Up Through the Cracks--October 1, 2020

 Up Through the Cracks--October 1, 2020

"Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope without wavering, for he who has promised is faithful. And let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another and all the more as you see the Day approaching." [Hebrews 10:23-25]

I was on a Sunday afternoon hike with my family a few weeks back, and we ventured to the spillway at the end of a lake created by a local dam.  I was struck with awe, both at finding a place I never knew existed, despite being so close to to where I live, and also to see this huge sloping pile of boulders, sections of concrete, and layers of exposed rock, designed to channel an overflow of water away from more vulnerable ground.  This is a place that has been created to be pounded by torrents of water when necessary, to redirect the rain and runoff and to prevent the kind of dangerous flooding our part of Pennsylvania has lived through in waves before.  So it is a spot where there isn't really supposed to be beauty.  It's a place that is supposed to be barren, almost in a sacrificial way, so that other ground and other places can remain undamaged by a sudden deluge.

But when we found a place to sit for a bit of an afternoon that day, I was caught by surprise.  There was an unexpected weed--a single, stubborn stem with a smattering of small yellow flowers straining up toward the sunlight--and it was growing straight up out of a crack in the rocks, with no soil, no nearby pool of water, and little direct sunlight. 

It didn't just surprise me, or make me laugh--although I did.  That little weed provoked me... in a good way.  It worked its little roots not just into the crevice in the rocks, but into the folds of my brain, and it's been growing there ever since.  That defiant little sprout with the yellow blossoms became for me a picture not only of hope but of the way hope, at its best, is provocative.  Ever since I laid eyes on it, that image has been poking at me to think and act in ways that do the same in my world: to be a presence of life, against all odds, in the midst of what seems dead.

It seems to me, too, that the early followers of Jesus saw their calling in similar terms: we are called to be provocateurs of hope, people whose voices and presence in the world serve as a contrast to the deathliness that is around us, but who spark acts of defiant hope in others as well.  The flower's mere existence has been working its way into my soul over the last several weeks, pushing me to look for ways to bring expressions of life and hope into the world around me.  And if I keep trying, maybe eventually I'll get it right and raise some little yellow blossoms up through the cracks in the limestone of someone else's barren soulscape.  And maybe then they'll do the same for someone else.  And who knows, but that before long one little weed may have ended up provoking quite a harvest of hopeful actions and words farther than any of its seeds could be carried by the wind.

When I hear these words from the book of Hebrews, I get the same picture in my mind.  "Let us hold fast to the confession of our hope... and let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds."  It's an underground movement of compassion.  It's an insurgency of goodness.  It's about little provocative acts of hope that become contagious--and which at the very same time expose how much of the ground around us is hostile to that liveliness.

Look, it's no secret that the setting in which the early church grew up was a pretty hostile environment.  The letter of Hebrews talks about persecution, torture, and imprisonment as things happening to people because of their faith in Christ.  The Empire, on the one hand, was starting to crack down on these Christians because they seemed to be associated with disorderly conduct and riots, and they wouldn't give their undying allegiance to Caesar.  And on the other hand, the guardians of Respectable Religion were upset at Christians, too, because they said scandalous things like saying the Son of God got strung up on a cross.  It was dangerous being a Christian in that setting, and the danger made it easy to want to give up.  Lots of those first generations of Christians would have found it very tempting to say, "You know what?  This is an inhospitable environment to try to flourish it.  We might live for a while and then get crushed in a deluge the next time there's a crackdown from Rome.  Let's not even try."  And yet, they didn't give in to those temptations.  They kept on spurring each other on, provoking goodness out of each other and inspiring love in one another.  And that, in turn, made the watching world take notice.

I want to suggest that this is our calling, too.  Look, I get it--there are lots of things to be cynical about.  There are a lot of things to be grieving over.  We're disconnected and disjointed from people we used to be very close to, and the pandemic just has made it difficult to nurture those relationships.  We're touched by loss all around--those whose businesses are in danger, those who have been cut off seeing family members in nursing homes or far parts of the country, those who have lost jobs, those who are just afraid and depressed and anxious all the time.  We're disgusted by the toxic atmosphere in public discourse, by leaders who let us down, and by friends and mentors we have lost respect for.  We're tired.  It feels like a wasteland, sometimes, to look around.  I get it.  I feel that, too.  

But I read an insight from someone just a few days ago that has, well, provoked me to new thinking.  She wrote that after a day's particularly disheartening headlines, she wasn't hopeless, even though she might have been expected to be.  She said, in effect, "I'm not hopeless, because I didn't expect any better of this situation, and I did not put my trust in the newsmaker of the day to do any better.  My hope lies elsewhere and that hasn't changed."  Now, the person whose thoughts I was reading wasn't making a specifically faith-centered point.  But for us who name the name of Jesus, I think something like that is how we navigate these days. We need to be clear--with ourselves, and with each other--about where our hope is... and where it is not.  We need to be clear on whom and what we expect to come through for us, and we need to be honest about who and what will not be dependable sources of hope.  And that allows us not to be disappointed when it turns out the ground around us bare rock without any soil--we will be able to find a crack to plant our roots in, and slowly but surely, those little roots can widen the crack and break the rock itself into pieces.  We can be clear in a moment like this where not to put our hope, and to know in whom we can and do place our hope.

The writer of Hebrews wants to be clear that when we have rooted our hope in Christ, we can be honest about all the way the world around us is barren and cold... and we can keep straining up toward the light anyway.  When we are rooted in Christ, we will be less let down when others don't come through--our hope will not have been in them.  When we are rooted in Christ, our hope is not pinned on the stock market's close for the day, or our quarterly profit report, or the outcome of the next election, or any of the other externals that compete for our hopes. Don't put your hopes in any of them--they will let you down. They are the bare rock where you may find yourself, but they are not the source of our hope.

Once we are clear what our hope is actually placed in, we can bloom in unlikely places, and our presence in the world can provoke hope in other people.  And that's the right spirit in which to think about why we do good for others--it's not about earning anything, or racking up imaginary points with God, or winning a spot in the afterlife.  It's about letting the things that have first provoked hope in us also provoke hope through us for others.  When someone has done something to show to love to us, it has a way of making us want to show love to others.  When someone does something that inspires us, it has a way of nudging us to inspire others.  That's how this works.

So go ahead, be a weed sprouting up through the cracks in the boulders.  Let the simple fact of your existence be a wonder and inspiration to those who see you.  Be a provocateur of hope.

Lord God, let our roots find strength in you, so that we can bring hope to others, too.

After Disappointing Jesus--September 30, 2020

 

After Disappointing Jesus--September 30, 2020

"Someone from the crowd answered Jesus, 'Teacher, I brought you my son; he has a spirit that makes him unable to speak; and whenever it seizes him, it dashes him down; and he foams and grinds his teeth and becomes rigid; and I asked your disciples to cast it out, but they could not do so.' He answered them, 'You faithless generation, how much longer must I be among you? How much longer must I put up with you? Bring him to me.' And they brought the boy to him. When the spirit saw him, immediately it convulsed the boy, and he fell on the ground and rolled about foaming at the mouth. Jesus asked the father, 'How long has this been happening to him?' And he said, 'From childhood. It has often cast him into the fire and into the water, to destroy him; but if yo8u are able to do anything, have pity on us and help us.' Jesus said to him, 'If you are able! All things can be done for the one who believes.' Immediately the father of the child cried out, 'I believe; help my unbelief!'" [Mark 9:17-24]

It must be hard for Jesus to bear with me.

I don't know that I spend much time letting that reality sink in, but I'm pretty sure there are lots of ways I have got to be a disappointment to Jesus.  That's not the end of this story, but it does need to be said.  As much as I want to imagine myself to be a model disciple who is completely in tune with his priorities and his kingdom, I am certain there are a lot of ways I am way off base and yet still go around advertising to the world that I'm one of his.  And that's got to be tough... for Jesus.

I know it, because the same scene played out already here in Mark's gospel, and you can tell Jesus is disappointed--no, stronger than that; he is disgusted with them.  Jesus is approached by a man whose son is clearly hurting and had asked Jesus' chosen disciples for help--and they couldn't.  Jesus responds in exasperation--one of the rare moments we get a glimpse of Jesus at his wit's end: "How much longer must I put up with you?" he asks.  And notice here, he doesn't seem to be upset at the dad for asking for help.  He's not disappointed in the sick son.  He is disappointed in his disciples. Somehow Jesus had just expected more from them.  He had expected better of them.  He is disappointed that they cannot do what he thinks they should be perfectly capable of, but cannot.

And to be clear, this isn't the only time that the chosen disciples of Jesus let him down--in fact, it's sort of a running theme throughout the Gospels.  They're the ones fighting with each other on the road over who is the greatest, and who will get the places of highest honor with Jesus in his glory--and Jesus, with a sigh, has to take them all aside and tell them, "That's not how it works among you!  If you are seeking to make yourself great, you have missed the point of being my disciple!" (See Mark 10:41-45 on that point, lest you doubt me.)  Or it's the time when some of his disciples are upset that a town didn't welcome them, so they want to call down fire from heaven--and Jesus, yet again, has to scold them.  It's every time Jesus mentions that he is headed for a cross and then one of his inner circle insists that can never happen, and Jesus answers back sharply, "Get behind me, Satan!"  And let's not even get started on the way the disciples want to keep children from being able to be with Jesus, or try and block the women, the sick people, the outcasts, and the outsiders from coming to Jesus... or the times they want him to send away the crowds because they cannot imagine finding enough bread to feed them all.

It sure seems like the disciples are constantly letting Jesus down in one way or another.  It seems beyond arrogant for me to imagine I'm not doing the same myself.  There have got to be days when Jesus looks at my pitiful words, my misguided efforts, and my wrong-headed thinking, and shakes his head while muttering, "How much longer am I going to have to put up with Steve?" under his breath.

Even the dad of the sick kid seems to be something of a disappointment to Jesus, too, honestly.  He has gone straight to Jesus after the twelve couldn't help his son, but even with Jesus, the father doubts Jesus can help.  If Jesus gave out miracles in proportion to how hard we believe, this guy would have left empty-handed.  But healing is not a reward for correct theology, and mercy is not a commodity you can earn in exchange for devotion.  It is a gift all the way through, or it is nothing.  So Jesus receives even the honest plea of this father who says, "I believe--help my unbelief!"  And the child is healed.  The evil that had taken hold of him is dispelled.

I read a story like this and find hope.  It's not a hope in myself, honestly.  It's not a hope in my ability to get it right, nor is it a hope in my fellow Christians' ability to get it right.  I'm sure Jesus weeps to see the ways we distort and mangle his message. I'm sure we disappoint him when we conflate our faith in him with hucksters, bullies, and blowhards that use faith as a prop but leads us away from him.  I'm sure we break Jesus' heart when we use the guise of Respectable Religion to tell others they are not good enough, not acceptable, unworthy, or unloved. We certainly must try his patience when we show ourselves unable to do what he has called us to do in the world. And yet, Jesus hasn't given up on us.  Not even despite all the ways we let him down.

Think about it--at this point in the Gospel's arc, the disciples have already let Jesus down with their flagging faith and misguided mess-ups plenty of times... and yet he doesn't fire them, ditch them, or bail out on them.  He does get frustrated. He does get disappointed.  But he does not give up on them.  He sticks with them, knowing that as he does, they are just going to let him down in other ways in the future.  And they do.  There are still plenty of other ways the hand-picked followers of Jesus in his inner circle will abandon him, betray him, and misrepresent him before all is said and done.  But he sticks with them anyway.  He even heals the child of the man whose faith is disappointingly mixed with unbelief.  Jesus sticks with them all.  Jesus sticks with all of us, too, anyway.  Despite the ways we let him down on a daily basis.

That doesn't let us off the hook to just go on with deliberate ignorance misrepresenting him.  That doesn't allow us to go doing things we know break his heart, just because he is patient with us.  And it doesn't mean we can get away with not being discerning about which voices we listen to as authoritative, or that we can just assume anybody holding a Bible as a prop gets our allegiance.  When you love someone, you don't want to keep disappointing them, after all, even if you know that their love will hold through their disappointment.

So today, maybe we need to look at the ways we are just like the disappointing disciples of this story--so that we can start over.  Maybe every day we need to start with asking ourselves where we might be off course or out of whack with the priorities of the Reign of God.  Maybe we need to start with the humility enough to consider where we have let Jesus down--and where he may need to work in spite of us as much as working through us.  And maybe where Jesus has called us and equipped us to do certain work, we should look and see if we are actually doing what we've been called to.

Sometimes seeing Jesus frustrated or disappointed with us--and then knowing that he keeps working with us anyway, for all that heartache--is the just the unexpected good news we needed.  Maybe today is one of those times.

Lord Jesus, don't give up on us.  Help us to turn from the ways we have let you down, and enable us to start over despite our unbelief, our hard hearts, and our knack for getting lost.

The Heavier Things--September 29, 2020

The Heavier Things --September 29, 2020

[Jesus said:] "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!  For you tithe mind, dill, and cummin, and have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faith. It is these you ought to have practiced without neglecting the others. You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel!" [Matthew 23:23-24]

We've got trouble--right here in River City.

But it might not be what you think.  It might not be what you've been told, at least.

If you have ever seen the classic musical, "The Music Man," you know the scene.  The mild-mannered people of River City, Iowa are managing just fine on their own until traveling salesman and crook "Professor" Harold Hill comes into town right off the train from the last town he swindled.  Hill is selling towns all across the Midwest on having kids' marching bands, which he gets them to pay him to set up... and then he blows town with their money.  It's a pretty lucrative hustle, but it requires Hill to do some crafty misdirection.  He has to create a need for them; he has to make them think that having a marching band is not just a nice idea, but a necessity for keeping their children righteous and pure... you know, to keep them out of trouble.

So here's the sales pitch--and it's a doozy.  "Professor" Hill gets everyone in town worked up with fear about the new pool table at the local billiard parlor.  He breaks into song with a mystifying logic:  "You got Trouble," Hill speak-sings, "and that starts with T, and that rhymes with P, and that stands for Pool!"  Well, with that air-tight reasoning, Hill gins up fear in the crowd that their sons and daughters will all become shady crooks and hoodlums if they get caught up in the pool-playing lifestyle.  And that, Hill insists, is why they need to stop the menace of playing Eight-Ball by getting their children signed up to be in a marching band... which, conveniently, he can set them up with.  

As snake-oil salesmen go, Hill is a king cobra, and the town buys it.  They all fall for the scheme he has laid out for them, and they start shelling out cash for Hill to save their precious young children from the menace of billiards, because he has made them think that this is the real danger lurking in their town... rather than Hill, the snake himself.

Jesus would have seen right through a schemer like Professor Harold Hill.  He surely saw through the same scheming that the Respectable Religious Crowd had persuaded the people with in the first century.  Jesus calls out those suit-and-tie-wearing big-name religious leaders of his day, and here in these verses from Matthew 23, he basically says that they've gotten everyone fooled about the issues that really matter.  He calls them out for being so precise in their giving of offerings that they even tithe on the herbs from their gardens, but they have missed out on the matters of substance--the "weightier things" as Jesus calls them: justice, mercy, and faithfulness. It's rather like Professor Hill's scheme: get everybody fussing about some small thing, and you'll miss the big one with a little bit of schmoozing and sleight-of-hand.  The Respectable Religious Leaders of Jesus' day are so great at getting people to focus on whether they have done these tiny acts of devotion to God (a God who, by the way, has no need of our mint or dill or anything else from the spice rack), that it becomes easy to miss the things that should have occupied everybody's attention: doing justice, loving mercy, and nurturing trust.  Like the town-hopping Music Man who bamboozles everybody in town into focusing on the terrible trouble of <gasp!> a pool table so they won't notice he's snookered them all out of their money, the Respectable Religious Leaders can get everyone to focus on their piety and applaud how religious they are, while they all leave justice and mercy out in the cold.

And Jesus just won't have it.  He doesn't say it's wrong to tithe on your herbs, but he does insist that you can't use that as an excuse not to focus your attention where it needs to be.  You can't use outward displays of religiosity as a way of ignoring the priorities that matter to God.

Now the temptation for us, all these centuries later, is to assume that we've got this all figured out ourselves, and that we don't have this problem anymore.  We "know better," we all insist.  We surely know that God doesn't care about us bringing offerings from the spices and herbs in our garden... and yet, we are so easily distracted by things that don't matter to God--or at least that matter far less than justice, mercy, and faithfulness.  We may not have to contend with the scribes and Pharisees of Jesus' day or the smooth-talking sales-pitches of Harold Hill, but we do have an awful lot of Respectable Religious voices around, all sure that they know what things really matter to God, and that they will gladly teach them to us.  And I can't help but wonder if we're all back in River City, hearing all over again that there's "Trouble that starts with T" and getting set up to be misdirected.

You know how it goes right? Someone claims they know what matters to God, and they have got it all printed up for you, and if only you'll just follow their pamphlet, you'll be good and righteous like them.  The sales routines vary, but they all offer variations on the Music Man hustle: get focus fussing over things that don't really matter to God, and manufacture a fix for them, while the real problems go unaddressed.  Sometimes the pamphlet says you have to have been baptized with a certain amount of water for it to "count"; sometimes it insists you have to be able to point to "the one moment" when you invited Jesus into your heart to be your personal savior (neither of those are things you'll find Jesus insisting on by the way). Sometimes the sales pitch dresses itself in the appearance of morality and throws around phrases like "family values" and insists that your family has to look a certain way, or that your relationships have to fit their pattern, or that you have to vote for people who have the same stances they have about those subjects.  Sometimes they just fixate on whatever the controversial issue of the day is in the culture wars from cable news and tell you that that's the real problem--and if only people would do just like them, there wouldn't be any trouble.  It's all the Harold Hill schtick--get people riled up about a minor issue to distract them, invent a villain (sometimes it's a pool table... sometimes it's a frightening "ism" of the day... sometimes it's a rotating cast of "those people" cast in the role of scapegoats), and then promise people a fix for the distracting problem (whether it's a marching band for sale, a self-help book, or a political party's agenda), and meanwhile, we have been successfully distracted from the heavier things: justice, mercy, and faith.

But here's good news, and because it's from Jesus, you know it's not a scheme or a sales-pitch: you don't have to believe any of those schemers and swindlers.  Not the ones who tell you all that matters is how old you were or how wet you got when you baptized.  Not the ones who insist you're going to hell if your family doesn't look like their cookie cutter one.  Not the ones whose pamphlets tell you who to vote for. Those are all ways of getting tricked into being afraid of a pool table at the billiards hall when the real trouble is the one making the sales pitch.  And Jesus tells us you don't have to fall for them any more.  When he exposes the misguided focus of the Respectable Religious Crowd, he exposes it in all the other misguided attempts of history, even in our own moment, so that we don't have to get hornswoggled any more by folks with an agenda to peddle.

 I know they look professional and polished. I know, with their handy pamphlets in hand and the list of things they want to make us fuss over, it is really easy to believe they know God's list of priorities.  But here's the Jesus test:  if it ain't about justice, mercy, and faithfulness, chances are it's not the main thing.  If someone else in a suit-and-tie with a stack of reading materials to hand out gets off the train and says they know the "real" problem and it's not about those, you are hereby invited to call "Phooey" on them.  

What matters now is what has mattered all along: justice, mercy, faithfulness.  Focusing on those makes us more fully alive.  Start there today.  Start with the heavier things.

Lord Jesus, turn our focus to the things you say matter, and help us to be wise enough not to fall for the sales-pitches that get us distracted.

The Witness of the Stars--September 28, 2020

 The Witness of the Stars--September 28, 2020

"Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility, regard others as better than yourselves.  Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus...." [Philippians 2:3-5]

Do you know the difference between a star and a black hole?

A star, like our own Sun, spends its lifespan giving itself away--giving off light and warmth and energy as it literally spends its fuel in the fires of nuclear fusion.  A black hole can no longer shine.  It has collapsed in on itself and its gravity only pulls more and more "stuff" into it bottomless maw.  It is always consuming, never shining.

A star like ours is pure Einstein in motion: every second (yes, you read that right--every SECOND) the sun converts something like 4,000,000 tons of matter into energy as it smashes hydrogen atoms into helium, with the lost mass becoming pure energy, right out of the E-equals-m-c-squared equation of the Theory of Relativity.  That energy is what makes life possible here on our little blue planet.  Our lives are possible, in other words, because the sun is constantly spending itself.

A black hole, by contrast, literally just sucks--everything in its path, all the time, forever.  Life can't survive inside its event horizon, and anything in the path of its appetite is lost.

The difference is obvious, but we should be clear about it: the reason a star like ours can host life is that it does more than feed itself.  Life is possible where you give yourself away.  I know that stars aren't rational, conscious beings; they can't "choose" to give or not give, like we can. But the contrast seems helpful for us, beings who can and do make choices in our lives.  Over against all the voices around us that think the point of life is to grab as much as you can for yourself forever, the witness of the stars insists just the opposite: life springs up where we are oriented outward toward others, rather than inward only to the interests of Me-and-My-Group-First.  The stars tell us the truth, that "Me-and-My-Group-First" is a recipe for death--your own and everyone else around.  It is the philosophy of the Void, and the campaign slogan of hell.

Now, of course, the apostle Paul hasn't got a clue about all of that astronomy.  He had no conception of what makes a star shine, much less about the existence of insatiably hungry black holes.  But even without a telescope he knows that the meaning of our existence--especially for anybody who claims to follow Jesus--is not to live your life seeking your own interests.  Paul teaches his dear friends in Philippi to reorient their lives outward, rather than inward--to put others first, and even to regard others as better than themselves.  And why?  He is convinced that this is the way of Jesus.  He see that the heart of the Christian faith is about giving yourself away in such a way that life springs out all around.

Now, Paul had to know that this was a pretty counter-cultural thing to say. It certainly was in his day, but my goodness, in our day how much more radical it is.  In Paul's day, no one knew about black holes, but they certainly saw how the empire worked:  It was basically a geopolitical black-hole, constantly hungry, sucking in the people, the wealth, and the lands of everyone around, always to feed the capital, in an endless death-spiral from which there was no return.  Empires are like that: they seem to run efficiently, but at the price of endless consuming that grows and grows until it collapses on itself.  In Paul's day, there was evidence of the decadence of the empire all around. Rome even bragged about how it devoured everything it touched to feed its own greatness, and the empire was sure it was going to last forever that way.  For Paul to come along and say that it was all going to collapse under the weight of its own voracious appetite, well, that was radical.  No wonder Paul kept getting himself in trouble.

We still live in a world full of voices in favor of black-hole thinking.  The conventional wisdom is that you have to seek your own greatness, and that the goal of life is--for individuals, for families, for churches, for communities, and for nations--is to be better than everyone else around you, always acquiring more, never giving yourself away.  Whether it's money or power or pleasure or stuff, or some imaginary substance called "greatness," the world's voices think the key is to get more and more and more... and that's how you'll know who "wins."  They think it is a point of pride how little they can get away with giving to the needs of others; they brag about how much they have, or even lie about how much they want you to think they have in order to puff up their image.  They try to convince us, like many a Caesar did in the days of the Empire in which Paul lived, that endless consumption and endless "winning" at the expense of others is not only possible, but good!  And we are so used to hearing those voices and calling them conventional wisdom that we start getting defensive any time someone suggests that may not be the real meaning of life.  We get antsy and fidgety when someone suggests (as Paul is clearly doing here) that the way of Christ puts others first, rather than myself, my group, or my nation first.  This is the sort of message that makes us want to pick up rocks to throw at people who say them.  Like I say, no wonder Paul kept getting himself in trouble for saying it.

But really, Paul is simply calling us into a fuller way of life.  He says that for people claim to follow Jesus, his pattern of self-giving life is going to be our way of life as well.  Paul is basically saying it is is anti-Christ (literally, opposed to the way of Christ) to orient your life around securing your own greatness, rather than to orient your life around lifting others up and putting their interests before your own.  In Paul's mind, we do this in community for each other, so nobody ever runs dry--we keep filling each other up as we keep pouring ourselves out for others.  But that runs totally counter to the black-hole thinking of empires ancient and new--all they can ever see is the next thing to swallow up in their decadent pursuit of some gluttony they imagine is "greatness."

But you and I can be free from that terrible way of life.  In fact, we already are.  To be a follower of Jesus is to be turned right-side out again, like a shirt from the dryer, instead of being tangled up inside ourselves.  To follow Jesus is to be given the freedom of shining like a star that gives itself away (which is actually the image Paul uses a little bit later in this same chapter of Philippians) rather than a pitiable black hole that is always feeding and never full.

Today, dear ones, let us be free of the anti-Christ way of thinking that is all around us.  Let us be free of the dead-end trajectory of decadent empires and devouring black-holes.  Let us learn from the witness of the stars today, which show us with every moment's gift of light how life springs up when you give yourself away.

Lord God, make us more fully like Jesus today, in the ways we put others' interests before our own, so that we and they together may be more fully alive.

Because Integrity Matters Now--September 25, 2020

 Because Integrity Matters Now--September 25, 2020

"O Lord, who made abide in your tent?
     Who may dwell on your holy hill?
Those who walk blamelessly, and do what is right,
     and speak the truth from their heart;
who do not slander with their tongue,
     and do no evil to their friends,
nor take up a reproach against their neighbors;
     in whose eyes the wicked are despised,
but who honor those who fear the LORD;
     who stand by their oath even to their hurt;
who do not lend money at interest,
     and do not take a bribe against the innocent.
Those who do these things shall never be moved." [Psalm 15]

I have to confess to you--I am tired.  

I am so tired in particular of hearing, "They did it first, so I can do it to them!"  I am tired of the thinking that says, "Look, here is someone acting crooked, so it's fair game for all of us to be crooked!"  I am weary of hearing, or seeing, "Ok, yeah, so my side wasn't truthful about this thing, but what about that time a long time ago when the other side did something bad--so I guess nobody can insist on truthfulness anymore!"  I'm exhausted at how easy it is to suggest rotten stuff about the people you don't like, whether it is true or not, just knowing that it can hurt them to have the accusation out there that begins, "Well, people are saying..."  And I am just done with promises that get made in one moment and then get dropped when it is difficult to keep them, or when principles that had been touted so fiercely are quietly set aside when holding them would be costly.

I think that's why I'm hearing good news these days in a psalm I used to really struggle with.  As part of a new (to me) daily prayer discipline I've been in, I'm reading through the psalms one day at a time, and I have found myself coming face to face with a much wider range of emotions, situations, and needs than just the well-worn, "The Lord is my shepherd." This psalm is one of those ancient prayers that I have been rather standoffish about in the past, because for a long time I could only hear it as a list of rules of good behavior that you have to follow in order for God to accept you.  I could only hear it as a checklist of morality for getting into God's presence (and that I couldn't help but hear also as a way of saying, "how you earn your way into heaven"), and everything in my Lutheran tradition's way of reading the Scriptures insists, "You can't do anything to earn your way into heaven, because it's all by grace!"  So I was left with a psalm that seemed to be selling a self-help plan for self-righteousness that I had been taught to label as bad theology.

But... what if I was wrong, all that time?

(Okay, seriously, let me just take a moment and say what a difficult question--but also what a freeing question--that is to put into words.  In a time where we are all just digging our heels in and retreating to our own social media and cable news echo chambers that only reinforce the things we already want to believe, it is a freeing and necessary thing to be able to ask, "What if I have been wrong?" and bear the idea of listening to others.)

Well, if I start pulling at that thread--that maybe there's more going on in this psalm than just a biblical version of Goofus and Gallant telling me to be a good little boy--something changes.  Instead of hearing this psalm as a set of merit badge requirements to earn God's love, I can hear these words as an answer to my weariness these days.  They speak to me insistently that having integrity does matter... that standing by your commitments is important... that people really are more important than making a buck... and that justice really counts in God's eye.  Even if nobody else thinks it matters to be honest, to be fair, to do justice, and to look out for their neighbors' well-being, God does.  I need that reminder that it's not pointless to think these things matter, because I am just so tired of all the noise around that says it doesn't because it's all a game of winning.

Because there is so much noise out there that is designed to make us angry or afraid rather than to think critically... because there is so much mud thrown around to give the impression that "Everybody has been crooked before, so there is no difference in anybody's character"... because there is so much cynical posturing to get us to think that the truth doesn't matter anymore, I need to hear the assured voice of the psalmist here saying, "These things do matter to God."

Maybe this was never about how to earn your way into heaven, but about our need to hear--in a time that seems focused only on how to get your side to win--that being honest, decent, just, compassionate, and fair people really does matter.  It matters in this life--not merely as the price of admission for the next life.  It matters to say, "I made a commitment, and I'm going to honor it even when it costs me." It matters to say, "I am willing to tell the truth, even when it means admitting mistakes and failures, rather than telling people they aren't seeing what they are seeing, or that everybody does bad stuff so none of it counts." It matters to make the choice not to take advantage of other people for your own benefit.  It matters to live your life in a way that you can look everybody in the eye.

I want to be that kind of person, and I want to be the kind of person who brings that out in others as well.  I want to be someone who is more interested in doing right by a neighbor than getting more for my own advantage.  I want to be the kind of person who people know is reliable, even when it is costly.  I want to be the sort of human being that doesn't immediately put the worst spin on what the people I don't like do, while only listening to the best spin on the people I do like.  And I want to be the kind of person who knows that "Me-and-My-Interest-First" is a damned shame of a principle to build your life on.

There's a line from the movie V for Vendetta that sticks in my head all the time lately.  The title character says at one point something like, "Fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words. They are perspectives."  In a time when everyone wants to use those words, I am tired of hearing them used as empty vessel that can be filled with whatever meaning anybody wants to stuff them with.  

And so on a day like today, I find myself unexpectedly refreshed by this voice from the psalms, because it says to me that God has always cared about the kinds of people we are, and that God isn't fooled by folks who just talk in those terms without living them.  God has always been more interested in the ways we live out the things we say matter to us.  Not as a way of earning a prize, but because we understand that being decent, just, compassionate people is a way of living in the love of God for all people.  Being people of integrity--and of valuing integrity in others--is a way of being more fully alive.

May God bring us so fully to life today and in this season.

Lord God, make of us people of integrity, of honesty, and of justice.  Make us fully alive, no matter how unimportant these things seem to the loud voices around us.

God's Kind of Good--September 24, 2020

 God's Kind of Good--September 24, 2020

"Good and upright is the LORD; 

     therefore he instructs sinners in the way. 

He leads the humble in what is right, 

     and teaches the humble his way. 

All the paths of the LORD are steadfast love and faithfulness, 

     for those who keep his covenant and his decrees." [Psalm 25:8-10]

God is good.  (Feel free to add your own reply, "All the time," call-and-response style, if you want to.  I'll wait.)

Okay, so God is good. (Even my childhood table prayer that force-rhymed "good" with "food" said so, too.)  But--what does that mean?  What does that look like?  How would I recognize the goodness of God?

Well, the ancient poets have some thoughts about that.  They point us in a really important direction: they show us grace.  In these verses from Psalm 25, we're shown that God's goodness is seen in the way God meets mess-ups and helps them start over.  Not just that God lets people have a second chance (which by itself is grace), but that God helps to teach and lead us in new ways, when our old ones have been dead-ends.  God's goodness is seen in God's choice to walk beside "the humble"--or "the lowly," as other translations put it, which is to say, the nobodies, the not-good-enoughs, the unacceptables, or as Howard Thurman put it, folks "with their backs against the wall" and to lead them on a good path.  That's how you know God is good:  God lets us begin again, and actively helps us to do it when we are in a bad spot.

Now, I want to ask us to stop for a moment and just let that sink in, because that's not always how Respectable Religious Folk have thought about God's goodness.  Often, it's been just the opposite--there have been lots of voices over the centuries who said that you know God is good because God can't tolerate bad people.  They have said that God's holiness and righteousness mean that God's first reaction on seeing sinners is to want to zap them.  In fact, our older brother in the faith Martin Luther had a huge realization on this very point: when he read Bible passages about "the righteousness of God," for a long time, it made him afraid, because he had always been taught that God's "righteousness" meant that God is so perfectly good and moral and holy that God must destroy and punish anything less than perfection.  And part of Luther's discovery (from, you know, actually reading biblical writers like the psalmist here) was that God isn't a Cosmic Building Inspector, issuing citations for everything that violates code and then leave us to our own devices to try (and fail) to fix them.  God doesn't have an allergy to sinners that makes the Almighty break out in hives any time someone messes up, either.  God doesn't immediately execute wrath and judgment the moment anybody jaywalks or relapses.  Instead, God helps us up again.  For the folks whose own actions or choices led them to fall down, God stoops down and helps them get on their feet again.  And for the ones who have just been down in the pit for as long as they can remember, God climbs in and helps pull them out, too.  That's God's kind of goodness--not zapping the unworthy for their unworthiness, but helping us to start over on a better foot.

Of course, there's still something in us that is used to picturing God as some ruthlessly efficient executioner.  A lot of what passes for Respectable Religion today is still built on the idea that God's "goodness" and "righteousness" are primarily something to be afraid of--because, they say, God cannot tolerate being in the presence of sinners and must vanquish transgressors wherever God finds them lurking.  And instead, if we actually read the Scriptures, they frame God's uprightness and goodness as a source of hope.  God, they say, isn't the bouncer of the club telling people who don't measure up that they aren't allowed in; rather, God is the One who finds the broken and heals us, finds the failures and gives us a new start, finds the ones who have been thrown away and calls us beloved.  That's what God's goodness looks like.

Now, what will we do in light of goodness like that?  It is so easy for us to hear verses like this and only take them as far as, "Well, that's good news, because I'm a sinner. I'm glad God forgives me," while in the very next breath have absolutely zero compassion or mercy for the people next door, or down the road, or sleeping in their car under a bridge after falling off the wagon again.  It is really easy for me to sing, "Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me" without ever considering that such grace extends to people I don't want to give second chances to.

I was talking with an acquaintance of mine not long ago about a situation she knows where a dad is raising three kids all under five alone, and how his past from decades ago means he can't find a decent house for them to live in, because his criminal record prevents him from getting into a better place for his kids.  He's working while also taking care of the kids, and he has turned his life around from the old habits that got him in trouble before, but our system has no way of letting him fully restart, even though he is trying with everything he has to raise his kids well and to care for them.  And I know, I get it, I can hear the voice welling up inside that wants to say, "Well, he shouldn't have made whatever mistakes he made before when he broke the law."  And yet, when I look to the Scriptures, they don't picture God saying, "Your mess-ups will haunt you forever, and there is no real escape from your past," but rather, I hear them saying, "God's kind of goodness means we can start over again."  I guess we have to decide whose voice we will listen to on the subject of what makes God "good"--is it some rigid need for punishment of wrongdoing, or is it God's commitment to helping sinners (like me) start over again?

And if we dare to let the psalmist shape our thinking, will we let God's goodness make us into people whose goodness is seen in the ways we love and accompany folks with their backs against the wall?  Or will we be one more crowd of Respectable Religious people whose "righteousness" makes everybody around us afraid to talk to us?

I know at least who I want to be today.

Lord God, you are good, and your goodness surprises us in the ways you reach out to set us back up on our feet..  Let your goodness fill us so that we can share it with the world.

The Breadth of Life--September 23, 2020

 The Breadth of Life--September 23, 2020

"When John heard in prison what the Messiah was doing, he sent word by his disciples and said to him, 'Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?' Jesus answered them, 'Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them. And blessed is anyone who takes no offense at me'." [Matthew 11:2-6]

What if Jesus' agenda is broader than ours?

Seriously.  What if we have our own ideas of what we think should matter to Jesus--what sorts of issues or positions or platforms we think he should stand for--and it turns out that Jesus has a larger vision? What if we have presented Jesus with a solitary, deal-breaking, this-or-nothing expectation... and he responds, not with a "no," but with a smile and then something like, "Oh, but I have so much more in mind..."?

What would we do then?

More to the point, would we walk away from Jesus because he didn't fit our rigid expectations or squeeze into our agenda... or would we let him stretch our vision to be as broad as his?

I'm not asking as a hypothetical.  It's exactly what happened to John the Baptizer from jail.  John, of course, has a certain set of assumptions about what the Messiah is "supposed" to look like.  He made no secret of it; it was the bread and butter of his riverside rants--er, sermons--that when the Messiah came, he would come with the Spirit and fire to burn down whatever unrighteousness he found like chaff, and to chop the bad trees down to mere stumps.  He probably assumed that the Messiah would root out corruption among the Respectable Religious Establishment, and he figured that the Messiah wouldn't stand for injustice. You know... like the wrongful imprisonment of a faithful prophet at the hands of a crooked and pompous puppet king.  John expected that if Jesus were the real deal, he would bust down the doors of the prison and break John out.  He would put that arrogant buffoon of a king Herod in his place.  He might even unleash the firepower of some angel armies.

In other words, John has let his expectations of the Messiah get hung up on a single issue:  If Jesus is the right guy, then why am I still behind bars?

It's a fair question.  After all, if Jesus leaves John in jail, doesn't that seem like Jesus doesn't care about injustice?  Doesn't it seem like Jesus must not really be on the side of life if he is going to allow John to languish in jail and lose his head when Herod has a whim to do some executing?  Doesn't Jesus have to call in the angel armies to purge away evildoers and wicked people if he wants to look like he's "tough on sin" and "big on God's laws"?  All of that is an easy train of thought to get swept up into.  And awfully quickly if you're in John's position, you get yourself sort of painted into a mental corner and end up saying things like, "If Jesus really were the right guy, he would be breaking me out of prison and zapping the wicked with laser beams from his eyes.  And if he doesn't do that, he can't be the real Messiah."

How quickly our expectations become rigid like that--from possible hopes to assumptions we make about what Jesus must think or say or do!  How quickly we present ultimatums to God, saying that God must meet our list of demands!  And how quickly we decide that anyone who doesn't fit inside our agenda can't be a part of God's plan or line with God's priorities!

How often, in other words, we end up saying, "Jesus must agree with me on this point that I feel strongly about... and therefore anybody who doesn't line up with my expectation cannot be of God... or be truly used by God... or be in tune with God's priorities in the world."  For John it was the fact of his imprisonment... or maybe a little more broadly, that Jesus didn't look like a tough guy, despite all of John's hyping the Coming One as a fire-wielding judge.  But my goodness, we are still playing the same terrible game today with different criteria.  You'll hear voices that reduce Jesus' vision to a single position on a single political issue, or that equate the Kingdom of God with a political party or candidate. You'll hear voices that say Jesus is only interested in things that help Christians, or that Jesus' agenda is identical to the American Dream.  Sometimes we make it sound like Jesus is aligned with only one institutional denomination, worship-style, or theology, and that anybody who doesn't toe the line with that must be a false teacher or heretic.  We are constantly telling Jesus he has to pass our litmus tests in order for us to accept him... and he just keeps insisting that his vision is broader and his agenda deeper than we imagined.

That's what I love about Jesus' response to John in this scene. (It's also what haunts me about it, too.) Jesus doesn't say that John is wrong to be upset that he's stuck in prison, or that Herod doesn't deserve to be taken down a few pegs.  What Jesus rejects is the assumption that he can't really be the Messiah if he doesn't fit the mold John has made for him.  What Jesus rejects is the reductionistic thinking that the Messiah can be reduced to a single issue, a single action, or a single action.  Jesus' response doesn't say, "No, you're wrong, John," so much as he says with a smile, "Oh, but I have so much more in mind."

Jesus' offers back his own set of messianic bona fides, which also turn out to show us a broader platform of what he has come for.  "Tell John what you have heard and seen," Jesus says, before rattling off a list of the many ways he has brought people more fully to life.  "The blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor are given good news."  Jesus' response is to say, "Whether or not I fit your narrow, single-issue expectations of what God's agenda is supposed to be, I am here doing what God has sent me to do--and it is a vision as broad as life itself. Now what are you going to do with me?"

I suspect we need to let that question sink in for each of us as well.  Jesus insists on being bigger than any of our preconceptions, on loving a list of people that is longer than we think should be allowed, on doing a wider range of things as the embodiment of God's Reign than we thought permissible, and on holding out a vision with the very breadth of life.  And any time we come to Jesus with an ultimatum that starts out, "You have to fall in line on this item here, Jesus, or else we won't accept you," Jesus smiles back, "Well, bless your heart... and blessed is anyone who doesn't take offense at me," and then goes about his merry way, doing exactly what he intended to do all along, whether or not we approve.

When we fall for the misguided voices that want to reduce Jesus to one option in our categories, Jesus refuses to accept our terms.  When we try to say, "Only someone who does X... or says Y... or is a member of Z party... can be in line with the true priorities of God," Jesus just responds, "Look at all I'm doing that doesn't fit any of the molds you have tried to shoehorn me into."  And once again he recites the list of many ways he is bringing us the world to life--healing of the sick, restoration for the poor, resurrection for what is dead in us.  Those actions and priorities are wider than any one church tradition, any candidate in any party, and any solitary policy issue.  Jesus is about the work of resurrecting all of the world in all of its deathly places--which means he is at work for people of all ages, backgrounds, nationalities, tax brackets, genders, and needs.  He has come to bring about the Reign of God, which is to be sure, all about life--but life in all the many ways we are in need of being made more fully alive.

What will we do with that realization?  What will we do when it becomes clear to us that Jesus won't let himself be squished into the mold we've made for him?  Because there are really only two options.  One is that we turn away from Jesus, even though he really is the one we have been waiting for, because he doesn't line up with our expectations.  And the other is that we let him widen our expectations to big enough for the breadth of life itself, even if it means swallowing some of our pride.

Right now, in this moment, Jesus looks at us with a smile and says, "I have so much more in mind than you dared to imagine."  What will we say in reply in this day?

Lord Jesus, come and be your wonderfully surprising, expansive self, and stretch our vision to include all that you intend to do within and among us.

Something to Work With--September 22, 2020

 

Something to Work With--September 22, 2020

[Jesus] 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.” [Mark 7:6-8]

Jesus doesn’t have a problem with failures; he has a problem with pretenders. Jesus has little patience for play-actors, actually. He just can’t do anything with them. 

That’s actually the root of the issue here, and it’s the root of the word itself that Jesus uses to describe religious pretenders. “Hypocrites,” Jesus calls them. That word has come to mean something like “a person who says one thing but does another,” but it was actually the Greek word for an actor in a play when Jesus used it. Jesus’ criticism of the religious so-and-sos of his day is that they are really “playing church” rather than seeking to listen for God’s voice. It’s like they are playing characters, just going through the motions and following their scripts in order to amuse God or entertain God, but never daring to let their real selves be seen beneath the masks and make-up. But when the show’s over, they are empty inside and have nowhere to go. 

Jesus’ real problem with these supposed religious experts is that they are fakers, not that they fail to live up to their own standards. Jesus can work with people who miss the mark. Jesus can make something of people who shoot for the moon and fall short. Jesus can bring blessing for people who have ideals and struggle to love up to them. He has room for the twelve failures we know as the twelve disciples, each of whom keep on trying to live the kingdom life, but bring shoddy faith, short tempers, and dim bulbs to the table. Jesus can work with the likes of them. 

The play-actors, however, are convinced that if they put on a good show they can fool God, fool everybody else, and therefore in the process fool themselves into believing they don’t really need any help. Sure, their hearts are fickle and their faith wavering, just like the disciples Jesus chose—but if they can focus on outward appearances and a long list of religious rules, then maybe, they think, they can keep us distracted enough from seeing their weaknesses and failings. They’re like the Wizard, telling Dorothy, the Scarecrow, and the rest not to pay any attention to the poor schlub behind the curtain. 

And that is exactly why Jesus can’t do much of anything with the likes of the religious hypocrites and pretenders of his culture. He can’t do anything with them because they won’t admit they have a problem that they cannot cure themselves. “Just keep drawing attention to how well we are following the plate-washing rules, and no one will notice the aching jealousy inside us, the fearful insecurity inside us, the petty greed and jealous lurking just under the surface again,” they think. Well, if you tell yourself a lie for long enough, you come to believe it yourself. And that’s the trouble with the folks in Jesus’ target sights in these verses here: they’ve been putting on a show for so long, trying to convince anyone who will listen that their hearts are perfect and their lives are in order that they can no longer face the truth of their own neediness. They have pretended themselves into a corner, because they are now the last people who would ever come to Jesus to help heal their weaknesses. Jesus doesn’t have patience for them because they keep insisting “The show must go on” when Jesus can see through their play-acting. A good honest failure, by contrast, at least has enough sense to come to Jesus and say, “I can’t do this on my own.” 

I have a hunch that we are often more afraid of being failures than being caught as pretenders. The loud voices around us mock anybody they think is a "loser." The talking heads are more interested in making people think you are successful, powerful, and smart--that you are "great" and that you are "winning," whether it is true or not.  They try and teach us to project confidence, to sell our “personal brands,” and to fake it til we make it, rather than ever offer up our failures to God to do something with. Offering them up means admitting them in the first place. 

We have a hard time, I suspect, hearing that Jesus can use honest failures (in fact, they’re just about the only people Jesus works with) more easily that religious play-actors. We would rather put up a good front and a good game face than come to a point of complete powerlessness and admit to ourselves (as well as to God) that we just can’t keep putting on a show anymore. What if instead, today, you and I decided to risk being honest failures rather than play-actors? What if, rather than pretending we never need God’s help because we can keep the rules just fine—and maybe add a few ourselves, just for good measure—what if we confessed the places we have fallen short today, and offered those up to God to see what God will do with them? 

I suspect, knowing what we know of Jesus, he will roll up his sleeves with a smile and say, “Now this, I can work with…” 

Lord Jesus, help us to be honest in looking at ourselves, so that we can offer ourselves completely to your transforming power.

Fire in the Bones--September 21, 2020

Fire in the Bones--September 21, 2020

"O Lord, you have enticed me,
    and I was enticed;
you have overpowered me
    and you have prevailed.
I have become a laughingstock all day long;
    everyone mocks me.
For whenever I speak, I must cry out,
    I must shout, "Violence and destruction!"
For the word of the LORD has become for me
    a reproach and derision all day long.
If I say, "I will not mention him,
    or speak any more in his name,"
then within me there is something like a burning fire
    shut up in my bones;
I am weary with holding it in,
    and I cannot." [Jeremiah 20:7-9]

It's okay.  You're not alone.

I mean, it's not okay.  So much in the world is not okay. So much feels like the old verse from Yeats, "Things fall apart/ the centre cannot hold/ mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." But if that's how you are feeling these days, if you find yourself just overwhelmed at how not-okay things are, it's okay--it's safe--to say so.  It's okay to say, "It feels like everything is coming unglued."  You are allowed. You have permission--and from the prophets of the living God, no less.

And it's okay, too, if you find yourself feeling quite alone in the midst of all the not-okay-ness.  It's okay--it is, to use Mr. Rogers' wording, "mentionable"--to name that feeling that everything around is falling apart and you feel like you're the only one who sees it, the one one troubled by it, the only one who cares about it.  That's how it feels when the center cannot hold--you end up feeling like everything and everyone is getting flung further from you.

So let me say this one more time, just to be clear: if you find yourself these days feeling like both you and the world are unraveling like worn threads, and if you wonder if you're the only one who is distressed by all that unraveling, it's okay to say it.  It's okay to say you feel like that.  You're not alone, in fact, but it does feel like it.  And that's okay to say.

That's often how the ones who were really in tune with God felt, to be honest. They felt alone--and oddly enough, they had that in common.  It's Jeremiah here in these verses (and honestly, through a lot of his book--he does a fair amount of complaining to God throughout the book of his words that we find in the Scriptures).  It was Elijah, too, on the run for his life from the king and queen and complaining to God that he was the only one left who was faithful... when God had to tell him that there were still many who had not sold out to the ones in power.  It was Amos who got chased out of town by no less than the high priest for calling out the rottenness of things in his day.  And it was surely John the Baptizer, too, languishing in prison for having spoken up against the puppet king Herod and his decadence, and wondering why Jesus hadn't busted him out of jail if he really was the Messiah.  And of course, it was the same for Dietrich Bonhoeffer in the solitude of his prison cell under Nazi guards... and Dr. King in that famous Birmingham jail cell, too, lamenting that so many white moderate preachers had decided to look the other way rather than support his movement.

All of them, from the ancient prophets of Israel to the good troublemakers of the last generation, they have all had those times they felt like they were the only ones sometimes.  They wondered why nobody else was speaking up, or if nobody else saw, or if nobody else cared.  When you are overwhelmed by the rottenness of things, it has a way of making you forget that others are in it with you.  Or maybe, like walking outside on a cloudy, moonless night, you can't see around you to know that you have others walking with you.

But if that's you these days, at least know that other faithful voices have been in the same place.  Jeremiah was there for a very long time--certain that things were falling apart around him while the official party line from the palace and the temple was that "This is all fine.  Everything is fine,"  and also just as certain that he was the only one willing to say out loud that things were not fine.  And when Jeremiah ran into folks who didn't want to listen, it just about broke the poor guy.  He felt like he had no options--if he spoke what he was sure God led him to say, he was going to get in trouble; and on the other hand, if he bit his tongue and tried to keep it all in, he felt like he was going to burst.  It was like "a fire in the bones," he says, like he couldn't shut the message from God in or he would explode.  But then he found himself back in the familiar place of being the only one in the room willing to acknowledge the elephant sitting there.

If you have been in that place before, or if you feel like you are there now, and you can't make out any faces in the dark, it's okay to say so.  Jeremiah's brutal honesty gives us permission to be honest, too--with each other, and with God--when we feel like we're the only ones who are paying attention, or the only ones upset, or the only ones troubled by the days we are living in.  You can say it.  You can even, like Jeremiah does, bring it right in God's face--look at how he comes out with both barrels, accusing God of having duped him, tricked him, and strong-armed him into being a prophet.  "You have enticed me.. you have overpowered me... you have prevailed," he says--to God!  Most of us were taught somewhere along the way that we have to be nice to God, that we have to be polite in our prayers, and that we have to sound... you know... "religious."  And here comes one of the most prolific prophets of the Bible just coming out swinging at God and accusing the divine of setting him up for failure with a message that nobody wanted to hear.  

If Jeremiah can accuse God like that, it's okay for you to bring your struggles to God, too.  If Jeremiah can be honest about how alone he feels, it's okay for you to say the same out loud.  If Jeremiah can confess how wearying it is to feel like he's the only one willing to say the unpopular thing, it's okay for you to own how tired you are if you feel like you're the only one paying attention in the world, too.  Jeremiah's words give us permission to be in the same place, for however long we need to be.

Because here's the thing: once Jeremiah vents, he can catch his breath, and he can rally his strength to speak again, and to let the holy fire out from his bones.  Once Elijah hears from God that he's not alone, he can get up and go back into the fray again.  Once every one in that great cloud of witnesses brings their lament and discovers that they are in a chorus of other voices, they can get back to work for a while.  And when the work wears them down again, they vent again, and they get through the next leg of the journey, too.

If you've been wondering somewhere along the way here, "Doesn't anybody else see?  Am I the only one saddened and upset and broken-hearted over all the rottenness around?" hear it now: you are not alone.  Everything's not okay, and you're not crazy to call out the not-okay-ness.  It's okay to say that out loud.  Maybe as you say it, you give courage to someone else who was waiting to hear that they weren't alone.  

Maybe you need to hear it, too:  you are not alone.  

It's okay to be frightened or sad or angry these days.

It's okay to say, "Things are not okay."

Even when we bring our angriest, sharpest words at God, there comes the voice that spoke to Jeremiah and all the other prophets, too: "I know it is hard.  I am with you.  The rottenness of it all grieves me, too.  I hurt with you.  And I will bear this with you, too. Take my hand. Let's go."

And if today we only get as far as sensing that there are other folks here in the dark beside us, that is enough for today.  Tomorrow we'll take the next step, and even if it's still in the dark, it will be with the knowledge that there are others beside you, who have the same fire in their bones as you have.

Lord God, strengthen us where we are weary. Bind up the wounds in our hearts, and tend to the pains we carry from feeling like we face the brokenness of this world alone.  Help us to sense one another's presence in the dark, and to know you are with us here, too.  Kindle the fire in our bones again.

God's Coup-de-Grace--September 17, 2020

 God's Coup-De-Grace--September 17, 2020

"When God saw what [the people of Nineveh] did, how they turned from their evil ways, God changed his mind about the calamity that he had said he would bring upon them; and he did not do it.  But this was displeasing to Jonah, and he became angry. He prayed to the LORD, and said, 'O LORD, Is not this what I said while I was still in my own country? That is why I led to Tarshish at the beginning; for I knew that you are a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing. And now, O LORD, please take my life from me, for it is better for me to die than to live.' And the LORD said, 'Is it right for you to be angry?' Then Jonah went out of the city and sat down east of the city, and made a booth for himself there. He sat under it in the shade, waiting to see what would become of the city." [Jonah 3:10-4:5]

The painful realization for us Respectable Religious folks is that we want God's goodness to be smaller than it is... and the second blow comes when we realize God is not going to stop being good to people beyond our made-up boundary lines, just because we are uncomfortable with it.  Our stinginess and short-sightedness cannot hold back God's grace.  And then the coup-de-grace is having to see the ways we have been so far off course from the mercy of God... in the hopes that by seeing it, we can be brought back into the wideness of God's life-giving goodness.

One of the haunting things about the story of Jonah is realizing that it's not just the ones who are "new" to the faith who have this struggle.  It's sometimes the very messengers God has sent, the prophets and leaders and teachers who are supposed to know the most about God and God's ways, who are most in need of having their vision stretched.  You expect the prophet... or the preacher... or the Bible study leader... to have the best understanding of what God is like, and to discover that they're the ones who need the wake-up call, well, that means all of us may need one as well.

Chances are, if you know the Jonah story, you learned it as "the story of the guy who gets swallowed by a big fish."  That's true, but it kind of misses the point of the whole story.  God sends Jonah to bring a message to the people of Nineveh--this is the capital city of the wicked enemy Assyrian empire, a people who were notorious for their violence and cruelty to those they captured or attacked.  Jonah doesn't want to go and speak God's disapproval to them--but not because he's afraid they'll laugh at him or persecute him or refuse to believe him.  As he says here, he's afraid that that God will turn out to be merciful to them, and Jonah doesn't want that possibility to happen.  He's decided that all the Ninevites (and with them, all the Assyrians) are bad, and that they do not deserve access to God's goodness--even though Jonah himself loves and cherishes his access to the goodness of God.  

Jonah doesn't want to let "those people" have what he thinks should only be for him and his group, so he runs in the opposite direction and gets on a boat headed as far away from Nineveh as he can get (hence the big fish's arrival later on). And so even though Jonah never throws a punch or makes a threat of physical violence to any of the Ninevites himself, he chooses to prevent the possibility that this whole group of people will have access to the good thing that he has freely received himself--he wants to keep the goodness of God back from all the Ninevites, just because he is convinced that all Ninevites are undeserving... are unworthy... are less-than.  Does Jonah ever directly harm the Ninevites--does he ever burn their houses down, kick the fenders on their chariots, kill any Ninevites, or even directly say, "I hate your kind?" No. Not even any name-calling, like referring to them as "a bunch of Ninnies." The problem in Jonah's heart is more pernicious, more insidious than that.  

Did it start with Jonah--did he invent the idea of hating Ninevites out of whole cloth?  No--surely it was something he grew up with, knowing that there had been generations of hostility between his people and theirs for a long time.  Probably nobody ever sat Jonah down and said, "You're supposed to actively harm and impede anything good from happening to Ninevites, and you are supposed to feel hatred for them in your heart."  But surely he grew up with the implicit teaching all around him that "THEY" were the enemy... that "THEY" were not eligible for God's goodness... and that "THEY" were not to be given access to the same good things that he, as an Israelite, took for granted. "THEY" were "OTHER"... and because of that, they were all to be treated as "enemy," every last one. Jonah didn't invent that system, but he was raised in it, and when the time came that God sent him to go to the Ninevites he had been ingrained to see himself as superior to, Jonah did exactly what he had been trained to do by every gesture, every implicit cue, and every cultural script that had been in front of his eyes from childhood:  he repeated the superiority he had been taught and refused to share the good things he had with those deemed as "other."

There is a word for that kind of complex system of indoctrination, the kind that becomes so subtle and insidious that you can almost forget it is there all the time, happening without anyone realizing it.  It is racism.  Among other things, it is systemic; it is ingrained; and most tragically of all, it is backed by Respectable Religious to make it seem like it is God's will and therefore OK.  There are all sorts of other things we could call Jonah's attitude--it is xenophobic, it is prejudiced, it is bigoted, it is merciless, and it is absolutely hypocritical.  But maybe it is worth letting ourselves be made a little more uncomfortable today by considering that at least part of what is going for Jonah is what we might call today "systemic racism."  And if Jonah is infected with it, then we are going to have to take an honest look at ourselves, too, for the same sickness--because Jonah was a Respectable Religious person who only saw goodness and righteousness in himself.

Hopefully the idea that there is racism going on for Jonah is obvious--he has a built-in prejudice against all Ninevites, and he assumes that all of them are just as unworthy, unrighteous, and undeserving of grace as the worst of the worst rumors and stories about the Assyrians that he has heard.  And treating a whole group of people negatively because they share a common ethnicity, culture, or language is exactly what racism is all about.  

The systemic part is what's harder sometimes for us to process.  See, Jonah doesn't burn any crosses on the lawns of the Ninevites, or blow up any Ninevite churches like the perpetrators of the firebombing of the 16th Street Baptism Church did in Birmingham 57 years ago this week (September 15, 1963).  Jonah didn't throw a punch or call a name.  But he was absolutely a part of a whole attitude, a whole set of practices and policies--in other words, a system--that assumed good things did not belong to the Ninevites and could not be shared with them, even if God said they were supposed to be.  Jonah had been raised in it, and then in adulthood, the same system came to fruition in him.  It wasn't even about his emotions or how he "felt" about the people of Nineveh--maybe Jonah would have even insisted, "But I have a Ninevite friend!"  But he had accepted and perpetuated the whole way of life that said, "All of these people are not worthy of the good things God has given me," and so even when God said explicitly, "Go to them and share with them what I have told you," he wouldn't.   

Poor Jonah--his whole view of the world is getting broken apart as he comes face to face with the realization that God's goodness is bigger than he wants to let it be, and that he is powerless to stop God's determination to bring life and grace to the ones he has been taught are unworthy.

Now, like I say, there's more to this scene than only what we would call racism today.  It's true that Nineveh is the capital of an empire that was notorious for its cruelty and wickedness, and there was certainly a lot that these particular folks had to repent of.  But what God wanted Jonah to bring was exactly the opportunity to repent, to turn, and to find mercy--and that's exactly what Jonah didn't want to let them have.

And that's in the end what we all need to wrestle with: here we are, Respectable Religious folks who like to think we know how God works and who "matters" in God's scheme of things.  And a lot of the time, those assumptions have been ingrained in us from childhood--nobody has to lecture us or brainwash us, but we just pick it up in a thousand different subtle ways.  And because we see it reinforced in our church life so often, we often just assume that God backs our prejudices, our assumptions, and our systems of "the way things are."  The whole arc of Jonah's story reminds us that God does not... and that God is not bound to live inside the boxes we have constructed to try and cage the Almighty.  God does not stay inside the boundary lines of our quietly-ingrained racism, our pet hatreds, and our unspoken patterns of prejudice that become the systems we build our lives on. The only question is what we will do when we realize that God has escaped the pen we built.

That's Jonah's question, too, and that's maybe where we need to leave our conversation for now, too.  The book of Jonah ends with the open question of how he will respond to a grace that is wider than he wanted to allow.  His story also calls into question the whole set of assumptions Jonah had surely grown up with--about who was eligible for mercy, who should have access to God's goodness, and whom the Respectable Religious Crowd are allowed to exclude.  Maybe we will need to take a closer look, too, at ourselves, and what ways we have been quietly ingrained with the belief that "we" are better than some people, and that "they" do not deserve the good things (or even the God things) we have freely.

What will we do when we have that honest conversation with ourselves?  How will we respond when we discover that God's goodness is wider and wilder than we dared imagine?  How will we react when we discover the father is welcoming home prodigals with lavish parties while we sulk outside, grouching about their unworthiness?

Maybe we will work up the courage to come into a party that has a lot more variety in its guest list than we could have dreamed.  Maybe we will even smile a little to see the celebration.

Lord God, open up these hearts and eyes of ours to the wideness of your vision, and help us to see ourselves honestly, including the ways we have learned to exclude others that you are still including.