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Christian Witness, Homilies,

Reflection for Passion Sunday 2024

Easter concept. Crown of thorns with Nail and blood drops on a stone background.

Now is the time of judgment on this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.” He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.

Welcome on this Passion Sunday. We continue in our Lenten study of struggle. 

Today we consider Jesus’s struggle as He faces His impending death. We also consider the very struggles we ourselves face in our faith journey. Through struggle, we realize that the Holy Spirit is alive and working in us. The Holy Spirit moves to guide and gift us. Jesus walks with us as we journey toward the eternal life Jesus won for us.

In today’s gospel message some Greeks arrive, find Philip, and make a request, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” 

It is interesting that this meeting with Jesus is not outwardly described. Rather, Jesus’ discourse is the very response to the request. If you wish to see Me, then this is what you will and must see – My suffering and death, the requirement to walk in My footsteps, a call to our willingness to sacrifice, our complete focus on God’s kingdom work, and allowing ourselves to go to Jesus crucified.

The call to all who want to see Jesus is to accept His very real presence in each aspect of our existence, in each experience of any or all of our human senses.

Sometimes the struggles we face are right there in our face, they are a very present experience that challenges us and gives us great examples of strong faith.

As you know, yesterday we went to our Seniorate Lenten Retreat. There was a lot of good accomplished in prayer and reflection. Of course we shared in a fantastic meal. Then this happened…

We got into our ‘brief’ Seniorate meeting. Everyone reported out on the activities in their parish. Then the meeting took on a negative tone. It was an awful struggle. Negativity is. The casting of blame on others or down-talking the way others find their way to Christ is no answer or help. It hurt.

That struggle may have made lesser people bitter or angry, yet brave people from those among us and others stood up and blew away the negativity. They remembered that the negativity of the ruler of the world has been driven out by Christ.

They reminded us of what is most important for believers. Problems – go to the cross with faith that God is God, that His promises are true, that we must act in all things with faith and hope – no struggle can overcome the Holy Spirit. Our call is to be there for all who struggle with exactly the hope, faith, and welcome Jesus calls us to offer. As Jesus faced His struggle so must we!

Christian Witness, Homilies, PNCC, ,

Reflection for Passion Sunday 2023

How to Overcome.

“Did I not tell you that if you believe you will see the glory of God?”

Thank you for joining as we continue our journey together, now in Passiontide. We are drawing closer and closer to the days of Jesus’ arrest, trial, cruel murder, and burial. Our hearts (that is our whole selves) consider most somberly our Lenten accomplishment and what is to come. 

Have these eight weeks helped us get rid of those hot stoves of sin in our lives?

In the second part of Bitter Lamentations which we sang together yesterday while on retreat, in the Lamentation Hymn, we hear the words: They whipped His shoulders; for my sins they beat Him. Come, all you sinners, Jesus’ blood is readied. As soothing ointment for wretched hearts of sin; Well-spring of true life.

In today’s readings and gospel we see exactly that wellspring of life, true life, cutting through doubt, confusion, worry, sadness, and finally death.

In Ezekiel’s prophesy God reveals that He will not only open people’s graves and have them rise – a physical fact, but simultaneously He will place His spirit in [them] that [they] may live. His work is true life in its factuality as well as in our very being. We are not dead on any level. God brings us to a life that is throughout. The old stoves of sin are cast off and we really live.

St. Paul reminds the Romans that they are: in the spirit. So, we are. We already possess new life as dwellers in the kingdom, we have new life in Christ by our baptism and our witness. 

Because of what remains in us of the flesh we have work to do. We need Paul’s reminder that we are in the spirit so we might set to work in getting rid of those stoves of sin, breaking away from the old fleshiness that we cling to.

Let us consider the gospel of Jesus raising Lazarus in part as a whole and in part as a series of vignettes – small stories, glimpses into human fleshy reality where we hold unto doubt, confusion, worry, sadness, and death.

If you will notice, Jesus does not say very much throughout. His statements are short and pointed solely to the revelation of God’s glory that is in Him, and the fact that all this is being done to show Who He really is.

Think of these scenes as the overarching story unfolds: Martha, Mary, and certainly Lazarus too, were worried. They call for Jesus’ help. He does not arrive. Lazarus dies. The apostles are confused by all of this because Jesus is not helping and then He says they are going back to Judea where He is under threat of death. Martha and Mary are sad. Jesus arrives six days too late from our fleshy perspective. The crowds criticize. There is a dialog about these long off last days and the resurrection.

We see in these vignettes people’s doubt, confusion, worry, sadness, and death. All this is not just centered on hot stoves of sin and a failure to see clearly Who Jesus is. It is an exhibit of an entire hot kitchen of sin that is the old flesh.

Then something amazing: “Take away the stone.” Jesus shows Himself God, bringing life from death and the first glimpse of the life He will bring us from the cross. As we wend through this Passiontide let us focus on the new true life we have in Jesus. Jesus’ blood is readied for us. 

Christian Witness, Homilies, ,

Reflection for Passion Sunday 2022

Made whole.

He will not break off a bent reed, nor put out a flickering lamp. He will persist until he causes justice to triumph.

Isaiah prophesies about a ‘bruised reed’ and a ‘smoldering wick.’ In fulfillment Jesus came, not to destroy the reed or put out the wick, but to take brokenness and smoldering away. Jesus has healed and re-ignited us, has brought us into the Kingdom, into lives vastly differently.

Through this Lent we reflected and acted on our call to be vastly different. We looked at our inward selves and our outward actions and have worked to reform them through more ardent prayer, sacrifice, study, worship, and giving. We came to realize that those in the Kingdom live like this year-round, not just during Lent.

Today, St. Paul speaks of that change in him. Paul accomplished much in his youth; he was at the top of his profession. He contrasts his life in Christ to that prior life, not in exaggerated detail, but in broad strokes. 

Paul tells us that everything he was before, all that he had, is loss — i.e., nothing, worthless, even a waste. Everything before his encounter with Jesus, and his acceptance of Christ in faith, Paul says with more than a little hyperbole, is rubbish compared to where he is and where he is going. 

That seems extreme until we realize how much more excellent life in Christ is. Paul got that! Paul came to realize, very clearly, what he was before Jesus. Indeed, Paul was, a bruised reed, a smoldering wick giving neither light nor warmth. Now all things are different. Jesus has changed him, and he now presses forward, as in a race, to attain, to possess the fullness of life in Christ we will know in heaven.

Paul challenges us to go forward in faith with eyes on the heavenly prize of eternal companionship with Christ. Faith is not backward-looking, nor does it rest on its laurels. We must constantly continue our pursuit of excellence in the Kingdom life, in walking the gospel path.

We see, brothers and sisters, the realization of God’s promises in Isaiah, the new thing He is doing, that is our Kingdom life today begun in Christ Jesus. That new thing is the removal of the bruise in us. It is the re-ignition of the fire within us. His doing is not at all reliant on our past, for it is out of complete mercy that He gives us that same new life Paul lived.

Illustrating all this in such a poignant way is Jesus in the confrontation over the sinful woman. In this confrontation the scribes and Pharisees remain steadfast in their past, they live so completely in the past that they fail to see the Messiah standing before them, they walk away. On the other hand, the woman recognizes the new thing God present is doing in her life, she goes forward, like Paul, changed — the past bruise is gone, she is reignited.

We are healed and made on fire for the Kingdom of God.  We are made whole. Our Lenten journey has revealed what God has done for us. Then let us let go, forget the past as God has, and press on to fulness of life here and forever with Christ.

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