The Reason for the Storytelling--April 16, 2020

The Reason for the Storytelling--April 16, 2020

"Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name." [John 20:30-31]

In times like these, sometimes it is all we can do simply to keep telling the stories.  The stories are our act of defiant memory against the circumstances of the moment. The stories are the seed of our resilience.  We keep telling the stories because through them, we are brought to life.

I have been thinking a great deal these days about how much our work as "church" has been changed--if not outright stopped--by shelter-in-place orders across our country.  Sometimes it is easy to feel defeated, or like we have been stopped from fulfilling our mission.  It is easy in times like these to think that we aren't doing anything important because we aren't able to gather in the same place on Sunday mornings.

And then it occurs to me, especially hearing these words that come late in John's Gospel like an epilogue, that sometimes the most important thing we can do is to keep telling the stories of Jesus... because in the stories we are brought into the presence of the One to whom they bear witness.  And in the stories, we come to fall in love all over again with this One who has loved us first.  And in that love, trust is kindled... and in that trust, John tells us, we are brought to "life in his name."  We keep telling the stories because they sustain us, even if sometimes it seems like all we have are the stories.

The Christian movement began, of course, just as a handful of small house by house gatherings, where stories were told.  Around the tables where they shared bread and recounted the stories of Jesus, faith was kindled, and a revolution began.  They didn't need big fancy buildings, and therefore they didn't have big mortgages to pay off or capital campaigns to finance.  They didn't need expensive instruments, elaborate vestments, or screens to project the trendiest worship songs onto--and therefore, they could simply be centered on the story of the homeless rabbi who brought people to life.  They didn't worry about attracting the "right demographic," and so they could simply welcome everybody--women and men, slave and free, poor and rich, Judeans and Samaritans and all-out foreigners, cultured intellectuals and illiterate fishermen, and everybody else, too.  And they lit a fire that spread across the empire--indeed, right under that bloated blowhard Caesar's very own nose.

I've been thinking lately about the final scene of my favorite Star Wars movie lately.  At the end of The Last Jedi, we see this back room in a racing stable on a luxury planet where a bunch of poor kids work cleaning out stalls for the creatures that the rich place bets on.  And this circle of kids is enthralled as one of them tells the other of the story he has been told, apparently, of Luke Skywalker's great victory against a huge imperial army.  And in a moment, their master shoos them back to work, but not before the story of hope has been shared... and remembered once again... and passed along to others.  It is a small moment, but it is, as the movie describes it, a spark that will light the fire that will burn down the powers of the day.

In so many ways, I see this moment of our history like that.  Right now, we cannot do very much all gathered together to be "out" in the world, on account of state-wide stay-at-home orders and the concern to let healthcare professionals not be overwhelmed with a surge in cases of COVID-19.  We can't gather on Sundays in the same place for worship, and we can't organize for the kinds of projects we usually do at this time to help others--no money raised for the American Cancer Society at special fundraiser events for the Relay for Life... no trips to the local state psychiatric hospital like we often take to spend time with patients... no community meals or sheltering the homeless.  Those losses are real, and we feel the grief of them daily.  But we do have the chance to keep telling the story, and the story sparks hope, and the hope can be tempered into resolve, and the resolve will mean endurance through this season and passion to get out into the world again when the time is right.

Sometimes we forget how often the people of God were called just to keep hope alive by telling the stories that brought them to life.  That's how the descendants of Jacob held onto hope and identity during centuries of enslavement to that greedy dictator Pharaoh in Egypt.  That's how generations in exile remembered who they were during their days under the authority of that pompous buffoon Nebuchadnezzar, who wanted to put his name on everything and to have everyone worshiping him. That's how the first generations of Christians kept the movement alive under the radar of arrogant Caesars who wanted to feed us to lions and nail us to crosses.  And it's how enslaved people in this country held onto hope when their "Christian" "masters" told them that God willed for them to be someone else's property... or how Christians meeting in underground gatherings resisted against Nazis in the 1930s and 1940s.  It started simply with small groups, often literally just in households, telling the stories of Jesus once again, both to remember who we are and to find ourselves brought to life again in that act of memory.

Today, then, maybe it's enough for us simply to find someone else--maybe someone just in your house, or someone you can call or email or text with--and share one of the stories of Jesus that brings you to life every time you tell it or hear it.  Maybe the act of remembrance will spark something in the other person; maybe it will bring you to life in the telling.  

That may seem like it's not much to do in the face of so much else going on... but it's what is ours to do right now. And it will turn out to be just enough.

Lord Jesus, keep us centered in the stories of who you are, so that we can be brought to life in you.

Our Lives Are Intertwined--April 15, 2020

Our Lives Are Intertwined--April 15, 2020

"But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the LORD on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare. For thus says the LORD of hosts, the God of Israel: Do not let the prophets and diviners who are among you deceive you, and do not listen to the dreams that they dream, for it is a lie that they are prophesying to you in my name; I did not send them, says the LORD." [Jeremiah 29:7-9]

Just when we think that God is our pet or mascot, only here to help out "us" (however we want to draw the lines around "us"), the actual living God speaks up, clears the divine throat, and says, "Ahem, your well-being is bound up with the well-being of everybody.  Your life is inextricably tied to the lives of all."

And that's just the thing.  Over and over again, the message from the Scriptures comes through that God is at work bringing us to life--but we have a way of hearing that as "only us, and NOT the others around you, who don't belong," when we really just needed to zoom out and see that God has been working to bring all of us to life.  Yes, including the people we don't think are worthy of it, or don't belong in our group, or even the ones we regard as enemies.

This is the really stunning move that Jeremiah makes as the exile in Babylon unfolded more than 2,500 years ago.  And it's a mindset we need to remember for this time and place, too.  When Jeremiah wrote, a large number of people from Judah had just lived through seeing their Temple destroyed, their king taken away, and their own lives turned upside down as they were carried away from everything familiar into exile.  They were separated from family, from friends, from work, and from the rhythms of normal life, too.  And all of it came at the hands of the arrogant and powerful Babylonian empire.  

Naturally, folks wanted to find any reason to believe that it would all be over soon.  In fact, there was a sort of shifting form of denial that you can see unfolding in writings from this time period. At first, there were folks in Judah who denied the Babylonians would ever get close:  "We're God's chosen people--we're different!  And God won't let anything that bad happen to us!"  And then when the Babylonians did come and burn the temple and the Jerusalem city walls to the ground, the conventional wisdom was, "Ok, but God wouldn't allow any of us to be taken captive into Babylon, right?  That's the capital of the enemy empire!"  But then exactly that happened.  So the conventional wisdom then became, "Ok, maybe some of us will go into exile, but it can't possibly last too long.  Just you wait and see--before you know it, we'll be on our way back to life as usual, and our old home country of Judah will be open for business once again!"

And Jeremiah had to be one of those few voices who said, "No.  That's not how this will work.  This is going to be a while.  God will bring us through it, to be sure.  But it's going to be longer than you think, and longer than you want it to be."  And then, most scandalously (but importantly) of all, Jeremiah said, "God is still committed to the big picture work of bringing life for the whole world, and even though you may not be able to see it yet, that means your well-being is caught up with the well-being of everybody else."

That's where these verses for today come from.  (And as a side note, it's also where the passage that starts, "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans to give you a future and a hope," comes from--so even that well-worn bit of scripture has to be understood as coming THROUGH exile, not INSTEAD of it!)  The message God sent through Jeremiah was that his fellow Judeans in exile could not just look out for their own well-being, but that they had to live their lives while also seeking the well-being of the city, and indeed the whole empire, around them.  As Jeremiah says it, "In its welfare you will find your welfare."  Yes, even though the city to which they were sent was in some ways "the enemy."  Yes, even though the city of Babylon didn't believe in Judah and Israel's God.  Yes, even though they Babylonians had just knocked down God's temple and ransacked the Ark of the Covenant.  The message from Jeremiah is that God is at work for good for all of them.

In other words, the logic of "Judah first!" was not only futile, but it ran against God's design to bring life for the people in exile and for the Babylonians, too!  And all of the wishful thinking that this exile thing was going to be just a short pause was wrongheaded, too--God was telling the people that it was going to take along time for the descendants of the exiles to come home (and yes, it would most likely not be the generation who went into exile who came home, but their children or grandchildren!).  Jeremiah was given the unenviable task of teaching people who were used to thinking in terms of "It's US against THEM" that God's directive to them was, "Pray for the ones you call 'THEM' because your life and theirs are entangled together."

It seems these are words we need to hear in this moment, too.  And I have to admit that I was well into adulthood myself before I ever remember learning this part of the Bible's story or the meaning of these verses, so we're probably all late to the party here.  But this moment of our lives can feel a lot like our own exile, as so many of us have had our normal routines up-ended, and people we care about are separated from us because of quarantine orders.  In days like these, of course, we would all love for it to be over as soon as possible.  Of course we would like to have some semblance of "normal" again, and we would like businesses to be able to get back to doing their work, kids to be back in schools, and the fear of contagion (or toilet paper shortages) to go away.  Of course we all wish those wishes.  But the dangerous temptation is for us to assume then, that our wish must be granted by God, on our timetable.  The dangerous jump of logic is to assume that "Me and my family are all probably safe from getting sick, and therefore, we should be allowed to jump back into things, because we're probably going to be just fine!" Or then it becomes, "The lives of other people who are already old and sick just aren't as important as me getting my stock portfolio back up to where it was!"  And the idolatrous leap follows: "God is surely going to protect Me-and-My-Group because we are believers--who cares about other people? They aren't necessarily believers like WE are!"

And to all of that, Jeremiah says, "No!  Your lives are bound up with the lives of others!  There is no Me-and-My-Group First--that damns us all!" At first, that will sound only like bad news--it sounds like saying he's just smashing our hopes for a quick recovery, and crushing our spirits in the process.  But Jeremiah would remind us that false hope isn't really hope--it's wishful thinking. And the only way to hold onto genuine hope is to clear away the false hopes and magical thinking that gets in the way.

Surely there were people in Jeremiah's day who thought he didn't have faith because he didn't believe the exile would be over shortly.  Surely there were those who said, "You must not really want good things for our people because you're telling us to get used to exile!"  Certainly there were people who accused him of not believing hard enough.  And Jeremiah knew he had to bear all that.  Instead his response was simply, "God wants us to see in this moment that our life is caught up with the lives of others--we aren't separate after all, even for all our differences."  Jeremiah sees the big picture view that the well-being of the people in exile is intertwined with the well-being of the foreigners whose land they live in.

And in this moment, perhaps we need to hear from Jeremiah again. As hard as it is, getting through this moment is going to take a while--longer than any of us would have wished for.  And beyond that, we are not given a religious exemption from suffering--Jeremiah reminded his people that even though they all believed in God, he and his fellow Judeans would have to go through the hardship of exile, and their lives were not really separate from the lives of the people they lived alongside.  It is time to be done with any thinking that we can seek the well-being of "just us religious people," or "Christians like us," or even just of our county, our state, or our country--our lives and our well-being are tied up with one another's.  Sometimes, maybe, we can pretend we don't see it--but times like a pandemic remind us that we can only find our welfare in the welfare of those around us... because God is committed to bringing life to this whole hurting world.

Today's calling, then, the difficult tasking of dismantling all the places in our hearts and minds we have built on the wrongheaded assumption that our good is separable from the good of others, or that my first quarter profits are more important than someone else's life.  Today's calling is to hear that God is indeed calling us to life--by calling all of us to life in connection with one another.

Lord God, help us to seek the well-being of all around us, and to see that you love all around us.

Not Caesar But Jesus--April 14, 2020

Not Caesar, But Jesus--April 14, 2020

"And being found in human form,
   he humbled himself
   and became obedient to the point of death--
   even death on a cross.
 Therefore God also highly exalted him
   and gave him the name
   that is above every name,
 so that at the name of Jesus
   every knee should bend,
   in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
 and every tongue should confess
   that Jesus Christ is Lord,
   to the glory of God the Father." [Philippians 2:7b-11]

In a world where Caesars are always claiming to have the last word and total authority, Easter is the evidence that Jesus is Lord... and that Caesar is not.

Here's a curious thing: if you ask the average Respectable Religious person in America today what the resurrection of Jesus means, chances are you'll get answers like, "It proves that there is an afterlife," or "Easter is important because it means I can go to heaven when I die (as long as I believe the correct set of facts about Jesus to activate my heaven-ticket, of course."  Or you might well hear something like, "Easter assures me of eternal life after I die, and therefore, I can do reckless things with this life, regardless of whether it endangers others, because my 'faith' is bigger than 'fear'."  Slogans like that are popular these days, even if their theology leaks like a colander.

But all of that aside for a moment, if you would have asked, say, Saint Paul, what the resurrection means, his focus would have been different.  He would have said (and in fact does say) that the resurrection of Jesus is how you know he is Lord of the universe--and, conversely, that all the other claimants to the title and authority of "lord" are phonies.  Even if it's Caesar claiming to have complete power and the right to decree whatever he wants, it just ain't so.  And, to hear Paul say it, you know it because the resurrection of Jesus reveals that God the Father has lifted Jesus up and put him above every other power. And if Jesus is Lord, then Caesar, or any of his appointed lackeys, cannot be.

For Paul that is really, really good news, because Paul knew that unlike the casual cruelty and bombastic brutality of Caesar, or the cowardly handwashing of Pilate, or the arrogant pomposity of Herod, Jesus really was a good Lord.  Jesus doesn't need to insist on his own greatness or declare his own authority, because when you've truly got it, you don't need to advertise.  (Like Margaret Thatcher's famous line about having refinement and class puts it, "Being powerful is like being a lady--if you have to tell someone you are, you aren't.")  As Paul tells it, the resurrection speaks for itself.  If you have overcome death itself, you don't have to go around telling people how powerful you are--an empty tomb says all that is necessary.

And the reason that is good news to Paul is that he knows what sort of a Lord Jesus is.  Jesus can be trusted with the authority that comes with divine exaltation, because Jesus was always (and still is) kind and compassionate to the nobodies, the anybodies, and the left out.  Jesus can be trusted and relied upon, because he was (and still is) faithful and reliable when others pass the buck or flake out.  Jesus can be counted on to not to abuse his divinely-given resurrection authority, because, as Paul also notes, "even though he was in the form of God, he did not regard equality with God something to be exploited."  In other words, the resurrection shows you that Jesus really is Lord of all--and the cross reveals that Jesus' way of being "Lord" is self-giving suffering love.  He is worthy of our calling him Lord, because unlike every other would-be "lord" in the dustbin of history, Jesus actually cares more about us than about his own ego.  He is worthy of our bending our knees, exactly because he doesn't demand our praise, but is simply good enough that it draws our praise and reverence from our lips and hearts and bodies.  He is Lord--and because he is the real deal, he doesn't have to go around claiming it.  And because he doesn't have to go around claiming it, we are simply moved to give him our allegiance freely like it is the most joyful thing in the world to do.

Two thousand years later, we are prone to forget that the resurrection is the evidence of Jesus' lordship, because we are so quick to see it only in terms of tickets to heaven rather than dethroning pretenders like Caesar and the long line of his imitators. But for the writers of the New Testament, a really important part of why Easter was good news was that it assured them that the real and true Lord of creation, the one who truly does have total authority over all things, also has the permanent wounds of being tortured by the hands of the empire, and knows what it is to surrender everything.  Jesus' resurrection means that Jesus' way of living and bringing others to life has been vindicated.  It means that Christ's way of loving people more fully to life really is God's way of ruling creation, and that Caesar's pompous boasting to boost his own legacy is not.  

For folks like Paul who were tired of the rottenness of Caesar and Herod and Pilate and the rest, that was good news.  It still is.

Lord Jesus, we name you Lord because we are convinced your resurrection confirms who you are. But we ask that you would enable us to live out our allegiance to you in more than words, but in lives that are centered on your self-giving love.

Unsentimental Easter--April 13, 2020

Unsentimental Easter--April 13, 2020

"The angel said to the women [at the tomb], 'Do not be afraid; I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.  Then go quickly and tell his disciples, He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him. This is my message for you.' So they left the tomb quickly with fear and great joy, and ran to tell his disciples." [Matthew 28:5-8]

There is something wonderfully urgent about the resurrection story that keeps me from getting sentimental about it.  Even after all this time, and the layers of commercialized nonsense that get piled on top of it like so much cellophane grass, the story of the women at the tomb cuts right to the chase and resists getting schmaltzy.  

Sure, my seven-year-old daughter is still primarily interested in the day because she is hoping for candy and a couple of treats (and a possible sighting of a mythical rabbit people keep telling her about, much to my chagrin), but even at that, I can get her to recall that THE Easter story is about Jesus rising from the dead.  I have a harder time at Christmas getting her to remember Jesus' birth, much less keeping the manger child at the center of her attention.  Maybe the birth story is easier to get sappy about--everybody likes a baby, after all, and babies generally don't say or do anything provocative enough to get themselves killed by the state to require a resurrection in the first place.  But the story of the empty tomb and the women who are first commissioned to spread the news of it is harder to co-opt.  Maybe there's something about being in a graveyard that keeps you from letting your vision be too rosy-colored.

Anyway, Matthew's telling of the story is particularly urgent--maybe moreso than any of the other evangelists' versions.  As he tells it, when the women find Jesus' tomb is lacking exactly one Jesus, they get told by an angel to go tell the news to the disciples--so that they, in turn, can get on the first bus back up to Galilee where they can meet Jesus there.  In other words, the message is something like, "Yes, Jesus is alive again--and if you want to catch him, you'd better high-tail it outta here and get to your appointment with him in Galilee!"  As the angel tells it, the risen Jesus is a busy fella, and he's already on a mission with lots more to do!  This is not a moment to get sentimental, and there is no time for being overcome with fear.  Instead, the women are given the news to tell to others... so that they can get moving and join Jesus in his ongoing work.  

I think I need that reminder.

Like I say, at Christmas time, we are conditioned to treat the whole month of December like a marathon of preparations, and the finish line is Christmas Day.  The story is told then, the presents are opened, and the dinner is shared.  It's an end-point for most folks--a thing you prepare for, and then once you live through it, you put your feet up and retire, as the poem puts it, "for a long winter's nap."  But the empty tomb is different.  It lands so unexpectedly, taking what everyone assumed was an ending and turning it on its side into a brand-new beginning.  The women trudge up to the tomb thinking they are going there for some kind of "closure" (as we talk about it now), and instead, they find a whole new journey has begun--and they're sent as the first runners in a very long relay-race to bring the news of Jesus everywhere.  There just isn't the time to sit around getting sentimental singing, "Mary, did you know?"  They've been sent running from the cemetery to get the word out.  And even more importantly, they've been commissioned to join up with Jesus in his mission already in progress.

I think that makes all the difference.  So often we treat the church like it is a group of old friends at a high school reunion--gathered around a table only for the purpose of remembering stuff that happened long ago, and trying to remember how great the good old days were. We act like the job of Christians is to get people to learn a sufficient number of Bible stories about what God "used to" do, or what Jesus accomplished once upon a time, as though the resurrection were the end of his career.  That's not how the angel sees it.  No--to hear the stone-sitting angel tell it, Jesus is just getting started.  He is alive and on the loose it seems, because he is too busy to be dead, like the days in the grave were an annoyance he endured so that he could get back to the work he has come for--bringing the Reign of God to all peoples and all places.  And now, the disciples are being invited to join in what Jesus is still doing--they are going to catch up with him in Galilee, it seems, because he's already got other fish to fry, and he's got to get to it.

Matthew's way of telling the story lights a fire under my feet.  He reminds me that the point of our Holy Week and Easter celebrations is not to put together an album of Jesus' Greatest Hits, but to receive our instructions for getting to work.  Catch your breath today if you need to.  Listen to the word from the heavenly messenger.  Lace up your shoes and double-tie them, sure.  But then, get moving--no sooner have we been given the Easter news and we are sent running from the graveyard with the women to tell others... so that all of us can get caught up with Jesus, who is alive and kicking... and already getting back to work bringing the world to life again.

There's just no time to be sentimental about it today.  The world is waiting for resurrection.

Lord Jesus, pull us into your Easter work today... and always.

Blessed Is the Match--April 8, 2020

Blessed Is the Match--April 8, 2020

"And being found in human form,
he humbled himself
and became obedient to the point of death—
even death on a cross." [Philippians 2:7b-8]

When Christians say that we believe Jesus “died for us,” we don’t just mean that Jesus closed his eyes and gave up his breath at some point. We don’t mean that Jesus lived a long and happy life to a ripe old age and then, after seeing grandchildren and great-grandchildren bouncing on his knee, he passed away quietly in his sleep. If that had happened, we could say that Jesus died, but that hardly seems like dying for us, or for anybody else, for that matter.

If it had happened that way, we could congratulate (or envy) Jesus for living a full life and dying a peaceful death. But we couldn’t say in any meaningful sense that he died for us—that he had given himself away for us, or that he had poured himself out for us.

Paul tells us that the cross makes the difference. The cross is evidence, not just that Jesus’ life was cut short by the Roman nails, but that Jesus consciously, willingly, intentionally gave his life up for us. The cross is Jesus knowing that he is forgoing decades of life, memories of children and grandchildren playing catch, and a comfortable retirement, and being willing to go through with it anyway, knowing he is going to lose those things. That’s why Paul emphasizes the fact that Jesus died on a cross—not in the safety of his own bed, not in good standing with the religious and political powers, and not with seven or eight or nine decades of memories to help ease him to a peaceful sleep. Jesus willingly put himself, not just in harm’s way, but in death’s way, the way a lifeguard knowingly risks her own life in order to save the unruly children horse-playing around the pool.

I once heard someone ask, “Why does it matter that Jesus died on a cross? Did the heavenly rules require that there be a certain amount of pain that Jesus had to endure? Is there some rating or score of suffering that had to be achieved?” In other words, why couldn’t Jesus just have lived a long full life and then just rode off into the sunset… or even had the obviously glorious and heroic kind of death of a soldier, leading the charge into battle? Why something so humiliating? So terrible? So sacrificial?

I suppose we could spend lifetimes trying to plumb the depths of the meaning of the cross, but at least part of it is this: there is nothing Jesus refused to hold back. Not the comfortable enjoyment of his golden years and grandchildren. Not his pride or dignity. Not the independence and freedom and control of taking life on his own terms. Not the sheer bliss and joy of “equality with God” as we heard in yesterday’s verses. Jesus was willing to lose it all, to hold nothing back.

If Jesus had lived a good ninety-some years of life, and then just fallen asleep on some cool Palestinian night, we might be left wondering, Was this for us that he died, or just because he had lived a full life and was ready to go? If Jesus had died a laudable, valiant death leading soldiers into battle, we would be left wondering, But he still got to be a hero—would he have done this still if nobody were watching? If Jesus had just fallen from the second story of a house when he was up on the roof hanging laundry, or trampled by a horse in an accident, we would still be left asking, Was this out of love, or just a freak accident? The cross is proof positive to us that Jesus willingly and deliberately chose to lay down his life… for you.  And because in Jesus we have the fullness of God in a human life (which is exactly the point Paul has been making at this point in Philippians), that means no less than God was willing to go to death for us.

The cross means that no matter what fears we face about death, Jesus has endured worse, and has been through the sadness, pain, and fear himself. God was willing to hold nothing back for our sakes.

Hannah Szenes was a Hungarian Jew who was parachuted into Yugoslavia in the late days of World War II in an attempt to rescue fellow Jews who were about to be sent to Auschwitz. She was captured by the enemy in the attempt, tortured, and executed. But in the midst of that experience, when she had committed to the mission and been parachuted into harm’s way, she wrote these words:

Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart.
Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor's sake.
Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame.
Something like that is what the cross is all about. Jesus was willing to lose everything—not just to die in comfort or in glory, but in a shameful execution—for us. Jesus was willing to pour himself out completely, holding nothing back. And in that, we can see that there was no price Jesus was not willing to pay to be faithful to the Father and to redeem us. You are just that precious.

How will you live on this day, knowing the lengths that Christ went to, and the things he was willing to lose, for you?

Lord Jesus, thank you. That may be all I can bear to say today considering your love. Thank you, Jesus. Thank you. For everything that you lost, so I could gain.

"Broken Things--April 7, 2020

"Broken Things"--April 7, 2020

"While they were eating, he took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it he broke it, gave it to them, and said, 'Take; this is my body'." [Mark 14:22]

Pay attention to the action that goes along with the words. The only way Jesus can give bread away and share it is if it’s broken. The only way Jesus can give himself away is the same.

As we have been making this turn in Holy Week away from the palm branches and toward the Passion of Christ, I have had a song lyric running through my head. It’s a Julie Miller song, and the opening verse goes, “You can have my heart/ Though it isn't new/ It's been used and broken/ And only comes in blue.” Then the refrain opens with this offer: “You can have my heart… if you don’t mind broken things.” Wow.

I have to admit, I am hearing Jesus’ words—the same words and the same story it is mine to tell when we gather at the Communion Table (and we will gather there again in due time!)—in a whole new way, held up against that song. There is vulnerability in them. There is tenderness. There is love. All of that was there all along in Jesus’ words, in his single simple sentence, “Take; this is my body.” But all too often, we let Jesus’ words get starchy and stiff, like he is giving a theological lecture with charts and graphs, rather than graphically depicting what he is about to do for his friends.

We read, “This is my body,” and for a lot of Christian history, we have decided he is giving us a metaphysical statement that we are supposed to diagram, and then agree to, and then commit to memory. So over the centuries, lots of well-intentioned smart religious professionals have jumped on these words and picked fights with one another over them. “He means that the bread transforms into his body in a literal sense, and if you don’t agree on that point, you are going to hell,” insist some. “No, he is telling us that the bread is like his body as just a symbol, and anybody who believes differently is lost in superstition and magical thinking,” say others as they wag their fingers. (Lutherans, I will confess, have their own way of saying it, and we have reasons for our position, which would go something like, “It’s not magic, and there’s no transformation, but the real Jesus is really there in, with, and under the ordinary, everyday stuff of bread.” But that is a conversation for another day.) And so the fighting goes back and forth, with each party condemning the other’s supposedly incorrect diagram of what Jesus surely meant when he said, “This is my body.”

How easily we forget that the action comes with the bread and the words. “He took a loaf of bread, and after blessing it, he broke it and gave it to them….” The only bread Jesus gives is broken bread. He tears the bread in two (or more probably, since it would have been flat unleavened bread for Passover, cracks it in two along jagged lines). It doesn’t pull apart neatly into perfect little perforated squares or circles like the tidy ways it often happens in churches. It is ripped, pulled, torn—it is broken. And in the breaking, Jesus says, earnestly, tenderly, and vulnerably, “This is for you. This is me. You can have it, if you don’t mind broken things.”

Jesus’ words have the exposed intimacy of a love song. They had it all along, but we were busy making charts and graphs to decide whose theology was damnable because of what they believed the bread did, or did not, turn into. We so easily miss the beauty and the infinite preciousness of what Jesus is doing. He is not saying, “Here is some quasi-magic bread, and if you eat it with the right theory about what it is, you will get more heaven points. So take it.” He is saying, “See this? See this broken thing? It is broken for you. This is me. I am going to be broken for you. If you want me in your life, the only way you get me is broken. It’s the only way I come.”

The cross, the Communion Table, the whole life of faith—they are all in one way or another all about Jesus giving himself away for us. And the only way we can receive him… is broken. There is no Christ without a cross, no Jesus as “just a nice moral teacher” or “just a guy with some good spiritual insights.” The only way Jesus comes is crucified. Risen, too, certainly. Triumphant over death, absolutely. But having come through death to get to resurrection. And that means Jesus himself was broken… for you, and for me. If we miss that, we can get all the rest of our diagrams right and still miss the point. Pay attention to the action that comes with the words. Receive the gift and take in what it is Jesus is holding up for you and me: This is my body. You can have it, if you don’t mind broken things.

Lord Jesus, we can scarcely take in what you have done for us. Don’t let us miss the awesome beauty of your love in our attempts to reduce you to theories and theology.

Misunderstood Hosannas--April 6, 2020

Misunderstood Hosannas--April 6, 2020

"Many people spread their cloaks on the road, and others spread leafy branches that they had cut in the fields. Then those who went ahead and those who followed were shouting, 'Hosanna!  Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David!  Hosanna in the highest heaven!'" [Mark 11:8-10]

Before it was anything else, it was a plea for help.  "Hosanna," that is.  This word has been preserved by the Gospel writers and then handed down by church folks over the centuries to the point where most of us don't recall its meaning.  We know to say it, and we know that it's the Word-of-the-Day for Palm Sunday.  But most of us just put it in the pile of Bible-jargon-we-learned-somewhere-along-the-way along with other Hebrew and Aramaic words like, "Alleluia," "Golgotha" (or its Latin parallel, "Calvary,") and names like "Pontius Pilate," "Zion," or "Jehovah."  And we add that on top of the other church jargon in our memory banks, like "narthex" and "litany" and "eucharistic" and "fellowship." 

But there is something deep going on in the cry, "Hosanna."  In fact, it's deeper than even the crowds who first said it when Jesus came into town a week before his execution.

Like I say, the word "Hosanna" comes from a Hebrew expression that means something like, "Save us, please!" It's the sort of thing you pray to God when you are at the end of your rope.  Or maybe it's like when you're really in a pinch and your friend agrees to help you--like to get you to the airport in time, or to cover a shift for you, or to spot you some money when you are in need of cash--and you say, before they have even done what they've promised, "You're a lifesaver!  Thank you so much!"  

"Hosanna" had come to have this feel of hopeful expectation along with the desperate need by the time Jesus comes on the scene.  There's a feel of deep and urgent need, but also deep hope that the God to whom we call will come through.  Of course, what we think we need to be "saved" or "rescued" from, exactly, is a trickier question.  For a lot of folks in the first century, the most they dared to hope for was an end to Rome's rule occupying their homeland.  To cry out "Hosanna!" in the days of imperial rule of Judea was to hope for rescue from the brutality of Roman soldiers marching through the streets, torturing their kinfolk to make examples out of them on trumped up charges, and crucifying their neighbors and countrymen.  To cry "Hosanna!" was maybe a wistful longing for some "better time" in Israel's past, too--it was a hope for the "good old days" when their nation wasn't overrun by foreign empires and then they had their own fully independent king.  And in the minds of a good many Judeans in Jesus' day, it was a word colored by rosy nostalgia about how "great" things had been in some glorious past, you know, back the days of kings like David.

The trouble is, that hope--for some imaginary day in the past when things were "great" if only you could somehow make everything go back to them all over again--was problematic.  We humans have this way of misremembering how "great" the past was, and assuming that recreating it will solve all the problems of our present.  And so the people who are crying out, "Hosanna!" as Jesus comes into town are precariously close to pinning their expectations on Jesus that he will restore the "good old days" when (at least as they selectively remembered things), their nation was strong, their armies were winning everywhere, their economy was booming, and their rulers were good and peaceful and just.  

Well, it is indeed a lovely thing to hope for a day when there is peace and justice and abundance for all... but that's a dangerously inaccurate view even of how things were during the days of the great King David or his successor, King Solomon (the literal "son of David").  David's reign was plagued not only by scandal and bloodshed with foreign enemies, but was marked by an outright civil war of competing claimants to the crown that would put your average episode of "Game of Thrones" to shame.  And Solomon, for all of his famous wealth and wisdom, was the architect of a national program to oppress his own people to build vast palaces, treasuries, and a life of royal luxury on the backs of his people's labor.  

Compared to the unpleasantness of life under the Romans, maybe all of that was easily swept under the rug.  But it's funny how anytime folks start longing for some previous time in history when things were "great," they selectively remember only the parts that were "great" for people like them, and they forget all the folks who weren't included in all that winning.  And then when someone comes along that they can pin all of that nostalgically wishful thinking onto and that someone doesn't magically turn back the clock to make things exactly as they were (mis)remembered, the crowd turns on them.  And that's what we're seeing here in the story of Holy Week.  If you have ever wondered what would possess people to throw their cloaks in the roads or cut down palm branches from the fields to throw in the street as some stranger rode by on a donkey, maybe you need to hear it with all of that pent-up longing in the background.  The faces in that crowd are people who have seen one empire after another tromping on their land, their nation, their communities, for as long as they could remember--and for generations further back before that.  And at some point, you latch on to any thing, any thing, that you think is making you the promise of restoring some era of better times.

And Jesus, in so many ways, was the unwilling target of everybody's projections.  He was doing things that seemed to fly in the face of the established order of Rome, and he seemed completely unafraid of the religious and political so-and-sos.  They just assumed that meant he was going to overthrow the Romans, make himself king after a quick and easily-won war (you can sense the delusions already, can't you?), and then, with a wave of a magical messianic hand, he would turn the clocks back a thousand years to the "glory days" of Israel's "greatness" under King David.  That's why they make the fuss they do.  They are projecting all of that onto this homeless rabbi riding a borrowed burro. And when it turns out that Jesus does not fit those projected expectations, they will turn on him.  They will want his death.  Indeed, it only takes five days from their "Hosannas" for it to happen.

Now, let's be clear--it's not that Jesus disappoints because he just isn't good enough to make those "good old days" of imagined memory happen again.  It's that Jesus has come to make something new... something truly better... and something at odds with both Rome and even old King Solomon's way of doing things.  Jesus has come to reign--but not in the sense of replacing one pompous bully tyrant with another new pompous bully tyrant.  He has come to save--but not by sending in the cavalry to kill enough centurions to make the rest turn tail and go back to Rome.  He has come to rescue, but not by destroying anybody else.  He has come, indeed, as the one worthy to receive our "Hosannas," even if we have misunderstood what we needed saving from.  Jesus has come as the one who bears the violence of the empire and takes it into himself.  He has come as the one who doesn't take up even a single sword to fight off the betrayer and the mob, but who dies for their sakes.  He has come as the servant that Israel's kings were always meant to be, but never could actually make themselves become.  He is the one who saves and reigns from a cross, not a throne or an armored war horse.  And he has come, not to recreate an artificial era from the past that was really only good for SOME people, but to create a new kind of life--the one he kept calling, "the Reign of God," in which there is goodness and enough for all, and where justice and mercy embrace in peace.  That's what we most deeply need.

So on this day, we too, can let the word "Hosanna" be called forth from our lips.  But we should be clear about these two truths when we speak it: first, people who find themselves chanting "Hosanna," even to Jesus himself, have a way of misunderstanding what we are asking to be saved from and how the saving should look like; and, second is the good news that even when we don't know what we really need to be rescued from or for, Jesus has come to bring us life anyway in spite of ourselves.  Jesus will bear our misspoken Hosannas, and he saves us the way we really needed it all along.

Dear Jesus, take our misunderstandings, misconceptions, and mis-remembered nostalgia, and bring us all to the kind of life you see we most deeply need.  Save us and reign among us by your cross, regardless of what we expected.