Relinquishing the Gavel--March 14, 2023

Relinquishing the Gavel--March 14, 2023

"The [Samaritan] woman said to [Jesus], 'Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.' Jesus said to her, 'Go, call your husband, and come back.' The woman answered him, 'I have no husband.' Jesus said to her, 'You are right in saying, I have no husband; for you have had five husbands, and the one you have now is not your husband.  What you have said is true!'" [John 4:15-18]

So, a confession:  for a lot of my life, I assumed Jesus was scolding this woman with a not-so-subtle jab about her having had five husbands before... and for a lot of my life, I was wrong.

It's funny how easily we put ourselves in the role of judge over other people--even people we know dangerously little about--and how quickly we assume the worst of them when we do.  And from there it is even easier to assume Jesus endorses our verdict over the people we have decided to condemn.  Funny, isn't it, how often we picture Jesus standing beside us in condemnation of others, rather than with his arms wrapped around the ones we have condemned?  And how easily we try to force Jesus' words to sound like a condemnation of this woman for who she loves or how her relationships have gone, rather than hearing them as Jesus' way of saying, "I know what you've been through; and I'm not running away from you."

What I want to propose is that if we have read, or heard [or been preached at] that this passage shows us Jesus shaming this woman for her past marriages, we need to listen and look again more closely and see whether those conclusions come from the text, or from our assumptions about her--and maybe our own insecure need to find someone we can cast as "less than" or "unworthy."

The truth is that we just don't know how she got to this point in her life, having had five previous relationships end and now muddling through a sixth.  It's easy to assume she is the problem, and that she's wrecked six marriages because of some fault of hers--that's easy because it lets us make her the problem, or at least allows us to look down condescendingly at her.  But Jesus doesn't speak with that assumption. Maybe she's met a lot of jerks, and everybody in her town was pressuring her to get hitched rather than wait to meet someone who would treat her well. [You know what they say about dating in small towns:  your odds are good, but the good are odd.] It is certainly possible that she has outlived multiple husbands who have died [there was even a commandment in the Torah about widows marrying the brother, or brothers if need be, of the deceased to continue the family line in what was called "levirate marriage," and the Sadducees even present Jesus with a hypothetical question of just such a case with a widow of seven husbands at one point in the gospels, too].  It's possible that, in a culture where some Respectable Religious Leaders taught that you could divorce your wife for something as petty as burning dinner, one husband treated her like garbage and threw her away, and then she became convinced that she wasn't worth any better treatment than that.  It's possible she had been through a host of terrible arranged marriages, or that one or more spouses had been a victim of violence from the occupying Romans.  There are countless possibilities, and yes, certainly, one of them is that she herself was a contributing factor to her past marriages ending.  

My point is to say that the text itself doesn't give us more information, and Jesus doesn't seem to make any assumptions, other than that he seems to know what surely was an open secret in town--and he doesn't scold or shame her over it.  It's almost like Jesus names this fact to get it out in the open and say, "If you're worried about me judging you when I find out about your past, you don't need to worry--I already know, and I have no condemnation for you."  It's like defusing a bomb before it goes off, or a nurse acknowledging the wound you've been trying to cover up with your arm--so that you don't feel like you have to hide it, but so that it can be treated and healed.

And yet, so easily, we can come to a story like this and turn this woman into a pariah or notorious "sinner," and once we've decided to take that interpretation, we start hearing Jesus' words with the same judgmental tone of voice, even if that's not what Jesus himself had in mind.  Jesus doesn't end this conversation trying to push this woman into a cookie-cutter pattern of a family with a husband, two kids, a dog, and a white picket fence.  He makes his offer of life that is infinite to her as she is, without additional prerequisites, expectations, or conditions. That's the thing: sometimes I think we modern-day Respectable Religious Folks think that Jesus has called us to find people we have decided are "broken" and then to "fix" them by forcing them into the molds we've prepared for them, when Jesus instead just finds people, regardless of the barriers others would have put in his way, and tells them, "I'm giving you infinite life as a free gift.  This love is for you."

We have a way of reworking Jesus' message to sound like "Come to me and I will make you fit the expectations of other people better, so then they won't judge you so much," rather than hearing him say unabashedly, "I already accept you; I don't condemn you, and I'm not here to rub salt in the wounds from what you've been through. And I won't bail out on you." And when we do that, we reveal the worst kind of arrogance around--the kind that dresses up as compassion but is really condescending pity.  That's not love--that's a backhanded way of saying, "You are currently unacceptable, but I can change you and make you acceptable according to my standards."  Jesus doesn't do that to this woman. He simply names the elephant [or all five of them] in the room as if to remove their power over her--he says, "I know about what you've been through.  And my offer still stands."  Jesus isn't here to pity this woman or look down on her.  He treats her as a peer, going toe to toe with her from topic to topic without talking down to her or belittling her. 

So here in a new day, how can this story shape the way we treat people?  How can Jesus' way free us from the baggage of arrogance we've been lugging around with us, and simply love people where they are at?  How might Jesus' way of putting this woman at ease without making it feel like they all have to walk on eggshells or avoid touchy subjects give us direction for our words and actions?  And maybe how could this closer look at a well-known story make us take a second look at the ways we often co-opt Jesus to endorse our judgment over other people and the assumptions we make about them?  Where have we been sitting in judgment over people--and where has Jesus been trying to peel open our clenched fingers and reliniquish the gavel?

Wrestling with those questions and figuring out some answers won't be easy--but it will certainly be more honest than ignoring them.  And it might just help us to more fully love like Jesus--and that makes it worth the effort.

Lord Jesus, keep us from trying to speak for you or to steal your authority to back up our condemnation of other people.  Teach us to love like you.

Brave Enough to Love--March 13, 2023

Brave Enough to Love--March 13, 2023

"[Jesus] came to a Samaritan city called Sychar, near the plot of ground that Jacob had given to his son Joseph. Jacob's well was there, and Jesus, tired out by his journey, was sitting by the well.  It was about noon.  A Samaritan woman came to draw water, and Jesus said to her, 'Give me a drink.' [His disciples had gone into the city to buy food.] The Samaritan woman said to him, 'How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?' [Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans.]" [John 4:5-9]

It takes great courage--maybe more than we have on our own--to acknowledge that the people we have arrogantly deemed unworthy are not only theoretically "acceptable," but in fact already have been accepted, loved, and decreed worthy by God.

But that is precisely what we are brought face to face with from this opening scene from the story in John's gospel that many of us heard this past Sunday.  Jesus, who had surely grown up surrounded by the racial prejudice and xenophobia that pitted Jewish people and Samaritans against each other, chooses to reject those old hatreds and the unspoken bigotry that was all around.  And he chose a different path--one that recognized these people labeled "other" as worthy, beloved, and made in the image of God as well.  Jesus is braver than we usually are in that way.

Before we go any further into this story--and we will, in the coming days, don't worry--before we get into the metaphors of living water, or the backstory of this woman who has been rejected at least five times and had her heart broken who knows how many more, let's just start with the bravery of Jesus to defy the casual and systemic hatred that was all around him.  Because it truly is a brave thing to be able to say to the people around you, including neighbors you've known for years or acquaintances who watched you grow up, "I will not further the xenophobia you taught me was normal.  I will not participate in it, and I will not give it a pass any longer."  But that is precisely what Jesus does as he walks into Samaritan territory and offers genuine love to a stranger who is "other."

That is courageous, because it means risking alienation from all those people who you grew up with, people who had perpetuated and participated in a pattern of prejudice that they had been taught from generations before.  You risk being accused of disrespecting your elders or betraying "your own kind" when you stand up and say "No" to the animosities that everyone had just gotten used to. You get blamed for "rocking the boat," for looking "political," or being swept up in the currents of pagan culture when you call out the bigotry that nobody else seems to notice.  Jesus stares all of that down, because he is confident that God's love includes the woman with the water jar coming his way.  And Jesus knows that genuine love--the love that is of God--does not let itself be watered down with the arrogance we call racism, nor any other arrogant mindset that seems somebody else as "less than."

Now, for us reading this story some two thousand years after John first jotted it down for us, it's easy to spot the prejudice and xenophobia in the story.  John the narrator literally comes out and says, "Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans," and he underscores the shock of the woman at the well that Jesus has asked for a drink out of her jar or cup.  So it should be pretty obvious to us that there are dynamics of racial prejudice and systemic fear in this story.  The harder part is being able to recognize that it's still all around us, like it's floating in the ether, and that we are still called to live in the love of Jesus that courageously rejects xenophobia.

That's particularly hard for the same reason it would have been hard for so many of Jesus' friends, neighbors, and relatives to recognize the bigotry they had all bought into: it's usually so thoroughly woven into the very fabric of everyday life that they didn't notice it anymore. A fish doesn't know that it's wet, after all.  And for us, an awful lot of the prejudice, subtle hatred, and bigotry around us so thoroughly saturates everything around us that it can be easy not to notice it, or to stay asleep to it.  Indeed, sometimes all of those forms of hate and fear dress up in the garb of Respectable Religion and it becomes a pious and righteous thing to uphold them.  Most of the time, the inherited prejudices with which we are ingrained are subtle--it's not just the houses with Confederate flags flying in their yard or on their cars [although, true confession, my official counter of "Days-Since-I've-Seen-A-Confederate-Flag-Flying-In-A-Yard" just went back down to zero over the weekend, here in good ol' Union state Pennsylvania].  Most of the time, it's the casual remarks, the facial expressions, the teaching of children [without realizing that we are indoctrinating them with racism] about "not associating with THOSE people," or how some people are "not our kind of folk." It's the instant criticism of those who are different, or the nonsensical attempt to pretend we "don't even see the difference," rather than acknowledging the ways we are different--and yet beloved all the same.

It's hard to have this conversation, I know, because surely most all of us want to think of ourselves as lovely, good, decent, polite people--you know, people "without a racist bone in our bodies."  But that's the thing: nobody has to sit you down and lectures you to "hate people like THEM."  You just see it modeled over and over again in a million little ways--a thousand tiny slights, a hundred offhand remarks that "are no big deal, right?"  You learn the systems and patterns you grow up in and inherit, and then you learn to defend those systems because your family and your neighbors and your community all thought they were good enough for them--so why are you too good for them now?  And without realizing it, we end up perpetuating systems of hatred and fear that we would recognize as obviously wicked if we had someone like John the narrator telling our story as we have in this story from the Bible.  But when you're living it, no voiceover will label the bigotries we are used to as bigotry--we need to be the ones who are brave enough in our love to be like Jesus, who simply refuses to perpetuate the xenophobia that just about everyone else around him had accepted as unchangeable.  

To live in the love of Jesus will mean growing in that kind of courage--and like I say, quite often on our own we are not that brave.  We go along with the crowd by nature, and it's hard to work up the nerve to say, "No--love compels me to act differently from what I have seen modeled around me." But what makes it possible to be brave in this way is that Jesus has gone ahead of us and blazed a trail, and he stays with us at the same time, refusing to give up on us when we get it wrong, and giving us the grace to start over.  It's hard learning to break out of the systemic hatred and arrogance all around us and to dare something different--but Jesus' presence leading us right up to those we were taught to view with animosity makes us brave.

Today, let us go where Jesus leads.

Lord Jesus, make us brave enough to love like you. Make us courageous enough to say No to the hatred we have been complicit in, and to say Yes to loving all the way you do.

Life From Our Deathliness--March 10, 2023

Life From Our Deathliness--March 10, 2023

"For the promise that he would inherit the world did not come to Abraham or to his descendants through the law but through the righteousness of faith. If it is the adherents of the law who are to be the heirs, faith is null and the promise is void. For the law brings wrath; but where there is no law, neither is there violation. For this reason it depends on faith, in order that the promise may rest on grace and be guaranteed to all his descendants, not only to the adherents of the law but also to those who share the faith of Abraham (for he is the father of all of us, as it written, 'I have made you the father of many nations')--in the presence of the God in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist." [Romans 4:13-17]

In a world obsessed with projecting artificial versions of ourselves to show off to the world, it's really a relief to hear the Scriptures tell us that God doesn't need us to impress anybody.  In fact, it's the unconditional love of God for us that lets us be honest about our frailties, and from there to love other people as they are in all of their frailties.  In the words of James Baldwin, "Love takes off masks we fear we cannot live without and now we cannot live within."  And the Love whom we have met in Jesus has been doing that for generations, even all the way back to old Father Abraham.

It's a matter of learning to see differently--or maybe, of learning to let God train our eyes [and hearts] to see the world through love.  When I know I am beloved, I don't have to constantly compare myself to others or try to make myself seem better.  I don't have to push you down or puff myself up.  Being loved allows me to love others, because I'm no longer obsessed with covering up my own insecurity in a thick wrapper of arrogance as insulation.  And that's possible, Paul tells us, becuase God takes what others might see simply as our liabilities, our weaknesses, or even our dead-ness, and with the eye of a master artist, God raises up beauty... grace... strength... life. Or, like the song by U2 puts it, "Grace makes beauty out of ugly things... grace finds goodness in everything."

That's what I hear in these words from Paul's letter to the Romans as he thinks about our ancestor in the faith, Abraham. Paul recognizes that Abraham isn't really the hero of his story--God is. What Abraham brought to the picture was his near-dead-ness: he was approaching a hundred years old, had been worshiping the idols of the Chaldeans, and had no prospects of continuing the family line through children since he and his wife didn't have any. Abraham didn't even have a perfect permanent record of rule-following, since there was no "Law of Moses" yet, and the commandments hadn't been given yet. In other words, what Abraham had to offer looked only like weakness, nothingness, and near deadness.

But in the eyesight of Love, what seems only like weakness becomes the source of beauty and strength and life. What seems dead becomes the point where resurrection breaks out. And as Paul sees it, it is not any obviously impressive traits or accomplishments of Abraham that puts him in good standing with God--it is only his willingness to trust, even feebly and shakily, that God can bring life out of his near-deadness, and that God can bring beauty out of what looks to anybody else only like ugliness.

Abraham is the subject the story, but God is the storyteller who lifts up the vitality in what otherwise might seem a tragic life story. It is an act of creation out of nothing, or an act of resurrection if you like. And this is exactly what the God of the Scriptures keeps doing all of the time: finding us just as we are, and, without waiting for us to fit anybody else's definition of being "good enough" or "strong enough" or "great enough" or "beautiful enough," God just brings life from our deathliness. It's not a lie or a fiction, but it is the work of a master artist whose creative eye raises up what otherwise would have gone unseen.

And this is how God keeps operating for each of us. Where the world looks at you or me and sees only our brokenness, our non-good-enough-ness, or our dead-ness, God creates something beautiful and true out of us. God acknowledges the struggles, the setbacks, and the sorrows we bear, but instead of just tossing us away as damaged goods, God raises us up and brings life to the foreground.  When we see how God's love accepts us--yes, embraces us--even when all we bring to the table are our liabilities and inadequacies, we no longer need to try and impress others or cut them down to make ourselves feel better.  We're already loved as we are.  We can just sit with that and know it's true.

Maybe the challenge of this day is not to pretend our struggles, our weak places, or our needs are not there, but to seek for God to show us ourselves from the viewpoint of God's own Master-Artist perspective, where life comes out of death, and where things come into existence that you'd have sworn weren't there a second ago.

May we have such courage and vision to see things through the resurrection perspective of God, and may that vision enable us to love others as we have been loved already.

Lord God, we offer you ourselves as we are, asking for you with your creative eye to help us to envision life in us where we might have overlooked it, and to bring life out of us where we can see only deadness.

A Place at God's Table--March 9, 2023

A Place at God's Table--March 9, 2023

"Now to one who works, wages are not reckoned as a gift but as something due.  But to one who without works trusts him who justifies the ungodly, such faith is reckoned as righteousness." [Romans 4:4-5]

The rules of business are as certain as the law of gravity; they're as cut and dry as the logic of mathematics.  If you are going to operate strictly by the rules of business, be warned--there's no avoiding the demands of the bottom line.

I mean that literally, of course.  If you are hired to do a job at a certain rate--say, Pennsylvania's current minimum wage of 7.25 an hour--you can do the calculations yourself to know precisely how much you should make at the end of a week, or a pay-period.  You know that the rules of mathematics put a ceiling on how much income you'll have: it's number of hours times the rate per hour, and minus taxes.  In that set-up, the company doesn't have to think about whether you will make enough money to pay for your rent or housing, or whether there will be enough for food until the next pay period, or anything at all for savings or special things. The management is allowed to remain completely oblivious to such things and only apply the cold hard algorithms of basic mathematical operations: hours times rate equals pay.  And of course, the one in the manager's position feels the same pinch from a different perspective--the rules of mathematics require that costs for running the business not exceed the income, or else the whole operation collapses.  

All of that is how the set-up works in IDEAL conditions, too.  If, God forbid, you clock in late because there was a traffic jam or an accident that blocked your route, your pay will suffer for the time you missed.  If your kid gets sick and you have to call off and stay home, that's income lost, or maybe even grounds for losing your job.  If you make a mistake and there are expenses related to it or you did something wrong with your tax information, you can end up with garnished wages, meaning there's less pay to cover the same costs.  And if you live in a time of economic inflation, the numbers on the paycheck may stay the same, but their buying power will shrink--and still, your kids need to eat and you need to make your next car payment or rent check.

All of that is to say that everybody who operates by the strict rules of business learns pretty quickly that the rest of the world just doesn't have to care about whether your income is "enough" for you to actually live on or feed your family.  It's all cold, logical math: you work for so many hours, and you get so much pay. If that's not enough to run your household and manage your affairs, the world is perfectly willing to tell you to look elsewhere, wish you luck, and say, "It's not my problem."

God, on the other hand, does not operate by the rules of business.  In fact, to hear the apostle Paul tell it, God doesn't operate at all by the mathematical logic of hours-times-rate-equals-pay.  God isn't paying wages; God gives gifts. That turns out to be deeply good news for us who are never going to "earn" our way into heaven by our own winsomeness or merits, but it does mean learning to let go of the old pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps illusion we are used to trotting out when it suits us.  It will mean surrendering the arrogant pride that let us tell ourselves we've "earned" God's love and that others just haven't been "good" enough, "righteous" enough, or "obedient" enough to deserve it.  The gospel tells us that God doesn't give out love based on earning, because that's not how love works.  God gives gifts to folks who haven't "earned" anything, because God runs things more like a family than a business.

This is the change in thinking Paul wants us to make.  While it's true that the logic of earning wages has a lot of downside to it [if you're not making enough to live on, for example], it does allow for the pride of saying, "My paycheck is what I've earned--my labor deserves this pay, and I put the work in, so I achieved this."  And again, if you can do the work and be satisfied with what you get in return, good for you.  But if we find ourselves struggling and realize that we can't do this on our own, we realize that we are in need of something that the rules of business cannot and will not supply:  we need grace.  We need someone who will say, "I'll cover your needs--just trust me on this."  That's exactly what we have been given in Jesus.

What Paul is up to here in the fourth chapter of what we call Romans is to get us to shift our thinking about how we relate to God and other people.  If we can earn our status before God, then we have room to brag. If my good deeds make God love me, or if my fervent Bible reading or stance on token culture war issues win me "points" with God, then I can claim that I have achieved my own salvation like a worker taking home a paycheck. But if it turns out that there's no amount of "stuff" I can do that would put God in my debt, then the whole notion of "earning" falls apart.  And that's just it: God doesn't run things like a business or a corporation, but like a household.  And in a household, everybody gets to eat, regardless of how much work you've done to bring a paycheck into the family.  In God's household, like in yours or mine, everybody has a place at the table even if you forgot to make your bed or do your homework, even if you sassed your mother, and even if you broke a plate last week by being clumsy.  Your status as beloved in the family does not depend on earning, because the household doesn't operate by the rules of business.  Instead, even when you are rude to others in the family, you still belong in it. Even when you are bossy and short-tempered, you still belong in the family.  Even if you are a little kid or are sick with the flu or don't bring in a paycheck from the outside world, you "count" as part of the family, because a family doesn't run on the logic of wage-earning.  

That means as the followers of Jesus we can let go of the relentless drum-beat of "Have I done enough?  How do I compare?  Have I earned God's favor?" and all the rest of those questions, because that's not how God operates toward us.  You don't have to worry that if you clocked in late you're doomed to hell because God is now docking your righteousness account and you'll fall short of points.  You don't have to compare yourself to someone else and whether they have done as much as you have or have earned their place--because nobody is there on the basis of earning.  You don't have to puff yourself up to seem more important, or pull someone else down to try and get ahead, because God is not looking to fire anybody or downsize to keep overhead costs under control.  God isn't running a business--God has gathered us into a family of grace.

Now, I can't change the way the world around us operates.  There are still lots of places where the cold, hard, ironclad rules of business are in operation and there is no room for grace.  And I get it, too, that each of us still has to live our lives with at least a foot in that world of paychecks and bottom lines, because the world in which we live is still operating on an economy of earning.  But we are sent out into the world as people who also know what it's like to be loved and to belong without concern for what anybody has earned.  We are still people who know what it is like to hear God say, "You don't have to worry about earning your keep around here--I've claimed you forever."  We are still people who have tasted a whole other way of living in the world--where we don't worry about how we measure up to anybody else or whether other people's place at the table takes away from my ability to get enough.  We have been brought into God's economy of grace, where God silences our prepared speeches about earning a place as hired laborers and insists on bringing out sandals, robe, and ring to claim us as children in the household.  The God who "justifies the ungodly" rather than firing them has welcomed us to the table and says we have a place there forever.

The good news we need today is also the word that humbles us: we are here in God's family not because we've earned it [and then we get to look down on others as though they haven't achieved it] but because God is extravagantly generous and given us a place at the table and a welcome in the family for free.  All we can do is trust what God says is already so.  That's not earning a paycheck--that's receiving a gift.

Someone you know is still stuck striving and constantly trying to earn approval or acceptance--maybe you can be the voice they need to be freed from that endless hamster-wheel life, and to look up to see a place is already set for them at God's dinner table.

Lord Jesus, let us trust your free gift and at last be done with the impulse to earn and compare what you give by grace, unearned.

Un-burying The Lede--March 8, 2023

Un-burying The Lede--March 8, 2023

"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him may not perish but have eternal life. Indeed, God did not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him." [John 3:16-17]

It's the cardinal sin of journalism.  They call it "burying the lede," and it refers to a badly written opening paragraph or sentence in a news story that hides or obscures the really important information with lesser detail or distraction.  In other words, it's what happens when the writer of the story misses the point or misdirects readers by pointing away from the real takeaway.  

For example, if you've got a headline that reads "Man Wearing Blue Socks with Black Shoes Robs Bank," the lede has been buried--this is a story about a bank robbery, but the headline makes it sound like a crime of fashion is the big deal.  When a bank is robbed, that's the story, not whether the robbers' shoes matched their socks.  Or, if a politician is supposed to give a big speech and the reporters don't talk about the actual content of the speech or the policies advocated by the politician, but instead obsess over the choice of necktie or the color of the podium, it's another case of burying the lede.  Sometimes it's inadvertent--a new reporter may still be learning how to think through what the "real story" is about, or a sloppy writer may just be throwing words together to make a deadline.  Sometimes it's intentional, if you've got an agenda that gets in the way of covering a story you don't like, or when you want to put a certain spin on how people hear it.  And in this day and age of niche news markets and nakedly partisan cable news, we can get pretty good at seeing how "the other side" sometimes buries the lede... but we have hard time seeing when we do it ourselves.

I mention this because Respectable Religious Folks have a habit of doing the same to the words of Jesus, too--especially when our religious traditions, theological assumptions, or hang-ups about the limits we want to put on grace get in the way of hearing him on his own terms.  And of course, when we do put our own "take" on Jesus and make him fit our expectations, we'll hear any pushback on that "take" as an attack on Jesus... rather than maybe someone helpfully [and correctly, even] pointing out where we've buried the lede with Jesus.  

A classic example from church history was when the medieval church took the proclamation of Jesus, as recorded in the gospels, "The kingdom of God is at hand--repent, and believe the good news!" and retold it [or mistranslated it] as "Do penance, and believe..."  The shift was subtle at one level, because "repent" and "do penance" sound pretty similar.  But in the ears of the medieval church, "do penance" had the very precise technical meaning of "perform the sacrament of confession to a priest and then do whatever ritual action he prescribes you," rather than the more radical sense of re-ordering your way of thinking and acting, to turn away from evil and to turn toward God.  What Jesus had intended as a radical reorientation of our allegiances away from self, empire, wealth, or sin, and toward God had been tamed and declawed into a reminder to do a bit of liturgical performance and go home otherwise unchanged.  Nobody intended to undercut the power of Jesus' words, but when you bury the lede and focus on "what you're supposed to do" rather than on "what God is up to" you are likely to get into trouble.

There's the rub--when we take the Scriptures and focus on what "we" are supposed to do, rather than on the announcement of what "God" is doing in the world, we are invariably burying the lede.  There's a bank robbery in progress and we're all fixating on what color socks the robbers are wearing, or the color of the necktie the senator is wearing for the big speech.  This is a pretty big deal, because it is terribly easy to make that mistake and turn the Scriptures into a behavior manual [which will sometimes seem to contradict itself since different behaviors are prescribed in different contexts and cultures in the Bible], rather than taking the Scriptures as, in the words of Daniel Erlander, "the unfolding story of God's promise to mend the entire universe." 

As you can imagine, when we bury the lede with one of the most well-known verses of the entire New Testament--say, good ol' John 3:16--folks can get uncomfortable or even feel threatened, because so many of us have not only memorized the words but learned a certain spin on them.  And, again as so often happens, the "spin" that a lot of Respectable Religious Folks have been taught about these words is to focus on what WE have to do in order to "achieve" or "earn" a thing called "salvation," rather than where Jesus is really placing the focus--namely on the God who saves and loves the world.  Both are there--the God who "so loved the world that he gave his only Son" and the piece about "whosoever believes"--but if we make this verse primarily about the things you and I have to do in order to earn eternal life, we're missing the point and burying the lede.  The gospel isn't a sales pitch for how to accept a deal from God to get yourself a ticket to heaven--its about a God who loves the world enough to die for it, even at our own hands.  One of those is the Real Story... and one of those is burying the lede.

The thing is, Jesus isn't here in this passage rattling off a list of theological propositions or credal statements you have to recite in order to claim a sunny spot in the afterlife.  The scandalous thing isn't the obligation that we have to correctly believe in Jesus in order for him to accept us--it's that in Jesus, God's love for has come in person to save and rescue, and with the whole world in mind.  Christianity, when we actually listen to Jesus, isn't a set of facts to be believed or actions to be done in order to make ourselves acceptable to God; it's the announcement of what God has already done to restore and rescue the world because God already loves the world.  When we take a passage like this and try to extract a formula of "what you have to do or say in order to secure eternal life" we're burying the lede--Jesus didn't intend to give us a to-do list but to tell us who has loved us enough to give everything away for our sake, namely God.

Jesus has come, in other words, to be the One who saves the world and then unburies the lede when it comes to telling the story of how it is saved.  Jesus comes as the One who lays down his life for our sake and then makes sure we know that it's a gift freely given, not a commodity to be bought or earned.  And when we take Jesus seriously that way, it has a way of sucking the arrogance out of our overinflated egos like a vacuum.  If the point of this passage isn't to list off "The Things You Must Correctly Believe About Jesus To Secure Your Eternal Status," then there's no room for us to boast, brag, or puff ourselves up.  If this point of these words really is--as Jesus sure seems to think--on the God who does not condemn the world in Jesus but saves it, then I don't get to point to my faith, my correct belief, or my shows of piety as the reason I'm "worthy" of being saved.  It's not about "worthiness" anyway--it's about the way love refuses to let our refusal of God be the last word.

For a very long time in American religious history, we've let the heart of the good news be hidden behind a list of Dos and Don'ts, rather than the announcement of what God has already done, for you, to save and redeem.  We've let the lede be buried, and it has meant that an awful lot of folks have only heard Christianity presented as a set of statements to be memorized or righteous actions to be taken in order to properly "count" as "believing in Jesus" and thus to get some sort of celestial prize.  And that has in turn led to a lot of folks being puffed up with pride about their piety, sure that they have "earned" their spot in glory because they did such a good job of believing... which misses the point of what Jesus is saying here.  Jesus' emphasis is on the graciousness of the Giver and the extravagance of the Gift himself [Jesus], not on being gatekeepers to determine who gets access to the afterlife.  

There are people all around us--maybe the face in the mirror, too--who are tired of hearing talk of Jesus come with a condescending and arrogant attitude that THEY have done something to make themselves worthy, and that only if you copy THEM can you, too, make yourself acceptable in God's eyes.  Maybe if we let Jesus speak on his own terms, we won't keep mishearing or misspeaking the news that Jesus has to share with us--news of a God who has already sent the One who saves the world out of love for that very world.  

Maybe it's time to un-bury the lede--or, more fittingly, to let Jesus roll away the stone and call it out of the tomb.

Lord Jesus, keep us from getting in the way of your good news, and let us speak your audacious word of grace to all.

Desperate for Anti-venom--March 7, 2023

Desperate for Anti-venom--March 7, 2023

[Jesus said to Nicodemus]: "No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life." [John 3:13-15]

It was one of those old family stories the children of Israel recounted to their children around the hearth... one of the great legends handed down from past generations about the wild and mysterious days of the wilderness... a tale that had been told and retold over campfires and on journeys for centuries.  It was story about the importance of trusting and respecting the awesome power of God. It was a lesson in not grumbling even when you couldn't see the next phase of the plan.  And it was just plain weird, too.

It was the story of the poisonous serpents in the wilderness, and how a bronze serpent on a pole saved the day.  And it's the story that Jesus references here in his conversation with Nicodemus, borrowing the imagery from the old tale in Israel's wilderness wanderings as a way of explaining himself and his own mission in the world.  Now, Jesus just assumes that Nicodemus, who had been trained in the teachings of the Torah, knows the story and can recite it chapter and verse.  But in case you never made it to Sunday School on the day they were getting out the poisonous snakes for the ol' flannel-board, here's the short version.  

Once upon a time when the recently liberated, formerly enslaved children of Israel were wandering in the wilderness, they started complaining about life in the middle of nowhere.  They didn't like not knowing where they were going... they were getting nostalgic for life in Egypt... they didn't like having to rely on God for food every day... and they were starting to get tired of trusting Moses to guide them. And they complained that they didn't think God was doing a very good job of taking care of them.  So, as sometimes happens in life, God gave the people exactly what they asked for, and they realized it was not what they thought. God let the people see what it was like without God's direction, guidance, and provision. God withheld the protection the people had been relying on, and whaddayaknow, all of a sudden, poisonous serpents [which, you know, already live in the wilderness] started coming up to the people and biting them.  So now you've got a whole group of people with dangerous snake-bites, who all of a sudden realize there had been a whole lot of dangers they hadn't even realized they were being protected from, that God hadn't even made a big deal about mentioning.  But they're also on the verge of death from the venom--so God directs Moses to make a representation of a serpent out of bronze and set it up on a pole. And this is the absolutely bonkers part of the story--God just decrees that everyone who as much as looks at the bronze serpent will be healed from the snake bites.  That's it.  There's no sorriness ritual, no sermon demanding a public show of repentance.  There's not even a logical connection between how looking at a snake made of bronze would cure a bite from a very real, very deadly actual snake.  It's simply a question of whether they will trust that God has provided a way for them--and just look at the bronze serpent that you almost couldn't miss seeing, since it was up on that pole.  

Now, once you get past the sheer strangeness of that episode from the book of Numbers, it's hard to hear that story be anything other than humbled by it.  Here the people come off as fickle, foolish, and ungrateful, and when they get their just desserts, God provides a remedy that leaves no room for bragging.  They realize ultimately that God knew what God was doing all along, that God has been caring for them in ways they didn't even know about, and then they are handed a remedy so unlikely and preposterous it has to be a gift of grace.  In other words, there's nothing anybody has to "do" or "acheive" or "earn" in order to win the antidote to the snake bites--they simply trust that God has provided everything and is giving the healing away for free.  You can't receive a free remedy for a problem you got yourself into and still be an arrogant jerk about it--you just can't.  God's love has a way of doing that to us--healing us and humbling us at the same time.

And with that in the background, Jesus takes the image of the snake on the pole and tells Nicodemus that this is what he has come for, too.  Just as the serpent in the wilderness was "lifted up" and provided life and healing to anybody who merely looked at it, so he [the "Son of Man," or "Truly Human One"] will be "lifted up" and give life to any and all who trust him.  That's it.  No rituals to be performed.  No quests to be completed.  No offerings or sacrifices, and no rules mentioned as prerequisites.  There is simply the free gift offered to anybody who finds themselves in a world of hurt and needing a lifeline.  And it comes, preposterously, not from a vision of beauty or a divine oracle, but from the grotesque figure of an executed man on a Roman death stake.  The cross is the new pole, and Jesus casts himself as the new bronze serpent--the one who becomes ugly for the sake of making us whole and beautiful, the one who bears all of our deathliness to bring us to life.

So what does any of this ancient storytelling have to do with us in the twenty-first century an ocean away from Jesus, Nicodemus, and the wilderness where the serpents live?  Well, for one, Christians dare to believe that Jesus is our Savior and Healer, just as he says it here to Nicodemus.  Jesus saves us the way the bronze serpent saved the bitten Israelites--that is, without our contributing effort, ability, skill, or smarts.  It's all a gift, which undercuts any grounds we had for pride that makes us look down on someone else.  It's why, after a lifetime of faith and dedicated service, Martin Luther's final words were, "We are beggars--this is true," and not, a la, Frank Sinatra's song, "I did it my way."  It's why Jesus' community was always full of people who knew they were mess-ups and why it was such a scandal to the people who were trying to convince they world they weren't mess-ups.  

Let's be honest: sometimes Christians talk about their faith like it's their accomplishment--they believe correctly about God, and should thereby be rewarded... or they have endured in the face of hostility [which is often why modern-day American Christians want to cast themselves as persecuted, even when we're not], and therefore have earned themselves one of those golden crowns.  But that's not how Jesus talks about things here: he's not doling out rewards for the Heavenly Honor Roll. He's rescuing us from the hell-of-a-mess we've gotten ourselves into.  And when we realize that, it has a way of humbling us.  When we see that we're recovering from our own snakebites, it takes away our arrogant impulse to scold the person nursing a fang-shaped wound next to us.  None of us gets to look down on the person next to us--we're all desperate for the same anti-venom.  

And it turns out that God's already given it away for free without strings--there he is, lifted up on a cross, just where we can see him... and find ourselves healed.

Lord Jesus, we dare to believe you are rescuing us right now--let that knowledge humble us enough to love the ones around us who are recovering, too.

Whose Labor?--March 6, 2023

Whose Labor?--March 6, 2023

[Jesus said to Nicodemus:] "Do not be astonished that I said to you, 'You must be born from above.' The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes. So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit." [John 3:7-8]

Quick reminder:  you didn't earn your own birth.  It was given to you.

So when Jesus uses the language of being "born from above" or "born of the Spirit" to describe how we come to participate in God's "kingdom" or "reign," guess what?  That's a gift, too.  Sharing life with God isn't something you apply for, achieve, or earn your way into.  It's not a reward, a graduation, or an accomplishment.  It's a gift from beginning to end, just like our lives are.  You can't earn your own birth--you are given it, primarily from a mother who does the labor, maybe with partial supporting credit for the doctors, nurses, or midwives on the scene, and the intangible support of everybody else who isn't pushing but is pacing, waiting, or squeezing hands in the delivery room.  But you know as well as I do that the one being born doesn't "work" to accomplish the birth--only to receive it.  And to hear Jesus tell it, even our coming to faith is a gift of the God who births us into that kind of trust.

That's a big deal to take seriously, because it completely reframes the way we are used to thinking about the start of our lives of faith.  So much of American religious-speak makes it sound like our accomplishment: "Have you been born again?" becomes a question loaded with ominous accusation, probing into whether we've done enough, or prayed the right prayer, said the right words, or believed the correct list of theological propositions to earn a certain status.  So much of Respectable Religion in our culture takes the phrase "born again" and completely misses the point of how being born actually works: it's a gift made possible by someone else's labor, and initiated by someone else's choice to love you into being.  In other words, it's not something you can brag about--only something you can be grateful for.

Whether it was Nicodemus in the first century or the official faces of Respectable Religion in the twenty-first, we still keep trying to make our relationships with God into something we can brag about or puff ourselves up over.  If I've been "born again" and it's my accomplishment, then I can look down on all the people who haven't checked the same boxes I have, and I can use that checklist as a gate to keep out others who don't measure up.  If being "born of the Spirit" is something I made happen, then I have grounds to justify my arrogance and treat everybody else like they're unworthy, unlovable, and unacceptable to God.  But if--as the metaphor of birth itself certainly implies--this whole notion of being "born from above" is a gift of a gracious God, then all of a sudden the playing field is leveled, and I don't get to look down on anybody. I'm just a recipient of new life by grace, the same as the rest of us.  And there's no earning on my part--it's all been God's labor and the Spirit's movement.

How will it affect the way we see other people with that in mind?  How might it help us to love people without looking down on them or puffing ourselves up?  And how might we be moved simply to gratitude to the Spirit for having birthed us, rather than comparing ourselves or our spiritual status to someone else?  It seems to me that all of that comparison and judgment ends up being just an obstacle that gets in the way of genuine love--think of how much more freely we can move without those hindrances today.

O Spirit of God, we give you thanks for having born us into faith--enable us to see that as your gift rather than our accomplishment, so that we can love like you.