EricPerry's blog

“Like one untimely born.

Last night I went to the graduation of a six month residential substance abuse rehabilitation program in Bristol. It was an emotional night for all. The graduates consisted of drug dealers, forgers and thieves. All were felons. One man had spent fourteen years of his life in prison. He entered the hospices of the Tennessee Department of Correction at the age of twenty-two. The program included a rigorous schedule of worship times, Bible study and service. For some it was the longest they had ever been sober since they were in their early teens. All gave credit and thanks to God. “I am a new creation,

Kindness and forgiveness and tenderheartedness. These are not our society’s virtues. Together they create a pattern for the perfect doormat. Left to our own devises perhaps that is precisely what such characteristics would weave.

“Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love as Christ loved us and gave himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.

Psalms are sung prayers. They can express the broken heart of a believer and the broken spirit of whole communities. They can launch into soaring anthems that enjoin choirs and orchestras to the heights of ecstasy and joy, or express the simple gratitude of a trusting soul toward God. Some can be sweetly hummed in the morning and lightly whispered before going to bed. Others rumble like the blues or rage like a rap. Love, hope, praise, awe, disillusionment, loss, sin, sickness and exile--the whole range of human experience has been offered to God in these prayer/songs throughout the millennia by Israel and the Church.

The pastor welcomes us, calls us to worship and prays a blessing over our work ahead. Everything is set except the table. As we leaf through our hymnals for the first song, the bread and cup are conspicuously absent.

The rousing strains of the opening hymn draw our attention to the notes and words on the page before us, but out of the corner of our eye we catch a glimpse of two people with the missing elements. As we follow their course to the front of the church they pause, raise the elements and place them on the table. The two volunteers find a seat as we try to find our place on the page. Verse two ends with some of us attempting to regain our composure while others beam like insiders of a private joke. Fortunately the service continues, and the distraction lasts only a moment.

“They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer.

"For they were afraid,” hardly seem like appropriate last words for the “Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” But according to the majority of scholarly opinion this is precisely where the original text of Mark ends. After receiving a brief explanation and simple instructions from a young man dressed in white clothes, three women intent on attending the neglected corpse of Jesus were filled with holy terror and amazement.

We have heard this kind of language before. Jesus’s best friends fell into a similar fright when the veil of his humanity had been pealed back to expose the divinity radiating just beneath. Terrified Peter blurted out that tents should be raised for the occasion. All three Gospels that record the event imply that these words may have been best left unsaid. The three women leaving the tomb had the good sense to keep silent—“for they were afraid.” On the mountain of transfiguration God’s glory poured through Jesus’s flesh and exposed light. In the empty crypt where Jesus’s dead body could not be found God revealed life. Light and life were there all along, we just didn’t have the good sense to be awestruck before.

The same Spirit that descends on Jesus at the Jordan sends him out to the wilderness. The same spirit confirms our identity and sends us to the wolves. In fact, these are not two separate acts, but one act of revealing identity. I’m suspicious of the notion that difficulty builds character. It can, I suppose. But it can equally devastate someone’s faith. The desert fathers usually required monks to spend a substantial amount of time in community before they allowed them to live the life of an anchorite. The desert can kill both body and soul. In his Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius of Loyola points out that the Lenten Retreat can lead to either consolation or desolation, and advises pastors on how to recognize the signs for each. Even the relatively uncomplicated way we participate in Lent can have significant consequences, not the least of which is the temptation to believe that we survive the hardship of our lives alone and by our own strength. Christ didn’t even do that. Angels attended him. Lent, if nothing else, should teach us that even in simple disciplines we need the encouragement of our brothers and sisters in the faith, and temptation requires nothing less than divine assistance. Blessed are the poor in spirit because they realize their predicament both as easy prey for the Great Accuser, and their dependence on all the resources available in Heaven’s stronghold just to get through forty days. Some of my clients with substance abuse issues would argue that all those resources are necessary to survive the next minute. Trials may build character, but they begin their construction by destroying foundational belief in our autonomy. We are, in fact, children of God in need of his words, his servants and his blessing.

“If you choose, you can make me clean.

In Jesus’ culture, a day began at night. As the first day began with darkness, and God spoke light into it, so our days begin with God’s spirit hovering over our lives as the details blur with the lengthening shadows of evening.

After an eventful Sabbath, the first day rose as the sun set. Mark frames our view through the doorposts of Peter and Andrew’s house. Rather than serving as a barricade against the undulating chaos of broken people gathering outside, the door opened to a new creation. The depressed, the anxious, the traumatized, the disturbed received their wits and grasped reality like they never had, or had long forgotten. The over medicated and uninsured extended their hands and receive health. God’s life poured irresistibly through his Son. Even the forces of evil could not refrain from declaring the good news. But Jesus silenced them. It is better to believe because of God’s good works than the devil’s word. Wholeness should speak louder than the last screech of a broken spirit.