Bigger Tables

Bigger Tables--October 30, 2018

"Then people will come from east and west, from north and south, and will eat in the kingdom of God. Indeed, some are last who are first, and some are first who will be last." [Luke 13:29-30]

It is a truly difficult thing for us to get in our stubborn heads and crusty hearts that other people matter to Jesus as much as you do.  But that is the challenge of Jesus: to see that other people--and not just people like me or near me, but folks who come from distant places, divergent backgrounds, and different stories--are welcomed into the never-ending party that is the Kingdom of God.  

It is all the more striking to hear that come out of Jesus' mouth, knowing that in his culture, the conventional wisdom said that only their nation was special to God.  But Jesus doesn't see God's goodness stopping at the borders of one land, one province of the empire, or one national boundary.  And Jesus seems to be convinced that God is making a new community out of people from every direction on the map, every nook and cranny of creation, every tribe and tongue and race and people and nation.  Jesus, in other words, is no nationalist.  And the practical consequence of that truth is the challenge of accepting that Jesus cares about other people as much as Jesus cares about me and my group.

What makes that so difficult is that it seems are virtually hard-wired to think of ourselves as "special"--as though my focus should be on getting and acquiring the most for me and my circle of family and friends, me and my ethnic group, me and my like-minded friends, and so on.  We tend to just assume that God nods approvingly at our way of looking out for Me-and-My-Group First, and we figure that everybody else in the world is just as self-centered as we are about their own groups, so that must be how we are all "supposed" to be.

But Jesus dares us to see things differently, and not simply to put our own group "first," but rather to look toward a day when peoples will be drawn from every nation, every country, every category, and every color of the rainbow into God's Reign.  In fact, like the prophets before him, Jesus takes it as a sign of the strength and glory of God's Reign that it welcomes all such people from "east and west, from north and south" to find places at the table.  It is a sign, Jesus challenges us to see, of the abundance and goodness of God that people from all over are welcomed in and that God has more than enough to provide for all there at the messianic banquet.  After all, it would be a pretty pathetic sort of deity who said, "Sorry, there is only so much to go around here inside my heavenly country club, and if I let in more people, we might run out of dinner rolls."  Jesus challenges us to see that the wide invitation to people from all over, every nation, every language, and every background is actually evidence of the greatness of God.  Only a weak and false idol would say, "There's not enough good stuff here for everyone who wants it, so we have to keep a tight guard on how many of the riff-raff we let in, or else we'll run out."  Like the old saying puts it, when you have abundance, you build a bigger table, not a higher fence.  

Well, Jesus is definitely a "bigger table" sort of savior, rather than a "higher fence" voice.  As he envisions God's great celebration, he sees a lot of the supposed "insiders" missing out because they have missed the point of it all, and meanwhile, the people from "east and west, from north and south," are all streaming into their places to "eat in the kingdom of God" and find there is room for them.  Much like the prophet Isaiah had envisioned a future day when "all nations" would be gathered to God's big feast and celebration (see Isaiah 25:6-9), Jesus sees people from all over being welcomed to God's table. 

And as Jesus sees that future promised day with all those outsiders, foreigners, and strange faces coming closer and closer to God's territory (as Isaiah says it, "On the mountain of the Lord of hosts"), Jesus doesn't get anxious or fearful or worried.  He sees that this is exactly what God has wanted all along--a party where people from everywhere are there.  Jesus doesn't say, "They'll all be coming from the east and the west and the north and the south, so God will have to stop them at the doors and turn most of them away to avoid exceeding our occupancy permit!"  But rather, Jesus takes it as evidence of the greatness of God that all these people are welcomed in.  That is what greatness looks like, if you ask Jesus.

Now, accepting this is hard for us, because as we have said, we all seem to be hard-wired for suspicion of "the other." And we seem to have this innate tendency to view everything as a zero-sum game, where if you get something good, it must be taking it away from me.  We all seem to have this sense of scarcity that there's only so much to go around, so I should get while the getting's good for myself, and then hold onto my pile at all costs, so that I will "win" by having more than you.  We all do it--I watch my kids do it bickering over animal crackers at snack time, and I watch grown-ups talk at podiums with that same childish logic on television.  But the challenge of Jesus is quite clear: to follow Jesus will mean learning to see the world through his eyes rather than through the eyes of scarcity, and that includes seeing other people as of as much importance to Jesus as each of us is.  It will mean trusting Jesus when he tells us that God's Kingdom will not run out of abundance, and that the welcome of others to the party doesn't take anything away from me.  Just the opposite, rather--Jesus is a "the more, the merrier," sort of Messiah, after all.

And once we dare to see the world as Jesus would have us see it, it will affect our daily lives, priorities, and choices in countless ways.  We will be less anxious when we hear of good things being done for others, and will be able to celebrate for them and with them.  We will be less worried about whether there will be "enough" for us (which is already a sort of laughable position to take given the gluttonous overkill of so much of our society already).  We will come to see others, for all of their differences, not as threats to our way of doing things or as competition over scarce resources, but as fellow guests welcome to God's dinner party.  We will start building larger tables, rather than higher fences.

We should be prepared, sisters and brothers, that if we accept Jesus challenge of acknowledging that others are as important to Jesus as I think I am, it will affect everything else in our lives.  We may find our old allegiances do not hold like they used to.  And we may find that new connections are formed with people we never expected.

Be ready, dear ones.  Accepting Jesus' challenge will change you.  You will come to see yourself as one of those faces streaming in from the north or south or east or west seeking refuge and welcome at God's table.  And you will see the faces of everyone else in that procession as people beloved of God, too.

Lord Jesus, enable us to love others and see their worth as of the same value as ourselves in your eyes, so that we can rejoice at how you draw all peoples to yourself.  Stretch our hearts where they have become shriveled, so that we may be full of your kind of love.

Jesus Sits Shiva

Jesus Sits Shiva--October 29, 2018

[Jesus] said, "Where have you laid him?" They said to him, "Lord, come and see." Jesus began to weep." [John 11:34-35]

Jesus weeps.  

He trembles. He cries.  His voice cracks.  And he has no teaching or parable to explain away the pain of this moment.  For this moment--between the death of his friend Lazarus and the moment when Jesus summons him back to life--Jesus sits shiva and only laments the loss of his friend's life cut short.  And for this moment, there are no words.  Just tears.

We who have heard the story of Lazarus before know that there will come a moment, very soon, in the story, when Jesus will raise Lazarus from the dead, and that everyone will be all smiles again before the scene ends.  But this moment--this moment of utter helplessness, of total vulnerability, of sheer lament--this moment is a hard one for us to bear.  

We like our saviors to be active heroes, casting out demons and curing lepers in the blink of an eye, rather than weeping uncontrollably and drawing everyone's attention while doing it.  But there is Jesus, melting into a million tears because his friend died too soon.

We like our saviors to be idealized generic supermen, descending from on high (whether from heaven or the planet Krypton) but keeping their distance. But Jesus shows up as an olive-skinned Jewish rabbi from the Middle East grieving the death of another olive-skinned Jew from the Middle East, as completely human as you and me.

We like our saviors to point fingers at an obvious easy target for an enemy to hate, someone we can pin all the blame for when things go wrong. But then there is Jesus, who doesn't vilify anyone here, nor make anyone out to be the bad guy--he is simply grieving the reality of death.

And honestly, all of that is hard for us.  It is a challenge for us to allow Jesus to weep--it makes him seem somehow out of control, somehow too much like us for our comfort.  We want to jump ahead to the miraculous moment of resuscitation when Lazarus comes out of the grave, just like we want to skip Good Friday and Holy Saturday right to the pastels and major-key anthems of Easter Sunday.  But today the challenge of Jesus is to bear the moments when our only task is grieving, and where the only right words are lament.  Today, our challenge is to sit shiva with Jesus, to be vulnerable with Jesus, to grieve with Jesus, and to hold our tongues before blurting out some faux-religious justification for the terrors that happen in this world or lobbing out some half-baked tough-sounding "solution" to prevent terrible things from happening.

Today, in other words, the challenge of Jesus is to weep with him, among others for the lives that were taken out of utter cowardice and petty hatred at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh.  The challenge of Jesus today is to weep with him for these kinfolk of his, and to hold at the center of our minds that Jesus was not simply an abstract generic human, but a Jewish man from the Middle East, and not the lily-white near-Scandinavian complexion we have seen in so many sentimental religious paintings over the years, knocking at doors while his blow-dried light-brown hair falls in perfect cascades down his head.  The challenge of Jesus is to recognize the presence of God there among the ones being shot at during Shabbat service, just as God was there in the ovens and gas chambers, just as God was there in exile in Babylon and Nebuchadnezzar's fiery furnace.  The challenge of Jesus, too, is to see God's presence at the lynching trees of the American South while Confederate flags wave in the background, decades after the Civil War was over... and to see God there tortured, tied to a fence, and left to die... and to see God forced to flee from violence and disaster and taking up shelter among moving bands of refuge-seekers.  

We do not want to do this, but Jesus challenges us to weep with him, where he is, even though he keeps insisting on bringing the presence of God into all the places we do not think a respectable, strong, "winner" deity to be found.  

So let us grieve today--with no trying to explain away the horror, or to minimize the evil, or to pretend that more weapons will keep us "safe" next time, or to skip past what feels like weakness and vulnerability.  Let us sit shiva with our Jesus, who wept for Lazarus, and who weeps today for his kin in Pittsburgh, too.

Lord Jesus, grant us to share your pain and to weep with you, rather than to avoid or ignore or to skip the necessary lament of this day.

Jesus the Brave

“Jesus the Brave”—Mark 14:41-42

[Jesus] came a third time and said to them, “Are you still sleeping and taking your rest? Enough! The hour has come; the Son of Man is betrayed into the hands of sinners. Get up, let us be going. See, my betrayer is at hand.” [Mark 14:41-42]

Jesus doesn't run.  Neither does Jesus fight.  Jesus does the hardest thing of all when faced with betrayal from a friend and confrontation with the police and the angry crowd: he heads into the danger, into their hatred, and into their smug self-satisfaction thinking they've "got" him, and he faces it with courage and love.

Sometimes I don't think we give Jesus enough credit for that courage.  We are used to hearing people wax eloquently (or preach long-windedly) about the love of Jesus.  But we often overlook how much that love is made possible by the courage Jesus summons to keep his feet planted rather than fighting back in bitter anger or running away in fear.  Jesus is brave.

In his book The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard observes that confessing “‘Jesus is Lord’ can mean little in practice for anyone who hesitates before saying Jesus is smart.”  In other words, you miss something crucial about Jesus if you treat him just as a distant heavenly object of worship or a sacrificial placeholder for the rest of us, but fail to actually listen to his words or see the brilliance in his way of living. Something is out of whack if we think we can confess Jesus is Lord without also recognizing that he actually knows what he is talking about when he speaks.

I would like to add a corollary to Willard’s observation:  that you cannot truly confess Jesus as Savior without also recognizing that Jesus is brave.  Jesus is courageous.  We forget, sometimes, that the one who went to a cross for us didn’t have a death-wish.  He wasn’t trying to throw his life away or destroy himself, even though Jesus knew what was coming.  The fact that Jesus didn’t run away from the danger of death doesn’t mean that he was suicidal—it means that he was, and is, courageous.  

Sure, Jesus went to the cross because he loved us.  But love that is not galvanized with courage often just hems and haws and stares at the floor wishing it could do more.  Jesus’ kind of love is willing to do the hard thing, the difficult thing, because Jesus’ love is not merely sentimental emotion.  It has been fired with courage like in a kiln.  

It is that courage that allows Jesus to head directly in to the events of his Passion. As all the Gospel writers tell it, Jesus knows what is coming.  He can see--he has seen it long before any of his disciples could see--that there is a final showdown looming, and there is a cross waiting for Jesus, where Jesus will lose everything--his friends, his dignity, his life. And yet notice that as Jesus sees it all on the horizon, he does not turn away from them or run the other way.  He doesn’t say to his disciples, “Get up.  Let us be going away from here because my betrayer is at hand.”  He doesn’t say, “Stay put, and maybe if we’re quiet they won’t find us.” And neither does he say, "Lock and load, boys, because our lives are more important than theirs--let's kill as many of 'em as we can before they get to us!"  Jesus' courage is what allows him even here, even in the Garden, to love those who are actively trying to do him in.  Jesus' courage doesn't run from death--not by killing, and not by hiding.  Jesus' courage stares down death and takes the worst it has to offer. Jesus isn’t trying to get himself killed, but he doesn’t hide from what is coming, either.  In fact, when the betrayer (Judas) is off in the distance, Jesus gathers up his remaining disciples to meet them face to face.  So he can look Judas in the eye, even if Judas will not do the same for Jesus.  That is courage.

Jesus doesn’t want it to be this way (you might recall that just a few verses earlier in this story, Jesus had been praying in the garden, “remove this cup from me… yet not what I want but what you want…”).  But that is precisely what makes this a moment to see Jesus’ courage.  Courage isn’t about doing something brash and foolhardy without thinking first, or without being afraid.  Courage is about doing the hard thing, the difficult thing, precisely when you don’t want to have to do it, and in spite of the fact that you are afraid.  That is Jesus' courage for our sake--and at the same time, that is a picture of the courage Jesus challenges us to live into as well.  

Because there is really no way around it: Jesus challenges us to be brave like him.  Jesus challenges us to step into his kind of courage, the kind that that neither runs away (out of self-preservation) nor attacks back (again, out of self-preservation).  Jesus challenges us to be so grounded in his love and his power for life even through death that we no longer have to put our own survival first--and when that happens, we find a new kind of courage that enables us to face anything.  

We find the courage to welcome the stranger--without the crippling fear of "What if there are bad guys somewhere in the mix of people God calls us to show hospitality to?"  

We find the courage to give generously--without the self-interest that says, "But I have to put ME and MY needs first!"

We find the courage to share someone else's suffering--without the fearful voice that says, "But it might be hard to have to go through it with them--let's just watch TV instead!"

We find the courage to respond to cruelty, bitterness, or rudeness--without the need to lash back out, to respond with rottenness back at the other person, or to call names and lob insults back.

This is what we are summoned into when Jesus challenges us to have his kind of courage.

That's why it is worth spending a moment considering the courage of Jesus: not only to help us get a deeper sense of what Jesus did for us in his Passion and death, but also so that we can recognize moments for courage in the ordinary and day-by-day stuff of life.  We are used to associating courage with battlefields and burning buildings.  We think of soldiers staring down their enemies in war as courageous.  We think of the lone student in Tiananmen Square standing before the tanks as brave.  We picture firefighters rushing out of an inferno carrying a child. And these are surely true places you will find courage.  But it is possible, too, that in the ordinary stuff of this day, you and I will be given moments to practice small (to the naked eye) acts of courage that echo Jesus’ courage all the same. 

Sometimes the courage here in the Garden of Gethsemane gets overshadowed by the cross.  Sometimes we jump right to the theological significance of Calvary—talk of atonement and redemption and paying for sins and reconciliation with God—that we forget this all starts with a conscious act of courage on Jesus’ part not to run away when it would have been easier to head the other direction, and not to break out the swords and fight back.  That is, at least to the casual observer, a small action.  In fact, for a moment, it barely looked like an action at all—it would have looked like Jesus standing there, rather than running away or raising a sword.  But that small action was a monumentally courageous choice, and it is what made Jesus’ love go the distance. 

Today, you and I will have many small chances to do the difficult thing, the hard thing, the thing we would not have chosen if it were up to us.  We will have the choice to stare into face of conflict, and the possibility that people will not always like us, or that we will take criticism, or that we will suffer loss, or to run away from them because we are afraid.  We will have the choice to let fear rule the day, or to act in spite of that fear.  It may happen in moments that look very small and insignificant—a conversation you were putting off, a decision you did not want to have to make, a commitment you don’t particularly like carrying through.  But such small moments of courage are often what galvanizes love.  They are moments that allow the Spirit to form the image of Christ in us.  And if we are going to be made to be reflections of Jesus, it will mean that the Spirit brings out the bravery in us.  Jesus, after all, is an awfully brave savior.

Lord Jesus, give us your courage today, so that we can act with strong love where we are.

Pity the Bouncers

Pity the Bouncers--October 25, 2018

[Jesus said:] "But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you lock people out of the kingdom of heaven. For you do not go in yourselves, and when others are going in, you stop them." [Matthew 23:13]

We are the ones, it turns out, who are so hung up on being gatekeepers.  We are the ones obsessed with keeping control over who's "in" and who's "out."  We are--not Jesus.

Jesus, it would seem, shakes his head in disbelief and disappointment that we spend so much energy and fuss trying to keep people from getting into the divine party without our prior approval, when Jesus would just as well have everybody come to join him at the celebration.  The more, the merrier, after all, in Jesus' book.

But we--that is to say, we who spend time in the community called "Church"--we are constantly tempted, as were the Respectable Religious Crowd of Jesus' day, to appoint ourselves the bouncers of heaven, standing at the door by the velvet rope and making our own judgments about who is "worthy" to come in... and who we deem un-worthy.

There's a sad and pathetic irony to being a self-appointed bouncer, too--while you are so busy making sure the riff-raff don't sneak into the party, you miss out on all the fun yourself, standing out in the cold and guarding the line.  At least if you have been hired by the club owner to be the bouncer you know you'll get paid to do that job; but if you decide to stand outside on your own, without the authorization of the management, just to make your own decrees about who should be allowed in, and who should be kept out, you're just plain wasting your time.  You don't get to say who's allowed in and who's not if you're a self-appointed bouncer; you have no authority to make that call.  But all the while, you're missing out yourself on the music and the drinks and the laughter.  What a terrible, terrible waste of a night.

In a way, this is what Jesus' lament and warning to the Respectable Religious Crowd is saying:  "Pity the bouncers, and doubly pity the self-appointed bouncers!  They stand outside the door by the velvet rope trying to keep out people they don't think are acceptable, and meanwhile, they themselves are missing out on the party, but they don't really have the power to keep anybody out." The actual authority to open the doors to the people waiting to get in falls to true Host of the Party, who, it turns out, is Jesus.  And of course, Jesus has made a policy out of inviting all sorts of people to follow him whom the Respectable Religious Crowd would not have deemed "worthy" of entrance to the party.  The Pharisees and scribes are regularly scandalized by Jesus' near-constant attendance at the homes of "tax collectors and sinners," and his way of reaching out to those deemed unacceptable. 

Jesus' is doubly upset at the Pharisees and scribes, then, not only because they have declared themselves (wrongly) to have the authority to keep people out of God's Reign, but also because they also teach other people to do the same thing!  And on this point, Jesus doesn't just pity the Pharisees and scribes, he is fiercely upset at them.  Not only are they being damn fools missing out on the party themselves in order to stand outside at the door scowling and the crowds waiting to get in, but they are actively teaching their own disciples to practice a sort of religion that does more of the same gate-keeping.  

And honestly, Jesus just doesn't have time for religion that is primarily focused on "keeping the riff-raff out."  He has to go and undo all the bad work those hypocrites (us) are doing, before getting back to his own work of finding the people who have been turned aside and telling them, "This love, this belonging, this party is for you, too--come with me!"  And frankly, it just makes Jesus' job harder if a bunch of Respectable Religious People take it upon themselves to tell folks they aren't good enough, when Jesus' whole project is to find the people who have been told they are not good enough, unacceptable, damaged goods, broken, or irredeemable, and to bring them into the party, too.

Now, the impossibly, amazingly good news in all of this is that even when we Respectable Religious Hypocrites complicate Jesus' work, he doesn't give up on doing it, and he keeps on running after the people who have been turned away at the door and telling them that there's room for them, too.  In fact, he even keeps telling the self-appointed bouncers, too, that they would be welcome inside at the party as well--if only they would just quit the tough-guy routines and come inside.  And when we slide into the role of self-appointed gatekeepers for the Kingdom, too, Jesus keeps on telling us, "You're missing the point!  You're missing the party!  Come inside out from the cold--it was never really your job to tell other people they weren't allowed in!  Let me work the doors tonight--after all, I am the gate for the sheep."

The challenge for us today, then, is to listen to Jesus on this one, and to give up our self-appointed gatekeeper jobs, in favor of going into the actual party that is currently going on.  Could we let go of our damnably arrogant need for control to keep the "riff-raff" out, and instead leave the gatekeeping and bouncer-work to Jesus, who is perfectly capable of handling the door on his own?  And once we admit we never had the authority to close the door on someone else in the first place, could we see that Jesus is still holding the door open for you, and for me, so that we can quit pouting and scowling like the prodigal's older brother, and instead go into the party?

That is a difficult challenge, especially if we have picked up the bad habit and faulty theology somewhere along the way of thinking that it is our job to keep "unworthy" people out of God's sight and away from God's party.  And honestly, church folk are often notoriously bad at letting go of the gatekeeper role that was never rightfully ours in the first place.  But let's give it a try on this day and leave the velvet rope behind.

Being the unauthorized bouncer was always a pretty pathetic job, anyhow.

Lord Jesus, help us get over our arrogant wish to be in control of who is "in" and who is "out" at your party.  And instead, allow us to leave the outer darkness and step into the warmth and joy of your unending celebration.

The Challenge of Surrender

The Challenge of Surrender--October 24, 2018

“When Jesus saw that a crowd came running together, he rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, ‘You spirit that keeps this boy from speaking and hearing, I command you, come out of him, and never enter him again!’ After crying out and convulsing him terribly, it came out, and the boy was like a corpse, so that most of them said, ‘He is dead.’ But Jesus took him by the hand and lifted him up, and he was able to stand. When [Jesus] had entered the house, his disciples asked him privately, ‘Why could we not cast it out?’ He said to them, ‘This kind can come out only through prayer.’” [Mark 9:25-29]

The hard thing is to surrender.  It is harder than acting heroic.  It is harder than trying to fix.  The hard thing, the really big challenge of Jesus, is to admit we cannot do things on our own, and that we need a power beyond our own.  You know... surrender.

Imagine you are in the kitchen cooking—let’s say you’re frying bacon—and the pan catches fire.  For a moment, you panic and think the first thing you learned about fires as a child:  throw water on it.  Well, of course, since it is a grease fire, it doesn’t extinguish the flames, but instead shoots up a ball of fire from the pan and now has spread the fire to the surrounding kitchen cabinets.  Your best attempt to put it out has not succeeded, even though you were only doing what you were taught in grade school to do to put out a fire… and even though you have probably put out other fires successfully in your life using water.  But this one is different somehow…

Meanwhile, someone else in the house has seen the fire and instantly called 9-1-1.  The firefighters come and put out the fire with no trouble at all, using fire extinguishers rather than plain water.  They are able to do what you had intended to do all along, but they did what you could not do.

Now, when you retell this story to friends and relatives later, would it be in any way accurate if you ended the story with, “And then I put the fire out by calling the fire department!”?  No, of course not.  Your calling the fire department is essentially an act of surrender—it is saying, “I cannot fix this on my own.”  It is a good kind of surrender, because frankly, your own attempts to put out the fire with a cup of water only made things worse.  But it is an act of surrender all the same—literally calling on someone else to do for you what you could not do.

Now, in hindsight, if someone asked you, “Why could you not put the fire out with water on your own?” you would probably answer something like, “This kind can be put out only by calling the fire department,” or “This kind can only be put out with a fire extinguisher.”

Well, Jesus says the same in the story in front of us. His disciples had tried to heal a boy possessed by a spirit on their own, but their best attempts worked as well as pouring water on a grease fire. When they hand the situation over to Jesus, he is able to cast the spirit out with no trouble. And when they ask why they couldn’t do what Jesus did, he replies cryptically, “This kind can come out only through prayer.”

Prayer, however, is really about surrender.  Praying is the spiritual equivalent of calling 9-1-1 rather than insisting you can fix this situation yourself and put that fire out with only your cup of water and sheer determination. To pray to God is literally to say, “I cannot fix this on my own.”  It is to invite God intentionally to act where God already was and is. 

But if prayer is like calling the fire department, then it’s not your accomplishment.  You don’t try to grab the credit from the fire department after they’ve just extinguished your flaming skillet by saying, “Sure, you all helped, but I had the bright idea to call you!” Prayer is not a technique we use to get what we want, and it is not a skill you can ever master.  It is calling on a big God who is able to do more than our feeble attempts can muster.  So when Jesus tells his disciples that this spirit can only be cast out with prayer, he is saying, “You can’t do this—not on your own.  This kind of situation requires calling the fire department.  This warrants calling 9-1-1.” 

When Jesus answers that the spirit can be cast out by prayer, he is not saying that there is some magic formula to make the demon come out, or that if you pray for a thing 700 times, that will be enough to make God grant your wishes.  The power is not in the praying, so much as it is in the God to whom we pray.  The power to put out your kitchen grease fire is not really in your phone call, but in the firefighters who have the right equipment to smother the flames.  And the power of our prayer is not in our words, but in the God who heals, who moves, who acts, who saves, as we call on him.

The challenge for us--from the greatest to the least of us--is to admit that there are things we cannot do, cannot fix, cannot force, and cannot accomplish by our sheer willpower.  The world around us never wants to admit that, because the loud voices in the world around associate that kind of honesty with "weakness."  But nothing could be farther from the truth.  Real strength is able to admit when we need help.  Real strength is able to say, "This is beyond my capacity, and I'm only making it worse if I pretend this is all under control."  Real strength is required for the hard work of surrender.

We may not think at first that this story of a demon being cast out has anything to do with our experience or daily lives. But on second thought, there are lots of times when we find ourselves making bigger messes of the grease fires in our lives, and discovering that all our efforts cannot make things better by ourselves. And when we do turn to God in prayer, half the time we give the credit to our praying—our words—rather than to the God we are praying to!  Jesus’ answer to us is quite often his answer to the disciples:  our only hope is prayer, which is to say, surrender, of our selves, our strengths, and our needs, to the living God.  It’s not about how much, how often, or how well we pray. It is entirely about the God to whom we pray.

The challenge on this day is whether we can swallow our damned pride long enough not to try and make ourselves the heroes, and instead to surrender to the God who can and does have the ability to work for good when our efforts fail.

Lord God, we surrender to you.  Come and act among us for life, help us get over ourselves and our need for credit and attention.

No Illegal Healings

No Illegal Healings--October 23, 2018

"Now he was teaching in one of the synagogues on the sabbath. And just then there appeared a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years. She was bent over and was quite unable to stand up straight. When Jesus saw her, he called her over and said, 'Woman, you are set free from your ailment.' When he laid his hands on her, immediately she stood up straight and began praising God. But the leader of the synagogue, indignant because Jesus had cured on the sabbath, kept saying to the crowd, 'There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.' But the Lord answered him and said, 'You hypocrites! Does not each of you on the sabbath untie his ox or his donkey from the manger, and lead it away to give it water? And ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?' When he said this, all his opponents were put to shame; and the entire crowd was rejoicing at all the wonderful things that he was doing." [Luke 13:10-17]

The complaint always goes something like this: "I'm all for letting people improve their lives--I just want them to follow the proper process and abide by the rules to do it."

And the challenge of Jesus in reply always goes something like this: "If your interpretation of the rules does not allow for helping the person God has put in your path at this very moment, then your interpretation of the rules needs to be broken."

This is one of those stories I have come to love more and more as years pass, but also one which unsettles me, too, if I pay close attention.  Jesus very clearly sets up a situation where he willfully, deliberately, and consciously breaks the rules (or at least, he defies the interpretation of the rules that the Respectable Religious Authorities have set forth) in order to bring healing to a woman who has been sick and bent over for nearly two decades.  And Jesus understands that his actions force everybody in that room--and everybody who hears this story now, two millennia later--to make a choice: if it comes to it, does our allegiance lie with our current understanding of "the rules," or is our higher calling to assist the person in our midst without putting her off for another day to fade back into the woodwork?  And if we are willing to love the person more than the current interpretation of the rules, then are we willing to defy the official position of the rule-makers in order to make sure that the real human faces are not erased from view? Because that's really what this is all about.  And that's really what Jesus' challenge is all about.

I say that with confidence because Jesus has numerous "outs" he could have taken to make this a less confrontational scene, and he deliberately does not choose them.  He could have found a way to help this poor woman and not have poked a thumb in the eyes of the Respectable Religious Crowd, whom I can't help but picture carrying angry signs and chanting, "No Illegal Healings!" Jesus could have found a compromise, or a win-win sort of scenario, where the religious rules would not have been violated, and where this lady could have been healed eventually.  For one, this woman has been hunched over for eighteen years--clearly this is a chronic, but not life-threatening, condition.  Jesus certainly could have waited a day--just one more measly day!--and said to her, "Come back here tomorrow and I'll heal you, and everyone will applaud me for doing it! They'll praise God, not just that you have been healed, but that you have been healed legally, going through the proper procedures, channels, and protocols."  This would have been a fine way to avoid an "illegal" healing, and everyone would have been happy to see their system of rules preserved intact.  Or, if it were so important to heal this woman that very day, he could have found her after the synagogue service, or told her to meet him in the parking lot where no one else would have seen it, and then again, he would have avoided a direct confrontation with the official Rule-Keepers, who seem oh-so-obsessed with making sure no unapproved healings slip in under the radar.  Jesus could have even just waited for the woman to come up to him and ask for the healing--maybe she wouldn't have even asked him for a miracle that day, and he could have found her on a different day, when it wouldn't have gotten him in trouble.

All of these are clearly options for Jesus, but instead, Jesus deliberately sets this confrontation into motion with his own choice to call to her and heal her right there in the synagogue, provocatively flouting the rules, and refusing to make her wait even one more day for the healing he knew she needed.  And Jesus does this, not naively or unaware that this will ruffle some feathers and cause a scandal, but deliberately intending to do just that.  

And that is because Jesus has come to heal everybody in that room--not just the woman whose back was hunched for eighteen years.   The rest of the congregation needs healing of their hearts and minds and eyes, because the rest of them had grown comfortable with a system that said the rules were more important than this human life.  Everybody else in that synagogue had been taught to think in line with the prevailing logic of the leader there, who says clearly that he thinks the rules about the days of the week preclude coming to the aid of this woman at that moment. And Jesus has come to heal everybody there, whose hearts are getting twisted into valuing order, rules, and protocol over the well-being of this human life.  Jesus knows that when we are more interested in making sure people stand in the proper line for the proper amount of time to be helped than in actually helping people, something has gone wrong inside our hearts, and we are in need of healing, too.

So Jesus has to cause a scene like this, really--because his view is not just on this woman, but on everybody else.  Everyone in that room needs to know, Jesus insists, that God's commandment for sabbath rest was always about giving and restoring life, and never a tedious bean-counting measure meant to prevent healing or helping.  Otherwise, everyone in that room will come to the mistaken conclusion that God loves rules more than people, or that God is more concerned with proper protocol than with the human face in need at the moment.  It is imperative to Jesus that the healing happen now, both for the sake of the woman who has suffered enough already, and also for the sake of everyone else who needs to have their hearts straightened out.  

The urgency is an important piece of the healing, too, because as Martin Luther is reputed to have said, "How soon 'Not now' becomes 'Never'."  And similarly, a namesake of his, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously wrote in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, "For years now I have heard the word 'Wait!' It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This 'Wait' has almost always meant 'Never.' We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that 'justice too long delayed is justice denied'."  Both Luther and Dr. King would point out in this story, as Jesus does, that the waiting this woman has had to do already was evil.  And for the Respectable Religious Leader to try and use God's Law to insist that she must wait even longer?  That, too, is evil, Jesus says, because there are, from God's eyes, no illegal healings.

There comes a point, Jesus insists, when we must decide whether we love the comfort and familiarity of "but that's what the rules say" more than we love our actual neighbor who is right before our eyes.  There comes a point where we need to ask if we are not using "the importance of the rules" as a cover for erasing people from being seen.  After all, if Jesus had quietly kept to himself that sabbath day and whispered to the woman that he could heal her on another day, she would have been forgotten by everyone else and treated like she didn't matter. 

So here is the challenge for us on this day: will we love and honor people more than we do our interpretations of rules and systems of order?  Will we recognize that, as tempting as it may be to put actions off with a simple, "Just wait a little longer... get in line!", that our "Wait your turn" attitude smacks of the privileged position of never having been told to wait?  Will we complain like the Respectable Religious leader does here, and insist to the world that we're "all in favor of people getting helped and improving their lives"... but that it just doesn't matter to us as much as being gatekeepers who control access to who gets the help and when their lives can be improved?  Or will we let Jesus' reply be our reply: "If your interpretation of the rules does not allow for helping the person God has put in your path at this very moment, then your interpretation of the rules needs to be broken."

Will we, in this day, contribute to the power of "what the rules say" to erase people, or will we, with Jesus, insist on seeing, on loving, and on helping the people God sends to our doors?  Will we be willing to risk being labeled rule-breakers, being accused of not caring about law and order, because we are committed to working for good now, and not just when it's convenient or waiting until everyone thinks it's a good idea?

Will we love our neighbors more than we love the safety of looking like we are staying inside the lines?

That is what Jesus challenges us to on this day.  What shall we say?

Lord Jesus, enable us to love you more than our understanding of the rules... and to love the people you send across our path more than getting to be gatekeepers.

The Gospel Monkeywrench

The Gospel Monkeywrench--October 19, 2018

[Jesus said:] "If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that go you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." [Luke 6:32-36]

The greatest challenge from Jesus is not about moving mountains or crossing oceans.  It's not about walking on water or changing water into wine.  In truth, the greatest challenge of Jesus isn't even about us doing anything in particular--it is a challenge to dramatically revise our definitions of God.  

And this is probably why Jesus' challenge is so hard--we would much rather keep the mental pictures of the Almighty that we have been crafting in our own stingy images, and are hard-pressed to part with them. But Jesus has it in mind to unmask our old pictures of God (or really, of our personally-approved "god") as idols, and dares us to take it on his authority that God is, at the core, the One who "is kind to the ungrateful and wicked."

The reason I say that this is the hardest challenge of Jesus is that we build our lives and our view of the world around the way we see God.  We tend to align our lives with whatever we conceive of as the Ultimate Reality--whether one god or many or none, whether Yahweh or Shiva or Allah or the Force.  The ways we picture the "Really Real" will shape the ways we see and define what is "good," and we will pattern our lives after it in turn.  This means that your theology, far from being the most useless of the fields of study (the way it is often derided these days, as just so much playing of word games and navel-gazing), is actually just about the most practical and most essential thing to get straight.  Because what we believe about Ultimate Reality becomes the way we see and direct our own lives.

Any first century listener of Jesus' sermon here would have understood that importance.  At the core of Israel's self-understanding, throughout the Law and the Prophets and the Wisdom writings, was the idea that God's people are supposed to reflect the character of God.  The ancient shorthand for that idea was God's command, "You therefore shall be holy, as I am holy."  So if it turns out that God cares a great deal about justice, the people were supposed to care about justice.  If the God of the Scriptures was said to have rested on the sabbath day, the people were supposed to rest on the sabbath day.  If the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob liked the color blue, well, the people were supposed to follow suit.  The core idea in the Hebrew Scriptures (what we often call the Old Testament) was that God's character is supposed to shape our character.  

That much was taken as a given when Jesus, an up and coming itinerant rabbi from Galilee, gathers a crowd and starts preaching about God and our practices for living.  Everybody would have assumed a connection between "what God is like" and "how we are called to live."  That much was an already established foundational idea of Israel's ancient faith. 

But the kicker comes when Jesus locates the beating heart of God in love for enemies, rather than in bean-counting judgment or ceremonial purity.  See, if you just take the divine command, "Be holy, as God is holy," as your jumping off point, very quickly you need to get some clarity on what "holiness" looks like.  And to many ears over the millennia, we hear "holy" and assume it's a sort of divine allergy to "otherness."  "God can't be around those sinners," the Respectable Religious Crowd said: "God would be tainted by their wickedness, and God can't be in the presence of sin!"  They talked like the Almighty would break out in hives if God were caught sitting next to someone with an overdue library book. They talked about God's holiness like it was lactose intolerance--a weakness on God's part that made God unable to bear the company of sinners. The Respectable Religious Crowd had a way of putting limits of what was "reasonable" on their understanding of God's love.  "Sure," they thought, "God loves the well-behaved and devout; but God's love does not extend to people who don't pray, don't sacrifice, don't go to synagogue, and don't wear their religion on their sleeves."  The conventional wisdom was that God's love was basically a reward system for good behavior, and that God could not, would not, extend love for those who were dead-set against God.

And conveniently, the Respectable Religious Crowd took that image of God's kind of "holiness-as-allergy" and took it as their guide for how to live "holy" lives themselves.  They assumed that God was more concerned with how many steps you walked on the sabbath than who needed your help on the sabbath.  They assumed that it was more important to keep up with the ritual washing than to enter into "uncleanness" by hanging out with a contagious leper.  In other words, the Respectable Religious Crowd looked exactly like you would expect for people who believed God's holiness was fragile and needed to be protected from coming into contact with "those people."

And then along comes Jesus... who insists he knows the heart of God better than any of those Respectable Religious leaders, and who pushes the boundaries of what God's "holiness" looks like.  In fact, Jesus just outright substitutes "mercy" for the old familiar word "holy" when Jesus says, "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful."  

If that weren't a big enough seismic shift, Jesus fleshes out just how wide and all-encompassing God's mercy really is.  God, Jesus insists, does not merely love those who can "pay God back" (because nobody really can).  And God doesn't just love well-behaved, polite people... but in fact is good and kind even to "the ungrateful and wicked."  Jesus says that the center of God's character isn't the exclusion of the unacceptable, but the embrace of the enemy.  And really, it is this dramatic shock to the system that leads the Respectable Religious Crowd eventually to thirst for Jesus' death.  He is a danger to their system.  He is a danger to their theology.  And if he is right about God, then their whole way of seeing the world, their whole way of living, and their whole system of ethics and conduct and right and wrong needs to be overhauled.  And they surely don't want to have to surrender all of that--none of us does.  We much prefer to clutch our idols and call them "the one true God" than to have someone expose the golden calves are really pyrite counterfeits--nothing more than fool's gold that we have been worshiping out of comfortable routine.

If you think about it, everything else that flows out of Jesus' conflict with the Pharisees and Sadducees (as well as the Romans and Herod-supporters) flows out of this essential difference of theology: Jesus acts and lives in accordance with his deep conviction that the Holy One of Israel is kind to the ungrateful and wicked--that God's greatest power and strength is the capacity to love enemies of God.  Seeing that love at the core of the Really Real explains why Jesus heals people on the sabbath while others quibble about whether it is allowed.  It explains why Jesus envisions the messianic banquet as a table full of tax collectors, hookers, and undesirables, and the Pharisees are offended at the idea that Jesus would even go to their house for dinner.  It explains why Rome doesn't know what to make of Jesus, too, because the only kind of power the Empire understands is amassing wealth, sending in the centurions to crush opposition, and crucifying those who defy them.  The hardest thing of all to letting Jesus be your rabbi is that he insists on redefining God in terms of radical mercy for those who least deserve it... and we don't want to let him do that, because we know that if he redefines God that way for us, we will not only lose our idols but have to practice that kind of radical enemy-love, too.

And, of course, that is exactly what Jesus sees as the logical consequence of his theology.  Because he believes that "the Most High is unkind to the wicked and the ungrateful" rather than just the perfect peaches, Jesus expects that we will grow in such extravagant love, too.  We will be good to those we least think are worthy of it.  We will extend kindness to those who have not extended it to us.  We will forgive the people who are still holding grudges against us.  And we will no longer set our course of action in terms of "What can I get in return if I do this?"  All of that flows as a logical consequence of accepting Jesus' theology: if God loves enemies, I cannot hold out from loving mine.

If this realization doesn't make us squirm, we're not hearing it correctly.  So let me say it again.  Jesus insists that the essence of God's character is unconditional grace--not simply a second chance to the people who are trying hard, but kindness to the people who aren't even trying, and generosity to the people who have crossed their arms and turned their backs on God.  And if that is anywhere close to correct, then we are bound to practice the same kind of love that puts others first, regardless of what we will get in return, and regardless of whether the ones to whom we are kind "deserve" it.  The entire notion of "deserving" dissolves out of the equation--it cancels out altogether in the presence of divine love.

I cannot stress enough how profoundly different this is from the thinking we hear all around us, all the time.  "We can't let those people in--they'll taint our collective holiness and moral rectitude!" or "We have to get more out of our deals for ourselves--we can't let someone else get something good in the trade that isn't more beneficial to us!" or "It has to be Us First--me and my group!  Do good only to the people who will prop up your power and position, and never help people simply because it is right. That's for suckers."  You can't deny that the prevailing logic of the loudest voices in our times shout out that you have to look out for yourself first, that you are only loyal to the people who will pay you back, and that it is a sign of weakness or being a "loser" to be generous if you aren't getting something back in return.  And accordingly, religious folks in our day want to remake their image of God in that same image--insisting that God rewards people who do "favors" for religious folks, and that God sees the world in terms of worthy winners and unacceptable, expendable losers and sinners. "Why care about one person's life, if it will jeopardize billions of dollars in profits?" I heard one such Respectable Religious leader say on TV this week.  That is exactly the kind of theology you get when you throw your lot in with the "Me-and-My-Group-First" thinking.  It doesn't surprise me any more when I hear those kinds of words on television... it just disgusts and disappoints me.

And into all of that way of seeing the world, Jesus throws a Gospel monkeywrench.  Jesus insists that we have built our theology around the wrong picture of God, and our false god instead has led us into fake lives.  The real and living God, Jesus insists, loves with a reckless disregard for what profit God will "get" out of loving us, without any concern for "worthiness," and with no conditions about politeness or manners.  Jesus insists that the real and living God loves enemies and shows kindness to the ungrateful and wicked... which includes me.  And you.  And a whole world full of us hard-hearted stinkers.

So today, let us take Jesus up on the hardest dare of all--the challenge to allow him to redefine our pictures of God in light of radical grace toward all... and then to let that new picture redefine us as well.  Let's allow Jesus' picture of God to replace all the gold-framed caricatures and counterfeits we have put up in the chapels of our hearts, and let us then hear Jesus' revision of the old commandment to be holy as God is holy.  Today, let us be holy in the way that Jesus says really matters--let us be merciful, as the beating heart of God is merciful.

Lord Jesus, come and remake our way of understanding God... so that you can remake our way of living in the love of God.