Precious in God's Sight--November 1, 2023

Precious in God's Sight--November 1, 2023

"Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones." [Psalm 116:15]

Even beyond death, God holds on to us.  Even when everyone still walking the earth forgets our name or our legacy, God remembers.  Even those lives swept away into oblivion as statistics and anonymous death counts after the latest hurricane... or mass shooting... or punitive bombing... are known, honored, and treasured by the One who has made us all.  All of that is because, as the psalmist puts it, "precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful ones."

This verse from the psalms has always sort of poked at me.  I guess it has seemed a bit odd to me, this idea of even our deaths being precious to God.  I suppose I might have expected something more like, "God prevents death for those who are faithful," or even, "Precious are the lives of God's faithful ones." But this recognition of the reality of death, especially to Easter people who believe in God's promise of resurrection, is striking.  The text doesn't quite say that God can't or won't prevent the death of God's faithful ones, but it does seem to take the fact of our death as a given--that we are mortal beings, and God loves us even in our mortality.  You even get the sense here that God grieves over our deaths, too--that it costs God something to love us, the same way loving anyone in this life comes at the price of sorrow at their death.  Maybe like Jesus weeping at the entrance of Lazarus' tomb, mere moments before he calls Lazarus back to life, God still grieves over any of our deaths, even though we also believe that God will raise us back to life and to new creation.

I think that's important to hold onto, because sometimes in our attempts to do Big Important Systematic Theologizing, Christians have talked about death only as a divine punishment for sin and made it sound like God gets some kind of satisfaction out of our death like it is the carrying out of justice for human sin.  And to be sure, there are certainly places in the Scriptures (often you'll hear it in Paul's letters, particularly Romans) where there is a connection made between primordial sin and death as a consequence for all of humanity (I'm thinking, for example, of Paul saying, "As sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned..." in Romans 5:12). But if we forget the tenderness and vulnerability of this line from the Psalms, we can end up seeing God simply as a divine sentencing judge, merely handing out fines and penalties for defendants' crimes who have been found guilty, impersonally following the guidelines for sentencing in some law book.  And that's not how the psalmist pictures God here.  Here God isn't some aloof Cosmic Judge meting out punishments and saying, "Justice is being done" when we die, but rather God is the One pierced to the heart when each of us gets to the end of our lives. God holds even our deaths precious, because God holds us as precious.

Today is the day in the church's life when we remember in particular the lives of those beloved ones who have gone to their rest, the Festival of All Saints.  And part of that remembrance is our trust that we're not the only ones who treasure those faces, names, and stories--but that God does, too.  On this day in particular, we are reminded that we are part of a vast and diverse family of people, not only of every country, ethnicity, language, and skin color, but also stretching through time from the distant past to the future we cannot yet see.  And we dare to believe that even though you and I may not have ever met most of those saints across time and space, none of them are forgotten or lost to God's memory.  Beyond that, all the countless small acts of kindness, the barely noticeable compassionate words spoken in a moment, and the unannounced minutes of presence alongside those who need a friend or an advocate, all of those are seen, honored, and treasured by the living God.  And when each of us breathes our last, even that breath is precious to God, because we ourselves are precious and beloved in God's sight.

In a time and place like ours that doesn't talk about death much at all, and that so often treats death as a matter of mere numbers, it is a countercultural thing to lift up the particulars of each individual life of those who have died.  And I suppose that means, too, that God is a party to that countercultural "good trouble" because of God's holding dear each life and story... because none of us is reducible to being a statistic or "collateral damage" in God's eyes. Not a one.

As we remember the lives of those we have loved, let us also remember that at our side is the living God, who holds each of them precious and of infinite worth.

Lord God, come along beside us and grieve with us, while we both honor those lives we have loved and lost to death, and also hold onto the hope you speak that none of your beloved are lost to you.

"Nothing Means Nothing"--October 31, 2023

"Nothing Means Nothing"--October 31, 2023

"Who is to condemn? It is Christ Jesus, who died, yes, who was raised, who is at the right hand of God, who intercedes for us. Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will hardship, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written, 'For your sake we are being killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep to be slaughtered.' No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord." [Romans 8:34-39]

For Superman, it’s kryptonite.

For Storm from the X-Men, it's tight enclosed spaces and a case of claustrophobia.

For Green Lantern, it’s either wood… or the color yellow (so I guess he’s really wary of the pencil aisle at Office Max).

The weaknesses of comic book superheroes are strange and rare, because the heroes themselves are meant to be so otherworldly and extraordinary. If you already have yourself an alien with superhuman strength and the ability to fly, then it’s not much of a stretch further that a green glowing rock from his home planet could make ol’ Supes grow weaker. If you are already granting the existence of an intergalactic corps of emerald-clad cosmic police using their magic rings to fight evil, then sure, you’re probably not stretching your suspension of disbelief much further to allow yellow to be an Achilles’ heel. Once you start inventing outlandish heroes, equally outlandish weaknesses seem to be par for the course.

Now, practically speaking, what that means is that neither Superman nor Storm (nor any of the others in the Justice League, Avengers, or any other superhero team) can make you an unconditional promise. They all have absolute weaknesses, things which will leave them hamstrung and helpless. Not even Superman, then, can make you the promise, "Nothing can separate you from my help!" He can't even say it to Lois Lane. There is always going to be an unspoken asterisk if he tries. He can say, "Nothing*... but really kryptonite could stop me," and Green Lantern could say, "Nothing*... except a banana or a banana tree..." and Storm could say, "Nothing*... well, other than a cardboard box put over my head."

But none of those characters from the printed page can truly, fully mean the sentence, "Nothing will be able to keep me from helping you when you are in need." And that is because, quite simply, each has a weakness over which they cannot triumph, from the mundane to the mysterious.

What's interesting to me about all of those superhero weaknesses is that they all belong to fictional characters whose creators could have just invented as completely invincible... but didn't. Even when people who specialize in imagining the fantastic and strange try and invent the most amazing, most powerful, most uncanny superheroes they can... we still seem unable to imagine someone who really can say "Nothing can separate us..." and actually mean the word "Nothing." We can only imagine people whose promises, power, and presence are basically like ours--conditional... even if Superman has fewer limits than I have. We can only imagine characters and heroes who have to put boundaries on their saving help and limits on their love.

But the apostle Paul says that this is what makes the good news of Jesus both good and new: his victory over death means that there truly is nothing that can ultimately separate us from his love. There is no asterisk, and no fine print. When Jesus says to us, as in Paul's words here, "Nothing can separate us..." it really means nothing.

How do we know that's not just empty talk (because, to be honest, there's a lot of that going around)? We know it, Paul says, because Jesus is risen from the dead! Death is the one wild card, the ace up the sleeve, that every other hero has to reckon with. Superman can't say "I will always be there for the good citizens of Metropolis..." because he knows that if someone locks him in the bathroom with a rock of kryptonite, he'll be done for. None of the rest of the world's imagined heroes can say "Nothing will separate us..." and mean it. Nope, no one other than Jesus himself, can say the word "nothing" like that and have it mean everything. Jesus has come through the worst that death could do... and he is still here, with us, beside us, upholding us.

For Paul reflecting on this, that's what gives us courage. We know that for whatever we face in this day, the Risen One has promised to be with us... and death has already done its worst to Jesus... and lost! Whatever fears, real or imagined, have wormed their way into our consciousness, they cannot separate us from Jesus. Whatever things inside myself get me tangled up in guilt... cannot separate us from Jesus' love. Nothing can divide us from him. And for Jesus, "nothing" means nothing.

Today, know it is true--you are held by a love that will not let you go, a love that endures forever, because Jesus is risen from the dead.

Lord Jesus, speak your promise to us again, and make us to believe that you mean it when you say nothing could separate us from your love. We do believe, Lord Jesus, we do.

Strength that Endures--October 30, 2023

Strength That Endures--October 30, 2023

"May you be made strong with all the strength that comes from his glorious power, and may you be prepared to endure everything with patience, while joyfully giving thanks to the Father, who has enabled you to share in the inheritance of the saints in light." [Colossians 1:11-12]

It's not about bench-pressing or tearing phone books in half, and it never was.

Strength, that is. At least the genuine article. I think the New Testament is a lot more interested in talking about the kind of strength that makes us able to endure, like a fortress, than the kind that smashes or rips something else apart like a battering ram. Real strength is about weathering the storm to protect others, not threatening or intimidating them. And that means, too, that real strength doesn't need to rattle sabers, make threats, or use fear. Real strength doesn't need to advertise or tell the world how great and big and powerful it is--real strength can walk softly, to borrow a phrase.

This is important for us to be clear on, especially because sometimes religious folk can get confused. We end up falling for the idea that being strong is about looking tough or having the power to dominate others, rather than the ability to endure what comes against us from outside. And sometimes we end up making the nonsensical claim that following Jesus will make us more muscular, more aggressive, or more intimidating.

I can remembering hearing years ago about a traveling group of "Christian" affiliated (and I use the word loosely here) weightlifters who would go around putting on shows in church amphitheaters or the gymnasiums of "Christian" schools where they would do a whole routine, a performed show, with different feats of strength, from lifting weights to literally tearing phone books in half, to all sorts of other tricks and displays of power. And in between the circus act, there would be testimonies that would try and persuade the cheering audience that Jesus gives this kind of power--that being a good Christian would also improve your muscle mass... and, I guess, your ability to destroy things.

And, yeah, a lot of times, we religious folk would fall for it--captivated by the idea that we, too, could be tough and strong and powerful like them, if only we prayed the right prayer to let Jesus in. Never mind, of course, that there are internet videos teaching the trick of phone book ripping (Spoiler alert--it has to do with creasing the binding of the phone book before anybody is watching). And never mind that Jesus himself never falls for that toxic masculinity garbage himself, and never teaches his followers that he will grant anybody the power to intimidate, dominate, or threaten others with some kind of divine strength. Instead, Jesus constantly empowers his followers to endure, to withstand, to persevere. That's his kind of strength.  And it is always put in the service of love.

Forgive my cynicism, but I've lived through enough of seeing sports heroes get asterisks by their names and records because their great feats of strength turned out to have been accomplished with cheating through performance-enhancing steroids and other drugs. I've seen enough internet videos giving away the tricks. I've seen enough times when people confused being strong with being a bully that I'm just not interested in those kinds of shows of so-called strength anymore.

We live in times when it is easy to want to have a show of force ready to intimidate the people we don't like, or don't agree with. It is easy to take everything that doesn't go our way as a threat... and then to think you have to meet those threats with more shows of strength and power, like we are animals putting on a display in a battle for the role of Alpha male. It's easy and tempting to believe the voices that say you have to overpower your opponents, crush your enemies, and intimidate everybody else if you want to "win" in life. It's easy, too, following that train of thought, to think that caring for neighbors is weakness and being defiant must be the same as being strong.

And it is, of course, natural, then, that we would want to take that same thinking and apply it to our picture of God. We want to assume that God's defining quality is the omnipotence that means God can coerce and force and threaten to make people do what God wants. And we want to reimagine Jesus as the conquering hero, rather than as the Crucified One.

The late theologian Robert Farrar Capon once wrote that we keep trying to make Jesus into Superman--that we would rather have a bulletproof Savior who smashes his enemies than one whose power is seen supremely in suffering love; that is, what the world thinks of as losing. In his fantastic Hunting the Divine Fox, Capon writes:

“We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he blasphemed: He claimed to be God then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It’s not that we weren’t looking for the Messiah; it’s just that he wasn’t what we were looking for. Our kind of Messiah would come down from a cross. He would carry a folding phone booth in his back pocket. He wouldn’t do a stupid thing like rising from the dead. He would do a smart thing like never dying.”

In a nutshell, I think that's our ongoing trouble with the notion of true strength. We keep thinking that having Jesus in your life will let you rip phone books in half, intimidate others into submission, and dominate your opponents. And instead, Jesus gives us a rather different kind of strength: one that looks like the capacity to endure suffering for the sake of love... even love of opponents and enemies.

The letter to the Colossians is clear on this, too, if we actually listen to what it says. For all the talk of God's "glorious power," note that these verses talk about that power and strength in terms of the capacity to endure. It's strength like an anvil is strong, or strength like a full-grown oak tree to withstand the fury of the storm. It's strength like a cleft in the rock in which you can take refuge, rather than a power you can wield to destroy somebody else.

In a time when lots of voices seem to think the way to show strength is through angry demonstrations with tiki torches, intimidating shows of weaponry (which all smack of a need to impress and overcompensate rather than real fortitude, honestly), or the tired old "Don't tread on me" motto, you and I are called to be different. No, let me correct that: we are empowered to be different. We have been given true strength--Christ's kind of strength. We are a people filled from the inside with God's strength--the strength it takes to go to a cross, not the appearance of toughness it takes to bully others. We are people given the ability to endure with love and integrity--and in a world full of hatred, indifference, and fakeness, that really is something.

The world around us may not understand it or know what to call it, but we do. It is real strength.

God give us the strength we need to face this day with love for all.

To The End--October 27, 2023

To The End--October 27, 2023

"Now before the festival of the Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to depart from this world and go to the Father. Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end." [John 13:1-2]

There is never a point at which Jesus sees that loving us will cost him, and then runs out on us.  There's never an occasion in the gospels where Jesus can anticipate the suffering and sorrow that come as collateral damage for being faithful us, and then he bails out.  And there is never a time where Jesus foresees trouble down the line and says, "This is where I get off," to avoid having to bear it with us.  That's always been the case with Jesus, and it still is.

And if you needed evidence of it, there's this: on Jesus' last night with his circle of disciples (including the one who would turn him in to the authorities by the end of the night), Jesus stared down death rather than running away for his own safety... and he spent the time washing their feet.  He loved, as John the narrator so poignantly puts it, "to the end."

Let's pause for a moment, though, to unpack that phrase, "to the end," because it's not only about a length of time; it's about total commitment and completion.  If your football team scores an early touchdown and then just coasts for the rest of the game, you might say the offense held the lead "to the end," but they could also just be half-heartedly running out the clock with only the bare minimum effort expended.  Saying that Jesus loves "his own... to the end" doesn't just mean that he felt a warm feeling about his disciples right up until he died.  It means he loved them completely, fully, to the ultimate expression.  The Greek phrase John uses ["eis telos" if you want to know the nitty gritty] means something like "to completion" or "to the goal" or maybe something like our English phrase "all the way."]  In other words, God's kind of love is about more than just duration in time, and it's about more than running down the clock. It's about filling even the last minute of the basketball game with unrelenting full-court press.  Jesus' love doesn't coast to the finish line--he runs every mile and every step even though it's a marathon.

And to push that even further, if John our narrator believes that the events of this last night together are evidence of how Jesus "loved them to the end," it's worth looking at what Jesus chooses to do with that last few hours, and in particular, what story John recounts next.  Jesus chooses to model what enduring love looks like for his disciples, not by giving them an academic lecture or decreeing a set of rules, or even by doing some ritual thing that looks particularly religious.  Jesus takes the most menial job there is to be done, and yet a job that calls for a certain tenderness and care, and he places himself in that role--the washer of muddy, dirty feet.  Jesus "loves his disciples to the end" by serving, and by inviting them into that same self-giving service.  It is a moment of humble caregiving, to be sure, and it is also a moment of teaching by example.  This is what enduring love looks like--the commitment to do good to others, even if it means taking the lowliest work for their sake, and then the invitation to others to get to participate in such love themselves.  You know, I suspect, that before the end of this scene, Jesus will tell his disciples (including Judas, who is there in the room and who presumably had his feet washed, too) that they are to wash one another's feet as he has done for them.  The motion continues outward, like ripples on the water, out from that upper room and ever since throughout the growing community of Jesus' followers.  Having been loved by Jesus, we are pulled into the motion to love in his way--serving tenderly and vulnerably.

It's probably also worth considering that when Jesus has just one last hands-on training session like this with his disciples, he uses it to wash feet rather than something more obviously heroic-looking.  Jesus doesn't "love" his disciples by handing them a Roman arsenal to go fight off the mob that will come later that night.  He doesn't pretend that handing them sacks of gold coins will solve their problems, as if "love" is convertible into hard currency. Jesus knows that love isn't reducible to money, power, or weaponry, but it sure does show up in a basin, a pitcher, and a towel--so he uses those in his last lecture.  It's all as if to say, "This is what love looks like--and I invite you into it."

Twenty centuries later, the particulars may have changed.  Washing feet isn't quite the practical help it was in a day of open-toed sandals and dusty, horse-ridden unpaved dirt roads.  But the call to love endures, and so does the call to find ways to love the same way Jesus has loved us: to the end.  We are called, not merely to run down the clock and coast, but to actively find ways to spend our energy, our time, and our resources for the good of others.  We are called to love "to the end" the way we have been loved, while knowing that Jesus has loved us first even before we lifted a finger for him or anybody else.

So maybe today you and I aren't called to a literal basin and towel, but we are called to find whatever humble tools are at hand to give ourselves away for the good of others.  That call doesn't expire or go away, even if the ways we live it out might change.  Today, following the way we have been loved by Jesus "to the end," may we love those God sends across our paths as well, all the way.

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see the ways we might love like you in this day before us, and then open our hands to take whatever tools--towels, pitchers, or whatever else--we need to do it.

No Weak Sauce--October 26, 2023

No Weak Sauce--October 26, 2023

"O give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,
    for his steadfast love endures forever.

 O give thanks to the God of gods,

    for his steadfast love endures forever.

 O give thanks to the Lord of lords, 

    for his steadfast love endures forever...." [Psalm 136:1-3]

Do you see the pattern?  Is the message getting through?

Because, in truth, this was just a short snippet of the repetition that runs throughout what we call Psalm 136.  It is a literal refrain, and the psalm itself is written as a sort of call-and-response, where each verse starts with a statement about God, and often what God has done for the people, and then the answer replies that God's "steadfast love endures forever."  Twenty-six times that same pattern occurs, without variation and without fail: the leader would call to mind something that God had done to save and bless, and the congregation would state the obvious conclusion: here is more evidence that "God's steadfast love endures forever."

I find this whole psalm fascinating, not just because it gives us a glimpse of ancient Israel's corporate worship life, but because of what those distant ancestors in the faith knew was important enough to keep saying.  I mean, at one level, it's kind of cool to be able to reconstruct a bit of what it might have sounded like to be an Israelite worshiping at the Temple, or on pilgrimage to Jerusalem.  It's powerful to think that, even removed by three thousand years in time, give or take, there are connections between our patterns of liturgy and those of ancient times. This psalm is sort of the Hebrew version of the preacher calling out, "Can I get an Amen?" and the congregation all replying with a shouted "Amen!" back, or our rhythm in Sunday prayers of intercession.  And that by itself binds us together with those past generations.

But like I say, beyond the church-nerd factor that says, "How cool!  Even ancient Israelites used litanies in worship!" the thing that is really powerful here is what those Hebrew congregations were focused on.  Of all the things they could emphasize, the simple idea worth coming back to over and over is the enduring love of God. Any good teacher will tell you that repetition is one of the best means of emphasizing your point and driving it home, and what the poets and song leaders of the psalms want us to retain, above all, is the unending steadfastness of God's love. That really is amazing when you consider that there are no parallel psalms with refrains like, "God's wrath burns eternally!" or "God's grudge-holding is unflinching!"  There's not even a chorus of, "God's holiness is uncompromising and unwavering!" even if that might also be true (whatever we think we mean by "holiness").  But there is this song, unique in all of Scripture, that keeps insisting we remember the persistent steadfast love of God, or what the late Brennan Manning called "the relentless tenderness" of the divine.  Our ancestors in the faith wanted to ingrain those who came after them with the news of God's unending, unfailing love, until it becomes dyed in the wool of who we are.

Now, given the lengths this well-used hymn has gone to so that people ever since would be grounded in God's unending love, here's my question: what do people around us first think of when they think of their local church... and of the God proclaimed in those pulpits and pews?  What impression of God do people currently get from the churches where you and I live and work and worship?  What one message is hammered home over and over again the most clearly?  And what do people believe that WE believe about God, based on what they hear and see from Respectable Religious People around them?

I ask, almost a little bit afraid of really finding out the answer, because I know for a lot of people, the messages they've heard time and time again from folks who claim to speak for God don't line up with the emphasis here in Psalm 136.  For a lot of folks, all they've ever heard has been the fear of getting zapped by a wrathful sky deity who is cut more out of the cloth of Zeus or Jupiter than the One whose "steadfast love endures forever."  A lot of other folks have been sold some version of a faith that comes with a list of Things-You-Have-To-Do to get yourself acceptable to "God."  And plenty of other folks have heard some tepid, mealy-mouthed weak word about God's love that comes with a "but" or an "if," as in "God loves everybody in general, but not if you are any of the following things..." or "God loves you if you do these other things."  And like the old line goes, a lot of folks find themselves unaffected by the power of the authentic gospel because they have been inoculated against it by a weak version of the real thing.  But the singers of this psalm have no place for that; they have no patience for weak sauce.

Maybe it's time to ask what those saints of the distant past who learned the refrain, "God's steadfast love endures forever," would say to the loophole-riddled, highly-conditional version of God's love so many have heard... and maybe it's time for us to recover the news they've been shouting to us for thousands of years:  God's steadfast love endures forever.  There is nothing that can stop it, nothing that can end it, and nothing that will wear it down.

What would it sound like for you and me today to be willing to keep repeating that news before anything else to the people around us?  What would happen if the listening world came to know us for being people who spoke of God's relentless tenderness, and who didn't water it down?

May we be such people today.  May that refrain be on our lips, upon our hearts, and in our hands.

Lord God, keep ingraining us with your unending love, and let it pour out from us in our words and actions.

Like a Refugee--October 25, 2023

Like a Refugee--October 25, 2023

"God is our refuge and strength, 

    a very present help in time of trouble. 

 Therefore we will not fear, 

    though the earth should change, 

    though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; 

though its waters roar and foam, 

    though the mountains tremble with its tumult." [Psalm 46:1-3]

Let's get the promise straight: God is our refuge through trouble, not our hall-pass to avoid trouble altogether.

The difference is important.  God's love for us endures and sees us through the times when everything else in our lives feels like it's been shaken to its core. But that is not the same thing as saying, "If you believe in God, nothing in your life will ever get shaken like that."  It does.  Sometimes everything else comes crumbling down, and sometimes the waters really do rage and roar.  Sometimes the things we thought were solid and unchanging buckle under pressure, and that reality does not mean God's love has faltered, faded, or given out on us.  It means that God's love is not bound to the durability of anything else in our lives.  There is no fine print, no expiration date, no set of cleverly-worded loopholes, and no escape clauses for God to squirm out of enduring it all with us.  God's love doesn't keep us out of the turmoil and tumult--it holds us safe through all of that.

I suppose that's the implication of calling God our "refuge"--it means we're going to find ourselves in the position of refugees at some point and in some way in our lives.  There will be times that the other things we had counted on for security (we don't have to list them all, but our money and investments, our property and possessions, our health and if we're lucky our health-care, and our relative insulation from the hardships of the world) fail on us.  And when that happens, the Scriptures point us to God's love as a safe place to find shelter, like townspeople hiding inside the castle walls of a fortress while the war rages outside the gates (which is probably behind Martin Luther's use of the image of a fortress in his hymn inspired by these verses, which we call "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God).  That's the picture: God is the castle who bears the incoming arrows and projectiles of the attacking enemy outside the walls, the one whose love endures all the bombardment and bears the damage for our sake.  God is the shelter when the storm comes... but that is different than saying it will never rain.  It's like that achingly beautiful lyric of Leonard Cohen, "Every heart, every heart, to love will come--but like a refugee."

It's important for our faith to get this clear, both to make sure we're not imagining Christianity as some kind of silver bullet or magic charm that keeps bad things from happening to us, but also because it reminds us that God is willing to bear the fury of whatever trouble or turmoil is swirling around us.  The image of a refuge is exactly that of a place that gets beaten by the wind and hail so the people under its shelter are not hurt, or the walls of the fortress that keep the people inside safe from fiery arrows by absorbing their impact into its own stone.  To say that God's love endures means that God is willing to bear all that damage and destruction for our sake.  And that also means that, if you find yourself going through a time of stress and storm, it's not a sign that God has failed you or abandoned you.  It means God is willing to go through it with you and bear the trouble along with you while you go through it.

Someone you cross paths with this week needs to hear that.  Someone you will talk with could use the reminder that God will be with them through their storm at the moment.  Someone you can check in with might just need your voice assuring them that if they feel like a refugee, fleeing from trouble to find some place to shelter them, that God has already signed up to be our refuge.

Whatever comes today, that's the promise of God.  Whatever comes, God is our refuge and strength.

Lord God, help us today with the troubles roaring around us and in the world, and be a refuge for all who are in need of shelter from harm today.

The Foolishness of Divine Love--October 24, 2023

The Foolishness of Divine Love--October 24, 2023

[Jesus said:] "Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!" [Matthew 23:37]

I suppose one of the costs of genuinely enduring love is that you keep running the risk of looking like a fool.  The commitment to keep offering yourself in love, only to have the beloved turn away, well, that starts to look pretty pitiful before long.

And here's my hunch: if it were anybody other than Jesus weeping over Jerusalem in this tender moment from Matthew's Gospel (echoed by a similar scene in Luke's gospel, too), we would write this guy off and say he was just too naive. You know we would.  You can hear the complaints now:  "This guy--what a loser!  He keeps expecting these hard-hearted people to listen to him, or to turn their hearts toward his offer of a new beginning, and they keep saying NO!  When will he get a clue?"  "Look, I know he means well, but I just can't imagine that a city full of people who have stoned and killed the prophets who were sent to it would ever change their minds!"  "Poor schlub... his intentions might be good, but he's just not being realistic!  There's no way people who have been so evil before as to kill the messengers who were sent to them would ever turn over a new leaf and start to listen. This guy is just out of touch with the REAL WORLD, you know?"  If it were anyone other than Jesus, we would write off this show of resilient love as a damn shame, and we'd shake our heads in frustration that the one weeping over the city didn't have the common sense to give up.

But that's the thing about Jesus: he just doesn't have the common sense to give up on us.  We would declare the folks with a track record of violence and cruelty to be irredeemable; we would say, "I just don't think it's realistic to imagine they could ever change," giving up on the possibility they could ever see the light or have their stony hearts crumble into good soil. And Jesus just doesn't. Divine love endures even when everyone else says it's hopeless, pointless, and futile.

But that's a hard posture to take in this life.  We live in a world of limited resources and limited energy.  We can just get exhausted with giving second, third, or fourth chances to people in our lives, and usually we're not dealing with situations that could cost us our lives.  Jesus knows that continuing to extend the offer of peace to city he's weeping over will cost him everything--all the way to a cross.  And on top of that, we're afraid, aren't we?  We're afraid of looking foolish, of being called naive, of being taken advantage of, or <gasp!> being called "weak" or "losers."  We all know the saying, right? "Fool me once, shame on you--fool me twice, shame on ME."  We don't want to be scorned and shamed, so we would rather give up on people.  Jesus, however, keeps on making the offer of himself, even when he knows where the story is headed, both for him and for the city before him.  But he offers anyway.

It's interesting--in the parallel version of this episode that Luke tells, Jesus laments in particular that the people have missed out on recognizing "the things that make for peace," and that the people are bent instead on their own agendas.  And then here in Matthew's telling, he offers himself as a mother hen who puts her chicks under her wing in order to put herself between the danger and her brood.  Jesus has been relentless in offering a way that leads to life, and yet the people keep rejecting that divine offer, even when Jesus has been willing all along to risk his life to give it to them.  It has never stopped Jesus, though, because that's how he loves.  He just won't give up on us; even when we have shown no interest in what he is offering.

And I suppose that sets us up for a bigger question: in the end, does God's determination to love, redeem, and mend all of creation win out over our stubborn rejection?  Is God's victory in love assured, or will our hard-hearted "no" be the last word?  In a sense, all our lives are lived out in the tension of that question, waiting to be answered.  But in another sense, the resurrection at the heart of our faith is exactly the evidence we need that ultimately God's enduring love is able to overcome even the worst we humans can do and even our most insistent "no." In the end, our hope as Christians is that God's relentless love wins.

That's a hope worth staking our lives on.

Lord Jesus, let your persistent love wear down the stone of our hearts to shape us into people capable of receiving your goodness.

More Than Cliches--October 23, 2023

More Than Cliches--October 23, 2023

"We always give thanks to God for all of you and mention you in our prayers, constantly, remembering before our God and Father your work of faith and labor of love and steadfastness of hope in our Lord Jesus Christ." [1 Thessalonians 1:2-3]

Be honest--at 90% of the weddings you have attended, someone has read those familiar words from 1 Corinthians 13 about "faith, hope, and love," haven't they? And while we're being honest, let's admit that for a substantial number of those weddings, we just let those words, faith, hope, and love go in one ear, and right out the other. Our ears are almost numb to the power of those words, doesn't it seem? Or at least, we can barely hear anything more in them than some nice verbal window dressing to round out a wedding ceremony. By the time you hear, "faith, hope, and love," after all, you're halfway through and can start planning how you'll get to the reception.

Those words almost have the feel now, for so many of us, of the cliche message on the inside of a greeting card--you don't really bother to read the store-bought message very often, do you? Maybe you look for a handwritten note or salutation, but the poems inside greeting cards almost seem like a formality--something that makes for nice verbal window dressing, but not much more. And the trouble, then, is that maybe we come to think that's all Saint Paul had in mind when he wrote those words to the Corinthians, "And now, faith, hope, and love abide, these three..." Maybe, we think, Paul was just trying his hand at writing some fluffy stuff for weddings. If that's all that Paul had in mind, after all, we don't need to pay much attention to those words or what they mean for us. If all Paul was doing was writing some 1st-century greeting card filler in his old age, then his words are nice and tame and will leave us as we are.

We do not, however, read the opening verses of 1 Thessalonians at weddings very often, for whatever reason. But here in this verse for today, those same three words appear: "faith... love... and hope..." Okay, a different order than he chose for 1 Corinthians, but there they are, those same three words again, and here it's pretty clear that Paul isn't just writing a greeting card. He is talking about a way of life. He is talking about something with teeth. He is talking about, or rather talking to, people who have sought to be people of faith, of hope, and of love for the long haul. None of this is cliche wedding-ceremony stuff--it is about work and labor and steadfastness here. There is nothing sentimental or fluffy in this verse--there is instead, well-deserved thanks for a life-long commitment of brothers and sisters in Christ to live as disciples. To hear these three words, faith, love, and hope, spoken here, without the distraction of dresses with puffy sleeves and flower arrangements, we can't just let them in one ear and out the other. In this verse, we hear about faith, love, and hope, not as poetic filler, but as perspectives. This is what love that endures looks like.

In all fairness to Paul, he did write both passages, and he never intended for his words in 1 Corinthians to be reduced to a bit of flowery prose read before the vows by whoever didn't make the cut of the bridesmaid list. In both 1 Corinthians and 1 Thessalonians, Paul is writing to whole communities, groups of disciples who are seeking to live the distinctive and peculiar life of followers of Jesus. We are people who believe certain things about God (that is, we have faith), but who live differently because we believe that we are not the commanders of our own destiny or captains of our own fate. We are people who love others--strangely enough, even strangers and enemies--even when it is a labor to care for others or put their needs before our own. And we are people who live in light of God's promise to restore all things and to mend what is broken in creation--in other words, we have hope, even when the rest of the world would tell us we can only rely on ourselves. These words are not merely nice ideas or abstract concepts--they are virtues and habits that we practice as part of our alternative way of living in the world. They are part of how we make the world sit up and turn its head, because the world around us cannot make sense of such deeply-rooted faith, hope, and love.

So maybe today we need the less familiar setting of this lesser-known letter for us to recapture the power of Paul's words when we have let them get stale from casual use. Maybe today we can hear again that our message, the Christian Gospel, is more than greeting card filler--it is a perspective, and a way of life that will carry us through for the long haul. Today, thinking deeply about what these words really mean for us today, let us be people of working faith, laboring love, and steadfast hope.

Lord Jesus, living Word of God, speak again to us and give us ears to hear what you are saying. Surprise us and catch us off guard, so that even while you keep speaking the same words you have spoken to your people all these years, we will understand with new insight and new passion the life you are calling us into. Make us your people of faith, of love, and of hope, so the world will watch and take notice.

What Cannot Be Lost--October 20, 2023

What Cannot Be Lost--October 20, 2023

"I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you." [Jeremiah 31:3]

You want to know the secret to how God's love can keep on enduring with us?  Here it is:  God's kind of love doesn't depend on our worthiness, action, or earning.  The unconditionality of God's love makes it unfailing, because God's willingness to keep loving us doesn't depend on how well we keep up our side of the deal.  Our goodness or badness, our loveliness or unloveliness, and even our awareness or ignorance of being loved, all factor out of the equation, and that leaves God free to continue to love the world, even in spite of the world's lovelessness.  In other words, even when we get ourselves in deep trouble and find ourselves in the pain of bearing the consequences of our worst choices and most terrible actions, we can't shake God's love for us.  It doesn't run out of energy or lose its grip on us, and it doesn't fade out, burn out, or give out.  Face it, we can't lose it--not even if we tried.

When I hear these words from the book of Jeremiah, I hear a song.  There's this gorgeous song of Sara Groves that just brought me to a halt the first time I heard it, years ago, and it is simply called, "You Cannot Lose My Love."  You could hear it as a parent's song to a child or as God's song to us, and I suppose that's part of the beauty of how love works--that there is a common thread of unconditionality to genuine love wherever it is found.  The verses all have the same pattern: listing off things that can be lost in this life, and then the assertion by contrast that the singer's love cannot be lost.  "You will lose your baby teeth, at times you'll lose your faith in me; you will lose a lot of things, but you cannot lose my love," goes the first verse.  Or, "You will lose your confidence, in times of trial your common sense, you may lose your innocence, but you cannot lose my love."  You get the idea, right?

I love that honesty about how many other things are indeed losable in this life--and how it makes God's love, real love, stand out.  Genuine love, whether God's for us or the best examples of our love for one another, endures and cannot be lost.  Our commitments to each other are not merely, "I will love you as long as it is easy," but rather, "I will seek your good even when it is difficult," because that's how God's love for us endures, too.  When Jeremiah first spoke these words on God's behalf, it was to people staring down exile, and facing the stark reality of having lost just about everything else in their lives: their homes, their kingdom, their Temple, and their sense of stability in the world.  But even in the face of all that loss, God's voice comes like the song: "I have loved you with an everlasting love."  It's as if God is saying, "You may well have lost all those things, but you cannot lose my love."  It's why Paul could say, centuries later to the Romans, that "there is nothing in all creation that can separate us from the love of God."  God's love sticks it out with us even when we lose everything else; the promise was never that because God loves us, nothing bad would ever happen, but that God's love would hold on to us even through those times of loss.

And again, that's possible because God doesn't put strings on divine love making it dependent on our behavior, our offerings, our piety, or our prayers.  It's just there, like a parent's for a child, because they are in the world.  

It's worth telling that to each other: to our children and grandchildren, to our fellow church folks, to the face in the mirror, and to people waiting to hear that they, too, are beloved.  I was just hearing someone share their faith story the other day, and it hit me again.  This person was mentioning a childhood full of trauma and no background in the church, and they grew up thinking that there would be no place in organized religion for them and anybody else who felt like an outcast they way they did.  (And to be honest, in a lot of gatherings of Respectable Religious People, they already had been told there was no place for them.)  But what made the difference was meeting someone who told them that they were beloved already, unconditionally, and irrevocably, by God.  And that was backed up by actions from people in that congregation who actually lived the welcome and love.  So now, this person who had been feeling left out, like all this God stuff wasn't for them, has come to faith, been baptized, and become the most amazingly involved person in their congregation--all because someone actually dared to say what Jeremiah was saying thousands of years ago: to speak on behalf of God, "I have loved you with an everlasting love," and to mean it through their actions.

I can't help but think that God is sending each of us today, like the prophet Jeremiah, to go find people who feel like they've lost everything and are ready to be disappointed by God, too, and to be for them the good news of love that endures.  There are folks we'll cross paths with who waiting to hear, and then to see us back up in our actions, the news that God's love cannot be lost, and neither can ours.  Who will we tell?  How will we show them the unconditional and unfailing love of God... through our own love?

Lord God, use us today so that someone else will know and believe your everlasting love for them.

God's Hidden Costs--October 19, 2023

God's Hidden Costs--October 19, 2023

"I was ready to be sought out by those who did not ask,
     to be found by those who did not seek me. 

 I said, 'Here I am, here I am,'

    to a nation that did not call on my name.

 I held out my hands all day long

    to a rebellious people,

 who walk in a way that is not good,

    following their own devices...." [Isaiah 65:1-2]

So, here's a true confession from the pastor:  to this day, I can't read these words without wrinkling up my face to keep from tearing up and squinting my eyes to keep them from watering.  

It's hard for me to read these words, even now, even as an adult, and to let it sink in that they depict God as the brokenhearted one, standing alone with arms held open to welcome home angry and wayward runaways.  It is difficult--but utterly necessary--to come to see the One we often think of as Almighty and All-Powerful in such a vulnerable position, offering love to people who outright reject it or just walk on by.  And yet... here it is, right in the Scriptures (and in what Christians often call the Old Testament, which church folks tend to caricature as "the parts where God is mean and cranky, at that!).  Here is the Strong One willing to look weak. Here is the Eternal One left standing alone "all day long" because no one would receive the free gift being offered.  There are hidden costs to God for the willingness to go on loving us, even when God's love is unrequited.

So when Jesus comes on the scene centuries after these words from what we call Isaiah 65 were first spoken, and he tells a story about a man whose runaway son comes back from being lost in the far country, Jesus isn't inventing something out of whole cloth.  He is saying what the prophets before him dared the people to imagine: that God is the one hiking up the divine robes to run out to meet us, that God is the one with prodigal, reckless love to welcome back the lost ones, and that God has always been the one holding open hands all day long for us.  The prophets like Isaiah were telling us what Jesus reaffirmed: that God's enduring love comes at the price for God of growing weary with heartache and disappointment every day that we don't come back home, and every time we shrug off the gift of grace in search of some lesser god.  And these voices from the Scriptures remind us that God has always been willing to be that One with open arms, even at the pain of breaking God's own heart.

This passage from Isaiah hits even harder when you realize the ones to whom God is speaking here in this passage.  The people "who did not seek me" and who "did not call on my name" aren't some pagan Gentile people, like you might think at first blush.  This word from the prophet isn't aimed at "outsiders," but at the prophet's own people--the people of Israel and Judah.  The people who prided themselves on being descended from the line of Jacob and his sons, who knew all the right religious rules, and who kept the commandments and the covenant, these are the people who nevertheless weren't really seeking the God who was seeking after them.  

That's a stark reminder for us modern-day Respectable Religious Folks as well. It's all too easy to pat ourselves on the back for having the "right" religious answers and projecting the appropriately "pious" image, only to hear God say back, "But you have missed that I was actually holding my arms out to you, and you walked on by without realizing it."  It's all too easy to get so focused on the trappings of "playing church" that we miss the Love that has been waiting there all along for us, calling out to us, "Here I am!"  I'm reminded a little bit of that passage from Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamozov, where a storyteller imagines Jesus coming back to earth during the days of the Spanish Inquisition, only for the Grand Inquistor to tell Jesus that "the Church" can do a better job of being in charge and that Jesus' presence will only mess things up, and that therefore, he'll burn Jesus at the stake "for having dared to come and trouble us in our work."  It's a scathing bit of satire against Organized Religion at our worst, but in its own way, it's making the same point as Isaiah 65 here.  We can think we've got all the right religious answers and still miss the very presence of the living God standing with arms wide open to embrace us.  It's a testament, then, both to how dense and self-righteous we Respectable Religious Folks can be sometimes... and how far God's enduring love will go to reach us anyway.

Today may be a day, then, to pause and look honestly at ourselves to see if maybe we've let the trappings of our own religiosity keep us from seeing the presence of the living God right at our side, reaching out to us right now.  And even if we do realize that we, like the pious people of Isaiah's day, have missed out on recognizing God's love with open arms for us, there is a word of hope.  God's enduring love keeps those arms open, so that even now we can find ourselves embraced again no matter how many times we have walked right on past with a shrug of indifference.

Today is a day to look up from whatever has distracted us to see that God has been willing to risk being heartbroken and rejected for our sake, and maybe that will send us running back into those wide arms of mercy.

Lord God, help us to hear your voice that has been calling out to us even when we wouldn't listen.  Help us to step into the embrace you have risked offering to us all along.

Reminded Like Children--October 18, 2023

Reminded Like Children--October 18, 2023

"Keep your lives free from the love of money, and be content with what you have; for he has said, 'I will never leave you or forsake you.' So we can say with confidence, 'The Lord is my helper; I will not be afraid. What can anyone do to me?' Remember your leaders, those who spoke the word of God to you; consider the outcome of their way of life, and imitate their faith.  Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever." [Hebrews 13:5-8]

When our lives are built on the reliability of God, we don't have to obsess over the instability of our investments, or the shakiness of our stock portfolios.  When we know we are held in the sure grip of God's enduring love, we can let go of our nervous clutching onto our piles of money... because we know what will really be there for us when it counts.  And it ain't the Dow Jones.

This is a pretty essential part of our faith as Christians, even though it never got codified in a Creed or a book of confessions.  But really it's at the hard of Jesus' message and mission. When our lives are grounded in the knowledge that God's love for us is unchanging and unrelenting, we don't have to seek our security in other things--not in getting more money, not in piles of possessions, and not in the size of our house or the balance in our 401(k). And that frees us up to share what we have with the needs of others.  When you know that you can count on God to be constant, faithful, and steadfast, you find yourself less inclined to look to money to be a back-up god for you.  And therefore we can let our money be used to help others rather than needing to be hoarded just for the sake of having "more."  We are able to love others more freely, confidently, and generously when we are assured that God's love will not bail out on us or give up on us.

I'll bet you've seen the same in children all the time.  When children have the assurance that they are loved and that their needs are provided for, they are much more able to share with other kids.  When they have the stability of knowing where their next meal will come from and that there are adults who will be there through the night, children are typically a lot better able to deal with changes or challenges in other parts of their lives.  But if kids are already dealing with the anxiety of not knowing if they'll get to eat tonight or whether there will be someone safe to go to when they need something, they are much more likely to be on edge, defensive, and combative.  When you know you are loved, you are much more able to offer love to others.  And when you are uncertain of love, it has a way of making you stingy and prickly.

We don't like to admit it, but we're not much different as adults, honestly.  And the writer of Hebrews wants us to see the important connection between being grounded in God's unwavering love and the freedom it gives us to love others well and freely.  Like children who are able to be kind to other children because they are loved at home, we are able to be generous with what we have because we know that we are loved by the One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.  We need to keep being reminded of that, like children.

Every so often, I'll hear folks from other branches of the Christian family tree make a sort of criticism out of us Lutherans and our emphasis on the gracious love of God beyond our deserving.  You may well have heard the critiques before: "Why don't you ever get beyond talking about God's unconditional love?" or "Why don't we hear more about what we have to do as Christians?" or "When will the preacher give more sermons about the requirements of discipleship and God's high expectations of us?" And, sure, there is more to the Christian faith that just hearing "God loves you already." We are called to a new way of life, and it does take learning and growing to step into that life. Sure.  But at another level, some part of us never leaves behind the needs of children to know that we are loved, so that we are then able to be generous with our love.  Some part of us will always need the reassurance that we are held in the grip of grace that will not let us go, so that we don't go seeking other (ultimately unreliable) sources of stability, like money, possessions, or status.  And to be honest, I can shout at a child to share with their classmates all day long and have it do no good if they are deep down insecure about whether they will be taken care of, too.  But when you help a child to know they are safe and cared for, it's almost like watching a flower open up as it blossoms to see the way they become generous and empathetic.  So for us as followers of Jesus, often the best way to lead us to grow in generosity and empathy is to help us to remember that we are beloved and unconditionally held in God's care.  That's why we Lutheran Christians (at our best) keep coming back to the love of God rather than bullet-point lists of what YOU have to do.  We're always children learning we are loved, so that we can be generous in giving away our love.

So hear it today, again, and let it sink in for this day's need:  you and I are loved unfailingly and unfalteringly by the One who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. And just see what that does to unclench our fists, and to open our hands.

Lord Jesus, be your same constantly loving self so that we can open up to others in love, empathy, and generosity.

Staying With Each Other--October 17, 2023

Staying With Each Other--October 17, 2023

"I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life." [Philippians 4:1-3]

Sometimes, you know, in the midst of the organ music in the background and the candles around the lectern on a Sunday morning, you forget that you are reading someone else's mail here when you read the letters of the New Testament. But little passages like this one we heard this past Sunday from Philippians remind me that we Christians have made an odd habit of giving public readings of someone else's correspondence and listening for the voice of God as we eavesdrop on the conversations of saints from millennia ago.

And yet, there is something wonderfully, surprisingly, immediate and relevant revealed as we overhear this ancient conversation. I have to tell you, I didn't always appreciate, or even much like, this odd left turn in the fourth chapter of Philippians; it always felt too... particular, too personal, too entangled with the details and disagreements of people I would never meet this side of glory. This odd little digression about two particular women Paul knew, with the unusual-to-our-ears names "Euodia" and "Syntyche," just seems to come out of nowhere, right in the midst of Paul waxing all sentimental. 

There are lots of great plaque-worthy, cross-stitch-wall-hanging-ready verses from Philippians, and then there is this very abrupt intrusion into a squabble of some kind between two women who were leaders in the church to whom Paul was writing. Plenty of people know, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me..." and "The One who began a good work in you will be faithful to bring it to completion..." or "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice!" Those are A-side tracks from the Philippians Greatest Hits album. But right in the midst of it, Paul stops with his valedictory speech here, and just stops to try and persuade two women with whom he has worked and suffered and struggled in the gospel to work things out with whatever mess is going on in their lives. These are real people with real problems, and Paul goes right into them.  And his counsel to them, and to the whole congregation surrounding them, is "Keep sticking it out with each other.  Let your love for each other endure and lead you to find a way to work things out.  And everybody else there in Philippi, you help them to find a way to come to a resolution, and let the love of God that has brought us together be strong enough to keep us together."

It's a terrible passage to engrave on brass or frame on your wall... but it's perfect for actually living out one's faith, because it is utterly real. Paul tells the truth about the disagreement, even if we don’t know what it was about. At one level, it doesn’t matter what it was about—these two sisters in Christ were going to have to get used to the idea that Jesus had claimed each of them, and that they were going to need to find a way to live together as part of the church, because Jesus wasn’t about to let go of either of them. They were central enough to the congregation, and their disagreement was potentially disruptive enough, that Paul decided he had better get the ball rolling toward their reconciliation. (Just as a sidebar, this seems to be a pretty strong indicator that women had important roles of leadership in the early church, if Paul not only takes the time to weigh in on Euodia and Syntyche’s situation, but also that he calls them “coworkers” who “struggled beside me in the work of the gospel.”) Call it Christian Discipleship by way of Al Green: even when we are struggling with each other, the apostle says, "let's stay together." In the end, it's because we know that God's love won't let go of any of us that we have to find ways to work together with all of us, to care for each other, and to hold onto each other beyond the things we don't see eye to eye on. Love that endures is love that won't let us walk out on each other or take our toys and go home.

So in one sentence, Paul names the disagreement—ridding us of any illusions that everybody always got along in the early church, or that Christians are always smiling and pleasant to one another. But at the same time, in the very same sentence, Paul offers up the hope that these two women, who have shown before their ability to work together in a common project, can come to an agreement. Paul is neither pure pessimist (they’ll never agree, those two!) nor wide-eye optimist (and we’ll all just naturally get along with each other because we’re all so pleasant to be around!). He sees truthfully with two points of focus (call Paul the inventor of spiritual bifocals, if you like): on the one hand, the reality of a broken relationship that it would have been easier just to ignore, and on the other hand, the equally true reality that Jesus is still holding onto both of these fellow sisters in Christ, and his claim makes them belong. And that means there is the possibility that these women could find a way to forgive and be forgiven, to come to an agreement, and to live in real community with one another. But it requires the courage to be honest about the disagreement, and that courage is only possible when we are grounded in the enduring love of God that doesn't give up on us or bail out on us.

So… what does this situation have to do with us living in the twenty-first century? Well, just substitute names of people in your own world, your own family, your own congregation, and the answer is in front of us. We are called to practice enduring love in community in the same way—to be honest about where we have divisions, disagreements, wounds that need to be addressed, and secrets that need to be brought out into the open. And with that comes the other side of Paul’s realism—to take seriously and firmly the claim of Jesus that binds us to one another.  We can tell each other, "Let's stay together," because we know that Jesus has promised to stay together with all of us and isn't letting go of any of us.

You might not have ever heard the named "Euodia" or "Syntyche" before, but you and I can be people who learn from these women who were leaders in the early church, to face our disagreements honestly knowing that Christ's love for all of us endures and won't let go, rather than thinking it's holier to walk on eggshells all the time.

When we are confident that God's love won't let go of us, we can find the courage to name our disagreements and work through them, rather than pretending they aren't there.  That's a game changer in a polarized culture that walks away at the first whiff of disagreement. So, yeah, like Al Green and the apostle Paul put it, let's stay together.

Lord Jesus, help us to be able to talk about our disagreements rather than hiding from them, and help us to trust that you can navigate us through the messes we share.

Love and Life That Endure--October 16, 2023

 

Love and Life That Endure--October 16, 2023

"Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved." [Philippians 4:1]

This might just be the greatest evidence of resurrection that we have: love.

It has to be the real thing, though. Only the genuine article will do. Not to be confused with boxes of chocolates and hastily purchased flowers. Not to be equated with liking someone, even liking someone a lot. Not to be confused with romance at all, really. But love, the authentic, I-will-go-to-the-mat-for-you, I-will-follow-you-into-the-dark kind of commitment and devotion, that might just be the best sign we Christians can offer that the tomb was empty on that Sunday morning, and that one day ours will be, too.

I realize that this verse might not seem at all like a statement about the resurrection—whether Jesus’ or ours. But this verse, which many of us heard this past Sunday, comes right on the heels of Paul saying that Christ Jesus “will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory.” And Paul wasn’t talking about a surprise makeover. He was obviously talking about resurrection, about life that endures beyond the grip of death, and about God’s power to make us into new creations. All of that is in the background as Paul continues here in what we call Chapter Four of Philippians.

See, today’s conversation begins with a “therefore,” which is Paul’s succinct way of saying, “Ok well, based on everything we were just talking about, here are some conclusions.” The hope of resurrection stands in the background of today’s verse. It is what keeps Paul grounded while he is in prison and very well staring down the possibility of capital punishment. And it is what allows him to face each new day while he is separated from distant friends who clearly mean the world to him. The resurrection, and Paul's confident trust in a God who can raise the dead, these are the things that lead Paul to say what he says in today’s verse—they are what the “therefore” is there for.

Ah, but none of that gets at how love is evidence for the resurrection, at least not exactly, and that was what I promised you. But it sets the stage, and it gets all the players to their right places. And that is actually what this is all about. Paul has come to love these people, the Christians at Philippi, very dearly. He is not bashful or awkward about it. He just comes out and says it. It is a pure love, free of self-interest, and one that allows him really to delight in the things that are good for these friends of his in Philippi, and really to be crushed by the things that pain the Philippians.

But consider this: there was no real reason that Paul ever would have had to meet these people, much less come to love them, except for the Message of the Resurrection. Paul lived in a world where your average peasant (and let’s face it, most everybody in the Empire was a peasant or below on the great Roman social hierarchy) might not have ever traveled a hundred miles from the spot they were born. Paul wouldn’t have had reason to travel out all the way west to Philippi—a Roman colony somewhere around seven or eight hundred miles from his own hometown. He could have lived a quiet life in Tarsus, or Damascus, or back even further away from Philippi in Jerusalem. He might never have had an occasion to visit Philippi—except for the fact that he came as a Christian to bring the news of a crucified and risen savior.  

Easter—that is, the news of a Savior whose love endured through the cross and out the other side of an empty grave—was the reason for Paul first meeting this people, all the way back to including that jailer who had once tortured him (see Acts 16). If Jesus had not risen from the dead, Paul would likely have had no reason, ever, to have gone to Philippi. And even if he had gone, if there were no resurrection, Paul would never have met any of the specific people he had come to love there. (Acts 16:13 implies that there was not a substantial Jewish population in Philippi for it to have its own synagogue, which meant there wasn’t a base of fellow Jews for Paul to have connected with, if he had not been changed by the resurrection.) So the people Paul knew and loved in Philippi are people he wouldn’t have even met if Jesus weren’t alive and hadn’t appeared to Paul.  Jesus' enduring life and love made it possible for Paul to be brought to faith in Jesus, and in turn Paul got to know and love those folks in Philippi because of that whole chain of events.  Jesus' resurrection led to Paul's coming to faith in Christ and from there to meeting and caring for the Philippians.  His love for them is evidence that Jesus is alive.

The fact that Paul has not only met these people, people with whom he had very little else in common before Christ, but also that he has come to love these people, that is a sign in and of itself that something powerful and life-changing has happened to Paul. The fact that their lives are now tangled up in one another’s, and that he can call these dear friends of his “my joy and crown,” this is sure evidence that something has completely changed Paul’s course of life and taken him places he never would have guessed he would go to.

And the fact that now, even while they are separated by great distance, they remain friends who continue to miss one another, this, too, is a sign that Paul isn’t just a blow-into-town kind of guy who forgets the people the moment he gets on the next bus. Well, something must have happened in Paul’s life to turn him into this person that even we have met through his letter: someone who loves these people at Philippi very deeply, someone who has gone to distant places he never expected, someone who is willing to suffer in prison for the sake of his calling.

That something was the resurrection: the enduring power of life and of love beyond death. Only a risen, living Christ can make sense of the change in Paul’s life situation. His love for these people, and their love for him, is evidence of Easter.  Like the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said it, "It is love that believes the Resurrection."

The same is true for us. We are placed in these amazing communities of faith, we Christians, where people show up for us when our hearts are heavy, where people rejoice with us in times of joy. And among these people, we find that our lives are bound up with theirs, as we are all tangled up in the love of God. The funny thing is, these are not necessarily people you would have picked to be your friends otherwise. You know, sometimes we talk about fellow Christians in our congregation as “church family,” and that refers not only to the closeness we find in these communities, but also to the fact that you don’t get to choose your family. We might not agree with one another or always get along with each other; we might not share the same taste in music or movies, either.  But our being pulled together in Christian community is evidence by itself that Jesus is alive with a love that endures beyond death. Here we are, people who might never have met otherwise, people who might not have expected to like one another, much less befriend one another, but the fact that we have is a sign that something wonderful and amazing has happened to us. We have been brought to this moment and this place because Jesus is alive, and someone told the news.

Today, how can you and I let our love of others be evidence to someone else that Jesus is alive? How might be we evidence of the Resurrection for someone?

Lord Jesus, let your resurrection show through in me today, by letting your love flow through me.