The Practice of Prayer--July 31, 2025

The Practice of Prayer--July 31, 2025

And [Jesus] said to them, “Suppose one of you has a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say to him, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread, for a friend of mine has arrived, and I have nothing to set before him.’ And he answers from within, ‘Do not bother me; the door has already been locked, and my children are with me in bed; I cannot get up and give you anything.’ I tell you, even though he will not get up and give him anything out of friendship, at least because of his persistence he will get up and give him whatever he needs." (Luke 11:5-8)

You already know the old joke, I'd bet:  "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" Practice, practice, practice.  

That tired punch-line makes a point, though. For anybody to get better at playing their instrument of choice, from piano to piccolo, you need more than just a single look at the sheet music.  Sure, some folks have a natural talent for sight-reading--they can look at notes on a page which they've never seen before and hammer out a pretty decent rendition of whatever the music is.  But even those with such innate talent will tell you that you get better at playing this particular piece of music the more you practice it.  That's because music is more than simply getting 100% of the notes played as written on the page--music involves interpretation, the shaping of the passage with louds and softs, with pauses and rushes, and with almost imperceptible nuances of expression that make a melody come alive.  You only come to see those and feel where they need to be brought out by spending time with the music.  

In other words, for a musician, practice comes to be about more than "getting the notes right." There comes a point when it is about the experience of letting the music come to life--where you almost have an unspoken conversation with the composer, even if the hand that first wrote the music has been dead for centuries.  You get these "Aha!" moments where you see what clever or beautiful moves the composer made--inverting a melody here, suggesting a counterpoint there, weaving in a theme from back in the first movement, and such--and sometimes those only occur to you after your fiftieth time playing through the score.  That is to say, sometimes, your understanding of what you are playing really only emerges after you have spent a certain amount of time immersed in the music, such that the composer seems to be in the room with you and you realize what he or she was expressing when the piece was first written.

I want to suggest that prayer is not that different for us as disciples of Jesus.  We are not looking for a simple formula of "right words" to be recited once like a magic spell or incantation.  We often mistakenly think that, of course. As we've been looking all week at the passage many of us heard this past Sunday in worship where Jesus' first disciples asked him to teach them "how to pray," we'll recall how often we treat Jesus' words like a recipe.  And hopefully we've seen already that Jesus doesn't see praying as the rote repetition of approved words. Jesus doesn't answer by giving us a printed page with fixed words and say, "Just sight read this."  Jesus has been inviting us to let our wants become aligned with God's wants, and to let God's vision shape our own.  Now here as Jesus continues, it becomes clear (if it weren't already) that prayer is an ongoing practice, not a one-and-done declaration.

This story Jesus offers in today's verses gets at that very point.  It's a sort of thought experiment about how a single one-time request from a friend in a desperate moment at night might not be adequate to get a response, but a persistent knocking on the door will eventually get through.  His point isn't to say that God is like your sleeping neighbor who wants to be left alone, but rather to say that prayer isn't about sight-reading the "right words" after a single quick glance at a printed page, but rather an ongoing practice that brings us into communion and connection with God.  Keep at it, Jesus says.  Keep praying.  Keep speaking.  Keep pouring out your heart.  Keep asking for God to shape and reorient your will.  Keep getting to know who this God is in the course of the interactions, and just see how greater depth emerges in your connection with God--maybe not on the first attempt, but developing slowly over the course of daily seeking, daily asking, daily listening, and daily silence before God.  This is what Jesus has in mind--that prayer become so much of a matter of friendship with God that we are in constant conversation.  And when that happens, then there will of course be times where the conversation is just the daily check-in of life stuff, and sometimes it will include the urgent request after everyone is in bed.  Prayer, then, is not about finding which "magic words" will compel God to grant our wishes, but about cultivating a relationship with God in which we bring the ordinary and the emergent, and in which God shapes us as much as we bring our desires to God.  And the only way that kind of relationship develops is through the investment of time and attention.  "How do you get better at prayer?" we might ask--and the answer might be just like in the joke: "Practice, practice, practice."

That notion of "practicing" prayer isn't about performance, however.  It's about making a regular discipline of praying, with the awareness that something develops in us as we spend more time and attention on it.  We have way of hearing the disciples' request, "Teach us how to pray," as merely about getting the correct words, but Jesus has continued giving his answer, well past the final phrases of what we call "The Lord's Prayer."  Today's verses about persistence are also part of his response about "how to pray."  That is, when we ask Jesus for how to pray, we should be prepared that he won't just give us words to recite but a rhythm to step into. His answer includes the direction, "Persistently." It includes the invitation, "Keep at this, and you'll be changed."  It includes the notion that we are pulled into a dance that keeps moving.

Seeing ourselves as disciples of Jesus has a way of changing our perspective on a lot of things, really.  We no longer look at praying like we are customers placing orders, but as children drawn into relationship with a parent who loves us.  As disciples at prayer, we no longer see ourselves as in control, like we are the ones calling the shots with God, but rather as learners at Jesus' feet, as aspiring musicians practicing with our instruments and letting the genius of the Composer become clear to us the more time we spend letting the music soak into us and train our muscle memory.  Jesus teaches us that prayer is not the answer to the question, "How do I make God give me what I want?" but rather, "How can I be more fully attuned to playing my part in the music God is making?"  When we see it that way, it makes perfect sense that Jesus' response to "Teach us how to pray" includes the direction, "Keep at this."  We pray as an ongoing practice, not because we have to wear God down, but maybe more because that is how a friendship is built up--in time, attention, daily check-in, and honest conversation.  We keep praying because in that investment of time and, yes, of practice, the richness of the music and the personality of the Composer is brought to our attention.

How should we pray today? Like the old joke says--with practice, practice, practice.

We come to you again today, God, asking for you to shape our vision, to open our hearts, and to give us what we need.  We ask it again, not because we think we have to wear you down, but in the honest admission that you may need to keep working on us through prayer to wear down our defenses.

Against Hucksters and Hornswogglers--July 30, 2025

Against Hucksters and Hornswogglers--July 30, 2025

[Jesus taught his disciples to pray:] "...And do not bring us into trial." (Luke 11:4b)

I grew up, like many church folks, reciting the words, "And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil," as part of weekly worship. Those words come from Matthew's parallel version of what we call "The Lord's Prayer," and you get a similar sense here in Luke's way of telling it.  We heard these words again in worship this past Sunday, and yet I have a sneaking suspicion that many of us aren't really quite sure what it is we are asking God to do... or perhaps what we are asking God not to do.

At first blush, this might sound like a desperate plea to the Almighty not to trick us, trap us, or lure us into some kind of snare.  Whether you have phrased as "Lead us not into temptation," or "Do not bring us to the time of trial" or "Do not lead us to a situation of testing," it can sound like we are trying to persuade God not to be a jerk and cause us to go astray, or pleading with God not to spring a pop quiz with eternal stakes on us.  And I suppose those would be plausible ways of hearing the text if we truly pictured God (as the Greeks and Romans pictured Zeus or Jupiter) sitting up on a throne in the sky brandishing a lightning bolt and just itching to lob it at us the moment one of us steps a toe out of line.  If we picture God as a celestial Highway Patrol officer hiding behind some trees and waiting to catch us in a speed trap and zap us with lights and sirens blaring, then yes, it might make sense to pray, "Please don't give me a ticket, Officer!"

But part of being Jesus' disciples means letting him redefine our understanding of who God really is, even if it requires us to let go of our old assumptions and definitions.  And Jesus does not give us the impression at all--like, EVER--that God is a trigger-happy bully sitting on a cloud and just waiting for us to mess up enough as to give an excuse to smite us or send us to our doom.  The old Puritan preacher Jonathan Edwards may have pictured the Almighty holding us over the fires of hell like a spider dangling by a thread, but that's really not how Jesus pictures the living God.  Jesus doesn't think we have to plead with God not to entrap us with some kind of temptation that then gives this bloodthirsty deity an excuse to punish us or damn us.  And that's because Jesus doesn't think God is looking for reasons to destroy us; rather, God is look for ways we can be led more fully into life, even when we have a track record of being our own worst enemies.

In that light, the prayer, "Do not bring us into trial or testing," lands less like a last-ditch plea to avoid entrapment and more like an honest self-assessment that we would fall for a con-man or an idol if we were left to our own devices.  Knowing that God is looking for ways to save and rescue us, and that God has been willing over and over again in the past to seek us out when we were the lost sheep caught in the thicket or fallen into a ditch, these words from Jesus feel more like a confession of our fallibility than a fear that God will beguile us.  This prayer is more like saying, "God, I know myself well enough to admit that I have been taken for a ride before by hucksters and hornswogglers.  I've been fooled before by people who did not have my best interest at heart, and I let them take advantage. Don't let me fall for it again."  And in that regard, this is both one of the most honest and hopeful prayers we can utter.

Carl Sagan once said, "One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”  Of course, the astronomer was right, and most of the time we don't want to admit that we have been duped.  A prayer like this is a helpful reminder to each of us that when we aren't listening for God's voice, we are far more likely to be conned into going after whoever is loudest. And because Jesus shows us who and what God is really like, he teaches us to pray that God would keep us from falling for the deceivers and demagogues who are vying for our allegiance to underwrite their agendas. If you have ever been brought to the point that you see you have been misled before, you know what it's like to need help in discerning which voices to listen to, and which to ignore.  Jesus gives us these words, not to dissuade God from tricking us, but to help us to resist those who would lead us astray for their own ends.  It is a prayer against the hucksters and hornswogglers, a prayer that we would be wise enough not to listen to their sales pitches, and brave enough not to go along with the crowd fawning over the emperor's new clothes.

And knowing how often we Respectable Religious Folks have given tacit approval to an awful lot of rotten things--sometimes with Bible verses to back up the rottenness--it is clear that we really do need God's guidance to keep us from being fooled by snake-oil salesmen and spin doctors.  From congregations whose preachers taught them God endorsed slavery to German congregations that quietly allowed the Reich to make their neighbors disappear to all the ways we still confuse the loudest voices with the Lord's voice, we keep needing God to lead us away from the dead-ends and back onto a way that leads to life.  Jesus knows that need--that's why he has given us such an honest prayer.

We need it every day--so we keep praying.

Lord God, do not bring us into trial or testing--help us to hear your voice clearly above all the pretenders.

Manna and Mercy--July 29, 2025

Manna and Mercy--July 29, 2025

[Jesus taught his disciples to pray:]

"Give us each day our daily bread.
 And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us." (Luke 11:3-4)

This is what it looks like when God's kingdom comes: daily bread and reverberating forgiveness.  This is what it looks like where God reigns; there is manna and mercy all around.  And this, dear ones, is what Jesus thinks is worth having his disciples pray for.

As someone who memorized these words which make up what we call "The Lord's Prayer" (which many of us not only heard in worship on Sunday, but prayed corporately as well) at an early age, I have to confess it is very easy for me to hear each phrase in isolation, as though they are a random string of unrelated items on a grocery list.  It has taken me a good few decades to realize that together, Jesus offers us a holistic vision of how God reorients our hearts, minds, and actions as we pray.  That is to say, Jesus doesn't merely intend for us to pray abstractly for "God's kingdom" to come without any other fleshing out of what that means, before moving on to an unrelated reminder to God to keep feeding us (as if we were fish in a fish bowl and God were a forgetful child).  No, I am convinced that Jesus has given us a short description of what it looks like where God's kingdom does in fact come among us.  This is what to look for, what to picture, and what to hope for, as we ask for God to reign more and more fully "on earth as it is in heaven" (as Matthew's version of this prayer adds). 

And in particular Jesus singles out two forms in which grace sustains us all beyond our earning, for the sake of the common good.  In the Reign of God, everybody gets to eat.  In the kingdom that comes near, we both give and receive forgiveness as easily and naturally as breathing in and out.  In the Beloved Community, we free each other from debts knowing God has cancelled ours, and we feed each other knowing that God has provided enough for all.  And all of this flows out of the earlier petition, "Your Kingdom come," because this is precisely the sort of thing that happens when our priorities align with God's, and when our wills are redirected by the will of God.

Now, if I am anywhere close to in the right ballpark here that daily bread and abundant forgiveness (of sins and debts alike, apparently) are part of what it means for God's "kingdom" to come and God's "will" to be done, then it is worth considering what that tells us about God's own priorities.  Jesus seems to suggest that you can tell you have ventured into God's realm when nobody goes hungry, and nobody holds grudges.  You can tell God's will is being done when no mother has to bury a child who has starved in her arms, and when no one aims weapons into a village with the justification, "But THEY started it!" You can tell that our hearts are coming into alignment with God's, according to Jesus, when we care more about making sure everybody gets to eat today and less about the third-quarter profit report. 

The plural is telling, too: Jesus doesn't teach me to ask, "Give ME MY daily bread," as if I should only look out for my own interests and get my own order placed.  Similarly, Jesus doesn't invite us to pray, "Forgive ME for MY sins, which are entirely separable from whatever you choose to do or not to about my neighbor's sins." Instead, Jesus binds our forgiveness all together--we are asking for God to forgive the whole mess of us, and for God to make us into people who forgive those indebted to us as well.  We pray in the plural for manna and mercy, for daily bread and daily grace, because that is how God treats all of us in this beloved community.  That is the order of the day in the Reign of God and the Economy of Mercy.

Now, conversely, it is worthy of note that Jesus envisions none of the typical "stuff" we associate with kings and kingdoms coming.  Remember that Jesus lives in a time when people had heard the announcements of "coming kingdoms" before--it was the warning of the invading Roman Empire, which brought the claim of Caesar's rule along with occupying troops marching in formation, Roman taxation and torture, and the claim that the Empire could round up anybody it saw as a threat on trumped-up charges and make them disappear--or appear on a cross--without any means of stopping them.  In Jesus' day, people heard imperial heralds announce the coming of the latest Caesar's latest executive order, and it was always backed up with the threat of force and the point of a sword.  Jesus, however, doesn't picture any of that. He doesn't envision that God's kingdom means my "party" comes to power, or my preferred nominee for king, Caesar, or emperor gets to be on the throne.  He doesn't picture a wave of armed zealots "taking back their country for God" or killing their occupiers in revenge.  God's Reign does not advance by killing enemies or spilling blood, and God's kingdom never requires starving those you see as your adversaries.  Instead, we are brought back to daily bread (a day at a time, mind you) and a letting go of grudges all around.

If that wasn't what I intended to pray for when I woke up this morning, Jesus has it in mind to change us.  The rest of the world may continue to pray in self-absorbed or vengeful ways--and God is free to hear those prayers and say "No" to them, because of course, God is nobody's genie.  But for us who claim to be Jesus' disciples, we should be prepared for Jesus' way of praying to change our wants to align with these: for all to be fed, and for all to be freed with forgiveness.  And as God answers that prayer--both by feeding us and by teaching us to want all to be fed--we might indeed discover that the world comes to look more and more like it is the kingdom coming.  We might even dare to say that God's will is being done then, "on earth as it is in heaven."

What might happen to our hearts if we took seriously what we have been asking all along as we have been praying for daily bread and abundant forgiveness?

Let's see what Jesus does with us to as we ask it.

O God, give us today our daily bread, and forgive us such that we forgive everyone in our debt as well.

Lessons in Surrender--July 28, 2025

Lessons in Surrender--July 28, 2025

Jesus was praying in a certain place, and after he had finished, one of his disciples said to him, “Lord, teach us to pray, as John taught his disciples.” So he said to them, “When you pray, say:

 Father, may your name be revered as holy.

  May your kingdom come.... (Luke 11:1-2)

I have a sneaking suspicion that we've been largely missing the point when it comes to prayer.  Maybe not completely, maybe not all of us, and may be not all the time, but enough that "Christian" publishers have marketed plenty of books about how to pray that all boil down to techniques for getting God to give you what you ask for, when maybe Jesus has been trying to teach us how to change what we desire to align with God.

This, I think, is the colossal mistake we have fallen for by and large in popular religion, especially here in our country's culture of one-click ordering and drive-through convenience.  We have convinced ourselves that learning to pray is about how we get our wish-lists fulfilled by God more effectively, when Jesus has instead been trying to instruct us in how to align our wants to match up with God's priorities.  We keep looking for experts to teach us strategies for persuasion, and Jesus is only offering lessons in surrender.  

This passage from Luke's Gospel, which many of us heard this Sunday in worship, is a case in point.  Some of Jesus' disciples have been watching and listening to him pray, and one finally works up the nerve to ask Rabbi Jesus to teach them to pray, much as they had heard that John the Baptizer had his own perspective on prayer.  What follows are words that many of us were taught to memorize and call "the Lord's Prayer," and over the centuries, we have often treated these words as a sort of quasi-magical talisman or spell--recite these words, and you're "doing it right," we say.  We take Jesus' response as a formula, a recipe, or a script.  And so, it is not surprising that over the centuries, some Christians have come to believe that if they repeat the Lord's Prayer so many times, it will take on special significance or become effective.  Or others come to believe they haven't "properly" worshipped God or adequately prayed enough for it to "count." Or still others think that if only we could force teachers in public schools to recite these words or post them on their classroom walls, then we would be adequately pious enough as a society and God would show divine favor on us against all our adversaries.  If all of that isn't pop religion's take on prayer, I'll eat my hat.

But of course, that is not only a sloppy form of magical thinking dressed up as piety, it is also completely backwards as far as how Jesus really intends us to hear his words.  Jesus isn't offering us a rote formula or script to recite when we pray, and neither is he interested in how we can "persuade" God to give us what we want, as though prayers are like dollar bills inserted into a celestial vending machine and Jesus is here to help us get the wrinkles out of them so the scanner will accept them.  Jesus doesn't see prayer as a means of demanding things from God as though we are customers (who, in a consumer culture, have been told they "are always right"), but rather as a means of learning to want what God wants, to seek what God seeks, and to long for God's ordering of the world rather than our own.  Or better yet, it is about allowing God to shape our desires until God's dream for the world becomes our own dream for the world.

Jesus doesn't start from the presumption that your and my personal want lists are already aligned with God's vision--so Jesus doesn't start with any techniques for pleading, persuading, or cajoling God to give us things.  We don't get any form of the kinds of strategies that deal-makers and schemers use--no "If you give me what I want, Lord, I'll make it worth your while," no attempts at divine flattery heaping up grandiloquent-sounding flourishes, "O Divine Majesty, thou who art all-powerful and all-knowing..."  and none of the standard pious praise-band cliches, like, "Lord, we just want to come and praise your name, and we just want to love on you, Lord, and, Lord, we just want to lift you up high..." Jesus doesn't offer us a style of speech, a form of address, or a set of techniques to get God to listen.  After all, Jesus starts from the presumption that God already knows what we need before we speak it, better than we ourselves know what we truly need.  So if we come to Jesus looking for guidance on "how to pray," we should be clear that he is not going to respond with a set of helpful hints for getting God on board with our agendas.  Jesus instead sets us up for having our agendas reoriented to point in the direction of God's reign.

That's why Jesus begins his model (not a recipe, but an example, mind you) with the reminder that we are children coming to a Parent rather than customers placing an order (or for that matter, employees speaking to a Celestial Boss or negotiators putting together a trade deal).  The same way a parent already truly knows what the children need, even when what the children think they need is more toys, more junk food, or designer clothes, God knows what we really need even if that's quite different from what we thought we wanted.  By teaching us to address God like a good parent, Jesus invites us simultaneously to trust that God knows what we need, and also that ultimately God is in charge rather than us.  Like a good parent, God is generous and provides for us beyond our earning, achieving, or buying--and yet at the same time, God is not like a vending machine or a genie who is obligated to give us what we ask for because we put our dollar in or rubbed the lamp.  Praying for God's name to be holy acknowledges all the ways we cheapen it by using it to puff ourselves up and put others down, using our piety as a pretense.  And Jesus simply calls us away from that bad habit.

The second thing that Jesus teaches us to seek in this passage is for God's Reign to come to fullness, which automatically dethrones our impulses, agendas, and programs.  Jesus offers no secret formula for getting divine backing for your political party, your candidate, your church group, or your platform to come into power.  Jesus reminds us that God's Reign cannot be reducible to ever aligning with any candidate, party, or policy list, and that also means Jesus is never interested in anything that looks like "taking back your country for God." Every country, people group, territory, and town is already within God's jurisdiction anyway. God is just not interested in using partisan politics to enforce a particular platform on everybody by coercion.  The prayer Jesus gives us asks that God shape our hearts and our lives so that God's Reign directs us, rather than us trying to make ourselves rulers of our lives and our world.  But it's not a plea for God to give us more power to dominate anybody else. To let Jesus' way of praying shape us is to invite God to pry our fingers off of the tight grip we have been exerting on our own lives, so that instead we can surrender to God's priorities--which turn out to be all about things like bread for the day and forgiveness to begin again, all around.  In other words, as Jesus teaches us to surrender to God's will, it's not going to mean that we suffer or starve--it is about stepping into God's ordering of things where everybody gets to eat, and everybody's debts get cancelled.  That, Jesus will insist, is how God runs the universe. That's what God's kingdom looks like.

For now, though, the central thing for us to get in our heads is that prayer is not about us placing orders to God, but rather God shaping our hearts, minds, desires, and thoughts in light of God's character.  We remain disciples when we pray--seeking for Jesus to direct us to what we really need and to see the world through his eyes, not trying to tame God to serve our purposes.

Taking that seriously will change not just how we pray but how we see everything else.  So let's go--let's step out into the world with new eyes, shaped by surrender to the vision of Jesus.  Let's see how things look different now.

Father, let your name be holy, and let your reign come among us.

The Goal of Maturity--July 25, 2025

The Goal of Maturity--July 25, 2025

"It is Christ whom we proclaim, admonishing everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, so that we may present everyone mature in Christ. For this I toil and struggle with all the energy that he powerfully inspires within me." (Colossians 1:28-29)

Time to lay some cards on the table: God has an agenda.

Not only that, but God's agenda may or may not be what we (even we Respectable Religious folks) thought it was, and God doesn't need to get my permission before enacting that agenda in the world. And while we're being completely honest here (the truth matters, after all), in the end it's God's agenda that matters more than mine. Ultimately God's agenda turns out to be the most deeply, genuinely good for all of us, beyond my narrow self-interested perspective, too--but even before I can come to recognize that, God's agenda is more definitive than my own.

And here is God's agenda, according to the letter to the Colossians--God has it in mind to make all of us more fully like Christ. Myself included, and also everybody else. The goal--the whole point of our lives, of our religion, of two thousand-odd years of Christianity, but also of all of human history and indeed of all the universe, is that we would be made more fully like Christ. Christ is the goal, the meaning, the purpose, of our being. And that also means that the more fully we become like Christ, the more fully we will truly be alive.

Now, let me offer a word of clarification here. When I say, following Colossians' lead here, that the goal is to become more fully like Christ, or "mature in Christ," as these verses put it, it doesn't mean becoming carbon-copies of Jesus of Nazareth. No beard and sandals are required. No prerequisite knowledge of Aramaic, and no requirement of a Y chromosome or biological ancestry in the family of Abraham. Becoming mature in Christ isn't about copying the stories from the Gospels, or trying to get back to some hypothetical first-century way of living in the name of saying, "This is how Jesus would have done it." And similarly, becoming "like Christ" isn't necessarily the same as "my mental picture of Jesus," since we have a way of sometimes making Jesus look like a Scandinavian catalog model with a beauty pageant sash, or sometimes wrongly imagine him as a musclebound Rambo type toting automatic weapons in order to "take back the country for God," or we picture him endorsing whatever teams, parties, or agendas we already like. (As Anne Lamott put it so well once, "You can safely assume you have created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.") 

Becoming "mature in Christ" isn't about copying the caricature of Jesus we have constructed in our minds.  Instead, it's about walking the way of Jesus--the way of life, the way of seeing, the way of acting, the way of loving, that reflects the character of Christ. That's the goal--both for me, and for everybody else I will ever meet. God is forming us into love... for love... through love.  Jesus himself told his disciples that the way the world would know we were following him, as opposed to some other rabbi, guru, teacher, emperor, or king, is that we would love like him.

And while I believe that is deeply good news, I want us to be clear that it's not always how Christians talk or think. Sometimes we turn the Gospel into a sales-pitch for heavenly real-estate, and that the sole goal of the Christian faith is to answer, "How can I reserve a spot in the afterlife for myself?" Sometimes we allow shallow (and shady) hucksters to turn the Christians message into a scheme to get rich, as though the point of believing in Jesus is so he'll bless you with a better car, a bigger house, and better quarterly profits on your portfolio. And sometimes we just let the name of Christ get hijacked by political hacks who seem to have very little interest in being like Christ but instead want to get folks riled up to support their policies on the capital-gains tax, deregulating their preferred industries, or turning decent neighbors around us into scapegoats. Anytime we fall for those, we are falling for less than God has in mind to make of us. God has it in mind, not just transport us to heaven while we remain selfish jerks, nor to make our bigger houses more full of stuff while our souls shrivel and get emptier and more hollowed out. God has it in mind to make us like Christ--in other words, to change the kind of people we are, to become more fully formed in love.

So while it is absolutely true that God loves me even in my selfish, childish, petty "Me-and-My-Group-First" mentality (wherever it still lurks in my soul), God is also not satisfied to leave me as that way, as a self-absorbed jerk. And while God's love accepts me even for all the ways I am still entangled in old patterns of greed, of childish egotism, of prejudice, of bitterness, and of just plain meanness, God knows that we are all made for undiluted love. After all, God is the One who made us that way!

So part of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus is to surrender our whole selves and let God reshape us wholly. And wherever there are places in me that run counter to Christ's own perfect love, I need to be prepared to have God take the power sander to my soul to remove my roughest, most jagged edges. Where I am bent inward on myself, I should be prepared for God to take the tools to me again and put me on the anvil, so to speak, until I am made true and square again. Where I am resentful inside and nursing old grudges because I am afraid of letting them go, I will need to get ready for God to help me to unclench those charley-horses of the soul to let go. Where I am too fearful and cowardly to act or speak in love, I'll need to start preparing for God to fashion courage in me. And where I am still captive to hatred and the need to intimidate others or rattle my saber at them, God is going to be disarming me--to teach us all "to lay down our arms so we can reach out our arms to one another," to borrow the phrasing from Amanda Gorman's well-known poem, "The Hill We Climb." All of this is to say that God is forming me--and you, and all of us--to become more fully like Christ, because that has been God's goal, God's agenda, all along.

Today is a day then to let that happen--and maybe to ask in every situation, "How could God use this moment to shape me and grow me into more Christ-like maturity?" Maybe then instead of just feeding the meanness and bitterness that seems to be rotting the edges of our souls like gangrene, and instead of seeing everything in a day as a battle to be won or a fight that has to be picked, we will see God forming love... and decency... and truthfulness... and grace... and selflessness... and kindness in each of us. In other words, maybe we'll see, as God sees with perfect clarity, that our deepest need is not to be richer or have more political power or make things "like they used to be in the good old days," but rather for us to be more fully like Christ.

Today, let's allow that every moment, every conversation, and every choice, is an opportunity to be made more like the One who loved us all the way to a cross. And maybe becoming like him has been God's design all along.

Lord God, make of us what you will--make us to be more fully like Christ.

Spotting the Mystery--July 24, 2025

Spotting the Mystery--July 24, 2025

"I became [the church's] servant according to God's commission that was given to me for you, to make the word of God fully known, the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has not been revealed to his saints, to whom God chose to make known how great among the Gentiles are the riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory." (Colossians 1:25-27)

One of my favorite jobs as a parent over the years has been getting to speak the sentence, "Hey, do you want to see something cool?" to my kids.  This is one of the lesser-known, under-advertised perks of raising small humans: you get to call their attention to things in the world around them that will amaze them, delight them, surprise them, and boggle their minds.  When my kids were little, it might have been running in the front door after a pop-up shower and saying, "Quick! Come outside--there's a double rainbow and you can catch it if you hurry!" and then staring up at the sky with them to see the colors ebbing and flowing in brightness.  Or when we found a praying mantis stalking some lunch in our back yard, I got to say it again: "Do you want to see something cool?"  These days with a teen and a tween, my best hope for catching their interest is a funny meme or a cool internet video, but it's the same question I get to ask: "Do you want to see something cool?"  And on the days they take me up on the offer, it's one of the best parts of the day.

I know we don't often think of it this way in church life, but I truly think that a large part of being a disciple of Jesus is being on both ends of that conversation.  We learn the faith from others who hold out something wonderful for us to notice--they tell us a story from the Scriptures that reveals a depth of God's love we never dared to imagine before, or they invite us to share in some moment of serving that becomes a memory of a lifetime, or we are welcomed into the sacred space of a hospital waiting room, a milestone of joy in their lives, or an ordinary conversation over coffee. And then as we grow in faith, we also get to be the ones who point out those amazing stories, the God-moments, the miracles in disguise, and the extraordinary sightings of Christ in ordinary places, so that others can spot them, too.  We grow up in the faith having others invite us, "Do you want to see something cool?" and we grow into the role of saying it to others and inviting them into the wonder, joy, and awe of grace.  Maybe all we ever do is see glimpses of God's goodness and love (in the Scriptures, in our daily lives, in the world around us) and then hold them up for others to see as well.   Maybe that really is what it means to be disciples--learning how to see the face of Christ where someone else has helped us learn to see him, and then helping others to see the face of Christ in all the unexpected places he shows up, as well.

For the apostle writing in the letter to the Colossians in these words many of us heard this past Sunday, the shorthand for that is "making known the mystery of Christ." That phrasing might seem odd to us, because we are used to hearing the word "mystery" like a puzzle to be solved, a riddle to be answered, or a whodunnit to be reasoned out like a detective sifting out the red herrings from the real evidence.  But in the New Testament's usage, the word "mystery" is not a game of Clue! awaiting the big reveal, "It was Professor Plum in the Drawing Room with the candlestick!" Rather, the Scriptures speak of mystery as the deep truth of God woven throughout all of creation that we might have overlooked before but now we can't miss once it's been pointed out.  It's like an open secret--it's not that God is hiding anything from us, but that we haven't paid attention to what was right before eyes, waiting to be recognized as it sat in plain sight.  Or, as a professor of mine used to say in college, "In the biblical sense, a mystery is something true that you would never have figured out on your own unless someone had shown it or told it to you."  It's the rainbow outside you would have missed because you were sitting inside watching TV. It's the mantis perched among the lavender plants, the sundog in the western sky, or the unexpected appearance of the Northern Lights above your back yard. Nobody was keeping any of those things secret, but they are easily missable unless someone calls your attention to them.  And yet once they do point these wonders out to you, you realize they were there waiting to be seen before you opened your eyes or looked in the right place.

And from the perspective of Colossians, there is really only one Mystery--it is the presence of God who chooses to be revealed in the ordinary earthiness of our existence, coming to be in relationship with us.  It is the face of the Divine in the welcome of the stranger.  It is the way the Lord of heaven and earth can yet be nearer to us than our own thoughts, our own breath, our own awareness. It is the way Love binds together all the fabric of creation, and how that Love wears nail scars from a particular point in time and space.  The Mystery is Christ; all we ever do is let ourselves be gobsmacked when someone points Christ out to us, and then learn to help others recognize that same Christ right under their noses so that they are moved to speechless joy as well. Our place in the grand scheme of things is allowing others help us see the Mystery and then helping new faces to see the Mystery as well in turn.  The question keeps coming back, first in our ears and then on our lips: "Do you want to see something cool?"

In one of his more thought-provoking books (and there are a good many of them), this one entitled, The Mystery of Christ... and why we don't get it, the late Robert Farrar Capon took a stab at opening our eyes. He points out that the "mystery of Christ" isn't just a finite set of Bible stories with Jesus as a main character, but something fundamental about how God constantly chooses to be present to us and all creation, and how God's unrelenting, unconditional, unabashed love for all the universe (including us stinkers) permeates not just every page of the Bible but every particle of existence.  The Mystery itself is the realization that God has always shown up in the ordinary, the earthy, the stranger, the outcast, the messiness of human life, and the commonness of creation.  We tend not to notice that presence because we have been taught to look for God only in respectable places--like Bible stories, church steeples, and people with a sufficient number of merit badges. The divine comedy is really that God has been present in every tuft of dandelion seed, every sketchy bar full of sinners, every stranger seeking refuge, every jellyfish, toadstool, and enemy, and God's presence in all of it is God's utter Yes of grace to the whole nine yards.  That Yes has been God's Word over all creation from even before "Let there be light" escaped the divine lips, and we Christians dare to believe that the same Word, the "Yes" of God, was embodied just as truly in the flesh of a homeless Jewish rabbi from the backwater of the first-century empire.  That's why we mean by Mystery.

You'd never have guessed it in a million years just with your own senses and smarts--the news sounds too preposterously good to be true.  But once someone points out to you the existence of this scandalous, prodigal love on every page of the Scriptures and in every corner of creation, you can't unsee it ever again.  You're in on the open secret. You've seen the double rainbow.  All you can do now is to run back into the darkened house and tell everybody inside to come out and see something cool.

That's the job for us disciples.  No more, and no less.

Who will you tell today?

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to behold the Mystery of your presence everywhere and for everyone, and then give us the courage to point out your presence for others who are waiting to see.

What We Signed Up For--July 23, 2025

What We Signed Up For--July 23, 2025

"I am now rejoicing in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am completing what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the church." (Colossians 1:24)

I can remember as a kid going to the amusement park like it was an annual pilgrimage. I grew up just about an hour away from Cedar Point, so I was riding roller coasters, bumper cars, and spinning rides from an early age.  And in particular, I find myself thinking today about the warnings they would post at the start of the line for the water rides--the log flume, the giant water slides, and the ones with names like "Snake River Falls," "Whitewater Rapids," or "Thunder Canyon." There was always a sign with big clear letters that read, "You will get wet on this ride."

Some part of me always thought it was humorous that they felt the need to make such a disclaimer (I'm sure some legal expert probably warned them that they needed to be clear). After all, with a name like "Whitewater" conjuring up the churning spray of a waterfall, or the suggestion that the torrents of water roared like "thunder," you would think it should be obvious that you could get wet.  If that weren't enough, you could easily see the riders disembarking from their rafts and see that they were soaking wet--you would presume, wouldn't you, that this same outcome was in your future if you got in line?  And of course, if you are a water-ride kind of person, that's the whole point.  You want the thrill of riding the current, of brushing with the cascades of a waterfall, of the big plunge as you go down the chute into a deluge at the bottom.  That's what the whole ride is about, and if the name didn't tell you, then watching the people ahead of you should certainly tip you off. Go on a water ride at an amusement part, and you will get wet.  That's what you signed up for.

I mention this because quite frequently the New Testament has to remind us that the Christian life is much the same.  We haven't signed up for an amusing pleasure cruise, but rather we have been called to follow in Jesus' footsteps--to walk the way of Jesus, to love the ways Jesus loves, to go to the kinds of places and among the kinds of people that Jesus surrounds himself with, and to bear suffering the way Jesus does, too.  Passages like today's verse from Colossians (which you may well have heard in worship this past Sunday) are rather like the sign at the entrance of the water ride insisting, "YOU WILL GET WET ON THIS RIDE."  They are reminder that the Christian life is, by definition, a life patterned on Christ, and Christ Jesus very much chose the path of self-giving love that often involved enduring suffering for the sake of others.  This should not be a surprise to us, any more than it would be a surprise to get wet on a water slide, or to have a waterfall soak your clothes on a ride that has "Waterfall" in the name.  At the very least, we can see from both Jesus himself and from the life of Paul the apostle (who was in line ahead of us for this ride, in a manner of speaking), that being disciples of Jesus will mean sharing in the sufferings of Jesus.  That is not an off-chance possibility, but a defining feature of the Christian life... because of Christ himself.

Of course, quite often Respectable Religious Folks are not interested in that part of the arrangement.  It's very tempting to try and repackage Christianity as some kind of means of avoiding suffering, or as though following Jesus was your ticket out of the sorrows and struggles of the world.  Just in the last week, I caught the pronouncements of another high-profile religious spokesperson declaring that those who had prayed fervently enough (and written checks big enough to this person's ministry) would have their fears of financial hardship, family stress, and career worries all "cancelled," as though their membership in the VIP Gold Level of the Jesus Club brought the perks of getting out of the day to day struggles of life. The implied message was that Christianity is a means for getting out of suffering and avoiding heartache, rather than one of deliberately sharing the sufferings of others and bearing the pains and heartaches of speaking love to a world full of mean.

There's the same wrongheaded impulse to see Jesus as our ticket out of suffering rather than our leader pioneering the way through it ahead of us in the misguided theology of the "rapture," which was invented a couple of centuries ago and offered the appealing idea that when Jesus returned he would whisk off the true believers up to heaven before the world went through tribulation and turmoil so that they would not have to go through it.  It's the same sales pitch in every televangelist who has offered prosperity and wealth as God's rewards for your faith (and faithful giving... to their televised ministries).  And it's there in every Respectable Religious Leader who talks about wanting to see Christians put in charge of every area of government or political leadership as a means of preventing them from being "persecuted," when history has shown us how terribly things go when people who name the name of Jesus get tangled up in empires. All of those are variations on the same misunderstanding--that there is some way to ride this waterfall without getting wet, so to speak.  But if Jesus' own words ("If any want to follow me, let them take up their cross...") were not clear, the witness of the apostle Paul should remove any illusions.

When the apostle says to the Christians in Colossae that he is "completing what is lacking in Christ's afflictions," I don't think the idea is that somehow Jesus' death on the cross wasn't "enough" to redeem the world, or that there needs to be periodic recharging or renewal of the ol' salvation bank account with a certain amount of suffering from us.  And it's not to say that Jesus' own suffering was somehow insufficient, partial, or ineffective.  Rather, I think it's Paul saying, "I am a disciple of Jesus, and that means suffering love is a part of my calling, not necessarily on a cross outside of Jerusalem, but in the ways I spend my life for the sake of others." Paul, of course, did end up regularly getting himself into good trouble for the sake of Jesus and his good news--he was often run out of town by lynch-mobs, stoned by Respectable Religious Leaders, ridiculed by the intellectual crowd, and arrested for disturbing the peace.  And it is also highly likely that he was eventually executed by the Empire on charges along the lines of treason (Caesar never likes to hear that somebody else is Lord, you know).  But even apart from the official threats on his life, Paul spent his energy, time, and resources on helping other people--collecting food for the folks in Jerusalem living through a famine, training leaders for new congregations, teaching and telling anyone who would listen about Jesus, and making sure that outsiders were truly welcomed into the church.  All of that flowed naturally and logically for Paul from his belonging to Jesus: because Jesus' way of life was one of self-giving and suffering love, of course Paul would follow that same course himself.  That's how it works--this is a water slide, so you will get wet on this ride.

So when Paul would find himself before yet another imperial official's whip, or staring down an angry mob, or risking his life on a voyage at sea to transport the funds that would help Judean Christians buy bread, he saw it as his part of the wider way of Jesus--a sharing in the same kind of self-giving love and enduring of suffering that he first learned from Jesus.  You don't get the sense that Paul regretted it or looked for a loophole to weasel out of those hardships; he just understood that they were a part of what it meant to follow Jesus, because Jesus' own mission centered on self-giving love, too.

Today, then, we shouldn't be surprised if the path of discipleship leads us to live, act, speak, and yes even suffer in ways that look like Jesus.  If we have signed on to the Christian faith as a way of avoiding suffering or securing the easy life for ourselves, then we have fallen for a bit of false advertising--that is now how the Jesus way of life works.  But if we are seeking to be disciples of Jesus, who follow in his footsteps, then we will be ready to spend our lives giving ourselves away even in the face of suffering, because that is the way Jesus has gone ahead of us.  When it happens, we won't throw ourselves pity parties--we'll see that it is a sign we are on the right path.  For us, the cross is the sign at the start of the line reminding us what we are taking up if we follow Jesus... and a reminder of the resurrection hope that waits on the other side of that cross, too.

Lord Jesus, give us the strength, grace, and courage to give ourselves away in suffering love as you have first done for us.

For When You Are Talking to Trees--July 22, 2025

For When You Are Talking to Trees--July 22, 2025

"...provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith, without shifting from the hope promised by the gospel that you heard, which has been proclaimed to every creature under heaven." (Colossians 1:23)

When I try to tell my dog that she can have a treat if she just stays put, she is not a good listener. She can often tell when something special is going to be put in her dish, and if I tell her to "sit," she will eventually sit down on her hind legs for a moment, but the instant I get any closer to the dish, she springs back up, gets in my way, and actually makes it harder for me to put the treat in her bowl.  Similarly, if she comes nosing up around my legs when I am sitting down in my chair in the evening, I will offer to scratch behind her ears or pet her back, but sometimes she is just so squirrelly that she moves out of the reach of my arm. And once again, the good thing is offered, but she misses out, because she has moved out of the spot where she could receive it.

The trees in my back yard, however, are different.  This seems obvious to say, of course, but let's unpack the difference.  My dog can move out of the "right place," whether by their excitement, or the jumpiness, or their sheer impatience.  A tree, however, stays put.  That is part of its essential tree-ness: trees stay rooted.  And big tall trees, like the substantial arbor vitae and the pines in my back yard, those are trees that have clearly already found a good spot to grow in, with soil that provides them stability and nutrition, and a spot with an open enough sky to get sun and rain, too. Trees like that are already precisely where they should be, and they are already literally tethered to the spot that feeds them, supports them, and allows them to grow.

So while you are unlikely to need to have this conversation with the oaks and maples in your yard, if you did ever find yourself talking to the trees, really all you would ever need to say in terms of advice is simply, "Stay rooted in the good soil where you are, and just let yourself thrive from the good gifts you receive here."  A tree doesn't have to be told to go somewhere else; once it's rooted and established in good soil, all it needs to do is to stay put where it is and allow the rain, soil, and sun to let it flourish.

Now, I mention this because these words from Colossians, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, might sound like they are giving orders to an antsy dog, but they are really talking to trees.  The apostle has been talking about how God has reconciled us through Jesus' death and resurrection and made us into new, holy creations, and now the sentence continues in today's verse, which begins, "provided that you continue securely established and steadfast in the faith...."  And at first blush, it could sound like the writer is talking to my very jumpy dog, along the lines of, "You can have these special treats as long as you sit in the right place.  Stay--stay--STAY!" And of course, if my dog is any indicator, sometimes the wagging tail sits still, and sometimes it bounces all around and gets in the way.  It could sound like Paul is saying, "God would be happy to give you some very nice salvation here, but you are just so squirmy and unwilling to stay still that I don't know if you'll get it after all." In other words, we might hear this verse like it's a catch, a bit of fine print, or a condition, so that God only gives good gifts to the ones who have proved they deserve a treat by sitting in the right place.

But really, the image here is a lot more like talking to trees:  the apostle talks about staying "grounded" (that's a better translation than "established," I think) and settled, like a tree planted in good soil with deep roots.  In other words, the letter to the Colossians isn't telling us that there is a prize waiting if we can find the right spot to sit still in--rather, it's saying, "You are already rooted in the firm foundation of the Gospel and the bedrock of Jesus Christ himself.  Just stay rooted where you are and let Christ give you the things you need right there to thrive!"  We don't have to be nervous little dogs wondering if we'll earn a treat for finding the right tile square on the kitchen floor to sit down in. Rather, we are evergreen trees planted by God, rooted in Christ, and nourished by the Spirit.  Our growth as disciples isn't so much our achievement for being sufficiently devout or dedicated--it is a gift of grace.  

That reframes the whole Christian life, if you think about it.  For all of our talk about the challenge of discipleship and the ways that Jesus leads us beyond our comfort zones (which is all well and good), the New Testament doesn't tell us that the life of discipleship is our accomplishment, but rather a gift God grows in us.  Paul doesn't say, "You all had better show sufficient improvement at obedience, or else God will start withholding grace!" He doesn't say, "God's forgiveness is only available if you don't get in the way when God is trying to give it to you!"  And God definitely doesn't wait to love us until after we have stopped yipping with excitement.  Rather, God has already planted us in a good place--we are rooted in Christ, after all.  It doesn't fall to us to go searching for the right spot to stand in; we are invited, rather, to bloom where we are planted, so to speak.  We are called to let God's good gifts have their rightful effect in us, so that we take in more and more of Christ-likeness much like white carnations will turn colors if you give them dyed water.  

The goal of the Christian life is indeed that we become more and more fully like Christ--so that we love, speak, serve, act, care, and pray in ways that look like Jesus.  But that isn't laid on us as a Do-It-Yourself project.  It is brought forth from us like watching a maple spring up from a whirlybird to a seedling to a sapling to a full-grown tree.  Being disciples of Jesus will change us--of that, there is no doubt. But God isn't holding back our spiritual nourishment like dog treats contingent on our being able to follow a command or sit still for long enough.  At least in one sense, we are less like puppies and more like poplars.

Today, then, pay attention to where you are already rooted in Christ, and let the living God feed, nourish, challenge, stretch, and develop your maturity through those connections.  Those people whom God has placed in your life whose insights feed your soul, whose questions stretch your faith, whose example challenges you to go beyond your comfort zones, and whose love gives you support--let those people continue to pour into you.  The opportunities you have to serve other people, to speak up for others like Jesus does, to welcome people beyond your usual social circles and share your table with them (also like Jesus does), and to learn from other disciples--don't pass those by or ignore them.  In other words, with whatever resources God has placed in your life to develop your discipleship, let them be your sun, rain, and soil.

Today, rather than nervously worrying if we have done enough, maybe today is a day to put roots down deep where they will be fed, and to trust that God knows how to call forth a tree from a seed.

Lord God, nurture us where you have rooted us, and bring us to maturity and the fullness of Christ's character in us.

Shaped by a Different Story--July 21, 2025

Shaped by a Different Story--July 21, 2025

"And you who were once estranged and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, he has now reconciled in his fleshly body through death, so as to present you holy and blameless and irreproachable before him..." (Colossians 1:21-22)

You know how Batman saves the day? Typically, by punching someone.

Superman--you know what his go-to move is? A blast from the ol' Kryptonian heat-vision.

The rest of the whole comic book pantheon is a variation on the same theme: Iron Man will blast you with repulsor rays or missiles out of his shoulders, Thor will whack you with this hammer, and Hulk will, well... Hulk smash.

For that matter, we know how the plot of the western goes, too: the white-hatted hero wins the day by being faster on the trigger and shooting the train robbers, the dangerous cattle wranglers, or the supposedly savage Indians.

We know how these scripts go, because they've been fed to us since childhood. (Perhaps we never stopped to ask if the thinking in them was also hopelessly child-ish, as well....) We know how the story goes, whether it's a superhero comic, an action flick, or a classic western: the hero saves the day by destroying something or someone else. The fact that it seems so obvious to us is evidence of how pervasively that myth has seeped into our ways of thinking. We almost can't imagine how a story could go differently, right? What's Superman supposed to do... NOT punch Lex Luthor? What--are we supposed to imagine that there could be peace in a frontier town without a sharp-shootin' sheriff and his posse keepin' the banditos and desperados off the streets?

I suppose it depends on whom you ask. The world's storytellers seem hung up on retelling that same plotline, over and over again, and it goes on redundantly and unchangingly, forever like this: Good guys punch/shoot/kill bad guys, who are hopelessly irredeemable, and the lesson is that any problem can be solved with enough firepower to keep the undesirables away.

But come, aren't we tired of that story? Haven't we seen that movie a million times and read the comic a million more? And haven't we noticed yet that it never really fixes things? (Or, as a compellingly deranged Heath Ledger's Joker says to a very angry Batman in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight, "You have nothing! Nothing to threaten me with! Nothing to do with all your strength!" revealing that indeed, Batman can't punch his way out of every situation.)

Here's the thing: the Gospel tells a different story. A very different story. Like radically different. The Gospel's story is just as dramatic as any comic book superhero movie, just as compelling as any western saga, but the plot--the story of salvation--works differently. In Jesus, in fact, God turns the whole logic of salvation-by-violence inside out. The hero we meet in the New Testament saves the day not by killing his enemies or vanquishing those who are hostile to him, but by dying at their hands and transforming them in love through his death. Jesus at last offers us a new story, beyond the same tired old tropes we've seen before.  And to be a disciple of Jesus is to let ourselves be shaped by a different story--the Gospel.

The letter to the Colossians makes it clear as well, especially in these verses that many of us heard in worship this Sunday. God's way of redeeming and reigning are not, in the end, to smash and destroy, but to bear our destructive ways and to endure our seemingly innate determination to smash whatever good things come across our path--even the body of the Son of God. And notice here, that as the letter to the Colossians sees it, God doesn't wait for us to be "on God's side" to redeem--no, in fact, it's while we are estranged and hostile toward God, that God takes on death and reconciles with us. The letter to the Ephesians, which feels much like a twin sibling of Colossians in many ways, says in similar terms that we were dead in sins and brought back to life by Christ's cross. Or as Paul says to the Romans, it was when we were God's "enemies," being "ungodly" and "sinners," that Christ died for us. In other words, God's way of saving is decidedly NOT to find the ones labeled "enemies" and to destroy them, but rather to absorb our violence into God's own self at the cross, like falling on a live grenade to absorb the blast rather than to let it kill someone else.  Being Jesus' disciples will mean learning to take that story as more definitive for our lives than all the superheroes, action movies, and westerns we've seen combined.

If that sounds preposterous, if our gut reaction is that the "real world" just doesn't work that way, then maybe it is a testament to just how completely we have accepted the story presented to us over and over again in the wider culture around us--the one that says the hero wins by punching or shooting, and that says good guys pummel bad guys into submission to win the day. The New Testament says that ain't so. God's way of saving the day... and the world... and us!... is to be killed by the "enemy" and thereby to defuse the enemy's power. Absorbing death, God breaks death's power. Bearing our violence, God saps violence of its fearful strength. And he sets us free from having to play by those rules anymore--God in fact makes us, by the cross, "holy and blameless and irreproachable."

Because that story is so different from the one we've all been fed all our lives, the one we have internalized over and over and over again, we need to keep hearing it and seeing just how frequently it comes up in the Scriptures themselves. Ultimately it changes our whole understanding of who and what God is if we dare to believe, as the New Testament certainly says, that God is most clearly revealed as the One who dies on a cross at the hands of a riled-up lynch mob and with empire's smiling approval, rather than as some angry bearded fellow who comes to earth locked and loaded.

We need to be clear about this, too, because our understanding of who God is affects who we are as well. And all too often, people who name the name of Jesus get confused and just take the villain-punching, white-hat-wearing John Wayne type of the movies and we slap the word "God" on it, assuming that God must operate the same way that the heroes of the movies and comics do. And we end up assuming, too, then, that Jesus needs us to be a part of his posse, like it's our job to "take back" whatever we think needs taking back--all "in the name of Jesus," of course. You know how those voices sound: "Who says that violence isn't the answer? Don't we need to recover that old sense of being 'tough'--you know, to make God look strong, too? Don't the righteous have to fight?" And of course, in reply to all of that, the New Testament itself pretty clearly says, "Are you kidding me?"

If we are going to be people who say that the Bible is important to us, then we are going to actually have to listen to what its voices say, rather than assuming God wants our help smashing things and intimidating our enemies as we wave our weapons in the air. God does not want that help. In fact, that is the very thing God absorbs from us in order to free us from the terrible and deathly logic of that tired old story.

Maybe we've been fed the old myth that you can save the world by threatening your enemies enough so many times that we don't realize how it has ensnared and enslaved us. Maybe we have forgotten that as the Gospel tells it, WE are the enemies and we have been loved into redemption by a God who absorbs all of our violence, hatred, and animosity, but does not want us to use those in supposedly "holy" or "righteous" pursuits for God's sake. God doesn't need our assistance on some battlefield. No, like the old saying goes, you defend God like you defend a lion--you get out of its way.

So since these just happen to be the verses that many of us heard as our Second Lesson for this past Sunday in the Revised Common Lectionary, let's let them sink in today. God's way of redeeming and reigning over all the universe is from a cross. And if we really believe that is who God is, all the way down so to speak, then it will affect the way we interact with others today--even others we don't know, don't like, or don't agree with. Maybe we can learn the lesson that there are some things you can't heal with more punching--in fact, there are really very very few.

And maybe we can leave the old childish stories with the discarded things of childhood and decide that today is the day for us to grow up, that we might be indeed "holy and blameless and irreproachable."

Lord God, unstory us from the myths we have been taught, and teach us to follow in your way--the way of the cross.

From Thinking to Doing--July 18, 2025

From Thinking to Doing--July 18, 2025

[Jesus asked the expert in the law:] "Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of robbers?" He said, "The one who showed him mercy." Jesus said to him, "Go and do likewise." [Luke 10:36-37]

It's one thing for this to be a thought-experiment; it's another thing entirely to have to live out the conclusions.  And disciples of Jesus are not called merely to think about things or memorize the right answers, but to act in ways that fit with the way of our Rabbi.  We are called to do likewise.

It's one thing to be asked to speculate on hypotheticals about who, for the sake of argument, qualifies as "my neighbor;" it is harder to be dared to put those correct answers from our heads into practice with our hands.  In other words, it is much harder in life to actually go beyond our comfort zones to care for the person at the roadside, to offer help to (or accept help from) the person you see as "other," or to pay attention enough to the sufferings of the world around us to be moved to care for people we might have easily ignored.

It's one thing to identify the outsider from Jesus' story (the Samaritan) as the one character who truly understood the commandment to "Love your neighbor" despite the failures of the Respectable Religious Professionals who passed by the beaten man at the roadside. But it is altogether life-changing to follow Jesus' instruction when the story is finished. It is difficult to "Go and do likewise" with the real people in our lives whom we are sent to love.

And yet, of course, that's the whole point of this. Jesus isn't interested in writing a systematic theology or writing an essay about the nature of love or human relationships. He is interested in forming us into people who love the way he loves, as broadly and deeply as he loves. That's what it means to be a disciple, after all--not just people who think spiritual thoughts or posture themselves to look pious, but people whose actions and words reflect the character of Christ. And therefore, Jesus is interested in changing our way of seeing the world and the people in it, so that we will show mercy for strangers, practice compassion for outsiders, and be brave enough to risk ourselves for people who can never pay us back. You know, the same way Jesus has done for us.

In fact, I think we often miss just what a big deal it is for Jesus to tell this story the way he does precisely because of his own personal experience. The parable we call "the Good Samaritan" (which again, would have sounded like a laughable contradiction and a preposterous oxymoron to his Judean audience) comes just a chapter after Luke gives us a story where Jesus is rejected by a town full of Samaritan people. In Luke 9:51-56, Jesus intends to pass through a Samaritan village--which would make him the outsider and the foreigner on their turf--but they reject him. And in response, two of Jesus' inner circle of disciples, James and John, ask Jesus, "Do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?" Jesus, of course, rebukes them for so completely missing the point and just goes on his way. In other words, Jesus knows what it is like to have been the outsider seeking hospitality and to be rejected--by people in this very same ethnic group that everybody else in his culture hated and looked down own. And yet not only does he refuse to answer their rejection with hatred from his side, but he also still makes a Samaritan the unexpected hero of his story. Jesus has already put his money where his mouth is and crossed barriers to respond with love to people outside his little group. So when he tells the expert in the law that "loving your neighbor" includes people across those imaginary lines we have drawn, he is only calling him to do what Jesus has done first. This talk of loving across the barriers we impose on each other isn't just fanciful theorizing or wishful thinking for Jesus; he has done it himself before he calls us to do likewise.

So, now some twenty centuries later, the question turns to us: what will we do in light of Jesus' story? How will we move from learning about biblical texts to living them, and who might Jesus be sending across our path today? How will we respond when there really is someone broken down by the side of the road (and we are oh-so-busy with Very Important Things To Do)? How will you engage with the person whose politics are different from your own but who needs your help--or whose help you need, even if you didn't want to admit it? How will we reframe the ways we think of people mentioned in passing on the news, when it is easy to reduce them to faceless crowds of "those people" rather than neighbors beloved of God? How will we find the courage not to look away when children near and far go hungry, or when people seeking a safe refuge have nowhere to turn, or when parents just looking to provide for their kids find themselves shipped off to filthy cells in faraway places? How might Jesus be calling us to see the faces of people who live in rougher neighborhoods in the city not as threats to be afraid of or hopeless targets for our condescending pity, but as neighbors worthy of care, respect, and decent treatment? How will we move from hearing and reflecting on a story we've heard plenty of times to know the right answers about loving our neighbors... to actually going and doing likewise?

The next move is ours...

Lord Jesus, transform us by your love and then empower us to follow in your footsteps.

Embodying the Alternative--July 17, 2025

Embodying the Alternative--July 17, 2025

"[God] has rescued us from the power of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of his beloved Son, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins." [Colossians 1:13-14]

So here's a confession: sometimes it is hard to pay attention to events around us, to read the headlines, or listen to the news, and still to believe these words.

It is hard to mouth an "Amen" over the claim that God has already "rescued us from the power of darkness" like it is an accomplished fact knowing that we live in a world where wars still rage on, where children who could be fed will go hungry, where bullies sure do seem to win the day a lot of the time, and where cruelty is often dispensed like currency.  It feels like we are still wading up to our necks in "the power of darkness" some days, and it doesn't often look like the gloom is letting up.

It is hard to believe we have been already "transferred into the kingdom of his Son" like it is a done deal when it sure looks like we are still struggling through history's long chain of empires and superpowers and the violent clashes of one nation against another, in a seemingly endless loop.

It's hard to believe that redemption is something we already have, when so much of the world around us feels woefully unredeemed.  And it is very hard for me, as a would-be representative and follower of Jesus, to see the cross of Christ all too often used as a symbol to dominate or intimidate other people, rather than a sign of the Love that laid down its life for the sake of the whole world.

So yeah, some days, it's hard to believe the promises and claims of the Scriptures. I'll own it--and I'm a preacher. It's also one of those days that raises the recurring question, "Why would you, or me, or anybody else, stay put in a place where such rotten things happen--or, God forbid, where they are cheered?"

And again, to be really honest, that is always a difficult question to keep finding answers for. Why stay in the midst of a situation where there is so much rottenness, meanness, and hatefulness? Why stay in a place--a community, a country, a world--where such terrible things not only happen, but are all too often celebrated or defended rather than unilaterally lamented?

Well, okay, here's my answer. Maybe it only makes sense to me, and I won't assume it will be persuasive for everybody. But to me, the challenge of these verses from Colossians, which many of us heard this past Sunday in worship, is the same challenge of staying in a world, a place, a time, and a situation that doesn't feel like it's been "rescued from the power of darkness." And facing that challenge looks something like this: to say we have been "transferred into the Reign of Christ" doesn't mean we have been taken out of the world--after all, it is the world, all creation, and the whole universe that is Christ's rightful domain. To say, as Colossians does, that we have been rescued from the powers of evil and transferred into the Reign of God means that we are freed from having to live under the rule and order of the rottenness and wickedness around us. We do not have to participate in it. We do not have to play by the world's rules of cruelty and self-serving "Me and My Group First" thinking.  We are freed from having to live under its terrible logic, and we do not have to give our allegiance to its loud bellowing voices. We live, right under the nose of the powers of the day, free from their domination over us. We are freed to live by a different set of values, a different vision of life, a different Lord--the Crucified One, Jesus Christ. That is what it means to be disciples: we look to Jesus for our way of being in the world, and we do not have to obey the powers of the day when they bark orders to the contrary. But we don't leave the world in which we live to do that--we just discover that we can stop listening to the angry shouting voices that still think they are in charge of us.

Well, they ain't.

In a way, it's almost like every day we are presented with the same dilemma that theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer was given about whether to stay in a comfortable teaching position at a university in America, or to return to Germany during the days of Hitler's Reich, knowing he would be called to resist its evil if he went. In 1939, Bonhoeffer told an American colleague that he knew he had to go back into the belly of the beast--back into the midst of the evils of Nazi Germany, and it was his faith in Christ that led him there. He wrote, "I shall have no right to participate in the reconstruction of Christian life in Germany after the war if I do not share the trials of this time with my people....Christians in Germany will face the terrible alternative of either willing the defeat of their nation in order that Christian civilization may survive, or willing the victory of their nation and thereby destroying our civilization. I know which of these alternatives I must choose; but I cannot make this choice in security."

In other words, for Bonhoeffer, his faith in Christ was not permission to go somewhere easy and safe where he never had to be a part of resisting evil and speaking up for the powerless. Rather, his faith in Christ was the very reason that he chose to stay, and first to go back, in the places that were most difficult and hostile. Bonhoeffer believed, like the letter to the Colossians says, that he had been rescued from the powers of darkness--but he knew that didn't mean he didn't have to engage or face it. It meant he didn't have to be ruled by it as its subject anymore. Bonhoeffer could go back into the presence of the worst human evils and the demonic powers of the Reich and resist it--to say "No" to it as he said "Yes" to the way of Christ. And he knew that only if he was there in the midst of that situation could he also say "No" to the way Hitler's Reich was co-opting the church to make it give its loyalty and blessing to the Fuhrer.

Let me say it again, then, for clarity's sake: yes, we are freed from the grip of evil in the sense that we do not have to play its games or by its rules, and we do not have to believe its lies anymore. But we are very much called, with Jesus himself, to find ourselves in the midst of that rottenness as a presence of salt and light. We are called to embody the alternative. As disciples we are called to say our "No" when the signs and symbols of Christianity are co-opted by the powers of the day, the bullies, or the people punching down. We are called, on more ordinary days, too, to say "No" to the ways the name of Jesus gets mingled with hatred and self-centeredness in the name of being "great." We are called to name not just the big idolatries we cannot ignore when they make the day's headlines, but also the countless little ways we are tempted to sell our souls for a little more influence, a little more money, a little more comfort or power or reputation. We can only do that if we are willing, like Bonhoeffer and the ancient Christians in Colossae, to continue living in resistance in the midst of the tension, rather than looking to leave it.

The early Christians, after all, all lived under the rottenness of the Roman Empire, and they didn't run away from it to go live in some imaginary "other" place where it was easy to live. They lived their lives right under the nose of Caesar and all his violence, cruelty, and arrogance, but they knew that they did not have to listen to his orders or his propaganda. They had indeed been rescued from the powers of the day--but they never left the places they lived when it happened. They chose to stay, because it allowed them to be faithful witnesses to Jesus.

So here's the deal, dear friends: I know that there will be other days when the meanness of the world seems to carry the day. And you and I will have to face those days, no matter where we go and no matter what happens. We aren't given a pass to "beam out" of the world, and we aren't given permission to just go somewhere where there will be less tension or less hostility or less friction. We are called to go where Jesus sends us, even if that feels like living our lives right under the noses of the powers of evil. But we are freed in that living, too, because we don't have to accept the terms or play by the rules of the powers of the day, either.

That's how a light is seen to be shining, anyway--you notice it when it is put in a dark place. If we're called to be a light, then we had better get used to the idea that we may be called to remain in situations that feel gloomy and dark. That's why we stay.

They may think (and say, or shout) that they have power over us, but they don't. We are freed, by Jesus himself, to tell them "No, thank you," and instead to live like we have been made citizens of an alternative domain--the Reign of Christ, whose way of being King was to lay down his life, and whose throne is a cross borne for the love of even his worst enemies.

The powers of the day won't have a clue as to what to do with us if we live in the freedom of that kind of love. We don't have to go anywhere else to live in Christ's Reign--we can do it right here, right now, even though it is hard a lot of the time.

Come on, let's make them wonder--whatever else comes our way in this day.

Lord Jesus, free us and remind us we have been rescued already so that we do not have to live by the ways of the rottenness around us. Help us to stay where you have placed us, and give us the courage to offer light to places of gloom.