The Overlooked Sigh

The Overlooked Sigh--January 21, 2019

“They brought to him a deaf man who had an impediment in his speech; and they begged him to lay his hand on him. He took him aside in private, away from the crowd, and put his fingers into his ears, and he spat and touched his tongue. Then looking up to heaven, he sighed and said to him, ‘Eph’pha-tha,’ that is, ‘Be opened.’ And immediately his ears were opened, his tongue was released, and he spoke plainly.” [Mark 7:32-35]

The only world Jesus came to heal is the real world—the world of tangible, touchable details, of earthy, ordinary, messy things like saliva, and of the end-of-the-day weariness that makes you sigh before you gather yourself again for the next thing to be done.  This is the world that needs healing, and it is the only world in which we will find Jesus working.

We Christians continue to have the problem remembering that Jesus came to this world, in all its utter commonness and messiness, this weary world of ours.  We have this need to imagine instead that Jesus walked six inches above the ground, stayed antiseptically distant from those who were in need of him, and was never saddened or worn down by the life he saw around him.  We almost would rather imagine Jesus only “up” in heaven where he can stay untainted by this world of ours and where he won’t get his lovely white robe dirty. We would rather not have to imagine the awfully earthy and intimate image of a man spitting on his fingers and placing them on a sick person’s tongue.  “I mean really, Jesus,” we think, “we know you can heal people simply by your word.  That seems respectable.  That seems impressive.  That seems like what a dignified Savior would do.  Not spitting and poking fingers in people’s ears.”

But there goes Jesus, touching tongues, spitting on his hands, and sighing in the midst of it all, too.  He is a decidedly earthy savior, and we can’t get away from that.  Mark, in fact, seems to want to spend a lot of time on this moment—describing the details down to Jesus’ sighing, even.  Just let that image settle in for you: the Son of God sighing. That sound we humans make when we are tired and our defenses let down enough to show it. That sound we make of release, of letting go. Of unclenching our spirits for a moment. Of surrender.  And yet it is not a powerless sigh—it is much the same as the way Paul tells us that when we pray, “the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words” (Rom. 8:27).  Jesus sighs as a wordless prayer to the Father who will work through Jesus ordinary words, “Be opened.”  Maybe you have never pictured a Savior who sighs.  I must confess that this detail caught me off guard the first time I read it and paid any attention. It makes Jesus seem so very human. 

That, of course, is the whole point.  Jesus is a real human savior (yes, fully God, too, we are sure to remember, but absolutely human, too at the same time), and he has come to real human beings in the real world.  That means the world Jesus entered, and the world Jesus came to heal is the same world you and I still live in.  It means that Jesus knows, really knows, what it is to be brought to the point of sighing.  It means Jesus is willing to get dirt under his fingernails and spit on his hands.

Some part of me has a hard time believing that the Christ of God is willing to get that close to this world.  There is so much that is disappointing, heartbreaking, and rotten among us.  There are smugly smirking faces wallowing in their privilege. There are angry blowhards ranting and bellowing to get our attention like little children.  There are deep sorrows and terrible shames.  And sometimes, it is difficult to believe that Jesus can bear to face all of the worst in us like that.  And yet, here is this story, where Jesus sees the heartache of the human experience, and does not run away from it.  He sighs... and he stays.

I sometimes wonder if the watching world shrugs Jesus off because we Respectable Religious folks have made them think he is from some alien world, or that he will only come close enough to us to drop us a few rules and commandments, but not close enough to touch our ears and our tongues with his own fingers.  If that is true, I wonder if it is our fault that we have given this false impression of our very earthy, fully human, savior.  I wonder—have we acted and talked as if Jesus is irrelevant to the hurts and tiredness of this day, as if he has no part in the joys and celebrations of this day, too?  Have we stopped looking for Jesus to be there in our own sigh-inducing moments?  Have we stopped telling others about the moments we have caught glimpses of him?  Or maybe, are we ourselves still a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of an savior who sighs and spits like the rest of us, regardless of how undignified it makes him seem?  Maybe Mark is giving us another glimpse of Jesus like this so that we will come to recognize him among the sighs and surprises of this new day.  Let us not waste the opportunity to catch a glimpse of our savior, right here in our midst.

Lord Jesus, be with us in all your real-ness and let us let you come as close as we need you to.

Extravagant (Poem and Picture 033)--January 19, 2019

"Extravagant"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 033--January 19, 2019

How many eons of time and tons of pressure,
and how much ancient life
were brought together
underground
so that one day
my eyes could take in
refracted rainbow stripes
waiting to be seen
as oil and water bend the light
from a lonely gas station puddle?

This world is extravagant.

#seeChristhere

Touching the Paint (Poem and Picture 032)--January 18, 2019

"Touching the Paint"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 032--January 18, 2019

You can keep your brush
from discoloring,
and prevent the handle from looking bruised,
but such a pristine look
means never letting it touch the paint
or move along the canvas.
To create is to be drawn into a mess.
What a wonder it is
that God would not

stay out of the paint.

#seeChristhere

I Will Follow You Into the Dark

"I Will Follow You Into the Dark"--January 18, 2019

“This was in accordance with the eternal purpose that he has carried out in Christ Jesus our Lord, in whom we have access to God in boldness and confidence through faith in him.” (Ephesians 3:11-12)

Here’s some good news:  God is not George Burns.  Not really.

Maybe you remember the 1977 Carl Reiner movie, Oh, God!, in which George Burns plays the Almighty as a one-liner-prone, mostly affable senior citizen, who appears to an assistant manager of a grocery store played by John Denver.  Burns is always funny—I can’t deny that.  And often his lines as “God” blend poignancy with their punch-lines; I’ll give him that, too.

But as Burns portrays him in the movie, God is really only rarely involved in anybody’s life, and only enters into human affairs on rare occasions, with a sort of vaguely-good-natured nonchalance at that (he says in the movie that his most recent miracle was the 1969 Mets, and before that, it was the Red Sea).  He says he hears everybody’s prayers but only rarely listens, since he’s only there “for the big picture—I don’t get into details!”  He only even bothers to appear to John Denver’s character to let the world know he’s “still there.”  And as far as grand plans or designs, Burns’ “God” just says, “Life is a crap shoot, like the millionth customer that crosses the bridge gets to shake hands with the governor.”

Wasn’t an awful movie, but it sounds exactly like the kind of theology you’d get from 1970s American-malaise pop culture: a generically pleasant deity who means well but just doesn’t go for all that meddling, and who never really has a plan for anything beyond the next one-liner.

I hope that it’s obvious why it’s good news that, as Paul tells it, this isn’t the real and living God.  Burns’ kind of God (or maybe I should just lay all my cards on the table and say “god”) doesn’t ever mean you any harm, but it hardly seems like he’s willing to do much of anything but shake his head and shrug about the messes we make, and he’s barely even willing to give anything but a pithy comeback to direct your life.  After all, Burns’ deity is all about your choices, and doesn’t seem to bother with bringing about something good with the brokenness of the world.  He just won’t get in the way if we decide to make the world a better place.

Great, George Burns.  Thanks for the permission for us to do everything on our own, alone, without any guarantee that you are with us through the suffering of life.  Thanks for telling us you’ll watch from…wherever it is you watch from… with something clever to say when we make a mess of things again.  Thanks for occasionally beaming down, George Burns’ “god”, whenever it suits you, and leaving us to fend for ourselves the rest of the time, because you are so laid-back.

Thanks, but no thanks.

Michael Spencer makes a great observation about the Christian faith.  He says—and this is especially appropriate in this season as we focus on the way God came among us in a human life named Jesus—that “without the incarnation, Christianity isn’t even a very good story, and most sadly, it means nothing. ‘Be nice to one another,’ is not a message that can give my life meaning, assure me of love beyond brokenness, and break open the dark doors of death with the key of hope.”

That’s just it.  The New Testament writers tell us that God is not just watching from the sidelines cracking jokes about the foibles of our fragile lives and randomly appearing when it suits him.  Paul says that God has had a design from before the beginning of creation to stand with us in Christ Jesus, as one of us.  And because God has taken that stand, not just to watch or comment on history with a wry zinger, but by entering our humanity in the fragile flesh of Jesus, we can have confidence, even “boldness,” as we come to God, because we know the lengths God has already gone to for our sakes.  God had designed all along to enter our lives and our world in the person of Christ, and God’s plan from the beginning was to use that entry in Christ to gather in all kinds of people, Jews and Gentiles, men and women, rich and poor, educated and uneducated—whatever other divides you can come up with.  This was God’s intention all along—to stand with us in it, and to stand with all of us.  To face what we face.  To endure the brokenness, not just to passively scold it.

There is a song which comes to mind for me.  It is, perhaps the second-saddest song I know, but also one of the most beautiful.  And today’s verses make me think of it, especially as a counterweight to the picture of God we got from George Burns in the movie.  There’s a song where Ben Gibbard sings this promise to a beloved pondering the closeness of death:  “If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks, then I’ll follow you into the dark.”  George Burns’ version of the deity can’t—or won’t—sing that.  That picture of God will always stay at a distance and leave the real messes to us and our supposedly sacrosanct “free choice.” But the God we meet in Jesus, this God is willing to say over all of humanity “If there’s no one beside you when your soul embarks, I’ll follow you into the dark.”  That’s what the cross is.  That has been God’s plan since the foundation of the universe—to enter into everything we fragile, mortal humans face, even including death.  God was willing to go all the way into a tomb for us.  How can anything keep us from that kind of love, and from that same God?  Once you know that truth, all of a sudden, it seems much easier to believe that we can count on God’s presence and faithfulness through whatever else comes at us in life—because God was even willing to go through the valley of the shadow of death, “into the dark,” for us… and with us.

Go into this day, and go in to the year that is just opening before us now, with that confidence.  The Maker of all that is chose to face it all with you through Jesus.  You can go to this God for anything... after all, in the God who wears our skin, we have met a love that will follow us into the dark.

O God our Maker and Sharer of our lives, tell us again today so that we will trust you how far you have gone and how far you will go to share our lives with us, not just in the big picture, but in the details.  Let your love reach us where we are, even when we stare down the dark. Even today.

Summoned Down (Poem and Picture 031)--January 17, 2019

"Summoned Down"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 031--January 17, 2019

From the top
of a metal ladder
perched precariously
above this
official sacred space
I was summoned down
step
by nervous step
to answer the ring
from a homeless woman
calling on the phone.
Don't believe it if
they tell you
the altar is the holy place.

Christ sleeps in a car.

#seeChristhere

Life at the Margins (Poem and Picture 030)--January 16, 2019

"Life at the Margins"
See Christ Here Poem and Picture 030--January 16, 2019

Here is life
emergent and bearing
green leaves and hope
in the space between
the creeping cold
and the insensate wall.
The ice has not killed it,
nor the barrier stopped it,
but fragile and defiant
it calls my attention
to ask:
Will you see Life
with all who live

on the margins?

#seeChristhere

Taken by the Hand

Taken by the Hand--January 17, 2019

“As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them." [Mark 1:29-31]

Pay attention to Jesus’ hands.  There is something wonderful about Jesus’ hands.  Pay close attention….

Anytime I am reading a story in the Bible, I find it worth asking, “Why was this story held onto in the first place, and why might it have been remembered in the way it was?”  Why are some details remembered and held onto like precious stones, and why are other details lost in the mists of time?  The Gospel-writers are, after all, a lot like movie-makers, choosing the angles and scene breaks as they tell the story that has been given to them.  Why does one director’s version of the Robin Hood story seem so campy and lighthearted, and another’s seem so dark? Why does one choose to start the story with Robin already a popular folk hero, and another tells an elaborate back-story for how Robin became the person he was?  If we are allowed to ask these questions about movies, it’s fair to ask them about the way the biblical writers tell the stories they are passing onto us.  After all, the gospel-writers think that the story they are telling is a matter of life and death, of history-changing good news—so it’s worth it to take a moment sometimes and to ask why the story goes the way it does, and why some details stick.

Take this short little story from Mark's Gospel for a moment. It’s not a long one at all, but at the same time, you almost wonder why Mark even bothered to tell it, given that he had no problem skipping over the first thirty years of Jesus’ life from the opening sentence to Jesus’ appearance in the story.  All sorts of interesting questions we might have—what was Jesus like as a young boy? What was his first word?  How did he come to recognize his calling as God’s Messiah?  and surely many more—go unanswered, but Mark stops his camera and parks it on this moment, for this short exchange with Jesus and Simon Peter’s mother-in-law.  Why? (Surely, it’s more than to tip us off that at least some of the disciples were married, which seems to poke some gaping holes in the idea that leaders/pastors/priests are not allowed to be married if they are going to be leaders in the community of Jesus.)

While we’re stopping to ask questions, doesn’t this scene come across as a little anti-climactic compared to other miracle stories in the Gospels?  For example, right before this scene with Peter's mother-in-law there's a powerful scene with a demon-possessed man, in which the unclean spirit speaks and is dramatically cast out by Jesus.  There was tension, there was something supernatural, and there was a clear and present danger.  Here, with Simon Peter’s mother-in-law, it’s just a fever.  By comparison, that just seems like small potatoes up against a story of demon possession.  If Mark were just telling us this story about the fever to impress us with Jesus’ amazing and miraculous powers, wouldn’t the demon-exorcism have done the trick?  This miracle barely seems miraculous, really—no lightning or thunder, no twelve baskets of leftovers. There are no "special effects" in this scene.  There’s not even the drama of seeing Jesus’ mere words bring about the miracle.  With the demon-possessed man, there’s an added wow-factor that Jesus didn’t even have to touch the possessed man to send the spirit out—he just spoke, and the demon left.  Now that leaves us feeling pretty impressed.

But this scene is different.  And it may just be that there is a method to Mark’s madness here.  Jesus touches Simon’s mother-in-law.  He “took her by the hand and lifted her up.”  Curious detail to hold onto, isn’t it, Mark?  You could have just said, “Jesus healed her, and she got up.”  But Mark mentions touch.  He shows us Jesus offering his hand and taking this woman by her hand, and helping her to her feet. Why?

Well, consider this:  obviously, Jesus doesn’t have to touch people to make them well.  The way he cast out the demon in the last story with just his words showed us that.  Jesus’ power is not like magic—it’s not about having the right technique, in other words, to get it “right.”  So if Jesus doesn’t have to touch someone with his own hand to heal them, but he chooses to anyway, like in today’s story, what does it mean?  It means Jesus chose to come that close.  It means that Jesus doesn’t worry about the most efficient way to be the Messiah—a quick spoken healing here, a speedy verbal exorcism there—he is willing to take people by the hand.  That’s what the Gospel is all about, after all—the God who comes close to us in our own human life, the God who wears our skin, the God who can take us by the hand, through the human hands of Jesus.  It didn’t have to be this way—that means Jesus chose to take Simon’s mother-in-law by the hand.  It means that Jesus is willing to come that close to heal us, too. Not just a booming voice from a distant heaven, but a God who comes and takes us by the hand.

Perhaps in this day, healing will come in little gestures, too--the holding open of a door, the hand on a shoulder, the offer of a hug, the holding of a hand.  Perhaps you and I will be able to give someone else a glimpse, too, of the God who comes close and chooses to offer a hand.

Come close to us, Lord Jesus, and let us know we are in your good hands.