Good Riddance to Bad CEOs

Good Riddance to Bad CEOs--August 31, 2016

"Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful." [Colossians 3:13-15]

There is a little CEO in my heart (you, know, from business, a "chief executive officer") who thinks he runs everything and that the whole world revolves around him.  You have one, too. 

I don't know for sure what mine or yours looks like. I imagine mine as an aging man with a bad comb-over and small hands, a furrowed brow over glaring, beady little eyes, and a big blustery voice that yells all the time.  He's the worst.

That little CEO who lives in my heart (and who, by the way, kind of reminds me of the Business-man in de Saint-Exupery's classic The Little Prince) is my worst self--the version of myself who is always bent in on getting more, blaming others, puffing himself up, and throwing other people under the bus.  He is, I suppose, what other passages in the New Testament call, "the old self," or "the old Adam," or "the flesh" in me.  He never admits to doing wrong himself.  He always holds grudges with pettiness and petulance. He could never confess to having needs of his own. He is the voice inside me that always wants to "win" the argument, to rub it in someone else's face, to hold on to old bitterness, to drown out every other voice in the room with his own braggadocio, and to claim every good thing as his own accomplishment rather than a gift for which to be grateful.

And on top of all that, he is never satisfied.  The old self within me--the little CEO who lives in my heart--he always wants more.  He cannot be satisfied with what has been given me already in the day, and he is not satisfied simply to call the shots in my heart and my life--he wants more power to tell everybody else what to do.  But as long as he is the CEO of my heart, I will be forever dissatisfied, forever bitter, forever trying (and failing) at fooling the world into thinking I've got it all together, and forever stuck in strained relationships with other people because I will not be able to forgive or be forgiven.  Pretty much, that blustery little man who holds corner office space in my heart is running things into the ground, but keeps thinking he is great at "winning."  But that's the old, sinful self for you: totally self-delusional and totally self-centered.

Helpfully, the Bible gives very direct counsel for what to do with that sad little CEO who lives in my heart: fire him. 

It's just that simple. Show him the door. Pack up his belongings in a cardboard banker's box, and have security escort him out.  Tell him he does not call the shots anymore, and tell him you have finally seen that he was ruining your life from the inside out-- by keeping you from the freedom of forgiveness and the joy of being accepted as you are without embellishment or smokescreen.  Just tell him quite plainly, "Your services are no longer required," or if you are feeling more dramatic about it, "You're fired," and then breathe a sigh of relief that you don't have to take his garbled self-centered nonsense seriously anymore.  He is not in charge any longer.

All of that, really, is what the third chapter of Colossians means by saying, "let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts." To rule, obviously, is to get to call the shots in your life and your heart.  And if Christ and his way of peace are ruling there, well, then, there is no seat in the board room for that pathetic, blustery old CEO to be there anymore.  Of course, in the first century, when people thought of "rule" and "rulers," they most likely thought of kings and emperors; today, in the era of multi-national corporations and titans of industry and technology like Steve Jobs or Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, maybe the image of the CEO is the best comparison.  But the point is the same, whether we are talking about ancient kings or modern-day company presidents: the old management has got to go.  And instead, we will find our greatest fullness, our greatest joy, and our greatest purpose when the peace of Christ is what calls the shots in our hearts.

Best of all, it's not like you have to "do" something to make Jesus the Lord--he already IS.  The Bible's word for our part is simply "let."  As in, "Let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts..." and "Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly..." To "let" is to allow, to permit, to release control.  It requires neither squinting nor straining, only surrender. It means recognizing that Jesus is Lord already over all the universe, and then recognizing that his way is infinitely better than the boastfulness and bitterness of the "old self," that arrogant old curmudgeon.  Let Christ's peace rule--let the way of Jesus, the way of mercy, the way of honesty about our own failings, the way of gratitude for blessings we did not earn--let all of that rule, and you don't have to listen to the rancorous ramblings of the old sinful self.

My goodness, we could be free.  Think of it--all the energy I waste holding on to the slights of what people have done to me and onto my old sense of entitlements.  Think of all the ways I have chosen to cut myself off from other people by choosing to see them as enemies, as threats, as people I need to compete with and win against in order to have worth.  What a total waste of my life.

The bottom line is that the life that is surrendered to Jesus' kind of peaceableness--radical honesty without the need to impress or "spin," radical mercy for me in my own sinfulness and for the person next to me who needs it the same, radical love that brings together people beyond the boundaries of culture or biology, radical gratitude that sees everything in this life as a gift of grace--that kind of life is what we have all been aching for.  It's just that somewhere along the way we bought into the filthy lie that the secret to fulfillment was in getting, and getting more: more applause, more recognition, more stuff, more "wins," more attention, more money, and more power.  And so we each hired that rotten old CEO inside our hearts to direct our aims--and he has been nothing but trouble ever since. 

But he doesn't have to work here anymore.  Jesus has already ripped up his contract and set us free from having to listen to that pompous blowhard anymore, whatever yours or mine really looks like.  Today, what if we stepped into grace's outstretched embrace and simply let the peace of Christ rule?  I bet our hearts will change....

Lord Jesus, reign and rule in our hearts today, and throw out the old bum of a boss who used to call the shots there. Be our peace and our guiding presence, and free us from the bad direction of our old sinful selves.  Change our hearts, Lord Jesus, by your grace.

There Is A "You"

There Is A "You"--August 30, 2016

"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars that you have established; what are human beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?" [Psalm 8:3-4]


Go out where it is dark sometime.


I don't mean just your-front-porch-after-sunset while you take the trash cans back in from the curb or water your flowers when the sun is down.  I mean, go to the dark where there are no street lights, no pole lights, no living room windows with big flat screen TVs shining out into the front yard.  Go out from the city. Go out from any cluster of houses some night to a moment and place where it is really and truly dark.  And watch for the stars.


And as countless pinpoints of light--all in subtly different hues of color--appear before your eyes in the sky, consider for a moment that even all those dots your eyes can see are but a tiny sliver of the stars in the universe. They are barely even a fraction of a fraction of the stars in our own local galaxy--and yet you can see more than your mind can number. 


Now consider this--each of those tiny specks of light is a star--an object so massive, so huge, that its own weight has crushed its core to the point of starting nuclear reactions!  Our own star, a middle-sized star, as these things go, is so vast that our entire planet could fit a million times inside its volume. And you have probably only seen a tiny fraction of a fraction of the wonders of just our planet.


And then, while you are considering all of this, eyes gazing up into the heavens, think about the fact that you are looking back in time as you look out at those stars.  Each and every one of those lights in the sky is millions and millions of miles away--so far away that even light itself takes years and years to reach us.  So the light you are looking at up on that starlit hillside in the country originated long, long ago--before you were born, and quite possibly before our planet was born, too.  The scientists who measure these things say that there are objects out there that our best telescopes can glimpse, which are really the residual light from events and objects from the early days of the universe--think billions of years into the past!  And in fact, they say, because the universe is expanding at an increasing rate (who can explain that one?), there are objects so distant that their light will never reach us, because the space between us and them keeps growing even faster than the traveling light can catch up to the expansion! 


My goodness, this universe is a big place. 


You don't notice that in daylight, perhaps, or when you are surrounded by the ambient light of neon signs, stoplights, and the glow of smart phone screens.  Awash in all of the glow of commerce, we come to think we are pretty big deals in a pretty small world.  We come to think that each of us is the center of things, and that everybody else had better pay attention to me because I am very important!  We imagine that our work is the most important, that our needs are more pressing that the person's next door (or in a country halfway around the world).  We pretend, then, that we are owed the things we have in this life, because, after all, we are such important, important folk--big fish in a small pond.


But, oh, the pond is so much larger than we ever imagined.  And what's more, none of it ever had to be here.  The universe--it didn't "have" to exist.  Ask the smartest scientists in the world and they will tell you that there is no law of physics that requires that there HAD to be anything at all...


And yet there is.  And there is a "you."


You and I, we didn't have to be.  We didn't have to exist at all.  Nobody owed us life, or even a shot at it. The universe did not require a Steve for all the rest of the protons to all be protons.  But here I am.  And alive, not only some desolate wasteland that can barely support me... but in a place of rich and infinite beauty, a world with so many colors, sights, sounds, flavors, and feelings, a world bursting with the amazing and unearned smell of rain and the sound of trickling water, and with the taste of cherries and the sight of golden fields of wheat rippling with the eddies in the wind at sundown.  This is not just a big pond in which we live--it is a place of infinite beauty.  And you are here, and I am here, to take it in.


Once you recognize that none of it was earned... and that all of it was given, as a masterpiece to care for and enjoy that has landed in our lap, free of charge, well, that does something to you.  You realize you are graced... with life itself.  There are so many things that had to happen just so in order to make the cosmos at all... how much more, for  a world where you could live... and how much more, for you yourself in that world.  Grace has a way of humbling us, and in the midst of that humbling, of making us grateful.  All of a sudden you see things differently--every day as a free jackpot you have won with minutes you did not earn in which to live.  All of a sudden you have the capacity to appreciate the simple gifts of breath... of good bread... of the knowing look of another human being which says, "I know what you are going through, and I share it..." without a single spoken word.  All of a sudden your heart is changed--open to infinite beauty and goodness, open to wonder and awe, and aware that none of it is a prize for good behavior, but all of it is a gift of grace.


And when that happens, you come to extend grace to the other lucky-and-blessed humans who were graced to get to live on this world, too.  You come to see that you don't have any rights to more than them. You come to see that they have been given a place on earth for their own lives and families and thriving, just as you have.  You come to see that, in a world that didn't have to exist at all, each breath is a gift.  And if it is a gift, well then there is a mighty generous Giver behind it all, underneath and before all things, who gives us these free gifts by sheer love.  And in fact, the Giver did not stop with just making a world full of "things" to let us play with... but that the Giver is also the Gift, and the Giver came among us, as one of us, offering himself up beyond our deserving as well.


Well, think about all of that today... and, well, you will be changed.  So go ahead... go out into the dark tonight, and let grace change your heart.


Lord God, amidst the infinite reaches of the universe, you have set us in a good place, and you have said you love us.  Let us dare to believe that, and to live gratefully for all that you have lavished upon us.  Let the gratitude for your gifts of grace make us stand out.

And Hurt's Not Much...

And Hurt's Not Much...--August 29, 2016

[Jesus said:] "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also." [John 14:1-3]

There's an old Dave Matthews lyric that goes, "Turns out not where, but who you're with, that really matters... and hurt's not much when you're around."

That's the underlying truth of Christian hope, too, even though plenty of church folks for the last two millennia have found plenty of ways to miss the point fantasizing about pearly gates and golden streets. For the followers of Jesus, it has never really been about the "where," but about the "who you're with."  It's always been about Jesus.  And our hope, in the end, has always been about being with him, or rather him being with us--and ultimately of being in the full and undiminished presence of the Source and Ground of all Being, with our eyes wide open to recognize that we have already been there all along.

Jesus himself knows it, too (of course).  When he talks about what will give comfort and hope for the troubled hearts of his closest friends, even on his last night with them, Jesus talks about himself--a "who"--rather than the details of heaven--a "where."  Jesus doesn't talk about the "where" much at all, and when he does, it's only in terms of the "who." It's only "my Father's house," not "the grand heavenly palace, gilded and glorious." And what he says is that there are "many dwelling places"--the older phrasing of "mansions" misdirects the point of the word Jesus uses, which is not focused on the size of the house but on whose house we get to live in.  Jesus, in other words, doesn't entice his disciples to hold on to hope by goading them with the lure of palatial estates they will all get to own, or of luxurious gardens or decadent resort-like accommodations.  Rather, it boils down to him saying, "I will be there.  Wasn't that all you really ever needed in the first place?"

And, yes, yes that really was it all along.  What we most deeply need for these troubled hearts of ours is not the promise of heavenly riches or beachside property along the River of Life. What we need is not the offer of the seats of prominence at Jesus' left hand and right hand (like John and James had argued about in another scene from the Gospels), but just to be where Jesus is. The real estate side of things doesn't really matter--it's about knowing that we are with the One person in all of the universe (and beyond it) who loves us with infinite depth and unending faithfulness.

Places lose their appeal over time, to be honest.  The beautiful place of vacationing from your childhood can become overgrown and unkempt. The comfortable memories of old homes get eaten alive when you go back to visit the old neighborhood where you used to live and find the familiar landmarks torn down to put in a strip mall. The magnificent tropical destination you picture for some future vacation may well turn out to be overrated.  The bigger house in the exclusive development with the gated community and cul-de-sacs will feel hollow and sad if you were counting on square-footage to make you happy. How does the John Lennon lyric go? "There are places I remember all my life... though some have changed; some forever, not for better... some have gone, and some remain."  Places are a gamble for calming your troubled heart.

But like Dave Matthews sings, maybe it was never about "where" but the promise of who we are with, and who promises to stay with us.  Granted, life itself can feel like a revolving door of people who come and go--children who are born into your life and then grow up and move out, parents who age before your eyes, co-workers who bail out on your company to go after more money somewhere else to find a happier life in retirement in Florida, lovers who promised they would be there forever but who disappointed or disappeared.  All of that is true enough, too.  But note: Jesus doesn't pin our hopes on those people--he pins them on himself. Rather, he nails them to himself. Jesus himself is the constant.  Jesus himself is the one who will be with us always, through this day and through the next. Jesus himself is the one who has loved us with an everlasting love, and who says that we do not have to be ruled by fear any longer, even in this world full of ear, because we can count on his presence. Now and always.  It was never about the where, really--it was always about the who. About Jesus. And hurt's not much when he's around.  Hurt may be real, and pain may be inescapable in this life, but Jesus buoys us up through them all.

And that's why the promise, in the end, for the whole Christian faith, is about a who (or a "whom", I suppose, in this sentence). The promise of the Christian faith is Jesus. Jesus with us always. Jesus with us now. Jesus with us tomorrow. Jesus with us on the third day, too.  Jesus in the midst of my greatest successes, and Jesus through my magnificent defeats. Jesus with me when I am the victim, and Jesus with me when I am the one to blame who needs forgiveness and a new start. Jesus, who will not abandon me, no matter what a mess I make of things. Jesus, who has gone on record saying, "I will never leave you or forsake you" as his official public policy. That Jesus--he says we get to be with him. Always.

That makes it possible for me to face whatever is coming in this day, and wherever it is, with whomever else is or isn't in the picture--there is Jesus.  And somehow in that, my heart is a little less troubled, and there a little less hurt, just in knowing that he will always be around.

Turns out, not where, but Who you're with that really matters.  And Jesus is always with you.

Lord Jesus, un-trouble our hearts by the promise that you are with us and will be forever. Give us the comfort of your real presence so that we can face whatever else comes our way, wherever else the day leads us.

Toppling the Velvet Rope

Toppling the Velvet Rope--August 26, 2016

"An argument arose among them as to which of them was the greatest. But Jesus, aware of their inner thoughts, took a little child and put it by his side, and said to them, 'Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me; for the least among all of you is the greatest.' John answered, 'Master, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he does not follow with us.' But Jesus said to him, 'Do not stop him; for whoever is not against you is for you'." [Luke 9:46-50]

Jesus would have made for a terrible bouncer. He just has this way of letting in all the riff-raff and making the proud and puffed-up so-and-sos wait in line behind them.  Jesus would have been a real troublemaker with the velvet rope.

Seriously, Jesus has this way of redrawing the lines, moving the barriers, and unhooking the rope lines that keep people out.  It's throughout the gospels, and it's here in spades in this scene from Luke's Gospel.  When the disciples start bickering with each other about their own personal greatness, Jesus doesn't weigh in by crowning one of the twelve as his chosen VP.  In fact, Jesus rejects their whole debate by rejecting the very notion of "greatness" as the disciples had been defining it.  There they are trying to rank themselves in line in order of importance, like would-be guests trying to get into a nightclub, and Jesus' responses isn't to rank the disciples himself, but to knock over the velvet rope altogether and to say, "You're acting like a bunch of little kids--and by the way, one of these little kids is what real greatness looks like." Jesus is not impressed by greater money, greater intellect, greater experience or references on the resume, or who's got more Facebook friends (well, he wouldn't have cared about that if they had social media two millennia ago). All the usual marks people use to compare themselves to others and rank themselves higher than others in their own minds just don't matter to Jesus, so he has no problem putting children ahead of the grown-ups in line and, for that matter taking outsiders who name the name of Jesus and including them on his "team" even if the rest of the disciples get upset that he doesn't share their brand-name.  Jesus just knocks down the boundaries of rank or side, and he leaves them down.

And he isn't satisfied with just knocking down the velvet rope himself--he is on a mission to get each of us to knock them over, too. He is working to change our hearts when we slide back into the old thinking of ranking greatness and keeping out the people we want to label as the riff-raff.

That's a bigger deal than we might realize at first. It means that being a Christian is not simply a matter of believing certain facts about Jesus; it means coming to adopt Jesus' positions and view of other people as our own, too.  To be a Christian is not simply to say, "I love Jesus with all my heart," but to let Jesus then bang around in our hearts and start knocking down the walls and rope lines in there.  To be a Christian is to love and trust Jesus enough to let him change the way we see other people, the way we see ourselves, and the ways we love everybody else around us. 

It is quite possible to recite orthodox Christian doctrine and still be stuck in the old mindset of ranking your greatness against others'.  You can even turn Christianity into subject of facts to be memorized and mastered--and still have missed the point of what Jesus is saying in these verses.  Jesus is not satisfied to get us all reciting the Creeds while still being jerks and narcissists talking about how "great" we are.  Jesus won't rest until he's broken open our old picture of what "greatest" and "least" are, and until we see the delightful divine comedy, the sheer hilarity, of knocking over the barriers and welcoming in the left-out. 

Now think for a moment: if we really were done with all the posturing to make ourselves look "great" or "greater" than somebody else, if we really didn't have to do any of that nonsense anymore, how would your day be different?  Live like that today.

Lord Jesus, where our hearts are still putting up boundaries and lines to rank ourselves, come knock down all the barriers we have set up.  Make us to love the left-out the way you have loved while we were left-out.

What's the Point?

What's the Point?--August 25, 2016

"For neither circumcision nor uncircumcision is anything; but a new creation is everything! As for those who will follow this rule—peace be upon them, and mercy, and upon the Israel of God." [Gal. 6:15-16]

This might seem like a strange question coming from a pastor--and one who grew up in the church, at that--but I'll ask it anyway: what is the point of the church? 

Seriously, what's the point of any of it? Why do we bother going every Sunday, why do we bother being involved in ministry activities, why do we bring our children to learn the stories, and why did early disciples like St. Paul risk their lives to bring the word of Jesus to new places and people?  What's the point?

I ask that question, because I think we often assume the answer... and usually the default assumption answers are the wrong ones.  Often, the default answers Christians give to "why church?" are either, "To get people into heaven," or basically, "Because it's a nice social club to belong to with people who are already kind of like me and who think and talk and look and vote like me."  Both of those miss the boat by jumping off the pier into the overly shallow waters on either side. 

So, what is it, really?  For Paul writing to the Galatian Christians a mere couple of decades after the resurrection, already they were making those kind of wrongheaded shallow assumptions. So Paul has to ask them, "Seriously, are we a part of this new community called the church as one more social club, where we can keep the uncircumcised out and let the circumcised in, or is there something more?  Is the point of belonging to the church just a matter of securing a place in heaven when we die?" 

Because, in all seriousness, if the church is just a means for lining up reservations for the afterlife, you've got to ask why we don't just give up on the weekly gatherings, the bread and the wine, the welcome of strangers, the housing of the homeless, the teaching of stories, the singing and praise, and the working alongside of people we don't always get along with. Why not just mail out pamphlets where people can check a box and pray a prayer to reserve their spot in heaven if that's the sole point of this thing called church?  We had better ask ourselves the same questions Paul put to his fellow disciples of Jesus back in the first century. Is church just my heavenly fire insurance policy?  Or is the scope of being the church bigger--including that promise of eternal life, but beginning even now? 

Paul thinks so--he thinks the old club mentality (even if it's the "heaven-club" mentality) is just too narrow for what God is really about in this community called the church.  God has it in mind to begin a new creation--and in fact, Paul would tell us, God has begun that new creation in the person of Jesus.  So in one sense, this "new creation" business is about each one of us being transformed individually--in a way that begins even now--from the heart outward.  "New creation" is about grace making something renewed out of my old dust and ashes.  "New creation" is about God taking the emptiness and spent-ness that is "me," the empty-handed, "I-got-nuthin" sense we sometimes get when we are at the end of our rope, and how God breathes into us again like the Creator breathing into the clay in Eden to bring humanity to life in the first place.  New creation is how God does that to me, and to you, as a free gift.

But it is also about the whole creation. As in everything, as in our societies and relationships, our politics and economics, our environment and our internal selves.  God's intention with the person of Jesus--and the community that gathers around him called the church--is nothing less ambitious than a whole new creation.  Paul has been telling us all along that God has begun that new creation already by the sheer grace of God.  As people who trust that promise, we are dared to be that new creation already.  Paul is telling us: God says you are a new creation, so go and be a new creation!

We practice that new creation--we embody what it looks like and what it will look like--in the ways we serve and love everything in God's creation.  That's the answer to the "why church" question.  It is an attempt, however meager, however imperfect, to let the new creation begin among all of us, and to offer our whole selves, from the heart to the head to the hands, from our piety to our passion to our politics, up to the God who brings about new creation.  We don't just send out pamphlets and say, "See ya in heaven," because the new creation begins now.  It sure as heaven ain't done here... but it does begin here. And God is determined to renew every last square inch of it... including the inches inside your ribcage, or mine.

This day is full of opportunities to practice the new creation that God has begun in us in both big and little, glamorous and unspoken ways--recycling, visiting the sick, forgiving the grudge I am holding, calling for reforms that provide justly for those in need, singing a new song.  The day is wide open with possibilities to be the people God says we are--to be a part of a new creation.  We will fail at it, too, in all honesty, but we will trust God's declaration that we are nonetheless still a part of the new creation and are still children of God--and we will God's declaration more strongly than we will trust our failures.  And we will be raised up again, in this day, and on the next day, and on the third day, too, to practice the new creation all over again.  Where will it begin for you in this day?

God our Creator, your works are so wide and so deep and so big.  Help us in this day to recognize everything we touch is a piece of your creation, a piece that can be touched with new creation as we embody the love of Jesus for all we meet and all your world.  And with that recognition, give us the courage to be the presence of your new creation today.

How We Are Held

How We Are Held--August 24, 2016

"And the peace of God, which surpasses all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." [Philippians 4:7]

There is a lot I do not understand about gravity... and yet all the while, gravity is doing its work on me.

I mean, I have a grasp of the most basic ways that gravity visibly affects my day to day life—like the fact that I do not go floating off into space when I get out of bed in the morning, or that when my clumsy hands let go of the butter knife at dinner, I know it will always fall to the floor rather than hovering in mid-air.  But the deeper things about gravity—like how gravity can bend light, or whether gravity comes from particles or waves, and things like that—I have no clue about.  I’m just going to own it.

For that matter, somewhere else in the Milky Way, gravity is pulling clouds of gas together to form a new star, and the pressure and force of all that matter being pulled in toward a center point is shocking it into a spark of fire and light, changing the very heart of a new sun for some future world I will never see with my own eyes. And yet, despite my ignorance of the details of this field of physics, gravity continues to do its work on me... and the stars... and everything, changing us all by its pull.

In other words, I am still held in place by gravity right now as I write, even though I do not fully understand gravity, how it works, or how we are held. Gravity doesn’t need my intellectual assent or approval to do its thing; it just keeps a hold of me and stubbornly refuses to let go. Thank God.

Now, because the list of things of which I am ignorant and uninformed could fill a city full of libraries, I could say the same about things like electricity, or the tax code, or the endocrine system, and on and on.  There are lots of things I do not understand, but which keep on doing what they do regardless of my level of comprehension. 

This is a humbling thing to realize, but it is also reassuring—it is a reminder that, on the one hand, the universe does not need my approval to keep on humming (nor does God need my approval to keep it humming), but on the other hand, I need not fear that the world will fall apart just because I don’t know how it all holds together.  Gravity, you might say, passes my understanding... even while it is changing me.

At the same time, two other truths need to be spun off here:  for one, just because I don’t understand how gravity works doesn’t mean it isn’t real (obviously). And on the flip side, just because gravity keeps operating with or without my understanding does not mean that there is nothing to be learned about gravity.  Even if I don’t know everything about it, it doesn’t mean I can know nothing about it.

Paul says that the peace of God is very much the same.  It is real, but it is beyond the grasp of our comprehension.  Like gravity, you can be held by the peace of God without really understanding how you are behind held together or why you are not having an emotional meltdown at the moment.  The peace of God does not come from your ability to see the solution to every problem on the horizon, or your charisma, charm, or good looks. The peace of God is not even dependent on your ability to wrap your brain around it.  Just the opposite, really: to hear Paul tell it, it has the ability to wrap itself around your mind:  “the peace of God…will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus,” he says.

The peace of God, then, is very much like those moments in your early childhood when being held made things okay.  Whatever it was that had frightened you or made you start to cry might still have been “out there”: the older brother or sister who was picking on you, the crack of the thunder, the suspiciously monster-shaped shadows on the floor of your bedroom at night, or whatever.  But being held had this way of making things okay, even if the source of the anxiety was still around to be dealt with… and yes, even if, logically speaking, nothing else had really changed by the placing of parents’ arms around you.  But still somehow, being held that way brought a world of difference—maybe because the embrace is a sign that you were not alone, and that whatever monsters or lightning bolts were out there would have to contend with those strong arms first before they could touch you.  Such is the power of a mother or father’s love.  It is like gravity—it has this irresistible power to hold us and keep us... even if we do not understand how it does what it does.

This is a real relief for the followers of Jesus: we may not understand how we are given the clarity of mind and peace of spirit to make it through those times when everything else seems shaken.  But just because we do not understand how we are getting through does not mean that it’s all in our head or a trick of our imaginations, at least not if gravity and electricity and the endocrine system are also real.

The peace of God, then, is a mystery, in the sacred sense of the word.  And as the old definition goes, an enigma is something so confounding that you cannot say anything about it, but a mystery is something about which you can never say enough, but which you can say something about.  So without going into things beyond our grasp, Paul just says that the peace of God will hold us, will keep us, will guard us, while at the same it goes far beyond anything we can dissect or diagram or predict.  But it is real.  And it changes us.

And at the same time, like we said about gravity, just because we don’t know everything, and maybe can’t know everything, about it, it doesn’t mean we can’t say something about it.  The “something” you can say about God, and the peace of God, before you reach the point where our words fail, well, that is called theology, and its place is the same as the study of physics or biology or history.  Knowing physics isn’t what makes gravity work, but it is still worth learning what we can say about gravity.  And the same with God and God’s peace:  our mental grasp of what God is up to does not save us (in other words, nobody is saved by theology), but it is still worth seeking to learn what we can about how God holds us.  We can, for example, say that the peace of God is not the same thing as sticking our heads in the sand to avoid having to think new thoughts, meet new faces, admit we were wrong, or be real about the very real heartache, unfairness, and just plain meanness in the world. The peace of God is not the same as saying, "You won't have to worry about money anymore since you are a Christian, because God makes those worries go away by sending you extra income in proportion to your faith!" The peace of God is not the empty promise of the cookie cutter life to give you fulfillment in your days. And it is worth recognizing that, as Paul does all this talking about "peace" being given, he was chained to a Roman soldier awaiting trial and sentencing when he wrote it.  The peace of God does not come from having everything on your life's wish list--rather, it comes to us often when we are most glaringly feeling it unfulfilled.  It comes without our explanation for why it is there, and it calms our hearts often without us realizing that our hearts are being calmed while it is happening.

So for starters today, it is enough to face the day knowing that God does hold us, and that God will hold us, whether we understand anything more about it or not.  We will be held today.  Thank God.

Lord Jesus, let us know you as fully as our feeble minds can bear today, but hold us beyond even that in your peace.



Dealing with Bulletproof Fear

Dealing with Bulletproof Fear--August 23, 2016

"In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountain, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it. Many peoples shall come and say, 'Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths.' For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem. He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore." [Isaiah 2:4]

Of course something will have to change our hearts! We will never get to this promised day with the same old fear-bent mindset that is the order of the day right now!  Of course grace will have to change our hearts if there is ever to be a beating of swords into plowshares--we are all still captive to fear, which makes us bound to suspicion of the person or group or nation next to me (you know, they might take what I have), which makes us tangled in hate and deeply insecure about ourselves at the same time. 

And here is the dirty little secret that the fear will never admit to you: the fear is bulletproof.

That is to say, no amount of having more or better weapons will give you real freedom from the fears that have taken hold of us. (And by the same token, Cain killed his brother out of the same insecurity and fear of being un-acceptable, and he did it without the invention of guns or bombs.) The problem starts in our hearts, before we ever get to any talk about the weapons we put in our hands or can detonate with the push of a button. The problem is my heart first--and then, of course, that problem can be made a whole lot worse (with consequences that are a whole lot bigger) if my fear-dominated, insecure heart can get a deadly weapon into my hands.  But if the vision given in Isaiah 2 is to be anything more than a cruelly naïve pipe dream, then the root problem needs to be dealt with: our hearts are afraid.

And pretty much, when we are consumed with fear--of whatever, or of whomever--we have two default responses wired into our hearts: we run, or we lash out. And either way, the fear has won.  Either way lets the fear set the terms, and the game is up before it's begun.  Whether we run from what we are afraid of or attack it, we have let the fear itself steep in our souls like hot tea, and we are captive to it. 

Now, we like to imagine that we are not so ruled by fear, because, "After all, this is the land of freedom! We are the Don't-tread-on-me! nation, right?" So we imagine that we are not afraid--afraid of losing the way of life we imagine in our memory, afraid of the next economic downturn or how we'll pay for the next rate increase at tax time or insurance time, afraid of losing importance, afraid of scary things or people out there, afraid there will not be "enough," afraid of "bad guys" both real and imagined, afraid of having to face it all alone. And we do all sorts of things--and buy all sorts of things--meant to keep the fear at bay. Turn the television up and keep your head buried in a smartphone so you don't have to think about the fear. (You still will think about it.) Stockpile guns and ammo so you can tell yourself it will quiet the fear. (They will not.)  Let the fear crystallize into hate and anger so you can direct it outward and whomever you want to scapegoat as "the real problem," so you don't have to take a look at the heart inside you but just blame everything on something easier to be mad at. (That doesn't work either, by the way.)

The deepest problem is our fear--and certainly there are things to be afraid of, reasons to feel insecure, reasons to feel indignant, reasons that our hearts are troubled.  And fear is bulletproof--you can't make it go away by shooting it.  Bullets, swords, spears, what-have-you--they are all simply not powerful enough to really make us safe or secure.  And if our hearts are still bent by fear, then you can take away the guns and swords and we will still kill each other with rocks and sticks (although, it cannot be denied that it is easier to stop someone who only has a single rock in one hand from killing lots and lots of people, as opposed to more lethal weaponry).  The problem is the bent-ness of our hearts, and the way fear makes us more and more self-absorbed and concerned only with "me" and my self-preservation in the face of my fear, which makes it harder and harder for anybody else to resist giving into fear and suspicion and hate, too, from their side.

If I am still ruled by fear, then putting a gun or a sword in my hand to wave at possible enemies will not make me less afraid or more safe--it will simply make me a still-afraid person who now has greater power to cause damage... which makes everybody else around more trapped in fear of what I might do. And see? Fear has won the game already if we play it that way.

What Isaiah envisions is nothing less than a radical transformation, both of human society as a whole, and of our own hearts.  It will take nothing less than a change within our hearts, otherwise we will always reach for whatever hard or sharp objects are around to throw at each other. (I am reminded of that darkly funny scene from Dr. Strangelove, when the military planners are envisioning that after a nuclear war breaks out and any remaining survivors go and hide underground in mines, then we'll have to outdo the commies in having more and better mines to hide in. The weapons and tactics change, but the underlying fear just keeps feeding and growing, whether it's ICBMs, semi-automatic guns, or sticks and stones.)

And this is the other place that we church folk sometimes miss the point (the first place being the way have often foolishly thought that having more and better weapons than "the bad guys" will solve the problem, while leaving the root fear unchecked). We have a way, we religious folk, of reciting these words from Isaiah (or the parallel places it shows up in the Bible, like Micah, or like the other prophets, or even in spirit in Jesus' teaching), but imagining that they are simply a prediction of some far-off day when we get to heaven, and that in the mean time, there's nothing to be done to anticipate that future beat-your-swords-into-plowshares day.  Sometimes we church folk just say, "Well, one day it will be great and God will make us all nice to each other, but in the mean time, our hearts are still all selfish and afraid, so there's nothing to be done but play by the world's rules and have more and better weapons to kill each other with."  We act, in other words, as if the change in our hearts is only something that happens post-mortem--in the afterlife.

Isaiah certainly didn't think so. He doesn't imagine that his words and his vision were restricted to an otherworldly floating soul cloud.  He envisioned real people in flesh and blood lives, who were able to let go of their swords and turn them into farm equipment--because they were not afraid anymore.  Isaiah envisions a change of heart, which makes it possible for us to no longer fear each other, and thus to always be aiming at each other.  Isaiah envisions that there is a third way to deal with our very real fear: instead of running from our fears or lashing out in anger and hate, we can be people so confident in the God of life that we can break the cycle of fear. We stand up, not to attack the "bad guys" before they attack us, but in order to say that we will not be ruled by fear anymore. We stand up, not to shoot first and ask questions later, but because we are confident that God has got our back and can even raise up the dead, so we do not have to fear what anybody else can "do" to us.  We stand up, because we are so grounded in the grace of God that we can start to live now as one day all creation will live when, as the prayer says, God's will is done on earth as it is already in heaven.  We are part of that "your will be done on earth"--it is not a "one day after we all die" thing, but a right now thing.  Isaiah has sparked the possibility for us that we don't have to give up on the idea of a world where swords are beaten into plowshares and weapons are at last laid down, and we don't have to put it off as a "heaven only" thing--we are the beginning of the change.  The change is in our hearts--these hearts, ours right now--and God is beginning to work that change in us already. Dare we let God continue that change in us? Dare we let go of the fear, and the stranglehold it has on us?

It's funny, kind of--how often we hear religious folk these days pining for a time when they thing things were better, more moral, more righteous, what-have-you... and yet, the Bible itself doesn't merely look backward. The prophets like Isaiah point us forward to a home we haven't been to yet, to a reality that is awaiting us on the edge of the horizon, to a new way of life that is not just a wistful rehash of "how it used to be." Maybe, if we think the Bible is important after all, we should take a cue from the voices in its pages, and look forward to a new kind life, in which our hearts are no longer ruled by fear, and when at last, we will be so grounded in the goodness of God that we can see it in the faces of those we used to be afraid of.  Maybe we should consider, as Isaiah and Micah and Jesus all tell us, there is an alternative to running and to lashing out.

There is a third way.  There is courageous love.

Lord God, break open our hearts where we are ruled by fear and insecurity, so that we can beat our weapons into tools for work, and so that our lives can be transformed by your power for good.

The Last Place You Look

The Last Place You Look--August 22, 2016

"Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus." [Philippians 3:12-14]

There's a reason that the lost thing you are searching for will be in the last place you look.

The reason, of course, is that once you have found the thing you were looking for, you quit looking.  And you can move on to using the thing you had spent all that energy and time searching for.

That's obvious enough, right?  If you've gone turning your house upside down looking for your missing car keys, you don't go and ransack the garage once you've found that you had left them on the kitchen counter by the stovetop.  If you have been searching for the best car to buy, and you find exactly what you are looking for at the price you have been hoping for, you buy it--you stop searching and you actually purchase the car. Once they are found... they are found!

That should be a freeing realization, too, if you think about it. Once you've got the thing you were looking for, you can stop looking for more. Or, as more often happens in life, once you realize that you have been given all you need for contentment already, you don't have to keep wasting energy or time searching for what you have already been graced with. When I am scrambling around the dining room table looking to see if I have left a pencil there, and it turns out that my even-nicer-writing pen is just behind my laptop there on the table top, I don't keep searching for a pencil that might never have been there, but I pick up the pen and start writing. Or when I'm reaching into the dryer for my white check dress shirt, once I realize it was right there under those jeans all along by the front of the dryer door I don't keep looking inside the stainless steel drum to see if somehow more identical shirts have magically appeared.  No, once I've found my shirt I go and iron it and put it on--I do with it what it was meant to be used for.

 

The New Testament talks about what it is to have found Christ in the same way.  Or more accurately, the New Testament talks about how Christ has already found us--and at some point, it dawns on us (we usually call this "faith") that we have been found and consequently have everything we were really ever in need of in the first place. Paul talks here in Philippians about the difference it made in his life to finally give up trying to impress his way into righteousness and to obey his way into God's acceptance... only to discover that he was already accepted and God had declared him already righteous.  That freed him.  All of a sudden, he didn't have to waste time and energy and life striving to get something that God had already given him for free.  And once he realized that, he could "forget what lies behind" in his own life--no more fussing about the heartache and hindrances he had faced, no more nervous fretting about whether he had done enough, and no more need to keep looking for what Christ had already given him.

And once you realize you don't have to keep checking the couch cushions for the car keys that are already in your hand, well, you can actually get out the door and get on with your day. That's the Christian life in a nutshell.  It is about the change in our hearts--which becomes a change in our calendars, our wallets, our social circles, and our priorities--that happens when we realize in faith that we don't have to keep seeking after what God has already placed in our hands.  The keys are right there. 

So, like Paul, we will discover more and more that all the things the world had promised us would make us happy just can't do the trick... but that we will find joy that comes from knowing we are accepted in Christ and beloved just as we are.  And we will discover then we don't have to keep wasting our time and beating our heads against a wall wondering why a new promotion doesn't automatically fill the empty place in our lives, or why the new house or car soon lose their magical allure once we've bought them. It's not that you bought the wrong house or the wrong color car--it's that assuming we would find our fulfillment, our joy, in those things was always a doomed search when our deepest sense of fulfillment was already in our lap as the free gift of Christ "who has made me his own." And we will discover that we don't have to keep worrying about whether we have done enough to make God accept us, or whether we look religious enough--no, our acceptance is already a given (literally--it is a gift!) that was never obtainable with a better resume or set of references.

Once we realize that we've been searching under every rock and tree for the meaning and the belonging that God gave us before we even knew we needed it, then there's no longer the monkey on our backs screeching at us to keep looking, to keep relentlessly striving after... anything else. And we can actually get about the business of living fully, rather than running around trying to find the stuff we think we need (or were told we need) in order to live that abundant life.  Like Paul says, we can forget all the stuff that is behind us that we had been spending our time looking through, and we can press on, knowing that all we really needed has been in our hands all along.

It's true: the thing you are looking for is in the last place you look--because if you are smart at all, you know to stop the quest once you've got what you were really after all along.Today, what will you be freed to do now that we don't have to go seeking after some way to earn God's approval, and now that we don't have to chasing after empty promises from the voices of the day telling us what they thing will make us happy?

Today, what will happen if you and I leave the couch cushions behind and head out the car with the keys we had not noticed were already in our grip?

Lord Jesus, let us be so confident that you have made us your own that we will no longer spend our energy looking elsewhere for what you have given us for free in you.

Tired of Winning

Tired of Winning--August 19, 2016

"Those who trust in their riches will wither, but the righteous will flourish like green leaves." [Proverbs 11:28]

I think I have won enough at Tic-Tac-Toe in my life.

By a certain point in life, you are just done with needing to win at that child's time-filler of a game, and you really don't have a "need" or a craving to play the game at all anymore, but certainly no more need to crown yourself World Tic-Tac-Toe Champion. 

So, when our family was out to eat the other day, and my son wanted to play the Tic-Tac-Toe game that was pre-printed on the kids' menu, I obliged him, not out of my need to vanquish another opponent in the game of Xs and Os but because he wanted to, and because I love my son. There was a time in my own childhood when I placed a great deal of worth and importance on who could win more games of this cerebral challenge, and I relished every time I bested, or even tied, my dad or grandfather or mom in restaurants or down time moments over the years.  But at some point I just realized that my value did not hang on how many times I won at Tic-Tac-Toe, and I guess you could say I just got tired of winning.

Deeper than that, I think I realized that "winning" was never really what was good about those childhood games of Tic-Tac-Toe. It was love.  It was time.  It was maybe even the brain-stretching exercise of learning whatever minimal strategy there is to the game.  But it was never really about winning--so maybe it's not even that I "got tired of winning," so much as at some point I realized that "winning" had been a silly and shallow thing to get excited about all along, and that it had never really been the thing bringing me any real joy.  And now as the dad in the restaurant waiting moments, I can see that whole exchange from a new angle. Even though as the adult I could trounce my five-year-old son every time, in a minimal number of moves and tell him the game was up before even half the spaces are filled in, that would miss the point of what is really happening there.  If I decided to best him every time, interspersed with relentless gloating about how I have won all the games, well, I would indeed rack up more wins in my lifetime win-column for Tic-Tac-Toe.  But that and five dollars will get you a cup of coffee at Starbucks.  The wins are meaningless by themselves.  Only when I see those games as means for building the relationship with my son, stretching his brain, and yeah, killing a little time until his chicken fingers arrive, does there come to be any lasting value in those games. And that value comes, regardless of whether I have won or lost or cat's-gamed the Tic-Tac-Toe game.  I'm just tired of winning, because it was never the thing that mattered.

The voices of the Scriptures have been saying the same thing for thousands of years. It's just that we have a harder time believing those voices when it comes to the grown-up equivalents of Tic-Tac-Toe wins--we have a harder time believing that "winning" at work... in our possessions... in other people's opinions of us... in anything, really, is as empty as the game on the back of the kids' menu. So the Bible has to keep saying it.  It's there in the Psalms and like today's verse, in the Proverbs.  It's there throughout the words of Jesus, and in the letters of Paul who came to recognize that all the so-called "wins" he had in his life were all "loss" compared to the surpassing greatness of being loved by Jesus. It's even the central message of the whole book of Ecclesiastes, in which the writer basically gives a list of all the "wins" he had racked up in his life, from money to romance and sex to intelligence to power, and then admits that they were all Tic-Tac-Toe victories: meaningless, like chasing after wind.  The writer of Ecclesiastes was tired of winning, too.

One of the hardest changes in our hearts to make is putting away that bit of persistent childishness.  Even though we may mature enough to know that placemat table games are kind of silly, we just move on to "grown-up" versions of the same silly obsession with trying to prove we are better than everybody else, or to puff ourselves up with the numbers in our "win" column. But grace, if we dare to let grace do its work, slowly erodes and wears away at the calcified thinking about "winning" that has built up in us over the years like plaque in an artery. And this the clever way grace does it: the whole logic of grace, the whole way of the gospel, is for God to love and accept us apart from our supposed wins or accomplishments, making them void of power to rank or define us. And God claimed us in the supreme act of loss--death by execution at the hands of the empire on a cross! And by discounting the worth of the "wins" we had racked up, God has also set us on equal footing in this new community, so that now I come to see everybody else around me as just as beloved, just as precious, just as blessed and treasured as I am. 

Grace is what helps us see that the point of the childhood placemat games were never about the wins, but about the love.  And grace is what lets us see that all the adult games of money-making, title-acquiring, romantic-conquesting, and pleasure-seeking were just as empty as the lifetime number of wins you had at Tic-Tac-Toe, Paper-Rock-Scissors, or the Dot Game.

It was always all about love. Now what will you do with your day--your life!--now that you don't have to waste it on the tedious and tired childishness of racking up "wins"?

Lord God, change our hearts to be free from the need to prove ourselves or one-up other people. And lead us out into the kind of love that doesn't need to impress.

The Two-Thousand Year Gamble

The Two-Thousand Year Gamble--August 17, 2016

"As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise."  [Gal. 3:27-29]

Just to be clear--we don't lose our gender, our eye color, music preferences, or national background when we become a part of the community of Christ. We don't lose those categories that are often used to define us; rather, those categories lose their definitiveness. They lose their power--if we dare to believe it--to keep us divided from each other and to set us against each other.

The critical thing is to ask, "What most deeply defines me?" And once I realize that the promise we call "the Gospel" says that God's calling me beloved transcends any other category, label, or division, then I can own my particularity and see you, in all your different particularities, as beloved, too, without me feeling threatened or afraid.  The Gospel works out that change in our hearts, even while we are still half-afraid. But like I say, it starts with daring to believe the claim of the New Testament--that the most definitive thing about us is God's calling us beloved, without pretending the other particulars of me aren't there.

So, for example, under my roof and in my immediate family, I'm still a white male of English and German ancestry who grew up going to art museums and orchestra concerts rather than NFL games or NASCAR races. I have straight brown hair, bad eyes, and skin that burns pink in the summer son, and I could never do a chin-up to save my life. My son and my daughter have curly dark hair and brown skin, and they move more gracefully in toddlerhood than I ever have.  We do not share DNA.  But we have staked our lives on the claim that it is love that makes us belong to one another rather than common ethnicity, appearance, or shared physical agility. Our family is not bound by the set of conditions any of us were born with, but it is sort of a daily gamble that a promise of always-love is powerful enough to hold together people who otherwise are quite different in many ways.  And yet at the same time, we don't pretend that we those differences are not there; we cannot.  At some point in our lives, something had to change in our hearts that broke open the old mental picture that family was primarily about passing on your genes, and a new picture, a new kind of understanding of "family" came into my awareness. Everything now is bet on the promise that love can make someone belong even if the traits we call "natural" or "inborn" are quite different from one another.

The followers of Jesus are a part of a very similar gamble. It is something of an experiment that has been going on for two thousand years, and we keep having to re-consider whether there is some label or category out there that is stronger than the promise of God, or God's claim, "You are beloved," is powerful enough to hold together any other difference, label, or category.  We don't forget or deny the things that make each of us who we are, not any more than I pretend my son's curly hair was my contribution to his identity.  To be a Christian, then, is not to pretend that we are all the same, but that the things that make us different are not more essential, not more fundamental, than the claim of God which says simply, "You are beloved--therefore you belong." 

So, if we dare to take these words--really quite radical words, if you think about it--from what we call the third chapter of Galatians seriously, we won't pretend that we suddenly lose our gender, our preferences, our in-born traits and tendencies, or our DNA.  Rather, we come to say that these things are not more fundamental than the love of God which says we all belong.  The old lines and distinctions no longer divide us or carry any force for us within the Christian community. 

Our baptism into Christ defines us, he says, and makes a stronger claim on us than any other label that gets put on us or that we put on ourselves.  Before I am anything else--before I am white or male or English or middle class or married or clumsy or near-sighted or whatever other categorization we might describe ourselves with--I am made a child of God through Christ.  My daughter EzRhianna has none of those demographic boxes checked the same way I do, but she is a child of God, and she and I can both recall the day when the water came streaming down her face and the cross was traced on her forehead to inscribe the promise over her. I don't stop being any of those other things that I am, and neither does Ez, and neither do you. Paul would tell us that none of those other things are the basis of my belonging or my identity any longer.  The old labels used to define me just don’t stick.  The Christian community is not defined by what we were born with. It is defined by a promise.

Now... truth be told, the problem we face with all of these words, though, is that we have let it go as just a utopian vision and we perpetually fall short of it.  Martin Luther King, Jr. used to point out that the most segregated hour in America was the Sunday morning worship hour--a sad reality that flies in the face of all that Paul says about what it means to live in the Christian community.  For that matter, for generations, Christians have either ignored or spiritualized this passage from Galatians so that women could not have positions of leadership in the church--often with the claim that they were abiding by other scriptures that speak against women's leadership, but clearly then ignoring this passage.  How tragic is it that Paul gives us this radically open, profoundly beautiful picture of community in this passage, and we have spent the last two thousand years inventing all sorts of excuses for why "those people" (pick your label or category) did not apply to that surprisingly inclusive vision in Galatians 3. We have come up with countless new ways to settle for less than this genuine kind of community.  

And maybe the saddest part about all of it is that Paul doesn't describe this picture as a future possibility or a commandment of what we should be or could be if only we would strive harder at it.  This is not a utopian hypothetical community--Paul says that this is how things are for us.  In other words, as far as God is concerned, God regards us already as a community where the old lines of gender, class, and race no longer need to divide us.  God sees Christ in us, and over us, and through us.  God just sees children.  And yet we somehow still settle for the divisions and distinctions and labels.  Paul seems to think that there's nothing more we need to do to create this kind of community, except to believe that it is already the case.  We belong in a family already--the powerful promise of love has already been spoken over us. What happens now day by day is our ongoing answer to the question, "Dare we believe that the promise is true?

It seems painful clear that the culture and time in which we live really struggles with daring to believe it, largely because we keep doing awful things to each other and justifying it in the name of our fear of one another.  Every day there is more evidence on the news of how clumsily we speak about race, how we still use talk about gender to alienate or belittle, how we make assumptions about people from other neighborhoods or tax brackets. The evidence day by say says that we just do not know how to relate to one another, and the temptation can be just to withdraw into our own little categories, and only imagine that God likes people who are "like me." Of course that is the temptation--it is always tempting to stay with what we have always known rather than letting God lead us somewhere new... and yet somewhere that feels profoundly like home.

And in spite of our utter failure (or maybe worse, our giving up on even trying) at loving the "other," here is Paul announcing that the Christian community exists as an alternative kind of community where the old boundary lines really can be taken down--because they have been taken down, once and for all by Christ Jesus.  Maybe the challenge for us, seeing how fractured our world is, is whether we can dare to actually trust the claim of the gospel--that the old lines need not hem us in any longer, that the old labels will not stick, and that our identity is a gift of Christ, a common gift meant to be shared with all.

Can we let our hearts catch up to the bold promise of the Gospel--that who we are comes from Whose we are?  Can we dare to stake our lives on the claim that regardless of whatever categories nature doled out to us at birth, the living God has said over all of our dripping foreheads, "You are beloved.  You belong."

The gamble is daring to let our hearts believe that is true. Believe it.

God of new vision, teach us to see as you see.  Train our hearts to look on your beloved and to see your beloved.  Teach us to own our particularities but not to judge by our particularities.  Teach us to rejoice that you have created a community in which the outsiders are brought in and the lowly are raised high, and we are all given the likeness of Jesus--simply as a gift.  Teach us these things, and we will praise you for them.