Eric S. Fought

A prodigal misfit's journey.

Good Friday

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We have reached the point of our journey where we find Jesus emptying himself, and we are invited to take part with our own acts of emptying. That invitation is to empty ourselves for others in our daily lives—not in isolation, but in the midst of community and out in the world full of opportunity for us to act as Christ.

On this Good Friday, we gather to remember a time of great vulnerability. Of course, there was the vulnerability of Jesus on the cross, the execution itself. And there was the vulnerability of all those who were there, those who loved Jesus, and those who despised him. All were forever changed by what happened that afternoon so long ago.

In that act of vulnerability, everything changed.

We gather to tell the story—our salvation story—once again. And we continue the story, together, as a community that follows the cross of Jesus. Today is a day to reflect on how we enter the story with our own, in that spirit of vulnerability. What experiences of loss, or pain, or shame, are we carrying with us as we stand before the cross? Perhaps we or someone we love is struggling with addiction. Or maybe as we heard the passion, we were reminded of the grief we are working through right now, still fresh and raw, as we faced death in the passion narrative. Look around, see all those who are gathered here with you, each is carrying some story of pain, or grief, or loss, or shame. You might never know the specifics of the story your neighbor holds in the pew next to or near you. And you might feel like the burden you carry is unlike anything anyone has ever had to go through. But look around again, and know that you are not alone, you are never ever alone.

Today is Friday, that moment in our journey of Holy Week when we stand before the cross. Often we can get stuck here—in the grief, in the pain, in the shame that is a part of our story. But, we know how the story ends. The point of today, the reason we gather, is not to mourn the death of Jesus, but to rejoice in the fact that death doesn’t have the final say. We are resurrection people. And Easter is coming friends, Easter is coming.

Today we do not mourn, but move more deeply into the paschal mystery, the mystery of life and death. We celebrate the victory of the cross, and the cross which we venerate is a symbol of that victory — victory over death, over pain, over grief, over addiction, over shame.

Shortly, as we continue in our liturgy, we will offer our prayers for many intentions. We will pray for the church, for government leaders, for the poor, for people of other faiths, for our brothers and sisters that have died. Indeed, you will probably notice that our prayers of the faithful this day is longer than usual. That is intentional, because the cross we prayerfully and reverently venerate, moves us beyond ourselves, it is a means of conversion, of awakening. Through the cross, we see the suffering of others, through the cross, we are reminded of the world outside ourselves.

Henri Nouwen reflected on that awakening in a series of prayers he wrote during Holy Week in 1986 [Heart Speaks to Heart: Three Meditations on Jesus (Notre Dame, IN: Ave Maria Press, 1989)]:

I look at you Lord, and I see your pierced side, the place where your heart is broken. As I look, my eyes begin to recognize the anguish and agony of all the people for whom you gave yourself. Your broken heart becomes the heart of all of humanity, the heart of all the world. You carry them all: abandoned children, rejected wives and husbands, broken families, the homeless, refugees, prisoners, the maimed and tortured, and the thousands, yes millions, who are unloved, forgotten and left alone to die. I see their emaciated bodies, their despairing faces, their anguished looks. I see them all there, where your body is pierced and your heart is ripped apart. O compassionate Lord, your heart is broken because of all the love that is not given or received.

Today, as our journey of Holy Week continues, we enter the story…that old, old story that began with the cross, continued with the resurrection, and continues with all of us today, called to give and receive love, as a community that follows that cross of Jesus.

Originally published in “Loose-leaf Lectionary for Mass,” Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. Copyright 2020. For subscription information, visit: https://litpress.org/loose-leaf-lectionary/index

Holy Thursday

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Tonight, we arrive at the point in our journey of Holy Week where we gather around the table. Together we commemorate and remember a meal shared, not only by Jesus and his disciples on the night before he died but shared by our ancestors for generations. And we are reminded of our call to not only continue to gather as a community here in this place, but to go out into the world and share communion with those who are in pain, those who are lost, those who are forgotten.

If we needed another reminder of our call to serve others, we find it in tonight’s reading from John’s gospel. Once again, as he had done often during his earthly ministry, Jesus surprises everyone. No one expected this man they had come to know as a prophet, their teacher, their master, their Lord, to wrap a towel around his waist, kneel before each of them and proceed to wash their feet. In this act, Jesus provided his friends with a model of how their life and ministry should proceed in the future, without him. That ministry would of course include much more than foot washing. Jesus didn’t just offer a how-to demonstration on how to wash feet. He was showing his disciples, and all of us, how to lead, how to minister to each other, how to be like Christ in the midst of community.

It’s not surprising that such an act—the washing of feet—causes controversy. The first followers of Jesus were shocked by the idea. It was counter-cultural then, for a leader of great esteem to take such an action. And it’s counter-cultural now, for Pope Francis to visit prisons and homeless shelters and other places, washing the feet of those on the margins. Such a humble act can be difficult to understand in our current context. Yet, by washing the feet of men and women—and those from faith traditions other than Christianity—the Holy Father has demonstrated for us each year what it truly means to be disciples of Jesus Christ. In washing someone else’s feet, the servant leader is not only reminded of his or her own humanity, but of the humanity of the other, the one whose feet lay in a basin before them. And by taking such an action this night, the church gathered in this place and throughout the world invites all of humanity to be cared for, embraced, listened to, and honored.

Pope Francis reflected on the ritual of foot washing while celebrating Mass on Holy Thursday in 2015:

From our feet, we can tell how the rest of our body is doing. The way we follow the Lord reveals how our heart is faring. The wounds on our feet, our sprains and our weariness, are signs of how we have followed Him, of the paths we have taken in seeking the lost sheep and in leading the flock to green pastures and still waters. The Lord washes us and cleanses us of all the dirt our feet have accumulated in following Him. This is something holy. Do not let your feet remain dirty. Like battle wounds, the Lord kisses them and washes away the grime of our labors.

It is indeed fitting that the church has placed the ritual of foot washing during this liturgy of the Lord’s Supper, and at the beginning of the celebration of the Lord’s final days. The reason for such timing is, of course, clear from John’s account of what happened that night so long ago. However, the church also reminds us that the celebration of the sacraments, particularly our regular celebration of Eucharist, goes hand in hand with our service to one another and the world outside of these walls. Our Eucharistic celebration is incomplete without humble acts of service, just as our acts of charity and our work for justice in the world are incomplete without our regular sharing of the bread and wine around the altar.

Our journey continues. We are now in the most sacred days, the three days, the Paschal Triduum. Tonight, we not only remember that gathering so long ago of friends at table, we gather together as friends, as disciples, around this table. And now, we prepare to be as Christ for one another in the washing of feet.

Originally published in “Loose-leaf Lectionary for Mass,” Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. Copyright 2020. For subscription information, visit: https://litpress.org/loose-leaf-lectionary/index

Palm Sunday

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We are now nearing the end of our Lenten journey, beginning the path of Holy Week. We find ourselves on this Palm Sunday in that uncomfortable in-between, ready to celebrate Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, eager to wave our palms and shout “Hosanna!” After all, it has been a long Lent, especially for those of us in the northern parts of the world where these forty days are generally snow-covered and bitterly cold. We have fasted and abstained, we have prayed, and we have walked the stations. We’re ready.

The richness of Palm Sunday is found in the contrasts experienced in the liturgy. We begin with Matthew’s retelling of the arrival of Jesus and his friends to an area just outside of the holy city. They have travelled to Jerusalem from Galilee, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, casting out demons, and countering the arguments of the hypocritical religious elite. Anyone who has made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land knows that the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem doesn’t take long. Yet, Galilee was far from Jerusalem in many ways. Jerusalem was a place of religious and civic power, Galilee was a town on the margins, made up of marginalized people. Jesus and his disciples walked from the margins of Galilee to the streets of Jerusalem, joining other pilgrims who had made the same trek, and continue to today.

Our liturgy moves us from that triumphant entry with palms waving and pilgrims dancing to the words of Isaiah setting the stage for what is about to come, of a prophet who prepares to be put to shame. We then hear the haunting, yet comforting text from Paul, the recounting of Jesus’ emptying himself completely, not only taking the form of one of us, but taking the form of the marginalized, the weak, the outcast. And then we turn to Matthew’s account of Jesus’ last days, beginning with the betrayal of Judas, and continuing on to the abandonment of Jesus by Peter’s denial and the rest of the disciples who refused to stay up and pray. We walk with all of them, from the cool early morning in the garden, to the scorching journey through the streets, to the trial, to the angry mobs shouting “Crucify him!,” to the embarrassing mocking, to Golgotha’s end.

Palm Sunday provides a look ahead, a glimpse at what will come as we progress through the journey of Holy Week, into the days of the Paschal Triduum.

However, the journey doesn’t begin today. It began long ago, in our baptism, and when we were confirmed by the power of the Holy Spirit. The journey continues.

The good news is that we do not walk alone, but with each other, in the midst of community, and joining together with Christians throughout the world. We walk the path that our ancestors walked and that Jesus himself trod. Yet we do not simply recreate historical events, we share in them.

We do not only remember, we believe, we see, we act.

That is what this moment, this journey of Holy Week, is all about for us. As we recall Jesus’ passage from death to new life, we embrace our own.

Jesus and his followers walked a different path than was conventional—they set out not to follow rules, but to love. They rejected labels and worked through divisions seeking common ground, finding solutions that healed the sick, fed the hungry, clothed the naked, and housed the homeless. Jesus gave all that he had to such a life, and in the end, it cost him his.

We find ourselves at a moment where individualism is viewed as more important than community, where we judge others for what they believe, who they love and interact with, and what they do for a living. We huddle in ideological corners, convinced that all of us in our corner have the right answers. We’re so sure that we’re right, we’ve forgotten what the questions are.

Today, as we begin this Holy Week, the questions Jesus asks of us are quite simple. Are we ready to walk the path that lies ahead, to love without ceasing, to set aside divisions and seek unity, to empty ourselves, bring our pain and our grief and our fear to the cross? And Jesus asks us if we see the pain that our neighbor brings to that same cross.

Originally published in “Loose-leaf Lectionary for Mass,” Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. Copyright 2020. For subscription information, visit: https://litpress.org/loose-leaf-lectionary/index

Shepherds, Angels, and Us at Christmas

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Every Christmas during my childhood my parents would set out on the hutch in the living room a lovely crèche. It was a substantial scene, including many of the characters believed to be present at the birth of Jesus—the Holy Family of course, along with a wide variety of people and animals. Hanging out in the corner was a shepherd.

I don’t know about you, but in 43 years of life, I’ve only encountered shepherds in nativity scenes and Bible stories. Stories like the Christmas story at the beginning of Luke’s gospel. In that story, angels do not visit the manger or a temple, but head to the fields, fields where shepherds lived, to announce the good news of the birth of Christ.

What Luke doesn’t tell us is something his original audience already knew—this choice of place and people, the place where this news was delivered and to whom, was significant. At the time of Jesus, shepherding was a job no one wanted. People viewed shepherds as liars, thieves, and worse. Shepherds couldn’t testify in court proceedings, and many towns had laws in place keeping them out. Religious leaders were especially harsh in their judgment of these men since the demands of their work kept them from being able to observe the sabbath.

And it was to these men that God sent angels to announce the coming of a savior.

The Christ-child came to dwell among us, not in the comfort of a steady home but in the cold and dirt of a manger to an unstable couple in a strange land. His birth was scandalous, born to a virgin and her unwed spouse. He wasn’t born into royalty or stability, but into poverty and a world of unanswered questions. It was here that our God chose to come, chose to dwell among us. God came to bring light to the darkness, to prove once and for all that the least shall be first and the first, last.

We have all but forgotten these realities, or perhaps have never even considered them at all. And yet I believe it is there—in the field with the shepherds, in the damp and stinky manger, in the refugee family on the run—in the messiness of it all, that we actually find God. Because it is there where God shows up.

Which is truly good news—for us, and for the messy world in which we live. Many of us and those around us can relate to those shepherds. Their experience is shared human experience, of being bullied and shunned and in grief. Those men stood in the fields dejected, wondering if God even existed. They were men who had given up on God. And God showed up, sending messengers to tell them that the world was about to and already had changed.

Today, people throughout the world are waiting in eager anticipation for good news of great joy. And the waiting is over. Our celebration of this Christmas feast brings tremendous responsibility for those of us who call ourselves Christian. None of us are angels of course, but we are still being sent out from the comfort of this sanctuary to share the good news. God shows up to us, and in us, as we are called to bring the light of Christ, lit in our hearts at Christmas, to the world.

Merry Christmas to you and all those you hold close. And may the New Year bring good things for all of us.

The Geography of All Saints

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In December of 2014, Malala Yousafzai became, at the age of seventeen, the youngest person to ever be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Hers is a remarkable story—one of courage, perseverance, and survival. Malala grew up in an area of Pakistan which the Taliban targeted and took control of in 2007, making it a place of war, unrest, and uncertainty. While the Pakistani army was eventually successful in forcing the Taliban to retreat, a number of insurgents remained in Malala’s hometown.

She had begun her public activism advocating for the education of girls when the Taliban invaded, and she eventually became a target. On October 9, 2012, a masked gunman boarded Malala’s school bus, asked for her by name, and shot her in the head, neck, and shoulder. She survived, and after a long period of recovery returned to school and her life of activism. Malala now travels the world, not only raising her voice and telling her story but empowering other girls and women to do the same. Out of such adversity—the horrors of terrorism and war—has sprung an international movement for change.

When I consider the lives of many of the saints, the men and women we celebrate on this day, I am reminded of how often they took stands like Malala. Faced with adversity, regardless of the details, they took a stand and, in the end, made a real difference in the world. Archbishop Oscar Romero, for instance, was forever changed by the death of his close friend at the hands of government soldiers and continued to be converted each day by the poverty and bloodshed experienced by the people he was called to shepherd. In the final years of his life and ministry, he spoke out about the oppression and violence facing his people, preaching in word and deed on the hope of liberation found in Jesus Christ.

Jesuit priest and author Gregory Boyle said in an interview a few years ago, “I read once that the Beatitudes’ original language was not ‘blessed are’ or ‘happy are’ but that the most precise translation is ‘You’re in the right place if.’ I like that better. It turns out the Beatitudes is not a spirituality. It’s a geography. It tells you where you stand.”

Of course, none of us would choose to be in a place where we mourn, are poor in spirit or otherwise, or where we are insulted or persecuted. And yet life presents us with those challenges, which can become opportunities for us. The good news today is that in those places where we are challenged we will also find comfort, satisfaction, mercy, and the opportunity to see God.

We are in the right place if we approach life on life’s terms and in that we will know God’s presence. We are in the right place when we are willing to weep for those we have lost, for at that moment God wraps God’s loving arms around us. We are in the right place when we accept and embrace our own poverty and recognize the poverty that so many others experience. It is there, amid scarcity and on the margins where God sits. We are in the right place if we speak words of mercy in a merciless world if we seek peace where peace seems so far from possible. We are in the right place if we stand for justice and grow increasingly hungry for righteousness. If justice brings us life, and injustice moves us to action, we will be met by a God who seeks the same.

But how do we find the strength and courage to live out this geography? How do we find the path to being in the right place? The lives of the saints offer us a roadmap or at least some ideas.

Today we remember all the saints, those whose names and lives we know well and those we have never encountered. Saint Paul in his epistles addresses all of us as saints, called not to a life of perfection, but to conversion, encounter, and awareness of God. Indeed, we are called to being in the right place, living out the Beatitudes each day of our lives. As we take our stand, let us speak out, raising our own voices and all those voices left unheard.

God Shows Up

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Our Gospel reading this Sunday is a familiar story—perhaps the best known parable in all of Scripture. Most of us know it as a message of the importance of showing mercy and kindness to our neighbor. We may understand the parable as one in which Jesus is reminding us of the importance of following the spirit of the law rather than getting stuck in worrying about adhering to strict dogma. We may also understand the text as a reflection on what it means to be neighbor to one another.

All of those are perfectly good readings of the passage. However, in many ways throughout our Christian tradition, the familiar story seems to have lost its edge and significance. In our attempts to understand what Jesus is saying in light of our own lives today, we may be missing what his use of the parable meant in the lives of those around him then and in the lives of those who first read Luke’s account.

In that tradition, we’ve attached the word “Good” to the Samaritan who finally comes to the aid of the one in the ditch, a descriptor not found in the text and one that would have been difficult for the first followers of Jesus to understand. In their lived experience, and in their judgement, Samaritans were far from good. Indeed, they were a group of people despised for their differences and their identity by first century Jews and Samaritans viewed Jews through the same lens. The relationship between Jews and Samaritans were generally characterized by that special hostility found among close relatives who feel themselves betrayed by the other.

Luke alludes to this animosity in the previous chapter, writing that the Samaritans would not receive Jesus as his traveling party made their way south through Samaritan territory on their way to Jerusalem. Galilean Jews were heretics in the eyes of Samaritans, and vice versa. The vitriol, the hatred, was so great that Jesus’ own followers, his disciples James and John, asked if they should destroy the Samaritans with fire. They wanted to kill them.

And yet, it is a Samaritan that Jesus carefully chooses to show mercy and compassion in a parable about what it means to follow the law of God and who is to be considered neighbor.

Just as the story of the Good Samaritan has become very familiar to all of us, this week as we turned on the news or tuned into social media, we were once again presented with stories that have also become too familiar.

ICE raids, detentions, and deportations. Children being held in cages. Shootings everywhere.

These stories, all too familiar, cause us to lament. They cause us to grieve and to try to understand. But in their familiarity, these stories can also cause us to miss the underlying complex set of problems and oppressive structures that must be addressed.

The ongoing disregard for our immigrant and refugee brothers and sisters is happening as a result of our country’s shameful legacy of racial oppression and economic exploitation. The forces of evil: fear, hatred and violence are pervading our culture and destroying our lives. Too many of us have failed to resist these forces, instead falling prey to voices of doubt and our fear, causing us to sit on the sidelines in silence and inaction.

We are called by our faith to lament the evils we face. We are also called by our faith to speak the prophetic truth.

The truth, the story we must tell, is that we live in country built on the genocide of our indigenous brothers and sisters, a legacy of slavery, racial oppression and economic exploitation of black and brown bodies. Until we confess our collective sins and wrestle with the implications of that legacy, we cannot achieve reconciliation. God calls us to do that work, to move beyond the division that seeks to destroy, the same spirit of division that caused the otherness of the Samaritans to fill Jesus’ disciples with hatred and to contemplate violence.

In his book, America’s Original Sin, Jim Wallis, the president of Sojourners wrote,

“Racism is America’s original sin and must be named as such. Sometimes it expresses itself explicitly and overtly, with the Charleston murders being perhaps the most extreme example in decades. But racism lingers far more pervasively in implicit and covert ways in American institutions and culture, in often unconscious attitudes, and in the very structures of our society.”

In his telling of the parable, Luke specifically notes that all three of those who encountered the half-dead naked man lying in the ditch saw him. The priest saw him and deliberately walked to the other side and bypassed him. The Levite saw him and did the same. They were too busy, too focused on what might happen if they acted, too afraid.

They saw him, but not as a neighbor, perceiving him instead to be a burden, perhaps even a threat.

The Samaritan man, in seeing a man robbed and removed of dignity, nearing the end of his life saw himself. He identified with the one set aside to die, lost and discarded. And because he could see himself, he was moved to act. It became personal. He had no choice but to respond, to take him to the inn and care for him. And through that empathy, two lives were changed forever.

“No one is beyond the reach of God’s love,” the theologian David Lose wrote. “No one. And so Jesus brings this home by choosing the most unlikely of characters to serve as the instrument of God’s mercy and grace and exemplify Christ-like behavior. That’s what God does: God chooses people no one expects and does amazing things through them. Even a Samaritan. Even me. Even you.”

The Good News I find in this Gospel text is the notion that God often shows up where we least expect God to be. For the man left to die on the side of the road between Jerusalem and Jericho, the last person he expected to show up and show mercy was a Samaritan, and a Samaritan was the last person the Jews hearing the parable would have expected to be lauded as the hero of the story.

Our communities are yearning for God to show up in big ways, as fear and anger and grief have a hold on all of us. It seems that we are in a place where we expect more violence, more division, more hate, more people to see suffering and walk to the other side of the road.

The unexpected way in which God can and is ready to show up is through us. It will be in the way we show love, the manner in which we offer mercy and compassion. In the midst of grief and uncertainty, love and mercy are unexpected. In a society where racism and structures of inequity harm and kill our brothers and sisters of color, direct action to bring about equity and justice are unexpected.

As we walk that road ahead, full of opportunities to see, draw near and show compassion, let us work to make sure that God shows up in unexpected ways through us.