Dirt and Water

         Several years ago we moved our baptismal font from the front of the church to the entrance.  It did not seem like such a radical move.  In a way we were replacing an old baptismal font which had served only as a receptacle for holy water.  When the font was relocated, however, we immediately discovered what a difference it made in the way we live out what we believe. 

            We moved it prior to Lent.  We began to rethink what it meant for the baptismal font to be the focus of Lent, itself a season for preparing for baptism and the reaffirmation of baptism.  We decided that all the important liturgical actions during Lent, Holy Week, and Easter we would do in close connection to the font.  So now, we bless the palms of Palm Sunday at the font remembering that just as Christ entered Jerusalem in triumph, so he enters us in baptism with power.  We wash each other’s feet on Maundy Thursday around the font, thinking about how in baptism not only our feet but our hands and heads are washed so we can be totally Christ’s.  We venerate the cross on Good Friday at the font, becaue in baptism we are signed with the cross that we take up daily to follow Jesus.  We gather around the font on Holy Saturday to remember the burial of Christ in the tomb, symbolized by the font.  And of course, the whole congregation now encircles the font when we baptize and renew our baptism, remembering that the font is supremely a symbol of death and resurrection.

            Nuestra fuente hace unos años hizo el centro de nuestra liturgia para la Semana Santa y Pascua.  Después de moverla cerca de la entrada, comenzamos juntarnos acá para la bendición de los ramos, para el lavatorio de pies el jueves santo, para la veneración de la Santa Cruz el viernes santo, para recordar el sepultado de Cristo el sábado santo.  En cada caso, la conexión  del bautismo está manifiesta. 

            So we began imposing ashes on Ash Wednesday at the font.  We are the only church I know of that does it there.  In most places people come up to the altar, as for communion, and kneel to receive ashes.  I suppose that few people make the connection between communion and ashes.  It is just a convenient and logical place to kneel.  But I wonder if anyone here ponders how odd—and fitting—it is to go to the font to receive ashes.  Once in my first parish a little girl came with her father to receive ashes for the first time, and saw what was happening.  When I approached her with ashes, she drew back in obvious disdain and shook her head.  I stood there with my hand outstretched not knowing quite what to do.  Her grandfather later told me that she had come home and said, “I wasn’t going to let Father Frank put that dirty stuff on my face, no way!”  She was right.  Ashes are dirty stuff.  There is nothing especially pretty about them.  And to put ashes on our heads while we are gathered around the font reminds us of two inseparable things wound together in a paradox.  We can get incredibly dirty and at the same time be thoroughly washed clean. 

Imponer las cenizas a la fuente es un poco raro.  Es un costumbre único de San Esteban.  ¿Es apropiado o no? Cenizas son sucias, no son lindas.  Cenizas son señales que nosotros son creados del polvo—del suelo.  A veces podemos ser muy sucios.  Pero, a la fuente recordamos que Jesús nos lava que seamos completamente puros.

            Lent is not meant for wallowing in self-pity that we are soiled creatures, misshapen by our own failings and misdeeds.  It is rather a time to realize that we are totally human, a season of being quite honest with ourselves.  And if we are honest with ourselves, there is much that is broken in us, and a good deal that needs cleaning.  It is not just what you think either.  I am not talking about the dark and sordid places in your heart.  What often needs cleaning are those places where we participate in others’ harmful behaviors, when we allow ourselves or others to be abused, where we collude with the forces of repression and destruction that warp human lives, spoil creation, damage other creatures, and poison otherwise good systems so that they corrupt justice and twist truth.

            Durante Cuaresma, no pensamos que nosotros somos pecadores más grandes en todo el mundo.  No, reconocemos que somos solamente y totalmente humanos.  Que seamos honestos y sinceros.  ¡Necesitamos mucho ser limpiado!  Especialmente porqué ya participamos aún por ignorancia en sistemas que abusan a las personas, que destruyen vidas, que causan daño a la creación y otras criaturas, y corrompen justicia y degradan la verdad.

            Pero la cruz hecho por cenizas ya es una cruz, recordándonos que Cristo no nos encuentra como debemos ser, pero como nosotros somos.  Cristo nos guía durante Cuaresma a las aguas en las cuales él puede lavarnos y renovarnos.  Cenizas duran solamente por una estación, alegría por ser lavado en el agua vida duran por eternidad.

            The cross made with ashes is still a cross, reminding us that Christ meets us not as we should be but as we are.  Whether we are weak or strong, arrogant or humble, ashamed or at peace with ourselves, Christ can take us through Lent again to that place where again he can wash us clean and restore us.  Ashes last only for a season, joy in being washed by Christ for an eternity.

© Frank Gasque Dunn 2013

El hizo humano a fin de que nosotros podamos ser Dios

 

            Cuándo yo era niño, mis padres no asistían la iglesia regularmente.  Entonces, no fui bautizado antes de mi cumpleaños cuarto.  El bautismo estuvo planeado por el Día de Pascua. Mi madre me había comprado un traje nuevo para la ocasión.  Durante la semana o dos semanas antes de Pascua, yo esperaba mi bautismo con esperanza y con mucha emoción. 

Unos días antes de Pascua tuve un accidente durante jugando en el patio.  Choqué con un poste de la línea para la ropa.  Entonces tuve una gran postilla en mi frente, que odie, tan fea era.  Pedí a Dios en mis oraciones que la elimine.  No quería ser feo cuando iba ser bautizado.  Esa tarde, después de mi despertar de mi siesta, me miré en el espejo y ¡que sorpresa!  ¡La postilla se fue!  Era lleno de alegría, saltaba jubilosamente, y gritaba, “¡Mamá,  Papá!  Mi postilla se fue, mi postilla se fue!”  Ya me acuerdo mi bautismo como un día de un milagro, cuando Dios me hizo bello.

            Hoy día es la fiesta del bautismo de Cristo.  Siempre esta fiesta ocurre el primer domingo después de la epifanía.  Es uno de las dos fiestas durante esta estación en la cuales nosotros celebramos la revelación de Jesucristo como el Hijo de Dios.  La otra es el ultimo domingo después de la epifanía, el día en lo cual recordamos la transfiguración de Cristo.  Ambos de las fiestas nos digieren conocer las dos naturalezas de Jesucristo, la naturaleza humana y la naturaleza divina.   Pero el punto magnifico de la vida de Jesús es que las dos naturalezas son potencialmente para nosotros también.

            Que exploremos lo que eso significa.  Claro cada persona tiene una naturaleza humana.  Es buena.  Dios nos a creado ser humanos completos.  Mucho de la naturaleza humana compartimos con los animales. Somos competentes de todas las emociones animales:  miedo, alegría, tristeza,  enojo, y todas las emociones derivadas de ellas.  Pero como humanos ordinarios, nosotros de tiempo en tiempo tuvimos accidentes.  Tenemos demasiado miedo,  que nos hace decidir hacer  cosas terribles, o cosas peligras, o cosas que dañan a los demás.  Igualmente, tristeza ordinaria puede ponerse depresión.  Tal vez enojo nos hace cometer actos crueles.  Entonces,  la naturaleza human puede producir heridas, a veces heridas serias.  Y nosotros llevar en nuestros cuerpos y almas las postillas que señalan nuestros choques varios.

            Pero, la naturaleza divina de Jesús no es reservada para él, pero es compartida con nosotros.  El punto de la vida de Jesús era mostrar las características de la vida de Dios, no simplemente que nosotros podamos dar gracias y alabanzas a Dios, pero que nosotros aceptemos esos características para nosotros mismos.  Creo que ustedes saben mucho de la vida divina, d la naturaleza divina.  Por ejemplo, saben que Dios ama a todos, cuida por lo menos, y se opone odio, avaricia, y mentiras y falsedad.  ¿Saben ustedes que Dios no aprueba nada que es cruel, incluyen chisme que destruya las reputaciones y hieren los espíritus de sus prójimos?  Empezando con bautismo, el proyecto de la vida cristiana, que es decir el programa de la iglesia, es traernos en contacto más y más con la naturaleza divina de Dios que se muestra por Jesús.  Eso es el propósito de la santa comunión.  Es el tema de oración.  Es la meta de participación en la iglesia, la comunidad de Cristo.  Día por día, por practica y dedicación, adquirimos los características de Dios, y el Espíritu Santo nos guía en el proceso de transformación hasta el momento cuando despertamos y descubrimos que la postilla fea se fue.

            Para vivir en la vida de Jesús es vivir cada día en su resurrección.  Es lo mismo como adquirir diariamente más y más de la naturaleza divina.  Pero, recuerden ustedes, que compartir in la vida de Dios no es fingir hacer un nivel de santidad.  Al contrario, es reconocer que no vale nada de fingir hacer algo, porqué Dios no quiere que mentamos, pero hacer y decir la verdad. 

            Todo de eso es la significación de la fiesta del bautismo de Cristo.  Por nosotros se humilló para compartir nuestra humanidad a fin de que nosotros compartamos su vida eterna.  Y por su gracia, podemos compartirla más cada día.

Amen.

             

El Milagro Último de Jesús

           

            ¿Quién entre nosotros esta noche ha visto el agua convertida en vino?  No es el tipo de cosa que se ve todos los dias.  Entonces cuándo leemos y escuchamos una historia como esa de la boda en Caná, ¿que suponemos es el propósito?  Es posible que la historia nos llama a una adoración más grande por Jesús.  También es posible que el punto es inspirarnos a creer en el poder de Jesús, mostrado por sus milagros. 

            La epifanía de Jesucristo consiste de tres eventos.  El primero es el descubrimiento de Jesús por los tres reyes, su revelación a sus gentiles.  El segundo es el bautismo de Jesús.  Y el tercero es su primer milagro, convertir el agua en vino a la boda en Caná de Galilea.  La historia del primer milagro leemos en el evangelio de San Juan.  Los capítulos primeros se llaman “El Libro de Los Señales.”  Cada historia en estos capítulos nos muestra el poder especial de Jesús.  Cado milagro nos dirige al senñal importantísimo, la cruz.  Cuándo Jesús llega a la cruz, en las palabras de San Juan, llegado su hora.  No es imposible decir que la Santa Cruz es la epifanía más grande de todos.  El milagro de la cruz es que Dios por su amor la transforma del instrumento de muerte en medio de vida.  Entonces, el primer milagro, convirtiendo el agua en vino, empieza una procesión muy larga que sigue a la cruz y la resurrección. 

            Comoquiera importante esta historia, como muchas historias ella existe en el dominio de cielo, muy lejos de vida ordinaria, ¿no?.  Convertir agua en vino, sanar al hombre nacido ciego, sanar al hombre minusválido, multiplicar los panes y pescados:  todo pueden resultar en la formación de la idea que Dios—y Jesús—es muy lejanos de nosotros.  En este caso, el milagro no conecta con nuestras vidas.

            Pero, déjame preguntarles otra pregunta. ¿Quién sabe aún un poquito de cambio?  Cada persona aquí conoce cambio, por qué es un parte normal de vida.  Unos cambios no queremos.  Unos cambios nos dan dificultad.  Unos cambios no son evadible.  No podemos elegir si cambiamos o no. 

            La pregunta no es si cambiaremos, pero como cambiaremos.  El secreto es que Jesús es el maestro de cambio.  Él hace la posibilidad que cambiemos hacia la verdad, hacia Dios. Cada vida es agua ordinaria.  Pero tiene la potencial ser vino excelente.  ¿Qué nos falta?  El poder de Jesús con lo cual se puede cambiar y crecer. 

            Favor de examinar eso un poquito más.   Por ejemplo, un hombre tiene la adicción a juego.  Como todas las adicciones la suya le tiene con una fuerza grande.  El trate cambiarse, pero no tiene el poder.  Su vida es agua.  Una mujer tiene el hábito de chismear.  No tiene el poder o la motivación por cambiar.  Su vida es agua.  Un chico está envuelto en drogas.  No conoce el camino por la liberación.  Su vida es agua.  Una persona se pone furioso, y causa mucho daño a su familia.  No sabe como vivir diferentemente.  No es libre.  No sabe como cambiarse.  Su vida es agua.  Todas la situaciones son muy comunes, porque la norma de la vida humana es ser cautiva por las fuerzas grandes de oscuridad.  A veces ocurre en maneras pequeñas, a veces en maneras grandes.  En suma, nuestras vidas son agua.

            Necesitamos un salvador, un maestro, un héroe que es capaz para transformarnos del agua en vino.  ¿Que es vino?  Ser vino es ser libre, imitar a Dios, dar un abrazo a cosas nuevas, crecer en nuestra capacidad pensar, aceptar ayuda en el proceso de cambiar nuestro comportamiento.  Todo el punto de cristianismo es adquirir las características de Dios.  No es posible sin la gracia de Dios.  Pero con Dios, todo es posible, aún las cosas más difíciles.  Se pueden nuestras vidas convertidas en vino, el vino especial de Dios.

            Volvamos otra vez y miremos la cruz.  La cruz nos dice que el poder y el amor de Dios está disponible para nosotros.  No es solamente para traernos en cielo después de esta vida, pero es para hacernos como Cristo aquí y ahora.  ¡Ojala Jesús nos convierta en vino momento por momento hasta el nos trae al Dios, el mayordomo de la fiesta, y Dios nos pronuncia el mejor vino del final!

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013

            

Guardrails and Grace

Luke 9:28-36

            No one knows which mountain it was on which Jesus was transfigured; but from the fourth century, the traditional site has been Mount Tabor, smack in the middle of the Valley of Jezreel.  Dome shaped, looking much as if an ethereal ice cream scoop might once have scraped it from the crust of the earth and plopped it down atop an otherwise level plain, Mount Tabor has been the destination of pilgrims and tourists for centuries.  Our bus took us from the Bedouin village at the foot of the mountain to a parking lot perhaps a quarter of a mile up.  We spilled out of the bus and into a half dozen beat-up taxis, therein to be transported up the mountain in a series of switchbacks, with nary a guardrail in sight.  Flying up the mountain at breakneck speed, our Palestinian taxi driver knew how to handle his old Mercedes, and knew as well how to give travelers fits.  At every hairpin turn exclaiming, “Hallelujah!” and chuckling, he had every one of us laughing and screeching like kids on a roller coaster.

            It didn’t do a lot for my devotional life.  By the time we reached the windswept summit, my major connection with the Transfiguration was the fact that we were white as bleached sheets.  I lamely suggested that we build three booths and avoid the trip down.  But the trip is worth the effort, white knuckles and all.  Atop the ruins of a fourth century basilica (can you imagine hauling all the stone for a church up such a peak?) twentieth century Franciscans built a magnificent edifice designed by the brilliant architect Antonio Barluzzi.  He depicted the Transfiguration with bi-level altars.  The upper altar, reached by side stairs, beams with magnificent mosaics like a jewel, symbolizing the divine nature of Christ.  Those mosaics catch the western sun just right on August 6, the Feast of the Transfiguration, and become totally resplendent with light.  Below, is a much simpler altar, made to recall Christ’s human nature.  And in the towers on the north and south sides of the church are two chapels, one for Moses and one for Elijah. 

            It would be easy, and maybe a little cheap, to go down the path of exploiting the irony of the church and its three naves, mirroring the rather stupid remark of Peter suggesting the building of three booths, perhaps for the Feast of Tabernacles.  But alternatively I would like to focus on how the Transfiguration of Christ, his own seminal religious experience, if you will, and how it somehow called for witnesses. 

            You have noticed, perhaps, that within the band of The Twelve disciples there was an inner circle consisting of Peter, James, and John.  The first three gospels tell several stories of how Jesus chose these three taking them with him on some occasions, of which the Transfiguration is one.  Nothing in the story suggests that Jesus was at all aware of what was about to happen to him.  What the narrative does suggest, however, is that there is a link between what had happened about a week before.  Jesus and his group had gone far out of their accustomed circuit to the headwaters of the Jordan at the foot of Mount Hermon, the highest peak in the country.  According to Mark and Matthew, at a place called Caesarea Philippi, associated with the Greek god Pan or Baneas, Caesar, and the House of Herod the Great whose son was the Philip who built the city there in honor of Caesar Augustus, Jesus asked the question, “Who do the crowds say that I am?”  The place itself, though perhaps on the much-used highway to the sea, no stranger to rumbling armies, was rather desolate and still is.  Awash in all the symbols of power and tradition—Roman, Jewish, and the waters in which Jesus himself had been baptized—Caesarea Philippi became remembered as the place where Peter confessed the answer to Jesus’ question:  “You are the Christ, the son of the living God.”  And all the gospels say that Jesus heard that response and immediately—“sternly,” they say—ordered his disciples to tell no one, explaining that ahead of him lay the road of suffering and death, not the glorious kingdom expected to be assumed by Messiah.

            So what is that all about?  It seems to me that Jesus was struggling with identity and vocation, a somewhat familiar struggle to many of us.  Who are we and what does our life mean?  If you read the gospels, especially the first three, you can see how deeply Jesus wrestles with those questions, although many of us miss that, imagining that he was somehow immune to human struggles.  In Luke’s narrative, although Caesarea Philippi is absent from the tale, Jesus is praying with his disciples near him when he asks that question, suggesting that the question itself might have been the subject of his prayer.  Who am I?  And if I am Messiah, the Chosen One, how does that square with this sense of destiny I have to suffer, to be rejected, to be killed, and to rise again?  There are no maps telling me how to get there, and I am not sure how to do it.

           

            After this episode of prayer, as happens in both Mark and Matthew, Jesus selects the inner three and takes them with him to a high mountain, apart.  And there something very strange happens.  We call it the Transfiguration, but in many ways it was Jesus’ confirmation.  It was his own unique spiritual experience that springs from the roots of this question, “Who am I?”  Christian theology takes the route of understanding Christ as one person of two natures, divine and human.  Do with that what you will.  The struggle of the self, his Self, is in some sense the struggle of the world of the crowds, Caesars, and gods of the nations wrestling with and against the divine world of God.  The scriptures today remind us that transfiguration is something that had happened before, to Moses, for example.  And Christian history contains other examples of similar, if not identical, experiences of ordinary people, St. Seraphim of Sarov being one.  Be that as it may, when they arrive on the mountaintop, Jesus enters into prayer again, and in that moment his appearance changes and even his clothes become radiant.  The story tells us that not only Jesus is different but that somehow the veil separating the world of the crowds from the world of the divine is pierced.  So Moses and Elijah appear, not to Jesus only, but to the on-looking disciples.  It is the realm of eternity, not time, where past and future have no meaning.  Moses and Elijah are speaking of what we would call future—the “departure” that Jesus was to accomplish in Jerusalem—but they know as much about the future as they do the past, which is to say that they belong to that timeless realm that is then and there on the mountaintop colliding with the realm of flesh and blood that is generally ignorant of any other realm than that of common, everyday goings-on.

            There are lots of things to be learned and gleaned from the story of the Transfiguration.  Almost always we naturally focus on Jesus, which is doubtless the point of the whole episode.  But notice the obvious.  Jesus took with him three disciples.  Thus there is an audience for this great epiphany, and a community to share it.  Why did he take them?  Perhaps for company—reason enough if you are going to hike all the way up Mount Tabor or some similar peak.  But the story is reminiscent of Mark’s account (which Luke had read) in which Jesus called these three out from among the others and took them with him deeper into the Garden of Gethsemane where he prayed in his agony to be spared his time of trial.  Jesus felt the need for company during critical hours.   And simply because they are there on the mountain, Peter, James, and John themselves get swept up in the overshadowing cloud, terrified as they find themselves in that awful space where time runs into eternity and flesh is saturated with glory.  The voice that comes out of the cloud, unmistakably the same voice that spoke on the day of that other epiphany, Jesus’ baptism, speaks not to him but to them.  “This is my Son, my Chosen.  Listen to him!”  Listen to him.  Open your hearts, your minds, your souls so that you can not only hear but pay attention, and follow.  The road downhill will be harder than the climb, because it leads to suffering and rejection, denial and cross.  The Chosen One is chosen not for domination but for submission, not as ruler but as servant.  And if the Chosen One chooses you, it is so that you may be like him.  Get your cross and take it up and follow him.  Listen to him.

            They kept silent and told no one in those days anything that they had seen.  What else could they have done?  Those whose minds are sealed in the world of the crowds and crows and Caesars are seldom impressed with tales of glory.  And even if they be enchanted, they ponder the unearthly, rarely imagining that transfiguration or any such thing could be for them.  Peter, James, John, their fellow disciples, and countless others were soon to come to see something more magnificent than the Transfiguration, namely Jesus’ Easter, his spring, his Resurrection.  They would only get there by listening to him and following him on the road that led through Gethsemane to Calvary, through agony and death.  But they would catch on in due time to the fact that what had happened to Jesus on the mountain was their destiny too.  Time would come when they would tell freely what they had seen there, convinced that the world of the divine penetrates the world of the crowds on every level.  The day would dawn when they and their sisters and brothers would be the community showing what could happen to the world when it but listens to the Chosen One, takes up its cross, and follows him in the way that seeks Love in an exhilarating journey where there are no guardrails, only grace.

© Frank Gasque Dunn, 2013