Holy foolishness

It’s nobody’s business whom you invite over for dinner. You send out your invitations, you turn on the front porch light, you open the door, and when the last guests have arrived you close it, and soon everybody gathers in the dining room. Chances are, nobody cares whom you invite to dinner, unless, of course, they expected to be on your guest list and never got an invitation. They drive by your house at night and see all the cars parked along the curb on both sides of the street and they see silhouettes of people in every window, and they turn to each other wondering, why weren’t we invited? Or they drive by and see all the cars and notice two vehicles belonging to people they would never want to be seen with, and now they’re relieved they weren’t invited and they make a mental note never to invite you to their house again since you’re hanging out with those people.

Now imagine a house where every time you drive by a banquet is in full swing, the lights are on and the door is open, and whoever wants to come in is welcome. What do you do? Do you just park the car and join the party? Or do you notice the cars belonging to people you don’t’ approve of? This is the house where Jesus is the host. And people who are used to standing outside most circles are welcome at table with Jesus. People who have been labeled as outsiders for so long, they almost forgot what it means to belong, are flocking to him. They eat and drink with him, and they listen with their hearts wide open. “Now all the tax collectors and sinners were coming near to listen to him,” says Luke. Not just a few, but all, he says. They were coming because Jesus told and continues to tell a story about God’s reign in God’s world where they are counted in. They were coming because in Jesus’ story God’s mercy and God’s desire to redeem illumine everything. And they continue to come near to listen because at Jesus’ table they can sit down and not feel out of place. Some are driving by the house and grumble, “This fellow welcomes sinners and eats with them.” A friend of tax collectors and sinners (Luke 7:34) they call him, and they don’t think that’s a good thing. What do you think? Your answer will depend on where you see yourself on the righteousness scale, if there is a scale like that. Is there?

Jesus tells us a story. Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?

Do any of you own even a single sheep? None? That’s what I thought. So let me tell you about Sammie. Sammie has his picture on yard signs and utility poles up and down Woodlawn. Sammie is a cute Jack Russel whose proverbial energy you can feel just from looking at the photo and you don’t even have to stop and take a closer look. Sammie is lost, and his picture is posted all over the neighborhood because Sammie is loved. Somewhere between West End and Woodmont there’s a home that’s not complete without Sammie.

You wouldn’t expect a home with a hundred little dogs, though, whose owner noticed recently that one of them was missing, would you? And she left the ninety-nine at the dog park and went after the one that was lost, stopping by Kinko’s on the way to have the posters printed? Jesus’ story isn’t quite as fantastic, but it stretches the imagination already with the opening question:

Which one of you, having a hundred sheep and losing one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the wilderness and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?

It sounds like he’s asking a rhetorical question, like it’s so obvious that anybody would do that.I don’t know. I hear somebody whisper, “Nobody in his right mind who has  one hundred sheep and loses one, leaves the ninety-nine to the wolves, the thieves, and the coyotes, and goes combing the hills for the missing one. You cut your losses and go on with the ninety-nine.” That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? And I can see that Sammie’s owner would call together her friends and neighbors to celebrate the day she got the call that Sammie had been found, but “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep that was lost” sounds a little over the top for a sheep owner who was able to track down a missing sheep, a little over the top – unless that particular one was special.

In one of the early Christian texts that were not included in the collection of apostolic writings of the New Testament, this story is told differently. According to the Gospel of Thomas, “Jesus said: The kingdom is like a shepherd who had a hundred sheep; one of them, the biggest, went astray; he left the ninety-nine and sought after the one until he found it. After he had labored, he said to the sheep: I love you more than the ninety-nine” [107]. That’s a very different story than the one Jesus told according to Luke. In Luke’s version, there’s no room for favoritism, only for love and joy, fantastic, exuberant joy.

What woman having ten silver coins, if she loses one of them, does not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search carefully until she finds it?

Most women I know (and the one I know best) would not light a lamp, sweep the house, and search all day for a coin; they have other things to do.

The sun’s barely up, and the school bus will stop at the corner in about seven minutes. One of the kids yells, “Mom, where are my shoes?” And she shouts back, “Wherever you took ‘em off, Sweetie! Do you have your homework folder?” There’s no response from upstairs. “Hurry up, the bus will be here any minute now; at least drink your orange juice and take a cereal bar.” He finally shows up, she asks him to stand still while she tries to comb his hair. “No, you can’t go to Josh’s house after school. You have piano and you need to get your homework done.” She glances out the window. Darnit. All the neighbors have their trash cans out, but her handsome husband forgot to push theirs to the curb, again. “Honey, can you take the trash out before you leave?” There’s no response from upstairs. “Mom, did you sign my form for the field trip?” The dog is barking because the bus is coming. “Didn’t I send that back to school with you two days ago?”  “Gottago, mom. Bye, dad! Love ya! Bye, mom!” “Love ya!” A a coin is missing? Well, that’s just too bad. It’ll turn up eventually, probably in the washer.

That’s our missing coin story, but in Jesus’ story, the woman drops everything, she calls the office to tell them she’d have to take a personal day; then she gets the flashlight and the broom, and she sweeps the house, every floor from the attic to the basement, and she searches carefully – until she finds this one coin. And that’s not the end of the story. She gets on the phone, calls her friends and neighbors saying, “Come on over, let’s celebrate; I found my lost coin.”

These stories barely touch our lived experience and then they erupt in fantastic, exuberant joy. What the man and the woman are doing borders on foolishness, because they will not stop searching until what is lost has been found, and what is incomplete has been made whole, and until all their friends and neighbors rejoice with them. That is how God looks at people. That is how God looks at you. That is how committed God is to finding every last one of us. Every single one counts. Creation isn’t complete until you’re at home in God’s house.

Jesus’ offensive table manners are performances of God’s desire to redeem us and restore us to wholeness. The other side of Jesus’ calling us to repent is his proclamation of a God determined to find us and bring us home. Jesus sits at table with sinners, happy to be called a friend of sinners, and he tells those of us who have a problem with that to rejoice, because the angels in heaven are rejoicing as God is finding lost ones left and right; and why wouldn’t we who have been touched by his friendship and his commitment to finding us, why wouldn’t we forget whatever scales of righteousness we carry around with us, why wouldn’t we begin to see ourselves and each other as equally dependent on God’s unrelenting mercy? Why wouldn’t we begin to seek for what is lost in our relationships with even just a dusting of that holy foolishness that is love’s deep wisdom?

There’s a Sufi story that illumines that divine determination:

Once upon a time a Sufi stopped by a flooding riverbed to rest. The rising waters licked the low-hanging branches of trees that lined the creek. And there, on one of them, a scorpion struggled to avoid the rising stream. Aware that the scorpion would drown soon if not brought to dry land, the Sufi stretched along the branch and reached out his hand time after time to touch the stranded scorpion that stung him over and over again. But still the scorpion kept its grip on the branch. “Sufi,” said a passerby, “Don’t you realize that if you touch that scorpion it will sting you?” And the Sufi replied as he reached out for the scorpion one more time, “Ah, so it is, my friend. But just because it is the scorpion’s nature to sting does not mean that I should abandon my nature to save."

I see in the Sufi’s actions a reflection of God’s love for all that God has made, a love that reaches out to every last one of us with relentless persistence, even to the point of great suffering. And our true nature – our true nature – is not to sting, but to let ourselves be found by the love that will not let us go.

Three tweets #discipleship

I’ve been seeing a lot of orange, black and gold at the stores these past few weeks. Yes, some of the stuff are pumpkins, bats, witches, and other Halloween paraphernalia, but this is also the season when we become quite serious about cultivating our tribal roots. Summer is over, and we are proudly displaying our colors, for we are Commodores and Gamecocks, Volunteers and Mountaineers, Titans and Seahawks, and forgive me if I didn’t mention your tribe. Our allegiances are many, and many a Sunday I will once again consider wearing a pink tie with light blue polka dots just because those may be the only colors left that have not been claimed by some school or team.

And our tribal allegiances aren’t limited to schools and sports. We are Yazoo and Bud Light, Chevy and Ford, Mac and PC, Republican and Democrat, Coke and Pepsi, Lululemon and Under Armour, Hershey and Olive & Sinclair, and forgive me if I failed again to mention your particular tribe. We wear carefully chosen colors, styles and logos, and everything from our footwear to our hair product and our water bottle projects who we are or how we want to be seen. Every purchase we make is an identity statement, and who we are, it seems, is a carefully created composite of our consumer choices. None of this is terribly new, except that it is, historically speaking.

For much of recorded human history, a person’s identity, in addition to their status as men and women, children and adults, was defined by their birth into a particular family, clan, or tribe. You were somebody’s son or daughter. You were born on this side of the mountain or the other. You were a Capulet or a Montague, a Hatfield or a McCoy, or, less dramatic, a Smith, a Miller, or a Rodriguez, and the best you could do with your life was to bring honor rather than shame to your family name. Some people called Jesus Mary’s boy, and most of them knew it wasn’t a kind thing to say. Others called him Joseph’s son, and to them that meant he would learn a building trade, get married and have children, and eventually take over the family business; that was the right and honorable thing to do. Only Jesus had the kingdom of God on his heart. And speaking in today’s terms, Jesus had the potential to become a very successful brand. People wanted to be close to him, see and hear him in person, touch him. Healing the sick, feeding the hungry, and telling kingdom stories was a phenomenal combination that attracted large crowds and met real needs.

But apparently Jesus hadn’t talked to a single marketing expert or social media consultant. On the way to Jerusalem, he turned to the crowd, and with fewer than 160 characters, just the right length for a tweet, he sent a most disturbing message, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.” Hashtag #discipleship. Not exactly what you would call a rousing summons to the masses to join the movement, is it? And he follows that with two more tweets, short and memorable. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple. None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.

Imagine the marketing experts and the personal brand consultants. Can you see them scratching their heads? “This kingdom mission was such a promising start-up. But what is this? Is he trying to alienate people and push them away?” Hate your family, carry the cross, and give up your stuff.  If this is what it takes to be a disciple – who would ever want to be one?

You are asking yourself very similar questions, aren’t you? When he speaks of ‘hating father and mother’ – does he mean to suggest that the teenager who storms off to her room shouting, “I hate you, Mom!” and slams the door, does he mean to suggest that she is the ideal candidate for discipleship? And when he speaks of ‘hating wife and children’ – is he seriously looking for deadbeat dads to assist him in proclaiming a message of compassion andreconciliation? He also mentions ‘hating brothers and sisters’ – well, yes, sometimes, I remember a couple of moments like that, but really? Hate? That is very strong language. Is this the same Jesus who challenges us to love even our enemies?

The scholars remind us that in this context “hating” is not the emotionally charged expression it is in English. Its meaning, they say, is closer to “turning away from” or to “forsaking” as in our wedding vows when we promise to be faithful only to her or him, “forsaking all others.” Following Jesus isn’t like following him on Twitter. Following Jesus is exclusive and it’s a life commitment, not something we do when we have nothing else to do or stop doing when we have other plans. Jesus compares the claim and cost of discipleship with our most deeply held allegiances to our parents, our siblings, our spouses and children, and ourselves. Following him doesn’t necessarily mean that we walk away from our other commitments, but that we live them in light of his kingdom mission. Our identities have been shaped by our families and the cultures in which we grew up, but when we begin to follow Jesus, our kingdom identity as citizens of heaven and members of God’s household begins to reshape us. We don’t cut the bonds of love and commitment that connect us with those closest to us, but we turn away from their exclusive hold on how we know and understand ourselves and the world. We learn to say, “I am a child of God. Jesus is my brother. I want to love as he loves.” That sounds perfectly lovely and harmless, only it isn’t.

That new identity and purpose has divided families and will continue to do so, three against two and two against three, father against son, and daughter against mother (see Luke 12:51-53). When we follow Jesus, we must be ready to be changed deeply.  We must be ready to have our other allegiances, loyalties, and belongings relativized. We must be ready to have our lives completely reoriented by divine love and toward divine love, and that kind of reorientation causes division.

In my own experience, this has meant being ready to have my male privileges pointed out to me and being committed to being part of dismantling them for the sake of women’s flourishing. After immigrating to the U.S. it has meant learning to see what it means to be white and how much the grand narratives of this nation have depended on excluding the lives and the stories of Native Americans and African Americans;  it has meant looking at European history and thought no longer as one epic tale of progress, but as human constructs in need of God’s gracious redemption, for the sake of life’s flourishing.

We must be ready to let him change our name. Our culture teaches us to see ourselves as the carefully created composites of our consumer choices. In sharp contrast, Jesus calls us to carry the cross. He calls us to follow him on the way that weaves our lives into his and his life into ours. He calls us to a life that reveals the shape of God’s unsentimental and passionate love for the world. Carrying the cross is not about looking for some heavy and painful burden. It is about seeking the pattern and finding the rhythm of a life that has Jesus Christ at the center. Alan Culpepper comments (NIB, 293),

The language of cross bearing has been corrupted by overuse. Bearing a cross has nothing to do with chronic illness, painful physical conditions, or trying family relationships. It is instead what we do voluntarily as a consequence of our commitment to Jesus Christ.

To carry the cross is to have our daily life shaped by our commitment to the Crucified One – wherever we are and whatever we do.

Now to the third of Jesus’ very difficult teachings. None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. We live in a culture where who we are is largely defined by what we have. The things we own allow us to project how we want to be seen. Possessions give us security, comfort, and status, and Jesus asks, “Who would you be without all those things? Who would you be if you depended completely on God’s love for you and the world?”

None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. Giving away everything I own doesn’t make me more of a child of God than I already am. But seeking life’s fulfillment in God does help me sort out the things that possess me and keep me and others from living more fully in God’s reign. Jesus invites you and me to be attentive to his call and to walk away with him from all things that keep us from living with God at the center of our life. The decision to respond to his call is not just a one-time action. It is the decision to live each day in response to Jesus’ call to the kingdom. It is the decision to open every layer and dimension of our life to God’s redemptive love.

Wedding etiquette

When you are invited by someone to a wedding banquet, do not sit down in the maid of honor’s seat unless you are the maid of honor. And stay away from the best man’s chair unless you’re the best man.

Jesus speaks about being invited to a wedding banquet, but I get a feeling he’s avoiding the most difficult part. You know that at a wedding reception the guests can’t just wander in and choose a seat, whether it’s at the head table or in the corner with their back to the sweetheart table, the cake, the dance floor, and everything else. Somebody has to decide which guest will just have to sit on that chair in the corner that nobody would choose to sit in. Somebody has to come up with the seating chart.

Heather Lee at brides.com suggests, “Begin by grouping guests according to how you know them: family members and friends from different aspects of life (childhood, high school, college, work, etc.). Seat younger guests closer to the dance floor and older guests a little further away. Use your seating plan to introduce people with similar interests and backgrounds. Try to make everyone feel comfortable by offering a mix of familiar and new faces at each table. Be tactful: Avoid seating people together who have a history they wish they could forget."

Be tactful. That sounds doable, but the folks at theknot.com seem a bit more willing to tackle the real challenge: “Your cousins have been feuding since the ‘80s, your last single girlfriend is hypersensitive to being seated at the ‘wrong’ table, and you have one couple coming from out of the country who only know you and your fiancé. What to do?” In the end it again boils down to being tactful: “With a little tact, diplomacy and common sense, you can create a seating plan that will make, well, almost everyone happy.” Almost. Don’t they know that word can hide a world of hurt?

Elizabeth Clayton tells it like it is at apracticalwedding.com:

For many of my clients, the wedding seating chart is one of the most stressful parts of planning—I’ve seen clients both cry and fight with each other (and their families) over them. Just recently a client of mine posted something on Facebook about their wedding seating chart, and one of the responses summed it up perfectly as being, “Like Tetris, but with emotions.”

Elizabeth is the practical one in the wedding consulting business. “Just remember,” she writes at the end of her column, “your guests are adults (or have an adult with them); they love you and are happy to be there, and will hopefully be gracious about whatever table they end up being placed at. If not—just remember that a well-stocked bar can go a long way towards soothing things."

Jesus has been invited to the house of a leader of the Pharisees for dinner. The other guests are watching him closely; they are not all friends there. But Jesus is paying close attention as well to what the other guests are doing. He notices how they go for the best seats, and he starts to comment; he sounds like somebody who writes a column for weddingguest.com or receptionetiquette.net: “Do not sit down at the place of honor, in case someone more distinguished than you has been invited by your host.” That would be so embarrassing. He sounds very practical, like somebody whose mission is to teach the masses the difference between the salad fork and the dessert fork. But Jesus didn’t come to offer reception advice, and he didn’t get crucified for teaching people how to be nice.

Is he really talking about the best strategy to get to the best seats without embarrassing oneself? How to lay low and hold back until the moment is right? His words sound very similar to the wisdom of king Solomon recorded in Proverbs, “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great; for it is better to be told ‘Come up here’ than to be put lower in the presence of the prince” (Proverbs 25:6-7). Is he telling us to choose the lowest place and to linger outside the lime light, waiting to be noticed, and when the moment has arrived, to step into the light, the envy of all the other contestants? I don’t know, that sounds a lot like humility as the ultimate technique of self-promotion; it just doesn’t sync with who Jesus is and with his other teachings.

Let’s look at it from a different angle. Why do the guests desire the places of honor? Why are we so eager to identify and occupy the good seats?

We have an image to cultivate. We have a position to maintain. We have a status to preserve. And you don’t just sit in the place of honor once you’ve arrived there. You worry and you never stop wondering: Am I projecting the kind of persona my social position requires? Am I being shown the kind of respect I deserve? Am I getting noticed by the people who matter? Will I remember to invite the guy three seats down to my next dinner party? Knowing him and being seen with him could be useful.

You don’t just sit in the place of honor, you constantly monitor your performance and your place on the big seating chart we constantly create and rearrange together in our minds, in the social pages and on social media.

Jesus isn’t talking about seating strategies. He is talking about how we see ourselves. We want to know where we stand, how we are doing, how we measure up – always in comparison to others. We find our place in the world by competing for a better place on the grand seating chart. There are, after all, only so many seats at the head table, only so many seats in the front row, only so many positions at the top, and so we learn to live with constant comparison and unending competition, anxiously worrying about our place.

In the ancient world, a dinner party was much more than an occasion for family and friends to hang out. A dinner party gave wealthy, influential families and individuals an opportunity to display and maintain their elite status. Every dining room was a hall of fame, and while the many worried about survival, the few worried about power and fame.

You invite me, and I invite you. You honor me, and I honor you. Quid pro quo.You introduce me to the people who can help me with my projects, and I introduce you to the people who can help you with yours. You invite my friends, and I invite yours. It’s how things get done in this city.

That’s how it works, isn’t it?

Jesus challenges the rules of the game. Against the habits of upwardly mobile networking and conventional patterns of reciprocity he lives and teaches kingdom etiquette. He grabs the dinner table and flips it over.

When you give a luncheon or a dinner, don’t invite your friends and your rich neighbors. Invite those who can’t do anything for you. Invite those who never know where their next meal will come from. Lift up the lowly. Surprise the poor, the lame, and the blind. Open the door and invite Lazarus to sit at the head of the table.

Why would anybody do that?

The biggest dinner party of all is life itself and God is the host. And no one gets to sit at God’s table by out-competing the others. Anyone who gets to sit at God’s table does so solely because God delights in shouting, “Friend, come on in.”

When Jesus welcomes sinners and eats with them, he performs the great wedding banquet of heaven. The invitation goes out to all, and there’s nothing we have to do or can do to get our names on the guest list. The occasion is the wedding of Christ and the bride, the blessed communion of heaven and earth, and God desires nothing more than for us to be part of the glorious joy. “Friend, come on in!” shouts the father of the bride.

We forget the seating charts because Jesus opens our eyes, our hearts and minds to the boundless love and hospitality of God. In his presence we know we belong to the household of God and we take our seat at the table where all belong. Here we learn how to let the kingdom shape our table manners. We lift up the lowly because God has lifted us up. We surprise the poor because God has surprised us. We open the door and invite Lazarus to dinner because God has opened the door for us.

The word invite rings out repeatedly in Jesus’ story of the great banquet and his words about dinners, luncheons, and receptions. The word invite rings out constantly in Jesus’ life because he embodies God’s invitation, “Friend, come on in.” Your dignity, your honor, your worth are not the result of anxious striving and self-monitoring and comparing and competing. You belong to God. Isn’t that why we’re here? To be reminded of God’s desire for communion with us? To hear that voice saying, “Friend, come on in!” and realize, “You are talking to me, you really are!” Isn’t that why we’re here? To forget ourselves for awhile and to remember that we are God’s own – chosen, invited, and honored? To forget ourselves for awhile and catch a glimpse of our true selves, all of us at home in God’s boundless hospitality? To practice living as God’s friends and learn to speak God’s word of friendship?

Sabbath for the bent and the bound

Many of us have watched the athletes. We saw Simone Biles jumping, flipping, landing, stretching and bending to accomplish great feats on the floor and up in the air. We saw Usain Bolt charging down the track like lightning, turning to the crowd with a beautiful smile, and then pointing up and bending back for his signature pose. We saw Ryan Lochte in the pool, gliding through the water like one who was born to swim, and then we witnessed him bending the truth into an embarrassing fabrication of lies. It wasn’t difficult these past few days to hear echoes of “bending” on the news, stories of bodies bending to accomplish greatness, stories of the truth being bent to escape accountability, stories of the rules not being bent for the sake of fairness. On Thursday the Department of Justice announced that the use of private prisons in the federal prison system would be phased out. I was surprised and very glad and I said to a friend, “If only the states would follow suit …,” and he responded, “the arc of the moral universe is long…,” inviting me to complete the sentence, “… but it bends towards justice.”[1]

I had the woman from Luke’s story on my mind, a woman with a spirit that had crippled her for eighteen years; a woman who was bent over by powers that rendered her quite unable to stand up straight. “Bound by Satan,” Jesus called it, careful not to name her that way, but rather all the things and forces that kept her from being who she was, namely a daughter of Abraham, a member of the covenant community, a child of the promise, an heir of the kingdom. “Bound by Satan” may still bring up images of a horned fellow with a tail, but they are easy to dismiss as mythical, pre-rational attempts to explain evil in the world. To me the image is not meant to explain, but to give a name to those things and experiences that render us less alive in body, mind and soul than we are meant to be and want to be. When I think about these crippling forces, I continue to return to a room at a nice conference center, where many years ago we had gathered for a weekend workshop. We were colleagues – pastors, chaplains, counselors and therapists – sitting in a circle, all of us facing to the middle, where a young woman was sitting alone on a chair. The workshop leader had asked us to name the spirits that cripple human beings, to name the powers that bend human beings, to name the forces under whose oppressive weight we struggle to maintain a sense of agency and freedom and hope. And she challenged us not to list the big abstracts we’re all too familiar with, names like “poverty,” “racism,” or “sexism.” Instead, we were to recall words and phrases we had heard over the years, images we had seen, scenes we had observed or lived through; we were to recall the seemingly small, daily things that cast shadows on our identity as creatures made in the image of God. There were a couple of baskets with scarfs and shawls, and every time one of us recalled a scene and named a power that bends human beings, he or she placed a shawl over the young woman’s head. The shawls were light as gossamer, almost weightless, but there were many. Layer upon layer covered her head, her arms and shoulders, and soon she began to bend under the weight, unable to see, struggling to breathe. She disappeared. We could barely hear her voice from behind the thick veil. She was no longer present as a person, but merely as a barely visible body, bent by crippling spirits, bound by Satan.

The woman who appeared in the synagogue where Jesus taught on that Sabbath had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. We don’t know how old she was, if she was in her 20’s or 40’s. We don’t know if she was married or not, if she had children or not, if she came from a wealthy home or if she had to beg for food. All we know about her is that for eighteen years she was bent over and quite unable to stand up straight. She could not walk upright. She could only see so far; her horizon had narrowed. She could direct her gaze only to the ground below. I wonder if her neighbors had gotten used to her being bent; if they took notice of her or if she always stayed below their line of sight. I wonder what nicknames the children may have made up for her; did they tease her from across the street or whisper behind her back? I wonder if she was in constant pain. Eighteen years of this must have redefined normal for her, perhaps she could not even imagine anymore any other way of seeing or being in the world. But Jesus could and did.

When she appeared in the synagogue he saw her and called her over. I believe he called her to make sure everybody in the room took notice. It was customary for the teacher giving the sabbath talk to sit in a chair at the front. I believe he called her over instead of getting up and walking over to her because her appearance was not an interruption of his teaching; she was part of his sabbath proclamation and possibly the most important part of it. “Woman, you are set free from your ailment,” he said to her and laid his hands on her. That’s all he did, proclaim her freedom and touch her. And she rose, slowly, I imagine, like a leaf uncurling in the morning sun, until she stood upright with her head held high, words of wonder and praise pouring from her lips. What a joyous moment it was! Only joy had to wait.

The synagogue leader was indignant; he too was bent, contorted by questions and the complexities of wanting to live faithfully in a complicated world:

There are six days on which work ought to be done; come on those days and be cured, and not on the sabbath day.

Couldn’t she wait till tomorrow? Isn’t healing on God’s holy sabbath blasphemy? The seventh day was set aside by God for rest, and keeping it holy meant refraining from work. For one day each week, God’s people were to live not by the work of their hands, but solely by the gifts of God. For one day each week, God’s people were to experience the freedom of complete dependence on God. This synagogue leader wasn’t just a joyless rule enforcer; he had the holiness of God’s word and the holiness of God’s people on his mind and in his heart. Healing on the sabbath was a difficult topic. The common understanding of the sabbath commandment was that medical emergencies could be and even had to be attended, but that chronic illnesses were a different matter. Non-emergencies could wait. In the leader’s mind, Jesus could have said, “Woman, come and see me tomorrow.” After eighteen years, what’s one more day?

But Jesus didn’t wait. Who wouldn’t untie their ox or donkey from the manger on the sabbath in order to lead them away to give them water? Untying farm animals and leading them to the water on the sabbath was common practice, and not only was it considered permissible but necessary for the animals’ well-being. If we can see the need to untie a thirsty animal, Jesus argued, how can we not see the need for a human being to be unbound and released to her full humanity?

Ought not this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for eighteen long years, be set free from this bondage on the sabbath day?

At the beginning of his ministry, on a sabbath in his hometown synagogue, Jesus read from Isaiah, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” And then he sat down to teach, and he said, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:18-21). Today, he said. It was time for every child of Abraham to taste the sweetness of sabbath. It was time for every son and daughter of Abraham to be set free from bondage: releasing the captives didn’t compromise the holiness of the sabbath day – on the contrary, it finally brought the peace and joy of sabbath to the bent and the bound. Yes, the sabbath is a day of rest for the weary and a day of remembrance for the forgetful, but the sabbath is also a promise, a foretaste of that seventh day when humanity and all of creation are at peace with God and with each other.

And Jesus said, today, not someday. Today it begins, he said in his first sabbath sermon. Healing the bent woman was not a sabbath violation but its fulfillment for her, and for the rest of us, it is the announcement of what has begun: the redemption of creation, the liberation of humanity from all that cripples, binds, and diminishes us.

The way we see her stand erect today, the praise of God pouring from her lips like water from spring, all will stand and raise up their heads and sing. Yes, we still struggle, but we sing of hope. Yes, there’s much that weighs us down in this world bent by unbending ways, but we sing of courage and mercy. We sing of the One who bends towards us with great tenderness and the power to make whole. We sing of the One who is making all things new.

[1] Famously and appropriately attributed to Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the metaphor goes back to New England pastor and abolitionist, Theodore Parker (1810-1860), “I do not pretend to understand the moral universe; the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways; I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. And from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.”

Learning Christ

Today we lift up the ministry of Christian education, we will bless teachers and learners, and we celebrate all the ways we learn to live as God’s people. What comes to mind when you hear the words Christian education?

Some of you may think of Sunday school, others may remember a person whose faith shaped yours more than any curriculum, class or sermon. Perhaps you remember Bible drills and flanell boards, or a grandmother who taught you good questions were more important than good answers. Perhaps you remember late night conversations with friends or a book that helped you understand your faith in new ways.

I remember night time prayers with my mom. I remember old Mr. Schneider whose glasses were the thickest I had ever seen; he rode his bicycle everywhere he went, including children’s worship on Sunday mornings at 11, and he told us Bible stories like he had been there and everything had happened only yesterday. I remember religion teachers in school who were kind and full of knowledge and wisdom. I remember youth group leaders who lived and taught the faith like there was nothing more important in the world. I remember my grandfather whose formal schooling ended in 7th grade and one of my theology professors with a dual Ph.D., and I can’t tell you which of the two was more influential in shaping my faith. I remember older kids in youth group who let me sell fair trade coffee, tea, and chocolate with them at the Christmas market and talked with me about God and colonialism and global trade. I remember singing a particular hymn every year on Easter, early in the morning, and the tune as much as the words has come to capture for me the deep meaning of resurrection hope.

I believe the whole life of the church is educating people in their faith. People use words like instruction, teaching, nurturing and development when they reflect on what Christian education is about. They speak of transmitting the faith and encouraging critical thinking, of spiritual formation and developing godly habits, of catechesis and socialization, and the list goes on. I would say, Christian education is a curious blend of the intentional teaching in settings designed for that pupose and the wild and wonderful learning that happens in all kinds of life moments. I learned a lot about God and prayer lying on my back in a boat in the middle of a lake in Sweden in my late teens, but that doesn’t mean that everybody else would have a similarly transformative experience simply by getting into a boat and rowing out to the middle of a lake. Some parts of Christian education can be included in how a family structures their day together or how a church plans its curriculum, other parts simply happen when we’re open to God’s presence and work in us.

I love the reading from Deuteronomy we heard earlier.

Hear, O Israel: The Lord is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.

This is what it’s all about, life and faith and education, everything: to love God with every capacity we have been given to think, feel, desire, will, speak, act, and suffer. The passage continues with instructions on how to learn and maintain that love:

Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart.

Keep these words at the center of who you are as a person. Let these words occupy the center of your being, let them determine who you are becoming day by day and year by year. Keep them, but don’t keep them to yourself.

Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise.

Recite them to your children so the next generation of God’s people may learn to keep them in their heart. Let them be the last words on your lips when you go to bed and the first ones when you rise. Let them give rhythm to your days, let them shape how you listen, think, speak, and act; keep them and they will keep you. Bind them as a sign on your hand, so you remember to keep your actions in tune with God’s will. Fix them as an emblem on your forehead, so both your thoughts and your vision are shaped by God’s purposes. Write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates, so both your private and your public life are spaces defined by God’s love and justice.

In order to love God with every capacity of their being, God’s people are to open their inmost self to God’s words, talk about them amongst each other, and let them structure their experience of time and space. Their lives are to be centered and rooted in these words and dedicated to hearing and keeping them, reciting, debating, and living them. Ultimately, everything in this brief passage flows from faithfully hearing in the community of God’s people what God has spoken.

The focus in the apostolic witness of the New Testament is very similar, which isn’t surprising, since it is the same God who speaks. We Christians affirm that God has spoken in Christ, and that the life of Jesus, his death and resurrection, are the event through which we are to hear, keep, interpret, debate and live all that God has spoken. We affirm that the ultimate word of God is not a text, but a life. The ultimate word of God is a human being who embodied God’s compassion and mercy among us.

In Colossians, the apostle teaches and admonishes those who have received Christ Jesus as Lord that we live our lives rooted and centered in him. Christ doesn’t take the place of the words of Torah so beautifully affirmed in the passage from Deuteronomy, no, he lives them completely, he embodies them. And for us to faithfully hear what God has spoken is to live in Christ and to have Christ live in us. The apostle writes, “clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience,” and this is not just a new dress code. Because we live in Christ, his character becomes visible as our true nature. Our interactions become expressions of his compassion, his kindness, his humility, meekness, and patience. We bear with one another, because Christ bears with us. We forgive each other, because Christ has forgiven us. Because we live in Christ, his perfect love of God and neighbor, a love that doesn’t exclude the enemy, becomes the garment that fits us all perfectly: in him we are one humanity, redeemed from our idolatries and restored to our true status as creatures made in the image of God.

Perhaps you wonder if clothing ourselves with compassion is just a game of dressing up and pretending that we are God’s people, you know, chosen, holy and beloved. But it’s rather the other way round: Because we are God’s chosen people, holy and beloved, we are finally free to stop pretending that we are who others need us to be or have made us believe that we are. Clothed with the perfect love of Christ, we live the life we were always meant to live. It is the life of the renewed humanity where Christ is all and in all. In this redeemed life, our hearts are no longer ruled by enmity and strife, but by the peace of Christ. And in this redeemed life, everything we do, we do in the name of Christ.

And so I want to suggest that all Christian education is about one thing: learning Christ. It encompasses learning who God is, learning who we are, and learning to live the life God desires for us. And it encompasses learning with our minds, our hearts, our hands and feet, and all our senses.

The apostle writes in Colossians, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly.” “You” is plural here, as just about everywhere in the epistles; it’s a subtle reminder that learning Christ cannot be a solo adventure, but is inherently communal. The verse can be translated, “Let the word of Christ dwell in you and among you,” and we are reminded that Christ is at work both within us and among us, and that in order for the word of Christ to dwell in us we must learn to dwell in the word, individually and collectively.

I already mentioned that learning Christ is inherently communal, it is also inherently mutual. The apostle tells us to “teach and admonish one another in all wisdom.” Learning Christ happens through one-anothering, which isn’t a verb yet, but I want to suggest that we begin using it anyway. Learning Christ happens through one-anothering. Learning Christ doesn’t divide the body into some who teach and all the others who learn. Learning Christ brings us together in a community where all learners are teachers and all teachers are learners, all God’s people together, young and old.

Come now

It’s hard to listen to Isaiah. It’s hard to listen to the words he has given to his vision, to what the Lord has spoken. Calling on heaven and earth as witnesses, he pours out God’s indictment of God’s people, in a whirling blend of anger and disbelief, tenderness and disgust, accusations and commands. And we didn’t even hear the chapter’s opening verses as part of our reading where God calls God’s people a sinful nation, rebels, people laden with iniquity, offspring who do evil, estranged children who deal corruptly, a people who have forsaken the Lord and despised the Holy One of Israel. There is so much pain in those few lines, so much grief. We can almost see the prophet standing on the temple mount, looking across the land, as he paints with just a few strokes a scene of devastation:

Your country lies desolate, your cities are burned with fire; in your very presence aliens devour your land… And daughter Zion is left like a booth in a vineyard, like a shelter in a cucumber field (Isaiah 1:7-8).

Some in the city are listening and they say,

If the Lord of hosts had not left us a few survivors, we would have been like Sodom, and become like Gomorrah (Isaiah 1:9).

The names of those cities are shorthand for violent sin and violent retribution. Some in the city are listening to the prophet and they are relieved, because the devastation isn’t complete. “It could have been worse,” they say to themselves. “If the Lord had not left us a few survivors,” they say, “we would have been like Sodom and Gomorrah.”

But now the prophet roars, “Would have been? Hear the word of the Lord, you rulers of Sodom! Listen to the teaching of our God, you people of Gomorrah!” and he’s not addressing cities that were destroyed in the ancient days of the patriarchs and matriarchs; he’s addressing them – their cities, their rulers, their people. And part of us wishes we could keep it that way – their cities, not ours; them, not us.

But we are part of the prophet’s audience. His words have been passed on, written down, and read, from generation to generation, because in them the character and will of the Holy One of Israel are revealed. We assume that our worship is pleasing to God, mostly because it is pleasing to us. “Of course the Lord does not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats,” we can almost hear ourselves say, mostly because the mere thought of it makes us squeamish. “Perhaps that was proper worship in less enlightened days,” we are tempted to say, forgetting that every detail of temple worship, every sacrifice, every instruction for the proper slaughtering of the animals and what goes in the fire and what doesn’t - everything is rooted in God’s commandments. Our brothers and sisters with an anti-Catholic or an anti-high-church bias will gladly hear and affirm that “incense is an abomination to [the Lord]” – because we’ll do anything to let these hard words be meant for any other community, just not us.

It’s hard to listen to Isaiah. It’s hard to listen to the prophets; their words can make us dismissive and defensive. But perhaps we listen with just enough interest and attention to understand two things that are indeed one:

God doesn’t obsess about proper worship nearly as much as we do; and we aren’t concerned about justice and righteousness nearly as much as God is.

“I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity,” says the Lord while we, well, we make do. We like solemn assemblies and we like happy assemblies, we like our assemblies with praise choruses or chanted prayers, with fog machines and big screens, or with hefty hymnals and fancy robes, but we like our assemblies, we need them.

“Our tragedy begins with the segregation of God,” said Abraham Heschel, “our tragedy begins with the bifurcation of the secular and sacred. We worry more about the purity of dogma than about the integrity of love.” Our tragedy begins with the segregation of God, the separation of worship and what we like to call real life. We like our assemblies and we worry about them while our God, with great passion and patience continues to call us to make worship the heart of our life, and not just a part of it.

Isaiah, in this opening chapter, looks around the temple area and he sees how much attention is given to the proper handling of the sacrificial blood of bulls and lambs and goats, and he cries out, giving voice to the passion and pathos of God, “But your hands are full of blood. Your hands are stained with the blood shed daily on your streets. Your hands are defiled by violence and abuse. When you stretch out your hands in prayer, I turn away; I don’t listen. I don’t know whom or what you think you are worshiping, but it’s not me.”

We may think of worship as the things we do in the sanctuary at the appointed times, but our God desires to be worshiped in all that we do. The prophet cries out for the desegregation of the everyday.

In a speech in 1963, Abraham Heschel said,

The major activity of the prophets was interference, remonstrating about wrongs inflicted on other people, meddling in affairs which were seemingly neither their concern nor their responsibility. A prudent man is he who minds his own business, staying away from questions which do not involve his own interests, particularly when not authorized to step in – and prophets were given no mandate by the widows and orphans to plead their cause.

No, the mandate doesn’t come from the widows and orphans, or the strangers and the imprisoned, the mandate comes from the God who made them and loves them. The prophet is a person who cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity, because God cannot. And so Isaiah directs his urgent plea to every member of the community:

Seek justice. Rescue the oppressed. Establish justice for the orphan. Plead for the widow.

Heschel said, “There is an evil which most of us condone and are even guilty of: indifference to evil. We remain neutral, impartial, and not easily moved by the wrongs done unto other people. Indifference to evil is more insidious than evil itself; it is more universal, more contagious, more dangerous. … The prophets’ great contribution to humanity was the discovery of the evil of indifference [and] all prophecy is one great exclamation: God is not indifferent to evil! [God] is always concerned, [God] is personally affected by what [one human being] does to [another].”[1]

I read about a conversation Will Willimon had with a man about his father. It sheds some more light on the necessity of overcoming the common segregation of God from the everyday and vice versa. His father, the man told Willimon, was a remarkable man. He did not have a huge amount of education, but by staying up late nearly every night, he self-educated himself in certain aspects of the law. During the Great Depression, a bank in his native Anson County (North Carolina) hired him to receive and to dispose of the many farms that the bank was foreclosing on, as a result of the bad times. His father had always been deeply concerned about the plight of African American farmers in his community, most of whom were sharecroppers. Their situation was little better than slavery. They lived and worked on land that wasn’t theirs. During the winter, they had to borrow from the landowner to buy food and fuel; loaned at high interest. In the summer, when the crops came in, the first money, taken off the top, went to pay back those debts with interest. And there was never enough money. Each year these sharecroppers sank deeper and deeper into debt. His father would meet with these sharecroppers, and together they learned to advance their farming methods and keep careful records of their crops and negotiate a good price for their work. By the time he died, in that community, 200 black farmers and their families, who had never owned land or home, were landowners, eating the good of the land, their land and enjoying the fruit of their labor.

But the story doesn’t end there. They had his father’s funeral at home, the man said, rather than at their church. They knew that most of the folk at the funeral would be black and would know that they were not welcome at the white church. “My dad almost never attended church,” the son said. “Couldn’t stand to sit there and watch ushers pass the offering plates on Sunday, knowing how those scoundrels conducted their businesses during the week, knowing the way they treated people when they weren’t all dressed up and playing church.”

Solemn assemblies with iniquity. Now we could of course sit here, shaking our heads and wagging our fingers, feeling good about ourselves, but we’re not playing church. We remember that the prophet’s severe indictment is not the last word. The tone changes dramatically as the vision moves from accusation to invitation:

“Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord: though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow; though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.”

It sounds almost like certainty, this possibility of forgiveness, “though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow.” The “maybe” sounds almost like “this is how it’s going to be.” Perhaps the promise, the possibility of forgiveness, has the firmness of certainty, because the One making the promise is essentially gracious and merciful, not wrathful and vindictive. The final word is the invitation to enter God’s salvation through repentance. Yes, our injustice and our indifference have and will have destructive consequences, but God’s will is not simply to get even or to punish. God wills to set things right: Wash yourselves. Make yourselves clean. Cease to do evil. Learn to do good. Seek justice. All these imperatives invite transformation and culminate in the last word, “Come now, let’s settle this.”

God’s arms are wide open. “Come now, let’s set things right.”

[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, Religion and Race, January 14, 1963

Whose life are you living?

When you’re little, you don’t get to choose what you wear. There’s no debate. As long as somebody else is dressing you, you don’t have a say, typically. They wrap you in blanket like a light blue spring roll or gently fold your little limbs into a yellow onesie – it’s their call. You wear whatever they decide. You cooperate, until one day you figure out how to say “no” and that’s when a transition period of daily struggle begins. Eventually you agree to their terms: you choose from one of three outfits one of your adult clothing partners has laid out for you on top of your dresser, or you get to pick items yourself straight from the drawer, and said adults reserve the right to veto your choices when you walk into the kitchen. You want to wear what you want to wear, clothes are very personal, and it’s hard for you to see why wearing your superhero outfit for three weeks straight, day and night, could possibly be a problem or why you can’t wear your undies on top of your jeans so everybody can see the cool print on the front.

The clothes we wear are the result of complex negotiations between self-expression and the need to fit it, between taste and functionality, between following rules and pushing against them. For ages, clothes have provided warmth and protection, but they also reflected gender, age, cultural identity, and class differences, visually distinguishing the ruling, powerful, and wealthy from everyone else. We call people white-collar or blue-collar, we call them suits or smarty pants or stuffed shirts. We used to say, perhaps some of us still do, “She’s all fur coat and no knickers” or, “He’s all hat and no cattle.” Our clothes reflect who we are or aspire to be as well as where we belong, whether we like it or not. We use clothing to express ourselves, but we also wear layer upon layer of other people’s expectations and dreams or lack thereof. I have met men and women of all ages who feel like they’re living somebody else’s life. I’ll come back to that.

Our friend Jerry Seinfeld tells us,

I hate clothes, okay? I hate buying them. I hate picking them out of my closet. I can’t stand every day trying to come up with little outfits for myself. I think eventually fashion won’t even exist. It won’t. I think eventually we’ll all be wearing the same thing. ‘Cause anytime I see a movie or a TV show where there’s people from the future of another planet, they’re all wearing the same thing. Somehow they decided “This is going to be our outfit. One-piece silver jumpsuit, V-stripe, and boots. That’s it.” We should come up with an outfit for earth. An earth outfit. We should vote on it. Candidates propose different outfits, no speeches. They walk out, twirl, walk off. We just sit in the audience and go, “That was nice. I could wear that.”

We see Jerry at the clothing store, and he’s tired of looking; the salesman tells him, “Well, I might have something in the back.” He returns with a jacket. Elaine says, “Try it on.” She touches it. “Wow, this is soft suede.” He tries it on.

“This may be the most perfect jacket I have ever put on.” And he buys it.

Next we see him sitting on his couch wearing his pajamas and his new jacket. He gets up to look at himself in the mirror. Kramer enters.

“Hey. New jacket?”

“What do you think?”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Is it me?”

And Kramer says, “That’s definitely you.”

“Really?” Jerry asks.

“That’s more you than you’ve ever been.”

Later Jerry proudly models his new jacket in front of George and says, “This jacket has completely changed my life. When I leave the house in this, it’s with a whole different confidence. Like tonight, I might’ve been a little nervous. But, inside this jacket, I am composed, grounded, secure that I can meet any social challenge.”[1]

Jerry has found his superhero outfit. It’s completely changed his life. In Kramer’s words, “That’s more you than you’ve ever been.”

Every line of dialogue in those scenes, of course, oozes irony. But they still speak to a deep longing inside you and me and to a deep fear: we long to be seen by others for who we are and be loved for who we are. And at the same time we are afraid to be truly seen by others, because we can’t believe they could accept us if they truly saw us instead of the person we work so hard to project. I said earlier, I have met men and women of all ages who feel like they’re living somebody else’s life. They feel like they’ve been given a role in somebody else’s drama, and they’ve never tasted the freedom of adding their own words to the script. They’ve never known the freedom of wearing feathers of joy, ponchos of comfort, or long, light shirts of no worries, because they’ve been dressed from a very young age in layers of pain and shame and guilt. And those layers fit so tightly, we wear them like skin or have almost forgotten there’s actual skin underneath. And we add more layers, layers of armor and invisibility cloaks. We choose with great care what we wear, but often with little hope.

The question is, can we hear what Paul has to say? He tells us to set our minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth. He’s not telling us to stick our heads in the clouds and block from view mountains and oceans, rivers, forests, fields and meadows, all things bright and beautiful, God’s creatures great and small – no, he’s telling us to set our minds on the reality of Christ’s resurrection, and he says “above” because our words fail us when we seek to speak about God’s reign that is in the world, but not part of the world. Christ is risen from the dead – he is beyond the reach of sin and death and any power that diminishes and distorts God’s gift of life. He is alive, fully alive, completely alive. But that is not the whole story. The resurrection is not just something fantastic that happened to Jesus, but the beginning of a whole new order of things, the beginning of a new creation. The resurrection is the beginning of life’s liberation from the house of bondage. The resurrection is the beginning of the end of sin’s oppressive rule and it is already the end of sin’s oppressive rule.

And because Christ has made us his own in love’s radical solidarity with us, we are not what the world has made of us or prevented us from becoming – no, we are who we were meant to be from the beginning, God’s beloved. Christ died in radical solidarity with us, but he is alive, completely alive in God, and this fullness of life is his gift to us. Because we belong to Christ, death is already a past reality for us, and our life is hidden with Christ in God. Hidden, but already present, waiting to be revealed. Hidden, but already transforming us. In Christ, we are becoming who we already are. The more fully we know ourselves and one another as God’s beloved, the less we will seek to serve the idols of money, sex, and control. We set our minds on Christ, we set our minds on things that are above, and when others go low in malice, slander, and abusive language, we go high.

The context of difficult transformation in our personal and communal life is being addressed in today’s reading with the language of stripping and clothing. The apostle writes,

You have stripped off the old humanity with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new humanity, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator.

This refers to our embracing of Christ as our life, and so active verbs prevail: you have stripped off, you have clothed yourselves. But the other side of our embrace of Christ, and the initial movement, is Christ’s embrace of us. And in his embrace we are being gently undressed. He sees who we are underneath all those layers. He takes off our armor. He peels away the guilt and shame, every layer, and he touches the pain. He knows. He takes off the old humanity with its practices, and he clothes us with the new humanity, that is, humanity in the image of its Creator rather than its many idols.

In Christ’s embrace, all that keeps us from being one humanity is being erased, and not so we can all be dressed in one-piece silver jumpsuits that hide the rich diversity of our humanity. God has designed an earth outfit for humankind; it has the color, texture, and radiance of glory: All of us alive, fully alive, completely alive with Christ. Living with Christ, embracing Christ as our life, we’re not living somebody else’s life. We’re finally living the one life there is, and nothing else.

[1] http://www.seinfeldscripts.com/TheJacket.htm

Trying times

“Praying for peace and healing love,” has been, for the past couple of weeks, the message on the sign by the road. We want to tell the people who drive by what we are about, and praying seems to be the first thing that comes to mind these days. It doesn’t mean we’re not working or protesting or seeking better answers than the quick and loud ones we are hearing day in and day out; it means that we turn to God with our questions, our fears, our rage, our broken hearts, our despair and our hope.

My own prayers over the past weeks have largely been shaped by news alerts: story after story of violence, terror, and ugliness washed over me, with just enough air between them, it seems, to whisper, “Lord have mercy.” It’s been one long litany of lament.

The gospel reading given to us for this day begins with Jesus finishing his prayers, when one of the disciples asked him, “Lord, teach us to pray.” Jesus prayed often, and perhaps the disciples sensed a connection between the kind of person he was and his habit of prayer. They may have had questions very similar to the ones we bring: When and how often should we pray? Where should we pray and why? Are we to keep our eyes open or close them? Are we to stand up, sit down, or kneel? Do we stretch out our hands like the branches of a tree or fold them? Jesus’ response is remarkably short.

When you pray, say:

Father, hallowed be your name.
Your kingdom come.
Give us each day our daily bread.
And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.
And do not bring us to the time of trial.

The words sound familiar; the prayer we know as the Lord’s Prayer comes from the gospel of Matthew and from the long tradition of use in the worship and instruction of the church. At Vine Street we say the prayer in the King’s English with “thy” and “thine,” thoroughly in love with the premodern pronouns that elevate these words from ordinary speech and infuse them with the aura of things that have been handled and used by many generations before us. The words in Luke are bare in comparison: Father, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come. There is no ornament, no flourish, there are no filler words – just simple imperatives: give us and forgive us, and don’t bring us to the time of trial. Jesus teaches us to pray with few words and clear focus. He teaches us to speak of God’s holy name and kingdom right next to our need for bread and forgiveness. This is how closely they belong together. Jesus teaches us to speak of God’s eternal purposes and our daily need almost in the same breath. He teaches us to ask for the consummation of God’s creation in God’s glorious reign of peace and to follow that cosmic-scale request with the most everyday petition for something to eat. Nothing’s too big. Nothing’s too small. We are invited to turn to God in all things and to trust in God’s mercy. Do we pray for bread and forgiveness because we are worried that we might receive neither unless we ask for them daily? No, we pray daily because we need to remember daily that we are recipients of precious, life-giving gifts, given to us for sharing. We pray with these words because we hope that remembering God’s mercy to us will help us become merciful toward each other.

In the fifth and final petition of the prayer, Jesus teaches us to ask God, “Do not bring us to the time of trial.” We pray that the things and events that test our faith will never be stronger than our faith. And these are trying times for disciples of Jesus in this country. Some of us are tempted to trade in our trust in God’s promises and our hope in God’s future for some angry nostalgia for an America that never was. Some of us are angry that it’s taking white folk so long to grasp how deeply the sin of slavery has wounded our life together and that still the pain is being felt overwhelmingly by black bodies. Some of us are tempted to dismiss the hard work of truth-telling and reconciliation-seeking as whining and blaming. Some of us are to utterly disoriented and discouraged, we just can’t believe there’s much we could do to make a difference.

Do not bring us to the time of trial, Jesus teaches us to pray in trying times. Praying we hold on to the relationship God has established with us. Praying we hold on to the vision of life God has revealed in Christ. Praying we hold on to the promise of being clothed with power from on high.

Jesus prayed often, and his praying grounded and shaped his living and his teaching. “Do not set your minds on what you are to eat or drink; do not be anxious,” he taught generations of disciples. “These are all things that occupy the minds of the Gentiles, but your Father knows that you need them. No, set your minds on his kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.” Many things occupy the minds of those who do not know themselves to be God’s beloved, but we are to set our minds on God’s kingdom. We are to let the promise of God’s coming reign give direction to our lives, how we think, speak, work, hope, vote and spend our money – everything; and all the things we tend to be anxious about when we forget that we are God’s beloved will be given to us as well. “Have no fear, little flock,” says Jesus, “for your Father has chosen to give you the kingdom” (Luke 12:30-32).

In his teaching Jesus refers to God as “your Father,” reminding us that we belong to God’s household and that God wants what is good and life giving for all members of God’s household. When Jesus teaches us to pray, he invites us into the intimate relationship he has with the one he calls Father, and so we join him in prayer, we let his prayer become ours. Four times in Luke’s telling of the gospel, Jesus addresses the Holy One of Israel as Father. First here, teaching us to pray with him,

“Father, hallowed by your name. Your kingdom come.”

Then again in Gethsemane, praying through the night of trial,

“Father, if your are willing, remove this cup from me” (Luke 22:42).

And two more times on the cross, saying,

“Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (Luke 23:34)

and finally,

“Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).

On the cross, God revealed the power of forgiveness to renew and restore what sin has destroyed. The path of divine justice revealed on the cross is love that embraces the enemy for the sake of reconciliation. Jesus proclaimed repentance and forgiveness as the door to the kingdom and God affirmed his servant life and his royal teaching by raising him from the dead.

These are trying times and while we cannot fully name the powers that threaten us, we can certainly sense their presence: they seek to convince us that we do not belong to God’s household, that we are neither God’s beloved nor each other’s brothers and sisters, and that loving our enemies is a ridiculous idea.

“Praying for peace and healing love,” the sign outside our sanctuary says, telling those who drive by that the people who gather here are holding on to God’s vision of life. We have so many questions about how and when and where and why to pray, and Jesus’ teaching gives focus to that flurry: remember whom you address in your prayers and with whom you are praying. Prayer is not about this and that and the other, and properly done this way or that way, prayer is about living attentively in the relationship God has established with us. In this relationship we are invited to bring and give voice to all our needs and wants, our hopes and fears, our frustrations and our pain, and to let God love us and reorient our lives toward the peace of God’s kingdom. We pray to be shaped by nothing but love.

One love

I wonder if you recently had that moment when you looked at the flag flying at half-staff and you didn’t know why it had been lowered: was it to honor the police officers who were shot and killed in Dallas or was it to honor the victims of the attack in Nice? Or had there been yet another terrible event that you hadn’t heard about? It seems the president could simply order the flag to be flown half-staff until further notice, since every day brings more stories of violent deaths abroad and here at home that weigh heavy on our hearts and minds. We hear the stories, we mourn and pray and ask, “What can we do? What must we do? What can anybody do?” Charleston, Ferguson, Paris, Orlando, Istanbul, South Sudan, Baton Rouge, Baghdad, Falcon Heights, Dallas, Nice – a torrent of stories of violent death touching countless lives deeply, and we boil it all down to the name of a city or a hashtag. This has become our way of bringing order to the chaos of our days. We hear a story and it breaks our hearts, and we feel the need to sit with it for a while to let it sink in and talk things through with friends and strangers, and we want to move from only reacting to terrifying events to proactively engaging with the issues in order to break bad patterns and prevent more of the same, but the world is relentless and the torrent won’t stop and tomorrow we will be flooded from every screen with by-the-minute updates of yet another incident, or at least so we have come to expect by now. For some of us, today’s news simply replaces yesterday’s and our attention quickly jumps from one thing to the next; for others, the stories pile up and we struggle to find a way to hold it all together and find an angle to respond in a meaningful way; and then there are those among us who tune out entirely and go shopping or watch the game, any game, anything to distract us from the claims the people in these stories make on us. What are we to do?

Luke tells us that a lawyer, an expert in Jewish law and scripture, asked Jesus, “Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” And he already knew the answer. You are to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. You are to love God and neighbor. The lawyer knew the answer. But knowing the answer is not the point; living it is. Loving God and neighbor is the point.

Jesus told the story of the man who was beaten, stripped and robbed on the Jericho road to help us see that “neighbor” doesn’t define a particular group of people who are recipients of our love at the exclusion of others. We become neighbors when we show mercy to another. We become neighbors when we let another make a claim on our capacity to empathize and care. “Go and do likewise,” Jesus told the lawyer and us who have listened to the story.

After this, Luke opens for us the door to Martha’s house, where Jesus is a welcome guest. Martha is a woman who goes and gets things done, and she goes and does a lot, in fact, she keeps going and doing. Luke tells us she is distracted by much serving, and it’s not just housework, it’s everything she does in loving response to the needs of others. She’s being a neighbor to all who’ve come to her house. She lets them each make a claim on her capacity to care and she responds with kindness and grace. But between one thing and the next, she stops briefly and with resentment in her voice she tells Jesus to tell her sister to help her.

Mary, of course, has been sitting at the Lord’s feet, listening to what he says. In your imagination this may trigger images of a star-struck teenage girl sitting on the ground, gazing with dreamy eyes at Jesus who looks the part of the boy celebrity – if that is what you see, move on quickly and try to forget it.[1] Sitting at the feet of someone is an expression for being the disciple of a master.[2] Mary sitting at the feet of Jesus means she and Jesus are both acting against widespread gender expectations where women are the ones who always go and do while men sit at the feet of wise teachers drinking of their words.[3] Perhaps Martha is a little resentful because she too wants to sit and drink of that wisdom. Or does she think there’s nothing wrong with the traditional gender roles and that Mary should be doing women’s work? And aren’t both of them welcoming Jesus?

The little story is big enough to contain our wondering and it gives us room to explore various answers and implications. I am drawn to the word “distracted” that is used twice in this passage.[4] Luke portrays Martha as distracted by many things and Mary in contrast as centered in the Lord’s presence and word. Martha is drawn away by many things that demand her attention much like we are in the daily torrent of stories that demand that we dismantle racism, that we bind up the wounds of those who are hurting, that we hear those who cry out in pain and in anger, that we show our solidarity with victims of terror, that we go and do the things that neighbor love demands. Jesus tells Martha, “You are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.” We know about being worried and distracted by many things, and Jesus tells us that there is need of only one thing.

The lawyer knows the right answer, but he has trouble living it. Martha knows how to go and do and her day is never long enough for the many things that need doing. What does Mary know? Mary knows the Lord; she has found the defining center of her life.

It’s tempting to read this story in the good sister/bad sister mold, but I don’t want to read it that way. To me it’s a story of belonging. The two belong together like loving God and loving neighbor belong together. The one thing necessary is not one or the other, but one love unfolding in countless ways. And so the one thing necessary doesn’t make the many things obsolete, but rather unifies them like many rivers that flow from a single source: one love flowing from the heart of God, awakening every act of compassion, inspiring every step toward justice, and driving out every fear. We still differentiate between love as the divine reality that faithfully holds us and love as human action, between seeking to find the face of God in the face of the other who is in need and seeking to see the face of God by studying God’s word, but there is only one love desiring to fill all things completely.

We live in the constant tension between focus and distraction, between being drawn in and being drawn away. The story of Mary and Martha captures a moment when the two sisters find themselves on the opposite poles of this tension; that doesn’t mean that this is who they are or where they always are. But it reminds us that the unity of love we seek to know and live is found in Christ and what he has done so we would inherit eternal life.

So what do we do when the world floods in on us and every day brings yet another story of violence and terror and fear and confusion without end? Mr. Rogers taught us to tell our children to always look for the helpers when something terrible has happened. Look for the helpers. Look for the men and women who follow love’s lead by acting with compassion. Look for the people whose actions tell a different story than the one fear wants to write. Look for the people whose lives are grounded in God’s love. Let your life be grounded in God’s love.

I invite you to sit in silence for a moment. Close your eyes and take a deep breath. Relax your shoulders and let your hands rest. Be silent. Be still. Alone. Empty before your God. Say nothing. Ask nothing. Be silent. Be still. Let your God look upon you. That is all. God knows. God understands. God loves you with an enormous love, and only wants to look upon you with that love. Quiet. Still. Be. Let your God—love you.[5]

[1] There is a particularly fine example of a particularly bad illustration at https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/1c/8e/8a/1c8e8ab3000d36d9184868d8349df959.jpg

[2] See, e.g., Acts 22:3 (Paul at the feet of Gamaliel)

[3] See, e.g., the tractate Abot 1.4-5 of the Mishnah: “… Yossei the son of Yoezer of Tzreidah would say: Let your home be a meeting place for the wise; dust yourself in the soil of their feet, and drink thirstily of their words. Yossei the son of Yochanan of Jerusalem would say: Let your home be wide open, and let the poor be members of your household. And do not engage in excessive conversation with a woman. …”

[4] In the NRSV translation of v. 40 and v. 41; in the Greek text two different words are used.

[5] Edwina Gateley, In God’s Womb: A Spiritual Memoir (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2009), 59-60.

Will we let ourselves be loved?

It was a stormy night in Memphis, forty-eight years ago, much like some of the nights we had this past week with heavy rains and powerful thunderstorms. It was the night of April 3, 1968, the night before Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. He was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers, and many wondered what a Nobel Peace Prize winner had to do with garbagemen – didn’t he have more important things to do? His closest aides reminded him that Memphis was not a strategic city, and sanitation workers would not attract the kind of broad sympathy on the national evening news the children of Birmingham or the victims of police brutality in Selma had created. What was King doing in Memphis?

There’s a back story. Local residents had objected to the sanitation workers’ practice of eating lunch outside the trucks—“picnicking” they called it. “Not in our neighborhood,” they said. And so the workers were instructed to eat in the truck, even though the cab of a truck did not accommodate a crew of four. One rainy afternoon, two of the workers crawled into the compactor on the back end of the truck to eat their sandwiches. Something was wrong with the wiring, the system engaged, and the two workers were crushed—compacted, like garbage. It’s no wonder that later, when their colleagues went on strike to demand better pay and better working conditions, many of them wore signs that read, “I am a man.”

That stormy night Dr. King asked the question, “Why Memphis?” and he answered it by telling the story of a man who was traveling from Jerusalem to Jericho when he fell among thieves and was beaten, stripped, thrown in a ditch and left for dead. The man in the ditch, said King, is the sanitation worker. He tried to imagine why the priest and the Levite didn’t stop to help. Perhaps they had more important things to do. Perhaps they were already late for a meeting of the Jericho Improvement Association. Perhaps they were afraid; you stop on a road like that and you may well be the next victim. The whole thing could be a trap, who knows. Who knows what went through their minds when they saw the man in the ditch and passed him by on the other side. Even honorable people, King said in his speech, ask, “What will happen to me if I stop?” But the real question, according to King, is not, “What will happen to me if I do stop?” but, “What will happen to them if I don’t?”[1] Memphis was not a detour for Dr. King; it was a demand of neighborly love that he be there. The next morning, King was shot and killed just outside his motel room. The Jericho road is a dangerous place.

Jesus told the story in response to the question, “Who is my neighbor?” asked by an expert in the law. The lawyer wanted to know who qualified as neighbor, how he could differentiate between neighbor and non-neighbor. Jesus told the story and he changed the question: Which of the three who came by the scene was a neighbor to the man in the ditch?

The one who showed him mercy, the lawyer responded. The one who was moved with compassion, who went to the man and bandaged his wounds, who then brought him to an inn and took care of him, and the next day paid the innkeeper to take care of the man and promised to repay him whatever more he spent upon his return. The one who showed him mercy, the lawyer responded. Some commentators say, he couldn’t bring himself to say the word Samaritan, so deep was the enmity between Jews and Samaritans. I’m not so sure; perhaps the lawyer had listened to Jesus’ story more carefully than we can imagine; perhaps he had learned to avoid labeling people with a quick reference to their ethnic background, their religious or political affiliation, or their socio-economic status.

Who was a neighbor to the man in the ditch? The one who showed him mercy. When love and mercy determine our actions, the labels begin to come off. In the story, the only character without a label is the man who was beaten, stripped, and robbed. No clothes to tell the passerby if he is rich or poor. Left for dead, he couldn’t speak and so there is no accent to betray if he’s a local or a foreigner. All there is to see for the passerby is a human being’s naked need. The man who stopped to help was still a man from Samaria, but in the lawyer’s mind, perhaps it was no longer the quick label that described the man, but his merciful actions.

Henri Nouwen wrote in the late 90’s,

We become neighbors when we are willing to cross the road for one another. There is so much separation and segregation: between black people and white people, between gay people and straight people, between young people and old people, between sick people and healthy people, between prisoners and free people, between Jews and Gentiles, Muslims and Christians, Protestants and Catholics, (…). As long as there is distance between us and we cannot look into one another’s eyes, all sorts of false ideas and images arise. We give them names, make jokes about them, cover them with our prejudices, and avoid direct contact. We think of them as enemies. We forget that they love as we love, care for their children as we care for ours, become sick and die as we do. (…) Only when we have the courage to cross the road and look in one another’s eyes can we see there that we are children of the same God and members of the same human family.[2]

When I heard the news that Alton Sterling and Philando Castile had been shot and killed by police, I was angry, I was sad. “Not again,” I said to myself, “not again.” I felt my soul draining through the bottom of my feet into the ground and I felt a deep helplessness.

There are powers at work among us that won’t surrender to our good intentions. We have collectively created systems of inequality and exclusion over generations, systems that we all participate in daily, whether we want to or not, systems whose power over us seems so much greater than our power over them. Michelle Alexander wrote on Facebook, “This nation was founded on the idea that some lives don't matter. Freedom and justice for some, not all. That’s the foundation. Yes, progress has been made in some respects, but it hasn’t come easy. There’s an unfinished revolution waiting to be won.”[3] The injustice, the violent exploitation and abuse of slavery and Jim Crow are not past, they are painfully present. Crossing the road, as Nouwen suggested, sounds simple enough, too simple perhaps; learning to see each other’s reality through each other’s experiences and stories rather than solely through our respective lenses takes a long walk, a long walk.

A national survey in 2015 by the Public Religion Research Institute showed a wide chasm separating black and white Americans’ attitudes toward the police. 64 percent of blacks vs. only 17 percent of whites identified police mistreatment as a major problem in their community. Similarly, 48 percent of blacks had a great deal or some confidence in the police, compared to 83 percent of whites who reported being confident in the law enforcement. 65 percent of whites said recent killings of African American men by police were isolated incidents, while only 15 percent of black Americans shared the same view. 81 percent of black Americans said recent police killings of African American men were part of a broader pattern of how police treat African Americans. Again, those are last year’s numbers, and I don’t expect much has changed for the better; it’s gonna be a long walk.

I was very comfortable looking at the scene in Jesus’ story from the perspective of the road, a very privileged perspective, as it turns out. It’s a privilege to see things through the eyes of the three men who travel the Jericho road with the freedom to choose if and when they cross it, whether they cross it to put greater distance between themselves and the man in the ditch or to come closer for mercy’s sake, close enough to look into his eyes and touch his bruised body with caring hands. Like I said, I was very comfortable looking at the scene in Jesus’ story from the perspective of one walking down the Jericho road, and then I heard the news Friday morning that eleven police officers had been shot in Dallas and five of them killed by sniper fire the night before.

I just sat there, I was terrified.

What is happening?

Is this what we’ve become?

Are we gonna take up arms and kill each other in helpless rage or calculated terror?

Fear crept in and numbness; it got cold.

What a mess we have made of the world.

We’re not on the road, we’re in the ditch.

Beaten, stripped, and robbed.

Helpless in our naked need.

Lord have mercy.

What a mess we have made of the world.

Will somebody come and bandage our wounds?

Will somebody come and pick us up and take us to a place of healing where our life is restored?

When we find ourselves in the ditch, the question changes. It’s no longer, “Will I cross the road and be a neighbor to the person in need?” Now the question is, “Will somebody see me and not pass by?” Now the question is, “Will I let one of them touch me?” Will I let one of them be Christ to me?

Jesus got himself crucified by the violent mess we have made of the world, but mercy prevailed. Will we let him bandage our wounds?

Will we let ourselves be touched, carried, and healed by the man who revealed on the cross the extent to which God is a neighbor to all human beings?

Will we let ourselves be loved by the divine Neighbor and become fearless in our work for justice with him?

Will we let ourselves be loved and create together with him the beloved community?

[1] See Richard Lischer https://www.faithandleadership.com/view-ditch

[2] Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey: A Daybook of Wisdom and Faith (New York: Harper-Collins, 1997), July 21-22.

[3] Facebook, Friday, July 8, 2016