Sympathetic Resonance

Sympathetic Resonance--June 19, 2017

"Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God." [Romans 8:26-27]

I played the string bass for the orchestra in high school and college, that most monstrously large of the stringed instruments.  And even though playing the bass also entails a fair amount of awkward schlepping of said instrument, one of the coolest things about playing the bass (which is essentially a gargantuan curved wooden box with thick metal strings on one side) is the way you can feel the pitch, as the strings vibrate. 

And I mean literally feeling it--not just hearing notes in your ears or tapping along to a rhythm with your feet, but feeling the vibration of a pitch as it reverberates through the soundbox of the double-bass and into the limbs and body of the person playing it.  Unlike, say, a violin or viola, that is held in place while you play it with a plastic chin rest mounted to the instrument and which absorbs and dampens the vibrations before they enter the musician's body, a bass just passes the energy of those sound waves right into the bassist's hands, and even the whole side of your body as the instrument rests against you while you play.  As you drag the rosin-coated horse hairs of the bow across those thick metal-wound strings, you get a pitch that makes the whole instrument shake with intensity. 

But I also learned you can get the strings of your double-bass to vibrate even when you aren't playing.  Sometimes the strings on your bass will reverberate just because the bassist next to you is playing his or her behemoth instrument.  You can feel it, even if you are simply holding it upright, if someone around you is playing their bass and hits a pitch that matches one of your strings.   It's a phenomenon called "sympathetic resonance," and the gist is that if you get one thing vibrating at a certain frequency, other things in the immediate area that are tuned to the same pitch will start to resonate, too, because the traveling sound waves start them moving, too, even if less intensely.  Now, if the person next to you is in tune, and you are not, your string may not feel the vibrations, so there is good reason to want to adjust your instrument to be in tune with the others around you, so that you can feel the resonance. This happens other instruments, too--with anybody in the string section, or even with two tuning forks that are near by each other, for that matter--but you can feel it and observe it best with a super-sized instrument like a string bass.  At least I'll say, in my life story, I learned about this cool phenomenon of practical physics not in a lab or classroom, but in our high school auditorium where the orchestra practiced.  I learned--and could literally feel--the way one object can cause another to resonate even if they are not touching... and I could feel the reverberations all the way down into my own body.

Well, if for a moment you can put yourself there as an awkward high school string player, then I'll ask you to consider that maybe the key to the Christian practice of praying (no pun intended on that "key" thing... well, maybe a little) is this idea of sympathetic resonance--the idea that it is possible to adjust your tuning so that you are now "in tune" with both the people right around you and the definitive "A-440" of the concertmaster's opening pitch.  Despite the fact that we routinely talk about prayer like it is a matter of aiming the right "magic words" up at a magic genie in the sky, the apostle Paul offers this rather different picture here in his letter to the Romans.   You won't hear Paul talking here about wish-lists like God is some celestial Amazon.com, and you won't hear Paul offer any formula for how to get the "right" words to pray.  (Take note of this--again, no pun intended--before buying any books that claim to offer "more effective prayers" or "the right wording to get God to answer your prayers" or whatever other nonsense they are peddling.)  Here in these verses from Romans, Paul dares us to imagine prayer as less about "me-giving-God-a-to-do-list-as-though-God-were-a-being-that-is-somehow-all-powerful-but-doesn't-know-that-neighbor-is-sick" and more like prayer is about creating sympathetic resonance of the soul.  That is, praying is about the intentional surrender of our personal tuning pegs so that the Spirit can make us resonate with the character of the Reign of God.  Praying does something to realign us, our deepest selves, as much as it may change things in the world around us.

And as a case in point, Paul offers those situations when our words fail.  And, let's be totally honest here, there are indeed those times when we don't know what to pray anymore.  There are days, maybe long seasons or years, where we just don't know how to put the need, the ache, into words.  There comes a point, doesn't there, when someone you love is sick and suffering, and you don't know whether it is "right" to pray for them to keep suffering like that (the way modern medicine can sometimes prolong death as much as it extends life) or for their suffering to be over.  Somehow none of those words seem right.  There are times when we don't know what to say about war and violence, other than the obvious wish for it to stop.  But so often, our understanding of prayer is that we have to come up with the right English words to give God direction about what we think God ought to do to fix things... with the limited perspective we bring... and with our short-sighted timetables. 

Take the war in Syria right now--I have no idea what would "fix" that mess, that violence, that devastation--I only have a profound heartache that this endless quagmire keeps on going while more and more people are displaced, maimed, or killed, and more little boys and girls find themselves dazed, distraught, and dust-covered sitting in ambulances like that iconic image of the little boy we all saw on the news a while back.  I have no good words to direct the divine, only the ache, only the awareness of the pain, and all I can do is hold that image of that boy up to the sky and say, "This is not right."  Those words are not much of a direction, if prayer is primarily supposed to be giving God directions (the way we foolishly and overconfidently think it sometimes).

Or take the friend, the relative, or the loved one, you know whose heart is broken with despair, depression, or grief.  I suppose you could cobble together words like, "Make them feel happy again," or "Fix them, God..." but in all honesty, sometimes the hurt of life in a world full of death is inescapable.  Sometimes you just have to be sad for a while, and there is no drug, no distraction, no busy-ness, no project to occupy the mind, that can be plunked down from heaven to make it go away.   When those we love hurt, sometimes there are clear things we identify as "solutions" that someone needs to try... and sometimes there are no fixes, only more salt in the wound.  Sometimes even the sentence, "I'm praying for you" causes more hurt than good, when it comes off as "You are pitiable and incapable of coping... but I have magic holy words that you must not have..."  Try as we might to find good words, sometimes there simply are no good words.

In those times (and there are surely many more instances--maybe far more than we realize), Paul doesn't advise the followers of Jesus to give up praying, just because there are no good words.  But rather, Paul pulls back the curtain a bit and says, "Maybe it's not even about getting the words right..." Paul is convinced that praying is less like giving God directions the way you speak commands to your iPhone's "Siri" feature to give you the weather report or recite your calendar to you, and more like surrendering our instruments to be put in tune... so that they will resonate with the will and way of the living Spirit.  Praying opens ourselves up to let the Spirit bring us into harmony, instead of being cut off in our own little sectional and absorbed with ourselves.  Praying doesn't have to have "right" words because the Spirit is able to take our clunky, awkward, well-intentioned-perhaps-but-still-insufficient words, and to make us resonate in tune with the God who loves rightly.  And if my own self-interested mindset keeps me lobbing off prayers like, "Give me a good parking space, help me make more money, and make my favorite team win their next game," the Spirit has a way of helping us to hear that we are not in tune with God's A-440 pitch.  The Spirit has a way of helping us to see and to feel when we are not resonating... and not only that, but to help turn the pegs so that we become more and more in-tune with the things that really matter in the Reign of God.

There is an old line of Frederick Buechner's about how daring a thing it really is to pray and to allow the Spirit to go banging around in our hearts.   Because in a sense, once we have let go of the idolatrous way of prayer-as-heavenly-take-out-order, we will see that all prayer is, in a sense, about mindfully offering ourselves up to be re-aligned with the character of the Reign of God.  In a sense, all prayer then becomes variations on the them of "Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth."  Buechner writes about those words from the Lord's Prayer:

"It takes guts to pray it at all. We can pray it in the unthinking and perfunctory way we usually do only by disregarding what we are saying. "Thy will be done" is what we are saying. That is the climax of the first half of the prayer. We are asking God to be God. We are asking God to do not what we want, but what God wants.... And if that were suddenly to happen, what then? What would stand and what would fall? Who would be welcomed in and who would be thrown the hell out? Which if any of our most precious visions of what God is and of what human beings are would prove to be more or less on the mark and which would turn out to be phony as three-dollar bills? Boldness indeed. To speak those words is to invite the tiger out of the cage, to unleash a power that makes atomic power look like a warm breeze."

To pray, then, is not to present God with MY list of wishes--no, that is magic-genie thinking of the worst kind.  To pray is to offer up our instruments, as it were, and to ask for the whole orchestra to be put in tune--so that we there will be sympathetic resonance across the stage, and all creation itself will reverberate with the pitch that puts us in harmony.  It is to ask not only for injustices to be put right "out there" but also to invite God to compel me to see where there is injustice and disharmonious self-centeredness "in here" in my soul's soundbox, too.  It is not merely to give God a prescription for what I think should happen to OTHER people (which God, by the Spirit, is free to take or ignore), but to face the very real likelihood that I myself am out of tune and need to be brought back into resonance.

Today, then, the Spirit is moving us... to pray.  Not in the mechanistic mindset of "Enough-people-have-to-believe-and-clap-or-else-Tinker-Bell-will-die" picture of prayer, but in the sense that praying is a practice that lets the tuning pegs of our souls turn, so that we can be changed, too, and so that all of creation can be brought back in tune.  And if we dare to take the time, even if it looks like a total waste of time to the watching world, to be moved to prayer that looks like surrender of our instrument, we will find that everything--ourselves included--is changed.  We will find the Spirit helping our ears to hear where we are out of tune, and helping our deepest selves to feel again the sympathetic resonance of being in tune with the Reign of God and the Way of Jesus.

Lord God, we have no good words of our own today... your kingdom come... your will be done... take these instruments of ours, and put them in tune.

More Than Words

More Than Words--June 16, 2017

For we know, brothers and sisters beloved by God, that he has chosen you, because our message of the gospel came to you not in word only, but also in power and in the Holy Spirit and with full conviction; just as you know what kind of persons we proved to be among you for your sake. [1 Thessalonians 1:4-5]

As someone who has listened to more than my share of 1980s pop-rock, I will confess that I can't read these words of Paul's without hearing the old song by Extreme, "More Than Words."  The recurring lyrics keep running through my head:  "More than words/ Is all you have to do to make it real/ Then you wouldn't have to say that you love me/ 'cause i'd already know."  The song itself, of course, is sung as a request, or maybe a challenge, from the singer to his beloved, insisting that she make it clear that her feelings are more than just talk.  Now whether he's got ulterior motives in putting that dare to her, or whether he really does wonder if he's being strung along by his girlfriend, are questions for another day (and probably not as part of a devotional conversation on 1 Thessalonians).  But the point of the lyrics above is a powerful one in any case--anybody can talk a great game, but if all we've got to go on is words, we can easily be let down.  Too many times before in life we have gotten our hopes up because of great talk, polished rhetoric, or flowery prose, only to find there was no substance to the speech.  Too many times we've been in the same place as the singer in the song, afraid of letting our hearts be broken by empty promises, whether from romantic interests or political pundits.

Now, the surprising thing to me reading Paul's words today is the direction he takes this idea of needing "more than words."  We religious folk tend to automatically assume this train of thought is aimed at other people, or even ourselves.  We know the words of James that faith without works is dead, and we might be suspicious of people who say they believe but show no evidence (to us) of a sufficiently changed life to be "really" redeemed.  We know the words from John's letters that call us to show love "not in word or speech, but in truth and action," and we know that all too often that can be us, paying only lip service to our calling to love God and neighbor with all we have and all we are.  So, yeah, it's true that the Bible does call us to a way of life that is "more than words," and to a faith that goes beyond talking the talk. 

But that's now how Paul is thinking here.  Here, in these opening verses of 1 Thessalonians, Paul isn't trying to poke our consciences and make us do more to show God that our faith is sincere.  He's trying to assure us that God's faithfulness is sincere, and that the Good News Paul brought was more than just talk.  Paul is reminding the Thessalonians that even if the gospel sounds too good to be true, they can know it's the real thing because when Paul came to them to tell them about God's free grace through Christ, it wasn't just a sales-pitch.  They had an encounter with the living Holy Spirit, who came among them in "power" and "full conviction."  Whether Paul means that they saw miracles or wonders done, or that the Spirit's presence was made clear in some other way, Paul doesn't say--but his readers apparently remembered whatever it was.  And Paul is convinced that their experience of the Spirit confirms that the Good News of Jesus is not just an intersting story. The power of the Spirit's presence is their guarantee that Paul was not peddling snake-oil, and his God is not the snake. And then he caps it all off and says if nothing else, the Thessalonians can remember the way Paul lived among them and they can see from his own transformed life that this Jesus is the real deal.

In other words, here in this verse, Paul isn't trying to goad Christians into putting forth "more than words" to convinced God that they really love him.  He's turned that whole song around and says, "Look here--God has given us more than words to assure us that the words he does speak to us in the gospel are true!"  Paul is putting the "more than words" test to none other than God, and saying that God has been found truthful after all.  The amazing, even unbelievable, good news that we are beloved through Jesus apart from our earning and without restriction is really the honest-to-God truth, and we can rely on that truth, because God has shown us more than words. In a world where a lot of voices are just talk, God has given us the Spirit, who shows up with a power that is always more than we can manufacture for ourselves.  And God has given us the lives of saints around us who have been transformed by the free grace of Jesus as yet a further sign to us that the Gospel is more than wishful thinking.  God has chosen to be held to the "more-than-words" standards, and if we are honest at all, we can see that God has not been found wanting.

Today, we go out into a world confident that the news we bring is more than a political platform or empty romantic gesture.  We go out bringing the news of God's love with the assurance that God actually backs up the promise with the power and presence of the Spirit, who will transform us and leave ripples behind as we go.

Lord God, come among us in power and full conviction again so that we will be assured that your promises are true, and so that we will be transformed in the sight of the watching world, and so be your witnesses of a promise that sounds too good to be true, and yet is indeed the Gospel truth.



Heavy With Apples

Heavy with Apples--June 15, 2017

"By contrast, the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.  There is no law against such things." [Galatians 5:22-23]

I was walking in my back yard last night in the early evening, and the apple tree at the far edge of the property caught my eye.  It seemed, at first, droopy.  Its branches hung lower, it seemed, than usual.  At first, for just a split second, I worried that the tree might be diseased, until I got close enough to see that my apple tree was neither sick nor sad--it was, in fact, being fully an apple tree in all of its apple-y glory. That is to say, its branches were bowed down low because they were heavy with the apples growing day by day on its limbs.

And it occurred to me in that moment that whatever care or energy I have given to that tree over the spring, or over all the years it has been mine to care for, all of it has simply been in the hope of letting the apple tree fully be what it is meant to be.  Fertilizer or water, pruning and checking its branches from time to time, these are not acts of "charity" or "pity" for the tree--they are, rather, simply actions of love (I guess that is the right word, having been swayed by Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree from childhood).  They are things you do, not because you feel "sorry" for a tree that has no fruit on it in February (it's not time yet for apples in February!), but because you want to let the tree fully be what it is, to allow it to do what apple trees are made to do, and to let that apple tree be a glorious apple tree.  And an apple tree whose branches are bowed in graceful curves toward the ground because they are heavy with apples is glorious indeed. (The Hebrew word for "glory," by the way, comes from a root that means literally "heavy," the way we say something of worth has "substance" or "gravitas" to it, so, hey, I guess an apple tree, or whatever else, really can be gloriously heavy!)

Anyway, this was a whole new angle for me on the familiar words from Galatians about "the fruit of the Spirit" and the long list of virtues that Paul lists: love, joy, peace, etc.  Paul's point here is to say that these are the kinds of things the Spirit of God brings out in us.  And in that sense, these are all dimensions of what we are all meant to be--that they are all a part of what it means fundamentally to be human. 

The old church father Irenaeus once famously wrote, "The glory of God is a human being fully alive."  Well, what does it mean to be fully alive?  It is not a matter of having gone to enough parties or Caribbean cruises in a lifetime, or to have seen a certain number of sites on your bucket list. It's not about having more accolades on your resume, degrees on your wall, or money in the bank. To be honest, I know plenty of people who have been lots of places, partied harder than their peers, made and lost and made more fortunes, and racked up impressive titles... and still seem to have no clue about being human.  Paul's list is means to give us a sketch: if an apple tree is fully and gloriously itself when its branches are heavy with apples, then we are most fully ourselves as we let our lives blossom into love... and generosity... and peaceable, gentle spirits rather than being pompous blowhards.  To be fully human is to let ourselves be bowed down in graceful curves because our souls are heavy with fruit like that, too. 

And if that is so, then it tells us something vitally important about the presence and work of the Spirit of God: the Spirit's work among us and within us is essentially to bring forth out of us what makes us most fully ourselves.  It is a constructive role, a nurturing role perhaps, and a creative role--but it is the work of cultivating within us what makes us glorious--what makes us fully alive.

That means that the Spirit's presence in our lives isn't about pity.

I need to say that because sometimes it can sound like Christians believe God "needs" someone broken to "fix" in order to be God.  It can sound like God is co-dependent and "needs" us to be needy, or that God sees us solely as miserable messes who are pitiable and wretched.  This is sometimes the criticism of Christianity, too--that we secretly "need" there to be tragedies in the world for us to swoop in and make ourselves the hero to "fix" them, or that we cannot look at other people, near or far, as equals who might have something to share with us, but rather can only see others as poor, lowly messes for us to pity.

And, as you surely know from your own life, one of the worst things you can do to someone is to pity them.  At least as a long-term posture, pity has a way of putting the other person permanently beneath you in your mind, even if the other person grows and thrives and succeeds.  Pity has a way of ruining friendships and souring family connections, because it doesn't make room for the "pitied" to work through and grow past whatever made them "pitiable."  On the flip side, sometimes the words we most need are the voice of the friend who sees us on the same level, eye to eye, as it were, and says, "You are not my project--I just love you."

And as I say, sometimes we get this picture of God that is basically one of pitying us--that God only sees us as miserable, pitiably objects of divine pity, who are only here to make God feel better by having us to "fix." We imagine that God's confession is like the line from the old Cheap Trick song, "I want you to want me... I need you to need me... I'd love you to love me."  Of course, that may just be our way of projecting our own need-to-be-needed onto the divine, but we should be honest that we sometimes do imagine God this way... because we sometimes are this way.  But if we consider this idea from Paul that the Spirit's presence brings forth "fruit" from us, that's not about pity.  I don't pity my apple tree when I clear away a dead branch in the fall or put manure around it in the spring time.  I just care about my apple tree doing and being what an apple tree is meant to be.  I just want to let it be... glorious.  I just want to let my apple tree do what makes it most fully alive.

The way Paul talks here in Galatians is much the same.  The Spirit cultivates love in us--because love is at the core of human beings at their most glorious.  The Spirit cultivates joy in us, because we are in our glory when we can rejoice in someone else's joy.  The Spirit cultivates peace, and faithfulness, and all the rest, because, well, those are what make us most fully human.  Not attractiveness.  Not money.  Not popularity.  Not power.  The Spirit's work in us is, in a sense, simply to let us get out of the way of ourselves so that we can be fully alive.  God's intent is not to keep us all permanently infantilized, but to let us grow heavy with apples ourselves--which is to say, to let us be... glorious.

Today, the Spirit of the living God says to each of us, "You are not my project--I just love you."

Wow.  You are so loved.  Now, go... be glorious.

Lord God, let your Spirit draw out from us the glory of love, peace, faithfulness, and generosity.  Make us to be fully alive in you.

A Good Fire

A Good Fire--June 14, 2017

"Do not quench the Spirit.  Do not despise the words of prophets, but test everything; hold fast to what is good; abstain from every form of evil." [1 Thessalonians 5:9-12]

Not every fire is a good one.  The opening line of Ray Bradbury's classic, Farenheit 451, which is all about a society which burns every book it finds, along with the houses where they are found, is a haunting enough reminder of that:  "It was a pleasure to burn.  It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed." Quite likely, we don't need fiction to tell us that fire is often an awful, awful thing--having known people who have been burned or lived through fires in houses or workplaces.  Too many family stories here in Indiana County include a chapter that begins, "Then the barn burned..."  or "That was before the house-fire changed everything..." for us not to know that fire is often a wickedly destructive thing.

That said, however, there is such a thing as a good fire.  And where such a fire can be found, you don't want to put it out--you want to let it blaze and shine and radiate a good heat, the kind that pulses out in waves.  This is the way Paul talks about the Spirit of God--like a good fire.  Maybe he's got the stories of that Pentecost day on his mind, and how the Spirit descended on the first followers of Jesus like little flames of fire on their heads, transforming them from cowardly fishermen into courageous witnesses who passed the news of Jesus along like one candle wick lighting another.  Maybe Paul has just the seen the Holy Spirit work in ways that could only be described as catching fire--the way the light from one person just catches another person, until they are both shining witnesses, and then both keep burning bright for others, so that they can be brought in, too.  Maybe Paul is thinking about the way a flame resists being tamed or boxed in, the way a fire moves with a restless energy that can never stay in one place, or the way it radiates an energy that has to be respected.  Maybe the answer is "D: All of the above."  But in any case, Paul pictures the Holy Spirit like a moving, blazing, stirring fire--and a good fire, at that. 

...Which is why Paul's direct command here is not to quench the Spirit.  Don't stifle, don't choke out, don't box in the living movement of God, even though it seems risky and dangerous and means giving up control.  Don't insist on being the boss of the fire--let the flames go where they will and move as they will (the same way the wind "blows where it wills," as Jesus says about the Spirit in the Gospel according to John...).  Don't let the desire to control the burn or the fear of fire lead you to put it out all together, in other words.  You can't master the flames, of course, but you can squelch them, and then your world would be a darker place.

In other words, Paul's most basic direction here is not to trample on the places you see the Spirit shining brightly and moving with restless energy.  Where you see the Spirit at work--in someone else's life, in the ministries of God's people, in a moment of conversation with someone hungry for good news, in an opportunity to serve with reckless love in Jesus' name--don't be so obsessed about controlling the moment or keeping it contained that you put out the flames.  Or, to cut to the chase, let God be God--which means admitting that God will move in ways you cannot predict or box in... maybe, even that God will move in ways you wouldn't have picked.

The rest of these verses, then, flow out of this command to let a good fire keep burning--when the Spirit inspires (or kindles, if you prefer) other faithful saints to speak with the same fierce brilliance as on that Pentecost morning, let the Spirit do his work there.  In the early church, of course, the idea of "prophets" was not limited to the books and scrolls of Isaiah and Jeremiah and their fellow centuries-old-and-dead colleagues--the word "prophet" was a wider term that included those who were still being raised up to speak and preach and teach in the name of Jesus.  (For example, in the book of Acts, you've got several different figures who were not from the original twelve apostles who are called prophets, who speak forth a Word from God.)  So now that Paul has said categorically not to quench the Spirit, he adds now specifically, "...And don't mess up what the Spirit is doing in speaking through someone else!  The Spirit doesn't have to ask your permission, after all!"  Paul would have us give a holy respect to the people through whom the Spirit speaks and moves and acts--even though, again, it means admitting that God's work and motion and designs will not always (or even often) be under our control.

We have known people like that before, haven't we?  People who just burn with a light and an energy that is not their own--that is a sure sign of the Holy Spirit's moving.  We find our lives challenged and encouraged by theirs at the same time, the way a good fire keeps you on your toes but can also brighten and warm you when you need it.  It is a gift--if not always an easy gift--to have such blazing people in our lives.  Jon Foreman, the lead singer and songwriter for the band Switchfoot, had a song about someone he knew whose life burning like a fire that was kindled by the Spirit.  In "Amy's Song," he sings, "Salvation is a fire in the midnight of the soul... it lights up like a can of gasoline.... yeah, she's a freedom fighter, she's a stand-up kind of girl.  She's out to start a fire in a bar-code plastic world."  Marilynne Robinson has the narrator of her novel Gilead say, "It was the most natural thing in the world that my grandfather's grave would look like a place where someone had tried to smother a fire."

That is what Paul has in mind when he pictures the Spirit at work in us--as a good fire, one that catches in the lives of the blessed saints around us--and spreads.  Of course, not every fire is a good one, and not everybody who is excited about something is burning with the Spirit.  That's why Paul says to test everything, and everyone, who is all hot and bothered about something, to discern which are the good fires--the bonfire beacons, the roaring hearths, and the campfire rings on a dark, starry night--and which are the ones not worth adding any fuel to.  (Because, yeah, there are fusses that religious folks sometimes make that produce only hot air but shed no light....)

And once we've done the testing, Paul says, we keep the good stuff--we let the Spirit shine and blaze and burn where and how he will--and then we let the bad stuff go out.  There is the triple challenge of this day:  letting go and surrendering enough to let the Spirit move and act beyond our boxes and attempts to control what God does on the one hand, and on the other, letting the frivolous or the destructive flames go out--and learning to tell which is which.  That may not be easy, but that is part of what we do as followers of Jesus--and part of why we don't do it alone.

O Spirit of Life, burn brightly around us, among us, and within us--and shine in us as you will it.

Bothering the Silversmiths

Bothering the Silversmiths--June 13, 2017

"Now after these things had been accomplished, Paul resolved in the Spirit to go through Macedonia and Achaia, and then to go on to Jerusalem. He said, 'After I have gone there, I must also see Rome.' So he sent two of his helpers, Timothy and Erastus, to Macedonia, while he himself stayed for some time longer in Asia.  About that time no little disturbance broken out concerning the Way. A man named Demetrius, a silversmith who made silver shrines of Artemis, brought no little business to the artisans.  These he gathered together, with the workers of the same trade and said, 'Men, you know that we get our wealth from this business. You also see and hear that no only in Ephesus but in almost the whole of Asia this Paul has persuaded and drawn away a considerable number of people by saying that gods made with hands are not gods. And there is danger not only that this great goddess Artemis will be scorned, and she will be deprived of her majesty that brought all Asia and the world to worship her.' When they heard this, they were enraged and shouted 'Great is Artemis of the Ephesians!' The city was filled with confusion; and people rushed together to the theater dragging with them Gaius and Aristarchus, Macedonians who were Paul's travel companions." [Acts 19:21-29]


What happens when the Spirit runs up against the bottom line?


You know, I have to give this much to Demetrius the silversmith here in this episode from the book of Acts: he sees clearly that sometimes the Way of Jesus is bad for business.  And he knows that sometimes you have to decide which is more important.  You have to decide which god really gets your allegiance, because, in the words of Jesus himself, you cannot serve the living God and Mammon.


Now, Demetrius does see that the message of Jesus and the movement of the Spirit that pushed Paul to keep hanging around there in Ephesus and the surrounding area are affecting their profits. He has a clarity that sometimes we Christians lack, or willfully avoid, because he realizes that there are times when you have to choose between making more money and living the Way of Jesus.  Sometimes you have to choose between the promptings of the Spirit and the profits in the second quarter.  Demetrius sees that, while often we like to imagine that God must always be in favor of making more, acquiring more, and possessing more.


The tragedy of Demetrius, however, is two-fold.  Not only does he pick the wrong side in the divine contest of Profits versus the living God, but he also dresses his decision up in piety to his goddess of choice, Artemis, whose figurines and shrines were made of the silver he peddled.  Demetrius has found a way to tell himself (and make himself believe) that he's not greedy--he's pious!  His god wants him to get rich--his god's honor is at stake if his business suffers!  He can tell himself that he is being devout when he drums up the other silver moguls in town and launches a riot against Paul and his anti-business (from their view) message.  It's a clash of us-and-our-way-of-life and... them... those no-good, profit-killing, trouble-making, impious followers of Jesus of Nazareth, he told them.  It was a contest of civilizations, Demetrius shouted, as he riled them up.  And they had to take a stand against these meddlesome Christians, or else, Paul and his ilk would subvert all that they had built up--their religious system, their business (that neatly went hand-in-glove with that same religious system), and the sway they held over their whole culture.


And, of course, Demetrius is not wrong about the choice between Jesus and another god: you do have to pick one.  But it's funny, kind of (in the way "funny" can really mean "sad"), to see how the powers of the day saw Christians once upon a time.  You know, if you look up in the archaeological and historical record how the Roman Empire and its accompanying culture viewed Christians in the first few centuries, you may be surprised at the charges they brought against us.  They called us "atheists," because we would not worship a god made in statue form, like dear old Demetrius and his silver statues of Artemis.  They called us political troublemakers because we would not worship the emperor and would not mouth the loyalty oath they demanded of all: "Caesar is Lord."  And when Paul eventually lost his life (most likely in Rome during Nero's reign), it is most likely that the charge was treason.


Why?  Why would those early Christians have been seen as such a threat?  Why, when we were all supposed to be following the teachings of an itinerant rabbi who wanted us to love everybody?  Because, as at least Demetrius saw, the Way of Jesus sometimes really does come head to head against the bottom line.  We didn't bring weapons and we didn't try to usurp Caesar with a bloody coup.  We didn't raise an army or organize a protest with torches outside city hall or even cut off our associations with non-Christians (as the pagan emperor Julian once noted, we Christians--he called us "impious Galileans"--didn't only take care of our own poor, but the poor of the wider society in which we found ourselves!).  The early church didn't look like an insurrectionist party.  And yet, our message of a God who isn't all tangled up in the local business establishment and who can't be manipulated by producing more religious trinkets, well that message turned out to be a threat to the order of the day.  And the shrewd observers like Demetrius saw that--that the Christian message really could subvert all the other neat and tidy systems we build our lives on, and pull the rug out from under them with its news of a God who doesn't need to be appeased by constructing temples or fed by offering up sacrifices.


And yet--even though the local silversmith trade (and probably a host of other related businesses and industries like the mines, goldsmiths, incense sellers, and farmers raising sacrificial animals for Artemis, Zeus, and the rest) all had branded Paul and his message dangerous and bad for business, the Spirit still led Paul to speak, to witness, and to be willing to be unpopular.  Notice that--as Luke tells the story, the Spirit of God leads Paul to the conclusion that he needs to stay where he is at the moment, exactly where it will be an unpopular message that the living and real God doesn't need silver shrines.  It wouldn't have been so controversial a message, perhaps, if Paul had been in a different city that had a different local industry, or a different local god-of-choice.  It would have been easier for Paul to speak out against the silver idols in a town that didn't have booming silver mines and silversmiths.  But that's where the message needed to be brought.  And make no mistake: it is the Spirit of the living God who tugs at Paul and helps him to see that he needs to stay where his message will be perceived as an attack on "business" and as "subversive" to the dominant culture.  And so instead of closing his mouth, or going somewhere else where his message wouldn't have ruffled so many feathers, Paul responds to the push of the Spirit--and he keeps on speaking the news of Jesus, the God who was embodied in a crucified human life rather than a statue made of precious metal.


I wonder... how will we find the courage if the Spirit tugs at us the same way?  I wonder, maybe even underneath that--will we dare to let the Spirit help us to see the unpopular realities when there are times that the Way of Jesus butts up against a bigger profit?  Will we be willing to say things like, "The Way of Jesus is more important than wealth and gain?"  Will we be willing to be criticized for saying things that affect the silversmiths? Not as an attempt to be politically partisan, but, like Paul, because the central gospel claim (of a God not made with human hands) runs up against business-as-usual?  Will we let the Spirit of God lead us still to witness to the Way of Jesus, even if people take it as an attack on our comfortably wasteful consumer society?  Even if others say like they did to Paul and to the prophet Amos centuries before him, "Why don't you take that message somewhere else where you won't rile people up?"


A hundred and fifty years ago, Christians were at the leading edge of a national (and international, too, in Britain and the British Empire) call to end slavery, because they were convinced it violated the Way of Jesus--but they spoke up, even when countless powerful interests said, "But it's bad for business to abolish slavery--you're anti-farm and anti-business if you want to set them free!"  But they did it anyway, convinced that the same Spirit who spoke to Paul was moving them. Thirty years ago, Christians were at the forefront of a movement that helped end apartheid, in large part because they were willing to say that the Way of Jesus and its equal treatment of all people, all races, was more important that making money in partnerships with companies that profited from apartheid in South Africa.  Twenty-five years ago, Christians were willing to be seen as subversives in countries behind the Iron Curtain as Communism crumbled and Christians kept worshiping the living God rather than the oversized metal statues of Lenin and Stalin.  And, so that we are clear, in all of those instances, followers of Jesus were branded as troublemakers who were threatening the comfortable arrangements of the silversmiths of the day.  Those Spirit-led voices spoke up... and they turned the world upside down... eventually.  But in the midst of the call, and in the midst of the speaking up, they got labeled as "bad for business," "against the common good," and "troublemakers," among other things.


And, of course... there were plenty of followers of Jesus in each of those decisive moments who just didn't want to make anybody upset, and who didn't say a word about the gospel and slavery... or the gospel and apartheid... or the gospel and totalitarianism and communism.  They just kept their heads down and didn't bother the silversmiths.


So... I wonder about myself, coward and pleaser that I usually am... what will I do, and what will any of us do, when we feel the nudge of the Spirit, even if it means upsetting the idol-peddlers and silver miners?  Will you and I find the courage, and the clarity, and the compassion, to risk bothering the silversmiths?


Lord God, let your Spirit give us courage, and clarity, and compassion in all things, to speak and live with grace and truth the Way of Jesus... regardless of what it does to our reputations.

The Agenda

"The Agenda"--June 12, 2017

"When [Jesus] came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll  and found the place where it was written:

'The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,

    because he has anointed me

       to bring good news to the poor.

 He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives

     and recovery of sight to the blind,

        to let the oppressed go free,

     to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor.'

And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. Then he began to say to them, 'Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing'." [Luke 4:16-21]

Everybody's got an agenda in life.  Everybody.  Jesus, too.

Everybody's got a list, whether spoken or unspoken, written or unwritten, conscious or subconscious, of things they are pursuing in life, things that matter in life, things that are worth working toward.  Your agenda is not only your list of goals, but also your perspective--it is just as much the lens through which you see the whole world as much as it is your set of things you want to do in the world.  And, as I say, whether we know it or not, we've all got one.

This is Jesus' agenda.

I mean that very seriously.  We religious folks are great at projecting our pet passions, persuasions, and politics onto Jesus.  We imagine that Jesus wants our local baseball team to win (and we forget that the folks rooting for the other team are praying to Jesus for help, too), that Jesus has strong feelings about lowering the capital gains tax (newsflash: he doesn't), or that Jesus wants my political party to win more elections (this is just the same as the baseball heresy, but with suits and ties and yard signs instead of big foam fingers).  The truth is, those are our agendas, not Jesus'.  And before we go baptizing our own particular list of personal pet peeves and ascribing them to the Messiah of God, we should probably just be honest and recognize what we are doing: trying to pass off our own agendas as Jesus'.

But to be clear, Jesus brings his own.  And he is entirely forthright and up front about it. On the day Luke talks about here, when Jesus went to his hometown, to his childhood synagogue, he came with his agenda spelled out and ready.  (This is important to note, because sometimes we make a parallel mistake along with confusing our agendas with Jesus' agenda, namely, we incorrectly believe that Jesus had no agendas at all, no particular "take" on things, and no particular angle or perspective out of which he spoke, acted, and loved people.  The danger there with that mistake, of course, is that if we wrongly conclude that Jesus had no agenda, we are back at square one baptizing our own personal agendas rather than holding them against Jesus' to see how they compare.)

There in the synagogue in Nazareth, Jesus reads from the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and essentially claims the passage he reads as his own mission-statement.  These are the first public words of Jesus in Luke's gospel, and they come right after his baptism and wilderness season, on the day he says these words from what we call the sixty-first chapter of Isaiah have been fulfilled as Jesus spoke them that day.  

That is to say, Jesus doesn't just invent his own agenda out of whole cloth. He doesn't come up with his own "neat idea" and say, "Wouldn't it be nice to work for these kinds of things?"  And he most certainly does not built a platform for his Kingdom movement based on putting himself first, or his nation or ethnic group or culture first.  Instead--as you can see for yourself--the agenda Jesus claims is from the words of the prophet, inspired by God centuries before him, and they are words of compassion, of restoration, of liberation, and of gracious care--for all.  This is the radical thing about Jesus: he has an agenda (and is quite open about it, as a matter of fact), but it is an agenda that's not all about himself!  It's not about getting what is good only for him.  It's not about how to keep himself, or his community of followers, safe and secure.  It's not about getting themselves jobs or wealth, and it's not about puffing himself up, either, to make himself look "great" or "important" or "successful" or like a "winner."

If anything, you could say that Jesus' chosen agenda is all about the people who have been labeled "losers" in life.  Jesus' agenda is about good news for the poor, release to those who are imprisoned, healing for those who are diseased, an end to oppression, and the announcement of God's "jubilee"/"the year of the Lord's favor" (the ancient practice prescribed in the Torah of taking every fiftieth year for a social re-boot in which debts were cancelled, land went back to its ancestral family owners, slaves were set free, and the land was to rest as well).  Jesus reads these words, and then claims that they find their fulfillment in him--right then and there!  And what's more, because this is Jesus, none other than the full divine presence in a human life, Jesus is also claiming that these words from Isaiah 61 are God's agenda in the world, too.

Think about that for a second, and there is remarkable clarity to be found.  If you want to know what things Jesus thinks are worth doing, look here.  If you want to get a foothold into thinking like Jesus, and also acting and speaking like Jesus, here are the crib notes.  If you want to know what things matter to God, and what are the essential planks of the platform for the Reign of God, here you go.  This is the angle from which Jesus operates--this is the perspective through which Jesus sees the world.  Sometimes we (wrongly) imagine, because we picture God being "up above" somewhere very high in the sky, that God doesn't have a vantage point or a particular perspective, but only sees everything with the distance of the 50,000 foot view (a la Bette Midler's song that suggests, "God is watching us...from a distance).  But Jesus here shows us--God does have a perspective, an angle, and agenda.  God is about the work of bringing good news to uplift the people on the bottom, to release those who are imprisoned to heal those who are bound by their ailments, and to announce jubilee freedom.  Jesus says that this is what the Spirit of the Lord has anointed (the same word we get "messiah" or "Christ" from) him to be about.

Don't miss the underlying point: this is what the Spirit of God does in the world. This is the kind of stuff the Holy Spirit will do with us, and in us, and through us, as we dare to let the same Spirit direct and propel us in the course of our Monday.  "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me," Jesus says, "because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor."  Well, if you and I are followers of this same Jesus... and if you and I are indwelt by the same Spirit, then in a very real sense, Jesus' agenda is to become our agenda, too.

This is what we'll be about in our lives, more and more, as we let the same Spirit make us over into the likeness of Jesus. This is what will matter to us more and more.  This is what we will find ourselves excited about, passionate about, sometimes really angry-and-hopeful-at-the-same-time about, too.  And less and less will we be fussy about the old things we had been keeping on our personal agendas that we used to think were "oh-so-important."  We'll be less concerned about making ourselves look like "winners" and looking tough. We'll be less concerned about protecting our pride and our reputations.  We'll be less worried about ourselves, all around, actually, and more interested in practicing compassion.  And we will find ourselves reading these same words of Jesus' again and praying, "Lord, let this scripture be fulfilled today in my living them, too!"

You know the old saying: "Opinions are like belly buttons--everybody's got one."  Today, what if we owned and took a closer look at our sets of opinions, our way of life in the world, our agendas, and held them up to Jesus' to let him realign ours with his?  What if we dared to let these ancient words from Isaiah, echoed by Jesus, become our agenda, for this day, and for the next day, and for the third day, too?

Lord God, realign our hearts, our wants, and our lives with yours.

New Song: "Always is Always"

Dear Friends,

Just a bonus note that my new song, "Always Is Always" (from this Sunday's sermon on Matthew 28:16-20) is available to listen to at the player below.

You can also choose to purchase the song as a digital download (again, follow the link you'll see, you can purchase it at Bandcamp for $1.00, or if you choose to give more, you can), and I'll send any and all proceeds to Lutheran World Relief for its Syria relief ministries to directly help those in the midst of the devastation and displacement in Syria. 

No strings. No catch.  No fine print: you want to listen for free?  Great.  You want to buy the song and know all proceeds go to help people living through the humanitarian crisis of our era?  Hurray! 

If you are interested in the lyrics, see below the player!

Always is Always (a song drawn from Matthew 28:16-20)

A Song for Hope+New Life—June 11, 2017 (Holy Trinity Sunday)

Now we are gathered, held like a breath, for an instant

Until you lead us, rippling out, both near and distant. 

Like dandelions, wind carries seeds to plant them

As we are scattered Let your promise be our anthem:

 “Always is always is always.

  Always is always is always.

  Deep in your bones,

  Know you’re never alone

  Always I’ll be with you.”

Into a new day, out to the world that sees us

Moved by your mercy We’ll bring the life of Jesus.

So here’s to beginnings You fashion out of endings

We’ll trust your presence comes along with your sending:

 “Always is always is always.

  Always is always is always.

  Lean on these words

  Until everyone’s heard:

  Always I’ll be with you.”

Whatever happens we’ll go with Word and water

Knowing for certain You call us sons and daughters.

We’ll be your welcome, offered to friend and stranger

Echo your voice there stronger than fear or danger:

 “Always is always is always.

  Always is always is always.

  No matter the place

  You can’t outrun grace

  Always I’ll be with you.”