What We Are Getting Ourselves Into

What We Are Getting Ourselves Into--January 9, 2018

[Jesus said:] "Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light." [Matthew 11:28-30]

I would like to make a proposal, a hypothesis of sorts, about these well-known words of Jesus.  And I'll ask your bearing with me to hear me out here.  I would suggest--and here's me, going out on a limb with this--that when Jesus spoke these words of invitation and of calling, he actually meant something by them.

Yes, I'd like to consider the possibility that maybe, just maybe, Jesus seriously intended to call people--of the first century, of the twenty-first century, and of every other time as well--into a particular way of life.  I dare say Jesus actually meant something by these words.

That is, Jesus wasn't just waxing poetic or rambling with an extended metaphor.  He wasn't just riffing on a half-formed image or analogy about yokes and burdens--he was calling anyone who would listen to share in a way of seeing the world, seeing God, and seeing oneself.  I want to suggest that when Jesus said he would give us rest, he wasn't just sentimental and saccharin.  He actually intended to be offering us a different way of living that would change the way we carried the burdens of life.

I feel this is an important point to make because to be honest, I think that religious professionals (preachers like me) have often so romanticized and sentimentalized passages like this as to make them empty schmaltz.  Unless Jesus is actually giving us a viable alternative to the ways we have been living our lives, all this talk of "Jesus carrying our burdens" will be meaningless.  And I say that as someone who, more recently than I care to admit, was in the company of preachers and heard a message that went something like this: "When life is tough and we are weary from anxiety, grief, sadness, or discouragement, you just need to trust Jesus more and it will all get better." 

Just wave the name of Jesus over your troubles, and watch them vanish!  Just mutter the two syllables of the Savior's name while you are thinking about the friend who has cancer and you'll be able to make it through the day with a smile on your face.  Just believe harder in Jesus, and you won't feel so bad about the crippling debts you don't want to deal with.  Honestly, it was like hearing that Jesus was an all-curing elixir like snake-oil that would fix just about anything, if only you would just stop what you were doing and "just trust Jesus more."

And to be clear, I'm all for trusting Jesus....

But I am of the conviction that trusting a person usually involves some concrete, specific action or direction.  Like the old story about the tightrope walker with the wheelbarrow, it's easy to stand on solid ground from a distance and say, "I believe YOU can cross the tightrope while pushing this across," but it doesn't really mean anything until you are willing to get into the wheelbarrow yourself, and let him carry you across the highwire. Just saying "I trust Jesus more" doesn't make my car payment go away, and it doesn't make a heavenly beam of light illuminate a nook in the couch cushions to find a long-lost roll of hundred dollar bills to pay it, either.  Jesus hasn't come to get us to recite a mantra about him, or treat his name like a magic incantation that gives us the power to sail past the troubles of daily life. No, I am convinced, as I say, that when Jesus called people to come and take his yoke upon them, he was calling us to a particular way of life, a set of priorities, a way of being in the world.  When Jesus calls us to take his yoke, he is summoning us to abandon our old loves and wish-lists and to take his loves, his priorities, and his way of engaging the world as our own.  

There's a line from the classic Alan Moore graphic novel (and later movie) V for Vendetta, in which the main character says that "fairness, justice, and freedom are more than words--they are perspectives."  That's an important reminder.  Just muttering that you care about fairness or justice or freedom doesn't make it so--these words represent ideas and a particular set of values.  And in a similar way, Jesus offers his yoke as a change of perspective--from our old ones to his.  Being a follower of Jesus isn't simply learning how to speak in Christian jargon or how to parrot religious sounding words.  It is a matter of actually going where Jesus goes, doing what Jesus does, and learning to carry what Jesus carries--nothing more and nothing less.

Unless we hear that in Jesus' words here, we will only ever hear this passage as saying, "Just trust more!" without it ever telling us what that would mean or look like.  But once we realize that Jesus is actually saying something of substance, then things start to make sense.  Jesus is calling us to take up his way of seeing the world, his way of living in the world, and his choices of what matters, and what doesn't. Some sources believe that rabbis of the first century referred to their teaching--their interpretation of the Torah, the Law--as their "yoke," and that therefore Jesus is making the invitation to people to live by his understanding of the Torah, rather than the burdensome interpretations of the Pharisees. Others think that this "yoke" language is more generally a shorthand for living by God's commandments rather than the demands of the world or the decrees of the Romans.  But either way, the force of Jesus' choice of words is about the same: he is calling people, not simply to say his name like a lucky charm, but to set down an old way of life in the world and to take up a new one that he sets forth.  And once we are clear that this is the invitation, his words here have a certain force to them.  Jesus really is convinced that the life of loving enemies, of generosity without tooting your own horn, welcoming the stranger, the life of practicing forgiveness, the life of trust in a God who provides daily bread, that this whole kind of life is freeing and more joyful than a life lived by the conventional wisdom of the day--the life marked by attacking enemies, closing oneself off from "the other," hating the stranger, proud bragging about your greatness and giving, and holding grudges.  Jesus is actually calling us to something, a way of life that can be practiced and grown into.  Jesus' "yoke" is a perspective, not just a sentimental analogy.

As long as I am still trying to play the world's games--to get ahead with more stuff and bigger piles of money, to win people's approval and get them to notice and applaud me, to make myself look tough by lashing out at my enemies and bitterly nursing hatred for the people I don't like or think have wronged me--I will always feel like I am carrying an extra hundred pounds of dead weight behind me wherever I go.  Even if you, for a brief moment, actually succeed on the world's terms and get a big pile of possessions or have lashed out at all the people you think have wronged you, you still will feel burdened and worn out, Jesus says.  It's inevitable--because the problem isn't that it's hard to win at the games the world teaches us to play. The problem is that even when you look like you are "winning" at them, you are still left carrying the baggage and the weight of the world's way of doing things, and you are still left feeling empty inside. 

Jesus calls us away from the losing game that is the conventional wisdom about how to live life, and into his way of living in the world.  And when that happens, the dead weight can be left behind, and we find our muscles can carry the load Jesus gives.  There is no choice to carry nothing--you can't not have a pattern for living in this life.  The question, though, is whether we will kill ourselves from exhaustion trying to carry all the garbage the world and the powers of the day want to pile on us, or whether we will dare to trust that Jesus' way of living and seeing the world can lighten the load.

Jesus is actually calling us into something... and out of something old.  He is calling us to abandon the old way of ordering our lives, and to let his way become ours.  And he is convinced it is worth it.

Dare we let go of our old perspectives, no matter how popular they are or what other loud obnoxious voices in our culture espouse them, and trust Jesus to give us a new perspective?

Let's try it... and let's be clear as we do just what we are getting ourselves into.

Lord Jesus, Rabbi, help pull us out of our old habits and practices and perspectives, and suit us up in your way of living in the world.

Current and Call

Current and Call--January 8, 2018

"Jesus went out again beside the sea; the whole crowd gathered around him, and he taught them. As he was walking along, he saw Levi, son of Alphaeus sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, 'Follow me.' And he got up and followed him. And as he sat at Levi's house, many tax collectors and sinners were also sitting with Jesus and his disciples--for there were many who followed him. When the scribes of the Pharisees saw that he was eating with sinners and tax collectors, they said to his disciples, 'Why does he eat with tax collectors and sinners?' When Jesus heard this, he said to them, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous by sinners'." [Mark 2:13-17]

I remember a childhood visit at my grandparents' house when my grandfather taught me about the compelling power of grace without either of us knowing that was the lesson for the day.  

Neither of us knew that there was theology going on at the time, because my Grandpa hadn't broken out the Bible for a sermon.  He was teaching me how to build an electromagnet.

I can still picture the wires, the 12-volt battery for the day's project, the large metal nail that became our electromagnet, and the handful of paper clips we tested it out on.  I remember my grandfather carefully showing me what he was doing, as he wrapped the wire in coils around the nail, and gave me the elementary-school version of what was about to happen.  I remember seeing this plain metal nail all of a sudden have a power to it that drew all sorts of objects toward it--paper clips, nails, iron filings, screws from the workbench, and more.  And I remember having at least a basic grasp of what I was witnessing: the invisible presence of an electric current was creating a magnetic field, and that had an attractive power that pulled on the metal in the paper clips for as long as the current was flowing.

Something curious and significant happens in a moment like that, when your homemade electromagnet starts attracting whatever is around.  The current itself is invisible, but clearly has a power, a force to it that pulls things toward it.  The paper clips weren't generating their own thrust to get closer to the magnet--they were being pulled, drawn, by the invisible compelling power of the electromagnet.  And yet, the paper clips, the iron filings, and the rest, they weren't resistant to the pull--in fact, something deep within them was compatible with the drawing power of the magnet. The pull was coming from the magnet, and the paper clips seemed designed to allow that power to draw them in.  And with a certain indiscriminate recklessness, the magnet just pulled all kinds of things in closer--paper clips, staples, iron filings, whatever.  The magnet did the pulling, but all sorts of objects were made--designed--to be capable of being pulled by an electromagnet.

And that, with a little bit of hindsight, is where I learned theology from this childhood science moment with my grandpa.  

This is how the call of Jesus--the compelling summons of grace--works among us, too.  Jesus has this way, like a homemade electromagnet, of pulling us toward himself, regardless of the baggage we bring, the tangles we are in, or damage we have already suffered.  And that pull includes not just us (after all, we each have  way of imagining ourselves on Santa's list of Good Boys and Girls), but others, too, even folks that I don't think are "worthy." Jesus' own presence, his voice, his summons, carries its own authority that just draws us in closer when he calls us.  

That's how it goes with Levi, this guy who would have been seen as a sell-out, a fraud, and a traitor to his own people, when Jesus just up and calls him to join his movement with the words, "Follow me," here in Mark's gospel.  Levi isn't looking for a rabbi to follow.  He's quite probably not even looking for a messiah to come, because most people's expectations of a future promised messiah in Levi's day were that he would root out all the people who had sold out to Rome and destroy them.  Folks who had signed up to do the Empire's dirty work for them were not too keen on the idea of a new king who would end the Roman occupation, after all.  Levi wasn't looking for Jesus... but that never stopped Jesus from looking for Levi.

And that is the power of Jesus' way of calling us.  Jesus, like the homemade electromagnet my grandfather demonstrated for me in his family room thirty years ago, brings his own invisible compelling pull, and Jesus' pull draws in all kinds of people. Not just the well-behaved and respectably religious, but the people who had been told they were unacceptable, unworthy, unreachable, and irredeemable, too.  Not just the churchgoing Gallants, but the notorious Goofuses--the sell-outs, the sinners, the cheats and the chaff, the left-out, the lost, and the least.  Jesus' call draws them all, since every last one of us is made to be capable of being pulled.  Jesus doesn't have to advertise his credentials, or promote his own best qualities, or demonstrate his messianic bona fides to get Levi to follow him. Jesus doesn't have to tell Levi, "You really ought to want to follow me--I'm a very important rabbi, and in fact, I'm the King of Kings and Lord of Lords.  There will be rewards later on for the ones who get in on the ground floor, so I'd take this offer to come and follow, if I were you.  I'm the best."  Just the call itself has the authority, the compelling power, the pull of grace. Jesus doesn't have to persuade or puff himself up to make himself look more appealing or prestigious.  An electromagnet doesn't have to show off, after all--it just pulls things in with an unseen power.

Really, it's all Jesus--his indiscriminate, unconditional, irresistible pull--that draws us close.  It's Levi, and it's Zacchaeus, too.  It's an anonymous woman at a well in Sychar, and Mary and Martha as well.  It's a band of illiterate fishermen (we'll hear their stories, too, in due time), and it's you and me.  It's an unexpected band of twelve, who include everyone in the social and political spectrum of Jesus' day, from a sell-out like Levi who had bought the party line about Rome to ex-Zealots who hated the Empire in power with every fiber of their being.  What held them together was not their like-mindedness, their worthiness, or their potential.  It was the pull of Jesus.  

That's where everything begins for us.  All that we call the Christian life.  Your and my whole lives of following Jesus.  Anybody who ever walked to the end of the aisle in an altar call, prayed a prayer to accept Jesus into their hearts, went down in the water, went up at a revival, felt a strange warming in their heart, and a whole slew of folks whose faith story doesn't include any of those tropes, too--even when we thought we were taking the first step to "come to Jesus," we were being pulled by him all along.  The call has the power.  Jesus' summons has the sheer authoritative force.  Jesus' voice, making us acceptable in the act of his calling us, is what draws us.  Jesus is the electromagnet, and we have been re-aligned, re-oriented, re-arranged, in the field of his indiscriminate drawing-in.

That means in a very real sense, Levi's story is yours and mine, too.  Before any one of us gets too big for our britches and starts telling ourselves, "I was the one who came to Jesus!  I was the one who took the first step and invited Jesus into my heart!  I was the one who made Jesus my 'personal Lord and Savior'!" we should be honest about where the power lies among the iron filings, paper clips, and coils of wire.  The power that pulls resides in the electromagnet, drawing into its grip whatever metal is around. All the paper clip brings to the equation is the capacity to be held.  And that's you and me, too.  What we bring to this relationship we call faith is our capacity to be held.  Jesus does the pulling.  Jesus does the calling.  Jesus does the holding.  We, to be honest, find ourselves found.

And once we are clear about that, all of a sudden it changes the way I see everybody else around me, as the same compelling grace of Jesus sweeps them up in his grasp, too.  It becomes clear that others who are drawn to his Christ don't have to meet my prior approval--they are being pulled by Jesus, not by majority vote of all the other paper clips.  And it becomes clear that each of us sticks to the magnet, each of us holds on to Jesus, not by our own sheer willpower, personal strength, or moral character, but because Jesus is the one whose call pulls us in close.  We find ourselves found. The quicker we are clear about that, the sooner it will dawn on us that our belonging doesn't depend on our own personal goodness or badness, our respectability, our resume, or our reaching out to Jesus--it depends on his hold on us, which, fortunately, is the "love that will not let us go," as the old hymn puts it.  And that realization will disarm and short-circuit our judgments about the other riff-raff Jesus is letting on his team.  The people I don't think are worthy, or don't look like me, don't think like me, and don't act like me--they belong, too, because belonging to Jesus was never up to my picking them--it has always been about the pull of Jesus.

Whether that dawns on you from reading the story of Levi, being called to follow right from his tax office, or from watching a mix of metal fragments pulled into alignment by the invisible pull of a magnet, or however else you might learn it, know it is true.  We didn't audition or apply or even ask for Jesus first--his call comes first, like the hand offered and extended to pull us out onto the dance floor--and the next thing you know, by the compelling grace of Jesus' call, we find ourselves found.

Lord Jesus, draw us.  Draw us all.  Hold us, and hold a whole world full of people you have made, created capable of being held. All praise to you for the pull of your grace.

A Long Line of Extremists

A Long Line of Extremists--January 5, 2018

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

I sometimes used to wonder how Jesus knew when to start.

You know, as in, when to begin his public life--his movement; his campaign, if you like; his ministry and mission.  How did Jesus decide that this was the day to start speaking, on whatever day that happened to be?  Other stories, after all tell us that Jesus must have had some kind of internal sense about when the time was right--since his initial protest to his mother at a certain wedding reception that has run out of wine is simply, "My hour has not yet come."  Jesus has a sense, it would appear, of when the moment was right to begin.  

And oddly enough, it doesn't seem to have been triggered by something that looked religious at all.  It wasn't a holy day or religious festival.  It wasn't the Passover, the Day of Atonement, or the Fourth of July.  And it doesn't seem to have been any kind of personal milestone either, like some kind of messianic mid-life crisis on his 40th birthday making him wonder what he had ever "done" with his life so far.  

No, but rather, the only hint of a cue that Mark the Gospel writer gives is that John--the forerunner--had been arrested.  Consider that for a moment. Let it sink in.  The trigger, the tipping point moment, for Jesus to begin his movement was the point at which John was arrested.  That is to say, it was at the point at which there was no doubt whatsoever that continuing in John's work and message would also get Jesus in trouble. Ah, but as Andrew Greeley's line so perfectly puts it, nevertheless, despite the clear warnings of the risks and the consequences, "Jesus and his troublemaking go merrily on."

That is crucial to understanding who Jesus is, and what it will mean for us if we dare to follow him as well--not just in this year ahead, but all of our lives.  Jesus avoided neither controversy nor consequences of being regarded as a troublemaker--and at no point did he fuss that it wasn't fair when he got into trouble, or insist on special treatment because he was the Messiah, or try to change his message to avoid saying things that would upset the powerful people who had thrown John in prison and then had him killed.  That by itself is a mark of Jesus' courage.

Take a look at the way the Gospels summarize John the Baptizer's core message, and you'll see something like this: "Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!" (See Matthew 3:2, as a case in point.) And when it becomes clear that the powers of the day have done the worst they could do to try and silence and stop John, Jesus senses that the baton has been passed to him, as it were, and so Jesus takes up the same message, as Mark gives it to us here (and Matthew, too, just so you know I'm not playing fast and loose in some kind of  Evangelist Switcheroo).  Jesus says, "The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news."  Sound familiar?  Jesus doesn't swerve or soften the message.  He doesn't qualify or backpedal so that his words will sound less threatening to the Herods and Pilates and Respectable Religious Crowd.  He just picks up right where John left off, knowing that it will likely land him in at least the same hot water it landed John in.

One of my recurring rules of thumb as someone who has been trying to live the Jesus way of life, as fully as I could grasp it or try to grasp it still, is the reminder that if your mental picture of Jesus is of someone who would never do or say something provocative enough to get himself crucified, it is a sure sign you have confused the real, living, breathing Jesus with a dumb idol of your own liking, with all the rough and jagged parts smoothed away.  That also means recognizing that Jesus did not simply wander into thorny situations and accidently upset people, despite trying hard not to offend anybody.  It means that Jesus knew sometimes very well that he was headed into a confrontation with the priests or the Sadducees or the Pharisees or Herod's party, and he was willing to take whatever heat there was to be borne from it.  It means that Jesus, like John, was willing to criticize things, actions, and perspectives that were hypocritical, and that Jesus was willing to do such things from the beginning of his public life.

I am reminded of a line from Dr. King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," one of those works that I have made it my personal practice to read at least once a year (yes, usually in mid-January, for obvious reasons).  And while there are numerous passages in his letter that provoke and challenge me year after year, I am reminded again of these words today, in light of these verses from Mark's Gospel.  Dr. King writes:

"Was not Jesus an extremist for love: 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.' Was not Amos an extremist for justice: 'Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.' Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel: 'I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.' Was not Martin Luther an extremist: 'Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise, so help me God.'"

If our picture of Christianity is that it is simply a ticket to having a quiet, comfortable family life with a steadily rising income and a reserved seat in the afterlife, we have missed something crucial.  There is something fierce and relentless about the movement and the message of Jesus; loving in its ferocity, to be sure, and gracious as well as relentless, but something that will inescapably always look like trouble-making to the world at large. 

It has to be--Jesus is announcing that there is another Kingdom, another Reign, one that the powers of the day cannot control or thwart or comprehend.  And even more intimidating for the powers of the day--and for us in our self-centeredness, too, to be honest--the Kingdom that Jesus announces is an order of things in which God sets a table for anybodies and everybodies, rich and poor, women and men, "acceptable" and "unacceptable," insiders and outsiders, enemies, strangers, and neighbors alike.  Empires like Rome's and fiefdoms like Herod's can only thrive on dividing people into "us" against "them" and insisting that it's better to have a tyrant like Herod supposedly protecting "us" and our interests over against "them" and those other people out there who are "the enemy." But Jesus' message, like John's before him, announced that where God rules, even enemies are invited, and we find that MY well-being is inseparably tangled up in YOURS and in everybody getting fed. (If you need proof that this was also part of John's message, take a quick peek at Luke 3:10-11 and following.)  

To be a follower of Jesus, then, is necessarily to be signing up for a life of gracious trouble-making.  Troublemaking, not because we are trying to just make noise or need the limelight, but because the news of God's Reign (rather than Caesar's over the Empire or Herod's over Palestine, or me over my own life) will always disarm us at the same time it embraces us.

So let us be clear, then.  We have spent these last weeks--days the church calls Advent and the Days of Christmas--preparing ourselves to come face to face with this Jesus and to follow him.  Hopefully we at least have some clue now as to what we will be getting ourselves into when we hear him call us by name, as he is bound to do.  But let us go with eyes wide open, knowing that just like Jesus himself taking his cue when his fellow provocateur John was in jail, we will go in the footsteps of Jesus ready to be a part of his blessed, holy, troublemaking.

Let's go....

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to follow you, and the grace to be extremists of love as you lead us.

 

Like The Shape of the Wind

Like The Shape of the Wind--January 4, 2018

"John the baptizer appeared in the wilderness, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins. And people from the whole Judean countryside and all the people of Jerusalem were going out to him, and were baptized by him in the river Jordan, confessing their sins. Now John was clothed with camel's hair, with a leather belt around his waist, and he ate locusts and wild honey.  He proclaimed, 'The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals. I have baptized you with water, but he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit'." [Mark 1:4-8]

Nobody "decides" to be loved. 

You can't.  It's not your choice. 

If you are loved, it is a reality entirely out of your control, and depends on the choice of the one doing the loving--the "Lov-ER", so to speak.

But what can--and does--happen, and with some regularity on this planet in fact, is that people realize that they are beloved.  Now that is a thing.  And, I suppose, you could also say that once you realize you are beloved by someone, you do get to decide what you will do about that reality.  Will you allow yourself to be loved, or will you run from it?  Will you return the love, or will it go unrequited?  Will you allow love to shape you (because love, like the river that carved the Grand Canyon will shape you in its likeness over time), or will you harden your heart?  These are open questions, but to be clear, they are responses to finding yourself beloved, not conditions for acquiring that love.

The same is true with being forgiven, honestly--and this is a point about which we seem to be rather confused.  You can't "decide" to be forgiven.  It is, like being loved, a condition that one receives.  Someone else does the forgiving (or not).  Someone else decides not to weaponize the past and hold it against you anymore. But you cannot choose to be forgiven any more than you can choose to be found "not guilty" by the judge in court.  It is a status that is given by someone else's choice--the real question is how you will respond to the gift of being forgiven.  You can act like it is true, and allow the burying of hatchets (and the shovels that buried those hatchets, too) to restore the relationship you once had.  You can decide to walk away, never to darken the other person's doorstep again.  You can decide to stay bent in on yourself as though the forgiveness had not been extended.  You can act like you never did anything wrong and never needed forgiveness in the first place.  Those are all possible options, I suppose--but notice that among all of them, they are all responses (or non-responses, in some cases) to being forgiven, not conditions one must fulfill in order to "win" or "earn" or "deserve" forgiveness.

And, as with finding yourself beloved, you can choose whether or not to allow the reality of being forgiven to shape you--to allow it to leave its mark on you like the wind carving the hills in the Painted Desert.  And that is indeed your choice--to be turned in the direction of the forgiver, or to hold on to your damned pride (and I mean that literally), dig your heels in, and turn away from the free gift of a new beginning.  You may choose not to "like" the fact of being forgiven, and you may choose to continue doing the terrible things that broke relationship in the first place.  But you cannot decide to be forgiven--that can only be given to you.

We need to be clear about all of those things before we take a look at one last figure who will help us to prepare for Jesus and his call to us.  We need to be clear that being forgiven, like being loved, comes first, if we are going to understand what John the Baptizer was all about.  When Mark the Gospel-writer summarizes John's project, he says John came on the scene "proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins."  And that could sound very much like John imagined that if you prayed the right prayer, or said you were sorry enough, or did enough good deeds to prove your contrition along with his Jordan River Dunking ceremony, you would be forgiven.  It could sound like John's offer was that if you participated in his water ritual and then promised God that you would be a good little Gallant instead of a naughty ol' Goofus, then you would acquire forgiveness.

This would be a mistake.

I say that, not only because the nature of forgiveness itself is that, like being loved, it is someone else's choice to love you, not your choice to "be loved," but also because the deeper Biblical concept we translate as "repentance" has more to do with a change of mind and a new way of thinking, seeing, and responding to the world than it does with saying you are sorry, or feeling guilty, or walking up to the altar at church.  "Repenting," at least as the Greek word was used in the first-century AD, looks more like a change of allegiance, a rearranging of priorities, or a change of mindset based on new information, rather than a matter of feeling "guilty enough" for sins or earning brownie points to get in good with the Divine.

So, rather than imagining that John the Baptizer's message boiled down to, "If you want to convince God to grant you forgiveness in the future, come out into the river with me and you will procure it for yourself," it's much more like John was saying, "Are you ready to decide to live in response to what God has already decided about you?  Good--then let this be the moment you remember as the time you quit being defined by the old orientation of your life, and let this water be an object lesson for you of the way forgiveness shapes you like erosion carves rock."  It was the beginning of a turning--a turning toward the direction of the Forgiver rather than being further bent in on oneself.  But John, who was never one to be impressed by empty ritual, certainly wasn't saying that if you did his little aquatic ceremony, that you could earn something that can only be given to you in the first place.

That means, in the end, that preparing for Jesus' entry into our lives is less about trying to make ourselves look good in order to impress the Messiah when he comes (as though he couldn't see our present messes!), and more about whether we will decide to see the world as Jesus would have us... whether we will see ourselves as Jesus would have us... whether we will see our priorities and choices, our actions and words, through the same truthful light that Jesus does.  There is a cost, to be sure, to taking John up on his offer of repentance--the cost of the old orientation in exchange for the new.  There is a loss, you could say, but it is a loss like the lumpy jagged boulders that are smoothed out and transformed by the shape of the wind over eons, until they are works of art in stone in the desert.  What is lost is only what was not the shape of the wind.

I am reminded of a lyric from Jon Foreman of the band Switchfoot, who sings as in a prayer, "Oh Erosion, Spirit fall like rain on my thirsty soul... Erosion, Oh sweet Erosion, break me and make me whole."  Such a prayer is what repentance looks like--a choice to let Love shape us into Love's own likeness, a turning toward the One who has already done the forgiving, a daring to see the world from the vantage point of finding yourself forgiven and to act like it is true.  Like the old hymn goes, "Love to the loveless shown... that they might lovely be."  

To prepare for Jesus' entry onto the scene in our own lives is not about trying to show enough effort to win the status of being forgiven or being loved.  It is to make the choice to see the world and ourselves as Jesus teaches us to see it, to give our allegiance to Jesus' way in the world rather than our own, to let his Spirit shape us like the wind and the rain and the river shaping rocks.  That's what John was getting people riled up in the desert about, and that is what his witness calls us to on this day, too.

Hear this now, then: you are beloved.  You are forgiven.  You cannot do a thing about it, neither to make it happen or undo it.  Being loved and forgiven is not your choice--it is God's, who does the loving and the forgiving.  

The only question that remains, then, is--how will you respond to God's choice to love and forgive you? And dare we let the Spirit shape us in the direction of such Love, like the boulders yield to take the shape of the wind?

Lord Jesus, we dare to believe what you say about us.  We dare to pledge our allegiance to you and to your Reign.  We dare to let your Holy Wind, your Divine Breath, shape us according to your love.

The God Who Grew Up

The God Who Grew Up--January 3, 2018

"When they had finished everything required by the law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him." [Luke 2:39-40]

Jesus was a boy who grew up.  Huh.  How about that.

These few sentences seem so ordinary--like they are talking about just any ordinary boy--and there is a reason for that. Jesus was like any other ordinary boy.

He was.

For whatever else we might have to say about him also being the very Son of God, the most orthodox thing you can say about Jesus is that he is one of us. In fact, the early church fought long and hard to end up saying that Jesus is a perfectly ordinary human (while, yes, also, insisting that Jesus is none other than 100% God at the same time), rather than some kind of curious hybrid, or approximation, or replicant, or divine emanation. Whatever it means, deep down, to be human... Jesus is.  Whatever beauty, whatever fragility, whatever strengths, whatever limits, and whatever capacity for growth come along with being a member of Homo sapiens, Jesus had them all in spades.

And so part of the beauty of such an ordinary-sounding paragraph from Luke about Jesus growing up is precisely that it could be said about just about anybody's teenage child.  They grow up--as they are supposed to do. Jesus did.  Jesus grew strong, and he grew wise.  That's what human beings are supposed to do.  And so... Jesus did, too.

There's a whole rabbit trail worth of theologizing we could do thinking about what it means that God-with-us--the Incarnate God-from-God and Light-from-Light--had a childhood so ordinary you wouldn't know if was your own life story if the names were removed from the page.  And that really is one of the wonders of what the Christian faith has claimed for the last two thousand years: that God (whatever it means to be God) chose to enter into a human life in all its fullness, so that whatever we do actually end up meaning by the word "God" has to also be capable of taking on our humanity, precarious as it sometimes can be.

But let's consider the flip side for a moment.  Jesus not only shows us what God is really like in his willingness to share our life with us, but Jesus also shows us what it really means to be human.

That's saying something... because, honestly, I'm not all that sure we really know what humans are for.  I rather get the impression a lot of the time that we never even ask a question like that--it doesn't occur to us that it might be a question worth asking: "What are human beings for?" Or to put it differently, "What is a well-lived life for a human being?"

But for whatever else Jesus will have to say to us or show to us about God, he also shows us what it means to be fully human ourselves.  That's part of why writers and theologians like Walter Wink suggest that Jesus' favorite title for himself, "Son of Man," from the Gospels, is really best understood as meaning, "The Truly Human One," as in, the one who shows us and embodies what it means to be human.

So maybe it shouldn't surprise us that Jesus the boy grows up, and gets stronger, and becomes wiser.  That's part of what humans are meant for.  That bit about wisdom is more important than we usually give it credit for, too.  It's important, and not just because our culture is not great at realizing the value of real wisdom as oppose to technical knowledge, or celebrity status, or market savvy to make a buck.  Being wise is essentially all about knowing what things are for, and acting accordingly.  

It might not seem controversial to say that wisdom is important in life... but if we are going to grant that Jesus was and is "full of wisdom," as Luke says, then it will mean that we are compelled to accept that Jesus' view of the world, Jesus' "take" on life and humanity and God, and Jesus' way of engaging the world, are what wisdom looks like, rather than whatever other convoluted, self-interested schemes we might come up with.  Jesus is wise--confessing that means admitting that Jesus just might know more than I do about what it means to be human.  And in turn, the wiser we become, the more and more we will become like Jesus himself.  

I am reminded of a line of Dallas Willard's from The Divine Conspiracy in which the theologian writes something like this: Jesus is not only Lord, but he is smart.  If you can line up with other churchgoers and profess the first one (Jesus is Lord) by heart without batting an eyelash, but have to pause, look around, and blush before you can say the second (Jesus is smart), you've missed the point of the Christian faith.  Willard's point is a good one--if we say Jesus is Lord but just don't think he's being "reasonable" or "realistic" when he says things about the way God runs the universe on justice and mercy, we don't really believe that Jesus is Lord.  No, in that case, we are just trying to use Jesus as our empty religious mascot or figurehead, onto whom we can project anything we like.

To say that Jesus shows us what it really means to be human is to admit that in so many ways, we aren't that good at being human. We are, rather, terribly inhuman to one another, to ourselves, to the world, and to God.  And what Jesus offers us in all his humanity is a picture of what it would look like if we let him bend us out of the knots we have tied ourselves into, and turn us outward to each other, to God, and to creation.  That is what we were meant to be all along, and Jesus gives us that--he shows it to us in himself, and he also creates it within us.  Like the old church father Irenaeus used to say, "The glory of God is a human being, fully alive."  When we are human--fully human and what we were meant to be, in practicing mercy and justice, love and forgiveness, beauty and courage, owning our fragility and unafraid of others' strengths--we are indeed a glimpse of God the Master Artist's glory.  We are, in those moments, as we were always made to be, "the image of God."

It is in the moments we slide back into silly, childish contests of whose stick is bigger, whose brains are smarter, and whose face is more lovely, that we somehow become less than we were meant to be.  And that--precisely that--is what it means to embrace Jesus' kind of wisdom rather than anybody else's.  The world's conventional wisdom says you have to brag and puff yourself up and threaten and cajole and make yourself look bigger, stronger, and tougher than the next person, or else you'll be a laughingstock.  It is the currency of bullies throughout history to play the "my-fist-is-bigger-than-yours" game, and it reveals how deeply insecure and in-human we really are when we deal in such thinking.  But Jesus' kind of wisdom--Jesus' way of being human, so to speak--says that we are at our most glorious when we abandon the gamesmanship and brinksmanship and braggadocio and live vulnerably, opened outward to the world rather than bent in on oneself.

To say that Jesus grew up and became strong and wise is not only a classic creedal declaration that Jesus is fully human like you or me; it is also to say that Jesus--the Truly Human One--reveals what it means to be fully human, over against all the many was we self-centeredly settle for less than humanity toward one another. 

Praise be to the One whose glory is in the face of a child who grows up.

Lord Jesus, show us--and make us more fully into--what true humanity looks like.

Hope Bigger Than Ourselves

Hope Bigger Than Ourselves--January 2, 2018

"There was also a prophet, Anna the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher. She was of a great age, having lived with her husband for seven years after her marriage, then as a widow to the age of eighty-four. She never left the temple but worshipped there with fasting and prayer night and day. At that moment she came, and began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem." [Luke 2:36-38]

In our journey to get closer to Jesus, the thirty-something male rabbi, God has pointed us to an octogenarian woman... because, you know... God.

In all seriousness, it might seem like an odd detour to turn our focus for one day to a character in the Bible like Anna who gets all of four verses' mention in the whole book, and no speaking lines.  And it might seem like a strange strategy to try and learn more about Jesus by looking more closely at someone who is not Jesus, and who only ever met Jesus, as far as anybody can tell, just this once when the once-and-future Messiah was still in diapers and therefore not much for conversation.  But it turns out that you can learn something about a person by looking at the way others talk about them.  And you can learn something about Jesus by looking at the kind of people who are willing to look like utter fools because of their joy over him.

So, in a way, rather like the way they detect gravitational waves by looking for the ways they effect the reflection of light, or perhaps a bit more down to earth like seeing someone just out of the corner of your eye, we'll catch a better glimpse of Jesus by considering what Anna, this eighty-four-year-old woman of God, saw in him.

And that's the key question: just what did Anna think was worth getting all excited about with this child she was seeing for the first (and probably last) time on earth?  We can probably rule out some things that are NOT on her list.  For one, Anna isn't looking at Jesus as her ticket to fame or notoriety for herself--after all she doesn't ever see him again as far as we know, so she's not looking to ride Jesus' coattails.  She isn't cruising for a husband or a meal ticket or someone she can leverage for political influence or a better reputation.  Luke, after all, has rather diplomatically said that Anna is already eighty-four and basically lives at the temple.  In fact, whatever will come of Jesus in adulthood, in all likelihood, Anna won't be there to see it happening, much less benefiting from it.  She's jumping up and down for joy over a child she has never met, will never see again, and who will not teach a lesson, preach a sermon, or work a miracle until long after she is a memory herself.

And yet--and this is something I have come to love about this Anna--there she is, making a scene among the bystanders all around, convinced that this child is worth getting excited about.  Her hope is bigger than herself, quite simply.  She knows (Anna is no fool, after all) that whatever this helpless infant before her eyes will one day grow up to do, she won't see it when it happens.  She won't benefit from it in lived history, or be the recipient of a miracle from Jesus when he's all grown up.  She won't get money or prestige or power for herself because of her connection to Jesus, which is barely a connection at all.  But she knows that Jesus' coming--his presence in the world--is good for more than just her.  Jesus brings more than just perks for Anna, but rather what Luke calls here "the redemption of Jerusalem," the restoration of all creation, and the in-breaking of God's Reign over all the world.  Anna knows she won't be able to see what it looks like, but she knows that this whole hurting world needs what Jesus offers. And because of that, she rejoices.

That is an example we could stand to learn from, while we are on the subject.  Sometimes our focus is so self-centered that we can only get excited about something if there is a quick and obvious answer to the question, "What's in it for ME?" first.  Sometimes we try and turn Jesus in our personal genie, as though he is here to get me a car or a promotion or a soulmate, and that the primary reason to associate with Jesus is what he can do for our work lives, family lives, or personal wish lists.  What's worse, of course, is that there are plenty of folks in the Respectable Religious Crowd--with smooth-talking TV preachers at the front of that line, too--who basically send the message that God is here to get YOU a bigger house, a larger paycheck, and the prosperity we all convince ourselves we deserve.  

But Anna's life reminds us that when you are really tuned in to the movement of God, you come to care less and less about what you'll "get" from your wish list, and more about how God works for good among all of us.  It's less about hoping I get in on the ground floor with God as a supporter so that one day I'll be rewarded with a prize, and more about seeing God work in ways that are bigger than my own little world.  Anna shows us that what makes Jesus worth getting excited about is always bigger than just how Jesus can help ME right now.  She reminds me that in God's order of things, we get excited for seeing God work even if it doesn't directly benefit me. 

And beyond that Anna teaches us how to see our whole lives in Christ's light.  Instead of being people who only care about what will directly benefit me or what will help our my bottom line, Anna's witness teaches us to be able to rejoice simply at the signs that God is moving in the world, whether or not I get a windfall from God's hand as part of the plan.  And that in turn teaches us to see the love of Christ and the way Jesus rules, because Jesus' own life (and death and resurrection) were all about giving himself away for the world in love.  Anna's joyous outburst over the birth of the Messiah is a song in the same key as the Messiah's own life, and death, and resurrection.  In this culture of ours that makes Jesus just one more distributor of heavenly prizes, Anna's joy reminds us that Jesus' Reign is always bigger and wider than we could have imagined.  

So, yeah, on a day like today, if you want to know about Jesus, you'll need to study the life of an eighty-plus year old lady who only met him once... and who saw the world was changed all the same through him.

Lord Jesus, let your Reign unfold in our midst, where we are, as we are.

A New (Real) Hope

A New (Real) Hope--January 1, 2018

"Then Simeon blessed them and said to his mother Mary, ‘This child is destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many will be revealed—and a sword will pierce your own soul too'." [Luke 2:34-35]

Beginnings are funny things.  

We have a way of projecting all sort of things onto them, of seeing the raw potential in the newness of a thing, and putting our hopes onto them.  We do it every year between December 31 and this morning, the first of a new year, as you hear people whisper to themselves, "This will be the year that it all comes together for me..." or "This will be the year when the business will take off," or "This will be the year I can finally put my feet up and relax!" Wishes about getting the promotion, or losing the weight, or making the team, or finding romance, or whatever else--we can't help putting our hopes on the blank slate of a new calendar.

And that's understandable.  A new beginning has a beauty to it like a blanket of freshly fallen snow before it gets sludged up by traffic and ash. New Year's Day is too early for disappointment, too full of possibility for us to hold back from pinning our wishes onto it. 

But we also know better, too.  We have lived through enough New Year's Eves and New Year's Days, to know that the freshness gets stale soon enough. We have lived through enough years coming and going to know that a simple change of numerals in the year or the turning of a page in the calendar doesn't, by itself, have the power to fuel all those wishes.   After all, the change from one year to another is still a rather arbitrary date--there is no finish line in space marking where the Earth has completed another lap around the sun, only our choice to use January 1 as a signpost that we have gone around again.

Other moments of potential newness have a way of letting us down, too.  The Browns and their fans held such hope in the start of a new game--maybe this one would be the win they had been waiting for all season!  Ah, but no--my dear old hometown team found a way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and made for a winless season.  Turns out the kickoff that starts a new game doesn't necessarily make for real newness.

We have seen it all our lives with changes in leaders and ruling political parties, all of whom make big promises of new beginnings and all of whom just as surely disappoint and divide.  For whatever hopes we have had that "This time, things will be different--it really will be GREAT!" we have been soon enough let down to see it was all bluster and braggadocio, the same big talk dressed up in a different suit and tie. At some point you just learn to see through all the nonsense and give up on believing the big, loud voices promising that they, and only they, are worthy of our hopes for newness.  They never are--just some you can tell in advance they are full of hot air, and some disappoint you slowly and sadly over time.

Truly new beginnings, with real freshness and hope, are harder to come by.  They are moments and events that sneak up on you. They rarely announce themselves.  They come when we are least expecting them, and often we don't realize our lives are changed until we look back in hindsight and see again the moment at which everything began to shift.  The kinds of beginnings that are worthy of our hope have a way of quietly walking into the room like a baby carried in his mother's arms, going unnoticed by most except for a precious few who knew to be looking.

That's what stands out about Simeon's story here in Luke's Gospel.  He senses the presence of newness in the child Jesus, but it is a quiet sort of arrival.  Most other folks are so busy with their own religious business in the temple that they don't notice anything unusual about the baby and his mother walking in for the customary rites and rituals after a birth.  There's not a trumpet blast or a twitter storm announcing their arrival, and there's no press conference calling everyone's attention to witness the entry of the Promised Child.

And that, in and of itself, is part of the real wonder, the real new-ness, of what this child brings.  Messiah comes, but under the radar.  The Savior arrives, but needs no imperial edict to make everybody turn their heads and notice.  The Promised One enters onto the scene, but doesn't require a parade of fawning onlookers.  The Christ does not toot his own horn--he doesn't need to.  After all of history's self-promoting, self-congratulating would-be saviors, the real newness of the child Simeon takes in arms is that his greatness doesn't need advertising.  (Like Thatcher's old line that being powerful is like being a lady--if you have to tell people you are, you are not; Jesus doesn't have to tell the world how "great" he is.)  The newness has already begun, even while Jesus is a baby held in arms.  He requires neither pomp nor circumstance, and nobody has to wear any funny glasses.  Faith in a God who keeps promises is the only necessary lens to see it.

This child is different--perhaps exactly because he is a child like anybody else.  The wonder, after all, of the Incarnation, is that God doesn't blush to wear our humanity as fully as we do, without any gold foil or tailored suits.  The world's past empty-promisers-of-newness all had to convince us that they were "different," that they were "special," that they were somehow better, or smarter, or richer, or cleverer than the rest of us--as if their specialness was how they would at last bring real new-ness.  And that was why they have always failed to deliver--we are tired of the same old game of King-of-the-Hill, with contenders pushing each other from the top of the heap and stepping on whomever they must to get there.  Real newness comes from below--from right in our midst.  

And in the new order of things--what we have learned from Jesus to call the "Reign of God" or "the Kingdom"--what God does is to end all of our silly, futile game-playing, by setting a table where there is room for all.  The lowly and unacceptable are lifted up and led to their seats, and the proud and puffed up are deflated so that, humbled, they can share at the same meal.  Simeon sees it, too--he sees that the child is destined for "the falling and rising" of many--not just that he will climb his way up to greatness for himself, but that in the coming of Jesus, there is a new way of life together, where the high and mighty are brought down, and the nobodies are told they are precious.   And unlike all of the false newness that has let us down before, the difference with Jesus is that he doesn't just keep the old system of dog-eat-dog and put a new dog in the Alpha spot.  Jesus' new way of life rearranges all of our old priorities and relationships so that we no longer scramble to be "better than" or "greater than" or even to rush to put "me and my group first."  Jesus' new way trains the muscles of our souls to bend to one another as we take turns putting one another before ourselves, so that, as the old Shaker hymn puts it, "to bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed."

That is what makes the child in Simeon's arms the bringer of something truly new, even though this moment is more than two thousand years in the past.  This is what makes Jesus worthy of our hope, in a way that the Times Square ball and blank calendars cannot.  They only ever reset the same old order of things and tell us to try it again. 

Jesus reorders everything--his is a beginning that at long last finally feels... new.

Lord Jesus, come and reorder our lives, our hearts, our communities, our politics, our thoughts, and our loves--that is, come and let your re-ordering Reign come among us.