On Both Sides of the Table

On Both Sides of the Table--February 28, 2019

"Let mutual love continue.  Do not neglect to show hospitality to stranger, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it." [Hebrews 13:1-2]

Maybe I've had it wrong all this time.  Maybe we all have, we churchy Respectable Religious folks.

See, I'll confess something.  After all this time, this whole month of our focus on "seeing Christ here... with the Other," I've tried to pay attention, and I think the Spirit has hit me over the head enough to get it--the followers of Jesus are called, unquestionably, particularly to look out for the needs of "the stranger."  I get it.  I may be dense, but I get that we are supposed to look beyond "Me and My Group First" to the needs of those who are outside the boundaries of my neighborhood, outside the lines of my county or commonwealth or country or comfort zones, outside the walls of my church building.  But along with that, I have to admit I have assumed that we "insiders" were supposed to show particular love for "outsiders" for the sake of the outsiders.  But here the writer to the Hebrews smacks me upside the head again and says, "That's kind of arrogant, isn't it?  Maybe the strangers whose paths cross with yours haven't been sent to your door so that YOU can 'fix' THEM, but perhaps God has sent them so that THEY might be a blessing to YOU."

And that brings me up short. 

I have this way of assuming that I've got it all figured out, that I've got it right, and that I'm the one with the correct answers, good theology, abundance of resources, and stores of divine blessing, and then assuming that everybody else around, especially "outsiders," "foreigners," "strangers," and "outcasts," are poor, needy helpless schlubs that I must "fix." And my second default assumption is that "fixing" them means "making them like me."

But the writer of Hebrews takes all that and turns it on its head.  The writer of Hebrews still directs the New Testament community to "show hospitality to strangers," like all the Torah, the prophets, and the teachings of Jesus had, but this passage reminds us that it may not be for their sake, but for mine.  It may well be that God has chosen to bless me by the presence of new faces who are welcomed to my table.  

That, of course, is the backstory that the writer of Hebrews has in mind when he says that "some have entertained angels without knowing it."  It's a callback to the story of Abraham and the three visitors, who turn out to be the very presence of Yahweh somehow (sometimes it is taken to be God and two angels, sometimes a teaser for the Trinity, and sometimes people just throw up their hands at why there are three and just say, "It was God who was visiting Abraham--that's enough to say.").  Well, Abraham back in Genesis 18 sees these three travelers coming his way, and he goes out of his way to ask them to stop, to eat, and to find some shade under his tent.  And in that exchange, the visitors (again, who are really somehow God) announce to Abraham that he and Sarah will have a son before long--a message so preposterous sounding that the elderly couple breaks into laughter, which eventually becomes the name of their son, Isaac, when he does come along.  Now, nowhere in the Genesis passage does the text suggest that the promise of a child is a "reward" for the hospitality, and yet the fact that these three strangers come to Abraham and find his door open to them is the means by which the promise and blessing are given.  The traveling strangers have come, not so that Abraham can puff himself up with patronizing pity for them or so that he can pat himself on the back for being a "good, moral person", but they have come for Abraham's benefit--as agents of blessing for him and his wife, and indeed all of creation.

And this is the great reversal of God--sometimes we imagine that we are sent into situations because, as people who "have it all together," we are there to help out someone not as good as we are, to show to the world "my virtue" by being willing to go and rub elbows for a bit ladeling soup for "those people" who need so much help.  And this, it turns out, is a load of dingoes' kidneys. Sometimes God has it in mind to bless me in ways I never expected, from the people I never expected had anything to offer me.  If I can quit casting myself as the hero on the white horse "fixing those broken people" and instead see myself as someone who can receive blessing from "strangers," "outsiders," and "foreigners," then maybe I will see that God has been staring me in the face this whole time while I was to busy patting myself on the back to see.

In fact, maybe in God's infinite cleverness, this has been God's intention all along--that both of us, who are each strangers from one another, find ourselves blessed by the presence of God... in the other!  And maybe instead of me "doing my noble community service by doling out soup from the Helper side of the soup kitchen line" I will be able to sit at a table with the stranger who has been sent across my path, and I can see that from the other side of that table, I am the stranger who has been sent across theirs.  And perhaps God has it in mind that we both become blessings for each other in that encounter.

If our understanding of "welcoming the stranger" or "caring for the Other" is one-directional, we will always be tempted to puff ourselves up as though "we well-to-do church folk have come to rescue you poor helpless objects of our pity."  But if we see from the Scriptures themselves that God intends to bless the people on both sides of the table, indeed, in every seat around the table, then we can see that we are sent both to be blessings and to be blessed in the encounter with the "other" whose story intertwines with mine today.

Our reason as Christians to "show hospitality to the stranger" (or, to be literal about the Greek word that gets translated "hospitality," to "love the foreigner") is not that we've got it all figured out and they've got it all backwards, but rather that an infinitely clever God chooses to show up at both sides of the table, offering blessing in both directions all around.

We are called to welcome and love those we would regard as "the Other," (those same folks who would look at me and call me "the Other" as well, mind you), in order to discover Christ is present both in my attempt to show love for the person at my table, and that Christ is present as well in the other who dares to sit with me and break bread and bring blessing there, too.

Today, see Christ in the face of the stranger--not simply as someone who is there for us to "fix," but as someone Christ has sent perhaps that we might be healed, too.

Lord Jesus, give us the eyes to recognize you in all the unexpected faces you wear, at all of our tables.

Other, Not Sinner

Other, Not Sinner--February 27, 2019

"So [Jesus] came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well. It was about noon.  A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, 'Give me a drink.' (His disciples had gone into the city to buy food.) The Samaritan woman said to him, 'How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?' (Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.) Jesus answered here, 'If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you, 'Give me a drink,' you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water'." [John 4:5-10]

Do not confuse being "other" with being "sinful."  Jesus does not.  Not once.

For all the times I have read and re-read this well-known story from John's Gospel, I don't think I had ever noticed that until today.  At least, I had never really stopped to consider this before (a reminder, as God's Spirit has a way of doing, that just when I think I have pinned a text into submission, the Scriptures wrestle me back down to the ground and punch me in the hip like God does to Jacob).  But notice that even though this woman has baggage, and Jesus is not afraid to deal with the broken relationships of her past when the time comes for that, Jesus doesn't treat her being "a Samaritan" as sinful by itself.  

Yes, she is different from Jesus--he comes from a Jewish background, and she has grown up in the neighboring region of Samaria.  And yes, that has also brought with it different religion (they banter about that, too, eventually), different culture, different ethnicity, and a whole host of differences.  And to be sure, there was plenty of animosity between Judeans who saw themselves as the "faithful remnant" who had not been tainted by intermarriage with foreign nations and empires, and the Samaritans, who held onto part of the heritage of ancient Israel but had also been interspersed among other people groups over the centuries and created something of a new culture that was a hodge-podge of nationalities, customs, and ethnicity.  The Judeans saw themselves as the "pure" and "true" people of God, and looked down at the Samaritans as "tainted," "impure," and succumbing to the ways of the world... and the Samaritans had their own vitriol to fling back at the Judeans.  From the Judean perspective, just being Samaritan was a wicked thing--because to them it meant you were comfortable with compromising with the world and its wicked ways.  And from the Samaritan standpoint, being Samaritan was simply what you were born--you couldn't "repent" of being Samaritan any more than you could repent of being brown-haired.  And from the Samaritan perspective, you kind of had to ask why you would need to repent of being brown-haired.  It was just a part of who you are.  

Jesus, however, does not accept the assumption that being Samaritan is a moral failure.  And he does not treat this woman as sinner because of her kind of humanity. She is "other," but she that does not, by itself, mean "sinful." 

That is critical for two reasons.  First, it means that Jesus is able to accept her, to cross boundaries that have been set up between them, without having to hem and haw about whether it is okay to associate with her.  He doesn't have to say, "Just so you know, me sitting down at this well with you is not an endorsement of your Samaritan ways," because that's not even an issue at all for him.  Jesus sees the difference between them, of course.  He doesn't spout any nonsense that he "doesn't see Samaritan-ness or Judean-ness," because of course, sure, it's there. But Jesus doesn't see being a Samaritan as anything to apologize for, repent of, or confess.  He sees she is different, but being different in this regard does not mean she is wicked. Jesus doesn't assume that his talking with her is an act of pity for some poor, misguided sinner.  He sees himself as one person talking to another person, both of whom are different kinds of thirsty. But there is no song and dance about how being Samaritan is by itself something that needs to be forgiven.  It does not.

And because this woman's identity is not a boundary (and never was, for Jesus), it is possible for their conversation to get deeper eventually, so that the messes she has come through in her past can indeed be named and dealt with.  She's been through a lot of bad relationships--they both know that.  And Jesus neither condemns nor applauds that fact--he just makes it clear that he knows she has been through a lot of dead-end relationships like the Goodbye Girl and he knows that she has been hurt.  And part of what Jesus has to do is to say, "I'm not like all those other dead-ends.  I have something good to offer you as a free gift--as free as water from a well."  And it is possible for Jesus to make that offer genuinely because they haven't gotten hung up on the bad theology that being a Samaritan was a sin.  Because that's not in the way, they can get to the real hurts and real dead-ends she has been through.

In all of this scene, Jesus does not patronize or condescend to the woman at the well.  He treats her as someone he can be honest with, and she can be honest back with him, because she comes to discover that she isn't being attacked for being a woman, or for being a Samaritan, or for anything... because she isn't being attacked at all.

The rest of their life-changing conversation, one which ends with the woman eventually going out and telling all her friends and neighbors about Jesus (which apparently is not a problem for Jesus, either), is all possible because at the beginning, Jesus is clear that her being "other" is not something to be ashamed of, to apologize for, or to confess.  It is possible to be "other"--to be different in some way--without having to say you are sorry for it, to pretend the difference is not there, or to cover over it.  Jesus doesn't forgive this woman for her otherness, because otherness is not something for which one must ask for forgiveness.  Otherness does not become an impenetrable boundary between them.  It is simply the truth.  

It is telling to me that the Bible often envisions God's promised future as a gathering of all sorts of "others" without insisting that they all become identical.  Isaiah dreams of wolves and lambs, cows and bears, lying down side by side to eat safely, but without the wolves all being zapped into become sheep.  They are transformed in such a way that they do not eat or kill each other, but they remain other.  Apparently, God is not ashamed of the otherness. The violence and hostility between those old enemies has been taken away, but not their difference.

Today, it is important to remember that Jesus is able to distinguish between "otherness" and "sinfulness." Yes, there are things in this life that are wicked and terrible and rotten which we need to turn away from.  Yes, we are constantly called away from giving ourselves back into the power of sin.  Yes, we are right to confess where we have sinned and where we continue to struggle.

But "otherness"--being different--whether it is the Samaritan woman talking with Jesus, or cows and bears in Isaiah, or the person waiting for you to tell them that God love them... and so do you, these things are not sins to be confessed. They are differences between us which can either become obstacles if we make them such, or they can simply be part of loving people as they are.

Can we do the difficult work of following Jesus into whatever unexpected conversations he gets himself into? And can we go there, as he does, without pity or condescension, and instead with the love that sees people honestly and calls them beloved?

Lord Jesus, give us the wisdom to know the difference between sinfulness and other-ness.

Holy, Dangerous Listening

Holy, Dangerous Listening--February 25, 2019

The whole assembly kept silence, and listened to Barnabas and Paul as they told of all the signs and wonders that God had done through them among the Gentiles. After they finished speaking, James replied, “My brothers, listen to me. Simeon has related how God first looked favorably on the Gentiles, to take from among them a people for his name. This agrees with the words of the prophets, as it is written, ‘After this I will return, and I will rebuild the dwelling of David, which has fallen; from its ruins I will rebuild it, and I will set it up, so that all other peoples may seek the Lord— even all the Gentiles over whom my name has been called. Thus says the Lord, who has been making these things known from long ago’...." [Acts 15:12-18]

It is a holy and dangerous thing to listen to one another... really to listen, and not simply to assume you know what the other will say.

This is the story of a time when the first generation of Christ-followers dared to listen, both to the Scriptures and to one another, and ended up being surprised by both.

When the early church wrestled with big questions like "Who belongs?" the early church committed to listening to each other.  The question at this moment in the book of Acts was whether Gentiles (non-Jewish people) were going to be allowed to belong in the church as they were, or if they would have to live within the rules of Judaism first.  And so they gathered in Jerusalem to talk... to wrestle... and honestly, to listen.

But what exactly did they listen to each other saying?  This was clearly not a Quaker meeting where everyone sat in silence until someone burst out with something to say.  It seems from just these verses that there are two things the Christian community kept its ears open for--the Word of God in the Scriptures, and the ongoing activity of God in the world.  These two go together, and they cannot be separated, because we cannot know how to identify what kinds of things God might be up to without know from the Scriptures what God is like and who God is, but also because we cannot leave the actions of God as fossils of the past, preserved in the pages of the Bible only, as though God retired when the last chapter of Revelation was written. 

Pretty easily, we see how the Christian community in Jerusalem did both at the same time.  James, who is probably the James we also know as the brother of Jesus, puts the Scriptures and the ongoing work of God back to back within two sentences.  First, he reminds the gathered community that "Simeon" (Simon Peter) has seen the stirrings of the Spirit to lead him to welcome Gentile believers and to draw those Gentiles to meet him and hear the Good News in the first place (this is back to the story of Cornelius in Acts 10).  The church, if it is to be faithful in any way, simply cannot stick its head in the sand so it can ignore what the Holy Spirit has continued to do.  The church simply could not ignore or deny that the Spirit has drawn non-Jews as non-Jews (that is, without having them keep kosher or be circumcised) into faith in Christ and into the community of his disciples, the same way that the church simply could not ignore the moving of the Spirit on Pentecost.  If they had, there would have been only twelve members of the church, and their bones would still be huddled together in a locked upper room in Jerusalem.  But because they were open to the leading of the Spirit, they walked out on that Pentecost Day and let the Good News flow through them. 

Well, here they are again--the Spirit has been moving, and they have been mulling over what it means.  It's not as though the church instantly knew what to do about these Gentile Christians they were seeing--the first disciples were genuinely surprised about this turn of events, it seems.  But once the fact was out there--once they started to see Gentiles coming to faith in Jesus without being circumcised and without keeping kosher--they had to deal with it, and they had to deal with it as though the Spirit of God were a part of it.

That kind of facing the facts is scary for us to do.  We have a hard enough time getting a handle on how things were or how things "used to be" in the nostalgia-tinted scenes from our memory.  So it's even harder to allow the possibility that God might surprise us, too.  It was scary for the church when, just a matter of decades ago, a movement began that started asking whether women could be allowed to be pastors, even though it had fallen out of practice and been forbidden for centuries.  But here were these women, who were convinced that the Spirit was moving--yes, even moving in ways that paralleled the women's movement in secular culture--and that they, too, had been led to be pastors in the church.  And for many Christian traditions--certainly not all, but some, including my own Lutheran tradition--it was a scary time, but still Christian leaders found the courage first to listen to one another rather than coming to the table with eyes shut and arms crossed.  And one of the things they listened for was the word from people who could only say that they knew the Spirit of God was moving among them.  The church worked up the courage to ask, What is God's Spirit doing in our situation?  rather than to assume they knew what God was allowed and not allowed to do.  That kind of courageous humility to let God be free to act led to new directions for women's leadership in many churches, the same way it allowed the church to be open to surprise with the inclusion of Gentiles.

And yet, there was more that happened in that gathering in Jerusalem in Acts 15.  The disciples did not just voice their own experiences as though they all knew what their experiences meant by themselves.  They did not merely pool their ignorance and decide something on their own, only to rubber stamp their decision with God's approval in their minds.  They turn to the Scriptures to see whether there might have been hints and surprises in those ancient, living words, to speak to their situation.  They risked allowing themselves--all of them--to be surprised by the Scriptures, to see what the Word of God said, rather than assuming that one side was the "Bible-believing" side and the other was the "Bible-rejecting" side.  

Both the Kosher-law-insisting Judean Christians and the Gentile-welcoming traveling Christians, who clearly already had their opinions, put themselves under the authority of the Scriptures, and both were willing to be surprised by the Scriptures.  And as James guides the conversation, they do recall words that perhaps that had known for years, memorizing in the synagogue as children, hearing read on the sabbath over the course of their lives.  There is this vision from the prophet Amos, a vision of Gentiles being drawn into God's community and called by the name of God.  And if they had spent much more time on the subject, they might have rattled off a long list of passages that pictured this kind of welcome into God's community.  The Scriptures had something to say to their situation, and it was a surprising word.

That is scary for us to imagine, too, because we would prefer to know that the Bible doesn't have any tricks up its sleeve.  We want to imagine that the Bible has no surprises left, and that God has said all that there is to be said on every subject, so we need not even bother reading the Scriptures a second time.  But no, the early church said--God continues to speak to us through the living Word of the Scriptures, and that means that God may well surprise us in what we find there.  Just as the Spirit is not our possession, at our command and in our tight grasp, but moves and works in a slippery way just outside of our grip, so the Scriptures, too, are free to overturn our expectations.  That was also, interestingly enough, a part of the conversation in many churches as the question of women's ordination came up--it was not simply a matter of deciding that something "new" needed to be done.  It was a matter of re-reading the Scriptures and discovering again not only the claim that "there is no longer male and female, for you are now one in Christ" in the New Testament, but also rediscovering that there were apparently many women leaders in the Christian church whose names and roles are mentioned in Acts and in Paul's letters.  It was not a matter of throwing out the Bible in favor of experience, but of letting the Bible speak to us, even if it spoke something we were not expecting, something that the Spirit was moving us to see again.

This is how the early church found itself addressing the question of Gentiles--committing to listening, but in particular, listening to the testimony of people who saw and witnessed the action of the Holy Spirit, and listening to the Word of Scripture to find hints of what the Spirit's motion would look like.  In some ways, it seems far too loose, far too risky, compared with our bureaucratic ways of making decisions in the church, and the mountains of paperwork it involves.  And yet, the early church never lost its rootedness, never lost its secure foundation, because it kept itself listening to the Word, spoken through the Spirit in living brothers and sisters, and spoken through the words of patriarchs and prophets in the Scriptures.  

Are we willing to risk such reading of the Scriptures together and to do the holy, dangerous work of listening for the moving of the Spirit today as we ask what God is doing with us?

God of speech and silence, grant to us the courage to listen, and beneath that, the foundational trust to know that you have claimed us and will not let us go.  From that position of trust, let us risk hearing, discussing, and engaging each other as we seek to be your people in this day and at this time.

Beyond the Whale

Beyond the Whale--February 22, 2019

"The LORD God appointed a bush, and made it come up over Jonah, to give shade over his head, to save him from his discomfort; so Jonah was very happy about the bush. But when dawn came up the next day, God appointed a worm that attacked the bush, so that it withered. When the sun rose, God prepared a sultry east wind, and the sun beat down on the head of Jonah so that he was faint and asked that he might die. He said, 'It is better for me to die than to live.' But God said to Jonah, 'Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?' And he said, 'Yes, angry enough to die.' Then the LORD said, 'You are concerned about the bush, for which you did not labor and which you did not grow; it came into being in a night and perished in a night. And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?'" [Jonah 4:6-11]

It really makes a difference to get the whole way through a story.

Fans of mid 1990s "Must See TV" from NBC's old classic line-up will know that.  If you were a fan of the show Friends at all, you are likely familiar with the classic episode where Phoebe (played by Lisa Kudrow on the sitcom) says how much she hates that "sad movie" called It's A Wonderful Life, and how much she loves the happy story of Old Yeller, because she has only ever seen the first two-thirds of both movies.  And of course, there's the joke--she has never seen the classic Frank Capra happy ending of the Jimmy Stewart Christmas classic, complete with Clarence getting his wings, and so she doesn't know that It's A Wonderful Life leaves everybody smiling. And she has never made it to the end of Old Yeller, so she has never had to see the good and loyal dog be put down when he gets rabies at the end.  Phoebe has her movie reviews backwards, because she has never made it the whole way through either story.  And in both of those cases, the ending is really what the whole story drives toward.  

That's not only a helpful hint for your movie viewing, but it's also essential for reading the stories of the Bible.  And Jonah's story is a classic case in point.  If you stop halfway through, you will likely assume Jonah's story is a morality tale about doing what God says or else risking punishment (like getting swallowed by a great fish).  But that's not what the point of the story was ever really about.  Making it all the way to the end of Jonah's story is much more dangerous to our sense of religious self-righteous.  Be careful--if you keep on reading past the famous fish scene, Jonah's story just might make you rethink your whole faith and revise the way you see "the other."

It's a shame that in a lot of church life, we stop at the part of the story where Jonah gets spit up by the great fish.  That much, almost everybody knows.  The Sunday School flannelboard version of Jonah's story that I grew up with boiled down to something like this:

"God told Jonah to go to Nineveh.  

Jonah said, 'No,' and went as far away in the other direction as he could.

God punished Jonah for disobeying by first sending a storm at sea and then sending a great big fish to swallow Jonah up.

God only let Jonah out when he finally promised to do what God said.

And the moral of the story is--do what God says or else you'll be punished."

Nobody in my recollection ever bothered pointing out that there was another two chapters to the story, and that maybe, just maybe, the actual turning point of the story was yet to be told.  In the Respectable Religious version of Jonah's story, Jonah is basically Goofus from the old Highlights' "Goofus and Gallant," giving us an example of what not to do if we wanted to avoid God's wrath.

But really, once the great fish vomits Jonah out at the city limits of Nineveh, the story takes a couple of unexpected turns.  Once we get beyond the whale, Jonah goes into the city of Nineveh--the capital city of Israel's sworn enemy, the cruel Assyrians--and he begrudgingly announces God's judgment on their cruelty and wickedness... only to have these terrible, no-good, hopeless, pagan Ninevites... change.  They turn from their wickedness and cruelty, so the story goes, and God decides to be merciful.

That was exactly what Jonah had been afraid of.

Seriously.  Jonah is angry with God, because he knew--he just knew--that if he did as God told him and announced his message to Nineveh, that they would turn from their wickedness and God would be merciful to them.  And Jonah didn't want that.  He complains to God, saying, "I knew it--I knew you would do this, because I know that you are gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love!"  Jonah gets upset that God is gracious to these... others... these enemies.  

This is the real issue of the story: Jonah wants permission to hate these people because they are from a hostile foreign country.  And he doesn't want to listen to God's summons to speak to them, because he doesn't want them to be eligible for mercy.  He just wants a justification for his own hatred of "the other." And that willful ignoring of God's love for these enemies consumes Jonah. Truthfully, he has been swallowed up long before any whales get to him.

So after Jonah has his hissyfit with God, the last scene of the story unfolds.  Jonah is wallowing in his own bitterness over God's choice to show mercy to the people Jonah hated, and so God gives another chance to Jonah to "get it," just as God had given the people of Nineveh another chance to "get it," too.  God shades the self-pitying, miserable prophet with a miraculous bush that grows overnight  (take that, Jack and the Beanstalk!), and Jonah loves the plant for its shade.  Then, when God lets a worm eat the plant in a second night, Jonah is upset at the loss of this random shrubbery.  This is God's entry--this is where divine mercy gets a toe in the door.

"You are upset about this plant, Jonah?" says God.  "You are sad for the loss of a shrub, which grew up in a night and which you had nothing to do with taking care of--and yet you wanted me to destroy a whole city full of people?"  God forces Jonah to see how divine love for "the other" really works.  Jonah has felt compassion for a plant--so how much more should Jonah have been concerned for the lives of men and women and children (and many animals, as the text notes, too!) in Nineveh?  Jonah had wanted to see divine wrath consume the city in fire and brimstone... and instead he saw divine grace envelop the city with love and mercy.  So God refuses to give up--not on the despicable Ninevites, and not on the despairing prophet, either.  And the last line, the question that God puts to Jonah, becomes a question put to us, too--can we dare to allow that God loves the people we have sworn off as our enemies?  Could we bear the thought that God just might send us to be the means of redemption for the people we wanted to hate?

This is what the whole story of Jonah has always really been about.  It's just that most of the time, we never make it beyond the whale.  But what a dramatic turn, if we actually make it through to the end of the story.  What at first sounds like a straightforward morality fable about what bad things will happen to those who disobey an angry and almighty God turns out to be a story about a grace that will not stay contained within the boundaries we want to put up.

Look, let's be honest: we are burning with our own personal hatreds for people we don't like and don't want to like.  There is a near daily ritual on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media in which we collectively post angry words about how "Nobody else sees what's going on!" while we rattle off our personal list of our favorite villains to hate--the political party you despise, the dangerous outsiders you want to get rid of, the dangerous influences affecting our children... the whole nine yards.  I'm pretty sure Jonah gave a speech like that to God listing all the reasons that God was not allowed to forgive the Ninevites.  You can easily imagine the reluctant prophet lecturing God about "those godless people of Nineveh" and how big a threat they are to Israel's national security--how they must be gotten rid of, not forgiven, and how anyone who shows mercy to "those people" must be hopelessly naïve or brainwashed.  Jonah is basically everybody's one rage-filled uncle who goes off on tirades about all the dangerous bad people we all ought to be afraid of.

And in a wonderfully ironic twist of grace, even that bigot of a prophet is given mercy, too.  Rather than just zap Jonah with a final lightning bolt or have the big fish just digest him at the bottom of the sea, God gives Jonah the chance to be changed by grace, just as much as the Ninevites are changed by grace and set free.

See, here's the thing about grace: the moment--the very moment--that we set up a boundaries beyond which we say grace is not allowed to go, God deliberately goes there and showers mercy on the people we were hell-bent on hating.  Godless, conniving Ninevites?  Grace.  Bitter, hateful Jonah?  Grace.  The people you and I are damn sure are beyond the reach of God's love?  Grace.  You and me for thinking that someone else was beyond the reach of God's love in the first place?  Guess what--grace, too. Jonah's story is precisely about how God chooses to take the side of the "other," even when we don't want to see it.

If we stop at the great fish, we'll never get any further than tired old moralizing that reinforces our old hatreds and justifies our old bigotry.

But if we go beyond the whale, we will find God has been leaning against castor bean plants and standing with the people we wanted to hate.

It really makes a difference to make it all the way through the story.

Lord God, whether it's by fish or plant or the voice of a friend, get our attention to love the ones we want to ignore or hate, and lead us to see the ways you have been gracious with us, too.

The Invisible Fault Lines

The Invisible Fault Lines--February 21, 2019

"Welcome those who are weak in faith, but not for the purpose of quarreling over opinions. Some believe in eating anything, while the weak eat only vegetables. Those who eat must not despise those who abstain, and those who abstain must not pass judgment on those who eat; for God has welcomed them. Who are you to pass judgment on servants of another? It is before their own lord that they stand or fall. And they will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make them stand. Some judge one day to be better than another, while others judge all days to be alike. Let all be fully convinced in their own minds. Those who observe the day, observe it in honor of the Lord. Also those who eat, eat in honor of the Lord, since they give thanks to God; while those who abstain, abstain in honor of the Lord and give thanks to God. We do not live to ourselves, and we do not die to ourselves. If we live, we live to the Lord, and if we die, we die to the Lord; so then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s." [Romans 14:1-8]

It's often the invisible divisions between us that are the hardest to overcome.

Sometimes the "us" and "them" groupings we put ourselves into are obvious.  We divide ourselves up along lines of gender, or skin coloring, of language and dress, and the like. And almost instinctively, we make judgments and preferences based on who is more "like" us and who is "other." We tell ourselves in our wiser moments that it is wrong to do, of course, but we still struggle with those obvious, overt divisions.

But even more insidious, even more powerfully subtle, are the divisions we cling to that are invisible because they have to do with the thoughts in our heads and the convictions in our hearts.  We still fiercely clutch those hatreds, the lines between "those who think like us" and "those who disagree with us," sometimes even more tightly than the (seemingly) visible differences of gender and race and dress.  Perhaps enough after-school TV specials or sound-bytes from Dr. King's "I Have A Dream" speech have taught us that it is not publicly acceptable to scorn people for the way their physical appearances differ from our own (although, again, below the surface, we are still often still entangled in those sins, too).  But we have without a doubt given ourselves permission to hate people who disagree with us.

That kind of division is rampant.  Not that our day and age has a corner on that market--as these verses from Romans remind us, the first generation of Christians in Rome were already good at dividing themselves into categories of "us" and "them," "like me" and "other," based on convictions of their hearts and theological differences in their minds.  As much as the early church in Rome was still trying to heal the wounds that had set Jews and Gentiles against one another, they were also divided along invisible lines over things like who would or wouldn't eat meat (which may have had something to do with being sacrificed to pagan idols before it was sold in the marketplace), who did or didn't observe special holidays, and so on.  These weren't visible differences--they didn't wear buttons or badges, or have color-coded t-shirts so you could tell at a distance who was one of those no-good, backward-thinking meat-eaters, and who was one of those rotten, weak-faithed non-meat-eaters.  You couldn't tell by just looking at someone who was secretly calculating when to celebrate the next new moon festival, and who were the folks that couldn't tell you what day of the week it was.  And yet those divisions were just as fierce--maybe even more so--than the visible categories of gender, of ethnicity, or even of socioeconomic status.  They still are pretty powerfully divisive.

Paul the apostle wasn't blind to those differences.  Even though he had never been to Rome when he wrote this letter, he knew about the partisan divides in the Christian community at Rome, not only the visible ethnic ones but also the invisible fault lines below the surface.  And not only does Paul know about the different factions--those who would only eat vegetables, and those who would also eat meat; those who observed special days, and those who did not--he has opinions of his own.  He doesn't pretend to be neutral on these subjects, and he has a set of convictions that ground his position.  He knows why he believes it's ok to eat meat (if his writing to the Corinthians gives us a clue, it's because Paul knows that the pagan gods are all fictional anyway), and he is free to say so.  Paul doesn't think that being in his position of authority in the church as an apostle means he must be Switzerland, neutral and without any convictions of his own.  He has them, and he says them.

But here is the really radical thing that keeps coming back throughout the New Testament--the thing that we in twenty-first century America seem to have forgotten: Paul doesn't insist that everyone has to believe like he does, even within the Christian community.  Instead, Paul says that we are all called to make room and allowance for those who think and feel differently.  Granted, we may not be at each other's throats in the year 2019 over meat or calendars, but the strategy Paul uses here is just as radical and just as vital today.  Paul's response to the invisible divisions we partition ourselves into is to say, "Ok, fine, you over there think one way, and you over there think another way--so how about you each make special effort to accommodate each other, since we are all striving to be faithful to Jesus here?"  The different factions Paul was writing to weren't a danger to each other--nobody was leading armed vegetarian raids against the meat-eating Bible Study members.  So Paul says, "If this group over here is convinced in their conscience that their meat-eating and holiday-celebrating is glorifying God, and this group over there is convinced in their consciences as well that only eating vegetables and not celebrating holidays is where they are led to be, then let's allow God to deal with it in God's own time and God's way!"  

In other words, Paul is capable of seeing that sometimes it is better to be gracious than to be "right."  Paul understands that being "saved by grace through faith" does not mean that you earn your salvation by having more correct answers on your theology exam than your neighbor.  It's not the case that the theologically "correct" get into heaven and the theologically "incorrect" go to hell--it's always all been about grace, and it always will be.  If that's how God regards us, then it's the least we can do to regard one another with the same grace.

That doesn't mean we have permission to be sloppy in our theology or not to care about what we believe and practice--but it does mean that we will not put a higher value on being "right" than on being kind.  And it means that even when we are deeply convinced of our views, that we will not deliberately make it harder for others who see things differently to do as their conscience leads them to do.  If anything, Paul says--and this is probably the hardest, most counter-intuitive part--we are to give preference to those with whom we disagree: making sure that they have what they need to be able to live by their own consciences, going out of our way to accommodate their needs, and bending over backwards to protect their ability to act and speak as their conscience leads them to, precisely because we disagree with them and want to make sure they are not snuffed out or silenced.  And the beautiful catch here is that the folks on the "other side" of the argument will be listening to Paul, too, and they will be instructed to go out of their way to accommodate you as well.

See?  Instead of Paul just bringing down the hammer of "I'm right. You're wrong. Get on my side or get out," Paul says, "Here's what I believe and why.  But I'm not so insecure as to be threatened by your difference of conviction, because I'm convinced we are serving the same Lord and called by the same Spirit.  So I will make my case, and then go out of my way to help you live by your convictions as well."  

We have been fed so much self-interested "Don't tread on me" sloganeering that it might never occur to us to recognize that Paul has built a whole way of life around deliberately putting his own preferences second to making room for "the other."  Paul doesn't get riled up when there are different factions who believe and practice differently than he does, and he doesn't defensively react by saying, "You can't tell me what to do!  No one can make me do or not do something--I have to defend my RIGHTS after all!"  Instead, he says the opposite: "I will go out of my way to make room for you, and I will lay down my rights for the sake of making sure you are ok."  And if everybody does that on both "sides", we will end up with breathing space for all of us to seek, to listen, and to do what we are convinced God is calling us to do.

Paul seems to be ok with the possibility that he might pray for God's direction and come to one conclusion, and that someone else might be praying just as earnestly for God's direction and come to another, and even though Paul knows what he believes and why, he doesn't have to attack the people who feel genuinely led to a different conclusion than he does.  Living together that way--knowing that we will disagree with each other, but staying with one another in the midst of that disagreement--is always hard.  It is certainly harder than just walking away and taking your toys with you.  But Paul is convinced it is worth it, because Paul is convinced that Christ is there, with the "other" side while Christ is also here "with" me, too. 

Today, let's be as completely honest as we can be: not just about the visible divisions that we allow still to color our treatment of one another, but also about the invisible fault lines that we struggle with.  Let's be honest about where we stand and why, rather than sweeping our differences of conviction under the rug and pretending they are not there.  And then, let us also go out of our way--as Paul here teaches us--to help those with whom we disagree to be able to live and practice as they are convinced God is leading them to do, because we are more interested in being like Christ than in winning a fight.

Lord Jesus, help us to see your presence with those with whom we most disagree, and to learn to do good for those we have the hardest time talking with.

Strangers in the Mirror

Strangers in the Mirror--February 20, 2019

"For the LORD your God is God of Gods and Lord of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome, who is not partial and takes no bribe, who executes justice for the orphan and the widow, and who loves the strangers, providing them food and clothing. You shall also love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt." [Deuteronomy 10:17-19]

God always has a way of making us look ourselves in the eye in the mirror.  

That might just be one of the critical ways you know you are dealing with the living God and not an idol or an illusion: the false gods never make us take so honest a look at ourselves as to make us uncomfortable.  It is not in the interests of the idols to have us see the truth about ourselves, after all.

But one of the thing that the God of Sarah and Abraham, of Rebekah and Isaac, and of Jacob and Moses and Miriam is well known for in the Scriptures is compelling those who claim to be the people of God to see their own stories honestly and without convenient omissions.

And that means remembering that the story of Israel begins--even before they have that name--with a bunch of wandering migrants seeking refuge in a land that is not their own.  The people of Israel start their story as the foreigners--the "stranger," to use the language of Deuteronomy.  In other words, the group that comes to see itself as "the insiders" who have special and exclusive closeness to God actually start their story as a loose collection of "outsiders" who go to Egypt because the previous land they had been squatting on was out of food.

Let's get that much of the story clear, because God here in Deuteronomy is unapologetically blunt about that.  You know how the story goes: not only had God's voice out of the blue called to Abraham and Sarah (before they were going by those new names), summoning them to leave their own country to go to a new one, Canaan, in which they had no roots, no business, no legal stake, and no family ties, but then Abraham's grandson and great-grandchildren later found themselves starving for food in Canaan.  And that extended family--really a collection of families that argued with each other a lot and occasionally sold each other into slavery if they didn't get along with someone--goes to the wealthy, prosperous, and abundant country across the border.  Jacob and his kids go to Egypt. They had first come there just to ask for the chance to get access to some grain when a famine hit and they had no way to provide food for themselves back in Canaan (which, again, wasn't even their land yet, but was still basically land they were squatting on as they wandered from place to place).  And their long lost brother Joseph persuades the Pharaoh at the time to let all of his family stay, all out of the sheer good-will that Joseph has built up with Pharaoh himself.  The descendants of Jacob--sometimes call the Hebrews--settle down in the best of the land with Pharaoh nodding approval, and they build lives there, having been welcomed as strangers and foreigners, and keeping their own lives, culture, stories, and faith in the God of Abraham and Sarah.

But when a new Pharaoh appears on the scene, he is overcome by fear--fear of the growing number of these foreigners living on his land and within his borders, and fear of losing his power.  Pharaoh whips up the population of Egypt and peddles the fear all around, and decides that the only way to reclaim Egypt's greatness and to secure its power is to turn these foreigners into slaves.  And there they live... and die... and raise their children... with their bodies enslaved to Pharaoh.  Pharaoh never let them be considered a part of Egypt--they were always "those foreigners, the Hebrews," the "other."  And that's what made it so easy, so terribly, horribly easy, to keep them enslaved.  No one in Egypt wants to risk their own livelihood, their own comfortable gig, to stick their neck out for one of "those people." And as long as Pharaoh could succeed in peddling the fear that "those Hebrew foreigners are going to overwhelm us and overpower our way of life from within," the system of slavery would continue.  So this band of foreigners who had once been welcomed with open arms now becomes the dangerous "other" who had to be controlled and kept down, all for the sake of keeping Egypt great.

Now, if you know how the rest of that story goes, one day, generations and generations after Jacob's children all settled down as welcome guests, the same God who had first called Abraham to leave his country of origin moved again and raised up a liberator, Moses, who went toe to toe with Pharaoh and led the people out of slavery in Egypt, and on the journey once again as strangers, foreigners, and sojourners, to the land that awaited them on the horizon.  And there on the journey, in the wilderness where they were once again without a country, God gave them the instruction for how to be a free people that we sometimes call "the Law," or in Hebrew, "the Torah."  The Torah includes such greatest hits as "Do not murder," and "Do not steal," and "No other gods before me," and also the commandments about sabbath year, debt cancellation, loving your neighbor as yourself, and all sorts of curious rules about animals they could and could not eat.  But woven throughout the Torah is this recurring reminder that was the foundation for all of Israel's self-understanding:  "You know what it was like to be the unwelcomed abused foreigner--so now you are called upon to welcome and treat foreigners well."

This underlying idea is core to the Law of Moses--it is the story in the background as God gives the Ten Commandments (yeah, remember that: the Ten Commandments don't just start off with listing rules, but with God reminding the people that he had just freed them from being mistreated as slaves in Egypt).  It is the recurring refrain throughout the Torah: "you were the strangers once, and you know what it is like to be the object of fear, manipulation, and hatred, and so you should know not to do those things to others."  And the flip side was also true: the Hebrews knew in their collective memory what it was like to be the migrants seeking a better life when there were food shortages back home, and to be welcomed in to a safe and prosperous new country with no questions asked.  They knew what it was like to be the "other" and to be welcomed, as well as what it was like to be the "other" and mistreated.  So God commands them to let that memory guide their actions from then on.

God, in other words, compels those who call themselves the people of God to look in the mirror of their own history and to see that they were once the vilified foreigners, they were once seen as the dangerous outsiders, and they were the ones once exploited by a fearful Pharaoh in the name of keeping Egypt great.  God reminds them, in other words, that caring for foreigners, strangers, and wandering migrants should be in their spiritual DNA, because they know what it was like to be shunned, scapegoated, and enslaved.

And then God goes one step further, as we see here in Deuteronomy.  God takes the side of foreigners, strangers, and "the other," too.  God doesn't just command the Israelites to be good to the foreigners who show up in their towns or at their doors.  God says, in effect "I choose to care for them, too--that's why I'm commanding you to do the same."  God chooses to provide for the needs of "the stranger," the foreigner, and the outsider.  There are no further conditions here--there is no rule that these "strangers" have to get in a line or fill out paperwork; there is no insistence that they learn Hebrew or even worship the God of Israel.  The identity, the story, and the background of these foreigners is not a factor in the equation--it is simply God saying, "You know what it was like to have pled for mercy when you were hungry in Canaan and sought refuge in Egypt, and you know what it was like to have been mistreated and made into a public enemy under a rotten Pharaoh, too.  So treat other foreigners with the kindness you wish you had been given when you were enslaved."  The theoretical "worthiness" of future foreigners and strangers who come to the towns of Israel is not a factor, at least according to Deuteronomy.

It is a difficult thing, to be honest, to stare our own history in the face.  It is a difficult thing to be reminded of how mercy and grace were shown to our ancestors once upon a time.  It is a difficult thing, too, to hear God call us on it and say, "If you know what it is like to be the outsider and the other, then treat the outsider and the other who crosses your path with the same decency you wish had been given to you."

Every time the children of Israel read their own Scriptures, they were reminded that their story was one of being foreigners in one scene after another--Canaan, Egypt, Babylon, and so on.  And in the times when they were the settled ones, they were called to live in light of that history.  Well, here's the thing for any of us who call ourselves Christians--we have taken these same Scriptures as our adopted story, too.   When I look at myself in the mirror, I don't see an American or a Pennsylvania first--I am dared to remind myself that I am incorporated into a story of foreigners, strangers, and sojourners who found welcome sometimes and found abuse at other times.  And I am dared to count those wandering Arameans as my own ancestors, so that I, too, will regard the "other" with as much love as the living God does.

If we dare to call ourselves the people of God, the real and living God will make us remember that part of our story, even when we do not want to remember it.

Lord God, give us the courage to look into the mirror of our past and remember who we are, how you have loved us through being outsiders, and to show the same love to the "stranger" that you have for strangers, sojourners, foreigners, and wanderers.

I Am 'Other', Too

I Am 'Other', Too--February 19, 2019

"But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us. Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life." [Romans 5:8-10]

I am the "other."  The outsider.  The one on the margins.  The estranged one.  And so are you.  

Or at least, in a sense, we had all made ourselves estranged and distant from God, and yet God loved us while we were in that condition.

We have been looking all month long at how Christ is present with "the other," but it can be easy to think that means "a separate group of people from me."  We can imagine that there's God and me on one side of a chasm, and then over there, across the abyss, there are some pitiable, pathetic "others" who are far, far away, and that God is sometimes nice and chooses to throw "those people" a bone.  Good respectable religious folks have a way of assuming that they are already rubbing elbows with God--it's just those others who are so far off and in need of a smidge of divine pity.  We--you know, as in, "God and me and the other good, respectable religious people"--we will hold an occasional car wash or bake sale to help "those people," the "other," the marginalized or the needy, we say.

And in that moment, God turns to us and says, like in the old joke, "What do you mean, 'we'?"  

See, it's not that Respectable Religious people are all close to God while there are a bunch of miserable wretches far off somewhere else.  We were all--Respectable Religious folks, too--distant, estranged, and even, to borrow Paul's word for it, enemies, of God.   And God just wouldn't take no for an answer--God wouldn't let our estrangement be the last word on the subject.

That means from God's perspective, all of us messy humans are "the other," and not just "other" in the sense of being different.  We have all, in our various ways, turned from God and crossed our arms in defiant rebellion.  We have all, on our own, wandered away from God.  And we keep doing it.  It's not just that Christians say, "I used to be a rotten sinner, but now I'm a perfect peach!" Rather, it's that we are constantly making ourselves enemies of God all over again, and God keeps on being determined to love us even as enemies.

It is this radical idea from which the whole Christian faith flows:  God has chosen to love us even while we were and are enemies of God.  God practices the same enemy-love that Jesus taught about--in fact, that is the whole point of Jesus' teaching: that we are to love our enemies because that is exactly God's policy toward a whole world full of stinkers, sinners, "those people," and estranged messes.  God's love did not wait for us to turn to God first. God's love did not wait for us to start to behave first.  And God's love still does not turn off and on like a faucet depending on my behavior, my closeness to God, or my religiosity.  God's love embraced me--and you, and all of us--as Paul notes, "while we were still sinners," and indeed "when we were enemies" of God.

That's about as "other" as you can get.  

So not only does God embrace what it "different," but God even unabashedly embraces us when we have set ourselves dead against God's goodness.  Even in our acts of betrayal.  Even when we are going further astray.  Even when we are in the far country envying the pig slop.

For folks who have been hanging around the church for very long, it is very easy to think that the church is the club for good boys and girls who from time to time raise a bit of money or take an exotic field trip of charity to donate our used clothes with the real messes.  But the apostle here says that we're all the sinful slobs, the destitute distant children who ran away from home, the ones who stopped answering God's phone calls.  We are other to the extreme--the enemies of God.  

And yet, that's not because God declared it so.  We made ourselves enemies, estranged, and outcast, and God just wouldn't stop loving us anyway, not even as enemies.

So before anybody groans or rolls their eyes about all this "Christ is present with the Other" stuff, as though it doesn't apply to us, and before anybody says, "Why do we always have to talk about God loving the Bad People when I'm one of the Good Guys?" as they tip their imaginary white hat, we should be clear: we are the ones who have been estranged from God, and we are the ones who have been shown mercy.  We are the distant ones who have been brought near.  We are "those people", too.  And that means we don't get to start judging who else is too far to be within the reach of God's mercy.  If God's love went to a cross for us when we were enemies of God, well, then, God's love went to a cross for all the other enemies of God, too.

That's how grace works--the worthiness of the recipient is not a factor in the equation.  The goodness or badness of the beloved is not the issue.  Even as enemies, Christ gave up his life for us.  And in that moment--at the cross--God once and for all declared an unending love for all the ones labeled "other" or "enemy."  Not just folks wearing black cowboy hats and twisting mustaches.  No just people from far away.  Right there in the mirror.

I am the "other.' And so are you.  And if God has loved us in our "other-ness," well then, I suspect we can count on it to be God's ongoing policy for a whole world full of messes, too.

Lord Jesus, help us to recognize our Other-ness so that we will also recognize that you have loved and claimed and died for us anyway, already.