Well, good morning. Since it’s Lent, it’s appropriate for me to begin with a confession. And I have to confess that one of the first things I do when I sit down here on Sunday morning is open the bulletin to look to see who’s preaching. So we’re going to have to muddle through the best we can today, and trust that somehow God is sufficient. Right?

As some of you know, I have the privilege of working with the international office of World Vision. I work with our international president. And I have the rather daunting responsibility of how we serve as a Christian organization. What difference does our faith work for how we work in the 97 countries where we serve with the 40,000 staff that we have, and probably 50 million people with whom we have the privilege of walking?

And it’s an extraordinary privilege. It means that I get to see expressions of the depth of human misery on a monthly basis while living here in Queen Anne. And the contrast of the absolute beauty of the miracles God works through people. And to hold all of that together.

Recently – well, a few years ago – while I was meeting with our staff in Israel and Palestine, I got up early one morning. I was staying in a guest house on the Mt of Olives. And I thought, early in the morning before the city stirs, I’d go into Jerusalem.

So I walked down through the Garden of Gethsemane, through the Kidron Valley up the slopes to the walls of the Old City, and into the Old City. And the city was just waking up. The shop keepers were opening their stores. Merchants were starting to put out their wares. Housewives were coming to get produce. Men were going to the coffee shops to get their early morning cups of coffee. The city was coming alive.

And as I was walking along these streets, as people were out buying and selling and shopping and hawking and chatting and wandering, I suddenly realized I was walking up the Via Dolorosa. I was walking up the street along which our Lord carried the cross. And it was just like any other street in Jerusalem. And it occurred to me that it was probably just like that day. People were buying and selling and shopping and seeking and wandering and looking. And along comes this little processional that interrupts their day slightly. A slight annoyance in an otherwise normal day.

And it occurred to me that’s probably not so unlike me. It’s so easy for me to allow God to walk past me and not even notice. It’s so easy for me to live as if God were irrelevant, disengaged, uninvolved, not present. And to miss it. It’s easy for me foolishly to think that life depends on me. That it’s all up to me. It’s all up to us. How striking that Jesus bore our sins, carried our sorrows, walked with the world’s grief in his own heart without our even knowing it. Without our even noticing it.

And Lent is that time where we say “Lord, I want to notice.” I want to watch. I don’t want to just allow you to drift past with me uninvolved, or unaware. But rather during these 40 days of Lent I want to walk with you. I want to walk your way.

And so over the course of the next weeks, as we prepare for Good Friday and Easter, we as a church are choosing to walk the way of Jesus. Our sermons will focus on what the church has called the “Stations of the Cross,” or Dan’s version of them actually…a modified Stations of the Cross, where we can intentionally focus on different moments of the last week of our Lord’s life and say, “Lord, make me aware. Make me attentive. Help me to walk with You.”

Today we have the gift of being with our Lord in one of the most mysterious passages for me in all of Scripture – our Lord’s encounter in the Garden of Gethsemane. Now I’ll warn you before we read this passage that the disciples slept through the whole event. So if you feel the compulsion to sleep during the next half hour, you’re simply walking in the way of the disciples. But if you’re able, would you stand with me as we listen for the Word of God.

Reading: Luke 22:39-46

I do think that this passage is laden with mystery, isn’t it? And you read it in Matthew and Mark and the other versions (and they have a much longer version of it), and you’ve got the drama enacted more and more in Matthew and Mark each time Jesus turns to the disciples and says, “Pray with me. Watch with me.” And he goes off and prays by himself and three times he comes back and they’re sound asleep. Asleep because of their grief, the passage says.

What’s going on here? I think if we can enter into this passage, we enter into the staggering mystery of the nature of our Lord and what happens in the incarnation and his death. As profoundly as any other passage in scripture, I think we see the meaning of our Lord’s life here. It’s in our flesh, in our name, in our frail humanity that Jesus bore the full weight of our brokenness; that he chose to bear the full weight of our brokenness. Not just so that we would be forgiven, but so we’d be different. So we could participate in the full glory of His divine humanity. The disciples slept through the whole deal. Verse 45 (says), “They stayed asleep and missed it.”

Jesus asked the disciples to stay awake and to pray, but they couldn’t. What happens to us when this happens to us? When this happens to us I think we risk wandering through life with an inadequate picture of our Lord. We miss out on seeing something quite staggering. We miss out on seeing the very tears of God.

Right above the Garden of Gethsemane is my favorite church in the Holy Land. It’s called “Dominus Flevit.” It’s a church built just above the Garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in the shape of a teardrop. [And I’d wanted to have on the cover of our bulletin today the view from that church but it didn’t work.] And you look through the window of that church, and the window’s shaped like a teardrop. And you look out onto the old city of Jerusalem and you see the Dome of the Rock, you see the Al Aqsa Mosque, you see the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, you see the Wall. And it’s the place where Jesus wept over Jerusalem.

There’s so much that puts us to sleep, isn’t there? The disciples were put to sleep by grief, this passage says. Sometimes we are put to sleep in grief. Grief anaesthetizes us to being aware of the presence of God. Grief makes us feel like God is absent, God has abandoned us, God is not present, God is not faithful, God didn’t protect. Loneliness, fear, a bad experience with Christians, a bad experience with the church. There are all sorts of things that put us to sleep, aren’t there? That make it hard for us to believe that God is indeed here among us, present, carrying our grief and our sin and our shame and our brokenness.

At the heart of Gethsemane is the shocking scandal that Jesus chose a surprising way to deal with evil. There was sin. There was sorrow. There was suffering.

We want a full on assault, don’t we? We want a surge. We want swords. We want to cut off the ears of our adversaries like the disciples did after they woke up. We want God to call down the heavenly host and annihilate the opposition. That’s what we want. We want that kind of God, quite frankly, and it’s frustrating at times – isn’t it – that we don’t have that kind.

Is it? If we realized that the line of good and evil goes within our own hearts and not just within the hearts of others, then maybe we’re a little more cautious about wanting God to call down the fires of heaven on evil. We want a God who exercises enemy annihilating power.

Last month I was in the Philippines and I had the privilege of meeting with a Catholic privilege in the south of the Philippines – Father Bart, and amazing man. During the military dictatorship under the Marcos regime, he was a young priest working with the poor on an island in the southern Philippines. And he just got very frustrated at the regime, at the suffering of the poor, at the apparent impotence of God to deal with it. And after 8 years of being a parish priest in the slum area and seeing nothing happen, he had decided he was going to leave the priesthood, take up arms and join the guerilla movement - that the only thing that would deal with Marcos was not his prayers as a priest but a fisticuff.

And he decided as a last act that he would take a retreat and he went to a convent run by a group of sisters and did a silent retreat for 5 days. And during that retreat, he felt confirmed. He didn’t believe anything. He didn’t believe in the faithfulness of God, in the trustfulness of God. He hadn’t seen God walk by in this slum. And so he was going to join the guerillas.

The sisters asked him if that Sunday he would lead mass. And he thought, “This is a little strange. I don’t believe any of this. But these sisters have been very nice to me and they haven’t had a priest come lead mass for months.” And so he accommodated them and I agreed that he would.

He was looking at the scriptures in preparing for mass; looking at the scriptures for that day. And it suddenly dawned on him it was Pentecost. And he says that as he was lifting up the elements in the mass, consecrating them before the Lord, the Holy Spirit fell upon him. And he started speaking in tongues. And it changed his life.

God, through Father Bart now has transformed that entire island. There are thousands of kids in school. There’s a lay order that has 450 members that have taken a very serious vow to address poverty. There are schools and clinics and vocational training programs. That community has planted 1.8 million trees on this island that had been completely deforested. The island looks different because on Pentecost Sunday, the Spirit fell on one priest, and he decided to take up a different kind of arms. The arms of the Spirit of God.

In the Garden, Jesus chose to bear a different kind of response to sin and evil and injustice and suffering. He chose even to bear our own lack of faith, our own incapacity to believe. Our questioning about the goodness of God. He bore our being seduced into sleep. He bore our being tempted to take life into our own hands - If anything’s going to be fixed here, I’ve got to fix it. He bore even our false notion of prayer where we tragically say to one another, “Pray as if everything depended on God and work as if everything depended on you.”

What a tragic notion of prayer, as if anything could possibly depend on us. Rather we pray and work with the recognition that everything depends on God and God’s strength is made perfect in my weakness. Right? That God works through me. That’s how God chooses to work. Through a Catholic priest whose abandoned all faith and is about to take up a (word).

God chooses to work. God is not bound by any weakness. That’s what we see in the Garden. We see this extraordinary capacity of God to take upon God’s self, clothed in human flesh, all our sorrow, all our unbelief, all our grief, all our sin. And so twice in this passage Jesus says to the disciples, “Pray you don’t come into temptation.”

And what is the temptation about which we’re to pray we don’t come into? I think our deepest temptation is to distrust the sovereign goodness of God. I think our deepest temptation is to live as if God weren’t here. Is to live as if God were not faithful. To live as if we were God-forsaken, and so we forsake God. That’s our deepest…that’s the temptation behind all other temptations…behind greed, behind pride, behind lust, behind all the other deadly sins. That’s the one behind it all. Is not trusting that God’s here. To sleep while God acts.

God can be trusted with the depth of my need and the depth of the world’s malaise. So we need not walk through life as if we were alone, on our own, and it’s up to me. When we don’t believe in the trustworthiness of God, we are indeed tempted to take up the sword and cut off ears, aren’t we? It may be a verbal sword, it may be a relational sword. There are lots of other ways we become convinced that the only way we can make it through here is if we protect ourselves, defend ourselves, assert ourselves, establish our own place. No one else is going to, and if I don’t it won’t happen. And so we cut off ears and Jesus has to come along behind us, healing.

We encounter here, in a quite extraordinary way, the tears of God. We encounter here the God who can be trusted with the depths of our need. Redeeming world-changing power, hidden in apparent weakness. “Father,” Jesus prays, “If it be possible let this cup pass from me.”

What’s the cup?

I don’t think it’s merely the cup of death. We’re all going to die. Jesus wasn’t simply afraid of dying. Nor was it even, I think, the cup of suffering – though Jesus was about to die and was choosing to die a hideous death. There are many people in the world who die equally if not more hideous deaths. So it wasn’t even the hideousness of the torture he was to experience. It’s not that that caused Jesus to sweat drops of blood. Nor was it simply, I don’t think, the punishment of Jesus on our behalf by the Father…as if somehow the justice of the Father required that He smash something. And so we attribute to God the Father qualities that we would not admire in a mediocre human father.

I don’t think those were the contents of the cup. It wasn’t just the cup of death. Nor was it just the cup of God’s wrath misunderstood as God’s anger. But it was the cup of tears.

Psalm 56 in this passage – this extraordinary Psalm. “I have kept your tears in the cup.” God has gathered all the tears of humankind. God has gathered all the tears of the holocaust. All the tears of the 50 million people who died in World War II. All the tears of the 10 million people who died in Africa’s World War – this Great Lengths War - of the past decade that still isn’t over in Burundi and Rwanda and Uganda and Congo.

God has gathered all those tears. God has gathered the tears of father who has left the house, of a broken home, of a divorced, of a child crying themselves to sleep at night because of loneliness or fear. God has gathered the tears of cancer. God has gathered the tears of unemployment and the incapacity to find a job that will provide. God has gathered all those tears in a cup, the psalmist says. And it’s that cup that Jesus drank.

“Lord, let this cup pass. I don’t think I can handle taking into my own life the full scope of human suffering. All the tears of all the people shed all over time. Oh Lord, I can’t take that. Let it pass. But not my will. Thine will be done.”

Jesus chose in the Garden to drink, to drink dry, to drink to the full the fullest scope of human suffering and sorrow and sin and grief. Lent is a time for us to wake up and not sleep through that. Lent is a time for us to notice. Lent is a time for us to journey with that and realize that a far better set of shoulders has borne the suffering of my own heart and home – let alone world – than mine could ever.

Jesus drank all the agony, all the sorrow, all the sin, all the tears of humankind that God had saved in a cup. Every death, every abuse, every lonely night, every divorce, every act of violence, every cancer. Jesus was choosing in the garden to drink it dry. Not my will, but Thy will. I will drink this cup of tears – the world’s tears, God’s tears – pour it out on me. Pour it out in me. Pour it out through me.

Now, for us, our places of tears actually become - rather than an expression or experience of God-forsakenness – a place of God communion; it’s a place where we meet. Because Jesus is no stranger to any tear. Jesus is not absent in any agony, but rather He is choosing in the garden to say, “I will drink this. I will take all the consequences of human sin, suman suffering, human evil, demonic evil, structural injustice. You name it, I’ll take it. Pour it out on me.”

Tonight, I fly to the Dominican Republic. We’re bringing out our senior leaders – both in our long-term development work in Haiti as well as our relief work – for 3 days of planning, of retreat, to strategize for our short-term response over the next three years to the catastrophe in Haiti. We’ve been there for 25 years. We have 800 staff. We’ve brought in a hundred relief staff to respond to the crisis. And we’re just bringing them out for a chance of reflection and prayer and discernment – “Lord, what would you have us do and be over the next 3 years in Haiti?”

And so, like you, I’ve thought a lot about Haiti in the past month. Where’s God? Is this an act of God? Is this an act of God’s judgment? Is this God pouring out God’s wrath on Haiti? Is this all the things we’ve heard the preachers and the pundants offer as their commentary on this catastrophe – right?

And yet, like you, I’ve been stunned by the capacity that even Anderson Cooper and other people in the media couldn’t avoid reporting, or the Haitian’s capacity to sing in the midst of their sorrow; to pray in the midst of their pain; to dance even in their difficulties; to share in spite of their scarcity.

What is it? What’s going on here? Is this merely the faith of the naïve? Is this merely the trust of the desperate? Is this merely those who have no other option – nowhere else to go so they will believe? Is it the submission of the utterly subjugated – they’re so pressed down they just keep on submitting? Is that it?

They could have rioted and the media looked hard to find examples of riots, didn’t they? And every little hint of an act of violence the media was quick to pounce on, but they really had to hunt. Because they just plain weren’t there in the extent that they would have been (frankly) if they’d happened in Seattle.

How would we live when we felt utterly betrayed? You look at the 200 year history of Haiti. The first slave colony that won its independence after a 14 year war in 1804. And so how did the world respond to the independence of the slave state? It launched a 115 year embargo on Haiti. Out of its 200 years, it’s had 115 years in a trade embargo. Initially the United States, France, Spain, Europe didn’t want other slaves to get the idea, so we had a multiple decade embargo on Haiti so they couldn’t trade.

France finally decided after bringing the leader of this slave rebellion to France to sign a peace accord. Napoleon imprisoned him and then had him killed. But then they decided after about 20 more years of embargo that they would acknowledge the existence of Hait iif Haiti would pay reparations for the loss of property that French colonialists had experienced. Not only the infrastructure that they built, but the slaves that they’d owned.

So over the next 115 years, Haiti paid to France the equivalent of $20 billion in contemporary currency - 70% of their GDP paid in reparations to France.

We don’t hear that in the media, do we? We hear about voodoo…that maybe it was voodoo that caused the poverty, maybe it was government corruption - the Duvaliers who were US-supported dictators because we didn’t want communists so close to the United States.

The Duvaliers banked in Switzerland $500 million of Foreign Aid - $50 million of that would have provided clean water for everybody in Haiti, $60 million of it would have provided universal literacy, $15 of it would have built roads.

Why is Haiti poor? Well, there are lots of reasons (for) why Haiti is poor, aren’t there? And Jesus bore that. And the Haitians know that. They believed that, and so they allowed the betrayals that they’ve experienced to be a participation in the betrayal of our Lord. And they allow it to be a place of communion. And so they sing and they dance and they share and they don’t take up swords, and they don’t cut off ears. But they worship.

We encounter in the Garden this absolutely staggeringly trustworthy intersection of divine power and human misery in a most extraordinary way. And so Jesus says to us, “Come with me. Come with me.” Come with me this Lent into the Garden and watch as I choose to bear your sorrow. And even your faithlessness.

Come and watch with me as I choose to bear your temptation to disbelieve and to distrust and to act as if you were on your own. I believe on your behalf, I trust on your behalf, I resist temptation on your behalf, I forgive all the perpetrators of your sorrow and suffering on your behalf. All of them. All the times you or others have denied, have betrayed, have distrusted, have disbelieved, have broken the most intimate of human covenants and agreements, have shattered trust… I have borne all of that. I’ve carried all your small and even what may feel like great “no’s,” all the times that you’ve said “no” or heard “no," so that a sovereign and a good “yes” could resound through your lives.

Jesus drank this cup filled with tears that we might drink a cup filled with life. Therefore tears become a place of communion with God rather than a place where God is absent.

Last month, Carrie and I were in Burundi in East Africa. We had the privilege of meeting probably the most remarkable human being I think I’ve ever met in my life. Her name is Maggie. She’s about 55 years old. During when the genocide broke out in Burundi, we hear about the Rwandan genocide, but 4 times as many people have died in Burundi in their genocide than Rwanda.

But in 1993 when it broke out, she was working in the bishop’s headquarters in her area, and her cousins – she was Tutsi…most of the other bishops were priests and nuns and the people in this office were all Hutu…and her cousins, who were Tutsi, came to kill all the Hutus with whom she was working. She tried to stop them. She couldn’t. They stripped her naked and forced her to kneel while and watch while they killed 70 people. Her cousins!

And after they had left, she buried their bodies. And she said, “As I wept, watching this murder, I encountered in my own tears the tears of Jesus.” And she said, “Instead of my heart being filled with hate, I just felt my heart overflowing with love.”

In the seventeen years since, Maggie has created homes for 30,000 orphans from the genocide. Thirty thousand! She’s known as the first lady of Burundi. She has a diplomatic passport. She speaks at the United Nations. But she has started schools and hospitals and … 30,000 orphans in group homes, foster homes…because, as she knelt and experienced the tears of Jesus the love of God was poured out of her heart.

There is no sin, no sorrow, no suffering that our Lord has not carried. Lord, I will drink this cup.

So in this chapel, Dominus Flevit, this little church above the garden of Gethsamane; this church where Jesus wept…it’s the only religious building that I know in the world that is dedicated to the tears of God. Quite striking, isn’t it, that in the Gospel we encounter a God who weeps, a God who has carried all our tears?

And now, a God who says, “Let me, by My Holy Spirit, create in you…create in your hearts a cathedral where we can commune in tears. Let your heart be this place of worshipping me in tears and encountering there the depth of my love; to be a place where we can commune with a God who bears all suffering and there, our own and the world’s deepest sorrows get transformed by the love of God.

For the joy set before him, Jesus endured. For the joy set before him, Jesus said, “I’ll drink this cup.” Jesus drank our cup of tears that we might drink his cup of life. And so we come to the Lord’s Table. We come to the table where we can drink fully in this cup of our Lord, the life of our Lord.

Let’s come to the table.