Beyond forsakenness

We read Psalm 22 a lot in church. Well, let me qualify that. We read the first 21 verses of Psalm 22 a lot.

The first part of the psalm appears several times in Holy Week, and comes up in the daily lectionary, usually on Fridays, a weekly reminder of the events of Good Friday. The psalm begins with the plaintive prayer: My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? It’s a prayer Jesus offered from the cross. The following verses in the psalm describe the deepest kind of suffering, including a break in relationship with God, a profound sense of isolation.

On those days when the church seeks to recall the passion, the suffering of our Lord, the first 21 verses capture that pain. The remaining verses, which were read yesterday in church and which appear in the column on the left, mark a shift in tone. That says something important about our life of faith. It says something important about Easter faith.

When I began parish ministry, the learning curve was steep. I started in a church in a university town. The congregation was filled with some of the smartest, most put together people I’d ever run across. I saved a New Yorker cartoon which captured my feelings at the time. It shows a young man entering a swell cocktail party. The bubble over the young man’s head reads: Yikes! Grown-ups! That was kind of how I felt.

But a memorable lesson of this season of steep learning curve came as I began to get to know members of the congregation. Perhaps because I was newly sporting a clerical collar, they would open up to me about what was going on in their lives. I came to realize that you can scratch the surface of the most put-together person and you will find some area of brokenness, a need for healing of body, mind, spirit, relationship, memory, some acute sense of the suffering of the world. It led me to believe that healing ministries are some of the most important ministries of the church.

I later served for a number of years at a large church in Washington, DC, a church with an active healing ministry, offering prayers for healing and the laying on of hands right after people had received communion. The lines were long. As some of Washington’s most powerful people came to kneel, asking prayers for healing, I confess I would sometimes think: What on earth do you need healing for?

What I’ve learned is that we all come to church bearing the experience of brokenness, an encounter with suffering, a need for healing, the sense that we may have been forsaken.

But that is not the last word. We can turn the corner. We can move beyond forsakenness. We can find a way forward. (I’ll repeat a reference to two books that capture this possibility. Uncommon Gratitude: Thanks For All That Is, by Rowan Williams and Joan Chittister, and Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy by Anne Lamott.)

The concluding portion of Psalm 22 is read in Easter season as a reminder that we are never promised that we can skip the challenges. They are part of life. But those challenges are not the last word. They need not define us or determine our destiny. In many of the resurrection appearances, Jesus makes a point of showing the disciples his wounds. His new life bore those marks. And perhaps those marks only made the joy of resurrection richer. When the psalmist says that his praise will rise in the great assembly, that signals the hope of the Easter season.

As we continue our journey through the Easter season, may it be a reminder that resurrection literally means we can stand again. All will be well in the end. If all is not well, it’s not the end. How can you savor that possibility, that promise this week?

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule. (Now accepting signups for Fall 2024 cohort)  Sign up now!

Enough already

Years ago, I read a story in the New Yorker, a poem actually, about an exchange between Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. I may not get all the details right but here’s the gist of their conversation. They were attending a cocktail party at the home of a rich, young investment banker on the end of Long Island. At the party, Mr. Vonnegut leaned over to Mr. Heller and asked something like this: “How does it make you feel to know that this young man made more money last week than you made from your novel, Catch-22?” Mr. Heller responded: “I have something this young man will never have.” “What’s that?” Mr. Vonnegut responded. Mr. Heller: “The knowledge that I have enough.”

We read Psalm 23 in church yesterday, on what has come to be known as Good Shepherd Sunday. It’s included above. The version from the Book of Common Prayer may vary slightly from the version most people know. That’s a good thing, as it allows us to hear this well-known psalm anew.

There’s much we can focus on in this psalm. What caught my eye anew this week was the first verse, which reads: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not be in want. In other words, the Lord is my shepherd and what I have is enough. It echoes the line in the Lord’s Prayer which asks for our daily bread. Not an overabundance, but bread that is sufficient for this day, the knowledge that it will be enough. The pastoral power of this psalm may come from the fact that in much of life, we battle a sense that whatever we have is simply not enough.

How do we come to a place in our lives where we sense that we have had a sufficiency, a gracious plenty?

It begins with an attitude of gratitude focusing on all good gifts around us, instead of focusing on what we might be missing. That grateful heart opens the doorway to contentment, which brings to mind the counsel of St. Paul as he wrote the beloved Philippian church. He spoke about his own sense of contentment, which I could imagine was a challenge for him: “I have learned to be content with whatever I have.  I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need. I can do all things through him who strengthens me.” (Philippians 4:11-13) In another letter to his protégé, Timothy, he writes: “There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment.” (I Timothy 6:6).

A call for contentment can be complicated in a world marked by deprivation and gross income inequality. The persistent biblical call to work for justice and peace trumps any message of stay in your place. It’s not a message of passivity or helplessness.

But in a culture stricken with affluenza, symptoms being the nagging sense that whatever we have is never enough, an attitude of gratitude leads to contentment which leads us to notice that we have what we need. As the hymn reminds us: All I have needed thy hand has provided. Great is thy faithfulness.

Where do you need to work on contentment in your life? Where does covetousness threaten contentment? And where do you need to embrace holy restlessness, an unwillingness to settle? As you embrace that restlessness, at the same time, remember all that you have been given, with a grateful heart. Remember that the world will tell you it’s never enough. Remember that you have a good shepherd.

-Jay Sidebotham

Interested in RenewalWorks for your parish? Learn more about how RenewalWorks works!

RenewalWorks: Helping churches focus on spiritual growth

RenewalWorks is about re-orienting your parish around spiritual growth. And by spiritual growth – we mean growing in love of God and neighbor.

Churches can launch as part of a fall or spring cohort or go on their own schedule. (Now accepting signups for Fall 2024 cohort)  Sign up now!

Write your own Magnificat

What would you say about the greatness of God? What would be your version of the Magnificat?

Today, in a bit of calendar juggling, we celebrate the Feast of the Annunciation, the day that the angel announces to Mary that she was going to have a baby, the Son of God. The child will be called Jesus, because he will save people. The name means “God saves.” The feast is usually celebrated on March 25, which was the beginning of Holy Week this year. The church therefore transferred the feast until after the first week of Easter is over. So here we are.

Mary models a way to respond to a call from God. In many of the call stories in the Bible, the person receiving the call acts like the call was a wrong number. Moses said that he was not a good public speaker. Isaiah said he was a person of unclean lips. Jeremiah said he was just a kid. Peter told Jesus to depart from him because Peter thought himself unworthy to be called a disciple, to be near Jesus.

And along comes Mary, who does her share of wondering about how this all could be. Reasonable. But then she provides the model for us when we hear God’s call. She says: Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.

Shortly after she gives her okay, as she visits her cousin Elizabeth, she breaks into song, the Magnificat, which proclaims the greatness of the Lord. That song is a kind of riff on the Song of Hannah, a character in the Hebrew Scriptures, who also breaks into song at the news of the coming birth of a child. Mary’s song also sounds a lot like the psalm printed in the column on the left, which is why that psalm is selected for this day.

It’s doubtful that any of us will receive a call from God as consequential as the call that came to Moses or Mary. But each one of us has a vocation. On a daily basis, we need to decide how we RSVP to God’s invitation to us, an invitation to be part of the Jesus movement, part of the saving, healing work God intends to accomplish in the world. How will we say yes?

A part of the answer, so fitting in this season of Easter, is to proclaim the greatness of God, to recognize the amazing grace that God calls each one of us to be part of the work of salvation.

Take time on this day in the Easter season to reflect on the greatness of God. Sing that old hymn, “How great thou art.” Give praise and thanks for God’s great wonders and plans for us (Psalm 40:5). And let that proclamation of God’s greatness, your own personal Magnificat, set the stage for doing God’s work in the world.

Join Mary in saying: Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.

-Jay Sidebotham

Asking for directions

I was reflecting on the different ways, over the course of my life, that I would get directions. Younger readers may not believe that glove compartments were crammed with maps and atlases, telling us where to go. At some point, mapquest emerged, providing a print out of where to turn right and where to turn left. That felt like great breakthrough. Now someone talks to you, telling you that in ten miles you need to take an exit. For those of us of a certain age, such guidance would have been unthinkable in earlier days. But however it comes to us, we all need direction in life.

We’ve completed the journey through the season of Lent. We’ve walked the way of the cross through Holy Week. Yesterday we arrived at the Feast of the Resurrection. The celebration of Easter may feel like we’ve reached a destination. Phew. But the journey continues, as we begin making our way through the season of Easter, 50 days that help us reflect on the path ahead.

For this Monday in Easter Week, we read from Psalm 16 with a promise (See the psalm above) Speaking of the Holy One, the psalmist says: You will show me the path of life. In your presence there is fullness of joy. All of which is to repeat that the spiritual journey continues. There’s always more. And so we need guidance along the way. Where will we find the guidance for next steps?

There are a variety of ways we find our way spiritually. For all of us, there are probably wrong turns that we make. The news of resurrection is that a living Christ provides the guidance we need. In coming days, we’ll read from Jesus’ last words to his disciples in the Gospel of John. We’ll see how he prepares them for the time when they don’t see him in person. He says that the Holy Spirit will come and guide them into all truth.

We claim such guidance is still available for us. It’s one of the things we celebrate in the Easter season as we make our way towards Pentecost when the Spirit comes to the church with that promised direction. I’m wondering if you’ve had the sense of the Spirit guiding you along the way.

Guidance for the spiritual journey can come in many ways. A good starting place is simply to do some listening, to set aside time in the rhythm of your life to sit in silence.

I’ve tried over the years to listen with the ear of my heart, as St. Benedict suggested. What’s your gut say? What brings you joy? What just doesn’t feel right? Frederick Buechner said that the place where God calls you is the place where the world’s deep hunger and your own deep gladness intersect. So we listen with our hearts.

That in turn means that one of the ways we are guided is by service to the world’s needs. Those needs are all around us, appearing in great variety. Clarity of direction can come as we get outside ourselves, seeking and serving Christ in all persons.

In my own journey, I find guidance in connection with scripture. There are plenty of passages I don’t quite get. Some I don’t like. But repeatedly, I find that these ancient words speak to my circumstances and provide a pathway forward.

God places us in community so that we can bounce ideas off each other and get direction. In communities where there are deep connection, we can find people who can speak the truth in love to us. (If you’re looking for a good book on discernment, consider getting a copy of Listening Hearts.)

And of course, we can return to a basic tool of discernment offered by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry who said that if it’s not about love, it’s not about God.

In this beautiful psalm, we find a promise that we will be guided in the way of life. May God give us grace in this week, in this Easter season and beyond to claim that promise for our own spiritual journeys. Happy Easter. And traveling mercies.

-Jay Sidebotham