Reflections – Page 294 – Unfolding Light

Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

The halls of heaven ring empty.
The sapphire, carnelian and amethyst gleam for no one.
The great mountain, the holy throne sit untouched.
You won’t find the All-Merciful at this remove,
nor the storehouse of the powers that raise the dead.
The Glorious One is not here,
but far outside the fortress,
favoring the tents of the forgotten.
The Loving One has gone out into the silence
of those who have been cut off,
into the darkness of those who cannot know,
into the cries of the abandoned.
The All-Loving does not visit her forlorn
in their solitary confinement,
but passionately embraces them from within.
The All-Knowing knows better than we
even the desolation they know
as the absence of God.
The Unsayable Presence has left the sure palace
and gone wholly to be in the abyss
of the deepest terror of the God-forsaken.
You can hear him there, calling out.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve
______________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Already

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

That in love
he was free
of their anger,
that his tenderness
was impervious
to their brutality,
that he had become
from a world
they could not breach,
that aflame with love
he was not consumed,
that he had given himself to them
more wholly than they could either
fully receive or prevent
was already
resurrection.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

______________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

He made no answer

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

         The high priest asked, “Have you no answer?
         What is it that they testify against you?”
         But he was silent and did not answer.
         …
         Jesus made no further reply,
         so that Pilate was amazed.
                  —Mark 14.60-61, 15.5

God says nothing.

Our insistence
on answers and explanations
is not prayer.
The Judge interrogates,
and quivers in anger.
But God is still,
offering gently what cannot be said.
(Only by a long listening
without demand
can we begin to see.)

God is silenced.
Our official language
does not admit his voice,
or those of his Beloved.
(Only without judgment
can we begin to hear.)

The innocent are as silent as God.
They have no words;
their goodness is beyond them.
(Only in silence
without knowing
can we begin to know.)

This is God’s fair warning,
that she will not defend herself from us.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

_______________________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Christ in handcuffs

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

Then they laid hands on him and arrested him

Jesus in an orange jumpsuit. That look on his face.
Detained without charges at Guantanamo.
Immigration police taker her in the night to deport her.

The chief priests accused him of many things

The Messiah, bullied on the playground. Bullied in church.
Pepper sprayed.
Solitary confinement.
Afraid of her husband.

After flogging Jesus, he handed him over

Christ, waterboarded.
Convinced by fear that her only way is working the street.
Gang raped by soldiers.
Homeless, arrested for trespassing.

They twisted some thorns into a crown and put it on him
They struck his head with a reed and spat upon him

The Son of God unemployed on the Reservation,
his language forgotten, his history buried.
Arranged at 14 in a marriage to a 45 year old.
Kept out of view in an asylum.

Then they led him out to crucify him.

A rape victim murdered for shaming her family.
Onlookers gather to watch Jesus receive the lethal injection.
Silenced, even her grief taken from her.

The centurion said, “Truly this man was God’s Son!”

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

__________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Anointing

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

He comes without armor
among spears and shields,
stripped of all that,
only in skin

so easily pierced
by splinters or thorns,
so easily opened,

and she alone
who lives in skin
knows

and knows she cannot save him
but only offer
a soft place to fall

and grants him
this lone gentleness,
a laying on of hands,

an opening
among closed things,
a tenderness
among hard things,

a communion
of vulnerability,

a touch upon his skin.

God closes his eyes,
oil running down his beard,
and weeps
with her empty jar.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

__________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Injustice

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.


         By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
                  —Isaiah 53.8

Some New Testament writers say Jesus was crucified “according to scripture,” as “atonement for our sin.” This does not mean God intended the cross, that God demands a sacrifice, that God “sent Jesus to die.” No, God sent Jesus to live. God sent Jesus to love, and to forgive, and to show us how, knowing that love is willing to suffer.

God is not the one who demands sacrifice; we are. God said, “I demand mercy, not sacrifice” (Psalm 40, Ps. 51, Hosea 6.6, Mt. 9.13). Jesus was not crucified because God needed for that to happen. He was crucified because people wanted it to happen. He was crucified by the power of human evil and injustice. Scripture simply predicts that this is what happens when God comes into the world, when we love in humble vulnerability.

The story of Holy week that we are about to witness is not some complex procedure God cooked up to get us saved, not some weird hostage exchange, not some preordained divine “deal” to secure our forgiveness, but the plain story of God’s presence in an innocent person suffering at the hands of human fear and power—and the story of God’s forgiveness overpowering our evil.

What makes it a holy story is not that Jesus suffered—people suffer a lot more than that—but that he forgave. What makes it holy is that we see God’s grace toward us in Jesus’ nonviolent love and forgiveness in the face of evil. As Jesus had said, what we do to the “least,” we do to God. Jesus said, “If you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless” (Mt. 12.17). There is no valid condemnation. But we do condemn. Yet the good news is, God forgives us. Nothing, neither our suffering nor the suffering we cause, can separate us from God’s love.

As you witness the events of Holy Week, resist the temptation to make it all seem long ago and far away. It’s about us. It’s about God’s condemnation of our violence, discrimination, judgment and oppression. It’s the story of Gandhi and King, the story of the Nazi Holocaust and the lynchings of blacks and the genocide of Native peoples. It’s the story of Palestine and Afghanistan and Columbia, the story of undocumented immigrants and torture victims, abused children and Trayvon Martin.

And it’s about how even amidst violence God’s love transforms people, and transforms life; God’s forgiveness changes us. It’s about how love is stronger than evil and life is stronger than death. It’s a love story, about us. It won’t be easy. But it is, as we say, “according to scripture,”—that is, it’s the truth.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

__________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

The song

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

Jesus, prophet of justice,
knows the wrath of the mighty.
Jesus, lamb of God,
hears them sharpening their knives,
and chooses gentleness.

Even with his death rising on the horizon,
he gathers with his beloved
to celebrate the Passover,
the great feast of liberation,
the celebration of God’s overthrow
of the powers of oppression;
and he sings the song,
the song of dawn sung in the night,
the song prisoners sing,
the song that will lead them out,
that will save them and consume him.
         (How did the hymn of freedom
         become the threat of death?
         Who hired this angel,
         who sends us hunting for lambs?)

He sings the song,
but he changes the words.
         The sacrifice is the flaw.
         The need is the lie.
         Your victim is always God.
         The angel from your shadow has fled.
         Put away your knives.
         The only song is a love song.

He will climb up on the altar
of our violence and fear,
our bloodthirsty religion,
and rescue us from the god of our own unforgiveness,
and receive the blows with patience.
But first he will sit at the table with us,
with our knives under our cloaks,
and sing the song.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

Palms

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

With sweaty palms
we wave these branches,
and quivering throats
we cry Hosanna?
save us, we beg you?
for our flesh knows
what our minds
do not yet remember,
how soon and badly
we will need you,
whom even now
in our sweet,
treacherous singing,
we condemn.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve
______________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Lambs

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.

Beth and I walked up the road to see the sheep the other day, the trees still bare but the air gentle, and daffodils just making their appearance. Little lambs stumped behind their mamas on their stilty legs, suddenly running, then stalling, then nibbling at grass, uttering their bleats that sound halfway between laughing and crying. The moms munched unconcerned. In a separate pen, rams munched just like everybody else.

None of the lambs know that it’s the week before Passover. They seem perfectly happy. And none of the people notice Jesus among the lambs, bleating and cavorting and laughing with them.

__________________
Weather Report

Sheep-like clouds all day
and a gentle breeze like lambs
gone to the slaughter;
darkness increasing
to a nearly unbearable degree,
but it will be spent at the last,
giving way to light,
and sheep.

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve

__________________

Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net

Occupy Jerusalem

Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.


Then they brought the colt to Jesus and threw their cloaks on it; and he sat on it. Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, “Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” And he entered Jerusalem.
         —Mark 11.8-11

There is this little political demonstration– not too big, or the authorities would have crushed it, but enough to make a statement. Maybe a few dozen people. Jesus, the country healer, riding into town on a colt, a royal symbol. Jesus with his dreams of a world of justice, a world ruled not by force or fiat but by love. Of course the powerful, at this point, can ignore him. A laughable nobody comes to town telling people to change the world. Right. Let him make a little scene. Then take him out. Have him disappear along with all those other victims of death squads. Or better, string him up in public and make a spectacle of him.

But for now, he’s making a fine spectacle of himself as it is. Who cares? Let him assemble his little ragtag hodgepodge of the hopeful, homeless and hapless, the sad, mangled and quiet folks, the the poor and humiliated—the blessed, by his accounting. Let them sing their songs. Let him do his street theater, proclaim his dream, do a few healings, raise somebody from the dead even. What does that mater to you? This will all blow over.

How crazy can he be to think this amounts to anything? How naïve can he be to think he can go up against Caesar and even last the weekend? History will swallow him. Obviously, he doesn’t understand power and how it works. Power belongs in the hands of those who know how to wield it. The weak have no place here.

Don’t worry—order will be restored. The cloaks and branches, the tents and signs will be hauled off. Just ignore him. Go back to your prayers. It’s between you and God. How does this concern you? What is it going to change, that he rides into Jerusalem—or even into your heart, this funny little man on a donkey?

Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve