Gethsemane’s Reversal of Eden

When I served as a pastor, the Maundy Thursday worship service was my favorite of the year. It was wrapped in darkness, silence, and somber contemplation. The readings, prayers, sermon, and singing took on a slowed pace as we attempted to understand the vulnerability of God in Jesus Christ, in and through whom Gethsemane recapitulated, reversed, and triumphed over Eden.

Whereas the serpent taunted, tempted, and circled about Adam and Eve, striking venom into their hearts and minds, the religious leaders circled about Jesus as he taught in the temple during the days before his arrest—like a pack of hungry wolves waiting to pounce upon their weakened prey. As the week went on, the gospel narratives indicate that the power of the void—the nothingness that sought to undo God’s good creation, to return it back to nothing—became more and more palpable. Jesus’ emotions were on the surface. One moment he was weeping bitterly for Jerusalem and the next foretelling God’s judgment upon her. He cursed an unfruitful fig tree and warned his disciples to be on alert for the coming days of dread.

In Eden, Adam and Even turned to mutual recrimination and blame. Shame closed then off to each other and God. They attempted to protect themselves, turning inward in the most harmful of ways, becoming invulnerable. Yet Jesus kept his heart open. With the utmost intimacy, affection, tenderness and devotion, he served his disciples a meal, knelt before them, and washed the grime off their feet. The crowds who had praised him and eagerly listened to his teaching; the disciples who communed with him for the three years; and the one who pledged his unswerving loyalty: all were about to forsake Jesus. Knowing this, he still chose love. He remained vulnerable.

In Mark’s account of Gethsemane, Jesus cried out, “My soul is sorrowful to the point of death.”  He felt half-dead with anguish.  Fear seized him, and he fell to the ground.  He was struck with horror (as John Calvin put it) by the fate that awaited him.  Being fully human, he desperately needed his friends in this hour; yet they failed him. They lacked the emotional and spiritual stamina to stay by his side. As the weight of the void (sin, death, and the devil) pressed down upon Jesus, he wrestled with God: “Take this cup from me; nevertheless not my will but thine be done.” Adam and Eve’s hiding from God now became Jesus’ persistent prayer even as God’s presence increasingly became distant, unreachable, and silent. Faith now triumphed over fear.

Yet this triumph had the appearance of its opposite: defeat. Jesus began to sweat and to sweat blood—blood, sweat, and tears. Hematidrosis is a medical condition brought upon by acute distress. The capillaries under the skin dilate so much that they burst, causing blood to ooze through the skin along with sweat. It makes one’s skin tender and fragile, painful to the touch.  The kiss of Jesus, betrayal in the guise of affection, likely caused emotional, spiritual, and physical pain. Jesus’ blood, sweat, and tears in the Garden of Gethsemane harkens back to Garden of Eden, where the original turning away from God yielded blood, sweat, and tears. For Eve, there would be the bloody anguish of birth; for Adam, physical labor that brought sweat to his brow; for both, tears of sorrow as they lost their peaceful union and communion with God and each other.

In Gethsemane, though, God is the one who bleeds, sweats, and grieves.  Here the power of the void entered into the personal existence of the Incarnate Word. “He who knew no sin became sin.”  He bore sin and death so completely that he took it into his own being; so that by his dying, it too would die. Our anguish became God’s anguish; our alienation, God’s alienation; our shame, God’s shame; our death, God’s death. Of course, on this side of Gethsemane, contemplation of this somber reality creates awe and gratitude, for Christ’s alienation has become our reconciliation. We receive (again and again) the gift of faith in place of fear and inseparable unity with God and each other.

The Listening God

Over the years I’ve encountered students who are adamantly convinced that pastoral care begins and ends with God’s word.  If by this they meant Jesus Christ the Incarnate Word, then I would heartily agree. For pastoral care is participation in his ongoing ministry of healing and reconciliation in the world. But instead, they mean the proclamation of the word of forgiveness. And while I could highlight the particular strands of Protestant theology and the contemporary theologians who have influenced this narrow depiction of ministry, I’ve come to think that the problem is much more pervasive--a theological amnesia, a forgetting that God is a listening God. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, “Christians have forgotten that the ministry of listening has been committed to them by Him who is Himself the great listener and whose work they should share. We should listen with the ears of God so that we may speak the Word of God” (Life Together).

Of course, much Christian theology emphasizes the speaking God, and rightly so. Jesus Christ is the incarnate Word of God who creates and sustains all life. God speaks life into being. The Word reveals the fullness of God to all humanity. If we want to know God, we listen to God’s Word, Jesus Christ. For his life, death, and resurrection constitute God’s love letter to humanity—a letter that is spoken and heard again and again. Scripture is the written word of God that witnesses to the incarnate Word. By the power of the Spirit, we encounter God in scripture and experience our lives as woven into God’s grand narrative of healing and reconciliation. There are the preached word and the sacramental word as well. Through the former, Jesus Christ is proclaimed in particular times and places through particular idioms and stories. Through baptism and the Lord’s Supper, we participate in the life of the Word and receive God’s words of promise.

Yet deep listening—listening that originates in the Triune God—undergirds all of this speaking. God hears the cries of God’s people. God hears the mutual recrimination and blame of Adam and Eve and all whom they represent. God hears the prayerful and sometimes bitter longing of barren and betrayed women. God hears the agony of enslaved Israel laboring under oppressive pharaohs. God hears the stubbornness of king Saul, the penitence of king David, and the petition of Hezekiah. God hears the cries of the psalmists for justice, mercy, truth, freedom, healing, and salvation even when those longings are masked by vengeful outrage. 

God, in Jesus Christ, first listens and then speaks. That this Word is a listening Word is perhaps nowhere more evident than in Jesus’ walk to Emmaus (Luke 23:13-35). Three days after Jesus’ execution, two of his disciples set out on a seven-mile journey from the bustling city of Jerusalem to the quiet village of Emmaus. Perhaps they needed the external quiet in order to wrestle adequately with their internal cacophony of thoughts, questions, feelings, and needs. As journeys go, this one was more inward and spiritual than outward and physical. Engulfed by shock, disappointment, and distress, these men wandered in bewilderment. They were threatened on all sides. The tortured death of their beloved friend, the supposed Messiah, led them face-to-face with nothingness, with the obliteration of life. Their association with Jesus made them vulnerable to violence. Two of their women friends made incomprehensible claims about an empty tomb, a missing body, and dazzling angels. Yet it was all too much for them. Their world—their very belief structure—had shattered. They could not transcend their situation. They were inwardly lost.

At this point of greatest need, God in Jesus Christ joined them, and as is often the case in situations like these, they did recognize God’s presence. So unbeknownst to them, Jesus walked beside them and entered into their experience. He listened deeply. He asked open-ended questions. He avoiding explicitly answering their questions and glossing over their angst in some superficial manner. He facilitated a deep indwelling of their own situation by creating space for their internal wrestling. When he finally spoke, he explored with them their own life story—their communal history as the chosen people of God—and their particular history as his disciples. He reflected on their stories in light of the biblical narrative. In this lively dialogue marked by attentive (and eventually mutual) listening, Jesus fed their souls with wisdom and understanding. When he broke bread with them, the scales fell from their eyes. As a result of having been seen and heard at the deepest levels of their existence, they now knew themselves, God, and the world differently. Their encounter with God in Jesus Christ, which began and continued with deep listening, comforted and transformed them.

The listening God is a ministering God, a healing God, a reconciling God. I wonder what our relationships with God and neighbor might look like if our theology began with attentiveness to this God. I wonder how much our failure to listen and follow this God undermines the mission of the church and leads us away from God and neighbor. As Bonhoeffer writes, “Many people are looking for an ear that will listen. They do not find it among Christians, because these Christians are talking where they should be listening. But he who can no longer listen to his brother [or sister] will soon be no longer listening to God either; he will be doing nothing but prattle in the presence of God too. This is the beginning of the death of the spiritual life, and in the end there is nothing left but spiritual chatter and clerical condescension arrayed in pious words” (Life Together).

Living Well and Faithfully in the Midst of Institutional Upheaval

I’ve heard much talk in the past five years about the radical changes coming in theological education. From the head of ATS (Association of Theological Schools) to administrators, faculty, and church leaders, the message rings clear: we cannot continue business as usual. Students by-and-large cannot afford a three-to-four year master’s degree. Mainline Protestant churches are shrinking rapidly, meaning fewer job opportunities for all graduates and less and less financial stability for those who do get jobs in communities of faith. Besides this, our ways of structuring theological education—for example, the good ole four-fold division of theological knowledge (Bible, church history, theology, practical theology)—have long been identified as problematic for student and faculty formation alike. 

In this context, some seminaries are adapting innovatively—establishing creative relationships with community and church partners that serve the vocational formation of students and enable them to participate in God’s ongoing ministry of healing and reconciliation in the world. Other seminaries are not able to do so. Many have closed, and more will close. Others are discovering (the hard way) that they must live within their means and somehow figure out to grieve the many losses that come with radical downsizing and the construction of a new identity.

All this talk about change comes easy at the level of abstraction—that is, when it’s someone else’s seminary. For those of us living through decline (or at least what appears to be decline until there are signs of resurrection), disorganization, or upheaval, it’s another story altogether. When old programs are cut or suspended; when the elimination of staff and faculty positions loom on the horizon; when the pressure is on to create revenue-neutral or new money-making programs; when collegial relationships end; and when financial and vocational wellbeing seems threatened: living well and living faithfully become a huge challenge.

I’m living through this kind of institutional upheaval at the moment, and I’m far from alone. Just this week, I learned of two schools in the throes of deep loss and grief: one seminary that must reduce faculty and staff salaries across-the-board (and this is after a major layoff just a couple years ago); one church-related undergraduate institution that has been financially mismanaged, leading to drastic cuts in program and personnel. And frankly, seminaries and Christian colleges are not the only ones experiencing this kind of institutional upheaval. Many of my friends and relatives know the same dynamics in their workplaces, from public schools and universities to private businesses. 

Living well and living faithfully in these circumstances, as I’m discovering, involves a kind of going-back-to-the-basics—practicing the abc’s of wellbeing, so to speak. (And yes, this is part of the paradox, since institutional thriving will necessitate radical adaptation and change on another level.) What are some of those basics?

Abiding. In the Gospel of John, Jesus speaks of our union and communion with him as an abiding—a resting in God that comes from trust that we are upheld at all points, in all times, and in all places through our unbreakable bond to Jesus Christ. Practices of worship, prayer, meditation, and contemplation in nature (to name a few) enable us to abide in the One in whom all things hold together.

Breathing. In the midst of stress, we tend to stop breathing deeply. As those who meditate and practice yoga know (and as neurobiological studies reveal), sitting quietly and intentionally breathing deeply helps to calm the mind, thus opening the way for clear, creative decision-making and action. This can be integrated with prayer as well—for example, the breath prayer. Twelfth century mystic, reformer, and church leader Hildegard of Bingen said, prayer is the inhaling and exhaling of the one Breath of the universe.

Communicating. Giving and receiving clear, accurate, and up-to-date information in the midst of institutional upheaval is paramount for building trust and moving into a new day with hope and healing. While all details may not be appropriate for all audiences, veiled references to upcoming decisions and trumped up (or worse yet, spiritualized) calls to look on the bright side sound disingenuous and fail to build up the body of Christ. Painful truth stated honestly not only reduces anxiety but also drives us to depend again and again on the Resurrected One, who can bring new life (because he is New Life) in the midst of death and destruction. And this is indeed what we need most.

Rooted and Grounded in Love: Lessons from Church History

This year I’m spending Valentine’s Day finishing a chapter on the history of pastoral theology for a pastoral care textbook that I’m co-writing. (That’s romance in the life of an academic!) I’ve spent the past month scouring ancient texts—learning how the communion of saints has participated in God’s ongoing ministry of healing and reconciliation in response to the most pressing needs and issues in various times and places. Of these, Julian of Norwich stands out for mention on this Hallmark day.

Julian (1342-1416) was an English anchoress, mystic, and pastoral theologian. She lived in a cell adjacent to a church, which likely had three windows—one into the church; one for receiving food and other necessities; and one for receiving visitors in need of counsel. Through her window into the world, she listened deeply and shared spiritual guidance, sustenance, and comfort with persons in need. Rooted and grounded in the providential love of God, Julian cared for others in her anxiety- and grief-filled age.

Fourteenth century English society experienced a scourge of plagues, both figuratively and literally: the Black Death (bubonic plague), the Hundred Years War with France, the peasants uprising of 1381, the widespread prosecution of heresy throughout Europe, and the Great Schism between the Avignon and Roman papacies. In short, life was fraught with anxiety, dread, and insecurity. And the prevailing popular sentiment and church practices only exacerbated this. The dominant theological lens for explaining rampant devastation and trauma was God’s wrath. This gave rise to piety marked by rumination on death and devils and practices of bodily deprivation, self-flagellation, and ruthless self-examination.

Julian’s antidote was an unswerving emphasis on God’s love. God is a compassionate nurturer. Christ our Mother, as she so eloquently described him, feeds, nourishes, teaches, holds, and disciplines believers. Julian reminded her charges that though they were surrounded by death and destruction, they nevertheless were enclosed in Christ—safe and secure like a child nestled in her mother’s bosom. Though all around them fall apart, they were united to God in love. As she learned from twenty-years of meditation on her own near-death experience, God’s eschatological promise is this: “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Julian’s message rings true today. For though the contours of our world may be radically different, the human experiences of pain, suffering, fear, upheaval, and disorientation remain the same (or last, quite familiar). We all need to be reminded again and again that God provides; that God upholds and nurtures us; that God is present with us and beside us in all circumstances. As Julian encouraged her spiritual directees, we abide in God’s love through prayer, contemplation, receiving the sacraments, and self-kindness. Prayer marked by honest surrender to God; contemplation on God’s goodness in creation and redemption; feeding on Christ in the Lord’s supper; treating ourselves as those beloved of God: through all this, the Spirit raises us up and sends us out to share God’s love with the world. And that sounds like Valentine’s Day.

Real Worship

I learned preaching and worship leadership from masters of the art. Their classes were captivating and remain some of the most memorable of my seminary experience. I can still hear their voices—the crisp, clear, exact wording and beautifully orchestrated cadences. From these professors I learned to read scripture publicly with attention to the meaning of the text and with the intention to play the human but still important role in bringing the text to life. I also learned to lead worship with a kind of seamlessness—that is, to allow the flow of the liturgy to do its work, or to allow the Spirit to work through the flow of the liturgy. This meant getting out of the way, specifically not introducing the hymns (they were written in the bulletin for a reason) and avoiding folksy commentary in between the elements of the service. My field education placement reinforced much of what I was learning in the classroom. Not only the elements of the service but also the use of technology, such as power point and microphones, was to be as smooth and unnoticeable as possible.

None of this was about entertainment—and if it was, it would be an abysmal failure given the shape and nature of what constitutes entertainment in our culture! Instead this commitment to a certain kind of excellence emerged from humility and reverence for the Word of God written in scripture. To bear God’s Word in worship leadership is no small thing, calling for the faithful and dignified administration of our gifts, knowledge, and finely-honed skills. Part of our responsibility is to direct the congregation’s gaze toward God, and there’s nothing so distracting as a screeching sound system.

I’m grateful for my seminary training. Perhaps there’s something about it that fits my personality as well as my theology. Ironically though, it’s created another kind of distraction for me as I participate in worship, which has led me to wonder about what constitutes real worship. Let me illustrate.

At a church service a few weeks ago, I cringed internally (hopefully not externally) when the person reading the biblical text actually read the wrong text. He caught himself, laughed, explained, and then turned to the assigned reading and started all over again. I cringed again when the guest preacher and pastor repeatedly stopped and started a video clip as a supplement the sermon. The preacher was supposed to be talking over the clip—a very nice effect actually except for all the creaturely bumbling accompanying it. I wanted to crawl under the pew as I witnessed the pastor’s waving arms and shouts to the preacher to stop and then the small group effort it took to figure out that the video wouldn’t restart because the pastor stepped on the cord and it came unplugged. The congregation laughed merrily as I turned to a friend and said with wide eyes, “You’d get crucified in many churches for this!”

And still the comedy of errors continued. The installation and ordination of the elders and deacons happened out of sequence with the bulletin, perhaps leaving some to wonder if it would happen at all. And then, for me, the pièce de résistance: one of the worship leaders dumped a glass of ice water (hear the clunking cubes) into the baptismal font in preparation for the deacons’ and elders’ renewal of baptismal vows. By now, it felt as though my every sensibility about worship leadership had been assaulted . . . and without anxiety (in others). The pastor didn’t seem phased at all, though there was an accompanying apology for the resultant ice-cold foreheads! 

Holding in my laughter, I finally started to delight in the whole scene and wonder what God was inviting me to see and learn in and through this worship service. At the very least, I was reminded of the creatureliness of every aspect of our existence, including our worship. To attempt to deny, avoid, or overcome our finitude (and all the accompanying limitations, foibles, and accidents) is the sin of overreaching if not idolatry. No, I’m not suggesting that how I learned to lead (and frankly will continue to lead) worship is sinful. But the inability to accept the human fallibility that sometimes becomes very evident even in our worship: that may be idolatry, a confusion and disordering of divine action and human action in our most public form of ecclesial witness. So the next time I’m in a worship like the one I’ve described here, I hope to cringe less and delight more. I hope to hear and worship the Incarnate Word in our midst, that one who, as many a theologian has reminded us, came into this world between urine and feces.