The Divine Wrecking Ball

The Divine Wrecking Ball—November 29, 2017

“For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.” [Ephesians 2:14]

The people who run the garbage trucks on our street want me to separate my plastics from my metal cans into separate bins for recycling.  That’s probably a good idea to improve efficiency for their employees.

The makers of my washing machine want me to separate dark colored clothes from white undershirts and tube socks when I’m doing laundry.  That’s probably a good idea, too, in order to avoid turning all my socks pink on account of one rogue red pair of sweatpants.

The same thinking is everywhere: the staff at the library insist that it is more orderly to keep non-fiction books in one section, kept separate from the novels and the children’s books in other areas.  The little dividers in my kitchen utensil drawer are designed to keep my spoons from touching my forks.  The algorithms on Facebook, too, all have figured out that everybody can live in a pleasantly blissful ignorance if people are kept in their own echo chambers of thought, getting only articles, “news”, and posts from people who will reinforce what they already think.  Just all makes things so much… simpler… neater… less messy… that way.

And then there is Christ.

In a world full of seemingly sensible, purposefully placed barriers, Christ is the wrecking ball of God.  The messy messiah.  The One who fulfills his divinely ordained task by taking all of our neat and orderly separate piles and shuffling them all together like a deck of cards.  And this, at least according to what we call the book of Ephesians, is God’s surprising kind of peace.  Jesus does not make peace by putting walls between us and cutting us off from one another, but by smashing down the wall and saying, “My love makes you all belong.  You’re part of this family, and you are blessedly stuck with each other!” 

Parents may well separate their arguing children from one another for a while, by sending them to their own rooms, but that’s not peace.  That’s at best a cease-fire, and it is neither a long-term strategy nor a real solution.  It just lets brother and sister keep fuming at each other from a distance.  Believe me—the stewing bitterness keeps on simmering, and sometimes the shouting keeps on going with a hallway between them.  Separation isn’t peace—it is sometimes the least-worst option, if it is what keeps two warring siblings, or two warring sides, cooled down enough to think rationally.  But separation is not peace. Genuine peace comes when I am able to embrace the ones I use to feel hostility toward, and they embrace me honestly, too.

That means peace is decidedly messy.  The breaking down of walls always is.

But it might just take us aback to consider that this is precisely what the book of Ephesians is daring to say about Christ.  Christ is messy.  Christ has broken down the wall that kept humanity separated into orderly piles.  Christ brings this kind of peace… and this is what God intended all along in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.  

In the first century, the division in mind was the separation between “Jew” and “Gentile,” within the Christian community, categories which brought with them all sorts of differences in language, culture, background, and original religion.  The early church truly wrestled with the question of whether one had to become Jewish first in order to belong to the body of Christ—did you have to keep kosher, have your sons circumcised, and follow all of the other instructions of the Torah, or could you keep your old customs, diet, language, and culture and be a Christian?

I’ll be honest with you here—it would have been a lot less messy if the answer had just been, “Yes, you have to keep all of those regulations and leave behind the old culture if you want to be a Christian.” It would have kept things uniform, regular, orderly, and streamlined.  No exceptions, no variation, no different categories—just everybody having to learn the same religious customs, speak the same religious language, and follow the same daily regimen.  There would only have been one pile—but it would have been homogenous… and therefore, nice and tidy still.  Instead, Ephesians says, God did the messy thing. Christ broke down the barrier that separated Jewish and Gentile followers of Jesus, and Christ allowed them to both coexist, and to stay in the same one collective pile.  That meant—inevitably—the Christian church has had to live, from the beginning, with the messier arrangement of people who speak different languages, wear their hair in different styles, eat different foods, come from different countries, have different complexions and shades of color in their skin, and even think differently on big questions.  And it means that—by God’s design and intention—God deliberately chose not to avoid all of that mess, but rather to break the old barriers down.

This is how God does things. Our history as human beings is marked by time after time of separating in the name of neatness—keeping “white” water fountains away from “colored” water fountains… keeping “undesirables” out of “our nice neighborhoods”… keeping my mind from ever having to digest a piece of information it didn’t already agree with.  But God has never been fooled into thinking that you could have “separate but equal” or even “separate but peaceable.”  Peace does not come from putting spoons in a separate compartment from forks.  Real peace comes when we are brought face to face with “the other”—as messy as that makes things—and learning truly to listen to one another, knowing that God already says we all belong because of Christ.

I wonder—what differences would it make in this day for you, to consider the way God has chosen to make peace, versus the way we tend to settle for “order” and “neatness”?  What barriers around you might need a wrecking ball?  What ways have we continued to keep ourselves separated when God has put us all in the same pile?

What could be different… starting today?

Without Entitlements

Without Entitlements--November 27, 2017

"You yourselves know, brothers and sisters, that our coming to you was not in vain, but through we had already suffered and been shamefully mistreated at Philippi, as you know, we had courage in our God to declare to you the gospel of God in spite of great opposition." [1 Thessalonians 2:1-2]

Contrary to popular Christian opinion, the followers of Jesus never got free passes.  Being truthful about that fact may clear one of the bigger hurdles that gets the church tangled up and tripping over its own feet these days.  We never got free passes, and we are not promised or owed entitlements, either.

In our place and time (really, ever since Constantine), it is pretty common for the Respectable Religious Crowd to expect the culture around us to make a special place for Christians because we are, or have been, the majority of the population in this country.  We find religious-sounding folks getting upset when non-Christians refer to events in December as "Holiday" events rather than "Christmas" events, even if they don't share our belief in Christ (and even when the events in question have nothing to do with Jesus--after all, what about an appliance sale really has to do with the birth of our Lord?).  We find folks getting really mad if someone can't put cross-shaped monuments or displays of the Jewish/Christian Ten Commandments on public grounds (and yet no one seems to think it could compromise the meaning of the cross or the commandments to have them associated with power-wielding governments).  People who remember an earlier generation when blue laws kept most stores and activities closed on Sundays now get upset when the rest of the world does not automatically make its schedule around the Christian holy day (meanwhile how many of those same suddenly devout folks don't bat an eye when their kids have soccer games on Sunday mornings?).  In other words, we tend to have a belief that it should be easy for us to be Christians in our culture, and that everybody else around us, while free to have whatever faith they want, should be flexible around our wants and calendars.  We expect free passes and entitlements, in other words. We expect things to be neat and tidy for ourselves.  

Historically, though, that's just now how Christianity was birthed.  Here in the letter that we call First Thessalonians, Paul makes that clear. Paul knew that his faith in Jesus was going to make things messier for him, not simpler, and that it would be more difficult rather than less to live by the upside down values of Jesus.  But he never expected, much less demanded, that the world around him had to give him special treatment because he was a Christian. That wouldn't have made sense to Paul, or to any of the New Testament era church.

Here in today's verses, it appears that Paul is referring to the events we know about from Acts 16-17, where he and Silas were stripped and beaten by a mob for freeing a slave-girl who had a spirit that told fortunes (effectively depriving her "owners" of their income and making them mad over it).  And when the authorities sent the angry mob away, their next step was to throw Paul and Silas in prison (yes, this is the set-up for the story of Paul and Silas singing in prison before the earthquake and the encounter with the Philippian jailer).  And then the next thing you know, Paul and Silas head over to Thessalonica, and there's an angry mob waiting for them there, too.  Nevertheless, in every town, and even when they've been horribly mistreated, Paul doesn't give up speaking the good news of Jesus wherever he goes.  He goes where Jesus leads him--which is always into the mess, not away from danger or complications.

Paul did not expect a free pass. Paul did not assume he was entitled to a friendly hearing.  He knew that he was in store for a lifetime of opposition and that his voice would always be one from the margins.  But he was convinced that the news he was bringing was just so inherently good, so compelling and beautiful and true, that it was worth telling, whether or not the crowds and the authorities made it easy for him or not.

If Christianity is not merely a hobby--something that can easily fit into the pockets of free time in our already booked calendars--then it is worth living out this faith of ours whether or not the culture around us makes it easy for us or not.  And at least as Paul's story makes it clear, we Christians have not traditionally been given free passes by the world around us, because the world around us knew that the way of Jesus truly is dangerous to the order of things "as they are."  If we really are part of a revolution, a movement, and not a pleasant pastime, then we should not expect to get special treatment.  If anything, we should be prepared for the world to make it harder for us bring the news of Jesus.  After all, following Jesus will lead us to seriously question our economics, our politics, our personal comfort and its cost to others, and how much of ourselves we give up to technology.  Paul and Silas were beaten and stripped at the decree of the authorities because their actions to liberate the slave-girl cost her owners a profit.  And the world around us, enamored as it is with profits, is always going to have trouble with Christians who question whether our piles of money are worth our devotion.  The world around us is always going to be upset when we go around announcing that the emperor is wearing no clothes.  That's how it has always been for us.

I had a professor in seminary who once asked in a sermon, "Can Christianity survive in times of persecution?  Certainly--we have plenty of evidence from 2,000 years of history that the church even thrives at the times and places where it is pressed the hardest.  But can Christianity survive in times of comfort?  That is much more in doubt."  If we spend our time and energy fussing that the world has not given us free passes or preferred status in the public square, and spouting angry words that we have not been given special entitlements for being Christian, then we are wasting time and energy that could be spent simply bringing the good news to people around us and letting the grace of Jesus speak for itself.  And in fact, we would be spending our energy and time serving ourselves by trying to make it more comfortable to be Christians, rather than serving Jesus and others bringing the Good News to people even when there is no special place made for us at the table.

So how will we spend our energy today--trying to get ourselves out of the mess Jesus leads us into, or going into the mess precisely because that is where we find Jesus? Complaining that we Christians are not given specially enough treatment, or simply putting the love of Jesus out there for people, whether or not we get a pat on the back from the world for doing it? 

Are we willing to share the Good News only if we get a free pass to do it, or have we found the Gospel so compelling by itself that we cannot help but live it and speak it, regardless of what the rest of the world does about it?  That kind of witness is going to turn some heads....

Lord Jesus, give us the courage and love to keep sharing your Good News rather than looking for easy outs or the path of least resistance.  And give us the wisdom and passion to see where you are leading us today.

God Picks Losers

God Picks Losers--November 27. 2017

"For thus says the Lord GOD: I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out.... I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord GOD.  I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice.  As for you, my flock, thus says the Lord GOD: I shall judge between sheep and sheep, between rams and goats: Is it not enough for you to feed on the good pasture, but you must tread down with your feet the rest of your pasture? When you drink of clear water, must you foul the rest with your feet? And must my sheep eat what you have trodden with your feet, and drink what you have fouled with your feet?  Therefore, thus says the Lord GOD to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep. I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd." [Ezekiel 34:11, 15-23]

I grew up kind of assuming that God doesn't really take sides in much in life.  Or at least, I figured, if God had a "side," you would know it by who looked like a "winner" at the moment.

After all, the pro football players all "thanked Jesus" for their wins, of course after having prayed to this same Jesus before the game to "get" the win, so pre-teen Me figured that was basically how the universe worked.  That is, I assumed you could tell where God's chips were by looking at who was stronger, faster, richer--and who won the game. 

How did God want the game to go?  Ah, well, God must have been backing the winning team. 

Which companies did God want to succeed on the stock market?  Clearly, the ones that closed higher today, dummy!

Whom did God want to win as prime minister in such and such a country on the evening news?  Obviously, whoever won the election was God's choice--that's how it works... right?

Well, I'll give this much to my childhood self: that sure made for a simple kind of theology.  It was basically backdated religious meteorology, after all.  What did God want the weather to be yesterday?  I guess, whatever the weather was yesterday.  Must be the same with the sports page and the headlines, too: whatever happened, must have been the way God wished for it to happen.  And whoever won in yesterday's contests must have been God's choice.

Except... that decidedly not how the Scriptures talk about things.  Honestly.

It's not just here in this passage in Ezekiel, but throughout the record of the Old and New Testaments, God... well, there's no polite way to say this: God picks losers.  God gets a reputation--and sort of wears it proudly--for being the defender of "the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner [sometimes translated "alien" or "stranger"]" in the Bible, and those are all people who are decidedly without a lot in the "win" column.  God chooses a band of slaves to set free.  God sometimes grants them victory... and sometimes allows them to be defeated.  God allows them to be carried off into exile--even when that looked in the ancient world like the defeated, exiled country's god or gods must have been destroyed by the victor nation's pantheon of deities.  That is to say, throughout the Bible, the God we meet in its pages is well aware that picking losers gets God labeled a "loser," too, sometimes--and yet God picks 'em, anyway.  God wades into the mess, instead of staying up at a distance to only take credit for the wins.

That blows apart my childish theology that said, "You know who God wanted to win because they won."  It says that the God of the Scriptures is willing, and in fact makes a sort of reputation on, specially attending to the ones who didn't win, who were overlooked, who were stepped on, forgotten, or shoved out of the way.  God decidedly isn't just underwriting the ones who win the day.

Now, at one level, I suppose you have to wrestle with the question of why or how things happen that are not God's will.  And certainly over the centuries, there have been traditions, writers, pastors, and theologians who are a lot less comfortable with saying that things happen that run counter to GOD'S WILL.  After all, they say, one of the defining qualities of God--perhaps, they say, the ultimate defining character of God--is that God is sovereign, and God makes happen what God wants to happen.  And I get that point... but then it also means painting yourself into the corner of saying that God picked Hitler for the German chancellorship in 1933, or that God wished for the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, or that God wanted hundred of people in prayer to be killed in a mosque in Egypt last week, by other people who wave the flag of ISIS.  If you really want to push the idea that God's sovereignty means saying whoever won the football game was God's favorite (which is easy to do when it's the home team that's headed to championship), you have to take with it the baggage of saying every win was backed by God. 

And here's the rub--even if you are willing to go out on that limb for the sake of internal consistency with your line of argument, even if you are willing to ride that train of thought all the way off a logical cliff, it ain't the way the Bible actually talks about God.  And this is the thing that keeps poking at me, not only from here in Ezekiel, but from throughout the Scriptures throughout.  Looking to yesterday's scores to declare whom God must have wanted to win isn't the faith of the Old and New Testaments--it's really more of a laissez-faire free-market deism, where God is the "invisible hand" of Adam Smith.  It gives the neat and tidy answer of saying, "Whoever won the horse race was the one God wanted to win," but it also means saying that God can't be the God of the orphan, the widow, and the foreigner, because they weren't "winners" on any page of the paper.

Instead, the Scriptures--like this passage from Ezekiel in particular--show a God who does in fact take sides, at least in some matters, but not as the de facto endorsement of whoever won.   If anything, the God to whom Ezekiel bears witness specifically is looking out for those who got shoved out of line, pushed back, and left behind.  And God threatens "justice" for those who have been butting others out and trampling on their grass.  The prophet puts it with characteristic bluntness:  "I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy."  Yeah, the God of the Bible takes sides, in a manner of speaking, but it ain't for the self-appointed "winners."  God enters into the mess and picks losers.

Like I say, for much of my life, my default assumption was that the God who picked winning football teams must also pick winners everywhere else, and that if you were wealthy, it must be a sign that God was rewarding you, and that lack of wealth must have been God's punishment. It all made neat and tidy sense--you could read the listing of top gains on the Dow Jones and figure out which companies God "wanted" to succeed yesterday....

But that's just not how Ezekiel, or any of the other prophets, really, see things.  They say instead that the living God reserves the right to bind up and strengthen the ones written off as losers by the world, and that God reserves the right to serve up a hot dish of "justice" for the arrogant and overfilled.  It's not just here in Ezekiel--it's Hannah's song in the book of Samuel about how God raises up the poor and sends the well-fed off to work for a change, and it's Mary's song before Jesus is born about how God fills the hungry with good things and sends the rich away empty.  It's the God of the Exodus saying "NO" to Pharaoh's claim that he is the greatest and biggest winner, and instead taking the side of a band of Hebrew slaves.  It's the God of the Exile being willing to look like a loser versus the gods of Babylon for the sake getting through to the covenant people.  It's the God of the cross who is willing to get nailed between thieves while Rome smiled proudly, thinking it had proven its "winner" status by crucifying another threat to its rule. The God of the Bible not only picks losers, but chooses to be a loser, for the sake of being with us... a world full of, well, losers. 

Sure God loves the whole flock, even the stinkers, but notice: instead of God just saying, "I like ALL the sheep," sometimes, God deliberately says, "I'm siding with the ones who got stepped on, pushed back, and squashed by the other bullying sheep," because those are the ones who need it said.  God picks losers.

I will confess that it was something of a rude awakening in my own walk of faith to read--to actually read--passages like Ezekiel here, or the Magnificat, or the Beatitudes, or any of a thousand other places in the Scriptures--and to see that my day-late weather-report theology and my laissez-faire free-market deism were simply not the way the Bible actually depicts the living God.  It is hard breaking out of the neat and tidy system that simply slaps a halo on whoever has the winner's crown.  

But it is deeply good news for all of us losers... for all the times we have been last, or felt lost, or seemed left behind.  And moreover, it is good news still for all those who are still losers, who are told they do not matter, who are elbowed out of the way, whose pasture grass gets trampled, and who have been tripped up by the strong and powerful, or made to be the scapegoats for some bully with a loud voice.  

The God for whom Ezekiel doesn't just endorse the list of winners from yesterday's news.  The God of the Scriptures takes the much messier step of picking losers... thank God.

Lord God, break open our neat and tidy systems of thinking, to allow that you have come to the aid of the weak and lowly, whether that is us, or someone else today.

Grateful in the Mess

Grateful in the Mess--November 23, 2017

"Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." [Philippians 4:6]

Words like these would be easy to blow off if they were said by someone who had everything going their way.

For the guy who just got the promotion (and accompanying raise!), has all his family around the Thanksgiving table (and everyone is getting along!), and had a new best score on the links (and enough spare time to go golfing!), it somehow would ring hollow to hear someone say these words: "Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests let your requests be made known to God."  It would come off sounding like, "Don't you fret, just smile and expect God to give you more."  It would have echoes of Marie Antoinette's famous, "Let them eat cake!" that just assumes everyone else has it as easy, and as good as you.

If that were the setting for these words from Philippians, they would mean next to nothing for us in the midst of our lives, which are decidedly... messier.  They would be shallowly sentimental pseudo-religious drivel, the stuff of vaguely inspirational wall plaques and bland Facebook memes, but nothing to sustain us through the days when we just are sick with worry... when the promotion fell through along with the job... when we are missing someone who is not at the family table... when our days are so packed full of work and work and work that we haven't had a chance to catch our breath.  If these words, "In everything... with thanksgiving let your requests be made known" came from a place of sheer comfortable complacency, they would offer little to us.

But they weren't penned by someone putting his feet up on the lido deck of a Caribbean cruise.  They were written by someone chained to a solider awaiting a capital trial (and most likely, his execution after that).  

That changes things.  It changes everything, really.

If someone like Paul can speak of being thankful while everything else is a mess, then maybe there is something for us to consider wherever we are.  Because the critical difference, the critical thing, here in his letter to the Philippian Christians, is that Paul doesn't say to be thankful for everything, but that we can be thankful in all circumstances.  Lots of things maybe going wrong, but there is grace in every moment of every day, and that means there are things for which we can be grateful in the midst even of the mess.  

Paul doesn't say he's glad to be chained to a Roman soldier, or that it's fun to be under house arrest.  He doesn't say he's thankful for an upcoming death sentence, and he's surely not a big fan of the petty, narcissistic tyrant named Caesar in whose name and by whose authority he'll face that verdict.  But he does know that even for all of those terrible things, there is grace that seeps down through the cracks to where he is in the mess.  

He is alive as he writes.  Life itself, every new day we get, every breath, is a gift.

He has been given the ability to share the news of Jesus everywhere he has gone, and now even some in the imperial guard have come to faith in Christ (according to the closing lines of the letter) because he is there in Rome... and the petty narcissistic tyrant named Caesar has paid for Paul's transport there to await trial.  That, too, was a grace of God.

He has been shown the support of fellow sisters and brothers in Christ who have not and will not abandon him while he is going through this time of hardship.  They are grace, and they are the face of Christ for him.

And he has been given the promise and presence of the living God that he will never be alone, and that the love of that God will not let him go.  That is grace.

That's just it--grace has a way of sticking around even when everything else feels like it's coming undone.  Grace endures.  Grace seeps down.  Grace stays.

And where our hearts are conscious of grace, we cannot help but be moved to gratitude.  That's why we, taking the counsel of Paul, can give thanks "in everything" as well as praying honestly and letting go of worry.  It's not that the world suddenly becomes perfect or we become numb to the sorrows and losses of life.  The mess doesn't disappear the moment we pray, "Thank you."

But because grace seeps down to meet us where we are, even when it feels like we are stuck the mess, thanks can rise up from the midst of the mess, too.  

Lord Jesus, thank you.  Awaken our hearts to the grace that is present all around us, so that we may know you are present with us where we are.

Within the Mess of History

Within the Mess of History--November 21, 2017

"And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father's only son, full of grace and truth." [John 1:14]

I know.  This has a way of hitting our ears as a "Christmas verse," the kind of thing that we aren't supposed to trot out and talk about until late December, and usually within a ten-foot radius of a porcelain Nativity set. And yes, this is verse from John's Gospel is describing the birth of Jesus, or the closest we get to any kind of story of Jesus' birth, since just a few verses later Jesus erupts onto the scene in John's Gospel as a full-grown adult.

But I need us to talk about this verse for a moment--I need you to think it out with me and help me think it through, without getting swept up in sentimentality or hearing it just as a sermon on mangers and shepherds (about which, of course, John doesn't say a thing).

I need to us to spend some time simmering with this passage without the pumpkin spice, peppermint, or egg-nog flavoring we would impose on it in December, and we need to think about what it means, quite simply, that--as John would have us believe--the living God crashes right into the mess of human history, in all of its muddiness, ambiguity, and paradox.

John the Gospel writer is interested in Jesus' birth, not so much as a story to have children re-enact in a yearly pageant, but as a way of saying that the infinite God chooses to get bogged down, waist-deep, in the quagmire of history.  And the Jesus we meet in the Gospels--John's and the other three alike--is one who is able to embrace people who are still tangled up in the mess themselves, often on different "sides" at the same time.  His own followers include Roman hirelings like the tax collector Matthew/Levi on the one hand, and at least one former (?) violent revolutionary against the Romans, Simon "the Zealot." He sits and discusses things civilly and honestly with the religious teachers, the Pharisees, and the experts in the law, and at the same time, he invites himself over to the parties of the unrespectable and unacceptable "tax collectors and sinners," even getting himself something of a reputation for being a glutton and a drunk for his way of enjoying their festivities.  He associates with the strictest of the rule-keepers, and then gets "caught" encouraging disregard for basic rules like Sabbath.  He eats at table with both the very rich and the very poor.  He includes among his followers those who cared about only "Israelites First" and then also deliberately crosses borders to go heal outsiders, outcasts, and Gentile foreigners, without checking their membership cards first to make sure they were on an approved list and eligible for his help. 

These events are not up for debate--they are simply culled from the stories of the Gospels.  In other words, whether we like it or not, and whether we know what to make of it or not, Jesus shows us a God who enters into history precisely in history's messiness, whose presence reaches to people who found themselves on all sorts of sides, sometimes quite opposing toward one another.  And yet Jesus met them where they were.   When John says that "the Word became flesh and lived among us," it is clear that the "us" is a pretty wide and diverse group.

I find this both deeply comforting and also quite challenging to make sense of, because I also get the sense from Jesus that there are times when it does matter to know where the side of "right" is.  I get the sense from Jesus--yes, from none other than this same Jesus--that there are times when Jesus' followers should be able to say, "this is the right side of history to be on."  Jesus, for as much as he is able to enter the mess of things and meet people where they were, also unapologetically took stands and confronted people, making no bones about upsetting the Respectable Religious Crowd, whether healing on the Sabbath, writing in the dirt to the sound of rocks dropping around him to protect a woman who was about to be killed by a mob, or deliberately provoking his hometown congregation to tell them that God loved foreigners (see Luke 4, and notice the turn from v. 16-22 to v. 23-30).  There is no question: there were times in the life of Jesus when Jesus was clear that there was a right side to be on--and (shockingly!) that it was not the side of the Respectable Religious Crowd as often as they might have thought!

And so, we have to be able to say, at least sometimes, that there is a "right side of history" to be on.  We have to be able to say that the Nazi war machine was wicked and evil, and that it was not right or "ok" to let it continue.  We have to be able to say that segregation in our own history was not ok, and that it never was, no matter how many "Christian" preachers and churchgoers all had gotten comfortable with it.  We have to be able to say that the Civil War was fought over whether it was permissible to own human beings or not, and that the God of the Exodus has a stake in that question and does in fact have a policy on slavery. We have to be able to say that apartheid in South Africa was wrong--not just unpleasant or against someone's preferences, but wrong.  There are times when we have to be able to say, "Yes, there is a right and a wrong side on this one," and there are times when we have to find the courage to say it when the emperor is wearing no clothes.  

We live in times when it is easy (and increasingly popular) to play the "what-about..." game, where I respond to your criticism on "my" side by bringing up an unrelated bad thing on "your" side by saying, "Well, what about...?" and creating a false-equivalency.  We live in a day when Moses says to Pharaoh, "God says you have to let the Hebrew slaves go," and Pharaoh says back, "Well, what about that time you fought an Egyptian?  You're not perfect... we've all done stuff we're not proud of, and there's blame to go around on both sides here, so I'll keep the slaves. "  And in the midst of those times, Moses has to say, "No--these things are not just morally equivalent."

And yet... as much as we can see such things with clarity, they are messy at the same time.  If it was the "right" side of history to oppose the Nazis in World War II, at the same time, is there some conversation we have to have about the death and destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima?  If the "right" side of history was to end slavery the United States, at the same time, mustn't we also acknowledge and face the horror of all that bloodshed on battlefields from Gettysburg to Antietam?  The moments at which we are self-assured of being on the "right" side of history sometimes also come with a terrible, even horrifying cost to them.  And that's part of the mess, too--everybody always assumes that their side is the "right" side, and thus that they are on the "right side of history."  But just because the Nazis or American slave-owners thought they were right, had a feeling of righteousness about their actions, or had even mangled some Bible verses to prop up their mindset, it doesn't mean they really were right.  But acknowledging that also means acknowledging that history is often messier to interpret than simply "having a feeling" that you are on the "right side of history."

For that matter, the same God who takes a stand against Pharaoh and takes sides in the Exodus also reveals a face in Jesus that loves sinners while they are sinners and who embraces even the worst in us, while we are still fully of ugliness in our souls.  The same God who, I am convinced, said "NO!" to Nazism also loved and still loves the old German lady I once knew who grew up in Hitler's era and remembered what it was like to have no food and no hope after the first Great War.  The same God who, I believe, led Dr. King's movement to resist segregation, over against the efforts of the KKK and Jim Crow lawmakers, also still went to a cross for the people who wore the white hoods and passed despicable laws while saluting their flag.  The same Christ who stopped the crowd holding rocks to stone the woman caught in adultery in John 8 also loved and gave his life for the angry lynch-mob, too.  The God we meet in Jesus--this "Word" who became "flesh" and lived among us--comes right into the thick of the mess that runs right through each one of us. 

And this is the conundrum in which I find myself (and which I believe we all find ourselves in if we take our following of Jesus seriously at all): we believe in a God who both enters into history in all its messiness, and who does, at least sometimes, say Yes to things and No to other things within that history... within the flow of our lives and the events which become our histories.  And while sometimes it is painfully clear (or should be painfully clear) where the God we meet in Christ stands, sometimes we also are so convinced of our "rightness" that we are unable to see that Christ is there... as well as over here, and that Jesus called both tax collectors and revolutionaries to follow him.  Sometimes we only see what "the right side of history" was all along in hindsight, and sometimes, we are afraid of seeing clearly because we know it will mean upending what we have grown comfortable with accommodating.

And sometimes--at least I will say this for myself--we/I are cowards who do not want to take a step into something scary by taking a stand when it is costly or unpopular.  We might have let the crowd stone the woman caught in adultery, because of fear of upsetting the Respectable Religious Crowd.  We might have left the man with the withered hand to suffer, or given the cold shoulder to the woman at the well.  Jesus is brave; I am a scaredy-cat.

This is the mess that is human history.  And the scandal of the Gospel is that the God who stands above the mess to take sides against Pharaoh and free slaves also enters into history as One of us to embrace humanity from within the mess.  That means even when we have clarity about rightness and wrongness of sides, the God whose face is Jesus loves people who are on the opposite side... without excusing or equating sides and saying they don't matter anymore.  Jesus loves the people I totally disagree with--and sometimes the people I totally disagree with are totally wrong, and sometimes they are right and I just don't see or admit it yet.  But part of the Christian faith is also daring to believe in a God who loves people who are on the wrong side of history as well as those who will be vindicated to have been on the right side.  

I wish sometimes that things could be simpler--that the Bible would just give us every answer to every question and that God's love would only be for the people who agreed with the right answers.  But that is not the way the Scriptures themselves show us God.  No, instead, we get John the Gospel writer saying that the Word became flesh, and lived among us... entering the mess, redeeming the mess, and loving the mess, while also being able to say "yes" to what is good and just and to say "no" to the Pharaohs and angry religious lynch-mobs.

When days come that I can make no progress walking forward or seeing clearly, or when I wish that everybody would just "see it my way," I am reminded of this line of John's--that the Word became flesh, and lived among us, right here in the mess... and he brings both grace and truth.

Lord Jesus, where we are in the wrong, correct us. Where we are in the right, confirm us.  Where we are paralyzed by confusion, move us.  Where we are tangled in the mess, meet us.

Faithful and Just

"Faithful and Just"--November 20, 2017

"If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.  If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us." [1 John 1:8-10]

These are words that I have known since before I even knew they were from the Bible. 

They will sound familiar to Lutherans especially--these words from 1 John were brought over intact into our Order for Confession and Forgiveness that begins worship for us most Sundays. They are words that have shaped the faith of many Christians, and for a lot of Lutherans, they roll of our tongues like our first words.  (In worship, after all, they are among the first words spoken on a Sunday morning, if you think about it.)

But there is something that surprises me hearing these words again today--maybe reading them on a Monday helps me hear them differently than speaking them aloud on a Sunday morning in a sanctuary.  I am caught today, not so much by John's description of us as "sinners" who need to be truthful about it [although, yes, that is true, too], but by his description of Jesus. 

John says "he who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and cleanse us..." (We could argue about whether John specifically has Jesus in mind, or whether he is thinking more specifically about God the Father, but the context seems to me to lean in favor of Jesus here.)  In any case, notice the words that get paired here--the one who forgives is "faithful and just."  That is a surprising combination for our ears, given how we often think about "justice" and what it means to be "just."

In conversation with people, ask them what "justice" is about, and quite often the first responses have something to do with punishing people for what they did wrong, or at least some sense of getting even for abuses suffered from others. Our minds often go right to the criminal justice system when we hear the words "just" or "justice."  And forgiving someone for what he or she has done wrong doesn't seem to fit with that.  Justice, we think, should be like saying, "You can be put back in right relationship when you have paid your pound of flesh," or "You can be reinstated to society when you have suffered enough to satisfy that society's demands." Our usual picture of "justice" is usually punitive, and it is stark in its black-and-white, neat and tidy dividing up of the world into "innocent" and "guilty,"  "good guys" and "bad guys." No ambiguous gray areas.  No mess.  No second chances.

But forgiveness as an expression of justice?  That doesn't seem right.  And yet here is John saying that Jesus, who is described here first and foremost as "faithful and just," will forgive us at the first mention of our sins--no time served, no pound of flesh, no getting even.  Forgiveness is messy--it is an acceptance of the offender while they are messy, in the interests of making a new start possible.  But this is what we have to work with, if we are going to take Jesus' seriously: his kind of "justice" includes forgiveness and not merely punishment.

Well, when we are confronted with a situation when our words and logic don't fit with what Jesus does and says, either our words and logic are going to have to change to accommodate Jesus, or we'll have to remold Jesus to our liking.  So either we have to remake Jesus to be as vindictive as our understanding of justice is--or we will have to do the riskier thing of surrendering our understanding of justice to Jesus, and letting him re-teach us.  

So if we are going to believe John our writer here and admit that Jesus is supremely "faithful and just," then we are going to have to stretch our understanding of "justice" to include "mercy."  And all of a sudden we realize that justice is not about demanding a pound of flesh for the sake of abstract principle--which would never allow for the breathing room of forgiveness--but rather, justice is about how people get put back into right relationships when they have gotten things messed up. But notice--that is a decidedly messy way of seeing things.  In that case, forgiveness is not only "allowable" as part of whatever "justice" means--it might well be a primary way of "justifying" people who are out of right relationship.  Forgiveness, then, might have very much to do with justice--they are not opposites, competing for God's attention, but both part of God's ongoing desire and design to put us (the whole human family) back into right relationship with the divine.

Jesus, then, is "faithful and just," and he shows it--he practices justice faithfully--precisely by forgiving us.  In addition to giving us a much needed assurance when we are honest about how much we have to be forgiven for, that also widens our view of what it means to be concerned for "justice," too. 

We are not forced to make a false choice between being people of justice and being people who forgive.  To see it in the life of Jesus, forgiveness is part of what his kind of justice is all about. 

Good Lord, we ask you both to forgive us of our sins, and to open us up to your kind of justice.  Let us be captivated and compelled by your desire to put us back into right relationship with you, and let us be a part of that work as we tell others about Jesus and pattern our lives after his vision of Your Kingdom, whether we call such work "justice" or "mercy," or both.

The Calling of Quarks

The Calling of Quarks--November 17, 2017

"Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep." [Romans 12:14-15]

Christians are like quarks. At least, we are supposed to be. 

That is to say, whatever we go through, we are supposed to be able to count on going through it with others who share the journey with us.  Good or bad, or a mix of both.  Rejoicing or weeping, or the bittersweetness of laughing and crying at the same moment.  Together.

Here's a little quick and dirty particle physics (which is to say, I'm only an amateur with an interest, rather than a trained scientist, so this could be a little rough if you run it past your scientist uncle or that friend of yours who works at the Large Hadron Collider).  When I was going through school, they taught us that atoms were made up of protons, electrons, and neutrons, and that, they said, was it.  No smaller parts.  No further in.  Well, turns out... there's more "stuff" that protons and electrons and such are made of.  Namely, quarks.

Now in addition to being just tinier little flecks of "stuff," here's a curious thing about these tiny particles.  Quarks are never alone.  Never.  Can't do it.  Can't happen.  They can be paired up with other quarks, or put together with anti-quarks (yes, that's a thing, too), but they are never alone.   In fact--and this is the thing that blows my mind--if you pull on two quarks that are bonded together, to try and pull them apart, it requires so much energy that at the precise instant you would manage to pull the two quarks apart, the energy you have spent pulling on the quarks is converted into matter, and two new quarks appear.  And they are--you guessed it--each attached to one of the two you just split apart.  No kidding.  

All of which is to say, quarks never face the cold empty space we call the universe alone.  Different quarks (or anti-quarks) might be together at different times, but they are never left to their own devices, and they are never abandoned.  At the precise moment it looks like they will be alone, a new particle appears at just the right time and place.

And that, dear friends, is why I say the followers of Jesus are called to be like quarks.  As Paul tells it, we are called to accompany one another--into the messiness of one another's lives. Through anything and everything.  Through rejoicing, and through weeping.  We are called to be with one another in this life, and to let our with-ness become a part of our witness.  After all, how are we supposed to share the news of a God who enters into the mess that is human history with us in the human life of Jesus, if we are not able and committed to doing the same in our life together with each other?

It is a hard thing, of course, to make the commitment to accompany one another through the laughter as well as the tears.  Each is hard in different ways.  It is hard enough to share someone else's sorrow when we have enough of our own, that is true.  But it can be hard to be happy for someone else when they are happy, too, if it ricochets back into our own lives when we aren't so happy at the moment.  But Paul doesn't ask us to do this on the condition of it being easy.  He treats us like quarks: we just do it.  Whatever energy it requires, whatever power or force needs to be summoned within us to make the effort, we show up for each other, easy or not, because that is simply the nature of Jesus' kind of community.  

That by itself will be countercultural.  The world in which we live is great at the short-term, minimal-commitment, quick photo-op way of relating to people.  We do fine with the quick Facebook post of support to someone else, or the banal generalities of offering our "thoughts and prayers" without any actual willingness to actually show up for those we say we are thinking of and praying for. We can all make Sunday morning small talk with other people in the pews and have a perfectly cordial conversation.  But the long-run, long-term, long-haul presence, living through messes with one another, weeping at one another's heartaches and rejoicing in someone else's good news--that is a rare bird.  But it is our calling.  That is what it looks like to be quark-like people: who promise to each other (and mean it) that no matter what you face, you will not face it alone.

Today, there is a great cloud of cross-marked faces who make that promise...for you.  And today, there is someone who needs to hear that promise from you, too.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage and strength to walk with one another through joys and sorrows, and the confidence to trust that you are raising up others to walk with us as well.

The Other Side of Too Late

The Other Side of Too Late--November 16, 2017

“While [Jesus] was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?’ But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’” [Mark 5:35-36]

Jesus has a wonderful way of redefining what is too late.

There are those moments in life itself when it feels like the universe itself is tightening up on you like a vise. You know? Well, Jesus has them, too.

This is one of those moments.  We have just a snapshot of the whole situation here in these two verses (the whole thing is there in Mark 5 if you want the play-by-play), but you can tell even with just these few sentences that Jesus has waded into a mess. Time is running out, and there are two people who need saving.  Jesus had started out on his way to help the young daughter of Jairus, the leader of the local synagogue, but on his way, another woman has stopped Jesus in his tracks needing his help.  Jesus does in fact help her and heal her of her malady, and he even protects her from any blowback from the crowd over an unclean woman touching another man in public.  But there has been a cost:  it now appears to be too late for Jesus to heal the young girl he first set out to help. 

Maybe there was only ever enough time for one of the two to be helped, but now it is certain. Maybe there was no elegant or tidy way out of this mess in the first place.  But now it seems certain.  Jesus was pulled in two directions, had to make a choice, and now he will have to live with the disappointment in the voices of these messengers:  Why trouble the teacher any further? 

All along this scene has played out in my mind like a set-up in the comic books—there’s Batman, staring up at the latest trap the Riddler has cooked up for him, with all of Gotham City in danger on the one hand, and Robin the trusty sidekick in danger on the other.  Will Batman defuse the bomb and save the city, or untie his young fellow crime-fighter?  Will Superman save Lois Lane from the clever ploy of Lex Luthor, or will he save Metropolis from certain destruction?  It seems that there is only enough time to pick one.  That’s always how the super-villains set it up:  there’s enough time to rescue one, so you pay your money and you take your choice.  One will get rescued, and for the other… it will just be too late. 

Now, of course, when Batman or Superman or some other costumed hero meets with this situation in the comics, they are somehow usually able to save both the girl and the world, or the sidekick and the city.  But those kind of endings seem too good to be true—and here in Mark 5 we don’t get one of those saved-at-the-last-minute endings.  We really don’t.  We reach this point of the story, where one of the two people in need was helped, but for the other… it really is too late.  All the sand has run out of the hourglass.  The story has pinched around Jesus and closed off any possibility that both could be saved from death.  By anyone’s rational description of the situation, it is now simply too late for Jairus’ daughter.  She has died.

Except… Jesus still has this look in his eye.

Jesus doesn’t propose some cheesy, far-fetched, just-in-the-nick-of-time way to prevent Jairus’ daughter from dying.  It is indeed too late for that.  It’s just that Jesus has a way of redefining what is “too late” and what can happen on the other side of “too late.”  Do not fear, he says, like a man who knows that there is more coming and the end of the story has not been written.  Only believe, he says, confident that there is more to be said.  Of course, for us who have grown up hearing these stories of Jesus—or even just as we are coming to see how Mercy leads us into the mess in our devotions these days—we have more than a hunch of what Jesus has up his sleeve.

We are coming to see that Jesus has a way, not of jumping in at the last minute to save the day and prevent the mess before it is too late, but of showing up after the last minute has ticked away and the mess is already made--to restore life after everyone else would have said it clearly was too late.  It is the Easter story in preview—not that Jesus escapes from the cross, but that he goes through it, into the tomb, and then arises long after everyone else had given up hope.  Easter Sunday happened on the other side of too late, also, and maybe here in today’s story, Jesus is tipping his hand to let us know where he is headed.

We Christians are not guaranteed that we will be spared from ever having to go through suffering in this life. If anything, just the opposite: following Jesus means he will be the one leading us into the mess. We are not ever promised that when things look darkest—look, up in the sky, it’s a bird! It’s a plane!  It’s Jesus!—just in the nick of time we will be beamed out of having to go through something painful or sorrowful.  Instead, we have a Savior who goes through those sufferings with us,  who meets us in the mess, and who does not abandon us in the face of them.  We have a God who endures, who stays well after “the last minute” has ticked away, who rolls away the Friday stone on Sunday, and who says, with a look in his eye, “Do not fear, only believe,” after everyone else has given up hope. 

Let us be honest: there may be places in our lives where it is now “too late” by any human reckoning.  Too late to start over in life.  Too late to be back at the bottom rung of the company ladder as you leave an old job and go to a new one.  Too late to get a smidge of the happiness you were sure would last forever in an earlier chapter of life.  Too late to hold the kids in your arms who have already grown up and gotten jobs.   Too late to say goodbye again to someone you loved and lost. Our lives are full of "too lates," and so often, we are the ones telling God, "Well, it's too late to do anything about it now..."

And yet it is possible, too, that Jesus will bring an unexpected echo of Easter in those very places, beyond our predicting or imagining.  Who knows what will be possible today on the other side of too late?  What might happen if we dare to go, as Jesus does, into the messiness of "too late" times, still seeking anyway to bring the presence and peace of Christ?

Lord Jesus, your time is not our time.  For all the things we are sure are past redemption or beyond hope, come in your own good time and work your Easter power in our midst again today.