God Along the Way--July 27, 2021

God Along the Way--July 27, 2021

"For Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf." [Hebrews 9:24]

I'm not usually one to offer movie reviews when I'm supposed to be reflecting on the Scriptures, but on this hot July day, I find myself thinking about the movie version of The Polar Express, and what it has taught me about the nature of God.

The movie itself, I confess, I find kind of forgettable.  (Truth-in-advertising, I'm not a fan of most Christmas movies, so this was gonna be a hard sell for me no matter how the movie was made.)  But they have basically taken a thirty page picture book that was thin on plot to begin with and stretched it out into a hundred-minute winding story with a whole host of characters and twists that weren't in the original.  That said, however, I am struck by a choice made in the casting of the movie that makes a connection that was impossible to create in book form, and I love it, for the sheer theology of it.

In the movie, which tells the story of a magical train that takes children to the North Pole on Christmas Eve, the voice of the conductor of the train is also the voice of Santa Claus himself. Both are played by the ever-popular Tom Hanks (along with a few other characters by the time the movie is done).  And while Hanks makes Saint Nick's voice a bit jollier and heftier than the manic conductor, his voice is so recognizable that anybody watching can tell there's a connection there.  Tom Hanks, the conductor, is bringing a train full of children into the presence of Tom Hanks, the man waiting at the North Pole in the red and white suit.  The same person is at the destination and along on the journey.  The same person is the one who gives out the gifts of Christmas and also the one who prepares the children along the way to be able to receive those gifts--and to believe that all of this incredible journey is happening in the first place.

Now, I don't want to lean too hard on a Theology of Tom Hanks or of the Polar Express, but I do think that this curious connection in the movie between the characters offers a helpful way of thinking about what God does in Jesus.  We heard from the very opening of this book that Christ Jesus is nothing less and none other than the very "reflection of God's glory" and the "exact imprint of God's very being," who sustains all things in the universe.  That sure sounds like saying that Jesus is what God looks like in a human life, and that's of course why the early church fought hard to be clear about that very claim.  In Jesus we get "God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God."  So Jesus is God's self-presentation to humanity--God coming to us, and God dwelling with us.

And yet at the same time, this Jesus brings us into the very presence of God, the One whom Jesus himself calls "Abba" (Papa, Daddy, Father).  Jesus is like the high priest, coming into the unfiltered, undiluted presence of God with all of us along in his presence... and Jesus is also one with the God to whom he brings us.  God is the destination, and God in Jesus is the one conducting us along our journey toward that destination.  God is the One who gives all good gifts as the Source of all things, and God is the One, through Christ, who enables us to receive those gifts and gives us the faith to believe and trust in this God's grace, by the Spirit.  God is the One we are longing to see face to face, and God, in Jesus, is the One who enables us to come to God.

That reframes all our lives, I believe.  It means that we are not being set up for disappointment at the end of our journey, like in The Wizard of Oz, when Dorothy and company find out that for all of the spectacle and drama leading to their arrival before the Wizard in the Emerald City, he's really just a sham and a fraud.  There is no worry of disappointment in the presence of God, though, because that same God has accompanied us along the way in Jesus to bring us into the presence of God.  It's all rather like the children's northward journey on the train, accompanied by the friendly voice of the conductor, which turns out to be the very same voice of the one they have been traveling to see all along.

And if nothing else, that means our faith is not merely a matter of getting "out there" or "up there" to where God is at some point beyond death--it means that God is right here with us now on the journey we call life, and also yet God is the One toward whom we are all coming home.  God is on both sides of the equation. God is both the destination and the companion on the way.  Or, as Catherine of Siena famously put it, "All the way to heaven is heaven, for Jesus said, 'I am the way'."

May we see it in this day as well.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to face this day's journey, knowing you are both our destination and our companion along the way.

What Holds Everything Together--July 23, 2021

What Holds Everything Together--July 23, 2021

"Hence not even the first covenant was inaugurated without blood. For whenever every commandment had been told to all the people by Moses in accordance with the law, he took the blood of calves and goats, with water and scarlet wool and hyssop, and sprinkled both the scroll itself and all the people, sayin, 'This is the blood of the covenant that God has ordained for you.' And in the same way he sprinkled with blood both the tent and all the vessels used in worship. Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.  Thus it was necessary for the sketches of the heavenly things to be purified with these rites, but the heavenly things themselves need better sacrifices than these." [Hebrews 9:18-23]

Last summer we began plans for creating a playhouse for the kids in the back yard.  I had invited them to help me come up with ideas--what things did they want in it, and where should they go?  Would we have swings? A slide?  Two floors or one?  A rock climbing wall, or a ladder?  That kind of stuff.  Of course, their wild ideas went all over the place, and at some point, to help them visualize what it would be like, we made a model.  I took pieces of scrap wood and cut them to a roughly even thickness to substitute for the actual posts and cross beams, so they could picture what an actual structure could be like.  I also wanted them to see how many beams would be needed, even for a small structure, so they could see how and why it would take a while for the whole thing to come together.  The model was to help them understand what the real thing would look like, but also what all was involved in building it.

Now, while the real play structure would be put together with bolts and screws, the model was obviously too small for that.  So hot glue did the trick there--in fact, hot glue went about everywhere for the model.  Every joint, every cross piece, every intersection, was slathered in hot glue to get it to hold together on the sheet of scrap plyboard we built the model on.  Again, the kids needed to be able to visualize how the real thing would hold together, but at every point while assembling the model, I reminded them that the real thing wouldn't work with hot glue--we needed something stronger for the real thing.  This was a mock-up, a three-dimensional sketch in smaller size, to help them understand how the real would work, and to give them something to picture and to look forward to.

So, it is technically correct that the model functioned by having hot glue hold the pieces together. But the model was never really for playing--it was to point the real, which would take longer to construct.  It was to help them visualize how the real thing would be assembled, but it was never meant to bear their weight.  Hot glue will hold little model planks together, but it will never be load-bearing for actual humans.  If you want to hold human-sized burdens, you need something heavy duty.

Well, in a manner of speaking, this is how the writer of Hebrews sees the whole set-up of the temple and sacrificial system in Israel's ancient memory.  Yes, it was true that the blood of animals was sprinkled on each of the implements and items used in sacrificial worship of God, as a way of highlighting the seriousness and set-apartness of all of those items.  Like we might save the good dishes or the special glasses for a holiday dinner with the whole family, rather than mixing them in with the free plastic spork that came with the Chinese takeout order a few months ago, Israel kept the vessels used for worshipping God distinct and treated them reverently.  Marking them with the blood of sacrificed animals was an element of that setting apart, that "holiness."

But the writer of Hebrews says that those sacrifices decidedly did not buy God off or feed God's bloodthirst.  They were, rather, part of a sketch of what God was about to do in Jesus.  They were what held the model together, so that the people of God could look forward to visualize what God has now done in Christ.  Like the hot glue  in the model that stood in for the actual bolts and screws of the real structure, the blood of animals pointed toward another, sturdier reality--the blood Jesus offers, which is his own.  The writer of Hebrews says, basically, that generations of animal sacrifices never did anything really between us and God, but they were always part of God's way of showing us what was to come.  The work of restoring a broken relationship between God and a human race gone rotten was real work that required something radical to set things right, and God has wanted to be as clear with us possible just what lengths would be required to do it. But it was never that a hungry deity needed our livestock; rather that our minds needed a model.  God's design was never to be bribed with animals in exchange for giving us a pass on our rotten behavior; it was always to mend the entire universe with God's own self-giving love, all the way to a cross, in Jesus.  We have just needed a model to understand what really holds everything together.

So, now that there is a real structure taking shape in our back yard, with actual beams sunk into the ground in concrete footers, and now that there are real eight-inch carriage bolts fastening the posts to one another, my kids can clearly see what the model only could point to.  The hot glue was only for the purposes of them seeing how the model would work, but the real burden is borne by something stronger.  They can appreciate that for the span of time between making the model and setting the first posts, the model made with hot glue could at least give them something to visualize the real thing with.  But they know now that the plan was never to build a playset in our yard with hot glue.  It was always going to be something stronger, because the load that needed to be carried was not only heavier, but more precious: my own children.

That, in a sense, is where Hebrews lands for today: you, dear child of God, are far too precious a child to leave to something lesser to hold you up.  Your and my burdens are far too heavy to be entrusted to anything less than Jesus, in whom no less than God's very own self bears the load. No less than Jesus' own life is what really holds it all together.

Thank you, Jesus, for offering your life for us.  And thank you, whom Jesus taught us to call on as Abba, for the lengths you have gone to that we might understand what you have done for us.

Amending the Will--July 22, 2021

Amending the Will--July 22, 2021

"For this reason he is the mediator of a new covenant, so that those who are called may receive the promised inheritance, because a death has occurred that redeems them from the transgressions under the first covenant.  Where a will is involved, the death of the one who made it must be established. For a will takes effect only a death, since it is not in force as long as the one who made it is alive." [Hebrews 9:15-17]

Here's a little bit of Probate Law 101 for you from the Bible: a will only takes effect when the person making it has died.  

That might seem obvious, because it is.  But that notion is important, as any number of mystery novels and whodunnit movies will remind you when the plot hangs on a last-minute change of will before a murder, or casts a would-be heir in a suspicious light. Pop culture aside, I've seen more than my share of conflict and animosity in families erupt over matters of changes in a will made before a dear patriarch or matriarch died.  Families get torn apart when one grown child expects they'll get such-and-such in the will, only to find out that their mother or father changed their wishes at some point before their passing.  And all of that happens because, of course, a person is free to change their will at any point as long as they're alive to make those changes. 

Now, all of this also helps to clarify what sometimes gets lost in the layers of litigation: namely, that a will is basically a promise of a gift.  The person writing the will says, in effect, "These things are mine, and I am giving them to the following people."  I remember, before my wife and I had adopted our children, that our pre-adoption agency had us prepare wills even before there were children in the picture, that basically said, "If we adopt children, they will be our legal heirs--whatever we have, we will give to them upon our death."  Even without specifying our estate or the names of the children, it was a declaration of our commitment to give them whatever we had of value. That's just it--a promise of grace.

The writer of Hebrews sees that this is a really helpful way of understanding our relationship with God, because it, too, is build wholly on promises, gifts, and grace.  We might miss what was clearer in the original Greek of this passage, because in Greek, the same word means both "will" and "covenant."  So as our author talks about Jesus as the one who brokers a "new covenant" between God and humanity, it has the same feel as saying that God has "amended the will" to include us--and that "us" includes us outsiders who didn't belong to the ethnic group of ancient Israel or live within its laws.  We "Gentiles" (anybody who isn't Jewish) have been adopted into the family, as the other New Testament writers describe it, and God has simply amended the will--or initiated a new covenant, if you like--to include us through Jesus.

This whole idea of a will being enacted helps us to make sense of what the cross of Jesus might mean, too.  We saw the other day that there's this tension throughout the Bible about the sacrifice of animals, which were definitely a part of ancient Israel's worship life, and yet which the prophets said never bribed or fed or powered God.  We saw yesterday that the temptation was to think that God was somehow bloodthirsty and needing other things to die in order to keep things copacetic for the rest of us.  Under that thinking, sometimes people assume that Jesus has to die on the cross because God demands X-amount of suffering or pain or blood in order to love us.  But the writer of Hebrews reframes this meaning of Jesus' cross--it's not that a bloodthirsty deity needs to be appeased by a certain amount of death, but rather more like the logic of a will, where the person giving away their estate dies in order to make the gift happen.  In other words, it's not that God needs to be paid with someone else's death, but rather that God chooses to be the One who dies, in order to enact the will and give away the farm to us.  That is radical.

How does it change our picture of God--and thereby our outlook on the day--to see God, not demanding payment from us in blood for our sins, but offering everything to us through Christ's death on the cross?  How will you see the your beloved-ness differently, knowing that it's not that God has to hold the divine nose and grudgingly accept us because a payment of blood has been made to settle our accounts, but more that God chooses to give us everything God has, and the will is made effective through God's own self-giving, all the way to death?  

Maybe we can finally let it sink in that God loves us for us, warts and all, failures and all, even for all of our mess-ups, and that God has already declared us part of the family.

That seems a good way to face the day.

Lord God, thank you. Thank you for the lengths you go to in order to give us everything.

A Satisfied God--July 21, 2021

A Satisfied God--July 21, 2021

"For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God!" [Hebrews 9:13-14]

It comes down to this: God isn't hungry.  And God certainly isn't bloodthirsty.

The writer of Hebrews refutes what, to be honest, I think a lot of Respectable Religious Folk (ourselves included, to be fair) kind of quietly assume without saying explicitly.  I think  at some level, we do think that God is hungry--that God needs to be fueled or powered or appeased by our offering... something.  That's often how we implicitly interpret what all those centuries of animal sacrifices in Israel's distant memory were about: that a hungry deity demanded sacrifices, and that God must be fed (or again, maybe we think we are being more refined by saying "appeased") by killing animals and offering their blood up to heaven.  Sometimes the thinking goes, "Our sins demand satisfaction, and goat blood is like the minimum payment on your credit card bill--if you can't pay the debt you owe in full, at least you can pay the minimum due to keep things in right standing with the folks at MasterCard or Visa." It all assumes that God is primarily interested in getting what is due to God and thus exacting payment from us when we sin.  It assumes that God is less interested in loving or saving or restoring relationship with us, and more interested in the getting paid.

But the New Testament writers, including our friend here writing Hebrews, takes the imagery of the ancient sacrificial system and breaks it open.  These writers understood how important the regular offering of sacrifices was to the religious life of Israel, especially for those whose lives were in orbit around the city of Jerusalem and its Temple where those sacrifices were offered.  But they also knew that there was a minority report in the Hebrew Scriptures themselves about those sacrifices.  There are voices within what we call the Old Testament, usually prophets or poets, who tell the people, "Wait, wait, wait--let's not pretend that God can be bought off with our ritual killing of animals, or the grain from our fields, or even the offer of our children.   You can't bribe or influence God.  And God isn't hungry!"  The prophets remind the people that God had saved them and rescued them from enslavement in Egypt long before they had a temple and before they had priests offering up lambs and goats and the like.  And those same prophets often remind the people that they can't cheat or hate or harm their neighbors, distort justice, or scorn showing mercy on one day and then think they can settle up with God with a few extra sheaves of wheat on the altar.  God doesn't need their offerings, and God isn't fed by their sacrifices.  And God most certainly will not permit a quid-pro-quo transaction where humans are given permission to be rotten to each other as long as they feed God with the blood of animals.

So as we read these verses today, let's avoid the temptation to turn this into some kind of argument that enlightened Christians came and "fixed" the bad theology of ancient Judaism, as if Judaism had ever really taught that you could pay for your sins with sacrifices of animals like feeding a parking meter you have allowed to expire.  The voices from within Judaism itself understood that God didn't need to be fed with sacrifices, and they kept reminding their own people that God was not thirsty for blood.

Let's also be done, once and for all, with pretending that we Christians have stopped thinking in those transactional terms.  Just yesterday, a pastor of a congregation hundreds of miles away shared on social media that he had jokingly posted a message saying something like, "Now that I've had my coffee for the morning, I'm ready to pray--thanks for waiting for me, Jesus."  And some stranger oh-so-piously appointed themselves the judge of this posting, insisting back something like, "It is sinful to keep the Lord waiting.  Jesus will be upset with you for not completing your ritual of morning prayer before you make your coffee."  And sure, there's no animal sacrifice there, but there's still the underlying impulse of, "You have to give God what God needs or wants from you--in this case proper attention or respect or priority--or else, you'll lose approval (and points?) from God."  It's all still the same terrible transactional thinking that the prophets and poets have been speaking up against for millennia.

We still struggle, in other words, with thinking that there's some substance--if not goats or lambs, then recited prayers, or hours spent in church, or money donated, or candles lit--that we need to offer in order to power up God's engines.  We still operate, even if we don't say it out loud, like God is hungry.

The writer of Hebrews, however, has been laying out a case that God not only isn't hungry and in need of our goats and bulls and their blood, but also that God has brought an end to the whole sacrificial system in Jesus, who doesn't offer something else to die, but offers his own life and his own blood, ending any notion of needing someone else's.  So for whatever else Jesus' death means or does, it cannot be said to give God something God did not already have.  Jesus' death doesn't fuel a divine motor that runs on blood.  The cross does not satisfy some need of God to inflict a certain amount of suffering in order to settle accounts.  And the sacrifice of Jesus' life isn't about satisfying a bloodthirsty deity who is hungry for souls.  Jesus ends the system of sacrifice as the one who is himself the last offering and the last priest, in line with all the ancient poets and prophets of Israel's memory who had told the people God didn't need to be fed and couldn't be bribed with animal sacrifices anyway.

When we let that sink in, it will transform our faith.  It will mean we are done with transactional thinking ("If I pray more times a day, then God will give me what I wish for" or "If you give me the job I want, God, I promise I'll give you extra money from my paycheck," and the like).  And instead, we will see that God has provided all that was needed to restore our relationship.  

And we'll discover the freedom of knowing that God was never hungry in the first place.  God is already, in a word, satisfied.

Lord God, let us live in the freedom of knowing we cannot bribe you or buy access to your power, but rather that you have freely given us yourself already in Jesus.

The End of the Toll Road--July 20, 2021

The End of the Toll Road--July 20, 2021

"But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption." [Hebrews 9:11-12]

Picture this: you're riding along in the passenger side of a car on the turnpike, and you see a sign that announces there is a toll both coming up.  "Have payment ready," it declares in a bright amber warning.  You start reaching into your pockets to check if you have exact change.  

You pass the first sign and come up to a second, and then a third.  Now there are flashing yellow caution lights and rumble strips in the concrete, alerting to you to the indisputable fact that a toll is going to need to be paid, and in the very near future.

At last, the vehicle slows down as you approach the toll gate. You come nearly to a stop, and then the barrier arm rises, seemingly on its own, as you pass under the roof of the tollbooth kiosk, and then you proceed on, speeding along your way to your destination.  

When you look at the driver in confusion, the answer comes back simple, "EZ-Pass. It's all prepaid."  How about that?  All those warning signs, with all their flashing lights.  All the rumble strips and announcements to have your payment ready, they were all pointing toward the moment of the transaction... and when you actually got to the tollbooth, you discover it's taken out automatically, and in a sense has already been paid long before you got into the car because the EZ-pass had been set up in advance to pay from the driver's account in a bank somewhere. 

Think about that moment.  After you go through the tollbooth, the warning signs will stop--you're off the turnpike now.  They were literally just signs--they were there to point ahead to the place at which the payment transaction would happen.  And yet in a sense, your driver had already committed to paying the toll from the moment the EZ-Pass was set up.  The warning signs, the rumble strips, and all the rest--even the arm on the gate at the tollbooth--they were all pointing to a moment of payment that the driver already had taken care of.  Once you're through the gate, the warning signs are no longer necessary.  But you also realize once you're through that those warning signs had a role in pointing ahead to the tollbooth, but they themselves didn't actually take your money.  They were signs that pointed to a reality that came after them.

Well, if you can picture all of that, then really you already understand something of how the writer of Hebrews sees what Jesus has done for us, and how his laying down his life at the cross does what centuries and centuries of day-in, day-out sacrifices of lambs, goats, and calves could not.  Jesus' willingness to lay down his life is the end of the road--it is the point at which the whole sacrificial system ends, and yet in hindsight you can see that all those countless sacrifices offered by high priest after high priest were signposts, pointing forward to what Jesus would do with his life.  After the toll booth there are no more signposts announcing a toll because the toll has already been paid. They serve completely to point ahead to the upcoming tollbooth and the transaction that happens there, but they themselves don't do anything or accomplish anything beyond pointing.  The writer of Hebrews says that all of our human-offered sacrifices are like that--they themselves didn't do anything, but they pointed the place of redemption at the cross, where Jesus offers his own life--where God offers up God's very self!  

What a gift of grace it is to discover at the point of paying your way, that the price has already been paid, and that you are free to keep going without one red cent to your name.  What a gift it is to know that before any of us began our lives, God had already chosen to pay the price of our passage by God's own self--and that Jesus puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak.

That's grace for you, friends:  at the very moment you start worrying about how you are going to pay your way through, the news comes that God has already chosen to pay it all for you already, even though the price is God's own life. 

Now, who will you tell that good news to... today?

Lord Jesus, thank you for your commitment to lay down your life that we might be free on our journey home.

Ripple Effects--July 19, 2021

 

Ripple Effects--July 19, 2021

"Such preparations having been made, the priests go continually into the first tent to carry out their ritual duties; but only the high priest goes into the second, and he but once a year, and not without taking the blood that he offers for himself and for the sins committed unintentionally by the people.  By this the Holy Spirit indicates that the way into the sanctuary  has not yet been disclosed as long as the first tent is still standing. This is a symbol of the present time, during which gifts and sacrifices are offered that cannot perfect the conscience of the worshiper, but deal only with food and drink and various baptisms,  regulations for the body imposed until the time comes to set things right." [Hebrews 9:6-10]

My daughter walked into the home office just a bit ago, and on her way out the doorway, she knocked over something on a shelf... which knocked the AC adapter cord for my computer onto the floor... which came very close to causing a chain-reaction involving a coffee mug.  Suffice it to say that a disaster was only very nearly averted.  Now, when I called her back into the room to address this, both she and I knew that she had not meant to cause trouble, and she was not being malicious or mean-spirited--she just wasn't paying attention to what she was doing, and she didn't think out the ripple effects of her actions.  So I wasn't upset or hurt because of what happened, but I did want her to know that she is responsible for her actions, even when she doesn't intend harm or injury.  The object on the shelf still fell, the cord in the wall was still jerked, and the coffee mug was still very close to being taken down in the momentum.  She bears responsibility for her actions, even if she didn't maliciously or willfully try to engineer a spill onto my desk.

And at the same time, I probably bear some responsibility for this near-catastrophe--I need to do a better job managing my shelves, and making sure that cords are not strewn precariously, either.  I didn't intend for an accident to happen, either, but my choices about how I leave my workspace set up all those potential pitfalls.   My way of leaving the workspace arranged was like setting up a chain of dominos standing on edge, and my daughter's action was rather like tipping over the first one:  neither of us might intend to cause the whole arrangement to fall down, but each of us plays a role--and bears a responsibility--for what happens when things start hitting the floor.

I have been thinking about that moment alongside these words from the book we call the letter to the Hebrews, and how much it reveals about our collective responsibility for our actions, our words, and our inaction as well.  In a way rather unlike our culture's narrow assumptions about individual responsibility, the Scriptures insist that we can be--and are!--responsible for wrong actions and words of ours, even if we didn't realize the wrongness at the time, and even if we participated in them collectively.  

That's a big deal.

It's important to acknowledge, for one, because it is so different from the buck-passing, spin-doctoring, shoulder-shrugging mindset of our culture that wants to deny responsibility for how our actions and choices affect others.  And second, it is important to face because the biblical writers keep showing us that our relationship by God is affected by those kind of things we so often say we aren't responsible for or didn't realize we were doing at the time.  

The writer of Hebrews, for example, notes that in the set-up of the ancient priesthood and temple system of Israel, the high priest offered sacrifices, not only for specific and known offenses the people had committed, but for the hidden, insidious, and even systemic (and yet still very real) sins of the people that they didn't even realize they had committed.  I mean, sure, if you steal your neighbor's chariot in the night or bow down to a golden statue, those sins are obvious, clear, and nameable.  But subtle things like showing prejudice against a neighbor who is different or came from another country... or skimming a little off the top for yourself at harvest tie... or leaning your hand on the scales just a smidge when that person you don't like comes to buy from you... or the unspoken trust you put in your weapons or your bank account that is really owed to God... these things are sin as well, even if you didn't necessarily "mean" them hurtfully, or didn't realize you were doing them.  And even though the long-term effects of a few cents here, or a few unkind words there, or a denied opportunity once in a while, might not look like they are big deals that actually cause harm to your neighbor, over time they have a huge impact, like dominoes falling in a chain, or erosion carving a canyon over eons.  Those were things the ancient Israelites understood--at least in theory--were things they were responsible for.  Those small injustices, even when no single individual committed them alone, still distort their whole communal relationship with God, and they need to be addressed.  The sacrifices brought by the high priest for the "unintentional" sins of the people were a reminder that God cares about how our collective actions affect one another and our connection to God, even when we may not realize at the time how our actions will cause ripple effects.

The point here isn't to just assign blame or make people feel guilty for things they didn't realize they were participating in, but rather to help the whole community be set right, and for every person to know that they bear responsibility for helping making things better--more just, more truthful, more faithful, more kind.  

In our day, we need this reminder more than ever, I think.  It is so easy to look at the troubles of our homeless neighbors, or those struggling with addiction to opioids, or the way hatred and fear of "the other" still makes life harder for some, and to think, "I haven't caused any of those problems personally, so I can't be held responsible for helping make things better!" It is easy to say, "I'm not wearing a white hood or burning a cross, and therefore I don't have a racist bone in my body," rather than the harder--but more honest--admission, "There are probably ways I make life harder for people who get treated differently because of their skin color, and I may not even realize I am contributing to it, but I still bear responsibility for checking those blind-spots in myself and learning to do better."  It is easy to say, "I'm not buying booze for my alcoholic relative, so I'm not a part of their problem," when maybe the more honest assessment is, "When I intentionally ignore destructive behavior rather than dealing with it, I may be contributing to the cycle that is slowly killing my loved ones."  It's easy to say, "I haven't evicted any one from their home, so I'm not at fault for the homelessness problem!" but it's probably a lot more truthful to say, "Every time I vote against the construction of new housing that would be affordable for people who are struggling to get permanent homes, because I assume they'll be criminals, or because I'm worried about what it will do to the resale value of my property, I'm contributing to the problem."  And yes, for all of those, we do bear responsibility, even if nobody intended to knock over the coffee mug onto the computer or tip the whole chain of dominoes.  Each of us does bear responsibility for the ripples we make on the world, even if that doesn't mean we are supposed to be petrified with guilt over it.

If the goal of naming those kinds of sins is just to make people feel bad or wallow in shame, we've missed the point, I think.  But from a biblical standpoint, it's much more about ensuring that everything is set right.  When we think of religion as merely a matter of individual scorekeeping to earn a postmortem spot in heaven, we will be insistent we only get minus points on our account for actions we have directly committed--robbing a bank, setting a fire, cheating on a spouse, and the like--but an awful lot of the brokenness and the hurt of the world will go unaddressed then.  But when we see that God's concern is more than giving out gold stars or red X marks on our permanent record, but about setting all things right, then we'll care about seeing our wider and deeper responsibilities to each other.  That's the vantage point of the biblical writers--we're the ones who have distorted things into this hyper-individualist perspective that ignores the impacts of our actions further down the chain.

So today, maybe it's enough to remember that God cares about the ripple effects of our choices, and those things we leave undone as well, and not just the red-pen marks or demerits that lower some imaginary tally of heaven points.  And then maybe we can find the courage to see how each of us is contributing to accidents, troubles, problems, hurts, and patterns of sin that make things worse for all God's world, and affect all of our relationships with God, too.

Maybe we each need to watch where we're walking... and how many things we have carelessly left to fall at the slightest touch.  It's good to know that God cares about those things, too.

Lord God, give us the courage to see ourselves, our choices, and our responsibilities to each other clearly and honestly.

The Robot on the Shelf (And Other Sacred Things)--July 16, 2021

The Robot on the Shelf (And Other Sacred Things)--July 16, 2021

"Now even the first covenant had regulations for worship and an earthly sanctuary. For a tent was constructed, the first one, in which were the lampstand, the table, and the bread of the Presence; this is called the Holy Place. Behind the second curtain was a tent called the Holy of Holies. In it stood the golden altar of incense and the ark of the covenant overlaid on all sides with gold, in which there were a golden urn holding the manna, and Aaron's rod that budded, and the tablets of the covenant; above it were the cherubim of glory overshadowing the mercy seat. Of these things we cannot speak now in detail." [Hebrews 9:1-5]

On the day our now-son came home with us, we stopped at McDonald's for lunch on the way home.  He loved chicken nuggets, and so his first celebratory lunch as part of our expanding family was a kids Happy Meal, and the toy was a Transformer robot of some kind that fired a real projectile.  He loved it because it was a robot (and smelled faintly of nugget grease). I kept it because I knew we would want this keepsake forever, as silly as it might have seemed to an outsider watching.

In the moment, of course, I couldn't avoid the obvious symbolism of taking home a literal "Transformer" while we were also bringing home a child who would transform our lives--sometimes in ways we could predict, and certainly in plenty of ways we could never have imagined at the time.  But even beyond the obvious metaphor, I just knew I wanted to keep that first toy from the first lunch--it would remind me, and maybe in time, it would remind my son, of this journey of life we have shared.  Even if the memory of that day doesn't stick because he was so young, I hope the sight of the robot toy will remind him one day of how we have done our best to love him.  One hopes, at any rate.

So, even though most of the kids' toys these days have homes in cubbies in their rooms, or in the basement play area, the Transformer-Toy-From-The-First-Happy-Meal has a special place in the house.  I have built a special bookcase beside my closet door, and at the very top he is perched on permanent display.  Other important books and mementos line the lower shelves, but the Transformer-Toy-From-The-First-Happy-Meal is at the pinnacle, a fixed reminder of the story of our family's journey--and ongoing transformation.

I think something like that is the way to think of the assorted collection of mementos and souvenirs that became the holiest, most sacred objects in Israel's ancient memory.  They weren't "powerful" in the sense of wielding celestial energy to smite your enemies or harnessing lightning bolts.  Unlike the famous climactic scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, the actual Ark of the Covenant wasn't used as an offensive weapon to reduce your enemies to dust.  It was a memory box, honestly.  It was a collection of souvenirs and old objects that had become sacred because they were imbued with memory from the journey of their homecoming to the Promised Land as God led this band of formerly enslaved people into freedom.  It was the stories that made these things holy--the stories of how God provided manna in the wilderness when the ornery people claimed there was nothing to eat, the story of how God raised up leaders like Moses and Aaron and Miriam, the story of how God gave the people a way of life and wrote it on stone tablets, while the people were literally melting down their precious metals to make themselves an idol at the same time.  The stories of how God went with the people--through the Sea, into the wilderness, and into a new home--and how they were transformed from a band of loosely affiliated tribes with the trauma of centuries of enslavement into a people striving to live together in justice and mercy, those stories came with objects that were picked up like mementos along the way.  And because of the ways those stories and objects helped the people remember whose they were, the people held onto them--they became sacred.  And so they kept them in a special box... which then got put in a special place, set apart from all their ordinary possessions. They just happened to call that place the "Holy of Holies."

If we think about the objects in our worship life like they are magical amulets with power in and of themselves, we'll make them into idols before the day is out.  But if we understand those objects as bearers of the story by which we are in relation with God, we can understand what it means to call them "holy" or "sacred."  The ark of the covenant--and inside it, the manna, the budded staff of Aaron, and the commandments--these were objects that came to have sacred significance, not because of their monetary value or potential as weapons, but because they were reminders of how God had, in the words of the hymn, "brought us thus far on the way."  And because the people knew they would need to teach future generations about where they had been and how God had gone with them, they set those objects apart, like putting them on the top shelf of the hand-built bookcase rather than in the plastic tubs of the basement to be forgotten or lost.  The objects weren't magic, but they did really and truly connect the people to the God who went with them.  They conveyed the presence of God through the memories that went with them, and the people were re-storied, or even re-membered, as they recounted the great saga from promise to enslavement to liberation to homecoming journey.  In a sense, they were sacraments--visible words that communicated the redeeming action of God.

I wonder, then, how you might tell your own life story, and what mementos from that story remind you of how God went with you.  Some of those objects might be obviously "religious" in nature, like the Bible you got when you were in elementary school, or the plaque with a cross on it from your confirmation.  Or maybe the program from your marriage ceremony, put in a frame somewhere, or the baptismal candle of your oldest child.  But some of those objects that bear the story of how God has carried you through will be surprising--a movie ticket, a handkerchief or a bandana of your father's, a notebook with handwritten chicken scratches written by someone important to you, a toy from a kid's Happy Meal.  Who knows what else?

Well, you do.  And if you can picture your own personal collection of objects you have held onto as reminders of how God has gone with you in your life's journey, through Red Sea crossings and wilderness seasons alike, then maybe you can appreciate how God's people survived on mere hope for centuries by holding onto the memory box we call the Ark of the Covenant.  And maybe we can understand why it was so important for those distant siblings of ours in faith to hold onto those objects and build a special place to keep them.  They reminded them of who God is... and because of that, whose they were, too.

May we be so re-storied as well, by the God who claims us and carries us.

Lord God, help us to remember how you have gone with us in this life's journey, and make us to hold on to all that reassures us of your presence.

God's Preposterous Business Sense--July 14, 2021

 

God's Preposterous Business Sense--July 14, 2021

"God finds fault with them when he says: ‘The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will establish a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah; not like the covenant that I made with their ancestors, on the day when I took them by the hand to lead them out of the land of Egypt; for they did not continue in my covenant, and so I had no concern for them, says the Lord. This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my laws in their minds, and write them on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And they shall not teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord”, for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest. For I will be merciful towards their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more.’ In speaking of ‘a new covenant’, he has made the first one obsolete. And what is obsolete and growing old will soon disappear." [Hebrews 8:8-13]

Let's get this much clear from the beginning:  God never renegotiates a deal to get more stuff or better terms for God's side of the ledger.  God will, however, create a new kind of covenant  in response to our breaking of the old one.  

That's huge.  It's astounding.  It is, to be quite honest, completely countercultural, too.

We live in a time and place where we are constantly taught to change the terms of the contracts in our lives for our own benefit.  We know how that game works.  We look to refinance a home-loan when the interest rates are more favorable... but the bank isn't looking to be a charity, so they will often only renegotiate your mortgage if they can get you to borrow more money or spread it out over a longer time period.  You're looking to renegotiate in your self-interest, while the bank does the same from their side of the table.  

We're taught to do the same with our employment--to try and push for more perks, fewer responsibilities, better benefits, and the like... and on the other side of the equation, the company tries to get as much as they can from you or to save as much money as possible in your compensation.  Everyone has an angle, and everyone is looking to reconfigure the deals, the contracts, and the partnerships they are in for the maximum benefit to themselves.  It is so pervasive that we probably just assume it's common sense, as if there's no way things could be any different.

It's the same with the public figures and celebrities of our time, as well.  The all-star who renegotiates for millions more dollars--or who cuts a new deal with a new team in a new town for more money--is celebrated as both a good athlete and a savvy business person, while the fans (and often a city) are left to pick up the pieces.  Politicians brag about bailing out on deals they don't like, or leverage their votes and influence to get what they want, all justified with the logic, "Everybody does this.  This is just the way of the world--you have to look out for your own interests and squeeze every opportunity to get more for you, regardless of what it does to the person on the other side of the table."

Well, here's the thing: that's not how God makes deals.  That's now how the God we meet in the Scriptures makes covenants or cuts contracts.  The writer of Hebrews quotes an extensive passage from an earlier prophet, Jeremiah, to point out that God doesn't have an "angle." God just wants to restore relationship with us.  Back in the days of Jeremiah, the people had broken the terms of their covenant relationship with God--running after idols, selling out to foreign empires, and putting their trust in their own power, wealth, and strength, rather than living according to God's ways of justice and mercy.  The covenant is as broken as a marriage ended by an affair, God says.  

This would have been a chance for God either to bail out and abandon these fickle people, or to press for more advantageous terms.  This could have been the time that God demanded more sacrifices, or required a bigger share of their harvests, or called for the construction of lavish temples and religious shrines.  That's what we would do, isn't it?  That's how the conventional wisdom of our time would think: while you've got leverage, use it to get more for yourself!  Squeeze 'em for all they've got!  Right?

But not God.  God instead sees that the problem with the old terms of the covenant was that it was breakable from our side.  So long as it depended on our remembering the rules well enough, or our goodness or badness, it would always be at risk, and we would always fall short.  But if God renegotiated the terms... not to make it harder or more painful for humans, but easier?  What if God said, "I'll forgive all the past" rather than, "You have added penalties for your previous failures"?  What if God said, "I'll write my word on your hearts rather than inscribing them on stone tablets or marble monuments"?  What if God said, "I will do for them what they could not do" rather than trying to push for more from us?

It would either be the worst move for business, or the best show of grace, the world has ever seen.  And that is precisely what God has done.  In Jesus, we have the creation of a whole new covenant--a new set of terms for how we relate to God.  The new comes, not because God has gotten us over a barrel and can force us to give up more for our part of the deal, but because God knows we have messed up too many times before and we need a new arrangement built on grace.

That's how this works.  No self-interested scheming on God's part.  No cutting a better deal that enriches God at the expense of humanity.  No... only grace, only the kind of covenant that does it all through Jesus when we could not do it for ourselves.  That's God's preposterous business sense for you.

This is our God, dear ones.  This is how you are loved.

Know it.  Own it.  Walk in it today.

Lord Jesus, thank you for your way of giving us more than we could imagine rather than squeezing more from us in our desperation.

The Choice God Makes--July 13, 2021

 

The Choice God Makes--July 13, 2021

"For if that first covenant had been faultless, there would have been no need to look for a second one." [Hebrews 8:7]

When things aren't working in a relationship in your life--anything from colleagues at work to family to friendships to romances--you really only have three choices.  You can leave it broken and just keep hurting and being hurt, for one. You can bail out and walk away from the relationship to find new ones with new people, but at the cost of giving up the old one.  Or, you can change the relationship to make it work again.  Every option is really some variation on those three: leave it broken, leave the relationship for new people, or keep the people and change how the relationship works.

What do you think--how does God choose among those options?  When it comes to the relationship (and that's really all the fancy word "covenant" means) between us and God, and things get broken, what does God do?  The three options in front of God are basically the same as ours. God could leave the relationship between us broken and just keep going through the motions, perpetuating the dysfunction.  Or, God could bail out on us--leaving the covenant--perhaps to go looking for better covenant partners than we humans.  Or, ultimately, God can choose to keep us and to change how the relationship works.

Well, I'll venture a guess that you know already: the God we meet in Jesus doesn't just pretend things are fine when the room is on fire.  In other words, God doesn't just leave things broken forever between us.  So Option Number One is right out.  The choice, then, is over which God would rather keep: the terms of an old deal... or us.  If God has to choose, will God insist on keeping the old contract for our relationship with the divine and get rid of us in the event that we can't hold up our end of the bargain... or will God keep us and adapt the terms of the covenant to stay in relationship with us?

Or, to put it a little more directly, would God rather keep the set of rules and change the people if they can't live by them... or keep the people even if it means changing the structures of how we relate to God?  Which is more important to God to hold on to--the terms  and conditions, or the people?

In case you couldn't tell, the writer of Hebrews says God chooses us, even if it means a change in the terms of the relationship. Or, in the language of his readers, a change of covenant.   God will change the covenant in order to keep in relationship with us, rather than kicking us to the curb in search of perfect people who can keep the covenant perfectly.  God would rather have us.

That's what makes the coming of Jesus so important.  In Jesus, God decides to be done with the old terms of relationship--sacrifices and priests, temples and altars, and so on--in order to bring about a new way of relating, one that comes through Jesus' cross and resurrection.  The writer of Hebrews points out that you don't need a new covenant--a new set of terms for the relationship, so to speak--if the current one is working as it's supposed to.  You know the saying:  if it ain't broke, don't fix it.  But where the relationship between us and God is broken, God's chosen solution isn't to throw us away in pursuit of better rule followers or perfectly-behaved little boys and girls to let into the heaven club.  God would rather remake the covenant and keep us.  God would rather have you than the dusty set of regulations we could never live by anyway.  God chooses you, and then lets the chips fall where they may.

I wonder how often any of us lets that sink in: God is so committed to you that God is willing to create a new kind of relationship for us, rather than throw us out when we fail at the old way.  You are just that important, just that beloved, just that valued.  And so is everybody else whom God has drawn together in love through Jesus.  You are loved enough that when God has to choose between keeping perfect rules and losing you or coming up with a new way of relating in order to keep us, that's what God chooses.  

Every time.

That's enough to give a person hope on the day you need it.  You are just that beloved

Lord Jesus, thank you for choosing us.  Help us to do our best to live inside the space that your grace makes for us.

Pointing to the Real--July 12, 2021

Pointing to the Real--July 12, 2021

"Now if he [Jesus] were on earth, he would not be a priest at all, since there are priests who offer gifts according to the law. They offer worship in a sanctuary that is a sketch and shadow of the heavenly one; for Moses, when he was about the erect the tent, was warned, 'See that you make everything according to the pattern that was shown you on the mountain.' But Jesus has now obtained a more excellent ministry, and to that degree he is the mediator of a better covenant, which has been enacted through better promises." [Hebrews 8:4-6]

We know that God doesn't live "up front" at the altar of our local church building.  We do know that, right?  

And we know, too, that the particular style or design of your congregation's sanctuary isn't "the ONE right way" to make a space for worship, too--right?  

You may well have personal tastes and aesthetic preferences for stained glass and stonework or a stage and screens.  You may feel most at home in an old country church with clapboard siding, or the gilded walls of the Orthodox style, filled with incense, or meeting in a storefront space in folding chairs.  You may feel most at home with a praise band full of guitar players and a drumset, or with the rich harmonies of chanting voices echoing up to a vaulted ceiling, or the hot densely-packed pews of a Baptist church with swaying Gospel choirs and dancing in the aisles. Any of those may be true for you and your personal style... but we're all clear that none of these are God's officially endorsed style.  These are our constructs, our traditions, and our attempts to create space where we can pray and praise.  But none of them is so sturdy a construction as to box God in.  Each of our many and varied ways of building spaces for God's people to gather may have strengths and weaknesses, and some may have a lot of weaknesses compared to their strengths (this may be my bias here, but to me, the megachurch, stage-and-screen design is mostly weakness, and very little strength, but I ain't God here).  But none of our designs for worship space is actually able to contain God, anymore than any of our church buildings an contain ALL the air in the atmosphere.  They are full of air, but not of ALL the air.  Our worship spaces are full of God, but no single one of them has ALL of God.

That was true even when we the worship space in question was "The Temple" in Jerusalem--the place the ancient storytelling recalled as the "one place" you were supposed to go for sacrifice and festival observance in Israel's memory.  That's what the writer of Hebrews is driving at here in these verses, and it's a big deal he's making here.  That's because, unlike your local church building, which was probably designed by some architect in an office (or, like a good many small country churches, may have been just built by members as a one-room rectangle with a pitched roof and a steeple to look like every other church they'd ever seen), the Temple in Jerusalem had details described in the scriptures themselves for how to build them. They had designs given in the Torah for their lampstands and curtains, the size and the shape of the rooms, and the correct vestments for the priests to wear--all of it, as the storytelling went, dictated by God for how to do it.

And yet, even though there were actual Bible verses telling the ancient Israelites how to make their worship space, the writer of Hebrews wants to remind them, that our buildings, altars, and all the rest are pointers, not cages, for God.  The design of our worship spaces will communicate something about the God we say we believe in--church architecture can't help but convey something of our theology.  But whether it is good theology we are communicating or not is a separate question. And just like no catechism or theology book (or even the Bible) can contain all that there is to be said about God, no single building can say all that there is to be said about God through its design.  A massive Gothic cathedral may move you to awe and praise of the God who is expansive and majestic.  A modest and humble one-room church building may speak to you of the simplicity and unpretentious nature of God.  A church with clear glass windows may remind you of the beauty of God's world outside the walls, and a church with stained glass depictions of Bible stories may teach the faith to those who can't read.  But none of them gets it all.

Just that reminder is important. Especially in a time when we can be so territorial, so parochial, and so divided about who's doing it "right."  It's easy to slide into thinking that church can't "happen" unless it's with wooden pews and a communion rail, or a high altar and chanted liturgy, or a forty-minute sermon and an altar call, or fifty-three repetitions of a one-line praise chorus.  But each of our ways of worshiping God is at best a sketch--and only a sketch--of the fullness of who God is.  Some sketches may fill in a lot of details, and others will be pretty impressionistic. Others, you sometimes get the sense that the message is that God shows up even in the least likely places--but even that says something important about God.  And again, each of us  our own traditions is going to have reasons for why we choose the approach and styles we do--as a Lutheran Christian there are commitments I have to a space that centers the Word and the sacraments, the font and the table, over other kinds of designs.  There are reasons I believe that the megachurchy stage-and-band approach mostly communicates bad theology rather than good, but even with those beliefs, I have to concede that "my way" doesn't contain or constrict God, and that God reserves the right to show up and be present in places that aren't designed the way I would choose.

Today, then, maybe it's enough to remember that God is bigger that each of us and each of our traditions.  And with that, it's important to remember that whatever styles, traditions, and designs shape our ways of worshiping God, none of them actually is God.  Just like a sketch of a person is not the same as the actual person, no matter how realistic the detail, our spaces for worshiping God are not themselves God.  Remembering that allows us to see that God is showing up for the people at the church down the street, or across the country, or across the ocean, and God doesn't need your or my permission to do that. God just shows up.

Keep your eyes open, then, today.  Pay attention to how your tradition's style and approach speak of God, and also how your neighbor's tradition speaks of God as well.  And let the sketches all around us keep pointing us to the Real Thing.

Lord God, help us to use our traditions as channels that point us to you, so that we never confuse our religious structures with the Real You.  Help us to love you fully, both through the traditions we bring and beyond them.

Alabanza Over Everything--July 8, 2021

Alabanza Over Everything--July 8, 2021

"For every high priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices; hence it is necessary for this priest also to have something to offer." [Hebrews 8:3]

What are humans for?

I mean that question seriously: what would you say our purpose is, we humans, in our place in creation?  How would you answer the question, "Why are the humans at all?"

Of course, we've been asking that question in some form or another for as long as we've been around.  And countless philosophers, theologians, prophets, mystics, and navel-gazing college students putting off studying for finals have offered answers.  So while I won't dare to pretend that I can solve this puzzle once and for all, I do want to offer a thought on how we consider an answer.

One of the things that seems distinctive about humanity, compared with say, asparagus ferns or hedgehogs, is our capacity to recognize goodness and beauty and to call attention to it, simply for the sake of that goodness and beauty.  We have the ability to see something lovely, something true, something honorable, and to lift it up, hold it up to the light, and to say to others, "See this thing?  It is good!"  Bees can tell other bees where to find flowers with their impressive, tiny choreography, but that's for the utility of getting pollen so the hive doesn't starve.  A dog can be captivated by a butterfly (or a passing truck, let's be honest here), but it's hard to tell if there's anything more than just curiosity going on it is mind as it cocks its head to the side and watches it float on the breeze. Humans, though, we can name the goodness of things, find joy in them, and even give thanks to the One who made a world that includes flowers, bees, butterflies, and curious dogs.  We can lift them up in acts of praise.  We can offer up the beauty of creation, saying back to God, "We see this good thing you have made; we are learning all about its intricacy and goodness.  And we praise you for having created it."

The late Robert Farrar Capon wrote a book along these lines, called An Offering of Uncles.  And the gist of his premise is that this capacity for lifting up the creation, piece by piece, in praise and joyful celebration with God, is what we humans are made for.  And he notes as well that this is basically what a priest does.  Strip away the different nuances of traditions and sects, and basically a priest lifts up good things in way that says to God, "Thank you for this," or "We praise you for your goodness--here is a sign of that appreciation, from on behalf of all of us."  In a sense, what it is to be a priest is just a picture of what it is to be human: to have the capacity to see the goodness in God's world as a means for communing with the God who made such goodness in the first place.

We would be foolish to pretend that when we offer something to God--whether it's a sheaf of wheat from the harvest, a lamb from the flocks, or a check from your bank account--we are giving something to God that God does not already have.  That's utter nonsense.  It's all God's anyway, and as C.S. Lewis once famously pointed out, a kid who borrows money from their parents to buy the birthday presents hasn't made the parent one cent richer in the transaction, and yet it is good and fitting for the children to want to honor the goodness of the parents with a gift--even if it is always with borrowed resources.

I've been thinking about this human vocation to see and to lift up what is good in God's world, and thereby to celebrate and honor the goodness of creation as well as Creator all at once, especially since once again recently experiencing the musical In the Heights now that it's a movie.  The unofficial grandmother of the neighborhood, Abuela Claudia, is remembered for how she called attention to the beauty of little things that others overlooked--feeding breadcrumbs to birds, glass bottles, and the night sky.  She is remembered for having said of these things, "Alabanza," which, we are told by a helpful translating narrator, means, "To lift this thing to God and say, 'Praise to this'."  In celebrating the goodness of creation, and naming it to God as we lift it up, we cannot help but also give glory to the Creator.  It's a whole theology of human purpose in one word: Alabanza.  Our calling--our place in the universe--is to be beings capable of seeing beauty, truth, and goodness, and lifting them up in celebration for others to see, and to let God know we acknowledge them as well.  It is to speak an "Alabanza" over all God's creation, and in so doing, to speak it to God as well.

We are all priests, then, lifting up everything we find and making of it an offering to the One who made it in the first place.  And in a sense, we are called to give ourselves away in the process of lifting up the goodness of the world around us (especially where that goodness has been denied, stifled, or put down by others), and in praise to the God who creates all things good.  That's the other thing about Abuela Claudia from In the Heights: she spends herself to lift up everyone else around her as an offering of her very life as well.  Without giving away too much plot, it's fair to say that for Claudia, every day is a chance to spend her energy honoring the goodness waiting to be seen in others and to do good for them, whether it is cooking for them, taking in kids who need protection or guidance, or giving away a windfall.  When the characters in the story are brought to a moment to reflect on all that Abuela Claudia has done and been and meant for them, they come back to the word she taught and embodied for them:  "Alabanza."  They sing, "Alabanza, alabanza a Doňa Claudia, Seňor," like a hymn--and indeed, it is a song of praise, which means something like, "Praise, praise, for the honorable Claudia, Lord."  It is both a statement about the woman and the God who made her.  

The writer of Hebrews sees in Jesus something similar--Jesus is the One who, as the true and perfect high priest, does what we human being are all meant to do.  He embodies our humanity and our human purpose more fully than any of the rest of us can.  And ultimately, what Jesus offers is himself.  He spends his very life giving himself away for our sake, in order to create communion between humanity and God.  In that sense, he is what it looks like to be fully and beautifully human, as well as being the fullness of God.

I wonder--how might it change our outlook on this day if we see ourselves and our calling as priests in the world, whose job is not necessarily to "look religious," but rather to lift up every thing, every person, every moment in creation that comes across our path, to name its goodness and to praise its virtue as well as the God who has created it, and to help to bring forth the goodness in all things.  It will mean everything and everywhere you go is holy.  It will mean every moment is ripe with blessing.  It will mean even the smallest and most forgettable details are able to be seen as full of glory, worthy of having the word "Alabanza" all over it.

Alabanza, Lord, indeed.  Alabanza.

The Meeting Place--July 7, 2021

The Meeting Place--July 7, 2021

"Now the main point in what we are saying is this: we have such a high priest, one who is seated at the right hand of the throne of Majesty in the heavens, a minister in the sanctuary and the true tent that the Lord, and not any mortal, has set up." [Hebrews 8:1-2]

Did you ever get invited to someone's house for, say, a summer backyard picnic or barbecue, and when you ask, "What can I bring?" your hosts simply and gracefully say, "Just yourself"?

I hope you have.  

I would like to think that at some point in your life you have been extended such an all-encompassing offer that demands no payment or transaction on your part, but instead prepares everything necessary, simply as a gift.  It is a beautiful thing to be shown hospitality like that.  Having someone say to you, "Everything is taken care of--we would just like the pleasure of your company," is a statement of pure, unconditional welcome.  I hope you have known that in your life so far.

I hear echoes of that same kind of all-sufficient graciousness in these verses that begin what we call Chapter Eight of Hebrews.  God has provided everything to make relationship with us possible--nothing is left to us to figure out or set up.  Seriously.  It's like that line from the hymn, "Great Is Thy Faithfulness," that goes, "All I have needed, thy hand hath provided--great is thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me."  And it's true.

For a while now in this letter (or possibly sermon--we're not sure what form this document first took), the writer of Hebrews has been going to great lengths to show how Jesus embodies a different kind of priesthood from the system that arose in ancient Israel.  Jesus, we've seen, doesn't need to keep offering repeated sacrifices, nor any sacrifices for his own sin, and he will never die and leave a need for a replacement.  He is both the sacrifice and the presenter of the sacrifice, all in one.  And at the bottom of all those claims is the amazing idea that God has provided this Jesus as the reality toward which all those previous generations of frail, fallible, replaceable priests had been pointing all along.  In other words, if there's a need for someone to be a mediator between God and humanity, God has already provided it in Jesus.  It's not up to us to find someone among us who is up to the task or worthy of the role--God has raised up Jesus precisely because Jesus can be for us what the old priests of the distant past could not be.

So... God provides the person who can fill the role of mediator and priest.  But not only that, God builds the meeting place.  In the recesses of Israel's ancient memory, the meeting place between God and humanity was a portable temporary structure--basically, a tent--called the tabernacle.  And while the Torah says that God gave the directions for how to make it and what it should look like, it was human craftsmen and artisans who built it, and it was human laborers who set it up and took it down as the people moved through the wilderness.  But now the writer of Hebrews says that, like the old levitical priesthood, the tabernacle was always meant to point ahead to a different tent--the "true" tent--that God has made.  

Notice, of course, that it's not that God needs a canopy from the sun or the rain.  God doesn't need a "place" at all, any more than you need a box in your yard to hold the atmosphere.  God's being is always beyond our boxes and attempts to contain the divine.  God doesn't need a house, a temple, or a tent.  We do.  We need a sense of "meeting place" because we are finite beings who think and experience reality in terms of "place" and "time" and the relationship between them.  So because of our need, God builds the meeting place--again, in Jesus.  Jesus is the priest, the sacrifice, and in a sense, the temple itself.  He is the point at which we come face to face with God, like the old movable tent the wandering formerly enslaved Israelites set up on their wilderness journey.  And, guess what--God is the One who has provided this, too.

Think of it: God is so deeply invested in relating to humanity that God does all the setting up. God makes all the preparations.  The table is set.  The feast is ready.  God has raised up all we need in Jesus--he is the meeting place, the mediator, and the one who feeds us with himself.  And as we work up the courage to approach this welcome table of God, should we find ourselves wondering or worrying, "What are we supposed to bring to this grand celebration with God?" the answer will always come back with a gracious smile:  "Just yourselves."

Lord God, thank you for providing all we need... in Jesus.

 

Good, All the Way Down--July 6, 2021

Good, All the Way Down--July 6, 2021

"For the law appoints as high priests those who are subject to weakness, but the oath, which came later than the law, appoints a Son who has been made perfect forever." [Hebrews 7:28]

It is devastating to lose a hero, not to death, but to disillusionment.

It is heartbreaking to have respected and looked up to someone, only to hear or see them later acting in ways that seem to contradict all that you had admired in them.

It is crushing to have placed your trust in someone and in their character, and then to have that trust lost and broken when they disappoint you, either by selling out to something reprehensible, or maybe by revealing they were never really worthy of your trust in the first place.

My goodness, even with fictional characters, it can be quite a blow to lose faith in someone you have been led to believe was good and noble.  I remember for myself feeling like I'd been punched in the gut to lose Atticus Finch as a hero, as I read the late Harper Lee's Go Set A Watchman describing an old man Atticus who was as insidiously racist and bigoted in that later volume as the corrupt judicial system he had fought against when I read To Kill A Mockingbird in tenth-grade English class.  To have had this character built up as someone good, decent, and willing to risk his own position and privilege for the sake of someone targeted by systemic racism... and then to have a later window on this character in old age, who had somehow become the very thing I thought he had taught me to resist--well, that's a loss I am still feeling.  One of the things you hope for in literature is that the characters you get to know in one place will stay the same because their lives are bound up in between the covers of a book--and here, I felt like I lost one of the steady anchor points I had been leaning on since high school.

It happens regularly with the people we know in real life, too.  Folks we had looked up to, or thought of as honest, decent-hearted, compassionate people, sometimes reveal a streak of meanness, or crudeness, or casual hatred, and it makes you wonder how to deal with the contradiction.  Do these folks not see the disconnect between the parts of themselves that are noble and the parts that are rotten?  Do they think the rotten parts are actually good or--gasp--holy (like Pascal said, no one does evil so completely and cheerful as when it's done with religious conviction)?  Have they always thought and acted in bigoted or cruel ways and you had just never seen it before, or is it a new temptation they are wrestling with? For whatever else good or ill there is in this age of social media, one thing it certainly has done is to reveal a lot of the things we each assume everyone around us will like or agree with--and with every like, re-tweet, or share, we discover some pretty terrible things about the people around us that we just didn't know before.  And maybe each of us is revealing to others some pretty unsavory things about ourselves.  (The answer, of course, is not to just go back to hiding the terrible and hateful things inside us, but to change--to stop being terrible, hateful, self-centered, and crude.  But that's a conversation for another day.)

Well, if you know what it is like, then, to have lost faith in someone you had looked up to, who then let you down when they revealed something truly deplorable in their words or actions, then you can understand why it is such a big deal for the writer of Hebrews to see in Jesus someone who will not leave us disillusioned.  While every other religious professional--priests in the old levitical system of ancient Israel, to the megachurch pastor holding a gigantic rally and livestreaming it on the internet--will let us down in some way, Jesus won't.  He is the one who, as Hebrews puts it, "has been made perfect forever."

Look, I can't stop the way each of us is going to have to deal with erstwhile heroes who reveal something rotten about themselves in life.  I can do my best to work on myself, and to be both as openly honest with others and also to strive not to be a hateful, cruel, or self-centered person.  But I'm going to let you down, too, at some point.  If I haven't already disappointed you, don't you fret--wait long enough, I'll get around to letting you down, too.  That's why the solution the writer of Hebrews offers isn't to point to me.  The solution is not, and can never be, "Steve won't let you down!" anymore than it can be "Atticus Finch won't let you down!" or anybody else but Jesus.  

To be honest, the primary reason I find Jesus so compelling isn't the stories of miracles or healings, but that in the way of Jesus we find someone who is completely and authentically good, without ulterior motives, without a selfish angle, without a hidden streak of socially-acceptable bigotry just waiting to be found when you scratch the surface.  You never have to worry what terrible slogan Jesus will have slapped on the back of his truck on a bumper stickers.  You never have to worry about being caught off guard that Jesus will tell a racist joke or treat other people as less-than.  You never have to worry that Jesus will turn out to root for a "Me and My Group First" agenda and try to baptize selfishness as some kind of virtue.  He's good, all the way down.  And that's why I can't help but place my life in the hands of this same Jesus, to walk the way of Jesus and to be filled with the life of Jesus.  After being let down too many times by people near and dear to me, Jesus has shown himself to be different--like the old spiritual puts it, "he hasn't failed me yet."

Lord Jesus, thank you for your authentic goodness--enable us to rely on you today, and to be transformed in light of your perfect love.