Dreams of domination

A trial is a formal meeting in a law court, at which a judge and jury listen to evidence and decide whether a person is guilty of a crime. Those who are called to testify are asked to “affirm that all the testimony they are about to give in the case now before the court will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Typically the truth at stake is solely about the facts of the case, but sometimes a trial reveals a larger truth.

On Friday the news broke that Kyle Rittenhouse had been acquitted on all charges in the shooting deaths of two men and wounding of a third at a Wisconsin protest against racial injustice last year. The truth all of us are facing after this trial is that in this country a young white man can carry an assault weapon into a situation rife with tension, shoot three persons, killing two, and the people won’t hold him accountable because he hasn’t broken any laws. We have to live with that hard truth, and with the fact that some of us are actually celebrating while others are in mourning and worried sick. And I will continue to live with the troubling conviction that if Rittenhouse were Black, “acquitted on all counts” would not have been Friday’s headline.

In 1967, a group of Black Panthers demonstrated at the California Statehouse in Sacramento carrying loaded rifles and shotguns. Ronald Reagan was governor and he said of the Panthers’ action at the time, “I don’t think that loaded guns is the way to solve a problem that should be solved between people of good will. And anyone who would approve of this kind of demonstration must be out of their mind.” The California legislature passed and Reagan signed the Mulford Act, which banned the open carry of firearms in the state. The NRA supported the measure. The bill’s author, Don Mulford, said at the time, “We’ve got to protect society from nuts with guns.”[1] It appears we have changed our minds about nuts with guns; the NRA certainly has.

Today is the last Sunday of the church year. The readings for this Sunday in the ecumenical lectionary invite us to reflect on the consummation of Christ’s reign—something that may feel like an escape, welcome or not, to some of you, but it actually takes us to the heart of the matter.

The psalm sings of the Lord’s majesty and everlasting throne, and in the Gospel reading, John takes us to phase two of a trial. Jesus has been arrested by a detachment of soldiers and temple police. After an interrogation by the chief priest, they have taken him to the headquarters of Pilate, with the goal to get him sentenced to death.

Pontius Pilate had been appointed governor over Judea just a few years before; Judea was a remote but strategically important corner of the Roman empire. Fully aware that he represented the greatest power in the mediterranean world, Pilate ruled the province with an iron fist.  A contemporary of his described him as “rigid and stubbornly harsh, wrathful and of spiteful disposition,” and that his rule was marked by corruption and “ceaseless and most grievous brutality.”[2] Whoever raised their head too high or their voice too confidently, risked being disposed of as a threat to Roman dominance. Pilate had heard about Jesus, he had received preliminary intelligence reports about a Galilean whom the crowd had greeted at the city gate as king of Israel.[3] “Are you the king of the Jews?” he asked Jesus. Pilate was neither a prosecutor nor a judge, but that mattered little; those were just formalities: he represented the power of the Roman empire. He looked at the man before him the way he looked at everything and everyone: through the eyes of those above him, those who would decide whether to advance his career or terminate it. As governor, he played the empire’s game, and he knew that if he didn’t handle matters in Jerusalem to the emperor’s liking, his next appointment would definitely not be a move up.

“Are you the king of the Jews?” Pilate asks Jesus rather routinely, to see if this Galilean peasant might have insurgency on his mind. But John uses this trial scene to help us see a larger truth. Pilate may think that Jesus is the one being interrogated here. The temple authorities may think Jesus is the one on trial here. But Jesus turns the tables on them and becomes the interrogator. “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” he asks Pilate. Whose questions are you asking? Do you want to know who I am?

The issue of Jesus’ kingship had been raised before. He had fed thousands by the lake up in Galilee, and when he realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he went away.[4] The empire, of course, excels at controlling the masses with bread and circuses, but Jesus has no dreams of empire. He won’t command an army to put himself in power. He doesn’t want to live in a palace behind high walls and guarded gates. He has no ambition to sit on Caesar’s throne, as unimaginable as that may be to a man like Pilate. This king knelt to wash the feet of his friends. This king told his companion who still carried a sword to put it back into its sheath. This king insists that should any blood be shed, it would be his own.

“What have you done?” Pilate asks. And Jesus continues to testify, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Jesus’ kingship is not from this world, not based on this world’s ambitions and assumptions, not established with this world’s methods. Jesus’ kingship doesn’t fit into the world’s power patterns, but it is for the world and exercised in the world, for the life of the world.

“So you are a king?” Pilate asks, and Jesus still won’t give him a simple yes or no answer. Jesus is testifying, and he tells Pilate and all who are overhearing this interrogation that his entire life has been a testimony to the truth. “For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”

John uses this trial scene to show us a larger truth: it may look like the temple authorities and Pilate, driven by political expedience, have put Jesus on trial, seeking to convict, sentence and execute him; it may look like the world has put Jesus on trial, but in condemning him, the world is  condemning itself. Jesus’ entire life is a testimony to the truth, but the world can neither hear nor see him. He doesn’t fit the patterns of perception of the powerful. “Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice,” says Jesus. “Truth? What is that?” says Pilate.

To belong to the truth is to see in Jesus the fullness of God revealed and to hear the words of God in Jesus’ voice. To know the truth is not a matter of having been told all the relevant facts, but a matter of encounter and relationship, a matter of belonging. Pilate assumes that truth is a “what”—a concept, an idea, a set of facts—but in the Gospel according to John, where truth is mentioned at least three times more than in all the other gospels combinded, Jesus is never said to teach the truth, and the disciples are never said to have to truth; and Jesus doesn’t give us great truths to live by—he gives himself. He himself is the truth of God. In the Fourth Gospel, truth is not a “what” but a “who,” a person, a king who isn’t a king and yet the only one worthy to reign over God’s creation.

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.[5]

The longing for one who rules over people justly goes back as far as ancient songs and poetry can take us. The hope for one who rules in the fear of God is as old as the persistent reality of rulers and princes and judges who don’t. The testimony of Jesus reveals love as the power at the heart of the universe, love that calls and invites, love that serves and never overwhelms. The truth about God is God’s love for the world, and the truth about the world is God’s love for it. The truth is Jesus.

In Gian-Carlo Menotti’s “Amahl and the Night Visitors”, one of the three kings says,

The child we seek doesn’t need our gold.
On love, on love alone he will build his kingdom.
His pierced hand will hold no scepter.
His haloed head will wear no crown.
His might will not be built on your toil.
Swifter than lightning
he will soon walk among us.
He will bring us new life
and receive our death,
and the keys to his city belong to the poor. [6]

“Jesus’ kingship … can be difficult to see, for it is manifest in crucifixion rather than in political dominance,” writes Susan Hylen.[7] Jesus’ kingship rests not on bribe and coercion but on self-giving love—something that cannot be legislated or decreed or enforced, only received. And those who know themselves to be recipients of this love no longer dream of domination. The good-shepherd king who lays down his life for those he loves—he has no subjects, only friends who see him and know his voice and follow him on the way to the fullness of God’s reign. May we be among them.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/07/opinion/gun-control-and-white-terror.html

[2] Philo of Alexandria, Legatio ad Gaium, 33.

[3] John 12:13

[4] John 6:1-15

[5] 2 Samuel 23:3-4

[6] https://www.opera-arias.com/menotti/amahl-and-the-nightvisitors/libretto/

[7] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/christ-the-king-2/commentary-on-john-1833-37-3

Steadfast anchor of the soul

There is a story about New College, Oxford, that I’ve come across here and there; I really like it, and I’ve retold it a few times. According to this story, it was discovered in the 1860s that the long oak beams holding up the roof of the ancient dining hall were in bad shape and needed replacing. Nobody knew where they might find such huge timbers, though, and back then they didn’t call it supply chain issues. Then the college woodsman reminded the building committee that when the hall was built in the fourteenth century, the college’s founder William of Wykeham had a grove of oaks planted that were expressly reserved for one day replacing the beams. And so, thanks to Bishop Wykeham’s wise stewardship, 500 years later the college had the timbers it needed for the job, and the fellows and students have been happily dining under the replacement beams ever since.

“It’s a wonderful story,” writes Roman Krznaric in his latest book. “The only problem is that it isn’t true.” He talked with Jennifer Thorp, who oversees the New College archives, and he learned that the oaks for the beams came from a woodland that wasn’t purchased by the college until decades after the original hall had been built, and they had never been kept in reserve for roof restoration. Bishop William of Wykeham had not been so far-sighted after all.

My heart broke a little when I read that. But then the author goes on to point out that “the popularity of this story shows just how much we want to believe in the human capacity for long-term planning. A tale about planting trees for the benefit of people half a millennium in the future feels like the perfect antidote to our age of pathological short-termism.”[1]

We want to believe in our capacity to care about our neighbors not only in distant lands, but also in distant centuries. We want to believe in our capacity to extend the reach of the command to love our neighbor like ourselves to generations far into the future.

Jonas Salk wrote in 1992, “We have so altered the conditions of life on the planet, human and non-human, as to become the co-authors of our destiny. … Will we have the wisdom to perceive the long as well as short-term advantages in the choices we make?” The title of his article is a question, “Are we being good ancestors?”[2] It’s a terrific question. Hard to answer, yes, hard to live with, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep asking it. Robert Macfarlane said, “To be a good ancestor is to bear responsibility for a future you will never know, for people you will never know, even for species you will never know. To extend care forwards in deep time to what Rebecca Solnit has memorably called the ‘ghostly billions.’”[3]

This week the UN climate conference in Glasgow, COP 26, went into overtime to finish work on a final draft document, and there was plenty of last-minute watering-down. It was a step, not the leap forward many hoped for. The governments of the world’s nations are trying to hammer out a difficult agreement with tremendous impact on this generation and generations to come, human and non-human. We want to believe in our capacity to cooperate, to compromise, and to co-author a better path forward. But we’re not certain. We’re not so sure of ourselves, not so sure about each other’s motives and dependability.

In today’s passage from Hebrews, we encounter a very different voice. It’s a voice brimming with confidence, confidence in what God has done in Jesus Christ. Christ has effected forgiveness of sin, once and for all. The affirmation is strong, because the audience is uncertain. One commentator suggests that “the entire sermon addresses a particular congregation’s exhaustion” and “weariness.”[4] There has been a noticeable decline in attendance at its assemblies. The reasons aren’t stated, but the context suggests fear of public ridicule and persecution, leadership tensions, and discouragement over the delay of Christ’s return. In the verses following our passage, the preacher tells the congregation,

Recall those earlier days when, after you had been enlightened, you endured a hard struggle with sufferings, sometimes being publicly exposed to abuse and persecution, and sometimes being partners with those so treated. For you had compassion for those who were in prison, and you cheerfully accepted the plundering of your possessions, knowing that you yourselves possessed something better and more lasting. Do not, therefore, abandon that confidence of yours; it brings a great reward.[5]

“Confidence” is the keynote here. In Greek, the word connotes frankness, openness to public scrutiny, courage, boldness, fearlessness, and joy. It is a characteristic of free citizens who may hold their heads up without shame or fear, looking others directly in the eye. In Roman society, it belonged to the free members of the household, but not to slaves. In Hebrews, it characterizes all members of the household of God, in their relationship with God as well as in all their relationships with each other and the community at large.[6]

Confident in God’s forgiveness, we follow Christ into the heart of holiness, the very presence of God. “We have this hope,” says the preacher, “a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, a hope that enters the inner shrine behind the curtain, where Jesus, a forerunner on our behalf, has entered.”[7] Because of him, we may “approach the throne of grace with boldness, so that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need.”[8] Grace to be honest with ourselves about the burdens of guilt and shame we bear—and to let God take them. Grace to be kind to each other, knowing that we all carry such burdens. And grace to be bold in our witness, particularly in the face of hostility.

Through forgiveness we are drawn into a transformative relationship with God, a relationship that frees us to love, to live fully in the love of God. We become conduits through which God’s unceasing love flows to revive the parched places in the lives of others. We become who we were made to be.

Many generations ago, the preacher of Hebrews addressed the weariness and exhaustion of a particular congregation, but his or her words and the Spirit who inspired them continue to move us closer to God, closer to each other, closer to our own true selves. Let us approach with a true heart in full assurance of faith, with our hearts sprinkled clean from an evil conscience and our bodies washed with pure water. Let us embrace this moment of freedom and new beginning, and since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely, and let us run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus the pioneer and perfecter of our faith.[9]

When we ask ourselves, “Are we being good ancestors?” we remember those who have been good ancestors to us, who chose the path of love when the highway of convenience was wide open, who chose faithfulness over fear, and hope for the sake of the hopeless. So let us hold fast to the confession of our hope, let us hold fast to the sure and steadfast anchor of the soul, not because our track record of not wavering is so impressive, but because the one who has promised is faithful.

The preacher of Hebrews walks us all the way into the holy of holies where in the company of Jesus our whole being becomes praise, and then we follow the stream of words back to Monday morning when lofty phrases have little chance of being ruminated, but another work week begins, another school week, another week of daily routines. And that, of course, is when the holding fast and the running with perseverance become complicated and challenging and urgent. Now the preacher of Hebrews speaks with rare simplicity: Let us consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds. And let us not neglect to meet together, as is the habit of some. We can’t provoke one another to love and good deeds with a bunch of unread emails piling up in our inboxes. We can’t encourage one another to move from apathy and fear to love with inspirational memes endlessly shared on social media. And we can’t ask ourselves if we are being good ancestors without getting on each other’s nerves with our half-baked ideas and our tired clichés and our wildest dreams—and loving each other anyway. We can’t be who we are without each other, from the 93-year-olds and up to the 3-year-olds and down, to the saints who have gone before. Let us not neglect to meet together, because the challenges we face demand the best we have to offer.

What would it take for us to love life, not as a commodity to be consumed, but as a gift we share with all generations of creation? Let us meet together. Let us bring our imagination, wisdom, and creativity, and let us consider how to provoke one another to love, to the glory of God.

[1] Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor: A Radical Prescription For Long-term Thinking (New York: The Experiment, 2020), 92.

[2] Jonas Salk, “Are We Being Good Ancestors?” World Affairs: The Journal of International Issues 1, no. 2 (1992): 16–18. http://www.jstor.org/stable/45064193.

[3] https://lafayettestudentnews.com/114337/arts/robert-macfarlane/

[4] Elizabeth Felicetti, Connections, 482.

[5] Hebrews 10:32-35

[6] See Susan Eastman https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-33-2/commentary-on-hebrews-1011-14-15-18-19-25-2

[7] Hebrews 6:19-20

[8] Hebrews 4:16

[9] Hebrews 12:1-2

To what end?

North Haven is a small town in Minnesota, just east, I heard, of Lake Wobegon. Michael Lindvall has written a couple of books about life in North Haven, tales about a minister and his flock.[1] Reading these stories you quickly get a sense that you know these people; they are your neighbors and co-workers, people you run into at the grocery store.

James Crory is one of them. He’s an overactive seven-year-old who talks a mile a minute and sleeps only sporadically. Calling him energetic would be an understatement. James loves to hang out with Angus and Minnie, both in their 80’s, and they, for the most part anyway, enjoy his company as well. They smile at his enthusiasm, and his stories and the seemingly endless stream of his questions and declarations about the world are way more entertaining than anything on tv.

It was in the afternoon of Halloween, the sun was already low, when James burst into Angus and Minnie’s living room complaining that his mom had gotten him the wrong costume.

“Spiderman? No one cares about Spiderman anymore. How can she not know that? I can’t possibly wear that costume! It will be the end! Everyone will make fun of me. Why did she do that to me? What am I going to do?”

Minnie waited a couple of seconds to make sure that he was finished.

“Perhaps you could be a ghost?”

Her boys had been ghosts every year growing up, even used the same costumes year after year—it never seemed to be a problem. Come to think of it, those ghost costumes were probably still up in the attic. And so Angus and James climbed up the creaky attic stairs to look for the costumes—and there they were! The classic design: a sheet with a couple of holes for the eyes, and a belt to keep the whole thing from blowing away.

Angus and Minnie insisted that James use a high-visibility reflector belt because it had already snowed, and you can’t see a ghost in the snow. The little boy could hardly stand still long enough to get the belt on. “Trick or treat! Trick or treat!” he shouted, jumping up and down.

Angus said he’d trail along behind to make sure the boy was OK, but before he could get his coat on, James dashed out the door and ran smack-dab into their maple tree.

Angus was rushing out to be sure he was okay, when little James picked himself up and rushed full speed ahead again. This time he ran into the neighbor’s pear tree. And this time, he stayed down a little longer.

“James! James, are you all right?” Angus quickly went over to the little boy. He looked down, and he realized that the holes in the sheet were not lined up with his eyes—not even close. James couldn’t see a thing. So Angus adjusted the sheet, and the boy’s eyes opened wide with surprise: “I didn’t know I was supposed to be able to see!”

I’m grateful for people like Minnie and Angus, old couples who become friends with young neighbors, and generously share with them their time, their food, and their love.

I thought about baptism, of all things, when I read this story from North Haven. In baptism we put on the white robe of new life. It’s not a costume that changes every year, nor is it a manufactured plastic dream that allows us to be the Hulk, Wonder Woman, or Chewbacca for a day. The white robe of new life is much more like a treasure from the attic, something generations before us have worn with joy and great reward. So you put on that robe, and you rush out the door to live your new life, only to run smack-dab into a tree.

“Something just hit me,” you say to yourself, but you rub your head, get up and start over, and—bang!—you run into the next tree. “Determination is everything,” you say to yourself, and you’re about to jump up and start over, when thankfully somebody helps you see a bit more clearly where you are and where you’re headed.

We are not alone in the adventure of faith, and this Sunday gives us an opportunity to gratefully acknowledge that reality. We are surrounded by saints, by a great cloud of witnesses who in generations past have walked the road we are on: they have faced challenges, they have kept the faith in the most difficult circumstances, and they are watching us, they are cheering us on, and they adjust our vision so we can see where we are going.

Frederick Buechner reminded us that “saints are not plaster statues, men and women of such paralyzing virtue that they never thought a nasty thought or did an evil thing their whole life long. Saints are essentially life givers. To be with them is to become more alive.”[2] Every Christian has them: precious people who have helped shape us, role models in the art of living well, people who continue to inspire and encourage us. Some of them may still be around, others have joined the church in heaven. Some of them you may have known in person, others you may have heard or read about. They are your saints, the people through whom God has made you who you are and continues to form you. Most of them are not  faith celebrities or super heroes of piety, but people like Angus and Minnie, ordinary people whose lives reflect God’s grace like walking mirrors.

Saint John the Divine was a Christian leader, banned by order of Rome to the island of Patmos. Jerusalem was gone; the Romans, tired of the protests and revolts in the volatile province of Judaea, had destroyed the city and demolished the Temple—a pile of rubble was all that was left. With an iron fist they had brought peace to the troubled region, the Roman variety of peace, that is, PAX ROMANA.

Christians were suspect because of their refusal to honor the gods of the empire. Violent persecution of the church wasn’t the norm, but many Christian leaders were executed or imprisoned, or, as in John’s case, banned. He found himself far from home, a prisoner on the small island of Patmos, off the coast of Turkey. The world around him was falling to pieces, and he knew that across the sea, in the cities of Asia Minor, where arrests and executions continued, his friends were suffering. They were losing hope. They weren’t running into trees out of joyful exuberance, but because Roman imperial culture surrounded them with demands that turned their acts of faithfulness to the risen Lord into acts of rebellion. How could they possibly acclaim the emperor as Lord and Son of God when they had come to know Jesus as Lord? How could they praise the emperor as Savior of the World when that title belonged to Jesus Christ alone? How could they continue to live faithfully when all they could see was Rome’s overwhelming might?

John saw all that, but it wasn’t all that he saw. He looked beyond the horizon defined by Rome’s imperial reach. And he saw a holy city coming down out of heaven from God. He saw a city for all peoples, a beautiful city of true peace.

To what end do we put on the white robe of baptism? To what end do we follow Jesus on the way, and not other lords that vie for our allegiance? To what end do we love and serve God and our neighbor, and not our own ambitions? We are walking toward that city. In faith we have embraced the gospel as the story of our life, and those who are walking with us, along with those who went before us, adjust our vision and help us align our lives with the promises of God.

The end, Saint John reminds us, is not a handful of souls escaping to heaven; the end is the new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven to earth. The end is not one tribe’s triumph over the others, or one nation’s imperial aspirations fulfilled—the end is a city for all peoples, and God is at home among them, dwelling with them, wiping every tear from their eyes. The end is a city where death is no more, where mourning, crying, and pain are no more—because the old order has passed away for good.

The end is a feast for all peoples, a feast of rich food and well-aged wines where the nations join Israel in singing, “This is the Lord for whom we have waited; let us be glad and rejoice in his salvation,” and the one seated on the throne says, “See, I am making all things new.”

We hunger and thirst for righteousness, and we can already see what is coming. We long for redemption and a world where people come together to celebrate and share the gift of life, and in the company of God’s saints we can already see what is coming. We follow Jesus on the way, and in the company of Isaiah and John, surrounded by the great cloud of witnesses, our eyes are lined up with the promises and purposes of God, and we can see what is coming: the blessed communion of humanity with God, the joy of heaven to earth come down, unhindered and unending and complete.

To what end do we put on the white robe of baptism? To what end to we follow Jesus on the way, and not other lords that vie for our allegiance? To what end do we love and serve God and our neighbor, and not our own ambitions?

To be part of the great transformation that heals life’s wounds and fulfills the promise of creation. To receive and give the fullness of God’s love and grace.

[1] Michael L. Lindvall, Leaving North Haven: The Further Adventures of a Small Town Pastor (New York: Crossroad, 2002)

[2] Wishful Thinking, 102.

An oasis of friendship

There’s an old story about a gentile who wanted to convert to Judaism. He went to Rabbi Shammai and said to him, “Take me as a proselyte, but on condition that you teach me the entire Torah, all of it, while I stand on one foot.” Shammai, insulted by this request, threw him out of the house. Then the man went to Rabbi Hillel, and Hillel accepted the challenge, saying, “What you don’t like, don’t do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary—now go and study!”[1]

The debate didn’t begin with Shammai and Hillel, and it didn’t end with them. According to Jewish tradition, 613 commandments were given to Moses. 365 negative commandments, answering to the number of days of the year, and 248 positive commandments, answering to the number of members of the human body.[2] Thus the commandments of God address the whole human person, every day of the year, and they cover all of life: what to eat and what to wear, when to work and when to rest, how to teach your children and how to treat strangers, how to lend and borrow, how to love your spouse and how to cook a meal, how to pray and how to farm—everything. Is there a way, students of the Torah wondered, to capture that totality in a single teaching? Is there one commandment that is something like the principle that is being unfolded in all the others, a central commandment, as it were, that anchors all the others?

The prophet Micah named three: “What does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” The prophet Isaiah named two: “Maintain justice and do what is right.” The prophet Amos named one: “Seek me and live.” And the prophet Habakkuk named another: “The righteous shall live by their faith.”[3] Rabbi Hillel answered, “What you don’t like, don’t do to your neighbor.”

Last week when I stood in the candy aisle, wondering what to get for the neighborhood kids for Halloween, I said to myself, “What you don’t like, don’t do to your young neighbors.” So I didn’t get any candy corn, and saying that candy corn fits the category of what I don’t like, is putting it mildly. I also didn’t get what I do like, simply because I’m more than a few years past my prime as a connoisseur of kids’ candy. So I got some KitKats, some Hershey bars with almonds, and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. But now my curiosity had been piqued: What is the most popular candy bar in the United States?

Lists, of course, abound on the internet, and I learned that M&Ms are the top selling candy in the United States. Yeah, I could have bought some M&Ms, I said to myself, but noticed with great relief that Peanut Butter Cups and Hershey bars came in second and third, and Kit Kat a very respectable fifth. I also learned that Candy Corn ranked sixth in Halloween candy sales last year, ahead of Snickers and Sour Patch Kids, which is just devastating.

But sales numbers don’t tell the whole story when it comes to popularity. Because what we buy and hand out may not be what the kids going door to door actually like. Somebody, of course, did a survey, with a cutoff at age 17, of U.S. kids’ favorite Halloween candies. The results? Let’s just say I won the candy aisle trifecta: Hershey Bar #1, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups #2, and Kit Kat #3. They also surveyed kids up to age 17 to find the most hated Halloween candy in the nation. Do I have to say it? It ranked #6 in sales and #1 in most hated: Candy Corn.[4]

When the scribe asked Jesus, “Which commandment is the first of all?” he didn’t have rankings in mind. He didn’t want to know which commandment Jesus thought was most important, followed by 612 less important ones. As a scholar of Torah he was interested in determining whether there was one commandment that was foundational for all the others, one stone, as it were, upon wich the entire edifice of devotion and obedience rested.

Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” 

The greatness of the double love commandment, writes Amy Allen, “lies not in its surpassing value over and against all of the other commandments of Jewish law, but, rather, in its ability to hold up all the rest. It’s less about beating out all of the other candidates and more about helping them to do their jobs.” The rock upon which the whole structure rests is love.

And Jesus didn’t name just one commandment, but two, implying that the will and desire of God for God’s people cannot be reduced to a single principle; all the commandments are rooted in a set of relationships. Love of God and love of neighbor go together, inseparably, so that we cannot be in right relationship with God without being in right relationship with each other, and we cannot love each other well without giving over our whole and broken selves to God—heart, soul, mind, strength. These two love commandments come first in the law because it is on them that all of the rest of the commandments of the Torah rest—all that God asks of God’s people, God asks as a response to and expression of love.[5] Together they reveal the meaning and orientation of the Torah as a whole.[6]

Most of us think we know what love is and that we are all talking about the same thing when we say the word—but we’re not. Love is about affection, desire, commitment and belonging, and the constellation of these elements shifts from relationship to relationship and from season to season. In our twenty-first century world love has widely been reduced to having good feelings about someone or something, and it has lost much of its core as a call to faithful action. Douglas Hare reminds us that,

In an age when the word ‘love’ is greatly abused, it is important to remember that the primary component of … love [in the Bible] is not affection but commitment. Warm feelings of gratitude may fill our consciousness as we consider all that God has done for us, but it is not warm feelings that [the commandment] demands of us but rather stubborn, unwavering commitment. Similarly, to love our neighbor, including our enemies, does not mean that we must feel affection for them. To love the neighbor is to imitate God by taking their needs seriously.[7]

Love is a deep loyalty to another, the kind of loyalty Ruth shows her mother-in-law. And when Jesus highlights the intimate link between loving God and loving our neighbor, he’s not telling us to have warm feelings for friends and strangers alike, but to commit ourselves to their wellbeing. Your neighbor, according to Jesus, can literally be your next-door neighbor who might be tired of eating alone or who might need somebody to rake the leaves for her. Your neighbor may be your father and mother who, after so many years, need you in unfamiliar ways that almost reverse the relationship of parent and child. Your neighbor is every person you encounter, and to love them is to take their desire to flourish no less seriously than you take your own. Think about that. To love them is to take their desire to flourish no less seriously than you take your own.

We know that there are all kinds of love. There is a covetous love that simply takes what it wants, but that is far from neighbor love. There is the love between equals, a love that thrives in mutuality and reciprocity. And there is a kind of love that is self-giving without a thought of reciprocity, a love whose sole concern is the other person’s well-being. Neither love reflects a merely emotional state, but rather, points to the relation in which one person lives toward another. One can perhaps be described as true friendship, the other as a holy selflessness that borders on recklessness. There are different words for these loves in New Testament Greek, but the two cannot be neatly separated. We often experience them together, be it as friends, lovers, parents, or neighbors, and at times we live out one more fully than the other.

Jesus calls us to follow him and to move continually from a self-centered way of being in the world to one centered in complete devotion to God and in those whom God gives us as neighbors. Jesus leads us from apathy to love.

The scribe said to Jesus, “You are right, Teacher; you have truly said that ‘he is one, and besides him there is no other’; and ‘to love him with all the heart, and with all the understanding, and with all the strength,’ and ‘to love one’s neighbor as oneself,’—this is much more important than all whole burnt offerings and sacrifices.”

Significant as the temple liturgy, offerings, and sacrifices are, giving ourselves completely to God and giving of ourselves to each other is much more important. The scribe agrees with Jesus. This remarkable scene is the only one in all of Mark’s gospel where a religious authority agrees with Jesus. Throughout his ministry, Jesus has encountered strong opposition from temple leadership—the chief priests, scribes and elders—and now that Jesus is in Jerusalem, the conflict between him and them continues to escalate. They are already conspiring to have him arrested and put on trial, and any questions they are asking him are designed to trip him up or trap him.

Except for this scribe who breaks the hostile pattern by asking a sincere question. He transcends the party strife and the us vs. them mentality. And Jesus answers him in an equally non-combative way. The scene itself illustrates what love of neighbor, in particular love of the challenging neighbor, might look like. In the middle of the brewing storm the two make room for each other and for each other’s honest questions and honest answers, for the pursuit of a deeper understanding of God’s will for God’s people—and the moment sparkles like an oasis of friendship in a wasteland of hostility and fear.

“You are not far from the kingdom of God,” Jesus says to the scribe, and that, in Mark’s telling of the gospel, is as close as it gets for any of us who await the kingdom’s consummation. Not far from the kingdom, closer to the truth and peace of God, closer to life in fullness.

[1] See Babylonian Talmud Shabbat 31a

[2] See Babylonian Talmud Makkot 23b-24a

[3] Micah 6:8; Isaiah 56:1; Amos 5:4; Habakkuk 2:4

[4] https://blog.galvanize.com/candy-crush-figuring-out-favorite-sweets-with-data/

[5] Amy Lindeman Allen https://politicaltheology.com/the-politics-of-the-greatest-commandment-mark-12-28-34/

[6] Eugene Boring, Mark, 345.

[7] Douglas Hare, “Matthew,” Interpretation Commentaries, 260.

Subversive love

They were on the way to Jerusalem. Jesus was walking ahead of them, with resolve in his stride, often a solitary figure against the horizon. The physical distance between him and the disciples illustrates how hard it is for us to follow him, to keep up with him, to walk the path he has blazed with his life.

The disciples in Mark’s story didn’t fully grasp yet who they were following and where he was going. On the way, Jesus had begun to teach them that he must undergo great suffering and be killed and after three days rise again, and they couldn’t bear to hear it. The first time Peter rebuked him for saying such things.[1] The second time, Jesus told them again that the Son of Man would be betrayed into human hands and be killed, and after three days rise again. And they didn’t understand what he was saying, and they were afraid to ask. Instead, they argued with each other about who was the greatest.[2] “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all,” he taught us then, but we’re slow learners. All we can do is try and keep up with him. A third time Jesus stopped to tell the twelve what awaited him in Jerusalem, and this time he added even more detail. He would be handed over. He would be rejected and condemned by the temple authorities. He would be mocked, abused, tortured, and killed. And after three days he would rise again. That’s when James and John came forward, the sons of Zebedee. They had been with him since the early days of his mission in Galilee.

“Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.” Perhaps you wonder if they had heard at all what he had just said. What led them to make this about themselves, this moment when Jesus had just spoken about what would happen to him in Jerusalem? How could they be so obtuse and insensitive? There remains, though, the possibility that they had actually listened to every word and heard every detail about how he would run into the walls of rejection and political convenience, and how these walls would become his grave. And perhaps their confidence in Jesus’ final triumph was so complete that they cast their vision past the darkness that lay ahead, and into the glory beyond. In their minds, perhaps they were already standing in the royal palace, with their toes touching the threshold to the banquet hall, and seated on the throne of glory they saw the Risen One.

“What is it you want me to do for you?” Jesus asked them. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory,” they replied. Were they dreaming about cabinet seats? Certainly the Messiah would need a Chief of Staff or a Chief Justice – and why not them, trusted friends who had been with him almost from day one? They knew how power works: the grand pyramid with its wide base among those in the dust, rising all the way up to the few whose feet never touch the ground because they rest on soft couches and ride in limousines or fly in personal jets. It’s a tall structure, with multiple layers, and the higher you climb, the greater the power and the more exclusive the company. James and John envisioned greatness quite conventionally, as most of us do, with the greatest occupying the pinnacle of the pyramid and God hovering over the top. They wanted to sit at the right hand and the left of the one in charge, imagining God’s reign like any kind of earthly rule, only shinier and purer, without corruption and cover-ups.

James and John knew how power and status work, we all do. Social Psychologists tell us that status anxiety accounts for much of what we do on a daily basis. We need to know where we are on the pyramid and where the people around us fit in: Are they above? Below? Somewhere on the same level? And when we’re not busy climbing, we’re busy keeping ourselves from falling. It’s hard, stressful work.

James and John were disarmingly honest about wanting to be near the top of the pyramid. “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory,” they said. And Jesus said to them, “You do not know what you are asking.” They had been two of the three disciples who witnessed Jesus’ transfiguration on the mountain, who saw him robed in clothes of dazzling white and conversing with Moses and Elijah. Perhaps the brothers were imagining a similar scene with them in it. John Calvin called the whole episode “a bright mirror of human vanity,” and the writer of Matthew was so embarrassed by the disciples’ lack of understanding that he had the mother of James and John make the request on their behalf.[3] Mark wants us to look into the mirror and see ourselves; and Mark is very careful to remind us that the only ones at Jesus’ left and right when he was hailed “King of the Jews” were the two bandits who were crucified with him.[4]

The way of the Christ is the way of the cross, not a new and improved way to lord it over others. Jesus puts his own life and death, along with the lives and sufferings of his followers, in complete opposition to conventional expressions of power. “You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.  But it is not so among you.” His death would exemplify the violent resistance his teaching and practice elicit from those who hold power over society, and it would exemplify a radical renunciation of that kind of power.[5] And more than a radical renunciation. In his death and resurrection, Jesus has delivered us from the constellations of power we concoct to control each other and set us free to serve one another.

“Not what I want, but what you want,” was Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane as he prepared to drink the cup of suffering, and those who follow him learn to pray with him.[6] Not what I want—not my aspirations, my ambitions, my pursuits—but what you want—your will, your purposes, your kingdom. The reign of God conquers the world not by overpowering it, but by subverting our notions of power.

Everybody wants to be somebody, and there’s nothing wrong with that, nothing at all. But since the dawn of human history, we have been tempted to choose power over love. Jesus didn’t manipulate people to get what he wanted. He didn’t use others in the pursuit of his own personal ambitions. Jesus was in the world as one who served God and every human being he encountered. And in his company, we learn to look at others not as means to our ends or as threats to our status, but as beloved of God. On the way with him, we let ourselves be opened to the coming reign of God where love alone is sovereign.

Martin Copenhaver tells a story about a church where he had been the pastor years ago. Some of the older members could remember a time when the wealthy families would send their servants to help cook church suppers alongside those who did not have servants to send. The world changed, and by the time Pastor Martin came to the church these stories were repeated with some amusement, but similar confusions continued.

According to the bylaws of the church the deacons were charged with the spiritual leadership of the congregation, and at a deacons meeting, someone complained that instead of being true to this high and momentous charge, deacons spent too much of their time delivering food to the homeless shelter and washing dishes after communion. How could they tend to important spiritual matters when they were occupied with such mundane tasks? “I schlepp bread and wine from the kitchen to the table, and when all have eaten I take the dishes back to the kitchen and wash them,” one of the deacons complained. “I feel like a glorified butler.”

They did a little Bible study and discovered that the apostles in the Jerusalem church commissioned deacons to take food to the widows. They learned that the word deacon was the anglicized version of the Greek diakonos, and that a diakonos was a servant or a waiter. They were indeed butlers, charged with the mundane task of delivering food, and they were indeed glorified because that simple act of service was an expression of the love of Christ the servant.[7]

Here at Vine Street, just a few days after our big anniversary weekend, the new season of Room in the Inn will begin. Every first, third, and fifth Thursday, from November to March, we will come together to prepare and serve meals, to make beds and set tables, and to open the doors of this house and welcome our unhoused guests.

Call us glorified butlers, if you want. Call us waiters or servants, we’d be honored, for we’re serving in the company of Jesus; we’re learning from the master.

We’re aware that our desire to be affirmed as persons of importance is deeply rooted in us; we all want to be somebody. But in the company of Jesus we practice affirming one another in our shared dignity as members of God’s household. We’re participating in the revolution that undermines the love of power with the power of love. Because we all are somebody.

[1] Mark 8:31-33

[2] Mark 9:30-37

[3] Mt 20:20-22

[4] Mk 9:2-8; 15:27

[5] With thanks to Matt Skinner http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=435

[6] Mk 14:36

[7] Martin Copenhaver, Christian Century, October 5, 1994, 893.

Fully known

He is a good man, perhaps even a very good man. He comes to Jesus – he ran up to him, we’re told – and he kneels before him with a question. His approach and his posture tell us that he’s not merely asking out of curiosity; he’s not asking to test Jesus or to make him say something that would get him in trouble with the authorities; he’s asking with urgency, and he is sincere, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

We have heard the story before, many times. With him kneeling there, we can already hear those dreaded words from Jesus’ lips, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.” We know the man will go away grieving, with his many possessions holding him back. Our hearts grieve with him as we watch him go away.

In the entire Gospel of Mark he’s the only person singled out as being loved by Jesus. He’s also the only one whom Jesus called who didn’t follow. Turned around and walked away. And we are once again left standing at the scene, wondering what we would have done, what we would do, what we should do in response to Jesus’ unsettling words.

The writer of Hebrews declares, “Indeed, the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, … it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare.” The word of God is not safely contained between the covers of an old book, but living and active, and it cuts with laser-like precision. It gets to us. It unsettles and disrupts. It finds its way to our innermost thoughts and intentions, things we may not even share with our best friends, rendering us naked and bare before God. We have learned to wrap ourselves in protective layers, but the word of God cuts through them like butter; it is aimed at the heart and it never misses. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

Am I too rich to enter?

Do I really want what Jesus offers?

Am I letting my stuff get between me and the life God wants for me?

Is my stuff getting between me and the life I really want?

Do I have to sell what I own and give it to the poor? All of it?

Maybe that was only meant for that particular man, and not for me?

I’m not rich anyway, not really. Rich is relative, and I’m not Oprah or Jeff Bezos.

Our minds add protective layer upon protective layer at the speed of thought so we don’t stand quite so naked and bare before God. Surely this episode isn’t to be taken literally, we tell ourselves. Surely its true depth lies in its symbolism—so why don’t you unfold the metaphor for us, preacher? Give us something spiritually uplifting to cover our nakedness.

It’s been done, quite creatively. In one medieval commentary, a scholar surmised that “the eye of the needle” was the name of one of the city gates of Jerusalem. In order for a camel to get through, the burden had to be taken off its back, and the beast had to get on its knees. This was obviously an excellent interpretation for a time when every bishop dreamed of building a cathedral: tell folks who wish to enter eternal life to get on their knees and write checks to the church until the burden on their back is small enough to let them slip through the gate. Never mind that Jesus told the man to give the money to the poor, not the church. Never mind that there never was such a gate. It certainly was a lucrative interpretation, but the word of God is living and active and sharp, and no effort of ours can render it convenient and dull or dead. There’s no easy button.

Just before this scene with the rich man, Jesus said, “whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.”[1] A little child is the personification of need and trusting dependence. The rich man in today’s lesson is everything a little child is not; he is the personification of achievement and confident self-reliance. He knows how to get things done. When presented with a challenge, he has various options at his disposal, and a solution is never more than a phone call away.

But he ran, Mark tells us, to get to Jesus and ask him, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus names the commandments dealing with our responsibilities toward family and neighbors, and the man replies, “I have kept all these since my youth.” Nothing in the story suggests that he is lying or bragging. Jesus tells the man, “You lack one thing. Go, sell what you own, give the money to the poor; then come and follow me.”

The two scenes highlight a great irony: the little children who possess nothing, don’t lack anything – the kingdom of God is theirs. Yet this man who has achieved so much and knows so much, and possesses so much, lacks the one thing that would open to him the door to eternal life. “Go, sell what you own, give the money to the poor; then come, follow me.” He can’t do it. “Children,” Jesus says to the disciples, “how hard it s to enter God’s kingdom!”

Children he calls them, all of the grown-ups who are trying to keep up with him on the way—and like us, they are perplexed and stunned. The eye of a needle is so very small, too small to squeeze through—then who can enter?

The kingdom of God is not a matter of squeezing through. No amount of knowledge, goodness, or wealth will open the door to life’s fulfillment. The question is not, “What must I do to inherit eternal life?” We want to believe that with enough effort and control we will be able to secure our own future.

The real question is, “What is God doing to make life whole?” And Jesus looks at us and says, “Come with me.” The fullness of life we seek is found in the company of Jesus. According to Jesus’ response to this man, even those among us who have done everything right and have been very successful in every way imaginable, even those very few, in the end, do not accomplish our way to God’s reign, but enter it in the company of Jesus.

The good news sounds like bad news at first: we cannot save ourselves. But it is indeed good news: we cannot save ourselves; only God can. And so Jesus invites us to trust God with our lives and our future, to trust God completely with the work of saving us. And he helps us turn our attention away from ourselves and our anxious worry about our salvation to the needs of those around us: to the poor, the hungry, the unhoused, the little ones.

For life to be truly fulfilled, the perils of wealth must be addressed as well as the perils of poverty. Jesus gets us to think and pray deeply about those perils with his challenging answer, and his word resists all our efforts to domesticate it or dull its sharp edge for easier handling.

It may well be that Jesus’ call to “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, … then come, follow me”— it may well be that this isn’t meant for everyone; but the call could still be meant for me or for you. We have to let it do its work. “Today, if you hear God’s voice, do not harden your hearts.”[2]

The writer of Hebrews reminds us that

the word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing until it divides soul from spirit, joints from marrow; it is able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart. And before him no creature is hidden, but all are naked and laid bare to the eyes of the one to whom we must render an account.

The language of a sword that pierces and cuts may be offputting, but the reality it describes is a hopeful one: no part of the human life is beyond the knowing gaze of God. We are fully known. In Psalm 139 we are invited to say with the psalmist,

O Lord, you have searched me and known me.

You know when I sit down and when I rise up;

you discern my thoughts from far away.

You search out my path and my lying down,

and are acquainted with all my ways.

Even before a word is on my tongue,

O Lord, you know it completely.

Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

It was you who formed my inward parts;

you knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Search me, O God, and know my heart;

test me and know my thoughts.

See if there is any wicked way in me,

and lead me in the way everlasting.[3]

No part of the human life is beyond the knowing gaze of God, but this gaze is not the round-the-clock surveillance of our every thought, word and deed by the big eye in the sky. It is the knowing gaze of a loving God who wants us to finally be who we were created to be—without fear, without pretense, without hiding.

[1] Mk 10:15

[2] A line from Ps 95:8 which is quoted repeatedly in Heb 3:8, 15; 4:7

[3] Ps 139:1-4, 7, 13, 23f.

Pioneer of our salvation

In 1849, in fear that she, along with the other slaves on the plantation, was to be sold, Harriet Tubman resolved to run away. One night she set out on foot. Following the North Star, she made her way from Maryland to Pennsylvania and on to Philadelphia. She found work there, saved her money, and the following year she returned to Maryland to escort her sister and her sister’s two children to freedom. And then she went back again to rescue her brother and two other men.

And she didn’t stop. The reward for her capture kept going up. By 1856, it was at $40,000. That’s a lot of money. We know that the Christian Church in Nashville, the congregation we know today as Vine Street, built a mighty fine church in 1852 for half of that. Nineteen times during a ten-year span, Harriet Tubman made the dangerous trip into the South, leading more than 300 slaves to freedom. And, as she once proudly pointed out to Frederick Douglass, in all of her journeys she “never lost a single passenger.”[1]

Calling her a “conductor” for the underground railroad seems very understated. John Brown addressed her as “General Tubman” in their correspondence, and many others simply called her “Moses.” She made a way in the wilderness, from the house of slavery to freedom. And she didn’t just tell others how to escape, she went with them, again and again, and she “never lost a single passenger.”

The author of Hebrews describes Jesus as one “bringing many children to glory” and calls him “the pioneer of their salvation.” A pioneer makes a way where there is no way, and the pioneer of our salvation doesn’t just blaze a trail and urge us to be careful and stay on it; he walks with us through the difficult landscape.

Somebody once asked Anne Lamott what she most wanted to convey to her son Sam about God. “I want to convey that we get to be human,” she answered.

We get to make awful mistakes and fall short of who we hope we’re going to turn out to be. That we don’t have to be what anybody else tries to get us to be, so they could feel better about who they were. We get to screw up right and left. We get to keep finding our way back home to goodness and kindness and compassion… I want him to know that no matter what happens, he’s never going to have to walk alone… That’s what I’m trying to convey to Sam.[2]

When you hear the opening verses of Hebrews, that kind of intimacy and closeness may not be the first thing that comes to mind. The first lines are like the Grand Tetons of poetic God-talk rising from the plains of everyday speech: enormous, majestic, awesome.

Long ago God spoke to our ancestors in many and various ways by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by a Son, who is the God-appointed heir of all things, through whom God created the worlds, who is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, who sustains all things by his powerful word, who, having made purification for sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become as much superior to angels as the name he has inherited is more excellent than theirs.

In the original Greek, the first four verses are just a single, carefully composed sentence, drawing listeners into the radiance of the divine presence and illustrating the bold claim that the entire history of creation, from the first day to its consummation, is contained in the life of Jesus. Commentators have long suggested that the writer may indeed be quoting, in entirety or in part, from the liturgy of the church to which the words were first addressed, reminding them of the powerful affirmations they shared.

I keep saying “the author” or “the writer” because no one knows who wrote Hebrews, and no amount of research has been able to overcome the anonymity. But we can piece together a picture of the community for whom the text was composed: They are believers who have experienced a great deal of shaming and hostility from their neighbors. Why? They have withdrawn from certain religious and social activities that bind a city and its people together, and their neighbors disapprove.[3] The believers experience serious pressures to conform to the ways things are done in the city, ways that go against their values as followers of Jesus, and not going along has consequences. The ongoing assaults on the believers’ honor, their economic standing, and even their persons are taking their toll on individual commitment. Some have stopped identifying with the Christian community entirely, others are in danger of “drifting away” or “turning away.”[4] The hymnic opening lines of Hebrews redirect their attention and ours toward the Son and the significance of the divine word spoken through his life and suffering, his death and exaltation. If this pioneer is not our constant, our central point of reference amid the swirling currents and pressures of our days, be it in first-century Rome or in twenty-first-century Nashville, who or what is?

The writer of Hebrews wants us to remember that the righteousness of God is not an idea or a concept; it is an embodied reality in Jesus. In him God embraces humanity, all of it, the best and the worst we’re capable of, our deepest joys as well as our anxieties, our desires, our hurts—us. And in him humanity opens itself up to God’s embrace, in complete trust and obedience. And so Jesus is the exact imprint of God’s very being and of ours as creatures made in the image of God.

The author of Hebrews recognizes God’s deep solidarity with us particularly in Jesus’ death:

We see Jesus, who for a little while was made lower than the angels, now crowned with glory and honor because of the suffering of death, so that by the grace of God he might taste death for everyone. It was fitting that God, for whom and through whom all things exist, in bringing many children to glory, should make the pioneer of their salvation perfect through sufferings.

For Jesus, any life short of suffering and death would have been less than a complete identification with humankind, less than a complete embrace of our condition. And tasting death for everyone, he made a way for everyone, to set free those who were held in slavery by their fear of death, and never to lose a single passenger.

Rowan Williams has referred to the church as the “pilot project for the new humanity.”

What is the new humanity? The humanity set free for intimacy with God. It’s the restoration of God’s image in us. That image, which is fulfilled perfectly in Jesus, is now communicated to us, and we are restored to where we ought to be. Our position in the world is now what it was meant to be because we were made for intimacy. We were made for communion. We were made for meaning. And for all those things to come alive again in the presence and the power of Jesus, that is what life in the body of Christ makes possible. That’s why the Church is the pilot project for the new humanity. The point of the Church, if you like, is that glory may dwell in our land. The glory of God in transfigured human faces, and we are there to hold that space and that hope, that place for the imagination to go, where human beings are allowed to grow into more than they’re allowed to grow into in [this] materialist environment. Our job is to try to make sure that the Church goes on being a landscape for that kind of humanity: a pilot project for the human race, a project worth joining because it leads into a bigger, not a smaller, world.[5]

Our passage from Hebrews ends with a joyful exclamation from Psalm 22, words spoken by Jesus who is not ashamed to call any of us his siblings. “I will proclaim your name to my siblings, in the midst of the congregation I will praise you.” Psalm 22 continues for several more verses after this one, and they open windows to an even bigger world. The psalmist - and I don’t mind imagining Jesus as the one speaking those lines as the author of Hebrews did - Jesus proposes a banquet for all the beneficiaries of God’s deliverance: himself, the poor, the sick, foreigners, even the deceased and future generations—all of us are siblings by virtue of our deliverance, all of us come home to goodness and kindness and compassion, all of us have a seat at God’s table because Jesus is the pioneer of our salvation.

Every Sunday we gather at the table to give thanks to God for the gift of life and for Jesus who leads his siblings out of any house where their dignity as children of God is being denied. And today we give thanks that this table stretches across the ages and around the world, reminding us who and whose we are, and inspiring us to give ourselves to the pilot project for the new humanity, to entrust ourselves completely to the pioneer of our salvation.

[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4p1535.html

[2] Jennifer L. Holberg, ed., Shouts and Whispers: Twenty-One Writers Speak About Their Writing and Their Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 199-200.

[3] See Hebrews 10:32-34; with thanks to David A. deSilva for his notes about the pastoral situation https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-27-2/commentary-on-hebrews-11-4-25-12-5

[4] See 10:25; 2:1; 3:12

[5]Rowan Williams, Archbishop's address to the Chelmsford Clergy Synod, 4th May 2006,

http://www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/sermons_speeches/060504%20Chelmsford%20clergy%20address.htm

Stumbling on the way

They had been arguing with one another who was the greatest, when Jesus took a little child and put it among them, and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” There hasn’t been a generation of disciples who didn’t have that argument about greatness, and across the ages, disciples have been confounded and confused by Jesus’ declaration that it’s the little ones, the ones without any power or status, in whom we welcome Christ himself and the Holy One who sent him.

I wonder if Jesus was still holding the child in his arms when John interjected, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” It’s profoundly ironic that John, a disciple belonging to the inner circle among the Twelve, wasn’t paying attention to what Jesus was saying, but rather to what someone else was doing in Jesus’ name. “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” Yes, you heard that right. “We tried to stop him,” he said, not “because he was not following you” or “because he was not following with us.” Someone was liberating people from demonic possession, and was doing so in Jesus’ name, and John said, “we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.” The apostolic circle was worried about ministry in Jesus’ name that hadn’t been authorized by them. And their worries had taken up so much of their mental and emotional bandwidth that they casually equated following Jesus with following them.

The big question was, who holds the copyright on Jesus’ name? Who determines what is legitimate ministry and what is not? John clearly was thinking about some kind of restraining orders in order to maintain the boundaries of legitimate, apostolic ministry.

Mark has told us that, at the beginning of his ministry, Jesus went up the mountain and called to him those whom he wanted, and … he appointed twelve, whom he also named apostles, to be with him, and to be sent out to proclaim the message, and to have authority to cast out demons.[1] Now Jesus hasn’t withdrawn his commission of the Twelve, but he also shows no interest in issuing restraining orders. “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us.” John is worried, perhaps suffering from a little status anxiety, but Jesus opens the horizon of kingdom ministry as wide as can be imagined, and once again redirects our attention from what others may be doing in Jesus’ name to who we are called to be and what we are called to do. Our eyes need to be on the One who is going ahead of us and on the little ones he puts among us. Our feet need to be following in his footsteps, so we don’t stumble over our attitudes, our distractions, ourselves. Our hands need to be serving the neighbors he has given us, and just like John couldn’t see the child in Jesus’ arms because his attention was elsewhere, we will be blind to the presence of God in those of little or no status, unless we have our vision adjusted by the living Christ.

Our eyes must become eyes of compassionate attention. Our feet, the feet of peacemakers. Our lips, the lips of truthtellers. Our hands, hands of service and comfort. Our minds, minds of Christ-inspired thinking. Our whole selves conduits of God’s grace and mercy for the life of the world.

But then Jesus says, If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and go to hell, to the unquenchable fire.

And he’s not done. If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell.

And still he’s not done. If your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell.

I hear the words and they terrify me. I don’t know what to make of them. The images are so vivid, it’s difficult to remember that Jesus isn’t promoting self-mutilation. The brutality of the actions shocks me, the violence disturbs me. My immediate reaction is to look away and keep silent—and then I’m inclined to joke: Now if your other hand causes you to stumble, you’ll find it difficult to cut it off since you have only that one hand left. I’m desperate to find a reason to laugh to release at least some of the tight tension, yet at the same time I know that these words are no laughing matter. These words have a history; people have been scapegoated and cut off from their communities for allegedly causing others to stumble. Heretics were cut off and burnt at the stake lest they cause the body of Christ to stumble. Dissenters were cut off and disappeared lest they cause unrest in the body politic.

No, these words are no laughing matter. I wonder if they are meant to shock—because so much is at stake, and we don’t get it when Jesus tells us to stop obsessing about status and start paying attention to each other. Could it be that he speaks of decisive, violent action, because our lives are at stake and nothing else gets our attention?

I am reminded of a wolf who stepped into a trap and it snapped shut. For an entire day, she tried unsuccessfully to free herself, pulling and biting the chain, trying to pry open the steel jaws with her snout, her entire ordeal caught on a trail camera. The next day she bit off her own leg, leaving her foot in the trap. She was limping, but she was no longer caught in a deadly trap.

You know it’s not your foot that’s causing you to get off the path, literally or metaphorically. It’s not somebody’s hand that’s causing them to lash out and hurt their spouse or a child. It’s not my eye that’s causing me to overlook the needs of others and to see only what I want to see. It is my lack of attention to the will of God that’s causing me to stumble. It’s my fear, my apathy, my impatience. It is my being absorbed with myself, my status, and my needs that’s pulling me astray.

Jesus says that this path of self-centeredness can only end in hell, and I believe him. I don’t believe in hell, though, I believe in God. “Hell,” writes Daniel Migliore,

is best understood as wanting to be oneself apart from God’s grace and in isolation from others. Hell is that self-chosen condition in which, in opposition to God’s self-expending love and the call to a life of mutual friendship and service, individuals barricade themselves from God and others. It is the hellish weariness and boredom of life focused entirely on itself. Hell is not the vengeful divine punishment at the end of history depicted by religious imagination. It is not the final retaliation of a vindictive deity. Hell is self-destructive resistance to the eternal love of God. It symbolizes the truth that the meaning and intention of life can be missed. Repentance is urgent. Our choices and actions are important. God ever seeks to lead us out of our hell of self-glorification and lovelessness, but neither in time nor in eternity is God’s love coercive.[2]

The meaning and intention of life can be missed. We are made in the image of God to love as God loves. We are made for communion with God, with each other, and with all of creation. We bear the name of Christ in order that we might be conduits of God’s grace and mercy, and anything that blocks their flow must go.

The imagery of cutting limbs and gouging eyes is disturbing, but it reminds us that repentance and real change are needed, including the removal of any obstacles that hinder the flow of grace—the walls of fear and suspicion come to mind, the traps of pride, the dams of greed. Our formation as disciples of Jesus Christ involves our whole selves, from the soles of our feet to the crowns of our heads, and from our relationships across space and time to the depths of our soul. And the work of transformation occurs in prayer and in practice, in our gathering with the community believers, in silence and in praise, in our obedient attention to God’s work among us. In the end, it is not our willingness to go to violent extremes with ourselves or with others that allows us to enter life; it is God’s unwavering commitment to us and our redemption, and our willingness to allow God to do this work with us.

Just moments before he was betrayed, Jesus said to the disciples at the Mount of Olives, “You will all become deserters.” The word “deserters” is the same word translated “to stumble” in our passage and “to fall away” earlier in the gospel.[3] We will all stumble. We will all abandon Jesus, even Peter who was so very certain that he would never do that.

But it’s never our willingness to go to violent extremes with ourselves or with others that allows us to enter life. It is always God’s loyal, non-coercive love. It is always and forever God.

[1] Mark 3:14

[2] Daniel Migliore, Faith Seeking Understanding: An Introduction to Christian Theology, Third Ed., (Eerdmans Publishing, 2014), 366.

[3] Mark 14:27; see also Mark 4:17

Attention shift

I spent some time in Germany this summer, in the town where I grew up. I walked down the hill from our house where my mom still lives to the tram stop at the center of town, the same way I used to walk just about every schoolday for twelve years to get to school. And I noticed that the streets looked so much narrower than they had been in my memory.

I passed the Elementary School - a lovely building with lots of carved sandstone details around the windows and the tall, arched entrance. I remembered how stepping through those doors felt like entering a sacred space, a temple of sorts; I couldn’t help but look up, and I straightened my back, and I swear I felt less like “just a little boy” and more like a scholar, an explorer, a person. Passing my Elementary School this summer I noticed that it was much smaller than in my memory, a rather humble two-story building, but it still communicated the importance of the people who gather inside and the significance of their endeavors. I found myself wondering if perhaps it had been built to scale for 6-10-year-olds, a thought I found quite moving.

Do you remember how big everything was when you were little? How you had to reach up to touch the door knob? How getting on a chair was like climbing a piece of playground equipment? And do you remember that room full of adults who were all standing tall as trees and chatting way up there while you were trying to find your way across through a forest of legs?

We all have memories like that, memories of a world just beyond our reach, a world we can’t wait to belong to. Getting to sit at the grown-up table at family gatherings is easy, it’s just a matter of time, all you have to do is grow a little every year. Getting to hang out with the people you really want to hang out with at school is a lot tougher. That may be when many of us begin to wonder if just being who we are is enough; and we begin to project being the kind of person we believe others want us to be.

The disciples had met Jesus. They had met the one who would set all things right, and they had begun to follow him. He had talked about going to Jerusalem, and they were ready to go with him. But then he kept talking about being betrayed into human hands and being killed. They did not understand what he was saying, and they were afraid to ask him.

Why were they afraid to ask? Well, we kinda know how it is. You want to fit in with those who get it, those who nod knowingly whenever he speaks. Even when you’re frightened, confused and clueless, you still want to project confidence and make everybody else believe that you have it all together. And so in Mark’s story, the disciples, instead of asking how the way of the Messiah could possibly have anything to do with getting killed, they share their aspirations for high office in the kingdom.

Two of them discuss sitting at Jesus’ right and left in his glory. One of them never misses an opportunity to mention that he has been with Jesus the longest. And while one touts his revolutionary zeal, another braggs about his connections in the business community from his days as a tax collector. They are afraid to ask what Jesus meant when he talked about betrayal, suffering, and death in the city, but they clearly have no trouble imagining their seats at the big table and their names and titles on kingdom letterhead.

Jesus, of course, is never afraid to ask. “What were you arguing about on the way?” And suddenly they were silent, the whole chatty, ambitious bunch; no one said a word. Why the sudden silence? Well, we kinda know how it is. Had he asked them in private, individually, several of them probably would have told him about Theophilus who “thinks he’s the greatest” or about Bartholomew who is “dreaming about a seat on the supreme court.” But with everybody gathered around, perhaps they were afraid or too embarrassed to be open about their dreams of greatness.

Three times in the gospel of Mark, Jesus talks about being rejected and betrayed, about being handed over and condemned to death and being killed and rising again after three days. Three times, and not merely because this is disturbing news that messes with our assumptions and won’t sink in easily, but because being a disciple of Jesus means being on the way with Jesus and letting his way of loving surrender of self for the sake of the kingdom shape us. Our ways of thinking, speaking, doing, living are inextricably tied to his way. We don’t understand and we’re afraid to ask not just because we want to keep up the appearance of our deep knowledge. We’re quiet because he messes with our assumptions and has this habit of flipping things upside down in our world. And he does it again. He says, “Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”

In our world, those at the top of the ladder lord it over those at the bottom. But in the world Jesus lives, proclaims and opens up, in the world of God’s reign, earth and heaven do not touch at the top, in the clouds of power, but at the bottom where Jesus kneels to wash the feet of all. He defines greatness in terms of service, and nothing else. His way remains at ground level and it leads to all of us, every last one of us.

We all start out little. We all start out needing to be welcomed. We all need somebody to see us and speak our name, somebody to pick us up and hold us, because we all start out small, needy and helpless. How much of our drive for greatness, do you think, has to do with that deep need to be seen, to be noticed and recognized, and finally welcomed?

Jesus took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” We argue about who is the greatest and Jesus puts a little child among us. Who even knew there was a child? Who noticed? We were engaged in important matters, making sure our voice would be heard, our opinion registered, and our contribution recognized in its true significance. And Jesus puts a little child among us.

Politicians pick up little children all the time, it looks good on any screen and it makes them more likeable. But Jesus doesn’t pick up a child to draw attention to himself. He does it to draw our attention to the child.

“In any culture, children are vulnerable,” writes Elisabeth Johnson.

They are dependent on others for their survival and well-being. In the ancient world, their vulnerability was magnified by the fact that they had no legal protection. A child had no status, no rights. A child certainly had nothing to offer anyone in terms of honor or status.[1]

Pheme Perkins observes how “our social conventions have exalted childhood as a privileged time of innocence,” but in stark contrast, “the child in antiquity was a non-person.” And Jesus identifies himself with the child, who was socially invisible.[2]

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” You want to be great and you make yourself as big as you possible can, just to be seen and recognized. But in the world of God’s reign you’re not being welcomed because you’re great. You are being welcomed because you belong. So don’t be afraid to shift your attention. Notice the ones that habitually go unnoticed, who are not great by any common measure, and welcome them.

“Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.” The welcome, welcome, welcome of Jesus’ radical hospitality on earth resounds like the holy, holy, holy sung in heaven.

Much of our religious tradition has taught us to wonder, “What must I do, who do I have to be, who do I have to become in order to be worthy of welcome by the holy God? How can I work my way up?” But Jesus works at ground level. He looks us in the eye and says, “I see you. I know you. I love you.” He turns our attention away from ourselves and our anxious obsession with our status,  and frees us to turn our attention toward each other. He stops the lonely ascend to the top that is our quest for recognition and control, and he guides our feet into the path that leads us to see and serve each other. Jesus opens our eyes to see that the neighbors who are constantly rendered invisible by our arrangements of power, are indeed the embodiment of the invisible God.

Perhaps some of you have been wondering in recent weeks, what became of the men and women who used to live in tents under the Jefferson Bridge. And what became of the people who used to camp at Brookmeade Park? Where do they live now?

How long do we want to pretend that rendering them invisible is the best we can do? When will we finally see them?

[1] https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-25-2/commentary-on-mark-930-37-5

[2] Pheme Perkins, Mark (NIB), 637.

Feathers and ambers

There’s a Jewish folktale that’s been told and retold for generations. A man went about the village telling tales and gossip about the rabbi. Later, he realized the wrong he had done, and began to feel remorse. He went to the rabbi and begged his forgiveness, saying he would do anything he could to make amends.

The rabbi told the man, “Go home, take a feather pillow, and cut it open. Then come back here, and on the way, drop handfuls of feathers as you go.”

The man thought this was a strange request, but it was a simple enough task, and he did it gladly. When he returned, he asked the rabbi, “What now?”

“Now, go and gather the feathers.”

“But that’s impossible! The wind has blown them all over town!”

“Just like the thoughtless words you spoke.”

According to the Talmud, a body of ancient teaching in Judaism, “the tongue is an instrument so dangerous that it must be kept hidden from view, behind two protective walls, the mouth and teeth, to prevent its misuse.”[1] In the book of Proverbs, those who desire wisdom are taught that “to watch over mouth and tongue is to keep out of trouble.”[2] And already in the first chapter, James has declared with urgency, “let everyone be quick to listen, slow to speak.”[3] Steve and Cokie Roberts, in their book, From This Day Forward, write,

A friend recently told us about a twenty-fifth-anniversary party where the husband gave a toast and said, “The key to our success is very simple. Within minutes after every fight, one of us says, ‘I’m sorry, Sally.’”

Good line, but it’s also true that what you don’t say in a marriage can be as important as what you do say. We often joke that the success of a marriage can be measured by the number of teeth marks in your tongue. Keeping quiet in the first place means you don’t have to say “I’m sorry” quite so often.[4]

Speech is potent and dangerous. Sticks and stones may break my bones but words—words will hurt or heal, delight or destroy, offend or befriend. James compares the tongue to the rudder of a ship, small and incredibly powerful, and he speaks of “bridling the tongue,” but then he quickly moves to a different image, an image that denies notions of control which rudder and bridle suggest. And it’s not feathers he has in mind. The tongue is a fire, he writes. Thoughtless words aren’t just blowing all over town like feathers in the wind. Careless words, reckless words, loveless words are like hot embers that spark and spread uncontainable wildfires.

James may have been able to relate to a saying like, “Falsehood will fly from Maine to Georgia, while truth is pulling her boots on.”[5] But when he wrote his meditation on the power and dangers of speech, he couldn’t even begin to imagine today’s categories of Twitter storms or the spread of delta variants of toxic speech spreading via Facebook, WhatsApp, and YouTube. The tongue is a fire, and thanks to more and more capable technologies, a blaze will spread farther and faster than ever. James sounds rather pessimistic:

Every species of beast and bird, of reptile and sea creature, can be tamed and has been tamed by the human species, but no one can tame the tongue—a restless evil, full of deadly poison. With it we bless the Lord and Father, and with it we curse those who are made in the likeness of God. From the same mouth come blessing and cursing. My brothers and sisters, this ought not to be so.

L. T. Johnson writes,

From the sages of ancient Egypt, through the biblical books of Proverbs and Sirach, to the essays of Plutarch and Seneca, there is a consensus that silence is better than speech, that hearing, not speaking, is the pathway to wisdom, that speech when necessary should be brief, that above all speech should be under control and never the expression of rage or envy.[6]

And then he adds that the philosophers and moralists were

aware how difficult control of the tongue is, but they [were] fundamentally sanguine about the possibility of bringing speech into line with reason and virtue. James is not. He flatly asserts that no one can control speech… In James’s treatment, the tongue is almost a cosmic force set on evil.[7]

But James hasn’t argued himself into a corner where all he can do is urge silence. A fig tree cannot yield olives any more than a grapevine figs. And a spring doesn’t pour out fresh water and brackish water. Only humans let blessing and cursing flow from the same mouth. Only humans are made in the image of God and yet dishonor the image in each other, again and again.

But God hasn’t left us to our lies and alternate facts, our slander and our slurs. God has spoken and God is speaking - light and life, truth and redemption and righteousness. And our first language has always been blessing and praise in response to God’s creative speech. Blessing and praise are as old as creation. Long before there were hymns and prayers and liturgies, there was praise.

Our babies remind us of this truth. I remember a little boy, still an infant, singing his morning psalms. Lying there in his crib, usually some time before the rest of the family was up, he awakened with the first morning light. He could not walk, couldn’t even stand up yet. But with the light of dawn in his eyes he chanted his morning prayer of giggles and gurgling, almost every morning, a song of thanksgiving for life, a hymn of praise to the maker of heaven and earth. That praise is the beginning and the end of every word and language and song. That praise is our mother tongue.

The heavens are telling the glory of God;

and the firmament proclaims God’s handiwork.

Day to day pours forth speech,

and night to night declares knowledge.

There is no speech, nor are there words;

their voice is not heard;

yet their voice goes out through all the earth,

and their words to the end of the world.

“Not many of you should become teachers,” says James, “for you know that we who teach will be judged with greater strictness.” He begins his discussion of disciplined speech with those for whom speaking is a vocation. He doesn’t mention spouses who may or may not succeed at biting their tongues. He leaves aside leaders who who are so busy spinning, they themselves can’t tell what’s real anymore. And he doesn’t tell a story about words blowing every which way after they have left the gossip’s mouth. I wonder if he begins with teachers because he is one himself; because he trembles at the thought of having to find words to speak about the dangers of language and speech. He’s certainly good company on a day when we ordain one of us, Jackie, to serve as a minister of word and sacrament.

James doesn’t say why those who teach will be judged with greater strictness. But he’s already talked about what the judgment will be based on. “So speak and so act,” he writes in 2:12, “as those who are to be judged by the law of liberty.” In other places he calls it the “perfect law” and the “royal law” or “law of the kingdom,” and he quotes it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”[8]

Liberty is not the freedom to say and do what I want. It is the freedom to be who we were made to be; the freedom to let ourselves be rooted in God’s love and to love each other well. May it be so, for all of us.

[1] http://storywork.com/when-stories-become-weapons-to-do-harm-and-kill/#_edn1

[2] Proverbs 21:23

[3] James 1:19

[4] Cokie and Steve Roberts, From This Day Forward (New York: HarperCollins, 2001), xi.

[5] Portland (Me.) Gazette, Sept. 5, 1820, quoted at https://freakonomics.com/2011/04/07/quotes-uncovered-how-lies-travel/

[6] L. T. Johnson, James, NIB, 203.

[7] Ibid., 204.

[8] See James 1:25 and 2:8