A Temple in the Streets

“You ride into town on a donkey, and you allow the crowds to greet you as king. You enter the temple and you drive out all who are buying and selling there. You overturn the tables of the money changers. You allow the blind and the lame to come to you in the temple, and you cure them. The children sing to you, Hosanna to the Son of David, and you do not stop them. Just who do you think you are?”[1]

The temple authorities were not just curious, they were angry and they demanded answers. “What kind of authority do you have for doing these things? Who gave you this authority?” Where did you go to school? What is your degree? When and where were you ordained? Do you have letters, certificates, diplomas?

The temple authorities lived in a very orderly world where authority was hard-earned and carefully assigned. You study hard, you finish top of your class, you get the right internships, you network in the outer courtyards to find a way into the inner circle, you make sure the people in charge remember your name.

It is easy to see how these seasoned temple leaders were disturbed and shaken by Jesus’ freedom. His words and actions went against all that was holy to them. And his words and actions undermined their power: Forgiveness of sins was temple business, yet Jesus forgave sins on the street.

The crowds saw it and praised God, who had given such authority to human beings, but the temple authorities couldn’t see it that way.[2] The crowds shouted, the children sang, but the chief priests and the elders of the people raised angry questions. “What kind of authority do you have for doing these things? Who gave you this authority?” They only knew the authority of the law and the authority of tradition, and Jesus didn’t fit.

They asked Jesus, but only they themselves could answer these questions, just like you and I trust the word and witness of others only to the point where we ourselves know the authority of Jesus. It’s a matter of seeing. We know his authority because it grabs us, it changes us, it puts us on a different path. We give the answer when the question isn’t a question anymore, and we give it with your lives.

Jesus didn’t give them an answer, because he gave it with his life as well. Instead he asked them a question, “Where did John get his authority to baptize? Did he get it from heaven or from humans?” They remembered John, who called people to repentance, and who baptized those who confessed their sins. They remembered him: he had called them a brood of vipers – not a phrase they could forget easily. John challenged them along with all the sinners gathered at the river’s edge to produce fruit that showed that they had changed their hearts and lives.[3]

Now Jesus asked them whether John’s authority came from heaven or from humans. What were they to say? They didn’t discuss if John was a prophet from God or just a crazy wild man, but they showed great concern for the political implications of their response. “If we say ‘from heaven,’ he’ll say to us, ‘Then why didn’t you believe him?’ But we can’t say ‘from humans’ because everyone thinks John was a prophet.” The safest thing to do was to plead ignorance. “We don’t know,” they replied. The entire conversation wasn’t shaped by a desire to know the truth, but by political considerations. Power was at stake, and these men were not free to respond to John or Jesus, because they were trapped in positions of privilege. An honest answer, either way, would have threatened those positions.

The way Matthew paints the scene makes it very easy for us, too easy, I believe, to stand in the courtyard and chide the religious authorities for their failure to respond with honesty. It doesn’t take great courage to demand honesty when others are the ones faced with the question. But if we’re honest – and I can only speak from my own experience, but I suspect I’m not alone – if we’re honest, we must admit that our own response to Jesus is determined by considerations of power and privilege, all the time: calling Jesus my Lord and Savior involves letting go of habits of thinking, speaking, and doing that are quite comfortable. And when I’m not ready to let go, I’m as good as the first of the chief priests at pleading ignorance.

I hear the little story of the two sons with great humility. A man had two sons. Now he came to the first and said, “Son, go and work in the vineyard today.” “No, I don’t want to,” he replied. But later he changed his mind and went. The father said the same thing to the other son, who replied, “Yes, sir.” But he didn’t go. Which one of these two did his father’s will?

Yet another question, and this time the temple leaders didn’t huddle to discuss their answer. “The first one,” they said. It was a good answer. What we say matters, but not as much as what we do. Actions speak louder than words. Well done is better than well said. It was a good answer, but it was also a word of judgment. Jesus draws our attention to the actions of notorious sinners, people who never claimed to do God’s will: When John came, they trusted his word that repentance was the gate to the kingdom. Tax collectors and prostitues changed their hearts and lives, and they are entering God’s kingdom ahead of you. Those who were blind are able to see. Those who were crippled are walking. Those who were deaf now hear. Those who were dead are raised up. The poor have good news proclaimed to them. [4] And all you do is ask, ‘Who gave you this authority?’ What does it take for you to see the grace of heaven at work on earth? What does it take for you to join the company of sinners in the embrace of God’s mercy? Are you so proud? Are you so proud?

In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky writes about the “lady of little faith.” She is an old woman who has doubts about her destiny in the face of death, and she seeks spiritual advise from Father Zosima.[5]

He tells her, “Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. In as far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immortality of your soul. If you attain to perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, … no doubt can possibly enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.”

“In active love?” she replies. “There’s another question—and such a question! You see, I so love humanity that … I often dream of forsaking all that I have, leaving [my family], and becoming a sister of mercy. I close my eyes and think and dream, and at that moment I feel full of strength to overcome all obstacles.”

She wants to say ‘yes’ with her whole heart, but then she wonders how long she could endure such a way of life. What if the patient whose wounds she would so lovingly and selflessly be tending, what if that patient should fail to respond with gratitude? “If anything could dissipate my love to humanity, it would be ingratitude,” she says.

Then the priest tells her what a doctor once told him.

“He was a man getting on in years, and … spoke as frankly as you, though in jest, in bitter jest. ‘I love humanity,’ he said, ‘but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams,’ he said, ‘I have often come to making enthusiastic schemes for the service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually have faced crucifixion if it had been suddenly necessary; and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with any one for two days together, as I know by experience. As soon as any one is near me, his personality disturbs my self-complacency and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because he’s too long over his dinner; another because he has a cold and keeps on blowing his nose. … The more I detest men individually the more ardent becomes my love for humanity.’ ”

“But what’s to be done?” the woman asks. “What can one do in such a case? Must one despair?”

“No,” the priest replies. “It is enough that you are distressed at it. Do what you can, and it will be reckoned unto you. … If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. … What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. … Never be frightened at your own faint-heartedness in attaining love … I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all ... But active love is labor and fortitude.”

The love of God which encounters and invites us in Jesus is not a love in dreams. It is a love that reveals its depth in the long labor of our redemption.

In the life of Jesus, word and action become one to build a temple in the streets. He calls us to change our hearts and lives and to join the company of sinners in the embrace of God’s mercy. He calls us to let go of our pride and recognize one another as brothers and sisters in our need for forgiveness. He calls us to join him in the dailiness of love’s labor, which is our priestly service. He calls us to give the answer with our lives.

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[1] See Matthew 21

[2] See Matthew 9:2-8

[3] Matthew 3:1-12

[4] See Matthew 11:5

[5] http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1073265&pageno=37

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.

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

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.

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

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

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.

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[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

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.

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[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

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

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.

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[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

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

Day without end

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Easter Dance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few years ago, Anne Lamott wrote,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- Words and Music by Michael E. Farris © Gypsy7Music



She travels outside of karma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Singing with Ezekiel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[2] Berrigan, p. 114

[3] Berrigan, p. 115



We are right

There’s an old tale about two rabbis.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How were your eyes opened?”

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

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

“I do not know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



Bent toward glory

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But only they who listen

More than a hundred years ago, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote four short lines I love, and she hid them in her impossibly long poem, Aurora Leigh. [1]

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God:
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries.

I love the majestic elegance of that third line, But only he who sees, takes off his shoes – and I love how the rhythm and elegance then simply collapse into the rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries. Plucking blackberries – something so sweet and familiar, and suddenly it sounds so banal.

Browning tells us that the divine is not a far-away reality in terms of space and time, but rather one that crams the everyday: every common bush is afire with God. The thing to consider, this Victorian writer insists, is not the presence or absence or distance of the divine, but whether or not we see what is there and respond to what is there.

We have built microscopes that allow us to look deep into things, we have come up with powerful telescopes that give us glimpses of cosmic events that happened millions of years ago, but we also sense that even the most advanced technology will not necessarily open our eyes to see what is there: a universe crammed with heaven.

Every year, between the seasons of Epiphany and Lent, we hear this story of Jesus leading Peter, James, and John up a high mountain. Every year, we climb this mountain with them in order to see with greater clarity. This mountain is the vantage point from where we look back on Jesus’ birth and his ministry in Galilee, and forward to his journey to Jerusalem and the conflicts that lead to his death. We look back and we look forward and we ask ourselves, “Where is God in all this?”

It doesn’t matter where we locate the mountain on a map; it’s not a matter of geography, and this mountain is not for tourists. You can fly to Israel, take a bus to Galilee, and local guides will gladly take you to the place where Jesus was transfigured. But chances are you’ll find yourself on top of a hill that doesn’t look any more glorious than the rest. The mountain of the transfiguration belongs in the landscape of our spiritual imagination, not on a topographical map.

According to the story we heard, strange and wonderful things happened on the top of that mountain. Peter, James and John saw Jesus like they had not seen him before. His face shining like the sun. His hands that had touched the sick and broken bread with thousands by the lake – his hands were afire. His feet, dusty from walking the streets and fields of Galilee – his feet had light pouring out of them. His whole body was aglow with the glory of heaven. Moses and Elijah appeared, the friends of God, and they were talking with him.

Peter, James and John were on the mountain with Jesus, and in one glorious moment their insight into who he was, was changed profoundly. Their perception of where he belonged in the story of God and God’s people was opened, and they saw a great deal more than they had ever imagined: They saw the body of Jesus crammed with heaven, light pouring out in every direction. “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God,” Peter had declared only days earlier, only half knowing what he was saying – but now he saw it!

“Lord, it is good for us to be here; if you wish, I will make three dwellings here, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.” What do we do when by the grace of God we see who God’s Messiah is with greater clarity than we ever thought possible? Peter gives voice to an inclination that is common among us. We want to build something to capture the moment and make it last. We want to stay and behold the glory, floating far above the fray of the world below, at home on the mountain of light and truth. We want to build a tent, a booth, a tabernacle, a church – something to make a home on earth for heaven’s glory.

But there is a voice that dashes our pious phantasies in mid-flight. “This is my Son, the Beloved; with him I am well pleased; listen to him!” The same voice was heard when Jesus was baptized down in the river, down in the valley, down in the world below.

No matter how glorious the vision on the top of the mountain, the way of Jesus doesn’t end there. Our journey with him doesn’t take us out of the world and into realms of pure spiritual splendor. Jesus leads the disciples down the mountain to the foothills and the plains below, to the towns where people are hurting and to the camps where people seek refuge from violence, to the streets where people are crying out for justice and dignity, and to the many places where the heavy blanket of despair threatens to smother all hope. Our journey with Jesus doesn’t take us out of the world but deeper into it.

“Get up and do not be afraid,” Jesus said to the disciples. And when they looked up, they saw no one except Jesus himself alone. Without heavenly companions, without heavenly splendor, he himself is the tabernacle, the reality of God’s abiding presence in the world. No need for us to make a home on earth for heaven’s glory when heaven’s glory has come down to be with us until the end. And so we follow him down the mountain and then on the long climb up to Jerusalem and to the hill they called Golgotha.

In startling contrast, the mountain of the transfiguration becomes the hill of execution. There it is not a bright cloud overshadowing the scene, but rather a great and dreadful darkness. On the mountain, Jesus’ clothes became dazzling white, but under the cross soldiers divided his clothes among themselves by casting lots. On the mountain, Jesus spoke with Moses and Elijah, but on the cross he was taunted by two criminals. On the mountain, a heavenly voice declared, “This is my Son, the Beloved,” but on Golgotha the hostile crowd shouted, “If you are the Son of God, come down from the cross.” On the mountain, Peter wanted to stay and build dwellings, but at the crucifixion he was nowhere to be found. The contrast is startling and stark.

On the mountain of the transfiguration, we reflect on our desire to see and be with God, but on Golgotha, we reflect on God’s desire to be with us.

We climb this mountain before the long journey of Lent so we remember in the darkness of Good Friday who this Jesus is: God’s Beloved whom we despised, the judge who bears our verdict, Emmanuel, God with us to the end of the age.

The long journey of Lent is about our transfiguration and the transfiguration of the world. During the season leading up to Holy Week and Easter, we are intentional about centering our lives in God’s will for us, and to that end we pray, we study, or practice another spiritual discipline. We ask for the light of God to shine in our hearts that we might be filled with the knowledge of God’s glory shining in the face of Jesus (2 Corinthians 4:6).

The long journey is about our transfiguration and the transfiguration of the world. We begin to see God’s glory in the face of Jesus, and soon we see the face of Jesus in the faces of every man, woman or child. Love is the light shining in our hearts that opens our eyes to see what is there, in every common bush and every human face.

When Moses came down from the mountain he brought with him ten commandments and some 603 more. When the disciples followed Jesus down the mountain there was just one commandment resounding in their heart: Listen to him. You may think that simplified things considerably, but it didn’t. Listening is just as difficult as seeing what is there. The world resounds with Christ’s presence and call, but only they who listen, hear — the rest sit around or go about their business. To listen to Jesus is not just a matter of paying attention to what he says or reading very carefully the words printed in red. To listen to him is to let his whole life speak to us down here in the foothills and plains of everyday. To listen to him is to let his whole life speak to our fragmented lives until they shine like the sun.

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[1] Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh (New York: C. S. Francis & Co, 1857)  p. 275-276

All these things

I met a woman on the internet. No, worries, I didn’t actually meet her. I don’t know who Vicki Dubinsky is, but earlier last week she left a comment on a website dedicated entirely to tv commercials.

I am 70 years old and have been watching TV since 1947. This is the BEST commercial I’ve seen in all these years. The dog’s “acting” deserves an “Oscar.” Whoever wrote this commercial, singer, song and music deserves a “Grammy Award,” and I can’t tell you how many times I have watched it. In fact, I get on my computer just to go to the site to watch it. … It is wonderful. Please, keep it on the Internet so I can keep watching it or please tell me how to get a copy of it.

I’m not nearly as excited as Vicki, but I do smile every time the little dog and its precious bone come on the screen, Ray LaMontagne singing Trouble in the background.

The dog is worried, its pretty bone is just perfect – somebody might take it. We watch the pup hide the bone in a basket of dirty laundry and behind a pillow on the couch – not safe enough. So it takes the bone outside, digs a hole in the backyard, and buries it there. The little pup’s still worried. You can see it through the window, staring at the pile of dirt in the middle of the lawn – not safe enough. Next you see the dog at a bus stop; it’s dark. Then you see it sitting on the bus, staring out the window – that bull dog on the sidewalk sure looks suspicious. The trip ends at a bank, where the bone goes into a safe deposit box behind a heavy steel door. Now the dog is back home, but there’s no peace for the little pooch. You watch it tossing and turning on its pillow, haunted by night mares – the bone’s just not safe enough.

Worries, worries, worries – the last thing you need when you’re worried is somebody telling you not to worry. And yet that’s exactly what Jesus does. He looks at his band of disciples and says, “No one can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth… Therefore, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear.”

Perhaps you think that’s easy to say for a bachelor who is hanging out with his friends on the sunny shores of Lake Galilee, while a group of wealthy women are taking care of their food and clothing (see Luke 8:1-3). But Jesus is talking to a wider audience, an audience that includes you and me; he’s talking to men and women who long to see God’s kingdom on earth; men and women who hunger and thirst for righteousness.

I wonder if he could imagine that one day there would be Weight Watchers, and that “worrying about what you will eat” would take on a whole new meaning.

I wonder if he could imagine that one day some of his disciples would live in houses with walk-in closets, and every morning, they would stand in front of racks of clothes, worrying about what to wear.

“Is not life more than food?” he asks. Yes, but life certainly is food. And water. And clothing. And housing.

And medical care.

And college savings.

And retirement plans.

And student loans. And budgets. And business regulations. And collective bargaining rights. And can somebody please stop that mad man in Libya? And what is happening in Egypt?

Oh my, you start with food and water, and before you know it, all you can do is try to stay afloat amid waves of anxiety. It doesn’t take much to slip into worry mode, does it? We know exactly how that little dog feels, only we don’t feel half as cute.

Jesus talks about birds and lilies, well-fed and beautifully clothed. He’s not trying to talk us into living like creatures of the wild, though; he is talking to women and men who hunger and thirst for righteousness, and he urges us not to confuse our priorities in times of anxiety: strive first for the kingdom of God and its righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. The trouble with worries is that they create a whirlpool that has nothing but our needs at the center. The trouble with worries is that they take over our whole being: how we perceive the world, they invade our thoughts, our actions, even our dreams.

The word translated worry in this passage from Matthew actually has a broader meaning. It does mean to be anxious; to give way to anxiety or unease; to allow one’s mind to dwell on difficulty or troubles – but it also means to care for; to be concerned about something. That other flavor comes to the fore when you shift the emphasis just a little.

First you hear, "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink." Then you shift the emphasis just a little and you hear, "Do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink." Strive first for the kingdom of God and its righteousness; let the reign of God shape your perception of the world, let it invade and shape your thoughts, your actions, even your dreams.

We hear echoes of this plea in another passage from Matthew, where the king says to those at his right hand, “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, … I was naked and you clothed me (Matthew 25:35-36).”

Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Yes it is. Life is trusting in the abundance of God’s creation and responding to the needs of those who despite that abundance go without food and water and all these things we need to thrive.

I meant to say some more about that, but I threw away the rest of my sermon notes. I threw them away because I got an email from our friend Lorraine in New Zealand. At this moment, I cannot think of anyone to better express what needs to be said than she does in this note:

Hi there from Christchurch, New Zealand!

I thought I should send out an email with a request for prayer support for our congregation following Tuesday’s devastating earthquake. We are elders and members of a wonderful part of Christ’s body which is situated in the hard-hit south-eastern suburbs, right on the fault-line which runs between the epicentre of the earthquake and the 1/3 destroyed Central Business District.

Our members and supporters take very seriously our role as ‘salt’ and ‘light’ in this community. Our witness as a serving, loving, worshipping gathering of God’s servants is well recognised in this community.

I have spent the past three full days searching by phone computer for our Linwood Avenue church members. We are very happy that all are now accounted for. Two are in Hospital but will be OK. Another is sitting with her dying husband in a relocated hospital!

50 members have had to leave the city to stay with friends and family away from Christchurch until things improve. We have had a family of 4 here this evening to shower and relax, and we have done a week’s laundry for them - 6 full loads! It was the parents’ Silver Wedding party this evening - cancelled of course, so we had a small celebration dinner for them here instead. We have a young woman from our congregation whom I mentor staying with us for the foreseeable future. Lyndsay mentors her boyfriend, who is a member of one of the search and rescue teams.

Also my twin sister and her husband (Yvonne and Ron Laing) are here from Napier (North Island, East Coast) for 4 months. When this new earthquake struck they were crossing on the Inter-island Ferry, on their way down to Christchurch for Ron to audit repairs to government housing following the September earthquakes.

Please pray for us here. Our congregation is truly a mission-minded church with a massive heart for the many poorer and needy people of the suburbs we serve. We have a wide range of ministries with children and youth, elderly and poor, and many people with special needs. So many people have found a caring and supportive Christian home within our church community. We love being elders and members of this congregation! I used to be the pastoral care minister of the congregation 20-25 years ago, However right now our minister and all our elders except Lyndsay and me and one other have had to leave Christchurch because of earthquake damage or ill-health, so I am having to step back into that role urgently, and build a new pastoral care team. More prayers needed!

Also 50% of our congregation have had to escape from Christchurch (probably for weeks and maybe many months), so those of us who remain are very much in need of prayer and practical support.

But it is also very likely that we will have many ‘refugees’ from neighbouring destroyed churches. Probably half and maybe many more of the churches throughout the city are unable to be used temporarily or permanently!

Tomorrow Lyndsay and I will lead worship outside on the grass! We are prohibited from entering churches and other public buildings until they have been fully inspected by the earthquake engineers. We are taking in our RV loaded with folding chairs because we can’t even go into the building to bring out chairs! But it’s really important to be there for all the traumatised people. (Our piano and organ, pulpit, coffee-station, and who knows what else, have all been tossed upside down! What force that earthquake had!)

I would be very glad if you shared our very real and urgent ministry needs with people in your church on Sunday. We are so far away from you physically, but spiritually we are immediate neighbours, brothers and sisters!

I need to phone our young minister now and update him on the needs of all our members!

We know God’s grace and love fills you, surrounds you and undergirds you in your own ministries, and we pray that the same grace and love will strengthen us in these very demanding and challenging days.

Your partners in sharing Christ’s love for the sake of God’s world.

Lorraine

We are anxious about many things. It is good to remember that it doesn’t have to be that way.

The common bowl

Creating a budget can be great fun. Every household knows the process of assessing needs, projecting revenues and expenses, and allocating resources accordingly. First things, of course, always come first:

• We all need food.
• We all need a roof over our head.
• We all need clothes.
• We all need medical care.
• We all need transportation to get from here to there.

Our basic needs are very similar. We make a list of all the essentials, we see what’s left for non-essentials, and we make a plan that allows us to live within our means. Living with a budget can be great fun, when you get to watch your savings grow over time, savings that will help you build a cushion for emergencies or allow you to do something special like a trip to the beach.

However, creating a budget is a painful process when your income cannot keep up with your expenses anymore. First you make adjustments: you don’t have to eat out as much; those clothes you got last year aren’t in style anymore, but they still look nice; you hope that the old heat pump will make it another year. For thousands of households in this country, though – families, businesses, and entire communities – these adjustments have become painful cuts.

There are many kids that didn’t go back to college last year or the year before because their families could no longer afford it. There are plenty of businesses that no longer offer their employees health insurance but only a small monthly benefit stipend. Cities and towns across the nation have closed libraries and even fire stations.

Last week, the President sent his budget proposal to congress. I don’t want to get into the politics of taxes and subsidies, the size of government, or the reform of Medicare and Medicaid. We all know that just about everybody agrees that we need to reduce government spending—just not the programs that bring money and jobs to our state, or that provide services we consider crucial.

I want to talk briefly about this budget proposal because my heart sank when I heard that it contains a 50% cut in the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program. This federal program assists households that pay a high portion of income on heating and cooling bills, and roughly 8.3 million people benefitted from it last year. Its target population is the elderly and the disabled. White House officials explained that the cuts aren’t real cuts because home energy prices have come down from unusually high levels over the last three years, and therefore less funding would be needed. I hope they are right.

My heart sank because our faith has taught me to pay attention to how a community, a city, a nation, treats its most vulnerable members. The law of Moses, in the passage from Leviticus read today, is beautiful in its simplicity,

You shall not reap to the very edges of the field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest. You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien. You shall not keep for yourself the wages of a laborer until morning. You shall not revile the deaf or put a stumbling block before the blind.

The disabled, the day laborer, the poor and the alien, they are the people that often are overlooked, forgotten, or ignored. They have little power, and God calls our attention to their needs and the demands of justice and mercy.

Economists are not known for being particularly imaginative; they are the people who do the numbers. But Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, may be the exception. He looked at the numbers that reflect the shrinking of the middle class in the United States and some European countries, and he came up with a striking way to picture inequality.

Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income. If your income is just about average, so is your height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of the United States is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income. One hour, the entire U. S. adult population.

The first passers-by are invisible: their heads are below ground; they are the owners of loss-making businesses. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the people walking by you are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. And then, suddenly, in the final minutes, it’s starting to look like the NBA. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall giants. And right at the end, when the 400 highest earners walk by, each is more than two miles tall.

The biggest challenge is not that there are short people and really, REALLY tall people – the challenge is that it takes so long before normal-sized people appear in the line.

What does all this have to do with the gospel? The world God envisions in creating abundance, liberating slaves, spelling out covenant commandments, calling prophets, and sending Jesus Christ is not a world where everybody has a chance to grow taller than the trees and the hills. The world God envisions is one where every human being knows life in fullness, a fullness that reflects the character of God, and not some vision of insatiable appetite and growth without limits.

When God says to Israel, “You shall be holy, for I the Lord am holy,” it is not a call to a competition where some spiritual over-achievers grow into giants whose heads touch the stars while the spiritually short stay underground. The call to holiness is a call to be the covenant community whose life together reflects the generosity and grace of God. I love how the passage from Leviticus talks about holiness in quite quotidian ways of paying attention to the poor and the disabled, not being partial in court, not defrauding others, and not telling lies. The commandments connect our everyday activities as family members and friends, as producers and consumers and citizens with the very nature and purposes of God. Daily human interaction is not left to the tricky rules of politics or the invisible hand of perfect markets or the laws of nature – daily human interaction is marked as sacred ground where God’s holiness is either honored or insulted.

I love how the many do’s and don’t’s all seem to arrive at that beautiful line at the end of the passage, a line that captures the essence of holiness like a bowl: You shall love your neighbor as yourself: I am the Lord. In that bowl we find God’s answer to questions that become particularly urgent in tough economic times:

Why should we care about other human beings? Why should we put aside the drive for self-preservation in order to act in a selfless way on behalf of another? What keeps us from perpetually elevating our own self-interest above that of others? What, if anything, draws us together and holds us together as a community? We find God’s answer in that bowl.

I imagine that several of you cringed when you heard Jesus’ words from the sermon on the mount, “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” You couldn’t help but think about your mother who always found something to criticize, no matter how hard you tried to please her. Or perhaps it was your Dad who excelled in academics as well as in sports, who built his own business and did everything right, everything – and you have spent most of your life trying to prove that you can be just like him, perfect. I have a friend who after many years of theological reflection and prayer has determined that the original sin is not pride, but the desire to be perfect. There is truth in that. Why then would Jesus say such a thing? Be perfect as God in heaven is perfect. Isn’t he commanding the impossible? Isn’t he sowing the destructive seeds of self-doubt, frustration, guilt and utter failure? You may have heard him that way, but it wasn’t Jesus you heard.

The word translated as ‘perfect’ does not mean flawless. It is a word that speaks of being complete and mature, of being at one with one’s purpose and fulfilled. Moreover, the command to be perfect is not a call to isolated, individual achievement, but again a call to life in a community that reflects the character of God. It is no coincidence that it sounds much like the ancient commandment to be holy because God is holy. Jesus picks up the bowl that holds the essence of holiness, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” and he says,

Now you may think that it is the neighbor who defines the reach of love. You may think that you can limit your love to the circle of those whom you recognize as neighbors, and hate those outside that circle. But it is the other way round: love’s reach defines who is neighbor. When you look at my life and my way of the cross, you will see love’s embrace of all, even the enemy. Heaven’s love is like the rain: it doesn’t discriminate between the righteous and the unrighteous, it showers them all.

Likewise, the life God desires for you is not determined by lines drawn between friend and foe, but by love continually crossing those lines for the sake of reconciliation and relationships restored in righteousness.

What I command you is not to let circumstances determine your actions, but to find ways for love to open and transform every circumstance. Be perfect, therefore, in God’s perfect love. Find fulfilment by living fully in God’s economy of abundance and enough for all. Be at one with who you are meant to be by letting God’s love bear you like a river that flows to the kingdom.

I thirst for words like that in times of tight budgets. Thank you Jesus.

Salt of the earth

Salt has been in the news a lot recently. The Department of Agriculture is changing its nutritional recommendations and considering switching from a food pyramide to a pie chart that looks like your dinner plate. Pie chart sounds a lot tastier than food pyramid, doesn’t it? What didn’t change was the recommendation that individuals limit their salt intake to 1500-2300mg a day, that’s about half a teaspoon to a teaspoon.

We love the taste of salt, and we love it for a reason; our bodies need it to function well. In addition to helping maintain the right balance of fluids, salt helps transmit nerve impulses, and it plays a significant role in the contraction and relaxation of muscles. For those of you who are into chemistry or physiology, unrefined salt contains all four cationic electrolytes, i.e. sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, as well as other vital minerals. Unrefined salt is a convenient package; it’s like we are meant to have a little bit of ocean within us. I love that we need a spoonful of ocean in our bodies to be well.

The big salt story on the news, of course, is not about milligrams but thousands of tons of salt. These are some quotes from the last couple of weeks from Nashville news outlets:

Road salt has become a hot commodity in Middle Tennessee after the biggest snowfall since 2003.

Almost no one has it, and everyone needs it.

Even TDOT, the best salt customer in the state, can’t get salt delivered.

There are places, such as Hickman County, that don’t have salt and don’t have money for any more; they’re done.

And my favorite,

Salt is a savior on Middle Tennessee roads.

Nobody ever writes about pepper like that.

Before people started using canning or artificial refrigeration to preserve food, salt had already been the best-known food preservative, especially for meat, for thousands of years. One of the oldest verifiable saltworks on earth dates back to at least 6000 BC. During the third millennium BC, Egyptians and Phoenicians traded salt fish and salt from North Africa throughout the Mediterranean. During the first millennium BC, Celtic communities bought wine from Greece and Rome, and they paid for it with salt and salted meat.

Salt has been a crucial ingredient in just about any known human culture, and it is no surprise that it gave rise to a variety of symbolic uses. Because it is such a powerful food preservative, salt came to represent permanence and protection.

In ancient Near Eastern cultures, including Israel, salt was eaten by the parties to agreements and treaties. Sharing salt expressed a binding relationship. In the Bible, the expression “covenant of salt” (See, e.g. Numbers 18:19 and 2 Chronicles 13:5) illustrates the permanent nature of God’s covenant with God’s people. We like to talk about “rules written in stone” or “iron laws,” but God’s covenants are “covenants of salt,” forever based in a living relationship of partners who have bound themselves to each other. “You shall not omit from your grain offering the salt of the covenant with your God,” we read in Leviticus, “with all your offerings you shall offer salt (Leviticus 2:13).” There certainly was the notion that salt would purify the offering to make it acceptable as a sacred gift, but the pinch of salt also served as a reminder that covenant fidelity went beyond bringing gifts to the temple and included daily life in the community.

In the ancient Near East, and just about anywhere else in the world at different times, any kind of contamination and spoilage were attributed to the machinations of demons. People knew the preservative power of salt, and scholars suspect that it was for that reason that salt became the substance of choice to ward off evil forces. Cultural anthropologists are quite confident that Jewish mothers began rubbing their newborn babies with salt to protect them against evil spirits, as mothers and midwives continue to do to this day in many parts of the world. But I can’t help but wonder – when a mother in Israel rubbed her infant with salt, didn’t she also rub that little one, head to toe, with the covenant promises of God? Didn’t she put a grain of salt on her child’s lips to give him or her a taste of God’s faithfulness? The truth is, we don’t know what thoughts went through her mind as she did what her mother and grandmother, and their mothers before them, generation to generation, had done. Salt didn’t have just one symbolic meaning; it was a substance that offered itself as a vessel that could contain a wealth of meaning.

When Jesus says to us, “You are the salt of the earth,” what does it mean? He says it right after he spoke a blessing on those who suffer for his sake, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Faithfulness to the way of Jesus will evoke reproach, resistance, and rejection – and he tells us to rejoice, because we are in the company of God’s prophets. We may feel like avoiding the confrontations that come with living as followers of Jesus; we may feel like withdrawing into a smaller, safer world of privatized religion; we may feel that adding a little religious icing to a thoroughly worldly cake is just fine. And so he reminds us who we are:

You are the salt of the earth. You are crucial to the world’s wellbeing. You add a particular flavor. Your presence in the world preserves what is good and heals what is out of balance.

I may be taking this a bit far here, but perhaps I am not: You are the salt of the earth. You are the de-frosting agent that helps thaw the frozen relationships of cold warriors and the slick paths of ice-cold corporate interests.

You are the salt of the earth. You are the living reminder of God’s faithfulness in the world, and the world cannot be without you.

Our bodies need a little bit of ocean in them to flourish. The world needs disciples of Jesus to be reminded of the covenant that binds us to God and to one another like an ocean of grace. What might that look like in your daily life?

There are plenty of bullies in our communities, not just in our schools, and you know that you need to do what you can to stop them, and you know that you may get a bloody nose, but you do it anyway. Salt of the earth.

Everybody at work, it seems, thinks jokes about lesbians are hilarious, and you know that this isn’t just a matter of your company’s non-discrimination policy, and you know, if you stand up and say, “Stop it, this is not funny,” that they will call you names behind your back or in your face, but you do it anyway. Salt of the earth.

Our entire culture seems to revolve around consumption and entertainment, and the forces of privatization and isolation seem to get stronger and stronger, and there are days when you question your Christian commitments to community and solidarity and the messiness of church life, but you stick with it. Salt of the earth.

The world needs disciples of Jesus to be reminded of the covenant that binds us to God and to one another like an ocean of grace.

Yes, there is plenty of hostility toward the gospel, and in our context, little of it comes in the form of outright persecution. It’s more like an endless commercial: friendly faces, great music, and clever lines inviting us 24/7 to turn our self-absorption and self-interest into a lifestyle. There are powerful alternatives to covenant living; there are powerful alternatives to understanding our lives as part of Christ’s mission. And that’s why Jesus’ words of affirmation are followed by words of warning. You are the salt of the earth – but salt can lose its integrity. And once salt has lost its integrity, once salt has lost its covenant character, “it is no longer good for anything.” The world needs salt, not just a little religious icing. The world needs a people who share their bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into the house and clothe the naked, instead of worrying about what they will eat or drink or wear. The world needs a people who practice righteousness together rather than serving their own interest.

When Jesus calls us the salt of the earth, we know one thing for sure: we are good for something, we are meant to add something. We have been called to a mighty purpose. The way of Jesus Christ reveals to us the depth of God’s grace, and our life together gives the world a taste and a glimpse of that depth. That’s why we sprinkle a little salt on Super Bowl Sunday and practice sharing our bread through Second Harvest and bringing the homeless poor into our house through Room in the Inn. We do this because we live for a world where that way of sharing life is as common and pervasive as salt is in the ocean.

I want to close with a quote, commonly attributed to George Bernard Shaw; there are different versions floating around, probably because people have made the words their own by adding a little here, and clipping a little there. I hear in these words echoes of Jesus’ words to us, declaring us to be salt and light of the world.

This is the true joy of life, the being used up for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; being a force of nature instead of a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances, complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. I am of the opinion that my life belongs to the community and as long as I live, it is my privilege to do for it whatever I can. I want to be thoroughly used up when I die ... Life is no ‘brief candle’ to me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for a moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.

Fishing for people

“Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” Jesus sounds a lot like John, the man who baptized him (see Matthew 3:2, 17). The reign of God has come near, and we must understand that its closeness and its presence among us demands a complete reorientation of our lives: Repent. Turn around. Change course. Get out of the hamster wheel and onto a better path. Repent.

John the wilderness prophet has been arrested, but Herod cannot silence the proclamation of God’s reign, much less stop its invasion of the world. In Pasolini’s film version of The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Jesus is walking at a brisk pace down a country road. A group of farmers traveling the opposite direction stop to look, perhaps to exchange a greeting, and, as he passes them, almost over his shoulder, he says, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near,” and just keeps moving. Where is he going?

Now he is at the lake, sees two brothers at work, says to them, “Follow me, I will make you fish for people,” and just keeps moving. The two hurry but they can barely keep up. Now he sees another pair of brothers, at work in the boat with their father, and he calls them, and immediately they leave the boat and the old man and follow him. The four hurry but they can barely keep up with him. What’s the rush? Where is he going? What about Zebedee, the old man? Is he too slow for the pace at which God’s reign is invading the towns of Galilee?

What a scene: Jesus and thefour men rushing away from the shore, and the old man alone in the boat, a net in his lap and a puzzled look on his face. “James, son, what do you want me to tell your mother?”

Matthew has no interest in Zebedee’s feelings, or anyone else’s, for that matter. This is no script for a television mini-series or a touching documentary. Peter’s wife, Andrew’s children, or Zebedee’s thoughts are completely irrelevant for the story Matthew is telling. In Matthew’s story, there’s only the urgency of Jesus’ call and the immediacy of these men’s response. There’s neither ‘hello’ nor ‘good-bye.’ There’s no quick discussion of what to do with dad nor a careful weighing of options between brothers. There’s only “the strange power of this Jesus, who declares and compels rather than explaining and persuading (Placher, Mark, p. 31).”

Matthew makes sure you and I understand that Jesus’ call is not some kind of church commercial inviting us to consider membership in an institution that will fulfill our spiritual needs and help us raise well-rounded children. This call is unlike any other; it grabs your soul like a voice from heaven, and when you hear it, there are only two options: you either follow its demand or you pretend there is no call, no divine claim on your life.

This call is intrusive and disruptive, and the chances that it will rearrange your relationships and your goals in life are 100%. In Jesus, the reign of God is invading the world, and this call pulls us out of our routines and makes us part of God’s mission. This doesn’t mean that we all quit our jobs and hit the road with Jesus or that we cease being the children of our parents, the brothers and sisters of our siblings, or the parents of our children. But this call to discipleship does make our lives part of God’s healing and liberating work and it redefines the meaning of words like brother and sister and neighbor and righteousness. This call grabs you not just for the sake of your soul, but for the sake of God’s reign in the world.

So the fishermen leave their nets and their boat, but they do not stop fishing. Who they were and what they did has been claimed and rearranged by Christ. “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.”

I have heard and read that story countless times, and for years, fishing for people sounded just fine to me. I thought of Peter and Andrew as fishermen turned mission workers: instead of catching fish, they brought people to Jesus, or something like that. Fishing for people sounded fine until I thought some more about the details: fish get caught in a net, they are pulled out of the water, then there’s a lot of wild wiggling and tossing, but eventually they all end up – fried, baked, or poached – on somebody’s dinner table.

Fishing for people – the phrase suddenly lost its missionary innocence, and I thought about the many ways in which fish are tricked with bait and fooled with lure only to get hooked and reeled in. Fishing for people cannot be about tricking or fooling people, though, if it is to have anything to do with the mission of Jesus.

I wondered what Matthew’s first readers might have thought when they heard this phrase, “I will make you fish for people,” and what kind of associations it triggered in their minds. A commentary directed my attention to a passage from the the book of Jeremiah, one of the great prophets in Israel, a passage many of Matthew’s first readers would have been familiar with. In chapter 16, the prophet declares,

I am now sending for many fishermen, says the Lord, and they shall catch them; and afterwards I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every mountain and every hill, and out of the clefts of the rocks. For my eyes are on all their ways; they are not hidden from my presence, nor is their iniquity concealed from my sight. _{Jeremiah 16:16-17}

The Lord announces a day of judgment, and people will be caught like fish and hunted like animals hiding in the clefts of the rocks. Fishermen and hunters are instruments of God’s judgment, and read next to this passage, fishing for people sounds frightening. Have Peter and Andrew, James and John been called to round up people for God’s imminent judgment as the kingdom of heaven is drawing near? Does this explain the urgency and speed with which Jesus is moving from scene to scene? Was Herod’s iniquity in putting John in prison the final straw?

The disciples followed Jesus as he went throughout Galilee, teaching in synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. They watched and learned. Great crowds gathered, people came from all over Galilee, even from Jerusalem and from beyond the Jordan (see Matthew 4:23, 25). But this was no roundup operation. People followed Jesus and they witnessed the power of God making things right among them.

The disciples followed Jesus and they participated in his ministry of teaching and healing and restoring life. How did they participate? Mending nets used to be part of their daily work: after the catch was brought in and taken to market, they would sit on the beach or in the boat, checking the nets for rips and holes, and repairing them. They used to do this until the day when this irresistible voice disrupted their daily routine, commanding, “Follow me.” As fishermen they had many skills: they knew how to be patient, they had developed endurance, they worked well with others, and they had learned to cope with failure as well as success. But perhaps the best gift they brought to the mission of Jesus was their ability to notice even the smallest tear in a net, and their skill and care in mending it.

The purpose of God’s judgment is to make things right in the world. God doesn’t judge to condemn, but to restore and make whole; God judges in order to mend what is torn and broken.

In the advance of God’s reign in the world, the only fishing that is going on is done by God in the work of Jesus. The net has been cast wide, and God is letting it sink to the deepest depth, deeper than our best hopes can reach, down even to those who sit in great darkness and in the shadow of death, and God is pulling the net in, ever so slowly and carefully so as not to lose a single one.

The net, of course, is Christ and all who belong to him, all of his brothers and sisters, young ones and old ones, the whole family of God, fishing for people. We are the net, woven into a web of new relationships and mended by the grace of God, and we are the catch.

The people who sat in great darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the shadow of death light has dawned. _{Isaiah 9:2/Matthew 4:16}

We are the net and we are the catch, and we are being pulled up from the dark depth not to be left lifeless on the beach, but to live together in the light of God’s glory. This fishing expedition is a rescue operation, and Jesus calls us to it for the sake of our souls as well as for the sake of the reign of God in the world. More than anything, he calls us together into a social network of grace, stretching across time and space, so as not to lose a single one. This call is intrusive and disruptive, but it also draws us – all that we are and all that we do – into wholeness. Thanks be to God.