Jesus' Words on Jesus' Terms--October 23, 2025

Jesus' Words on Jesus' Terms--October 23, 2025

"For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, be sober in everything, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully." (2 Timothy 2:3-5)

It is fascinating--and in all honesty, more than a little terrifying--how many times I've heard folks put their own words into Jesus' mouth.  And part of the terror, I'll confess, is that when I see it around me from others, it reminds me (with a hard gulp) that I had better check myself for the ways I'm tempted to put my own words, my own wishes, my own pet priorities, and my own agendas into Jesus' mouth, rather than letting his way, his message, and his gospel flow out of mine.

Some examples are obvious, and I bet you've heard some of them, too.

"God helps those who help themselves." (Sorry, that's Ben Franklin, not Jesus.)

"Give a man a fish, and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish, and he eats for a lifetime." (This one has been attributed to writers as varied as Lao Tzu to Maimonides to Anne Isabella Thackeray Ritchie, but none of them are Jesus.)

"Everything happens for a reason, and God won't give you more than you can handle." (Both of those are really sort of faux-inspirational generalities that could mean anything or nothing, but you won't find Jesus saying either sin the Gospels.)

And of course, deep down, I suspect a lot of us secretly operate with the unspoken assumption that Jesus said, "I hate all the same people you do, and my politics align perfectly with your registered party."  But that one's a lie, too--maybe the most insidious of them all.

On the flip side, I've also heard plenty of folks dismiss as dangerous nonsense or unpatriotic subversiveness the actual words of Jesus, and I'll bet you have, too.  

"What are we supposed to do when someone wrongs us?  Love our enemies?  Turn the other cheek?"  (Uh, yes, actually.)

"Now you're telling us to share our abundance?  What are you, a Marxist?"  (No, that's Jesus, quite literally on numerous occasions.)

"Blessed are the poor?  And the peacemakers? Well, that won't make for a very fierce military culture or train kids to be ambitious!"  (Maybe not, but the question at hand is about what Jesus teaches....)

You get my drift.  It seems that a great many of us Respectable Religious Folks want Jesus, but really only as sort of a figurehead--we'd like him to endorse our personal philosophies, political platforms, and economic priorities with his stamp of approval, and we'd like the editorial right to censor out the things we don't care for from his message and way of life.  Then, if someone criticizes our opinions, we can tell ourselves "They're attacking Jesus, God, and all that's holy! They're persecuting Christians!" when really, they might just be pointing out the ways we've tried to make Jesus our ventriloquist's dummy.

Well, it's worth noting that this is not a new concern, and ours certainly isn't the first generation of Christians to be tempted to listen only to the messaging we want to hear.  That concern is here in the New Testament itself, in this passage that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  The apostle, speaking to a young pastor-in-training, warns, "For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound teaching, but, having their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths."  You know, I used to hear these verses like it was some sort of bold and ominous prediction of some distant future (and plenty of TV preachers and self-deputized parachurch spokesmen always seemed to think this was just about the contemporary era, and their preferred targets!).  But the more I read the Scriptures, and the more I study history, the more it seems like this is a perennial and pernicious temptation of every age--and we keep wanting to do it!  Apparently the early church struggled with the impulse to distort or twist the Gospel into something else other than the audacious message of the grace of God in Christ.  

And ever since, each generation has faced new counterfeits: from "Let's make Jesus the official mascot of the Roman Empire!" in the time of Constantine to "Jesus needs us to conquer and take back the Holy Land, so we're going to war in his name!" during the Crusades, to "You can buy your loved ones out of a post-mortem period of suffering in purgatory with sufficient donations to the church" in the era leading up to the Reformation, to "Jesus will rapture away his chosen saints while the rest of the world suffers through misery in the end times" when that notion was invented in the 19th century in England, to "Everything is just going to get better and better until we create the perfect Kingdom of God on earth through the help of good morals and human ingenuity" in the years before the first World War proved that one wrong.  Of course, there are plenty of other examples--these are just some easy, low-hanging fruit. The point is that the temptation to listen only to the messages we want to hear, and to selectively cultivate the messengers we want to hear from, has been around basically since the day after Easter Sunday.  Heck, even on the day of Jesus' ascension into heaven, some of his disciples were asking him if he was planning on setting up a kingdom on earth right then, and he had to do a last-minute course-correction on the spot!

So what do we do about this "ear-tickling" temptation to self-select only the parts of Jesus' way that we already like or agree with?  What do we do, once we have named how often and how easily folks like us, who name the name of Jesus, dress our own agendas and philosophies in a robe, sandals, and fake beard to claim to be Christ-like--assuming, of course, that we don't want to fall into that trap? Well, maybe that's the first thing we need to establish: if we are sincerely seeking to be disciples of Jesus, rather than exploiters of Jesus, then we need to start by agreeing that we are not going to actively try to co-opt Jesus to back our pre-existing political, economic, or personal commitments.  It may well be that what I already think turns out to line up with Jesus on X or Y or Z matters, but we don't select which parts of the way of Jesus we like based on what I want to be true, but rather, we let Jesus be the one to shape us, even when that means unlearning old, crooked, unjust, unkind, or ungracious habits and beliefs in order to let Jesus re-form us, as often as he needs to.

Once we can agree on that point, I think the next point is exactly what these verses from 2 Timothy model for us: a commitment to mutual accountability.  In other words, we commit to one another to help see the ways that each of us attempts to remake Jesus in our own image, rather than letting him shape us in his way.  And when you catch me covering my ears to some part of Jesus' teaching (say, maybe I'm having a hard time with showing kindness to that person who really irritates me, even though Jesus makes love for enemies a clear priority of his way of life), you can step up and help me to hear what I've been ignoring.  When you have been confusing your political party's talking points with the Gospel of Jesus, then other disciples may step up and ask you to re-examine where your commitments come from--even just to get you to start raising questions about things you had never thought to ask about.  We do this together, back and forth, helping one another to identify the things we couldn't see in ourselves, and helping one another to hear the voice of Jesus more clearly above the other noise competing for our attention.  And we do it, not to be mean, or to catch someone else in an embarrassing "gotcha" moment, but so that all of us can more faithfully and authentically follow Jesus.

That's what the goal of all of this is--for all of us, who already claim to be disciples of Jesus, striving to live the Jesus way of life--to more and more fully be formed in his likeness.  It's for all of us to come to listen, wholly and fully, to the Gospel's good news, even in the places where that Gospel stretches us, challenges us, and turns our old view of the world upside-down. 

Maybe the more we help each other to listen to Jesus on his own terms, the less we'll feel the impulse to put our own words in his mouth. Maybe we will realize we don't have to.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to listen to you before trying to speak for you.

In the End, Jesus--October 22, 2025

In the End, Jesus--October 22, 2025

"In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage with the utmost patience in teaching." (2 Timothy 4:1-2) 

In the end, it will be Jesus' verdict that matters, not Caesar's.  In the end, it will be the Reign of God that endures, not Rome's empire or whatever other regimes come and go in the mean-time.  In the end, it is the character of Christ that is the true measure of how we have spent our lives, and not anybody else's definition of "winning" or "greatness" or "success." Remembering that gives us a great deal of guidance as we step out into the world to face another day.

I think that's the underlying message here in these verses from Second Timothy, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday.  When the apostle reminds his young protege in ministry that "Christ Jesus... is to judge the living and the dead," and that it is Christ's kingdom and coming for which they wait, it's not to scare young Pastor Tim. It's to remind him whose voice to listen to, and whose values to hold onto.  I've got to admit, an earlier version of me would have heard these verses as something of a veiled threat, along the lines of, "You had better do a good enough job preaching and toeing the line with the right message, Timothy, because after all, Jesus is a-comin' and will judge the world!"  But because of who Jesus actually is, I don't hear these words as intimidation any longer, but rather encouragement.  I think it is a reminder that even though there are a LOT of other voices out there, clamoring for our attention and allegiance, it is only Jesus' voice that is worth listening to.  I think it is the apostle's way of saying, "There are a lot of other folks who think they are Big Deals out there, and they will look at the way of Jesus and call you a loser, a weakling, or a dangerous subversive for following it--don't listen to 'em. Jesus is the One whose opinion matters when all is said and done."  And I think it's a reminder, both for a young pastor just starting out back in the late first century, as well as for us in the middling days of the twenty-first, that the powers of the day will rise and fall, come and go, and they are not worth us building our lives on.  Neither the folks in power today, nor the party in power after the next election cycle, nor the administration coming down the pike in twenty years, do not get to tell us who to be or how to spend our lives.  We are called to live in light of Jesus' kind of kingdom, in which the towel and basin are the signs of true leadership rather than Caesar's crown, and in which we shower even our enemies with goodness and mercy, rather than the sewage of hatred and the filth of cruelty.

In the late first century, when this letter was written, that would have been a word of encouragement to keep telling the news of Jesus, practicing the way of Jesus, and welcoming people into the community of Jesus, even though the Empire was increasingly hostile toward them.  It would have meant choosing to believe that it is still worth giving your life to following Jesus even if that doesn't translate to more power, status, wealth, or comfort.  It would have meant a commitment to the Gospel's message of God's grace even to a culture that dismissed it as nonsense and foolishness. These words have the thrust of saying, "I know that the ones who are currently on the throne arrogantly think they will rule forever, but we know differently--we know that in the end, Jesus is the One who reigns, and that his kind of authority looks like a cross rather than conquest."  That means we are always called to think in longer-range terms than "How can we curry favor with the current regime?" since emperors come and go, but rather to think in terms of, "What will truly matter, and what will really last, in light of God's Reign and the authority of Jesus?"

Now, that doesn't just mean that we should pay attention to Jesus' kingdom because it will endure when other regimes have gone into the dustbin of history; it's also a reminder that because of the kind of king Jesus is, we don't have to be afraid.  Jesus will indeed "judge the living and the dead," but he is the same one who, when he was condemned under the judgment of Pontius Pilate, prayed for forgiveness for his executioners. He is the same one who restored Simon Peter back to belonging after Ol' Pete denied even knowing Jesus, and who showed up to convince Thomas he was alive, even when Tommy Boy declared he couldn't belief unless he got to poke around in Jesus' wounds.  He is the same one who invited himself over to dinner at tax collector (and outcast) Zacchaeus' house, who refused to condemn a woman caught in the act of adultery as the story in John's Gospel tells it, and who didn't zap Saul of Tarsus for ferociously persecuting the early church, but instead claimed him to become a leader within that church.  If Jesus is the judge, we don't have to worry about merciless condemnation. If Jesus is the king whose opinion counts, we don't have to fear being oppressed or intimidated under a tyrant's heel. If Jesus is the One who tells us, ultimately, what really matters, then we don't need to care one bit what the other voices bark and bellow about. 

To read these verses and remember that it is Jesus whose verdict matters in the end also calls to mind just how upside-down Jesus' values are from the conventional wisdom of the world.  When the common sense of our culture uplifts the rich, the well-connected, the ambitious, the comfortable, and the vindictive ones who hate their enemies as the models of "success" and "winning," we remember that Jesus declares God's blessing in the opposite direction: on the poor, the grieving, the meek, the persecuted, the peacemakers, and the merciful. We recall that Jesus regularly declared that the first will be last and the last will be first, that the exalted will be humbled while the humble will be exalted, and that the way to show your greatness is to become the servant of all. Jesus' ordering of things really does flip the script on what the powers of the day think is really important.  So at some point, we really do have to decide whose voice we will listen to: the powerful and influential Big Deals of the moment, or the voice of Jesus.  The letter of Second Timothy calls us to keep the bigger-picture perspective in mind, and to remember that the kingdom we truly belong to, in the end, is Jesus' reign.  All these centuries later, and nobody really remembers who happened to be on the throne in Rome when this letter was written--the Caesars all blur together in the haze of history.  But Jesus' reign, as countercultural and upside-down as it is compared the world's empires, is the one we pin our hopes on.  In the end, Jesus is the One by whom we measure our lives.  And because Jesus is both just and merciful, we do not have to be afraid.

Lord Jesus, keep us oriented around your kind of reign and your way of being in the world.

Shaped Like Jesus--October 21, 2025

Shaped Like Jesus--October 21, 2025

"But as for you, continue in what you have learned and firmly believed, knowing from whom you learned it and how from childhood you have known sacred writings that are able to instruct you for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, so that the person of God may be proficient, equipped for every good work." (2 Timothy 3:14-17)

The perpetual complaint of schoolchildren goes something like this: "But we'll never have to USE this stuff in REAL life!" 

I bet you have heard it before, whether from the mouths of your own children or grandchildren, students you have known, or out of your own mouth. They don't know why they must learn what seem to them merely random facts or obscure trivia just for a test, only to forget them and never use them again for the rest of their lives.  State capitals, the periodic table, Mohs Scale of Mineral Hardness, or whatever else they are being tested on, it all gets lumped in with "stuff we'll never use in real life" in the minds of a lot of kids.  And in fairness, I'm sure there are plenty of things I was taught in school that I could have gotten by in life never really needing to know.  I still know the ten lines from Macbeth I had to memorize in 12th Grade English, but it has never helped me in a direct practical sense with raising my kids, doing my job, or paying my bills.  I remember a smattering of 9th Grade Geometry or 8th Grade Algebra, but typically I only realize I still know it when my kids have homework that forces me to dust off the old polynomial skills while they now ask ME, "When will I ever need this in life?"

Now we might quibble, between one generation to the next, about what information is really needed to get by in life.  After all, math that I had to learn to do by hand my kids are used to doing on a computer, or with the assistance of AI... and things that I learned with the help of a calculator were things that a previous generation had to use a slide rule in order to calculate.  Knowledge that I think is important might be dismissed by the generation to come, and practices I had to work hard at learning might well become obsolete with the next technological revolution (card catalogs, anyone?).  But that said, I have a certain sympathy for those who ask the question, "Why do we need to know this?"  And I do believe that just memorizing facts for the sake of filling our brain with them misses the point of real learning.  Somewhere along the way, a great many of us slipped into thinking that the point of education was just to do well on a test... so that we could get a good grade... so that we could get hired for a better job... so that we could make more money.  But I think there is something deeper we may have lost, and which we may need to recover, about the real purpose of learning: formation.  We learn in order to be formed as people in a certain way--to be shaped both with particular skills and specific knowledge, but also with a certain character and way of seeing the world.

I think that's also true for why we read the Scriptures, too.  If we have forgotten that the Scriptures themselves are not an endpoint, but rather a means by which God shapes us into the likeness of Christ, we are at risk of turning the Bible into mere trivia to be memorized for "the test" and then forgotten.  But the New Testament writers themselves, like this passage from Second Timothy that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, don't make that mistake.  They know that the Scriptures are meant to do something to us: they are not merely textbooks meant to be gleaned for head-knowledge. They are a tool by which God still shapes us, like a woodworker with chisels, rasps, and sandpaper.

That's something we might not have noticed in this passage at first.  I have heard these verses trotted out plenty of times over the years when Respectable Religious People have wanted to build a case for the infallibility or the inerrancy of the Bible, since this is one of the few places where a Biblical writer actually speaks about "the scriptures" and uses the language of being "inspired" (the Greek is even lovelier, meaning literally more like, "God-breathed"). And I'm not here to belittle the Bible or cast aspersions on the Bible's authority.  But the thing I notice here in the actual passage from 2 Timothy is that the writer doesn't just talk about scripture as a source of facts to be stored in the brain, but as a tool for training... us.  Scripture is inspired, yes, and useful, yes, but for what purpose?  "For training in righteousness (or "justice" would be just as accurate a translation)," and to be "equipped for every good work."   In other words, the Scriptures are given to form us into becoming a certain kind of people, who act in certain kinds of ways, who love in the particular way of Jesus, and who see the world (and all people in it) from a Jesus-shaped point of view.  The Bible, in other words, isn't a subject we can ever "master" like you can memorize the list of US presidents or the world's tallest mountains, but rather something through which God makes us into new creations.  The Bible isn't so much an end-point in and of itself, so much as it always points us to Christ and forms us to be more like Christ.  Any version of Christianity that merely uses the Bible as a repository of facts to be memorized or as a weapon to attack people with, rather than as a means by which Christ comes to us and transforms us in his likeness has missed the point.  The Bible isn't here just to be memorized in our heads, shouted at others we don't like, or used to justify our own agendas.  Rather, the Scriptures have been given to us so that we love the way Jesus loves, see people as neighbors the way Jesus sees, and serve the way Jesus serves.  The list of dates you had to memorize in history class might not make a difference in the way you live you life today.  But the God of the Scriptures is intent on forming us into a new kind of people by shaping us in the Story they tell.

There is wisdom, in other words, in that meme you see floating around the internet these days that says, "Don't go around with a mouth full of Bible verses and a heart full of hate."  That may seem a bit blunt, but it's a fair point.  The Bible will do something to us, because God has not only breathed out these ancient texts with which we wrestle, inspiring poets, prophets, and storytellers to write their experiences with God, but also because God continues to work through those words and stories to make us like Jesus, as well as to ground us in the truth that we are beloved by Jesus, too.  But none of that is mere head knowledge, and none of that will leave us the way we were.  I can memorize the periodic table of elements and still be a rude, selfish jerk to other people.  The Scriptures, by contrast, intend to make a new creation out of me, by forming the love of Christ in me.  I can't walk away from engaging the Scriptures and be the same--like Jacob, I may find myself both blessed by the encounter and also walking with a limp.  So if we have told ourselves that the point of the Bible is to give us the essential facts we need to memorize so that we can get into heaven, I think we may have missed the boat.  Rather, these verses from Second Timothy see the Scriptures as one more way God makes us more and more fully shaped like Jesus--so that we are trained to do justice in the world, and so that we are equipped to do good to neighbor, stranger, and enemy, just like Jesus.  

That's the goal, in other words: not that we would become people who know certain facts about God, but that we would become people in whom Christ's presence is ever clearer, in the ways we love, the ways we speak, the ways we serve, and the ways we lay down our lives.

I have spent a great deal of my life already doing a lot of reading of Bible stories, books, commentaries, and translations. And I do not think that time has been a waste, not for a moment.  But I am not interested in being merely a head that knows Bible facts.  I hope that, when my time on earth is done and I breathe my last, people don't say of me, "That guy knew a lot of Bible verses," but rather, "God brought forth Christ-like love through him--I bet some of that came from the influence of the Scriptures."  In the end, we aren't going to be masters of Bible knowledge, but that was never really the point.  God's desire with all of us is that the time we spent studying, reading, reflecting, and wrestling with the Scriptures will form us to be more fully in the likeness of the One who is the Word Made Flesh, Jesus himself.

Lord God, shape us by the Scriptures and the Story to make us love like Jesus.

Pulling at the Threads--October 20, 2025

Pulling at the Threads--October 20, 2025

Then Jesus told them a parable about their need to pray always and not to lose heart. He said, “In a certain city there was a judge who neither feared God nor had respect for people. In that city there was a widow who kept coming to him and saying, ‘Grant me justice against my accuser.’ For a while he refused, but later he said to himself, ‘Though I have no fear of God and no respect for anyone, yet because this widow keeps bothering me, I will grant her justice, so that she may not wear me out by continually coming.’” And the Lord said, “Listen to what the unjust judge says. And will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night? Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will quickly grant justice to them. And yet, when the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” (Luke 18:1-8)

Jesus takes it as a given that God cares about justice in the world--this world, the one in which we live, here and now.  And Jesus seems intent on convincing us to believe that God cares about justice, too.

I suppose you could say that "God is always on the side of justice," except that so often in our time everyone assumes that their own side is always the "just" and "righteous" one, and therefore that the matter of justice is reducible to an US-versus-THEM conflict.  And even more dangerously, we tend to assume that since we have told ourselves we are on the "side of justice," therefore any means are permissible to accomplish that justice--and history shows us a terrible list of people who committed atrocities because they were convinced in the righteousness of their cause and the justice of their goals.  So maybe it's not so helpful to think about justice as a matter of pitting one "side" against another, or putting the interests of "Me and My Group First" because we have convinced ourselves that God and justice are with "us," rather than with "them."

Maybe we would do better if we thought of God's commitment to "granting justice" in terms of making all things whole in the world.  We are so quick to define "justice" in terms of who gets zapped for stepping out of line, or how big of a punishment is meted out for the breaking of the rules, but really, the Scriptures offer a much bigger picture of what justice really is.  It's more about putting thing right, restoring what is lost, mending what is broken, and healing what is wounded.  Justice is more about repairing what has been harmed, lifting up those who have been stepped on, and seeking the good of all rather than just a select few--and that will never quite fit rightly within a framework that can only see life as a zero-sum game, where good for you is a threat to me and my group, and where my victory can only come by means of your loss. Jesus isn't suggesting that God is anybody's mascot when he says that God is committed to granting justice; rather, God's kind of justice is about making all people whole and putting all things right.

That means when we are looking to recognize God's presence or work in the world today (because, again, Jesus doesn't rope off God's concern about justice to being just for the afterlife or up in heaven, but seems very much about this world as well), we can't just oversimplify God's work to taking sides.  It's not that God is on the "side" of the Russians against the Ukrainians in that war (much to the chagrin of the clerics and patriarchs of the Russian state church that have publicly declared God on their "side"), or the other way around, but rather that God doesn't want anybody killing anybody over who owns pieces of land, and God doesn't want anybody to be afraid of incoming bombs or drones in the night.  It's not that God is on the "side" of the nation-state of Israel or that God is only on the "side" of the Palestinian people who live in Gaza and the West Bank, but rather that God doesn't want to see anyone taken hostage, or anyone's home to be bulldozed or blown up.  God's kind of justice isn't about making one side win and another side lose, so much as it is about remaking our whole way of relating to one another, so that I can see you as a neighbor, even across the lines we have drawn between us, and I can seek your well-being just as you are called to seek mine.  God's kind of justice isn't about getting my party in office at the next election so that we can just hold onto power, but rather about how we lay down our need for power and status so that instead we can serve one another.  God's kind of justice is much less interested in damning people for being rule-breakers, and much more invested in restoring people who are suffering in some way.  And it is for everyone, because God's intention is to make the world itself whole. That just doesn't work with the us-against-them kind of vitriol that labels anybody you don't agree with as terrorists or criminals.  God's kind of justice is committed to restoring all of us, and making all of us whole.

That's what Jesus says we can count on God to grant.  We can't put a leash on God to serve only on "my side" or work for "my agenda," but we can depend on God always to be committed to putting things right in the world, wherever things have gone wrong.  Sometimes that work is slow, tedious, and difficult to see, rather like watching someone untangle a messy knot might look for a good long while like nothing is being done, because the progress is small and often messy.  But if you've ever untangled a knot before, you know that the slow and steady work of pulling at the threads and loosening the tangles is worth it.  And if you want to save the whole piece of string rather than just cut your losses and settle for giving up on some of the tangled cord, then you have to take the time to get the whole thing unraveled rightly.  That's what God's kind of justice is like--the deliberate, dedicated work of undoing all the ugly knots we have gotten ourselves tied up into, because God knows that we are all bound up together in the same skein of yarn.  Your well-being is connected to mine, just as mine is tethered to everyone else's.  God isn't willing to give up on some part of the ball of string by just cutting a segment out--God is intent on setting the whole thing free again. That's our hope.

Today, the question to ask is this: how can I be a part of God's work to untie the knots around me, and how can we see the work of "justice" as something bigger than sides trying to defeat each other? How might we let ourselves be a part of God's work to mend the whole creation?

Lord God, bring your kind of justice to us, and allow us to be a part of your work in this tangled world.

Without Our Clapping--October 17, 2025

Without Our Clapping--October 17, 2025

"Therefore I endure everything for the sake of the elect, so that they may also obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory. The saying is sure:
 If we have died with him, we will also live with him;
 if we endure, we will also reign with him;
 if we deny him, he will also deny us;
 if we are faithless, he remains faithful—
 he cannot deny himself." (2 Timothy 2:10-13)

When they tell you they need your support in the cause of "saving God," let it be clear to you that they don't know what they're talking about.  When they say that "It's up to us (whoever they allow into the group they label as "us") to save Christianity," you can be certain it's false.  And when the loud voices claiming to speak for Respectable Religion claim that God needs their movement, their influence, their power, or their culture war leverage for things to come out all right in the world, your Gospel-configured "Baloney Detector" should be going off with sirens and alarm bells.  None of it is so, no matter what they say... no matter who the "they" happens to be at the moment.

I've been thinking about this since this past Sunday, when many of us heard this passage from 2 Timothy read in worship, and how the New Testament-era church was clear that it's never Jesus who needs our help to accomplish his purposes, but rather, we are the fickle (and often faithless) ones who rely on Christ.  Whether or not we flake out on Jesus may well be an open question; Jesus, however, is not at risk of running out of energy or giving out on us.  At no point is there a concern that Jesus will bail out, give up, or depend on us to save him; there is, on the other hand, constantly the possibility that we will do any of those things toward him.  And yet--amazingly--the writer of Second Timothy insists that even "if we are faithless, he remains faithful." Even when we blow it, even when we don't live up to our calling, even when we bring wobbly faith, scandalous sins, or a track record of selling out, Jesus remains faithful.  He never needs our help to step up and save the day for him; we always need his.

Or, as I sometimes tell our confirmation students, the position of the Holy Scriptures is that God is not Tinker Bell. 

Yeah, that Tinker Bell.  You know, the winged fairy character from the Peter Pan stories.  The one whose cartoon version graced the opening titles of many of Disney movie over the decades.  God ain't like her... at least in one very important way.  In the classic stage retelling of Peter Pan, there comes a point at which Tinker Bell drinks the poison that was intended for Peter Pan, in order to save the life of the Boy Who Could Fly.  When Peter finds her and discovers what she has done, he realizes she is dying, and then breaks the fourth wall to address the audience for help.  "You have to help save her!" Pan insists.  "You have to bring her back! If you all in the audience will clap your hands, believe really hard, and say out loud that you believe in fairies, Tinker Bell can be revived and come back to life!"  In other words, the magical supernatural pixie creature needs our help to save the day, and to save her life.  Fortunately for the fictional fairy, it always turns out that the exact amount of applause the audience gives is precisely the quantity that will resuscitate Tinker Bell, and the play can move on toward its inevitable happy ending. Captain Hook is defeated, and all is well with Never Land, all because when Tinker Bell needed saving, we in the audience did our part.

And, as I say, as much as it works for a theatrical version of a children's story, that ain't how the Scriptures teach us to picture God.  It might be tempting to think that God needs our help, or Jesus is enlisting us to fight a culture war for him, or that it's up to us to rescue Christianity from whatever nefarious forces they say are out there. But the Scriptures insist that Jesus doesn't need saving, God's Reign doesn't depend on our political machinations, and the Spirit does not need our help to make the Good News "great" or the church "successful." God isn't Tinker Bell, and Christ does not need our assistance to come through in a pinch.  It is always the other way around: we are the ones who need God to be reliable, and we are always the ones dependent on Jesus to be faithful even when we are not.  Blessedly, that is precisely what the Gospel gives us.

So the next time you hear the talking heads at a podium, lectern, or TV studio hawking their plan for how we can help save God, or bring back Christianity, or rescue the church, let these verses from Second Timoty come back to your mind.  God has never needed our measures of "success," "greatness," "power," or "influence." Rather, God's way of saving us--and indeed the world--comes through precisely the things that look like loss and lowliness, weakness and insignificance. When we get it backwards, we lose what makes the Gospel actually good news, and we sell it out for more of the world's typical power-grabbing dressed up in religiosity. 

And you know what?  Even when that happens--even when we turn out to be faithless in God's way and sell out for some counterfeit--Jesus still doesn't sell out, bail out, or give out.  He remains faithful, even when we are faithless, and even without our clapping from the seats.

Lord Jesus, be your faithful self and keep us from selling out for cheap counterfeits of your good news.

On Being Called Criminals--October 16, 2025

On Being Called Criminals--October 16, 2025

"Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David—that is my gospel, for which I suffer hardship, even to the point of being chained like a criminal. But the word of God is not chained." (2 Timothy 2:8-9)

The earliest Christian community didn't shy away from being called troublemakers. They didn't deny that they were accused of being criminals by the powers of the day. The first followers of Jesus readily admitted that everybody from the empire's armed enforcers to the respectable religious leaders saw them as bad citizens, dangerous subversives, and impious pot-stirrers. They didn't even mind the way that reputation got them pushed out to the margins of society rather than occupying centers of power and prestige.  In fact, they were convinced that out by being on the edges like that, it was made even clearer that God's powerful word was free, uninhibited, and on the loose.

That's what strikes me, as I consider again these words from what we call Second Timothy, an early Christian letter from the New Testament that many of us heard in worship back on Sunday.  Here we have the voice of the apostle Paul, and as the text tells it, he sure seems to be looking at the end of his life, awaiting a death sentence meted out at the hands of the Empire, and he is not afraid of admitting that they've got him chained up on criminal charges.  In fact, the word used in the original Greek is even stronger--he says he is being treated as "an evildoer," and that's why he is enduring chains and imprisonment.  There are plenty of things that might be technically against the law but which we might not be too harsh with someone if they were accused of it.  Unpaid parking tickets are a violation of the law, and so it failing to pay your taxes on time or jaywalking, but most of us would cut a little slack for infractions like that.  But calling someone an "evildoer" is a pretty big swing.  Now, it's worth noting that the apostle here in Second Timothy isn't saying that he has actually done something objectively evil--but he is admitting that the government authorities have treated him that way, even if he insists his actions have been right and good.

But that's just it: the early church didn't actively commit crimes, rob banks, or burn farmhouses--but they were willing to be regarded as criminals by the powers of the day. They were willing to endure suffering, but not to inflict suffering on others. They were willing to be pushed to the margins and labeled "troublemakers," but they didn't strike out against others with that kind of hate or unfounded name-calling. Caesar and his underlings might have called us "evildoers" or "treasonous" or even "atheists" (and they did call Christians all those things in the first several centuries), but the community of Jesus didn't resort to the same empty accusations or scapegoating, not of anybody. That was part of our witness.  Like Jesus, we were willing to bear slander, libel, and hostility without returning it.  Like the Crucified Christ, we would accept the hate of others without lobbing it back in return.  Like the examples, not only of Jesus but of the Apostle Paul and just about all of the first disciples of Jesus, we would be willing to endure being excluded as outcasts, but we wouldn't do the same to others who came seeking the grace of God.  And in that willingness to absorb the meanness of others without throwing it back, it was revealed how powerful and free God's message really was.  After all, when someone is truly powerful and authoritative, you don't have to get all bent out of shape or defensive trying to make them look tough.  

I often find myself thinking of that line of Margaret Thatcher, who famously said that being powerful is like being an elegant lady: if you have to tell people you are, you aren't.  I think something like that was true for the early church, and it freed them.  They knew that they weren't really evildoers. They knew that they weren't really criminals or violent extremists, even though the loud voices of the empire tried to paint them as such.  But because the first Christians really trusted that their identity came from Christ--the descendant of old king David who had been crucified by the state and still rose from the dead victorious--they weren't constantly needing to defend their reputations to the rest of the world. We didn't have to keep making ourselves look "tough" or "strong" or like "winners" or even to refute the charges that we were lobbed at us; we just let our lives and our love be the witness of what the Christian faith was really about. After all, the folks who do spend the better part of their energy and breath talking about how great and noble and virtuous they are, they tend to be the insecure ones who are trying to convince themselves.  The early church trusted that its worth and belovedness came through Christ, so they didn't need to impress anybody, prove anything to anyone, or project an image for the world to see.  And that also meant that those Christians weren't afraid to acknowledge when they had been rounded up and jailed, or vilified by the Empire as dangerous criminals, or dismissed as "unschooled fishermen" (another lovely accusation you hear in the book of Acts). 

And part of what made that kind of freedom possible for the New Testament-era and later church was that they knew that the voices of the Empire would say or do whatever they felt they had to in order to maintain their grip on power, but that the Empire's pronouncements and declarations weren't necessarily the truth.  They could call us "criminals" and "evildoers" but that didn't make it so.  They could label people "enemies of the state" but that didn't mean we were trying to burn down society. Voices like the one here in Second Timothy just knew that they didn't have to play the Empire's game or accept its definition of terms.  And while the Empire's spokespeople were trying so hard to turn popular opinion against some made-up caricature of Christianity as violently seditious, the actual Christian community was free to share the news of Jesus, welcome new faces into its embrace, and embody a love that the Empire could not understand.  So yes, the empire's muscle came for us, just like they did to Paul the apostle and Jesus before him. Yes, they put our ancestors in the faith in jail cells, prison blocks, and detention centers without rightful cause. And yes, they tried to label us as "evildoers" who were opposed to everything good in the world. But that didn't stop the disciple community from following the way of Christ, answering malice with goodness, and being a countercultural presence like salt and light.  They learned that from Jesus, too.

Today, it is worth remembering that not everything Caesar or his lieutenants says about the world is true.  The Romans were labeling their violent conquest as "peace" and their emperor as "lord and savior" since the days of Augustus, and every version of every empire since has been using the same playbook.  They condemned Jesus as a criminal, labeled Paul an evildoer, and branded the whole Christian movement a dangerous threat to law and order.  They were lying. We can either get sucked into their game and keep trying to shout louder, or we can just freely go on our way without succumbing to Caesar's old nonsense. I know it is hard not to throw mean names back like they are thrown at us, or to push back with hatred.  And I know sometimes it is the strategy of the Empire to try and provoke violence from people so that they will feel justified in cracking down on them with more violence.  We just don't have to play that game.  The witness of the New Testament reminds us we don't.  We are free from it, even if, like the apostle in 2 Timothy, we are at the same time in chains or branded as troublemakers. Even then, as he says, "the word of God is not chained." Like the living Christ himself, it is free and loose in the world.

Lord Jesus, let us be faithful witnesses in the world even amidst the hostilities and hatred that the world is used to throwing.

Our Ordinary Rivers--October 15, 2025

Our Ordinary Rivers--October 15, 2025

"Naaman, commander of the army of the king of Aram, was a great man and in high favor with his master, because by him the Lord had given victory to Aram. The man, though a mighty warrior, suffered from leprosy. Now the Arameans on one of their raids had taken a young girl captive from the land of Israel, and she served Naaman’s wife. She said to her mistress, ‘If only my lord were with the prophet who is in Samaria! He would cure him of his leprosy.’ So Naaman went in and told his lord just what the girl from the land of Israel had said. And the king of Aram said, ‘Go then, and I will send along a letter to the king of Israel.’ He went, taking with him ten talents of silver, six thousand shekels of gold, and ten sets of garments. He brought the letter to the king of Israel, which read, ‘When this letter reaches you, know that I have sent to you my servant Naaman, that you may cure him of his leprosy.’ When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes and said, ‘Am I God, to give death or life, that this man sends word to me to cure a man of his leprosy? Just look and see how he is trying to pick a quarrel with me.’ But when Elisha the man of God heard that the king of Israel had torn his clothes, he sent a message to the king, ‘Why have you torn your clothes? Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel.’ So Naaman came with his horses and chariots, and halted at the entrance of Elisha’s house. Elisha sent a messenger to him, saying, ‘Go, wash in the Jordan seven times, and your flesh shall be restored and you shall be clean.’ But Naaman became angry and went away, saying, ‘I thought that for me he would surely come out, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and would wave his hand over the spot, and cure the leprosy! Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel? Could I not wash in them, and be clean?’ He turned and went away in a rage. But his servants approached and said to him, ‘Father, if the prophet had commanded you to do something difficult, would you not have done it? How much more, when all he said to you was, “Wash, and be clean”?’ So he went down and immersed himself seven times in the Jordan, according to the word of the man of God; his flesh was restored like the flesh of a young boy, and he was clean. " [2 Kings 5:1-14]

We're always looking for God in the extraordinary, you know? Always up on the moutaintop, or in a booming voice from the sky. We seem to think God is more likely to connect with us on a particularly important day, too--maybe a holy day in the church's calendar, or on the anniversary of someone's death, or at that moment you watch the sun rising over the horizon.

But the ordinary? We rarely give it a second thought. That's surely not where to find God. That's surely not where you'll see divine fingerprints. It almost seems like we think God is like the "good dishes" you save only for special occasions, or the fire hose in the public buildings that is kept behind glass except "for use in emergencies only." We have a harder time thinking that Christ dwells with us exactly in the mundane, the routine, and the unnoticed... because we expect something of the flutter of angel wings or heavenly light and the echo of angel choruses where Christ shows up.

And yet, over and over again, the Bible has to call our attention to seeing the fullness of the divine in the perfectly ordinary, and even outside of the center limelight, in the wings off to the side and the marginal, unimportant places of our lives. Not just on Sunday mornings, but on routine Wednesdays while you are slogging through your regular work load. Not just in the glorious golden glow of the rising sun on a new day, but when it is forgettably grey as well. And not just at the big impressive "rivers of Damascus," but even at the plain, old unremarkable backwaters of the Jordan river.

As a case in point, consider this story that many of us heard this past Sunday The point of the story, in which the foreign (enemy) army officer Naaman seeks a cure for his sickness, is not that the Jordan River in Israel was special, or holy, or even particularly clean water. Just the opposite. The power isn't in the water, but in the God who works in the midst of the ordinary. If you wanted a more impressive river, you could go up to the ones Naaman thought of--the Abana and the Pharpar. But this isn't really about the river, is it? It's about the God who chooses to work healing in the midst of the ordinary, and who shows up unannounced in the backyard creek as well as on the shores of the Mighty Mississippi.

So often, we aren't any different, really, from Naaman. We expect God's presence to be in the extraordinary, but we almost can't dare to imagine that the mundane is worthy of God. We pray with fervor in times of crisis--like when we are in the emergency room with someone we care about... but our attentiveness has a way of falling off when our loved ones are home and getting around just fine again, as if we are saying to God, "We've got it covered from here, God--we don't need you anymore." We might be beaming with praise to God when you get the promotion, or when your kid graduates with honors, or when you make your last payment on the mortgage... but, hmmm, it's funny how we have a way of missing the presence of God on the days when your kid gets a C-minus, or when your car insurance premiums go up, or when you just keep on keeping on at the job you've been in for years. And yet, Naaman's story would seem to tell us that God reserves the right to show up--and to work for good--precisely in those situations we think are too "ordinary" to matter.

Sometimes we limit how much we will let God use us, too, for that matter. I bet we would each be willing to do God's work if it were clearly a criticial situation--to save a life, rescue someone drowning in the ocean, or to sit at the bedside with someone before they have a critical surgery. But somehow, we just start to shrug off the possibility that God might call you or me to something less dramatic or show, but just as vital from God's vantage point. And what a damned shame it would be if we decided that since it's not a "crisis," then we must not be "on-call" for God to use us for the people around us--you know, and we can get back to doing our own thing without worrying about God interrupting our plans for the sake of someone who needs us.

Maybe you'll be called today to check in on the friend who is down in the dumps--and you'll never know it, but your voice might be what pulls them back from the brink, just because you reached out, and not because you actually talked them down from a bridge. Maybe the other person never gets to the ledge or the bridge because you were there and just said, "Hey," when they needed you to. It's not flashy, and you'll never know the difference you made... but it's one of those moments that has divine fingerprints on it, even though it feels completely ordinary from your side.

Maybe you'll be prompted to make some small monetary donation to the homeless ministry, or to the refugee-resettlement organization affiliated with your church (if you don't know one, let me know and I'll help you out!). And you know full well that your ten dollars won't go very far on its own... but as ordinary as that Alexander Hamilton in your wallet might be, who knows how it gets put together with other small donations to give someone a new start and a safe place to sleep?

Maybe you're the one who offers the insight that makes someone think a little bit differently, or your example is what makes someone else give just a little bit more effort because you challenge and inspire them. Maybe you're the one who just shows up on an ordinary Wednesday, and in that ordinary space, God's motion is evident--in you.

It's never about how impressive our actions appear at the moment--after all, it was never about the greatness of the river or the holiness of the water that makes Naaman well. It's always about a God who shows up in the ordinary. In the flat places as well as on the sacred mountains, on weekday afternoons as well as at sunrise on Easter Sunday. In the moments that seem completely forgettable, as well as the days we have circled on our calendars as "special."

I guess that's the thing about this God of ours--the real and living God isn't hemmed in to making only cameo guest appearances for emergencies and liturgical processions with incense and robes. The real and living God shows up in the muddy creek in the back yard, the non-emergency phone call, and the routine weekday.  

Today might feel like an ordinary river, rather than a sacred pool of holy water or a cascade of thundering waterfalls. The question, really, is--will we have our eyes open to allow ourselves to see God's presence without fanfare in all of our ordinary rivers? That is to say, will be ready to see God's presence in whatever meets us in this day--will we recognize the God who is already there...here... right now?

Lord God, show up in this day and let us see you here.