Daily Reflections and Worship Resources
Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
Breathe deeply.
A voice comes to you
through the garden.
Why go back
into the cave of death?
You don’t need your spices.
Are you ready to be taken away?
Be free now.
Your lover
comes for you.
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve
__________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
You were created to love.
It is your nature, and your purpose.
Your fears and desires get in the way:
your self-centeredness, your desire for control,
your fear of loss or diminishment,
your weakness and your wounds,
your attachment to things
that subvert love and drain life from you,
all prevent you from loving perfectly.
But their power is an illusion.
We flung them all at Jesus—
even death, and the wort suffering.
And they did not stop him;
they could not stop love.
God has defeated them,
buried them in the grave with him,
and he has come to us now without them.
He has risen, and has overcome them all.
You are free to love.
When you love you die to that world of fear,
and you are raised to a new life.
When you love you enter into God,
into what is divine and infinite and eternal.
When you love, even at great cost,
and even if you fail,
even if you have no effect at all,
you have won the victory.
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve
__________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
Dearly Beloved,
Grace and Peace to you.
Loving One,
you are present,
unbound by anything.
Dawning One,
you are in this moment,
not entombed in the past.
Forgiving One,
you are in the freedom of my soul,
not the stones of my surroundings,
not the grave of my deeds.
You whose glory it is to set us free,
deliver me
into the present moment.
You who give life
where there is none,
I live not by surviving
but by being raised
each moment,
with each breath
to have died,
with each breath
to be risen.
Deep Blessings,
Pastor Steve
__________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
__________________
Copyright © Steve Garnaas-Holmes
Unfolding Light
www.unfoldinglight.net