t know if you’re aware of the Hallmark Channel, the people who make those Christmas movies where the tough-as-nails-executive-on-her-way-up gets dispatched to some small Vermont town in order to buy out the last local Christmas tree farm, only to fall in love with the farmer and his dog, ditch her stilettos, get a warm hat with a pom pom, save the tree farm, and live a small town life, instead. 

Well, good news.  

They’ve discovered Easter. 

One of their new offerings is called “Easter Under Wraps” — and it’s really pushing the envelope.  

It’s about a woman who goes undercover to figure out what’s hurting sales at her family’s chocolate conglomerate…only to fall in love with the Head Chocolatier of a smaller rival company.  

You can look this up. 

I don’t know if I’ll be getting to it this year, myself — if you do, I’d love a review.  (And it’s ok to like it. I bet I will when I see it.) 

However, I will say that it misses something important about Easter, and by that, I don’t just mean the whole part about Jesus and the resurrection.  (Although I’m getting to that.) 

More basically, it shoehorns Easter into yet another performance of the same old rom-com plot—it’s just like Christmas, except it’s spring, with the holidays providing a generic sort of setting rather than much by way of a theme.  

In that, it misses just how disruptive the story of Easter is and always has been.  

Easter is not just a happy ending — it’s like a low-budget Halloween movie that suddenly becomes an epic…or even a musical.   

It is puzzling and glorious and determined to show us the world in an entirely new light — the light of the one at its center — and also to invite us to join the story rather than just passively take it in.  

There’s nothing “same old” about it, or about any life that seeks to put Easter at the center.   

It means that simple explanations and cozy plots will never quite do, anymore.   Life is just too interesting and precious for shallow treatment — and so are our neighbors, our enemies, and while we’re at it, Creation.  

As we gather to tell the story once again, may it shake us up, shake us awake, and shake the foundations of a world so hungry for truth and so desperate for healing.  

Happy Easter.  

See you in church….

Palm Sunday may be the closest that the Christian year ever comes to engaging irony, and I love it for that. 

If you scratch the surface, there are a lot of levels to the gospel you’ve just heard.  

The tone is celebratory.  The Eagle has landed. Jesus is finally coming to the capital.

His followers are anticipating…what?

We don’t quite know.  Maybe even they don’t quite know. 

But it stands to reason that all those snarky back-and-forths between Jesus and the Pharisees all along the way – you remember those, right? – would have set the disciples’ expectations sky-high.  

Think for a moment about those confrontations – those moments when some local guy from somewhere encounters Jesus and doesn’t like what he thinks he’s hearing.  

The guy asks, in so many words, who in God’s name Jesus thinks he is. 

He doesn’t mean it as an actual question, of course.  

He means it as a put down.  

As a way to bring the crowd back down to earth. 

Whenever someone takes that approach, Jesus always comes right back at him, loaded for bear, right?  

If you traveled with Jesus, you would have known it was coming.  You would have looked forward to it.  

It must have been a heck of show—one that got them imagining even bigger stages.  

You could hardly have blamed the disciples for watching those moments, hearing those moments, and wondering: what if? 

What if this conversation Jesus was having wasn’t with some schmo whose name they never quite got? 

What if this moment wasn’t just happening in some one horse town whose name they can scarcely remember? 

What if he ever went theologically mano-a-mano with the biggest of their big-wigs? One of the Jerusalem guys?  Maybe even the High Priest himself?  On Passover? With the Roman Governor standing right there?  

I actually think our guy would win. 

They must have thought it. 

For them, that’s where Palm Sunday was pointing. 

And yet, as we know, in a way the disciples did not, that this is not what would come next—that this is not how the story would end.  

Instead, Jesus will be dead on by dinnertime on Friday. 

That’s the first irony.  

The second irony is more subtle.  

Because the story will not end on Friday, either. 

The Gospel will not come to rest in Jerusalem. 

It will keep on moving. 

On its way—actually quite early on in its travels—the Gospel will even pass through Rome. 

Rome will prove powerless to stop it, just as Pontius Pilate and the leaders who arrest and convict Jesus will prove powerless to stop it.  

You can’t kill the truth.  

You can’t stop goodness from preaching—from convincing and transforming.  

And so when that first Palm Sunday group walked up toward Jerusalem in the name of a different kind of world, under the leadership of a different kind of king, even they had no idea of just how right they actually were.  

How’s that for irony? 

Every now and again, we see something in the world that reminds us of the power of truth.

Lately, I’m thinking of the recent death of the prominent Putin critic, Alexei Navalny.  

In the evening after the world first learned that he had died, Liz watched the recent documentary about him and was especially moved by a moment that I’ve since seen mentioned elsewhere, too.  

Navalny, who had already survived poisoning, said, “If they decide to kill me, it means we are incredibly strong.  We need to utilize this power not to give up…to remember.” 

Along those lines, for us as Christians, Palm Sunday is part of how we remember—how we are urged to find our strength and not give up when we’re faced with challenges of our own. 

Every now and again, we see something in the world that reminds us of the power of goodness.  

This isn’t something visible only in the martyrdom of a moral leader.  

In a quieter way, we see it in the kindness we show for one another as life unfolds.  

Whatever might be on our minds or bending us back into our own situation, we remember one another.  

I was reading yesterday that ever since the UCONN Women’s basketball team won its first national title, they have made a point of leaving time after the game for kids to come forward and get autographs. 

This seems like a small thing.  

Actually, this began with Rebecca Lobo in 1995, which is when the attention and the autograph seeking really first began to take off…to require actual time.  

Her parents would take her out to dinner after every game, and there was a lot of pressure on her and a lot to process, but her mother insisted that Lobo sign every autograph and greet anyone who was waiting to see her. 

In fact, on one occasion, her mom pulled her aside because she was signing autographs but not really paying attention. 

“You look everyone in the eye when you sign,” her mother said,  “especially a little kid, because they’ve waited in line to see you.” 

As things go, of course, a moment’s attention is a small gesture.

But not to the person who’s been waiting on that line.

Not to the person who is quietly carrying whatever life has put on their shoulders lately, and who receives a moment from you or me that helps them make it through the day.  

On the other hand, we remember that in the Gospel, it’s Pilate…it’s Herod…it’s Caiaphas…it’s the villains of this story who have neither time nor patience for the people they can’t use.  

As a result, in their eyes, this dumb parade of palms and cloaks and a guy riding into Jerusalem on a donkey is something between a hassle and a brush fire—it’s an event they don’t have time for led by people of no consequence moved by visions about which they could not care less.  

They’re no longer able to imagine this parade could represent anything more than that.   

They don’t get what it means to be standing on that line, to be hoping for a brief moment of connection, and to recognize how holy, inspiring, and strengthening our connections can be.  

They don’t get it.  

Certainly, they don’t see God in it.  

The gods they recognize surely wouldn’t stoop so low.  

But we get it.  

Palm Sunday is teaching us to remember a very different picture of who God is, what God values, and just how low God would be willing to go out of love for us.  

Remembering that will save the world. 

So it is a day full of irony, a day of triumph, looming tragedy, and triumph once again.  

Its joy points us steady onward, moving faithfully toward the day when the saints come marching in, and everyone will know once and for all which of us are in that number. 

What if we were? 

Amen.  

There’s a story about the great preacher William Sloane Coffin from his many years as a college chaplain.  

Apparently, at a freshman convocation at some point in the 60s, Coffin observed that while the college prided itself on producing great men, in more recent years it seemed content instead just to churn out nice guys.  

We can probably parse that in any number of ways. 

I would hasten to add, it wasn’t that Coffin saw anything wrong with niceness, but rather that he wanted to push us ask what was right about it—and whether that was sufficient. 

He thought it was not.  

And our Gospel this morning seems drawn along similar lines. 

Mark describes a moment of encounter between Jesus, heading toward Jerusalem, and a man with many possessions.  

This in itself was not so unusual, and there are a range of ways that Jesus responds in such encounters.

The Gospels always emphasize his ability to see through externals to the person beneath. 

He could look at a sinner and see a good person in desperate need of healing and understanding.  

He could look at a pillar of the community and see how wobbly they were.  

And he could look at a big shot and see their smallness. 

This week, I was interested to read the obituary of Brian Mulroney, who was Prime Minister of Canada back in the 90s.  

It noted that, while he was the consummate politician while in office, in later years, there were indications that, behind the scenes, he had always been far less affable, if not downright mean.  Notably foul-mouthed. Quick to take offense.  Long in holding a grudge.  

I was sorry to hear it.  That was news to me.  

For their part, though, the Gospels would want to remind us that it wasn’t news to Jesus. 

I say that just to make the point that, in this morning’s story, he’s not looking at some robber baron and telling him to beat it or warning him that he can’t take it with him.

Not at all. 

Jesus looks on this man and loves him.  

But I think the person he sees standing there is a nice guy.  Maybe even a really nice guy.  

Jesus wants to challenge him to become a great man.  A great person.  

By way of getting started, this will demand a particular commitment to letting some things go. 

II.

If you think about it, it’s a great Lenten story, and I’m surprised we don’t preach it more often during this season. 

A few weeks ago, we talked about Jesus going into the wilderness to face temptation for 40 days…this deliberate period of self-denial in order to face his demons and see himself and the work ahead of him more clearly. 

In this later moment with the man, Jesus seems as if he’s about to prescribe the same medicine: saying, brother, you need to get rid of anything and everything that is not God…you need to face your demons…you need to start getting out of your own way.  

Do that, and on Day 41, the angels will let you know where to find me.  

It makes me wonder—if Jesus had taken a different approach, and just named a really high price for joining the disciples…you know: “Why sure you can join, my brother, but there are dues, the initiation fee, the loaf and fish minimum…just bring your W-2 over to Judas, and he’ll tell you your number….”…would the man have been willing to pay that?  

I kind of bet he would have, right? 

He seems like he might be an ROI kind of guy.   

Mark seems to suggest that there is something in him that measures. That calculates. 

It isn’t presented such that it sounds sinister – as in “he’s calculating” – but it’s fair to say that in this important moment when he stands before Jesus, such tendencies get in his way. 

What was that kid’s book – was it Cheaper By the Dozen? – where the dad is an efficiency expert and he insists that the whole family run according to time/motion studies and other organizational principles.   The point of diminishing returns…the Pareto principle…sunk costs…all as principles of parenting.  

Our nice guy probably wasn’t that extreme, but he might have gone to B school with that dad. 

As we said, he’s an ROI kind of guy. 

But Jesus doesn’t ask him for money.  

ROI and the other frameworks he’s learned along the way for making choices don’t help him to say yes to this particular choice.  

It’s asking something different of him.  

That means, even for a really nice guy (which he is), this is a leap he can’t quite make, even though his soul clearly wants so very much to make it.   

III.

What about us? 

Do we have tendencies that seem to get in our way, somehow – especially in the important moments of our lives? 

And by these, I don’t actually mean our flaws.  

More particularly, I mean the shadow side of so many of our virtues, which manage to make us trip over our own feet.  

Here are some places where we know it: 

…Hospitality that becomes an over-eagerness to please.  

…Humor that provides subtle strategy for silencing a room.  

…Attention to detail that devolves into scorekeeping.  

…Spontaneity that shades into indifference.  

…Love that looks more like worry.  

…Niceness that waves off the messiness of true concern. 

What if the very things Jesus asks us to let go are the very ones we mistakenly believe are holding us together?  The essence of the selves we most know how to be? 

Aren’t those the things we try to hold onto at all costs? 

So often, it’s only stepping back that lets us see the shadows.  

It’s only stepping back that lets us find our way toward the abundant life we know in God.  

Isn’t that what Jesus is saying to the man this morning? 

“Show me who you are without…all this…without all that…” 

That man refuses. 

Isn’t that what he says to us, especially in Lent?  

He asks: “Can you walk without those crutches?” as he looks on us with love.  

What will we say?  

On Friday night, Liz, Emily and I went to go see older daughter Grace perform in the school play, which was the Sondheim musical, “Into the Woods.” 

Have you heard of it? Anybody seen it?  

Proud dad stuff aside – mostly – it was a great show. 

The thing about Stephen Sondheim musicals is that there’s always an ironic twist to them.  

For example, there’s one where the music starts out very sad and gets happier and happier as the show goes along.  

That sounds great, right? 

The only problem is that it begins at the end and goes on to tell the whole story in reverse order—so instead of telling us about someone triumphing over adversity, the whole thing is about how, in this case, adversity wins, with the hero of the story getting less clear about that as the show goes on, while for the audience, it gets painfully more and more clear.  

That’s Sondheim. 

So when I tell you that the show we saw last night, “Into the Woods,” is his take on classic fairy tales, well…you might guess how he would run with that.  

There are a lot of really interesting moments I could tell you about, but I’ll focus on just one idea that I took away from it. 

I want to talk a bit about what he’s getting at with this idea of “the woods.”  

Obviously, the whole idea of going “into the woods” is classic fairy tale stuff.  

Little Red Riding Hood does, of course – you probably remember that story.  

But a bunch of other characters also do – Cinderella, Jack of Beanstalk fame, a baker and his wife. 

Each of them harbors some version of a very human wish: for example: a wish for love, for an end to their poverty, or for a child.  

And through one set of circumstances or another, each of the characters has to leave the safe, comfortable, well-known world of the village and go into the dark, confusing, and perhaps dangerous woods to realize their wish.  

A lot of stories go like this, right? 

This is where the twist comes in.  

Because slowly but surely, the characters all get what they’ve wished for, which is great.  

Great happiness ensues.   

There’s only one problem.  

It’s just the end of Act I.  

And this is where the story gets much deeper. 

Because when Act II begins, some time has gone by. 

Several months…maybe a year.  

It isn’t too long after all the main characters’ wishes have come true…and yet already, one by one, they realize that they haven’t stopped wishing.  

Wishing doesn’t end.  

New hopes pull at our hearts.  

Restlessness can set in, sometimes quite abruptly and earlier than we might ever expect.

New challenges need facing.  

For Sondheim, love and happiness are more elusive than fairy tales suggest, and true loyalty and friendship harder to come by and far more surprising than we could ever believe…until we find ourselves in the woods.  

The average fairy tale is far too neat when it comes to the messiness of life.  

When it comes to the human predicament, he’s not going to let even a fairy tale pull its punches.  

As he sees it, life doesn’t send us out “into the woods” just once, or only by our own choice.  

One way or another, we find ourselves out there many times.  

You get the idea.  

You can also understand why some audiences find this pretty gloomy.  

But if you ask me, I don’t think Sondheim is trying to be gloomy. 

He’s just unusually honest about the things that can make life so hard and so beautiful.  

If we wonder why attributes like wisdom, character, and solidarity are not only so important, but also somewhat more rare than they ought to be, and so hard won, even for the best of us – well, Sondheim would gesture toward the woods.  

The truths we find out there never fail to surprise us.  

II.

 Our Gospel reading this morning is the story of a healing.  

It comes from Mark’s gospel. 

In fact, it’s the story right after Jesus comes down from the mountain where he is transfigured before Peter and two of the others—when the narrative begins to point toward Jerusalem and Holy Week.  

The other disciples have been busy in his absence, trying to offer healing and preaching in the same spirit as Jesus, but without much success.  

As far as the preaching goes, they are getting shouted down by the skeptics. 

Their lack of success in healing a boy who has been possessed by a demon surely is not helping to convince anyone, either.  

The whole scene seems tense and chaotic.  

What really makes this story different than so many other accounts of exorcisms and healings are the words of the boy’s father. 

Jesus arrives and takes in what’s happening, and at first, his response has a kind of “o ye of little faith” quality. 

This is directed at the father but isn’t meant just for him, by any means.  

The father pleads with him, saying “If you can do anything, take pity on us and help us.”  

Jesus responds, “ ‘If you can’? Everything is possible for one who believes.” 

But then the father says something that nobody else has said to Jesus before.  

He says, “Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.”

“I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief.” 

He comes before Jesus in profound desperation, and yet also with total honesty.  

Because the messiness of life has sent him into the woods. 

The obvious answers have not solved his problems. 

His son isn’t just a sick kid—his son is sick in a way that would have scared other kids, and not just them. 

He’s sick in a way that would have prompted neighbors to keep their distance, that would have drained the resources and tested the resilience of a family, maybe even broken a marriage.  

The gospel writer Mark makes clear that it’s been this way for years.  

Who wouldn’t find themselves wishing for something else at some point? 

How could you blame someone else for wishing? 

They’ve been wandering in the woods, confronting all these sad realities for years.  

That’s just to say that, by this point, the easy pieties and wishful thinking are long gone.  

What’s left is utter honesty.  

What’s left is that, when the father comes to Jesus, he still says “us”: “take pity on us,” he says, “help us.” 

Whoever else has fallen away, and however it is that came to pass, he has not fallen away.  

Wherever they need to go in hope of healing, he’ll find a way to get them there.  

Because, by God, somehow, he still believes in that. 

Against the long litany of all the things that father has learned he can’t believe in…must not believe in…there’s one thing he mostly still does—mostly, he still believes that with God, all things are possible.  

The woods have taken so much away.  

But somehow, by and large, they have left him with that.  

And he’s not afraid to name the truth that his heart is full of both. 

That’s the testimony that he steps up and lays right at the feet of Jesus.  

And Jesus immediately turns to the boy and heals him.  

III.

There are a lot of ways to talk about faith.  

Throughout its history, the church has reflected at length about what faith oughtto be, and it has gone on to describe that in a range of ways, each of which names something important for us to hold onto. 

Our Scripture this morning comes at this differently.  

It’s saying that faith is what has the power to abide when all the easier pieties and the lesser loves end up falling away. 

It’s what keeps going when we’ve long since abandoned any worldly notion of perfection.

It’s what we learn when life sends us out into the woods.  

On the further shore of our initial disillusionment, there is the call to seek a life beyond illusion, and in the believing and the unbelieving, the learning and the loving, to know first-hand the healing of God.  

May it be so. 

Amen.