The End of "The Way Things Are"

The End of "The Way Things Are"--September 29, 2016

James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came forward to him and said to him, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” And he said to them, “What is it you want me to do for you?” And they said to him, “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.” But Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” They replied, “We are able.” Then Jesus said to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink; and with the baptism with which I am baptized, you will be baptized; but to sit at my right hand or at my left is not mine to grant, but it is for those for whom it has been prepared.”  When the ten heard this, they began to be angry with James and John. So Jesus called them and said to them, “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”  [Mark 10:35-45]

You know, "the way things are" doesn't have to be "the way things are."  To hear Jesus tell it, in fact, his followers already don't play by the rule of "the way things are."  He demolishes the power of the-way-things-are with just two little words: "Not so."

"Not so."  It is just "not so."  Who ever thought that the words "not so" could be so beautiful, so hopeful?

I love the way Jesus puts in these words from the very heart of Mark's Gospel.  "It is not so among you!"  As in, "This is a matter of plain fact, not wishful thinking."  It is, as a grammar teacher would remind us, in the indicative mood, which is to say, it is stating the way things are, not simply expressing a hope or an ideal or a possibility. It is not even a command in the imperative, like, "Don't let it be so among you!" or "Make it not that way for you!"  But rather, Jesus speaks like he is making a simple declaration of fact.  It is not so among you.  And that's that.  The followers of Jesus play by different rules than all the silly maneuvering and power-plays for greatness of the world around us.

Of course we play by different rules: we are playing a different game than the world around us is.  While they all count up who has bigger piles of pastel colored Monopoly money or more hits on each other's Battleship fleet, we are joyfully just playing Follow the Leader.  And there are no points, no missiles, and no dollars in Follow the Leader.  We don't play by all the byzantine rules of the world's silly gamesmanship in the quest to prove our worth by the size of whatever we have piled up, because for us it just isn't so. 

You recall the scene from Mark: Jesus' inner circle of followers is bickering among each other about who is the bigger "winner" and who will get to be the "greatest" next to Jesus.  It started with John and James, and then the other ten disciples get in on the competition.  They are all trying to play the same old sad, tired games of the world--all variations on the eternally futile "King of the Hill."

And Jesus points out to them that this is exactly what they are doing: they are sliding back into copying the old patterns of the world around them: each person trying to step on the others to get on top, each person trying to prove their greatness, each person trying to grab as much for themselves as possible.  And Jesus also tells those first followers what that way of life gets you: tyrants as rulers, all trying to portray themselves as "great ones." 

But right into the midst of that, Jesus speaks those beautiful, life-giving words: But it is not so among you.  You don't play by those rules.  You don't have to accept those terms.  You are to be different.  You will not step on each other or lord it over one another.  You will not accept the world's definition of "greatness."  You are supposed to be an alternative to all of that--you already are.  You are what it looks like to start over with a whole new way of being human. 

According to Jesus, that is simply who we are as his followers. He doesn't speak with wagging fingers in terms of "should"--Jesus just says, "You are different.  Dare to believe that it is true.  You who follow me will no longer be defined by the way the world around you defines greatness.  You are those whose greatness comes through self-giving.  You will not have to play the never-ending, exhausting game of climbing forever and being pulled down by others who are climbing for the top, too.  You will find your greatness in kneeling to serve each other, and in taking turns letting one another wash your feet.  You will bow and bend to one another, and that will be your revolution."  This is how God starts over with humanity--we are called to be a new kind of human community, one that just doesn't accept the dictums of every other power-broker of the day says.

This is what makes Jesus' kind of starting-over something real and solid: it is not just a chance for us to repeat all of our old mistakes.  It is a way for things to be truly different because we are doing things differently--differently than we used to, and differently than the world around us still does.  You and I can be a part of the wonderfully upside-down movement Jesus has begun, and we do it without campaigns or super-PACs, without millions of dollars in muckraking ads or off-putting social media posts, without a single weapon and without a bullet fired.  We are part of the new way to be human in the way we lay down our lives for others, and in the way we just shrug off the world's insecure fussing about proving yourself "great."  All that silly ego-stroking and puffed-up competitiveness, all the fuss and bluster wasted on trying to make yourself "great," whether for the first time or all over again, all of that is so much sound and fury--nonsense and wasted breath for us.  We are no longer interested in playing Battleship or Monopoly--you get stuck at a table for those anyway.  We are people who play Follow the Leader, a game in which there is movement, freedom, and energy.

There is this scene in the classic The Little Prince where the title character meets a Business-Man who claims he "owns the stars" and spends all his energy trying to count up all the stars he "owns," and how much they are then worth.  The prince asks him what good it does him to "own" the stars, to be rich, and to calculate their monetary value, and the Business-Man says, "It lets me buy more stars!"  And of course the prince recognizes how foolishly circular that is, like the drunk he has met earlier in the story who keeps drinking in order to forget the shame of being a drunk.  That's the old humanity for you--the futile, circular thinking of always climbing for more and more in order to try and prove your greatness or restore some imaginary lost greatness.  And it would be funny if it weren't so sad.

But not so among us.  Not so indeed.  Jesus has set us free from that emptiness already; the only question is whether we will dare to believe it is true.  We don't have to do it the old way anymore.  God has started over with us, and the newness is real.  Trust it.  Practice it today.

Lord Jesus, here we are today seeking your kind of newness.  Help us to hear your freeing word that we are already a part of the new way of being human--and help us dare to practice that newness.

Ready for a New Day

Ready for a New Day--September 28, 2016

"So then let us not fall asleep as others do, but let us keep awake and be sober; for those who sleep sleep at night, and those who are drunk get drunk at night.  But since we belong to the day, let us be sober, and put on the breastplate of faith and love, and for a helmet the hope of salvation." [1 Thessalonians 5:6-8]

Most people I know who are coffee drinkers reach a point in their day when they stop drinking regular coffee and will only have something decaffeinated if they drink anything else, so that they are not kept up late into the night.  They are mindful enough of what the caffeine will do to them and of what time it is that they make different choices:  "Oh, it's past 7:00pm already?  No, I'd better have decaf."  It's a common enough response.

And on the other end of the day, the choices we make are even more obvious.  People who are coffee drinkers--and who can have caffeine--will pass on the decaf when they first wake up and drink "the real stuff" to help them get energized and face the day.  And pretty much, working people know not to start the day with a beer or a glass of wine, because they know, too, that the alcohol will slow their brains rather than activate their brains.  It has to do with knowing what time it is, and what is appropriate to each time.  If you are really trying to get ready for a new day--and not to get away from or out of a new day--you will make certain choices because you know that you are at the beginning of something, rather than watching yourself unwind at the end of the workday.

The early Christians had a deep conviction that they were at the beginning of something, too, and that, if you can believe it, we are still at the beginning of it.  We are on the verge of a new day beginning--at the leading edge of the Reign of God, which is just on the verge of breaking loose.  We live--and in fact, we have spent the last 2,000 years--in that moment before the dawn where the sky just begins to lighten in the east, and where, if you are facing the west, it still looks like the middle of the night.  This is the way that Paul talks about our waiting for the coming of Jesus--like people who are just on the verge of a new day, the day of the Lord, and who have the choice either to cover their eyes with a pillow and deny it, or to wake up and get ourselves dressed for the day ahead and all that will unfold in it.

And if you really did see yourself at the start of a whole new 'age' like it was the beginning of a new day--as Paul sometimes talks about it--you really would ask some questions about what choices make sense to prepare for it.  If you know not to start a work day in your regular weekly routine by drinking a couple of beers and a shot of whiskey before driving off to work, well, then, by analogy, what are some things that would make us less ready than more ready for the coming of Jesus and the breaking in of the Kingdom of God?  It's all about analogy--if there are some choices that make sense at the start of a literal work day (like getting dressed, rather than lounging in your pajamas or sweatpants, for one, or drinking coffee rather than Coors), then what are the choices that make sense at the start of the day of the Lord, even if it feels like it's only just the edge of dawn right now?

Hopefully, this helps us understand what Paul's saying about drunkenness and soberness, too--while Paul is never in favor of excess, this passage isn't so much about actual alcohol as it is about the analogy between getting ready for a new day in your regular routine and getting ready for the new Day that begins when Jesus comes.  If you know enough not to let your senses be dulled and your thinking distracted by drunkenness when you're starting a work day, well, then we should not let ourselves be dulled, distracted, or numb by anything that would impede our ability to step into the new Day of the Lord ready to live in it full and deep.  Paul isn't arguing against literal alcohol any more than he is arguing against literal sleep--Paul's point is not to say that Christians should not literally go to bed at night because Jesus is coming.  He is using both sleep and drunkenness as metaphors for being distracted and numb to the coming of Jesus.  Just like you are missing out on the good things of a new day if you hide yourself under the covers or crawl into a bottle and waste the daylight, Paul calls us not to let ourselves be distracted or slumbering our lives away as we look ahead to Jesus' coming.  

So it comes down to this.  This morning is the start of an ordinary Wednesday--your clock told you, the morning news told you, and eventually the light in the sky told you, that a new day was beginning.  So what choices did you make to get ready to face this ordinary Wednesday?  Well, if we dare to believe what the Scriptures tell us, we are on the verge of a new day, too, as creation groans for the coming of Jesus:  so what choices will we make to live in anticipation of that new Day?  How will we treat each other in the fullness of the Kingdom?  With jealousy or generosity?  With selfishness or self-giving?  With apathy or with love?  Well, if you can imagine what it will be like in the full sunlight (or Son-light, if you like) of that Day, Paul says to us, "Go ahead and live like that now--after all, that's the kind of Day that is just about to dawn among us."  Today, let us begin to live like that Day for which we have been waiting really is dawning among us.

Lord God, open our eyes today, and give us the faith to believe you really are bringing about a new Day in Jesus.

Giving Us Back to Each Other

Giving Us Back to Each Other--September 27, 2016

"Soon afterwards he went to a town called Nain, and his disciples and a large crowd went with him. As he approached the gate of the town, a man who had died was being carried out. He was his mother's only son, and she was a widow; and with her was a large crowd from the town. When the Lord saw her, he had compassion for her and said to her, 'Do not weep.' Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, 'Young man, I say to you, rise!' The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother." [Luke 7:11-15]

In the middle of things, God gives us back to each other. 

That is what resurrection is all about.  And that is, in a very real sense, the great instance of "starting over" there could be--the raising of the dead. In the middle of things, God gives us back to each other.

I say, "in the middle," because, of course, the whole point of resurrection is that death does not get the last word.  The whole idea is that death does not have, ultimately, the power to silence the voices of young men gunned down in city streets, or the sounds of children who have been decimated by hunger, or the singing of grandmothers and grandfathers who have lullabied their grandbabies to sleep.  Death thinks it has the power to claim and silence all of those--but the defiant protest of resurrection says that death does not get the last word.  And thus, when God raises us up to new life, we are not at the end of things, but the middle.  Really, it is a whole new beginning of things, if we are going to weigh notions like "eternity" against the span of decades we call a lifetime.  But because this life matters, and because we cannot ignore or waste or disregard the beauty, the potential, and the stakes of this life, let's call it the middle.  Resurrection is the great moment in the middle of things when God gives us back to each other.

And that last bit is vitally important, too, come to think of it.  Resurrection, to be quite frank, is not just a individualistic affair.  I don't belong just to myself--I belong to other people.  Maybe you could say that one of the critical realizations of the Christian faith is the point at which you stop trying to belong to yourself and when you seek to be completely given away.  That means that resurrection is not merely a matter of saying, "Yippee for me--I get to go live in heaven after I die," but more, "I will be restored back into connection with the people who have loved me." Resurrection is a plural hope--it is a "we" thing, rather than merely an "I" thing, because our hope is that at the last, God will give us back to each other.  I will not be complete until you are restored to the circle.  When you are parted from me, some part of me is missing, too.  It may well be true that distance makes the heart grow fonder, but distance also feels like losing someone, and with them, some piece of yourself.  As John Donne so beautifully put it, "Every man's [sic] death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind...."

And so, when Luke talks about this sudden miracle in which Jesus raises a young man from the dead, his depiction of the moment is not framed simply in terms of the individual.  Luke doesn't say, "That lucky rascal got a second try at his twenties!"  but rather, "Jesus gave him to his mother."  We belong to each other, and we all belong to God.  And so the great Start-Over around which the whole Christian faith centers is not merely my own self-help scheme or some list of neat ways to feel refreshed in middle age.  The great Start-Over is resurrection, and the real hope of resurrection is the way we will be given back to one another, so that the missing pieces in each of our hearts will be made whole again.

That means, too, that resurrection means vindication for those young men killed in the street, and comfort for the mothers who lost their babies, and justice for those who laid down their lives and had them snatched away by the brutal and the powerful.  Resurrection means solace for those whose hearts have been pulled apart at the seams to say long goodbyes to parents and grandparents through the slow sadness of sickness, as well as those who have been shocked at the sudden goodbye of losing someone they expected to have in their lives for a long time to come.  Every death is a separation, and in the end, the Christian hope is that God will give us all back to each other.

Perhaps I don't always realize how the loss of others, removed by hundred of miles, or oceans, or years of history, makes me incomplete, and I think that I don't need to worry about the violence "over there."  But the witness of the Old and New Testaments is that we human beings belong to one another, and the whole mosaic isn't complete until all the pieces are in the picture.  That includes you.  That includes me.  That means includes the faces and names that weigh heavy on our hearts on this day.  And it means the names and faces we have forgotten or ignored--the faces shown up on the screen during the news, the faces of countless homeless families and veterans, the faces of refugees leaving the terror of their own governments trying to kill them, the faces of the sick and the ashamed, the faces of the proud and puffed up.  It includes the faces of people we like, the faces of people we love, the faces of people we have never met, and the faces of those we do not like at all. 

Somehow in the great power of God, the miracle of resurrection will not only give us back to each other, but will transform the still-as-yet broken and jagged pieces of me into something beautiful, so that even the most hateful, greedy, or selfish (like, say, Zaccaheus or Saul of Tarsus, maybe?) can be transformed and we can see how we are made whole when God gives us back those who we have lost--but who were never lost to God, and never slipped from God's fingers, not even for a second.

In the middle of things, God gives us back to each other.  Today, while we wait for that Great Start-Over, what if we lived like that were true... and that each face you see today is somehow a part of what makes you and me complete?

Lord Jesus, give us resurrection hope today--hope for every mother's son, hope for every friend we grieve, hope for strangers not yet met, hope for the great day of being given back to one another in your love.

Sadder But Wiser

Sadder But Wiser--September 26, 2016

"The Lord said to me again, 'Go, love a woman who has a lover and is an adultress, just as the Lord loves the people of Israel, though they turn to other gods and love raisin cakes....'" [Hosea 3:1]

There is no doubt about it--it takes great courage to risk restarting. We risk our already-tender hearts, which may still bear the scars from past breaks.  God knows.

There is a song, early on in the classic Rodgers and Hammerstein show, The Music Man, where the male lead, "Professor" Harold Hill sings that he doesn't want to get caught up with any romantic entanglements with a girl who has never had her heart broken before. Rather, he sings that it's "the sadder-but-wiser girl for me. No bright-eyed, blushing, breathless baby-doll baby. Not for me.  That kinda child ties knots no sailor ever knew...the sadder-but-wiser girl's the girl for me."

You could take that as either cynicism or defensiveness, or maybe both at the same time.  Hill is a con man who makes his living blowing in to town one day and then blowing out of town the next, and he knows he is going to break more hearts along the way.  Maybe he is still reeling from his own wounds from past relationships that ended, and he has just learned to avoid commitment in order to avoid the complications that come with it.  You can't get tangled up in all the messiness of matrimony if you keep things casual and expectations low from the start, right?  Don't make any commitments and don't let yourself get reeled in to any actual on-paper promises, and then you are free to bail out when it's time to bilk the next town full of dupes.

That kind of honesty from a character is, I guess, both refreshing and horrible.  On the one hand, at least he's honest in recognizing that he has no intention of ever really loving somebody else, just having a good time until it gets hard or stops being fun, and then he is free to bail out because he tells himself he never made any official promises to stay.  Call that honest, if you like.  But of course at the same time, that's pretty awful--just sort of looking for a way to rationalize and justify using people without being vulnerable.  The whole mindset arises out of its own selfish logic that just because he's had to break things off before, he should never make big promises again so he doesn't have to deal with the inevitable hassle when the next fling ends.

Or maybe to boil it down to its essentials, it comes down to the question, "Why should I put everything at risk by making the big promises again if I've been hurt before and don't like the idea of getting hurt again?"  Harold Hill's solution to that problem is simply that he just won't ever make the big promises again--he'll look for flings without strings and relationships without requirements, and he'll never get caught putting his commitments in writing so he can't ever get snagged in a breach of contract. (This is the hallmark of the snake-oil salesman, by the way, so as a general rule, be wary of anybody who only talks in big, splashy generic talk of how "great" they can make things for you, but who will never be held down to any particular commitments.  These people are con artists, aka slimeballs.)  Hence, his wish for the "sadder-but-wiser girl," the romance who won't ask him to make big promises anymore because she has been hurt too many times before, too.

Well, we've taken this stroll through the early scenes of a Broadway musical here because the same dynamic is raised between God and God's people in the story of Hosea.  God calls the prophet Hosea to live out a sort of walking, talking object lesson in his own marriage to a woman who has cheated on him and ended up stuck in prostitution.  Hosea has seen his marriage fall apart and is watching his three children grow up wondering where mommy is.  And surely, there was some part of Hosea that was not interested in making the heartbreak worse by taking her back and remaking his vows to her all over again, running the risk that she would cheat again and he would be hurt worse than before.  Hosea has had his heart broken before, and common sense (and sheer self-preservation!) would tell him not to go back into any situation where he could get it trampled on again. He is on the verge of becoming the sadder-but-wiser prophet, afraid of making any big promises or vows again because he has had someone else treat those promises as flimsy and unimportant before.  I get it--you can certainly understand why he would be hesitant to sign up for the chance of more heartbreak again.

Why not just a future of no-strings, no-commitments, no-hassle, and no-vows arrangements?  Sort of a no-contract, pay-as-you-go deal like you might have for a cell phone, but with people?

Because, Hosea decides in the end, that's not how God's love works.  And Hosea sees that his own love is meant to be a reflection of God's love--that is to say, vulnerable. 

That is surely the most radical, surprising thing about God's love: it is vulnerable.  When God starts over with us--as God keeps doing, rather than putting up walls to avoid being disappointed again--God runs the risk that we will break God's heart all over again.  And yet, God risks it anyway.  And so God has chosen, it would seem, not to hold anything back or minimize the risks.  God says from the outset, "I will keep making the promise.  I will keep running the risk.  I will be vulnerable."  Common sense would tell any conventional deity to keep some leverage: "Don't promise to love your people unconditionally!  They might turn away and worship their money, or their armies, or the next Professor-Hill-type who blows through town promising to make Israel great!  Don't risk loving them that way, God--you'll get your heart broken for sure!"

And that's just it: God knows it will mean heart break.  God knows it would be less painful from the divine side of the relationship to keep us at arms' length, or to make a new start conditional on our showing some improvement first.  It is always a risk to put your heart out there with a promise, because there is always the fear that the promise could be broken or disregarded.... and yet that is exactly how God's love works.  God doesn't keep cards close to the vest that way, or say, "Let's just do this on a trial basis, and see if it works..." and God doesn't say, "How about I love you, but we won't get entangled with obligations or commitments or vows because it might hurt..."  Instead, God's love gets played out in the living object lesson of Hosea reconciling with his wife as a way of showing us a love that is vulnerable enough to really start over.

Today, for us, the vision is that kind of love--love that vulnerable enough to really start over, love that is willing to put itself out there, love that will not treat people as pay-as-you-go cell-phone customers, but love that is still willing to deal in promises, with all the complications that come with promises.  Today, the vision is not the cynical wish for "sadder-but-wiser" people who have already been disappointed enough by life never to expect real love anymore, but the hopeful vision of a God who is willing to risk us breaking the divine heart and still to love us anyway.

That's what it means to say that grace starts over with us--God is willing to start over with us in the strongest terms possible and to promise that the new beginning is real, and that the love is unconditional.  How can we be people who live like that kind of love is real? Who will you tell today?

Lord God, love us in all your reckless vulnerability, and we will share that love with everyone we meet.

After the Rainbow

After the Rainbow--September 23, 2016

"The sons of Noah who went out of the ark were Shem, Ham, and Japheth. Ham was the father of Canaan. These were the sons of Noah; and from these the whole earth was peopled.  Noah, a man of the soil, was the first to plant a vineyard. He drank some of the wine and became drunk, and the lay uncovered in his tent. And Ham, the father of Canaan, saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brothers outside...." [Genesis 9:18-20]

This changes everything about the way we hear the Flood story.

Seriously, this weird little episode--which surely was remembered in Israel's collective book for stories for the campfire just as much because it gave them a reason to justify conquering the land of the Canaanites (who, after all, were the distant relatives of the "bad son" Ham in this story)--this weird little story of Noah passing out drunk and naked in his tent makes a critical difference for how we understand the theology of the Flood Story, but most of the time we don't even think of this story (or have deliberately tried to forget it is there).

And I get it, too--culturally, for whatever reasons, we have allowed the Flood story of Genesis 6-9 to be heard primarily as a children's story, with pastel cartoon animals all smiling as they are gathered into a Winnebago-sized boat until you turn the page and they are all smiling on dry land under a rainbow.  And a children's story is not allowed to end with the hero getting drunk and getting caught naked on the ground.  Again, understandably so: we want our children's stories to have simple morals, and it is easier to make Noah's story become a fable about "keeping on believing (in yourself, we might add, because this is America...) even when other people doubt you" than to let it end as strangely as "Noah couldn't stand the haunting memories of all he had been through, and so he self-medicated with cheap wine to silence the nightmares once he got off the boat." But that indeed is the way the story goes in Genesis, and not the G-rated cartoon musical with singing animals we probably imagine it to be in our heads.

And that, as I say, makes all the difference.  And this is why:

Anybody who has heard the story of Noah probably has this built-in implicit assumption that Noah was qualitatively "better" than everybody else, and that he "won" the prize of surviving the Great Flood because he was "holier" than all the world's rotten sinners.  Our quick-and-dirty thinking usually goes something like this: If God was so upset at all the rottenness and sin in the world that God was going to wipe all humanity out with a flood, but then decided to save one person and his family, well, that one person must have been better--made of better stock, so to speak--than everybody else. He must have been more righteous, and that's why he made the cut and got to live, and all the other sinners were justly punished.

And if Noah had gotten off the ark and been a Boy Scout for the rest of his life, we might have had reason to think that way.  We might have assumed that the storytelling in Genesis is there to say, "Only the worthy survive--watch out and be good, or else the divine boogeyman in the sky is going to zap you somehow."  We might have assumed that Noah's survival is a lesson in God rewarding good behavior.  But... once you realize that the story keeps going after the rainbow, and that the guy who got off the boat was just as much a mess as everybody else, before or after, then this story is less about God punishing 'bad people' and rewarding 'good people,' and more about God's choice of grace edging out the option of giving up on all creation.

Now, I can hear the protests forming on lips already: "Doesn't the Bible say that Noah was special?  That he was more righteous or holy or whatever than everybody else? Isn't that the clinching proof that he was good and everybody else was bad?" Well... it's true that Genesis calls Noah "righteous," but actually the first thing said about Noah is simply that "he found favor in the sight of God."  That is to say, he was graced.  God loved him because God loved him--not that God loved him because he was better behaved.  Grace is thorny that way--it stubbornly refuses to be taken as a reward for good behavior and insists on seeking us out before any discussion of our resumes or background checks.

And then once you realize that post-flood Noah is drunken slob, it becomes crystal clear: the Bible itself is not trying to give us a morality tale, but a saga of grace.  God sees how rotten we are to one another and to our environment, and God came very, very close to saying, "That's it--I'm done with all of you" and giving up on all creation.  At that point in the storytelling, God could have started over with new humans--people who couldn't mess up, a Humanity 2.0 that wouldn't rebel, people who would never harm one another, be selfish, kill one another, or exploit the created world.  That could have been how the story went.

But it ain't.

The strands of Genesis tell a messier story, by choice. God does not get rid of all the "bad people" and make creation start over with only "good people" (supposedly like Noah). But rather, God takes one of the messes, with all of his jagged rough edges still there, and says, "I am going to continue with you, rather than giving up on humanity."  Yes, Genesis says, God got to the point of "being sorry" to have made us, because humans proved to be such short-sighted and selfish caretakers (we are still pretty short-sighted and selfish as caretakers of creation, for that matter). But the story says that when push came to shove, God chose to keep the broken people, the messy people, the "sinners" after the rainbow... God did not choose to start from scratch.

And that makes all the difference, really, between the real Good News of the gospel and the morality-tale versions of it that we are more used to.  The fact that Genesis does not whitewash out the messiness, the tragic desperation, and yes, the unfiltered reality of ongoing addiction, from the story of Noah forces us to see that when grace "starts over" with us, it doesn't mean that grace gets rid of "bad" people and only works with a clean slate of "good" people.  Rather, grace starts over with us in all of our messiness.  The story of Noah is the story of God's choice to allow brokenness to stay in the raw ingredients of the world.  It is the story of God choosing, in the end, to "hang up the bow" as it were and to rule out ever again operating by the old strategy of wiping out the sinners. It is God's choice to keep a world that will thus always be full of messes and messy people rather than starting over with new, non-messy people.

What that means is that God loves you, and this whole world, so fiercely that God chooses a world with you--and therefore, with messes--in it, rather than a world in which nobody can ever break a rule or a heart but which would be without you.  And it means that when grace  starts over with us, God doesn't not throw us out in favor of holier raw materials, but uses us as we are where we are.  Even after the rainbow, we live by grace.

God of all creation, you who choose to love us in our messiness, enable us to love each other and your world in all of our messiness, and to hear and receive your love for US in all that messiness, too.

Telling Paco

Telling Paco--September 22, 2016

"...In Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us." [2 Corinthians 5:19]

Maybe everybody is named Paco.

Ernest Hemingway wrote a short story called “The Capital of the World,” whose first paragraph goes like this:

"Madrid is full of boys named Paco, which is the diminutive of the name Francisco, and there is a Madrid joke about a father who came to Madrid and inserted an advertisement in the personal columns of El Liberal which said: 'PACO MEET ME AT HOTEL MONTANA NOON TUESDAY ALL IS FORGIVEN PAPA' and how a squadron of Guardia Civil had to be called out to disperse the eight hundred young men who answered the advertisement."

Maybe everybody is named Paco, really.

When you get down to it, the whole Christian message boils down to announcing “Papa’s” words to the whole world:  “All is forgiven.”  Saint Paul himself seems to think so.  He says the whole world was reconciled to God in Christ, and that God has put away the sins of the whole world once and for all.  Peace has been made.  All has been forgiven. God has already started over with us--from God's side. Our job, our calling, is to be the living newspaper announcement: “Meet me at the Hotel Montana at noon.  All is forgiven.  Papa.”  And we announce it to the whole world.  Who will show up at the hotel looking for Papa?  Paul seems to think the whole world is aching for it, at least.

The details are a bit different for us, but the gist of the message is the same.  We announce to the world the Father’s invitation, “Beloved child, meet me on Sunday morning at the table.  All is forgiven.”  Paul says that’s our job.  Getting that message out.  Telling anybody and everybody that all is forgiven… that God has made peace with us through Jesus.  God has reconciled the world to himself, Paul says. That means the Christian Good news is NOT, “Do the following things, and then God will forgive you,” and neither is it, “Prayer this prayer and apply for forgiven-status.”  It’s done. Accomplished.  God has made peace from God’s side, so our work is not so much to get people to do this or that religious action in order to “make” God forgive, but rather to bring the news that God already has forgiven.

The really good part of that good news is that there will be no “wrong Paco.”  The joke in Hemingway's story, of course, turns on the whole idea that at 799 young men named Paco are all in for a disappointment, because it wasn't their Papa announcing the forgiveness. But not so with the amazing claim of the Gospel. For us there is a divine comedy in the opposite truth: that there is no disappointment waiting for all but one of the Pacos waiting at the Hotel Montana. The news from what we call Second Corinthians is that God has already reconciled things with "the world"--that is, the whole world, all of us, every last one, without waiting for us to make our apology speeches first. All of us are estranged children of God, and all of us are recipients of the news that God has restored the relationship through Christ from God’s side of that equation. We may or may not be on speaking terms with our biological mothers or fathers, but the living God speaks the assurance that reconcilation is already accomplished and all is forgiven already between us and our "Papa." And to each of us who shows up to the Hotel Montana—er, the Table and Meal of Jesus week by week—we find Jesus giving us the signs that forgiveness is an already-accomplished fact. Showing up "in church" isn't what makes us forgiven--it's just that there  is the place the ad in the paper told us to meet Papa, where we can embrace over the reality that "all is forgiven."  In fact, if Paul's claim is right that God has "reconciled the world" already, then part of the Christian claim is that even the people who didn’t show up at the Hotel Montana on Tuesday are forgiven, too.

That’s the thing about this anecdote in Hemingway's story: the forgiveness comes first.  Then comes the response of the forgiven child, aching to live in the peace that “Papa” has announced.  Sometimes Christians get this confused.  We make ourselves sound—or worse, we make God sound—like the message is, “Come to the Hotel Montana, and if you do, then forgiveness will be available based on your good-faith effort of at least coming to accept my offer.”  We turn forgiveness into a deal to be arrived at, something negotiated or bartered. 

But that’s not how Saint Paul saw things.  He says that the ad is already in the paper:  the forgiveness has already happened.  The question is whether we will recognize what was already true and come to bank our lives on it. And once we do recognize it, our calling is to tell everybody else around us: "Papa says all is forgiven."  That’s ultimately what it is to be a peacemaker: to announce that God has brought peace already to people who need to hear it.  The rest is just living like it is true.

Maybe all of us are named Paco… and more than that, maybe all of us are children of one and the same Papa who has already made peace with us.  The starting over has already begun--that is what grace does. Now... who will you tell that to? 

Lord Jesus, let us be your good-news-bringers as we tell the world that you have made peace with us.

Becoming Who We Are

Becoming Who We Are--September 21, 2016

“For once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light.  Live as children of light—for the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.” (Ephesians 5:8-9)

They say that the things you choose in life shape the person you become.  And that is true.

But it is also true—maybe even more true—that the ways we are chosen in life shape the people we become, too.

Let’s have a Harry Potter moment, shall we?  One of the recurring structures in the books of the Harry Potter series is the way new students at good old Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry are assigned their dormitories:  the Sorting Hat.  This magical talking hat gets placed upon the head of all first-year students at the beginning of the new school year, and the hat, discerning the young magician’s character and values perhaps even better than the students know themselves at the moment, declares which “house” he or she will belong to.  In the books, there is noble and brave Gryffindor House, patient and hardworking Hufflepuff House, intelligent and academic Ravenclaw House, and (last, and always sort of least in the books) conniving and cunning Slytherin House.  And in the world of Harry Potter, the house you are assigned to affects who your classmates are, what virtues will be brought to the fore in your education, and to a large degree what kinds of influences will be put in your path.

In other words, in the wizarding world that J.K. Rowling created, you get chosen to belong in a certain community, and that chosen-ness then shapes you into the person you were chosen to become.  Gryffindors become more “Gryffindor-ish.”  Slytherins become more “Slytherin-y,” so to speak.  But you “are” whatever house you are sorted into from the get-go, without auditioning or trying out or pledging, like an American college fraternity.  You get chosen in an instant—bam!—and yet you also become over time what you were already chosen to be.

Something like that is the way it works in Christ.  On our own we weren’t anything—we were “darkness,” says Paul. Turned away from God.  Bent in on ourselves.  Self-interested and self-centered.  Not disciple material, in other words, and certainly not disciple-of-Jesus material.  On our own, we humans have the raw materials in us to be pretty cruel and greedy, and are often afraid of our own shadows.

Ah, but, now we have been claimed by Christ.  We have been chosen.  Selfish chicken-hearts that we were on our own, before we’ve shown a lick of promise or proven ourselves, we were claimed, chosen, and marked.  We are now, as Paul says, “in the Lord,” light.  We have been brought into the light by God’s own claim on us—so that we will become what God says we already are: children of the light. 

In Harry Potter-speak, it’s like Paul says, “You are Gryffindors—act like the Gryffindors the Sorting Hat already chose you to be.  Become what you are.”

Yes, that’s it.  That’s the challenge, and the invitation, for this day and every day:  to become what God says we already are.  To become, more and more fully, what we have been claimed and chosen to be.  Because Jesus claimed us for himself and called us into his light, regardless of how dim and dirty we were before, we are now children of light—but we are still only slowly learning how to live and act like what we are. 

If this is one of those days when you are not feeling particularly like you are a “child of light,” if this is one of those dark days for you, know this: the living Jesus says you belong to him.  You will more and more become a reflection of his light, as who you are flows out of whose you are.

Lord Jesus, let us become more and more fully like you, because we are in you.

With Outstretched Hands

With Outstretched Hands--September 20, 2016

"I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask, to be found by those who did not seek me. I said, 'Here I am, here I am,' to a nation that did not call on my name. I held out my hands all day long to a rebellious people, who walk in a way that is not good, following their own devices...." [Isaiah 65:1-2]

There are indeed times in this life, in this world, when you cannot go back again. 

If you should find yourself traveling by car in, say, the Rocky Mountains, or the Pacific Northwest, you may well find that the mountain pass is closed for the winter, and you cannot drive in a new direction or cross back if you have come too far under the wrong weather conditions.  That is not a moral failing--neither of you, nor of the mountain road--it is just the nature of the terrain.  It literally goes with the territory.

Sometimes it is not about geography but about the passing of time: you cannot go back to your old high school and find your old friends.  Yes, you may well be able to go back to the building itself (although, even in that case, school buildings have been known to be razed and rebuilt, so even the bricks and mortar that were your bricks and mortar may be gone), but the people there will not be the people you knew when you were a student there.  Even if you go to some artificial re-gathering of your classmates at a reunion, you aren't really with the people who were your classmates. Those people are gone--they have become new people in all the years in between.  Your old eighteen-year-old friends are residents of a past to which you cannot go back, even if you can stand in the same old spots where you once walked to chemistry or algebra class.  Again, that is not a moral deficiency on your part--it is the way linear time works.  You can go forward, but you cannot go back again.

If you end up not liking the person who occupies the Oval Office, or the state governor's mansion, or your local city council, pretty much you have to wait it out until the next election--you don't get to have do-over on Wednesday, November 9th when you realize you have made a horrible mistake in your choice and wake up to realize you've been had.  You can decide to vote differently in the next election, but you don't get to undo the one you have already lived through. Whether there are or are not, as in F. Scott Fitzgerald's famous line, "second acts in American lives," it is certainly true that you don't get to go back and have an Act One all over again.  Sometimes the road really is closed for the winter.  Sometimes the years really have scattered the old and familiar.

We Christians need to be honest about this.  If we are to have any word of real, solid, meaningful hope for the world (ourselves included), we are going to have to deal with the reality that none of us can travel back in time or drive a car through a closed mountain pass. We are going to have to deal with the reality that some areas of our lives will not allow for "do overs."  If you quit your job in a rage and a huff, and go stomping out of your office after smashing a window and keying your boss' car on your way through the parking lot, there is no going back the next day and expecting that you can pretend it didn't happen and go on collecting your usual paychecks.  If you move back to a place you have lived before after years of being away, you don't have the right to be upset if the people don't remember you or you don't have all the same "good old days" with the friends you used to have.  You are not the same "you" any longer, and they are not the same "them" anymore.

So when Christians say--and we have good reason to say this, mind you--that we believe that grace starts over with us, we need to be honest.  We are decidedly not saying that Christians are given the power to quit their jobs and then come back the next day with impunity when we have thought better of it. We are not saying that we can dodge the consequences of our choices once we realize that we made mistakes.  And we are not saying that everybody else around us is required to give us infinite second chances just because we keep messing up.  Eventually other people get tired of our repeated jabs, slights, and nicks, and they back off to keep from being hurt again.  Our actions--and our inactions--have consequences.  Our words--and our silences--can wound. So, for example, people convicted of embezzlement don't get to be the financial managers again.  And people who have hurt children don't get to be in positions to do it again.  The Gospel's promise of new beginnings is not a blank check for abusers and cheats to go on abusing and cheating all over again.  And on a scale that is perhaps closer to home, the promise of new beginnings doesn't mean that we can require people to "just get over" a broken trust, a betrayed relationship, or a last straw.  Abusers and schemers will want to use, to co-opt, the language of "starting over" and insist it is "the Christian thing to do" to just ignore those past choices, but that is not the Christian hope.  There are times when we do not go back again because we cannot, sometimes in big ways, and sometimes in little ones.

Now, having said all that, here is what the Good News does say: even when every other presence in your life has walked away and turned their back, the living God is still holding out open arms.  Even when every other bridge has been burned and you are still holding the lighter and the can of gasoline, Jesus is walking on water to get to you.  Even when you are turned away--dead set, 180-degrees in the opposite direction--from God, God is still ready for the new beginning to happen.  You cannot exhaust the possibilities for starting over with God. 

In a sense, that is what the cross is all about.  We have already done the worst we could to God--we crucified the Creator of the universe.  Forget about the small scrapes and nicks of day-to-day unkindnesses or slights--we literally up and killed the Source of Life.  That would have been the point at which we should have been done, washed up, past the point of no return, done-for.  But with the resurrection, grace started over--it started Jesus' life over, but kept the scars as proof of all that God endured for our sake.  And if even the risen Jesus keeps showing up in the presence of his disciples, there is the proof for us that there is never a point in this life at which God puts down those open arms.  We have already done the worst we could to God--and God did not walk away.

There is our hope.  We will still have to live with the outcomes of our choices in our families, our work-lives, our friendships, and our nation--those consequences are unavoidable, because that is what life in this world is.  But even when the worst has been done, the living God stands with open arms saying, "Here I am."  Even if we weren't calling for God or looking for God first.  When we Christians are honest about the consequences of  our choices for every other area of our lives, we get a clearer picture of the amazing news of God's grace. For even when every other bridge has been burned, ours is the God who says, "Leap out into my arms, and I will catch you."

What are the places in our lives where we are being dared to take the leap into the ever-present arms of Jesus?

Lord God, hold out your hands to us.  Pull us to you.

Bearing With

Bearing With--Sept. 19, 2016

"I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace."[Ephesians 4:1-3]

I didn't want it to happen at a McDonald's.

It shouldn't have happened at a McDonald's.

Revelations of grace are not supposed to happen beside the counter in a local franchise of a multinational corporate behemoth restaurant chain--that seems so ordinary, so worldly, so un-spiritual a place to come face to face with the wonder of how grace starts over with us.

But there I was.  And there it happened.

I was at one of our local McDonald's the other day grabbing a quick bite for the road. And as I waited in line for my turn to place my order, I noticed a rather large, slightly shaggy man in his late fifties with a thick brown mustache that was on the verge of leaving from Magnum, P.I. territory and entering into Yosemite Sam territory.  He was part of a group of maybe four or five who had come in the same vehicle--a decade old SUV whose hood was up in the parking lot, telling the short version of a story of some kind of engine trouble which had necessitated their visit to the Golden Arches. The husky man with the husky mustache was waiting at the counter for his family's order (I'm guessing they were all family, but there were no little children and no clear cookie-cutter pattern to assign everybody to a relationship in a nuclear family), and when the food was ready it was offered to him on two trays. 

"Do you want some help with that?" asked the employee who had just set three or four drinks onto one of the trays (at least one of which was hot coffee and one of which was topped in whipped cream), as well as a heaping collection of burger boxes and fry containers onto the other.  Already, a step beyond what one expects of your average fast-food restaurant cashier--her offer to carry a tray because she could tell they would be top-heavy and hard to balance with one in each hand.

"No, no, I've got it," came the self-confident, mustachioed reply, as he grasped the two trays, each with a single hand precariously gripping it by the slightly angled edge. 

That moment sticks in my memory, because it was almost like I was watching a scene from a movie or television show, in which some cinematographer had carefully orchestrated all of this to unfold in front of my eyes.  The old author's rule known as "Chekhov's gun" says, "If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."  Well, this felt to me like the same set-up--the clumsy, oafish man at the counter (who looked rather like Mario without the overalls and color-matched hat), the trays full of very full, messy beverages, the possibilities for knocking something over were endless, and I was watching the scene unfold in front of me.  I stepped aside to make sure I wasn't in the man's way at all, and then I turned my head back to face forward, both because I knew that extra eyes on him might make the man with the trays more nervous and lose the balance of the travs, and (honestly) because I was going to be next in line to place an order. 

Then came the THUD.

Then came an exclamation of profanity--a single syllable of scatological anger.

The man had dropped the trays.  Quickly, he scrambled to get still-wrapped burgers back onto one of them, but of course there is no getting a Coke back into a cup.  At least three different drinks were mingling on the floor in a split second--a cola of some stripe, a hot coffee, and the rapidly melting chocolate concoction that was once a chocolate shake--and were making a terrible mess.  He gave a look back to the counter, as if to ask, "Am I gonna have to clean this up?" I stood to the side, watching this all unfold, wondering what the right thing to do might be for a bystander like me.  I watched.

Without so much as a second thought, the server from behind the counter simply said, "I'll get it," and then she went back to work--making new replacement drinks for him.  The man with the mustache offered sheepishly to help clean up if they would give him a mop.  A booth full of college students around the corner snickered.  The man tried to save some face, telling the server that his sandwiches had all been salvaged and that he only had lost the drinks (as if that somehow made the mess smaller than it was). And as she smiled a friendly smile, he attempted to pick up the sandwiches and fries on the one tray and to go to the rest of his family, hoping to disappear from view.

Then came the PLOP.

And a second, different expression of profanity. I believe the man was making some sort of comment as to what sort of animal was the mother of his fallen tray.... The college boys chucked again, barely even trying to mask their scorn for him.

The man in the shaggy mustache had just made things worse.  A second, bigger mess, and all the while the line of other customers was growing.  This would have been a moment for one of the employees behind the counter to give a frustrated sigh, or a righteous defense of why the man was not going to get any new drinks unless he bought new ones.  But instead, the servers worked twice as hard now, on two jobs: cleaning up the mess and getting the man and his family a new tray of drinks (which they would graciously carry to the family at their seats, rather than making them attempt a third precarious journey from counter to table). Some part of me thought I should offer to help or do something, but they seemed to have this down, and they were quite capable of dealing with the situation.

Before long, the family had been given a new round of drinks, and the kitchen staff had mopped up the dining room floor in the restaurant.  No rubbing it in. No "Now you owe me one." No "This is going to cost you." Just... in a word, grace.

One of the lesser-seen dimensions of grace is the way the love of Christ enables us, not simply to forgive some past wrong, but to bear with one another.  That means grace enables us to keep living with one another, to keep on accepting each other.  Grace makes it possible for us to start over with each other, and to go right on serving the people who have wronged us or left messes for us to clean up.  Otherwise, it would be awfully easy and understandable for us to become bitter all the time at every little mistake or careless word.

In  the restaurant, the man in the mustache brought on his own troubles in a sense, but in another sense, he got an unlucky moment  when a full cup slipped and fell.  And the servers showed real grace--no lectures, no passive-aggressive revenge, no indignant insistence that he must pay for the lost drinks again.  There was only the unspoken grace of giving him back what he needed, and going right back to work.

I want to be that kind of person.  I want to be able, not simply to speak the sentence, "I forgive you" but to keep doing good for people.  I want to be the kind of person who doesn't demand that there must be payment, that there must be blood so to speak, for wrongs I have endured. I want to have the ability to simply keep on working for the good of the people who keep making messes around me. I want to learn how to bear with others, not just to give speeches where I say "I forgive you."  And, harder still, I want to be able to receive the grace from others who do not bail out on me when I am the one who has made life messier for them. 

For us in this day, the question is whether we will bear with one another the same way.... and whether a wonder of grace might just be seen in the unlikely ordinariness of a Monday morning. 

After all, if the grace of starting over can happen so beautifully even on the floor of a McDonald's.... it can happen wherever this day finds you.

Lord Jesus, as you bear with us, let us bear with one another.

Beyond the High School Reunion

Beyond the High School Reunion--September 16, 2016

"Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, 'See the home of God is among mortals. He will dwell with them; they will be his peoples, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.' And the one who was seated on the throne said, 'See, I am making all things new.' Also he said, 'Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true'." [Revelation 21:1-5]

I dare say we may well have missed the point.

I heard a poet on the radio the other day, and he was asked to read a poem of his entitled, "Heaven."  The poet, Patrick Phillips, shared that he grew up as the son of a Methodist minister, but he has since lost his faith... although he misses, he said, the comfort of the idea of a reunion in with those we have loved in this life one day in heaven.  But the closest he could dare to imagine now is the idea that after we die, we live on in the memory of other people.  So reflecting on all of that, and longing for the comfort of an idea he no longer believes in, he wrote this poem:

It will be the past
and we'll live there together.

Not as it was to live
but as it is remembered.

It will be the past.
We'll all go back together.

Everyone we ever loved,
and lost, and must remember.

It will be the past.
And it will last forever.

What saddened me as I heard these words spoken over the airwaves was that somehow, this minister's son had heard the Christian hope of resurrection as solely a looking-back, as though the Gospel's big promise were some future day we will all sit around a table drinking and wistfully remembering "the good old days."  As much as the poet said he wished he could have the comfort of believing in heaven, even that hope he coveted strikes me as a misreading of what the Scriptures have really been promising. All the poem can envision is a rose-colored wistful living in the past.

Now, here's the really hard part of me: I don't blame the poet for that picture.  I think by and large we Christians have done it to ourselves--or more accurately, we have done it to the Gospel.  We have made our hope of resurrection sound like it is only a looking back--like it will just be an eternal greatest-hits album and a bittersweet (at best) remembering of stuff we used to do.  We have made it sound, I fear, like we really just think heaven is the glorification of "the past."

And to be really honest, I fear that goes hand in hand with the way we Christians have of only looking back wistfully at some imagined past (like Phillips says, "not as it was to live, but as it is remembered," which is not quite the same) that we wish we could recreate.  So we end up with religious folk who say things like how much they wish they could make society "like it used to be" and then envision an eternal afterlife in which all we will do is tell stories with the angels and our dead relatives about how great "it used to be."

But I will be very, very honest with you--that is not much of a hope.  I have been in a number of conversations, some lately and some over the years, that were mostly wistful looking back at the "good times" of the past. And when there is no shared future to look ahead to as well, those are awfully painful conversations. You have to keep the silence at bay with another story from "the good old days," because if things get quiet you have to face the uncomfortable present--whether it is going separate ways, or the fear of death on the horizon, or the awareness that a relationship is drifting apart. You can bask in the afterglow of past good times together, but when the storytelling is done, if there is nothing ahead of you to look forward to, it starts to feel awfully dark.  The elephant in the room is the awareness that you have only been looking back because you have nothing pleasant left to say about the present or the future.  If "heaven" were just an everlasting high school reunion (perish the thought--that sounds more like hell!), we would never be able to escape the sadness that all our adventures were behind us and that we were all just dreading the moment when they closed the doors and we all had to go our separate ways again.... as if all that were real were behind us, and all that was left was to retell and rewatch movies of the real.

That's what made me saddest as I heard this poem on the radio--I fear that we Christians have unwittingly broadcast that kind of message to the world, and that all the watching world sees from the outside is that Christians are reserving their seats now for an eternal high school reunion, something that is only "the past," and only remembered, no new adventures looking forward.  Maybe it wasn't that the poet had misunderstood all those sermons from his childhood

See, one of the difficult parts about a picture of heaven that only looks backward, or a religion that only thinks about going back to some imagined time when things were "great" in the past, is that our past wasn't "great" for everybody. I was listening to a radio preacher yesterday (ok, there is my confession--it is like spiritual junk food that I don't even like the taste of, but I keep listening in every so often just to hear what is out there), and I was listening to him recap the last sixty or so years of history in the United States.  And he waxed nostalgically about how great things were in the 1950s in his memory, and then began to lament that the world isn't like it was "back then." And of course, you could surely say that there are some things that were more pleasant about 1950s America for some than the present day feels like.  But at the same time, those were not the kind of days that everybody looks back on so fondly--those were the days of fear of nuclear war, drafts for multiple wars, segregation and Jim Crow, lynching and McCarthyism and missile drills in school.  If all you can see when you look back--at any given moment in history--is the stuff that was good for you, it's worth asking, at least asking, if there others who got the short end of the stick and on whose backs or shoulders your happy memories were built.  If your childhood memories are full of times you got two popsicles for yourself, you had better double check and make sure you aren't misremembering taking your little brother's popsicle every time. 
Well, all of this is to say that when it comes to the Christian hope we call "heaven," if we are just looking backward to some "great" time in the past, we are forgetting all the things that made that time in the past not-so-great, and we are failing to imagine a new kind of future that is good for everybody.  And when the Bible does envision that promised future of the resurrection life, it doesn't just describe some glory days of our history--it envisions things that have never happened before.  The Bible envisions life that is good for everybody, including the people who have been stepped on and forgotten during the times we thought were 'great.'  When the Bible talks about that hope of life beyond the grip of death, it doesn't say, "Remember how great the 50s were?  Well, it will be like that...," not for the 1950s and not for the AD 50s, either.  The Bible doesn't idolize any moment from the past--rather the voices like today's from Revelation 21 looks forward.  And instead of dwelling on details about what it will be like, the Bible focuses on the who question--who will we be with?  God.  None other than God.  And if we are clear that God will be with us in a way more full than we have ever known before, then all the other stuff is window dressing.  We can head into whatever future awaits us as long as we know that the God who loves us will be there with us.


Think about this today: the Bible's many voices do not merely look back to recreating some "great" time in Israel's past, or the church's past, and to make everybody work to make Israel great again.  Rather, the Bible seems to say, "That backward-looking kind of hope was always too small and too narrow--God has something better and bigger up the ol' divine sleeve--and you ain't seen nothing yet!"  Whatever it is, it will be good for everybody there--there will be no groups left out because of the color of their skin or the language they speak, and there will be no fear of war against one group or another.  That is unlike anything this world has ever known--our hope has to be a forward looking one, one that always looks to the future, rather than trying in vain to duplicate the past... at least if it is going to be real Christian hope.


Today, maybe we need to think about what kind of witness we have given to the watching world, and whether they think our hope is just for a celestial high school reunion or if there is something more to be said and hoped for.  How can you witness to that future day when God dwells among us and wipes tears away... right now?  How can we be sure not to miss the point of it all today?


Lord God, come and do your new thing, and keep us looking forward to what you will do for all.