Fifth Sunday in Lent

Today's text is Mark 15:33-41, read by Alison Garrett. This morning's sermon was delivered by the Rev. Dr. Phil Snider.

Lead Pastor: Rev. Dr. Phil Snider (he/him)

Associate Pastor: Rev. Emily Bowen-Marler (she/her)

Youth Director: Paije Luth (she/her)

Children’s Church Coordinator: Valerie Bush (she/her)

Executive Assistant: Wacey Rivale (she/her)

Transcript

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Let's see, today's scripture is Mark chapter 15 verses 33 through 41. When it was noon, darkness came over the whole land until three in the afternoon. At three o'clock, Jesus cried out with a light voice, Eloy, Eloi, Lama Sabakdani, which means, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? When some of the bystanders heard it, they said, Listen, he is calling for Elijah. And someone ran, filled a sponge with sour wine, put it on a stick, and gave it to him to drink, saying, Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to take him down. Then Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last. And the curtain of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom. Now when the centurion who stood facing him saw that in this way, he breathed his last, he said, Truly this man was God's son. There were also women looking on from a distance. Among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary, the mother of James the younger, and of Joseph, and Salome, who followed him when he was in Galilee and ministered to him. And there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem. Maybe hear what the Spirit is saying to the church.

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I had a chance to listen to one of my favorite podcasts, an episode from the podcast On Being by Krista Tippett. If this is not one of the podcasts you regularly listen to, I highly encourage you to check it out. Even though we had this sermon series planned weeks in advance, I couldn't believe how much this episode connected with the theme for today from our series, When Hope Feels Crushed. As Krista describes, it seems to me that a feature of our time among just about everybody I know across just about every dividing line we have is that everyone feels exhausted and overwhelmed. And living in a state of being constantly overwhelmed is an enemy of hope. Indeed, the idea of feeling as if we are overwhelmed, exhausted, fatigued all the time, wondering if there's ever light at the end of the tunnel can make us feel not just exhausted and fatigued, but can make us wonder about the possibility of hope. In our scripture passage today, we encounter those who would have their hopes crushed. And these are the stories we we look at during this season of Lent when we pay attention to the struggles, to the frailties, to the times when hope feels crushed, when our hopes feel dashed. You have Jesus on the cross who cries out, My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? This is God feeling forsaken by God. It is Christ feeling abandoned on the cross. And if Christ can feel forsaken by God, if Christ can feel abandoned, if Christ can feel hopeless, who are we to not have those same feelings from one time to another? We also encounter Jesus's friends, we are reminded of their hopes being dashed in the wake of death. While in Florida, we stayed in Sarasota, and there is a Ringling Art Museum that is there. We had a chance to visit it. One of the most striking pieces was done by students of Rembrandt. It was originally thought to be by Rembrandt, but historians like, I don't know how they figure these things out, but they figure these things out. It turns out it was by students of Rembrandt. It's called The Lamentation Over the Dead Christ. And it imagines the scenes among Jesus' friends just after Jesus had died. These are the folks who did not abandon Jesus but tended to him in his time of loss. Crucifixions were designed to make people give up. In the ancient Roman world, there would be streets lined with crosses, sometimes with the bodies of those who have been crucified still hanging on them as a way to remind people not to mess with Rome, because if you do, this is the outcome. In other words, if you feel like things are not going well, don't do anything about it. Because this will be the outcome for you. Crucifixion in the empires, in the Empire of Rome, was designed to crush hope. And the Empire knew that the best way to get people to go along to get their way was to make people feel like they did not have any chance of things changing. The Empire was structured in such a way that it was given its power precisely because people refused to believe things could change. Empires want to crush hope. And there are times in all of our lives when our hopes can feel crushed. And maybe it is because of the state of affairs in our world. Maybe, like in Kate Boulder's case and in her book that we've been reading during this season of Lent, maybe it's a diagnosis. Maybe it's the loss of a beloved friend or family member who holds dear. Sometimes something just happens that rocks our world, and we know things can never be the same again. We need hope. We long for hope. Sometimes it doesn't feel like we have reason to hope. Sometimes it can feel as if our hopes have been crushed, like Jesus' friends surrounding him in the wake of his death. On the On-Bean podcast episode, Krista Tippett interviewed the author Jason Reynolds, and he said that, quote, hope is potentially the most potent word in the English language. And when we don't feel hope, we don't know if we can have the courage to go on. I was reminded of a retired therapist and minister who used to tell me all the time, I met him when I was very new to ministry, and he used to remind me and say to me over and over, don't forget that hope is the most important word in the English language. Hope is the most important word in the English language. He felt like as a pastor and as a therapist, if he didn't provide hope, then he was doing a disservice to those with whom he was ministering and counseling. Reminds me a little bit of that timeless scene out of the Shawshank Redemption when Andy writes to his good friend Red, saying that hope is a good thing, perhaps the best of things, and no good thing ever dies. Which could be contrasted with feelings of loss, when people wonder if hope is gone, kind of like in the Avengers franchise? After Thanos snaps his fingers, destroying half the world's population. This leads even Captain America to have to join a support group. He was feeling so much despair. So if Jesus can wonder and feel abandoned by God, if Captain America can join a support group, it makes us wonder how we manage despair and struggle. People search and search for answers when things fall apart because they long for hope, because they need hope. To not feel hope is to feel utter loss. This is one of the reasons people turn to religion for a sense of hope, for a sense of possibility that even though things may not be good now, they may get better. Even though we struggle now, this is not the final outcome. This is why the whole Christian calendar moves through Lent toward Easter. In the midst of the struggle, the heartbreak, there is possibility and promise of resurrection, that death does not have the last say, that grief does not have the last say, that all of the struggles and changes we go through life, things that we navigate we never expected situations to be in, even though we can feel so lost in the middle of them, that is not the end. People turn to religion, rightly so, for a sense of hope, of possibility that there will be a future of promise. Kate Bowler writes about her experiences after being diagnosed with cancer, and and she she's very uh honest and vulnerable. And she also mentioned some things that that surprised me along the way. So, to remind you a little bit of something we've mentioned before in this sermon series, Kate Bowler, as an academic theorist, she studied the um uh what's called the prosperity gospel. And so she was a historian of of religion in America. Um, and and she studies the prosperity gospel movements. Now, the prosperity gospel is kind of known as the name it-claim it. You know, if you have enough faith, then God will reward you. Uh, and and so you got the televangelists who who fly on these fancy jets, and people ask him why. Well, it's just because God is richly rewarding my faithfulness. Also, I'm praying on desperate people. They don't say that part. But the idea is that if you have enough faith, God will either reward you with wealth, riches, or that God will heal you. And so if you are struggling in some way or another, if you have enough faith, God can fix it. God can heal you. And and Kate Bowler is is a critic of the prosperity gospel for a lot of reasons. I would guess most of us in this space would be critics of the prosperity gospel. It sets people up for failure, blames them for failing. Oh, you got sick because you didn't have enough faith. Oh, you're struggling fine, struggling financially. Well, maybe you just need to pray harder or give to your favorite televangelist more, and God will reward you. Lot of reasons to criticize the prosperity gospel movement. But one of the things that Boulder talks about as she's struggling with her own diagnosis is that she found herself strangely, oddly, surprisingly longing to be able to have the kind of control that that approach to Christianity offers. Even though she didn't intellectually believe in the prosperity gospel, and that if she prayed hard enough or had enough faith that God would magically or miraculously heal her, even though she didn't intellectually believe that, she wanted that. Because it gave her a it would give her a sense of control. Because if you're put in a situation, and in her case, she was a young mother in her 30s diagnosed with cancer, wondering if she was gonna even have a future, you can see why intellectually she may have a lot of reasons to be anti-prosperity gospel, but whenever you don't feel like you have much hope or the diagnosis is grim, you're gonna want to hold on to as much control as you can. And so while I can easily as an outsider throw shade onto the prosperity gospel movement, I also understand that there are people who are drawn to it, that while I think they're being played as fools, there are people who are drawn to it because they feel so desperate and they feel as if they don't have any hope at all. And they're trying to find it wherever they can. And over the years, I've spent a lot of time deconstructing and picking apart various beliefs. You all have been with me through a lot of that. And sometimes I don't know how in the world people can can hold on to some of the beliefs that they have. Like as Mark Twain once described, he said that there are so many religious people who who believe 12 unbelievable things before breakfast. He's like, how do they hold it all together? Like the mental gymnastics or or interpretive, you know, uh acrobatics to try to make it all work, things that don't seem at all to go together logically, somehow people hold together. How do they do that? It's been easy for me over the years to a lot of times make light of it or to highlight several of the reasons that I don't hold to fundamentalist beliefs. How I oftentimes associate those kinds of things with superstition and magic. And I can criticize those things an awful lot, and I can, you know, find you know different ways to approach Christianity than those ways. I mean, I can't believe that a person would think that if they send money to a televangelist, they will be healed. I don't get it intellectually. I mean, these folks are such obvious charlatans and fakes, easily parodied. They take advantage of desperate people for their own selfish game. But when you don't feel like you have any hope and you feel like you don't have any control, and this world's spinning out of control, you're struggling, every which way you can see why people long to believe. I had a friend who uh would talk about on the travel circuit, he wasn't a televangelist, setting it up like that. We make it sound like he's a televangelist. Um he would get asked to speak to a lot of different, you know, uh in a lot of different settings, uh, university campuses, uh, some churches, stuff like that. And and and he would always say that like, you know, getting people to believe is like shooting fish in a barrel. And that's because people are so desperate. People are so desperate. And and and religious folk so much long for there to be the possibility of a different outcome that sometimes they will believe things that that maybe they wouldn't otherwise believe, that maybe doesn't logically hold up because that's that's how people function when they're desperate. And so it's easy to throw shade at different beliefs, but um, I think it's important, and I I hope this is a lesson I've learned over the years, to be mindful of maybe the reasons why people believe things. Maybe it's because they feel so desperate and they feel like they're completely out of hope and their hope has been crushed. So they'll try anything. I've always been perplexed by the figure of Andy Kaufman. Some of you might might remember him. Uh he was he was a comedian in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Uh he made appearances on Saturday Night Live, uh, the David Letterman show, uh, lots of other places. He was a character in the sitcom Taxi. Um he was especially known for like being a prankster and like pulling off hoaxes. Like there are still rumors that persist that his death, he died in the early 1980s, there are rumors that his death was a hoax because he was known for perpetuating so many hoaxes. He would dress up in costumes, he'd get into character uh like as a wrestler, and he would swear he wasn't in character. This was really who he was. I mean, one of those people that that um just was always known for playing that role of a of a prankster. Uh someone who who was good at trying to hoax others. But he was tragically diagnosed with lung cancer. And there's a a movie about his life uh called Man on the Moon. It stars Jim Carrey. There's also an REM song. I'm stuck in the Gen X material deep. I'm sorry about that. Uh there's an REM song about his life called Man on the Moon. Um and you can see this person who his whole life was always like acting, putting on performances, trying to, if not, scam people into thinking he was someone he was not, enjoying the hoax. And when he was diagnosed with lung cancer, he felt so desperate that he went to see someone who purported to be a doctor or a healer, who was widely known to be fraudulent, and he paid a lot of money for someone to heal him, even though intellectually it doesn't add up, it's all a scam. Even someone who perpetuated the hoax fell for the hoax, fell for the fraud, not because they weren't smart, but because they were so desperate. And sometimes whenever our our our hopes feel crushed, we long for any kind of hope that we can get. Karl Marx, maybe Groucho, I'm not sure, one of them. I get them all confused. He said two things kind of back to back in the same paragraph. He said that religion is the opium of the masses. Religion is the opium of the masses. Because people feel so beat down and worn out, they long for some kind of escape or liberation from that kind of existence to where things would be better. When life continues to throw at you lemonades and you don't have enough time to make lemonade, you're just like guarding, you know, shielding yourself from all the lemonades or all the lemons that get thrown at you. Sometimes it's hard to make lemonade. When life is hard, you try to find a way to cope. You try to find a way to have hope. And Marx thought that religion functioned like that for some people. And a lot of times he's viewed as being completely anti-religious, but he also, in that same paragraph, said that religion is the heart of a heartless world. And so what's going on there? He's identifying the hardships that people feel and why they long for escape or for liberation, how the world can be heartless and cool and cold and calculated. It can beat you up and spit you out. You been there? And yet, the presence of love in the heartless world gives it a heart. In a world that chews you up and spits you out that is cold and calculated, in which the powers that be will do everything they can to crush hope, to take the heart out of the world. The presence of love in the heartless world is what gives it a heart. So where does all of this land a couple of Sundays before Easter? I'm not sure, but 1036, so the sermon probably should land somewhere. The trauma expert Gabri Matei, he said that safety is not the absence of threat. It is the presence of connection. Our world can make us feel like it's full of threats. There are realities that we encounter. Whether it's the political stuff, whether it's our individual lives and relationships and work stuff, I mean, across the board, there is struggle. And the presence of love is what gives this heartless world its heart. Not away from the struggle, but precisely in the midst of the struggle. Safety is not the absence of threat, it is the presence of connection. Faith, hope, and love abide these three. But the greatest of these is love. So here are Jesus' friends in the wake of loss. These are people who follow Jesus before he was resurrected, before they thought it might end differently, there they are with him, present to him and to one another in the spirit of love. In the midst of loss, they surround each other in the spirit of love. They chose to follow because of the love. This is when Jesus had died and their hopes had felt crushed. They chose to follow because of the love. Because the harsh truth of life is that sometimes things go badly wrong. Sometimes circumstances don't change as much as we wish they would. But the presence of love does not save us from these moments, it saves us in these moments. The miracle we are all looking for is the miracle of love and the spirit of solidarity that gets us through even the hardest times. I don't like Lent as a pastor at all. Because it challenges us to face stuff like this: struggle and hardship, brokenness and death. I don't want to have to face those things. Who of us does? Our world's full of it enough. But Christianity refuses to look away because it tells us that it is inevitable for us to experience feelings of loss, to feel abandoned or forsaken from time to time, for our hopes to feel crushed. But it reminds us that the presence of love in the midst of those moments is what saves us, not magic, not superstition. It doesn't save us from these moments, it saves us in these moments. Which is why Christianity also speaks of resurrection. I do want to close with a quote from my friend and colleague, the Reverend Molly Haush-Gordon. She's a pastor in Jeff City. Excuse me, Columbia. She says, some years the ancient stories collide into the present moment with particular force. This year, perhaps, we struggle to be buoyant in our joy or fierce in our hope or even to stay committed to our love. We see the terrible forces of crucifixion in our own time, and we understand for a moment the despair of those who followed a teacher of radical love and helplessly watched his execution at the hands of empire. We name those places now where crucifixion is at work in our time. We share a deep lament for all those that empire even now seeks to sacrifice. Our disabled kin, our trans kin, our black and brown kin, our kin in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan. We can name Iran now and beyond. The children pleading their own cases in immigration court because they are denied legal representation. We don't have to go back to the biblical stories to see all this. It's happening here, now. We weep, we wail, we rend the altar clothes of our hearts, we linger there for a time, forsaken. My God, my God. And then we look around. We look around and we find that life persists, that it rises up as surely as the spring flowers now pushing through the soil. We look around and we find each other, hearts broken open. And every excuse we had to hold ourselves apart is burned away. We find each other. We find each other and we hold each other and we remember the teachings of our teacher, the command to go to every single place where the powers and principalities are telling us not to love and to love there even more wildly. We remember the rigor of Jesus' solidarity even unto death. And maybe we feel something rising in us too. Maybe it is hope, that small flame licking at our hearts. And if it is not yet hope, maybe it is a promise that we will stay in witness, that we will listen to our aching hearts, that we will live that rigorous solidarity as best we can with the breath in our bodies, that we will take each other's hands and we will not let go, that together we will rise. Love does not save us from these moments, it saves us in the midst of these moments. Thanks be to God.