On Suffering With

On Suffering With--January 11, 2019

"For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who is every respect has been tested as we are, yet without sin. Let us therefore approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need." [Hebrews 4:15-16]

It is so much more than a rack of pastel colors in the greeting card aisle.

Maybe that's just about all we use the word "sympathy" for these days.  When someone is sick, or going through loss, the Wal-marts and Hallmark stores of the world have just the thing: a sympathy card!  No inconvenience, no big sacrifice (they're only a few bucks, after all), and not even a need to go out of your way--you can pick one up while you are doing your grocery shopping and tuck it in the card next to the toilet paper and green beans.

It is, in other words, easy, to sympathize with someone in the age of the supermarket and shopping mall--we have turned it into a cheap consumer good that can be sent for fifty cents first-class postage.  And with that kind of picture in our minds, "sympathy" itself can seem like a meager thing.

But the word itself, in its linguistic roots, is powerful.  Our words "sympathize" and "sympathy" come from Greek roots that mean "to suffer with."  The image is so much richer and deeper than saying, "I happened to buy you a greeting card with a sad-faced puppy dog on it while I was buying bologna and aspirin," but rather it is the willingness to share someone else's suffering with them, alongside them, and beside them.  That kind of love is costly--not in price tag, per se, but in the real terms of heartache and time and presence.  Greeting cards get pitched after a couple of days most of the time, but someone will remember it when you share their sufferings--sitting with them in a waiting room, having coffee with them while they vent their troubles, weeping with them when there are no good words to "fix" things.  Those are powerful, precisely because they are instances of "suffering with."  

And that is the image that the writer of Hebrews gives us of Jesus.  Jesus is the One who suffers with us.  That is what makes his coming so powerful, so worthy of celebrating.  The living God doesn't merely stay up in heaven and send us pleasant thoughts or happy wishes to feel better--the living God has chosen to suffer with us, with all of us, so that there is nothing we can experience in this life that God has not entered into through Christ.  Betrayal and disappointment, rejection and anger, hunger and pain, loneliness and weariness and everything in between.  Jesus has suffered with us--he gets it.  He really gets it.

There is, of course, more we can say about why Jesus came and what he means. But it is enough for one day simply to let it sit with us that.  There are times in this life when it feels like nobody else understands what you are going through.  There are times when it feels like everyone else is rushing to find ways to "fix" you or "cheer you up" or "solve" you like a story problem, and what you really most need is to know that someone shares your suffering, because some sufferings in life are not meant to be waved away.  They are to be endured, and in the enduring they may be redeemed.  

What good news it is that God doesn't take the cheap and convenient way out of merely offering a bit of card stock with some cliché couplets on the inside to check us off God's list, but that God has chosen in the human flesh of Jesus to suffer with us.

It was always more than the greeting card aisle from God's perspective.  Maybe today it can be more from ours, too.

Lord God, give us the comfort of knowing you suffer with us, and give us the courage to suffer with others.

Easy to Miss (Poem and Picture 023)--January 9, 2019

"Easy to Miss"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture--January 9, 2019

The robins
were not hiding;
they are simply
easy to miss
if you do not know
to look for them.
This, too, is
the Incarnation
of the Christ:
God was never hiding,
but rather waiting
right before our eyes
washing feet,
walking miles,
holding hands,
even up on a tree.

#seeChristhere

The Hungry God

The Hungry God--January 10, 2019

"Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished." [Luke 4:1-2]

God knows what it is to go hungry. Huh. How about that?

We usually like to imagine our deities being all-sufficient and incapable of feeling any need or lack like hunger.  In fact, we would probably expect that to be one of the job requirements for any self-respecting god: invulnerability to hunger, as well as cold, age, or heartache.  Certainly, that's how the Greeks and Romans imagined their gods--they lived a charmed life up on Mount Olympus eating ambrosia and never knowing the hunger that so many mere mortals live and die with all the time.

For that matter, Israel had always understood that its God--YHWH, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob--didn't need animal sacrifices as "food" like some of the other Canaanite gods and goddesses were believed to need.  Any good Judean in the first century knew that God doesn't get hungry, much less need our rams or grain offerings to be "fed" with.

And yet... here is Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, the very One whom the voice from heaven has declared to be "my Son, the Beloved," and after forty days in the wilderness, he is starving.  Christian theology has unapologetically asserted over all these centuries that Jesus is none other and nothing less than fully God--not simply God's Number One Assistant, or God's Vice-President of Human Affairs, or God's Best Delegate, but "of one Being with the Father."  We even get rather poetic with it in the ancient creeds: "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made."  That seems a rather clear position.  What Jesus does, God does.  Where Jesus is, God is.  What Jesus is, God is.

And here, after a grueling few weeks in the middle of nowhere, Jesus is famished.  Which is to say, God--the giver of life and the source of all sustenance, who brings forth grain from the earth--is dying of hunger in the Judean desert.  That settles it.  The Greek and the Roman gods may not know what it is like to go without daily bread, but the real and living God we meet in Christ Jesus surely does.

That's a big deal.

That means, for one, that Jesus doesn't just "appear" to be human.  He doesn't just look the part, without having to suffer the difficulties and messiness of humanity.  Jesus doesn't just play a human being--he is one.  God is not "above" the indignity of a growling belly or the vulnerability of going without.  God is not ashamed to grow weak and frail from lack of nutrition.

And in a sense, it means that God knows something more of being human than I do--because there are lots of people on this planet who are going without food, and who do not know where their next meal will come from... but I have lived a pretty comfortable and privileged life without that kind of knowledge.  I have seen uneaten food go bad or and be thrown out from my refrigerator and kitchen counters, but I do not know what it is like to be chronically hungry.  I don't know what it is like to have the raw ache make it hard to concentrate. I don't know what it is like to have teeth get loose in their gums from malnutrition, and I have never had the hollow cheeks and sunken eyes that come from going without food for a sustained time.  Many--a great many--of my fellow human beings do know those symptoms.  They live with them every day...until they are remedied, or until the hunger takes their lives.

And Jesus knows that hunger, too.  He can relate--and therefore stand in solidarity--to and for those who live and die with empty bellies every day.  And he can also therefore say, "Blessed are you who are hungry now," in a way that speaks real hope without sounding like Marie Antoinette's infamous, "Let them eat cake."

It is easy, from my well-fed position, surrounded by chain restaurants and touch-screen menus, to be indifferent toward those who live week to week without knowing whether they will be able to feed themselves or their kids.  It is easy to become callous and assume that their hunger is a moral failing or a character flaw--that surely, if they would only "work a little harder," or "budget their money better," they would have enough money to put food on the table.  It is easy to say those things when you have never had to tell your kids that there's not enough money to have dinner tonight.  Jesus, however, knows better... because he knows himself what real hunger is. His hunger silences my comfortable finger-wagging with his own gaunt look and loose skin in the Judean desert.  He enters into humanity with and for those who suffer.

As we consider what it means that God entered our humanity in Christ, we will have to consider this, too.  The hungry God of the wilderness--the God whose name is Jesus--calls us beyond our complacency and comfort to stand, as Christ does, with those who are hungry.  Not to scold or to explain or diagram them, but to cast our lots with them, to open our tables to them, and to break our bread alongside one another with them.  It doesn't matter how they came to be hungry, where they came from or how far they have traveled across the desert that they haven't been able to eat, or what circumstances have brought them to our door.  We are called--if we dare to name the name of Jesus on our lips--to take the position that everybody gets to eat in the Kingdom of God. 

Jesus knows more about being human in that sense than I do.  But perhaps I can learn from him, and become more fully human myself as I share my bread with my neighbor.

Lord Jesus, you who have both gone hungry and announced blessing on the hungry, you who broke bread to feed thousands and to signify your own body, give me the courage to learn from those who still hunger, and give me the compassion to share my bread.

Beneath Our Feet (Poem and Picture 022)--January 8, 2019

Beneath Our Feet
See Christ Here Poem and Picture--January 8, 2019

A circle is perfection,
the ancients believed,
an ideal form of eternity,
symmetry,
and beauty,
beyond the best attempts
of artists to duplicate.
But here,
beneath our feet,
look how grace lavishes
more circles than you can count.
God comes low
more than we knew.

#seeChristhere

Despite the Cold

Despite the Cold--January 9, 2019

"Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.... And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." [John 3:17, 19]

Sometimes I don't know how God stands it...us.

For all its beauty, and for all the glimpses of compassion and nobility there may be, the world can be a terribly cold place.  No--let me not try to shirk or dodge responsibility: we can be terribly cold, we human beings.  And sometimes it is hard to believe that God hasn't given up on us.

I have to say, more and more for me the wonder of the Incarnation--the idea of God coming among us and wearing our skins--is that in the human flesh of Jesus of Nazareth, God was willing to be identified as one of us, despite our rottenness.

I don't mean to be melodramatic here, but seriously, the world that God sent the Son to save is not a terribly friendly place a lot of the time.  Like John says, Light has come into the world, and we consistently say, "No thanks" because we would prefer to keep our cold self-centeredness hidden behind a mask of shallow niceness or the cover of night.  Light came into the world, John says, but we love the dark.  

It is hard not to be disappointed anymore--disappointed in our selves (myself included, to be sure) at the ways we harden our hearts.  It is hard to watch the news and not find myself shaking my head in sheer disgust at the ways we treat each other.  Whether it is our propensity for violence toward each other, or the opposite cruelty of indifference to the sufferings of others, whether it is our fear of others who are different, or our insatiable appetites that drive us to put Me and My Group first above the needs of the other, it's hard not to be disillusioned at the face in the mirror and the world full of fellow cold-hearts with whom I share a common sin-sickness.  I am fond of saying we humans are "stinkers," but that almost sounds glib at times, like our inclinations toward fear and cruelty are harmless, when I know better--we all do--that we are capable of such terrible actions and attitudes.  

And I think, if I were God, I would have given up.  I would have given up on the whole project, the whole planet, the whole lot of us.  I would have seen enough of our cold and hardened hearts, and I would have said, "I'm done with this."

Thank God I'm not God.

Thank God that instead, impossibly, wonderfully, gracefully, the word from the Scriptures is NOT that God is fed up with our rottenness and has gone off to heaven to leave us to our own devices.  

Thank God that the announcement from John is NOT that God says, "Oh, you love darkness and don't want my light? Well, if you won't accept my gift, I guess I have to leave you all alone to fend for yourselves."

Thank God that the declaration of the Good News is NOT that God is naïve and thinks we are all good little boys and girls.

Thank God that the Gospel's word for us today is this: "Yep, the whole lot of you loves darkness and wouldn't accept God's light if it were dangled right in front of you.  But that doesn't stop God, and it never will.  God is willing to love you all in spite of yourselves.  And God knows full well what terrible things you are capable of--and God will bear you doing them to him in Christ, rather than give up on you."

Please, let us not leave the Christmas season behind without considering the immense and infinite commitment it means on God's part.  In the coming of Christ, God has looked full and deep into our cold hearts, seen the worst in us, and hasn't flinched.  God has still said, "I am with you.  I have come among you and I will own all the baggage that comes with loving you as you are.  I will not be stopped by your own refusal to welcome me or open the gift."

Every time I hear some angry voice grumble, "It's not MY problem--they should take care of their own needs!" or "We have to look out for our own--I can't be troubled with the worries of someone else!" or every time I catch that same coldness on my own lips, I am caught off guard twice: first, by how brazen our hardheartedness can be as a human species, and second, at how amazing it is that God does not take such a policy toward us. That is exactly the point of the Incarnation--the coming of Christ is God's refusal to tell us, "You're not MY problem."  The brown-skinned body of Jesus is the form of God's commitment NOT to be as coldly indifferent toward us as we are toward one another.

That is a greater grace toward humanity than I can muster, honestly.  But it is my--and all of our--only hope. After the manger scenes are put away, the stubborn, persistent, relentless love of God in the human life of Jesus continues to say, "I will not take your darkness-loving No for an answer.  I will not let you destroy yourselves.  I will not let your coldness be the last word."

For whatever rottenness is waiting in the headlines of the new day, my hope is not that "Maybe we'll do a little bit better job tomorrow," but rather that God will not walk away from us despite the cold, and despite our turned backs.

Praise be to the God who wears our skin in solidarity with us beyond our deserving or willingness.

Lord Jesus, thank you, thank you, thank you, for your wonderfully stubborn refusal to leave us.  Thank you, thank you, thank you, for staying.

What We Name Fire (Poem and Picture 021)--January 7, 2019

What We Name Fire
See Christ Here Poem and Picture--January 7, 2019

What we name fire
is chemistry:
a reaction releasing
energy latent
in dead, dry wood.
The flame reveals
what was present already.
If old logs contain
such hidden blazing light,
it is not hard to believe
God can reside
in the brown skin
of a Middle Eastern woodworker.
Not at all.

#seeChristhere

Jesus, Destroyer of Walls

Jesus, Destroyer of Walls--January 8, 2018

"For he [Christ] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is the hostility between us." [Ephesians 2:14]

Funny--if you ask the apostle to picture a monument to what Christ has done, he envisions a broken barrier, a wall pulled down so that it can no longer keep people apart. If you asked the first generations of Christ-followers what their faith was all about, they would have said (and in fact, did say, here in Ephesians, among other places), that it was like God had razed to the ground the old walls that kept "outsiders" out and separate from "insiders."

That was the vital issue for the early church--were the "outsiders" really welcome, or did the "insiders" have control over keeping "those people" out and away from the grace of God?  The early church deeply wrestled with this question, especially as what began as a homogenous group of Jewish believers from the same land, language, and culture began to see more and more non-Jewish (Gentile) faces showing up in their gatherings.  There were some who were deeply suspicious and afraid of these new folks arriving.  They raised concerns like, "But our traditional way of life will be lost if we start letting in these outsiders--they don't all speak Hebrew (well, they didn't either, anymore--it was Aramaic by that point, even for people who lived in Judea), and they don't eat the same kinds of food!  They have different values and different cultural backgrounds!  They aren't following our traditional religious laws!"  The insider group was afraid, perhaps understandably so, that things would change if there were a whole bunch of new Gentile folks allowed to be followers of Jesus without first adopting all the practices and values and traditions and laws of Judaism.  They were worried that they wouldn't all assimilate into the "insider" way of doing things. (Surely no Christians today would take such a position... right?)

And here was the conclusion--the truly amazing and wonderful conclusion--that the early church arrived at (it is recorded in the Bible itself, beginning in Acts, as a matter of fact): "outsiders" were welcome to be followers of Jesus as outsiders, and the "insiders" were allowed to belong still, too.  But there would be no blocking the "outsiders," not with an official "No Gentile" policy, and not with requirements that you had to learn and keep all the practices of Judaism (like keeping kosher, or observing the festivals, or male circumcision), either.  Outsiders were no longer going to be kept out from the insiders, or from Christ.  As our verse from Ephesians put it, "the dividing wall" had been "broken down," never to be put back up again.

Why?  What made this kind of radical change possible?  Well, in a word, Christ.  Christ had made the decision that his new community was going to include insiders and outsiders both.  Christ had decided--and guided his people to live into the decision--that outsiders were not required to learn the language or culture or practices of the insiders in order to belong.  Their belonging didn't depend on that baggage or the requirement of "sameness." It depended entirely on Christ's own claim to insider and outsider alike.  It depended on the grip of Christ to bring "outsiders" into the same space as the "insiders," with the wall that had kept them out now razed to the ground.  Any insiders who were afraid or anxious about what would happen if a whole bunch of outsiders came in all of a sudden would have to take it up with none other than Christ himself.

That amazes me.  Honestly.  The idea of including these outsiders as outsiders wasn't a matter of a committee vote, or a mere demographic shift.  It wasn't the insiders saying, "Well, we need new blood around here, so let's allow some of the riff-raff to come in in a trickle so we can make them be exactly like us." It wasn't a bishop's decree or a resolution passed in parliamentary procedure with Robert's Rules of Order.  The New Testament itself says that none other than Christ, "in his flesh," had made the two groups, insiders and outsiders, to become one... even while they held onto their differences. 

"In his flesh" is a curious phrase.  Jesus, the actual historical human being who walked around Palestine in the 1st century, was of course biologically Jewish--one of the "insiders."  And yet the writer of the Ephesians sees that there in the physical human life of Jesus wasn't just a representative of one ethnic group versus another, or one language group versus another, but all of humanity.  In the life of Jesus God took on all of humanity--insiders and outsiders both, people at the center of attention and power and people on the margins, with no boundaries of race, gender, wealth, class, or language holding ultimate power to separate.

That means that the decision to take down the wall--to "break" it down, actually, using the language of Ephesians here--comes from none other than God, the same God who took on humanity in the person of Christ.  If you don't like that decision, there is no higher court to appeal to.  You may not like the hymnal in your congregation--you can take it up with the worship and music planners, or the pastor.  You may not like the color of the carpet or paint in the lobby--again, you can always voice your complaint to the property committee.  You may not like your pastor--go for it, and complain to whatever body appoints or oversees your pastors, whether bishops or boards, superintendents or sessions.  But if you have a problem with being a part of a community that accepts "insiders" and "outsiders," your problem is with Christ himself, according to Ephesians.  If I have a problem with letting in "outsiders" without the pre-condition that they all adopt the traditions, language, and customs of the "insiders," then my problem is with Jesus, who made that call.  If we are afraid that letting all these "outsiders" in will mean we lose our comfortable "insider" status, then we should take it up with none other than the living God, who, in the human flesh of Jesus, has knocked down the old border wall that divided humanity into "insiders" and "outsiders," and who has brought us all into one.

That's why when the first followers of Jesus pictured what their faith in Christ was all about, they pictured a wall that had been knocked down forever, and streams of outsiders being welcomed in as outsiders by none other than Christ himself.

May we be able to rejoice like those first Christians did, at the barrier-breaking ways of the living God.  May we rejoice... and no longer be afraid.

Lord Jesus, we thank you for having brought us who were outsiders in to belong in you.  Let us offer that same welcome to the outsiders waiting to be told they belong in you still today.