What To Do With Our Hands--December 1, 2020

 What To Do With Our Hands—A Prayer for December 1, 2020

We’re fidgety again, good Lord,
and we don’t know what to do with our hands.

The prophets and apostles, and even Jesus, all tell us
to wait and be ready.
And that’s hard enough.

But we get the sense somehow
we’re not supposed to be merely
twiddling our thumbs in the waiting.

So show us again,
and tell us anew
how to spend the gift of this day,
this hour,
this minute,
this breath,
and how to move our hands and feet
and how use these voices, these bodies, in ways
that sway with the cadence of the rhythm of your song.

You Reserve the Right--A Prayer for November 30, 2020

 



You Reserve the Right—A Prayer for November 30, 2020 

(drawn from reading Isaiah 64:3-4)

We want you, O God, to be predictable.
and you, in your holy stubbornness,
seem determined as ever to surprise us.

You are the God with an ace up your sleeve,
and you insist on the unexpected.

You reserve the right,
so the old seers tell us:
to catch us off guard,
to do a new thing,
to move beyond the categories we construct
to contain you (we think) and keep you safe.

But you—you do what we never saw coming.
You call teenage girls to bear divinity.
You welcome the ones the rules call unacceptable.
You choose to be faithful
in the face of our fickle hearts that keep bailing out on you.

Be your surprising Self, O God. You are just what we need.

We Are Not Great—A Prayer for November 29, 2020
(drawn from Mark 13:24-37)

Help us, God, to live through these days in particular.

These days call for patience—and we are not great at waiting.
These days demand us to be flexible—and we confess
we are not great at having our plans changed, either.

These days we are having a hard enough time
stringing together two days of “normal” in a row.

Even “new normal” is hard to come by.
And then you speak to us again
with words that shouldn’t come any more
as unexpected to us, but which still bring us up short.

You speak of the sun going dark,
the stars crashing down,
and all the powers we thought were permanent
being shaken to the foundations.

We are not great, we confess, at having our worlds
turned upside down, and these days make our heads spin.

But you are great, O God, at holding us through. Do it now.

 

 

Thanks for Broken Things--November 26, 2020

 Thanks for Broken Things--November 26, 2020

"While there were eating, Jesus took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to the disciples, and said, 'Take, eat; this is my body.' Then he took a cup, and after giving thanks he gave it to them, saying, 'Drink from it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. I tell you, I will never again drink of this fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new with you in my Father's kingdom'." [Matthew 26:26-29]

I don't know that I had thought it this way before, but this probably wasn't the way Jesus would have wanted to spend his holiday.  But it was necessary... for the sake of love.

Church folk are so used to hearing this story as the origin of what we call Holy Communion or the Lord's Supper, or we just leap past this story on the way to the cross, that we forget that Jesus was celebrating a holiday with his closest friends in this scene.  And not just any holiday, this was Passover--the central festival of Israel's religious, national, and cultural life.  Picture it like Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one.  It's a big deal.  And of course the tradition was to eat the usual Passover Feast with your family, and to eat it with joyful remembrance.  You pulled out all the stops to make everything just right.  You joined with family and neighbors to have enough people around the table to eat the whole roasted lamb.  And as one of the festivals specifically prescribed in the Torah, it was a matter of faith to get it right.

And yet here was Jesus, knowing that it wasn't the way he would have wanted.  He knew it was mere hours before he would be abandoned by his followers.  He knew the sham trial was waiting, and torture by the state and the empire's cross after that.  He knew he wasn't going to be in his hometown.  He knew all the aunts and uncles and extended relatives wouldn't be there.  He knew they were putting it together as well as they could with a borrowed room in a strange city filled with tension in the streets.  And so as much as the calendar told them all it was a day for celebration, it was just obvious--this wasn't the way things were "supposed" to go.

And yet, Jesus bears with the needs of the circumstances... for the sake of love.  Things are different, but he is willing to let them be different--because the people he loves need it to be different.  He is headed to a cross--and for two millennia, Christians have dared to claim that he offered up his life out of love for all the world to redeem and rescue all of us.  Jesus also loved his disciples and didn't want them to misunderstand what was about to happen--he needed them to understand that the cross wasn't the empire's victory over him, but rather his subversive choice to break the power of death itself.  He wanted them to understand he wasn't a helpless victim caught up in the machinations of powers beyond his control, but his chosen surrender to set his people free--like the Passover lamb itself, whose blood on the doorpost guarded the Israelites from the power of death.

So he takes the bread, breaks it, and gives thanks for it in its brokenness, and tells his disciples it is his own body.  He takes the cup, meant to be celebrating the sweetness of freedom from slavery, and gives thanks that his own lifeblood can free the world anew.

He chooses to let this holiday celebration be different, for the sake of love.  He gives thanks--lifting up the bread and the cup--even though the thanksgiving is colored by sorrow and suffering.  Even though none of it is "the way it's supposed to be."  Even though it wasn't like any Passover they had ever celebrated before.  But love is worth letting the traditions change sometimes.  Love is willing to go to additional lengths, and often that means going out of our comfort zones.

By comparison, the ways this year's Thanksgiving will be different are small changes.  Yes, we are all making changes this year.  Yes, many of our gatherings are smaller and feel subdued.  Yes, the traditions change, and it's ok to name that it feels uncomfortable for things to be different.  Yes, we miss the face to face gatherings with the larger groups.  Yes, lots of things are different this year.  And "different," as an adjective by itself, is neither good nor bad.  The question is, "Why--why should things be different?"  And when the answer is, "love," well, then, maybe there is something beautiful in the difference this year, even in the bittersweetness. 

Jesus himself gives us a picture of how love sometimes leads you let the traditional celebration be different.  Sometimes circumstances and love require us to let go of the mental picture of "how it's supposed to be," and to do things in new ways, for the sake of others and their needs--whether they understand what we are doing for them or not, whether we can draw a straight line between our actions and their well-being or not, and whether we get to see the direct impact of our choices for love. Jesus, after all, allows his Passover celebration to be different because he intends to offer up his life for the world at the cross, and the rest of the watching world doesn't even understand what's happening.  He is willing to let things be different, even while the world remains blissfully ignorant.  He is willing to set aside his picture-perfect holiday celebration, because sometimes that's what love does.

Today, lots of folks are making small sacrifices for the sake of love.  Folks are not traveling or gathering in large crowds to avoid the possibility of spreading sickness.  Folks are working extra-long shifts at the hospital and at nursing facilities, risking exposure themselves.  Folks are trying extra hard to find new ways of being together... separately--dropping off meals at the homes of neighbors who could use a sign of care, making a phone call to someone who needs a reminder they are loved, writing a note card and taking the time to send it.  We are also having to learn to let go, for a time, of some of our pictures of "the way things are supposed to be," for the sake of love.  None of us is being asked to die on a cross for the sake of the world... but we are called to the same love.  And sometimes what the way of Jesus look like is to take broken things and thank God for them anyway, and to let love lead us to do things differently.

Today, in whatever ways you are giving thanks, and with whatever things feel different or out of sorts or even broken like bread, remember that there is something beautiful in the choice to let it be different for the sake of love.  Love turns broken bread and leftover wine into the very feast of God.

Lord Jesus, thank you for what you did for us... thank you for your presence with us... thank for the ways your love leads us still to face new situations in your goodness.

Conscious of Our Treasures--November 24, 2020

Conscious of Our Treasures--November 24, 2020

"Do not worry about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God." [Philippians 4:6]

If you want to be more fully alive, practice gratitude.

Really.  

There's no ritual you have to follow.  No spiritual pilgrimage required.  No magic prayer to pray or mantra to recite.  But rather, the intentional, deliberate, conscious practice of appreciating what and who you have in this life, and saying thank you for them.  Giving thanks--both to the people for whom you are grateful, and to the God who puts them in your life--helps us to see what we have been blessed with and realize these things were not owed to us.  They are grace.

I am often reminded of the wisdom of Thornton Wilder on this subject, who wisely said, "We can only said to be alive when our hearts are conscious of their treasures."  And that's just it--gratitude is not merely about good manners (although good manners are a lovely and delightful thing, and I highly recommend them as opposed to being a jerk in life).  Gratitude opens our eyes to see and to appreciate what has been put in our hands, especially when we are tempted to take things for granted or look for things to grouse about. 

I want to be more fully alive, so I'm going to take Wilder's advice--because it is very much in keeping with the Apostle Paul's direction, too.  Thankfulness has a place in everything.  Even when I have needs that are urgent and I bring those to God in prayer, gratitude changes the conversation.  When I choose thankfulness in my prayers, I am reminded of why we can be confident God is listening.  The practice of giving thanks calls to mind all the answered prayers of the past and helps us to see that God has been good to us over and over and over again.  It gives me reason to keep bringing my needs to God, and gives me a peace in knowing that God has provided for my needs and graced me beyond my earning plenty of times before.

In other words, practicing gratitude in prayer isn't about trying to butter God up before we make our "big ask" of whatever the next thing is that we need.  It's not that God will be snitty if we forget to say "Thank you," but rather than without the regular practice of gratitude we start to lose our senses of all the blessings around us.  We forget that the smell of a wood fire on a cold day is special, or that the sound of rain is a thing of beauty.  We stop noticing the kindness of strangers or the effort friends and family make to brighten our days.  We take things for granted or find only complaints, and we become a little less alive.

So on a day like today... in the week that it is on the calendar... in the year that has been full of so much turmoil and disappointment, it is easy--but dangerous--to spend all of our attention on the things that didn't go our way.  Yes, we can name them.  And yes, we can be honest about them.  But it is worth taking the time to recognize the good, the beautiful, and the graceful that is all around us.  Yeah, maybe you don't get to have family over for Thanksgiving this year, or to travel to see whomever you might usually see on this day.  Yeah, there's much that is uncertain and frustrating these days.  Yeah, some days it is hard just to make ourselves watch or listen to the news for all the eye-rolling and head-shaking it makes us do.  But alongside all those things, you and I were given another day today.  You and I are blessed again with people who love us.  You and I have been given a love that will not let us go in Christ Jesus.  You and I get to eat today.  You and I are given the opportunity to be a part of this gorgeous, vibrant, vital world, we who live on this small blue planet in the vastness of a galaxy beyond our comprehension, which is only one of a countless host of other galaxies.  Seeing just the fact of our existence in the midst of the infinite expanse of the cosmos has a way of putting my petty complaints and grievances back into their proper place.

Maybe it just starts with the thoughtful sentence that begins, "Today, I am grateful for..." and to see where it goes.  And then we try it again tomorrow.  And the next day.  And the next.  And before long, we are recognizing grace and goodness that is lavished upon us all the time but that we had been too busy, too entitled, or too numb to notice.

See?  Being thankful really does make us more fully alive.  Thanks be to God for bringing us to life in new ways all the time.

Lord God, thank you.  Thank you.  Thank you.

When No One is Looking--November 23, 2020

When No One Is Looking--November 23, 2020

"Then the righteous will answer him, 'Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?  And when was it that we saw you a stranger and welcomed you, or naked and gave you clothing?  And when was it that we saw you sick or in prison and visited you?' And the king will answer them, 'Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me'." [Matthew 25:37-40]

The saints are blessedly clueless--Hallelujah!

This is one of the details I have come to treasure about the well-known parable Jesus tells which we call "The Sheep and the Goats."  It's that when Jesus highlights all the good that the "righteous" did, they didn't realize anybody was watching or do it in order to score points.  They were just doing it because that's what happens when you are captivated by the goodness of God.  They feed the hungry, they clothe the naked, the welcome the foreigner, and they care for the sick and imprisoned, not as a photo op, and not to earn a merit badge, but simply because that is what justice and righteousness look like (and, reminder here, the same word in the Greek carries both senses, "justice" and "righteousness").

In other words, they do good simply because it flows out of who they are, not because of what they can "get" for doing it if the right person notices.  The righteous have been caring for neighbors, not because they want it to be a headline in tomorrow's paper and they can get the credit, but because somehow they are most fully alive when they are showing love, justice, and goodness to any and to all--even the ones deemed "least."  And so they aren't even paying attention to who is watching or whether anyone else notices--they are blessedly clueless that it has been Jesus there all along.

This is something I think we need to let sink in for a moment here.  All this year, I hope it has been clear that we have been looking at how God brings us more fully to life--how little resurrections are happening all around us all the time in anticipation of God's work to bring all creation to new life at last.  And while our hope is for a day when all creation is made new, in the mean time, here and now, God makes us more fully alive in the ways we love others. Being fully alive is far less about having the right stuff, getting the right job, making your relationships or social life fit someone else's expectations, or looking the right way--and it has almost everything to do with how we live our lives oriented toward one another.  We are more fully ourselves, and more fully alive, when we are loving others--especially those who can't do a thing to pay us back or don't know we are doing it.  And when that happens, something wonderful and mysterious happens: we stop focusing on ourselves and almost forget ourselves.  The "righteous" in Jesus' story aren't thinking a great deal about getting the credit for what they do in life, and they aren't staging a scene so reporters will take their picture.  They are simply seeking to love--as they have been loved by God--and so they aren't nearly so worried about how their actions are viewed by anybody else.  And when you are less worried about what others think and can simply act in love, you are brought a little more authentically to life.

For too long, church folks have read this story of Jesus and made it into a list of requirements to earn your way into heaven, when instead, Jesus seems to think that people who "get" what matters to God will more and more fully do these kinds of things without a second thought of what reward they'll get or who is watching.  We'll simply love because, well, that's how we are most fully alive ourselves!  And if it turns out in glory that Jesus was present behind the scenes when you cared for a stranger, well, then hot diggity, we get to be blessedly clueless, too!

Today, let us dare to let God make us more fully alive, when we can at last get out of the way of ourselves and simply do good--that is to say, love and justice--for the folks around us.  And let's just see if we aren't more fully alive for having done it.

Go, dear ones.  Do justice and practice mercy.  Be fully alive.

Lord Jesus, make us fully alive and less worried about who is noticing as we give ourselves a way for the sake of doing justice and practicing mercy.

A Sublime Patchwork--November 19, 2020

 A Sublime Patchwork--November 19, 2020

"Therefore, my beloved, be steadfast, immovable, always excelling in the work of the Lord, because you know that in the Lord your labor is not in vain." [1 Corinthians 15:58]

It is worth it--the good that you do in this world.

The tiny gestures of decency and mercy that go unnoticed--they are worth doing, even if they do not register on someone else's radar or make a lasting impression in their memory.

The persistence you put in--small actions, day by day, that form a lifetime--it matters, and it is not lost, even if you are going through a time when you wonder if any of it makes a difference.  The effort you put in at work... the time you take with your children or grandchildren... the additional grace you extend to a stranger... the willingness to be put to a little bit of inconvenience in the hopes of helping someone else.... the energy you spent taking the time to speak kindly rather than rashly... these things are not lost in the great sweep of history, even when we can't see what any of it accomplished.

Or, as the apostle puts it succinctly, in the Lord your labor is not in vain.

Now, to be clear, that doesn't mean the world around you will always recognize the value of what you do.  Our 24-hour-a-day news-cycle culture wants flashy, attention-getting, headline-making acts of heroics, and most of the good you and I can be a part of is, honestly, the stuff that is easily overlook-able.  You aren't likely to get a parade in your honor or a statue in your likeness set up somewhere, but that may be for the best anyway (Jesus seems pretty skeptical about the value of statues of anybody, it seems to me, and he knows how fickle the crowd at a parade can be, too, between a Sunday and a Friday).  

So as long as we understand that Paul isn't promising that the world will recognize your work and hand you a Nobel prize or Academy Award for it, we can trust Paul's point.  The world's big names and so-and-sos will always boast about crowd size, ratings, or numbers of social media followers they command, but the followers of Jesus aren't meant to be fooled by any of those metrics as the key to our worth.  For us who are disciples of the homeless, jobless, executed rabbi from a backwater town called Nazareth, we don't have to worry about who looks like a "winner," and we don't have to go blustering on about the legacies we will leave, or how much we have done in our time compared to anybody else.  

We just don't have to play those games, because we know better.  Or at least, we should.  We know that we don't have control over anybody else's estimation of the value of our work.  We know that the kind of work that really matters--the labor we call love--usually doesn't turn heads, sell newspapers, or get clicks.  But we do it anyway, because it is the work to which Jesus calls us.  And Jesus' work, in his divine creativity, takes all these small actions, these momentary graces we extend to others, and stitches them together into something beautiful and whole, like a quilter taking small scraps in all their different colors and arranging them into a pattern than creates a sublime patchwork.  

Like a weaver working individual threads into a tapestry, or like the countless drops of water in the river that carves a canyon out of the colored layers of rock, in Jesus, our small actions of love are not lost.  Sure, nobody sets up a plaque to commemorate the ten billionth drip in the stream, but you can see how its presence, together with all the others that flow into the river, make a natural wonder like the Grand Canyon.  The difference the droplet makes is in the canyon itself, and the way its presence ripples out to nudge other droplets as they smooth away the jagged edges of the shale is the legacy it leaves.  None of the droplets, none of the threads, none of the little squares and triangles of fabric, are meaningless.  Their presence is not in vain.

Maybe what it takes is a divine quilter like Christ to see the possibilities and beauty in each scrap, each thread, and to find ways to use what the world would discard.  But that is exactly what our hope is as Christians--that the small actions of love for neighbor, the small words of truth we insist on, the small commitments to justice and decency we muster in this life are not wasted, but are gathered up in the arms of Jesus himself, who stitches them together and incorporates them into the new creation.

Think of that--the good you do, the love you show, the grace you practice, and the welcome you offer, won't be lost even when the world's empires have crumbled and the universe itself has worn out.  They will be preserved in some way, and their impact will endure, like the river of the water of life carving a canyon into the bedrock in the new heaven and new earth.

Add a droplet.  Add a blue square or a purple triangle.  Add a golden thread.

Lord Jesus, take what we offer today and use it for good--even if we cannot yet see how it matters.

How To Keep Going--November 18, 2020

 How To Keep Going--November 18, 2020

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who for the sake of the joy that was set before him endured the cross, disregarding its shame, and has taken his seat at the right hand of the throne of God." [Hebrews 12:1-2]

Sometimes you just keep going, putting one foot in front of the other, and you call that a win for the day.  Honestly.

I know it's hard these days to keep up with all we are asked to do, with increasingly complicated circumstances to deal with, and to find the energy or the will to keep on going.  I know many have found their jobs keep changing as everybody lives with the challenges of responding to COVID, if they are lucky enough to have a job.  I know it's hard to keep finding joy when we are separated from one another.  I know it's hard being responsible and continuing to do what we are asked to do for the sake of our neighbors, from wearing masks to keeping distances to limiting gatherings.  I know it's hard to say "No" to things that seem fun, or that have been long-standing traditions.  I know it's hard to adapt.  And I know, when so many things feel like they have been brought to halt, canceled, or turned upside down, to dare to believe things really will get better sometime.  It's hard, in other words, to persevere.

And if we are going to be truly honest with one another, we should admit that it can be hard to hear the Scriptures call us to keep "running" with perseverance, because, hoo boy, we are tired already.  It's hard to be weary already from the marathon we've already been running, and then to be told, "Just keep on running."  And maybe, at first blush, that's all it sounds like we get here from the writer of Hebrews--just the sideline shouting of a track coach telling the runners to do more while they watch from the bleachers.

But perhaps it would be good to give this voice from Scripture the benefit of the doubt and see if there's good news to be heard here more than merely, "Keep on running with no end in sight."  Let's see if we can't wrestle a blessing out of this text, as they say.

First off, picture the scene that the writer of Hebrews describes.  It's not a solo marathon, really--it's like a relay race.  We are a part of a team, and that "great cloud of witnesses" who have gone before us (read all of Hebrews 11 to get a sort of run-through of saints and sojourners from the saga of God's people) are people who have run ahead of us.  In other words, yes, we are being called to run our part of a race--but it's not all on you or me.  We run together as part of a team, and others have gone ahead of us and done their part of the course.  Each of us has a leg of the race to run, but others have covered rough terrain before us already.  And those who have gone ahead of us are cheering for us, not rooting against us.  Neither are they just passively watching like mere spectators looking to be entertained--their voices encourage and inspire and propel us forward.  We don't race alone: Hebrews reminds us of that when it feels like you're the only one on the path.

Second, the writer of Hebrews invites us to run with greater freedom by letting go of the baggage and weight we thought we had to talk along with us.  As we keep on persevering in this life, there are so many voices telling us things we need to carry with us--the status that comes with our jobs, our worries over having more money than our neighbor, our hang-ups about our past, the ghosts of our mess-ups and failures, and the guilt and regret we each carry from things we wish we could take back or do over differently.  We are also lugging around a lot of other dead weight that ain't the gospel, either--the hatreds and fears we have had ingrained in us from childhood, the selfishness and narcissism we've been taught that says, "I've got to look out for Me-and-My-Group First!", and the assumptions we have been handed about what Respectable Religious people are supposed to do, or think, or look like, or act like.  All of that is extra weight that we don't need to be carrying, even though somebody along the way told us we had to strap it on our backs and carry it all.  The writer of Hebrews says, "No!   You don't need to carry anything else, so let go of the baggage, the weight, the sin, the hang-ups, the bent-in-on-self-ness that you were taught to pick up at some point.  You don't have to carry it any more."  So rather than hearing these verses like the writer is cracking the whip on us and endlessly telling us to run faster and harder, he's actually telling us to let go of the things that are weighing us down, things we didn't have to be carrying in the first place.  That makes the journey easier, not harder.

And ultimately, there is Jesus.  Jesus is really what makes the difference in all of this.  Because the secret that the writer of Hebrews is sharing with us is that the victory in this race is already accomplished.  We are on Jesus' team, and he has already broken the track record.  He has already won the race for the whole team, which means the pressure doesn't all rest on you or me alone to do a "good enough" job.  Jesus has already lapped the competition, and the race is won.  That's why the writer of Hebrews can call Jesus the "pioneer and perfecter of our faith."  Or, to be a little more literal with the Greek of the original, Jesus is "the inaugurator and the completer"--he's the first runner on this relay, and he's the one who has brought it to completion, too.  If this life's journey is a marathon relay race, Jesus was not only our first runner, but he's already crossed the line on our behalf, and our calling is just to keep going in confidence that the race is already won.  Not only that, but there is an end to this race, and we know it because Jesus has already crossed the finish line and sat down at the right hand of the Father.  The winning is over. Victory is assured and accomplished.  Now that the pressure is off, you and I are free just to run without worrying we'll let God down when we stumble, or fussing over how we compare to somebody else.  We don't have to worry about it at all.  Jesus has already triumphed.

If that's true, then it does change the way I face this day.  In a sense, my calling hasn't changed--we keep going, no matter what.  But in a different sense, everything has changed.  Because I no longer have to stay stuck in that rat-race mentality of our coworkers, neighbors, and friends who are constantly trying to "get ahead" so they can feel like they are "winning" at life by being better than somebody else.  We don't have to live with the hang-ups of worrying how we compare to someone, or fussing over if we have done enough.  We don't have to play those games or carry those loads anymore.  Our hands are free, since we've set all that competition-minded garbage thinking side, and with empty hands we can not only take the baton that's been passed to us, but use our freedom of motion to love the people around us. 

So if you find yourself, today or ever, feeling worn down in this daily race... if you find yourself feeling like you're alone... if you feel like you've been handed too much of a load to carry while you run a marathon with no end in sight, here is good news.  You are not alone, and you never were.  You don't have to carry the junk and baggage that other people hand to you.  And you don't have to worry that it all hangs on you being good enough, because Jesus has already won this race.

Your calling and mine is simply to keep putting one foot in front of another.  Even after it feels like we've taken a couple of steps backward, too.  Even if the only win for the day is one step's worth of movement.  Even if we are still tempted repeatedly to keep picking up old discarded bags and weights laying at the edge of the path.  We keep going, because Jesus has won the race already, and he picked you and me for his team.

Lord Jesus, help us to keep going today, but freely and without the weights and worries we are used to.

Better Than Great--November 17, 2020

Better than Great--November 17, 2020

"Praise the LORD!
How good it is to sing praises to our God;
     for he is gracious, and a song of praise is fitting.
The LORD builds up Jerusalem;
     he gathers the outcasts of Israel.
He heals the brokenhearted,
     and binds up their wounds.
He determines the number of stars;
     he gives to all of them their names." [Psalm 147:1-4]

How amazing, isn't it, that God isn't too busy to tend to our broken hearts, wounded bodies, or tear-streaked faces?

How truly awesome that the Maker of the universe, who names and counts the stars, doesn't send us and our troubles away because he's got "more important things to do", you know?

This is the audacious claim that the writers of Scripture make: that the same God who is mindful of the vast and infinite reaches of the cosmos is also mindful of us.  Of you, in all of your you-ness. And of me, in all of my me-ness.  Not just when we're polished and put together, either, but on the days when we are broken up inside and disheveled, when our shirt-tails are hanging out and we've been wiping our runny noses on our sleeves.  

It says something truly beautiful about the God we meet in those Scriptures that God is never too busy or too proud to stoop with us and comfort us in our most difficult days.  That's what makes the God of Abraham and Sarah worth praising.  It's not just God's sheer power--but God's choice to be compassionate to us mortals who can't do a thing to pay God back in return. It's not just God's might, but God's mercy, that is worth singing a song about.

Think for a moment about how truly radical that is.  The ancient empires that surrounded Israel all had their own pantheon of gods, and they all sang their praises and offered prayers to those gods and goddesses.  And usually, those ancient songs of praise were focused on the power they imagined their gods to have.  If you were an ancient Canaanite, you praised Ba'al for controlling the storms, the lightning, and the thunder.  If you were an ancient Babylonian, you praised Marduk for being stronger than the chaos monster goddess Tiamat.  If you were an ancient Egyptian, you praised the power of the sun-god Ra (and you praised Pharaoh, too, because the pharaohs claimed to be the living embodiment of the sun-god) which could scorch a parched field or bring crops to life.  And if you were an ancient Roman, you praised Caesar himself as a god for his military might, imperial wealth, and the power he commanded that was conquering the known world.

Ancient Israel and Judah said something else about their God, Yahweh.   Yes, the God of Israel was strong.  Yes, their God was the almighty creator of the universe.  But more noteworthy was that this God was not merely content to be strong--Yahweh was compassionate.  Strength by itself wasn't enough to write a song about.  It was God's love for the lowly, God's mercy for the marginalized, God's empathy for the at-risk, that inspired songs and hymns and praises.  The ancient poets of Israel didn't simply praise Yahweh for being the biggest thing or strongest entity in the universe--they praised Yahweh because Yahweh was known to be compassionate for those whose hearts were broken and whose bodies were bruised.  The psalmist doesn't just praise God for being "great" but for being deeply good.  That makes all the difference.

In the end, I think what we usually think of as being "great" is overrated.  Sheer strength, after all, can be used to both good or destructive purposes.  The thing that makes God worthy of our praise isn't just God's mere muscle--it's the way God commits to sitting with the sorrowful and healing those who hurt.

It's an old adage that we become like the objects of our worship.  Maybe it's no wonder then that the Babylonians, Romans, or Egyptians all gave in to becoming cruel and dominating empires--they all assumed their gods were important solely on account of their power and strength.  But the people of Israel were supposed to be different, as are the followers of Jesus today, too.  Greatness isn't enough for us--at least it shouldn't be.  We are called to something better than the mere pursuit of what the world calls "great."  We are called to be good in the ways God is good--care for the brokenhearted among us, love for the wounded, mercy for the empty-handed and powerless.

In a world full of folks who are obsessed with making themselves look "great," but who are often too busy for the likes of us ordinary people, what a difference it is to know we are invited to bare our broken hearts to the God who made the universe, but is never too busy for you.  What a difference it makes to praise God, not just for being the biggest thing in the room, but for having the deepest love.  What hope is to be found from the assurance that God isn't just powerful, but compassionate.

Singing praise to that sort of God--and then being shaped by that God's character--is going to leave a mark on us.  We will become people who are more interested in being good than in looking "great." And we will become people whose choices arise from genuine love rather than a need to look powerful or impressive.  And honestly, amid all the fakers, pretenders, and charlatans out there, I am longing to be made into someone who loves genuinely rather than putting on a show. 

All praise to the God who gathers the outcasts of Israel--the God who is worthy of our songs because of God's love, more than just for brute force.  May our whole lives be a lived hymn to such a God, who is great, because he is good.

Lord God, you are worthy of our praise because you are good.  Let us praise you with lives shaped by your goodness to the lowly and the left out ones.

A Just Hope--November 16, 2020

 

A Just Hope--November 16, 2020

"I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep, and I will make them lie down, says the Lord God. I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak, but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice. Therefore, thus says the Lord God to them: I myself will judge between the fat sheep and the lean sheep. Because you pushed with flank and shoulder, and butted at all the weak animals with your horns until you scattered them far and wide, I will save my flock, and they shall no longer be ravaged; and I will judge between sheep and sheep.  I will set up over them one shepherd, my servant David, and he shall feed them: he shall feed them and be their shepherd. And I, the Lord, will be their God, and my servant David shall be prince among them; I, the Lord, have spoken." [Ezekiel 34:16, 20-24]

Getting back to normal isn't enough.

Just hitting "reset" to get things the way we think they "used to be" in our memories (even if there were such a reset button) won't make things right.

And merely making things predictable after a season of chaos isn't the same as making things good or right or whole.  The farmer can predict what will happen if a fox gets loose in the henhouse, after all, but isn't good.

No, the hope has to be bigger, deeper, more complete than just, "Can't we go back to the way it used to be?" because "the way it used to be" is what got us where we are.  Our hope has to be more more than just what's familiar or expected--we are called to something truly better, something good for all, something we have never fully known but always longed for.  The people of God are called to yearn for a just hope.

Ezekiel is teaching me that again.  These words--words that we'll hear this coming Sunday as part of what the church observes as Christ the King Sunday--speak to people who have been living in the turmoil and uncertainty of exile.  They have seen their government pulled down when the Babylonians installed a puppet king, only to have the same Babylonians decide that wasn't enough, and then destroy the capital, burn the city to its foundations, and raze the Temple to the ground.  They have seen their life as a nation utterly broken.  And they are longing for hope--the possibility of a new beginning on the other side of exile.

But it's important to note what the prophet offers as hope--and what he doesn't say.  Because as much as everybody seems to just want things to go back to "the way they used to be," Ezekiel doesn't quite promise that.  He offers hope, but more than that, he insists that the future God brings will mean justice for all people, even if that makes some of them uncomfortable.  

See, as Ezekiel tells it, the problem with "the way things used to be" before the exile was that the people of God were being terrible to one another.  The strong preyed upon the weak.  The rich preyed upon the poor.  The well-fed took advantage of the hungry.  And making it worse, the powerful and prosperous used the lie that their advantage must have been God's will and a sign of God's blessing because they were doing so well.  That was the system in Israel and Judah before the exile: the strong and the rich exploiting the weak and the poor.  But because they had all just gotten used to it and assumed it was "the way things are meant to be," everybody assumed that was all there ever could be.  This must be God's plan, after all, because this is how things have always been.

I am reminded of a line from Christopher Nolan's Batman movie, "The Dark Knight." In a climactic monologue, Heath Ledger's Joker says, "No one panics when things go 'according to plan'--even if the plan is horrifying!"  And isn't that just the truth?  If we have been taught that it's normal for people to go hungry or be homeless, we won't bat an eye when a neighbor family goes without food.  If we have been taught that racism, or hatred for our neighbors, or angry threats of violence when someone doesn't get their way, are all "just facts of life," we won't try to change them or call them out when we see them.  If I accept terrible things as just "part of the plan," we won't be troubled when those terrible things happen... as long as they happen to people I don't have to think about.

And this is where Ezekiel begs to differ.  More to the point, God begs to differ.

God doesn't have it mind just to bring the people back from Babylon so they can start stepping on each other all over again.  God isn't going to force Babylon to let the exiles come home just for them to oppress their neighbors like they always have.  God's vision of a future on the other side of exile doesn't merely hit the reset button on Israel's crookedness so they can take advantage of each other or ignore the needs of their neighbors all over again.  God's vision means justice.  And that means a hope, not just for the well-fed and well-heeled who want to get back to living the jet-setting glamorous lifestyles they were used to, but a hope for the people on the margins who had been treated like they didn't matter for too long.  God's vision isn't just of a market hitting record highs, but of a community where nobody has to go hungry anymore, and nobody gets elbowed out of the way because they are seen as expendable.

That's part of the sharp (but necessary) edge to Ezekiel's message here.  God will again gather the scattered people of Israel, like a shepherd gathering a lost flock.  But God will not let the powerful be bullies any longer.  God will not let the well-fed and aggressive one push the weak or the sick or the slow sleep aside, and God will not just return the exiled people back to the old order of the day, because it was never truly good for everyone.  God's vision is of justice, not merely familiarity.

If it makes us squirm to hear God say, "I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak but the fat and the strong I will destroy. I will feed them with justice," maybe we need to ask what makes us uncomfortable... and whether we are afraid of God actually rearranging our comfortable and familiar routines.  If we don't like God telling the "fat sheep" they they can't get away with pushing others out of their way because they were weak, maybe we need to ask why that is.  And maybe we will have to decide, at long last, whether we would rather have the familiarity of "the old normal" or the promise of a hope with justice.

In these late days of a turbulent year, of course we are all longing for what is familiar, what is comfortable, and what feels like "normal."  Of course.  We want our work lives and family situations to go back to what we remember.  We want the upheaval and ugliness from a nasty election season and its aftermath to settle down.  We want our lives back.  Of course.  But it's worth remembering that there have been some folks who were living with upheaval and ugliness thrown at the for a lot longer than we have.  And there are folks whose lives have been in turmoil and chaos for a lot longer than just what the pandemic has brought.  And it's just possible that a lot of us have just accepted all that brokenness of society because we were told it was just part of "the plan" and couldn't be avoided.  And when we clamor for the old "normal" we end up saying we're OK with all that old rottenness that came with it.

The prophets keep daring us to dream with them of something different--something better--and something that rings not only of peace but of true justice, too.  Yes, God will shepherd the people and gather the out of exile, but also this same God will keep the strong sheep from butting the weak out of the flock.  God will make a new order of things, where the weak, the lowly, the injured, the lost, and the left-out are included.  And instead of being upset that God won't just reinstitute the old normal, maybe we can rejoice that God has committed to a new kind of community, where nobody goes hungry, where justice is truly done, and where all are honored.

I can only barely even imagine it... but it seems worth hoping for.

Lord God, bring your Reign of justice--even where it unsettles our expectations and shakes up what we had accepted as normal.

Why the Truth?--November 12, 2020

Why the Truth?—November 12, 2020

“So then, putting away falsehood, let all of us speak the truth to our neighbors, for we are members of one another.” (Ephesians 4:25) 

So, why exactly should we tell the truth? 

Maybe it seems an odd thing for the preacher to be asking (I would hope it seems odd, at least at one level), but seriously, why is it that the followers of Jesus are taught specifically to be honest people? Why are we taught not to lie and deceive people? 

Afghan American novelist Khaled Hosseini offered an interesting answer through a character in his first novel, The Kite Runner. One of his characters proposes that there is really only one sin—theft—and that all other sins are forms of theft, and so lying, he says, steals someone’s right to the truth. 

An interesting way of framing things, isn’t it? That the truth is something your neighbor has a right to, and that you and I have obligations to each other and to everyone else to honor that right by giving the truth to people. 

I have to tell you, I think that notion is at least on the right track. It moves us beyond seeing “Thou shalt not lie” as just one random rule in a list of random rules, and says that we have a responsibility to each other, a connection to one another, that is grounded in honesty and that falls apart if we deceive one another. 

See, I think the problem for a lot of us is that we don’t make that connection—a connection that Paul makes, too. We often just hear the commandment, “Thou shalt not commit false witness against thy neighbor” as a rule you are supposed to follow as just one of a long list of rules God has come up with, and that if you follow that rule (along with all the others), you will be earning God-points to cash in upon death so that we can get admittance into heaven. We get sloppy with our talk about morality, and make it seem like my only real reason to be “good” is so that I can get some eternal reward for myself after death, or alternatively, to avoid some kind of eternal punishment. And the danger with that thinking—in addition to the fact that it completely forgets that grace means we are not judged on the basis of what we have earned or deserve from our deeds—is that is it makes truth-telling seem like it only affects me. “I should tell the truth because of how I could end up being punished if I get caught for lying,” or something like that, is how the common line of thinking goes. And if I do lie to others, well, the only one who really gets hurt is me, because I’m the one who will get the divine ruler on the knuckles for doing it. See how narrow and self-focused that is? 

The letter to the Ephesians doesn’t have so small a view. Paul doesn’t say, “You all should tell the truth or you will each go to hell.” In fact, Paul doesn’t really ground his teaching about truth-telling in the post-mortem consequences for the “teller” at all. It’s because we have an obligation, a commitment, a responsibility, even a covenant, with the people around us. And that commitment is to be truthful for the sake of relationship. Paul doesn’t say, “Don’t lie or else God will zap you, or your boss/spouse/parent will find out.” Paul says, “Don’t deceive anybody, because you belong to each other.” In other words, we tell the truth to each other, even when it is difficult, awkward, or painful truth, because love binds us together, and love requires eyes made clear by truth-telling. 

Love means bearing the truth together, even when the truth is uncomfortable or not to my advantage.  In fact it is precisely because I am called to love my neighbor that I owe my neighbor the truth even when I don't like what the truth is.

We don’t often think of it that way. We don’t think—at least when we are the ones doing the deceiving, the fudging of facts, the clever omission of part of the real story—we don’t think about how dishonesty is like dry-rot for relationships, whether friends, family, or just people who work together. It undermines the substance that keeps the friendship strong. And when the floor is weakened at any one point, the whole thing suffers. I might like to think that I can tell, you know, “most” of the truth to someone, and think I’m doing them a favor, or at least doing enough to sustain the friendship. But when I hold things back, when I twist things because I am afraid of revealing how things really are, when I keep the truth from someone for my own purposes (even if they are well-meaning and seemingly noble or nice purposes!), I am sawing on the branch we are both sitting on. Like the mold spores eating at the strong fibers of the wood, every time I withhold the truth, it weakens the connection between us, making it harder and harder for you to really trust me again. 

You and I can each surely recite times when your heart sank into your feet to find out that you had been lied to—and usually not just because of whatever the lie was actually about, but because all of a sudden there is this wedge between you and the other person. And worst of all, once it’s out there that some of the truth has been kept, hidden, twisted, or covered over, it makes you start to suspect everything that gets said by the other person, so that you feel you can’t count on anything that the other person says. 

You and I both know, too, how long it takes, and how hard-fought it is, to get back to a place of trust when that trust has been lost. Even if it is never said out loud, the past deception is always there in the background, haunting ever possible future moment of honesty and soul-baring like a ghost. Maybe those past falsehoods, whether by saying something false or keeping something vital to the truth, maybe they never really go away. Maybe at best they scar over, and in time, you learn how much weight you can put on the friendship again, like a recovering patient with a broken leg learning again how much weight the healing-but-fractured bone can bear. 

It’s a big deal to be truthful people. It really is. Just not merely for the usual reasons people give—not because God just likes giving us rules to follow, and not just because there are rewards and punishments in store for truth-telling Gallants and lying Goofsues. It’s a big deal because truth is a part of what love looks like. 

If there are any people in your life who are worth your love—your real, authentic, enduring, go-to-the-mat-for-them love (and to be a Christian is to belong in such a community of brothers and sisters that we call “church”)—then those same people are worth the risk and the courage it takes to be honest. Not just to tell technically-true statements of fact, but to BE honest people, people who dare the vulnerability it takes to put the truth out there, and who risk that love means they will be accepted and cherished regardless of what that truth is. It means, too, that we will insist on truth from one another, that we won't settle just for telling ourselves a lie that makes us feel better but has no substance to it, and that we teach our children and grandchildren to do the same.  

So to answer the question at the start of all of this--why the truth?  We who follow Jesus are committed to speaking and living truthfully because it is a part of how we love.  And because we are called to love all people--even the people we may not like, may not agree with, or may not know--we are called to be truthful with all people as well.  We owe it to each other, because we belong to each other.

Lord God, give us the love to be truthful people, and give us the courage to recognize that love.

Something Solid--November 11, 2020

 Something Solid--November 11, 2020

The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, "Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, 'After three days I will rise again,' Therefore command the tomb to be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, 'He has been raised from the dead,' and the last deception would be worse than the first." Pilate said to them, 'You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can."  So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone. [Matthew 27:62-66]

"Facts are stubborn things," as the line attributed to John Adams goes, "and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence."

I know it may be strange, here just a month and a half out from Christmas and in the late days of fall, to be thinking about a moment from the Easter story.  But in the course of this whole year, and the focus we've been returning to over and over again on God's resurrection work, it's worth remembering that our faith in a God who raises the dead isn't just wishful thinking.  The story we call the Gospel is a story grounded in something solid, something real, something true, and at the heart of that solid bedrock is the stubborn fact that there was a tomb in Palestine that had been sealed shut with an imperial Roman seal, and that it was broken open in the resurrection of Jesus.

The Gospel writers, for all of the different nuances of the ways they tell the story, all come back to this solid and stubborn fact: there was a tomb, which held the body of Jesus, and everybody in power did all they could to keep that body in there... but the stone was rolled away, the body was missing, and the tomb was empty.  The Christian faith, from its beginnings when Mary Magdalene preached the first Easter sermon to this very moment twenty centuries and change later, is rooted on the stubbornness of the fact of the empty tomb, rather than on what the powers of the day, then or now, wish had happened.

I want us to be clear on that for a couple of reasons--reasons I believe are vital for us in this moment.  One is that Christian hope always has to be more than the mere power of positive thinking--that just boils down to wishful thinking.  And while I don't mean to sound like a Debbie Downer, that means the challenges, the struggles, and the hurts of our lives and of the world around us cannot be wished away because we don't want to have to face them anymore, or because we got bored of them, or because we want to be distracted by something less unpleasant.  Maybe one of the casualties of a culture where we can endlessly scroll social media feeds and skip past the things we don't like, or where we can fast-forward on a digitally-streaming TV show or movie to skip the credits or a boring scene, is that we end up thinking all of life is like that, and that we can avoid wading through the hard parts, or slogging through the tedious times.  It means, too, that problems like a pandemic don't just vanish because we wish they would go away or we've gotten tired of them.  It means that we can't give up on the work of feeding hungry neighbors or helping families out of homelessness just because it's not always fun.  It means, too, that the work of being church isn't just for the times when they're singing my favorite songs, but in the times when we're doing the unglamorous work of cleaning tables, balancing budgets, or washing feet.  We can't make the tough stuff go away just because we wish it would.  And the news of the resurrection is NOT merely wishful thinking because death is unpleasant--the earliest witnesses make a point of that.  They tell the story of the tomb sealed shut, and they expose the conspiracy theories that were floating around even in the first century, about how it got opened.

That's the other thing we may need to remember especially in this moment:  because our faith is rooted on the insistence that the resurrection of Jesus is a fact and not merely a myth, we are supposed be fact-people.  Christians are supposed to be people who can face the truth--even unpleasant and inconvenient truths--and who think evidence is important in what we believe and how we act.  We, of all people, can have the courage to insist on actual facts and solid evidence, because our faith itself springs from the stubborn fact of an empty tomb over against conspiracy theories old and new.

This is one of the reasons it may be helpful for us, six months away from Easter, to consider this moment in the story of Jesus' death, burial, and resurrection.  In Holy Week, we are so used to focusing on the cross and on Easter Sunday that we don't make time to consider why we are given this scene from Holy Saturday.  On the day between cross and resurrection, the power-brokers and the Respectable Religious Crowd conspired--literally--to concoct a false narrative about what happened in case it turned out that Jesus really did rise from the dead.  The Religious leaders, of course, had bet all their chips on Jesus staying dead, and they knew they would lose face, lose influence, and lose power, if the rabbi from Nazareth actually rose from the dead, or even if it looked like he had risen from the dead.  Rather than face a fact that would have blown their worldviews up and forced them to re-think everything, they wanted to cover up the fact of the resurrection (they go even further and start bribing the guards at the tomb to say that the disciples stole the body later on in Matthew 28:11-15).  They literally invent a conspiracy theory because it is easier for them to keep their tidy picture of the world intact than to consider a fact that they don't like.  And so, without evidence, they construct a parallel story--that Jesus' disciples will come and steal the body, because certainly he can't rise from the dead!  T.S. Eliot was right: humankind cannot bear very much reality, and so our recurring strategy in the face of stubborn facts we do not like is to invent alternatives, no matter how far-fetched, that comfort us because they let us keep our old picture of the world and continue unchanged.  From the body-snatching theory of the religious and political leaders on Holy Saturday to the nonsense of QAnon or Flat-Earthers today, it is always tempting to invent a story that will allow us to ignore facts we don't like, because facing those facts will mean rearranging everything in our lives.

Christians have a stake in saying that facts matter.  We have an obligation to say that evidence should back up the claims we make.  There were plenty of myths, fables, and mystery religions in the ancient world that all told fantastic tales of gods who died and rose from the grave, but none of them offered any stubborn facts that rooted them.  By the first century, everybody knew deep down that Zeus and Hades and Mithras and the rest were all just captivating stories, and over against those the witness of the first Christians was that there really was an empty tomb, and that the powerful and well-connected folks had a vested interest in inventing conspiracy theories that would allow them to ignore those facts.

It's worth us saying again that we are fact people.  We are called to use the minds and reason we have been given by God to make decisions and arrange our lives on something solid, and we are convinced that the resurrection of Jesus is itself more than a campfire ghost story, but a blessedly stubborn fact.  It's worth the work in every area of our lives to ground what we say and do in confirmable facts, reliable sources, and even inconvenient truths.  The Gospel depends on such things.

Lord Jesus, root us in the solid reality of your resurrection, and give us the confidence to know that our faith is more than fable, and truer than any conspiracy theory.

Persuaded by Love--November 10, 2020

 Persuaded by Love--November 10, 2020

"Always be ready to make your defense to anyone who demands from you an accounting for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect. Keep your conscience clear, so that when you are maligned, those who abuse you for your good conduct in Christ may be put to shame. For it is better to suffer for doing good, if suffering should be God's will than to suffer for doing evil." [1 Peter 3:15-17]

To put it simply, when others go low, we will go high.

Always.  As a rule.  Not just when it is easy (it rarely is), but especially when it is difficult.  We will respond to meanness with kindness and we will treat others with the respect we would wish from them, but whether or not they have shown it to us first.

I have been thinking a great deal lately about these words from what we call First Peter, and what it means that the first Christians understood that their witness was made more powerful by their commitment to do good even to those who regarded them as enemies.  It was that kindness in the face of meanness, that showing of decency and dignity even to those who treated our ancestors in the faith with disrespect, that drew people to faith in Jesus, more than demolishing people with arguments.  Nobody gets yelled at into love, and Christianity is about being captivated by Love himself.  Our calling, then, is to persuade by our love, rather than to demand we are right or to smugly refuse to extend decency to others because we imagine that "they were mean to us first."  We are not children on the playground, after all--we are called to be the grown-ups in the room... in any room we walk into.

We need this kind of reminder these days, especially in the lingering aftermath of a brutal election season and the interminable campaign season before that.  Already there is that arrogant and self-righteous impulse to tell "the other side" (who, of course, everybody assumes is the "wrong" side while claiming God for theirs) some version of, "Well, you weren't very respectful to me, so why should I show respect to you?"  We look for ways to justify our bitterness, and we end up trying to make it sound like a virtue:  "I remember all the times you and your group were mean to me, so now it's my turn to be mean right back. Fair is fair."  Of course, we sound like absolute babies when we talk like that, but we tell ourselves it's actually righteous indignation.

No.  No, First Peter says.  We are called to be better than that.  Our witness to the Love that has captivated us calls for better than an endless game of "They did it first."

We need the reminder that there is no permission given in the Scriptures for "They started being mean, so I am allowed to be mean back," and there is no excuse of "But the people I disagree with haven't been respectful to what I think--why should I show respect to them?"  At least as far as First Peter is concerned, the answer is simply "Because you're supposed to be the grown-up."  Other people being jerks doesn't give us permission to be jerks, and other people being nice is not the pre-requisite for us to show kindness.  All of that tit-for-tat transactional thinking is the graceless attitude of toddlers and traders, and the followers of Jesus are neither.  Part of our witness is the way we respond to the folks from whom we receive the greatest hostility.  Part of the way of Jesus is to break the cycle of endlessly trying to get even, which is not only exhausting, but also completely ineffective.

Honestly, in the times in my own life where I have had a really significant change in my thinking, or an inflection point in my faith--and there have been some doozies--it has never come because someone's meanness finally bullied me into thinking their way.  The very pettiness of that kind of behavior itself pushes me away.  What has gotten through to me--even this dense mind and often hardened heart of mine--has been the persuasion of love.  It has been people who showed love to me without the condition that I had done it first.  It was people who risked kindness to me, even when they knew at the time that I thought or believed things that belittled them.

I think about the conversations I have had over coffees or lunches with folks who risked telling me their stories, even knowing they were opening themselves up to me judging them, and whose acts of vulnerable love got through to me.  I think about the woman who told me her life story and about how being honest about who she really was inside and about how she loved enabled her to stop lying to other people... and how her faith journey made me re-examine my assumptions about people I was used to labeling as "those people."  I think about the man who had been burned too many times by religion and religious institutions, who still extended enough respect and care for me to ask me sincere questions about what I believed and why, and invited me to listen to his own faith as well--and it occurs to me that he shaped the direction of my life and my faith without calling me a single name or lobbing a single insult, even though he knew we started our conversation from different perspectives at the time.  I think about the teachers of faith who convinced me of the immenseness and the relentlessness of God's love, and how it wasn't yelling or intimidation or bitterly indignant arm-crossing that got through to me.  It was the witness of love itself.

In other words, in my own life at least, not once has someone persuaded me to think their way by some form of getting even with me.  Not once has someone said to me "People who think the way you do have been mean to me before, so I will be mean to you in response," and then produced a change in my thinking or heart.  Meanness doesn't change anybody else's heart--it just corrodes your own.

And I think that is just what First Peter has been saying for the last two thousand years.  If we see the world just divided into "My Side" and "Their Side" and assume that the only outcome between the two is to destroy the other team, we will not only alienate everybody else Jesus has sent us to share our faith with, but we will have abandoned the way of Jesus.  If we see people we disagree with as enemies to be destroyed rather than people to be reasoned with, we will have consigned ourselves to being children rather than adults.  And if we insist on living our lives with the guiding principle of "I think you and your side have not been sufficiently nice to me and my side, so I will not show respect to you," we will not only find we don't persuade anybody else to grow in their thinking, but we will reveal just how badly the bitterness has corroded our own hearts.

Look, showing someone else decency even when you don't think they have shown it to you doesn't mean you agree with their position.  It means you won't sink to their level--you won't let them have that kind of power over you.  And it means you would rather use the opportunity to embody the non-transactional, unconditional love we have been given in Jesus than be a jerk about it.  It means we see every moment as an opportunity to be a witness to the grace that has saved us.

So today, wherever that "You weren't nice enough to me so I'll show you by being rotten to you" thinking is still sputtering around in our hearts, let's give it a rest.  Today is a chance to be a grown-up rather than a child, and part of being a grown-up is being willing to extend goodness even when you have been met only with rottenness so far.  When they go low, we go high.  

Because nobody was ever convinced by being yelled at more, but plenty of folks have been moved to new ways of thinking and acting because they were persuaded by love.

Lord Jesus, give us the grace to answer meanness and pettiness with your kind of love and honor to others.  Let our actions be a witness that gives us the right for our words to be heard.

The Divine Escape--November 6, 2020

The Divine Escape--November 6, 2020

"Then the glory of the LORD went out from the threshold of the house and stopped above the cherubim. The cherubim lifted up their wings and rose up from the earth in my sight as they went out with the wheels beside them. They stopped at the entrance of the east gate of the house of the LORD; and the glory of the God of Israel was above them. These were the living creatures that I saw underneath the God of Israel by the river Chebar; and I knew that they were cherubim...." [Ezekiel 10:18-20]

What do you do when the box you made to contain God gets smashed beyond repair?

There are, as far as I can see it, really only three options: you can try in vain to trap God and put the divine once again in a new cage; you can despair that God has gotten out of your clutches and is beyond your ability to control; or you can rejoice that God is free to go wherever God's presence is needed.

The hard lesson that God's people have to keep learning is that even though we keep trying the first two options, only the third way holds the truth.  God has never been stuck inside the structures we made to hold the Almighty, and it turns out to be good news that God can't be destroyed when our God-boxes get blown apart.

This insight, it turns out, is Ezekiel's gift to us.  He tells us his own story of realizing that the boxes we make for God, even with the best of intentions, can never be strong enough to hold God down--and in the end, what we need is a God who can go with us into the places of uncertainty and anxiety, rather than being trapped beneath the wreckage of a rubble pile.  A gilded cage is still a cage, as they say, and God will not stay put inside the structures we make to keep God safe, controlled, and contained.

Follow me for a moment.  In the very opening words of the book of Ezekiel, the mystic-minded prophet tells us a dream he's had where God shows up when he is in exile.  Ezekiel had been a priest in the Jerusalem Temple, but had been carried away by the Babylonians into exile in one of the waves of conquest that happened in the late days of the kingdom of Judah.  And there in exile, by the river Chebar, Ezekiel saw God's "glory" appear as a sort of moving presence, with strange heavenly creatures surrounding a complicated contraption with wheels inside of wheels that could go in any direction.  It's a strange vision, and it's hard to picture what Ezekiel saw and tried to put into words (words we then have to translate from Hebrew into English and then picture in our own minds' eyes), but the gist seems to be that even hundreds of miles away from home, God showed up and appeared to Ezekiel in exile.

Well, then a few chapters later, Ezekiel tells us about another vision--the one in the verses above.  I've quoted just a few verses from a longer description (because honestly, it's super easy to get lost in the weeds with the outlandish and other-worldly details of wheels full of eyes and strange creatures with many faces), but the gist, if you'll trust me, is that the prophet sees God's glory rise up out of the Temple in Jerusalem--just in the nick of time before the Babylonians came along and knocked it to the ground--and travel in this strange God-mobile to go out east... in the direction of Babylon.  In other words, Ezekiel saw a vision of God's presence leaving the old building where the people thought God lived, before the building was razed by the invaders they assumed were the enemy, the Babylonians.  And rather than God "beaming up" into heaven to stay safe while all the dust settled back on earth, instead, Ezekiel sees God's glory heading into Babylon, to be with the people who were living in exile there.

This was a a really big deal.  It was earth-shattering theology in Ezekiel's day, because the conventional wisdom of the day was that gods lived in boxes, and whoever controlled the boxes controlled the gods.  The Babylonians had their pantheon of gods and goddess (with names like Marduk and Nebo), and the people of Judah and Israel had Yahweh, the God they believed had gone with them since the days of slavery in Egypt.  The only thing was, the people of Judah had gotten sloppy and believed that God was contained in the structures they built.  The thinking was something like this:  "We built this lovely temple for God, and in return, God backs the authority of our king and the king's policy agenda, and God will protect our nation from enemies, and certainly God will protect the capital city of Jerusalem where God's Temple is, and God of course wouldn't let anything happen to the Temple itself... because, you know, God wouldn't want the divine reputation to look weak."  The pop theology that the palace endorsed said that God had chosen the king, and that God would never let the temple or the palace or the capital be destroyed, because of course that would make God look weak... like a loser... or defeated... and nobody could imagine that from any respectable deity.  The conventional wisdom also assumed that in a conflict, whichever side won had the stronger god--so if you had a fight between two sides, the winner must have God on their side, and the loser must not.

Ezekiel's vision blows all of that up.  It's really no wonder the prophets kept getting stoned to death, run out of town, or sawn in half--because they were always taking the conventional thinking and smashing it to bits.  What God showed to Ezekiel was that God wasn't stuck in the Temple when the Babylonians came along, so the God of Israel wasn't destroyed or crushed or killed or even weakened when the Babylonians came and knocked it all down.  The people had made the mistake of thinking that structure they built could contain God--and when the Babylonian armies came with their wrecking balls and battering rams, God just made it clear that God wasn't under house-arrest.  God up and got out of the Temple before the Babylonians ever came--in order to go to be with the people in exile in Babylon.

Ok, so what?  Here we are, like twenty-five centuries and change after Ezekiel's bizarre fever-dreams, and we all think we know better now.  We all say we "know" that God doesn't live inside a Temple somewhere, or even in all of our many church buildings.  So we think that we have learned all that this passage has to tell us, because we modern Respectable Religious folks know so much better now.  Except the trouble is that we keep building all sorts of other structures that we think will at last contain God, and we don't realize we're doing the same thing all over again.  We build these structures out of words and ideas as much as bricks and stones these days, but don't doubt that we still fall for the same old thinking that God is obligated to stay put within the boundaries and spaces we have created.  We do it in our denominational thinking when we imagine that only "My Kind of Church" has the real truth about God, and that our neighbors down the street have it all wrong.  Or we do it with national boundaries when we imagine that God is partial to American or American ideals or interests (and, boy, we do a bang-up job when we yank that verse from 2 Chronicles 7 about "if my people who are called by my name will turn to me..." and pretend it has anything to do with the United States in the 21st century--because, that is decidedly NOT what what is about, and we are abusing scripture when we share flag-draped memes with that verse as a way of ginning up support for our particular political agendas).  And to be honest, we keep doing the same nonsense with political parties, too, when we imagine that God has to fit into one of our political party categories, and that therefore God must defend the interests, the platforms, or the candidates of the party we have pegged is "God's party."  None of those these are true.

Let me say that again clearly and loudly, for the folks in the back:  God does not back your or my candidate, and God does not back any of our countries or political parties.  Neither does God need to defend any party, candidate, church denomination, nation, or institution, in order to protect the divine reputation or preserve the structures we have made for God to live in.  And in fact, it seems over and over again, at the moment when we think God has to fit inside the nicely decorated box we have made for the divine, that is precisely the time when God gets up out of the temple, church, structure, institution, or container we have made for God (you know, to keep God safe, we always tell ourselves), and God gets loose before something comes to smash the box we built.

Because something always does.  The boxes we make for God never last.  The Temple in Jerusalem got smashed to the ground by the Babylonians in Ezekiel's time, and then after the people rebuilt it, the Romans came and smashed the second one a generation after Jesus' time.  And every time Respectable Religious people come along and say that God "has to" defend some other structure we have made--from churches and denominations to political parties and candidates--God seems to especially chafe at our arrogance, gets the old cherub-powered God-mobile, and shakes free of the constraints we want to put on God.  God refuses to stay put inside the God-boxes we build.  Ezekiel wants to make that clear, and so he uses as vivid and attention-getting a set of images as he can dream up to convey that to us.

But there is deeply good news to hear in that word, too.  While it can be uncomfortable to have to face the truth that God isn't required to do the things we want or expect or assume God should do, it really turns out to be good news that the Almighty doesn't have to stay inside the God-boxes we build.  That's because it means God is free to actually show up where we need God.  For Ezekiel, it was scandalous at first to say that God didn't owe it to anybody to keep the Temple from being destroyed, or to support the king when the Babylonians took him prisoner, or to keep the capital from being destroyed.  Everybody lived in a system that was built on the assumption that God had chosen the king, and therefore that God could not let anything bad happen to the king... and that God would not let the king's palace or city or administration be pulled down.  But Ezekiel's vision showed the people that God had never been tethered to a place... or to any particular royal administration... or even to a temple, a city, or a piece of ground.  God was always free to slip the leash and go wherever God blessedly-well-pleased to go... included to join the people in exile.

And that's where this surprising claim about God is revealed to be Gospel good news--because God can't be chained up like a dog to the post in the back yard, God is free to meet the people who are taken into captivity and dwell among them. God doesn't get destroyed when the God-box gets smashed open, and beyond that, God is free to be present where we are, and wherever we go.  God always was free--we just kept imagining that God had to stay where we dictated.

This is a hard word for us, perhaps, more than two and a half millennia after Ezekiel's time, but it is good news for us if we dare to recognize it as such.  It means that God is free to be with us and for us and among us, even when the structures we had built our lives on get shaken to their core, and even when it's our own rottenness and sin that have landed us in trouble.  A god who has to stay in the box we humans build is going to get smooshed when the box collapses.  But the living God never had to stay inside the structures we build, and so when the God-box breaks apart, there has already been a divine escape.  God is already free to show up where we need God to be, even if that's not back where we expected God to be.

It may be worth the time and humbling it will cost us to look at where each of us has been trying to tether God into a box, so that we can open our hands.  And when we do that, we discover that God was never stuck inside our grip in the first place, but rather has always been free to stay among us, and also free to go on ahead of us, wherever the next leg of life's journey will take us.  

What are some of the ways each of us has been trying to stick God in a box... and what might it mean to admit that God is something of a Houdini when it comes to slipping the handcuffs and strait-jackets we keep trying to hold God in?  Maybe today's the day to let go of the box, because God's not in it.

Lord God, as you showed to your prophets ages ago, speak to us again and help us to let go of the constraints we try to put you in, so that we will see you always have been free, and you choose to use your freedom to go with us.