Prophets from Anywhere--January 5, 2025

Prophets from Anywhere--January 5, 2025

"Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, 'Now I have put my words in your mouth. See, today I appoint you over nations and kingdoms, to pluck up and to pull down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant'." (Jeremiah 1:9-10)

Prophets--at least the genuine ones--don't need to carry weapons or make threats to get their point across.  They don't have political power or official positions in the government, and they don't get special accommodations in the palace, either.  In fact, to most casual observers, the authentic prophets of ancient Israel's memory looked utterly powerless on their own.  All they have in their hands is the truth... and the willingness to use their voices to speak it. But they can come from anywhere.

And yet, impossibly, those prophets--ones like Jeremiah, whose words many of us heard this past Sunday in worship--are regarded by God as standing "over nations and kingdoms."  Jeremiah and those like him don't wield official titles or get specially-appointed status from the king to let them boss people around. But they do have the authority--because of God's message on their lips--to speak up against the powers of the day, and to offer an alternative rooted in God's mercy and justice. A prophet can be any of us. Even you or me.

These words that conclude the scene we looked at in yesterday's devotion give us God's commissioning of Jeremiah, and here God makes it clear that this not going to be a cakewalk for the newly-called prophet.  He had protested at first that he was too young and didn't know what to say or how to say it. But God responds here in today's verses, with the promise that God would provide the words. God would enable him to speak up even to the powerful, and to tell the truth when the proverbial emperor was wearing no clothes.

All too often, I think we hear the word "prophet" and picture some mystic in hippie clothes making obscure and ambiguous predictions about events so far in the distant future that nobody can get upset with their prognostications.  If you're talking about something that will happen in a thousand years, the people in the present moment will think they can safely ignore you because your message won't affect them.  If it's so vague and nebulous (like those Nostradamus-style predictions that could mean anything or nothing) that no one can decipher it, you can make your prophecy mean whatever you want, and therefore nobody will see you as a troublemaker--just a sideshow novelty or a traveling huckster.  

But the prophets of ancient Israel and Judah weren't like that. You couldn't dismiss them as irrelevant or ignore them for being vague, because they were willing to speak up to kings, to high priests, as well as to the crowds of their own people, and to call them out for the specific things they were doing, in the present moment, that ran counter to God's ways of mercy and justice.  They called out the daily practices in the local marketplace that cheated the poor, as well as the greed of the folks in the capital who lived in luxury while others starved or worked themselves to death.  They spoke up against the lure of military alliances or putting trust in the power of their armies, and they called out the empty show of religiosity in the places of public worship.  All of that is to say, the prophets of ancient Israel and Judah understood that being called by God would most certainly take them out of their comfort zones.

And yet, the wonder is that they answered "Yes" to God's call.  As frightening as it must have been to show up in the presence of the king and say, "No, you are wrong!" the prophets did just that on a regular basis.  As dangerous as it surely was to say to the Leaders of Respectable Religion, "Come back to justice, mercy, and faithfulness, and not your empty shows!" the prophets were given the courage to speak that message as often as it needed to be said.  And, as Jeremiah's story most definitely reminds us, God raised them up from among anybodies and nobodies.  The prophets were sometimes farmers and sometimes shepherds. Some were residents of the big city, and some came from the back country. Some were polished poets and others haven't left us a single trace of a written word from their own hand.  But what they had in common was the Word from God (pent up inside, Jeremiah would say at one point, like "a fire in the bones") that spurred them on to speak--simply to speak--without needing to threaten, to bully, or to rattle sabers, and to trust in the power of the word itself to make the necessary difference.

To be a prophet in the biblical sense is to bring, over against the dominant messaging of the day, an alternative word which comes from the God of mercy and justice.  It is to believe in the power of the truth (what Gandhi called "sataygraha," the nonviolent holding onto truth, or soul-power) even in the face of kings with swords pointed at you.  It is the willingness to use your faithful imagination to look at the crooked meanness of the world around and say, "But it doesn't have to be this way. God has a better vision."

And in that sense, any one of us might find ourselves called, like Jeremiah, to speak up. It might be for one moment on one day when everyone else is silently staring at their shoes, or it might be a lifetime's work.  It might mean a phone call to your representatives and senators, or it might mean an honest conversation over coffee with a friend.  It might mean marching in a protest like Dr. King, Bayard Rustin, and John Lewis, or it might mean being the lone voice among your friend-group asking questions like, "What does the way of Jesus look like in our situation?"  You don't have to threaten fire and brimstone or preach a wearyingly long sermon. You just might need to be the voice that makes people stop and think rather than nodding their heads along with the status quo uncritically.  You might just need to make the noise that will lift folks' heads up from their doom-scrolling screen-induced trances for a minute. Any of us might do that.  Maybe it will even happen today.

Lord God, give us the courage to speak with your hopeful vision and our faithful imaginations the word you give us tell to the ears around us today.

Called to Speak Up--February 4, 2025

Called to Speak Up--February 4, 2025

Now the word of the Lord came to me saying,
  “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,
 and before you were born I consecrated you;
 I appointed you a prophet to the nations.”
 Then I said, “Ah, Lord God! Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.”
 But the Lord said to me,
 “Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’;
 for you shall go to all to whom I send you,
 and you shall speak whatever I command you.
 Do not be afraid of them,
 for I am with you to deliver you,
 says the Lord.” (Jeremiah 1:4-8)

The old saying is right: God doesn't call the equipped, but rather equips the called. 

That is to say, God isn't sitting up in heaven twiddling the ol' divine thumbs waiting around for the perfect person to come along with just the right talents and an ideal resume.  Rather, God meets us as we are, calls us as we are, and then equips us with what we need in order to do what we are called to do.  God doesn't wait until we are perfect, or hold out to find someone who is perfect, but finds us as we are, raises us up, and gives us the tools for our mission.

That means several things for us.  For starters, it means that we don't have to worry that we are not smart enough, important enough, holy enough, or influential enough to be used by God.  God doesn't demand any of us have an advanced degree in theology, a certain balance in our bank accounts, or a minimum number of years' experience before calling us to be a part of God's purposes.  And in a culture like ours that is always lobbing reasons at us to think that we aren't good enough, significant enough, or acceptable enough to matter, just that truth by itself is good news.  We don't have to worry that God will take a closer look at our flaws, weaknesses, or liabilities and say, "Sorry, there's no way I can work through the likes of you."  

But there is another side to this reality.  Because the thing is, if God doesn't wait to find the perfect applicant before calling us into God's work, then we can't hide behind our supposed inadequacies as a way of avoiding God's call.  It can be easy to say, "God, you can't use the likes of ME, because I'm too...." and then fill in the blank with something we think should disqualify us, or at least get us off the hook, for doing whatever thing God is going to call us to do.  And if I am pre-emptively unfit for God's work, then I don't have to worry that God will lead me out of my comfort zones or stretch me beyond the familiar.  That's the playbook Moses uses ("Don't send me to Pharaoh--I'm not a good public speaker!"), as well as the prophet Isaiah, ("Woe is me, for I am a man of unclean lips and from a people of unclean lips!"), and plenty of others in the sweep of the Scriptures.  And, of course, the prophet Jeremiah tries a similar tactic, too, as he relates his own calling by God in these words that many of us heard just this past Sunday in worship.  Good ol' Jeremiah begins by protesting to God that he's too young to be called by God, and that he won't be able to speak for God because of his youth.  He's still operating out of the assumption that God needs to find someone else who is more qualified, rather than working through Jeremiah and making him able to do what God is calling him to do.

Of course, that's just it: God doesn't accept Jeremiah's argument that he's too young to be useful, not any more than God let Moses off the hook for the showdown with Pharaoh just because he wasn't a polished public speaker.  God says, in effect, to all of those who have been called, "I will be with you, and my presence is what will make you worthy.  My presence beside you will give you courage.  My Spirit within you will give you strength and enable you to accomplish my purposes."  It is God's presence that makes us able to do what God calls us to, not our own awesomeness.

And that by itself is good news--but it also means, too, then, that God make take any of us by the hand and lead us somewhere we don't think we are ready to go, or to do something we don't think we are prepared for.  God calls young Jeremiah, not to an easy job of patting people on the back or telling kings what they wanted to hear, but speaking truth to power and announcing to his people that they were headed for exile.  To people who were convinced that their shows of religiosity made them God's special favorites, Jeremiah had to say that God was not going to be bought off with sacrifices or empty prayers, and was still going to let the Babylonians come and pull down their walls and even destroy the Temple.  To people who treated God as their lucky charm who would make them invincible in battle, Jeremiah was sent to tell them that God was in fact the one letting the foreign empires defeat them.  And just when the people were ready to give up hope altogether, Jeremiah would be the one daring them to believe that God could do a new thing and start over with them, even in the wake of exile.  At every turn, Jeremiah was called beyond what he was comfortable with, and certainly beyond what he thought he was "good" at, and instead God equipped him to do precisely what God called him to do.  

I know that in our own day, it is really easy to believe that the troubles we face are too big for any of us to do anything about.  I know how easy it is to feel defeated already from the moment your feet hit the floor in the morning.  And I know that any one of us might say, "But God, I don't have influence... or status... or a public platform... or official credentials..." and to think that there's no way we can make a positive impact in the face of all the world's rottenness.  But Jeremiah's story reminds us that God doesn't need people in positions of power or social media influencers to change the course of history--God uses ordinary people, even ones who are too afraid to speak up when God first gets a hold of them, and equips them with the Spirit, the courage, and the wisdom to offer an alternative to the cruelty, greed, hatred, and arrogance of the world around.  Even if we protest that we can't do it, and even if someone else has told us we aren't worthy, God is the One doing the calling, and God is the One doing the equipping.  

You and I, as ordinary as we are, can be the voices through whom God speaks a better word than the world's petty yelling and childish bluster.  You and I, who might believe we are too young or too old or too insignificant or too uncertain, we can be the ones through whom God's message defies Pharaoh or wakes up complacent crowds or gives hope to folks who feel like they are in exile in their own homes.  It is possible, even when we don't think we are worthy or ready, because God is the One who makes us able.  Like Jeremiah long ago, we are called to speak up.

The only real question, I suppose, is whether we will take seriously what God says about us, and dare to trust when God says, "You are called to speak up for me."

Where might God be leading each of us to speak up on this day?

Lord God, we are afraid to ask it, because we are nervous about going beyond our comfort zones, but we will dare to ask it anyhow--call us for your purposes, and then equip us for what you have called us to do.

No Trickle-Down Mercy--February 3, 2025

No Trickle-Down Mercy--February 3, 2025

"And Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.' All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth. They said, 'Is not this Joseph's son?' He said to them, 'Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, Doctor, cure yourself! And you will say, Do here also in your hometown the things that we have heard you did at Capernaum.' And he said, 'Truly I tell you no prophet is accepted in the prophet's hometown. But the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months, and there was a severe famine over all the land; yet Elijah was sent to none of them except a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many lepers in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of the was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.' When they heard this, all in the synagogue were filled with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff. But he passed through the midst of them and went on his way." [Luke 4:21-30]

Jesus could have stayed safe if he just would have kept his mouth shut. The fact that he doesn't says that Jesus is more committed to declaring the scandalously big love of God than he is to looking out for his own interests. But then again, that shouldn't surprise us: Jesus was never really one for the "Me-and-My-Group-First" routine.

That, it turns out, is exactly what gets him into trouble, and what provokes so much anger from his listeners here in the wake of his first sermon at his hometown in Nazareth. Jesus insists that God's love always reaches beyond the boundaries we set up to contain it, and that God even reserves the right to attend to the needs of the outsiders before the wants of the insiders.  To hear Jesus tell it, "Nazareth First!" is a heresy; or maybe, worse than that, Jesus says it runs counter to the heart of God.

Everything had been going fine, of course, when Jesus began in this scene that many of us have been hearing in worship over the past two Sundays. He was the hometown-boy-done-good who had come home as an up-and-coming rabbi. And at first, the message Jesus brings sounds like God is going to do something special just for the people in Jesus' hometown in Nazareth. When Jesus read from the scroll of Isaiah a vision of God setting captive people free, bringing good news to the poor, and announcing God's favor, the folks from Jesus' hometown heard it as their special prize possession. They heard it as Jesus saying he was going to bring back the good ol' days of Israel's glory, and that it was just for them, just for the people in Nazareth, who all looked alike, talked alike, believed alike, and thought alike. Jesus' hearers first thought he was saying that he was going to bring back Israel's old greatness once again (even if no one was quite sure what that "greatness" looked like, or when exactly it was), and they thought Jesus was launching a campaign to put Nazareth First. After all, he was their own hometown boy...surely, Jesus meant for his divine power and favor to be just for their own kind, right? Or that once everybody who fit into the "one of us" category, the "insiders," had their fill, maybe they could give the scraps and the leftovers to other people outside the boundaries, right? The folks in Nazareth might have been fine with sharing with "outsiders," as long as they got to the end of the line and waited until all the "insiders" had had their fill.

And then Jesus just up-ends all of that thinking when he keeps on talking.

Jesus tells these religious neighbors in the pews, who so far have all heard only what they wanted to hear from Jesus's words, that he has not come just for them, and that he has not come to launch a Nazareth First campaign. In fact, Jesus says, the way God has always operated has been to reach out beyond barriers and boundaries of insiders and outsiders, and to be good to the outsiders, the foreigners, the strangers, and even the enemies, sometimes before the "insiders"! Jesus takes the old conventional wisdom of "You have to look out for your own first" and turns it inside out.  This is a really big deal, because all too often, folks try and pin that kind of "Me and My Group First" thinking on Jesus, as though Jesus endorses a trickle-down economy of mercy where you first favor your family... and then your community... and after that your country, and only then anybody outside those concentric circles gets the dregs and the crumbs. But Jesus sees that mindset coming from a mile away, deliberately rejects it, and says that God's goodness has always sought out the folks deemed "outsiders."

And to make his case, Jesus references two well-known stories from the days of the prophets Elijah and Elisha, each of whom had been sent in difficult times, not to the "insiders" of Israel, not to the halls of power, and not to the people who were "like" them, but deliberately across borders to the nobodies, outsiders, and even enemies who were on the margins and beyond the borders. Elijah had been sent to help out a poor widow in Zarephath (not an Israelite town, but a Gentile/non-Jewish/pagan village in Sidon) to provide flour and oil for her and her son during the famine, and even to raise the woman's son from the dead when he fell ill and died. And Elisha had given a free healing to the commander of the enemy army when Naaman the Syrian contracted leprosy. Of all the stories Jesus could have taken for inspiration for his own mission, Jesus highlights these two: times when God had deliberately stepped over the boundaries and to include outsiders, to show love to foreigners (yes, even prioritizing them before the Israelites), and to care for even those who had declared themselves to be enemies of the Israelites and their God. Jesus says, with his hometown listening, that God's way is decidedly NOT to put Nazareth First, or Me-and-My-Group First, but in fact, God deliberately reaches beyond those boundaries to embrace strangers, foreigners, and even enemies, as well.  As Jesus tells it, God doesn't offer mere crumbs to the outsiders, and God doesn't wait for mercy to trickle down from all the insiders first before helping them out.

And with that, at the mere suggestion that God's power and love are not the sole possession of "people like us," the crowd who had just been praising Jesus wants to lynch him. They run him out of town and are prepared to throw him off the cliff because they don't like the idea that God is not at their beck and call, to the exclusion of all others. They do not like the idea of a God who doesn't say, "Make all those outsiders stand and wait in line until after we have all had our fill," and they sure don't like the idea of a God who dares to put "the other" first. It is downright scandalous to them, and Jesus has poured salt on the wound by showing them from their own Scriptures that this is how God operates.

That seals it. Sometimes we (because come on, we are not really different from the people of Nazareth in the story) would rather kick Jesus out than let him in if he is going to insist on bringing everybody else along with him. Sometimes, our need for control about who does and does not get access to God's power and love are so strong that we will silence the voices who suggest that God's reach is bigger than we dared imagine. Sometimes we are so afraid of being wrong about who is or isn't acceptable to God that we would rather raise angry fists at those (even if it's Jesus!) who compel us to look back in our own Scriptures to see that God has always surprised us with a reach and a love that crosses the lines we thought were uncrossable.

But now here is good news on this day--at least good news for Jesus and for the people who want to be about his work: even when the angry crowd does its worst and wants to throw Jesus off a cliff, he simply "passes through their midst" and goes on his way. Like the old Andrew Greeley line says, "Jesus and his troublemaking go merrily on," and that is exactly what happens here. Jesus not only declares his intention to cross the boundaries that the Respectable Religious people have set up, but when they try to stop him, he simply goes right through them like a hot knife through butter, and passes on his way to keep making trouble, to keep reaching out beyond our comfort zones to the "other" and the "outsider," and to keep on bringing good to people who were strangers, foreigners, and even enemies.

That's what Jesus will be up to today, too--what will you and I do about it?

Lord Jesus, break down whatever boundaries we set up to keep people away from your reach and your love, and send us out as your servants on your way to bring news of your love to strangers and outsiders, foreigners and enemies, too.

Worth the Cost--January 31, 2025

Worth the Cost--January 31, 2025

"If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. Now you are all the body of Christ and individually members of it." (1 Corinthians 12:26-27)

The cost of loving people is that it will mean hurting when they are hurting.  The joy of loving people is that it will mean sharing in their joy when they are joyful, too.  That's the price of the ticket, and there's no way of getting out of the cost side of the ledger if you are a part of a community bound in love--which the community of Jesus absolutely is.

In other words, if your approach to life is just keeping yourself withdrawn and disconnected from everybody else in the hopes that you won't ever be hurt or suffer, be warned right now that Christianity is not the faith for you.  You can feel free to try to invent your own religion where you cut off from everybody else so that you don't have to care about the pains of others, but that in no way looks like the way of Jesus, which always leads us beyond comfortable insulation to the risk of empathy in community.

Ask anybody who has lived in such genuine community and they'll tell you it is absolutely worth the price of admission. But they will also tell you for certain that being a part of genuine Christian community is not for the faint of heart, because it will mean sharing the sufferings of others alongside learning to be happy for someone else's happiness, even if it doesn't directly affect you.  And none of that is easy.

All of this is to say that belonging in the community called "church" will always take us beyond our comfort zones, because it will always mean venturing into the experience of others--and in particular, practicing the empathy of trying to understand someone else's sorrow even when it is not personally your own.  That's the real challenge of the body metaphor Paul has been using here in First Corinthians, in this passage we heard last Sunday: if one part of the body is in pain, the whole suffers, even if it's only the stubbed toe or bumped elbow that endured the injury.  The nerves in my eye don't start to hurt because I scraped my knee--but my eyes do indeed well up with tears, over a pain they do not directly experience.  My nose does indeed start to sniffle, and my voice does indeed start to break when I'm in pain.  And in the Christian community, at least part of what Paul's "body of Christ" metaphor means is that I will be moved to cry out when someone else in the community is suffering.  I cannot pretend that their pain leaves me untouched, at least not without denying that we are both part of a body larger than ourselves.  But that will also mean that I may have to learn how to understand someone else's heartache or woundedness even if it is not first nature to me.

So, for example, if I learn that other people in my community are really distraught and I can't understand why, I have some homework to do--to ask, to listen, and to hear from their perspective what is making their hearts heavy, and to share that pain with them.  And if someone else is feeling overwhelmed by depression, our calling is not to try to argue them out of it (as in, "But here are all these reasons to be happy! Doesn't that cheer you up?") but to acknowledge the weight of what they are feeling, to honor it by listening to them, and only from there to talk together about how you will accompany them through it. And on the other hand, if someone is joyful about something that you don't feel particularly excited about, it can be very easy to just become bitter or resentful about the good thing that happened to them, rather than to practice (and it is indeed a practice) being happy for their sake about the new job, the new relationship, the book they loved, or the bright spot in their lives.  But all of these are part of our life as the body of Christ--going beyond the bounds of just my own immediate experience to share in the joys and sorrows of those around me.

Today's calling, then, is to step outside of the relatively comfortable zone of our own personal experience and to enter someone else's in order to divide their sorrows or multiply their joys.  That will mean a lot of listening, and quite frankly, it will mean being willing to feel awkward or humbled when other people share their stories and emotions that are outside of our personal experience.  It might also mean that the preconceived notions, prejudices, and cookie cutter molds we have tried to put other people in just prove themselves to be unhelpful, and we will have to get to know people as they really are, in all their complexity and sometimes their messiness, rather than as the cardboard cutouts and stereotypes we have too often settled for.  And once we do get to know someone else's perspective and their pain, the additional challenge is not to run away from those, but to shoulder them alongside the whole community of Jesus.  Like the Decemberists' lyric goes, "A neighbor's blessed burden within reason becomes a burden borne of all and one." 

Like I say, anyone who has participated in genuine community knows it means taking others' sorrows into our own hearts, as well as celebrating their joys with them.  But anyone who has done that at all will also surely tell you it is worth the cost of loving.  

It is worth it, after all, to Christ, who has shared all of our suffering as his own.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to share in others' sorrows, and make us brave enough to learn empathy.

Rolling Up Our Sleeves--January 30, 2025

Rolling Up Our Sleeves--January 30, 2025

"On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension in the body, but the members may have the same care for one another." (1 Corinthians 12:22-25)

In a wonderful way, you can kind of see why the authorities, magistrates, and other assorted officials were always wanting to put Paul in a jail cell or run him out of town wherever he went.  To take Paul seriously here would mean overturning all of our old ideas about who is really a "big deal" and who is just dressing the part to cover up their insecurity.  This is one more reason why Christians were seen as a subversive threat to the established order--and why when Paul and his message came to town, local pundits sometimes called them "these people who have been turning the world upside down" (see Acts 17:6).  Here, in these words from the letter to the Corinthians that many of us heard just this past Sunday, Paul has turned the tables on our old understanding of who is "important" and who is ignorable, who gets pomp and circumstance, and who doesn't need it.

The analogy to the body that Paul uses to make his point is simple enough: the parts of our bodies that we are most self-conscious about or feel awkward about are the parts that we make sure to clothe.  In short, we wear underwear (or the ancient equivalent).  But our arms, legs, and heads, we don't make a big fuss about needed to make sure they are clothed.  They don't need it.  They are busy doing important work, while our swimsuit zones (again, not to be crude) are basically just covered up because we tend to think of those parts of our bodies as less fit for public settings.  This is why bathroom stalls have walls or partitions, but we don't mind windows in our office spaces--we don't mind being seen with rolled-up shirt sleeves baring our arms, but we don't feel comfortable letting others see us use the bathroom.  Okay, so far, so good, right?  The bottom line of Paul's little thought experiment is that you can tell which parts of the body are really the strongest because they don't need to be wrapped up in padding or special garments all the time, and that in fact the parts that do need to be specially dressed are the less honorable ones, not the more honorable ones.  And the flipside is true, too--there may be parts of the body we think are weak and unimportant, but they might just turn out to be the most vital of all.  We could quibble about exceptions, but you get the idea of his argument.

Now consider the kind of world in which Paul lived--one that was ensconced in the trappings of the Empire's pomp and circumstance.  In the Greco-Roman world, you knew who was most important int he empire's eyes, because they made a big deal about themselves.  The emperors, governors, commanders, oligarchs, and plutocrats were the ones draped in expensive fabrics, the ones with gold crowns and sparkling diadems. And they used all that ornamentation to set themselves apart from everyone else--the peasants, foreigners, and slaves who didn't have two drachmas to rub together.  In other words, in the culture of Paul's day, if you thought you were a big deal, you would advertise by putting on shows of your importance, from the way you dressed, to the statues you had carved in your likeness, to the titles you heaped up on yourself, to the places of honor you took at dinners, sporting events, or public ceremonies.  The enslaved population, along with the farmers, artisans, and the rest of the peasant class, well, they all would have worn the same basic meager tunics for work, home, market, and travel, and it would have been a lot less fancy and a lot more functional.  In Paul's day, the people who wanted to project their own self-importance (and didn't have to worry about breaking a sweat at work) made sure to clothe themselves in opulence to send the message that they were the center of attention. And in response, Paul basically said, "Nope.  That's all just underwear. Those guys are actually needy and insecure."

And of course, within the life of the Christian community, Paul applies the same thinking.  Instead of the people who see themselves as "strong" or "important" or "great" puffing themselves up and bragging about it all the time or putting themselves in the center of attention, the truly "strong" ones don't need to always be in the limelight. In fact, they'll go out of their way to help lift up and honor the lowly, the overlooked, and the undervalued.  The ones who really are great don't have to advertise it or tell you that they are great--you'll know it, Paul says, from the humble way their love lifts others up rather than only themselves.  Like the old line says it, we rise by lifting others.  In the Christian community, we are called to this very different--even upside-down--way of life, in which the most important or the greatest are the ones with their sleeves rolled up and doing something helpful for others rather than needing to parade around in royal robes or expensive accessories.  And on the flipside, we make a practice of showing special honor, care, and love to the people who have been treated as nobodies, remembering that in our physical bodies, sometimes the parts that seem least important turn out to be the things keeping us alive.  

It's a complete reversal of the expected way of doing things, and it certainly would have made the early Christian community stand out in unexpected ways.  It's just one more way that our faith in Jesus will lead us beyond our comfort zones and rearrange the way we see the world.  But it all flows from the kind of life that is centered on Jesus' kind of love rather than our wider culture's need for attention and adulation.  Maybe it's time to reclaim a bit of that subversive way of doing things.  Maybe it's time we spent less attention on the self-described "great" ones telling us how important they are and instead made a point of looking for ways to honor and lift up the folks who have slipped through the cracks or been left out before.  

Maybe it's time we rolled up our sleeves and got to that kind of gospel work.

Lord Jesus, keep us so grounded in your love that we don't need to get attention or honor from others, but can use our energy to show honor and care for the people we easily forget or ignore.

A Feature, Not A Bug--January 29, 2025

A Feature, Not A Bug--January 29, 2025

"Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, 'Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, 'Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,' that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be?" (1 Corinthians 12:14-19)

Just to be clear, the inclusion of diverse people with diverse gifts in the church is not a failure or a flaw to be fixed--it's a feature designed by God's intention.  So, if we have a problem with that, Paul advises us to take it up with Christ himself.

The New Testament says so: it's right here in this well-known passage from Paul's correspondence to the Corinthians that many of us heard aloud in worship this past Sunday.  The community of Jesus' followers is intentionally diverse, with members as different from one another as eyes are from feet or gall bladders are from nose hairs. Each of those parts of our own body belong, not because of their uniformity, but precisely because in their difference, they are each able to contribute something different and necessary for the life of the whole.

Now, when Paul makes his rhetorical point using the analogy of a human body, it all makes perfect sense, and it all seems pretty simple.  After all, in real life, feet don't talk, and therefore they don't go bullying the hands or trying to kick them out (pun intended!) because they look a little different.  And in real life, the ears are not overwhelmed with self-doubt that they think about dropping off the sides of your face because they don't feel important enough to belong.  The eyes don't tease the lips that they're unimportant. And the crossed arms don't get to hold a special vote in conjunction with the furrowed brows to get rid of the organs don't understand much about because they're on the inside, like the intestines or the kidneys or the spleen.  When it's all inside the body, typically the parts all get along pretty well for the most part. After all, they are designed to cooperate, and they are not intended to function in isolation.

The hard part for so many of us is when we make the leap from a single human body to a collection of us in the community we call "church."  That's where we start to get uncomfortable with the idea of difference.  That's where folks sometimes fall into the mindset that SOME people don't really belong because they are different.  It's really easy to start dividing ourselves into little cliques or factions, all of them fracturing along fault-lines of difference.  The people who live in one neighborhood all hang out, but the folks from across the tracks?  No, they aren't really "our kind of people..." right?  The ones who all watch the same TV channels and get their news from the same talking heads, they all decide that they are the "True Church," but the ones who watch, read, and think differently, well, they aren't really members of the community.  The people who went to school with you and go way back in the same town, well, they are ok--but these new faces? We're not so sure.  Early service versus late service... contemporary versus traditional music... red states versus blue states... high church versus low church... loud and outspoken versus quiet and reserved.  We could go on and on with the different dividing lines, from the serious to the ridiculous.  But you get the drift--and my guess is that you've lived through conversations where one group of like-minded folks decides that some other group that doesn't fit their cookie cutter doesn't really belong.  

In those times, the differences across the whole community are talked about like they are problems to be solved or flaws to be fixed. We tell ourselves that the way to make everything harmonious in the church is just to make everybody the same--the same in their thinking, the same in their perspective, the same in their approach to living out their faith. And once we are in that mindset, we start to see anybody who stands out, whose gifts don't fit our preconceived places to use them, or whose life experience is different from our own, as people who need to be pushed out of the circle or compelled to conform.  But again, for the apostle writing to the first-century church, the differences across the community called "church" are not mistakes, but blessings.  They are not weaknesses, but strengths.  They are not bugs in the software, but features God has intentionally set in place.

As Paul saw it in the very first generation of the church, God certainly could have required uniformity within the church, but instead had deliberately chose people from diverse backgrounds, different cultures and languages, and a variety of points on the spectrums of class, status, gender, and ethnicity. And in addition to that, God gave each member of the community different gifts, abilities, and strengths, all of which are needed--but all of which also bring slightly different perspectives, understandings, and ways of making sense of the world.  Rather than force us all to see things all the same way or all approach questions from the same vantage point, God has deliberately given us a community in which some are immediately practical, some deeply relational and emotional, some philosophical, and some (often the poets) are out in left field making you wonder why they are even invited to the table, until they say something that completely reframes the situation and makes everyone see new approaches.  We need all of those voices, and our communities of faith would be impoverished if we were missing any one of them.  How much worse it would be if we insisted everyone see things all from the same vantage point all the time?  

The only catch to receiving the gift of all these diverse voices, gifts, and perspectives... is that we really do have to make the space for each of them and to honor them rather than shut them down.  That means each of us will be asked to go beyond our comfort zone and to see the world from someone else's vantage point--or at least to listen to them when they tell us how they see things and why.  It will mean considering the possibility that MY way of seeing things is not the only way, and that in fact it may well be GOD who has put the others with diverse perspectives in my life, so that they can catch the blind spots I don't even realize I have.  I won't lie to you--doing that consistently is hard work, and it is often easier to slip back into the old model of forcing everyone to toe the party line.  But it leaves us shriveled and dying as a community--the same as a body would die if it were all feet or all ears, but no heart, lungs, or stomach.

So today, perhaps the most important way for us to live on the edge of our comfort zones is to look around at the diversity of the people of God--in your congregation, in your community, and around the world--and before the impulse to make everyone homogenous kicks in, to see each of those different, diverse, varied sets of gifts and perspectives as a blessing worthy of being included.  What if we dared to see our differences as God-given features, not failures or flaws?

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to appreciate the value of each other person in the body with us--not only the people whose perspectives are similar to our own, but the ones most markedly different.  And teach us what we have to learn from all of them.

When God Interrupts Your Plans--January 28, 2025

When God Interrupts Your Plans--January 28, 2025

"Jesus rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing'." (Luke 4:20-21)

I have this hunch. Sort of a working theory that's being formulated in the back of my mind all the time.  I don't usually like to talk about it out loud.  But sometimes, like when I read these words from Luke's gospel that many of us heard on Sunday, I can't help it.  I have to say it out loud.

So here goes: I have a hunch that a lot of us church folks don't actually want ancient Scriptures to be fulfilled in our lives.  We aren't really all that eager to have God move in a definitive and clear way in the world, especially close to home in our daily routines, precisely because we are used to the routine and we don't want them up-ended or our priorities rearranged.  As long as God is silent, we don't have to respond to whatever God might say. As long as God is slumbering up in the sky and not moving, like a cat curled up at the end of the couch, we don't have to change.  And as long as God isn't stepping into history in some noticeable, non-ignorable way, I can just keep on doing whatever I am doing in my life without any nagging guilt or questions.  And I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of us are just committed to keeping our lives on their current trajectories--making money, getting the kids (2.5 of them) off to good schools, having a nice place to vacation, piling up our investments, and then retiring somewhere sunny, where we'll live the good life sipping fancy drinks with tiny umbrellas, or whatever your version of it is.  We all have our personal goals and ambitions, and all too often, we want to use God to rubber-stamp them and bless our wish-lists to make them happen.  But we are rarely comfortable with the other way around, letting God step in and rearrange what we were aiming for and where we have directed our lives.

But if God steps into the story and some ancient Scripture is fulfilled in the course of your or my ordinary Tuesday, well, then all of a sudden it becomes clear we aren't in control of things.  Maybe even more uncomfortable, we realize that we never were.  Many of us, including faithfully attending church folks who sit in pews (or preach in pulpits) every Sunday, turn out to be what they call "practical atheists"--that is, people who might believe in our heads that God is real, but who conduct our lives by the assumption that God doesn't make a difference at all in how we live or what we do.  And it is easy--damnably easy--to decide that the close of the Dow Jones, the value of my 401(k), or the success of my favorite sports team are all more significant markers for how I face the day than the words of Jesus. And I can keep my life oriented on my money, my team, or my routines, so long as Jesus doesn't show up and disrupt everything with his different set of priorities.

That's my hunch: that if we had been there in the service with Jesus' neighbors in the Nazareth synagogue, a lot of us would have squirmed uncomfortably at the notion that God was fulfilling ancient words of the prophets right here and now.  That might just force us to consider that God is more significant than our bank accounts, or that Jesus might claim he makes a bigger difference in our lives than the GDP.  And a lot of us would just rather keep on aiming at our current target--more money, bigger house, and the rest of the life from the cover of the magazine.

So I warn you--and myself--that if we take this passage from Luke seriously, it will mean recognizing that the living God really does reserve the right to step into our lives and rearrange all of our neatly ordered values and choices.  God reserves the right to change our course or show us that the things we'd been living for before just weren't the things that really mattered.  God might just come among us, like Jesus in the synagogue, and say to us, "Here's what really counts, and here's what I think is worth spending a life on--good news for the poor, healing of the hurting, release of the oppressed, and jubilee forgiveness all around."  What would we do if that message interrupted your plans for this day?

That's exactly what happens in this scene. Jesus has basically told everyone in the room, "This is what I'm spending my life on," as he points to the list of items in his reading from Isaiah 61.  From there, we have to decide what we are going to do with this Jesus.  If we shrug Jesus off and dismiss him as just a random neighbor or an oddball rabbi who has no claim on us, then we are free to go back to chasing the dollar sign and perfecting our white-picket-fence lives.  But if we dare to believe that in this Jesus, we are encountering the living God, then we might just have to let him point us in a new direction, beyond our comfort zones, and into the path he is walking. And who knows where that might lead?

Well, that's the gamble.  Ignore God's moving in the world and keep on where we were already headed, or let God's interruption through Jesus point us on a new course.  I've got to tell you, as risky as it can feel, and as much as I know it will take me beyond what is easy and comfortable, I'm convinced it's worth it to go with Jesus.

Let's go together.

Lord Jesus, direct us as you will, even if it interrupts our familiar routines.

Jesus' Inaugural Address--January 27, 2025

Jesus' Inaugural Address--January 27, 2025

"When [Jesus] came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

because he has anointed me

to bring good news to the poor.

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

and recovery of sight to the blind,

to let the oppressed go free,

to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.'" [Luke 4:16-19]

Everybody's got an agenda in life. Everybody. Jesus, too.

Everybody's got a list, whether spoken or unspoken, written or unwritten, conscious or subconscious, of things they are pursuing in life, things that matter in life, things that are worth working toward. Your agenda is not only your list of goals, but also your perspective--it is just as much the lens through which you see the whole world as much as it is your set of things you want to do in the world. And, as I say, whether we know it or not, we've all got one.

This is Jesus' agenda.

I mean that very seriously. We religious folks are great at projecting our pet passions, persuasions, and politics onto Jesus. We imagine that Jesus wants our local baseball team to win (and we forget that the folks rooting for the other team are praying to Jesus for help, too), that Jesus has strong feelings about lowering the capital gains tax (newsflash: he doesn't), or that Jesus wants my political party to win more elections (this is just the same as the baseball heresy, but with suits and ties and yard signs instead of big foam fingers). The truth is, those are our agendas, not Jesus'. And before we go baptizing our own particular list of personal pet peeves and ascribing them to the Messiah of God, we should probably just be honest and recognize what we are doing: trying to pass off our own agendas as Jesus'.

But to be clear, Jesus brings his own. And he is entirely forthright and up front about it. On the day Luke talks about here, when Jesus went to his hometown, to his childhood synagogue, he came with his agenda spelled out and ready. (This is important to note, because sometimes we make a parallel mistake along with confusing our agendas with Jesus' agenda, namely, we incorrectly believe that Jesus had no agendas at all, no particular "take" on things, and no particular angle or perspective out of which he spoke, acted, and loved people. The danger there with that mistake, of course, is that if we wrongly conclude that Jesus had no agenda, we are back at square one baptizing our own personal agendas rather than holding them against Jesus' to see how they compare.)

This passage, which many of us heard in worship just yesterday, is the first time the adult Jesus speaks in Luke's telling of the Gospel.  These are his first public remarks, and that gives them the feel and the heft of an "inaugural address."  That is, this is Jesus' first opportunity to lay out his priorities, his mission, and in a manner of speaking, his "platform." There in the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and essentially claims the passage he reads as his own mission-statement. 

That is to say, Jesus doesn't just invent his own agenda out of whole cloth. He doesn't come up with his own "neat idea" at random and say, "Wouldn't it be nice to work for these kinds of things?" And he most certainly does not built a platform for his Kingdom movement based on putting himself first, or his nation or ethnic group or culture first. There is no place--absolutely none at all--in Jesus' vision for the self-absorbed "Me and My Group First" thinking that has been popular through much of human history, right up to the present day. Instead, Jesus' agenda, drawn from the prophets inspired by God centuries before him, is a vision of mercy, of forgiveness (of sins and debts alike), of liberation, and of gracious care--for all. This is the radical thing about Jesus: he has an agenda (and is quite open about it, as a matter of fact), but it is an agenda that's not all about himself! It's not about getting what is good only for him. It's not about how to keep just himself, or his community of followers, safe and secure. It's not about getting themselves status or wealth. It's not about pushing out anyone not like him. And it's not about puffing himself up, either, to make himself look "great" or "important" or "successful" or like a "winner."

If anything, you could say that Jesus' chosen agenda is all about the people who have been labeled "losers" in life. Jesus' agenda is about good news for the poor, release to those who are imprisoned, healing for those who are diseased, an end to oppression, and the announcement of God's "jubilee"/"the year of the Lord's favor" (the ancient practice prescribed in the Torah of taking every fiftieth year for a social re-boot in which debts were cancelled, land went back to its ancestral family owners, slaves were set free, and the land was to rest as well). Jesus reads these words, and then claims that they find their fulfillment in him--right then and there! And what's more, because this is Jesus, none other than the full divine presence in a human life, Jesus is also claiming that these words from Isaiah 61 are God's agenda in the world, too.

Think about that for a second, and there is remarkable clarity to be found. If you want to know what things Jesus thinks are worth doing, look here. If you want to get a foothold into thinking like Jesus, and also acting and speaking like Jesus, here are the crib notes. If you want to know what things matter to God, and what are the essential planks of the platform for the Reign of God, here you go. This is the angle from which Jesus operates--this is the perspective through which Jesus sees the world. Sometimes we (wrongly) imagine, because we picture God being "up above" somewhere very high in the sky, that God doesn't have a vantage point or a particular perspective, but only sees everything with the distance of the 50,000 foot view (a la Bette Midler's song that suggests, "God is watching us...from a distance). But Jesus here shows us--God does have a perspective, an angle, and agenda. God is about the work of bringing good news to uplift the people on the bottom, to release those who are imprisoned to heal those who are bound by their ailments, and to announce jubilee freedom. Jesus says that this is what the Spirit of the Lord has anointed (the same word we get "messiah" or "Christ" from) him to be about.

Don't miss the underlying point: this is what the Spirit of God does in the world. This is the kind of stuff the Holy Spirit will do with us, and in us, and through us, as we dare to let the same Spirit direct and propel us in the course of our Monday. "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," Jesus says, "because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor." Well, if you and I are followers of this same Jesus... and if you and I are indwelt by the same Spirit, then in a very real sense, Jesus' agenda is to become our agenda, too.

This is what we'll be about in our lives, more and more, as we let the same Spirit make us over into the likeness of Jesus. This is what will matter to us more and more. This is what we will find ourselves excited about, passionate about, sometimes really angry-and-hopeful-at-the-same-time about, too. And less and less will we be fussy about the old things we had been keeping on our personal agendas that we used to think were "oh-so-important." We'll be less concerned about making ourselves look like "winners" and looking tough. We'll be less concerned about protecting our pride and our reputations. We'll be less worried about ourselves, all around, actually, and more interested in practicing compassion. And we will find ourselves reading these same words of Jesus' again and praying, "Lord, let this scripture be fulfilled today in my living them, too!"

You know the old saying: "Opinions are like belly buttons--everybody's got one." Today, what if we owned and took a closer look at our sets of opinions, our way of life in the world, our agendas, and held them up to Jesus' to let him realign ours with his? What if we dared to let these ancient words from Isaiah, echoed by Jesus in his inaugural address, become our agenda, for this day, and for the next day, and for the third day, too?

Lord God, realign our hearts, our wants, and our lives with yours.

 

God Chooses Mercy--January 24, 2025

God Chooses Mercy--January 24, 2025

"And the foreigners who join themselves to the LORD,
    to minister to him, to love the name of the LORD,
    and to be his servants,
all who keep the sabbath, and do not profane it,
    and hold fast my covenant--
these I will bring to my holy mountain,
    and make them joyful in my house of prayer;
their burnt offerings and their sacrifices
    will be accepted on my altar;
for my house shall be called a house of prayer 

    for all peoples.
Thus says the Lord GOD,
    who gathers the outcasts of Israel,
I will gather others to them
    besides those already gathered." (Isaiah 56:6-8)

Just when you think you've got God figured out and pinned down, God squirms out from underneath your grip and makes a move you didn't see coming.

Just when you are confident you have a final version of the list of who's allowed "in" and who is "out"--written in permanent marker, or even chiseled in stone--God stretches the welcome wider and sends out more engraved invitations.

Just when you are certain God will insist that the "outcasts" stay cast out ("They might be dangerous, and they're not OUR KIND of people, you know..."), God chooses mercy and gathers those outsiders all in.

That's God for you--consistently pushing us beyond our comfort zones because God has a thing for strays, rejects, and refugees.  Including you and me.

These words from the book of the prophet Isaiah are just one passage of many in the Bible that remind us of God's bewildering (and beautiful) habit of choosing to include people who had reason to believe they would be left out.  And as we consider them on this day, it's worth remembering that these words would have been a challenge for many in Isaiah's audience to hear, because accepting them meant moving beyond what they were familiar with, and it meant accepting that God could widen the circle with or without their permission.

This section of the book of Isaiah addresses folks who are picking up the pieces after exile.  They were coming back home to their ancestral lands after a generation before them had been forcibly taken into exile.  They and their parents had learned in Babylon what it was like to be the foreigners who were looked down on and treated with suspicion.  They had felt the glares from the citizens of the superpower of the day, and they knew what it was like to be mistreated there in a strange country. 

But once those exiled people finally came home to their ancestral lands in Judah, they had to deal with the new fact that there were others--foreigners--in the picture now, too.  Some were people who had married into the family, and others had been transplanted to live in Judah when it was occupied territory under the Babylonians.  And for the Judeans home from exile, they were pretty sure the old rules said that no foreigners were allowed to belong in the assembly of God's people, no matter how they had gotten there or how long they had lived there in Judah.  Rules are rules, right?

Well, except that God--as you may have heard before--reserves the right to surprise us by gathering the outcasts in.  In fact, that's exactly what God says in this passage of Isaiah 56. This whole section is the prophet speaking for God and saying specifically to the foreigners who find themselves living in the land of Judah that they are now able to be included among the servants of God and the covenant people.  God is well aware that the conventional wisdom was that no foreigners--that is, no non-Israelites or people of Judah--could belong among the people of God.  And God is surely also aware that some of those Israelites wanted to get the foreigners out altogether (you can read that perspective in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah).  That group saw all foreigners as a danger and even wanted people who had married people of foreign ancestry to leave their spouses--or rather make their spouses leave!  Again, you can read that whole episode in places like Ezra 10, where the people with foreign wives and children were told to send their whole families away.  But... over against that perspective, the prophet here in Isaiah 56 says, "No! They don't have to leave! They can belong!" People from whatever background or nationality or ethnicity could belong among God's people, provided that they were willing to live the covenant way of life--to do justice, to practice mercy, to keep God's ways, including the rhythm of sabbath rest which was unique to the heritage of Israel and Judah.  In other words, the voice here in Isaiah 56 says that all those people who would have been sent away, even separated from their families, can be welcomed into the covenant and belong as God's people.  God chooses mercy, rather than sending them away.  God chooses to gather the outcast foreigners in, alongside the Israelites who had been outcasts in exile and come back home.

Now, this announcement from the prophet would have been obviously good news if you were one of those foreigners living in Judah and were wondering if there was a place for you among God's people.  This would have meant that you were no longer an outcast and no longer cut off from God.  It would have meant that you were welcomed into the Temple, too, which was now to be understood as "a house of prayer for all peoples" rather than the exclusive possession of one group.  But if you were one of those returned exiles, this was all very, very challenging.  This was about as far out of your comfort zones as you could imagine, not only because it meant accepting that God was doing a new thing, but also because it meant that you were going to have to make room to accept and welcome these foreigners as your own neighbors (which they were already, after all) because God had decided to include them.  And for the returned exiles, it also meant the uncomfortable recognition that they had been outcast foreigners before, too--back in Babylon, of course, and farther back when their ancestors had been the oppressed foreigners held as slaves in Egypt.  And it was difficult for many of them to accept that since God had gathered them in, God was also free to choose to gather in other people who were foreigners and welcome them into the covenant people.

For every voice in Isaiah's day who said, "But we're different!  Those people shouldn't belong with us!" the prophet said, in effect, "Sorry--you're both people who were outsiders and outcasts... but good news! I have chosen to show mercy to both groups!" We often have a hard time, don't we, with the realization that when God chooses to be gracious to us, God reserves the right to be gracious to other people we were not prepared to welcome?  But that's how things work in the sweep of Scripture.  God gathered the people who were foreigners in Babylon back home when they were outcast, and so God could gather in the foreigners living among the Israelites once they got back home, too.  Nobody had to be sent away.  Nobody had to be a permanent outsider.  Nobody had to be separated from their families, the prophet said. And all of this welcome was possible because God chose mercy.

It is possible, even now, even on this day, for us to choose mercy, too.  It is possible for us to see that we were once outcasts, strangers, and foreigners from the ways of God and that we have been welcomed in, and that therefore others could be welcomed in as well.  It is possible for us to choose surprising welcome.  After all, God does it all the time.

Lord God, you who have first mercifully gathered us to belong to your people, grant us the courage to show mercy to those waiting for welcome today, too.

The Grace of a New Name--January 23, 2025

The Grace of a New Name--January 23, 2025

"For Zion's sake I will not keep silent, 

     and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, 

 until her vindication shines out like the dawn, 

    and her salvation like a burning torch. 

The nations shall see your vindication, 

    and all the kings your glory; 

and you shall be called by a new name 

   that the mouth of the LORD shall give." (Isaiah 62:1-2)

Some of the bravest people I know are the ones who have reinvented themselves completely, even to the point of going by a new name and new identity.  They continually teach me what the prophet means when he speaks of God calling us by a new name that somehow also reveals our truest selves.

I say this as someone who typically only makes incremental changes in my own life--and even then, pretty slowly and often with great internal turmoil.  I tend to get the same haircut every time I go to the barber, buy new shoes or jeans that replace my worn-out ones as closely as possible to the previous pair, and stick to the same set of familiar scents for shampoo and soap.  I like my morning routine--same glass of grapefruit juice while unloading the dishwasher, and same travel cup of coffee to take to work--and I like the beats of consistency throughout my day and week. In other words, I am not typically one to launch into personal reinventions... at all.

But I know folks who have.  I know people who went away to college and came through it, not only with their horizons broadened but with a whole new sense of self.  I know folks who came to decision they didn't want to be known by an old name anymore but found a new one that fit them better.  I know people who answered the call to ministry after putting in full careers in some other field and completely rearranged their lives and their old identities to go where they were certain God was leading them.  And I can only imagine the courage it takes to make those kinds of changes and step into a new reality.  And all of it begins with the brave realization that we do not have to be defined by where we have come from, what we have done, or what someone else has said about us.  It begins with the leap of faith that is willing to let what God says about us be more definitive of our identity than anything that has come before.  Even if it is a whole new name, and with it, a whole new sense of self.

And to be honest, it happens in the Bible more often than we realize.  Not just the dramatic turn of events from being a "notorious sinner" to a "striving saint," and not even just the sea-change of vocation like fishermen and tax collectors who are called to become apostles for Jesus, but deep-down-to-the-bone changes of identity.  There's Abram and Sarai who are given new starts and new promises, signified by new names, Abraham and Sarah.  There's Jacob, who had been stuck with the old identity chained to his name, which means "usurper," who is given the new name Israel ("strives with God") and a new identity to go with it.  Simon gets the nickname Peter and the new calling to be the "rock" (the name "Peter" means "rock" in the Greek), and of course Saul of Tarsus starts going by Paul when he is turned around from persecuting the early church to spreading the news of Jesus to the Gentile world.  You can't go too far in the Bible before you bump into another story of someone being given a new identity and even a new name because God was daring them to become a new creation.  And maybe when God calls you by a new name, the new identity leaps into being like God calling to the light when there had only been darkness before in the beginning.  Maybe the whole history of the universe is the story of God calling each of us, each being, and each creation, by a succession of new names.

And that's the same kind of bold, beautiful moment happening here in the words of Isaiah 62, words that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  Speaking to people who are still defeated and despairing in the wake of exile, God gives a word of hope.  The old identity of the people (symbolized by their city, Zion, another name for Jerusalem) is given the promise of a new beginning, the prophet says, because God will give them a new identity.  "You shall be called by a new name that the mouth of the LORD shall give," the prophet says.  It is an utter gift of grace that when we find ourselves in a dead end, God speaks new possibilities we could not achieve ourselves.  But it does require great courage to step out in faith and believe what God says about us in the face of what our past, our inner monologue, or other people say about us.  It takes great trust in God to believe that we are who God says we are, and to answer when God calls each of us by a new name.

I don't know what the details of your story are. I don't know what past mess-ups you wish you could leave behind, but are afraid or unable to let go of.  I don't know what parts of yourself have been foisted on you by others, that you wish you could release.  I don't know what new directions you are feeling called to.  And I don't know if there is something inside you that has been feeling unsettled, like you were waiting for someone, even the living God, to finally call you into a new identity and call you by a new name.  But I know that's the sort of thing the Bible announces that God just might do.  And I know that when it happens, and at last you hear a voice calling you by a name that is different and yet somehow summons forth who you were really meant to be all along, something beautiful and holy is happening.

Maybe today our work is to listen for the voice of God, and to be ready when God calls us by that new name, to let God transform us into who God says we are meant to be.

Lord God, you who have called light out of darkness and called your people into new identities and new hopes, call to us now, and make us brave enough to believe your word when you say we are your new creations.

More Than Mesmerized--January 22, 2025

More Than Mesmerized--January 22, 2025

"Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him." (John 2:11)

There were plenty of people who once saw Siegfried and Roy put on their magic act, complete with white tigers, over the years, but nobody left the theater quitting their day jobs to follow the show wherever it toured.

There were certainly numerous crowds who watched David Copperfield or David Blaine making things disappear before their eyes, only to bring them back with a flourish to thunderous applause, but I don't believe anybody then committed their lives to the philosophy of Copperfieldism or became born-again Blaine-ians.

Jesus' disciples, however, find themselves compelled by what they have witnessed at a village wedding reception after the caterers ran out of wine, and they rearranged their whole lives forever after.  That's something, isn't it? That's really something.

I don't mean to belittle the miracle here, not at all, but simply to say that I think there was more going on here than just that Jesus' disciples were impressed that Jesus did "a cool trick" when he turned water into wine.  After all, we might all be stunned, impressed, or dumbfounded by seeing some spectacle we cannot explain, but we typically don't overhaul our whole lives just because we saw a rabbit pulled out of a hat or a lady sawn in half.  Even if you see some astonishing image while you are doomscrolling on social media, my guess (and my hope!) is that you don't automatically decide to believe every crazy conspiracy theory that also gets dumped into your feed by the algorithm because you saw one photo or video clip that left you speechless. You know better--or at least you should, especially in this age of doctored photos and AI-generated images--that just because someone shows you something inexplicable or amazing, you are not obligated to believe everything else that comes out of their mouths.  So if somebody at a party should one day make it appear that they have turned clear water into dark-red burgundy, I would advise caution to you before you leave your family to become their roadies simply on the basis of a parlor trick.

My point is to say that if you and I know not to be bamboozled solely on the basis of a magic trick, no matter how impressive it might have appeared, that Jesus' disciples are drawn to faith in him by more than just being impressed at the unexplainable cups of wine where there had only been jars of water before.  They are more than mesmerized--they are captivated in faith by the compelling way of Jesus. They didn't rearrange their whole lives simply because they got an unbelievably good glass of Bordeaux from nowhere.  They did it because in this moment, they became convinced not only that Jesus had amazing power, but that he was using it for good... for compassion... for the sake of life.  And that was worth upending everything else to be a part of.

Mind you, the disciples do in fact uproot their lives as a result of this story.  When John says that Jesus' "disciples believed in him" because of what they witnessed at the wedding banquet, it's not as passive spectators in the stands, shouting, "We believe in you!" to a team they are merely watching.  To say that the disciples "believe in" Jesus marks the beginning of a relationship of trust that would change their lives. They did in fact leave behind their day-jobs--literally dropping their nets at the shore, in some cases--to go follow Jesus.  They did in fact let go of their old view of the world and how God works in it, trading it in for the vision Jesus gave of the Reign of God.  They did in fact discover Jesus was pulling them across boundaries--social and cultural ones, as well as geographical--to strike up conversations with Samaritan women at wells, to join tax collectors throwing dinner parties with paid escorts on the guest list as well, and to help foreigners and even sworn enemies who were in need.  The disciples of Jesus were changed because they "believed in him," that's for sure.

All of which brings me back to the underlying question: was it just because they had seen something unexplainable that they put their trust in Jesus?  Was it only a matter of being astounded at the water turned into wine?  Were they only hoping for front-row seats for the next show, the next trick, the next spectacle? Or perhaps was there a sense that this Jesus was worth giving direction of their lives over to because, for someone with this previously-hidden astounding power, he was willing to use it, not to draw attention to himself or make himself the hero, but precisely as a behind-the-scenes gesture of compassion?  Could it have been that the disciples longed to be transformed, too, even if they didn't know what this Jesus would make of them, only that they knew they could trust themselves in the hands of someone who turned water into wine? Perhaps, did they see that the "sign" they witnessed pointed to the character of Jesus, who stood out as someone whose power was used for love rather than for fame, power, wealth, or self-interest?

Honestly, I have to think that something like that is going on here.  Sure, the spectacle at Cana was eye-catching, but I am convinced that the thing that held the attention, and ultimately the faith, of the disciples, was that the One who wielded this miraculous power used it to help a poor couple on their wedding day rather than to make himself rich or crown himself king.  What makes Jesus different is not merely that he works wonders, but that he uses his wondrous power for life, for healing, for others, and not to build an empire, smite his enemies, or amass a fortune.  That's the difference between Jesus as the professional illusionists, traveling hucksters, and magic acts throughout history: the others might put on a great show, but they're doing it for the paycheck, the power, or the prestige.  Jesus is compelling because whatever power he has access to is used in love for others. That's why the disciples see this wonder and put their faith in him.  

I don't know about you, but I'm just plain tired of seeing folks who cast themselves as Big Deals use their power, position, or perch only use it for themselves.  I'm wearied by the ones who wield their influence or aptitude to make themselves richer, stronger, or "greater." I'm disgusted, honestly, every time I hear someone with a grip on power use it like a cudgel to smash other people down in petty revenge or leverage it for their own advantage--because Jesus so very clearly gives us an alternative.  And when the followers of Jesus hear those loud voices bragging about their power, it falls to us as Jesus' disciples to say, at least for ourselves, "No.  This is not how WE do things, because this is not how JESUS does things."  We find ourselves captivated by the way Jesus uses power in the service of compassion--like the first disciples, that is what first caught our attention and kindled our faith, and that is what we dare to embody, as well as we are able, for the world.

Today, as people who are drawn to Jesus, not merely because he channels divine power, but because that power is never self-serving, we step into the world to speak against all other self-serving abuses of power and to act for the use of our own power, such as it is, for the sake of those most at risk across our path, whether in a wedding reception in Galilee, in the next aisle at the grocery store, taking an ESL class at a local church fellowship hall, or crossing your path in the next ten minutes.  That's what it looks like for us to behold Jesus' glory... and to believe in him.

Lord Jesus, let us be captivated again by your compelling way of using power in love, and let us do the same as we follow you in faith.