A God We Can Count On--March 31, 2026

A God We Can Count On--March 31, 2026

    "The Lord God helps me;

        therefore I have not been disgraced;
  therefore I have set my face like flint,
  and I know that I shall not be put to shame;
  he who vindicates me is near.
 Who will contend with me?
  Let us stand in court together.
 Who are my adversaries?
  Let them confront me.
 It is the Lord God who helps me;
  who will declare me guilty?" (Isaiah 50:7-9a)

The thing that keeps Jesus on the path that he knows is headed to a cross is his utter confidence that he remains in God's hands.  And unlike us so often, who keep thinking we have to take matters into our own hands, Jesus knows that he can count on the One he calls "Father" to put things right, to vindicate him, and to raise him up.  It is precisely that utter assurance in God--which is really what faith is, after all--that enables Jesus to give himself away all the way to death.  

Jesus knows it's not up to him to prevent his own death, to destroy his enemies, or to come out looking like a "winner" against Pilate and the Religious Leaders by sundown on Friday. It is simply his to be faithful.  And the God to whom he is faithful will be in charge of putting things right come Sunday.  Because Jesus knows he can count on the living God, he can be wholly focused on facing the hostile forces around him in a way that fits with God's character--which is to say, with love for enemies, with goodness instead of evil, and with mercy rather than cruelty. And this turns out to be the same for us as well.

That's part of what I think we can hear in these words from Isaiah 50, continuing the passage we heard yesterday and which many of us heard back on Sunday. While these words were written centuries before Jesus' last week in Jerusalem, they give us a way of understanding how Jesus faces the events of that first Holy Week.  As we saw yesterday, the prophet spoke of a non-violent response in the face of evil and insult--committing to be faithful to the message God had given even when it was met with violence and mockery.  And then today, we can see in the subsequent verses how the one speaking is able to keep on that path of self-giving love without being goaded into sinking to the opponents' level and answering their evil with evil of his own.  The thing that keeps him on course is his confidence that even when the powers of the day do their worst, he remains in God's hands--and therefore, he can simply focus on carrying out his God-given mission.  Because the prophetic voice in Isaiah 50 knows that God will vindicate him, he doesn't have to give in to the temptation to resort to the tactics of his attackers because they look more "successful" or "effective."

And of course, that's precisely how this week unfolds for Jesus.  There are multiple times where Jesus points out that he could use the same violence and rottenness that the empire and the riled-up lynch-mob have been using on him, but he is called not to play by their rules.  When they come to arrest him in the garden, he points out that they have come with swords and clubs but that he will use no such weapons to fight back against them--even stopping Peter when he starts swinging a sword to try to protect Jesus. "Those who live by the sword will die by the sword," he says in one gospel's retelling.  And in another, he heals the ear of the man whose ear Peter has just cut off.  He additionally notes that he has the authority to call "twelve legions of angels" to his aid if he had chosen to, but that this isn't the way God has called him to fulfill his mission.  Over and over again in the course of Jesus' final confrontations with the powers of the day, he remains committed to the message and mission he has been given, including his refusal to fight evil with evil or violence with violence. And he commands his followers to the same commitment as well: forbidding the disciples to attack the lynch-mob or the religious police back, and disarming them in the garden.  

At no point in any of the Holy Week storytelling does Jesus say he needs his followers to go into battle to defend him or advance his interests, just as he had taught throughout his ministry that God's Reign calls for love toward enemies. Jesus will never endorse killing in his name, no matter how many times throughout history people have blasphemously invoked his name to bless their wars. That is possible because Jesus actually trusts that God will accomplish the necessary vindication, and on God's terms rather than anybody else's.  That confidence allows Jesus to go all the way to the cross, even though the powers of the day will be bragging that they have defeated and destroyed him. Jesus entrusts himself to the God who raises the dead, and that allows him not to give in to resorting to evil's tactics.

For a lot of my life, I've heard people talk about how important it is for us as Christians to believe that Jesus rose from the dead at Easter.  And that's certainly true.  But I think even more vital before we get to talking about OUR belief in Jesus' resurrection is that Jesus seems to have been so convinced that God was not only able, but willing, to raise him from the dead that he was able to walk the road to the cross without needing to fight back in kind or destroy his enemies. He really did believe that he could trust God to both redeem him and to vindicate him, and that allowed him to face down the powers of death with courage and conviction.  And as Easter Sunday assures us, the God in whom Jesus put his trust turns out to have been trustworthy all along.  The empty tomb insists that we have a God we can count on.

That is the kind of trust we are called into as well. How do you and I answer the question, "Can we count on God?" And how do we answer it, not merely in the abstract or the hypothetical, but in our actual choices and commitments? Can we dare to believe that God really does have us in a sure and certain grip, to the point of no longer believing we have to take matters into our own hands?  Can we act as though God really will set things right, no matter what the powers of evil do?  Can we trust that God will hold us even through death, so that we don't have to sell out our faithfulness to the way of Jesus out of fear?

That's what the whole life of discipleship really is--learning to trust God so fully and completely that we can walk the same path as Jesus.  But if we are walking on his path, then he is never far from us, and we are never--never--left to our own devices.

That is good news.

Lord Jesus, enable us to trust as you trust, so that we can be as brave and faithful as you are, too.

God on the Cross--March 30, 2026

God on the Cross--March 30, 2026

"The Lord God has given me a trained tongue,
       that I may know how to sustain
  the weary with a word.
 Morning by morning he wakens,
  wakens my ear
  to listen as those 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 50:4-6)

In the end, the way God defeats the powers of evil is not to play at their own game--using the tactics, the cruelty, and the violence of those powers in the name of fighting them.  No, in the end, God's way of overcoming evil is to endure its worst attacks and respond with good. 

That may be difficult for us to hear--and even harder for us to practice in our own lives--but it is definitely what prophets like Isaiah had come to understand, and certainly what Jesus embodies.  The way of God is ultimately to exhaust evil of its ammunition, to outlast its fury, and to refuse to retaliate in kind, rather than to perpetuate its rottenness. God--and God's Chosen One--will not succumb to becoming monstrous in the name of fighting monsters.

These verses come from a reading that many of us heard in worship this past Sunday on the celebration of Palm Sunday, and I'll admit that they don't seem particularly cheery.  Basically, the voice of the one speaking says he has been trained by God to listen for God's message and then to speak it for those who are "weary," and that this faithful serving has landed him in trouble.  Despite his obedient listening to God (or maybe because of it), he has become the target of enemies who do him harm, both in physical assault and cruel insult.  The prophet may be thinking of his own rejection by unwilling listeners, including the powerbrokers like the king who regularly lashed out against God's messengers. Or he may be looking forward to some person coming in the future--we often group this passage from Isaiah among the so-called "Servant Songs" which describe a figure who would be chosen or anointed (Hebrew "messiah") by God to serve God's purposes precisely through innocent suffering rather than violent retaliation. It is also possible, since this is all poetry, that the author intends to allow both interpretations to stand at the same time.  Maybe the point is precisely that: no matter the specific person is that God is working through, God's chosen way of dealing with evil is with good, God's intended way of responding to cruelty is with compassion, and God's strategy for answering violence is with persistent self-giving love.  The prophet may have felt that call in the way he responded to hostile opponents in his time, just as he may have envisioned God's Chosen One doing the same in a new way some day in the future, just as he may also direct us to the same kind of non-retaliatory love in response to the evil in our own lives and world today.

If that's anywhere close to being in the right ballpark, then this passage's imagery of not running away (or hitting back) in response to those who lobbed insults and spitting is not just meant as a one-time quirky outlier, but a pattern for how we respond to violence and evil in our own day and time.  In the face of such rottenness, the Chosen One of God doesn't say, "We've got to fight fire with fire--we've gotta GET them before they GET us!"  Being God's peculiar people in the world will mean that we make the conscious, intentional choice not to answer evil with more evil, or violence with more violence, or cruelty with more cruelty. Isaiah 50 seems to be telling us that our way of serving God's purposes might look foolish to the world or naively weak in the eyes of "conventional wisdom," but this is in fact what God is training us for.  Our way of dealing with the meanness, violence, and rottenness in the world is to listen for God's message, to faithfully tell it to the world despite the costs, and to commit to answering evil with good when we meet with hostility.  This is our witness to the world, and this is our way of pointing to God's counter-cultural work in the world.  Our way of being "holy" is ultimately our refusal to use the world's tactics of petty insult, cruel hostility, and brutal violence for our own benefit, because we have seen the alternative in the way God's Chosen One responds to the evil in the world. The prophet of Isaiah 50 might not have known the name Jesus, but we see the connections between his vision and the way of the Crucified One who also taught us to love our enemies and not to answer evil with more evil. And once we see the common thread through the centuries between Isaiah 50 and the way of Jesus, we know, too, that there is no way we can ever designate a war as "holy" or claim God's blessing on the same kind of cruelty and violence that the world uses.

As we enter again into the story of Holy Week and the brutality inflicted on Jesus, it is worth remembering that the mere fact of suffering and pain are not what make this week "holy." It is that Jesus embodies God's holy otherness by enduring suffering rather than inflicting it on others--even in the name of a "righteous cause." The cross is not beautiful to Christians merely because it involved an immense amount of pain inflicted on the crucified one; rather it is because we have come to recognize that God is the One on the cross, and that God's way of dealing with the world's hateful evil and cruel violence is to absorb and endure it rather than to turn it back on us in kind.  These words from the prophet in Isaiah 50 train us to see that the One who "gave his back to those who struck him," the same One who pled for forgiveness for his executioners as he bled out from the cross, is the Creator of the universe--and this is God's way of healing the wounds of the world. 

That is how God defeats evil--and that is the way we are called to share in as well, if we dare to be servants in God's purposes in the world, too.

Do we dare?

Lord Jesus, train us to respond to evil in the world with your kind of self-giving suffering love; keep us from becoming monstrous in the name of fighting monsters.

Laid Beside Lazarus--March 27, 2026

Laid Beside Lazarus--March 27, 2026

"Jesus said, 'Take away the stone.' Martha, the sister of the dead man, said to him, 'Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.' Jesus said to her, 'Did I not tell you that if you believed you would see the glory of God?' So they took away the stone. And Jesus looked upward and said, 'Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may know that you sent me.' When he had said this, he cried with a loud voice, 'Lazarus, come out!' The dead man came out, his hands and feet bound with strips of cloth and his face wrapped in a cloth. Jesus said to him, 'Unbind him, and let him go'." (John 11:39-44)

Nobody was there in that instant at the dawn of creation when God first said, "Let there be light," to be able to report on how it felt--but I bet it was a lot like this. 

Jesus calls Lazarus back to life in very much the same manner as the voice of God calling creation into existence, each thing by its own name, with the kind of authority that makes something leap out of nothing. And at that moment "in the beginning," the nothingness does something very surprising by producing "something" where there had been only emptiness before, like the hollow darkness of a tomb. And yet it is also the most natural thing in the world for the "something" to answer the creative voice of God calling it into existence. The light, the sea, the land, the plants, and the animals--they all respond to God's summons freely, and yet they cannot bring themselves into existence apart from God calling them into being first. Each creature is unable to come into being on its own, but with the voice of God, all things effortlessly come into being to be precisely what they are meant to be. That is to say, there is no point in creation at which God calls oceans into existence and only a mud puddle appears, or where God intends to create whales but can only muster guppies.  When God speaks, the creating Word of God is simultaneously so authoritative and gentle that the world comes into being with perfect joy and freedom, while also being utterly dependent on the God who is doing the calling. The same thing is true when Jesus calls Lazarus back to life--and when Jesus calls to us, too.

I think this is one of the most important--but also most difficult--implications of this whole story which we've been reflecting on throughout this past week and last Sunday. This story isn't simply about proving that Jesus theoretically "has the power" to resuscitate the dead, or telling us about a stand-alone "one-off" miracle from twenty centuries ago.  This story compels us to see that each one of us, on our own, is Lazarus--completely dependent on God's creative and powerful word that brings us to life.  This is the way the New Testament often talks about the sinful human condition apart from God--not that we are spiritually "sick" and need Jesus to come along and give us a dose of divine medicine once we are clever enough to ask for it, but rather that we are dead and in the grave on our own and not even aware of our need for someone to raise us to life.  Our journey of faith doesn't start with us being smart enough to ask Jesus into our hearts or pious enough to give our lives to the Lord; it begins with Jesus calling to us like he did at the mouth of the tomb and waking us back to life when we couldn't do a thing on our own.

If that's uncomfortably humbling, well, I think that's the price of resurrection: we have to admit that we can't accomplish it by our own effort or even ask for it first.  Jesus has to call us into life the same way that God has to call the light into being in the beginning at creation.  And, again, like at the creation story, when Jesus calls our name, we cannot help but respond and come to life, like it is the most natural and free thing in the world for us to do--because it is.  But our coming to life, like the light coming out of darkness, is only possible because Jesus calls us first.  On our own, we'll never ask, initiate, or achieve new life, because we have been laid beside Lazarus in the same grave.  We are wholly dependent on a God who is willing to take the first step, to call us out onto the dance floor while we are still bashful wallflowers up against the bleachers, and to call us into motion by name when we are frozen stiff.  Jesus shows us, blessedly, that it turns out this is precisely the God we have--or rather, the God who has us.

So let this put to rest all the variations of popular religion that turn the gospel into something we must accomplish, or at least must initiate on our own, in order to get into God's good graces.  The story of Lazarus--which turns out to be our story as well--insists that God isn't waiting for us to make the first move, because we can't.  Like Lazarus, we are in need of more than just a little encouragement to keep going on the spiritual path we have already started on. We are in need of being called back to life.  Like the light before God speaks, "Let there be," we are not able to bring ourselves into existence or into salvation, but depend completely on the same God who calls us freely into life.  

Maybe faith, then, is less about figuring out the right answers on a theology exam in order to secure our names on the Heavenly Honor Roll list, and more about responding to the voice that calls us by name, the same way that voice first called creation into existence and then called to a dead man beside a rolled-away stone, "Lazarus, come out." Maybe faith is about becoming more and more fully alive and more and more completely what God has made us to be.  And maybe we could even say that when we obey the voice of Jesus who calls us up out of our graves, it is not drudgery the way we often think of "obedience" but the most joyful and free thing we can be.

Today, do you hear the voice calling us already?  He's there--just at the door. He is calling you and me, and all of us, by name.  Can you hear it? "Come out."  What can we do, but answer his call?

Lord Jesus call us to life again today, and let your voice be strong enough to enable us to respond.

The God Who Weeps--March 26, 2026

The God Who Weeps--March 26, 2026

[Jesus] said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep." [John 11:34-35]

Jesus weeps.

He trembles. He cries. His voice cracks. And he has no teaching or parable to explain away the pain of this moment. For this moment--between the death of his friend Lazarus and the moment when Jesus summons him back to life--Jesus sits shiva and only laments the loss of his friend's life cut short. And for this moment, there are no words. Just tears.

We who have heard the story of Lazarus before, as many of us did this past Sunday, know that there will come a moment, very soon, in the story, when Jesus will raise Lazarus from the dead, and that everyone will be all smiles again before the scene ends. But this moment--this moment of utter helplessness, of total vulnerability, of sheer lament--this moment is a hard one for us to bear. This, too, is what God is like.  This, too, is the Lord of all creation and Ground of all being. Jesus shows us a God who weeps, whether you and I like it or not.

Typically, we like our saviors to be active heroes, casting out demons and curing lepers in the blink of an eye, rather than weeping uncontrollably and drawing everyone's attention while doing it. But there is Jesus, melting into a million tears because his friend died too soon.

Generally, we want our saviors to be idealized generic supermen, descending from on high (whether from heaven or the planet Krypton) but keeping their distance. But Jesus shows up as an olive-skinned Jewish rabbi from the Middle East grieving the death of another olive-skinned Jew from the Middle East, as completely human as you and me.

Usually, we expect our saviors to point fingers at an obvious easy target for an enemy to hate, someone we can pin all the blame for when things go wrong, and then for the "savior" figure to obliterate those identified villains in order to save the day. But instead we are given Jesus, who doesn't vilify anyone nor make anyone out to be the bad guy at Lazarus' grave--he is simply grieving the reality of death. Jesus grieves, because God grieves over death--any death.

And honestly, all of that is hard for us. It is a challenge for us to allow Jesus to weep--it makes him seem somehow out of control, somehow too much like us for our comfort. We want to jump ahead to the miraculous moment of resuscitation when Lazarus comes out of the grave, just like we want to skip Good Friday and Holy Saturday right to the pastels and major-key anthems of Easter Sunday. But today the challenge of Jesus is to bear the moments when our only task is grieving, and where the only right words are lament. Today, our challenge is to sit shiva with Jesus, to be vulnerable with Jesus, to grieve with Jesus, and to hold our tongues before blurting out some faux-religious justification for the terrors that happen in this world or lobbing out some half-baked tough-sounding "solution" to prevent terrible things from happening.  If we belong to the found-family of Jesus and his beloved, then sometimes the thing we are called to do, as the Apostle Paul would write to the Romans, is to "weep with those who weep," even when it looks utterly weak and pointless.

Today, in other words, the challenge of Jesus is to weep with him--and therefore with God--over every death: those still grieving from terrorist attacks a few years ago in Israel, as well as those grieving in Gaza and Iran; those who have lost loved ones in Ukraine, in Venezuela, in Sudan, and in our own neighborhoods.  We grieve over every death, never celebrating anyone's dying, because Jesus has shown us that there are tears streaming down God's face as well. And from there we cannot help but see this weeping God present also at the lynching trees of the American South while Confederate flags wave in the background, decades after the Civil War was over... and to see God there tortured, tied to a fence, and left to die... and to see God forced to flee from violence and disaster and taking up shelter among moving bands of refuge-seekers. We cannot help but see God in every place of suffering in all of human history--Jesus has shown us this about God.

We do not want to do this, but Jesus challenges us to weep with him, where he is, even though he keeps insisting on bringing the presence of God into all the places we do not think a respectable, strong, "winner" deity to be found.

So let us grieve today--with no trying to explain away the horror, or to minimize the evil, or to pretend that more weapons will keep us "safe" next time, or to skip past what feels like weakness and vulnerability. Let us sit shiva with our Jesus, who wept for Lazarus, and who weeps today for beloved ones still all over the world.

Lord Jesus, grant us to share your pain and to weep with you, rather than to avoid or ignore or to skip the necessary lament of this day.

The Hard Work of Waiting--March 25, 2026

The Hard Work of Waiting--March 25, 2026

"Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha. Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, 'Lord, he whom you love is ill.' But when Jesus heard it, he said, 'This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.' Accordingly, though Jesus loved Marth and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer at the place where he was." (John 11:1-6)

I am convinced--and I won't be surprised to hear Jesus say so when get to glory--that those two days waiting, apart from his dear friends in Bethany, were harder to get through than the two days Jesus spent in the grave himself. It is always harder to know that someone you love is in pain and to know you need to be apart from them in the suffering, than to go through physical pain yourself. It is harder not to be able to fix things for them, and harder still not to be able to be with them as they hurt.

Every parent wishes they could trade places with their hurting kid at whatever age: when they are up in the night as little ones throwing up, when they get their hearts broken after their first crush ends badly in junior high school, or when they are stressing out in young adulthood about jobs and life decisions and everything... and mom and dad have no magic wands to make it all better. Every grown child, for that matter, wishes they could absorb the suffering of their parents, too, whether it is from a cancer diagnosis, or beginning the long goodbye of dementia, or watching them age and slow down. Everybody wishes they could take away the tears of their friends who are grieving, too. Honestly, we would all rather have some way to take away the pain of those we love. And it is quite often the hardest thing we have to do to know that sometimes we have to stay back.

Jesus knows how this story is going to turn out--he knows both that Lazarus really will die after all, and he also knows that he is going to raise Lazarus from the dead, too. And yet, Jesus also knows that he isn't at the end of the story, yet. He knows that what is necessary at this moment is the distance... the time... the separation. But please, let's not pretend that it was easy for Jesus, or that Mary, Marth, and Lazarus were not important to him. Twice in just six verses here in this story that many of us heard on Sunday, John the narrator has underscored that Jesus loved these people; they were dear friends to him. And it had to cut him to the quick to stay where he was, knowing both that it would mean arriving "too late" to save Lazarus, and that he would be opening himself up to accusations that he didn't care, or wasn't a help, or that he had let everybody else down.

It is easy to be the one who always shows up on time and has a silver bullet to stop every problem. It is hard to be the savior who (like with Jairus' daughter, too) gets detained and isn't there when people expected him to be there. It is hard to bear the looks of disappointment, and then to keep on bringing people to life again.

I don't think we usually give Jesus enough credit for what he suffers in this story. I mean, the actual miracle isn't hard work for Jesus--by the time he raises his dead friend, all Jesus will have to do is call to him, "Lazarus, come out!" But we forget how much Jesus was willing to endure in the in-between time. We forget that there needed to be two days in limbo waiting, and that there would be angry tears and bitter disappointments from Mary and Martha, and that there would be the unsteadiness of having his own knees give out when Jesus got to Lazarus' grave and finally fell down to the ground in shock and sadness himself when he saw it. We forget, I think, that sometimes the path to bringing life requires an unheroic-looking distance.

These days, a lot of people are learning that same pain. We would all love to get to be "heroes" who drop in and "fix" things for friends, for neighbors, for loved ones who are struggling, whether with a difficult diagnosis, a loss in their own lives, a relative who is now deploying overseas into a war zone, or someone who is just struggling to find the money to put gas in their vehicle before the money runs out. We would love it, I suspect, if we could just drop in say the "one right thing" that will cheer hearts, make the cancer go away, bring back the lost loved one, or bring down the price of groceries and utilities. We want to be useful, helpful... you know, "Christ-like." And instead, we find in so many different ways that we can't "fix" things for the people we care about.

But mark my words: Jesus knows what it is like to be there.  Jesus knows--which is also to say that God knows--that sometimes there is no quick fix.  Jesus knows that he will end up bearing the brunt of angry questions from Mary and Martha, just as God has gotten plenty of our angry questions aimed at the sky in the past, too: "Where were you when my spouse got sick, God?" "If you are so good, why did you let those children die in the news story I heard about?"  "Why did you allow my friend to be so swallowed up by the depression they kept hiding that they ended their own life?"  God, too, has been hit with our relentless questions that boil down to asking why God didn't show up when we wanted God to, and on the terms that we wanted.

You know, I suspect, that before the story of Lazarus is done, Jesus will have broken down weeping, and he will have to bear the accusations of the dead man's sisters, demanding to know why he wasn't there to prevent Lazarus from dying. He will take their angry words, knowing all the while what he is going to do for the, and he bears them all. He doesn't dodge or deflect. He doesn't insist that everything is fine when it isn't. He doesn't pass the buck or deny his choices. He takes every last word, and every hysterical punch Mary and Martha can throw at him, and he bears them. All the while, knowing he has come to raise Lazarus from the dead.

Jesus knows that in the end, he needs Martha, Mary, and even Lazarus to know that he will be with them all the way through death and out the other side into resurrection life. He wants them to know they can trust him to the end of the earth--and so he goes with them to the very brink... and beyond. If Jesus dropped in as the hero on the white horse in the nick of time to save the day, it sure would have made for a great story, but there would have always been an unspoken fear of death hovering around everyone. There would have been relief that Lazarus hadn't died... but it would have come at the expense of all of them still being afraid that one day Lazarus could get sick again, and Jesus might not be able to make it in time. So Jesus has to show them, by arriving too late on the scene, that there is no such thing as "too late" for him. But it sure must have hurt to wait those two extra days away from his friends.

We may have to see things in a similar light these days. Nobody wants their friend, their neighbor, or their relative to be left alone as they go through difficult times. We all want to be helpers and heroes. But sometimes, if helping is really about what is best for someone else's well-being rather than about an ego-trip for ourselves, we have to be ok with knowing we can't always fix situations. We have to do the hard work of waiting sometimes: to accompany people through their grief, to walk with them through their sorrow, and to face the hard questions that bubble up in those times.

There will come times when we can help in person... when we can help best by washing feet or showing up. But Lazarus' story reminds us that sometimes all we can do looks like too little and too late.  In those times, we rely on the Gospel's promise that we are not alone in that waiting time, either--Jesus is there in the waiting, too.  And even when we have only burning tears and angry accusations at the heavens, Jesus bears and comes to be with us.

Lord Jesus, give us courageous and loving patience like you.

Without Our Initiative--March 24, 2026

Without Our Initiative--March 24, 2026

"Then [the LORD] said to me, 'Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel. They say, Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely. Therefore prophesy, and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people, and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. And you shall know that I am the LORD, when I open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people. I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live, and I will place you on your own soil; then you shall know that I, the LORD, has spoken and will act, says the LORD'." [Ezekiel 37:11-14]

Watch out--the first step is a doozy.

The first of the Twelve Steps, I mean--in an addiction recovery program, like Alcoholics Anonymous. The first step is especially hard, because it means letting go of the illusion that you're in control of things. "We admitted we were powerless... and that our lives had become unmanageable." That's how it starts--not with a vow to "just try harder," or a recitation of the old poem Invictus, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." No, instead, recovery has to begin with the honest recognition of our powerlessness, so that we can finally quit wasting our energy pretending we've got our stuff together.

In so many ways, that's all of us human beings, too--whether or not you're officially in a Twelve Step Recovery program. Left to our own devices, we're all pretty well powerless, and our lives are just about unmanageable, too--except we tend to want to fool ourselves and everyone else around that we're all smashing successes. We want to picture ourselves as the doctor or nurse who saves the patient in the nick of time, or the firefighter who comes out of the burning building at the last minute, carrying the rescued child. We don't want to consider that we're the patient on the table or the person carried out of the flames.

But the Scriptures telling us the uncomfortable truth: we are not spiritual Boy Scouts earning heavenly merit badges to make it to the next rank up; we are more like old chalky bones needing to be raised to life again through a power beyond our own. We're Lazarus, waiting to be called to life again--which isn't something we can achieve by our own power.

Maybe that's what makes it so hard to admit we are powerless like Ezekiel's valley of bones: it means that we bring nothing to the table but our helplessness. Bones, after all, can't even ask for help or healing. A sick person might have the bright idea to call 9-1-1. A child trapped in a burning house can shout for help. But bones? They don't even know their predicament--they can't even ask for help in the first place. God has to give it without being asked first. God has to step in and raise the dead, without waiting around for the bones to get their act together and request a resurrection. That means--gasp--God's work to save us doesn't depend on our being bright enough to request it, good enough to earn it, or pious enough to invite Jesus into our hearts first. We are powerless, and our lives are unmanageable, after all. We need a God who is willing to raise us from the dead without needing our initiative to kickstart it or to invite God into our hearts first. We need a God who redeems even before we realize we need redemption.

That was certainly the hard pill that the exiles had to swallow in Ezekiel's day. After generations of thinking they were invincible because they had God on "their side" or because of their national wealth or their armies or their weapons or their own generic "greatness," they were brought face to face with their own helplessness. Babylon, the empire du jour, had trampled down their city walls, burned their Temple, overrun their armies, and plundered their wealth. It was as close as you could be to national death--to being just a valley full of old bones. And it was at that point--but not before--that God could bring about a resurrection and bring them home again. Resurrection, by definition, is only for the dead, and therefore must be given and cannot be earned, initiated, or even asked for. But that's exactly when God's best work gets done.

If we, like the ancient exiles sitting in Babylon, don't bring anything to the table to earn or initiate our own resurrection, then that certainly removes any ground we have for looking down on anybody else. Bones don't get to brag, and the femur over here doesn't have reason to think it's better than the tibia further down on the pile. We're all just in need of a power beyond ourselves to bring us back to life. If I want to grow in love, it will mean abandoning the illusion that I'm more worthy of God's love than you or anybody else.

Today, then, is a day for honesty... with ourselves and with God, so that we can be honest with everybody else, too. We are helpless on our own--but that doesn't need to make us despair for even a split second, because ours is a God who meets us exactly at our helplessness. The thing that changes for us, though, once we are able to admit that we are powerless and that our lives have become unmanageable, is that we don't have to try and compare ourselves to anybody else, push them down, or puff ourselves up. We can leave that kind of arrogance behind as one more coping mechanism that never got to the root of the problem anyway. And instead, with open, empty hands, we will at last be ready simply to let God resurrect what is dead in us--and to rejoice when God does that for others around us, whether or not we thought they were "worthy" of it.

O living God, we find ourselves resurrected by your power and your life-giving Spirit--thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Allow us to quit pretending we have come to life in you by our own achieving, so that we can celebrate as you call others to life all around us, too.

Letting God Surprise Us--March 23, 2026

Letting God Surprise Us--March 23, 2026

"The hand of the LORD came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones. He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry. He said to me, 'Mortal, can these bones live?' I answered, 'O Lord GOD, you know.' [Ezekiel 37:1-3]

The longer I continue in this life's journey with God, the more I come to believe that faith starts, not with what we "know" about God, but with the humility to say, "I don't know, God--but you do." Faith, in other words, doesn't start with our cocky certainty about how God works, but rather with giving God the room [or recognizing that God already has the room] to surprise us.

And honestly, I think faith doesn't only start there. Mature faith has learned how to let God keep surprising us, too. A growing and deepening faith doesn't look so much like a catechism of memorized answers, which confine God to stay inside the boundaries of theological theses and philosophical propositions, but rather looks like a relationship that knows the Divine well enough to know that there's always an ace up God's sleeve.

That is most certainly where the prophet is by the time we get to the vision here in Ezekiel 37, words that many of us heard yesterday in worship. He has known the living God long enough not to put anything past the Almighty... and knowing that the moment you decree God "can't" do something, or isn't "allowed" to do something [you know, because of "the rules"], God tends to take it as a personal dare to do the very thing you said God couldn't or wouldn't do. That's why Ezekiel has learned that when God asks a question, especially something that sounds like a loaded question, it's best not to pretend to have more answers or more certainty than you really can claim.

When God shows Ezekiel a valley full of chalky old dry bones and asks, "Can these bones live again?" the obvious answer would have been a resounding NO. No, old bones cannot come to life again. No there is no hope for scattered skeletons. And by extension, the obvious answer should have been NO, there was no hope for the scattered fragments of the people of Judah, whose nation had been destroyed and whose citizens had been taken into exile in Babylon. By all reasonable accounting, the nation was, to be blunt about it, dead.

And that's really what's behind God's question and the imagery of dry bones. They are a stand-in for the exiled people of Israel and Judah, and they were certain that there was no hope for them. Their nation and all the things they built their identity on [their Temple, their capital city Jerusalem, their way of life, and their king] were gone, and they were certain that their covenant relationship with God was permanently and irreparably broken. The idea of a new beginning and a new relationship with God was as absurd as the idea of dead bones becoming living people again. So when God asks Ezekiel, "Can these bones live?" Ezekiel and all of his fellow exiles would have heard it with the same force as, "Could there ever be a new beginning for us as a people?" And the obvious common-sense, rational answer to both questions should have been, "No."

But of course, Ezekiel has known God for long enough not to fall for the obvious answer, even when anything else seems impossible. He knows that God doesn't ask a question like that without a reason, and usually the reason involves up-ending our old assumptions. So Ezekiel lets humility direct his answer: "O Lord God, you know." That is to say, "Everything else would have told me there was no hope, but you are the God who does impossible things, and you would move heaven and earth for the sake of your beloved, so I won't put anything past you any longer." Ezekiel's faith is mature enough that he's ready--maybe even expectant--for God to surprise him, even if it means admitting he doesn't have all the answers.

That's really what God's people keep coming back to, isn't it? Throughout the Scriptures, in the stories of ancient Israel through the gospel adventures of Jesus and the witness of the early church, we are most in closest [and most honest] relationship with God when we abandon all arrogance and pretense and let ourselves be surprised by the ways God's strong love does the impossible. Or, as theologian Douglas John Hall puts it, "The disciple community believes that God reigns, all contrary evidence notwithstanding. But God, as God is depicted in the continuity of the Testaments, is never quite predictable—or rather, only this is predictable about God: that God will be faithful.”

It's the same humility in faith that leads Peter to call out to Jesus, "If it's you, Lord, call me to come to you out on the water." It's the same openness for God to do a new and impossible thing that leads the Ethiopian eunuch to ask, "What is to prevent me from being baptized?" and Philip to go ahead and baptize him, even for all the long list of reasons that "the rules" say he can't. And today we are again dared to let our love of God be humble enough to be open to God's surprising actions that push the boundaries of what we thought possible.

On this day, the living God just might pose some equally impossible sounding question to you, too: "Mortal, will you love those you have written off as unacceptable and unworthy?" "Disciple, could my grace give a new beginning for someone you have written off as beyond hope?" "Child, could there be hope where you have given up, and new life for you right now?" When it happens, may we have the maturity of faith to know how, like Ezekiel, to answer humbly:

"O Lord God, you know."

Surprise us, O God, as you will--and let these hearts of ours be ready for you to move in ways we did not expect, but which turn out to be completely faithful to your character.