Daring to Listen

Daring to Listen--September 28, 2017

"The Lord GOD has given me

    the tongue of a teacher,

 that I may know how to sustain

    the weary with a word.

 Morning by morning he wakens--

    wakens my ear

    to listen as thought who are taught.

 The Lord GOD has opened my ear,

    and I was not rebellious,

    I did not turn backward.

I gave my back to those who struck me,

    and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard;

 I did not hide my face

   from insult and spitting.

The Lord GOD helps me;

   therefore I have not been disgraced;

therefore I have sent my face like flint,

    and I know that I shall not be put to shame..." [Isaiah 50:4-7]

Listening isn't really done until you have acted in response to what you have heard.

Let's put this in the category of things that should be obvious, but sadly are probably not.  I'll say it again for clarity's sake: genuine listening isn't really complete until the hearer processes what someone else has said and... does something with it. 

You might disagree with what the other person has said and simply made the mental determination that you do not agree, which might prompt you to ask more from the other person about how they have come to the conclusion to which they have come.  You might agree with the point someone else has made and find yourself almost unconsciously nodding in affirmation.

You might hear someone's out-of-the-blue request for help and find yourself compelled to help them get shelter for the night, or you might bristle with revulsion at overhearing someone's ignorantly self-absorbed comment in a conversation at another table in a restaurant. 

The responses are different, of course, but in a sense, they all reveal that listening isn't really "done" until the message we have heard awakens something in us.  And of course, what is awakened--whether disgust or delight, obedience or aversion--depends on to whom we are listening, and what is being said.

So, here is a question for us, folks who say that we are among the people of God: what is the right response when listening... to God?

If listening is only truly "listening" and not merely "hearing" if we are stirred up to response to what has been said, what is the right response when God speaks?  Is God's opinion something we are free to take or leave, depending on whether it "fits" with our politics?  Is God's repeated call, for example, to welcome the stranger, or to care for the hungry, the sick, and imprisoned, is that sort of thing optional, depending on whether we decide separately that these people are worthy of our time, care, and effort?  What about when Jesus requires his followers to love our enemies and to do good to those who will never pay us back or say thank you?  Do we get to claim we are really listening to the divine voice if we hear the words, and then decide, complacently, "Naaaah, that doesn't really suit me right now.  That doesn't apply to me. That doesn't fit with my common sense."

All of that is to say, if I am listening to God with excuses at the ready (perhaps polite and reverent excuses, but excuses nonetheless), am I really listening to God?

The 20th century martyr/pastor/theologian/Nazi-resistor Dietrich Bonhoeffer famously says in his brilliant and challenging work, The Cost of Discipleship, that we cannot really say we "believe" in Jesus (or are listening to God, I think he might add) if we are not prepared to be "obedient" to Jesus.  That is to say, if I say I believe Jesus is the Lord, the Son of God, and that I trust in the living Christ, but then do not actually do what this same Lord directs me to do, I am revealing to the world that I don't really trust Jesus to know what he is talking about.  And conversely, Bonhoeffer says, the moment I step out and do what Jesus calls me to do, even if I do it questioning how it will work out or why I should, in that instant I have moved from merely memorizing facts about Jesus to actually trusting the One I confess as Christ and Lord.  You only really know you believe, Bonhoeffer says, when you obey.  We have only really listened to God, we might say, when we let God's word awaken action within

us in response.

We have had to start there because of the connection here in these ancient words from the compiled words, poems, songs, and oracles that we call the book of Isaiah.  What we know as Isaiah 50 makes a connection between "listening to God" and then a response of willful surrender and suffering love.  "Morning by morning God wakens my ear to listen as those who are taught," says the prophet, singing about God's chosen servant.  And then the very next thought is this listening servant offering up his back, his face, and his reputation to those who were his enemies.  The servant of Isaiah 50's song here listens--you know he is listening to God, because he responds in a way that fits with the character of God's own suffering, self-giving love.

Now, for the last two thousand years, Christians have been reading Isaiah 50 and having a "Jesus moment" with this passage.  That is to say, we hear this business about offering a back up those who strike and hit, offering up one's face to spitting and insult, and we cannot help but hear echoes of the Passion of Jesus--his trial and torture by the Romans, his rejection by the crowds, and his expedited death at the hands of imperial cowards who hid behind their big talk and brute force.  And I dare say that is a fair move to make--while the prophet himself might not have been picturing a Roman crucifixion or the name Jesus, it is certainly fair to say that Jesus himself understood his life, his calling, and his mission in these "servant songs" of Isaiah and other passages from Israel's Scriptures.  But I don't believe that Jesus saw these passages merely as predictions.  To read the Gospels, one sees that Jesus himself appears to be convinced that suffering love, love that does not return violence for violence or evil for evil, love that is willing to do good even when it is not returned, that this kind of suffering love is at the heart of who God is.  And therefore because that is how Israel's God loves the world, of course that is how the servants of this God will act in the world.

Jesus chooses the way of suffering love because he listens to the Father. And because of who God is, God's own character is the path of suffering, self-giving love.  The suffering of the Messiah, the Christ, is not a random fluke nor a unique and unlikely event--but rather, it is exactly what you would expect from a God whose own way of engaging the world is self-giving love.  Jesus suffers at the hands of angry, hateful people, not because God the Father needs to get a pound of flesh or needs to mete out some kind of punishment to balance the cosmic scales of justice.  But rather, Jesus chooses the path of suffering love because that is the heart of the living God, and when that God speaks, Jesus listens all the way--he acts in response to what he has heard.

The connection is the same for us.  If we are going to claim to be people who listen to God's Word, or who listen to Jesus, or who listen to the Scriptures, we should be clear from the outset that acting in response to what we hear is not an option.  We cannot hear the One who says, "Blessed are the poor" and then continue to act as though merely getting more money is a worthy goal for life, or for society.   We cannot hear the One who says, "Do good to those who hate you" and then continue baptizing our pet hatreds and prejudices.  We cannot claim to be listening to the One who was a childhood refugee in Egypt, a convicted criminal of the most respected justice system of his day at his death, a regular table guest of outcasts and notorious "unacceptables," and who regularly knelt down to stand in solidarity with lepers and contagious strangers and women accused of adultery on the days in between... and then not act in accordance with way of that same Jesus. We do not get to edit out the parts of Jesus' life, actions, story, or love that push us beyond our comfort zones--not at least if we want to claim to be listening to him.

Today, as a new day opens up in front of us, what will we do as we hear the voice of the divine calling us again?  We still certainly have the old option of selectively hearing only the parts we like, and then patting ourselves on the back for being good little religious boys and girls.  But Jesus himself calls us to something more.  He intends to awaken us.  He intends, morning by morning, to waken us to a response that looks like his cross-shaped love.

Dare we listen today?

We dare.

Lord Jesus, speak and make us to listen... and to respond as you speak and your word shapes these hearts.

Something Worth Hearing

Something Worth Hearing--September 28, 2017

"But we urge you, beloved... to [love] more and more, to aspire to live quietly, to mind your own affairs, and to work with your own hands, as we directed you, so that you may behave properly toward outsiders and be dependent on no one." [1 Thessalonians 4:10b-12]

Early on in the revolution, the leaders of our movement (called the Church) had to decide how much they were going to stir the pot and deliberately go looking for trouble, versus letting the scandalous message of Jesus do its own work and let the resulting trouble come to them.  They decided, as Paul's words here show us, on the latter.

The first followers of Jesus decided, in other words, not to let the drama in their own lives get so loud that no one would be able to hear the love of Jesus above all the ruckus.

Now, just to be clear, the early Christians were not cowards.  They didn't shy away from being put on trial, mocked, or imprisoned for their faith, and they weren't afraid to look like fools or lay down their lives in love and in service of the Good News of God's recklessly wide grace.  And in fact, they knew from the beginning that sharing the news of Jesus--and the power of his life beyond the grip of death, and thus beyond the power of the worst the empire could do to you--would get them into trouble.  The first followers of Jesus knew the stakes and were not turned off by them.  But they also knew to save their energy for the scandals and troubles that really mattered, and that it wasn't worth going out and picking fights with their neighbors about other, lesser things, just because the Gospel itself might land them in hot water.

In other words, the early church knew it would get itself into trouble--it just wanted to make sure the trouble it got into was the right kind of trouble, or trouble for the right reasons.  It was worth becoming a laughingstock with the neighbors if it meant that someone else heard the news of Jesus that sounds like foolishness.  It was not worth making your neighbors mad at you over something trivial and piddling, like fighting over property, or being known in the community as self-righteous blowhards, or lamenting that "things aren't like they used to be...", or insisting on special treatment in the public square, or squabbling over rituals and rules.  As a smart theologian named Gerhard Ebeling put it, we know that the Christian message will be received as a scandal, we just want to make sure we are bringing people "the true scandal."  We know that people may be offended by grace--we just want to make sure we are not "causing offense in the wrong way." 

We will only get so much of the world's attention--we had better not waste it crying wolf over stupid issues when we could be using our opportunities to announce the news of God's love in Christ... and then let the chips fall where they may. We don't need to shy away from controversy--it's just that we had better know what controversies are worth getting entangled in, and which are just plain silly.

This is the direction Paul is giving here:  the early Christians were called to "live quietly" and "mind your own affairs," while not becoming a financial burden or drain on others, so that they did not cause the wrong scandal.  If Christians became known for stirring up trouble over every little thing, no one would bother listening when it came to the genuinely worthwhile news of Jesus' death, resurrection, and reign.  If Christians were always making a stink when they felt like their rights were being impinged upon, frankly, no one would bother listening to them when it came to sharing the message of God's free gift of grace. If all Christians are known for in the world is complaining that we aren't given special treatment in the world, no one will want to be a part of a community like that. And if Christians were constantly known as a drain on society, they would hardly be a witness of God's abundant provision, and no one would want to be a part of their new way of life.

In our day, the issues may change, but the wisdom isn't.  The news of Jesus brings a scandal all its own, and if gets people riled up for the wrong reasons if we Christians are known in the community for being nasty neighbors, pompous blowhards, angry internet trolls, or petty and litigious in our disagreements, or constantly expecting special treatment, well, then, no one is going to be willing to listen to us when we want to tell them the really world-changing news about what God has done in Jesus.  If we shout so loud at each other, or at the world, when we are upset, no one will be able to hear us when we speak in a softer, but more genuine, voice of love.  

This is important, because there really are Big Deal concerns out there.  My goodness, there are three and a half million people in Puerto Rico without power now because of a hurricane, countless millions more who lost their old lives in hurricanes from Texas to Florida, and earthquake damage in Mexico--and that's just staying right in our own global neighborhood.  If we as followers of Jesus are known for being angry jerks while there is urgent real need right in our own back yards, the world will see where our priorities are. 

It begs the question of whether we can we not waste our energy on the little fights that really only serve ourselves, and instead use our moment to speak to offer the news of Jesus?  If we bicker with each other over trivial things, or refuse to share our abundance when so many go hungry, the watching world will dismiss us with a shrug and say, "Don't you have something more important to say at all?"  If we do--if we are convinced that the story of Jesus and the community of his followers really is worthy sharing--perhaps we will do well to turn down the volume in other parts of our lives and not go looking for trouble over lesser things, but rather just let the news of Jesus be enough trouble for the day.

If we are convinced that the Good News of Jesus really is something worth listening to, maybe we can turn down the drama in our lives and be a little less self-absorbed, so that when people listen to our lives, they will find in that Good News something worth hearing.

Lord Jesus, we know that as long as your are alive and loose in creation, you will always be stirring things up and surprising a tired and curmudgeonly world.  Let us be a part of your scandalously good news, but let us not distract from that news by wasting the chances we have with the world's attention by fighting over nonsense.

The Impotence of Anger

The Impotence of Anger--September 27, 2017

"You must understand this, my beloved; let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger; for your anger does not produce God's righteousness."  [James 1:19-20]

Let's be clear about a few things today.

For starters: if, hypothetically, my car doesn't want to start in the morning, no amount of kicking the doors, pounding on the steering wheel, or shouting at the chassis will get it moving.  The energy of my temper tantrum simply cannot be converted into forward momentum or internal combustion.  In fact, it would be accurate to say that a car is powered by an entirely different kind of physical energy than futile kicking and frustrated cursing.  I may indeed feel upset that the car isn't starting as I find myself later and later to work, but I do need to be clear: no amount of hitting the car's doors or dashboard will translate to a purring engine.

Now, if we are clear on that much, we should say something as a corollary.  Just as my personal meltdown is of an entirely different kind of energy from the precisely timed controlled explosions inside the cylinders of a car's engine, my anger is simply useless in terms of generating God's kind of justice... God's kind of righteousness (side note: the Greek word James and the New Testament both use that is translated "righteousness" is also the same word for "justice." These are not separate categories or ideas in Greek). 

In other words, my anger powers God's justice as well as my punching the car generates internal combustion.  Which is to say, not at all.

James here says that in about as plain a way as you can say it here in these verses, but it almost seems that we don't really believe him on that point. (Funny how religious folks can be so very particular about "getting back to the Bible" but when the Bible says something we do not want to have to deal with, like exposing the impotence of our anger, we ignore it or pretend the Bible is talking to someone else.)  Somehow, most everybody in our culture has bought into the damnably stupid thinking that if someone else upsets me, I must "save face" by unleashing my unbridled anger at them so that I won't look "weak."  We have swallowed the lie, hook, line, and sinker, that "real" power has to shout angry words back when someone has done or said something to offend you, or that the only way to appear "tough" is to keep insisting on getting the last word, the last glare, or the last punch.

How many times have we seen or heard the teenage boy muddling his way through high school and convinced that if someone upsets him, he needs to hit first and ask questions later in order to prove himself? 

How many times have we seen (or been) the one who seems so desperate to provoke a fight on social media that they keep lobbing angry words, or name-calling, or making threats and denouncements, while being totally unaware that every additional post, every additional bombastic outburst actually becomes more and more of an embarrassment, less and less persuasive, and increasingly pathetic?  '

How many times have we been pushed to ignore or shake our heads or debate about whether or not to respond to someone on the fringe of our circle of acquaintances because we simply couldn't believe the vitriol coming out of their mouths--the refusal to see others as made in the image of God, the refusal to hear why someone else thinks the way they do, the refusal to listen, because listening feels scary and threatening?  And then--the question we never really want to ask ourselves--how many times have I said (yelled), posted, "liked", "shared" or approved of something that was so drenched in blind and futile anger that it made someone else stop listening to me?  How many times has self-righteous anger on my side and self-righteous anger on someone else's side kept both of us from hearing what the other has to say?

People who might have been willing to listen to a perspective they did not share are quickly turned away and get defensive, and then they shut down any attempt to hear where you are coming from.  That is to say, anger-powered outbursts of immature name-calling or threats draped in the presumption of rightness are simply impotent--they cannot accomplish anything or move a thing forward.  They are the interpersonal equivalents of punching your car to make it run.

The Biblical writers offer us some counsel for when we find ourselves in such situations (and we will).  While it is absolutely true that sometimes anger is the right response (like the old line says, "Hope has two lovely daughters whose names are Anger and Courage--anger at the way things are, and courage to change them"), there is a difference between anger that fuels constructive action and just plain outraged bluster.  One is powerful, and the other is impotent.  One comes from a place of being in tune with the Reign of God, and the other, as James says it, simply cannot produce the justice of God.  Before we automatically baptize our own anger and outrage as being "the good kind," it is worth taking a moment seriously to ask whether we are fired up because are really attuned to justice, or whether we really feel insecure and threatened.  Because here is a dirty little secret: most of the time, we (wrongly) assume that MY anger is always the "righteous" kind, when it is really more likely to be the "frightened bully" kind.  The less I am willing to seriously look at my own anger that way to test it out, the more likely it is because I already know that I am just a scared, cornered bully in that moment and don't want to have to face it.

So James' counsel is to listen more, and speak less.  When someone else is spewing something outrageous and vitriolic, it is far more effective in the long run to let their own impotent rage hoist them by their own petard, rather than returning fire on their terms.  Once you engage someone else's impotent anger on their own terms, you have already given away the contest, because impotent anger colors our vision so that we can only see ourselves as "winning" the argument and automatically dismiss the other as a "loser."  It's like declaring that sky is red and then putting on red-tinted lenses so that all you can see is red in the sky; at some point, you lose the ability to recognize that you are selectively filtering out any input to the contrary of what you already think. 

When we, as James puts it, are "quick to listen," we defuse and de-escalate.  So often, the impotent, car-punching, plate-throwing kind of anger comes from a place of feeling threatened or insecure, and we feel threatened when we think we are being dismissed or ignored or told we are unimportant.  When someone else says something (or posts something, or tweets something, or whatever) that seems soaked in that kind of insecure anger, they are almost always spoiling for a fight--but if our response is not to return "sound and fury" in kind, to borrow Shakespeare's phrase, but rather to stop the other person in their tracks and say, "Tell me about what leads you think that," a clever thing happens.  First, it refuses to accept the terms of impotent anger that this is a "fight," and second of all, it compels both the other person and you, the speaker and the listener, to think through why each of you think the way you think.  It is a way of disarming someone who is expecting you to disrespect them (so that then they can feel justified in treating you or others with further disrespect), and it is a way of refusing to give them ammunition to use against you any longer.

I am reminded of something Dr. King used to say about the core philosophy of his nonviolent resistance during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.  King wrote in 1957, "the nonviolent resister does not seek to humiliate or defeat the opponent but to win his friendship and understanding. This was always a cry that we had to set before people that our aim is not to defeat the white community, not to humiliate the white community, but to win the friendship of all of the persons who had perpetrated this system in the past. The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community."

That kind of response is both radical and powerful--the opposite of futile and impotent anger.  The idea is not to condone or keep looking the other way when someone is boiling over with infuriated nonsense, but to engage in a way that seeks the good of all, and that allows the possibility that I might learn something myself, too.  If I enter the encounter listening, then no matter what, there is the possibility of something good coming from it: either it defuses impotent anger from the person I listen to, or it compels me to hear and recognize something I did not recognize before myself.  Listening is risky in that sense--it allows the possibility that I don't have all the right answers yet, and that I might need to learn something from someone I disagree with, and it also surrenders the right to hit first and ask questions later.  Being "quick to listen" requires the courage to be vulnerable... and let's just be honest, most of us are simply not that brave all of the time.

James' direction is even more important when the stakes are high--when we are talking about things we hold dear, and when we are talking about our highest allegiances.  Sometimes we grudgingly agree to listen on matters of no consequence--ice cream flavors, taste in music, style of clothes, or whatever--but then we think that when it comes to God, we have to shout more loudly because we have to defend God's honor.  But as Stanley Hauerwas put it so well, "Never think that you need to protect God. Because anytime you think you need to protect God, you can be sure that you are worshipping an idol.”   Or as another old line has it, you defend God the way you defend a lion--you get out of its way. 

Today, we are going to run into people--some in the flesh, and some through countless screens and devices--who will strike us as impotently angry.  They will be lashing out because they feel threatened (whether they know it or would say it that way or not), because they feel insecure (whether they would admit it or not), and because they feel like they have been told they do not matter (whether that is justified or not).  Our calling is not to sink to the level of impotent anger.  It is always to take the higher road, even when the angry shouting voices go low.  That may not feel "fair," but our calling is not simply to settle for "I hit you because you hit me first," but rather the creation of the beloved community. 

So when someone says something that provokes a spark of that outrage or head-shaking disgust (and that will happen, too), what if you and I dared to try what James suggests. What if we paused and listened, thereby refusing to reinforce the expectation of the angry voice who is expecting to be ignored so they have excuse to retreat to their own echo chamber, and what if we asked, sincerely and honestly, "I'd like to listen to how you come to that position.  Tell me what you think, and why..."  Sometimes the question itself compels someone to realize that the conclusions they thought were obvious are not so obvious to everyone, and sometimes it pushes them to re-examine what leads them to their own opinions.  Sometimes even, people come to see that the things they always assumed were the "righteous" answer, or the godly position, may not be on the solid footing they thought.  And sometimes you as the listener learn something you were not expecting, either.

Answering impotent anger with impotent anger creates no forward motion--it is really just competitive venting.  It is scorched earth warfare at its worst.

Responding to impotent anger with a willingness to listen is not conceding that you are wrong--but rather, it is a chance to defuse someone who is spoiling for a fight about the color of the sky with their red-tinted glasses on, and a refusal to give them permission to run back to their own echo chamber still convinced that they are right.

Today, let us dare to practice the powerful act of listening.

Lord God, let your justice come about, but give us the humility and grace to see that you don't need our blind yelling to make it happen.  Give us the courage to be vulnerable enough to listen.

Confessions of a Hard-of-Hearing Heart

Confessions of a Hard-of-Hearing Heart--September 26, 2017

"Hear this word, you cows of Bashan who are on Mount Samaria,

     who oppress the poor, who crush the needy,

     who say to their husbands, 'Bring something to drink!'

 The Lord GOD has sworn by his holiness:

     The time is surely coming upon you,

     when they shall take you away with hooks,

     even the last of you with fishhooks.

Through breaches in the wall you shall leave,

    each one straight ahead;

    and you shall be flung out into Harmon, says the LORD.

Come to Bethel--and transgress;

    to Gilgal--and multiply transgression;

    bring your sacrifices every morning,

    your tithes every three days;

bring a thank offering of leavened bread,

    and proclaim freewill offerings, publish them;

    for so you love to do, O people of Israel!   Says the Lord GOD.

....Hear this, you that trample on the needy,

    and bring ruin to the poor of the land,

    saying, 'When will the new moon be over

       so that we may sell grain;

    and the Sabbath,

       so that we may offer wheat for sale?" [Amos 4:1-5, 8:4-5]

May I tell you something that frightens me, something that keeps me awake and nags at me during the day time?  May I tell you something that genuinely scares me?

It is the fear that I could be utterly out of sync with what matters to God... and not realize it.

It is the fear that God might well be saying, whispering, shouting, pleading to me what really matters, and that I could be missing God's voice because I can't hear it over the sound of my own religiosity.

And the reason that fear haunts me is that, like all persistent and potent fears, it is grounded in reality.  It has happened before.  It will happen again.  It is happening right before our eyes.  Over and over and over again in the story of God's people, folks convince themselves they have God's priorities, as they get fixated on symbols and ceremonies, gestures and rituals, only to have God say to them, "You are missing the point!"  And over and over and over again, no matter how loudly or how often God cries out, "It is about people, not things!  It is about justice and mercy, not the objects or songs or rituals or ceremonies you associate with religion!" the people of God dig in their heels and obsess over those symbols--and miss what they were always supposed to be about in the first place.

Amos puts it starkly.  He was by no means the only prophet tasked with helping the privileged and powerful in Israel to see that they had missed the point, but he is certainly one of the most direct about it.   He just outright calls the privileged women of Israel "cows" who lounge around asking for more to drink while they ignore that there are others in their society who are getting trampled on.  Amos is blunt. He is grim. He paints an awfully frightening picture of those privileged and complacent elite ladies of power being led out like livestock when the invading Assyrians come (which they did, in 722BC).  Very few people choose this dark passage from Amos' collection of sermons to embroider on a throw pillow or frame for their wall.

But in fairness to Amos himself, the old farm hand from a small town knows, as Flannery O'Connor put it once so well, "When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock -- to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures." Well, God sent Amos to a populace so hard of hearing that the prophet had to shout, and so dim in the eyes that he had to draw big and bold.

The real trouble was that the majority of the people to whom Amos was sent didn't see a problem.  They thought things were fine in Israel... because things were fine for them.  If you don't have cancer, it's easy not to think that you should care or worry about it... but once you or someone you love gets it, all of a sudden, you start to make a fuss.  Well, it was the same for the people to whom Amos spoke: they had been so comfortable in their avarice and insulated from the way others were being ground into the dirt, that they didn't think anything was wrong in Israelite society.  After all, during Amos' day, the markets were up... up... up, and all having record closes.  But Amos knew that from God's perspective, the real value of a society is not in how the markets finish at the end of the business day, but about how the most vulnerable people are treated, regardless of what it does to the bottom line.  The people to whom Amos was sent were just about blind and deaf, and didn't want to be bothered with anyone showing them anything different.

And part of what made it even harder for the people who heard Amos was that they had told themselves that as long as they did good, respectable religious things, they were righteous.  As long as they observed the official civic ceremonies and religious rituals of the day--offering sacrifices, bring their offerings, muttering a prayer on the Sabbath day, and recognizing civil observances like new moons and national holidays--they thought that was all that mattered to God.  So, who cared that others in Israel were treated as less-than, as marginal, as unimportant--the "cows of Bashan" didn't have to think about that as long as they convinced themselves that they were doing right on the rituals and symbols.

There's this other scene in the book of Amos where the prophet goes up to one of the official national government-approved worship sites in Israel, and the priest is all upset that Amos isn't showing proper deference there. He's not being respectful... he's not keeping quiet... he's not just nodding his head and letting the faceless crowds be pushed to the margins.  And on top of that, Amos was getting--gasp--political.  In Amos 7, the priest sends word to the king that Amos is not just a troublemaker, but he is now ruffling feathers with the politically connected, too, by speaking against the king.  And the priest tells Amos to go somewhere else, or to shut up, because the people there don't want to have to hear all that Amos has to say.  If they hear him speak against the king, a thread will begin to unravel, and their religious cover that allowed them to ignore the way other people were being stepped on would also come undone...and if that happened, well, it would mean the whole reinvention of all of Israelite society!  And since the priests and the king and the people didn't want to have to deal with that, it was simply much easier to ignore the prophet and turn their attention to the next religious or civic observance.  Focus on the symbols, hold on only to the rituals, and you won't have to think about the faces.

This is what scares me: a whole society--the whole nation of Israel in Amos' day!--that had prided itself on being godly and good, still so completely missed the point of what mattered to God that they wanted to silence the prophet God sent because he said things that forced them to confront the stuff that made them squirm.  They chased the prophets like Amos out of town, and were convinced they were in the right for doing it, because this Amos was just an agitator who was threatening their cherished religious and civic symbols.

And that's what just about kills me: the religious leaders and the king's official policymakers were convinced that Amos was the real problem in Israel, because he was disrespecting their idol (the king had set up a literal golden calf at his state-sponsored worship site in Bethel) and he was poking at the arrangement they had all made not to have to look at the most vulnerable in their society or hear the cries of the marginalized who had been trampled on.  They saw it as their religious and civic duty to silence and shame Amos because they didn't want to hear what God had sent him to say.

And if the religious and political so-and-sos...as well as a whole nation full of respectable religious folk in Israel... could get it so completely wrong back twenty-seven hundred years ago, how would I know if I am in danger of the same thing... today?

So often, we do just what the priests and kings of Amos' day did, too.  We do not want to have our worlds shaken, so we simply drown out the noise of the prophets God sends in our path... because we do not want to be compelled to be jolted out of the way things are.  So often we are the ones, like the folks Amos spoke to, who get hung up and fixated on symbols and ceremonies and rituals, and then do not see anything wrong with raising another glass while other people are stepped on or forgotten.  So often, we get mad at the ones God has sent to us to wake us up, because they see through the symbols and ceremonies and get right to the things that really matter to God beneath them.

We do not want to listen to the voices God sends, because we know the consequences of listening--we will be compelled to see our world differently, and to revise our pictures of our own lives.  And we would rather not do that--we would much rather just be angry at Amos for causing a ruckus in the temple and disturbing our rituals.

And because we can read about that actually happening like here in Amos' day, I have this fear that I will do the same.. will become the same... will stop listening for God's voice and drowning out the sound because I don't want to have to deal with it.

I have to admit: Amos doesn't have a lot of good news for his stubborn hearers here in these verses.  He is relentless and bold and angry and heated.  And I'll be honest, too, it is hard to make myself read his words or listen to his message.  But Flannery O'Connor is right: sometimes you have to shout to get through to people who are hard of hearing.  And maybe in all of this, that is what I most need to confess: I am hard of hearing in this complacent heart of mine. I need the loud voice of Amos.

And if it feels like Amos' words are being shouted at us, it is a sign that the living God has not yet given up on getting through to us.

Thank you, good Lord.  Thank you, for not giving up on us.  Where you see that you need to, please keep speaking up to us... and make us to listen, even when we would rather not.

For Such a Time As This

For Such a Time As This--September 25, 2017

"Hathach went and told Esther what Mordecai had said. Then Esther spoke to Hathach and gave him a message for Mordecai, saying, ¹¹‘All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law—all alike are to be put to death. Only if the king holds out the golden scepter to someone, may that person live. I myself have not been called to come in to the king for thirty days.’ ¹²When they told Mordecai what Esther had said, ¹³Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, ‘Do not think that in the king’s palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. ¹⁴For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.’ ¹⁵Then Esther said in reply to Mordecai, ¹⁶‘Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do. After that I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish.’" [Esther 4:9-16]

Listening for God's voice does not necessarily mean permanent silence.  Sometimes it is precisely because of listening to the voices God sends across our path that we are compelled to speak.

Just ask Esther.

A lot of people know the one verse from this passage in the book of Esther, the line of Mordecai about being placed in "royal dignity for such a time as this."  But less familiar is the context, the setting, of those words.  (Here we should confess our bad habit of selecting verses out of context and slapping them on bookmarks, plaques, and Facebook posts without considering what they are really saying.)  Those words of Mordecai's, the words that Esther finally listens to, are calling her to risk her position of privilege and comfort to call attention to a grave threat and injustice to a whole ethnicity, when it would have been easier to look the other way or keep quiet so as to avoid rocking the boat.

In case the plot of the story of Esther is a little hazy in your memory, here's the short version.  In the days when the Persians Empire stretched across much of the ancient world, the Jewish people were one of many subjugated nations who were occupied by the powers of the day.  And as the story goes, one of them, the lovely Esther (her given Jewish name was Hadassah), had been chosen by the king to be his next queen.  It was a comfortable life as queen, and King Xerxes didn't even know Esther's ethnicity.  When the villainous Haman plotted to have all the Jews in the empire killed (on account of a personal grudge with Esther's uncle Mordecai), Esther could have been in a position to keep quiet.  In fact, for a while, that seemed a likely option.

Esther could have kept herself safe, could have kept from risking her own reputation, her own position of wealth and power and prosperity as queen, and her own life by simply keeping quiet.  As long as the king never found out she was Jewish, too, she could have simply let her people die and just not made a fuss.  It was risky, after all, to speak up.  As Esther notes in her conversation with her uncle Mordecai, if she went to the king unsummoned and burst in without an official royal invitation, she was liable to be put to death.  Going in to see the king unannounced was the height of disrespect--and of course, not simply disrespect to one individual person, but to the whole government, the nation, and indeed the whole Persian empire.  Speaking up and inviting yourself in to see the king would be seen as brash, irreverent, unpatriotic, and possibly even treasonous.  It was a symbolic gesture that was likely to get Esther in trouble... and she knew that.

But she listens.  Esther listens to her uncle, and it was from that listening that she found the urgency and courage to speak up.

Mordecai says that this is her moment to use her position to bring attention to the plot and expose it so that her people can be saved.  He knows, as she does, that it is risky to her well-being, but if she does not speak up, countless lives will be lost, while everyone else will agree to turn the other way and pretend it isn't happening.  The situation calls for someone to do something dramatic enough, jarring enough, and yes, risky enough, to get the king's attention and to save the Jewish people.  Mordecai knows that Esther risks falling out of favor with the king, or even with the whole Persian empire if her act of going to the king uninvited is cast as a show of disrespect to the Persian king and its government.  He knows that there will be people who are scandalized at the thought of her breaking the established rules, violating "good order," and calling attention to a problem that everyone else had just agreed not to think about or deal with.  Esther runs the risk, even if she gets out of the situation with her life, of being seen as a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, a disrespectful member of an ethnic minority who "just won't stay in her place."  Mordecai and Esther both know that if she speaks up about how the bodies and lives of young children are being endangered, just because of their ethnicity, she will have made powerful enemies--like Haman, the villain of the whole book--who do not want to have to see or think about it.  Mordecai knows that what he is asking Esther to do, by speaking up to the king, carries the risk of Esther either losing her life or her privilege.  And yet he asks it of her anyway--lives depend on it.

Only against that backdrop do we really get what it means when Mordecai says those words you have likely heard before:  "If you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise from another quarter... who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this."

We have a way--and I will confess, I have done this, too, all too often in my life--of taking verses out of their settings to turn them simply into self-esteem boosters or motivational clichés.  I have heard (and, Lord, forgive me if I have preached) plenty of sermons about this whole "such a time as this" idea that boil down to just, "Seize the day--make the most of today!  Don't miss an opportunity, because you might have been put here for such a time as this..."  And the danger there is that we water down the force of what Mordecai is actually saying to Esther; we can quote the verse but lose the force, the risk, the sense of urgency to speak up for those whose lives are endangered.  In its original context, these words of Mordecai's are not the Old Testament version of "Carpe Diem"--they are a call to speak up when everybody else, both the powerful and the comfortable, have all agreed not to talk about something that is systematically eliminating people.  That means these words are loaded with a call to see the threats to those who are vulnerable (something we are never really eager to do) and then to speak up about them, even if it means being called names, or losing your position, or even losing your life. 

That's simply what these words mean.  It is what they have always meant, because that is what the story of Esther is about: a heroine who speaks up, even when it is against the rules, in order to call attention to a systematic attempt to wipe out an entire ethnicity.  If we (and if I) have missed that by separating the "such a time as this" line from the setting in the story, then we (myself included) have not been really listening to the Bible on its own terms.

And that's just the point.  Esther finds the courage to speak up before the king because she dares actually to listen to Mordecai. 

It would have been so much easier for her to throw excuses like, "But the people will say I'm disrespecting the king by coming to him unannounced!  And I don't want to lose my position!" or "The people will not understand that I am using my position of influence to call attention to a wider problem, and they will think I am just an out-of-touch elitist complaining!"  It would have been so much easier for Esther to keep her head down and be a good Persian and not bring the whole extermination plot to light... or only bring it up if it wasn't going to cause offense.  It would have been so much easier to hear Mordecai without listening to him, and lob back reasons she couldn't be bothered to speak up.

But... with every passing day, Haman's plan got closer and closer to its terrible execution.  Every day, every moment she waited, the noose got tighter around their collective necks.  And so, after listening to Mordecai, Esther speaks.  She fasts, and she prays, and she asks her people to do the same.  But she goes...knowing that it might mean her death.

Now, chances are, you know how the story ends.  You know that in the end, Esther is successful in pleading with the king, her life is spared, and in fact, her whole people are saved, and the wicked Haman is exposed and then hanged on the gallows he had been plotting to lynch Mordecai with.  We remember Esther today as a hero of the faith, and an example for our children.

But to be clear, in this moment of the story where our verses come from today, while we are still halfway through the narrative, Esther isn't recognized as much of a hero yet.  There is every possibility that she will not be popular, or that her actions will be misunderstood, or intentionally slandered, or that people will see her as attacking all the fine institutions of the Persian Empire by breaking the rule about coming before the king.  This is the reality of the text: sometimes real heroes are not recognized as heroes in the moment--they are seen, like Esther here, as stirring the pot, subverting good order, talking out of turn, making a fuss, and attacking beloved institutions.  That was part of the risk, too: Esther could have come out of this with her life, but been tarred and feathered in the public eye as a troublemaker who should have stayed quiet and just kept to being a pretty face in the king's harem. 

But despite those risks, Esther listened to the voice God had put in her path... and because she listened, she spoke up. 

And because she spoke up, knowing the risk that she might ruffle some feathers for speaking, countless lives were spared.

Our calling as the people of God today is always to listen... and then as we listen, we may well find that our calling is also to speak up.  Speaking up first without listening for what (or whether) God is nudging us to say is just pushing your own agenda.  Listening without ever speaking up is ignoring your responsibility.  But when we listen... and then speak as God directs, we will find ourselves in good company at least.

Who knows, but that you and I are called to listen... and then to speak up... at such a time as this?

Lord God, help us to listen for what you are actually saying, rather than what we want you to say... and help us to find the courage to speak when you call us, like Esther, to speak for those who are most endangered.

God... and the Expert-Rejected Deal...

God... and the Expert-Rejected Deal--September 21, 2017

Then [the LORD] said to Abram, “I am the Lord who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess.” ⁸But he said, “O Lord God, how am I to know that I shall possess it?” ⁹He said to him, “Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon.” ¹⁰He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two. ¹¹And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.

As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him. ¹³Then the Lord said to Abram, “Know this for certain, that your offspring shall be aliens in a land that is not theirs, and shall be slaves there, and they shall be oppressed for four hundred years; ¹⁴but I will bring judgment on the nation that they serve, and afterward they shall come out with great possessions. ¹⁵As for yourself, you shall go to your ancestors in peace; you shall be buried in a good old age. ¹⁶And they shall come back here in the fourth generation; for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet complete.” When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces. ¹⁸On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates..." [Genesis 15:7-18]

Sometimes, the only thing there is to do is listen.  And sometimes that itself is grace.

Like this story here from Genesis.  This is the story of God making a one-sided deal with Abraham... and how all Abraham (still going by his earlier name, Abram, here) can do is listen, as God makes all the promises, and gives the farm away to the old childless man.

This is the story of how Abram brings nothing but doubt, and God brings gift after gift, grace upon grace, and offers it up to Abram as a promise with no strings, conditions, or expiration date.  It begins here with Abram asking God, "Okay, so back in Genesis 12 you promised me a new homeland, and descendants, and blessing... and so far all I've got is a camel-load of bupkis.  How do I know that you're gonna keep your promise, God?  How do I know that when you talk big, you will actually deliver?" (You get the sense that Abram had recently been watching the news and seen some elected official deliver a bloviating speech full of empty slogans and finger-pointing with no action right before this conversation with God, perhaps.)

Well, despite the fact that I imagine most of us are too shy to talk to the Almighty with such... chutzpah, let's say... God takes Abram's question seriously and deals with it.  "Okay, Abram, you want to know how you can trust that the promise will come true?  Let's make a deal..."  God instructs Abram to get the traditional, customary components for cutting a deal back in the ancient near East--animals that are to be cut in half in a covenant-making ceremony. 

While our symbolic actions for making deals official are a bit less bloody here in the 21st century (we use signatures and dates, and perhaps a notary's official seal if we are being extra official) than they were in Abram's time, the idea is the same: there are certain accepted practices, symbolic gestures, and actions that come to be the accepted procedure for making contracts and covenants.  In the ancient world, the process was something like this: two parties (let's call them, oh, say, Party A and Party B) would get an appointed assortment of animals and ritually slaughter them, and then lay the pieces out in two piles over against each other, and then BOTH parties would walk between the pieces, and each one was supposed to say out loud what their part of the deal was going to be... and at the same time, you were to invoke your god or gods, and effectively call down a conditional curse on either party if one side or the other did not live up to their end of the bargain, as if to say, "May my gods do to me what we just did to these animals if I don't live up to my end of this deal."  So, if, for example, I made a treaty with you and your city-state to offer you 20 sheaves of wheat in exchange for your protection from the roaming barbarians, or if I promised you could marry my daughter in exchange for a sum of gold coins as a dowry, we would cut a covenant this way.  And both Party A and Party B would pass between the pieces, each of them saying out loud what they were going to do for their end of the deal, and each of them calling on their deities to cut them down like these animals pieces if they flaked out or reneged on their part of the deal.  Sort of a grown-up, very literal version of "cross my heart, hope to die..."

What's critical here in the set up for this weird conversation with Abram and God is that God proposes this covenant ceremony as a way of assuring Abram that what is about to be promised will come true.  It appears God presumes Abram will  already understand what God has in mind with these animal pieces. Abram expects, then, that God is about to speak something, and then that Abram himself is going to have to put some skin in the game, so to speak.  Abram will have to do something for his part, offer some commitment, give some concessions, or at least speak some kind of allegiance, devotion, or agreement to good behavior there... right?

Ah, but this is one of those times where all there is to do is listen.  And where that fact is evidence of mercy.

God, the text says, makes a "deep sleep" fall upon Abram, something that allows the future patriarch to see what is happening and to hear the voice of God, but not to get up and move, or even speak, for his own part.  And that's when God starts talking... and Abram just listens.

God speaks a promise as the Party A of this covenant: land, descendants, and blessing for Abram, albeit through a bumpy ride and a couple of detours in Egypt and the wilderness. But all in all, quite a showcase of divine abundance.  God says it out loud, while Abram listens, and then God appears as a torch and smoking pot and passes between the animal carcasses.  This is one of those moments that would have been shockingly clear to Abram, and to the first tellers and hearers of this story, because basically the Almighty has just invoked a curse on the divine self:  "May I be torn apart like these animal pieces if I do not live up to my side of this deal."  My goodness--what can it possibly mean that the Source and Ground of all Being threatens self-destruction as a consequence of breaking faith on a covenant?  God vows to be torn apart if unfaithful to this contract--talk about a signing statement!

And Abram?  He just listens.  Still.

This is the wonder of the story. God still has ol' Abe in a trance--he can watch the flaming torch.  He can hear the divine voice.  In other words, he can listen.  But he does not speak.  He does not act.  He does not shake his head yes or give his permission.  He does not offer anything back, and there's not even a bit of fine print about promising to be a good boy from now on.  Abram just listens, as God makes all the promises.

That means for this contract, for this covenant, the living God puts it all on the line... and gets nothing back in return.  The living God makes a promise--a unilateral, one-sided agreement, that does not depend on Abram.  Not on his future good behavior or past rule-keeping.  Not on gold stars outnumbering red marks on his permanent record.  It is simply a one-sided promise, a deal in which there is no "tit-for-tat" or quid pro quo, but rather all unconditional grace on God's part and only listening on Abram's part.

Wow.  Wow.  Wow.

There are people in this world who are convinced that the only good "deals" out there are the ones in which I get X in exchange for giving you Y, and that those deals are only "great" if I value the X that I get more than the Y that I am giving up.  And similarly, such supposed "experts" on "making great deals" will try and convince you that only people who think in such terms are the Great Deal-Makers of the world.

And then there is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob... the God of Miriam and Sarah and Ruth, too.  And here, this God makes an entirely one-sided, unconditional, giving-away-the-farm-for-free covenant... for nothin'.  God does all the promising, and that means God does all the oath-making and curse-invoking.  Abram?  He listens.  That's all.  He gets to witness God say, "This promise does not depend on what you bring to the table, Abe--this is all me and what I will do for you." 

Some might call that a poorly negotiated deal... but the Bible calls it grace.  The Bible calls it God's telltale modus operandi.  The Bible calls it an unconditional, unilateral covenant.  And it is the beginning of the story of the whole "salvation history" of the world, as it were.  With this covenant, the story of the universe takes a sharp turn toward restoration and renewal, as God picks a childless old man and says, "I'll change the world with you and the son you don't have yet."

"Why would God be satisfied with such a deal?" some might ask, with the unspoken assumption that God should have renegotiated to get something better out of the deal than... nothing.  But that is to misunderstand the whole point--of everything.  The "point," you could say, of life, the universe, and everything, the goal toward which all of creation is aimed... is, well, love.  And love, as a later apostle will tell us (at every wedding ceremony you will ever go to) that "love does not insist on getting its own way."  Love, which is our shorthand for the self-giving impulse that God has woven into the fabric of creation itself, love is the point of everything.  God operates on the basis of, and with the logic of, love, which is to say, God isn't concerned with "getting" something in return for goodness--only, rather, the well-being of the beloved (that's us--a whole planet full of us!).  So God is perfectly willing to do things and make deals and speak promises that look like nonsense to all the world's bone-headed small-minded short-sighted "experts" who can only see as far as what a deal with get for them, because God is more interested in our good than in impressing people who wrongly think themselves to be experts at making deals.

That's the long and the short of it, really: the whole story of the Scriptures, from Genesis through "Amen, come Lord Jesus!", is the story of a lopsided deal that had no negotiations or back-and-forth of demands and concessions, but only the unilateral promise of God, "I will give you these things--I swear by myself to do it, and I will be torn to pieces before I break my promise."  The whole story of the Bible is the story of what unfolds from a promise that would make the experts blush because God doesn't "get" anything for God's side of the deal.

And, of course, the followers of Jesus are convinced that God didn't change tactics after that encounter with Abram and the animal pieces.  We tell a story--in fact, we tell it every week in the places where I worship on Sundays--about how that same God took on human flesh, and then took bread and broke it open, and poured out a cup of wine, and told his closest friends something like, "This is me.  I am about to be torn open in a new act of divine deal-making.  Your job... is to listen.  Your role is to receive what I give you.  Your task is to receive, now hear closely as I make a new covenant with you."  And then Jesus cut a new covenant with the universe--except that by the time Jesus was around, animal pieces had fallen out of fashion for deal-making, and instead, Jesus invokes the curse of self-destruction from a Roman execution stake.  The cross is God's way of doubling down on one-sided deals.  Rather than saying, "I should have used my leverage to squeeze Abraham for some more concessions for my side... I'll use the cross to get a better deal for myself now!" the Maker of the universe says, "Here once again, I'll do it all... without getting anything in return for myself or my 'side' of the deal.  It is finished."

And us?  We just listen. We listen still.

These are the upside-down values of the people of God and the followers of Jesus of Nazareth.  We celebrate a deal that God cut without getting a single perk or payoff.  We dare to practice such self-giving, unconditional generosity ourselves.  And we teach both our children and new disciples that sometimes the greatest deal of all is the one the experts all laugh at because it looks like you get nothing in return.  That, after all, is the way God saved the world.  Our job... is to listen.

Lord God, let us be shaped by your wonderfully strange kind of logic, so that we no longer angle or posture ourselves to get more for ourselves, but simply give ourselves away with the same unconditional love by which you rule and redeem creation.

Having to Hear Your Own Voice

Having to Hear Your Own Voice--September 20, 2017

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

We all imagine that we have the most pleasant and expressive speaking voices... until you have to record the outgoing message on your voicemail or answering machine, and hear the tinny sound of your own voice as it is actually heard to the outside world.

We all like to pretend we are rock stars in the shower... until, by chance, someone else needs to wash their hands in the sink while you are attempting to belt out, "Come On, Eileen" into the showerhead, and discover that the stage of our imagination is a more forgiving place than the acoustics of the bathtub makes you think.

We all think that we are supremely eloquent and thoughtful speakers in public, until we are compelled to listen--or watch--a recording of our own public speaking, and then discover that we pepper our oh-so-profound ramblings with "uh" and "um" and "ahem" and made-up words while we reach for the correct one.

All of that is to say, it is a humbling thing to be made to stop and actually listen to our own voices--not just the quality or timbre of the way we speak, but even the questionable content of what we say.  It is a difficult thing to find the courage to hear your own words in your own voice. 

Sometimes it is particularly hard because we don't realize just how insulated we become from the rest of reality in our own heads.  Just like you don't realize how nasal your voice sounds to other people's ears (because you only hear your own voice through your own head), sometimes I don't realize how I get used to, accustomed to, and comfortable with, my own self-centeredness and fail to see it or hear it anymore... until someone else helps me to recognize what had been audible and visible to everybody else in the world outside the echo chamber between my own ears.

 I read a news story this week about a volunteer firefighter in another state who had publicly posted online that he would rather save a dog that a person of color from a fire, because, in his words, "one dog was more important than a million n-----s" (and there, yes, he used a word that begins with N).  The guy didn't get why that might pose a problem to anybody, and his wife's comment was simply that "everyone is entitled to their own opinions."  You wonder (at least I hope you do) how someone gets such a bent perspective that not only sees other people so hatefully, but how someone can say it in a public posting on the internet without shame.  It was really like he didn't realize how his own voice sounded--like he didn't get the sound of the hatred in his own words and thoughts.  And that's just the thing--until we are compelled to come face to face with our own private hates, our own privately thought greed, our own secret envy, our own quietly believed delusions, we simply don't hear how rotten things just might be inside us. 

Everybody thinks they're a rock star singing in the shower--and nobody can believe it when they hear how off-pitch and squeaky they sound in real life.  Everybody thinks they have got it all figured out and that all of "my" beliefs, positions, and feelings are all perfectly just and perfectly justified--until someone helps me hear how all of that stuff pours out of me when it's outside of the echo chamber between my ears.

This is perhaps the great challenge of our moment in history right now.  We seem to have less and less ability to hear what comes out of our own mouths--and therefore out of our own hearts--at least, to hear it as it comes out to the world around us.  I may not realize how really really cruel, or truly complacent, or privileged and insulated I may sound to someone else...because as long as I keep it inside my heart and just let it animate my actions without saying it out loud, I won't realize how deep the roots of my own self-absorption really is.  We all have learned to ridicule Marie Antoinette for how tone-deaf and insulated her famous line, "Let them eat cake" was in the ears of the French peasants, but aren't very good at hearing the indifference, or the socially-acceptable-hates, or the collectively ignored prejudices, that are stewing in our hearts, and that get blurted out from our own mouths without our realizing it.

And when we do say something that reveals how bent our hearts have become in some way, and someone else says to us, "Do you get how that sounded?" we have a doubly pernicious way of getting defensive and accusing other people of being overly sensitive rather than ever daring to listen to ourselves--to the stuff bubbling up out of our souls--and having to face what is in there.  "The problem must be them..." we think, to let ourselves off the hook.  "Everyone's entitled to their own opinion..." we say, trying to turn un-Christ-like attitudes into a matter of "free speech" (as though Christ is fooled).  "Well, there's a reason that I think the way I do..." we say, reaching for any way to rationalize what we know we cannot defend.  We dig our heels in and clench our fists when someone brings us face to face with what our words and hearts actually sound like outside the echo chamber.  And it's all utterly absurd, like hearing a recording of my own off-key singing and blaming the audio recorder for making me sound bad or taking me out of context.  It would all be laughable if it weren't so terribly sad, and the consequences were not so terribly high.

I think Jesus had to have both great courage and great patience with his followers--his friends and disciples--when moments came along for him to have to confront them with the out-of-touch self-centeredness that came spilling out of their mouths from their hearts from time to time.  This scene from Mark's Gospel is like that--James and John have their own "let them eat cake" moment, and they are totally unaware of how arrogant and self-absorbed they sound.  They cannot see their own privilege, or how insulated they have become from everybody else--even from the other ten disciples of Jesus' inner circle.  James and John have become their own echo chamber, and in that space, it seems perfectly reasonable for them to ask that they get the two top places of honor with Jesus, and they see nothing wrong, nothing unjust, nothing out of place, with their sense of entitlement that they should get it rather than Peter or Andrew or Bartholomew or Mary or Martha or your own 3rd grade Sunday School teacher.  They have no shame about asking Jesus, and that's what so preposterous at first about this scene.  Jesus has to say their own words back to them for them to realize how utterly self-centered their thinking is.  Why would they assume that they are the most important people, or that there are even two spots and Jesus' right and left hand that are up for grabs?  Why would they think that their wants come first, or that they are more important than the others who have given up just as much to follow Jesus, and taken just as big risks?  How can they not see how privileged they are just to get to be a part of Jesus' movement in the first place?  See--grace has a way of spoiling into entitlement if you do not recognize that the things we are given by grace are not our "earnings" but signs of Mercy's extravagant generosity.  James and John don't realize how they sound... because in their minds there is nothing out of order about their assumption that they should be first.  Funny how "Me and My Group First" never sounds odd to us while we are saying it in our own heads... until someone else echoes our words back to us and says, "Wait--what?"

And that's what Jesus does.  He shakes James and John--and for that matter the rest of the disciples who might well have just been thinking the same thoughts but keeping them quiet in their own heads--out of their pampered insulation by holding their words back up to them.  "Really?  You two want to be at my right and my left hand?  Do you know what you are asking?"  They swear they understand what they are asking for, but clearly they still don't get it.  After all, as Mark the Gospel writer points out at the story of the crucifixion, the ones who end up "at Jesus' right hand and at his left" are two thieves who get nailed to crosses with Jesus.  James and John are so deluded into their own visions of glory and greatness and their own sense of self-importance that they cannot possible imagine that the way of Jesus is the way of a cross, not the way of power, prestige, and pomp.

So Jesus not only helps them to hear how magnificently dense they have been, by compelling them to hear the tone-deafness of their own words, but then he helps them--and us--to hear that there is another way... another order of things... another kind of greatness than the self-important nonsense James and John have been fed.  "You know that among the Gentiles, their great ones are tyrants over them... but it is not so among you," he says.  It's indicative--it IS NOT SO.  Not suggestive, imperative, or subjunctive--it's not "It shouldn't be this way for you," or "I wish it weren't that way for you" or "Don't let it be that way for you..." but rather, "IT IS NOT SO." 

The followers of Jesus are called always--always--to be about the good of the other, not simply as much as our own good, but even more than we seek our own.  This is not a choice.  This is not an option. This is not extra credit for the overachievers or the ones trying to polish their halos.  This is not subject to other opinions--in fact, when it comes to the way of Jesus, loving all and serving all is not up for discussion or debate.  Nobody following Jesus gets to say, "I don't think some people... those people... any people are worthy of my care, or time, or serving, and hey, we're all entitled to our own opinions here."  Nope.  Not if we are followers of Jesus. 

If we are unable to see why James and John's approach--the way of the pompously self-important and the cluelessly insulated blowhards of all time--is out of step with the way of Jesus, then maybe we first need Jesus to help us hear how we sound outside of our own echo chambers.  We need voices like Christ's to compel us to hear how our own singing in the shower sounds, so to speak.  We need the gracious voice of Jesus--who, we should be clear, does not kick out James or John, but rather corrects them while holding them in his inner circle out of nothing but sheer mercy--to help us to hear our own voices, and to recognize what is rumbling around in our own hearts that we have gotten used to there.

We need voices like this one: there is a poem of the great Wendell Berry's that does this difficult work of compelling us to hear our own voices and the insulated self-absorption in our own hearts.  I share it with you now as I hear him asking these questions of me as well, almost as if the poet were forcing me to hear my own tinny voice and recognize the hardness of my own heart, too.  He entitles this poem, "Questionnaire"...

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy

In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

We never want to hear such questions put to us, because we are afraid of hearing the sound of our voices... and the true sounds of our own hearts.

But Lord knows we need to hear... we need to be made to listen to the sounds of our own voices.  And we need to hear the enduring, unrelenting call of Jesus, "It is not so among you...here is another way... we live by serving, and our greatness is in giving ourselves away."

Lord Jesus, draw us out of our own echo chambers, and make us to hear ourselves... so that we can love the way you do.