Saturday, April 7: The Rev. Lex Breckinridge

Romans 8:1-11. There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit.

^{“There is no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.” We hear these words from the Apostle Paul, but do we really believe them? No condemnation. Not now. Not ever. God loves us so much, God yearns for us so dearly, God longs so eagerly, like a loving parent, to restore us to God’s own tender embrace. That is why, According to Paul, that God has given us Godself in Jesus, in the power of the Incarnation. Not to suffer in our place. Not to show us how to earn god’s love or live so that we might somehow “deserve” God’s love, and certainly not to satisfy a strange notion of justice that says it is only possible for God to love us if blood has been spilled. No. In the cross we see how much God already loves us. On the cross, Jesus opens his arms wide and takes into himself all the evil and sin in the world. That is what God does for us. Now. Not later. Now. And then, in the power of the Resurrection, all that evil and sin is redeemed. Love is more powerful than anything including death. Love is more powerful than our own foolishness. Love is more powerful than our own confusion. Love is more powerful than the condemnation that we, not God, but we, want to heap on our own heads.}

^{Paul invites us to experience and to know, in this very moment, the freedom from the law of sin and death, when we know ourselves to walk according to the spirit. Not as prisoners who have been condemned, but as free people, walking upright into the light. Love is more powerful than death.}

^{— Lex Breckinridge}

Friday, April 6: The Rev. Jim Fredrich

John 13:36-38, Simon Peter said to him,”Lord, where are you going?” Jesus answered, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterwards.” Peter said to him, “Lord, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.”

A feisty Baptist preacher from the last century used to say, “The biggest lie told in America today is, ‘Jesus is Lord.’” He was referring to the distance between faith professed and faith practiced, a gap he himself experienced when he created an interracial, pacifist commune where possessions and money were shared rather than hoarded in Georgia – in the heart of the segregated South, and in capitalist America, just as the country was working up enthusiasm for “The Good War” (World War II). Needless to say, such an attempt to be faithful to Jesus was not so popular with the so-called Christians who surrounded their community. Not everyone who says “Lord! Lord!” is necessarily on board with the Founder’s program.

We see the same gap today when political candidates try to outdo each other defending “religion” while at the same time pushing policies which bear little resemblance to gospel values. Those folks are easy targets, of course. Perhaps harder to see is our own failed discipleship, whenever the allegiance we profess to our Lord and Savior is not truly manifested in the choices we make, the lifestyles we adopt, the practices we engage in. But then the cock crows, and suddenly all our denials and deferrals of authentic discipleship bring us up short.

We all need that rooster’s reckoning, over and over. That’s why confession of sins is like the old joke about the Saturday night bath. You bathe once a week whether you need it or not. We fall down and get up, fall down and get up, over and over. But there can yet be progress in such a pattern. We need not be Sisyphus, always returning to the same place he started, never really getting anywhere.

There is growth and progress in the Christian life, be it a zigzag, a spiral, or two steps forward one step back. Formation does produce measurable effects over time. “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now,” Jesus says. “But you will follow afterwards.” Jesus is being both realistic and encouraging here. He knows Peter isn’t going to get it all right now. But over time – through Christ and with Christ and in Christ - he will.

So for me the Lenten message in this passage is about both self-examination and self-compassion. We need to hear the cock crow (over and over, it seems), but at the same time we must remember that the story doesn’t end there, in the stunned shock of Peter’s “OMG” moment, but on the beach, by another charcoal fire, when Peter is given a new chance to be faithful. “Do you love me?” Jesus asks him. “Then feed my sheep.”

We might want to give up on ourselves sometimes, but Jesus never does, never will. He knows our weakness, but he believes in our potential.

— The Rev. Jim Friedrich+

Thursday, April 5: The Rev. Karen Haig

Mark 14:12-25. Jesus said, “Truly I tell you, one of you will betray me, one who is eating with me.” They began to be distressed and to say to him one after another, “Surely, not I?”

I often wonder what Judas was thinking as he sat at table with Jesus and his friends. Did he think what he was doing was worth it? Did it seem to him to be the right thing? Was he having second thoughts? And what was he feeling? Was his heart pounding? His stomach churning? Was he afraid, or heartsick, or angry? What, if anything changed in him between his conversation offering to betray Jesus to the chief priests, and that intimate supper in somebody’s upstairs room? A supper only Judas and Jesus knew would be the last for this band of disciples who had traveled together for so long, who had hoped for so much, who had worked so hard to bring God’s kingdom to come.

I wonder whether Judas heard another word, after Jesus announced that someone right there at that table would deny him? I wonder if any of them heard another word? It must have been quite disconcerting really—probably even very uncomfortable around that table… not just for Judas, but for everyone. Someone in the midst of this faithful little band of brothers is a traitor. Someone isn’t to be trusted. Someone is going to have a hand in the death of the one who had called each of them by name, and the one whom they called rabbi, master, Messiah.

And even though Judas knew it was him, one by one, every other disciple asked, “Is it me?” Every one of them, trembling as he wondered “Surely not I?” Could it be that each one of those disciples somehow knew of his own capacity to turn away from God … to betray God?

Could it be me? It’s a bold question to ask ourselves, and a most uncomfortable question at that. But it’s a really important question to ask, if only to begin to understand what it means for us—as individuals and as a worshipping community, to follow Jesus in a radically authentic way. We talk about Christianity being counter-cultural, yet don’t always find ourselves living in countercultural ways. Our culture is profoundly self-involved… self-fulfillment and personal satisfaction, looking out for our own interests and personal advancement are the goals our culture encourages us in. And sometimes, in the face of our own heartache or fear or brokenness, we are right there in the midst of that misguided culture, finding that we too have fallen short of Jesus’ call to rich and real gospel living.

Do you remember what happened just after Jesus spoke of the betrayal that was to occur? “…He took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take, eat; this is my body.” In the face of the ultimate betrayal, Jesus offered himself again… “this is my body… this is my blood shed for you and for all…” Jesus continues to offer himself to us too, not in spite of our foibles and failures, but because of who Jesus is.

In Lent we have the wonderful opportunity to take stock of our lives—to find the places where we don’t allow God in and to begin to open up those hidden places, the places of our own betrayal, to the God who loves us, the One from whom no secrets are hid. So don’t be afraid. Don’t be ashamed of the betrayals you may find. Because when we open ourselves up to what God wants to show us, we come to know that it’s all for the sake of Love.

— Karen Haig

Wednesday, April 4: Charles Rus

Mark 12:1-11. But those tenants said to one another, “This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and the inheritance will be ours.”

Upon reading this passage for the first time, I had to come to terms with some anger I experienced because of how this passage has often been interpreted. That interpretation goes something like this: God sent his prophets to Israel. The Jews rejected them and killed them. God sent Jesus, his only son, and to God's apparent surprise they killed his son too. So God took favored status away from the Jews, and now the Christians are God's chosen people. Indeed, it could well be that the politically motivated writer of the Gospel of Mark was trying to express just that. Zeal for even a good cause can mislead. And this is when I am so happy to have found the Episcopal Church. We are allowed to question things, not necessarily checking our brains at the door.

As a gay man I've been ultra-sensitized to the tragic phenomenon of seeing the Bible used to scapegoat and exclude groups of people who are different in some way. It is good for me to be reminded that I have a choice to let go of some past resentment. It doesn't serve me or others to hold on to old hurts. But it is a huge challenge.

Can I find myself in the characters of this parable? The first thing I notice is how like the murderous tenants I am. Though I have never gone to the extreme of actually killing someone for selfish gain, I do indeed go about my day with the subtext, "what can I do today to be happy"? My goal is my happiness. Our culture firmly embraces this goal. But Jesus does not. His ministry was about self-forgetting and showing others how to ground themselves in God, the deeper reality, the real Self, and in the oneness and interdependence of all things. True happiness comes only when we seek for good for everyone. How freeing it is indeed when I can let go of my little goals, pay attention to someone else, and suddenly find peace.

I can also see myself in the tragic selfishness and cowardice of the landowner. Even after many servants had been hurt and even killed, he still could not find the time or inclination to take care of the situation himself. How important we often think ourselves to be!

God, please free me from the bondage of self today.

— Charles Rus

Tuesday, April 3: Steve Sponar

Mark 11:27-33. Again they came to Jerusalem. As he was walking in the temple, the chief priests, the scribes, and the elders came to him and said, “By what authority are you doing these things? Who gave you this authority to do them?

Is Jesus of God, man, or both? Is truth spoken by one any different from truth spoken by the other? Lord, as you confronted the establishment by cleansing the temple, etc., were you questioned because of the nature of your authority; or, was it more for fear of the truth you lived and professed? As we live in a world much in need of having its boat rocked, give us the courage and strong arms needed for the task!

— Steve Sponar

Monday, April 2: Jim Friedrich

Mark 11:15-18. And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple.

This dramatic scene, appearing in all four gospels, is a key to understanding why Jesus got in so much trouble. The Temple was the key symbol of national and religious identity for Jesus’ people, the sign of God’s protective presence among them. And its central activity was the shedding of animal blood in rituals of atonement and purification. That may seem strange to us today, but we might consider that the only difference between the Temple and McDonalds is that in the Temple the animals were sacrificed in a prayerful act of offering.

In any case, the buying and selling of animals for sacrifice was a routine activity in the Temple courtyard. You went to the Temple, bought a lamb or a bull (if you were poor, you bought a dove), and the priests would take it to make a “burnt offering” on the altar. It was a noisy, commercial scene, like an Old World bazaar, and perhaps such an unseemly atmosphere in a “house of prayer” was what set off the idealistic young rabbi visiting the big city for the first time. Or maybe Jesus was outraged at the way the temple system exploited the poor while enriching the clerical elite.

But some scholars suspect that Jesus wasn’t just reacting in the moment, but that his action was a highly symbolic, carefully considered action. By disrupting the sacred center of his culture with his embodied parable of destruction, Jesus symbolically proclaimed divine judgment on the religious and political status quo. The old system is corrupt and inadequate, he was saying, and he offered himself as the new temple. This was blasphemous to the religious authorities. Only God could make such a judgment and such a claim, so Jesus was in effect acting as if he were God.

But you don’t have to be a first century Temple priest to be outraged by Jesus. His call for radical change remains disturbing to anyone invested in the status quo. In the film The Last Temptation of Christ, Pontius Pilate asks Jesus what he is after. Jesus tells him he wants to change the world with love, not with killing. And Pilate replies, “Killing or loving, it’s all the same. No matter how you want to change things, we don’t want them changed.”

Where are the places in our own lives and interactions that are fraught with deadening complacency, or perhaps are even to some degree complicit with economic and political systems which oppress the poor, pollute the planet, and otherwise resist or distort God’s purposes and hopes for creation? Can part of our own Lenten self-examination be to let Jesus enter those places with his whip and his fervor and turn everything upside down – all those things which need to be let go of, tossed aside, cleared away, so there will be room at last for God’s new reality to take place in us?

— Jim Friedrich

Sunday, April 1: Kelly Gregory

Mark 11:11. Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

Who am I? I could not shake this resounding question.

I know the story of the Triumphal Entry well, Jesus and his disciples enter Jerusalem as crowds gather, laying their cloaks before Jesus, and 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!” (Mark 11:9-10). I imagine a joyful and celebratory atmosphere. “Then he entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.” (Mark 11:11). This is where the question comes crashing down, who am I? The noise has faded, the crowds have returned to their daily lives, and the twelve go out to Bethany with Jesus. Am I one of the disciples, faithfully following Jesus? Or am I in the crowd, celebrating the arrival before returning to the routines of life.

The disciples arrive and leave with Jesus; they have devoted themselves to following Him. They are there for the triumphal entry and stay for, what I imagine as, a long walk back to Bethany. The disciples are not simply by-standers for the glorious moments.

Then there is the crowd. What happens to them when Jesus leaves? Do they know it was Him? Why don’t they follow? The crowd celebrates when Jesus comes to them but does not follow Him when the celebration is over. As Father Lex has said, “Jesus wants followers, not admirers.”

I don’t want to be part of the crowd! I want to be with Jesus. I wish I could say I have always fallen into the disciple group, but it would not be the truth. There are days when I have melted into the crowd. I hope and pray that each day I will have the faith to recognize Christ in my life and the courage to follow anywhere He leads me.

— Kelly Gregory