Called Friends--February 1, 2024

Called Friends--February 1, 2024

[Jesus said:] "This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. No one has greater love than this, to lay down one's life for one's friends. You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you servant any longer, because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father. You did not choose me but I chose you. And I appointed you to go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, so that the Father will give you whatever you ask him in my name." [John 15:12-16]

There is a critical difference between one's "family" and one's "friends"--you're stuck with your family, at least at some level, but friends are chosen.

Of course, that cuts both ways.  Sometimes it's comforting to know that even if your friends all desert you, your family is bound to you unchangeably, no matter how many years or miles are between you.  Like Robert Frost once said about the place called home, family is that group of people who, "when you have to go there, they have to take you in."  And yet, that also means that there is something especially precious about a friendship, because it isn't a compulsory relationship. It is chosen.  So if someone chooses to call you their friend, you are being given a truly special gift--one the other person doesn't "have to" give.  Family may have to take you in, no matter how long you've been the prodigal in the far country with the pigs, but a friend makes the choice to open the door to you.

How amazing a thing it is, then, that Jesus calls his disciples "friends" on his last night with them.  To be sure, Christians are told that we are "children of God" who belong to the "household of faith."  And that is family talk.  So, yes, there is a sense in which our relationship to God is as unbreakable and unconditional as the bonds of love that hold a family together.  But it is worth noting that Jesus also makes the point of telling his disciples that he now regards them as "friends," beyond the role of servant to a master or student to a teacher.  Jesus calls them friends, which means he has chosen to build and keep that relationship, not that someone else is forcing him to take them in.  Jesus has chosen us to be his friends.

Just let that sink in for a moment! Sometimes we can get so focused on worshiping Jesus as God-incarnate, or offering praise to Jesus for bearing our sins, or trying to learn from Jesus as our Lord and Teacher, that we forget we are called to be Jesus' friends, as well.  Friends learn to care about one another's interests, passions, needs, and thoughts.  Friends grow to love the others who are important to the friend--the rest of their circle of relationship.  Friends eventually come to rub off on each other: some of my personality, quirks, and mannerisms become yours, and some of yours become mine, when you are my friend.  You come to share perspectives, even while you can honor and understand places where you don't yet see eye to eye. And in a sense, every day brings the decision all over again, whether to renew this friendship or let it wither. So every day you find yourself in a friendship that has carried over from the day before, know that you are being chosen, over and over.  Someone is saying "Yes" to you with each new day.  And--wondrously--Jesus has chosen you and me that way. He has called us "friends."

Of course, in some ways, friendship with Jesus is more difficult than friendship with a co-worker or former classmate... and in some ways it is far easier.  On the one hand, you know Jesus' friendship with you isn't really about Jesus wanting to be seen with the "cool kids" or to get to use your stuff, the way sometimes as children we might have had friends who just liked our toys, video games, skateboard, or popularity.  Jesus isn't using us and calling it "friendship."  And Jesus has a way of being a great deal more forgiving about our failures as his friends than just about anyone else I've ever met--Jesus does, after all, include Simon Peter in this conversation from John's Gospel, and before the night was out ol' Pete would deny even knowing Jesus three times! 

But on the other hand, the kind of life Jesus calls us to share with him in friendship is a lifelong challenge.  You might have a friend who's really into sports who wants you to learn to play tennis or golf with them, but Jesus calls us into a life of caring for the least, the lost, and the left behind.  Jesus calls us as his friends to learn how to love enemies, to share our bread, and to cross boundaries to include outsiders.  Those are a good deal more difficult than learning the rules to pickle ball.

So in a sense, recognizing we are called friends of Jesus both stretches us beyond our comfort zones and also relieves the stress and worry of being accepted. As Dallas Willard put it in The Divine Conspiracy, "Jesus tells us we have no need to be anxious, for there is a divine life, the true home of the soul, that we can enter simply by placing our confidence in him: becoming his friend, and conspiring with him to subvert evil with good."  What a beautiful and strange coalescence to be Jesus' friends--we find ourselves freed from worry and comfortingly embraced by Jesus' love, and at the same time he dares us to join his revolution of goodness over against a world full of mean. We are simultaneously companions with Jesus, who graciously shares our journey with us, and also comrades of Jesus, who boldly go at his side into the world's pain, suffering, and rottenness as his agents of grace. He has called us to both by calling us "friends."

What difference might it make in this day ahead to see ourselves as Jesus' friends like that?  How might we find comfort and assurance to know that Jesus keeps on choosing to be in relationship with us (and not merely that someone has "guilted" him into it in the name of "family"!)? And how might we also be challenged by Jesus to go with him, as the line goes, "once more unto the breach," staring down evil and answering it with good, bearing the hatred of others and answer it with love, confronting the crookedness of the world and responding with justice?

That's the invitation on this day.  It is all possible, because Jesus has chosen to call us "friends."

Lord Jesus, as you have called us to be your friends, let us own that relationship, and all that comes with it.

Worthy of the Calling--January 31, 2024

Worthy of the Calling--January 31, 2024

"I therefore, the prisoner in the Lord, beg you to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love, making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace." [Ephesians 4:1-3]

Jesus doesn't call anybody to "be a success."

For that matter, you'll never find Jesus calling someone with the sales-pitch, "Come follow me, and I'll make you win more in life." You don't hear a single Bible story where Jesus says, "Join my team, and I'll make you richer than everybody else around," and you don't find Jesus calling people with a promise of what the world calls "greatness."

In fact, usually in this life, Jesus says, the voices who lure you with talk of "winning," "success," "bigger wealth," and becoming greater and greater...if only you'll pledge them your unquestioning loyalty, are the voices who have nothing to do with him, or with the Kingdom he represents. They are, to borrow a word from another New Testament writer, "anti-Christ" voices.

There is no calling to "look successful" on the lips of Jesus. And there sure-as-heaven is never a time where the actual, living Jesus calls anybody to put themselves, or their group, first, ahead of everybody else. It just ain't what Jesus is about.

On the other hand, when voices like these verses from Ephesians describe Jesus' call on our lives, they immediately start talking in terms of "love," "humility," "gentleness," "patience," and "peace." And that, dear sisters and brothers in Christ, is what it looks like to "live a life worthy of the calling" to which we have been called.

A life that is "worthy" in Jesus' book doesn't mean bigger profits or higher market closes. It doesn't mean looking "respectable" in your religiosity or public with your piety. It does not consist in being the envy of your friends or fawned over by neighbors. Jesus looks at the way the big-wigs and so-and-sos of our era brashly call attention to themselves, or boast about looking out for themselves first, or pass the buck in blame to avoid responsibility for their own mess-ups, and Jesus just simply says, "That isn't worthy of the Kingdom I represent. That kind of life has nothing to do with me. Those kind of values have nothing to do with the God I have come to reveal." Jesus has called us to something else, something more, far beyond, "Me-and-My-Group-First!" thinking. Jesus has called us to a life like his.

It's funny--well, "funny" in that way things can be called funny when they are really disturbing and sad--how often the talking heads, demagogues, celebrities, and pundits of our day avoid answering questions about what is good or noble or worthy in their actions or words, and instead shift the conversation by talking about what is "successful" and "polling well," or calling themselves and their side the "winner," or, most popular of all, calling those they don't like "losers." And I don't know--maybe they really think they are fooling people, or maybe they have fooled themselves, or maybe they just don't care, but it just seems so cartoonishly obvious that those voices sound nothing at all like the way of Jesus. It doesn't seem like the point could be any clearer than it is here in Ephesians: the followers of Jesus have been called, not into a club, or to a religious "winner's circle," or to the top of the Forbes 500 list, but to a way of life marked by selfless love that doesn't have to call attention to itself or put someone else down in order to puff itself up.

That is, quite literally, what these verses are all about. Words like "humility" and "gentleness" actually mean something for the followers of Jesus. And it is worth noting that in the first century, in the Greek and Roman world in which Ephesians was written, "humility" (literally "lowliness" in the Greek) was not considered a virtue. The Greeks and the Romans thought that putting yourself lower than others was scandalously bad PR. You were supposed to flaunt your strengths, leverage them to get people to give you what you wanted, and at the very least find someone else you could blame or put beneath you to make yourself seem better, more like a "winner," by comparison. That was the stock-in-trade of Caesar and his Empire, and maybe of every empire and every new Caesar since. So when Ephesians describes a "life that is worthy," it was radical to hear such a life described, not in terms of "winning," or "success," or "greatness," or military wins, or money accumulated, but in terms of putting ourselves lower so that others can be raised up.

I will tell you something. I am tired. Tired of all the usual talk from the talking heads on television and their Greek choruses on social media, who use the same tired, worn-out old talk of who's "winning," who is "greatest," who is the "loser," and of how the key to success is in putting Me-and-My-Group-First. I am just done with it all, and it leaves me with nothing but disgust.

What does invigorate me, though, is this surprising, life-giving, unexpected picture that Ephesians gives us... which is really no different than the picture Jesus has been sketching out for us all along. What gives me genuine hope and real newness on the days I need it is this vision that Ephesians says we have already been called into: a life lived together where we don't try and climb over each other or step on others to put ourselves ahead, a life in which I am willing to bend lower for your sake and you do the same for me, a life in which nobody has to go around tooting their own horn or labeling somebody else the "loser," because we have all just grown tired of the childish games of making some winners and some losers. Whether that way of thinking really ever satisfied the Caesars or not I could not say (although, honestly, I rather suspect that history's long line of Caesars all went to bed at night insecure, alone, and afraid that someone would see through their self-aggrandizing bluster), but what I am certain of is that such talk and thinking never had anything to do with the way of Jesus. The Me-And-My-Group-First mindset is, to be blunt about it, unworthy of Jesus.

You and I have been called into the life that really is worthy--and to be clear, Jesus does not seem to think it is optional whether we will adopt his view of the world or not. Jesus calls us, and his voice carries authority--which is to say, Jesus is convinced his call itself is enough, not only to draw us to his side, but to get us to let go of our sweaty, little fingers from their clenched grip on the old "success" way of thinking. Jesus calls us into a new life, one which means surrendering the old neediness for attention and blue ribbons and ego-stroking, so that our hands will finally be free to hold one another's... and his.

There is no option of getting to wear the name of Jesus and keeping the old mentality. It is simply unworthy of Jesus and his people. So maybe this is a moment for us to decide which is more important to us: the call of Jesus... or the endlessly annoying chatter of the loudest shouters.

Which way of life is worthy of you giving your minutes, your mind, and your heart to on this day?

Lord Jesus, call to us again, and lead us into lives worthy of the living: lead us to love like you.

Your Calling and Mine--January 30, 2024

Your Calling and Mine--January 30, 2024

"Paul, called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God, and our brother Sosthenes, to the church of God that is in Corinth, to those who are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, together with all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ." [1 Corinthians 1:1-3]

Just so we're clear, the call of Jesus is not like getting to the Super Bowl.  My calling from Jesus does not knock yours out of contention, and your being called by Jesus is not a threat to my belonging, either.  It ain't like the play-offs, where I have to root for your team to lose if there's any hope of my team advancing.  We would do well to remember that.

After watching over the last several weeks of football playoffs how a field of teams has been winnowed down to just two, it is a powerful thing to realize that this is not the way Jesus calls people to himself.  Jesus doesn't pit people against one another to compete for a spot in the next set of brackets or the next round of a tournament.  His calling to you is not exclusive of his calling to me, or to people half a world away who are strangers to us both.

I don't think I ever noticed before how clear that point is here in the opening of Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, for as many times as I have read it.  Over the course of just these three verses that make up Paul's salutation and greeting, he stresses just how wide Jesus' calling extends.  There are at least three different groups Paul mentions here in connection with being "called" by Jesus, and none of them exclude the others from that calling.  

For starters, there is Paul himself--he introduces himself to his readers with the description that he has been "called to be an apostle."  In other words, Paul didn't come up with this bright idea himself, and he didn't apply or try out or audition.  He was called by Christ himself.  That by itself is actually a pretty big deal when you think about it, because Paul would be the first to tell us that he wasn't worthy of Jesus' calling.  He was the one dead-set against Jesus and the budding movement of his followers. He was the one holding the coats and nodding with approval when the lynch-mob came for Stephen, the church's first martyr.  He was the one headed to Damascus, "still breathing threats and murder" (Acts 9:1) with warrants to arrest and bind anybody--men, women, or children--who belonged to the Christian community, when the living Jesus appeared to him on the road, knocked him off his high horse, and changed everything.  Here was the enemy, not only of Christianity, but of Christ himself, and Jesus called him and brought him into the embrace of love.  Not only that, but the living Christ commissioned him to become one of early Christianity's most prolific and daring messengers.  The call of Jesus included the likes of Paul--and changed everything for him, and for us.

But that's just the tip of the iceberg, because this same Paul who is writing to the Corinthians in our verses for today describes them as "called to be saints."  These people, too, are called by Jesus, and Paul doesn't seem threatened by that notion at all.  Paul doesn't think there's only so much "call" to go around, like it's a scarce resource,.  There's no worry that if Jesus has called some of the Corinthians there might not be a spot on the team for him anymore.  Instead, Paul sees the whole congregation in Corinth as "called" by Jesus, in their own ways and to their own roles, using the same wording for "calling" as he had described his own calling to be an apostle.  And mind you, the folks in Corinth were pretty messed up--to read the rest of the letter we call First Corinthians is to uncover a laundry list of failures, sins, and dysfunction that boggles the mind.  And yet--Paul doesn't blush to remind them that they have been called by Jesus, and called to be a holy people (which is what "saints" means) no less.  But notice that from Paul's perspective, that calling isn't contingent or conditional upon their measuring up first.  It is the calling that comes first, and the way they live is always at most a response, like light coming into existence at creation when God calls it into being.  But to be clear, the same living Christ Jesus who called Paul to be an apostle also called all those folks at First Church of Corinth, and there's no worry at all that Jesus will run out of room on his roster.

In fact, that's the third audacious turn in this passage: Paul moves from just the one congregation in Corinth to the ever-widening circle of Jesus' followers everywhere in this same passage.  Paul reminds his readers in Corinth that they aren't the only people Jesus has called, but in fact, the beloved community includes "all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ," and that this Jesus is "both their Lord and ours."  In other words, Jesus' calling stretches out to include people the Corinthians hadn't met--or even that Paul hadn't met yet!  That also means Paul realized that Jesus didn't not need any of their permission, not Paul's nor the Corinthian Church's, to include that whole wide world full of other "saints."  That might be the most provocative realization of this whole passage: Jesus doesn't need my permission or seek my approval before calling somebody into his movement.  Jesus doesn't need to run his list of names past me, and he doesn't have to check with any committee, council, or congregation to make sure they're acceptable.  It is Jesus' calling itself that makes us acceptable, by definition, because it is Jesus' calling that declares we are accepted.

Wherever you find yourself in today's passage, Jesus' call can reach to you. Any time we picture Jesus' call as a narrow, restrictive VIP list (and especially any time we blatantly mis-use that verse about how "many are called but few are chosen"), we're getting it wrong. Jesus' calling extends to us even when we are barely holding it together, to countless faces far away who we've never met, and even to enemies dead-set against Jesus at the moment. Jesus' calling is scandalously inclusive that way.

That runs completely counter to so much of the world in which we live and work.  It's not just the Super Bowl (where your team making the cut means that mine didn't get a ticket to the Big Dance), and it's not just March Madness that will be on the sports page before long, too.  It's at our workplaces, where only one person can get the promotion.  It's the gated housing developments that market their exclusivity--only so many lots available, you know!  It's a whole mindset that sees the world as a zero-sum game where my group winning can only come at the cost of your group losing.  And over against all of it is Jesus' way of calling to us prodigally, widely, and extravagantly.

Today, what if we recognized that our own calling from Jesus comes alongside Jesus' calling to other people, regardless of our approval or vote? And conversely, what if we found confidence in knowing that nobody else's approval or permission is needed for Jesus to call you?  You, indeed, are called by Jesus.  Me, too.  And a whole world full of people who might be labeled mess-ups, failures, sinners, losers, and even enemies. Turns out there are more than two tickets to the Big Dance....

Lord Jesus, let us hear your calling to us and also recognize your call to others beyond us as well.

Done With Game-Playing--January 29, 2024

Done With Game-Playing--January 29, 2024

"Consider your own call, brothers and sisters; not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing the things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God." [1 Corinthians 1:26-29]

When you have nothing to prove, you are truly free.

And the community of Jesus is meant to be a gathering of people who have nothing to prove, and nothing to be ashamed of, because our belonging comes from Jesus' call rather than our earning. That simultaneously makes us free--and binds us together in love.

It seems like everywhere else in our lives, we are forced to preen and posture ourselves to make ourselves acceptable, or to attain some status of belonging. We learn it early on in school, as kids fragment into cliques and castes of the cool and the uncool, the trendy dressers and the unstylish, the athletic and the clumsy, the popular and the wallflowers, and a host of other lines. As we get older, the particulars may change, but the impulse to make ourselves seem "impressive" is the same old routine. Whether it's the level of education you attain, or the amount of money you make, or the neighborhood you live in, or whether you share the politics of your coworkers, or whether you look, act, or think the same, we end up still trying to fit in like we are back in middle school trying to avoid being ostracized before the big dance. And ironically, in the attempt to fit in with whatever clique, class, or caste we think we want to belong to, we end up more alienated and cut off from other people because we fear they'll take our spot in the club.

And you can play that game, I suppose, but--truth in advertising--it's always a losing one. No matter what the variable--class, education, power, influence, wealth, ethnicity, or whatever else we come up with--just when you think you have "arrived" among those of the preferred status, the game invents a new status, a new VIP level, a yet more exclusive elite, and you don't measure up anymore. It's like we're all living out the old Dr. Seuss story about the Sneetches, all vying to have stars on their bellies, until everyone does, and then the status symbol becomes having no star. It's all one terrible, desperate game, and nobody who plays it can come out on top; the house always wins.

But... you don't have to play. That's the open secret that the followers of Jesus are meant to be shouting from the rooftops. You don't have to play the old games of status. God has already chosen to include people of every stripe, category, and class, and deliberately lifted up the ones regarded as "nobodies" by the world. This is part of the sheer brilliance and beauty of God's choice to make a community defined, not by status or sameness, but by grace. And the apostle Paul recognizes that this is not an accident, and certainly not a flaw--it is exactly how God has intended the community of Jesus. God has chosen the ones labeled "nobodies" and regarded as "nothing" by the So-and-Sos to show how empty the status of "So-and-So" really is. God has created a community in Jesus where you don't have to be from the "right" background, or tax bracket, or pedigree, or educational level in order to belong. It is Jesus' calling, Jesus' claim on us, that makes us belong, and not our ability to fit into anybody else's cookie cutter mold. We are bound to each other, then, because of Jesus' love for us, which takes away any grounds any of us have for bragging that we "got in"... and it removes any reason to have to envy anybody else or elbow them out of the circle, either. There is no secret VIP section, no first-class seating, no velvet rope. There is only a welcome to all of us on the grounds of God's grace in Christ.

And like I say, once you "get" that--once it becomes clear you don't have to play the game of reaching for a certain status to fit in--you are truly free. And in the very same moment, you realize you are tethered to everybody else through love because they are no longer your competition vying for a limited number of spots on the team, but members of a family you have been brought into by the power of that love before you even realized it.

This is God's alternative to the world's stupid game-playing. We are what it looks like to build a community on the genuine kind of love that doesn't need to impress, boast, or envy, because it is just done with all that nonsense. We are a glimpse of what it can be like not to have to worry about fitting in or measuring up. And we have been from the beginning. When we forget that and turn the church into one more exclusive club defined by your money, your ethnicity, your education, or your social class, we betray the beautiful vision God has intended for us and turn Christianity into a religious version of the Sneetches. But it doesn't have to be that way. The question really is whether we will dare to believe what the Gospel already says: we don't have to prove anything to anybody, and we don't have to be ashamed of where we've come from or who we are.

Today, let's live as people truly freed from that tired old losing game, and step into the ways love holds us together.

Lord Jesus, enable us to let go of the need to achieve a certain status, and to trust your call to us as we are.

All the Wrong (Right) People--January 26, 2024

All the Wrong (Right) People--January 26, 2024

"Jesus went out again beside the lake; the whole crowd gathered around him, and he taught them. As he was walking along, he saw Levi son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, ‘Follow me.’ And he got up and followed him.  And as he sat at dinner in Levi’s house, many tax-collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples—for there were many who followed him." [Mark 2:13-15]

You know that old one-liner attributed to Groucho Marx?  It goes, "I would never want to belong to a club that would have someone like me for a member."  That, dear ones, is the sheer divine comedy of the gospel.  Jesus has deliberately (and provocatively) chosen to make his new community out of all the "wrong" people... and that turns out to be exactly right.

It's no secret that Jesus got a reputation early on for hanging out with the people labeled as "sinners" and treated as outcasts by the Gatekeepers of Respectable Religion, Incorporated (C).  And chances are, somewhere back in the recesses of our Sunday School flannel-board memories, we recall that tax collectors were counted as traitors and sell-outs by their fellow Judeans both because of their reputation for graft and corruption but also because the government for whom they collected taxes was the occupying Roman Empire.  In other words, Mr. Levi, mentioned here at his tax booth before Jesus finds him, wasn't raising funds for helping the local school district, the band boosters, the Metroparks, or the local roads and bridges.  He was extorting money from his own people (you know Levi is Jewish because his name is one of the twelve tribes of ancient Israel) and, after he got his cut, the lion's share went to subsidize and enrich the very enemy armies that marched through their streets, harassed their neighbors, beat their relatives, and crucified anybody they wanted to make an example of.  Maybe Levi felt trapped and saw no way out of his place in the system, but he was definitely being used by that system to hurt his own people and assist the hostile empire.

And yet... Jesus comes right up to Levi and calls him to be a part of his new community.  And he does it without precondition, without a prerequisite of showing sufficient sorrow for his sin or repentance to show he had changed his ways.  He doesn't even make Levi pray the sinner's prayer or accept Jesus as his "personal Lord and Savior" (although, truth in advertising, nobody in the Bible does that--that's just not how Jesus or the early church thought or spoke).  Instead, Jesus sees Levi, stuck in precisely the dead end of a job that alienated him from his community and petrified him to try and leave behind (sort of like working for the mafia), and speaks the same simple call, "Follow me," as he had given to the somewhat more respectable fishermen Simon, Andrew, James, and John (who at least were seen as contributing to the common good by providing food).

Let's just pause there for a moment: the wording of Jesus' invitation is identical for both the fisherman and for the tax collector--even though Levi is a pariah and an outcast whose livelihood is seen by many as inherently sinful.  Jesus doesn't discriminate.  Jesus doesn't add a list of "But first you must..." conditions.  Jesus doesn't make Levi's invitation conditional on a probationary period, nor does Mark tell us that there is any speech about "giving up his sinful lifestyle as a tax collector."  There is only the call, given to Levi the human being (without other labels or judgments foisted onto him), "Follow me."  And just as it had been for the fishermen, it is Jesus' call that makes Levi worthy--it is not Levi's worthiness that prompts Jesus to call him.

And see? We're right back to Groucho Marx.  Jesus' community is made up entirely of the folks who get labeled as "all the wrong people," and that is exactly the beauty of his movement.  Jesus doesn't take a survey and find the people deemed "worthy" or "winners" by the pollsters to recruit for his team.  Jesus finds the anybodies--and in particular the ones who have been told they are nobodies--and it is his calling to them, his treating them as somebodies, that makes them able, worthy, and willing to get up and follow.  The call makes you worthy; it's not the worthiness that leads Jesus to call you.  Jesus doesn't call Levi "in spite of" the fact that he's a notorious member of the tax-collector-and-sinner demographic; that doesn't even register for Jesus.  Jesus doesn't pity Levi and condescendingly say, "Even though you're terrible, no good, and unlovable, I guess I'll let you tag along." He says, "Follow me," as though those very words removed any question of worthiness or value and settled the matter once and for all.

Now, if all of that weren't bad enough for Jesus' P.R. in the eyes of the Respectable Religious Leaders, it's worth remembering that Jesus has claimed to be bringing the Reign of God near.  The summary of Jesus' primary message is still ringing in our ears from earlier this week and just a bit earlier in Mark's Gospel: Jesus went around saying, "The wait is over.  The Reign of God has come near--turn around and believe it, because it's here!"  Everybody who heard Jesus understood that he wasn't just speaking in the abstract, like "Somewhere, at sometime, the Kingdom of God will come--I'm just reminding you that it might, hypothetically, be on the horizon."  He was saying that in his ministry, the Reign of God was opening up and gathering momentum.  To be in Jesus' entourage, his circle of followers, was to be a part of God's Reign.  And therefore, the people Jesus included in his circles were the people Jesus thought were acceptable in God's sight!  

This was the real scandal.  If some ordinary person, or even a respected rabbi, decided to make their public reputation self-destruct by hanging out with sell-outs and sinners, that was their business. The Gatekeepers of Respectable Religion, Incorporated (C) might not have thought well of you if you did, but as long as you confined the damage to your own reputation, they could hold their peace.  For the Respectable Religious Crowd, the unforgivable thing was--well, exactly what Jesus did: he said that "the sinners" weren't merely acceptable to Jesus alone, but that they were accepted already by God.  The labels and judgments other people affix simply do not register for Jesus. They do not factor in his equation one little bit.

Think I'm overreaching?  Notice how Mark makes it clear that Levi isn't a special case, an exception, or in some separate category of "doesn't really count as a disciple" by noting that "many tax collectors and sinners... followed him." As Mark the Gospel-writer tells it, Jesus made a habit of including people that others had determined were unacceptable, and not just of letting them hang around in his orbit, but of deliberately seeking out the folks others have deemed unworthy.

Well, friends, just so we're clear then, here's the question: if this is how Jesus gathers people, not just into his social circles but to the messianic banquet and the very Table of God's Reign, who are we sent to speak a word of welcome to?  Who that has been told they are unworthy, unacceptable, and undesirable by God are we being sent specifically to--for the expressed purpose of saying, "Jesus calls you to follow him"?  And what in heaven's name gives us the utter arrogance to think we know better than Jesus or can set the bar higher than he does for eligibility in his beloved community?

Let me say this as clearly as I can, then: if you've ever been in Levi's position--told (or elbowed out) in no uncertain terms that you were not acceptable or worthy of belonging to God's Reign, then hear it from Jesus' own words:  "Follow."  You are called.  And Jesus' call is definitive--you are worthy of love and belonging, on Jesus' authority, by Jesus' say-so.  And on the other hand, for any of us who see ourselves as already belonging to Jesus' community, then the question is, Who that crosses my path today might Jesus be sending me to, in order to welcome them to Jesus' table?

Wherever Levi's story hits you, we have a word for the day. You, and everybody else you meet, are being called into the pull of God's love, to a place at Jesus' table, and to the motley crew of anybodies-who-are-really-somebodies called the Reign of God.

Lord Jesus, help us hear your call--for us, and for all, to find our place at your table and in your Reign.

When You Find The One--January 25, 2024

When You Find The One--January 25, 2024

"As [Jesus] went a little further, he saw James son of Zebedee and his brother John, who were in their boat mending the nets. Immediately he called them; and they left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men, and followed him." [Mark 1:19-20]

When I read this story, these words many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, I hear the voice of Billy Crystal.  In particular, I hear one of my favorite lines of his from the classic romantic comedy, When Harry Met Sally, one that comes from his Big Dramatic Speech at the end of the movie.  Having watched their will-they-won't-they relationship grow from friendship to romance and then seeing it teeter on the brink, you finally see Harry seek Sally out at a New Year's party, and he says he has come to find her and profess his love, not because he's lonely on the holiday, but "because when you find the person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible."  Billy Crystal gets me every time.

And once you hear that, his big, bold romantic gesture of a speech in front of all the other party guests makes perfect sense.  It's not reckless or rash that he risks making a fool out of himself there--it's completely rational within its own kind of logic.  Harry is right: when you find the one you want to spend the rest of your life with, you want the rest of your life to begin as soon as possible.  And as often as that might be true in the realm of romance (although making those relationships work takes more than a grand dramatic gesture, no matter what the movies say), it is certainly true of Jesus and his followers.  When Jesus comes along and invites himself over into your life, you realize that "wherever-Jesus-is" is the place you want to be, and all of a sudden it seems perfectly sensible to drop everything and go after him.

Something like that is the logic behind James and John dropping their nets--and leaving their dad in the boat, too!--and going to follow Jesus.  There is this sense that the thing they have been waiting for--no, make that the One they have been waiting for has stepped into their lives and invited them to be a part of his movement.  And, really not all that unlike Billy Crystal's line in the movie, they realize how they want to spend the rest of their lives... and so they want the rest of their lives to begin as soon as possible.

Now, mind you, it's not that they are under the illusion that following Jesus is some pleasure cruise (they'll flirt with that idea later on, but as of this moment, they have no reason to think that), or that Jesus is offering signing bonuses or golden mansions for the first twelve to join his VIP club.  But I do think they realize that what they have been longing for--like, all of their lives, and for generations before that, too--is stepping right across their path and opening a door to them.  You'll remember from a couple days ago that Jesus' opening message, as Mark gave it to us, was, "The Reign of God has come near!  The time is fulfilled--the wait is over!"  The ears of contemporary church folks might not immediately perk up at that, but if for first-century Jewish folks (like James and John) this was the thing they had been hoping for, yearning for, and aching for over centuries of waiting.  After living under one pagan empire after another, going through exile, enduring rotten kings and seasons of utter devastation, what everyone was waiting for was the hope that maybe, just maybe, none other than God would set things right and bring about a different sort of "kingdom" or reign.  It wouldn't be one more version of the same old dominating and conquering they'd known since the days of Babylon (followed by Persian, Greek, and Roman successors).  And it wouldn't be like all the times before when kings promised they would be faithful, just, merciful, and decent--only to turn out just as bloodthirsty, greedy, and corrupt as the outside world's empires.  The difference, everybody hoped for, was that God would be the One to reign--not as a tyrant, but as a shepherd... and not for conquest, but for liberation.  It was where all those ancient hopes from the prophets came together--lambs and wolves lying down together in peace, weapons being beaten into plowshares, people from all nations being gathered together around God's table where a feast would be spread and death would be destroyed.  And at long last, the bullies of history with their bombast and threats would be silenced and pulled from their thrones, and the lowly would be lifted up.  

If you were an ordinary Jewish Galilean growing up in the first century, all of those hopes would have been poured into the phrase, "the Reign of God." And now, out of nowhere, here comes Jesus of Nazareth, announcing to anyone who will listen that this very thing, the Reign of God, is at last here, and open to any and all takers.  So imagine yourself in James or John's sandals: he comes up to YOU, of all people, who had been minding your own business (literally) working your day job, and he says to YOU, "I choose you to be in on the ground floor of this happening.  I want YOU to be a part of it.  YOU are worthy."  Wouldn't you drop everything to get to share in it?

For a lot of my life, I heard this part about James and John dropping their nets and leaving their dad and thought, "My goodness, this is a test of commitment from Jesus--to see if they are willing to do this very difficult thing of leaving behind their family and jobs to go following this total stranger!"  But the more I think about it, the more I have to imagine dear old dad Zebedee as the one shooing them off to go with Jesus, insisting that this was the moment for which they and their ancestors had been hoping for more generations than they could count! Ol' Zeb surely must have been elated at the idea that God's Reign might at last really be breaking loose among them, and I can only imagine that James and John didn't hear this as a test but as the offer of a lifetime--maybe of ten lifetimes.  They knew: when God's Reign came, it was good news for all people who were stepped on, beaten down, and empty-handed.  So of course they jumped at the chance when Jesus looked their way.  They knew exactly how they wanted to spend the rest of their lives--now they just wanted the rest of their lives to begin as soon as possible.

I wonder if we have lost some sense of just how good Jesus' invitation to us really is, these days.  We find ourselves treating Jesus like one more obligation in a long list of competing interests that all want a slice of our free time, and all too often, we treat following Jesus like it's the least important on the list after soccer practice, book club, career advancement, and aiming for that next promotion.  Maybe we have missed what Jesus is actually calling us into. He's not just offering us a hobby called "church" to occupy a few free hours of our disposable time--he's pulling us into the very Reign of God, the new creation, the restoration of all things.  And you and I don't have to wait until we're dead to get to be a part of it: Jesus says it's right here at hand now.

In that light, what things might have less importance in our lives in comparison to getting to be a part of God's Reign?  How might every day now have new meaning if we see it as a chance to participate in God's Reign, right here and now?  And how might that help us to see every place we walk as holy ground... and every face we meet as belonging to a citizen of God's realm, a member of God's family?

Honestly, that sounds like something you and I could spend a lifetime digging into, and we would never get bored of it or run out of ways to spend our days.  And now that we know how we want to spend the rest of our lives, well, let's get the rest of our lives started as soon as possible...

Lord Jesus, let us spend the rest of our days getting to live in the new creation you are beginning among us... and let it start today.

Disturbing Our Peace--January 24, 2024

 

Disturbing Our Peace--January 24, 2024

"As Jesus passed along the Sea of Galilee, he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting a net into the sea--for they were fishermen. And Jesus said to them, 'Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.' And immediately they left their nets and followed him." [Mark 1:16-18]

So, true confession here: there are times I am excited by this story of Jesus' first followers dropping everything to go follow him... and there are times when I can't bring even myself to read it, because I don't want my life to be up-ended by following Jesus.  And I suspect I am not alone on that count.

To be honest, I think for a lot of us, some part of us secretly (or maybe not-so-secretly) is only interested in a Jesus who will keep things in our lives going exactly as they always have, a Savior who is the guardian of our routines, defender of our expectations and, maintainer of our comfort zones.  I think for a lot of us, we have imagined Jesus as the person we turn to when things are out of order in our lives, for the expressed purpose of restoring the old status quo.  We credit Jesus (or God, more broadly) with helping us find our car keys, get a good parking space, not miss our flight or bus, and holding the rain off for our summer weekend at the beach.  We tend to picture Jesus as the one cheering us on to make the honor roll or varsity team, to help us climb the corporate ladder for that next promotion, and encouraging us to save up a big enough pile of money for that Caribbean vacation when the kids grow up, or whatever else is on our personal wish-lists.  In other words, we tend to picture our lives of discipleship with ourselves calling the shots and Jesus simply cheering us on--giving us a little extra divine power to achieve our goals, attain success, and make our dreams come true.  And then, in our golden years, having checked off the last item on our bucket list, we'll credit Jesus for helping us do it all, and for confirming our afterlife reservations at the Heavenly Hotel and Spa for a luxurious and peaceful eternity.

We rarely imagine Jesus as the disturber of our peace, however... and yet, that's a lot closer to what happens when Jesus calls Simon and Andrew to follow him.  His call--as compelling and utterly worthwhile as it is--is about to up-end their lives.  He will pull them out of all that was familiar to them, transform them along the journey, and send them back into the world they thought they knew with new priorities and a new perspective.  Once Jesus is done with them, the same old streets of Capernaum and rolling hills around the Sea of Galilee will never be the same for them--because they will be changed people.  Once you have been captivated by the vision of God's Reign that Jesus gives, you can never settle for just your own comfortable, complacent life anymore. Jesus' call awakens you to a new way of life--and to the way things are meant to be--such that you can't hit the snooze bar on it anymore, until everybody gets to eat, nobody lives in fear, and the last clenched fist opens up to be disarmed and embraced.  And because we live in a world still so bent on its own self-interest, greed, fear, apathy, and violence (what church folks have classically called in the collective sense as "sin"), the struggle to let the world step out of that tangle of rottenness by announcing the arrival of God's Reign is a lifelong commitment.  To answer Jesus' call is not merely to accept his help as we pursue "the American dream," but rather to learn how to surrender our old personal wish-lists and to let Jesus stretch our vision to be as wide as God's dream of a world made whole.

I'm reminded, on the days when I can bring myself to read and hear this story of Jesus' calling the fishermen, of a hymn that rarely gets sung these days. I don't think it was ever terribly popular, largely because it is so honest about the costs of discipleship when it comes to following Jesus.  It's a text from William A Percy, called "They Cast Their Nets," and it goes like this:

They cast their nets in Galilee, just off the hills of brown;
such happy, simple fisherfolk, before the Lord came down... before the Lord came down.

Content, peaceful fishermen, before they ever knew

the peace of God that filled their hearts, brimful, and broke them, too... brimful, and broke them, too.

Young John, who trimmed the flapping sail, homeless in Patmos died

Peter, who hauled the teeming net, head down was crucified... head down was crucified.

The peace of God, it is no peace, but strife closed in the sod.

Yet, let us pray for but one thing: the marv'lous peace of God, the marv'lous peace of God.

You can see, I expect, why nobody picks this song for the church hymn-sing.  And yet, I think this might be one of the most oddly beautiful and compellingly honest hymns about what it is to be called by Jesus.  Once you have been grabbed hold of by Jesus, you can't settle for the old way of life that just boiled down to getting more for yourself and insulating your own little clan from the pains of life.  In the wake of Jesus' call, you can never settle for "Me-And-My-Group-First!" thinking anymore, and you certainly can't be content with leaving others to suffer in a world full of mean.  Jesus comes to disturb all of that counterfeit "peace" and pulls us into his own kind of shalom--the sort of wholeness that isn't complete until it is given freely to all.

So, yeah, truth in advertising--this is what's in store for us, since we've heard this story without looking away, and since Jesus calls us with his own compelling voice.  Something in us is awake now, and won't go back to sleep--the Spirit Jesus gives us won't let us settle back into indifference, but keeps us restless for a world made new, and keeps us reaching out to draw others into his movement like a net hauling in fish. 

We've heard the story. We've heard the call.  We will never be the same.  Let us, like the song says, pray for but one thing: the marvelous peace of God, which disturbs us from old apathies.

Lord Jesus, enable us to give up our old notions of peace and quiet to be captivated by your way of shalom in the world.  Come and disturb our peace with your own.

A Shot Across the Bow--January 23, 2024

A Shot Across the Bow--January 23, 2024

"...Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, 'The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news'." [Mark 1:14b-15]

If you lived during the time of the Roman Empire--say, oh, about what we call the first century AD--these words would have either sounded dangerously provocative or downright ridiculous... or maybe both.  And I would propose to you that both Mark our narrator and Jesus himself know how subversive this message is, and they deliver it anyway, letting the mic drop once it's delivered, and letting the chips fall where they may.

Here's what I mean.  We 21st century church folk are used to hearing the phrase "good news" (or "gospel," as it is sometimes translated--same thing here) and immediately thinking "This is a religious message, in particular about how to get to heaven when you die."  Ask a Respectable Religious Person what the word "gospel" means, and more often than not you'll hear some version of a ticket-to-heaven sales pitch ("...if you want to go to heaven when you die, then say these words, pray this prayer, or go under this water, and then you're in the club...").  Now, to be sure, the "good news" that Jesus brings does have something to do with life beyond death and the coming of God's space ("heaven") into our kind of space ("earth"), but we often hear all that as though it has little to no impact on the here-and-now powers of the day.  Rome didn't care what your religion was, after all. You could worship one god or goddess, many, or none, so long as you acknowledged that the Empire called the shots and the Emperor was the "lord" (the title Caesar ascribed to himself, mind you).

But before "gospel" became a churchy word, it was already a term the Empire had co-opted and used for declarations of imperial propaganda. In the Greek that Mark was writing in, the word is "euangelion" (and you can kind of see our word "evangelize" in there--it's literally just the prefix for "good" [eu-] and the word for "message" or "news" or "declaration" [angelion]. When Rome had won a military battle, occupied new territory with its armies, defeated some enemy, or conquered a now subservient people, the official imperial victory pronouncements were called--you guessed it--"euangelion," a "declaration of good news."  They were state press-releases of the empire's propaganda.  Think of those old World-War-II-era newsreels that were shown at movie theaters during the war--they were meant to drum up popular support back home for the war effort, to promote citizens to buy war bonds and the like, and to highlight victories on the battlefield.  Well, Rome was already doing that sort of thing nineteen and a half centuries prior, except instead of announcing the latest defeat of Nazis or Mussolini's forces, it was the declaration of whomever Rome had most recently conquered (er, "brought peace and security to," if you get my drift).  Rome's way of describing its military conquest was always framed as "good news"--good, in particular, for the citizens of the Empire, but of course, at the expense of those who were conquered, killed, enslaved, or defeated.  So if you lived in any territory that the Empire claimed, you would have heard plenty of imperial edicts and propaganda pieces, listing who else had been conquered, dominated, or destroyed, all coming from Roman mouthpieces, and you would have heard each one of those called a "gospel"/"euangelion"--a declaration of good news.

And so when Jesus--this itinerant rabbi from the backwater of the empire, with no political power, no official title, no armies at his command, and no money to his name--comes along and starts speaking a message that he himself calls "the good news" (yep, same word, "euangelion"/gospel), right off the bat, this is going to get people's attention and provoke the attention of the Empire.  This is a shot across the bow.  And the empire would have heard it as potentially subversive, possibly revolutionary, and definitely provocative, just by Jesus announcing that his message (and not Rome's) was the genuine euangelion--the real declaration of the authentic victory that was newsworthy.

Once Jesus actually said what his "good news" declaration was, it put more fuel on the fire.  As Mark gives it to us, the heart of Jesus' message, his "good news" was this:  "The time has come; the Reign of God has come near!  Turn around, and believe it--this is the good news I have for you!"  The Empire would have had a conniption: Jesus was declaring that God's Reign (not Rome's) was the real deal, calling for our response to turn from old allegiances and instead to give our allegiance to God's Reign.  And by framing it all as "good news," using the Empire's own term for war propaganda announcements, it's like Jesus is saying, mockingly, "Oh, does Caesar think that his wins on the battlefield are good news? Well, bless his pea-pickin' li'l heart, because that ain't the good news.  God's Reign is breaking out right under Caesar's nose, and that's the real good news."  

From the very beginning of his public career, Jesus has known exactly what kind of trouble he was getting himself into, and he didn't shy away from it.  Jesus knew that God's kind of Reign was nothing like what the Empire was expecting, and yet that God's Reign would finally expose Rome for being the pompous bully that it was, and that the emperor (whichever one happened to be on the throne; past, present, or future) was wearing no clothes.  This is the news Jesus brings.  This is the life Jesus calls us into.

To follow Jesus--to answer his call--is always going to mean a change of allegiance for us.  Jesus has just been willing to say that to the empire's face from the beginning. And his utter fearlessness in saying so gives us the same freedom he has. It will mean recognizing that the loud (and often angry) voices from positions of power do not get the ultimate say over our lives, that the Dow Jones or S&P 500 do not get to determine our real worth, that the talking heads on TV and influencer on social media do not get to tell us what to think or how to feel. Rather we dare to align our minds, our actions, and our love with the character of the God we have met in Jesus.

What would it look like today to step into the way of life Jesus is announcing?  What could it mean for us to live today like it is God's Reign we will live in, and that we do not have to obey the merciless Law of the Jungle?  And how could we help someone else to be freed by Jesus' declaration, too?

That's the adventure we are already pulled into, one that leads us to call into question everything the empires of the day want us to believe is the gospel truth.  The Reign of God has already come near--it has started with Jesus' shot across the bow.

Lord Jesus, bring us into the new reality you've begun with the announcement of God's Reign.

Looking for Trouble--January 22, 2024

Looking for Trouble--January 22, 2024

"Now after John was arrested, Jesus came to Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God..." [Mark 1:14]

Before we can talk about what Jesus calls us to do, we should probably raise a prior question: What tells Jesus himself that is it time to begin his work?  What initiates Jesus' response to God's call on his life?

I ask it that way because when you actually look at the storytelling in Mark's gospel, the catalyst for Jesus' public ministry seems to be the arrest of John.  That is to say, Jesus begins his public career well-aware of the potential (maybe inevitable) danger waiting for him, if announcing the imminent inauguration of God's Reign got John arrested.  Jesus knew, and he did it anyway.... which means, for certain, you can’t make a victim out of Jesus.

You might try, but in the end, the story of Jesus resists any attempts to make him a hapless fall-guy who stumbled into trouble with the religious authorities and the imperial power-brokers. That’s not to say people haven’t tried to make Jesus sound like just a poor, misunderstood rabbi who naively got caught up in the royal mess of first century Roman and Judean politics. But these people have to pretend that verses like today’s aren’t there. To hear Mark tell it, Jesus sure seems to be looking for trouble.

Or at the very least, he knew the stakes. Jesus did not start out on a public career in ministry thinking it would make him a respectable figure in the community. He knew that if he was going to walk the same road as John, there would at least be jail time in store for him, and most likely worse. Jesus didn’t start out thinking that he would win a popularity contest by announcing the Reign of God, only to be surprised when the religious professionals made him a public enemy. There is no honest version of Jesus that never upsets the powers of the day, and there is no truthful picture of Jesus that doesn't knowingly provoke and unsettle the Respectable Religious Crowd. He knew from the beginning that there would be costs—and he was prepared, from day one, to give everything. And for the sake of bringing the world to life in God's kind of justice and mercy, Jesus decided it was worth the costs.

Now, this brings up what I have come to believe is a very helpful rule-of-thumb when thinking about Jesus: if your picture of Jesus is of someone who would never have said anything controversial enough to get him arrested, or if your picture of Jesus is of someone whose words, actions, or social company never would have gotten him crucified, then check your picture again: you have got someone else’s photo in your frame. That’s not Jesus. If he didn’t do and say things provocative enough to get himself publicly executed by the authorities or lynched by a crowd of smiling religious people, you’ve got the wrong Messiah.

The thing of it is, Jesus knew all that was in store for him. He knew the costs head, because he had seen them in John’s life, all played out. It’s much as theologian Walter Wink says about martyrs—they "are not helpless victims, but fearless hunters who stalk evil out into the open by offering their bodies as bait." Jesus knew the costs and was prepared to pay them—for the sake of the Kingdom he announced, and for the sake of all of us who would get to be a part of it.

Now, that means two things for us as we step into the new day. For starters, there is a whole new depth to Jesus’ love for us—or at least one that maybe we haven’t spent much time thinking about. It means that Jesus was not merely “hypothetically willing” to die for us, or that Jesus was ignorant of the potential costs of being God’s Messiah. We often end up making sacrifices in our lives that we had been playing the odds on never really having to face. A couple promises in their wedding vows, “For richer or poorer, in sickness and in health…” but in the intoxicating fog of optimism and flowers, chances are they are both just hoping it will never come to the sickness or the poorness parts. Or they just aren’t thinking about what it will be like to have been married for 40 or 50 years and to go through a lifetime of lost sleep, tired muscles, belt-tightening, and the rest. We are not bad at making promises, so long as we don’t have to think much about the costs of keeping them, or we think that the odds are in our favor about ever having to pay the piper. Jesus, however, is under no such illusions. He has seen John get arrested from the get-go, and yet he suits up and goes off to do the same nevertheless. Jesus isn’t playing the odds or just crossing his fingers and hoping he’ll be lucky as a messenger of the Kingdom and maybe not get pinched. He knows what’s in store, and he does it anyway—for you and for me. Jesus won’t be made a victim by anybody else—he knew what he was getting into. He still does.

And he decided it was worth it anyway. Hold that thought for a moment. That means--YOU--were worth it anyway. You, dear one. You, beloved. You were worth all that holy troublemaking.

But now that also means there’s a second conclusion for us, too: we cannot help but be aware of what we have gotten ourselves into as Jesus’ followers. Being Jesus’ followers is going to mean—by definition!—going where Jesus has gone. And Jesus has headed right into a life of holy troublemaking, same way as John before him. Maybe John could have pled ignorance and that he didn’t know being a prophet of the living God would get him thrown in jail (he seems to have had such doubts and frustrations in Matthew 11:2-6), but Jesus knows, and now so do we, that being a part of the Kingdom may well shake things up and turn us into holy troublemakers, too.

We will be called to sacrifice our comfort and our routine, to risk looking foolish, to associate with the nobodies, the anybodies, and the not-very-respectables, all to invite them into the Kingdom, too, the way Jesus did, no matter who is upset by it. We will be called to speak up and to stand with others. We will be called into waiting rooms in moments of holy silence to shed holy tears. There will be a cost. There could be marches and jail cells, and even bullets, like there were for Dr. King whose legacy we just recalled as a nation once again last week. There could be the loss of friendships of folks who simply can't imagine why you, as a follower of Jesus, care so much about "those people" when they have a long list of reasons not to. There may be a loss of Facebook-friend and social-media-follower popularity when folks don't want to be challenged by your insistence on going where Jesus leads you, and loving the people Jesus leads you to love. And there may be a frightening loss of familiar idols as the way of Jesus leads you to let go of the false gods of prosperity, of reputation, of nationalism, of political party, or even of "the American dream." As a wise older brother in the faith, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, says, the grace of following Jesus will cost us our lives, but it will give us the only true life there really is.

And there it is again: following Jesus means a death of sorts--but the kind of death that makes resurrection possible, too.

At least, we can say like Jesus, we know what we’re getting into.

Dear Jesus, to be honest, following you sometimes feels like the first hill on a roller coaster. Hold onto us tightly and do not let us go as we stare down the adventure before us.

The Divine Rendezvous--January 19, 2024

The Divine Rendezvous--January 19, 2024

"And [Jesus] said to him, 'Very truly I tell you, you will see heaven opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man'." [John 1:51]

You know, sometimes, we struggle with Jesus' words because they are so clear, incisive, and provocative.  This would include times like, "If your eye causes you to sin, you should pluck it out," or "Love your enemies, because that's how God loves, being kind to the wicked and the ungrateful." Or when I, coming into my house from the two-car garage to brew a pot of high-end brand-name coffee and watch streaming television on demand, hear Jesus say things like, "Woe to you who are rich..." or "If you want to follow me, you'll have to lose your life and take up your cross."  In these times, the problem is that I hear Jesus and understand him clearly--I just find myself squirming at the implications of what he says.

At other times, we struggle with Jesus' words because we're not really sure quite what he is saying.  Sometimes, we can tell that he's definitely saying something important, but we just can't quite figure out what that is--like we are straining to grasp our minds around his words, but can't get a good grip.  And that's a shame, because quite often it's the times when Jesus is saying something we can't quite comprehend that there is deeply good news to be heard.

This is one of those latter times, I think.  The closing sentence of Jesus' first conversation with Nathanael feels like it is important.  Somehow we can tell something big is going on, and that he is saying something compelling enough to get Nathanael to change his life-plan on the basis of this exchange and to following after Jesus.  The imagery Jesus uses seems mysterious, but compelling--this strange image of "angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man" sounds glorious, but maybe also very hard to picture.  What does Jesus have in mind? Why would angels need to climb up and down a person?  How small are these angels, or how big will Jesus have to be in order for that to happen?  And... why do these angels need to go through Jesus to get where they are going?

It almost has the feel of one of those dreams you can't quite remember when you wake up: you can sort of half-recall what you saw, but the more you try and put it into words to explain to someone else, the further it slips from your rational mind and capacity for language.  And honestly, maybe thinking of this as a dream-like image isn't that far off the mark, because there's another time in the Bible when someone has a dream of "angels of God ascending and descending" on something--and I think Jesus is calling our attention back to that scene.

In case you are straining to remember it yourself, let me set the scene.  In Gensis 28, we get a story about the young man Jacob, the future patriarch of all Israel, who is on the run from his brother Esau. Esau is furious with Jacob for stealing his inheritance and blessing, and he is at the brink of killing his brother, so Jake goes on the lam, at first just trying to put some miles between him and his slightly-older fraternal twin, even if it leads him into the middle of nowhere.  And it's there, in the middle of nowhere, that he camps out one night and has a strange dream.  He sees a ramp, or a ladder, or a staircase, stretching from the ground up to heaven, and on it, he sees--you guessed it--"angels of God ascending and descending on it" (Gen. 28:12).  And then Jacob hears God, standing beside him there, promising to go with him, to bless him, and to bring him back safely in time. For Jacob, this is a word of assurance that even though he's been a total jerk to his family, God's faithfulness to him remains unconditionally gracious.  But the vision of the stairway to heaven (yeah, that's where the imagery from the Led Zeppelin song came from) that we sometimes call "Jacob's Ladder" (yeah, this is where that phrase came from, too) also suggests an intersection, a thin-place, between the divine and the human world.  When Jacob wakes up from his dream, he marks the spot with a stone monument and says, "Surely the LORD is in this place--and I did not know it!"  He sees the spot itself, which he calls "Bethel," the "house of God", as a meeting place between heaven and earth, God and humanity.  The image of the stairway/ladder with the angelic beings going up and down gives a visual cue that this is a place where the boundary between God's space and human space is pulled back, and God can come to meet him there, even standing at Jacob's side.  Once he's awake, Jacob treats that spot of ground like it is a rendezvous for meeting God, a place where God is not distant or aloof, but right there beside him.

Well, anybody who grew up in first-century Judaism would have been immersed in those stories of ancestors like Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, along with Moses, Miriam, Elijah, Deborah, and all the rest.  So when Jesus casually drops a reference to "angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man," Nathanael surely recognizes the allusion to Jacob's ladder, and he surely would have understood it as a sort of metaphor for a meeting place between God and humanity.  Except here's the startling thing: Jesus doesn't talk about a place, or even an object, like a stone pillar, as the divine rendezvous--he talks about himself in those terms.  Jesus himself is the living Stairway to Heaven, the walking Ladder of Jacob that connects God and humanity.  Jesus is trying to prime Nathanael for the eventual epiphany that to be in Jesus presence is to be standing beside none other than God, just like Jacob dreamed.  

Now, for John the Gospel writer who is giving us this story, all of this fits with what he's been saying all along.  John, after all, is the one who starts off his story with, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God...and the Word became flesh and lived among us..." (see John 1:1-14).  So what he had given us as a lofty bit of poetry in his opening prologue he now gives us in a conversation between Nathanael and Jesus--that in Jesus, we get the very meeting place between God and humanity, not in a building or shrine, not in a box like the Ark of the Covenant or a monument like the stone at Bethel, but in Jesus himself.  Jesus is the walking, talking intersection of the divine and the human, in his very body, in his very life.

And all of a sudden, when we realize what Jesus has been saying all along, as John tells it, we realize what Good News has been brought to our ears! Jesus has been offering himself as the open gate, the access between God's space and ours, and he comes into our midst to bring God's presence to us without a catch and without condition.  He simply shows up, seeking us before we were aware of it, calling to us without auditions or try-outs, and brings us into God's presence wherever he is.

This is the gift we are given as people claimed by Jesus.  He's not simply a giver of neat insights or declarer of new religious rules.  Jesus brings us the very presence of God, with no distance, no velvet rope to keep us back, no barbed wire fencing to restrict our access, right at our side already. To hear Jesus tell it, then, the place to look for God is not some celestial "Somewhere Else," but here, with us, among us, even now.

That's good news.  Who that you know might be waiting, like Nathanael, to hear it offered to them, too?

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see you at our side, and to recognize the presence of God in you among us.

The Real Seeker--January 18, 2024

The Real Seeker--January 18, 2024

"Nathanael asked [Jesus], 'Where did you get to know me?' Jesus answered, 'I saw you under the fig tree before Philip called you.' Nathanael replied, 'Rabbi, you are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!' Jesus answered, 'Do you believe because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree? You will see greater things than these'." [John 1:48-50]

I once read a definition of the word disciple that went something like this: "A disciple of Jesus is someone striving to follow after Jesus, who is, of course, already pursuing us."  That's the real wonder for me in this scene: Jesus has been seeking us out before we were looking for him--in fact, even before we were aware of him at all.

If you want to know what was so special about the fig tree that Jesus mentions, I'm sorry; I can't help you. Some people have speculated that Nathanael had been praying earlier that day under a fig tree, and that Jesus' knowledge about it must be evidence that he is God. Others might take it simply as evidence that Jesus had some knowledge of Nathanael prior to this conversation, whether it was "supernatural" or just having seen him earlier in the day.  The vital thing, I think, is the awareness that Jesus is seeking us out before Nathanael knew it--that Jesus saw, called, and chose him, even when Nathanael wasn't on his best behavior, even without waiting for him to get his act together, and even before Nathanael had ever heard of Jesus.  Jesus doesn't wait for us to get the bright idea to reach out to him--he's already reaching out to us. His acceptance of us isn't contingent on seeing us at our best, waiting for us to get the words right, or even understanding what's going on.  Jesus just claims us, as we are, and says, "It's you I choose."

Jesus, it turns out, is the real Seeker in the Christian story; we are the sought.

In a culture like ours where people are constantly goaded to put on some kind of show to get more attention, that is beautifully upside-down.  Our kids grow up watching would-be influencers on the latest social media platforms of the day, trying to become famous with their fashion sense, dance moves, random opinions, or manufactured hype.  Our celebrities are increasingly known just for being celebrities.  And we are tempted more and more to define success in terms of "How many likes did this get?" rather than "What sort of quality is this made with?" We keep telling each other and teaching our children to attract ever more attention to ourselves, or else fade to irrelevance.  We keep reinforcing the notion that our worth is bound up in getting noticed, and here Jesus' response to Nathanael reminds us that he has set his sights on us before we were even trying.

Maybe that's what we need to keep reminding each other, especially in the age of social media.  The so-and-sos and Big Deals who need you to put on a dog-and-pony show in order to get their attention are not worth the effort.  The ones who relentlessly demand you to impress them in order to gain their acceptance don't get to tell you your value.  You are already claimed, chosen, and sought after by the living Jesus, who has been seeking us out while we were looking the other way.  You and I don't need to dazzle God or get God's attention--you already have it, and you are already deemed precious, beloved, and called to be a part of God's movement in the world.  The only question, really, is whether we will dare to believe what God says is already true about us.

I suppose in this life, when you realize that you have been sought out and claimed before you were even aware of it, and without your starting into your talent-show-song-and-dance-routine, and that the One who has sought you has already seen you at your most raw and unpolished self--and still seeks you anyway all the same--you can't help but be overcome with wonder.   Maybe it's no surprise, then, that Nathanael bursts out in reply to Jesus, "You are the Son of God! You are the King of Israel!"  The kingmakers, powerbrokers, and celebrity-consultants won't give us the time of day until we prove our potential and get their attention.  But Jesus has already sought us out as we are--that's how you know he's the real deal.

Lord Jesus, remind us that you have sought us out as we are and loved us, so that we can stop trying to earn others' approval and simply live as people you have claimed as your own.