Christ Church Rockville Lenten Devotion

Monday in Holy Week ~ April 10, 2017

I apologize if this devotion is too confessional. This Lent/Holy Week finds me at low ebb. Our world and our country seem to me to be teetering on the brink of an abyss, and I fear a new Dark Age where humanity once again falls victim to an exhilarating immersion in anger, fear, hatred of the other, leading to cruelty, nastiness, violence, and death. Bullying seems to have become, not an aberration, but public policy. Well, the more things change, the more they stay the same: Jeremiah felt exactly as I do thousands of years ago and he turns on God with a desperate complaint:
Righteous art thou, O Lord,
when I complain unto thee;
Yet I would plead my case with thee.
Why does the way of the wicked prosper?
Why do all the treacherous thrive?
Yet look at our context! We read these words, and join our voice with Jeremiah’s, on Monday of Holy Week. The person we worship, and promise to follow, was the greatest teacher of God's love ever, and he was also that love incarnate, and his love and forgiveness got him nailed to a cross. Jesus warns us that God’s love is very dangerous and controversial—it threatens the foundations of this world order based on greed, selfishness, and resentment. The Powerful will protect that order; they will not tolerate love and forgiveness. So to follow Jesus and his way is to follow him to the Cross
Rudolf Bultmann once observed: There can be no resurrection from death until there has been a death. Most of us would prefer to skip Holy Week, and especially Good Friday, and go right to Easter, but before resurrection there must be death. The good news (a.k.a. Gospel) is that Death does not get the final word. Jesus calls us beyond fear to new life, beyond death to resurrection.
(St. Paul writes) “Not that I have already obtained this (resurrection) or am already perfect;
but I press on to make it my own, because Jesus Christ has made me his own. Brothers and
sisters, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but one thing I do, forgetting what lies
behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the
upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”
We, indeed, live in dark and scary times. The temptation is to get lost in Jeremiah’s despair. But Holy Week calls us upward. It calls us to believe that love will finally triumph. Remember the old TV show “Mission Impossible”? Christian faith shows all those plots to have been child's play. That death can turn into life . . . that is the real mission impossible! In a dark time, we are to be Light. In a dark age, Christ Church is to be a place of refuge where God’s death-defying love still rules.

— The Rev. Pete Bastien