Follow the Way

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Gabe Triplett
Fourth Sunday of Lent
March 11, 2018

Believe in Jesus and you will be Saved!!! Says the Billboard along highways across our nation. Ok, Well what does that mean?  Here is what it has come to mean; the turning of the gospel message that is Love and liberation into the exact opposite. A bumper sticker theology used to exclude.  Surface level, 21 century literal, mental magic, a four-word spell that MAKES God love us but not the other.   It is a lie!!!

In today’s Gospel Jesus is talking to Nicodemus.  Nicodemus is a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin.  A keeper of the “official” religion and part of the Judean political hierarchy, that is in collusion with Rome, and actively uses religion and scripture to keep people disempowered, poor, and enslaved.  Sound familiar?
Nicodemus does not doubt that Jesus is a man of God.  The first thing he says to Jesus is that “he believes in Jesus”.  To Jesus that means nothing.  Despite his proclamation of Jesus’s communion with God, Nicodemus is still in Darkness. Jesus tells him that it is his shame of the evil way in which he lives that keeps him there.  You see, to truly believe in Jesus is something far greater than a proclamation of words, it is to live a truth that will naturally bring us into the Light and allow us to follow The Way! A way that is an alternative too and in direct opposition with the system of oppression that Nicodemus represents.  

The truth is this,

 Just like Jesus, you and I are the Beloved daughters and sons of God, and God’s favor rest on us! 
Just like Nicodemus, that is often hard for us to believe for so many reasons.
We are taught a lie from a young age that we are, what others think of us, what we do, or what we have, or some combination of those.  Anything less than perfection is not good enough.  I will add that in Jesus’s time there were categories that automatically exclude you from being good enough.  Where you were born, your abilities, your gender, your religion, what you looked like, could all instantly exclude you from being worthy of God’s love! Sound familiar?
 In fact, the reason that the Pharisees and priest give time and again throughout the book of John as proof that Jesus is not the anointed one is that he is from galilee and nothing good can come from those people or that place! We can imagine they might have said those “shitholes”.  Sound familiar?

A society that pushes these lies is a society that denies the Greatness and Goodness of God and becomes a society of death.  And when we except these lies as truths we are led into a world of drama and trauma, sharp ups and downs as the opinions and actions of others dictate our own worth.  We become immersed into relationships of isolation that are often violent and hurtful as we die a thousand deaths.  This way is a lie!  But Jesus is The Truth that leads us from into eternal life through communion, to community, to ministry.  For the Jesus in the book of John eternal life isn’t about the Hereafter a sweet by and by in the sky.  Eternal life is quality of Life, it is life that gives rise to more life.

So, the question becomes then, what is it to truly believe that we are the Beloved.  Fr. Henry Nouwen tells us that there are 4 words that summarize Jesus’s life as the Beloved of God and thus summarize belovedness as well!
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Chosen

• Each of us precious and special.  Carved into the palm of the Creator’s hand before time began.
• Each given a purpose to live out in our communities. We may call it vocation or a calling, it is the way in which God has created us to love and be loved!
• We must remember that just because we are chosen does not mean that the other is not.  Just the opposite we know because we are called so is the other.

Blessed
 

• Coming from benediction, its Latin roots Literally means having good things said about you. 
• We are all Blessed, God has said good things about us.  And we hear these good things both in the silence of prayer and through the blessings that others give us. 
• A couple weeks ago I took Oscar to faith formation and when I saw Oswaldo I said, “I am so glad you are here, I am so glad to see you”.  I expected him to be delighted with my praise.   He looked up at me and said “why”? Hahaha that’s why children are the best, no pretention.  I was giving praise and praise doesn’t not heal people.  But blessings do, proclaiming the real good truths about the other to them does heal.  “Oswaldo, you are a great listener and when you are working with Oscar or anyone else in class you are kind, and I can see that you make them feel good.  That is why I am happy you are here.”
• I’m convinced that As Parent’s the best thing we can do for our children is to bless them often, our blessings will, in the end, mean so much more than any education, praise, achievements, or stuff. 

• Broken
  • We are good, and we are broken. The two are not mutually exclusive. What good does it do to ignore the truth, play as if our brokenness doesn’t exist? It does us no good! But To be vulnerable with our brokenness, that is powerful!
    •  I think about all the women in my life who had the courage to share the #metoo and tell stories of how they had been broken. How that movement centered around brokenness gave way to liberation and resurrection for so many!  Imagine the healing that could come forward if men had the courage to share the #IDid……
    • It takes courage to proclaim our weakness, our failures, our short comings. During Lent we are reminded by our Christ’s who sheds tears in the garden and screams out from his own cross “my God my God why have you forsaken me” that is a God that invites us to bring our brokenness and move it under the blessed category. Because It is our brokenness that speaks truth to the societal lie of perfection.  It is our broken ness that is the crack in the shell of our ego, a crack in which the Grace of God can pour herself in and fill us.  
  • The truth is this, our wounds and our joys are never separate, our blessedness is tied to our brokenness, our cross to our resurrection. 
  • The miracle is this, when we can truly see our brokenness within the blessed category then we are able to see the same with others.  The ups and downs of the culture of death start to level out.  No longer does that little jab from our spouse, that comment from our co-worker, that look from the girl in class send me into a mental narrative that leads to paranoia, anxiety or revenge.  in their brokenness we are reminded of our own.  Which leads us to our blessedness and theirs.  And concludes in the truth of our shared identity as the Beloved.  And that is the light that cannot be consumed by darkness.  Do you see?  When Jesus says he hasn’t come to condemn, he has come to heal, to save and that it is we who condemn ourselves.  This is what he is talking about!  The failures of others will always remind us of our own failures.  We get to chose whether or not to put those failures under the blessed category, or if we choose to condemn them and thus condemn ourselves.
• Given
  • God gave God’s self to the world and we are called to do the same.  Our beloved-ness is a gift not to be cloistered, kept in the quietness of chapels and churches. Perhaps that is where we find it yes, but we can-not keep it hidden for ourselves because ALL that we are is a gift to be given to the world.  Not just part of us, but the whole thing!  Our Chosen-ness, Our blessedness, AND our brokenness.
  • In the book of John we see Jesus being given to all, walking all over the place, from village to village, staying longer in places than he had planned because it was asked of him,  feeding people, healing people, raising people from the dead, standing up to the rich and the powerful, uniting people across economic, political, and religious differences, Insisting on Justice, giving himself to the point of heart break….. and then he gives some more, The Way commands us to do the same. The Truth sets us free to do just that.  That is why we organize in our neighborhood trailer parks, that is why we do so much in our St. Vincent de Paul, that is why we create hardship funds for immigrants and declare our walls a refuge for those facing deportation, that is why we visit the homebound and minister to the lonely. 
  • When we recognize our collective beloved-ness, there is nothing left to us but to follow Jesus, The Way, that is an alternative too and in direct opposition with the systems of oppression that we witness.