Taking Jesus Seriously--August 10, 2023

Taking Jesus Seriously--August 10, 2023

"After Jesus had washed the disciples' feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, 'Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord--and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you'." [John 13:12-15]

If Jesus is just a random historical figure, then you're free to ignore what he says and dismiss his actions.  If Jesus is nothing more than a teacher of philosophy, there's no reason we can't pick and choose from his insights like we're at a buffet, selecting only the nuggets of wisdom we like and skipping over the things that are not to our taste.  And if Jesus is reducible to just our religious mascot (as it is tempting for Respectable Religious Folks to want to do with him) who merely endorses whatever agenda we've got for him, then we never really have to be stretched out of our comfort zones to follow him.  

But... if our relationship with Jesus is one of discipleship to a rabbi or allegiance to a Lord, then we aren't the ones in charge, picking and choosing what to keep from Jesus, and what to skip over in the salad bar.  That is to say, if our relationship with Jesus requires us to live in trust with him, then we're not customers paying for a product. We are learning the Jesus way of life, and he gets to be the one to show us how we walk that way.  Faith in Jesus, in other words, means accepting that he'll show us what it looks like to love the way he loves.  And it means we don't get to ignore the teachings of Jesus that call us into serving like him.

Jesus makes that clear in this well-known passage from his last night with the disciples.  When he gets up from the table and washes their feet--taking the most menial job of the lowliest of the servants in a first-century Mediterranean culture--the disciples are baffled at first.  You probably know that at first Simon Peter protests what is happening and refuses to let Jesus do something so scandalously humbling.  But when Jesus has washed all of their feet (including, the text makes clear, Judas the betrayer), he then explains to them that this outrageous act of serving is what it looks like to love.  And he makes it clear, too, that they are called to follow the example he has set--perhaps literally, by physically washing one another's feet when they were dirty and smelly and needed it, but also as a model for all of their life in community.  Jesus' followers are called to serve each other, and to let other serve them in turn as well, in whatever the situation is.  

So, beyond the basin and towel, that might mean we take turns doing the "dirty" work of washing dishes in the church kitchen at the next shared congregational dinner.  It might mean that in our households, we look for ways to serve each other, rather than demanding or expecting others to serve us.  It might mean we go out of our way to hold the door or take the shopping cart back for the stranger at the grocery store.  It might mean we risk being called "weak" or a "loser" because we aren't always trying to put ourselves on top.  And it might mean learning the back-and-forth of sometimes putting other's needs before our own (which can be difficult for us, sometimes), and also of letting others attend to our needs as well (which can also be difficult, especially if we want to project the illusion that we're self-sufficient and don't ever need any help).  But none of those are "optional" practices we can just skip if we believe that Jesus is Lord rather than just an interesting figure from history or a philosophy professor.

I suspect you might be noticing a recurring thread here through this month's focus on how love is "always believing."  We keep hearing and seeing in passage after passage of Scripture that faith is not only a matter of believing things about Jesus, but also of simply believing Jesus--that is, trusting what he says and striving to live in ways that look like him.  We don't do it to impress anybody, least of all God (who isn't fooled and doesn't need to be, anyway).  But we strive to live the Jesus way of life precisely we believe that Jesus knows what he's talking about. So if Jesus says, "My followers will practice self-giving love for one another," we will commit to that same kind of love because we believe Jesus is right about that.  Like the old line of Dallas Willard puts it, "Saying Jesus is Lord can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate in saying Jesus is smart…he is not just nice, he is brilliant, he is the smartest man who has ever lived."  Saying we believe in Jesus is going to include trusting that he knows the purpose and greatest fulfillment of our lives.  Faith is not merely a matter of memorizing a set of statements about Jesus without practicing love the way Jesus calls us to.  Faith means trusting Jesus when he directs us to wash one another's feet, choose the way of serving, and seek the good of others. It always has.

Today, what might it look like to practice foot-washing kind of love?  What might the 21st century analogs be for that utterly humble and self-emptying act of Jesus for his followers?  And what could it mean for us today to love people--including enemies, as surely as Jesus washed Judas' feet--the way Jesus has done for us first?

For us who name Jesus as Lord and Teacher, and not just an Interesting Historical Figure, exploring those questions is not optional.

Lord Jesus, let our trust in you lead us to do what you call us to do for one another.

Because Jesus Said So--Devotion for August 9, 2023

Because Jesus Said So--Devotion for August 9, 2023

"Philip went down to the city of Samaria and proclaimed the Messiah to them. The crowds with one accord listened eagerly to what was said by Philip, hearing and seeing the signs that he did, for unclean spirits, crying with loud shrieks, came out of many who were possessed; and many others who were paralyzed or lame were cured. So there was great joy in that city.... But when they believed Philip, who was proclaiming the good news about the kingdom of God and the name of Jesus Christ, they were baptized, both men and women." [Acts 8:5-8, 12]

If everybody you knew from childhood had taught you to hate a certain group of people, but Jesus had told you to love them... who would you believe?

If your teachers, neighbors, and relatives had all raised you with the belief that some folks were not acceptable to God, just by their very nature, but then Jesus had come along and said otherwise, whose instruction would you follow?

If your entire upbringing had been built on the assumption that "Those People" were your enemies with the wrong religion, wrong culture, and wrong way of speaking, but then Jesus told stories that made those very same folks the heroes, would you welcome them just because Jesus said so?

Or would the force of inertia from old prejudices hold you back from embracing the folks you had been brought up to keep at arm's length?

That's the question at play in this story from the life of the early church: whether faith in the particular teaching of Jesus was strong enough to overcome old animosities and bigotry, or whether those ingrained prejudices would snuff out the flickering flame of love.

You don't have to know a great deal of ancient geography to see why this episode from the early church is such a big deal; you probably already picked up on the name of the city where Philip went to tell people about Jesus, and it started ringing bells.  He went to "Samaria," which--you guessed it--is where the name "Samaritans" comes from.  And you probably already know that in the first century, there was a fierce hatred between Jewish and Samaritan communities, one which had gone back for generations.  Each group eyed the other with suspicion, derision, and contempt for having the wrong religious practices, heritage, and dialect.  That's why Jesus' parable about a Samaritan who saves the day was so shocking to his first hearers--it had the impact of imagining a pastor and church council president walked on by the man in need while an Afghan refugee or central American migrant seeking asylum stopped to help.  Everybody in Jesus' hometown had been raised in an atmosphere of hostility toward Samaritans, and they had learned it from their parents, grandparents, and generations further back. 

But then along comes Jesus who doesn't accept those prejudices, and who won't just accept and pass along the xenophobia that others had gotten so used to that they didn't even notice it any longer.  And when Jesus' followers began an intentional community (we call it "church") continuing to live by his way and inviting others to join them, they dared to take Jesus' inclusive vision seriously.  It wasn't always smooth, and it wasn't always speedy, but they did.  The early church preserved the memory that Jesus had spoken to a Samaritan woman as a social equal at Jacob's well, and then her witness became the catalyst for drawing all her neighbors to know Jesus, too.  They retold Jesus' story about a Samaritan who truly understood what it meant to "love your neighbor" when the Respectable Religious leaders didn't.  And they shaped their lives around the kind of love Jesus had taught them--even when it led them to re-evaluate and leave behind the old hatreds their families had ingrained in them.  Their faith in Jesus didn't only mean believing certain things about Jesus, but actually taking seriously what Jesus said and taught.

That's what makes this story such a big deal.  Here an early Christian leader, by the name of Philip, took seriously what he had come to believe because of Jesus.  When the church in Jerusalem scattered to avoid persecution, Philip deliberately chose to go to Samaria. And he didn't go there as a way of going in to hiding or covering up his faith in Jesus--he went there to keep telling more and more people about him.  In other words, Philip went to Samaria with the clear intention of including--gasp!--Samaritans in the community of Jesus.  Just a few years earlier, when Jesus was first gathering disciples, that would have sounded scandalous and outrageous.  (Remember that time a village of Samaritans didn't want to receive Jesus, and the disciples' first instinct was to ask Jesus for the OK to call down fire from heaven to incinerate them all?  That's where the bar was set.)  But something changed over time--the community of Jesus' followers actually dared to listen to his teaching. They still struggled with just how to live out his commandments (as we still do), but they really did attempt to live out what they believed--to trust what Jesus told them, and to live by it.  So when Philip goes to Samaria, it is a momentous thing, because it meant that the early church was trying to live out its faith through love--to include the ones they had all been raised to exclude, and to embrace the ones they had grown up hating... all simply because Jesus said so.

Two thousand years later, that's worth remembering.  When we deliberately welcome those we had been taught to shun, it's not because we are bent on disobeying Jesus or rejecting the Bible, but just the opposite: it's because we are daring to take Jesus' example seriously.  When we look at ourselves honestly enough to see where old prejudices have us in their grip, it's the voice of Jesus that helps us to shake them off and show love.  When we intentionally seek out the folks we were always told were "unacceptable," it's not because we're ignoring God, but exactly because we are trying to listen to what God has said in Jesus.  Even if it means leaving behind the legacy of hostility that an earlier generation taught us to hold onto, we dare to show love to the ones labeled "enemy," precisely because of our faith in Jesus, not in spite of it.

Today that might mean some honest self-reflection and a willingness to let Jesus stretch us beyond our comfort zones and maybe even beyond what other people told us was right.  It might mean a willingness to trust Jesus' word and way even above what we've always assumed and what we had always been taught.  I know that can sound scary, and it runs the risk that others will look at us skeptically and accuse of, well, who knows--moral carelessness, being friendly with "sinners," and all the same things they accused Jesus of, too.  But that's just it: when we are actually listening to Jesus and live out our faith in him, that will always lead us to love more widely and risk being labeled a troublemaker... just like him.  

That's worth the risk.

Lord Jesus, help us hear your voice and to take your teaching seriously, even when that stretches us beyond our old assumptions.

A Borrowed Faith--August 8, 2023

A Borrowed Faith--August 8, 2023

"When [Jesus] returned to Capernaum after some days, it was reported that he was at home. So many gathered around that there was no longer room for them, not even in front of the door; and he was speaking the word to them. Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man, carried by four of them. And when they could not bring him to Jesus because of the crowd, they removed the roof above him; and after having dug through it, they let down the mat on which the paralytic lay. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, 'Son, your sins are forgiven.'" [Mark 2:1-5]

Healing is never the prize awarded for your believing hard enough.  And faith is not the currency that buys you access to God's help.  

Here's one way you can know that: the man in this story who gets healed isn't the one named as having faith.  It's his friends.  Mark, the narrator of this story, says that "Jesus saw their faith," that is, the friends who lowered their companion on the mat.  And it's from being moved by their care for their friend and their trust in Jesus that the rest of the story unfolds.  We don't know anything at all about the faith of the man on the mat--we don't know if he was hoping Jesus could heal him, or if he was uncertain or downright skeptical.  We don't even know how aware he was of his situation.  What we are told is that the friends who lowered him through the hole in the roof (which they had dug, mind you!) were determined to get their friend in front of Jesus, and that something good would come of it.  That's what faith in Jesus looked like in this moment.  

Now, let's hit the pause button for a moment here, and rewind the scene.  As Mark the narrator tells it, Jesus sees these guys tearing a hole in the roof of this house and lowering their friend down, but as far as we know, he hasn't had a chance to inquire about their theology, grill them on their biblical interpretation, or hear them recite a creed.  What Jesus sees is their love for their friend. And that love is expressed, at least in this case, by pulling apart the barrier that kept their friend from being in the presence of Jesus.  Jesus sees this action of compassion, and he can see their faith from that compassion.  If you want to say that the man on the mat is healed by faith in Jesus, you have to concede that in this story, it's a borrowed faith.

He knows they have put their trust in him because he can see the gamble they've taken in the very act of pulling apart the roof.  They are willing to bet, not only that Jesus is able to help their friend, but that he will be willing, rather than, say, angry about the damage to the roof. And it turns out that their faith is well-placed, because Jesus responds with compassion--he's not upset about the roof, offended at their impertinence, or mad about what they've done.  Instead, Jesus has seen the faith that animates their actions, and the way they are embodying love. The paralyzed man isn't healed, forgiven, and restored as a reward for his fervor in faith, but because the love and faith of his friends brings him to Jesus, who really is as compassionate and merciful as they had hoped.

In our culture, we so quickly want to turn faith into a transaction, where my belief in God is rewarded with answered prayers or good fortune and prosperity.  We have a way of seeing God as some kind of celestial appraiser, who assesses how much to compensate us as payment for our proper theology or the strength of our devotion.  We are tempted to take a story of healing and say, "Ah, well, he was healed because he believed hard enough, and Jesus knew he was deserving."  But that's simply not how this story goes--the faith that gets Jesus' attention belongs to the friends, and all they want is the chance for their paralyzed friend to meet Jesus.  There is no quid pro quo, no cures given in exchange for creeds, and no reduction of faith to a commodity you can trade for something else.  There is only an observant and compassionate Jesus, who knows faith when he sees it, and who is moved by the mercy of the man's friends.

I wonder--how could our trust in Jesus lead us to action for other people whom we care about?  Who might we be led to bring to Jesus, even if we don't know quite what to expect, other than that he is good, he is gracious, and he doesn't turn away even the man breaking through his roof?  I'll bet there are people you know who are waiting for you to help pull down the barriers that are keeping them from Jesus.  And I'll bet you Jesus recognizes it when we spend our energy removing those barriers for the sake of others.  In fact, I'd wager Jesus recognizes that as the calling card of love and of faith alike.

Lord Jesus, let our trust in you lead us to remove the barriers that have been keeping others away from you.

Beyond "Reasonable"--August 7, 2023

Beyond "Reasonable"--August 7, 2023

"When it was evening, the disciples came to Jesus and said, 'This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.' Jesus said to them, 'They need not go away; you give them something to eat.' They replied, 'We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.' And he said, 'Bring them here to me.' Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds." [Matthew 14:15-19]

Honestly... nobody knew what was going to happen next.  But, for all the ways they could sometimes be dense or doubtful, in this moment, Jesus' disciples trusted his directions even when they made no sense, and they got to be participants in an utter miracle.

For all of us who have heard this story before (like many of us did this Sunday), the surprise miracle of a plot-twist is spoiled already.  We know what to expect.  We have been taught to call this story "The Feeding of the Five Thousand" (which gives away the ending right there in the title) rather than "The Time Jesus Told His Disciples To Do Something Crazy With Some Bread." But that familiarity means we might miss what a leap of faith it is for the disciples to do what Jesus says here.  And we might not realize how that foundation of trust makes it possible for them to play a role in Jesus' amazing act of love here for a hungry crowd of thousands.  

At the start of this story, Jesus' disciples actually sound like the collective voice of reason here. They're the ones gently nudging Jesus to call off his impromptu free clinic curing the sick until evening, and they're also the ones suggesting it might be wise to send the crowds home early enough that they could all find some food on their way home back to their villages and towns.  They're not being stingy, miserly, or selfish--they're just realistic about the size of the crowds, the lateness of the hour, and the utterly colossal amount of money and resources it would take to feed the literal thousands of people there on the hillside.  Their first proposal to Jesus ("Send the crowds home for today so that they can get back to their homes and get some food...") is a sensible plan to manage the large crowd and keep them from becoming a hangry mob (you know, being angry from being hungry is called "hangry," right?).  By contrast, when Jesus tells them to take what might have been a passable lunch for maybe two people and tell the thousands to sit down and get ready for a meal, it sounds patently absurd.  No rational person would look at the mere handful of morsels they had in hand and conclude, "This is enough for everybody here!" It wouldn't have even been enough for all the people in Da Vinci's Last Supper painting!

But when Jesus directs them to do it, the disciples dare to believe that there is a method to his madness.  They will trust him, and they will do as he asks, even if they don't know what he has in mind or up his sleeve.  They have faith in him--not merely in the academic, catechetical sense of "memorizing correct theological facts about Jesus"--but they trust him enough to do what he directs them to do, whether or not they understand what difference it could make.  Like the famous line from Dietrich Bonhoeffer's classic The Cost of Discipleship puts it, "Only those who believe are obedient, and only those who are obedient believe."  In other words, when Jesus tells you to have the crowd sit down and prepare to distribute five little dinner rolls to feed thousands of people, actually believing Jesus means doing what he says, regardless of your understanding of his plan.

That is precisely what the disciples do--they dare to believe him, by doing what he calls them to do. And when they carry out Jesus' directions on faith, they are part of a colossal act of compassion for the hungry crowds.  They are moved beyond what is "reasonable" to what embodies Christ-like love, by letting themselves become a part of Jesus' miraculous meal.  They don't know how he will provide for everyone, but they believe it is worth doing what he says--and so they help carry out a mass-feeding that communicated Jesus' love for all those people gathered in the grass.

Something changes in us when we let our first question be "What is Jesus' love for all people leading me to do, even if I don't see how it will work?" rather than "What is reasonable, rational, and sensible?"  It's fine to want to be logical, but Jesus is always going to reserve the right to pull us into something bigger than our minds can comprehend, and in those times, we need to be prepared to do what Jesus calls us to do whether or not it fits anybody else's definition of "reasonable."  Jesus' kind of compassion is always more than our tiny, shriveled, miserly thinking about being "reasonable" can grasp.

Today, there might be moments when you know you are being called to join into what Jesus is doing in our time and place--and you might not be able to see where it's leading, or how your part will make a difference.  Maybe sometimes the smallness of our efforts, our power, and the vastness of the need makes it seem futile and irrational to even try to do what Jesus calls us to.  Maybe it feels like taking five loaves and two fish and trying to feed thousands with it.  But... for the disciples, this became the moment they trusted Jesus even when they didn't know how his plan would work out, and because of that, they could be instruments of help and compassion on a huge scale.  When you think that your voice, your time, your efforts, and your energy are too small to make an impact for good, it's worth it to stop and say to yourself, "I will trust that Jesus knows what he's doing--and I will be a part of his movement of mercy in the world." That's how faith opens the door to a daring, vibrant love.

Lord Jesus, call us where you will, and give us trust enough in you to go where you lead, and to do what you call us to do, even if it seems impossible.

The Why of Love--August 4, 2023

The Why of Love--August 4, 2023

"We love because God first loved us." [1 John 4:19]

So, yesterday a young girl, maybe eleven years old or so, came riding her bike with her family down the street, and she wiped out.  Her tire probably hit a stray rock on the asphalt or something, and it was just enough to tip her off balance and skin her elbows and knee.  In a matter of moments, though, not only had her family members circled around her to help her up off the ground, but neighbors came, too.  Just people who had been sitting on their front porches or in their yards and heard the noise or saw the fall, and they offered whatever she might need.  Band-aids?  Check.  Ice for the scrapes?  It was there.  Neosporin and some wet paper towels?  All offered, accepted, and used.  And all of it between perfect strangers who just happened to be on the same block in the same town at the same time.  It was a beautiful moment to see playing out in real time, and in so many ways, it seemed to be exactly what Mister Rogers had in mind all those years ago when he sang to children on television about neighborliness.

Now, there is something truly lovely about how random strangers snapped into action to offer help, without much time at all to deliberate, pontificate, or ruminate on whether they should help.  They just showed up, like it was the most natural thing in the world--like they were on autopilot, or like they'd been rehearsing and practicing for such a moment for years and knew just what to do.  And maybe, in that moment, no thinking at all needed to be done--it was obvious there was a neighbor in need, and those needs were easily met.  So they did.

But preachers are good at digging deeper into things that seem obvious already on the surface, so I'll admit, I've been thinking about that scene ever since.  What is it that spurs a handful of people who have never met to help someone who clearly cannot pay them back, someone who arguably has only added an interruption and inconvenience to their day, and someone about whom they knew nothing (other than that this was a fellow human who was hurting)?  Why wasn't the immediate reaction of the neighbors on their porches, "This is no concern of mine!" or "Here's another scam from someone trying to con me out of my supply of band-aids..."?  Why wasn't there any crunching of numbers to see how many spare band-aids or ice cubes were needed for the people in the house in case they had an injury?  Why no suspicion that the stranger in the road with the skinned knee might be a bad person, or come from a family with different politics, or root for the wrong sports team?

Well, for those of us who strive to follow Jesus, I'll bet at least part of the thought process, if we ever find ourselves in such a situation, is simply, "Here is someone God loves--how can I not show love to them when they are in need?"  Or, as a variation on the same theme, "God has loved me and offered comfort for me when I was the one who had fallen in the road: now I am called to pass that love forward for the next person in need."  Or maybe it just comes across as: "God has commanded us to love our neighbors, and because this God loves me, I want to do the things that align with God's heart, too."  But however you get there, the same basic move happens: something we believe about God shapes how we see our neighbors.  And if we believe (as Christians do) that God's fundamental posture toward every face on earth is, "You are made in my image... you are my beloved... you are worth dying for," then our posture toward other people will be shaped by that same love.

All of that is to say, what we believe about God--and more specifically, what we believe God thinks about a world full of fellow humans--plays a direct role in how we treat those fellow humans.  And for us who have come to know God in the life of Jesus, we are convinced that God loves all of those face, those neighbors, those fellow-beloveds.  And so we love as well.  As the writer of what we call First John puts it, "We love, because God first loved us."

Sometimes we just don't recognize that the claim "God first loved us" is a claim of faith.  You can't deduce it like a logical theorem; you can't prove it with a stack of physical evidence.  You can't look it up in the Encyclopedia or Wikipedia or appeal to some universally accepted Book of Knowledge.  Rather, it is a claim the Christian Scriptures make that we have to decide what to do with: will we dare to believe what the New Testament writers say about God as we've come to see God in Jesus, or will we refuse to believe? Either way we are making a claim on the basis of faith--of trust, of belief--and either way, it will affect how we see other people around us.

And at least part of what it means to believe that God not only loves us, but has loved us first before we did a thing to earn it, is the realization that we are called to love others back precisely because God loved us first.  What we believe makes a difference, not so much because there will be a post-mortem final exam in theology at the gates of heaven, for which your score determines your destination in the afterlife, but because what we believe about God shapes who we are and how we love.  And when we take it seriously that God loves us--an "us" that includes the whole world--then we become people who snap into action when a neighbor scrapes her knee outside of our front porch, or needs someone to listen when his heart is heavy, or needs permanent housing.  We come to be people who love like it is second nature, because we have come to believe we are loved by God--and so are those who come across our path.

Good theology matters, in the end, not to win us points on our Afterlife SATs, but because what we believe affects how we see the world, and how we love the people in it.  Today is a day, then, to pay attention to what we believe about God, for the very practical reason that faith becomes the energy that drives our hands and feet.

Lord God, remind us that you have loved us first, so that we will love others in response.

...If It Ain't Got That Swing--August 3, 2023

...If It Ain't Got That Swing--August 3, 2023

"For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything; the only thing that counts is faith working through love." [Galatians 5:6]

Maybe there was no other way to say it than Duke Ellington's:  it don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.  

That song, now a standard of jazz and swing music, became both a hit and a classic, and you almost can't hear the words or tune without tapping along to the beat.  Ellington's song has "that swing," and of course as the words remind us, you can have everything else technically "correct" in a piece of music, but if it doesn't have the rhythm to move you along with it, it's sort of a waste.  Ellington once said that "swing" was "Harlem for rhythm," and you get the sense that he'd say you could compose a symphony with complexity and precision and still miss the point of everything if it didn't draw listeners into the sway of its pulse.  If your piece of music is just an academic exercise or maximally-marketable pop-culture confection but doesn't actually move people, well... as the lyric goes, "it don't mean a thing."  And even if that phrasing isn't the King's English, I suspect that you know exactly what Duke Ellington is trying to get across. Music that doesn't move you in its groove can feel like a homework assignment to listen to; music that swings has a way of pulling you into its motion.

I get the same vibe from Paul, honestly, when he talks about what really matters in our lives as the people of God.  After having spent an awful lot of his letter to the Galatians making the point that God was not interested in making people fit into neat little categories like "Jew" or "Gentile," "free" or "enslaved," or even "male and female," (check it out--that's literally right out of Galatians 3:28), Paul now gets to what really does matter to God.  "In Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncirmcumcision (the physical markers of being Jewish or Gentile) count for anything," he says.  And instead, "the only thing that counts is faith working through love."  Maybe if the apostle had sat in with Duke Ellington and company, he might have said, "I don't mean a thing if it ain't about faith energizing love." You get the same feel from Paul as from the jazz lyric: you can get all the externals technically right, and you can maybe even make yourself a religion that's popular and marketable--but if it isn't about faith embodied into love, "it don't mean a thing."

Church folk, to be sure, have historically had a way of majoring in minors and focusing on the stuff that ultimately "don't mean a thing."  We disagree about the color of the carpet in the new building project.  We complain when they try out a new hymnal.  We get upset over the right way to celebrate Communion--the moment in which the followers of Jesus should theoretically be most bound together in unity--and end up splitting ourselves up from one another over who's right and who's wrong. We can't even all agree on when to celebrate Easter, it turns out.  But throughout it all, the voice of the apostle keeps saying loud and clear, "If the things you're getting hung up on aren't ultimately about faith expressing itself in love, well, they don't mean a thing."  

I think we need that reminder, not just as a way to sift out what not to make a fuss about, and what to keep in focus, but also because Paul is telling us that faith is more than an idea in our heads and love is more than a feeling in our hearts.  It's easy to treat love as merely an amorphous feeling--just a vague niceness, or that feeling of butterflies in your stomach when the ones you love are in the room.  But because Paul keeps faith and love connected, almost like faith is the wind in the sails of love, there is direction and energy given to love.  And because for Christians that faith is always connected to the particularity of Jesus--the way he lives, the way he treats people, the things Jesus values, and the way Jesus overcomes death with resurrection life--our love as Christians is always more substantive than flighty feelings or ephemeral emotions.  Love that is informed (literally, "formed from the inside out") by faith in Jesus will always take shape in action, in a particular way of moving in the world--maybe, you could even say, echoing Jesus' cadence, or dancing in Jesus' kind of groove.  Christians, in other words, are not simply people who subscribe to certain facts about Jesus or God or heaven, but people whose trust in Jesus leads us to move like him in the world--that is, with his love... his grace... his swing.

Where our faith has stopped connecting to the ways we live and move and love in the world, maybe it's time to ask, "Does this mean anything anymore?" or at the very least, to ask ourselves, "What difference is this going to make in how I live and love others in this day?" And maybe where we start asking that again, we'll find a new energy in the course of our days--maybe even an unexpected swing we had been missing.

Lord Jesus, animate our actions into love that is formed by our faith in who you are.

Braided Strands--August 2, 2023

Braided Strands--August 2, 2023

"Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, ‘Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.’ But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, ‘Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.’ He answered, ‘I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But she came and knelt before him, saying, ‘Lord, help me.’ He answered, ‘It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.’ She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.’ Then Jesus answered her, ‘Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.’ And her daughter was healed instantly." [Matthew 15:21-28]

So... is this a story about a mother's deep love for her daughter, or her fierce faith in Jesus?

It's both, of course.  And maybe it's a story that shows how often "faith" and "love" turn out not to be two discrete, separable things, but two sides of the same coin.  If I asked you to point to the evidence of this woman's faith in Jesus in this episode, you'd say, "Well, look, she loves her daughter enough to go to Jesus, confident that he is able to help, even despite the roadblocks that both his disciples and seemingly Jesus himself puts in her way."  And if I asked you to show me evidence of her love for her daughter, you'd say, "She's willing to leap out in faith that Jesus is not only able, but will ultimately be willing, to help heal her daughter."  You can't really extricate faith from love in this story, like you can't get the chocolate syrup back out of your chocolate milk once you've stirred them up. 

To be sure, there are other thorny issues with this story that probably make us wince when we read them.  Why does Jesus seem so standoffish about helping?  Does Jesus know how ugly his words sound, by essentially calling this woman a "dog" (a common slur against Gentiles in this time and culture)?  Does Jesus know about her deep faith all along somehow, and simply use this episode to tease out the belief he knows is waiting to be given voice--or does Jesus change his mind and reconsider his opinion of her as the scene unfolds?  I know--there's a lot that makes me uncomfortable about this story every time I read it, even in those times when I think I know what Jesus is up to.  But when I stop for a moment and look at the actions of this mother for her daughter, I find something solid to hold onto. She shows me that, even when I can't understand what Jesus may be up to in this story (or in my life, too), I can at least put my faith into action in love--or, to put it the other way around, do what love calls me to do through the direction my faith points me in.

Faith, of course, can never just be reduced to Facts-You-Memorize-About-God-For-The-Test, despite the many ways Respectable Religious Folks have done that to the notion of faith over the centuries.  It's not just mouthing the correct theological jargon, whether out of a creed, a catechism, or a tract someone handed you with a recipe for a prayer on the back page.  Faith, as our older brother in Christ Martin Luther once put it, is "a living, daring confidence in God's grace, so sure and certain that the believer would stake their life on it a thousand times."  In other words, faith leads us to take the next step, even when we can't see all of the road.  Faith is what lets us say, "I might well be scared about all the things beyond my control, but I am confident in the goodness and power of God to let me put one foot in front of the other and do what is within my purview for those I love."  Faith never merely sits still twiddling its thumbs, in other words--faith keeps expressing itself in love.

For the unnamed mother in this story, it is her love for her daughter that leads her to be willing to risk getting into trouble, being shamed, or being rejected when she steps out in faith toward Jesus.  There are so many ways that this episode could have ended with heartbreak--Jesus could have flat-out refused, or he could have made a public spectacle out of her, or his disciples could have succeeded in their efforts to play gatekeeper.  But she was willing to stare down all of those possibilities for the sake of the daughter whom she loved, because she really did trust deep down that there was a possibility that this Jesus she'd heard about could be both able and willing to heal her.  For her, faith could only be expressed in an act of sacrificial love for her daughter by putting herself out there before Jesus as she pleaded for help.  And love could only take the form of a leap of faith seeking mercy from a stranger she'd only ever heard about.  Ultimately for this woman and for us, faith and love are intertwined like the strands of a braid.

All too often, we church folks let somebody convince us that love and faith pull in different directions, and that we have to choose between them sometimes.  "I know you want to do the loving thing," they sometimes say, "but theologically correct faith won't let you."  Sometimes it's about who can be included.   Sometimes it's about who is welcome at the Table of Jesus.  Sometimes it's about who is permitted to lead.  And a lot of the time, there are voices convinced that "true faith" runs counter to the direction of "genuine love."  

So sometimes you'll hear, "You can't support your kid who has come out to you--not if you have 'True Faith'!  You have to pick and choose whether to hold fast to 'being right' or loving your child."  Or sometimes it's, "I know you would like to allow women in the pulpit, but we have decided that Officially Approved Faith will not allow for their leadership, no matter how loving your intentions."  And heartbreakingly, it is often, "I understand that you want to let those visitors come to take communion at our church, but until we double-check to make sure their theology is in sufficient agreement with our official policy, they're not allowed--you might upset Jesus."  We keep finding ways to try to sever "faith" from "love" like they can be in conflict, and as if we have to pick one or the other.  It's like we're missing the power of this mother's witness.

I recently came across a sermon of Dietrich Bonhoeffer's that has helped me to see the connections between faith and love more clearly.  In a sermon of his from 1934, the pastor-and-future-martyr says this:  "A church of faith--even if it is the most orthodox faith that faithfully adheres to the creeds--is of no use if it is not even more a church of pure and all-embracing love. What does it mean to believe in Christ who was love and still be full of hatred yourself? ...It is of no use for us to confess our faith in Christ if we have not gone first and reconciled ourselves to our brothers and sisters, even to the godless, racially different, ostracized, and outcast."  Bonhoeffer had discovered what the mother in this passage knew: you can't really separate living faith from genuine love.  Her faith in Jesus' power and ultimate willingness to help her daughter could not be severed from her love for her child.  To act in faith meant to act in love--even if there were "religious reasons" she should not have asked, or kept on pestering, or talked back to Jesus.  The disciples would have surely said to her, "Officially approved theology [faith] decrees that your daughter is not eligible for help." They would have told her that she could pick either loving her daughter [asking for help] or orthodox theology [according to them] that realized Jesus' help was not for her.  But this mother refuses to accept such a division. To love her daughter meant to act in faith, and to put her faith in action meant to reach out for the sake of the daughter whom she loved.  

Today, maybe it's worth taking a look at the places we've fallen for separating "faith" from "love," and the places we've accepted the idea that those two point in opposite directions sometimes.  Maybe it's worth reconsidering how living faith leads us to act in love, and how genuine love is guided by faith in God's goodness, even when "the rules" or the religious gatekeepers say otherwise.

What leaps might that lead us to take in this new day?

Lord Jesus, let our faith in you lead us to act in love.