Forgiven Already--April 2, 2025

Forgiven Already--April 2, 2025

"But when he came to himself he said, ‘How many of my father’s hired hands have bread enough and to spare, but here I am dying of hunger! I will get up and go to my father, and I will say to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me like one of your hired hands.”’ So he set off and went to his father. But while he was still far off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion; he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him." (Luke 15:17-20)

Both father and have prepared for this moment, each in their own way.  I don't know that I had ever realized that before, for as many times as I have heard this story of Jesus (which many of us heard this past Sunday).

Of course, the lost son's preparation is a matter of getting a speech ready.  At his point of desperation, he realizes what he has lost by leaving home and blowing his share of the inheritance and going off to a far country where no one is neighborly enough to help him when a famine comes and he is completely broke.  And so, Jesus tells us, he concocts a plan to go back home and offer his father a new arrangement.  He is convinced he has burned the bridge of family once and for all, but perhaps he could be taken on as one of his father's hired hands.  

It's a gamble, of course.  There is not only the very real possibility that a father who had been so grievously disrespected might not even look a returning son in the eye, much less let him speak, but also there was potential danger to the son's own life.  The Torah had provisions for addressing disrespectful and insolent sons, and the punishment was death.  The commandment from what we call Deuteronomy 21 says that the parents of a child who does not obey are to take him to the edge of town where the community elders meet and "shall say to the elders of his town, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from your midst."  You could easily imagine a father, already humiliated by the request of the younger son to mortgage the family farm so that assets could be liquidated and a share given to him, deciding to press charges as soon as the son came back, tail between his legs, to his old house.  You could imagine a father grabbing such a son to the gate of town and hefting rocks to put him to death.  You could even more easily imagine a lynch-mob deputizing itself to "purge the evil from their midst" and taking it upon themselves to stone the son to death as soon as they saw him walking down Main Street and recognized who he was.

But, obviously, that's not what happens.  We know, of course, that the father in Jesus' tale saw his son "while he was still far off" and "he ran and put his arms around him and kissed him."  And while that might at first seem like a completely spontaneous, unplanned response, I think it actually suggests just the opposite.  The fact that the father sees his son from a distance, "while he was still far off," means that he had been looking for his son--watching the horizon and keeping his eyes open, ever since his son left home.  For however long it had been since his son had left home with his share of the inheritance, burned through it all, and found himself in dire straits, the father had been watching for his son to come.  And he was ready when he spotted him.  The father had been preparing for how he would respond if and when his son came home, which means he had decided long before how he would handle a reunion.  The father has forgiven him in advance.  All that remains to be done is for that forgiveness to be communicated to the son. But there was never a moment in the story where the father was waiting for the son to do something "right" first.  He has been straining his eyes looking to the distance and knew already the moment he recognized his son's silhouette or the way he walked exactly how he would respond.  He had been ready for reconciliation all along.

The other thing that suggests about the moment the father embraces his son is that this may well have been a human shield strategy on the part of the father.  Presuming for the moment that everyone in town knew the instruction from Deuteronomy about stoning an insolent child to death in order to "purge the evil" from the community, the father may well have feared that his own neighbors would take matters into their own hands and lynch the son, with or without the father's consent.  And if they had, the whole town could have insisted it was only a matter of "law and order" and that they had the fortitude to do what the father apparently didn't.  They might well have started hurling rocks at the son before he even had the chance to plead for shelter and sanctuary on his father's front doorstep. 

So the father runs out to meet his son--not merely out of overwhelming emotion, I suspect, but because he is prepared to put himself between his son and any danger.  He offers his own body in case there are any rogue neighbors with stones in their hands who think this lost son has brought shame to their whole town.  Before the son can even get a word in edgewise, the father has embraced him. That is both an expression of the forgiveness that was already given by the father, and also a move to put his own body on the line in order to protect his son.  And this, dear ones, is how you are loved.

Honestly, before we go any further in the story or miss the power of what is happening in this moment, let's pause and let it sink in.  This story of Jesus offers a glimpse of the way God's love operates, not just in the hypothetical setting of a parable, and not just in the historical setting of first-century Palestine, but here and now.  And as Jesus tells it, God's forgiveness is not something that is ever in doubt.  It is neither conditional nor contingent on our taking the first step to make amends.  God crosses the entire distance, running out to us while we are a long way off still, in order to wrap divine arms around us.  God's forgiveness is already decided on God's part. Like the father in the story, God knew what God was going to do from the moment we strayed.  The only thing yet to be done is for that forgiveness to be communicated to us who have been off in the far country over and over again.  And at the cross, God puts God's money where God's mouth is, so to speak. God wraps arms around us in Jesus, taking the hit of any stones that might have come our way.  In Jesus, God becomes the divine-human shield absorbs the blows and stones that might have otherwise come from bloodthirsty and vengeful townspeople convinced they were the deputies of righteousness.  This is how we are loved.

All this Lent, we have been looking at how God's love crosses the boundaries that we might have thought would hold it back.  Whether it was the line between Jew and Gentile, insider and outsider, or righteous and unrighteous, God was not content to stay put leaving others out.  Whether it was the boundary between respectable, restrained common sense and reckless, audacious mercy, or the line between life and death itself, we keep meeting a God who crosses all those lines in order to bring us back home, to restore our lives, and to express forgiveness to us.  Here it is, one more time, in utter fullness.  The God of the universe has already determined to forgive you; that is a done deal. God has already run out to meet you exactly where you are and says, "You are my beloved. Before you've done a thing I will offer my life to protect yours."  What else can we say in response to such love? Or maybe that's the point?  Maybe there is nothing we need to say... or do... or earn... or achieve... only to recognize that we are already forgiven, already loved, and already claimed as children in the family.

Could we dare to see God's love this way--and to see that this kind of love isn't reserved just for ME or "Me and My Group First," but everybody on our personal lists of unworthy "sinners" too?

What might that do in the day ahead?  Let's find out.

Lord God, let us see the depth of your love in all of its fullness, and let us be transformed by the gift of your already given forgiveness.

Jesus Holds Up A Mirror--April 1, 2025

Jesus Holds Up A Mirror--April 1, 2025

"Then Jesus said, ‘There was a man who had two sons. The younger of them said to his father, “Father, give me the share of the property that will belong to me.” So he divided his property between them. A few days later the younger son gathered all he had and travelled to a distant country, and there he squandered his property in dissolute living. When he had spent everything, a severe famine took place throughout that country, and he began to be in need. So he went and hired himself out to one of the citizens of that country, who sent him to his fields to feed the pigs. He would gladly have filled himself with the pods that the pigs were eating; and no one gave him anything...." (Luke 15:11-16)

What if this weren't just a fictional fable about a hypothetical father with hypothetical sons?  What if this were our story--the autobiography of the people of God--and Jesus was simply holding mirror up for our faces in it?

I raise the question because often we treat Jesus' parables as just a religious version of Aesop's fables: that they are generic stories with timeless lessons that aren't really about real people, or at least about particular people. And as long as we hear them as general rules, rather than told with you and me in mind, we can always nod our heads in agreement at Jesus' wisdom and still refuse to acknowledge that they have anything to do with us.  The greedy man who builds bigger barns and then finds out he's going to shuffle off this mortal coil before the day is out?  That's not about ME--that's about OTHER people, really and truly greedy people, so I can safely ignore it!  The one about the man laying in the roadside passed by a priest and a Levite before he gets any help from an alien enemy from Samaria?  Well, that doesn't apply to ME, since I'm not a priest or a Levite, and I've mistreated a person from Samaria before, either (because I've never met one).  See how it works? When we treat Jesus' parables as generic morality plays, we can find ways to let ourselves off the hook for taking them to heart.  They're not about US--they're always about some other people, somewhere else, or maybe just hypothetical people who don't exist at all.

Ah, but when Jesus first told this parable, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, his audience of Judeans who prided themselves on being descendants of old Jacob/Israel, son of Isaac, and grandson of Abraham himself, they saw their reflections in the opening sentence.  "There was a man with two sons" feels like a shot across the bow right from the get-go, because any Israelite worth his salt knew the story of their patriarch Jacob, who eventually became Israel, and how he was the younger of two sons who was determined to steal the family inheritance and who ran off to a far country to live with his uncle for a couple of decades, leaving behind a furious older brother Esau and a bewildered and brokenhearted father. When Jesus goes on in his own story and says that the younger brother in his parable asks dad for his share of the inheritance (forcing dad to mortgage the property, and basically sending the message, "I'd rather just have the money I would get when you die, and then I'll be on my way" to dear old dad), these details hit close to home.  Everyone in Jesus' audience heard echoes of their own national and cultural identity.  Everyone who grew up in Jewish culture in the first century knew the stories of their scheming wayward ancestor Jacob, and they knew that the family line had often fallen back into that same pattern over the generations and centuries.

The descendants of the same Jacob/Israel found themselves turning away from God and chasing after wealth and success from pagan gods and pagan empires around them.  And then after enough time, when God allowed them to be taken captive into exile in Babylon, the descendants of Jacob found themselves rather like Jesus' lost son in the story: alone in a far country, wondering whether he could ever come home, and without other help in the world.  All of that is to say, the Jewish listeners in Jesus' first audience for this parable would have heard their own story in his.  And they would have been reminded of all the times that they and their ancestors had been the wayward ones, the willful wanderers, the ungrateful children who took for granted the inheritance that was meant to be a gift, and who then found themselves in deep trouble in the world.  Everybody who heard Jesus' story would have realized he was holding up a mirror and compelling them to see their own faces in the son who went "into the far country." And it would have forced them, at least if they were honest, to see that they had all at some point or another been the ones who turned from God and got themselves lost.

That, of course, is the first step in Jesus' plan.  He's not just trying to make people feel bad about themselves or pile guilt onto their shoulders just for the sake of burdening them.  But since, as we saw yesterday, this story is prompted by self-righteous Respectable Religious people who are upset that Jesus welcomes sinners and includes sell-outs like the tax collectors to his table, the first thing Jesus needs to get them to realize is that they are not in a position to condemn the people on Jesus' guest list.  It is easy, after all, to look down on somebody if you believe that you are morally upright and without fault. Then you can trot out the old lines like, "Well, I never had this problem that THEY have..." or "Well, I did things the RIGHT way..." and condemn whoever doesn't measure up to the standard you imagine yourself to have already cleared.  But Jesus sees that kind of spiritual snobbery from a mile away.  And in a manner of speaking, he sets a trap that the Respectable Religious Crowd walk right into.  Jesus tells a story that forces them to see that they belong to a long line of lost children, wandering schemers, and sinners who get stranded far from home.  Jesus is laying the groundwork for compelling them to see that they are only different from the "tax collectors and sinners" who are at Jesus' table in the particular ways they have each gotten themselves lost and in trouble.  But they are all pitiful prodigals, whether the Pharisees and scribes listening, or the not-good-enoughs who were welcomed at Jesus table. They are all like the exiles who found themselves in the far country of Babylon, and they are all like Jacob before that--the wandering and lost son who ended up far from home, too.  Jesus is yanking the high-horse right out from under them--and from us, too.

We should be aware, too, that Jesus' story will do the same to us, if we have a shred of honesty in us.  We can't hear a story about a son who bails out on the father who vulnerably lets himself be rejected and allows his wayward child to walk away without seeing that we've been the lost son before, too.  And once we see that, we will have to admit that we've lost the right to condemn somebody else for getting themselves lost, too.  Jesus is intent on holding up the mirror to our faces as well, not just his first-century listeners.  He won't let us pretend we are pious and pure while we look down on the ones who actually respond to Jesus' welcome. Jesus won't let us be obstacles keeping other people from his company because we don't think they are "worthy." He compels us to see we are lost sons and daughters, too, and the only way any of us find a spot at the dinner party of grace is when we quit thinking we have earned it by our good behavior.

How will that change the way we interact with people today?  Who might we have been trying to elbow out of Jesus' company before? Where have we been propping ourselves up and pushing others down to make ourselves feel like we've earned God's favor?  And who might Jesus be daring you to invite, rather than to shun, when we gather at Jesus' table on Sunday?

What might happen when Jesus holds up a mirror in this story so that we can see our faces in the face of the wandering son?

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to see the truth about ourselves so that we can allow your grace to do its work on us all.

Real, Not Abstract, Mercy--March 31, 2025

Real, Not Abstract, Mercy--March 31, 2025

"Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to [Jesus.] And the Pharisees and the scribes were grumbling and saying, 'This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them'.” (Luke 15:1-2)

Everybody loves the idea of mercy as long as it's only talked about in the abstract. The moment we start talking about kindness for real people who we really think are undeserving, or acceptance for those we really don't want to accept, or reconciliation with the actual people we have been nursing grudges again, well, then people get fussy.

You can see it playing out in this scene, the opening verses of what we call Luke 15, which many of us heard in worship this Sunday as the introduction to the story often called the Prodigal Son.  All the Respectable Religious People--"the Pharisees and the scribes," as Luke identifies them--surely knew that the God of Israel was known for being "gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love." That line, and variations on it, are woven throughout the Torah, the Prophets, and the Psalms like an ancient creed.  If you asked a sampling of random Judeans on the street to describe their God, they would tell you God is "One" (as in, there's only one God) and then they would tell you that God is merciful.  It was the sort of thing that kids memorized from their earliest years and that septuagenarian grandparents recited by heart every morning with their daily prayers.  Everybody knew that God was "merciful" in first century Judaism; that was the party line.

And as long as it didn't have to get fleshed out any further than that, there was no controversy.  As long as everyone could broadly affirm "Yes, in a broad sense, God is hypothetically merciful and kind," that could be the end of it.  But once you start asking, "Well, to whom is God's mercy available?  To whom does God show kindness, forgiveness, and grace?"  you're setting the stage for a fight.  Because as a general rule, we human beings (especially we religious human beings) tend to start from the assumption that we ourselves are pretty decent people without severe sins or excessive red marks on our permanent record.  We tend to assume that whatever mercy is out there is--of course!--available to us.  It's those OTHER people you gotta watch out for.  It's THOSE PEOPLE who are just not quite as good as us, not quite as worthy, not really proper candidates for forgiveness.  We tend to think of our sins and trespasses as minor infractions--peccadillos, really--like returning our library books late, or occasionally being stingy with the tip at lunch if we are short on cash and don't want to break a larger bill.  But OTHER people?  Well, they are a different story.  And we all have our personalized lists of people who are just beyond the reach of mercy, folks who are across the boundary that separates OUR nice, manageable, even respectable, sins, from THEIR abominable ones, which disqualify "those people" from acceptability.  The trouble is, Jesus just does not care about the lists we make or lines we draw, and he will not leave mercy inside the rigid constraints we would try to cage it in.

Jesus makes the notion of mercy real, not hypothetical.  And he does that by giving his mercy and welcome to actual people with real issues and human faces--and then inviting them to dinner with him.  Jesus doesn't treat sinners like he is quarantining pitiful patients with an incurable and contagious disease--he doesn't keep antiseptic distance or put up barriers to prevent being "tainted" by their iniquity. And neither does Jesus put up pre-conditions of "life change" or prerequisite rituals of repentance before he shares a table with "THOSE PEOPLE." He eats with them--and in the ancient Near Eastern context, table fellowship implies acceptance and friendship between those who break bread together--without insisting that tax collectors quit their jobs and without demanding that the "sinners" get clean and give six months' worth of good behavior before he'll put the kettle on or set the table.

This, I think, is really what upsets the Respectable Religious crew in this story.  See, it's not just that Jesus refuses to condemn or zap the sinners around him.  It's that he actively welcomes them as they are without requiring they clean themselves up, turn over a new leaf, or change their ways first.  To be sure, we might say, being in Jesus' company will change us in profound ways--he will remake us in the image of his likeness and his love, the more we are around him.  But the horse and the cart have to be in the right order.  Jesus doesn't insist on "sinners" stopping being "sinners" before they come to him, like he's got an acute sin allergy and will break out in hives if he's around crooks and gamblers.  It's the other way around: Jesus draws people to himself as they are, declaring them his companions at the table and extending them his friendship, and that has a way of transforming us.  And of course, since Jesus keeps claiming that he is bringing with him the very Reign of God, he's saying that none other than God welcomes the "tax collectors and sinners" as they are.  And for those who wanted to keep mercy as an abstract concept for hypothetical people, that's just a bridge too far.

Jesus, of course, is well aware of their objections, their worries, and their perception that he is too "soft on sin," or even "encouraging abominable behavior" with his welcome.  He just doesn't let it stop him from setting a wide table and crossing the boundaries between "righteous" and "unrighteous" folks for his guest list.

Maybe today that's enough for us to hold onto and let simmer in our souls.  We have probably sung a song or two about how "amazing" God's grace is and how "wide" God's mercy is, but we have probably also kept ourselves from having to picture faces when we do.  Today it might be worth asking ourselves, "Who have I been assuming is outside the line and beyond the reach of God's mercy--and what does Jesus really think about those faces?"  It might be worth asking, "Where have I been saying the right words about God's love and kindness without having to take seriously just how wide a welcome that means?"  And it might be worth it--even if it makes us squirm to do it--to ask who we would have a hard time imagining at the dinner party with Jesus, and what we will do when it turns out that Jesus has already set a place for them?

Lord Jesus, enable us to see the real faces of the real people whom you love, and remembering it includes us as well, even in our stingiest and most hard-hearted moments.

The Way God Thinks--March 28, 2025

The Way God Thinks--March 28, 2025

"See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.  Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.  For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts that your thoughts."  (Isaiah 55:6-9)

It's never about God just pulling rank.  It's always about God's supreme mercy.

I don't think I ever realized that this is the underlying point of this passage from Isaiah 55, until reflecting on it this week after hearing it in worship this past Sunday.  The final verses to this section include more familiar words about how God's thoughts are "higher" than ours, and how God's ways are beyond our ways. And I've heard those lines plenty of times in my life.  Usually I hear them trotted out to mean that God is smarter than we are, or that things that seem terrible and awful in life must really be good, because they must be part of God's plan and how God's ways are just beyond our own.  Often I hear these verse interpreted to mean something like, "If the world seems unfair or unjust or you don't understand why terrible and cruel things happen in it, well, it's only because you don't see how it's all really necessary and God's ways are just inscrutable, so suck it up, because God is just smart and we are just dumb humans."  And okay, sure, God must certainly be "smarter" than we are.  Sure, God's way of knowing must be infinitely beyond the crude and limited way we walking meat-sacks barely have a grasp on reality.  Sure, we are all playing checkers and God is playing three-dimensional chess from Star Trek.  But is that all that's going on here in Isaiah?

When we read these verses about God's ways and thoughts being above our own in their actual context, it's not at all about forcing us to accept the apparently cruelty or injustice of life as "just part of God's plan" that we can't understand.  It's not at all about telling us we should unquestioningly accept the violence, rottenness, or trauma of the world without a protest, because God supposedly "must have willed it to be so." The voice in Isaiah 55 doesn't have the need to cudgel us into grinning acceptance of terrible things in the name of God being "higher" than we are.  And it is most definitely NOT a matter of God just pulling rank to say, "I'm above you, so don't question anything."

Instead, when we take the time to hear these verses about God's ways being beyond our own in their original setting, we see that they come as the conclusion of a passage about God's unexpected mercy and welcome of outsiders, mess-ups, and crooked hearts.  It starts, as we read, with the announcement that outsiders (the "Gentile" nations, outside the borders of Israel or Judah, and beyond the boundaries of good Torah-trained worshippers of Israel's God) will be drawn to the people of Israel and Judah.  They will come, wanting to live the covenant way of life that is grounded in justice and mercy.  They will want to learn to share their bread the way God's Word had commanded the people of Israel to do.  They will come, seeking refuge, belonging, and a place within the covenant people of Israel.  And when all these immigrants come, the prophet says, it will be because God has drawn them: "because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel."  

That notion would have been mind-blowing for the first hearers of these words, who had certainly grown up hearing that God was their unique possession, and that they alone were the people God cared about.  They had heard voices insisting them (in the name of God, no less) that God wanted them to be separate from every other people group, and that every other people group on earth was beneath them... and here comes the prophet saying, "Nope--God is going to draw those other people in, and God wants you to make space for as many of them as come to your doors."  That wasn't what anybody expected.

But the prophet of Isaiah 55 is just getting started.  He adds that God is inviting "the wicked" and the "unrighteous" to come to God and to leave behind their old crooked ways and find forgiveness.  Instead of God saying, "I've had enough of you sinners, so here comes a lightning bolt of wrath to wipe you off the face of the earth!" God says, "Hey, all crooks and rotten stinkers!  Calling all wicked no-goodniks!  You can leave all your crookedness behind and come to me instead!  I'm offering mercy, a new beginning, and forgiveness.  Just quit those old dead-end ways you've been pursuing--they'll never fulfill you or satisfy you.  I'll give you what you need."  God's invitation is specifically to sinners, mess-ups, evildoers, and villains--all of them can find grace and a new beginning, and all free of charge, God says. And again, that all would have been shocking to the ears of the Respectable Religious People in the audience when Isaiah 55 was first spoken.  To people who pictured God as merely personified karma, doling out punishments for "bad guys" and giving out gold stars for "good guys," this would have been scandalous... reckless... absurd!

In other words, it would have been beyond the typical human way of thinking.  As in, "just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my thoughts higher than your thoughts, and my ways higher than your ways."  See it now?

It's only after God has scandalously declared a new policy of welcome to foreigners and mercy to criminals that God breaks into that bit about "my ways are higher than your ways."  God isn't just bragging about being God while belittling us mere humans just in order to stroke the divine ego.  God is saying, "The reason you all find my mercy so preposterous is that you are all still stuck thinking in your narrow and self-centered little patterns.  I operate by a different vision: grace."  That's what this passage has been about all along.

Hopefully, this close reading of these verses will remind us of the importance of reading the Bible in context, rather than clipping out a couple of verses that sound good.  That's probably a good practice for our reading of Scripture no matter what.  But beyond that, the particular message of this whole passage is worth taking to heart.  When Isaiah 55 says that God's ways are beyond our ways, it's not trying to say that God is so enigmatic or obscure that we can never figure anything out about how God operates or what matters to God.  No, really, it's the opposite: it's a clear declaration of how God's ways are beyond ours, namely, through mercy.  

And to hear Isaiah 55 tell it, if there ever comes a time that we think mercy for mess-ups sounds foolish or welcome to foreigners sounds reckless, it's a sign we've stopped thinking in God's kind of thought patterns and have settled into our old, shriveled, and selfish habits again. And God calls us out of those mindsets, to step into the expansiveness of grace that makes room for all of us, outcasts and sinners, losers and fools, alike.

An old definition goes, "Theology is learning to think God's thoughts after him." Isaiah 55 might tell us that every time we train our minds to think, see, and act through mercy and grace, we are learning to think like God. That's at least worth a try today, isn't it?

Lord God, teach us to see the world and use our minds in ways that reflect your graciousness to outsiders and your forgiveness for sinners... like us.

If I Ran the Garden--March 27, 2025

If I Ran the Garden--March 27, 2025

Then he told this parable: “A man had a fig tree planted in his vineyard; and he came looking for fruit on it and found none. So he said to the gardener, ‘See here! For three years I have come looking for fruit on this fig tree, and still I find none. Cut it down! Why should it be wasting the soil?’ He replied, ‘Sir, let it alone for one more year, until I dig around it and put manure on it. If it bears fruit next year, well and good; but if not, you can cut it down.’” (Luke 13:6-9)

I have to confess: I would have given up on the tree.  

I don't think I would have even given it the opportunity for a fourth year of growth and a chance at last to bear fruit, much less committed to extra work for its sake.  

If I had been in charge of this tree--if I had been the gardener in Jesus' story--I would have either chopped it down, dug it up, or more likely just ignored it to let it wither and die without so much as an ounce of further effort on my part, leaving it to take its place in the long line of houseplants, flower gardens, and ornamental shrubs I have managed to kill by neglect over the years.

In short (apologies here to Dr. Seuss), if I ran the garden in Jesus' parable, I wouldn't have crossed the line into being inconvenienced simply for the sake of nursing a fruit-deficient tree into producing a few figs.  (There is probably a joke waiting to be found here about "not giving a fig," but I shall leave it for someone else to make.)  I know myself well enough to admit that I might be willing to encourage or root for someone as long as it doesn't demand too much of my time, effort, or energy, but if it's going to take a long commitment or a big investment of resources, I get stingy.  

It's easy to wish for others to find safe refuge or build a new life for their families away from war zones, but watch how quickly that abstract hypothetical sympathy and support evaporates when folks think they might be inconvenienced by refugees moving into their neighborhood or their resources being requested to help them get settled.  It's easy to say you want folks recovering from addiction to be successful in getting sober, so long as it doesn't affect your schedule, your wallet, or your routines.  It's easy to say we want to care for the environment, or educating children, or any number of worthy causes and issues, only to refuse to change the way we shop, support school levies, or waste less energy. I suspect that all of us are like this at some level, at least for some of the time.  Our caring about others--even if it's people, not fig trees--is firmly circumscribed by our resistance to being inconvenienced or put to extra trouble for them.

And as I say, this is part of the wonder of this parable for me.  Jesus offers an alternative perspective--a minority report--in this story, voiced by the gardener.  He proposes giving the so-far fruitless tree an extra year out of utter grace (the tree has definitely not "earned" an extra year of time, since it hasn't produced fruit yet), and he proposes doing extra work in order to help this tree out.  It's not only going to require both the owner and the gardener to be patient, but the gardener is now signing up for extra work, watering, putting manure on the tree, and helping it to bear fruit.  Everything about this is an inconvenience for the gardener, and yet the gardener is the one leading the charge to help this tree to produce figs.  He is willing to take the time and make the effort for this tree to produce fruit, even though it will cost him.  He is willing to cross the line from what is easy and convenient but basically an empty gesture, across into the realm of what is costly and difficult but actually offers help.  That's the difference with Jesus' kind of love.

And really, that's what still stuns me about this story of Jesus--this is a glimpse of the lengths God in Christ is willing to go to for my sake.  This is how Jesus expended himself for our sake.  This is how God bears with us, over and over again, through long seasons of fruitlessness on our part, in order to nurture us into maturity--in order for us to become what we are meant to be.

Maybe the hallmark of Christlike love is just that: it is willing to go to extra effort, be inconvenienced, or give time, resources, and effort for our sake, even when we haven't given Jesus much reason to believe we'll be a worthwhile investment.  And when we realize that this is how we have been loved, maybe we'll dare to love others the same way--with a willingness to go beyond pleasantries and convenient but empty gestures, into a patient love that goes the extra mile.

Like I say, if I were the gardener in Jesus' story, there's a good chance I would have just given up on the tree.  But Jesus isn't done with me, and he is loving me into becoming the kind of person who would give the tree the grace to become what it was meant to be... which is to say, he is also giving me the grace to become what I was meant to be, too.

Lord Jesus, lead us to love beyond what is convenient the way you have loved us with patience and grace.

The Unconventional Offer--March 26, 2025

The Unconventional Offer--March 26, 2025

"Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters;
    and you that have no money,
    come, buy and eat!
Come, buy wine and milk
    without money and without price.
Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread,
    and your labor for that which does not satisfy?" 
Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good,
and delight yourselves in rich food. (Isaiah 55:1-2)

Conventional wisdom says, "If you got it at a cheap price, it can't be of good quality."

Common sense says, "If you don't make a sizeable profit, it's bad business."

The God of the Scriptures says, "I'm giving away the good stuff for free--why would you go anywhere else?"

And that, dear ones, is the difference between the logic of the market on the one hand and the economy of grace on the other.  The people lauded as great "deal-makers" and savvy entrepreneurs in our culture are only interested in making a buck, while the living God is interested in giving graciously to the empty-handed.  You can decide whose approach you want to follow, I suppose, but you can't pick both. They are pointed in opposite directions.  So choose wisely.

This passage from what we call the book of Isaiah, which many of us heard read in worship this past Sunday, had to have sounded shocking to the ears that first heard it.  Come and get what is good for free?  Really?  Not just water, which might have been available from a river, spring, or well, but milk, wine, and bread?  Who would do such a thing?  Who would give away valuable commodities (surely even more valuable back in the sixth century BC when there weren't dairy departments and wine aisle in every grocery store) without maximizing a profit?  Especially if you had customers who were desperate for the essentials to feed their families, as surely many of the returned exiles who first heard these words from the prophet were. No, if you have high demand, the first Law of Economics is that increased demand leads to increased prices!  If you have something everybody needs, and times are already hard, you can get away with charging anything you want!  When you have your customer-base over a barrel, you can practically name your price!  That is literally Business 101 thinking. There are lengths you might go to for the sake of closing a deal and pleasing a customer, but you don't just give away the store. That's crossing a line.

But here is God, calling to a bunch of needy refugees from Babylon looking to start over in their ancestral homeland, throwing out the economics textbook and crossing the line from "good customer service" to "recklessly generous giving." Why would God just give away good things to people who are hungry and thirsty and want to feed their families?  Well, because it turns out that God has always cared about people more than profits, and because God isn't interested in a relationship with us on the terms of vendor-to-customer, but parent-to-child, Lover-to-Beloved, Redeemer-to-Redeemed.  God crosses the line and breaks the boundary from good business sense into gracious blessing, because that's just who God is.  And it turns out that God has just never been all that interested in asking, "What's in it for me?" or "Why would I do a sucker-thing like helping someone without getting something in return?" God has only ever been interested in loving us, not profiting off of us.  

Of course, part of the tragedy that Isaiah 55 alludes to here is that so often we human beings choose foolishly and go chasing after the snake-oil salesmen and price-gouging peddlers who try to profit off of our habit of seeking the things that don't satisfy.  God keeps giving away good, cool, clean, refreshing water right from the spring, and we keep buying giant-sized fluorescent-colored Big Gulps in unnatural flavors that have no meaning or referent in the real world (What is "Baja blast" or "Purple Thunder"?).  God keeps offering genuine love, and we keep settling for counterfeits that are measured in social media "likes" and "follows."  God keeps offering authentic justice as our way of life, and we keep chasing after a vision of "Me and My Group First" instead.  God keeps calling us into real community, and we keep separating ourselves into exclusive little clubs, gated developments, and cliques.  In other words, God keeps offering us the good stuff for free, and we human beings keep insisting on paying more for shoddy knock-offs.  And that is a downright shame.

Maybe today is a day to hear God's unconventional offer with new ears, and finally to be done with the ways we have chased mirages and wasted our money on things that didn't satisfy.  Maybe today is a day to be done with the kind of obsessions with profits and deals that cannot recognize the gift of grace staring us right in the face.  Maybe today is a day in which, when we hear God's invitation, "Come to the waters," we drop what we are doing and come with empty hands to receive.

And maybe we can tell a neighbor along the way about the Recklessly Generous God who is giving it all away.

Lord God, teach us to stop spending our lives on the things that don't satisfy, and instead to receive the good things you give freely.

Jesus Calls Baloney--March 25, 2025

Jesus Calls Baloney--March 25, 2025

[Jesus said:] "Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them--do you think they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did." (Luke 13:4-5

Jesus has a way of preventing people from punching down.  You know what I mean?

Jesus often will intervene in a situation when someone who is already in a vulnerable situation or marginalized position is getting ganged up on or picked on by others who have more power, clout, or status.  He steps in to stop the bullies and to silence the ones who use their situation to look down on others (or hold them down).  

It's the scene with the lynch-mob and the woman caught in adultery, where Jesus shuts them all down with the proposal that the one who is without sin gets to throw the first stone... until they all walk away.  Or it's the time when the disciples assume that a person born blind is being punished by God (or that his parents are being punished) by the blindness, and Jesus tells them that their thinking is all wrong.  Or when the Respectable Religious people grumble that Jesus is at the much-hated tax collector Zacchaeus' house, Jesus silences them all by insisting that Zacchaeus, too, is a child of God worthy of redemption.  That's just Jesus' thing: he's always putting himself in the middle of the bullies and their targets, and he makes it clear that God has no part in kicking people when they are down. And I have to tell you--this is one of the things I have come to love most about Jesus--even though it also makes me uncomfortable at the same time, because I am so often a coward who isn't brave enough to speak up like he does.  Jesus never joins the side of the bullies; he always speaks up for the ones who are belittled.

This is one of those times, even if it's hard at first to see what's being said here.  Let's unpack this verse that continues along in the reading that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  Yesterday we looked at the case of some Galileans whom the Roman governor Pilate had executed without trial or due process while they were in the act of worshiping in the Temple, and Jesus insisted that this terrible thing wasn't a sign that they were worse sinners or being singled out by God for wrath.  Now as the scene continues, Jesus goes further and offers another example--this time without the complicating factor of the empire.  He pulls an example from the headlines of the day--apparently a tower had fallen in the city of Jerusalem, and eighteen people were killed in the accident.  Now, the conventional wisdom of the day would have said, "Well, when an accident like this happens, this must have been God's punishment for the ones who were killed."  The unspoken assumption of a lot of folks in the world is still basically the same: when a bad thing happens in your life, it's a sign of God's disapproval.  So now not only are you hurting, but you've got a truck-load of guilt piled on top, too, pinning you underneath.  Talk about adding insult to injury!

That's basically what Jesus is dealing with in this conversation: the people who have come to Jesus in this story picture a world in which suffering is translatable to sin.  Therefore, in their view, the people who were killed by the collapse of a tower are not victims to be mourned, but evildoers to be scorned.  They see God taking sides against those eighteen who died beneath the rubble, and presumably they would say the same about whatever other natural disaster might happen tomorrow, or whatever accident might happen next week. This perspective sees everyone who suffers, from rain on your wedding day to the terminal cancer diagnosis, as recipients of divine retribution, and therefore, not worthy of our compassion or empathy, but only our condemnation.

And to all of that, Jesus definitively calls "Baloney!"

"Do you think those victims who died when the tower fell were worse offenders than everyone else in the city?" he asks sardonically.  "No, I tell you!" That's not how it works--the accident that took their lives was not God's laser-guided precision judgment on them, and for that matter, those who weren't affected by the accident don't get to say that they are perfect and pure in God's sight, either.  Jesus is dismantling the mindset that pictures God heaping on insult to add to injury when people suffer.  He is rejecting the worldview that allows those in positions of strength and stability to punch down at the people they see struggling beneath them.  And he is tearing down any theology that says, "When you suffer in life, it is a sign of God's wrath against you." 

The implication, of course, is that God--<gasp!>--just might choose to stand with the victims, the sufferers, and the sorrowful.  Jesus wants us to see God, less as the Cosmic Referee handing out lightning bolts like penalties, and more as the empathic Comforter of Those Who Grieve, the Lifter of Those Bowed Down, and the Vindicator of Those Who Have Been Stepped On.  God is not absent from the victims of tragedy in the world; Jesus insists God is particularly present for them.

And in a sense, this is only the logical continuation of the perspective of the Beatitudes.  If Jesus can announce, "Blessed are the poor, the hungry, and those who mourn," without blushing or crossing his fingers, it is because Jesus sincerely believes that suffering is not evidence of God singling you out for your egregious sin.  Jesus tells us that's simply not how it works, and thereby opens us up to the possibility that God is present especially for those who suffer, not merely rewarding good behavior with convenient parking spaces and sunny weather.  Jesus, in other words, shows us a God who crosses the line to stand with those who are troubled, those who are victimized, and those who endure tragedy, rather than a distant deity perched up on the cloud tops doling out disasters left and right.  This is how God's love works.

Taking Jesus seriously will probably overturn a lot of what we took for granted about how God operates in the world, especially if we have ever been the ones explaining some natural disaster as God's judgment on "those people" (the way Respectable Religious talking heads so often do when there is an earthquake or a hurricane).  It is always tempting to view someone else's tragedy as a punishment from God, because the mere fact that you didn't have to deal with a fire, or a tornado, or a tsunami can make you feel like you are better than those who did.  Jesus puts a stop to all of that.  He just outright calls baloney on that whole program of bad theology, in order that we might come to recognize God crossing lines and choosing to side with the sufferers rather than the ones who are punching down.

Maybe we could stand to actually listen to Jesus, even if it calls us to a new kind of bravery or forces us to re-think what we thought we knew about God, and to see the presence of God among all who are hurting on this day. What might that do to the way we spend our time, our energy, and our love today?

Lord God, help us to see you where you are among those who hurt, and to let go of our old assumptions about your ways in the world.