A Refugee's Prayer--April 1, 2020

A Refugee's Prayer--April 1, 2020

"Turn to me and be gracious to me,

    for I am lonely and afflicted.

 Relieve the troubles of my heart,

    and bring me out of my distress.

 Consider my affliction and my trouble,

    and forgive all my sins.

 Consider how many are my foes,

    and with what violent hatred they hate me.

 O guard my life, and deliver me;

    do not let me be put to shame, 

    for I take refuge in you.

 May integrity and uprightness preserve me,

    for I wait for you." [Psalm 25:16-20]

Leonard Cohen sang, "Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee."  He was right.

I find myself paying attention these days to the reasons for God's actions in the Scriptures.  I keep looking for what moves the heart of God... and what moves the hand of God, in the old storytelling.  And I keep seeing this recurring pattern--that God doesn't seem persuaded by our appeals to our own worthiness or greatness or accomplishments, so much as God is moved to help us at the point of our need.  The praying poet doesn't say, "Turn to me and be gracious, O God, for I am great--so great--and I'm winning at life like you wouldn't believe."  But rather, the psalmist brings only a refugee's prayer:  "I am running for my life, and you're my only hope  I take refuge in you."  And everything hangs on that hope--the hope that God's nature, God's character, is to help the desperate.

And that is indeed enough to hold us.

In the end, our hope is not that God will help us because we were religious enough, or well-behaved enough, or prayed hard enough, but simply that God's deepest core impulse is to bring us to life.  It's not about me, how much I have achieved, how hard I believe, or how often I pray.  It's about God, and how much God loves, how fiercely God holds us, and how ready God is to act even before we've asked or mouthed a prayer.  Our hope is in the God who brings us to life, the God who meets people at the point of their loneliness and affliction, the God who knows what it is, in Christ, to be alone and afflicted, too.  

These days it is tempting to look for religious rabbits' feet that we think will make God act for us.  Maybe if I get the right words in a prayer, God will help me.  Maybe if we all go out to gather for worship in public in defiance of the wisdom of health experts, we'll prove to God we're devout.  Maybe if I just believe hard enough that Jesus' blood covers me from coronavirus, it won't come to my house.  All of those may be easy thought patterns to slide into, but they are also all dangerously bad theology.  They all end up pointing back at me rather than at God, and they are all grounded in what I do in order to make God do the thing I want, rather than centering on God's goodness to us when we're at the end of our rope. 

Those voices are all around us, honestly.  It's the Respectable Religious folks who say, "If you're afraid of getting sick these days, it must be because you have unconfessed sin in your life."  It's the preachers and religious professional that insist, "If you really had faith, you wouldn't get sick," and it's the loud talking heads on television that shout, "Of course God must be on my side--look how successful I am!"  They all focus in the wrong direction--on us, and what we do, rather than on the goodness of God, even when all we bring are empty hands.

The honest voices of faith in the Scriptures know better.  They turn our attention not onto themselves and their "greatness," but to the God who holds them precisely at their weakest points and most desperate hours.  They recognize that God raises us up exactly when we have nowhere else to turn and have run out of options and aces up our sleeve. They help us to see that God's life-giving help is not given as a reward for good behavior, a prize for a certain amount of "winning" and "greatness," or in return for showering God with adequate amounts of prayer and devotion.  God's help is given as a gift of grace, like streams in the desert for parched souls, like life for Lazarus lying dead in the tomb, like shelter for the homeless and the refugee.  God doesn't give out rescue on the basis of who "deserves" it; that is simply not how God operates.  God does not love us on the basis of what we offer the Almighty.  No, our hearts come to the Love of God like refugees--when all we've got is nuthin', and when we are knee-deep in trouble.

This, it turns out, is good news.  Because if God's help depended on my worthiness, I'd never be able to rely on it.  My heart is fickle, and my best intentions are always tainted by my insecurities, fears, and selfishness.  But if my hope is rooted in who God is, apart from how I have behaved or how much I look like a "winner," then I can rest secure, because God's goodness doesn't change.  We can pin all our hopes on this God, even when we've got nothing else in our hands.

Lord God, turn our focus away from ourselves and onto your faithfulness.  We are seeking you for refuge, and all we bring are our empty hands.

The Gift of Angry Jesus--March 31, 2020

The Gift of Angry Jesus--March 31, 2020

"So the Pharisees and the scribes asked [Jesus], 'Why do your disciples not live according to the traditions of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?' He said to them, 'Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, 
     This people honors me with their lips,
        but their hearts are far from me;
     in vain do they worship me,
        teaching human precepts as doctrines.
You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.' Then he said to them, 'You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition!  For Moses said, 'Honor your father and your mother'; and 'However speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.' But you said that if anyone tells father or mother, Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban (that is, an offering to God)--then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on.  And you do many things like this'." [Mark 7:5-13]

I have come to love the moments when Jesus gets angry in the Gospels--because his anger is always born out of his love for people.  And most of the time that anger is directed at the leading members of the Respectable Religious People's club, because they have found a way to miss the point and value things or traditions or their own position more than people.  And if you ask Jesus, the clearest way to love God is to love the people around you.

This is the reason I am rediscovering an unexpected appreciation for this sharp little exchange between Jesus and the Respectable Religious Leaders.  They think they are pointing out a flaw in Jesus' teaching because his disciples don't practice the ritual washing that was emerging in some Jewish circles at the time.  Now, as a quick time-eth out here, Jesus isn't anti-handwashing (please, don't misunderstand that much!), and Jesus isn't even opposed to the idea of a ritual sort of handwashing as an expression of your faith.  (Again, nobody back in the first century was thinking about "germs"--that's a modern notion. This was all about the categories of ceremonial purity, with its categories of "clean" and "unclean."  So please, keep washing your hands for thirty seconds with soap and water.)  The problem is that these religious professionals are trying to pose a "gotcha" question to catch Jesus, and he just won't play their stupid games anymore, because he's tired of the ways they have found to use religious game-playing for their own profits and at the expense of the elderly.

That's why Jesus pivots here in this confrontation to the issue of ritual handwashing to this other relatively obscure issue that refers to as "Corban."  The gist seems to have been that someone could declare some part of their wealth as being "devoted to God," and therefore it was not able to be used for any other purpose--even if your aging parents were in need of provision and care!  The Respectable Religious Crowd taught that it was holier to keep your pile of money officially "dedicated to the Lord" than to go ahead and spend as much of it as you needed to for the sake of caring for your parents.  And Jesus just plainly saw this is as a total misunderstanding of what matters to God.  It's always people.  It's not about maintaining profits--not even for a supposedly religious cause.

God, after all, doesn't need our money, doesn't need our treasures, and doesn't need our offerings.  But your neighbor... or your aging parent who can no longer work... or the senior citizen next door who is living on a fixed income... or for that matter the single mom on the next block over who doesn't know how she'll feed her kids after being laid off... these people do need our care.  And Jesus says the choice is easy: we take care of people before we worry about buying more gold candlesticks for the altar or padding out the vacation fund.  Raising up other people... caring for those who have their backs to the wall (as Howard Thurman used to put it)… and providing for the needs of others, (especially the generation before us that gave us life!) is how you show your devotion to God.  Otherwise we are just sacrificing our parents and grandparents on the altar of wealth.

And Jesus just needs to be clear: the real and living God isn't hungry for those sacrifices.

And while I wouldn't have thought that needed to be said (because we so often assume we have all learned the lessons of the Gospels and have heard this all before), it seems we are once again in need of being reminded by Jesus himself, even an angry Jesus, that we owe more to the generation that bore us than we do to our own 401(k) accounts, our own vacation funds, and our stock portfolios.  It's been only a few days since loud public voices were all insisting it would be better to risk more of the elderly dying or getting sick with COVID-19 than to have the stock markets lose more value and risk the economy slowing down too much.  It was only last week that pundits were saying they would rather quickly send people back to regular work routines at the risk of spreading infection to their elderly parents and grandparents, so that the economy would recover faster, than to harm their precious profits.  And for that matter, there are still lots of Respectable Religious folks insisting that the must hold to the "principle" of their freedom of religion and keep holding services in places where governors have ordered shelter-in-place closures, rather than to protect the lives of their neighbors, their parents and grandparents, or their own at-risk congregation members.  And I can only assume that Jesus is rightly furious at it all.

See--we haven't learned.  We Christians have a way of looking down on the religious leaders of Jesus' day as though the problem were specific to their being Pharisees.  But that's not really the problem.  We keep inventing new ways to avoid caring for our fathers and mothers and neighbors.  We justify sacrificing them for the economy, or in the name of "religious liberty," and Jesus angrily and justly calls us out on all that garbage.  He insists the way to love God truly is to love people more than your money and more than your pride and more than your sense of independence.  And his fierceness is fueled by his love for the people we are tempted to think are expendable in the name of "freedom of religion" or "the good of the market."

This is a God worthy of our worship--a God who doesn't need to be fed with sacrifices of any kind, not of bulls and goats, and not of our grandparents, either.  This is a God I would give my life to serving--one who is willing to get riled up and to toe-to-toe with Respectable Religious Leaders over their pretentious hypocrisies.  This is why I love Jesus: he is always more interested in bringing people to life than in making a buck.  All hail Lord Jesus, the face of God's ferocious love.

Lord Jesus, let us get riled up over the things that upset you, and let us root out the rottenness inside our own hearts and thinking that puts possessions or pride or profits about people you love.

A Prelude to Hope--March 30, 2020

A Prelude to Hope--March 30, 2020

"While he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head. But some were there who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her. But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone; why do you trouble her? She has performed a good service for me. For you always have the poor with you, and you can show kindness to them whenever you wish; but you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for its burial. Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her'." [Mark 14:3-9]

It was a small gesture, in hindsight. 

This woman's act of kindness for Rabbi Jesus, it didn't change or prevent Jesus from dying.  At this point in the story, it is no longer a question of "if" but rather of "when" the tension between Jesus and the political and religious authorities will ignite.  (In fact, the previous two verses just before this story make it clear that the Respectable Religious folks are actively looking for a moment to snare Jesus, whom they see as nothing but a dangerous troublemaker.) And yet, even though this woman's act of tenderness will not stop Jesus from being executed by the state, it is worth her doing it anyway.

In fact, you could say that it is exactly because it will not stop Jesus from dying that her action is particularly beautiful.  She is not trying to stop him from making the sacrifice he is headed toward making; she only recognizes--even if only in part--that he is worthy of honoring, and she does this small kindness to offer her thanks.  And in a curiously beautiful bit of paradox, Jesus says she is preparing his body for his burial in advance.  Jesus appreciates her gesture, enough to make sure her story and her kindness are remembered now forever.  (And isn't that an equally beautiful bit of divine reversal? We don't remember the individual roles of the religious authorities who conspired against Jesus, but we remember this woman's small gesture even after twenty centuries!)

What I want to ask you to focus on for just a moment is that her action matters--it means something--even if it does not stop the terrible thing unfolding around her.  Even if her action is offered precisely because she cannot stop the terrible thing that is about to happen to Jesus.  She does not cast herself as some kind of action-movie hero, taking matters into her own hands to fix what is beyond her ability to fix.  But she does do something to bless and honor the life of Jesus, as he heads into the gaping maw of hatred that is intent on swallowing him whole on Good Friday.  She takes the time, she expends the effort, she offers up the most precious thing she has, and she places herself in this position of unashamed, unblushing tenderness.  And Jesus realizes what she has done--and appreciates it.  He lets her act of kindness comfort him in this moment, and he receives what she intends as compassion.

Dear ones, most of the time in this life, all we get are moments for small kindnesses like that.  Rarely can any of us singlehandedly prevent the terrible thing unfolding from erupting around us.  And in those moments, it can feel like anything we do is futile against it.  It can feel like there's no point, no use, in doing small things--small acts of compassion, small gestures of love, small words of honesty and truthfulness, small works of beauty.  I know it often feels that way in the midst of the tsunami breaking around us called COVID-19.  We watch the numbers of cases climb, and the numbers of deaths rise with it. We hear the news reports of another extension of closures, and we worry about the cascade effect it will have on businesses, on the jobs of our friends and neighbors, on the churches and schools and communities that root our lives.  We find ourselves overwhelmed with conflicting or confusing information about what we are, or are not, supposed to do (Masks, or no masks?  Should I have gloves at home or leave them at the store for someone else who needs them? And on and on...).  And in the midst of all of it, it can feel helpless, because we can't all go somewhere and get together to "do something" to fix this.  We can support first responders and hospitals, but not in person.  We can pray, but we don't have magic words.  We can practice good precautions in our own homes, but we can't make other people do them, too.  And against so many things that seem beyond our power, it can feel like it isn't worth it to even offer whatever little gestures of goodness are, in fact, in our hands.

But the story of this brave and loving woman stops me from giving up.  Jesus' response to her action gives me hope--or at least, a prelude to hope.  He says that her actions do matter, that they are worthy of remembering, and that indeed, they are a small act of life-giving compassion that Jesus needs exactly at this moment.  Her act of pouring out her perfume, Jesus says, is the only funeral anointing his body will ever get--because on Easter Sunday when the other women come to do the burial rite properly, he is already risen from the dead and missing from the tomb!  In other words, her action here doesn't exactly set Easter into motion, but it is something of a foretaste of resurrection.  It is a prelude to hope, even if she doesn't know it.

These small, everyday kinds of actions we can each take in our respective worlds--they matter.  They do mean something.  They are, to borrow Saint Paul's way of describing it, not in vain.  The time you take to encourage someone else in their endurance these days... it is worth it.  The energy you put into being patient with a person or situation that is wearing you down... is worth it.  The love you put into writing a note or making a phone call or reaching out to someone who might feel left out or left behind... is worth it.  Not a one of these actions will "fix" all that is broken around us, or magically stop the progression of the sickness and the chain reaction it is causing in our common life these days.  But each of them is worth the doing just because they are moments we can choose to bring others to life rather than to give into the power of despair and apathy.  We don't get to save the world or die for anybody's sins--only Jesus gets to be Jesus.  But the woman with the alabaster jar knows she has something to contribute because of what Jesus is about to do and to go through--and she dares to believe that her contribution matters, even in the midst of all that is terrible.

I pray you are given the eyes to see the same about the day that is in front of you.  I pray you will be able to see moments where you can expend love, energy, effort, time, and caring for someone else and to bring them--even if for just a moment--a little more fully to life.  It won't be a full-length, final production Easter pageant--but it will be a little resurrection you can bring to the world, against the tidal wave we sense is breaking on the shore. It isn't time to sing our Easter "alleluias" yet--but maybe, today is a prelude to hope.

Lord Jesus, call to our minds the remembrances of those who used small actions to do good because of your infinite goodness, and let us see moments for such kindness and goodness today, too.

The Lack of an Audience--March 27, 2020

The Lack of an Audience--March 27, 2020

[Peter said:] "We are witnesses to all that [Jesus] did both in Judea and in Jerusalem. They put him to death by hanging him on a tree; but God raised him on the third day and allowed him to appear, not to all the people but to us who were chosen by God as witnesses, and who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead. He commanded us to preach to the people and to testify that he is the one ordained by God as judge of the living and the dead. All the prophets testify about him that everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name." [Acts 10:39-43]

Jesus doesn't require a news conference to rise from the dead.  In fact, it appears that God's deliberate plan was not to make a big public spectacle of Jesus' resurrection, but to let it happen subversively, like a divine conspiracy against death, right under the nose of the imperial so-and-sos... and to spread quietly, stealthily, almost secretly, while the world was looking the other way.

Easter, it would seem, is like the boiling of the proverbial pot--it doesn't happen when someone is watching.

For a lot of my Christian life, I rather arrogantly assumed this was a mistake, or at least a regrettable design flaw, to the plan of God. (I am thick-headed and dense sometimes, and I think I know better than God.  In these instances, I am, unsurprisingly, wrong.)  An earlier version of me used to think that God's Easter mistake was not having the resurrection of Jesus happen in broad daylight, with unquestionable clarity, in the heart of town, and with a cheering and applauding crowd.  Surely, if Easter had an audience, there would be no doubters, no lingering questions, and no need for a church to spread the news, right?  Everybody would have seen that Jesus was alive again, and that would settle it.

But the more I think about it, the more it seems to me that it was God's intentional choice to raise Jesus in the pre-dawn darkness of a sleepy Sunday morning without anybody watching it happen.  I am convinced that there is something more important to God than measuring crowd-size or needing adulating fans, and I think that is part of what this is all about.  God's ego doesn't need stroking, and so God doesn't need to put on a show to get our fawning praise or awe-struck cheering.  In other words, God doesn't pull off a resurrection because the Almighty needs an audience, but because God is always about the work of raising up what is dead, whether or not anybody else notices.

So, yes, the news that Jesus is alive needs to be shared far and wide--after all, people need to be freed from the fear that death gets the last word over us!  But God doesn't need an audience to make it happen.  God doesn't need packed pews and bustling crowds to see the moment of resurrection, and God doesn't need us to have watched it happen out of some insecure need to be in the limelight.

And that really is saying something.

We've all lived through moments where someone hijacks a situation to make it all about themselves, right? We've all known folks who seem to be always "on," like an entertainer in search of an audience, who need constant attention, constant affirmation, constant praise and adulation, and who get testy when the camera is on anybody else.  Maybe all of us struggle with that need for the spotlight sometimes, but I'll bet you have lived through situations where someone is over the top with it.  And you can tell, you can just tell, that the ones who put themselves at the center of attention aren't really interested in doing good for others, but in making themselves the story.  You get the sense that if you just barely scratch the surface of the public personas they are presenting, you'll see a terribly insecure, trembling little kid on the verge of throwing a temper tantrum because not enough people are watching their antics.

And no matter how much such insecure showmen and impresarios want our praise in those moments, I just can't do it.  I can't worship or applaud the needy limelight stealers... because I can't trust them. I know that they aren't doing what they do for my benefit, or anybody else's, but just to feed their own attention-hungry egos.

But here is good news: God ain't like that.

The under-the-radar reveal of Jesus' resurrection--the central wonder of the Christian faith!--is what assures me that this is about God's love for the world and God's work to save us from death, rather than about some insecure need in the deity for more attention and ratings.  The news of the empty tomb needs to be shared far and wide now, but not so that God will feel more important or look "strong."  God doesn't need to impress anybody.  That means the resurrection really is about God's loving commitment to rescue us from the power of death, not about putting on a good show or bragging about the size of the crowd.  The fact that God pulled it off when nobody was there and didn't put it on a billboard for the world to see all at once is how you know.

So now... we are the ones tapped to share the news.  And as we do, it doesn't--at all--need to be about "us" and our egos.  We go and tell, in our words and actions, as many people as possible in whatever ways we can, that death's power doesn't get the last word, that God's love will not be stopped by the grave, and that God's grace does not care about getting attention for all of it.  We don't have to worry about having big crowds in worship (when we can be in worship again together).  We don't have to brag about who's got more social media followers than who.  We don't have to pretend we've got it all together in our lives (we don't really, anyway).  And we are freed from all of that garbage because we don't have to worry about getting attention for what we do or what we say--only to share the news that death doesn't get the last word, because Christ is risen, as far and wide as we can.

These days, it can feel like the church has been put into a coma.  But that isn't it.  We are simply being called to go underground like secret agents, not looking to put on a show, but to speak resurrection hope to people and to practice Christ's risen compassion for folks in ways that don't get headlines and won't draw a crowd.  

The lack of an audience does not stop Easter from happening, and it won't stop us from finding new venues and ways to share the news. Don't worry--that's not a design flaw.  That's how God intended it in the first place.

God of life, work your resurrecting power in whatever ways you see fit, and let us be a part of your divine conspiracy for life here and now.

The Hardest Two Days--March 26, 2020

The Hardest Two Days--March 26, 2020

"Now a certain man was ill, Lazarus of Bethany, the village of Mary and her sister Martha.  Mary was the one who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair; her brother Lazarus was ill. So the sisters sent a message to Jesus, 'Lord, he whom you love is ill.' But when Jesus heard it, he said, 'This illness does not lead to death; rather it is for God's glory, so that the Son of God may be glorified through it.' Accordingly, though Jesus loved Marth and her sister and Lazarus, after having heard that Lazarus was ill, he stayed two days longer at the place where he was." [John 11:1-6]

I am convinced--and I won't be surprised to hear Jesus say so when get to glory--that those two days waiting, apart from his dear friends in Bethany, were harder to get through than the two days Jesus spent in the grave himself. It is always harder to know that someone you love is in pain and to know you need to be apart from them in the suffering, than to go through physical pain yourself.  It is harder not to be able to fix things for them, and harder still not to be able to be with them as they hurt.

Every parent wishes they could trade places with their hurting kid at whatever age: when they are up in the night as little ones throwing up, when they get their hearts broken after their first crush ends badly in junior high school, or when they are stressing out in young adulthood about jobs and life decisions and everything... and mom and dad have no magic wands to make it all better.  Every grown child, for that matter, wishes they could absorb the suffering of their parents, too, whether it is from a cancer diagnosis, or beginning the long goodbye of dementia, or watching them age and slow down.  Every friend wishes they could take away the tears of their friend.  Honestly, we would all rather have some way to take away the pain of those we love.  And it is quite often the hardest thing we have to do to know that sometimes we have to stay back.

Jesus knows how this story is going to turn out--he knows both that Lazarus really will die after all, and he also knows that he is going to raise Lazarus from the dead, too.  And yet, Jesus also knows that he isn't at the end of the story, yet.  He knows that what is necessary at this moment is the distance... the time... the separation.  But please, let's not pretend that it was easy for Jesus, or that Mary, Marth, and Lazarus were not important to him.  Twice in just six verses here, John the narrator has underscored that Jesus loved these people; they were dear friends to him.  And it had to cut him to the quick to stay where he was, knowing both that it would mean arriving "too late" to save Lazarus, and that he would be opening himself up to accusations that he didn't care, or wasn't a help, or that he had let everybody else down.  

It is easy to be the one who always shows up on time and has a silver bullet to stop every problem.  It is hard to be the savior who (like with Jairus' daughter, too) gets detained and isn't there when people expected him to be there.  It is hard to bear the looks of disappointment, and then to keep on bringing people to life again.

I don't think we usually give Jesus enough credit for what he suffers in this story.  I mean, the actual miracle isn't hard work for Jesus--by the time he raises his dead friend, all Jesus will have to do is call to him, "Lazarus, come out!"  But we forget how much Jesus was willing to endure in the in-between time.  We forget that there needed to be two days in limbo waiting, and that there would be angry tears and bitter disappointments from Mary and Martha, and that there would be the unsteadiness of having his own knees give out when Jesus got to Lazarus' grave and finally fell down to the ground in shock and sadness himself when he saw it.  We forget, I think, that sometimes the path to bringing life requires an unheroic-looking distance.

These days, a lot of people are learning that same pain.  We would all love to get to be "heroes" who drop in and "fix" things for friends, for neighbors, for loved ones who are afraid about getting sickness, or whose businesses are in jeopardy, or who are just so afraid of losing the "old normal" forever.  We would love it, I suspect, if we could just drop in say the "one right thing" that will cheer hearts, lift the markets, and inspire the scientists to cure the sickness that is overturning so much of daily life.  Teachers want to get back to be face to face with their students, where they can see the difference they make.  Shop owners and restaurant owners want to be able to bring their regular customers their "usual," and to help keep their employees getting paid.  Folks want to check on their friends and loved ones in nursing homes or in the hospital.  And right now, the necessary thing for so many of those situations is... distance.  It is a terrible thing, that distance.  It feels so helpless.  We feel so guilty for not being where the hurt is.  We want to be useful, helpful... you know, "Christ-like." And instead, we find in so many different ways that we have no choice but to keep our distance, to stay away, or to delay those reunions.

And yet, as this scene reminds us, sometimes the most Jesus-like thing you can do is to hold off... to keep distance... to delay. Not because you don't care about someone.  Not because they are unimportant.  And not because something or someone else is a higher priority.  But because sometimes it is actually in the interests of the people you love that you cannot be there to take away their pain for them.  And we--like Jesus--have to be prepared to bear the feelings of guilt, of disappointment, and of doubt about whether it is the right choice in those times.  But mark my words: Jesus knows what it is like to be there.

You know, I suspect, that before the story of Lazarus is done, Jesus will have broken down weeping, and he will have to bear the accusations of the dead man's sisters, demanding to know why he wasn't there to prevent Lazarus from dying. He will take their angry words, knowing all the while what he is going to do for the, and he bears them all. He doesn't dodge or deflect. He doesn't insist that everything is fine when it isn't.  He doesn't pass the buck or deny his choices.  He takes every last word, and every hysterical punch Mary and Martha can throw at him, and he bears them.  All the while, knowing he has come to raise Lazarus from the dead.

Jesus knows that in the end, he needs Martha, Mary, and even Lazarus to know that he will be with them all the way through death and out the other side into resurrection life.  He wants them to know they can trust him to the end of the earth--and so he goes with them to the very brink... and beyond.  If Jesus dropped in as the hero on the white horse in the nick of time to save the day, it sure would have made for a great story, but there would have always been an unspoken fear of death hovering around everyone.  There would have been relief that Lazarus hadn't died... but it would have come at the expense of all of them still being afraid that one day Lazarus could get sick again, and Jesus might not be able to make it in time.  So Jesus has to show them, by arriving too late on the scene, that there is no such thing as "too late" for him.  But it sure must have hurt to wait those two extra days away from his friends.

We may have to see things in a similar light these days.  Nobody wants their friend, their neighbor, or their relative to be left alone as they go through difficult times. We all want to be helpers and heroes.  But sometimes, if helping is really about what is best for someone else's well-being rather than about an ego-trip for ourselves, we have to be ok with being helpful by staying where we are, keeping our distance, and delaying when we can be face to face with someone.  

There will come times when we can help in person... when we can help best by washing feet or showing up.  But Lazarus' story reminds us that sometimes the way to most helpfully preserve and restore life means keeping distance for a while--not for our own sake, but for the sake of others from whom we need to be distant.  In those times, we rely on the Gospel's promise that ultimately we are indeed bringing people to life.  And for the waiting time when we need to be separate, we discover we are not alone in that waiting time, either--Jesus is there in the waiting, too.

Lord Jesus, give us courageous and loving patience like you.

Without Our Seeing--March 25, 2020

Without Our Seeing--March 25, 2020

"When the sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome brought spices, so that they might go and anoint [Jesus' body]. And very early on the first day of the week, when the sun had risen, they went to the tomb. They had been saying to one another, 'Who will roll away the stone for us from the entrance to the tomb?' When they looked up , they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. But he said to them, 'Do not be alarmed; you are looking for Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified. He has been raised; he is not here. Look, there is the place they laid him. But go, tell his disciples and Peter that he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him, just as he told you'." [Mark 16:1-7]

I know the timing is all wrong.  I know we are two and a half weeks before the calendar calls it Easter, and we aren't supposed to be to this part of the story yet.  I know that we are not only wading into the heaviest part of this season called Lent, but also some of the worst days of the COVID-19 outbreak here in the United States.  Schools are extending how long they are closed for.  Numbers of confirmed cases are climbing, just as the experts told us they would.  And for church folks, we are staring at the increasing likelihood of not being gathered together with everybody for Easter Sunday.  It doesn't feel like a celebration, and it doesn't feel like the right time for talking about Jesus rising from the dead.

But... that's exactly the point.

Nobody was ready for it when Jesus actually rose from the dead, two millennia ago, either.  Nobody was expecting it (well, maybe Jesus), certainly not Jesus' closest disciples or the women who were such dear friends of his that they came to anoint his body for burial.  Nobody had ordered lilies and hyacinths.  No one had practiced a choir anthem.  And nobody had even gotten a special outfit to wear for the occasion.  My goodness, the women didn't even have a plan figured out for how they were going to roll the stone away from the entrance to the tomb, and that was when they were expecting just to find a corpse inside it!  Nobody was planning a celebration on that day of resurrection--and yet, it happened, all the same.

This is the beautiful, blessed, frustrating, wonderful secret of the God we meet in Jesus: God doesn't need our permission, our preparation, or even our awareness first in order to save and redeem and resurrect.  Jesus has risen before anybody else shows up on the scene on that Resurrection morning, and at least as Mark tells it, Jesus doesn't even hang around outside the tomb long enough to be sighted by the handful of women who were there.  There isn't a voice or a flash of light or even so much as the fringe of his garment to grab onto--only the promise that he is off to the next adventure and will catch up with his people when they join him on the next mission.  He is, so to speak, loose in the world.

And from there--from that completely bonkers, totally unrehearsed scene with a handful of very confused women outside the city limits of Jerusalem--everything changes.  Or maybe to be more accurate about it, from that moment, it becomes clear that everything already has changed.  The resurrection has already happened while our heads were turned the other way.  The tomb is emptied before the women get there.  The stone has already been rolled away before a crowd has a chance to gather.  That's how it was in the beginning, and the lack of a packed house didn't stop Jesus from rising.

I was listening to a magician give an interview on the radio not long ago.  And when the interviewers asked her for some hint about the secret to a card trick she was famous for, the illusionist said modestly, "Let's just say that the trick is already done before the audience member pulls the card out of their pocket."  I love that elegant way of describing it.  Maybe that's the wonder of the resurrection story: God has accomplished it and slipped Jesus out of the grave before we, like the hapless mark plucked out of the audience, realize what has already happened.  We are late to the party and only realize dimly, slowly, what has occurred when our eyes were turned in the wrong direction.  

In other words, God doesn't need us to be there for the resurrection to happen.  Jesus is already alive again, risen from the dead, and out the door to kick up some more holy troublemaking by the time we realize the grave is empty and death has been pickpocketed by a homeless rabbi.  We don't have to be there to make him come back to life.  Just the opposite: his sneaky resurrection is what brings us to life out of our deathliness.

I want to ask you to hold that thought in your head these days.  I want to ask you now to remember that our presence or absence doesn't bring Jesus back from the dead--God doesn't need us to be there to witness it in order for Christ to rise from the grave.  We are not audience members at a production of Peter Pan, and Tinker Bell does not need us to clap hard enough and declare that we believe in pixies to revive her from drinking the poison.  The resurrection is accomplished for us, not by us, and that means it is a done deal without a big crowd, a loud organ voluntary, and even without a sermon.  We can't make it happen more by our showing up, and we can't prevent it from happening by not being there.  After all, the miraculous moment of resuscitation had come and gone by the time the women showed up at sunrise.  Everything in the past 2,000 years has been basking in the afterglow of a moment we weren't there for, and for which God did not our presence to make it happen.

It may be that we Christians have the chance to gather physically together come Easter Sunday yet.  But it is also increasingly likely that it will not be a wise or loving decision to do that, if it comes at the cost of putting millions of neighbors' health at risk.  But here's the thing: Jesus is already risen, and he was even already risen by the time Mary and company got up to the borrowed tomb on the first day of the week.  The trick is already done by the time the card is pulled out of the pocket.  All that falls to us to do is to let it sink in, and then in awe-filled joy to go tell the next small group of people the news... and the next... and the next.  The rest of the disciples were in a group of ten or less when they found out that Jesus was alive again, too, for that matter.  Maybe what we need this year is the reminder that Jesus' resurrection, like his birth, could not be scripted or pinned down, but broke loose from every expectation and assumption of "how it is supposed to go."  And maybe what we need for the rest of our lives is the urgent and joyful fire that comes from telling other people about the God who raises the dead with or without anybody else's permission or awareness.  Maybe all the rest of our lives can be spent, not trying to get people to do something to get themselves "saved," but rather to see that they have been redeemed from death to life already by Christ's own resurrection when they weren't even paying attention.

Yeah, I could see spending the rest of my life doing that.  I wouldn't even need a lily or an Easter basket to do it.  

For whatever comes in two and a half weeks, let's be clear that Jesus is already risen, and is already onto the next adventure in holy troublemaking.  Then we'll know our job isn't to wait around by the tomb to mark the site, but to go to the places where he's promised to show up... and let's join him there.

Lord Jesus, regardless of our timing or planning or expectations, be your own risen self, loose in the world, wherever you will.  Just give us the grace to catch up with you wherever else you lead us.

People Before Profits--March 24, 2020

People Before Profits--March 24, 2020

"Hear this, you that trample on the needy,

    and bring to ruin the poor of the land,

 saying, 'When will the new moon be over

   so that we may sell grain;

 and the sabbath, 

   so that we may offer wheat for sale?

We will make the ephah small and the shekel great,

    and practice deceit with false balances,

 buying the poor for silver,

    and the needy for a pair of sandals,

    and selling the sweepings of the wheat.'

The LORD has sworn by the pride of Jacob:

    Surely I will never forget any of their deeds." [Amos 8:4-7]

People before things.

Preserving life before clutching onto stuff.

I tell it to my kids when they are getting buckled into their seats in the car and don't want to let go of the fifteen toys they wanted to take along with them for the ride.  I tell it to them on their birthdays when they are more interested in opening presents than in saying hello to their friends or relatives who have come for a party.  I tell it to myself when I start dreaming about some big purchase I want to make for myself, rather than how the money could be used for clothes for my kids or their savings for college.

And the prophets were saying it twenty-eight centuries before the words ever came out of my mouth:  people before things.  Preserving life before clutching onto stuff. Love your neighbor more than you love your money.

And sometimes, that means leaving your business closed for the well-being of a stranger you'll never meet.

It's funny to me in these days of the coronavirus, how often the ancient words of these wild-eyed prophets from so long ago and half a world away speak so clearly to the choices in front of us.  When all of this began and our local schools were closing, my initial gut fear was that the Scriptures wouldn't have much guidance for us because there are no Bible stories about COVID-19 by name, or commandments about whether to take ibuprofen or not.  I was--and this should not surprise you--wrong.

Even if the specific matter of this global pandemic isn't mentioned in the pages of the Bible (and it's not--please, let's stop trying to look for predictions of tomorrow's headlines in the back half of the book of Revelation; that's not what it's for), the voices in the Scriptures do speak to what matters most to God, and how we live out the values of our God.  

The Scriptures might not specifically mention toilet paper... but they do warn us against the futility of hoarding, and the way it misplaces our trust in stuff rather than in the God who gives us daily bread.

The Bible might not use the phrase "social distancing"... but it does insist on rhythms of work and sabbath rest (sometimes for a day, and sometimes for a whole year) when work stops, business pauses, and both people and creation can be renewed and restored to life.

The prophets don't address the question of "flattening the curve" the way experts are teaching us to think these days... but they do have a warning for the folks who are more interested in making bucks than in preserving their neighbors' well-being.

And so maybe we do need to hear these ancient and sharply-pointed words from the prophet Amos.  Maybe what we need is to consider the prophet's claim, like we are children clutching onto toys instead of getting our seat belts buckled, that human beings matter more than having things, and that it is more important to preserve people than profits.

In Amos' day, there wasn't a clear and present danger like a global pandemic closing down businesses: it was just the regular rhythm of stopping work for the sabbath day, or the monthly celebration of a new moon that made them close up shop.  And yet, there were folks in Amos' day who were so bent on making more bucks that they didn't care who it hurt (Amos calls it "trampling on the need" and "bringing to ruin the poor of the land") or who they cheated (Amos charges them with some sneaky and questionable tactics for doing their business) or even whether it was a commandment from God (like keeping sabbath).  They were itching to open their doors again to make more money, even if it came at the cost of other people's lives and livelihoods.

And God said it was downright abominable.  

Why was God so upset?  Why don't the prophets want to let the tycoons get back to business?  And why isn't God cheering the CEOs on for increasing their profits and their efforts to improve the national economy?  Doesn't Amos know that if their businesses do well it means increased offerings and sacrifices offered to God?

The answer is simple: God has always valued restoring life over making profits.  God has always insisted that the point of existence cannot be bound to the value of your 401(k) or the close of the stock markets.  God has always believed that people are more important than things.  And God won't be bribed into thinking otherwise even if the ones chomping at the bit to get back to commerce say they are motivated by piety.

I wonder what Amos would say to us in this moment.  Or maybe that isn't quite right.  Maybe I have a pretty solid guess what Amos would say... but I'm nervous about admitting it.  We are all getting anxious, I get it, about how long and how much of our ordinary lives gets put on hold while experts and authorities tell us to stay home and avoid big gatherings. Kids are getting stir-crazy off of school.  Parents are getting frazzled knowing how to handle their amended routines.  Business owners are worried about how long they can live without their usual volume of income.  And pastors and other religious professionals (gulp) are worried more than they will say out loud about how they will weather the imposed closures for worship, and even whether people will decide when this is all over that they never really needed to go to church anyway, and that they won't bother going back.  We're all antsy about how long it will take to deal with the sickness lurking around.  Believe me, I get it.

And it is very easy--VERY easy indeed--to start finding ourselves in the same sandals as the Ancient Israel Chamber of Commerce and wanting to get back to making profits again. Pretty quickly, too, we find ourselves offering all sorts of justifications for why making more money is more important than saving the lives of our neighbors.  You can hear them already--inside your own mind if not also from the talking heads on television. "The elderly are near the end of their lives already--they should be willing to be OK with risking their lives so that their children and grandchildren can get back to making money again."  Or, "The truly faithful won't get sick anyway, because God will protect them, and therefore we should open back up for business--only heathens will suffer, so who cares?" Or even, "Sure, the church has weathered being fed to lions, crucified, and pushed underground during the time of empires and authoritarian regimes, but we are afraid we can't last for more than two weeks without people giving their offerings."

I suspect Amos would simply call us out on each of those sentiments--each of which I have heard expressed in some form or another in the last couple of days--and give us the same lecture I give to my kids: people before things.  Preserving life before goosing profits.  Loving your neighbor is more important than making a buck.

Look, nobody is saying that it is morally wrong to operate a business--and obviously, lots of work needs to continue even when other things have to temporarily close.  And nobody is saying that it won't be scary to see things shut down for a while--believe me, as a religious professional whose ability to feed my kids depends on the whims of generosity of strangers who put money into envelopes each week, I get that fear and anxiety. (Being a pastor is like being self-employed in a lot of ways, except that you can't just "work harder" to increase revenue.)  But what Amos and the other prophets do seem to have to say to us is that our God is always more interested in bringing people to life than in bringing people to wealth. And they would remind us that there have been times before when the ironclad expectation was that the people, rich and poor alike, would value each other more than their chances to make more money.  Even if it meant closing their businesses up for the sabbath when they could have been open to customers.  Even if it meant a smaller bottom line at the end of the fiscal year.

The question to ask as the people of this particular God is always, "How can we best save and preserve life?" before asking, "What will make me the most money?"  Sometimes we just need a prophet like Amos come along and remind us of what matters... and of who we are called to be.

May God indeed raise up such prophets... and may God indeed restore us to life, even if it costs us disposable income.

Lord God, raise up the voices who will speak your word to us and help us to see what matters as you see things... and then give us the courage to live in light of your priorities.

Before the Final Chord--March 23, 2020

Before the Final Chord--March 23, 2020

"Not that I am referring to being in need; for I have learned to be content with whatever I have. I know what it is to have little, and I know what it is to have plenty. In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need.  I can do all things through him who strengthens me." [Philippians 4:11-13]

Can I say something, as a nearly lifelong Beatles fan?  You need the build-up before the final chord. Otherwise, you're just pounding pianos.

One of the Fab Four's grandest musical achievements was the sweeping and complicated song, "A Day in the Life," off of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.  After a curious mashup of verses and styles, there is a final crescendo that actually made use of a huge string orchestra, increasing their pitch and their volume in an eerie frenzy.  And then, a final, single major chord, which, as the story goes, was played on four pianos and a harmonium all at once, with all of them slamming their fingers down on the keys at the same time with maximum force.  It's an amazing moment of music to hear, and it's probably the most iconic E-major chord in pop music.  If you can't hear it in your head right now, go ahead and find it--Google it, or find it on the internet, or on your copy of Sgt. Pepper if you are lucky enough to have it. 

Go ahead and listen again--I'll wait.

But the last chord doesn't really "make sense" without the energy that builds to get there.  Without the crescendo of the strings, without the urgency of their rising notes, it's just a chord that a beginning piano student knows, with just three different notes.  Without all that comes before, an E-major chord doesn't "do" anything, and it hardly feels like it resolves any tension.

But, of course, the Beatles and their fantastic producer George Martin knew that, and they let the musical friction build before they let it release.  And because of that, the E-major chord feels somehow "earned," somehow like it means something that it wouldn't have if it were just played by itself.

I want to suggest that this is the right frame of mind for hearing the famous (but often misunderstood and misquoted) line of Paul from here in his letter to the Philippians (which is, in a sense, the Sgt. Pepper of Paul's letters--inventive, original, and iconic). Lots of folks know Philippians 4:13--"I can do all things through him who strengthens me."  It's the kind of verse that gets put on coffee mugs and sweatshirts, gets embroidered on decorative pillows and engraved on necklaces.  And it has been mis-understood to the point of being taken as a virtual promise of superpowers to Christians.  I've heard folks use "I can do all things through him who strengthens me" to justify unwavering certainty that they would for sure get the promotion, or that their team would win the championship, or that they would win the nomination, or that they wouldn't get sick.  Never mind that Paul when he wrote these words wasn't trying to get a job, win an election, score a touchdown, or ignore good medical wisdom.  He was talking about how the living Christ kept giving him the will, the peace, and the love to keep going in life, even when he seemed to be at his wits' end.

This is why the Beatles are so helpful here.  Just like the last chord of "A Day in the Life" doesn't mean anything unless you hear it as the conclusion of the rising tension that came before, Paul's assurance about doing "all things" is meant to be heard as the concluding thought that follows from Paul having lived through hunger and abundance, in times of want and of plenty. And through all of those times, Paul says he has learned the "secret" to getting through them--he can be content, even when the external circumstances are rotten, because Christ keeps bringing him to life and sustaining him. It's not about superpowers or getting the job you wanted--it's about how you keep on keeping on in days when it would otherwise be hard to work up the nerve to put your feet on the floor in the morning.

This, to be honest, is the real need for us most of the time.  Not imagining that faith is a blank check we get to write to make Jesus pay for our wildest dreams and most fanciful wishes, but being given life again at the start of each day enough to face another 24 hours of worry and trouble, of uncertainty and chaos... and to do it with contentment.  That's what Paul is really getting at here.  The living Christ keeps sustaining Paul so that he can get through the difficult times and the easy times, so that, as Rudyard Kipling's poem so beautifully put it, he "could meet with Triumph and Disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same."  The times change, the circumstances keep moving underneath his feet, but the Christ who gives him life and strength is the constant.  That's the way the E-major chord is meant to be heard: as the culmination of all the tension and turmoil that came before.

I'm tired, frankly, of Respectable Religious people misusing that verse, whether they realize they are doing it or not.  I'm tired of the way folks make outlandish claims about how God guarantees them success because they "can do all things," or how folks suggest that if you don't get your dreams, or do get sick, or can't achieve your goal, then you must not really be relying on Christ.  It's all a bunch of garbage. It's bad musicology, and it's bad theology:  the final chord only means what it is supposed to mean as the release of the building tension.  And Paul's message for us is not that we'll get whatever we want so long as we invoke Jesus, but rather than Jesus will keep bringing us to life even when Jesus is all that we've got.

At the start of a new week while the world we live in feels like it is slipping toward chaos in so many ways, sometimes we wonder where we'll get the will, the peace of mind, or the love to keep going without coming unglued.  We worry if there will be enough toilet paper to get through the week, or enough money to pay the next round of bills.  We worry if our businesses, churches, and organizations will still be around to turn the lights back on after having to shutter for who-knows-how-long.  And it's OK to wonder and question and name those concerns.  Paul could name the challenges he had faced, too.  But know this: what kept him going when the external circumstances were overwhelming was the same One who keeps bringing us to life, too.

That is enough for us.  That is our source of contentment. That is our peace. That is the meaning of the E-major chord.

Lord Jesus, keep bringing us to life, just to get through the days when we don't think we have it in us on our own.  And let that be enough.

Mercy Like Daily Bread--March 20, 2020

Mercy Like Daily Bread--March 20, 2020

"The thought of my affliction and my homelessness

     is wormwood and gall!

 My soul continually thinks of it

     and is bowed down within me.

 But this I call to mind,

     and therefore I have hope:

 The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases,

     his mercies never come to an end;

 they are new every morning;

     great is thy faithfulness." [Lamentations 3:19-23]

These words were written in the midst of disaster.  The hope they speak has been earned through the experience of deep suffering.  It is a solid hope, then, and nothing fluffy or ephemeral. These words are load-bearing, like a plank-and-rope bridge that you know will hold you because you have seen all that they have been through and held up before.

When you hear the poet here say, "The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases," or that God's mercies are "new every morning," you might first hear echoes of that beloved hymn, "Great Is Thy Faithfulness" ringing in your ears.  And rightly so--this is the passage from Scripture that provides the inspiration for Thomas Chisholm's lyrics.

But what we often forget--or maybe never learned in the first place--is the crucible out of which these words were written.  These verses are part of the single, solitary passage of hope in a book of funeral dirges, all written to grieve and deal with the trauma of seeing the city of Jerusalem besieged, attacked, and burned to the ground.  The poet lived through the worst of it (and it got very bad), and he tried to make sense of where God was in the midst of the suffering.  The advancing enemy was the Babylonia Empire, and they surrounded the city, so that everyone had to stay inside in a sort of forced "shelter-in-place" order.  We think it's bad enough to stay inside our homes to prevent the spread of a sickness or to see a local grocery store running out of toilet paper, but the folks who endured the fall of Jerusalem in 586BC ran out of literally everything.  The whole point of a siege is to starve your enemy into submission, so that they put up no resistance when your army finally breaks through the walls, or so that they come out willing to surrender in exchange for food.  And when the Babylonians did it, the people of Jerusalem watched their supplies dwindle down to nothing.  They starved, and they watched their children starve.  They contemplating eating the dead (see Lam. 2:20).  Money becomes worthless when there's nothing to buy with it to feed your family, and soon the streets were filled with the dead. And on top of that, then the Babylonian army came in and looted the buildings, palaces, and temple, burned the city to the ground, and took the living back to Babylon as their prisoners while they left the dead for the vultures.  So, yeah, it got bad.

And this is what I mean when I say that the words of hope from this poet were hard-earned.  He's not just skipping through life from a privileged position of comfort, wondering why everyone else is so glum, or suggesting for the people, "Let them eat cake." He has seen everything he loved destroyed.  He has seen the slow decline of watching friends and neighbors waste away, who could neither work nor eat, and he has seen the fast wave of violence from a literal invading army.  And through all of it, he has had to ask the terrifying question, "Where is God while this is happening?"  

So for someone who has seen and shared so much suffering still to say, "God's mercies are new every morning," well, that means something.  The poet isn't ignoring reality, and he's not trying to whitewash a tragedy.  But he believes, really and truly, that God is getting him through this.  Not around it, not instead of it, not over or under, but always through.  And day by day, God gives to all those who suffer the strength for the day.  It comes, in a sense, like daily bread--not a lifetime supply all at once, but one meal for the soul at a time.  

Hope cannot be hoarded like toilet paper.  Mercy is given with each new day, like the morning's freshly baked bread.  It is set before you to sustain you for this moment, and then you go and live and work and endure and fall asleep exhausted... and then you find yourself given new bread for the day when the sun rises on a new morning.

We Christians are fond of talking about "daily bread," because Jesus taught us pray for the day's bread.  But perhaps all that rote memory has made us forgetful of what that idea really means.  We so often want to have the lifetime supply, the pension set up and secured right now, the 36-pack of Ultra Mega 4-times-as-big rolls of toilet paper... when God gives us what we need day by day by day.  Back in the wilderness days, God could have--but didn't--set the wandering Israelites up with a 40-year supply of manna in a giant slab that they could have dragged around with them on a pallet.  That wasn't an error on God's part, despite the people's near constant complaint that they wanted to know where their next meal would come from.  Instead, God gave them manna every day, day by day, new every morning, so that they could learn to trust what the lamenting poet here had come to see as well: God's mercies are new with each day, given like daily bread.

To live as people who recognize that mercy comes day by day like manna in the wilderness is to recognize that God brings us through suffering and thin times day by day by day.  It means that instead of obsessing over trying to get a forty-year-supply of things, or to maintain control of everything into the far distant future, we take things one day at a time, trusting God to give us bread for the day and grace for the moment.  And that means each day we are born all over again--that the sunrise is a little resurrection for each of us, and new goodness will be provided like bread for the day.

A lot of what we are facing these days feels pretty stark.  We feel isolated, cut off, and worried about limited supplies, like in the days of the besieged Jerusalem.  We feel anxious that we'll watch our children go without... or that our way of life could collapse.  We wonder how far into the future our plans will remain knocked down to the ground.  And we wonder where God is in the midst of it all.  Maybe we feel like offering up a lamentation of our own right now.

Go ahead.  Laments are not only OK in the Bible, but they are OK now, too.  And the fact that book of Lamentations has this bright moment of hopefulness but then goes on to more lament, all the way to the end of the book, reminds us that it's OK if we get to the end of the day and only have sorrow left in our hearts.  That's OK--God can bear the lament, and we need to be able to pour it out.  Lament is not an absence of faith--rather it speaks to the strength of your trust in God if you are courageous enough to bring your anger and heartache to God, knowing God can bear it.  These days, sometimes the Respectable Religious voices around us want to suggest that "real faith" doesn't get sad at the loss we are living through, or doesn't allow for any anxiety about how things will turn out because you're supposed to just say that "God is bigger than a virus."  But come on--here's a whole book of the Bible woven through and through with lament and grief over what has been, and is being, lost.  And if that's where you are right now today, that's OK.

Because here's the thing: the breath with which we sing our laments, and the energy which we spend on crying out in sorrow and loss--these are gifts of grace to us, too.  And God keeps giving us life, day by day and moment by moment, along with the strength--in ourselves and borrowed from others--to get up and face another morning.  It comes, not as a one-time windfall or a nest-egg you have to lug around, but in servings.  Mercy is given to us like daily bread--enough for now.  And then tomorrow, enough for tomorrow.  And what do you know, but there is enough after that for the third day, too.

Lord God, bear our laments when that is all we have in us.  And sustain us day by day with your mercy like daily bread.