Temple builders

Imagine you were given the opportunity to build a church. No need to worry about land to build on or the building budget; that’s all taken care of. Your job is to come up with the basic idea for the whole structure. Where would you start?

Perhaps you would begin on the inside, with a table placed prominently at the center for God’s people to gather, and the entire building would take its shape from there. Perhaps you would want it to be round, with doors opening in every direction, to allow God’s people to gather from the ends of the earth to worship God and be sent again to the ends of the earth to serve God. Or perhaps you would begin on the outside with a tall set of doors, and right in the entrance, you would build a pool with a fountain; it would remind all who enter that the community that gathers here finds its life in its immersion into the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Or perhaps you would want the entire structure to be made of glass doors and windows to suggest that the church is very much in the world, though not of the world. Or perhaps you envision a building that is a sanctuary for the weary, where the hungry are fed, refugees are sheltered, and homeless veterans no longer have to face their demons by themselves. And on Sunday morning God’s people gather in the large dining room for worship around the big prep table that’s been brought in from the kitchen. Or perhaps you would want to design a church that looks like a ship – not a cruise ship that always returns people where they started, but an ark making its way through the waves of chaos of our days to the land of God’s promise. Or perhaps you would think about the proposal for a few seconds and say, “Thank you for the offer; I think I’ll pass. There are plenty of church buildings already, more than plenty. I’d rather be part of building the church.”

“You are God’s building,” Paul wrote the church in Corinth. There were divisions in the church, different groups aligning themselves with various leaders, and Paul wrote to remind them that there was only one church; they all belonged to it, but they were behaving like it belonged to them. He had already compared the church to God’s field where all the various leaders are field hands, working together in God’s service, doing their work as each had been assigned by God. Now he introduced another image. You are God’s building, and like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation. Others are building on that foundation, and each builder must choose carefully how to build on it. But the foundation has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ. If you make your own wisdom the foundation, or the eloquence of your leaders and their success in drawing the rich and powerful into your assemblies, if you do that, you might erect one impressive edifice after the other in the city, but it won’t be God’s church. The foundation has been laid, and that foundation is Jesus Christ. Some of you may think that the skills needed to continue the work of building the church are the possession of a few – that’s how it is in the world, isn’t it? The real estate developers, the bankers, the successful merchants, the folks with the degrees, the folks with the connections in high places, the folks with the money, they are the few who determine what gets built and where, while the many hope to get a job here and there. But the church isn’t that kind of project. You are God’s building, and in God’s project the skills needed to continue the work have been given to all, for the good of all. The foundation has been laid, and that foundation is Jesus Christ, and on that foundation, we are all building: men and women, young and old, no matter where our people came from or what we do for a living. We all work on that magnificent building, and while some of you may think what others are adding to the structure is pure gold, while your own contributions look more like bricks and buckets of sand, the truth is that all of us give ourselves to the building. What we bring or think we bring is as nothing compared to the reality that we each bring ourselves to the work to which God has called us. Christ is the foundation, and Christ is the pattern for the whole structure: his obedience shaping ours, his compassion stirring ours, his forgiving embrace holding us all. So let no one boast about human leaders. Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.

And now Paul moves on to yet another image. It’s already quite clear that the community of believers whom God has called together and sent is not just any building. Do you not know that all of you together are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? Do you not know that your divisions can only be compared to the destruction of God’s temple? Do you not know that such loveless actions will not pass God’s judgment? For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.

Some of Paul’s initial readers had been to Jerusalem and had seen the temple from afar, glistening in the sunlight like it was made entirely of gold and precious stones; they were Jews who had entered the breathtaking building with awe in their hearts and psalms on their lips, they had stood among the crowds in the court yard, their gaze resting on God’s hidden dwelling place among mortals, the true center of creation. All of Paul’s Corinthian readers, Jews and Gentiles, had seen the many temples erected to the glory of other gods in their city – there was one on every corner, it seemed – spectacular feats of architecture and devotion. I imagine them sitting in one of the houses where they gathered on the Lord’s Day for prayers and teaching and to share the Lord’s supper, and several of them looked up at that point and said to the one reading Paul’s letter, “Wait, would you repeat that last line?”

“God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple.”

They had heard it right the first time. Paul told them that they together were the temple of the living God, the same people he had called just a few lines before, people of the flesh and infants in Christ; now he told them that they together were God’s dwelling place on earth. It wasn’t because of anything they had done; it was because Christ had made them his own, and because Christ was the foundation, and because Christ’s holiness was theirs. “The temple of God is the holy people in Jesus Christ,” wrote Dietrich Bonhoeffer. “The Body of Christ is the living temple of God and of the new humanity.”[1] The question Paul is holding up to us, all of us, the saints in Corinth and in Nashville and anywhere on God’s earth where the gospel is lived and proclaimed, the question Paul is holding up to us is, how will you continue to build? There’s a million things to do, but there isn’t a list of them anywhere. The living temple of God and of the new humanity, wrote Bonhoeffer, “is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate. The more clearly we learn to recognize that the ground and strength and promise of all our fellowship is in Jesus Christ alone, the more serenely shall we think of our fellowship and pray and hope for it,”[2] and, I would add, continue to build it.

There’s a wonderful scene in Exodus 35 where Moses talks to the people and calls on all who are wise in heart among them to come and make all that was needed to build the Lord’s tabernacle.

And they came, everyone whose heart was stirred, and everyone whose spirit was willing, and brought the Lord’s offering to be used for the tent of meeting, and for all its service, and for the sacred vestments. So they came, both men and women; all who were of a willing heart brought brooches and earrings and … rings and pendants, all sorts of gold objects, … And everyone who possessed blue or purple or crimson yarn or fine linen or goats’ hair or tanned rams’ skins or fine leather, brought them. Everyone who could make an offering of silver or bronze brought it as the Lord’s offering; and everyone who possessed acacia wood of any use in the work, brought it. … All the Israelite men and women whose hearts made them willing to bring anything for the work that the Lord had commanded by Moses to be done, brought it as a freewill offering to the Lord.[3]

It’s a beautiful scene, isn’t it, this procession of temple builders – men and women, young and old; the woman cradling her earrings in the palm of her hand, the old man carrying a piece of acacia wood on his shoulder, the little girl with a skein of blue yarn, and the boy with a rolled up goat skin. As always, some of them thought that what others were contributing to the sacred project was so much more than what they themselves could give, but I hope it didn’t diminish their joy. The important thing was not the tent, the real project was and has always been the building of a community attentive to God’s word and ways. What we bring or think we bring is as nothing compared to the reality that we each bring ourselves to the work which God is doing. We’re not just given the opportunity to build a church. We are being built into the living temple of God and of the new humanity, and we have the privilege to participate in that work with our prayers, with words of encouragement, and with acts of kindness and defiance. Even the smallest gesture stirred by the Spirit of Christ will build the living temple.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 247.

[2] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 30.

[3] Exodus 35:21-29

Field trip

At the beginning of the Bible, on page 2 in most editions, the story of creation is told as a story of a garden God planted. And God took the human being, whom God had formed from the dust of the ground, and put him in the garden to till it and keep it. That is the first thing to know about what it means to be human, according to the Scriptures: we are creatures whom God has formed, and our God-given purpose is to work the garden and take care of it. The verbs used to describe the role of humankind in the garden of creation contain overtones of serving, guarding, and protecting, suggesting that we are here to look after all things that grow, tending to their flourishing.

Wendell Berry wasn’t the first to note that “there is an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth.”[1] In chapter 1 of Genesis, just a few verses before the garden story, God addresses humanity, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.” There’s a tension between our call to till and keep and our call to subdue and rule—and it’s a tension largely because we don’t grasp the dominion of God in whose image we have been made. God’s rule is sovereign, but never self-serving; God’s dominion serves the flourishing of life, and humanity is called to participate in God’s dominion, not to establish our own by subduing the earth and one another to our own will. There is indeed an uncanny resemblance between our behavior toward each other and our behavior toward the earth.

The prophet Isaiah used the image of the vineyard, a staple in love poetry of his day, to sing about God and God’s people Israel.

My loved one had a vineyard on a fertile hillside. He dug it, cleared away its stones, planted it with excellent vines, built a tower inside it, and dug out a wine vat in it. He expected it to grow good grapes—but it grew rotten grapes.

Rotten grapes, that’s no way to end a love song. Sweet wine and the joy of sharing it was what the audience expected; they were baffled. Now the prophet stepped into the role of the disappointed owner who had made such an effort digging, clearing, planting, and caring for the vineyard.

You who live in Jerusalem, you people of Judah, judge between me and my vineyard: What more was there to do for my vineyard that I haven’t done for it? When I expected it to grow good grapes, why did it grow rotten grapes?

They couldn’t tell him, couldn’t name a single reason why the song ended with rotten grapes rather than sweet wine. The man had certainly done everything that could be expected. Now the prophet continued to sing in the role of the disappointed lover, but it wasn’t really a song anymore; it was the violent undoing of what was meant to be a happy-ever-after love song:

Now let me tell you what I’m doing to my vineyard. I’m removing its hedge, so it will be destroyed. I’m breaking down its walls, so it will be trampled. I’ll turn it into a ruin; it won’t be pruned or hoed, and thorns and thistles will grow up. I will command the clouds not to rain on it.

They had known for a while this was no ordinary love song, but with that last line even the most metaphorically challenged in the audience realized that they were listening to the poetry of divine promise and judgment. Isaiah had made his point, now he just underlined it:

The vineyard of the Lord is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are the plantings in which God delighted. God expected justice, but there was bloodshed; righteousness, but there was a cry of distress![2]

God plants the garden of life and we are called to till it and keep it. God plants a vineyard and God’s people are expected to bear the sweet fruit of justice and righteousness.

The Apostle Paul continues in that tradition of reflection on what it means to be human in God’s creation with images drawn from the garden, the vineyard, and the field. In today’s passage from First Corinthians, he doesn’t go to the field right away, though, he begins in the house, in the nursery. Remember, he is challenging individual believers who think of themselves as spiritually advanced, way ahead of the less mature believers, the less sophisticated sisters and less eloquent brothers. Paul has reminded them that the center of their life together is occupied, not by ladders of advancement defined by worldly standards of upward mobility, but by Christ crucified. Worldly standards of power and success, wisdom and knowledge have been turned upside down in the revelation of God on the cross.

The spirit-enthusiasts who pride themselves in their maturity and their ability to discern which leaders offer the best in eloquence and wisdom are in truth babies in the life of Christ. The life of faith is a life of growth and maturing, but what they like to think of as their advanced status is in truth the large part of their life and identity that hasn’t been transformed by their baptism, that hasn’t been converted. They still behave and think as those whose lives have not been claimed by the Spirit of Christ, but by the lesser spirits of human inclination that make their presence known through jealousy, quarreling, and division. When one says, “I belong to Paul,” and another, “I belong to Apollos,” they only replicate in the church the world’s standards of boasting and belonging. Old habits die hard, and it’s not enough to dress up the old attitudes of elitism and superiority with pious talk and a cross necklace.

What then is Apollos in this new reality where Christ crucified occupies the center? What is Paul? Servants, the Apostle answers; co-workers in God’s service who simply do what has been assigned to them. “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” The life of faith is a life of growth and maturing, individually and in the church as a whole, but our allegiance is not to Paul or Apollos, Luther or Calvin, Wesley, Campbell or Francis, but to God who gives the growth. The one who plants and the one who waters are as one in their service, and the field, the garden, the vineyard, the earth is God’s. You are God’s field, writes Paul, and the emphasis is on God to counteract our very human tendency to parcel up the garden into smaller and smaller tracts claimed by one or another of God’s field hands. You are God’s field, Paul writes, and I believe he would agree that this “you” is really a “we,” because in Christ all of us are both field hands and field, workers in the vineyard and branches on the vine, sowers and the soil that receives the seed.

We began our journey in the garden, we looked at Isaiah’s vineyard and Paul’s field, and along the way other images emerged that help us reflect on what it means to be human in God’s creation. For the final leg of this field trip I invite you to a brief walk in the woods. Henry David Thoreau wrote,

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen. As if a town had no interest in its forests but to cut them down![3]

Thoreau takes us again to the ancient tension, old as humanity, between our call to till and keep and our call to subdue and rule, but I want to consider the trees themselves for a moment, mindful of the prophet who announced that God’s people would be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, to display his glory.[4]

“No tree is an island,” I read recently, “and no place is this truer than the forest. Hidden beneath the soil of the forest understory is a labyrinth of fungal connections between tree roots that scientists call the mycorrhizal network. Others have called it the wood-wide web.” The wood-wide web, that’s cute, maybe a little corny, but it’s really quite astonishing.

[The fungi] partner with plant roots because each gets something out of it. The fungus infiltrates the plants’ roots. But it does not attack — far from it. The plant makes and delivers food to the fungus; the fungus, in turn, dramatically increases the plant’s [capacity to absorb water and minerals] via its vast network of filaments. They provide far more surface area for absorption than the meager supply of short root hairs the tree could grow alone. What has not been appreciated until relatively recently is both how complex [these] fungal networks can be and that they can also act as conduits between trees. … [Researchers in Canada] found that Douglas-fir seedling and paper birch shuttle carbon back and forth to one another seasonally via their [fungal connections]. Paper birch send carbon to Douglas-fir seedlings, especially when they were shaded in summer, probably enhancing their survival. In spring and fall, the Douglas-fir return the favor when the birch have no leaves.[5]

Trees sharing nutrients via fungal networks, and not just between generations of the same species, where older trees give the little ones an occasional boost, but even across species. When we look at trees only above ground, we may see only competition for precious sunlight; but below ground, the forest is shaped by astonishing mutuality. I believe Paul would have loved the image of the church as God’s forest, where we flourish and grow to maturity, planting, watering, shuttling resources back and forth, all of us serving together for the good of all, to the glory of God.

[1] The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry. Ed. by Norman Wirzba (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2002) 118.

[2] Isaiah 5:1-7 CEB

[3] Henry David Thoreau, Life Without Principle (1863)

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper2/thoreau/life.html

[4] Isaiah 61:3

[5] http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/the-secrets-of-the-wood-wide-web; see also https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/artful-amoeba/dying-trees-can-send-food-to-neighbors-of-different-species/

Mother of kindness

Some members of the church in Corinth thought of themselves as especially inspired, Spirit-filled, spiritual persons. They got all puffed up about how wise they were and mature, especially compared to those in the church who sat on the lower rungs of the ladder, whom they considered mere spiritual babies. The “spiritually advanced” saints in Corinth didn’t just have an air of superiority about them, they breathed the stuff, convinced it was the very Spirit of God. The opening chapters of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians are designed to deflate those boast bags— and I should be very careful what names I choose for them, because the longer I point the finger at them, the closer I am to joining their exclusive club. Paul wrote,

When I came to you, brothers and sisters, I did not come proclaiming the mystery of God to you in lofty words or wisdom. For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.

The center of the scene, says Paul, is not occupied by a ladder, where we rank ourselves and each other according to ethnic and cultural backgrounds, gender, educational achievements, income levels, or any other indicators— the center is occupied by Jesus Christ crucified. We all gather under the cross and around the cross, but our attention is so readily caught by our differences rather than by the new reality that brings and holds us together in its power: the love of God revealed in Christ. Elsewhere Paul wrote,

…make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind. Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves. Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others. Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus.[1]

The center is occupied, not by our dreams of greatness and the ladders by which we seek to achieve them, but by Jesus Christ crucified. Paul’s insistence gives his words a graphic quality; he paints a new picture of the world, a world no longer under the power of sin, but flourishing in freedom and in love. And at the center is the cross as the revelation of God, imperceptible to human criteria and concepts of greatness, power and glory. What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him—these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit, the Apostle writes. The knowledge of God is not the mind’s intellectual ascent to the heights of all that is true, good, and beautiful. The knowledge of God is letting ourselves be fully known in the embrace of Christ. The knowledge of God is love responding to love. And the primary movement of that response is not upward, but across the many lines that separate us from each other.

I want to share with you three vignettes; one is a letter, one a prophetic word, and the third a word of encouragement. They each address the challenges of living with the cross of Christ at the center of our world as well as the promise of that new life.

I. A Letter

We have C. S. Lewis to thank for a series of letters from a senior Demon by the name of Screwtape to his nephew Wormwood, a Junior Tempter. The uncle’s mentorship pertains to the nephew’s responsibility in securing the damnation of a man referred to only as “the patient”. In one of his letters Screwtape imagines the patient going to church:

My dear Wormwood,

I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. … [However,] there is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy’s camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favour.

One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. … All your patient sees is the half-finished, sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has hitherto avoided. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like “the body of Christ” and the actual faces in the next pew.

It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains. … Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. …

He has not been anything like long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet. What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy’s ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these … commonplace neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.

Your affectionate uncle,

Screwtape.[2]

II. A Prophetic Word of Judgment

This is not a letter, although we can hear it as such; it is a stark warning from a prophet of the 19th century for the church in the 21st century not to lose sight of the cross at the center of our life together. “I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ,” wrote Frederick Douglass in an appendix to the narrative of his life.

I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels. … We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members. The man who wields the blood-clotted cowskin during the week fills the pulpit on Sunday, and claims to be a minister of the meek and lowly Jesus. ... The slave auctioneer’s bell and the church-going bell chime in with each other, and the bitter cries of the heart-broken slave are drowned in the religious shouts of his pious master. Revivals of religion and revivals in the slave-trade go hand in hand together. The slave prison and the church stand near each other. The clanking of fetters and the rattling of chains in the prison, and the pious psalm and solemn prayer in the church, may be heard at the same time. The dealers in the bodies and souls of men erect their stand in the presence of the pulpit, and they mutually help each other. The dealer gives his blood-stained gold to support the pulpit, and the pulpit, in return, covers his infernal business with the garb of Christianity.[3]

III. A Word of Encouragement

“All of Portland seemed to be in a bad mood that Sunday afternoon not too long ago. The sky was spitting rain in intermittent bursts, frustrating both the people who had gone through the trouble to bring an umbrella and the ones who hadn’t.” Journalist Egan Millard was feeling adrift. He had only recently moved across the continent and, as much as he was loving Portland, hadn’t had time to adjust or relax. “My life was changing rapidly, and it seemed like the world was too. When I feel ungrounded, I gravitate to the firmest ground I know, which is the church.”

As it turned out, he was the only congregant to show up for the evening service that Sunday.

I took a seat and looked up into the chapel’s spire. Every once in a while, some muffled fragment of a sound would surface briefly – a faint siren, rain on the roof – before dissolving. Candlelight brought a warm glow to the chapel’s wood-paneled walls, which fold into a partial dome over the altar. … Imagine being cradled in a conch shell under a dark sea. In those minutes, my understanding of the word ‘sanctuary’ deepened.

The priest went ahead with the liturgy; she asked Millard if he would read the scripture passages appointed for the day, and when it was time for the homily, she came and sat by him in the pew and asked about his life.

As we talked, I thought about the timeliness of this little scene. In an age when many Americans have abandoned the institutions they once turned to for solace and truth, there we were, a priest and a journalist huddled together in an empty church. With the light fading and our voices low, it felt almost subversive, as if even kindness were a political act.[4]

The Apostle Paul has painted a picture of the world with Jesus Christ crucified at the center. He reminds us just how subversive love, the mother of kindness, is.

[1] Philippians 2:1ff.

[2] C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (Harper Collins, 1996) 5-8.

[3] Frederick Douglass, Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass (Kindle Locations 1716-1735).

[4] http://www.pressherald.com/2017/01/01/what-happens-when-youre-the-only-one-who-shows-up-to-church/

Exceptional?

Every year, around the beginning of Lent, we bring a wooden cross into the sanctuary. There’s already a brass cross on the table and a subtle cross shape in the window, but for Lent, we hang a rough wooden cross above the baptistery; it helps us focus our attention on the suffering and death of Jesus; it helps us reflect on who we are as a community baptized in his name, as those who are called to love and serve in his name. Every year, we attach a couple of thin ropes to the back of that wooden cross and we pull it up, and every year, one or two of us find ourselves obsessing over whether it’s hanging straight and level and centered, and every year, we stop to remind each other that there’s something wrong, profoundly wrong, with wanting to make the cross look pretty. There’s nothing pretty about the cross. The beauty of the cross is not easily seen.

The disciples, according to the Gospels, had learned to live with the many surprises that being in the company of Jesus presented – his compassion for all people, his openness to children, his healing presence, his teachings about righteousness. But nothing could prepare them for his shameful, violent death. We read in Luke,

While everyone was amazed at all that Jesus was doing, he said to his disciples, “Let these words sink into your ears: The Son of Man is going to be betrayed into human hands.” But they did not understand this saying; its meaning was concealed from them, so that they could not perceive it. And they were afraid to ask him about this saying.[1]

They struggled, as all of us do, with holding together Jesus’ exalted status as God’s anointed with his shameful suffering. They struggled, as all of us do, with fully embracing the new view of the world that was at the core of Jesus’ proclamation: the new world of God’s reign in which conventional perspectives on honor and shame, power and privilege, and the meaning of suffering in relation to God’s redemptive purpose are turned on their head.

Crucifixion was a horrible form of public torture and execution, reserved by the Romans for those who resisted the authority of Roman occupation, and designed to demonstrate that nothing but complete surrender to the power of Rome would be accepted. The crucified person was often denied burial, with the corpse left on the tree to rot or as food for scavenging wildlife. The message was brutally clear: Challenge Rome’s authority and this is what you will face.

Crucifixion was an obscenity not to be discussed in polite company. In a speech defending a Roman senator against a murder charge for which the prosecutor was seeking the death penalty and was apparently suggesting crucifixion, Cicero sought to sway the jury, declaring, “The very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes, his ears.”[2]

That very word ‘cross’ is what Paul holds up for all in Corinth to see. Paul’s gospel is an insult to the sensibilities of educated men and women, an ugly interruption of any polite conversation about politics, the law, or religion. Paul proclaims Jesus, God’s crucified Messiah. To Jews, his proclamation borders on blasphemy; to non-Jews, it’s just nonsense. The word of the cross disrupts whatever we think we can know and say about God, or about justice, or power, or love.

Jews demand signs, Paul writes.We too want God to do big and spectacular things, something like a Wimbledon final where Jesus is on the court against all the forces that oppose God’s will and purpose, and he dominates the game, and the whole world is cheering; instead we must look at him on the cross, beaten and forsaken by all.

Greeks desire wisdom, Paul writes. We too want the gospel to be philosophically elegant and aesthetically pleasing; we want the TED talk that blows us away, instead we must listen for the word of God from the cross.

Where we look for power, weakness is given. Where we expect wisdom, foolishness is given. But in the community God gathers around the cross, in the community shaped by the love and obedience of Christ, deep compassion, the courage of vulnerability, and humble service are not seen as contradictions to the power of God, but as its fullest expressions. The word of the cross shatters our systems of knowledge and self-assertive power. On the cross, God is completely hidden and fully revealed. Nonsense, we say, until we see that what is so clearly the world’s judgment of Jesus, is in truth God’s judgment of the world. The cross is God’s judgment of our politics, our justice, and our religion, and it is the vindication of Jesus and the world he announced. God raised Jesus from the dead, inaugurating a world no longer under the power of sin, but finally free to flourish in love.

“Be careful of the way you live,” said Dom Helder Camara, “it is the only gospel most people will ever read.” Our life together is the proclamation of the gospel of the cross, and perhaps we must learn to walk before we talk. What might that look like? Throughout 1 Corinthians, Paul is confronting various forms of social, theological, spiritual, and moral elitism which have fractured God’s church in Corinth. One of the issues the first believers had to face was dietary. Should they eat food that had been presented as an offering in a pagan temple? Serving that kind of food was common practice at dinner parties, especially when meat was part of the menu. Some believers said, “No big deal; there’s only one true God, and those idols are no competition. We can eat anything we please, for Christ has set us free.” But there were also those who worried they might fall back into pagan ways if they didn’t stay clear of pagan practices; they stopped eating meat altogether, just to be safe.

Given Paul’s own faith and robust theology, you’d expect him to side with those who act boldly in Christ-given freedom. But he doesn’t. “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up,” he says.[3] In the community that proclaims the power of the cross, building up comes before personal liberty. We must walk together in love before we brag about the consequences of our freedom as children of God.

I read a story that illustrates beautifully what walking together in love might look like today.

The church was next door to a group home for adults. One day one of them came in and sat down before worship, uninvited. She was painfully overweight and wearing clothing that didn’t fit. She hadn’t bathed and wasn’t able to breathe or move comfortably. She wouldn’t speak or make eye contact with anyone. From the beginning, she tried our patience. More than once she forgot where she was and lit up a cigarette right there in the pew. Her medication prevented her from being able to follow the order of worship. She fell asleep during sermons. Her breathing problems escalated and became loud snoring problems. You can imagine the conversations we had at council meetings: “She doesn’t belong here; she couldn’t possibly be getting anything out of it so heavily medicated.” [One member said,] “I’m tithing to this church, and she’s just giving pennies … she shouldn’t be allowed to ruin it for everyone.” Some observed that she ate too many cookies at coffee hour. They worried that she was a deterrent to other visitors. I worried about everyone.

Finally, an exasperated council member said that she’d had enough of all this talk. She announced that she would make a friend out of our troubled visitor and would hereafter be sitting next to her in church. Gentle Reader, take note: this means that after more than 25 years sitting in one pew, she moved ... to a different pew. When the snoring started, the council member gave a gentle nudge; she helped our visitor find the right hymn to sing; she reminded her to put her cigarettes away and limited her to no more than three cookies in the fellowship hall. That small act was all our visitor needed. Soon I witnessed her talking to people; she made eye contact and learned to shake my hand at the door after worship; her first words to me were “bless you.”

Some months later I received a phone call from the woman’s social worker. He told me that she had never been accepted by any group or able to sustain a single positive relationship until she started coming to our church. “Thank you for welcoming her,” he said to me. “I have never been to your church, but I know that it is an exceptional place.”

After I hung up the phone I sat for a moment. “Exceptional?”[4]

Is it exceptional for God’s people to welcome the stranger? Isn’t it simply who we are becoming by the power of God? Is it exceptional for followers of Jesus not to give in to fear and to let love build us up in community? Is it exceptional? If it is, then by all means let us be the exception.

[1] Luke 9:43-45

[2] The Speech In Defence of Gaius Rabirius, sec. 16, in The Speeches of Cicero, trans. H. Grose Hodge, The Loeb Classical Library (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1927) 467.

[3] 1 Corinthians 8:1

[4] Erica Wimber Avena, The Christian Century, January 4, 2017, 26. https://www.christiancentury.org/article/power-essays-readers

No longer I

During this season between Christmas and Lent, we’re reading passages from one of Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth. We only hear passages, cut to size to accommodate our attention spans and our preferences for how long a proper worship service should be. If you haven’t already done so, I want to encourage you to read the whole letter at home. Not only will it give you great insight into the kind of challenges the first Christian congregations were facing, it will also show you that church life has been messy ever since it began.

“Grace to you and peace” is the greeting with which Paul opens each of his letters, and he also closes all of them with a word of grace. No matter how messy the situation, no matter how hard and heated the arguments between the first and last paragraphs, it’s grace that surrounds us, Paul reminds us and himself, and grace that claims and equips a people for God’s purposes in the world. This grace bears the name of Jesus Christ, in whose death and resurrection God has judged the world of sin and begun the new creation where righteousness is at home.

The church in Corinth was barely four or five years old, when Paul wrote them this letter. The number of church members was probably in the dozens, rather than hundreds, but the small size didn’t mean they couldn’t find ways to divide.

You know the joke of the man stranded on a deserted island for several years after a shipwreck? They finally find him and he’s so happy at the prospect of living among other humans again. But before they leave, he shows them how he has lived, what he has built. He points to a hut, “This is my house where I sleep.” He points to another hut, “This is my church where I worship.” His rescuers point to yet another hut, on the other side of his house.  “What’s that?” they ask. “Oh, that’s where I used to go to church. Three years ago I got mad and left and started a new church.”

Division in a desert island church of one – it doesn’t get any more ridiculous than that, but where two or three are gathered in his name, chances are they won’t be together for long. We gather in the name of Jesus Christ, but other names pull us in different directions.

“It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you,” the apostle writes. I’d love to know how many heads turned when the letter was first read in Corinth and how many of the congregants mumbled under their breath, “Tattletales, you had to tell him, didn’t you?” Would they be able to hear what Paul had to say? Would they be able to hear his urgent appeal to all of them to be united in the same mind and the same purpose? Apparently they had divided themselves along lines of allegiance to the person who had first told them the good news of Jesus Christ. I belong to Paul. I belong to Apollos. I belong to Cephas. You don’t have to listen particularly attentively to detect a lot of “I” in those statements. It sounds like it goes much deeper than, say, “Paul’s alright, but Apollos is just such a moving preacher,” or “Paul really speaks to me as somebody who didn’t grow up with the scriptures of Israel, but Cephas, think about it, Cephas was with the Lord from the earliest days in Galilee.” Folks in the church in Corinth weren’t looking around and appreciating the variety of Christian witness and teaching, they were drawing the first denominational lines; and it was getting to the point where their identity was shaped more deeply by their respective allegiance to the particular tradition of Apollos, Cephas, or Paul, than by their new life in Christ.

“Really?” Paul shouts across the sea from Ephesus. “Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” Other names get in the way of who we are in Christ, and who we are becoming as a people who are sanctified in Christ, called to be saints, set aside for God’s holy purpose in the world. There’s a lot of “I” in our divisions, but our hope for salvation is wrapped up in the grace with which Christ has made us his own. “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians.[1] No longer I, but Christ in me and all of us in Christ.

Julia Keith, Eva Evans, and Gary Halloway just returned from India where they were part of a global gathering of Christians from 29 countries and who knows how many language groups. The theme of their gathering was, God Breaks Down Walls to Build Bridges.  The men, women, and children who gathered there embodied that theme in their coming together in the embrace of grace. They both witnessed and participated in the dismantling of walls and the building of bridges across continents and cultures, and other divisions far more difficult to overcome. Grace led the way and they followed.

I read a remarkable book this past week. Reading it was part of my trying to understand where we are and what is going on in this country. The book, Strangers in Their Own Land, was written by Arlie Russell Hochschild, a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. She went, you might say, from the bluest spot on the bluest coast to one of the reddest Tea Party spots on the electoral map of the United States, Lake Charles, Louisiana. She didn’t move there, but she traveled back and forth over the course of five years to meet people and visit and deepen relationships.

She came, she writes, “with an interest in walls. Not visible, physical walls such as those separating Catholics from Protestants in Belfast, Americans from Mexicans on the Texas border, or, once, residents of East and West Berlin. It was empathy walls that interested me.”

She describes an empathy wall as “an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.”

And she continues, “In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.”[2]

Like many of us, she “was becoming becoming alarmed at the increasingly hostile split in our nation between two political camps. To many on the left, the Republican Party and Fox News seemed intent on dismantling much of the federal government, cutting help to the poor, and increasing the power and money of an already powerful and rich top 1 percent. To many on the right, that government itself was a power-amassing elite, creating bogus causes to increase its control and handing out easy money in return for loyal Democratic votes.”

She writes, “I had some understanding of the liberal left camp, I thought, but what was happening on the right?” But she didn’t come at the question from a political perspective, but with “a keen interest in how life feels to people on the right— that is, in the emotion that underlies politics. To understand their emotions, I had to imagine myself into their shoes.”[3] And that is what she did. She sat at kitchen tables and went to campaign events; she walked through refineries and drove across old plantations; she went to church and to crawfish cookouts, and she did the work of imagining herself into the shoes of the people she met. She asked questions and listened, and whenever she ran into the empathy wall, and she did, again and again, she didn’t walk away, but asked more questions and listened even more carefully. She began to see the world through the eyes of the men and women who welcomed her interest and she came upon what she calls their “deep story,” a narrative not just of a world view, but of how the world is felt, integrating history, place, experience, and faith.

Reflecting on the whole process of discovery and transformation she initiated and shared with her readers, she writes,

The English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of having that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift. Gratitude, awe, appreciation; for me, all those words apply and I don’t know which to use. But I think we need a special word, and should hold a place of honor for it, so as to restore what might be a missing key on the English-speaking world’s cultural piano. Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.[4]

Too easy to settle for dislike and contempt, that is where we are in this country, and not only here. There’s a lot of I, I, and I, and me first and us first, and not much of a we that prepares room for strangers whose deep stories may be utterly unfamiliar, yet just as human as our own.

We still read Paul’s letter to the church in Corinth, because he addresses the deep challenges facing all of us who are called to live as God’s people in the world. We are baptized into Christ and in baptism our old ways of understanding ourselves and each other are soaked in God’s redeeming and liberating grace, but living into that new creation is a daily and life-long project. The name of the project, according to Paul: No longer I, but Christ in me and all of us in Christ.

[1] Galatians 2:20

[2] Arlie Russell Hochschild, Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right (The New Press, 2016). Kindle Edition. Location 170.

[3] Ibid. Location 70.

[4] Ibid. Location 117. Italics are mine.

Letters to the church

Do you still write letters? It’s a mode of communication that has been slowly vanishing since the arrival of the telegraph and the telephone, not to mention email and the growing number of text and video messaging apps. We sent a letter to all members of the congregation this week to announce the upcoming congregational meeting. Sure, we could have sent everybody an email, but we took the time to compose and print a letter, stuff it in envelopes, add address labels and stamps, and take it to the post office. Why? It wasn’t only to make sure that those of you who don’t use email would receive the information. We felt that the magnitude of the decision we as a congregation are about to make demanded that we put words on paper, something more tangible than weightless pixels flashing on a screen. And so every member household received a copy of the letter in their mailbox.

In Paul’s day, people wrote mostly on papyrus, a plant whose fibers were woven into sheets and, in the case of long letters or larger documents, were sewn together into rolls or assembled into book-like volumes. Paul was across the sea in Ephesus when he wrote his letter to the church in Corinth, a church consisting of several house churches spread out across the city. Little is known about how a letter like the one we call First Corinthians was read.[1] It probably wasn’t passed around from one member household to the next until all had seen it, but rather read out loud when the congregation gathered for worship and the Lord’s Supper. But we don’t know if the whole letter was read in one setting or over the course of several weeks.

Paul didn’t know that his words would be shared widely and eventually be read by Christians around the world. He wrote what he thought to be an occasional letter to address a specific set of problems among a fledgling community of Christians he had just recently founded; but obviously the letter’s readers didn’t just toss it out or file it in the congregational archives.

When we read First Corinthians, we’re quite literally reading somebody else’s mail. And given the content of the letter, the Corinthian church probably would have preferred, in the words of one commentator, “that this correspondence not be broadcast to the ages, for it portrays them in an unflattering light and divulges a number of things that they might well … wish to have kept private.”[2] The letter addresses serious divisions, sexual immorality, legal disputes, abuses of the Lord’s Supper and other challenges; and it seems we are still reading this letter because other churches also faced similar challenges and because Paul’s response shed light on the character of any community bearing the name of Christ.

Corinth sat on a narrow land bridge between the mainland and the Peloponnese, and its geographic location gave it an importance to international trade comparable with Panama in our own time. The city had been captured and destroyed by the Romans in 146 BCE, and re-founded as a Roman colony in 44 BCE – that’s less than a hundred years before Paul’s arrival. Many of the colonists were freed slaves, and so there was an atmosphere of opportunity and upward mobility. The city was a bustling commercial hub and political center of the empire, where human achievement of every stripe was rewarded – from financial success, to sporting prowess, to rhetorical and philosophical persuasion.[3] The house churches, consisting mostly of Gentile converts, but also including Jewish members, reflected the cultural, ethnic and socioeconomic diversity of the city.

Paul’s letter follows the standard format for the time by naming the sender first and then the recipient and including a greeting, much like we add both the sender’s and the recipient’s address and begin with “Dear John and Sally” or “Dear Vine Street community” and end with another greeting and a signature. But Paul played a little with the standard format. He could have written, “Paul to the church of God in Corinth, greetings.” But he added a few things to remind his readers of their new identity in Christ. Next to his name, the most important aspect of his identity was that he was called to be an apostle of Christ Jesus, and likewise the most important aspect of the recipients’ identity was their being called to be saints. Whoever or whatever else they might have been before – Jew or Gentile, slave or free, rich or poor, highly educated or illiterate – now, in Christ, they were called to be saints, holy people. Like God’s ancient covenant people Israel, they, a colorful group of mostly Gentile men and women from across the known world, had been claimed by God as God’s own people, set apart for the service of God. They were called to be holy people, not because they were uniquely qualified or had risen to extraordinary levels of moral performance or spiritual maturity, but because of their relationship with Jesus Christ. It was God who sanctified them for God’s holy purposes, and not only them, but all those who in every place call on the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Paul found a way, in the very first lines of the letter, to remind his first readers, and then readers in every generation to follow, that they were part of a much bigger story, a much larger movement than their local struggles and obsessions might suggest. We are called to be God’s people, a people shaped by the good news of Jesus Christ, holy not because of anything we bring to the relationship, but because God is faithful.

The letter you received in the mail on Friday or Saturday includes a final greeting before the signatures, grace and peace. Paul was the first to use this greeting, and the church embraced it. It’s the combination of a common Greek greeting with a common Jewish greeting, a subtle reference to the boundary-crossing work of God in Christ and at the same time an affirmation that we are rooted in God’s grace and intended to flourish in God’s peace.[4] And just as Jewish and Gentile traditions come together in this simple greeting, all of humanity is meant to come together in God’s household of grace and peace.

In v. 4 Paul begins the actual letter, and quite surprisingly for a letter written to address serious problems in a fractured community, the first words are words of thanksgiving to God. Paul thanks God for the Corinthians and for the grace they have been given, specifically the gifts of speech and knowledge with which they have been enriched. From the rest of the letter, we know that speaking in tongues and having knowledge were among the ways that the Corinthian Christians were dividing themselves up, with some claiming rank and status over others. But rather than reprimanding them, Paul emphasizes his gratitude for the community’s giftedness; he states, again rather subtly, that what some might have considered to be expressions of individual spiritual capacity or brilliance were in fact gifts to the whole community and part of God’s work. Paul begins with grace and gratitude, hoping that his readers in turn would begin to live in that rhythm.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in Life Together,

… Only [the person] who gives thanks for little things receives the big things. We prevent God from giving us the great spiritual gifts He has in store for us, because we do not give thanks for daily gifts. We think we dare not be satisfied with the small measure of spiritual knowledge, experience, and love that has been given to us, and that we must constantly be looking forward eagerly for the highest good. Then we deplore the fact that we lack the deep certainty, the strong faith, and the rich experience that God has given to others, and we consider this lament to be pious. We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. …

If we do not give thanks daily for the Christian fellowship in which we have been placed, even where there is no great experience, no discoverable riches, but much weakness, small faith, and difficulty; if on the contrary, we only keep complaining to God that everything is so paltry and petty, so far from what we expected, then we hinder God from letting our fellowship grow according to the measure and riches which are there for us all in Jesus Christ. …

The more thankfully we daily receive what is given to us, the more surely and steadily will fellowship increase and grow from day to day as God pleases. Christian [community] is not an ideal which we must realize; it is rather a reality created by God in Christ in which we may participate.[5]

Paul begins with gratitude for the gifts of grace, hoping that we in turn would begin to live in that rhythm, that we would begin to thank God not only for our fellowship with Christ at the individual level, but for inserting us into the particular community that has been given to us and to which we have been given, flawed and imperfect as we are.

I want to close with words from yet another letter, written in 1963 from a Birmingham Jail. It’s a long letter, so I’ll only read a couple of brief excerpts, in which Dr. King tells the truth in love to the church of God in Birmingham and beyond.

… I have been so greatly disappointed with the white church and its leadership. … I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen. …

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South’s beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: “What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices … when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call for defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?”

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.

The closing lines of Dr. King’s letter invite us yet again to live more fully into the grace and peace of God:

… Let us all hope that the dark clouds of racial prejudice will soon pass away and the deep fog of misunderstanding will be lifted from our fear drenched communities, and in some not too distant tomorrow the radiant stars of love and brotherhood will shine over our great nation with all their scintillating beauty.

[1] First Corinthians is not Paul’s first letter he sent to the church in Corinth; see 1 Cor 5:9.

[2] Hays, First Corinthians, 1.

[3] Suzanne Watts Henderson, “First Corinthians 1:3-9” Interpretation 62, no. 4 (October 2008): 426.

[4] A side note: Paul begins and ends all his letters with χάρις (grace), thus illustrating that we are surrounded by it; Rom 1:7; 16:20; 1 Cor 1:3; 16:23; 2 Cor 1:2; 13:13; Gal 1:3; 6:18; Eph 1:2; 6:24; Phil 1:2; 4:23; Col 1:2; 4:18; 1 Thess 1:1; 5:28; 2 Thess 1:2; 3:18; 1 Tim 1:2; 6:21; 2 Tim 1:2; 4:22; Tit 1:4; 3:15; Phm 3; 25.

[5] Bonhoeffer, Life Together, 1954, 29f.

For all to see

Jesus was baptized. He came to John at the Jordan like all the others who had come to be baptized, confessing their sins and repenting in light of the nearness of God’s reign. John was even more perplexed than we are about the thought of Jesus standing in line with us sinners near the bank of the river, and he asked, “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” And Jesus told him that this was how it had to be for righteousness to be fulfilled. We see him submitting to John’s ritual of repentance and renewal not out of his own need, but because he lived his whole life in complete solidarity with us. He let himself be fully immersed in our lives – our hopes, our regrets, our broken promises and old wounds, our best thoughts and our selfish obsessions – all of it. He let himself be fully immersed and when he emerged – and he did emerge rather than drown and be washed away in the river of our sins – when he came up from the water, the Spirit descended and a voice from heaven called him “my son, my beloved.” Because of him, because of the life he lived and the death he died and the resurrection life into which he has drawn us, because of him we believe that “my beloved” will always be part of the name by which God calls us, the part of our name that defines our identity more than anything else. My beloved, God says, singular and plural, each of you and all of you. Why is this beautiful truth so hard for us to remember?

You have heard about the infamous Facebook live-stream. I haven’t seen the video. I don’t want to see it. Four people have been charged with hate crimes for allegedly carrying out an assault, live-streamed online, in which a man was tied up, hit and cut with a knife by several assailants.

I haven’t seen the video. I don’t want to see it. I read that it showed multiple people taunting, threatening and hitting a man who is tied up in a corner.  At a news conference, Chicago Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson highlighted the “brazenness” of the assailants, for not just carrying out the attack but broadcasting it “for all to see.”

“It’s sickening,” he said. “It makes you wonder what would make individuals treat somebody like that. I’ve been a cop for 28 years — I’ve seen things that you shouldn’t see in a lifetime — but it still amazes me how you still see things that you just shouldn’t [see].”[1]

I haven’t seen the video and I don’t want to see it. Watching it would fill my heart with pain, terror, grief and fear, but it wouldn’t help me see with any more clarity what makes a group of young people broadcast their torture of another young person. Just like watching a video of a young man murdering a whole group of people who invited him to join their Bible study would not help me understand why he went to Mother Emanuel church with weapons in his backpack and hatred in his heart. Watching is at once too much and not enough; it doesn’t help us see, it only adds to the distortion of reality.

The reading from Acts for this Sunday is part of a longer story. It tells us in a series of short scenes about a tectonic shift in the life of the early church. A central theme is the church learning to see how God is moving and finding the courage to follow.

In Caesarea there was a man named Cornelius, an officer of the Roman army. He was a devout man who feared God, gave alms generously to the people and prayed constantly to God.  One afternoon he had a vision in which he clearly saw an angel of God coming in and saying to him, “Cornelius.”

He stared at him in terror and said, “What is it, Lord?”

“Your prayers and your alms have ascended as a memorial before God. Now send men to Joppa for a certain Simon who is called Peter; he is lodging with Simon, a tanner, whose house is by the seaside.” When the angel had left, he called two of his slaves and a devout soldier from the ranks of those who served him, and sent them to Joppa.

About noon the next day, as they were on their journey and approaching the city, Peter went up on the roof to pray. He became hungry and while some food was being prepared, he fell into a trance. He saw the heaven opened and something like a large sheet coming down, being lowered to the ground by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air. Then he heard a voice saying, “Get up, Peter; kill and eat.”

“By no means, Lord,” he replied; “for I have never eaten anything that is profane or unclean.” The voice said to him again, a second time, “What God has made clean, you must not call profane.” This happened three times, and the thing was suddenly taken up to heaven.

Now while Peter was greatly puzzled about what to make of the vision that he had seen, suddenly the men sent by Cornelius appeared. They were standing by the gate, calling out to ask whether Simon, who was called Peter, was staying there. Peter was still thinking about the vision, but the Spirit said to him, “Look, three men are searching for you. Now get up, go down, and go with them without hesitation; for I have sent them.” So Peter went down and said, “I am the one you are looking for; what is the reason for your coming?”

They answered, “Cornelius, a centurion, an upright and God-fearing man, who is well spoken of by the whole Jewish nation, was directed by a holy angel to send for you to come to his house and to hear what you have to say.” So Peter invited them in and gave them lodging; the next day he got up and went with them to Caesarea.

Cornelius was expecting them and had called together his relatives and close friends. Peter said to them, “You yourselves know that it is unlawful for a Jew to associate with or to visit a Gentile; but God has shown me that I should not call anyone profane or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without objection. Now may I ask why you sent for me?” Cornelius told him the whole story again and said, “So now all of us are here in the presence of God to listen to all that the Lord has commanded you to say.”

What would Peter say? He was in the house of an officer in the Roman army, which was already quite a stretch for a Jewish fisherman from Galilee. And that house stood in Caesarea by the Sea, a coastal city that King Herod had built for his Roman lords; it was the capital of the Roman province of Judea with a grand temple dedicated to Caesar Augustus and the goddess Roma perched on a hill overlooking the harbor. Peter was farther removed from his Jewish environs than he had ever been and I imagine he was just as far from comfortable. But he had begun to see what God was up to and he followed the Spirit’s lead. He said, “I am just now truly grasping that God shows no partiality, but in every nation anyone who fears him and does what is right is acceptable to him. You know the message he sent to the people of Israel, preaching peace by Jesus Christ—he is Lord of all. That message spread throughout Judea, beginning in Galilee after the baptism that John announced: how God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and with power; how he went about doing good and healing all who were oppressed by the devil, for God was with him.”

The story of Peter and Cornelius reflects a seismic shift in the life and mission of the early church. The risen Christ had told the disciples, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (Acts 1:8). Neither geographical limits, nor social boundaries, nor ethnic differences would constrain the gospel, and when Peter came down from the roof of the house at the Spirit’s prodding to meet the three men, he took the first steps to the ends of the earth. He entered into the life and space of the other, the stranger, the Gentile, not to remake him in his own image, but to be remade together with him in the image of Christ.

There is significant pressure in our society and around the world to let ourselves be shaped by tribal identities, to seek the comfort of being with people who think like us and look like us. But God is moving in a different direction. We are called to live as witnesses of Christ in this fragmented world. We are called, just like Peter, to be attentive to what God is doing and to let God use our lives, broken as they are, to accomplish God’s healing work. We are called to live, pray, work, serve, and suffer in the name of him in whose name we were baptized. He made our lives his own so that his life would be ours.

My beloved, God calls us, singular and plural, each of you and all of you.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/01/05/508331652/4-people-in-custody-in-chicago-over-beating-live-streamed-on-facebook

Isaiah's Advent suite

Some music you barely hear, it’s just part of the background noise. Jingle Bells at the mall.

Some music you hear and it stays with you. And I don’t mean how you can’t get Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer out of your head after a quick trip to the grocery store.

Some music stays with you – you love the lyrics, you like the beat, it makes you feel good just to hum along. You buy the record. You add it to your playlist. You love waking up to it.

Some music stays with you because it was playing just before your first kiss. You don’t care that nobody else seems to recognize the tune anymore; it’s your song and it will always be. You hear it and it takes you to a very happy place.

And some music just stays with you and you can’t quite say why. It’s not just part of the sound track of your life like all the rest; somehow it’s bigger than that, and you return to it again and again.

Johann Sebastian Bach wrote six suites for cello, sometime in the first half of the 18th century, and like most of his music, they were almost forgotten. In 1890, almost a century-and-a-half after Bach’s death, the great cellist Pablo Casals discovered a tattered copy in a secondhand sheet music store. He wasn’t great then, he was only 13 years old, but he spent years practicing these little-known suites and falling in love with them, before performing and eventually recording them. Bach’s cello suites by Casals has been on my desert island CD list ever since I first heard the staticky opening bars on the radio. And it was on the radio the other day that I heard Tom Ashbrook talk about this music with his guest, Eliot Fisk, who only recently had completed a transcription of the suites for guitar. They talked about how this 300-year-old music continues to draw in listeners; it has this impossible-to-describe quality. One caller said it sounds like it could have been written only yesterday. And then Eliot Fisk mentioned how there’s a lot of talk about fake news these days and how this music is the exact opposite: “This is true—whatever it is.”

Bach’s life was marked by great hardship. He was orphaned at age ten. He was the father of twenty children, but only ten lived to adulthood. His first wife died while he was gone on a trip, and he didn’t know until he came home and was told, “Your wife has died.” He had to live with so many painful losses, and yet his music comes from a place of joy, a deep, calm joy.

Why am I talking about music? Because Isaiah sings. He sings us an Advent song and in his song the desert, the most lifeless place imaginable, sings. The prophet sings of a day when the desolate and dry land erupts with lush life and song.[1] Isaiah doesn’t give us a text on horticulture or desert ecology; he gives us the poetry of hope, a hope grounded in the presence and power of God.

The second movement of Isaiah’s prophetic suite gives voice to the suffering of a people in exile: the lyrics speak of weak hands, feeble knees, and fearful hearts, of lost vision, hindered hearing, paralyzed limbs, and silent tongues – we can see a body utterly overwhelmed by despair and weariness, and at the same time we can hear a clear call to strengthen and to make firm and to say to those who are of a fearful heart what the prophet says to us, “Be strong, do not fear! Behold: your God.”

The prophet sings of the desert bursting into song as life erupts, because God will not leave the world as it is, in bondage, in drought, and in exile, but will restore the people and the land to wholeness. The people and the land will rejoice, be glad, and sing. And that joy is not a distant, someday joy. It is present in the song of the prophet and so much music and in all the ways we find to strengthen weak hands, feeble knees, and fearful hearts.

John the Baptist was in prison when he heard what Jesus was doing. So he sent word by his disciples and said to him, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to wait for another?” Do you remember how he answered? “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them.”[2] Go and tell what you hear and see: the healing of all that stands in the way of joy.

We affirm that in Jesus, God has entered the world as a human being, in power and in vulnerability. We testify that he is the one who is to come because in him we recognize the healing love that redeems and restores all things. We follow him because wherever he goes, the kingdom of God breaks in like showers of grace in the desert, and new life emerges. We follow him because his life, all of it, is for us a highway in the wilderness, a holy way: the road home for the people God has redeemed from all our exiles.

In the final movement of Isaiah’s Advent suite for voice and creation we hear and see the children of God walking homeward in a glorious procession of life, and upon their heads – like a canopy, a garland, or a crown – unbounded and unending joy. Some music stays with you because it taps into that joy and in an instant your heart knows, this is true.

There are many things the heart knows and experiences only the heart can comprehend. George Carlin gave us a fine study of how words can hide the truth by concealing reality. He said he didn’t like euphemisms and that American English is loaded with euphemisms. “Cause Americans have a lot of trouble dealing with reality,” he suspected.

Americans have trouble facing the truth, so they invent the kind of a soft language to protect themselves from it, and it gets worse with every generation. For some reason, it just keeps getting worse. I’ll give you an example of that.

There’s a condition in combat. Most people know about it. It’s when a fighting person’s nervous system has been stressed to it’s absolute peak and maximum. Can’t take anymore input. The nervous system has either (click) snapped or is about to snap.

In the first world war, that condition was called shell shock. Simple, honest, direct language. Two syllables, shell shock. Almost sounds like the guns themselves.

… Then a whole generation went by and the second world war came along and the very same combat condition was called battle fatigue. Four syllables now. Takes a little longer to say. Doesn’t seem to hurt as much. Fatigue is a nicer word than shock. …

Then we had the war in Korea, 1950. Madison avenue was riding high by that time, and the very same combat condition was called operational exhaustion. Hey, we’re up to eight syllables now! And the humanity has been squeezed completely out of the phrase. It’s totally sterile now. Operational exhaustion. Sounds like something that might happen to your car.

Then, of course, came the war in Viet Nam … and thanks to the lies and deceits surrounding that war, I guess it’s no surprise that the very same condition was called post-traumatic stress disorder. Still eight syllables, but we’ve added a hyphen! And the pain is completely buried under jargon.[3]

Post-traumatic stress disorder. The pain completely buried under jargon. Now we call it PTSD, removing even the last trace of trauma from from the name. Carlin didn’t mention that two generations before the first world war, during the Civil War, traumatized combatants developed a condition they called soldier’s heart. It broke their heart to see what they saw, to suffer what they suffered, and to do what they did. It broke their heart and shattered their sense of self and of life’s integrity.

Perhaps you noticed that both the prophet Isaiah and the apostle James point to the heart as the place that needs strengthening. Parker Palmer reminds us that the heart is the “center place where all of our ways of knowing converge—intellectual, emotional, sensory, intuitive, imaginative, experiential, relational, and bodily, among others. The heart is where we integrate what we know in our minds with what we know in our bones.”[4] Our hearts will get broken by loss, failure, or betrayal; the question is not if or when your heart breaks, but how. If your heart breaks apart into pieces, you need others who will shelter and strengthen you as you begin the work of healing. If it breaks open, your capacity to hold the full range of human experience will expand and you will bring new knowledge, true knowledge to those whose lives you touch.[5] I believe this is where Isaiah’s Advent poetry comes from and Bach’s music, from the heart broken open.

So what do we do, other than learning to sing Isaiah’s song of redemption and the song the angels sang the night when Christ was born? In Deuteronomy, Moses recites the words the Lord spoke at Sinai and says, “And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart.”[6] In one of countless rabbinic story commentaries on that verse, a disciple asks the rebbe: “Why does Torah tell us to ‘place these words upon your hearts’? Why does it not tell us to place these holy words in our hearts?” The rebbe answers: “It is because as we are, our hearts are closed, and we cannot place the holy words in our hearts. So we place them on top of our hearts. And there they stay until, one day, the heart breaks and the words fall in.”[7]

[1] See https://www.nps.gov/deva/learn/nature/wildflowers.htm or Death Valley Is Having A Rare And Magical ‘Super Bloom’ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/death-valley-super-bloom-2016-flowers_us_56dd81a3e4b03a405679135b

[2] Matthew 11:2-5 with quotes from/echoes of Isaiah 29:18f; 35:5f; 42:18; 61:1.

[3] http://www.dailykos.com/story/2010/5/22/868800/-George-Carlin,prophet

[4] Parker Palmer, Healing the Heart of Democracy, 6.

[5] See Palmer, 18.

[6] Deuteronomy 6:6 (RSV)

[7] As told by Jacob Needleman; see Palmer, 149.

There will come a day

The first word the church hears in Advent is a magnificent portrait of peace, spoken by the prophet Isaiah: his vision of days to come when nations stream to the mountain of the Lord’s house. The nations come not to conquer, plunder, and destroy as in days past, no, they come to learn God’s ways and walk in God’s paths. The nations come not because they have been defeated by a yet another empire and are now forced to pay tribute; no, they come willingly, uncoercedly, eager to learn. They come to let God’s justice be their justice, and they are finally free to beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks.

The first sound of Advent is the sound of days to come when from all the ends of the earth people are making their way to the city of God. The first sound of Advent is this symphony of people, their chatter and laughter, their stories and songs, and the clanging of hammers falling on anvils, ringing across the land, bright and clear as bells. Swords are being beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, tanks into school buses and war ships into bridges, fighter jets into bicycles and M16s into water mains—every tool of destruction is being forged into a tool of shared life. Through the din of Black Friday commercials and the relentless news of violence and war we hear the sound of days to come—that our feet may pick up the rhythm and we may learn the tune by heart and hum the new song as we go up the road of hope.

Hope wasn’t Isaiah’s first word, though. His first word was a clear-eyed description of what he saw when he looked around the city and the land: the words that stand out from just the first four verses of the book’s opening chapter are rebellion, iniquity, sinful, evil, corrupt, estranged – and it doesn’t stop there. The religious festivals have become a burden God is weary of bearing. The country lies desolate. The city where righteousness is meant to lodge, is marked by injustice. Her silver has become dross, her wine is diluted with water, her princes are companions of thieves. Everyone loves a bribe and runs after gifts. They do not defend the orphan, and the widow’s cause does not come before them.

The prophet’s first word is a long litany of indictments, line after line written with tears of fury and the fire of wrath: “The strong shall become like tinder, and their work like a spark; they and their work shall burn together, with no one to quench them.” Thirty-one verses of relentless accusation and judgment, and then Isaiah abruptly stops. It’s as though his ears have picked up, above his mournful and angry lamentation, fragments of a different tune, a song as old as creation and overflowing with the promise of newness. It’s like he must start over, because in the doom and gloom of human faithlessness, suddenly, light shines, divine light. And so he begins to speak of days to come, of a newness far beyond the possibilities of current circumstances; he draws a wide horizon of hope opened up by the faithfulness of God.

A colleague of mine from Memphis was on a summer vacation in Maine, and one morning he took the ferry to one of the islands. The sea was smooth as glass, mirroring the clear, blue sky; it made for a most pleasant crossing. The trip back later that day, though, was a different story. A front had moved in and where earlier there had been only a gentle breeze, now there were stiff gusts of wind. Before long, the sea became quite choppy and the adventurer from Tennessee was starting to feel a storm brewing in the pit of his stomach. The captain took one look at him, noticed the hint of green in his complexion, and gave him a good word.

“Sit down, find a point on the shoreline and focus on it.”

That’s exactly what he did. He sat down near the rail. Then he picked a spot, far away on the rocky shore, a sharp peak with a lighthouse on it, and he kept his eyes on it. The boat kept pitching and rolling, but he kept his eyes fixed on that point. Soon his stomach became calmer, his head cleared, and he began to breathe deeply. “I’m going to make it,” he said to himself.

The word that Isaiah saw is a point on the horizon of time, a focal point in the turbulent days of injustice, fear, and war. We keep our eyes fixed on God’s promise, not only to calm our storm-tossed souls, but to keep the end of the journey in mind, to remember where we are headed, and to walk with courage.

Ruby Bridges was one of four children to integrate New Orleans public schools in 1960; she was the only black child to enter the William Frantz Elementary School that year. On her way to school, for days that turned into weeks and weeks that turned into months, this child had to brave angry mobs who were hurling threats and slurs at her. Every day, federal marshals walked with her to school and brought her home. At first, she attended school all by herself, because of a total boycott by white families. She sat alone in the classroom, and only one teacher overcame her own fear and taught her.

Robert Coles was a young psychiatrist working in New Orleans, and he volunteered to talk with Ruby to help her process the daily terror. A teacher told him,

I was standing in the classroom, looking out the window, and I saw Ruby coming down the street, with the federal marshals on both sides of her. The crowd was there, shouting, as usual. A woman spat at Ruby but missed; Ruby smiled at her. A man shook his fist at her. Ruby smiled. And then she walked up the steps, and she stopped and turned around and smiled one more time. You know what she told one of those marshals? She told him she prays for those people, the ones in that mob. She prays for them every night before going to sleep.

Ruby told him, “Yes, I do pray for them.”

“Why?” Coles asked her.

“I go to church,” she told him, “every Sunday, and we’re told to pray for everyone, even the bad peeple, and so I do.” When the subject came up again she said, “They keep coming and saying the bad words. But my momma says they’ll get tired after a while and then they’ll stop coming. They’ll stay home. The minister came to our house and he said the same thing, and not to worry, and I don’t. The minister said God is watching and He won’t forget, because He never does. The minister says if I forgive the people, and smile at them and pray for them, God will keep a good eye on everything and He’ll be our protection.”

Coles asked her if she believed the minister was on the right track.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m sure God knows what’s happening. He’s got a lot to worry about; but there is bad trouble here, and He can’t help but notice. He may not rush to do anything, not right away. But there will come a day, like you hear in church.”[1] 

Little Ruby didn’t keep her eyes fixed on the steps to the school house; she looked at the people who harassed and assailed her, but her eyes were fixed on God’s promise. There is bad trouble here, and God can’t help but notice. He may not rush to do anything, not right away. But there will come a day. There will come a day.

Little Ruby had learned, young as she was, that the most important question to ask in Advent is not, “When?” but “Who?” The future doesn’t belong to the haters and harassers, but to the One who is coming.

About that day and hour no one knows, neither the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.

When, we do not know, but be believe that the One who is coming is the same who has come and who is with us always, to the end of the age. We see great courage in Ruby and in countless others who have kept their eyes fixed on the promises of God in times of turmoil; it’s a courage born of deep trust that Christ has made us his own. He lived fully for the kingdom of God, and he entrusted himself completely to the faithfulness of God. He died alone on a hill that looked nothing like the mountain of the house of the Lord. He died, scorned and taunted, surrounded by swords, pierced with a spear. And there the depth of God’s commitment to us was revealed.

We didn’t start the fire in the forge where the nations will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks. God did by raising Jesus from the dead.

And so we begin the year with Advent, we begin by awaiting the fullness of him who was, who is, and who is to come. The future doesn’t belong to the haters and harassers, but to him who fills all of creation with the light of his love. Through the din of Black Friday commercials and endless news of violence and war we hear the sound of days to come—and our feet pick up the rhythm and we learn the tune by heart and we hum the new song as we go up the road of hope. Come! Come let us walk in the light of the Lord!

[1] Robert Coles, The Moral Life of Children (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986) 22-24.

Gathering the scattered

The days are getting shorter, and the colors around us are changing; pumpkin orange and corn yellow are fading and the richer tones of cranberry red and spruce green are coming to the fore. The days are getting shorter, the temperature outside is finally catching up with the season, and we start dreaming in the middle of the afternoon about being at home, cozy and warm, with the people we love and the music we have known forever. We want to bake cookies, we want to send cards, wrap presents, and light candles.

The days are getting shorter, and we look forward to the long night when shepherds hear the angels sing, “To you is born this day in the city of David a Savior, who is the Messiah, the Lord.” We look forward to finding the child lying in the manger, wrapped in swaddling cloths. And we look forward to asking again with hushed wonder in our voices,

What child is this who, laid to rest, on Mary’s lap is sleeping? Whom angels greet with anthems sweet, while shepherds watch are keeping?

and to respond with joy, “This, this is Christ the King…”[1]

Toward the end of Second Samuel, we read an old man’s last words, written down so that generations to come would know and remember:

One who rules over people justly, ruling in the fear of God, is like the light of the morning, like the sun rising on a cloudless morning, gleaming from the rain on the grassy land.[2]

The hope for one who rules over people justly goes back as far as historical records, legends and ancient epics can take us. And the hope for one who rules in the fear of God is as old as the sad reality of rulers who abuse their position for selfish ends. The prophet Jeremiah accused the king of Judah,

Woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness,
and his upper rooms by injustice;
who makes his neighbors work for nothing,
and does not give them their wages;
who says, “I will build myself a spacious house with large upper rooms,”
and who cuts out windows for it,
paneling it with cedar,
and painting it with vermilion.

Are you a king because you compete in cedar?

Did not your father eat and drink
and do justice and righteousness?[3]

It wasn’t the king only whom the prophet accused in the name of God:

Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture![4]

The leaders were responsible for the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile of God’s people, but the scattering didn’t begin when the captives were taken to Babylon or the refugees fled to Egypt. The ‘scattering’ had begun when families were driven off their land because they couldn’t make their debt payments and when the workers who built the spacious houses and paneled them with cedar were not paid their wages. The ‘scattering’ had begun when the king and the leaders of the people attended to their own real estate interests instead of pursuing justice and righteousness. The ‘scattering’ had begun when personal desires and ambitions pushed the needs of the poor to the margins of attention – and this is where the prophet’s indictment concerns us all, where we can’t deflect its force to hit somebody else or pretend it will remain safely enclosed in a long-ago past, in a country far, far away. God’s people are scattered when our attention is absorbed by our own needs and desires until there is no time left, no energy, no love to attend to the needs of others, particularly those left to fend for themselves. Again and again, God’s commandments draw our attention to the widows and orphans and strangers, to those whose lives are vulnerable and fragile and whose position in the community carries little influence, but whose wellbeing is the measure by which the community as a whole is judged.

We hear a lot these days about being divided – red and blue, black and white, rural and urban – but those simple dualisms are too simple to reflect the many shades of purple we represent and the complexity and diversity of our life together. I believe Jeremiah’s ‘scattered’ captures much better how fragmented our common life has become; thankfully the prophet also points to the way out of this mess for God’s people: I myself will gather them, says the Lord. Our God indicts us for our scattering ways, and judges us for fragmenting the unity of life on God’s earth, but God also gathers us:

I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, and he shall reign as king and deal wisely, and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.[5]

The prophet’s words point to God’s faithfulness, and for the church they point to Jesus who has compassion for us because we are like sheep without a shepherd. The promise points to Jesus, the curious king who builds his spacious house with living stones and whose upper room is large so he can gather us in, all of us scattered ones.

What joy to hold the baby in our hands and sing, “This, this is Christ the King…” This is the long-awaited one, the righteous one, the one of whose kingdom there will be no end. Today is the last Sunday of the church year when the church celebrates the reign of Christ the King. We continue to use kingdom language, even though most nations have banned kings and queens from our political life. Many say, and with good reason, that we shouldn’t call Jesus “the king”, because our imaginations are already overstuffed with men sitting on thrones or high on the horse. Yet we continue to use the language, and not just out of respect for tradition. We use it, because we trust that Jesus has the power to transform and redeem all of life, including our imagination and our language. Robert Capon wrote,

We crucified Jesus, not because he was God, but because he (…) claimed to be God and then failed to come up to our standards for assessing the claim. It’s not that we weren’t looking for the Messiah; it’s just that he wasn’t what we were looking for.[6]

He wasn’t what we were looking for. He doesn’t fit our patterns and molds, but remakes them. We use words like Messiah, Christ, and king, but it’s not the words that define who Jesus is; it’s the other way round. His life gives new meaning to the old language. His death and resurrection open the door for us to life that is nothing but life.

On the night of his birth, the angels sang and we were glad to join their heavenly anthems. Then the air was filled with song and possibility, the small cradle was big enough to hold all our hopes and expectations. But on the day of his crucifixion there were no anthems, only a cacophony of scorn, “Hey, Savior, show us some salvation!”

“He saved others, let him save himself if he is the Messiah of God!” the leaders were laughing.

“If you are the King of the Jews, save yourself!” the soldiers jeered at him.

And one of the two criminals joined them in taunting Jesus, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us!”

The scene looks like an obscene joke, with the punchline written on a sign and nailed over Jesus’ head, “This is the king of the Jews.”

Amid the abuse and the clamor Jesus remained silent. “Father, forgive them,” he prayed, “for they do not know what they are doing.” Forgive whom – the soldiers who, as always, were only following orders? Forgive those who gave the orders? Forgive the leaders who assure us they always act with the best interest of the state or the temple or the church or the nation in mind? Forgive all of us who are trapped in sinful modes of relating, thinking, speaking, and acting? Forgive us and our scattering ways? Forgive us who can find a moment of unity only by ganging up against him?

Yes.

This kingdom, his kingdom is not a new and improved version of the kingdoms of the world, it’s their end. It’s the end of our royal ideologies and our dreams of domination. It’s the life of Jesus alive in us.

Delores Williams remembers Sunday mornings from her childhood when the minister shouted out, “Who is Jesus?” And the choir rsponded in voices loud and strong, “King of kings and Lord of lords!” And then little Miss Huff, in a voice so fragile and soft you could hardly hear her, would sing her own answer, “Poor little Mary’s boy.” Back and forth they sang. “King of kings and Lord of lords,” the choir thundered; and Miss Huff sang softly, “Poor little Mary’s boy.”[7]

We long for a world where justice and righteousness prevail, and we already live in that world because Mary’s boy is the Ocne whose kingdom has no end. With love and mercy he invades the world to build his reign. His pierced hand will hold no sword but a shepherd’s staff. On his haloed head he will wear no crown but the splendor of his mercy. Never will his might be built on the toil of others, but he will walk and work with us on the journey to the city of God. ‘The Lord is our righteousness’, it will be called, and the keys to his city belong to the poor.[8]

[1] What Child Is This, Chalice Hymnal #162, words by William C. Dix.

[2] 2 Samuel 23:3-4

[3] Jeremiah 22:13-15

[4] Jeremiah 23:1

[5] Jeremiah 23:5

[6] Robert F. Capon, Hunting the Divine Fox (New York: Seabury Press, 1974) 90-91.

[7] See Barbara Lundblad http://odysseynetworks.org/news/onscripture-the-bible-john-18-33-37

[8] Jeremiah 33:16; some of the words are from Gian-Carlo Menotti, Amahl and the Night Visitors