Permanently Open

Permanently Open--November 30, 2018

"And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and the kings of the earth will bring their glory into it. Its gates will never be shut by day--and there will be no night there. People will bring into it the glory and the honor of the nations." [Revelation 21:23-26]

Open gates are a sign of strength.

Open gates are a sign of confidence, of peace, of power, and of not being afraid.

You close the gates when you are afraid of something "out there"--whether or not there really is anything out there to be afraid of.

Closed gates smack of feeling insecure,  of distress, and of weakness.

That's why the story of God's victory in the Slain-but-Living Lamb (Christ!) ends with this scene with permanently open gates in God's new city.

The whole book we call the Apocalypse, or the Revelation to John, is chock full of symbolism.  John the Seer doesn't waste a single opportunity to give us layers upon layers of meaning, from Christ as the Lamb to white robed singers to lampstands and seals and bowls.  Even down to the dimensions of the city of God, the New Jerusalem (which is a cube, curiously enough--a three-dimensional symbol of completeness, perfection, and wholeness), and the number of gates in the city (twelve, which calls back to the tribes of Israel and the new community of disciples that Jesus gathered), every image in the book of Revelation is intentional.

That's why it's worth paying attention to this scene from the tail end of the book at the tail end of the Bible and the way it describes the full and complete victory of God.  There, at the last, John says, God's reign is perfect and complete, so that there is no reason to be afraid.  And when there is nothing and no one to be afraid of, the gates are left open and the doors are left unlocked.  The last enemy--death itself!--has been dealt with, and so there is no threat to God's beloved community.  John gives us this picture of gates permanently left open as a way of saying, "The living God is so strong and so secure that we don't need hide away from anybody anymore.  We don't need to close the gates, because we are no longer ruled by fear--we are ruled by God whose love casts out fear like a demon."

In other words, when John wants to come up with an image of complete confidence and peace, he doesn't say, "And we'll all hide behind the big strong walls and the big sturdy iron gates, so that nothing bad can come and get us anymore." But rather, John says, "At the last, we will finally be done with living in fear and we can leave the doors all propped open and welcome everybody from every nation (a nice touch John is sure to add here), because God isn't afraid of them coming in.  The very fact that all the nations and their rulers want to come into God's city is a sign of God's glory--it is the highest compliment of all that they all come streaming in to be in the fullness of God's presence and God's reign.

One of my favorite places on Earth is a sleepy little town on Lake Erie where my family has vacationed every summer since I was a baby, and one of the things that I like best about it is that it is a place where people still all leave their doors unlocked.  There is no fear that somebody will break in or take things, and there is no fear that our loved ones are not safe.  And so you find friendly faces coming and going, running in and out of their doors to go get their kites or swimsuits, all because they are so confident that they are safe, and therefore don't have to look suspiciously or fearfully at their neighbors.  People come from all across the country to vacation there, and I have never met anyone there who was overcome with anxiety about intruders.  There is a peace to that place, because no one is afraid.  And I think something like that is the image that John wants to give us about how God's victory is finally going to be felt and seen.  It's a community where the doors can be left unlocked.

In the end, God's strength, God's kind of "winning," and God's kind of "toughness" are not found in the locking of doors or in turning away the nations who want to come in.  In the end, God's kind of victory is shown most clearly in gates that are never closed, in a confident welcome to all nations, and in a beloved community who lives at peace because they are no longer ruled by fear.

Now, I know--this isn't how daily life in our world feels right now.  I know that burglars break into homes and thieves come in and steal--even when you DO lock the doors and shut the gates.  I know that this is a world in which countries still invade each other (like Russia "annexing" Crimea) and attack each other (like the war in Yemen), where reporters get murdered in consulates, and where we have all just gotten used to living with a certain amount of fear of the bad stuff that could happen.  And I'm not suggesting you should leave your car doors unlocked when you park it at the grocery store, or that you can leave your garage door open and assume everything will still be in it at the end of the week.

But I am saying that it is worth remembering the future toward which all creation is headed, according to Revelation, and that our hope in God's victory pulls us toward that future now.  We are called to be people no longer ruled by fear.  We are called to be people who recognize that the open gates of God's city are not a sign of weakness on God's part, but the supreme sign of confidence that God is not afraid of anything or anyone coming in.  

We will be people, then, who welcome strangers--to our tables, to our churches, to our communities.  

We will be people who see that strength is expressed in open doors, not in hiding behind locked ones (like the fearful disciples on Easter Sunday).  

We will be people who hear John's description that people from all nations will be drawn together into God's new creation, and we will practice for that day now by widening our circles now enough to get to know people from other nations in the mean time.

If the ultimate victory of Jesus looks like a city whose gates are never closed, into which all nations come streaming into it in welcome, then our lives will start to take that shape even today.  That, after all, seems to be what Jesus has been after all along.

And, as I hope we have seen together over this past year, it's all about Jesus.

Lord Jesus, pull us into your future victory now with open arms, open communities, and open hearts.

Laments, Love Songs, and Hardy Novels

Laments, Love Songs, and Hardy Novels--November 29, 2018

"How long, O LORD? Will you forget me forever?

 How long will you hide your face from me?

 How long must I bear pain in my soul, 

    and have sorrow in my heart all day long?

 How long shall my enemy be exalted over me?

 Consider and answer me, O LORD my God!

     Give light to my eyes, or I will sleep the sleep of death,

 and my enemy will say, 'I have prevailed';

     my foes will rejoice because I am shaken.

 But I trusted in your steadfast love;

     my heart shall rejoice in your salvation.

 I will sing to the LORD,

     because he has dealt bountifully with me." [Psalm 13:1-6]

There's a lyric that's been stuck in my head for years, somewhere rumbling around in the dusty corners of my mind.  Jon Foreman, of the band Switchfoot sings this recurring line, "Every lament is a love song."

I think Jesus is teaching me the truth of that line--to lament something requires that you have loved it enough to grieve over its loss.  To lament over someone implies that you know and love them enough to feel pain at their own suffering.  Jon Foreman is right: every lament is a love song.

But the more I think of it, I would push that even further.  Every lament is not only a love song for the thing or the person who is lost, but it is also a cry of faith longing for things to be put right.  A lament is a recognition that something beautiful in this world has gone wrong, or been broken, or been lost, and naming that loss in lament assumes that the God to whom we cry out cares about our sorrows, and is capable (and willing) to mend what is broken in this world.  

Every lament is not only a love song, but also a cry of hope for God's ultimate victory to set right all that is wrong in this wonderful, terrible world.  Lament directed at God carries the seed of expectation that justice should be done, that the wounded should be healed, and loss should be restored to fullness.  In a sense, lament is the prayer for the victory of God over chaos and death.  Even when it is phrased in angry accusation or brash confrontation with God: "How long, O Lord?  Will you forget me forever?" the passion of the one praying implies a certain expectation that God is both powerful enough and compassionate enough to do something when we feel forgotten or are bearing pain in our deepest self.  The angry cry, "Why did you let this happen?  How long do I have to wait in this tension?" comes, deep down, from a place of trust in One to whom we think we are speaking--otherwise we wouldn't bother to complain and accuse and shake our angry fists at the sky.

For me, that lesson began in earnest, not in a Bible study, but a high school English class. Years ago--decades, actually--I remember reading Thomas Hardy's 19th century novel, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and after a bit of struggling through the Victorian subtlety of Hardy's style of writing, was forced to come face to face with the way our experience of tragedy compels us to cry out for justice and restoration. (Note to the reader: the next sentence is both a plot point and description of a violent act perpetrated against a character in the book--forgive the unsettling nature of what has to be said in what follows.) In Hardy's novel, the title character is raped in the woods by someone she knew and trusted in a cruel turn of events that changes the course of her whole life and leads to heartache, loss, and murder by the end of the story.  And as the narrator of the story describes this crime, Hardy raises the question of God: where was God when this happened?  How could Tess's God let such a thing happen?  Was God absent, or unaware? Unable to stop it, or unwilling to do anything to prevent this monstrosity?  These are the questions of lament--they are much the same as the questions of the psalmist here in Psalm 13.  

The 19th century British novelist Thomas Hardy could offer no hopeful answers--in fact, he couldn't bring himself to believe that a good God would allow any such things, and so wrestled with saying there must be no god, or that there was only a cruel and indifferent thing called "Fate" that made terrible things happen.  

But for people who are convinced of the reality of God, the questions and accusations of lament--the "where were you God?" and "How long, O Lord?" questions--are questions that carry with them trust that God is real and that we expect God to put things right at the end.  Christians are not permitted to ignore the difficult questions of tragedy and injustice--whether we find them on the lips of the psalmist or a 19th century novelist--but we ask them with the expectation that the God to whom we cry out will, at the last, set things right, and restore justice for those who have been made victims and will lift up those who are bowed down.  Our calling out urgently, "Where are you, God?" carries with it the hope that the sorrows of life in this world can become joys, and that unjust suffering is not the end-goal of creation.  We do not get to run away from the difficult questions, but we ask them differently, perhaps, than the Thomas Hardys of history.  We will ask, "How long, O Lord?" as though we really do believe God's victory will come, and that somehow even the worst experiences and most cruel tragedies of life can be transformed, redeemed, and put right.

As we get close to the very end of this year we have called "It's All About Jesus," with this last month's focus on the Victory of Jesus, this is one of those pieces we'll need to remember.  We don't get to tie things up with a neat bow as though everything is working out just fine right now.  The followers of Jesus still suffer great loss, still endure tragedy, and still struggle with our own sin, too.  We are victims sometimes, and we are perpetrators, too.  We are wounded by the cruelties of life, and we also participate in them, sometimes actively and sometimes with passive complicity.  And when we find ourselves entangled in the painful things that happen in this life, we lift up our laments--not as surrender to despair, but precisely as cries of faith to a God whose victory we long for.  We cry out, "How long, O Lord?"  "Will this pain in my heart last forever?" because we believe, deep down, that the God to whom we cry is both able and willing to put things right, albeit in God's own time.  We cry out because we do believe that God cares about our suffering, shares it with us, and holds the hand of every victim as only somoene who has taken nails in his own hand can, and also that this God has promised victory for all creation at the last, when the world is put right.

Our lament is not only a love song for the things and people who suffer.  It is also a seed of hope in God's victory--and so today, we water such seeds, acting and living in ways that contribute to the healing, the restoration, and the compassion that we believe will at the last win out in God's timing. 

Lord Jesus, you know what it is to suffer and even to cry out in godforsakeness, and you know the victory toward which you are gathering all creation.  Help us to live in the tension between your promised future and the pain of this life, and to be a part of the healing you are doing even now.

Overcoming

Overcoming--November 28, 2018

"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." [Romans 12:21]

You cannot dig your way out of a hole by going down deeper.

You cannot spend your way out of debt.

You cannot smash pottery shards back together to repair the broken vase.

And you cannot overcome evil by playing at its own game.

Or, as the good Dr. King famously put it, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that.  Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."  

So when we followers of Jesus refuse to sell out or do rotten things as a means to a noble end, it is not because we are cowards afraid of danger or  fools naïve to the reality of evil in the world.  It is simply that we have learned, following Paul here in Romans, that you cannot overcome evil with evil.  You can only be truly victorious--with Jesus' kind of victory--through goodness.

That's important to say out loud, even if it seems obvious, because the temptations to sell out always sound like they are reasonable.  

"We have to be in a position of power if we want to get to make good policies... so we have do to anything necessary to get to power."  That has a certain appeal to it, doesn't it?  

"We want to be able to do noble things with our fortune in the future, so in the mean time, we don't ask questions about where our investments come from or whether the business we do is good for people now in the mean time."  That sounds like a fair deal, right?

"We are afraid of a future in which we aren't as important or powerful or great as we once were, and so we will give our support to any voice that promises us (whether they can deliver on such a promise or not) a way to keep things the way we imagine they once were, regardless of what it costs other people."  That can sound awfully alluring if we are honest.

"We are so concerned that someone else might do something bad to us that we decide to preemptively do something bad to them in advance to thwart them." That just sounds like basic, old-fashioned conventional wisdom to our ears.

But if we are going to be truthful with ourselves, those are all ways of lying to ourselves and trying to justify rottenness if we think it will lead to something good for ourselves in the future.  And that just isn't how Jesus wins the victory.  Whether it's the temptation to torture bad guys in the name of protecting innocents. or selling out your convictions to get more votes--or maybe closer to home, doing something unethical at work because your boss tells you to, even if it will hurt other people, none of those are Jesus' way of winning God's victory. 

Today, Jesus dares us to respond to the darkness of the world, not with more darkness, but with God's own light.  It turns out that's really the only way you can.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to be like you in the world.

A Sheep Ahead of the Curve

A Sheep Ahead of the Curve--November 27, 2018

"A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse,

     and a branch shall grow out of his roots.

 The Spirit of the Lord shall rest on him, 

     the spirit of wisdom and understanding,

     the spirit of counsel and might,

     the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.

 His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD.

 He shall not judge by what his eyes sees,

     or decide by what his ears hear;

 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor,

     and decide with equity for the meek of the earth;

 he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth,

     and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.

 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, 

    and faithfulness the belt around his loins.

 The wolf shall live with the lamb,

     the leopard shall lie down with the kid,

 the calf and the lion and the fatling together,

     and a little child shall lead them.

 The cow and the bear shall graze,

     their young shall lie down together;

     and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.

 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp,

    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den." [Isaiah 11:1-8]

I guess this means that at some point, the lambs and the wolves are going to have to put the past behind them, won't they?

That's the practical upshot of this vision we get from the prophet Isaiah of the promised victory of God, isn't it?  That at the last, when old enmities are overcome, the old grudges and hatreds and division of the past will be put aside as well.

Maybe that's the most difficult part of this whole scene to believe, honestly.  As fantastical as it sounds to imagine cows and bears, lions and oxen, wolves and lambs, all playing together and munching on grass, maybe even harder to envision is that each of these critters is able to move beyond the animosities of their past.  

For a scene like this to become reality, after all, you'll not only need the wolves to give up eating the flock, but you'll need the sheep to give up holding on to the resentments of past wolf attacks, too.  You'll not only need the leopards to promise to quit stalking the goats, but the goats will have to dare to trust the promise and forgive the times they had been hunted before.  And if goats and sheep are anything like the people I know, that's probably the hardest part of all of this--the forgiving, the trusting, the starting over without sliding back into the same old enmities.

A wise sheep--or at least a sheep that's ahead of the curve--would do well, then, to take that future scene from God's peaceable kingdom into consideration in the present moment, too.  It would be a good idea for the cattle and goats and lambs to be able to see beyond present animosity, and to recognize that there will come a day when these two opposing sides will share the same lunch buffet and eat at the same table.  But that requires the ability to recognize (with more than a little humility) that the animosity of the present moment will not--and indeed should not--last forever.  It requires the ability to act now with a certain graciousness, even toward those who are opponents right now (yes, even if they seem like hungry wolves and salivating leopards), because we dare to believe that there will come a day when our old hatreds are put aside.  That is hard to do if I am convinced that my enemy is 100% evil and I am 100% an innocent lamb.  But hey, if the sheep can do it here in Isaiah 11, then maybe I can make the effort knowing that I am not actually 100% innocent in this life, and the people I like the least or have the biggest hostility toward are not demons, either.  A sheep who's ahead of the curve will at least be able to see that somewhere down the road, the ones I want to cast as wolves will be reconciled to me, and we will all be changed.  Their preying instincts will be curbed, and I will have to let go of the bitterness from my side.  And I should be careful now what kind of words and actions I use against the ones I see as wolves, because one day I may have to eat those words along with the grass and straw.

Right now, near where I live, there's a big strike going on at our local hospital.  People I care about and respect find themselves on opposing sides of that dispute.  It reminds me of the teachers' strike they had in a nearby district about twelve or thirteen years ago, too--where people who sat in the same pews at church were seething with merciless bitterness toward each other on the internet, in newspaper editorials, and in gossip at the post office.  In moments like these, people have a way of waging all-out war against one another, unleashing cruel words and taking petty actions against each other, because they cannot see beyond the conflict of the present moment.  

In those moments, it is almost like we get amnesia and forget what life was like before the fighting--and maybe we even forget that the current conflict will not last forever.  And when that happens, we start justifying all kinds of rottenness and cruelty against "the other side"--you know, those dirty, scummy wolves and snakes!--because we are convinced there will never be a reconciliation, and because we have told ourselves that "my side" is wholly in the right, with nothing but pure motives and angelic righteousness, while "the other side" is wicked and evil.  It's funny how much we can justify ourselves doing when we cast ourselves as the poor, victimized sheep who just have to defend ourselves, and when we cast "the other" as a dangerous, threatening, wicked wolf.  After all, when you have told yourself that the ones on the other side aren't really like you, you can convince yourself it's okay to do terrible things in the name of protecting the ones who really are like you.  When you convince yourself that YOU'RE the "good guy," you can let yourself off the hook for all kinds of terrible things done to the "bad guys," because you can never imagine a time when you might be brought back together, side by side, to share a table together.

And that's the true power of this vision of God's victorious Reign--the one established by the "shoot from Jesse," that is to say, Jesus of Nazareth.  This vision of lambs and wolves lying down together, of cows and bears in the same lunch line at the divine cafeteria, forces us to see further into the future than our shortsightedness would otherwise allow.  We are compelled to see that there will come a time when old enmities are reconciled, when old hatreds are put away, and when I will find myself sitting face to face with the ones I swore were my bitter enemies.

And maybe we are compelled to see one thing more: maybe as much as I want to see myself an "my side" as the entirely innocent and righteous sheep, and as much as I want to see "the other side" as the villainous, wicked wolves, it is possible that my opponent sees the tables turned and the roles reversed.  It is possible that the ones I am so sure have nothing but ash in their hearts actually have reasons for the ways they see and think, and that they perceive my actions and words as cruel, selfish, or wolf-like.  Nobody does evil so quickly as when they are convinced they are victims who must defend the cause of righteousness, after all.  And no causes so much destruction so enthusiastically as someone convinced he's the lone "good guy" who has to take out the ones he has decided are the "bad guys." But maybe Isaiah's vision compels us to take an honest look forward into the future and to see that there is a time when the hostilities we think will last forever will one day come to an end, even if we cannot see how at the present moment.  A sheep that's ahead of the curve will at least have the humility to trust that the reconciliation can happen even if I don't know how it will... and will be wise enough not to use scorched-earth tactics now when there will come a time when we have to graze on that ground together.

There are plenty of hostilities and divisions in front of us these days.  We can feel them between our nation and other countries, within our own nation in these terribly polarized times, and in our communities and families, too. I cannot wink those conflicts away.  But Isaiah reminds me that neither can I forget that there will come a time when the enmities that seem permanent are over and done, and that I would be wise to live now in such a way that I can even look my present enemies in the eye without shame.  And when the ones I can't help but see as "wolves" go low, I will not return evil for evil, but will go high in response.  There will come a day, after all, when God gathers us all together at the same unending dinner party.  And I need to be at least as ready for that day as I am for the tensions of the present one.

We all do.

Lord Jesus, give us such confident trust in your promised victory that we can be careful even in the ways we deal with conflict and tension now--help us to see those for whom we have the greatest animosity now as people you will seat beside us in your peaceable reign's banquet.

A More Courageous Song

A More Courageous Song--November 26, 2018

Praise the Lord! 

     Praise the Lord, O my soul!

I will praise the Lord as long as I live; 

     I will sing praises to my God all my life long.

Do not put your trust in princes, 

     in mortals, in whom there is no help.

When their breath departs, they return to the earth; 

     on that very day their plans perish.

Happy are those whose help is the God of Jacob, 

     whose hope is in the Lord their God,

who made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them; 

     who keeps faith forever;

who executes justice for the oppressed;

     who gives food to the hungry. 

The Lord sets the prisoners free;

     the Lord opens the eyes of the blind. 

The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; 

     the Lord loves the righteous. 

The Lord watches over the strangers; 

     he upholds the orphan and the widow, 

but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

The Lord will reign forever, 

your God, O Zion, for all generations. 

Praise the Lord!  [Psalm 146]

This is what it looks like.

This is what it looks like where the living God is victorious, where "the God of Jacob" reigns.  Prisoners freed. The oppressed vindicated.  The bowed down lifted up.  Foreigners, orphans, and widows provided for and protected.  This is what it looks like.

It is fascinating to me, reading this ancient, ancient poetry thousands of years after it was first set down, that the writer of this poem was willing to go out on a limb in a sense, by declaring this divine agenda.

It would have been easier, to be sure, just to keep the descriptions to the natural phenomena, wouldn't it?  It would have been easier to just stick with "God made the heaven and the earth," or "God made the sea, and all the fish in it," and then just to skip to "God will reign forever."  That's not controversial.  That doesn't rankle anybody's sensibilities.  That keeps God...neutral.  

And at some level, I suppose that's what we probably think we want--a tame, non-committal, aloof and neutral deity, who promises not to get too involved in our affairs.  The sort of deity that just makes a universe and then walks away, or takes a hands-off policy.  The sort of god who doesn't have a soft spot for foreigners and "strangers"... who isn't so insistent on providing for those who have no other provision... who doesn't keep calling our attention to the hungry.  See, we know that if the God we say we believe in takes these sorts of stands, then we will be obligated as well.  And if we are honest, there is a certain terrible kind of apathy in us that just doesn't want to have to make those same commitments.

It would have been easier for the poet here in Psalm 146 to keep the praises nice and generic: God is great and glorious... God is powerful and majestic... God made the world.  That would have been a fine way of hedging bets--that way, no matter which way the political winds were blowing in ancient Israel, this psalm wouldn't have raised any red flags.  And it wouldn't have called our hearts to any change or compassion, either.

Instead, the poet has found the courage to speak the particular praise that the God who reigns over the universe takes sides on things like hunger, oppression, imprisonment, and the treatment of foreigners.  That had to have been difficult.  There were surely voices at the time who would have objected, or even tried to silence the psalmist.  There were surely people who said, "Wait, wait, wait!  Don't we have to check and see whether all these widows and orphans are really deserving of any help before we go around saying that God is protecting them?"  There were surely people who didn't like having this particular hymn in Israel's ancient hymnbook because it sounded like it was saying God wanted foreigners treated with the exact same dignity, care, and respect as Israelites (maybe even greater respect).  For the people whose lives were comfortable and insulated already, the claims in this psalm would have been uncomfortable and provocative.  They would have liked a song to sing that just kept God watching the world, like the old Bette Midler song put it, "from a distance," rather than working for a particular set of values and a particular agenda.

And for that matter, you can also be sure there were voices in Israelite who wanted their songs and their songbook to say things like, "God is behind every win and every victory, so if you are rich, it is because God wants you to be rich and God wants others to be poor," or "Whoever won the battle must have been God's choice, because God only backs winners."  You can imagine people who would rather have sung, "The Lord protects those who protect themselves," or "God helps those who help themselves."  You can be sure there were folks who wanted to sing, "God's invisible hand guides the market, so if your stock portfolio is up today, it must be a sign of God's blessing, and if your investments are down, it must be God's punishment."  But none of these easier, self-congratulating songs made it into the Bible.

Instead, our Scriptures teach us to sing a more courageous song--to dare to see that God's victory has a particular thrust to it, a particular agenda, even.  The psalm in front of us says that, no matter who is in power at the time (because none of them are reliable or even last very long), God is always at work to free the oppressed, to lift up the lowly, to fill the hungry with good things, to provide for those without other support, and to welcome foreigners with divine guidance and protection all along the way.  These are God's priorities.  These are the things that happen where and when God gets what God wants, so to speak.  These are the kinds of things that show what God's victory looks like in the world.

It will always demand bravery from us if we are going to dare to sing these kinds of songs.  It will take courage, for one, because we know the moment these lyrics are on our lips, we are committed to living by the same priorities.  And it will call forth bravery also because there will always be other voices wishing to keep God neutral and uncommitted, and they will be upset if we dare to say what the poet says here.

But we cannot help it, can we?  Like the old classic puts it, "How can we keep from singing?"  How indeed, can we not take up this courageous song that puts ourselves on the line? How can we not sing praise to this particular God of ours, who sides with the empty-handed and the marginalized?  How can we not let such a song change our hearts and our actions today?

There is no generic neutral deity in the Bible, despite our wishes to invent one.  There is only this God of foreigners, widows, orphans, prisoners, and hungry people--the God whose reign welcomes all of them to the table.

Lord God, give us the courage to sing your songs, and to let our hearts be shaped by the priorities of your Reign.

Given Victory

Given Victory--November 22, 2018

"The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God, who gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ." [1 Corinthians 15:56-57]

The work of winning is God's.  The role of receiving the gift with gratitude is ours.

Call it the division of labor in the divine economy.

On this day when our culture pauses--barely, since there are midnight sales to be attended to!--to hold off on business-as-usual in the name of giving thanks, it is worth remembering that from the standpoint of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, gratitude is our full-time calling, while God is the one who wins the victory for which we give thanks.

We have a way of turning this day into a celebration of our own gratitude--a day to focus on how good we are (or how guilty we should feel if we are not so good) at saying thank you, at expressing gratitude, and at living appreciatively.  But focusing on our actions or words of giving thanks misses the point.  To give thanks, rightly at least, is always to point our attention beyond ourselves and to the Giver of good (like recklessly good) gifts.  And that isn't for just a couple of hours while the turkey is on the table, or for a whole day from the start of the parade until the last play of the fourth quarter of the football games.  Gratitude is not one square in the patchwork of our yearly calendar--but it is the very fabric of our whole lives.  And that is simply because gratitude is a practiced awareness that we are the recipients of gifts we did not earn, of a victory we did not win ourselves, and of a life that was handed to us for free, not by our own effort, but by the labor of our mothers who birthed us into the world.  

Everything is a gift.  All is grace.  It is only fitting (or, as we sometimes say in church-speak, "indeed right and salutary") that our whole lives be an echo of gratitude.  Gratitude is the recognition that this life I am living is not my accomplishment (for which I would pat myself on the back), but a gift.  It is a realization that the people who risk loving me are not things I have earned, but channels of God's own daring love for me.  It is a realization that the bread I will break today is no less a miracle of grace than the manna given in the wilderness day by day to the freed Hebrew slaves.  God does the work of saving, of providing, and of winning the victory.  My calling is simply to receive with thanks--no more and no less.

Receiving God's good gifts with thanks, however, of course means recognizing that the good things in front of me are not mine to hoard, because they are not my achievements--anymore than happening to sit in front of the bowl of mashed potatoes at dinner makes all of them mine.  They have been set in front of me to be enjoyed, yes, but to be enjoyed by all.  Passing the potatoes is part of what it means to receive a place at the table as a gift. Gratitude means understanding the intention of the Giver is to share it with everybody else, while they also share the stuffing, the turkey, and the cooked carrots.  Gratitude means freedom from the fear of scarcity, which allow my anxiously clenched fists to let go and share. We did not earn or achieve the feast--ours is to receive, and to share so that everyone else can receive, too.

It is true when it is potatoes and turkey, and it is true when we are talking about the promise of resurrection life in Christ.  Jesus has done the hard work of dying, the difficult task of laying down his life as a gift, the long labor of giving us birth.  Ours is to receive the gift, so that our whole life becomes the passing of the potatoes, the handing off of the turkey, and the sharing in the celebration to which we have been invited.

For us, it is not a single day.  For us it is every breath of every day.  For us, every moment can be a thanks--not just for a meal, but for life beyond the grip of death and a love that will not let us go.  

Thanks be to God, says Paul, who gives us the victory.  Yes.  Thanks be to God always.

The Triumphal Entry

The Triumphal Entry--November 21, 2018

"Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord forever." [1 Thessalonians 4:17]

On some days during the week, if I get home first before my wife, when I hear her car pulling into the driveway, I will come outside to the driveway, meet her at her car to see if she's got anything to bring in--groceries or shopping bags or school work or the like--and will walk with her back into our house together.  Even though it might look at first like I am walking out of the house to leave, the whole ritual is really about welcoming her back in.  When she pulls into the driveway, I don't walk out the back door to get in the car with her and then leave our house behind, usually, but rather I go out to meet her to walk alongside her as she comes home for the day. She may not have been at the house for the whole day, but of course, it was her house already--she has just been at work.  When she comes home and I meet her in the driveway, it is to come back--with a certain sense of victory at having made it through another day--to the place that we share together.

You'll have your own particulars, of course, but I'm betting that kind of scene is pretty familiar to you.  Whether you are more frequently on the welcoming side or the being-welcomed side, I'm willing to be that at least the meaning of that moment makes sense to you, and that it is clear when I walk out the back door, it is not for my wife to whisk me off to some other location (unless we are, say, going out to eat straight from work), but for her to come home to the place that was already hers.  Well, keep that picture in mind to consider one other scene before we jump into the verse for today.  

In the ancient world, especially in the practice of the Roman empire, when the emperor was coming to visit a Roman city or colony, a very similar ceremony of welcome unfolded.  Citizens from the city--who understood the emperor to be their ruler--would go out through the city gates and walls and stand waiting to greet the emperor, who would then be escorted with this entourage back into the city.  The city was understood to already belong to the emperor, and he was the rightful ruler.  He was simply being welcomed back into what was his own, perhaps as he returned from some far off military campaign, or as he toured his territory.  But what always happened was that the loyal citizens of that city would gather outside the city so that they could meet the emperor and accompany him back into the city--the city, mind you, from which they had just left, in order immediately to come back in as part of a triumphal procession.  There was never a scene where the emperor would come near to one of his own cities, and then have the citizens standing outside like they were waiting for a bus to be picked up and taken somewhere else.  The emperor didn't take his own citizens out of their various cities (which were all under Roman rule) to bring them all to Rome.  No, the scene was always the other way around--the emperor is met by loyal crowds who welcome him into their city, which they all agree is under his authority already.  So this scene, which was played out again and again across the empire, was both a moment of celebration, but it was also a statement of allegiance.  Those who welcomed the emperor into their city were, in effect, saying that he was the rightful ruler of their city and that he was coming back to a place that was his own already.

Well, both of these scenes help make sense of what's going on in this passage from 1 Thessalonians (as well as some of what is going on in the triumphal entry in all four Gospels when Jesus comes into Jerusalem riding on a donkey on the day we call Palm Sunday--a day when the people of the city "took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him" (John 12:13) before escorting him back into Jerusalem.  On both Palm Sunday and here in 1 Thessalonians, the idea is that Jesus is being escorted into a place, and that people have come to welcome him--and by doing that, they are pledging their allegiance to his authority and lordship.  It turned out to be rather fickle allegiance on Palm Sunday, but the idea is the same.  Just as the emperor or other imperial dignitaries would have triumphal entries to Jerusalem as shows of their power, Jesus has a parallel entry, and it was a statement of a different reign than Caesar's.

This is the way Paul talks about what will happen at Jesus' return.  The whole scene here is of a triumphal entry, or a homecoming celebration--not a rescue mission to retrieve people and whisk them away somewhere else.  The same word Paul uses for "meeting" Jesus in the air is the same technical word used in Greek for that political procession of welcome when the emperor came to a Roman city. The idea is that Jesus, when he comes, will be met by his people, who will then accompany him back into the world that is rightfully his--the place that he shares with us, and where we will dwell together.  This idea of meeting Jesus in the air is all about a triumphal return to the world, not a secret rescue or rapture out of the world. 

That's because ultimately, God is not going to give up on his claim over this world.  Sure, now it looks like the world is not interested in God's rule, but that will not stop God.  To borrow one more image, when the Allies liberated France in the D-Day campaign to win World War II, the goal of the mission was not just to cut their losses, gather as many displaced French citizens and settle for rescuing them out of occupied France to give them new lives in England permanently.  The mission was to liberate and to restore the rightful rule of the country, because the Allies never gave up on the conviction that France did not really belong to the Nazis, but to the French.  The Allied invasion was, in many ways, about the rightful rulers returning to their own places.  This is the way Paul talks about Jesus' coming--except, for him, the victory is already won.  In Jesus' death and resurrection, the battle is fought, won, and over, and now what remains is for Jesus to be welcomed back home in triumphal procession back to what is his already.

What does any of this mean today for us?  For one, it means that God does not think this world is disposable or something he will give up on.  Jesus still claims this world of ours as his own rightful property.  Second, it means that our hope is not to be beamed out of trouble so that we do not have to face trials or suffering in this life--our hope is to welcome Jesus back to this world that has been his all along.  We are not only missing the point of this Bible passage if we insist that it is about a "secret rapture" where true Christians will disappear while the world goes to hell in a handbasket, but we are also settling for less than God is apparently willing to settle for.  The Allies would not give up on France and leave it to Nazi occupation--and God will not give up on the world and leave it to the rebellious, idolatrous emperors and Caesars of human arrogance.  God will not settle for plucking a few good people out of the world and then letting it fall apart--God is committed to restoring, reclaiming, and redeeming the whole thing.  That is what we wait for.  That is why we live our lives now with an eye out the window and on the driveway.  We are waiting to pledge our allegiance to our Lord in celebration of his triumphant homecoming.  We are waiting to welcome home our Beloved to the place where we will dwell together. 

Come, Lord Jesus.  Reclaim, restore, and redeem, and keep our eyes watching to greet you and welcome you home in the mean time

Playing Jesus' Tune

Playing Jesus' Tune--November 20, 2018

"When they heard these things, they became enraged and ground their teeth at Stephen. But filled with the Holy Spirit, he gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God. 'Look,' he said, 'I see the heavens opened and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God!' But they covered their ears, and with a loud shout all rushed together against him. Then they dragged him out of the city and began to stone him; and the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul. While they were stoning Stephen, he prayed, 'Lord Jesus, receive my Spirit.' Then he knelt down and cried out in a loud voice, 'Lord, do not hold this sin against them.' When he had said this, he died." [Acts 7:54-60]

If God's kind of victory looks like a cross for Jesus, then it shouldn't surprise us that God's kind of victory looks like this for Jesus' followers.  We are playing the same song--the tune Jesus taught us--each on our own instruments, but it is the same melody.

Let me take that a step further: Jesus' death on a cross isn't just one more in a line of countless rushed Roman executions.  There were innumerable crucifixions carried out under the authority of the Empire, after all, and yet Christians are convinced that there is something unique and powerful about the death of their particular homeless, penniless rabbi, Jesus.  For one, Jesus did not meet death fearfully bargaining, cursing his God or his executioners in a fit of rage, or despairing and despondent.  He died, Luke told us (see Luke 23), at complete peace with God, praying from the psalms, "Into your hands I commend my spirit," and calling on God to forgive those who were holding the hammer that had put nails in his hands.  Jesus' victory begins there--before we even get to Easter glory--because Jesus would not be broken by Empire. He would not give into the violence, hatred, and fear that Rome and all the other powers of history have used to get their way.  And this is his victory. Jesus would not lash out to kill his enemies, and he refused to give himself over to their tactics.  Before we even get to the stone rolled away on Sunday morning, Rome's power has been exposed as smoke and mirrors, and the power of death itself is already hamstrung, simply by virtue of Jesus' complete and utter faithfulness to the way of God rather than to the way of Rome, of self-centeredness, of fear, and of power.  

And then second of all, of course, the New Testament would have us believe that Jesus' cannot be held in even by the grave.  Resurrection breaks out, and Jesus rises beyond the power of Roman centurions, and even beyond the grip of death itself.  The cross is a double victory, then, both because of how Jesus remains faithful to the way of God even all the way to death, and how Jesus rises from death after the cross.

So if that is true for Jesus, then here is something wonderful and awesome: the followers of Jesus share in that same victory.  That's how Luke--the same guy who wrote the Gospel we call by his name--wants us to understand the stoning and death of Stephen (no relation).  Luke wants us to see that when an angry mob got stirred up to kill this early servant-leader in the church, Jesus' kind of victory was visible again.  Stephen has learned to die victoriously, and he has learned it from Jesus himself.  He has learned to sing the same tune Jesus sang, to play the same melody with his own life.

Look at the last words on Stephen's lips here as Luke gives us the story.  He is echoing Jesus!  "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit," he asks, seeing the risen Jesus while the angry crowd roars to drown out a message it cannot comprehend.  "Lord, do not no hold this sin against them," he prays, seeking forgiveness for the lynch-mob that has encircled him.  Where do you suppose Stephen gets these ideas from?  Who taught him this kind of response to this kind of hatred, this kind of ignorance that yells louder so it doesn't have to listen to what it doesn't agree with?  Where of course, but Jesus?  Stephen's death--the first time someone died for faith in Jesus, according to Luke's storytelling--is a witness that the early church got it.  The first followers of Jesus understood that Jesus' kind of victory isn't won by overpowering an enemy with bigger guns and more ammo, or more centurions and spears--it is won by suffering love that will not bend to the power of hatred, of fear, or of death.  Stephen dies pointing to and echoing the tune, so to speak, of Jesus.

And that means evil's defeat continued into the community of Jesus' followers--it couldn't corrupt Jesus, and it couldn't corrupt his disciples into returning evil for evil.  Much like Kipling describes in his poem "If," Jesus and his community "being lied about, don't deal in lies...or being hated, don't give way to hating." The powers of death, hatred, and evil couldn't get Stephen to go to his death cursing the ones hurling rocks at him, and in that, Stephen participated again in Jesus' victory.  And that wasn't all--as Luke subtly notes, there was a young man named Saul watching all of this unfolding, holding the coats for the rock-throwers, nodding approvingly as they killed Stephen.  But we know this Saul better by his Greek name: Paul.  This same young man would be transformed before long (it takes another chapter of the book of Acts) to become a follower of the same Jesus, and Paul/Saul brought a message to the world that declared God in Christ loved his enemies and died for their forgiveness in order to save them.  The angry mob intended to silence this Jesus and his movement when they stoned Stephen to death, but in fact, they only gave it more power to witness authentically to the love that lays down its life even for the enemy in order to save them.  Jesus' strange kind of victory strikes again, even for the young man named Saul holding the coats at a stoning.

If you are looking for some scene in the Bible where Stephen gets to come back from the dead and get revenge on his killers in a final act of "victory" over them, I'm sorry.  That never happens.  That is not how Jesus' kind of victory works, and that is not the kind of victory his followers seek after. Jesus' kind of victory reconciles enemies, forgives sins, and gives up on attempts at revenge or "saving face."  Jesus' kind of victory is bigger than all of that, and he calls us to be bigger than that as well.

So for us on this day, sharing in Jesus' kind of victory will mean looking like Jesus--the way he lays down his life forgiving his enemies, the way he asks for God's mercy on his persecutors, the way he can confidently commend his life into God's hands, the way he is at total peace with the way of God.  And we have to know now, in advance, that the world will look at that and will not recognize it as victory. The world will see it and think it has won, just like the angry mob thought it had won over Stephen when the last rock was thrown, and just like the Respectable Religious Leaders and the Romans thought they had won when they nailed Jesus to a cross. They did not understand--how could they?--that they had actually sown the very seeds of God's kind of victory, a victory so large and wide and deep that it even swept up the very enemies of God in its embrace.  They did not realize that their attempts to stamp out the movement of Jesus actually scattered seed into the whole world to make the Kingdom grow.  They did not understand that Jesus' victory comes through giving yourself away.

But we are invited to see that, to understand it, and to stake our lives on it.  

Today, let us share in Jesus' kind of victory--not giving into the hatred, the lies, the violence, the bitterness, and the greed of the world's way of doing things.

Today, let us surrender our old need for getting even or looking tough, and discover the great power that lies in refusing to sing the world's song, but rather playing Jesus' melody in our own key.

Today, let us look for ways to embody a love so big and wide that it defeats enemies by embracing them and transforming them into friends.

This is Jesus' victory song.  It is our tune today, too.

Lord Jesus, let us reflect your kind of victory in the ways we lay down our lives today, too.