From Trust to Love--August 1, 2023

From Trust to Love--August 1, 2023

"[The LORD] brought [Abram] outside and said, 'Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them.' Then he said to him, 'So shall your descendants be.' And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness." [Genesis 15:5-6]

Long before the commandment is given, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your mind and all your strength," the invitation is given: "Trust me.  I will do good to you and yours."  The essential tenet of Israel's faith--to love God--doesn't come until centuries have passed since old father Abraham takes a leap of faith and trusts the impossible-sounding promise of the Divine.

For whatever else that means, it certainly says to me that we can't love God without first trusting God.  And we probably can't love other people very well without trust, too.  

But for the moment, let's just consider our relationship with God.  It is certainly true that loving God (and yes, its corollary of loving our neighbors) is at the core of our faith as Christians.  Jesus says those are the two greatest commandments, and they both come from the heart of the Torah in the Jewish faith in which Jesus was raised.  Certainly, to be a follower of Jesus involves loving God, as well as loving other people.  But even that basic Christianity 101-level teaching is built on a more essential prior foundation: trusting the God whom we are learning to love.

The same is true, of course, in families and households: raising children means teaching them from their earliest days that they can trust you, if you are a grown-up in their lives.  While of course, the hope is that those children can say, "I love you," to the parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and siblings who will be a part of their lives, that love is called forth by the experience of trusting those adults and family members. And that means, of course, that parents have to model being trustworthy, even when they are not shown love in return.  When children are very young and have no means of expressing affection, but really are just able to communicate need, parents still provide for their children and show that they are reliable.  And when children get older and their adolescence makes them bristle at everything their parents say, it is the job of the parents still to show themselves to be trustworthy, even when the children are rude or thoughtless, irresponsible or unreliable.  It is the role of the grown-ups to be trustworthy, so that children (of whatever age) can trust those grown-ups--and then, to be sure, that is meant to call forth love from the children just as surely as they have already been loved by the parents.

Well, I want to suggest that our relationship with God is not that different.  So when we look back to those first tenuous beginnings of the story of the people of God, we don't begin with God decreeing commandments, but earlier and further back.  We start with God being trustworthy and calling forth trust from the people with whom God chooses to be in relationship.  We start with a promise out of the blue to Abraham and Sarah--one that comes with no strings attached, no fine print, and no conditions.  It is a one-sided promise, made wholly by God and dependent completely on God to carry it out.  And it is from that beginning, as God is revealed to be faithful and worthy of the leap of faith Abraham will make, that the groundwork is laid for Abraham and Sarah's descendants to be given the commandment, "Love the Lord your God."  Only after they have learned that this God is worthy of their trust can they be called to love God.

And the same is true, I think, for us.  As much as we want our children, our church families, and our congregations and communities to love God (and that is a noble desire, to be sure), we don't start there with just barking commandments at them.  We don't start with, "Here is what you have to do in order to make God happy."  We start with, "Here is God who already unconditionally loves you and is completely faithful and worthy of your trust." We begin by showing them the ways God has been reliable before.  We help them to see the signs in their own lives that reveal God's goodness.  We tell them the stories of how God has come through for God's people before, and we just let them soak those stories in.  And from there--out of that rich soil--we trust that seeds that are planted will start to grow.  They will come to love God, and to love the neighbors God has put in their lives--but that comes as a response to realizing they are loved and they are secure in the care of Someone who is reliable... faithful... worthy of their trust.  Love is possible when trust lays the groundwork.

Maybe that's worth remembering in our churches and congregations, too.  If we want to see people deepening their commitment and love for the work of their church, maybe we have to first show the community as a whole that we are worthy of their trust--that we will be there with them for the long haul, and that we will love the communities where we are regardless of what we "get" out of it.  We earn the trust of those around us when we show up in times of struggle or need.  We earn the faith of people around us when we don't bait and switch people with a conditional gospel that starts out sounding like, "God loves you," but keeps adding fine print like, "... but not if you're...." or "as long as you..." or "unless you should happen to..."  We become the kind of churches to which people are drawn when they know that God's love is reliably shared with them.  In other words, others can be drawn more deeply into love when they first come to trust us as a community of God's people.

So let's start there.  Whether it's children or grandchildren in your own household, or kids in your own local congregation, or the wider community that is watching and listening, let's be people who keep pointing to the utter faithfulness and trustworthiness of God.  Let's tell the stories of where God has been faithful in our lives.  Let's share the inherited memory of God's people in the Scriptures of every time God has come through in the past.  Let's start making sure that everyone around us knows they are loved already, unconditionally, by the God who keeps promises.  And let's just see if that doesn't help each of us to grow first in faith... and then into love.

Lord God, remind us of your faithfulness, so that we can trust you more deeply, and love you more fully.

The Gospel According to Journey--July 31, 2023

The Gospel According to Journey--July 31, 2023

"Love is always believing..." [1 Corinthians 13:7b]

It's not that love is gullible; it's more that love is brave enough to risk trusting.

I want us to be clear about that here from the get-go as we turn in our looking at love from First Corinthians to our next focal point, because it's easy to miss the point.  After all, a lot of our English translations take this next phrase from Paul's description of Christ-like love in 1 Corinthians 13 and render it as "love believes all things."  And that could make it sound like the hallmark of genuine love is getting duped into buying the Brooklyn Bridge--as if love requires you to be fooled, bamboozled, or hoodwinked by every schemer and snake-oil salesman that comes into town.  

But that's not really what Paul is saying here.  When someone has lied to you before, love doesn't obligate you to fall for another scam on the basis of some principle that "love believes all things."  And neither does it mean that love requires us to believe nonsense or outlandish conspiracy theories.  Genuine love still believes the truth about things (as we saw already earlier this year, when we looked how "love rejoices in the truth"), so we're not talking about subscribing to nonsense about faking the moon landing or nanorobots in your flu shot or lizard people in the government or Elvis still being alive.  It's not that love believes any impossible or deceitful thing you tell it; it's that love doesn't give up on the hard work of trusting, even for all the ways that trust can be betrayed, broken, or lost.  

Paul's language here in this partial verse has the feel of saying "always" rather than being woodenly literal with "all things."  That is, the apostle is saying "love always believes," or "love is consistently trusting," rather than "Love will be duped into accepting whatever malarkey you tell it."  So, not to be too on the nose here, but maybe it really is like the Journey song: to grow in love, Paul might tell us, "Don't stop believing..."

And again, it's not just the idea of faith in some abstract concept, or belief in the power of belief (it's not like Fraulein Maria sings in The Sound of Music, "I have confidence in confidence alone...").  Trust always has an object--the something (or, for our purposes, the Someone) in whom we place our trust.   Trust holds like an anchor.  Trust is willing to do what the beloved directs us to do, even if we can't see how it will work out or don't understand why.  To love anyone well in this world requires at least some level of trust, and that's certainly true of loving God.  Because we have found God to be trustworthy in our lives--always faithful, always reliable, always coming through on what God promises--we are able to love God, and also to follow God's direction that we love others, even when we don't understand how or why sometimes.  

Maybe that's as far as we can go for one day.  We start with deepening our trust in God--not merely believing in the abstract concept of a higher being, but trusting this particular God whom we have come to know in Jesus.   When we stop and think for a moment about how God has been faithful to us, how God has been worthy of our trust, it grounds us to take the next step... and the next... in faith.  We may not always see all the way down the road, but we trust the one who walks with us, and we find that trust allows us to love, both the God who guides us, and the people whom God calls us to love as neighbors and fellow sojourners along the way.

So as we continue to look for ways we can grow in love, both toward God and toward others, let's start with simply remembering again how God has been reliable in our lives all our days, and allowing our trust in God to give us the stability to risk loving the people around us.   In other words, if you want to grow in love today, don't stop believing.

Lord God, remind us of your trustworthiness today, so that we can grow in love.

Diaper Duty, During and After--July 28, 2023

Diaper Duty, During and After--July 28, 2023

"We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies." [Romans 8:22-23]

When my kids were in diapers, I could hardly wait for that piece of parenting to be over.  

Don't get me wrong--there were absolutely wonderful things about those early years of their lives, through toddlerhood, before they were out of their Pampers.   I can barely believe these days that I used to hold my daughter cradled in one arm, and now she's racing to be a teenager as fast as she can.  I remember playing at the park with my son when we had a free Friday afternoon, and how he would run across the bridge over the creek, climb on every piece of playground equipment, and laugh out loud in his delightful bright voice.  But diaper duty was never a highlight.  

Changing diapers as a fact of life put a damper on what you could do, how long you could be away from home (or at least away from a space where you could change a diaper discreetly), and what accessories you needed to have wherever you went.  It affected the rhythms of the day ("Are we ready to leave for the party?"  "Wait, we better change diapers one more time before we get in the car..."), and it seemed to always hit at the least convenient moments.  But it's part of the price of admission when you are a parent of a pre-potty-trained kiddo.  There's no way around it--as the old song about the bear hunt goes, "you've gotta go through it."

Now, all through those years of toddlerhood, some part of me intellectually knew that the diaper thing wasn't forever.  You live on planet Earth long enough, and you come to know how the seasons of life and stages of childhood typically go.  So I knew that there would come a point when we were done we changing stations in public restrooms.  And I knew that there would one day be a "Last Box of Diapers" we'd have to buy for our kids to use.  But in the meantime, we never stopped changing diapers just because it wasn't fun or easy.  Parents don't get to skip out on the diaper duty just because it won't be around forever.  While you're in that stage, you have to do it, and you have to do it diligently, faithfully, and consistently, because you care about your child.  And it isn't only a future version of your child that you love, but the present-tense child who is both adorable and also generates a lot of soiled diapers.  Yes, there is a future on the horizon toward which you can look in which those old routines and accessories are no longer in your life, but in the meantime, you bear with what your children need now.

I want to suggest that there's a similar tension for the community of Jesus, too, as people who live in the tension between future hope and present-tense life as we know it.  We are people who live in light of God's promise, at the last, to make all things new.  And we are also simultaneously people who live in this world as it is, with all the violence, destruction, waste, greed, and ruin that we inflict on it and on each other.   Both are true, and both are part of how we face each day.  If we only ever think about the future when war is no more and nobody dies of hunger or exposure to the elements, we will be indifferent or oblivious to the suffering around us--and that ignorance will only increase the suffering (like if you just ignored the child with the dirty diaper rather than changing them--that makes it worse, even if you're not personally adding to the problem).  And on the other hand, if we only ever keep our heads down in the present without a sense of future newness, it will be nearly impossible to avoid becoming resentful, bitter, and burned out at the thought that there is no hope for something better.  We need to hold onto the hope that God is making all things new, and to let that be part of the reason we find strength and endurance to keep bearing with things as they are... and to do our part to make them better.

With children growing from infancy through toddlerhood into pre-school and kindergarten, you know that there's work to be done right now to help them where they are at, and there's also work going on inside them, developmentally, as they grow and change into human beings who can use the bathroom on their own, or hold their own cups, or take their own bites of macaroni and cheese.  And with the world in which we live, we can hold onto hope that, indeed, God is making all things new, and at the same time we can understand our calling to help with messes that are happening right now.  Just because one day there will be no hunger doesn't mean I don't have a calling to help feed my hungry neighbor now--in fact, that future hope is part of the reason I am called to help them now.  Just because one day no one will have to live in fear of abuse from a violent spouse or romantic partner doesn't mean I can ignore the needs of those victims now--but just the opposite.  Just because one day our weapons will be beaten into plowshares and pruning hooks doesn't mean I can be apathetic to those who are made into refugees today because an invading army razed their village to the ground, or robotic drones have blown up their home.  We live with hope for the new creation, while living in this world as it is, and that means attending to the messes in this world right now, with eyes wide open to their existence.  And we do that because of love--because we love God's creation, or at least because as people loved by God we are learning to love it as God does.

To be honest, for a lot of the last two millennia, we Christians have not always done a very good job at that.  We have a habit of talking so much about life after death (and even then, often only as an otherworldly celestial "up there" rather than a renewed creation "down here") that we act as though we have no calling to care for the hurts of the world in which we are living now.  We can distort our hope to sound only like "Jesus came to get souls into heaven," rather than Paul's way of saying it, that "all of creation is waiting for redemption, which includes our bodies and this physical world, too."  And when we do that, we often shrug off the needs to care about hungry neighbors, entrenched poverty, the needs of those grappling with drug addiction, systemic racism, poison in our drinking water, or people around the world suffering in drought and record heat (the list could go on and on).  But that's like saying, "I have no obligation to change diapers now because one day my kid will be old enough to be potty trained."  While the second half of that sentence may well be true--one day your kids may not need diapers anymore--that doesn't get you off the hook for the needs right now, because you love your child.  And you don't only love the future version of your child, but the present-moment child who requires a diaper bag and all the rest of the accessories and inconveniences that come with them.

As Christians, our calling is to learn to love the way God loves, which includes loving the world in both the present-tense as well as the future hope.  And that kind of love means bearing with the world as it is, attending to its needs, and caring about the suffering in it right now, rather than writing it all off as "stuff that will go away one day in God's future."  To love anyone is to love them as they are right now, even if there is also hope for growth, development, and renewal in the future.  So we bear the messiness, the tediousness, the unpleasantness, and the lowliness of those serving roles now--whether it's changing diapers, cleaning up trash by the highway, organizing food for the local food bank, or keeping vigil with a dying friend.  We do that because love calls us to bear with one another's needs in the present, even while we hope for a day when all those needs are met, and all things are made new.

One day, creation won't need our help to be cleaned up from industrial waste or toxic spills, and one day, our neighbors won't be at risk of going hungry.  But today they do.  Today we are called to love them in those needs, because we know God loves them enough to make all things new in the future.

Where are we being called to show our love today?

Lord God, give us the endurance to bear the needs of the world around us, even while we await the new and renewed creation you have promised.

Gardeners for the World--July 27, 2023

Gardeners for the World--July 27, 2023

"I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God...." [Romans 8:18-19]

Every so often, I find myself really appreciative that I took Spanish in high school--for the theology it taught me.  Sure, I suppose it's useful for those times when I cross paths with someone who only speaks Spanish, or if I am reading the Spanish-language pages of an instruction manual because something spilled on the English, or if I want to know what I'm ordering in a Mexican restaurant.  But learning Spanish also has helped me think theologically.  Here's an example that still blows my mind: in Spanish, the same verb, esperar, means "to hope" and "to wait."  Waiting and hoping are, from that perspective, two sides of the same coin.   And both of them are about enduring something in the present in light of the anticipated future.

We English speakers tend to think of "waiting" as just a waste of time when you're doing nothing.  Waiting is what you do in little rooms at the doctor's office, thumbing through old magazines or scrolling on your phone.  In our minds, it's the time when nothing is happening, and when you can't do anything about it.  But when you think of "waiting" and "hoping" together, that changes things, doesn't it?  Hope points you forward, and it gives you energy to move toward your goal.  If I plant seeds in the ground and hope for a harvest at the end of the summer, then it is that hope that pushes me on hot sunny days to pull weeds, add fertilizer, and water the plants.  There is work to be done when you are hoping--and yet, you are willing to bear that additional burden of labor and sweat because of the object of your hope.  You want the zucchini vines to produce zucchini, and so in light of that future harvest, you work to make it happen.  And even your waiting while things grow silently is different--it is a useful, even loving, kind of waiting, because it feels purposeful and directed, not aimless and futile.  It really does make a difference whether you picture a doctor's office waiting room or the active work of tending a garden when you think of "waiting" and "hope."

Well, if you can hold that idea in your mind for a moment and stretch it out wider, that's where Paul points us in this passage from his letter to the Romans.  In these words that many of us heard this past Sunday, Paul pictures all of creation in that place of expect hope that pushes us toward a goal.  All of creation, ourselves included, is "eagerly longing" for God to make all things new, and for the fulfillment of God's dream of redemption and restoration.  And it's that vibrant kind of "longing"--the enduring, actively-tending-the-garden kind, rather than the tedious, aimlessly-doomscrolling-in-the-waiting-room kind--that all of creation is engaged in.  It's like all of the universe is striving (Paul will later use the imagery of labor pains) to bring forth the fullness, the goal, the completion of what God intends.  And in the mean time, the task is hard... the hours are long... and the work is sweaty.  But we, along with all of creation, keeps at it, because hope keeps leading us forward, and because love keeps energizing us to go on.

If you love the plants in your garden, you'll be willing to put in the work to tend the sprouts, care for the soil, and help everything produce a harvest.  The future toward which you are headed (harvest time) gives you the passion and hope to keep spending your energy for the sake of what you care about.  Well, zoom that out to the size of the universe, and you get a sense of what Paul is talking about.  All of creation is straining toward God's promised redemption. And for the followers of Jesus, who are in on the open secret that God is making all things new, our hope in what God will do keeps giving us passion and energy to tend our little corners of God's garden.  With your tomatoes and cucumbers, it might be weeding, watering, and pruning.  In the wider picture of God's Reign, it might mean feeding neighbors, cleaning up the trash along the highway, comforting a friend who is grieving, advocating for justice, providing a meal for a family without housing, speaking up against racism, or welcoming someone who feels left out.  Like the work of tending the garden, we do these things because they anticipate the promised future, and we are willing to bear the sweat and dirt of the work now because we care about the people, the communities, and the world around us.

That's the difference between the kind of waiting that just twiddles its thumbs to pass the time and the hopeful sort that keeps moving and working toward the future for which we are waiting.  Today, we are called to be gardeners for the world around us, spending our strength and bearing the long hours, because we care about what God is growing among us.

Lord God, give us energy to keep giving our strength in actions that bless the world you so love.

The Stranger as Sacrament--July 26, 2023

The Stranger as Sacrament--July 26, 2023

"Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it." [Hebrews 13:2]

Be kind to strangers... to "the other," says the Bible, because you just might have been brought face to face with the messengers of God. All of a sudden the stakes of your short temper with the single mom juggling three kids ahead of you in line at the grocery store just got a lot higher, eh? The writer of Hebrews whispers, "Mighta been angels, the whole lot of 'em. Now... just how important was it that you got your plastic box of pre-washed spring mix salad greens and bag of Oreos three minutes faster if those kids wouldn't have been holding up the line? More important than the way you treat a quartet of the heavenly host?"

Jesus, too, never himself one to fold in a game of cards, doubles down on this train of thought in those familiar words, "As you did it to the least of these... you did it to me." And now all of a sudden, the hungry face I turned away because I thought he might be a freeloader... and the shadowed face behind bars that I ignored because I thought all prisoners were worthy of my condemnation... and the lonely face... and the sick face... and the... uh-oh, stranger's face... all of those faces now bear the eyes of Jesus himself. Jesus upped the ante even from where the book of Hebrews had set it--now the face of the stranger is not just a potential angel. The stranger is Jesus himself... and, of course, as we insist in the ancient words of orthodoxy in the Creed week by week, wherever Jesus is, none other than God is there, too. So now, the way you treat a stranger is... <gulp> the way you have just treated the almighty Maker of all things.  And the ways we bear with the needs of a stranger, even if their needs are different from our own, become the ways we show love to none other than God.

There's a line of C. S. Lewis, the great 20th century British theologian and writer, who says, "Next to the blessed sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses."  That is, as much as we recognize the real presence of Christ in the bread and cup at Holy Communion, Christ himself has also promised his presence among the "least of these."  And classically, the language the church has used for "things in which Christ's presence is communicated through ordinary means" is... a sacrament.  If Christ can be truly presence in bread that someone baked this morning, and if Christ's promise can be made real through water that just came out of our tap, then certainly Christ can choose to be present in the face of another human being, who is already made in the image of God.

Now, if those stakes weren't high enough, even the word the Bible uses for "stranger" is loaded. Our English translations use the word "hospitality" in this verse--"do not neglect to show hospitality...". But to be truthful, most of us hear "hospitality," and we picture someone who offers a coaster and a glass of lemonade to the company they have invited... or the concierge desk at the hotel who offers bathrobes for use of paying customers. "Hospitality," in those circumstances, is not much of a gamble, and you only have to show it to people who have either given you money to do it, or people who you already like enough to invite to your house. But the Bible's word is more...adventuresome. The word beneath our English "hospitality" here in this verse is the Greek "philoxenia," which is made up of the two words "phile-" (which you probably already know is one of the words for "love," as in Philadelphia or "bibliophile" for book-lover) and the word "xenos," which means... well, "stranger," or "outsider," or "foreigner," or just... "the other." The one thing it does NOT mean is "people who are already like you in every way." Hebrews is not merely saying, "Be nice to other Christians whom you haven't met yet." Other Christians aren't called "stranger" in the New Testament--they are brothers and sisters. For the writer of Hebrews to talk about "strangers"/"xenos/xenia", it means we are, by definition, talking about people who are not already part of the "family" we call church. It is not just a welcome to "safe" people... it is a welcome to "the other." Those are the stakes when the Bible uses the word "xenos."

You know the word "xenos" already because you almost certainly already know the word "xenophobia," the fear of outsiders and foreigners. And even if you didn't know the word for it, you know what it is to live in a culture of xenophobia... because we are living in one. As polarized as we are, often from even the neighbor across the street or down the block, and as much as the loud voices from the screens around us encourage us to fear "the other" as a threat to us... to our way of life... to everything, we are increasingly baited to be afraid of whomever and whatever is different from what I already think, or look like, or believe, or hold dear. We live in a culture that is not predisposed to welcome "the other" these days, however you take the phrase.

And yet--rather than saying, "Beware of those strangers who don't share our culture, our faith, our language, our way of life... they are dangerous!" (and in the supremely cosmopolitan Roman Empire, you couldn't help but cross paths with peoples from all sorts of places, cultures, and creeds), the writer of Hebrews says, those very strangers just might be angels you do not have the eyes to see yet. Like Jesus' own words about "the least of these," the writer of Hebrews dares us see in a new way--a daring, risky way. The "other," the "stranger," the faces who are different, they are the very people we are commanded to receive, to care for, and to love--not out of condescending pity for "those poor souls," but in fact because they may well be the ones God has sent as divine holy messengers across your path.

Curious, isn't it, how we can be so concerned in our Facebook posts about wanting to call our country "back to the Bible"... and yet to forget, stifle, or silence the clear command of Scripture when it comes to how we see the "stranger" and the "other" who cross our path in real life off of the screens. Go ahead, protest about how it sounds impractical or dangerous or foolish to welcome those the Bible would call "foreigners", if you want--but you cannot do so on the grounds that the Bible is backing your argument. The living voice of the Scripture is always pushing us to do things that strike the world as impractical, dangerous, and foolish--that's one of the ways you know it is really the living God and not just our own self-interest talking.

So today, let us dare to hear the words of the Bible in all their force. We are not given an "inspirational suggestion" to "be nice to the guests at your dinner party," but a firm command to love--to love!--those who would get labeled "foreigner," "stranger," "outsider," and "other." And in order to love them, rather than pitying them, we have to follow the other directive Hebrews gives us: we must learn to see the "stranger" and the "other" as quite possibly the very angels of God, come to fill the empty places around us. Let us dare to actually do what Jesus says, and to open our eyes to seeing that "the least of these" bring us face to face with none other than the living God.

Lord Jesus, help us to see you and to see your messengers everywhere you show up... let us recognize your real presence in the sacrament of the stranger.

An Absence of Bouncers--July 25, 2023

An Absence of Bouncers--July 25, 2023

[The farmer in Jesus' parable said:] "Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn." [Matthew 13:30]

I know this may be difficult to hear, but Jesus doesn't need us to be enforcers for God.  Neither, it turns out, does God need bouncers, gatekeepers, or a brute squad to kick out the riff-raff.  

If God is presently willing to bear with the world being a mix of goodness and rottenness, of wheat and weeds as it were, side by side, then we are going to have to learn to be OK with God's choice.  And we are going to have to let go of our need to root out the ones we think of as "bad people" in the supposed name of holiness and purity (which is often the way we dress up bigotry in pious clothing).  Because God simply doesn't need us to be the hired muscle to hunt down "undesirables" and run them out of town--God isn't interested in running them out of town right now anyway. And at whatever point it's time for crooks and criminals to go, God doesn't need our help.  Our services are not required.

I think this is actually one of the harder things for us to accept about Jesus' understanding of the Reign of God: he is a whole lot less fussy about maintaining perfect purity and holiness around him than we think a respectable Messiah should be.  That, of course, was also what kept getting Jesus in trouble with the Respectable Religious Leaders in the storytelling of the gospels, too: Jesus was unbothered by sharing a table with "those sinners and tax collectors," striking up a conversation with an outsider, healing someone at the request of a soldier in the enemy army, and being counted among the unclean and outcast. But if we take Jesus' parable seriously, we'll realize Jesus believes that's actually God's policy in dealing with the world, too!  God is willing to let the world continue for the present time in this tension between good and rottenness, and God is not insistent on pulling out the weeds from the wheat in this life.  As we saw yesterday, Jesus says that God is willing to bear with tares in the field, even if that makes God look foolish or weak in the eyes of the neighbors, for the sake of preserving what is precious and saving what is beloved.

All of that means that we don't get to deputize ourselves to get rid of the people we have identified as "sinners," or "troublemakers," or "weeds."  We don't need to do it for the sake of God's purity or some divine allergy to sin, and we don't need to it for the sake of God's honor and reputation, either.  God is already willing to bear with whatever ridicule comes God's way for choosing to save what God loves at the expense of zapping the weeds.  

This is hard for us, especially us Respectable Religious folks, because we can be very easily persuaded to think we have to defend God's reputation for God, or root out the people we've pre-identified as "weeds" (or "sinners" or "bad people" or "ungodly" or whatever way we've worded it). We can convince ourselves that God's honor requires us to get rid of all of those undesirables.  And we tell ourselves, too, that we're doing it in the name of holiness, or for the sake of "looking out for our own," or "cleaning up our town."  So it comes as a shock to hear Jesus tell us a loud and clear "No."  No, we are not being called by God to run the riff-raff outside the city limits.  No, we are not being tasked with "taking back our country for God" and getting rid of anybody who doesn't fit.  No, we are not divinely authorized to threaten or intimidate people who don't share our values.  The humbling truth of Jesus' story is that God doesn't need our help to identify anybody as "unworthy" or "unacceptable."  Chances are, after all, somebody might take a look at my life (or yours) and decide we're looking rather weedy and deserve to be uprooted.  Jesus doesn't give them permission to get rid of us, either.

Too many times, people commit terrible acts of violence convinced that they are weeding out the unrighteous--and that they get to be the judges.  The shooter in the synagogue in Pittsburgh, along with the one in El Paso, along the gunman at Mother Emanuel, along with countless others in our history, all convinced themselves that they were looking out for "their own" by getting rid of the people they saw as threats.  That's what happens when we decide that God needs our assistance to eradicate evildoers on our terms.  And it's exactly what Jesus is calling us away from.  Jesus' story prevents us from ever saying we get to be the ones to decide someone is unworthy or needs to be gotten rid of.  Jesus' understanding about how God reigns in the world says that we don't get to issue those verdicts, and we don't get to decide someone else is a weed.  That authority is not ours, and it never has been.

Today, taking Jesus' story seriously is going to mean surrendering control (or realizing we never had it) over who we deem acceptable.  God has not given us the right to pull weeds from the field, and God doesn't really care what that choice does to God's reputation as "tough on sin" or "strong against enemies."  So if God is willing to bear with all of that now, well, our calling is to bear with those realities, too.

Maybe, instead of worrying about getting rid of the people we don't think are worthy, we might spend our energy first realizing that God has loved us when we were definitely not worthy ourselves, and then just doing good to everybody... whoever they are?

Lord Jesus, stop the impulse in us to get rid of the people we don't think are worthy, and instead let us see our own welcome as your gift of grace.

The Foolishness of Love--July 24, 2023

The Foolishness of Love--July 24, 2023

[Jesus] put before [the crowds] another parable: “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field; but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away. So when the plants came up and bore grain, then the weeds appeared as well. And the slaves of the householder came and said to him, ‘Master, did you not sow good seed in your field? Where, then, did these weeds come from?’ He answered, ‘An enemy has done this.’ The slaves said to him, ‘Then do you want us to go and gather them?’ But he replied, ‘No; for in gathering the weeds you would uproot the wheat along with them...." [Matthew 13:24-29]

Love that isn't willing to look foolish for the sake of the beloved is just pretending.  If it's real love, it's willing to put up with coming across as silly, weak, and feeble to anybody watching.  That's part of how love bears.

And as Jesus makes it clear from this story many of us heard this Sunday in worship, that is how God loves.  God is always more committed to preserving what is precious to God than managing the divine reputation.  In other words, God is more deeply invested in saving you than in saving face, and God doesn't have some need to look "strong" or "tough" or "like a winner."  You are more important to God than God's ego.  Wow.

That really is what this story is about.  The premise is simple enough: a farmer plants good seed on his field, and expects wheat to grow up.  But when an enemy comes along and plants weeds (sometimes called "tares" or "bearded darnels," based on the word Matthew uses in the Greek) in the field too, just to be rotten, the farmer is left with his wheat harvest growing alongside these tares.  Now there's a dilemma: what to do with a wheat field that is also full of a bumper crop of weeds?  The farm hands all want to pull out the weeds, because, well, they're weeds, right?  If they let the weeds stay in the field, the farmer (and his staff) will look ridiculous!  It will send the message that the enemy has won!  He'll be cackling off in his lair somewhere, gloating in the belief that he's bested this farmer.  And meanwhile everyone else in town will be laughing themselves to tears over the farmer who (they think) is wasting water, time, and fertilizer on a mixed bag of good wheat and useless tares.  

The farm hands are worried that their boss will be a laughingstock, and so their advice is to take the "tough guy" approach. They need to project strength.  They need to make the boss look like a winner, and they certainly can't let that no-good enemy get away with thinking he's one-upped their employer.  So they propose pulling out the weeds--that way the enemy will know he hasn't won--what the villain did in the dark of night, they'll undo in the daylight, just to show him that he's not victorious... right?  Well, the trouble is, the farmer himself knows that the wheat and the tares are intertwined at the root--you can't pull one up with out risking damage to the other.   And so, the real choice is whether the farmer wants to keep his ego intact at the risk of damaging his harvest, or keeping the crops safe even if it means looking like a loser.  Will the farmer insist on burnishing his reputation or preserving what he considers precious?  And is his ego so needy that he must look like a "winner" at all times, or can he play the waiting game for the sake of saving the wheat?

Well, you know the answer: in Jesus' story, the farmer is more committed to saving his wheat harvest than in sticking it to his enemy. He's willing to bear whatever mockery, whatever criticism, and whatever damage to his reputation might come with the choice not to uproot any of his wheat, even though that means leaving the weeds where they are for now, and worse still, letting the enemy think he's wont.  The farmer is more interested in the welfare of the wheat than in what anybody else thinks of him, even the old enemy himself.  That's what genuine love does--it bears with risk of looking foolish or weak, because it is more interested in the well-being of the beloved.  That's true whether it's a lone individual, a field full of wheat, or a world full of people.  God's love means God is willing to look like a loser in the eyes of the world for the sake of saving us.  Ultimately that's what the cross means, too--that God chooses to redeem the world, not through conquering angel armies who could destroy all opposition and show glory and power, but through the weakness and foolishness that are the cross.  God is willing to risk that the very world God loves is mocking the one nailed to a Roman death stake. God is willing to bear that the powers of evil will think they've won because God hasn't immediately uprooted their dastardly plans.  God is willing to put up with all of that, because that's what love does.

My goodness, it is an amazing thought to realize that God loves you more than God's own ego.  But it's true.  And when you realize that, maybe you also find yourself starting to let go of the old egotistical need always to look "right" or "smart" or "tough" or like a "winner."  Maybe we don't need to impress anybody else in all creation--after all, God is done with needing to impress, too.

Lord Jesus, thank you for the lengths you have gone to for the love of us.  Let the truth of that love hit home.

Stronger Still--July 21, 2023

Stronger Still--July 21, 2023

    "You are to be praised, O God, in Zion;
  to you shall vows be fulfilled.
 To you, the one who answers prayer,
  to you all flesh shall come.
 Our sins are stronger than we are,
  but you blot out our transgressions." [Psalm 65:1-3]

Well, there's quite a confession being made here, isn't there?  "Our sins are stronger than we are."  It is an admission, not merely of having done a bad thing (like "I took an extra cookie from the jar," or "I said those mean things to somebody online"), but of being under the power of sin, too.  There's an admission of powerlessness here, and quite honestly, it's not the kind of thing we're good at admitting in our day.

How many times have addicts insisted to their loved ones, "I can quit any time I want!" only to continue on in their destructive patterns without any evidence that they can kick their habits alone?  How often do folks proudly quote Henley's poem, "Invictus," with its famous line, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul," completely convinced that they can mean them sincerely?  And how often do church folks (often with preachers leading the charge) reinforce all of that? 

We are really missing something important when we talk only about "sins" as immoral actions to be punished for, rather than to see "Sin" also as a power by which people are held captive, and a mess in which we are all entangled and snared?  We Respectable Religious People can get so obsessed with debating "Is X action a sin, or not?" or "Did you properly repent of Y action that we have deemed sinful?" that we miss how the Scriptures talk about sin more frequently as an enemy that holds us captive.  Worse still, the Biblical writers tell us, the grip of sin on us is a captivity from which we cannot free ourselves by our own sheer willpower or brute force. What we need is more than just a scolding finger from heaven telling us what we've done wrong, but the divine hand that breaks the chains that have held us prisoner, and the holy power that bears the weight of those shackles to set us free from them.

When we listen to the words of the psalmist here, we are brought face to face with sin as a power.  To take these verses seriously means realizing that we have a way of getting in over our heads, that sin feels like an undertow pulling us under the surface of a stormy sea.  And in those moments, it does no good to lie to ourselves and say, "I can stop any time I want," when the truth is that sometimes we don't know how to be free from the grip of sin in our lives.

Imagine someone struggling with a drug addiction problem, who maybe in a moment of clarity wants to get help.  But they don't have money to go to a residential rehab facility somewhere, so they're left with less effective local treatment where their old social circles can easily lure them back in.  Meanwhile, they're struggling to hold a job to put food on the table for their kids, and if they have to miss work for multiple days because they're sick from detoxing, they'll get fired and have no income, and the kids are then at risk to boot.  How do you find a way out of that situation without someone from outside of it offering resources, time, or help that lets the person take new steps out of the dead-end they're in?  It can feel like an utterly hopeless situation, more than the person struggling with the addiction can bear if they're all alone in it.  And it can certainly feel like there's no way "out" without someone else stepping in to help bear some of the burden.  

Well, if you can imagine that (or any of a hundred other scenarios like it), you're on track to see how the psalmist here pictures the power of sin.  It's something we can get stuck in, so that we can't even seen how to be free of it any longer, like we are held in its power.  In that case, what we need is more than a stern reminder that we've been breaking the rules--what we need is the help of Someone who can carry some of the burden we're under, Someone who can bring relief beyond what we can do for ourselves.  We need the God the psalmist has in mind, the one to whom "all flesh shall come."  We need God as more than just an impartial judge refereeing our actions and labeling our bad actions when they are bad--we need God to intervene on our behalf to set us free, when we are overwhelmed by the mess we have found ourselves in, and when we cannot get ourselves out.

That's part of why the tradition from which I come makes a regular practice of publicly confessing that sin is a power in which we have been held captive, not just a list of dos and don'ts.  We need to be honest with ourselves about our need, so that we're clear what we are actually calling on God to do for us--not simply to overlook one or two bad actions on the divine Permanent Record, but to free us from the powers we cannot get out of on our own.

Today, then, let's be honest.  We aren't just people who occasionally step a toe over the line--we are people held captive in the power of sin and we regularly chains ourselves back into its prisons in our worst moments.  We find ourselves in dead-ends we cannot get out of, and we need someone who can pull us out.  We need the God whose love bears with us where we are, in other words.

And once we're brave enough to see that this is exactly our condition, we find we see other people in a new light.   It becomes harder to just blame someone else for their bad situation, when we might well learn that they feel trapped and are aching for a way out of the mess they're in.  It becomes harder to paint someone else as beyond hope or beyond redemption, once we realize how easily any of us could end up in a dead-end without any warning.  And it becomes easier to see how much we have in common with the other sinners, messes, and failures around us, rather than telling ourselves we're "better" than anyone else.

Today let's see ourselves honesty, and others around us as well--let's borrow the words of the psalmist and admit when our sins are stronger than we are... and so we'll call on the God who is stronger still.

Lord God, be stronger than our sins, and rescue us from the captivity we keep selling ourselves into.

Learning How to Kneel--July 20, 2023

Learning How to Kneel--July 20, 2023

"Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” (Ephesians 5:21)
Here’s a simple question, if not an easy one: if Jesus is your picture, not only of what God is really like, but also of what being human really looks like, then how would it affect every other relationship in your life? How does who-Jesus-is make a difference in who-you-are?

Once we cross the bridge from talk about Jesus into talk about us, we are potentially opening up our whole lives, our widest furthest interests, and our deepest selves, to a re-orientation. When we really take it seriously that Jesus is our picture of what we are meant to be—that Jesus shows us humanity in its fullness—we are in for reinvention. And we can’t compartmentalize our faith, our religion, to just what we do for an hour or so on Sunday mornings. As the Switchfoot song, “The World You Want” puts it all too clearly, it will affect every part of who we are:

What you say is your religion

How you say it's your religion

Who you love is your religion

How you love is your religion

All your science, your religion

All your hatred, your religion

All your wars are your religion

Every breath is your religion

If that’s somewhere close to being right, then all of our lives—our words, our loves, our ways of thinking, our patterns of feeling, and everything else about us—is going to be remade, remolded, in the image of Christ.

So, for example, take this verse from Ephesians: “be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” In the whole book we call Ephesians, this will kick off an extended discussion about how all of our relationships—spouses, children, parents, employees, employers and so on—are changed when they are put through the lens of Christ. And yet it all starts here: “be subject TO ONE ANOTHER.” Everybody bows. Everybody bends. Everybody puts the needs of the other ahead of themselves. And then each one of us, in turn, has the whole rest of the circle holding their hands up to carry us because they are putting us ahead of themselves. It is a brilliant and beautiful picture, where everyone can give way to everybody else, and there is a constantly turning, constantly folding-in-on-itself loop of serving love.

The whole of the Christian life is bearing the needs of others as they in turn bear us up--putting ourselves in the position of serving the person next to me, as they do the same for me and my needs, and all because that is what we have learned from Christ himself.  Like the lyric of the U2 song, "Vertigo," puts it, "Your love is teaching me how to kneel."  I'd be hard-pressed to find a better eight-word summary of the way of Jesus than that, even without the catchy guitar riffs in the background.  All our lives in Christ are spent learning how to kneel--to place ourselves in the position of bearing the needs of one another, as they in turn bear our own.

While it’s true that in just another verse, the text is going to start sketching out what he thinks this looks like for wives and husbands and then all the rest, it’s really important for us to see that the point is not just to give us advice for having happy families. Lots of authors have made a lot of money and sold a lot of books starting with the premise that the Bible is interested in answering the question, “How can I have a cookie-cutter family with 2.5 kids, a white picket fence, and a dog?” or that the Bible is particularly interested in helping you find the man or woman of your dreams. These are, frankly, narrow, short-sighted, and self-interested questions to be asking, rather like getting an appointment with the governor and asking him just to validate your parking.

No, Paul isn’t writing to answer the question, “How can I have a happy family, a sustainable love life, or a house full of smiling cherubic children?” He is writing to answer the question, “How would your life sound different if it were played in the key of Jesus?” That’s a lot bigger than just managing your nuclear family. In fact, as much as some may be uncomfortable with this language, frankly, it redefines what “family” is. It remakes “family,” and even what it means to be “human” in light of Jesus.

And because of who Jesus is—because his power and his love are both expressed in self-giving service—Paul’s direction to us today is to “be subject to one another.” He says, first and foremost, that if our lives are going to be recast in the likeness of Christ, we will more and more defer to each other and put preference toward each other, rather than to ourselves. It’s not one-way—not just wives for husbands, or just children toward parents. It’s in both directions, where everybody, in whatever role they find themselves in, looks for ways to give themselves away to put the needs of the other first. I put your needs first before my own. You put my needs ahead of yours. And in this ongoing, always-turning loop, our lives take on a little more of the character of Christ, who put us all before his own comfort and who gave himself away for the love of us.

What are ways today where you can consciously and joyfully put the needs of others ahead of your own—not as a helpless victim or passive doormat, but as an intentional act of Christ-like love?

Lord Jesus, make us to be like you. Teach us to bow. Teach us to bend. Teach us how to kneel. Teach us to love.

No Measuring Up--July 19, 2023

No Measuring Up--July 19, 2023

"For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh, so that the just requirement of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit." [Romans 8:2-4]

Let's be completely clear here: God isn't a part of the dating scene, and God isn't looking for "The One."  God has found you... and me... and all of us, as we are, and chosen to love us, rather than forever looking for some hypothetical (but ultimately non-existent) perfect partner to receive God's love.  God loves imperfect people, because that's all there are, and makes us right with God, even while we're crooked stinkers.

Or, if you want to get all fancy and theological about it, you can borrow the wording of our older brother in the faith, Martin Luther, who put it this way in his 1518 Heidelberg Disputation:  "The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it."  In other words, God isn't searching eternally to find some perfect being who measures up to an absolute standard of purity and goodness, and then decide to reward that being with love for being so worthy, but rather God finds us as we are and makes us worthy by the fact of God's love for us.  Or, as another classic hymn of the faith, "My Song Is Love Unknown," sings it, "Love to the loveless shown... that they might lovely be."

God meets us, knows us, and chooses us even at our worst and most unloving--and says, "I choose you.  I'm declaring it: I hold nothing against you."  There is no endless (fruitless) quest for "The One," despite all the pablum we've been fed by countless romantic comedies (and dating services, who make their money off of keeping that search for the perfect person as long and drawn out as possible) that there's some single solitary "right person" you need to find in life.  There ain't.  At least, there's not for God.  God doesn't wait to love the perfect person, but loves us and by that very choice makes us worthy.  Through Jesus, God has said to all of us, "In Christ I choose you, and in Christ I will do for you what you could not do for yourselves.  I choose to love you apart from earning it."

That's what I love about Paul's phrasing here--that God has done what the law and our sin-tainted natures could not do.  After all, all a law can do is tell us when we've messed up and yell at us to behave, but it can't actually make us "be good."  Even God's commandments don't have the power to "make" us into good little boys and girls--they can only hold up the bar of what God intends for us and then call us out when we don't measure up.  If God were the sort who were creating a dating profile for what kind of persons God wanted to love, perhaps God might have wished for people who are always compassionate, perfectly honest, deeply just, completely faithful, and totally peaceable.  That's what "the Law" calls us to be, after all.  But the trouble is, none of us are that--at least not all the time, and not all the way.  Nobody is.  So instead of waiting around for us to achieve moral perfection or looking for some human being somewhere who actually lives up to all those expectations, God takes us as we are... and in Christ God has made us worthy when our own ability or virtue wasn't enough.  But that means to some degree God makes the constant choice to love us in our unloveliness, to accept us as we are, to put aside the question of our not-measuring-up, and any set of futile expectations.  God does for us what we could not do for ourselves, rather than giving up on us or waiting for us to achieve some impossible ideal.  it is the fact of God's love in Christ that makes us more fully and deeply like Christ, to be sure, but God doesn't wait around until we're perfect to accept us.

If we take that seriously, it will shape the way we face the world and interact with every other person.  Realizing that God has loved us, not like it is a prize for our perfection but as a gift that meets us where we're at, well, that keeps us from looking down on anybody else, doesn't it?  It removes any sense of being "holier-than-thou" because we realize that none of us has earned our beloved-ness, and nobody else is "beneath" us, either.  If I can hear the news that God's love isn't a reward for my innate moral achievement but a gift I didn't earn, then I will need to acknowledge that's how God's love meets everyone else I'll ever meet, too.  God has done for us what our own exertion couldn't do, what the law's stern shouting could not compel, and what my own limitations cannot accomplish.  So everyone else I meet is a recipient of grace as well--maybe that realization will take a bit of the hot air out of my over-inflated ego the next time I want to condemn somebody else for not measuring up.

Maybe this was never about measuring up anyway, because God was never looking for "The One" only to be disappointed by our sinful selves--God has only ever chosen us as we are and loved us into worthiness by the power of that very love.

Good Lord, let us see the way you love us truthfully, so that we can love others with the same grace and forbearance you show us.

God Makes Pearls--July 18, 2023

God Makes Pearls--July 18, 2023

"There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus." [Romans 8:1]

It's one thing when somebody upsets you as a one-time, isolated incident.  Your feelings may be hurt, or you may suffer some injury or loss, but if you are convinced it was a lone lapse in judgment or accident that won't be repeated, it is easier to forgive and move on.  When someone has wronged you but learned their lesson and made amends, you are more likely to believe they won't hurt you again and you are more likely to set aside the past.  

But it's sure a lot harder when the other person's whole personality grates on you, and when it seems like everything they do causes friction.  In those situations, it's not so much a single one-time offense to be forgiven and set aside--it's more like the other person's very being just rubs you the wrong way.  You know the kind of thing I mean, right?  Maybe it's their mannerisms that annoy you, or their attitude that just drives you crazy.  Maybe you're neat and they're messy--or you're laid back and their high-strung.  Maybe you value getting things done fast and right away, and they're perennial procrastinators.  Maybe it's their difference of politics, or their worldview, or their just-plain rudeness, and you find that no matter what they do or say, it always gets on your nerves.  In those situations, it is really hard to "set aside differences," because it doesn't feel like a single past action you can try to move past, but like every day is a new scrape, and you're dying the death of a thousand paper cuts.  In those times, the needful thing isn't "forgiveness," as of an isolated infraction or trespass, but the ability to bear with the personality conflicts, and to seek the other person's good anyway.  And that's just a lot harder than overlooking a one-time error in judgment, because it feels like it's never really in the past.  It's like you need pre-emptive forgiveness for the present-moment agitation they cause.

I'm willing to bet you know what that feels like.  (I'm also willing to bet that each of us causes that kind of agitation in other people, even if we don't realize it--and that by itself is a humbling realization.)  But if you can put yourself in that mindset right now and think of how frustrating it feels to be in constant interaction with someone who grates on your last nerve, then I bet you can appreciate how big a deal it is when someone is able to overlook your rough edges and chooses to love you even with those jagged places causing friction.  It's humbling, but it is also powerfully grace-filled to know that others choose, not merely to forgive individual bad actions of ours, but to bear with the flaws that run deep in our character and cause persistent irritation like a grain of sand to an oyster.  It is beautiful when that happens... like a pearl.

And of course, at the heart of the Christian faith is that God has committed to that kind of love--love that endures not just momentary lapses in judgement or instances of bad behavior, but the patterns of sin that are dyed in the wool within us.

See, that's the thing: God loves us, not because we're sinless, but because God is willing to bear with us as we are, even at our most annoying, most frustrating, and most grating.  (It's hard to admit that we could be any of those things, but come on here, let's be honest with ourselves.) The Christian hope is not that we're perfect peaches; it's that God has committed not to hold our rotten places against us.  To be "in Christ Jesus" isn't to have attained moral perfection, as if we're the elite members of some spiritual VIP club, but rather that God is willing not to condemn us for our failures, mess-ups, or sins.  In fact, God has decided forever and always not to let even our most deeply-ingrained tragic flaws come between us.  

That really is amazing.

And yet, that's exactly what Paul has in mind when he writes to the Romans that "there is therefore now no condemnation" for us because of Christ.  It's not that once you believe hard enough in Jesus, or belong to the church for long enough, or learn enough theology that you stop being a jerk (I know--God is still working on me!). It's that God won't be held back from staying in relationship with even when I'm at my worst. God hasn't just forgiven me for past actions--that time I lied, the hurtful words to a friend, or the occasion when I ran a stop sign, and the like.  It's that God keeps choosing, moment by moment so to speak, not to hold it against me when I am selfish, or cowardly, or hurtful.  God has decided not to let my present-tense ways of being a stinker break off our relationship.  Because that is how love works.  Love endures the agitations of the beloved, rather than waiting until they are all smoothed over.  It doesn't mean God pretends our rough edges aren't there, or that God is indifferent to them--it just means God won't let those determine or limit our relationship.  And if we know what it is like to choose to overlook the ways someone else in our lives can get on our nerves and still to care about them, then maybe we've got a glimpse of what God has committed to doing for us every moment of every day.

Rather than reject us because we are constant irritations, or hold off on loving us until we are perfect first, God chooses to bear with us as we are, friction and flaws and failings and all, because that's how love works.  God chooses to make pearls.

How might that affect the way we see everybody else in our lives, and how we treat them?

Lord God, thank you for your love that bears with us as we are, even at our most frustrating and frictious.

Our Blessedly Inefficient God--July 17, 2023

Our Blessedly Inefficient God--July 17, 2023

"Jesus told them many things in parables, saying: 'Listen! A sower went out to sow. And as he sowed, some seeds fell on the path, and the birds came and ate them up. Other seeds fell on rocky ground, where they did not have much soil, and they sprang up quickly, since they had no depth of soil. But when the sun rose, they were scorched; and since they had not root, they withered away. Other sees feel among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked them. Other seeds fell on good soil and brought forth grain, some a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty.  Let anyone with ears listen!" [Matthew 13:3-9]

For whatever else this story is about, it means that God is more interested in growing something good than in maximizing profits and efficiency.  Or to put it the other way around, God is willing to put up with looking ineffective for the sake of increasing life in the world.  God's commitment to nurturing seeds that will grow somewhere is stronger than God's need to "maximize productivity."

This parable, which many of us heard in worship this past Sunday, presents us with farm worker who has to know that his approach of scattering grain seeds everywhere is going to look wasteful.  He has to know that the seeds that land on the path are likely to get snatched up by the birds, that the thorns and thistles will starve out any seeds that land among them, and that the stony ground won't produce a good crop, either.  And yet, he's more interested in getting something to grow than he is with maximizing his labor-to-profit ratio.  He's willing to go to the length of broadcasting seed everywhere, even if that means knowing some will not provide a return on the investment.  Those with more miserly business sensibilities might say, "You're losing money there," or "You're not getting as much final profit as you could if you only planted seeds where you know there's good soil."  But the farm worker seems to know full well what he's doing... and is willing to take that risk.

Now, I'm not really in a position to know whether this technique for planting a field was standard in Jesus' culture and time, or whether it is supposed to be striking and unusual.  What I do think is clear is that Jesus chose this kind of image to describe how God's "kingdom" operates--that is, how God runs the universe.  And Jesus insists that God is willing to bear with the reality that some of God's effort in the world will be met with rejection or disappointment... and yet God goes through with giving abundantly (even recklessly) in all directions, anyway.  God is willing to deal with the inefficiency.  God is willing to accept the apparent waste of effort. God is willing to put up with the lackluster response we humans sometimes (often!) give back in response to God's gracious word to us.  And that is all because God loves.

If we want to embody God's kind of love in the world, it's going to mean that kind of willingness to risk that our efforts won't turn out, don't yield the response we want, or might not produce the results we want.  It means the willingness to put good into the world, anyway, even if others don't receive it.  And it means the deliberate choice to plant seeds with the full, open-eyed awareness that we do not have control over what will come from our attempt.  We can make the effort, but we can't guarantee others will see or appreciate it.  We can scatter God's good word around to everyone, but we can't compel every listener to take it to heart.  And yet we do it anyway, because that vulnerability itself is a piece of what makes love love.

In the end, this story isn't so much about how to avoid being a bad kind of soil or how to make yourself into a good kind of soil--it's about the lengths God is willing to go to, even in the face of rejection and disappointment, to keep on bringing life among us.  If we are going to live this story, then maybe today is a day to make the additional effort or take the risk of giving a second try to something that seemed fruitless.  Maybe today's a day to love people without worrying about whether they will return the favor or repay you.  Maybe today's a day to let go of the need to look "successful" in anybody else's eyes, and instead to risk putting good into the world regardless of how anybody else judges it or responds to it.  Maybe today's a day to reflect the character of our blessedly inefficient God.

What could that look like today?

Lord Jesus, spur us on to take the risks of giving your good word everywhere.

Our Blessed Burdens--July 14, 2023

Our Blessed Burdens--July 14, 2023

"Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ." [Galatians 6:2]

Quick Bible quiz:  Do you know how many times the New Testament instructs Christians to wear a cross necklace?  

How about how often Jesus tells his followers to recite a creed or invite him into their hearts and accept him as their savior?

How many times does the Bible instruct the people of God to share a meme on social media with a picture of Jesus on it, and that anyone who doesn't must be ashamed of Christ or not have the "guts" to share it?

How frequently does Jesus tell his followers to "take their country (back?) for God"?

If you guessed zero for all four, you're a winner!  

But when it comes to consciously choosing to bear the heartaches, the burdens, and pains of others, well, it turns out that is the beating heart of what living faith actually looks like.  Like the apostle Paul says, "Bear one another's burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ."

I needed us to take this moment for clarity, though, because to tell the truth, looking around at what often passes for the hallmarks of Christianity, you'd think that list of jewelry, political posturing, social media posts, or formulaic faith-statements were the most important thing to following Jesus.  But it turns out that Jesus is far less interested in how we "project" the persona of being devout, and far more interested in how we love--and more specifically than that, how we choose the way of suffering rather than our own self-interest or self-indulgence.  That's the sine qua non of the Christian life, according to the apostle, rather than our religiously-themed fashion accessories or the pious posts we make on social media.

Following Jesus, quite simply, means the commitment to love, broadly and deeply--and that sort of love means the choice to enter into the sorrows, the troubles, and hurts of others, rather than avoid them.  It may even mean we put on hold (permanently, if need be) the distractions and amusements that look like more fun, in order that we can be truly present for one another in our needs and times of weariness.  It's like that gorgeous line of the band The Decemberists, from their song, "Don't Carry it All," that goes, "A neighbor's blessed burden, within reason, becomes a burden born of all and one.... we are all our hands and holders, beneath this bold and brilliant sun."

Simone Weil said much the same quite beautifully; her insight is often translated from the French this way:  "The love of our neighbor in all its fullness simply means being able to say to him, 'What are you going through?'"  That's it--that's the step that love takes, and therefore that is truly indispensable to following Jesus.  It is about love, not simply in the abstract sense of "I will try and be nice to everybody," and not in the emotional sense of willing yourself to "feel" a certain way bout everyone, and not even in the patronizing sense of needing to zoom in to every situation to "fix" other people so you or I get to be the hero, but love in the sense of entering someone else's pains and walking with them in them.  It is the conscious choice--which becomes a lifelong commitment, in all honesty--to forgo focusing on our own entertainment, our own goals, our own fun, or our own achievements and awards, so that we can be available for the neighbor.  I suppose that is why this sort of love looks so much like Jesus--he was always letting himself be stopped, turned in a different direction, and interrupted to be present for whatever the person or situation in front of him needed.  I don't think that was a lack of forethought on Jesus' part--I think it was his intentional choice about his way of life.  

We Christians aren't the only ones with an idea like this, of course.  Perhaps we could learn from our Buddhist neighbors, for example; in the Mahayana tradition of Buddhism, there is the notion of becoming a bodhisattva--that is, someone who is able to attain the level of enlightenment called nirvana, but chooses to delay doing so out of compassion in order to help and relieve other suffering beings.  And rather than getting uncomfortable with the idea that we Christians can learn something like this from a different faith, I want to suggest that seeing this same notion in other faiths can help us to see that the same idea has been speaking to us from the pages of our Scriptures as well.  Paul seems to say that bearing the burdens of others is exactly what the "law of Christ," or "the way of Jesus" if you like, looks like.  That sounds like the conscious choice to take on more difficulty, more shared sorrow perhaps, more inconvenience, in order to bear the burdens of others, and in the process, we discover that is exactly when and where we are most fully alive.  That's the mystery, I suppose--that the life that really is life is found precisely at the point of giving it away, rather than holding on to one's own interests.

It reminds me of a line from Marilynne Robinson's absolutely glorious novel Gilead, where her narrator (who is an old preacher) says, "I heard a man say once that Christians worship sorrow.  That is by no means true. But we do believe there is a sacred mystery in it, it's fair to say that."  Maybe that is the task of this day, and the calling of the whole rest of our lives--to willingly, intentionally direct the course of our lives along the paths that will take us beside others in their sorrows, not because we have to "save" or "fix" them, and not because we need to wallow in misery for its own sake either, but because in a sacred mystery, Christ is revealed there most powerfully as we share the brokenness and mend the wounds each of us carries.  It may mean we make the deliberate choice to forgo other ways our lives could have gone, and other paths we might have taken, but we walk through those valley-of-the-shadow-of-death times with others because paradoxically, we find that we are all brought to life by sharing that journey.  It is the choice to see the weight a neighbor carries as a "blessed burden" that is meant to be shared, so that nobody has to carry it all.

Maybe the Christian life, then, has very little to do with making sure other people know we are "religious", and everything to do with knowing that no one is truly whole until we are all truly whole... that my present-moment happiness is a hollow husk until the suffering of all is healed.  What will you choose, then, to do with this day that will have been worth spending your hours on?  What will you choose to do with the course of your whole life?

Lord Jesus, bring us to life in the full as you lead us to choose to bear the burdens of those who suffer today.