Becoming Who We Are

Becoming Who We Are--November 23, 2016

"Beloved, we are God's children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed.  What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is."  [1 John 3:2]

The whole Christian life is about becoming who and what God says we already are.  If that seems like a bit of a brain twister, it's probably a sign that we're onto something. After all, most of the really important things we believe as Christians boggle our minds if we spend any time at thinking about them. (In his book, Everything Belongs, Richard Rohr quotes some of the great Eastern fathers as saying, "If you can explain it, it isn't true," meaning that ultimately we can't completely unravel the mystery of the faith, and that if we think we understand it all, it's a sign we have probably missed the boat somewhere.)  So, back to the mystery du jour:  the Christian life is a matter of becoming who we are.

Again and again throughout the Bible, Christians find themselves bumping up against the idea of things being already-and-not-yet with us and God.  Jesus is Lord of the entire universe, and yet there is still coming a day when he will be revealed fully to all as Lord.  The Kingdom of God is among us, Jesus said two thousand years ago, and yet the same Jesus also still taught us to pray for that same very Kingdom to come, and for God's will to be done on earth the way it is done already in heaven.  Eternal life begins now, the New Testament writers say, but it also yet to come beyond the bounds of death.  There are lots of places where we live in that already-but-not-yet tension as believers in Jesus.

Well, here's one more for the pile:  John tells us here we are God's children now, and he says it plainly and assertively as something we can take to the bank,  But John also points us forward to something that is yet in store for us, something that is to come, something we are not yet experiencing fully.  "We will be like him," John says, referring to Jesus.  We will be like Jesus, the One in whom we have met the face of God.  In other words, we are God's children already, but we will be made to be fully like God's Son at the last. 

In some ways, that is part of what this whole life is about--being formed into the likeness of Jesus.  Not beards and sandals of course, but becoming like Jesus in the ways that matter.  This life--which also then includes this day--is part of how God is shaping us to be made like Jesus, so that, as John says, "when he is revealed, we will be like him."  That is an important thing for us to remember, because it is very easy for us to slip into thinking that this life is just a matter of biding our time until we get to heaven, or that we just have to trudge through the days and keep our nose down as much as possible so that we can just skip ahead to the good part of life after death.  But Jesus, it turns out, is just as much interested in life before death.  And in fact, Jesus has gifted us with a community of people who are placed around us in this life-before-death to be used as instruments whom God uses to shape us to be like Christ.  That community is called church.  Sinners though we are, every last one of us, in God's great cosmic genius, the Spirit uses each of us to work on all of the rest of us.  And together in community, we learn how to love like Jesus, how to be courageous truth-tellers like Jesus, how to serve in humility like Jesus, and how to weep and rejoice like Jesus.  When we go out to serve others--whether on far-out mission trips or just down the road to the clothes closet or working side by side in our own church buildings--part of what is happening is that you and I are being changed, too.  For whatever other good we are doing for others on our mission trips and with our clothing drives, God is using those moments to form the kind of people we are becoming--so that we will come to look like the kind of children God says we are already.  When we hold hands together to pray in a circle, when we come to the Table to receive the bread and the cup, when we are gathered around the Word each Sunday, God is shaping us to make us to be like Jesus.  God has already called us and claimed us as "children of God," but that is not the end of things--God continues to make us to be what God says we are already.

So for today, we look out on the hours in front of us before we go to bed again, and we can see the open possibility that God will be at work on us today--and through us at the same time, too--to make us all more fully to become like Jesus.  We, children of God already, are being made to be more fully like the Son of God.  And it will be happening, if perhaps in small ways that we will have to be vigilant to notice and recognize, even today. 

O Great and Gracious God, we pray for your presence and blessing today on us, to make us more fully to become who and what you say we are.  Let us be your children, and let us live as your children as you keep shaping us in the image of Jesus today.

"And in the End..."

"And in the End"--November 22, 2016

"When evening came, the owner of the vineyard said to his manager, 'Call the laborers and give them their pay, beginning with the last and then going to the first.' When those hired about five o'clock came, each of them received the usual daily wage. Now when the first came, they thought they would receive more; but each of them also received the usual daily wage. And when they received it, they grumbled against the landowner, saying, 'These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.' But he replied to one of them, 'Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for the usual daily wage?' Take what belongs to you  and go; I choose to give to this last the same as I give to you. Am I not allowed do do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or are you envious because I am generous?' So the last will be first, and the first will be last." [Matthew 20:8-16]

I don't often say this, but it is unavoidable in this instance: the Beatles were wrong.

At the tail end of the last album they recorded together, Abbey Road, after a brilliant two minutes of volleying guitar licks to lead up to it, the Beatles offer this lone couplet: 

"And in the end, the love you take

Is equal to the love you make."

This is another instance of the life-principle "Don't believe something is true just because it rhymes."  How much bad theology has been done over two thousand years just because some writer's-blocked pious poet reached for an easy rhyme rather than thinking out what he or she was writing? Well, same thing here: if we are to believe Jesus (and I believe he is indeed the authority on the subject of... anything), the way God runs the universe is decidedly NOT to only reward people based on what they have put in.  The economy of God is, from start to finish an economy of grace.  And therefore, in the end the paychecks are given out not based on who sweated the most during their shift, but based on a commitment from the landowner that everybody should be able to feed their kids the next day.

In the end, it would seem, the love you take is always way beyond what you deserved. Always.

Now, as long as I am the one receiving the windfall, that will sound pretty good.  But we humans have a way of getting envious of when someone else receives a gift that puts them on equal footing with us.  We have a way of getting angry, upset, and bent out of shape when someone else is given the same amount we have--we start fussing about what is "right" and what is "just" and what's "fair" because we feel threatened.

And that's the thing--to the ones with more than others, any gracious gesture to put people on equal footing feels like a threat. 

So here's a quick rule of thumb: if I find myself getting all bent out of shape with anxious indignation because someone else has been given a leg up so that they are at the same starting point as I am, I am probably unaware of just how privileged I have been all along.  It's funny--in that way things that are awful can also be funny--how when I look at my own life, I have a tendency to assume that I am entitled to all the advantages I have... but when I look at someone else's situation and see that someone has given them grace, I can start bemoaning them as undeserving and unworthy.

The good news in all of that (if you want to call it that)--I guess I should realize I'm not alone in that.  The workers hired first in Jesus' provocative story here are lodging the same complaint.  "You have made them equal to us!" That's their problem.  They wouldn't have minded the last ones getting an inflated paycheck so long as the first hired workers got their own paychecks pumped up--so they could still see themselves as "better."  To the ones first hired, it's fine if the next guy gets a bonus, as long as mine is bigger--that's how I compare myself to them and tell myself I'm better than all of them, after all. 

But when they see that the landowner has treated them all the same--paid them all the same amount--they get upset.  Turns out they and I are kindred spirits sometimes.  And you, too, I'll wager.  We who fancy ourselves the "first hired" have a way of forgetting that we have been graced, too--we forget that someone reached out to give us a leg up, and that we didn't earn the good in our lives, either.  The talents you were born with--grace. The family that taught you, supported you, and encouraged you--grace.  The wealth that gave you the creature comforts you assumed "everybody" had growing up--grace.  The conveniences and advantages we have had, some of which you and I don't even recognize we have--guess what, grace!  It has all been grace, all along.  The whole universe is run on God's irrepressible itch to give out good things to people who didn't do a thing to deserve them first. 

So one day, Jesus' parable hints, we will all stand before God and realize that everything in this life has been a gift all along.  The privileges I have had in my life were not something I "deserved"--they were there already before any talk of my "working" for them.  But God chose, not only to give me blessings and benefits in this life, but also to grace other people, too--and that means that God reserves the right to lift people up and fill their empty hands with good things the same as me.  If I am still stuck in the old thinking of earning and winning and climbing over top of everybody else to get to the top, I am going to feel threatened and insecure when God blesses other people. 

Today is the day for you and me to see things differently.  Today is the day for us to see the end of the story--the end of all things in this life and this world--and how, all the way to the very end, God has a way of blessing the people we deem least deserving.  And then we can begin to realize that there is surely someone who looks at me and has decided that I am least deserving of grace, too--and yet, that doesn't stop God from lavishing grace upon grace on me... on you... on a whole world full of the last-picked and seemingly least-deserving.

We can either rail against that divine economy of mercy in this life--we can pretend that we are more deserving of what we have, and keep on feeling threatened when the group that came at noon, or the group that came at three, or the group that came just a minute ago, have good things provided to them so that they can care for their families, too--or, we can see that this is the logic of divine grace at work.  We can see that "they" and "we" alike have been given all we have as a gift of God, and that means there is no room for me to fuss that someone else got a handout... when I have been living off of divine handouts every day of my life, too.  We can let of our awfully smug "I did this all myself" attitudes and instead see that we have all been graced beyond our deserving.  And when that dawns on me, then a windfall for you doesn't have to feel like a threat to me.  You getting to have equal standing and footing with me doesn't have to scare me anymore, because I realize we have both been placed at that point by a goodness we did not deserve.

In the end, the love you take... well, turns out always to have been the love that God has given us freely, way beyond what any of us made or deserved or earned.  The whole ride has been grace, all along.  That's how the story will end when our labor for this life is done, and that's how God runs the show right now.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to love your gracious giving to others, and to see ourselves as people who have been graced and blessed beyond our earning.

Unencumbered

"Unencumbered"--November 21, 2016

[Paul] lived there two whole years at his own expense and welcomed all who came to him, proclaiming the kingdom of God and teaching about the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness and without hindrance. [Acts 28:30-31]

We say it at funerals a lot, but it is certainly true here, too--God gets the last word in our story.  And literally here, in the tail end of the book of Acts, which is itself the second volume in Luke's great epic story that starts with what we call the Gospel of Luke, the last word is of great importance.  In Greek, it's just one word that says, "without hindrance," rather like our word "unencumbered," or to put it a little bit more colloquially, "with nothing in the way that could ultimately stop him."  The last word is that the news of Jesus was free, was uninhibited, was unleashed.  The last word is that the movement of Jesus' followers,  opened up to the in-breaking Kingdom of God, kept on rippling out from that first pouring out out of the Spirit on Pentecost--and the world could not stop it.  The last word is that the risen Christ and the living Spirit remain loose in the world. 

In some ways, that is an entirely unsatisfactory way to end a story.  A good literary critic would point out how many loose ends are left unresolved and how much is left up in the air for us, the readers who have been following this story for so long.  We never get to see Paul's day in court, we never learn what the emperor said, and we never know what became of the Christian community....

Except that we do--we are living proof that the story is still going on.  Luke has written this story knowing that the Christian community continues and live and thrives, still "unencumbered" and "without hindrance" itself, long after the events of Paul's life that are written down here.  We are the continuation of the story.  Luke doesn't give a nice and tidy ending to his story, no "And they all lived happily every after..." because the story didn't end with Paul.  It keeps going.  The same Spirit is loose and alive and working among us and in us (and even, if we can bear to admit it, in spite of us sometimes).  Saying anything more than what Luke says, which is essentially, "And the story kept going on..." would suggest that the "real" mission of God was over, and that we Christians are left just to tell the stories of what God did.  But that misses the point--this book was never just a record of what God did; it was always a reminder that the Spirit of God is leading us to live as Jesus' people still, even now, even thousands of years after Jesus' death and resurrection.  There's no punctuation in the original Greek of Luke's book, but I suspect that if there would have been, he would have even ended the last sentence with a good old ellipsis (...) to say that there is more to come and the story of Jesus' people continued in hope and confidence, even after Luke stopped writing about it, and even after the empire put Paul to death.

There is that old cliché that we should not put periods where God puts commas, and as tired as that might sound, there is real truth to it.  The empire thought it could put a period on the life and ministry of Paul by executing him (eventually--we don't get the story here).  And before Paul, the angry mobs (of which Paul had been a part, when he was going by the name Saul) thought they could put a period on the life and ministry of Stephen by stoning him.  And of course, before that, the empire and the religious leaders and the angry mobs (and even Satan, we could say) thought they could put a period on the troublemaking of Jesus by putting him to an ugly death, too.  But, as the saying goes, God had it in mind to put commas at each of those points--or better yet, to put an ellipsis after the cross, and after the stoning of Stephen, and even after the end of Paul's earthly life.

Keep that in mind in these days, too.  Many in our country like to talk about the decline of the church--some who wistfully remember days gone by when Christianity had a place of public prestige about it, others who are eager to see the dethronement of any faith of any kind, and others who are not quite sure what to make of the signs and symptoms they see.  And it may well be that church as we have known it in our lifetimes is indeed dying--that an easy Sunday-morning-only faith which never is lived out through the week will in fact fold up.  In may well be that the church as the comfortable hideout of people who want to appear respectably religious will need to make room for a deeper, riskier, more passionate and on-the-fringe community of disciples.  But let's not put any periods where an ellipsis should really be.... The community of Jesus has lived through death and resurrection before--in fact, it has staked its life on it.  The community of Jesus, though not ever hemmed in to one set of liturgies or church-talk or style, has continued on "without hindrance."  And even that is not our own accomplishment--it is the power of the same Spirit who works in us and who has upheld us all along.  For whatever else is out there for us--for you and for me as individuals, and for us as gathered communities of Jesus' followers--Luke wants us to hear his last word, "without hindrance," not as an end, but as a signpost along the way to remind us whose we are, whose hands we are in, and whose work we get to be a part of.  What else can we say to that but "Amen and Amen"?  Out we go today, confident that for whatever else it looks like to the period-pushers of the world, the Reign of God keeps rippling out among us and in us and through us--even, as Jesus says, to the ends of the earth....

Lord Jesus, in some ways, all of our prayers begin with an unspoken, "Into your hands, we commend our spirits."  So, too, today, with whatever comes, we place ourselves intentionally where you have already put us yourself--into your hands.  From that place of confidence, go along with us, out into your world, spurred on by your Spirit, upheld by the gracious presence of Jesus, to embody the blessed life of your Kingdom for all.  We ask it in the name of Jesus, the great Amen himself, as the Scriptures say, and offering our lives as a living Amen to your promise....

A Plan to Lose

A Plan to Lose--November 18, 2016

"More than that, I regard everything as a loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord.  For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ and be found in him…" [Philippians 3:8-9a]

In one of my favorite songs by the band Switchfoot (a list which, I will confess, is a long one), Jon Foreman sings, “Only the losers win—they’ve got nothing to prove.  They leave the world with nothing to lose,” and then he comes to the chorus, “I’ve got a plan to lose it all.  I’ve got a contract pending on eternity.  If I haven’t already given it away, I’ve got a plan to lose it all.”

A plan to lose… everything.  It hardly sounds sensible.

We usually use the word “lose” to describe something accidental and unintentional, something regrettable and pitiable… not something you have a plan for.  We say things like, “I lost my wristwatch again—can someone help me look for it?”  or “I have felt just awful since I lost that gift they gave me. What a shame.”  We talk about the stock market losing points on the day, when of course everyone would rather see a day when the markets close up for the day.  We lament about losing time, losing chances, losing profits, and losing our minds—none of them very positive situations. 

And in those rare and precious moments when we do bring ourselves to part with something intentionally, we reach for other verbs than “lose.”  Your offering check put in the plate is a donation, or a gift or a tithe, but I don’t know anyone who says, “I lost money to the church today.”  Losing sounds like surrender.  Losing sounds like defeat.  Losing sounds like something you stumbled into because of absent-mindedness (the misplaced wristwatch) or risky investing… not something you set out to accomplish when you get up in the morning.

Unless you have met Jesus, of course.  Jesus is the reason that Paul, and the songwriter Jon Foreman, and countless disciples over two thousand years, have been willing to talk about—and sing about, too, I guess—our plans to lose it all.  Paul talks about loss the way a personal trainer talks about the extra twenty pounds or so we are all carrying around that we could stand to shed.  You do have to consciously plan to lose that kind of weigh, which is precisely dead weight.  You do have to say, “This is something I need to get rid of, something I need to lose, and something that is only holding me back and comparatively a waste.”   

Of course, when we are just picturing twenty pounds of excess weight—read fat—from our bodies, it’s easy to say, “I want to be rid of that!”  The really radical thing about Paul is that he is willing to talk about things he used to think were great, and now to call them “rubbish.”  Actually, he calls them something even more graphic in his original Greek—something that could be politely translated as “dung.”  Paul isn’t talking about spiritual love-handles or a flabby soul—something that anybody might easily say, “This needs to go!” about.  Paul is talking about all of who he used to be before Christ was a part of his life.  His trophies and medals, his scorecards and gold-stars.  All of it is so much garbage that ought to go to the junk heap.  All of it requires a plan to lose.

That flies in the face of our natural impulses.  We all cling to the things we think give us worth, and here Paul is convinced that the grace of God changes all that. We are much more likely to want to try and preserve whatever we thought of as our accomplishments, rather than to be willing to let go of them.  It's the frustrated early retiree, who worked hard at his job, only to be forced out when the business dried up, and all he can do now is lash out in emasculated anger at all the people he blames for his troubles, while he conjures up wishes for reliving his glory days.  It's the sad, lonely mogul, who did great in business and made a fortune, but comes to a point where he realizes his money didn't make him happy and all his millions or billions were a waste of a lifetime since he feels empty inside. It's Al Bundy, reliving his high school football career and "that time I scored four touchdowns in a single game" because he is afraid to admit that none of that matters anymore.  All of us are like that to some degree--we don't dare say that our best and most important achievements are "rubbish," because we are have a hard time believing that grace really does get the last word, and that in the end there will be no proving of our worth--only the free gift of God's love that is already yours before you've done a thing.


It is hard to do what Paul does here in Philippians, because we are afraid of admitting our best and greatest weren't all that great, and we would much rather clutch onto the things we thought gave us value and worth.  It is hard to accept that I am beloved and precious and of infinite worth to God... even if my job went away, even if my industry is disappearing, even if I have had to be on unemployment, even if I need the help of others, even if nobody else remembers the four touchdowns in a single game from high school.  But the New Testament does indeed dare us to quit putting our trust and our worth in those accomplishments, and instead to make a plan to lose them all.

Every so often in our lives we have those turning-a-new-chapter rummage-clearing times of our lives, when we sort through the “stuff” that has accumulated and decide what we need to keep and what we do not need.  We might fill up a back of clothes for goodwill, or finally get rid of those broken small appliances we had been meaning to get around to.  Or we might find something that had gotten buried at the bottom of a closet or storage tub and rediscover something of value.  It does happen.

But then there are the markers of achievement. The collected report cards or merit badges from childhood. The certificates of achievement from work or letters of commendation from our supervisors.  The actual plastic trophies from childhood wins and school victories.  When we win them—the big trophy for the year your team won the championship, or the perfect attendance award from your fourth-grade class—they seem like they are of great value and that we will never want to part with them.  Funny, though, how by the time you have to move a couple times in life, you get tired of unboxing and re-boxing the same pieces of tarnished, gaudy plastic with stick-on nameplates.  Funny how these things that once seemed so important become one more piece of junk you are willing to part with—to pitch because it is of no use to anybody else, and because your present-tense life doesn’t need it anymore.  I remember the day I finally parted with my second-grade Pinewood Derby trophy from my short-lived Cub Scout career—and the way I looked at the yellowing faux-gold of its plastic topper and said to myself, “Who do I think I need to impress with this anymore… and am I really fooling myself to think that it would impress them?”  Pitching the trophy was loss, in some sense of the word, but it was also really freeing, because it meant I was losing one more instance of trying to make myself good enough to be acceptable.  One more idol dethroned.

There comes a point where the new life you are standing in is worth more than the trophies from your past that mark where you used to be.  There comes a point when you realize you would rather have a few more free moments now than the time it takes to dust your old school trophies.  And so, at some point… out they go.  It’s a loss, but not a pitiable one.  Nobody says, “Oh, what a shame—I wish I had more of the faded clutter from my childhood that rewarded me for meaningless contests.”  But it does take the conscious action, the chosen willingness, to pitch them when it’s time.  It takes a plan.

The Christian life is like that.  It is the conscious plan of disciples of Jesus to do an ongoing inventory of our lives and to be free enough to pitch the clutter of personal points and tired trophies which never really earned us anything in the first place.  It is the daring plot to pin our whole lives on Christ and to see that in this present moment with Christ we no longer need gold stars to be loved.  In fact, we never did. 

When that becomes real for us—when the reality of grace smacks us upside the head like that—all of a sudden we find ourselves free to lose it all… because we recognize that, more importantly, we have been found.

Lord Jesus, you have claimed us as we are.  Let us dare to trust it and plan to lose the dead weight we have been carrying around.

The Gospel According to Mesons

The Gospel According to Mesons--November 17, 2016

"[Christ] himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together. he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning, the firstborn from the dead, so that he might come to have first place in everything. For in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconciled to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace through the blood of his cross." [Colossians 1:17-20]

Inside of every cell of your body--in fact, inside every nucleus of every atom of every molecule that is inside of every cell of your body--there is a profound mystery that is holding you together.  It is holding the world together, too.

Scientists call it the "strong nuclear force," and it is quite amazing.  Everybody remembers, I trust, their basic science education from back in middle school or junior high school, where you learned that positive repels positive and negative repels negative, just like the poles on a magnet repel poles of the same kind, too.  And I'll bet you recall, too, that every atom in the universe is made up of protons (which have a positive charge), neutrons (which are neutral), and electrons (which have a negative charge).  And while electrons go whizzing around in orbit on the outside of an atom like a buzzing, moving shell, the center of every atom is densely populated with protons.

So, in the center of just about every atom in the universe (okay, not hydrogen, which has only one proton to begin with), from the carbon atoms in your eyes as you read these words to the silicon atoms in the microchips within the computer on which I am typing them, there are subatomic particles pushing away from each other.  Inside every nucleus of every atom there are protons that are repelling one another, and if there were not another force at work holding them together, that pushing would rip apart every atom in creation, and there would be nothing but subatomic particles zipping around the chaos of otherwise empty space.  If all you had was the basic description of things from middle school science, you might say, "The universe shouldn't work!  It shouldn't hold together at all!"  If all there were was the meeting of one proton's charge butting up against the force of another, then, to borrow a phrase of Yeats, things would fall apart, and the center would not hold.

And yet... here we are.

There must be a force, a power, that is of a different kind than the you-push-me-I'll-push-you-back repulsion of one proton against another.  There must be another kind of force--somehow even stronger in those close, infinitesimally small distances, that can make all the protons stay with one another.  This is the mystery.  This is what scientists call "the strong nuclear force." And instead of being a pushing kind of force, like positive charges push against and repel other positive charges punch for punch, somehow the strong nuclear force is a "giving" kind of force--it binds protons together by getting them to trade even tinier particles, mesons, back and forth.

We don't need to delve further into the intricacies of subatomic particles to get the point for today: at first glance (a 7th-grade level knowledge of science), it looks like nothing should hold together at all, but there is a deeper power at work that still binds everything even in spite of our assertions of what "can" or "cannot" happen.  Curious, isn't it, that the force of giving thing away back and forth ends up being more powerful that the force of one proton pushing and shoving on another like drunk brawlers in a barfight.

Except, maybe not that curious at all, for people who dare to believe that the Maker of all things leaves fingerprints in the universe--that in some way, creation itself bears the mark of the Creator like the Van Gogh print on the wall across from me has the name "Vincent" painted subtly in letters of yellow ochre at the bottom of the sunflower vase.  And I don't mean that God hides tiny crosses in the structure of molecules, or stamps "John 3:16" onto the far side of planets for us to find, like some theological version of 2001: A Space Odyssey.  I mean that if God's own nature is to bind all things together in the act of self-giving love, then maybe it isn't all that surprising that God has fashioned the universe in the same way--that in the face of our most powerful bouts of anger and pride and pushing and shoving, God reserves the right nevertheless to bind all things together in the power of a force whose strength comes from self-giving, too.

This is exactly the Christian claim: that even though we seem determined to divide ourselves up, we human beings, God insists on binding all things together in love anyhow. We keep angling for ways to to exclude and accuse, to condemn and to hate one another along all sorts of lines, and then to push and shove back and forth at one another because we are afraid of "the other" getting more power than we have... and then God instead says, "No, I am still holding you all together."  And God doesn't do it with coercion, not with guns or laws or imprisonment or threats or angry bluster.  God holds all things together in love, the same self-giving love that gave itself away for us on an ugly imperial death stake that we call the cross.  God's power to gather up, God's power to bind up what is broken and scattered, God's power to embrace, is going to win out in the end, like the strong nuclear force holding together even ornery protons that are still wanting to push and shove each other into chaos.

To be a follower of Jesus is to stake your claim now to be a part of God's work of self-giving love--love that does not back down from speaking out for those who have been stepped on, made to be afraid, or left out, but love also that does not shy away from giving itself away, to bow and to bend and to make room for the other as well.  We are people who dare to believe that, as impossible as it might seem to a rudimentary surface knowledge, God's self-giving love is more powerful than our impulse to hate, to divide, and to dehumanize one another. So we will be about the work of love today, even when it takes the form of courage, and even when it takes the form of suffering.

Lord Jesus, bind all things together within us, and bind us together with all creation in your self-giving love.

The Last Checkmate

The Last Checkmate--November 16, 2016

"Come, behold the works of the Lord;
   see what desolations he has brought on the earth.
⁹ He makes wars cease to the end of the earth;
   he breaks the bow, and shatters the spear;
   he burns the shields with fire.
¹⁰ ‘Be still, and know that I am God!
   I am exalted among the nations,
   I am exalted in the earth.’
¹¹ The Lord of hosts is with us;
   the God of Jacob is our refuge." [Psalm 46:8-11]

There's an image burned into my brain from decades-old memories of watching Star Trek reruns in the basement of my childhood home. Maybe you can picture it, too, if you are willing to own your inner Trekkie for a few minutes on a Wednesday afternoon.  It's that game they would sometimes play on the original series and occasionally on the spin-offs: the three-dimensional version of chess.

To refresh your memory (or to offer a sketch of it if you never indulged in the show), three-dimensional chess has multiple flat game boards of different sizes, each at different heights off the table. And in fact, you can buy 3-D chess games in all sorts of variations and names: Parmen, Raumschach, Tri-D Chess, and so on.  And as much as these games all try and present themselves as some radical new innovation in game-playing, they are really still all just variations on the same old goal: checkmate.  Whether it's the standard flat chessboard or an officially licensed Star Trek commemorative edition three-dimensional set, the game is still based around one side defeating the other by taking your opponent's king, and quite often taking out most of the opponent's pieces in the process. 

And while that is a classic game, and there is plenty of mental stimulation to be gleaned from a good game of chess, that's really not a very "new" kind of game.  Winning by slowly killing off your enemy or cornering their leader is old hat. It is the same game the human race has been playing since Cain decided the only way to deal with the envy he had for his brother was to murder Abel rather than to work on himself.  It is the same old game by which humanity has been amusing itself to death since the beginning.  It always boils down to Team A against Team B, whether the teams are tribes or nations or kingdoms or campaigns, and "victory" is always defined by ridding the game board of your opponent, or capturing their king.  You can add as many game boards as you like, or make the game pieces sleek and futuristic or old and hand-carved, but you are still basically playing the same tired old game that is the only way human beings seem to know how to play, when we are left to our own worst devices.

But... the story of God is different.  God doesn't go for our tedious game-playing.  God has come up with an entirely different kind of victory.  It is there, throughout the Scriptures, but we often do not have the eyes to see it, or we don't realize what radical things are being said about our God.  Perhaps we do not expect so revolutionary a deity, or we are consciously trying to tame the divine so that we won't be challenged ourselves.  But this is the radical way God wins:  God's victory comes by breaking open our old us-versus-them thinking and transforms "the enemy" while embracing them.  God's kind of victory isn't just "I have more swords and spears and shields than you, and so my team is going to win," but rather God snaps all of our spears on the divine knee like twigs, and God destroys all of our weapons of war for killing each other... because God has it in mind to reach everybody.

Everybody.

See, if you can only see the other person as an enemy, you will see the only possible resolution to your conflict as a win-or-loss zero-sum-game, and it will never cross your mind that you could end the conflict not by killing the enemy or beating them in a campaign or a plundering their treasures, but by transforming them into friends.    But God sees the game board differently. Just adding more layers to the chessboard isn't enough for God--God changes the game entirely, by making our wars to end.

God offers us a new way of thinking, a new way of winning, and a new kind of victory.  It will always be a tough go to seek that kind of victory, especially if you are still engaged with folks who don't understand, or won't understand, and can still only think in terms of Cain 'winning' against Abel and one player kill the other player's king in chess.   For the people of God, it will always feel like a struggle in which we have fewer "weapons" than those who see themselves as enemies, because being a part of the Reign of God means we don't use their weapons or fight on their terms.  It means we are not looking to 'get rid' of anybody, but to be transformed together in the likeness of Christ.  I cannot share the news of the extravagant love of God with you if I can only see you as an enemy, and I certainly would not be willing to let you help me see my own blind spots if I can only see you as an opponent.  But the people of God dare to believe that God doesn't just win wars by picking Side A over Side B--the Scriptures talk about God ending wars all together--bringing an end to that kind of thinking.  The Scriptures want us to see the world in a very different way from what we were used to--and the world around us can only think in terms of beating the opponent, rather than being transformed by the victory of grace.

The followers of Jesus are taught to look for a different kind of winning altogether.  We don't plunder from the "losers." We don't gloat over the defeated. We don't use violence or threats to get our way.  We don't even look at ordinary 'wins' and 'losses' as the world sees them as God's way of picking sides--God, after all, has a way of siding with the losers, rather than the so-called "winners" in the story of the Bible.  We aren't looking to solve our problems by cornering the opponent's king on the chessboard--for us, the last checkmate already took place, when our King sacrificed himself to break open the whole old order of us-against-them that had been writing the rulebook since Cain and Abel.  And Easter Sunday is the evidence that God's way of winning worked--instead of destroying enemies, God has destroyed the old order of things so that enemies can become beloved.  And thus Jesus' great prayer of victory is, "Father forgive them for they know not what they do," rather than a gloating cry that God must be on the winning side.  Jesus wasn't, to any outside observer, on the winning side at the cross--but that is exactly the point.  God's kind of victory doesn't kill the enemy; it absorbs death and hate and breaks their power and the cycles of revenge they keep feeding.  For us, the last checkmate has already happened.

Today, how will we treat people differently if we are caught up in God's new kind of victory?  It's your move.

Lord Jesus, let us be transformed by your wonderfully upside down way of winning the victory, and let us love those whom we have seen as our enemies, not to appease or cave, but to return good to them even when we have received evil.

Slingshots at Fort Knox

Slingshots at Fort Knox--November 15, 2016

"So if you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your mind on things that are above, not on things that are on the earth, for you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God." [Colossians 3:1-3]

Ok, right as we get out of the gate here, we should clear something up: this life matters.  It matters a lot.  This day matters.  This week matters.  This month and this year matter.  And what you do with the next breath matters.

Please, oh please, don't go misreading the thrust of these words from the New Testament, even though we seem to keep trying to miss the point.  The third chapter of Colossians is not saying that we should turn a blind eye or a deaf ear to the broken places and injustices of the world and just say, "Well, maybe it will all get fixed in heaven," with an unconvinced shrug.  Colossians is not saying we should try to pacify (silence) those who have been stepped on in life by just whispering, "It will be better in the sweet by-and-by...now get ready for more abuse!"  To be a Christian is not merely to have heavenly fire insurance to get us to some celestial prize after we die--it has everything to do with living every moment in the presence of God.  So even though we have hope of life beyond the grip of death--because God will not let go of us even after we are unable to hold onto our own lives--we don't (or at least we aren't supposed to) simply ignore the needs of this day, and we don't pretend the disappointments, letdowns and heartbreaks of this life are irrelevant because they are only "just" for this life. 

But when we take these words from Colossians seriously, something does change about the way we see our choices, our actions, and our words in this day and this life: namely, we stop worrying and whining about protecting our own interests, and we find a remarkable courage and compassion we never knew before.

"Your life is hidden with Christ," says Colossians, which is a way of saying, that our lives are preserved by the hand of the living God in a way that no bullets, no tear gas, no threats of angry mobs or hateful tyrants can get to them.  The powers of the day will do their worst, and they will use the same old tired lines they always use to make us afraid and suspicious--they will try to make us afraid of someone out to "get" us, and they will try to get us to put our trust in our own weapons and ammunition as the key to being "safe."  The powers of the day go further--they want to make us think that our own lives are more important that other people's lives, and so I must protect myself and my interests at all costs--that I be ready to hurt someone else before they come and take my precious piles of stuff.  The powers of the day want to get me to misplace my trust in my own strength, and to redirect my fear at the face of the neighbor next to me.  All of that is to say, the powers of the day want me to doubt the clear promise of the New Testament--that my life is hidden with Christ. 

And if my life is hidden in God, and God will not let me go, then all my bluster to try and protect my stuff (and all my fear of what would happen if I didn't) is like trying to defend the gold inside Fort Knox from an oncoming truck with a slingshot.  The slingshot is no match for the truck--but the truck was never going to get through the fortress anyhow.  My slingshot is both totally futile and totally unnecessary.  My life is hidden with Christ in God.

That should give us courage and compassion in this day--because we no longer have to be biting our nails in worry about "what might happen to me... or my stuff?!" and instead I am free to look out for the protection of others around me, who really are in danger of being stepped on, harmed, or hurt.  The powers of the day just don't have any real... power... over me, once I hear the truth from Colossians.  They can do their worst... but the truck just ain't getting through the gates of the fortress. 

There's a story from back in the family album of the early church that seems worth mentioning.  The well-loved old father of the church John Chrysostom once found himself rounded up in front of the empire, when they were cracking down on followers of Jesus and their stubborn refusal to bow down to the powers of that day.  Chrysostom was in front of the empress herself, so the story goes, and she threatened to banish him if he wouldn't give in.

The old saint says in reply, “You cannot banish me, for this world is my Father’s house.”

“But I will kill you,” said the empress.

“No, you cannot, for my life is hid with Christ in God,” John says back--quoting these very words from Colossians.

“I will take away your treasures," said the face of the empire.

“No, you cannot, for my treasure is in heaven and my heart is there," John answered.

“But I will drive you away from your friends and you will have no one left," the empress pushed further.

“No, you cannot, for I have a Friend in heaven from whom you cannot separate me. I defy you, for there is nothing you can do to harm me.”

That is not a lack of concern for the present life--it is a fire-tested courage that can deal with the troubles of this life with greater defiance and greater love because it is grounded in the power of God to hold our lives.  The powers of the day can only intimidate us if we believe they are holding all the cards, but they are not.  There is an ace up God's sleeve--there always is.  There is a power at work among us that the threats and jackboots and dictators of history do not have and do not understand.  If we dare to believe the promise of the New Testament--that our lives are hidden in God with Christ--then the empires that come and go cannot make us afraid.  And without that fear, we have the renewed courage to speak up for those without a voice, to stand with those who are afraid of being cut down, to comfort those who are heartbroken and enter into their grief, and to love those who feel they have no one left.

Hear this truth, and know it in your bones:  your life is in Christ, and there is nothing that anybody, anybody, ANYBODY, can do to take it away.  Now, go and defy the empire with courage and love.  Go bring the face of Christ to someone who needs it today.

Lord Jesus, hold onto our lives, and go with us as we walk where you send us, no longer afraid, and no longer fussing about protecting our own interests.  You hold them for us--let that be enough.