They didn’t mean to fall asleep in the garden, but they were just so weary, and how long can anybody watch someone else pray?

Peter didn’t intend to deny him, he just did it, impulsively blurting out one lie, then telling a second and a third, just to make the first one true.

James and John and the others didn’t set out to abandon him, but my God, how could they stay and watch their friend tortured to death?

Judas probably thought he knew what he was doing, a kiss and a payday are evidence of intent, but had he figured out what would happen?  He did, after all, choose the noose for himself in a cavalcade of guilt and remorse.

And you and I?  Our choices don’t mean much, do they?  Our little side deals with evil, they don’t amount to much.

Only his death again and again when the

Hungry are left hungry

The lonely are left alone

The poor are still poor

And no one has the Good News proclaimed to them

My lord, and my God!  How did the hammer come to be in my hand?

In Malta, today is observed in the tradition of “is-seba’ visti” in which families visit 7 different churches throughout the day.

In Sweden, Maundy Thursday is associated with folklore traditions and it is known as “the day of the witches.” It’s observed by children dressing up as witches, going from door to door collecting candy and treats in exchange for decorated Easter Eggs.

In the Philippines, TV AND Radio stations go off the air from Maundy Thursday through Saturday.

These are all ways in which various communities and cultures Observe the events of Holy Week. No matter the practice, people throughout the world, for 2,000 years, have affirmed that what happens during Holy Week is worthy of observance. Reflecting on Jesus’ story, living through his last days, hoping for the resurrection…believers everywhere interrupt their lives to Observe what God did, is doing, and will do.

How do you Observe this Holiest of Weeks?

Beginning tonight, Hancock UCC offers many opportunities to observe together, as a questioning community…and you are invited to come and watch…to come and live.

Hancock UCC Worship Opportunities:

Maundy Thursday Worship: 7:30 p.m. in Clark Hall

Good Friday Worship: 7:30 p.m. in the Sanctuary

Easter Sunday Worship: 6:00a.m. Sunrise Service at the Belfry Tower

9:00a.m. Easter Worship in the Sanctuary

11:00a.m. Easter Worship in the Sanctuary

6:15p.m. Easter Worship @ The Well in Clark Hall-Gospel Night!

We don’t know what the menu was.  We don’t know the whole guest list. We don’t know everything they talked about.  But we do know that there was a lot of complaining about one woman there.  There were lots of strong opinions, and they weren’t good.

Except for the only one that really mattered. Jesus stood  up for her and said something about her that he didn’t say about anyone else, ever:  that what she’d done will always be remembered, anytime His story is told, the whole world over.  What was all that about?

The woman was the only one who took Jesus seriously when he said he’d be killed.  Everyone else slapped Jesus on the back and said he’d be fine!  Nothing that awful would happen!  Cheer up!  For chapter after chapter in Mark, Jesus tells the truth, and everyone else runs away from it.

One nameless woman knew that bad things do happen to good people.  She didn’t try to pretend that courageous actions don’t have consequences.  She knew Jesus had knocked over tables in the temple, and critiqued religious powers.  She knew he’d said God’s Kingdom was all that mattered, not Ceasar’s.  She knew that when powerful leaders are called out for their cruelty, powerful leaders will smash their foes.  It was true then, and it is true now.

So this woman did what she could, and prepared Jesus’s body for his burial. She washed his feet, and she anointed him with precious burial creams. Everyone else at Simon’s home ridiculed her, because she’d wasted money. But Jesus thanked her, because she was his first true follower.

If we follow, there will be a cost.  Don’t kid yourself.

Knowing that, are we willing?  It’s the big question this week.

It’s the big question every week.

every loss, every injury, every tiny death …

                                         is seen as preparation for our eventual DEATH.

            With every passing season, with every changing relationship, when we lose a job or when a loved one leaves us…

Spiritual masters invite us to say goodbye to all these things…

we are invited to see God in the void created by these tiny deaths…

so we are better prepared to greet God upon our own DEATH.

The Good News of the Christian Faith is this:

On the darkest day, in the greatest loss, in EVERY death, we not only meet God, but we are Born Again.

 In every ending, there is a new Creation, renewed love, another life ready to begin.

That’s the promise of the Resurrection.

Previously unimaginable possibilities, revealed in the midst of grief and darkness.

Such transformation, however, can only be found IN death, not by avoiding it, or ignoring it.

New life only exists when we ALLOW our previous life to pass away, not by clinging to it.

It is always hard…it is always sad…and what happens next is more brilliant,

more bizarre than anything we’ve thought possible.

On Good Friday I walk the winding country roads of Harvard,MA in Support of Sharing Inc. The walk has become a ritual for me, a holy week discipline calling me to reflect on my surroundings, my community and the impact my walking can have on my inner strength and the lives of others.   Most years, I recall being cold and damp, but no matter, I still walk. Even when the wind is howling over Prospect Hill, I still walk.  Many times, I have walked alone, finding comfort in the familiar path I forge around the town common.  Other years, friends, family or neighbors join in the route. Five, ten, twenty miles, each walker decides, and sets there own pace.  There are more 300 fellow walkers in Harvard each year, with hundreds more walking in other communities.  To my delight I have found fellow walkers here at Hancock and marvel that we have been walking together all these years without knowing of the other’s labors.  Come, join in walking on Good Friday, or pledge a fellow walker.

From Faith Fenske, walking this year with Harriet Chmela and Ruth Ladd

I feel so fortunate to have been able for about 35 years to raise funds for food, farm cooperatives, day care centers, scholarships and other necessities for those struggling with poverty and racism,. just by putting one foot in front of the other for 20 miles once a year on Good Friday. I thank the  people of our church who have supported my walk and this worthy cause. The woman, whose anger at there being hungry children in this land of plenty, is a perfect example of “one person CAN make a difference.”  This year I will walk my 700th mile!

Sharing’s mission is to discover and nurture our common ground. We try to do that by providing pathways that span the divisions of race, geography, religion and class.

Inspired by the compassion of Jesus, we demonstrate our caring by:

• Promoting, organizing and supporting ecumenically based Good Friday Walks.
• Identifying and supporting people and organizations working in the rural south who are positively impacting the lives of African American children who suffer the effects of racism and poverty.
• Providing concrete opportunities for people of all beliefs to connect their faith with the reality of injustice in our world.
• Educating ourselves and others about the interconnectedness of institutional and personal racism, white privilege and poverty.
• Sharing stories of hope.
• Offering opportunities to experience the joy of knowing that each one of us can make a difference in someone else’s life.

It wasn’t because I had any misgivings about the organization or its leader – the ministry which I was pitching provides astonishing love to homeless men, women and children, and its leader is a long-time personal friend of mine, a living saint known well to me and to everyone else who was in the room.

Neither was the problem with the potential donors.  They’re church people, generous and caring. Many of them are leaders of important work around the globe and close to home, reaching out to people in need.  By all rights, my working assumption should have been that they would give all they could.

The problem was with me.  When I was asking the group for money, I was also asking myself, and that was what was making me squirm.  Yes, I’ve already given, but have I given enough? What fears hold me back from sharing more?  What excuses do I use to evade my own pitch:  that my funds are jointly held with another so I can’t make unilateral decisions; that my earnings are less than they used to be; that due to the economy our extended family will likely need more of our support; that even more economic uncertainties lie ahead for me in the year ahead..? .Am I more articulate with the excuses than the pitch?

The people I admire do two things when this money stuff comes up.  They don’t just vaguely feel poor or rich or generous or frugal:  they run the numbers and make honest decisions, being clear about their budget.   They also acknowledge that when the economy is sour, if they are hurting, then others are too, sometimes — or often – worse than they are.  The time to be most generous is the time when everyone is hurting, even themselves.

Lent always overlaps with tax season. When we dig out our W-2s and QuickBooks or check registers and actually look at the numbers.  Our numbers.  The numbers that really all are God’s.

God knows me so well: providing a Lenten discipline, perfectly timed. Lord, this time may my eyes look down at the numbers, not at the floor.

Eyes closing, my mind drifts into prayer.  For the people I’ve known my whole life, including my mother who first knew me. For my whole family, tracing their faces with my words. I pray for the friend from law school who emailed to ask for prayer, feeling she is going through fire alone, standing up for causes that make her an easy target. Then I find myself praying for the new ones in my life, people I didn’t know two years ago, but met through my new church community.  One by one, their stories come over me and I hold them before Love.

After atheists led a Rally for Reason in Washington this past weekend, I tried to preach about  how Christians like me come to believe in God, in these days when belief seems nonsensical.  I meant to say something like my prayer, how it radiates out like ripples on a pond. I meant to say that we start not with a string of unprovable theses about God, not with contents of a creed that mark us inside the lines and others out.  We start with a sense, somehow, of Whose we are.  That  despite the pain of this life, we are held by a Love at the center of the universe.  That we are not alone.  And that others aren’t either.  We start when we’re welcomed into a space where Love abounds and we dare imagine that we belong.  It’s such a relief, this belonging.  That starting point is the rock tossed into the pond, with a heavy plunk, the ripples starting.

Once we risk the notion that we belong and that everyone else does, too, then it’s easier to behave in a way that embraces rather than excludes, that loves rather than hates, that tries to understand rather than condemns.  That falls into prayer for people near and distant, and ones we’ve only recently met.  Because we don’t need to spend quite so much energy posturing to protect ourselves. Of course we blow it, since we’re human, well trained by life to look over our shoulders and forget that we already belong, and you do, too. But we get to compare how it feels to act from fear or from love, and to prefer the the arms wide open liberty of the latter.  Ripples radiate.

Believing  – that seemingly nonsensical thing — is the waves lapping at the shore, sent there by the relationships  and what grows out from them. It comes not from principles, but from experience, the fleeting moments of connection I can’t deny and don’t want to, spreading out over my life.  It grows from the glimpses of another way of living, trusting that it will be all right, when all is said and done.

That’s what I meant to say.

How would you put words to it?

To see how the original author of these ideas lays them out, read the newest book by Diana Butler Bass, Christianity After Religion: The End of Chruch ad the Birth of a New Spiritual Awakening (Harper Collins: 2012). 

Yuck.

It looks scary.

And oh, the guilt.

The self-loathing.

No, thanks.

I’ll pass.

But confession is not about any of these things.  It’s about honesty.  And humility.  In the Psalms, when we confess our sins it’s referred to as “truth in the inward being” (Ps 51:6).

Through confession, we stop trying to impress God with our great performance – “Look how well I’m doing!” and instead, we connect to God through God’s grace – “Look how I’ve screwed up.”

Thomas A Kempis said it best with these words: “The acknowledgement of our weakness is the first step in repairing our loss.”

It’s hard to think of a more powerful prayer than sorry.  But help comes close.

When we call out to God in help, we are bound to God more powerfully through our needs and our weakness than we ever could have been through our joys, successes, and strengths alone.  And the simple word, help, acknowledges that we are limited in our own abilities, so it allows God a greater opening into our lives.

Through our prayers of confession – sorry – we learn to see ourselves as needy, weak, limited, imperfect, stressed, driven, frightened, or troubled.  But we also learn not to criticize, condemn, or chide ourselves.  Rather, we join with God in seeing the possibilities for goodness in ourselves and we deepen our reliance on God’s love and grace.

According to the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus was baptized by John in the river, he heard the voice of God saying, “This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” (3: 17).  Jesus was then led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for 40 days he was tested and tempted (Chapter 4).  I believe Jesus was driven into the wild desert, away from his normal life, his culture, his people, so that he could better understand this newly discovered identity.  No longer was he just Jesus of Nazareth.  To borrow a phrase from Paul Shupe, he wasn’t just “Mary and Joseph’s little boy.”  He was God’s Beloved, and he needed to take time to figure out how to live out of that identity in a world that did not treat him as though he was beloved.

A couple weeks ago, we had more than 60 people come to Hancock Church (many were not members of our church, many were there for the first time) to watch a movie called Miss Representation.  It’s a documentary that explores the ways in which women are portrayed and represented in our culture.  About half of the audience stayed at our church for two hours to talk about the feelings and revelations the film evoked.  We heard stories of the pain, the heartache, the constant struggle that all of us go through–men and women alike–to claim our identity as God’s Beloved in a culture that would label us and use us in its endless cycle of “buying” and “selling” and “owning.”

Do you know how special you are?  Do you know that you are God’s Beloved?  Are we able to live out of that identity, or are we trapped in the identity that our culture has assigned us?  My hunch is that if even Jesus needed to get out into the wilderness to understand himself this way–Jesus, whose town had no daily newspaper, let alone a 24/7 digital media–then surely we must step outside for a time as well.

Turn off your phone.  Take a walk in the reviving warmth of spring.  Hear God calling you, “You are my Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.”  Let that identity become more real to you on your walk.  With every step, accept God’s love and return that love to the Creation around you.  Now come back to the world…show the world who you really are.  Beloved.