You Are A Group Project

March 24, 2024 - Luke 19: 28-40

I sometimes hesitate to speak of suffering.

So many of you have been through so much worse than me.

I don’t actually think we can rank suffering or that we shouldn’t be kind to ourselves when we suffer because we think the only people who deserve kindness

are some imaginary people who have the dubious honor of suffering most.

But from what I can tell, I still think it might be true that the world doles out meanness that I have only faced in part.

Maybe my experience is good enough though to say I know something of meanness, grief, and even the violence of life.

I know enough to know that the places where we hurt can be very lonely places. Sometimes that’s inescapable, and sometimes that’s because we refuse to let other people in.

I don’t know if I have ever felt more alone than when they wheeled me into the OR for surgery. It was years ago now. It was technically a minor surgery but I had never been rolled into the OR before. And you know what some people say the difference is between a minor and a major surgery? Whether or not it’s happening to you.

In that OR moment I was caught up short by the idea that life is so very unlike watching a movie or being part of a video game. At the end of the book, I can close it, walk away, and pick up a new one. I can experience a thousand lifetimes in all these patterns of storytelling that I love. But being rolled into the OR, I was overcome with the harsh reality that there is no getting out of this body. There is no do-over button if things go wrong.

It was hard to trust in that moment that I was still connected to my husband waiting nearby and connected to the one big heartbeat that I call God. But I do remember deciding to try to trust that I was still connected and that that meant one way or another things would be okay.

Even dying, as unlikely as that was and as grief-inducing as it would be for my family, would be okay in the sense that I would still be part of this great fabric of love and being somehow.

Jesus experienced the breadth and depth of all that it means to be human. In that palm parade in Luke 19 we read about today, he was surrounded by crowds singing his praises.

But in just a short time, by Luke 23, the crowds would want him dead. They would demand the release of Barabbas instead. After they take Jesus to the cross, Luke tells us, even Jesus’ bravest, most stalwart friends could only look on from afar while he was tortured to death. 

We don’t all go through everything Jesus did, and Jesus didn’t go through everything exactly like we will either. But the extreme ups and downs of mortality, Jesus did experience. Christians talk about how God in Jesus experienced the fullness of being human. In the church, we call this the incarnation.

At Christmastime, imagining God made flesh often comforts me. Imagining God made flesh in Holy Week is more disturbing. But that’s incarnation, too. That’s life, too. And God is here with us in the thick of all its messy, imperfect, flawed wonder from our brilliant babyhood to our last breath.

I’m trying to get at this idea of atonement and what it means to me.

Rick Gardner did a nice job of explaining two different takes on atonement to the Passion of Jesus Sunday School class last week.

There are more than two options of course. And the beautiful and messy thing about the Church of the Brethren is that we don’t demand everyone believe the same things the same way.

But the idea of atonement in short is that there is a brokenness or a disconnect in existence and there is something to be done to fix it, to heal it, to overcome it, to endure it, to accept it, and to put things back together.

Some people use the word salvation, and while we may all define that differently, I think most of us would agree there are times in our lives when we could use a healing salve. 

I know that some of us really appreciate the idea that Jesus died for our sins and that now we don’t need to fear God’s retribution and punishment. For some of us, there is profound freedom in that belief. I can respect that.

For me though, I need to take a different road to understanding the boundless grace and appreciating the infinite being of God. What works for me is understanding atonement as the act of making things one, literally breaking the word atonement down to at-one-ment.

I get the at-one-ment when I read about the fullness of the incarnation in the Gospels from Jesus’ birth to his remarkable life to his horrific death and his mysterious resurrection. In the fullness of his love and life and death and mysterious ongoing life, I see the fabric of how the universe is made and how we can participate in experiencing and knitting more closely together that eternal connection. Because I see my life in Jesus’ life. I see your life in Jesus’ life. No, it’s not the same. But there is a universality in the details. There is a solid and sacred connection to the love that moves the universe. His life and death and life teach me how to lean into that one big holy heartbeat in healing and transcendental wholeness making ways.

 When I feel that at-one-ment - that connection - I can understand a little better the sentiment of the crowd crying out, “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord.” That deep contentment doesn’t solve all my problems but it gives me a lot of fuel to face my problems. And it spurs me to want to walk alongside others going through life’s ups and downs, too.

I often visit people in the hospital or otherwise when something hard has happened. That’s part of my job. And while I wish nothing bad would ever happen to you, the truth is sometime something will. So, I hold it as a sacred honor to be invited to stand with you in the breach when the awful things come. Some of you do this for each other, too, whether it’s visiting, or bringing soup, or otherwise serving others and standing up to be part of the solutions our community needs.

I often forget about the power of it though, until it’s me who needs it. In preparing for that years ago surgery day, I cracked. At the time, I was even more enamored than I am now with thinking myself invincible and able to evade suffering with my intelligence, creativity, charm, and hard work. Realizing that nasty things happen anyway wasn’t fun. I was worried. I felt alone. I had just had a second baby. We were living hundreds of miles from family. Parker was there like a rock but I didn’t want him to feel alone either. So, I cracked my armor and let someone in. I called one of the only friends I had in the whole state even though she lived over an hour away. I told her what was happening, and I asked, will you please visit me when it’s done?

So, she did. She was there with Parker when I woke up. Some dear church person was watching our tiny kids. I’m not sure what it changed to have her there. But I know it was a big deal to me. I felt more solid. I felt connected. It mattered.

Listen, if you don’t want me to come to the hospital every time, I’m not offended. You can be as private as you want about whatever you want.

But I think every time we do things like this for each other, we participate in the one-ness making that God is about. We declare in a good enough way that each one of us in our own way comes in the name of God and no matter the suffering we go through, we are blessed and beloved.

The last thing I want to do before I stop today is to tend to the stones. What a great line that ends today’s reading: “Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, ‘Teacher, order your disciples to stop.’ [Jesus] answered, ‘I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.’”

I do believe we are a group project - each of us individually. We are interconnected to so many others who have touched us along the way. But I also know that we fail each other profoundly all the time.

So, I love that while we can be part of the sacred work of connecting and wholeness making, that work also does not entirely depend on us. Even when we fail to love each other or ourselves as we wish we could, even when we face life’s harshest disappointments, even when we learn that all our trying and striving and strategizing will not save us from all hardship, there is still a force of love that moves the universe far beyond our human efforts. Even though I think using words to describe that eternal fount of life and love fails to do it any justice, I call that fount God, and to me it is good enough knowing that God is in humans and also far beyond them in the trees and stars and stones.

It is good enough for me to know that because we are connected to all of that and to each other, we are all a group project. Even when it feels that way and it will sometimes, we are never really alone. God goes with us through the palm parades and the passion days and that is good enough for me today.              

May it be so. Amen.