What Our Words Reveal

What Our Words Reveal--June 30, 2017

"Let no evil talk come out of your mouths, but only what is useful for building up, as there is need, so that your words may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit, with which you were marked with a seal for the day of redemption. Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice, and be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven." [Ephesians 4:29-32]

My grandfather used to have a quick one-sentence argument for avoiding cuss-words.  "Using profanity," he used to say, "is a sign you are not intelligent enough to find another way of saying what you have to say."  Case closed.  Game, set, match, Clifford Shotwell.

Now, you and I might quibble over whether our real-life experience lines up with that sentiment.  After all, I know plenty of people who are very smart and whose language choices are as rough as a corncob.  You could even say that there's an undeniable cleverness in the wordplay in George Carlin's old routine, "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television," even though it is precisely about... well, the seven words he claimed you couldn't say on television.

But where I think my grandfather was vindicated is the basic underlying idea that there is a connection between what we say, and what we reveal about our inmost selves.  That's not merely about using potty-talk or profanity that would get bleeped on radio or TV broadcasts, but it's about the deeper content of what we say, of how we use (or abuse) language.  Our words do reveal what's going on in our hearts, for good or for ill, and because of that, they matter. 

Curiously enough, the Bible has surprisingly little to say about any particular four-letter words (and the commandment against swearing is literally about our use of God's name, rather than about scolding scatological humor). And for that matter, the apostle Paul himself had occasion to use some pretty salty language that we sometimes forget is in the Bible, or have watered down in English translations to minimize blushing in church (Galatians 5:12 and Philippians 3:8, I'm looking at you...). But the New Testament does repeatedly call the people of God to consider the ways we use all words.  It's less about whether we would get a G or PG rating for a movie made from the transcript of your every conversation, and more about whether we use words as vessels of grace, or whether we lob them at people like recklessly aimed hand grenades to puff ourselves up or bring someone else down.  There's the real language issue for the people of God--and in that case, our words really do (as my grandfather would have told you) reveal what's going on inside your deepest self.

In fact, these verses from Ephesians today take our words so seriously that the writer here raises the fear that we might be "grieving" the Holy Spirit when are not graceful in our words.  That is to say, it reveals a great deal about whether we are open to the movement and whispers of the Spirit or not, how we speak and how we use words toward other people.  Because honestly, our unchecked tendency is going to be to be childish with our words--to attack other people with them, to puff ourselves and make ourselves look great, and to cut other people off at the knees to belittle them and make ourselves feel bigger in the process.  The petulant child inside me, that bent-inward-on-self pettiness that is all about me, me, me, that part of me would want to use words to attack others, to put myself in as good a light as possible, to threaten others when I don't get my way, to attack others whether or not they deserve it, and to respond to insults with more insults.  That's the way my four-year-old thinks.  That's the way childish hearts act--they hit me, so I will hit them... they insulted me, so I will insult them back... they used words to upset my feelings, so I will fight fire with fire and launch an attack back.  We are all prone to it, but the letter to the Ephesians says that the Spirit has a way of calming us down and seeing another way.  And if we are still stuck in that childish, self-serving, "you-insulted-me-so-I-insult-you" way of thinking and speaking, Paul here says it is a sign we might have drowned out the voice of the Spirit in our lives.  It is certainly a sign that we are not grown-ups.

And against all of that childish, thin-skinned pettiness, the letter to the Ephesians offers us a hopeful alternative.  We don't have to be so... pathetic.  We don't have to be so... insecure.  The movement of the Spirit among us, within us, keeps pulling us away from the old patterns of lashing out and getting defensive.  The Spirit frees us from the need to puff ourselves up--the question, really, is whether we will leave the Spirit move us in that direction, whether we will let the Spirit uncoil the bentness of our hearts that get so sadly curved in on themselves. 

Because truthfully, words can do amazing things.  For all our culture's tendency to dismiss our words--whether spoken, written, typed, instant-messaged, tweeted, or posted--as so much forgettable buzzing, your words really do have amazing power. 

You and I have the fantastic ability to speak courage into the heart of someone teetering on the edge of the precipice of fear. 

You and I have the wondrous capacity to speak welcome to someone who has been told they are not good enough, not attractive enough, not normal enough, not stylish enough, or whatever else, and when you speak such welcome--it becomes real. 

You and I have the infinite potential to speak forgiveness for someone who has been too afraid to ask for it, and to find ourselves set free at the same time.

You and I have the same creative power--in words!--as the Creator whose Spirit brooded over the chaos in the beginning and brought the universe into being with the sentence, "Let there be light..."

See that?  The power of God is seen in speech--and in particular, in words that give life, in words that create, in words that give good things away to newly created beings.  Not once in the Scriptures will you find the living God being petty and lashing out because someone has wounded the divine ego, or because of Christ being self-centered and defensive.  Not once will you find the Spirit speaking childish "you-made-fun-of-me-so-I'll-make-fun-of-you" insults to us, even when we have disrespected and dishonored God or those who bear God's image (all of us).  Not once is Jesus goaded into losing his cool by hecklers or those who taunted him.  And not once does Jesus pray, "Father, let me unload on them because they did it to me first." 

Rather, the power of the living God is the creative power of speech--speech that "calls into existence the things that do not exist," as another New Testament voice says it, speech that raises Lazarus from the dead at the sound of his name, speech that restores poor ol' despondent Peter who had given up hope, speech that brings grace to Zacchaeus' table as Jesus invites himself over for supper, speech that breaks down boundaries and declares, "No longer free or slave, no longer Jew or Gentile, no longer male and female," speech that claims us from wherever we were and says, "I have called you by name--you are mine." 

Anybody can pick a fight.  Anybody can lob an insult.  Anybody can use words to knock something down--that is kid stuff.  Literally, it is the height of childishness.

But the Spirit leads us to more.  The Spirit leads us to tap into nothing less than the creative power of the divine in the ways we use words.

How will you use yours today?

Lord God, direct first our hearts to align with your creative goodness, and let our words reveal where you are leading our hearts.

The Evidence of Belonging

The Evidence of Belonging--June 29, 2017

"For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, 'Abba! Father!', it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God; and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ--if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him." [Romans 8:14-17]

My son asked me a question the other night that I knew I would one day have to answer. I knew for a long time, from the beginning, really, that it would be coming, but I had hoped might not form on his lips for another few years--not because I wanted to keep secrets or hide something from the boy, but because I feared failing him with an answer that was inadequate for his five-going-on-six-year-old mind.

My son asked me, quite directly, sitting up from his blankets in the darkness of his room after the lights had been switched off for bedtime, "Who is my real daddy?"

The moment had been building for some time. He had been noticing differences over the last few months, or maybe a year, and wondering why his skin was so beautifully brown, while my wife and I have the same pale pink-white skin of our northern European ancestors.  He had been observing for some time how he and his sister have the same curly dark hair, while the grown-ups in the house have hair that is straight, lighter brown, and graying.  He knew little pieces about an infant brother and a toddler sister who lived elsewhere, but his precocious mind had never pushed further beyond thinking it strange that they lived in different places before being overcome by interest in some toy or other distraction before.  He had had flashes of memory from when he had lived with his foster mother, but was for the first time pulling at the thread that lay underneath them.  And for the first time, the question arose about who had given birth to him... and whether that also meant there was another person he should have been calling Mommy... or Daddy... all this time.

And so the question there, up in the darkness of his room, "Who is my real daddy?" which is another way of asking, "Where do I truly belong?"

Well, where to even begin?  My son is five--and there is only so much reality that any of us can bear at once.  Trust is important, and so I could not lie to him.  Nor was it fair to cast his biological parents as villains--that is unfair to him, and to them, as well. And so, this week, the conversation began--one I am sure will be revisited and rehashed, reopened and reconsidered over the rest of his life--in the darkness of a five-year-old's bedroom.

"Yes," I told him, there was indeed another man and another woman who had been his birth parents.  Yes, they were real, and yes, when the time was right sometime we could look them up and know them some day.  Yes, it is true that there was a time "before us," a time even before his earliest recollections, and yes, that realization made our collective picture of the world infinitely more complex than it had been just a few hours before. Those things were all true, and they had to be spoken--to remove the possibility of lying to my son, to affirm the solid and real trust we already have between us, and to allow the groundwork to be laid for whatever comes one day when my son wants to know or meet those other faces that will look more like his than my own.

But at the same time, I told my boy, it is love that makes this family. He belongs in this family, and I belong to him as well, because love binds us to each other, and such love will not let us go.  It is love's claim that makes it true to say, "Well, even though it is accurate that other people were responsible for your being born, I am your daddy, really and truly, because of love"--because love is more essential than chemistry, than biology, or even than what genetics say. 

Our whole family is staked on a gamble, I must admit--the four of us are bound up in a grand wager that love is more powerful than the differences of biology, chemistry, race, or the cookie-cutter social construct of what families are "supposed" to look like.  Up until this week, I suppose I had been keeping the terms of that bet pretty close to the vest, but now it is out there for my son to know, too.  We have staked our lives on the notion that love can meaningfully make me this boy's father, and he my son, even though he does not share my DNA and I cannot share all of what it will feel like for him to grow up as a young black man in this time and place.  We have staked our lives, mine and his as well, on the hope, however absurd or flimsy it may seem against the cold, hard facts of chemistry, that a promise can last, can hold, can endure, as sure and true as the bonds of biology.  It is all pinned on the strength of a promise and on the durability of love.

I know that there will be many more rounds of conversation with him, and with his sister, as the months and years go by.  I know, too, that there will be bitterness as well as sweetness in those future conversations, and that a bell has now been struck that cannot be un-rung.  I know, too, that I have given my boy the ammunition, some day in a teenage fit of outrage, to say, "You're not my REAL dad!" or "You're not my REAL mom!" to my wife, and that one day those words could be weaponized without him realizing the scars they will leave on our hearts.  But I also know two other things from that conversation lit only by the hallway chandelier. For one, I know there is no more possibility of some fear-driven impulse to hide or cover up the truth, which would have only delayed and magnified the possibility for destroying trust.  And I know this, too: that night, having taken in as much of the answers which he had asked for as his five-year-old mind could grasp, my son had me sleep next to him in his Ninja Turtles blanket, and he rested his head in the crook of my arm while we slept.  And in the morning, he called me Daddy as he always has.

And that, ultimately, is how I know that I am his daddy.  That is how I know he is my son: his own voice speaks that truth, and as the words come out of his mouth, the promise holds and love endures.  His voice calling to me, "Daddy..." is the evidence that, for whatever heartaches or struggles are yet ahead, whatever failures will be mine or mistakes I will make, love is strong enough to create belonging apart from chemistry or biology or social expectation.  It is love that creates the belonging.

It is the same for us as the children of God.

In this ancient letter we call the epistle to the Romans, the early church made a radical claim: that biology and chemistry were no longer definitive in creating belonging.  In fact, Paul would say, they never really had been, except that we had acted like tribe and clan and race and ethnicity and biology and cookie-cutter-thinking were the defining powers that drew the lines.  Paul the apostle dared to envision that God was creating a new kind of family, one that included the biological descendants of old Father Abraham and Mother Sarah, but also included people from every other place, every other tribe, every other color and clan.  And in this new kind of family, held together by the Spirit who moves us and leads us to one another, we no longer depend on just "making more babies" to continue a family line.  The church does not grow by birthing new members, but by welcoming an infinite variety of faces alongside us for the journey as children of the same God of all. That means, in a very real sense, the thing we call "church"--despite the fragmentation and schism, despite the persistence of 11:00am on Sunday morning being the most segregated hour in America, as the old observation goes--this lumbering institution that T.S. Eliot once compared unfavorably to a hippopotamus, this thing called "church" is really a two-thousand-year and counting experiment in the gamble that the love and promise of Christ really are strong enough to create belonging... for all.

Now, to be utterly honest, most of the those twenty centuries have revealed that we Christians do not really believe that love is stronger than differences in nationality, race, skin color, language, biology, chemistry, or adherence to cookie cutter expectations.  We have fallen, again and again, back into the old beliefs that such things get to draw lines between us. We have doubted, over and over, that the love and promise of God can hold together people who share nothing else in common except that they are beloved of God and claimed by Christ.  We separate ourselves into smaller and smaller pie wedges of denominations and worship styles, ethnicities and political niches, that we act as though we really do not believe that there is anything powerful enough to create belonging across all of those boundaries.  We are, like a frightened five-year-old in the dark of a late Monday night in June, afraid that the truth of our differences is too powerful, too strong, too real, and that our hopes of real belonging were all just wishful thinking.  We are afraid that the gamble on the power of love is lost.

But then here are these ancient words from Paul, a Greek-speaking Jewish Christian whose skin would have been darker and hair curlier than mine, who dared to reach across all the boundaries he could have imagined in his day, to me, and to you on this day, and to say, "But God has not given up on this dare--the living God still calls us children."  And beyond that, Paul says, when we listen to our own voices calling on this same God, "Abba!"--Daddy!  Papa!--there is the evidence of our belonging.  It is the evidence that you belong, and I belong, and everybody else moved by the Spirit to call out as sons and daughters call out in the darkness and fall asleep in the crooks of arms they trust.  It is love that creates the belonging, not biology.  It is the love of God that has claimed us, despite all the heartbreaking ways we still divide ourselves or think it is in our power to exclude others who are still children in the same family whether we like it or not, and it is the prompting of God's own Spirit that coaxes the word from our lips, "Abba!" by the light of the new day.

So... how do I know--like deep down in my bones, know--that I belong?  And what will remind me that you belong, too--and countless others regardless of whether they fit my cookie-cutter picture?  We will listen for the Spirit prompting our voices to call on the living God like we really do belong.  And we ourselves then will become the evidence that the dare was worth taking, and that the power of God's promise is strong enough to hold together all of our varied faces in love.

Abba, God whose child I dare to believe I am, let me rest in the crook of your arm, and let me find there the space for all this human family, too.

The Right Way to Lose Control

The Right Way to Lose Control--June 28, 2017

“Do not get drunk with wine, for that is debauchery; but be filled with the Spirit….” (Ephesians 5:18)

This is not an anti-drinking message today—it is a pro-Spirit one.

That’s the thing we have to be clear about from the beginning, here, or else we are going to miss Paul’s point and just make him out to be a tee-totaling wet blanket who can’t even appreciate a good glass of Cabernet or a nice amber lager.  Paul is neither—the same apostolic authority is invoked elsewhere in the New Testament to advise Paul's protégé Timothy to take some wine for his stomach.  Paul isn’t sweepingly opposed to all alcohol, not even for Christians, necessarily.  But he is always in favor of the Spirit.  And he will always be more “pro-Spirit” than he is “anti-alcohol.” 

So the question is not, “Is it sinful to drink wine?”  At least not from Paul’s perspective.  The right question is, “How can you be more and more filled with the Spirit—and is there anything in your life that is in competition for the Spirit’s place in your life?”

It’s a question of what—or whom—we allow to drive us, to guide us, to comfort us, and to fill our days.  And because of that, you could put virtually any other addiction, any substance, any distraction, any other stuff we use to cope, in the place of “wine,” too, in this verse, and still have Paul nodding approvingly.  For the followers of Jesus, we are now made to be filled with the Spirit of God as the One who guides our will, who comforts us in loneliness, who molds us into the likeness of Jesus, and who gives us wisdom for choices and actions.  Putting anything or anyone else in the driver’s seat of our lives is like putting sugar in your gas tank—it is not only an inadequate substitute for the power of gasoline, but could actively harm your car’s fuel injectors by putting it in there.  So we have to hear today’s verse as two halves that are set together in contrast:  DON’T do this (be drunk with wine), but INSTEAD DO that (be filled with the Spirit).  Paul isn’t just saying “Don’t drink” like someone might say, “Don’t eat junk food” or “Don’t hold back overdue library books” or “Don’t forget to brush after every meal like good little boys and girls.”  He is telling us what we ought to do, not just giving us a list of no-nos.

And actually, it’s not even really what WE are supposed to do—it’s about letting GOD do what God intends to do with us, namely, filling us with the Spirit.  And that means that, either way, we will give up control. That’s something we have to face: it’s not that giving into abuse of alcohol is surrender while the Christian life leaves you in control of your own destiny.  BOTH are forms of surrender—the question is simply who is safe to entrust your life to when you do surrender.  The trouble with turning to a bottle (or a needle, or prescription drugs, or the slightly more socially acceptable addictions like status, attention, social media, money, casual sex, food, or prestige) is that it lies to you by making you think that you are in control.  How many times has the old chestnut, “I can quit any time I want to” been heard on the lips of addicts in denial, right?  But you’re still surrendering to its power—you’re just fooling yourself in the mean-time while you do it.

Paul doesn’t pretend that the Spirit-filled life isn’t a life of surrender.  He is just convinced that there’s no one better, or more trustworthy, for surrendering your life to, than the very Spirit of God.  The Spirit will still insist we let go of control over our plans, our priorities, and our personal comfort zones. But the Spirit actually knows what he’s doing, unlike any of a million substances out there that can lie to you, if you will believe them, and try to convince you that they can run your life better for you than God can guide you into.

So ultimately, what is Paul’s problem with “getting drunk with wine”?  Not that alcohol is, in itself, always inherently evil, but rather that it is just never enough.  Look, I get it--life can be terribly difficult to bear sometimes.  Like Westley says to Buttercup in The Princess Bride, "Life is pain, your highness--anyone who says differently is selling something."  And the question in front of us today, and every day, is whether our strategy in the midst of all the heartache, all the brokenness, all the hurt, all the injustice, and all the pain of the world will be to numb ourselves to it by finding something to dull our senses to it, or whether we dare to be vulnerable enough and courageous enough to face it head on and steer into the skid, so to speak.  It is awfully easy to pick the easy way out in life and to choose something to help us ignore or anesthetize ourselves to the hurts of life--to drink until we've forgotten the hurt for today, to numb ourselves to the sadness with pills, to distract ourselves from the emptiness with tiny screens and tallies of Facebook friends or Instagram followers, to avoid having to deal with the latest news reports of chemical weapons attacks in Syria by turning up the volume on our on-demand streaming movie channels.  It's not that any one of those things, from beer to prescription drugs to technology to entertainment, is sinful by itself.  But it is the choice we make to surrender ourselves to those things--and surrender can happen without us even perceiving what we have done--that prevents us from being available, to be present, with the world in its suffering, rather than numb and withdrawn from it.

And that's the thing--if we dare to surrender to the Spirit of the living Christ, we will be sent where Christ went, too: to share sorrows with the heartbroken, to defend those who stand accused, to speak up for those who are forgotten and on the margins, to welcome those who had been told they were unacceptable.  All of that is to say, we will be sent straight into the pain of the world, rather than being able to avoid or ignore or remain numb to it.  Whatever our distractions or addictions of choice, the trouble comes when we give control over our lives and then have to mount a rebellion/resistance movement to try and take control back—addictions never want to give up the control they get over us, and they never go willingly, after all.

Today, maybe the take-home for each of us is to remember that the first half of today’s verse is followed by the second half.  If abuse of alcohol—or any other substance—isn’t an issue for you or your loved ones immediately right now (and be thankful if it isn’t), remember that Paul’s goal is not just to keep us from having a beer or a good time. There are times to raise a glass--sometimes in joyful celebration, and sometimes to share misery. The point here is to be honest about how--and to what, or to whom, we surrender.  The goal is for us not to settle for anything less than the very presence of God filling and directing us.

It's not about keeping ourselves independent as some mythical (and imaginary) captains of our own souls and masters of our own fate--it's about the right way to lose control. Don’t settle for anything less than the Spirit of God as the directing voice of your life today. 

O Lord our God, let us be filled with your Spirit, and give us the courage to mean those words as we pray them.

The Price of Words

The Price of Words--June 27, 2017

"Therefore I want you to understand that no one speaking by the Spirit of God ever says, 'Let Jesus be cursed!' and no one can say, 'Jesus is Lord' except by the Holy Spirit." [1 Corinthians 12:3]

Talk is cheap, they say.

I understand why, and surely you do, too.  It is easy to say something.  But it is much harder to follow through and act in line with what you say.  We are great at saying we will give our time, or show up for someone, or follow through on that commitment, but we find it is much more difficult to do what we have said.

And one of the unavoidable consequences of that disconnect between the ease of speaking and the difficulty of doing is that we often assume that no one takes our words very seriously anyhow, and that words simply do not matter.  It is easy to believe, once you grant that "talk is cheap" because "actions speak louder than word," that there is no cost at all to our words, because no one puts any stock in them anyhow.  The old joke from Jack Handey's "Deep Thoughts" puts it like this: "Broken promises don't bother me--I just think, 'Why did they believe me?'"  In an era when I can spout off in some social media posting and then delete if it find it is embarrassing later on, an era in which we are saturated by so many people's comments, thoughts, and selfies that it can feel like any one message doesn't mean much, it sure is easy to believe that my words have no consequences.  After all, I can always delete what I said off the screen, or always tell someone that I didn't really mean what I said, or that I wasn't making a promise, just, y'know, saying stuff....

And of course, in so much of the world around us, we act as though words really don't matter.  We don't expect people to follow through on promises, because we don't hold ourselves to living up to our commitments if we stop "feeling like" keeping them.  We have practically given up on holding politicians accountable to keeping their promises, or owning up to things they say--that all just seems so naïve and passe now.  Once we grant that talk is cheap, it is awfully easy, then, to assume that all talk is counterfeit, too--all just fake money that cannot be trusted, and that carries no value or cost.

And so, it is hard to believe that it means much, one way or the other, to say "Jesus is Lord" or "Jesus be cursed," in our era, isn't it?  It is hard to believe that Paul could say this is a matter of great importance, because, after all, can't I just delete my tweet if I communicate the wrong message?  Can't I just erase my words, or issue an apology, or say, "Well, of course, I didn't really mean it!"?  Can't I say, "Look, isn't it enough that I occasionally go to church and put my offering in the basket?  Isn't it enough that I have a cross necklace and a Bible on my coffee table?"

Perhaps in our era where words are taken to mean so little, we might think that saying, "Jesus is Lord" is virtually meaningless, especially because it is quite possible to mouth those words in one instant and then do very un-Jesus-like things in the next.  We are all too aware of folks who mouth religious talk and claim the name "Christian" but whose actions, priorities, and attitudes bear very little resemblance to Jesus himself.

But I would suggest, before we write off the whole notion of speaking the sentence, "Jesus is Lord," or shrug it away like it is merely religious lip service, that at least for the first few centuries of the Christian story, the stakes were impossibly high when one spoke those words.  We in the 21st century hear the word "Lord" as simply a religious term--we are used to "Lord" as a title for God, and so we assume that the sentence "Jesus is Lord" simply means "Jesus is God" or "I believe Jesus is divine."  And while, yes, it is true, and even essential, to the Christian faith, that God enters into the messiness of human life by taking on a human life in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, and while, yes, it is true that a great deal of ink was spilled in the process of thinking through just what we mean when we say that Jesus is "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God," in the first century, people didn't first think of "God" when they heard "Lord."  They thought of Caesar.

The empire's decree was that all subjects of Rome had to confess "Caesar is Lord."  And by that they didn't mean to make a statement of theology, so much as a statement of allegiance.  To confess Caesar as Lord was to say that Caesar, and the whole empire he commanded, got your final and ultimate allegiance.  Rome didn't really care what other gods or goddesses you worshipped, what other philosophies or spiritualities you practiced, what other sacrifices you offered, as long as you were willing to concede that Caesar got your allegiance, and that Caesar was indeed lord over the world you lived in.  

And beyond that, confessing "Caesar is Lord" was also a way of accepting Rome's view of things--that might makes right, that "winning" matters most, that you can do whatever you like as long as you have the power and status to back it up, and that you should do whatever Caesar says or else you can be crucified or thrown to the lions.  In Rome's view, you can tell who matters because they have conquests and crowns, treasures and titles.  In Rome's view, you know the gods have smiled on you when you have wealth and power.  And you know to be afraid at night of ever falling out of line, because the Empire can always string you up to make an example of you if you question it.

Over against all that, it took quite a lot of courage to say, "No, Caesar is not Lord.  Jesus is."  And truthfully, that is what was at stake in Paul's letter here.  When Paul talks about confessing, "Jesus is Lord," it was inescapably heard as a jab at the powers of the day, at Caesar, who demanded to be recognized as "Lord," as well.  To say "Jesus is Lord" is to say Caesar is dedicedly not, and neither is Rome or Babylon or Britain or America or my job or my political party or my 401(k) or Google or Amazon or Apple, either.  To say that Jesus is Lord is to make a statement of allegiance, and that means, too, that I am surrendering my view of the world to Jesus, and to his surprising way of blessing the poor, lifting up the lowly, welcoming strangers, washing feet, winning by losing, and living by dying.  And it is to say that Caesar's way, and Caesar's view of things, is a sham.

In the first century, saying that out loud could not only get you into trouble with the empire if they heard you say it, but it began a chain reaction in the heart to reprioritize and realign one's heart, one's loves, and one's attitudes.  To say "Jesus is Lord" is to say that we are daring to live as though Jesus' picture of the universe--in which enemies are loved, truth is told, bread is shared, and the dead are raised--is the way we will see the world, and that we will learn to say no to the cheap talk and smokescreens of the pretenders like Caesar.

And so, yes, it is a costly thing to dare to say, "Jesus is Lord."  It always has been--we perhaps have just forgotten what we were committing ourselves to as we said it.  It is not only costly, but it is the kind of thing so subversive to our old Caesar-approved, self-centered ways of thinking that we would never dare to speak it out loud except that the Spirit of God lights a fire inside our bones and they break out of our pursed lips like a rocket.  Only by the directing of the Spirit will we dare to see the wisdom in the foolishness of saying the poor are the blessed, the first shall be last, the least are the greatest, and the rightful ruler of the universe is a homeless rabbi who got strung up with the approval of Caesar. 

If we have forgotten the power of the those words, it is worth remembering that the people who first dared to speak them knew that they would get rounded up by the powers of the day for saying them, shared their possessions because they were convinced their Lord ran the universe on an economy of mercy, and welcomed people very different from them because it was what they had seen Jesus himself do.

May we consider the cost and power of those words as the Spirit leads us to speak them on this day: Jesus--and not Caesar--is Lord.

Lord Jesus,  give us the courage and vision to see the world as you do, to see ourselves as you to, and to give our allegiance to your movement of love for the outcast and welcome for all.



Leaving the Wristwatch...Intentionally

Leaving the Wristwatch...Intentionally--June 23, 2017

“In him you also, when you had heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and had believed in him, were marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit; this is the pledge of our inheritance toward redemption as God’s own people, to the praise of his glory.” (Ephesians 1:13-14)

How do you get someone to trust that you’ll be there in their future? 

How do you convince someone that there will be more to come, no matter what may be going on in the present?

One way you do it is you leave something of yours with them.   Something important.  Something of yours that you are not really giving away as if you’ll never see it again, but something that you will need again.  Something, in other words, for them to hold onto, that you will have to come back for.

There’s this great scene in King Vidor’s 1925 World War I epic film, The Big Parade, where the character Jim is shipping out with the other American troops to fight in the war.  And in this huge cavalcade of marching soldiers, he is looking for his love, Melisande, somewhere along the way in the crowd, knowing this is the last time she’ll see him and he’ll see her before going off to combat in the trenches.  She is looking for him fiercely, as row after row of marching soldiers tramps past, and she calls out for Jim and looks for a familiar face in the sea of uniformed and helmeted men.  Jim, too, has been looking for Melisande but has just about given up when he climbs into the back of his unit’s transport truck.  And at that moment, he hears her voice and looks up.  He sees her in the distance, leaps from the truck, and runs toward her.  They embrace, and they kiss, and he insists to her (well, you have to do some guessing at what he’s saying in between the title cards because it’s a silent movie) that he is coming home, and that she’ll see him again.

They are there, just staring at each other, when the commanding officer comes and finds Jim and drags him back to the truck, where he dutifully climbs back in, while Melisande hangs on to his legs, and then to his extended outreached hand, and then to a rope at the back of the truck as it starts to pull away.  She is at the very edge of desperation, needing something, some tangible thing, to hold onto while she clings to the hope that they will indeed be reunited. 

So as the truck is pulling away, Jim has an idea.  We see him take off his wristwatch and throw it backward off-screen—to Melisande.  And then he reaches around his neck and tears off his dogtags—again, to her.  The camera cuts to Melisande, picking up these things Jim has thrown her—now, not just the wristwatch and the tags, but even a left shoe!  It is a beautiful scene—heart-rending and at the same time almost comical to see shoes tossed out as a sign for the beloved, a sign that says, “I’m coming back for this. There is more to come.”

So… how does God get our attention like that?  Or not just our attention—how does God gain our trust in the promise that we and God share a future together?  How does God say to us, “No matter what may be going on in the present, and what you will endure in the future, I will be in the picture with you in that future?”

God leaves something with us.  Well, not so much a something as a Someone.  It is the Holy Spirit.

Paul writes that the followers of Jesus have been, much like we say in the baptismal liturgy, “marked with the seal of the promised Holy Spirit,” and that this Spirit “is the pledge of our inheritance.”  In other words, for whatever else the Spirit does in our lives, he is also what it looks like when Christ throws his wristwatch, his dogtags, and his shoe for us.

The Holy Spirit is a sign in our lives that there is more to come.  The Spirit’s presence in our lives, dwelling within us, is God’s commitment to us that God will be in our future, and that we can depend on that relationship, come what may.  When we are hysterical with fear about the future, when we are terrified at the prospect of facing the unknown alone, when we are at the edge of desperation, needing something to hold onto to assure us that we will be brought through, there is the Spirit in our lives—the very indwelling presence of God, who reminds us of the promise.

When you want someone to know deep in their bones that you intend to be in their future, even when you have to head out to war or to work, you leave something with them, with the promise, “I’m coming back for this. Keep it for me.”  When God wanted us to know the same, God gave us the Holy Spirit as a pledge, as if to say to all creation, “This is my own self who will dwell with you.  I am coming again to you--and in a sense I have always been with you.  Let my Spirit remind you.”

Day by day, we have been given this Spirit as a gift from God. And for whatever else the Spirit does, the Spirit is God’s way of leaving a wristwatch... even a shoe... for us to keep.  Hold that gift close when you need to remember the promise.

Lord God, let your Spirit’s presence be so real to us today that we will trust your promise that you will be in our future all our days, until that Day when we see you face to face.

Turning Up the Heat

Turning Up the Heat--June 22, 2017

"Let love be genuine; hate what is evil, hold fast to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; outdo one another in showing honor. Do not lag in zeal, be ardent in spirit, serve the Lord.  Rejoice in hope, be patient in suffering, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the saints; extend hospitality to strangers. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Live in harmony with one another; do not be haughty, but associate with the lowly; do not claim to be wiser than you are." [Romans 12:9-16]

What does the Spirit move us to do?

To love.  Loving... wider, fuller, deeper, until every relationship in our lives, every connection point with anyone else at all, is drenched in real, authentic, more-than-endorphins-in-the-brain-or-greeting-cards-on-the-rack love.

But to understand what this "love" looks like, this genuine love that the Spirit causes to overflow through us and spill out over everything else, we need a closer look at what is buried here in the fast-flowing directives of this passage from Paul's letter to the Romans.

I'm not usually one to spend a lot of time getting lost in the weeds of differing translations from the Greek of the New Testament into English... but sometimes, I just have to stop.  Because up above, the New Revised Standard Version, for all of its other strengths or weaknesses, really misses something about how this passage works in the interest of trying to make simple English sentences.  So, forgive me for a moment, but we need to dust off this translation a bit.

First off, in English, most translators make each phrase into its own command, which makes each thought appear like it is a separate sentence, unconnected from the others as though Paul is just randomly firing off imperatives.  "Do this!" "Don't do that!" "Now do this!"  But really the Greek is all something like a long run-on sentence that all flows out of the opening directive about genuine love.  It really feels more in the Greek something more like this:

"Here's what genuine, unhypocritical love does: saying no to what is evil, clinging to what is good, loving one another like you are a family, going over and above and before each other to show honor, not being lazy in your dedication, boiling over in spirit..."

Right off the bat, you can see how that changes the feel--instead of this being a hodge-podge of unrelated commands, this is a sketch, a picture, of a whole way of life that hangs together.   In other words, all of this is what love looks like.  We don't get to be selective and pick just the ones that are easier for us to do and say, "Look how loving I am--I was nice to the people I already like!" or "I'm great at feeling love... so long as I don't have to actually do anything that makes any sacrifices..."  No, instead, Paul says that if love is genuine, it will play out and spill over into all of these kinds of actions and attitudes.  It will mean sharing with others who are in need, welcome for strangers and outsiders, empathy for those who are heavy-hearted, refusal to return evil for evil, and not giving up or bailing out on people just because it gets hard. That's what genuine love is all about--all of those, because love drenches every part of us, every relationship, every facet of who we are.  We have a way of being much more selective with our love--we limit who we deem worthy, or we are unwilling to be inconvenienced, or we refuse to take the risk of sharing someone else's sorrow or need.  That's easier to justify if we read Romans 12 as just a shotgun approach to lobbing out random instructions, but if these are all part of one reality called "genuine love," we can't be so hit-and-miss.  Paul has in mind a love that pushes us wider, fuller, and deeper to overflow from the bounds of our lives as the Spirit keeps leading us.

Now, that brings up one other thing in this passage that needs to be dusted off and held up to the light.  The rather tame translation from the New Revised Standard Version just say, "be ardent in spirit," but the Greek is much more energetic.  The verb is more literally, "boiling over" or "seething," and it's unclear whether Paul simply means "the spirit" as in "the human spirit," or means "the Spirit" as in the Holy Spirit, the same Spirit of God who brooded over the waters in creation like a divine wind.  Of course, even if Paul is only referring to "the human spirit," he would surely say that our [human] spirits will only be boiling with passion and energy if they are stirred up by the Holy Spirit, like the wind of the Spirit at Pentecost set the apostles loose on the world like someone had shaken up a can of Coke and let it spray all over.  Either way, then, the Spirit of God is at work behind all of this--the Spirit adds the fire, you could say, that brings our lukewarm hearts to a boil and sets them to overflowing, like a pot you forgot to keep an eye on while cooking the spaghetti that spills over when it gets to a rolling boil.

To be enlivened by the Spirit of God, then, is to be envigorated with love that acts, love that spreads, love that embraces not only the people I already liked, but pushes me to treat all the followers of Jesus as family, and stirs me to offer genuine welcome and inclusion to those labeled outsiders and strangers, and leads me even to act with grace toward people I would otherwise call my "enemies."

You miss all of that if all you read in your Bible is "be ardent in spirit," like it's one more random command in a list of unrelated helpful religious suggestions.  But if we read this passage rightly, we'll see it's all about love... it's always been about love.  And the kind of love to which we are called takes practice and commitment to get better at, to be sure, but it is also always something that pushes us a bit further, a bit wider, a bit more real and vulnerable, than we would have been comfortable with on our own.

That's part of how you know it comes from the Spirit of God turning up the heat on these tepid hearts of ours--we would always be satisfied with a love that is "less than" or "just for some" or that can be confused with just warm, fuzzy feelings.  But when the Spirit of God, the giver of life, turns the burners up on us, we find a love boiling up inside of us that cannot be contained any longer, and that pushes us beyond what we were comfortable with yesterday.

When the Spirit sets us to boiling, love cannot be restrained inside mere feelings or niceness-to-people-I-already-liked--love spills over and drenches neighbor, stranger, and enemy and draws us all into the stirred-up waters over which the Spirit still broods.

Turn the heat up on us, O Spirit of God, and set us to boiling over with love that doesn't pretend.



Getting to Calculus

Getting to Calculus--June 21, 2017

[Jesus said]: "I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now. When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all truth; for he will not speak on his own, but will speak whatever he hears, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine. for this reason I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you." [John 16:12-15]

The old line of T. S. Eliot says, "Humankind cannot bear very much reality."  God knows that is the truth. 

I was finally getting around to watching the movie Interstellar recently, the 2014 movie by Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, and one of the delightful little details woven into their story was  the way the robots who are employed in the film's space voyages all have "honesty settings."  The human astronauts can adjust the robots' settings for things like honesty, or humor, and the algorithms in their artificial intelligence will shift in response, the way you adjust a thermostat in your house to boost the air conditioning when you are hot, or nudge the volume down on your television when a particularly obnoxious commercial comes on.  And at first, the one astronaut inquires about this--why would anyone want a computer that isn't fully truthful with you?  And the answer comes back from the robot itself that total honesty is not always safe, nor diplomatic, when dealing with emotional beings--that is to say, with us.  So the astronauts and the robots all agree on "90% honesty" with one another... because T.S. Eliot, and Jesus himself, are both right: human being cannot bear very much reality all at once.

You and I know it to be true, too, from our own lives.  Nobody likes to hear about their own faults. Nobody wants to have to come face to face with the ways they have hurt someone else... and then own it.  Nobody wants to have to show mom the shards of the cookie jar on the floor. Nobody likes to hear about the problems that are lurking over the edge of the horizon.  Nobody wants to deal with the plain and simple reality that sometimes things don't go our way, and there is nothing to be done about it. 

And so instead, we find all sorts of ways to numb ourselves or block out the unpleasant truths and the undesirable realities that we don't want to face.  We give ourselves to addictions, perhaps--drinking or swallowing or injecting things that allow us to forget or ignore the things we don't want to deal with.  We give ourselves over to distractions, which are maybe just another form of addiction--I don't want to deal with the heaviness of my heart, or the realities in the future, or the jerks at work, so I distract myself with screens and devices, games and apps and parties and weekends away just so I don't have to deal with what is in front of me.  And while a little distraction now and then may let some steam blow off, we increasingly find ourselves tempted to live hopping from one distraction to another, so that we spend less and less time actually face to face with reality.

We find all sorts of other ways of NOT dealing with the truth: if there's a truth--or even the possibility that something may be true--and we don't like it, we have a way of discrediting the messenger, inventing reasons not to believe them, or making things seem much less certain than they really are (I have a way, for example, each year at tax time, of keeping the date of April 15 in a sort of mental fog, as though it is always very very far away...).  Lots of folks didn't like the news that cigarettes would kill them or their loved ones with cancers that emerged years or decades later when it was too late to do anything about it, and so for a long time, folks pretended the science was ambiguous.  Lots of people trapped in addiction don't like it when their family and friends hold an intervention to get them to face reality, and so they turn on their loved ones and start lashing out at them, rather than having to admit something unpleasant about themselves... and harder still, admitting that their family already could see it, and that they weren't as good at hiding it all as they had thought.

All of this is to say that on the individual scale, and then all the way up to the societal scale, we all have this tendency to want to turn town the honesty levels on life.  So what are we to do about it?  Is the solution just that we all agree with one another to casually lie or deceive each other when we don't think the other person can handle it?  Are we all going to be allowed a couple of freebies in life of things-you-don't-want-to-deal-with that we just let each other live in a pleasant delusion? 

Well, that sort of thing may work for keeping the conversation polite at a dinner party, but if a train is coming while I'm stalled out on the tracks, I need to know it rather than be allowed to ignore it just because it's an unpleasant truth.  And if the doctor thinks there's a pretty significant chance I'm at risk for cancer if I refuse to use sunscreen and go tanning every week, I'm a damn fool if I hide behind the lack of mathematical certainty by just saying, "But he can't know for sure I'll get cancer--he must be getting kickbacks from Big Sunscreen."

For that matter, too, even in our relationships, our friendships, and our families, just setting our honesty levels at a seemingly acceptable 90% setting is, despite the movie robot's logic, a bad move.  It has a way of patronizing the other, if I decide, "Well, she won't be able to handle it if I tell her this, so I'll dodge..." and on the other hand, it puts cracks in the trust, the way covering up an offense usually makes it worse than the original trouble (you'll recall, for example, that former president Bill Clinton's impeachment was over the crime of lying under oath and obstructing justice, not the original affair that he tried to cover up).  There's a line from Khaled Hosseini's novel The Kite Runner about how lying to someone, or more broadly deceiving them, is really a form of theft, because, as the one character puts it, "You are stealing the other person's right to the truth."  We all convince ourselves that hedging on the truth is just a fact of life, and perhaps we all think that if we all agree to a 90% honesty setting, then no one else will burst our bubbles when we are the ones living in an illusion.  Sort of a "I won't expose the lie you are living with if you won't expose mine," or "I'm allowed to fudge it with you because I expect you to fudge things with me that you don't think I'll like."

It's interesting, holding all of this up against the words of Jesus from John's Gospel.  And what gets me is that Jesus is no fool about our human fragility when it comes to dealing with truths we don't like, or can't yet comprehend.  He doesn't tell his disciples there on the night of his betrayal, "Well, you guys had better buckle up because I'm gonna give it all to you right now, and there will be no getting off of the roller coaster until I've said it all."  But neither does he hedge with these closest friends of his.  He is, after all, utterly honest with them about his own upcoming arrest and death, and even the reality that he can tell they will all bail out on him when he needs them most.  Jesus doesn't flinch when it comes to telling these guys things that are surely not easy to say, nor to hear.  He doesn't even hold off in the garden when it comes to his disappointment that they can't even stay awake with him for an hour--he tells them honestly that it is hurtful, because Jesus doesn't do the 90% honesty setting. 

And surely that is, at least in part, because genuine forgiveness is only possible, and certainly only meaningful, when there is real acknowledgement of what was hurt and what is being let go of.  If I just make a single blanket apology to you for all time, "I am sorry retroactively and in advance for all the things I have done, will do, or might do that could hurt your feelings..." the forgiveness feels just as vague.  But when we dare to name, "This is how I was hurt..." so that I can also say, "This is what I am letting go of... and this is how we will start again new..." now we have something solid.  In a very real sense, being forgiven is just as hard as forgiving, because being forgiven--genuinely forgiven--means facing the truth rather than putting a blanket over it and pretending there aren't lumps under there.  Real forgiveness doesn't just say, "I'm over it--let's just not talk about it," but rather real forgiveness says, "This is what happened.  This is how I felt.  This is what I'm not going to hold against you anymore.  This is how we are going to be okay again"  Jesus knows it, and so his approach with his disciples is the honesty--the truth-telling that makes forgiveness possible.

And all of that brings us to the gift of the Spirit.  Jesus sees the Spirit as part of God's answer to the human tendency to dodge or ignore unpleasant realities.  Jesus doesn't hedge or lie or misdirect his followers, and in fact, he probably shared more with them in that upper room than they thought they could handle.  But Jesus also knows that there are indeed things they are not able to bear...so he makes them a promise. They will be given the Spirit--whom Jesus calls the "Spirit of truth," tellingly--and the Spirit will allow them to find the courage to hear and understand more and more fully as time goes on.  It is never that Jesus lies or fudges with his followers, but he does give them what they can grasp in the order than makes sense, just like a math teacher doesn't start teaching calculus until the students have gotten a grasp of basic arithmetic, and then algebra, and then a smattering of trigonometry.  It is not a lie or a deception when the kindergarten teacher starts with, "this is the number 2--count with me, One... Two.." and nobody protests, "Why are you covering up the truth by not starting with polynomials or differentials?"  But neither does a kindergarten teacher think, "Well, I'll just stop at the number ten with these kids, because they might not be able to handle the idea that there are numbers higher than the have fingers to count on."

So for us today, how will we know if we are listening for the voice of the Spirit?  Well, in all honesty, if we are ever totally comfortable with our read of the world and our picture of "how things are," it is probably a sign that we have stopped listening to the Spirit. The Spirit of God, Jesus says, will keep leading us into "all truth." That means there will always be some stretching, always be some pushing, always be some movement beyond what we thought we could handle--probably much like you felt each year in high school as a new level of math was taught to you.  The Spirit will do the same--always leading us beyond, always pushing us to be able to bear more of reality, even when it includes things that we don't like at first.  And conversely, if there ever comes a point at which we tell ourselves, "I have now mastered the truth, and I can handle it all, and it's just everybody else who can't see or recognize what I understand..." it may well be a sign that we have stopped listening to the Spirit and just  built ourselves a little fortress to hunker down in, from which we can ignore anything else that might complicate or destabilize our picture of the world.

The Spirit, in other words, will always make us squirm a little bit, even while holding us in an unfailing grip that will not let us fall.  If we are daring to let the Spirit lead us, even beyond the 90% honesty level into "all truth," then we should be prepared to be stretched. 

Today, let the Spirit move us to see more than we thought we could handle, and to be willing to be honest and vulnerable with one another. 

Lord Jesus, you have promised us your Spirit to lead us into all truth.  Give us the courage to let your Spirit stretch us where we need it, day by day and moment by moment, in speaking and in hearing the truth.

Beyond Talking Points

"Beyond Talking Points"--June 20, 2017

[Jesus said to his disciples:] "See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so we wise as serpents and innocent as doves. Beware of them, for they will hand you over to councils and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you." [Matthew 10:16-20]

The ancient Greeks used to have this recurring thing in their plays and dramas where the action would happen on stage--say, Oedipus has a fit of rage, or Antigone takes a stand against her uncle the king--and then this group of performers called the chorus would all chant in unison a sort of summary of what just happened.  They would basically narrate what had already happened in the scene, just in case you missed it while it was happening.

You could say that this theatrical trope was a bit ham-fisted, but hey, it was the dawn of theater and people were just figuring out how to tell stories through performance.  Plus, for whatever strangeness there is to having a chorus of characters all chant at you what you have just seen, it did have the function of making sure everybody got the same story, and that everyone in the audience was on the same page.  If you are wanting to drive home a clear, unmistakable message of "This is what just happened," a Greek chorus will do the job.

We might imagine that, in the age of CGI-enhanced summer blockbusters, Broadway musicals, and action-packed video games, we have dispensed with the Greek chorus and have found more "sophisticated" ways of telling stories.  But not really--we have just shifted them over to news channels on TV and the internet, and we call them "pundits" now.  Because basically, at the end of every news cycle, there is now the 21st century American version of the Greek chorus, giving us their respective party's version of "the story" that was the day's news.  This is one of those realities that crosses party lines--you'll get one set of pundits on one set of channels and another set on different stations or websites, but the role is basically the same: take what just happened in the day, and give your side's official "take" on what the story really is.

And it's all theater, really.  Rarely are these talking heads on television actually having a real conversation, in which someone might say something surprising that leads people to think in a new way or come to an unexpected conclusion, but rather, this is all the Greek-chorus all over again, telling us a scripted version of one way of seeing "the story" that has all been talked out before the cameras go live, with a set of bullet-point ideas that are going to be the highlights of the program.  It happens on both sides of the political aisle, and it happens on all the news channels--every so often, you'll hear a report about a released "talking points memo" that has been circulated by one group or another, to give their respective pundits and official party line for how to spin, or discuss, or defend, or attack, whatever (or whomever) the day's news has been about.  And, really, I don't mean any of that description as a putdown, per se--it's really just the Greek chorus all over again.  And you can either like it or not like it, or just like one set of pundits versus the other, but it's basically one way of trying to make sure people hear your side's "version" of the story. 

What I do think is noteworthy in this age of ours, with talking points and pundits who trot out the official story of their side when they go on the morning news shows, is that by now, we all know the game.  We all know when we watch someone being interviewed on some news show, we are going to be getting a rehearsed and rehashed version of someone's list of talking points.  We aren't watching a real exchange of ideas, in which one person actually listens to another person, considers the merits and weaknesses of their ideas, and together they arrive at a conclusion they can agree on, or at least sparked a new insight or understanding for one another.  To be honest, we aren't even really watching people talk to or with each other, but more like they are talking at each other--just interrupting one another during pauses for breath to regurgitate the same polished talking points they have learned to spit back regardless of what the question might be, or where else the conversation might have gone.  That tells you: we aren't watching a conversation, we are watching a contest, as scripted as pro wrestling, with favorite moves, favorite stars, and favorite rivalries.  Now, you may like one channel's scripted pundits or another's, and you may be willing to stomach some channels or change some others the moment you see them on, but you and I all know what it is we are watching.  We just live in an era with a lot of Greek choruses, each trying to tell us from their scripted lines what they want us to take away from their version of "the story."

But the followers of Jesus are meant to be different. 

We are called to dare to go beyond talking points, and into the (scary, perhaps) realm of real, genuine, open, Spirit-prompted conversation.  That doesn't mean we have nothing to say in the world's marketplace of ideas--but it also means that we have something to listen to in that same exchange of ideas.  And a real conversation is something open-ended, something that is to some degree unpredictable.  A real conversation might start at Point A, but then wind its way to Point Q before circling back at B and D and then sticking a pin at Point L until you can have some more time to talk.  And a real conversation requires that the people who are not currently speaking actually listen to the people who are talking at the moment, so that they can consider the input and respond to what was actually said, not what they planned for someone to say.  In an age of pundit-saturated, talking-point-reciting Greek choruses, Jesus invites us to something different--to be something different. He dares us to trust that the Spirit will nudge us, if we dare to see conversations less as battles to be won and more as laboratories for honest exploration and discovery.  Jesus dares us not to use conversations as weapons, and part of how we will do that is not to plan out how to 'attack' people with sharpened (but stale) talking points.  In fact, Jesus' direction to us is that, when we find ourselves even in hostile situations (and to be honest, sometimes Christians have brought that hostility on by being jerks), our response is not to fall back into talking-point argumentation, but to trust the Spirit to help us actually have a conversation.

How radical!  How refreshing!  How different from the temptation we feel to prepare weaponized speech to shout over people because we are feeling defensive!  My goodness, it would be amazing, in this era, in which we think we already know what someone else is going to say because we know what channel they are on, and we have already predetermined to agree or to disagree because we have heard their version of the Greek chorus before. It would be amazing, and countercultural, for the followers of Jesus to actually take Jesus' direction seriously and to trust the Spirit enough to allow for an actual conversation, even knowing it might mean we won't be able to control it, or shout our way out of it, or ignore the other person if they say something we don't like. 

But what possibilities could be in store, too!  We might learn to see things in a way we had never thought before.  We might find we still think what we did before the conversation, but have found a way to put it into words in a way we never had.  We might discover we were wrong in what we assumed from "the other side" and that we had been fooled by the caricatures told to us by some TV Greek chorus.  We might find that someone else is led to be a part of the Way of Jesus because they saw it lived, graciously, in the way we listen and talk with open ears.  If nothing else, we will find we are in for surprises, because we will leave the scripted talking points aside and simply trust that the Spirit will direct what we say, when we speak, and how to listen to the other...

O Living Spirit, give us the courage as you move us to dare to have real conversations with others, rather than shouting over them or dismissing people we don't think we will want to hear.  Give us the courage to trust the direction of Jesus to go beyond talking points.