Process Theology

Christ the Lord is Risen today! How do we speak these words in a pluralistic, scientific age? How do we share the resurrection as a global witness in a time in which many suspect any universal religious messages? How do we, as Wendell Barry says, “practice resurrection” without denying our personal and corporate economic uncertainty, the threat of violence on a mass scale, and the realities of global climate change and the end of human life as we know it? Resurrection is not for the faint-hearted; but for people whose stature enables them to affirm life in the midst of death.

In many respects, Good Friday for Christians is like Yom Kippur for Jews: a day of asking forgiveness for one’s sins of the past and promising to lead a better life with the help of divine grace in the future. Yet, beneficial as these rituals of atonement may be for one’s personal spiritual life, they still sometimes raise questions about our ongoing relationship to God. Does God require specific penitential practices as a condition of offering us forgiveness for our sins?

On this day, the liturgical reading of scripture is centered on the solemn proclamation of the Johannine Passion. While the passages from Isaiah and the Psalter and Hebrews of course have their own integrity in their own contexts, on this day, for Christians, they are interpreted in the field of force of John’s account of the crucifixion. Our commentary, therefore, begins with the passage from John.

Let’s be honest. Many progressive and moderate pastors don’t like to preach Good Friday sermons. Good Friday is the low point in Holy Week, especially if you’re not a cross-centered evangelical or have problems with the violence inherent in many traditional atonement theories. There’s nothing to celebrate, the story is predictable (we’ve heard it so many times and seldom discover anything new in it), and we struggle to find alternatives to the popular belief that Jesus was predestined to physically die for our sins, stand in our place, and suffer on our behalf.

It is interesting to note that the people who craft the Lectionary feel free to have a reading from the Gospel of John on the Fifth Sunday in Lent and then again on Easter Sunday but do not do it on Palm Sunday. John is the only Gospel that mentions palms, so it is strange that we do not have here the reading from that Gospel.

The Lenten journey from desert temptation, to Jerusalem, to the Cross is propelled by a dramatic confluence of images between the lections in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament this week. This fifth Sunday in Lent brings an unusually opportune time to read and preach inclusively from all four texts and not just the familiar story line of the gospel text.

There are so many themes that jump at us from the texts this Sunday that one might be tempted to preach a very long sermon taking each text as the point of departure for “mini-sermons.” That, by the way, is one model that could be tried. Have a lay person, a woman preferably since this is Women’s History Month, comment briefly and sing a hymn. Repeat the process four times and you will find that several people will like the pattern and might want you to repeat it. You might consider just a “triptych” selecting three out of the four texts for this Sunday.

Both of these passages offer rich fare for preaching. I will comment only on one point. What does Paul mean when he writes to the Corinthians that he no longer views people "according to the flesh" or "from a human point of view"? Does he offer us a way of being in the world to which we should respond? Or is his vision illusory and even dangerous? For Paul, conversion meant putting on a new pair of glasses. He had earlier lived in a world from which God was largely absent, a world that hoped for a great change with the coming of the Messiah.

The readings for this Sunday are a virtual goldmine of texts expressing the related themes of the grace of God, forgiveness, and reconciliation. The passage from 2 Corinthians celebrates the new creation in which those in Christ participate and proclaims the divine-human reconciliation effected through Christ. Psalm 32 celebrates the joy of one whose sins are forgiven (vv. 1-2, 7, 11), contrasting the spiritual uplift that genuine confession brings (v.5) with the burdensome weight of sin (v.

If we look for a common thread in the readings for the third Sunday in Lent, that thread seems to be the judgment and the mercy of the Lord. This was a major point of contention when the Christian way, the following of Jesus, was taking shape in the Second Century of the Common Era. In the middle of this century the “Christian” congregations were divided down the middle over whether God was merciful or whether God was both merciful and judgmental.