A while back the ELCA asked pastors to name a few members to receive a newsletter called, Seeds in the Parish. Besides their name, address, age range, gender and ethnicity, the pastor was to identify each one’s role in the congregation. Most titles were routine and obvious: leader, teacher, evangelist, etc. My favorite is Mission Interpreter. It sounds so bold and out of the box. I’ve used it only once. Next time I have a chance I’ll use that title, Mission Interpreter, to describe Jamal Caldwell (not his real name).
I say that, in part, because Jamal coaches me to use a blog to connect with younger people who aren’t yet part of this community. The latest lesson came in an email. Jamal encouraged me to put the blog up for review with a high-powered editorial / marketing service. They'll test the blog to see if it meets the standards of high exposure, heavy hitters like CNN, Fox News, USA Today and Reuters News Service.
Overall, applying for the review didn’t take much time, maybe 20 minutes. The greater challenge was responding to the three main questions using the required maximum keystrokes, not words, keystrokes. Imagine me saying anything in 200 keystrokes! What I’ve said before I’m saying this took 1,162 keystrokes.
The next challenge was answering the questions honestly, or rather, fairly – fair to them and fair to us. One item said, “Tell us about yourself and your blog.” Another said, "Summarize the blog," which I took to mean, what’s its focus, why do you write it. You see part of the difficulty here. Is it my blog, or our blog?
Now since I’m trying to persuade them that there’s some sizzle in the blog content, I tried to put some sizzle in these responses. I wanted both me and us to sound like we’re sizzlin’ folks and this is a happenin’ place. Of course, there’s not much point in evading the truth. If they choose to read the entries, they’ll make up their own minds.
Still, I worked to find sizzle, in me, in you and in us. I said I’m a second career, boomer pastor. I said you are a multiracial urban congregation in America’s heartland. (I don’t think of us as you, and me but they need to know that, for now, the pastor is the author.) I borrowed phrases from this piece about finding a church home. [See, "You'll Know a Church Home When You Find It," on this blogsite.] I read it often. It always prompts the same questions. If we’re being this kind of church, do I have the stamina to stay here? If we’re not being this kind of church, do I have the courage to leave here?
The best line said, “We’ve got a blue-state consciousness in a red-state context.” Pretty cool, huh? That might hook ‘em enough to read the blog, but there’s no telling what they’ll think of it.
Trouble is, you see, the last two blog entries are about Lent. How you gonna make Lent, and people who are praying, fasting and almsgiving, sound sizzlin’? How does a place where that happens sound happenin’?
Maybe I should say Lent is a fierce battle against temptation. Perhaps, using less churchy words to describe what temptation is would sound more sizzlin’. Temptation is trying to persuade someone. Temptation is wily pressure or cunning manipulation. Better yet, temptation is seduction. There’s a sizzlin’ word. When you’re seducing someone, you’re alluring, beguiling. Seduction is enticing someone from here to there. It comes from the Latin word, seducere, to lead away. Sounds more like an Oscar party than church, right? Now that’s sizzlin’ in a happen’ place!
Well, how about for the rest of this I just focus my whole heart on the flock God’s entrusted to me and not worry my mind over the flock my inflated ego thinks I should have over at CNN. How about for the rest of this you focus on Luke’s version of Jesus’ desert journey (Luke 4:1-13) as if you never heard it before, cuz it’s been a year since you heard it, and a year is a lifetime in the life of a true disciple.
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit in the wilderness, 2where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing at all during those days, and when they were over, he was famished. 3The devil said to him, "If you are the Son of God, command this stone to become a loaf of bread." 4Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'One does not live by bread alone.'"
5Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. 6And the devil said to him, "To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. 7If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours." 8Jesus answered him, "It is written, 'Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.'"
9Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, "If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, 10for it is written, 'He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,' 11and 'On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.'" 12Jesus answered him, "It is said, 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'" 13When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.
This Bible story, like every Bible story, is about God before it’s about us. This story tells us that the Jesus we call God’s divine son, is fully human. To be truly human Jesus must have the capacity to be tempted, i.e., allured, beguiled, enticed, influenced, persuaded and yes, seduced. Jesus could not have been some first century Clark Kent, capable of jumping into a phone booth to stop a satanic herd of pigs from goin’ over a cliff. Humans aren’t like that!
Jesus listened to and followed God’s word. He was full of the Holy Spirit. That’s why he was tempted, that is, had to struggle, needed to fight the battle. See, listening to God isn’t a struggle. Following God isn’t a battle. But those who listen to God will attract folks motivated by different words. They struggle for our attention. Those who follow God will be a magnet for folks charmed by other pathways. They battle for our allegiance. When they come around with their alluring terminology, we have to struggle. When they come around with their beguiling alleyways, we have to do battle.
Notice just how precise and persuasive this tempter is. The Greek word Luke uses for devil is diabolos. It means slanderer. That’s someone who, with lies, defames, insults, libels, or maligns.
This Satan, in Hebrew that means adversary, suggests to Jesus that, “If you are the son of God, then you should do these good things.” Do you see that? At root, these aren’t bad acts. God will have Jesus do each of these things in God’s own good time, when it pleases God for Jesus to do them. [Jesus does multiply loaves. Jesus does come to rule the world after defeating, not worhsipping the devil. Jesus is lifted by temple authorities onto a cross and after three days shows that God "protected" him from defeat by death.] It’s also true that the devil’s motivation and timing are not rooted in the word of God.
Pay attention to this sixth verse. The devil says authority over the earth has been given to me. That premise, stated nowhere in the Bible - especially nowhere from God’s mouth -doesn’t tell the truth, but how often have we been persuaded to act as if it were so. The powers are at work out there, but they have no authority out there unless we refuse to struggle, until we fail to do battle.
We carve out 40 days for Lent. But Lent isn’t about time; it’s about space. Lent is the journey we’re invited to take that crosses the space between where we are now and where God wants to lead us.
Inside that space, the distance between the last time we listened to God’s word and this moment, we have an opportunity to distinguish God’s word of life from the tall tales the culture would have us believe about ourselves, about world and about God.
Inside that space, the distance between the last time we walked in the evening shade with God and this moment, we have an opportunity to differentiate God’s high road of selfhood, wholeness and grace from the back alleyways the culture would have us travel toward selfishness, emptiness, and greed.
We make our way in this space, even though that often makes us crossways with the same world, the same flesh, and the same devil that put Jesus crossways, for us, on Calvary. We make our way in this desert space, pressing toward the promised land, so that we, like Jesus, can become more certain about our identity, more clear about our own mission under God’s rule, and more confident about how God wants us to join in what God never tires of doing, creating, saving, and blessing the world out there, including all God’s children.
Here’s how that looks. When you’re out there, where the powers are at work, and someone says, “What a coincidence…” that’s your chance to join the struggle. That’s your opportunity to wrestle with that false terminology and seduce them from over there to over here. “No, it’s not a coincidence. Our running into each other in this unlikely place is a grace from God.” When you’re out there, where the powers are at work, and someone says, “I’m havin’ a string of bad luck…” that’s your chance to do battle. That’s your opportunity to confront that charmed alleyway and seduce them from over there to over here. “No, it’s not bad luck. This awful experience you’re having gives us an opportunity to look for the ways God works all things for good for them that love and trust the Lord. Let me sit with you until that happens, that God makes a way out of no way.”
Sometimes when that happens, and God strengthens you for the struggle, the sizzle will be obvious. Other times the ways that’s happenin’, that God emboldens you for battle will require a Mission Interpreter. There’s none better to do that work than we who hear this God’s voice, eat from the fruit of this God’s table, and walk faithfully along this God’s path - alone and together.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Tuesday, February 27, 2007
An Ossuary Is Not Shock and Awe
If you're in doubt about the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth from the dead, the one who was crucified, there is little to nothing I can say in this brief space, or even in other settings, to change your mind! And if that's the case, then both of us, you and I, join a long list of folks who've recognized this reality before. You join the long list of doubters. I join the long list of witnesses who fail miserably.
Even Mark's Gospel reports that the first witnesses, the three women who discovered the empty tomb, had their doubts, "... So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." Mark 16:8. Read: shock and awe!
Clearly that wasn't the end of the story. Still, no one follows Jesus today based on knowledge from the past. We keep following Jesus - banking our present and future actions, choices and decisions on his word - by trusting that Jesus lives. Jesus is risen! Read: shock and awe.
See, at one level, it doesn't matter what happened to Jesus' body. And YES, I know that St. Paul wrote that if Christ is not risen from the dead then our faith is in vain. I believe that, too. But the focus of Paul's claim had, and has, more to do with what it means that Jesus lives, and less on habeus corpus, "show the body."
It's much like the saying, "Don't just tell me what you believe as a Christian, show me the difference that believing in a living Jesus Christ makes in you and in your world."
Folks are much more interested in hearing you tell them the last time you heard Jesus call you by name, than they are in finding out whether you think Jesus sits at the right or left of the throne of God!
Folks are much more convinced that Jesus is risen when you tell them the last time Jesus influenced your risk-taking, than they are when you read them the riot act cuz today the whole enterprise is too tough for them to swallow. Read: shock and awe.
Folks are much more interested in hearing how the story of Jesus is the story of your own everyday life, than they are in hearing you or me preach! Part of reclaiming the living Jesus, dead and risen for you, for me and for the whole world, happens when we put ourselves through the solemnity, the terror, the shock and awe, and even the tedium of worship each Sunday, but especially in Holy Week: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday.
Give yourself the gift of hearing the talk and walking the walk, again. Come reclaim the shocking, awesome things this great "coming for us God" has done and keeps on doing with only water, bread, wine, wood, nails, and blood, because Risen Jesus lives. Read: shock and awe!
Even Mark's Gospel reports that the first witnesses, the three women who discovered the empty tomb, had their doubts, "... So they went out and fled from the tomb, for terror and amazement had seized them; and they said nothing to anyone, for they were afraid." Mark 16:8. Read: shock and awe!
Clearly that wasn't the end of the story. Still, no one follows Jesus today based on knowledge from the past. We keep following Jesus - banking our present and future actions, choices and decisions on his word - by trusting that Jesus lives. Jesus is risen! Read: shock and awe.
See, at one level, it doesn't matter what happened to Jesus' body. And YES, I know that St. Paul wrote that if Christ is not risen from the dead then our faith is in vain. I believe that, too. But the focus of Paul's claim had, and has, more to do with what it means that Jesus lives, and less on habeus corpus, "show the body."
It's much like the saying, "Don't just tell me what you believe as a Christian, show me the difference that believing in a living Jesus Christ makes in you and in your world."
Folks are much more interested in hearing you tell them the last time you heard Jesus call you by name, than they are in finding out whether you think Jesus sits at the right or left of the throne of God!
Folks are much more convinced that Jesus is risen when you tell them the last time Jesus influenced your risk-taking, than they are when you read them the riot act cuz today the whole enterprise is too tough for them to swallow. Read: shock and awe.
Folks are much more interested in hearing how the story of Jesus is the story of your own everyday life, than they are in hearing you or me preach! Part of reclaiming the living Jesus, dead and risen for you, for me and for the whole world, happens when we put ourselves through the solemnity, the terror, the shock and awe, and even the tedium of worship each Sunday, but especially in Holy Week: Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday.
Give yourself the gift of hearing the talk and walking the walk, again. Come reclaim the shocking, awesome things this great "coming for us God" has done and keeps on doing with only water, bread, wine, wood, nails, and blood, because Risen Jesus lives. Read: shock and awe!
Monday, February 26, 2007
The State of Our Union Is...
The President shall report to the Congress on the state of the union, from time to time... , so says the constitution of the United States. And while there's no requirement that people of faith render the same sort of public accounting on the state of their souls, the season of Lent does offer us - alone and together - an opportunity to consider how life and faith are coming together for us.
What difference does it make, for ourselves and for the world that we claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ?
Have there been changes - maturity or "back-sliding" - in our follower-ship?
Maybe you remember those self-assessment tests published in magazines like Reader's Digest which ask us to score our emotional health. These usually involve charting major events in one's life; have we: moved; changed jobs; lost a spouse, or loved one; experienced a major illness; retired; won an award, etc. The "tests" suggest that each of these is the source of either a major stress or a significant delight - and so, affect our sense of well-being either positively or negatively.
While I'm not a big fan of so-called pop psychology, there is value in reflecting on who we are now; how we got here; what this space feels like, physically, emotionally and spiritually; and, whether or not this is really the space God calls us to inhabit. Heaven forbid our personal assessment of, "that's the way it is," were to echo the President's words – let’s ramp up our efforts to do more of the same even, though that hasn’t worked so far!
I'm not much of a fan of pop-religion either. That's why I recommend we take on some disciplines that have served people of faith since very early in the church's post-Easter, post-Pentecost experiences. These are: prayer, fasting, and alms-giving.
Despite the claims made by various civic and cultural leaders that all manner of beliefs, values, practices, and even laws, are rooted in the teachings, of Jesus, really living day-to-day, through Christ in the Holy Spirit, has never been popular or easy.
Jesus seems to have used his 40 desert days to sort through who God was calling him to be (Messiah); how he'd exercise that call (Sharin' Plenty Good News!); and, the means he'd use to make that proclamation come alive in his hearers' hearts (Suffering Servant / breaking open and pouring out).
What made the desert experience "work" for Jesus was something very much still available to us - time spent in dialogue (speaking and listening) to a loving God. Lent invites us to enter into that same union, from time to time.
These suggestions for practicing the traditional Lenten disciplines: prayer; fasting and almsgiving, are offered to help us, alone and together, make room in the middle of all our stuff to let Lent go through us. By such practices, Christians throughout the centuries have arrived at the three sacred days, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday better prepared to be seized by the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ. May God lead and find you there.
Prayer - We pray. Meaning we get into real communication with God the Spirit, who gathers us here; God the Father, who speaks a word that frees us from all anxiety here; and, God the Son, who has gone on ahead of us, leaving us such a clear example of what it means to live here and now as though the day Lord has indeed come near.
Don’t hold back:
• talk to this God
• write letters to this God
• make notes to this God in a journal
• draw pictures, or doodles to this God
• sing to this God, play music if you can
• cry your eyes out with this God
• scream at this God.
Be quiet with this God. Hear this God's word spoken just to you. Listen to this God's voice as it breaks out for you in special:
• memories
• feelings
• insights, and/or
• images.
More often than not, these aren't distractions; they're God's reward to you.
Fasting - We fast. Meaning we let go of all those dependencies that keep us from living a full life. That means not only giving up something, but moving toward something. God doesn't need a universe in which you don't eat cookies. But God might rejoice in a world where your voting habits change because you have a keener sense of what it means to really be hungry. That would lead to a fast of your heart, not of your belly. Your cutting an attachment from one thing in order to attach to something else, says a lot about where your treasure is. Don't hold back.
The purpose of fasting is to have empathy with (feel the feelings of) a suffering other, not to have sympathy (feel sorry) for another. Compassion wombs another; it creates a related exchange between another and ourselves. That's why we say our God is a compassionate God. Fasting helps us to walk in the other's shoes.
Almsgiving - We give alms. Meaning we adjust the way we spend all our resources: time; energy; attention; and, money, so that we're reminded that in Christ our life is dedicated to living in common with believers and unbelievers alike. Don't hold back.
• Call someone long distance and don't time how long you talk. Just tell them God reminded you how much you love them.
• Send someone a greeting card each day for a week. Just tell them God reminded you what an important part of your everyday life they are.
• Eat lunch with someone you've taken for granted. Just tell them God reminded you that every meal with them is a foretaste of the feast to come.
• Give an extra big offering to a church or to a charity whose mission and ministries you respect. Just tell them God reminded you that mission and ministry happen more smoothly when money isn't a constant worry.
• Attend Sunday school. Just remind yourself that God wants you both to learn more about each other.
What difference does it make, for ourselves and for the world that we claim to be disciples of Jesus Christ?
Have there been changes - maturity or "back-sliding" - in our follower-ship?
Maybe you remember those self-assessment tests published in magazines like Reader's Digest which ask us to score our emotional health. These usually involve charting major events in one's life; have we: moved; changed jobs; lost a spouse, or loved one; experienced a major illness; retired; won an award, etc. The "tests" suggest that each of these is the source of either a major stress or a significant delight - and so, affect our sense of well-being either positively or negatively.
While I'm not a big fan of so-called pop psychology, there is value in reflecting on who we are now; how we got here; what this space feels like, physically, emotionally and spiritually; and, whether or not this is really the space God calls us to inhabit. Heaven forbid our personal assessment of, "that's the way it is," were to echo the President's words – let’s ramp up our efforts to do more of the same even, though that hasn’t worked so far!
I'm not much of a fan of pop-religion either. That's why I recommend we take on some disciplines that have served people of faith since very early in the church's post-Easter, post-Pentecost experiences. These are: prayer, fasting, and alms-giving.
Despite the claims made by various civic and cultural leaders that all manner of beliefs, values, practices, and even laws, are rooted in the teachings, of Jesus, really living day-to-day, through Christ in the Holy Spirit, has never been popular or easy.
Jesus seems to have used his 40 desert days to sort through who God was calling him to be (Messiah); how he'd exercise that call (Sharin' Plenty Good News!); and, the means he'd use to make that proclamation come alive in his hearers' hearts (Suffering Servant / breaking open and pouring out).
What made the desert experience "work" for Jesus was something very much still available to us - time spent in dialogue (speaking and listening) to a loving God. Lent invites us to enter into that same union, from time to time.
These suggestions for practicing the traditional Lenten disciplines: prayer; fasting and almsgiving, are offered to help us, alone and together, make room in the middle of all our stuff to let Lent go through us. By such practices, Christians throughout the centuries have arrived at the three sacred days, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Holy Saturday better prepared to be seized by the Paschal Mystery of Jesus Christ. May God lead and find you there.
Prayer - We pray. Meaning we get into real communication with God the Spirit, who gathers us here; God the Father, who speaks a word that frees us from all anxiety here; and, God the Son, who has gone on ahead of us, leaving us such a clear example of what it means to live here and now as though the day Lord has indeed come near.
Don’t hold back:
• talk to this God
• write letters to this God
• make notes to this God in a journal
• draw pictures, or doodles to this God
• sing to this God, play music if you can
• cry your eyes out with this God
• scream at this God.
Be quiet with this God. Hear this God's word spoken just to you. Listen to this God's voice as it breaks out for you in special:
• memories
• feelings
• insights, and/or
• images.
More often than not, these aren't distractions; they're God's reward to you.
Fasting - We fast. Meaning we let go of all those dependencies that keep us from living a full life. That means not only giving up something, but moving toward something. God doesn't need a universe in which you don't eat cookies. But God might rejoice in a world where your voting habits change because you have a keener sense of what it means to really be hungry. That would lead to a fast of your heart, not of your belly. Your cutting an attachment from one thing in order to attach to something else, says a lot about where your treasure is. Don't hold back.
The purpose of fasting is to have empathy with (feel the feelings of) a suffering other, not to have sympathy (feel sorry) for another. Compassion wombs another; it creates a related exchange between another and ourselves. That's why we say our God is a compassionate God. Fasting helps us to walk in the other's shoes.
Almsgiving - We give alms. Meaning we adjust the way we spend all our resources: time; energy; attention; and, money, so that we're reminded that in Christ our life is dedicated to living in common with believers and unbelievers alike. Don't hold back.
• Call someone long distance and don't time how long you talk. Just tell them God reminded you how much you love them.
• Send someone a greeting card each day for a week. Just tell them God reminded you what an important part of your everyday life they are.
• Eat lunch with someone you've taken for granted. Just tell them God reminded you that every meal with them is a foretaste of the feast to come.
• Give an extra big offering to a church or to a charity whose mission and ministries you respect. Just tell them God reminded you that mission and ministry happen more smoothly when money isn't a constant worry.
• Attend Sunday school. Just remind yourself that God wants you both to learn more about each other.
Sunday, February 25, 2007
A Fetching Time
She hadn't meant to cause any harm. She especially hadn't meant to upset the villagers, to bring shame to her family, to put distance between herself and her husband, or to bring on so many sleepless nights.
It wasn't supposed to become a distraction, or such an attraction. It was just a tale, not even a whole story. That's why she'd filled in a few of the blanks, stitched a few details into gaps in the time line. Now it had gathered its own steam, taken on a life of its own, and it was smothering her. What to do?
What to make of the looks people gave her as they drew back into narrow doorways to let her pass by as she walked in the square. They felt like daggers as her friends' eyes darted past her. Wanting, it seemed, to probe her face, but not wanting their eyes to meet hers. What to do?
It was only Tuesday. She couldn't wait for the priest to open the confessional on Saturday afternoon. She might even be dead by then. Oh, the weight of it all; pressing down on her neck, shoulders and back. It made her legs wobble. Her color was bad, probably due to taking too many short breaths. She couldn’t breathe right. It seemed that her heart had swelled in her chest, squeezing the places her lungs were supposed to occupy. Her heart was so heavy. It pushed down on her stomach. Now she could barely eat the crusts of bread she soaked in warm water mixed with olive oil and vinegar, just a dash of vinegar. Everything tasted so bitter lately. Even sweet bread had a sour taste. What to do?
She'd simply have to press Padre Giuseppe to hear her confession today, after the noon-time Angelus. He'd understand. He was a good priest.
It's a story my grandmother told about an old woman living in Italy who gossiped about a neighbor. Realizing her sin she confessed to the priest. The confessor said, "For your penance, take a down pillow up into the bell tower, cut it open and shake the feathers onto the town square, then go gather the feathers and return them to the pillow. When you've fetched all the feathers, now scattered as far as your gossip has flown, your sin will be forgiven."
Our religion tells us that this is a story about penance. It's really a story about repentance. Literally, the word repent means to drive back; to drive back to a point in time before you held that thought or did that deed, and then not take up the thought or commit the deed. To repent is to feel such remorse about a past thought or deed, that you change your mind and your ways.
Sometimes we use our religious language so casually and thoughtlessly that it loses its power to give shape and meaning to our lives. Lent is full of religious language: pray; fast; give alms; repent. But if these words don't gather the energies of our hearts and minds, if they roll off our tongues like so many tales of days gone by, then they lose the power of transforming grace deep-seated in God's holy Word.
Forty days. Enough time to recall that religious language, the Word of God, means to shape all our days, not just our Sundays. Forty days. Time enough to remember that the death and resurrection of Jesus is for our everyday. Lent. Time to experience a continuing death of the old and familiar. Time to be reborn again into new hope, new trust, and new love. Lent. Time to say what you mean and to mean what you say. Lent. Time to fetch the feathers.
It wasn't supposed to become a distraction, or such an attraction. It was just a tale, not even a whole story. That's why she'd filled in a few of the blanks, stitched a few details into gaps in the time line. Now it had gathered its own steam, taken on a life of its own, and it was smothering her. What to do?
What to make of the looks people gave her as they drew back into narrow doorways to let her pass by as she walked in the square. They felt like daggers as her friends' eyes darted past her. Wanting, it seemed, to probe her face, but not wanting their eyes to meet hers. What to do?
It was only Tuesday. She couldn't wait for the priest to open the confessional on Saturday afternoon. She might even be dead by then. Oh, the weight of it all; pressing down on her neck, shoulders and back. It made her legs wobble. Her color was bad, probably due to taking too many short breaths. She couldn’t breathe right. It seemed that her heart had swelled in her chest, squeezing the places her lungs were supposed to occupy. Her heart was so heavy. It pushed down on her stomach. Now she could barely eat the crusts of bread she soaked in warm water mixed with olive oil and vinegar, just a dash of vinegar. Everything tasted so bitter lately. Even sweet bread had a sour taste. What to do?
She'd simply have to press Padre Giuseppe to hear her confession today, after the noon-time Angelus. He'd understand. He was a good priest.
It's a story my grandmother told about an old woman living in Italy who gossiped about a neighbor. Realizing her sin she confessed to the priest. The confessor said, "For your penance, take a down pillow up into the bell tower, cut it open and shake the feathers onto the town square, then go gather the feathers and return them to the pillow. When you've fetched all the feathers, now scattered as far as your gossip has flown, your sin will be forgiven."
Our religion tells us that this is a story about penance. It's really a story about repentance. Literally, the word repent means to drive back; to drive back to a point in time before you held that thought or did that deed, and then not take up the thought or commit the deed. To repent is to feel such remorse about a past thought or deed, that you change your mind and your ways.
Sometimes we use our religious language so casually and thoughtlessly that it loses its power to give shape and meaning to our lives. Lent is full of religious language: pray; fast; give alms; repent. But if these words don't gather the energies of our hearts and minds, if they roll off our tongues like so many tales of days gone by, then they lose the power of transforming grace deep-seated in God's holy Word.
Forty days. Enough time to recall that religious language, the Word of God, means to shape all our days, not just our Sundays. Forty days. Time enough to remember that the death and resurrection of Jesus is for our everyday. Lent. Time to experience a continuing death of the old and familiar. Time to be reborn again into new hope, new trust, and new love. Lent. Time to say what you mean and to mean what you say. Lent. Time to fetch the feathers.
Saturday, February 24, 2007
40 Days in Space is Cross-wise from Here
Lent. Forty days and nights from Ash Wednesday, February 21st until Passion Sunday, April 1st. But it's not about time. It's about space - the space between where we are with God now and where God wants to lead us - alone and together.
Every time the number 40 occurs in the Hebrew Bible, stuff happens. After 40 days of purging rain, Noah's family and the earth were very different. After Moses spent 40 awesome days on the mountain, oppressed slaves found themselves in a covenanted partnership with the Great God Almighty. After 40 years of wearisome wanderin', a bunch of nomads became a people set apart, a holy nation. After 40 days on a lonesome mountain, Elijah saw God. After 40 days in the mean desert, Jesus knew not only who he really was, but also that God's rule would always reveal itself, cross-wise, through him. After 40 resurrected days, Jesus, the Risen Christ, returned to the Father and sent the Holy Spirit. After 40 days of Lent 2007, the people whom the Spirit calls, gathers, and nourishes at First Trinity, the ones who have put their names and their lives on the line by living into the vision of themselves as folk who keep on Sharin’ Plenty Good News will: __________________. We gotta fill in the blank - alone and together.
I don't know for sure what goes on that line. I do know for sure what doesn't go on that line. The line can't read, "Nothin’s changed." The line can't say, "Everything’s the same."
I don't know for sure what will get written on that line. I do know for sure that both the structure of the sentence and, more importantly, the motivation and attitude that puts the pen to paper, must be future oriented. It can't say, "We adjusted our worship time." It can't say, "We bought new hymnals." Those sentences are past tense. They're also about things external rather than things internal.
First Trinity's future with God lies in verbs that end in 'ing.' First Trinity's future with God has got to be a future of God. That means the only verbs that will do are these: engaging; inviting; welcoming; listening; freeing; praising; nurturing; and, discipling.
First Trinity's future with God lies in attitudes of God. That means the only attitudes that will do are these: forgiving; liberating; healing; and, empowering.
Most of us have been through Lent many times. The question for today is, "How many times has Lent been through us?"
God wants to take us to a new place. That's happened before - alone and together. And we've lived to tell the tale. The details are familiar. Growth and change involve grief and pain. The conclusion is also certain. God leads us out of an oppressive Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Making good on the promise, God leads us into a land flowing with milk and honey. We express our confidence in God and join God's future each time we share Eucharist - thanksgiving. We give thanks for what God has done. We also give thanks, before we decide whether or not cross-wise suits us, for what God will do and where God will lead.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. We have 40 days to immerse ourselves into both who we are and Whose we are. That's plenty enough time to get into that cross-wise space from here!
Every time the number 40 occurs in the Hebrew Bible, stuff happens. After 40 days of purging rain, Noah's family and the earth were very different. After Moses spent 40 awesome days on the mountain, oppressed slaves found themselves in a covenanted partnership with the Great God Almighty. After 40 years of wearisome wanderin', a bunch of nomads became a people set apart, a holy nation. After 40 days on a lonesome mountain, Elijah saw God. After 40 days in the mean desert, Jesus knew not only who he really was, but also that God's rule would always reveal itself, cross-wise, through him. After 40 resurrected days, Jesus, the Risen Christ, returned to the Father and sent the Holy Spirit. After 40 days of Lent 2007, the people whom the Spirit calls, gathers, and nourishes at First Trinity, the ones who have put their names and their lives on the line by living into the vision of themselves as folk who keep on Sharin’ Plenty Good News will: __________________. We gotta fill in the blank - alone and together.
I don't know for sure what goes on that line. I do know for sure what doesn't go on that line. The line can't read, "Nothin’s changed." The line can't say, "Everything’s the same."
I don't know for sure what will get written on that line. I do know for sure that both the structure of the sentence and, more importantly, the motivation and attitude that puts the pen to paper, must be future oriented. It can't say, "We adjusted our worship time." It can't say, "We bought new hymnals." Those sentences are past tense. They're also about things external rather than things internal.
First Trinity's future with God lies in verbs that end in 'ing.' First Trinity's future with God has got to be a future of God. That means the only verbs that will do are these: engaging; inviting; welcoming; listening; freeing; praising; nurturing; and, discipling.
First Trinity's future with God lies in attitudes of God. That means the only attitudes that will do are these: forgiving; liberating; healing; and, empowering.
Most of us have been through Lent many times. The question for today is, "How many times has Lent been through us?"
God wants to take us to a new place. That's happened before - alone and together. And we've lived to tell the tale. The details are familiar. Growth and change involve grief and pain. The conclusion is also certain. God leads us out of an oppressive Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm. Making good on the promise, God leads us into a land flowing with milk and honey. We express our confidence in God and join God's future each time we share Eucharist - thanksgiving. We give thanks for what God has done. We also give thanks, before we decide whether or not cross-wise suits us, for what God will do and where God will lead.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again. We have 40 days to immerse ourselves into both who we are and Whose we are. That's plenty enough time to get into that cross-wise space from here!
Friday, February 23, 2007
American Idols Don't Do Lent
As "church work" goes, Lent is a bit of a tough sell. What's to celebrate?
It seems a little like asking people to vote themselves off the island, or to vote for your opponent instead of for yourself. Most of us don't need an official notice to begin beating ourselves up! Neither do we need our church home to schedule a six-week season to put ourselves down, emotionally or morally.
The elegant response to those legitimate misgivings goes this way. Lent is part of how we Christians "mark time" differently than the world does. (Wal-Mart is already marketing Easter bunnies and swimming pools.) Lent also ensures that we walk all of Christ's walk, including the cross' defeat, before we fast-forward to resurrection victory. Pilgrims on a journey in faith, we want to make sure that we connect with Jesus' costly grace, not the world's cheap-grace.
But what if the 40 day journey was just that; a walk together through which we join with the God who wants us to come clean with ourselves, and clean with God? A phrase like, honest-to-God comes to mind. Whether we take that frame of mind from scripture: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, or from our catechism: I confess that I am in bondage to sin and cannot free myself, the idea of coming clean with God, being honest with God, telling the truth – the whole truth, nothing but the truth - puts us in touch with both our deepest desires and our greatest fears. That's why we take this hardest of walks together.
While most of us won't find our pictures on the wall at the Post Office, when we see ourselves as we really are, we see someone who simply can't "do better" on her or his own. This is as good as it gets, and yet we know God wants so much more for us.
That "more for us" is, finally, Lent's focus - the cross of Christ. Here we can see the lengths we humans will go to avoid how much more God has in store for us. Here, too, we get to see the lengths God will travel to love us into seeing ourselves as God sees us -graced to break ourselves open and pour ourselves out for the sake of God's kingdom vision.
Lent is a time when we can name and claim the freedom God gives us to look deeply at ourselves, not just on the edges where we eat too many desserts, not just on the margins where we hoard our money, not just on the fringes where we use our prayers like so many bargaining chips.
Looking deeply, cross-wise, will change us, honest-to-God. That calls for a celebration!
It seems a little like asking people to vote themselves off the island, or to vote for your opponent instead of for yourself. Most of us don't need an official notice to begin beating ourselves up! Neither do we need our church home to schedule a six-week season to put ourselves down, emotionally or morally.
The elegant response to those legitimate misgivings goes this way. Lent is part of how we Christians "mark time" differently than the world does. (Wal-Mart is already marketing Easter bunnies and swimming pools.) Lent also ensures that we walk all of Christ's walk, including the cross' defeat, before we fast-forward to resurrection victory. Pilgrims on a journey in faith, we want to make sure that we connect with Jesus' costly grace, not the world's cheap-grace.
But what if the 40 day journey was just that; a walk together through which we join with the God who wants us to come clean with ourselves, and clean with God? A phrase like, honest-to-God comes to mind. Whether we take that frame of mind from scripture: all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, or from our catechism: I confess that I am in bondage to sin and cannot free myself, the idea of coming clean with God, being honest with God, telling the truth – the whole truth, nothing but the truth - puts us in touch with both our deepest desires and our greatest fears. That's why we take this hardest of walks together.
While most of us won't find our pictures on the wall at the Post Office, when we see ourselves as we really are, we see someone who simply can't "do better" on her or his own. This is as good as it gets, and yet we know God wants so much more for us.
That "more for us" is, finally, Lent's focus - the cross of Christ. Here we can see the lengths we humans will go to avoid how much more God has in store for us. Here, too, we get to see the lengths God will travel to love us into seeing ourselves as God sees us -graced to break ourselves open and pour ourselves out for the sake of God's kingdom vision.
Lent is a time when we can name and claim the freedom God gives us to look deeply at ourselves, not just on the edges where we eat too many desserts, not just on the margins where we hoard our money, not just on the fringes where we use our prayers like so many bargaining chips.
Looking deeply, cross-wise, will change us, honest-to-God. That calls for a celebration!
Sunday, February 11, 2007
Jesus: The Only Sap You'll Ever Need
I’ve seen this cashier about six times in the last three months. Each time I bring my items to her counter we exchange the shallow pleasantries customers and clerks speak to one another. Not in a uniform, she’s always dressed in what we call work-casual. Like most women her age, she tries to look younger than she is. She colors her hair. Her jewelry looks somewhat girlish. She wears make-up more suitable for a cocktail party than for early evening retail. But, hey, it’s a liquor store; so what do I know?
The crew at this 21st Amendment branch doesn’t turn over much. She’s the new kid on the block; the only female. The place is seldom crowded. The employees often converse in ways customers can’t help but overhear as they shop. Sometimes I’ve felt like I was interrupting when one had to drop out of the talk to tell me my purchase’s cost.
Last week, the counter between us, I didn’t think much the woman and a manager absorbed in conversation. Both seemed more intent on completing their thoughts than completing my transaction.
I heard her say, “I just can’t be sad anymore; not ever again. All I want is to be happy. That’s what life’s about.” “No,” said the manager. “Life is about doing your duty and meeting your responsibilities.” “I don’t think so,” she shot back. “I’ve had my share of sadness. From now I’m just going to look for happiness.” Then, in a voice sounding like a plea, she looked at me and asked “Don’t you think life is supposed to be happy?” How would you answer?
Caught me way off guard! It clearly wasn’t the time or the place for where that kind of conversation should go. But since I’m always urging believers to seize the evangelical moment I couldn’t take a pass. “Well, no,” I said, haltingly. “See,” said the manager, looking at me like we were sharing a guy-thing. “No,” I glared at him, sensing this wasn’t the first time men had dissed her insights.
“There’s joy in living,” I said; sounding more like I was speaking in riddles than with wisdom. “Happiness is a by-product, not a goal. Even when sadness hits, or we don’t meet all our responsibilities, we can still walk with a joy that’s deeper than happiness, frustration, or guilt.” “Yeah,” she smiled, “joy; that’s it!” “Nah,” the manager harrumphed, with a laugh, “that’s so sappy.”
Jeremiah’s done more with the oracle God gave him than I was able to do with the opportunity I had to share the whole truth. Jeremiah uses clear, earthy images to describe the awesome grace and blessings God has in mind for all God’s children.
Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit. The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse — who can understand it? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings. (Jeremiah 17:5-10)
Jeremiah wrote these poetic interpretations of the insights God gave him to God’s already divided chosen people. Israel lived in two separate kingdoms. Each had made political alliances with different pagan rulers. Each was failing to live, in heartfelt ways, the duties and responsibilities of God’s covenant. Each mixed its rich ritual economies with the coins of ungodly realms, not as worship and praise, but as transactions to appease consciences already more deeply rooted in the other side; the dark side.
Jeremiah tallies accurately the potential for profit and loss God’s gamble yields. God bet that we creatures, made in God’s image and likeness, would recognize the difference between bogus efforts to go it alone and the genuine joy that could be ours rooted in God’s original grace and blessing.
That’s why God made us little less than the angels. That’s why God gave us all God’s own attributes: freedom, rationality, the ability to make decisions, and the power to receive and give love. That’s why God gave us God’s own garden to tend; God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)
As Jeremiah sees it, that’s a bet God keeps on losing, yet it remains a gamble God won’t go back on. The judgment may sound too harsh, without first hearing the charges. Listen to what it is God sees that causes God to deliver this indictment:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you* in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’
For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors for ever and ever. (Jeremiah 7:1-7)
Not only does God see the fruits of a people rooted in ideas, deities and personalities other than God’s own, God also grieves over how deeply this people’s roots go. Look at 17:1. The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts, and on the horns of their altars… I’m thinking Jeremiah is seeing this as a rather permanent, indelible, fixed condition.
Let’s do a quick anatomy lesson. These near eastern folks understood the heart to be the organ that controls the human will, our disposition and intentions. They would not have understood the romance of our Valentine’s Day hearts. Likewise, they located the place in the body controlling emotions, translated here as mind, to be the kidneys. (That has more truth to it than we realize when we remember that the adrenal glands, sitting atop the kidneys, are the source of our chemistry necessary for our fight or flight reflex to kick-in.)
So what does it mean when God says it’s time to search the devious heart? God examines the ways our mind is so sly and slippery as to cause us to trust in ourselves, or others like us, over trusting in God, and God finds that perverse, i.e., incurable. Now everybody here knows you don’t have to be old, or in a pre-Alzheimer condition to have your mind play tricks on you, right? Everybody here can remember a time or two when we thought the smartest thing God might do is to pass that bad-boy, run-the-world baton to us for a time, that would fix everything and make us real happy!
So, too, God examines, as in tests to prove – the way we might test to prove that a gall bladder works or doesn’t work - the seat of our emotions and finds that these, too, drive us to prefer what is alien to our well-being over what is beneficial for our well-being, namely, rootedness in God. Now everybody here knows you don’t have to completely round the bend to have your emotions carry you away, right? Everybody here can remember a time when, without any particular drug ingestion, we were ready, willing and able to carry out on somebody that had done us wrong that swift, sweet vengeance belonging only to God. That, too, would make us happy, right?
What’s a body to do? Even though we know more anatomy than Jeremiah’s generation, our minds and hearts, our wills and our emotions are just as eager to displace God and to take God’s place. What’s a body to do? Neither Jeremiah, nor his God, will give up on the bet. In another place God tells Jeremiah to write this: But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people (Jeremiah 31:33.) These are those days, when we know what a body can do.
In Luke 6:18-19, just after Jesus has chosen the apostles, and just before he teaches the Beatitudes, “on a level plain,” Luke says: Folk from everywhere, all kinds of folk came to listen, to understand, to comprehend, to finally “get it,” to be re-minded – not as in remember what they’d forgotten - but to receive a new mindset. And they came to be made whole of their dis-ease; and those who were disturbed, confused by unclean spirits (pneuma / wind) - thrown about, and off course by gusty, ghastly winds - were “therap-ied,” made whole, again. And all in the crowd were trying to cling to him, to become attached or rooted to him, because power, dynamis in Greek (dynamic / dynamite), went out of him, and they were made whole. That’s what a body can do. Come to hear Jesus. Come be made whole in Jesus.
From him we can receive the new instruction God chooses to write on our hearts. It’s an instruction that, for all the world, looks to turn things upside down. Like the hymn (Magnificat) Jesus’ mother sang, God’s otherwise vision brings woes on those who are full, proud and hoarding wealth. To those who receive the word, who become rooted in the promise, whose routes follow Jesus’ path to the sap-delivering, life-giving, fruit-bearing waters of the living God, God delivers not fleeting happiness, but a new justice, a lasting kinship that bestows blessedness, blessing, new dignity and truly unending joy.
The crew at this 21st Amendment branch doesn’t turn over much. She’s the new kid on the block; the only female. The place is seldom crowded. The employees often converse in ways customers can’t help but overhear as they shop. Sometimes I’ve felt like I was interrupting when one had to drop out of the talk to tell me my purchase’s cost.
Last week, the counter between us, I didn’t think much the woman and a manager absorbed in conversation. Both seemed more intent on completing their thoughts than completing my transaction.
I heard her say, “I just can’t be sad anymore; not ever again. All I want is to be happy. That’s what life’s about.” “No,” said the manager. “Life is about doing your duty and meeting your responsibilities.” “I don’t think so,” she shot back. “I’ve had my share of sadness. From now I’m just going to look for happiness.” Then, in a voice sounding like a plea, she looked at me and asked “Don’t you think life is supposed to be happy?” How would you answer?
Caught me way off guard! It clearly wasn’t the time or the place for where that kind of conversation should go. But since I’m always urging believers to seize the evangelical moment I couldn’t take a pass. “Well, no,” I said, haltingly. “See,” said the manager, looking at me like we were sharing a guy-thing. “No,” I glared at him, sensing this wasn’t the first time men had dissed her insights.
“There’s joy in living,” I said; sounding more like I was speaking in riddles than with wisdom. “Happiness is a by-product, not a goal. Even when sadness hits, or we don’t meet all our responsibilities, we can still walk with a joy that’s deeper than happiness, frustration, or guilt.” “Yeah,” she smiled, “joy; that’s it!” “Nah,” the manager harrumphed, with a laugh, “that’s so sappy.”
Jeremiah’s done more with the oracle God gave him than I was able to do with the opportunity I had to share the whole truth. Jeremiah uses clear, earthy images to describe the awesome grace and blessings God has in mind for all God’s children.
Thus says the Lord: Cursed are those who trust in mere mortals and make mere flesh their strength, whose hearts turn away from the Lord. They shall be like a shrub in the desert, and shall not see when relief comes. They shall live in the parched places of the wilderness, in an uninhabited salt land. Blessed are those who trust in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. They shall be like a tree planted by water, sending out its roots by the stream. It shall not fear when heat comes, and its leaves shall stay green; in the year of drought it is not anxious, and it does not cease to bear fruit. The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse — who can understand it? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings. (Jeremiah 17:5-10)
Jeremiah wrote these poetic interpretations of the insights God gave him to God’s already divided chosen people. Israel lived in two separate kingdoms. Each had made political alliances with different pagan rulers. Each was failing to live, in heartfelt ways, the duties and responsibilities of God’s covenant. Each mixed its rich ritual economies with the coins of ungodly realms, not as worship and praise, but as transactions to appease consciences already more deeply rooted in the other side; the dark side.
Jeremiah tallies accurately the potential for profit and loss God’s gamble yields. God bet that we creatures, made in God’s image and likeness, would recognize the difference between bogus efforts to go it alone and the genuine joy that could be ours rooted in God’s original grace and blessing.
That’s why God made us little less than the angels. That’s why God gave us all God’s own attributes: freedom, rationality, the ability to make decisions, and the power to receive and give love. That’s why God gave us God’s own garden to tend; God blessed them, and God said to them, Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth. (Genesis 1:28)
As Jeremiah sees it, that’s a bet God keeps on losing, yet it remains a gamble God won’t go back on. The judgment may sound too harsh, without first hearing the charges. Listen to what it is God sees that causes God to deliver this indictment:
The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: Stand in the gate of the Lord’s house, and proclaim there this word, and say, Hear the word of the Lord, all you people of Judah, you that enter these gates to worship the Lord. Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel: Amend your ways and your doings, and let me dwell with you* in this place. Do not trust in these deceptive words: ‘This is the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord, the temple of the Lord.’
For if you truly amend your ways and your doings, if you truly act justly one with another, if you do not oppress the alien, the orphan, and the widow, or shed innocent blood in this place, and if you do not go after other gods to your own hurt, then I will dwell with you in this place, in the land that I gave of old to your ancestors for ever and ever. (Jeremiah 7:1-7)
Not only does God see the fruits of a people rooted in ideas, deities and personalities other than God’s own, God also grieves over how deeply this people’s roots go. Look at 17:1. The sin of Judah is written with an iron pen; with a diamond point it is engraved on the tablet of their hearts, and on the horns of their altars… I’m thinking Jeremiah is seeing this as a rather permanent, indelible, fixed condition.
Let’s do a quick anatomy lesson. These near eastern folks understood the heart to be the organ that controls the human will, our disposition and intentions. They would not have understood the romance of our Valentine’s Day hearts. Likewise, they located the place in the body controlling emotions, translated here as mind, to be the kidneys. (That has more truth to it than we realize when we remember that the adrenal glands, sitting atop the kidneys, are the source of our chemistry necessary for our fight or flight reflex to kick-in.)
So what does it mean when God says it’s time to search the devious heart? God examines the ways our mind is so sly and slippery as to cause us to trust in ourselves, or others like us, over trusting in God, and God finds that perverse, i.e., incurable. Now everybody here knows you don’t have to be old, or in a pre-Alzheimer condition to have your mind play tricks on you, right? Everybody here can remember a time or two when we thought the smartest thing God might do is to pass that bad-boy, run-the-world baton to us for a time, that would fix everything and make us real happy!
So, too, God examines, as in tests to prove – the way we might test to prove that a gall bladder works or doesn’t work - the seat of our emotions and finds that these, too, drive us to prefer what is alien to our well-being over what is beneficial for our well-being, namely, rootedness in God. Now everybody here knows you don’t have to completely round the bend to have your emotions carry you away, right? Everybody here can remember a time when, without any particular drug ingestion, we were ready, willing and able to carry out on somebody that had done us wrong that swift, sweet vengeance belonging only to God. That, too, would make us happy, right?
What’s a body to do? Even though we know more anatomy than Jeremiah’s generation, our minds and hearts, our wills and our emotions are just as eager to displace God and to take God’s place. What’s a body to do? Neither Jeremiah, nor his God, will give up on the bet. In another place God tells Jeremiah to write this: But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people (Jeremiah 31:33.) These are those days, when we know what a body can do.
In Luke 6:18-19, just after Jesus has chosen the apostles, and just before he teaches the Beatitudes, “on a level plain,” Luke says: Folk from everywhere, all kinds of folk came to listen, to understand, to comprehend, to finally “get it,” to be re-minded – not as in remember what they’d forgotten - but to receive a new mindset. And they came to be made whole of their dis-ease; and those who were disturbed, confused by unclean spirits (pneuma / wind) - thrown about, and off course by gusty, ghastly winds - were “therap-ied,” made whole, again. And all in the crowd were trying to cling to him, to become attached or rooted to him, because power, dynamis in Greek (dynamic / dynamite), went out of him, and they were made whole. That’s what a body can do. Come to hear Jesus. Come be made whole in Jesus.
From him we can receive the new instruction God chooses to write on our hearts. It’s an instruction that, for all the world, looks to turn things upside down. Like the hymn (Magnificat) Jesus’ mother sang, God’s otherwise vision brings woes on those who are full, proud and hoarding wealth. To those who receive the word, who become rooted in the promise, whose routes follow Jesus’ path to the sap-delivering, life-giving, fruit-bearing waters of the living God, God delivers not fleeting happiness, but a new justice, a lasting kinship that bestows blessedness, blessing, new dignity and truly unending joy.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Preacher Jesus Was ALL the Rage
Hometown sermons are hard to hear and hard to preach. Jesus had to learn that the hard way as well. Things didn’t go to well at his Nazareth synagogue (Luke 4:14-30).
I keep trying to get a feel for what it was that Jesus said, or what it was that this synagogue congregation heard, that set them off so. And I’m especially intrigued that once so severely attacked by what he must have thought was a rather friendly, hometown crowd, Jesus’ reacts so calmly.
I’m remembering times when I taught theology, both at a high school and at a junior college. It was the most benign things I said that seemed to set people off so severely. I once previewed a sex-education video tape with parents of juniors, on which the most sterile, matronly healthcare worker used a very clinical plastic, invisible women to explain female anatomy. Whereupon a tenured faculty member at Notre Dame’s law school leaped from his chair and screamed, we had no business showing this tape to a co-ed class. Doing that would simply embarrass the girls and probably excite the boys.
I stood speechless, because I really didn’t know what to say and because I was hoping another parent might jump in and save me. My silence only seemed to set the lawyer into deeper rage and he kept fulminating about the inappropriateness of teaching sex-ed in a theology class; that our job was to teach abstinence as prescribed in the commandments and work harder to instill in the teens the virtues of chastity and purity. Finally, he screamed, the only purpose I had in showing such a thing was to encourage the youngsters to engage in deviate sexual conduct.
Well that did it. I shot back that the clinician’s teaching style was the time-honored Socratic Method - extending people’s knowledge of the unfamiliar by using what was familiar. I suggested that he probably used that same method to teach unfamiliar concepts in his own classroom. Further, I barked, everybody knows where his or her butt is anyway, except maybe you, since you seem to keep tying your necktie around it!
The crowd burst into laughter, and then applause, as he stormed out of the room. And while it looked like I was the victor, bested a lawyer in a verbal sparring match, the fact that we represented, in some sense, a church at war with itself, didn’t bear much fruitful witness to a world we claim is more broken and lost than we are.
Besides not being completely certain about how Jesus held himself together while everyone around him was trying to tear him apart, I’m only somewhat clear as to just what these folks heard that riled them so. I’m thinking that since they’d heard reports of the marvels Jesus had worked in nearby regions, places where there were fewer synagogues, more aliens and foreigners, an increased number of backsliding Jews, and even the heretic-Jews known as Samaritans, these folks were expecting some big payoffs from Jesus.
They were Jesus’ wider social context and faith community. Theirs was the village that had done such a good job supporting Mary and Joseph. These parents had raised such a splendid teacher / preacher with their help. Therefore, were they not due some sort of double portion of all the benefits Jesus seemed to be lavishing on their version of the great unwashed.
What they seem not ready to hear, is that Jesus doesn’t take as his model for mission someone like David, who divided the spoils of war among the Israelites. Jesus isn’t taking as his model for ministry someone like Judas Maccabeus, the son of a priest, who, in the name of Yahweh, led a war to overthrow a foreign king, boot the priests who’d made an alliance with the king, and reclaim the Jerusalem Temple.
Jesus tells these folks that the model of his mission and ministry - who his mission is directed toward and the kind of ministry he’ll exercise to achieve the mission - is more like the people’s own ancestral prophets. Prophets who spoke against insider-arrogance and prophets who demonstrated the inclusive, lavishness of God’s steadfast love, first, to outsiders.
In one sense, Jesus got what every preacher who stands in a pulpit wishes for, a reasonable hearing from those gathered, and a corporate response to the message. The trouble began when Jesus suggested, by choosing the word from Isaiah he had, that this crowd of believers, despite their certainty that they believed all the right things, was still not getting it. Jesus finishes off this blow to their religious egos by saying that, just like Israel’s first generation prophets, he, too, will prefer to show forth God’s unconditional love to those who’ve never experienced it, rather than heap more favor on those who receive it only to hoard it.
The result was another believing community at war with itself. This crowd sets out to hurl him off a hill. Ten weeks from now, we’ll hear about another crowd of enraged believers who succeed at nailing him one.
Unless we take our cue from prophets like Jeremiah and Jesus, Spirit-led and Spirit-fed folks who speak God’s words of truth both with reluctant humility and bold conviction we, too, are just a few bible verses away from the kind of mob rule that can turn us from faithful congregation to a crowd at war with itself. What makes that both possible, and perhaps likely, has more to do with what we forget, than it does with what we remember.
I think it’s wonderful so many of us remember the 10 commandments. How does that make us authorities on who should sleep with who, when, but not how we run our businesses, hold elections, or collect taxes?
I think it’s marvelous that so many of us remember Gen 2:24, Therefore a man shall leave is father and mother and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. How does that make us authorities on whose union God blesses?
I think it’s great that in this age of so-called biblical illiteracy so many folks recite John 3:16. How does that make so many authorities on who God will keep out of heaven? I don’t think any of that would be happening if we weren’t so forgetful.
Have we forgotten those times when each one of us, like the widow of Zarephath, was:
• starving for the nourishment of belonging
• wracked by grief at our inability to provide for our children
• so poor and sunk so low we looked forward to dying
• parched and dried by our doubting God’s love
only to have a stranger, someone like Elijah, speak a godly word that yielded an abundant harvest of deliverance.
How could we, the people of this Book, become arrogant believers and hoarders of God’s grace, unless we’ve forgotten, that each of us, like Naaman, was:
• despised because of a skin condition - its color
• disregarded because of our gender
• discounted because of how much / little education we have
• held in disdain because of our ethnicity
only to have a stranger, someone like Elisha, speak a godly word that unleashes a torrent of healing and wholeness.
The Spirit of the Lord was upon Jesus. The Spirit who anointed Jesus was not the sort of Spirit who would let Jesus tame this God or this God’s Book, turning either into a tame pet. The Spirit who sent Jesus was not the sort of Spirit who would permit Jesus to claim the God who makes and keeps this Book’s promises as the possessions of a select few.
As Jesus’ first sermon began, Luke says, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Words full of the unearned, unmerited favor, and steadfast love in which God held them.
By sermon’s end, faced with an allegedly believing community at war with itself, Luke says, “Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” Jesus knew that the love of God is strong. God doesn’t require our weapons. God isn’t made safer, stronger, or more believable by our violent words or deeds. Humanity’s respect for God isn’t promoted by holy warfare. God’s existence doesn’t depend on us, and God’s will is far larger than our causes of the day. We might unleash our destructive passions in order to feel better, but we should be under no illusion that doing so serves God in any way.
Wherever you worship I hope you, too, hear and are filled with words of unearned, unmerited grace. What you leave there to do, full of the Spirit that empowered Jesus, is to let others know that you: believe what you read; preach what you believe; and, live what you preach.
You’ll know if you’re doing that well enough, because when you do, surely, you’re gracious words will enrage somebody.
I keep trying to get a feel for what it was that Jesus said, or what it was that this synagogue congregation heard, that set them off so. And I’m especially intrigued that once so severely attacked by what he must have thought was a rather friendly, hometown crowd, Jesus’ reacts so calmly.
I’m remembering times when I taught theology, both at a high school and at a junior college. It was the most benign things I said that seemed to set people off so severely. I once previewed a sex-education video tape with parents of juniors, on which the most sterile, matronly healthcare worker used a very clinical plastic, invisible women to explain female anatomy. Whereupon a tenured faculty member at Notre Dame’s law school leaped from his chair and screamed, we had no business showing this tape to a co-ed class. Doing that would simply embarrass the girls and probably excite the boys.
I stood speechless, because I really didn’t know what to say and because I was hoping another parent might jump in and save me. My silence only seemed to set the lawyer into deeper rage and he kept fulminating about the inappropriateness of teaching sex-ed in a theology class; that our job was to teach abstinence as prescribed in the commandments and work harder to instill in the teens the virtues of chastity and purity. Finally, he screamed, the only purpose I had in showing such a thing was to encourage the youngsters to engage in deviate sexual conduct.
Well that did it. I shot back that the clinician’s teaching style was the time-honored Socratic Method - extending people’s knowledge of the unfamiliar by using what was familiar. I suggested that he probably used that same method to teach unfamiliar concepts in his own classroom. Further, I barked, everybody knows where his or her butt is anyway, except maybe you, since you seem to keep tying your necktie around it!
The crowd burst into laughter, and then applause, as he stormed out of the room. And while it looked like I was the victor, bested a lawyer in a verbal sparring match, the fact that we represented, in some sense, a church at war with itself, didn’t bear much fruitful witness to a world we claim is more broken and lost than we are.
Besides not being completely certain about how Jesus held himself together while everyone around him was trying to tear him apart, I’m only somewhat clear as to just what these folks heard that riled them so. I’m thinking that since they’d heard reports of the marvels Jesus had worked in nearby regions, places where there were fewer synagogues, more aliens and foreigners, an increased number of backsliding Jews, and even the heretic-Jews known as Samaritans, these folks were expecting some big payoffs from Jesus.
They were Jesus’ wider social context and faith community. Theirs was the village that had done such a good job supporting Mary and Joseph. These parents had raised such a splendid teacher / preacher with their help. Therefore, were they not due some sort of double portion of all the benefits Jesus seemed to be lavishing on their version of the great unwashed.
What they seem not ready to hear, is that Jesus doesn’t take as his model for mission someone like David, who divided the spoils of war among the Israelites. Jesus isn’t taking as his model for ministry someone like Judas Maccabeus, the son of a priest, who, in the name of Yahweh, led a war to overthrow a foreign king, boot the priests who’d made an alliance with the king, and reclaim the Jerusalem Temple.
Jesus tells these folks that the model of his mission and ministry - who his mission is directed toward and the kind of ministry he’ll exercise to achieve the mission - is more like the people’s own ancestral prophets. Prophets who spoke against insider-arrogance and prophets who demonstrated the inclusive, lavishness of God’s steadfast love, first, to outsiders.
In one sense, Jesus got what every preacher who stands in a pulpit wishes for, a reasonable hearing from those gathered, and a corporate response to the message. The trouble began when Jesus suggested, by choosing the word from Isaiah he had, that this crowd of believers, despite their certainty that they believed all the right things, was still not getting it. Jesus finishes off this blow to their religious egos by saying that, just like Israel’s first generation prophets, he, too, will prefer to show forth God’s unconditional love to those who’ve never experienced it, rather than heap more favor on those who receive it only to hoard it.
The result was another believing community at war with itself. This crowd sets out to hurl him off a hill. Ten weeks from now, we’ll hear about another crowd of enraged believers who succeed at nailing him one.
Unless we take our cue from prophets like Jeremiah and Jesus, Spirit-led and Spirit-fed folks who speak God’s words of truth both with reluctant humility and bold conviction we, too, are just a few bible verses away from the kind of mob rule that can turn us from faithful congregation to a crowd at war with itself. What makes that both possible, and perhaps likely, has more to do with what we forget, than it does with what we remember.
I think it’s wonderful so many of us remember the 10 commandments. How does that make us authorities on who should sleep with who, when, but not how we run our businesses, hold elections, or collect taxes?
I think it’s marvelous that so many of us remember Gen 2:24, Therefore a man shall leave is father and mother and cling to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. How does that make us authorities on whose union God blesses?
I think it’s great that in this age of so-called biblical illiteracy so many folks recite John 3:16. How does that make so many authorities on who God will keep out of heaven? I don’t think any of that would be happening if we weren’t so forgetful.
Have we forgotten those times when each one of us, like the widow of Zarephath, was:
• starving for the nourishment of belonging
• wracked by grief at our inability to provide for our children
• so poor and sunk so low we looked forward to dying
• parched and dried by our doubting God’s love
only to have a stranger, someone like Elijah, speak a godly word that yielded an abundant harvest of deliverance.
How could we, the people of this Book, become arrogant believers and hoarders of God’s grace, unless we’ve forgotten, that each of us, like Naaman, was:
• despised because of a skin condition - its color
• disregarded because of our gender
• discounted because of how much / little education we have
• held in disdain because of our ethnicity
only to have a stranger, someone like Elisha, speak a godly word that unleashes a torrent of healing and wholeness.
The Spirit of the Lord was upon Jesus. The Spirit who anointed Jesus was not the sort of Spirit who would let Jesus tame this God or this God’s Book, turning either into a tame pet. The Spirit who sent Jesus was not the sort of Spirit who would permit Jesus to claim the God who makes and keeps this Book’s promises as the possessions of a select few.
As Jesus’ first sermon began, Luke says, “All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” Words full of the unearned, unmerited favor, and steadfast love in which God held them.
By sermon’s end, faced with an allegedly believing community at war with itself, Luke says, “Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” Jesus knew that the love of God is strong. God doesn’t require our weapons. God isn’t made safer, stronger, or more believable by our violent words or deeds. Humanity’s respect for God isn’t promoted by holy warfare. God’s existence doesn’t depend on us, and God’s will is far larger than our causes of the day. We might unleash our destructive passions in order to feel better, but we should be under no illusion that doing so serves God in any way.
Wherever you worship I hope you, too, hear and are filled with words of unearned, unmerited grace. What you leave there to do, full of the Spirit that empowered Jesus, is to let others know that you: believe what you read; preach what you believe; and, live what you preach.
You’ll know if you’re doing that well enough, because when you do, surely, you’re gracious words will enrage somebody.
Saturday, February 03, 2007
Breathing Differently
This February, temporary occurrences threaten to distract our focus from those monumental events which give true shape to our identity and purpose.
As Americans we want to take some special time to focus on and to celebrate the gifts our society and culture relish in from contributions of African Americans. As Christians we want to begin an annual time of remembering and responding to the gift God gives us in the passion and death of Jesus which we celebrate in Lent.
This year we’re doing that amidst a dream most of us share to live out the rest of 2007 in a Super Bowl city. Too bad that’s not our only distraction.
The legislature is in long session, to build a budget. We’re again beset with value choices which will shape how we live, regardless of our Colts’ achievement of the football field. Decisions about: education, (full-day Kindergarten and modifying ISTEP [again!]); health care (providing access to those unable to afford insurance); criminal justice (to reduce jail overcrowding and decrease “good-time” earned by those incarcerated); gambling (increasing video gaming and “leasing” the state-operated lottery); and, road-building (by private contractors who will “own” these proposed toll roads). Lest we forget, the proposed amendment to the state’s constitution, banning gay marriage, is up for second passage by both houses. This is required for the amendment to be on the general election ballot in 2008, coincidentally, a presidential election year.
Beyond the issues, the legislature must determine the tax strategies required to fund our shifting values. These will effect all of us, without concern for either our ethnicity's or our faith postures.
While we may be the first Hoosiers to breathe Super Bowl, we’re not the first citizens to remember Black History. Neither are we the first Christians to remember the way of the cross.
We celebrate differently because we remember differently. We stand amidst the ancestors whose courage, long-suffering and joy still propel our own becoming. They stood for the freedom of all persons, as imagio dei (image of God). They laid down their lives for equal access and opportunity.
We stand at the cross of Jesus whose blood still sets us all free to be people of God. While our ethnicity's diverge and converge, though our faith postures vary and coalesce, by the Spirit of the risen Jesus poured out upon us, we breathe differently. In that breathing space some of us are interested in thinking critically about God, faith, personhood, world, and our life together in that mix. Others seem more interested in practicing a personal faith. The latter, it seems to me, goes something like this: the Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it.
However we breathe, inside the space where the ruach (wind / spirit) of God sustains us, our practices ought not to be about either sucking the oxygen out of the room, or blowing out the life-spirit of any other. Inside this different breathing space neither of those results can be on our conscious agenda, nor can we allow them to stand as the unintended consequences of our cross-remembering, cross-celebrating practices.
When you’re finished celebrating our Colts victory, no doubt a monumental event, please also remember to make your opinions known to our legislators from the depths of your identity-shaping, purpose-making remembering and celebrating in Jesus’ name.
Together, remembering and celebrating, our focus is sure and our future is certain. I look forward to the awesome experiences this February holds out for us as we keep on Sharin’ Plenty Good News!
As Americans we want to take some special time to focus on and to celebrate the gifts our society and culture relish in from contributions of African Americans. As Christians we want to begin an annual time of remembering and responding to the gift God gives us in the passion and death of Jesus which we celebrate in Lent.
This year we’re doing that amidst a dream most of us share to live out the rest of 2007 in a Super Bowl city. Too bad that’s not our only distraction.
The legislature is in long session, to build a budget. We’re again beset with value choices which will shape how we live, regardless of our Colts’ achievement of the football field. Decisions about: education, (full-day Kindergarten and modifying ISTEP [again!]); health care (providing access to those unable to afford insurance); criminal justice (to reduce jail overcrowding and decrease “good-time” earned by those incarcerated); gambling (increasing video gaming and “leasing” the state-operated lottery); and, road-building (by private contractors who will “own” these proposed toll roads). Lest we forget, the proposed amendment to the state’s constitution, banning gay marriage, is up for second passage by both houses. This is required for the amendment to be on the general election ballot in 2008, coincidentally, a presidential election year.
Beyond the issues, the legislature must determine the tax strategies required to fund our shifting values. These will effect all of us, without concern for either our ethnicity's or our faith postures.
While we may be the first Hoosiers to breathe Super Bowl, we’re not the first citizens to remember Black History. Neither are we the first Christians to remember the way of the cross.
We celebrate differently because we remember differently. We stand amidst the ancestors whose courage, long-suffering and joy still propel our own becoming. They stood for the freedom of all persons, as imagio dei (image of God). They laid down their lives for equal access and opportunity.
We stand at the cross of Jesus whose blood still sets us all free to be people of God. While our ethnicity's diverge and converge, though our faith postures vary and coalesce, by the Spirit of the risen Jesus poured out upon us, we breathe differently. In that breathing space some of us are interested in thinking critically about God, faith, personhood, world, and our life together in that mix. Others seem more interested in practicing a personal faith. The latter, it seems to me, goes something like this: the Bible says it; I believe it; that settles it.
However we breathe, inside the space where the ruach (wind / spirit) of God sustains us, our practices ought not to be about either sucking the oxygen out of the room, or blowing out the life-spirit of any other. Inside this different breathing space neither of those results can be on our conscious agenda, nor can we allow them to stand as the unintended consequences of our cross-remembering, cross-celebrating practices.
When you’re finished celebrating our Colts victory, no doubt a monumental event, please also remember to make your opinions known to our legislators from the depths of your identity-shaping, purpose-making remembering and celebrating in Jesus’ name.
Together, remembering and celebrating, our focus is sure and our future is certain. I look forward to the awesome experiences this February holds out for us as we keep on Sharin’ Plenty Good News!
Thursday, February 01, 2007
Two Steps Backward; One Step Forward
“The shoemaker’s children have no shoes.” That was my Italian grandmother’s politically correct way of suggesting that what she judged to be the aberrant attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors of someone were the result of “bad” parenting, not their own responsibility. Other folks mean much the same thing when they say, “The apple did not fall far from the tree.”
I’m mindful of parents’ effects on their children because my three adult children never cease to amaze me. In many respects their attitudes, beliefs and behaviors look remarkably similar to my own. Would that I was able, or willing, to see more of my wife’s attributes in them. Her character is much more balanced, sensitive and whole than mine.
I’m mindful of this because I spend a whole lot of time with other people’s children, from pre-schoolers to college students. These parents seem quite content to permit me to do a great deal of informing and forming their children’s attitudes, beliefs and behaviors concerning faith and religion. On most days, and in most ways, I do a decent job. Would that I’d paid as much formal attention to help shape and strengthen my own children’s faith formation.
Don’t get me wrong. Mine are great kids. You’d really enjoy their company. No doubt they make great friends. I find, however, their moral decision making, as well as their ethical practices to be customary and usual – within normal limits, as a physician might say about blood chemistry results.
It’s difficult to admit this, but I’m not certain how certain my children are that God wants them, as well as the rest of us, to live inside a story that poses significant differences to our culture’s story. Neither am I aware how much my children are aware that God’s vision for each of us and for our world(s) is “otherwise” to that of our contemporary society’s.
Obviously, much of this might be resolved if I asked each one straight up. That would require more courage than I’ve been able to muster so far.
On occasion I have asked them if they have prayed about some issue, or if they’ve taken a particular problem to God. I seem, always, to stumble through that line of questioning. They, too, seem to stumble through their responses. Those moments seem only to reinforce my own doubts about transmitting the faith: “Did I ever really teach them to pray?”
I’ve heard folks console their own shortcomings in this regard with words like these, “Faith has to be caught before it can be taught.” True, or not, these sentiments don’t comfort me.
Guess I’ll look to spend some quality time with each of them. Maybe holding them hostage over a restaurant dinner is a time and place to broach the topic. More likely, stepping back from my own anxiety and self-centeredness, simply sharing with them the sore tenderness that’s on my heart will touch a healing place within their souls.
That step forward could take us onto the kind of path where God said these words to Moses, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
I’m mindful of parents’ effects on their children because my three adult children never cease to amaze me. In many respects their attitudes, beliefs and behaviors look remarkably similar to my own. Would that I was able, or willing, to see more of my wife’s attributes in them. Her character is much more balanced, sensitive and whole than mine.
I’m mindful of this because I spend a whole lot of time with other people’s children, from pre-schoolers to college students. These parents seem quite content to permit me to do a great deal of informing and forming their children’s attitudes, beliefs and behaviors concerning faith and religion. On most days, and in most ways, I do a decent job. Would that I’d paid as much formal attention to help shape and strengthen my own children’s faith formation.
Don’t get me wrong. Mine are great kids. You’d really enjoy their company. No doubt they make great friends. I find, however, their moral decision making, as well as their ethical practices to be customary and usual – within normal limits, as a physician might say about blood chemistry results.
It’s difficult to admit this, but I’m not certain how certain my children are that God wants them, as well as the rest of us, to live inside a story that poses significant differences to our culture’s story. Neither am I aware how much my children are aware that God’s vision for each of us and for our world(s) is “otherwise” to that of our contemporary society’s.
Obviously, much of this might be resolved if I asked each one straight up. That would require more courage than I’ve been able to muster so far.
On occasion I have asked them if they have prayed about some issue, or if they’ve taken a particular problem to God. I seem, always, to stumble through that line of questioning. They, too, seem to stumble through their responses. Those moments seem only to reinforce my own doubts about transmitting the faith: “Did I ever really teach them to pray?”
I’ve heard folks console their own shortcomings in this regard with words like these, “Faith has to be caught before it can be taught.” True, or not, these sentiments don’t comfort me.
Guess I’ll look to spend some quality time with each of them. Maybe holding them hostage over a restaurant dinner is a time and place to broach the topic. More likely, stepping back from my own anxiety and self-centeredness, simply sharing with them the sore tenderness that’s on my heart will touch a healing place within their souls.
That step forward could take us onto the kind of path where God said these words to Moses, “Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.”
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