Category: Liturgy

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Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (August 13th, 2023)

Delivered at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit:

  1. Introductory Exposition of Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

Let me confess, our Old Testament reading from the Book of Genesis struck me as peculiar when I first read it. I’ll tell you why momentarily but first, let’s review the broader narrative of which this excerpt is but a part. The main character is the Patriarch Joseph, the son of Jacob, grandson of Isaac, and great-grandson of Abraham. This is the one that Orthodox Christians call “Righteous Joseph the Fair,” because, in spite of all that was done to him, he sought justice and redemption in the end. For those who don’t know the whole story, it begins with the horror of a brother being sold into slavery by his ten older brothers. This action was fueled by jealousy, as Joseph was the favorite child of his father, Jacob. The brothers had considered killing Joseph but one among them, Judah, convinces the others to sell him to some Midian slave traders instead. Then the brothers take Joseph’s fancy coat, a gift from his father, cover it in the blood of an animal, and tell their father that Joseph had been tragically mauled to death in the wilderness.

This narrative becomes roller coaster-esque. Joseph is sold to an affluent Egyptian man named Potiphar. He becomes the lead slave in Potiphar’s household but then, according to the Book of Genesis, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him and when she fails because of Joseph’s moral strength, she frames him for sexual assault. Joseph is sent to an Egyptian prison but due to a divine gift he received—the ability to interpret dreams—he is freed, eventually, when he happens to be imprisoned with Pharoah’s exiled cup-bearer who remembers him one day when the restored cup-bearer hears that Pharoah has had a troubling dream. This cup-bearer recommends Joseph to Pharaoh; Joseph successfully interprets Pharaoh’s dream, warning him that after seven years of agricultural plenty, there will be seven years of famine. Joseph is appointed to oversee Egypt’s preparation for the years of famine—a famine that leads Joseph’s brothers to Egypt begging for food. Joseph tests his brothers, who don’t recognize him, to see if they’ve changed, and when he is confident that they have, he reveals his identity, welcomes his family—including his elderly father—to Egypt, and as fairy tales end, “they live happily ever after”. 

But our liturgy stops at Genesis 37:28, which read, “When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.” This is why I found our stopping point peculiar: it ends with one of the ugliest parts of the story as Joseph is being trafficked to Egypt.

  1. The Middle of the Story

It’s clear that the compilers of our liturgy recognized that this was less than edifying. How would preachers preach this passage to congregations on a Sunday? It’s a downer. So, you’ll notice that the accompanying psalm previews the aforementioned happy ending when it says:

Then he [God] called for a famine in the land 

       and destroyed the supply of bread.

17 He sent a man before them, 

       Joseph, who was sold as a slave.

18 They bruised his feet in fetters; 

       his neck they put in an iron collar.

19 Until his prediction came to pass, 

       the word of the Lord tested him.

20 The king sent and released him; 

       the ruler of the peoples set him free.

21 He set him as a master over his household,

       as a ruler over all his possessions,

22 To instruct his princes according to his will

       and to teach his elders wisdom.

Whew! Don’t worry, our liturgy tells us, it’ll all work out in the end! The inclusion of the psalm provides a theological interpretation of the narrative that is meant to console us: the famine was the work of a sovereign God who had plans to protect his chosen people, using Joseph’s suffering redemptively for the good of his family. This echoes the words of Joseph in Genesis 50:20, which reads, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” But maybe we should ignore the psalm for a moment, and maybe I shouldn’t have fast-forwarded to the end of Joseph’s story.

Let me suggest that sometimes stopping in the middle of a biblical narrative, as our reading from Genesis did, invites us to hear the story afresh. Let me suggest that it’s dangerous for us to become too comfortable with the Bible, especially when we’ve become accustomed to hearing the same stories for years. Let me suggest that the saying “familiarity breeds contempt” is wise and true. Let me suggest that sometimes we need to stop in the middle of a story because that’s how real life is often experienced. Sometimes we find ourselves in the middle of our own story, when life is its ugliest, and we have no way of knowing whether or not things will be alright in the end. And yet, whether we sense God or not, the power of being in the middle of the story is that our God is as present there as he is at the end of the story. We may want to skip to the ending but the ending doesn’t make any sense without the middle.

I see this every spring when I walk my students through the Passion Narratives in the Gospels, where Jesus is arrested, brutally beaten, and abused in numerous ways, only to be crucified by the Roman state—which, by the way, was one of the most shameful and dehumanizing ways to die. As I point out how the disciples respond, like the two disciples walking to Emmaus who say of Jesus in Luke 24:21, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” and I try to help my students understand that for all intents and purposes, according to the criteria of the day, Jesus was a failed and false messiah because messiahs don’t get crucified, many of my more biblically literature students want to jump quickly to “Yes, but, he comes back from the dead.” And while this is correct, it misses the point. The Evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all dedicate much of their narrative about Jesus to explaining and detailing Jesus’ suffering and death. They could’ve written, “Yes, Jesus died by crucifixion, and it was sad and all, but enough with that—let’s move to the real good news!” But they didn’t because Jesus’ resurrection is given meaning because of his crucifixion.

This is why our liturgical calendar makes us stop at Good Friday, asking us to feel what that day represents in and of itself. Then we’re to sit through the silence of Holy Saturday. Only then does Easter Sunday feel triumphant.

Unfortunately, we Christians often act like my students: we want to jump to the triumphalistic parts. We want to hear how Job receives back double from God after his time of tribulation. We want to hear how Joseph rises to power after being dragged into prison. We want to hear that Jesus calms the storms that appear to threaten the lives of the disciples. But for the Bible to pack its intended punch, I contend, we must wade through chapter after chapter of Job’s friends telling him that he must deserve what he’s experiencing; and we must sit with Joseph in prison, feeling that sense of abandonment; and we must be with Christ as he hangs from his cross, rejected by Heaven and Earth alike. This is where Scripture meets most of our actual lives.

  1. The Ending is Not Yet

So, while I was initially perplexed by how the excerpt from Genesis 37 ended, now I’m grateful that it ended there because it provides me the opportunity to remind us that in this narrative, two decades pass between Joseph’s enslavement and his reunion with his family. Two decades! Don’t get me wrong, I want to believe with the great theologian Julian of Norwich that Christ told her, “It behooved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” And I do hope that the quote derived from the Brazilian writer Fernando Sabino is true when he wrote, “…everything works out in the end. If it didn’t, it’s because it hasn’t come to the end yet.” And I’m what you might call an “eschatological optimist,” which is to say I’m not always optimistic about the present but I believe (on my best days) and hope (every day) that our Creator has a plan for how to end our collective story so that every injustice is rectified and every suffering rewarded. But the ending is not yet, and that’s ok. It’s ok to be in the middle of your story, not knowing what will happen next, not sure if you’ve been abandoned by God and humans, like Christ on the cross crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s ok to be in the part of the story where we left Joseph: when you can’t pretend to know that it’ll all work out and it’s ok to feel those emotions without feigning confidence. It’s my conviction that, like Joseph, we are as loved in our times of abandonment and doubt as we are in our times of triumph. We may feel distant from God. We may feel lost. And if that’s you, that’s ok. You’re allowed to be in that part of your story. You’re allowed to be unsure. You’re allowed to have doubts, just as I’m sure Joseph would’ve felt as he was being dragged to Egypt. I want to encourage you with the claim that if you’re in the middle of your story, God hasn’t forgotten you but I won’t guilt you if you feel like life has left you exiled far away from home. The end of our stories don’t make any sense without the middle, so if you feel like your life has stopped in the middle of your story, I hope that today’s excerpt from the Book of Genesis can serve as a reminder that sometimes that’s just where we are, and it’s ok, and you’re loved. Amen

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Sermon for Evensong, Trinity Sunday (June 4th, 2023)

Delivered at St. Thomas Episcopal Church and School:

I. Introduction

According to the fourth-century theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, the doctrine of the Trinity was the trending topic of his day. He claimed that everywhere you went, people were sharing their theological opinions: whether you were asking for change at the market, inquiring about the quality of the bread being sold, or visiting a bathhouse, you would run into someone who wanted to share their personal theology with you (Oratio de deitate Filii et Spiriti Sancti). In other words, “doctrine” or Christian “teaching” was akin to what we see regarding politics and sports in our society today. It’s what animated people! Can you imagine the equivalent of an ESPN, CNN, or Fox News that is dedicated to Christian theology? Or people arguing about the Trinity, en masse, on Twitter as they argue about politics and sports. I can’t. (And maybe that’s a good thing!)

Today, for better or worse, only some Christians want to discuss the Trinity. I can’t say that I blame the rest. Throughout the history of Christianity, one of the quickest paths to being labeled heretical by your fellow Christians has been to try to explain the Trinity in a way that they find unsatisfactory. It seems that every analogy and metaphor—from three-leaf clovers to water in the form of a liquid, a solid (ice), and a gas (steam)—can lead to accusations that you’ve misunderstood one of the central teachings of Christianity. For this reason, many have found comfort in side-stepping discussions about the nature of the Trinity by using the one phrase that can provide an escape from complex theological debates: “It’s a mystery!” And this isn’t wrong. In some sense, it’s wise. Christian theology is often at its healthiest when Christians admit that the Christian God is “ineffable” (a fancy way of saying that our God is beyond our ability to describe with human language). But I’m not in a position to avoid talking about the nature of the Trinity tonight. After all, it’s Trinity Sunday! 

So, I want to emphasize the value of the doctrine of the Trinity with regard to how it shapes us as individuals seeking personal, individual spiritual nourishment within a diverse, pluralistic community, like St. Thomas. Our goal can’t be to revisit the philosophical, theological, and metaphysical arguments that led to the present shape of the doctrine—after all, it took many of the most prominent minds of Christendom several centuries to iron out the specifics. Instead, we’re going to skip directly to the practical implications of Trinitarianism. 

II. The Trinity as Unity-in-Diversity

We must begin with the earliest Trinitarian language which is found in the texts of the Christian New Testament. While attempting to maintain fidelity to the Jewish theology they inherited, the earliest Christians spoke of the Creator God in a unique way. There was a recognition that the Creator God had been experienced afresh with the appearance of Jesus. For example, as we sampled in our excerpt from the Gospel of John (16:12-15), the Gospels report that Jesus’ followers were invited into a dynamic relationship between the Father, Son, and Spirit. As a whole, John’s Gospel claims that Jesus Christ prayed to and spoke about God the Father, that God the Father spoke to and about the Son, and that the Holy Spirit was actively sent from the Father to the Son, but also that the Son promised that he would send the Spirit who would draw Jesus’ followers into the divine life. As their Lord and Christ, Jesus spoke of the divine nature in such a way that the earliest Christians understood as revelatory what he had said regarding the nature of God, but also it seems to have aligned with their own experience of God in Christ and through the Spirit.

III. Experiencing God through the Son and the Spirit

Our other reading from the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (5:1-5) sketches the Christian experience of the Trinity as the One who saves us. Paul wrote:

“Therefore, being justified (or made right) by [Christ’s] faithfulness, we have peace toward God through our Lord Jesus Christ whom also we have access into this grace in which we stand and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. But not this only, but also we boast in afflictions, having known that afflictions produce steadfastness; and steadfastness, character; and character, hope; and hope does not humiliate because of the love of God that has been poured in our hearts through the Holy Spirit—the one gifted to you!”

Paul’s audience had collectively experienced reconciliation and peace with their Creator, God the Father, and they were growing together as a community through their collective struggles, into a fuller understanding of God’s love. This peace and reconciliation had been experienced through the crucified and resurrected Son, Jesus Christ. The shared, internal confirmation of this reality was actualized by the Spirit. Notice how Paul presents the experience of God: with regard to the peace we find with God, the touchpoint—if I can use that word—is the Son. The Son is the one by whom we find peace, but we don’t experience peace with the Son alone. You can’t separate your experience of Jesus from your experience of God the Father. Jesus provides us with the human face that helps us see the invisible God. Similarly, the love we experience is the love of God the Father, but the touchpoint is the Spirit. When we consider the whole testimony of Scripture, we know God the Father is Love and loves us by sending the Son (1 John 4:16; John 3:16) and that the Son has loved us, even commanding that we love each other as he has loved us (John 15:12). But here Paul says that this love is something we can experience, we can know, we can feel because of the Spirit’s work in us. The Spirit is the divine touchpoint for experiencing the love of the Father and Son.

IV. Embracing Diversity and Plurality within the Trinity

As you know, I’m a Social and Religious Studies Instructor at TMI Episcopal. In this capacity, I teach courses on comparative religion. One component of these courses is that I lead field trips to various sacred sites in San Antonio. While visiting other religious communities and listening to the various presenters as they teach my students about their beliefs and practices, I often experience what the theologian and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor calls a “holy envy,” where you see something in another religion that you respect, or maybe even wish was part of your own religion. These encounters make me rethink my own Christianity anew. For example, when I take students to the local Hindu temple in Helotes, they see a variety of murtis or images of the various Hindu gods. This may seem to be an aspect of Hindu belief and practice of which Christians should be critical. But when you talk to Hindus about the various murti, many will explain that each murti is analogous to how multiple TV channels can show the same event. Let’s take the State of the Union address, for example. Everyone who watches it wants to hear what the sitting President has to say, but everyone approaches it through the means that are most natural to them. This means some will watch on ABC, others on CNN, others on Fox News, etc. Same event; different platforms. Similarly, for many Hindus, the divine is one—similar to what Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe—but how you access the divine is multifaceted and people are invited to approach the divine from where they are through the murti that most resonates with them. Each murti or god is a different channel emphasizing a different aspect of the one and same divine reality.

Christians sit at an interesting place within the schema of the world’s religions. Like our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, we place a strong emphasis on the oneness of God but unlike our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, we want to emphasize internal diversity and plurality-in-oneness. In some sense, this connects us with our Hindu neighbors, though, unlike our Hindu neighbors, we place greater emphasis on the unity of God. But what’s important for my current point is that we can learn to think of the Trinity with the help of our Hindu neighbors. We speak of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. Whatever worship we give one, we give the Trinity, ultimately. But the plurality-in-oneness gives our minds more ways to perceive our God and to be open to our God based on our present needs, past experiences, and the state of our mind and heart.  

For the individual who needs a majestic deity who provides assurance that in the chaos of this life, there is a sovereign One above it all, holding it all together, guiding everything towards its ultimate purpose, the Father is our divine touchpoint. For the one who asks the question (that the musician Joan Osborne asks, “What if God was one of us?” What if God participated in this “workshop, of filthy creation”— to take a visual from Mary Shelley—the Son is our divine touchpoint, sharing in our human frailty, but also showing us the way as humans to be the imago Dei (image of God) that we were created to be. For the one who needs a sense of presence, of experience, an assurance that we’re not alone in this world, the Spirit is our touchpoint, bringing us into the divine life. But in all these ways that we can experience God, we experience the Trinity holistically, through each touchpoint. We experience the one Creator God who is Trinity but we experience the Trinity as we need it at that moment wherever we are in our life through the Person that acts as our touchpoint. 

This is depicted beautifully in the cover art by Kelly Lattimore found on your handout. If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s an opening at the table. The Trinity sits for a shared meal but the internal divine nature isn’t closed off to us; there’s an opening for us to join. You’ll see that we’re invited to experience the Triune love of God. It may be that you find that invitation is made possible through reflection primarily on the Father, or on the Son, or on the Spirit, but however you approach you get the whole Trinity. And when one Person of the Trinity interacts with us, we get the whole Trinity. As the fourth-century Bishop and theologian, St. Augustine of Hippo, wrote (Letter 11.2), “For the union of Persons in the Trinity is in the Catholic faith set forth and believed, and by a few holy and blessed ones understood, to be so inseparable, that whatever is done by the Trinity must be regarded as being done by the Father, and by the Son, and by the Holy Spirit together; and that nothing is done by the Father which is, not also done by the Son and by the Holy Spirit; and nothing done by the Holy Spirit which is not also done by the Father and by the Son; and nothing done by the Son which is not also done by the Father and by the Holy Spirit.”

Now, if the language of Father, Son, and Spirit creates a hurdle, our Triune God goes beyond language. (Remember, God is ultimately ineffable!) As the 14th-century English theologian and mystic, Julian of Norwich reminds us, and as Kelli Lattimore has depicted it, we are free to think of God through feminine language as well, if the masculine language is prohibitive or feminine language more inviting (since language is but an arrow pointing to God, not God in God’s self). In her book, Revelations of Divine Love (LIX), Julian points out to the reader that “we receive our being,” our very existence, from God through Christ just as we receive our existence through our mothers. Therefore, God, and Christ, are Mothers to us. The Triune God self-reveals as who and what you need. Julian says that God says to us, as an invitation, “I am the power and the Goodness of the Father, I am the Wisdom of the Mother, I am the Light and the Grace which is blessed love, I am the Trinity, I am the Unity, I am the supreme Goodness of all kind of things, I am the One who makes you love, I am the One who makes you desire, I am the never-ending fulfillment of all true desires.” And this is what I want you to remember on this Trinity Sunday: Christianity has long taught that we share one God, Creator of us all, and this unifies the Church and potentially humanity but this one God is internally pluralistic, relational, Trinitarian. And the Trinity’s plurality meets our human plurality so that in all our difference—even in our differences of language and imagination—we can find God as unified individuals. We don’t have to become homogenous to experience God as Christians; our God can meet all of us at different points simultaneously, as we see here in this setting tonight. And you—especially you—are invited to approach this God just as you are.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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Interview: discussing the Saint John’s Bible with Jonathan Homrighausen

Jonathan Homrighausen is a PhD candidate at Duke University, working on Hebrew Bible. He’s also a writer and scholar on Scripture, art, and interreligious dialogue. While he was working on his MA at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, CA, he began researching The Saint John’s Bible. His interest continued to develop to the point that he wrote a book about it: Illuminating Justice: The Ethical Imagination of The Saint John’s Bible (Liturgical Press, 2018), which ‘explores the call to social ethics in The Saint John’s Bible, the first major handwritten and hand-illuminated Christian Bible since the invention of the printing press.’

If you’re interested in the history of the Bible, biblical manuscripts and their physicality, art and the Bible, the liturgical use of the Bible, or just the Bible, period, you’ll enjoy this interview. Here’s the questions I asked Jonathan:

  1. First, what is The Saint John’s Bible? When, where, and how did it come about?
  2. Can you tell us about your professional training and how The Saint John’s Bible became of interest to you?
  3. I’ve read that this is the first Bible of its kind made since the popularization of the printing press. What does this mean and how does it help us understand the history of the Bible?
  4. Many of us might not think much about the intersection between art and the Bible. How does The Saint John’s Bible shed light on that relationship?
  5. My friend, Michael Barber of the Augustine Institute in Denver, has said something to the extent that we sometimes forget the Bible’s purpose was liturgical or sacramental long before it became an object of research. How does The Saint John’s Bible help us think about the liturgical purpose of the Bible?
  6. Your book, Illuminating Justice: The Ethical Imagination of The Saint John’s Bible, ‘explores the social ethics in The Saint John’s Bible’. How does this Bible uniquely provoke ethical/moral thinking? Or, another way of asking: How does the Bible provoke ethical/moral thinking in a way that’s different from any other Bible I might purchase?
  7. If I wanted to see The Saint John’s Bible, what would I have to do?
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Easter 2020

In Luke’s Gospel the two disciples who traveled to Emmaus didn’t recognize Jesus until they saw him through the breaking of the bread. For many Christians, this is how Jesus is seen and heard every week. This pandemic has taken away that experience away from them. Instead, we’re left with something closer to Mark’s open-ended account of the Resurrection. We’re trembling with fear. We don’t understand what’s happening. We haven’t experienced closure.

The Evangelist Matthew reminds us in this time that Jesus’ final words include the promise that he’ll be with us always, even to the end of the age. The Evangelist John reminds us that like Mary Magdalene, the Apostle to the Apostles, we can hear the Resurrected One’s voice if we listen as we’re addressed by name.

In our sacred Scriptures we have four similar but unique interpretations of the Resurrection. This year it’s important to remember that; it’s important to remember that we don’t experience the risen Lord the same; it’s important that even our individual experiences of Easter can change.

This Easter isn’t ruined. It’s different. It’ll add new texture to your understanding of the event and it’s meaning. Next year we’ll break bread again. But this year we experience fear and trembling, we hope for the the divine presence, and we listen for the Voice

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Good Friday 2020

I hope everyone is staying safe today. If you’re wanting some semblance of Good Friday liturgy, I know many Churches will be doing services online, and there’s even our (TMI Episcopal) chapel service recording. (I’m Judas. Also, we practiced social distancing and all the participants are residents on campus. We gathered at All Saints Chapel on our campus to do this.)

There’s a lot that can be said on this solemn day. Instead, I want to share a Facebook post and a couple of articles that stood out to me.

This 2018 Facebook post from my friend Joshua Paul Smith was a reminder of the upside-down nature of ‘Good’ Friday:

Also, I found Rev. Laura Everett’s article ‘After a Holy Week disrupted by death, an honest Easter’ to be a timely reflection on what Good Friday means in light of this pandemic. Also quite insightful is Prof. Rev. Stephen B. Chapman’s ‘This year Easter will feel more like Passover’.

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Maundy Thursday 2020

We hear this narrative yearly, at least. We hear it alluded to more often than that: ‘On the night that he was betrayed…’ But we hear it from different perspectives. This is the first time I’ve heard it during a pandemic. What does this do to my hearing of this story?

It emphasizes our agnosticism toward the future. Most of us didn’t know we’d be in this situation on April 9th, 2020. While there were a few people who could make decision that could’ve impacted the trajectory of this pandemic (see ‘South Korea’) most of us aren’t those people. We can respond only to the world as it unfolds before us.

This experience highlights the disciples place in the Maundy Thursday tradition. Jesus seems to have expected something. Each Evangelist gives Jesus more or less of an understanding of his fate. But in the Gospels, his disciples seems uniformly unaware. Tragedy is coming. They don’t know it. They can do nothing to stop it.

This night the disciples will be shown their inability to control things. This night most of us recognize this helplessness in ourselves. We’d like to be the masters of our destinies but we’re not. Personally, this Maundy Thursday preaches that message as loud and as clear as it ever could.

But there’s one thing we can control. Jesus commands us to do so. We’re told to love one another and he loves us. In our powerlessness, we can do something powerful; we’re commanded to do something powerful: love one another. We see this in the work of our medical professionals but they’re not alone. We can all contribute in some way for we can all love in some way.

Maundy Thursday icon of Jesus washing the feet of St. Peter
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Palm Sunday 2020

This morning I googled icons of Jesus’ triumphal entry. The one posted above, by the Ukrainian artist Oleksandr Antonyuk, stood out to me not just because of it’s unique visually—the proportions of Jesus’ head and the shape donkey’s body stand out the most—but because it’s lonely. Palm Sunday 2020 will be a lonely one. We won’t be gathered together. We’ll be at home, maybe with family, maybe live-streaming a service, but not together as we’re accustom.

There’s something odd yet fitting about celebrating Palm Sunday during a pandemic. I’ve often told my students that the Gospels are probably easier to embrace for those who see the world through the lens of disorder and brokenness. If life’s going well for you it’s hard to resonate with the desperation of narratives that climax with execution by crucifixion.

But then a pandemic breaks us. Even the most comfortable are uncomfortable. And those who already were suffering, sadly, are even more vulnerable to the harshness of our world. It’s one of those rare moments where we’re all sharing in some form of struggle even if it’s not being felt evenly. But it’s being felt and that opens us up to stories we’ve heard already but needed to hear in a new way.

Palm Sunday does exalt Jesus as King but it also highlights the reality of shattered expectations. Jesus isn’t that kind of King. Jesus will not experience that kind of enthronement. The paradox of the Gospels is that Jesus is the kind of King who rides a humble donkey, whose enthronement is a Roman cross, who in the Johannine tradition has a Kingdom that’s not from this earth. His disciples don’t understand this. His adoring crowds don’t know this. In just a few days their worldview will be shattered.

Many may be asking ‘why?’ this pandemic is happening just as Jesus and his disciples will ask (in a few days, liturgically) how Palm Sunday could morph into ‘Good’ Friday. As regards the pandemic, we can talk about humanity’s responsibility another time because in this situation there’s a lot of it. But for a moment I want to think about divine responsibility as relates to expectations. One reason I enjoy teaching the Book of Job, and why it’s the last part of the Hebrew Bible I cover when I do, is because it undermines all the theodicy of Books like Proverbs and Deuteronomy. It’s (IMO) an absurdist response to the idea we could comprehend the divine mind even if the divine plan was explained to us. I don’t like this for theological reasons, per se (I’m not linking with many Fundamentalists who rebuke us for questioning God), but for literary, human reasons: I don’t think we can understand our suffering and our world in ways that satisfy us when we’re experiencing that suffering. All we can understand is we had expectations about how the world should work, or God should act, and those expectations were wrong.

Like Job, we feel alone when this happens. We feel like we’re the only one being targeted by God. Did Jesus feel this during the Holy Week we’re about to remember? It seems like he did. He asks, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ He asks this less than a week after he rides into Jerusalem as the King, as the Messiah.

But Job isn’t alone. He represents all of us, even if in the extreme. And Jesus wasn’t alone, he represents all of us, even if in the extreme. And now, during this pandemic, we’re not alone. We may feel alone, or at least lonely, but this is a microcosm of the human condition. Our expectations are high, they’re broken, and we’re left wondering why things are the way they are. This pandemic has magnified this reality. And all we can do is let it color this particular Palm Sunday for us so that we read these stories afresh.

Holy Week exists, liturgically, to be experienced. Usually, this is sacramental in nature. Now, it’s in the midst of a world shattering pandemic. We have no choice but to go through this Palm Sunday alone, like Job, and like Jesus, and allow it to speak to us about our expectations. But I don’t say this is to encourage reflecting on Palm Sunday isolating from the rest of Holy Week. For today, yes, let it sink into your soul a bit. But this isn’t the last day. We have six more to go.