What Keeps Jesus Going--June 4, 2020

What Keeps Jesus Going--June 4, 2020

"Now during those days Jesus went out to the mountain to pray; and he spent the night in prayer to God."  [Luke 6:12]

What brought Jesus to life?  Like in the sense of daily rejuvenating him, what kept Jesus--the actual homeless brown-skinned Galilean rabbi Jesus--going in his work?  What kept him able to face his dense and thick-headed disciples again after they did or said something stupid (again)?  What enabled him to keep facing hostile attacks from the Respectable Religious Crowd and to respond with a graceful truth-telling that neither let them off the hook nor gave into answer hatred with hatred?  What gave Jesus the strength to keep putting himself in those provocative situations where he ate with sinners, helped someone from a different nationality, touched the untouchable, engaged women like equals, or healed someone on the sabbath day? What fueled his righteous outrage when he saw structures and institutions meant for good--like the Temple itself--being used in ways that preyed on people? And what grounded Jesus, on the days he felt like the loneliest person on the planet, to assure him that he was and forever would be God's Beloved Child?

Quite simply, he prayed.

Jesus prayed, and it certainly seems that this regular practice brought him to life at those points he was running on empty and needed to be both filled and reoriented to face the world again.  He prayed--which is nothing more than saying he picked up a conversation with God and continued it right where he had left off--and it kept Jesus centered on what he needed to do, even when it was difficult, or unpleasant, painful, or demanded courage.  Praying, it seems, was a big part of how Jesus himself could keep on keeping on.

And I have to think that part of why Luke tells us so often about Jesus' habit of going off by himself to pray, even through the whole night, is that he offers Jesus' way as an open invitation for us as well.  I do believe that the Gospel writers think that praying like Jesus will have a way of sustaining us--of keeping us alive and renewing us--when the days are difficult to get through.  And they are, aren't they?  They are so difficult, sometimes it feels like we are juggling too many terrible things at once and are about to drop them all.  But Jesus always had a lot on his plate, too.  You never see Jesus twiddling his thumbs (or using them to scroll through the screen of his smart phone out of boredom) because he's got nothing to do.  And yet, for all the furious busyness and the weight laid on him, Jesus was brought to life with each new day in his regular practice of praying.

What if that gift really were there for us... just waiting for us to make use of it?

Because... it is.

Now, to be clear, praying isn't magic.  It wasn't for Jesus, and it isn't for us.  Praying doesn't make your troubles go away, and it doesn't work mechanistically.  Prayer isn't really even a means to an end, because the point of praying is--praying.  That is to say, prayer is conversation, connection, contemplation, and even communion with the God who is life.  So if you want to be more fully alive, yeah, it makes sense to be intentional in what the old saint called "practicing the presence of God."  It's not like a reward--God doesn't sit up in heaven promising good feelings as a positive reinforcement for every time you mutter the Lord's Prayer or for every five minutes you keep your eyes closed and your hands folded.  Prayer is connection with the living God--it is the being in touch with the very Source of Life.  

We don't get any sense that Jesus spent his prayer time just demanding things (or even wishing things) from God, so much as he spent his time listening, asking, seeking, and re-centering.  Those things don't usually take the form of, "God give me this thing and I'll be happy."  We have a way in our consumeristic culture of seeing prayer primarily as a way of "getting" things--and that's why there's a cottage industry of religious-people's books offering their proposals for how to get God to answer your prayers, or what words to use.  But that's not how Jesus used prayer.  It was his lifeline like drinking water from the canteen is what keeps a thirsty soul alive in the desert.  

So maybe it's not about getting the technique right, or the number of times a day we do it, or whether there is incense or candlelight in the background.  And maybe instead it is simply about facing the day with intentional invitation to the Source of Life, the God of mercy and justice, the Christ who claims us, and the Spirit of creation to speak... and to make us to listen.  Maybe the way you and I find the energy to keep going back into a world full of rottenness is to pray like we are picking up a conversation with an old friend.  Maybe the way we keep the resolve and courage to keep trying to be decent people in indecent times is to pray for God's presence to carry us through.  Maybe the way to keep our heads on straight when we feel like we are losing them is to ask God to keep turning us in the right direction.  And maybe the way we work up the nerve to do some honest truth-telling with ourselves about our failings is to come to the God who has already forgiven us.

The world is going to demand a lot from you today, just to keep your head above water.  But when we are on the verge of wilting in our souls, we are invited to be brought back to  life simply by opening up the conversation with the One who is our life.

May we take that time today, so that we may be made fully alive--and so that we may be ready to face what God will send us into.

Lord God, help us in this new day.  Ground us in your love.  Equip us with your gifts.  Show us your way.  Fill us with your life.

When I Am the Villain--June 3, 2020

When I Am the Villain--June 3, 2020

"About that time no little disturbance broke out concerning the Way. A man named Demetrius, a silversmith who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the artisans. These he gathered together, with the workers of the same trade, and said, 'Men, you know that we get our wealth from this business. You also see and hear that not only in Ephesus but in almost the whole of Asia this Paul has persuaded and drawn away a considerable number of people by saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this trade of ours may come into disrepute but also that the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be scorned, and she will be deprived of her majesty that brought all Asia and the world to worship her'. When they heard this, they were enraged and shouted, 'Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!'" [Acts 19:23-28]

A warning: be careful when you decide to make business your religion. The gods of profit are fragile things and easily broken... and yet they have an insatiable hunger for human sacrifice.

Look, I know that this strange little scene buried in the back-nine of the book of Acts probably seems obscure and distant from our daily life.  And I know it may seem that a story centered on people who make little silver idols of a pagan goddess will have very little to do with our day and our culture, which likes to imagine it is vaguely Christian (or at least has memories of calling itself Christian).  But in a way, this lesser-known story from the early witness of the church is just the kind of story we need to take an honest look at ourselves, and what we will and will not allow to interfere with the comfortable systems we live in... the systems that pay our paychecks and fill our bellies.

Because here's the thing: this random silversmith named Demetrius has just said out loud all the things that we are constantly tempted to live by--but that we are afraid to admit are true.  And maybe we owe him and his conniving scheme to get Paul and the Christian movement into trouble a debt of gratitude.  He forces us to take an honest look at what lengths we go to for the sake of holding onto money, power, and prestige. As the saying goes, Demetrius here "says the quiet parts loud." That is to say, he comes out and says the unsavory things that nobody else wanted to admit they thought.  And as uncomfortable as that may make me, even reading his words two thousand years later, I know I need it.  I need to be pushed beyond what is comfortable to see where I have made systems of money or privilege or comfort into my god.

The gist of this scene is actually pretty simple, and Demetrius' logic, although deplorable and amoral, is at least sound.  He is a silversmith--his job is making stuff out of silver.  In particular, their city is famous for having a temple dedicated to the Greek goddess Artemis, and part of that whole cult of Artemis is the use (and therefore the selling) of silver shrines to her.  In other words, she happens to be the goddess with a local temple in town, but the thing Demetrius is most concerned about is losing his business if something should affect the worship of Artemis.  This is not a guy who is really convinced that Artemis is a real divine being, so this is not like his deeply held piety is in crisis.  This is a guy who knows that religion is good business... and so he has made a living in the business of religion.  When he gets the other silversmiths together, he just lays it all out like that.  They have to silence this guy Paul they've heard about (this would be Saint Paul, the apostle who wrote half of the New Testament), not because he is actually disturbing the peace or violently causing an uproar to others, but because his message will be bad for business.  Demetrius sees that they have to get Paul branded as a troublemaker, a rabble-rouser, and a dangerous public enemy, because they realize that their bottom line is threatened by his message that little metal figurines aren't real gods, no matter how shiny they are.  Demetrius is mad about losing money, and so he organizes the others in his business to bad-mouth Paul and start a riot to get Paul either in trouble with the authorities or hurt him enough to get him to go away.  Like Eisenhower's famous warning about the "military-industrial complex" becoming a never-ending cycle where we "needed" to have more and more weapons, not because there were necessarily more and more enemies, but because it pumped the economy, and so we convinced ourselves that more and more weapons were needed to fight ominous enemies everywhere, Demetrius knows that there's a religious-industrial complex that will always demand to be fed and protected.  At least he's honest about what is really driving his motives, I guess.

Almost like a stereotypical action movie villain (I hear echoes of Goldfinger's big evil scheme speech while James Bond overhears) reciting his plan to his henchmen, Demetrius just puts it out there: they need to keep the system the way it is, because they have a vested interest in it.  Their comfortable lifestyles and cushy places in society come from keeping the Artemis-cult in full swing, and so they will do whatever it takes to keep that business booming.  It is a matter, not only of money, but of keeping the status of their city and keeping their influence in that city.  And boy, when money, prestige, and power are on the line, it sure is tempting to sell your soul to hold onto that unholy trinity.  

The thing that just haunts me about this snippet from Acts is that if you're Demetrius and his gang, all of this seems good and noble.  If you're part of the Silversmith Lobby of Ephesus, it seems indeed right and salutary to want to do everything in your power to stop Paul.  From their vantage point, Paul is a direct threat to everything they hold dear: the "greatness" of their city, their heritage, their prestige, their identity, and yes, their fortunes.  Being opposed to idol-worship in Ephesus would be taken as subversive, unpatriotic, and dangerous to the local economy!  Of course any red-blooded Ephesian would be willing to rough up some outsider named Paul and his religious message that was opposed to that whole system--they wanted to keep making money, and they wanted to protect their local economy, and they wanted to keep telling themselves they were "great."  And as long as they had a booming cult of a popular goddess, they could keep all the other wheels of business turning.  It would have to be pretty hard to stand up against all of that and speak up against it.  You'd be viewed as an insidious threat, even if all you ever used were your words.

So, yeah... we don't have silver-smithing as a major economic power these days.  And by and large the First Church of Artemis doesn't have the sway it once had, maybe.  But without a doubt there are the same pressures, the same competing impulses, and the same wicked logic around us all the time.  So often, we get swept up in preserving "the system"--the way things are, all around us--because we build our jobs, and our families, and our livelihoods, and our pride on those systems.  And when anything--even the Gospel of Jesus Christ--seems to threaten that system, we find ways to stifle it, discredit it, silence it, or to ignore it.  Once we decide we are committed to keeping things "the way they are," we will start getting defensive about anything that rocks that boat or threatens the way the system works--even if the system is terrible for some people.

Let's stop kidding ourselves--what we believe about the God revealed in Jesus Christ is going to upset a lot of the systems we have all built our lives on.  In the first century, it was the way Paul's message threatened the local economy of idol-manufacturers.  Eight hundred years before Paul it was the way the prophets called out the business-owners of Israel who didn't want to give time off for sabbath because it would cut into their profits.  And in this moment, it is quite possible we don't want to consider the way my comfortable way of life comes at the expense of other people who aren't able to get by.  We have gotten used to systems that told (and still tell) black people they were worth less than white people's lives--from the original Three-Fifths Compromise written into our Constitution, to the segregation of schools and businesses, to the way black bodies seem to be more easily regarded as collateral damage in the course of doing business than other bodies.  And for whatever ways we have made progress as a society over the centuries, they have come only because folks were willing, like Paul in Ephesus, to speak in ways that challenged "the way things were," even when Demetrius and his gang were waiting for them and pounding their fists.  It has been much the same in the ways women are regarded in our society, or the way people with disabilities are regarded, or any of a number of other challenges to "the way things are" over time.  It is always terrifyingly easy to assume "the way things are" is the same as "the way they have always been and always should be, forever and ever, Amen." But Paul's example shows us it just ain't so.

Sometimes I think we assume that Christianity only ever enters those conversations as a voice of "let's keep things the way they are," and that's because often Respectable Religious folk have used the trappings of Christianity in only that way.  But if we take this story from Acts seriously, it seems that from the beginning, Christians with credentials as solid as Paul himself understood that sometime the Gospel will run counter to "what's good for business," or "what's comfortable for me," or "what lets me stay insulated from the troubles of others."  And when Paul's message ran into people whose livelihoods and sense of "greatness" depended on keeping the system the way it was, Paul knew he was headed into trouble, even though he was never one to cause destruction or violence or harm to others.  

Look, I'm not asking any of us to become martyrs here, and I'm not trying to excuse any of the destruction happening across the country we live in where peaceful protests curdle into opportunistic looting and violence.  But I do see in myself the temptation to want to ignore the sincere voices of protest because it is uncomfortable to have to look at the ways I am Demetrius, which is to say, when I am the villain--the ways I am entangled in all kinds of systems and patterns in my own life that come at the cost of others.  I want to imagine, as a religious professional, that I am always on the side of goodness and truth and light... and yet, so did Demetrius.  We all want to imagine that whatever is good for business, or for boosting community pride or national greatness, must be perfectly consistent with the Gospel of Jesus Christ.  And yet the witness of the actual Scriptures testifies otherwise--that there are an awful lot of ways each of us has gotten entangled in patterns and habits and systems that benefit "us" but harm others, and when that happens, we get defensive, rather than letting the Gospel rearrange our priorities and disentangle us from those systems.

The hope I hear in this passage, as odd as it may seem to call this hope, is that despite all the attempts of the Ephesian Gang of Silversmiths, the Gospel came to town and compelled people to re-examine their allegiances.  As uncomfortable as it may have been for them, some people did let the Spirit of God rearrange their lives, even if it meant they made less money or their city's "greatness" (rooted in literal idolatry) was tarnished.  And that gives me hope that God won't give up on me when I am the defensive one, clutching onto "the way things are" because I'm afraid the Gospel will make me squirm.  

God doesn't give up on us, even when that means God has to keep sending truth-telling "troublemakers" like Paul, who force us to see where our lives our out of sync with the way of Jesus.  For all the ways I am still stuck in systems I want to pretend aren't even there, that is good news to my stubborn ears.  God won't give up on me.  God hasn't yet.

Lord Jesus, make us to see the ways we are stuck and don't want to admit it, and help us to hear your Gospel as the way of freedom from all that we are entangled in... so that all can be free.

Through the Smoke--June 2, 2020

Through the Smoke--June 2, 2020

"Many crowds followed [Jesus], and he cured all of them, and he ordered them not to make him known. This was to fulfill what had been spoken through the prophet Isaiah: 

'Here is my servant, whom I have chosen,

    my beloved, with whom my soul is well pleased.

 I will put my Spirit upon him,

    and he will proclaim justice to the Gentiles.

 He will not wrangle or cry aloud,

    nor will anyone hear his voice in the streets.

 He will not break a bruised reed

    or quench a smoldering wick

 until he brings justice to victory.

     And in his name the Gentiles will hope'." [Matthew 12:15b-21]

In the Bible, the greatest examples of power show up as gentleness.  And the truest forms of strength look at first blush like being "weak."  Full stop.

Now, I get it that saying this runs counter to our usual expectations.  For sure, it is the opposite of the way that conventional wisdom sees power or strength.  Those voices you and I already know.  We can't get away from them--after all, they ain't called "the powers" for nothin'.  They shout and bellow and threaten, and pose for photo ops to do it, and then dress it all up with the appearance of Respectable Religion.  And yet, against all the background noise of that bluster, and through all the smoke, there is an alternative.  It is the way of Jesus.  And the Gospel writers have been pointing to him through that haze all along, calling us to see, not a spectacle of domination or force or violence, but of compelling gentleness.  The biblical writers want us to see it, too: that true power doesn't cajole or rattle a saber in one hand while holding a Bible in the other, but stoops to lift up a bent blade of grass, and pauses to help a flickering candle to shine again.  This is the power of God, not the loud counterfeits that surround us at every turn.

This really is a radical thing to say.  It certainly is today, but it was just as scandalous when Matthew wrote these words about Jesus and quoted from the prophet Isaiah.  After all, back in the first century, Rome proudly declared to the world that THEY were the true power, and that their WAY of showing you their power was to dominate anybody who stood in their way.  Rome's strategy was to overwhelm anyone who threatened their law and order with ruthless force, and to try and win popular support by casting anyone who opposed them as dangerous, lawless brigands, terroristic zealots, or barbarians.  That way Caesar could cast himself as the noble hero, guardian of peace and safety for all... when in actuality, Caesar was just one more loud brash blowhard waiting to be tossed into the dustbin of history.  Everywhere you looked in the first century there were signs of Rome promoting itself, and Caesar casting himself as the divinely-appointed head of the empire.  They put it on banners and flags, they stamped it on coins, and they carved it in marble.  They made shows of military force in pompous parades marching through cities,  keeping the residents of the cities they occupied petrified in fear and then they had the gall to call it all "the Pax Romana"--the "Roman peace."  If you lived in the first century, in Palestine, you were taught from your earliest memories that the mark of power was having your boot on someone else's neck, and that you must be "weak" if you did not threaten others to make them do what you demanded.  

And over against all that, here comes Matthew, the Gospel-writer, daring to say that a homeless rabbi from the imperial backwater was in fact the true Lord of the universe and the Chosen Servant of God.  And the kicker was Matthew's proof--he said, "The way you know Jesus really is God's Messiah is that he DOESN'T threaten or cajole or bluster, but uses gentleness to bring justice."  Matthew quotes the prophet Isaiah as if this clinches it: "Here are the receipts!  They show that Jesus is really what God's kind of power look like--see, Jesus is the kind of person who doesn't need to even raise his voice; he doesn't need to intimidate, because he hasn't come to make anybody afraid.  His way of ruling is to bind up what is broken, to lift up again what has been stepped on, and to give his strength so that others who are weak may be empowered.  But he doesn't need to yell or bring in any armies to do it--that's how you know it's God's kind of power."

Look, the choice is actually pretty stark: either "real" power needs shock and awe and spectacle (and a dose of religious pageantry) to get our attention and scare people into obeying, or true power is just the opposite: the quiet actions to heal and help those who have been stepped on, done without an audience or a photo op to look pious.  The contrast could not be more clear, and day by day we are asked to make the choice about how we will spend our lives.  Will we listen to the loud voices of the powers of the day, or will we believe what the writers of both Testaments have been saying all along: that God's power looks like healing the broken and gently caring for the wounded, rather than Caesar's carefully choreographed shows of power?  We don't get to pick both--Caesar will always laugh at Jesus' way and call him "weak-looking," and Jesus just never had any use for waving banners to draw attention or making himself look more religious than he really is. Caesar is always most interested in asking, "What will make me look tough?" and instead, Jesus is simply interested in living out the answer to, "What will bring people more fully to life?" The question today--maybe the only question that really matters day by day--is simply, "Whose vision of power will I accept as the truth?"

Matthew, for his part, has laid his cards on the table, and he is openly admitting where his allegiance lies.  If we dare to take his words authoritatively--you know, like as Holy Scripture, the answer is pretty clear, too, even through all the smoke.

Lord Jesus, we dare to confess you as our Lord and the true picture of divine power, even though you look nothing like the way the world recognizes power.  Strengthen us to follow in your way, even if the world thinks it looks like weakness.

An Unorthodox Board-Game--June 1, 2020

An Unorthodox Board-Game--June 1, 2020

"For you know the generous act of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich. And in this matter I am giving my advice; it is appropriate for you who began last year not only to do something but even to desire to do something--now finish doing it, so that you eagerness may be matched by completing it according to your means.  For if the eagerness is there, the gift is acceptable according to what one has--not according to what one does not have. I do not mean that there should be relief for others and pressure on you, but it is a question of a fair balance between your present abundance and their need, so that their abundance may be for your need, in order that there may be a fair balance. As it is written, 'The one who had much did not have too much, and the one who had little did not have too little'." [2 Corinthians 8:9-15]

I've had this idea for a board game. Picture your typical winding-path game board, like "Candy Land" or "Chutes and Ladders," or even the old classic "The Game of Life."  Or even like the pathway around the perimeter like Monopoly.  But here's the twist: instead of each individual player's pieces moving independently of one another, everybody's pieces are tied to each other's with a certain length of string, so that your setbacks affect mine, and mine affect yours, and conversely, your advances pull me along to some degree and mine help move you forward as well.  What do you think?

I know, I know.  The moment I pictured this kind of a game, I heard the imaginary complaints about such an unorthodox board-game:  "Wait a second--you mean MY successes help someone ELSE?" or "That's not FAIR--that means that we're all CONNECTED!" or for certain, some version of, "But then YOU would share in MY winning, and then how would I really know that I'm better than you?"

Maybe my board game would never be a commercial success.  But as a thought experiment, I think it might be a good way to get at what the New Testament writers take for granted about our life together in Christ:  we are all connected, so that my life is inextricably bound up with yours, and yours with mine. We can pretend that's not how it is, or we can attempt to ignore it, but the truth is that all of our lives are already tethered to one another.  And yes, that ruins whatever nonsense we had been carrying along with us that "winning" must be a zero-sum game.  And yes, it means that we will each benefit from the successes of others as they go around in this life, and that we will all bear the costs of one another's troubles.  We have just been fed the lie that life really is like those stringless board games where I can "win" at your expense, when that is, honestly, a gross distortion of things.

When Paul writes to his friends in Corinth, he just comes out and says it that way.  He is writing to a church of largely Gentile Christians--that is, folks who weren't Jewish, and who lived in a pretty prosperous part of the Empire in one of its major metropolitan centers.  Things were going pretty well for them, on the whole, especially compared to what was going on for their fellow Christians back in the greater Jerusalem area.  The region around Jerusalem was living through a famine, so picture food shortages, price gouging, and families going hungry.  Now, just by the geography of things, just about everybody there in Jerusalem would have been Jewish.  So they would have had a different language, ethnicity, culture, and likely skin complexion than the Greek and Roman folks living in and around Corinth.  And Paul is writing to his friends in Corinth calling on them to help out the folks in Jerusalem because, as he seems to think is obvious, they are all connected to one another.  The tokens around the board really are all tethered to one another.  And so, in Paul's mind, it only makes sense that it would be right for his Gentile Christian friends to make good on their commitment to take care of their sisters and brothers in Jerusalem--even though these groups were separated by nearly a thousand miles and would never have crossed paths with each other in ordinary daily life.

Now, let's just hold that thought for a moment and let it simmer for a second.  This is in an era without the internet, without air travel, without telephones, email, or even a national postal service.  Most people never went further than a hundred miles from the town they were born in during their whole lives, and there were already plenty of tensions between Jewish and Gentile groups.  It would have been really easy for the folks in Corinth to say, "But their problems don't really affect us, so why are we being asked to support these people who live so far away?"  It would have been easy for them to get resentful, and to get bitter when Paul encouraged them to come to the aid of the Jerusalem community. They could have said in reply to the apostle, "Look, Paul, we're all struggling with our own stuff in life--we've got our own problems to worry about."  Or you could imagine them insisting, "Why are you calling for special help for THEM?  Don't ALL of us matter to you, Paul?"

And in response, Paul anticipates those arguments and simply says, "But they're the ones in need right now, and when the tables are turned in some other way or time, you'll be the ones who are supported by their abundance."  Paul knows that it would be theoretically possible for these different groups to go their whole lives without ever having to interact.  But he believes that in Christ, we cannot ignore the connections that hold us together, even if the world believes that they are optional or not there at all.  He calls on the Corinthians to help their neighbors a thousand miles away because no one is fully taken care of until all are truly taken care of.

It seems important to me these days to remember that this underlying awareness of our connection to one another isn't a new idea, or a radical notion, but was an obvious truth for the New Testament writers.  And maybe that is one of the greatest hurdles we have to deal with in reading the Bible in our day, because so much of the conventional wisdom in the times in which we live say the opposite.  They say that the pieces on the game board are untethered, and that, in fact, the only way to meaningfully "win" at life is to be better than someone else.  The conventional wisdom says that you need to look out only for your own interests, and in fact, if someone else does well, it comes at your expense. To see the blue game token advance three spaces must mean something bad for the red, yellow and green players.  

But what if that kind of thinking only works in childish settings like board games?  What if that kind of oversimplification is exactly the way Candy Land is different from real life?  And what if the conventional wisdom is just plain wrong, and there is no zero-sum reality where your success can only come at the cost of my defeat?  What if that whole mindset of "winners" and "losers" misses this point of life itself?

We need to ask these kinds of questions, and we need to pull at the thread we are beginning to unravel here.  We have to, because at times like these it gets really tempting to look at the troubles around in the wider world and to imagine the solution is just to put our heads down, or to withdraw up to a quiet little hill removed from everybody else and sit on a porch somewhere muttering, "It's not my problem."  We were already feeling that temptation with the coronavirus, weren't we?  Lots of folks in the region where I live are feeling really tempted to just say, "Let the people who live in big population centers worry about spreading sickness, but I don't have to care about it--we aren't connected to them."  And I get it--we're not New York City or Chicago, and there's no chance of spreading coronavirus in an empty field with just your tractor and the animals out to pasture on the next hill.  But my goodness, that's just how the folks in Corinth could have seen things, too: "Those people in Jerusalem should have known that they could be susceptible to a famine living in that arid place--it's their problem if they choose to live in a place where they can have food shortages and famines!"  Paul doesn't let it fly there, either.

We are also tempted in these days, and in this place, to imagine that the angst, the anger, and the outrage in the African-American community "doesn't have to do with us" either.  I get it, in the place where I live, it is really easy to say, "We just don't have many people whose skin is black or brown, and so we really can't have a problem here--and we certainly don't have to spend time thinking about the troubles everybody else is having over the death of George Floyd... or Ahmaud Arbery... or Breonna Taylor."  It is even more tempting to say, "Getting involved in all of that stuff just leads to riots and destruction like so many cities are having, and so the best thing to do is just to ignore it, to bury our heads in the sand, and to insist that 'those people' don't have anything to do with us as we dust off our hands."  But again, back in the first century, Paul didn't let the differences between Gentiles and Jewish peoples become an excuse not to care for one another.  There is no "It's not my problem" for followers of Jesus--there just isn't.

Maybe most difficult of all to face up to is how threatened we can feel sometimes when someone like Saint Paul specially lifts some one group for needing help.  It can feel like the message is, "These people matter... and you don't."  And of course, you can imagine some in Corinth becoming indignant over Paul's position, because they assumed that lifting up the Jerusalem church meant bringing down the Corinthian church.  We do the same these days, too.  It is the same temptation to answer every cry of "Black lives matter" with an immediate "All lives matter!" in response, when of course the point of saying that black lives matter is that they have been made to feel for a very long time that they don't belong in that "all lives" category.  It's not pie, folks--giving someone else a share of dignity doesn't take any away from mine.  It's not a zero-sum game.  But it is so easy to become defensive.  It is so easy to feel like calling attention to the famine in Jerusalem must be saying that my troubles here in Corinth aren't important.  But that's not it at all--Paul is simply saying that in real life, all of our game pieces are tethered together as we move around the board.  My struggles do affect you, and yours mine.  Your joys lift me up, and mine will buoy yours as well.  And God is at work in bringing us all more fully to life.

Today's work, then, is first of all to let go of the childish nonsense that pictures life as a zero-sum game with one winner and a bunch of losers.  Rather, we will see that our well-being is intertwined with the well-being of people near and far, people whose language or culture or ethnicity are different, even including people you might never have crossed paths with in your lifetime.  And that will mean looking at all the places in our lives where we have gotten comfortable with the idea of withdrawing to our own little hills and hollers where we don't have to deal with "those people's problems," and instead looking for how we can support one another, whether it's you wearing a mask to protect me from sickness, or me speaking up for the folks around who have been treated like they are less-than.  It will mean, once and for all, abandoning the notion that the Kingdom life is a pie to be cut up into competing pieces, where a bigger piece for you means less for me.

Maybe nobody would buy a board game where everybody's pieces are tied to everybody else's, but it sure seems like the New Testament thinks it would be good practice for our life in Christ, because all of us are caught up together in him... and Christ's victory over death itself has pulled us from defeat into life forever.  What if I lived like that were true right now?

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to see the ways we are connected to one another.  And give us the faith to trust you will provide for us all.

Round Midnight--May 29, 2020

Round Midnight--May 29, 2020

"When they had brought [Paul and Silas] before the magistrates, they said, 'These men are disturbing our city; they are Jews and are advocating customs that are not lawful for us as Romans to adopt or observe." The crowd joined in attacking them, and the magistrates had them stripped of their clothing and ordered them to be beaten with rods. After they had given them a severe flogging, they threw them into prison and ordered the jailer to keep them securely. Following these instructions, he put them in the innermost cell and fastened their feet in the stocks.  About midnight Paul and Silas were praying and signing hymns to God, and the prisoners were listening to them...." [Acts 16:20-25]

Tonight, Thelonious Monk and Ella Fitzgerald are my conversation partners in Bible study.  They have a lot to teach me, and I have a great deal to learn.

My eyes fell across these words from Acts, about Paul and Silas in prison and how, after being beaten by the police and thrown into the maximum security section of the prison, they find themselves singing hymns to God "about midnight."  And all of a sudden, all I can hear is Ella Fitzgerald's voice and Oscar Peterson on the piano, crooning the old jazz standard-and-lament, "Round Midnight."  (If you don't have that recording in your collection, do a quick search for it and given it a listen--go ahead, I'll wait.)

"It begins to tell, 'round midnight," Fitzgerald sings to Monk's composition, "I do pretty well till after sundown... Suppertime  I'm feelin' sad, but it really gets bad... 'round midnight."  Midnight is that low-point, that deepest darkness of the night, the loneliest hour and the time when hope ebbs almost to the point of vanishing.  It is telling, I believe, how much of the Bible's story takes place in those times of weary midnights, and how much of the lives of the wisest and most faithful saints was spent in what John of the Cross called "the dark night of the soul."  When we are just plain word down--worn down by life, worn down by adversity, worn down by dealing with so much swirling hatred and anger and hostility, and worn down by the absence of friends, the absence of support, the absence of help--that's when you know it's 'round midnight in your heart.

And in that midnight hour, sometimes it is all you can do just to keep singing your blues and pouring out your lament.  Sometimes just continuing to exist, just continuing to live for a little bit longer despite the suffocating night around you, sometimes that's the most victory you can muster.  Just keeping on keeping on.... round midnight.

That's where Paul and Silas are at this moment.  It is literally about midnight, as our narrator Luke tells us, but deeper than that, it is as dark a night of the soul as you'll find.  This is a scene we may not want to think much about, especially not about how these two evangelists came to this predicament.  There are old gospel anthems and Sunday School songs about the next scene in the story, when an earthquake comes and breaks open the prison doors and busts their chains wide open (although, we should note, Paul and Silas do not escape, but use the moment to show compassion to the jailer responsible for their torture).  But what brought them to this moment was that some respectable business owner in Philippi was upset that Paul and Silas were a threat to their profits, and they start accusing the two of them of disturbing the peace.  The angry accusers cast them as dangerous lawbreakers who are only causing trouble, and on top of that, they single them out for being the "wrong" ethnicity, too.  You can hear the code-words in their accusation: "These two are Jews!" (In other words, they aren't like us--they aren't "our kind of people," they say, to the judge and the chief of police, winking in confidence that the authorities will get their meaning.)  The accusers don't want their kind around, and they want to make an example out of them.  So the police, along with the angry crowd that has formed by this point, all humiliate Paul and Silas by stripping them naked and now beating and flogging them, all with the clear permission of the local government authorities, too.  Those whose job is to protect the innocent and ensure justice--the ones you might have hoped would keep you safe from an angry mob--they are the ones condoning the abuse and making it happen, because to them Paul and Silas don't really matter.  They are "other."  They are... expendable.

So yeah, it gets pretty bad 'round midnight.

But this is what gets me about this part of the story.  Paul and Silas, despite their weariness and the violence they have suffered--at the hands of "law and order" no less--they bring it all to God.  And they keep on keeping on.  That is the seed of their victory, their rescue, their vindication.  They bear what they have been subjected to by bringing it to God--they pray, they sing, and they sit in silence, too.  I have to think their songs have the cadence and ache of the blues, too.  I don't think there's reason to assume that the "hymns" they sing are all peppy up-tempo praise songs--I think they just bring what they are carrying to God in words and melody, and they cry out for help there.  And yet, that is exactly what is needed in that moment.  They survive by honest lament, by calling out to God for help, by singing their faithful blues at midnight and bringing into God's face all that they have suffered and endured.

All too often we just want to skip past the pain of this story, the terror of the injustice, and the utter fear that must have been all around Paul and Silas in that place at midnight.  We want to jump ahead to, "And it all worked out because, you know, earthquake."  We want to skip the parts that make us squirm, that make us think, that make us look at ourselves with terrifying honesty.  We (at least we Respectable Religious folk who have been given a lot of privilege in life) want to forget, I think, that our movement began with scenes like these--with the followers of a rabbi who was killed by the state then getting singled out for their ethnicity, too, and being brutalized by the authorities in town after town all across the empire.  I don't think we want to remember the parts of the story that happen 'round midnight like that--before the earthquake comes--because if we remember them honestly, we'll be compelled to make connections to our own moment that we would rather not face.  And I think we are afraid of the solidarity with those who suffer that we will need to practice if we face all of that.

But being followers of Jesus calls for just that kind of honest courage, so let us face it.  For a lot of us church folk, we have simply chosen to ignore or willfully forget that Paul and Silas (and Jesus himself) share an awful lot in common with George Floyd, with Ahmaud Arbery, with Breonna Taylor, and with a list of names that never seem to end.  I have ignored it, I know. And we have also chosen not to think about how many people there in Philippi saw Paul and Silas getting beaten by the civil authorities and just stood there, letting it happen, convinced that "they must have done something to deserve this."  We choose not to think about it, because we do not want to consider that so many times, we are more like the watching crowd in Philippi, condoning violence as long as it is done in the name of "law and order" for people like us, than we are like Paul and Silas, the actual disciples of Jesus in this scene.

And once we modern religious folk face up to how much we are like the angry agitators rather than the apostles, well, we find ourselves in our own spiritual hour of midnight.  And yes, I get it that we are all already each carrying a whole other list of ways we feel like we are worn down at midnight with a host of other worries and troubles.  We can be both like the angry crowd and like Paul and Silas at the same time.  The question, it seems to me, is, What do we do about it?

What do we do at that hour of deep lonely darkness that comes to our souls 'round midnight?  Paul and Silas have a word for us, it seems.  They have the same response that the enslaved Hebrews had during their midnight in Egypt... the same response the three young men had in the fiery furnace... the same response Daniel had in the lions' den... and the same response even Jesus had while he suffocated to death on a state-sanctioned cross.  They carried their weariness to God--they prayed, and they sang, and they prayed and the sang.  And even before help came, the truth-telling kept them going.  Even before their shackles were broken open, the act of bearing their weary souls to God enabled them to keep on keeping on.  Even before the prison doors swung open, they were sustained by lifting up lament to God, calling on God to be present with them in that dark place in the moment between days.

It would seem that is our place to start, too.  Our prayer may well demand confession from us as well as lament; we may have to own the ways we are more like the crowd than the Christians in this story.  But we can also bring our worn places, our threadbare spirits, and the places we are just running on empty.  We bring them to God, we name them, we speak them out loud, and we find strength in naming them all.  That's what Paul and Silas do.  They take what they have lived through, and they lay it before God with empty and open hands.  And that keeps them going long enough until help breaks through and transformation can begin.

I don't have easy answers for how we solve the many things that make us weary and worn.  I don't have some trite religious "fix" for how we'll deal with the anger brewing inside each of us all the time, or the fear that seems as infectious as the coronavirus.  And I sure as heaven can't pretend that if we will only pray harder or do more religious-looking things, all the bad stuff will vanish.  That ain't how it works, and it never was.  But it does seem to me that a starting point is that we take all that we are carrying on this dark midnight of the soul and bear it up to God, both the laments of what feels so wrong and unjust, and the confessions of the ways you and I have each been a part of making things the way they are.  We will lift up to God both the ways we are the violent crowd and the weary, abused apostles, and we will trust that in the darkness, God hears.

God is there--or rather, God is here with us, and with all who are gasping for breath and hope 'round midnight.

Lord God, we lift up to you all that we are carrying, both our failures and our hurts.  Tend to them all, and meet us in these times we feel lost in the dead of night.  Be our hope, and bring us into your new day.  We pray it in the name of your executed Son, Jesus.

Unnecessary Miracles--May 28, 2020

Unnecessary Miracles--May 28, 2020

"When they reached Capernaum, the collectors of the temple tax came to Peter and said, 'Does your teacher not pay the temple tax?' He said, 'Yes, he does.' And when he came home, Jesus spoke of it first, asking, 'What do you think, Simon? From who do kings of the earth take toll or tribute? From their children or from others?' When Peter said, 'From others,' Jesus said to him, 'Then the children are free. However, so that we do not give offense, go to the sea and cast a hook; take the first fish that comes up; and when you open its mouth, you will find a coin; take that and give it to them for you and me'." [Matthew 17:24-27]

So... this is a weird story, isn't it?

It's one of those strange episodes, like the turning of water into wine at the wedding in Cana, where it almost feels like Jesus is just doing magic tricks.  These moments are pretty rare in the Gospels, actually.  Usually, if Jesus performs some sign or wonder, it is an act of healing, or even of resuscitation, that relieves another person from disease or distress, or even death.  Those kinds of miracles somehow feel necessary--like if you are Jesus, and you have divine power to help someone, you do it.  But this episode, about a coin that seems to appear out of thin air (or water) in a fish's mouth, in order to pay a temple tax, well, it just seems kind of frivolous. Doesn't it?

I mean, honestly, this just seems like an...unnecessary miracle.  For one, Jesus seems to insist in his one-on-one conversation with Simon Peter that he is exempt from having to pay the temple tax, presumably because he is the Son of God, and therefore doesn't need to make a contribution for the temple, which is like his dad's house. So, if he wanted to stand up for The Principle of "You-Can't-Make-Me-And-Neither-Can-Anybody-Else" this would have been the chance for Jesus to dig his heels in and refuse to pay the temple tax.  (I suppose, too, that I would like to imagine that Jesus could have just paid the tax out of his wallet, but then I realize that Jesus was pretty much penniless all his days, even if I would rather picture him as an up-and-coming member of the upper-middle class.  He is not that.)

And there is the snag for me: Jesus, the almighty Son of God and Messiah of Israel, is the one person who shouldn't have to pay the temple tax, as both the embodiment of the New Temple and as the very embodiment of the fullness of God.  It is absolutely within his "rights" not to pay the temple tax.  And, if he really wanted to pull rank, Jesus could have just refused to pay... or used a messianic Jedi-mind trick to make the collectors go away... or called down an angel army to threaten anybody who gave him any pushback.  In short, Jesus could have been a jerk about this.

But he wasn't.  Jesus deliberately chooses not to take the "Be A Jerk About This" option from behind Door Number One.  He pays the temple tax.  He bears the inconvenience of it. He goes out of his way when he theoretically could have avoided it.  And even though he makes it clear to Simon Peter that no one can force him to pay this tax, he seems almost intentional about making Peter see that he is choosing NOT to be a jerk.  Jesus refuses to lean on the Principle of "You-Can't-Make-Me-And-Neither-Can-Anybody-Else," and he uses this as a teachable moment so that Simon Peter can see that Jesus complies with the tax, not because he is afraid to refuse, but because he refuses to be a horse's rear-end about this matter.  Jesus, in short, refuses to be a jerk, for the sake of avoiding the wrong kind of scandal.

Mind you, Jesus is perfectly willing to cause the "right" kinds of scandals--he's willing to go to the mat for his policies of healing on the sabbath, or eating with sinners, or touching the untouchable, or loving his enemies.  He is absolutely willing to ruffle feathers by going toe-to-toe with the Respectable Religious Crowd and will even hold his own with the Roman governor Pontius Pilate himself.  But here, in this moment, Jesus doesn't want to be a jerk... and so he comes up with a (rather creative) solution to the situation and complies with what is asked of him.

And, lest we protest that Jesus can't care about "offending" people, because we don't think that Jesus would care about what is "politically correct," let me note: Jesus himself here says he is trying not to cause undue offense (the Greek word is literally something like "cause a stumbling block" or "start a scandal", but it's the same gist).  Jesus says his reasoning for paying the tax is that he is trying to avoid being a jerk, and that if he has to choose between not being a jerk on the one hand and demanding "his rights" because he can, he is going to choose not being a jerk every time.  He is willing to speak up and be a troublemaker for the sake of others, but you'll never find Jesus shouting, "You can't make me, and neither can anybody else" for his own interests.  That's just so piddling and petty, and Jesus always has bigger fish to fry than that.

That says something really important.  For a lot of my life, when I heard or read this story (not that it was a frequently told one on the ol' Sunday School flannel board), I usually assumed the point was to demonstrate how powerful Jesus is.  I heard it mostly as Matthew saying, "See how authoritative Jesus is?  He can make coins appear in the mouths of fishes--that PROVES he's the Messiah, and that he doesn't have to pay the temple tax!"  But I don't think that's really the point Jesus is trying to make here.  He does point out to Peter (but note--not to the tax collectors) that he could pull rank on this one, or demand his rights and insist that he won't pay the tax for the upkeep of the temple.  But then he deliberately sets up a plan to pay it anyhow, without ever registering his protest with the authorities.  I think this is less a lesson of "Jesus is powerful enough to make coins appear in marine life," and more a moment to see "Jesus refuses to be a jerk... ever."

It seems this story is less about the parlor tricks Jesus can do, and more about Jesus' way of bringing life to others rather than to demand what is easiest, most convenient, or makes him look strong.  And honestly, I think that's more what I need to hear in days like these.  Honestly, there's never going to be a time when my go-to gut response is, "Should I call on God to plant a quarter in a trout so I can get out of a parking ticket?"  but there are LOTS of times when I need to remember that followers of Jesus don't get to choose the Jerk Option behind Door Number One.  There are going to be lots of times in this life when it is tempting to insist, "You can't make me, and neither can anybody else!" and to make a big fuss over what we refuse to do, just because we can make a fuss.  But in those times, I should be clear that Jesus never takes that road.  If I insist on walking it, I will have left the way of Jesus.  That will be part of why I will keep working on being willing to be inconvenienced with long lines at the grocery store... or wearing a mask even when it fogs up my glasses... or not lashing back at someone who has said a mean thing on social media somewhere... or giving the benefit of the doubt to people I have a really hard time with liking.  And it's why I am convinced that Jesus is going to keep pushing me to take the time to listen to people even when I don't agree with them... and to refuse to reduce them to a caricature or straw-person argument... and to keep myself from petty name calling as much as I would like to sometimes.  These things are not options for us... because we are followers of Jesus, who made a pretty big point of not trying to cause unnecessary offense, and who went to the trouble of an unnecessary miracle in order not to be a jerk.

Maybe today, I can look for ordinary ways not to be a jerk, too.  I already have the pocket change.

Lord Jesus, keep us from being jerks.  Even when it's hard.  Even when we think it would be fun.  Pull us along on your way.

Saving Saul, Too--May 27, 2020

Saving Saul, Too--May 27, 2020

"Meanwhile Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest and asked him for letters to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any who belonged to the Way, men or women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem.  Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, 'Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?' He asked, 'Who are you, Lord?' The reply came, 'I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting...'" [Acts 9:1-5]

Saul doesn't know it, but he needs to be rescued from violence and danger, too.  He needs to be saved... from himself.

Of course, at the very same time, those whom he was hunting down to arrest (or to do worse to) need to be rescued from the violence and danger Saul intended for them.  And that's just the thing--in this moment, everyone is in danger of something terrible happening.  Everyone is threatened, everyone is put at risk, by Saul's reckless fervor to stop the ones he believes are troublemakers--namely, the followers of Jesus.  Obviously, those he plans to round up and bring back to Jerusalem in chains are endangered by his plans, but Sault, too, doesn't realize that he is destroying himself by this same course of action.  

And the stakes are high indeed, all around.  Saul, of course, thinks he is doing God's work by rounding up the followers of this new sect within Judaism--he thinks they are dangerous as well as heretical, because they believe that the Messiah has come and had already died at the hands of the Romans. It flew in the face of everything Saul believed about God, and he was sure--damned sure--that it was his responsibility to stamp out these dangerous disciples of Jesus who called themselves "followers of the Way." They were dangerous enough in his mind that Saul clearly thought it was acceptable to kill them without trial by mob justice if necessary--you'll recall that Saul is the one holding the coats for the lynch mob that stones Stephen to death just a little bit earlier in the story of Acts.  And he smiled with approval while the mob did his dirty work for him, too.

What is most frightening to me about this whole scene is that, until Jesus gets a hold of him, Saul is convinced he is going good--that he is doing "justice" by rounding up followers of Jesus and killing them if necessary.  Saul is convinced he has God's approval for what he is doing, and if some Christians, men or women, get killed in his pursuit of order, well, surely they are just collateral damage in Saul's quest for righteousness and social order.  Regrettable, perhaps, but nothing to lose sleep over, in Saul's mind.  Like Blaise Pascal so famously put it, people "never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction."  And here am I, a comfortable, privileged religious professional with a lot of the same perks that Saul had, and it occurs to me how easily I can be led to believe that such ruthlessness is acceptable--even noble!--if we believe it is being done in the service of "maintaining order" or stopping the ones labeled as "bad guys."

Sometimes I think we (at least we Respectable Religious folks) forget that our movement began as a persecuted minority, and that we were constantly seen, both by religious leaders and the empire, as a troublesome and expendable sect of people.  Christians were assumed to be dangerous, to be likely to stir up a ruckus, to be disturbers of the peace, and to be inciters of riots.  Once that picture gained popularity, it became easier and easier in one town after another (notice that Saul is going WAY out of his jurisdiction here to get to Christians in Damascus--modern day Syria!) to look away at the torture of Christians... or the arrest of Christians without charges... or the killing of Christians without a trial.  And when we forget that it is our own story, we become callous and numb in the face of others who are treated the same way still today. You know there had to be people in the first century who invented excuses for why it must have been ok for Saul to round up suspected Christians and drag them off, bound, to stand trial in far away places, or even for those suspected Christians to die in his attempt to bring them to "justice."  There were surely folks in the wider community who just muttered, "Well, those Christians must have done something wrong--otherwise, Saul wouldn't have wanted to arrest them!"  Maybe that's even what Saul told himself at night: "These people are all trouble, and even if I haven't seen them doing something illegal, or if I haven't proven that they are bad, they've surely done something bad in the past, or are going to do something wrong in the future... so I'm justified."  And it occurs to me just how easy it is for any of us to look away when it's someone else's son, someone else's daughter, and to assume, "They must have had this coming."

But no--it's my son.  It's my daughter.  It's your children.  It's our aunts and uncles.  It's our neighbors and acquaintances.  We cannot compartmentalize the rottenness we don't want to have to look at and say, "Well, that's someone else."  We are all threatened by the impulse to destroy the ones we label "other" because we are afraid of them.  The fear itself is part of the problem.

And that's just it: Saul is endangered, too, by his own fearful violence.  He is slowly dying inside from what he is doing to others, and he doesn't even know it. As much as the church was threatened by his quest for "righteous" justice, he was destroying himself, bit by bit, as he gave himself over to that way of thinking and acting.  The more he hunted those troublesome Christians down, the easier it became; and the easier it became, the more and more numb he felt bout it... until the point came where he did not realize how much he was poisoning his own soul.  He could not even realize that he had become diametrically opposed to the way of the God he was sure he was serving by his actions.  He could no longer recognize that his means and his ends were all terribly misguided.

So Jesus interrupts him.  Both for the sake of those he was going to hunt down, and for Saul's own sake--because everybody was in danger.  Jesus came to rescue them all--stopping Saul not only spared the lives of countless families in Damascus that would have been ripped apart if he had carried out his plan, but it also set Saul free from the hateful path he was on.  It was the beginning, for Saul, of a grand reversal that would end up bringing this persecutor of the church to faith in the same Jesus he had been hunting down.  And of course, we have come to know him now as Paul, the apostle responsible for half of the New Testament and the great evangelist and theologian who got into lots of trouble himself bringing the news of Jesus to the rest of the empire.  The rest of that journey is a story for another day, but for now, just consider how the living Jesus works to bring life all around--for the persecuted, and for the persecutor, for the church in Damascus, and for Saul who was out to get them.  They were all endangered by Saul's quest for law and order, and they were all rescued.

This is how God operates in the world, and if we cannot see that, perhaps it is because we cannot see how many ways even we comfortable bystanders are entangled and endangered by the things that threaten and harm others.  Perhaps we need to look daily down at our own hands, and to see that, a lot more often than we would like to admit, we are either holding rocks for stoning, or happily holding the coats of those in the mob.  There are an awful lot of ways we are wearing Saul's sandals, whether we do it knowingly or unwittingly.  That doesn't mean we are irredeemable villains--Saul, after all, is bound for transformation himself.  But it does mean that we may have to look at places in our lives and hearts that we though we were doing just fine--or maybe that we were even righteous and noble and good--and ask God to empty our hands and to disarm us.

I know at least that needs to be my own prayer for myself today.

Saul needs saving, too, at that moment on the Damascus Road.  And I guess I have that in common with him as well.  Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, a comfortable and complacent sinner dressed up in respectable religiosity.

Lord Jesus, I really want to follow after you.  Where I am wrongheaded, turn me in your direction.  Where I am hostile against your way and your beloved, break my hardened heart.  And where I am clenching rocks to throw in the name of righteousness and order, disarm me.  And embrace me at the same time.