Torn...But In A Good Way

Torn... But In A Good Way--January 15, 2019

“And just as [Jesus] was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.” [Mark 1:10]

Most of the time, the phrase “torn apart” is not a positive expression.  At least, it is rarely good news for the thing that is getting torn apart.  And it’s not likely to be good news for anyone else involved. 

When there’s a paper jam in the copier, and my nice set of originals has to be tugged at to retrieve it from the jaws of the document feeder, they get "torn apart" and it’s bad news all around.  It’s bad for the documents, now torn into pieces, and it’s bad for me, who needed them kept in tact for making copies.  And when I am mowing the lawn and accidentally catch part of the drooping leaf of one of our tiger lilies, so that it gets torn apart and shredded in my wake, it’s bad for the flower and bad for me, who really likes those flowers in our yard.

Pick almost any other context, and you’ll see the same:  the phrase “torn apart” is so dramatic and almost inescapably violent that you can hardly imagine reading it with a smile.  The jacket that catches on the hook of the back door and tears as you are headed out for an important meeting.  The devastation in our country after the Civil War when the nation itself was “torn apart.”  The wreckage of a home left in the wake of a death or divorce and all the pain that led up to it.  These are the kinds of scenes we might expect to see “torn apart” used to describe, but none of them are very positive at all.

And then there’s the Gospel.  And when it comes to the news of Jesus, all bets are off about what can or cannot have good news come out of it.  Our God is a surpriser to say the least.

So here is how Mark the Gospel-writer describes what happens when Jesus is baptized by John:  the heavens themselves were “torn apart.”  And at first we are left scratching our heads and wondering, “Is this a good thing or a bad thing to hear?”  So often tearing something apart is a jolt of bad news.  But Mark reports it like it is something good, even something holy, and something divine going on.

Back up for a moment and remember that the scene is Jesus being baptized—and that Jesus is the One life in history who didn’t need to go through John the Baptizer’s ritual of repentance, because Jesus is the One person who doesn’t have anything to repent of.  So his very choice to be baptized is not about Jesus’ need to get his life cleaned up and turned around, but about our need for him to stand with us and identify with us.  It’s about Jesus standing up beside us and saying, “I am Spartacus,” for our protection—to take our place and stand in our spot. 

But Jesus is not just a religious teacher or wise spiritual guru.  Remember the opening line of Mark’s Gospel—he gives away the open secret that Jesus is “the Christ, the Son of God” (Mark 1:1).  That means it’s not just one man standing alongside us there at the banks of the Jordan—it is no less than God coming close, wearing our skin, standing there at the shore to be one of us and saying, “I’m with them.”

In other words, in the baptism of Jesus, whatever boundaries there had been, whatever walls or barriers separated a holy God from a mess of a human race, God crossed those boundaries, from God's side by getting into the water with us.  And for anything that stood in the way that would have kept God from coming to be with us, God was willing to cut through it to get to us. Or, if you prefer, God was willing to tear it apart.  The boundary, the wall if you like, between heaven and earth, between human and divine, gets pulled down--bulldozed, really--from God's side, as Jesus takes the side of all humanity in the waters.

This is what’s going on in the scene there at Jesus’ baptism.  The heavens themselves—and along with them, the whole idea that God has to be kept at a distance from us sinful human beings in a holy bubble—are torn apart as God comes right into our midst.  Jesus is showing us by his very life—and Mark is telling us in the story—that God will not be bound in a hermetically sealed envelope of incense and angel feathers to keep from being contaminated by us earthy, messy people.  God is coming to be with us, and removing whatever other barriers would stand in the way—even tearing them apart if necessary.

So the heavens are “torn apart” at Jesus’ baptism, and what do you know, when Jesus dies on the cross at the end of Mark’s Gospel, the curtain in the temple will be “torn” in half (same Greek verb in both), shouting to us all that the wall separating God and humanity was being permanently opened, from God’s side to us. That’s our God—a God who is willing to be with us, and to pull down the barriers between us forever, no matter what stands in the way.

Lord Jesus, come to be with us, and let us trust that you have not only crossed every boundary, but torn them apart to stand with us.

Bulk Mail (Poem and Picture 028)--January 14, 2019

"Bulk Mail"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 028--January 14, 2019

You expect
the bulk mail office
to be impersonal, bureaucratic.
(It is the bulk mail office.)
But today:
"How are you today?"
"Worried about my mother.
She has heart surgery tomorrow."
"Would it be okay if I pray for her?"
Eyes soften, almost melt.
"Yes. And--thank you."
Christ.

#seeChristhere

I'll Stand By You

I'll Stand By You--January 14, 2019

“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan.” [Mark 1:9]

If there’s one person in history who shouldn’t have been baptized, it was Jesus. And yet, no one’s baptism is of more importance to the whole of history than Jesus’ was.  How’s that for a paradox?

Most of us church-going folks assume that baptism is a pretty respectable thing to have done.  While we might differ across traditions and denominations about the why and when and where and even squabble over how much water is supposed to be used, pretty much all churchgoers see this act we call baptism as a respectable religious ritual that is just part of what “good people” are supposed to do. It’s a box on our churchy-checklists, a requisite on our religious résumés: something you’re just supposed to “get done” sometime to show the world that you are a good and godly person, and to show God the same, I guess.

Trouble is, that just about completely misses the point of what baptism is about now, and it certainly misses the point of what this guy John was doing in the river Jordan some 2,000 years ago. What John had in mind was anything but respectable. First off, you couldn’t keep your outfit nice and dry—sometimes we modern Christians can be so stingy with the water at baptism that you’d think we just had a 3/4 measuring cup worth to use for the rest of history. But not with John—John went out in the river, took you in hands and brought you under, and then brought you back up you soaking wet, hair-do all undone, mascara streaking down your face and cologne all washed away, and possibly a little river silt in your hair.

But not only was getting baptized by John a physically humbling thing to do, it was a spiritually humbling thing to do. Remember, John was offering this act called “baptism” (which was really not a technical “religious” word, but was just the common Greek word for “dipping”, which means, I suppose, you could conceivably have gotten a “double-baptized cone” at the local ice cream parlor in Judea), as an act “of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.” In other words, you went out to John in the river if you were ready to admit (or maybe needed his help in admitting) that your life was at best a mess, and at worst, a mess tied up in a bow to make it look well-put-together.  You went out to John to get turned around again, as a public sign that you were tired of your sin and hypocrisy and wanted a fresh start. That’s not a particularly respectable statement to be making in public, is it? “I’m a sinner. I’m a failure. I’m a sell-out. I need help.” The reason that 12-Step programs are anonymous, after all, is that it’s not a boost to most people’s reputation to confess, “I’m an addict. I need help.” If you went to John out in the river, it was because you had reached a point where you were willing to say that to God and to everybody else and didn’t care anymore who heard it. That’s not respectable religion—that’s raw honesty.

So then… what’s Jesus doing there in the water? We Christians make a big point about Jesus being the “sinless Lamb of God” who is like us in every way, “except without sin,” as the writer of Hebrews is quick to add (Heb. 4:15). But everybody else out there at the shore was a big ol’ sinner….  And everybody else in line to be baptized was there to say it out loud to the world…. And Jesus wasn’t keeping his distance from everybody else, as if to make it clear that he’s not one of them, not one of the huddled masses, not one of the ungodly sinners, those dirty messes who had come to John to get clean.  Jesus was there standing in line with them, alongside of them, to do and say the same as them—why?

There—that’s the reason by itself.  Jesus went and stood in line with all the rest who got baptized by John in order to stand with them.  Jesus, Christians believe, is the one person in history who didn’t need to be baptized by John because he’s the one human life that didn’t have any sins to repent of or be forgiven for in the first place.  And yet, Jesus is the One whom God sent precisely to stand with us—to stand and live and die and rise in solidarity with us, as one of us, with all of us.  And in fact, he was willing to be counted among us as a big ol’ sinner like the rest of us—in fact, as Paul would write in 2 Corinthians, God “made him who knew no sin to be sin for us, so that we might become the righteousness of God.”  Jesus is the one person who didn’t have the need to go under the water and turn from his past. But because he had come to stand with us, that was the one place he needed to be.

This, it turns out, is one of the more difficult things of the Christian faith: we have a very hard time imagining a God who comes that close, who stands with us, and an even harder time letting that God save us by taking a place in line alongside of us, even if it doesn’t seem a very respectable place for God to be. But that is the news we have to bring to the world: that God is not off somewhere else at a distance, keeping divine hands from getting dirt under divine fingernails, but standing with us in our place. Tell someone that news, and it could change their life.  It has already changed the world.

It's the Gospel encapsulated in the famous lyric by the Pretenders, for a world full of recovering pretenders (and still-pretending pretenders) like us: the God of the universe says, "I'll stand by you."

Lord Jesus, come and stand among us, as much as it surprises us to have you come so close.

If Traffic Is Light Enough (Poem and Picture 027)--January 13, 2019

"If Traffic Is Light Enough"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture--January 13, 2019

Every so often--
if traffic is light enough--
stop in the middle of the road
and see,
just see:
the stillness
of a world waking up;
the beauty
that did not have to be given;
the presence of God
in this fragile moment
along the way,
even before you reach
your destination.

#seeChristhere

Grace All the Same (Poem and Picture 026)--January 12, 2019

"Grace All the Same"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture--January 12, 2019

Never mind that
the cups are empty:
there is something
utterly real
about a tea party with a five-year-old.
It's grace all the same.
What matters
turns out to be
less about
what's in the cup
and more
who's at the table.
Jesus and my daughter
have that in common.

#seeChristhere

Ginger Tea Preaches (Poem and Picture 025)--January 11, 2019

"Ginger Tea Preaches"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture--January 11, 2019

Steaming and steeping
the sweet and spicy crystals
dissolve in a ceramic pot,
then poured out for me,
and in turn
to nourish and warm this body
until it becomes part of me.
Ginger tea preaches
to me the Gospel
of the God
who has come
to get into hot water with us.

#seeChristhere

The Absence of a Thing (Poem and Picture 024)--January 10, 2019

"The Absence of a Thing"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture--January 10, 2019

What looks like
emptiness
is really the space
where salt had been,
before dissolving
to resist
the surrounding cold.
Even the absence of a thing
is evidence
of the beauty
that remains
from giving oneself away.

#seeChristhere