Coffee at Ten

Coffee at Ten--February 1, 2019

"Then the king will say to those at his right hand, 'Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world; for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.' Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink? And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked at gave you clothing? And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me'." [Matthew 25:34-40]

It's less about rewards, and all about promise. It is the promise of Jesus telling us where to find him.

If you and I are going to meet for coffee, and I tell you, "I'll be at the coffee shop at 10 and will get a table, so I'll be there waiting whenever you get there," that is something of a promise.  Not terribly high stakes, but a promise nonetheless.  So suppose you decide to believe me, and you could use some mid-morning caffeine, so you show up at the coffee shop and find me, exactly as advertised, sitting at a table looking for you arrival.  If, at that point, you and I sit down to have coffee and conversation, and maybe I even spring for a couple of biscotti, would you call that a "reward" for coming?  Or is that simply the keeping of a promise--as in, "I said I would be there, and I am, so now we can sit and talk and sip our coffees together"?

It's obvious, right?  You show up there, not thinking, "If I come, I bet Steve will give me a reward for coming out to meet him!"  but rather, "This is where he told me he would be; if I want to share a table and some conversation, this is the place to find him."  You are not there to collect a prize but to meet me exactly where I told you I would be.  And you wouldn't think that this meeting for coffee was about you patronizing me and condescendingly sitting across from me out of pity; you would be there as much for your own enjoyment as for mine--that's how coffee works.

So let's get all of that straight if we are going to hear these words of Jesus rightly, and as we turn our attention in this new month to seeing Christ here... with the Other.  Because the temptation is to hear this story from Jesus as a deal with rewards (and punishments) doled out for good behavior (or the lack thereof).  We want to hear these words of Jesus and treat them like the ticket counter at Chuck-E-Cheese, where prizes and goodies are available in exchange for the tickets you have earned by doing well enough at Skee-Ball and Whack-a-Mole.  Some part of us thinks that Jesus offers glory in the afterlife as a prize for those who have won enough heaven-points by feeding hungry people or making visits to the prison.  Some part of our Respectable Religion teaches us that every night spent out on a mission trip to help "those people" will one day be redeemable for celestial prizes at the heavenly ticket counter.  That is, we come to hear Jesus' words as a system of rewards to be earned rather than a promise of where Jesus tells us he will be findable.  

And that makes all the difference.  Because if this is just about "how many poor people I have to ladle soup for in order to get to heaven," then this whole scene is not about love--not for Jesus, nor for the people in line with the soup--but all about me and my own self-preservation.  And I will just treat the people who come down the line at the soup kitchen as means to an end... and in the process, I will miss out on the encounter with Christ who is there in the space between me and the other.

But if I take Jesus' words as a promise--as Jesus' way of telling me where he'll be sitting in the coffee shop, so to speak--then it changes the whole encounter.  Instead of seeing other people as simply receptacles for my pity and objects for my virtuous good-deed-doing, I will see that Christ has promised to be present among these unexpected faces--in the "least," to use Jesus' word--and that if I want to meet up with Jesus, I will find him present, just as promised, in the lives of those who are most vulnerable.  It's not about earning prizes; it's about believing Jesus when he tells us where to find him.  And when recognize him there, he invites us to sit down, gets us a cup of coffee and wrangles up some biscotti at the table he has prepared for us.  There--now we can talk, and sip, and enjoy one another's company.  That was the whole point all along.

Maybe it is worth asking this question today: When we church-folk go "out" on service projects, mission trips, and outreach events, what do we think we are doing?  What is the purpose?  Because it is all too easy for us to see those activities in self-serving terms--as ways to do public relations for the church, as an attempt to get more members for our "club," as a way of racking up individual "heaven points" for the divine ticket counter, or as ways of patting ourselves on the back for doing a good deed as we identify people to pity and feel bad for.  But that not only misses the point--it misses Jesus.  Jesus has promised us that we will find him in the encounter of the shared meal, the welcome of foreigners and strangers, the time spent at the bedside of the patient, and the drink shared at the coffeehouse table.  If our reason for going "out" into the world is simply to feed our own egos' need for doing something noble, or recruiting would-be members for our religious clubs, or building up our own celestial bank accounts, we will miss Jesus every time.  But if we dare to trust Jesus himself, we'll look for Christ in all these faces where Jesus himself said he would be... and those we meet will find Christ looking back at them with our faces as well.

Can we dare to see today, not as a chance to earn some more tickets so we can earn a reward from the heavenly prize counter later, but as an opportunity to meet Jesus exactly where he promised to save a table for us?

Dear Jesus, help us to recognize you where you are... and to believe your promise of where to look.

The Persuasive Fish

The Persuasive Fish--January 31, 2019

"While they were talking about this, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, 'Peace be with you.' They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost. He said to them, 'Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.' And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet. While in their joy they were disbelieving and still wondering, he said to them, 'Have you anything here to eat?' They gave him a piece of broiled fish, and he took it and ate it in their presence." [Luke 24:36-43]

Jesus is fully human from beginning to end to new beginning.  He doesn't shed his skin at the cross to become a disembodied spirit or a beam of light or a warm and fuzzy feeling--he remains one of us through the grave, into resurrection, and forever.

That's a big deal.

In fact, it is so big a deal that the risen Jesus goes to great lengths to convince his doubtful disciples that he is not only alive, but as fully human as he ever was.  There on the evening of the first Easter Sunday, as Luke recounts it, Jesus shows up, having had a very busy day of appearances.  After the morning resurrection appearances at the tomb, he walks along the Emmaus road with Cleopas and his companion, breaks bread with them and opens the Scriptures up to them along the way, and now here comes back to the locked room where the rest of the disciples were hunkered down, and shows himself.  And he not only invites them to see and touch his hands and feet, but he also offers them the most persuasive evidence he can at the moment: he eats a piece of fish in their presence.  The idea, of course, is that ghost don't eat (in addition to not existing in the first place), and that if it had all been a mass group hallucination, there would have been a piece of fish left on the floor where they all thought they had seen Jesus.

But the way the story goes, it seems that the fish sticks did the trick to at least give these disciples hope--not only hope that Jesus was somehow alive beyond death, but that he remained as fully human, as fully embodied, as he ever had been.  Jesus doesn't leave embodied life behind even after the empty tomb.  That's a really important thing, because being embodied is simply part of what it means to be human.  And the Gospels believe that the whole Christian faith stands or falls on whether Jesus really is one of us, and not simply a talking hallucination, a spirit-being, an angel, a religious invention, or a figment of our imaginations.

There have been, of course, those other voices, sects, and religious off-shoots that didn't like the idea of a God who fully entered human life, from messy birth in a borrowed barn to a criminal's death.  There have been voices that said, "Tut, tut, this Savior Christ must have only appeared human, or maybe the divine part of him beamed back up to heaven right before the cross so that he didn't have to go through the suffering.  Or maybe it was a trick and Jesus didn't actually die but switched places with a look-alike just before the first nail was pounded into a wrist." All because the idea of a God with permanent scars on permanent skin seemed scandalous.  And it should sound scandalous--it is.  But that is precisely the claim that the Gospels all want to make.  And that is exactly what the piece of fish is about: it is a lingering piece of evidence that whoever it was that appeared in the locked upper room on Easter evening was really, fully human, and not merely a disembodied spirit or a trick of the light.

Part of what that means, too, is that Jesus now and forever still bears the scars of having gone through the cross, still owns a body, even if it is somehow glorified and transformed, and still shares our humanity now and forever.  God has committed, once and for all, to share human existence with no givesies-backsies, as the kids say on the playground.  Jesus wears our skin, and shares our woundedness, forever.  The eaten fish stick is the persuasive evidence that the one who rose from the dead still shares our humanity.  It may not seem as poetic or dramatic as the stone rolled away in the dim light of dawn, and there may not be any Easter hymns that sing, "You ask me how I know he lives?  He ate a piece of cod!"  But it is a detail that the first Christians held onto as a sign that the Risen One has always been One of Us, fully sharing our human life, even into resurrection.

That means, too, that our hope as Christians is not for a way out of being human, but for a transformation of how we live within our humanity--no longer bent, broken, and distorted by our selfishness, hatred, greed, fear, and sin, but as God meant for us to be.  All those children's stories, stock-image cartoons, and tired jokes about people dying and becoming angels when they get to heaven have missed the point--we don't lose our humanity in eternal life, but actually gain it in a fuller way than we have ever known it. In the resurrection of the human Jesus, we are freed from the ways we give into fear, hate, and the Me-and-My-Group-First mentality that robs us of some pieces of our humanity.

All of that is there, waiting to be recognized as Jesus takes a piece of fish to eat on the first Easter evening.  It is a sign for us, too, that Christ has forever entered into our humanity, and chooses to be inextricably tied up in our life.  Whatever kinds of messes we find ourselves in--whatever kinds of messes we put ourselves in!--God has taken them on in Jesus, and forever wears the scars in a human body from bearing them.

Turns out, that was a pretty persuasive piece of fish.

Lord Jesus, thank you for sharing our human life all the way, and thank you for the lengths you have gone to in order to help us believe and know that you are with us.

Without Bodyguards

Without Bodyguards--January 30, 2019

"While [Jesus] was still speaking, suddenly a crowd came, and the one called Judas, one of the twelve, was leading them. He approached Jesus to kiss him; but Jesus said to him, 'Judas, is it with a kiss that you are betraying the Son of Man?' When those who were around him saw what was coming, they asked, 'Lord, should we strike with the sword?' Then one of them struck the slave of the high priest and cut off his right ear. But Jesus said, 'No more of this!' And he touched his ear and healed him." [Luke 22:47-51]

I had never really thought about it this until this week, but Jesus doesn't use his disciples as bodyguards.  Jesus deliberately chooses to be vulnerable at every point of his life, not only when it's easy because he is popular, but when it is dangerous, as well.  Part of Jesus' humanity is Jesus' embrace of the risks of being human.  Jesus does not shy away from the very real possibility that an angry mob will try and harm him, because an essential part of wearing our skin is vulnerability.

You might stop and ask yourself, "Wait a second--why does one of Jesus' disciples carry a sword then?"  And that's a good question.  And the answer is, oddly, "Because Jesus told them to have swords on them... but not to use them."  That seems like a head-scratcher.  Go back a few verses in Luke's gospel (like to Luke 22:35-38) and you'll see Jesus tell his disciples they'll need to have a couple of swords on hand, even though earlier in his ministry he sent them out into strange towns and villages deliberately unarmed.  You might ask yourself, "Has Jesus had a change in policy?  Has Jesus finally seen the light and decided that in a dangerous world you have to protect yourself, and now told his disciples to open-carry their swords in case an angry mob comes along to rough them up?"  And the answer to all of that is a loud-and-clear, "No."  We know that because here, just a bit later on that same evening, when the angry mob does come along and one of Jesus' disciples tries to use the sword he brought along, Jesus stops him, commands him to put away his sword, and heals the person who had been injured.  

So, what's going on with the sword business? To be honest, it seems most likely that Jesus is letting himself be surrounded with circumstantial evidence that will be used against him to push the authorities to call out for Jesus' death.  Jesus himself quotes a scripture, "And he was counted among the lawless" when he tells his disciples to take swords with them.  In other words, Jesus never intended for the swords laying around to be used, but always intended them to be basically incriminating props that would give the religious and political authorities more reason to push for Jesus' execution as a "dangerous" revolutionary.  

Well, if that helps unravel one of the stranger scenes in the Gospel, that also sheds more light on Jesus' way of being the savior.  At no point does Jesus hide from danger, and at no point does Jesus value his life more than the lives of others around him.  That's not because Jesus knows he's invincible or bulletproof--the cross clearly shows he is not.  It is because Jesus will not put his own life, and his own self-preservation above the lives of others--not even the "enemy" who has come to arrest him.  

And to be sure, this isn't the only time something like this happens.  When Jesus' disciples want to call down fire from heaven to burn up a town that has rejected Jesus, he has to tell them no, and shows them that's not how we do things in the Reign of God.  When he sends the disciples out into the towns around Galilee to bring the Good News, he sends them out vulnerably, without swords, staffs, or money, but running the risk that something could happen to them along the way.  These are not accidents, and they are not flukes.  They are an essential part of Jesus' way of being human--truly human.  Because as Jesus sees it (and also, the New Testament claims, as God sees it), we were intended to own and embrace our vulnerability, not to run away from it, hide it, cover it up, or threaten other people in an attempt to distract from our own vulnerability.  And above all, we don't put our own lives above the lives of others.  Jesus rejects a "Me-and-My-Group First" mindset, not just on the cross, but even here in the Garden, when he refuses to let his disciples play "bodyguard" and start attacking the mob that has come him.  Jesus refuses even to let the slave of the high priest be deemed less important than his own life.

And that, dear ones, is Jesus' model of courage, of strength, and of humanity.  You don't show you are strong by hiding behind armed guards, according to Jesus.  Jesus' kind of courageous humanity leaves all of that adolescent "tough-guy" routine behind, because Jesus never needed to intimidate, impress, or threaten.  Those are the tactics of fear, and Jesus is utterly free from fear.

That doesn't mean Jesus is naïve, nor that he teaches his followers to be naïve about the dangers of the world.  Jesus knows exactly what he is getting himself--and his followers--into.  And we need to be absolutely clear, with eyes wide open, about the dangers and terrors out there that still can do awful things.  Just yesterday, as I write, the news carried the story of a TV star who was attacked, insulted, beaten, had had a noose put around his neck, ostensibly because he was black and gay.  And in the news the day before was a young man who had killed his parents and girlfriend and then ran from authorities.  That's just in the last 48 hours, and that's just the top headlines that made national news.  This has not stopped being a dangerous world, and there is still terrible hatred in hearts all around us that does not hesitate to lynch or beat or intimidate or shoot people.  Jesus, too, knows what it is to stare down an angry, hate-filled lynch mob, and yet he refuses to let his followers play the role of bodyguard to kill or harm the mob, not even the slave of the high priest.  Jesus shows us that being fully human means being vulnerable, and refusing to put our own lives above the lives of others.  That is hard, but that is what true humanity looks like.  We, with all of our "tough-guy" posturing and sword-carrying, have been settling for something less than full human-ness, all along.

In all of the gospels, whether it's the fallout from his first sermon in his hometown or the night of his arrest, Jesus never runs from a confrontation out of cowardice, but neither does he attack those who are out to get him, or let one of his disciples do the fighting for him.  Jesus shows us a greater courage than swinging a sword or running away takes.  Jesus shows us that real humanity requires the courage to be vulnerable.

In this dangerous, often violent, hateful and fearful world, may this same Jesus give us the courage to be fully, vulnerably human, the way we were created to be.

Lord Jesus, give us your courage, so that we can be vulnerably human.

The Rejectable, Irresistible Jesus

The Rejectable, Irresistible Jesus--January 29, 2019

"When many of his disciples heard [what Jesus said], they said, 'This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?' But Jesus, being aware that his disciples were complaining about it, said to them, 'Does this offend you? Then what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you  are spirit and life.....' Because of this many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him. So Jesus asked the twelve, 'Do you also wish to go away?' Simon Peter answered him, 'Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God'." [John 6:60-63, 66-69]

Jesus was... rejectable.

That's a strange thing to call attention to, I know.  It's hardly the kind of quality you would use as a compliment to a friend, mentor, or respected coworker.  Calling someone "rejectable" comes off rather like saying someone who irritates you has a very "punchable face."  

It's even stranger, I think, to say such a thing about Jesus--not just because we (rightly) assume that Jesus should be regarded with at least as much respect as any of those friends, mentors, or respected coworkers, but also because there's something about Jesus that also seems... irresistible.  In fact, a good many of the Reformers of the 16th century made a big point about the grace of God ultimately being just that: "irresistible," which was their way of saying that when God determines to love and claim and choose you, you cannot squirm out of it. (Later Calvinists actually made that one of their five bullet point main ideas, and they called it "irresistible grace.")

So here we are, seemingly having painted ourselves in a corner.  On the one hand, good theology (and biblically-rooted theology, mind you) will say that in the end, God gets what God wants, and that the God of the Scriptures is ultimately like a Mama Cat who is willing to pick up her endangered kittens by the napes of their necks to safety, whether they like it or not, because her love is more definitive than their inability and kitteny cluelessness.  There's good, solid Scripturally-rooted reason for saying that God's grace is, in the end, irresistible.

On the other hand, the Scriptures themselves (this passage from John as a pretty good example) also show us a Christ who is absolutely rejectable.  Here was Jesus, saying things that upset the fair-weather followers and respectable religious types in the crowd, and they consciously, willfully chose to reject Jesus.  Maybe at first in this passage, we might assume that Jesus just lets their rejection roll off like water off a duck's back, but as you go further on, it sure seems like this rejection kind of gets to Jesus.  After he sees so many turn away, he asks the twelve, "Do you also wish to go away?"  Jesus seems to be holding out the possibility that they could just say, "We're done with you, Jesus.  You keep challenging us when we would rather stay complacent! You keep poking us when we would rather stay lulled to sleep!"  Jesus comes off as, well, vulnerable--as capable of being hurt, being wounded, being rejected.  Jesus shows us a God who, as he'll describe himself at one point in the gospels, "would have gathered you to myself like a hen gathers her brood... but you would not let me!"

So, maybe we feel like we have to pick and choose one:  which is Jesus--the Mama Cat whose grip grabs hold of her kittens, or the Mother Hen who would love to gather her brood, but they will not let her?  (And wow, what does it say about Christ, and about God, that both of those decidedly maternal images are our options?)  Maybe it's a false choice--maybe both are true at the same time.  (To be honest, the Lutheran in me is content to live in the tension of that paradox, even if we are wired to want to pick "either/or" rather than "both/and" when we get a choice like this.)

Seriously, maybe it's really both.  Go poking around a little further on in John 6, and Jesus just comes out and tells his disciples, "I chose you," which is a theme he comes back to later on in the Gospel, too.  And in the verses that I skipped over above (see John 6:65) Jesus adds that "no one can come to me unless it is granted by the Father." That sounds pretty irresistible to me.  It sounds very much like a God who grabs us by the nape of the neck whether we chose it first or not, because God will not give up on us.

And at the same time, Jesus is utterly rejectable, too.  That is an essential part of what it means to say that Jesus shares our humanity.  To be human is to be vulnerable--not just physically capable of being wounded or getting bruised, but emotionally and socially able to be rejected by others.  Jesus, because he wears our human skin, is willing to be rejected.  He is willing to bear the hurt of having others say, "I do not want to be associated with you anymore."  He is willing to bear the weight of unpopularity.  He is willing to do and say what he has come to do and say, regardless of whether it polls well or will make him look "tough" or "strong" or "great."  Jesus chooses to be rejectable.

My goodness, that's what the cross is all about, too--Jesus' willing choice to be rejected by everybody, from his hand-picked closest friends, to the religious leaders of his people, even to the cry of dereliction, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?"  Part of being human is that we do not have the omnipotence to force everyone to like us, and that means that a certain percentage of human life is going to involve the risk of rejection.  There is no use pretending it ain't true.  And what a wonder--what an honest-to-God wonder it is--that in Christ Jesus, God chooses to risk our rejection.  That really is a big part of the Good News, because it means that Jesus would rather bear the pain and hurt of us saying "No" to him than to avoid it by saying "No" to us.  Instead of that immature response you see sometimes, where someone will say, "You're not breaking up with ME--I'm breaking up with YOU!" or "You can't fire me--I QUIT!" or "They didn't reject MY offer--I rescinded my offer in the first place!", Jesus bears all the shame, all the pain, all the scorn of being the rejected one.  And it happened, not just at the cross, but all along the way, as Jesus kept on speaking and acting authentically, regardless of whether it got him more friends on Facebook or followers on Twitter.  Jesus was willing to be rejected, rather than invincible, tough, and popular.

But--and this is the coup de grace of it all--Jesus reserves the right to keep on loving us and living out his mission, even once we have rejected him.  Jesus goes on loving, goes on serving, goes on speaking, and goes on saving us, even when we have said, "No" to him.  In other words, our rejection of Jesus does not require him to reject us.  And perhaps that's the whole Gospel in a nutshell.  Even when we say "No!" to Jesus--to his new way of life, to his vision of God's Reign, to his self-giving love--Jesus reserves the right still to say "Yes!" to us again and again.  Even when we refuse to let Jesus gather us together like the mother hen, he still picks us up by the scruff of the neck like a mama cat.  He is rejectable… without rejecting us.  

Regardless of whatever you face in this new day, that will remain true.  Even at the points where we say "NO!" to Jesus' way--even when we choose to be self-centered, "Me-and-My-Group-First!" sinners, even when we choose to treat others like they don't matter, even when we reject God and God's ways--Jesus reserves the right not to say "No" to us, and instead keeps on seeking and saving and sheltering and scooping us up by the nape of our necks.  Even when we do our worst--like telling him, "I don't want anything to do with you, Jesus!" or nailing him to a cross--Jesus bears the rejection and keeps on choosing us.

You are chosen--and you cannot lose your chosenness.

You are beloved--and there is nothing you can do to no longer be so.

You are held secure in the grip of grace--and even your rejection of God does not require God to reject you.

The God who wears our skin is able to be both--bearing our rejection, and refusing to return it in kind.  The God who comes to us in Jesus is vulnerable, but also compelling... he is rejectable, and irresistible.

Lord Jesus, thank you for your vulnerability.  Thank you for the grace which does not give up on us.

What the Emptiness Became (Poem and Picture 038)--January 24, 2019

"What the Emptiness Became"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 038--January 24, 2019

See this space
where all the coins used to be?
All the leftover pennies
from large coffees,
all the nickels and dimes
after grocery runs.
They were sitting here,
in this old jar
doing nothing.
But now a wonder:
this emptiness has become
a room for the night

for a homeless couple.

#seeChristhere

Spotting the Galilean (Poem and Picture 037)--January 23, 2019

"Spotting the Galilean"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 037--January 23, 2019

I spotted the Galilean again.
At the burger joint he slipped in
between the incoming customers.
One moment I am holding the door
for a woman with a broad smile
and hair in dark tight curls,
and the next she is escorting in
a lost-looking woman
to buy her lunch.

Christ all around.

#seeChristhere

King of the Jews

King of the Jews--January 24, 2019

"It was nine o'clock in the morning when they crucified him. The inscription of the charge against him read, 'The King of the Jews'." [Mark 15:25-26]

Christ not only knows what it is like to wear our human skin; in Christ, God knows what it is to be kept down because of the sort of skin he wore.  That is to say, God knows from personal experience what it is like to be the victim of racism.  God knows it, this piece of the human condition, more fully and truly than so many of us who have been privileged to be insulated from it in our lives.

The Gospels are clear about this, and if we miss it, it is likely because we  have let the dramatic irony of the story get to us.

If you have ever been anything of a churchgoer, or even have a vague awareness of the story of the Gospels, you know this scene: Jesus, at the cross, with an inscription above him that reads something like, "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews." (And side note, this is why lots of religious artwork includes the lettering "INRI" on the cross--this would be the initials for the Latin phrase, "Iesvs Nazarenvs Rex Ivdaeorvm".)

Christians are "in" on the joke here, of course--the Gospel writers all want us to believe that Jesus really is the King of the Jews, the promised Messiah of Israel, and that the Romans don't know how right they've got it.  And yes, that is part of what's going on in the scene of Jesus' crucifixion--the sheer weight of the irony of the pompous and arrogant Romans actually being more right than they know when they nail up the charge against Jesus: "King of the Jews."  I can remember as a kid getting to this part of the story every year on Good Friday, almost shaking my head with disdain for those foolish Romans, and feeling like I was in on a secret that even that big shot Pontius Pilate didn't understand.

But before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let's just stay with this familiar moment in the story for a bit.  While it may well be that, from the perspective of the Gospel-writers, the Romans are set up as the butt of a joke--in that they don't understand how right they really are about Jesus--from the perspective of the Romans themselves, they think this is a power-move to belittle Jesus and the people from whom he traces his ancestry.  The Romans see this charge as a fantastic way to mock one more conquered people over whom they have casually trampled.  The inscription, "King of the Jews" wasn't simply meant to mock Jesus, but to mock his people--it was a way of saying, with so much imperial braggadocio, "Look what we do to Jews--if this is their king."  It was a way of threatening, while keeping a tight-lipped smirk on their imperial faces, "You conquered people are nothing to us.  See how easily we kill you?  See how negligible you are to us?  So... don't step out of line--you and your kind are all the same to us."

There is word for what happens when power is used to puff up one group of people--one nationality, one culture, one language, one complexion, one shade of skin color, or what have you--and to keep another group down: racism.  We didn't invent racism in the antebellum period of American history, and racism had plenty of other banners to fly before the invention of the Confederate flag. We have simply followed the lead of one powerful empire after another in history.  And make no mistake: what happened to Jesus at the hands of the Roman Empire was, for whatever else it meant for the salvation of the world, also about what happens when one people group constructs a system designed to control, abuse, and when profitable destroy, the bodies of another group of people.  That is to say, from Rome's perspective, killing Jesus was one more way of reinforcing a system designed to keep all the peoples they had conquered down and subjugated.  

This is a really important point for us to let sink in.  From Rome's perspective, they don't really care about the particulars of Jesus' words, actions, or religious claims.  Rome doesn't care if you call yourself the Son of God or a baked potato, so long as you aren't a threat to the "Rome First" agenda.  You see that in the Gospels, when Jesus is put on trial--the religious assembly cares about his claims of divinity and charges of blasphemy, but when Jesus goes before Pilate, the charges shift to Jesus being a threat to Roman political rule. Rome doesn't care if Jesus believes he has come to reveal the Father to the world--Rome cares that people are using the term "Messiah" for Jesus, and they will not tolerate that.  A "Messiah" would upset their system which allows Rome to rule over Judeans, to control their bodies, and to deny them their full humanity.  That's what makes Rome nervous.  So Rome wants to kill Jesus for the same reason lynch mobs left black bodies hanging in trees: as one more way of instilling fear in everybody else of the subjugated group, so they wouldn't make trouble or resist the system that kept the powerful ones in power.  As far as Pilate is concerned, the phrase "King of the Jews" isn't merely a condemnation of Jesus for claiming messiah-ship--it is a claim of Roman superiority over the people Jesus represented, and a claim of Roman control over their bodies.

Now, obviously, as I say, Christians see that there is more going on at the cross than killing a Jewish rabbi as an example to the rest of the Jewish people Rome sought to dominate.  After all, Rome did the same to countless other victims on countless other crosses, and yet Christianity sees something unique and powerful--salvific--in the specific crucifixion of this particular Jewish body.  But, to borrow a phrase of the biblical scholar N.T. Wright, while the cross of Jesus indeed means more than that, it cannot mean less than this.  In other words, we cannot ignore or cut out from the scene at Calvary the fact that Rome did what it did to Jesus as part of a deliberate system designed to control the people groups whom the Empire conquered.  We cannot ignore that the same Empire that paved roads across Europe and built aqueducts and coliseums was also powered by a system of domination that put Rome First at the expense of the peoples and lands they took.

And there is a Good News reason we need to remember it.  It means, because of what we believe about Jesus, that no less than God knows what it is to be the victim of systemic racism, and that none other than God was willing to endure its brutality, as a way of saying "yes" to all those who have ever been treated as "less-than" by another group of people with power.  To say that Jesus is God-in-our-skin also means that God knows what it is like to be killed--lynched--by the Empire as a way of trying to make other dominated people live in fear... and it means that the resurrection of Jesus breaks the power of that Empire to ever force anybody to be ruled by that fear any longer.  

It would have been easier--less painful for God, at least--if the Incarnation had been into the life of a well-to-do Roman citizen, wouldn't it?  It would have meant that the Son of God could have avoided being made an example of, and it would have meant a much more comfortable platform from which he could have launched a new religion.  But God was not interested in a cushy, insulated niche, or in starting new religions with the Empire's nodding approval.  God was committed--and always remains committed--to identifying with all of history's victims and "less-thans".  God remains committed to taking a stand and a place with all the ones whose bodies have been controlled, beaten, threated, and destroyed by systems of power.  God remains committed, in other words, to giving dignity to those whose dignity has been stolen by others.  And God does it, not by bringing in an even bigger empire with an even bigger army to blow the Romans off the map, but by suffering at the hands of the powerful for the sake of the weak.

This is the upside-down wonder of our God.  This is what it really means to say we believe that in Jesus, God entered into humanity and wore our skin.  It means that God has chosen deliberately to be counted among those who are kept down and regarded as "less than" because of their kind of humanity.  And it means that God is not ashamed or afraid to identify with a whole world full of people who have been stepped on in this life.

The Romans didn't understand how right they were when they called Jesus "King of the Jews," and they didn't understand how powerful a claim it was to say that the God of the universe was willing to be lynched in order to stand with all peoples, all nations, and all faces.

All praise to the God who was strung up at the cross. All praise to the God whose resurrection allows all who have been stepped on to rise anew.

Lord God, you astound us by coming near, not simply to watch safely at a distance, but to bear the worst of our inhumanity to one another by embracing our humanity.

Wading into Grace (Poem and Picture 036)--January 22, 2019

"Wading into Grace"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 036--January 22, 2019

They say
grace is like the rain--
it comes down and covers
everything.
As the water falls
giving itself away
for the life of the earth,
I cannot help but notice
that I am wading into grace
with every step.
How would Christ teach me
without the gift of

such rainy afternoons?

#seeChristhere

Stubbornly, Vulnerably (Poem and Picture 035)--January 21, 2019

"Stubbornly, Vulnerably"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 035--January 21, 2019

It was my fault.
I had left this bulb,
bought from the clearance rack,
in the dark cold of a car trunk
and forgotten about it.
And still
look how a new green edge
stubbornly,
vulnerably
refuses
to let my failure
be the last word.
O amaryllis,
like Christ

you do not give up on me.

#seeChristhere

Traces (Poem and Picture 034)--January 20, 2019

"Traces"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture--January 20, 2019

Even late at night
the sun leaves traces
of its presence
like fingerprints:
icicles tell the tale of sunlit warmth
that made them dribble into existence;
light bouncing off the moon
and into our eyes;
trees which only grew so tall
in past summer sun.

God, too, leaves such traces.

#seeChristhere

Every Face a Sanctuary

Every Face a Sanctuary--January 23, 2019

"Then God said, 'Let us make human kind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.' So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them." [Genesis 1:26-27]

You can communicate "sadness" with a piece of music, or convey "springtime in the country" through a painting.  But you can't convey the concept of the number seven through a smell.  And you probably would have a very difficult time communicating "heartbreak" through a soup recipe.  You can project the shadow of a person onto a screen or a sheet to tell a story, but you can't project the shadow of a song, or of the taste of peaches, onto a screen.  You can get paint onto a canvas--the canvas can bear having a picture painted onto it (and indeed, the canvas was made for just such a purpose)--but you can't put paint on a radio wave.

Some channels just don't work for conveying some messages.

Even using language, some means don't work well.  Morse Code was fine for sending latitudes and longitudes of enemy vessels during naval battles in World War II.  But you couldn't, for example, get across the perfectly-timed deadpan humor of an early Bob Newhart phone gag in Morse code.  You need to see his face, hear the hesitancy in his voice, and his comedic knack for pauses and silence in between the spoken lines.

All of that is to say that it is really quite a powerful statement that the Scriptures make when they say that human beings are made "in the image of God."  For whatever else it means (and we'll get there in a bit), the storytelling in Genesis claims that human beings are capable of bearing some telltale imprint of the person of God.  Human beings are, just in our being, able to communicate something of who God is.  

That really is a profound claim, especially given how vastly different--holy, transcendent, mysterious, and infinite--God is from human beings in some ways.  God is beyond time, beyond space, beyond our tiny frail categories and perceptions of reality, and yet in some meaningful way, Genesis says, you can project the image of God onto the screen of humanity and still get a half-decent picture.  Somehow, to some degree, God's character is evident in human beings.

So in a sense, before we even get to the later New Testament claim that in Jesus we had God walking around in human skin, Genesis has already primed the pump and said that all human beings--every child of every parent in all of human history--already bears the image of God right off the bat.  Before the incarnation of God in Christ, the image of God is already visible in our skin in the face and personality of every one of us.

Maybe this is a little like saying that while you can't convey the smell of the number seven in an aroma, you can convey deep sadness in a song--and you can (or, God can) convey some essential glimpse of God's own being, through... us.

And notice--it is through all of us.  In every permutation, every variation, every one of us.  Him, her, they, them, we, us, me, you, in every shade of color, every subtle difference, beyond the boundaries of whatever categories we tend to put each other in, we bear the image of God in some true and unmistakable way, like when you hear the blues, you know it is communicating heartbreak and sorrow.  In a sense, then, it is no wonder that the story we call the Gospel eventually says that God entered into our humanity in Jesus of Nazareth in some new and definitive way: the opening chapter of the Bible itself was getting us ready for a turn in the story like that by telling us that every last one of us already bears the image of God from the get-go.

Perhaps the question, then, is whether we dare to recognize that image in every person--every person--rather than reverting back to our old instinct only to see the divine in "the ones who are like me."  To be brutally honest, for a lot of the last few millennia, a lot of Respectable Religious people have assumed that God is really male, white, and probably spoke King James English (I have heard more than a few say over the years that they believed the only true version of the Bible is the old King James, on the grounds that "God speaks that way", and forgetting the layers of Hebrew and Greek underneath any English translation).  But if we dare to take the voice of Genesis seriously, then we can't accept the bearded European fellow on the Sistine Chapel as the sole bearer of God's "image."  If we take the storytelling here seriously, then God's image is not reducible to the binary picture of male or female, men or women, and for that matter, God is not reducible to "whiteness", either.  Even the singularity of God is more complicated than it might first appear here in Genesis, since God says, "Let us make humankind in our image."  That suggests that God's own being, God's pronouns, so to speak, cannot be expressed as merely "he" but "they"--and in fact, classic Christian theology speaks of God as a Trinity of Three Persons in One Being who are beyond our categorization of gender, race, or what-have-you.

This is to say that every person you and I see today bears the presence of the divine.  Every human being is, within our own being, holy ground.  Every face is a sanctuary.  And we do not get to pick and choose which faces are worthy of our respect, which faces are deserving of our love, which faces are reflections of the God who is here in our skin.... because they all are.  

Here's a secret: you don't have to go to church to see God.  You don't have to get underneath a steeple or looking at a bearded figure in stained glass to get a glimpse of God's face.  You don't even need to go out into the woods in the peace of nature--although you can sense God's presence there, too.  But right next to you, right in front of you, right around you, every human face is a reflection of God's own image--in our capacity for relationship and love, compassion and creativity, thought and reason and self-awareness.  God has made us to be capable of bearing that image from the very beginning, which makes all of humanity a sort of walking gallery of canvases painted with divine self-portraits.

When we take that claim seriously, it will change every interaction with every person--the bigwig boss at work, as well as the awkward, gangly clerk at the grocery story ringing up your milk and bread, the faces that look like yours, and the ones who are quite different, the stories that resonate with yours, and the lives that have taken very different courses.  It will mean I do not get to cling to the privilege of treating the ones who look more like me as more important, as of greater worth, while sneering and smirking at others whose likeness is not on the Sistine Chapel. It will mean we no longer get to treat some human beings as of more worth, and it will mean that we will honor the image of God in the ones that the world labels as "the losers," "the strangers," the "other," and the ones who do not fit our categories.  

Look for the presence of God all around you today, friends.  Every face is a sanctuary.

Lord God, let us glimpse your image in the presence of others around us, and give us the ability to honor your image in all.

Seeing All That's There

“Seeing All That’s There”—January 22, 2019

“On the sabbath he began to teach in the synagogue, and many who heard him were astounded.  They said, ‘Where did this man get all this? What is this wisdom that has been given to him? What deeds of power are being done by his hands! Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary and brother of James and Joses and Judas and Simon, and are not his sisters here with us?’ And they took offense at him.” [Mark 6:2-3]

Sometimes, it is possible to be staring at something straight on and still to miss it.

Anyone who remembers those “Magic Eye” computer-designed images that were so popular in the 1990s will tell you the same.  Stereograms, they were called—and they’re still around today as a quirky visual artform.  On a two-dimensional surface would be printed a pattern—and if you stared at it intently, you would see nothing more than the repeated pattern as a flat image on the paper.  But if you sort of let your eyes relax and unfocus, a new image would appear to “jump out” in three-dimensions.  It was there all along, and the old pattern didn’t disappear—it’s just that there was more there the whole time, and your eyes had to take a while to recognize it.  But that means that in the mean time, while you are learning to let your eyes see the “hidden” image, you can be staring straight at the deeper picture and be completely oblivious to it.

When Jesus goes back to his hometown, all of a sudden, he is the living stereogram in their midst, and the folks back home can only see the flat pattern.  And of course, they start to sound like those people who can’t see anything more in a “magic eye” image than the plain two-dimensional pattern that becomes the background for the “real” image.  “I can’t see anything more in this Jesus…” they say.  “I know what I’m looking at—and it’s just the carpenter.”  “We know his story—this is the kid whose brothers and sisters are all still around, who never left town, and there’s nothing more to be said about this Jesus.”  They can’t believe that Jesus has the gall to talk to them like there’s anything more to him than meets the eye.

That's the driving question of all the gospels, particularly of Mark's:  who will recognize the truth of who Jesus really is?  Most of the time, it is a surprising and motley group of persons who recognize that Jesus is the Son of God—a group that includes demons, tax collectors, Roman centurions, and only sometimes includes Jesus’ own hand-picked disciples!  But the people you would expect to recognize Jesus—the religious experts or his closest neighbors and family members—these people keep missing the truth about Jesus.  He had been staring them right in the face all those years in Nazareth, or in encounter after encounter with the Pharisees and religious professionals, and they are missing the truth that Jesus is none other than God-with-us, the Son walking around in a human life.  It’s not that Jesus isn’t really human—it’s that in the midst of his humanity, Jesus is at one and the same time fully God in the flesh.  The religious experts can’t see that, even though the fuller picture is right in front of them.

I wonder if we suffer from the same troubled vision sometimes, too.  Not that we don’t recognize Jesus—no, at least for most of us who have spent anytime in the church at all, we have learned the right technical terms and liturgical formulas to recite to show we know that Jesus is the Son of God.  We know the Creed, perhaps, which insists that Jesus is God’s Son, “God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God… of one Being with the Father.”  We know that the “right answer” about Jesus is that he is God’s Son.  And yet when we look for the presence of Jesus, and of the Kingdom he brings, right in our midst, we miss these things that are right in front of us.  It is hard sometimes for us to see that Christ shows up right among us, in our skin.

Here’s what I mean, or at least an example.  Ask someone to tell you about the Kingdom of God, and chances are, most church folk are going to start talking about heaven—some place, other than here, where we will go when we die.  But we have a much harder time recognizing the Kingdom, the Reign of God, in moments and people and actions around us, right here right now, where God is reigning and creating a community full of overflowing joy and genuine love.  We church folk easily miss that Jesus really is present whenever two or three are gathered in his name—even if that is in a hospital intensive care unit as tearful prayers are spoken.  We can easily miss that God’s Kingdom is there in the serving hands of disciples washing dishes together in the church kitchen… or the soup kitchen… or in your kitchen.  We can miss that the Reign of God “happens” as strangers who were told they were unacceptable by someone else... are welcomed.  We so often miss that it’s a Kingdom moment when we are given the opportunity to listen to someone whose heart is heavy, or to forgive someone you had just settled for estrangement from.  We often miss that Jesus insists on showing up, as he said, in the presence of “the least of these.”  And so we miss that there is a deeper, fuller picture going on all the time in the midst of the flat patterns on the surface of things.  We miss seeing that no less than the living God is breaking into our daily routines, right where we are.  

Today, let us refuse to miss out any longer. Today, let us be willing to look for Jesus as he has already been there among us, staring us in the face, and see the fuller picture awaiting us in this day.

Lord Jesus, don’t let us settle today for seeing only surface things.  Let us see you here in our midst, and let us recognize the fuller picture of who you are and where you choose to show up.