Stepping onto the Sea

Lorenzo Veneziano, Christ Rescuing Peter from Drowning, 1370

As I’ve pursued my call to ministry over the past six years, I’ve often found myself coming back to the story of Jesus walking on water in Matthew 14.

Jesus’s disciples are crossing the sea and find themselves overcome by a storm. As they look across the water, Jesus appears to them walking on the surface of the sea. Peter calls out to him, challenging him to prove he’s really Jesus by bidding Peter to walk on the water with him. Jesus does so and Peter  begins to walk out and meet him. As he makes his way towards Jesus, Peter gradually becomes more and more frightened by the wind (and I should think anxious about the fact that he could drown at any moment) until he begins to sink. Jesus pulls Peter up, takes him back to the boat, and they go ashore to continue their ministry.

I feel a kind of bond with Peter in this story. Like Peter, I often feel that God has called me to do the impossible in calling me to follow Jesus’ example amid the often unpredictable conditions of life. By responding to that call, I took the risk of stepping out of my boat onto the surface of troubled sea. And for a while, as I began seminary, I felt like I was doing alright. But as time went on I became more and more aware of my own shortcomings, and the nuances of the ordination process. I began to feel overwhelmed – even doubting my call to ordained ministry at times, wondering if I’d made a mistake.

But the key to the story is that Jesus doesn’t let Peter drown. He’s right there ready to catch Peter and bring him back to the boat and sending him out to preach the good news of God. And likewise God is there for me as I go about this long and often difficult process. While this doesn’t necessarily make things easier, it helps to know that I’m not going it alone, to remember that, since God’s called me to this work, God won’t let me drown in the process.

The truths that this story tells us about God has implications for all of us. Wherever we are, whatever our struggles, God has already been there. God knows our pains, our limitations, our doubts. And God will always be present to stretch forth a hand the waves threaten to overwhelm us.

Where are the points in your life that God has asked you to step onto the sea? And how do you cope when it feels like the waves keep pressing in?

A New Commandment

Jesus Christ – detail from Deesis mosaic, Hagia Sophia, Istanbul (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.”

How beautiful is it that Jesus uses some of his precious final moments on earth to urge his disciples to love one another.

Just as he loved – loves – them.

But sometimes, for us, following that commandment seems almost impossible.

How can we live up to that when it’s so much easier to hold on to our petty differences? To name the one who would deny us, the one who betrays us. To blame those who we feel will abandon us in our hour of need.

Jesus did all those things, but what he calls us to emulate is his love. After all, he forgave them all in the end. And he did that out of love.

When we blame another person instead of loving and forgiving them, we inflict upon them again whatever injustice they’ve inflicted upon us.

We betray, deny, abandon them in their hour of need.

But Christ calls us to love one another. And a love like God’s looks beyond petty division and instead constantly, endlessly forgives.

Maybe when we learn how to do that we can finally say that we’ve raised our cross to follow Christ.

Still Doubting

About two weeks ago I included Caravaggio‘s The Incredulity of Saint Thomas in a post. The painting, included below, shows Thomas investigating Christ’s wounds following the resurrection. While the encounter is mentioned in John 20, the author does not say whether or not Thomas actually took Jesus up on his offer. Jesus merely invites Thomas to touch him and Thomas responds by declaring, “My Lord and my God!”

I love this piece for a number of reasons. In the style typical to Caravaggio, the interplay between light and dark here is incredible – I particularly like the way Thomas is depicted as literally emerging from darkness into light as the reality of Christ’s resurrection is made plain to him. I also find it incredibly touching that Caravaggio depicts Christ as actually guiding Thomas’s hands to his wound, highlighting the both the intimacy and the intentionality behind his inviting Thomas to touch him.

Yesterday a professor of mine pointed me towards a modern rendition of this piece to ask what I might make of it. The piece is John Granville Gregory’s Still Doubting – and it turns out I love it about as much as the Caravaggio – for different reasons.

The scene is almost identical, though clearly the artist has chosen to depict the encounter as happening in a contemporary setting. While less pronounced, the light/dark interplay is still present – especially in the contrast between Christ’s white burial shroud – the same as in the Caravaggio – and Thomas’s black leather jacket. Christ is almost unchanged, the only real difference is that his wound is smaller, almost as if it’s now reduced to a scar rather than the fresh wound of the first Easter – as if to suggest that Christ, though constant, has healed. Time has passed, though the scars remain, and Christ has gown with us.

I love the addition of the glasses. For me they highlight both Thomas’s unwillingness to believe without seeing Christ as the others had, but also the idea that just seeing Christ isn’t enough – he needs to touch the scar, perhaps again and again, as if it still hasn’t sunk in after all these centuries. And yet Christ still patiently guides Thomas’s hand to his wound.

For me these pieces speak volumes about the nature of Christ’s willingness to stand with us – for the first time and again for the millionth if we need it. But no matter how many times we question and push back and doubt – Christ is always willing to reveal himself to us.

I could probably go on non-stop about these paintings for quite some time – but instead I’d love to hear your thoughts on them. How do they speak to you (if at all?). Which do you think has more to say for you personally? And what do we make of art that imagines the empty spaces in scripture?

Unbounded Love

I don’t think I will ever forget the first time I held my niece,
Katherine Jean.
I had taken the 1am train to DC.
I arrived in the delivery room less than an hour after she was born.
And my brother immediately put her in my arms.
Cradling this gift of new and promise-filled life.
Gazing into her alert, but as yet unfocused eyes,
I found myself shaken,
Taken by overwhelming emotion.
By Love.
It was in that moment,
In that overwhelming wave of Love,
That I think I really began to get a glimpse of who God is.
If I, as a mere mortal,
A shadow of the Father in the story of the Prodigal,
Running across the fields of night
To greet my niece for the first time,
If I can feel so much unconditional love
For a child who isn’t even my own,
How much more must God,
In God’s perfection,
Love us.

Wednesday Sabbath

Today I kept the Sabbath.

I guess it wasn’t a “real” Sabbath technically speaking – it’s not a saturday…and I did a fair amount of work. But I had declared today a Sabbath even before I went to bed last night.

In the business of academic life – especially with finals and paper due dates looming ominously on the horizon – I’d been forgetting to devote time to myself. And everything from my mood to the tidiness of my apartment was starting to show it. So my rule was that today I wouldn’t do anything related to school.

I’ve made it a practice to try to take Sabbaths throughout my time in grad school – sometimes I manage better than others – but I’ve found that taking a day to focus on something, anything, that isn’t school or work related is immensely helpful.

Today I spent time catching up on some tv shows, I cleaned, did dishes, did a load of laundry, ironed, and made banana bread (using a recipe I from mom’s old recipe box!). That’s a lot of work for a “sabbath” perhaps – but just what I needed to allow myself to re-center and de-stress.

In the business of our lives I think it’s important for all of us to find time to keep Sabbath – whether it’s a weekend or a Wednesday. Whether it’s 1 hour or 24. Because if we become so overburdened by our work or school we’ll wind up not having room in our over-packed schedules for ourselves. Let alone God.

How do you keep Sabbath? How do you find time to let yourself re-center and just be?

God in Shakespeare: Sonnet 61.

I remember memorizing this sonnet for a competition in high school. I don’t know what brought it into my mind the other day, but out of nowhere – BAM!  There it was again.

But as I think it through now my interpretation is almost entirely different. While Shakespeare is almost certainly writing about a human relationship, what happens if we read the “other’ in this poem as God?

Is it thy will thy image should keep open 
My heavy eyelids to the weary night? 
Dost thou desire my slumbers should be broken,
While shadows like to thee do mock my sight? 
Is it thy spirit that thou send’st from thee 
So far from home into my deeds to pry, 
To find out shames and idle hours in me, 
The scope and tenor of thy jealousy? 
O, no! thy love, though much, is not so great:
It is my love that keeps mine eye awake; 
Mine own true love that doth my rest defeat, 
To play the watchman ever for thy sake: 
   For thee watch I whilst thou dost wake elsewhere,
   From me far off, with others all too near.

 

William Shakespeare, Sonnet 61.

If we read the “thee” in this poem as God instead of a human lover, the poem turns into a discussion of the negative side effects of religious zeal. The Church has a long history of encouraging humanity to punish where God is more than willing to forgive. God does not want us to stay awake, fretting over our sins – because God is not preoccupied with them like we are. We fall in love with God and, out of our desire to please God, we start to magnify our own inadequacies – and at worst, magnify what we perceive to be the inadequacies in others.

This is by no means a perfect reading. After all, God is not “far off” nor would I describe God’s love as “not so great.” But I think it still gives us another way of thinking about God’s relationship with us and how we – in our humanity – so often try to narrow the scope of God’s love.

But maybe that’s just me! What do you think?

On Holy Doubt

Icon of St. Thomas the Apostle

The Gospel of John tells us that on the evening of the first Easter, the disciples are gathered together – in hiding. For some undisclosed reason, Thomas was not among them (I like to think Thomas was out doing something practical like grocery shopping) which was highly dangerous considering their political situation. The risen Christ appears to them, giving them his peace and showing them his wounds. By the time Thomas returns, Jesus is gone. When the Disciples tell Thomas what had happened, he challenges them, refusing to believe their story until he touches Christ’s wounds himself.

A week later, when they are all gathered together, Jesus appears again. Instead of berating Thomas, he holds out his wounded hands, shows Thomas the wound in his side, and invites Thomas to touch them if he does not believe. The bewildered Thomas exclaims, “My Lord and my God!”

Poor Thomas often gets a bad rap for not believing his friends’ testimony right away. He’s called “The Doubter” by a church that forgets that the other disciples didn’t believe at first either. We overlook the fact that we are the Thomas’s of today. We who so often ask for definitive proof. We who demand to see all the data neatly in order before we believe. As hard as it must have been for Thomas – who knew Jesus during his earthly ministry – to believe these things, how much harder is it for us living two thousand years later.

I find Thomas the Courageous – something along those lines – more apt. He had the courage to ask the difficult questions. To ask for a personal revelation. To own up to his unbelief in a community of believers. And he reminds us that a faith untested by doubt is a weak faith. If we refuse to ask the difficult questions ourselves, life will force them upon us when we least expect it. Doubt is healthy.

While it is remarkable that Jesus returned to show Thomas his wounds that he might believe, it is equally remarkable that Thomas remained with his friends. That, in spite of his doubts, they didn’t kick him to the curb either.  He continued to live in his community, upheld by them, perhaps even encouraged by their testimony. Until finally, a week later, Christ came again into their midst.

And Christ gladly does the same for us now. He is willing to meet us in our deepest doubts, our darkest fears, our utter lack of faith. All we need do is ask. And we will find him patiently waiting with outstretched arms to welcome us home.

And this story reminds us that it is we ourselves – not God – who shun those who don’t believe the same as we do. How do we learn to be more like those disciples who waited with Thomas until, a week later, he was able to exclaim: “My Lord and my God!” ?

Parable

The Kingdom of God is like a man who has everything and loses it.
His job.
His home.
His friends.
His partner.
His faith.
Having lost status and livelihood, he turns to his children.
And they – who have nothing themselves – become his everything.
With nothing left to lose, he gives them his love.
Pours himself out for them.
Loves them unconditionally.
Asking nothing but to be loved in return.
And they do.
In this he finds purpose.
In this, he finds true happiness.
In this, he finds the face of God.
Boundless, changeless love.

This is what the kingdom of God looks like:
A man who loses his life and finds it again in love.

Thomas in poetry

These things did Thomas hold for real:
the warmth of blood, the chill of steel,
the grain of wood, the heft of stone,
the last frail twitch of blood and bone.

His brittle certainties denied
that one could live when one had died,
until his fingers read like Braille
the markings of the spear and nail.

May we, O God, by grace believe
and, in believing, still receive
the Christ who held His raw palms out
and beckoned Thomas from his doubt.

Thomas Troeger

Telling the Easter Story

“So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid.”

– Mark 16:8.

For those of us in Lectionary-based traditions, this year is the “Year of Mark,” so the Gospel readings appointed for Sunday morning services have come, for the most part, from Mark’s Gospel this year. That means that, between my Holy Week and Easter duties at St. Thomas’s and my attendance at Morning Prayer and Chapel at school, I’ve heard the resurrection account from Mark at least four times this week (it feels like far more than that!).

And each time, I’ve found myself stuck on Mark’s ending, quoted above.

If you were to open up a Bible and look at the ending of the Gospel of Mark, chances are you would see this ending, followed by four more episodes, where Jesus appears to Mary Magdalene, Peter, two other disciples, and then gives what is often called “The Great Commission.” But most biblical scholars agree that Mark originally ends at verse 8. With the women leaving the tomb, too frightened to say anything to anyone, that the later episodes were added by other members of the Marcan community, having found the original ending unsatisfactory for a number of potential reasons.

But we know that those women did not remain silent. Even if none of the other resurrection appearances took place – whether those in Mark or those in the other gospels – at some point, they must have told somebody what had happened. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be a Gospel in the first place.

So why does the evangelist end their gospel in confused, terrified silence?

To challenge us to tell the story.

That’s what Easter calls us to do. Easter isn’t about putting on nice clothes, singing some alleluias, going to church one day a year. Easter is about allowing the Good News of the resurrection take hold of us and drive us out into the world ready to work for resurrection wherever evil and death seem to hold sway. We are called to be like those women who, no matter what Mark says, overcame their terror and amazement, and allowed themselves to be changed by their experience at the empty tomb.

We are called to tell the story of God’s unbounded love within our hearts and out in our world.