The Dancing God

The Dancing God--December 1, 2016

"And Jesus came and said to them, 'All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age." [Matthew 28:18-20]

My kitchen floor is one of the most sacred places in my life these days.

Not because I am terribly skilled in or devoted to the culinary arts (I am not--in truth, I only know just enough to be dangerous around a mixing bowl or a spice rack).  And not because I frequently bake bread for Communion in our kitchen, either (I don't--maybe once a year, to refresh my memory before we practice making it with the Confirmation students). 

Those would be fine reasons, but my reason for calling the kitchen floor one the most sacred places in my life is that it is there that my children most frequently grab me by the hand to dance with them in a joyful frenzy after dinner.  It is the perfect space for toddler dancing--it is next to the dining room with the stereo, it is relatively free of clutter on the floor, and it is big enough for a grown-up or two and two children to move freely.  Our song list is rather eclectic: my children are indiscriminate dancers who will move their arms and feet to the sounds of the Beatles and Rihanna... Michael Jackson to Taylor Swift.... 90s surf rock to classic soul... even good old Elvin Bishop's trusty "Fooled Around And Fell In Love" in a pinch.  They don't particularly care about the music; they just want to dance, and they are convinced that it is more fun when they pull me into the motion on the kitchen floor, too.

And there, when my children grab my hands to sway and swing and pick them up while music plays from another room, I learn what the Great Commission is all about.  The whole mission of the church, the whole project of Jesus' life and ministry, and maybe you could even say the whole point of the universe itself, is to be swept up in the great dance of God.

We have added too much starch, in all likelihood, to these words of Jesus that end the Gospel according to Matthew.  We have made them stiff and stifled.  We have, over two thousand years, turned them into a divinely-ordained membership drive for our religious clubs, or a motivational speech given to spiritual salesmen before they make their cold calls to sell people on their package deal trips to get to heaven.  We have turned Jesus' words into a "Get 'em to sign on the dotted line--we need new blood!" kind of threat, like Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, pushing the salesmen to Always Be Closing and make sales... or be fired.

But Jesus always has a bigger view than we do.  He is always seeking after so much more than we can set our meager sights on.  Jesus is calling us to let ourselves get pulled into the dance of God, and then to pull other people into the joy of it, too.  Whether you are graceful and lithe on the dance floor, or have two left feet like me, we are all of us being pulled out from the edges of the room as spiritual wallflowers and into the movement of God.

I mean that bit about movement, and about dance, quite seriously.  We tend to imagine God (to the extent that we imagine God at all) being a static, fixed figure--seated, usually, and immovable.  That's how Aristotle pictured the divine, after all--an "unmoved mover," someone who was fixed and unchanging, but snapped the occasional finger to get the rest of the cosmos to do its thing.  But the New Testament--and with it, a strand of voices from Christian history--doesn't picture God as a celestial stick in the mud.  The New Testament depicts a God whose very being is in relationship: of, as the Gospel of Matthew puts it, "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." 

God is, if the New Testament and early church are to be taken seriously, a community of Persons who are also One.  That means that God, in God's very deepest being (Being?), is the moving, swirling, giving, receiving, constant motion of being Three-in-One that is also always three-in-relationship.  The old church Fathers of the East used to talk about it as "perichoresis," which is just a fancy way of saying in Greek roots, "dancing around one another."  You might recognize the "chor-" root in that word, which is the same root we get "choreography."  In other words, the Eastern church used to talk about God's very life as one great dance--a dance which, before there were any humans or birds or algae or even planets and galaxies, was already in motion between the Three who are also One.  God's very life is a dance... not a big long eternal sit.

And so... to be made a disciple of Jesus, to be baptized as his follower, is not simply to join a religious club or get a ticket to the afterlife from some pastor or missionary who sees himself as a heavenly tour guide.  To be made a disciple of Jesus is to be brought into a dance that has been going on from before there was a thing called time.  To be a part of the Movement Jesus speaks of is to be pulled from the sidelines into the very motion of God's own dance, the ever-flowing, ever-moving, ever-giving motion of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

That's why Jesus talks about being baptized in the name (singular) of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit--this is not a last-minute slapping-on of a brand name, but rather a picture of God's own joyful, unabashedly open eternal dance.  To be a disciple of Jesus is not merely to get your reservation in at the Heaven Hotel, but rather to be pulled into the very motion that is God's own life.  It's like when my son and my daughter reach out a hand and pull me into their dance on the kitchen floor.  They don't make me take a test first to see how graceful a dancer I am (answer: not very), and they don't make me dance while they sit back and watch me flail awkwardly.  They are already in perfect joy, and they simply want to pull me into that joy, too.

That's what Jesus calls us to do--it is less about getting people to sign on the dotted line, and more about being pulled out from the edges of the room to bounce and dance and swirl on the kitchen floor right where we are, where God is already moving to the music.  And when Jesus instructs his disciples to "teach" newcomers to "obey everything that I have commanded you," it is not like an audition or reality TV show to see who will be good enough to stay on until the next round. It is Jesus offering dance instructions so that we will learn to move like him.

Every day, then, is a chance to be a part of that movement, a part of that divine motion that has been swirling and circling between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit since before "in the beginning."  Every day is a chance to move like God moves--every act of selfless giving, every motion of grace, every instance of bowing and bending to make room for the other... it is all a part of the dance God is already in the midst of dancing.  That means every day is a chance to be brought into the motion of the Creator of the universe--not simply of the promise of one day getting to heaven, but to see that the dance is already happening in such ordinarily sacred places as kitchen floors, hospital waiting rooms, office buildings and coffee shops.  It is happening on farmers' back fields and on rivers and oceans.  And Jesus has not only sent people into your life to pull you out onto the floor to join the dance, but today, Jesus is sending you to a stiff and stodgy world to invite them into the movement, too, like children on a kitchen floor.

Lord Jesus, let us move like you move, and as we are brought more and more fully into the dance of your own divine life, let us bring others into the motion, too.

The Daughters of Hope

The Daughters of Hope--November 30, 2016

"Justice is turned back, and righteousness stands at a distance; for truth stumbles in the public square, and uprightness cannot enter. Truth is lacking, and whoever turns from evil is despoiled.  The Lord saw it, and it displeased him that there was no justice. He saw that there was no one, and was appalled that there was no one to intervene; so his own arm brought him victory, and his righteousness upheld him." [Isaiah 59:14-16]

Here's the bottom line, at least as far as the Scriptures tell it: when nobody else will stick up for those who have been stepped on, God will.

Even if nobody else seems to care, or everybody else is afraid, or everybody else is too busy with other things, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God of Sarah, Miriam, and Deborah, rolls up the divine sleeves and goes to work righting what is broken in the world.

If your picture of God is not someone who will risk troubling the waters to speak up or stand up for the people who are most vulnerable, then Isaiah would tell us we have been worshiping an idol.  The living and real God is invested in putting right what is wrong in the universe, all the way down to making sure that people who get stepped on in life get lifted back up, and those who have been taken advantage of or made to be afraid will be restored.

Now, if you and I are going to say we believe in God... and if we are, furthermore, going to say we believe in the God who is named in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, the God whose name was spoken on the lips of freed slaves leaving Egypt, and prophets denouncing decadent kings, and visionaries living in exile under one empire after another, if we dare to say we believe in this God, then quite simply the question is put to us, as well: will we be a part of what God is doing in the world?

There is deep grace, deep hope, and deep promise in these few verses from Isaiah, in the sense that God commits to shouldering the work of justice even if everybody else is too chicken, too comfortable, or too complacent.  There is the assurance that even if the rest of us all turn and look the other way... or rationalize our indifference... or insulate ourselves from any news or perspectives that might make us squirm with discomfort by only filling our Facebook news feeds and reading materials with things we already agree with... even if we should all give in and take the easy way out rather than stand up for those who are hurting, the living God will not.  There is hope, and it is not a false hope in me working up the nerve or having all the answers.  It is a hope that God will not run away or give up even when the cause seems lost.

But again, if we Christians say not only that we believe God exists, but that we are seeking to live our lives as a movement of people following after Jesus and the way of life he calls us into, then we have to ask if we really dare to follow the living God into the fray.  Sometimes we let ourselves be convinced that "being Christian" is the same thing as "being nice" (forgetting for a moment that the word "nice" comes from the French for "ignorant"). And just as easily, we let ourselves forget that "being nice" is not the same thing as "loving" people--love means truth-telling, love means honesty, love means vulnerability and suffering, and love means we sometimes go into uncomfortable places for the sake of those we love.  Being a Christian will include all of those, and that is so much more than just being "nice."  In fact, sometimes it will not look so much like being "nice" as it looks like speaking up on behalf of others... which doesn't always win you friends, in all honesty.

There is an old line that is attributed  to Saint Augustine of Hippo (with some haziness as to where it was actually said or written), but which seems to be in the spirit of what Isaiah 59 is all about here either way.  The old church father is quoted as saying, "Hope has two beautiful daughters. Their names are anger and courage: anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain as they are."

Those words, whether they first came from Augustine or not, are important for us to remember in this Advent season of hope.  Without them, we are sorely tempted to sentimentalize the idea of "hope" in this season and to reduce it to vaguely spiritual wishful thinking, as in "I'll just hope that everything works out all right..." It is so easy in this season to reduce "hope" to mean "twiddling my thumbs and pretending that everything is fine" or "believing in the power of Christmas magic" the way the TV movies all do.  But if we take seriously the promise of an old prophet named Isaiah, we won't settle for that kind of empty "hope." We will see the Christian virtue of hope is something moving, living, and active--it pushes us to act in light of the promised future we are hoping for in the first place.  It leads us to get angry when people are marginalized.  Hope does that. Hope leads us to find courage to stand up for people who have been made afraid.  Hope leads us to discover the bravery to say, "Everything is not fine... but God is not done, either."  Hope leads us no longer to be silent when it would be comfortable, and leads us to the strength to endure as well. Hope pulls us from the sidelines and into the fray ourselves, because real hope--hope in the living God--is about being a part of a movement in time and space, to stand where we believe God is standing: as an advocate for those most vulnerable, as truth-tellers to obnoxious naked emperors, and as witnesses to the One who rolls up his sleeves to reveal nail-scarred hands getting to work as he sets right what had been knocked over.

Today, let us invite hope and her two daughters into our lives, into our homes, and into our thinking... perhaps starting with breakfast conversation, and then joining them out in the world, working where God has already promised to be.  That is what Advent hope is.  That is what the Movement of Mercy is all about, too.

Great God of justice and truth, give us the courage and anger from our hope in you to work and speak where you would have us, so that more and more of this creation would be restored to your just and truthful rule.

The Difference With East

The Difference with East--November 29, 2016

"In days to come, the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, 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 an 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. O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!" [Isaiah 2:2-5]

We get our bearings from the direction of the new day.

We find our place--our orientation, quite literally--from the constancy of the rising sun.

My son was putting on his shoes yesterday morning, and as I told him, "This one is for your left foot," he proudly announced back to me, "This is my left foot, and this..." as he wiggled the other, "is my right foot."

"Very good," I said, confirming that he had correctly identified left and right feet.

Then he doubled down on his directional declarations, pointing with his fingers in different directions. "Left, and right," he said, pointing his finger correctly to either side of him.  But then the followed up by pointing forward and backward and saying, "North, and... east!"

Well, he was right about the left and right at least.

I said to him, "You got left and right correct, buddy, but east is different.  North and south go together, and east and west go together."  And then I added, pointing my finger behind me out the window, "That way is east." 

He was confused for a moment, and then while he faced me, he pointed behind himself and said, "Oh.... that's east!"  He was confusing the word "east" for "behind."  He thought I was telling him that east is just another term for the relative direction of being "behind" something or something.

So I said to him, "No, not quite--east is different from left and right, buddy.  If you turn around and face the other way, what you called 'left' and what you called 'right' will seem to switch.  But 'east' is always pointed in that direction.  And you can always find east by looking at the direction where the sun rises from."


Well, that seemed to satisfy a five-year-old who was only just trying to put his shoes on, but that little exchange got me thinking.  There is a difference between relative terms like "left" and "right," which depend on asking what your reference point is, and a directional term like "east," which at least on our planet is roughly the direction from which the sun rises.  You can head north a long ways until you hit the north pole, but at that point, if you keep going around the world in the same direction, you'll find yourself headed south again.  But east is different.  If you are pointed east and keep on going, you will always be headed east.  And east will always be the direction from which a new day comes.  And by the same token, that means, you can always get your bearings for where you are now, if you know from what direction the new day will dawn.  The promised tomorrow orients you for where you are right now.


At the start of this new year-long journey together, that's an important truth to consider.  We live this life in light of what the promised future will bring.  The direction of the new day informs what we do now and where we point our feet.  Everything else in this life may well seem relative or uncertain, but there is a difference with East.  The sun always rises from the same direction: once you know that direction, you know how to plant your feet no matter what else comes along to get you off your bearings.


So for as the followers of Jesus, as people who belong to his movement that we sometimes call the Kingdom or the Reign of God, this is where it all begins.  We start the journey with an awareness of the direction of the promised new day.  We start the journey knowing where things are headed.  And even if there are a lot of steps in between that we cannot see, we begin with confidence that we know from what direction the new day is coming.


And when the Scriptures describe the direction of that promised future, they keep saying that it looks like... peace.  It looks like an end to war.  It looks like reconciliation between old enemies.  It looks like justice with none other than God sorting out troubles and setting things right.  It looks like the ability to love enemies and hammer our weapons into farm tools.  That's the direction toward which God is moving all of creation.  It sure may not feel like it on a lot of days.  Every day there is news of new violence, a new attack somewhere, a new feeling of fear, a new anxiety, and a new worry.  But to be honest, a lot of those anxieties and fears are relative--they depend on where you are standing.  Like the way left and right reverse themselves when I turn around 180 degrees, there are plenty of worries and fears these days that are relative.  People who felt despondent and fearful a year ago may now feel secure and self-confident, while those who were hopeful now feel threatened.  Your situation determines some of those fears or feelings of comfort--and they may well change depending on where you are standing and whom you are standing next to in life.


But there is indeed a difference with East.  The direction of the new day is constant.  And for the people of God, we keep holding out those visions of what God's New Day will look like, so that we know in what direction to move today.  So if one day we will all let go of our weapons and learn to forgive one another and do right by one another, well, then the people of God today will start to live in that direction now.  We will be people who practice forgiveness, because that is the direction that God's New Day is leading us.  We will be people who love enemies, who do good when it has not been done to us, because we can see that is the way that God's New Day will work, too.  And we dare to set our feet from the light of that New Day that is just over the edge of the horizon.


If the whole Christian life is a journey, then the "direction" in which we move is always pointed toward that promised future.  And we can count on it always being the same, despite the other things that change for us, because that new day is always going to dawn from the same direction. 


That is the hope we find on the horizon.  That is the difference with East.


Lord God, keep us always pointed at your promised future, and then lead us toward that day together as your moving people.

...And Be Thankful

...And Be Thankful--November 24, 2016

"And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body.  And be thankful." (Colossians 3:15)

Gratitude does not mean we ignore what is yet wrong in the world. 

Gratitude, rather, can see that life itself is a gift of grace--the fact that there is something rather than nothing is a sign that we have been graced before we were ever born.  The fact that there is a world at all is a sign that God is committed to saying a YES to all creation over against the powers of chaos and oblivion.  Life itself is evidence that God is invested in the struggle against evil, against death, against hatred, and against chaos.  Naming that there is still much that is hurting in the universe is not ungrateful--it is one more reason to be thankful that God is alive and moving in the world, mending all that is broken, lifting up those who have been stepped on, deflating the pompous and puffed up.  And being thankful does not mean sticking your head in the sand to those real troubles, either.

Tonight, I am listening to a song by the great Sharon Jones, who died this past week, that has been a little three-minute sermon on gratitude in the midst of a broken world, all to the sounds of soul music.  In her song, "Humble Me," Sharon Jones sings,

"When I start demandin'
More than the rest, oh yeah
And when I start mournin'
I didn't get the best, no

Just remind me of the man, oh
Ooh, with nothin to eat
And remind me of the other man
Oh, with no shoes on his feet, yeah

Now, ooh, let me be grateful, oh
For all that Ive seen
And all that I have here
And theyll be around me, ooh yeah, now

Ooh, make me grateful for my voice, oh
That I might lift you up, yeah, yeah
Ooh, now grateful for these old legs, oh yeah
That I might jump and come and shout, yeah oh"

Jones reminds me that thankfulness doesn't mean ignoring the "man with nothing to eat" or "the man with no shoes on his feet," and it doesn't mean I just pat myself on the back for at least not being that bad off.  It means that I can appreciate what I have... and work to be the answer to prayer so that everybody gets to eat in the Kingdom of God, and so that all God's children get shoes.

Being grateful should not make us numb or insulated against the reality that on this day there are many who are afraid, many who have been told they are less-than, many who went hungry last night, many who are without a home, and many who are aching to belong and know they are beloved.  And at the same time, being grateful means I should not ignore the goodness that has been put in my life.

As Marilynne Robinson puts it in her beautiful novel Gilead, "there is more beauty than our eyes can bear. Precious things have been put in our hands, and to do nothing to honor them is to do them great harm."  The ugliness and brokenness of this world does not destroy the beautiful things that call forth our honoring them and our thankfulness to the God who is willing that there be something rather than nothing. 

So today, amid whatever hurts, broken places, empty places, wounds, or injustices that weigh on our hearts, we are also thankful. 

We are thankful, because there is something when there could have been nothing.

We are thankful, because there is beauty at all when it could have all been desolate.

We are thankful, because even those there is evil and injustice and want in the world, the living God has taken the side of the hurting and oppressed in the struggle.

And we are thankful in advance, too, because we dare to believe that God's goodness wins in the end against the powers of evil and the shadow of death.

And that is enough for today, even if that were all we had.

Lord Jesus, thank you.  Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Becoming Who We Are

Becoming Who We Are--November 23, 2016

"Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.  What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is."  [1 John 3:2]

The whole Christian life is about becoming who and what God says we already are.  If that seems like a bit of a brain twister, it's probably a sign that we're onto something. After all, most of the really important things we believe as Christians boggle our minds if we spend any time at thinking about them. (In his book, Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr quotes some of the great Eastern fathers as saying, "If you can explain it, it isn't true," meaning that ultimately we can't completely unravel the mystery of the faith, and that if we think we understand it all, it's a sign we have probably missed the boat somewhere.)  So, back to the mystery du jour:  the Christian life is a matter of becoming who we are.

Again and again throughout the Bible, Christians find themselves bumping up against the idea of things being already-and-not-yet with us and God.  Jesus is Lord of the entire universe, and yet there is still coming a day when he will be revealed fully to all as Lord.  The Kingdom of God is among us, Jesus said two thousand years ago, and yet the same Jesus also still taught us to pray for that same very Kingdom to come, and for God's will to be done on earth the way it is done already in heaven.  Eternal life begins now, the New Testament writers say, but it also yet to come beyond the bounds of death.  There are lots of places where we live in that already-but-not-yet tension as believers in Jesus.

Well, here's one more for the pile:  John tells us here we are God's children now, and he says it plainly and assertively as something we can take to the bank,  But John also points us forward to something that is yet in store for us, something that is to come, something we are not yet experiencing fully.  "We will be like him," John says, referring to Jesus.  We will be like Jesus, the One in whom we have met the face of God.  In other words, we are God's children already, but we will be made to be fully like God's Son at the last. 

In some ways, that is part of what this whole life is about--being formed into the likeness of Jesus.  Not beards and sandals of course, but becoming like Jesus in the ways that matter.  This life--which also then includes this day--is part of how God is shaping us to be made like Jesus, so that, as John says, "when he is revealed, we will be like him."  That is an important thing for us to remember, because it is very easy for us to slip into thinking that this life is just a matter of biding our time until we get to heaven, or that we just have to trudge through the days and keep our nose down as much as possible so that we can just skip ahead to the good part of life after death.  But Jesus, it turns out, is just as much interested in life before death.  And in fact, Jesus has gifted us with a community of people who are placed around us in this life-before-death to be used as instruments whom God uses to shape us to be like Christ.  That community is called church.  Sinners though we are, every last one of us, in God's great cosmic genius, the Spirit uses each of us to work on all of the rest of us.  And together in community, we learn how to love like Jesus, how to be courageous truth-tellers like Jesus, how to serve in humility like Jesus, and how to weep and rejoice like Jesus.  When we go out to serve others--whether on far-out mission trips or just down the road to the clothes closet or working side by side in our own church buildings--part of what is happening is that you and I are being changed, too.  For whatever other good we are doing for others on our mission trips and with our clothing drives, God is using those moments to form the kind of people we are becoming--so that we will come to look like the kind of children God says we are already.  When we hold hands together to pray in a circle, when we come to the Table to receive the bread and the cup, when we are gathered around the Word each Sunday, God is shaping us to make us to be like Jesus.  God has already called us and claimed us as "children of God," but that is not the end of things--God continues to make us to be what God says we are already.

So for today, we look out on the hours in front of us before we go to bed again, and we can see the open possibility that God will be at work on us today--and through us at the same time, too--to make us all more fully to become like Jesus.  We, children of God already, are being made to be more fully like the Son of God.  And it will be happening, if perhaps in small ways that we will have to be vigilant to notice and recognize, even today. 

O Great and Gracious God, we pray for your presence and blessing today on us, to make us more fully to become who and what you say we are.  Let us be your children, and let us live as your children as you keep shaping us in the image of Jesus today.

"And in the End..."

"And in the End"--November 22, 2016

"When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, 'Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.' When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, 'These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.' But he replied to one of them, 'Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?' Take what belongs to you  and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed do do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?' So the last will be first, and the first will be last." [Matthew 20:8-16]

I don't often say this, but it is unavoidable in this instance: the Beatles were wrong.

At the tail end of the last album they recorded together, Abbey Road, after a brilliant two minutes of volleying guitar licks to lead up to it, the Beatles offer this lone couplet: 

"And in the end, the love you take

Is equal to the love you make."

This is another instance of the life-principle "Don't believe something is true just because it rhymes."  How much bad theology has been done over two thousand years just because some writer's-blocked pious poet reached for an easy rhyme rather than thinking out what he or she was writing? Well, same thing here: if we are to believe Jesus (and I believe he is indeed the authority on the subject of... anything), the way God runs the universe is decidedly NOT to only reward people based on what they have put in.  The economy of God is, from start to finish an economy of grace.  And therefore, in the end the paychecks are given out not based on who sweated the most during their shift, but based on a commitment from the landowner that everybody should be able to feed their kids the next day.

In the end, it would seem, the love you take is always way beyond what you deserved. Always.

Now, as long as I am the one receiving the windfall, that will sound pretty good.  But we humans have a way of getting envious of when someone else receives a gift that puts them on equal footing with us.  We have a way of getting angry, upset, and bent out of shape when someone else is given the same amount we have--we start fussing about what is "right" and what is "just" and what's "fair" because we feel threatened.

And that's the thing--to the ones with more than others, any gracious gesture to put people on equal footing feels like a threat. 

So here's a quick rule of thumb: if I find myself getting all bent out of shape with anxious indignation because someone else has been given a leg up so that they are at the same starting point as I am, I am probably unaware of just how privileged I have been all along.  It's funny--in that way things that are awful can also be funny--how when I look at my own life, I have a tendency to assume that I am entitled to all the advantages I have... but when I look at someone else's situation and see that someone has given them grace, I can start bemoaning them as undeserving and unworthy.

The good news in all of that (if you want to call it that)--I guess I should realize I'm not alone in that.  The workers hired first in Jesus' provocative story here are lodging the same complaint.  "You have made them equal to us!" That's their problem.  They wouldn't have minded the last ones getting an inflated paycheck so long as the first hired workers got their own paychecks pumped up--so they could still see themselves as "better."  To the ones first hired, it's fine if the next guy gets a bonus, as long as mine is bigger--that's how I compare myself to them and tell myself I'm better than all of them, after all. 

But when they see that the landowner has treated them all the same--paid them all the same amount--they get upset.  Turns out they and I are kindred spirits sometimes.  And you, too, I'll wager.  We who fancy ourselves the "first hired" have a way of forgetting that we have been graced, too--we forget that someone reached out to give us a leg up, and that we didn't earn the good in our lives, either.  The talents you were born with--grace. The family that taught you, supported you, and encouraged you--grace.  The wealth that gave you the creature comforts you assumed "everybody" had growing up--grace.  The conveniences and advantages we have had, some of which you and I don't even recognize we have--guess what, grace!  It has all been grace, all along.  The whole universe is run on God's irrepressible itch to give out good things to people who didn't do a thing to deserve them first. 

So one day, Jesus' parable hints, we will all stand before God and realize that everything in this life has been a gift all along.  The privileges I have had in my life were not something I "deserved"--they were there already before any talk of my "working" for them.  But God chose, not only to give me blessings and benefits in this life, but also to grace other people, too--and that means that God reserves the right to lift people up and fill their empty hands with good things the same as me.  If I am still stuck in the old thinking of earning and winning and climbing over top of everybody else to get to the top, I am going to feel threatened and insecure when God blesses other people. 

Today is the day for you and me to see things differently.  Today is the day for us to see the end of the story--the end of all things in this life and this world--and how, all the way to the very end, God has a way of blessing the people we deem least deserving.  And then we can begin to realize that there is surely someone who looks at me and has decided that I am least deserving of grace, too--and yet, that doesn't stop God from lavishing grace upon grace on me... on you... on a whole world full of the last-picked and seemingly least-deserving.

We can either rail against that divine economy of mercy in this life--we can pretend that we are more deserving of what we have, and keep on feeling threatened when the group that came at noon, or the group that came at three, or the group that came just a minute ago, have good things provided to them so that they can care for their families, too--or, we can see that this is the logic of divine grace at work.  We can see that "they" and "we" alike have been given all we have as a gift of God, and that means there is no room for me to fuss that someone else got a handout... when I have been living off of divine handouts every day of my life, too.  We can let of our awfully smug "I did this all myself" attitudes and instead see that we have all been graced beyond our deserving.  And when that dawns on me, then a windfall for you doesn't have to feel like a threat to me.  You getting to have equal standing and footing with me doesn't have to scare me anymore, because I realize we have both been placed at that point by a goodness we did not deserve.

In the end, the love you take... well, turns out always to have been the love that God has given us freely, way beyond what any of us made or deserved or earned.  The whole ride has been grace, all along.  That's how the story will end when our labor for this life is done, and that's how God runs the show right now.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to love your gracious giving to others, and to see ourselves as people who have been graced and blessed beyond our earning.

Unencumbered

"Unencumbered"--November 21, 2016

[Paul] lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance. [Acts 28:30-31]

We say it at funerals a lot, but it is certainly true here, too--God gets the last word in our story.  And literally here, in the tail end of the book of Acts, which is itself the second volume in Luke's great epic story that starts with what we call the Gospel of Luke, the last word is of great importance.  In Greek, it's just one word that says, "without hindrance," rather like our word "unencumbered," or to put it a little bit more colloquially, "with nothing in the way that could ultimately stop him."  The last word is that the news of Jesus was free, was uninhibited, was unleashed.  The last word is that the movement of Jesus' followers,  opened up to the in-breaking Kingdom of God, kept on rippling out from that first pouring out out of the Spirit on Pentecost--and the world could not stop it.  The last word is that the risen Christ and the living Spirit remain loose in the world. 

In some ways, that is an entirely unsatisfactory way to end a story.  A good literary critic would point out how many loose ends are left unresolved and how much is left up in the air for us, the readers who have been following this story for so long.  We never get to see Paul's day in court, we never learn what the emperor said, and we never know what became of the Christian community....

Except that we do--we are living proof that the story is still going on.  Luke has written this story knowing that the Christian community continues and live and thrives, still "unencumbered" and "without hindrance" itself, long after the events of Paul's life that are written down here.  We are the continuation of the story.  Luke doesn't give a nice and tidy ending to his story, no "And they all lived happily every after..." because the story didn't end with Paul.  It keeps going.  The same Spirit is loose and alive and working among us and in us (and even, if we can bear to admit it, in spite of us sometimes).  Saying anything more than what Luke says, which is essentially, "And the story kept going on..." would suggest that the "real" mission of God was over, and that we Christians are left just to tell the stories of what God did.  But that misses the point--this book was never just a record of what God did; it was always a reminder that the Spirit of God is leading us to live as Jesus' people still, even now, even thousands of years after Jesus' death and resurrection.  There's no punctuation in the original Greek of Luke's book, but I suspect that if there would have been, he would have even ended the last sentence with a good old ellipsis (...) to say that there is more to come and the story of Jesus' people continued in hope and confidence, even after Luke stopped writing about it, and even after the empire put Paul to death.

There is that old cliché that we should not put periods where God puts commas, and as tired as that might sound, there is real truth to it.  The empire thought it could put a period on the life and ministry of Paul by executing him (eventually--we don't get the story here).  And before Paul, the angry mobs (of which Paul had been a part, when he was going by the name Saul) thought they could put a period on the life and ministry of Stephen by stoning him.  And of course, before that, the empire and the religious leaders and the angry mobs (and even Satan, we could say) thought they could put a period on the troublemaking of Jesus by putting him to an ugly death, too.  But, as the saying goes, God had it in mind to put commas at each of those points--or better yet, to put an ellipsis after the cross, and after the stoning of Stephen, and even after the end of Paul's earthly life.

Keep that in mind in these days, too.  Many in our country like to talk about the decline of the church--some who wistfully remember days gone by when Christianity had a place of public prestige about it, others who are eager to see the dethronement of any faith of any kind, and others who are not quite sure what to make of the signs and symptoms they see.  And it may well be that church as we have known it in our lifetimes is indeed dying--that an easy Sunday-morning-only faith which never is lived out through the week will in fact fold up.  In may well be that the church as the comfortable hideout of people who want to appear respectably religious will need to make room for a deeper, riskier, more passionate and on-the-fringe community of disciples.  But let's not put any periods where an ellipsis should really be.... The community of Jesus has lived through death and resurrection before--in fact, it has staked its life on it.  The community of Jesus, though not ever hemmed in to one set of liturgies or church-talk or style, has continued on "without hindrance."  And even that is not our own accomplishment--it is the power of the same Spirit who works in us and who has upheld us all along.  For whatever else is out there for us--for you and for me as individuals, and for us as gathered communities of Jesus' followers--Luke wants us to hear his last word, "without hindrance," not as an end, but as a signpost along the way to remind us whose we are, whose hands we are in, and whose work we get to be a part of.  What else can we say to that but "Amen and Amen"?  Out we go today, confident that for whatever else it looks like to the period-pushers of the world, the Reign of God keeps rippling out among us and in us and through us--even, as Jesus says, to the ends of the earth....

Lord Jesus, in some ways, all of our prayers begin with an unspoken, "Into your hands, we commend our spirits."  So, too, today, with whatever comes, we place ourselves intentionally where you have already put us yourself--into your hands.  From that place of confidence, go along with us, out into your world, spurred on by your Spirit, upheld by the gracious presence of Jesus, to embody the blessed life of your Kingdom for all.  We ask it in the name of Jesus, the great Amen himself, as the Scriptures say, and offering our lives as a living Amen to your promise....

A Plan to Lose

A Plan to Lose--November 18, 2016

"More than that, I regard everything as a loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him…" [Philippians 3:8-9a]

In one of my favorite songs by the band Switchfoot (a list which, I will confess, is a long one), Jon Foreman sings, “Only the losers win—they’ve got nothing to prove.  They leave the world with nothing to lose,” and then he comes to the chorus, “I’ve got a plan to lose it all.  I’ve got a contract pending on eternity.  If I haven’t already given it away, I’ve got a plan to lose it all.”

A plan to lose… everything.  It hardly sounds sensible.

We usually use the word “lose” to describe something accidental and unintentional, something regrettable and pitiable… not something you have a plan for.  We say things like, “I lost my wristwatch again—can someone help me look for it?”  or “I have felt just awful since I lost that gift they gave me. What a shame.”  We talk about the stock market losing points on the day, when of course everyone would rather see a day when the markets close up for the day.  We lament about losing time, losing chances, losing profits, and losing our minds—none of them very positive situations. 

And in those rare and precious moments when we do bring ourselves to part with something intentionally, we reach for other verbs than “lose.”  Your offering check put in the plate is a donation, or a gift or a tithe, but I don’t know anyone who says, “I lost money to the church today.”  Losing sounds like surrender.  Losing sounds like defeat.  Losing sounds like something you stumbled into because of absent-mindedness (the misplaced wristwatch) or risky investing… not something you set out to accomplish when you get up in the morning.

Unless you have met Jesus, of course.  Jesus is the reason that Paul, and the songwriter Jon Foreman, and countless disciples over two thousand years, have been willing to talk about—and sing about, too, I guess—our plans to lose it all.  Paul talks about loss the way a personal trainer talks about the extra twenty pounds or so we are all carrying around that we could stand to shed.  You do have to consciously plan to lose that kind of weigh, which is precisely dead weight.  You do have to say, “This is something I need to get rid of, something I need to lose, and something that is only holding me back and comparatively a waste.”   

Of course, when we are just picturing twenty pounds of excess weight—read fat—from our bodies, it’s easy to say, “I want to be rid of that!”  The really radical thing about Paul is that he is willing to talk about things he used to think were great, and now to call them “rubbish.”  Actually, he calls them something even more graphic in his original Greek—something that could be politely translated as “dung.”  Paul isn’t talking about spiritual love-handles or a flabby soul—something that anybody might easily say, “This needs to go!” about.  Paul is talking about all of who he used to be before Christ was a part of his life.  His trophies and medals, his scorecards and gold-stars.  All of it is so much garbage that ought to go to the junk heap.  All of it requires a plan to lose.

That flies in the face of our natural impulses.  We all cling to the things we think give us worth, and here Paul is convinced that the grace of God changes all that. We are much more likely to want to try and preserve whatever we thought of as our accomplishments, rather than to be willing to let go of them.  It's the frustrated early retiree, who worked hard at his job, only to be forced out when the business dried up, and all he can do now is lash out in emasculated anger at all the people he blames for his troubles, while he conjures up wishes for reliving his glory days.  It's the sad, lonely mogul, who did great in business and made a fortune, but comes to a point where he realizes his money didn't make him happy and all his millions or billions were a waste of a lifetime since he feels empty inside. It's Al Bundy, reliving his high school football career and "that time I scored four touchdowns in a single game" because he is afraid to admit that none of that matters anymore.  All of us are like that to some degree--we don't dare say that our best and most important achievements are "rubbish," because we are have a hard time believing that grace really does get the last word, and that in the end there will be no proving of our worth--only the free gift of God's love that is already yours before you've done a thing.


It is hard to do what Paul does here in Philippians, because we are afraid of admitting our best and greatest weren't all that great, and we would much rather clutch onto the things we thought gave us value and worth.  It is hard to accept that I am beloved and precious and of infinite worth to God... even if my job went away, even if my industry is disappearing, even if I have had to be on unemployment, even if I need the help of others, even if nobody else remembers the four touchdowns in a single game from high school.  But the New Testament does indeed dare us to quit putting our trust and our worth in those accomplishments, and instead to make a plan to lose them all.

Every so often in our lives we have those turning-a-new-chapter rummage-clearing times of our lives, when we sort through the “stuff” that has accumulated and decide what we need to keep and what we do not need.  We might fill up a back of clothes for goodwill, or finally get rid of those broken small appliances we had been meaning to get around to.  Or we might find something that had gotten buried at the bottom of a closet or storage tub and rediscover something of value.  It does happen.

But then there are the markers of achievement. The collected report cards or merit badges from childhood. The certificates of achievement from work or letters of commendation from our supervisors.  The actual plastic trophies from childhood wins and school victories.  When we win them—the big trophy for the year your team won the championship, or the perfect attendance award from your fourth-grade class—they seem like they are of great value and that we will never want to part with them.  Funny, though, how by the time you have to move a couple times in life, you get tired of unboxing and re-boxing the same pieces of tarnished, gaudy plastic with stick-on nameplates.  Funny how these things that once seemed so important become one more piece of junk you are willing to part with—to pitch because it is of no use to anybody else, and because your present-tense life doesn’t need it anymore.  I remember the day I finally parted with my second-grade Pinewood Derby trophy from my short-lived Cub Scout career—and the way I looked at the yellowing faux-gold of its plastic topper and said to myself, “Who do I think I need to impress with this anymore… and am I really fooling myself to think that it would impress them?”  Pitching the trophy was loss, in some sense of the word, but it was also really freeing, because it meant I was losing one more instance of trying to make myself good enough to be acceptable.  One more idol dethroned.

There comes a point where the new life you are standing in is worth more than the trophies from your past that mark where you used to be.  There comes a point when you realize you would rather have a few more free moments now than the time it takes to dust your old school trophies.  And so, at some point… out they go.  It’s a loss, but not a pitiable one.  Nobody says, “Oh, what a shame—I wish I had more of the faded clutter from my childhood that rewarded me for meaningless contests.”  But it does take the conscious action, the chosen willingness, to pitch them when it’s time.  It takes a plan.

The Christian life is like that.  It is the conscious plan of disciples of Jesus to do an ongoing inventory of our lives and to be free enough to pitch the clutter of personal points and tired trophies which never really earned us anything in the first place.  It is the daring plot to pin our whole lives on Christ and to see that in this present moment with Christ we no longer need gold stars to be loved.  In fact, we never did. 

When that becomes real for us—when the reality of grace smacks us upside the head like that—all of a sudden we find ourselves free to lose it all… because we recognize that, more importantly, we have been found.

Lord Jesus, you have claimed us as we are.  Let us dare to trust it and plan to lose the dead weight we have been carrying around.

The Gospel According to Mesons

The Gospel According to Mesons--November 17, 2016

"[Christ] himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconciled to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross." [Colossians 1:17-20]

Inside of every cell of your body--in fact, inside every nucleus of every atom of every molecule that is inside of every cell of your body--there is a profound mystery that is holding you together.  It is holding the world together, too.

Scientists call it the "strong nuclear force," and it is quite amazing.  Everybody remembers, I trust, their basic science education from back in middle school or junior high school, where you learned that positive repels positive and negative repels negative, just like the poles on a magnet repel poles of the same kind, too.  And I'll bet you recall, too, that every atom in the universe is made up of protons (which have a positive charge), neutrons (which are neutral), and electrons (which have a negative charge).  And while electrons go whizzing around in orbit on the outside of an atom like a buzzing, moving shell, the center of every atom is densely populated with protons.

So, in the center of just about every atom in the universe (okay, not hydrogen, which has only one proton to begin with), from the carbon atoms in your eyes as you read these words to the silicon atoms in the microchips within the computer on which I am typing them, there are subatomic particles pushing away from each other.  Inside every nucleus of every atom there are protons that are repelling one another, and if there were not another force at work holding them together, that pushing would rip apart every atom in creation, and there would be nothing but subatomic particles zipping around the chaos of otherwise empty space.  If all you had was the basic description of things from middle school science, you might say, "The universe shouldn't work!  It shouldn't hold together at all!"  If all there were was the meeting of one proton's charge butting up against the force of another, then, to borrow a phrase of Yeats, things would fall apart, and the center would not hold.

And yet... here we are.

There must be a force, a power, that is of a different kind than the you-push-me-I'll-push-you-back repulsion of one proton against another.  There must be another kind of force--somehow even stronger in those close, infinitesimally small distances, that can make all the protons stay with one another.  This is the mystery.  This is what scientists call "the strong nuclear force." And instead of being a pushing kind of force, like positive charges push against and repel other positive charges punch for punch, somehow the strong nuclear force is a "giving" kind of force--it binds protons together by getting them to trade even tinier particles, mesons, back and forth.

We don't need to delve further into the intricacies of subatomic particles to get the point for today: at first glance (a 7th-grade level knowledge of science), it looks like nothing should hold together at all, but there is a deeper power at work that still binds everything even in spite of our assertions of what "can" or "cannot" happen.  Curious, isn't it, that the force of giving thing away back and forth ends up being more powerful that the force of one proton pushing and shoving on another like drunk brawlers in a barfight.

Except, maybe not that curious at all, for people who dare to believe that the Maker of all things leaves fingerprints in the universe--that in some way, creation itself bears the mark of the Creator like the Van Gogh print on the wall across from me has the name "Vincent" painted subtly in letters of yellow ochre at the bottom of the sunflower vase.  And I don't mean that God hides tiny crosses in the structure of molecules, or stamps "John 3:16" onto the far side of planets for us to find, like some theological version of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I mean that if God's own nature is to bind all things together in the act of self-giving love, then maybe it isn't all that surprising that God has fashioned the universe in the same way--that in the face of our most powerful bouts of anger and pride and pushing and shoving, God reserves the right nevertheless to bind all things together in the power of a force whose strength comes from self-giving, too.

This is exactly the Christian claim: that even though we seem determined to divide ourselves up, we human beings, God insists on binding all things together in love anyhow. We keep angling for ways to to exclude and accuse, to condemn and to hate one another along all sorts of lines, and then to push and shove back and forth at one another because we are afraid of "the other" getting more power than we have... and then God instead says, "No, I am still holding you all together."  And God doesn't do it with coercion, not with guns or laws or imprisonment or threats or angry bluster.  God holds all things together in love, the same self-giving love that gave itself away for us on an ugly imperial death stake that we call the cross.  God's power to gather up, God's power to bind up what is broken and scattered, God's power to embrace, is going to win out in the end, like the strong nuclear force holding together even ornery protons that are still wanting to push and shove each other into chaos.

To be a follower of Jesus is to stake your claim now to be a part of God's work of self-giving love--love that does not back down from speaking out for those who have been stepped on, made to be afraid, or left out, but love also that does not shy away from giving itself away, to bow and to bend and to make room for the other as well.  We are people who dare to believe that, as impossible as it might seem to a rudimentary surface knowledge, God's self-giving love is more powerful than our impulse to hate, to divide, and to dehumanize one another. So we will be about the work of love today, even when it takes the form of courage, and even when it takes the form of suffering.

Lord Jesus, bind all things together within us, and bind us together with all creation in your self-giving love.