Accustomed to Failure

Accustomed to Failure--October 14, 2016

"But Peter said, ‘I have no silver or gold, but what I have I give you; in the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, stand up and walk.’ And he took him by the right hand and raised him up; and immediately his feet and ankles were made strong. Jumping up, he stood and began to walk, and he entered the temple with them, walking and leaping and praising God. All the people saw him walking and praising God, and they recognized him as the one who used to sit and ask for alms at the Beautiful Gate of the temple; and they were filled with wonder and amazement at what had happened to him." [Acts 3:6-10]

Which is scarier--failure, or success?

Of course, our gut reaction is to say that failure is what we are afraid of.  We hold back from daring new things, conventional wisdom says, because we are afraid of messing up, getting it wrong, coming in last, or being labeled "losers."  We are afraid, we tell ourselves, of failing.

But sometimes, I think we are actually more frightened about what would happen if God's Spirit and God's power really were let loose in our lives--and if we succeeded in seeing God move through us.  Because if God's power really is available... and if God really can and does work through people, then we aren't off the hook for letting God work through us on any given day.  If God's power really is still at work in the world, and if God really is at work, moving and healing and changing and directing, then we can't just shrug our shoulders in defeat when we look at the brokenness of the world and say, "Well, there's no hope for any of it... let's call it a day."  If God really is alive and at work among us, then we will have to be prepared for God to work through us... today.

I'll be honest here. This story from Acts with Peter and John healing a man in the Temple is unnerving to me, and I think that what makes me anxious is that their command to the man to be healed actually heals him.  And frankly, even bracketing out all the potential abuse of this story by snake-oil selling would-be faith healers on television who take advantage of people, I am scared the reality that Peter and John do not fail and actually bring healing into this life.  And it scares me precisely because it means that Luke would have us believe that the living God is actually doing things through his people to bless and restore the broken.  It means that God might well work through us, through me, through you, through our congregations and other people's congregations, in tangible, real, even wondrous ways.  And to be honest there is a part of me that would feel much more comfortable if I could just resign myself to thinking that there was nothing I--or we--could do to really bless the lives of others.  We can sympathize when others are sick or hurting, but it is difficult to imagine that God might actually heal someone through our praying--whether in a way that seems right on the spot as in this story, or behind the scenes.  We can feel guilty about our piles of stuff when others have nothing, but it is difficult to imagine that God might actually bring relief for those who go without through our actions to share. 

And there is a part of us that doesn't mind hearing stories about others being healed or mended or welcomed or satisfied in miraculous ways like this story from Acts, but we wouldn't know what to do with such a wonder if it happened in our midst—if it violated the order of our liturgy (It's not time for people to be healed--it's time for the offering!, we might say...) or was not printed on the official calendar (We can't have the poor raised up on Wednesday--we've got a meeting scheduled then!). 

I will be truthful: it may sound odd, but there is a part of me that is just more used to failing—to praying for healing to happen in the name of Jesus, only to see no miracle, only to see people still hurting.  We are all used to days when we braced ourselves for sorrow, for disappointment, for loss.  We are afraid to take a story like this one from Acts too seriously, or else we might dare to think God will be moving mountains and working wonders among us today... and we are afraid of how our comfortable routines in life would be overturned if God started moving in a new way.  And I don't know what I would do with myself to see healing actually take place in ways I could see.  I don't know what we would do with ourselves if we saw God actually working through us, whether it defied our sense of the laws of nature, or whether it was the day-by-day wearing away at evil through our witness. 

We may be afraid of failing, but it is in some ways a familiar, comfortable fear—and perhaps we are even more afraid of recognizing that God may well transform the world through us.  And since we do not have the control over whether our faithful risking will yield "success" or "failure," the question put to us today instead is whether we are willing simply to risk, and leave in God's hands what the results look like.  Theologian and writer Charles Ringma says, "God can hardly use the careful."  That seems to be a piece of this story: Peter and John are willing to risk the possibility that God will actually work through them to heal this man.  And they are about to get into big trouble for it, too—risks are not always only difficult on the "before" side as we wager and wonder what will happen. 

"We are divided and hurting in this country," we hear people say--or perhaps we have said it ourselves.  "We are drowning in a sea of despair when it comes to the drug crisis in our area," we say with our heads shaking.  We are getting more and more accustomed to violence in the news, as though there were nothing we could do about it but lament that "things aren't like they used to be."  All those troubles of our common life these days may make us anxious, but it is the well-worn fear of what we are used to.  It is, so to speak, the devil we know. 

But could we dare to believe that God is neither imaginary nor sleeping, and that God really does have it in mind to heal the world?  And could we dare to believe that God is up to that kind of work on this day--even on a regular Friday?

Whatever this day brings in it, it is filled with opportunities for us to risk letting God work through us—never because we need God to be oh-so-impressed with our accomplishments, and never in order to "get in" to God's club, but simply because that is what followers of Jesus do.  How might we risk today—and how might the living God actually use your words, your prayer, your kindness, your welcome, your listening, to heal someone else today in the name of Jesus of Nazareth?

Good Lord, we are just a bunch of scaredy-cats, to put it nicely, when it comes to your work among us and through us.  We are afraid of failing and we are often just as afraid of succeeding. So take both out of our hands and place instead in them simply the call to be faithful, and to let judgments of success or failure rest in you, you who save the world in the failure of the cross.

Both-and Versus Either/or

Both-and Versus Either/or--October 13, 2016

"Now there was a woman who had been suffering from hemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, 'If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.' Immediately her hemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, 'Who touched my clothes?' And his disciples said to him, 'You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, Who touched me?' He looked all around to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. he said to her, 'Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.'  While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader's house to say, 'Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?' But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, 'Do not fear, only believe.'" [Mark 5:25-36]

A baseball game has a winner... and thus necessarily, a loser.  Same with just about every football game.  Basketball, too.  Horse races, track meets, and spelling bees all have one winner and lots of losers.  Presidential elections--same thing: one candidate wins, and all the rest lose (although, as a caveat, it is possible to have an election where everyone comes out losing, but that can be a conversation for another day.  Drop me a line, and we will talk over coffee or a pint.)  In any case, all of those are basically zero-sum games.  One person (or horse) is the winner, and that precludes anyone else from getting the victory.  In a zero-sum game, there is only one victor's crown (or gold medal or shiny trophy or what-have-you), and thus my win is also necessarily your loss, and vice versa.

There are, to be sure, plenty of things in life that are zero-sum games, even beyond sports or other literal games. The promotion at work is available to one person in your department, and if someone else gets it, you don't.  Your company may be making a bid on a potential project, and either your firm gets hired for the job, or someone else does--your win means someone else's loss there, too.

Now, because there are indeed some things that are, in fact, zero-sum games, it is very easy in this life to come to believe that everything is.  It's not just that there's only one promotion in your department at work--soon, it becomes envy when your neighbor, who works somewhere completely different, gets a raise.  You end up feeling jealous of when your relatives' kids get on the honor roll, as if their success has sucked up good grades from a limited supply of "As" out there.  You end up thinking that if someone else gets something good, they must be taking it away from you.  You end up suspicious, too, about other families, other communities, other states, and other countries.  You end up imagining that if good things are happening for some other group, it must be bad news for you and your group.  You end up saying things like, "We have to put ourselves first!  We have look out for us, and we can't let good things go to them--or else we'll lose!  And we surely don't want to be losers, do we?" 

The only trouble with seeing everything in the world as a zero-sum game is, well, aside from that just being factually incorrect (if facts are the sort of things that matter to you), but also that it has a way of poisoning your heart.  If everything and ever person is part of a zero-sum game, from work to family to our civic life and society, you are going to start viewing everybody else around you as competition, rather than as companions.  You will grow suspicious, envious, insecure, and before long hateful--bitter over the good that happens to others, because you come to see it as a loss to you.  Now, I don't know about you, but that sounds pretty miserable to me.

Even more significant, that's not a Biblical way of seeing things.  For the followers of Jesus, we are invited out of the zero-sum-game way of seeing the world, and we no longer have to view everybody else as competition who are sucking away what could be "mine" from a limited pool of scarce resources.  And we no longer have to be threatened when we see something good happen for someone else.  I no longer have to be afraid of you succeeding, or something good happening in your life--I can rejoice.

Why?  Because the followers of Jesus know stories like this one from the Gospels, where Jesus himself is faced with what seems to be an either/or kind of choice.  Whom will you help, Jesus?  There are two people who need your power to heal, and there is only enough time for one of them.  Will it be the 12-year-old daughter of a local wealthy civic leader, who is at death's door, or will it be the anonymous poor woman who has gone broke with doctors' bills and doesn't have a way to pay for anything more and is getting worse by the day?  It seems so clearly to be a zero-sum-game with the stakes as life or death.  And, of course, as the story goes, it does turn out that when Jesus is delayed attending to the needs of the woman who reached out to touch his robe, Jairus' poor sick daughter does in fact die.  At that point, it sure seems like it's too late to help both, and that it was a zero-sum game after all.

Except... there is no such thing as "too late" for someone who raises the dead.  Jesus has a habit, in fact, of arriving after it's "too late," and then doing exactly what everyone else thought was impossible.  Jesus has a way of taking the either/or situations and making them both-and scenarios.  And so, even though it sure looks at first like help from Jesus is just one more thing to fight and claw over in life, there is actually life available for all.  Healing is not a zero-sum game, after all.  What is good for the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years turns out to be the same good for Jairus' twelve-year-old daughter. Everybody can rejoice at the end of this story, because Jesus has broken open the old assumptions that there is only so much "life" to go around.  Not so.  Jairus and family don't have to be angry or suspicious about the woman who touched Jesus in the crowd, and she doesn't have to be bitter that Jesus goes and helps Jairus' family, either.  There is enough--and more than enough--for everybody, so nobody needs to become bitter.

If we are going to take this story seriously, it will change our view of everything.  The point of this story--the reason it was remembered in the way that it was--is not just to say, "Jesus can do miracles.  He must be the messiah," but beyond that, that Jesus shows us how the power of God breaks open the either/or into a both-and.  The way of Jesus, the power of life beyond the grip of death, says that I do not have to be suspicious or bitter or envious of you anymore.  Your good does not mean my loss.  Your healing does not mean I have missed out.  And my healing does not close doors for yours, either.  After all, when Jesus was faced with an either/or situation, he refused to accept those terms.

Once we consider what Jesus' actions in this story really mean, it will change the way we see every other relationship, every other dimension, in our lives.  Instead of the fearful and insecure, "I must put my own interests first!  We must look out for our own or else there won't be enough for us to go around!" mindset, we will no longer feel threatened when good things happen for other people--whether next door, in the next town over, or on the other side of the world.  I don't have to be bitter anymore to see good things happen for you, because I no longer have to worry that when God does something good in your life, there won't be "enough" of God's power to go around for me.

Today, let's begin to try to step out of the zero-sum-game thinking that has infected our heads and our hearts.  Let's dare to break out of the lines and rules the world sets out for us, and claim in faith that God is able to provide for me as well as my neighbor, so my neighbor does not need to become my enemy.  And instead, let us be free today to rejoice in the both-and.

Lord Jesus, awaken us always to see and believe you are making all things well.

The Power Behind the Movement

The Power Behind the Movement--October 12, 2016

"Beloved, pray for us." [1 Thessalonians 5:25]

Jerry Seinfeld used to have a bit about how writing a check wasn't a very macho or masculine way of paying for something.  He would say that writing a check is essentially like telling someone, "I don't have any actual money on me--but if you contact these people at my bank, they'll give you some money to cover this."  And from Jerry Seinfeld's perspective that was the singular reason that check-writing is a bad choice--it shows weakness, because it is an admission of being dependent on someone else to get what you want.  It is, in effect, an admission that the only power you have access to comes from outside yourself.

For Christians, however, this is the source of our greatest strength, the engine of our revolution, the power behind the movement.  Not check-writing, of course, but something equally dependent on Another to move and to act when we cannot.  The Christian revolution, the movement of the followers of Jesus, is driven by prayer, which is, at bottom, an admission that we do not have power ourselves, and yet that we have a living connection with the Maker of the universe, whose gracious will keeps the world together moment by moment, and who has promised to mend its lingering brokenness.

That is what is so compelling to me about the simple, stand-alone sentence, "Beloved, pray for us."  This is what makes the Christian movement so radically different from the many other revolutions and campaigns that ended up in the dustbin of history--at our most faithful, we have never lived in the illusion that we operate under our own power.  At our most faithful, we know not to pretend to be "winners."  We pray for one another, a move which puts each of us twice dependent on someone outside ourselves--both on the God to whom we pray, and on the people we ask to pray for us.

Plenty of revolutionaries ask for financial support from their followers; plenty of other movements or causes recruit more members.  And nearly every political campaign in history has tried to cast themselves as always in control, always right, always winning. But Christians have this way of asking for prayer--of admitting, "I've got nothing. I need God's power to bring me through this next challenge," and of compelling those who will pray to admit that the most they can offer is prayer, too!

For us, praying to God on behalf of someone else is very much like writing a check--it is essentially saying, "I don't have any actual power to fix this situation--or at best. whatever power I do have is spent and inadequate on its own.  But this God of mine has the power to cover this."  To pray for someone else is to say, "God, I know you are invested in healing the whole world--so here, here is a corner of your world that needs healing," and knowing that God may well reserve the right for you to become part of the answer to that prayer.  But it starts basically with, "I can't do this. I can't fix this.  I can't straighten out this mess on my own.  I need you." 

See, the world sees that kind of action and thinks it is a sign of weakness.  We Christians do not disagree--we just think it is better to be honest about our weakness than to pretend we can solve all the world's problems by our sheer willpower and muscle.  A quick survey of world history will quickly reveal how well that approach turns out.  We don't deny, we Christians, that we are weak (at least we shouldn't--the folks who truck in Christian/religious lingo but seem insistent on projecting a puffed-up picture of their toughness or power need to figure that out).  We just do not see our weakness as an obstacle to getting things done--it is, in fact, the best channel we have for getting anything done!  By praying, we simultaneously let ourselves be humbled and get our egos out of the way of a situation, and we invoke the power of a mighty God who does move in our history and in our lives.

But something else happens wonderfully in our act of praying--we followers of Jesus are drawn closer together into communion and connection.  God surely could just go around healing the world and solving its problems without our prayers or our actions, pulling levers and pushing buttons to keep the universe in constant balance without needing us to bother with putting our needs into words on behalf of someone else.  But God, clever as God is, has found a way for us to be bound together and knit into a tighter community as we ask in prayer.  In other words, it is certainly not the most efficient way available for God to accomplish things in the world to be depend on prayer.  God could (and surely reserves the right to) act without our praying.  And yet by leading us to pray, and to ask on behalf of one another, God gets a two-for.  God is both able to be glorified in the weakness of our asking, but also brings us closer into relationships of caring for one another as we carry each other's burdens and joys to God in prayer.  It is one more sign of how clever God is, and how beautifully strange and compelling the Christian revolution really is.  Rather than being one more cause convinced it has the man-power or money or polling support to change the world, we are a people who openly admit our neediness and find that to be the key to how God turns the world around and mends what is broken.

Today, let us keep being a part of that revolution in two ways--by praying for someone else who is on your heart today, and by letting someone else pray for you.  Both are powerful, revolutionary acts--and yet both will look surprisingly weak to the watching world.  Be a part of that kind of surprise today--beloved, pray for us.

Lord God, wherever your people are in need, provide for them.  Correct us in our error, deflate us in our pride, strengthen us in our broken places, comfort us in our pains, and bless us where we are faithfully serving as your hands and feet.  Heal this whole hurting world. We ask it in the name of Jesus, who both taught us to pray for one another and who himself keeps on praying for us.

A Plain Box of Band-Aids.

A Plain Box of Band-Aids--October 11, 2016

"Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city. On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations." [Revelation 22:1-2]

It's for everybody.

I went to the store a few months back with both of my kids in the cart. We were on a quest for basic household staples--new kitchen trash bags, boxes of macaroni and cheese, new children's shampoo, and the all-important fashion accessory/first-aid supply: band-aids.

We got to the first aid aisle, and as I grabbed a box of the bandages, my daughter of three says, "Is this for me?"  So I answered, "Well, it's for you, and your brother... and for me and for Mommy... for whoever has a cut and will need a Band-Aid sometime."  This question, it turns out, is a matter of no small importance to a three and a five year old, because like their choice of toothbrush or breakfast cereal, band-aids are an essential part of their artistic expression and personal style.  If the band-aids are just for you, then logically, you get to pick whether the box has Hello Kitty or the Ninja Turtles, the Minions or an assortment of dinosaurs printed on it.   So for my daughter, the question, and its answer, were imbued with great significance.

With a nod of understanding, she synthesized my list of names.  "It's for everybody?" 

"Yes," I nodded.  "It's for everybody."

Pleasantly (and I must say, somewhat surprisingly), that seemed to settle the matter for her.  There were no protests on that day that I had chosen plain band-aids, over cartoon characters that were designed and packaged to appeal to one person, one gender, or one age group in our family.  There was no insistence from either child that "it wasn't fair," and there was no crying or pleading for superheroes or Dora the Explorer.  Because, it seemed settled--could it really have been this easy?--that these band-aids were for everyone.  No one person got to claim them all, and yet no one would be turned away who needed one.  They were for everybody.

That meant, of course, that the only qualification, the only pre-requisite, for getting one of these band-aids from the medicine cabinet in our first floor bathroom... is that you need healing.  The band-aids are for healing, and the healing is for anybody who will need it when they come to our house.  Even guests. Even visiting relatives or friends. Even next door neighbor kids who scrape their knee when they come over to our house to play on the steps.  The band-aids in the box are for the healing of anybody who is (a) at our house and (b) needs one. 

My three-year-old daughter understood that. She could be content with that.  It is a simple enough idea, but it is also radical--these things are for healing, and therefore anybody who needs healing can have one. 

The last chapter of the book we call the Revelation to John has a similarly simple but radical vision. There in the center of the new creation, when all things are made new, there is a tree--the ancient tree of life, like it was plucked up from Eden's untended garden and transplanted into better soil.  The tree keeps producing fruit all year long, every month, so there is never a need to hoard or steal. 

And its leaves?  Well, those are for the healing of the nations. 

Are they only for me?  No... they are for me... and you... and for people who live in the city... and for people who live in the country... for people who live in red states, and for people who live in blue states.... for people who will vote for a Democrat for president this year, and for people who will vote for a Republican... for people whose families look like yours, and for people whose families look quite different... for people who cover their heads out of piety and modesty, and for people who keep their heads uncovered in celebration of their freedom... for people who seem so Christ-like you'd almost swear they were Jesus' stunt doubles, and for people who seem to have never met Jesus at all... for people in liberal democracies, and for people living under dictators... for people whose skin looks like yours, and for people whose complexion is a different crayon from the crayon box.  "The leaves on the tree of life are for the healing of the nations." That is to say, they are for everybody.

At the tail end of our Bibles, in a book full of visions of what we might simply call "the end of the world," there is a surprising twist.   On the last page of the story, despite all the violence and bloodshed of human history, despite all the many ways we have divided ourselves from one another, ostracized and "othered" each other, and refused to listen to one another, yet on the last page of the story there is the tree from back in the first chapter, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations.  The wounds within us, as well as the wounds between us.  The pain in my own heart, the scars that are left on yours, and the pain of the estrangement between you and me, too. 

The leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.  No one person got to claim them all, and yet no one will be turned away who needs one. 

The healing is for the nations.  It's for everybody.

Whatever else the Christian story means, it means that.  Whatever else is a part of our belief about how human history goes from here, or when Jesus comes again, or what happens to the world on which we live, whatever divergence of opinions there are on any of those subjects, the story ends with "the healing of the nations" with aloe from the leaves of the tree of life.  So if your own personal faith, your own personal worldview, or your own politics and priorities and values are missing that crucial picture--that in the end, all nations, all peoples, everybody gets healing for free--then it is time to re-examine your faith in light of the actual picture of the Scriptures.  If my theology makes no room for a God who will just up and heal all the nations at the end, because I am more interested in wishing to see somebody get punished, or because I can see the history of nations only in terms of "winners" and "losers," then it is time for me to re-read my Bible and discover that God chooses to end the story with "Healing is coming for all the nations.  It's for everybody."

My three year old girl understands that.  It is time for us to take it seriously, too.

Lord Jesus, speak to us again your hopeful vision of healing for all the nations, and let our actions now reflect hope in that kind of future.

The Face in the Window

The Face in the Window--October 10, 2016

"The Lord opens the eyes of the blind. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down; the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the strangers; he upholds the orphan and the widow, but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin." [Psalm 146:8-9]

A child's face caught my eye this morning as I stood up at the altar, lifting the bread of Christ and retelling the story of Jesus laying down his life for a world full of such children.

His eyes were piercing, but not hostile at all--they were just looking right through me.  And, as it happened, those eyes were staring into me through the glass of the small windows in the doors that lead from the church's narthex and entryway into the sanctuary.  Those inner doors were shut, but there were his eyes, the rest of the door obscuring his face and mouth so I could not tell if the boy was smiling or serious from where I stood. 

For a moment, I had a hard time processing what my eyes were seeing.  Our congregation is of such a size that I know just about everyone on a given Sunday, both their name and their families, and can often at least guess about who visitors or new faces have come with. But I didn't recognize this boy, and I didn't see any other adults with him.  All I saw was the face, separated from me by a closed church door.  I was "in" and he was "out," and, after all, I had important things to do at the moment, and preachers are so scatterbrained anyhow.

Well, it was, as I say, just a moment before my brain could put all these facts together, and I realized that the face looking at me so intently through that little window in the sanctuary door was actually the face of a child on a poster that had just been put up in the narthex of the church.  There was no young boy in our church entryway--there was only the picture of a child.  But, as it turns out, he was a homeless child. The poster was a notice about National Family Promise Week, a celebration and recognition of the ministry to homeless families (also formerly known as Interfaith Hospitality Network) which we and numerous other congregations in our county support and in which we participate in different ways.  And in that moment, the cup of wine now lifted up into the air in my hands, I felt the power of what I was seeing.  The face of a homeless child was peering into our sanctuary through closed doors, but his eyes were still staring into mine, as if to remind me that what happens at the altar cannot in the end be separated from the faces of children in the window.

I am glad, strangely enough, that for a moment the poster fooled me and I thought I was looking straight into the gaze of a homeless child.  Because it forces me to ask whether our doors are open, or will be open, when the child is really there, and the faces are actually in the room.  And it pushes me to see that in the Bible at least, the faces in the window are not ignored, but welcomed in as the beloved of God. 

The book of Psalms in the Bible is basically a hymnal--a collection of poetry and songs gathered over a long time that the people of God have used to sing their way through heartaches and triumphs, changes of leadership and times of great fear, praise and lament, and those bittersweet moments of life that are all of the above at once.  And when the many song-writers, poets, and lyricists of Israel's past made a list of reasons why they believed their God was great, so often it was because the first saw that God is good.  That is to say, they looked to the promise and character of the God who cares for the faces in the window--the face of the stranger (which is what the Bible calls immigrants), the child, the orphan, the widow, and the poor.  The reason God is worth praising, these old poets say, is that God's priority is on caring for those who have been forgotten, those who found the church door closed, those who have been turned away, those who look on in need and stare right through us while we try to get along on our way with other things we call "business." 

If we are going to talk about how grace heals the world and actually mean anything by those words, we are going to have to follow the pattern of those ancient songs in the middle of your Bible, and see that our worship of God is intrinsically connected to the face of the homeless boy who stares through the window of our sanctuary door.  We are going to have to see that "healing the world" does not just mean "MY world," or the "tiny universe I enclose around myself when I shut the door," but it includes all the people, ALL the people, all the PEOPLE, who find themselves on the outside looking in, and whom we are all otherwise likely to reduce to numbers or groups or statistics or not to notice at all.

It may have been accidental that the door in the church was closed yesterday morning.  It may have just been some good faithful steward in the church thinking we didn't want to waste energy and heat on a chilly October morning by letting a draft in from the front porch.  And it may have been just sheer random coincidence that placed the poster with the formerly homeless boy and the windows of the sanctuary door right in line with my eyes up at the altar.  But the God of the Psalms, and of the Bible in general, is not above using seemingly random coincidence to smack us upside the head and get our attention.

Today, let us indeed praise the living God for the divine commitment to graciously healing the world... but then let us open our eyes in the midst of our great thanksgiving to see the faces in the window who are looking to us to show the character of the God whom we praise exactly for caring for such faces of children and widows, of outsiders and immigrants.

Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see your face and the face of those whom you especially care for, right in our path on this day.

Our Many Kinds of Broken

Our Many Kinds of Broken--October 5, 2016

"...the creation itself will be set free from the bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies."  [Romans 8:21-23]


They say that most cases of a so-called "24-hour-bug" case of the flu is really food poisoning.  We just like the more pleasant-sounding euphemism of calling it a twenty-four-hour flu rather than saying you ate undercooked chicken and your body was protecting you from an invasion of really nasty little germs.


So you get sick at your stomach, and your whole GI tract seems to be up in arms against you, and pretty much you feel miserable until the next day.  But the stomach isn't the culprit--not really.  It would be a colossal mistake to blame your stomach for your choice to eat from the sketchy new food truck on the corner or the hole-in-the-wall greasy spoon diner.  Your stomach reacts the way it is supposed to--getting rid of the dangerous stuff in its system--all the hullaballoo is there to intended to rid the body of the offending tainted food.  And, yes, as a result, your whole body feels pretty weak and sickly for the next day while it's all working its way through your system.  Your whole self feels pretty crummy, to put it politely--not only your stomach that has to process the bad food, but also your head (which let you tell yourself to take the chance on a restaurant that skimped on hygiene) and your hands (which were the offending appendages that actually put the bad food in your mouth. 


In other words, when you get a case of food poisoning, your whole body feels the sickness, but in different ways.  Your gut bears the brunt of it, even though it's not really your gut's "fault," and then the rest of your body feels weak and sickly from the nausea. 


Well, to be honest, that's not just you after a risky Taco Tuesday or convenience store sushi.  That's all creation.  That's the whole world.  We are all sick--all of humanity suffers as a body, in different ways.  Some, to be sure, bear a lot more of the brunt of the suffering than others do.  And that suffering, like an upset stomach, makes the rest of the body queasy and weak.  And that also means that other parts of humanity who inflict more of the damage on the rest suffer, too--like the head gets a headache and the arms and hands feel weak from the nausea your stomach is feeling.


All of humanity, and indeed, all of the world, suffers from our own destructive choices toward each other. We are all infected, and affected, by the sickness. The church's usual way of naming that sickness is sin, but sometimes church words bring their own baggage.  You could call it brokenness, too--we are all broken.  Victims get broken by the powerful and the violent, but the powerful and the violent are broken, too--affected by the pain of the victims just like the head and the hands that put the bad food in your mouth are also affected by the stomach's nausea.  We are all tangled up with each other, a part of each other, for good and for ill.


Sometimes it is fashionable for us, the ones who live pretty comfortable and insulated lives away from the worst of the suffering, to be critical of the folks who cry out that they are hurting the most.  You and I do the same thing, too, when we are sick with food poisoning--we blame our stomachs for being upset, when it was really our own poor dinner choice that made our stomachs so sick in the first place.  We don't like to acknowledge that our choice, say, of the undercooked pork chop, ended up causing pain for our stomach, which means pain for our whole body, too.  It's always easier to blame the center of the discomfort. "It's my stomach's fault!  Why is it being so disagreeable? Why is it making me feel so weak?  Why is it making the rest of my body feel like it's been hit by a truck?  Why can't my stomach just quiet down and take it?" Well, come on--I'm the one had the bad oysters. My choice (my brain), my action (my hands). 


Well, let's project that analogy back on how we often look at the suffering of others in the world.  From the vantage point of comfortable, fully-employed, well-taken-care-of folks, who have stacks of privileges we were just given in life, we can find ourselves getting upset or critical of others when they start crying out about the suffering in their lives, their neighborhoods, their corner of the world.  "Why are they acting up? Why are they making such a ruckus? Why are they making me so uncomfortable?"  And from there, it's easy to just be dismissive or scornful: "They should just be nice and not make a fuss. They shouldn't complain--it makes the rest of us feel sick. They shouldn't disturb the peace of everybody else. I don't like them drawing such attention to their situation."  Think about how foolish that sounds if we are talking about an upset stomach and a case of food poisoning.  The stomach reacts to the poison--the tainted beef or uncooked shrimp or whatever--the way it is supposed to, and because it suffers, the whole body suffers. 


When it's your own gut that is making you nauseous, you know that if your stomach is upset, something you ate is likely the culprit.  And more to the point, if you want your whole body to feel better, you do what you need to do in order to make your stomach feel better.  You take the pink stuff; you take some other medicine for the nausea, maybe.  You stick to the BRAT diet and eat just bananas and toast for the next day.  Yes, you make a special effort to make your stomach get through the illness.  And you know that if your stomach gets better, then the whole of your body will be made well, too.  Nobody says, "Well, how come we're so focused on the stomach here?  What about my elbow? Doesn't my left ear matter?  Don't my toes matter? Why do I only give medicine to my stomach right now?  Why not some of the pink stuff on my knees, too?  They're feeling weak, too!"  Well, yes, of course--but they are not fighting off food poisoning right now.  The source of the pain is in the stomach--taking care of it will take care of the whole body.  Of course your whole body matters when you are hit with food poisoning--but the source of the discomfort is in your gut.  Heal the stomach, and your whole body gets to feeling better.  That's not "special treatment" of your stomach, and it's not a denial that your elbows or knees or left ear are important, too.  But they aren't facing an onslaught of raw chicken right now, and your stomach is.  It's when you take care of the most vulnerable part of you--the part that is under attack by sloppy street vendor chili dogs--that the whole of you is made well.


The perspective of the New Testament says the same about all of humanity, indeed, all of the world.  We are all connected to one another, and the suffering of the most vulnerable comes back to me--not only because if I am honest, I am sometimes a contributing cause to the hurt of others, but also because their unrest touches on the rest of humanity.  And instead of angrily scowling at the vulnerable ones who suffer and cry out about it, if I am moved to help them, I will find that the whole body called humanity is made well. It is, of course, always easier to want to dismiss the voices of unrest and say they are just agitating or complaining, but if I recognize that my stomach's way of dealing with the sickness I have inflicted on it is to agitate the rest of my body to expel the bad food, then I should recognize the same in the body called humanity.  Sometimes the outcry, the agitation, the unrest, is how the body rids itself of the poison.  And if I want the whole body--of which I am a part--to be well, I need to attend to the parts that are suffering most right now, the parts which are most vulnerable.


Dr. King said it beautifully back in 1957 in his piece, "Nonviolence and Racial Justice," written for The Christian Century.  King wrote:  "The nonviolent resister must often express his protest through noncooperation or boycotts, but he realizes that  noncooperation and boycotts are not ends themselves; they are merely means to awaken a sense of moral shame in the opponent. The end is redemption and reconciliation. The aftermath of nonviolence is the creation of the beloved community, while the aftermath of violence is tragic bitterness."  In other words, the point of the dissent is to make the body whole. The goal is not to punish one part of the body at the expense of another, or to ignore a part of the body and focus only on the parts that aren't suffering.  The goal is "redemption... reconciliation...the creation of the beloved community."  In other words, the goal is always to make the whole body whole again.


Paul reminds us in Romans 8 that all of creation is sick, groaning and waiting for that redemption.  All of humanity is caught up in our cruelty to one another, our indifference to the most vulnerable, and our quickness to resort to violence with each other--whether it is in a household throwing dinner dishes at the wall, in a neighborhood where shots are fired in the night when death could have been avoided, to the ways we marginalize others and then criticize them for saying something about it, to the weapons of terror and murder used by one nation or group against another.  We are all sick with it.  And our hope cannot just be for my little corner of the world to be put right--you can't make the head feel better without dealing with the stomach.  The goal has to be making the whole body well.  That means for the followers of Jesus, we can never settle for a vision that is smaller than everybody being cared for, everybody being precious and beloved, and everybody being looked out for--not just the people like me or near me or who resemble me. And that means it is outright antithetical to our faith to adopt the "Me first" or "My corner of the world first" mentality, if we are going to take the New Testament seriously.  All creation is groaning, because all humanity and all creation is broken.  We are broken in many ways, but we are all broken. And my wellness can only come when all are being attended to.  My healing can only come as I attend to the healing of the most vulnerable among us, just like the whole body only feels better when you attend to the stomach bug that is the site of the pain.


The amazing word of hope today from the Scriptures is that God intends to make all of creation well and whole again.  It is not too big a task, and it is not too much to hope for.  But if our vision shrinks to only being concerned with me-and-my-interests getting well, we will all continue to languish.  God's vision is to make us all well, and that starts day by day with care for the most vulnerable and most pained right now.


How will we respond to people around us differently if we dare to see ourselves as all part of the same sick-but-recovering body?  Let this day be different.  Let it begin now.


Lord Jesus, heal this whole body called humanity, starting where it hurts with the most vulnerable and pained, so that indeed all will be well, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be made well.

Holding Three Oranges

Holding Three Oranges--October 4, 2016

"As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered, 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work'." [John 9:1-4]

This isn't going to be easy. But we have to go here.

This is a world in which awful things happen.  And if followers of Jesus are going to be honest, we are going to have to deal with that. We are going to have to figure out some way of thinking through how we can say we believe that God is real--that God is knowable, and personal, and that the Scriptures describe this God as both wholly good and almighty--and at the same time not to deny that awful things happen. Unless we are going to deny that awful things are truly awful--the death of children, the starvation of countless people in one part of the world while food gets thrown away in other parts of the world, the memory of the ovens and lynch mobs, the labeling of some as "the other" who were thus expendable, the cruelty of those who abuse or prey on others, the devastation of a hurricane or an earthquake or an violent mob, or any of a host of other tragedies--unless we pretend that those things don't matter, we have to find some way to speak about how those things happen in the world while we also say that we believe God is real, good, and all-powerful.

It's rather like trying to hold three oranges in a single hand all at once: you might be able to fit two of the three at once, but the third one always wants to drop onto the floor.  And so you end up with people throughout history who have tried to resolve this conundrum by saying, "Well, God is good and well-intentioned, but just doesn't really have the power to stop us from doing awful things to each other," or "...but God just set the world up to run on its own and doesn't muddle with it any longer." 

Or you have others whose conclusion goes, "God is real, and God is all-powerful, but this so-called God is just a capricious and cruel hand of fate that deals disasters out without regard for what gets destroyed." 

Or, also, there have been folks throughout history whose answer has been, "A God who is all powerful and all good is a nice idea, but a fiction.  You need to give up on that as a real idea and just treat it like a bit of wishful thinking."  Any one of those answers gets two out of three oranges, but lets one hit the ground.

We have had to start here because we are going to be looking this month at how grace heals the world.  And while that sounds wonderful--and indeed, it is wonderful--we need to start honestly.  And in all honesty, "healing" means that there is something "sick" in the first place, just like "resurrection" means that something was "dead" first.  And if we are talking about God doing the healing, whether of an individual man born blind in John's Gospel, or of your sick parent or child, or of the whole world, then the sickness itself begs the question, "Why did God let them get sick in the first place?"  Only if we are willing to face that question, and to just bear the fact that any way you ask it is painful, can we somehow also see the healing as grace, too.

People do get sick.  Is God not aware of their need or of the existence of germs prior to a diagnosis?  No--to hear the Scriptures tell it, God is indeed aware.  Couldn't God have just prevented every sickness before it even ever happened?  Couldn't God have stopped the earthquake, the hurricane, the maniacal tyrant using chemical weapons on his own people while Christians half a world away comfortably twiddled their thumbs and didn't want to think about where those people would find a safe home?  Couldn't God have stopped the iceberg before it hit the Titanic, or stopped the water crisis in Flint before anyone was affected?

This is the hard thing we have to face now.  The way the Scriptures describe God, they are unwilling to give up on the claim that God really is able to do any of those, and yet also that God really is supremely good, and at the same time, that God really is real and not just a figment of our imaginations.  The Scriptures insist on finding a way to hold all three oranges in one hand, so to speak, without letting any of them drop.  That means the Scriptures dare us to imagine that it can be true, even if paradoxically, that God is good, that God is strong, and that God is real.  But that comes at the price, so to speak, of also acknowledging that someone you love will get sick with Alzheimer's Disease, or with inoperable cancer, or with heart disease, and that God's way is not usually to prevent anything bad from ever happening, but to bring life through even the most deathly of valleys. 

And it means, too, that there is no promise that angels will stop us as a human race from devastating ourselves.  We came very close during the Cold War to self-annihilation, and it is possible, now that the day to day threat of nuclear war has abated and been replaced with different fears to trouble our hearts (like terrorism and endless war), to think that the lesson to be learned is that God will not let us do lasting damage to ourselves, because God is too nice.  But that is not the way the Scriptures view it: the Old and New Testaments say again and again that, yes, we can and do inflict damage that doesn't get undone, but which much be born and gotten through.  Israel did go into exile, even when they were sure that God would never let it happen.  The Second Temple did get destroyed, even when God's people were sure that the true God would never let the Romans get that close.  We really did wipe out the passenger pigeon and the dodo, and we really are capable (more than just capable--we are doing it) of causing great damage to the beautiful world in which we live.  Faith in God does not mean we have a get-out-of-jail free card for the consequences of our actions, whether individually or collectively.  No, there is no rule that says God must step in and prevent the sickness in the first place, even when the sickness is worldwide... even when the sickness touches all of us.  Rather, the hope of which the Bible speaks is of a God who heals--that means the sickness comes, and God brings us through and out the other side.  The Bible speaks of a God who raises the dead--that means that death comes, and God brings us through and out the other side of that, too.  But the sickness is real--whether for a person or a planet.

In the midst of all that, Jesus teaches us to look for God in the healing of suffering, in the relief of disease, in the restoration of what sickness or death have ravaged.  And Jesus does that knowing that it will raise the questions in our mind of how God can be good... and strong... and real... all three at once.  Jesus knows it appears impossible to keep all three of those off the ground.  But nevertheless he teaches us to see the presence of grace in the healing of what is wounded, even though he knows it will provoke the question from us of why someone was able to be wounded in the first place.

All this month we are going to explore what it means to say that grace heals the world. But if we do that, we need to have begun here, because we have to acknowledge that both healing and resurrection mean going through something painful and frightening, rather than avoiding ever having to face them in the first place.

We do need healing.  In all kinds of ways.  Today, let us keep our eyes open and our ears honest about our need and learning to see God in the midst of it all.

Lord Jesus, heal our sicknesses.  Be merciful to us.  We are messes.