Ghost Town Lessons

Ghost Town Lessons--August 18, 2017

"Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is in the name of the LORD our God.  They will collapse and fall, but we shall rise and stand upright." [Psalm 20:7-8]

Let me tell you about a lesson I learned from a ghost town.

The year was 1865, and oil was struck near a creek on a wooded hillside in western Pennsylvania, just a few miles from where they had first found oil at Drakes Mills a few years before.  Because of the boom in investment in drilling for oil at Drakes Mills, people rushed to this new spot, too, hungry to cash in on what they expected to be another gushing deposit.  With a matter of months, some 15,000 people had swarmed to the spot, building a little town, which took its name from the nearby creek... which in turn supposedly took its name from a curious crack in the ground nearby that everybody knew about (and half-suspected was an entrance to hell).  And thus, Pithole, Pennsylvania was born.

Alas, after a high-point of 20,000 people had created a bustling down, and after the oil boom came and went, prices dropped, and speculators picked up and left for other places, within twelve years the town had shrunk back to almost nothing and went unincorporated.  Before long the woods reclaimed the town, and today there is a visitor center there and volunteers who mow the grass that grows where the town's roads used to be.  Pithole--yes, pronounced "pit-hole"--Pennsylvania came and went in less time than elapsed between the last two Rocky movies.  And now a gift shop and road sign marks what had once been the location to be at for people who wanted to get rich and make their fortunes.

If you find yourself driving through Venango County, Pennsylvania, make a point of stopping yourself sometime--and learn from the haunting scene of a town reclaimed by the trees.  And if you should stop, let it sink in: this is the best that money, or power, or popularity, or fame, or possessions can get you.  They may show up in your lap, but they are a flash in the pan, and then they are gone.  Try and build a lifetime on them, and they vanish.  Try and build something stable on them, and they crumble beneath you and return to the loam before long.

I don't know what the people of Pithole in its heyday thought they were doing or how long it would last, but it seems to me that they were only thinking as far as the next well, or the next barrel.  They never dreamed their supply would run out or that prices would collapse.  No one ever does.  But when it turned out that the great fortunes to be made in the oil business were more mirage than money-in-the-bank, at least there in that spot, everybody left.  And the great bustling boom town of Pithole, PA returned to the woods.

I hear that historical lesson in the back of my head when I consider these verses from the psalms.  In the end, the things we think (think!) are solid and dependable--things like horses and chariots perhaps in one era, or oil derricks and barrels in another, or smart-phones and 401(k)s in our day--these things simply cannot be counted on. They don't last. They don't live up to any guarantees. They don't endure.  And if we place our trust in stuff like money, profits, weapons, wealth, or our piles of stuff, we are setting our sights too small and too short. 

So often that's our problem--we can't look beyond whatever things are right at hand, right in the moment, whatever is immediately around us, and we pin our hopes and put our trust in them.  It is myopia of the soul--short-sightedness about what really matters and what truly lasts.  And the voice from the psalms is that whether it's horses or handguns, power or possessions, these things simply won't prove reliable.  The bubble bursts, the security that was promised dissolves, the peace of mind we were counting on evaporates.  And if we are only able to focus the eyes of our hearts on the immediate, it will take us by surprise when those things happen.

It's the politicians who can only see as far into the future as the next election.  It's the newly married couple who assume they can get the McMansion right away in their adult life and then get up to their eyeballs in debt.  It's the tendency in all of us only to care about the people immediately in our awareness--people who live in my neighborhood, or look like me, or think like me.  We have this way of seeing only what it is immediately at hand and then having the things we put our trust in disappear beneath our feet.

But the people of God are given a gift--like a pair of glasses to correct our vision.  We are given the capacity to see beyond the immediate--to see and think beyond just me and my stuff, me and the people like me, me and the short term.  We are given the ability to see beyond just what is good for me, beyond what feels good in the moment, beyond just caring about people who are "like me," and instead to have our vision expanded. 

Grace gives a new way of seeing that is always further--further out in time, and further out around me.  It means we ask less and less, "What's good for just me?" or "What will get me through the day... or the year?" and more and more we will ask, "What is good not only for me but also for a child in China, a university student in South Africa, or a struggling single mom on the edge of poverty on the other side of the country?"  It means we not only ask, "What's the short-term pay-off?" but also, "How would this affect my grandchildren and the world they will inherit?"

Today, what if we let the Mercy of God--the one thing that is reliable in this messy universe--put new lenses in front of our eyes, so that we can see not just the immediate, local need, but also to see wider and deeper and further... so that we can think beyond a boom in business for a few months, or the short term market gains on the nightly news. 

Today, the living God offers us a cure for the myopia in our hearts. It is worth taking it.

Barney and Friends--Hope+New Life Devotions--August 17, 2017

Barney and Friends--August 17, 2017

"When he had come to Jerusalem, [Saul] attempted to join the disciples; and they were all afraid of him, for they did not believe that he was a disciple. But Barnabas took him, brought him to the apostles, and described for them how on the road he had seen the Lord, who had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had spoken boldly in the name of Jesus." [Acts 9:26-27]

Grace will change your eyesight.  Be prepared.

And--just in case it weren't equally obvious--once your eyesight has been changed by grace, your heart, your social circles, and your priorities are in line next to be changed, too.

Grace has a way of changing the way we see the people we called our enemies. 

This is one of the things I have to come to love about stories like this scene from Acts--we get a glimpse of the real, slow but steady, real-life messiness of what it looks like when people who have been grasped by Grace slowly have their vision changed.  It's a moment that I don't think ever made it into childhood Sunday School flannelboard lessons, but it's the kind of story that we desperately need to hear. 

The story of Saul/Paul's dramatic encounter with the living and risen Christ on the road to Damascus is one of those stories that most church folk know.  It's got everything--supernatural special effects, a dramatic conversion, and a fast-paced plot as the guy who was going to round up Christians and imprison them ends up becoming a follower of the same Christ he was persecuting.  But after that powerful one-on-one moment with Jesus, there was the difficult and thorny question of what anybody else in the Christian community was going to think of this guy. 

After all, everybody had heard of Saul of Tarsus, at least in the local Jerusalem Christian community.  They had heard of him, and they were afraid of him.  He had first come to public notoriety when an angry mob started to stone a young Christian named Stephen and Saul offered to hold everybody's coats while he nodded approvingly.  And  then this Saul nursed his hate of the still fledgling Christian movement, even getting authority to round up any "followers of the Way" (that's what they called us first, before the title "Christian" came along) to be bound in chains, imprisoned, and likely beaten or worse... because they were followers of Jesus.  Saul was good at what he did, and he had a passion for it.  He was responsible for plenty of suffering among the early Christian community, and everybody knew his reputation. 

So when all of a sudden, out of the blue, the news comes that this same guy has now come to faith in Jesus, it was hard for the early church to know what to make of it.  And to be honest--as the book of Acts is refreshingly honest here in the retelling--there were a lot of those disciples who didn't want to let Saul in.  They couldn't believe he had come to faith in Christ.  They were afraid it was all a hoax, this newfound "faith" Saul supposedly had.  They saw him as a danger to themselves and to their children. They were afraid if they dared open their tables or their lives to him, he would betray them and have them jailed or beaten or killed like Stephen.  All with good reason, mind you--they weren't trying to be mean to Saul... they just knew everything Jesus publicly stood for and didn't want to get themselves killed if possible.  But sure, there had to have been anger, frustration, resentment, and doubt going through the minds of those early Christians.  And all they could see when they looked at Saul or heard his name was anger, was fear, was the impulse to keep Saul out for everybody's safety.  They saw a threat when they looked at Saul, and they really and truly struggled to dare to believe that even the Spirit of God could break open his hatred-hardened heart.

And then there is this guy named Barnabas.  And good ol' Barney (who had been introduced earlier in the book of Acts because of his amazing generosity selling his family homestead and giving all the proceeds to help feed people) sees things differently.  More to the point, he sees Saul differently.  Instead of seeing him as Public Enemy #1, or as someone beyond redemption, Barnabas sees this former enemy of the church as someone beloved of God.  And not only as someone beloved of God, but someone claimed by God for a mission.  Barnabas allowed the Spirit to change his own vision, so that he could see Saul, not as an adversary to be fought, but as someone held in the grip of grace.  That allowed him to acknowledge not only what Saul had done but also what God was going to do through him.

This is it, folks.  This is how the Christian community is called to live in the world.  This is how Grace changes the world--the mercy of God gives us new eyes.  And the new vision no longer sees the world divided up into "us" (you know, the good guys) and "them" (you know, the bad guys... the other... the stranger... the enemy...).  But rather the new vision Mercy gives us sees that God's goal is to transform those we call enemies into friends.  The Kingdom struggle is not for "my group" to win out over "your group," but rather for all of us to be transformed, and for all of us to be made well.  When I allow the Spirit to change my vision, so that I see even people I strongly detest as people beloved of God--people whom God is capable of transforming, just as God is at work transforming me, too--it does something to the old hate and fear inside me.  It makes me able to love.  It makes me able to seek the well-being even of people I was determined to hate.  That's exactly what Barnabas attempted when it came to this violent young man named Saul.

And it worked. 

It worked in Saul's life--because when Barnabas stood up and vouched for Saul, the other leaders gave him a chance, and it changed the course of the next 2,000 years of history.  But Saul's story was not a fluke. At the heart of the Kingdom of God is the idea that love transforms enemies, just as Christ loved us "while we were enemies" of God and died for us.  At the heart of the Gospel is the notion that God uses our love to transform those we see as enemies.  That's why, for example, when Dr. King talked about his philosophy of gospel-inspired non-violent civil disobedience in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, he was always clear that the goal of the cause was not to punish or hurt those who opposed King and company, but for all to be transformed.  Those who had been forced to sit on the back of the bus not only needed to see change come, but those who had cheered for segregation and Jim Crow needed to be changed as well, in their hearts.  King never forgot that in his movement--it was always about seeing even the most hardened segregationist as someone imprisoned by their own hate and needing to be set free.  That's how mercy changes our vision--it reveals that the "enemy" is a child of God, too, and often in deep need of transformation.  That breaks the grip of the old "us" versus "them" thinking and instead sees us all as candidates for God's power to make us new.

It took a good while from there, perhaps, for the rest of the followers of Jesus in the early church to accept Saul with all of his baggage.  It's worth noting that this change, this new start, this welcome to Saul was a bold move for the early church. It would have certainly been easier to keep Saul out because he was no doubt an enemy of the church.  It would have been easy to write Saul off as a loss.  It would have been easier to threaten and cajole Saul. And instead Barnabas does the hard work of leading the rest of the Christian community to see Saul in a new light and to act accordingly.

Dear friends, that is the hard work that you and I are called to. We are called to love--and to let love change the universe by letting it change the way we see others.    Today, see someone you don't like as a beloved child of God... and see how that changes the day.

Lord Jesus, help us to see as you see.

Hope for Cowards Like Me

Hope for Cowards Like Me--August 16, 2017

"When James and Cephas and John, who were acknowledged pillars, recognized the grace that had been given to me, they gave to Barnabas and me the right hand of fellowship, agreeing that we should go to the Gentiles and they to the circumcised. They only asked one thing, that we remember the poor, which was actually what I was eager to do.  But when Cephas came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood self-condemned; for until certain people came from James, he used to eat with the Gentiles. But after they came, he drew back and kept himself separate for fear of the circumcision faction. And the other Jews joined him in this hypocrisy, so that even Barnabas was led astray by their hypocrisy. But when I saw that they were not acting consistently with the truth of the gospel, I said to Cephas before them all, 'If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew, how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews?'" [Galatians 2:9-14]

It takes courage to love.

I think it took me a long time to learn that--longer, perhaps, than it should have.  It takes a great deal of courage, and not simply warm, fuzzy feelings, to love people genuinely. 

I don't just mean that the people you love can let you down or break your heart, although that is true. (And in those cases, yes, one has to find the courage to keep on loving even when one has been wounded, rejected, or betrayed.)  I mean that, beyond the arena of romance, genuine love means taking the risk of being judged or condemned by others who are provoked by your daring to love.  Genuine love calls for standing with those we love, in solidarity with them, sharing joys and tears with them, and that means being vulnerable.  And it always takes courage to be knowingly vulnerable.  Like James Baldwin writes, "One can give nothing whatever without giving oneself--that is to say, risking oneself. If one cannot risk oneself, then one is simply incapable of giving."  

That is a lesson that even the pillars of Christian history have had to learn--and they usually learned it by seeing how they failed at it first.  And it is a lesson that we will have to face, too.  And, coward that I so often am, I do not want to have to come face to face with all the ways I have failed to love because I failed to have the courage enough to risk myself... the courage to be vulnerable.  Somewhere along the way we confused "love" with "niceness," and so we have a hard time grasping that there are times when genuine love must be provocative to those who see it.

 

I know that today's verses from the letter Paul wrote to the Galatians hardly seem heart-warming, but they are, in truth, all about learning to have the courage to love in this kind of provocative, vulnerable way.  This is Paul's version of the story of the time he had to chew out none other than Peter (here called by his nickname in Aramaic, "Cephas," which, just like the Greek name "Petros" is basically like being called "Rocky").  That's right--the Simon Peter, the one who was the de facto leader of the early church, the first to confess Jesus as the Messiah, the one who, tradition says, was willing to be crucified upside down because of his humble adoration of Jesus.  That same Simon Peter... Paul had the chutzpah to tell him off to his face, because Peter had shown a failure of courage to love.

Here's the short version of the backstory: of course, historically, the first followers of Jesus--during his actual ministry before the cross--were all Jewish.  There was diversity from the beginning, to be sure: men and women, ex-Zealots and former tax collectors side by side, rich and poor, educated and illiterate, but all of Jewish background.  As the early movement of Jesus-followers spread, they began to reach out to non-Jewish people, too (the shorthand for that was "Gentiles").  And for a while, there was uncertainty about whether this was OK or not with God.  Were these outsiders from different nationalities, languages, and ethnicities acceptable?  Could they become followers of Jesus as they were, or did they have to adopt the cultural, and ritual laws of Judaism?  Did they have to eat kosher?  Did they have to be circumcised or keep the festivals?  In other words, the early church wrestled with the question of whether you had to leave behind all of your old cultural attachments and take up all the ritual practices of the "in-group" people in order to really "belong" as a Christian?

Simon Peter himself had been one of the early voices that had seen God's Spirit draw some of those Gentiles to faith in Jesus.  And Peter himself would have admitted that he only got to that point kicking and screaming by having the Spirit smack him upside the head with a vision and a knock on the door from a Roman centurion's messenger.  But Peter finally "got" it that the living God was drawing people from other nationalities to become followers of Jesus--and that God was doing it with or without the official permission or OK of the church leadership.  The Spirit's gonna do what the Spirit's gonna do, after all.

Well, at some point, the church got around to making a decision that, yes, they were going to include Gentiles as Gentiles, and that they didn't have to convert to Judaism before they could become followers of Jesus, and they didn't have to follow the Jewish dietary laws or keep the old festivals or any of the rest.  That became the official church policy in Acts 15, and the leaders of the early church all at least tacitly gave their OK.

So when Peter would be hanging out with Gentiles, he got used to eating with them, probably even eating food like they did (I mean, after all, bacon cheeseburgers are hard to resist--I'm just saying...).  And Peter could do this, whenever he would travel away from the central church in Jerusalem on trips out to Gentile territory, because he had the official church policy to back him up, and because he really did seem to believe that God was welcoming anybody and everybody into the beloved community of Christ-followers.  As long as nobody else from the main office was nearby watching him, that is.

This became the trouble... see, it's easy to do the right thing when you aren't afraid of having it upset anybody.  It's easy to be friendly to someone deemed "questionable" or "other" if no one else knows about it.  But it takes courage to love all the time... because at some point, someone else will see.  And someone else will be upset, or provoked, or stirred up, or angered. 

And in that moment, it is easy to become a coward.  I know.  I often am one.

So was Peter.  The same Peter who had argued in Jerusalem (see Acts 15) that he had seen evidence that God's Spirit was drawing Gentiles-as-Gentiles to follow Jesus, alongside Jewish disciples, this same Peter who argued that Gentiles should not be treated as second-class Christians, or that they should somehow "try not being Gentile" or that they could just adopt the cultural practices and language of the in-group, that same Peter got intimidated when some other Jerusalem-crowd folks caught him sharing a table with Gentile Christians... and they bullied him.  They bullied him into separating from the Gentiles, and they even got some of Paul's other associates like Barnabas to do the same.  It had been easy to be friends with these other nationalities of Christians and to break bread with them when no one else was upset about it... but it became hard to keep at it when they saw that it was rankling the so-and-sos from Jerusalem.

And so, Peter folded.  He wimped out.  He was a coward. 

There is another line of James Baldwin's that has been haunting me lately--he writes in The Fire Next Time that "a civilization is not destroyed by wicked people; it is not necessary that people by wicked but only that they be spineless."  That was where Simon Peter faltered.  Not that he had suddenly become a mustache-twirling, black-hat-wearing cartoon villain... not that he had even suddenly become a hateful, racist bigot himself... but that he had let himself stay quiet when other people provoked about his genuine acceptance of Gentile Christians as Gentiles.  He had not been wicked, in Baldwin's words--he had only been spineless.

And when Paul saw this, he recognized that this wasn't just a faux pas, or a slip of social graces, and this wasn't just about Head-of-the-Church Peter needing to shore up support with his base of support from back in Jerusalem.  This was about the heart of the gospel. Because at the center of the Good News is the radical claim that we are accepted by God, not on the basis of what we have done or not done, the rules we have followed or not followed, or even the categories of our demographics--but everything hangs on the free gift of God's grace through Christ.  And if Peter was suddenly going to act like the Gentile Christians around him were second-class members of the kingdom of God, he was making a mockery of the gospel of grace.  Paul saw that this wasn't just about alienating potential Gentile church members or a bit of bad PR.  This was about whether the Gospel really is the Gospel.  And if the message of God's mercy for all really were true, it would mean a whole new way of seeing people, a whole new set of eyes.  It would mean being able to risk upsetting people... and provoking people... and even angering the people who were "like" Peter, in order to offer genuine love to those who were not "like" Peter.

Well, there is good news in this story.  Even after Paul calls Peter out, there is change.  Peter sees what he has done, and he changes.  There is hope for cowards like Peter and me, that once we have had some faithful voice, some gracious saint, help us see that we have been acting like hypocrites and doing damage to the gospel by being quiet while others are pushed to the side, we can begin again, too.  And there is the unshakable promise of God in Jesus that even when I am at my most cowardly, nothing can separate me from the love of Christ (the same Saint Paul told us that much, too).  Once I know that, I can face the ways I have been a coward, and I can dare to change.  I can dare to nurture the courage to love even when it is provocative.  I can dare to let God give me the gift of bravery enough to be vulnerable.  And I can dare to speak up when it would be easy to be quiet. These things are gifts of grace, given even to scaredy-cats like me.

I don't know how you see your own story, and I don't know how you have made choices in your own life.  But I'm willing to bet there's at least a decent chance that you have been in moments like Peter, too--where you let silence win the day rather than courageously speaking love to people who were told they were unacceptable or unloved.  I'm willing to bet there have been times when we have been shooed away from sharing the table with another because we were afraid of what someone else might think.  I'm willing to bet that there have been moments when we were so afraid of ruffling someone's feathers that we were willing to keep quiet when someone else bad-mouthed another group of people who were not like you.  I'm willing to bet we have all had times of spinelessness, figuring it was no big deal and at least didn't alienate people.

And if you have ever been in any of those spots in your life, then here is grace for you and me.  Here is mercy for cowards (though hopefully recovering cowards) like us.  God raised up a Paul to get Peter back on track, and God kept on loving and forgiving and using Peter to reach others with the love of Jesus.  Maybe this is a day to think about whose voices we have not wanted to listen to because they make us squirm, and to let them give us the courage to be vulnerable... the courage to be provocative if need be... the courage to love.

Lord Jesus, put the people in our lives and awareness today that we need to wake us up out of complacency and to love others genuinely.

Room for Everybody

Room for Everybody--August 14, 2017

"After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. They cried out in a loud voice, saying, 'Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!'" [Revelation 7:9-10]

When I get there, it will have been because the living God makes room for everybody.

When I get there, to that promised day among the sea of all those faces in the presence of Mercy, this face of mine with its pale pink Northern European tint, will be in the minority.

When I get there--in the glorious company of the chorus of all those voices of every tribe and nation singing their praise--my voice, which has only ever spoken English fluently, will not be among the majority.

When you and I meet there, before the throne that undercuts every other power and every other ruler, it will be because the Creator of the universe loves... otherness.

We have witnessed a great deal over the last few days in this country.  I have been, I confess, at a loss for how to put into words things that feel so obvious, so crystal clear, so (to borrow a phrase) self-evident, that I would not have thought they needed to be said out loud or put in black-and-white text on a screen.  I have been, I shall further confess, disappointed--first in myself for having had to take so long to hammer these words out (knowing the delay doesn't make for any necessary improvement in the quality of those words), and disappointed, too, by others to whom we might have looked for the right words, only to find silence or empty phrases heaped up without clarity. 

And for that matter, I have been disappointed, too, in the attempts we all sometimes feel to "weigh in" on the news or buzz of the day in order to make ourselves feel relevant and profound.  I am under no illusions that these words of mine right now will be any different.

But I find that in a moment like this one, when we have witnessed an angry mob, literally carrying torches, trying desperately to convince the world (or themselves?  I seriously don't know to whom they think they are shouting...) that they need to "reclaim" a power, a prestige, a place in the pecking order, that they think is theirs and theirs alone... a moment when I have watched people whose skin, and ancestry, and heritage are like mine, use cars as weapons to intimidate, silence, and kill others in the attempt to "reclaim" it, a moment in which the folks who carry those torches and shout about blood and soil think that they are doing so with the blessing of the living God... well, in such a moment, it seems important to listen again to what the voice of that living God actually says.

And this is the unequivocal answer: when we get there to glory, it will be as members of a great multitude from every nation, every language, every tribe, and every place.  The Scriptures themselves leave no question about it--the future toward which the living God is drawing all of history, includes a whole rainbow of humanity. And that means, furthermore, that my presence will be but one shade of color there... and by no means should I expect to be in the majority there.  By no means would it make sense to assume that English will be the official language of the heavenly throne room--there will be, we are promised, voices from every tongue and dialect, every language and group. 

This is how God wants it, it would appear.  This is the future to which we are called.  This is the kingdom, so to speak, to which we are called to pledge our allegiance. This is the beloved community Jesus is creating--and it is for all.  It is rooted in the soil of every place on God's green earth.  It is made up of the blood that flows through every heart. 

And, as I say, it has struck me as especially sad that these things need to be said out loud again... and said amidst the vacuum of silence of voices that should have spoken up sooner or louder.  It has struck me as unfathomably uninformed to hear anyone claim that Jesus is the sole property of one group, one language, one anything... and downright blasphemous to invoke the name of Christ in the quest to "reclaim" power and social place. 

It is a travesty that these things need to be said at all, except that we religious folks do have this pernicious habit of covering over the things in which we are complicit so that we do not have to deal with them anymore.  It is sin--and there is no lesser word for it--that followers of Jesus have been so indifferent to the ways faces around us are treated that someone else might think the way of Jesus could ever be compatible with the notion of hating the "other" simply because of their "otherness."  It is absurd that it has to be said at all, that hatred must be explicitly condemned as "not the way of Jesus"--which is to say, "anti-Christ."  There are not many sides on this one--there is instead the picture from Revelation in which all peoples, all nations, and all languages are gathered on one side around the Lamb. 

To be a Christian, let us be clear, is to hope for the day when God brings all such peoples together, when every face is welcomed, when every voice is given space to be heard, when every language is spoken, and when every shade of color is found in sea of humanity gathered around the Lamb.  And to be a Christian is no longer to pledge allegiance or loyalty just to the fortunes and futures of one group, of "my" group, or "my" heritage, or "my" place of power--to be a Christian is to be done, once and for all, with the attempt to get more power, more privilege, more prestige for "me and my group of people like me."  To be a Christian is to be where Jesus is--and Jesus the Lamb insists on being surrounded by infinite crowds where all nations and all peoples are not just "allowed," but welcomed.  If it were not clear already, let these words from the book of Revelation (which is never a book to pull punches) remove any doubt.  At the last, all of creation is headed toward a future in which every language, every beautiful shade of brown and pink and olive and black, and every nation is found. That is where God is leading the story of the universe.

And so on these days, I keep looking ahead at the promised future.  Like old sailors in the days before GPS and radios, I know that if I keep pointed toward the setting sun on the horizon I will be headed always west.  And the promised future is a multitude so large you can't count it, made up of all peoples, all groups, all nationalities, all languages... everybody.  And in the Reign of God, everybody means everybody.  If we have the courage to listen to the Scriptures, to see the future they are intent on showing us, then it will make a difference in how we live and act now.  We will speak up now any time someone settles for a vision that is not open to all.  We will stand with those who have been excluded or threatened.  We will set aside the childish quest to get more, or "reclaim," our power or prestige or perks.  We will stand, when the angry shouters with tiki torches come down the street, simply with hands held open and the invitation that Mercy is making room for all of us... yes, even for a white-skinned English-speaking minority among the heavenly crowd like me.  The more we keep that promised future in our view now, the more we will dare to embody it now, too.

Thanks be to the God who loves otherness... including yours and mine.

Lord Jesus, give us the courage to love otherness as you do, and to speak where you lead us to.

Lemon Parade

Lemon Parade--August 10, 2017

“I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power for us who believe, according to the working of his great power.” (Ephesians 1:17-19)

It’s news so good, so deep, so intimately personal, that it seems hard to believe it could be true. But once you see it, it changes everything.

And the news is simply (simply!) this: the Creator of the universe—the Maker of the vast interstellar distances of galaxies and the vast dark expanses of space, and the Designer of the infinitesimal and intricate patterns woven into every strand of DNA in every cell of your body—that Creator not only knows you exist but loves you in all your particularity.  And not only does this Creator love you, but wants you to know more and more fully what it is to be beloved. 


This One we have met in Jesus wants us to know... him.  And not just to know about him, but to know him himself, the way you come to know a friend or your child or your parents.  And then, amazingly beyond all that, this same Christ cares about whether you know you can trust him to take care of you, that he is strong enough to guard and guide you. 

My goodness, I don’t even expect the president, or the governor of my state, or even the mayor of my town to know who I am or, truthfully, to care much about my life and my livelihood (sorry, I guess that makes me a cynic).  And yet here I come face to face with the word from the Scriptures that none other than the Ruler of the universe, of all that is, seen and unseen, wants me to know him, to relate to him, and to be safe in his love.  How does that not boggle your mind?

There was a song by the 1990s band Tonic, called “Lemon Parade,” whose first verse went like this:

I wish I’d seen you as a little girl/ Without your armor to fend off the world.

I would have kept you underneath my wing/ I would protect you from everything.

There’s something of that same spirit in these verses from Ephesians—Paul says he wants us to know just how great God’s power is, so that we will know that God intends to use it for us, to guard us and hold us.  Paul says he wants us to know just what God has to give to us.  Paul says he wants us to know we have a hope to hold onto that is not just wishful thinking. 


All of that is to say, Paul wants us to be able to see with new eyes--to see more fully and deeply than we ever had before--what it is to be beloved... and to let that vision change the way we see ourselves and every other beloved person on the planet.


Rather than putting up defenses or pretending we are tough enough ourselves to take on the hurts and troubles of each day, Paul prays that we would be so aware of what God intends to give to us and do for us that we won’t feel the need any longer to run off after other defenders, other loves, other lesser…things to fill the empty space inside us.

Think about that—God wants us to know “the immeasurable greatness of his power… for us.”  It’s not just that God wants to show off or needs the divine ego to be stroked with our fawning praise.  It’s that God wants us to know, with all of our armor stripped away, that he really will and does keep us underneath his wings.  God shows us this power, not just for its own sake, but always as a power for us and for our benefit.

So when we sing songs of praise on Sunday mornings, and we ascribe to God words like “Power and riches and wisdom and strength,” we are doing it for two reasons: one, is just that it’s the truth about God, and it deserves to be said for its own sake as the truth, I suppose.  But they would all be true about God whether we said them or not.  So the second reason we heap up these words of praise about God’s power is so that we would be reminded of God’s strength and know we can rely on it.  We sing those songs on Sundays, and at whatever other times they are on our lips, so that we can hear God’s strong promise to you, to me:  “I will keep you underneath my wing… I will protect you.”  We sing these songs, we offer praise, in part because it changes our vision and enables us to see the world as people who are held by a Love that will not let us go.

Sing God’s praise somewhere along the way today.  Sing it full and deep.  Sing about God’s awesome power, because that is true.


Sing, and let the praise strip away all the defense mechanisms, self-congratulation, fake bluster, and fabricated armor we put on ourselves to make ourselves feel tougher than we are... so that we can know, really know, that even with nothing else, we are kept safe in the shadow of God's wings.  We really are so beloved.  You really are so beloved... and so is everybody else on God's green earth.

Sing praise, whether you feel like it at the moment or not, because it is worth doing and God is worthy of it regardless of how we feel at any given time.


But when you sing, listen to the words yourself—and know you are held in strong arms.  Let your vision be changed.

Lord God, be strong for us, and let us see and know that you promise to use your strength for our good.  We ask it in the strong name of Jesus.

Half a Bubble Off

Half A Bubble Off--August 9, 2017

"This is what the LORD showed me: the Lord was standing beside a wall built with a plumb line, with a plumb line in his hand. And the LORD said to me, 'Amos, what do you see?' And I said, 'A plumb line.' Then the Lord said, 'See, I am setting a plumb line in the midst of my people Israel; I will never again pass them by; the high places of Isaac shall be made desolate, and the sanctuaries of Israel shall be laid waste, and I will rise against the house of Jeroboam with the sword'." [Amos 7:7-9]

I have a love-hate relationship with my level.  I'm just gonna own that.

A level, or a they are sometimes called, "bubble levels" or, my personal favorite, "spirit levels" originally on account of the liquid in the tube which creates a bubble to mark plumb-ness with, is one of those tools that brings an awful lot of bad news when you are using it correctly before it can give you good news.  A spirit level (I can't stop using that phrase!), as you have probably seen before, will have a flat edge, and then inside it will be a clear tube filled with colored liquid and a bubble inside, and then little hash marks in the middle of the tube.

The idea with a level is that if it is held against a surface that is truly horizontally flat, or vertically plumb, the bubble will rest right in between the hash marks in the center of the tube.  But if it is inclined or leaning, even slightly, the bubble will show you by being off center.  Hence the expression (often applied to me) about being "half a bubble off plumb."

We all like to imagine we have great vision and would be able to tell with the unaided eye if a wall is straight or a surface is flat, but it turns out we are... what's the word?  Ah yes:  wrong.  Our eyes fool us.  A lot.  We are fine for rough estimates, but precise measurements are just too much for our naked eye.  We need something like a bubble in a marked tube to show us clearly what we would otherwise only be guessing at.  We need a tool that will tell us what we need to see, even if it something we do not want to see.

Case in point.  I was hooking up the washer and dryer in the new laundry room the other day, and after feeling both proud and sweaty from the initial task of lifting, moving, and wiggling those giant metal boxes into the right spot and hooking up the hoses and changing the electrical cords, and such, I was reminded that my job was not done until the machines had been balanced to be level.  Sigh... I can handle the big, visible stuff, easily.  But the fine tuning of adjusting the feet just by a smidge here and a smidge there seemed really unpleasant.  Besides, I thought to myself, the machine looks just fine.  It looks flat.  I'm sure it's fine....

But I got out the level anyhow.  And my eyes were proven wrong.

See what I mean?  Bad news first, before good news.  The level had to show me where the machine was out of plumb so that it could be addressed--because my eyes couldn't see that level of incline, and because my tired willpower didn't want to have to see it.  But the spirit level did what I needed, without stopping to ask whether I wanted to see what it had to show me.  I needed to see the truth.

After all, a washing machine that is out of plumb will rock and shimmy and shuffle across the floor, and in the mean time, risks causing damage to the dryer, the wall, or the floor.  I could look away in blissful ignorance and just hope it was fine, but that would not stop an unbalanced washing machine from causing damage to its surroundings.

Suffice it so say that after enough adjusting of the feet of the machine, and enough lifting, nudging, and enough re-measuring, the washing machine in our house is now sitting flat and balanced.  The level told me so.  It enabled me to see what I would otherwise have missed with my naked eye or ignored with my mind.

That's what a level does.  It brings the bad news of what is out of plumb first, so that things can be put right.  The whole point of such a tool is to get things adjusted, changed, corrected, so that the wall can be straight, the foundation can be solid, or the washing machine can be balanced.  The goal is for things to be put right--but that means being able to say first when things are not right, when something is rotten in Denmark, as the Bard says.

Before they invented the spirit level, of course, they had the plumb line.  A weight, hopefully with a pointy end at the bottom, is suspended from a string or cord, and you can measure whether something is plumb--truly vertical--or not.  And like a level, a plumb line is there to give you bad news when necessary... so that things can be put right and you can have a wall that is straight up and down, which means your house will not fall over.

Now, it's critical to say at this point what should already be obvious: the point of either of these tools is ultimately constructive--to help build, preserve, and make whole.  You don't measure your project, find out it's off plumb, and then destroy it all or give up on the project.  You may have to adjust, or take down and then re-erect, or re-inforce, whatever you are building, but the intention--the goal, if you will--is to have a building that stands upright when you are done.  A plumb line brings judgment, so to speak, but it is judgment for the goal of making things right... of putting things in balance.  You and I may hate to have to see it when it tells us there is more work to be done, but that is far better than letting something out of plumb cause destruction later on because we were too tired, too lazy, or too apathetic to be bothered.


That's why we need the visions of prophets like Amos, who at least in this one instance actually saw a plumb line.  It was sort of like God's children's-sermon-object-lesson for Amos--a way for him to understand, and then for us to understand as we read, that all of God's harsh words against the people of Israel in Amos' day were meant to be the constructive words of a master builder who is determined to set things right. And Amos understood that sometimes you have to hear the bad news of what is out of plumb first, in order for things to be set right. 


So Amos regularly tells the powerful of his day that they are aloof, out of touch, and insulated from the sufferings of the poor around them... and that this is not acceptable. 


And Amos tells the religious establishment, including all the priests and official court-prophets who told the king of the day what he wanted to hear, that their religious shows and government-approved spirituality cannot cover up the ways they are cheating people in business and getting rich while others starve. 


And Amos tells the dealmakers and powerbrokers, too, that for all their affluence and all their influence, they are destined for the dustbin of history.


It is not bitter or vengeful or malicious when Amos brings this report--it is with the clarity of a spirit bubble that simply says, "Things are crooked here."  The intention is always to build things up rightly--but that never means just painting over shoddy work in the hopes no one will notice. 


Sometimes it is hard for our ears to hear that good, creative, constructive purpose in the harsh words of a prophet like Amos... or prophetic voices in our day who tell us where our hearts, our priorities, our greed, our fear, and our apathy are crooked, too.  But we need those voices... and usually a way to tell if we need to hear a prophet among us is if her or his words make us squirm a little. 


Those voices, like the bubble on a spirit level, help us to see what our own poor vision would not recognize. 


Those voices, like the straight line of a plumb bob pointing down to earth, compel us to see with new eyes what we would have preferred to let ourselves ignore. 


And those voices, because they come from a place of love ultimately, allow us to gain a vision for a future in which things are set right, the crooked is made straight, justice is done, the hungry are fed, and all find a place of welcome in the house of God forever.


Whose voice have you not been wanting to listen to because it makes you squirm... and how might such voices help you and I to see clearly what we need to see?


Lord God, raise up prophets and plumb lines, spirit-levels and Spirit-led voices to help us to see what our eyes cannot on their own.

The Revolution of Routine

The Revolution of Routine--August 8, 2017

"Truly God is good to the upright,

     to those who are pure in heart.

 But as for me, my feet had almost stumbled;

     my steps had nearly slipped.

 For I was envious of the arrogant;

     I saw the prosperity of the wicked. 

 For they have no pain;

     their bodies are sound and sleek.

 They are not in trouble as others are;

     they are not plagued like other people.

 Therefore pride is their necklace;

     violence covers them like a garment.

 Their eyes swell out with fatness;

     their hearts overflow with follies.

 They scoff and speak with malice;

     loftily they threaten oppression.

 They set their mouths against heaven,

     and their tongues range over the earth....

But when I thought how to understand this,

    it seemed a wearisome task,

 until I went into the sanctuary of God;

     then I perceived their end." [Psalm 73:1-9, 16-17]

Routine is a great deal more powerful than anybody gives it credit for.

Usually, people use the word "routine" with a certain roll of the eyes and shrug of the shoulders.  Routine is just the "same-old, same-old" as opposed to what is new or fresh.

But routine--at least certain kinds of routine--shapes our habits, and habits shape our heads and hearts, and in turn, make a world of difference.  What we repeat, we learn, and what we learn becomes ingrained in the wiring of our minds, until it becomes a lens for how we see the world, and how we deal with what happens in the world.  All of that is to say that in addition to the plastic-framed, extra-thick eyeglasses on my face, I am also always seeing the world through the spectacles created by the habits and routines of my thinking and action.  And you are, too.

The question, then, becomes, which lenses do we allow to affect our view of the world?

Everyone knows the old cliché "Practice makes perfect," but my piano teacher from my high school days used to correct that line.  "Perfect practice makes perfect," she used to insist.  That is to say, reinforcement, repetition, and routine are tools, but they are not magic.  What you repeat will stay with you--so if you keep making mistakes and never correct them with that fourth finger on the B-flat, you will only hard-wire that into your performance.  But once you have learned the way the sonatina is supposed to go, you keep practicing it correctly... and it will stay.  Again, it all comes back to the question, what do we choose to keep repeating... and therefore learning... knowing that what we repeat will likely become the way we think.

I mention all of this because I think it vindicates one of the things people most often complain about in church--especially in the liturgically-minded strand of "church" in which I have grown up and still live.  Church--in particular, the rhythms of a Sunday service, or liturgy--gets accused of being boring because it is repetitious.  It's the same pattern, the same sung lines, the same familiar prayers, the same structure, week after week.  And therefore, it is said sometimes, it is not only routine (said with that same eye-roll and shoulder-shrug) but also stale.  Familiarity breeds contempt, as they say.

Of course, you'll find plenty of alternative suggestions--add screens, add flashing lights, add guitars, add movies, never sing the same song twice in one year, and on and on--for making church feel more "novel."  And quite often, those suggestions assume that if you do something that changes the routine, you are automatically making church "better."  Because, after all, routine is always blah--right?  And my goodness, if you are "routine," well, you must also be irrelevant.

But the poet in what we call Psalm 73 sees things differently.   At least he does now.

This old poem is a sort of reflection on how liturgy saved his life.  Or at least his sanity.

Here's the scene.  The first half of the psalm is a recollection of what it was like earlier in the poet's life at how, well, unfair and unjust life is.  And, in all honesty, he wasn't wrong.  He had seen how often the arrogant, the proud, the powerful, the wicked, and the corrupt won the day, and how often the lowly the helpless were stepped on.  He had seen, too many times, how rotten bullies got away with their rotten bullying, and how easy it was for crooks and con-men to cover up their corruption by dressing it up in pride like a necklace and violence like a three-piece suit. 

And to see so much injustice, so much that "ain't-how-it's-supposed-to-be," in the world, and to have to bear watching the pompous blowhards and arrogant bullies getting away with their awfulness, and to have no one standing up to say, "No!" well, it just about took the wind out of the psalmist's sails.  More than that, the psalmist says, it made him so frustrated he was like a dumb animal, braying and whinnying at the sound of the thunderstorm outside the stable walls (see v. 22). 

He was at the brink of despair--after all, how do you keep going when it feels like you are the only one who sees that the emperor is wearing no clothes?  How do you keep believing in justice when you keep seeing it stepped on while people look away?  How do you keep your sanity when the people around you and the people you had looked up to all seem unfazed and indifferent to seeing crooks get away with crookedness and who aren't bothered to see the arrogant boasting about their greatness while others are pushed to the margins?

These are questions, not just for a distant time thousands of years ago, but for every morning when you watch the news or look around.  These are questions that keep all of us up at night at some time or another, and it boils down to, Why do the wicked prosper?  and perhaps the thornier question underneath it, Why does it seem God lets them get away with it?  Those are hard enough questions by themselves, but they are even harder to ask if, like the psalmist, you feel like nobody else is getting bothered by them, but instead are cheering for the bullies and blowhards as they parade through the street.

It's enough to make you lose your mind, or give up hope.

But... in a odd and understated turn, the poet says, things changed when he "went into the sanctuary of God."  He goes to church.  Well, temple.  He goes to worship--where everything is done with a certain order, a certain structure, a certain precision, and yes, a certain routine--and all of a sudden, "I perceived their end."  That is, he finally saw a new way of making sense of his world.  He had a lens through which to see reality--not that hid or denied the rottenness and injustice, but that put it in a new light. 

In worship, the poet saw a story enacted.  And not just any old story, but THE Story of the God of justice, the God of mercy, the God of goodness who cares for the marginalized (the orphan, the widow, the foreigner, as the Scriptures often name them). And the story of this God is one in which God promises to deflate the puffed-up and powerful, to lift up the lowly and stepped-on, to provide good for all, to give rather than to hoard, and to end oppression, violence, and corruption.  It's a story woven throughout Israel's worship life--you hear it again and again in Israel's hymnbook, the Psalms, how God brought them through the Sea and defeated Pharaoh in Egypt, how God protects the vulnerable, how God is committed to ending injustice.  You see it and hear it again and again and again--most of all, you would hear it in Israel's ancient worship life, in the repeated prayers and songs, the story-telling and ritual re-enactments, that all created a picture of the world.

That's what the poet here in Psalm 73 says--I had no way of making sense of the rottenness and evil in the world, until I looked again through the lens that liturgy gave me. By hearing the story of the particular God we meet in the Bible, in worship, we have our eyes re-trained to deal with all those unpleasant things in a whole new way.  By hearing the story, by rehearing the narrative of the Passover and exodus, by recounting in song the times God was there for us before and saved us from bullies past, the poet can see the headlines of his day in a whole new light.  It doesn't whitewash or ignore the presence of wickedness and bullies, or hide them in a fog of incense, but rather the story he re-learns and rehearses in worship helps him to see with clarity, with courage, and with new resolve the truth: God won't let the bullies stand forever, God does in fact see that they are there, God is not fooled by their lies or their lives of luxury, and God is making us to be a people who can say it out loud when the emperor is wearing no clothes, or when the con-men think they are going to get away with their schemes.

It is in worship that the psalmist gets a new view--which is really an old view that he had forgotten was available to him.  It was a way of making sense of the madness around him without pretending it wasn't there or being driven to despair.  And it happened right in the thick of the regular routine of structured, patterned worship. 

The stories we retell become the narratives that define us.

The rituals we rehearse become the fiber of our being.

The routines to which we give ourselves become the lens through which we see the rest of the world--and they can either equip us for dealing with the injustice and insanity of the world, or they can make us more confused. 

My former piano teacher was right--it's just not practicing anything that makes perfect; it's practicing the right thing. 

What happens in worship for the people of God makes a difference, and it will reinforce something in us.  We will be different people as a result of what and how and when we worship, and one Story or another will become more a part of our identity.  Not worshipping is not an option, since the culture around us is constantly bombarding us with things to give ourselves to (money, stuff, movies, TV, prestige, etc.) and constantly telling us other stories to live our lives by.  Trying NOT to have a story at all leaves us like the poet--at the edge of despair without any way to make sense of the rottenness in the world. 

But in the ritual life of the followers of Jesus, there is the possibility--even for all the ways we have messed it up before or turned it into a performance--that we will hear again the story of the God who silences Pharaoh and Goliath, who lifts up Hannah and Hagar, who welcomes Ruth and Rahab, and who promises to be at work for justice, for mercy, and for good.  And if we hear that story again, it will change who we are.

 

Routine, it turns out, is far for more powerful than any of us may have given it credit for.

What routine will we give ourselves to today?

Lord Jesus, order our days, our hearts, and our lives.