One Coin

It’s not easy to put a large table cloth on the ground for a picnic. Have you ever tried it? On a calm, windless day it’s just a matter of shaking it out so it spreads and settles down slowly. But if there’s a little wind, even just a breeze, it becomes near impossible: the fabric billows, the corners fly – you want the cloth to behave in a tame, domesticated manner, but it wants to be a banner, a kite, or a sail.

A good parable is like that. You expect somebody would know how to lay it out on the ground, nicely and orderly, but it just won’t lie still. It’s full of possibilities and surprises; every time you hear it, it’s new, it’s deeper, challenging, confusing, comforting.

Imagine you take this little gem of a story about a vineyard owner to the business round table, the next time they have a luncheon downtown. Entrepreneurs, executives, managers – they listen how this peculiar workday unfolds from first light to pay time, and they wonder what kind of business man the landowner is and how he ever managed to stay in business.

Then you take the story to the union hall, if you can find one, and they try to keep calm while they explain to you why you can’t pay some workers for one hour’s work what others make in an entire day.

Now imagine you take the story to the corner of the parking lot at Home Depot where out-of-work men gather, waiting for someone to hire them. They laugh as they listen because they know how hard it is to make a full day’s wage with part time labor. They know how hard it is to watch truck after truck drive by – and very few trucks come around after noon. Not a lot of people are hiring these days. On the way home you hear on the radio that the unemployment rate in Tennessee is at 9.8% and that 1 in 6 Americans now live in poverty.

When Jesus first told this parable, many farmers in Galilee had lost their land, and they had to make a living as day laborers. Mid-size and large farms, many of them owned by absentee landlords, were usually operated with day labor rather than slaves; it was much cheaper, and there was an abundance of landless peasants. Farmworkers in Galilee were poor, underemployed, and heavily taxed by the Roman authorities.

One denarius, a small Roman coin, appears to have been the going rate for a day of field labor, but a denarius wasn’t much. You could buy 10-12 small loaves of pita bread for a denarius. For a lamb you had to pay 3-4 denarii; for a simple set of clothes, 30 denarii.[1]

The landowner in the story is very peculiar. He goes out early in the morning to hire laborers, which was the usual time. But then he comes back at 9 to hire more, and you say to yourself, “Well, he finally realized that he needed more hands to get the work done.”

When he comes back at noon, you wonder if he knows what he’s doing or if he is one of those rich city slickers who bought himself a vineyard and a winery. And then he comes back in the middle of the afternoon, when everybody is dreaming about quitting time, and he keeps hiring – and you are running out of explanations that would make sense of this kind of behavior. Has he been in the sun too long?

But that’s not the end of it. The sun is already low in the west when he returns again to the marketplace, and he hires every last worker he can find. The day began in the familiar world of the tough Galilean rural economy, but it ends in a world that looks and feels very different.

Imagine you got up at dawn to go to the corner where they pick up day laborers. You know that if you get hired, you can get some bread on the way home and your family will eat dinner. But you don’t get picked in the first round. You go to the other side, hoping to have better luck over there, but you don’t. The younger ones are hired first. The stronger ones are hired first. You cross the road again, hoping for better luck on the other side, but it’s noon already. You decide to check out the Labor Ready office on Gallatin, but they tell you to come back tomorrow, and to be there early. So you go back to the marketplace, and just when you decide to call it a day and walk home, this landowner shows up and asks you, “Why are you standing here idle all day?”

The economy has tanked and you find yourself pushed to the margin, and you already feel like a left-over person, no longer needed, unnoticed, forgotten, and this man calls you idle. This man doesn’t know how long you have been on your feet. He doesn’t know how hard you have tried to find work. He doesn’t know how hungry you are and how much you dread coming home tonight with empty hands. Did he just call you lazy or work-shy?

“We’re here because no one has hired us,” you say.

“You also go into the vineyard,” the landowner replies.

And you go. You’re not doing it for the money, or you would have asked him how much he’s paying. You go because …, who knows. You go because you want to be useful, because you are somebody, because you want to contribute and participate. You go and work in the vineyard.

Soon the manager calls everybody to line up, starting with those hired last, starting with you. You barely got your hands dirty. How much could it be for an hour’s work? A copper penny? It doesn’t really matter. It won’t be enough to put bread on the table. It’ll be another dinner of wild field greens for you and the family, organic and locally harvested!

Now the manager puts a coin in your hand. It’s a denarius. It’s a full day’s pay. It’s unbelievable! You turn around to the people behind you, “Look at this! A full day’s wage!”

The news travels fast to the end of the line, where the ones hired first are waiting to be paid. Imagine you’re one of them. You’ve worked twelve long, hard hours. You are dirty, sweaty, your clothes are sticking to your skin and your back is aching. Talk about eating your bread by the sweat of your brow! But you’ve heard the news and now you’re looking forward to a little bonus, and your back is already starting to feel better.

You move to the front of the line, and the manager puts a coin in your hand. It’s a denarius. One denarius. It’s unbelievable! You turn to the people around you, and they are just as upset as you are.

“These last worked only one hour, and you have made them equal to us who have borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat.” You have made them equal to us. You have wiped out the distinctions that are so important to us and to our sense of justice and fairness.

This story comes with more than just a breeze; the air is charged, a thunderstorm is brewing. You expect somebody would know how to smooth it out on the ground, nice and square, but it just won’t lie still. This story will continue to challenge, confuse, and comfort us, depending on how and where we enter it.

This little story holds the pain and the hope of those in every generation who are treated like left-over people. All those in the company of sinners and tax collectors who are not pious enough to be considered righteous and worthy of divine reward, and yet Jesus welcomes them into the kingdom. The story holds the pain and the hope of all those in the company of landless peasants who feel like they are no longer needed or wanted, and Jesus insists that their needs and dignity matter.

But this little story also holds the anger and resentment of those in every generation who worry that too much mercy for others will only breed further lack of effort on their part. All those in the company of the self-made upright who cannot imagine themselves as recipients of gifts they didn’t earn, but whom Jesus welcomes with equal compassion as he welcomes notorious sinners. The story holds the anger and resentment of all those who look with envy on those they deem less industrious, less committed, less worthy of the joy of God’s reign than they are.

This little kingdom story holds a mighty surprise, and whether we respond with joy or with grumbling depends entirely on how we see ourselves: Have I been working since the break of dawn, or am I only just beginning to get my hands in the dirt in this vineyard? I like to think that I’ve been working for a very long time, but what if all my busyness since the break of day was only idleness in the eyes of the owner of this vineyard? This little story is full of possibilities and surprises; every time you hear it, it’s new, it’s deeper, challenging, confusing.

One thing I know: God is not like some absentee landlord who shows little interest in us but much more like the quirky vineyard owner in our story. The God who meets us in Jesus is one who comes and seeks us, as if the day was not complete until each of us has done at least a little vineyard work. God comes and finds us, sometimes early, sometimes late, and will not rest until we’re found, every last one of us. And at the end of the day, we all receive the fullness of what God so generously gives: life. Life that is nothing but life.

---

[1] Ulrich Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (EKK 1/3), p. 146

What Are Prisons For?

At first the answers may seem simple. Prisons are for the punishment of people who have broken the law. Prisons are for the protection of the community from potentially dangerous offenders. Prisons are for the correction of behaviors that threaten life in community. But prisons are also communities where people live and work, where babies are born and people die of old age. What do we make of the fact that the U.S. has the largest prison population in the world? How effective are prisons in accomplishing what they are supposed to accomplish?

This fall we will meet numerous times for conversations around incarceration and how it relates to our faith. Some of the conversations will happen in our fellowship hall, others in homes, in a local prison, and in our sanctuary. We are well aware that we cannot address every dimension of this seemingly simple question, What are prisons for? Once the planning team started naming themes for programs, we quickly realized that we were looking at a complex and multi-layered set of issues.

The idea behind prison:360 is not to look at an issue from every possible angle. What we try to accomplish is integrating traditional classroom learning with opportunities for fellowship and service, as well as spiritual practice and reflection. 

All of the programs are open to the public, but please note that a registration is required for some.

Wednesday, October 12

6:30 p.m. (dinner begins at 6 p.m. ) in the fellowship hall

Robin Porter – How Do Prisons Work?

Robin began working in prisons as an intern when she was a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and today she is the Director of Victim Services with the Tennessee Department of Correction. She will share with us from her own experience how prisons work, system-wide and on the day-to-day level in a specific setting.

Make your dinner reservation by Monday October 10

Thursday, October 13

8 p.m.   Documentary night at the Kleinert’s

American Drug War (2007)

The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world, and illegal drugs have a lot to do with that. The War on Drugs has become the longest and most costly war in American history, the question has become, how much more can the country endure? Inspired by the death of four family members from “legal drugs” Texas filmmaker Kevin Booth sets out to discover why the Drug War has become such a big failure.

Map and directions

Sunday, October 16

9:30 a.m.   in the fellowship hall

Gayle Ray – What Are Prisons For?

Gayle is a former sheriff of Davidson County and former Commissioner of the Department of Correction. She will talk about the purpose of prisons: what is incarceration supposed to accomplish, and how well does the system work?

Sunday, October 16

10:45 a.m.   worship
Lee Camp, guest preacher
Lee is Professor of Ethics at Lipscomb University, at both the college and graduate level, and he is well known as the host and creator of Tokens, a “theological variety show.”

Monday, October 17

7 p.m.   Documentary night at the Kleinert’s

What I Want My Words To Do To You ( 2003)

The film goes inside a writing workshop at New York’s Bedford Hills Correctional Facility led by playwright Eve Ensler. Fifteen women, most of whom were convicted of murder, delve into and expose their most terrifying realities as they grapple with the nature of their crimes and their own culpability. The film culminates in a prison performance of the women’s writing by acclaimed actors Mary Alice, Glenn Close, Hazelle Goodman, Rosie Perez and Marisa Tomei.

Map and directions

Tuesday, October 18

5:30 p.m.   Riverbend Prison

Life Behind Bars

We have the opportunity to visit one of Nashville’s prisons, Riverbend Maximum Security Institution. Visitors get a close look at life behind bars as well as time to talk with two of the inmates. The group size is limited and early registration is required. Please register here or call the church office at 269-5614.

Sunday, October 23

9:30 a.m. in the fellowship hall

Prisons – Places of Healing?

Many non-government agencies, groups, and ministries work with inmates and ex-offenders. Mark and Dana West are with The Theotherapy Project, and they will tell us about their work with convicts while in prison as well as after their release, when they face the challenges of life outside. Graduates of the program will talk about their experience during worship.

Monday, October 24

7 p.m.   Documentary night at the Kleinert’s

The Dhamma Brothers (2008)

An overcrowded maximum-security prison in Alabama is dramatically changed by the influence of an ancient meditation program. Behind high security towers and a double row of barbed wire and electrical fence dwells a host of convicts who will never see the light of day. But for some of these men, a spark is ignited when it becomes the first maximum-security prison in North America to hold an an emotionally and physically demanding course of silent meditation lasting ten days.

Map and directions

Wednesday, October 26

6:30 p.m. (dinner begins at 6pm) in the fellowship hall

Charlie Strobel – When Crime Becomes Personal

Most of us know and love Fr. Strobel for his work with the homeless in our community. What many of us don’t know is that Charlie’s mother, Mary Catherine, was murdered in 1985 by a man who had escaped from a prison mental ward. We have invited Charlie to talk about how his faith shaped his response to the violent and painful loss of his mother.

Make your dinner reservation by Monday, October 24

Wednesday, November 2

6:30 p.m. (dinner begins at 6 p.m. ) in the fellowship hall

Robin Porter and Nicole H. Smith - Victim Impact

Incarceration is a means to punish and rehabilitate offenders. What about the victims of crime? How does the prison help offenders take accountability for what they have done? What systems are in place to support victims of crime? Robin is the Director of Victim Services with the Tennessee Department of Correction. Nicole has used her experience as a victim of crime to teach victim impact classes for inmates and facilitate victim offender dialogues.

Make your dinner reservation by Monday, October 31

Thursday, November 3

8 p.m.   Documentary night at the Kleinert’s

Prison Town, USA (2007)

In the 1990s, at the height of the prison-building boom, a prison opened in rural America every 15 days. The film tells the story of Susanville, California, one small town that tries to resuscitate its economy by building a prison — with unanticipated consequences.

Map and directions

Sunday, November 6

After weeks of conversations and experiences, we address in worship and in the context of the gospel some of the questions that have been raised. Our faith traditions speak and sing about prisoners losing their chains and prison doors flying open, about repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation, and the scriptures are full of prison stories – Joseph, Daniel, John, Peter, Paul, to name just a few. Who knows what will emerge when we juxtapose recent experience and ancient tradition, burning questions and living Word?

Sunday, November 6

4:45 p.m.   Documentary night with the youth group

(the title of the film will be announced shortly)

A Lovely Idea?

The world turns, the years pass, and on this day people of every faith throughout the world pause and gather to mark the passage of a decade since that sunny morning in September when thousands died in a premeditated act of mass murder. We each have our own memories. Where we were. How we felt. How long it took for the reality to sink in. How our lives were touched by stories of loss and of human courage. How much our lives have changed in response to the heart-stopping violence of that day.

We are here this morning to worship God and to remember Jesus Christ. Our faith urges us to perceive the world in the light of God’s grace, and we gather here to receive that vision. We gather here that we may grow in faithfulness to God’s will rather than shrink in fear. We gather here to practice walking in the paths that lead us out of cycles of hatred, violence, and revenge to a life that is God-pleasing. You may call it an uncanny coincidence or a divine gift that one of Jesus’ teachings on forgiveness is the lectionary text for this Sunday.

Forgiveness is at the very heart of Jesus’ ministry. A college professor reports that whenever she asks her undergraduate students in her religion class what they believe to be the most important part of the Christian message, they unfailingly bring up forgiveness. Jesus came to bring a message of forgiveness, they say. So true. And some of the students remember to add that he came to teach us how to forgive one another. In a world where hatred, violence, and revenge are not to have the last word, forgiveness is a daily necessity. And so, every Sunday, we gather to affirm the life Jesus embodied, proclaimed, and opened to us.

Every time we say the prayer Jesus taught us, we speak about forgiveness. Whether we learned to say trespasses, debts, or sins, we put into words our need to be forgiven and to be forgiving. We ask our Father in heaven to ‘give us this day our daily bread’ and in the same breath we remember the one thing we need just as much as bread – forgiveness, given and received, daily.

You know that breaking bread with a stranger is much easier than sharing the gift of forgiveness with a friend. Vengeance and retribution are easy; all I have to do is follow my instincts and let the waves of my emotions carry me. You hurt me and I’ll hurt you back; it’s easy. But there is nothing instinctive or natural about forgiveness. C. S. Lewis wrote,

I said … that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. (…) Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.[1]

Forgiveness has increased in popularity since C. S. Lewis wrote those lines, but it is still a lovely idea. Like community is a lovely idea, until you are part of one. Like a committed relationship is a lovely idea, until you live in one, daily. We can’t say what’s harder, to forgive someone who has wronged  us or to acknowledge that we have hurt somebody and ask for forgiveness. Most of us know how it feels when a relationship is stuck in tension. We know how it feels to long for resolution, for a way of leaving the hurt behind and moving toward healing. But we also know how it feels to wait for the other to make the first move. We love the idea of forgiveness, but we don’t always find it easy to do, both the giving and the receiving. The idea lives in our mind, but we sense that something other than our mind is needed in order to move out of stuckness, something we call the heart, the soul, our innermost being.

A few weeks ago, I read about Thomas Ann Hines. Thomas Ann was a divorced mother of an only child. Her son, Paul, twentyone, was a senior at Austin Community College, four hours south of their Plano home, when she got a call from the police one night. Her son had been shot; he was dead. The murderer was a seventeen-year-old drug dealer, Robert White. Believing he was about to be arrested for a burglary, he wanted out of Austin fast. He needed a car. Near a video arcade he spotted Hines and asked him for a ride. He told him his mother was deathly ill, that he wanted to see her, and Hines agreed to take him. Minutes later he was bleeding to death, shot through the lungs and heart.

Thomas Ann descended into a pit of anger and vengeance. The hope of her life was gone. She was completely alone now, without a future, without hope, without any reason, it seemed, to live.

She endured the investigation and the trial, hoping for the death penalty. White was convicted of murder, but he was too young for Death Row. He was sentenced to thirteen years “flat time,” and probation until age forty. Thomas Ann managed to survive. She regularly wrote letters to the Parole Board to ask if her son’s murderer “had died yet,” and to remind them that she would fight his release at every opportunity. Her hope was that Robert Charles White would rot in prison for what he’d done to her son. But struggling to heal, she read voraciously, books on the soul and the spirit and the criminal mind, and the more she read, the more interested she became in who these offenders actually were.

One day she was invited to join a panel of violent crime victims speaking at one of the state prisons. The idea is that victims tell their stories to inmates—not the offenders in their own cases—in an effort to show the human consequences of their crimes. Hines was already convinced that inmates had it too easy, and she thought they ought to be facing “real guilt and pain.” If she could make them do that by telling her story at prisons, she was ready.

And then she sat at the front of the room, awaiting her turn to speak to the 200 assembled inmates, and she noticed a red-haired young man sitting not far from her who, she says, “could easily have passed for Paul’s brother. I looked at him, and suddenly thought to myself, ‘what would his mother want to say to him if she could say something?’ I realized that if my son was in this room, I’d want someone to reach out a hand to him.” It was a moment that instantly transformed her from an angry lecturer to a compassionate mother. It was the beginning of her new life’s work with victims of violent crime and offenders.

On the morning of June 9, 1998, in the chapel of the Alfred D. Hughes Correctional Facility in Gatesville, Texas, where White was an inmate, Thomas Ann Hines sat across the table from the murderer of her son. They talked for eight hours, and if I had just one hour, I would tell you all the things they talked about. No, it wasn’t forgiveness. It was just hard, painful truth. But when, in the course of the conversation, the young man put his face down on the table at which they sat and began to sob, she reached across and touched his arm.[2]

I don’t know if this story did become one of forgiveness. It is a story of healing, though, of moving out of stuckness. What I love about it is that it isn’t one of those tales of modern day saints that give forgiveness a patina of heroic exception, when it is in fact deeply embedded in the day-to-day struggles that are part of living with others. It is not the exceptional that moves me in Thomas Ann’s story; it is the long arch from unimaginable loss to new life. And what moves me more than anything is that moment when she sees a red-haired young man among the inmates and suddenly realizes, “if my son was in this room, I’d want someone to reach out a hand to him.” The love for her son enabled her to see those men – men who had committed terrible crimes – not solely as offenders but as children of mothers, and in that recognition a new and better future began.

“If a brother or sister sins against me,” Peter asked Jesus, “how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?”

The first lesson in forgiveness is that it isn’t something that can be counted. When your brother owes you money and you forgive his debt, that’s easy. He borrows money and you forgive his debt. Once. Twice. Three times. Ten times. You can do it as often as you want or think is wise. But if your brother or sister sins against you, you can’t make yourself forgive them. Forgiveness is hardly ever a simple matter of will, something one decides to do – once, twice, three times. Forgiveness is not a series of seemingly saintly acts. It is a call to a future better than vengeance, a future not bound by the past. It is a call to move out of stuckness.

You can’t make yourself forgive anyone, but you can make the effort to remember your own dependence on God’s acceptance of you and all your brokenness. You can pray that this deep memory of God’s mercy will shape how you react to those who have injured you. Forgiveness is not so much something we do as it is something we participate in. It is a healing river whose source is not in us. Forgiveness begins with God’s love for the world, a love we recognize most fully in the life of Jesus Christ.

In Jesus, God becomes vulnerable to the world of human beings, vulnerable to the human capacity to touch, caress, comfort, and hold, but also vulnerable to the many ways in which we abuse, betray, mock, and abandon one another. In Jesus, God enters the space where sin destroys trust and friendship and all that is sacred between us, and Jesus ends up judged, condemned, and crucified. Everything ends there, in the darkness of Friday. Everything but God’s mercy and faithfulness. And God makes the first move by raising Jesus from the dead.

Forgiveness is much broader than a lovely idea. It is one of the names we give the new creation we inhabit, initiated by the One who makes all things new. Forgiveness is a healing river flowing freely from the heart of God, and all we do – all we can do – all we must do – is remember that we live in the flow of God’s forgiveness, and allow that memory to shape how we relate to each other.

And if a brother or sister sins against me, it always begins at the beginning, countless times: Take a step. One-to-one. Face-to-face. Take a breath. Tell the truth.

---

[1] Mere Christianity, Harper Collins 2001, p. 115

[2] Jon Wilson, Crying for Justice http://www.justalternatives.org/CryingforJustice.pdf

OK... Which Seven?

It's time for the final round. I asked you to submit questions you thought I should address in a sermon series, and you did. I did some minor editing, but there still are 22 questions.

Now it's your turn! Since there is no way to do this that is both elegant and simple, this is how we'll do it: below you'll find a long list of twenty-two questions, each with a 1-7 scale. I suggest that you scroll through and read all of them first. Then give your favorite question a 7, your second choice a 6, your third choice a 5, ... you get the idea. You can submit fewer than seven, but please no more than seven (in that case my trusted robot will randomly delete one of our entries). You may think you have to do all the hard work, but I'll keep track of all the responses and I'll do the math. You will soon realize that the entire process is statistically impeccable, but don't let that keep you from voting.

If the form doesn't load, use this link. Thank you!

Face to Face

The whole passage from Matthew we heard this morning is printed in red: whenever Jesus speaks, the editors want his words to stand out. Our passage is part of a long teaching Jesus gives in response to the disciples who asked, “Who is the greatest  in the kingdom of heaven?” Jesus talks about children and humility, about stumbling blocks and lost sheep, all in very rich, metaphorical language – but then there is a noticeable change. “If a brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.” The words are printed in red, but Anna Carter Florence observes, “Jesus is so concrete and practical in this passage that you could swear he was Paul, writing to a feuding congregation. He tells the disciples what to do if [one sins against another,] and then offers step by step instructions for how to proceed.”[1] She is right, he does sound a little bit like Paul who wrote long, passionate letters to the church in Corinth to remind them and the church throughout all generations that we need each other in order to be whole.

Paul is often concrete and practical, but he’s no stranger to rich, metaphorical language. We need each other in order to be whole. We must pursue one another when sin creates a rift in our relationship. Paul says it beautifully: One member of the body of Christ cannot say to another, “I have no need of you.”[2]

Jesus may sound like he’s teaching a course on church polity; he may sound like he’s writing the article on excommunication for the bylaws, but he’s still responding to the disciples who are with him on the road to Jerusalem, wondering who will get the best seats in the kingdom.[3] They have their eyes and minds set on greatness and triumph, and he teaches them, teaches us the hard and humble work of reconciliation between one sinner and another.

A congregation is not just another organization that needs members and money and bylaws. Paul wants us to think about a body where every limb and organ is part of the whole. Jesus wants us to keep in mind the one lost sheep without which the flock is incomplete. He may sound like he’s starting to write the bylaws, but he’s teaching his followers how to be one body, how to be each other’s shepherds when sin has caused separation. We may be dreaming about greatness, but he teaches us to humbly seek and restore one another and cultivate gentleness, mercy and forgiveness.

Here is how it often goes, instead, and I’m not talking about any of you – I have plenty of illustrations from my own life. If a brother or sister sins against me, I want to tell somebody about it. I want to tell my story and make sure I get plenty of sympathy. I have been wronged. I have been harmed. I have been hurt. I may end up telling all my friends about it, but not the one person who, according to Jesus, needs to hear about it first and foremost. Or I just carry the weight of that sin around with me and don’t tell anyone. This is how it often goes. I know it’s not right, but often I can’t get my proud heart to relent. The Spirit urges me to mend the relationship, but the flesh is slow to go. Let me add that hesitation isn’t always bad; waiting a bit and pondering what has happened sometimes helps me see that just because I’m miffed with someone, doesn’t necessarily mean they’re in the wrong.

Jesus skips all the preliminaries and says, “Go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.” You can add a cup of coffee, but beyond that it’s as basic as it gets: One-to-one. Face-to-face. Take a breath. Tell the truth.

Beverly Gaventa states quite elegantly, “Jesus’ counsel … demands a costly forthrightness that I normally reserve for the few and the greatly trusted.”[4] Yes indeed, Jesus’ counsel demands that I expand my small circle of the few and the greatly trusted to include all who are members of the community he has established. I may think that sin is a matter between me and God and between me and the other person, but Jesus has placed me and the other into this community of reconciliation. Consequently the rift sin has created between me and another is not a private matter, but the place where the whole fabric is torn. What we do or fail to do to each other has an impact not just on individual relationships, but on the community as a whole. In every instant, the whole community Christ has gathered is at stake.

Jesus teaches in the tradition of Israel’s covenant law, where we read in Leviticus, “You shall reprove your neighbor, or you will incur guilt yourself. You shall not take vengeance or bear a grudge against any of your people, but you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[5] It is this particular expression of love Jesus points to when he says, “If a brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.” Face-to-face. Take a breath. Tell the truth. Hear them out. If the two of you can work it out, no one else needs to know. There was pain, there was guilt and shame, but now all is held in mutual love. In the place where the covenant of love was broken, it has also been restored.

Jesus continues, “If you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you.” You’re not bringing in additional troops to intimidate your brother or sister. You ask for their help so the two of you can hear each other out and come to a shared understanding of what happened. You ask for their prayers to hold you both in the mutual love of the community. If you can work it out, no one else needs to know. The relationship has been mended, the community is restored.

Jesus continues, “If the brother or sister refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church.” It is easy to see how this can go terribly wrong. First one, then several people, then an entire congregation confront one person with their sin, but instead of a humble confession, they only encounter a growing wall of silence. Some may describe such a coordinated effort as loving persistence, but the person at the center of their attention may experience their actions as harassment. Scenes from The Scarlet Letter come to mind where an entire community is all too eager to mark and exclude the “offender.” Jesus himself comes to mind, alone on the cross, outside the city gates, the excluded “offender,” violently excommunicated. Keep that image in mind for a moment.

“If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a gentile and a tax collector.” A hard word of exclusion. But the one who said it died for gentiles, tax collectors and every other species of scoundrel on the face of the earth. The excluded are the very people Jesus seeks out to save and restore to community in his ministry.[6] So in one sense, treating someone “as a gentile and a tax collector” means rejection, exclusion, excommunication. In another sense, and quite ironically, it means the radical, offensive inclusion demanded by the gospel itself.[7]

I take this challenging dilemma as further encouragement to focus my attention on the beginning, the first step on the road to reconciliation. That first step is the bigger issue for me and, I suspect, all of us. Take a step. Face-to-face. Take a breath. Tell the truth. This approach to dealing with the reality of sin is tough. It is demanding. It is persistent. It doesn’t write off anyone. It hangs in there. Paul comes to mind again.[8] Love is patient. Love is kind. Love is demanding. Love is persistent. It doesn’t write off anyone. It keeps going back repeatedly to work toward reconciliation. “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” Paul writes in Romans; “for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”[9] In every relationship, the whole community Christ has gathered is at stake. The road to the brother or sister who has sinned against me is demanding and difficult, but it is the road Jesus has prepared for us. I must learn to be truthful without being hurtful. You must learn to say hard things gently. We must learn to live as people of the covenant by trusting the bond of love Christ has created between us.

Jesus says last, “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” To me, this is the verse that holds the entire passage together. “If a brother or sister sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone.” One-to-one. Face-to-face. In his name. Not alone. When we gather in his name, we are never just the two or three of us. We are only together because of him and the work of reconciliation he has accomplished. At first glance, we may only see a sister struggling to find the right words to tell a brother how he has sinned against her. Now we see Jesus, one arm on her shoulder, the other on his. Trusting in the work and presence of Christ, we find the courage to bring each other back to the reconciled community.

Let me finish with another scene, one which at first glance has nothing to do with what Jesus teaches in this passage. On Friday morning, just hours before Jesus was crucified, Judas realized what he had done, and he brought back the thirty pieces of silver to the chief priests and the elders. He said, “I have sinned by betraying innocent blood.” And they replied, “What is that to us? See to it yourself.” They left him alone with his guilt and his shame. He went and hanged himself.[10]

I wonder what might have happened if, instead of going to the chief priests and elders, Judas had gone to his brothers and sisters to confess. I wonder what might have happened if he had remembered the promise, “where two or three are gathered in my name, I am there among them.” I wonder if mercy would have embraced him, a sinner among fellow sinners.

---

[1] Anna Carter Florence, Preaching the Lesson, Lectionary Homiletics Vol. 19, No. 5, p. 54

[2] 1 Corinthians 12:21

[3] See Thomas G. Long, Matthew (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997), 202

[4] Beverly Gaventa, “Costly Confrontation,” The Christian Century, August 11-18, 1993, p. 773

[5] Leviticus 19:17-18

[6] See, e.g. Matthew 9:10-13

[7] See Beverly Gaventa, “Costly Confrontation,” The Christian Century, August 11-18, 1993, p. 773

[8] See 1 Corinthians 13

[9] Romans 13:8

[10] Matthew 27:3-5

After Ten Years

Next Sunday marks the 10^th anniversary of 9/11 and the shock and pain the attacks of that day brought to the U.S. and to the world. So much has changed in these ten years, and I often wonder if we will ever fully regain the sense of safety that in retrospect seems like innocence.

The past decade has been defined by the struggle to bring the perpetrators to justice and to prevent future attacks. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars. The line between national security needs and constitutional freedoms has constantly been under negotiation. Survivors of the attacks, the families and friends of the victims, first responders and their families, and all of us were relieved when Mr. Bin Laden was killed earlier this year, but we are far from what we too lightheartedly call closure. We continue to grief and to rebuild and to seek deeper understanding.

We will each have our own personal way to honor the great losses of that day and to remember the extraordinary courage of ordinary men and women who responded with selfless service. We will observe a moment of silence in our worship services at Vine Street. But many Nashvillians will also come together from across the various communities of our city: we want to affirm our belief that peace is not a thing of the past but a possibility for the future.

In the afternoon of September 11, 2011, the Office of Religious Life at Vanderbilt University invites the community to an interfaith gathering at Benton Chapel. This gathering, “Prayer, Remembrance and Hope,” will include music offered by Vanderbilt students and Blair Children’s Choirs, readings by representatives of various faith traditions, the presence of ROTC/NROTC and police/fire personnel as well as members of the Interfaith Council, the Divinity School and the VU student government.

The painful events of 9/11 have reminded us that we cannot live in isolation as if on islands. We must reach out to each other, try to understand and appreciate our differences, and prevent seeds of fear and suspicion to take root. Coming together to remember helps us do that.

Sunday, September 11, 2011, 2:30 p.m.
Prayer, Remembrance and Hope
Interfaith Gathering at Benton Chapel

Armor-piercing Moments

Moses grew up in a world of contrasts. Raised by his Hebrew mother, he had been given an Egyptian name. He was the child of slaves, but as the adopted son of the Princess Royal, he lived a life of privilege in the big house. One day he went out to his people, the story continues in the book of Exodus, leaving us wondering if he knew that they were his people, his kinsfolk, or if that was only the storyteller’s knowledge. Moses hadn’t lived among his folk for so many years, and formative years at that, you can’t help but wonder if he thought of himself as a Hebrew or an Egyptian, as a grandson of Pharao or a brother of those groaning under slavery.

One day he went out to his people, and he saw an Egyptian beating a Hebrew[1]  – now I don’t imagine that to be an unusual scene, do you? The whole system of slavery was built on violence, I would think that abusive language and physical abuse were pretty common and quite visible – unless, of course, you lived your life in the sheltered world behind the palace walls. One day Moses went out and he saw what he may not have seen before or perhaps he had forgotten, and the injustice he witnessed stirred his soul. He couldn’t just walk away from the scene as though it had nothing to do with him. This moment demanded a response of him.

The Jewish scholar and author, Martin Buber, wrote in 1947,

Each of us is encased in an armour whose task is to ward off signs. Signs happen to us without respite, living means being addressed, we would need only to present ourselves and to perceive. But the risk is too dangerous for us, … and from generation to generation we perfect the defense apparatus. All our knowledge assures us, “Be calm, everything happens as it must happen, but nothing is directed at you, you are not meant; it is just ‘the world’, you can experience it as you like, but whatever you make of it in yourself proceeds from you alone, nothing is required of you, you are not addressed, all is quiet.”

Each of us is encased in an armour which we soon, out of familiarity, no longer notice. There are only moments which penetrate it and stir the soul to sensibility.[2]

This was such a moment. Moses couldn’t just walk away as though everything happened as it must happen. He looked around, and seeing no one he killed the Egyptian and hid him in the sand.[3] His passion against injustice urged him to act, and the only response he knew was more violence.

The next day he went out again, and he saw two Hebrews fighting. “Why do you strike your fellow Hebrew?” he said to the one who was in the wrong, and the man replied, “Who made you a judge over us? Are you going to kill me too?” Certainly not, but now Moses knew that there had been at least one witness the day before, and he was afraid. It was just a matter of time before Pharao would hear of it and seek to kill him. And so Moses fled and settled in the land of Midian. He met and married Zipporah, one of Jethro’s seven daughters, and she bore a son whom he named Gershom.[4] The boy’s name, meaning “a stranger there,” spoke of Moses’s lack of a home; he didn’t know where he belonged; he didn’t know what to tell his own son about his people.

You could say Moses had a good life in Midian. He had a wife and a child, he had decent work, but for him all that didn’t add up to being at home. He was an alien residing in a foreign land and he didn’t even know where home was. I bet he enjoyed being out in the field with the sheep where nobody asked him where he was from. And out there, beyond the wilderness, he came to Horeb, the mountain of God, where he saw the blazing bush.

This is a place where I trust Zora Neale Hurston’s imagination over Cecil B. DeMille’s any day.[5] She wrote,

Moses could not believe his eyes, but neither could he shut them on the sight. Because the bush was burning brightly but its leaves did not twist and crumple in the heat and they did not fall as ashes beneath charred limbs as they should have done. It just burned and Moses, awed though he was, could no more help coming closer to try and see the why of the burning bush than he could quit growing old. Both things were bound up in his birth. Moses drew near the bush.

“Moses,” spoke a great voice which Moses did not know, “take off your shoes.” [6]

Don’t think of this as a place far away. Think of it as another moment that demanded a response. Remember what Buber wrote,

Signs happen to us without respite, living means being addressed, we would need only to present ourselves and to perceive.

Have you lived through moments when, trembling with awe you wanted to take your shoes off? I have; they are the moments when suddenly the everyday becomes translucent and you see life as the miracle it truly is. The least you can do is take off your shoes so nothing touches the ground but your bare feet. It is as though the moment has been prepared just for you to arrive and notice and abide.

When I was little, we had a small rug, no bigger than one foot wide and perhaps three-and-a-half feet long, stretching along the wall right behind the front door. When we came home, we would stand on the entrance mat, untie our shoes, and then place them on that small rug. You could tell who was home just by looking at the shoes that were lined up behind the door. I know my mom taught us to take off our shoes at the door, because she didn’t want us to carry in all that dirt and dust from outside. But there was something else going on. Every time I walked in, when I paused to untie my shoes, there was a brief moment of recognition: I’m at home now. This is where I belong.

When Moses bent to untie his sandals, he certainly did it with deep reverence and vulnerability, but I also like to think that perhaps for the first time in a long time he knew how it feels to be at home. I like to think that when he heard the great voice calling him by name he was no longer an alien residing in a foreign land. He felt like one who belonged.

“I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmasters. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.”

There was a better land than the land of oppression and bondage. The violence and injustice Moses had seen with his own eyes had not gone unnoticed in heaven. The God who knew and called Moses by name, had observed everything, had seen and heard and declared, “I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them.”

That was good and most welcome news, but there was another word: “Moses, I want you to go down to Egypt.”

“Into Egypt? Egypt is no place for me to go. They have my face on every most-wanted poster.”

“I said Egypt, Moses. I want you to go down and tell that Pharao to let my people go.”

“Me? Pharao? Who am I to tell Pharaoh what to do? He won’t pay me no attention, I know he won’t.”

“Go on down there. I will be with you.”

Moses, the child of Hebrew slaves who grew up in a palace of privilege; Moses, the man driven by a deep sense of justice but unable to control his anger; Moses, the refugee who longed for home; Moses suddenly felt the weight of God’s claim on his life.

“Well, if I go, what do I tell your people? I don’t even know your name. Who do I tell them sent me?”[7]

“I am who I am.”

That response sounds more like a riddle than a name, doesn’t it?

“I will be what I will be.”

Volumes have been written about these three words in Hebrew and the four letters of the name that hasn’t been spoken in many hundreds of years. But even if we knew how to pronounce the name, it wouldn’t add much to what we know of God. Why? Because who God is is forever tied to what God has promised and done. God’s name is embedded in the stories of God’s people. God is one who hears the cry of the oppressed and does not forget. God is one who sees the injustice in the land of bondage and is moved to action. God is one who suffers in the sufferings of others and acts for their deliverance. God said to Moses, “I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. And now I will be your God. I will go with you.” Moses didn’t learn God’s name by the blazing bush where God summoned him. That was the beginning. That was but a first taste of home for the sojourner who didn’t know where he belonged. Moses learned God’s name over a lifetime of listening for God’s voice and call.

The name of God is forever tied to the liberation of God’s people from the land of bondage, and thus our God is the God of Moses and Aaron, of Miriam and Joshua. The name of God is forever tied to the prophets who spoke with urgency and courage in times of crisis, and thus our God is the God of Hosea and Amos, Jeremiah and Isaiah. The name of God is forever tied to the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and thus our God is the God of Mary Magdalene and Paul, of Peter and James and Lydia. Our God is the God of Sojourner Truth and Martin Luther King.

To know the God of our ancestors, we recall the stories of the witnesses to whose names the name of God is forever tied, and then we go. Like all of them before us, we go – with a little courage and still with fear, but we go – toward the good and broad land, toward the future where all of God’s children and indeed all of God’s creatures are at home. We go to live as witnesses – always listening for God’s voice and call and responding with faith.

---

[1] Exodus 2:11

[2] Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004, p. 12

[3] Exodus 2:12

[4] Exodus 2:13-22

[5] The Ten Commandments http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049833/

[6] Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, p. 125

[7] With thanks to Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain, p. 126

Seven Questions

Earlier this month, I asked you to help me create a sermon series. Many of you participated (Thank You!), and after the race was neck-to-neck for a while, in the end it was a clear victory for "Seven Questions."

Now this means that we are starting a crowd sourcing project: I invite you, your friends, neighbhors, distant relatives to submit questions: Do dogs go to heaven? Is sin just another word for bad morals? What is good about Good Friday? Questions like that. Any questions you think the preacher should address (i.e. not the kind of questions you think any preacher should stay away from).

You can submit your questions online (there should be a box at the end of this post), via email or twitter @thomaskleinert, or via handwritten notes (in the offering plate, under the door, or in my mailbox). I will collect and post all your questions, and then you'll get to rank them. I will address the top seven of your choices as best I can. That's what I call a grassroots campaign.

Here are a few questions I have already received:

• What should be the role of the church versus the moral and ethical corruptions of modern society? Handmaiden? Critic? Gadfly? Partisan supporter? Evaluator? Other?
• Whatever happened to the concept of sin? Aren’t many of our serious social problems related to The Seven Deadly Sins (wrath, greed, sloth, lust, envy, gluttony, pride) and the lack of support for The Seven Cardinal Virtues (fortitude, justice, prudence, temperance, faith, hope, charity)?
• How can the church serve as a peacemaker in dealing with the divisive issues (other Christian traditions, other faiths, political extremes, social values) of our time?
• What happens when forgiveness does not lead to repentance?
• When does a virtue like compassion or accepting difference turn into a vice?
• Did Jesus study Buddhism between ages 12 and 30?
• The first recorded miracle of Jesus is at the wedding of Cana, where he turned water into wine. The last recorded miracle is the healing of the servant whose ear was cut off. The other miracles can be explained as changing people’s attitudes. The first and the last are magic. What’s your take on that?

The Shadow of Pharaoh

Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph.[1] You know Joseph, youngest of Jacob’s sons until baby Benjamin was born. Joseph the dreamer with his fancy coat whom his brothers hated so much they sold him as a slave to some Midianite traders. He ended up in Egypt, where he rose to a position of power and authority. You know Joseph who made it, against all odds, and who made it big: Pharao’s right-hand man.

When drought and famine struck the land of Canaan, the sons of Jacob went down to Egypt looking for food, and there they reconciled with the brother they hadn’t seen in a very long time. After the party Pharao said to Joseph, “Settle your father and your brothers and their families in the best part of the land,” and they settled in the Nile delta. Pharao remembered Joseph who had made him owner of all the arable land by reorganizing Egypt’s economy, and Joseph’s people enjoyed most-favored immigrant status.

Then Joseph died, and all his brothers, and that whole generation. But the Israelites were fruitful and prolific; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong, so that the land was filled with them. Now a new king arose over Egypt, one with a short memory. Now those resident aliens and their large families were regarded with growing suspicion.

In Exodus, the first person to speak is this new king who doesn’t remember, and in his mind fruitfulness and flourishing among the Hebrews aren’t signs of blessing but a growing threat. “Look,” he says to his people, “the Israelite people are more numerous and more powerful than we.”

What we hear in his words is not just the sadly familiar fear of strangers that so easily turns into prejudice and hate. The Israelites are the bearers of God’s promise to Abraham; their life is a testimony to the faithfulness and trustworthiness of God, and the king wants to suppress their life.

The new king remains unnamed in this story. He is more than a historic figure whose name the story tellers failed to recall. This king embodies our own forgetfulness and our resistance against God’s plans for the flourishing of a people in whom all the families of the earth would be blessed, which was the promise to Abraham. He embodies our fear of everything that might undermine the plans we make and the systems we build to control life, no matter how large or small our thrones might be.

The new king’s anxiety quickly turns into a policy of forced labor, but the results of his efforts are the opposite of his intentions: the Israelites continue to multiply and fill the land. The powers of oppression and abuse are helpless against the power of blessing that is at work in this community.

In these opening paragraphs, God isn’t mentioned, only the irrepressible growth of God’s people, against all odds, despite all the ruthless efforts to make their lives bitter with hard service. And when forced labor doesn’t have the desired effect, the king ratchets up the oppressive measures. Building royal supply cities with cheap labor wasn’t enough to bolster his sense of power and to keep the Hebrews in their place. Now he summons the Hebrew midwives and gives them the obscene commandment to kill all newborn Hebrew boys.

Zora Neale Hurston wrote in her 1939 book, Moses, Man of the Mountain,

Moses hadn’t come yet, and these were the years when Israel first made tears. Pharaoh had entered the bedrooms of Israel. The birthing beds of Hebrews were matters of state. The Hebrew womb had fallen under the heel of Pharaoh. ... So women in the pains of labor hid ... They must cry, but they could not cry out loud. They pressed their teeth together. ... Men learned to beat upon their breasts with clenched fists and breathe out their agony without sound. ... The shadow of Pharaoh squatted in the dark corners of every birthing place in Goshen. Hebrew women shuddered with terror at the indifference of their wombs to the Egyptian law.[2]

They shuddered with terror, but in the deadly chaos of genocidal cruelty, courage and grace arose, and each is given a name in the story: Shiphrah and Puah. Remember those names, remember those women. You don’t need to remember how many times Joseph’s brothers travelled from Canaan to Egypt; you don’t even need to remember their names – you can look them up anytime you want. But these two names you need to remember, the names of Shiphrah and Puah, because the moment will come in your life, if it hasn’t already, when you witness the depth to which human depravity can sink, especially when power is at stake. And you will feel small and powerless against the forces that oppose the flourishing of God’s people in true freedom and true peace. And you will shrink a little more and say to yourself, “What can one person do?”

You need to remember Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives. The first time God is mentioned in the great story of the Exodus is when these two women are introduced. They know a lot about the irrepressibility of new life that wants to be born. They know a lot about helping life to emerge and thrive. And this king summons them and says, “If it is a boy, kill him.”

These two women know everything about the shadow of Pharaoh squatting in the dark corners of every birthing place in Goshen. But the midwives, it says in verse 17, feared God; they did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but they let the boys live. What can one person do? You can choose to fear the God of life. You can refuse to obey the masters of oppression.

The great story of the liberation of God’s people begins with Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, two women willing to say ‘no’ to a mad king’s deathly decree. With defiant grace they go about their good work in the birthing place. When the king summons them again and demands an explanation, they lie and life among the Hebrews continues with the blessing of children.

Now the king ratchets up his rule of terror yet another level and he commands all his people to throw every boy born to the Hebrews into the Nile.

This king distorts everything that is good: Work is a form of human creativity, a source of pride in making things, a source of joy in being useful. This king turns work into forced labor. Midwives assist in the birth of new life with patience, love, and great skill. This king wants to turn them into servants of death. The great river runs through the land like a life-giving artery, watering the fields and replenishing them with fertile silt, and carrying the ships that bring the harvest to market. This king wants to turn the river into a grave. It is as though in the realm of this king nothing can escape the pull of fear and death. In such a world, what can one person do?

The next chapter begins with a man and a woman. There is a marriage. There is a birth. It is as though out of the chaos which the king decreed, life again emerges defiantly; and it is good. The infant’s mother hides him, and when she can no longer hide him, she makes a basket; she puts the child in it and places it among the reeds on the bank of the river. She does it all with love and great care and with tears, and his sister stays close by the river’s edge to see what will happen to the boy.

The Hebrew story teller has left a beautiful hint that is hard for us to detect, but we have wise teachers in the rabbis who point these things out for us. The word which is translated ‘basket’ here, is the same word which is translated ‘ark’ in the story of Noah and the flood. We are to hear the two stories together, let one resonate in the other, and know that the little boy is safe, floating in his little ‘ark’ on the water which the king had intended for his death. It may appear as though in the realm of this king nothing can escape the pull of fear and death, but this little basket tells a different story.

The boy’s sister watches as the daughter of Pharao comes to the river to bathe, and she finds the basket and opens it and sees the little boy who is crying and she picks him up. She knows exactly what she is doing. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she says. She recognizes that he is a child from the slave community, a child under death sentence from her father – and yet she doesn’t throw him into the river. She obeys a different law than her father’s and thus becomes part of the conspiracy of grace that resists Pharaoh’s fury.

Now the boy’s sister steps forward, another accomplice in this conspiracy, and smart as a whip she asks with all innocence if perhaps her royal majesty would like her to go and get her a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for her? And before you know it, the little boy is back in his mother’s arms.

This is how the great story of Israel’s liberation begins: With Shiphrah and Puah, the Hebrew midwives, whose fear of God gives them the courage to ignore the king’s command. With a mother and a sister whose love inspires them to be creative and incredibly bold at just the right moment. And with the king’s own daughter, who doesn’t obey her father’s deathly decree, but responds with compassion to the child’s vulnerability. Together these five women resist the pull of fear and death, and their actions align with God’s life-giving and liberating intentions and work. In later chapters of Exodus, God takes direct action with great displays of power against those who stubbornly oppose the freedom of God’s people. But here in the opening chapters, the power of God is almost hidden. God is barely mentioned, and yet God is at work. The shadow of Pharaoh may be squatting in the dark corners of every birthing place, but courage and grace make a bright light. Remember those names: Shiphrah and Puah.

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[1] Exodus 1:8

[2] In Moses, Man of the Mountain, first chapter

Sermon Survey Update

Last week, I asked for your input in creating a sermon series. Who would have thought that the wisdom of many would lead to a tie?

If you haven't submitted your vote yet, please do (here's the ballot) and help us get a definitive result. Voting will end on midnight, Sunday, August 21. Thanks!

Update on 2011-08-21 14:50 by Thomas Kleinert

The current score is 2.5 / 3.05 / 2.3

"Seven Questions" is the front runner, followed closely by "Do You Speak Christian?"

Voting will end tonight at midnight.

Children and Dogs

Adam Gopnik wrote a delightful article about a little girl and a dog. Until not very long ago, Adam and his wife didn’t like dogs, but their daughter did – and that was all it took:

A year ago, my wife and I bought a dog for our ten-year-old daughter, Olivia. We had tried to fob her off with fish, which died, and with a singing blue parakeet, which she named Skyler, but a Havanese puppy was what she wanted, and all she wanted. With the diligence of a renegade candidate pushing for a political post, she set about organizing a campaign: quietly mustering pro-dog friends as a pressure group; introducing persuasive literature (…); demonstrating reliability with bird care.

(…) Shrewd enough to know that she would never get us out of the city to an approved breeder, she quietly decided that she could live with a Manhattan pet-store “puppy mill” dog if she could check its eyes for signs of illness and its temperament for symptoms of sweetness. Finally, she backed us into a nice pet store on Lexington Avenue and showed us a tiny bundle of caramel-colored fur with a comical black mask. “That’s my dog,” she said simply.

We know what a persistent child can do to a parent. Not only did Olivia get her dog whom she named, with her daddy’s help, “Butterscotch” – after seven pages of stories and deep reflection her dad admitted, “How does anyone live without a dog? I can’t imagine.” [1]

We know what a persistent child can do to a parent. We also know what having a sick child can do to a parent: it makes you desperate.[2] It makes you say horrible things to the receptionist who won’t give you an appointment until after Labor Day. It makes you very rude to doctors who run test after test for hours and then tell you their diagnosis in two minutes. It makes you scream at the insurance company representative who tells you that your plan does not cover the treatments your child needs. It makes you stay up all night doing research on the web, finding out where the best clinics are, the best doctors, the best therapists, the most promising programs. And after you’ve exhausted all options, would you consider a trip to Mexico or India or anywhere else on God’s green earth? Of course you would. You will do anything it takes to make your child well.

Sometime a couple of weeks ago I saw the picture of a mother in Somalia. She had walked for days under the blazing sun, carrying a starving baby on her back, another one on her hip, and holding a third child by the hand. When she gets to the camp where relief agencies are distributing food, will she find mercy? What will they tell her? Will it be too late for one of her children, or perhaps for two, or, God have mercy, all three of them? Can you imagine anybody telling her that she and her children didn’t qualify for this particular food program?

I thought about children and dogs these last few days, about parents and persistence, and about the limits of mercy. And I was curious about how much we spend on our dogs. According to the current National Pet Owners Survey by the American Pet Products Association, basic annual expenses for dog owners in the U.S. include:

$407 Surgical Vet Visits
$248 Routine Vet Visits
$254 Food
$274 Kennel Boarding
$95 Vitamins
$78 Travel Expenses
$73 Grooming
$70 Food Treats
$43 Toys

That adds up to over $1,500 a year for the Gopnik household and for each of the 46.3 million households in the U.S. that own at least one dog.[3]

Many of us, I suspect, wouldn’t hesitate to treat our dogs as canine members of the family. This was very different in the world in which Jesus grew up. In first-century Jewish communities, dogs weren’t pets, but semi-wild animals that roamed the streets scavenging for food, and they were not allowed in a Jewish house. It wasn’t a matter of hygiene, but of ritual purity. You had to be careful about the things you ate and with whom you ate, the clothes you wore, and even what you touched: every part of life was to reflect the holiness of God. Dogs being scavengers and rather indiscriminate about what they ate, were considered impure. They had to stay outside. Ritual purity was about boundaries, clear boundaries between holy and unholy. How to draw that line and where was an ongoing debate, and Jesus taught that our attention shouldn’t be on the things that touch us or that we allow to enter our bodies. Instead we should pay attention to the attitudes and commitments that determine what we say and do.

When Jesus crossed the border into the region of Tyre and Sidon, he entered foreign territory: language, custom, religion, food – everything there was to Jewish eyes like an advertisement for unholy living, which is why many of Jesus’ Jewish contemporaries would have avoided going there. The scene quickly becomes almost unbearably offensive, when a woman from that region approaches Jesus, shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” It wasn’t proper for a woman to approach a man who didn’t belong to her family for help. It was unthinkable for a Jewish man to be approached by a Gentile woman, let alone when demons were involved. And Matthew adds a dose of ancient prejudice to the already potent mix by calling her a Canaanite.[4] Canaan hadn’t been on the map for generations, but the name still served as a quick label for people who got in the way of the holy purposes of Israel’s God.

This Canaanite woman wouldn’t stop shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” We don’t know why Jesus crossed the border, but we know why she did; we know what having a sick child can do to a parent. The barriers of custom, language, ethnicity and religion were high between her and the man from Nazareth, but her love for her child gave her wings. Her love for her child was stronger than anything that stood between them. Shouting without any restraint she begged him to cast the demon out of her daughter.

To the disciples the whole scene was just too embarrassing, and they urged him to put an end to it. “Send her away,” they said.

“Lord, have mercy,” she shouted.

“Send her away,” they said.

“Lord, have mercy.”

The little scene reflects a large debate: if holiness is not defined by external boundaries, what are the limits of Jesus’ ministry? How wide is the circle of God’s mercy that has the life of Jesus as its defining center? Wide enough for one like her?

We may not like it, because this doesn’t sound like the Jesus we know, but he said,

“I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Let her shout – she doesn’t belong to the flock I was sent to tend. But the woman was determined. She came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” We notice that she isn’t arguing, she is praying. The Jesus we know would reach out and, taking her hand, would tell her to get up and go home and that her daughter was well. Instead he said, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.”

How wide is the circle of God’s mercy that has the life of Christ as its defining center? Which voices will prevail, the woman pleading, “Lord, help me?” or the voices of those already in the house, already at the table, who are telling Jesus, “Send her away”? This is a hard story because it is a difficult debate, and in the language we use, our attitudes and commitments spill from our hearts and over our lips. “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.” Don’t you wish this had been said by one of the disciples rather than Jesus? It does sound like something we might say when we try to keep outsiders out: we insult them.

Many have wrestled with this story, trying to reconcile the Jesus they thought they knew with the Jesus who practically called this woman a bitch. Some have suggested that he didn’t really mean it, that he was merely testing the woman’s resolve. Others have suggested that Jesus wasn’t testing the woman’s faith but the disciples’, that he was just waiting for one of them to stand with her and say, “Lord, have mercy.” But there’s nothing in the story to suggest that this was a test.

I am intrigued by the fact that Jesus talked about bread. Throwing the bread to the dogs would be wrong, he told the woman, since it was the children’s bread. But the woman was not only courageous and persistent, she was also quick and attentive. “Yes, Lord,” she said, “yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” What she asked of him didn’t take away anything from the lost sheep of the house of Israel. Crumbs of mercy would be plenty to save her child. He had just fed 5,000 people with a lunch that looked like nothing to his disciples, and when all had finished eating and all were full and satisfied, there were twelve baskets of broken pieces left. She had been paying attention; she knew in her heart that what she needed was his to give, and that there was enough for all, even the dogs under the table.

“Woman, great is your faith!” Jesus answered her. “Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly. And now the debate was over.

Almost immediately following this hard story about children and dogs, there is another bread story: Jesus was with a crowd again, curing the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others, and they were amazed and praised the God of Israel. Why does Matthew emphasize that they were praising the God of Israel? Because they were a bunch of Canaanites and other suspect Gentiles.

Now Jesus said to the disciples, “I have compassion for the crowd (…) and I do not want to send them away hungry.” No more sending away of those who hunger for the bread of salvation. He took the seven loaves and gave thanks, broke them, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all of them ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. Of this bread, there is more than enough for all of us. There is no reason to keep anybody away or under the table out of fear that there might only be just enough mercy for us but not for them. Every child of God has a seat at the table.

I love this hard story about children and dogs, nestled between a bread miracle for Israel and a bread miracle for the Gentile world. In that unnamed Canaanite mother’s persistence I now recognize the relentless nature of God’s own faithfulness. Her love helps me see that the two bread miracles belong together, that they are not a story with an odd repetition, but rather courses of one and the same meal: the bread of God’s compassion for all.

We know what a persistent child can do to a parent. We also know what a persistent mother can do for her children. Thanks be to God.

---

[1] Adam Gopnik, Dog Story, The New Yorker, August 8, 2011, p. 47, 53

[2] With thanks to Anna Carter Florence, Lectionary Homiletics, Vol. 19, No. 5, August-September 2008, p. 30

[3] All data from http://www.americanpetproducts.org/press_industrytrends.asp

[4] In Mark 7:24 she is identified as Syrophoenician

Four to Seven

I'd like to get your input for a sermon series at Vine Street. I can't tell you the dates, but sometime in the near future I'll set aside the lectionary readings (that usually determine my preaching) and follow a different path. Question is, which one?

Your responses will help determine four to seven weeks of preaching at Vine Street. I think that's pretty cool, and I hope you agree and start clicking boxes... Thanks!

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.

---

[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.

---

[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