Because He Is the Lamb

Because He Is the Lamb--November 15, 2017

[Jesus said:] "See, I am sending you out like sheep into the midst of wolves; so be wise as serpents and innocent as doves.  Beware of them, for they will hand you over to council and flog you in their synagogues; and you will be dragged before governors and kings because of me, as a testimony to them and the Gentiles. When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given to you at that time; for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you." [Matthew 10:16-20]

If you are waiting for the "but..." to come, I'll spare you the time.  There isn't one.

If you are hoping for Jesus to give an escape clause or a secret plan for how we can avoid the dangers of "wolves" out there, or how we'll be spared the sufferings of a world that routinely deals with troublemakers by silencing them, intimidating them, or marginalizing them, I'll just say it now: there is no out. Jesus calls us "sheep in the midst of wolves," not "sheep who have a back-up posse of rhinos and lions to keep the wolves at bay."  We are sent into the world vulnerably, always vulnerably--and that is actually Jesus' plan. 

In other words, the followers of Jesus are sent into the world, not simply to face hostility, but to face it in a certain way, reflecting the image of the One we call on as the Lamb of God.  Jesus does not, for example, say, "It's a dog-eat-dog world out there, so as I send you out, be ready to bite anybody first who growls at you," nor does he say, "Because it's so scary and dangerous out there, I just won't send you out into the mess at all."  He sends us... and he sends us as sheep, because he is the Lamb. 

That's important for us to be clear about, because we have a way of just reducing Jesus' words down to something that fits better with our common sense.  We say things like, "Oh, well, Jesus is getting us ready to face hostility in life--so that we can be ready to hit back with power when they make fun of us."  We say things like, "It is indeed a dangerous world full of wolves out there--so we had better have ourselves a club, or a stick, or a shotgun to fend them off in Jesus' name!"

There is that well-known line that you see floating around the internet and attributed to Benjamin Franklin (but which, to be honest, doesn't sound very 18th century, and has been riffed on by so many people anyway that it's hard to know who said it first in what form) that says, "Democracy is four wolves and a sheep deciding what to have for dinner--and liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote!"  Now, again, whether a voice like Franklin's said that or not (doubtful he did, but I'll give the benefit of the doubt), we need to be clear that it sure wasn't Jesus.  Jesus doesn't send out his followers as "well-armed lambs," ready to kill other people (or even "wolves" for that matter) in order to protect our interests.  He sends us out like himself--unarmed, but also unafraid--to be the reflections of the way he has come to be the Lamb of God.  There is no asterisk, no fine print, no side note about an exception when "conventional wisdom" recommends shooting wolves before they get close.  There are only Jesus' words.  And since religious folk are often so keen on emphasizing the red-letter text of "what Jesus says," we should at least be honest about what he actually says here.  He sends his followers out like sheep among wolves, and that we ought to have our eyes open and go out there knowingly, without naivete (hence the "wise as serpents" business) but also without sliding into the ways of the wolf-pack (hence the "innocent as doves" part).  This is how we are sent into the world--so that even the way we are present in the world becomes a picture of Jesus' suffering love at the cross that called out, "Father, forgive them..." in death.

I know--it sounds radical.  It sounds scandalous.   It sounds foolish to send disciples out with the explicit command to be vulnerable.  It is all of those things.  And if we try to soften Jesus' words or make them sound more like the conventional wisdom about being well-armed sheep, we are losing what Jesus is actually saying. In the end, the question for followers of Jesus to ask is not, "Is my faith going to make me successful in the world's eyes?" but rather, "Am I being faithful to the way of Jesus?"  So long as we are playing the world's game and trying to be the wolves or beat the wolves on their own terms, we will always come up short.  And if we withdraw or hide from the dangerous mess of the world because we are afraid of it, we will always be letting the wolves win, too--and once again, we'll be giving in to the wolves on their own terms.  Jesus insists on playing on his terms, which means that we no longer get fussy over the threats and bluster of wolves, and that we will not fall into being ruled by fear enough to try and play "wolf" back.  It is indeed radical.  And it does indeed call into question just about everything else we accept as "conventional wisdom," because conventional wisdom always says, "You have to bite them first before they bite you if you want to be a winner in this world."  The followers of Jesus just don't accept that premise from the starting gate, because we just aren't trying to be "winners" on the world's terms.  It's not about being successful as the world defines success; it's always about being faithful.

Now, there will be those voices that think that Jesus' words here make Christians sound weak... or fearful... or cowardly.  I think Jesus knows better.  I think Jesus knows that what really takes guts and cleverness in this world is to be a sheep in the midst of wolves knowing that is precisely what you are and to stick it out anyway.  I think Jesus knows that the real cowardice is trying to hide behind borrowed claws and teeth (or swords and spears) because you are afraid of someone else's claws and teeth.  It is when we are afraid of someone or something else out there, afraid of "them" or "those people" or "the bad guys" or the "wolves" that start looking for sticks to shoo them away.  If we were really courageous, we wouldn't keep reaching for sticks or swords or spears to hide behind.  It is much like the line of Walter Wink: Jesus and the martyrs of his movement "are not victims, overtaken by evil, but hunters who stalk evil into the open by offering as bait their own bodies."  To be a sheep in the midst of wolves is not for the faint of heart, and it is not cowardly.  It requires the greatest courage of all--the willingness to combat evil with good, and the willingness to overcome hatred with love.

In an age like ours now, when mass shootings happen in churches as well as in malls, elementary schools, concert venues, and movie theaters, it can be very easy to tell ourselves that Jesus' words here in Matthew are just no longer applicable, or that they need to be updated for the age of ubiquitous semi-automatic weaponry, or that we need to force Jesus' words to fit within our preconceived notions of "being realistic."  It can be easy to say, "Well, Jesus' words were fine for the first century, but now that I have to consider the possibility of a mass shooting in a church--or my church--we just have to re-think and re-edit this whole speech of Jesus."  It would be tempting to think that Jesus and internet-Ben-Franklin are both recommending being well-armed-lambs in order to counter the possibility that scary stuff might be out there or wolves might be around the corner.  Except that--Jesus is well aware that there were dangerous things in the first century, and the first few centuries of Christian history did live with the regular threat of people bursting into their worship gatherings to cause harm or do violence.  And yet, both the New Testament-era church and the first three centuries of Christianity didn't edit out this saying of Jesus because it seemed "unrealistic" or "lacking common sense."  They refused to be well-armed-lambs--they were just lambs.  Like Jesus.  Ready to offer their lives if it came to it in order to embody the way and the love of Jesus... but never to try and dress up as wolves to scare the real ones away.  

No, we are not supposed to be naïve and optimistically distorted in our vision to just hope nothing bad will ever happen to us or to those we love.  Bad things happen in the world, and Christians are called to live in that world, for all its messiness.  With open eyes we are sent into a world, ready like Jesus to love that world vulnerably, and ready to let our lives, our deaths, and everything else be a witness to the way Jesus wins. 

There are lots of ways to be cowards in this life: whether hiding from the wolves by withdrawing and running away, or hiding behind sticks or swords or clubs out of the same fear of the wolves.  But being courageous--being truly courageous like Jesus does jumping feet first into the mess--that requires the vulnerability of laying down our sticks and swords and fake wolf teeth.  

Let us dare to be brave enough to be lambs like Jesus.

Lord Jesus, give us the honesty to hear your words on your own terms, the courage to be sheep without sticks, and the love to be vulnerable in the midst of wolves.

(Re-)Defining the Sacred

(Re-)Defining the Sacred--November 14, 2017

"When Jesus had come down from the mountain, great crowds followed him; and there was a leper who came to him and knelt before him, saying, 'Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.' He stretched out his hand and touched him, saying, 'I do choose. Be made clean!' Immediately his leprosy was cleansed. Then Jesus said to him, 'See that you say nothing to anyone; but go, show yourself to the priest, and offer the gift that Moses commanded, as a testimony to them'." [Matthew 8:1-4]

Whatever it means to be holy, it can't mean "separation from the mess."

At least, not for people who think Jesus gives us any sort of clue to what it means to be sacred or holy.

So often, religious folks get on a soapbox about what a "holy God" will allow, or what a "holy God" will not accept, or what a "holy God" can and cannot tolerate, usually suggesting that if a "holy God" were to touch or get too close to something "unholy," God would be... tainted.  But at the heart of the Christian faith is the scandalous notion that whatever Jesus does, God does. And that means that whatever it can possibly mean for God to be "holy," it sure as heaven doesn't mean that God avoids contact with those deemed "dirty," "unclean," "unacceptable," or "sinful." Because, lest we miss it, Jesus deliberately touches the so-called "untouchable"... when he clearly doesn't have to.

Let's start just by looking at the details of this story here in Matthew's Gospel.  And as a reminder, Matthew and the other gospel-writers have no problem whatsoever with the idea that Jesus can heal people just by the sheer authority of his words.  That much is already implied by the first seven chapters of Matthew's Gospel, but in case we had any doubts, in the story that immediately follows the one in today's verses (that would be Matthew 8:5-13, just in case you want to check to make sure I'm not making this stuff up), Jesus heals a centurion's servant without even entering the house where the young man is. (It is, in fact, the well-known story with the line, "Lord, I am not worthy to have you come under my roof; but only speak the word and my servant will be healed.")

So as far as Matthew is concerned, Jesus doesn't need to be in the room, or even the same building, as the person he is healing.  The person healed doesn't even have to be the one who trusts or prays or asks or has enough faith to believe that Jesus can do it--it has everything to do with Jesus, and next to nothing to do with what we bring to the table besides our need.  And for Jesus' part, healing doesn't require a magic gesture, magic word, magic alignment of planets, or anything else.  All claims to the contrary notwithstanding, actually, Jesus is not magic.

Are we clear on this so far?  If someone is in need of healing, Jesus doesn't have to touch them.  He doesn't to snap his fingers, nod his head, or cross his arms, a la I Dream of Jeannie, and he doesn't have to even get close.

So... what does it say that Jesus does choose, not simply to heal a man with a frighteningly contagious disease (one believed to be spread by touch in the ancient world), but to "stretch out his hand and touch him" in the act of healing?  The sick man is correct, of course, "If you choose, you can make me clean!" As Matthew relates it to us, Jesus could have just said the word, or blinked, or silently willed a miracle.  But Jesus goes further.  He goes beyond what was necessary, and jumps into the mess--hand first.  He touches the sick man to heal him.  It is a conscious choice on Jesus' part, a hand placed on a shoulder or a forehead, to restore his full humanity to him.

That's just it--the sickness of leprosy was serious business, especially in an age before modern medicine. And sure, the rules that were there about not touching anyone with leprosy were basically a quarantine--a preventive measure designed with the community in mind to preserve the whole neighborhood from infection.  But that also meant that people who were sick with the disease were now treated like non-persons--they were starved of touch, denied their belonging in the community, deprived of their families, and assumed to have done something wrong in order to acquire the disease in the first place. After all, so the reasoning went, if everyone followed the rules and didn't touch someone who had leprosy, nobody else would get it... so if you got leprosy, you must have done something, gone somewhere, or touched someone or something you weren't supposed to.

Well, now all of a sudden, you've got a whole moral/sin/holiness layer added onto the disease, too, don't you?  If you've got leprosy, just about everyone else you used to know would find it all too easy to say, "He was asking for it--he did something he shouldn't have done, and now leprosy is the consequence of his bad choice."  or "I always liked her, but look, she just should have known better--she brought this on herself somehow."  How easily a skin disease became a proxy for moral failings--and from there, it was somehow justifiable to keep your distance from these people.  You can imagine the respectable community leaders all saying, "I assume some of these lepers are very nice people, but look, if they got the disease, that in itself is proof that they did something worthy of being alienated from their old communities for.  They have to be isolated and removed from the rest of us, for the common good! That's just how it is!"  You can hear the keepers of order saying, "Look, this isn't really a leprosy issue--this is a rules-issue! If those people would just follow the rules and not touch anything associated with leprosy, they wouldn't get it themselves!"  What a temptingly black-and-white way of seeing the world, isn't it?  Bad thing happens?  You must have brought it on yourself by breaking a rule.

And from there, well, you can see exactly how someone's picture of "holiness" comes to be defined in terms solely of "remaining untainted by bad stuff."  You can see with terrible clarity how people would come to assume that being "holy" meant that you don't touch, you don't go near, you don't get "tainted by" the mess.  And you come to assume that is both how your picture of "God" must act, and how "godly" people must act, too.  Don't get too close to the mess, or you'll get mud on your soul.  Don't touch the person who is sick, or you'll get tainted by it, too.  Don't associate with the "unclean person," or else you'll be endorsing their rule-breaking (well... we assume they must have broken the rules) choices and actions.  Don't make it seem like they are acceptable or touchable as they are, or else people will get the wrong impression, and it will be downright scandalous!

Jesus, well aware of all of that conventional wisdom, goes ahead anyway and chooses to heal the sick man here by touch.  Jesus does it, not only knowing that it flusters the Respectable Religious Crowd to see him do it, but in a sense, precisely because it does!  He has come, not only to heal the world's list of "identified patients"--the ones with leprosy, blindness, paralysis, and so on--but also to correct the eyes of ALL of our hearts, because we have all created a system that has mistakenly concluded that being "holy" means being "distant" and "untouched" by the mess.  So Jesus willfully, deliberately, provocatively touches the man to heal him, knowing that this tender placing of the hand is at the same time a slap in the face to the Respectable Religious Crowd and their (our) whole way of seeing the world.

Here's the thing, friends.  If Jesus matters at all to us, then we are going to have to redefine words like "holy" and "sacred" and even "God" in light of what Jesus is like.  And Jesus just ain't the kind of Messiah who avoids being "tainted" by anything--not sickness, not soiling, not sin, not scandal, and not securing his status or his safety. Jesus chooses to touch the "untouchable" in order both to heal him and to say to him and all the world, "You are indeed touchable, acceptable, accepted, and beloved," because that is how Jesus is holy.  That is what true sacredness is. 

The old line of Eugene Peterson says that "Jesus is the dictionary in which we look up the meanings of words."  On this point, that means that instead of taking our preconceived assumptions about what "a holy God" will not allow, or will not go near, or will not love, or will not touch, instead, we look at Jesus and let that redefine our picture of "the sacred."

It is Love that makes you Real, according to the Skin Horse.

And it is Love, even risk-taking, daring Love that crosses boundaries we all swore were impenetrable, that makes a thing, or a person, or an outstretched hand... holy.

May such a "holy" God grant us such holiness as will move us, like Jesus, to reach an outstretched hand to those called "untouchable," and to lead us with Jesus to bring the healing to someone else that arises from treating them like accepted human beings.

Lord Jesus, make us holy in all the ways that you are holy... and redefine us where we need it to be made in your image.

Jesus, the Grown-Up

Jesus, the Grown-Up—November 13, 2017

“For to this end you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example, so that you should follow in his steps. ‘He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.’ When he was abused, he did not return abuse; when he suffered, he did not threaten; but he entrusted himself to the one who judges justly.” [1 Peter 2:21-23]

Before you get to any of the more exotic and high-fallutin’ titles for Jesus, you could really just spend a lifetime considering the fact that Jesus is the Supreme Grown-Up.  Jesus shows us how to “adult,” in a world full of childishness.

Yes, yes, all of the other things that Christians have classically said about Jesus are vital and essential to our faith.  Yes, Jesus is, as the old words say, “Light from Light, true God from true God, of one Being with the Father.” Yes, the honorific titles like, “Slain but Victorious Lamb” or “Lion of the Tribe of Judah,” like “Daystar” and “Messiah,” or “Prince of Peace” and “Lord of Lords,” are all accurate ways of naming Jesus.  But before we even jump into those deep waters, consider what it means for a moment that Jesus shows us the way mature human beings enter the mess of other people’s abuse and hostility.  Jesus shows us what a real, authentic, grown-up Human Being does and says in the face of suffering, condemnation, and persecution.  He is enough of an adult not to sink to the level of those who attacked him.  Whatever else we may say about the wandering rabbi from Nazareth, we must at least say that. He did not return evil for evil, and he did not respond to childish name-calling or mockery in kind. 

Why? Well, because, despite the fact that we are not great at doing it ourselves, that is what Grown-Ups do.  This isn’t just an attitude reserved for Messiahs.  This isn’t a Jesus-only sort of action.  This is what mature, responsible, grown-up adult humans do.  They don’t let themselves get sucked into resorting to petty insults, blustering threats, or empty outrage.  We may not be able to duplicate the stories of Jesus turning water into wine or silencing a storm, but we can—and are expected to, according to First Peter!—act like grown-ups in the midst of a world of childishness gone to seed.

And this is the real wonder of what Jesus, the Grown-Up, does: he remains gracious, refusing to return evil for evil, insult for insult, or threat for threat, while he is in the midst of the world’s hostility.  It’s easy not to get riled up if you just ignore everybody.  It’s easy to keep cool and have a polite smile plastered to your face if you retreat to your own little echo chamber where you only ever hear things you already agree with and people who already pat you on the back.  That is to say, it’s easy to look mature if you avoid entering the Mess of the real world, which is full of real people, who sometimes are really childish.

But Jesus doesn’t avoid the mess.  Jesus enters into the tangle of humanity in all of its messiness, including the fact that we are often brutal and vicious toward one another.  And yet, Jesus’ way of being in the mess is not to sink to the level of those who hurl insults, bellow threats, or inflict pain on him.  That is how a Grown-Up acts.  That is how the Truly Human One acts.

Somewhere along the way we get this notion that if someone makes a crude remark toward you, you have to zing them back with equally nasty words.  Or that if someone threatens you, it somehow makes you tougher to threaten them back.  Maybe when we are living through it in eighth or ninth grade, we just chalk it up to boys trying to figure out how to be boys.  Maybe we just say it’s a “mean girl phase.” But even then, some part of us realizes that’s not what real maturity looks like.  Some part of us has to know (right? Don’t we?) that real Grown-Ups show their maturity, not by returning a threat for a threat, but by absorbing it, and returning evil with good.  What may be an unavoidable lesson of adolescence is something we all expect eventually to grow out of…

And yet, here we are, living in a world where childishness and angry threats fill the air.  We live in a world full of messiness, full of the mess we immature humans make when we let childishness reign in us.  But Jesus gives us an alternative.  Jesus embodies another way to be human—the way of being a genuine Grown-Up.  Today, the challenge for us, we who cannot help but live in this messy world, is to live in it the way Jesus does—to be present with people, despite the impulse toward childish pettiness, and to respond differently… to respond like mature adults.

Whatever else we Christians have to say about Jesus, and surely there is much more to say, maybe the place to begin is here: with Jesus’ way of being a Grown-Up.

May we have such maturity in this day, as well.

Lord Jesus, grant us the grace to return kindness when we are given insults, to respond to dishonor with honor, and to be the kind of people who do not sink back into petty childishness.

The Non-Religious Jesus

The Non-Religious Jesus--November 9, 2017

Now when the Pharisees and some of the scribes who had come from Jerusalem gathered around him, they noticed that some of his disciples were eating with defiled hands, that is, without washing them. (For the Pharisees, and all the Jews, do not eat unless they thoroughly wash their hands, thus observing the tradition of the elders; and they do not eat anything from the market unless they wash it; and there are also many other traditions that they observe, the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles.) So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, "Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?” He said to them, "Isaiah prophesied rightly about you hypocrites, as it is written, ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching human precepts as doctrines.’ You abandon the commandment of God and hold to human tradition.” Then he said to them, “You have a fine way of rejecting the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition! For Moses said, ‘Honor your father and your mother’; and ‘Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely die.’ But you say that if anyone tells father or mother, ‘Whatever support you might have had from me is Corban (that is, an offering to God)—then you no longer permit doing anything for a father or mother, thus making void the word of God through your tradition that you have handed on. And you do many things like this.” [Mark 7:1-13]

It turns out that it is quite possible to be very much on the same wavelength as Jesus... and not be very "religious-looking" at all.

Take Jesus, for one.

This is one of those scenes where Jesus easily--easily!--could have blown off a small skirmish with the religious so-and-sos and then walked away.  He could have traded a couple of quips and then walked on without pulling at the thread they have left in front of him dangling there.  He could have kept things polite and respectable, and then not gotten into anything more involved. He could have, in a word, left their comfortable religious systems and greedy self-interested schemes untouched, and he wouldn't have upset them.

But this is Jesus we are talking about.  And Jesus has a way of cutting through the smokescreens we put up, and getting right to the heart of things, even when we wish he would just look the other way.

What starts out here as a discussion about the practice of ritual handwashing (Jesus is not pro-germ, and the religoius so-and-sos are not experts in antibacterial hygiene--this is about doing things they think God wants them to do) quickly escalates into a much bigger discussion.  And it happens by Jesus' choosing.  That is to say, Jesus instigates.  He pushes.  He provokes.  Make no mistake about the one we call the Prince of Peace, the one we all have decided must have been "meek and mild" because it rhymes with "little child" in all the Christmas carols, this same Jesus had a habit of intentionally stirring the pot with the people in power and comfort, when it came to waking them up to see their own hypocrisy. 

And so here's how Jesus breaks all the rules in this little encounter.  It starts when the religious so-and-sos ask him why he doesn't insist on his disciples following the "acceptable practice of religious people" in that era, of having ritual washing of their hands (as well as kitchen utensils and such) before they ate.  And again, this could have been a little thing. Jesus could have even just told his disciples, "You know, even though the Pharisees don't know about germs and bacteria and such yet, it's not a bad idea to wash your hands before eating, so how about you guys just do this from now on?  It's just a little gesture.  It'll show people that we arren't trying to rock the boat or upset people.  It will show your piety and devotion... so come on, let's all just start doing the ritual washing thing, okay?"  Or Jesus could have just said to the Pharisees, "We are going to have to agree to disagree here," and then just left the whole scene alone.  

But he doesn't. Jesus enters--the mess.  

In fact, Jesus actually kind of makes the mess by pulling at the loose thread that the Pharisees don't want to see is hanging there.  And he opens up the discussion into something much, much bigger.  The Respectable Religious Crowd not only makes a big fuss over ritual handwashing, but Jesus says, they have missed the point about what really matters to God, and what things don't matter to God.  In fact, Jesus comes across as surprisingly non-religous.  He is a lot less interested making sure people dedicate "stuff" to God, and a lot more interested in making sure people are taking care of those who depend on them... and as you might imagine, that upsets the Respectable Religious Crowd.

Instead of just leaving this as a discussion about whether you had to, or didn't have to, practice ritual handwashing to preserve the holiness and purity that God supposedly cared about, Jesus makes this a "While we're on the subject..." kind of moment.  And he delves into a bigger mess that everybody else had just agreed to ignore.  The short version was something like this: the Law of Moses commanded that you not only honor your parents, but provide for them in their need, which meant that children were simply expected to provide for their parents in their golden years (not quite Social Security, but sort of a family-based parallel). But there was a convenient loophole.

Apparently you could declare your own personal nest-egg as “devoted to God”—or in Hebrew, “Corban,” and swear an oath that your life-savings was to be given to the temple… eventually.  But in the mean time, you could continue to draw on your nest-egg and spend it on yourself, but not have to pay for mom and dad’s medicine and doctors’ visits, because all the money you would have been expected to spend on their care had been “devoted” to God.  Sort of a religious 401(k): you tell dear old mom and dad that you can't touch the money you've set aside, but in the mean time, you can work out a system to still keep it for yourself. And you can justifiy it to your parents (and to let yourself sleep at night) by saying, "I'm being religious--I'm dedicating all this wealth... to God." Almost makes you feel dirty and blasphemous just reading that scheme, doesn’t it? 

Jesus saw this practice going on in his culture around him and saw it as a prime example of putting human traditions over God’s commandment, and pretending that God was pleased with the whole thing.  Funny and tragic, isn’t it, the things we will do in the name of being devoted to something.

Now here's the thing that gets me, that genuinely takes my breath away about Jesus.  Jesus isn't the one saying, "We need to give more of our stuff to God." Jesus is actually telling people the opposite!  Jesus has taken the position that what God really cares about not propping up religion or donating more to help God out, because, as Jesus would remind us, God doesn't need our money to stay alive, and God doesn't need our donations to keep the universe going.  God doesn't need feeding, tending, protecting, or defending, it turns out.  God will be just fine, it turns out, whether or not there are contributions in the offering plate, checks in the mail, or enough household goods marked as "Corban." And as far as Jesus is concerned, the thing God really cares about is that we take care of the people around us--particularly our elders, in this case--who need someone to provide for their needs and their health as they get into older age.  

Well, unsurprisingly, that riled up the Respectable Religious Crowd.  Not just because Jesus was basically picking a fight with them and making a mess of their tidy little system that justified leaving the elderly on their own while they padded their own accounts, but also because it meant that Jesus wasn't auotmatically endorsing "religion" or "religious practices."  The Pharisees who did this "Corban" thing really thought that they were pleasing God by dedicating their belongings to God.  This was a ritual show of devotion!  This was giving to God!  And Jesus just basically says, "God didn't really need any of these gifts--how about you spend it honoring your parents and taking care of the old couple who lives down the road from you and is struggling on a fixed income?"  Jesus doesn't, in other words, look to shore up the systems and structures of "religion."  Instead he is convinced the living God is a lot more interested in actually helping and caring for other people.

Jesus could have left that all alone, but instead, because he cares about the people who are going hungry or going without, Jesus makes a bigger mess of the scene by bringing up the whole Corban thing.  And let's be clear about that motivation, then: Jesus isn't just being a jerk on Facebook, like the angry uncle everyone has who doesn't realize how bitter and selfish he comes off when he goes on his rants.  Jesus is picking a fight for the sake of those who are being forgotten--in the name of religion.  Jesus is speaking up because there are members of the Respectable Religious Crowd who think God smiles on their system that leaves others out in the cold while they pile up money that they label "set aside for religious purposes."  That is what makes it worth it here for Jesus to risk making enemies and making a mess.  That is what pushes Jesus beyond pious-looking politeness.

This is an important moment for us to consider, too, here all these centuries later.  There is a persistent danger that we, too, will become so infatuated with "religion" that we think religion an end in and of itself.  We end up thinking that "protecting" (and propping up) religion itself is a worthy cause, or that God needs our special protections, donations, or defense in order to still be God.  And we end up ignoring the faces of people we are charged with caring for--our mothers and fathers, our grandparents, our neighbors, and the Biblical trio of "widows, orphans, and resident aliens"--in the name of "defending religion."  We must protect "religion," the televangelists and the demagogues say.  We must preserve and shore up "religion," because then we will be showing God how faithful and holy and pure we are, and then we will have blessings showered upon us.  (And meanwhile, we won't have to give more of our resources to our elders in nursing homes or the eighty-year-old neighbor who doesn't have heat--that's just extravagant and wasteful social policy...).

I wonder, in all seriousness, what Jesus would say if he looked around at our churches.  I wonder what he thinks is worth us spending money on there, too.  I wonder if Jesus would be all that interested in the need to save up money for fancier robes (or robes at all), or for flashier signs, or for video screens and pipe organs.  I wonder how much Jesus cares about "defending religion," and instead how much Jesus would rather we practice our faith, which is to say, to "do justice" and "love mercy" and to "walk humbly with God."  I am sure--absoultely sure, because you can see it in the gospels here and throughout--that the Respectable Religious Crowd was threatened by what they heard from Jesus, and that they denounced him as someone attacking the cherished traditions and the central role of "religion" in their society.  And maybe you can decide for yourself if they were right. I think they at least have a point: Jesus consistently showed he wasn't interested in propping up privileging, or preserving "religion," whatever that meant.  And instead, Jesus was willing to make a big P.R. mess for himself by opening up a much bigger, more controversial debate, because he cared about the people who were being forgotten or pushed to the side in the name of "defending religion."

Interestingly enough, nowhere in the Bible does any prophet, apostle or divine voice call for "better protections and preservation of religion." Instead, the voice of Mercy calls us, because of and out of our "religious" faith, to care for others as our way of loving God.  Like the old line attributed to Martin Luther puts it, "God doesn't need your good works, but your neighbor does."

May we have the courage and compassion to make the kinds of messes Jesus does...

Lord God, we devote ourselves to you--and because of who you are and what you care out, we devote ourselves to the care of the people you love... everybody.

Real People with Real Problems

Real People with Real Problems--November 8, 2017

"Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.  I urge Euodia and I urge Syntyche to be of the same mind in the Lord. Yes, and I ask you also, my loyal companion, help these women, for they have struggled beside me in the work of the gospel, together with Clement and the rest of my co-workers, whose names are in the book of life." [Philippians 4:1-3]

Sometimes, you know, in the midst of the organ music in the background and the candles around the lectern on a Sunday morning, you forget that you are reading someone else's mail here when you read the letters of the New Testament.  But little passages like this one from Philippians remind me that we Christians have made an odd habit of giving public readings of someone else's correspondence and listening for the voice of God as we eavesdrop on the conversations of saints from millennia ago.

And yet, there is something wonderfully, surprisingly, immediate and relevant revealed as we overhear this ancient conversation.  I have to tell you, I didn't always appreciate, or even much like, this odd left turn in the fourth chapter of Philippians; it always felt too... particular, too personal, too entangled with the details and disagreements of people I would never meet this side of glory.  This odd little digression about two particular women Paul knew, with the unusual-to-our-ears names "Euodia" and "Syntyche," just seems to come out of nowhere, right in the midst of Paul waxing all sentimental.  There are lots of great plaque-worthy, cross-stitch-wall-hanging-ready verses from Philippians, and then there is this very abrupt intrusion into a squabble of some kind between two women who were leaders in the church to whom Paul was writing.  Plenty of people know, "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me..." and "The One who began a good work in you will be faithful to bring it to completion..." or "Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice!"  Those are A-side tracks from the Philippians Greatest Hits album.  But right in the midst of it, Paul stops with his valedictory speech here, and just stops to try and persuade two women with whom he has worked and suffered and struggled in the gospel to work things out with whatever mess is going on in their lives.  These are real people with real problems, and Paul goes right into them.

It's a terrible passage to engrave on brass or frame on your wall... but it's perfect for actually living out one's faith, because it is utterly real. Paul tells the truth about the disagreement, even if we don’t know what it was about.  At one level, it doesn’t matter what it was about—these two sisters in Christ were going to have to get used to the idea that Jesus had claimed each of them, and that they were going to need to find a way to live together as part of the church, because Jesus wasn’t about to let go of either of them.  They were central enough to the congregation, and their disagreement was potentially disruptive enough, that Paul decided he had better get the ball rolling toward their reconciliation.  (Just as a sidebar, this seems to be a pretty strong indicator that women had important roles of leadership in the early church, if Paul not only takes the time to weigh in on Euodia and Syntyche’s situation, but also that he calls them “coworkers” who “struggled beside me in the work of the gospel.”)

So in one sentence, Paul names the disagreement—ridding us of any illusions that everybody always got along in the early church, or that Christians are always smiling and pleasant to one another.  But at the same time, in the very same sentence, Paul offers up the hope that these two women, who have shown before their ability to work together in a common project, can come to an agreement.  Paul is neither pure pessimist (they’ll never agree, those two!) nor wide-eye optimist (and we’ll all just naturally get along with each other because we’re all so pleasant to be around!).  He sees truthfully with two points of focus (call Paul the inventor of spiritual bifocals, if you like):  on the one hand, the reality of a broken relationship that it would have been easier just to ignore, and on the other hand, the equally true reality that Jesus is still holding onto both of these fellow sisters in Christ, and his claim makes them belong.  And that means there is the possibility that these women could find a way to forgive and be forgiven, to come to an agreement, and to live in real community with one another.  But it requires first their willingness to be real about the disagreement: they need to own the mess, rather than pretending it's all fine.

So… what does this situation have to do with us living in the twenty-first century?  Well, just substitute names of people in your own world, your own family, your own congregation, and the answer is in front of us.  We are called to enter into the mess the same way—to be honest about where we have divisions, disagreements, wounds that need to be addressed, and secrets that need to be brought out into the open.  And with that comes the other side of Paul’s realism—to take seriously and firmly the claim of Jesus that binds us to one another.

You might not have ever heard the named "Euodia" or "Syntyche" before, but you and I can be people who learn from these women who were leaders in the early church, to enter into the mess of our relationships with one another, rather than thinking it's holier to walk on eggshells all the time.

Today, be real.  Be real.  Be real.

Lord Jesus, help us to be able to talk about our disagreements rather than hiding from them, and help us to trust that you can navigate us through the messes we share.

Desperados--Or, An Absence of Hats

Desperados--Or, An Absence of Hats--November 7, 2017

"What then? Are we any better off?  No, not at all; for we have already charged that all, both Jews and Greeks, are under the power of sin, as it is written: 'There is no one who is righteous, not even one; there is no one who has understanding, there is no one who seeks God. All have turned aside, together they have become worthless; there is no one who shows kindness, there is not even one'." [Romans 3:9-12]

The old Westerns had a certain clarity to them, didn't they?  Bad guys wore black hats, and good guys wore white hats.  It was as simple as that.  In the world of those movies, you could tell if a character was a hero or a villain, virtuous or vicious, just by the color of their cowboy hats.  White hat?  Must be on the side of law and order.  Black hat?  Must be a no-good cattle rustler, bank robber, or all-around trouble-maker. Job done, dust off your hands.

Of course it wasn't just Westerns that used costumes to break the world down into simple, discrete piles of human beings: good guys and bad guys.  Indiana Jones had a certainly clarity to his world, too--the Nazis were clearly the bad guys, and Steven Spielberg drew on the pulpy adventure serials of an earlier generation to create his world of noble and daring heroes (Indy and his sidekicks) pitted against the evil armies of Hitler. There were even musical cues when the bad guys walked on screen to help you know who were the villains, and who was the hero. The Third Reich villains might have seemed a little one-dimensional, but at least you had some clarity about who should and shouldn't end up with the Grail or the Ark of the Covenant.  And for that matter, the worlds of Star Trek, Star Wars and the classic James Bond movies of the Cold War era all provided us with easily-divided, pleasantly simple universes of Good Guys (the Federation, the Jedi, Bond's MI-6, etc.) and Bad Guys (the warlike Klingons who were a stand-in for the Soviets, the evil Empire with its vaguely Nazi-esque imagery, or James Bond's classic enemies in nefarious groups like SPECTRE, or obvious Russian arch-villains).  Growing up on so many of those movies, it seemed so obvious: Nazis were bad, and Allies were good.  Empires were bad, and Jedi-led rebels were good. The Russians were bad, and the forces of the Free World were good.  It all seemed so... obvious.

Maybe the conflicts of an earlier era really were just that simple (it certainly seems at least that it was clear that Nazis were, and are, bad).   Or maybe that is part of what makes those movies such audio-visual comfort food: they offer us a world where there are only black and white hats, and where the costumes themselves can tell you who are the good guys, and who are the bad guys.  You don't have to know any backstory at all to know that Darth Vader is a bad guy--you can even walk in halfway through the movie without knowing a thing and still tell just by his appearance that we're rooting against him, and that we must be "for" whoever is resisting a Bad Guy who is so clearly bad.  Those kinds of stories appeal to us--they certainly do to me, at least--in part, I think, because we long for a world in which we can simply identify at a distance clear Good Guys to root for, and Bad Guys to hate.

The difficulty is that, as the writers of the Scriptures are quick to remind us, life isn't like that.  In the real world, there is an absence of hats.  As much as we want to--and as much as the movies make us think it is possible--there is no headgear to identify "good guys" and "bad guys."  And even more significant, maybe there aren't even clear "good guys" (at least as a group completely separable from "bad guys") out there at all in the first place.  That is to say, as the Biblical writers see it, all of us are villains to one degree or another.  All of us are part of the problem, and all of us are capable of terrible things, shocking violence, and secret hatreds.  It's the old punchline from the Pogo cartoon:  "we have met the enemy, and he is us."  And not one of us is immune or untainted by it.

That doesn't mean every person's actions are equal to every other person's actions--it doesn't mean that the guy who litters is as much of a sociopath as the one who robs banks or sets arsons.  It doesn't mean we can't call wicked the things that need to be called wicked, either--we need to be able to say things like, "No, it is never OK to murder another person made in the image of God,"  and "No, it is not acceptable to treat other people like they are disposable."  We need to be able to acknowledge that it is not right when bullies can intimidate, or the powerful can steal and hoard, or when the truth is not cared for.  These things are all true.  But the difficult truth we need to acknowledge, too, is that every one of us is affected--infected, even--by the capacity to do great harm to others.  The problem, it turns out, is that if there were hats to be given out, we should all be given the villain costume.  

The writers of the Scriptures--many of whom the apostle Paul quotes here in our passage from Romans--are clear on it:  every last one of us is prone to slide into committing injustice... every last one of us is inclined away from kindness at some point.  It's the same truth that honest eyes have recognized throughout human history, too--what is the Lord of the Flies about, after all, but the way that even a bunch of proper, upper-crust, "civilized" boys are just a push away from brutal violence if allowed to give in to the worst impulses within us?  The truth about us humans is that that we are all prone to join up with the cattle rustlers and desperados, if it comes down to the handing out of hats. 

We are all part of the problem, which is to say, we are all part of the mess.

That forces us to face two difficult implications then.  First off, it means owning the mess inside each one of us.  It means I don't have permission to cast myself always as the hero, or to assume that my motives are always pure and noble, or that my view of things is always the correct one.  Like the old cliché says, more evil has been done by people who were convinced of their goodness than by obvious, overt, mustache-twirling villains.  We have a way of doing terrible things and justifying it because we tell ourselves that we are in the right... and those people are the villains.  We have a way of whipping up imaginary black and white hats... and since we always cast ourselves as the heroes, it always leaves the villain costume for "them"... whoever "they" happen to be at the moment.  But it just ain't so.  If we dare to listen to the news that Romans 3 has to break to us, it is that the mess isn't just "out there" in those "bad guys" out there somewhere... the mess is inside me, too.

And the other difficult thing we have to face, then, is that it means the solution the problem of "bad guys" is not outnumbering them with more, bigger, stronger "good guys."  Because... there are no "good guys," not really.  We are all, to use a loaded word of church techno-speak, sinners.  And every last one of us is bent in our own selves, capable of doing terrible things, as well as capable of doing wonderful things.  It is true, as the old line from a Doctor Who episode put it, that "every life is a pile of good things and bad things," and that while "the good things don't always soften the bad things, but vice versa, the bad things don't necessarily spoil the good things or make them unimportant."  But that means recognizing that the good and the bad, the virtuous and the vicious, are both located inside me... and inside you, too--not that I get one hat and leave you with the other.  As the famous insight of Alexander Solzhenitsyn from The Gulag Archipelago puts it, "If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"

The solution, then, when I see evil in the world, is neither to pretend it's not there and avoid the mess, nor is it to project the mess outside of myself, as if all the evil is "out there," as if enough "good guys" on scene could cancel out the presence of "bad guys" like matter and anti-matter annihilating each other in subatomic explosion.   The mess is "out there" AND it is "in here," too.  So if we are going to deal with the wickedness there is in the world, we are going to have to leave the imagined over-simplicity of the movie theater, and step into a world that is marked by an absence of hats.  It is not that good and evil do not matter or are unknowable--it is, rather, that we all know the bent self-centeredness of evil all too well ourselves... and the Good One who did enter into human history, well, we strung him up on a tree with the blessing of the white-hat wearing moral pillars of the religious and political powers of the day, and we made him out to be the greatest villain around. 

That is the scandal of the gospel: that in the end, God's way of saving the world is not to send in a larger army of white-hat-wearing "Good Guys" to shoot down a posse of black-hat-wearing "Bad Guys," but rather, that for a world full of vice-bent enemies like us, the living God--the Good One--chose to be executed as a trouble-making criminal "Bad Guy" between thieves... in the name of and by the supposed authority of "Good Guy" Law and Order (Rome). See?  At the cross itself--at the centerpiece of what the New Testament calls the salvation of the world--all the hats are all mixed up, with the executioners dressing themselves in white hats and putting the black hat on Jesus along with a crown of thorns, who dies giving himself away for all of us enemies of God.  It is all a mess--and the gospel is all about God's insistence on entering into the mess we have made, rather than some project of sorting the world into piles of "good guys" and "bad guys."

There is indeed evil in the world.  There is indeed a mess to be dealt with.  But I am a part of the problem, as well as someone longing for things to be put right.  And the gospel's announcement is that there is hope, not only for some imaginary people who deserve to wear white hats on account of their moral purity and uprightness, but for the desperados we see in the mirror, too.

Lord Jesus, meet us in the mess, and bring us face to face with the mess inside us so that we can see both the good and the bad within us, and within all.

Cutting Through Our Defenses

Cutting Through Our Defenses--November 6, 2017

Jesus said to [the Samaritan woman at the well], "Go, call your husband, and come back." The woman answered him, "I have no husband."Jesus said to her, "You are right in saying, 'I have no husband'; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband. What you have said is true!" The woman said to him, "Sir, I see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship neither on this mountain, nor in Jerusalem..." [John 4:16-21]

Okay, here's just some free good advice.  I don't particularly care if you are happy with it or unhappy with it, and I am not going to be bothered if you don't like it.  This is just one of those things that from time to time needs to be said while we are in the neighborhood and on the subject: it's a bad idea to live with someone without being married to them.

All around bad idea.  There are plenty of rationalizations around to try and say why it should be ok, or why it's "just how things are these days," or why that's old-fashioned thinking, but I'm gonna stick with it here: it's a bad idea to live with someone without promises made to one another that you are both in this for the long haul--we just usually call those promises "marriage."  And it's a bad idea to sleep with someone without those promises made as well.  It's not just the statistics and studies that indicate that cohabitating couples are more likely to divorce later (although there are such statistics).  It's, at least in part, the ways we are so easily led to treat the other person in a relationship as an object to be consumed and thrown away, rather than someone on whom you can build a life.  Marriage is more than just a piece of paper--it is the public declaration of promises... and if someone isn't willing to say in public that they won't bail out on you, I'd be cautious before building a life with them.  Yes, there are indeed some couples who defy the odds, but there are so, so, SO many ways it can go terribly wrong and end up a colossal mess--but a mess that the other person feels no compulsion to stick around and work through with you if there are not promises made and daily lived out.  It is, in a word, stupid, and confuses genuine love with fleeting flutters of endorphins and brain chemistry.S0, bottom line on the free advice: it is a bad idea to live with someone or sleep with someone without the promises of faithfulness that we usually just call "marriage." 

Okay.  Now that that's said, here's something that amazes me about Jesus and brings me up short.  Jesus chooses to enter into the colossal mess with the woman he meets at the well, rather than politely looking the other way on the one hand or just scolding this woman from a distance and walking away with a look of smug self-righteousness.  Jesus enters the mess, and that makes all the difference.

Just right off the bat, it's a wonder that Jesus breaks the social rules that would have kept any other respectable rabbi from even speaking in public with a woman who wasn't a relation. Most everyone else in Jesus' culture (including his own disciples, when they appear on the scene later in the story) would have scolded Jesus or scowled at him for breaking the social rule of the day that you weren't supposed to be in public with a woman other than basically your mother, your daughter, or your wife.  And then on top of it, Jesus intentionally delves into the mess of her life story--but there's not a word of scolding or shaming.  There is simply truth-telling.  He knows her story, and he knows that she's lived with a string of broken relationships (and yeah, it is plenty easy even for people who make the promises of marriage to end up bailing out on each other, too, so nobody is saying that just speaking vows makes a marriage enduring).  He knows that she has been burned by men who used her and walked away, men who treated her like she was disposable, that she's just now at the point where promises or no promises don't seem to matter.  And here's the thing that gets me about how Jesus handles the mess: he doesn't condemn, and he doesn't turn away to keep things polite and surface-level shallow.  He deliberately steers the conversation into the mess, as if so say, "Just we are clear, I know about everything that's happened to you, and everything you have been through--and I'm not walking away."  He lets her know he will not be scared off or scandalized if he finds out that he knows she's had five husbands and is now living with someone who is just as likely to bail out on her as all the others before. 

That's why Jesus has to enter into the mess.  We all know what it's like to have a friend or a co-worker who treats us just fine, until they find out some unpleasantness about our past, or they discover that you have different political preferences and convictions, or that you are friends with someone they just can't stand.  And you know, in those moments, the temptation to keep some part of yourself hidden in the future--you don't want to lose a friend, or have a bad working relationship because now they know something about you and see you differently, or are scandalized and decide to walk away from you.  We know what that is like, and so does Jesus.  So Jesus cuts right through any of those distance-creating defense mechanisms, so this woman doesn't put on a good face in the hopes of keeping Jesus from finding out that there are messes in her past and her present.  Jesus cuts through all of it, not to scold her and tell her to shape up, but to let her know that there is nothing she can do or has done already that will scare him off. (You'll notice, perhaps in a way that makes the moralizers in all of us squirm, that Jesus doesn't tell her to break up with her new boyfriend or that she's out of his good graces because she's been divorced--there is not a whiff of punishment or even a hint of brow-furrowing from Jesus.)  Once he has entered the mess with her, he can again offer her the invitation of life from.  But for someone who has been hurt too many times before, and for someone who is now used to hiding the mess in her life from people's judging eyes, this woman needs to know first that Jesus does not have an ax to grind or a lesson to teacher or a moral to recite.  He offers her acceptance.  He offers her grace.  He offers her honesty.  He offers her "real."

That's what it is to let mercy move us into the mess of this life.  Instead of keeping things surface-level polite, or backing away from people who seem too "scandalous" for respectable religious people to associate with, Jesus leads us right into the mess of one another's lives. 

And he leads us to be honest about the messes in our lives, too, and to once and for all take off the foolish masks we have been wearing to make people think there is a smile on the outside when there is only turmoil on the inside.  Jesus leads us into the mess--the mess of one another, and the mess beneath the polished exteriors we have been taught to project to the world.

Thank God for the gift of "real."

Lord Jesus, cut through our defenses and meet us where we are, here in our messes... and help us to acknowledge the messes inside us, too.