Jesus the Lens—September 20, 2024

Jesus the Lens—September 20, 2024

“Then [Jesus] began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again. He said all this quite openly. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. But turning and looking at his disciples, he rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things’.” [Mark 8:31-33]

Maybe it’s not that there are only certain topics that count as “spiritual” things or “divine things.” Maybe it’s a question of perspective—of whether we see things from a crassly temporal perspective, or from the vantage point of the Reign of God. Maybe in the end, everything in heaven and earth matters to God, but it’s a question of the way we make sense of everything in heaven and earth. Maybe it’s a question of whether we will dare to let Jesus become the lens through which we see everything else, so that Jesus’ way of engaging the world will become our way, too.

I think that’s the way that we have to hear this snippet of conversation between Jesus and his disciples, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship. Simon Peter (God love him) has just blurted out his “eureka” moment realization about Jesus: “You are the Messiah!” and Jesus has immediately told the whole room full of disciples not to breathe a word of that to anybody. Jesus’ reason is not that Peter is wrong, exactly, but that everybody is going to mishear the title “Messiah” as some kind of conquering king, commanding general, or a militia leader looking to violently take up weapons against Rome and “take their country back for God” or some other such nonsense. And of course, Jesus has come to be precisely none of those. So he tells his disciples as much: he intends, not to go kill his enemies, but to love them; not to crucify his opponents, but to be crucified by them; not to launch a project of restoring national “greatness” (whatever that might mean) but to embody God’s Reign of justice, mercy, and peace.

That’s the part that doesn’t go over well. Jesus’ disciples are looking for someone to fight the empire on the empire’s terms, and someone who will promise them power, status, wealth, and glory. And instead, Jesus says that his way of being God’s anointed is to be the one who bears a cross rather than the one holding the hammer and nails.

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t care about this world or the people in it. And it’s not that Jesus is merely “neutral” on the subject of the Empire. So it’s not so much that Jesus doesn’t have opinions that would have counted as “political” in the first-century, but rather that Jesus’ perspective—his way of engaging those things—doesn’t translate into either “siding with the Empire” or “raising up and army to fight the Empire.” Jesus hasn’t come to replace Caesar’s brutal regime with a new brutal regime of his own, or to switching out conquering centurions from Rome with an army of his own making. He has come to resist that whole way of thinking, regardless of whose title is on the letterhead. Jesus’ perspective is divine, but he very much cares about the troubles, sufferings, and needs of human life. He’s just not willing to sell out or get suckered into using the world’s usual tolls for dealing with those troubles.

I think we need to be clear about that--Jesus does care about the whole mess of human life, including the ordinary and mundane routines, the issues of the marketplace and the public square, the concerns of politics and economics, and the everyday slings and arrows we deal with. Jesus doesn’t only care about getting souls “up to heaven,” or else he wouldn’t have spent any time or effort healing sickness, forgiving sinners, welcoming outcasts, or feeding the multitudes. Jesus cares about the way the widows of Judea were being exploited and pushed out of their homes, or the way xenophobia and prejudice had turned his own people into bigots against Samaritans (or, gasp, Gentiles!), or the way the Empire oppressed the peoples it conquered and compelled them to carry their gear or pay ridiculous tribute in “taxes.” Jesus knows about all of those ills in his world, and he clearly cares about the people who suffer in the face of any and all of them. But the critical difference is that he knows that starting a war against Rome would be a meaningless tool to solve those problems. He knows that conquering his adversaries (as people expected the Messiah to do) wasn’t a radical enough solution. 

It’s not that Jesus only cared about lofty spiritual ideals about disembodied souls floating in the sky by and by.  It's that he cares about everything—and he sees it from a divine perspective, rather than the limited human vantage point that reduces everything to a Game-of-Thrones style power play. Everything matters to Jesus—it’s just that his way of seeing and addressing the needs of the world come through self-giving love rather than some misguided need to look “tough,” “strong,” or like a “winner.” That's the difference between setting your mind on "human things" and setting it on "divine things." It's not that Jesus only cares about "churchy" topics; it's that Jesus sees everything through the lens of God's self-giving love.

To be a Christian, then, following on the way of Jesus, doesn't mean that we stop having opinions or thoughts about "secular" topics in favor of spending all our time and though on "religious" subjects.  It means that we come to see all of life through the perspective of Jesus. 

That's the invitation for us today: to see the world more and more completely from the vantage point Jesus gives us. What could that look like today?  What could that do to our vision?

Lord Jesus, set our minds on your perspective, and let us see the world through your eyes.

Looking for Losers--September 19, 2024

Looking for Losers--September 19, 2024

"[Jesus] called the crowd with his disciples, and said to them, 'If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life?" [Mark 8:34-37]

One day I will have been forgotten.

All my accomplishments (whatever they will have been), all my accolades, all the beautifully lettered diplomas, all the money I have ever made, all the work I have ever done, and all the objects I have had in my possession--they will one day all be tossed unceremoniously into the dustbin of history.

The synapses in my brain, these amazing neurological connections in my cerebral cortex that store my memories, experiences, and thoughts, they will one day have degraded like an old VHS tape that was kept too close to the refrigerator magnets. Even the molecules that make up my body will one day have stopped being "me" and become soil... maybe to be reorganized into grass, or, if I am lucky, a dandelion.

One day, all the things I thought were triumphs--my best ideas, my greatest labors, my biggest wins--will have all been forgotten... lost to the great forgettery of death.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but one day, the same will be true of you and all the things on your résumé, too.

One day, your promotions will have been forgotten, and no one will remember any longer who it was that held your position once upon a time. One day, no one will be around on God's green earth who remembers the moments we think now are etched in stone forever.  The great tombs of the pharaohs all got looted, and the grand monuments chiseled in marble from empires past get plundered or crumble to gravel in time. None of it lasts, and all of it gets lost... eventually.

One day, America will have been forgotten, the same way the Hapsburg dynasty, the Ottoman Empire, and the Holy Roman Empire have all become answers to trivia questions rather than the immortal, eternal things they once pretended they were.

One day, the bank that houses your money will be gone... and the money you have worked so hard for in your years will be worthless, all just tattered rectangles of paper.

One day, we will all have been forgotten.

Now, if all of this seems rather bleak, bear with me. This might seem like a downer of a message, but I think more, rather, it is a clarifying bit of honesty. It is the bulldozer grading and leveling the ground so that something new and right can be built. It is the starting point if we are going to have any hope of understanding the way Jesus achieves victory.

That turns out to be a surprising answer, because Jesus' way of attaining victory doesn't look like what the world calls "winning." God's kind of victory, in fact, looks like loss. A particularly shameful loss at that, too--an execution as an enemy of the state, green-lit by the respectable religious folks. All of that is to say that God's kind of victory... is a cross.

Now, Jesus takes that upside-down victory, and he sees it not just as a fluke or some kind of cosmic exception to the rule, as if God's usual way of ruling is to get bigger armies, larger piles of money, or grander displays of pomp and power, and the cross is just a random outlier. No, not at all. Jesus sees that the surrender and loss we see in the cross are in fact God's calling card, and they are meant to be our way of life, if we are going to dare to follow God's Messiah, Jesus. In order to share in God's upside-down victory, we will be called to let go of the nonsense that the world around us thinks makes us look like "winners." Jesus is only looking for losers, it turns out.

Jesus calls us to see today the difficult truth that all our stuff, our accomplishments, and all our marks left on the world will be lost one day, no matter what. You can either let go of caring about them now... or you can clutch onto your stuff, your achievements, and your (appearance of) control to your last breath, and still have all of those things lost to the trash heap and the burn pile of history. You can either fight and claw to try and preserve your own importance, your own nest-egg, your own control over your world, and your own achievements, only to find that the world forgets us faster than we can keep chirping in to toot our own horns... or you can let go of that whole foolish enterprise and lose yourself now.

As an old line of Jon Foreman's goes, "There's just two ways to lose yourself in this life... and neither way is safe." He means that you can either clutch onto your self-importance and the illusion of security in this life... only to have the rug yanked out from under you at some point and to feel the loss of it then, or you can lose yourself now to Jesus and his way of self-giving love, and be a part of the adventure of all time.

But there is no way of keeping a permanent grip on the things the world and its many bully-pulpit-puppets think make you a success or a "winner." Those puppet voices say that success in business is all that matters, that building yourself a nice comfortable (insulated and isolated) life is the measure of success, and that if you want to be remembered forever, eternally etched into history's record, you only have to win... and keep winning.

Jesus says differently. Jesus says, "Not to put too fine a point on it, but anybody who says you can have a lasting legacy built on your own record of achievement and wins is either a complete fool or a corrupt liar. All of those things will be forgotten one day." Or, as Mark's Gospel puts it, "What profit do you get if you gain the whole world but have lost the whole point of life?"

So Jesus invites us today to do one thing: to lose. To lose big. To lose daily. Jesus calls us to lose our old idols of power and success. Jesus calls us to lose our old agendas that put "me-and-my-group first!" Jesus calls us to lose the illusion of needing to be "great." Jesus calls us to lose our old, well-worn familiar hates. Jesus calls us to lose our out-of-whack priorities. Jesus calls us to lose, in a word, ourselves... and in letting go of ourselves, to find the only life that really is life. 

Look what happens when I quit worrying about my immediate comfort and appearance, and go where Jesus leads! Look how I could be a part of the one thing that really will last forever--the Reign of God! And you can, too! Everything else in this universe will be forgotten in enough of the mists of history... but the Gospel holds out the good news of a God who remembers us... and calls us by name.

There is only more qualifier: we only have to lose.  Jesus, after all, is looking for losers.

Lord Jesus, help us to be ready to lose it all for you... and to find that we have been given it all in the very same moment.

 

Like Our Namesake--September 18, 2024

Like Our Namesake--September 18, 2024

"The Lord GOD has given me the tongue of a teacher,

that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.

Morning by morning he wakens--

wakens my ear to listen as though who are taught.

The Lord GOD has opened my ear,

and I was not rebellious,

I did not turn backward.

I gave my back to those who struck me,

and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;

I did not hide my face

from insult and spitting." [Isaiah 50:4-9]

So, truth in advertising, as a native of the Cleveland area, I grew up both rooting for--and often being perplexed by--the Cleveland Browns. (If the Lion, Bengals, or Steelers loyalists among those who read this cannot in good conscience allow their eyes to view anything that suggests learning something positive from the Browns, consider this your warning.) My complicated relationship with my hometown football team was, of course, sometimes from the fact that they so often managed to rip defeat from the jaws of victory in new and heartbreaking ways, but also it came from my hang-up about their name.

As a kid, I just assumed the name of the team came from the color brown, which was in the color scheme of their uniforms and went with the orange color of the team helmet and logo. And basically, I figured the color uniforms came first (like the Chicago White Sox or Boston Red Sox), maybe by random chance, and then that the name stuck after that.

Turns out, of course, I was wrong. As you may already well know, and as an older me learned, the name wasn't chosen at random just because of the coincidental color of the jerseys, but because of the team's founding coach, Paul Brown. During Brown's tenure with the Cleveland team, they won four championships in the All-American Football Conference (in the days before there were Super Bowls), and his legacy was important enough that the team kept the name, the color, and all the rest (including occasional mascot "Brownie the Elf"--because, of course). All of that is to say that the name for the team turns out not to be just a fluke or an accident of history, but was directly connected to the man who first created and coached the team. What might have at first seemed just incidental about their identity turns out to have been deeply rooted in their founder and leader, and who he was.  The team was his namesake, and therefore took its identity of the legacy of his leadership.

I know this seems a strange place to start a reflection on words from the Bible (although I still maintain that rooting for a perpetual underdog like the Cleveland Browns is good for the soul), but I'm going to ask you to follow me for a moment and see the method to my madness. In a passage like this one from the book of Isaiah, which many of us heard read this past Sunday in worship, we get a picture that the church has consistently understood in light of Jesus. That is to say, even if the prophet himself wasn't picturing Jesus yet when he spoke these words, in hindsight we can look back and better understand Jesus through these words. And here the prophet speaks of someone who does not answer evil with evil, but rather bears the insults and mockery of others without retaliation... but rather with love. He doesn't stop to defend his honor, his reputation, his perceived "greatness" in the world, but rather bears the worst his enemies can do to him, and endures--without "turning backward" or giving way to hatred in return. This figure, this "servant" figure whom Isaiah's later chapters spends some time talking about, does not return abuse for abuse or cruelty with cruelty, but bears it with suffering love.  That is the servant's way--and, as Isaiah 50 tells it, it is God's way as well.

And the more I think about it, the more it becomes clear to me that this was the key to the identity of Jesus' followers, not just an incidental or accidental quirk of history. The first followers of Jesus were deeply committed to not answering evil with evil, not retaliating when they were harassed, not giving into the trolls of their world, and not being baited into hatred--and they did this, not as a random fluke, but because they understood it was at the core of Jesus' own identity. Like the team I grew up rooting for, the early Christians formed their identity around the person of their founder and leader--Jesus himself. And because their namesake, Jesus the Christ, had not only taught them not to return evil for evil, but had shown it to them as well in his own trial and torture by the empire, the early church made this into their own identity as well. The Browns took their name, not from a color chosen at random, but from the name of their founding coach who led them to early victories.  And the early church took its cues about refusing to answer evil with evil, not by accident, but directly from the way of Jesus himself, the one who had first called them and who won THE victory over the powers of death and evil through his suffering love.  That was Jesus' way... and so it became the way of life for the followers of Jesus.

The question, perhaps for us, all these centuries later, is whether we dare to let the way of Jesus still be central to our own identity even now. It is terribly easy to get baited into hating people... or feeling like you have to get the "last word" in some petty internet argument... or to be suckered into somebody else's bitterness because they were spoiling for a fight and just like to stir the pot. Lots of folks do all those things... lots of folks who claim in front of the world that they are followers of Jesus, too (by their cross-marked ball caps, religiously themed bumper stickers, and social media profile photos)... but our actions and attitudes reveal something different. We so easily want to keep the name "Christian" without actually living out the legacy of the "Christ" for whom we are named. We so easily want to lash back out at the people we have been taught to think have aggrieved us, when maybe the problem is our own insecurity, rather than actual persecution. (Not to push the metaphor too far, but there was a time in Browns history when the team literally sold out and moved to another city, and the franchise changed its name and let go of the old connection to the man Paul Brown--and sometimes we Christians have done the same, too.)

This is a moment, then, to reclaim the legacy that's been given to us. At the core of Jesus' being was his commitment to answer hatred with love, evil with good, violence with endurance, and rottenness with truthfulness and justice. That wasn't just a random trait of his, but central to Jesus' understanding that God's love doesn't ultimately answer evil with more evil, and that God's love includes even those who have made themselves enemies of God. For us, then, who want to be on Jesus' team, we are called to walk in that legacy--not simply to wear Jesus' name casually, but to let his identity shape our own.

There was a time when anybody who saw the Cleveland football team, heard them on the radio, or even caught a mention of them in the paper would be led to think about their founder and namesake, Paul Brown himself. Well, maybe today is a day for people to see a connection between Christ Jesus and us, we who bear the name "Christian," in the ways we love. We don't have to be the ones known for picking fights on social media. We don't have to be known for bigotry against anybody who is different. We don't have to be known for have such insecurity issues that we feel we have to fight back every time we feel slighted. No, all those can be left behind or pitched into the dumpster. We are called to be people whose very lives point to Jesus--so that people will see us, and catch a glimpse of our source, our guide, and our namesake, Jesus the Christ.

Lord Jesus, let your way of loving even your enemies become our way--let it become our hallmark in the world.

Made for Blessing--September 17, 2024

Made for Blessing--September 17, 2024

"From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so. Does a spring pour forth from the same opening both fresh and brackish water? Can a fig tree, my brothers and sisters, yield olives, or a grapevine figs? No more can salt water yield fresh." [James 3:10-12]

We weren't made for hate. 

We weren't created to rip each other apart with cruelty and cursing.

We were not intended to spew meanness and crudeness at other people.

God formed us for love, all around--with God, and with our neighbors--and fashioned us with the power of communication so that we could live in healthy and holy relationships with them all.  We were made for blessing--to bless one another with our words, and to bless and praise the God who made us.

There is something truly beautiful about that vision, and these verses from James (which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship) help us to see just how much we have lost by giving into the impulse to speak hatefully and spitefully to one another.  He reminds us that God's intention for humanity has always been that we would use this God-given gift of language for good.  We are the ones who have found ways to weaponize words, to mislead each other, to deceive each other, to hurt each other, and to belittle each other in some childish attempt to make ourselves feel bigger by contrast.  But none of that is what God wanted for us--God had a different way of life in mind for us.  And so it's all the more tragic that we use these mouths of ours both to bless and to curse, to heal and to hurt, to speak the truth and to peddle lies.  We weren't meant for this: we were made for blessing.

One of the gifts of James' letter in the New Testament is that he so very clearly captures a glimpse of what that blessed way of life could look like for us.  He shows us what the way of Jesus would mean in our lives, in our speech, in our choices, in our attitudes and actions, if we dared to take Jesus seriously.  And in a sense, he invites us to dream--to use our faithful imaginations to envision lives in which we didn't feel the need to lob petty insults at people when we disagree, in which we didn't need to stir up anger with false or misleading claims that looks for easy scapegoats, and in which we didn't get sucked into comment wars in social media. James' point here is that we don't have to get lured into any of those things.  We are made, to borrow his imagery, to be springs of good and fresh water! There is no reason for bitter salty brine to come from inside us.  

That's just it. There is nothing and no one forcing us to be rotten to each other with our words... other than that we give in to the rotten lie that tells us we have to fight fire with fire. "You have to have a comeback, or you'll look weak!" the thinking goes.   Or something like, "You can't rely on the truth to be enough; you have to create a story that will make people upset and get them on your side!"  Or in our most insecure moments, we get suckered into the "You have to be as crude to them as they were to you or else you'll be a loser!" mindset.  We don't have to give in to any of those impulses, and we do not have to give them power over us.  Jesus certainly didn't, and he gives us a glimpse of what wholeness in humanity could look like in us.  The way Jesus didn't take the bait when the Respectable Religious People or the Politically Powerful People would set traps for him or lob gotcha questions at him--that can be our way, too, of dealing with others.  The way Jesus used words to heal, to encourage, and to forgive--those can be ours as well.  The only question is whether we will dare to take the path that Jesus has laid out for us... which is the very same way of life we were made for in the first place.

Today is a day to take a step, even if it feels only like a single step, further on that way, by paying attention to what we say and how we say it, and by using this wondrous gift of language we human beings have been given in order to speak truth, beauty, encouragement, compassion, and justice into the world.  Like the Switchfoot lyric puts it, "Love is our native tongue."  This is who we were created to be. This is what it looks like to walk the way of Jesus. We were made for blessing.

Lord Jesus, draw from our lips words that reflect your goodness and invoke your blessings on the world you love.

The Power of Our Words--September 16, 2024

The Power of Our Words--September 16, 2024

"For all of us make many mistakes. Anyone who makes no mistakes in speaking is perfect, able to keep the whole body in check with a bridle. If we put bits into the mouths of horses to make them obey us, we guide their whole bodies. Or look at ships: though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire. The tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body, sets on fire the cycle of nature, and is itself set on fire by hell. For every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God." [James 3:2-9]

For people who care about following the way of Jesus, the way we speak matters.

I would hope that much is obvious, but sometimes it is worth just letting the words of Scripture sink in on the subject.  You can tell here in these words from James, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, just how seriously this ancient church leader took matters of speech in the Christian community.  You get the sense that James has seen firsthand the kind of damage that hateful and careless words can do in a community, and he is coming from a place of heartache that is still healing as he writes here.

James is feeling pretty raw here, you can tell. He almost sounds like he's ready to give up hope on us human beings ever using words in a good or healthy way.  The description he gives here is pretty bleak: "the tongue is placed among our members as a world of iniquity; it stains the whole body... and is itself set on fire by hell."  Wow--that's pretty severe!  (I would not recommend James look for work writing greeting cards, to be honest.)  And part of what is so difficult--and so disappointing from James' perspective--is that he's writing to Christians, who (one would hope) should know better than to give into hateful speech, gossip, or rotten language.  James isn't writing to a hypothetical audience of "general citizens" of the Empire, or to people who have never heard of Jesus.  He is writing to followers of Jesus as a leader of a Christian community, and you can hear it in the way he speaks that he has just been gutted before by seeing the damage caused by mean-spirited, deceitful, and hateful language.  Don't try and tell James that words don't matter, or that Christ-followers are free to spew whatever garbage or vitriol they want to out of their mouths--we aren't.  We are bound by the way of Jesus, who uses the power of his words for truth, for healing, and for love. We simply do not have the option of peddling convenient lies that fit our preferred narratives or degrading other people because we don't like them. If we care about walking the way of Jesus, we have to care about the way we use words.

This is one of the things James is painfully clear about, actually: the reason for us not to use hateful or vile speech toward anybody else is that everybody is made in God's image, and is worthy of being treated with decency and dignity because of the value God has placed in them.  That's a really important notion, and it's pretty fundamental to how the Scriptures teach us to think about our speech and about other people.  For the writers of the Bible, the right question is never "Can I get away with saying this?" or, "Don't I have the right to say whatever I want, whether it's true and kind or not?" but rather, "Is this something I ought to be saying to someone who bear's God's image?"  And if we take that question seriously, it really changes what we say, and how we say it.

Of course, as you can tell from James here, this isn't just about matters of etiquette or good manners. James isn't merely worried about Christians being accepted in polite society--he knows that reckless and hateful speech can wound, or even kill.  In our day and our culture, the stakes are terribly obvious--as false rumors about Haitian migrants (who have legal permission to be here) have been amplified (often by people who claim to be followers of Jesus) and in turn have led to threats of bombings, shootings, and other violence in schools, colleges, and offices just a few hours from where I live.  What starts as rumor gets amped up by demagogues into a culture-war talking point, and now we end up with people's lives being threatened--all because people were careless with their words.  We are living in a time when casual and thoughtless speech about one's political opponents gets fanned into real-life violence.  And we're living in a time when the incendiary comments of public figures can easily incident stochastic violence (that is, you can't predict precisely when or where someone will do something terrible, but the provocations from public voices keeps increasing the likelihood that something terrible will happen at some point).  You get the sense that James would take a look at the fear and danger unleashed these days and weep with the sorrow that comes from knowing it didn't have to be this way.

James' point in all of this passage is precisely that--it doesn't have to be this way.  We don't have to use our words as weapons, and we don't have to give into the temptation to dabble in gossip, deceit, or slander (or even just irresponsibly sharing rumors without having facts or the full story) to serve our own agendas.  We don't have to give into the conventional wisdom that the end justifies the means, and that we can invent false stories to suit our purposes at the cost of the well-being of other people who are made in the image of God.  The world's voices will tell us we "have to" play its game and play by its rules, but James reminds us that we don't. Indeed, if we are followers of Jesus, we cannot.

It's worth a second thought today before we click "like" or repost or share or amplify words that reinforce hatred, that slander other people, or that deny the image of God in other people. The watching world--as well as the next generation of disciples--is watching us, and more importantly, listening to us.  James simply reminds us that if we are going to call ourselves followers of Jesus, we cannot ignore the ways our words reflect the way of Jesus, too.

Lord Jesus, direct our words and our thoughts, so that people can heard the cadences of your own voice in us.

A Jesus-Kind Of Struggle--September 13, 2024

A Jesus-Kind of Struggle--September 13, 2024

"Consider him who endured such hostility against himself from sinners, so that you may not grow weary or lose heart. In your struggle against sin you have not yet resisted to the point of shedding your blood." [Hebrews 12:3-4]

Every time I come across this passage in Hebrews, I am brought up short. It astounds me that we seem so out of touch in our age of comfortable, lazy (even lethargic) Christianity from what we so staggeringly obvious to the early generations of Jesus' followers. We seem to have forgotten--either by accident or by willful ignorance--that the first generations of Christians assumed they would be brought into conflict with the powers of the day... and that their way of responding to that conflict would be suffering love, rather than threatening bluster at their would-be persecutors.

Let me just unpack for a moment what the writer of these verses is saying. He starts with Jesus as our example, as if to say, "When you are going through difficult times, or you start to feel like the world is out to get you, remember how Jesus dealt with that, because he is the hallmark. And Jesus not only endured hostility from the lynch mob and the political and religious authorities who strung him up on a cross, but he responded to their hatred with self-giving love." Jesus sets the bar. More than that, he charts out the particular course we, his disciples, are to follow in the world (that fits, too, since just a sentence or two before in Hebrews, Jesus is referred to as the "pioneer" of our faith--like he is the one blazing the trail that we follow in).

And quite simply, Jesus' response to struggles with others was the kind of transforming love that would not answer hate with hate, but even laid his life down for his enemies. Jesus defeats the power of hatred, not with more hatred, but by refusing to accept hatred's terms. Jesus defeats the power of fear, not with his own litany of intimidating threats, but by refusing to be intimidated by the blowhards in authority who say, "Don't you know that I have power to crucify you?" Jesus defeats the power of violence, not by breaking out his own celestial army, but by taking the nails and exposing the ultimate impotence of the killers by rising from the dead. Rather like the famous line of Booker T. Washington, often cited as, "I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him," Jesus simply refuses to accept the terms that evil plays by--and thereby evil is undone.

Now, that much should seem pretty basic theology, like Christianity 101. The beating heart of our faith is that God's greatest victory came, not by sending in angel armies and a conquering hero but as a crucified homeless rabbi who rises from the dead regardless of what the Romans think. As Jim Wallis has eloquently noted, the Romans placed an imperial seal on his tomb (see Matthew 27), so when Jesus rose from the dead and broke the seal, it was an act of civil disobedience against the empire. Resurrection is resistance. And, more than that, it is a resistance that refuses to kill or threaten or even hate the ones who placed the seal on the tomb.  There's no way around it: the way of Jesus will always involve a struggle against hatred, evil, and death--but not one that resorts to using those tactics in the fight.  

But now, notice how the writer to the Hebrews takes that insight and turns it back to us--the people who dare to name the name of Jesus and claim to follow in his footsteps. As soon as he has invoked the example of Jesus, who endured hostility from his opponents, the writer of Hebrews says to his struggling readers, "Look, you all haven't even had to resist to the point of having your blood shed yet! It may come to that, but let's be clear about the lengths Jesus went to in his resistance to evil. Jesus laid down his life--so that's what we should be prepared for as well. And then just as Jesus broke the power of death with his own resurrection, we'll trust that we will be raised up to new life as well."

Look at what the writer of Hebrews takes for granted--that if it comes to a conflict between us and the powers of the day, or us and a hostile society, we will be the ones who offer up our lives, our blood, and our selves, in the name of Christ's love. We will not be the ones shedding blood. We will not be the ones threatening to shed blood. In fact, we will not be holding the tools for killing at all--the writer of Hebrews cannot even fathom that as a possibility. What he sees is that, yes, sometimes, the followers of Jesus will unavoidably run into conflicts with the powers of the day who want us to worship Caesar, bow down to Nebuchadnezzar's statue, or kowtow to Herod. And when those powers demand that we give them their allegiance, we will say, simply, "No." But the writer of Hebrews seems to take it as a given that we will not point a sword or a gun or a drone at anyone back. We will simply say "No," because we are not afraid of what they can do to our bodies, and because we will not let them "degrade our souls" (like Booker T. Washington says) by making us answer their hate with hate, their threats with threats of our own, their violence with ours against them.

This is the really and truly radical thing about the actual New Testament-era Christian community: for at least the first three hundred years of our faith, the default assumption of the Christian faith was that some wicked power or imperial blowhard might try to kill us for our faith in Jesus and his Lordship, and if they did, we would keep on loving Jesus and loving our neighbors, no matter what they threatened or did to us. But we would not kill them or threaten them back. That is not our way--because it is not the way of Jesus. The writer of Hebrews assumes this, because it seems so blatantly obvious to him... and yet we live in a time when folks will often try to pair their Respectable Religiosity with some thought that we have to be able to threaten people back with weapons in case we get cornered.

The mindset goes something like this: "We need to have the tools of violence at the ready in case some tyrannical government starts telling us to do things we don't like! We need to have our swords and guns and whatever else at the ready so that we can resist the voices of tyrants! And if we don't have blades or bullets to beat them back, Christianity will be defeated and destroyed!" The only problem with this way of thinking is... well, everything. It completely forgets that for the first three hundred years, Christianity thrived--it spread like wildfire across the empire, even when it was brutally persecuted by the tyrannical government of the Roman Empire. And for all those generations, Christians were simply taught and trained to understand that their form of holy resistance was to look like Jesus--not killing but laying down their lives, not giving into hatred but responding with self-giving love. This was so obvious to them because they took it seriously that the Christian faith should produce lives that actually look like Jesus' life. So if Jesus' way of dealing with the powers hostile to him was to die at their hands and then rise in resistance against their imperial demands, then our way of practicing holy resistance will be with the same self-giving love. Like Walter Wink says so powerfully, "To have to suffer is different from choosing to suffer.... Martyrs are not victims, overtaken by evil, but hunters who stalk evil into the open by offering as bait their own bodies."

Sometimes you'll hear folks lob an argument that goes, "What will you do if they come for you and you don't have weapons to defend yourself with?" as though they don't really recall that the Christian faith is centered on the actual night in history when they came for Jesus and he refused to use weapons to defend himself, but chose to give his life up both for his followers and for his enemies. Like Jon Foreman sings it, "Love is the rebel song." So, in all seriousness, the answer to "What will you do if they come for you?" for an honest follower of Jesus is, "I will rise."

How does Maya Angelou put it?

"You may shoot me with your words,

You may but me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I'll rise."

That has been our strategy as the followers of Jesus from the beginning. It's just that from time to time--sometimes for many centuries at a time, even--we forget that is how our story goes. We forget what was obvious to the writer of Hebrews: when it comes to the struggle of this life, our resistance to the powers of evil is so deep and radical that it doesn't accept the terms of engagement that evil wants to use. We will resist against the powers of evil, hatred, and violence--but we will do so by offering ourselves up... and then, when they have done their worst, still we shall rise.

The followers of Jesus won't be the ones bearing torches and weapons, but will be the ones bearing the hatred and violence of others and responding with truth-telling love, like Jesus himself. That is to say, love is the shape of our resistance.  It is a struggle, to be sure... but it is a Jesus-kind of struggle.

Lord Jesus, shape our way in the world in the form of your suffering love. Let your cross be our resistance.

Jesus, the Way--September 12, 2024

Jesus, the Way--September 12, 2024

[Jesus said:] "And you know the way to the place where I am going." Thomas said to him, "Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?" Jesus said to him, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, you will know my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him." [John 14:4-7]

Sometimes you have heard a verse from the Bible so many times you assume you already know what it has to say, and that it cannot possibly have anything new to say to you... and so you turn your brain off rather than listening to it. And quite often, that's the very moment we reach for verses to use as weapons, rather than putting our ears and hearts up to them, to let them speak anew.

I think this is one of those times.

I say that because there are LOTS of church folk who know John 14:6 by heart: "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me," and their first instinct is to weaponize it. We Respectable Religious Folks latch onto this language of "The Way and the Truth" and Jesus' line about "no one coming except through me," and it is really easy for us to do a bit of interpretive sleight-of-hand and end up morphing Jesus' sentence into, "Unless you believe the correct facts about me (which we'll call 'The Truth'), you don't get into heaven." And since that line of thinking uses words and phrases from the verse out of the Bible, it's really easy to tell ourselves that MUST be what Jesus is really saying.

But it's not. Jesus doesn't give us a list of correct facts, orthodox propositions, or theses to memorize as our ticket to heaven. And to be honest, he doesn't give us some prescribed ritual, prayer, or method for locking in our spot in the afterlife by signing with him as our Personal-Lord-and-Savior (TM). Instead, Jesus simply offers us himself. He is the Truth we have been looking for. His is the Way we are on. He is the Life in whom we are fully alive. So for whatever else we thought we meant when we picked up John 14:6 and started waving it around like a club, it means this: in the end, the Way and the Truth... is a Person.

I'm reminded of an insight of the late Frederick Buechner along these very same lines and this very same passage. Buechner writes:

"Some think of a Christian as one who necessarily believes certain things. That Jesus was the son of God, say. Or that Mary was a virgin. Or that the Pope is infallible. Or that all other religions are all wrong. Some think of a Christian as one who necessarily does certain things. Such as going to church. Getting baptized. Giving up liquor and tobacco. Reading the Bible. Doing a good deed a day. Some think of a Christian as just a Nice Guy. Jesus said, "I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me." (John 14:6) He didn't say that any particular ethic, doctrine, or religion was the way, the truth, and the life. He said that he was. He didn't say that it was by believing or doing anything in particular that you could "come to the Father." He said that it was only by him—by living, participating in, being caught up by, the way of life that he embodied, that was his way."

And of course, that's just it: in the end, the Way and the Truth isn't so much of a "What" but a "Who"--it is Jesus himself, not simply facts about him or principles derived from him like geometric proofs.

In this era of culture wars and religious self-defensiveness, we are so quick to take Jesus' words about being "the Truth" or our particular interpretation and tradition as "The Way" and to turn them into tools to suit our own agendas and litmus tests to let us play the role of gatekeeper. You know how it goes: "Oh, you don't believe in MY group's interpretation of what Jesus said or did or meant? Well, then YOU'RE denying The Capital-T Truth, and you don't get access to God." Or some other such nonsensical variation. Those are all ways of letting us keep control in our own hands and trying to pry power of Jesus' hands. And he's not going for it.

To say that "the Truth" is ultimately Jesus is to say that we don't just memorize correct facts or learn approved faith-statements, but that we are brought into relationship with the One who really knows how the universe is meant to be--and he says that it is all built on self-giving love. To know "the Truth" is by definition to be pulled into Love, because Jesus (who is the Truth) is also the One who brings us into relationship with the God who is Love. We so easily forget that, especially among church folk, who are easily tempted to take their personal pet issues, weaponize them as "The Truth" and use them to keep people away from Jesus, when Jesus himself insists on being the Truth and the Way who brings us to God.

So in this day, maybe we need to stop and take a look at how we've been using the Bible, or our faith traditions and denominations, or the words of Jesus--and where we've just been ransacking those places to find anything we can hit someone else with, we need to stop. Jesus hasn't come to give us ammunition to cut down the people we don't think measure up. He has come--precisely because he IS "the Way" and "the Truth"--to bring anybody and everybody into relationship with the One he called on as "Abba," as Father.

The Truth, in the end, isn't a set of facts to be learned by rote, and the Way isn't a list of rules to be anxiously followed, but a Person who teaches us to walk with him and who loves us even when we have gone off track. That makes all the difference in the world.

Lord Jesus, be our Way, our Truth, and our Life.

Signs of Life--September 11, 2024

Signs of Life--September 11, 2024

"Then Jesus ordered them to tell no one; but the more he ordered them, the more zealously they proclaimed it. They were astounded beyond measure, saying 'He has done everything well; he even makes the deaf to hear and the mute to speak'." [Mark 7:36-37]

Life is Jesus' calling card.

If you want to participate in the way of Jesus, then spend your energy on bringing other people more fully to life. That's where to look for him: look for the folks that get labeled as "broken people," and you'll find Jesus at the center of that crowd. And somehow, just by being near him, people are more fully alive. Seriously, it's like everywhere Jesus goes, there are little resurrections happening everywhere, life bursting our all over the place from where there had only been scattered ashes before.

Stay with that thought for a minute. Think of all the things you could say about Jesus, all the possible ways you might summarize what Jesus is all about.  And then consider this: when it's the Gospel writers' turn, they talk about Jesus making people more fully alive. There's no talk about Jesus teaching people how to manage their money better, or how to leverage their connections to get more political power. There's honestly (maybe even embarrassingly, for folks in the Respectable Religious crowd) very little teaching about proper religious technique, hardly any preacherly moralizing about good behavior, and absolutely no talk about what anybody has to do to make God love them. You won't even find Jesus talking about having a "personal relationship" with him, or about anyone "inviting him into their hearts." You'll find precisely zero times that Jesus offers a path to more personal wealth, an agenda for "taking your country back for God," or a strategy for how to be a "winner" on the world's terms. But you will find him bringing people more fully to life along the way wherever he goes.

That's his trademark. Jesus' telltale signature is life--deeper, wider, fuller... for anybody and everybody. No strings. No catch. No subscriptions or fine print. Just taking what is dead in us and bringing us more fully to life. Like a doctor practices medicine on her patients, Jesus practices resurrection on anybody around.

This is what he's called us to be a part of, too. Not propping up an institution. Not using our influence as a means of getting more political power for our own benefit. Not selling religion like it is a consumer product. And not even recruiting fresh membership for a club called "church." He has called us to be a part of his movement that exists for the purpose of bringing people to life--not just people who sign on the dotted line to join that movement, either, but everyone and anyone around. These verses, which many of us heard read this past Sunday in worship, all take place in "outsider" (Gentile) territory, among people who were not likely to pick up and follow Jesus as disciples after being healed.  And yet he helped them anyway. That's Jesus' way, after all. 

Like Bonhoeffer said, the church is the one organization on earth that exists for the sake of people who are not yet a part of it. We aren't here just to keep the club running for another season. We are here to let Jesus bring others to life through us. Using our talents, our resources, our time, our love, our listening ears, and our words.  That's Jesus way... and so therefore it is ours, too.

That's life-giving news for us, especially on the days we wonder if we doing what we are supposed to as the church in a time when many find church too irrelevant to care about or too hypocritical to bother listening to. It's hard to feel like we are doing "enough" if our calendars aren't full of meetings and our rooms aren't full of small groups chugging along with churchly business. it's hard to feel like we're "winning" if things aren't "like they used to be" in some imagined glory days in our memories (or more accurately, in our imaginations). 

But hold on a second--as lovely and fine as those things may be, none of those are what Jesus has called us to. His calling card is bringing people to life, not talking people through a meeting. His purpose is about resurrections big and small, not trying to set new records for church attendance. And his place for work is not in an Official Religious Location, like a church, a temple, a synagogue, or a shrine, but right in the midst of hurting people along his way. There is his sanctuary. There is where Christ holds office hours.  In other words, to find Jesus, don't necessarily look for steeples and stained glass--look for signs of life.

If that's true, then our work following Jesus won't be just in a church building or Sunday School classroom. And our success will not be defined in terms of whether we pack hundreds of people into our worship spaces for services or receive record offerings in the plate.  Rather, we'll be bringing people to life wherever we are--or, more accurately, the living Jesus will be bringing people to life in and through us. It will happen when you take the time to comfort someone whose heart is breaking... or to listen to someone and help talk them through a really difficult time they are going through. It will happen when you offer love and grace to someone who is dead certain they are not worthy. It will happen when you forgive someone who has deeply hurt you, and when you speak up in solidarity and stand with someone who has been hurt and forgotten by others. It will happen when you serve, when you make a meal for a neighbor who can use a bit of relief, or make time for your kids. It will happen just when you do your job well in ways that make life better for other people, or when you write a note for no reason to someone just to brighten their day.

All of these can be the places where the way of Jesus brings people to life in and through you and me. We just have to remember that's what we're really here for.

Life is Jesus' calling card--may it be ours, as well.

Lord Jesus, use us in this day to bring others more fully to life, in whatever ways you will.

The Geography of the Heart--September 10, 2024

The Geography of the Heart--September 10, 2024    

"Then [Jesus] returned from the region of Tyre, and went by way of Sidon toward the Sea of Galilee, in the region of the Decapolis. They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, 'Ephphatha,' that is, 'Be opened.' And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly." [Mark 7:31-35]

Look, there's no getting around it: the way of Jesus will lead us outside of our comfort zones.  That's not a flaw or a failing on Jesus' part, but rather it is intentional. It is, as they say, a feature, not a bug.  Jesus is going to take us among the unfamiliar and unknown, not only in terms of the markings on a map, but in terms of the geography of the heart.

This scene from Mark's Gospel, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, is a case in point.  Now, in the event that you haven't committed the places-names of first century Palestine to your memory, or in case you got lost in the flurry of cities and locations Mark rattled off in that opening verse, the unmistakable common trait in all of those places are Gentile (non-Jewish) locations.  Jesus has gone outside the boundaries of his own home "turf" in Galilee and Judea, beyond the familiar circles of his fellow Jewish brothers and sisters, and embarked on a trip among "those people"--you know, the ones everyone in Jesus' hometown would have sworn up and down were no good, ungodly, wicked, and decadent.  In a time like Jesus' day, when few people traveled more than a hundred miles from the place where they were born (and if you did, you went on foot, on horseback, or on a boat--no turnpikes or non-stop flights), Jesus makes a conscious, deliberate choice to go outside the lines where "our kind of people" lived, and to become the stranger himself, a foreigner attracting suspicious looks and furrowed brows from the locals.  The way of Jesus goes through "outsider" territory, with the result that Jesus and his disciples are now the "outsiders."

And to be clear, this isn't just a matter of Jesus sticking a toe across a line and then running back to the safe and the familiar.  As Mark gives the itinerary, after Jesus first ventured to Tyre (where he has that well-known conversation with a local Syrophoenician woman whose daughter is troubled), he doesn't turn around and go back home.  He goes further away from his Jewish homeland, north to Sidon and even further beyond his "home-base," and then when he does turn back south, he goes around the far side of the Sea of Galilee to "the region of the Decapolis"--that is to say, to Greek-speaking, Gentile-majority cities and towns. (The name "Decapolis" is Greek , not Hebrew or Aramaic, for "ten cities"--which tells you that these were Greek-founded communities populated largely with non-Jewish residents.)  All of this is to say that Jesus doubles down on his venturing beyond his comfort zone and into the kinds of places where other people look at him like he's the stranger.  And, of course, he's brought all of his disciples along on the trip so that they, too, will know how it feels to be the outsiders and foreigners.

With that as the setting for this scene, it's a HUGE deal that when Jesus comes face to face with a man who can neither hear or speak clearly and is asked to help, he doesn't hold back.  Jesus heals the man--and not just with a magic word spoken at a distance (with the Syrophoenician woman, Jesus doesn't even go to her house or meet the daughter!), but with touch.  Jesus puts his fingers into the (presumably Gentile?) man's ears, and touches his tongue as well--this is personal, earthy, messy, and real. Jesus has broken all the taboos about not touching "those people" or sharing their space, even though of course Jesus certainly could have kept things neat and sterile with an efficiently worded prayer and a nod of his head.  Jesus chooses to let touch be the way he heals.  Jesus chooses to go further into the strange land.  Jesus chooses to show compassion to people that all too many others had told him were unacceptable and unworthy outsiders.  Jesus doesn't just rack up miles on the road, but pushes the boundaries in the geography of the heart.

So here we are, all these centuries later, reading these stories and finding ourselves taken along for the journey and carried off where Jesus leads us.  Like those first disciples, heading into uncharted and unfamiliar territory with their rabbi, we find Jesus leading us beyond our old prejudices and bigotries (even the ones that came with their own supposed religious rationalizations) to see the faces and needs of other people who are still beloved to God.  And Jesus has it in mind to change us in the encounter.  He goes into Gentile territory to take a public, on-the-record stance that he has come for their sake as well as his own "insider" community. And that speaks both a word of welcome and hope for those "outsiders" who are in need of what Jesus can offer, and a word of challenge to disciples like us who are tempted to think that Jesus' compassion and help are our private possessions, subject to our control.

All of this is just fair warning, I suppose, for the reality we are in for if we are going to be disciples of Jesus who are learning to walk and live in his way: Jesus is going to take us beyond the familiar places we know and people "like us," in order for us to be channels, like him, through whom God's love and healing flow for ALL.  If that's not what you signed up for (or if you were hoping to just do a bit of "spiritual tourism" and call it a "mission trip" to condescend or look down on the people you visit), then you might as well find a different Messiah to follow, because Jesus is bound and determined to stretch our compassion wide and take us into new places... maybe even a few new places in our own hearts.

Lord Jesus, even if it seems unfamiliar and scary for us, lead us where you will, among the people whom you love.

The Trouble We Need--September 9, 2024

The Trouble We Need--September 9, 2024

"My brothers and sisters, do you with your acts of favoritism really believe in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ? For if a person with gold rings and in fine clothes comes into your assembly, and if a poor person in dirty clothes also comes in, and if you take notice of the one wearing the fine clothes and say, 'Have a seat here, please,' while to the one who is poor you say, 'Stand there,' or 'Sit at my feet,' have you not made distinctions among yourselves, and become judges with evil thoughts?" [James 2:1-4]

My former preaching professor back in seminary used to say that a good sermon has to trouble you enough to make you squirm, as well as speak grace strong enough to make you weep. Everybody likes the second half of that. Rarely do we recognize how much we need the first. James is here to trouble us, but in a good way.  And that's because the way of Jesus calls us to be troubled when our head-knowledge about God doesn't line up with our actions in God's name.

James is an honest fella, and he knows how to trouble us enough to make us squirm... and then some. Just listen to his pull-no-punches approach in this passage, which many of us heard read in worship this past Sunday, and you know it. He tells the truths we would rather ignore, and he does it out of a deep place of love for the folks who are getting stepped on by that very same willful ignorance of ours. Like the prophets of ancient Israel, who were willing to call out the wealthy and the powerful for their mistreatment of those most in need, James cares about the actual lives of those who are being pushed aside in the community of Jesus. And he won't stand for it. 

For James, this isn't about some abstract principle of "fairness" or whether the Christians in his community have the "right" to treat others however they want in the name of "freedom." For James this is about the very real, very particular lives of neighbors, who are being made second-class within the church itself, and James sees that such discrimination runs counter to the heart of Jesus. This is about embodying love and embodying the way of Jesus.  And the way of Jesus is about more than the facts about God we believe with our minds or recite from a creed.  The way of Jesus is about how we live out our whole lives as whole people.

The way James phrases his question here gets me every time. He just comes out swinging and says, "Do you really even believe in Jesus if you are discriminating against people because they are poorer than you?" I think for a long time, that question made me bristle, because I didn't like the idea of somebody (never mind it was somebody speaking with the weight of the Bible's own authority!) questioning the sincerity of my faith because of some issue I saw as "secondary."

And that's just it: I think for a lot of us (certainly in my own experience) we learned Christianity as a set of correct facts about God to be believed, memorized, repeated, and organized into a system. We called this "theology," and were told that questions about how we treat other people were called "ethics," and that these were really secondary, or bonus, matters compared with "what the Gospel is REALLY about." After all, growing up in a tradition that emphasized that we are "justified by grace through faith apart from works," it only seemed logical that we should spend all our time making sure fellow Christians believed the correct facts about God in order to be saved (which, it turns out, is not really what "justified by grace through faith" means anyhow). Discussion about how we treat other people seemed like we were saying that doing good deeds could save you, and we were CERTAINLY not going to say that! And after all, if we started meddling in talk about how we treat other people, that could very quickly become political (gasp!) or affect the way we actually lived our lives, gave our time, and spent our money (double gasp!). It was so much easier to treat Christianity as a set of religious facts and dogmas one had to believe correctly in order to be "justified by faith" rather than say that following Jesus demanded a certain way of treating other people.

The trouble is (and already I find myself squirming again), James reminds us that we don't get to separate how we act from how we think and believe. Saying "I'm saved by good theology so we never have to talk about ethics" is nonsense two times over--for one, because it assumes we are saved by our good theology in the first place, and secondly because it assumes you can split what we believe about Jesus from how we live our lives as his disciples. And we can't--they are two sides of the same coin.  They are both part of the same reality--the same way of life, which is Jesus' way.

James questions how we can believe in Jesus if we are disregarding the poor among us because Jesus is so clear in his concern and love for those same faces. Saying that being a follower of Jesus is compatible with looking down on the poor is like saying you support shooting sprees in Jesus' name or nuclear war for the sake of the gospel, or that your devotion to Christ is the source for your racial bigotry. You simply cannot.   This is not a matter up for debate to James, but has to do with the very heart of the Jesus we say we believe in. Jesus, after all, has a particular set of commitments and a particular character--he chooses love over hatred, healing over hurting, self-giving over domination, liberation over oppression, and sharing abundance with the poor rather than hoarding wealth for oneself. Over against all the voices of celebrity preachers of the "prosperity gospel" Jesus clearly takes sides with the have-nots of the world, announcing "Blessed are you who are poor," and "Woe to you who are rich" in Luke's gospel, and lifting up the ones regarded as nobodies by the well-heeled and wealthy. For James, this is such an obvious and essential piece of who Jesus is that to miss this is to misunderstand what Jesus is all about.

Like the theologian and biblical scholar N. T. Wright puts it, “Justice is what love looks like when it’s facing the problems that its neighbor is dealing with. And, if we can’t translate our love into justice then I think Jesus himself would say ‘Have you actually understood what the word love means in the first place?’”  James is simply make the same point: the way of Jesus is not merely a matter of things we believe about God, but about a certain perspective on the world that leads us to care about the most vulnerable--because Jesus cares about them. Showing favoritism for the well-heeled in the name of Jesus is like having a Pig Roast for Vegetarians or a Fight Club for Pacifists--it runs completely counter to Jesus' agenda and entire way of life.

To say we believe in Jesus--especially to give him our allegiance as "Lord"--means we seek more and more fully to align our hearts with his, and to let our lives embody his character. And because Jesus' heart is oriented toward honoring the poor and lifting up those the world treats as disposable, we are called to do the same. That's a part of who Jesus is... and therefore who we are, as people who confess Jesus as Lord.

And so, if we are going to be people whose lives embody the way of Jesus, then our actions and attitudes need to reflect Jesus' priorities, too. So James doesn't let us get away with just having the intellectual belief that "God cares for the poor," but insists that our actions embody that care, too. We don't get the right to look down on people who are on public assistance or rely on school lunch programs to feed their kids, or to dismiss people struggling to make ends meet as "lazy" or "unintelligent." We don't get to assume that people who live in low-income housing are going to use any money they have for drugs or alcohol or some other vice--not even when it is politically fashionable to do so. And James calls us out on giving positions of privilege and honor to the people from wealthier backgrounds, too--he insists we show respect and love to the ones most in need.

That means getting to know one another, too--rather than just treating anybody as part of some faceless collective we dismiss as "the poor," we are called to get to know each other's stories, to honor people with the gift of our time, to show respect to the folks who can't do anything for us in return, and if anything, to give preference and advantage to those who have less than you or I do. As Gustavo Gutierrez put the challenge to us, "So you say you love the poor? Name them." It's easy to remember the names of those who can do you a favor or are well-connected. But love calls us to get to know the stories of the people right down the street, the folks across town, the people who walk past our church buildings but wonder if they will find a welcome if they walk through the door because they have nothing to put in the offering. James won't let us off the hook for making those things a priority, because he knows they are a priority for Jesus.

Today, then, let's do the hard work James calls us to do. Let's have an honest look at ourselves, even if it makes us squirm, to spot the places we are still harboring prejudices and assumptions about people. Let's be done with belittling anybody's job or treating it as "unskilled"--let's be done with cracking jokes about "flipping burgers" or "entry-level" work. Before writing someone off as lazy or lacking motivation, let's commit to getting to know someone's story, and seeing their faces. Rather than using "blessed" as a code-word for "rich," maybe it's time to dismantle once and for all the anti-Jesus notion that having more money is a sign of God's favor. And then finally, for today, James challenges us to use what we do have--our own wealth, our influence (yes, including our votes), our time, our energy, and our love--to seek the benefit of the ones the rest of the world treats as disposable, regardless of where they are from, what they look like, how they dress, or what they do. For James, those are all signs that we really believe in Jesus, because those are all things that reflect the heart of the Jesus we say we confess as Lord.

And if all of that makes us uncomfortable, fine--it's ok if we are troubled. Maybe it's the sort of trouble we need. Because along with that trouble comes this grace enough to make us weep: ours is a Lord who is always looking out for the welfare of those the world treats as nobodies, because ours is the Lord who sees everyone as somebody. Following that Lord just means we'll take it seriously enough to live it out in our own choices as well.

Lord Jesus, align our priorities with yours. Let us love our neighbors around us with your kind of priority for those treated as nobodies by the world.

On Passing the Potatoes--September 6, 2024

On Passing the Potatoes--September 6, 2024

[Jesus said:] "So whenever you give alms, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be praised by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. But when you give alms, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your alms may be done in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you." [Matthew 6:2-4]

Jesus takes it for granted that his followers will be generous. That by itself is saying something.  But more importantly, Jesus he teaches his apprentices a particular way of being generous--one that keeps the well-being of others in focus, rather than centering our own egos.  And in a world full of Big Deal Donors who get their names put on signs or engraved in stone for their sizeable contributions to the cause-of-the-day, that really is counter-cultural.  Jesus calls for his community to practice stealthy generosity, to give in ways that don't draw attention to ourselves but respect the dignity of those with whom we share our abundance, and to care about the needs of others rather than the credit we could get for giving.

Underneath Jesus' teaching about almsgiving (that is, charitable giving to people in need--not the same as our offerings to church or our contributions to the local art museum or high school sports boosters) is a vital question: Am I giving to another person because I care about their well-being as a fellow human being made in God's image, or am I centering myself to get attention when I give?  If it's the first, then giving is an act of neighborliness that flows from recognizing God's generous care for me.  If it's the second, then I'm just using another person to be a prop so that I can "do good deeds" or try to placate my guilt.  One is about loving a neighbor, which Jesus insists is inextricably tied to how I love God, and the other is about trying to score points.  And Jesus has always insisted that God does not run the universe on an economy of merit, transaction, or points-scoring--but always on an economy of grace.

Sure, there are other times in our lives when we can give and get the credit.  If you contribute to your local public television or radio station, go ahead and get the tote bag or the coffee mug as a prize (and if you do support your local public broadcaster, thank you very much!). If I donate to the art museum or the band boosters or the soccer team candy bar fundraiser, go ahead and let them put your name on the list of supporters.  But let's be honest: those are basically transactions which you will get something out of--your membership at the museum helps to ensure that there is a local art museum at all, or your contribution allows your kid to be in the band or play on the soccer team.  By contrast, when I give of my abundance to help a neighbor, whether with food or help with a utility bill or to help with their housing or emergency shelter, it's simply because I recognize in them their own fundamental dignity and worthiness of having food, shelter, and respect.  And when I see in them my own worth as a fellow human being made in God's image, then I no longer want to use another person as a prop or a means to get more attention for myself, or to make them feel pitied or infantilized.  I simply want for others the same basic necessities I have been given already myself.  It's not about credit or glory or attention, but about treating others with love, the way I have been shown love by God already.

This is how Jesus intends for us to see one another--not as useful tools we can manipulate for our own purposes or agendas, but as human beings of infinite worth because we are all made in God's image.  And when we see one another as fellow members of God's big household, then we know the same rule applies that holds at each of our family dinner tables: in God's family, everybody gets to eat.  Jesus reminds us that giving is not about getting extra credit with God, but about practicing the same kind of unconditional generosity God has already shown to us.  And once we realize that all of our possessions--including our time, talent, and money--are gifts of God in the first place, then sharing these for the benefit of someone else who belongs at God's table flows naturally as well.  We share generously--and without needing to get credit for it--when we realize that all we have to share was first given to us by God.  Living the Jesus way of life is rooted in recognizing that everything we have, and everything we are, is a gift of God first, and not ultimately "mine" to hoard.

So on this day, our calling is to be generous in a way that doesn't need to draw attention to ourselves, because at most we are only ever sharing what has first been given to us.  When I was a kid passing the mashed potatoes around the table at dinner, I didn't need to make a big to-do about it, because I was not the one who cooked them, much less bought or grew them.  I was only ever just passing what someone else prepared and happened to have placed on the table near me, but which was always meant for all of us to share. Jesus says that our acts of generosity toward one another are never any more complicated than passing the potatoes--these are good gifts that happen to have been set nearest to us at the table, but which are meant for a common sharing so that all can be fed.  Once I realize that, I don't need to get attention for giving to someone else--I can only give thanks to God who has set a table with enough for all.

Lord Jesus, teach us and train us to give generously and without the need for recognition, instead only recognizing what you have first given us.