If mercy didn't have eyes

Praise is the duty and delight, the ultimate vocation of the human community; indeed of all creation…  All life is aimed toward God and finally exists for the sake of God. Praise articulates and embodies our capacity to yield, submit, and abandon ourselves in trust and gratitude to the One whose we are. Praise is not only a human requirement and a human need, it is also a human delight. We have a resilient hunger to move beyond self, to return our energy and worth to the One from whom it has been granted. In our return to that One, we find our deepest joy.[1]

These strong affirmations were written many years ago by Geoffrey Wainwright and Walter Brueggemann. There are moments in life when our hearts are opened wide to the miracle that life is, to the gift that it truly is, to the wondrous reality of our being part of the unfolding mystery of creation, that we get to hear and see it, touch it, taste and smell it, explore its depths and learn it, love it, share it: life. Praise is our response to the gift and to the loving giver. Praise is joy and gratitude poured out in shouts and words and songs and dance and generosity.

Does God need our praise to be God? Does God need our worship, our offerings, our attention? Many ask questions like that, but the crucial question is, can humans survive as humans without praise? To withhold acknowledgement, to avoid celebration, to stifle gratitude, may prove as foolish as refusing to breathe.[2]

I wonder if a growing number of us are slowly running out of breath. I wonder if a growing number of us are too busy and distracted to recognize life as anything other than the stage, backdrop and material for our own projects. Russell Johnson writes, and we all know the reality he’s describing,

The majority of Americans read headlines but rarely read news stories, we move our attention from subject to subject more rapidly than ever before, and the pandemic accelerated our tendency to focus on tweets and TikToks at the expense of lengthier media. We look at each webpage for an average of fifty-four seconds.[3]

We are switching our attention from one thing to another at an unprecedented rate. Russell says,

I can still read a book uninterrupted for several hours… if I’m on an airplane and have no other options. I can still watch a long movie… if I’m in a movie theater and devices are off. More frequently, I’m looking at my phone to distract myself from the TV show I put on to distract myself from my lunch.

Blaise Pascal lived in the first half of the seventeenth century, and he already suspected then that diversion and distraction were the principal threats to a life of faith. “All of humanity’s problems stem from [our] inability to sit quietly in a room alone,” he wrote. Today, flitting from preoccupation to preoccupation, our capacity to be attentive is shrinking rapidly, and with it our capacity to notice and marvel and breathe out praise. Early in the twentieth century, Simone Weil wrote, “Not only does the love of God have attention for its substance; the love of our neighbor, which we know to be the same love, is made of this same substance.”[4] Attention is the substance of love. Attention is at the heart of Luke’s story.

Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem when he was approached by ten men with leprosy. Luke writes Jesus was traveling between Samaria and Galilee, only there wasn’t any land between the two—there was, however, a line. There was no border, no wall, no checkpoints, but there was a line, a sharp line drawn between two groups of people who hadn’t been friendly with each other for generations, Jews and Samaritans. The enmity between them was entrenched and old. They disagreed about things that mattered most to them: how to honor God, where to worship, what set of scriptures to receive as sacred. The line between them wasn’t so much on the land as it was in their hearts and minds, in their imaginations. They did what they could to avoid contact with each other, to not see, not touch, not interact with each other.

Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, traveling through the region between Samaria and Galilee, when he was approached by ten men with leprosy. Leprosy was dreadful. It was the name given to any skin blemishes that looked suspicious and triggered fear of contagion. Leprosy was a sentence to exile. These men who approached Jesus had been banished from their homes and villages. How long had it been since they had felt the loving touch of another human being? It no longer mattered which side of the line they once claimed as home or which community they claimed as their own or who they used to be or dreamed of being—now they were lepers. Whoever saw them didn’t see them as persons, but as no-longer-persons, as untouchables pushed out and left to beg and wander in the borderlands. “They shall live alone,” the law of Moses declared; “their dwelling shall be outside the camp.”[5]

The ten approached Jesus, crying out for mercy, and Jesus saw them. He was attentive to them and to their cry. He didn’t cross to the other side of the road and walk past them. “Go, show yourselves to the priests,” he said. The priests were the ones responsible for determining if a rash was leprous or not. The priests were the ones who would examine the skin and decide, after the blemish had faded, if a person could return from their exile. “Go, show yourselves to the priests,” Jesus said to the ten, as though the time had come for them to return to life. And they went, and as they went, they were made clean. Made clean meant they would belong again. Made clean meant they could touch and be touched, hold the baby, kiss the children, hug their wives, do their work, hang out with their friends. The ten had encountered Jesus in the land of not-belonging and now they were restored to life, restored to wholeness.

One of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice, and he thanked Jesus. One of them, when he saw that he was healed, noticed something the others didn’t; he was attentive and responsive. Nine of the ten got their old lives back. One found new life. And he was a Samaritan.

Again it was a Samaritan, the proverbial outsider in Jewish circles, who saw what others didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t see. Jesus told a story about a man who fell into the hands of robbers on the Jericho Road. You know it well. A priest happened to come down that road, and when he saw the victim, he passed by on the other side. He saw him, but he wasn’t attentive. He didn’t see what he needed to see. Next a Levite came to the place and saw the man, and he also passed by on the other side. His attention elsewhere, he also didn’t see what was there for him to see. And then a third man came near, and when he saw the man, he was moved with compassion. And he was a Samaritan. It was an outsider whose actions on the Jericho road revealed the substance of being a neighbor, and it was again an outsider who was attentive to the presence of God in Jesus. The gospel draws our attention to the outsiders who saw what many others didn’t, couldn’t or wouldn’t see.

Ten cried out for mercy. Ten did what Jesus told them to do. Ten were made clean. Nine went home and lived happily ever after; and nothing suggests that their healing was revoked for their lack of gratitude. God’s mercy is unconditional. One of the ten, though, one of them turned back and gave praise to God at Jesus’ feet.

In Jesus, the kingdom of God has come into the region between where exiles wander, longing for redemption and crying out for mercy. Leprosy meant exclusion and isolation, and that makes it the perfect symbol for all the ways in which human beings experience not being at home, not belonging, not being seen, not being at one with each other, not being at one with ourselves. It was the Samaritan, the outsider, who was attentive and who recognized that with Jesus the realm of God was present. He saw a new reality of belonging. He saw an embrace so wide and welcoming, it wouldn’t create yet another camp in this broken, divided world, but a new community, one that included Jews and Samaritans; he saw the promise and presence of a redeemed humanity, made whole by God’s mercy. The Samaritan saw grace so deep, mercy so wide, his whole being became gratitude and praise.

“Get up and go on your way,” Jesus said to him; “your faith has made you well.” Ten had been healed. Ten had been restored to life and community. But one of the ten returned, and not just to say, “Thank you, Jesus.” He returned and praised God. Martin Luther was once asked to describe the nature of true worship. His answer: the tenth leper turning back.

The story of the grateful Samaritan can help us see that “to be saved is not only to be healed and forgiven but to be delivered from [anything] that inhibits grateful praise.”[6] In grateful praise we live the life we were made for, abandoning ourselves in trust and gratitude to the One whose we are.

The story of the grateful Samaritan can also help us see that there are people in the region between in our world, people who belong neither here nor there, people who would be invisible if mercy didn’t have eyes.

Now we can pray, “Mercy, will you look through my eyes, that I may see what is there to see, that I may let my whole heart be yours, and my hands your hands—my whole life yours?”

May it be so.

[1] Walter Brueggemann, Israel’s Praise: Doxology against Idolatry and Ideology, Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1988), 1. The first sentence is a quote from Geoffrey Wainwright, “The Praise of God in the Theological Reflection of the Church,” Interpretation 39 (1985), 39.

[2] See John Burkhart, quoted in A Sourcebook about Liturgy, ed. by Gabe Huck (Chicago: LTP, 1994), 148.

[3] Russell Johnson, “Attention, Please,” Sightings, September 22, 2022 https://mailchi.mp/uchicago/sightings-218364?e=6562fb9336

[4] See Johnson, “Attention, Please”

[5] Leviticus 13:46

[6] See Eugene Boring and Fred Craddock, People’s Commentary, 247.

Table power flip

Ashley Jones wrote a poem about Sally Hemings. Sally Hemings? Ashley Jones says, “It’s safe to say I’ve always been fascinated by the ways that history is taught in America.” And she goes on,

Let us tell it, 1492 was a year of great discovery and exploration instead of the start of mass genocide and pillaging. Slaves and masters were happy together. The Emancipation Proclamation marked the end of second-class citizenship for Black people in America. We know these things aren’t true, that history is painted over to make us seem more heroic, more loving, more okay with the way things are.

Ashley Jones wrote a poem about Sally Hemings because she’s “interested […] in the discrepancies between the story in our history and the reality of what happened.” She says,

Some people will tell us that Sally Hemings was Thomas Jefferson’s mistress, lover, girlfriend, etc., but none of that is possible because she was a slave. She could not give consent, and in the eyes of the law, in the eyes of her master, she wasn’t human enough to feel such a complex feeling as love. [...] Thomas Jefferson didn’t think of Sally, of any Black person as a full human being. In [Notes on the State of Virginia], Jefferson asserts his belief that Black people are scientifically inferior to White people for many reasons, but some of note are that we are smellier (more sweat), require less sleep, are incapable of complex cognition, and we are unable to feel love, only lust.

Ashley Jones wrote a poem about Sally Hemings because she’s interested in the discrepancies between the story in our history and the reality of what happened. She’s interested in the discrepancies between the story in our unquestioned assumptions, our comfortable assumptions, our oft-repeated assumptions and the reality of what happened. “As the poem developed,” she says, “I realized I wanted the facts to stand alone so the reader could draw her own conclusions. I didn’t want to moralize, as Sally’s voice has been silenced enough—I wanted her life to exist on the page so everyone could see who she was and what was done to her. I wanted her to finally get to tell her truth.”[1]

Ashley M. Jones, What It Means To Say Sally Hemings

Bright Girl Sally
Mulatto Sally
Well Dressed Sally
Sally With the Pretty Hair
Sally With the Irish Cotton Dress
Sally With the Smallpox Vaccine
Sally, Smelling of Clean White Soap
Sally Never Farmed A Day In Her Life
Available Sally
Nursemaid Sally
Sally, Filled with Milk
Sally Gone to Paris with Master’s Daughter
Sally in the Chamber with the President
Sally in the Chamber with the President’s Brother
Illiterate Sally
Capable Sally
Unmarried Sally
Sally, Mother of Madison, Harriet, Beverly, Eston
Sally, Mother of Eston Who Changed His Name
Sally, Mother of Eston Hemings Jefferson
Eston, Who Made Cabinets
Eston, Who Made Music
Eston, Who Moved to Wisconsin
Eston, Whose Children Were Jeffersons
Eston, Who Died A White Man
Grandmother Sally of the White Hemingses
Infamous Sally
Silent Sally
Sally, Kept at Monticello Until Jefferson’s Death
Sally, Whose Children Were Freed Without Her

Jesus seems uncomfortably comfortable talking about slaves, not as persons with names, persons with their own stories, but as nameless characters in his parables. “Who among you would say to your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field, ‘Come here at once and take your place at the table’?” he says, and the expected answer is, “No one; it would be unthinkable.”

According to Luke, Jesus told this story to the apostles — are we to assume then that there actually were owners of slaves among the first followers of Jesus? Or was this question just another conventional way to begin a story? Like, “In a certain city there was judge” or “there was a rich man who had a manager”?

The question may have been just another conventional way to begin a story, given that slavery was a painfully common institution in the first century and beyond. The word slave occurs more than 150 times in the Greek New Testament,[2] and our hearts are heavy with grief and shame and anger, because we know how this frequent occurrence was used for centuries as a convenient cover to justify chattel slavery in this country.

The stories of masters and slaves, or slaves and fellow slaves, presuppose the institution of slavery as it existed in the first century; and the writers of the New Testament appear to have largely accepted it as a given of the social order. Explicitly the institution wasn’t questioned until later, but Jesus’ teaching, together with the unsettling reality of his dying a slave’s death on the cross and his being raised by God on the third day, undermined the whole structure of divisions between Jews and Gentiles, free citizens and slaves, male and female, and the old world began to crumble, and a new one began to emerge.

All of creation was radically renewed with the resurrection of Jesus from the dead and the pouring out of God’s Spirit on all flesh—but the wave of reconciliation unleashed by God’s act of new creation did not spread at the speed of an imperial army; it spread at the speed of trust: one gesture of brave hospitality at a time, one faithful act of service, one small step toward wholeness at a time.

The story that begins with the question about your slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field is Jesus’ response to the apostles’ request to increase their faith. Why increase it? Are they looking for more, bigger, better, faster faith? New and improved faith? This year’s model of faith? In the preceding verses, Jesus teaches the disciples about repentance and forgiveness. “If another disciple sins, you must rebuke the offender, and if there is repentance, you must forgive,” he says. And then he adds, “And if the same person sins against you seven times a day, and turns back to you seven times and says, ‘I repent’, you must forgive.”

Rebuking the offender? Not a problem. Forgiving if there is repentance? Perhaps you could say a bit more what true repentance looks like… But seven times? Increase our faith.

They’re like most of us. They don’t think they have quite enough of what it takes to be forgiving like that. They don’t think they’re ready for what they perceive to be the major leagues of Christian living. And Jesus tells them in so many words that they have all the faith they need for one small step toward wholeness and then another; for one gesture of courageous hospitality that lets the stranger in, and then another; all the faith we need to look at our history and at each other and let go of one comfortable assumption, and then another, and begin to know what it means to say Sally Hemings and Uncle Nearest[3] and David Drake[4] and Abraham.[5]

In Jesus’ story the assumption is presented that the slave who has just come in from plowing or tending sheep in the field doesn’t get to eat and drink until he has prepared supper for his master, put on his apron and served his master while he eats and drinks.

“Do you thank the slave for doing what was commanded?” Jesus asks, and again the expected answer is negative, “No, such a thing would be unthinkable.” Up to this point, the apostles and all of us who have followed Jesus’ story, have been encouraged to identify with the master, regardless of whether we did so comfortably or not. But now Jesus flips the scene, something he likes to do a lot.

“So you also,” he says, “when you have done all that you were ordered to do, say, ‘We servants deserve no special praise. We have only done our duty.’” Forgiving a person seven times a day is nothing extraordinary like hitting sixty-one home runs; it’s as everyday as it is for a slave to plow, tend sheep, prepare food, or serve at the table. Forgiving, offering hospitality by making space for others and letting them in by listening to them, entertaining their thoughts, eating their food and offering ours, letting go of comfortable assumptions—all these actions are simply things we do because we follow and obey Jesus.

And because it is Jesus we follow, there’s one more twist. In a later scene, where the disciples are busy debating which one of them ought to be regarded as the greatest, Jesus asks them, “Who is greater, the one who is at the table or the one who serves? Is it not the one at the table?” All heads nodding. Some still quietly composing seating charts for the great banquet. And Jesus adds, “But I am among you as one who serves.”

We know he likes to flip the scene. In chapter 12 of Luke, we hear him say, “Blessed are those slaves whom the master finds alert when he comes.” Here the master is the one who comes in, not the slave. We wonder what the master will tell the slaves. We wonder who will sit at table and who will put on the apron. “Truly I tell you,” Jesus says, “he will fasten his belt and have them sit down to eat, and he will come and serve them.” The master is the servant, and the slaves are the guests of honor. And we are only beginning to know what it means to say Jesus is Lord.

[1][1] From Magic City Gospel (Hub City Press, 2017); all author’s quotes and the poem at https://poetrysociety.org/poems-essays/in-their-own-words/ashley-m-jones-on-what-it-means-to-say-sally-hemings

[2] According to https://biblehub.com/greek/1401.htm, the word group δοῦλ- is used more than 150 times. In English translations, the word slave is used 130 times in the New Testament, 31 times in Luke alone, if you read the version we read in worship, the New Revised Standard Version. Other editions, including the King James Version and the New International Version prefer the translation “servant.”

[3] https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/industries/2022/06/22/uncle-nearest-whiskey-preserving-historic-legacy/7610307001/

[4] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/17/arts/design/-enslaved-potter-david-drake-museum.html

[5] http://truthsofthetrade.winterthur.org/silver-spoon/

The gate of heaven

You remember Mary’s song, don’t you? The one she sang when she was pregnant with Jesus? The song about God who has brought down the powerful from their thrones and lifted up the lowly, who has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich away empty?[1] And do you remember Jesus’ sermon at Nazareth, where he declares that he’s been anointed to bring good news to the poor?[2] And you remember Luke 14:12, don’t you, where he admonishes his followers not to give dinners for friends and family and rich neighbors, but to invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you remember how he told a certain ruler who wanted to inherit eternal life, “Sell all that you own and distribute the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.”[3]

Poverty and wealth are of great concern to Jesus. Greg Carey calls today’s story from Luke a “juxtaposition of obscene luxury and abject poverty.”[4] Topics of great concern to Jesus are thrown into sharp relief in this story. Barbara Rossing calls it “a wake-up call, pulling back a curtain to open our eyes to something we urgently need to see before it is too late.”[5] A wake-up call, in case we got drowsy and dozed off when Jesus declared, “Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. … But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation.”[6] Poverty and wealth are of great concern to Jesus.

The poor man in today’s story has a name, which is remarkable. Lazarus is the only named character in all of Jesus’ parables. The name is the Latin rendering of Eleazar or Eliezer, which means “God helps” — and no one else in the story does. We live in a world where the rich have names and the poor are statistics. The rich have their names written on large buildings, and spoken with hushed reverence at fundraising dinners; tour busses drive by their homes and the guides point to the gates and speak their names and everyone on the bus knows who they are. The poor are nameless and countless. But Jesus tells a story of a nameless rich man and a poor man named Lazarus. A rich man dressed in purple and fine linen and feasting sumptuously every day, and Lazarus, covered with sores, lying at the rich man’s gate, longing to satisfy his hunger with what fell from the rich man’s table. Dogs were licking his sores. Perhaps the dogs were also snatching the pieces of bread the rich man’s guests used to wipe their greasy hands — bread napkins, tossed under the table. Perhaps Lazarus was too sick, too weak to jump up and grab even a morsel.

Jesus doesn’t tell us if Lazarus died of starvation, or if one of the sores got infected, or if it was one of those nights when temperatures outside the gate dropped into the upper 20’s. Lazarus died and he was carried away by the angels to be with Abraham. The rich man also died, but no angels came to carry him away. He died and was buried. We may imagine that it must have been a lavish funeral in one of the city’s choice cemeteries, with an opulent reception, but that kind of detail doesn’t get any attention in Jesus’ story. Both men died, as all of us eventually do, and at the moment of death, suddenly their relationship was reversed.

Lazarus’ suffering was over, he reclined in the seat of honor at Abraham’s table, and the rich man was in agony in the flames of Hades. He called out, “Father Abraham, have mercy on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue.” Have mercy on me, he said, and we wonder if Lazarus used to shout or whisper those words at the rich man’s gate to deaf or distracted ears. And did you notice? The rich man spoke of Lazarus by name. So he knew him, he recognized him, and now we wonder how long he might have known his name without acknowledging his presence and his need. And he didn’t say, “Lazarus, would you come over and help a brother out?” He asked Abraham to send him — still he could think of Lazarus only as socially inferior, somebody to be sent on an errand.

Abraham told him, “Between you and us a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who might want to pass from here to you cannot do so, and no one can cross from there to us.” Who was it that fixed the great chasm?

I suggest that it was the rich man himself. The great chasm between him and Lazarus is nothing but the reverse manifestation of the one that existed in their earthly lives — only now their separation is permanent. The time to bridge the yawning abyss with a little attention and kindness has run out. The gate where Lazarus begged and waited, the gate that kept him outside, was and is and forever will be the very gate that keeps the rich man out of Abraham’s banquet.

In Anton Chekhov’s story, Gooseberries, one of the characters says,

Apparently, those who are happy can only enjoy themselves because the unhappy bear their burdens in silence, and but for this silence happiness would be impossible. It is a kind of universal hypnosis. There ought to be a man with a hammer behind the door of every happy man, to remind him by his constant knocks that there are unhappy people, and that happy as he himself may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws, catastrophe will overtake him – sickness, poverty, loss – and nobody will see it, just as he now neither sees nor hears the misfortunes of others. But there is no man with a hammer, the happy man goes on living and the petty vicissitudes of life touch him lightly, like the wind in an aspen-tree, and all is well.[7]

We don’t know if Lazarus bore his burdens in silence. We don’t know if the rich man ignored the poor man at his gate, or if the poor man’s presence and need had blended into the background of the rich man’s life, together with the dogs and the people on the sidewalk and the traffic noise. We don’t even know if the rich man was happy. All we do know is that he was well-dressed and well-fed and that Lazarus was neither, and when the great reversal came it was too late to do anything about it.

In a way, the rich man was saying to Abraham, “Behind the door of each of my brothers, there ought to be a man with a hammer, to remind them by his constant knocks that there are people in great need. Send Lazarus that he may warn them.”

And Abraham replied, “They have Moses and the prophets; they should listen to them.” The commandments are clear: Do not be hard-hearted or tight-fisted toward your needy neighbor.[8] The words of the prophets are indeed constant knocks at the gate: Share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house.[9] The commandments speak of obligation. The prophets proclaim the word of the Lord with urgency, and when their words fall on deaf ears, they “lament over people who can see nothing about which to lament.”[10]

Woe to those who are at ease in Zion, who lounge on their couches, and eat lambs from the flock, who drink wine from bowls, and anoint themselves with the finest oils, but are not grieved over the ruin of [my people].[11]

The rich man in Jesus’ parable doesn’t have a lot of confidence that his siblings will heed the scriptures. “No, father Abraham,” he pleads; “but if someone goes to them from the dead, they will repent.”

Will we? Are we listening to the man with the hammer? Are we reaching across the great chasm that separates us one from the other? Do we hear Mary’s song with joy and hope and join her in singing it? Do we want to see every valley lifted up and every mountain and hill made low?[12] Are we letting God guide our feet into the way of peace, across bridges of mercy and compassion and difficult, demanding justice? Or are we happy enough with the way things are?

Poverty, hunger, and homelessness are very complicated issues, but they are also very simple: open the gate. Because lying at the gate is not a bunch of issues and problems; lying at the gate is a human being with a name, a person made in the image of God. The man with the hammer wants us to pay attention and repent. He wants us to refuse to sit in the isolation which horded wealth creates. He wants us to realize that, as one of America’s martyrs wrote from jail, “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.”[13] The gate between me and the neighbor waiting at my threshold is the very gate of heaven.

Jesus calls us to repent, to turn and walk with him on the path of faith and compassion. His love lifts us out of our fear and pride. His love gives us the courage to let our neighbor in. His love, embodied in countless daily acts and gestures, bridges the great chasm between us.

Jesus told us the parable of the rich man and Lazarus so we would rewrite its ending with our lives. Imagine, one morning the rich man stepped out of his gated existence and said, “Good morning, Lazarus. Come on in. I just made some biscuits and a fresh pot of coffee.”

[1] Luke 1:46-55

[2] Luke 4:16-21

[3] Luke 18:22

[4] Greg Carey https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-26-3/commentary-on-luke-1619-31-2

[5] Barbara Rossing https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/ordinary-26-3/commentary-on-luke-1619-31-4

[6] Luke 6:20,24

[7] Anton Chekhov, Gooseberries, 1898 http://www.online-literature.com/anton_chekhov/1290/

[8] Deuteronomy 15:7

[9] Isaiah 58:7

[10] Donald Gowan, NIB, 398.

[11] Amos 6:4-6

[12] Isaiah 40:4

[13] Martin L. King, Letter from a Birmingham Jail, April 16, 1963

http://www.stanford.edu/group/King/popular_requests/frequentdocs/birmingham.pdf

Shrewd like that

Where do I start? Thank you. Thank you for letting me take a sabbatical of more than three months. It was wonderful just to be, to hike, to pray, ro read, to paddle, to be with family, to rediscover forgotten rhythms and practice new ones.

I read Scripture in worship a couple of times while I was at Mepkin Abbey in July, but I haven’t planned a worship service or prepared a sermon since the end of May. And a lot has happened since then in your lives, in mine, and in the world. We’ll be catching up for a while, I imagine, and our stories, questions and experiences will weave their way into our conversations for who knows how long.

I haven’t lived with the rhythm of weekly preaching since the end of May, and when I looked at the lectionary readings for this Sunday, a voice in my heart whispered, “How about this one?”It’s one of the most baffling of Jesus’ parables; in it, a master summons his manager and says,

“What is this I hear about you? Give me an account of your management.”

The master has heard reports, rumors perhaps, that this manager had been squandering his property.

“What is this I hear about you? Give me an account of your management.”

I found myself once again drawn to this line; it has resonated with me for many years because the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, as it says in Psalm 24, but many of us have lived on it as if it were ours, to do with as we please. At the end of today’s passage, Jesus asks, “And if you have not been faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is your own?” We are stewards destined to be heirs, but if we aren’t faithful stewards, what will we inherit? Certainly not the fullness of life God desires for God’s creation.

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, and the owner demands an account from the squanderers. I’ll come back to this.

You’re still wondering, “What did he do with over three months of time off?” and you don’t demand an account, but you want to know what I did, what I saw and heard and tasted, whom I met and what I learned, what joys and sorrows I encountered. I had one of the best summers of my life, and today, since the gospel reading alludes to a ledger, I thought I’d share with you some numbers from the only document of this summer that looks anything like a ledger. In June I spent eleven days hiking in the Italian Alps, and I used GPS to track distance and altitude. I walked about a hundred miles, but walking may not be the best term, because what I did day after day was climb or clamber up and down — up from the valley to the pass, and down on the other side into the next valley. I climbed up a total of about 33,000’, and down a total of about 35,000’, and the highest pass I crossed was Passo del Maccagno at 8,179’. Those eleven days in the Alps were also the only days that I wore socks all summer long until this morning. Now back to the story.

There was a rich man who had a manager, and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his property. That’s all we’re told. A lot is left unsaid, not even hinted at. We don’t know if this manager was incompetent or corrupt; if “squandering” meant he had missed his quarterly earnings goals for the fifth time in a row or if he was embezzling. We don’t know if this manager was an employee or a slave, although some of the language suggests the latter.

The rich man summoned the manager and demanded to see the books. The manager had to think and act fast. He may not have been strong enough to work the soil, and wouldn’t consider begging, but he was quick. One by one, he summoned his master’s debtors, and together they rewrote the paperwork.

“How much do you owe my master?”

“A hundred jugs of olive oil.”

“Take your bill, sit down, make it fifty.”

Those weren’t the jugs you keep in your kitchen cabinet, the ones most of us can easily lift with one hand. Each of those jugs held about ninety gallons. They were looking at a lease agreement or a loan document involving 900 gallons of olive oil. And the manager said, Cut it in half. And to another who owed a hundred containers of wheat, he said, “Take your bill and make it eighty.” 20% off, that’s still a substantial discount. We can assume there were other debtors, although none are mentioned, because nobody needs a manager to handle only two accounts. But we don’t know if the manager was giving away what was his to give, say his commission, or if he was reducing payments owed only to his master.

The purpose of his actions, though, is obvious: he made sure that tomorrow his master’s debtors would owe him. He knew how to make the best of a critical situation, and he may have been a squandering scoundrel, but he sure was a clever one.

But now comes a curious twist: his master commended the dishonest manager because he had acted shrewdly. What kind of master would commend a dishonest manager? What is going on here? And then there’s another twist, because now Jesus holds him up as an example, telling us to make friends for ourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome us into the eternal homes.

Jesus’ parable of the dishonest manager has always puzzled its readers. It’s an old story that bucks like a young horse the moment you try to put a saddle on it. We’re looking at a man running out of time, making urgent decisions under the pressure of a world coming apart; and Jesus praises him—not for being dishonest, but for being shrewd: he was quick, creative, and decisive when he realized that his squandering days were over.

The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, and we have been notified that charges have been brought against us that we have been squandering the master’s property with careless, loveless, and sometimes clueless stewardship. We clearly need to be reminded constantly, that we cannot serve God and wealth. “The domain ruled by wealth is a dangerous habitat,” writes John Carroll, “for attachment to wealth entangles one in concerns that run counter to the … commitments of the realm of God.”[1] And five hundred years ago, Martin Luther wrote,

Many a one thinks that he has God and everything in abundance when he has money and possessions; he trusts in them and boasts of them with such firmness and assurance as to care for no one. Lo, such a man also has a god, Mammon by name, i.e., money and possessions, on which he sets all his heart, and which is also the most common idol on earth.[2]

No slave can serve two masters; for a slave will either hate the one and love the other, or be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

Some of the clothes I wore on the trail and on the water this summer were made from recycled one-way water bottles and discarded fishing nets that were pulled from the ocean. Several of them were made by Patagonia. On Wednesday, Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia, revealed that he and his family had given away the company and that all future profits from the apparel maker would go toward fighting the climate crisis.

“Rather than selling the company or taking it public,” David Gelles wrote in the New York Times,

Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe. …

“Hopefully this will influence a new form of capitalism that doesn’t end up with a few rich people and a bunch of poor people,” Mr. Chouinard, 83, said in an interview. “We are going to give away the maximum amount of money to people who are actively working on saving this planet.”[3]

“Earth is now our only shareholder,” Chouinard wrote in a letter posted on the company website.[4]

I tend to read corporate PR with great suspicion, especially when they tell me what I want to hear. But I hope they will be successful and that others will follow their example.

Our squandering days are over. The manager in Jesus’ story realized that his familiar world was coming to an end and he jumped into action. He invested himself and all his resources in the world to come. Shrewd like that is how Jesus wants us to be so that we may inherit fullness of life.

[1] John T. Carroll, Luke: A Commentary (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2012), 125-126.

[2] Large Catechism, Explanation of the First Commandment at http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/catechism/web/cat-03.html

[3] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/14/climate/patagonia-climate-philanthropy-chouinard.html

see also

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/16/climate/yvon-chouinard-patagonia-philanthropy.html

[4] https://www.patagonia.com/home/

God's Language of Imagination

For many reasons, I love Children’s Bibles. When done well, they are a wonderful tool to help learners of all ages and abilities to hear about God’s presence in the world and God’s relationship with God’s people. I love the artistic interpretations that illustrators create. I love that they can cover massive amounts of text in a way that is accessible and understandable. And I love the fact that with careful listening, adults can hear familiar stories in a new way. No, they aren’t exact translations. Yes, they are an invitation into God’s story. So this summer, most weeks we’ll hear at least one story from a Children’s Bibles. For kiddos, I invited you to listen and hear God working in the world. And for adults, I invite you to notice some differences and wonder why some of those choices were made. And I invite you to ask some of the kids this summer, “What did you notice? What made you wonder?” You may be surprised at their answers!

This story of Pentecost is an invitation into the people of God. It’s an invitation to imagine what could be, to imagine what the Kingdom of God on Earth might look like and sound like and feel like. It’s an invitation to engage and create something new, at God’s insistence. It compels a response to God’s call. For those who lean on empire and coercive power, imagination can be a dangerous exercise. It leans into abundant possibilities that liberate.

“The book of Acts speaks of revolution. We must never forget this.”[1] writes theologian Willie James Jennings. After the seemingly endless news of violence over the past days, weeks, and months, after the seemingly constant barrage of accounts and witnesses of injustices, the idea that the story of Acts speaks of revolution feels almost like relief. But, as we see in this story, and heard in other stories of Acts—Peter and Cornelius, Tabitha, Paul and Silas—this revolution isn’t coercive or violent. No, this revolution is compassionate and invitational. It invites us, as listeners and readers, into the story of and into relationship with God: A God that is revealed and made known, again and again, in new and surprising ways; a God that does not rely on the power of empire, but is made known in the wisdom and experiences of the child, the widow, the slave, and the oppressed. “God speaks people fluently. And God, with all the urgency that is with the Holy Spirit, wants the disciples of his only begotten Son to speak people fluently too. This is the beginning of a revolution that the Spirit performs.”[2]

Again and again, we’re invited into the story. We’re invited to recognize God’s presence and God’s spirit. We’re encouraged to imagine what a new world, what God’s Kingdom on Earth, might look like and feel like. And we’re invited to help shape that reality, not only as individuals but as larger communities. We're invited to imagine and we’re invited to ask others to imagine with us.

Like John the Baptist proclaiming, “Repent! The Kingdom of God is at hand!,” Peter and the apostles proclaim God’s presence in the world through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Peter and the apostles praise a God whose Spirit and presence is revealed and made known in a rush of wind and tongues of fire. But, as miraculous as it was to hear such news in a variety of languages—it was a struggle for many to believe. It was easier to write Peter off by saying they were drunk. Still today, it’s a struggle and a challenge to yield to God’s Spirit, following God into the new that God imagines and is bringing about for the world.[3] To imagine, to wonder, to lean into to God’s Spirit that doesn’t work in the ways that we’re used to can be hard in a world that often demands black and white answers and is too often fueled by greed and violence. 

And yet God continues to show up in the world, constantly, continually, throughout time and place. God continues to be in relationship with the world, speaking to people fluently, in ways that we might understand. The story in Acts shows us what God’s design might be for the world—that in all our diversity, we are known by God and that we seek to continue to know God. It makes plain God’s call and our response, our call and God’s response.

Sometimes that requires a different voice or different language, different imagery and illustrations, different life experiences and different questions to help each of us recognize God’s expansive love, that God knows us and wants us to know God and others. We’re reminded that God is not made in our image, but that we are made in God’s. And so we celebrate the diversity and work to understand friend, neighbor, stranger, and even enemy. And maybe in turn, even be truly known. It’s a powerful, revolutionary act to speak in a way that another understands. It’s a gift in and of itself.

My father’s first language is Samoan, but growing up in Southern Indiana didn’t afford us many opportunities to interact with the Samoan community. And even though he lived in the States longer than he lived in Samoa, whenever he met someone from “back home,” he was noticeably different. His countenance visibly changed. He held himself differently. His eyes seemed brighter. And after switching back to English, he spoke differently, almost as if his Spirit was lifted from that encounter. Because he didn’t have to explain his experiences or code switch and he didn’t have to deal with micro-aggressions. He could just be known. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve recognized what a gift it was to him.

Church, what are the languages we need to learn so that this revolution of the Spirit might be more fully known? What is the language of God we most desperately need to hear so that we might be transformed?[4] How might we be changed so that the Spirit’s daring revolution might break us open in ways that we might not only imagine possibilities, but that we might work towards making them a reality here on Earth?

Over a year ago, a “Faith Formation Task Force” gathered to help name what was integral to our community of faith and helped give language to principles/pillars that help ground us so that we might share the love of God with ourselves, our neighbors, and the world. These pillars invite us to practice together, to make space to be authentically known, and to affirm our many gifts. They have been written about and shared briefly, but this summer we’ll be taking a deeper dive to each of these eleven pillars so that we might imagine together, be transformed together, that we might offer welcome, and that we might recognize God’s presence in and among us.

May we give thanks for the multitude of diverse ways God’s makes Godself known to us in big and small ways. May we celebrate the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. May our language, our minds, and our actions be opened to the Spirit’s transformative and revolutionary ways. May we learn together to speak to and with people a little more fluently. Guided by Christ’s teachings, may we imagine together. And may we work together in compassion, justice, and love.

[1] Pg.1 Jennings WJ. Acts / Willie James Jennings. First edition. Westminster John Knox Press; 2017.

[2] Ibid. 30. 

[3] Ibid. 2.

[4] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/ecopreacher/2017/06/lengua-dios-pentecost-language-god/. Accessed June 1, 2022.

Courage to love

My friend Virzola is a pastor in Texas. On Wednesday, between prayers and outrage, she wrote a post about her granddaughter. “Ava had lots of questions still this morning. We tried to shield her from the news. Her mom put her to bed … but she woke up and saw us watching the news. And this morning she said, ‘Today is super hero day at my school.’” Virzola did everything she could not to cry, but tears flowed as her little girl, dressed in pink tights, with a shiny pink satin cape draped around her shoulder, proclaimed, “Ava will save the day.”

“She had questions,” Virzola wrote, “and she had answers.” And I have a lot more confidence in a little girl’s super powers, than in the ability of some of our political leaders to stand up straight with anything resembling a backbone. Dressed in their navy power suits, they repeated the old talking points of the gun industry. “What we need now is a top-to-bottom security overhaul at schools all across our country. Every building should have a single point of entry,” one of them said on Friday in Houston, at the great assembly of the true believers. “There should be strong exterior fencing, metal detectors and the use of new technology to make sure that no unauthorized individual can ever enter the school with a weapon.”[1]

They refer to this as “hardening soft targets.” We need to harden schools, and I assume that means we must also harden grocery stores. And churches, and synagogues and temples. And don’t leave us vulnerable at malls and movie theaters. And perhaps we ought to consider replacing school busses with armored personnel carriers? The hardening of soft targets goes hand in hand with the softening of constitutional thinking that insists, against all historical evidence, that the Second Amendment “gives anyone, anywhere in the country, the power to mow down civilians with military weapons.”[2]

Asking for prayers, the archbishop of Chicago reminded the faithful that “the Second Amendment did not come down from Sinai.” But the second and third commandment certainly did. Another bishop spoke of sacrifice, stating that “this bloody sacrifice of children enabled by the death-culture of guns cannot be justified by appeals to ‘rights’.” And a chaplain at Harvard also spoke of sacrifice, “Our society is in deep crisis. We desperately need to relearn how to sacrifice for one another.”[3]

The bishop’s decision not to call the massacre at Robb Elementary School a tragedy but a “bloody sacrifice of children” shocks us into realizing that what we have witnessed again is the idolatrous ritual of a blasphemous death cult. And the chaplain’s words point to the reversal that is needed: from sacrificing others on the altar of our presumed “rights” to “relearning how to sacrifice for one another.”

After the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School ten years ago, Garry Wills wrote,

Few crimes are more harshly forbidden in the Old Testament than sacrifice to the god Moloch (for which see Leviticus 18.21, 20.1-5). The sacrifice referred to was of living children consumed in the fires of offering to Moloch. Ever since then, worship of Moloch has been the sign of a deeply degraded culture.

Wills quotes lines from Paradise Lost, where Milton represented Moloch as the first pagan god who joined Satan’s war on humankind:

First Moloch, horrid king, besmear’d with blood

Of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears,

Though for the noise of Drums and Timbrels loud

Their children’s cries unheard, that pass’d through fire

To his grim idol.

Against the noise of distractors Wills insists that

The horror [of the massacre] cannot be blamed just on one unhinged person. It was the sacrifice we as a culture made, and continually make, to our demonic god. We guarantee that crazed man after crazed man will have a flood of killing power readily supplied him. We have to make that offering, out of devotion to our Moloch, our god. The gun is our Moloch. … Its acolytes think it is capable only of good things. It guarantees life and safety and freedom. … The answer to problems caused by guns is more guns, millions of guns, guns everywhere, carried openly, carried secretly, in bars, in churches, in offices, in government buildings. Only the lack of guns can be a curse, not their beneficent omnipresence.[4]

How can we turn away from this horrifying idolatry? How can we “relearn how to sacrifice for one another”? I am convinced little Ava knows the power that’s needed. “Ava will save the day,” she declared with great confidence, ready to step into the world, with her pink satin super hero cape. Ava knows she is loved by her mom and dad, her granny, her siblings and cousins, and she knows all of them are loved by Jesus, and that God, who is big enough to love all people and all animals and the whole universe, does indeed love all people and all that God has made. Ava knows she is loved, and that’s the best super power of all. In her family, and in the company of Jesus, she is learning how all people and all thing are one in the love of God, and that gives her the courage to love others.

The gospel reading for today comes from Jesus’ last night with the disciples. He has shared a meal with them. He has washed their feet and told them, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”[5] He has responded to all their worried, anxious questions about his going away. And now he stops addressing them, and starts praying for them, praying for us. His final words that night aren’t last-minute instructions about how to be God’s people in the world. His final words are words of prayer, and we have the privilege of overhearing what he says. In the other three Gospels, when Jesus prays before he is arrested, he is in Gethsemane, and he prays alone. Even his most trusted disciples are some distance away from him, and rather than praying with him or keeping watch, they fall asleep.[6] In John, the disciples, and we with them, get to witness the intimacy of the relationship between Jesus and the one he has consistently called “my Father” and “your Father.”

“As you, Father, are in me and I am in you,” Jesus prays, “may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.” He prays for us to be drawn into the intimacy and mutuality of their life. And he prays for us to be drawn into the communion of love that is God, he doesn’t just make it so, because there is nothing coercive about this love. The commandment he has given us is new not in commanding us to love one another, but to love one another as he has loved us. This means that the center of the circle of love that holds us, as well as the radius that determines its reach, have been marked and drawn by Jesus, the Word of God made flesh. And the purpose of this wide-reaching unity is not only for us to find fullness of life in our communion with God and one another. The purpose is beyond us. The purpose is for the world to be fully alive. It was for love of the world that God sent the Son, and in Jesus’ great intercession, the farthest horizon of love’s reach is still the world, even the hostile world, the idolatrous, violence-torn, gun-obsessed world. He prays for us that our unity in love will be a living witness to God’s love for the world, and that the whole world may let itself be drawn into the consummation of life in the communion of love that is God.

We have been entrusted with the sacred responsibility of making the love of God visible and tangible in the world. Frightened and prone to stumbling into idolatrous paths as we are, God has entrusted the continuation of Christ’s mission to us. And John wants us to know that we belong to the community for whom Jesus prays. We are not alone in our mourning. We are not alone when our capacity to hurt each other breaks our hearts. We are not alone in our prayers for the world’s healing. We are not alone when we sacrifice for one another. And we are not alone when we ask for the courage to love as Jesus has loved us.

[1] https://www.newsweek.com/trump-says-schools-must-harden-after-uvalde-texas-already-tried-that-1711100

[2] See Garry Wills’s article from 1995 https://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/sep/21/to-keep-and-bear-arms/

[3] Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago; Archbishop Elpidophoros, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America; Greg Epstein, humanist chaplain, Harvard University https://religionnews.com/2022/05/25/uvalde-school-shooting-faith-leaders-offer-comfort-call-for-reform-of-gun-laws/

[4] Garry Wills, “Our Moloch,” New York Review, December 15, 2012 https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2012/12/15/our-moloch/

[5] John 13:34-35

[6] See Mark 14:32-42 and parallels

Clarity will come

Paul was in prison when he wrote his letter to the Philippians. But despite the most unpleasant circumstances, joy and gratitude infuse his writing from beginning to end. “I thank my God for every remembrance of you, always in every one of my prayers for all of you, praying with joy for your partnership in the gospel from the first day until now.”[1]

When Luke later wrote in Acts about this partnership in the gospel from the first day, he lifted up one woman in particular. Her name was Lydia, and according to Luke, she was the first person on European soil to embrace the gospel with faith.

Paul and his missionary team had been traveling in what is today Turkey. They had been city-hopping, as it were, following the Roman roads that were major arteries for the exchange of goods and ideas, but it doesn’t appear that they had planned their route well in advance. Luke writes, “They went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia.” Forbidden by the Holy Spirit, Luke writes, without any further explanation what that might have looked like. “When they had come opposite Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them.” It was the Spirit of Jesus, Luke insists, in case some of us readers might wonder if perhaps it was the spirit of censorship or the spirit of fear that did not allow them to take their proclamation to those regions. “So, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas.”[2]

“They stumble around the region, running into one barrier after another set up by God,” writes one commentator. “Barred by the Spirit from going south and west into Asia or from going north into Bythinia, Paul [and his team appear] backed into a coastal corner at Troas by God’s strange and repeated ‘no.’”[3] I mentioned last Sunday that the book of the Acts of the Apostles might as well be called the Acts of the Holy Spirit, because everything that unfolds in the wake of God’s pouring out God’s Spirit on all people is Spirit-infused, Spirit-guided, Spirit-driven. I wish Luke had written a little more about how they determined that their next stop wouldn’t be Bythinia, how they knew it wasn’t because they weren’t trying hard enough to get there, but because God had a different route in mind for them.

So now the team was on the coast in Troas, with no idea where to turn next. And there, during the night, a vision came to Paul: it was a man from Macedonia urging Paul, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” And now something marvelous happens in Luke’s story. Up to this point, it’s all “the disciples did this and the apostles did that, Peter did this and Cornelius did that, the circumcised believers did this and the Gentile believers did that.” But in Troas, in the morning, the narrator’s perspective shifts:

Immediately after Paul saw the vision, we prepared to leave for the province of Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them.

As readers, we’re still following the carefully investigated and compiled account of a historically informed writer,[4] but now the story is no longer presented from an observer’s perspective, but from the perspective of a participant. The story is no longer just their adventure, it’s ours: Immediately after Paul saw the vision, we prepared to leave for the province of Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to proclaim the good news to them. Paul received the vision, but interpreting it wasn’t up to him alone. We discerned, writes Luke, that this was God’s call, and that the help which was needed was the preaching of the good news, and that the call was for immediate action.[5] Again, I wish Luke had written a little more about the process of discernment; clearly it wasn’t a matter of Paul coming down the stairs in the morning, pouring himself a cup of coffee, and telling the rest of the team who were sitting around the kitchen island, “I had a dream last night. Pack your things. We’re going to Macedonia.” The church, over the centuries, has been in Troas countless times, not certain where to go next, often wrestling with the nagging worry that perhaps God wanted it to go to Bythinia after all, that perhaps the last time it had attempted to go there, it just hadn’t prayed hard enough, planned hard enough, worked hard enough. Luke doesn’t go into the details of discernment, and I think he doesn’t because to him it’s not a matter of meticulously following a detailed process — the church forever doing just what the apostles did and how they did it. The way I understand Luke’s witness, the only thing that really matters, is for the church — every manifestation of the church, from the ministry team of two or three, to the congregation, to the conference of bishops, and the World Council of Churches — the only thing that matters, is for the church to entrust itself wholeheartedly to God’s movement in the world. With such trust in the Spirit of Jesus, clarity will come.

Paul and his team got into a boat to the island of Samothrace, then sailed on to Neapolis, a lovely seaside town in the northern Aegean, and once on land they didn’t linger on the beach, but walked eight miles inland to Philippi. No meandering here, no attempting to go this way or that way, just a straight journey from Troas to Philippi, a Roman colony, as Luke mentions. “[The city] was the heart of the Empire’s project in this corner of the world,” writes Brian Peterson, “a place that lived like an extended section of Rome itself, intended to be an example of what Rome offers to the world.”[6] And now this little missionary team showed up, this gospel avantgarde of the kingdom of God, a community of witness to a way of life that subverts systems of domination, a living testimony to what Jesus offers to the world.

Upon their arrival in the city, nothing much happens for a while. Luke isn’t very specific, only tells us that they were there for “some days.” The appeal in the vision was urgent. The team’s response to it was immediate. But then they were just there for some days, waiting for God to move.

Luke doesn’t mention a synagogue, and perhaps there wasn’t a large enough Jewish community in the city to sustain one. Synagogues were typically the first stop for Paul and his team, according to Luke. Philippi wasn’t typical. On the sabbath, they went outside the gate to the river, thinking they might find a group of worshippers there. And they did, and most of them, possibly all of them, were women. And one of them was Lydia. Paul’s vision was about a Macedonian man, but the first to receive the gospel of Jesus with faith in Philippi was a woman, and to add one more layer of holy unexpectedness, she wasn’t even Macedonian: Lydia was a business woman from Thyatira, a city in the Roman province of Asia, from the very area where the Spirit had forbidden the team to go. When you entrust yourselves to the movement of God in the world, apparently you better brace yourselves for some old rugs of expectation to be pulled from under your feet.

Paul talked and Lydia listened eagerly, but Luke doesn’t mention even a word of what Paul had to say, because it was God who opened her heart. The heart has ears no preacher can open, not even Paul — charm, eloquence, conviction, empathy and wisdom are wonderful gifts and skills, but at best they can lay words on a listener’s heart. Only God can open hearts to receive the Word. Only God can open eyes to recognize Christ in the stranger. Only God can open minds to let the same mind be in us that was in Christ Jesus, which is God’s way of subverting our proud dreams of supremacy, domination, and empire with the promise of God’s reign.[7]

Lydia was baptized along with her entire household, which makes me wonder if God opened all those other hearts as well, or if workers and children simply had to follow the head of household’s lead — I hope it was the former. Lydia was a business woman of substantial means, and entrusting herself to the movement of God in the world, she opened her home to become the first mission station in this Roman colony, making her the first leader of what may well have been the first house church in Europe. When Paul wrote his letter to the church in Philippi, thanking them for their partnership in the gospel, he didn’t mention Lydia — I hope this was only because there were too many local leaders to mention by name.

Luke tells us, that after Paul and Silas were released from jail in Philippi, and before they got on the road to Thessalonica, they went to Lydia’s home.[8] There they encouraged the brothers and sisters, and no doubt received encouragement for the long road ahead. Together they entrusted themselves to the movement of God in the world. May we go with them.

[1] Philippians 1:3-5

[2] Acts 16:6-8

[3] Brian Peterson https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter-3/commentary-on-acts-169-15

[4] See Luke 1:1-3

[5] See Brian Peterson https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/sixth-sunday-of-easter-3/commentary-on-acts-169-15

[6] Ibid.

[7] Compare the various divine openings that occur in Luke 24: 31,32,45; Philippians 2:5

[8] Acts 16:40

Conversions

The book of Acts is volume two to the Gospel that bears Luke’s name. It’s full name is The Acts of the Apostles, yet it could also be called The Acts of the Holy Spirit Poured out on all Flesh. It tells the story of the first believers struggling to keep up with the movement of God’s Spirit after God had raised Jesus from the dead. The opening chapters of Acts are centered in Jerusalem, but the Spirit pushes outward, and soon we hear about Philip’s witness in Samaria and the wilderness baptism of a man on his way back from Jerusalem to Ethiopia. But what presents the most difficult challenges to the first witnesses isn’t geography or the hardships and dangers of travel: it’s learning to think about themselves as participants in God’s movement in the world.

One of the most significant divisions in the ancient Jewish world was between Jews — God’s people, called to live in righteousness and holiness — and Gentiles, seen as living far from God in the darkness of their idolatrous ways. And now the good news of Jesus was spilling over into the Gentile world, crossing boundaries and reshaping identities that had been in place for generations. In Acts, Luke masterfully compresses this gradual, very difficult, and contested development into a sequence of dramatic scenes with Peter as a key character.

Last Sunday, Nancy read Acts 9:36-43, the story about Peter praying at Tabitha’s bedside. Tabitha had died, and after praying for her, Peter told her to get up — and she opened her eyes and got up. The scene concludes with the narrator’s comment, “This became known throughout Joppa, and many believed in the Lord.” The next verse, verse 43, seemed a little odd as a conclusion to the reading, so Nancy asked, “Do I have to read the last verse? Meanwhile [Peter] stayed in Joppa for some time with a certain Simon, a tanner. What does that have to do with anything?” So, she ended the reading with verse 42. That odd verse 43 doesn’t add anything to the story about Tabitha, but it prepares Luke’s audience for the story that unfolds over the next two chapters. Peter was in Joppa, a port on the Mediterranean, on the edge of the Jewish heartland, where he was staying at the home of Simon the tanner. Tanners work with animal carcasses, and their occupation made it very difficult for them to remain ritually clean. Many pious Jews would have chosen a different place to stay on a visit to Joppa. So, Peter wasn’t just on the edge of the Jewish heartland; he was awfully close to the boundary line of purity and holiness. Some would have thought that Peter had already gone too far, but this was only the beginning.

Now Luke introduces Cornelius, an officer in the Roman army, in Caesarea, forty miles up the coast from Joppa. Caesarea was a thoroughly Gentile port city, but Luke lets us know that Cornelius was a devout, God-fearing man. They knew him at the synagogue, and they liked and respected him. He participated regularly in the daily prayers and shabbat services, and he gave generously to those in need. Cornelius was as close to being a Jew as a male Gentile could be without undergoing circumcision. And one afternoon Cornelius had a vision. An angel of God came to him and said, “Cornelius! Your prayers and gifts to the poor have ascended as a memorial before God. Send messengers to Joppa and bring back a man named Simon, who is known as Peter. He is staying with Simon the tanner, whose house is by the sea.” Cornelius called two of his servants and a soldier from his personal staff, and sent them to Joppa.

In the next scene, we see Peter on the roof the house, where he’s praying. He became hungry, and while the meal was being prepared, he had a vision. He saw heaven opened and something like a large sheet being lowered to the earth by its four corners. In it were all kinds of four-legged animals, as well as reptiles and birds. And a voice told him, “Get up, Peter. Kill and eat.”

“Absolutely not, Lord!” Peter exclaimed. “I have never eaten anything that is impure or unclean.” The voice spoke to him a second time, “Do not call anything impure that God has made clean.” This happened three times. Three times — who would have thought that a heavenly voice could run into such resistance! Clearly a lot was at stake here for Peter. What he was told to do went against some of his most deeply held convictions, things he had been taught since he was a little boy.

Now while Peter was wondering what to make of this very persistent vision, the men sent by Cornelius arrived at the gate, and the Spirit interrupted his thoughts, “Simon, three men are looking for you. Get up and go downstairs, and do not hesitate to go with them, for I have sent them.” So, Peter went down and the men told him, “We’ve come on behalf of Cornelius, a centurion in Caesarea; he is a righteous and God-fearing man, who is well-respected by all Jewish people. A holy angel told him to ask you to come to his house so that he could hear what you have to say.” Peter invited the three into the house as his guests, and the next day he went with them, and some of the believers from Joppa went along.

Anticipating their arrival, Cornelius had gathered his relatives and close friends. Upon entering the house, Peter found a large gathering of people, and he said to them, “You all are well aware that it is against our law for a Jew to associate with or visit a Gentile. However, God has shown me that I should not call anyone impure or unclean. So when I was sent for, I came without raising any objection. May I ask why you sent for me?” Cornelius told him of his vision and said, “It was good of you to come. Now we are all here in the presence of God to listen to all that the Lord has commanded you to tell us.” And Peter said, “I now realize that God shows no partiality to one group of people over another. Rather, in every nation, whoever worships him and does what is right is acceptable to God.” And while he was still speaking, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who heard the word. The circumcised believers who had come with Peter were astonished that the gift of the Holy Spirit had been poured out even on Gentiles. God was indeed pouring out God’s Spirit on all flesh! Peter declared, “Surely no one can stand in the way of their being baptized with water; they have received the Holy Spirit just as we have.” So he ordered the whole Gentile assembly to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ.

An ancient boundary, deeply embedded in Jewish life and tradition, was eroding and collapsing. It was astonishing, yet for all who were there, their actions only followed the lead of God’s Spirit — they certainly felt quite uncomfortable on the way, but they went anyway, prodded by the Spirit, and to them their actions didn’t manifest disobedience, but rather true obedience.

Back in Jerusalem, Peter was criticized for crossing the line: “You went into the house of uncircumcised men and ate with them?” Brian Peterson writes,

To those serious about Israel’s covenant, eating with Gentiles carried a whiff of idolatry. It might have been understandable to preach the good news to these Gentiles. It might even have been acceptable to baptize the household, especially if the Spirit was as evident as Peter alleged. However, those in Jerusalem apparently did not agree with Peter in how to interpret, and even more importantly how to embody, what this event meant. Baptism admitted these Gentiles into some level of belonging.[1]

Maybe Gentile faith and baptism meant that they could be welcomed at the table where the disciples of Jesus gathered; but should disciples of the Lord really join a Gentile table?

Luke then tells the story of Peter telling them the whole story, and it all ends beautifully. Peter says, “God gave them the same gift he gave us who believed in the Lord Jesus Christ—who was I to think that I could stand in God’s way?” And his critics praise God and say, “Then God has given even to the Gentiles the repentance that leads to life.”

Even to the Gentiles. The church in the first generation moved from a carefully bounded ethnic identity to a multi-ethnic, Christ-centered identity, and it wasn’t the church’s doing. The initiative was God’s and the church followed — slowly, hesitantly, but Jewish and Gentile believers followed. Both Cornelius and Peter were given visions that allowed them to see what God was up to. Both were given new identities as recipients of God’s boundary-crossing initiative. Both were given new purpose as witnesses to the wideness of God’s embrace of the whole human family. And Luke shows us repentance that leads to life not only among the Gentiles in Cornelius’s household, but also among Peter’s circumcised fellow believers in Jerusalem. We witness a miraculous change of heart, inspired by the Lord, that infused the early believers with a radically transformed sense of the kind of community that is possible in God’s new realm.[2]

It is tragic that for centuries, conversion has meant that they have to become like us in order to be acceptable, or that we have to become like them. But Luke tells a different story, a powerful corrective to that dominant story of conversion: in obedience to the Spirit’s guidance people welcome one another despite all that divides them. They welcome the stranger, ready to hear what divine word they might bring. They enter the house of the stranger, not to take it over and make it their house, but completely entrusting themselves to the Spirit’s movement and work.

What if we, amid the seismic shifts we’re experiencing and the deep divisions we watch only getting deeper, what if we entrusted ourselves to the Spirit’s movement and work? What if we went, wherever we go, trusting that God is already there, preparing encounters for our continuing conversion into the likeness of Christ? What if we embraced, in every encounter, the repentance that leads to life?

In Revelation, the end of our story is seen as a city. “See, the home of God is among mortals. God will dwell with them; they will be God’s peoples, and God will be with them and be their God.” According to John, our story doesn’t end with all of them finally becoming like us; it ends with God being at home with God’s peoples. And you heard that right, it’s peoples, plural. The One who is making all things new delights in plurality and is at work even now to heal all our divisions. Thanks be to God.

[1] Brian Peterson https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-of-easter-3/commentary-on-acts-111-18-4

[2] See Karl Kuhn https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fifth-sunday-of-easter-3/commentary-on-acts-111-18-5

The conquering Lamb

WPLN’s Blake Farmer did an exit interview with outgoing Health Commissioner Dr. Lisa Piercey. Talking about what she learned as a public health official during the pandemic, she mentioned dropping by a grocery store in rural Gibso County. The sign on the door read something to the effect of, “no masks allowed.”

“It was an interesting case study because I knew these people,” she said. “That’s where I grew up and that’s where my family still lives.” While she served as health commissioner, Piercey split her time between her West Tennessee home and an apartment in Nashville. So she experienced the rural-urban divide every week. And on that day, prior to any COVID vaccine being available, she took off her own mask — despite her public statements about their importance — did her shopping and was on her way. She realized that her Nashville messages didn’t quite land in Gibson County. “One of the biggest lessons I learned was that facts don’t change people’s minds. And as a scientist that baffled me initially. I thought, ‘Oh, well maybe I need to say it louder? Maybe I need to say it in a more simple term?’ But it wasn’t that … What we learned very quickly is facts don’t change people’s minds if it causes them to go against their tribe.”[1]

We are very reluctant to go against our tribe. “Tribe” has become a way to speak about, or to somehow get a handle on, the deep divisions that baffle us. Mike Murphy, a veteran Republican strategist who studies polarization, said about the electoral landscape, “It’s two different worlds — hostile, suspicious of each other and assuming bad intent. It’s become totally tribal. There are no opponents anymore. Everyone is an enemy.”[2] And it looks like not even the hightest court in the land can resist the pull of the tribal vortex.

“Five of the last six presidents talked about healing America’s divide,” writes Peter Baker.

George H.W. Bush called for a “kinder and gentler nation,” Bill Clinton promised to be the “repairer of the breach,” George W. Bush termed himself “a uniter not a divider” and Barack Obama declared there was not a Blue America and Red America but “the United States of America.”[3]

I assume they all meant what they said, but the tribal divide only grew deeper, year after year.

The passage from Revelation we just heard, speaks of a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, gathered around the throne of God, along with angels and elders and four mysterious creatures, all of them shouting and singing together. We are given a vision of a community that transcends all human divisions and even the division between earthly and heavenly creatures — it is the vision of a community of praise, a joyful, crosscultural,  polyphonic and multilingual shouting fest of gratitude. We have trouble identifying the powers and forces that are driving us apart, but John tells us that in heaven, the angels and saints are singing of the one who is drawing us together: they are singing about lamb power.

According to the book of Revelation, the risen Lord appeared to John on the island of Patmos in the eastern Mediterranean, and gave him messages to be sent to the seven churches in the Roman province of Asia, the part of the world we know today as Turkey. John is caught up into what he describes as the heavenly throneroom, where he sees a book with seven seals, and the vision unfolds with each broken seal, the seventh seal opening into seven trumpet scenes, and the last trumpet announcing a set of seven bowls of wrath which are being poured out upon the earth. John sees plagues and devastations, climaxing in the destruction of Babylon, the “great city,” representing imperial Rome. Then he sees visions of the final triumph of God as Christ returns: the dead are raised, the final judgment is held, and the new Jerusalem is established as the capital of the redeemed creation.

Revelation was probably meant to be read in its entirety in worship, perhaps with the congregation singing along with its many doxologies, hymns and anthems, uniting heavenly and earthly creatures in worship. The whole thing feels like the script for a cosmic-scale performance, and it’s no coincidence that the rich, symbolic world of Revelation has inspired poets, musicians, painters, and even architects. However, the same symbols, writes L. T. Johnson, have also “nurtured delusionary systems, both private and public, to the destruction of their fashioners and to the discredit of the writing … Few writings in all of literature have been so obsessively read with such generally disastrous results as the Book of Revelation.”[4]

Revelation was written to fledgling churches during a period of oppression and persecution. It was meant to strengthen their faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead, during a time when the Roman empire was making claims on believers’ allegiance that made it challenging and costly for them to hold on to their confession of Jesus Christ as Lord. Revelation was written as a letter of encouragement, urging believers to keep the faith in the clash of Rome’s empire and God’s kingdom. Most of the letter’s first audiences probably knew how to read it; they were familiar with John’s world of symbols and the letter’s countless allusions to the Hebrew prophets and other parts of Scripture. But it didn’t take long before the book began to be read as “something akin to a train schedule” for the final years of the world. Rather than a source of hope, the text soon became an instrument of fear and abuse in the hands of those who claimed to know the true, but hidden, meaning of its bold declarations.

The book contains plenty of material that is difficult to absorb if your faith has been shaped by the Jesus who embodied love, forgiveness, and reconciliation. In scene after scene, God, the heavenly armies, or Christ are presented as violent perpetrators. There’s no turning the other cheek, no prayer for those who persecute, no love of enemies. Eugene Boring writes, “The reservations of some [against Revelation] have been based on the real dangers that have emerged when [the book] has been interpreted in foolish, sub-Christian or anti-Christian ways. Although every biblical book is subject to misinterpretation, no other part of the Bible has provided such a happy hunting ground for all sorts of bizarre and dangerous interpretations.”[5]

The way to read Revelation faithfully is to keep our eyes on the throne that stands at the center of the heavenly worship. Amid scenes of unimaginable destruction and cosmic upheaval John shares with us his vision of the heavenly throne where God is seated together with the Lamb, the crucified Jesus, risen from the dead. The way to read Revelation faithfully, the way to read our own challenging circumstances faithfully, is to keep our eyes on Jesus.

Rome’s oppressive power was real and reached into all aspects of daily life, but it wouldn’t last, John declared. The Nazi empire of industrialized death was real and horrific, but it couldn’t last. Apartheid in South Africa was real and horrific, but it couldn’t last. The devastating legacies of colonialism and slavery are pervasive and persistent, but they will not last. Putin’s imperial aspirations are terrifying and cruel, but they will not last. They cannot last, John declares, because they have already been conquered by the Lamb, conquered by the wondrous love of God who embraces all of us on the cross. All that separates us from God, all that separates us and from each other and from the fullness of life God desires for all of creation, all the forces and powers of division and domination have already been conquered. The Lamb is on the throne. John saw a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands, and singing, “Victory belongs to God.” John saw humanity gathered together not by imperial order, nor by coercion or dreams of greatness, but by the gentle gravity of Jesus’ life.

John heard one of the elders say, “The Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” There is much in the book of Revelation that worries me. Too much room is given to vengeful fantasies that don’t reflect the compassion and mercy of Jesus. But the affirmation that the Lamb at the center of the throne will be our shepherd is one I want to embrace with my whole being. It’s a curious, species-hopping play with metaphors: Jesus is likened to a lamb, and the lamb in turn is likened to a shepherd, a human figure of care and protection. The one who guides us to springs of the water of life, is both utterly vulnerable and the most powerful reality in all of creation. Jesus completely resists the temptation to dominate, and he is the one who conquers and reigns.

John saw them, a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, singing with the angels, praising the wondrous love that heals creation. “God’s praises are sung both there and here,” wrote St. Augustine.

Here they are sung in anxiety, there, in security; here they are sung by those destined to die, there, by those destined to live for ever; here they are sung in hope, there, in hope’s fulfillment; here they are sung by wayfarers, there, by those living in their own country. So let us sing now, not in order to enjoy a life of leisure, but in order to lighten our labors. You should sing as wayfarers do—sing, but continue your journey. … Sing, but keep going.[6]

Amid all that divides us, even amid terror and war and all our fears and worries, John invites us to keep our eyes on Jesus, the Lamb upon the throne, and to sing as wayfarers do. To sing, and to keep going. To sing, and to press on to the better city.

[1] https://wpln.org/post/in-exit-interview-tennessee-health-chief-lisa-piercey-defends-how-the-state-dealt-with-covid/

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/06/us/politics/abortion-rights-supreme-court-roe-v-wade.html

[3] Ibid.

[4]Johnson, L. T., The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation (Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1999), 573.

[5] Eugene Boring, Revelation (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1989), 4.

[6] Augustine of Hippo, quoted in Gabe Huck, A Sourcebook about Liturgy (Chicago: LTP, 1994), 35.

Fall from certainty

Acts 9:1-9

We meet Saul at the end of Acts 7, where Luke introduces him, almost in passing. A group of people opposed to the teachings and witness of Jesus’ followers have dragged Stephen out of the city to stone him, and some of them, we’re told, “placed their coats in the care of a young man named Saul.”[1] And he wasn’t just watching coats. “Saul was in full agreement with Stephen’s murder,” Luke lets us know, and he adds, “Saul began to wreak havoc against the church. Entering one house after another, he would drag off both men and women and throw them into prison.”[2] And in ch. 9 we read how Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, wants to expand the persecution to the synagogues of Damascus. Followers of Jesus’ there were known as people of the Way, and Saul was looking for paperwork that would authorize him to take them as prisoners to Jerusalem. He was a man on a mission. His certainty was unshakable; his authority, unquestionable; his cause, righteous. And on the road, he suddenly found himself thrown to the ground, surrounded by blinding light, and questioned by a heavenly voice identifying itself not with him, the fervent defender of pure doctrine, but with the people he was harassing.

One moment, he was so certain, so self-assured, striding forward with great confidence, and now he was helpless and blind, had to be helped up and led by the hand like a toddler. For three days he was without sight. And then something like scales fell from his eyes—and it was after Ananias, one of the ones Saul had come to find and bind and take away, had laid his hands on him. Saul had his eyes opened, quite literally, by someone he was 100% certain belonged in prison for their distorted and dangerous views of Jesus.

This is the kind of thing that can happen when church happens: The living Christ may appear, disrupt, intrude, may cause us to fall from certainty, take away our former way of seeing things, open our eyes, and claim us for life in his name—no one knows when or where or how.

A week ago, the Tennessee legislature voted to make it illegal to camp on public property in Tennessee. It’s already illegal to camp on both state and private property at night. The bill, now on the Governor’s desk, would add serious criminal charges for camping on city and county property as well. It would be a Class E felony to camp on any public property between 10 p.m. and 7 a.m. — that means up to six years in prison and a fine up to $3,000. If the measure becomes law, there would be nowhere left for homeless individuals and families to sleep without risking a criminal charge. And people convicted of felonies in Tennessee face more than the possibility of fines or prison time. They also lose the right to vote, and anyone with a felony on their record faces enormous barriers to securing employment or housing. Tennessee does not have enough shelter capacity to house all of the state’s homeless population, and nationwide, the homeless population is growing. And our legislation is doing nothing to improve mental health services, incentivize affordable housing stock in critical markets, or boost TennCare funding. What our legislature is saying, is, “We’re not willing to do much to help you get a roof over your head, but if we catch you camping in parks or under bridges, you go to prison.”

The Governor has not said publicly if he supports the bill, and I joined with faith leaders from across the state in signing a letter urging him to veto it. I have little confidence he will, but I’ve been wrong before.

A group of professional social workers and mental health advocates wrote in Tennessee Lookout,

We recognize homelessness is a complex issue. Leaders must work collaboratively to develop community-specific solutions that support but don’t punish our most vulnerable neighbors. … Criminalizing sleeping in public is a solution for no one in Tennessee.[3]

Remembering Saul, I pray for a fall from certainty for our legislators, that they may lose their reductive vision of felony and punishment, and come to see the hard and often frustrating complexity of our life together. Like Saul having his eyes opened by hanging out with Ananias, they may come to see in new ways by listening to the very people they’re seeking to lock up.

On Wednesday, our representatives were having a debate about books. A last-minute amendment had been introduced requiring school districts to submit lists of school library books to an expanded state textbook commission. This amendment was to make certain that obscene material wouldn’t end up in children’s hands. There had been an earlier version that required the commission to issue a list of “approved” materials Tennessee schools could provide to students, but it caused such an uproar among parent and librarian groups, that the sponsors withdrew it. So now it was school districts submitting their lists of library collections to a politically appointed commission for final approval.

The debate was quite heated. At one point, Rep. John Ray Clemmons asked what the state would do with the books deemed inappropriate, put them out in the street or set them on fire? To whch Rep. Jerry Sexton responded, “I don’t have a clue, but I would burn ‘em.”[4] Let’s make it simple. We don’t trust the teachers. We don’t trust the librarians. We don’t trust the local school boards. So let’s just make a list of approved titles, pull the rest and burn them.

The simplicity is tempting. We don’t like all these tents and shopping carts on the side of the road and in our parks—let’s just threaten the campers with prison time; that’ll teach them.

We don’t like certain books that present a perspective on life quite different from our own—let’s just put them on an index, pull them from our school libraries and burn them.

Saul was on the way to Damascus when Jesus found him. Peter was fishing with his friends when Jesus found him. What these stories invite us to consider is that Jesus is neither safely buried in the grave, nor safely gone to heaven never to be heard of again. They present to us a world perpetually disrupted by the presence of the risen Christ, and not a far-away world, but ours. They tell us that Jesus used to be somewhere: somewhere in Nazareth or Capernaum, Bethany or Jericho, somewhere on the lake, on a mountain, in somebody’s house. You could have traced his movements on a map. But now his astounding intrusions may occur anywhere and anytime. The resurrection is the world in which Jesus has been raised, the reality of the continuing, disruptive presence of Jesus.

Chapter 20 of John wraps things up nicely:

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book. But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.[5]

That’s a lovely ending, isn’t it? But there’s another chapter; it opens with a wide view across the lake: we’re in Galilee, where it all began. Peter is here and Thomas, the sons of Zebedee and two others of Jesus’ disciples, and Nathanael—Nathanael who hasn’t been mentioned again since Jesus promised him in chapter 1 that he would see greater things. And now he sees them, along with the other disciples, after a long night of hard work with nothing to show for it.

“Cast your net on the right side of the boat and you will find some,” the stranger said, and they did, and they couldn’t haul it in because of the abundance of fish they had caught.[6]

One of them said, “It is the Lord!” What about Peter? We haven’t heard much from Peter since he rushed off to the tomb, entered it, and then returned home without saying a word.[7]

Peter put on his clothes and jumped into the lake, so very eager to get to shore quickly. There was a charcoal fire with fish on it, and bread. I can almost smell it, delicious.

“Come and have breakfast,” Jesus said. Bread and fish in abundance—did any of them remember that day by the lake when Jesus fed five thousand with a boy’s lunch of five loaves and two fish?

For Peter, the charcoal fire brought back memories of the fire in the courtyard where he had come to warm himself, and three times he denied that he was a disciple of Jesus. Three times he denied having anything to do with the love by which people know that we are Jesus’ disciples.[8] But in the world where Jesus is raised from the dead, this love will continue to be fundamental to Peter’s identity.

Three times Jesus asked him, “Do you love me?”— not to shame him or burden him with guilt, but to give him a new way to make his love manifest: Feed my sheep. When you make a pledge today, when you add your name to one of our ministry teams, you say yes to making the love of Jesus manifest. Jesus, risen from the dead, finds us and feeds us, and he sends us to feed others in his name. Sends us as he has been sent, to be people of the way. His life our life. His love the heartbeat of all things, especially in a time of war and deep division.

Sometimes you wonder what all we affirm and declare when we confess our faith in the God who raised Jesus from the dead. We affirm the faithfulness of God. We affirm the power of love to drive out fear and guilt and shame. We affirm the newness of life the first witnesses embraced and proclaimed. We affirm that this newness will erupt wherever and whenever the love of Jesus disrupts our loveless ways. We affirm our hope that Jesus, raised from the dead, will find us again and again to open our eyes and draw us into fullness of life.

[1] Acts 7:58 (CEB)

[2] Acts 8:1, 3 (CEB)

[3] https://tennesseelookout.com/2022/04/12/commentary-criminalizing-sleeping-in-public-will-make-problems-for-homelessness-worse/ See also https://wpln.org/post/tennessee-lawmakers-pass-a-bill-that-could-target-people-experiencing-homelessness/

[4] See https://tennesseelookout.com/2022/04/27/representative-says-he-would-burn-books-deemed-inappropriate-by-state/ and https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/politics/2022/04/27/jerry-sexton-burn-books-tennessee-school-library-bill-debate/9554117002/

[5] See John 20:26-31

[6] Funny sidenote from a great scholar, “It is notable that never in the Gospels do the disciples catch a fish without Jesus’ help.” Raymond E. Brown, John, 1071.

[7] John 20:3-10

[8] John 13:34-35