Letting Ourselves Be Surprised--February 28, 2025

Letting Ourselves Be Surprised--February 28, 2025

[Jesus said:] "Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven; give, and it will be given to you. A good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap; for the measure you give will be the measure you get back." (Luke 6:37-38)

A wise woman I knew and loved many years ago used to say, "You never know what's going on underneath someone else's roof."  I have never forgotten her counsel.

She easily could have told herself she had earned the right to criticize or condemn other people. Once you reach a certain number of decades in your life, you have probably seen enough and survived enough that you can make pretty good assumptions about other people and their lives. You have seen enough deadbeats before to know when not to trust someone who gives off creepy vibes. You have heard your share of slimy sales-pitches from sleazeball schemers to know who is just selling snake oil. At some point in life, you have met enough people that it becomes hard not to typecast everybody and fit each person into some category or preconception.  Maybe all of those things are true, and yet this dear woman had decided the life lesson of her years was the opposite: don't assume you know who people are, what categories they do or don't fit into, or what else they have going on in their lives that you don't know about.

I think that's what I have held onto especially about her insight.  We may see some part of another person--the version they present in public, at work, on Sunday mornings, or on their social media.  But we simply don't know all the moving pieces in anybody's life, and we certainly don't have a complete enough picture to know everything going on under the surface.  The old observation is that people are a lot like icebergs--most of who we really are is hidden from view and below the water line.  And a more recent observation you may well have heard puts it this way: chances are that someone you cross paths with today is doing everything they can to just hold it together, and you would never know just to look at them.  Someone is trying to stay sober and exerting all their strength to keep from falling off the wagon. Someone is dealing with a crippling depression that comes out as bitterness or hostility toward other people, but is really about their own profound sadness and insecurity.  Someone's marriage is at the breaking point, and someone's kids just shouted, "I hate you!" in a fit of teenage angst for the first time.  All of this is to say that none of us have the whole story on anybody else, and we would be wise to remember that before we write someone off as brittle or flaky, as irresponsible or lazy, as unfriendly or rude.  Or as the voice in my memory used to say it, "You never know what's going on underneath someone else's roof."

I think it's in that same spirit that Jesus offers these words from the Sermon on the Plain, words that many of us heard back on Sunday as part of the Gospel reading.  I know that sometimes the sentiment, "Don't judge others, and you won't be judged" sounds too naive or unrealistic for modern cynics like us, but really, this is one of Jesus' most practical and grounded teachings if you think about it. Jesus is reminding us that we don't ever have all the pieces of the puzzle to someone else's life, and we would be both foolish and arrogant to pretend that we do.  He is saying, in so many words, "You never know what's going on underneath someone else's roof."  And honestly, keeping that truth in mind--as much as it forces us to use spiritual muscles that we have not exercised very much--makes a huge difference in our relationships.

This is especially true in a time like ours, when it is terribly easy to pigeonhole people into boxes or reduce them to shallow stereotypes rather than getting to know them.  We so quickly typecast people--by their political party, their tax bracket, their neighborhood, their skin color, their language, or the look of their family--that we often find it uncomfortable to do the hard work of seeing past stereotypes to get to know the real person beyond the prejudices we bring to them.  We decide in advance that we don't want to associate with "those people" (however we have defined that nebulous category), and then never get the chance to really know what "those people" are really like because we avoid them, so we are only left with our preconceptions and no new data to challenge or correct them.  Or we reduce people to a single character trait, a small slice of their story or circumstances, and never make the effort to get to know the richness of who they are beneath the one-dimensional oversimplifications we settled for.  Over against all the ways that our culture makes it easy to reduce others to cheap caricatures in our minds, Jesus brings us to a halt and says, "Wait. You don't have the whole picture.  What if you took the time to get to know the other person and to learn their story before deputizing yourself as their judge?" Especially in our time we need that voice.

Of course, some part of us resists taking Jesus' counsel here because we don't really want to be surprised.  Something inside of us doesn't want to be wrong or have our assumptions about others challenged or disproven, and so we look for reasons not to get to know people, to learn why they think or feel the way they do. We avoid finding out that the people we decided not to like can actually be deeply funny or compassionate.  We don't look for opportunities for the folks we know voted different from us to tell us why they think or see things differently--it's just easier to silently assume the worst, isn't it?  

The tragedy is that we are missing out on the beautiful richness of actually knowing other people in all their complexity.  Our lives are impoverished because we won't let ourselves really understand other as more than cardboard cutouts or shoddy assumptions, and Jesus offers an alternative.  When we stop ourselves from writing people off, we open up the possibility of getting to know their stories, learning from them, and letting ourselves be surprised.  What would happen if we heard Jesus' teaching not to judge others in that light--not as something we do only for their sake, but because we are missing out when we condemn people without getting to know and understand them?

Today, then, let's be wise enough to remember that we never really know what's going on underneath someone else's roof, and that it's worth getting to know the full picture before we write someone off, put them in a box, or label someone as "unworthy"? Like the old line goes, what if we were curious, rather than judgmental?  We might discover just how much we have been missing.  

Maybe we don't have to keep missing out anymore.

Lord Jesus, enable us to get to know other people in the fullness you know, so that we can love them as you do.

Jesus and the Reinvention of God--February 27, 2025

Jesus and the Reinvention of God--February 27, 2025

[Jesus said:] "But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful." (Luke 6:35-36)

The greatest challenge from Jesus is not about moving mountains or crossing oceans. It's not about walking on water or changing water into wine. In truth, the greatest challenge of Jesus isn't even about us doing anything in particular--it is a challenge to dramatically revise our definitions of God.  

It may well be that the most significant way Jesus pulls us out of our comfort zones isn't a change of location to which we are sent or a new habit to put into practice, but a revolution that happens in the seven inches between your ears.  Jesus has it in mind to give us a wholly new understanding of who God is--he has come, in a very real sense, specifically for the purpose of the reinvention of God.  And this is probably why actually listening to Jesus is so hard--we would much rather keep the mental pictures of the Almighty that we have been crafting in our own stingy images, and are hard-pressed to part with them. But Jesus has it in mind to unmask our old pictures of God (or really, of our personally-approved "god") as idols, and dares us to take it on his authority that God is, at the core, the One who "is kind to the ungrateful and wicked."  And my guess is that most of us don't start with that phrase at the beginning of our understanding of God.  But Jesus does.

The reason I say that this is the biggest way Jesus pushes us out of our comfort zones is that we build our lives and our view of the world around the way we see God. We tend to align our lives with whatever we conceive of as the Ultimate Reality--whether one god or many or none, whether Yahweh or Shiva or Allah or the Force. The ways we picture the "Really Real" will shape the ways we see and define what is "good," and we will pattern our lives after it in turn. This means that your theology, far from being the most useless of the fields of study (the way it is often derided these days, as just so much playing of word games and navel-gazing), is actually just about the most practical and most essential thing to get straight. Because what we believe about Ultimate Reality becomes the way we see and direct our own lives.

Any first century listener of Jesus' sermon here would have understood that importance. At the core of Israel's self-understanding, throughout the Law and the Prophets and the Wisdom writings, was the idea that God's people are supposed to reflect the character of God. The ancient shorthand for that idea was God's command, "You therefore shall be holy, as I am holy," which you can find as a recurring theme in the Torah. So... if it turns out that God cares a great deal about justice, the people were supposed to care about justice. If the God of the Scriptures was said to have rested on the sabbath day, the people were supposed to rest on the sabbath day. If the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob liked the color blue, well, the people were supposed to follow suit. The core idea in the Hebrew Scriptures (what we often call the Old Testament) was that God's character is supposed to shape our character.

That much was taken as a given when Jesus, an up and coming itinerant rabbi from Galilee, gathers a crowd and starts preaching about God and our practices for living. Everybody would have assumed a connection between "what God is like" and "how we are called to live." That much was an already established foundational idea of Israel's ancient faith.  "Of course," they all would have affirmed, "if we are the people who belong to this God, then we are called to embody the character of this God." That was Ancient Israelite Faith 101 stuff.

But the kicker comes when Jesus locates the beating heart of God in love for enemies, rather than in bean-counting judgment or ceremonial purity. See, if you just take the divine command, "Be holy, as God is holy," as your jumping off point, very quickly you need to get some clarity on what "holiness" looks like. And to many ears over the millennia, people have heard the word "holy" and assumed it's a sort of divine allergy to "otherness." "God can't be around those sinners," the Respectable Religious Crowd said: "God would be tainted by their wickedness, and God can't be in the presence of sin!" They talked like the Almighty would break out in hives if God were caught sitting next to someone with an overdue library book. They talked about God's holiness like it was lactose intolerance--a weakness on God's part that made God unable to bear the company of sinners. The Respectable Religious Crowd had a way of putting limits of what was "reasonable" on their understanding of God's love. "Sure," they thought, "God loves the well-behaved and devout; but God's love does not extend to people who don't pray, don't sacrifice, don't go to synagogue, and don't wear their religion on their sleeves." The conventional wisdom was that God's love was basically a reward system for good behavior, and that God could not, would not, extend love for those who were dead-set against God.

And conveniently, the Respectable Religious Crowd took that image of God's kind of "holiness-as-allergy" and took it as their guide for how to live "holy" lives themselves. They assumed that God was more concerned with how many steps you walked on the sabbath than who needed your help on the sabbath. They assumed that it was more important to keep up with the ritual washing than to enter into "uncleanness" by hanging out with a contagious leper. In other words, the Respectable Religious Crowd looked exactly like you would expect for people who believed God's holiness was fragile and needed to be protected from coming into contact with "those people."

And then along comes Jesus... who insists he knows the heart of God better than any of those Respectable Religious leaders, and who pushes the boundaries of what God's "holiness" looks like. In fact, Jesus just outright substitutes "mercy" for the old familiar word "holy" when Jesus says, "Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful," as he does in these words that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.

If that weren't a big enough seismic shift, Jesus fleshes out just how wide and all-encompassing God's mercy really is. God, Jesus insists, does not merely love those who can "pay God back" (because nobody really can). And God doesn't just love well-behaved, polite people... but in fact is good and kind even to "the ungrateful and wicked." Jesus says that the center of God's character isn't the exclusion of the "unacceptable" ones or the condemnation of the "abominable," but the embrace of the enemy. And really, it is this dramatic shock to the system that leads the Respectable Religious Crowd eventually to plot Jesus' death. He is a danger to their system. He is a danger to their theology. And if he is right about God, then their whole way of seeing the world, their whole way of living, and their whole system of ethics and conduct and right and wrong needs to be overhauled. And they surely don't want to have to surrender all of that--none of us does. We much prefer to clutch our idols and call them "the one true God" than to have someone expose the golden calves are really pyrite counterfeits--nothing more than fool's gold that we have been worshiping out of comfortable routine.

If you think about it, everything else that flows out of Jesus' conflict with the Pharisees and Sadducees (as well as the Romans and Herod-supporters) flows out of this essential difference of theology: Jesus acts and lives in accordance with his deep conviction that the Holy One of Israel is kind to the ungrateful and wicked--that God's greatest power and strength is the capacity to love enemies of God. Seeing that love at the core of the Really Real explains why Jesus heals people on the sabbath while others quibble about whether it is allowed. It explains why Jesus envisions the messianic banquet as a table full of tax collectors, hookers, and undesirables, and the Pharisees are offended at the idea that Jesus would even go to their house for dinner. It explains why Rome doesn't know what to make of Jesus, too, because the only kind of power the Empire understands is amassing wealth, sending in the centurions to crush opposition, and crucifying those who defy them. The hardest thing of all to letting Jesus be your rabbi is that he insists on redefining God in terms of radical mercy for the ones we think least deserve it... and we don't want to let him do that, because we know that if he redefines God that way for us, we will not only lose our idols but have to practice that kind of radical enemy-love, too.

And, of course, that is exactly what Jesus sees as the logical consequence of his theology. Because he believes that "the Most High is unkind to the wicked and the ungrateful" rather than just the perfect peaches, Jesus expects that we will grow in such extravagant love, too. We will be good to those we least think are worthy of it. We will extend kindness to those who have not extended it to us. We will forgive the people who are still holding grudges against us. And we will no longer set our course of action in terms of "What can I get in return if I do this?" All of that flows as a logical consequence of accepting Jesus' theology: if God loves enemies, I cannot hold out from loving mine.

If this realization doesn't make us squirm, we're not hearing it correctly. So let me say it again. Jesus insists that the essence of God's character is unconditional grace--not simply a second chance to the people who are trying hard, but kindness to the people who aren't even trying, and generosity to the people who have crossed their arms and turned their backs on God. And if that is anywhere close to correct, then we are bound to practice the same kind of love that puts others first, regardless of what we will get in return, and regardless of whether the ones to whom we are kind "deserve" it. The entire notion of "deserving" dissolves out of the equation--it cancels out altogether in the presence of divine love.

I cannot stress enough how profoundly different this is from the thinking we hear all around us, all the time. "We can't let those people in--they'll taint our collective holiness and moral rectitude!" or "We have to get more out of our deals for ourselves--we can't let someone else get something good in the trade that isn't more beneficial to us!" or "It has to be Us First--me and my group! Do good only to the people who will prop up your power and position, and never help people simply because it is right. That's for suckers." You can't deny that the prevailing logic of the loudest voices in our times shout out that you have to look out for yourself first, that you are only loyal to the people who will pay you back, and that it is a sign of weakness or being a "loser" to be generous if you aren't getting something back in return. And accordingly, religious folks in our day want to remake their image of God in that same image--insisting that God rewards people who do "favors" for religious folks, and that God sees the world in terms of worthy winners and unacceptable, expendable losers and sinners. "Why care about one person's life, if it will jeopardize billions of dollars in profits?" I heard one such Respectable Religious leader more recently than I wish were true. That is exactly the kind of theology you get when you throw your lot in with the "Me-and-My-Group-First" thinking. It doesn't surprise me any more when I hear those kinds of words on television... it just disgusts and disappoints me.

And into all of that way of seeing the world, Jesus throws a Gospel monkeywrench. Jesus insists that we have built our theology around the wrong picture of God, and our false god instead has led us into fake lives. The real and living God, Jesus insists, loves with a reckless disregard for what profit God will "get" out of loving us, without any concern for "worthiness," and with no conditions about politeness or manners. Jesus insists that the real and living God loves enemies and shows kindness to the ungrateful and wicked... which includes me. And you. And a whole world full of us hard-hearted stinkers.

So today, let us take Jesus up on the hardest dare of all--the challenge to allow him to redefine our pictures of God in light of radical grace toward all... and then to let that new picture redefine us as well. Let's allow Jesus' picture of God to replace all the gold-framed caricatures and counterfeits we have put up in the chapels of our hearts, and let us then hear Jesus' revision of the old commandment to be holy as God is holy. Today, let us be holy in the way that Jesus says really matters--let us be merciful, as the beating heart of God is merciful.

Lord Jesus, come and remake our way of understanding God... so that you can remake our way of living in the love of God.

People Over Profits--February 26, 2025

People Over Profits--February 26, 2025

[Jesus said:] "Give to everyone who begs from you; and if someone takes away your goods, do not ask for them again. Do to others as you would have them do to you. If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again." (Luke 6:30-34)

The old line says, "To the one with a hammer, everything looks like a nail." That is, if you are already holding the implement for pounding, you'll be inclined to see the whole world in those terms--as a project that can be assembled by pounding.  The hammer turns out to function also like a set of lenses that affect your view of the reality.

We might say something similar for us who live in the age of the market: when we see everything in terms of making deals, other people just become a means toward a bigger profit.  Maybe we don't realize just how much we are affected (or infected) by the greed-driven logic of our time and place, but it's everywhere.  Right after the headlines, what does the morning news move to?  Which stocks made the most money today, and how much profit the exchanges notched.  Who gets on the cover of the magazine? The listing of the richest people, the CEOS who made the biggest profits for their companies, and the trailblazing entrepreneurs who found the latest way to turn something into a product for sale. We are constantly told by the loudest talking heads of our day that it's only worth doing something for someone else if we will GET more in return than we give out: that spending time, money, or resources on other people, other countries, or other needs that don't affect ME directly is all foolishness and wastefulness.  And in open defiance of that whole way of thinking, Jesus says, "What a rotten mindset that is!" before pointing us toward radical generosity and selfless giving.

Jesus, in other words, has come to take the old earnings-obsessed lenses from our eyes and to see human faces again--in order that we might prioritize, as God does, the worth of people over profits. And in a culture that still is hypnotized under the spell of getting more, winning more, and making more, letting Jesus heal our vision that way will be uncomfortable.  It will mean allowing Jesus to help us unlearn what we had been told by so many voices were the most important things in life, in order to learn a new way of thinking and assessing worth. Jesus is teaching us not to care nearly so much about getting a bigger pile of money with our day's efforts, but investing our lives in the good of other people.  Jesus intends for us to see other people as beloved of God, not merely transactional partners in commerce.  

If all that matters in life is what I get from other people, then, absolutely, I should only help people who will do something for me in return.  If all that matters is getting "ahead," then I should only do favors for people whose potential for return favors could be even more profitable for me.  If the value of my life can be boiled down to my income versus expenditures on a spreadsheet, then I should only ever expend effort if it will increase my net worth.  And if those things are true, we should probably find a different Lord other than Jesus, because he wants nothing to do with that kind of assessment. But if we are going to listen to Jesus, then we should be prepared to have it rearrange our priorities in every area of our lives.

Think about it--what happens when we value people over profits? We would change the way we advise young people in their pursuit of careers and education, and instead of saying, "What kind of money will you make in that field?" we would find ourselves saying, "How will this kind of work allow you to love neighbors well?" And our kids would know that even if they didn't get rich in their fields of study or employment, we would be there to support them, because that, too, is our calling.  We might change how we invest money as well--instead of only looking at what businesses are making the biggest profits, we might ask better questions like, "What kind of businesses do I want my resources associated with? How do they treat their workers, and what kinds of things are they doing that make the world an honestly better place for everyone?" We would have a different perspective on the needs of people or countries far away, too--and instead of asking, "What do we get out of helping them?" we might ask, "Who might die if not for the resources we can offer?" When we value people over profits, everything shifts in our lives, from international relations to the way we raise our children to the money in our wallets and bank accounts.  That's the kind of change Jesus has it in mind to make with us.  He knows it will be an adjustment, and one that takes us outside of our comfort zones, but he is convinced that he has come to bring us the life that really is life.

Today, then, let's allow Jesus to remove whatever hammers we have wrongheadedly put in our hands, and to take away the dollar-sign-shaped spectacles in front of our eyes, so that he can teach us again how to see truthfully; that is, to see the way God does.  Let's dare to let Jesus heal our vision to see faces made in the image of God as the priceless wonders they are.

Lord Jesus, transform our view of the world to see one another--and all that we have--as you do.

On Not Becoming Monsters--February 25, 2025

On Not Becoming Monsters--February 25, 2025

[Jesus said:] "If anyone strikes you on the cheek, offer the other also; and from anyone who takes away your coat do not withhold even your shirt." (Luke 6:29)

If we tell ourselves we've already heard this speech about turning the other cheek before, we are almost guaranteed to misread it as Jesus' instructions for everyone to be a doormat, setting ourselves up for abuse from other people and allowing ourselves to be dehumanized by dictators or belittled by bullies.  That's how a great many folks have been taught to understand Jesus' teachings, and we have thereby avoided hearing what he actually is saying. I want to ask us to take a second look and listen more closely, because I am convinced that Jesus has found a way to be simultaneously non-violent and also not a doormat.  And to do both--to resist evil while also refusing to give into evil as a strategy--is a challenge that will absolutely take us out of our comfort zones, because we are much more used to either burying our heads in the sand and letting rottenness run roughshod over everything or succumbing to hatred ourselves in the fight against hatred.  Jesus charts a different course.

I want to suggest--and this is hardly my original insight, but drawn from many who have spent time with the teachings of Jesus and of the New Testament--that Jesus is calling for his followers to respond to those we see as "enemies" in ways that do not blithely copy the enemy's playbook.  Theologian Walter Wink once put it like this:  "Evil can be opposed without being mirrored, oppressors can be resisted without being emulated, and enemies can be neutralized without being destroyed."  In other words, we don't run from confrontation with the bullies and blowhards of the world, but we don't respond the way they expect--with the kind of hatred, violence, or destructiveness that just gives them more ammunition.  We respond in ways that are meant to turn the tables on our adversaries by refusing to demonize them, but rather treating them as people capable of seeing the rottenness of their ways and of being changed. It is what Gandhi called "satyagraha"--or soul-force, or "the power of truth"--and it works, as some like to put it, the same way jiu-jitsu throws an opponent off guard.

Let me offer an example from here the Sermon on the Plain.  In the first example Jesus offers, he says that if someone strikes you on the cheek, you are to offer the other also.  The idea here, which is even clearer in Matthew's parallel version of the same teaching, is that you turn to your assailant and refuse to do either of the two things they expect of you: fight or flight.  You turn to face the opponent, unafraid but also unarmed, and say essentially, "I refuse to do to you what you have done to me. I will not allow you to degrade or dehumanize me, either by just bowing my head like I deserve your mistreatment, or by degrading you back."  In Matthew's telling, Jesus specifies that you are struck on the "right cheek," and numerous biblical scholars will point out that in an ancient near-Eastern culture, which like many still today was right-hand dominant (and left hands were literally used only for unclean purposes like bathroom functions, rather than eating or interpersonal gestures) if you were striking someone on the right cheek with your right hand, you would be backhanding them.  In other words, this would be a slap--a literal slap in the face--which is not a gesture of sparring equals, but an attempt to dominate or belittle the other person.  If that's anywhere close to being in the right ballpark, then this whole passage has the feel of saying, "If someone else tries to put you down by publicly trying to shame you with a backhanded slap, look them in the eye and turn the other side to them, as if to say back, 'I refuse to be seen as less-than. You will have to treat me as an equal if you are intent on hitting me'."  And of course, that's the last thing bullies really want.  They are looking for low-hanging fruit--people who will easily cower to them or be goaded into an imbalanced fight so that the bully can look "tough" or "strong" or like a "winner." Jesus' approach denies them that opportunity--it says, "I will not let you and your intimidation tactics define me, and neither will I let you make me sink to your level and play by your rules." It defeats the opponent by refusing to engage on their terms, and it also leaves the door open to transformation of the opponent, which is really the greater victory.

In a similar vein, the second example Jesus gives has also has a subversive twist to it that would have been obvious to first-century listeners but which we easily miss twenty centuries later.  The Hebrew Scriptures had a legal principle that you weren't supposed to take someone's coat or outer garment permanently as collateral in a pledge or a loan.  In other words, if someone were in need of a loan and all they had for collateral were the actual clothes they kept warm with, you weren't supposed to actually deprive them of their clothing overnight (when it got cool and they would need it for warmth--again, remember this is a Mediterranean climate and everybody does physical labor as part of their daily work).  It was considered being a bad neighbor to deprive someone of their coat like this, even as collateral for a loan (and again, you'd have to be pretty hard up if the only collateral you had was your coat, so this would be a situation for some pretty vulnerable people).  Now, imagine that someone with more wealth starts making loans in the hope of making themselves a tidy profit, and they don't care about the rules against keeping clothing as pledge--if someone did that and insisted that they were keeping your coat until the loan was paid off (likely with exorbitant interest, which was also against the Torah), what kind of recourse did you have?  Well, technically, you did owe the money on the loan, and technically the lender was going to insist on collateral.  And of course the occupying Roman Empire in the time of Jesus doesn't care about the Torah's rules against keeping a coat overnight--they don't recognize the authority of non-Roman rules or laws.  So who would be your advocate?  Jesus proposes a response that is meant to shame the lender into the right kind of practice.  If they insist on taking your coat overnight (in defiance of the Torah's good rules against such a thing), then give them your shirt, too, as a way of publicly forcing them to own up to their actions.  If they have to publicly acknowledge that they are making you go around half-naked, the hope is that they'll be publicly ashamed and have a conscience wake-up call.  The social pressure of having everyone else in the community see that they have been unjust will force their greedy practice out into the open and expose it, so that either they'll have to contend with the whole community no longer wanting to have anything to do with them, or they'll change their minds and give you back your coat to keep warm with in the mean-time.  In other words, this whole approach calls attention to the wrong being done, but it doesn't resort to injustice as a way to get things resolved.  Jesus calls us to find creative approaches that force those who have been aggressors or tried to dominate us to see their own actions, in the hopes of changing them--if not from an authentic change of heart, then at least from the social pressure of knowing that others will see their behavior, too.  It's a revolutionary approach because it stands up for the person who is being taken advantage of but also refuses to do harm to the person trying to cause harm to you.  It recognizes both the infinite worth of you, the person being threatened, and also the fact that the person threatening is nevertheless made in the image of God and capable of repentance, change, and growth.  That is a courageous stand to take, and it is also very much an uncomfortable place to stay.

We are so easily pressured either into giving in to the folks who want to dominate and take advantage of other people or hating them and refusing to see those people as still beloved of God, even at their worst.  And Jesus' teaching here won't let us do either--he doesn't let us just give up in the face of rottenness, greed, or intimidation tactics, but he also doesn't let us hate those people, either.  So when we stand up in the face of that rottenness, it is not just a stand "against" someone that we don't like but rather a stand "for" those who are being harmed, and even "for" the recognition that even those we don't like are still made in the image of God.

If we actually spend the time trying to unpack what is going on for Jesus in these teachings, we'll find that we can't so easily just ignore him or dismiss him as if he's telling us to let everyone walk all over us.  He is not.  He is instead insisting that our kind of resistance to bullies, blowhards, and browbeaters will have to reject their tactics. Jesus insists, in other words, that we not become monsters ourselves in the attempt to combat monstrosities.

To do that well, and in a sustained effort, is not just difficult, but profoundly uncomfortable.  But there are moments from our history--from the Montgomery Bus Boycott or the marches in Birmingham during the Civil Rights era, to Gandi's march to the sea, to the worldwide divestment pressures that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa--that remind us it is possible to say a loud No to adversaries without succumbing to hatred. It is possible to insist upon your own inherent dignity as a person made in God's image without degrading that same dignity in the person who is hostile to you.

If that feels like a hard needle to thread, the good news for us is that Jesus never intended for us to do that alone.  We do that work together, as community, and with Jesus in our midst leading the way.

Let's go.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage, the clarity, and the compassion to respond to the rottenness in the world around us without being swallowed up by that rottenness ourselves.

A Stretching of Our Ears--February 24, 2025

A Stretching of Our Ears--February 24, 2025

[Jesus said:] "But I say to you that listen, Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who abuse you..." (Luke 6:27-28)

Before we even get to the scandalous notion of loving our enemies and returning hatred with good, Jesus issues another challenge first.  Will we listen to him? As in, will we actually let Jesus speak on his own terms, rather than us trying to fit our own words, wishes, and agendas into his mouth?  Will we let Jesus say things that we do not expect... or do not like... or do not particularly want to follow? Will we let Jesus be our Lord, even if he says things that pull us out of our comfort zones, rather than trying to make him our personal mascot, trotted out to endorse what we want him to say?  Will we actually listen to Jesus' words and worldview, even if it means a stretching of our ears, or will we tell ourselves that we already know what Jesus has to say, and never really hear him?

I ask these questions sincerely, because I know all too well in my own faith journey that sometimes the temptation is greatest for those of us who have been sitting in pews for decades and going to church all our lives to ignore Jesus while telling ourselves we are worshiping him. As they say, familiarity breeds contempt. It is easy to sing praises to Christ if we don't let him get a word in edgewise to say things that will turn our understanding upside down or question the things we took for granted about the world. But Jesus will not let us muzzle him or turn him into a mute messiah with an empty speech bubble we can fill in with our own wishes.  Jesus insists on giving us his own alternative vision for living in the world, and it will unquestionably stretch us outside of our comfort zones.

This week we'll be taking a closer look at the words from Luke's Gospel that many of us heard this past Sunday in worship.  And as we do, we should be ready in advance for Jesus to say things that may make us squirm, because we don't want to have to take him seriously.  Our culture has been so thoroughly ingrained with a worldview that says, "We've gotta GET them before they GET us!" that we will look for any excuse to dismiss Jesus' undeniable directive for us to do the opposite.  We have been so completely immersed in the kind of conventional wisdom that says, "We only help out those who will do something for us in return!" that we can hardly bear to hear Jesus calling us into his kind of non-transactional, unconditional love. So let this be a warning to us all: if we are not interested in letting Jesus overturn our old "Me and My Group First" thinking, we should probably not read any further in the Gospels. Because Jesus is determined to flip those tables.

Let's just say it out loud: a great many of the dominant voices in our day are trying to sell us a view of the world that runs completely counter to Jesus' way. They want us to see everything in the world as a deal to be leveraged, and that the only worthwhile relationships are the ones in which we "get" more from the other party than we put in. They think it's foolish, wasteful, or bad "business sense" to do good for people who might be seen as enemies, and instead want us to reduce everything to a transaction in which we are either "winners" or "losers."  And in addition to being an embarrassingly immature and shortsighted way of seeing the world, that whole perspective is honestly the complete opposite of the Jesus way.  Here in just these opening directives of this section of the Sermon on the Plain, Jesus rejects that self-centered thinking and calls us to break the old cycles of revenge and petty one-upmanship that we are all just tired of.  If we are going to listen to Jesus, rather than trying to baptize our childish self-absorption, then we will have to unlearn what the world told us was "common sense" and to let Jesus teach us his way.  And that will mean learning to say "No" to those dominant voices of our culture who think it's foolish to do good to someone without worrying about getting something in return.

So, what do you think? Are we brave enough to move forward through this section of Jesus' teaching?  Are we willing to listen to Jesus on his own terms, and to stifle our impulse to make him say things we approve of? And if Jesus' view of the world takes our old perspective and stretches it wider so that love encompasses even those we wanted to hate, will we let him stretch us that way? Let's dare it together today. Let's offer our ears to hear Jesus, and then see together what he makes of us.

Lord Jesus, keep us from putting our words in your mouth, and instead let us hear what you have to tell us, even when that forces us to rethink everything.

 

Refusing the Old Rules--February 21, 2025

Refusing the Old Rules--February 21, 2025

"See that none of you repays evil for evil, but always seek to do good to one another and to all." [1 Thessalonians 5:15]

It's about refusing to play by someone else's rules--and instead, playing only by Christ's.

The mindset in this verse from Paul's first letter to the Christians in Thessalonica is some of the most potent, and most revolutionary, thinking around. When the world tries to lure us into seeing life its way, or baiting us into reacting with wrong in response to wrongs done to us, Christians from the very beginning have been taught not to return evil for evil done to us. It is a way, not of rolling over for evil, or letting evil walk all over us, but of refusing to play by evil's own rules. We have been called to defy the very undergirding system that the world accepts, in which you are supposed to hate your enemies and make their lives as miserable as possible and do as much evil to them as you can. This is our revolution--this is our different kind of victory. This is what it looks like to live as if the cross really is God's way of saving and ruling creation.  And that will undoubtedly take us outside of not only our comfort zones but also whole old way of seeing the world.

Think about how truly revolutionary this one sentence is--Christians are called, not to target other people as our enemies, but rather to subvert the whole way of thinking that accepts returning evil for evil as a way of solving our problems. We are called to bring about change, not by wiping out one set of violent crooks to replace them with a new set of violent crooks (the way so many revolutions end up doing, and becoming the very thing they were trying to bring down), but by living now as though the rightful Ruler of the universe really is in charge of things, and refusing to use violent, crooked ways to get what we want. As Walter Wink says in Jesus and Nonviolence, "Violence is not radical enough, since it generally changes only the rulers but not the rules."

So when the first followers of Jesus were taught to refuse to repay evil for evil (and consider that 1 Thessalonians could quite possibly be the first of Paul's letters and therefore the oldest and first of the New Testament writings!), they were not being told just to keep their heads down and not to rock the boat--they were being told to question the way the world was being run by the powers around them, powers which accepted repaying evil for evil as the best way to solve your problems. And by questioning that order of things, the followers of Jesus pointed to a very different kind of Kingdom altogether, with a very different kind of King. The followers of Jesus were witnesses to their King, Jesus, by using the same tactics that Jesus used to bring about his Reign, his Movement--suffering love that breaks the cycle of revenge. You can say that Jesus' death on the cross "paid" whatever debts stood against us on God's books, you could also say that the cross is the sign of God's refusal to repay evil for evil to us for our sin! Christians are only doing what Jesus taught us to do and did for us by following suit in response to the little evils committed against us.

And making the revolution even greater--Paul not only rules out returning evil for evil, he insists that we are called to do good not just for other Christians, but for all! I cannot stress enough how radical and critical that insight from the New Testament is, because we religious folks have a way of reading the Bible in ways that reinforce our comfort zones. We have an easier time with, "Be nice to folks who are already nice to you," or even "Be nice to other Christians--they're on the same team!" We are used to voices that say, "We have to look out for our own group's interest first!" But Paul insists that we are called, not only to "one another" (that is, to other disciples of Jesus, other church folk, other people "like us"), but "to all." That means here is quite possibly the earliest written piece of the New Testament commanding the followers of Jesus to deliberately seek to do good to the folks who seem the most "other"--the ones who don't sit next to you in church, who maybe don't go to any church, who may or may not believe in God, or who may or may not practice the same faith at all. Paul doesn't let us off the hook with just keeping our heads down and not retaliating if we are provoked--he insists our calling, because of Jesus' radical victory, is to actively go out and do good to people who will never stop at your front door with a pot of soup because they heard you were feeling sick, or who will never drop you a note in the mail to say that they are praying for you.

Today, then, you and I have the opportunity to be truly revolutionary--to question the system that so many people around us are still living in--by our willingness to live by Paul's words and to refuse to return evil for evil. We will do good, not only to other Christians, but as Paul says, "to all," whether they are insiders or outsiders, whether we consider them to be friends, strangers, or enemies. And in doing that, we will point to a different sort of King who governs a different sort of Kingdom. We will break the cycle of wrongs to repay wrongs that sets up a never-ending, self-feeding chain of revenge. And we will be living signs of the cross of Jesus, where no less than God in the flesh did the same for us and refused to pay evil for evil to a sinful humanity, but did good for us by giving us his own life. That is our victory.

Lord Jesus, help us to see the chances we have in this day to return good when we are shown evil, and do to it, not as a sign of defeat or apathy, but as your revolutionary way of rejecting the rules by which the world plays.

Recovering the Unsung Verses--February 20, 2025

Recovering the Unsung Verses--February 20, 2025

(Jesus said:)

"But woe to you who are rich, 

     for you have received your consolation.

Woe to you who are full now, 

     for you will be hungry. 

Woe to you who are laughing now, 

     for you will mourn and weep. 

Woe to you when all speak well of you, 

     for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets." (Luke 6:24-26)

Everybody loves the Christmas song, "O Holy Night," but rarely does anybody sing the third verse in concert or out caroling.  That's a shame, really, because it's absolutely beautiful and some of the most powerful poetry in the song.  Many folks don't even know that there's more than one verse, but the third in particular complicates the song.  That's because it's in the third verse of "O Holy Night" that the song itself takes a stand against the practice of slavery, and over the years a lot of choir conductors have just decided that feels less "Christmas-y."  Everybody likes to sing about the stars "brightly shining" and the "thrill of hope," because those are positive images.  But the third verse leaves behind the Nativity story imagery (the Magi and the manger at least are in the second verse) and comes out with a clear position on the issue of slavery, declaring, "Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother, and in his name all oppression shall cease."  There's not a Fa-la-la to be found, just the firm rejection of human bondage.  And even if folks today are solidly anti-slavery (and I would hope they are), a lot of folks don't want to "go there" in their yuletide concerts, or to have a positive, cheery season tinged with the bleak mention of slavery.  I have a feeling that more than a few critics or music directors have said, "Oh, that's too negative, let's just stick to the positive first verse and close out with We Wish You A Merry Christmas."

The song, of course, takes its stand for a reason.  The text, originally written in 1847 (and in French, it turns out) was written in an era when slavery was a thriving institution--not to mention wreaking havoc over countless African American people who were enslaved in this country at the time.  From the perspective of the author and translator, the connection is indeed obvious--the Christ-child has come to set people free from oppression, and that would include an end to enslavement.  The positive claim (that Jesus' birth is a "holy night") cannot be separated from the negative claim (that Jesus' reign is opposed to slavery), because it is a part of what makes Jesus who he is.  Jesus is worthy of praise, adulation, and worship, at least in part because he has come to set people free as he brings about the Reign of God.  So, despite the fact that it throws a monkey-wrench into our sentimentality at Christmas time, the third verse is really an indispensable part of the song. You can't sing, "Fall on your knees" at Jesus if you don't also sing, "Chains he shall break, for the slave is our brother," without losing something essential about why Jesus is worthy of our bending our knees and offering our praise.

Well, I mention all of this because I think there is an important parallel with the words of Jesus that are sometimes known as Luke's version of the Beatitudes.  And just like the conscience-pricking but necessary third verse of "O Holy Night" that folks sometimes want to leave out or skip past, Jesus speaks words that many folks want to ignore or mute because they make us squirm.  We love the announcement of blessing, but nobody wants to hear the second half, the inverse statements of "woe." It's heartening to hear Jesus say, "Blessed are you who are poor," and even more comforting to hear blessing for the hungry and the weeping.  But folks start getting uncomfortable, or even downright irritable, when Jesus goes on to say, "Woe to you who are rich," along with the full bellies and smiling faces of the self-satisfied.  So we skip over the part that makes us uncomfortable, rather than wrestle with what Jesus has to tell us.  As long as we only ever talk about being blessed, we never have to feel bad about ourselves... right?

The only trouble is that Jesus, rather like the original minds behind "O Holy Night," doesn't seem ready to let us slice up his words in order to edit out the parts that sound too "negative." Jesus insists that the YES of blessing for the ones typically regarded as "losers" cannot be separated from a parallel NO for the mindset of those who label themselves "winners" at the top of a human pyramid.  And again, much like the Christmas song, it's because there is a through-line between the "positive" and the "negative" parts.  They are two sides of the same coin.  It is because Jesus is the sort of Lord who breaks chains and ends enslavement that we acclaim him as redeemer and savior.  And just the same, it is because we believe Jesus when he says that God particularly cares for the human beings who suffer (whether in grief, hunger, or need) that we also are called to turn away from any way of life that is oriented just toward getting "more" for ourselves, at the expense of others.  And Jesus' statements of "woe" on the rich and well-fed are just that--criticisms of what happens when we orient our lives on getting more money, more stuff, more food, or more of whatever else we hoard, rather than on the value of the other human beings around us.  We are missing the point of the gospel if our lives are bent on the pursuit of "more," according to Jesus.  He is just willing to be honest about that, even if we would rather he not say that part out loud.

We should probably stop for a moment, too, to note that the word that gets translated "Woe" here in today's verses (which continue the passage we've been reading all week since worship this past Sunday) isn't so much a statement of curse or condemnation, as it is one of pity. It's got the feel of "I feel sorry for the ones who..." or in an earlier generation's language, "Alas for..." (or perhaps like Mr. T used to say, "I pity the fool who...").  In other words, these "woes" aren't Jesus saying, "If you make such and such an amount of money in your annual salary, God hates you and you are doomed for hell," so much as he's saying, "What a shame it is to spend your life on piling up money! What a waste of your life is it trying to make yourself smiley and happy all the time rather than sharing the sufferings of others in compassion!"  Jesus will tell a story later on in Luke's gospel about a man who piles up his wealth into bigger barns (rather than sharing his windfall with his neighbors), only to find out that his life will end that night and all of his hoarded treasures will be scattered anyway.  It's the same sort of statement here in these "woes"--Jesus is trying to warn us that it's a waste of our lives to accumulate more stuff, more wealth, or more things we think will make us happy.  And yeah, that may not be comfortable for us to hear (since we live in a culture driven by the impulse to make more money and possess more stuff), but it's the necessary corollary to confessing as Lord the one who seeks out the lost and lifts up the lowly.

If we are learning to see the world through Jesus' eyes enough to recognize God's blessing and care for the empty-handed, the broken-hearted, and the losers, then Jesus will also compel us to see that we are wasting our lives if we are bent on making ourselves "winners." We don't get one without acknowledging the other.

Today, let's be brave enough to recover the unsung verses, so to speak--let's allow Jesus to say both the things that are easy to hear and the ones that trouble us, in order that we can spend our lives on what really matters.  And let us be brave enough to listen when he speaks.

Lord Jesus, speak and make us to listen. 

Rejected for the Right Reasons--February 19, 2025

Rejected for the Right Reasons--February 19, 2025

[Jesus said:] "Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice in that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven, for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets." (Luke 6:22-23)

Daniel Berrigan, the Jesuit priest and author, once said it like this: “The poor show us who we are and the prophets tell us who we could be, so we hide the poor and kill the prophets.”  Well, yesterday we heard Jesus announcing God's blessing on the poor, and now today as we continue this passage from Luke that many of us heard this past Sunday, Jesus calls us to walk in the same path of rejection that got the prophets regularly into trouble all throughout the history of ancient Israel.  And it's not a popular place to be, by any measure.

The connection Jesus makes here to the prophets who came before is important, because Jesus' point about being blessed isn't to say it's automatically virtuous to be disliked.  It's not a default positive if people can't stand to be around you--that may just mean you are jerk.  As the old line of James Finley goes, "It may be true that every prophet is a pain in the neck, but it is not true that every pain in the neck is a prophet. There is no more firmly entrenched expression of the false self than the self-proclaimed prophet."  In other words, if people don't like being around us, that doesn't necessarily mean we are being excluded for the sake of righteousness or persecuted for our faith--it may just mean we are unpleasant to be around.  The goal is not to be unpopular for the sake of unpopularity, nor to be left out because we are rude, selfish, or terrible conversationalists.  The calling, rather, is for us to be alternative voices of God's Reign in the world like the prophets were, and to do it even when that calling is costly.

That's important to be clear about, because I've heard more than my share of loud, angry, and boorish folks who are also Respectable Religious People who like to wave the banner of being "persecuted for their faith" when in fact they have just alienated everyone around them because they are mean, obnoxious, and unpleasant.  Jesus isn't looking to give gold stars to people for their crudeness, and he doesn't give us permission to cast ourselves as martyrs when in reality we have just put people off because we've been acting like a horse's rear end.  The calling is to be willing to risk our status, our reputation, and our comfortable social positions for the sake of being the kind of voices the prophets were, who did have a way of upsetting the CEOs, the folks in the palace, and the ones running the show in the Respectable Religion Department.   We might be called to be rejected, but Jesus insists that means being rejected for the right reasons.

The prophets were holy troublemakers, who questioned whether it really was a good thing when the ancient Israelite stock markets were booming, but the poor found it harder and harder to get by.  They questioned whether it was really a righteous thing for the kings to put more and more trust in their military might, rather than to spend their energy on establishing justice and letting God defend them.  They questioned whether it was better to make bigger profits by working through the times set for sabbath rest rather than to have a culture that obsessed less about money and enjoyed more of their time.  And they questioned whether God really wanted all their sacrifices, rituals, and public shows of piety if the people weren't going to treat each other fairly, look out for the most vulnerable, and show mercy to the people with their backs against the wall.  As you might imagine all of that made them some powerful enemies within the economic sectors, the political centers, the religious institutions, and the military-industrial complex of ancient Israel and Judah.  Because they got all those Big Deals upset, the prophets were regularly run out of town, officially censured, cursed and insulted, and often (the legends said) put to death, whether by state execution or lynch-mob.  In other words, it was their consistent willingness to risk everything for the sake of speaking God's vision of how things were meant to be that got the prophets kicked out of high society, booed out of the country clubs, and escorted out of the halls of power.  And on that count, Jesus calls us to be like the prophets.  The calling is to be willing to bear rejection and exclusion for the sake of our witness to the Reign of God, not because we are mean-spirited, rude, or unpleasant people.

As we face this day, that's vital to consider. Jesus isn't recruiting people to be abrasive or to sow discord just for the sake of putting more spite in the world.  He is calling us to be willing to leave our comfort zones, risk our losing friendships, and bear other people's rudeness and rejection aimed at us, for the sake of living and speaking his way of life.  Others may choose to be hateful to us, but we will not hate them in return.  Others may exclude us, but we will not lock the door or burn the bridge from our side.  Others may choose to be immature, rude, spiteful, and mean-spirited toward us, but we will not return in kind.  Like the apostle Paul would tell the whole congregation in Rome, we are not to "be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." That, too, is at the heart of how Jesus calls us to be like the prophets.

It might not require something as bold and daring as a throne-room showdown with the king like Isaiah or Jeremiah might have had, and it might not require getting kicked out of the official government-endorsed sanctuary like Amos, but it might mean we speak up in small ways. It might mean that when someone else around you says something hateful or bigoted that you and I speak up and say that it's not OK.  It might mean that when you notice somebody else being silenced or interrupted, you call attention to it so that they can have their input heard and their place at the table respected.  It might mean that we risk being unpopular rather than keeping our heads down and not saying anything when others start acting like bullies.  And yeah, it might even mean that when someone you know starts making reckless or baseless claims on their social media that you take them aside one on one and ask them where they got their information from or to cite their sources.  We aren't being commissioned to be pedantic or condescending in the name of the Lord, just to be voices, even small ones, that amplify God's melody over the rest of the noise around us. And we might do that in any number of ways, even on a day like today.

If we think our mission is to be offensive and off-putting, we've missed the point.  But if we understand our calling to witness to God's Reign as we've come to see it in Jesus, even when that riles up the people in centers of power, wealth, and influence, well, then we might just be blessed.

Indeed we are, Jesus says.  Indeed we are.

Lord Jesus, give us both the courage and the clarity to risk our reputations and comfort for the sake of being your messengers in this time and place.

Which Way Is Up--February 18, 2025

Which Way Is Up--February 18, 2025

"Then Jesus looked up at his disciples and said:
'Blessed are you who are poor,

     for yours is the kingdom of God.

 Blessed are you who are hungry now,

     for you will be filled.

 Blessed are you who weep now,

     for you will laugh....'" (Luke 6:20-21)

To listen to Jesus is a little bit like having vertigo. We might have thought we knew which way was up and how the world was ordered, until he comes along and reorients us until we discover that what we thought was upside-down was really right-side-up.  And that will always make us a little bit uncomfortable--as well as making us look and sound odd to the rest of the world that hasn't been shaken up by Jesus yet.

But let's be clear here, as we take a look at these words from Luke's Gospel that many of us heard in worship on Sunday: Jesus has in mind nothing short of turning our old vision of the world on its head and then telling us that we had been pointed in the wrong direction all this time.  He isn't offering helpful life-principles to "get ahead" and live "our best life now," at least not in the usual ways we describe those things. No, here, as he describes God's priorities, Jesus subverts all that "conventional wisdom" has been telling us about the good life and replaces it with his own vision.  That's bound to cause a little motion sickness of the soul.

The real issue is that somehow we've gotten our bearings so convoluted and backward in the first place that what Jesus says will sound backward and wrong-headed to our ears.  But from Jesus' perspective, he isn't saying anything new or outlandish--he is simply putting things right that we have had out of sorts all along. 

And to be sure, there are lots of loud voices (many of them obnoxiously so) who would have us believe that the REAL "good life" is all about accumulating MORE--more wealth, more food, more stuff, more technology, and more experiences (or substances) that will stimulate more good feelings. There are plenty of folks whose whole sales-pitch is built around claims of making us ever wealthier, or more secure, or more successful, who never for a moment even question whether those goals align with the kind of life Jesus has in mind. They cannot fathom that anyone could possibly say--as Jesus does without blushing--that God's blessing is on the empty-handed and God's favor is for the broken-hearted.

This is what makes Jesus' so revolutionary.  Honestly, there were plenty of would-be messiahs in the first-century who were promising wealth, power, and status to their followers--those were a dime a dozen.  They promised their recruits greatness and the arrival of a golden age of prosperity, happiness, and excess, if they would just join their armed resistance again the Romans and help them replace the old empire with a new one. Jesus doesn't do any of that, because he knows better that the ache deep inside of us is not for more money, or more power, or even for more of the things that cause the momentary happiness of endorphins in our brains.  Jesus instead points us toward a different set of values, where we care most about those who have been treated as least, where we lift up those who have been bowed down and stepped on, and where we make sure to feed those whose plates and pantries are empty.  Jesus says that these are the priority for God, and that all of our chasing after the endless quest for "more" (even when we mislabel it as "the pursuit of happiness") is fundamentally upside-down.  The things that make for the good life look a lot more like love, compassion, empathy, and a sharing of our good things with others, and a lot less like the opposite values of greed, avarice, and self-interest.

If it seems like we are being asked to choose between two different competing visions of reality, that's because we are.  We cannot chase after the things the world's loudmouths tell us we are supposed to want (no matter how "great" they promise they will be, or how rich they swear they can make us) and also at the same time seek the things Jesus tells us are worth our effort.  We cannot make enough profit in the stock market to buy the Kingdom of God, and we gain no advantage if we have food spoiling on our shelves while others starve to death.  If we want the life that Jesus offers, it will mean learning to reorient our lives, our values, and our choices--away from what the world told us was worth having, and toward the well-being of the people God is particularly concerned about, namely, those who suffer.  The ultimate question for us is whose reality we will accept as, well, real.  Who gets to tell us which way is up--the conventional wisdom that says the real "winners" are the rich, the full bellies, and the blissfully ignorant; or Jesus, who announces God's blessing on the poor, the hungry, and the weeping?  

Will we let Jesus turn us the 180 degrees it will take to see his vision and make it our own?  Will we allow Jesus to briefly give us spiritual vertigo--and then cure us of the same as he puts us right side up at last?  Will we allow Jesus to show us, no matter how accustomed we are to the old orientation, which way really is up?

Lord Jesus, turn us right side up to align these hearts with your compassion for those who weigh heavily on your own heart.

The People Jesus Draws--February 17, 2025

The People Jesus Draws--February 17, 2025

"[Jesus] came down with [the disciples] and stood on a level place, with a great crowd of his disciples and a great multitude of people from all Judea, Jerusalem, and the coast of Tyre and Sidon. They had come to hear him and to be healed of their diseases; and those who were troubled with unclean spirits were cured. And all in the crowd were trying to touch him, for power came out from him and healed all of them." (Luke 6:17-19)

Jesus doesn't ask people where they've come from when they seek out his help; he just helps them.  He doesn't screen out the people whose troubles, sickness, disease, or uncleanness would complicate his life or potentially taint his personal holiness; he allows them all to have access to him, even to touch him.  In fact, Jesus seems to think this is precisely what he has come into the world for in the first place.

This introductory scene that sets up the Sermon on the Plain, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, presents a surprising mix of people audaciously coming to Jesus.  In case you haven't memorized your ancient Palestinian geography, Luke gives us a curious mix of both Jewish and Gentile regions who are drawn to Jesus.  The first grouping shouldn't surprise us--Jesus, after all, is Jewish, and so it's understandable that people from his own background, ethnicity, and religion would seek out this new teacher both to hear his message and because of the stories they had heard of his wondrous powers.  But beyond "all Judea" and "Jerusalem," Luke says that people from the whole coastal region of "Tyre and Sidon" were coming to Jesus--and those are much further cities, which were historically Gentile (they are both in modern day Lebanon, for what that's worth).  

In other words, Luke presents us with a Jesus who is not only well-known to his own people, but who had apparently developed a reputation among foreigners for being not only powerful, but approachable.  The people who journeyed to see Jesus crossed the border to seek him in the hope that he would receive them, rather than turning them away.  And apparently, Jesus did not disappoint. He welcomed foreigners and kinspeople alike, the sick and the well, even when their touch would have made Jesus himself unclean.

Those are the kinds of hurdles that would have seemed insurmountable to other religious teachers of the day.  Jesus was certainly running a risk letting this mix of people, Judean and Gentile, neighbors and foreigners, demon-possessed and deeply devout, all come to him, from whatever places or countries they had first come, and letting them come right up to him.  Luke seems quite clear that Jesus didn't have a screening process or vet which people had "qualified" for his assistance, and he certainly didn't insist on only helping his own "in-group" members first. They streamed in from across boundaries and borders in ways that certainly would have raised the eyebrows of other Respectable Religious Leaders.  And I can only imagine that Jesus' own disciples, who have apparently been brought along for this ride, are feeling way out of their comfort zones seeing this all happen.  Jesus hadn't mentioned anything about ruffling quite so many feathers when he first called them to follow him, and I have a feeling that there were times that Simon Peter, James, John, and the rest of the twelve found themselves squirming in their seats as Jesus broke taboos, disregarded rules about uncleanness, and welcomed foreigners without consulting them first.  But that's what happens when we get drawn in by Jesus--he has a way of bringing along a surprisingly diverse mix of people without asking our permission.  

This season we have been exploring how Jesus leads us beyond our comfort zones, and it's worth noting that sometimes that's not a matter of us going somewhere else, but rather of welcoming others in all of their differences to where we are. Sometimes you can be pulled outside of your own comfort zones without ever moving your feet.  That certainly would have happened with Jesus' disciples who found their teacher widely welcoming not only Judeans and Galileans like them, but Gentile foreigners from outside their turf, including people with severe sickness and even demons. Jesus reserves the right to do the same with us.  We should be prepared to have Jesus stretch us by means of the other people he welcomes in our midst, even if we don't move.  We should be prepared, too, for the very real possibility (likelihood?) that Jesus will send people across our path who stretch us beyond our comfort zones in all sorts of ways--where they are from, how they vote, what language they speak, or what their families look like--and that he will call us to show them love, welcome, help, and even healing.  We should be ready for newcomers who are brave enough to show up in worship on Sundays, perhaps, but also to welcome the faces in line at the grocery store or post office, the people new to the neighborhood or school district, and wherever else we find them.  And if it feels like we are a little anxious, nervous, or squeamish at the diverse mix of people who are drawn to Jesus, well, it's worth knowing that we likely in the company of the first disciples on that count.  Jesus helped his first disciples to grow and stretch as they watched him welcome, heal, and help others, without condition and without discrimination.  It's almost like that was his plan all along--not only to help strangers in need, but also to shape his inner circle of followers and widen the scope of their love.

I wonder whom Jesus will send across our way today--and how he might stretch us in the process.

Lord Jesus, make of us what you will as you welcome people far and wide into your healing presence.

An Impossible Hope--February 14, 2025

An Impossible Hope--February 14, 2025

[The LORD told Isaiah:] "Even if a tenth part remain in it,
     it will be burned again,

like a terebinth or an oak

    whose stump remains standing

    when it is felled.

The holy seed is its stump." (Isaiah 6:13)

Isn't just that like God?  Just when we have gotten used to despair and told ourselves to give up, God upsets our apple carts of desperation and pulls a new beginning out of nowhere.  That is to say, if God is indeed going to pull us out of our comfort zones (as God does seem perfectly willing to do), then we should be ready, when we have gotten acclimated to despondency, for God to surprise us with a new reason to hope.  

It's never merely cheap optimism or a spin-doctor's PR spin on bad news, and it rarely means we get a detour to avoid the difficult things of life.  With our God it is always about coming through the valley of the shadow of death into the sunlight on the other side, rather than avoiding the ravine altogether. But God does seem to reserve the right to pull an impossible hope out of nowhere like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Just when we think that death is the last word on the subject and the grave is sealed tight, God speaks a word of resurrection and starts rolling away stones.

This verse from Isaiah is one of those moments, too.  We've been walking through Isaiah's call story this week through our devotions, and we've seen how God has been pulling him out of his comfort zones throughout the encounter.  First, we saw how he was utterly petrified just having the vision of seeing God in the temple. Then he was commissioned to be God's spokesperson, not merely a passive audience member watching God from a safe distance.  And yesterday, hardest of all, we heard God warn Isaiah that his mission would largely involve speaking to people who would not listen to him, and that the result would be a whole nation devastated by exile and the invading Babylonians.  That certainly was not the sort of thing any of us would exactly be "comfortable" with at first, and so part of what God had to do was to help it sink in for Isaiah just how hard and seemingly futile his job would be.  Like building up a callus on your hands from repeated labor, Isaiah would have to develop a thick skin for his prophetic call, since God was deliberately sending him to a hostile audience.  And I can only imagine that for Isaiah that came at the risk of being constantly on the verge of depression and loneliness.  It must have been terribly isolating to be Isaiah and feel like you were the only one paying attention to the collision course your society was on, and it must have felt like he was doomed to watch his nation careening toward destruction while his people amused themselves to death.

It would have been hard enough to convince anybody in Isaiah's time that disaster was on its way--after all, the stock markets were healthy, business was booming, and the Babylonians weren't on anybody's radar yet.  Other world powers and international rivals would come and go before the worst of what Isaiah warned about actually happened to Judah.  And yet, even if he did manage to persuade some outlier to listen to him, and to take seriously that the nation was headed for trouble, it would have been nearly impossible to convince them that there might yet be hope, on the other side of exile, after all of the chaos and turmoil Isaiah warned about.  But that's where today's verse ends--just a glimmer of impossible hope that comes on the other side of destruction.  It emerges like a seed growing out of the dead stump where a tree used to be.

Honestly, you almost miss that there is any good news at all in this verse, because it only comes after the threat of relentless destruction first: even if a tenth is left standing, even that will be burned down again!  Imagine being Isaiah and being told to tell his people that God was going to let their whole nation be obliterated by invading empires, and that God wasn't even going to leave ten percent in place, but was going to allow the nation as a whole to be overrun.  And imagine that Isaiah knew he wasn't being sent to tell people this news in order to get them to prevent it from happening, or to put up more defenses against the enemies, or to make an alliance with some other nation in order to stop the looming threat, but rather that he was sent simply to say, "You can't fight this enemy with weapons or military might. But it's coming. The whole tree is getting chopped down and then the stump will be burned to ash." And then after all of that, imagine that God pushes the door into the future open just a crack--barely enough to see the light from the next room--and says, "But then there will be a seed in the stump."  That's what happens in this final verse here.

That kind of hope--costly, fragile, and hard to believe--is what God brings here, and also, it would seem, what God tells Isaiah to bring to the people as well.  Isaiah won't live to see it, and neither will the people he is addressing, but they may pass along the word of hope to their children, who may pass it along to their children and grandchildren, to sustain them until exile ends.  And this hope, as I say, isn't a secret plan to avoid the hard stuff or circumvent the pain of their consequences for repeatedly turning from God's ways of justice and mercy, but rather it is a lifeline to hold onto like a rope in the dark.  The hope is for a way through the disaster and out the other side, not an escape hatch to avoid it.  As we followers of Jesus might say it, there is no resurrection without a death first, and an empty tomb first requires that there has been a cross beforehand.

But even if that hope is good news for us, even hope itself can be out of our comfort zone if we had conditioned ourselves to be hopeless.  If we are finally resigned to the worst-case scenario, sometimes we almost don't want to risk believing or hoping that there could be a new beginning, because we don't want to get hurt or be disappointed again.  And yet, God doesn't leave us in despair, but keeps pulling us, tugging at our sleeves like a toddler leading us into the next room, when we had just gotten used to staying in the darkness.  Isaiah is given that bare spark of hope--a seed that will grow out of the old burnt stump--and it will have to be enough to hold on through his lifetime of ministry, through the years of being ignored, and then through his people's exile. The new sprout will not come by way of battle, monetary policy, or clever political deal-making.  It will come, like resurrection out of death, when God calls forth new possibilities from dead-ends.

It's hard for us to live in that tension, too--the tension between honest assessment of the troubles around us and the hope that will accompany us through those troubles--but that is where all of our lives are lived as people of faith.  We are held in the space of Holy Saturday, between the cross of Good Friday and the sunrise of Easter Sunday, always.  And like Isaiah, we sometimes have to speak both a difficult word about the rottenness around us, in which we are all entangled and complicit, and also hold out a hopeful word that God can bring dead stumps back into green leaf as the old tree's composted limbs give rise to an acorn growing from the old roots.  That is never easy, and it is most certainly beyond our comfort zones.  But it is what we are all called to as the Spirit-filled people of God. Like the old line says about prophets being sent to "afflict the comfortable and to comfort the afflicted," we are sent both to be honest voices of difficult truths and authentic witnesses of life-sustaining hope that comes through the grave out into resurrection.  

That's the job.  Are we up for it?

Lord God, don't let us give up on your ability to bring life out of dead places and hope out of despair.