Death no dominion

Ezekiel never has been our favorite prophet, has he? We much prefer Isaiah, especially the words we can copy straight to our Christmas cards. We also like Amos and Micah, who speak out with such passion and courage for justice for the poor. But Ezekiel? He doesn’t show up much in our Sunday school lessons or in our lectionary; he does get quoted, though, sort-of, several times by Samuel Jackson’s character in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.[1] Ezekiel is strange; some would say, he’s weird. His visions and voice are imaginative, often incomprehensible, with violent and pornographic tendencies, and his most fervent readers tend to be of the wild-eyed kind.

Ezekiel, son of Buzi, was a Judean priest, or perhaps a recent graduate preparing for the priesthood. He was part of a first wave of exiles from Jerusalem whom King Nebuchadrezzar deported to Babylon in an attempt to subdue the troublesome leadership of Judah. We don’t know much about Ezekiel’s personal life, but I imagine that as a priest he felt utterly out of place in that foreign land. You can be a teacher without a school building; you just gather your students in the living room or under the tree in the back yard. You can be a bricklayer or a weaver anywhere in the world, as long as you have your tools. But Ezekiel was a priest of the Lord whose temple was in Jerusalem, and outside of that sacred place he was a man without a purpose. His entire community had been uprooted, and they all struggled to make sense of this devastating experience.

It was in exile that Ezekiel became a prophet of the Lord. He had visions, he heard voices, in the grip of God’s spirit he traveled far, and he shared what was revealed to him with his compatriots. Ezekiel insisted that their exile did not reflect the defeat of their God by the gods of Babylon, as some surmised; no, their loss was the judgment brought down on them by the Lord, and in Ezekiel’s mind, it was altogether justified and deserved. In his reflections, there was no room for historical or geo-strategic analysis that might explain Jerusalem’s defeat as collateral damage in the conflict between the global powers of the day, Assyria, Babylonia, and Egypt. In Ezekiel’s mind, it was all God’s doing, and the God he knew was consumed by wrath and bent on violence. The fire burning in Ezekiel’s belly was one few if any of his fellow exiles had ever even gotten close to. And the bad news continued to pile up, layer upon layer of loss and grief.

The word of the Lord came to me: Mortal, with one blow I am about to take away from you the delight of your eyes, yet you shall not mourn or weep, nor shall your tears run down. Groan quietly; make no mourning for the dead. Bind on your turban, and put your sandals on your feet; do not cover your upper lip or eat the bread of mourners. So I spoke to the people in the morning, and at evening my wife died. And on the next morning I did as I was commanded.[2]

Ezekiel declared that the Babylonians would breach the walls of Jerusalem, burn the buildings to the ground, slaughter many of the inhabitants, and deport the rest. And those who thought that Ezekiel was out of his mind weren’t so sure anymore when more news arrived from Jerusalem. “In the twelfth year of our exile, in the tenth month, on the fifth day of the month,” he wrote in his diary, “someone who had escaped from Jerusalem came to me and said, ‘The city has fallen.’”[3]

Everything that once made them who they were as a people, had been taken away or destroyed: the land, the temple, the city and throne of David, their proud theology of the city that shall not be moved.[4] All gone. All they had left was their exhaustion and despair.In the midst of that, Ezekiel heard a new  word—or was it the memory of one he had heard long ago?

A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances. Then you shall live in the land that I gave to your ancestors; and you shall be my people, and I will be your God.[5]

He heard this word, or half-remembered it, but who among his people could hear it? Was he ready to say it? He wrote it down, but he couldn’t say it. The words of judgment had come to him more easily. And the losses they had experienced were much more tangible than these first whispers of hope that were seeking a way to his lips, whispers of a new heart and a new spirit.

Then the hand of the Lord once again came upon Ezekiel, and the Lord brought him out by the spirit of the Lord and set him down in the middle of a valley. It was a journey into the heart of the people in exile, a journey into the depth of his own heart. Ezekiel didn’t just see a valley full of bones, he walked around in it. The Lord led him around as if to make sure he would take in the full extent of life’s absence.

Ezekiel was a meticulous diarist, noting, e.g., that the word of the Lord came to him in the sixth year, in the sixth month, on the fifth day or in the seventh year, in the fifth month, on the tenth day.[6] But Ezekiel’s vision of the valley of dry bones, unlike his other visions, does not bear a date, as Elie Wiesel noted. Why not? Wiesel suggested, because every generation needs to hear in its own time that these bones can live.Because in every generation, those who have reached the end of the miserable road that took them away from home, away from joy and life and hope—they need to hear in their own time that these bones can live. All of us in the valley of history hear some echo of the Lord’s question, “Mortal, can these bones live?” And all of us need to hear some echo of Ezekiel’s words, spoken with fantastic courage or holy madness, “O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord. Thus says the Lord God to these bones: I will cause breath to enter you and you shall live. … You shall live; and you shall know that I am the Lord.” Ezekiel was about as far away from the garden of creation as the human imagination can go, and there, in the dust where life once was, in the desert of tired despair, he spoke the word of the Lord.

And a rustling sound / as of leaves in autumn wind / started amid the dry bones. / A whisper, then a drumbeat! / They stood erect, those bones, and knitted firm! [7]

One human being, walking like the last chronicler through fields of destruction, Ezekiel spoke the words of God,

and the spirit entered the bones. / First a whisper, / then a drumbeat, / then reverberant – / a heartbeat! / They took breath once more! and / walked about! and / conversed one with another! / joyful, harmonious, / an immense throng, / the newborn, / the living![8]

The prophet spoke, and hope began to sing: Death no dominion! “I will put my spirit within you, and you shall live!”

It was God who made humans from dust and breathed into them the breath of life.[9] It was God who brought Israel out of Egypt, making covenant with them at Sinai, and bringing them to a good land. And now, Ezekiel saw and declared, God would bring new life to a weary people whose bones were dried up and whose hope was lost. The spirit of God is blowing in the valley, he told any who would listen—let it breathe on you, let it breathe in you; allow it to give breath to your voice and inspire your actions. You are not cut off from the presence of God—breathe, the spirit of God is as close to you as your own breath. Breathe—this is not the end of the road.

In the Gospel of John, the reality of death is stated less poetically by Martha who says it as it is: “Lord, already there is a stench because he has been dead four days.” Then Jesus speaks, and Lazarus emerges from the tomb. Jesus speaks the word that gives life to the dead,[10] and it begins to dawn on Martha, and on us, that Jesus is the word that gives life to the dead. In Jesus we meet the human being who embodies the life-giving word of God so fully, that the Gospel of John declares him to be the word of God—not merely a great teacher of the word, or a prophet who faithfully proclaims the word, but the very word of God living life with us as a human being.

We know the place where we say, “Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost.” We know the place where despair presents itself as the only reasonable response to the course of the world. We know the place, and anytime we get there, it’s good to have a friend like Ezekiel who’s been there and returned with a vision of God’s insurrection against hopelessness. We know the place where nothing seems more real than death, and when we’re there, may we know in our bones that Jesus is there with us, breathing and speaking life—the life that ends death’s dominion.

[1] “The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of the darkness, for he is truly his brother's keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know I am the Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0110912/characters/nm0000168 Cf. Ezekiel 25:17 “I will execute great vengeance on them with wrathful punishments. Then they shall know that I am the Lord, when I lay my vengeance on them.”

[2] Ezekiel 24:15-18

[3] Ezekiel 33:21

[4] Psalm 46:5

[5] Ezekiel 36:26-28

[6] Ezekiel 8:1; 20:1

[7] Daniel Berrigan, Ezekiel: Vision in the dust (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1997), 114.

[8] Berrigan, 115.

[9] Genesis 2:7

[10] cf. Rom 4:17

Be the light

“Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light,” the apostle writes. As far as metaphors are concerned, it doesn’t get more elemental than darkness and light. “Let there be light” were the first words spoken by God on the first day of creation, according to Genesis 1. Darkness and light are night and day, fundamental to the ordering of time and the rhythms of life.

“Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light,” writes the apostle, and we hear echoes of creation, echoes of life’s beginning. Ephesians seems to have been a baptismal sermon which was circulated as a letter among churches in Asia Minor. Unlike other New Testament letters, it doesn’t address the day-to-day struggles of a particular church, but rather the big-picture challenges of living a baptized life.

Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. You noticed that the apostle didn’t write, “Once you were in the darkness, but now in the Lord you are in the light.” It’s the same contrast, but apparently, for the apostle, it might invite the misunderstanding that baptism is merely a change of environments, a change of religious affiliation from one cult to another, with the identity of the person making the transition left basically untouched, like moving from one room to another, from one job to another. Baptism, this preacher wants the church to understand, is our transition to our true identity as God’s beloved children. Once you were darkness, now you are light. Earlier, the apostle wrote, “You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, … but God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us …, made us alive together with Christ.”[1] Once you were dead, now you are alive. Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Walk as children of light. Walk in ways that show who and whose you are. Let your life shine. Christ is your life. Be the light. Shine. Let the light of Christ shine in you and through you. And don’t be afraid, the fruit of the light is found in all that is good and right and true.

When you start to think about it, the fruit of the light sounds like a weird mix of metaphors, but less so when you consider that the light of Christ shines in and through the lives of human beings, who we are, what we say and do, and how we say and do—Christ wants to and does shine in and through all of it,

and all of it is fruit of the light for the harvest of light.

Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light—you are who and what you were meant to be, and it doesn’t matter if you hear yourself addressed as a person first or as a community, if you hear singular or plural, you or y’all: you are light. For many of us, Lent is a season when we take a closer look at our lives, when we ponder how fully and faithfully we’re living the life we have been given, when we wonder if we’re still trying to find out what is pleasing to the Lord or if somewhere along the way we’ve settled for what is pleasing to ourselves. It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of our known or perceived shortcomings; it’s easy to imagine the light as harsh, inescapable, and as somehow delighting in exposing our inconsistencies and contradictions; it’s easy to end up in a place of pervasive shame and guilt, stuck. The apostle warns us, “Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness; rather, expose them”—not to the harsh light of the relentlessly chatty and relentlessly critical voices in our minds, but to the light of grace and truth. When Paul writes, “Put away from you all bitterness and wrath and anger and wrangling and slander, together with all malice,” he has the whole community of the baptized in mind. “Be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another, as God in Christ has forgiven you.” That is the light. Kindness shines in the darkness of bitterness. Compassion and forgiveness shine in the darkness of wrath and malice. That is the light.

“Therefore be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us.”[2] We often treat others the way we treat ourselves, or the way we believe we deserve to be treated. Lent is a wonderful opportunity to walk intentionally under the loving gaze of God and let ourselves be loved—not for who we wish we were, but for who we are, beloved children.

At the end of today’s passage from Ephesians, Paul writes, “Therefore it says, ‘Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.’“ The apostle is not quoting scripture; most scholars think the line is most likely from a baptismal hymn his initial audience would have been familiar with. “Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.” It’s a lovely line, whether you hear it as a thundering wake-up call with bugle blasts, or a gentle voice whispering in your ear.  Many theologians of the first centuries heard echoes of a line from Isaiah, “Arise, shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you”—you can hear it too, that lovely echo, across the ages, can’t you?[3]Once you were darkness, but now in the Lord you are light. Arise! Shine! Be who God made you to be! However, Isaiah was also quite aware of the masters of deception: what many call light, some will call darkness. “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter!”[4] And we know exactly what he’s talking about.

We have presenters on news programs who intentionally lie for the sake of ratings, and some of us do want somebody to tell us that evil is good; and the mob storming the capitol on January 6? Those were actually groups of patriots on a self-guided sightseeing tour. We have state legislators and a governor who call the state-sponsored denial of medical care for transgender youth, protecting our children. And after the Tennessee Commission on Children and Youth reported the state’s foster care system is the worst in the nation, the administration really stepped up its efforts to turn things around—by dropping a plan to dissolve the Commission. A spokesperson for the governor’s office called the effort

another meaningful step to better serve Tennessee children by incorporating important services within child and family-serving state agencies, which includes DCS. To be clear, Tennessee is not cutting services for children or families, but rather, integrating them into state government, meaning that current services will remain intact and be relocated.

“If that’s the case,” comments the Tennessee Lookout’s Sam Stockard, “we have to wonder whether the fox will be guarding the henhouse if the commission’s work is shifted into the Department of Children’s Services, which has been falling short on the job for years.”[5]

A book for young readers comes to mind. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle was first published in 1962 and has been in print ever since. It has also faced several challenges and attempted bans: it was ranked #23 on the American Library Association’s 100 most frequently challenged books from 1990-1999, and #90 on the ALA’s list from 2000-2009.[6] Only in the last decade did the award-winning young adult novel drop from the top 100 list.[7]

A Wrinkle in Time is the story of Meg Murry, a high-school-aged girl who is transported on an adventure through time and space with her younger brother Charles and her friend Calvin to rescue her father from the evil forces that hold him prisoner on another planet. The three children learn from three celestial guides that the universe is threatened by a great evil called the Dark Thing. Several planets have already succumbed to this evil force, including Camazotz, the planet on which Meg’s father is imprisoned. On Camazotz, conformity rules, and everything is controlled by IT, a giant disembodied brain. Meg, Charles, and Calvin try to fight IT, but without success. They manage to escape, but Charles remains possessed by IT, a prisoner of Camazotz. One of the celestial guides tells Meg that she has one thing that IT does not have, and this will be her weapon against the evil. However, Meg must discover this weapon for herself. And, of course, she does: her love for her brother sets him free from IT’s clutches and he becomes himself again.

Some challengers thought the book was too religious, others, that it wasn’t religious enough; I think young readers are perfectly able to come to their own conclusions. Right around the time that L’Engle was writing A Wrinkle in Time, Dr. Martin Luther King preached, “Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”[8]

In 2018, A Wrinkle in Time was adapted into a motion picture by Walt Disney Pictures, directed by Ava Duvernay, and featuring Oprah Winfrey, Reese Witherspoon, and Mindy Kaling as Mrs. Which, Mrs. Whatsit, and Mrs. Who, the celestial guides. The movie’s promotional tagline passed on the insight of Mrs. L’Engle, Dr. King, the Sermon on the Mount, Ephesians, and Isaiah—the whole, deep, beautiful tradition: “The only way to defeat the darkness is to become the light.” So, whether you are contemplating the landscape of your heart or the world around you, let Christ shine. Be who and what you were meant to be. Be the light.

[1] Ephesians 2:1-5

[2] See Ephesians 4:31-32; 5:1-2

[3] Isaiah 60:1

[4] Isaiah 5:20

[5] https://tennesseelookout.com/2023/03/17/stockard-on-the-stump-killing-the-commission-on-children-and-youth-wont-be-easy

[6] https://bannedbooks.library.cmu.edu/madeleine-lengle-a-wrinkle-in-time-draft/

[7] https://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/decade2019

[8] Strength to Love, 1963.

What shall we drink?

I remember the sound of water on the land. I spent a couple of weeks hiking in the Italian Alps last summer, and I remember moving through magnificent mountain landscapes, most of the time immersed in some combination of bird song, wind, and water, water everywhere—dripping and trickling between rocks, gurgling in brooks, and thundering over boulders. I remember the sound of water and the delicious taste. One moment stands out: I had crossed over a pass, my water bottles were empty, and I was getting thirsty. I followed the narrow trail down, and eventually I came to a spring whose water filled a granite trough, bigger than a bathtub, to overflowing, and I drank. And I didn’t just drink a little water; I felt like I was drinking the mountain itself. I was drinking the essence of that place and that moment, and I felt like I had never tasted anything like it before (and you can’t bottle that).

I remember how my thirst prepared me to receive the fullness of the gift. Thirst can be a blessing—but of course that’s not all it can be. Israel remembers asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” They were thirsty and an inch away from full-throttle panic. “One hundred hours. That’s … how long a human body can typically survive at ‘average’ temperatures without access to water,” writes Anathea Portier Young.

Today’s Sinai Peninsula averages 82°F in May and 91°F in June. For those same months, average high temperatures are 95°F and 104°F respectively. In such extreme heat and with exposure to sun, the timeline for survival shortens considerably.

She quotes a scholar who has written The Biology of Human Survival: Life and Death in Extreme Environments: “At 90°F survival time with limited activity easily can be decreased by a factor of two.” So instead of a hundred hours, you only have fifty. Now take into account that your activity is far from limited, since you’re “walking long distances in the day time, carrying [your] belongings, tents, and small children, and wrangling livestock along the way.” And it’s quite reasonable also to take into account the possibility of higher than average temperatures when, according to the author of The Biology of Human Survival, “sustained high sweat rates can reduce estimated survival time without drinking water to as little as seven hours, or approximately the time it takes to walk twenty miles.”[1] One unusually, but not impossibly, hot, day was all it would take to finish God’s people; because at Rephidim, there was no water for the people to drink. Israel remembers asking, “Is the Lord among us or not?” They were thirsty and an inch away from full-throttle panic, and we know they were not being unreasonable.

“Remember the long way that the Lord your God has led you these forty years in the wilderness, in order to humble you, testing you to know what was in your heart,” Moses said to them at the end of the long journey, before Joshua led them into the promised land.[2] Only in retrospect did the long way become a test. They were formerly enslaved people who had escaped the house of slavery, but they still carried Egypt as a memory in their bones, they still bore the burden of Egypt as a mental state. More than once, they weighed their oppressed but viable lives as forced laborers in Pharaoh’s brick yards against the dangers of the long way through the wilderness. Only in retrospect did they come to see the long way as a test: God was committed to their liberation, but were they?

The testimony of the witnesses about those years is consistent. “We failed the wilderness test,” they tell us. “We had doubt in our heart and fear and little faith.” The testimony of the witnesses is consistent, and they didn’t edit the desert scenes to make themselves look a little better; they didn’t cut the grumbling, the quarreling and complaining, because to them, remembering meant remembering the truth and not some white-washed fiction. “We forgot what God had done,” they told generations to come.

We forgot the miracles the Lord had shown us,
who divided the sea and let us pass through it
and made the waters stand like a heap;
who led us in the daytime with a cloud,
and all night long with fiery light;
who split rocks open in the wilderness,
and gave us drink abundantly as from the deep,
making streams come out of the rock
and causing waters to flow down like rivers.[3]

We failed the test, I hear the wilderness wanderers say, but the promises of God were still new to us then; we were still in our growing-up years as God’s free covenant partners, we still had everything to learn. We failed the test, but we began to trust the faithfulness of God, and tell it, so that every new generation would put their trust in God … and not be like their ancestors, a stubborn and rebellious generation, a generation whose heart was not steadfast, and whose spirit was not faithful to God.[4]

Beginning with the wilderness wanderers, every generation passed on the stories to their children and grandchildren and urged them to remember. And they didn’t commission working groups for the beautification of the past and the smoothing of the record. They declared, we have failed again and again in our life as God’s people, but God has been faithful and true all the way. We failed to remember God’s promise and the commandments of life, but God remembered us. We failed to live as God’s people, but through our failure we came to know the wideness of God’s mercy.

In the stories of Israel’s wilderness wanderings, complaining and quarreling are recurring themes: Trapped between the sea and Pharaoh’s soldiers, the people said to Moses, with a good pinch of dark humor, “Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? What have you done to us, bringing us out of Egypt?”[5] Yet soon they marveled as God made a way out of no way.

Then at Marah, they couldn’t drink the water, because it was bitter, and the people complained to Moses, “What shall we drink?”[6] And God showed Moses a piece of wood to sweeten the water.

Then they ran out of food, and again they complained, “If only we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate our fill of bread; for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger.”[7] And the Lord gave them quail and manna to eat.

Then the water gave out altogether and the people quarreled with Moses, “Why did you bring us out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our livestock with thirst? Give us water to drink.”[8]

Israel’s testimony was born in a long struggle against oppression, against hunger and thirst, against fear and despair and amnesia, the long struggle for a life of justice in covenant with God. Israel’s trust in God was found at the end of their strength, at the very edge of what they could bear: where nothing’s left to lean on but the promise of God. “Go on ahead of the people,” God said to Moses, “and take some of the elders of Israel with you; take in your hand the staff with which you struck the Nile and go. I will be standing there in front of you on the rock at Horeb. Strike the rock, and water will come out of it, so that the people may drink.” And so he did, and the people drank.

God never failed us, the wilderness wanderers told their children. We escaped from the house of slavery. We had food to eat and water to quench our thirst. No one had more than they needed, no one too little. God was faithful, and we learned to be faithful to each other. Not that we never failed each other again; God knows we did. But in the wilderness, we drank God’s word like our life depended on it, and we have been sustained by this living water ever since. God’s presence and promise is water for our deepest thirst.

Water is essential for life to flourish. And because water is essential for all living things, and water connects all living things from the cellular level to oceans and atmospheric rivers, water is also one of our richest metaphors. And so we learn to say with the Psalmist,

As a deer longs for flowing streams,
so my soul longs for you, O God.
My soul thirsts for God, for the living God.[9]

And at the same time, we also try to fully grasp that access to clean water is precarious for billions of people, and that the next war may not be fought over oil, but over water.[10]

When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, he asks her to give him a drink. It is wonderfully ironic that the giver of living water is himself thirsty, asking for the most basic and most precious gift. To the woman, he’s little more than a curious man without a bucket, but soon she’ll recognize the face of Christ in the stranger. He needs what only she can give, and she needs what only he can give. This is how intimately connected God and humanity are, writes Osvaldo Vena: “A thirsty Messiah and a resourceful woman … find out that they need each other,”[11] and life-giving water flows—from her to him, from him to her, and from them to us. In giving and receiving, we come to know the faithfulness of God and learn to be faithful to each other. May we drink deeply from this spring.

[1] Anathea Portier Young https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-exodus-171-7-11

[2] Deuteronomy 8:2

[3] See Psalm 78:11-16

[4] Ps 78:7-8

[5] Exodus 14:11-12

[6] Exodus 15:23-24

[7] Exodus 16:2-3

[8] Exodus 17:3

[9] Psalm 42:1-1

[10] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20210816-how-water-shortages-are-brewing-wars

[11] Osvaldo Vena https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/third-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-john-45-42-3

Sojourners of the promise

It was on a morning after it had snowed in Nashville, when I saw the picture. It was taken from inside the house, through the open front door. There is snow on the ground, and you can make out the outline of a door mat, dusted with barely an inch of the winter wonder stuff. You also notice the crisp imprint of a dog’s paw—just one. Somebody in the house must have thought the dog might want to go, might need to go, or should perhaps go anyway, just in case, but the dog said no—in the unequivocal body language of a single paw pressed briefly into the thin layer of wintry precipitation and quickly withdrawn. The puppy was willing to try, but decided it wouldn’t take another step. It was cold and wet out there, and inside it was cozy.

Leaving can be tough. The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” The words are very specific about what he was to leave behind, and quite vague about his destination. Do you remember a time when you had to pack up and go? Allison and Jared are filling up boxes, a thousand decisions about what to take and what to sell or give away. Leaving takes effort. Pulling up the stakes and loosening the lines that had held your tent taut for so long, and watching it collapse, it takes effort. Allison and Jared and the boys know where they’re headed, but the unknown can be overwhelming. Do you remember when you found yourself on the road in mom’s old car or in the U-Haul truck or the station wagon with the kids in the backseat? Others talked about this moment as going to college, or getting married, or being between jobs, or starting over, but you couldn’t tell if you felt like an adventurer, an explorer, a pilgrim, or a refugee—you looked out the window at the passing landscape, carried by currents of excitement, fear, and hope.

Perhaps you recall that moment when you arrived, or you thought you did. You were beginning to feel settled, you had started to put down roots, and then the whole world changed in an instant when the phone rang and they told you that your best friend from college had died in a climbing accident; or your parents called to tell you they were getting a divorce, and what seemed like a reasonable thing to do for two adults who had grown apart turned out to be so painful and hard. And you pulled up the stakes and rolled up your tent and you found yourself on the road, again. Where would you set up camp next and for how long? Who would be there with you? And who would you be at the end of the journey? The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” We always seem to know what we’re leaving behind; the rest is unknown. Warsan Shire is a British writer born to Somali parents in Kenya who grew up in London. She knows about leaving, and I trust her voice when I try to comprehend the reality of the millions of people of all ages around the world who are leaving home on foot, by car or train or bicycle, crossing the sea in overloaded rubber dinghies, crossing mountains, rivers, jungles, borders, and deserts, on the way to a better life for themselves or their children. These are lines from her poem, Home.[1]

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well
your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
…
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
…
you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied
no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
…
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying leave,
run away from me now
i don't know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

The voice Abram heard—he knew it to be God’s. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” The story doesn’t say it wasn’t safe there anymore in Haran. It doesn’t say Abram’s herds couldn’t find pasture there anymore, or that the wells had dried up, and he had to pull up the stakes of his tent and move on. Abram and Sarai and his brother’s son, Lot, left Haran because Abram heard a call.

We’re in chapter 12 of Genesis, and the stories leading up to this moment begin with beautiful meditations on the promise of life. In the beginning, there is the wondrous word that calls all things into being, heaven and earth, light and life, creatures great and small—swimming, jumping, flying, crawling, growing, singing, roaring life. And God saw that it was very good.

Most of the stories that follow, not very good. It’s a miniseries about the fracturing of relationships with Adam and Eve and the serpent, Cain and Abel, the flood, the ark, and the tower of Babel, and amid the threatening chaos, the desire and determination of God to see life flourish. After Babel, the whole human family had come to a dead end. The sun still rose every morning, yes, and the rains still fell, but life was not what God intended it to be.

The Lord said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you. I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.” Where fractured trust had spread, fullness of blessing was to erupt. God spoke words of promise, but the first word was go. Leave the world you know, and become what I will make of you.

I will — five times this divine commitment is repeated in these four-and-a-half short verses, promising to give what human beings crave: well-being, security, prosperity, prominence. “The promise provides,” writes Walter Brueggemann, “exactly what the people of Babel … tried to form for themselves and could not.”[2] The promise cannot be had without the promise-maker.

We may want to know what made Abram so special. And how he knew it was God who was speaking to him. We may want to know what thoughts went through his mind, what questions he had, and whether he discussed any of this with Sarai. The story isn’t interested in any of these questions. The focus is entirely on God’s initiative to overcome the fracturing of relationships in creation, beginning with one human being. The focus is entirely on God’s promise and call and Abram’s response. And Abram doesn’t speak a single word in this encounter; he gives his answer with his feet. He and his household became migrants for the sake of the promise, resident aliens sojourning among other peoples.[3] And as sojourners of the promise, they became the ancestors of Israel and of all, as Paul insists, who entrust their lives to God’s call and promise.

It has always been important for God’s people to remember that we are a people on the way, not necessarily geographically, but in terms of who we are and where we are going. We are a people who live into the divine promise. Remembering that we are a people on the way is particularly important when nativism, nationalism, and “us first” is written on so many closed doors. “The simple fact of being a human being is you migrate,” I heard a man say on the radio. “Many of us move from one place to the other,” he said.

But even those who don’t move and who stay in the same city, if you were born … 70 years ago, [and] you’ve lived in the same place for 70 years, the city you live in today is unrecognizable. Almost everything has changed. So even people who stay in the same place undergo a kind of migration through time.[4]

The pace of change in our world and its depth are profoundly disruptive for many, just about anywhere you turn these days. Fear is rampant, not only among those who leave home just to survive, but also among those who are afraid to let them in. It’s easy to forget that we are all migrants, which makes it all the more important for the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, the sojourners of the promise, to remember that we are all on the way, that we are becoming the people God wants us to be, all of us.

“Of all the things in the world,” wrote Jim Mays many years ago, “we are most interested in those to which we can attach the possessive pronoun—my family, my home, my possessions, my plans, … my life.”[5] In that constellation of interests, God’s call creates a crisis. “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you.” Our response determines whether we live with and for the promise or against it; whether we hold on grimly to the present ordering of our world and our vision, or find the courage to step out on faith toward hope.

[1] See full text at https://www1.villanova.edu/content/dam/villanova/mission/mandm_assets/2016workshop/Home.pdf

For audio by author, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=182&v=nI9D92Xiygo&feature=emb_logo

[2] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Interpretation, a Bible commentary for teaching and preaching), (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 119.

[3] See Genesis 12:10; 17:8; 20:1; 21:23, 34; see also Hebrews 11:8–9.

[4] Mohsin Hamid http://www.npr.org/2017/03/06/518743041/mohsin-hamids-novel-exit-west-raises-immigration-issues

[5] James L Mays, “God has spoken,” Interpretation 14, no. 4 (October 1, 1960), 420.

Trust and suspicion

We heard two stories on this first Sunday in Lent, one taking place in a garden, the other in the wilderness. The garden is a place of lush life, the home of the first man and the first woman. Together they represent humankind, named, in Hebrew, after the soil from which we were made: earthlings, all of us.

“Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return,” we were reminded on Wednesday as we had ashes rubbed on our foreheads, and some of us heard echoes of the words spoken by the grave, where we commit the body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. We are earthlings, we belong to the earth and to God our creator.

In the story from Genesis, three gifts are mentioned: The first is the bountiful garden that is our home and our purpose; we are here to serve its flourishing, to inhabit, explore and enjoy it. Our second gift is the freedom to eat of every tree. And the third gift is a command. The two are presented together in the first words of God addressed to humanity: “You may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” Life as God intends it comes with limits. According to the story from the garden, to be human is to live with our God-given purpose, in God-given freedom, and within God-given limits.

Then there is another voice, asking a question: “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” And what unfolds from there has, unlike any other conversation in Scripture, shaped and reshaped our views about moral freedom, men and women, sin, shame, guilt, sex and work. It’s a conversation that for hundreds of years has been heavily commented, annotated, and footnoted, and some of the commentary has not been life-giving, especially for women. In 1 Timothy 2:11-15, for example, we read:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve, and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided they continue in faith and love and holiness, with self-control.

The apostle seems to assume that his readers will agree when he confidently declares that “the woman was deceived” and that “Adam was not.” I’m not convinced. If deception did actually occur in the garden, the two of them together fell for it; Adam was there with her, after all, but he didn’t speak up until later when he became the first in a long line of many men to point the finger at Eve. And if Adam didn’t speak up in what has been characterized as such a critical moment in the relationship between God and humankind, one could make the argument that men should be the ones learning in silence rather than silence the voices of women.

Another footnote with a long afterlife identified the serpent with the devil, even though the story says that the serpent was just that, a serpent, one of the animals of the field God had made. It was a part of God’s creation, not some cosmic intruder bent on disruption. The serpent was crafty, yes, perhaps cunning, possibly wise, but not evil.

You may think that a talking snake is curious, but it’s not the first story you’ve heard that has talking animals in it, is it? I find it much more intriguing that this is the first conversation humans have that is not with God, but about God. In a way we’re witnessing the beginnings of theology. “Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?” the serpent asked. No, of course not; we know that, and Adam and Eve know that. What we don’t know is if the crafty serpent knows it as well, and so we wonder if the gross overstatement in the question is merely an innocent mistake or a way to sow suspicion about God’s motives in establishing boundaries for human life.

The woman corrected the serpent, stating that it was only the fruit of the tree in the  in middle of the garden that was forbidden, and adding that God said, “nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.”

“You will not die;” the serpent replied, “for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” The serpent tells the humans something God didn’t tell them, and so the word of the serpent puts the word of God in question. Did God  keep something back? Why didn’t God tell them the whole truth about the matter? Does God really have their best interest at heart or is God jealously protecting divine privileges? Suddenly the words and motivations of God are in question along with the larger matter if the creator of life can be trusted when it comes to what makes for the flourishing of life. What will the humans do?

Here’s what they don’t do: They do not turn to God for answers, and they do not turn to each other to talk about the questions the serpent’s words have raised. Instead they turn to the tree and its promising fruit, and they take and eat in silence. And nobody dies. The serpent had told them the truth; perhaps not the whole truth, but it certainly had “correct information about the garden’s trees and the consequences of eating from them — information that God either did not know or did not reveal to the humans.”[1]

We are earthlings, created in and for relationship with the earth, with each other, and with God, but few of our relationships are simply programmed into our genetic code. Our relationships with other people and with God are complex, and they are rooted in trust. The story of the humans in the garden and the serpent allows us to think about what happens when mistrust and suspicion creep in: suddenly there’s estrangement, soon shame and blame thrive instead of joy, and life in the garden is put on a trajectory away from communion with God. Death creeps in—not in the form of mortality, our mortality is part of life—death creeps in in the breakdown of the relationships that make us who we are, make earth a garden, and make life what God intends it to be.

The other story this morning takes us to the wilderness. The forty days of Lent are patterned on Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness. It was the Spirit who led him there to be tested, immediately after his baptism. By the river, the voice from heaven said, “This is my Son, the Beloved,” and again, as in the garden, after God has spoken, there’s another voice. Jesus is famished, and this voice says, “Since you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.”

The voice belongs to the devil. Nothing is said where he came from, nothing is said of his looks or if he can be seen or smelled. What matters here—and perhaps the only thing that matters—is the fact that the devil speaks. And what he suggests is utterly reasonable: You’re hungry. You’re the Son of God. Go ahead, make yourself a little bread.

The wilderness is not a place of quiet retreat for Jesus. It’s a landscape for sorting out what voice to be attentive to, what voice to trust: the voice from heaven or the voice from who-knows-where-it-came-from.

Jesus responds, “It is written, ‘One does not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of God.’ ” Jesus doesn’t argue with the tempter; he simply states what he lives and what we are made to live. Bread is nutritious and delicious. Bread is good. Bread is essential, but a human being doesn’t live by bread alone. Jesus is famished, yet he doesn’t pay attention to his hunger; his attention is tuned to every word that comes from the mouth of God.

But the devil isn’t done yet, and he is quick: Speaking of God’s word, he says, consider Psalm 91. Jesus finds himself on the top of the temple and the devil quotes Scripture, chapter and verse:

He will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.

Since you are the Son of God, throw yourself down. Go ahead, live by God’s word and jump. Throw yourself into the arms of the angels. Consider the publicity you could get with a stunt like that. The whole world will know you. Show them who you are. Jump.

But Jesus doesn’t. “It is written, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’ ”[2]

Finally the devil takes Jesus to a very high mountain with a view of all the kingdoms of the world. “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” What’s at stake in this wilderness test is what kind of power rules the world: Is it the devil’s empire of one throne to rule them all, the dream behind every imperial dream and every imperial war, or is it the kingdom of God?

Jesus tells the devil to be gone, and he begins his ministry in Galilee, a servant of God’s reign. That was and is the point. Jesus’ response to every test was to refuse the tempter’s suggestion that he could be so much more than human—if he just stepped away from the relationships that made him who he was. But Jesus walked his path in complete trust and obedience to God.

The temptations didn’t end in the wilderness. Jesus had wilderness moments throughout his life, when he was exhausted, hungry, frustrated, tired, and lonely, but mistrust or suspicion never crept in, and he remained true to  God, true to all of us, and true to all of creation. And the power of this faithful love broke the power of sin and death.

We are earthlings, created in the image of God, made for communion with God. We’re invited to live these forty days with less of what we don’t need and a little more of what we know we do. Call it a fast; some of it may become a habit for life. Less scrolling up and down screens, and more strolling under trees. Less spending and more giving. Less attention to voices that pull us away from God’s covenant of love, and more attention to the One who has made us and claimed us as beloved children. Have a blessed Lent.

[1] Cameron Howard https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-genesis-215-17-31-7-3

[2] Deuteronomy 6:16

Salt and light

“You are the salt of the earth.” Jesus says it like he fully expects us to know what he means. But we don’t; his assertive pronouncement makes us wonder, and perhaps that’s the point.

“You are the salt of the earth.” It’s a statement of fact, an affirmation. Jesus doesn’t say, “You must be the salt.” It’s not a matter of trying. Dietrich Bonhoeffer writes in The Cost of Discipleship, “It is not for the disciples to decide whether they will be the salt of the earth, for they are so whether they like it or not, they have been made salt by the call they have received.”[1]

We love the taste of salt, it’s in our genes. Our bodies crave it, because they cannot function without it. In addition to helping maintain the right balance of fluids, salt helps transmit nerve impulses, and it allows our muscles to work properly. Unrefined salt contains just about everything you find in a bottle of Gatorade, except artificial color and flavor. Unrefined salt is a convenient package of sodium, potassium, magnesium, and calcium, as well as other vital minerals. It is as though we carry in our bodies an ancient memory of the sea, and as long as we have a tiny dose of the ocean in us, we thrive. Salt is in our blood, sweat, and tears. “You are the salt of the earth” — does he mean essential like that for the world’s wellbeing?

Salt has been, for thousands of years, one of the most widely-used food preservatives, especially for meat and fish. The ancient Egyptians and Phoenicians traded salt fish and salt from North Africa throughout the Mediterranean, and salt roads crisscross all continents, except Antarctica. The soldiers in Rome’s armies were paid with salt allotments, called salaria in Latin, and many of us still work for a salary. Salt was precious, and pressed into cakes it was one of the earliest currencies in the world. Salt has been a crucial ingredient in just about all known human cultures, and it is no surprise that it gave rise to a variety of symbolic uses.

Because of its use as a food preservative, salt came to represent permanence and protection. In ancient Israel and among its Near Eastern neighbors, a pinch of salt was eaten by the parties to agreements and treaties. Sharing salt expressed a binding relationship. In Israel’s scriptures, what we call the Old Testament, the expression “covenant of salt” illustrates the permanent nature of God’s covenant with God’s people. We talk about “rules written in stone” or “iron laws,” but God’s covenants are “covenants of salt,” based in a living relationship of partners who have bound themselves to each other.[2] “You shall not omit from your grain offering the salt of the covenant with your God,” we read in Leviticus, “with all your offerings you shall offer salt.”[3] There certainly was the notion that salt would purify the gift to make it acceptable as a sacred offering, but the pinch of salt served as a reaffirmation of covenant fidelity.

The preservative power of salt may have been the reason behind its becoming the substance of choice to ward off evil forces in general. I remember a grandmother on the Italian side of our family, who would throw a pinch of salt over her left shoulder, muttering a well-worn prayer whenever she felt she needed to keep the devil away. Cultural anthropologists are quite confident that mothers began rubbing their newborn babies with salt thousands of years ago to protect them against evil spirits, as mothers and midwives continue to do to this day in many parts of the world. But I can’t help but wonder — when a mother in Israel rubbed her infant with salt, didn’t she also rub that little one, head to toe, with the covenant promises of God? She may have put a grain of salt on her child’s lips to keep evil out, but didn’t she also do it to give her little one a taste of God’s faithfulness? I like to think she did, and that salt — that wondrous, precious substance — never meant just one thing, but gained ever new layers of meaning, from generation to generation. There still is an expression in modern Arabic, “there is salt between us,” meaning, “we are like family, we are close friends.”

Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth.” He says it to those who have been summoned to follow him on the way of grace; and he says it right after declaring, “Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.” Our following him on the way will evoke rejection and defamation, he says, even persecution — and he tells us to rejoice, because we are on the way with him. “You are the salt of the earth,” and for ages his followers have heard him affirm, You are precious. You are essential. You bring healing. You add flavor and zest to the world. You embody divine hospitality and friendship. The earth cannot be without you. We may feel like there’s nothing wrong with adding a little religious icing to the world’s cake, but he tells us what we are: the salt of the earth. Not sugar, not syrup, but salt. A community of followers that adds a particular, essential quality and flavor. People whose life together is vital for the wellbeing of the earth.

You are the salt of the earth. We live in a culture that is incredibly creative, but more and more of our collective attention seems to revolve around consumption and entertainment, and not around building strong communities. There is plenty of hostility toward the gospel that calls us to live as members of one household, and in our context, none of it comes in the form of outright persecution. It’s more like an endless loop of commercials: friendly faces, beautiful images, great music, and clever lines inviting me 24/7 to believe that life really is all about me. We are surrounded by powerful alternatives to covenant living, and we are constantly being enticed to embrace them—rather than living our lives as those who have been summoned to follow Jesus. Rabbi Shai Held commented on today’s passage from Isaiah:

So much of human religiosity comes down to a hoax we try to perpetrate on God. ​We’ll give You worship​, we say in effect, ​and You just mind Your own business. Your place is the church, the synagogue, or the mosque; butt out of our workplaces and our voting stations. You’re the God of religion, not politics or economics.

And God laughs. ​If you want to worship me,​ God says, ​you’re going to have to learn to care about what I care about—and who. And as the Bible never tires of telling us, God cares about the widow, the orphan, and the stranger; the poor, the oppressed, and the downtrodden. If those people don’t matter to us, then God doesn’t really matter to us either. That’s Isaiah’s message.[4]

Isaiah reminds us that God desires a people who undo the knots of injustice and break the yokes that are keeping their neighbors from walking erect, a people who share their bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into the house and clothe the naked — instead of worrying, Jesus adds, about what they will eat or drink or wear.[5]

In our world, the forces of privatization and fragmentation are winning against the social solidarity implicit in covenantal faith. But God’s imperatives speak against selfish preoccupation with our own needs and passions, declaring again and again that we are members of one another. And it’s not only God’s imperatives. Jesus addresses us in the indicative, “You are the salt of the earth,” and we know one thing for sure: We have been summoned to a holy purpose. We are good for something. We are meant to add something essential.

And the same Jesus who, speaking of himself, said, “I am the light of the world,” says to his followers: “You are the light of the world — in your whole existence, provided you remain faithful to your calling. And since you are that light, you can no longer remain hidden, even if you want to."[6] Being the light of the world is not optional. It is simply who and what we are when we follow Jesus: His light infuses our actions, our speaking and thinking, and it shines forth from all that we are and do, to the glory of God. We are the light because we have been lit — not for our own sakes, but for the sake of the world.

I have a deep desire to understand where we are and how we got here — a fragmented and fragmenting church in a fragmented and fragmenting world — and what this means for us as followers of Jesus and servants of God’s reign. I want to understand the forces that divide and polarize people around the world, the forces that drive us away from each other and into isolation. I want to understand, but that’s not the one thing necessary.

Jesus says, “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” And in each of these bold declarations, the ‘you’ is plural. That may well be the most important detail to hear these days: Amid all that is fragmenting us, there is a hidden ‘us’ being addressed and called forth by Jesus. The one thing necessary is that we follow him.

[1] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1963), 130.

[2] Numbers 18:19; 2 Chronicles 13:5

[3] Leviticus 2:13

[4] Rabbi Shai Held https://www.christiancentury.org/article/living-word/august-25-ordinary-21c-isaiah-589b-14

[5] Matthew 6:25

[6] See Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship, 131-132.

Love builds up

Somewhere in Rome, in a building dating back to ancient times, is the earliest known picture of the crucifixion; some believe it may be from the 2nd century CE. It’s not a devotional image, but a graffito scratched on a wall, showing a man with a donkey’s head strapped and nailed to a cross. Next to the cross is a human figure, and scribbled below it, “Alexamenos worships [his] god.” Presumably one of Alexamenos’s buddies, perhaps a fellow-slave, had created the graffito to make fun of him and his god.[1]

In our sanctuary, there’s a cross on the table, and the outline of a cross in the baptistry window. In the world of Paul and the early church, a place of worship was the last place you would expect to see a cross. Imagine coming into a church and being faced with a large picture of an electric chair or a lynching noose. You find the thought shocking? That’s the kind of shock first-century Jews and pagans would have experienced. If you don’t find it shocking, perhaps even worthy of prayerful reflection, it’s likely because your imagination has been shaped by the gospel of the crucified Christ.

Crucifixion was generally regarded as the most degrading and shameful of deaths in the Roman repertoire of execution.[2] It was a form of public torture, generally reserved for slaves and those who resisted the authority of Rome. The crucified person was often denied burial, with the corpse left on the cross to rot or as food for scavenging wildlife.

Crucifixion was an obscenity not to be discussed in polite company. In a speech defending a Roman senator against a murder charge for which the prosecutor was not only seeking the death penalty, but apparently suggesting crucifixion, Cicero sought to sway the jury, declaring, “The very word ‘cross’ should be far removed not only from the person of a Roman citizen, but from his thoughts, his eyes, his ears.”[3]

Paul, of course, did the exact opposite: he held up the cross for all to see, in all the cities where his mission took him. The cross was at the center of his proclamation, and he did all he could to make it the center of life in the assemblies of the believers. Paul’s gospel was an insult to the sensibilities of educated men and women: he proclaimed Jesus, God’s crucified Messiah. To Jews, his proclamation bordered on blasphemy; to non-Jews, it was just foolish nonsense.

Jews demand signs, Paul writes. And don’t we also want God to do big and spectacular things, something on the scale of parting the sea or turning down the planet's temperature? Something like a grand-slam final where Jesus is on the court against all the forces that oppose God’s will and purpose, and he dominates the game, and the whole world is watching and cheering as he wins in straight sets? Instead we look at him on the cross, beaten and forsaken by all.

Greeks desire wisdom, Paul writes. And don’t we also want the gospel to be philosophically elegant and aesthetically pleasing? Don’t we want the TED talk that blows us away? Instead we hear the gospel of the crucified Messiah. We look for power, and weakness is given. We want wisdom, and foolishness is given. But in the community gathered around the cross, in the community being shaped by the love of Christ, his humble service, his deep compassion, and the courage of his vulnerability are recognized as the fullest expressions of God’s power and wisdom.

The word of the cross doesn’t fit the mold of what we know and how we know; it shatters it. Paul quotes from Isaiah,

The Lord said: Because these people draw near with their mouths and honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me and their worship of me is a human commandment learned by rote, so I will again do amazing things with this people, shocking and amazing. The wisdom of their wise shall perish, and the discernment of the discerning shall be hidden (Isaiah 29:13-14).

Paul wants us to see that the cross of Christ was the shocking and amazing act of God who chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; who chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; who chose what is low and despised in the world, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. No more boasting in our wisdom, our might, our wealth, our power.

With his opening reflection on the cross of Christ, Paul is laying the foundation for his argument against elitist attitudes that are fracturing the Corinthian community. One of the issues was about supper: should believers eat food that had been presented as an offering in a pagan temple? Serving that kind of food was common practice at dinner parties, especially when meat was part of the menu. Some believers said, “No big deal; we know there’s only one true God, and those idols are no competition. We can eat anything we please: Christ has set us free.” But there were also those who worried they might fall back into pagan ways if they didn’t stay clear of pagan practices; so they stopped eating meat altogether, just to be safe. Given Paul’s own faith and robust theology, you’d expect him to side with those who act boldly in Christ-given freedom. But he doesn’t. “Knowledge puffs up,” he writes, “but love builds up.” (1 Corinthians 8:1)

In the community that embodies and proclaims the power of the cross, building up comes before personal liberty. The love and faithfulness of God, revealed in the cross, is to shape the love and faithfulness among us, and our witness in the world. Love builds up.

“Building up” takes on fresh urgency when yet another black man has been beaten to death by police. And when we hear the news from Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay, and we continue to turn the names of towns and schools into shorthand for mass shootings. “Building up” takes on fresh urgency, but many feel drained by the violence, exhausted and helpless, numb.

Jillian Peterson and James Densley teach criminology and criminal justice. In a recent column, they listed one-sentence details from profiles of the suspected or convicted perpetrators of more than 150 mass shootings in the United States. They had created the profiles from news reports, public documents and their conversations with the shooters’ friends, colleagues, social workers and teachers.

He was accused of threatening to kill his roommate.
At least seven killed and one injured in Half Moon Bay, Calif., on Jan. 23, 2023

He believed his family tried to poison him.
At least 11 killed and nine injured in Monterey Park, Calif., on Jan. 21, 2023

One of his only friends died from a heroin overdose.
Seven killed and 46 injured in Highland Park, Ill., on July 4, 2022

It goes on like that, a sad line and a statistic, a startling line and a statistic, over and over, more than 150 times. These events have become more frequent and more deadly over time. The professors write,

This is no coincidence. The killings are not just random acts of violence but rather a symptom of a deeper societal problem: the continued rise of “deaths of despair.” This term has been used to explain increasing mortality rates among predominantly middle-aged white men caused by suicide, drug overdose and alcohol abuse. We think the concept of “deaths of despair” also helps explain the accelerating frequency of mass shootings in this country. Many were socially isolated from their families or their communities and felt a sense of alienation. … Most chose not to ask for help when confronted with hardship, like a breakup or being fired from their job. They chose mass shootings as a way to seize power and attention, forcing others to witness their pain while attempting to end their lives in a way that only they controlled.

At first Peterson and Densley employ medical language, suggesting that “we must treat the underlying pathologies that feed the shooters’ despair.” But the work isn’t for experts only; we must, they say, “find ways to reduce social isolation.”

It’s no small thing to knock on a neighbor’s door with a plate of cookies. It’s no small thing to call a friend you haven’t seen in a while; to write a note, or give a ride, or listen. I want you to remember that sending notes to students at West End Middle is no small thing, and eating supper with Room in the Inn guests, and praying for God’s wisdom to inspire us, and welcoming every person as God has welcomed us.

Allow me to return to the peculiar wisdom of the cross. I want to return because so many of us do feel drained by the violence, discouraged, and numb. I just finished reading a novel about Peter Abelard, one of the great theologians of the 12th century. Toward the end of the book, Peter, in disgrace and despair, is trying to find a measure of peace in a remote, little hermitage. Thibault, one of his former students, is living with him. One day, they’re coming back from fishing, and they hear a tiny cry, like a child’s cry of intolerable anguish, coming from the woods behind them. They rush in the direction of the cry and find that it’s not a child, it’s a rabbit caught in a trap.

The rabbit stopped shrieking when they stooped over it, either from exhaustion, or in some last extremity of fear. Thibault held the teeth of the trap apart, and [Peter] gathered up the little creature in his hands. It lay for a moment breathing quickly, then in some blind recognition of the kindness that had met it at the last, the small head thrust and nestled against his arm, and it died.

It was that last confiding thrust that broke [Peter’s] heart. He looked down at the little draggled body, his mouth shaking. “Thibault,” he said, “do you think there is a God at all? Whatever has come to me, I earned it. But what did this one do?”

Thibault nodded. “I know,” he said. “Only—I think God is in it too.”

[Peter] looked up sharply. “In it? Do you mean that it makes [God] suffer, the way it does us?”

Again Thibault nodded.

“Then why doesn’t He stop it?”

“I don’t know,” said Thibault. “... But all the time God suffers. More than we do.”

He points to a fallen tree beside them, sawn through the middle.

“That dark ring there, it goes up and down the whole length of the tree. But you only see it where it is cut across. That is what Christ’s life was; the bit of God that we saw. And we think God is like that, because Christ was like that, kind, and forgiving sins and healing people. We think that God is like that for ever, because it happened once, with Christ. But not the pain. Not the agony at the last. We think that stopped.”

Peter asks him whether he means that “all the pain of the world, was Christ’s cross.” And Thibault says, “God’s cross… And it goes on.” For a moment, Peter is baffled, and then he exclaims, “Oh God, if it were true … it would bring back the whole world.”[4]

The wisdom of the cross is God’s persistent, vulnerable love that will not let us go. May it fill our hearts and continue to shape our life together.

[1] For more information about the image see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexamenos_graffito

[2] James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2006), 209.

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

[4] Helen Waddell, Peter Abelard (Chicago, IL: The Thomas More Press, 1987), 262-265.

Our deep story

Did you hear about the man who was stranded on a desert island for several years after a shipwreck? They finally found him; he was so glad to see human faces again and to talk to real people instead of a deflated volleyball. He was overjoyed that he’d be living among other humans again, but he didn’t jump into the boat right away. Before they left, he wanted to show them his camp. He pointed to a hut, “This is my house.” He pointed to another hut, “This is where I worship.” His rescuers pointed to a third hut, on the other side of his house. “What’s that?” they asked. “Oh, that’s where I used to go to church. Three years ago I got mad and left.”

Church life is messy. Where two or three are gathered in his name, chances are they won’t be together for long before they get the itch for other configurations. We gather in the name of Jesus Christ, but other names pull us in other directions.

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

The church in Corinth was barely four years old, when Paul wrote them this letter from Ephesus, on the other side of the Aegean Sea. Corinth was the capital of the Roman province of Achaia, a wealthy city with a steep social pyramid. The number of church members in the city was probably in the dozens, rather than hundreds, but the small size didn’t mean they didn’t find ways to divide. “It has been reported to me by Chloe’s people that there are quarrels among you,” they were reading from Paul’s letter in homes across the city where house churches gathered. Some heads may have turned, some believers may have mumbled under their breath, “They just had to tell him, didn’t they?” Others must have been glad Paul was aware of these issues and addressing them. Would all of them welcome his urgent appeal to be united in the same mind and the same purpose?

It appears a good number of them had begun to identify themselves by the name of the person who had first told them the good news of Jesus Christ and baptized them. I belong to Paul. I belong to Apollos. I belong to Cephas. You notice there’s a lot of “I” in those statements. It sounds like those new believers weren’t just saying, “Paul’s alright” or “I really like Apollos; he is such a great teacher.” Folks in the church in Corinth weren’t looking around and appreciating the variety of Christian witness and teaching, they were drawing the first denominational lines. It was getting to the point where their identity was shaped more deeply by their respective allegiance to the particular tradition of Apollos, Cephas, or Paul, than by their new life in Christ.

“Really?” Paul shouts across the sea from Ephesus. “Was Paul crucified for you? Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?” Other names get in the way of who we are in Christ, and who we are becoming as a people being saved, a people set aside for God’s purpose in the world.

There’s a lot of “I” in our divisions, but our hope for salvation is wrapped up in the grace with which Christ has made us his own. “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me,” Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians (2:20). No longer I, but Christ in me, and all of us in Christ.

Jane Lancaster Patterson writes, “Many people in America today would say that divisiveness is one of the most dangerous issues in our common life, that factionalism and misguided allegiance keep us from being able to address the very serious challenges that confront us today.” She then goes on to name some of the very serious challenges that confront us today: the increasing disparity between rich and poor, climate change, global violence, competition for natural resources, migration due to war and famine (Commentary on 1 Corinthians 1:10-18 - Working Preacher from Luther Seminary). Reading her reflections, I was nodding along, but I also noticed that her list didn’t include abortion or crime, not to mention “the deep state” or “the great replacement” — issues that others would have named first on their list. Our divisions run so deep, we can’t even agree on the very serious challenges that confront us today.

Arlie Russell Hochschild is a sociologist at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research for her most recent book, Strangers in Their Own Land, took her, you might say, from the bluest spot on the bluest coast to one of the reddest spots on the electoral map of the United States, Lake Charles, Louisiana. She didn’t move there, but she traveled back and forth over the course of five years to meet people and visit and deepen relationships. She came, she writes, “with an interest in walls. Not visible, physical walls such as those separating Catholics from Protestants in Belfast, Americans from Mexicans on the Texas border, or, once, residents of East and West Berlin. It was empathy walls that interested me.” She describes an empathy wall as “an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.” And she continues,

In a period of political tumult, we grasp for quick certainties. We shoehorn new information into ways we already think. We settle for knowing our opposite numbers from the outside. But is it possible, without changing our beliefs, to know others from the inside, to see reality through their eyes, to understand the links between life, feeling, and politics; that is, to cross the empathy wall? I thought it was.[1]

She thought she had “some understanding of the liberal left camp,” but she had “a keen interest in how life feels to people on the right — that is, in the emotion that underlies politics. To understand their emotions, I had to imagine myself into their shoes.”[2]

And that is what she did. She sat at kitchen tables and went to campaign events; she walked through refineries and drove across old plantations; she went to church and to crawfish cookouts, and she did the work of imagining herself into the shoes of the people she met. She asked questions and listened, and whenever she ran into the empathy wall—and she did, again and again—she didn’t walk away, but asked more questions and listened even more carefully. She began to see the world through the eyes of the men and women who welcomed her interest and she came upon what she calls their “deep story,” a narrative not just of a world view, but of how the world is felt. Reflecting on the whole process of discovery and transformation she initiated and shared with her readers, she writes,

The English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of having that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift. Gratitude, awe, appreciation; for me, all those words apply and I don’t know which to use. But I think we need a special word, and should hold a place of honor for it, so as to restore what might be a missing key on the English-speaking world’s cultural piano. Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.[3]

Our polarization … makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt—that is where we are, and not only in this country, and not for the first time. We forget too easily, and some of us have never learned, how to make room for strangers whose deep stories may be utterly unfamiliar, yet just as human as our own.

We still read Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth, because he addresses the very serious challenges that confront all of us who are called to live as God’s people in the world. Thirty-eight times in his first letter to them, significantly more than in any other of his letters, Paul uses the simple address, brothers and sisters. Thirty-eight times he affirms the common ground and the equal standing of all who are in Christ. Brothers and sisters he calls us repeatedly, so that when the letter is read aloud in the assembly, we would perhaps remember that all of us belong to the family of God. That we don’t “belong” to Apollos or Cephas or Paul or any other earthly label, but that Christ had made us his own; that we belong to no other master, not even to ourselves, but to Christ, and therefore, in a radically new way, to each other. Brothers and sisters he calls us—not ladies and gentlemen, or Gentiles and Jews, or dear members and guests.

“In order to form a Christian community identity within a pluralistic pagan world, Paul repeatedly calls his readers to a ‘conversion of the imagination,’” is how Richard Hays has put it.[4] A conversion of the imagination. A complete reordering of our inherited cultural norms and practices. Our thorough resocialization, from all sorts of backgrounds into a new community where Christ is Lord and brother of all. A community where we look at ourselves and each other not through the usual lenses of who matters and who doesn’t, who knows and who doesn’t, who has a voice and who doesn’t, who counts and who doesn’t, but instead through the complete and radical undoing of all of that in the cross of Christ.

Baptized into Christ, we are being soaked in God’s freeing grace, and we are being transformed after the pattern of Christ. His love makes room for all of us strangers, and in his embrace, his story becomes our deep story.

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

[2] Ibid. Location 70.

[3] Ibid. Location 117.

[4] Richard B. Hays, First Corinthians (Louisville: John Knox Press, 1997), 11.

What are you looking for?

In the gospel according to Matthew, Jesus says to John the Baptist who is reluctant to baptize him, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”[i] These are the first words he speaks in that Gospel. You read that and you know that for Matthew, the fulfillment of righteousness is key to knowing who Jesus is.

In Mark, Jesus’ first words are, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”[ii] To Mark, that is the core of the message of Jesus and of the church.

In Luke, Mary and Joseph have been searching desperately for their boy for three days, and when they finally find him in the Temple, he says to them with astonishing adolescent innocence, “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?”[iii] To Luke, Jesus’ deep connection to the Temple is an essential part of the gospel.

Now, if you were to write the good news of Jesus according to yourself, what would be the first thing Jesus says? From all the sayings of Jesus you remember and perhaps jotted down in your journal, which one would you choose? Wouldn’t you want to find one that would signal what matters most, one that would draw your readers into the story that changed everything?

In the gospel according to John, Jesus’ baptism isn’t even mentioned, and he doesn’t talk back to his mom until the wedding in Cana in chapter 2. His first words are a question, “What are you looking for?” In this opening scene, he asks two unnamed disciples of John who just began to follow him, after John had watched him walk by and exclaimed, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!”

It is notoriously difficult to know what John might have had in mind when he referred to Jesus as the Lamb of God, both the John we know as the Baptist, and the John who composed the fourth Gospel. Was he thinking about the Passover lamb? Possibly. Could he have been thinking about the Suffering Servant in Isaiah who was oppressed and afflicted, and, like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, did not open his mouth? Maybe. It’s like John wants to tell us something important about who Jesus is, while also teaching us that his testimony is meant to generate more than a single meaning, and that he wants us to find our own answer.

On the story level, Jesus asks his two new followers, “What are you looking for?” But with the same question he also addresses you and me who have just begun to hear John’s testimony about Jesus, “What are you looking for?” Jesus begins a dialogue not just with his first two disciples, but with every reader, “What are you looking for?”

If this were your realtor, the answer would be easy; you’d start talking about bedrooms, baths, and school zones. If this were your school counselor, you’d talk about your dreams of campus life and about financial aid. And if this were the person in HR whom you sent your resume, you’d talk about career opportunities, job satisfaction, and salary expectations. But this is Jesus asking you, “What are you looking for?”

You don’t have to keep reading, you know, you can sit with that question for a moment. Think about your life. The dreams you once had, and the ones that still energize you. Think about the world, the kids, the damn war, the floods, the hopes you cling to with every fiber of your being. What are you looking for? Think about your curiosity about Jesus, why you find yourself returning to the book of testimonies, what it is that brings you back to the community of believers. What if you started an actual list of things you are looking for in your life, just to help you get to the bottom of your longing and searching?

In a breathtaking prologue, John has introduced Jesus as the light that shines in the darkness, the true light that enlightens everyone, the Word who became flesh and lived among us. Now we hear of two of John’s disciples who are with him when Jesus walks by and their master exclaims, “Look, here is the Lamb of God!” They don’t know any better than you and me what that might mean, but they follow Jesus anyway. Why? Not because they trust Jesus, but because they trust John and his testimony about Jesus. Rowan Williams reminds us that “Faith has a lot to do with the simple fact that there are trustworthy lives to be seen, that we can see in some believing people a world we’d like to live in.”[iv]  The journey of discipleship doesn’t begin with six impossible things to believe before breakfast; it begins with a very good question and the trustworthy life of a witness who points to Jesus.

The trustworthy life of a witness who points to Jesus. Tomorrow the nation takes a day to honor the life and witness of Dr. King, whose dream of a world no longer burdened by racism, poverty, and war didn’t end when he was assassinated. Richard Lischer writes,

Long after King himself began to doubt the goodness of the “white brother” and the tainted principles of civil religion, his expression of hope in the kinship of races endures, as the Sermon on the Mount endures, as a mark to aim at in a sinfully divided society. The more pessimistic he grew with regard to humanity, the more optimistic he became about God. Even in the darkest period of his own discouragement, he continued to say to African Americans, “Go ahead! God can be trusted.”

After King’s death, his old mentor Pius Barbour said, “Martin was a great believer in this, the attitude of Jesus: He believed spiritual power could down any power. Can it?” Lischer says it’s a measure of Dr. King’s abiding influence in our lives that we still ask the question and want to answer, Yes.[v] That we want to affirm with our own lives, with our little courage and our spotty faithfulness, that God’s commitment to the redemption of the world is unshakable.

Several years ago, the results of a study on what Americans think about Christianity were published. The research showed that among late teens to early 30-somethings, Christians were best known for what they are against. They were perceived as being judgmental, antihomosexual, hypocritical, too political, insensitive to others, and clueless about real life.[vi] According to the authors of the study, these negative views of Christians weren’t just superficial stereotypes with no basis in reality. Nor were the critics people without previous exposure to churches or Christians. No, they looked at the lives of Christians and they didn’t find those lives trustworthy. One of the authors remembered his first look at the data:

I’ll never forget sitting in Starbucks, poring through the research results on my laptop. As I soaked it in, I glanced at the people around me and was overwhelmed with the thought that this is what they think of me. It was a sobering thought to know that if I had stood up and announced myself as a ‘Christian’ to the customers assembled in Starbucks that day, they would have associated me with every one of the negative perceptions described in this book.[vii]

And that was before the term ‘Christian’ began to fit quite comfortably between the terms ‘white’ and ‘nationalism.’ What can we do about that, you and I?

When Jesus asked the two, “What are you looking for?” they didn’t give an answer. Perhaps they didn’t have one yet, perhaps they had too many to even begin. Instead they asked, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” Now you can read that as them asking for his address. I think they were curious about where his life was rooted; where he found courage and hope for the road ahead; where his heart and soul were at home. “Faith,” says Susan Andrews, “begins with curiosity. It is rooted in companionship. It often leads to commitment and conviction, but it all begins with curiosity. Jesus is not only the Word become flesh. Jesus is the Way become flesh. Jesus is a journey.”[viii]

I believe it’s always good to go back to the beginning, back to our initial curiosity, back to Jesus’ opening question, “What are you looking for?” What are you really looking for? It is a powerful question to ask ourselves, to ask one another, and to seek to answer as truthfully as we can. I am looking for a community where love becomes real, a community that embodies grace and solidarity. I am looking for a community where you are accepted for who you are. I am looking for an economy whose currency is gratitude, not greed. I am looking for hope for our tortured planet. I am looking for deep and lasting conversion. I am looking for who I am. And I keep hearing Jesus say, “Come and see.”

Faith begins with curiosity, and it is rooted in companionship. I trust the testimony of those who discovered grace and truth in the company of Jesus, and a taste of life’s fullness. And I believe when he says, “Come and see,” he actually means it quite literally, as in, Get up from the couch and meet the others who are on the journey with me. Talk with them. Work with them. Sing with them. Eat with them. Sometimes they will rub you the wrong way, and that’s actually a good thing. Because we’re never safe against the temptation of claiming God too simply as the sanctifier of whatever we most fervently desire. That’s how we end up with people proclaiming ‘white Christian nationalism,’ convinced they are talking about the kingdom of God.

We need one another, for “we must always seek the truth in our opponents’ error and the error in our own truth.”[ix] We need one another to learn courage and practice humility in the company of Jesus, to have life and have it abundantly.

[i] Mt 3:15

[ii] Mk 1:15

[iii] Lk 2:49

[iv] Rowan Williams, Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2007), 21-22.

[v] Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King Jr. and The Word That Moved America (New York: Oxford, 1995), 269. I changed “Mike” to “Martin” to avoid confusion about introducing another character. I don’t think “Mike” is a typo, but “Martin” works just as well.

[vi] David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons, unChristian: What a New Generation Really Thinks about Christianity... and Why It Matters (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker, 2007); back cover

[vii] unChristian, 222.

[viii] Susan Andrews, Lectionary Homiletics Vol. 16, No. 1, 65.

[ix] See Obama’s Favorite Theologian? A Short Course on Reinhold Niebuhr | Pew Research Center

Remembering our baptism

The Jordan is a mighty river. We have heard about it in ancient stories, sung of it in our songs. The Jordan holds a central place in the geography and imagination of our faith.

Not many of us have seen it in person, and, until a few years ago, I hadn’t either. Then I went to Israel with a group of Jewish leaders and fellow pastors from Nashville. It was a touching and transformative experience—the conversations, the encounters with Israelis and Palestinians, the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, the food, and the very land itself: to stand on the Mount of Olives and look at the old city of Jerusalem and the temple mount, and not just to stand there with the made-for-Instagram view, but to walk down the slope, across the Kidron valley, and to enter the city through one of its ancient gates, and to realize that my feet were touching the same stone pavement that had been there in the days of Jesus; and to see the hills of Galilee, to look across lake Kinneret, the Sea of Galilee, and feel the wind blowing across its waves. The pilgrimage churches of Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and Capernaum paled in contrast to the land itself.

As to the Jordan, I was prepared for a little disappointment. I had heard it wouldn’t be nearly as impressive as it was in my imagination. When you picture the river, don’t think Mississippi or even Cumberland, think Harpeth in August. But size is not the measure of its significance. The Jordan is one of the few rivers in that very dry region that actually flow year-round, turning the valley into a lush, fertile band in an otherwise rather dusty landscape. More importantly, the Jordan marks the border between Israel’s wilderness wanderings and the land of promise.

It was in the plains of Moab, in the wilderness beyond the Jordan, where Moses expounded one last time the covenant commandments before the people crossed the river, committed to living as God’s people, according to God’s will, on God’s land. It was near Jericho, that the waters of the river parted before the ark of the covenant, and the people walked across. The Jordan has been a mighty river in the memory of God’s people, because crossing it means entering freedom and fulfillment. The river flows between wilderness and home, between fleeing and resting. Enslaved Africans and their descendants in the United States who fled the terror of the South didn’t have their geography mixed up when they sang of the Ohio, Deep river, my home is over Jordan; deep river, Lord, I want to cross over into campground … that promised land where all is peace. Jordan river may be distant and wide, chilly and cold, but the Lord would make a way for God’s people to cross over into the promised land. The Lord would make a way.

John the Baptist appeared in the wilderness of Judea and proclaimed, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near!” John reminded God’s people who they were, and he challenged them to reaffirm that they did indeed want to live as God’s people, according to God’s will and purpose, on God’s land. They came from Jerusalem and the surrounding region, and they headed down to the river to listen to John’s preaching and to be baptized by him, confessing their sins. One by one they stepped into the water.  One by one they said what needed to be said. One by one he plunged them beneath the surface, into the silent depth of the old river. Their ancestors had crossed this river to enter the promised land, and now they passed through these waters because they wanted to be worthy of being counted among God’s people, worthy to live in the coming kingdom of God. They prayed that the river would wash away their transgressions and their shame—so they would climb up the bank refreshed, renewed and presentable.

“I baptize you with water for repentance,” the Baptist said, “but one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire.” A mightier one would come, John declared, and he would bring the fire of judgment. Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan—not to baptize, but to be baptized. He came like the rest of them had come, walking the same dusty roads and down the same rocky paths to the river’s edge, waiting in line in the heat of the day, and finally stepping into the water.

John looked at Jesus, and somehow he knew that the days of preparation and repentance were now over: the day of fire and truth had come. “I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?” he asked. The first words Jesus speaks in the Gospel of Matthew are spoken here, “Let it be so now, for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.” He acts in complete obedience to God’s will and in complete solidarity with us. He gets in the water with all who have come to the river for a bath of mercy and fresh commitment, for a new beginning. We step into the river hoping that it will carry away all that weighs on us, our failures and our worries, our broken promises and our self-condemnation, all that keeps us from living lives that are faithful and God-pleasing. We get into the water, and Jesus gets in with us. He steps into the river and is baptized along with all who gather there, not because he needs to repent, but because he wants to be with us.

This is what righteousness fulfilled looks like. Obedient to God’s will and purpose, Jesus is baptized in solidarity with us. He is Immanuel, God with us in our broken humanity. He gives himself to the murky water of our wrongs and regrets, trusting that the river of God’s grace will carry him, and not only him, but all of us with him. Stepping into the water with us, he commits himself to the path of humble servanthood, a path that would lead him to the cross where the flood wave of our sin would drown him.

This brief scene at the river is like a sketch of his entire life and ministry. When Jesus rose from the water, newness erupted: the heavens were opened, the Spirit descended, and a voice from heaven declared, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.”

When Jesus got in the water with us, something wonderful happened to that old river that marks the border between wilderness and home. In his baptism, Jesus made our lot his own: he let himself be immersed in our alienation from God, our lives far from the kingdom, our trouble with doing justice, loving kindness, and walking humbly and obediently with God. In his baptism, Jesus made our life his own. And in our baptism, his beautiful, faithful life becomes ours in the forgiveness of our sins, in our reconciliation with God and with each other, and in our call to participate in his mission.

“Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen, in whom my soul delights,” God spoke through the prophet Isaiah.

I have put my spirit upon him; he will bring forth justice to the nations. He will not cry or lift up his voice, or make it heard in the street; a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench; he will faithfully bring forth justice. He will not grow faint or be crushed until he has established justice in the earth; and the coastlands wait for his teaching.[1]

John expected one more powerful than himself. What he didn’t expect was one who would faithfully bring forth justice by not breaking a bruised reed and not quenching a dimly burning wick—one who would show us the face of God through a life marked by humility, compassion, and astonishing faithfulness.

Some of you may remember how cold the water was when you were baptized, and how you felt like a whole new person, or how you didn’t really feel all that different. Some of us, including myself, can’t recall that moment because we were babies when we were baptized. Christians have fought long and hard over when and how to baptize people properly, and it took us generations to realize that the church of God is big enough to hold a variety of traditions and practices. No matter what particular form of baptism we undergo, in it we testify that God has claimed us as children: In our own bodies, we receive and proclaim the good news that our lives are made whole in the life and death of Christ and in the hope of our resurrection with him. Whether we were immersed in a river or had a little water poured over our head, when we were baptized we let ourselves be plunged into the river of God’s grace, we let the life of Jesus become our life, his story our story, and his way our way. 

Tertullian was a Christian author from Carthage in north Africa. Around the turn from the second to the third century, he wrote about baptism,

When we are going to enter the water, but a little before, in the presence of the congregation and under the hand of the president, we solemnly profess that we disown the devil, and his pomp, and his angels. Hereupon we are thrice immersed, making a somewhat ampler pledge than the Lord has appointed in the Gospel. Then when we are taken up (as new-born children), we taste first of all a mixture of milk and honey.

The nourishment the newly baptized were given was milk and honey—the sweet taste of the promised land, the taste of freedom and fulfillment. Tertullian concluded that baptism paragraph telling his readers, “and from that day we refrain from the daily bath for a whole week.”[2] A whole week without bathing—to let the memory sink in? I don’t know. Why not remember our baptism every time we bathe? Why not remember every time water touches our skin, how in astonishing faithfulness Christ has made us his own to save us?

[1] Isaiah 42:1-4

[2] Tertullian, De Corona Militis, ch. 3 http://www.tertullian.org/anf/anf03/anf03-10.htm#P1019_415012