The Ambulance Gospel--February 28, 2020

The Ambulance Gospel--February 28, 2020

And as [Jesus] sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples. When the Pharisees saw this, they said to his disciples, "Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?" But when he heard this, he said, "Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick. Go and learn what this means, 'I desire mercy, not sacrifice.' For I have come to call not the righteous but sinners'." [Matthew 9:10-13]

If you want to learn about grace, watch an ambulance crew showing up on scene. Their mission is always crystal clear. It's never about worthiness or unworthiness.  It is always about restoring life.

And if you are clear that your calling, your purpose, is simply bringing people to life as fully as possible, a lot of distracting issues simply fall away from consideration.  The EMTs who show up when someone has been in a car accident, or who get called in response to a drug overdose, or who show up on site when fire engulfs an apartment building all know that their work is focused simply on saving life.  They don't need to evaluate whose life is "worth" saving, or whether the person got into the trouble they're in by their own fault or someone else's.  They simply know their job is to restore life, wherever and whenever life is threatened.

Part of that is simply because of the urgent nature of being a first responder.  If someone has had a heart attack or been trapped in a smoke-filled room, you don't have time to ask, "Well, have you been a good person?" or "Did you start this fire because you weren't paying attention to the stove like you should have been?"  The emergent nature of the need calls for a policy of "save-first-ask-questions-later."  But there's also simply an assumption we make as a society that life is worth preserving, regardless of what messes we have made with our lives.  The ambulance crew responds to save the Eagle Scout and the deadbeat dad alike, just like they would treat the bank robber as well as the victims of the heist.  There are other consequences, for sure, for the bank robber or the deadbeat dad, but there is no question about whether they are "worth" saving or not.  When you are a first responder, your mission is clear: restore life. 

I get the sense that Jesus had that same urgent clarity to his own mission as well.  As the gospels tell it, he is far less concerned with questions of "worthiness" than all the Respectable Religious folks around him are.  It's not even that Jesus judges some worthy and others unworthy, but then helps the second group after telling them they're his charity case.  He doesn't approach the folks looked down on as "sinners" by saying, "Well, you know, you don't deserve my help, but because I'm feeling nice today, I'll throw you a little pity."  The categories of "deserving" or "undeserving" aren't there--he only sees folks in need of being brought more fully to life.  That's what lets him spend time with religious leaders like Nicodemus, crooked sell-outs like the Roman sub-contracted tax collector Zacchaeus, and everybody in between.  Jesus just doesn't see the world in categories of "white-hat-wearing good guys" and "black-hat-wearing bad guys."  Jesus only sees a world full of us trapped in different kinds of death, and like a good EMT, he goes right to work restoring us to life in whatever ways we need it.  All of us.

Like Robert Farrar Capon put it so clearly, "Jesus came to raise the dead.  He did not come to teach the teachable; he did not come to improve the improvable; he did not come to reform the reformable.  None of those things works."  Unless that is true, Jesus would have had to go around triaging the people he helped based on moral rectitude. He would have had to do background checks and get personal references before inviting himself over to someone's house (like a tax collector's dinner party) to break bread and share supper.  He would have had to check if you were going to be a worthwhile investment before bestowing any healing on you.  But he never does... because resurrection, like grace, does not ask about worthiness.  It only asks, "Do you need to be brought to life?"

So much of the time, we church folk water down the power of the Gospel's good news by thinking we have to pre-screen the ones we speak of God's love to.  So often, we act as though our job is to decide who is worthy of acceptance, or who has shown enough potential to receive mercy.  So often, we settle for the damnable logic of transactional thinking that says, "There's only a place for you if you are going to have something valuable enough to contribute, and there's only help for you if you are going to pay it back in some measurable way."  So we employ trite little mottos like, "Charity begins at home," or "We have to take care of our own," or "We don't want to attract the wrong type of people here."

Well, Jesus is only ever interested, apparently, in the "wrong type of people."

Or maybe, better yet, Jesus just doesn't care about what other folks think are the "right type of people." Like physicians are meant to help the sick, without regard for who "deserves" it (or whose insurance company thinks you are "worthy" of approval), Jesus has come to raise what is dead in us, all of us, without regard for deserving or not.  

A young and budding theologian I know (who is almost thirteen) recently put it in words I haven't been able to get out of my head lately.  She says, "But some can't accept that all will be loved, so he died on a cross."  Jesus' refusal to consider the opinions of the Respectable Religious Crowd about who was acceptable upset them so much they called for his death.  His insistence that God's great messianic banquet included sellouts and outcasts and mess-ups and failures and troublemakers and crooks was downright scandalous to the Guardians of Piety.  And yet even if they couldn't accept it, Jesus still insisted: all will be loved.

Maybe today our calling is to see the world with the clarity of an EMT crew--to know that our work is simply to bring life to folks, regardless of whether we, or anybody else, thinks they are "worthy." Maybe it is enough simply to love people prodigally. Maybe it would fill a lifetime and more just to invite everyone you meet to God's grand and raucous dinner party, without ever getting around to screening them at the door.  Maybe the world needs our radical belief that, indeed, all will be loved.

After all, when you know your calling is simply to bring people to life, it has a way of making all the other side issues fall by the wayside.

Lord Jesus, let us dare to give life to others as tenaciously as you do...and as you have already first given it to us.

Of Heads and Hearts--February 27, 2020

Of Heads and Hearts--February 27, 2020

"Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust consume and where thieves break in and steal; but store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust consumes and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there you heart will be also." [Matthew 6:19-21]

I think we've got our internal organs all confused.  And at least part of what Jesus has come to do is to get them straightened out.

For one, we have accepted this split in our day between what we think the "head" does and what we think the "heart" does, and I'm not really sure where it came from.  Our culture talks about the "head" like it's all cold logic and austere rationality, and then we give all the fun stuff to what we call the "heart"--emotion, intuition, love, commitment, romance, passion, dedication, and faith, too.  We have a way of belittling "head" knowledge and saying that it is somehow better to just feel things in... well, you know, in our "hearts."  But maybe that split isn't fair, not to our heads or our hearts.  And maybe more than that, accepting the idea of a rigid head-heart split like that is actually part of our problem.  Maybe it's actually killing us.

And maybe, in fact, Jesus' alternative picture could bring us back to life again, both in whatever our "heads" and "hearts" actually are.

Take these words from what we call the Sermon on the Mount here (words that are still ringing in my ears from hearing them on Ash Wednesday). Jesus doesn't talk about "the heart" in that sort of schmaltzy, purely emotional sense that we do, in our common talk that "the heart wants what it wants."  We tend to think that the heart is about emotions while the head is only about math.  And therefore we end up treating these two like they are enemies or opposites, so that you have to choose whether the head trumps the heart, or our hearts have to overrule our heads in other situations. We end up assuming (incorrectly) that "head" and "heart" are mortal enemies, or at least polar opposites, rather than inseparable elements of being whole selves. Seriously, it seems like the plot of every romantic comedy seems driven by the belief that feelings (the "heart") should outweigh everything else, and that the characters who aren't recklessly steered by their endorphins are somehow cold and unlovable.  But this, I firmly believe, is a load of dingoes' kidneys.

The way Jesus talks, by contrast, suggests that we have some power in directing where we want our hearts to be, and that really the issue is about rightly ordering our loves.  (The well-known church father Augustine took this idea and ran with it, but I think the notions are there in Jesus' own teachings and the underlying mindset of first-century Judaism, too.)  When Jesus talks about not treasuring our possessions, it's not because clothing or real estate or food are sinful--just that they are not meant to be the thing we love the most.  When we value "stuff" over God, we are loving lesser goods over the Supreme Good, namely God.  When we use people and love things, we are doing the same.  It's not about having a fight between "head" and "heart," but about getting clear on what order our loves should be in.  And yes, Jesus believes that "stuff" shouldn't get a higher ranking than God, or even than our neighbors--even neighbors who will never be able to pay us back.  When I get my loves in the wrong order--when I value stuff over people, or, say, "The American Dream" more than God--something dies in me.  And then, no wonder I can never be happy, but will always and endlessly be "pursuing" it (as our American way of talking about it goes), forever chasing after something that will always elude me because the problem is in my disordered self, rather than "out there" in the world.

So for Jesus, there is good news to be found here.  If you want to be someone who gets your loves in the right order--who treasures what really matters, and who can let go of the things that don't--put your energy, time, and self into where you want your heart to go... and it will.  Jesus doesn't teach us to follow blindly wherever our emotions lead (like every terrible romantic comedy made since 1980), but rather to choose to invest our selves, our energy, and our time on the things we know should matter most--and then our emotions follow.  That's not about putting "head" over "heart"--that's about knowing what loves should get more of our attention, and which loves should get less.

Take, for example, the guy who loves his city's major league baseball team and who also loves his family.  When the team gets sold to another city--or even just goes down somewhere tropical for spring training--nobody thinks it's the right call to part ways with his family so he can follow his team in the new city. Hopefully we'd all be clear that love for your family should get a higher priority than love your local sports franchise.  And if he's got a job in his home city and needs to be able to provide for his family's well-being, it's not even a "win-win" to bring his family along to the baseball team's new city, because that seems dangerously irresponsible.  It's not that his "head" has to win over his "heart," but rather that his loves (which involve the whole self, including reason and emotion) need to get sorted into the right order.  And when that means he has to give up a certain attachment to his baseball team, yeah, it may hurt a little not to get to see them with his season tickets--but that is sometimes exactly how you measure love: what you are willing to let go over for the sake of showing up for what matters most to you.

You can love the comfort and convenience of your car, but don't love it more than you love your children.  You can love the warm weather and salty air of the beach, but don't let that become more important than the people who matter most to you if they need to be working the family farm in Iowa.  You can love having disposable income, but it's a sign you're partially dead inside if the money becomes more important than being able to give some of it away so that someone else can eat or have a shelter for the night.  It's ok to love being busy with your very important work, too, but again, something has gone wrong inside if that means you pass by the man at the side of the road like the priest and the Levite because you can't spare the time to help him.  The Samaritan surely has just as important a to-do list, but he understands the right ordering of his love--and people come before even the seemingly almighty to-do list.

This is what I think Jesus has in mind when he talks about getting our hearts in the right place.  When we are willing to let our loves be sorted into the right order, we come alive.  And when we insist on loving things before people, or conveniences and creature comforts before God, or even our pet wish lists before the relationships that matter most to us, something has already died inside of us... and needs to be resurrected.  We don't need to pit "head" and "heart" against each other as opponents--we need Jesus to get our loves in the right order.

Today, maybe it's worth a second look inside our whole selves, heart and head and everything else all together, to see where we need to be brought to life again... and where our loves need to be realigned.

Lord Jesus, come rearrange our hearts in line with what you see matters most, and help us stop being at war with ourselves, but to find our peace in loving you most of all.

The Gift of Ashes--February 26, 2020

The Gift of the Ashes--February 26, 2020

"Job... sat among the ashes....Now when Job's three friends heard of all these troubles that had come upon him, each of them set out from his home, Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite. They met together to go and console and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust up in the air upon their heads. They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great." [Job 2:8b, 11-13]

Before we can speak any honest word of hope, we must be truthful about what brings us despair.  And before we--especially we people of faith--get to talk about resurrection, we must stare down the reality of our many kinds of deathliness rather than sweeping them under the rug or pretending they are not there.

And this is the gift of the ashes.  

When we are done running from unpleasant truths, from the things that break our hearts, from our sadness and sickness and suffering, and from the ways we are tangled up in the rottenness we call sin, we can at last see them clearly, name them, and then watch for God's Spirit calling forth life from the dust like at creation.  If we are always afraid of facing the suffering of life--ours or others'--we will never see God's hand lifting up those who sit on the ash heap.  Like James Baldwin famously said, "Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced."  That's why our journey called Lent starts with ashes, and that's why Job's three friends know the place for them to be is beside their friend covered in soot from his burned-out life.

Without rehearsing the whole plot of the literary thought-experiment we call the book of Job, it's enough to say that it centers on facing the truth of our mortality, and what happens when we either stare it down courageously or try to explain it away to avoid the pain of unexpected suffering.  And as Job has just come through losing his family and his fortune, and is now on the brink of estrangement from his wife, too, Job's friends come, as the text says it, "to comfort and to console him."  And they know--at least for these seven days when they are wise enough to keep their mouths shut--that there are no good words for this moment.  They are not yet ready, because he is not yet ready, to hear words of hope.  And while there will come a point in just another chapter of the story when they start trying to find religious explanations for Job's situation rather than simply facing his grief with him, for the moment, they know the thing they must do is simply stare the reality of death in the face.  Honesty about that loss will clear the ground for life to spring up.

This is at least one of the reasons why the journey the church takes each year called Lent begins with ashes.  We have to look in the eye the reality of death--both the ways we are entangled with death beyond our control, and the ways we willfully chain ourselves to its power--and to clear away the pretense that "everything is all right."  Because it is not.  And the only hope for things being put right is to acknowledge how we are broken, how we are crooked, how we are suffering, and even how we are dead inside.

So often we treat Lent like it is merely a church version of a self-help regimen or a second try at a New Year's resolution. But Jesus isn't here to make slight improvements in our self-esteem or give us slightly sunnier outlooks on life--he is here to raise the dead.  We start Lent with ashes as a way of reminding ourselves how much of the world in which we live, and how much of the hearts inside our chests, are in the valley of the shadow of death right now, so that we can lift these things up to God to turn us again to life.

We let our foreheads be inscribed with a sooty cross, not because God needs our signs of public piety (in fact, Jesus thinks that these are questionable at best), but because we need the honesty they enable.  We need the freedom of being honest about all the ways we don't have things under control, all the ways we are not living our best lives now, all the ways we do not love our God and our neighbor, and all the ways we are aching for life.  That is the gift of the ashes, and we give it to one another like Job's friends, bearing our own mortality and speaking it honestly to each other as something we hold in common.

Today, whether you already have the smudged cross on your forehead or will have it placed on you later today, or whether you simply trace the mark on your face invisibly with your finger right now, remember that the ashes are a gift.  Perhaps they are a terrible-seeming gift at first, but they are a gift that makes honesty possible, so that the hope of resurrection will be real and authentic as well.

Today, let us receive the gift of the ashes.

Lord God, we are dust, we know it.  But we know you first made us alive out of the dust of the earth.   So gift us the gift of honesty to face it, and then give us the hope of resurrection that lies beyond ashes.

What Gets Jesus Fired Up--February 24, 2020

What Gets Jesus Fired Up--February 24, 2020

"As he taught, [Jesus] said, 'Beware of the scribes, who like to walk around in long robes, and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces, and to have the best seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets! They devour widows' houses and for the sake of appearance say long prayers. They will receive the greater condemnation'." [Mark 12:38-40]

Jesus' harshest words are aimed at Respectable Religious and Civic Leaders.  And he gets them in his sights, not because they were rude or brash or not sufficiently "nice," but because their practices were rotten.  It wasn't a matter of merely improving their manners, but of rediscovering their humanity.  

These are difficult words for us to hear, especially for me as a modern day "religious professional," who is often greeted with respect when folks see me in a clerical collar walking down a hospital hall or even at the grocery store, and who wears a long robe on Sundays in worship.  But as much some part of me wishes I could skip past the verses that make me squirm, I need to let Jesus' words sink in.  Because honestly, Jesus' issue isn't so much with the length of your robe or the pleasantness of being "greeted with respect in the marketplaces," but rather with the ways the Respectable Religious Crowd uses the veneer of politeness to cover over terrible policies that destroyed the lives of those with no safety net to care for them.

This really gets at Jesus' point here. It's not that it's a sin to be greeted with respect or to accept an honor of some kind.  The problem was that folks in positions of relative power, authority, and respectability (like these "scribes" that Jesus specifically mentions) could use those positions as cover for doing terrible things that exploited those in their communities who were most vulnerable.  When Jesus accuses them of "devouring widows' houses," he seems to have in mind some way that these highly educated, highly respected figures in their communities were able to prey on the most at-risk in their societies and to charge exorbitant fees for their services, even when it forced their "customers" to lose their meager nest-eggs they had to live on.  Whatever it was the scribes were doing, it was technically "legal," but Jesus saw that it violated the deeper spirit of God's law which called for protection and care for those who had no means of providing for themselves.  Jesus isn't upset so much that they pray (whether in long or short prayers), but that they drape their actions in the veneer of religiosity so that everyone will think that all they do is acceptable to God.  

By publicly parading around their piety, the scribes thought they were immune from public criticism. if someone called them out for their predatory business practices (like Jesus does here), they would reply, "But I'm so devout!  Whatever I'm doing in business must be OK, because I pray so much!  You must be attacking me because I'm religious!" And that, of course, would be wrong.  But it makes for a formidable defense strategy--gaslighting always is.  Jesus just sees through it, and calls out the respectable religious folks anyway.  What upsets him is not the length of their robes, but the smallness of their compassion for the most vulnerable among them.  Jesus is clear: even if something is technically "legal," if it makes its profit by siphoning life off of the most at-risk, it is neither good nor right.

I want us to be clear on this, because sometimes in our day, people assume that Christians are simply interested in the cause of "niceness."  Sometimes folks think that all we want is for people to be "nice" or "civil" to each other, but that we have no stake in the actual practices and policies that affect our communal life.  And other times, folks insist that it doesn't even matter if you are "nice" or "civil" to others, as long as you "get the job done."  But Jesus' concern is not that the scribes are using bad manners or coarse language because they are so passionate about pursuing good policies--it is just the opposite: they are covering over terrible policies that hurt the most vulnerable, and they are draping their actions in the cover of piety, respectability, and politeness.  And that is a damned shame in Jesus' book.

Jesus is always about what genuinely brings life--not simply what looks religious, or what has the appearance of respectability.  His problem with the scribes is not that they pray to God, but that they seem to think that sort of praying is still compatible with preying on members of their own community.  Jesus isn't opposed to being respected--he just hates when it becomes a cover for treating the vulnerable like they are disposable.

The question for us to ask, then, as we face a new day, is, "Beneath the question of niceness or respectability, do my actions bring life to others, or prey on others?"  The issue is whether we are pursuing goals that would harm others who are most at-risk--and if we are, no amount of politeness or rudeness, piety or respectability, will make it OK. Jesus isn't upset if we are socially rougher than a corncob--he is concerned with whether we are pursing objectives in our lives that harm others, and whether we are OK with policies that treat the vulnerable like they are disposable.  Beneath the question of politeness, there is the deeper need for genuine goodness.  And beneath the exterior of looking "nice" or "pious," there is the deeper issue of whether we are about the work of giving life all around.

That's what gets Jesus fired up.

May we get so fired up as well.

Lord Jesus, cut through our exterior projections and carefully crafted pretense, to the things that really matter.

Defiant Grace--February 21, 2020

Defiant Grace--February 21, 2020

“But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved…” (Ephesians 2:4-5)
See? A “but.” More importantly, a “But God…”

"But" is one of those great words that says a lot in three letters. It is adversative. In other words, it means, “Regardless of whatever just came before, this next thing is true anyway, even in spite of what I just said.” The word and is practically just a plus sign—it can be as dull as your shopping list: I need eggs, and milk, and bread, and canned tomatoes, and on and on and on. But each of those things could go on a list with anything else and still not really relate to each other. The word “but” has a certain defiance to it, sort of an in-your-face quality.

Hold onto that feeling as you read these verse from Ephesians again: even though we were dead in sins, “But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us… made us alive.” We were dead, but God made us alive with Christ. We were turned away from God, mired in our own messes and sin, but God put our sins away and pulled us out when we couldn’t even ask for a life-preserver on our own. We didn’t have a thing to offer with which to buy, earn, deserve, or merit a new life, but God just up and gave us that new life by grace.

I don’t know that I ever really thought about it like this before, but all of this means that grace is really a kind of defiant thing, isn’t it? Grace is God’s way of saying, “I don’t care what you say you’ve done—I’m going to love you anyway. I don’t care what was in your past, what is still going on in your present, and what you have yet to do wrong in your future—I’m doing good to you anyway, and will be faithful to you.” Defiant grace doesn’t take a look at the evidence and decide to be kind to us because we have proven our worthiness.

Martin Luther said it this way in the last thesis of his Heidelberg Disputation from 1518: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.” In other words, unlike stingy, finite human love, God doesn’t have an imaginary standard he carries around to compare us to, and then only love us if we meet the standard, but God finds us as we are and then makes us into new creations regardless of whatever we were. That’s what grace is like—God’s wonderfully stubborn unwillingness to give up on us despite the fact that we don’t bring anything to the table but our brokenness, and God’s passionate determination to make us lovely by loving us. Grace is God’s obstinate refusal to let our dead-ness be the end of the story. Grace is what it looks like when God takes a look at the shipwrecks we have made with our lives and God says, “But…” to it.

Maybe we need to add a verse to the old song, something like this (I expect you’ll know the tune to sing it to):

Defiant grace, how bold the sound
That took me as I was!
No points to earn it could be found:
Your love said, “Just because.”

For whatever else has come before, in Jesus Christ God has said, “But still…” over your life and mine. But still I claim you as my own. But still I am trading your stale-in-the-coffin deadness for my gift of stone-rolled-away-from-the-tomb life. But still my love will be unswerving and unfading, despite your fickle and flaky faithfulness sometimes.

Let’s sing the song, and live our lives, like that is true.

Lord God, thank you for your grace that defiantly refuses to let our deadness be the last word over us.

The Conspiracy of Life--February 20, 2020

The Conspiracy of Life--February 20, 2020

"But we have this treasure in clay jars, so that it may be made clear that this extraordinary power belongs to God and does not come from us. We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies. For while we live, we are always being given up to death for Jesus' sake, so that the life of Jesus may be made visible in our mortal flesh. So death is at work in us, but life in you." [2 Corinthians 4:7-12]

Sometimes the greatest act of courage is simply putting both feet on the floor and facing another day.  

Sometimes the fiercest sign of hope is just to put one of those feet in front of the other, and to take the next step.  

Sometimes the most important thing you can do in the face of what seems like a world full of rottenness is to keep going, to keep offering whatever small kindnesses, whatever acts of integrity, whatever reflections of light are yours to shine into the dark corners around you.

And maybe that "sometimes" is really just about "all the time."  Because Paul certainly found in his experience that it was often all he could do to just keep going one step at a time, despite all the million things that were swirling around him and threatening to snuff out his flickering flame. And yet Paul discovered that it was right there, on the verge of feeling overwhelmed, that glimpses of resurrection happened.  Paul knew it was not within his power to overthrow a hostile empire that hounded him, or the angry mobs that seemed to run him out of one town after another.  He knew he couldn't magically wave away the other traveling religious snake-oil salesmen who tried to turn God into a product to be peddled or a prize to be earned.  And he knew that he couldn't wish away the deep loneliness he often felt when it seemed like it was him against the whole world.  His head knew he wasn't alone, but sometimes his heart had a hard time believing it.  And in those moments, Paul says, he just kept putting one foot in front of the other in what seemed like a completely ordinary action, and in the midst of that ordinariness, God's power for life was seen.

Paul knew, too, that God's power for life might not always look like triumph in his day-to-day activities.  He might go to a new town and share the news of God's gracious love in Christ and get booed off stage. He might go to a group of skeptical intellectual Greeks and be dismissed with a shrug.  He might preach the bold news of the resurrection of the dead in a synagogue and be heckled by folks from his own Jewish faith who couldn't dare to believe it was true.  He might try desperately to encourage a new congregation to welcome outsiders, only have them dig their heels in and double-down on their policy of "We don't want THEIR kind here!"  There were days when it was all Paul could do just to put one foot in front of the other; there were probably days it was all he could do just to make himself get up in the morning and get both feet on the floor in the first place.

And, yet, precisely there, in those small, almost-unnoticeable choices to keep going, there were the signs that the living God was--and is--real, alive, and up to something.  In Paul's small but persistent work over here... along with, say, a Barnabas doing his thing over there.... and Simon Peter in another place over there... oh, and of course, Junia fulfilling her apostolic office in yet another place, and Priscilla pastoring a house-church in her community... and presumably Mary Magdalene and Martha and her sister Mary and Joanna and James and John and Andrew and Timothy and Titus and Apollos and a whole host of others... there was a conspiracy of life.  Each was a little spark God was kindling. Each might have seemed tiny alone, and always on the verge of being swallowed up by the darkness.  But God kept breathing the Spirit onto them to make the embers glow and the flames climb higher.  God kept bringing them to life... so that they could keep bringing life to the world around them.

That's always how it is among the followers of Jesus.  We don't get to wield big power and influence for our own benefit--at least, we shouldn't, and we shouldn't try.  We are always sent out in ways that look small and vulnerable, weak and foolish, always on the brink of death, so that when God pulls resurrection out of those deathly places, it will be clear that it wasn't our power that made it happen.

Today, maybe what you and I are called to is what Eugene Peterson (borrowing a line from Nietzsche, curiously enough) called, "a long obedience in the same direction."  That is, maybe all we are called to do is to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep moving, even if it feels like the progress is just one step. Maybe some days all it feels like we can do is just to get up out of bed and put our feet on the floor--but that, even that by itself, is an act of resistance against giving up or deciding not to care anymore.  Maybe even some days, even standing up seems precarious.  But like Fannie Lou Hamer said so powerfully, "Sometimes it seem like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I'll fall five feet four inches forward in the fight for freedom."  Sometimes even just falling forward is all we can contribute for the day.  And then we'll get up again and rise... and rise... and rise.  The conspiracy of life that we often call the "Kingdom of God" is made up of such small footsteps, such getting up to put our feet on solid ground, and such falling and rising again.

There is the work for today.  That is more than enough for God to use to bring life to the world around us, in all its obsession with self-destruction. That is enough for God to kindle a light in us for the dark places into which we are sent like sparks rising up from a fire.

Lord God, give us the courage to put one foot in front of another, to keep doing good, to keep showing love, to keep telling truth, to keep showing Christ.  And let our ordinariness be enough for your extraordinary power to be seen.

Meeting Tabitha--February 19, 2020

Meeting Tabitha--February 19, 2020

"Now in Joppa there was a disciple whose name was Tabitha, which in Greek is Dorcas. She was devoted to good works and acts of charity. At that time she became ill and died. When they had washed her, they laid her in a room upstairs. Since Lydda was near Joppa, the disciples, who heard that Peter was there, sent two men to him with the request, 'Please come to us without delay.' So Peter got up and went with them; and when he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs. All the widows stood beside him, weeping and showing tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them. Peter put all of them outside, and then he knelt down and prayed. He turned to the body and said, 'Tabitha, get up.' Then she opened her eyes, and seeing Peter, she sat up. [Acts 9:36-40]

Sometimes even just seeing someone as a person with a face and a story is the beginning of what brings them back to life.

Like here... A curious detail made me stop at just these two verses, and almost made me stop even before Tabitha (whose Greek name is Dorcas) is brought back from death. Luke records such a strange detail in the scene when Peter walks in and finds the body lying on the bed that I first wondered what possessed him to include it. As Peter walks into the darkened room, he finds the widows of the community all weeping alongside the bed—so far, nothing strange. But then, Luke notes that these women are—apparently while they are weeping—showing Peter "tunics and other clothing that Dorcas had made while she was with them." At first, I thought this the worst possible timing for a round of show-and-tell. The woman is dead, and the rest of the community responds by displaying her handiwork to the traveling healer who has come to town? Is this really the moment for something like this?

But I wonder if, perhaps, this is exactly the right moment for showing Peter the clothes and wares that Tabitha had made. Not to be crude, but let's be honest—she cannot get any more dead than she is. There is no such thing as arriving too late when you have been summoned to raise the dead. That seems to be abundantly clear from the familiar story of Jesus raising Lazarus after four days when, as the King James Version so eloquently puts it, "he stinketh." So Peter is not going to have any less work if he prays for Tabitha to be restored to life right when he walks in the room compared with waiting for five minutes to see the clothing the deceased woman had made.

But consider what it does to the situation when Peter takes the time to see these tunics and other clothes as they are held up proudly in the wrinkled, toughened hands of the widows of the community. All of a sudden, Tabitha is not a faceless, anonymous corpse in the room—she is a person. She is a human being with a story, with a talent, with a face. She is not just "the body," and she is not merely the object for Peter's divinely given power, used to wow the rest of the people in the town. She is not an "it" (the way we talk about a corpse), and she is not even just "she" or "her" (a generic placeholder for Peter to do his magic on). She is Tabitha. She is Dorcas. She has a face now. Peter takes the time--or perhaps he can't help it with these eager widows pressing in on him—to see who Tabitha was. She was a seamstress, and she would have had her own style, her own signature way of finishing a garment, her own customary way of cutting the shape of a tunic, a way of hemming a robe. You got to know Tabitha, or at least something of who she was, by seeing these garments. Recovering Tabitha's particularity was the first step to restoring her life. Peter honors this woman, and the widows of the town honor her, by hearing her story and seeing her life's work. Those works and that craft do nothing to earn her resuscitation or win Peter's respect enough to pray for her, but they are a part of the personality and the person that is to be raised. God does not raise theoretical people or generic examples of humanity—God raises actual humans with actual lives and actual faces. What seems at first to be an odd detail or digression in the story is actual the moment at which the dead Tabitha has her face restored to her so that she can be restored fully to life.

Think about how this scene speaks to us on this day—perhaps it is not given to us to heal sickness with a single prayer today, or to command the dead to breathe again with the call, "Get up." It may be that God will use you or me in such wondrous ways today, but even if not, we are still given the ability to give people back their faces. We may be a part of God's way of restoring the personality and the beautiful particularity of others who have had their faces taken away from them—we may be given the opportunity today to rescue someone from the all-consuming force of anonymity, of being lost in the crowd as a nobody. We are given the possibility to listen to someone else's story and to honor it; to take the time out of our oh-so-busy and oh-so-important schedules to look at someone else's life and to treat it with care and dignity. You may be stirred up today to visit those who are homebound--in your family, in the congregation, in the wider community, wherever—and to rescue them from being lost in a sea of anonymity and amnesia by letting them speak and treating them like human beings, not mere objects for our charity. We are so tempted to let the names prayed for in worship become meaningless and forgotten, or worse yet, to let them refer only to the work we have done—one more visit made and checked off the list, one more good deed done in the world. Or perhaps you will be stirred up to listen to someone and spend time with someone at work who would otherwise be consumed into a cubicle and treated like a number. Maybe you will be led to make sure that our outreach as a congregation and our giving to causes does not become a mere exercise in box-checking—you may be the one today who will call our attention to the faces of those going hungry in our community or world, or the hopeful futures of the students who will receive school supplies through a collection we take up. Maybe you will simply help to retell and remember and cherish the life stories of those who have already died and who are waiting for the authoritative call of the Lord to raise them up. Perhaps the first work that needs to be done before the dead are raised among us is to ensure that they have faces again—and perhaps it is enough for us today to be people who treat all whom we meet as people with names, with faces, and with stories worth cherishing. From there, we can safely leave it to God to speak the life-giving call that begins with our name, "Tabitha..." or "Steve... get up."

Right here, right now, this God of ours looks at us in the face and says to you and to me, "Child, arise."

O God who has given us each a name to be called by, and who has given us a name to call on you by, O Lord, Yahweh, O Lord, Triune God--Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—we are lost and awash in an anonymous sea of numbers, and we perhaps have forgotten or stopped noticing that we are reduced to our status or income or Social Security Numbers daily. We have forgotten how many around us hurt in that sea of facelessness. Grant us the peace to stop, to pause in our well-intentioned good-deed-doing and busyness, to listen, to see, to love, and to recognize the faces and the names that would otherwise be lost in a crowd or an empty room. We ask it in the name of Jesus, who is your face for us.

Jesus Is For Losers--February 18, 2020

Jesus Is For Losers--February 18, 2020

"Those who find their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it." [Matthew 10:39]

You've probably heard before the quote of billionaire and mogul Ted Turner, who once (in)famously said, "Christianity is a religion for losers."

He meant it as an insult, of course (most people do when they use the word "loser").  But I don't think anyone who wasn't already a follower of Jesus ever put it quite so correctly.  Ours is a faith--at least when we are faithful to the way of Jesus--that is all about losing... and then about how we discover that losing, even to the point of giving our lives away, is the way we find ourselves found and our lives raised up to glory.  We aren't accidental losers, or losers in spite of Jesus--we are called to be losers precisely because of Jesus.  And to take it just a step further, we're only supposed to be "losers" because Jesus modeled it first in his own grand losing on a Roman execution stake that becomes the prelude to his resurrection anthem.  

We're called to be losers, because we follow after King Jesus, the Greatest Loser of them all.

We just can't get away from this upside-down-sounding logic, because it's not just in a single verse, or a single passage in the Bible.  This notion of surrendering your life in order to receive the life-that-really-is-life is woven throughout Jesus' words, life, and gospel message, and the whole rest of the New Testament, too.  Jesus gives himself away every step of the way that leads up to the cross--not just at Calvary.  Jesus' whole life was and is oriented toward offering up all of himself for the sake of bringing life all around him, rather than clutching onto it for himself, and that was true when he was healing people at the shore, sitting at table with unlikely companions, teaching disciples who just didn't get it, or washing the feet of his betrayer, just as much as it was true when he was nailed to a cross.  Jesus spent his whole life losing himself--and at the very same time, truly finding himself and the meaning of his life.  And in that way, we are called to be losers just the same.

So when we read these words of Jesus about "losing your life for his sake," let's be clear that it doesn't require your heart to stop--just that our orientation turns from being bent inward all about "Me and My Group First" toward letting God bring life to all around us, through us and outward to all the world.  We don't have to get killed by the Romans or stoned by an angry mob to do that. You and I can give ourselves away--we can "lose" ourselves, so to speak--and as we do so, we discover we are more fully in tune with what life was all about all along.  We become more fully alive precisely at the point where we loosen our grip on our lives, or as Jesus says it, we find our lives precisely in the act of losing them.

Maybe there is always something bittersweet about letting go of our selves, our time, our energy, and our love.  Maybe it always feels like the ABBA song that the things we treasure most are "slipping through our fingers all the time."  But maybe that is simply how love works--to live our lives oriented in love means that we give of ourselves to others, knowing they will grow up or move on, knowing we may love them to their last breath or to our own, knowing that we will give ourselves away for their sake, and knowing that sometimes they will not be aware of the costs we have endured for the chance to love them.  Maybe we are worried as we give ourselves away that we will become empty trying to fill up other people, or saddened to think that those we love most deeply are meant to grow up or grow old, and we will only get the chance to walk with them for a part of the road before our paths take us in different directions.  But it seems to me that the most honest thing we can do is to recognize that is the nature of how love works, and that we can either acknowledge it and choose to live our lives, like Jesus, oriented toward love... or we can pretend that we can control and clutch and hold onto things just the way we want them forever, only to be disappointed later on when it doesn't work.  So, yes, maybe to live the love of Jesus will mean that even our own lives are "slipping through our fingers all the time," but maybe that is exactly what you are suppose to do with life.  You can't grab a handful of water from the ocean and expect it to stay in your palm forever to possess and control, but you can experience the sheer joy and delight of letting the water pass through your fingers and down back to the shore.  Maybe that feeling--of letting the water flow--is exactly what it feels like to be truly and fully alive.  And maybe, just maybe, that is what Jesus has been daring us into all along.

Ted Turner didn't know how right he was--we Christians are at our best when we are losers.  Just like Jesus.  It just turns out that losing ourselves is the way God makes us most fully alive, too.

Lord Jesus, let us lose ourselves and be found in you, just as you gave yourself away and rose to abundant, overflowing life.

To Stop the Dying Inside--February 17, 2020

To Stop the Dying Inside--February 17, 2020

[Jesus taught:] "You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, 'You shall not murder'; and 'whoever murders shall be liable to judgment.' But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, 'You fool,' you will be liable to the hell of fire. SO when you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift." [Matthew 5:21-24]

Hmmm... maybe there's more inside me that needs to be raised from the dead than I realized. Maybe I need to come face to face with the reality that Jesus sees deeper into me than I want to notice, and he can see places where hatred and bitterness have already begun to strangle the life out of me.

I've been having something of a re-introduction to passages like these--words of Jesus that often make Christians squirm with discomfort. We get uncomfortable because Jesus exposes how much deeper our brokenness actually goes--he isn't only concerned with our external actions, but with the attitudes, the hatreds, and the pettiness that sprout up out of our inmost selves. Most of us, after all, can get through an ordinary day without committing murder. We can probably avoid physical violence altogether in a regular day, and it would be easy then to assume that we're off the hook as far as God's commandment is concerned. But Jesus sees that the roots of the problem go deeper--not just to our external actions, but to our inner thoughts, our emotional life, and to our words. If there's hatred and animosity there, if there's rage and bitterness and rancor in our thoughts and speech, we are already starting to die inside. And Jesus won't let us off the hook by leaving us to stay dead inside our pet hatreds and spite. 

Jesus won't let that deadness stand. He just won't.

This is part of the re-awakening I've been having. Jesus isn't just protecting "other people" from me in this teaching about the murder commandment. He is about saving me from myself. See, here's the part I've had the hardest time realizing before. A commandment against murder--or against violence or assault or whatever other physical, external acts you might list--is obviously intended to protect potential victims. There's a good reason we need commandments, laws, and statutes against murder. But when Jesus goes deeper, to include things like my words, my thoughts, and the posture of my heart, he's getting into things that don't directly affect others. I can sit next to someone and feel positively toward them, feel neutral, or feel hostility toward them, and as long as I'm keeping my hands to myself, all three scenes would look the same. But Jesus still says that something has gone wrong when I allow hatred to fester in my heart toward someone else. The other person might not be able to feel it or sense it, but the hatred is slowly killing me from the inside, and Jesus is ruthless against all that prevents me from living life in the fullest, as well as against all that would diminish the life of others.

So when I hear Jesus say that it's not only my external actions that matter, but my words, my inner monologue, and my thoughts as well, it now becomes obvious that Jesus sees something that has gone wrong inside my heart that he has it in mind to heal. Where I have become consumed with hatred for someone else, even if the other person can't feel it, I am affected by the hatred. When I let myself get caught up prejudice against other people--other nationalities, other racial groups, other faiths, other social groups, and the like--I am dying inside already, even before that bubbles up to poison others. I may not see how it is affecting me right now (that's often how the worst cancers works), but that doesn't mean I'm well. While I go about my day, assuming I'm doing just fine, the rancor I allow to take root in my soul is metastasizing into something that will choke the life out of me altogether. And Jesus insists on cutting that out of me--which first means that I have to realize what it is doing to me.

Jesus' teaching here, then, exposes some of our old attitudes as lies. It is fashionable these days to hear people say, "Crude words and hateful speech aren't a big deal--as long as you get the job done." or "I don't care if someone is vitriolic and spiteful toward the people they don't like, as long as my bank account is doing fine." But Jesus says, quite plainly, "No--that's the business model of hell. And I am in the business of bringing people to life." Jesus calls us out when we grow comfortable with letting hatreds, pettiness, or cruel insults come out of our mouths, and he insists even on uprooting them from our minds and hearts as well. The criminal laws of a nation or statutes of a country do not police our thoughts and our words, that is true. They only handle the external actions we commit, like assault or murder. But Jesus insists that he has a higher authority and a deeper jurisdiction. And on his authority, he says that the hatreds, the bitterness, the childish pettiness, and the prejudices we allow to fester in our hearts are not OK. In fact, they are killing us.

Jesus doesn't say these things simply to leave us to fend for ourselves, but in order to heal them. We tend to run away from the insightful voices in our lives that call us out on the things we are not proud of, because we are afraid they are simply there to punish or shame us. But Jesus isn't here just to wag a judging finger at us or shuttle us into hell. He is here to name the deadness in us in order that he might bring us to life. He is here to cut out the cancer so that we can be healed. He has come to stop the dying inside.

Today, what if we opened up our deepest selves to Jesus' scalpel, to allow him to do surgery on these deadened hearts of ours and to bring us to life yet again?

Lord Jesus, cut away all the things we have gotten comfortable with that are also killing us, even the pet hatreds and familiar bitterness we have allowed to fester there.

The Late Days of Orion--February 14, 2020

The Late Days of Orion--February 14, 2020

"We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him. The death he died, he died to sin, once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus." [Romans 6:9-11]

Betelgeuse is dying... and with it, so is the last of my illusions that the things that seemed liked they'd last forever would actually endure.

You might have heard the news story somewhere along the way recently.  Scientists who watch the skies have been noticing that Betelgeuse, the red super-giant star that makes up the left armpit of the constellation Orion (the Hunter), has been dimming.  Like, really, really, dimming.  It's even noticeable to the naked eye.  A lot of astronomers think this supergiant star is getting ready to go supernova and explode. (Or, in a quirk of Einsteinian physics, that it may already have exploded but that the light from the explosion hasn't reach our eyes yet, because it is 600 light-years away from us). And when it happens (or when our Earth-bound eyes finally see that it has happened), Orion just won't be the same.  

Eventually, over a matter of months once the big explosion lights up the sky as bright as the full moon, the remnants of Betelgeuse will fade like dying embers in a hearth.  And maybe our eyes won't be able to see the shape of a human figure in the pinpoints of light that remain of Orion.  Maybe this hunter that human imaginations have been picturing in the sky for as long as civilization itself won't be recognizable any longer.  Maybe future star-watchers will think they see new images in the sky... maybe it won't look like anything at all.  It's mind-boggling, but it is quite possible that this star, which has been in the night sky for longer than there have been human beings around, will vanish in our lifetimes.  We may well be living in the late days of Orion.

And to be honest, that's a rather sad thought to me.  More than that, it's frightening.  It's scary to consider the very real possibility that the things we took for granted as permanent and unchanging might one day be gone.  It's unnerving to think that an object twenty times more massive than our sun could vanish from the spot in the night sky where it has kept constant vigil for all of our lives--and the lives of all our ancestors.  And it is unsettling to realize that if the very heavens are not as permanent and fixed as we wished they were, then all the other structures and figures we assumed would last forever could be shaken or taken away, too.  

A cosmos without Orion in the night sky means there could be a world without the institutions we have relied on, or without the old norms and principles we thought would endure, or maybe even without the people we were sure were dependable to make everything turn out all right.  It's just like the line from the old Fleetwood Mac classic: "I've been afraid of changing, 'cause I built my life around you." There are some pretty important fixtures--people, things, ideas, and institutions--we have all built our lives around, after all.  And it is scary to consider that the things we assumed were solid, were unchanging, and were unshakable, could all become only the memory of afterglow before our very eyes.

There's no pretending that this isn't the age we live in.  All the time, we are being reminded how things aren't "the way they used to be."  All the time, the norms and standards we thought would prevent the worst from happening reveal they are crumbling.  All the time, the people we counted on to be fixed points in our lives reveal themselves to be unreliable, shaky, or simply not who we thought they were--sometimes even the faces we see back in the mirror.  Like James Baldwin put it, "A civilization is not destroeyd by wicked people; it is not necessary that people be wicked, but only that they be spineless."  Every time I look up at the night sky and spot Betelgeuse there in Orion's shoulder socket, I am reminded that even the things I thought would be there forever may just vanish--and maybe we are watching them start to fade right now.

When you realize that everything else we might "build our lives around" (to use Stevie Nicks' phrasing) could be shaken, at some point, you start asking questions about God, too.  If the very stars in the universe can be put out like snuffing out a candle, then what gives us confidence that the life we are promised in Christ will not flake out on us.  If the institution called "church" doesn't look like it used to... or doesn't seem to command the same perch of influence it once had... or doesn't seem as reliable as we imagined it once was... then how do we know we can count on the Christ the church says it is centered on?  What gives us reason to believe that Jesus will really be able to come through for us and deliver on the promise of life for us when even supergiant stars eventually succumb to the power of death?  If one of the brightest stars in the night sky for all of human history is fading out before our very eyes, what gives us assurance that the One we name as "the Bright and Morning Star" and "the Light of the World" will not vanish like Orion's shoulder?

This seems to be the very question Paul has in mind when he thinks about the kind of life that Jesus brings.  And for the apostle Paul, it is Jesus' own death that gives us confidence in his power for life.  Paul says that because Jesus has already died and been raised, he cannot die again.  He is no longer subject to the power of death--and because of that, he can make promises that really are building our lives around.  Betelgeuse can't promise that--it still has to deal with its own death.  Orion can't promise that, either--the mighty hunter will have to stare down his own mortality.  All the other institutions, structures, norms, and even civilizations of history will have to come face to face with their own expiration dates.  But the executed-and-risen homeless rabbi named Jesus has something that none of the world's empires or the galaxies biggest stars have: Jesus has the wounds of his own death still marking his body.  And because he has come through death, we have the confidence that he can give us life.

That's why he's the one worth building our lives around, despite all the other people that change in life and landslides that shift the ground underneath our feet.  Jesus is the one who will not let us down, because he has already faced the moment where we let him down and let him get strung up--and he has come through it.  Jesus' death is what assures us of our resurrections, because nothing can stop him any longer.

Maybe that's the long and the short of the good news we need right now.  Nothing can stop Jesus any longer.  Not the failure of our institutions, not the changing of norms we thought were fixed, and not the collapse of the safeguards we were sure would endure.  When they crumble--and they do--he keeps at it.  When they fade--and they will--his light keeps on shining.  When the others we built our lives on prove unreliable or fickle--and that happens, too--Jesus remains, because the worst that can happen to him has already happened.

On the days when I can't bring myself to put my trust in anyone or anything else, the apostle seems to say to me, "Safe bet.  I wouldn't trust any of them, either.  But Jesus is risen from the dead--you can count on him."

And I can.  Every time, I've learned, I can.  Even in these late days of Orion.

Lord Jesus, reach out your hand to us and let us build our lives around you, where everything and every one else proves shaky.  Let us trust in you to bring us to life.

Getting a Reputation--February 13, 2020

Getting A Reputation--February 13, 2020

"Now many signs and wonders were done among the people through the apostles. And they were all together in Solomon's Portico. None of the rest dared to join them, but the people held them in high esteem. Yet more than ever believers were added to the Lord, great numbers of both men and women, so that they even carried out the sick into the streets, and laid them on cots and mats, in order that Peter's shadow might fall on some of them as he came by. A great number of people would also gather from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those tormented by unclean spirits, and they were all cured." [Acts 5:12-16]

The early church had a reputation for bringing people to life.

That sentence--and that reality--both inspires me and haunts me.

I know it is easy to romanticize the life of the early church, or to imagine that it wasn't fraught with challenges, beset by divisions, and often hounded by the powers of the day. I know that there were a great many difficulties for the early community of Jesus, and it seems to me, too, that an honest reading of the Scriptures indicates that a lot of the time they were making things up as they went along. The first generation of what we call "church" did a lot of designing the plane they were flying in and building the boat they were already at sea sailing in.

So I don't mean to simply pine for "the good old days of church" to the book of Acts and say, "If only we could do things like they did back then...." both because we can't go back in time, and because we aren't called to duplicate a past era but rather to embody Christ for the present moment to which we are called.  And there are a lot of good things to be grateful for in this present moment, two millennia later, that weren't yet ironed out in the first generation of the church.  (You know, like, they hadn't decided yet at this point in the book of Acts that you could be accepted as a disciple of Jesus if you were a Gentile....and that's me.)

But what strikes me here about this short scene from the early days of the Jesus movement is that the followers of Jesus were getting a reputation for bringing people to life.  They had a hunch that life just might break out wherever the followers of Jesus went, and so even when they were afraid to join up, they would line the streets where the apostles just might be walking, in the hopes that life might break out among them, too.  And to hear Luke tell it, this wasn't empty hope or wishful thinking--the sick, the hurting, and the ones troubled by spirits all found themselves brought fully to life from just being around the disciples.  You almost get the impression that life just erupted wherever Peter and James and John and the rest went, that the power of God to give life just flowed from them without a thought, so that folks from around were just hoping to get touched by Pete's shadow.

Now, I know that this kind of cult of personality can go terribly wrong, and I know that plenty of religious hucksters have abused the hope of healing to solicit donations from hurting and sick people who placed their earnest faith in people who did not deserve it.  And I don't mean to say that the plan for the 21st century church should be to promise that people will be cured of cancer if the shadow of the preacher touches them during the sermon (that sounds like a terrible mash-up of liturgy and Groundhog Day).  But I do mean to suggest that there was something genuine about the early church that gave it a reputation for bringing people to life... and that life included everybody.

Luke seems to make a point of that here, too.  You had folks who weren't brave enough yet to join the disciple community or profess their allegiance to Jesus (which was a pretty dangerous thing to do), but they were still hopeful that they could be healed of their sicknesses anyway... and they were.  The gift of life--of healing from sickness, relief from hurts, liberation from the power of unclean spirits--was given all around, not just to church folk, not just to "their own," and not just to dues-paying, offering-giving members of the Jesus Fan Club.  The early church had a reputation for being loose that way--it just gave away the gift of life to anybody and everybody.  The followers of Jesus became known for giving life, not on condition that someone joined the church or made a decision for Jesus or prayed the right prayer first, but without condition and without fine print.  We were reckless... prodigal... extravagant.

You know... just like Jesus.

And this is what haunts me as much as it inspires me.  I don't know that when people think of "church" today, they have that same impression.  I don't know that when folks hear about Christians, they think, "Oh, those are the folks who bring life wherever they go!"  And I'm pretty sure that folks don't expect the Respectable Religious Crowd to be giving away good things for free without a sales-pitch, a guilt-trip, or a winking, "But I need you do me a favor first and join my club..." that comes along.

All of that is to say, a lot of folks' impression of the church in 21st century America is that we are NOT interested in helping folks who aren't already "like us" or "in the club," or "members in good standing."  A lot of folks assume (correctly, because church folks SAY things like this, or post things like this on their social media) that we're only supposed to "take care of our own" and that others who stand at the street corner hoping for help are just mooching and leeching and lazily siphoning off the rest of the "good people."  A lot of folks in the communities where we live think that the church is a building inside which people are taught to justify their own selfish "Me and My Group First" mindset, because we give them no reason to think otherwise.  We don't have a reputation like Peter did for being so full of God's life-giving power that others were brought to life more fully just by being in his presence.  We don't have a reputation for being "loose" with Spirit-given life like the first disciples got known for.

And this story both challenges me and encourages me to change that.  This ancient anecdote tells me that it once was that way, that we have been and once again could be a community known for life breaking out among us.  I can see it in our future again because it was a part of our foundational past. I can see it like the image C.S. Lewis uses in his story of the creation of Narnia of a world so new and brimming with life that a piece of toffee that touches the soil becomes a seed of a toffee tree, and a lamp post that gets stuck in the ground sprouts roots and becomes a permanent living thing.  The early church was so open to letting God's Spirit move through them recklessly and abundantly that they were known for life spilling over out of their presence in the room--and we could be that, too.

Dream with me here for a moment: we could be people that others choose to sit by at the coffee shop because they know they will find a kind and listening ear.  We could be people that others are willing to share their troubles with because they know our first impulse will be to listen with love rather than to condemn or ostracize them.  We could people who are the first the community turns to when there is a disaster or a tragedy or trouble, because they know that we are committed to walking through those times with others, rather than hunkering down and caring only for our own.  We could be people who are known for life breaking out among us, not just for church members, but for everybody--and we could be a part of God's ongoing mission to bring all of creation back to life in the fullest.

All of that could be our reputation, and if it happened, people would say, "Doesn't surprise us that they are known for abundant life and reckless grace--that's what Jesus was all about, too."  There is our once-and-future legacy--to be people in whom the overflowing life of Jesus is shared with all.

And it starts now, in what you and I choose to do with this day.

Let's get cracking.

Lord Jesus, let your life spill over through us in the needs of everyone around us, and let us get a reputation like yours, for being loose with life, and healing, and love.