Rev. Knox's Daily Note for Maundy Thursday April 9, 2020

Dear Friends,

It’s Maundy Thursday – the day when Christians remember Jesus’s last supper with his disciples in an upper room in Jerusalem. This day is called by different names throughout the many branches of Christendom. Roman Catholics call it Holy Thursday; Eastern Orthodox Christians call it Great and Holy Thursday; the Coptic Orthodox Church refers to it as Covenant Thursday; and many in our Protestant branch of our faith call it Maundy Thursday. Maundy comes from the Latin, mandatum, which means commandment and reflects Jesus’s words, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (John 13:34)

With the exception of Judas, none of Jesus’s guests at the dinner knew what was to come. None had an inkling that this was to be their last meal together with their beloved teacher. This was their last gathering with the one they had followed for more than three years, a man who had changed their lives and who was about to change them even more radically – indeed, unimaginably – in only a few days. Please read the account of this last supper, found in John 13:1-17, 31b-35.

We are intimately familiar with the Last Supper because it is a regular part of our worship experience. Every time we celebrate communion, the liturgy re-enacts many parts of the Last Supper. As reflective and enlightening as communion is meant to be, today’s reading makes it even more so. This reading gives us a deeper understanding and a more vivid image of the final meal shared by Jesus and his disciples in the upper room. Two aspects in particular stand out for me.

The first is the story recounted in John 13:4-11 about Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Peter is at first horrified that Jesus would so debase himself as to systematically wash and dry the disciples’ feet. Unable to fully explain at that point, Jesus says to Peter, “You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand.” (John 13:7) Peter continues to protest, but Jesus cannot specify what is to come; he knows his followers won’t believe it. Jesus tries to soothe Peter by telling him, “Unless I wash you, you have no share with me.” (John 13:8)

Peter begins to have a glimmer of understanding; maybe more than a glimmer, because only moments after protesting Jesus’s humble act, he is emboldened enough to ask Jesus to wash not only his feet, but also his hands and head. I can almost see the light beginning to dawn in his eyes, but he’s clearly still unaware of the magnitude of what is to come. He and the disciples may be wondering at Jesus’s words, and certainly at the depth of his humble servanthood when he washes their feet, but they’re still savoring the welcome they received in Jerusalem. They’re likely still basking in the glow of the giddy enthusiasm of the crowds gathered around Jesus. And now, here they are, safe and together, celebrating one of the most festive holidays in Judaism.

“Later,” says Jesus, “You will understand.” Peter could not possibly have imagined that in less than fifteen hours, Jesus would be hanging on a Roman cross, that he would die in agony, and that he would be resurrected by God three days later. Peter, the disciples, and all who followed and were to follow Jesus would thenceforth look back on the night of Jesus’s last supper as the beginning of a new beginning. It would forever color their, and our, understanding of Jesus’s teachings, miracles, and ministry. This is one of many reasons the events during this final meal, this last supper, continue to engage our attention and faith.

Many writers refer to the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as a “hinge” event in Western civilization, a “before and after” event that separates what happened previous to the event from everything ever since. On a vastly smaller scale, the World Wars have been hinge events, as was 9/11, and, I am sure, as the corona virus pandemic will be. But the Christ event that unfolded in Holy Week is a hinge event for all time; it even changed how we measure time. The world’s most generally used calendars refer to history as either BCE (Before Common Era, whose meaning is the same as BC, Before Christ,: both refer to the time prior to AD 1)) or as CE (Common Era) or AD (anno domini, Latin for the Year of our Lord).

Peter could not conceive of how the events he was so much a part of would shatter history, because on that night he stood on the “before” side. In three days, and for the remainder of his life, he stood and lived on the “after” side. We live our lives on the “after” side. Whether or not we think deeply about Easter as a hinge in human history, all of us, including Peter after the Easter event, can’t help but see all of Jesus’s actions and all of history itself in light of the resurrection. People of faith never cease to wonder and analyze this hinge event; we continuously seek to more fully understand it even as we proclaim it with the boldness of our faith.

Second, I would like to call our attention to the new commandment that Jesus gave his disciples, and I certainly include us among his disciples. “Love one another” (John 13:34) is the compelling new mandate.

John’s gospel is known as the gospel of love primarily because it is in this gospel that Jesus gives us this new commandment. We are to go further than the essential and necessary mandates, like doing to others as we would have them do to us or turning the other cheek, which he gave us in his Sermon on the Mount. Here, Jesus gives us another deceptively simple but rigorous instruction: we are to love one another. In his last earthly hours, Jesus raises the bar for us all.

Jesus goes on to say, “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples.” (John 13:35) And just as he said that to his disciples, so does he say it to us.

I know that you are disciples of Jesus Christ. I know this of you as a congregation and as individuals. Ultimately, it is not what we think or how we worship; it is our love for one another that makes us known as followers of Jesus Christ. Your ministries to one another and to the greater society are abundant, and so is your love.

Let us pray together this evening,

God of the covenant, as we celebrate the beginning of the paschal feast, we come in humility and hope to the table of the Lord in whom we know we have salvation, life, and resurrection. Renew the power of this mystery as we serve one another and you. Share with us the power of your love, that we may share that divine gift with one another, both with those we know and love, and with the stranger we do not yet know but love nonetheless. Grant that we may enter into this time of reflection and thought with open hearts and minds, so that with Christ, we will more fully comprehend your purposes for us. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Post for Wednesday of Holy Week, April 8, 2020

Dear Friends,

The lectionary reading for this Wednesday of Holy Week is John 13:21-32. Please take some time and read this account of the interaction between Jesus and Judas at the Last Supper. We’ll read the rest of the story of the Last Supper tomorrow, Maundy Thursday.

Imagine this dinner, at which a small band of men who have given up their families and livelihoods to follow Jesus celebrate the Passover together. Their sharing of the age-old celebration of the liberation of the Israelites from Egypt is made even sweeter by their jubilation at Jesus’s recent triumphant entry into Jerusalem.

And then, everything goes silent and still. All talk and eating ceases abruptly when Jesus interrupts the festivities with his shocking announcement that “one of you will betray me.” (John 13:21) This is entirely unexpected, incomprehensible, even scandalous. In the abrupt silence, they look at each other with astonishment and disbelief. They are frozen in place, reclining at a low table, as is customary for the Passover seder. Peter disturbs the silence when he motions to the disciple reclining next to Jesus to signal that he, “the one whom Jesus loved,” (John13: 23) should ask Jesus to explain his extraordinary statement.

Jesus’s response is exact and precise. “It is the one to whom I give this piece of bread when I have dipped it in the dish,” he says in John 13:26. John continues in the same verse, “So when he had dipped the piece of bread, he gave it to Judas son of Simon Iscariot.” Surely, the disciples held their respective breaths, staring in disbelief at their companion, who had walked countless dusty roads with them and listened to Jesus preach from hillsides, plains, towns, and boats. At that very moment, “after he received the piece of bread, Satan entered into him. Jesus said to him, ‘Do quickly what you are going to do.’” (John 13:27).

Even after Jesus’s dramatic words and his absolutely unambiguous actions with the bread, the disciples still could not yet fully comprehend that one of them would betray Jesus. They made plausible excuses, possibly more for their sakes than for Judas’s. In the continuing silence, and without a word, but with apparently mutual understanding between himself and Jesus, Judas goes out into the night.

All of this unfolds with Jesus’s knowledge and acquiescence. Although this year we won’t read John 13:18-19, Jesus had said, “I am not speaking of all of you; I know whom I have chosen. But it is to fulfill the scripture, ‘The one who ate my bread has lifted his heel against me.’ I tell you this now, before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe that I am he.”

Do you recall that feet were regarded as contemptible and filthy? And do you recall the depth of humility Mary showed when she washed Jesus’s feet with her hair? When Jesus speaks of the one who has lifted his heel against him, he is highlighting the lowliness of feet even more. In middle eastern and Asian cultures, to expose the sole of your foot to another is a sign of great disrespect, even contempt. It’s a taboo that exists to this day in many parts of Asia. One cannot lift one’s heel without exposing the bottom of one’s foot. Jesus is well aware that Judas is to lift his heel in contempt and betrayal. And Judas complies.

Scholars speculate endlessly about Judas’s complicated reasons for being such a willing player in this tragic drama. Some think he’s a revolutionary who wishes to set off the first salvo of rebellion against the tyranny of the Romans, and/or of the Sadducees, who were seen as complicit, power-hungry cooperators with the Romans. Others think he is simply a mole, collaborating with the Roman overlords. John the gospel writer speculates that Judas is just a low-life. In John 12, when Judas questions Mary so severely for using costly perfume to wash Jesus’s feet rather than selling the oil and helping the poor, John make his own bias and thoughts about Judas clear, saying “He [Judas] said this not because he cared about the poor, but because he was a thief; he kept the common purse and used to steal what was put into it.” (John 12: 6)

Whatever Judas’s character and motives may have been, Jesus is fully aware of what he, Judas, will do. He completely understands that betrayal and treachery are to come from one of his own small band of disciples. And yet, he allows him to go forward.

Betrayal is an overwhelming failure of faithfulness. It is devastating. Those of us who have experienced betrayal in our lives recognize that such an act shakes the very foundation of our being. Relationships that give us meaning and values, bonds that were the solid building blocks of our trusted sense of humanity, are torn apart. The very notion of trust itself is radically called into question. And if it is we who have betrayed someone, we may find ourselves living with pain far greater than physical distress, until and unless we’re able to pursue reconciliation. Knowing how we ourselves deal with betrayal makes the complexity and intricacy of this part of the story, and of Jesus the man, even more compelling for people of faith.

Two thousand years after this Last Supper, Christians still cannot grasp “the why and wherefore” of Judas’s apparent contempt for Jesus. But even at this very low point, the gospels remain the “good news of Jesus Christ.” Jesus knows full well that Judas’s betrayal would cost him his life; but he also knows that such a betrayal was to result in the glorification of the Son of Man, and of God. Indeed, Judas’s betrayal launches the glorification. After Judas leaves the Upper Room to carry out his task, Jesus says, “Now the Son of Man has been glorified and God has been glorified in him. If God has been glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself and will glorify him at once.” (John 13:31b-32)

Thanks be to our God who humbles himself unto death and indeed, freely offers himself up in the glory that defeats death.

I ask you again to pray intentionally every day of this Holy Week. Remember the one who unites us as a people of faith by tracing the cross on your hand as you wake or go to sleep. Let us pray now together,

Holy God,

We seek to open our ears and hearts to your call to us to sustain the weary and protect the oppressed. Uphold us in our concerns for all others on the earth, and strengthen us, that we may not only speak our prayers but act on behalf of their fulfillment. Help us to understand the depth of Jesus’s humility and to know that his acceptance of the searing pain of betrayal by one of his own followers is what brings us to salvation and to you, triune and triumphant God.

We pray for all who are impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, including ourselves. Give us the strength and courage to overcome our fear and anxiety and to offer help to those in need, even while we receive it from one another. We give thanks for all those who risk so very much every day in order to comfort and help heal those who are sick.

We lift a prayer in solidarity with our Jewish neighbors and friends and all the Jews around the world who begin Passover celebrations this evening. May they find wholeness and togetherness despite the enforced pandemic separated-ness on this most family-oriented of holidays.

Most Holy One, grant that we may be counted as members of the great cloud of witnesses who live with justice and compassion, and reveal your divine glory before all people. Amen*

Rev. Knox's Daily Post - Tuesday of Holy Week, April 8, 2020

Dear Friends,

Our reading for this Tuesday of Holy Week is John 12:20-36. It centers on Jesus’s hour, his understanding of time.

Time is ever-present for us, but it’s an extremely hard concept to fully understand. There’s an entire branch of philosophy that focuses exclusively on time, and while I don’t pretend to have a complete grasp on it, I’d like to share just a few observations as we consider this passage.

Time has a number of meanings for us mortals. We don’t think about it much, but we’re acutely aware of its passing every year, when our birthdays come around. It moves way too slowly for children, and way too fast for us. And our perception depends on what we’re doing. New mothers wryly talk about each hour passing like a day, and each year passing in a minute. As I see trees flowering and grass greening up outside, I’m happily reminded that it seems like spring lasts longer here than it does up north. Springtime in Virginia is marvelous, and I’m especially grateful this year for our long Virginia spring; in the midst of so much bad news, the rebirth and revitalization of this season seems more important than ever.

We say we waste time, or we run out of time, or we don’t have enough time. Before the pandemic sequestered us in our houses and changed all our schedules, many of us (including me, I confess!) chained ourselves to demanding schedules and calendars and worried that we’d never have enough time to do it all.

The truth, however, is that time is simply time. Time measures change, but time doesn’t actually change itself. There’s neither too much nor too little, there’s just time.

As important as time is to our awareness of ourselves and our places in the world, it exists in the background. Look around. How many clocks do you see? Your watch, your cell phone, the cable box, the microwave, the computer screen, the thermostat – they all display the time, and I suspect you have others to add to the list. Before we had all those clocks, we relied on the sun to know the time, and people were able to tell time with surprising precision. As much as we may feel we’re ruled by the demands of time on our lives, we don’t think much, or very often, about the notion of time itself.

A Greek mystic once said that “For God, time and eternity are the same.” As we read the Gospel of John, however, Jesus’s awareness of his finite time on earth is very clear. This is just one of the many ways we know him to be fully human. He knows when his hour has come. When his mother asks him to save the wedding feast at Cana from ruin when they run out of wine, his first words are mysterious: “My hour has not yet come.” (John 2:4) With the benefit of hindsight, we know he’s saying “Not yet.”

“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” We hear this for the first time in John 12:23. “The hour has come.” What a thought-provoking notion. We are tumbling through time to the events leading up to Easter.

It’s significant that Jesus’s first, somewhat unexpected, response is, “The hour has come” when he learns that there are “some Greeks” asking to see him in John 12:20-22. These Greeks have approached Philip, whom we know to be a disciple from Bethsaida in Galilee. He tells his fellow disciple, Andrew, and the two of them then go to Jesus to ask if he will see them. Philip’s home of Bethsaida was originally a Greek community on the Galilee that had been conquered by the Romans, and both Philip and Andrew are Greek names. So, it’s not surprising that these Greeks would seek out these two disciples, with their familiar Greek names and likely Greek origins.

That they are Greek is an important twist in the story, as is Jesus’s response. Some scholars suggest that John defines them as Greeks because they come not from the Jewish community, many of whom are already following Jesus, but from the Gentile community. That would indicate that Jesus had already caught the attention of those outside of his preaching audience, a foretaste of the rapidity with which word about him would spread after the miraculous events of Easter, and a reality by the time John was writing his gospel at the turn of the first century. John also lays out this possibility earlier, when Jesus says to his followers, “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also.” (John 10:16) Word of Jesus was spreading beyond the Galilee and beyond Israel. Greeks are also seeking him. His otherwise mystifying response thus makes sense.

Jesus shares with Philip and Andrew that “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” (John 12:24) Here, he is explaining what it means that “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” We know that his hour will include a savage death as well as the triumph of resurrection, but it will also yield the spreading of his word to all the corners of the earth. The grain of wheat that is Jesus will bear much fruit indeed! Step by step, and hour by hour, during this Holy Week journey, Jesus is moving closer to Golgotha and the resurrection, a story that will be shared across the earth.

Neither his followers nor those new to his word want to accept what he warns them is coming. “We have heard from the law that the Messiah remains forever. How can you say that the Son of Man must be lifted up?” (John 12:34) Despite the confusion of his followers and their reluctance to understand or believe his predictions of his death, Jesus knows and accepts what was to come. At many points, it seems as if he were directing the action that was unfolding. The voice from heaven in John 12:28-30, which the crowd hears as thunder or an angel, is not for him, but for us. We are the ones who are called to set aside our shallow, one-dimensional notions of time, and our assessment of what should be in order that we may accept and then live lives that reflect the glorified name of God.

Let us pray together,

Ever-listening God, we know you hear even the prayers that remain unspoken sighs. Help us to step back from our worries and our concern that time is slipping away from us. Open our hearts to your eternal, unchanging reality. Watch over us as we struggle to understand the hour that is to come for Jesus, and as we struggle to walk the way of the cross. Do not let us escape the pain of Jesus’s holy passion, but grant that we will more fully understand his purposes for us and experience his peace. Enable us to continue to find new ways to reflect our growing understanding in all we do. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Post - Monday of Holy Week, April 6, 2020

Dear Friends,

In this time of self-isolation and stay-at-home orders, many of us are likely to be watching more television. Maybe we’re streaming entire series and binge-watching them over just a few days. Many such series were probably originally meant to be watched from week to week, and each new episode often begins with a deep-voiced announcer intoning, “Previously on. . . ,” followed by a few short, crucial scenes from earlier shows to get us up to speed. I find my mind wandering all too often in these pandemic days, and even if I’ve just watched the previous episode, I really appreciate that short summary. Our reading for this Monday of Holy Week is John 12:1-11. Let me step into the role of that deep-voiced announcer and recap what was happening in Chapter 11, which we read eight days ago, for the Fifth Sunday in Lent.

“Previously on…” Lazarus has died. Jesus travels with the disciples to Bethany and raises him from the dead. Mary and Martha, Lazarus’s sisters, were sitting shiva, the seven-day period of mourning, and many neighbors and friends had come to be with them and console them.

And now, let me fill you in with a short summary of the rest of chapter 11 in John. (I can only assume it ended up on the cutting-room floor when that episode was filmed!) Everyone at the house knew Jesus had raised Lazarus, and reports of this miracle (the seventh of John’s signs) spread rapidly, including to the Pharisees and the ruling council of the Jews. “What are we to do?” they asked in fear and anxiety. “This man is performing many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy both our holy place and our nation.” (John 11:47) They feared that the miracles Jesus was performing would coalesce and focus the growing unrest in the Jewish community, and that their Roman oppressors would perceive it as outright revolt and destroy them all. Jesus’s life had already been threatened by the Jewish council, whose role it was to placate their people. “Jesus therefore no longer walked about openly among the Jews, but went from there to a town called Ephraim in the region near the wilderness; and he remained there with his disciples.” (John 11:54) He remained there until the opening of Chapter 12.

“Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead.” (John 12:1) Here is the man who but a few days earlier had saved Lazarus and then disappeared into the wilderness. How would you receive such a man? How would you ever be able to express the depth of your gratitude? The three siblings – Lazarus, Mary, and Martha – did what many of us would do: they fed him; they threw a party for him. As we would expect from earlier descriptions of the relationship between Mary and Martha, Martha took on the bulk of responsibility for the meal, including serving it. That couldn’t have been easy; Jesus presumably had his disciples with him as well, so it was far more than a simple meal; it was actually a feast, shared by a lot of people.

But for Mary, even a banquet wasn’t quite enough. “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair.” (John 12:3) Please see a medieval artist’s painting of the banquet at the end of this email, and notice Mary washing Jesus’s feet. The value of that rare perfume called “nard” was equal to nearly a year’s wages for a laborer. Knowing this, the disciple Judas Iscariot angrily asked, “Why was this perfume not sold for three hundred denarii and the money given to the poor?” (John 12: 5) (Judas’s motives, outlined in verse 6, are questionable and worthy of greater examination. We’ll consider Judas later during this Holy Week.)

It’s entirely reasonable that the family would go to extremes to welcome Jesus back into their home after his time in Ephraim. Both the feast and Mary’s act display their unfathomable appreciation for their brother’s miraculous return to life. For the gospel writer and the church, however, Mary’s act stands out and has taken on much more meaning.

Symbolically, Mary’s anointing of Jesus echoes the anointing of prophets, priests, and kings of old. But those were anointings of the head, not the feet, which were nearly always dirty and dusty from the roads. Feet were regarded as disgusting and repellent. In the culture of the time, when a guest arrived at someone’s home, a servant would greet the visitor and wash their feet. Washing the feet of a visitor was never left to the householder. It was an act of respect to ask one’s servant to do it for a visitor; it surely kept houses cleaner, and it would have made visitors much more comfortable. Such washing of the feet normally involved a simple basin of soap and water, certainly not costly perfumes.

Mary was far from a servant; she was one of the heads of the household. Hers was a radical act of deep gratitude that transcended almost all cultural norms, but even more, with this action, she humbled herself and exposed herself to condemnation. This was a culture that did not allow women to let down their hair in the company of men outside of their family, but Mary dares not only to let down her hair, but to wipe Jesus’s feet with it. And she does so with costly perfume. Her act is a powerful witness to Jesus, and it is the epitome of servanthood, discipleship, sacrifice, and love. In the midst of social, political, and religious discord; despite cultural norms; and in the face of violent threats from the Pharisees, Mary affirms her faith in the one who she recognizes has came in the name of the Lord.

Does her act anticipate Jesus’s own death in a few short days? Is this action a symbolic embalming?

The story is moving quickly now. In coming episodes, we’ll see Jesus in an upper room in Jerusalem washing the feet of his disciples; we’ll witness the Son of God taking on the role of a humble servant. Just like Mary, but much more so, when Jesus washes his disciples’ feet, he is showing profound humility and servanthood. Even as he acts so humbly, though, he demonstrates his power, his dedication to all of humanity.

The two verses that follow our reading for today, verses 12 and 13, tell us, “The next day the great crowd that had come to the festival heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, shouting, ‘Hosanna!’” And the story continues…

During this Holy Week, I invite you to commit to praying every day. If you already do that, add another spiritual exercise this week. Begin each morning by tracing the cross on the back of your hand. Use prayer or that simple exercise to focus on this holiest of weeks. Even in times of pandemic and isolation, indeed, maybe especially in these times, it’s essential to keep our spiritual muscles in the best possible shape.

And so, for today’s prayer, join with all your sisters and brothers; let us pray together,

Creator of the universe, you made the world in beauty, and you restore all things in glory through the victory of Jesus Christ. May we be as humble as he was when he washed his disciples’ feet, and may we be as grateful as Mary when she humbled herself and bathed his feet in costly oil. We thank you for your extravagant love. We pray that, wherever your divine image is disfigured by rampant poverty, global sickness, selfishness, war, and greed, the new creation in Jesus Christ may appear in healing, justice, love, and peace, to the glory of your name. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note - Palm Sunday, April 5, 2020

Dear Friends,

Hosanna! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Even from a distance, a blessed Palm Sunday to you, one and all! Please take a moment and read Matthew 21:1-11, our gospel passage for this Palm Sunday.

As recounted in Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’s entry into Jerusalem starts boldly, with an action that echoes the prophetic witnesses of the Hebrew scriptures. Of the four gospel writers, Matthew is clearest in defining Jesus’s ministry as the fulfillment of the promises and prophesies of the Old Testament. Remember, for example, how Matthew’s Gospel begins with a long genealogy, placing Jesus in the line of David. In the Old Testament prophesies, it was understood that the Messiah would come from the House of David.

Fulfilling these prophesies is central to the Messianic vision and yearning of the captive Jewish people at the time of Jesus. Their suffering was enormous, and their patience was thin. Their yearning was so severe that a number of false prophets and false messiahs had arisen at this time. One of Matthew’s purposes was to affirm the legitimacy of Jesus as the true Messiah in such an atmosphere.

For the first fifteen chapters, and then in the last eight chapters, Matthew reveals time and again the many ways that Jesus’s life and ministry were the fulfillment of God’s promises.

With that context in mind, try to visualize the day we’ve come to call Palm Sunday. After Jesus and his followers reach the small village of Bethphage, located on the Mount of Olives about a half mile from Jerusalem, Jesus sends two disciples into the village, where he knows they will immediately find a donkey and a colt for his journey into the capital city. We all have an image of Jesus riding a donkey into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, but here there are two animals! And that Jesus wants to ride is an unusual image in the New Testament. We most often imagine Jesus walking with his disciples, being in a boat, sitting on a hillside; the idea of Jesus riding an animal, no less asking for two, brings us up a bit short. But we discern the reason when Matthew quotes from the prophet Zechariah in Matthew 21:5, “Your king is coming to you, humble, and mounted on a donkey, and a foal of a donkey.” (Zechariah 9:9) More validation of Jesus as the true Messiah predicted in the Old Testament.

Also important to the earliest of Matthew’s readers is that this parade started from the Mount of Olives. As cited in Zechariah 14, that is the place from which the messiah was to liberate Jerusalem. Our Old Testament reading from yesterday is another such prophesy, as it reminds us of the gates Jesus rides through. “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord. This is the gate of the Lord; the righteous shall enter through it.” (Psalm 118:19-20) And as we noted yesterday, that gate in the psalm was the East Gate, on the road to the Mount of Olives that Matthew cites in the first verse of this chapter.

As Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, the crowds starts to shout, “Hosanna to the Son of David! Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Hosanna in the highest heaven!” (Matthew 21:9) We might assume that shouting Hosanna is like shouting, “Hip, Hip, Hooray!” Indeed, it is that, and much more. In Hebrew, Hosanna means “Save us!” Salvation and liberation are precisely what a beleaguered, captive population yearned for from the Messiah promised to them from Old Testament times. They yearned to be saved from the cataclysm their lives had become under the heavy hand of Roman rule. Even as Jesus entered Jerusalem to the cheering mob, myriad crosses, hung with the bodies of all those executed almost daily by the Romans, dotted the hillsides at Golgotha.

As they watched this humble man enter through the gate to the city, the “the whole [and over-crowded] city was in turmoil, asking ‘Who is this?’” (Matthew 21:10) Try to imagine the astonished murmur that would have swept through the crowd as they heard others say, “‘This is the prophet Jesus from Nazareth in Galilee.’” (Matthew 21:11) How amazing it is that people had only to hear the name of Jesus to know who he was.

As Jesus enters Jerusalem via the East Gate, Pontius Pilate and his army would have been arriving in the city at about the same time, entering by the Gennath Gate from the west.

At this point, Pilate’s only concerns were the crowds and ever-growing unrest in Jerusalem. The crowds, whom we know to be fickle and tragically unpredictable as the week will progress, were swept up by the immediate emotions and drama of such an extraordinary day. Jesus’s disciples limped along beside him, confused by all they’d seen and heard in the days before they came to Jerusalem, and with no idea how all of this was to unfold.

Hosanna! we shout from each of our homes and hearts. Even as we join those crowds in Jerusalem to cheer Jesus’s triumphant arrival, our cheers also mean “Save us.”

Embrace the triumph, and cheer with the crowds in Jerusalem, even though you know the full story – that as he entered Jerusalem to loud Hosannas, Jesus was setting the political and theological table of the Holy Week to come. Our Hosannas will take on new and deeper meaning.

We pray for all who suffer from Covid 19, for all who care for them, and for everyone who loves them. We pray for all who are ill and at greater risk of the virus, that they may find relief from their illness and their anxiety.

We pray for all who lead the fight against the pandemic, including first responders, care givers, researchers, and government leaders. May God guide their hands and minds to solutions and wise strategies.

We rejoice in new-found ways to communicate and be in relationship, even in a time of isolation.

Friends, let us pray the prayers above and together:

Humble and gentle God, you are the soul and heart of life. Open our eyes that we may see the glory of your humbleness, and open our hearts to your love, strewn like triumphant palms across our path. May we recognize your glory as you ride upon a simple beast of burden on the crooked roads that lead to Jerusalem. May we see the truth that we don’t need to wave palms of victory and praise to see that your glory dwells in gentleness, patience, loving kindness, and even pain and death. Your way of peace – of faith, hope, and love – is our path, our joy, our way. Hosanna in the highest! Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily note for April 3, 2020

Dear Friends,

Today, we’re reading the second of the four scriptural texts for Palm Sunday. This one, from the Hebrew Bible, is Isaiah 50:4-9a. Please take a moment and read this Servant Song.

This is the third of four Suffering Servant Poems or Songs that appear in Isaiah 40-55. Though the word servant doesn’t appear in this reading, the concept is implicit in every verse, and it appears explicitly in the verse that follows this passage, which reads, “Who among you fears the Lord and obeys the voice of his servant.” What an astonishing concept: to obey the voice of a servant!

The notion of servanthood, and especially the Suffering Servant, is essential to understanding Jesus and his message. It may help us unpack this important concept if we briefly examine the structure of this quite remarkable book from the Hebrew Bible. After decades of communal work, Biblical scholars have divided the book into three parts. The first part, chapters 1-39, are the prophecies of Isaiah, including those of some of his followers, which were written in the years before the exile to Babylon. Chapters 40-55, the middle part, was written during the exile in Babylon by students who followed Isaiah’s prophetic school of thought. The final ten chapters are a collection of the works of various prophets who were writing after the return to Jerusalem. It’s no surprise that all of the Suffering Servant Poems are found in the middle part of Isaiah, when the people of Israel are homeless refugees, wandering without hope in exile. Their exile lasted for generations, and like many refugee populations in today’s world, they probably could not imagine an end to their poverty and displacement.

We Christians understand that the story of our faith is grounded in the Old Testament and continues into the New, and we recognize the suffering experienced by people of faith in both. In the gospels, Jesus is often called teacher, rabbi. We and his earliest followers know him to be a miracle worker, prophet, and healer, and we rejoice in the sustaining affirmation this brings us. Jesus’s teaching by both word and example becomes the heart of our faith. We are his students, his disciples.

The concept of Jesus as God’s suffering servant, especially as we experience his journey during Holy Week, is, in its way, the antithesis of all those miracles, but it is also the culmination of humankind’s suffering and pain recounted throughout our scriptures. A careful reading of today’s passage in Isaiah reveals that the part of the human condition that is suffering is actually part of the victory of our faith. Beneath the miracle stories and all the events of Jesus’s ministry is the Easter journey. It is the foundation of our faith, the radical vision that a suffering servant is elevated to become the salvation of all humanity.

Holy Week brings us our own visceral experience of Jesus’s suffering. Like the servant in Isaiah, he suffered lashings on his back as he was whipped. “I give my back to those who struck me.” (Isaiah 50: 6) His trials in Roman-occupied Jerusalem were shams; their outcome had been decided before a single word was spoken as accusation or in his defense. He suffered insult upon insult. And yet, we shall see that, with God’s help, he set his “face like flint” (Isaiah 50:7) and was not put to shame.

It’s tempting to idealize or underestimate the patient forbearance of Jesus because there’s a part of us that wants to assume that Jesus always knew God’s ultimate plan. But to think that is to deny the reality that Jesus is fully human. Those who suffer feel genuine pain that is amplified by their powerlessness; in Jesus’s humanity, he surely felt the same. For countless martyrs and unnamed, unnameable victims of torture and slavery, their suffering is the moral mark that they leave. Certainly, no less is true of Jesus, the Suffering Servant of all humanity, and of God.

To be a Christian is to have a faith, to take on certain beliefs, to develop an understanding of God; that’s what theology is. To be a Christian is to live by a moral code, an ethic, that emerges from our faith. Jesus did not have the power to respond to the horrors he suffered; he had an entirely different kind of power: he had the power to witness. His witness is the foundation of our theology and our moral code.

Even as he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday, he knew he was entering the city where he would face his worldly suffering, agony, and death. And yet, he continued on; he did not resist the pain that was to come. The words of Isaiah were surely in his heart as he rode into Jerusalem to the Hosannas of his followers. “I know that I shall not be put to shame; he who vindicates me is near.” (Isaiah 50: 7b-8a) None of those who were shouting Hosanna knew what was to come. That Jesus likely did, and that he chose to move forward into what was to come, makes his suffering even more painful, and more powerful, to his disciples, and to all of us who love him. It makes all that we learn from him more potent and intense.

Today, all of humankind is suffering in the face of a global pandemic. Many will be infected by the virus; an almost unbelievable number will die; and every person on earth will have been and will continue to be affected by Covid 19. Though our lives in these times are marked by the intensity of the suffering we see wherever we turn, and though we may be isolated from one another, we are not apart or separate from the global misery that we cannot avoid. Nor is the Suffering Servant Jesus far from our side.

Our moral response, honed by our faith, is not to be passive and patient in our suffering, but to do all that is in our power to alleviate the pain and suffering we see in our world, including, at this remarkable moment in time, to do something as simple yet effective as self-isolation. We may not be Jeff Bezos; we can’t contribute a hundred million dollars to care for the poor and helpless or discover a vaccine, but we are not powerless. We can keep safe physical distance, share what we can to help others, look after our neighbors, voice our urgent concerns to our leaders, and care for one another via text, email, telephone, and digital media. And we can take one of the most powerful actions possible: we can pray.

As we enter into Holy Week, we shout Hosanna, even though we know how Jesus is to suffer, and that we suffer with him. As we enter this most unusual Holy Week of 2020, we suffer with all our sisters and brothers across the globe. May we respond in faithfulness and love.

Let us pray together.

All caring God, awaken us to an understanding of your wisdom and will. Empower us to be faithful followers of Jesus. Enable us to truly know the depth of the world’s ills so that we may serve humbly to relieve suffering all around us. Inspire us to action that will bring peace and healing to all who bear the burdens of these times and the virus that rages among us. Rouse us to value even the simplest of actions, like self-isolation, in order that we may help restore our world. Energize us to examine the depth of faithfulness that Jesus shows us, and help us to follow his example. We know we cannot possibly meet the standards he sets for us, but we thank you for the trust you endow us with as we strive to follow the Suffering Servant, your son, Jesus. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for April 2, 2020

Dear Friends,

Have you figured out that I sometimes like to use a popular song or hymn to focus our thoughts in these Daily Notes? It seems that I’m in unbelievably good company, because Paul apparently does the same thing in his letter to the Philippians. Please take a moment to read Philippians 2:5-11.

Biblical scholars pretty much agree that this reading is a hymn, even though they can’t find any trace of it in other writings around the time of Paul. Its poetic, rhythmic cadence reinforces the depth of its words and suggests an almost choral or chanting incantation. When Paul visited the emerging Christian community in Philippi, a town in eastern Macedonia, he may have introduced them to this song in person. If, as some speculate, he is repeating the hymn in his letter, he may be using it to remind them of the personal relationship he had forged with them. That relationship is crucial to his work to nurture this newly forming Christian flock into fuller maturity.

Paul writes this letter to the group at Philppi from a prison cell. After hearing that they were embroiled in division and argument, he is deeply concerned. Their behavior was a clear threat to the emerging wider Christian community; this is not how Christians should live together. Sharing this hymn, called the kenōsis (Greek for emptying) hymn, with them, he tries to re-ground them in the story of Jesus. The hymn begins with a vivid reminder of the power and depth of the fully human Jesus’s self-giving. The implication for the troubled community at Philippi is clear: Shape up! Get over yourselves! Behave as though you were Jesus himself!

And that notion is made particularly clear in the almost shocking words of the opening verse. Are we really to have the same mind as Jesus? Does Paul really mean that? Is he actually recommending such arrogance, or is he simply foolish and a day late? I don’t believe we’re to take these words literally; Paul is not actually suggesting that we can possibly be identical – of the same mind – to Jesus. Paul is instead calling us to a common commitment. In modern vernacular, he might have said that we are to be on the same page as Jesus.

Having gotten their (and our) attention, Paul goes on to remind them of the essence of Jesus’s humanity. “Though he was in the form of God, [he] did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave.” (verses 6-7) “He humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross.” (verse 8) How could this bickering group read those words and not stop to examine the shallowness of their motives and actions?

Paul shares these compelling words as witness to God’s love, and also to encourage the community at Philippi (and us as we study this passage) to action that is more in line with that which was modeled by Jesus the Christ. We, in turn, being of the same mind as Jesus (that shocking notion), should live our lives in a similar way, without arrogance or entitlement, but humbly and “obedient to the point of death.”

In six short verses, Paul outlines the Christ event for us. Jesus, in the form of God, is in heaven. He willingly forgoes the singular divinity that is his and takes on human likeness, which Paul compares to slavery. And perhaps that’s what it would be for God to voluntarily take on the fullness of being human. In Roman times, slaves were at the bottom of the social/economic pyramid. Thus, not only did Jesus the divine become fully human, but he entered our less-than-heavenly realm as the lowliest of people.

It’s important that Jesus was not forced to take on his human-ness. Paul’s description here is a description of the depth of God’s love for creation. The implication is clear: we, too, are to freely choose to behave with humility and obedience; we are to stop our childish squabbling and remember who it is who inspires and unites us.

And then Paul pivots in verse 9. He reminds us that Jesus was, in fact, God, the highest form imaginable. This is not just a simple pivot, however; it’s Paul telling us that Jesus fosters a radical equality. In the person of Jesus, we find both God and slave, the highest and the lowest. Jesus lives a humble life and dies a shameful death on the cross when the Roman authorities execute this man who is God in the basest, most humiliating way, as a common criminal.

As we anticipate the beginning of Holy Week, we anticipate the joyous Hosannas of Palm Sunday. But we also know that the horror of Good Friday is coming. And yet, and yet…we have the assurance that from this lowliest of deaths, God will exalt Jesus on Easter morning. Jesus, who became human and thereby took on the form of a slave, is eternally honored to the glory of God. “At the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” (verses 10-11)

This is the essence of Easter: love triumphs!

As we live through this story in this coming week, may our faith be deepened. May the journey we travel in these very difficult times remind us that we travel with each other, and with Jesus the slave who is also the risen Lord.

Together, let us pray this prayer from the Book of Common Worship,

God of all, you gave your only-begotten Son to take the form of a servant, and to be obedient even to death on a cross. Give us the same mind that was in Christ, that, sharing in his humility, we may come to be with him in his glory, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and forever. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for April 1, 2020

Dear Friends,

When Nan and I sat down to dinner the other night, our conversation turned to Easter and how we would celebrate in this extraordinary time of pandemic. Pretty much every one of our Easter traditions will have to change this year. No new spring clothes to celebrate the day. No delicious Easter feast with family and friends around the table. No Easter hike, our long-standing tradition. No Easter egg hunt with our granddaughter – even with FaceTime, it’s not the same. There’s just no way to digitally hide or find eggs and treats.

For most of us, Easter means happy gatherings of groups of people. Remember the classic movie Easter Parade? As Irving Berlin wrote, “In your Easter bonnet, with all the frills upon it, You’ll be the grandest lady in the Easter parade!” No parades this year – no gatherings of more than ten people. No Easter egg rolls on the White House lawn or in neighborhood parks. No church services. So many no’s!

And even though Nan and I don’t yet know all of Scottville’s Easter traditions, we find ourselves already missing them. We won’t gather on Maundy Thursday to remember and re-enact the Last Supper. Nor will we come together on Good Friday to quietly remember Jesus’s Last Seven Words on the cross. And I don’t know if Scottsville Presbyterians gather at church in the still, dark dawn of Easter, but Easter has always begun for me at sunrise, with Mary Magdalene and the other women discovering the empty tomb and then seeing their resurrected Lord. I was about to outline my hopes for a sunrise service with Session before we were hit by the new rules of our lives under the threat of coronavirus. Perhaps most of all, we’ll miss being with our beloved congregation at our Easter service, joining together to affirm, “Christ Is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!” All of these joyous celebrations of the Risen Christ have traditionally involved gathered people, and this year, none of us will be able to do any of them.

But even in the midst of pandemic, Easter is a time for a resounding YES! And that yes might well be even more meaningful this year than it’s ever been.

We may not be able to be together for our traditional celebration of Easter or for the Holy Week events that lead to it, but I hope we can continue to be spiritually connected and centered as an undivided, un-isolated people of shared faith and conviction. Perhaps we’ll become even more centered. We are always united as a people of faith.

These complicated times offer us an opportunity to find new and meaningful ways to observe this most important week in the life of our church, even within the confines of our social/physical isolation. If you’d like to share your beloved family traditions and/or your new innovations, please send me an e-mail telling me about them, and I’ll share them with the congregation. Hearing what others are doing might kindle even more new ideas for our individual reflection and celebration.

One new innovation is, of course, these Daily Notes. Starting tomorrow, my reflections will focus on the multiple scripture readings for Palm Sunday, and then I’ll share some thoughts about our lectionary readings for Holy Week, culminating with the Empty Tomb on Easter Sunday.

May we be together in spirit, faith, and heart as we journey beside one another, despite pandemic isolation, to the glorious YES of Easter!

Let us pray together,

Almighty and Present God, we praise you with hearts filled with thanksgiving for the love you continually shower upon us. As we prepare to celebrate Christ’s gift of abundant life to us all, we ask for the wisdom and perspective to recognize the essence of the sacrificial gift Christ offers us, even in these new and challenging times. Help us to hear your still small voice. We hunger to praise you with shouts of Hosanna and to welcome you into our hearts. Even though we are separated, we are together as one, because you are always near. We thank you and praise you for your holy presence among us. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for March 31, 2020

Dear Friends,

Our Daily Lectionary suggests that we read Psalm 91 this evening. Please take some time to read and absorb this comforting psalm. In these days of pandemic, we certainly need comforting, and Psalm 91 provides just that, with its vivid descriptions of God’s unflagging protection and refuge for God’s children. How welcome, especially now, in the face of this catastrophic pandemic, are these affirming words about our God who cares for us so deeply. At those times when I feel most anxious or lost – not only in these scary times, but also at many other times in life – I find myself acting on the wise counsel of Yair Hoffman, an Israeli Biblical scholar, who suggests that we read this psalm not just once, but repeatedly, over and over again.

Reading it again and again makes its cadences and meaning so familiar that I discover that I’m able to find deeper understanding of the troubles that assail me, and of the very notion of comfort itself. We would, after all, feel no comfort unless we could feel and were fully aware of suffering. We don’t know how or when this time of pandemic will end. But God’s comfort is ever-present. “No evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent,” verse 10 tells us.

All that said, it’s hard to trust completely in God’s comfort, especially when life goes awry. Read verse 10 again as you re-read the psalm. “No evil shall befall you, no scourge come near your tent.” And yet, here we are, surrounded by a scourge that is not only near our tent, but possibly in it.

It’s important that we read the Bible, not that we read what we want it to say. We could come away from this psalm thinking that God is our “big brother” who will protect us from all the bullies and sadness that we’ll inevitably encounter in life. If we’re children of God, won’t God be the completely loving parent we all yearn for, generously supplying us with safe sanctuary and all the sustenance needed for an abundant life? No, dear friends; to think that is to decide that we are the god, and God’s purpose is simply to fulfill our needs.

It’s a paradox and a mystery, one that requires long, faithful thought. And my emphasis here is on faithful. Ultimately, it is certainly God who provides, but we are neither passive receptacles of the word of God nor helpless children of God. God is assuredly our great comforter, but God also empowers us. We must take responsibility with and for the gifts God gives us. As Christians, if we’re to understand and fully appreciate our relationship with God, we must work diligently and hard to try to understand ourselves and the very troubled world in which we find ourselves. Only if we open our hearts to see all the perspectives we haven’t previously examined will we be able to love God more fully and walk with confidence in our journey of faith.

As we read and study, and as we contemplate the Holy Week journey that we will soon make, we must be careful not to misuse the good news about God that our scriptures share with us. The fully human Jesus himself was tempted, just as we are. Recall, if you will, Matthew 4:1-11, our gospel reading from the First Sunday in Lent. This is the gripping story about the devil tempting Jesus. In the second temptation, the devil suggests that Jesus throw himself off the pinnacle of the Temple. Quoting from Psalm 91, the devil suggests that God will protect Jesus when he says, “You will not dash your foot against a stone.” (verse 12 of Psalm 91 and verse 6 of Matthew 4). Jesus, however, beats the devil at his own game, responding with Deuteronomy 6:16, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Jesus emerges victorious from the temptation. So, I pray, will we emerge victorious from the temptation to retreat into the false safety of a one-way street of easy comfort in hard times. Our hope instead is to accept the challenge of faith in God’s care for God’s whole creation, including us and our current crisis. We must not fall into the devilish trap of testing our God. Rather, as we rise to the complicated challenge of faith, we must open ourselves to fully receive the solace of God’s love and enduring comfort.

Be comforted by our God this evening and all our days, and find comfort as well in this prayer.

Comforting, empowering God, As evening shadows fall across our world, thank you for the rest you provide as you comfort us. Strengthen us in body and soul that we might be confirmed in all the complexities of our faith and extend comfort to our sisters and brothers here and farther from us. May our efforts to seek understanding and solace be ongoing and strengthened thanks to your grace and love. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for March 30, 2020

Dear Friends,

Today is National Doctors’ Day. It might come as a surprise you that this isn’t a new holiday created in response to the current pandemic. It’s actually been on the calendar for years, but with our overly busy lives, who would have noticed? Doctors, nurses, and medical staff, and all the schedulers, nutritionists, technicians, custodians, guards, and volunteers who work with them literally risk their lives and those of their loved ones so that they can care for us. I’m sure I left some out, so fill free to add your own medical heroes. That’s never been truer than now. They deserve so much more than a note on overlooked calendars. Pause with me and lift a silent prayer of thanksgiving for all the medical professionals, supporting staff, and volunteers who care for us. . . .Amen.

And now, take another moment for something much, much lighter. It’s a story that I want to share. A doctor – let’s call him Sam – died and went up to the pearly gates. It was very busy, and a long line had formed while everyone waited to be questioned and checked out by St. Peter before they could be welcomed to heaven. As Sam finally got closer to the front of a line, a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck walked past everyone and went directly through the gates. Not only did he not join the line, but St. Peter actually bowed to him. Everyone was dumbfounded, but Dr. Sam was nearly speechless. When he finally got to St. Peter, he exploded in barely-contained rage. “What kind of a process do you have here? I’ve been waiting for nearly three centuries. I’m a doctor, and I’m sure you have some people there in heaven who could use my services. Or maybe I could serve as a guardian/teaching angel, maybe like Clarence in It’s A Wonderful Life. I’ve waited all this time, and yet, you let that doctor go ahead of me and everyone else, and you even bowed to him. I’m furious! Who is that guy who skipped the line and just walked in?” St. Peter smiled and answered, “Oh, that’s Jesus. He just thinks he’s a doctor.”

I hope this joke, shared in loving jest, works to honor all the medical people in our world and to serve as a segue to our gospel reading for today, Mark 9:30-41.

In our reading, Jesus makes a second attempt to let his disciples, the twelve, know what is to come. He tells them how the Son of Man would be betrayed, killed, and three days later rise from the dead. But even after hearing this future for a second time from the lips of their extraordinary teacher, they just couldn’t accept it. It didn’t make sense for this to be what was to come for this the man who performed miracles and attracted and enthralled crowds of people every time he spoke. Surely, Jesus was here to inaugurate a victorious new age for them and their captive people ground under the thumb of the Romans.

Unable to imagine such a terrible scenario, they didn’t ask for clarification or explanation. They avoided dealing with it entirely. Instead, they had little squabbles among themselves about who was the greatest among them. They responded like children, avoiding the impossible, and bickering and competing with each about who was best, and who Jesus loved best. Utterly impossible to face the vision he outlined!

When they arrived in Capernaum, Peter’s hometown and the Galilean headquarters of Jesus’s movement, Jesus asked them what had they been talking about. Maybe they were ashamed of their childish behavior; I can only imagine the quick, sheepish glances as each kept his eyes down, afraid to be chosen to answer. Clearly, however, Jesus knew exactly what had been going on. He sat them down together, much as a frustrated parent might sit squabbling children down for a little “time-out” talk, and said, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.” What an unexpected comment that must have been! It would have caught their attention and put a chill into any continuing conversation about who was best among them. He definitely had their number.

Then Jesus continued to talk to them. Not only did he not discipline them for their shallow behavior, as perhaps some of them expected, but he illustrated his confusing words with something almost like a little skit. Now he had their full attention; I don’t imagine anyone staring sheepishly at the floor. “Then Jesus took a little child and put it among them, and taking it in his arms, he said to them, ‘Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.’”

This had to be a total surprise. As Jesus’s ministry grew and became more significant, I can imagine that they had visions of greatness beyond their dreams. They would ride Jesus’s cloak-tails to earthly power and lordship over others. In their squabbling, they were surely competing for position in what they imagined their world was to become.

But for Jesus, their bickering and jockeying was entirely irrelevant; worldly position and the world’s definitions of success and greatness were utterly inconsequential to his vision. They clearly hadn’t been paying enough attention to Jesus’s counter-cultural vision of spiritual greatness.

Jesus’s simple act of picking up the small child brought this home to them (and us) on many levels. In the Roman world, a newborn was accepted into the family only when and if the father picked up the child. If the father were to ignore a baby, that innocent baby was abandoned, to die. Childhood in those times was literally a time of terror. The infant mortality rate was upward of 30%; of those who survived infancy and the judgment of their fathers, 30% were dead by age six, and 60% were dead by age sixteen. Children were always the first to suffer from famine, war, disease, and dislocation.

The callousness of the Roman Empire has parallels even today. As we proudly celebrate our country as the greatest on earth, we need to remember that it’s the children in America who experience the highest percentage of poverty. Conversations about limiting or abandoning school breakfast and lunch programs are a common part of too many school budget discussions; when the money can’t be found, it’s often school lunches that are the first to go.

And now that schools are closed, finding ways to continue our school breakfast and lunch programs has been high on the agenda of our beleaguered teachers, as they struggle not only to find new ways to teach remotely, but to simultaneously keep from abandoning the children who rely on schools for food. Hungry children cannot learn. And sadly, as teachers know too well, school lunch programs are too often the only reliable source of food for families whose children save some of their food to bring home to their parents and siblings.

Those statistics from the Roman Empire are beginning to feel uncomfortably close, aren’t they? Childhood poverty and hunger exist throughout this country, including here in the abundant farmlands of central Virginia. And malnourished children more often need medical care, but they disproportionately lack health insurance. It’s heart-rending to recognize that we are not so different from ancient Rome. But it’s soul-soothing to know that churches like ours work so faithfully and generously to alleviate this terrible need for the least among us.

By taking an unknown child into his arms, Jesus lived his vision for his disciples. He showed them that they couldn’t avoid his message and purpose. Power was to come through the perils, tragedy, and victory of Holy Week, not to the powerful or to those seeking power. It was to come for the innocent, the least among people. They are the ones whom Jesus holds in his arms, to be nurtured into the family of God.

I hope you enjoyed the joke above, but it’s the exact opposite of our reading today. Jesus would not have thought he was somehow better than everyone else and therefore eligible to enter heaven without delay. Jesus’s model was a child, the most innocent and least powerful of all. It is those who are like children, not those like Caesar, who are likely to be great in God’s realm. And so too are we called to reflect the model Jesus sets among us. As we welcome the least of those among us, we welcome the risen Christ and open our hearts to God’s presence.

Let us pray:

We pray for all doctors, nurses, emergency workers, and support staff. May the skills you have nurtured in them enable them to bring hope, healing, and wholeness to those in their care. May they also know guidance and support in times of pain and frustration, when their skills are not enough to prevent permanent injury, disability, or death. May they find your peace as they work long hours and are forced to make hard decisions in this time of pandemic. Hold them safely in your arms, O God, just as you held a little child when you taught your disciples in Capernaum. Bless each one of them, that they may be a blessing to others. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for the Fifth Sunday in Lent

Dear Friends,

Yesterday, I received word that the Reverend Sherrie Johnson had died from complications of the Covid-19 virus. Sherrie and I were friends, not the kind of friends who talk every other day, but friends who knew each other during more than twenty overlapping years of ministry in New Jersey. I respected her as a pastoral colleague, and I grieve her death. It took this virus two weeks to kill 1,000 people in the United States; the second thousand died in only two days. In the days ahead, I have no doubt that grief will become a much more prevalent emotion in our everyday life.

The Gospel reading for this the Fifth Sunday in Lent is taken from John 11:1-45. I ask you to prayerfully, meditatively read today’s gospel, which addresses the very difficult theme of grief.

John has often been called the gospel of signs. The events generally understood In the other gospels as miracles – the powerful and mighty acts of Jesus – are for John not so much mighty acts. Instead, they’re signs that point to who this man is, that signify that he is the Son of God. What’s important for John is who Jesus is, not the miracles themselves.

The raising of Lazarus is the seventh and final miracle, the final sign, that John recounts. After this story, the pace quickens, and the second half of the gospel describes events spanning fewer than a couple of weeks, and ending with the resurrection of Christ. Reading about those few weeks is like being on an emotional roller coaster. There’s barely time to catch our breath, but the story is of such consequence and magnitude that we must do so.

Our breath-taking journey begins with the death of Lazarus. John’s vivid, heart-rending description of the grief and pain experienced by Lazarus’s family and friends, including Jesus, doesn’t mince words. When Jesus tells his disciples that “Our Lazarus has fallen asleep, but I am going there to awaken him” (verse 11), John is using a widely recognized synonym for death, one that was used at various points in the New Testament by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Paul. It may seem like Jesus is avoiding the hard truth of death when he speaks of Lazarus sleeping, but he was actually putting the raw truth out there: Lazarus is dead, and Jesus and the disciples know it.

With Lazarus’s death, grief grips the hearts of his family and friends. Martha, Lazarus’s sister, runs to meet Jesus on the road as he approaches their home. In her anguish and raw grief, she blurts out to her beloved Jesus, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” (verse 21) It’s an awkward, supremely uncomfortable moment; Martha seems almost disrespectful. But try to imagine the rawness and pain Martha was feeling. She and her sister, Mary, have been mourning their brother Lazarus for four days. They are, thankfully, not alone; their neighbors and friends are with them to console them and grieve with them as they sit together in a room in their home in Bethany. This is the Jewish practice of sitting shiva, when family mourners sit together, often on low stools to symbolize how they have been brought low by their loss. They remain in their home or in the home of the deceased for up to seven days, during which time they are visited by friends who come to console them, care for them, and express their own grief.

This age-old practice continues to this day, providing structure in the emotional chaos that immediately follows the death of a loved one, as well as the support and consolation of community and the comfort of a rite shared through millennia, displacement, and captivity.

Their mourning is intense. And the fullness of Jesus’s humanity comes through in this moment, when in verse 35, he weeps. I normally use the NRSV version of the Bible, in which verse 35 is translated as, “Jesus began to weep.” But that translation lacks the immediacy and power of the King James version’s “Jesus wept.”

He is more than the rabbi who teaches love and humility; he is more than the miracle-worker who turns water into wine at Cana to salvage the celebrations; he is more than and different from the remarkable one about whom God whispers, “This is my Son, the Beloved, the Chosen” in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This weeping man is fully human, just like the mourners in Bethany.

Jesus wept. Those two familiar words are extraordinarily powerful. As I grieve my friend, I also grieve the desolation of this crisis, and I grieve once again all the losses I’ve suffered in my own life. And yet, I know that Jesus wept – Jesus weeps – with me.

The overwhelming theme of this passage is the expression of grief. And it is an ongoing reality in our lives today. Too often, especially as we confront the raw emotion of grief, we pull back and try to downplay our emotions. We try to put up a good front, as if that were a sign of strength. Somehow, we cannot allow ourselves to acknowledge or share the pain of grief. To acknowledge such depth of emotion would be, for far too many of us, a sign of weakness. That’s one of many reasons we as a society are so shamefully slow to understand and accept mental and emotional illness as real illness, just like physical illness. Sadly, there are some among our Christian brothers and sisters who believe that grieving means questioning God. My heart aches for them as they are then unable to seek and find God’s comfort in their pain.

And there is no question that grief is pain. Even though the pain of grief doesn’t manifest itself like the observable, pathological pain of a broken arm, or a cut, or a sore throat, our bodies respond to grief in measurable and painful ways. We need to acknowledge, especially to ourselves, that pain is pain, whether its source is physical or emotional. In these days of our global pandemic, we are experiencing genuine grief, with all the emotional, psychological, and physical pain that accompanies it.

For a generation of psychologists, counselors, and seminarians, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying was a crucial tool in understanding grief. A few days ago, I saw David Kessler on television. He worked closely with Kübler-Ross before her death and has continued to analyze and address issues of grief and loss. He defines grief as change that is unwanted, which I find to be a particularly elegant and comprehensive definition. The death of a loved one, as we saw in John’s recounting of the death of Lazarus, may be the most intense of the unwanted changes we suffer over our lifetimes.

But death is far from the only source of grief pain that we experience. The current crisis has brought us a new reality that is deeply threatening and hard to fathom. In the midst of so many unknowns and questions, it’s hard to find our footing. We grieve. Whether we isolate ourselves voluntarily or in response to a government mandate, we experience wrenching, unwanted change to the freedom we’ve enjoyed all our lives. We grieve. We are unable to see and touch those whom we love. We grieve. We are unable to be with those who are lonely, or those who are ill, or those who mourn. We grieve. We read about the rising global and US death rates from coronavirus, and we have no way to harness our alarm. We grieve. When that death rate takes on a personal reality, we grieve. I grieve Sherrie’s death.

The Gospel of John acknowledges that we grieve, and so we should. Indeed, the Gospel of John permits us to grieve. Grief is painful, and it is not a sign of weakness or faithlessness. As Christians, we proclaim Jesus as truly God and truly human. The human Jesus weeps in grief; the divine Jesus gives life. In verse 25 Jesus says it forcefully, “I am the resurrection and the life.” This is a future promise and it is a present reality. Even in the painful midst of our immediate grieving, we are a resurrection people. No matter the cause or degree of unwanted change we experience, be assured, my friends: our God is trustworthy. In God’s love and with God’s generous grace, we have life, here and now, and eternally.

Let us pray together this prayer from the Book of Common Worship:

God of compassion, you watch our ways, and weave out of terrible happenings wonders of goodness and grace. Surround us who have been shaken by tragedy with a sense of your present love, and hold us in faith. Though we are lost in grief, may we find you and be comforted. Through Jesus Christ who was dead, but lives and rules this world with you. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for March 28, 2020

Dear Friends,

Why me? Why us? Why here? Why now? Why, God?

Have you gotten to this point yet? In this time of social distancing, or, more appropriately, physical distancing, have you cried out your plight, cried out our plight? Have you found yourself crying out to God? I certainly have. Crying out to God is a natural response. That comma in “Why, God?” is not a typo.

Life feels overwhelming these days. In this time of physical isolation from beloved family, long-trusted friends, the neighbor next door, and fellow church members, we can’t even give or receive a comforting hug. Why haven’t we figured out a way to give hugs despite being separated by six feet?

We have so many things to mourn, and our lists, both individual and communal, keep getting longer. Our situation isn’t new; we’ve suffered epidemics and disaster throughout the centuries, but this is significantly different. Never has disease spread so quickly, literally around the world, with all the social, emotional, psychological, and financial fallout that has engendered. Having circumnavigated the Northern Hemisphere, the coronavirus is quickly moving South, to Africa and South America. It has influenced our individual lives and our communal lives, and even after the virus is conquered or gone, it will continue to do so in ways we can’t yet begin to comprehend. Literally nothing in our world will ever be the same.

Our Psalter reading for tomorrow, the Fifth Sunday in Lent, is Psalm 130. Please settle back and slowly read this short psalm of eight verses. Every indication is that it was meant for liturgical use. If your translation is like my NRSV, this psalm is defined as “A Song of Ascents.” It is thought that this psalm was used as liturgy as worshippers climbed the mountain into Jerusalem and the Holy Temple. With that in mind, it becomes clear why this psalm is cited by our Lectionary for this Fifth Sunday in Lent. It places us squarely in self-examination during our annual forty-day ascent with Jesus into Jerusalem.

This is a psalm of lament, which is a universal reality for us all. There’s a strange comfort in such a psalm of mourning. It assures us that we are not alone. Others, even from as long ago as the time of the psalms, join us as we cry out our laments in this particular time of sickness, economic crisis, and social and cultural devastation. How difficult it is to abandon the arrogance behind our smug assumptions that in these modern times, we’ve conquered pestilence and tragedies like those of the past. In truth, we are no different from other people of faith from ages ago as we begin to recognize the timeless reality of the human condition.

Lament is thus both universal and timeless. Forty-two of the 150 psalms, just under 30, are either individual or collective laments. “Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord” reads the first verse of Psalm 130. Because so much of this psalm is in the first person, scholars classify it as an individual lament, which would be a personal cry, rather than a cry from the community. The classic example of an individual lament is Psalm 22, which, unlike our psalm for today, is four times as long and lists numerous specific woes that are shared with God.

But see how the personal, individual lament of Psalm 130 ends. The last two verses refer not to the individual of the first six verses, but to all of Israel. And after the cries and lamentations of those six verses, these closing verses shine with the assurance of hope for all of God’s people. How poignant it is that this year’s lectionary includes this compact psalm of such depth and power, especially in light of our current catastrophe. Just as it was for the Psalmist, our lament today is heart-rending and heart-felt, and it’s both individual/personal and collective. Like the psalmist, we fervently pray that God will be “attentive to the voice of my [our] supplications” (verse 2) in these perilous times.

In lament psalms, the psalmist cries and then passively waits. We all cry, especially these days. And we all cry out to God: “Why, God?” And then we wait, a passive time when we open ourselves to try to discern God’s presence in our desolation.

Psalm 130 gives us the means to wait, but actively, rather than passively. As verse 7 tells us, “Hope in the Lord! For with the Lord there is steadfast love, and with him is great power to redeem.” We wait in hope. There’s more for people of faith than simply to lament and wait. There is the active, sustaining, redeeming power of hope. Please know, my friends, there is always reason to hope because we are blessed by a loving God who walks with all people in God’s creation, with people of faith, like us, and with people who are unknowingly buoyed by our faith.

Hope is the foundation of our shared ministry, and it is an active, dynamic, and powerful response to our present situation. Indeed, hope is built into the fabric of our being. Our powerful hope can ignite healing and restoration for us and our wider world.

We live the hope that is the fruit of our faith. Some of us are crafting protective masks; some faithfully check in with friends, either in person (with all sorts of precautions) or via phone, text, and email; some buy groceries for neighbors; others maintain an active schedule of volunteer work, adapting to new situations but still getting the job done. These are the ways we give hugs, despite being separated by at least six feet!

And then there’s the best of all ways to give hugs and to actively embody our hope: we pray.

Thanks be to God for the gift of hope, especially in these difficult times, and for the power of prayer.

Let us pray together.

Our souls wait for you, O Lord, more than those who watch for morning. Help us to sleep this night in peace, trusting that you will awaken us with refreshed hope. Help us to turn our hope into action so that we may be reminded of your steadfast love. Through Jesus, the radical affirmation and embodiment of your love, we pray. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for March 27, 2020

Dear Friends,

As we continue to examine each of the four lectionary readings for this coming Sunday, I invite you to read Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 8, verses 6-11. To more fully understand the context of these six verses, you might want to read all of chapter 8. It’s been said that this chapter is the best summation of the entire New Testament, but don’t be alarmed if you have trouble understanding it. Paul is very difficult for all of us – preachers, scholars, students, and believers of all kinds.

Difficult to understand though they may be, Paul’s words are among the most compelling in our theology. As we continue our journey through Lent, a careful reading of these verses helps us focus on our task of examining our lives in relationship to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Be careful as you read these verses, especially those at the beginning of today’s lectionary (verses 6-8, and verse 5 as well). Don’t fall into the common trap of compartmentalizing Paul; don’t try to define his position as “either/or.” Resist thinking that his concept of the earthly is the reverse of the Spirit. It won’t help for you to wonder if he’s saying that what makes us the humans we are is the polar-opposite of the Spirit, and that the two cannot co-exist.

If we think that Paul is telling us that we live either by the flesh or by the Spirit, and that we can’t do both, we have at best only a superficial understanding – more often, a misunderstanding – of what he’s saying here. Thinking that way makes it too easy to give up, to think we’re lost, that we’ll inevitably fall short of our understanding of God’s expectations for us. If we retreat into that kind of thinking, why would we ever seek to do better, to rise to the challenge of faith that God puts before us, and for which Jesus died on the cross?

I grant you, wrapping our heads around Paul’s words is difficult, but so is the faith that sustains us. I, for one, wouldn’t have it any other way.

Read the passage one more time. Pay particular attention to verse 9. “But you are not in the flesh; you are in the Spirit, since the Spirit of God dwells in you.” We are not called to choose between the fleshly life and the life of the Spirit, nor are we called to deny our earthly selves. We are called to take on the Spirit. Consider the powerful words of John 1:14, “And the Word became flesh and lived among us.” Jesus, the spirit of God, took on flesh and lived as both God and humanity, God and us.

We can’t become Jesus, of course, but taking on the Spirit changes who we are; it complements and fulfills the essence of our being. Taking on the Spirit completes us. Once we accept that, we are empowered to do the kind of work on our spirit that Lent requires, which is grounded in contemplation of Jesus’s sacrifice.

The question for us during Lent, and at any time, is not whether we have received or accepted this divine spirit. We did that at our baptism and affirmed it when we were confirmed. Rather, the question is whether we choose to cooperate with the Spirit that already dwells within us. We are to live in cooperation with God, not selfishly in an earthly manner of the flesh, but rather, purposefully, with conscious intention. We are meant to live with God’s indwelling in our very being.

In response to the tragic events of August, 2017, the Charlottesville Clergy Collective was formed. I often benefit from their wisdom. This morning, I received an e-mail that included the prayer below. Though it was specifically written for these difficult times, it also seems appropriate to this difficult but ultimately enlightening reading. As we struggle with the deep concerns that the pandemic has engendered, I invite us all to join others in our community in this prayer as we share our gratitude and concern for those who care for us. They are the embodiment of the Spirit of God residing in earthly beings.

And as we pray together, wherever we are and whenever we find ourselves able to do so, please also remember to send me the joys and concerns that have marked this week for you personally, so that we may share them in Sunday’s daily note. Prayer is one of the ways we take on the Spirit. And so, I share this prayer for this evening with you.

A Prayer for Health Care Workers in a Time of Epidemic, by Rev. Roy Hange, Co-Pastor, Charlottesville Mennonite Church.

Oh mysterious One who created within our bodies the power to heal, we honor today the ones on in our community who are trained to focus this healing, those nurses, doctors and researchers who carry the words and wisdom to keep us alive.

Oh Holy One who called some to be healers as medical professionals, we pray over them Your gifts of protection, wisdom and resilience of spirit. Above all give them each now a deep sense of hope to hold their service, risk and work at this challenging time in human history. You have called them and empowered their training for such a time as this.

May they feel each hour the deep gratitude of our community. And, as they look to return to work the next day, may they hear in their hearts a great chorus of “Thank You” ringing out from the community to balance the natural fear within. We pray for ourselves and our communities that our will to listen to them. Be as great as our honor for them.

Oh Holy One, save us all from weak resignation to the challenges before us.

Amen

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for March 22, 2020

Dear Friends,

Lent is a challenging season for Christians. For forty days, we deliberately and intentionally examine ourselves, looking not at the best of who we are but instead at our shortcomings, our oversights, our misdeeds, our sin. Lent has no pretentions; it requires humility and genuine humbleness. It requires that we struggle to discern and understand the least desirable aspects of our lives so that we may acknowledge them, and more crucially, so that we may confess them to God. We hope that in doing so, the negative parts of our humanity will cease to dominate our lives and enable us to open ourselves to God’s abiding grace, a grace that we pray will be manifested through us into our wider faith community and beyond, to all of God’s children. Therein lies the seeds of the beloved community of God, one that has no boundaries or borders.

Lent is especially hard in these times. We’re grappling with a global crisis that needs something other than humble self-assessment. We need cooperation, compassion, and the sharing of resources and discoveries. Instead, we’ve cut ourselves off from each other. That might work with regard to spreading the virus, but our overwhelming global reality is chaos, denial, and self-defeating competition. It’s grounded in fear that finds its voice in malignant distrust and vilification of the stranger. It seems that for many, seeking the broader community of God isn’t an imperative right now. Some have retreated into self-righteous smugness; others into despair; others blame God; others fear God has abandoned us.

The discipline of Lent is already a struggle. How do we focus on our individual shortcomings when collectively, we must focus on a new, nearly unimaginable virus and its cruel effects on our global society? How does this twist in our Lenten pathway lead us to God’s beloved community?

Our gospel reading for this middle Sunday of Lent is the ninth chapter of John. Please take a moment and read all 41 verses about how Jesus restored the sight of a man born blind.

Did you notice that the story of Jesus’s restoration of the blind man’s sight took only two verses (6 and 7), while the controversy about the cure took 39 verses? Many Biblical scholars think this chapter marks the beginning of division between the Pharisees and the newly-emerging group of Jesus’s followers. Here we see the sowing of the tragic, insidious seed of antisemitism that has shaken the foundations of the first two Abrahamic faiths ever since.

This division between two kindred religious groups exemplifies our own blindness. When we retreat like the Pharisees into dogma and insist that our way is the only way, we cannot open ourselves to cooperation with other people of good will. Our self-righteousness renders us blind to our shared humanity and our shared love of God. Biblical examples of antisemitic attitudes are warnings, not affirmations, from God.

The Gospel of John is heralded as the gospel of love. When we commandeer God’s love, we retreat into blindness and self-righteousness, which is self-serving, not God-serving. Now, in Lent and in the grip of a malign virus, we must turn with humility instead to God’s grace. There we find God’s love. By sharing God’s love, by seeking to heal the widening divisions of our threatened world, our sight and our understanding will be restored.

As we try to fathom our global crisis, now is not the time to seek to assign blame or point fingers. During these challenging days of Lent, as we humbly examine our shortcomings and try to find our place in a suffering world, we seek to open ourselves to receive God’s grace and love. With genuinely humble and penitent hearts, and certainly without self-righteousness, we will then be able to share God’s love

Studying this chapter led John Newton, a former slave-trader and then pastor in the village of Olney, England, to write Amazing Grace. “I once was blind,” he wrote, “but now I see.” As he gained sight from the light of Jesus, may the divine light heal our blindness, and may we understand our blindness even as we open our hearts and eyes to the grace of God, shed without exception on all our sisters and brothers. Thanks be to God!

May our prayer for today comfort and enlighten you on this Lenten Sunday:

Holy God, why is it that we look, but do not see? Bring us again and again into your light until your ways become visible to us and bear fruit in us. Touch us so that we are utterly changed, a “before” and “after,” a “now” and “then”; that we may also say, “One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” Lord, even as we believe, help our unbelief. In Christ’s light, we pray. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for March 23, 2020

Dear Friends,

Many years ago, shortly after a significant earthquake struck in southern California, Richard Mouw, then president of Fuller Theological Seminary, was asked to preach at a religiously conservative church in the earthquake area. The church leaders specifically asked him to help them understand God’s place in that catastrophe. They wanted to hear that the quake was God’s response to the rampant secularization around them in southern California. Who, they assumed, would be better at aligning with their world view than the president of Fuller Seminary, the conservative, evangelical center of their denomination?

Dr. Mouw, however, had no interest in equating the quake with God’s wrath or judgment; nor did he presume to frame questions for God in the face of devastation. With conviction and courage, he chose to preach on the story about Elijah in 1 Kings 19: 9-18. This story recounts utter desolation as Elijah waits on the mountaintop: first, catastrophic wind, then devastating earthquake, and finally the ruin of fire. God is not in the earthquake, Dr. Mouw told the gathered congregation. Nor was God in the wind or the fire. “And after the fire,” he reminded them as he read from 1 Kings, was “a still small voice.” That’s where God is. I don’t know how the congregation responded, but I hope his choice of text and his words inspired them to delve deeper into their understanding of God.

Please take a moment to read 1 Kings 19: 9-18, but first, please turn to Matthew 17: 1-8. This is the story of the Transfiguration, which we observe on the Sunday just before Lent begins. If I may remind you of our sermon on Transfiguration Sunday, the story describes another mountaintop experience, this one Jesus’s. He asks his three disciples, Peter, James, and John, to travel with him to the peak of the mountain, where they are miraculously joined by Moses and Elijah. Peter wanted to build three dwellings, one each for Jesus, Moses, and Elijah; perhaps he wanted to hold onto them forever in that miraculous place.

I remind you of this essential story of our faith because it reminds us of the mountaintop experience that Elijah, and Moses before him, had with God on Mt. Sinai (also known as Mt. Horeb in 1 Kings 19: 8). Moses’s sojourn in the desert lasted forty years; Elijah’s journey to the holy mountain of God took forty days and forty nights. The echoes here are not serendipitous; they are a forewarning of the mountaintop experience recounted in the Gospels. (And they are echoed in our forty days of Lent.)

The stories served to further legitimize Jesus as a man of God to his disciples, who would have known them well enough to see the fulfillment of the Hebrew Scriptures in Jesus. And then in Matthew, the astonishing final confirmation comes when God speaks from a bright cloud, saying “This is my Son, the Beloved, with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” (verse 5). And Peter and the disciples did indeed listen to him, just as we do to this day. As you think about these passages, remember that we are a Lenten people. We are always seeking to understand how the ills of the world – including earthquakes and pandemics – fit into the concept of God’s limitless umbrella of grace. As a Lenten people, we are assured that we are not alone; God is always with us and with every single one of our brothers and sisters in both our sinfulness and our grace. We are not separate from God, nor are we separate from the rest of God’s creation.

How unhelpful, counterproductive, indeed sinful and essentially unChristian it is for any group, Christian or other, to think not only that we stand alone, but that we’re somehow exceptional, protected from all ills by a unique and special relationship with God. None of us stands in a magical bubble of protection from the harshness of the world. We do not live on a small, eternally tranquil island in the midst of a sea of suffering and dying humanity.

God’s love, God’s grace, cannot be hoarded as a private cache of righteousness. There is no piety in believing that an earthquake years ago in southern California or the current calamity of coronavirus are God’s judgment from which our special faith and devotion will protect us. Dr. Mouw heard that from the church that invited him to speak, and we hear too many similar rumblings these days. As this crisis gets worse and global devastation grows, such self-righteous rumblings grow louder and more insistent. How will we hear the still small voice of God in all that noise?

Others might instead seek to assign blame, not to God, of course, but to the “other.” We’ve already begun to see this in the reprehensible attacks on Asians being reported almost daily. Those in this camp are so busy blaming the “other” that they also fail to listen for the still small voice of God in the clamor of misplaced blame and false accusations.

There are no easy answers. The world is left in silence. It is in that silence that we must listen for God’s word whispered in a still small voice.

Be assured: God’s love and grace are always with us, even in the worst of times. We have only to open our eyes and hearts to find them. We have only to listen for the still small voice that resounds in the silence after the catastrophes of wind, earthquake, fire, and now, a vicious disease. If we just listen for it, that voice speaks to each of us from a bright cloud on a mountaintop today and eternally.

The sun is setting as I send this. Even in our different locations and at different times, may we pray this evening prayer together?

Lord Jesus, you call us to be faithful disciples. Enable us to hear your voice above the distractions and rumblings of this day, to see each challenge as an opportunity for faithful witness, and to offer ourselves in obedient service in all that we do. Amen.

Rev. Knox's Daily Note for March 26, 2020

Dear Friends,

As Christians, we consider the Bible the sacred, inspired word of God, handed down to us by hundreds of generations of devoted people. Both testaments of our Bible combine to become the source of the faithful witness of God’s people. The Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures) records God’s activity with us from the creation to just before Jesus’s birth. Not including the creation stories, the Hebrew Scriptures span a period of about two thousand years. The New Testament (the Christian Scriptures), on the other hand, focus on a much shorter period of time. The time from the birth of Jesus to the writing of the Book of Revelation was less than 100 years. It is difficult to keep the various aspects of the early church’s history clear in our minds, let alone the history of our faith ancestors.

I know it’s still Thursday, but both the Sunday lectionary and the daily lectionary always include four readings. We generally focus on only one or two readings, but for this Sunday, the Fifth Sunday in Lent, I want to examine all four readings, and thus, we begin next Sunday’s readings today.

I’d like to start with Ezekiel 37:1-14, one of the two readings from the Hebrew Scriptures for Sunday. Please take a moment and carefully read and savor this wonderful prophecy story of the valley of the dry bones. Here’s the context: Ezekiel was among the first group of exiles taken to Babylonia in 597 BC, the year that Jerusalem fell to Nebuchadnezzar II, the Babylonian king. Based on historical knowledge of Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, and biblical scholarly understanding of the general range of David’s reign, we can postulate that Ezekiel lived about 300 years after King David and 600 years before Jesus.

Do you remember teaching the body parts to a toddler just beginning to talk? I do. I remember pointing to each part as I sang, “Toe bone connected to the foot bone; foot bone connected to the heel bone,” working all the way up to the “neck bone connected to the head bone.” This nursery ditty is also a song, variously called “Dem Bones,” “Dry Bones,” and “Dem Dry Bones,” which was written in the 1920’s by James Weldon Johnson and his brother, J. Rosamond Johnson. You might recall our singing another of their songs two months ago, when our church rang as our voices rose to their beautiful, rousing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” (# 563 in our hymnal). “Dem Bones,” often sung with great fervor, especially around the campfire and in Vacation Bible School, was inspired by the passage we read from the prophet Ezekiel. Its two verses conclude with the resounding affirmation we know so well, “Now hear the word of the Lord,” the very same words we read in verse 4. Even in the depths of desperate exile made even worse when the spirit of the Lord brought him to what must have been a terrifying vista – a valley brimming with dry bones – Ezekiel did as God commanded. He prophesized to the dry, dusty bones. And the bones came together, forming into a vast multitude (verse 10) of living beings.

The Hebrew word “ruach” can mean wind, breath, or spirit. As you read this passage, pay attention to those words in our English translations. You’ll see that all three words are used to convey Ezekiel’s and God’s message. We are not alive in the fullest sense unless we experience God’s gift of wind, breath, and spirit, God’s ruach. Lose yourself in the elegance of verse 8, for example, when the bones had come together, and been covered in sinew and flesh, but remained dead; “there was no breath in them.” Verse 9 continues the story, “Then he said to me, ‘Prophesy to the breath, prophesy, mortal, and say to the breath: Thus says the Lord God: Come from the four winds, O breath, and breathe upon these slain, that they may live.’” And in verse 14, “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live…”

It’s not surprising that the Johnson brothers were inspired by this wonderful story to write their song. The story is almost cinematic – how can we help but see the valley, watch the bones come together, see the sinews and skin wrap around them, and then, with God’s ruach, see them quicken into new life? How can we help but hear the word of the Lord? This is not a bodily resurrection; this is the resurrection of “the whole house of Israel” (verse 11). Just as God gave the gift of new life through God’s ruach to the dry bones in that desolate valley, God gives life to the entire company of his people, to all of us.

God promises that “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil.”

God not only restores us; God brings us home. Our current plight is far from equivalent to the forced emigration and enslavement that is Ezekiel’s exile, but now, in these days of social and physical distancing and self-isolation, we might feel as if we are in exile. What good news it is that God’s spirit mingles with our breath to give us life and bind us together as a community!

Ezekiel confirms that we are not alone; we live, and we live in community and kinship with one another. Be assured, my friends, God is with us!

Let us pray together:

Holy God, creator of wind, breath, and spirit, in our darkened valleys, you bring light; in our crumbling communities, you build your holy realm; as disease spreads around our world, our lives are renewed and fortified by your love. Holy Spirit, Breath of God, you live in every corner of our souls; you bind us together as a single people who share this tormented world, and you bind us to God. With your loving presence, you breathe God’s peace into our lives. Thanks be to you, God of wind, breath, and spirit. Amen.