Two particular components of worship are emphasized in our liturgy this season of Lent: singing, especially the use of Taize, and our healing service.
Taize music comes from a monastic community in France begun by Roger, a young man with tuberculosis in the early 1940’s. This was during WWII and Roger, a citizen of Switzerland had a dream to live in France, where his mother was born, and help young people affected by the war. He bought an abandoned house in Taize, along the demarcation line that divided France. It came with some buildings on the property and soon he began the process of setting up a community to house refugees. But within a few years it became too dangerous and they had to flee. A few years later they were able to return and have lived on this property ever since.
The community of Taize is now a formal monastic order made up of men from all denominations and backgrounds. A women’s monastic community set up near by and the two communities do a lot of work together. Taize models compassion and hospitality in a truly ecumenical sense. It is a community dedicated to helping the truly poor – poor in spirit, poor in body, poor in life.
The hallmark of the community is their simple worship marked by singing repetitive chants. These chants, made up of short phrases sung over and over invite the singer into a meditative place of prayer. Singing the words over and over allows us to let go of the hymn book, let go of the words, and open ourselves to God’s presence. The hymns are easy to learn with phrases taken from scripture. The one we will sing (at 10:00) as we head to the font for healing contains variations of the words of Psalm 27, which we prayed this morning:
O Lord, hear my prayer, O Lord hear my prayer, when I call, answer me.
The church, softly lit with candles invites us into a space where we can be present to God in the simplicity of the season, reinforced by the simplicity of the words. And God can meet us in that place of our inner most being that yearns for God.
The Psalms, sung or said, offer us a pathway into scripture and into the tradition of people searching for God. Walter Brueggerman, a scholar and theologian who has written extensively on the psalms breaks the psalms down into three categories:
psalms of orientation,
psalms of disorientation, and
psalms of re-orientation.
By these he means that psalms of orientation speak of God and as a known entity, the psalmist knows God and is confident in God’s presence.
Psalms of disorientation speak of a loss of God, a fear of abandonment, the psalmist is lamenting,
Oh God, where are you?.
Our psalm this morning is a psalm of disorientation.
O, Lord, hear my prayer, O Lord, hear my prayer…is a lament, a plea for God to be present.
Come, and listen to me…
these are words of one in sorrow,
in pain,
lamenting.
And they remind us that we yearn most for God when we are lost, feeling low and unwell.
The psalms remind us that every occasion of being lost and disoriented is followed by a new place of being oriented, a re-orientation in God. Because God never abandons us but journeys with us and in the process we are changed. But even as God journeys with us, God does not force God’s way into our lives. God waits for us to invite God in.
Our Gospel points us in that direction with the question, “will only a few be saved”? The fear is not, will I be saved, but how many will be saved? The Gospel points to a process of excluding some and not others. This kind of thinking can lead to panic and greed. “Lord, we will knock on the door and you will say,”
“I do not know you….”
We wonder, what does it take to be known by God, known by Jesus??
Jesus responds:
“There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and you will throw yourselves out.”
Did you hear that…
You will throw yourselves out…
It is we who throw ourselves out, fearful and feeling unable to do make it through the narrow way, we will throw ourselves out.
How does this happen? How do we throw ourselves out?
Listening carefully we hear Jesus say to the people, “strive to enter the narrow door”.
His response is not about how many, his response addresses the struggle of following Christ, of being a person of faith. This scripture tells us that we throw ourselves out, when we self-select, when we choose to do something else instead of striving for the narrow door…
The narrow door is a metaphor for the spiritual journey, the challenges we face just trying to be good Christian people who love God, love neighbor, and love self, with the radical hospitality that Jesus showed.
Strive to enter the narrow door.
The image of a narrow door tells us that the process of living a life of faith will be a struggle. We may feel as though the conflicting demands of life are pressing in on us, squeezing us.
The irony is that when faced with such a struggle the best thing one can do is let go.
Rather than force the issue or tighten up the best way to get through is to loosen up.
Those who open themselves to the struggle, will find peace in the process.
They will find God, and they will be known by Christ because the struggle will change their hearts.
They will come to know that in all their efforts to squeeze in,
it is in the letting go of anxiety,
letting go of anger,
letting go of fear,
that enables us to get through
and God to come in.
The irony of the squeeze is that it is an opening not a tightening…
From this open place in our spirits, in our souls, in our hearts, it is the grace of God that gets into us, not we who get into God.
God waits for us to invite God in.
The invitation from us comes in the effort to let go and yet squeeze through the narrow door. Maybe it helps to think of our spirits as pliable like water able to be big or small thick or thin, able to adapt to what is requires. Frozen water is not pliable, liquid water is…In this flexible way we need to shape and form ourselves as a people of faith, which actually causes us to open up to God, to trust God, and to follow God.
Someone once asked Fritz Pearls, a psychologist, if he was saved. His response was, “I’m not worried about being saved, I’m trying to figure out how to be spent.”
It’s not about saving, and its not about being narrow, it’s not about being frozen solid…its about opening up, being expansive, and it’s about spending…(and I don’t mean money, I mean)spending ourselves in the name of God…
I’m trying to figure out how to be spent…
The struggle through the narrow door comes with a cost, at the expense of opening our inner most being to God…
Spending all of ourselves in the effort is the price of being saved by a God who loves us.
This God yearns to be in us and with us and part of us.
Like the words of our Taize hymn sung at the Offertory:
Within our darkest night, you kindle the fire that never dies away…
When God resides in our being it is a fire that sustains us through the darkest night. And as we sing it at the Offertory we add this prayer of assurance, “Within in our darkest night you kindle the fire that never dies away..”to that which we offer back to God, our bread and wine, our money, ourselves…
In the season of Lent we are invited to ponder the ways we seek to enter the narrow door.
And one way we do this is to examine the broken and spent places in our own lives,
the sorrow,
the pain,
the hurt,
the grief,
the anxiety,
the stress,
the strain,
the burdens,
the illness,
the disease,
and
in examining them to give them over to God.
In Lent we are invited to come forward to be anointed with the chrism oil, to open ourselves to God, to be healed of that which wounds us. This holy oil was used at our baptism to mark us as Christ’s own forever. That mark, the sign of the cross, leaves an impression on our foreheads, a pathway to the spirit. In the healing prayer the oil follows this same pathway to remind us of who we are and whose we are, a beloved of God.
God yearns to take our burdens, to lighten our load, and bring us into a place of wholeness. The prayer for healing is an invitation for us to open our hearts to God and give over our burdens and let God in.
In the prayers and the anointing we can be healed of our burdens. In the healing and the anointing, in the laying on of hands, all of our hands, and in the prayers Jesus comes to us, like a hen gathering her brood under her wings.
To love us.
To heal us.
To lead us through this life.
Strive to enter the narrow door
Let our lives be spent in loving as Christ loves.
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