Midweek Lenten Lament for War

Luke 19:41-44

As [Jesus] came near and saw the city, he wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes. Indeed, the days will come upon you, when your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you, and hem you in on every side. They will crush you to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another; because you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.”

---

This lament from Jesus, the first in our series for these midweek Wednesdays, feels like he could be sitting on a hill or a bridge or by the roadside somewhere in Kyev or Lviv, Ukraine, this morning.

“…your enemies will set up ramparts around you and surround you … hem you in on every side … they will crush you to the ground, you and your children with you, and they will not leave within you one stone upon another…”

“If you had recognized this day the things that make for peace!”

But, “…you did not recognize the time of your visitation from God.”

Jesus’ lament is particular, of course, to the people of Israel in the First Century. He wasn’t in Ukraine. He was somewhere between the Mt. of Olives and Jerusalem. And the prediction which inspired his lament came to pass: Jerusalem was surrounded and besieged, the temple was toppled, lives were lost, families were destroyed, and more – all as part of the war between the occupying Romans who took what wasn’t theirs; occupied the land of another; laid waste to a people and a place as a show of power and in the name of empire-building.

It sounds familiar, right?

It’s familiar because it’s not unique to Rome and Russia, of course. If you spin a globe like a roulette table in Vegas and drop your finger blindly at any point thereon, you’re likely able, with a little research and some honest history, to find a time when that land once belonged to… was inhabited by… was called “home” to someone other than whoever is living there at the moment. And there was likely violence, bloodshed and war connected with that transfer of ownership.

This would be a good time to remind ourselves and each other about the indigenous, native peoples who lived on the land we call home at Cross of Grace, here in New Palestine, these days. As an expression of gratitude, repentance and lament, let’s acknowledge and give thanks for the Lenape tribe of Indians. Indiana means “the land of the Indians,” of course, and the Lenape lived in east central Indiana, in this neck of the woods, alongside the likes of the Shawnee, the Miami, and the Potawatomi, too. This was holy ground to those children of God, long before people who looked like me forced them to give up their homeland and migrate, like so many refugees, to places like Kansas, Oklahoma, and beyond.

Which is to say war is so much a part of the human condition, it touches every one of us in some way or another. Whether we read about the horrifying accounts of it in Scripture, do a deep dive into our nation’s history and origins, or research the leaves on our family tree, our connection to humanity’s “warring madness” – for better and for worse – impacts each of us personally, spiritually, cross-culturally, and more.

And that grieves the heart of God, as Jesus himself showed in his lament over Jerusalem way back when.

And I don’t have an answer to any of this tonight, of course. I’m a “beat your swords into plowshares” and “turn your spears into pruning hooks” kind of guy. I’d melt every gun down into a gardening tool, for that matter, if they’d let me, because I think that’s what Jesus would do. I’m a “turn the other cheek,” “love your enemy,” “blessed are the peacemakers” sort of soul, too, because … well … Jesus.

But none of that makes for a winning political platform for our kind of Christian nation these days and it is – sadly and shamefully – seemingly impractical in light of current events.

So what’s a believer to do?

As wars and rumors of wars rage... As nation rises up against nation… As widows and children become refugees and aliens… As brother rises up against brother… As neighbors destroy neighbors… As homes and hospitals are obliterated… As life after life is lost… As ego and pride and fear and greed rule the day where humility and faith and generosity should lead…

All I know to do sometimes is lament… to cry out… to grieve… like Jesus did – like the heart of God still does, I believe – for the state of things and for our inability to repair what is broken or restore what is lost...

…because we fail to recognize, this day … still … the things that make for peace.

Since yesterday was International Women’s Day – and since March has been deemed Women’s History Month – it seems appropriate to share what some of us learned in our study of Rachel Held Evans’ book, Inspired, recently. Rachel Held Evans struggled with the prevalence of war and violence in the Bible; with all of the bloodshed and genocide to be found there and very often claimed in the name of and at the pleasure of the God we worship. It challenged her faith mightily – as, maybe it should all of ours. But Rachel Held Evans learned not to just dismiss or condone, rationalize or ignore the ugliness of all the war in our faith’s story. She let it get her attention and make her uncomfortable enough to wonder more deeply about it.

Rachel Held Evans learned to pay attention to the people in the stories who didn’t behave “according to the script,” as she put it. And she specifically tells of the young women of Israel who publicly grieved the unjust sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter in the book of Judges. (Some of you will remember that the girl was sacrificed because her daddy won a war against the Ammonites.) Anyway, the young women of Israel made a public practice and display of lament for the murdered girl, which became an Israelite tradition for women to go out for four days every year thereafter to commemorate the death of Jephthah’s daughter.

Rachel Held Evans says, “While the men moved on to fight another battle, the women stopped to acknowledge that something terrible had happened … and with what little social and political power they had, they protested – every year for four days. They refused to let the nation forget what it had done in God’s name.” (Inspired, p. 74)

So, I decided that women of Israel are like that Ukrainian woman who so defiantly, bravely passed out sunflower seeds to Russian soldiers. The sunflower has long been a symbol of peace and unity for Ukraine and the woman told the soldiers to put the seeds in their pockets so that when they die in Ukraine, at least a sunflower will grow from their dead, buried bodies.

Or maybe the women of Israel are like that other Ukrainian grandmother who took down a Russian spy drone with a jar of pickled tomatoes.

I don’t know.

I just know it feels like there’s not much we can do sometimes, but plant seeds, throw tomatoes, and lament. But lament isn’t nothing … it’s a deliberate, faithful grief over what has been lost; a sadness for what we haven’t been able to change; a frustration over what is yet to come; and an expression of solidarity with the suffering, even in spite of our own apathy and complicity in it, just the same.

And I hope some measure of our “Lament for War” – past, present and future – will help us, not just recognize, but celebrate and engage the things that make for peace, instead … until we learn to work for and walk alongside and do the bidding of Jesus, the Prince of Peace; so that we will not learn war any longer; so that we will, indeed, lay down our weapons or turn them into gardening tools; so that we will love our neighbors – and our enemies – as ourselves.

Amen

We watched the video below as we lit candles as an act of prayer and lament for the war in Ukraine. The audio is from a performance by the Kyev Symphony Chorus, conducted by Matthew McMurrin, in 2012, at Northland Church in Longwood, Florida.

Wilderness Wandering

Luke 4:1-13

Then Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness were, for forty days, he was tempted by the Devil. He didn’t eat anything during those days and when they were over, he was famished. The Devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread.” Jesus said to him, “It is written, ‘one does not live by bread alone.’”

Then the Devil led him up and showed him all the kingdoms of the world. He said to him, “I will give to you their glory and all this authority, which has been handed over to me, and which I give to anyone I choose. If you will bow down and worship me, it will all be yours.” Jesus said to him, “It is written, ‘you shall worship the Lord, you God, and serve only him.’”

Then the Devil led Jesus to Jerusalem and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple and said, “Throw yourself down from here, for it is written ‘he will command his angels concerning you,’ and ‘on their hands they will bear you up so that you won’t dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘do not put the Lord, your God, to the test.’”

And when the Devil had finished every test, he departed from Jesus until an opportune time.

---

The wilderness seems pretty close these days.

In First Century Galilee, Jesus apparently had to be “led out into it,” by the spirit. He had to go somewhere else to find it, it seems. …away from the river where he’d just been baptized along with crowds of people. …away from towns and villages like Cana and Capernaum. …away from whoever was looking to follow him, as would happen soon enough. Maybe Jesus had a hunch about what was to come in that regard, so he let the Spirit lead him out … lead him away … lead him into whatever and wherever the wilderness was for him.

And if “wilderness” is a metaphor for something… if “the wilderness” is a place of uncertainty, loneliness, disconnection, temptation, and fear … I’m not sure Jesus would have had to go very far to find himself there, if he were walking around in the world today.

“The wilderness” seems right around every corner, or maybe even following us around, no matter where we go, these days.

Maybe it’s the constant presence of social media in our lives …

Maybe it’s the news these days – the 24/7 nature of it all reminding us about our own broken politics, our own divided nation, and everything going on in Russia and Ukraine, of course.

Maybe it’s the ever-evolving list of prayers and concerns and challenges we wrestle with as God’s people in this place and out there in the world, ourselves…

Whatever it is, the wilderness doesn’t seem so hard to find… or so very far away… or too difficult to get to, if you ask me.

So I hope it’s strangely comforting for us to see Jesus out there in the wilderness this morning, doing his thing with the Devil.

The point of Lent – and the point of this Gospel story, for me, anyway – is to wonder what it means to be called into the wilderness. I think we’re invited to wonder – not so much about conversations with a guy and his pitchfork – which is how this story with Jesus gets reduced and dumbed-down a lot of the time. I think, instead, we’re called to wonder about the lonely places … the uncertain places … the scary places in the world where – and the lonely, uncertain, scary times in our own lives – when we are tempted to choose the darkness. I think, in these days, we’re called to seek out and to put a finger on the sin, the evil, the faithlessness and the temptation in our own lives. We’re called to name it, to stop denying that it finds us from time to time, and to confront it in ways we would rather not.

But that's hard to do, this wilderness wandering – whether it’s the First Sunday of Lent or any other day of the year – or we would do it more often, more faithfully, with more resolve and courage and success, I believe. It seems to me we don’t head out into the wilderness enough, following the Spirit’s lead. We’re more likely to find ourselves pushed there, dragged there, kicking and screaming, against our will. Or we end up there, in the wilderness – much to our surprise – before we know what’s coming. And then the temptation of it all is to let it overwhelm us – the grief of it; the fear of it; the unknown and uncertainty of whatever the wilderness is for us.

And so we fail the tests too often, don’t we? We fill ourselves with all the wrong things too much of the time. Where Jesus refused to turn a stone into bread – we grab the potato chips or the ice cream; the booze or the weed, the cigarettes or the pills.

Where Jesus turned down the offer for more power and glory, we go after as much as we can grab and look for it in all the wrong places – our ego, our work, money, things and stuff.

And where Jesus refused to put God to the test, we do just that … every time we throw up our hands and wonder why God won’t – why God hasn’t – just fixed everything that’s wrong with us, with the world, and with this wilderness.

Where Jesus went… followed… left...? We stay home… stay put… and stay safe… so much of the time.

And I think the reason we fail the proverbial tests so often is because we forget something Jesus knew and held onto, from the start. Remember, Jesus entered into the wilderness “full of the Spirit,” “led by the Spirit,” and on the heels of his baptism. I like to imagine his hair was still wet when he met up with the devil in the desert, because he was fresh from the Jordan River where the heavens had opened, a dove had appeared out of nowhere, for crying out loud, and God had declared him beloved, “the Son, the Chosen” with whom the Creator of the Universe was well pleased.

And it’s with all of that in his back pocket, that Jesus made his way into the wilderness to duke it out with the Devil, which makes it easier for me to imagine how he might have resisted all of that temptation and passed all of those tests, in the first place.

And that gives me hope. To remember, however and whenever we find ourselves in the wilderness (whatever that is for us) that – just like Jesus – we can enter it all on the heels of and filled with the promises of baptism. And we can go there, led by God’s spirit of wisdom and understanding, God’s kind of counsel and might, with faith and fortitude to endure the lonely, scary, uncertain, dark wilderness places that wait for us in this world.

In our Stephen Ministry class Thursday night we had a pretty hard, holy, heavy discussion about suicide – and tending to someone who may be in the throes of that kind of wilderness struggle. We were wondering about what to say and what to do and how to find the words and wisdom to respond in such a circumstance – should we ever find ourselves in that kind of wilderness with somebody else. I shared something with the class that seemed to resonate with them, so thought it might be meaningful to share with you all this morning, too.

It’s not rocket science, but whenever I find myself headed into a wilderness like that – an emergency of some sort, a crisis full of uncertainty, a scary situation where something is required of me that I’m not sure I’m prepared for (that maybe there is no preparation for, to be honest) – I try to remind myself that God is already in that place, around that person, gathered together with whatever or whoever has called me into their wilderness with them. And that kind of prayer, that sort of reality check, that exercise of faith has proven to be helpful and True over the years, and I believe it’s something like we see Jesus trusting, doing and believing this morning – out there in his own kind of wilderness, way back when.

See, I believe Jesus was able to enter his own wilderness because he knew he didn’t go there first, or alone. He let the Spirit of God lead him there, remember. And he was full of the Holy Spirit in the first place.

So, when the wilderness looms, when it seems too close… too easy to find… too hard to navigate… too difficult to escape... When the temptation to quit… to choose the selfish, prideful, destructive way… to get lost in it all… to take the devil’s hand and follow his lead – remember that God is already out there, too, in your wilderness, waiting for you.

I like to think of God, in the wilderness, as like a dad in the swimming pool promising to catch his terrified toddler about to jump from the diving board into the deep-end. Or maybe God, in our wilderness, is like a mother, waiting in the front office, to rescue her child from a bad day at recess. Or like the good friend who walks with you after the divorce, or the diagnosis, or the death, because they’ve been through it already themselves.

Whatever the case, we can enter into any wilderness trusting that God will be there waiting to walk with, stand beside, and catch us, even, if necessary. And we can go there, with the waters of baptism still dripping from our foreheads and divine promises of grace always ringing in our ears…

And we can go, following Jesus’ example so that we don’t have to be so afraid about any of it. So that we might even enter it all willingly – whatever our wilderness brings – and go boldly, bravely, with faith, to see God transform it all into something sweet, something safe, and something sacred, on the other side.

Amen