The Silhouette of God--January 28, 2021

 The Silhouette of God--January 28, 2021

"For in [Christ] the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fullness in him, who is the head of every ruler and authority." [Colossians 2:9-10]

There was a time--really not that long ago--when the conventional wisdom looked at the natural world and said, "See how it is? Only the strongest animals, and only the fittest species survive--that must be how God is, as well--God wants the strong to dominate the weak, and those who don't make the cut weren't worthy."

We could also talk about the time in which scientists looked at the vastness of the universe, and how tiny our little blue speck in all that ocean of inky void called space, and therefore concluded, "Well, if there is a God who made all this (and we are skeptical), this God must be indifferent to the piddling concerns of the hairless bipeds who walk around on it; God must be like an impersonal force, like gravity or magnetism, at best."

There was also a time when the most brilliant minds in economics said, "The demand of customers with money is the force that governs everything like an invisible hand on the world, and if the market says that some people aren't worth feeding while others luxuriate in ivory palaces, well, that's the market's decree--and God's, too."

And, while we are on the subject, there was a time (well, we are still living in it) when even many Respectable Religious Leaders said, "You can tell who really has God's divine favor because they will be the ones with more wealth; if you are poor, it is because God has set up a world in which that's your punishment for laziness, and if you are rich, it is because God is specially blessing you--so pat yourself on the back, slugger.  You've earned it."

Each of those--and there are surely other variations on that theme--took some observation about the world, whether in biology, physics, economics, or what-have-you, and projected it onto God.  And what do you know, but you end up with a god who is just as greedy, indifferent, and self-centered as we are at our worst.

Well, the book we call Colossians would beg to differ--not just about what God is like, but how we arrive at our conclusions about God.  Our verses for today say that for followers of Jesus at least, Jesus himself is our clearest picture of the fullness of God.  We don't get to say, "I really like laissez-faire capitalism, so I bet God is like that, because that's what I want God to be like," and we don't get to say, "Here's this political platform I want to support--how can we remake God in that image?"  We don't take the ambiguities of the world, or the universe, in which we live, and try to reverse engineer what God must be like based on our observations of sharks hunting for prey or supernovas blowing up their planetary systems.  

No, the letter to the Colossians starts with Jesus and says, basically, "This is what God is like.  You want to know how God feels about the weak and the ones labeled 'unfit'?  Look at how Jesus treats them."  Colossians says, "Instead of taking your preferred economic theory or tax policy and then trying to shoehorn your picture of God in to endorse it, we look to Jesus, and the way he announces blessing on the poor, teaches his followers to forgive debts as well as personal infractions, and how he keeps talking about the last being first."  And instead of narrowly focusing on what would be good for me, my business, and my income, or me and my group, and then looking for (or manufacturing) a way to say that it's also God's will, Colossians points us to Jesus, and the way he deliberately focused on the good of others, even when it wasn't good for him in the narrow or immediate sense.  

Jesus, in other words, means a complete overhaul of what we thought we meant by the word "God." Instead of an angry white bearded fellow hurling lightning bolts on rule-breakers and doling out prosperity as a reward for being more deserving, as so many old paintings taught us to imagine, in Christ we are presented with a God who loves enemies to the point of death, gives generously to stinkers without any question of deserving, and who doesn't make decisions based on "What's in it for me?"

Somewhere along the way, I think we forgot that.  We soft-pedal Jesus where his teaching would rearrange our personal or national budgets. We ignore him when his example would lead us to embrace people we had gotten used to pretending weren't there.  And we try instead to turn him into our mascot who will endorse whatever things I want him to.  But Colossians says that Jesus has to be Lord even over all those other things we think are so important--"the Market," "The Law of the Jungle," "The Fundamental Forces of the Universe," and even the "Bottom Line."  All of those categories--politics, economics, national identity and pride, and all the rest--they may seem like they are powerful authorities that command a great deal of influence in this world.  But Colossians insists that Jesus outranks them all.  If you want a clear picture of God, you don't look to those other powers and authorities: you look to Jesus.

It's almost like how a lunar eclipse shows us the true shape of the Earth.  Short version:  when the Earth gets in between the sun and the moon and they all fall in a nice line, you get an eclipse of the moon--the moon starts to disappear in the shadow that the Earth casts on it.  Well, pay attention the next time you can observe one or see photos from a previous one, and you'll see that the shadow curves--because it is revealing the shape of the Earth that is casting the shadow!  In a way, these verses from Colossians say something similar about Jesus: Jesus us what God looks like when projected onto the screen of human history.  Jesus is what it looks like when God dwells fully in a human life.  Jesus, you could say, is the silhouette of God that we can see and understand and know.  So if something doesn't fit with the character of Jesus, well, it doesn't line up with the shape of God, either. No matter how much we want our pet political parties or economic agendas to rule the day, Colossians says that Jesus is the One who overrules them all and shows us most clearly who God really is, and what really matters to God, as well.

Today, then, it might be worth it to re-examine everything we do, say, think, and value in light of Jesus--because Jesus shows us what matters to God and how we go about living in the world.  And before we blurt out some casually hateful thing, or post some angry screed on social media (with no intention of listening to someone else with a different point of view or even making room for conversation), or make choices based on pure self-interest, maybe it's worth looking at our choices, actions, and values in light of Jesus first.  And if something really doesn't fit with the character of the homeless rabbi from Nazareth who ate at scandalous dinner parties and loved the nobodies, well, maybe it's time to acknowledge that those somethings are out of step with God, too.  And maybe then we can leave them behind so that our hands are free to pick up with more Jesus-shaped work to do.

Lord Jesus, help us today to see God in you, and to re-examine all of our lives for what does or doesn't reflect you in the world, too.

Jesus Among the Talking Heads--January 27, 2021

 Jesus Among the Talking Heads--January 27, 2021

"See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the universe, and not according to Christ." [Colossians 2:8]

It comes down to this: at some point in your life, you may have to choose between the way of Jesus and your feelings about the capital-gains tax... or between the mind of Christ and the current platform of the political party you have "always registered as"... or between the character of the Crucified One and the worldview of your favorite bloviating talking head on cable news.  When that time comes, choose Jesus.

For that matter, in this life we are going to have to make choices from time to time between the way of Jesus and whatever self-help gobbledygook is on the best-seller list, or whatever shallow psychobabble is trending on social media.  We may have to choose between the mindset of Christ and the ambiguous buzz-words on the mouths of pundits and celebrities, too.  And, again, when it happens, don't be surprised... but I'd recommend choosing the way of Jesus over all those others.

In fairness, of course, the problem is that so often, the difference is subtle, and rarely do those other voices announce how they run counter to the way of Jesus.  Only in rare cases is the contrast so outlandishly, cartoonishly glaring as to be obvious on the face of it.  I mean, sure, when the loud angry voices are shouting, "Me and My Group First!" or actively encouraging us to hate our neighbors and insist on our own benefits over others, we should probably spot that as anti-Christ pretty easily. But a lot of the time, the influential voices competing for our attention are sly and sneaky--they like to dress their vantage point up to sound good and holy and righteous, maybe even dressing up with a cross stamped on the cover or quoting Bible passages.  Then it becomes trickier.  But our calling, according to Colossians, is still the same:  to be wise and discerning enough to recognize what really reflects the character of Christ, and what is simply somebody's self-interested agenda dressed up in religious garb.

The other thing that makes this so challenging for us is that the impostors keep changing.  Back in the first century, when these words to the Colossians were first written, the biggest concerns were ancient mystery religions like Mithraism or any of a number of gnostic groups that all claimed to have secret "true" knowledge of the divine, but were willing to put just a dash of Christian-friendly jargon in their spiels that it was easy to be hoodwinked by them.  Or it was accepting uncritically the metaphysical baggage of Aristotle or Plato, and assuming that their fashionable philosophies were perfectly compatible with the Gospel.  These days we probably read less philosophy (well, we read less all together), but there are still lots of voices out there holding out their own worldviews, and often presenting them as "Christian" when in fact they don't really look or sound like Jesus.

And for us who are marked with the cross of Christ, it really does come down to what reflects the character of Jesus as the touchstone for discerning which voices to listen to, and which to turn down the volume on.  So, for example, Jesus has this undeniable insistence on showing love even to our worst enemies--on that count, I'd steer away from listening to voices that feed your hatred of other people, no matter how easy and natural it can feel to want to hate someone who you see as different.  Or, for another example, Jesus is always crossing boundaries and offering a welcome to people on "the other side of the line," whether it's the people with scandalous diseases, foreigners with the wrong religion and nationality, soldiers of the enemy army, or notorious "sinners."  So, it seems pretty clearly opposed to the way of Jesus to buy into a worldview that values those dividing lines more than the people on the other side of them.  To go a bit further, Jesus insists that his kind of power takes the form of suffering love rather than violent coercion, and he seems unrelenting on the importance of being truthful rather than using lies or deception as a means of getting more power or influence.  That is also going to put some guard-rails up for us in terms of which voices we will take as authoritative--Jesus doesn't let us sell out our integrity because it is politically expedient, or to give up on seeking the good of all.  

All of that is hard work, because it means we are called to a permanent posture of critical thinking, and holding everything up to the light to see how it aligns with the way of Christ--or not.  And we should be honest about how difficult that can be, and then decide that it's worth the hard work of thinking critically and discerning wisely, so that we don't get duped again by the next blowhard that talks up how important "God" and "religion" are without being in line with the heart of Christ.

To do that work means having voices around us that we trust who can help us listen for what resonates with the person of Jesus, what is in tune with the song he sings.  It means having the patience, strenght, and wisdom to stop and ask, "How does this fit with the way of life shaped by a crucified and risen homeless rabbi?" of the things we hear--and to do that difficult evaluation even if the voice is saying something we want to be true, but know deep down doesn't ring true to the way of Christ.  It means we find the courage to realize that the people who tell us things we want to hear may not be the ones telling us the things we need to hear.  And the way to tell, in the end, is to look to Jesus.  The One who feeds multitudes of strangers with abundant bread and fish without asking for even a shekel from them, the One who washes feet rather than throwing punches, the One who prays forgiveness for his executioners and defends the folks who are being picked on by bullies, this is the One we measure all other voices up to.  And where the other voices run counter to Christ and we have to make a choice, well, we'll choose Jesus.

Lord Jesus, help us to listen to your voice and to be discerning enough to know how to hear you amid the other noise around us.

Canoes and Fire Insurance--January 26, 2021

Canoes and Fire Insurance--January 26, 2021

"As you therefore have received Christ Jesus the Lord, continue to live your lives in him, rooted and built up in him and established in the faith, just as you were taught, abounding in thanksgiving." [Colossians 2:6-7]

Jesus is less like an insurance policy, and more like a river.

I believe with all my heart that understanding the difference is what sets living faith apart from dead (if also respectable) religion.  It's all to do with seeing ourselves canoeing down a particular river, rather than possessing heavenly fire insurance.

Let me back up for a moment.  First off, I mean no disrespect to those who sell, oversee, and manage my insurance policies.  I am grateful for the peace of mind they offer me, and I am glad to know that if lightning strikes my house, or my car slides into guard-rails in an icy storm, or if my kid ends up with a rare disease that requires expensive treatments, that there is an insurance policy that can hopefully help with covering costs.  Knowing that allows me to put those fears--and the policy itself--out of my mind, and just go about my business without thinking about it.

In a very important sense, that is the best thing about having insurance--it is the freedom not to think about it once you have it, and to know it's safely stored away in a filing cabinet, or the drawer where you keep important papers, or in a safe-deposit box somewhere, where you hopefully won't have to see it or deal with it again.  That is sort of the hope, isn't it--that you get insurance but never have a situation where you actually have to rely on it in an emergency, right?

And while that is a lovely feature of having literal fire insurance for your home, it becomes terrible theology when we treat Jesus like he is merely your own personal heavenly fire insurance policy.  And we do actually do that sometimes.  We talk about Jesus like he is something you can possess, rather that someone with whom we are in a relationship as disciples.  You know the standard religious boilerplate:  the pamphlet left wedged in your front door that asks, "Have you accepted Jesus?" phrased as though Jesus is that upgraded insurance coverage that your agent keeps recommending.  "Have you received the Lord?" it asks, as though Jesus were a commodity to be possessed, and as long as I "have" Jesus (whatever we think that means) then all I have to do when I die is trot out my Jesus-insurance-policy, say his name like a magic word, and I get into the afterlife.  I'm sorry to be crude about it, but that's pop Christianity for you in a nutshell--Jesus as consumer product who won't affect your actual day to day life but can be cashed in for a heavenly escape hatch in case of death. We're the paying customer, and he becomes the merchandise. Why doesn't it surprise me anymore that living in this land of ours where everything is a commodity for sale, we do the same thing to Christ Jesus himself?  

Well, suffice it to say that none of that is how the letter to the Colossians intends the phrase, "as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord," as it does in these verses.  For the apostle, Jesus ain't an insurance policy you only think about in an emergency or after death--Jesus creates for us a particular way of life that we move in.

That's why Jesus is more like a river.  If you are in a canoe, the course of the river directs where you go.  Its flow points you in a particular direction, and it gives you momentum as it pushes you and guides you along that course.  The river is simultaneously what moves you forward, holds you up, and surrounds you--and it doesn't leave you where you started.  

And that is actually a lot closer to the idea that we hear from these verses in Colossians.  I don't merely "accept" Jesus like I receive my new insurance policy in the mail, only to forget where I put it or that I even have it.  We "receive" Jesus like a canoe receives the support, momentum, and direction of the river--allowing the canoe to move forward along its own course. Our translation of this verse says, "continue to live your lives" in Christ, but the Greek is actually a verb for movement--it's closer to "walk in Christ." That's a way of helping us to picture that the following Jesus is a journey in a particular direction.  I don't stay put, and I don't remain unchanged.  Like riding in a canoe will often mean letting the river move you downstream, following Jesus will mean he moves us and helps us grow in new ways, becoming more like him in the ways we act and speak and love.

An insurance policy leaves me more or less unchanged, just by having it.  In fact, that's sort of the point--I can go about my regular life, knowing that my insurance will cover me if I do something really stupid or cause major damage somehow.  But riding in a canoe along a river will move me.  That's what the Christian life is more like--being moved by Jesus, who is also supporting and surrounding us.  He holds us up, and he also directs our course.  

Where might Christ be leading you, or me, in this day?  How will we be ready?

Lord Jesus, lead us where you will today, and don't leave us unchanged.

Spooky Action at a Distance--January 25, 2021

Spooky Action at at Distance--January 25, 2021

"I am saying this so that no one may deceive you with plausible arguments. For though I am absent in body, yet I am with you in spirit, and I rejoice to see your morale and the firmness of your faith in Christ." [Colossians 2:4-5]

We are all learning these days that it is hard--but possible--to be connected to one another even when we aren't in the same room.  It's kind of humbling, and also kind of encouraging, to read a passage like this from Colossians and to recall that it's always been this way for the community of Jesus.

That's really the challenge we are reading about here--it's hard for Paul that he can't be physically with them at the time that he's writing, and he knows it would be easy to misinterpret the lack of face-to-face connection as a lack of caring on his part.  Silences are notoriously difficult to interpret, and Paul's absence would make it easy for folks in Colossae to say, "See? We must not be important to Paul because he hasn't come to spend time with us."

And while it's true, as Zadie Smith writes, that "Time is how you spend your love," in Paul's case, as we've noted earlier, he can't help being apart from all of his friends in congregations across the empire.  This one really isn't his fault--he's in prison, or something like a house-arrest, as he writes, and is headed sooner or later to a trial that will end with his execution.  He can't be with the Colossians in person, but not because he doesn't care about them--it's because he has already given so much of himself for the work of the gospel that he's gotten himself thrown in jail again.

And yet--and this is the thing we are dared to take on faith in the community of Jesus--even when we can't be in the same room together, we are bound together in a community and a communion that are real, even if not in our usual sense of physical closeness or shared space.  Paul insists that even when he can't be with the Colossians in their weekly gatherings, where they would share a meal together and hear the stories of Jesus and encourage each other for how to face another day in a brutal empire as the face of God's countercultural reign, he is still connected to them.  He is connected at the soul level, so to speak, even if he can't pass the basket of bread or the dish of mashed potatoes to the next person at the table.

We've been living with this reality for most of the past year, haven't we?  This is one of those times where we may be in a better position right now to understand what Paul and his readers were going through than we have ever been in our lifetimes before.  We are learning, living through the days of social-distancing, suspended in-person gatherings, and meetings-by-screen, that it is hard to be physically separated from our community... and yet that it is possible to find ways to connect with each other.  No, it's not the same.  No, it's not easier.  No, we don't want the "virtual" way of doing things to be the new normal... but the fact that we keep trying and making the effort to stay connected in the face of how hard and weird it is is evidence that we are still connected even when it's not in the same room.  And that connection is real, even if it doesn't look like everyone piling into the same space.

It's hard to wrap our minds around the idea that we can still be bound to each other, "in spirit," as Paul says it here, when our bodies and faces are in different places.  It's okay to admit that--hey, even Einstein had a hard time with the idea.  Seriously!  See, there's this notion in quantum physics that they now call "particle entanglement" that basically says there are ways to connect two tiny subatomic particles so that doing something to one will affect the other, even if they physically separated from one another--even across vast distances in the universe.  Quantum entanglement says that things in the universe can be connected even when the usual rules of space and time dictate that they shouldn't be able to relate to one another.  Well, as this idea was just emerging in Einstein's time, he couldn't understand how something like this could be true--his famously skeptical phrasing dismissed this whole business as "spooky action at a distance."  It was his way of saying, "I can't understand how it could be true that things could be connected even when they are so far removed from one another."  And yet, quantum physics says, "Like it or not, understand it or not, that's how it works."

I rather like that idea as a way of thinking about our life in Christ right now.  There's a lot that just feels like "spooky action at a distance"--the difficulty of trying to keep one another connected, of reminding one another that we are all held in God's grip, of assuring one another that this difficult time of distance will not last forever, and of encouraging each other with the hope of a renewed future.  That's all hard, and sometimes the physical separation just gets to us.  I know it, too.  I feel it, like you do, I'm sure.  But if particle physicists can tell us that things in this universe can be "entangled" with each other even across vast distances in space, then I wonder if we, too, can say the same of our life in Christ.  We who are held in the grip of Christ's scarred hands are entangled with each other, so that even when we are not in the same place, we are still held together.  The connection is real, even if we cannot explain how it works.  The love that binds us together is genuine, even when it has to bridge all the other ways we are divided from one another.

Today, maybe it is enough to trust that we are bound up, as Dr. King so powerfully put it, "in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny."  What affects you also affects me, and my choices pull on you as well.  We don't have to understand how it works that we are entangled with one another, but it is worth being honest that we are.  

We are blessedly, wondrously, and mysteriously stuck with each other--that is how Christ holds us.

Lord Jesus, hold us even when we cannot see or quite feel the connectedness between us, and give us the faith to believe the promise that we are bound up together in your love.

On Not Mastering Divinity--January 22, 2021

On Not Mastering Divinity--January 22, 2021

"For I want you to know how much I am struggling for you, and for those in Laodicea, and for all who have not seen me face to face. I want their hearts to be encouraged and united in love, so that they may have all the riches of assured understanding and have the knowledge of God's mystery, that is, Christ himself, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge." [Colossians 2:1-3]

My seminary degree is preposterous.  Well, at least the way it sounds when you say it out loud sure is.  The name for the degree you get when you graduate from seminary in a program toward ordained ministry is, and I kid you not here, "Master of Divinity."

Shoot.  Master?  Of divinity?  

Where to even begin, right? That sounds like it's claiming an awful lot of expertise in a subject that by definition is bigger than our minds can grasp.  

We all know of course, that it's because the name for a graduate degree program is a "masters degree." And to be sure, there are some kinds of knowledge that you can indeed master--that is to know them exhaustively, completely, and to have your command and your disposal.  

State capitals--sure, watch me rattle them off from Juneau, Alaska to Cheyene, Wyoming.  That's a finite set that I can memorize and recall when needed. 

Pythagorean theorem--learned it in junior high school and never looked back.  No mysteries there--just triangles.

Names of all the Beatles' albums, painters of the Renaissance, lyrics to "Come On, Eileen," by Dexy's Midnight Runners--all of them are subjects one can more or less accurately be said to "master."  But--divinity?  Really?

Well, this is something we need to talk about.  Because it is all too tempting to put God in the same category as 80s song lyrics or the periodic table of elements--you know, as a subject you can exhaustively know, master, and explain.  We sometimes speak and act as if knowing God is simply a matter of memorizing Bible verses, reciting creeds, or learning a particular set of answers to predetermined questions in a catechism.  We treat God like God is something (not even someone) you can be a master of.

The letter to the Colossians begs to differ.  Instead of treating God, or even Christ specifically, as an academic subject we can study or dissect or put into a chart, the letter to the Colossians comes back to the notion of "mystery."  Mystery here, of course, doesn't mean like a whodunnit where Columbo solves the murder before the last commercial break as he launches into a speech that says, "Just one thing..."  But rather, a mystery in the biblical sense is a reality beyond our complete comprehension--something, or someone, that is too wondrous for words, too deep for diagramming, and too big to put in a box.  A mystery, a Bible teacher once told me, is something you would never have figured out on your own unless it had been shown to you.

And in that sense, knowing Christ isn't merely about memorizing a set of facts--it is being drawn to participate in the One whom we know... the One who knows us already, and perfectly, at that.  Let me try and sketch out a bit more of what I think these verses mean.  Back to state capitals--you can know that Albany is the capital of New York without ever having been there.  You can know that lithium is the third element on the periodic table, but not understand a thing about what it looks like, how it reacts, or what it does.  But to know Christ pulls us in; it changes us.  Knowing Christ puts us into a relationship with Christ, and also shapes us to become like Christ as well.  (In some languages, like Spanish, they even have different words for knowing a fact--the verb "saber"--and knowing a person or place relationally--the verb "conocer."  This might be a helpful way of thinking about it for us.)

Okay, so what?  

Well, in addition to meaning that we can never really "master" God and therefore maybe we should change the names of our seminary degree programs, I think it means that we should be prepared for being changed, being transformed, by knowing Christ.  Christians are not merely people who know facts about the historical Jesus--in fact, it turns out that the Gospels themselves give us precious few details about the man from Galilee.  Rather, we are called to be people who are shaped by the One we are coming to know more deeply.  You can't really, truly "know" a mystery by memorizing facts about it--you only "know" a mystery by participating in it, being changed by it, and being swept up into its reality.  And this is what voices like Paul's, as well as all the gospel writers and other apostles, and all the most faithful teachers and saints of the last two thousand years, have been trying to do for us--to help us to be pulled into sharing the life of Christ.  They aren't teaching us facts to memorize, but forming us by immersing us in the presence of Christ.

In a way, this helps to make sense of why other voices of the New Testament can say things like, "The one who doesn't love doesn't know God, because God is love."  That's different than state capitals and song lyrics.  I can memorize those without being there or singing the tune.  But God--I can't really know God without being changed in the encounter.  And because of who God is, that change will look like love.

So, for whatever else it might mean for us religious folks to say we "know God," or for us to invite other people to "know Christ," it definitely means a surrendering of ourselves to become what God will make of us.  It means that if I am using my belief in God as a way of beating up on other people, I have missed the point of the Gospel, because that doesn't fit with the God we come to know in Jesus.  And if we somehow get hornswoggled into thinking that our faith gives us permission to ignore the needs of others outside our faith, or to baptize our pet greed and hatreds, we are revealing that we really don't know Christ, no matter how many Bible stories about Jesus we have memorized or how many cross-stamped objects we own.  Christ's kind of knowing makes us like him--in other words, the way to gauge how well we are learning Christ is to see how we are getting better at love, at justice, at truthfulness, at gentleness, and at courageous mercy, not to measure how many Bible verses I can recite.

Today, let's allow Christ to shape us.  Let's give up on pretending Christ was ever an academic subject we could master, but instead to see that he is intent, as he draws us in close, on forming love in us, so that we can participate in the mystery--so that we will be like the One who loves us.

Come and make us into your likeness, Lord Jesus.  Shape us in the form of your love.

God's Unapologetic Agenda--January 21, 2021

God's Unapologetic Agenda--January 21, 2021

"It is he [Christ] whom we proclaim, warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil and struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me." [Colossians 1:28-29]

Time to lay some cards on the table: God has an agenda.

Not only that, but God's agenda may or may not be what we (even we Respectable Religious folks) thought it was, and God doesn't need to get my permission before enacting that agenda in the world.  And while we're being completely honest here (the truth matters, after all), in the end it's God's agenda that matters more than mine.  Ultimately God's agenda turns out to be the most deeply, genuinely good for all of us, beyond my narrow self-interested perspective, too--but even before I can come to recognize that, God's agenda is more definitive than my own.

And here is God's agenda, according to the letter to the Colossians--God has it in mind to make all of us more fully like Christ.  Myself included, and also everybody else.  The goal--the whole point of our lives, of our religion, of two thousand-odd years of Christianity, but also of all of human history and indeed of all the universe, is that we would be made more fully like Christ.  Christ is the goal, the meaning, the purpose, of our being.  And that also means that the more fully we become like Christ, the more fully we will truly be alive.

Now, let me offer a word of clarification here.  When I say, following Colossians' lead here, that the goal is to become more fully like Christ, or "mature in Christ," as these verses put it, it doesn't mean becoming carbon-copies of Jesus of Nazareth.  No beard and sandals are required.  No prerequisite knowledge of Aramaic, and no requirement of a Y chromosome or biological ancestry in the family of Abraham.  Becoming mature in Christ isn't about copying the stories from the Gospels, or trying to get back to some hypothetical first-century way of living in the name of saying, "This is how Jesus would have done it."  Instead, it's about the way of Jesus--the way of life, the way of seeing, the way of acting, the way of loving, that reflects the character of Christ.  That's the goal--both for me, and for everybody else I will ever meet.  God is forming us into love... for love... through love.

And while I believe that is deeply good news, I want us to be clear that it's not always how Christians talk or think.  Sometimes we turn the Gospel into a sales-pitch for heavenly real-estate, and that the sole goal of the Christian faith is to answer, "How can I reserve a spot in the afterlife for myself?"  Sometimes we allow shallow (and shady) hucksters to turn the Christians message into a scheme to get rich, as though the point of believing in Jesus is so he'll bless you with a better car, a bigger house, and better quarterly profits on your portfolio.  And sometimes we just let the name of Christ get hijacked by political hacks who seem to have very little interest in being like Christ but instead want to get folks riled up to support their policies on the capital-gains tax or deregulating their preferred industries.  Anytime we fall for those, we are falling for less than God has in mind to make of us.  God has it in mind, not just transport us to heaven while we remain selfish jerks, nor to make our houses more full of stuff while our souls get emptier and more hollowed out.  God has it in mind to make us like Christ--in other words, to change the kind of people we are, to become more fully formed in love.

So while it is absolutely true that God loves me even in my selfish, childish, petty "Me-and-My-Group-First" mentality (wherever it still lurks in my soul), God is also not satisfied to leave me as that way, as a self-absorbed jerk.  And while God's love accepts me even for all the ways I am still entangled in old patterns of greed, of childish egotism, of prejudice, of bitterness, and of just plain meanness, God knows that we are all made for undiluted love.  After all, God is the One who made us that way!  

So part of what it means to be a follower of Jesus is to surrender our whole selves and let God reshape us wholly.  And wherever there are places in me that run counter to Christ's own perfect love, I need to be prepared to have God take the power sander to my soul to remove my roughest, most jagged edges.  Where I am bent inward on myself, I should be prepared for God to take the tools to me again and put me on the anvil, so to speak, until I am made true and square again.  Where I am resentful inside and nursing old grudges because I am afraid of letting them go, I will need to get ready for God to help me to unclench those charley-horses of the soul to let go.  Where I am too fearful and cowardly to act or speak in love, I'll need to start preparing for God to fashion courage in me.  And where I am still captive to hatred and the need to intimidate others or rattle my saber at them, God is going to be disarming me--to teach us all "to lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another," to borrow the phrasing from Amanda Gorman's poem, "The Hill We Climb" spoken during the inauguration ceremony.  All of this is to say that God is forming me--and you, and all of us--to become more fully like Christ, because that has been God's goal, God's agenda, all along.

Today is a day then to let that happen--and maybe to ask in every situation, "How could God use this moment to shape me and grow me into more Christ-like maturity?"  Maybe then instead of just feeding the meanness and bitterness that seems to be rotting the edges of our souls like gangrene, and instead of seeing everything in a day as a battle to be won or a fight that has to be picked, we will see God forming love... and decency... and truthfulness... and grace... and selflessness... and kindness in each of us.  In other words, maybe we'll see, as God sees with perfect clarity, that our deepest need is not to be richer or have more political power or make things "like they used to be in the good old days," but rather for us to be more fully like Christ.

Today, let's allow that every moment, every conversation, and every choice, is an opportunity to be made more like the One who loved us all the way to a cross.  And maybe becoming like him has been God's design all along.

Lord God, make of us what you will--make us to be more fully like Christ.

The Glorious Embrace--January 20, 2021

The Glorious Embrace--January 20, 2021

"To them [the saints] God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." [Colossians 1:27]

When the Big Deals of the world want to impress you, they show off their power and weapons.  

You know how it is--whether it was the Romans marching their legions into town with gleaming helmets and blood-red propaganda banners, moving to the rhythm of the marching centurions, or the Cold War-era military parades of the Soviet Union, where armies and nuclear missiles were put on full display, all throughout history, the go-to move of dictators and emperors has been to show off their arsenals. That was how you saw the "glory" of Rome, or the supposed "triumph" of Stalin and his successors.

Funny, though--that's not how God does things.  God doesn't put on a show of force to reveal divine glory: God's glory is in welcoming the not-good-enoughs to the party.

This is, in so many words, what this sentence from Colossians is saying.  The apostle says that God's way of showing God's glory is not a flashy military parade, but the inclusion of outsiders.  In this case, the letter to the Colossians is talking about the inclusion of Gentiles--that is, all the non-Jewish peoples of the world, people who didn't bring the credentials of proper ancestry, or correct sacrifice, or membership in the right cultural group of Israel.  The writer of Colossians says that God's glory can be seen the best in the way God has chosen to include all the ones who didn't belong--that is, Gentiles--as a gift of grace.  

In other words, what makes God worthy of praise in the end isn't that God is the Biggest Kid on the Block or that God carries the biggest stick, but rather that God welcomes in people who had been deemed unacceptable, unworthy, and unloved.  It is God's welcome to Gentiles in the community of Jesus, beyond the boundaries that had been in place before, that shows us the goodness--and indeed, the greatness--of God.

I want us to spend a moment letting that sink in because it is so very different from the usual thinking of the world around us.  The conventional wisdom is that the way to impress people is to show them how you wield power... or how you have gold-plated your living room to demonstrate your wealth... or for that matter, to make a big deal about your social media following, or your status as an "influencer," or your firepower.  But God finds none of those things very impressive, and instead, God seems intent on showing us the glorious way that love reaches and stretches beyond what is socially acceptable to include outcasts and anybodies who don't fit the cookie cutter pattern. You get a better picture of God, then, from a neighborhood block party where everyone is welcomed than from a Roman-style imperial march of soldiers.  

And if that's God's choice, we need to pay attention, too.  If God has decided that God doesn't need to parade around the missiles or show off the centurions in order to be God, then maybe we don't have to worry about looking "tough" or "powerful" or  like "winners" in order to be faithful representatives of this God to the world.  We don't need to spend any more time at all trying to impress anybody else, and instead, we can just focus our attention on welcoming in the ones who had been labeled (probably by religious people) outsiders or told that God's love wasn't for them. We can be freed from needing to "wow" people, and instead are simply freed to love people... whomever God sends across our path today.

If people feel loved, genuinely loved, among us, they will have been given a glimpse of the glory of God as surely as Moses looking at God's backside and still glowing for days afterward.  If people feel that they are not merely tolerated, but actively sought and draw in, they'll have seen a show of God's real glory.  If people feel that they are welcomed as they are, they will be drawn to praise the One who welcomes them.  That's what will be worth spending our energy, our time, and our lives on today.  

Go--be glorious: welcome someone who has been told they don't belong.  Embody for them the glorious embrace of Jesus for outsiders.

Lord God, let us reflect your glory in the ways we love like you.

Discovering Rosebud--January 19, 2021

Discovering Rosebud--January 19, 2021

"I became [the church's] servant according to God's commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed to his saints." [Colossians 1:25-26]

Spoiler alert: it's Jesus.

Jesus is "the mystery... now revealed."  According to the apostle here, Jesus is where the story of the whole universe has been headed, and Jesus is the One who makes sense of all the craziness of human history.  In fact, Jesus is the One who brings God into focus for us--so that we'll know how to recognize the Real McCoy from the fakers like Caesar or Pharaoh or Zeus or Ra--all the other would-be gods who thought just being loud and powerful bullies made them divine. Jesus shows us what God is like--and what it really means to be human--all the way down to the core.

It's a little bit like the movie Citizen Kane.  (And okay, spoiler alert here for a movie that is 80 years old this year and regarded by many to be the greatest movie of all time--so, if you haven't seen it and don't want the ending given away, go watch it and come back here.  I'll wait.) The whole plot of Orson Welles' classic movie turns on the question of what the title character's dying word, "Rosebud," means.  And the movie traces the story of Charles Foster Kane's life in flashbacks as a reporter interviews people who had known him, trying to find out what the word means, and why this is the last thought on his mind after his life of business, politics, and worldly success.  When you finally find out what "Rosebud" means in the very last seconds of the movie, it gives a whole new meaning, a deeper meaning to what his life has all been about.  (See, I'm really not spoiling anything--I haven't said what it is, have I?)  Without knowing the meaning of "Rosebud," you have some impression of the main character, but in the final seconds, you get a whole new understanding of what really mattered in the end, and what turns out to have all been worthless and vain.

I think the letter to the Colossians sees Jesus in similar terms.  Without Jesus, of course, you can still know plenty of the human story--the rise and fall of empires, the stories of kings and kingdoms, fortunes made and lost, wars fought and truces struck.  But Jesus revises the meaning of all of it--the coming of Christ reveals what really mattered about our existence, and what things were all piddling games of King of the Hill.  Jesus' existence reveals the meaning of existence, and the purpose of our lives, is not caught up in making ourselves "great" or making bigger piles of money.  It's not about commanding armies or conquering the world, and it's not about seeking my benefit over against yours.  Jesus reveals that all the attempts in all of history to coerce and conquer or to clutch onto what's mine at the expense of my neighbor are empty--they crumble into dust in our hands.  The only thing that gives the universe meaning is love--the love that takes on a human face and wounded human hands in Jesus, the love that ate at the houses of mess-ups and stinkers, the love that identified with the nobodies and anybodies, the love that was willing to take on death for us rather than to kill and save itself.

Knowing Jesus is like finally understanding what the story--The Story of Everything--was really all about all along.  And so, rather like getting a glimpse of Rosebud only in the last seconds of the movie, the apostle here says that after generations and centuries of one empire trouncing another, Jesus comes along and shows us that they were all vanity, but self-giving love was everything all along.  And with that, the world makes a whole new kind of sense.

The story--your story, my story, the world's story--hangs together differently once we discover that God saves the world, not with weapons drawn, locked and loaded, but with arms open ready to take nails.  The meaning of our lives is different, and can never be the same, once we have understood our lives in light of Jesus.

That's what this verse from Colossians means about the mystery now revealed--it's the realization that because of Jesus, everything takes on a different meaning, and it's not what the So-and-sos of history thought it was.  Once we let Jesus become the center that brings everything else into focus, we see the rest of the world with a new clarity as well.

And it becomes clear (if we are honest) that we don't get to hate other people and call it religion... and that we don't get to whip up and angry mob and storm the Capitol building and then pretend Jesus smiles on our actions (even if someone prays using Jesus' name while they do it)... and that we don't get to make our motto "Me and My Group First" and think that it lines up at all with the way of Jesus.... and that we don't get permission to let ourselves off the hook for caring about the needs of our neighbor, even if their situation doesn't directly impact mine, even if my neighbor doesn't look like me, and even if I don't particularly like my neighbor.  

Seeing Jesus as the key to the mystery means I don't get to take my already-in-place view of the world and just slap a cross logo on it like an endorsement from God--it means Jesus is to going to dramatically revise what matters in the world, and what doesn't.  It means discovering all our time and energy spent amassing power or hoarding money or puffing up our own egos was a waste, but all the time spent seeking the good of others was the key to the universe.  Everything else burns to ash or crumbles to dust, but the moments of genuine Christ-like love, those are the only things that endure or have worth in the end.  See--it's Rosebud all over again.

You and I have been given the key to everything--the clue to the mystery that gives meaning to all of the universe.  It is none other and nothing less than Jesus, and the way he brings the Reign of God into the world through small gestures of love, courageous words of truth, and daring actions of justice.  What will it look like, today, to live in light of that reality?  What will it look like to center your life on that?

Lord Jesus, center us on you and give us the wisdom to let everything else rearrange itself in light of your way of love.

The Open Secret of Love--January 15, 2021

The Open Secret of Love--January 15, 2021

"I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." [Colossians 1:24]

There is something beautiful--compelling, even--in the ways we choose to bear sorrow or pain or hardship on account of love. It runs against the conventional wisdom of the day to say that, but it is true. Love--the intentional choice to seek the good of someone else--transforms suffering into something powerful, something capable of bearing joy, even something redemptive.

I picture nights when my son or daughter were up in the middle of the night--feeling sick or scared by a bad dream--and sitting on the couch with a little head in my lap, knowing that my giving up sleep for a stretch of hours in the night meant that little head could finally get some peace and fall asleep. And when I look back at those moments, I see there was something wonderful about that time (and rest) sacrificed for their sake. It didn't stop the morning from coming, or the dark circles from appearing under bloodshot eyes when the sun rose, but somehow the difficulty was worth it, because it was for their sake.

Or the time your friend asked you to pick you up at the big city airport, and even though it meant rerouting your whole day off and you had to deal with headaches of rush hour traffic, you were glad to do that for them, because that's what love does.

It's the time you spend sitting in a hospital waiting room with someone whose loved one is in a critical surgery, or the time you give up listening and talking them through a crisis. It's the comfort you lose being willing to take a turn sleeping at the church to be a host for the homeless families staying for the week in your Sunday School rooms. It's the choice to encourage someone who just got bullied. It's the willingness to be pushed out of your comfort zone by listening to the perspective of someone whose life story is very different from yours and that might make you squirm to hear it. 

It's any of a thousand other ways you and I are called daily to endure discomfort--in bodies, and in hearts--for the sake of someone else, whether someone very dear to you, or someone you'll never meet this side of glory. You know already that there is something strangely joyful about the privilege of getting to suffer for the sake of love. Doesn't make it less painful, but it does somehow make it worthwhile.

Well this, dear ones, is the secret (but an open secret) power of the life of following Jesus. This is the kind of life we are drawn into as people marked by the cross of Christ. We are called to be people whose lives are spent in the joy of suffering love--that is, love which is willing to put the needs of others before our own comfort or convenience. And it is powerful, that kind of love. It is the most powerful reality in the universe, because it is of a piece with the One who is Love, whose reign over the universe is a reign of suffering love.

Let me say that again: The God who reigns over and fills up the entire universe does so by means of suffering love. God is the Parent up all night with a sick kid (us... the whole world). God is the One who makes the long, slow, out-of-the-way trip to bring us home. God is the One who sits and waits with each of us in our times of heartache. God is the One who bears the angriest and most painful words we can throw. God is the One who lifts up the lowly and encourages the ones who have been stepped on by bullies or internet trolls or angry mobs. God is the One who bears even the pain of a shameful execution at the cross of Jesus. This is God's power, and this is God's way of relating to us--in love that bears pain, rather than in adolescent displays of brute force or coercive bellowing. And if we have been claimed by this God, then our way of life, too, will be marked with the love that is willing to endure suffering and sorrow for the sake of others.

So when Paul writes that he is completing whatever is "lacking in Christ's afflictions," he's not saying that Jesus didn't do enough on the cross to save us. It's more like the same love that went to a cross for us is still needed in day by day situations as we care for others. The question for us is, "How do we bring the same self-giving love of Christ to every situation we face?" Paul looked at his own life and saw that he had opportunities to spend his time, energy, love, and reputation for the sake of others, and he understood that he could participate in the same Love shown to him in Christ that way. And for you and me, we have the same opportunity with every day: we are called to seek out ways to give ourselves away in love for others. That is our power. That is our revolution.

In a time when it is easy and tempting to just turn the cross into an insignia on a flag and then misuse it to try to justify violence, terror, and intimidation, Paul reminds us that the cross of Jesus isn't simply a symbol or corporate logo that we can make to mean whatever we want. It is the sign of the Love that is willing to suffer for the sake of the beloved--which is all of us. To bear the mark of the cross is to be willing to take up that kind of love, that kind of willingness to suffer for others, that kind of self-giving strength--for whomever God sends across our path.

Today, our calling is to love--and to know that is not merely an emotional state, but the choice to bear suffering for the sake of others.  And at the same time, God is calling someone else to love you as well--to bear sorrow or pain or inconvenience for the sake of caring for your good as well.  Go, give and receive Christ-like love.

Lord Jesus, help us today to bear hardship where it will help someone else, and to find joy in the ways we let love flow through and around us.

More Than a Game Show--January 14, 2021

More Than a Game Show--January 14, 2021

"...provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven. I, Paul, became a servant of this gospel." [Colossians 1:23]

It's not a game show.  The Christian life, the life rooted in following Jesus Christ and being claimed by God, it's not like a game show, a quiz program, or even trivia night at the nearest Applebee's or sports bar.  It's not about a single question you either get right or don't in a lone moment of your lifespan--it's about the trajectory of our whole lives.  It is, to borrow the phrase Eugene Peterson used once, about "a long obedience in the same direction."

Let me flesh this out a bit.  You know how the standard game show works, whether it's trivia questions and answers (or answers and questions, in the case of Jeopardy!) or solving word puzzles, or guessing the Password, or whatever else: you get enough answers right, and then you are a winner.  Get the question wrong, or guess the wrong letter, or spin the wheel and land on Bankrupt, and you're all done.  It's all very much about creating individual moments that everything rides on.  If you happen to know a lot about the Final Jeopardy category, you can risk it all and hope to double your winnings and win the game--and of course, secure yourself a spot on the next episode as the returning champ.  But if you blow it when the stakes are high, you're gone, with only a few "parting gifts" to take home with you into anonymity.

I honestly think a lot of the time we operate with a picture of the Christian message like we are on some kind of game show where God is the host asking questions.  And if you get the Big Question right (different denominations would each like to phrase the Final Jeopardy question their own way, of course, but same basic premise) you earn a spot in the next episode--the afterlife.  Get it wrong, and you're off the show and out of the studio. We treat the Gospel like God is a genial but neutral game-show host, watching to see if you'll get the answer right, but of course, unable to help you, and bound by the rules of television to make you sweat as you weigh your options and consider your answer.

I don't know how many sermons, testimonies, and altar calls I have heard over the years out of the mouths of Respectable Religious People that present the Gospel basically in those terms.  On television, over the radio, on internet videos, and in county fair exhibit halls, I've heard the Good News of Jesus turned into some Millionaire-style "Who Wants to Get Into Heaven?" game show.  "It all comes down to this--will you say the correct formula for accepting Jesus into your heart?" or "Will you now recite this Creed for me?" or "Don't you want to ask Jesus to be your personal Savior?" and if you get the wording right, the game-show host/preacher declares you a winner and shuttles you off stage so they can get to the next contestant.  It's all so momentary, so short-focused.  It sort of imagines that if you get the right answer, then God is done with you, see you in heaven--and that ultimately, you have yourself to thank for being smart enough to know the correct answer on Spiritual Final Jeopardy!

But that's not really the way the Scriptures talk about how things work.  It's not a single moment you when you either get it right or you lose it all.  It's about a whole way of life.  It's not a solitary point in time, but the arc of our whole lives.  There will be days we feel completely in line with God's ways and are faithfully following Jesus... and there will be days we blow it and miss the mark. There will be days that we say all the right words but our hearts aren't in it, and there will be days when our hearts are anchored fully in faith even when we struggle with getting the words right.  There will be days when our lives and our choices are beautiful reflections of the character of the Reign of God... and there will be days when our hypocrisy or willful ignorance makes all of our choices fall miserably short.  It's a long journey, this life, and recognizing that is important.

The writer to the Colossians sees that.  He reminds the Christians in Colossae that God's goal in reaching them with the good news of Jesus is not to get them to answer a single Final Jeopardy question right so that they can get into heaven one day when they die, but rather that God's work is to sustain us and anchor us in a whole way of life, one that is rooted in the life and love of Jesus.

That means we don't get to say, "I prayed the prayer to accept Jesus into my heart, so I don't have to care about following him." It means we don't get to say, "I went to church and recited the Creed, so now Jesus doesn't get to question my bigotry or selfishness."  And we don't get to say, "I know the right religious jargon, so I can use it to dress my own agenda in it, because all God cares about is me saying the right words."  Colossians insists that God's design is to keep us grounded all our lives long in the story and vision of Jesus--the way he loves, the way he tells the truth, the way he lays his life down for others rather than seek his own interests.  It's not just getting an answer right once and then walking off--it's the whole life's journey, and knowing that God walks with us, pointing us in the direction of Jesus the whole way.

Honestly, this is why we keep gathering together, we Christians--in worship, in study, in prayer groups, and even in online gatherings, too.  It's because we know that our faith is not about a single moment when we mouthed the right words (and earn our heaven points by getting them right), but that we need each other to help hold us accountable, challenge us when we are off-base, encourage us when we are on the right track, and to keep reminding us of the way of Jesus as we all go along the way.  Otherwise it is too easy (too damned easy, literally) to mouth the right-sounding religious words about Jesus and then to get lured into patterns of thinking that nurse our hatreds, infect our love, stifle our commitment to truth-telling, and make us into mean-hearted people. We have all seen it too many times not to believe it happens, and maybe we have had the courage to see the way each of us has been pulled off course before.  But because I don't want to become the kind of person who can say all the right religious words in one moment and then to be hateful, selfish, or mean-spirited in the next moment, I know I need others who will keep re-centering me, who will keep pointing me back to Jesus, and who will keep me grounded in Christ rather than in conspiracy theories.

That's what this verse reminds us--God is not interested in just getting us to mouth the right words one time like it's the last round of a game show.  God is interested--deeply, passionately, and fiercely committed, in fact--in shaping us over the course of our whole lives into the likeness of Christ.  That's what today is about.  That's what every day is about.

Lord God, hold onto all our lives long, beyond learning the right-sounding religious words once, to the shape of our whole selves.

A New Story At Last--January 13, 2021

A New Story At Last--January 13, 2021

"And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him..." [Colossians 1:21-22]

You know how Batman saves the day?  Probably by punching someone.

Superman--you know what his go-to move is?  A blast from the ol' Kryptonian heat-vision.

The rest of the whole comic book pantheon is a variation on the same theme: Iron Man will blast you with repulsor rays or missiles out of his shoulders, Thor will whack you with this hammer, and Hulk will, well... Hulk smash.

For that matter, we know how the plot of the western goes, too: the white-hatted hero wins the day by being faster on the trigger and shooting the train robbers, the dangerous cattle wranglers, or the supposedly savage Indians.

We know how these scripts go, because they've been fed to us since childhood.  (Perhaps we never stopped to ask if the thinking in them was also hopelessly child-ish, as well....) We know how the story goes, whether it's a superhero comic, an action flick, or a classic western: the hero saves the day by destroying something or someone else.  The fact that it seems so obvious to us is evidence of how pervasively that myth has seeped into our ways of thinking.  We almost can't imagine how a story could go differently, right?  What's Superman supposed to do... NOT punch Lex Luthor?  What--are we supposed to imagine that there could be peace in a frontier town without a sharp-shootin' sheriff and his posse keepin' the banditos and desperados off the streets?

I suppose it depends on whom you ask.  The world's storytellers seem hung up on retelling that same plotline, over and over again, and it goes on redundantly and unchangingly, forever like this:  Good guys punch/shoot/kill bad guys, who are hopelessly irredeemable, and the lesson is that any problem can be solved with enough firepower to keep the undesirables away.

But come, aren't we tired of that story?  Haven't we seen that movie a million times and read the comic a million more?  And haven't we noticed yet that it never really fixes things?  (Or, as a compellingly deranged Heath Ledger's Joker says to a very angry Batman in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, "You have nothing!  Nothing to threaten me with! Nothing to do with all your strength!" revealing that indeed, Batman can't punch his way out of every situation.)

Here's the thing: the Gospel tells a different story.  A very different story.  Like radically different.  The Gospel's story is just as dramatic as any comic book superhero movie, just as compelling as any western saga, but the plot--the story of salvation--works differently.  In Jesus, in fact, God turns the whole logic of salvation-by-violence inside out.  The hero we meet in the New Testament saves the day not by killing his enemies or vanquishing those who are hostile to him, but by dying at their hands and transforming them in love through his death.  Jesus at last offers us a new story, beyond the same tired old tropes we've seen before.

The letter to the Colossians makes it clear as well: God's way of redeeming and reigning are not, in the end, to smash and destroy, but to to bear our destructive ways and to endure our seemingly innate determination to smash whatever good things come across our path--even the body of the Son of God.  And notice here, that as the letter to the Colossians sees it, God doesn't wait for us to be "on God's side" to redeem--no, in fact, it's while we are estranged and hostile toward God, that God takes on death and reconciles with us.  The letter to the Ephesians, which feels much like a twin sibling of Colossians in many ways, says in similar terms that we were dead in sins and brought back to life by Christ's cross.  Or as Paul says to the Romans, it was when we were God's "enemies," being "ungodly" and "sinners," that Christ died for us.  In other words, God's way of saving is decidedly NOT to find the ones labeled "enemies" and to destroy them, but rather to absorb our violence into God's own self at the cross, like falling on a live grenade to absorb the blast rather than to let it kill someone else.  

If that sounds preposterous, if our gut reaction is that the "real world" just doesn't work that way, then maybe it is a testament to just how completely we have accepted the story presented to us over and over again in the wider culture around us--the one that says the hero wins by punching or shooting, and that says good guys pummel bad guys into submission to win the day.  The New Testament says that ain't so.  God's way of saving the day... and the world... and us!... is to be killed by the "enemy" and thereby to defuse the enemy's power.  Absorbing death, God breaks death's power.  Bearing our violence, God saps violence of its fearful strength.  And he sets us free from having to play by those rules anymore--God in fact makes us, by the cross, "holy and blameless and irreproachable."

Because that story is so different from the one we've all been fed all our lives, the one we have internalized over and over and over again, we need to keep hearing it and seeing just how frequently it comes up in the Scriptures themselves.  Ultimately it changes our whole understanding of who and what God is if we dare to believe, as the New Testament certainly says, that God is most clearly revealed as the One who dies on a cross at the hands of a riled-up lynch mob and with the blessing of the empire, rather than as some angry bearded fellow who comes to earth locked and loaded.

We need to be clear about this, too, because our understanding of who God is affects who we are as well.  And all too often, people who name the name of Jesus get confused and just take the villain-punching, white-hat-wearing John Wayne type of the movies and we slap the word "God" on it, assuming that God must operate the same way that the heroes of the movies and comics do.  And we end up assuming, too, then, that Jesus needs us to be a part of his posse, like it's our job to "take back" whatever we think needs taking back--all "in the name of Jesus," of course.  Already since last week's siege of the Capitol building there are the predictable (and terrible) hot-takes floating around, all draped in the language of Respectable Religious Folk, that go something like this: "Who says that violence isn't the answer?  Don't we need to recover that old sense of being 'tough'--you know, to make God look strong, too?  Don't the righteous have to fight?" And of course, in reply to all of that, the New Testament itself pretty clearly says, "Are you kidding me?"

If we are going to be people who say that the Bible is important to us, then we are going to actually have to listen to what its voices say, rather than assuming God wants our help smashing things and intimidating our enemies as we wave our weapons in the air.  God does not want that help.  In fact, that is the very thing God absorbs from us in order to free us from the terrible and deathly logic of that tired old story.

Maybe we've been fed the old myth that you can save the world by threatening your enemies enough so many times that we don't realize how it has ensnared and enslaved us.  Maybe we have forgotten that as the Gospel tells it, WE are the enemies and we have been loved into redemption by a God who absorbs all of our violence, hatred, and animosity, but does not want us to use those in supposedly "holy" or "righteous" pursuits for God's sake.  God doesn't need our assistance on some battlefield.  No, like the old saying goes, you defend God like you defend a lion--you get out of its way.

So since these just happen to be the verses that have come up today in our unfolding journey through Colossians, let's let them sink in today.  God's way of redeeming and reigning over all the universe is from a cross.  And if we really believe that is who God is, all the way down so to speak, then it will affect the way we interact with others today--even others we don't know, don't like, or don't agree with.  Maybe we can learn the lesson that there are some things you can't heal with more punching--in fact, there are really very very few.

And maybe we can leave the old childish stories with the discarded things of childhood and decide that today is the day for us to grow up, that we might be indeed "holy and blameless and irreproachable."

Lord God, unstory us from the myths we have been taught, and teach us to follow in your way--the way of the cross.

All of God's Chips--January 12, 2021

 

All of God's Chips--January 12, 2021

"For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconciled to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of the cross." [Colossians 1:19-20]

It was God who went to a cross, got buried in a borrowed grave, broke open the powers of hell, and came out the other side alive. It is none other and no less than God who wears the nail-scars like trophies of triumph now. 

This is a pretty big deal, if you think about it. And it's why the early church fought very hard and wrestled for a very long time to make sure they were clear on what they believed about Jesus, "the image of the invisible God." And the conclusion of all that debating, arguing, writing, sweating, and praying, was the conclusion that in Christ Jesus, we don't simply have a divine press secretary, a heavenly placeholder, or a celestial vice-president of human affairs: we have none other than "the fullness of God" embodied in the particular human body of a homeless rabbi from the backwater of the empire. 

Other splinter groups, both in the early centuries and still today, got squirmy with the idea of a God who comes that close. They would be willing to say that Jesus is God's first and best creation, or that Jesus is empowered to speak for God, or that Jesus is the earthly messiah who had been promised by the prophets--but passages like this one insisted that wasn't enough. It's not enough to say that God wanted to reconcile with humanity and so sent a very, very good diplomat to broker a peace treaty or negotiate a deal on God's behalf. It's not enough to say that God appointed Jesus to be the divine representative, law-giver, teacher, or heavenly proxy. The scandalous thing about the New Testament is its insistence, over and over again, that you lose something vital to the Christian faith if we don't recognize God's own face in the crucified Christ, and see God having taken on death in the risen body of Jesus.  We lose what makes the Gospel "good news" if we miss that God's power is most clearly seen on a cross--dying for enemies rather than killing them... and indeed for a whole world of us.

And the difference is in what lengths God will go to for rescuing us. If you need to be picked up at the airport, and I tell you I'm too busy, but I'll ask another mutual acquaintance to go meet you, I'm kind of telling you that I think my other business is more important than you are. Maybe it's the hassle, or the need to have to go out of my way all the way to the airport, or maybe the roads are dangerous (if it's wintertime) and I just don't want to risk it myself. But whatever the reason, I'm sending the message that I'd rather do my other work, or keep myself safe, rather than go to the lengths of picking you up at the airport. But if you need a ride and, despite everything else on my to-do list, I come myself to get you, well then, it's clear, there are no lengths I won't go to. It's clear that you must be pretty important to me. 

Well, if the Christian story is simply that God appointed the assistant manager to come rescue humanity while God minded the store, that tells you what God really values most. But if Jesus really is the fullness of God in a human life, well, that means that God doesn't hold any chips back, but goes all in for you and for me. It says that God wasn't more afraid of death than God was in love with you. It says that God was willing to be permanently scarred for our sake, rather than to be without us--and, to hear Colossians tell it, that "us" includes all things in creation--in the risen body of Jesus of Nazareth. 

I have to tell you, in all honesty--that's why I keep on in this faith of ours, instead of giving up or looking for another religion. For all the ways we screw it up, and all the ways we have let our faith be co-opted by angry mobs, mixed it with the idols of nationalism or political power, or allowed it to be tamed by fussy Respectable Religious people, the thing that holds me in the Christian faith is the audacious claim that there are no lengths God is not willing to go to for us--not even being killed by the state while it mocked him for being a loser. 

That's why I dare to believe it is good news that Jesus is risen: not simply the idea of someone coming back to life after death (which happens in the stories of a lot of other religions, too), but that the One who went through death and hell and resurrection is none other than the fullness of God in the flesh. The Greeks and Romans and Vikings all had plenty of mythological gods and goddesses and demigods and heroes who had brushes with death and then came to life. The ancient near East was full of them, too, from Mithras to Persephone to a long list of dying and rising sun gods. Resurrection stories were a dime a dozen in the ancient world. 

And to be honest there are lots of things that are frustrations and heartaches about the institution we call Church today, too--we get fussy over things Jesus didn't seem to care about, and we overlook the things Jesus said were essential; we get crank ywhen we don't get our way or feel inconvenienced; and we can end up divided over the things that were meant to unify us. There are lots of reasons one could cite for giving up on the ungainly hippopotamus that is the church (as T.S. Eliot called it once), and still find another religious story that involved an afterlife. The thing that keeps pulling me back to this story, this Gospel, this messy and frustrating community called Church is the news that none other than God entered into the mess all the way down to death--a real, human death--and raises that scarred, tortured body into life again, forever marking God's own being with the wounds. 

 If the Christian message were just that God sent Jesus to fix things, but that God in God's own being didn't go through that death and resurrection, I wouldn't be able to be a Christian. It just isn't worth it if God says at some point, "I love you, but there's a length I won't go to for you, and in those instances, I send a substitute." But if the one we call Christ really is the "image of the invisible God," then there are no lengths God will not go to, and there are no boundaries or limits to the reach of God's love. And that, of course, is why the writer of Colossians can say that in the risen Christ, God has reconciled with "all things." No limits. Nothing held back. God goes all in. 

Look, I don't mean to disrespect the sects and spin-off groups (I don't think I need to name names here) that talk about Jesus but can't bring themselves to confess with Colossians here that in Christ we have the fullness of God in a human life, but as I look at the mess of this world, the only hope I can see is if God really says there are no limits to how far God will go, how deep into our pain God will dive, or how much God will endure to reconcile with all things. If there are limits we are all doomed, because we are sure to push the boundaries and cross them one day or another. 

But if we can dare to trust the vision of Colossians, then God really has put all the chips on the table, as it were, and has risked it all... for all of us. And that is news that will let me work up the nerve to put my feet on the floor another day. That is hope enough. 

Lord God, let us dare to believe it is true, that you have completely taken on our life and our death in Christ, and that there are no limits to the power or reach of your love.