Life takes over (as it should)

When I started reading The Last Week by Borg and Crossan, I had no idea (as we never do) of what was waiting in the wings of my life.  My friend Bob had gracefully passed onto the next phase of his life, things were sprouting in the greenhouse, and it seemed to be the perfect time for a week long furlough into intellectual/spiritual musing.  Ah, but the best laid plans...

It has been my first time as Clerk of Hopewell Centre of being involved with the life, dying, death and memorial planning for a Friend.  Also my first time of doing something like this since I declared out loud that God has called me to ministry.  Sometimes just the naming of a process gives it a whole new feel, and this was one of those times.

Where before I might have said, "This is just too much for me to be involved in," and pulled back, I now felt I had a responsibility to be Present.  Not just a responsibility; I wanted to be present.
Where once I might have glossed over things, performing the perfunctory tasks, I now found myself anticipating the needs of others, and desiring to go the extra mile, to seek where I might be of help, to encourage others to do the same.

It was a blessing of the greatest gifts to me as much to others.  I received the opportunity to "officiate" at the graveside, to deliver a prayer, some scripture and some words of comfort.  My first reaction to being asked was fear, but that was quickly replaced by a calm fortitude, as it was not me that had this work to do, but the inner Light, ministering through me.

Lest you think I have been spirited off to some other-worldly plane, I must tell you quickly that the acceptance of the gift of ministry has by no means wiped my slate clean of human frailty.  Along with the acceptance of responsibility, came my the surfacing of my most common human traits:  control, anxiety, misspoken words of correction, loss of patience, and an overwhelming sense of being more "right" than others.

So being a minister does not free one of one's humanness?  Alas, as even Jesus knew, this is not the case.  But my friend Bob, even in his human absence, ministered to me in this case.  His wife said,
"Where is that scripture Bob liked, Whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's?  You can read that graveside, right?"

And so I went to Romans 14:

Romans 14

The Weak and the Strong

 ¹Accept him whose faith is weak, without passing judgment on disputable matters. ²One man's faith allows him to eat everything, but another man, whose faith is weak, eats only vegetables. ³The man who eats everything must not look down on him who does not, and the man who does not eat everything must not condemn the man who does, for God has accepted him. ⁴Who are you to judge someone else's servant? To his own master he stands or falls. And he will stand, for the Lord is able to make him stand.  ⁵One man considers one day more sacred than another; another man considers every day alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. ⁶He who regards one day as special, does so to the Lord. He who eats meat, eats to the Lord, for he gives thanks to God; and he who abstains, does so to the Lord and gives thanks to God. ⁷For none of us lives to himself alone and none of us dies to himself alone. ⁸If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord. So, whether we live or die, we belong to the Lord.
 ⁹For this very reason, Christ died and returned to life so that he might be the Lord of both the dead and the living. ¹⁰You, then, why do you judge your brother? Or why do you look down on your brother? For we will all stand before God's judgment seat. ¹¹It is written:
   " 'As surely as I live,' says the Lord,
   'every knee will bow before me;
      every tongue will confess to God.' "^{[a] 12}So then, each of us will give an account of himself to God.
 ¹³Therefore let us stop passing judgment on one another. Instead, make up your mind not to put any stumbling block or obstacle in your brother's way. ¹⁴As one who is in the Lord Jesus, I am fully convinced that no food^[b] is unclean in itself. But if anyone regards something as unclean, then for him it is unclean. ¹⁵If your brother is distressed because of what you eat, you are no longer acting in love. Do not by your eating destroy your brother for whom Christ died. ¹⁶Do not allow what you consider good to be spoken of as evil. ¹⁷For the kingdom of God is not a matter of eating and drinking, but of righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Spirit, ¹⁸because anyone who serves Christ in this way is pleasing to God and approved by men.
 ¹⁹Let us therefore make every effort to do what leads to peace and to mutual edification. ²⁰Do not destroy the work of God for the sake of food. All food is clean, but it is wrong for a man to eat anything that causes someone else to stumble. ²¹It is better not to eat meat or drink wine or to do anything else that will cause your brother to fall.
 ²²So whatever you believe about these things keep between yourself and God. Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself by what he approves. ²³But the man who has doubts is condemned if he eats, because his eating is not from faith; and everything that does not come from faith is sin.

And I read, and I read again, and I sat and I thought.  And I laughed a little and gazed upward at the point where I imagined my white bearded Friend and his invisible, inperceivable, beyond that which is knowable Friend were laughing with each other, as they gazed down at me.

And I asked the forgiveness of myself, my God, and my friends for my erratic behavior, and once again tried to return to the humble place the Light had carved out to me, where I could be of some better service than my humanness had planned.

I can only be the best me that I can be.  "And we are all being the best me's we can be," my friend Bob whispers in my ear, "and that is why we should do all the good we can, and do the least judging we can, and the most loving."

Yesterday I sat with my women friends after meeting for worship, and "debriefed" my experience of the memorial:  all the things I felt could have been done differently, all the things we thought went well, and most of all, all the ways I wished I had behaved more graciously.  We all were of one mind:  that Bob's memorial was beautiful, that everything went just as he had planned it, and that we were all grateful to be present.

In the end we all came to the same conclusion:  There is no way to anticipate every need, address every person in their individual personalities, define and list every process, meet every individual at their own very unique place.  It is impossible.  There is only one way to be "good enough." 

One must live to the Lord.  As in the example of Jesus, the Buddha, Mohammed, the many wonderful early saints, George Fox, Isaac and Mary Penington, Thomas Kelly, and so many of the Friends we encounter every day, the only way to be truly present is to live in the manner we belong to God. 

If I cultivate a loving spirit that is in kinship with that of Jesus as he walked the earth, it does not mean that I will not make mistakes, that I will not lose my temper or say the wrong thing.  But there is certainly a greater chance that those I encounter will encounter the Light through me. If in my daily practice, I endeavor to not judge others, to bring a spirit of Love, and to live to the Lord, then there is certainly a greater opportunity for me to meet God in them.  This is the making of peace.

My friends, on the day of Bob's memorial and wake, I saw more faces of God than I might ever have seen before.  And it was good.

What was Jesus' intent?

Friends, I must confess that this trip through Jerusalem, exploring The Last Week:  What the Gospels Really Teach About Jesus's Final Days in Jerusalem, has not been so immediately enlightening as I hoped.  It is not that the book has failed, it is that all my years of wimping out on Greek and Hebrew study because I was a "pastoral counselling" student has come back to haunt me.

Now I find that I'm faced with a relatively scholarly book that is written for the popular market, and each place I read a translation of Scripture, I am picking up my NRSV translation and finding it wanting.  The book is based on a more up-to-date reading based on both archaeology and reading of original language text, and focuses more on the book of Mark, as the earliest accounting of the story.  Even Mark was writing 70 years after the events, and writing knowing of the destruction of the Temple that occurred in his own era.  So the story is a delicate teasing out of history, to discern the "true" history of the time.

I like what I find, I'm just not sure whether to trust it.  It's hard to give up one's lifelong held version of Jesus' life, even if it is in favor of a version that more suits my life today.  I want to believe what I am reading:  that Jesus was an activist, and that many of his movements, even in this last week, were planned fulfillment of the prophecies, meant to call attention to important lessons for the people, about following their true leader, rather than the Romans.

I've just spent an amazing amount of my life being in dialogue with the 'suffering servant' interpretation of Jesus, and it has not always been pretty.  The salvific model of Jesus life, leading up to his death and resurrection on the cross, has not really had much meaning for me.  I must admit, however, that since it is the Cross that was the focus of my Christian upbringing, this book calls me to see how much time I have spent rebelling from the beliefs of my childhood, a fact that perhaps deserves a little more attention.

So Borg and Crossan have caught my eye, in a way I didn't expect.  They have put the part of me that believes in the work of Jesus' life, in direct conversation with the part of me that was raised to believe (and rejected) his death.  I'm know this is not by accident.  I'm tired of pretending to stand for something, to be polite in certain circles, and I'm ready to have this dialogue.

In my reading of this Last Week, I am at Tuesday night, and so far, my first surface reading has uncovered the powerful messages of Jesus as a countercultural leader, on his Pam Sunday entry into Jerusalem as the peaceful presence counter to Herod's military domination. On Monday, I view his work as a challenger of the status quo, as the Temple has been degraded to a pitiful amalgamation of Roman and Jewish allegiances that serve no one but the rich.  Here he fulfills the prophecy that the Temple shall become as a "den of robbers."  On Tuesday he continues to grapple with both the Priests and the Romans in the temple, calling attention to their own inconsistencies, and deliberately putting himself into more confrontations that fulfill the Jewish prophecies.  Borg and Crossan tell us however, that Mark struggles here to inject meaning that has more relevance for the later destruction of the Temple, so I am left to tease out that which is appropriate to Jesus' life that week.

It is a much more difficult task than I expected.  I can only tell you today that I am halfway through this week, and I do not know how Jesus' life, seen from this perspective, will end.  It is a much more exciting and active week than I have previously thought.  Without viewing the week through the Cross, I am free to see more of the message Jesus may have intended his peope to see, the spiritual message of listening to the Light, to the Divine, rather than falling prey to the fierce, fearsome violence surrounding the Jerusalem that was under domination of the Romans.

I'll continue to read and write, but I can tell you already that this new perspective, while familiar to my innate understanding, will take more than just this week to digest.

PALM SUNDAY 2010

This morning, thanks to my Ffriend Michael Newheart, I had a chance to read a blog about the book by Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan, called The Last Week:  A Day-by-Day Account of Jesus' Final Week in Jerusalem.  It gave me a new look at Palm Sunday, one that is much more closely related to my journey as a Friend.

Michael Westmoreland-White's blog (http://pilgrimpathways.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/palm-sunday-anti-imperialist-street-theatre/) tells us that this book reveals:
"When we celebrate Palm Sunday, we don’t just remember the fickle crowds (so soon to desert Jesus, along with the 12) and their brief recognition/celebration of Jesus’ triumphal entry. We also remember that Jesus presents us with a deliberate choice:  Following His Way of meekness, humility, and peace or the Way of Empire and military might.  There is no Way to follow Jesus that does NOT break from the military option."

Wow!  I'm going to have to read this book.  I struggle so much with the meaning of the resurrection and the cross to my own life, compared to the obvious meaning I find in  the example of Jesus' life.  This simple couple sentences has opened a door wide, to see more of the radical change of Jesus presence in people's lives, even on the way to the cross.

I don't have much more to say right now, except, stay tuned.  I'm going to purchase and read this book this week, my humble tribute to the Lenten season.  When I feel a leading this strong, the best I can do is listen and obey.  I'm looking forward to what develops.

This morning, in worship with my community, I will be contemplating "the contrast between Jesus’ entry into the East Gate of Jerusalem with Pilate’s military/imperialist entry into the West Gate of Jerusalem on the same day."  I love having the opportunity to open my heart even more deeply to the experience of the peace that passes all understanding.

I invite you to do the same, and please, share your journey with me.