Forgiven for Being Good

Readings: Third Sunday in Easter

Are you good?

If you're reading this, then you probably are a good person, or you have the potential to be one, or you at least want to be one. That's the human condition. That's what we all want to think about ourselves.

The Apostles in our first reading allowed their audience no such luxury. They had just cured a man of his longstanding lameness so that he could walk again. And they did it, they said, by calling on the name of the man, Jesus, whom the crowd had killed not long before.

Now wait a minute, you say. The crowd didn't kill anybody. The Romans killed Jesus. Well, yes, some Romans did the deed itself. But they couldn't have done if the crowd had tried to stop them. The crowd was guilty of what the legal profession would one day call "contributory causation." They helped cause the death of Jesus, because they had done nothing to stop it. Indeed, many of them had called out to have another man pardoned instead of Jesus.

Yet the Apostles go on to say that Jesus makes his name available to be called on freely, even to those who, by their inaction, enabled his executioners. To pardon them from paying the debt for their sins, including that one. (It is significant that many languages use the same word for guilt and debt.)

Ok. The crowd needed forgiveness, just like the lame man needed to be healed of his affliction. But you're good. For you forgiveness is optional, right?

Again, be honest. If you had been in the crowd when Jesus was executed, would you have done anything different? Would you have saved him? Would you have tried? Whether you admit it or not, the people in the crowd were like you, and you are like them. Good people.

How good are we?

How we rationalize our choices to maintain our self-talk about our own goodness! Some people might be pro-life, otherwise liberty-loving people who think that wanting to use government power to coerce others to have babies they don't want or can't support makes them good people. Others might be pro-choice, otherwise life-cherishing people who think that preserving a woman's license to kill the living human being in her own womb before it can become a legal person - her child - makes them good people. How we tell ourselves what we need to hear in order to think that we never have and never will compromise, contradict or violate our own core values! Or that our core values are consistent with each other!

Stephen Sondheim was right on point in his musical Into the Woods when one of his characters says to the crowd, "You're not good, you're not bad. You're just nice." And another character observes, "Nice is different than good."

Forgiveness is not an option. Forgiveness is a necessity. For all of us, all the time. It's just socially constructed to be more obvious in some people than in others.

And so our psalm and our second reading exhort us to turn away from our sin and toward our God for Forgiveness. How shall we receive that Forgiveness?

In that darkened room of our Gospel reading, so long ago, as his former followers sat in mourning, Jesus suddenly showed up. He spoke with them, touched them, and ate with them. Face to face.  That is how they received their Forgiveness. That is how we shall receive ours. Up close, in person. As it were, face to face. That is the Promise God makes to those who seek Him.

So, seek, and you shall be found. Even if you think yourself to be at the bottom of the heap of those who seek God, it's the best heap there is to be at the bottom of!

And God's Peace be with you always.

Leia Mais…

Up, Up and Away

Readings: Seventh Sunday in Easter, Year C

Jesus, whom his disciples loved, had been killed by crucifixion, a form of execution well-known for its pain and humiliation. After this horrific shame, he appeared to his disciples in a hyper-physical living form, able to enter rooms without passing through doors or walls, yet still able to eat food with them, and to touch them and be touched by them. These meetings and instructions went on for some time, the traditional "forty days," as it is written. And now, on this Sunday, we commemorate his leaving them.

And what an exit he made! Rising up from among them and into the clouds where they could see him no more. It was an exit that did not leave them sad, but rather triumphant. Their teacher who had lost his life, had won the sky!

And someday, when it was their turn, they would win it, too. This death thing, is just a phase. They would get through it. They would get over it. And what happens next, well, that would be too glorious to describe.

The promise of Christianity, and the hope of Christians, is that even though you are some 30 generations removed from those who witnessed Christ's ascension, your ultimate destiny is the same as the destiny of those witnesses. Because, despite all appearances to the contrary, ultimately God is in control. The entire Universe, and all the good and bad in it, is on loan to you for a time, in order for you to become yourself and then return to the One who made you.

Sounds too good to be true, doesn't it? Sounds like some nutty magical thinking. Those who witnessed the event, would answer, "Yes, but I was there. I saw it. I felt it. It's really true!"

Two thousand years later, we have some scant record of their testimony. Yet we live in the world they changed, because of what they experienced. In this age of skepticism, maybe it's time to be a little skeptical of skepticism itself. Maybe it's time to be more open-minded to the proposition that things are actually a good deal better than you think.

Leia Mais…

O Brightest Hope

Readings: Easter Sunday, Year B

Sometimes there is a cloud over our lives, so vast, so dark that it is impossible to hope that it will pass over us. So overwhelming that it is impossible to hope at all. All one can experience is helplessness, despair. And the gnawing dread that things are getting worse. That we or our loved ones are going down into the pit from which there is no return. It is only a matter of when, and how hard the shock will hit us.

Cowering and ashamed after they had abandoned him to suffering and death, Jesus' inner circle of followers waited for things to get worse for them. Soon, the Romans would come for them. They, too, would be crucified. Theirs was a shrinking circle of grief and dread.

But then something extraordinary happened. All a scientific historian can know is that suddenly, the followers didn't care that they might be crucified. They took up places in public squares and declared that they had seen, felt, conversed with, and even dined with Jesus after his crucifixion and burial. Jesus, they claimed, was God's Anointed who had conquered death itself. Jesus would lead anyone and everyone who asked him by name out of death and into life everlasting.

What has become of their claim? Two thousand years later, one third of all the world's people say they believe it. The Roman Empire that crucified Jesus and later, many of his followers, is sixteen centuries gone. The claim of his Apostles and the witness of more unusual events since then still stand. In blood and agony a message of hope was planted in the world, and large parts of the world are still guided by it.

Their claim has become our brightest hope. The hope that we do not surrender our loved ones and ourselves to the abyss. Rather, we give them and ourselves back into the loving embrace of the infinitely generous God.

Against this hope, the secularists advance unaided reason. But without a defiant and irrational Stoicism, unaided reason leads inevitably to despair. It gives us the what and the how, but not the why. The crisis of pure rationalism is a bottomless abyss of meaninglessness that can be resisted only by irrational means. Stoicism provides only resignation. There is no meaning, there is no hope. But there is a kind of pointless honor in going on.

But pointless honor provides no basis for anything other than societal suicide. It may be that one must go on, but must one at great cost to oneself bring someone else into the world, just to carry on the pointless struggle, fraught with suffering and anxiety? A hopeless society is a below-replacement-birth-rate society, an aging society, a dying society.

Is it really so reasonable to stand reason against hope? Is is really so reasonable to deny our brightest hope, that this one man, God's Anointed, has triumphed over suffering and death, and that he did so in order to share his his triumph with us?

You are free, of course to deny anything not proved to you by unaided reason, or Divinely revealed to you. But if the Risen Christ makes himself known to you, then you will be stuck. You cannot then help but bear witness of him. People will think you are a little bit crazy.

You will have been cured of your bad spiritual infection (existential despair and angst, or worse) by acquiring a good spiritual infection (the spirit of God). In material terms, it is like treating bowel disease by eating yogurt. Instead of the noxious but familiar fumes of nihilism, you will emit the stink of salvation. Eventually, you will get used to your reconstructed self, and tone it down to where your brothers and sisters on this earth can stand you. And then you will get down to the business of your calling.

So now imagine that you are one of the Apostles two thousand years ago. The person you have come to love more than anyone else in the world, who for the last three years has given your life all its meaning, has been humiliated, tortured, and killed. And then he comes back from the dead, in radiance and power, and takes your hand. Don't worry, he says. Everything is going to be fine. Everything is going to turn our very well indeed. Much better than you can imagine. Much better than even he imagined. Go, tell it on the mountain.

Ultimately, you are in the best of hands. Count on it. Rise up in hope. The brightest hope ever proclaimed in this world.

Leia Mais…