Sermons

The Rev. Joseph Farnes

MAUNDY THURSDAY

Here we are, at the gate of the Triduum, the Three Holy Days. Tonight we begin our descent into the heartache and pain of the Passion with a depth we only taste briefly on Palm Sunday. Our liturgy walks us through transitions and changes; it becomes stranger, unsettling. Maundy Thursday begins like any other Eucharist – and then the washing of the feet starts to upend the regular rhythm. We are unsettled by the bizarre action: people remove their shoes and present their bare feet to be washed by another human being.

It’s doubly-bizarre to us modern Americans because we don’t regularly wash our feet at the front door, let alone have servants or slaves to wash them for us. We ritually act out something from a culture far removed from us.

In fact, I think that because it is so far removed from us that we do not fully get the humility, the humbling effect of washing feet. It’s strange enough that we don’t connect the act of washing another’s feet as something undignified or humbling. I have, in half-jest, suggested that perhaps our culture would make more of a connection to the work of a CNA in a hospital, caring for those who cannot do much of that self-care for themselves. Healthcare companies pay them so little and expect so much of them.

While we do not fully get the humbling aspect of being the one washing feet, we do understand that humbling – and possible humiliation – when we have our feet washed. We expose a part of ourselves that we normally keep hidden – in our feet are traces of years of our shoes cramping our toes, years of walking and worrying, all worn into our bones and flesh. We would rather hide that part of us. We would rather hide much of ourselves.

No wonder we are a lonely people.

We struggle to bring ourselves fully and completely – afraid of being judged, afraid of being wounded, afraid of being rejected.

Over ten years ago as a young priest, my boss sat in on a Christian education class I was doing on ethics. The feedback she gave me did not focus on my topic, my words, my engagement with the group, or even any pastoral sensitivities that I needed to be aware of. What she wanted to tell me about was my face. She said I needed to smile more. That my listening face, my neutral face, was “intimidating” with its little downturn at the edges like a frown. I hadn’t realized something was wrong with my face, but I took that lesson to heart.

She told me that it was important to know that as a priest, my body is not my own. I will be hugged when I do not want to be hugged. My face will always need to look happy and eager and peaceful, and my inner life cannot crack through the surface. When I was going through a particular rough patch, she was the one to point out that my voice sounded sad in my sermon, and that I needed to fix that immediately. My job was to be what the people needed me to be, and my job, in return, was to tell them that God loved them. Not that I needed to love them – no, she said, the job was only to tell them that God loved them.

She was not the only clergyperson to tell me that I needed to hide more of myself. During a clergy retreat, a priest in this diocese wildly misinterpreted something I shared about my childhood pain and threw it in my face. I’ve been told by a priest during an internship that I needed to be quiet about being gay. I’ve heard folks in collars talk about me with language like “vibes are off” instead of talking with me, if they were so concerned. Even in the Church, with people who should know better, we do not do this well.

And yet, among you I have learned to take off my shoes and let myself be seen. I am hilarious and funny … and also, to use a term our forebears would have used, occasionally of a “melancholic” temperament. I get tired, and I’m capable of overthinking anything. I’m smart and once in a while even insightful, and I’m also three seconds away from getting lost in the weeds of a theological question.

And this community of All Saints has flipped the logic of my old boss on its head. Her stance was “It’s not our job to love them; it’s our job to tell them God loves them.” All Saints flipped it around and showed me that what I felt in my heart was right all along: “It is, in fact, up to all of us to love one another, and then people will know God loves them.”

It’s hard to do, this love thing. It’s something we do in word and deed far before our emotions catch up. To love the newcomer and welcome them to coffee and to share the journey, to love the person whose way of being is different from yours, to love the person whose personality doesn’t gel with yours, to love the person in pain without rushing to try to fix them or their heartache.

It’s also hard to be loved, too. To sit like Peter and have someone wash your feet to show you love – and I imagine that the act of love stung even worse when Peter denied Christ a short while later. When we show up with our pain and let someone sit with us wordlessly, when we let someone show us kindness, when we make the risk of showing up to a community unsure of what welcome we might find.

Love is the central Christian discipline – it is what makes us disciples of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, God the Son, the Lamb of God.

“Having loved his own who were in the world, Jesus loved them to the end. … and he said to them, I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

So we begin our entrance into the sacred mystery of the crucifixion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. How fitting, and how perfect it is that the entrance begins with love. Amen.

GOOD FRIDAY

What good thing happened on Good Friday? We struggle to name it at times. We aren’t sure. We who sit in the depths of Christian tradition know that something holy happened on the cross, but we lack the language to express it well. We don’t have a neat and tidy theological package to put it in. We know that the Bible uses many different metaphors for what happened on the cross. All of these metaphors and images within the Bible work together – and sometimes sit in uneasy contrast to one another. Just as the cross was not a neat and tidy death, so too is the mystery of the cross not neat and tidy and simple.

Here are some images and metaphors that the New Testament uses to share the power of Jesus’ death on the cross:

Christ ransomed us from the power of death – he put down his life as payment to buy us back from being enslaved to death and sin.

Christ is the Great High Priest who offered himself as a priestly sacrifice – to make us holy and wash us clean.

Christ substituted his life for ours – not to appease and placate a wrathful father, but to suffer the consequences of sin for us and to share with us his inheritance as God the Son.

Christ is the Passover Lamb – his blood marks the doorposts and leads us into the exodus from being enslaved to death and sin, the Passover from death into life.

Christ the Sinless One is judged by the injustice of the world – and on the cross his death renders a judgment of all injustice.

Christ is the wounded head of the body of the faithful – he shares our pain and suffering completely and perfectly in absolute solidarity of love, and he will share the fullness of his resurrection in return.

All of these images are found in the New Testament. On Good Friday, we let the mystery enfold us. It is not a comfortable mystery – it does not enkindle in us nice, warm, pious thoughts. It fills us with uneasy awe and wonder, gratitude and heartbrokenness. It is a solemn day.

This day is solemn because it is a beautiful and holy mystery that Jesus Christ died for us. His death was not meaningless; the Gospels tell us repeatedly that he knew his death was coming and he still actively chose it. He didn’t have the resurrection as a “back-up” plan in case something went wrong – his death was a key part of living out the Gospel itself. He chose his death just as much as he chose his resurrection.

His death was not powerless; something happened on the cross. In the complete humility of accepting our human body, in accepting human mortality and death, Jesus was doing something powerful. His powerlessness in dying manifested the power of God. Human power was manifest in mobs and soldiers and priests and governors and kings, the full oppressive power of human government law and order – and ultimately all that human power fails in comparison to the power of God in the weakness of the cross.

Christ’s death, then, is a sign of God’s powerful life.

Christ’s death does not sugarcoat the reality of the situation we’re in; the powers of death surround us on every side. We see how close death can be when wars and violence erupt overnight and cruelty gets cheered as policy. We see how close death can be when officers who claim to be “law and order” break the law themselves by executing citizens. We see how close death can be when healthcare becomes impossible to get, even if you have done the right thing by getting health insurance. We see how close death can be when financial consequences flood downwards to impact workers and the poor yet all the financial rewards float upward to the surface for the few to reap. And we see how close death can be when we meditate on the uncertainty and shortness of life in our own grief.

The cross keeps us from sugarcoating all this to make it more palatable. The cross is at the heart of Christianity, and it is a cross that bears the suffering body of our Lord Jesus Christ. We can’t pretend that the cross was just an “oopsie-daisy” on the way to the empty tomb; we can’t “Good Vibes Only” our way past the suffering of life and death. That’s spiritual bypassing, that’s avoidance, that’s all flimsy. If we try to skip over the suffering and death on the cross to keep ourselves happy and cheerful, we’ll find that we don’t have a strong enough hope to support us when we see the power of death all around us.

We live in a world where people are being killed by war and hunger, we live in a world where those who have little are being targeted and deprived so that the rich and powerful can have more and more. Christ on the cross, his life fading with his final breaths from a suffering, bloodied body, Christ embraces all those who suffer, all those who are dying, all those who cry out with none to help.

No wonder, then, that Christian nationalism now takes the body of Christ off the cross – they can’t have a savior who wasn’t a winner, after all, and Jesus is too merciful to be a hero – and that same Christian nationalism is willing and eager to crucify others out of the cruelty in their hearts. That form of Christianity wants nothing to do with a crucified savior who pours out his love on the cross – that form of Christianity demands that they insert some form of power and dominance into the cross. It was heresy when Constantine put the cross on weapons of war, and it is heresy now to use that same cross to validate cruelty to those who suffer.

Good Friday rips away triumphalism and cruelty from the Christian heart forever. Our God is a God who is willing to bleed for us, to bleed alongside us, to be rejected and to be abandoned. On Good Friday, we have a hope given to us by a loving Messiah who stretches out his arms of love on the wood of the cross to embrace all of creation.

Good Friday gives us the powerful mystery that is the ground of our Christian hope: Jesus Christ took upon himself the fullness of our humanity, with everything that entails, and he was willing to endure the pain of death, just like us. He was so willing to take on our humanity, that he was willing to be ridiculed, rejected and shamed.

In his death, Jesus Christ gives us hope that no matter what ever happens in this life, no matter if we are loved or hated, celebrated or despised, rejoicing or in pain, we have hope that Jesus Christ bore all of it in himself. He was loved, and he was hated; he was celebrated and he was despised; the crowds that rejoiced gave way to the crowds who demanded he be crucified.

On this solemn day, something powerful happens: this Jesus Christ, God incarnate, love fully divine and love fully human, was killed, and from his blood and death we are set free from the power of sin and death.

Christ the Passover Lamb, Christ the High Priest, Christ the Sinless One, ransoms us from the powers of death and pays the debt of Adam’s sin.

We tremble: What kind of love is this?

We mourn: Our beloved Messiah and teacher is dead.

We sit in awe: God accepted cruel death at human hands and offers mercy and healing in return.

This is the mystery of the cross. This is Good Friday. Amen.

EASTER DAY

Alleluia, Christ is Risen! The Lord is Risen Indeed! Alleluia!

It all started with Mary Magdalene. She had gone to the tomb, and she noticed the stone had been rolled away. Something had happened – and she decided she needed to tell someone. She ran back to the other disciples. She wasn’t doing this alone. Jesus’ body wasn’t in the tomb. She tells Peter and the Beloved Disciple what she had seen. They all race back. Peter and the Beloved Disciple get there, take a look, and leave to go back home.

Maybe Peter and the Beloved Disciple had seen enough – maybe they had some inklings that something Jesus had said previously about being raised on the third day was true, maybe they were too shocked by the events of the crucifixion to give much thought. But they didn’t stick around.

Mary Magdalene, on the other hand, sticks around. She’s crying. She looks into the tomb and sees angels.

For many of us, that would be the highlight of the story. Seeing angels would be the big story we’d be rushing back to share. We’d rush back to tell people of the peace we felt, maybe, or try to find words to describe what we witnessed. Maybe we’d be expecting to hear a message to go back home and share, some heavenly wisdom or prophecy.

Oddly enough, the angels are not the highlight of the story.

The angels present do not command the attention of Mary Magdalene. They actually turn our attention in the story right back on to her: “Why are you crying?” they ask. If we were dazzled or surprised by the angels appearing in the story, the angels are bringing our attention back to Mary Magdalene. If we got distracted, the angels are focusing us on what matters most.

Mary Magdalene is weeping, looking for the body of her beloved Jesus. She is heartbroken. She does not rest until she meets Jesus, and she is rewarded for her persistence with being the first to see the Risen Lord Jesus. Mary Magdalene will not rest until she can show her love to Jesus.

To paraphrase a line from St Evelyn Underhill, “Jesus is the interesting thing about Christianity.” Jesus the baby born in Bethlehem; Jesus the prophet, healer and teacher; Jesus crucified outside Jerusalem; Jesus the Risen Lord. Jesus is the center of Christianity, and Jesus gives life to us Christians.

But we need to remember Jesus the person, the resurrected body, the one who was crucified and risen – not an idea about Jesus.

In our spiritual lives, it can be so easy to be like Peter and the Beloved Disciple – we can encounter something spiritual, and then go home. The spiritual life maybe becomes a fact: yes, I believe such-and-such, but it doesn’t make a difference in my daily life. We see that when a lot of people who like to talk about Jesus sure don’t act like Jesus taught. Jesus feeds the hungry and heals the sick and calls us to love God and our neighbor – those seem like non-negotiable and uncontroversial behaviors required of Christians, but here we are.

But Jesus is not a fact or an idea. Jesus is a person. We can’t just go home like Peter. Jesus is not an idea that we can say, “Yes, I believe in Jesus” and then go right back to what we were doing. Just as Jesus said throughout his life, he says to us now: “Follow me.” Follow a person, not an idea of a person.

In our spiritual lives, it can also be easy to be overcome by seeing the angels. We get swept up in awe and emotion. For a moment we can feel our hearts expand as huge as creation and we are overcome with joy. But, human beings and human brains do not last long in that state. We shrink back on down to regular human size, and all that awe and wonder dissipate as our eyes adjust back to the here-and-now. And then we ask ourselves why we don’t feel the way we once did, why the excitement faded. We might think something went wrong.

But Jesus is not an emotion, a rush of feelings of awe. Jesus is a person. Anyone who has spent any length of time around any other human being will know that love is not a warm feeling all the time. Sometimes love is quieter – a small thing lovingly done. Sometimes it’s hard work – loving someone even when they’ve frayed the last nerve on a bad day. Loving a person is an action word.

And so the angels help us re-focus away from awe and wonder. The angels will not let our eyes fixate on them; the angels always point away from themselves, to point to God and to point at what God is doing in our very midst.

Mary Magdalene is our exemplar today of how to be a Christian.

One – always look to Jesus. Mary Magdalene was on the lookout for Jesus and would stop at nothing less. So we should take a page from her book and look for Jesus all the time, too. Encounter Jesus in the readings of the Gospels. See the work of Jesus in the world around us. See Jesus in our strangers, friends… even our enemies! Taste and see the goodness of Jesus in the sacrament of communion. In the Gospels, in the wonders of creation, in our neighbors, in communion, Jesus is always present, if we would just keep our eyes looking for him.

Two – Don’t give up. Mary Magdalene did not give up – not with the empty tomb, not when Peter and the Beloved Disciple went home, and she didn’t stop when angels showed up. She wanted Jesus. She is our model for persistence. Sometimes it feels like our faith is just an idea of faith without much life in it. Sometimes it feels like our faith is an emotion, and some days it’s easy and other days it’s a challenge. But we don’t give up. It’s not just that we need Jesus – it’s that the world needs the hope and love that Jesus offers us.

And here’s point number three – this is good news that we simply have to share. Mary Magdalene went to get Peter and the Beloved Disciple, and she went back with the news of the encounter with the Risen Lord. Our spiritual life is not a private treasure but something we are called to share. The world is heartbroken and confused. People mistake money for the most important thing, and people clamor for power and dominance. Those are things Jesus told us multiple times in the Gospel to be aware of – We can’t serve God and money, and the greatest must be a servant to others (if you don’t believe me, then feel free to read the Gospels for yourself!) The world needs to hear about Jesus, and the world needs to see that those who love Jesus really, really believe in Jesus.

Not “Believe in Jesus” as in can say all the right things about Jesus, nor do I mean “Believe in Jesus” like having all the warm feelings or ecstatic joy about Jesus all the time. I mean “Believe in Jesus” – as in, believe that Jesus really meant what he said, and that Jesus really was who he was, and that Jesus invites us to follow him and love him with all our hearts and minds, and that Jesus also asks us to love our neighbor just as much as he loves them.

Because Mary Magdalene wasn’t interested in nice, correct ideas about Jesus. Mary Magdalene wasn’t going to stop searching for Jesus even when Peter and the Beloved Disciple went home. Mary Magdalene wasn’t overawed by angels. She wanted Jesus the person, Jesus who taught her the Gospel, the Good News. She wanted Jesus the Messiah. She wanted to find Jesus who loved her so she could show him love in return. Jesus was worth everything to Mary Magdalene.

And we who want to follow Mary Magdalene in her quest for Jesus, we should also remember what he asked of her: that she not cling to him in one way, but to go back to the other disciples again and share the good news of the resurrection. While we must seek Jesus wholeheartedly, being a Christian isn’t a solo adventure, something we do on our own. We have to share it with one another and share it with the world. And when we go to share it, we will see the presence of Christ in many places we hadn’t expected before.

So on this blessed Easter:

One – Always look to Jesus.

Two – Don’t give up.

Three – The good news of Jesus is something we get to share. Alleluia, Christ is risen!

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Palm Sunday, Year A

Deacon Christina Cernansky

I speak to you in the name of Source, God, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, mother of us all. Blessed Palm & Passion Sunday, All Saints!

This Sunday, as we roll into Holy Week, is when we get to be reminded of the story of Jesus’ last days. We get to hear, to listen, and we fully embody this pathway of life, death, and resurrection. We join him, his disciples, and many fans as he enters Jerusalem.

When Jesus arrives and cruises through Main Street. He has his entourage, and of course, always shows up in style.  This King of Kings arrives via donkey, not a horse-drawn carriage, or even a horse, but on a donkey. Why a donkey, well of course, to fulfill a prophecy laid out in Zechariah 9:9, but I digress.

As Jesus strolls through, he does it with grace, with humility, and without any hesitation or reservation. Because remember, up until this time, Jesus wanted to keep his ministry under wraps. He knew what was yet to come; he also knew that too much commotion would continue to turn heads, and he wanted to gather folks together before he was put to death.

And what did the people declare? They were saying, “Hosanna” over and over again. Now, why were they shouting this word?  In Hebrew, Hosanna means “save us.” The early followers of Christ were inviting, calling on him to save them, to lead them towards a new way of living, to deliver them from pain and suffering. The prophecy of Yeshua was being fulfilled, all of God’s people were being saved and being united in the saving grace of the message of love.

You would think that in Roman times, he would have had a fancier entrance…but no, there was no fancy red carpet, but the garments of followers were laid down in his pathway out of respect.

I invite you to imagine ourselves in that scene. Let’s walk into this scene and put ourselves in the shoes of the many early believers in Jesus’ ministry, turning towards mercy and justice and shedding light on the hypocrisy and double standards of the day.

Salvation is being delivered; the people are raising their voices to God, inviting Jesus into their lives to deliver them, deliver us, from a life we know is full of sorrow, pain, and injustice.

And here we are, off to the side, standing patiently awaiting Yeshua. As we stand off to the side, awaiting Jesus’ arrival, you are filled with excitement, hope, and faith, fully embodying the idea that a new day will come, because the Messiah is here to save the world, the Messiah is here to save… us.

Let’s imagine we are like Photini, the Samaritan woman at the well, whom Jesus showed unconditional love for after she was shunned by many others because of her history of multiple marriages.

Maybe, imagine we used to be blind, and through Jesus’ ministry, either him or his disciples, shed light on your faith and showed you the way to see again.

Maybe we are Judas, wanting to follow a Golden deity, in the form of 30 pieces of silver, to follow wealth and power.

Maybe we are Mary Magdalene, who has seen and lived through so many hardships, and feels so much joy that the “good news” is finally out in the open? Maybe we are Simon Peter, who still gets in your own way, and your ego still shies away from true freedom by denying Christ’s love 3 times before the rooster crows?

Every year, we walk together to reenact this day, to remind us of the arrival of the King of Kings; his presence is no longer a secret, and the world is now allowed to know and sing, announcing the Savior has arrived. We walk together as those early disciples did, walking together into Holy Week, announcing Hosanna.

We are not alone in our faith, our practices, or our ministries. Not only are we guaranteed salvation, but our shadow side is also being shown redemption. Our shadow side is being called forth to be renewed, along with all those who stood on those streets in Jerusalem hundreds of years ago.

What about the shadow side of Judas? How many times have we let our desires for worldly things shade us from God’s love as Judas did?  Maybe we felt we weren’t meeting people’s expectations and sold out to the highest bidder? How did we let our guilt and shame keep us from God’s love, as Photini did that day at the well? Do our complicated histories blind us to the Holy Spirit? How many times a day do we deny God’s love in our actions, as Simon Peter did that fateful week? We deny Jesus teachings, and shade us from being at one-ment in community? What if we stopped persevering and stepped out of Mary Madeline’s path and got exhausted from having blind faith?

We not only get to walk this path of joy, but also this path of salvation and redemption. We are reminded of those who celebrate the miracles of Jesus’ ministry, and we also get to honor the teachings and become followers of The Way, a new way, of agape and of blind faith. 
As we continue to walk this path into Holy Week, I invite you to celebrate and shout for joy at the King of Kings’ arrival, but let us not forget how easy it is for us to turn away from his teachings. Let us plan for the arrival. We also get to remember we are to keep going, with blind faith sometimes, walk into those steps, not away, towards salvation, towards redemption, to share the good news along with Our Savior Jesus Christ.

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The Rev. Joseph Farnes

All Saints, Boise

Lent 5A

Jesus began to weep. So they said, “See how he loved him!” But some of them said, “Could not he who opened the eyes of the blind man have kept this man from dying?”

One of the shortest sentences of Scripture is “Jesus wept” – though we get a wordier translation of that sentence today. Jesus wept. He shows his human tenderness so powerfully in this Gospel story as we make our final climb to Holy Week.

Some people saw the tenderness of Jesus in his weeping. He loved Lazarus, loved Martha, loved Mary; he knew the miracle that soon would happen, but grief and pain draw his deep love to the surface in his tears.

But notice the other response some people had. They did not see tenderness, and they did not have compassion for the tears of Jesus. They responded with a razor-sharp question: “Were you powerless to keep him alive? Why did you fail?” Were they mocking him? Were they pointing out this supposed Messiah’s mistakes and flaws? Even if you take it as them asking an honest question, we are all familiar with people who ask “honest questions” but conceal a sharp edge underneath that honesty.

The musical, “Jesus Christ Superstar” puts a similar sentiment in the figure of King Herod:

So if You are the Christ

You’re the great Jesus Christ

Prove to me that You’re no fool

Walk across my swimming pool

If You do that for me

Then I’ll let You go free

C’mon, King of the Jews

I only ask things I’d ask any superstar

What is it that You have got

That puts You where You are?

I am waiting, yes, I’m a captive fan

I’m dying to be shown

That You are not just any man

So if You are the Christ

Yes, the great Jesus Christ

Feed my household with this bread

You can do it on Your head

Or has something gone wrong?

Why do You take so long?

Come on, King of the Jews!

In his song from the musical, Herod gives a mockingly playful tone to this expectation that Jesus’ miracles are a command performance, a sign that can be conjured up at an instant, and that anything less is a sign of his failure. If he is more than human, then we can expect more from him than we expect of humans. If he’s divine, if he’s the Messiah, then why isn’t everything fixed? Even as we claim as Christians that Jesus is both human and divine, an accusing finger goes straight to his divinity with an expectation for superhuman results.

But, truth be told, we still expect of “more than human” results from mere humans, too. We learn that “Great Men” (and great women) were the movers and the shakers of history, that it was these great persons with their readable biographies that shaped history. It was up to these towering figures to change the course of history – everyone else was a background character on a stage dominated by a select few with nearly superhuman ability and drive. It didn’t matter that all of these “Great People” were taught, supported, encouraged, challenged by others: by parents, family, friends, teachers, donors, colleagues, students, and, so frequently, unmentioned spouses. No, all of the labor from those people is disregarded or absorbed into the Great Person’s work.[1]

And so our eyes are peeled for the next Great Person – either on the large scale or the small scale. We see it in our politics: if we just support this Great Politician, then we will have the world we want to see with no effort from us, no hard work on building community and building the world we want to see ourselves. And when they fail, we start looking for the next Great Person to fill their shoes (or, as we sometimes see, unwavering support that refuses to see their failures).

In the Church, we sometimes get overawed by the category of “Saint” – that the mark of being a successful Christian is fame and eventually getting listed in the Lesser Feasts and Fasts … or, on the flip side, that our role as a Christian is to be passive and let the better, more important people take charge. Let the Great Ones figure this out, I’m not good enough.

But that’s not how being human works.

We humans are social beings. We benefit one another, and we benefit *from* one another. We make things happen together. There is a power in our solidarity with one another – when we see ourselves as part of the whole body of Christ, part of the whole community. The church community – and the rest of humanity – are not little islands of greatness floating in an undifferentiated swamp of human failure and mediocrity. Not how it works.

Yet, we seem to think that sometimes. And then we get mad at what we think is a little island of greatness for being more like us than we’d like.

These people who ask their razor-sharp question of Jesus see Jesus’ tears as a sign that he is, in fact, not as great as everyone seems to think. If he were great, then Lazarus would not have died. John’s Gospel even tells us that Jesus *waits* to go. Jesus sets himself up for failure – the point is not saving Lazarus from dying, it’s saving Lazarus from the power of death itself.

And even though Jesus seems to have it all planned, he still weeps. He’s overcome with love and human tenderness as he stands there; Lazarus is dead, Mary and Martha weep for their brother, and Martha proclaims an abiding faith. It is a powerful moment, a most holy moment, and an incredibly human moment. For this humanity, they mock Jesus.

But before we get too judgmental about their behavior, we need to turn our gaze on ourselves. How do we mock the humanity of others – and stop seeing their humanity at all? How might we be expecting people to play the role of Greatness, and refuse to be part of the work together? Do we expect the Great Persons to fix the problems that we see, and will we turn on them the second they are less than superhuman?

Next week we enter into Holy Week. We take our part in the story as members of the crowd that mock Jesus, shout for his blood to be upon us, shout for the authorities to crucify him. We take the role of the people we might be condemning this week for their mockery. This liturgical, dramatic switch keeps us connected to their humanity, too. Humans are capable of great love – that is what God made us to do, that is what it means to be made in the image of God. From this great love, Jesus weeps, and from this great love Jesus walks his way of the cross. And humans are also capable of turning away from that love, too – and our response as Christians should be to turn to them in human love, to call them back to the way of Christ’s love. And out of the abundance of Christ’s love in our hearts, let us all take our part in the work of Christ in the world – we need not be Great to do it – all we need to do is to be human. Amen.

[1] Indebted to Julian DeShazier’s article, “The Great Man Theory Is Poison for the Church”, The Christian Century, Aug 2024. https://www.christiancentury.org/voices/great-man-theory-poison-church

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The Rev. Joseph Farnes

All Saints, Boise

Lent 4A

March 15, 2026

          During Lent, we spend time in John’s Gospel, and that means we move away from the sayings and snippets we tend to get from the other Gospels. We don’t get the straightforward moral teachings we might get in Matthew and Luke, and Mark’s Gospel moves quickly whereas John’s Gospel tends to take its time. It takes its time to develop themes. It slows down.

          Which makes for incredibly long Gospel readings like today, where we read an entire chapter of John’s Gospel to hear about the healing of the man born blind. It’s not a story you can carve up, though I hear some folks do just that. They think it takes too long, that our increasingly short attention spans will simply not tolerate such a lengthy story.

          But I think that’s honestly another reason *to* read a lengthy story like this. In other Gospel readings, we get a snippet of a story. A person appears, the person and Jesus have a conversation, there might be a healing, and onlookers are upset because they’ve decided that whatever Jesus does must be wrong, and Jesus gives an insightful response about the nature of God.

          But in John’s Gospel, we actually linger with the story. The man born blind is not a set piece or a plot point in the story who shows up when needed and then disappeared as soon as Jesus says something. The man born blind is brought to the center. He speaks. He explains what he experiences. He brings our attention to the actions that happened. He pushes back on the religious authorities. And even this man’s parents are part of the story; the religious authorities are quick to interrogate them, too! The religious authorities are on the hunt for some kind of proof that Jesus isn’t who he says he is, but the man born blind simply relates to them again and again what he experienced. Anointing with a mud paste, a washing in the pool of Siloam, and the man can now see, something he could not do before.

          The people in the story get to stand on their own. They are not backdrops or foils for Jesus’ preaching. John’s Gospel surprises us by letting people speak for themselves and wrestle with their encounter with Jesus. The man born blind can now see, and he starts off saying that Jesus is a prophet… then on his second encounter with Jesus this man believes in what Jesus says about himself, that Jesus is the Son of Man. This man born blind is able to see physically, and he is able to see spiritually. Because this man was open to each encounter with Jesus revealing something deeper, this man could see more deeply each time.

          Which is the opposite of what the religious authorities in the story do, and the opposite of what many of us do. We have our story, we have our interpretation, and we will stick with that story and interpretation no matter what. The religious authorities in the Gospel reading see Jesus as a sinner and a charlatan, and no matter what he does, their interpretation will not change. Jesus gives sight to a blind man, and they say he’s a sinner. What will happen next week when we hear the story of Lazarus being raised from the dead? Will their interpretation change? These religious authorities have their view of who this Jesus is, and they will not change their view. They will stick to the image of Jesus they have in their minds, and be angry that others encounter Jesus and see someone radically different, someone who heals, someone who is the Son of Man and the Messiah.

          In our current day and age, there is a view that we should hold fast to our interpretation of things. That’s what we see on social media, yes? Isn’t that what political parties do? You have your view of the world, and everything in the world must conform to that. Those people are the bad guys, and we’re always the good guys. If you slip up and say something that doesn’t conform to our interpretation, then we’re going to cast you out. Us, all against them. Are you one of us, or are you one of them? It’s a terrifying groupthink, to use the phrase from Orwell. But we are social creatures, and the more that we live in online bubbles and no longer spend time together in flesh-and-blood community, the more we define our social us-and-them through words and ideas.

           We’re not like the man born blind. Are we willing to let our eyes see, or will we quickly see what we *want* to see? Will we fit everything into our pre-existing box, or will we encounter things anew? The man born blind let himself encounter Jesus and to be changed. Are we willing to be changed? Are we willing to see? Or are we afraid that we might see something differently? Are we afraid that we’ll see something that means that our worldview, the box we put everything into, is going to have to change?

          I cherish at the end of the Gospel reading where some Pharisees ask Jesus if he thinks they are blind. Notice the physical proximity – these religious authorities are standing near Jesus. Would you expect that? Wouldn’t you expect these religious authorities to have walked away or kept their distance from this man they thought was a fraud? Or was it that Jesus went to where they were, where they were driving this man born blind out of their community?

          Jesus keeps the encounters going. The decision is not made once-for-all. Jesus doesn’t write off the religious leaders, and it seems that the religious leaders aren’t completely writing off Jesus, either. Something in them wants to be seen as wise or good by Jesus. There’s something there. Maybe it’s our human desire to be liked – even if we think someone’s a terrible person and an enemy, maybe we still want them to respect us in some way. But maybe that human desire is a sign of something more – our desire to have authentic, real encounters with God and with others. We want to be seen. We want others to have open eyes to see us as we are.           Perhaps this is what we need to learn from this long story: we who wish to be seen as full human beings should also work to see others as full human beings, and we who wish to be seen by God should work to let our eyes behold Christ, to meet him as he is, and to let him help us see. Amen.

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The Rev. Joseph Farnes

All Saints, Boise

Lent 3A

            During this season of Lent, we have a tradition of veiling the cross. It feels slightly ironic – the season when we’re following Jesus to the crucifixion is the season when we deliberately hide the cross in much of our worship. Even our new Lenten banner de-centers the cross; the central image is the wilderness, not the cross.

            But this veiling of the cross de-centers the cross of Jesus so that we may meet it more clearly during Holy Week … and the veiling of the cross centers the WAY of the cross that we are all called to follow. The wilderness and the veiled cross bring our attention to the WAY of the cross. We have to discern our way of life, we have to figure it out in the midst of everything going on. We encounter Jesus in the words of the Gospels, we encounter Jesus in moments of daily life like the woman at the well, we encounter Jesus in one another, we encounter Jesus in preaching, teaching, and in the sacraments.

            But we do not get easy, simple answers to things. Christianity is not simplistic, though some branches of Christianity sure have tried to make it that way; say a special prayer, have a conversion experience, and poof, easy street. I hate to break it to you, but real Christianity is hard. We have to keep our eyes on Christ, wherever he is leading us. We have to learn how to see Jesus, to listen to Jesus, to turn and re-turn to Jesus in every moment of life.

            We have to walk the way of the cross – we follow Jesus to his cross, and we follow Jesus to our own cross, not knowing what shape it will take in our lives.

            Again, parts of Christianity these days do not want to talk about that. Parts of Christianity, especially in America, have warped the cross into a symbol of wealth, power, and triumph. American Christianity made the cross into a sign of wealth – the prosperity Gospel where if you are good and righteous you get rewarded with earthly wealth and that greed is good and our obligation to our neighbors is purely voluntary. American Christianity made the cross into a sign of power – the power to get what you want no matter the consequences, and the power to avoid consequence. American Christianity made the cross into a sign of triumph – not of Jesus’ triumph over death, but American triumph over every enemy, foreign and domestic … and that American triumph includes only certain Americans.

            So maybe it’s good that we veil the cross during Lent. We see and hear so many blasphemous messages about the cross that we need to purge our eyes, ears, hearts, and minds to let the cross of Jesus come into focus. We have to see glimpses of the cross from an angle, at a slant, that we may also see where our cross also lies.

            Notice so many different saints in our banners – and so many of them have a cross with them. We see the cross more clearly when we see how the cross shows up in distinct human lives, in the lives of the saints.

            So, let’s look at our saints so we can see the cross.

            Jeremiah – if Isaiah is the prophet associated with Advent and Christmas, it’s Jeremiah who we see with Lent. He experiences suffering and rejection, gets thrown into an empty cistern, hated because of the words of his prophecy. He sees the downfall of Jerusalem – and how Jerusalem was falling long before the invading armies set foot inside of it. Jeremiah does not want to be a prophet; he is not aiming for social media fame like so many religious figures today. Jeremiah only wanted to be faithful to God and to speak the words God gave him – and to speak the truth when none will listen is part of the way of the cross.

            And down from Jeremiah is Margaret of Scotland. An English princess born in exile who arrives in England in time for the Norman invasion to drive her family northward into Scotland where she marries King Malcolm – her spirituality and generosity as queen stands in contrast to the violence and scheming that characterized so much of the medieval royal houses. Sometimes the way of the cross looks like not being conformed to the world around you.

            Down from St Margaret is Therese of Lisieux, a French Carmelite saint who died at the age of 24. She grew up with a great fervor for Jesus and wanted to be a nun from an early age. She wrote about her “little way” of loving Jesus … and it was this “little way” that she clung to when she felt a dark night of the soul that stripped away all the warm feelings of love toward the end of her life. She doubted, she struggled, and yet she persevered in love. That’s the way of the cross, too.

            Below from her is William Stringfellow, one of my patron saints and a forgotten voice in the Episcopal Church. He was a layperson, a lawyer by training – but he was a far more insightful theologian than many who get degrees in theology and wear a collar. His piercing eye cut through the pious layers that mask the powers and principalities of this world. He made no friends within the church when he pointed out the racism and classism of the mid 20th Century Episcopal Church, and he certainly didn’t make friends when he was targeted by the FBI for subversive activities like harboring peace activist Daniel Berrigan. The way of the cross means knowing that powerful people will use their power against you.

            And down from him is Florence Li Tim-Oi, first female priest in the Anglican Communion. She was ordained not in the comforts of Western Europe or North America, but rather in the chaos of war. She was ordained a priest in China in the middle of Japanese assaults in World War II because no one else was courageous enough to care for those communities. Her courage proved too much for comfortable, pious churchpeople who cared more about her gender than about her courage. She never surrendered her priesthood though she did not preside at Eucharist for much of her life. Sometimes the way of the cross is courage and unshakeable integrity.

            At the top of the other banner is St Benedict, founder of Western monasticism. He wrote that a monk’s life should be a perpetual Lent, always one of penance and conversion. Though firm, he was not inflexible; the only absolute is, to use a phrase from his Rule, “to prefer nothing to the love of Christ.” If you find a better way to do it, then do that, he says. Pray. Read. Sing the Psalms. Learn how to love others and learn how to set aside your ego for a second. He didn’t need martyrdom to see the way of his cross.

            Down from Benedict is Julian, medieval anchoress of Norwich. With a desire to see the Passion of Christ, she was granted a series of visions that became the foundation of her prayer for the rest of her life. Her book, the first theological text written by a woman in English, is deeply rich and evocative, but let me summarize it with three things she asked of God as a young person: true contrition, natural compassion, steadfast longing for God. To understand what truly to be sorry for and to change, to know in the depth of our human nature how to love others, to desire God steadily and continuously: that is the way of the cross, too.

            Down from Julian is Lili’uokalani, last queen of Hawai’i. Watching as the rights of her people were stripped away by American colonizers in the late 1800s, she tried to protect them and guarantee their rights would not be infringed by greedy corporations, and for that she paid with her throne and her freedom. She stepped down when the corporations overthrew the Hawai’ian kingdom and America annexed it in 1893. She was imprisoned, and she prayed for peace and forgiveness. She was not successful in protecting her people – but faithfulness and trying to protect the suffering even when the odds are impossible is part of the way of the cross.

            And also speaking for the downtrodden, we have Toyohiko Kagawa, a social reformer and proclaimer of the Gospel during the height of Imperial Japan in the early 20th Century. He was arrested for advocating for the poor, he was arrested for apologizing to China for the Japanese invasion in 1940, he was attacked for advocating for universal voting rights for men and for women. The way of the cross is freedom in body and in spirit.

            And finally we come to Desmond Tutu, beloved Archbishop of South Africa during the final storms of Apartheid. Speaking for truth and reconciliation, hoping for a new future that goes away from eye-for-an-eye and instead makes for peace and justice. He saw as a young person how small acts of honoring the dignity of another human being make for powerful transformation, and so he never forgot the sacred dignity of every human being. The way of the cross means looking for the image of God in every person, and speaking out for human dignity when it is denied.

            None of these great saints knew what their cross would look like. The shape of the cross in their lives only became clearer in retrospect; the challenges and suffering they endured carved an outline around the cross that was theirs. None of them knew in every single moment what they were called to do; no such certainty, but whatever was done was done with faithful love.             Perhaps this is why I love the season of Lent so much. It’s messy – and I know my life sure is messy and imperfect, and I have to figure things out in the moment and do my little faithful thing now, no matter the consequences. These saints lived in very different times and places. Some of them we might consider successes – and others known for their faithfulness in the midst of failure. They knew the holiness of the cross is about faithful love. No matter where we go, let us follow Jesus – and see what the way of our cross looks like, and may we have the strength to live it. Amen.

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