Courage for Chicken-Hearts

Courage for Chicken-Hearts--August 20, 2018

"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.  

And I am among the chicken-hearts so often.

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, with whom Jesus shared a table, but basically folks 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? Were they going to affect the community of disciples negatively by bringing in different cultural practices, different attitudes, and different histories? Were they really coming to faith in Jesus... or were they coming to the church in hopes of getting free handouts from this community of people who shared their bread with one another freely? (You know how quick we are to assume such things about people we don't know...) 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?

Well, 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, other cultures, other languages, and other skin complexion, 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 the ones labeled "unacceptable" all the time... because at some point, someone else will see.  And someone else will be upset, or provoked, or stirred up, or decide that you are "unacceptable" too, for associating with "those people" as they are.

And in that moment, it is easy to be a chicken-heart.  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... the same Peter who knew it was hogwash to insist that Gentile believers 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 Respectable Religious Crowd from Jerusalem.

And so, Peter folded.  He wimped out.  He was a coward and a chicken-heart.

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 chicken-hearts (though hopefully recovering chicken-hearts) 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.

The More, The Merrier

The More, the Merrier--August 17, 2018

"On this mountain the LORD of hosts 

      will make for all peoples

  a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,

  of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.

And he will destroy on this mountain

      the shroud that is cast over all peoples,

      the sheet that is spread over all nations;

 he will swallow up death forever.

Then the Lord GOD will wipe away

      the tears from all faces,

and the disgrace of his people he will take away from all the earth,

      for the LORD has spoken." [Isaiah 25:6-8]

Spoiler alert here, friends--this is where the story of the universe is headed: a big ol' dinner party for all peoples and the destruction of death itself.

I love these words from the prophet Isaiah, and I find deep comfort in them, whether they come up on a Sunday morning in worship, or I find myself like I was earlier this week reading them to dear saint of God sleeping fitfully in a hospital bed in hospice care, or I stumble upon them paging through my Bible.  I love these words, and they have lifted up my heart when I have been grieving the loss of people I have loved over the years.

But sometimes I also have to stop and remind myself of just how scandalous this vision must have sounded to Isaiah's first listeners.  Before these were words of deep comfort, I think they must have also been words of profound surprise, like the punch-line of an absurdist joke that no one expected.

I say that this vision of a grand divine family reunion dinner was (and is!) scandalous because of how broad and wide its scope is.  When the prophet Isaiah lived, the conventional wisdom of Israel and Judah's religion was something like, "We are the chosen people, and we alone matter.  God has a special relationship with us, and we are exceptional.  Nobody else is really as important, and God certainly favors us over everybody else."  

The ancient story about God calling and choosing Abraham to "bless all the families of the earth" had somehow congealed and hardened into a rigid script that the God of Abraham only cared about the family line through Isaac and Jacob and to the children of Israel, and that their "chosen-ness" meant that God was indifferent toward anybody else on earth.  We do that, we human beings.  We have a way of taking a sentence like "You are special" and hearing it as, "I am better than everyone else."  Well, the Respectable Religious Crowd of Isaiah's day had done about the same, and so you have to imagine it was something of a shock for them to hear the old dreamer talking about this divine dinner party.

The idea of God having a grand victory celebration might have been easy enough to swallow.  Maybe even the idea of God destroying death once and for all, if the people had dared to dream of life beyond the grip of death, was fine, too. But the guest list here?  "All peoples?"  Really?  "All nations?"  What? Isaiah was envisioning something radical--a God who could still have covenant faithfulness with the "chosen" children of Israel, and who at the same time still included "all nations" to be there at the big party.  This was the kind of idea that got so many prophets killed--Isaiah and his fellow prophets dared to listen when God's Spirit whispered in their ears that others were just as included, just as invited, just as precious, as the ones who prided themselves on being "in."

So consider again what it is that Isaiah is really envisioning here: that one day, the God of Israel and Judah would throw a party at which all peoples, all nations, all skin colors, all ethnicities, all languages, all cultures, and all the various and different ways of being human, would find a place set for them at the table.  And there at the party, everybody eats from the same menu, even from the same platters.  There is no first-class seating for the "truly chosen" with the really good food, and then leftovers and scraps for the rest back in coach.  There is no division or segregation into groups.  Everybody who is covered by the shroud of death is invited to watch as God rips it to shreds like an old sheet.  Everyone who has wept will find their tears wiped away. Everyone who is hungry eats.  Yes, the chosen people who have been stomped on by one foreign army after another will feel vindication, but Isaiah's vision of the dinner party is at the same time open to everybody.

That was scandalous.  The conventional wisdom of Isaiah's day was that only fellow Israelites and Judeans were acceptable to God, and that "other people" were a threat to their way of life.  The recurring advice of the talking heads of the day said that "If we let other people around into our lives and communities, they'll change what it means to be Israelites! We'll lose our way of life! Those other people, those outsiders, are dangerous, and they are threatening to make us lose our culture, our nationality, and our way of life!  We must keep them out, out, out, or else they'll taint and infect everything we have tried to build for ourselves here!"  The Respectable Religious Crowd of Isaiah's day said, "The Israel we all know and love is in danger of not existing anymore, because there are all these... other people around, and they are a threat to us! We have to keep them away... out... removed!"  And then Isaiah, knowing full well how controversial it was to say this, declares, "Well, the God of Israel is throwing a party for all of them, and we'll all be seated together at God's table, right here on God's mountain.  God's party is for all nations, and nobody else gets to revise the guest list."

Whether the people who heard Isaiah liked that vision or not is another matter entirely--none of us ever likes to be reminded that God is not exclusively my personal possession, after all.  But that wide, big, expansive vision is what Isaiah saw.  All nations.  A rainbow of faces, with cheeks dried of their tears by the same hand of the one God.

If we are going to call ourselves followers of Jesus, who was fed by vision of prophets like these, then we should be prepared for this kind of an end to the story.  The prophets themselves dared to listen when they heard God speak about a party for all nations.  They did not edit out the other peoples when they pictured the grand dinner table.  The prophets who pointed ahead to Jesus, and then Jesus himself, had this expansive vision of who would find themselves at the table. And that made them see other people differently in their present moments, too.  After all, if you have convinced yourself that someone is just not good enough to make it on God's eternal guest list, it becomes very easy to treat them like they are disposable or ignorable or less important right now when they are walking right beside you on the street, or standing in line at the store in front of you, or looking for work in your town.  But if we dare to listen to the prophets and can see that all nations will be there at God's dinner party one day, you and I cannot help but treat everybody, no matter how different they are from either of us, as a future guest at the table. They may be the ones asked to scooch in their chairs to make room for you when you get there, after all!  

If everybody, no matter their nationality, language, ethnicity, skin color, or culture, is going to be invited to God's big ol' table, then I should be very, very careful before I go dismissing anybody in the course of my day to day life and work.  If God has said that "all nations" and "all peoples" will be there, I don't get to try and narrow down the guest list because it makes me uncomfortable.  And if God says that the table has room for every tribe, tongue, and race, then I don't get to change that... and I should probably consider for a moment that such a wide invitation is actually my only hope, too, since an American of northern European ancestry like me isn't anywhere close to the actual ethnicity of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, or Jesus.  My only hope of belonging is that God's table is big enough to include me, too, and that others who are different from me will be willing to slide their chairs over to make room for the likes of an outsider like me.

Taking God's table seriously also means that I am no longer allowed to picture the people of God as looking or sounding just like me. And I am no longer afforded the privilege of being afraid of "them," or of keeping "those people" out or away or removed from what I have.  It is all God's anyway--past, present, and future--and God says here in Isaiah that all nations will find a place at the table.  It would be damned foolish of me now to try and shoo away someone to whom God has sent an engraved dinner invitation already.  

Isaiah had the courage--the nerve!--to stand up in a crowd that was dead certain God's blessings were only for people who lived within their borders, and to say, "Hey everybody! Our God is throwing a party for all peoples!" It took courage because accepting that wide vision was going to change what it meant to be the people of God, and the Respectable Religious Crowd were afraid of losing their old homogenous image of what it meant to be Israel.  And Isaiah's vision of a future table for all nations was threatening to them... threatening enough that they were stirred up to silence prophets like Isaiah, or even to start setting up crosses for them, too.  But Isaiah's was a joyful courage, too, because it meant allowing God's table to be infinitely bigger than anybody ever dreamed.  

It still demands courage to see that, and to consider that God operates by the principle of "The more, the merrier," even when we want to imagine that God's blessings are our private possession.

So, again, let this be your spoiler alert: a prophet who got a glimpse of the end of the story saw that all nations and all peoples are there at God's table.  If any of us has a problem with that, we'll have to take it up, not with the other nations or peoples, but with none other than God.

Get ready.  Someone whose story, whose face, whose language is quite different from your own will very likely be the one scooching their chair over at God's party one day... to make room for--you.

Lord God at whose table we are fed, give us the grace and humility and courage to regard all people we encounter today as future tablemates at your grand celebration.  Get us ready for your party.

Passing the Potatoes

Passing the Potatoes--August 15, 2018

"Awe came upon everyone, because many wonders and signs were being done by the apostles. All who believed were together and had all things in common; they would sell their possessions and goods and distribute the proceeds to all, as any had need. Day by day, as they spent much time together in the temple, they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people. And day by day the Lord added to their number those who were being saved." [Acts 2:43-47]

It really is a gift to be able to sit down with your family and share a meal together.  For all the additional work it takes to coordinate schedules, to get the food cooked, to get young hands to help set the table, and to pause the distractions and busyness of the day for even a half an hour of synchronized eating, it truly is worth all the work that goes into making it happen.  

It is a gift of grace to share a table for an ordinary Wednesday dinner, regardless of what is on the menu, because it is in that shared meal that we share our lives.  Make no mistake about it: it is a holy and blessed thing to take the time--and to get to take the time--whether it's over fish sticks or filet mignon, to share a table with the family.

When we eat together, we talk to each other.  You find out what the best part of someone else's day was.  You hear what is on the mind and on the heart of the other people around the table.  You build the common experiences, the memories, the household traditions, of certain foods and certain times.  You share.  You pass the mashed potatoes and you split the last serving of meatloaf. And in the passing of the platters, the family practices its own kind of economics, without talking about who "earned" the food, but only the joyful concern to make sure everyone gets to have enough on their plate. And those meals, whether with just a nuclear family or five generations and their bonus friends who got the invite, those meals become the threads that bind our lives together. 

You and I know as much from having eaten at tables like that before.  We know what it is like to be the one included even if you don't share a bit of biology with anybody else, but simply on the basis of the principle of "The more, the merrier."  We know what it is like to find comfort from each other even when our hearts were heavy, and then to find that sharing a meal together lifted us back up again.  We know what it is like to teach children the importance of taking care of one another by modeling the passing of the rolls, the waiting on seconds until everyone has gotten a first helping, and the value of waiting for everyone to be at the table before we eat.  We know what it is like to see the common meal flow almost seamlessly into the common labor of clearing the table and washing the dishes.  And that is why we keep gathering around tables, even though there are times when it is tough, or when personalities clash, or when we are already so hangry (that is, "hungry-angry") that we get on each other's nerves before the drinks are already poured, or when we are each so busy that it can feel like trying to align the planets to make the gatherings happen.  But we keep at it, we and our various families, because in a very real sense, those meals bring us to life and sustain us for the times when we aren't all around the table.

Now, if we know the value of that kind of shared experience at a dinner table with our families, it won't surprise us that the first followers of Jesus saw the same power among them as well.  They were not biologically related--and yet they made the effort to share tables and break bread with one another.  They didn't "have to" all share meals together, at least not in the sense of some kind of religious law or requirement of their piety--but the practice of sharing meals together was so life-giving and so essential from the beginning that the first Christians did it without anybody "making" them.  They had not yet invented all of the layers of liturgical sediment or shiny gold accessories as the later church would get saddled with like great-grandmother's china that nobody knows what to do with--and yet they held the common meal as of great importance.  The first followers of Jesus knew that sharing tables with one another was part of how they learned to love each other.  You learn to love the people you pass the mashed potatoes to.  You get in the habit of asking about their day or their dreams.  You become accustomed to sharing the common work before and after the meal. And all of that is really what it looks like to love each other.  Nobody has to enforce it as a rule, but the common table and the common life become so obviously important that it is worth it to make the effort to set up the chairs and put out the serving dishes.

That's the way I think we have to hear these verses from the beginning of Acts.  And really, as much as it seems obvious to anybody who has had a family dinner in their lives, it's important for us to say this out loud.  And that's because we can be so afraid of making this shared meal and shared resource thing into a "rule" that we ignore passages like this from Acts altogether.  I can't tell you how many times in my life I have heard people, upon reading these verses from Acts, blurt out like an alibi, "But this isn't a requirement! Not all early Christians lived communally like this, and we don't have any proof they ever did it outside of the city of Jerusalem here in the first few chapters of Acts!"  And while it is of course technically true that Jesus issued no commands that his followers "had to" eat together every so often, that seems almost willfully to miss the point.

Can you technically be a family and still never eat together?  Sure.  But either you have to make the effort of finding other ways and times to share each other's lives, or you just slowly succumb to drifting apart.  You'll still be a family, at least in name or DNA, but you will have missed something beautiful, something blessed, something essential.  Well, it's the same with us as the family called church: the more we share our lives with one another, including breaking bread "with glad and generous hearts," the more we find our lives strengthened and enriched.  It's not a matter of "have to" or "you can't make me"--it's a matter of what love does.  And love shares food, passes the mashed potatoes, and then shares the labor after dinner--that's just what it does.

In the day and time in which we live, is SO easy to insist that nobody can "make" us share our abundance with someone else, or that nobody can "compel" us to give up our stuff so that someone else can have enough. It is so easy to become resentful when someone else gets a break that you didn't get.  It is so easy to become bitter and possessive, and to start digging in our heels about how someone else is getting something they didn't earn while I feel like I'm getting passed over.  That is exactly how the culture in which we live teaches us to see the world.... but it is not how it works in a family.  And even though there is no requirement for salvation to share X-percent of our resources, or to give up Y-number of possessions, or to share so many church dinners together, we know that sharing our tables and our stuff is part of how family works... and we are a found family together, we followers of Jesus.

Today, then, instead of the knee-jerk impulse to say, "Nobody can MAKE me share--not a table, and not my treasures!" what if we were the people who saw in the example of the Acts 2 Church a picture of a more joyful life together?  What if, instead of scrambling for excuses of why we don't "HAVE to" take the time or make the effort to share our tables and share one another's troubles, we chose to say, "It's not a matter of whether we have to or not, but we are missing out on something good and beautiful if we don't keep gathering at table and sharing our abundance."  Glad and generous hearts--that sounds like what I want to be.  Why would we not make the effort and keep the commitment to share our tables, to share our resources, and to share the time doing the dishes afterward, too?

Come to the table.  And if there isn't one already set up to come to, then you be the one who sets up a table and invites others around to join you.

Lord Jesus, give us the fullness of life that unfolds from breaking bread and passing the peas, as well as sharing our abundance with one another because we have discovered we are family together.

The Overturned Tables

The Overturned Tables--August 14, 2018

"Then they came to Jerusalem. And [Jesus] entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple. He was teaching and saying, 'Is it not written, My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations? But you have made it a den of robbers.' And when the chief priests and the scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching." [Mark 11:15-18]

You can't talk about all the tables of Jesus without including the ones that Jesus overturns.

Last fall, when I first charted out this year's worth of devotions under the overarching idea of spending a year looking at different angles of Jesus' life, teaching, ministry, death, and resurrection, I knew we would eventually have to talk about this scene.  It was inescapable when I made the choice, nine or ten months ago, eventually to spend a month of 2018 looking at "the Table of Jesus," And that's because for every miraculous feeding or holy supper at a table in an upper room, there is also a table that Jesus knocked over in the temple, in what was certainly his most provocative and symbolic act of prophetic protest in all the gospels.

And mind you, that is precisely what this scene is: it is a symbolic act of protest in the tradition of the old Hebrew prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, who were all compelled by God's Spirit to perform strange enacted parables that riled up the kings and powerful people in their day.  And just like Jeremiah publicly wearing a yoke for oxen as a symbol of the coming exile of Judah, or like Ezekiel laying on his side for over a year, Jesus knew that this intentional, deliberate, and symbolic act to shut down business-as-usual in the Temple would provoke people.  That was part of his intention--let's not patronize Jesus and pretend that he didn't know exactly what he was doing, or that he had no idea his actions would be interpreted as impious, disrespectful, out of place, unpatriotic (the Temple was as much a national symbol as it was a religious one, mind you), and maybe even blasphemous or treasonous.  Jesus knew that all of these would be the kinds of reactions he would face for this deliberate, pre-meditated act of protest.  Jesus knew that as much as the crowds loved him for his miraculous table on the hillside where bread and fish were multiplied, he would be hated and vilified for the choice to overturn the tables in the Temple.

So, just to be clear about it, because this moment seems very important to Jesus, what is really going on here?  What prompts Jesus to overturn the tables in the Temple, which was undeniably the defining national, ethnic, cultural, religious, and spiritual center of Judea in the first century?  And why is it that the scribes and the chief priests in particular are so threatened and insecure by what Jesus does that they redouble their efforts to kill Jesus and get rid of his troublemaking?

It is probably worth stating here some of what is NOT going on in this scene.  For one, when Jesus overturns the tables in the Temple, he is not protesting tables.  When he drives out the moneychangers and dove-sellers, he is protesting neither money nor doves.  And the fact that he stages this dramatic scene in the Temple, rather than, say, at his own house, does not mean that Jesus is anti-God.  No, quite the opposite: Jesus protests the system that the Temple has become entangled in, a system that most people of Jesus' day had simply gotten accustomed to, a system in which the worship of God had been turned into the opposite of everything it was supposed to be.  

Jesus overturns the tables, not because he is anti-table, but because he is calling out the brokenness of the whole sacrificial and temple system, which allowed access to God at a price like a commodity, and which kept the powerful and well-connected running the show at the expense of widows and the like who gave all they had.  Jesus overturns the tables, not because he is trying to attack God, but exactly because he believes God is incensed over this corrupt and co-opted temple-industrial complex.  Jesus overturns the tables, not because he is an overly privileged celebrity who is ungrateful to the priests and scribes for "letting him" teach in "their" Temple, but because Jesus cannot help but call out the ways the Temple became one more way of trying to control God and to manipulate the people.

These things might seem obvious to us, reading the text from the Gospels, but it's funny--you just know that those are the kinds of things the loud voices of the Respectable Religious Crowd were alleging about Jesus.  You just know they were threatened by Jesus, and that they would have looked for any possible excuse not to have to see the truth he forced out into the open.  They were looking for any reason to dismiss Jesus and his criticism of what the Temple had become--so they criticized him for not being adequately respectful to their Temple, and to their God, and to their king and all the generations before who had labored so hard to build that Temple and set up the system of sacrifices and rites and rituals.  They criticized Jesus for being ungrateful for all those who had set up the Temple.  They accused him of being disloyal to his nation and to his nation's God, and they surely all pointed out that Jesus had a pretty comfortable set-up as a rabbi, and that he must be awfully disloyal to his nation, his religion, and his leaders if he was going to criticize the Temple system.  You can hear the accusations on their lips: "If he doesn't like the way we run this Temple, maybe he shouldn't be here--maybe he just shouldn't be allowed to come in to the Temple... or maybe he shouldn't be allowed in Jerusalem... or maybe we should just kill him."

This is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that happens when a prophet is raised up--like Isaiah or Jeremiah or John the Baptizer, too--who is so fiercely committed to the living God that it is impossible to stay silent in the face of systems that corrupt or co-opt people's connection to God.  Jesus was able to see with laser-like focus what the Temple was supposed to be about, and how far it had gone as it became a pay-for-play, controlled-access business scheme that kept the nobodies away from access to God.  And so Jesus chose to protest what had gone wrong in all of Judea that the nation as a whole had become OK with, or at least numb to, that kind of system.  And he did it, knowing full well that he wasn't there to criticize God or protest doves or tables, but also knowing that that was exactly the kind of thing the Respectable Religious Crowd would say about him.... because they didn't want to face the difficult truth to which he was calling their attention.

Jesus did it anyway.  He chose his moment (see Mark 11:11, in which Jesus scopes out the scene at the Temple but chooses to come back the next day during business hours); he planned what he was going to do.  He calibrated his message, and he overturned the tables, clearly stating what his protest was all about... but also knowing full well that others would deliberately misinterpret that message, so that they could make him the villain attacking and disrespecting cherished institutions, rather than seeing him as the truth-telling prophet he was in that moment.

Jesus did it anyway.  That is an important piece of what his courage looks like.  And it is also an important piece of what his love looks like.  Jesus, after all, was motivated in this protest both by his genuine love for his Abba, the God of Israel, but also by his love for the people who were getting stepped on and scammed in the Temple system.  And because of his love for both God and neighbor, Jesus was not only willing to stir up trouble at the Temple, but to be branded as an ungrateful, disloyal, impious, and disrespectful celebrity-rabbi for doing it.  Maybe even we could dare to say it was his love even for the scribes and the priests in the Respectable Religious Crowd that tried to get their attention when they we so clearly missing the point.  After all, like Flannery O'Connor says, "...To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures."  For the leaders of the religious and national institutions of Jesus' day, less dramatic attempts would not get their attention.

You and I, we who are seeking to be followers of this Jesus, we know that Jesus is not attacking God, but rather protesting the abusive of a system that tried to control God.  And you and I can see that it is possible for someone to be critical of something or something that one deeply loves nevertheless.  We can see that, at least, when it is Jesus in the Temple overturning tables.

But the challenge for us today, some twenty centuries give or take later, is to use the same discernment today.  Ours is a day and age that doesn't deal well with subtlety, or nuance, or even with prophetic criticism.  We tend to be more comfortable with short bursts (you know, 280 characters or less seems to be our attention span) that paint everything in black and white.  We tend to think that if someone is overturning tables in the Temple, it must be because he hates God and is rejecting our cherished religious values, when in actuality, he might just be calling our attention back to the living, beating heart of truth.  We tend to look for reasons to vilify the people who call out our hypocrisy, our complacency, and our apathy, because we would rather see them as unrepentant villains than ourselves as complicit and guilty bystanders.

The difficult question for us to ask on a day like today is this: If we had been there at the Temple that day, and if we had seen Jesus take such dramatic action in the Temple, would we have let his symbolic and prophetic message hit home in our hearts, or would we have looked for rocks to kill him on the spot for what appeared to us as disrespect for our institutions and subversion of our religion?

And maybe the hardest question of all for each of us to pose on this day is simply: Where are there tables in my life, my world, my system of getting through the day, that need to be overturned?  And when the living Jesus shows up and does just that, will I recognize what he is up to... or will I start reaching for rocks?

Lord Jesus, come into our hearts and overturn our tables.  Come in to our routines and drive out all that keeps us from you.  Come into the systems of our lives and knock over the idols, the distractions, and the lies that we have bought into.  Come and turn us upside down where we need it.

Naming the Problem Correctly

Naming the Problem Correctly--August 10, 2018

Jesus said: "There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and who feasted sumptuously every day. And at his gate lay a poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, who longed to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man's table; even the dogs would come and lick his sores. The poor man died and was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In Hades, where he was being tormented, he looked up and saw Abraham far away with Lazarus by his side. He called out, 'Father Abraham, have mercy on me, and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue; for I am in agony in these flames.' But Abraham said, 'Child, remember that during your lifetime you received your good things, and Lazarus in like manner evil things; but now he is comforted here, and you are in agony. Besides all this, between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.' He said, 'Then, father, I beg you to send him to my father's house--for I have five brothers--that he may warn them, so that they will not also come into this place of torment.' Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.' He said, 'No, father Abraham; but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.' He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead'." [Luke 16:19-31]

If a stranger shows up on your lawn someday, and then you open your blinds every morning to check and see that he's still there every day, there is a problem.  About this, both the Bible and so many loud voices of our day agree.

But we need to be clear at this point about just what the problem is.

See, many of the loud and powerful voices of our day would take that scene and say, "The problem is that you've got an intruder at your gate, and you have to get rid of them! Who said they're allowed on your property? Get those people off your lawn and send them back to... well, wherever they were before they got to your house!"

Ah, and this is where the loud and powerful voices of our day part company with the less bombastic but more confident voice of Jesus in the Scriptures.  The voice of Jesus, along with the chorus of voices we find in the Law and the Prophets of the Hebrew Scriptures, would agree that there is a problem if you keep seeing a stranger on your lawn or at your gate with no change day after day.

But to be clear, the loud voices and powers of the day notwithstanding, the problem is not simply locatable in the stranger. The problem is not correctly named as "an intruder at the gates."  The man at the gate is not really the problem--he has a name, too, by the way.  He is a person, named Lazarus. The problem is you... is me... is all of us peeking out from behind our curtains, watching the stranger and assuming we are not connected, one to another.

The chorus of the Scriptures says it this way, "The problem is that you have a neighbor at your gate, and you have not invited him in!  You have the power and ability to invite him to your table, to share your abundance, and to attend to his needs, and yet you are upset that he is too close to your precious property?  Get him off of your lawn and welcome him to your table!"

See... we get riled up at a situation like Jesus describes here in this absolutely biting parable, but we get riled up for the wrong reasons.  The loud and powerful voices around us have got it all backwards, inside-out, and upside down!  If there's a stranger laying outside your gate and I keep watching him from the comfort of a McMansion in between binged episodes on Netflix and get upset that he's getting germs from his sores all over my nice lawn, then the problem is first and foremost ME.  There is something wrong with me that I am OK with the suffering of a man like Lazarus--a man with a face, a story, and a name as Jesus insists--but that I get upset when he is bringing his suffering too close to my comfortable and insulated life.  I am the problem first in that case.  I am the one who is truly sick. 

Open sores, after all, can have salve put on them, and empty bellies can have food put into them.  But self-centered, privileged, entitled, hardness of heart... well, that is much harder nut to crack.

Look, there's a lot going on in this parable that we will have to unpack at length on another day (or, preview of coming attractions, join me for a fall Bible study on the Gospel according to Luke!).  And there are a lot of ways we can get lost in the weeds in here with this parable by missing the point.  I have heard, for example, all too many sermons on this text trying to treat it like Jesus is giving a literal geographic description of heaven and hell, or trying to prove that this is a historical event just because Jesus gives one of his characters a name, or trying to insist that because we're saved by grace through faith, this story CAN'T be saying anything about how we are supposed to treat each other.  

And to try and deal with those all quickly, Jesus is crafting a story using (and then inverting) stock images and tropes of the Judaism of his day much like we would tell a joke about someone dying and going to the Pearly Gates to meet Ol' Saint Peter, but we don't actually mean to be describing the geography of heaven.  And the fact that Jesus gives a name to Lazarus (but NOT to the rich man, mind you) is important, but not to tell us that this is a historical event being recounted, but because Jesus refuses to treat the sick beggar as a faceless, nameless nobody, even if the world thinks that only the rich man in the house matters. And even though I am still convinced we are saved by grace through faith apart from doing enough good deeds to earn God's favor, I am also still convinced that Jesus intends this story to compel us to see that it is precisely the God of grace who cares about the people who are treated as expendable by the loud and powerful voices around them. And Jesus intends for us to see that if we are going to live in line with the values of the God of grace, we will see we are connected to the people outside our gates and on our lawns, and that we will share the bread God has graciously given to us because of that.

In other words, this is a story that is all about grace, but it will not sound like grace to us at first if we are more interested in hoarding "my stuff" under the illusion that it is mine to do with as I please, rather than first and foremost God's and has been entrusted to me in order that everybody be fed and cared for. This story is all about grace--the grace of abundance that had been lavished on the rich nameless man, grace that he squandered by thinking what was given to him by God was his own accomplishment, and grace that God shows to Lazarus even when his wealthy neighbor refuses to come to his aid.  

And yet, I suspect, this story upsets us rather than comforts us.  And if that is correct, my guess is that is because we have been listening to the loud and powerful voices of our day more closely and more attentively than to the voices of Moses in the Law and the Prophets after him, or even to Jesus himself.  We who talk a good talk about loving Jesus and wanting to practice our faith in Jesus freely... we have a way of not actually listening to him at all, because we know that if we actually listen to what he says about the neighbors at our gate, we will discover we have been seeing things all wrong.

Before we get to complain or whine about the world at large making it harder for us to practice our faith freely (and man, we are really good sometimes at that old saw), we should perhaps first see if the problem is actually... ourselves, and that we are the ones who have been keeping us from actually doing what Jesus says and seeing as Jesus sees.  Nobody else is keeping us from practicing Jesus' kind of neighborliness, which he himself insists has been THE dominant them of the Law and the Prophets all along.  We have been getting in the way of ourselves--we and our complacency, we and our love of stuff and use of people, we and our demonic insistence on putting ourselves first.

Yes, it is a problem if there is a stranger who keeps camping outside my gate or on my lawn, slowly dying of hunger and neglect.  But the real problem to name that situation is me and my damned (and I mean that literally) complacency and self-centeredness that treats him as expendable.  Yes, the stranger should not still be there on my lawn--but not because he should "go back to where he came from" before he came to my yard, but rather because Jesus says I should have been sharing my table, my abundance, and my gifts of grace with him!  Of course he should get off my lawn--I should get my head out of my rear-end and invite him to share my bread as a welcomed guest in my house!  He is, after all, a neighbor... and in the eyes of all the Scripture, Old and New Testaments alike, I should therefore love him as myself.

For too long, we have all been looking at our lives upside-down, inside-out, and backwards, thinking that we were fine and that "those people" were the problem. Well, it is time for our sight to be restored.

Today, may the God of grace, who never stops seeing the people like Lazarus, open our eyes, too, so that we can see beyond our blinds and our blinders, so that the curtains can be pulled wide, and so that we will open our tables to share the grace God has lavished on us with the neighbors God has sent across our path, too.

Jesus, give us your eyesight, your vision, your love, and your clarity to recognize the abundance in our hands as grace meant to be shared, and the people at our gate as neighbors to be welcomed at our table.