Loving Strong

Loving Strong--March 31, 2017

"Then I saw between the throne and the four living creatures and among the elders a Lamb, standing as if it had been slaughtered, having seven horns and seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth.  He went and took the scroll from the right hand of the one who was seated on the throne.  When he had taken the scroll, the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders fell before the Lamb, each holding a harp and golden bowls full of incense, which are the prayers of the saints.  They sing a new song:

'You are worthy to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slaughtered and by your blood you ransomed for God saints from every tribe and language and people and nation; you have made them to be a kingdom and priests serving our God, and they will reign on earth'." [Revelation 5:6-10]

People who want to look tough say things like, "We do not negotiate with bad guys."  That's a strong, tough policy.  That's Harrison Ford's flinty president character in the movie Air Force One, or any of a million other movie heroes and real-life would-be tough-guys.  That's how you keep from getting taken advantage of.  You don't pay ransoms.  You don't let yourself look... weak.

Seems like God has never been much of a Harrison-Ford movie fan. 

I say that because at the heart of the Good News, and at the end of the Bible's story, is God's refusal to "look tough," if it meant giving up on a world full of blessed, beloved, benighted people... like us.  At the center of our faith is a God who is less interested in looking tough and more interested in liberating all people--even if it means paying a ransom.  Even if it means being a ransom.

Think about that for a moment.  Most people we know are a lot more protective of their reputations.  Most folks are bent on doing anything they can to look strong, to look tough, to look like they are in control.  Most folks are so obsessed with shoring up their fragile egos that they don't want to let anybody, anybody, see them bend.  But, as I am increasingly aware, Jesus ain't most folks.

You and I know it about ourselves, too, don't we?  We all like to picture ourselves as the tough-guys in the room.  No one can shake us.  No one can make us give up something precious.  At least we tell ourselves some version of that story. Everybody wants to be, or to be around, the kind of hero who beats up the bad guys, who negotiates with his fists, and who wins the day by bringing bigger guns and more ammo. Who doesn’t want to be friends with Superman—or better yet, to BE Superman, right? There’s a brilliant line of Robert Farrar Capon’s where he suggests that if WE had been drafting the divine plan, WE wouldn’t have done a “stupid” thing like dying on a cross—we would have done a “smart” (and impressive and strong) thing like not dying in the first place.

And then there is this God of ours.  This God's plan to save the universe, to redeem people of all nations, languages, cultures, and places, to redeem creation... is to not simply "pay" a ransom to rescue us all, but to be the ransom.  The Christian Gospel centers on an act that the world would dismiss as "weak-looking," as "giving in" or "giving up," as "losing."  The great new song of heaven centers on an act of surrender that would never make it as a blockbuster movie.  But it turns out God is less interested in protecting the divine reputation then in restoring creation and reclaiming you and me.  The Lamb--Christ, the crucified and risen One who is the incarnate God--is the object of praise in the heavenly throne room because he has done the unthinkable in offering himself up as the ransom. 

It is a surprising thing that in the end, the savior of the world doesn't look like Harrison Ford punching stereotypical goateed bad guys and declaring defiantly, "Get off my plane!" but rather looks like a slain, but living Lamb.  But that's God for you--never aiming for movie-star appeal, but rather willing to save the world even if everyone else thinks it's crazy or foolish or silly. 

Let me ask it this way, as a way to frame this day: why do we think God is worthy of our praise?  Why do we find ourselves praising and worshiping God--what has God done that calls forth our adoration?  In the end, it's not that God has projected an image of being tough--but rather that God has set aside all fuss about images and reputations and just gone and given God's own self up for us.  How might you and I be called in this new day to set aside our reputations, our image, or the perception of being strong in order to be truly strong?  How might you and I point to the way we have been loved in the ways we care for the people around us? 

And just think of how much freer we could be--right now--if we didn't have to worry about whether we looked strong to other people... in order to simply love strong?

Lord Jesus, let us love like you--with reckless abandon.

The Descent into Triumph

The Descent into Triumph--March 30, 2017

“Therefore it is said, ‘When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive; he gave gifts to his people.’ (When it says, ‘He ascended,’ what does it mean but that he had also descended into the lower parts of the earth? He who descended is the same one ascended far above all the heavens, so that he might fill all things.)” (Ephesians 4:8-10)
Hmmm… seems like a lot of up and down, with all this “ascending” and “descending” business. Maybe even more than in the stand-up/sit-down rhythm of a Sunday at a Lutheran church.

So, here’s what I wonder: clearly Paul thinks he is hitting on a really important point here. He’s quoting a line from the Old Testament, and he’s trying to explain it to us at the same time, and he is building up to making a bigger point. So if I can’t quite wrap my brain around what he’s so excited about at first, can I at least make the effort to see what has got Paul all fired up?

This is a little like one of those times when a friend recommends a movie or a book to you, or raves about a song or a musician to you, and even if you don’t understand at first why they think you would like it, you are willing to give it a try to see why it means so much to them. If you’ve ever been there—if you’ve been the one holding the book, or the DVD or CD they gave you (but you didn’t ask for)—and you have made the effort to see why it’s so appealing to someone you respect, then use the same skills here with Paul. Why is he so excited about this saying he quotes with all the ascending and descending in it?

Okay, first off—Paul is quoting, or rather loosely paraphrasing, a verse from the psalms. Psalm 68:18 reads, “You ascended the high mount, leading captives in your train and receiving gifts from people…” In its original setting, the verse in Psalm 68 is about God’s power and might as God’s presence goes up to the Temple mount in Jerusalem. It’s part of a whole psalm about God’s victory and God’s vindication—how God was strong and powerful in the past, and how God has defeated all the threats posed to the people of God, whether enemy armies, wild animals, or natural disasters.

Now what’s at first surprising is how fast and loose Paul seems to be playing with that verse from the Psalms. He’s done a fair amount of rewording, and he has even reversed the image of God “receiving gifts from people” to “giving gifts to his people.” And for that matter, Paul makes the reference to this Psalm while he’s talking about Christ, and specifically seems to be thinking about Christ’s death (the “descent into the lower parts of the earth”). That seems a little strange at first, since Jesus’ death doesn’t seem very… victorious.

Except… maybe that is exactly the point. Paul sees Jesus’ death as the victory. He connects Jesus’ “descent”—as in, his burial in a tomb—and the great victory of God, because it’s there at the cross and there in the tomb where God defeats the power of death once and for all. It’s the cross that makes it possible for God to reconcile and restore a world full of outsiders to himself—ending their estrangement by leaving it nailed to the cross. Jesus’ death is what God’s victory looks like, in the end. God chooses to work through what seems weak, what seems foolish, what seems tragic, in order to accomplish his purposes. Paul makes the connection here so that we will see the way God triumphs: not in a show of strength, but in a moment of surrender.

That’s just it: this is what’s worth giving Paul a second, or third or fourth, chance to listen and consider what he is trying to say. In the end, this is Paul’s way of saying that God’s great victory is what looks like utter loss at the cross. It’s what Frederick Buechner calls “the magnificent defeat.” This is how Jesus wins—he swallows up death by dying, and he captures captivity itself by dying as a prisoner captive to the whim of the Roman Empire. At first blush, those seem contradictory, but as Paul sees it, the Scriptures have been hinting at this amazing upside-down kind of victory all along. It’s just a question of whether we will sit with the Scriptures long enough to let their truth speak.

Gracious God, work through our weaknesses like they are precious gifts, as you worked through Jesus’ weakness unto death to bring us all to everlasting life.

Still the Lamb

Still the Lamb--March 29, 2017

Now as [Saul] was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do.” [Acts 9:3-6]

Forgive me for what I'm about to do. It is necessary for the purposes of the Gospel.

"You're still the one--that makes me strong
Still the one--I wanna take along
We're still having fun--and you're still the one."
 
Ok, you can be mad at me now that that song will be stuck in your head for the rest of the day, whether you are a fan of the band Orleans or not. That little recurring riff--about five seconds of pure pop perfection--is an earworm that just keeps coming back into your consciousness. That's doubly fitting, I suppose, since that couple of lines comes back about ten times in the course of four minutes of pop-song, and because it's a song about coming back to find a love that has been there all along through thick and thin.

Well, hold onto that idea for a minute--the idea of a musical theme or refrain that keeps coming back. Something like that happens with the love of God as we trace the story of the Bible. Like a recurring melody in a great symphony (or to be a little less fancy-pants and highbrow about it, like the catchy refrain from "Still the One,"), the Scriptures keeping coming back to the theme of enemy-love. But here in the ninth chapter of what we call Acts, the refrain comes back blazing like it's never been so dramatic, so striking, a love up to this point.

There is, of course, Jesus' own teaching in places like the Sermon on the Mount that teach us to show love for our enemies. And then even in the book of Acts, you'll find Peter's sermons on Pentecost and then before the religious leaders, how he labeled his hearers as complicit in the death of Jesus--and then at the same time held out the offer of God's gift of new life in Jesus to those same ones who bore their share of responsibility for Jesus' suffering.

But this may be the first time that someone who so actively was set as an enemy of Jesus is met with the transforming love of the Risen Jesus. Earlier stories might hint at forgiveness and love for the enemy, but maybe we could dismiss them as just hints or minor themes in the bigger story. In other words, maybe we could have denied that loving enemies is central to our faith if we only had those other stories from earlier in the Bible, or maybe we could have thought that enemy-love was just something for meek-and-mild Jesus before the cross, but something left behind after he rises from the dead. Nope--not so.

Once we hear the words from heaven, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting," and then the call to Saul be a servant of this Jesus, there's no denying it any longer. Love of enemies is at the crux (literally) of our faith because Jesus himself has loved his enemies. And he keeps loving enemies even once he is enthroned in glory after the resurrection. "Love your enemies" is not simply the strategy of a powerless itinerant rabbi because he has no power or armies at his disposal, but also of the Risen, Exalted Christ. The same Christ knows only one way of relating to us: love that dies and suffers even for enemies... like us.

We sometimes are willing to grant that Jesus loved his enemies right up to his death--we think of the line, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing," or the offer of mercy to the thief on the cross, maybe, as quintessential examples of this kind of love. But what does it mean that even after the resurrection Jesus is still loving enemies, and not just vaguely ignoring them, but actively seeking them out and calling them into belonging in the new community with a new purpose?

See, sometimes, you hear people talk about as though Jesus had some death wish and was willing to do all sorts of crazy, unwise things in order to get to a cross. Maybe we would be tempted to see his forgiveness from the cross or his teaching on enemy-love as just part of a program that would ensure he would die. And then, we might like to think, once Jesus was raised from the dead, he would again be a macho, tough-guy type who meted out justice and zapped his enemies. (You sometimes hear this in talk about Jesus' coming again—"He came like a lamb the first time, but when he comes again, he will be a devouring lion!" Never mind that in the book of Revelation, there is an announcement that the Lion has arrived, and when everyone looks to see him, they see nothing but the slain-but-living Lamb!) It would be tempting to think that Jesus' bit about loving enemies was just a hiccup that made his passive death on the cross possible, but now that Easter has come, we're back to business as usual and the normal order of kill-or-be-killed. At least it's a way of life we're familiar with, a logic we have been trained in. But no--Jesus turns out to be the same, as the book of Hebrews puts it, "yesterday, today, and forever." And that Jesus is, as he always has been, the Lamb who loves his enemies.

With Saul's call experience on the Damascus road, it is clear that Jesus is still the Lamb: risen and victorious, yes, but still wearing the scars of slaughter, and still committed to loving enemies. God's new way of doing things in Christ is to love enemies and to transform them by that love.

To be a follower of Jesus, both two thousand years ago and today, is to be pulled into the kind of love that Jesus makes possible, the love that includes neighbor and stranger and enemy together. It is not just a minor theme of Jesus before he died, it is the fabric out of which our own salvation is woven. This same Saul, who finds himself a reconciled enemy of God, is the one who will later point out in his letters that God loved us while we were "enemies" of God, every last one of us (see Romans 5), and that because of this, we too are called to "bless those who persecute us" (Romans 12). These ideas are not unrelated—they are two sides of the same coin! God has loved us even when we were enemies, and that divine love has transformed us—and still is transforming us. That is our victory--because that is how Jesus won his victory at the cross.

And part of how we are transformed is to be made vessels through which God's enemy-embracing love transforms others. Paul/Saul did not just invent this idea out of thin air, and he did not just write this kind of theology abstractly without having really lived it. He could speak of Christ's love even for the most ardent persecutors of Christ because he had been one and found himself changed by this experience on the Damascus road. And he could speak of the new order of love in the Christian community because he had found it happening in his own life.

These ideas are not just intellectual theories or abstract thoughts—Saul lived the story of God's enemy-reconciling love in his real, flesh-and-blood life. And this story invites—no, it calls—us to live in that same new order of things, the order we call the kingdom of God. After all, as Revelation tells us, too, the One whose kingdom it is, who sits in the midst of the throne, is still the Lamb (Rev. 5:6).

Still the Lamb--who makes us strong
Still the Lamb--who says we belong
One with the I AM--Christ is still the Lamb. 

Go ahead... just try to get it out of your head today... it'll keep coming back...
 

O Love that will not let us go, hold onto us today in all the twists and turns of this day. Open our eyes to see the ways you have loved us, and then open our hands to extend the same kind of love for those with whom we are estranged, so that together we may all be transformed into the likeness of your Son, the one who called on the Damascus road and who calls to us on Main Street as well.

The Notes, Right-Side-Up

"The Notes, Right-Side-Up"--March 28, 2017

"Jesus answered them, 'The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Very truly, I tell you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit. Those who love their life lose it, and those who hate their life in this world will keep it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there will my servant be also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor." [John 12:23-26]

I remember this old bit by the piano-and-comedy virtuoso Victor Borge where the pianist is sitting down at the keys playing something, something whose rhythms seem vaguely familiar, but whose melody doesn't sound like anything well-known.  He plays for a few measures, and then stops, turns the sheet of music upside-down, and begins again.  And now, all of a sudden, it makes sense--it is the familiar melody of the William Tell Overture (known to many as the Lone Ranger theme).  Borge's musical joke works by showing us you can have the music right in front of you but reading them upside down.  And when that happens, you're missing what the music is meant to be.

Again and again, Jesus' role in the Gospels is like that--he is the one who takes the world around us and turns it on its head for us, only to enable us to recognize that he is helping us to see things right side up after all.  We have had the correct data in front of our eyes, but without Jesus turning the page in the right orientation we will be reading creation itself the wrong way.

Here's an example of what I mean: you can look at the world around you and see the patterns of self-preservation in nature, and then conclude, "That must be how the world is set up--it's kill or be kill, dog-eat-dog."  You can see the way the strong prey on the weak, the way that only the best and the brightest, the fastest and the most powerful, pass along their genes, while the lesser creatures get eaten or starve.  You can see all of those realities in nature and conclude that is how to 'read' or interpret nature--as one unending slog of killing and eating and overpowering one another.  You can end up concluding that this is the way to determine "winners" in life, too--the one who defeats the other must be the best!  The winners must be nature's--and therefore God's--choice to be on top.  And the losers... well, they are just food for the winners. 

You can take the data of the world around you and read it that way. And of course a great deal of human history has done just that: decided that might makes right, that the powerful must be better than the powerless, and that it is "God's" or "nature's" will for the strong to survive by dominating the weak.  And of course, once you take that to be the truth, you are willing to do just about anything to preserve yourself, regardless of what you have to do to the other guy, just to keep breathing.  It becomes really easy to justify anything if you already believe that the Law of the Universe is "kill or be killed, eat or be eaten."  And using that pretext, we humans have done some truly awful things to each other... and we keep doing them.

But Jesus keeps turning the music upside down--or rather, putting it right side up, even when we get upset at him because he is upending the way we had gotten used to seeing things.  Jesus makes a point about his own death on the cross here in John's Gospel, but notice how Jesus ties it into his own "reading" of the natural world.  "A grain of wheat remains just a single grain as long as it stays out of the earth... but if it gives itself up, allows itself to be broken up, and essentially dies, then something amazing happens.  Life!"  Jesus teaches us to see that the created world is designed with self-giving love at its heart, too, much like that famous line attributed to Martin Luther that "God has written the Gospel not in books alone but in every tree and flower," and that the promise of resurrection is to be found in creation itself "in every leaf in springtime."  Now, while certainly the reawakening of the crocuses in my yard each March is in some way different from Jesus rising from the tomb, the point is that creation itself is dropping hints about how God really does things.  And instead of just seeing violence and self-preservation in the created world and assuming that's "how it's supposed to be," Jesus turns the sheet music on us and points us to see that surrender and self-giving are in fact hard-wired into the created world first.  A grain of wheat will just sit there and do nothing, unless you let it die--then it has real creative power.  The seed that is kept in the envelope you bought it in from the home and garden store will never do anything as long as you try and "preserve" it.  It must be broken open for life to happen.  It must die so that new life can begin. 

Jesus wants us to see his own death and resurrection in this way, too--that it is in keeping with the way God really has organized the universe.  We just have been reading the notes in front of our eyes upside down.  Every time we justify our own selfishness with the rationalization, "I had to do it to them first or else they would have done it to me!", every time we act out of the mindset of "I have to preserve me and my group, me and my kind, me and my DNA first--nobody else is as important!", and every time we decide it is better to look out for ourselves than the needs of the stranger because they are "just" a stranger, we are misreading the created order itself.  We are misreading nature.  We are misinterpreting the world before our eyes, and doing it in such a way as to let ourselves off the hook to excuse our self-absorbed inclinations.

But Jesus intends for us to see rightly... so that we can love rightly... and so that we can be loved rightly, too.  Jesus interprets his own death on a Roman cross, not as the rightful triumph of the strong Roman Empire over a weak rabbi, but as his victory over death the same way a grain of wheat triumphs over death and unleashes life at the instant it surrenders itself to being broken open.  Jesus turns the music right side up so that we can see his own death and resurrection come from the same divine logic that makes seeds surrender their own lives to create a new harvest, or that allows a mother killdeer to offer her body up to a predator with a broken-wing dance to preserve the life of her young.  Jesus wants us to see the power of self-giving love is in fact reflected throughout creation--if we have been missing that, then perhaps it is because we have had the music upside down in front of our eyes.

Today, let us see rightly.  That is, what if we started this day asking the living Jesus to turn our old preconceptions upside down from where they are now, so that we can see his self-giving love underlying all of creation?  What if we gave up our old "Hey, it's a dog-eat-dog world" excuses and considered how God's power and love are shown? What if we dared to trust Jesus to show us what true victory really looks like?

Lord Jesus, turn our vision the right way.  Reorient us, so that we will be able to see your love woven through all of the universe.

Neon Signs and Keystones

Neon Signs and Keystones--March 24, 2017

"After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying,

     'Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne,

         and to the Lamb!' 

And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, singing,

     'Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom

          and thanksgiving and honor

          and power and might

     be to our God forever and ever! Amen!'" [Revelation 7:9-12]

It seems to me that there are two basic kinds of leaders: neon-sign types and keystone types.  And it matters a great deal which kind you believe leads you. 

Allow me a moment to elaborate.  A neon sign's primary job is to draw attention... to itself.  As a piece of a building it offers no meaningful support to the rest of structure.  In fact, its weight it something the rest of the building has to bear, in addition to the weight of its own bricks and mortar.  A neon sign, in other words, is visibly the center of attention, but it gives practically nothing back to the rest of the building on which it is perched.  It is prominent, but not productive, and in truth, the whole building could be just as solid and secure without it as with it.  It depends on the silent strength of the rest of the edifice while catching the attention of passersby with its gaudy brightness.

By contrast, a keystone is certainly noticeable at the top of an archway, but it is more than ornamentation or showiness.  A keystone uses its own weight to hold together all the rest of the pieces of the arch.  And oddly enough, even though it might look like all the other stones in the arch are holding the keystone up, it is really the opposite.  The keystone's weight is distributed in such a way that it holds the arch together, when without it, the whole thing would fall down.  A keystone is still plenty visible, and it is still definitely in a central and lofty position, but for a keystone that is functional.  A keystone sits where it sits because only there can it hold the rest of the arch up, and only the keystone can do that job.  Neon signs, on the other hand, come and go as a business changes hands.

If you'll grant my rough little analogy, then the question for the followers of Jesus is, "Which kind is Jesus?"  Is our leader, our Lord, a neon sign drawing attention but doing nothing to lift the rest of the building up?  Or is Jesus more like a keystone, whose presence binds together the whole structure and holds us all in positions that appear to defy gravity?

Think about this scene from the book we call Revelation (although, given the amount of times that figures in the book break into song, it might as well be called, "Revelation: The Musical!").  There is this image of Jesus, the Christ, the Lamb of God.  Jesus is clearly front and center--at the very throne of the living God, no less.  And clearly, all eyes are on Jesus the Lamb.  He is the reason they break into song.  He is the reason for their palm branch parade.

But is Jesus there just as an attention getter?  Is Jesus the Lamb just starved for publicity and there simply to catch the eye?  We have surely all been let down by our share of neon-sign figures in our lives before--is Jesus the Lamb just the heavenly version?

In order to come up with an answer, pay attention to what Jesus the Lamb is praised for here--"salvation."  Jesus the Lamb is the One who has rescued, redeemed, and reclaimed all this countless host from all places and languages, all customs and cultures, and drawn all people to himself.  The Lamb--who is first introduced in the book of Revelation as "slain, but alive"--has defeated the powers of evil and death, and the Lamb accomplished it, not by sending others out to die in his army, but by laying down his own life for all of creation.  The Lamb's act of chosen, self-giving vulnerable love breaks the lethal logic of death and hatred, and the whole of creation, a countless crowd from every corner of the world, is now held together by the Lamb.

Hmmm... holding all things together by his presence in the midst--lifted up, but thereby binding all things together.  That sounds like a keystone, rather than a neon-sign.  That sounds like a Lord worthy of our allegiance.

As we look toward the cross again--not just in this season but every day--it is worth being clear about this, because it makes a great difference how we see Jesus' victory.  The neon-sign figures of history "win" (and I put that in quotes intentionally) by grabbing attention for themselves without actually doing anything, leaning on the sturdy supports behind and beneath them while overshadowing them in their artificial light.  But the keystone figures genuinely do something, and they share their victories with all whom they draw into their presence, so that the leader's victory is the victory of all.  For the followers of Jesus, there is deep hope for us day by day that the Slaughtered-But-Living Lamb has given us his victory to call our own, and he has bound us together by his presence, without which we would all fall over and crumble. 

It matters whom you follow in this life.  It matters what kind of Lord you allow to lead you.  And the Lamb at the center of God's great musical is the kind who has really done something... and who yet holds all things together in self-surrendering love.

Lord Jesus, Our Lamb, you are worthy of our allegiance--make us over in the light of your self-giving, death-defying love.

The Tip of the Iceberg

“The Tip of the Iceberg”—Mark 14:55-59

Now the chief priests and the whole council were looking for testimony against Jesus to put him to death; but they found none.  For many gave false testimony against him, and their testimony did not agree. Some stood up and gave false testimony against him, saying, “We heard him say, ‘I will destroy this temple that is made with hands, and in three days I will build another, not made with hands’.” But even on this point their testimony did not agree. [Mark 14:55-59]

I never thought I would say this, but Jesus and Al Capone have something in common.

The famous Chicago gangster was notorious for organized crime, bootlegging, political corruption, and orchestrating the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, but he was only finally convicted on… tax evasion.  Everybody knew he was trouble, but the thing they finally caught him on seems a sort of side issue, almost something of a technicality.  And yet, tax evasion was, in fact, one part of his whole operation, even if it seems like it’s just the tip of the real iceberg.  Capone was a real threat, but the feds only ever caught him on something that, in the end, was small potatoes compared to the real menace he posed to law and order.

The same was true in the end with Jesus.  In the end, at his trial, the one charge the witnesses keep coming back to is some remark about destroying the temple and rebuilding it in three days (which John’s Gospel says was really all about Jesus’ death and resurrection on the third day all along), but that’s really only a small piece of what Jesus was really about.  Jesus really was a threat to the established order of things, even more subversive and more radical than most of his accusers even realized he was.  But a comment about the temple was just barely the tip of the iceberg.  Jesus was indeed dangerous to the order of the day—just not in the way any of the powers of that day understood threats to their existence.

The priests and religious establishment took offense at the idea of anyone threatening their Temple.  It symbolized God’s presence with the people--or more to the point, it symbolized access to God, which the respectable religious folk could control.  It served as the locus of sacrifice, as the meeting place between God and the covenant people, and kept people’s lives ordered with a system of “clean” and “unclean,” “acceptable” and “unacceptable.”  Threatening to knock down that Temple (which is not really what Jesus said, but what they all heard) would have interrupted all of that religious system, and after all, who did Jesus think he was?  If Jesus threatened the Temple somehow, he was a threat to all their order and control and neat, tidy piles of "good" people and "bad" people.

Well, that’s just the thing: Jesus wasn’t claiming just to be a troublemaker or rabble-rouser who wanted to knock things down.  He wasn’t a protester criticizing the corruption of the priestly system or an anarchist just looking to smash things—he was, in his own person, undermining not only the temple building, but the whole system of religion it stood for.  Jesus was offering himself as the last sacrifice and the new meeting-place between God and humanity. Jesus was placing himself as the new temple, and that put him on a collision course with the old one, and the whole priesthood and sacrificial system that went with it.  He was a wrecking ball, but Jesus had bigger fish to fry, frankly, than just knocking down walls of a worship space or driving out money-changers for a day.  Jesus was intent on ending a whole way of thinking and acting.  And he was spoke as someone who claimed God’s authority to do all of this.  That was a bigger threat than any of those false witnesses could have made up about Jesus.  He really was subverting the old order—but Jesus’ accusers only saw the brick-and-mortar side of it, not the complete overthrow of their understanding of how to relate to God.

The Romans had the same trouble with Jesus.  The only way they could understand him was as a political revolutionary or a military threat.  They heard him talk of the Reign of God/Kingdom of God and could only make sense of that as a threat to start a riot or an insurrection.  They saw the world as a huge game of King of the Hill, and that Jesus was one more upstart trying to challenge the empire and to take its place with one more new empire, the way the Romans had done to the Greeks, and the Greeks had done to the Persians before them, who had done the same to the Babylonians before them, and on and on back in a long chain.  They saw Jesus as a potential leader of a rebel army, when Jesus really had something even more radical in mind.  Jesus’ teaching, life, death, and resurrection called into question the whole game of King of the Hill that Rome had been playing.  He wasn’t trying to replace Caesar and make himself tyrant over the nations—Jesus set his sights on the whole notion of empires and their way of ruling at the point of a sword.  Jesus came to rule from a cross and to reign with a servant’s towel, and frankly that was something so revolutionary that Rome couldn’t event comprehend it.

Jesus was a threat, in other words, not just to the priests who happened to be in office or the emperor who happened to be in power, but to the whole system of priests and emperors, and the whole worldview that went with them, where coercion is how you get things done and animal sacrifices get you access to God.  Jesus was challenging that all of that.  He was a threat to that way of seeing reality. Jesus was going to attack death itself, and the system of sacrifices and military rule that came out of a world run by the fear of death.

Jesus, in other words, is intent on completely transforming each of us, too, and shaping the way we think, believe, speak, and act—not just making himself the next king of the hill. He is just that radical.

 And to think, the prosecution only nabbed him on an off-hand remark about knocking down the walls of a building.  Sounds like just the tip of the iceberg to me.

Lord Jesus, let us take in—as well as we are able—the fullness of your vision, and let us invite you into our lives to completely remake us and our ways of seeing the world.  We surrender to you.

Strange Fruit

Strange Fruit--March 22, 2017

"Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us--for it is written, 'Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree'--in order that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come to the Gentiles, so that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith." [Galatians 3:13-14]

Billie Holiday is on my running Lenten playlist.  

Yes, that Billie Holiday--the one you might be able to hear in your mind singing old standards like "Our Love Is Here to Stay" or "You Turned the Tables on Me." Her voice is part of the soundtrack that helps me to understand the gaping mystery at the heart of the Christian faith: the lynched God.

Holiday sings a haunting song--a song whose opening trumpet blare and ominous minor piano chords ring in my ear long after the last note--written by Abel Meeropol, called "Strange Fruit."  The opening verse goes:

Southern trees bear strange fruit

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees

Sometimes we forget, or choose not to acknowledge, that such was a part of our country's not-too-distant past, and we forget how easily people who pride themselves as being "good, respectable, church-going folks" get stirred up by evil and hatred to kill string up another human being on a tree to die.  We forget how easy it is for "good people" to become a lynch-mob, while at the same time deluding themselves into thinking they are "righteous" and the ones in the nooses are the "accursed."  We deny the horror of what polite, "decent" people do in the name of preserving their picture of "decency," and how easy it is to cast the shame of it all onto the victims rather than on the perpetrators--to make everyone else feel like the ones left to hang are the cursed or wicked or shameful ones. We do not want to face that such things happened in our "free" and "enlightened" country of "liberty and justice for all."  I can only assume it is that willful (and cowardly) ignorance of our own history that allows folks in my own neighborhood and on the roads I regularly travel (in the unequivocally Union state of Pennsylvania) to put Confederate flags on their cars or fly them in their yards thinking that the motto "heritage, not hate" printed on the stars and bars makes a shred of sense or cleanses the symbol of its violent past associations.  No, Billie Holiday's voice ringing in my ears will not let me be comfortable like that any longer.

And, like I say, it is that image she conjures up that helps me have a fuller understanding of the scandal of the cross. In these days of Lent, I need the reminder that my Lord, too, was once hung on a tree like the strange fruit of a southern poplar. 

In so many ways, the Roman cross was simply a precursor to the lynching tree.  We forget sometimes, we Christians, how scandalous a thing it was for someone to be crucified in the first century.  We sometimes forget that it was horrifically common for the Romans to crucify people, as though there had only ever been one cross, or that Jesus' crucifixion looked noticeably different from the crucifixions of countless other enemies of the state. But of course, a great many who were deemed troublemakers by Rome were tortured and staked to trees, posts, and crosses, all across the empire, and it was designed to be as shameful a death as possible.  It was shameful, first of all, simply in all the ways the victim was dehumanized--stripped bare, beaten first, and left as a public warning to anyone else who dared get in the way of the Roman Empire (which prided itself on bringing "peace" to all the world, and to being a model of "decency" over against all the "barbarians" around it).  But beyond that, to Jewish watchers, a crucifixion was doubly shameful because of an old obscure commandment from Deuteronomy 21:23 "anyone hung on a tree is under God's curse."  The commandment itself in full said that anyone executed for crimes was thought to be accursed, and of course that meant that everyone watching at the crucifixion of Jesus came to the same conclusion: this homeless rabbi was cursed, wicked, and shameful.

Paul sees all of that going on in the crucifixion of Jesus.  Jesus himself takes the curse.  He absorbs its shame.  He is willing to be put in the place of every executed criminal, and of every victim of the lynch-mob in history.  He endures the vile actions of people who picture themselves as well-behaved, respectable citizens.  And at the very same time, the cross of Jesus exposes all of their violence for what it is--the real shame, and the real wickedness.

Too often people who think themselves righteous and decent commit unrighteous and indecent acts and praise themselves for doing them.  They are "preserving law and order" (as the Romans surely said).  They are "safeguarding their way of life and their heritage" (as the religious leaders in the Second Temple of Jesus' day surely said). They are "keeping their nation free from dangerous troublemakers" (as Pilate and Herod and plenty of pious folks all said when Jesus was crucified).  And so often, the supposedly "decent" and "respectable" crowd starts shouting "Crucify him!" and grabbing their ropes.  And all too often, too, the followers of Jesus have either gone along with it or just held their tongues in silence.

The scandal of the Gospel is of a God who enters into the midst of such a world and who chooses to identify with all the lynched bodies that hang from trees, whether Roman cross or southern poplar or whatever else the respectable-folk pick up next to use.  The scandalous message of the cross is that God chooses, not to look respectable but to become contemptible.  The Source of all blessing absorbs the divinely-pronounced curse by getting strung up on an execution stake.  The Righteous Judge bears the sentence of crooked cowards who think they have to kill Jesus to preserve the peace.

In these days, we need the voice of Paul, and maybe I need the voice of Billie Holiday to keep me from ignoring the scandal of what Paul has been saying, so that we will learn to find God in the places we do not expect God to be--not among the self-styled decent, respectable religious folks (who easily become a lynch-mob), but hanging from a southern poplar, and nailed to a Roman cross.

How will it change your day, and my mindset, and our outlook on the world, to pronounce the sentence: my Lord, too, was strung up like the strange fruit hanging from a southern poplar tree?

Lord Jesus, you who became a curse for us and placed yourself with all those who have been shamed and made accursed in human history, keep us from quiet willful ignorance and stir us up to go where you go, entering into the suffering of this world.  Thank you, Lord, for becoming a curse at our hands.

Swallowed Up

Swallowed Up--March 21, 2017


"The last enemy to be destroyed is death." [1 Corinthians 15:26]

There's an old saying about military strategy that goes something like this: even though nobody marches elephants through the Alps anymore, it is still wise to study Hannibal. 

The gist is that, even if the tactics or technology of combat change, there is something to be learned about the bigger picture strategies that have been used in battle.  It is worth, in other words, not only learning who won which battle, or even how many they had in their army and which weapons they carried on to the battlefield, but how the victory was won.  Those strategies may be useful to know and claim and make one's own.

So for the followers of Jesus, we who make this strange claim that Jesus won the victory for God from the powers of evil, sin, and death, it is perhaps just as important for us to have a strategy conversation.  It is worth it for us to take a moment to ask, "How did Jesus do it?"  What is it about Jesus that defeats the powers of death, sin, and evil?

It's worth asking that because we tend to just assume that all victories come down to who has bigger guns, larger armies, or fancier drones and missiles.  We tend to assume that victory is simply a matter of throwing more at the other side and simply overwhelming the opponent with brute force.  And, yes, sometimes that kind of overwhelming force does prove a useful approach.  But the question for us is... is that how Jesus wins his victory?

And the answer is a perplexing... no.

Different enemies require different kinds of approaches.  World War II was a different kind of conflict that Vietnam, and both of them are vastly different from, say, the fight against ISIS today in Iraq and Syria.  For that matter, in the emerging age of cyber-warfare, all the advanced weaponry in the world may prove useless if an enemy agent hacks its encryption and disables your systems or steals your secrets. Each is a different kind of conflict. And unlike cheap baseball caps with flimsy plastic tabs on the back, one size does not fit all. 

And of course, the real issue for Jesus is not a conflict against another "team" or "side" or "nation's" army.  Jesus knows that the real adversary, as Paul notes in First Corinthians, is death itself.  And you can't defeat death by killing more soldiers.  You can't bomb death or send a drone strike.  You can't use a missile defense or a wall to protect from death.  In fact, there is no hardware to be found, and no software to install, that can outsmart death.  You can't hack it, and you can't attack it like a enemy stronghold.  Death is a different kind of enemy altogether.

So how is Jesus' victory accomplished?  He gets swallowed up... swallowed up by death, in order to break death open from the inside.  It is the victory death never saw coming, to let death kill him... and then to break death's inner workings from inside it like the soldiers in the Trojan Horse.  It is the kind of win that evil did not understand and therefore could not prevent--to be executed at the hands of the evil empire of the day with the cheering approval of the angry mobs and religious leaders.  It is a victory against hatred because Jesus refused to use hate to defeat hate--Jesus embodied the same self-giving love, even for enemies, that he taught.  However you describe it, the basic idea is the same--you don't fight death on death's terms with an all-out frontal assault. Jesus defeated death by dying, which is to say, explicitly NOT by killing anybody else (which only makes death more powerful).

I can't help but picture that scene from the Disney classic The Sword in the Stone, based on the earlier T. H. White story of the King Arthur legend, where Merlin the magician is challenged to a "wizard's duel" by the nefarious and wicked Madam Mim, in which each will be allowed to change into different animals to defeat the other.  And while the contest begins like a standard "outgun 'em" sort of conflict, with each wizard transforming him or herself into larger and larger creatures to stomp or bite or catch the other, eventually Merlin comes up with a completely different approach: he turns himself into a germ.  Instead of going bigger and bigger and bigger and using brute force to crush Mim, he lets himself get swallowed and gives her the chicken pox--undercutting her power from the inside.

Well, something like that is the way the New Testament talks about God's victory in Christ.  The heart of the story of the whole universe is of God's defeat of death by dying, and in turn how "death is swallowed up in victory" (1 Cor. 15:54) and how "what is mortal may be swallowed up by life" (2 Cor. 5:4).  Jesus doesn't defeat those who would crucify him with a bigger army of better equipped soldiers--that doesn't really solve the problem of death.  Jesus doesn't look for bigger and better weapons to get a technological advantage over death. Jesus' divinely clever approach is the way of self-surrender.  Jesus himself is swallowed up by death, where, like Merlin-as-a-germ, he can bring down the opponent from the inside without a shot fired.

If we are followers of Jesus, that strategy means something for us, too.  If military students still study Hannibal even if they don't use elephants in the army anymore, then we are to be guided by Jesus' way of defeating evil even though none of us is called to die on a cross as the savior of the world.  There is, to be sure, something definitive and unrepeatable about Jesus' death on the cross--but there is also a sense in which all of our actions, all of our lives, are called to bear the same shape, the same strategy.  You and I are part of Jesus' ongoing movement against the powers of evil; you and I are part of the resistance against the empire of death.  But we do not employ the same strategies as the powers of evil, and we will not use the tactics of death.  We are called, like Jesus, to use the power of self-surrender, the power of self-giving love, the power of showing goodness to those who have done us wrong, the power of being swallowed-up, to witness to what Jesus accomplished at the cross.  That means, as Rudyard Kipling's poem put it so well, "being hated, don't give way to hating," and that even when the powers of the day use angry yelling, lies, or brute force to get their way, we will not give them the satisfaction of using their kind of tactics or playing by their rules.

Today, we are called to follow Christ our commander into the great victory of love that comes through being swallowed up--going into the valley of the shadow of death, yes, and then being swallowed up by life, as well.

Lord Jesus, teach us to practice your way of self-surrender as we witness to your victory in the cross.

Who The Enemy Isn't

Who The Enemy Isn’t--March 20, 2017

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places.” (Ephesians 6:10-12)

It’s a little like The Matrix, really.

Without spending a lot of time rehashing the plot of the 1999 Keanu Reeves sci-fi/kung-fu action movie, let’s say this.  The movie imagines a dystopian future in which computers control everybody and have us all plugged in, via machines, to a vast network (called “the Matrix”) in which we all think we are living out our normal, everyday lives…when actually we are all stuck in pods in the “real” world, which is a post-apocalyptic wasteland ruled by robots and artificially intelligent programs.

Have I lost you already?

The reason I want to take a trip into the world created by the Wachowskis in the Matrix movies is that it offers a parable for the Christian life.  In the movies, Keanu Reeves’ character Neo learns the truth and gets freed from the control of the machines.  But he has to learn that anyone he encounters while he’s plugged into the Matrix is a real person, out there somewhere in one of the pods somewhere in the real world.  But until they realize that truth, everybody else is a part of the system, and everybody else can be manipulated by the machines to try and stop Neo and his band of freedom-fighters.  That means recognizing that everybody they meet while they are “plugged in” is caught up in the illusion of the Matrix, but is not the real enemy.  The real enemy is the machine-fabricated illusion of the Matrix itself, and their whole system that keeps human beings trapped inside it.

In all the many ways that the movie is like any other shoot-‘em-up action movie, that one difference is illuminating: it’s recognizing who the enemy isn’t as well as who the enemy is.  And at least at some level, the other freedom fighters in the movie come to see that other people are not the enemy—they are waiting to be freed from the real enemy.

As fantastical and outlandish as all of this science-fiction movie’s premise is, that is an important dose of realism for Christians:  other people are not our enemies.  There are times we may well need to take stands, as disciples of Jesus have taken stands before—against slavery, against Hitler and fascism (as well as the complacent state-churches of that era that turned a blind eye to the horrors of Nazism and fascism), against human trafficking, against greed and hypocrisy.  And there will be times we need to take stands for things—the protection of the vulnerable, the care of the poor, the needs of the hungry or the stranger or the marginalized, and the preservation and preciousness of life, among them.  But we can never forget that other people are not “enemies” to be squashed.  There are forces of evil out there, but they enslave and entrap us into their service—we are not to hate the people.  And that is the key to the kind of victory Jesus has won already.

Dr. King used to say that the goal of using nonviolent resistance as a means for making change was that it not only intended to free the oppressed, but that it also freed the oppressor from the spirit-distorting posture of being oppressors.  King’s approach was to avoid demonizing anyone, while still being crystal clear about what kinds of changes needed to happen.

That, I think, is a piece we are so often missing in our day.  It is all too easy for Christians to demonize others—to make other people themselves into the “enemy” rather than seeing others as people beloved of God who may be caught up in systems they do not understand and cannot see.  Evil is real, yes, but it holds us hostage and makes us complicit in it like kidnap victims with Stockholm syndrome sympathizing with their captors.  Evil is out there, but we are not doing the work of Christ if we think that gives us license to hate other people. 

Paul never forgets that.  He reminds us that our conflict is not against “enemies of blood and flesh”—that is, other people.  The forces of evil are real, and those forces have their hooks into all of us.  But that never gives me the freedom or right to hate someone else, or to lump “those people” together as “the enemy.” Our goal, our calling, is for everyone—yes, every last one of us—to be freed from the pods that had kept us trapped.  Let the demons be the demons, and not make anybody else to be the scapegoat. If other caught up in the systems and powers of the day are rotten to us, we will rise above their rottenness--we will not play by their rules.  That is the power and freedom of the followers of Jesus. The directive here in Ephesians is to quit thinking that you and I are supposed to be doing the fighting; it is Christ who has already won the victory in the cross and resurrection.

Today's call, then, is to refuse to demonize other people or forget that even the people most strongly opposed to God are still beloved of God. 

Lord God, strengthen us in the fight against all the forces that oppose your rule of love, but help us, too, to see clearly how each and all of us are in need of rescue from those forces, too, even when we are complicit with them.

Blessed Is The Match

Blessed Is the Match--March 17, 2017

And being found in human form,

        he humbled himself

        and became obedient to the point of death—

                even death on a cross. [Philippians 2:7b-8]

When Christians say that we believe Jesus “died for us,” we don’t just mean that Jesus closed his eyes and gave up his breath at some point.  We don’t mean that Jesus lived a long and happy life to a ripe old age and then, after seeing grandchildren and great-grandchildren bouncing on his knee, he passed away quietly in his sleep.  If that had happened, we could say that Jesus died, but that hardly seems like dying for us, or for anybody else, for that matter. 

If it had happened that way, we could congratulate (or envy) Jesus for living a full life and dying a peaceful death.  But we couldn’t say in any meaningful sense that he died for us—that he had given himself away for us, or that he had poured himself out for us. 

Paul tells us that the cross makes the difference.  The cross is evidence, not just that Jesus’ life was cut short by the Roman nails, but that Jesus consciously, willingly, intentionally gave his life up for us. The cross is Jesus knowing that he is forgoing decades of life, memories of children and grandchildren playing catch, and a comfortable retirement, and being willing to go through with it anyway, knowing he is going to lose those things. That’s why Paul emphasizes the fact that Jesus died on a cross—not in the safety of his own bed, not in good standing with the religious and political powers, and not with seven or eight or nine decades of memories to help ease him to a peaceful sleep.  Jesus willingly put himself, not just in harm’s way, but in death’s way, the way a lifeguard knowingly risks her own life in order to save the unruly children horseplaying around the pool. 

I once heard someone ask, “Why does it matter that Jesus died on a cross?  Did the heavenly rules require that there be a certain amount of pain that Jesus had to endure?  Is there some rating or score of suffering that had to be achieved?”  In other words, why couldn’t Jesus just have lived a long full life and then just rode off into the sunset… or even had the obviously glorious and heroic kind of death of a soldier, leading the charge into battle?  Why something so humiliating?  So terrible?  So sacrificial?

I suppose we could spend lifetimes trying to plumb the depths of the meaning of the cross, but at least part of it is this:  there is nothing Jesus refused to hold back.  Not the comfortable enjoyment of his golden years and grandchildren.  Not his pride or dignity.  Not the independence and freedom and control of taking life on his own terms.  Not the sheer bliss and joy of “equality with God” as Paul notes in just the verses preceding these from Philippians.  Jesus was willing to lose it all, to hold nothing back.

If Jesus had lived a good ninety-some years of life, and then just fallen asleep on some cool Palestinian night, we might be left wondering, Was this for us that he died, or just because he had lived a full life and was ready to go?  If Jesus had died a laudable, valiant death leading soldiers into battle, we would be left wondering, But he still got to be a hero—would he have done this still if nobody were watching?  If Jesus had just fallen from the second story of a house when he was up on the roof hanging laundry, or trampled by a horse in an accident, we would still be left asking, Was this out of love, or just a freak accident?  The cross is proof positive to us that Jesus willingly and deliberately chose to lay down his life… for you.

The cross means that no matter what fears we face about death, Jesus has endured worse, and has been through the sadness, pain, and fear himself.   He was willing to hold nothing back for our sakes.

Hannah Szenes was a Hungarian Jew who was parachuted into Yugoslavia in the late days of World War II in an attempt to rescue fellow Jews who were about to be sent to Auschwitz.  She was captured by the enemy in the attempt, tortured, and executed.  But in the midst of that experience, when she had committed to the mission and been parachuted into harm’s way, she wrote these words:

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.

Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake.

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.

Something like that is what the cross is all about.  Jesus was willing to lose everything—not just to die in comfort or in glory, but in a shameful execution—for us.  Jesus was willing to pour himself out completely, holding nothing back.  And in that, we can see that there was no price Jesus was not willing to pay to be faithful to the Father and to redeem us.  You are just that precious.

How will you live on this day, knowing the lengths that Christ went to, and the things he was willing to lose, for you?

Lord Jesus, thank you. That may be all I can bear to say today considering your love.  Thank you, Jesus.  Thank you.  For everything that you lost, so I could gain.