Stay the Course

Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.[1]

We know these lines from the book of psalms, and most of us have lived long enough to know that this is not the prayer of someone who swam out too far from the beach and got caught in a rip tide. This is the prayer of someone who looked around and could only see trouble on every side.

For more than two years, we have been in the wake of the most seismic housing collapse in the nation’s history, and nearly 1 in every 4 U.S. homeowners with mortgages owe more on their home than it’s worth – they’re underwater, as we say.[2] We have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over us, and people are drowning – in debt, in anxiety, in despair. These are times when our worries and fears don’t stay contained in our hearts but flood us like mighty waters that threaten to swallow up everything.

When Peter began to sink and his life was about to disappear in the deep, all he could do was cry out, “Lord, save me!” – and Jesus immediately reached out his hand and caught him. When they got back in the boat, the disciples who had witnessed his power to save worshiped Christ – but a couple of them, at least a couple of them, I imagine, eventually turned to Peter and said, “What were you thinking? Why didn’t you stay in the boat?”

Earlier that evening, they had been part of that wondrous banquet on the beach, where their meager resources, in the hands of Jesus, became food for all. They had witnessed Christ’s power to transform their worries about what to eat into a feast of joyfully shared abundance. Then, while Jesus dismissed the crowds, he told the disciples to get in the boat and go on ahead without him. It was the first time since Jesus had called them to be his disciples that he told them to go on without him. When night fell, he was alone on the mountain, praying, and they were alone in the thick of things, battered by the waves in the night, far from the land, with the wind against them, working hard to keep the course, bailing to keep the boat afloat.

The scene depicts the church on its mission: a small boat on a voyage to the other side of the wide sea, threatened by the wind and the waves. This is actually the second time in Matthew that we are invited to recognize ourselves in those seafarers rather than watch them from the shore. The first time, Jesus was in the boat with the disciples when a wind storm arose on the sea, and the boat was being swamped by the waves, but he was asleep.[3] He was right there with them, but to them it was as if he wasn’t there at all. They woke him up, saying, “Lord, save us! We are perishing!” And he said, “Why are you afraid, you of little faith?” Then he got up and rebuked the winds and the sea; and there was a dead calm. They were amazed, saying, “What kind of man is this, that even the winds and the sea obey him?” They – and we along with them – began to see that Jesus truly is Emmanuel, God-with-us.

In this second clip of the great voyage to the other side, Jesus was not in the boat. It was dark, the waves were powerful, and they were far from the land – but they were not afraid. With the wind against them, they were busy keeping the course. And early in the morning, in the darkest hour of the night, just before dawn, they saw Jesus walking on the sea. Now they were terrified and they cried out in fear – until they heard the familiar voice, saying, “Take heart, it is I; do not be afraid.” They – and we along with them – discovered that Jesus was not far away on a distant shore, but that he is Emmanuel, God-with-us.

In the Bible, the sea is shown as a place teeming with life, but also as the unfathomable deep, the unpredictable and uncontrollable force that can destroy life. Within minutes and without warning, its friendly, sun-speckled surface can turn into violent, churning, watery chaos. Matthew’s witness of Jesus walking on the sea is to help us recognize and remember that in him, God is with us, that he can subdue the frightening chaos of our anxiety and fear. At the end of the story, the wind ceases and the sea is tamed.

Matthew’s gospel, Matthew’s witness to the saving power of Jesus Christ, begins with the birth of a child called Emmanuel, God-with-us, and it ends with the promise of the risen Christ, “Remember, I am with you always to the end of the age.”[4] And here, in the middle of his narrative, Matthew gives the followers of Jesus on their long voyage, with the wind, it seems, always against them, a church tossed by the waves of opposition against its mission, a church exhausted by the struggle – here he gives the church of all generations a glimpse of that darkest hour before dawn: Matthew shows us the Son of God walking across all that frightens and threatens us and bringing peace to creation. “Take heart, it is I,” he says to us. It is a long journey, it is a hard journey; fear and anxiety will stir the world into a horrid dance of suspicion and mistrust, but you are not alone. “Take heart, it is I.” Stay the course of faith and mercy.

Now what got into Peter that he responded, “Lord, if it is you, command me to come to you on the water”? Many have suggested that Peter climbing over the gunwhale is an example of discipleship. They tell us that Jesus is standing on the stormy waters of life, bidding us, across the roar of the wind and the waves, to come to him. Like Peter, we are to heed his call and find the courage to step out onto the water. Step out boldly; pay no attention to the storm; keep your eyes on the Lord. If you want to walk on water, you’ve got to get out of the boat. They present Peter as an example of “extreme discipleship” whereas the rest of the disciples are mere “boat potatoes.”[5] They suggest that it’s perfectly OK for a follower of Jesus to want to walk on water, and if Peter hadn’t taken his eyes off his Lord, he would have hiked up and down the waves like it was just the thing to do in the middle of a storm.

Peter is an example, but not of extreme discipleship. He is an example of ordinary discipleship, an example of how difficult it is to be a follower when the one you follow isn’t present in familiar ways.

“Take heart, it is I,” Jesus said. You are not alone. We hear the words, we hear the promise, but we go back and forth between courage and fear, between trust and the need for unshakable certainty, between Yes and Yes, but what if? What if this call to a life of discipleship is just in our imagination?

Peter said, “Lord, if it is you,” and in all of Matthew there are only two other scenes when someone addresses Jesus with this kind of conditional clause. In one, the tempter comes to Jesus in the wilderness, saying, “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”[6] And in the other, at the crucifixion, some who pass by say, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.”[7] We want more than the word and the promise, and that can put us in the company of those who tempt and scorn our Savior.

Nevertheless, Jesus said to Peter, “Come.” And this simple command reminds me of the time when Jesus called his first disciples. He walked by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Peter and his brother, and he said to them, “Follow me.” Immediately they left their nets and followed him. Things became more difficult when following was no longer just a matter of keeping up with the man going ahead of them. That’s when they – and we along with them – began to understand that to follow Jesus is to trust his word and promise; to be attentive to his voice and call. Our faith in Christ equips us not to be water-walkers but rather seafarers on the great voyage to the other side, ordinary human beings in a threatened world who, with the wind against them, stay the course of faith and mercy. Our faith is as human as Peter’s; it is that mixture of courage and fear, of trust and doubt, of listening to the Lord and noticing the wind, and of sinking and being held. When Peter began to sink and the waters were about to close over him, he cried out, “Lord, save me!” No more “Lord, if it is you,” only the voice of a human being crying out from the violent, churning, watery chaos – and there it was, the strong hand of Jesus.

Save me, O God, for the waters have come up to my neck
I sink in deep mire, where there is no foothold;
I have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over me.[8]

We know these lines from the book of psalms, and most of us have lived long enough to know that this is not someone else’s prayer, but ours. This is the prayer of God’s people, and Jesus has prayed it with all who put their trust in God’s power to save.

We have come into deep waters, and the flood sweeps over us, and people are drowning – in debt, in anxiety, in despair. These are times when the worries and fears of many surround us like mighty waters that threaten to swallow up everything. These are times when the world needs the witness of ordinary disciples, ordinary men and women who muster the courage to stay the course of faith and mercy. May we be among them.

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[1] Psalm 69:1-2

[2] See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/02/03/learning-to-walk-underwater-mortgages_n_818315.html

[3] Matthew 8:23-27

[4] Matthew 28:20

[5] John Ortberg, If You Want to Walk on Water, You’ve Got to Get Out of the Boat (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2001), pp. 13, 31

[6] Matthew 4:3, 6

[7] Matthew 27:40

[8] Psalm 69:1-2

The Better Banquet

Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.

This is a very curious way to begin a story. It’s like walking into the theater with your 3D-glasses and your bucket of popcorn and realizing that they started the movie without you. “What did I miss?” you ask yourself. What was it Jesus heard that causedhim to withdraw in a boat?

The disciples of John the Baptist had just buried the body of their master. He had been beheaded in Herod’s prison. That’s what Jesus heard.

It was Herod’s birthday, and the ruler had invited foreign dignitaries, government officials, members of the chamber of commerce, and a select group of lobbyists to a banquet at his palace. There was plenty of food and drink; the guests sang Happy Birthday, dear Herod, and they took turns giving toasts, praising the wisdom and statesmanship of their host. Food and drink, song and – the only thing missing, Herod thought, was a little dance. So he asked the daughter of Herodias to dance before his company. Herodias was his wife, but she used to be his brother’s wife, and John, the man who had been preaching and baptizing outside the city, John had been telling him, “It is against the law for you to marry her.”

Herod really wanted the man silenced, but he feared the crowd: recent polls indicated that a significant number of people thought of John as a prophet. His word had a great deal of authority among them. So execution was not an option; instead Herod had John arrested and put in prison.

Back to the birthday party. The young woman danced for Herod and his guests, and she pleased him so much that he promised on oath to grant her whatever she might ask. He may have had a few drinks too many, or perhaps he just wanted to impress his guests with his royal munificence. What could the girl possibly ask for – a new dress, jewelry, perhaps a trip to Rome? But prompted by her mother, she said, “Give me the head of John the Baptist here on a plate.” She said it out loud, in front of everybody. It was too late to take back the foolish promise – he couldn’t afford to go back on his word and lose face in front of his guests, half of whom were just waiting for him to show signs of weakness. So he sent and had the prophet beheaded. Dessert hadn’t been served yet, when the head of John the Baptist was brought in on a tray and given to the dancer. Nobody said much; who knows, the occasional beheading may have been part of the routine at court.

John’s disciples came and took the body and buried it; then they went and told Jesus. Now when Jesus heard this, he withdrew from there in a boat to a deserted place by himself.

You can imagine he wanted to be alone to mourn the death of his friend. Perhaps he crossed the lake to get away from Herod, at least for a while, to pray and reconsider his own ministry: like John, Jesus proclaimed a kingdom that wasn’t Herod’s, and he had just heard what can happen to those who serve and obey God rather than the ruler of this world. So he got in a boat and sailed away, all by himself. As he made his way across the lake, the crowd followed him on foot from the towns. They were the people who lived under Herod’s rule; they were the people he taxed and polled and feared, always ready to do what needed to be done in order to please Rome or to maintain order and – most important of all – his own power. Jesus saw them, and he didn’t stay in the boat, out on the water, in solitude and silence, no, he came ashore to stay with them. He didn’t go away because he had compassion for them. He didn’t go away because his love for God’s reign was greater than his concern for his own safety.

At Herod’s party, worldly power was unmasked; the deadly game of competition and control, flattering and fear was in plain view. Eating, drinking, singing and dancing made it all look like a joyous feast, but the bloody truth of that banquet was and remains the prophet’s head on a tray.

There is a better banquet where Jesus is host, and the contrast is stark: in Herod’s palace, death rules; in the company of Jesus, life is healed and shared.

We all want to live life in fullness, but everybody, it seems, wants to be invited to Herod’s party in the big house. The game of power promises everything to the ambitious individual, but it destroys communities and silences prophets.

The gospel is about a better banquet for us and our hunger for life in fullness. There is no bread for our hunger in Herod’s palace, but there is bread in abundance on the other side where Jesus prepares a picnic in the wilderness. The gospel is God’s invitation to us to leave Herod’s party and go where Jesus is headed and find fulfillment there.

Herod^[1], like his father, Herod the Great who killed the infant boys in and around Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’ birth, Herod looks a lot like Pharaoh – you remember Pharaoh. Like the pharao’s violent resistance against the exodus, the murder of John was not an unfortunate, isolated incident of poor judgment on the part of a weak or evil individual; this murder revealed with brutal clarity the powers that will do anything to keep God from disrupting their plans. Pharaoh, Herod, Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Bashir – the list goes on through the ages; the players change, but the game remains the same: power at any cost. But there is a better banquet with good news for the poor, freedom for the oppressed, compassion for the suffering, bread for the hungry, life in abundance.

I don’t want to be part of Herod’s party and I don’t want a piece of his cake. I want to be where there’s bread enough for all and twelve baskets full of leftovers. I want to be where the singing continues through the night until the morning dawns.

For Herod’s party you need an invitation, you have to know the right people who can make a couple of phone calls and get you in. Once you’re in, if you want Herod to remember your name, tell him how to spin the murder of John into a triumph of justice for tomorrow’s headlines – you pull that off and you’ll always have a seat at Herod’s table.

Jesus’ banquet isn’t a party for the select few but a gathering for all who yearn for fullness of life.

Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live.^[2]

I hear the voice of Christ in these lines from Isaiah. I hear his invitation to all who hunger and thirst for life to come to him. He calls the poor to buy wine and milk without money, and those who have money he asks, “Why do you spend [it] for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy?” Why indeed? Why do we spend so much money for things that promise to fill us, but always, always leave us empty? Why do we labor for things that only leave us wanting more? Why do we work and shop and buy and put our stuff in storage – and still we don’t know how it feels to be filled? Why do we listen to voices that tell us day and night that we must work and consume our way to fulfillment?

Meanwhile, Jesus is at the lake shore, God’s compassion in the flesh, calling the poor and the rich to come, and healing them. It’s getting late, and some of the disciples are beginning to worry about this enormous group of people and their hunger. “Send them away so that they may go and buy food for themselves,” they say. There are markets in the villages, convenience stores and restaurants, something for every taste. Send them away, we say, so that they may buy food for themselves – send them back to Herod’s world.

Jesus says no. They need not go away; you give them something to eat, he says. And we look at what we have to offer and it looks like nothing to us. Five loaves and two fish looks like nothing to us. What’s a handful in world of need? Not enough. Never enough. And Jesus says, bring them here to me. We say, we have nothing here but five of this and two of that. But Jesus says, bring them here to me. The point, apparently, is not how little or much we have but what we do with what we have to offer.

The contrast is stark. In Herod’s palace, gifts are a part of the game. They create relationships of dependence and obligation. In Herod’s palace, every gift is a bribe, a quid-pro-quo, hush money, a little extra padding for a deal – one hand washes the other. At the other banquet, we place what we have in Jesus’ hands and watch in wonder how the miracle of life in fullness unfolds.

You can bet they had the biggest cake in town for Herod’s birthday, but the party ended with the violent death of a servant of God. At the end of that same day, there was a party outside the palace, a banquet where life ruled, and all ate and were filled.

We live in a world where Herod rules, but in this very world we hear the call of a different ruler. We live in a world where voices from every side tell us that we must look out for ourselves, but in this very world we hear the call of a different ruler. Incline your ear, he says. Listen, so that you may live.

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[1] Herod Antipas, son of Herod the Great (Matthew 2:1-23)

[2] Isaiah 55:1-3

No Line

I love how life slows down during the summer, at least for part of the summer. Part of the fun is that I get to do things I rarely get to do the rest of the year.

This morning, I went to the Campus for Human Development, put on an apron, and helped to serve lunch to over 200 men and women. "Soup kitchen" only describes the concept. The reality is so much more: we served salmon patties from the grill, corn, fruit salad, field greens, bread, dessert and iced tea. And the best part: we served restaurant style. No line. Of course, a cafeteria line is much more efficient. The difference between "feeding people" and "serving lunch" was palpable. Efficiency can be measured in meals per minute or cents per plate. But there's no quick formula for allowing clients to be guests. That will always be called a table.

Luke 14:12 (yes, the organization is named after a Bible passage) depends almost entirely on volunteers to prepare and serve lunch twice a week at the Campus of Human Development.

If you're free between 11:30 and 12:45 on Tuesdays and Fridays, think about it. It's the perfect lunchbreak ministry.

You can be part of extending the hospitality of Christ's table. No line. Just a table and the invitation to come in.

Send me an email if you have questions.

The Eyes of the Birds

One day, the disciples asked Jesus, “Why do you use parables when you speak to the crowds?”

And he replied, “Because they haven’t received the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but you have. Although they see, they don’t really see; and although they hear, they don’t really hear or understand. What Isaiah prophesied has become completely true for them:

You will hear, to be sure, but never understand; and you will certainly see but never recognize what you are seeing. For this people’s senses have become calloused, and they’ve become hard of hearing, and they’ve shut their eyes so that they won’t see with their eyes or hear with their ears or understand with their minds, and change their hearts and lives that I may heal them.”[1]

Jesus tells parables to get through to people whose senses have become calloused. They are people who have heard too many lies, too many promises that evaporated into thin air, too many speeches that only add heat and noise to the debate. They are people who have seen too much of the heart-breaking stuff; now their eyes are clouded with the cataracts of cynicism and despair, and they can’t see the things that heal. Jesus tells parables to crack the shells of our imagination and allow us to glimpse the secrets of the kingdom of heaven.

In many ways, parables are like jokes: you either get them or you don’t; and if you don’t, no amount of explanation will make you laugh – and making you laugh is the point, after all. Perhaps you have seen the clip of the Dalai Lama who was interviewed on a morning news show a few weeks ago. The reporter wanted to lighten things up a little bit by telling a joke – opening line: The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop. Simple enough intro, you’d think, except that the Dalai Lama sitting in the studio apparently has no idea what a pizza shop is. With a puzzled look he turns to his translator for help, who probably tells him something about a bakery, pies, crusts, and toppings, who knows.

The Dalai Lama nods and the reporter resumes telling his joke.

The Dalai Lama walks into a pizza shop. “Make me one with everything.”

That’s the whole joke, and it’s actually quite funny – if you know a little bit about ordering pizza and the basic tenets of buddhism. If you don’t, you just stare at the reporter waiting to hear how the story might continue or wondering if he is quite right in his head.

A snowman walks into a bar. “I smell a carrot. Do you smell a carrot?”

I love that joke, but I wouldn’t want to explain it to a kid who’s never seen a snowman.

Now back to Jesus. Jesus tells parables to heal our calloused senses so that we might perceive the secrets of the world of God’s reign. And just like any joke is embedded in a culture, so is every parable.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field; it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make their nests in its branches.

Now you can call a mustard plant a shrub or a bush, but nobody in their right mind would call it a tree. It grows about five feet tall, maybe six in a good year, or even nine, but only if you coddle it because you want to take it to the Tallest Mustard Plant Competition at the county fair – and even at nine feet tall it’s still only a scrawny, twiggy thing. If you want to talk about a tree, you don’t start with mustard seed. Everybody knows that.

The prophet Ezekiel compared Israel’s powerful neighbor to the north, Assyria, to a cedar of Lebanon, with fair branches and forest shade, and of great height, its top among the clouds. The waters nourished it, the deep made it grow tall, making its rivers flow around the place it was planted, sending forth its streams to all the trees of the field. So it towered high above all the trees ... All the birds of the air made their nests in its boughs; under its branches all the animals of the field gave birth to their young; and in its shade all great nations lived.^[2]

In Israel’s imagination, trees represented the great empires of Assyria, of Egypt, Babylonia, and Rome, and in Jesus’ day, many hoped that God’s coming kindom would be the most magnificent tree of all: it would be the very tree of life with the nations of the world finding peace and security in its shade, together with the birds of the air and the animals of the field. Trees with birds in them had become symbols of hope, hope that in the end God’s reign would prevail on earth.

I remember a story from Uruguay, about a teacher and his daughter. During the years of military rule, the teacher was thrown in prison for what the generals called subversive activity. He hadn’t planned an assassination, nor had he been part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government; he was imprisoned for teaching history and literature. He was fortunate, though, because his 7-year-old daughter was allowed to come and visit him once a week. On one of her first visits, she brought him a picture she had drawn the night before at his desk at home: it was a tree with it’s top touching the clouds, and birds flying in the sky and perching on the branches. However, her dad didn’t get to see it, because the guards took the picture away from her. Birds were considered subversive, free as they were to fly anywhere they wanted in a sky without borders—they might give the people the wrong ideas.

A week later the little girl returned with another drawing. It was a beautiful tree, tall, with strong branches, lush and green, and the sun was smiling in the sky. The sun had not yet been put on the index of banned images, and so the girl was able to give her dad the picture.

“Thank you, darling, this is the most beautiful tree I have ever seen. Is it a cherry tree?” he asked, pointing at a number of small red dots among the leaves.

“Shhh, Papa,” she said, “those are the eyes of the birds. They live in the tree, and when the guards aren’t watching, they fly!”

The tree with birds in it was a symbol of resilience, freedom and hope, and the guards were clueless.

When we hear the story of the mustard seed and the tree with birds in it, we might think, at first, that it is about the contrast of small beginnings and wonderful endings, but it is about more. Perhaps farmers in Jesus’ day actually did grow mustard to eat the greens or use the seeds as medicine. Perhaps they knew about mustard as a rotation crop that helps improve the soil; if so, they had to get it plowed under before the plants seeded—otherwise their fields would produce very little that year except a bumper crop of mustard. I think of mustard as the perfect weed—invasive, fast-growing, drought-resistant, and impossible to control. It begins with a seed only slightly bigger than a pin head, and before you know it, it’s taken over your field and garden.

Jesus tells a parable with mustard in it. Yes, the mighty tree of God’s reign on earth begins with the tiniest of seeds, but this is about more than small things growing tall. For that kind of story any kind of seed would do, but Jesus tells a parable with mustard in it. Mustard is a necessary ingredient here, and there’s nothing mighty or majestic about mustard. It grows everywhere, not just on the hights of Lebanon or the seven hills of Rome or by the great rivers of Egypt or Babylon. It doesn’t just grow in the places where power tends to be at home, no, it grows like a weed wherever the tiny seeds get dropped. It is invasive, fast-growing, drought-resistant, impossible to control, and common as crab grass and thistles.

I don’t know if I get this parable, but what I’m beginning to hear and see is an incredible affirmation of common men and women. The oaks of righteousness don’t sprout from acorns, genetically engineered in the  lab and pampered in beds of privilege in the greenhouses of power. No, the great tree of God’s reign on earth begins with ordinary seed, common as mustard and just as invasive. Ordinary men and women, inspired by Jesus to live as citizens of God’s reign, are part of the transformation of the world that will abide when all empires have fallen. Every small act of love and compassion matters. Every unsung moment of forgiveness, every little word of encouragement matters. God’s reign is like a weed that finds the tiniest crack in the concrete and it grows and nothing can stop it until the birds of the air make nests in its shade.

After this, Jesus takes us from the field to the kitchen.

“The kingdom of heaven,” he says, “is like yeast that a woman took and hid in three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.”

If you’ve never baked with yeast or sourdough, you need to give it a shot. Popping a can of ready-to-bake cinnamon rolls makes nice enough rolls in the morning, but it’s not much of a parable. To get the meaning of leaven, you must have seen and smelled and felt it at least once.

For bread, all you need is flour, water, yeast, and a little salt. You make the dough and you place it in the bottom of a bowl. It looks great, a little dense, perhaps, and heavy, and it doesn’t smell much like anything. Now you cover the bowl with a clean dish towel, and then you go and watch the news, walk the dog, or take a nap. You just give it time.

An hour later you come back to the kitchen, and it smells lovely: fresh and tangy, like somebody squirted a little lemon in the air. Then you notice the kitchen towel: it doesn’t just hang over the bowl, no, it rests on a perfectly rounded mound of dough that is light and springy, and touching it makes you think about baby skin.

The parable works with this beautiful image of slow, barely noticable and powerful transformation, and it doesn’t begin in a palace or a board room on Wall Street. It begins in the kitchen, the garden, the field – it begins with you and me. It begins with our ordinary days that suddenly become transparent to reveal the kingdom of heaven. And finally we begin to see.

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[1] Matthew 13:10-15 (CEB)

[2] See Ezekiel 31:2-9; see also Daniel 4:10-12

Weed Control

This story about the wheat and the weeds bothers me, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. This story bothers me so much, it doesn’t just go away and blend into the landscape. It sticks around. It raises questions. It makes me wonder.

In the gospel of Mark, Jesus tells a very similar story that is bursting with promise and hope, and that is where I want to begin. He says,

The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.[1]

This story of the mysterious growth of God’s reign was remembered and retold among believers, and when the gospel of Matthew was composed, it had absorbed some of the questions followers of Jesus had begun to ask: Why, after all this time, do we see so little of God’s reign? How come other things that have nothing to do with the kingdom of God continue to grow? The kingdom seed is sprouting and growing, just as Jesus promised, but some other seed, nasty seed is also doing mighty well and it is showing no signs of withering away. Why? Believers had questions like these, and that is how, in Matthew’s telling, the weeds got a part in the story, together with a host of other characters besides the sower.

People who study the biblical texts and the ancient world with much attention to detail tell us that the weeds in this story are in fact Bearded Darnel or lolium temulentum, an annual grass which grows plentifully in Syria and Palestine. In its early stages, they say, this weed looks very much like wheat, making it almost impossible to identify until the ear appears, and only then the difference is discovered. As the plants mature, the roots of the weeds and wheat intertwine, and it would take hours to separate the two without hurting the wheat. Separation, however, is necessary, because darnel is both bitter and toxic: if not removed prior to milling, darnel ruins the flour and the bread and the family dinner. Most farmers in ancient times therefore separated the grains after threshing by spreading them on a flat surface and removing the darnel seeds – a different color at that stage – by hand.

All this is very interesting and helpful information, but the story still bothers me. It sounds like an innocent parable from the world of agriculture before the rise of Roundup-ready wheat, but it quickly loses its innocence.

The disciples approached Jesus, saying, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” He answered, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man; the field is the world, and the good seed are the children of the kingdom; the weeds are the children of the evil one, and the enemy who sowed them is the devil.”[2]

In this interpretation people are compared to weeds – and the weeds end up in the furnace of fire. The story bothers me because comparing people to weeds or vermin has too often been but the first step toward their extermination. Once the Jews in Germany had been labeled as parasites, the gas chambers and ovens were not far away. In Rwanda, members of one ethnic group referred to members of another as cockroaches, and soon hundreds of thousands were killed. Weeds, pests, vermin, parasites are labels designed to hide the humanity of others and justify their destruction. The language of extermination makes me sick, and reading in our sacred scripture that “the weeds are the children of the evil one” grieves and worries me.

During the crusades, a group of knights, crosses painted on their armor, crosses stitched on their banners, blew through a Syrian town on their way to Jerusalem and killed everyone in sight. It was only later and almost by accident, when somebody turned the bodies over, that they found crosses around most of their victims’ necks. “It never occurred to them that Christians came in brown as well as white.”[3] They thought they were just plucking up weeds so that the seed of God’s reign might flourish in the Holy Land.

The same logic was at work in the Inquisition when men and women were tortured and killed solely to protect the pure wheat of the true faith from the noxious weeds of false doctrine. As late as the 19^th century, women and men accused of witchcraft were burned at the stake in an effort to purge communities of the devil’s influence. It never occurred to those who conducted the witch-hunts that they were doing the devil’s work.

The simple division of humanity into weeds and wheat is a dangerous and deadly proposition. Evil is real, no doubt about it, but much of it is the result of people’s conviction of their own goodness or the unquestionable righteousness of their cause. When we look at the field of the world, and the mixed up mess that’s sprouting and growing there, we are not very likely to see ourselves as weeds, are we? No, we point the finger at anyone and everyone who doesn’t fit the patterns of our piety, our morality, or our politics. We know an infidel when we see one, and we have a hard time coming to terms with the possibility that, in the words of Anna Carter Florence, the infidel, he may be us.

We have a hard time coming to terms with the reality that the field of the world doesn’t just stretch before us, from our noses to the horizon, but rather within us. We are not farm hands who can stand on the edge of the field and talk about weed control, we are the mixed up crop that grows there. We are this entangled mess of wheat and weeds, and none of us is clearly one or the other.

Yes, the kingdom seed is in the world, and yes, it is growing, but it doesn’t grow unopposed: other things are growing, too. The field of the world is messier than we want it to be. The field of our life is messier than we want it to be. This congregation, even on our best days is messier than we want it to be. Everywhere we look, so many things don’t measure up to our expectations about the presence of God’s reign. And sometimes we are afraid that the weeds could take over the entire field and crowd out the wheat, and that would be the end of it.

But the master says to the anxious slaves, “Let both of them grow together until the harvest.” Apparently, the growth of the weeds cannot interfere with the flourishing of the wheat. Is the master telling the slaves to do nothing? Doesn’t he know that the surest way for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing? Isn’t that exactly what happened in Germany and Rwanda? Isn’t that what happened in every crusade, every colonial invasion, every show trial? No, what happened there was that not nearly enough people had the courage to speak up and remind those getting ready for their purity raids that ridding the world of evil is not a task for armies, inquisitors, or crusaders, but for angels.

The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father.[4]

Jesus calls us to trust the growth of God’s reign in the field of the world and to be patient. Evil is real but it cannot prevail. The causes of sin cannot stand in God’s judgment, and in the end goodness will abide. Perhaps you think that being patient and trusting sounds a lot like sitting on the couch with our hands in our laps and waiting for the angels to arrive. But it has very little to do with that; we must continue to live as followers of Jesus and as witnesses to the grace he embodied. And because of this grace that teaches our hearts to believe, we become less and less afraid to examine ourselves with a little more honesty under the gaze of Jesus. Over time, we might, of course, become a little less certain of ourselves and our opinions, but we might also become a little quicker to welcome one another in our shared imperfection.

The enemy of God’s good and righteous reign can do nothing against goodness and righteousness. The enemy can only sow the seeds of fear and suspicion, but that is enough to wreak havoc in the world. In the parable, the enemy goes away after sowing the weeds: no need to hang around. He depends on others to do his work for him, people convinced of their ability to identify the weeds in the garden of paradise, convinced of their own goodness and righteousness. “Goodness itself,” writes Robert Farrar Capon, “if it is sufficiently committed to plausible, right-handed, strong-arm methods, will in the very name of goodness do all and more than all that evil ever had in mind.”[5] It never occurred to those who conducted witch-hunts and other purity raids that they were doing the devil’s work.

Resistance against God’s good and righteous reign is not just out there, but first and foremost in our own heart and mind. That is why Jesus warns us against the urge to create a paradise of purity by attempting to weed the world. He calls us to resist the exclusion of others that begins with the labels we use to categorize them as outsiders to God’s covenant community and that ends with murder. Jesus calls us to follow him in practicing mercy and trusting the judgment of God. He calls us to welcome one another in our shared imperfection and to surrender together to God’s desire and power to save us.

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[1] Mark 4:26-29

[2] Matthew 13:36-39

[3] Barbara Brown Taylor, Bread of Angels, p.148

[4] Matthew 13:41-43

[5] Robert Farrar Capon, The Parables of the Kingdom, p. 102

Joshua's Worries And Moses's Dream

You know it’s hot when you walk across the parking lot at the mall wondering if the asphalt is softening or if the soles on your shoes are melting; or maybe both. You know it’s hot when roads in Minnesota are closed not because of flooding, but because the pavement’s buckling and blowing up. It’s hot, and it’s not even summer yet.

Back in the 60’s, The Mamas and the Papas sang about the preacher who loves the cold because people out on a walk might come in and stay. I don’t know if any of you came in this morning just to get out of the heat and chill a little. Whatever it was that brought you here this morning I want you to know that I don’t love the heat, but I intend to take full advantage of it; it is a welcome illustration for the long, hard journey of God’s people through the wilderness.

The Hebrews had left the house of slavery in Egypt, dreaming of the promised land, dreaming of milk and honey and of resting in the pleasant shade of fig trees and vines. Moses had led them out, but he was just about ready to quit. God’s people weren’t acting like grown-ups, but very much like tired kids on a road trip: the complaints from the back seat just wouldn’t stop.

“I’m hot – can we stop at a pool?”

“Mom, he touched me; tell him not to touch me.”

“Why did we have to go on this trip, Dad?”

“Are we there yet?”

And when it came time for dinner, the complaints about the food just wouldn’t end, “Oh no, not manna again! We’re tired of eating manna every day.” Like generations of moms and dads Moses could have said, “And I’m tired of your constant complaints. Manna is what we’re having, and if you don’t like it, you’ll just have to go to bed hungry.” But Moses didn’t say anything like that. He turned to God and said,

Why are you doing this to me? What have I done that you lay the burden of all this people on me? Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a suckling child’? I am not able to carry all this people alone, for they are too heavy for me. If this is how you are going to treat me, I’d rather die.[1] You called me to lead your people according to your word and promise, but this is not what I agreed to do. These are your children, not mine, so don’t expect me to mother them all the way to the promised land.

God answered Moses saying, “Gather for me seventy of the elders of Israel and bring them to the tent of meeting. I will take some of the spirit that is on you and put it on them; and they shall bear the burden of the people along with you so that you will not bear it all by yourself.”[2]

And that is what happened. God took some of the spirit that was on Moses and put it on the seventy elders. Now it wasn’t just one man who would lead God’s people according to God’s word and promise, but a large group of elders; in the heat of the wilderness, the leadership base had been broadened to include a variety of voices and life experiences. The crisis wasn’t addressed by turning around and going back to Epypt or by attempting to find a short cut from the heat of the wilderness to the land of milk and honey. God addressed the crisis by giving leadership authority to a broader group of people.

To me the most intriguing part of the story are the very different responses of Joshua and Moses to the surprise that happened in the camp while the elders were gathered at the tent of meeting. Eldad and Medad had not left the camp to go to the tent, and yet the spirit rested on them and they prophesied as well. The little scene is a powerful reminder that God’s spirit is free, and that the authority to interpret God’s word and promise is never fully tied to institutional structures. In the story, Joshua gives voice to our need to keep things neat and orderly and under control, when he says, “My lord Moses, stop them!” Can’t you see how this will undermine your authority and the authority of the elders? Moses, however, who has born the burden of the people for some time, gives voice to a greater vision: “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets, and that the Lord would put his spirit on them!” Imagine a people of God where the knowledge of God’s word and promise is no longer delegated to moms and dads just so the kids can continue to whine and complain from the back seat. Imagine a people of God where the knowledge of God’s will is the common work of God’s sons and daughters!

Where Joshua is anxious and protective, Moses dares to dream of an outpouring of God’s spirit that would turn relationships of dependence and complaint into a community of freedom and mutual accountability. Moses, in the middle of the wilderness, gives voice to a vision we call Pentecost.

“In the last days it will be, God declares, that I will pour out my Spirit on all flesh, and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams.”

Jews from every nation under heaven were in Jerusalem on that day, and they heard the good news of Jesus, each in their own language, and they were amazed. And it didn’t stop there. Slaves, forbidden to speak unless they were spoken to, proclaimed even to their masters the liberating word they had received from Jesus, the Messiah. Women, long denied the right to participate in interpreting the scriptures, began to preach and prophesy in powerful ways, and their fathers and husbands listened as well as their sons and daugthers. Old men who thought their days of dreaming were long over and young men who thought the future was void of new possibility began to share their visions of lives fully open to God. And it didn’t stop there. In chapter 8 of Acts, we read of Philipp who read scripture with a eunuch from East Africa. In chapter 9, we read about a Pharisee named Saul who was overpowered on the road to Damascus and recruited to proclaim the good news of Jesus the Messiah among all nations. In chapter 10, we read about Peter, not a young man anymore but not an old man yet, who received a vision that taught him not to call anyone profane or unclean, and he began to understand that God shows no partiality. When God declares, “In the last days I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh,” God means all flesh.

The Spirit of God is poured out, and disciples of Jesus praise God in every dialect, extending the gospel of God’s gracious presence in Jesus Christ into every human arena, obliterating the word “foreign” from their vocabulary. The Spirit of God is poured out, and hierarchies of authority are flattened, long-established boundaries between clean and unclean become meaningless, and what is beginning to emerge is a community of freedom and mutual accountability.

Of course, it’s still hot out there and we’re not there yet. In many ways, it’s hotter out there than it’s been in a very long time and we’re less sure how to continue the journey than we have been in a very long time. It’s hot, and there are days when the heat is just brutal. These are particularly difficult times for denominations that have long been a strong and visible part of the fabric of life in this country and who must now learn to live without the privileges of cultural establishment. The world is changing incredibly fast, and the changes are shaking up our assumptions and challenging our imagination about many things, chief among them how to live faithfully as God’s people in the world. Sunday school classes large enough to fill half the sanctuary are disappearing fast in the rearview mirror together with women’s circles, deacons wearing white gloves, and other elements of church life we once took for granted.

There are days when I just want to sit in the back seat and complain about the heat and how long it’s taking us to get there and why we have to ride in this old car that doesn’t have video screens in the backs of the seats. But it’s a different kind of journey now. The knowledge of God’s will and word is no longer the domain of moms and dads who tell us where to go and what to do. Joshua was afraid this might happen and Moses wished to see the day when it would: the Spirit of God being poured out on all flesh, and all God’s sons and daughters discerning the way with authority and mutual accountability.

In the heat of the wilderness, God addressed Israel’s crisis by including more voices, more life experiences in leadership. And in the heat of the wilderness in which we find ourselves this is what we must remember: pouring out the Spirit, God has chosen us to be the body of Christ in the world, together. Church is not what we think we were in the 50’s or who we wish we were today; church is who and what we become when we listen for the word of God in every voice, and the voice of God in every word. Church is who and what we become when we discern together how to be faithful to God by being faithful to each other. Church is what the Spirit makes of us when we pray and when we serve the world in the name of Christ. So let us journey on.

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[1] See Numbers 11:4-15

[2] See Numbers 11:16-17

The End Was Near

Sometime last week, I flipped through the pages of the New Yorker, and yet again one of the cartoons delivered the perfect commentary before I had started reading even a single paragraph. It was a drawing of a familiar character, the end-time prophet on the street corner: long hair, long beard, wild-eyed expression in his face, holding a cardboard sign. The artist changed just one little word: THE END WAS NEAR. I understand that the end of the world has been rescheduled for October 21 when events on May 21 didn’t unfold as predicted by Harold Camping.[1]

I love it when serious theological critique is also very funny. To me, the scene at the beginning of the book of Acts is one of the funniest in all of scripture, and it’s serious theological critique as well. The risen Jesus and the disciples are together, and the disciples are curious about the timing of God’s reign. “Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” And Jesus says quite clearly and unambiguously, “It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set by his own authority.” Harold Camping must have missed that line in his obsessive search of the scriptures for hints about the end of the world. But that’s not the funny part. As the disciples were watching, Jesus was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight. While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven and gazing up toward heaven and gazing up toward heaven … suddenly two men in white robes stood by them and said, “Why are you staring up toward heaven?” This makes a great scene for a Monty Python movie, but it’s holy scripture addressing a crucial theological question: Now what? Now that Jesus is risen from the dead, what are the men and women who follow him to do? Wait for him to come back? Count the days, the years, the generations, eyes fixed to the heavens?

In Peter Marty’s church in Kansas City, worship on Ascension Day called for special props.

Five or six people show up a couple of hours before the evening’s ascension service and begin filling up balloons. They pump hundreds of white balloons full of helium gas and stuff them into an enormous cloud of white bedsheets that have been sewn together. As the balloons begin to push out the fluffy white pocket, a (…) cloud takes shape. The volunteer “cloud squad” pins the cloud shut and releases it to float about the [sanctuary]. It dips and rises over worshipers, moving wherever it wants to go. (…) Some years the cloud takes on unruly behavior, accepting a few too many ceiling fan currents, and divebombing the candelabra. Sometimes we’ve had to tether the gigantic white blob with ten-pound fish[ing]line. (…) The net effect of this soaring-cloud routine is “the crooked-neck syndrome.” Most of the worshipers tilt their heads skyward for much of the service. Pinched nerves and stiff necks are fast becoming a regular feature of our church’s ascension festivities.[2]

Jesus’ disciples looked up, determined to keep their eyes on the spot where they had last seen their Lord, determined to hold on to his presence with them and to their memories of him. Who knows how long they would have stood there, straining their necks, had the two men in white robes not shown up.

“You will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth,” Jesus’ parting words to them had been. They didn’t know what being witnesses might mean, but they remembered his promise that they would receive power to do what they needed to do.

In this brief scene at the beginning of Acts, Luke describes a necessary shift of focus for followers of Jesus Christ: from the end of the world to the ends of the earth. The earthly ministry of Jesus comes to a conclusion, and yet it will continue in the witness of his followers. Jesus’ presence and power would no longer be contingent upon his bodily presence, but be let lose on earth in the freedom and power of the Holy Spirit. Jesus’ departure does not result in his absence, and therefore we have more to sustain us than memories of a great teacher who once walked among us: through the Holy Spirit the mission of Christ continues, and we are the ones whose lives bear witness to his presence and power.

“Lord, is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” the disciples asked, and instead of answers, they were given a promise and a mission: “You will be my witnesses to the ends of the earth.”

I find these words immensely liberating. They free me from anxiously scanning the horizon for signs of the end. They free me to expect the presence of Jesus the Lord not in some cataclysmic finale at the end of time, but in the dailiness of our life and work. They free me to lower my gaze and discover the footprints of Jesus on the ground, and to follow him to the ends of the earth.

This moment of liberation doesn’t reach deep enough, though, if it only makes busy people even busier. In one of his sermons, the Apostle Peter proclaimed,

God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him. We are witnesses to all that he did.[3]

We hear those words, and some of us can’t wait to go about doing good. We don’t want to stand there and gaze at the heavens, we want to get busy doing something, in the name of Jesus.

I was curious about how many people go about doing good in their free time, and I turned to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to find out how many people in this country volunteer in some organized fashion. I learned that between September 2009 and September 2010, close to 63 million people volunteered through or for an organization at least once. That means that just over 26 percent of the adult population participated in fundraising for schools and non-profits, serving food at the local soup kitchen, driving a van for Room in the Inn, building houses with Habitat, or tutoring youth and adults.[4] 62.8 million people, and that’s not counting the guy down the street who regularly cuts his neighbor’s grass or the lady who bakes a cake every week for the family across the backyard. 62.8 million people of all faiths or no faith at all volunteered through or for an organization at least once last year.

Sounds like a big number, although I had hoped that it would be higher – and, it turns out, so did the Corporation for National and Community Service: back in 2007, the group was aiming to raise the number of adult volunteers to 75 million by 2010.

In 2007, the group’s CEO, David Eisner, said, “Our work is cut out for us because, nationally, the volunteer bucket is a bit leaky. We get a lot each year, but we lose a lot each year. We have to figure out how to plug those holes.”

Rob Wallace, a spokesman for Keep America Beautiful, identified one of the holes in the bucket, “Everyone is extremely busy today, so if they begin to feel their volunteer time is sucking the life out of them without giving them satisfaction, they get jaded and want to quit.”

Beth Erickson, a business consultant in suburban Minneapolis who volunteers at least twice a week at her church in St. Paul, pointed to another hole. “Our nightly news is riddled with very few good news stories. Wars, corporate and political scandals and ethical breaches have made us not only weary but also wary of others. So a ‘bunker mentality’ has developed, where people keep to themselves and don’t worry about anything but insulating themselves from the world and the latest bad news. We simply have to turn that around,” Beth said. Beth, Rob, and David made these comments in interviews for an article about “the tide of do-gooder fatigue.” [5]

Most churches are no exception from those trends. We want to do good to the ends of the earth, in the name of Jesus, and we are learning the hard way that our mission is not carried out in our own strength. Robert Wall wrote in his commentary on the Acts of the Apostles, “We live in an activist’s age in which participation in good deeds is keenly encouraged, even demanded of the ‘committed person.’”[6] Don’t just stand there, do something. Go to work. Change the world. True, but the first great act recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, after the very funny opening scene, is the disciples’ return to Jerusalem where they waited. Luke names the eleven, and he mentions the women who were part of the group, as well as Jesus’ mother and brothers, and he notes that all these were constantly devoting themselves to prayer. They prayed and waited to be clothed with power from on high.[7]

Before they went to work, they waited. Before they began to move to the ends of the earth, they learned how to be attentive to God’s initiative. They didn’t rush into action, but practiced resting in the movement of God’s Spirit.

It is easy for us to grasp how feeding the hungry is a witness to the reign of God’s mercy – and it is good. We teach our young ones that filling a bucket with cleaning supplies is a witness to the love of God who knits us together in community – and filling buckets together is great fun. We know that speaking the truth without fear is a witness to the liberating power of the gospel – and it is necessary.

What is much harder for us to grasp is that to engage in the mission of the risen Christ in the world doesn’t begin with doing, but with resting in the movement of God’s Spirit. Before we go and do, we wait and pray, and that too is an act of witness. We come together and practice attentiveness to the Spirit’s movement. We trust the promise that we will be Christ’s witnesses to the ends of the earth so deeply that it doesn’t just add to our busyness, but gets to the root of our thinking, and speaking, and doing, and transforms us.

No more do-gooder fatigue. Only the movement of God’s Spirit through all of creation toward the glory of God – and we get to be a part of it.

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[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/harold-camping-reaffirms-october-date-for-the-end-of-the-world-says-may-21-date-was-invisible-judgment-day/2011/05/24/AFVsMhAH_story.html

[2] Peter Marty, “Up, up and away,” The Christian Century, May 15, 1996, p. 543

[3] Acts 10:38-39

[4] http://www.bls.gov/news.release/volun.nr0.htm

[5] http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0717/p01s03-ussc.html

[6] Robert Wall, Acts (NIB), p. 44

[7] See Luke 24:49

World whisperer

Have you heard the great news? Nashville is getting another law school. In October 2009, Belmont University announced the launch of a College of Law, the first new law school in Middle Tennessee in nearly a century. The College will begin classes this fall, and when at full capacity, it will enroll approximately 360 students. That is good news for Belmont, I suppose, and for our city as well, although I must admit that I’m a little concerned. It makes me nervous when the demand for lawyers is going up while the demand for clergy with a divinity degree continues to decline. Do we really need more attorneys?

When Jesus was a guest at the wedding in Cana – you know the story – he turned some 120 gallons of water into wine and revealed his glory in a wedding feast without end. Well, we do weddings here, and when we inquired recently about the possibility of opening a few bottles of wine during receptions in the fellowship hall, we were advised to seek legal counsel and have a separate contract drafted – one for receptions with innocent punch and iced tea, the other for receptions that might include the dangerous fruit of the vine.

I know, the world’s becoming more complex and complicated and we need good attorneys to help us figure things out and manage our conflicts with reason and wit instead of violence – but I just can’t shake the suspicion that the growing demand for lawyers is not just a response to a world growing more complex, but also a major cause of everyday life becoming more and more complicated. Call me sentimental, but I still remember the days when you could get a cup of coffee that didn’t have a warning printed on it, “Caution! Contents may be hot.” I’m kinda waiting for the red sticker on every banana, “Caution! Peel is slippery. Open at your own risk.” Who knows, you may have to sign a release form before you leave the grocery store carrying all those dangerous things in your bags.

Enough of that. Truth is, I don’t know very many attorneys, and the ones I do know are all wonderful people who do great work. And if the Belmont College of Law will add to their number I can’t wait for the first class to graduate.

When I woke up Thursday morning, I heard the news that General  Ratko Mladic had been arrested in Serbia after sixteen long years. Mladic was the head of the Bosnian Serb army throughout the Bosnian war and the man many hold responsible for the worst atrocities in that bloody conflict. His name, along with that of Bosnian Serb political leader Radovan Karadzic, has come to symbolize the Serb campaign of ethnic cleansing of Croats and Muslims in former Yugoslavia. He played a significant role in the bloody siege of Sarajevo, where thousands of civilians were killed, but the most notorious attack on civilians happened in July 1995, at Srebrenica, a Bosnian Muslim enclave under UN protection. Mladic’s forces overran the town and rounded up Muslim men and boys between ages 12 and 77. Hours before the shooting began, the general himself was seen handing out candy to Muslim children in the main square, smiling and joking with them. Then, over the course of five days, at least 7,500 captives were killed, reportedly machine-gunned in groups of 10 before being buried by bulldozer in mass graves. Later that year, the UN war crimes tribunal indicted General Mladic on two counts of genocide for the Sarajevo siege and the Srebrenica massacre.

I don’t know how many attorneys have been working to bring this case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but I am grateful for every single one of them and for their dogged pursuit of justice. This old man will have to answer in a public court of law for what he did, and I just hope he won’t die before the court has finished its work. It is so easy to make jokes about lawyers – until you need one yourself, or until you cry out for one after justice has been violently undone by unimaginable hatred and the cold disrespect that holds nothing sacred.

On the night before the crucifixion, that final night Jesus spent with his friends, he told them, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments. And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate, to be with you forever.” Now an advocate is essentially a lawyer, and Jesus apparently assumed his friends would need one and told them God would give them one. Why would disciples of Jesus need a lawyer by their side? Because following Jesus might get them in trouble? Jesus did indicate something to that effect when he warned his friends, “If the world hates you, be aware that it hated me before it hated you.”[1] Do we need a lawyer to shout, “Objection!” when the world drags us into court because we see what the world cannot see? “When they hand you over, do not worry about how you are to speak or what you are to say,” Jesus says in the gospel according to Matthew. “What you are to say will be given to you at that time, for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you”[2] – are we to assume that the Advocate will lean over and whisper lines into our ears for a convincing argument?

But what if it isn’t the world that drags us into court, say for following Jesus when everybody else has been following the prevailing winds of the day? What if it is our own conscience accusing us that we are indeed following the prevailing winds of public sentiment rather than Jesus – do we need an advocate who will speak in our defense and make a powerful case for grace?

Or do we need an advocate when we watch the news of yet another tornado shredding through yet another town leaving so much death and destruction in its wake – do we need an advocate when we look into the face of a father whose two little boys were killed, one in the bath tub where mom and the kids had sought shelter, the other one ripped from his mother’s arms and his body not found until two days later? This father certainly needs an advocate who mourns with him and groans with him and speaks for him with sighs too deep for words.[3] Does he have one?

I believe he does. I believe we do. Jesus sends the advocate who is the Spirit of truth, the comforter who breathes in us when the world takes our breath away, the helper who stands beside us, the witness who opens our eyes and ears and hearts to the presence of Christ.

Table runner detailThat night before the crucifixion, before the world came to its quick verdict and moved without delay from sentencing to execution, that night Jesus said, “If you love me you will keep my commandments.” And he said, “A new commandment I give you, that you love one another as I have loved you.” And he said, “If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love.” And he said, “I am giving you these commands so that you may love one another.” And he said, “In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you will see me; because I live, you also will live.” Jesus’ words to his friends that night were nothing like a commencement speech, they were like music, ever new inventions on a theme he had embodied all his life: love in communion. In his life and his words, seeing, knowing, loving and living intertwine like melody lines in a symphony, and Jesus invites us to come in and be part of its glory.

Jesus sends an Advocate to be with us forever; this is the Spirit who teaches us to hear the theme of life in communion in common conversations and even on the radio news; this is the eye-opener who allows us to see that love is the truth and how wondrous life truly is; this is the world whisperer who descends upon our hearts to give testimony on behalf of God, and who descends upon the heart of God to testify on our behalf. This Advocate works tirelessly to wake us up to the miseries of genocide and war, and to instill in us an aching hunger for peace, whispering over our shoulders, gently prodding us, dropping hints left and right to direct our attention to the beauty of life in communion.

Several years ago, Johnny Wray, who was at the time the Executive Director of Week of Compassion, came to visit and he brought us a gift from our neighbors across the ocean. This table runner was hand embroidered by Saha Prses who lives in Sarajevo with her two children. Saha did this work as part of a women’s project called ‘Sarajevo Phoenix.’ Those women came together because they refused to let violence have the last word in their broken city. They were Catholic Croats, Muslim Bosniaks and Orthodox Serbs who believed in a multi-ethnic Bosnia-Herzegovina. Some were refugees, some had lost their homes in the 44 month siege of Sarajevo, others were widows who lost their husbands in the carnage of war. The variety of colors and patterns in their fabrics reflects the diversity in age and ethnicity. Patiently and skillfully they created beautiful pieces of cloth and other textiles, and doing so together they revitalized the fabric of life in their communities. I imagine that they came together sometime on Thursday afternoon to talk about the possibilities for reconciliation and lasting peace that the arrest of Ratko Mladic had opened. I don’t know if and how they interpreted their experience spiritually, but I recognize the voice and work of the Advocate, the world whisperer who invites us to life abundant in communion with God and with one another.

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[1] John 15:18

[2] Matthew 10:19-20

[3] Cf Romans 8:26

The Father's house and the gatekeepers

You can write the same words in three-foot tall letters on a billboard, or with a stick in the wet sand on the beach, or with brilliant ink on a beautiful piece of paper, that you fold and mail in an envelope. The words remain the same, but the different ways they come before our eyes open windows to very different meanings.

The words spoken to a group of friends at the dinner table can be repeated verbatim to a crowd of thousands in a stadium, amplified so that even people on the end of the parking lot can hear them, but they are not the same words anymore.

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” It matters greatly when and where Jesus referred to himself in this way: It wasn’t at the beginning of his ministry, but on the evening before his crucifixion. He didn’t shout these words while driving money changers and merchants from the temple; he spoke them in the same room where he had just washed his disciples’ feet during supper. Jesus said these words to men and women who had been with him for some time, who had found life in his presence, and whose hearts now were troubled by the thought of his imminent departure. Who would teach them? Who would guide them? How would they follow a Lord who was no longer there? “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus didn’t compose one-liners for billboard advertising; he spoke to friends who needed comfort and courage for the road ahead.

In the gospel according to John, there is an exuberance and superabundance of language, metaphor piled upon metaphor – light of the world, bread of heaven, water of life, vine and branches, sheep and shepherd – and every word points to and circles around the life of Jesus, the divine Word in the flesh, the revelation of God in this particular human life. Everything in this gospel is an invitation to come and see and abide and love and serve and know and live. Everything in this gospel is an invitation to trust this call to abundant life and to let ourselves be drawn into communion with God. The intimacy of mutual love between Jesus and the one he called Father is not exclusive; it is open to the world, open to us, open to everyone.

All my life I have been around people who insisted on turning this beautiful invitation into a condition, with a box added to the right of the paragraph that needs to be checked properly in order for salvation to happen.

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” Do you believe this? Check.

It took me a while to understand that while these very passionate people got the words right, they still managed to get the language wrong: the joyful affirmation of Jesus as the giver of life with God for Jews and Gentiles alike had become yet another rule in the gatekeeper’s manual. And while Jesus did refer to himself as the gate, he not once asked any of us to be gatekeepers. That same night, he said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”[1]

The affirmation of the love of God in Jesus Christ is not a rule for the gatekeeper’s manual, but a life embodied in the community of disciples. The divine reality doesn’t appear after someone has checked the correct box or said the magic words; it becomes visible and tangible in the community of Jesus’ friends.

It is, of course, much easier to erect a wall and control who gets in and who doesn’t, than it is to be together, to be with others, mostly very difficult others, in the love of Jesus. Gatekeepers always expect change to be something that needs to happen in others at the transition from outside the wall to the inside. But the love of Jesus breaks down the wall, and his friends expect change to happen in the relationships into which we are drawn by that same love.

I find it very intriguing that in the same chapter in John, only a few lines away from the beautiful words about the way, and the truth, and the life Jesus embodies and offers, only a few lines away, we read about the “Father’s house” and its “many dwelling places.” Now those who cringe every time they hear what has become one of the gatekeepers’ favorite proof texts, suddenly smile. Perhaps “many dwelling places” suggests not only plenty of room for all, but also a great variety of rooms where a great variety of people are at home. For the first readers of John’s Gospel, the metaphor may have offered a way to visualize a community that had room for Jews and Greeks, Samaritans and Romans, Galilean fishermen and urban elites. All of them would be at home, all of them would be together. The Father’s house has room for every nation, every culture and subculture, their music, songs, prayers, cuisine, literature and games – is it too much of a stretch to visualize a house big enough for people of all religious traditions who do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with their God?[2] Is it too much of a stretch to visualize a house big enough for all? Isn’t the promise of many rooms in the Father’s house very good news in this world of border fences, high walls, closed doors, and conflicts fuelled by religious differences?

Two short verses, only a few lines apart in the same chapter of John; one a favorite among those who love to emphasize the particularity of our faith, the particularity of our confession, the other a favorite among those who love to emphasize the commonalities among the world’s great religions. The curious thing is that both groups seem to suffer from amnesia. One tends to forget (or overlook) when and where Jesus is speaking, and who his audience is. The other tends to forget (or overlook) that it is Jesus who is speaking, and that this vision of a redeemed humanity at home has everything to do with his particular way of revealing mutual love as the character of God and the power that creates and heals community. There is nothing generic about the Father’s house; it has Jesus’ name written all over it. Wiping the name off the door is no way to invite our neighbors to come in, but neither is telling them that they have to become like us for the sake of their salvation.

John tells the gospel of Jesus Christ with a unique extravagance of language and image that calls us to trust that the Word of God became flesh and dwelled among us so that we in turn might dwell in God, now and always. In John’s telling the gospel is an invitation to fearlessly rely on Jesus’ relationship with us and his love for us. The deeper our trust in him, the better equipped we are for encounters with our Buddhist, Hindu, or Muslim neighbors. Rather than wipe Jesus’ name off the door in order to be more welcoming, we must trust more deeply in his name in order to know the Father’s house in the first place.

Every religious tradition has its fearful gatekeepers who insist that pure religion can be maintained only in a ghetto or compound, and they are not entirely wrong. As soon as we begin to listen to each other and talk about the things we hold sacred, we open ourselves to change. It becomes harder to maintain our stereotypes and preconceptions about each other. We may even change the way we understand and live our own faith. Again, the deeper our trust in Jesus Christ, the better equipped we are to encounter our neighbors with genuine curiosity and a desire to know them. We can trust that whatever transformation occurs in the encounter and the conversation, in them or in us, or, most importantly, between them and us – we can trust that such transformation is the work of the Spirit of Jesus who draws us into God’s future.

On that night when the disciples were uncertain how they would follow a Lord who was no longer there, Jesus told them that he wasn’t going away, but rather ahead of them. “Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?” Jesus is going ahead of us to make tomorrow a place where all of us are at home. No matter where the long road will take us next, we believe the journey of discipleship will lead us home.

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[1] John 13:34-35

[2] Cf Micah 6:8

Marcel and the life abundant

The first book of religious instruction I ever read was given to me in first grade. My teacher gave it to me; it was clothbound, not too large for my small hands, and not too heavy. I had grown up with stories, pictures, and songs about God and the world, but this first book about our faith marked a significant transition. The teacher and all the grown-ups who had read stories to me ever since I was a baby, now put the book in my own hands, and they began to teach me to read and explore and write on my own.

In those first days of school I wasn’t a reader yet, and so I looked at the pictures. On the front cover was a drawing of a friendly looking man in a long white robe. He was surrounded by sheep and he carried a lamb on his shoulders. On the back cover was another picture of the same man. There was a corral in the background, with lots of sheep in it, and in the foreground was the man in the long white robe. He looked very focussed and determined. In his hands he held a long stick with its pointed end raised against a snarling wolf. The wolf looked very dangerous, but the man stood between it and the sheep, and it was apparent that he would do anything to keep the wolf away from them. The title of the book was “The Good Shepherd.”

In my first year of school, I also learned a song that stayed with me through the years.

Weil ich Jesu Schäflein bin,
freu’ ich mich nur immerhin
über meinen guten Hirten,
der mich wohl weiß zu bewirten,
der mich liebet, der mich kennt
und bei meinem Namen nennt.

A simple tune and simple words, Because I am Jesus’ little lamb I am glad about my good shepherd who is my host at the table, who loves me and knows me and calls me by name. “Jesus’ little lamb” sounds just a little too sweet to my grown-up ears, but it didn’t bother me at all then. I had seen the back cover of the book. I knew this shepherd was a fighter. I learned that being Jesus’ little lamb wasn’t all woolly and cute, but a promise I could rely on.

In the first week of first grade, with a picture and a song, the church taught me perhaps not everything I needed to know about my own vulnerability and God’s power to save, but I learned what is at the heart of our faith: I am known, I am loved, and there’s nothing I need to be afraid of for I belong to Jesus. You are my shepherd and that is all that matters. I will never lack anything, and I will live being pursued by your goodness and mercy. You know me, you love me, you call me by name, and I am yours.

These words have shaped my experience for many years. They speak of a relationship that has defined who I am and who God is for me. Anytime I speak about life in a way that includes notions of purpose and meaning and fulfillment, I speak of Christ who has made me his own. Jesus has indeed been my shepherd, as well as the gate through which I pass again and again as I seek to live more fully and love more fully and know more fully.

Speaking of living more fully, one thing that has long troubled me is the decline of social ties in our society. A quarter of Americans say they have no one with whom they can discuss personal troubles – and according to a study published in 2006 that’s more than double the number who were similarly isolated in 1985. Overall, the number of people we have in our closest circle of confidants has dropped from around three to about two. The study paints a sobering picture of increasing  fragmentation and shrinking social ties. One of the authors of the study said, “We’re not saying people are completely isolated. They may have 600 friends on Facebook … and e-mail 25 people a day, but they are not discussing matters that are personally important.”[1] It’s like we are surfing very fast and far on the surface, but we rarely go deep anymore. And the crazy thing is, none of us want a life of fragmentation and isolation, yet that’s exactly what we are creating in our pursuit of the life abundant. Lots and lots of daily choices, seemingly insignificant in the big picture, create a world nobody actually wants.

The wolves, of course, are very pleased. They look friendly in their sheep’s clothing as they tell the lambs not to be part of the herd – who wants to be part of the herd? Make your own path, your own life. Who says you need a shepherd? You know sweet grass when you see it, when you taste it, don’t you? Have you tried this?

My friend Lary grew up on a sheep farm in North Carolina. He says sheep don’t run away, they nibble their way lost. They graze happily from leaf to leaf, some clover here, a little buttercup there – and moments later they lift their heads and look around wondering where everybody is and what happened to the community.

Ironically, the biggest herd of all are the masses of disconnected consumers with our eyes glued to high resolution screens on our walls, on our desks, and in our hands. Have you met Marcel? He sits with you on the couch when you watch tv. You don’t know who I’m talking about? It’s this commercial where the singer in an all girl band says, “Hey, Marcel, watch this!” and then she starts dancing across the stage. Next scene, there’s a basketball player dribbling with his back to the basket, just outside the 3-point line, shouting, “Hey, Marcel, watch this!” And then he makes his move and scores. Next scene, there’s the triple doppler radar woman who wants to talk about the weather tomorrow, but Marcel isn’t paying attention. “Marcel! Marcel?! Hey, Marcel!” She even has his name written across some low pressure system, but Marcel is flipping channels. Attention is a rare commodity, and hundreds of channels are working tirelessly to get a piece of it. Hey, Marcel, watch this!

The commercial suggests that you and Marcel purchase a service that lets you watch four channels at once on the same screen. That is fantastic! Now you can watch the game, the weather, CSI and some reality flick all at the same time, interrupted only by four times as many commercials to sell you sleep aids, anti-depressants, laxatives and more beer.

What does it have to do with Jesus? Nothing. Jesus isn’t just another channel.  Jesus doesn’t shout “Marcel!” Jesus is the gate to life, and not just the door to yet another store.

He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. He goes ahead of them, and the sheep follow him because they know his voice.[2]

We know there are other voices that call us by name. Computers generate personalized letters for the mail, targeted ads that match our shopping preferences, and phone calls that sound like some long lost friend has finally found our number. It’s just a matter of time, and your tv or touchscreen will literally know and say your name in order to get your attention.

We don’t live in a world of shepherds and sheep anymore, but the metaphor still makes us wonder and helps us to think and talk about the life we have and the life Jesus wants us to have. We want to be safe, we want to belong and be known and remembered, but we have a hard time discerning the voices that call our names. More often than we care to admit, we settle for less than abundant life by making great sacrifices for just more of the same.

We don’t live in a world of shepherds and sheep, but we know the world judged in these words of Ezekiel and the world promised here:

Ah, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves! Should not shepherds feed the sheep? You eat the fat, you clothe yourselves with the wool, you slaughter the fatlings; but you do not feed the sheep. You have not strengthened the weak, you have not healed the sick, you have not bound up the injured, you have not brought back the strayed, you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them. So they were scattered, because there was no shepherd; and scattered, they became food for all the wild animals. Therefore, you shepherds, hear the word of the Lord: I myself will be the shepherd of my sheep; I will seek the lost, and I will bring back the strayed, and I will bind up the injured, and I will strengthen the weak. They shall live in safety, and no one shall make them afraid. They shall know that I, the Lord their God, am with them, and that they, the house of Israel, are my people, says the Lord God.[3]

I hear the voice of Jesus in these words, Jesus who has has come to seek the lost and bring back the strayed, to bind up the injured and strengthen the weak. He doesn’t send out the dogs to round up the herd and take it to market. His sole desire is to gather us into a community of deep friendship with God and with each other. This is where life abundant is to be found, and he faithfully calls our name amid the clamor of our days. I hope and pray we will continue to hear his voice.

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[1] Shankar Vedantam, “Social Isolation Growing in U.S., Study Says” Washington Post, June 23, 2006; A03 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/06/22/AR2006062201763_pf.html

[2] John 10:3

[3] From Ezekiel 34

Day without end

The man is dead, and I’m glad he’s gone. I don’t need to mention his name, everybody has been talking about him all week. I’m glad he’s gone, and at the same I’m sorry that only death could stop his deadly plans. I long to live in the bright day when love triumphs over wrong, but these are foggy days, difficult days; perhaps the best we can do, is do what must be done, knowing that we must also continue to seek a path out of the endless cycles of violence and hate.

I want to honor this moment by recalling one of the thousands of life stories that were cut off brutally because of that man’s perverse piety and deathly imagination.

Beverly Eckert lost her husband, Sean Rooney, in the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. She remembers her husband’s warm brown eyes, dark curly hair, and that he was “a good hugger.” The two met at a high school dance, when they were only 16 years old. When Sean died, they were 50.

On Sept. 11, Sean called his wife at 9:30 a.m. He told her he was on the 105^th floor, and he’d been trying to get out. The stairwell was full of smoke. “I asked if it hurt for him to breathe,” Beverly recalled, “and he paused for a moment, and says, ‘No.’ He loved me enough to lie.” After a while, they stopped talking about escape routes and instead focused on the happiness they’d shared together. “I told him that I wanted to be there with him, but he said, no, no, he wanted me to live a full life,” she said.

As the smoke got thicker, Sean whispered, “ ‘I love you,’ over and over,” Beverly said. “I just wanted to crawl through the phone lines to him, to hold him, one last time.” Then she heard a sharp crack, followed by the sound of an avalanche. The building was beginning to collapse. Beverly called Sean’s name into the phone repeatedly, and then she just sat there, pressing the phone to her heart.

“I think about that last half-hour with Sean all the time. I remember how I didn’t want that day to end, terrible as it was, I didn’t want to go to sleep because as long as I was awake, it was still a day that I’d shared with Sean … I could still say that was just a little while ago, that was only this morning. And I just think of myself as living life for both of us now. And I like to think that Sean would be proud of me."

I heard this story on the radio, and it moved me deeply. I could see Beverly, exhausted by pain and tears, fighting sleep just so the day she had shared with Sean wouldn’t turn into yesterday. Where did she go when she woke up? We don’t know.

The story from Luke we heard invites us to see her as one of the  companions on the road to Emmaus. Each of us walks that road when great love has been turned into grief, or when great hope has been drained. Emmaus is the place that we go to in order to escape. Emmaus is wherever we go to make ourselves forget what we cannot forget.

Seven miles is a good long walk. When your heart is broken and you don’t know where you are nor where to go, you go for a walk. Walking helps you sort through things. Sometimes you have to be alone – you take a walk by yourself, you want to be under tall, old trees; you look around, and when you know there’s no one else on the trail who could hear you, the words don’t just run through your head anymore, but spill out. You don’t really care who it is you’re talking to: yourself? God? The trees?

When your heart is broken and you don’t know where you are nor where to go, you go for a walk and you talk, sometimes by yourself, sometimes with a friend. You tell the story, again and again; the rhythm of your steps keeps your thoughts and memories from spiraling into chaos.

Seven miles, that’s a good long walk. Two of Jesus’ friends, Luke tells us, were on that road – Jerusalem behind them, Jerusalem and the events of the last few days. They were trying to unpack the flood of events that had just washed over them: the traumatic experience of Jesus’ arrest, the horror of his death, and this astounding story the women had to tell about a vision of angels who said that Jesus was alive. It was all too much to take in, and so they walked. Their eyes were kept from recognizing Jesus who had come near and was going with them. “What  are you talking about?” the stranger said to them, and they stood still. And then they told the story again, in rich, loving detail, how their hope had grown from a spark to a bright flame in the company of Jesus, and how death had snuffed the flame together with the life of their friend. Emmaus is where we go when we can speak of hope only in the past tense.

The stranger listened, and then he retold the story they had just finished, told it right back to them. He retold their story through the lens of God’s promises, from the perspective of God’s loving and saving intentions for all creation. Telling the story, he wove their deadly experiences of loss into the story of God’s faithfulness. Now they could hear the confusing rumors of resurrection as echoes of God’s promises to God’s people. Now they could begin to see that the suffering and death of the Messiah was not the end of their hope, but somehow a part of it. In the stranger’s words, the words of scripture opened up like blossoms, and the two companions opened up along with them.

“Stay with us,” they urged him when they reached the village and he was walking ahead as if he were going on. “Stay with us; it is almost evening and the day is now nearly over.” So he went in to stay with them. And there, at their kitchen table, he took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. That’s when the fog lifted and they recognized him. That’s when Easter finally dawned on them. The resurrection was no longer a rumor or an idle tale, but a new day, a new reality, God’s powerful rewrite of our story of sin.

Seven miles is the road from Friday to the new day. We walk those seven miles many times. We walk together, we talk, and we listen to our stories again as the living Christ weaves them into God’s story, and the fire returns to our hearts and we come to the table and he breaks the bread and suddenly the resurrection is no longer a tale we once heard but the new world we inhabit.

That same day, the two returned to Jerusalem and they found the eleven and their companions gathered together – and now everybody had a tale about the risen Lord! And while they were sharing resurrection stories, Jesus himself stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” No one had let him in; he just showed up, again, startling them.

Now perhaps you think that since this was the third time that the resurrection disrupted their day, they should have been able to deal with the fact that Jesus was not dead but risen. But they were still startled and terrified, disbelieving and wondering, just like the rest of us.

Or perhaps you think it was time for them to get it and move on – but where to? What did it mean that Jesus was not dead but powerfully present? What does it mean?

In the gospel according to Luke that first day begins at early dawn, but it never ends. There’s not a single word indicating that eventually everybody got tired and went to bed. Jesus ate a little supper of broiled fish, and then he opened their minds to understand the scriptures. How long do you think he taught them? Until the next morning?

He taught them until their imagination was unlocked and in sync with the new creation. He teaches us until our imagination begins to fathom the reality of this new day.

“You are witnesses,” he said to them, he says to us. The world knows terror and fear and violence, but you know life and love and hope in a way that the world doesn’t. You are witnesses.

In Luke’s telling of the gospel, the entire final chapter is dedicated to the first day when Jesus rose from the dead; and the sun doesn’t go down on that day, night doesn’t fall. The first day doesn’t end; it culminates in the disciples’ return to the city, and the way I see it, they are not alone. Returning with them in an unending procession of joy are the nations of the world who have heard the good news of repentance and forgiveness of sins.

The story of this day is not written by our sin, but solely by God’s power to create and redeem, and this day does not turn into yesterday. “You are witnesses of these things,” Jesus says to us. And we want to respond, “Who – us?” because the world has a way of robbing us of our hope, filling us with fear, closing our minds, and colonizing our imagination. But the Risen One continues to break into that reality saying, “Yes – you.”

Easter Dance

I went to church on Friday at noon. I sat in the pew and I wasn’t paying much attention to the readings or the hymns – you probably know what I’m talking about. Not that I wasn’t participating in the service, but my mind was filled with thoughts about these two women, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary.

They had followed Jesus all the way from Galilee. They had listened to him teach, both in small groups and in front of large crowds. They loved listening to him, because his words encouraged them to see a world where the poor are blessed, and all who mourn are comforted. They hungered and thirsted for righteousness, and when they were with him they were filled. Jesus had shown them a world where love embraces all, even the enemy. They had watched him touching and healing the sick, breaking bread with friends and strangers, and declaring God’s forgiveness. They had begun to believe that the kingdom of heaven had indeed come near, and that he embodied it. They looked at Jesus and they saw the whole creation held by grace and infused with mercy. He had planted a dream in their hearts, the dream of a redeemed world.

I went to church on Friday and I thought about these two women who were still there after Judas, Peter, James and John and all the other disciples had betrayed, denied, and forsaken Jesus. They were there when his life drained from his body. Then it was my turn to read from Matthew:

When it was evening, there came a rich man from Arimathea, named Joseph, who was also a disciple of Jesus. He went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus; then Pilate ordered it to be given to him. So Joseph took the body and wrapped it in a clean linen cloth and laid it in his own new tomb, which he had hewn in the rock. He then rolled a great stone to the door of the tomb and went away. Mary Magdalene and the other Mary were there, sitting opposite the tomb (Matthew 27:57-61).

The funeral was over, and everybody but the two Marys had gone home, but I still had a few more lines to read.

The next day, that is, after the day of Preparation, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, “Sir, we remember what that impostor said while he was still alive, ‘After three days I will rise again.’ Therefore command the tomb to be made secure until the third day; otherwise his disciples may go and steal him away, and tell the people, ‘He has been raised from the dead,’ and the last deception would be worse than the first.” Pilate said to them, “You have a guard of soldiers; go, make it as secure as you can.” So they went with the guard and made the tomb secure by sealing the stone (Matthew 27:62-66).

Powerful interests got together to stop this nonsense once and for all. The religious and political leadership had a summit at the capital and they agreed on measures to maintain their notion of order.

When I left the church on Friday I was already smiling. “Go, make it as secure as you can,” the governor said, as though guards in the cemetery could keep the kingdom of heaven from taking over the world. When Jesus was born, King Herod had already done all he could to prevent the arrival of God’s future by brutally killing the children in and around Bethlehem. Earthly powers are easily tempted to deal death when power is at stake, but not even death can stop the life God intends for the world.

A few years ago, Anne Lamott wrote,

“I don’t have the right personality for Good Friday, for the crucifixion: I’d like to skip ahead to the resurrection.”

Who can blame her? We know that we live in a Good Friday world, and who wouldn’t want to fast forward to the world to come? Lamott has a very specific vision in mind,

I’d like to skip ahead to the resurrection vision of one of the kids in our Sunday School, who drew a picture of the Easter Bunny outside the open tomb: everlasting life and a basket full of chocolates. Now you’re talking.”^[1]

We laugh at the blending of divine promise and chocolaty sweetness into everlasting bliss, and why wouldn’t we: after the world had had its cruel way with Jesus, after so much faith, hope, and love had been buried, and after the guards of death had made the tomb as secure as they could, at the beginning of the first day, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to the cemetery and they stumbled into a whole new world.

Martin Luther once said, “If I were God, I’d kick the world to pieces.”^[2] We can all relate to that anger and frustration, but when the two Marys went to see the tomb, they heard a different sound, the echoes of resurrection: there was the rumble of God kicking to pieces the walls of death, there was the thunder of God breaking the chains of fear, there was the tremor of God lifting the heavy lids that seal the end of hope. Swords and clubs, betrayals and denials, high priests and street mobs, and even death and the grave could not keep this body down.

“Do not be afraid,” the angel said to the women, “I know that you are looking for Jesus who was crucified. He is not here; for he has been raised, as he said. Come, see the place where he lay.” He has been raised, and with him all that he embodied. The words he spoke – now affirmed forever. The lines he crossed – now removed forever. The life he offered – now accessible forever. Death no dominion.

Jesus and the kingdom he proclaimed were not defeated by sin and its deadly empire. At the dawn of the first day, the guards of death are like dead men, and the women are apostles of life. “Go quickly,” the angel said, “tell his disciples, ‘He has been raised from the dead, and indeed he is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see him.’”

Friday night, when KK led us on the way of the cross, we practiced saying, “Surely not I, Lord.”[3] Four little words to remind us that broken promises, betrayal and denial are very much part of who we are. We can say these words with hope rather than despair only because we live in this new day where Jesus is alive and not just an episode in history. When the women quickly left the tomb, Jesus met them and repeated what the angel had told them – with one small but most significant change. The angel said, “Go and tell his disciples,” and Jesus said, “Go and tell” – and here you could insert every name known for failure, except that Jesus was very careful not to do that, for he said, “Go and tell – my brothers.” Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead to live in glory and never to be seen again. Jesus was raised from the dead to be with us, to go ahead of us on the way, and to remind us that nothing we do or fail to do will make him love us less. He is not bound by the ending we give the story, but he rewrites the ending to include us. Jesus is at large in the world and he calls us to follow him, because the mission continues: the kingdom of heaven is near, and we live in the light of its dawn. Kindness and mercy are not lost causes in this Good Friday world, because the way of Christ doesn’t end in the tomb.

The God we worship is the one who raised Jesus from the dead, but the resurrection is not merely something spectacular that happened to Jesus. The resurrection of the crucified one is God’s judgment of the world and it is God’s word of new life for the whole world.

On Friday afternoon, I was already smiling when I thought about what Pilate said about the tomb, “Go, make it as secure as you can.” Then I smiled even more when I noticed the similarity and contrast between Pilate’s command and the command of the risen Christ, “Go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me.” One command sent guards to the cemetery to keep hope buried. The other command sent women on a mission to bring forgiveness and new life to the world. Not a very difficult choice, is it?

Well, then I listened to Mike Farris on Friday afternoon, and I started humming and clapping and swaying and doing a little Easter dance – and for a moment I thought, “Oh my, am I supposed to do that? It’s only Friday, after all.” Listen to his song, Streets of Galilee.[4]

Now he is waiting just for you, out on the streets of Galilee. We live in a Good Friday world where the guards of death make the tomb as secure as they can, but that’s all they can do. Christ is risen.

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[1] Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith (New York: Riverhead Books, 2005) p. 140

[2] Frederick Buechner in a PBS program http://www.pbs.org/wnet/religionandethics/week633/feature.html#right

[3] See Matthew 26:20-22, 33-35

[4] During the service, I played a portion of the song from my ipod. These are the lyrics http://mikefarrismusic.net/media_lyrics.php#sog

O’ Mary, Mary
I know just whom you seek,
You seek for Jesus, whom they crucified last week
Now child he’s risen from the dead and now he walks the
Streets of Galilee

O’ Mary, Mary
Tell the disciples that he is free
Run Mary run

Now he is waiting just for you
Out on the streets of Galilee
Now when they got up to the mountain,
Where he said he’d be
They worshipped and adored him
And said Lord how can this be
“All power is within me”
From sea to shining sea
Now, go tell all the world about me
And tell them that I walk the Streets of Galilee
You can tell them I am alive and doing well
Out on the Streets of Galilee

- Words and Music by Michael E. Farris © Gypsy7Music



Wednesdays in May

During May, we continue our aging:360 focus with a series of Wednesday night programs (and meals! See details below). Our members have raised many good questions, and we will address at least some of them each week:

As an adult child, how can I be more diligent in ensuring that my parents are able to retire and be cared for? Are there any tips on how to talk with aging parents about choices? At the end of life, when is it time to let go, and how do I make my wishes known? Medicare, long-term care insurance, supplemental insurance, reverse mortgages – it’s such a jungle! Where is God in the so-called Golden Years?

May 4 – Easing Difficult Conversations

Dinner 6pm – Program 6:30pm - Dinner reservations by Monday, May 2
Childcare provided - Call the church office if you need transportation

Facilitator: Carol Smith, Counselor, Pastoral Counseling Centers of Tennessee

Communication between aging parents and adult children is often strained because of difficult decisions that need to be made. Many of us just don’t know how to talk about making the home more accessible, changing living arrangements, finding in-home care, monitoring bank accounts, writing living wills, managing medications, or dealing with driving limitations.

Carol Smith is a Family Therapist; she will give us some tips that apply to all kinds of situations, and she will also try to answer our very specific questions.

May 11 – Caregiving and Support

Dinner 6pm – Program 6:30pm - Dinner reservations by Monday, May 16
Childcare provided - Call the church office if you need transportation

Facilitator: Nancy Pertl, Caregiver Education Specialist with the Mental Health Association of Middle Tennessee

Caregivers provide 80% of the care for individuals. Especially with Alzheimer’s disease and related dementia, caregiving can be particularly stressful. Making decisions about healthcare, communicating with physicians, knowing what to expect as the disease progresses, mobility and safety, making arrangements so the individual can stay at home and making decisions when that may not be possible any longer, are all decisions that caregivers face. What about the caregivers needs? When do they feel that they have time for friends, church, a movie, or a walk in the park?  What about the caregivers’ health and well-being?

May 18 – End of Life issues

Dinner 6pm – Program 6:30pm - Dinner reservations by Monday, May 9
Childcare provided - Call the church office if you need transportation

Facilitator: Greg Rumburg, Chaplain, Odyssey Hospice

Our physical, emotional, and spiritual needs change as we near the end of our life. When individuals and families are faced with decisions about the type of care they prefer at the end of life, they often wait too late to make their plans. Discussions about hospice care for life-limiting illnesses and discussions about palliative care for those with terminal illness can often be supportive to both the individual and to the family members. Knowing what to expect and making plans can take some of the burden off the family. Grief is inevitable, but support from clergy and bereavement experts can help. Knowing the individual’s wishes about funeral arrangement can help the family make better decisions with which they feel comfortable.

Greg Rumburg is an Elder at Vine Street, and as a hospice chaplain he walks, talks, sits, and prays with individuals and their families as they approach death. He will share his knowledge and wisdom with us.

May 25 – Navigating Medicare and Planning for the Future

Dinner 6pm – Program 6:30pm - Dinner reservations by Monday, May 23
Childcare provided - Call the church office if you need transportation

Facilitator: Lucy Utt, Tennessee Commission on Aging and Disability, Supervisor, State Health Insurance Assistance Program (SHIP)

Medicare is a federal government health insurance program that provides medical care and prescription drug benefits. You become eligible for Medicare when you turn 65 years of age or if you are under the age of 65 and have a disability. Medicare Part A is for hospital coverage, Part B is for medical care, and Part D is for prescription drug coverage. What all does Medicare cover? Do I need an Advantage Plan? Do I need supplemental insurance? What about long-term care insurance? What happens if I need long-term care in my home or in a nursing home? What if I can’t make decisions on my own? What if I run out of savings, will I lose my home?

Meals at 6pm

The Wednesday nights in May are great opportunities for learning, but they are also opportunities for fellowship and for getting to know each other. So pick up the kids and come on over for dinner! We have partnered with Copper Kettle to provide a delicious meal for us each week, and we will have childcare available as well.

We ask that you make meal reservations no later than Monday morning of each week, but you can make them as early as right now. We will take your reservations online, over the phone (call the church office at 269-5614), in person on Sunday mornings (look for the people carrying sandwich boards!), or with print forms available in various places at church.

She travels outside of karma

This is such a curious day, Palm Sunday. We sing and shout in joyful procession, welcoming King Jesus into the city, because we do want him here, we do want him to rule and make all things right – but we already know better. While we are singing Hosannah, Jesus hears the voices we would rather drown out with our happy songs.

I hear the whispering of many—terror all around!—as they scheme together against me, as they plot to take my life.

The words of the Psalm[1] pull us toward Friday, and we wish the parade could just go on until inauguration day and then we all live happily ever after. We do want Jesus to rule and to make all things right, but we are also at least beginning to understand that it is not just them who get in the way – them being the Romans, or the Jews, or whoever else we can blame – it is we ourselves who cannot let God’s love have its way with the world. Our own visions of a world made right often have more in common with imperial dreams of world domination than with the peculiar way of Christ. We get power wrong, and we half know it, and so we feel a little awkward standing in the gate of the city and watching Jesus riding down Broadway on a donkey. He’s turning our world upside down, and we half know that that is what it takes to make things right, but the other half resists the pull of God’s love. We get power wrong. We see the donkey, but in our dreams it’s still the hero in shining armour, riding high on a white stallion, who comes to save us.

There is a city, not far from here, and it could be any city, in any state, where they have a state hospital.[2] And in the state hospital they have people who are emotionally wounded and mentally ill. Years ago, the hospital staff wanted to start some halfway houses in the community, so that people who were on their way to full recovery could be supported while making the transition back into life outside. Rather than taking one giant step from the small world of the hospital to the big world of the city, they would be encouraged to take a number of small steps toward greater independence.

Well, not everybody in the city was thrilled with the possibility of this prospect, and so there was a city council meeting. The place was packed. Hundreds of people squeezed into the meeting room, yelling and screaming their opposition to the halfway houses. “We don’t want these people in our neighborhood.” After a couple of brief presentations and a lot of yelling and a lot of screaming the city council said no to the proposal.

Just then, the back doors of the auditorium were opened, and in came this little woman with a white scarf over her head. Suddenly it was so quiet, even people up in the balcony could hear the hushed questions, “Is that Mother Teresa?” Indeed, it was her. She was in town for a ceremony dedicating a Sisters of Charity program and she heard about this meeting. She came down the center aisle and everybody gasped as she came to the front, got down on her knees in front of the city council, raised her arms and said, “In the name of Jesus, make room for these children of God! When you reject them, you reject Jesus. When you affirm them, you embrace Jesus.” And then with her arms up in the air, she pleaded, “Please, please, please, please, please, in the name of Jesus, make room for these children of God! Make room for them in your neighborhoods.”

Now pretend for a moment that you’re on the city council. There is Mother Teresa on her knees in front of you. Crews from several television stations have followed her into the auditorium, with cameras rolling. What are you going to do?

You guessed it. One of the councilmen moved that the previous motion be reconsidered, there was a second, and then the city council did a complete 180 and voted unanimously in favor of the proposal.

There were hundreds of people packed into that hall, and not one of them uttered a word of opposition to the motion. Why? Because of the pleas of a little old woman who spoke with irresistible authority. Mother Teresa didn’t have to twist any arms because everybody knew about her love for the poor in the streets of Calcutta. Everybody knew how she served God by giving of herself to meet the needs of others. Her selfless love was her response to the grace and mercy of God she encountered in Christ, and it was the source of her authority.

Those who draw from the well of divine love don’t have to resort to power. Jesus doesn’t ride in front of an army. Jesus doesn’t change the world by imposing his will on others. He turns the world upside down by refusing the path of coercion.

This is the week when we reflect on the character of God’s power and how it is revealed in the life and death of Jesus. Paul’s words in his letter to the Philippians call us urgently to let the same mind be in us that we have in Christ Jesus. “Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others” (Phil 2:4). When you think about your neighborhood, listen to the needs of your neighbors, rather than forcefully and loudly asserting your own. Listen for the small voice that calls you into community. “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit” (Phil 2:3).

In a city like Philippi, such words were rare and they challenged the dominant version of reality. The citizens of Philippi valued their imperial connections, their privileges, and their advantages as subjects of Caesar. Roman culture valued force, competition, and honor-seeking, and humility was not considered to be a virtue. The perfect career of a young Roman aristocrat followed the cursus honorum, or “course of honor.” It was a ladder that comprised a mixture of military and political administration posts. Each office had a minimum age for election, and at each stage the upwardly mobile young man gained new responsibilities and new privileges. Roman society, much like ours, was built on the pursuit of status. You move up, and you socialize with the people who can help you move up even higher.

But when everybody is only concerned about moving up, nobody thinks and acts in ways that encourage and build community. The defining reality for the world, Paul reminds us, is not the race to the top, but a different path.

You want to talk about status? Jesus had the highest status imaginable: equality with God. Only he did not regard that equality as something to be used for his own advantage. On the contrary. He emptied himself. He humbled himself. He “made himself of no reputation” (KJV). Obedient to God, he lived a life free of concern for status and honor, loving us with a vulnerability for which we have no words.

On the cross, his career in reverse reached its end and he died the most cruel and degrading death. You may say, “Well, that’s just the way it is in the world, isn’t it?” Yes, that is part of the truth we must face here, this is what we are capable of doing in the name of religion and justice and political convenience. But this Friday truth has an Easter side: God vindicated the way of Jesus. God gave him the name that is above every name, which is to say that the story of Jesus reveals the very name of God. Jesus is Lord. In the end, the defining reality for the world is not the race to the top, but love that goes all the way and opens new possibilities.

In 2000, U2 released their CD All That You Can’t Leave Behind. It wasn’t one of their best albums, but on the final track Bono sings about Grace, and it’s the name of a girl, but it’s also the name of this wondrous something that changed the world.[3] One of my favorite lines of the song is, “she travels outside of karma.”

You know Karma, if you’ve watched My Name Is Earl. If not, Karma is the common expectation that people ultimately get what they deserve, “You made your bed, now sleep in it.”

But grace travels outside of karma – that’s another way of saying, thank God, love goes all the way.

Today is a curious day, when we stand in the gate of the city; part of us wants to shout for joy, and part of us wants to fall silent as we watch Jesus, humble and riding on a donkey.

When asked by an interviewer about grace and karma, Bono said,

At the center of all religions is the idea of Karma. You know, what you put out comes back to you: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, or in physics; in physical laws every action is met by an equal or an opposite one. It’s clear to me that Karma is at the very heart of the universe. I’m absolutely sure of it. And yet, along comes this idea called Grace to upend all that “as you [sow], so you will [reap]” stuff. Grace defies reason and logic. Love interrupts, if you like, the consequences of your actions, which in my case is very good news indeed, because I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff. …

I’d be in big trouble if Karma was going to finally be my judge. … I’m holding out for Grace. I’m holding out that Jesus took my sins onto the Cross, because I know who I am, and I hope I don’t have to depend on my own religiosity. …

Christ took on the sins of the world, so that what we put out did not come back to us, and that our sinful nature does not reap the obvious death. That’s the point. It should keep us humbled.[4]

Humbled, yes, and full of hope. Welcome to the city, King Jesus.

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[1] Psalm 31:9-16 was our second reading

[2] Based on a story told by Tony Campolo http://www.csec.org/csec/sermon/campolo_5218.htm

[3] The lyrics say “thought,” but thought is not big enough, is it?

[4] Michka Assayas, Bono: In Conversation with Michka Assayas (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 2005), p. 203-204



Singing with Ezekiel

Ezekiel. He never was our favorite prophet, was he? We much prefer Isaiah, whose words we can copy straight to our Christmas cards. Or Amos and his friends who speak out with such passion against oppression and injustice. Ezekiel doesn’t write copy for Hallmark’s line of religious cards. He doesn’t show up much in our Sunday school curriculum. His friends are mostly wild-eyed men and women, obsessed with the God’s judgment of the world. Ezekiel is strange, some would say, weird; his visions and voice are imaginative, often incomprehensible, with violent and pornographic tendencies. If you want to find Ezekiel in popular culture, you must listen to songwriters from the mountains or watch Samuel L. Jackson in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.

I was 14 years old when my friend Chris and I thumbed through our Bibles in confirmation class and stumbled upon Ezekiel. The pages opened in chapter 23, and we read about two sisters whose names no one had ever mentioned to us before or ever since, Oholah and Oholibah. We read with a mix of fascination and terror, and we didn’t know what to make of the strange world we had accidentally entered, and so we giggled. Our pastor didn’t know how to be strict and stern, but the way he looked at us then was pretty close. He asked me to read verses 5 and 6, and thankfully I remembered that we were supposed to find chapter 23 in Jeremiah, one of Ezekiel’s neighbors in the book.

Ezekiel, son of Buzi, was a Judean priest, or perhaps a recent graduate preparing for the priesthood. He was part of a first wave of exiles from Jerusalem whom King Nebuchadrezzar deported to Babylonia in an attempt to subdue the troublesome leadership of Judah.

We don’t know much about Ezekiel’s personal life, but I can imagine that he felt utterly out of place in that foreign land. You see, you can be a teacher without a school; you just meet your students in the living room or under the tree in the back yard. You can be a bricklayer or a blacksmith anywhere in the world, as long as you have your tools. But Ezekiel was a priest of the Lord whose temple was in Jerusalem, and outside of that sacred place he could not be a priest. He had lost his home and the focus of his life. His entire community had been uprooted, and they all struggled to make sense of this devastating experience of loss.

It was in exile that Ezekiel became a prophet of the Lord. He had visions, he heard voices, in the grip of God’s spirit he traveled far, and he declared it all to his compatriots in exile. Ezekiel insisted that their losses did not reflect the defeat of their God by the gods of Babylonia, as some surmised; no, this was the judgment brought down on them by their God. It was God’s judgment against them, and Ezekiel insisted it was justified and deserved. In his mind, there was no room for historical coincidence, no room for political analysis that might explain their losses as collateral damage in the conflict between the global powers of the day, Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt. In his mind, this was God’s doing, all of it. Relentlessly the prophet painted the picture of a God consumed by wrath and bent on violence; Ezekiel burned with a fire not many of his fellow exiles had ever even gotten close to.

Those who thought that Ezekiel was out of his mind weren’t so sure when more news arrived from Jerusalem. Ezekiel had declared that the Babylonians would breach the city walls, burn the buildings to the ground, slaughter many of the inhabitants, and deport the rest. And he was right; he wrote it all down:

In the twelfth year of our exile, in the tenth month, on the fifth day of the month, someone who had escaped from Jerusalem came to me and said, “The city has fallen” (33:21).

Everything that once made them who they were as a people, had been taken away or destroyed: the land, the temple, the city and throne of David, their proud theology. All that was left was complete exhaustion and long silence. And in that silence Ezekiel heard a new word, a word that spoke of homecoming and new hearts – but who could hear it? Not even Ezekiel himself; he wrote it all down, dutifully, but he couldn’t say it. The words of judgment had come to him so much more easily. The losses they had experienced were so much more tangible than these first whispers of hope that were working their way to his lips.

That’s when the hand of the Lord once again came upon Ezekiel, and the Lord brought him out by the spirit of the Lord and set him down in the middle of a valley. It was a journey into the heart of the people in exile, a journey to the end of the road. Ezekiel didn’t just see a valley full of bones, he walked around in it. The Lord led him around as if to make sure he saw the full extent of hopelessness. It is one thing to walk around in a dusty lifeless desert where life never flourished, but this was a place that once was lush with life and laughter, full of possibility.

Elie Wiesel noted that Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, unlike his other visions, does not bear a date. Why? Wiesel suggests, because every generation needs to hear in its own time that these bones can live. Amid the ash heaps of Auschwitz we meet Ezekiel, amid the killing fields of Cambodia, the orchards of Bosnia, the roads and churches of Rwanda, the villages of Darfur – amid the “vast acreage of death, once fields of birth,” as Daniel Berrigan called the land marked by the consequences of our sin.

In Berrigan’s meditation on Ezekiel’s vision, God cries out,

Have I populated the earth with monsters?
Of the symphonic
sweep and scope
of my creation
… they make this –
a petrified forest of death.
Bones, bones. Dry bones.
But not forever, I swear it!
… Ezekiel, stand in the killing fields.
Shall these bones live?[1]

“Mortal, can these bones live?” the Lord asked, while the prophet made his way through the lonely valley of history. And Ezekiel answered neither no nor yes, but said, “O Lord God, you know.” The answer is not ours to give, and yet we are part of the answer that is given.

The Lord told Ezekiel to start preaching to the bones and told him what to say:

“O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. … You shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

Imagine that. Ezekiel was about as far away from the garden of creation as human imagination can travel, and there, in the dust where life once was, in the desert of hopelessness, he spoke the word of the Lord.

And a rustling sound
as of leaves in autumn wind
started amid the dry bones.
A whisper, then a drumbeat!
They stood erect, those bones,
and knitted firm! [2]

One human being, standing amid the consequences of our sin like the last chronicler, Ezekiel spoke with prophetic courage

and the spirit entered the bones.
First a whisper,
then a drumbeat,
then reverberant –
a heartbeat!
They took breath once more! and
walked about! and
conversed one with another!
joyful, harmonious,
an immense throng, the newborn, the living!
…
“Speak to them.
Say:
Death no dominion!
from graves, mausoleums, hecatombs—
Lazarine multitudes, come forth!
“Rejoice!
far from servitude!
enter the gates
of new Jerusalem!” [3] 

The prophet spoke, and hope began to sing. Death no dominion! Corruption, injustice, oppression, and proud theology? Not the last word. Devastating judgment, exile, and weeping by the rivers of Babylon? Not the last word. “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live!” The last word is so much like the first in the garden, when the Lord God formed the earthling from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the earthling became a living being. Beyond the reality of death, there is the promise of new creation. “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live!” Ezekiel traveled to the end of the road, and he came back singing of the faithfulness of God like a preacher in the morning of the third day.

When we get to the point where we say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost,” when we get to the point where cynicism and despair look like the only reasonable responses to the course of the world, when we get to that point, we need a friend like Ezekiel who’s seen it all and came back singing. We need a friend to remind us that God is not done. Or better yet, because we are part of God’s Easter people, because the spirit of hope is at work within and among us, we take our stand beside Ezekiel and bear witness to God’s faithfulness and promise, “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord!”

You who abandoned your dreams because you fear the pain of disappointment, listen up! You who see that we’ve made a mess of the world and that we just don’t have what it takes to fix things, listen up! You who have settled for the status quo and the whispers of the Babylonian gods that tell you that exile is as close to home as it gets, listen up! Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you, and you shall live!

The breath of God is at work in the valley, and you must bear witness to it with your own breath and voice. Not just for your own sake – the world needs prophetic friends who clearly see what is, and yet dare to declare that fullness of life for all is God’s will and promise. That is our work.

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[1] Daniel Berrigan, Ezekiel: Vision in the Dust (Maryknoll: Orbis, 1997), p. 112, 114

[2] Berrigan, p. 114

[3] Berrigan, p. 115



Ezekiel's Bones

On Sunday, Ezekiel calls us to sit with him in the middle of a valley. Now before your imagination takes you to the murmuring brook running between pussy willows and grassy banks, let me tell you about Ezekiel’s valley: it’s not a pleasant valley but one full of bones, very many of them and very dry.

In that valley, the Lord speaks to Ezekiel, and asks him a question, “Mortal, can these bones live?”

We're about to launch aging:360, and Ezekiel walks in to talk about old bones and remind us of our first name: Mortal. Strange and wonderful things happen when our stories cross paths with God’s story.

Aging and mortality are not the kind of topics anyone would want to face on a sunny spring Sunday, but when’s a good time to look at something we don’t really want to look at anyway? Aging is one of those conversations we’d rather postpone until…

So, frail children of dust, we’ll talk about our aging bodies, and memories, and harvest time, and retirement plans, and whatever else comes to mind when we think about people getting older.

After the 10:45 worship service, we will gather for lunch in the fellowship hall. We’ll have a blend of potluck and sandwiches – if you can bring something to share, please do.  During lunch, we’ll tell each other toy stories – childhood memories of the bear that never left our side, the one toy we always wanted, or how we made do with whatever we found in the kitchen drawer – and discover how very similar and very different it was to be a child in the 30’s, 50’s, or 80’s.

After lunch, Kathy Zamata will talk about the baby boom generation who are just beginning to retire, and what this means for them and their children and the society at large. And since with this “360” in particular we want to address the questions you have, Kathy will also solicit our input for the remaining programs. Some of us may want to talk about housing options, others are very curious about transportation and independence, and again others may want to hear more about legal issues like wills.

And when we’re finished with the meal, sharing toy stories, and listening to Kathy’s presentation, we’ll go back to the sanctuary for a time of worship with Ezekiel, the Rev. KK, and other old and new friends. And that’s because April 10 also happens to be Second Sunday, but mostly because strange and wonderful things happen when our stories cross paths with God’s story. We hope you’ll join us.

We are right

There’s an old tale about two rabbis.

Rabbi Mendel once boasted to his teacher Rabbi Elimelekh that evenings he saw the angel who rolls away the light before the darkness, and mornings the angel who rolls away the darkness before the light. “Yes,” said Rabbi Elimelekh, “in my youth I saw that too. Later on you don’t see these things anymore.”

Our eyes get weaker with age, but the rabbis were talking about a different kind of change, changes in the way we look at things, changes throughout the seasons of our life in how we perceive the world. The story leaves open whose vision of reality is closer to the truth: the one who sees the angels of evening and morning, or the one who doesn’t see such things anymore.

When we are little, we begin to know the world with immediacy, intimacy, and wonder, by simply participating in the miracle of every moment, and the older we get and the more we know about the world, the more difficult it becomes to keep that earlier, and often happier way of knowing. How we know has much to do with how we see, and vice versa.

Annie Dillard wrote a meditation about seeing in her book, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.

I once spent a full three minutes looking at a bullfrog that was so unexpectedly large I couldn’t see it even though a dozen enthusiastic campers were shouting directions. Finally I asked, “What color am I looking for?” and a fellow said, “Green.” When at last I picked out the frog, I saw what painters are up against: the thing wasn’t green at all, but the color of wet hickory bark.[1]

Even when we look at the same things, we don’t see the same things. Dillard was delighted to find a book about early eye surgery.

When Western surgeons discovered how to perform safe cataract operations, they ranged across Europe and America operating dozens of men and women of all ages who had been blinded by cataracts since birth [and they wrote down fascinating case studies]

… Before the operation a doctor would give a blind patient a cube and a sphere; the patient would tongue it or feel it with his hands, and name it correctly. After the operation the doctor would show the same objects to the patient without letting him touch them; now he had no clue whatsoever what he was seeing.

… The mental effort involved [in learning to see] proves overwhelming for many patients. It oppresses them to realize, if they ever do at all, the tremendous size of the world, which they had previously conceived of as something touchingly manageable.

… Of a twenty-one-year-old [woman], the doctor relates, “Her unfortunate father, who had hoped for so much from this operation, wrote that his daughter carefully shuts her eyes whenever she wishes to go about the house, especially when she comes to a staircase, and that she is never happier or more at ease than when, by closing her eyelids, she relapses into her former state of total blindness.”

… A twenty-two-[year-]old [woman] was dazzled by the world’s brightness and kept her eyes shut for two weeks. When at the end of that time she opened her eyes again, she did not recognize any objects, but, “the more she now directed her gaze upon everything about her, the more it could be seen how an expression of gratification and astonishment overspread her features; she repeatedly exclaimed: ‘O God! How beautiful!’”[2]

Jesus saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked about the cause of his blindness, if and how it was connected to sin. He pushed their categories aside; looking for an explanation and possibly even blame apparently is not what is at stake in this encounter. God’s works must be revealed; the light of the world must shine.

After such lofty talk you’d expect some dramatic action paired with mighty words of power – but instead we read,

Jesus spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes, saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam.”

Dust and spit – it doesn’t get any earthier and less spectacular than that.

The man went and washed and came back able to see. Only now Jesus was gone. What do you think: was he happy about his ability to see? Or was he secretly hoping to have his former, more manageable world back? He hadn’t asked for his eyes to be opened, and things didn’t really go well for him. Many of you remember how the story continues.

From the man’s perspective, the whole world had been changed in his encounter with Jesus. But the neighborhood where he used to have a place and a role didn’t know what to do with him anymore. When he came back nobody shouted, “Look at him: he can see; let’s have a party!” Instead, the neighbors talked amongst themselves, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” They remembered a man who was barely visible, a man who walked hesitantly. They remembered a man whose identity was defined by his place on the margins of the community and by his dependence. And now they were looking at a man walking upright, quite visible and independent, a man repeatedly asserting his identity against their attempts to explain him away, “Oh, that’s not him, he just looks like him.” He kept saying, “I am the man.”

You know the thought must have crossed his mind, “If I just close my eyes and sit down, the questions will end and I will be at home again.” But he didn’t, and the questions didn’t end.

“How were your eyes opened?”

“The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.”

Where is the man you say has done this? Why is he not with you? Why are you not with him? Where is he?

“I do not know.”

The questioning continued when the neighbors took the man to the religious leaders, expecting those in authority to make sense of the disruption and to reassure them that all was still how it used to be, and was supposed to be, and would continue to be. When people encounter the power and presence of God, they look at the world in new and different ways, they know God in new and different ways, they understand themselves in new and different ways, and all that newness and difference causes anxiety because suddenly the familiar balance has been upset.

The newness and difference that Jesus brings into the world is a new way of seeing and knowing and being. Jesus says, “Come and see,” inviting us to trust that God is the author of the newness of life we will find in his company. He says, “Go, wash,” and when you wipe the water from your face you will see what those who are too certain of their own categories cannot see.

The way the story continues is both beautiful and tragic. The man who once was blind becomes a teacher to the experts, only they refuse to be taught. They ask questions. How did you receive your sight? What do you say about the man who did this? Were you really blind? “We know that this man is a sinner,” the leaders affirm with rock-solid conviction. And the man they are questioning responds, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.”

The religious authorities are so certain that they know, that they cannot be open to what is taking place right before their eyes. They are sure that they know what there is to know and how one is to know it; they are unwilling to risk opening up their familiar patterns of thought and perception to the experience of Jesus.

The scene ends tragically. The religious leaders drive the man out. At the beginning of the chapter, the man was on the outside because of his blindness. Now he is on the outside, because those who sit in authority have no room for an experience that doesn’t mesh with their views of God and the world.

The tragedy reaches deeper yet. At the end of the chapter, Jesus returns and finds the man outside the community to which he used to belong. With Jesus representing the presence and power of God in the world, those who pushed him out, now find themselves on the outside; their own judgment has turned against themselves.

Yehuda Amichai, a 20^th-century Israeli writer wrote a poem, titled The Place Where We Are Right:[3]

From the place where we are right
Flowers will never grow
In the spring.

The place where we are right
Is hard and trampled
Like a yard.

But doubts and loves
Dig up the world
Like a mole, a plow.
And a whisper will be heard in the place
Where the ruined
House once stood.

I can’t help but think of the place of Jesus’ crucifixion as the place where we are right, a place hard and trampled like a yard because of too much certainty and too little room for trust,  a place with little room for a God who invites us to come and see and become familiar with God’s ways of knowing.

From the place where we are right flowers will never grow in the spring. But doubts and loves dig up the world like a mole, a plow, and no love digs deeper than the love of God, breaking the hardened soil for new growth, new life, new creation.

In the end, I hope, we will all stand in the garden, greatly astonished like children, seeing the glory of God in all things.

---

[1] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Perennial, 1985) 18

[2] Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (New York: Harper Perennial, 1985) 25-29

[3] http://daysofawe.net/shebotzodkim.htm For more information about this writer, and a small selection of his poems, go to http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/yehuda-amichai



Fight against poverty and hunger

Hunger is an issue that is very important to me. This year, I am again walking with the Vine Street team in the Nashville CROP Hunger Walk and I need your help. Our donations will support life-saving programs around the world. Join me and our family and friends as we work together to address this world-wide challenge.

You can be the difference, and you can start by making a donation.  Visit my personal page, where you can make a secure online credit card donation. Your gift can help save a life!

Thank you!

Click here to visit my personal page.



Letters to a young elder

During April and May, we will talk a lot about “aging” at Vine Street. No, not the kind of aging we like in our cheese, steak, wine, or scotch – our own getting older and the aging of our parents. We will have a series of programs on baby boomers and medicare and how to live independently as long as possible – a whole host of conversations about important issues we call aging:360.

While I was meeting with the group that is putting it all together, I thought about what I would like to do as part of this 360 project. The landscape of aging is so vast and universal, and at the same time it is so very personal. What else might we do, other than sharing important information? How about some wisdom?

Joan Chittister, a very wise woman and one of the most gifted writers on spiritual matters of our time, published a series of brief meditations when she was just over 70 years old. The title of her book is, THE GIFT OF YEARS: Growing Older Gracefully.

Each of the forty short meditations with titles like, DREAMS, TALE-TELLING, REGRET, AGELESSNESS, and PRODUCTIVITY, begins with a quote. “Old age transfigures or fossilizes.” So true, isn’t it? Another one I liked because it reminded me of some of my favorite old people, “How beautiful the leaves grow old. How full of light and color are their last days.” When I sat with this one, “For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of harvest,” I just wondered what I might need to learn before the time of harvest begins.

In Chittister’s book, the quote in each chapter is followed by a meditation of about four pages, and the chapter ends with two pithy statements like these, “A burden of these years is to assume that the future is already over. A blessing of these years is to give another whole meaning to what it is to be alive, to be ourselves, to be full of life. Our own life.”

This is not a book for study, but rather one that invites deep reflection and response. I would like to read this book with a group of folks over 50. For eight weeks, starting sometime in April, we each read one chapter every day, five chapters per week. At least once a week, we write in response to what we have read. We may respond to just one particular thought, or to one or more of the chapters, or to the whole experience of reading, and we give our response the form of a letter.

At first I thought it would be fun to write this letter to a child or a grandchild, to a niece, or to the kid across the street. But then I started to think about bringing the reflection closer to the community where we live, work, and worship with several generations, closer to Vine Street. That’s when “letters to a young elder” crossed my mind like a bird you suddenly notice and then you can’t take your eyes off of it.

I like the idea that is beginning to take shape: Each week, we get together to listen to each other’s letters. We might read our own or ask someone in the group to read it for us. We may decide to talk some more. We may decide to collect the letters and give them to our folks under 50. We may decide to invite them to dinner and an evening of homemade wisdom. This is something I’d really like to do. How about you?

If this sounds like something you'd like to give some of your time to, call me or send me an email, let's say by April 10, and then we talk some more about how we'll make this happen.

Bent toward glory

When I was little, I enjoyed watching my mom do things around the house, especially in the kitchen. Whatever she did, I watched how she did it, and then asked her to let me try.

When I peel an apple, I peel it just like she did. When I chop an onion, I chop it just like she did. When I fold my shirts and socks, I fold them the way she did. I can’t tell you how many things I learned simply by watching her. Listening to her, though, is a different story.

She loves to tell me about the day when she was ironing and my eyes were following the tip of the iron across the ironing board. I was little and I remember my fascination with the hissing sound of the steam, and how I loved the smell of freshly ironed laundry. She set the iron on its back while putting something on a hanger or in the basket, and she said, “Don’t touch it, it’s hot.” She laughs every time she tells me that, as soon as she turned around, I touched the iron. Many parents seem to think this has something to do with their children’s need to test boundaries or challenge parental authority. I don’t think so. What I remember is that I was curious about the meaning of ‘hot,’ and I learned to use a bit more caution when it comes to my desire to know – not every lesson has to be painful, after all.

There is truth, though, in the parents’ suspicion; we do like to push the boundaries, just to see what will happen or how far we can go. “Don’t play in the creek,” says the parent, “the water’s too high” – “Well, let’s see about that,” says the little one.

“We use the scissors only for cutting paper, don’t even think about cutting your sister’s hair” – well, dear parent, you know that you just planted an irresistible idea in your child’s mind, don’t you?

Some say that the story of Adam and Eve, the tree and the serpent has something of that dynamic. God says, “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, just not that one.” Suddenly that one tree, among all the trees of the garden, is the most fascinating and attractive.

I don’t know if this dynamic is part of the story; I doubt it. The story of Adam and Eve is not about children testing boundaries in order to build confidence and discover limits. To me, this is a story about what it means to be human.

Adam is named after adamah, the Hebrew word for the soil from which the human being is made. The story reminds us that we share an identity that is even more basic than our identities as men and women – we are earthlings. Adam is the embodiment of humankind, and humankind is given three gifts: A beautiful, bountiful garden that is our home and our calling: we have a purpose as keepers of the garden; earth and earthling belong together. The second gift is God’s permission to freely eat of every tree of the garden; the garden is ours to fully inhabit, enjoy and explore. The third gift is a prohibition. As creatures of God we have limits, and within these limits life flourishes as God intends. To be human is to live with this God-given purpose, in God-given freedom, and within God-given limits.

Then the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the earthling, and when they awoke, they were male and female – and that’s when things got complicated. Now we look at humankind not just in relationship to God and to the earth, but to each other.

The story of Adam and Eve and the serpent is incredibly fertile. More than almost any other story, it has shaped and reshaped our views about moral freedom, male-female relationships, sexuality, shame, and sin, and it comes with hundreds of years of footnotes and commentary. Some of the footnotes have caused a lot of pain, especially for women. One of them we find in 1 Timothy 2:11-15, where we read,

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty.

I can’t follow that argument. If anybody was actually deceived in the garden, it was both of them together, Adam was there, after all. It’s not like he came home after a long day at work and ate his dinner of forbidden fruit. You could make an argument that if he’s that clueless, he – the man – shouldn’t be teaching anybody, but rather learn in silence.

But this story is bigger. It is bigger than its use in blaming others or silencing the voices those in authority don’t want to hear. Let’s take a closer look and see what we discover.

The serpent was just that, a serpent. Many footnotes want to identify the serpent with the devil, but the story says that the serpent was one of the animals of the field God had made. It was part of God’s creation, not some intruder from outside. It was crafty, cunning, smart, wise, yes, but not evil.

The serpent began a conversation, and you may think a talking snake is curious – but this is not the first story you’ve heard that has talking animals in it, is it? I find far more intriguing that this was the first conversation that wasn’t with but rather about God, and the topic was what God did and didn’t say. The woman quoted the divine command not to eat from the tree in the middle of the garden, and the serpent replied, “You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” This is a crucial moment in the conversation. The serpent tells the humans something God didn’t tell them, and so the word of the serpent puts the word of God in question. Did God keep something back? Why didn’t God tell them the whole truth about the matter? Does God really have their best interest at heart or is God jealously protecting divine privileges? The question of who knows what and who doesn’t; the question of what kind of knowledge is good for the flourishing of life and what kind is not; the question now is one of trust. What will they do?

Here’s what they don’t do: They do not turn to God to hear what else God might say about the limits that make life full. Nor do they turn to each other to discuss their options and decide how to proceed. Instead they turn to the tree, its possibilities and promises, and they take of its fruit and eat in silence. It turns out that the serpent hadn’t deceived them, but rather told them the truth; perhaps not the whole truth, but who knows if it knew the whole truth.

We are created for relationship with God and with each other, but our relationship with God is not simply part of our genetic program. It is rooted in trust. The story shows what happens when mistrust creeps in: alienation and estrangement grow, silence and shame drive out joy. Mistrust disrupts the fabric of creation and puts life on a trajectory away from communion with God, and death creeps in. Death creeps in – not in the form of mortality, mortality is part of life – death creeps in in the breakdown of the relationships that make us human: our relationship with God, with the created order, and with one another. Sin invades creation from inside like an alien power, breeding death, perverting and unmaking all things, thriving on anxiety, fear and mistrust, and threatening to drag the world back into chaos. Life is no longer how it’s supposed to be.

When Paul writes that sin came into the world through one man, it’s not so we can all blame Adam as though Adam were somebody else. We are Adam the earthling, created for communion with God, yet unable to escape the dominion of sin after we have given it access to God’s world. Sin is too big for us; bigger than the sum total of the wrong we have done and the good we have not done, bigger than all our loveless thoughts and thoughtless words together. What Paul wants us to see is that sin is not a lower-case transgression, not even a human disposition, but an upper-case power that stands over against God and enslaves us, keeping us from being who we are meant to be.

But Paul doesn’t want us to see that because he enjoys gloom and doom and sin talk. He wants us to know that big, upper-case, creation-enslaving Sin has been dealt with and defeated. Paul points to Jesus as the one human being who lived the life God intended for humankind. Jesus was fully at home in his relationship with God and God’s creation and with all of us. Mistrust could not enter; rejection and injustice could not break the bond of love. Sin and Death had their way with him, but death’s dominion ended at the cross; the reach of sin ended at the cross.

God raised Jesus from the dead, making him the firstborn of a new creation where sin and death are no more. And just as Adam was our life pattern in the oppressive, sad solidarity of sin and alienation, Jesus now is our life pattern in the liberating, joyful solidarity of grace. Just as we were one in Adam, our true identity now is our freedom and unity in Christ. The relationships that make us human are restored in Christ, and life in fullness begins.

We are free because in the story of Jesus God’s power to redeem all of creation is revealed.  We are free because through the Holy Spirit we already participate in the life of this new creation, and we are being conformed to the image of Christ. By the grace of God, the ancient trajectory of death has been ended, and the universe is bent toward glory.