NO to the New Normal

NO to the New Normal--October 31, 2017

"Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God, because of which the heavens will be set ablaze and dissolved, and the elements will melt with fire? But, in accordance with his promise, we wait for new heavens and a new earth, where righteousness is at home." [2 Peter 3:11-13]

Christian hope--the thrust of the whole New Testament, and indeed of the whole arc of Scripture--is simply this: things will be put right.  No more, and no less.  Things will be put right.

That is to say, we are hoping for a renewed creation, where "righteousness is at home."  We are a people taught to aim for a world in which justice is finally done, where what is crooked is made straight, where the lowly and stepped-on are lifted up, and where the proud and puffed up have all their obnoxious hot air let out, so that all relationships are put back in their rightful balance.  We are seeking for a world of shalom--which is to say, a world of peace, but as Dr. King used to say it, a peace that is not simply "the absence of tension," but "the presence of justice."  We are having our hearts trained to seek and long for all to be made well, in a world where so much is out of order.

Don't forget that.  Don't settle for a lesser hope.  

People talk a lot these days about getting used to whatever is going on as "the new normal."  "Just get accustomed to violence and terror," they say, whether from gunmen with assault weapons from hotel windows, or those seeking to inspire terror on city streets with rented trucks like in Manhattan last night.  That's the new normal--endless violence.

"Just get used to the insulation and tribalism that keeps us withdrawn into our own little bubbles, never being stretched to listen to 'the other," they say, teaching us to get comfortable with the echo chamber lives we increasingly live behind screens.

"Just get used to shouting loudmouths who are unconcerned with facts but just yell and rage in the hopes of drowning out anybody else," they tell us, hoping that we will give up on the possibility of thinking critically and talking honestly with one another.

"Just get used to war-without-end," they say, hoping we will collectively write a blank check and let them change the names of our enemies as necessary, just so long as we are numb to the idea of always being at war with someone. (And think about this for a moment--for anyone who is a sophomore in high school or younger, the only world they have ever lived in, ever, is a world in which we have been at war!)

"Just get used to the not-so-subtle rise of racism and animosity between groups, and just get used to the idea that you have to seek the interests of you-and-your-group-first in this world," they tell us, and to be honest, we have gotten ourselves awfully accustomed to it already.

And worst of all, sometimes the practitioners of religion chime in, too, telling us to simply "accept the new normal" here in this life, because, they say, "we won't have to deal with it in heaven, so we can give up on caring about this life."  It is easy, in such an environment, just to say, "This is all we've got, and so we have to just get used to it as the new normal."  It is so easy simply to say, "Look, we will never be able to solve the problem of world hunger... so let's not even pretend to try, but we'll all just learn to be OK with the reality that we got to eat today while lots of people starved."

It is so easy to teach yourself to say, "Look, you'll never be able to stop all the people who want to recklessly murder large crowds of people, so just learn to accept a certain amount of violence as the way it has to be."

It is so easy to say, "Well, maybe we have all become afraid of faces that are different, but our parents and grandparents were even worse about that, so we are off the hook."

No.  Just no.  We are settling for a lesser hope and calling that settled disappointment "the new normal."  But that is a damn shame. No.  No, dear ones, do not settle for a vision less than a renewed creation "where righteousness is at home."  And do not forget, either, that the word "righteousness" is the same word in the original as "justice."  We are called to be people who are not, and will not be, satisfied with anything less than a world in which justice is at home--where people don't get stepped on, where bullies don't win the day, where shouting and saber-rattling is finally silenced, and where abusers, deceivers, and predators do not get away with hurting others.  Christian hope is not simply the wish to go to another world--it is the longing for a world where justice is at home--where things are finally put right. Christian hope does not go gentle into that good night, as the old poet says, and it does not simply shrug and say, "This is the new normal--I guess we have to settle for this."

The question, though, is how we go about seeking for God's promised future--whether we think that we can force it to happen with our own angry vitriol and loudmouthed shouting, our own sinking to the level of those who most frustrate us, or whether we are called to anticipate God's promised future differently.

If Step One in the practice of Christian hope is learning not to settle for "the new normal," that all the shouting pundits tell us we have to get used to, then Step Two is learning the right strategies for resisting the "new normal" with grace and love and justice ourselves--at least, if we honestly believe that God's promise is to renew the world in grace and love and justice.  Step One is to let God awaken us out of complacency, and Step Two is to seek the pattern of Jesus for what we are supposed to do next.

And this is the key of it all--we anticipate the promised future by living now the way we believe all things will be done in that new heavens and new earth.  If we are convinced that in the new creation, no one is shot for their skin color or victimized for driving in the "wrong" neighborhood, then we will be people who act for just treatment of people in our own lives... and we will take the even scarier step of looking at our own selves more honestly for the places we are blind to our own hostility and hate.

If we are convinced that in the new heavens and new earth, nobody resorts to childish shouting to get their way, then we will anticipate it now by being people who practice the courageous act of listening to others rather than just talking over them.

If we are convinced that in the renewed world, we will at last begin to recognize the image of God in which all faces are made, then we will anticipate that future now by choosing to see the image of God in all faces now.

In other words, you anticipate the promised future by acting now the way we believe it will be when we get there.

Today, then, let me ask two things of you: for one, do not settle for "the new normal" if it is anything less than a world where righteousness is at home.  And then second of all, arrange your life now in light of how we are convinced it will be when justice and mercy are at last done to the fullest.  Don't give up on living in light of that vision. 

Lord God, make your justice at home among us now while you are putting all the world right.

When God Re-Negotiates

When God Re-Negotiates--October 30, 2017

"The days are surely coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt--a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the LORD. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD; I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another, or say to each other, 'Know the LORD,' for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the LORD; for I will forgive their iniquity, and remember their sin no more." [Jeremiah 31:31-34]

You and I are living in the future.

No, still no jetpacks.  Still no flying cars.  But we are living in the future that ancient dreamers envisioned, prophets like Jeremiah, people who dared to listen to the Spirit's voice saying, "I will make a new covenant..."

You and I are living in the vision that Jeremiah could only hope for, long for, and look forward to.  You and I are living in the future that the Spirit held out to the prophets, because you and I are people who live in the midst of the "new covenant" inaugurated in Jesus.  It is strange in a way how we can take for granted what those ancient prophets dreamed of.  We have a way of forgetting how surprising this passage must have sounded in the ears of Jeremiah's first hearers. Because the way God speaks here of a new covenant... well, it flies in the face of the way the world usually does business.

At the brink of exile, Jeremiah and other prophets of his generation were navigating the people of Judah through a crisis of their faith and identity. Exile was the end of the line.  It represented an end to the relationship with their covenant God, Yahweh, so they thought.  For centuries, the basic theology of the day said, "We do certain things to live as Yahweh's people, and in return, Yahweh gives us divine protection and blessing."  And hanging over their heads in the background was always the fear, "If we mess things up so royally, so completely, by turning away from God and turning toward violence, greed, and the ways of other nations around us, then the worst that could happen would be for God to let those foreign powers overwhelm us and carry us away into exile."  As the Babylonians came knocking at the door, armed with siege-works and soldiers, folks in Jeremiah's day could see exile coming.  And that meant, they assumed, that their relationship with God--their covenant partnership--was at worst obliterated, and at best, thoroughly broken.

This would be the moment for a contract renegotiation.  This would be the moment where self-proclaimed business experts would push to get more concessions from the people of Judah.  This could have been God's moment to exert some leverage and tell the people, "Well, if you want to continue in relationship with me, I'm gonna need to see a big increase in what I get out of the deal."  This could have been the moment for the Almighty to push for more offerings, or increased sacrifices, or to regulate a certain code of additional moral purity, with the threat of exile cajoling the fearful Israelites into re-negotiating on the Deity's harsher terms.  That's at least how plenty of powerful folks would insist on doing things today, at any rate.

Except--and this is important here--the God of whom Jeremiah spoke is not a colossal cosmic Jerk.  The God who speaks new covenant isn't looking to push for better terms that benefit God.  Rather, the God of Jeremiah 31 speaks of a new covenant that will NOT depend on what the human actors bring to the picture.  It will depend, in a word, entirely on grace, and not on what humans "do" for God. 

This is the wonderfully counter-intuitive way the God of the Bible works: instead of leveraging to get something "better" on God's side of the deal, the God of new covenant says, "It is all grace. I will remember your sin no more.  You are forgiven."

That is the new covenant Jeremiah envisions, and for the followers of Jesus, that is the reality we are invited to step into right now.  Already.  Today.  The rest of the world may think that it's a good idea to push for getting more for yourself when you are re-negotiating a deal, but that's not the way Christians are called to see the world.  Rather, we are called to see things through the lens of the New Covenant--the relationship between us and God that has everything to do with God's grace and nothing to do with God "getting" more out of the deal.  Jeremiah dreamed it.  He envisioned it would happen.  He hoped for its coming.  And we get to live in it.

We are included, we are given hope, we are welcomed... because when the God of the Scriptures revises a covenant to make it "new," God has a way of giving away the farm for free.  If God were a selfish jerk, sure, God could insist on "getting more" out of the deal, the covenant, between the divine and the human, but blessedly God is not a  selfish jerk.  

And instead, the God who spoke to Jeremiah offers us a future that depends entirely on God's goodness, and not upon what we bring to the table. That is an amazing reality to consider--and we have received it by grace.   

In all of our discussion this past month about how Mercy moves us into God's future, we can sometimes get so focused on the heavenly talk of pearly gates and golden streets that we can forget how we are living in part of God's promised future right now.  The assurance of grace that holds us together is a gift that countless prophets like Jeremiah dreamed of and waited for... and you and I get to live in it and lean on it now.  Today, then, as much as we keep envisioning and picturing what else is in store, this is a moment to consider that we already live in the gracious future God had promised to voices like Jeremiah's.  

We get to live in light of the new covenant.

Lord God, write your word on us and make your new covenant in our hearts and lives and deepest selves.

What Has Been Promised

What Has Been Promised--October 27, 2017

“…and I trust in the Lord that I will also come soon.” [Philippians 2:24]

Okay, I am going to try and tread lightly here.  I do not want to bad-mouth Paul the apostle here at all.  But it is quite possible that he was wrong on this one.

There are a number of reasons to believe that Paul never did get out of Rome to see the Philippians, and that he was put to death by the empire before he could visit them as he had hoped. (We could spend a lot of time going those reasons, but suffice it for now to say that the New Testament book of Acts leaves off the story of Paul with him under house arrest in Rome—and if he had gotten out eventually, you have to wonder why Luke didn’t give us that story. And for that matter, we don’t have evidence from Paul himself that he was out of prison later on and able to write again from other places.)  It just doesn’t seem very likely, based on that alone, that Paul made it out of prison.

That doesn’t mean that the Bible is untrue here if that was the case—Paul really did think that he was going to get out of his imprisonment and go to see the Christians in Philippi. Today’s verse from Philippians accurately and truthfully reflects what Paul honestly believed.

Neither does it mean that Paul’s faith in God was misplaced, if indeed it turned out that he never did get to see Philippi again. 

What it could mean, however, is that we need to be careful to distinguish between what we are wishing for—or even praying and hoping for—and what God has promised.  When it comes to God’s promises, you can bank on them, every day of the week, with complete assurance.  If God says something is so, you can count on it.  You can trust it.  But beyond that, we may, at any given moment, also be asking for God to do other things, things that God has not already promised in the Scriptures to give to us, but things which God may do in answer to our prayer anyway.  And yet God is not obligated to give us things God never promised… even if God sometimes does in fact give to us more than had been promised.

An example:  let’s say I pray for a pony.  I hope for a pony.  I wish on my lucky stars for a pony.  But I get no pony.  Even if I had convinced myself and started telling my friends, “My God is going to get my a pony,” God still wouldn’t be obligated to send me the animal.  I don’t get to cash checks that God didn’t write.  And yet, God is still trustworthy, because the things that God does promise, God does accomplish. 

On the other hand, we sometimes get more from God than we have been promised.  We ask for our daily bread, and we believe God’s promise that our prayers are heard—and yet far beyond just our daily bread, you and I are given more food than we can eat on some days, a roof over our heads, cars to drive, more clothes in our closets than we can wear in a week, and creature comforts that most people in most of human history could hardly even imagine. We have people who love us.

We were not owed these things.  And truth be told, we were not even promised all these things.  They are privileges and bonuses and windfalls.  Remembering that keeps us from falling into the pattern of baptizing my personal wish-list and claiming that just because I want it, God must give it.  And just because I, in my head, start trying to convince myself that God owes me, or that God has to do what I want, well, once again, God isn’t obliged to pay on a check God didn’t write.  There is a difference, in other words, between my self-interested laundry lists of wants, and God's promised future.

Sometimes we make the assumption that God has to do the things that I think will make me “happy.”  Well that can be wrong for a whole bunch of reasons:  first off, we are really not that bright when it comes to what will make us “happy”—after all, we run off after shallow, lesser loves that will not really satisfy.  And second, maybe just “happy” isn’t what God is working on in our lives—maybe God is working on making us into joyful people whose spirits are fed by something deeper than just our endorphins and good feelings. 

I may want to assume that God’s will is for me to get that new job…because I am assuming that the job will make me happy, or that more money is the same as God’s will, or that the Holy Spirit and my gut-feelings are one and the same.  But it might just be that God has something else in mind, or that God is doing something in the life of the other person who does get the job, or that there is some other way I will be called to use my talents and passions and energy.  Or, you know what, we live in a broken and sinful world:  sometimes things happen that are not God’s will—like corruption and cruelty, like violence and abuse and injustice.  If you don’t get the job because of the employer’s prejudices and discrimination, or because of plain old corruption and nepotism, we don’t get to pin that on “God’s will.”  God didn’t promise that you would get the job, even if providing for your employment is the kind of thing God sometimes does, and even if it wouldn’t have been a surprising thing for God to do it.

And the same with Paul.  Truth be told, the apostle was never promised that he would get an easy course in life.  He was never promised that he would leave Rome after his trial.  And while it is true that God had preserved his life in amazing ways already by the time he wrote Philippians, God was not obligated to come to Paul’s rescue on Paul’s terms—to do things the way Paul wanted them to happen or the way Paul assumed they would happen.

So, yeah, it is possible, quite possible, that Paul assumed he was going to get out of prison so he could go visit his friends in Philippi—and it is quite possible that Paul was wrong.

But you don’t stop trusting God when it turns out that your assumptions about God were wrong, not any more than children should stop trusting their parents when they fall off the bike the first time the training wheels fall off, or when they get the chicken pox, even though it is their parents’ job to take care of them when they get sick.

This is the real, difficult challenge of living by faith in a God who is not a genie, and who is not me.  But no other God will keep a promise so fiercely for you, much less give us sometimes even more than he promised.

Lord Jesus, keep us grounded in your promises today, so that we do not stray from them.

A Promise to Thorns

A Promise to Thorns--October 25, 2017

“…just as he chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.” (Ephesians 1:4)

I planted a rosebush once—oh, this has been a few years now—before I had seen what its blossoms would look like.

I had the space to put a rosebush, and I had the desire to have one there, and so one day off I went to the store, picked one out that had already blossomed for the summer, and put it in the ground.  I chose it. 

That is saying something, because I really did choose it.  I selected that specific rose, among lots of other roses that were there at our local Lowe’s.  Some of them were later-blooming varieties, too, and so I could have seen what they would produce.  I could have had one knowing it would yield big deep red blossoms or fragile white ones.  I could have known exactly what I was getting when I bought it, and seen exactly how it would look in full bloom from the very day I planted it.

I did not do it that way. 

Instead, before I had laid eyes on a single blossom on that plant, I chose it. I chose it with a future vision in mind of what it would become in my care, but not with any track record of what it had already been. And from that moment on, I made a sort of promise to it—it is my rose, and my job is to cultivate it so that it will blossom as beautifully and fully as possible.  I made that commitment—to the extent one can make a commitment to a flowering plant—apart from anything the plant had done for me, and really without any guarantees of what it would do for me.  To be truthful, at the point of planting that rosebush, all it had done to that point was jab with thorns and scratch my forearms—that’s not much to go on, and hardly anything positive.

Instead of poring over all the blossoming choices in the greenhouse, I saw that one, checked what kind of shade and sun it could handle, and was ready to go.  It took all of a few minutes, because I went in knowing I was going to get a rose.  That may seem foolish.  But that is how I buy things—I am the guy who takes seven minutes or less to buy shoes generally because my goal is just to get something that looks as close to identical as possible to the shoes I have just worn out. 

So… why, would you say, did I buy the rose?  What was my reason for planting it?  I think you have to say something like this: first off, I just claimed it as my own as it was, before it had done a thing to impress me. You could say it was an act of hope in a promised future.  I bought and planted that rose in the hopes of what it would become one day when it did blossom, but not that I got it because of what it had done already.  There had not been any blossoms yet to wow me or grab my attention.  There was only its thorny sticks and some leaves, and with it, my self-made promise that this would be my rosebush.  But that was it.

The truth now—you are the rose bush.

You are the rose bush, and so am I.  And God is the One who has bought us, claimed us, and chosen us from among a greenhouse full of shelves.  In Christ, God the Father saw us when all we had to our credit was the scratching and wounding of Jesus.  All there was on our record were thorns—and that is hardly positive.  But God chose us anyhow.  Before we had done a good deed.  Before we had prayed any prayers, sung any hymns, or made any decisions for Jesus, Jesus had made a decision for us.  He chose us—as we were, as we are, and yet also with a vision of what we might become because of our chosen-ness.  And so, from before the foundation of the world—before we had even been planted in the soil of God’s good earth—God determined to claim us, to love us, and to cultivate beauty and life in us.  You could call it a promise Christ made with himself—after all, we weren’t on the scene yet even to hear it!  It was a promise made over us even when all we had to offer were our thorns, and yet the promise itself planted us securely in the household of God so that we would put forth blossoms in time.  It was a promise of a future, into which we are being pulled.

This is what the gospel of Jesus is all about—how God’s love chose us in Christ before we had done a thing, and how that love makes it possible for us to become something more than brittle branches and thorns. Love creates that future for us, because God makes possibilities open for us that we could not have arranged for ourselves.  “My song is love unknown, my Savior’s love for me—love to the loveless shown, that they might lovely be,” goes the old hymn.  Sounds like the way God buys rose bushes.

Now, a second bit of truth is in order—it is a humbling thing to recognize that you have been chosen apart from anything you did or didn’t do.  And it can be a difficult thing for us proud, independently-minded people to allow ourselves to be loved that way, and to know that it depends not on our behavior or our being perfect peaches, but on God’s self-sworn promise to love our thorns into roses.

This is how you and I have been loved—from before time began, with a vision for the future of how Mercy would make us blossom.

This is how you are loved still—right at this very moment, as I write these words and at whatever time you read them.

This is how you will be loved always—what will you let that love do for you, in you, and through you today?

Lord God, we can scarcely take in the beauty and breadth of your love for us.  But as we find ourselves found by your sovereign and gracious love, let us be changed by the power of your love.  Make us to blossom, as you have known all along that we could.

Reaching Finish

Reaching Finish--October 20, 2017

"The end of all things is near; therefore be serious and discipline yourselves for the sake of your prayers. Above all maintain constant love for one another, for love covers a multitude of sins. Be hospitable to one another without complaining." [1 Peter 4:7-9]

My kids love to do the mazes on the back of the kids' placemats when we go out to eat at a sit-down restaurant ("fancy restaurant," to them means, "crayons provided").  They'll play tic-tac-toe, or the dot-game, or color in the pictures, too, but I was noticing the other day as my son and daughter both were asking their mommy to help them with the maze.  My daughter does mazes in a curious turn-taking sort of way, where she'll trace a path for a while, and then stop and tell someone else, "Your turn to keep going..." so that even a maze becomes a team effort.  If their mommy comes to a wrong turn, she'll point it out and say, "I stopped here, because the path became a dead end.  You can start over here..." and then she'll redirect the kids to pick up in the middle again.

So the other day, my daughter is doing another of these mazes tag-team style, and she looks up and says, "Mommy, I came to another dead end.  Your turn."  And the maternal reply was, "Oh, honey--no, you came to the finish of the maze!  Good for you!  This isn't a dead end--this is the finish!  You did it!"

Well, that was good news for my daughter, but beyond that, it was a moment to learn an important distinction.  The finish of a maze isn't a sad thing, or a loss, or something to be avoided--it is the point at which a maze's journey is complete.  The "finish" of a maze, like the finish line of a race, is the intended goal toward which you were headed all along.  It is not a dead end, not at all--it is, in a sense, I guess, more of a "living" end, an end which is reached as the fulfillment, the consummation, of something.  It is, in a word, the point of the whole exercise.  The "point" of a maze is to get to the finish, like the "point" of a jigsaw puzzle is to put the pieces all together into the finished picture of the dogs playing poker, much like the "point" of chopping and cooking and simmering raw ingredients is to create a finished (and therefore edible) meal.  The "point" of a seed is to sprout, grow, blossom, and then make new seeds, which look like an ending but are really beginnings all over again. These all mark "end" points, but they are not "dead ends."  They are marks of completion--they carry a sense of fullness, of having reached the point they were intended for all along.

All that important distinction is carried in the difference between calling something a "dead end" (or even just an "end") versus calling it the "finish" or the "goal."  And all of that, learnable on the back of the placemat at Eat-n-Park.

The difference is critical if we are going to read these verses from what we call First Peter anywhere close to correctly.  We hear those opening words, "The end of all things is near," and a shiver might go down our backs, while we tremble in fear.  Oh no!  The END?  The end of--ALL things?  That sounds horrible--that sounds scary!  That sounds so... final!

Except that when First Peter uses the word that gets translated "end" here, it isn't at all a dead end.  It isn't the idea of throwing something away, or destroying or punishing.  The word is the Greek "telos," which means something more like "completion," or "fulfillment," like "finish line" or like "goal."  It is the destination at which you have been journeying all along that you finally reach after a long trip--which is to say, it feels like home.  A "telos" isn't something to be sad about, any more than you would be sad when you finish the jigsaw puzzle or the meal you have just been cooking is finally ready to eat.  The telos is what it means to see all your hard work finally pay off, to see the project in the workshop finally given its last coat of stain, to see the smiles of satisfied family members eating the soup you made, to hear someone say, "You made a difference here."  

And so, when First Peter says it, the feeling is not meant to be like a closeout sale from the store at the mall that is closing up shop, but more like finally arriving at what the destination has been all along.  It's less like, "The end of all things is nigh--be afraid!" and more like, "Everything is heading toward completion--this is what we have been waiting for!"  It does beg the question why our brains tend to assume this is something to be scared of, when the author himself doesn't seem to be freaking out.  He does take his sentence seriously, and he takes the idea of getting to witness all of creation heading toward its final fulfillment and purpose as something pretty significant to get to be a part of.  But he's not afraid--more like, when you know that the moment of getting to watch the century plant blossoming is getting close, you want to have your eyes peeled.

Heard in the right frame of mind, then, First Peter says something more like, "The goal of all creation is finally getting close--so pay attention and live like every day and every moment matters!"  And when you see it that way, then the next sentence finally makes sense: "above all maintain constant love for one another."  That's because, as we've seen earlier this week, the only thing that really lasts, the only thing that really endures, is love.  Not sentimentality.  Not romance.  Not the socially-constructed insistence that everyone needs to be squeezed into a cookie cutter family with a husband, wife, two-point-five kids and a dog living behind a white picket fence.  But real and genuine love--the conscious choice to do good to the other, regardless of what you get in return or whether you like the other at the moment, the willful practice of compassion when apathy is easier, the determined decision to give yourself away for the sake of another--this is all that ever really lasts in the universe.  Because--and this is the beauty of it really--such love is really the goal of the universe in the first place.  Love is the reason for our creation, and love is what we were intended for.  Love is the Source, and Love is the destination of all things.  Love is the finished jigsaw puzzle, and love is the picture of the dogs playing poker on it when all the pieces are assembled.  Love is the why, the goal, the completion of all creation, so that, as another biblical writer put it, "God may be all in all."

And so in light of that promised future, we practice love.  For one another, sure.  For outsiders, yes also.  For strangers--them, as well.  We know that, too, because when First Peter gets to describing what this "constant love" looks like, the next thought in the train is "being hospitable," which in the Greek is something more literally like, "welcoming the stranger."  

That's what we are called to be about today: the conscious, intentional, radical practice of love.  We will love the people who are like us.  We will love the people who are not like us.  We will love the people with whom we see eye to eye. We will go out of our way to do good to people with whom we strongly disagree.  We will go on the record as people led by Jesus to welcome the stranger, and we will take the time to practice compassion to the people it is easy to be kind to, as well as the people who do nothing but get under our skin.  We do this, not because it is easy, but simply because the finish line, the goal, the destination of all things is nearer and nearer....

...and the goal of this creation in which we find ourselves is love.

Live today like you are walking toward that goal. Live like it's coming toward all of us.

Lord God, pull us toward your intended telos for all creation, and make us to live in your kind of all-embracing love.

A Matter of Trust

A Matter of Trust--October 19, 2017

[Jesus said:] "Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father's house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and I will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also." [John 14:1-3]

Really, the question is whether Jesus is trustworthy or not.

Honestly, that's what this all comes down to--the whole of our hope in God's future, the whole way of life we are drawn into now--it all comes down to whether we trust that Jesus knows what he is talking about, and that Jesus actually means what he says. If Jesus is the sort of person who tells the truth, we are more likely to be able to rely on what he says and live in light of the future he promises.  But if Jesus is the sort who makes wild and unverifiable claims that have to be walked back the next day by backpedaling disciples and official messianic spokespersons, then we would be foolish to stake our lives on his way of living in the world.  If Jesus is the sort who just sort of fires off big talk in a shoot-from-the-hip sort of way, whose words don't mean anything or have any grounding in reality, well, then, we shouldn't listen or believe him when he says that he will gather anybody to himself beyond the reign of death.  We should just ignore him and leave him alone in that case, because you can't seriously devote any of your attention to the kind of voice that just blurts out nonsense and hopes you will forget about it later.

This might seem obvious for a moment--after all, religious people are "supposed" to automatically trust Jesus and what he says. But think for a moment about it: we are so used to it anymore when voices claim to have "authority" and then reveal they aren't reliable.  We all know what it's like to know someone who talks a good game, but never actually follows through... or makes a claim, and then never has the facts to back it up.  We all know what it's like to be let down by someone you put your trust in, who then turned out not to mean what they said, or shouldn't have promised what couldn't be guaranteed, or simply was hoping you would forget they had ever made a commitment.

There's a famous argument of C. S. Lewis from his Mere Christianity about Jesus, one that's often called the Lunatic-Liar-Lord trilemma.  The gist is that someone who says the things that Jesus says, like here in John 14 about having the authority to offer life beyond the grip of death, can only be one of three things: either a lunatic (that is, he's insane like someone who thinks he is Napoleon or a sea cucumber), or he is a liar (that is, someone who deliberately deceives people into thinking he has power over death when he knows full well that he doesn't), or, Lewis says, he must be who he says he is: the Lord himself.  Lewis' point, ultimately, is that we don't have the option of just saying, "Jesus was a fine moral teacher, and that's all," or "Jesus was a respectable Jewish rabbi who didn't want anything more than to teach people to be nice," because Jesus himself doesn't allow that choice.  You don't say things like, "I will come again and take you to myself" about life after crucifixion, if you are just being a nice religious teacher.  You don't get to claim that you in your very person are embodying the Kingdom of God if you are just a respectable teacher of morals.  Jesus keeps saying things that either make him crazy, a con-man, or the Christ.

Now, that said, sometimes I wonder if, in this day and age of ours, we need to add a fourth option to Lewis' argument.  Perhaps we need to ask whether Jesus is not a Lunatic or a Liar, but that other unique phenomenon of our day, the Loudmouth.  Unlike, say, the Liar, who knows what the truth is and cares what the truth is, but tries to hornswoggle you to believe a deception, and unlike say, the Lunatic, who is so detached from reality that he doesn't know what is or isn't real, the Loudmouth is the figure who blurts things out without even caring whether they are grounded in the truth or not.  And because we now live in the era, not only of twenty-four-hour-a-day news channels that have to fill their airwaves with something, but also the era of social media when we are constantly being manipulated by stories, accounts, and messages that turn out to be either partially or completely unfactual but still get passed along and shared because we want them to be true to reinforce our picture of the world, it is now possible to be a Loudmouth who doesn't care if what he says is true or false or whatever.  He just says it, and then blurts out the next thing to make you forget (or at least to stop asking about) whatever the last thing was.

This, maybe, is the pressing question for us in the age of social media and reality TV: can we trust Jesus to tell us the truth about the future he promises us, or is he just one more in a long line of Loudmouths, who just say things without thinking that those words have any consequences?  

That's a vital, life-changing question to ask, because honestly, Jesus doesn't just make claims about an afterlife, but Jesus' statements about God's promised future also dramatically affect what we do with this day, this year, this life.  Take the well-known story Jesus tells that we often call "The Sheep and the Goats."  When Jesus imagines a future moment when it is revealed that loving the people on the margins (the hungry, the thirsty, the naked, the prisoner, the sick, etc.) is received as loving him, the question to ask is, "Can we trust him on that?"  After all, if Jesus is just saying stuff because he loves the sound of his own voice, or making these big claims because he wants to distract attention from something else, we could just as easily spend our lives doing something different.  But if Jesus really knows what he is talking about, and if Jesus really is tapping into the truth when he says, "As you did it to the least of these, you did it to me," then claims are made on our lives.  We really will spend our lives, our energies, our money, and our time differently.

For that matter, too, if Jesus is just being a Loudmouth bloviating about things without caring whether it's true or not, then we dare not live now like there is the promise of life beyond death, and we dare not ever take risks with our own lives because we'll be so afraid that something bad might happen and our lives would be unfixable.  If Jesus is just a Loudmouth, we don't have to take his words seriously, and we don't have to actually listen to him--he can just be our figurehead, or our Cosmic used car salesman.  If Jesus is just occupying the role of Loudmouth, and if we know he doesn't really mean anything that he says, we can make him mean anything we like and turn Jesus into our mascot to pretend he endorses whatever we want him to endorse. 

This is actually, I think, what makes the Loudmouth possibility even scarier than the "Liar" or "Lunatic" figures of C. S. Lewis' original argument--at least with both the Liar and the Lunatic, there is some underlying commitment to something that is real, that you could check a liar or a lunatic against.  If a person believes he is Louis XIV, there are ways to either confirm or deny that (for example, is the person in front of you French? ... and dead?). If a person is lying to you deliberately, you can verify or disprove things he or she says against other verifiable facts.  But the Loudmouth is even more insidiously dangerous--the Loudmouth keeps talking and doesn't seem to notices when the things that come out of his mouth have no grounding in reality.  Much less, he doesn't seem to care--it's only what gets said now, and whether you buy it.  If you do, he's got you, hook, line, and sinker, and if you don't, he's upset that you're undermining his credibility.  In all seriousness, I think that if Lewis were living today, he would have had to put something like the Loudmouth alongside Liar and Lunatic as possibilities we have to examine before concluding that Jesus really is who he says he is... and that he can be trusted when he makes claims about God's promised future.

What gives me deep hope today, in the midst of a world full of Loudmouths, as well as its share of lunatics and liars, is that Jesus seems to foresee that we will need to ask this sort of question, and he grounds all of his promises in his track record.  Jesus knows that any time he talks about something we cannot see--about the hope that sounds too good to be true of a life beyond the grip of death--he runs the risk that we will run away in skepticism or disbelief.  Jesus knows that we will have had our fill of nonsense-spouting Loudmouths who fill the air with their sound and fury, and that it will be difficult at times to know why we can trust him if we have learned to ignore the Loudmouths.  And so Jesus puts it directly to his followers--us included--and puts his own reputation on the line.  "If it were not so, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you?"  That is to say, "You know me.  You know what I say and how I say it.  You know that I am truthful with you.  And you even know that sometimes I tell you truths you do not want to hear.  If you have known me at all and seen that I am reliable and trustworthy, then, yes, you can dare to believe when I tell you that I will come and take you to myself.  You can dare to believe that there is future beyond the rule of death, beyond the power of our self-destruction, beyond the grip of the grave.  You can dare to believe it, not because you have "proof," but because you dare to trust me... because I have shown myself trust-worthy."

In this life, there will be plenty of voices that ask for you to believe them.  Some of them will be reliable, and some of them will not be.  Some of them will be lunatic-type voices who are living in their own world.  Some of them will be liars who are trying deliberately to deceive you.  And some of them will be Loudmouths who don't even care about truth or falsity any longer, but just say things because they love the sound of their own voices.  And then there will be Jesus. 

Jesus is the voice who stakes it all on his trust-worthiness, and who says, "I have not failed you or let you down before, and I have not shied away from saying uncomfortable truths when I have to.  And now I am telling you--asking for your trust again--that I will hold onto you beyond the power of death.  Live today--go ahead, you can trust me--go ahead and live today like I really will hold you through to life beyond the power of death, and make your choices in this day as though resurrection is more than a rumor.

See--it all hangs on whether Jesus is trust-worthy or not.  What do you say?

Lord Jesus, speak your truth and dare us to live in light of it, today and always.

Ready to Be Surprised

Ready to Be Surprised--October 18, 2017

"But you, beloved, are not in darkness, for that day to surprise you like a thief; for you are all children of light and children of the day; we are not of the night or of darkness." [1 Thessalonians 5:4-5]

When you know the who, it is ok to live without knowing the when... or even all of the what.  If you can be confident about the who, you can live with surprise on just about all the rest.

That said, this is one of those days when I want to say to Paul, "Which is it, Mr. Apostle?" Is Jesus' coming supposed to come "like a thief" or not?  Are we going to be surprised, or see it coming? 

See, the trouble is that here in these verses, Paul says that the coming day of the Lord and Jesus' return need not surprise us "like a thief."  That would be all well and good, except a mere three verses back in the letter, the same Paul said to these very same readers, "You yourselves know very well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night."  So... which is it?  Will it be like a thief or not?  

Will it surprise us when the promised future comes or not?  Should I get on the bandwagon right now of those radio preachers on our dial right now who are certain they know the day and the year when Jesus will return?  Should I just not think about Jesus' coming at all, because I don't know when he'll come again?  How can Paul say two things that seem utterly contradictory in the space of just two or three sentences?

Maybe we need to talk baseball for a moment.  In a way, Paul's perspective, and really the whole New Testament's position as well, teaches us to be postured like a good outfielder in a baseball game.  You have to be aware enough of what's going on that you can be ready for any pitch to become a line drive to the your part of the field, but you have to be loose enough to run whichever direction the ball comes and patient enough to know that it might not come right when you want a hit to come.  And when that hit comes, of course at one level it will be a surprise--at least in that you can never be quite sure which pitch with which hitter will connect--but you don't have to be caught off guard.  You can be looking for surprises, so that when they come, you are delighted by them rather than upset by them.  That outfielder posture is what Paul is talking about--we know that Jesus is coming, so even if we don't know when, we don't need to be caught off guard by his coming, but can be living now like the Lord of the Universe, who wears scars from laying down his life for creation, is coming still to put right all that is in disorder in the world. 

We don't know what day he will pick to come back to us, so that heaven will come home to earth and God will dwell among humans, but it will be fitting and right when it happens. A good outfielder might not know for sure which pitch will be the one that has your name on it, but if you're paying attention to the game and the players, you'll know which players on the opposing team can hit your pitcher's change-up.  Well, Paul seems to have the same kind of anticipation in mind for us with Jesus--except Paul is convinced that Jesus is not on the other team, but on our own! We don't know the when, but we do know the who, and that helps us to be ready for what to expect when Jesus does after all come to us. We can be ready to be surprised, in other words.

That brings us back to the matter of the who and the when. We can stand a surprise more easily in this life if we know the person who is surprising us.  It helps to know that we can trust the person (Jesus, in this case) who is going to surprise us, too.  I've been thinking this week about the surprise birthday party I threw for my wife a few years back.  Now while she didn't know for sure what I was up to, she was willing to leave the plans for her birthday up to me. There's nothing odd about that.  It makes perfect sense that spouses would trust each other with those kinds of surprises, because there is theoretically already the foundation of a solid relationship underneath.  You don't trust a perfect stranger to take you out for an evening when you don't know where you're going or what will happen, but you can trust yourself to be surprised by someone who has won your trust and who loves you. (Even for those who go on blind dates--which are a notorious gamble at best--a couple meets somewhere they both agree on, don't they?)  And yet when it is someone you have learned to trust, you can let yourself be surprised much more easily. It seems obvious when we're talking about birthday parties and spouses that the difference in being surprised has to do with trust.

So, was my wife surprised when her friends appeared and shouted, "Happy birthday"?  Well, yes and no--yes, in that she couldn't have perfectly predicted what I was planning, but no, she wasn't caught off guard exactly, either.  She could trust that whatever I had up my sleeve would be good and would be fitting with my character and with hers.  My wife might not have known the when of her surprise birthday party, but because she knew who was in charge of orchestrating the day (me), she could trust that the what would somehow seem right.

Well, it seems that this is the same kind of relationship Paul invites us to have with Jesus, too.  We don't know the when of his coming and the great surprise party that will unfold when it happens.  But we do know what Jesus is like. 

We do know the who, and so we won't be (or at least we don't need to be) caught off guard when God's promised future does come.  We may not know the moment it will happen, but when it does happen, there will be something about the moment that will fit perfectly with who Jesus is and how he has related to us before.  We can look ahead with hope rather than with fear because there is a foundation of a solid relationships underneath already. That's because the one surprising us is trustworthy... and we have already seen what Jesus is like.  Whatever Jesus' coming is like, it will be consistent with who Jesus himself is.  There will be no bait-and-switch. There will be no Jekyll-and-Hyde.  The One who triumphs over death by dying for us will be the one who reigns at the last--he does not suddenly change tactics and resort to missiles and armies and threats to get his way.  Jesus is Jesus is Jesus, all the way down.

That's actually really important to be clear about, because sometimes you'll hear religious voices say things like, "Jesus came the first time all meek and mild, but when he comes again, he's gonna let his wrath run wild!"  You get the impression that they think Jesus has split personalities or schizophrenia.  But to hear Paul tell it, the thing that makes it possible for us to face the future with all its uncertainty is knowing that Jesus remains our constant. Paul doesn't think we have to worry about whether we'll get "Merciful Jesus" or "Angry Jesus" or "Lamb Jesus" or "Lion Jesus" or "Peacemaking Jesus" or "Saber-Rattling Jesus"--Paul is convinced that the same one whose power came from self-giving love all the way to a cross is the one who will reign at the last.  Jesus is Jesus is Jesus... all the way down.

So, as Paul says, the day of Jesus' coming does not have to surprise us like a thief--that is, in a fearful, defensive way.  But it can surprise us the way someone who loves you throws you a party--we who have learned to trust Jesus this far in our lives can let our defenses down enough to let Jesus surprise us, and to trust that it will be just what we have been waiting for after all.

O Christ our Lord, we will do all we know to do in this day to let you in and to let ourselves be watchful and hopeful. Surprise us as you will, Lord, but be faithful to your own good character as you do, and we will be joyful in it.

The King Versus the Minority Report

The King Versus the Minority Report--October 17, 2017

"Then the king of Israel gathered the prophets together, about four hundred of them, and said to them, ‘Shall I go to battle against Ramoth-gilead, or shall I refrain?’ They said, ‘Go up; for the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.’ ⁷But Jehoshaphat said, ‘Is there no other prophet of the Lord here of whom we may inquire?’ ⁸The king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, ‘There is still one other by whom we may inquire of the Lord, Micaiah son of Imlah; but I hate him, for he never prophesies anything favorable about me, but only disaster.’ Jehoshaphat said, ‘Let the king not say such a thing.’ ⁹Then the king of Israel summoned an officer and said, ‘Bring quickly Micaiah son of Imlah.’ ¹⁰Now the king of Israel and King Jehoshaphat of Judah were sitting on their thrones, arrayed in their robes, at the threshing-floor at the entrance of the gate of Samaria; and all the prophets were prophesying before them. ¹¹Zedekiah son of Chenaanah made for himself horns of iron, and he said, ‘Thus says the Lord: With these you shall gore the Arameans until they are destroyed.’ ¹²All the prophets were prophesying the same and saying, ‘Go up to Ramoth-gilead and triumph; the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.’

Micaiah Predicts Failure

13 The messenger who had gone to summon Micaiah said to him, ‘Look, the words of the prophets with one accord are favourable to the king; let your word be like the word of one of them, and speak favourably.’ ¹⁴But Micaiah said, ‘As the Lord lives, whatever the Lord says to me, that I will speak.’
15 When he had come to the king, the king said to him, ‘Micaiah, shall we go to Ramoth-gilead to battle, or shall we refrain?’ He answered him, ‘Go up and triumph; the Lord will give it into the hand of the king.’ ¹⁶But the king said to him, ‘How many times must I make you swear to tell me nothing but the truth in the name of the Lord?’ ¹⁷Then Micaiah^* said, ‘I saw all Israel scattered on the mountains, like sheep that have no shepherd; and the Lord said, “These have no master; let each one go home in peace.” ’ ¹⁸The king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, ‘Did I not tell you that he would not prophesy anything favorable about me, but only disaster?’
19 Then Micaiah^* said, ‘Therefore hear the word of the Lord: I saw the Lord sitting on his throne, with all the host of heaven standing beside him to the right and to the left of him. ²⁰And the Lord said, “Who will entice Ahab, so that he may go up and fall at Ramoth-gilead?” Then one said one thing, and another said another, ²¹until a spirit came forward and stood before the Lord, saying, “I will entice him.” ²²“How?” the Lord asked him. He replied, “I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.” Then the Lord ^* said, “You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do it.” ²³So you see, the Lord has put a lying spirit in the mouth of all these your prophets; the Lord has decreed disaster for you.’ " [1 Kings 22:6-23]

Maybe Jack Nicholson was more right than Tom Cruise ever gave him credit for--maybe we really can't handle the truth.

This is one of those weird, likely unsettling, but necessary-to-know-and-to-wrestle-with stories from the family album we call the Bible that I'll bet you didn't learn growing up in Sunday School.  The story of Micaiah the Unpopular Prophet just doesn't translate well to flannel board and Sunday School songs... but it is an important reminder for us that Christian hope, for whatever it does mean, is not the same as saying, "God will make whatever I want to happen happen." 

All due respect to Jiminy Cricket, but the Gospel ain't the same as "When you wish upon a star... anything your heart desires will come to you....." Because, sometimes, what my heart wishes for isn't good... sometimes what my heart wishes for is self-centered and short-sighted.  Sometimes what my heart wishes for is unjust or unkind to someone else God loves.  And sometimes my heart thinks it wants momentary "happy" when the only thing that will really fill it is enduring joy.  That is the difference between baptizing my wish for instant gratification and the ultimate goal of God's good promised future.

It is true that we are a people formed by hope in God's future. But God's promised future is not the same thing as My Personal Wish List, or the American Dream, or climbing the corporate ladder.

It is true that we are nurtured by the hope of a day when everyone would get enough to eat, and where God's abundance makes all cups overflow so that no one needs to live ruled by fear or scarcity.  But that hope does not mean that God is rooting for the Dow Jones to close at higher and higher records every day.

It is true that we tell stories of that promised day when all peoples are gathered at God's table and the unending Resurrection Party, under the shade of the Tree of Life whose leaves are, as Revelation says, "for the healing of the nations."  But that hope for nations is not the same thing as saying, "God is on the side of my nation," or that God automatically wants my country to win the battle... or that God is under contract to underwrite our wars and give a little extra heavenly firepower to clinch the win.

It is true that we are taught to pray for leaders, elected and unelected, local and national, of our land and of other lands.  But that is not the same thing as saying everything that happens in government is a sign that God supports the king.

That's a hard notion for us to get behind, or even to understand.  We tend to think only one move ahead in life--we are playing tic-tac-toe while God is playing chess.  We have a way of thinking only about the immediate, the right-in-front-of-us, the headlines of a win or a loss for today's news... and we assume that God must be in favor of our instant gratification, too.  But hope in God's promised future is not the same as saying, "I want it all, and I want it now--the big car, the big house, the prestigious job... all the day after I graduate."  Like the old line says, if you want crabgrass, you only have to wait a couple of days for it to grow; if you want an oak tree, you have to be a little more patient.  God's promised future is a lot more like an oak, it turns out, and here we've got these shortsighted little crabgrass wishes.

That difficult lesson is at the heart of this strange story about a little-remembered prophet named Micaiah.  Micaiah lived during the days of the rotten king Ahab, who was--as the book of Kings will be quick to tell you--greedy, self-absorbed, corrupt, and easily persuaded to do whatever other people told him was a good idea (ask his wife Jezebel about that).  Ahab surrounded himself with yes-people, including a whole official system of palace-approved, government-sanctioned prophets, whose job was basically to tell the king that God approved of whatever he wanted to do.  Raise taxes to build a new palace?  Sure, said the prophets, God would want you to have a nice place.  Seize property violently from one of your own citizens illicitly and cover up your shady dealings so no one will find out about it in the papers? (His name was Naboth, and the cover-up didn't last long.) The prophets all promised to look the other way and give their implicit blessing on it... and to give the impression that God was okay with it, too.  And then here in today's passage, King Ahab has gotten into saber-rattling and is debating about whether or not it's a good idea to go to war and pick a fight at a place called Ramoth-gilead.  And once again, the official court prophets all nod sycophantically: "Oh, yes, Your Majesty, Oh Great One!  God will give you the victory!"

And the scariest thing of all in this scene is that everybody actually thinks that God wills for Ahab to lead this battle, and that God has promised a win for Ahab.  Every one of the official court prophets truly believed they had God's official stamp of approval on this battle plan... and it didn't hurt that it's what the king wanted to hear.  It's so easy to take the idea that God "makes all things to work for good..." and twist it into sounding like, "God wants my bright idea right now to succeed, on my terms," regardless of what it does to anybody else.  That was Ahab and company--they took the true and right hope that God will be victorious in the end and twisted it to sounding like God would grant Ahab victory on any given day.... because, of course, God must be on Ahab's side... and God must always be in favor of "winning."

Except... not.

Eventually Ahab worries that maybe his yes-men, court-prophets, and administration-approved religious spokespersons are only telling him what he wants to hear, and he goes to the one voice he knows will not pull punches with him.  Ahab goes to Micaiah, the prophet who never has anything positive to say about Ahab.  (Interestingly enough, the Bible doesn't fault Micaiah for that, or accusing the prophet of unfair bias--the Bible just acknowledges that there was nothing good to say about Ahab, the greedy, self-centered, short-sighted, buck-passing charlatan.)  And at first, Micaiah is just going to let Ahab hear the party line again--"Oh, sure, your highness... I'm sure you'll win big today in battle.  You'll win so big we won't be able to believe it."  But Ahab pushes the cynical prophet... and Micaiah pulls back the curtain with a minority report.  "Yep, you're right, Ahab--the other prophets were just telling you what you wanted to hear, and they had convinced themselves that God was speaking.  They fell for a lying spirit and willingly bought into the deception, because that's what court-appointed, administration-approved prophets do.  Yep, you're right, Ahab--I'm here to tell you that you're gonna go into battle anyway because you're a moron, you're gonna lose, and you're gonna die."

See why nobody invited Micaiah to their parties?

Of course, he was right.  The problem wasn't the truth--the problem was that a giant ego like Ahab couldn't handle the truth.  Ahab wanted to co-opt the assurance of God's ultimate victory and tell himself that God was giving him the short-term win on the battlefield.  Ahab wanted to assume that God's promised future meant he could get what he wanted...today.  And Micaiah said, "No."

Like I say, this isn't an easy story to hear, or to think about.  But it is an important one.  It is vital for us to know the truth in this story, because otherwise we will sell out the good and solid hope of God's real promised future and trade it for the counterfeit of our own personal wants and whims.  And when we discover--as we surely will in this life--that everything on my personal wish-list doesn't come true, we will need to know in that moment that it isn't the failure of God's strength or the faultiness of God's promises.  God's promised future is real and sure--but it is not the same as me getting whatever I think I want, and it is not the same as my town having a boom in business, or an uptick in my state's economy, or even my country's national interest.  Saber-rattling Ahab was sure that because he was supposedly leading "God's nation" that God must want him to "win" all the time... and that was a lie.  God's promised future is always bigger than just me-and-my-group-first.  Micaiah's story, rough as it is to hear, reminds us of that.

Today, the challenge is for us not to sell out the good and wide and spacious hope of God's promised future, which is good for all creation and all peoples, by trying to trade it in for our short-sighted, self-centered wishes.  Don't settle for less than God's real promised future.  Don't sell it short.  And don't let court-appointed prophets just tell you what you want to hear. 

Listen for the truth from the minority report voices like Micaiah's, the truth that may be harder to handle, but is what we need to hear.

Lord God, don't let us settle, and keep putting honest, good voices around us to tell us what we need to hear, even if it is not what we wanted to hear.