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What Day is Today

Text: Matthew 28:1-10

This is not a day of sweet contentment. This is not the day that resolves Holy Week’s mysteries. This is not the explanation. It is instead a day of disruption. Of new mysteries made.

Today is a day of confusion. A day of joy and fear. This is the day that Mary Magdelene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.

Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb where Jesus had been placed, his death clear to everyone and attested to by the soldiers who went out to make sure. The two disciples went to watch the tomb, in Matthew’s story, not to anoint the body—that is in another Gospel. But to keep a vigil, to keep watch. Jesus was dead. The last scene had closed, the credits had rolled off the screen.

But then an angel appeared, an angel in white, looking for all the world like lightning, with a message: Do not be so quick to draw conclusions. Take a look, see what you see. The angel rolled away the tombstone, and—behold!—as a result the earth shook. Behold! it says. And the guards shook too.

Where was Jesus? Not here, the angel said. He is not here, which was obvious by then. That was confusing. Perhaps there were possible, reasonable explanations why he was not there: Perhaps someone spirited him away (as the guards later think in verses we did not read). Perhaps this was the wrong tomb. Perhaps Jesus had only appeared dead (though they knew otherwise).

None of those things is the reason, says the messenger. Jesus has been raised. That is the reason Jesus was not there. And the angel says again: Jesus has been raised from the dead. And a third time, the same message in a different form: You will see him soon, here, on this earth. And they did.

In the Gospel of Matthew, this story is short and clear. There is no magical realism of the sort found in the Gospel of John. This is an account as straightforward as Matthew can make it. This is what happened, here is who said what to whom. Yet the earthquake and the lightning-like angel—to say nothing of the amazing message—tell us that straightforward and commonplace are two different things. The story is not easily told in natural terms. Yet Matthew’s deadpan delivery makes it clear that it is not unnatural. A surprising and unexpected simple event.

Yet there is an urgency underlying Matthew’s version of this event. Behold! the angel says. The word repeats four times in this short passage, but never translated that way in our Bible. It comes out as “suddenly.” Suddenly there was a great earthquake. But it is really: Behold! A great earthquake! The word comes from a word about sight, about seeing. Seeing with urgency. Pay attention! might be better. Or Look here! Pay attention, Mary Magdelene and the other Mary! Jesus is going ahead of you. Behold! Jesus met them and greeted them.

Expectations get us stuck in a kind of dreary landscape. It is not that the two women had run out of hope. Rather, they saw that what happened to Jesus is what happens to everyone. Promising beginnings give way to disappointed middles or tragic ends. The promise of a new world was not so much dashed as it fizzled out. They arrived at the tomb expecting to find things as things always are. It is not that they could have been prepared for what happened (though Jesus does try to warn his disciples ahead of time). But if everything works out as predicted, then there is no new world. There is no transformation. If our lives follow the expected route, if we understand exactly how things work, then there is no surprising future.

Behold! says Matthew. Behold! says the angel. Mary Magdelene and the other Mary are filled with fear and joy. Both coming as a result of expectations shattered. Is everything going wrong or is everything going right? Should they be afraid that things that cannot happen have happened, or should they be joyful for what has happened? Behold! says the angel. Can they believe their own eyes?

Fear and joy. It is a recipe for confusion. The angel tells them not to be afraid. And Jesus says the same. And he tells them to be joyful (not Greetings as our Bible puts it, but more than that: an encouragement to joy. Great to see you! he says.)

It is confusing. Yet it is only in the midst of this kind of holy confusion that change happens, and new futures are revealed, hinted at. Unfold in us and in front of us. And out of which new worlds are formed, or new ways of being in the world. New kingdoms. The kingdom of God. When expectations are not met, and both joyfully and fearfully so.

Though we sometimes seek out these times of confusion, stepping into adventures unknown, on paths untrodden. More often—if we are blessed—they come upon us, as they did Mary Magdelene and the other Mary. We can and do run from them. In Matthew’s story, the two women are told to tell the other disciples to meet Jesus in Galilee. In Mark’s version, they are told the same. But in Mark, they say nothing to anyone, and run away. In Matthew, they run to the disciples in fear and joy to announce the good news. By their actions, the church is born. A new thing.

Faith is not an antidote to confusion. It does not ensure a predictable life that fulfills our expectations. Such a life closes off all avenues for re-birth and renewal. Rather, faith lets us not only endure that state of fear and joy, it lets us welcome it. To seek it.

God is certainly not done with us. There are bound to be more fearful, joyful disruptions ahead. More mysteries to unfold. Faith enables us to remain confused and not to flee, trusting in God, awestruck at what God has done, and eager to see—Behold!—what will happen next.

Thanks be to God.

Palm and Passion

Text: Matthew 26:14—27:66
Other texts: Matthew 21:1-11

There is a lot of hoopla today, in a seriously religious kind of way. And it will continue throughout this week until next Sunday, Easter Sunday. This is the central moment in the church year, far outweighing Christmas, and we rightly make a big deal of it.

We are so familiar with the story, however, that there are few surprises. Not only do we know what is going to happen, we know how to interpret it. We know what it means. The church has had 2000 years to think about it. And we know how things turn out.

We just heard one of the two Gospel readings for today, this doubly-named Sunday. We heard the Palm part, where Jesus rides into the city amidst rejoicing and hosannas. We are about the hear the Passion part, where the joy turns to grief and horror. These are not two different stories. They are a part of one thing, one story. In its simplest: a rabble-rousing blasphemer comes to the city, makes more trouble, and is arrested, tried, and executed.

However, no such story of life cut short is simple. Hopes and expectations reside in the narrative of all people, and especially in those whom we allow to lead us—from messiahs to presidents to CEOs—allowed because we trust them to redeem us, heal our sorrows and sins, and bring us peace and contentment. They rarely can.

This is one story. But if so, are we obligated to explain it? To explain how what starts in glory ends in grief? What starts in hope ends in mourning? Or it that just the way things go: a sudden change in the winds, and a good life turns tragic?

The people lining the road to Jerusalem expect a king. The king is coming to you, quotes Matthew, borrowing from the prophets Isaiah and Zechariah. And the crowds call Jesus, with hope, the Son of David. A warrior king, scion of the greatest monarch of Israel. They have heard his teaching, seen his healing, eaten the bread and fishes with which he fed thousands, watched him confront authorities. These experiences fuel their expectations of a powerful leader. Save us! they cry—which is what hosanna! means. Hosanna, Son of David—save our nation!

Although this part of the story is about Jesus, Jesus is hardly present in it. It is a story of people longing for what they think Jesus is. Jesus is the carrier of a desperate desire. This man, riding humbly, as it says, on a donkey, nevertheless inspires in the people vision of political power and the overthrow of the sitting government. What is Jesus thinking, as he rides without speaking over the cloaks and branches, as he sees the expectant faces of his brothers and sisters, other than that he is surely headed toward his death. And their disappointment. We do not know; it does not say.

You will hear in a moment the second Gospel reading, also from Matthew, but five chapters later. You will hear that while Jesus at first speaks quite a lot, once he is brought before Pilate, he says almost nothing. He claims nothing. He will not answer when accused. He will not answer a single charge, it says. He will not claim the title of king of the Jews. “You say so,” he responds to Pilate. And those words—except with his last breath, when he asks God why he has been forsaken—those are his final words.

The Jesus of Matthew’s Passion is a humble man, not an imperial one. He was humiliated by everyone—priests, passersby, even the bandits. He is mocked and ridiculed. Save yourself, if you are the Son of God—Son of David, mighty warrior. Save yourself—a wicked mockery of the earlier hosannas. Save yourself, if you can save others as they say you have. But he cannot. Or does not. Unlike in John’s Gospel, where Jesus seems to be in charge of directing a drama about his own death, here in Matthew he is powerless. There no clever win-by-losing scheme going on here. Only losing.

We, like the crowd with its palms and hosannas, have a hard time accepting a humble Jesus. We transmute his powerlessness in the Passion according to Matthew into a secret power. But this makes his death meaningless and trivial if it is only part of some theological mathematics of atonement. Instead, we teach that it is important that God really died—as everyone does—and really suffered—as everyone does—and, if we are to believe Matthew, was truly humiliated. As everyone is.

It is helpful to hear the Palm and Passion story as if we never knew of Easter. If we never knew how things turned out. To imagine that the last word in the Gospel of Matthew was, as we are about to hear: So they went and sealed the tomb.

And then to ask ourselves what is the good news in that. Without the resurrections, does it make sense to follow a God who is disgraced and crucified? Because we do.

The Jesus of the Palm and Passion steps out of the normal way of the world. He is humble not because he is obedient to God—though that is no doubt true—but because the usual and acceptable way of things in the world is arrogance, exploitation, abuse of power, and leverage. Jesus refuses to participate in that scheme, which is a cause of much suffering and despair. Are you king of the Jews, Pilate asks? You say so, answers Jesus. You inhabit the world of kings and courts, Jesus answers, but I do not.

Christians have tended to pray for a kingly Jesus who is on their side, an earthly force with divine power whose wishes parallel their own, morally, politically, or culturally. We are no different in that regard from those singing hosannas by the side of the road.

But the Jesus of Palm and Passion does not serve us like this, but rather with persistent courage and humility, and brings this good news through the ministry of his life—there is a another way.

Resurrection Life

Text: Ezekiel 37:1-14 Other texts: John 11:1-45

Hooray. A warm sunny day. Spring finally has forced its way to the front, pushing winter to the back of the line. The crocuses’ prematurity has been vindicated. We can breath again. A fitting day for texts whose theme is clearly resurrection and rebirth.

Things like to live. The grasses pushes up to shatter the asphalt. The trees thrive even in their urban four square feet of soil. Our bodies crumble and are rebuilt constantly. We get sick, we get well. Forests encroach on formerly cleared land. In the history of our earth, great calamity has destroyed almost all species, and the remainder has re-covered the earth more than once. The Noah story repeats. Life in the aggregate is strong, and against it death is irrelevant.

The miracle of resurrection is matched by the miracle of creation. The wonder of re-birth is exceeded by the wonder of the first birth. Thinking about being born again reminds us of the astonishing fact that we are born at all.

The bones lie in the valley. Ezekiel is led there by God. There are very many bones, it says. Very dry, no marrow, no life left in them. Ezekiel walks around all around them. A desperate and creepy image. The bones represent despair. Northern Israel has been conquered and turned into oblivion. Judea is left alone, bereft. Our bones are dried up, they lament. Our hope is lost. We are cut off from God completely. They mourn in advance the prospect of their certain end from their separation from God.

This theme of displacement is one of the great themes of the Bible, a common pathology of sorrow in the story of God and humans. The theme of being far from home, from the nourishing and true spiritual center, from the source of life. Adam and Eve tossed from the Garden. The Israelites enslaved in Egypt, and then later exiled to Babylon. The fear of eternal judgment that would separate us from God forever.

Out of the depths I call to you, O Lord, we sang in today’s psalm. Hear my pleas, I wait for the Lord, my soul waits for God.

Yet the bones rise. The bones live. Ezekiel speaks to the bones, the Lord speaks to the bones. The destruction is undone, reversed. The organs of strength and motion—muscle and ligaments—grow again, re-organized. Form emerges out of chaos.

And finally, lifeless form is given life by the breath of God. Ezekiel speaks to the winds, the Lord speaks to the four winds. The word for breath is the word for wind is the word for spirit, appearing nine times in these fourteen verses. The wind, breath, spirit of God comes into them, and they live.

The story reiterates the creation, the creation of form from chaos, the speaking of things into existence, the spirit as the carrier of the power of life. This wind/breath/spirit word is the same as the wind that blew over the waters of chaos in the first chapter of Genesis. God the creator in Genesis is the healer in Ezekiel. God the creator, the redeemer, and the breath of life are all the same.

Yet the stories are not quite the same. Resurrection is not the same as first creation. It is not new life, but renewed life. Just as risen Lazarus is not a reborn baby Lazarus, but a restored grown-up person, with memories and unrequited desires and old scars. (As resurrected Jesus came with scars and wounds to show disciple Thomas). Resurrection is an impure process—like everything else in life. The resurrection of the bones in the valley and the friend of Jesus in the tomb restores something that was lost. Repairs something that was broken.

In this way it conforms to John’s notion of eternal life, which is not something that comes after life but which is part of life. Resurrection is therefore likewise not something post-life but part of life. It is not an exception or an aberration, but rather the long-term consequence of the breath of God that animates all the universe. It is built in.

I am the resurrection and the life, Jesus tells Martha. Both resurrection and life. Lazarus is raised, and later eats with Jesus. Both the restoration of loss and also the new life that follows.

Resurrection in this way is the chief model of Christian life. It is the basis for our confidence in words like renewal, revival, restoration, and even repentance. It is the force behind Desmond Tutu’s hymn: Goodness is stronger than evil, love is stronger than hate, light is stronger than darkness, life is stronger than death.

Resurrection describes our experience of being lost and then found by God. Of recovering a life destroyed by grief or anxiety. Of being freed from addiction. Of finding grace when burdened by self-hatred. Our experience of being saved not after death but from despair and hopelessness now is evidence that resurrection is the norm, not the exception.

What kind of God would create the world and yet never rescue it in times of trouble? What kind of God would push the cosmos off on a long, sometimes treacherous, and always surprising journey without a guide?

The Spirit of God dwells in us, Paul reminds us in Romans. God’s spirit/breath is in all of us. Some people dismiss the Lazarus story as mere resuscitation. But that is mean-spirited. The story, like the one in Ezekiel, like the whole arc of the Bible, is one of an always-near God whose love of life infuses all of creation.

Thanks be to God.

Simple Suffering

Text: John 9:1-41

A common way to interpret the Gospel of John is to consider it to have two parts. In this view, the first part is called the book of signs and the second part the book of glory. The first part contains seven stories, which we might call miracle stories. For example, the first of these is the changing of water into wine at the wedding feast at Cana. Each of these stories is described by John as a sign. They point to something. What they point to is the glory of God embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. We are supposed to pay attention, like the famous smart dog, to the thing pointed to more than the finger pointing to it.

However, this makes some pretty amazing stories—and long and detailed ones like today’s—some pretty amazing stories into things a little boring and contrived. These stories are not just about random miraculous deeds. All but one of them have to do with healing someone or feeding someone, or many someones. This is not a coincidence. The story itself tells us a something important about Jesus and the world he proclaimed.

The episode today about the blind man and his cure is simple on the face of it. A man is blind. Jesus heals him. That is sign enough, if that is all you are looking for. But of course, as in real lives of real people, things get complicated. Everyone brings their own expectations and baggage, powerful people exercise power, and as sometimes happens, people get hurt.

The political core of the story is, as it often is with Jesus, about what is OK to do on the Sabbath, which is protected by the third commandment. The day is holy because it reminds us of both God’s work in creation and freedom from captivity.

Jesus cannot be from God, the Pharisees claim, because he healed someone on the Sabbath when it was not dire—he could have waited but did not. Jesus does this a lot, elsewhere saying famously (and a little unfairly) that the Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.

Jesus heals the blind man on the Sabbath. To our Protestant thinking, there is nothing wrong with this. What’s the problem? If a person suffers, you relieve the suffering. But as the story shows, acts of compassion are rarely without consequences. The Pharisees are upset by the behavior of Jesus, which undermines useful and God-given rules for people trying to live together. The parents are fearful (and, it turns out, rightly so) of what all this weirdness means for their son and for themselves in their own community. The man himself is amazed and pleased at first, but his life is irrevocably changed.

Helping someone—relieving suffering—is a choice we make. Is it always harmless to chose to be compassionate? How do we decide? In the face of the anger and sadness which this act caused, how did Jesus decide to help the blind man to see?

He could have ignored him. There are always plenty of reasons to pass people by. Their suffering could be from birth, as the blind man’s was. Who sinned, the disciples ask, this man or his parents? They had no doubt the man was blind for a reason, and none either that his blindness was permanent. Perhaps people who suffer are to blame, perhaps their upbringing is. Their culture, their genes, their circumstances. Their character. Do they deserve to be helped? Helping people might be fruitless, it might create ungrateful dependency, it might aggravate things. It might be inconvenient at the moment.

But for Jesus, healing is always timely. The demands of suffering are always urgent. Jesus tells his disciples: “We must work the works of the one who sent me while it is day.” No dawdling. No waiting for approval or to get ducks lined up.

Though not in a gospel known for ethical teaching, this story gives us four interconnected ethical guidelines for Christian behavior.

First, present suffering always trumps hypothetical future benefits or dangers. Arguments about the imagined dangers of healing a man on the Sabbath are outweighed by the actual benefits of his seeing for the first time. Even if the dangers are likely, that is not enough to deny healing when it is possible. Or on the flip side to justify causing suffering. We do not know the future, and to allow or to cause suffering for the sake of an imagined future is hubris and arrogance. We can learn from the past, we try to prepare for the future, but in the moment we are called only to relieve or prevent suffering.

Second, and as a corollary, compassion always trumps form. Being in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong paperwork is not sufficient to deny healing. Procedures, taboos, and expectations are helpful, but they are not compelling.

Third, knowledge is not a prerequisite for helping others. We do not have to know how someone came to be hurting. We do not have to know whether he or she sinned or not. Or will continue to sin or not. We do not need to know the consequences of our compassion. “The one thing I do know,” says the man, is that “I was blind, now I see.” How did this happen, the Pharisees ask? “We do not know how it is that he sees,” say the parents, “but now he does.”

And fourth, underlying the other three: suffering is simple and complete. It is not complicated, subject to equivocation and argument. It is not good to suffer. There is no redeeming virtue. There is no meaning to it. There is no need to explain it (except to know how better to heal it). The man’s blindness in itself is sufficient to call on Jesus to heal him. “As Jesus walked along,” it says, “he saw a man.” That is all it took. To relieve suffering, no questions asked, is one way to love our neighbor as ourselves.

The disciples in John call Jesus rabbi, meaning teacher. But he does not so much explain God’s work as reveal it. In this story, it matters not how God works but that God does.

What Jesus calls himself—in the very next verses in John—he calls himself the good shepherd. Jesus is a pastor (which means shepherd). He is not a theologian. He is not an ethicist, either. He comes to heal the suffering world. To save the world, as John puts it. Not to debate about saving it.

Shepherds, like the one in today’s psalm, know the sheep, make sure they have food and water, a safe place, a place to rest, a trustworthy guide. To be fearless, to be undistracted, and to love the sheep first of all.

The Lord is this, our shepherd. May the Lord’s goodness and mercy pursue us all our days.

No Tent

Text: John 4:5-42
Other texts: Exodus 17:1-7

It is common to refer to people new to the habit of going to church as “seekers.” Some churches have special worship for seekers, different from worship for others, which I guess they could call “finders.”

There are a couple of problems with this. First, it divides people into groups based on some notion of spiritual progress, as if such a thing existed. And second and more important, it implies that God can be found in particular places, through particular means, and through particular efforts on our part.

It is hard for us to get over the idea that as far as God and we are concerned, we are the agents. We see ourselves as world-crafters, coming up with visions and implementing them, creating something from nothing. Being made in the image of God, we imagine that we are the same as God. That is a bit of a stretch. It is only God who creates something from nothing.

It is fine to demand things of God, to argue with God, and to complain to God. There is a lot of all those things in the Bible, including the passage we just heard about the Israelites whining in the wilderness. But that does not mean that we are the bosses. We have neither the authority nor the responsibility.

Even when we acknowledge that we are not the same as God, we think that it is our actions that lead us closer to God. Our work—to say it in a Lutheran way. Including the work of seeking God. As if to find God, we have to go looking for God. And that if we do not seek—and especially that if we do not do it right—we will not find.

We are driven to these thoughts because we miss God. We are afraid of God’s absence. Or we grieve that God is far away.

The Israelites ask: Is the Lord with us or not? It is a common question in times of trouble. Where is God when people are dying of famine, or plague, or drought? Where is God when people are exiled, or enslaved, or suffer humiliating defeats? Where is God when violence takes innocent lives, where is God when someone near to us is suffering?

Sometimes we think that this is God’s problem. That God is unaccountably and unfairly absent. But we just as often think that God is missing because we did not act in the right way or look in the right places. We are all too willing to blame ourselves.

We think there is a special way to God. That God lives in the Temple, for example, and that people must go there to meet God. Or that God is in the churches, where we have come together especially to be close to God. Or that God is present in a more intense way in a spiritual retreat, or in prayer, or when we are contemplating scripture.

We think there is a special path on which we must walk. We wonder whether we are abandoned and not favored by God because we have not found that path. Or perhaps that we are on some path that looks pretty good, but wonder whether we are tragically mistaken. We are doing stuff that seems right, but who knows whether it really is?

When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, she wonders whether God is more on mount Gerizim in Samaria or more in Jerusalem in Judea. Neither one, Jesus answers. Not meaning that God will not be in those places, but that there are no places which are the exclusive abode of God.

When Jesus answers the woman about on which mountain is God’s favorite house, and after telling her neither one, he then adds one more thing: that the Father seeks the worshippers.

The seeker is God, not us. It is God’s search that matters, not ours. God’s longing for us, God’s work.

The woman at the well does not come to Jesus, Jesus comes to her. She does not discover him, he discovers her. The story of Jesus in the Gospels mostly follows this pattern. Some people come to Jesus to be healed, but many others are healed because Jesus finds them, suffering. Jesus tells parables about sheep that are lost and searched for and coins that are lost and searched for, the searcher, we gather, being God. Jesus approaches the first disciples and calls to them: Come and see.

Before God was in the Temple in Jerusalem, God was with the people as they wandered through the desert. God, like them, was a nomad, and God’s presence lived in a tabernacle or tent. God’s word was near because it was among the people.

But as the people settled the land and built permanent structures, God, like the institutions that tended to the people, seemed to settle in (so to speak) and people began coming to God’s house in Jerusalem. In the Gospel of John, in the prolog in which it says in English “and the word dwelt among us,” the phrase John uses here—and only here in all the Gospels—means God lived among them in a tabernacle. Back to the tents among the wandering people.

But for the Israelites and for us, God is not in one place and absent from others. Neither Temple nor tent nor church. God is not revealed in one program, or one kind of piety. There is not one path to God that we must carefully tread. A colleague wrote that our job is not to find the path to God, but rather to walk the paths where God is most likely to come find us. But even that is less than graceful. It does not matter on what path you walk, God will come to find you anyway. There is nowhere that God is not. You have searched me and know me, it says in Psalm 139, you have searched out my path and are familiar with all my ways.

For Lutherans, the official definition of the church is a place in which the Gospel is rightly preached and the sacraments rightly administered. All the rest, while nice and helpful, is not necessary. And for Luther, the essence of the Gospel and the sacraments is a word of promise.

There are lots of implications of that promising word, but one is that no matter where we are or what we have done, or are doing, or contemplate doing, God will come find us. The church is a place that is special not because it is especially holy and filled with the spirit of God more than other places are. It is special place because in the church we say that promise over and over again.

People of the Cross

Text: John 3:1-17

We are people of the cross. A church, a faith, of the cross. This is a tale of three crosses.

The first cross is a crucifix. Jesus on the cross. A physical, embodied, suffering human.

Jesus comes to this world to be human. Where, perhaps, God experiences what it means to be human. We are created by God, yet—could it be?—as much a mystery to God as God is to humans.

Jesus comes to suffer. But not only to suffer. I imagine he laughs with his friends (he certainly tells jokes). He loves to eat and drink. He is often the life of the party. He hangs with all sorts of people.

But he comes, in the end, to suffer. Either part of the plan, or an inevitable consequence of his mission—hard to say. All people suffer—and that is surely not part of the plan, though it, too, often comes with the mission. But sometimes suffering just comes for no reason at all.

Jesus sees what we see. In the passage just preceding the one we heard today, it says “Jesus … knew all people; … he knew what was in everyone.” He learns what we know. To experience regrets, make hard decisions (some of which have no good end), to lose one’s sense of self, to witness despair. We get confused by the wickedness of others, and surprised by wickedness of our own. We get frustrated by our inability to help others because we lack skill, resolve, or resource.

The cross is a sign of failure. In the same way that war is a failure. Executing others is a failure. Slavery is a failure, imprisonment. All are signs of a failure to discover, to imagine, a way of being that reconciles conflict, failure to see humanity equal to our own in other people, failure to figure out how to love all as we love those nearest to us. The cross is just one example of—and stands for—all the desperate last choices that we end up making.

There is nothing good about crucifixion. There is nothing good about war. There is nothing good about poisoning someone to death, or electrocuting him. There is nothing good about enslaving someone. There is nothing good about denying the needs of others. They are all dark failures of our souls.

The cross is failure for Jesus, too. Jesus did not eagerly seek his own death on the cross. Jesus despises death. Jesus did not seek death, but he was willing to go to his death. He was willing to live a fearless life that predictably would lead to his execution. Jesus came to persuade, teach, show, lead the world to another way of living. But that did not happen because of the hard and frightened hearts of humans. Death on the cross, as my colleague John ... says—that was Plan B. Such things are always plan B.

The second cross is an empty cross. Like the one behind the altar. Christ is no longer there. Christ is risen.

We are people of the Resurrection. Death is not the end of life. What we think of the end turns out to be open-ended. What we absolutely know about life and death turns out to be inadequate.

This cross brings hope and new life in the face of discouraging experiences. Even in the darkness we see light. The crucifixion of Jesus turns out to not be the end of the story. God is able to extract the good from evil, to mine the good from the ore of fearful errors that we keep making.

Nicodemus comes stealing out of the darkness. In a very strange conversation—each person seemingly speaking past one another—Jesus tells Nicodemus that no one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.

The word, as you probably know, means “from above” and also “again” and “anew.” Some Bibles, like ours, translate it “born from above.” Others translate it “born again.” It is like the phrase musicians use when they say “take it from the top,” also meaning again and anew.

In these meanings—theological or musical—the point is that we get to start over within familiar boundaries. Jesus is not talking about a some fantastic place totally unlike the one in which we live, but about this place here, only different. Take it from the top.

We are not condemned by our traditions or habits of heart to repeat old patterns. Just because we cannot think of another way to have the world run does not mean that there is no such way.

Neither are we condemned by our sins, by our fears, our regrets, our pain. Jesus’ words to Nicodemus are comforting, not condemning. There is another way to be, he says to Nicodemus. God brings it.

No one can see the kingdom, Jesus says, unless they are born anew. Open your eyes. Can you see it? Each day starts fresh. Each day we are forgiven. Each hour is new; each moment. It is eternal life—meaning abundant, blessed life, here and now—constantly renewed.

The Wednesday evening worship during Lent closes with this prayer: “What has been done, has been done. What has not been done, has not been done.” Neither forgetting or denying the past, yet we escape from the power over us of regrets and disappointments. Our sorrows will not rule us.

The third cross is made in gesture. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. We are people of the Trinity.

Nicodemus comes to meet Jesus. He sees the power of God. He hears Jesus promise the gift of eternal life. He is invited to receive that gift—to receive new life—from the Holy Spirit.

We can lean on the trinitarian God, who created us and the elaborate, amazing, and difficult world; who knows intimately our sorrows and joys; and who leads us forward each moment into new blessings. The trinity is a multipurpose vehicle that carries us from death to life, from darkness to light, from crucifixion to resurrection.

The Gospel of John famously sees two ways of being, described mostly as two communities, two peoples. There is the community of darkness and the community of light. We are born first into the community of darkness. The one from whence Nicodemus comes, and which is the community of suffering. But we can come into the community of light. An encounter with Jesus (Nicodemus here, a woman at a Samaritan well next week), is (or can be) a transforming experience. We enter (or are born again, born anew) into the community of the light. We are freed from the captivity of the past (you will never be thirsty, Jesus tells the woman) and enter into abundant life. We become people of Christ.