The Vital Tethers--July 11, 2023

The Vital Tethers--July 11, 2023

[Jesus said:] "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 11:29-30]

Bob Dylan was right: "You gotta serve someone."  There's no way around it in this life--we will dedicate our lives to something or another.  We will give our hours and our energy to some cause, some person, some pursuit, or some combination of all of those things.  But there's no option in this world where you don't spend your life somehow.  There is no way of getting through life without bearing some burden, and without serving... someone.  It really just turns out to be a question of what is worth shouldering, and who is worth hitching our fates to.

Jesus is at least honest with us about that much.  You'll note that he doesn't say, "Come to me, because there are no yokes at all when you sign on the dotted line with me!"  He doesn't say, "There are no burdens at all in life when you join Team Jesus!"  That is to say, he doesn't lie to us.  Plenty of voices in our day and time do, however, and promise us that there is a life out there to be found where no burdens exist and no one can tether you down with obligations, responsibilities, or requirements to share someone else's load.  They often use the language of "freedom" to make their sales pitch, and they tell you that nobody can expect or require you to be bound to the needs of anybody else.  But of course, being disconnected from everybody turns out to be its own burden, too--like the Eagles sang, "Freedom? That's just some people talkin'--your prison is wand'ring through this world all alone."

Again, what Jesus has to offer is not a life free of all attachments, or free of the call to share the struggles and sufferings of others, but a life in which certain burdens can be let go of, so that we are able to carry the ones that truly matter.  I think that, in a nutshell, is what the Christian life really is: it is the lifelong training in learning what things we can let go of in order to be able to pull the weight of the vital tethers of love.  And Jesus is clear: he hasn't come to remove every tether on us, but to untie, untangle, and sever the ones that unnecessarily weigh us down.  Jesus insists, however, on leaving us bound to the love of God and the love of neighbor (who turns out to be everyone--yes, everyone).  But even though that sounds like we are being set up to be pulled apart in every direction (if I am tethered by love to each of the eight billion or so other neighbors with whom I share the planet at any given moment), it actually gives remarkable clarity. There are an awful lot of things I don't have to carry, don't have to be weighed down by, and don't have to stay leashed to any longer.

In fact, a great deal of what Jesus does in the Gospels is to go around with a pocketknife cutting ties and slashing tethers that hold people back from being able to love God and neighbor.  He undoes the knots that tether people to their religious guilt.  He cuts away the shame that others have piled onto the backs of people deemed "unworthy."  He removes the baggage of racial prejudice and old ethnic hatreds. He releases people from the impossible expectations of rule-following Respectable Religious Leaders.  He unties the bonds that hold people to their obsessions with their stuff, their money, their status, and their need for power and control.  And once you're released from those burdens, you find you really are free to move in the direction that matters--in the direction of love for God, and love for neighbor.  As Dietrich Bonhoeffer once preached, "God's love frees us from ourselves to be free for others.  To be free means nothing else than to be in this love, and to be in this love means nothing else than to be in God's truth."  That's what Jesus makes possible: a release from all that doesn't really matter (even if they were things that other religious people told me I had to carry, and even if I had been dragging them around for a very long time), and the clarity I find in only having to move in the direction of love.  Against every other obligation, restraint, and tie, Jesus is ruthless in cutting the tethers away, so that at last I can move freely--in the direction where he leads us, which is always the direction of love.

I wonder what it would to do our priorities if we actually let Jesus cut away the unnecessary ties we've been tangled up in.  If I were no longer worried about what anybody else thinks of me, I would be free to share table and offer welcome to the people others deemed "unacceptable" and "unworthy."  If I realized that my worth was not bound to the rise and fall of the Dow Jones or the worth of my 401(k)--and that it never had been!--I might be a lot less stingy about my resources and a lot freer to share.  If I was not bound to propping up a political party's agenda or backing my candidate at all costs, I would actually be free to speak up and <gasp> offer critique of where its platform needed correction or wasn't just or compassionate, and I would be free to see, and acknowledge, the flaws and failures of the public figures everyone else is cheering for without a second thought.  And if I was released from the need to seem "strong" or "powerful" or "great" in anybody else's eyes, I would probably be a lot less defensive, a lot less hostile, and a lot less insecure.  All of that sounds like freedom, and yet all of that opens the door for me to love others more fully.

That's the invitation in this day: to let Jesus cut away the tethers that keep us from love, and to allow him to sever the yokes to burdens that were unnecessary (even the religious ones), so that we are freed in every step forward to move in the direction of love.

Where will that take us today?

Lord Jesus, unleash us from all that has held us back and held us down, so that we will be free to move in the way of your love.

The God Who Carries--July 10, 2023

The God Who Carries--July 10, 2023

[Jesus said:] “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest." [Matthew 11:28]

You might know the old joke about the difference between cats and dogs--it goes something like this:  Dogs say to themselves, "My humans take care of my every need, give me food, provide me with shelter, and give me love.  They must be God."  On the other hand, cats look at the same evidence and say, "My humans take care of my every need, give me food, provide me with shelter, and give me love.  I must be God!" And we all have a good laugh about how independent and self-possessed cats are compared with their canine counterparts.

But there's a theological question underneath the joke that is worth looking at in its own right:  what do we expect in a god (or God)?  Is God the caregiver, or the one who needs care?  Is God the one on the receiving end... or the giving end of the equation?  Does God depend on our offerings, devotions, gifts, and support, or are we dependent on God's grace and provision?  At the grand divine table, is God the one being served by heavenly waiters and human servants--or is God the one feeding us like beloved children and honored guests?  Or to put it in other words, do you recognize God's glory by all the things humans do for God... or do you see the glory of God most clearly in the ways God sustains us?

Well, I'll just lay my cards on the table: I'm convinced that Jesus would have us believe that God's glory is in God's choice to carry us, not in God somehow being carried around, like some ancient pharaoh in a palanquin or sedan chair, ferried through the streets of a parade on poles carried by slaves or royal attendants.  The God-ness of God is shown most clearly in bearing our burdens, not in our subservient acts of bearing burdens for God.  It's a pretty poor deity, after all, who needs help carrying things.  And it's a sure sign you've got yourself an idol if it needs human help transporting or protecting it.

To be honest, we human beings have a harder time getting that into our heads than you might expect.  To hear the biblical writers tell it, we keep fashioning our own gods and telling ourselves they need to be fed with sacrifices, housed in temples, and protected from offense or indignity.  And by contrast, the living God keeps insisting that the divine doesn't get hungry, need shelter, or rely on us for protection.  Ultimately, we are convinced, the living God shows us the fullness of divine glory by bearing the weight we cannot carry alone--the heavy lumber of the cross itself.  The God-ness of God, so to speak, is clearest in the way God carries us and our burdens, not in our offers to schlep God and God's baggage around.

An awful lot of what we human beings have invented and slapped with the label "religion"  turns out to be our attempts to do things for God that the living God doesn't need to have done, honestly.  We easily let ourselves believe (implicitly, if not out loud in so many words) that God needs to be powered up by our prayers or our offerings.  We convince ourselves that God's glory is dependent on having political power or "godly" candidates in office.  We fall for thinking that God's reputation needs to be defended by our "culture warrior" posturing, as if God might puff out of existence if there aren't enough public displays of piety in city halls or schoolyards.  And then along comes Jesus who insists just the opposite--that he brings us into the presence of the God who feeds like a mother, who carries us like a father, and who bears our heaviness like we are sleeping children needing to be brought home.

The cats, in other words, have got it wrong--at least in the joke.  The way to recognize the living God isn't to spot the one being pampered and fawned over, but to turn our eyes to the God who, behind the scenes and without fanfare, lifts up the weary, shoulders our burdens, and gives us rest.  That is what love does, after all--and God's glory ultimately is visible in the way God loves.

O God, help us to see you where you really are--as the one carrying us and our burdens, rather than the one needing to be carried.

Aikido Undercover--July 7, 2023

Aikido Undercover--July 7, 2023

"Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good." [Romans 12:21]

Like the old line goes, "You don't have to attend every fight you're invited to."  Or, perhaps at the very least, we don't have to accept the rules of engagement and the terms of conflict that others want to force us into.  The longer I keep in this life of following Jesus, the more I am convinced that's just what our presence in the world as Christ-followers is meant to look like--people who engage with a world still entangled in hostility, violence, greed, and crookedness, but who don't have to resort to those vices to prevail.  We refuse to fight fire with more fire, because we find the Spirit's presence is like rushing water to quench the flames of hatred and cruelty, rather than fanning them inside us to make us hateful and cruel ourselves.

In a way, it reminds me of the Japanese martial art known today as aikido, which emerged as a distinct form in the early decades of the 20th century.  Aikido is an approach to martial arts that attempts simultaneously to defend against an attacker while protecting the attacker from injury as well.  It is a philosophy that recognizes the innate human value and dignity even of one's opponents, and therefore refuses to use a scorched-earth tactic of doing maximum harm.  Instead, aikido techniques are meant to take the opponent's energy, receive it, and redirect their force and momentum in such a way that both the defender and the attacker are not permanently harmed. Now, since I'm hardly an expert in any form of martial arts, it's not my bailiwick to judge how effective or successful any given style or school may be.  But I do find the idea compelling, that it is possible to be "victorious" without needing to hate, harm, or destroy your enemy, but rather to seek their well-being even if they are not seeking yours.  That seems both very Christ-like to me and very much what the apostle Paul was getting at here in Romans.

And what's more, it's another example of what it means that love is "always bearing." The nature of love is to be patient enough (remember where we started in this series, with "love is patient"?) not to immediately react, but to think how to respond to a situation, even of hostility, in ways that redirect and channel hostility without lashing out or attacking back on evil's terms.  That's what Paul is advising the Christians in the very heart of the Opposing Empire (in Rome itself!) to do, whether they find themselves harassed by Roman soldiers, excluded by relatives, or run out of town for being "troublemakers" by their neighbors.  The Christian community doesn't answer that hostility with more hostility, and neither do we adopt a tactic of "we've-gotta-get-them-before-they-get-us."

The challenges you and I face today will likely be different from what the first century Christians faced in Rome when Paul wrote to them. Nobody will point a spear at you with the threat to impale you if you don't burn incense to Caesar... but you will face questions of who and what get your ultimate allegiance (and no matter how noble or wholesome, if it ain't Jesus and the Reign of God, it's not worthy).  It's unlikely anybody will run you out of town for costing them profits in their silver idol business (like happens in Acts 19 with the business around the cult of Artemis), but they may get upset when we start to question business practices or profit margins in our own country while neighbors go hungry.  And there's not much chance you'll ruffle feathers for baptizing a foreigner in a chariot by the side of the road (like Philip does for the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8), but you just might incur the wrath of Respectable Religious people around you who don't like the people you say are included in the reach of grace.  The details will be different, but in the face of whatever hostility we encounter, the call is the same: to bear, absorb, and redirect that energy in ways that seek the good of all.  We will answer their enmity with compassion, and we will refuse to accept an "It's us or them" mentality.  We can seek our own well-being while also protecting and preserving even those who would do us harm.

Think of it like doing aikido undercover--no martial arts garb, gi, or belt are necessary, no weapons, and no formal moves--but in every interaction today, we will be ready to answer any hostility from others, any evil directed our way, with good... for all.

Lord Jesus, give us the wisdom, grace, and patience to love the way you do--answer hostility and hatred with love even for those who see us an enemy.

The Opposite of Revenge--July 6, 2023

The Opposite of Revenge--July 6, 2023

[Jesus said:] "Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you." [Matthew 5:42]

Jesus has come to dismantle the need for payback. 

Seriously, the more time I spend in the Gospels, the more it becomes clear to me that Jesus' message and ministry are rooted in the work of pulling apart our impulse to 'get even' and in showing us that God doesn't operate out of the need to 'get even,' either.  Over and over again, Jesus shows us a God who runs the universe on an economy of grace, and he dares us to turn over our lives and livelihoods to that way of relationship, too.

It starts with God--it always does, for Jesus.  Jesus introduces us to the God we thought we already knew, but reveals that if we take God's presence seriously in the world, we'll see signs of God's generosity rather than stinginess everywhere.  God, Jesus shows us, gives good things abundantly to all life, without any sense that we will, or even could, "pay God back."  How do you return the favor for the One who called you into existence out of nothing, after having built a universe that provides all you need... also out of nothing? (Reminds me of the old line of Carl Sagan's: "If you wish you make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.")  Jesus says you can't do anything to "settle up" with God, but you can receive the good gift of your existence and accept that it is yours by grace.  

Then, as he so often does, Jesus doubles-down on his understanding of God's policy of no-payback by pointing out that God's good gifts of sun and rain are given prodigally to everybody, including stinkers, sinners, crooks, and ungrateful jerks.  In other words, God's good gifts for life are not doled out as rewards for good behavior (payback), nor as incentive to prompt us to pay God back with offerings or harvests or sacrifices and thus to earn more good things (yet another form of payback).  Rather, God gives good things because it is God's nature to be generous, and God's love doesn't take into account our "worthiness" or "deserving."  God's love bears with our inability to pay God back, and it doesn't take any of that into consideration.   Jesus tells us to stop and realize every time it rains, that there's no way to pay God back for God's generosity to us--you can only receive it and realize it's been grace all along.

Jesus' emphasis on God's forgiveness of us goes even further.  Jesus weaves God's forgiveness into his model for praying, "Forgive us our sins, as we forgive..." and he keeps telling stories where the stand-in for God cancels debts, forgives offenses, and doesn't seek to get even with enemies (I'm thinking of the wheat and the weeds there).  So not only does not give good things to us without our ability to pay God back, but God forgives our sins rather than "getting even" with us when we do mess up. And of course, ultimately at the cross, Jesus shows us a God who bears the pain of our sinfulness into God's own being, rather than zapping a world full of bloodthirsty sinners who crucified him. To hear Jesus tell it and to see Jesus embody it, God has totally rejected the logic of needing to "get even" with some form of "payback."  

And instead, the resurrection breaks the cycle of needing to wreak revenge for some past infraction or offense, but rather creates a new future that isn't dictated by past wrongs.  That's the real wonder of resurrection: it's not that Jesus has come back to life to "get even" with all the people who wronged him (this isn't The Count of Monte Cristo or Sweeney Todd), but rather to start things over without being forced into the old ruts of the past.  The notion of "payback" is always bound up in the past--getting even for what someone did to you, or making up for some imbalance in the accounts between us.  But Jesus' understanding is that God is always seeking new beginnings that aren't determined by what we've done, what we deserve, or what we owe.  Those are always bound by the past, and God is looking to create a new future between us.  God has committed to practicing the opposite of revenge.

And then here in this section of the Sermon on the Mount that we've been reading through this week, Jesus has been simply calling his followers to live by this same logic of non-transactional thinking everywhere in our lives.  Since God doesn't charge us for the good gifts we receive, and since God doesn't overwhelm us with debts for our sins and transgressions, Jesus simply calls us to act toward others the way God has already committed to acting toward us.  We will be generous toward other people, because God is generous to us.  We will graciously forgive others (remembering that in Jesus' word, "forgiveness" is first about debt and only later becomes applied metaphorically to sins and personal offenses), because God has been merciful to us.  We can bear and set aside the question of "deserving" toward others, because has set it aside with regard to us, and has born even the nails of a cross without holding a grudge.  And we can let go of the ways we've been tethered to the past, so that we can pursue new relationships with people in the future.

Today we are sent out into the world to dismantle the need for payback everywhere we go, because Jesus says God has no need for payback with us.  We will be generous toward people around us, because we believe that God continues to be generous to us beyond our deserving.  We will be forgiving toward others, because God has forgiven (and keeps forgiving) us.  It is a whole way of life that pulls apart the old impulse to "get even" and instead lets grace be our currency, because that is how God's economy works.

Today, let's turn away from repeating the old patterns of the past that keep us trying to "get even" but never do, and turn a new direction into the gracious Reign of God.

Lord Jesus, dismantle the impulse for getting even in our hearts, as you have already shown us that you are not out for payback from us.

Turning the Tables--July 5, 2023

Turning the Tables--July 5, 2023

[Jesus said:] "...And if anyone wants to sue you and take your tunic, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go with him two." [Matthew 5:40-41]

How do you change things for the better when you don't have power?  

How do you make a difference when you don't control the levers of political policy-makers or have the weight of your wallet to force others to do what you want?  

How do you insist on your own dignity without either caving into to bullies or denying their own worth and value as humans made in God's image?  

How do you expose unfair or unjust treatment without inciting more injustice against you for speaking up?

And how can love have any ability to set things right in the world if it won't coerce or threaten people into the desired behavior?

I am convinced that this is exactly what Jesus has in mind at the heart of the Sermon on the Mount as he continues to equip his followers to deal with the real world without giving into hatred and retribution.  He is neither idealistic nor out-of-touch, but is addressing people who find themselves powerless (by usual measures) and seeking both to survive and seek God's will in this very real, very messy world.  And it has everything to do with the way Christ-like love "bears" the injustice of the world and offers a correction for it that doesn't use the tactics of injustice or coercion to get its way.

Let's start by seeing where Jesus assumes his listeners are in the social settings he imagines.  They are the ones being sued, dragged into court, and at risk of losing their livelihoods.  They are the ones being forced by the Roman or Herodian soldiers (who are sort of both police and army at the same time) to carry a burden for them.  But Jesus doesn't envision his followers taking someone to court to get the shirt off their back, and he doesn't envision us as the bully centurion abusing their power to intimidate an ordinary peasant into carrying their equipment for them.  Jesus assumes his community is in the position of being powerless, and his counsel is for how to live justly when an unjust world is trying to squeeze you.

Now right off the bat, it's worth noticing what Jesus doesn't have in mind: he doesn't envision his followers seizing power, giving themselves the leverage, and imposing their will on others.  There is no thought from Jesus of trying to replace the pagan Roman Empire with a "Christian" empire that will coerce non-Christians to do our bidding.  But neither does Jesus think we are helpless to bring about change without being the ones pulling the strings.  The power we have to change things isn't the threat of force or fear, though; it is the capacity to absorb and redirect the mistreatment others direct toward us without answering it in the form of more mistreatment.  That kind of approach turns the tables on the bullies.

So in the case of someone threatening you with a lawsuit, and in the worst-case scenario of poor peasants who don't have much but the clothes of their backs, Jesus' response to "give your cloak as well" forces both the one suing you and the wider public to see what they are trying to do to you.  Your choice not to fight on your opponent's terms is meant to compel them to see that they are trying to take your very last belongings, in the hopes that they will be shaken up and shocked into realizing that they're the villain here, not you.  And even if they don't, the wider community will see, come to your aid, and give you what you need for clothes, while pressuring the one suing you to change course of action.  By going to the extreme of giving the additional (and more expensive) cloak as well as your tunic, you put the one suing you in the spotlight and call attention to their course of action.  

And in the instance of going "the second mile," the context is similar--it's about someone with more power pressuring you into doing something, and how you expose that abuse of power.   In our culture we use the phrase "going the extra mile" to mean something different--we talk about it as if you are choosing to do an extra-special good job for a customer at work or the boss who could promote you or the family member who has asked for a favor.  But Jesus is addressing a different kind of situation--it's about how we respond when someone is trying to leverage their power over us.  In Jesus' setting, that's most likely a scenario of a Roman soldier forcing a bystander to carry something for them--like the soldiers did to Simon of Cyrene by forcing him to carry Jesus' cross.  Jesus knows that if you mouth off to a Roman soldier (who is entrusted with enforcing Roman "law and order"), they'll have reason to arrest you, beat you, torture you, or even outright kill you, just to make an example out of you.  It's not that you don't have the "right" to resist the Roman soldier, but that it could be a death-sentence for you and those you love.   But on the other hand, if you just do exactly what the solider compels you to do, you give the Empire exactly what they want at a deeper level: your perfect acceptance of their terms.  You give the impression that it's their intimidation that is making you do what they want.  

But... what if you surprised the soldier and did more than what was ordered, and without their asking or compensation?  Well, now you've shown them that you aren't doing things because they are "making" you.  You are showing you aren't intimidated by them, but also that you aren't going to give them any reason or excuse for them to harass you.  They can't credibly accuse you of insubordination or troublemaking... and yet you are undermining the Empire's source of power by refusing to let their threats dictate what you do.  It's about not letting the one abusing power set the terms of relationship or determine your course of action.  And it points to a different Reign, a different Kingdom, that subverts Rome's claim to be the Ultimate Power.  Most of all, it allows the possibility--even if it is only just a possibility--that those in love with power will be moved by the power of love, as the old saying goes.

For what it's worth, this same approach is what undergirded Gandhi's nonviolent resistance to the British Empire--he called it "satyagraha," or "truth-force." And it was the same basic logic as the willingness of the Freedom Riders, sit-in participants at segregated diners, and marches across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, to shake the powerful out of their abuse of power by their willingness not to answer violence with violence or hatred with hatred.  Those were movements in which people who did not have power used the witness of their willingness to answer abuse with love--to bear and endure when evil was done to them without returning it back.  And even if it didn't immediately change the hearts of the ones with setting the fire hoses on them or unleashing the police dogs on them, it did draw public attention and eventually began change through social pressure on the powerful.

All too often in our day, church folks assume that the way to change the world for the better starts with Christians having to occupy positions of power, and that if we can get ourselves in charge of branches of government, then we can force everyone to do what we think they should do.  But instead, Jesus calls his followers to use the position of being without power to change things without intimidation or coercion, just by our witness.  Jesus' followers won't refuse to help or serve someone who asks for our assistance--even if we don't know or don't like them (I can't imagine Jesus' neighbors liked the Roman soldiers who harassed them into walking and carrying their equipment, after all). In fact those moments give us the opportunity to show Jesus' kind of love--especially for the people we don't know or like. And when we do find ourselves feeling pressured by those with power, our second-mile response has the capacity to shock the other person into reconsidering their position, as well as answering them with love rather than giving them reason for hate.

In a time when Christians are often known for a "You can't make me do something for THAT person" attitude, especially for people deemed "other," Jesus calls us to surprise those around us and to question the order of things by answering coercion with compassion and leverage with love.  And that kind of subversive response has the power to change things, even if it happens one life or one moment at a time.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to use even situations that feel powerless in ways that reveal the power of your love.

A Slap in the Face--July 4, 2023

A Slap in the Face--July 4, 2023

[Jesus said:] "You have heard that it was said, 'An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.' But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also...'" [Matthew 5:38-39]

How did Booker T. Washington put it?  "I will permit no man to narrow and degrade my soul by making me hate him."  Yeah, I think he was on to something.  I think Booker T. Washington knew something about how the way of Jesus works.

These words from Matthew 5 come from the heart of what we call the Sermon on the Mount, and, to be honest, we modern Christians have found all sorts of ways to miss the point of Jesus' teaching here, or to outright ignore it.  But when we listen to Jesus' words and take him on his own terms, I think we'll find that Booker T. Washington was pointing us on the right path--these words are about refusing to give bullies and enemies power over us by making us hate them, or to sink to their level in returning evil for evil.  Love includes the refusal to let someone else's rottenness dictate my behavior in response.

But to see how we get there, I'm going to ask you to follow along with me for a moment.  To do that, I'm going to lean on the insights of other scholars and authors (I'm thinking right now of Walter Wink's work with this and similar passages, if you're interested in further reading along these lines.) First off, let's take a closer look at the details Jesus offers us.  He begins quoting a passage from ancient Israel's code of laws: the lex talionis [law of retaliation], most well-known as "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth."  Everybody had heard those words in Jesus' audience, because they're a core legal principle in the Torah, as familiar to Jesus' hearers as "innocent until proven guilty" or "You have the right to remain silent" in our culture.  But out of context, it's easy to hear "an eye for an eye" and assume that the law was requiring revenge and commanding victims to get back at their assailants, when the original intention of the Torah was to limit how much you could do in response to someone else's hostility.  In its original setting, the commandment was saying, "If someone harms you, you are not allowed to do more to them than they did to you; so if they punched you and knocked a tooth out, you're not allowed to stab them in the chest or threaten the life of their child as payback."  Jesus knew that his listeners had heard the words "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth" before, but over enough centuries it was easy to yank those words out of context and turn them into permission (or even requirement) for revenge, rather than an attempt to limit retaliation.

Okay, so things are maybe a little bit clearer here.  But next we need to explore the details around the hands Jesus mentions.  Jesus' statement here in Matthew specifies striking someone on the "right cheek."  Now, in a culture like the ancient near East, in which the right hand is dominant for just about everyone (and there were strict rules that the left hand was used for less savory tasks like bathroom-related functions, while the right hand was for dominant use in most other everyday interpersonal uses), hitting someone else on their right cheek with your right hand meant you were doing a back-hand slap. (Go ahead, picture it in your mind--if you're facing your imaginary opponent and you are going to use your right hand to strike them, the only way you can hit their right cheek is to use the back of your hand.) That's not a punch thrown between equals, but an attempt to belittle someone--to shame them, to insult them, and to dehumanize them.  

So when Jesus says, 'If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also," it does two things at once.  First of all, it says to the opponent, "I will not let you demean me by treating me as if I am somehow beneath you; if you are going to strike me, I'm going to insist you treat me as an equal and you'll have to commit assault and punch in the face."  It refuses to accept the terms your opponent is trying to force you into--to put you down in order push themselves up.  It is also a way of shocking the opponent into seeing how they are treating you, and saying that you will not be treated as less than someone made in the image of God--and yet it also recognizes that even your opponent is made in the image of God as well.  And that's the power of this response: by turning the other cheek, you force your opponent to confront what they've done to you, and you force them to either treat you as a social equal if they are going to pursue their hostilities, but it also doesn't give them any further ground to hate you or attack you.  It's back to Booker T. Washington's insight--we refuse to give another person the power to make us distort our souls, our deepest selves, by hating them and sinking to their level.  In one move, the person who has been struck simultaneously refuses to be demeaned, asserts their own worth and dignity (as if to say, "You'll regard me as an equal or not at all"), avoiding sinking to the level of the attacker, and offers a way forward without giving the attacker any justification for their attack.  In other words, it refuses to let your course of action be decided by the rottenness of the hostile opponent.  It bears with their choice to cause harm without being forced to cause harm in return.

That is downright revolutionary.  And that's Jesus for you.

Sometimes people accuse Jesus' teaching in the Sermon on the Mount of being too idealistic, too naive, or too oblivious of the meanness and violence of other people.  I respectfully disagree--I'm convinced that it is precisely Jesus' clear-eyed realism that makes his teaching so powerful.  Jesus knows that we cannot often (hardly ever) control what other people will do to us, and he is unwilling to let go of his commitment that all people--even bullies--are made in the image of God.  So Jesus doesn't teach us to fight other people's evil with more evil, and he doesn't think we can force people to be good with threats or intimidation.  But we can control what we do, how we respond, and whether we break the old cycles of hatred and violence or not. Jesus' teaching does not require us to live in a fantasy world where everyone learns their lesson and behaves kindly in the end; he assumes we live in the real world, and he prepares us to respond to that world without giving in to the rottenness all around.

The longer I live on this planet, the more I am convinced that learning to love requires us to be equipped to deal with the world as it is, knowing that we cannot force others to behave lovingly or peaceably, but we can refuse to give in to the impulse of others to be hostile and violent.  That's where today's calling leads us--to go high when others go low, in order that they might be jolted into a change of perspective and action.  It means, above all, as Booker T. Washington says it, the refusal to let our souls be distorted by letting anybody else make us hate them.

Lord Jesus, enable us to break the old cycles of seeking revenge while still insisting that you see us all as beloved and worthy of dignity.

Breaking the Outrage Cycle--July 3, 2023

Breaking the Outrage Cycle--July 3, 2023

"Love bears all things..." [1 Corinthians 13:7a]

Would you do a deep dive with me into this short sentence?  It's funny--this snippet from Paul's lengthy description of Christ-like love that we've been looking at all year is only four words long in English (and only two in Paul's original Greek), but there are a lot of ways to miss the point Paul is making.  As a kid I remember getting hung up on the word "bears" and immediately picturing either the stuffed teddy bear I had in childhood or the grizzly creatures that lurked in the woods--I actually thought the Bible was telling us to "love bears," like the brown furry creatures with claws.  But this verse isn't about furry hibernating mammals--the idea is of "bearing" like carrying or enduring or "putting up with" or "not making a fuss over."

But even once we get past the confusion of English homonyms and the various meanings of the word "bears," there's still plenty we need to get clear.  For one thing, our English translation "all things" is really a bit wooden--the Greek has the sense of working like an adverb, "always."  So rather than saying "Love puts up with everything," as if to suggest someone whose spouse was abusing them or beating them should just stay put and take it (which some preachers have taught, thinking they were "just being biblical,"), the gist of Paul's original phrasing is more like, "Love keeps on keeping on," or "Love consistently accepts the other, without making a big deal about it."  Even the word we translate as "bears" has a richer sense of "putting a cover on"--it's actually related to the Greek word stegos for "roof" or "covering," and is actually familiar to dinosaur lovers who know about the armor plated "stegosaurus".  So the image Paul is using is something like "Rather than publicly shaming others for their failures or flaws, love is willing to set those aside without making a spectacle of it."  There is no public finger-pointing, and no "Woe-is-me; look-at-all-I-have-to-deal-with" martyr complex that turns the attention back on ourselves.  There is instead in love the willingness to know what can be kept discreet, maybe even what can be kept in confidence, or what we can just let go of.

Now, to be sure, I don't think Paul is advocating "cover-ups," as in the hiding of serious harm done to others in the name of saving a powerful person's reputation or keeping an institution out of legal trouble.  We need to be clear about that because we do live in a time when all sorts of abuse has been committed, and then often covered up, by people who insisted that the truth be covered up for the sake of preserving their own public image or the status of their organization or office.  In recent years we've lived through the scandals of abuse perpetrated by clergy in the Roman Catholic Church and in the Southern Baptist Church, and the way those were made worse by institutions trying to hush up the harm and silence victims.  Of course, every branch of organized religion has its share of leaders who abuse their power, and every time the leaders of the institution have to choose between transparency and truthfulness or hiding things that need to be brought out into the light.  And certainly secular institutions are no better--as someone who grew up in a world still rocked by the effects of the Watergate scandal and who came of age during the Clinton impeachment scandal, I've never known a time free from deep cynicism about the trustworthiness of elected leaders.  I can't imagine the apostle Paul insisting that genuine "love" would silence victims to protect the reputation of an institution, not even the church--Paul knows all too well that the church itself always entangled in the tendrils of sin and struggles to be truly free.

So we're not talking about a willingness to cover up abuse or harm. But I think it's more like the wisdom to overlook the rough edges each of us scrapes each other with, the graciousness to give others the benefit of the doubt, and the willingness not to make every perceived slight into a lawsuit or eternal melodrama. In a culture like ours where it seems everything is weaponized to stoke our outrage, and where everyone is ready to be triggered into lashing out at others, we need the ability to stop, to think, and to decide not to add more fuel to that fire.

Maybe that's as much as we can deal with at once on a day like today.  It can be draining--maybe downright exhausting--to reconsider what the word we've heard all our lives actually mean.  And maybe it starts with doing some difficult work looking inside ourselves--when someone causes some small harm or you are slighted or upset, it's worth pausing to ask, "How big a deal do I need to make this?"  Sometimes our initial gut response is to explode in anger or lash out in shaming the other person--but a little bit of a pause to catch our breath puts things in enough perspective to know that it would be better all around to let cooler heads prevail and to address the person calmly, one-on-one, rather than humiliating them in public or ranting about them on your social media.  Maybe that's where it starts, and maybe that's how we break the outrage cycles that tire us all out.

Let's start there today--and let's see how love releases us from the draining force of all that drama.

Lord Jesus, give us the wisdom in our love to know what not to make a big deal out of, so that we can preserve our relationships with others in healthy ways.