In
Walt Disney's animated film The Lion King, Simba, the young son of Muphasa, the lion king,
gets tricked by his uncle Scar into disobeying his father's orders.
His disobedience is indirectly responsible (he thinks) for his
father's death. Shamed and confused, young Simba leaves the pride and
goes off on a journey of forgetting. Joining with new friends in the
savanna, he lives an unlionly life of ease, and eats unlionly food
like grubs and insects. By listening to Scar and not his father, he
became both a victim of Scar's jealousy and willfully disobedient. He
tried to forget who he was, the son of the Lion King. Only the
intervention of his childhood playmate Nala and the baboon shaman
Rafiki allowed him to finally remember his father's voice and his own
destiny. Remembering who he was allowed him to overcome his shame and
face Scar, and finally to come to be the Lion King.
Lent
is a time for remembering who we are. The forty days of Lent are part
of a ninety-day celebration in the church surrounding the
Triduum, the three days that recall
the death and resurrection of Jesus. The Triduum opens the door to
the celebration of Easter, which we observe with a jubilee 'week' of
eight Sundays. The liturgical high point of the ninety days is the
Easter Vigil, at which the church baptizes her catechumens, anoints
them with chrism, and brings them to the table of Jesus for the first
time. On that same night and at every Easter Sunday liturgy, all of
us renew the baptismal vow that we made, or that was made for us, to
be God's anointed, God's Christ, in our world. During the forty days of Lent, we
are invited to look closely at our lives and see whether there are
other voices to which we have been listening, other gods whose empty
promises have lured us away from our true destiny and have let us
block out the voice of the One who calls us out of darkness into
marvelous light.
Before
our baptism, God has called us to a great destiny: to join the
mission of reconciliation by which the destructive effects of sin
upon the earth and upon the human family will be reversed in a new
creation. The human face of that creation is Jesus Christ. Jesus, at
his own baptism by John, hears the voice that is calling him to this
very same mission declaring, "This is my son, my beloved." That voice
and that mission consume him, and he is faithful to it during his
desert sojourn when another voice promises "all this will I give you
if you will fall down and worship me." "The Lord alone is God,"
replies Jesus, "him alone shall you serve." Jesus remembers who he
is, and whose he is, holds to the voice that calls him "beloved." The
sound of that voice, the name "beloved" sustains him through his
darkest hours, and brings him on Easter morning out of his own grave.
Recently,
I took my children to see The Prince of Egypt, which is the somewhat
romanticized but still powerful story of the journey of Moses. A
Hebrew and yet the adopted son of the Pharaoh, Moses too in the court
of Pharaoh begins to forget who he is. By a series of encounters,
first with his future wife Tzipporah and later with Miriam and Aaron,
his brother and sister, he begins to see the oppression of the
Hebrews by the Egyptians for what it is. Murdering an Egyptian
overseer, Moses flees into the desert in a self-imposed exile, where
he meets Jethro, Tzipporah's father, at an oasis. Jethro sees in his
son-in-law more than Moses sees in himself, and sings a wonderful
song at the wedding of Moses and Tzipporah around the desert campfire
with his family. He sings:
A
lake of gold in the desert sand is less than a cool fresh spring,
And
to one lost sheep, a shepherd boy is greater than the richest king.
If
a man lose everything he owns has he truly lost his worth?
Or
is it the beginning of a new a brighter birth?
So
how do you measure the worth of man in wealth or strength or size?
In
how much he gained or how much he gave?
The
answer will come to him who tries
To
look at his life through heaven's eyes.
To
see ourselves as God sees us, as beloved sons and daughters, is to
begin to imagine how we ought to act, and what we might become. We
begin to remember that our enemies, people we don't know, the poor
and forgotten, and people yet unborn are also God's beloved sons and
daughters, and we see that many of our habits and ways of acting need
to be changed. God calls us to the mission of reconciliation, the
mission whose fullness can be seen in the story of Pentecost. There,
in the fullness of Easter time, the whole world hears the good news
in its own language, and the damage of sin symbolized by the
scattering of peoples from Babel is healed. This Lent, let us prepare
to renew our baptismal promises earnestly. Let us remember who we
are, called by God into union with Christ for the mission of
reconciliation.
Who is my servant? Where is
she?
My light to the nations, where is he
In prison and palace my gospel who told,
And living, my gospel became?
This is my servant whom I shall uphold:
His name is Christ is her name.
Who answers to slander with silence
And vengeance returns not for violence?
Whose presence is healing for young and for old,
To friend and to stranger the same?
This is my servant whom I shall uphold:
His name is Christ is her name.
(from "Servant Song," by Rory Cooney, © 1987
Epoch/NALR)
Lenten Bulletin fervorinos
Ash Wednesday:
Remember that you are dust
-- Is that so bad?
The phrase we hear on Ash
Wednesday is from Genesis 3, and sounds a little harsh to us. But
should it? When we're not in denial about the fragility of our life,
we can begin to hear that we are dust as the truth
about us. And it's pretty good news, as we read in Genesis. What God
can do with dust is make children,
God's own beloved sons and daughters!
First Sunday of Lent:
Forty days to listen,
remember, and decide
Jesus, having heard the
Father's voice at his baptism, is driven into the desert by the Holy
Spirit. There he endures the same tests that Israel, God's chosen
people, had endured in the desert: their physical hunger, their
desire to test God, and the lure of idolatry. Unlike Israel, Jesus
responds to his being chosen as God's beloved faithfully. He says
"yes" to the election that will shape his identity and ministry. In
Lent, we have the same opportunity. Will our lives be shaped by the
voice that calls us "Beloved," or by the empty promises whispered by
the other voice in the mocking wind?
Second Sunday of Lent:
A glimpse of what might be:
the future tasted now!
"Look at the stars, and count
them, if you can! That is the number of your descendants." God,
faithful to the promise made to his beloved children, gives them a
glimpse of their future. Jesus, too, facing the journey on which he
will confront the powers that will destroy him, is given a glimpse of
the glory that God gives to God's own. The radiant love of children
lightens the tedium and frustration of parenting; the tenderness,
security, and gifts of a parent's love lightens the frightening
burden of childhood. It's not just light at the end of the tunnel:
there is light in the darkness because God is
with us.
Third Sunday of Lent:
Thirsting for
reconciliation: The Beloved know the voice of the Seventh Lover
Jesus and the woman at the well
share their thirsts and risk an encounter with a stranger. In today's
gospel, the woman, like Samaria and its people, has given her life
over to six lovers who are less than the perfect match. The mystic
biblical number, the seventh lover, is right before her
eyes. The woman and her people choose to quench their thirst with the
living water of the gospel. Can we too lay aside our prejudices and
comfort with lesser gods, and choose to live the gospel in harmony
with all of God's children, even our
apparent enemies? It is that choice that turns the elect -- and other
seekers -- into apostles.
Fourth Sunday of Lent:
Seeing through heaven's
eyes: the chosen and the holy are rarely what they seem!
In the words of the Church
father Tertullian, Christians are made, not born. God chooses a
people, but we only truly act like God's beloved when we respond to
God's election by living a life of right relationships with God and
neighbor. God's vision sees beyond names and human value to the heart
of us. It is not always the humanly-declared 'sacred' that marks
God's presence, nor is the human 'reject' a sign of God's absence.
Today we pray with our elect to walk as God's beloved in Christ's
light, the light of God's reign of justice and truth, and to see
clearly with heaven's eyes.
Fifth Sunday of Lent:
To death, and "fates worse
than death," one answer: "Lazarus, beloved friend, come out!"
Ezekiel weeps over the killing
fields where the dry bones of Israel lie bleaching in the sun; Jesus
weeps at the tomb of his friend, Lazarus. We weep over our own
mortality when we confront it honestly and don't live in denial by
accumulating possessions or nursing addictions to pleasure, power, or
narcotics. But even death will not hold God's beloved in its bands:
the voice of Christ bids us up from all of our tombs, and we, the
living, hear his cry to roll away the stone so that God's glory may
be seen when God's breath enters clay once again.
Passion Sunday:
The wages of grace: God's
beloved servant surrenders his life
Faithful to the last, Jesus
holds to the vision of his election as God's beloved before the human
powers in Jerusalem. His rejection of religious law that isolates
rather than unites, that creates insiders and outsiders, his
insistence that God's rule limits and shrinks the boasts of human
authority, his claim of a special relationship to God while uniting
himself with the losers and rejects of his nation, all these have led
him into the hands of his enemies. Their verdict: capital punishment.
We know the outcome for Jesus. Does that knowledge in faith give us
the courage to live as he did? Can we renew our baptismal commitment
with integrity when asked to do so next week? God is faithful; the
call is renewed. How will we respond after this
forty days?