New heart

The psalm for this day, Psalm 51, calls for a story. The scribes who assembled the poetry, prayers and songs that grew into the collection we know as the book of Psalms, added a brief introductory note to this one, “A Psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba.”

That is quite a story—about power, desire, and deception. It begins in the spring of the year, the time when kings go out to battle – but that year king David sent his generals out and he himself stayed in Jerusalem.

Late one afternoon, he rose from his couch and, walking about on the roof terrace, he saw a woman bathing, a very beautiful woman. He sent one of his aides to find out who she was, learned that her husband was out with the army, and sent for her.

She came over, and perhaps they had a couple of drinks; the record doesn’t go into details. They made love, and perhaps that’s not the right choice of words, assuming that Bathsheba likely had little say in the matter. She went home, and a few weeks later, there was a message for the king. I imagine it was a handwritten note David himself opened and read. It was brief and to the point: “I’m pregnant. Bathsheba.”

Right away the king concocted a plan to hide the consequences of his adulterous affair. He called Bathsheba’s husband, Uriah back from the front lines. Scheming to make him think the child was his own, he told him, “Go home, take a break, spend some time with your beautiful wife.” But Uriah refused; he told his king that he couldn’t indulge himself while his men were in battle. The king resorted to making him drunk, yet Uriah, ever the good soldier, still resisted the comfort of his wife’s bed; he spent the night camping out with the other officers.

Now David stepped even deeper into the morass he himself had created. He gave secret orders that Uriah be put in the front lines where the fighting was fiercest, and to make sure he died there for king and country. And so it happened. Word came that Uriah had been killed in action.

On hearing the news of her husband’s death, Bathsheba lamented; the record doesn’t reveal if she was heartbroken or merely going through the motions. All we’re told is that, after the period of mourning was over, David sent for her and she became his wife.

End of story? Not quite. The prophet Nathan came to the palace, and he told the king of a rich man who stole a poor man’s only lamb and slaughtered it for dinner. David was furious, “That is an outrage! Not in my kingdom! The man who has done this deserves to die!” After that forceful royal declaration, Nathan didn’t have much to add. “You are the man,” he told the king.[1]

That was when the fog lifted, the fog of self-absorption, entitlement and abuse, and David finally saw what he had done. This psalm, the learned scribes wrote in the margins of their scrolls, this psalm is the sort of prayer that fits such a moment. A moment of sudden, painful clarity when you see yourself without the usual filters, when you see yourself as the person your actions betray you to be, rather than the person you imagine yourself to be, or the person you try to project to the public. The words of this psalm, the learned scribes suggest, are more appropriate for such a moment than the carefully composed apologetic press releases which kings, presidents, governors, and CEOs have their aides release after accusations can no longer simply be ignored or dismissed. Psalm 51 is an invitation to honest reflection, a “liturgy of the broken heart.”[2]

Just about every word from the vocabulary of human sinfulness is listed in the opening lines: my transgressions, my iniquity, my sin, the evil I have done in your sight – it’s like there aren’t enough words for the horror, the guilt, and the shame. We are listening to the voice of a grown up man who reflects on his capacity to do evil. The “I”, though, that speaks in this psalm is not only David, as the scribes suggest—“I” is every reader, every listener who recognizes their own self in these words, “I” is all of us, at the moment when the fog of illusion and denial lifts and we realize our capacity for being who we do not want to be and doing what we do not want to do.

However, this prayer doesn’t invite us to wallow in guilt or fall into despair; it encourages us to see ourselves in the light of God who heals what is broken between us and within us. Before the litany of sin that dominates the opening verses, the prayer appeals to the character of God who is merciful and whose steadfast love and tender compassion have been affirmed by generations of God’s people. The place to reflect on our sin, according to this psalm, is in the light of God’s grace. Much of what sin entails cannot be seen in the dim shadows of a guilty conscience or a disillusioned self-image, but only in the bright, unflattering light of grace.

Sin is not just a churchy word for not doing the right thing. Sin is a reality, a power. Sin is a fracture, a brokenness in our relationship with God, a brokenness that impacts how we relate to ourselves, to each other, and to the world. Sin distorts every aspect of our thinking, speaking, and doing, and sin reigns when we fail to know ourselves and one another as God’s own. It is like being completely out of tune in a creation that sings the glory of God.

Many prayers for help say, “Change my situation, so I may praise you.” But this Psalm teaches us to say, “Change me.” We know how to ask for a clean slate, for a new beginning, a second chance, or a third. This Psalm, though, rises from a place of deeper insight. Sin is not an occasional misstep, something we do or fail to do now and then; it’s bigger than that. It’s a reality that pervades our lives and distorts our entire being.

A young man goes and buys himself a gun, murder in his heart. He drives to three buildings and kills eight human beings. He holds female bodies responsible for his own thoughts and desires, and he eliminates the threat they pose in his mind, to his self-image, by murdering them. He is the one who pulled the trigger, who knows how many times, but the sin is not merely murder. He looked at other human beings and didn’t see fellow-creatures, made in the image of God, persons worthy of reverence and respect—he saw desirable and disposable objects. He had learned to see others that way, to think of them that way, and to treat them that way. Sin distorted his vision, his attitudes and thoughts, and, in the final consequence, his actions.

Perhaps the prosecution will ask for the death penalty, further continuing the myth of violence as a legitimate means in the pursuit of justice. And perhaps his conviction and execution will allow us to perpetuate the myth that he is, or rather, was, the problem, and that we don’t need to think or talk about the fact that it’s easier to buy a gun than a bottle of liquor, or the fact that so many mass shootings are committed by young, white men, or the fact that attacks against people of Asian descent, and particularly women, have increased dramatically over the past year.

Psalm 51 comes from a place where the fog lifts, and suddenly we see that we are not who we imagined ourselves to be. And it teaches us to pray, Wash me in your mercy. Bathe me in your healing grace. A clean slate will not do. Create in me a clean heart.

In this prayer, and in Scripture in general, heart does not refer merely to the organ that pumps blood through the body, supplying every cell with the oxygen and the nutrients it needs to thrive. “The ancient Israelites understood the heart as a faculty. They knew the heart as the seat of will, invention, reasoning, discernment, and judgment.”[3] They knew the heart as a hub where our sensibility and imagination, our mind and will come together to shape our perception and give direction to our actions. And the witness of Scripture is very consistent in pointing out that we have a heart problem.

We have hearts that gravitate toward pride and fear and idolatry. Jeremiah speaks of sin as “written with an iron pen” and “engraved on the tablet” of our hearts.[4] But Jeremiah also speaks of a renewed covenant, “when God will write God’s law upon the hearts of the people, [and] their hearts will embody and empower the true relationship they share with God and one another.”[5] Yes, human sinfulness is powerful, pervasive, and persistent, but God’s faithfulness is more encompassing than the reality of sin. And not only more encompassing, but also more powerful.

As we learn to pray with Psalm 51, we begin to envision ourselves and our communities no longer entangled in the cursed consequences of our sinfulness, but knit together by the creative possibilities of God. We begin to see beyond the habits and stereotypes that distort our perception, our imagination, and our actions.

The learned scribes of the past determined that this Psalm called for a story, and they drew the connections to David and Nathan, Bathsheba and Uriah. They encourage us to draw the connections to our own stories and to ask God to renew us, inside out. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me. A spirit of honesty to sustain our efforts to reestablish truth and trust in our communities. A spirit of hope to strengthen our belief that change, though slow, painfully slow, is possible. A spirit of courage to surrender to God who makes all things new. This psalm calls for a people to pray it and live it, a people after God’s own heart. By the grace of God, may we belong to that people.

[1] 2 Samuel 11:1—12:7

[2] James L. Mays, Psalms, 202.

[3] Anathea Portier-Young https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/reformation-day/commentary-on-jeremiah-3131-34-11

[4] Jeremiah 17:1

[5] Portier-Young, see reference above.

Lifted up

Snakes get my attention. More than once have I been startled by that dark, wavy outline on the ground, on the edge of my field of vision, only to realize that it was a stick that scared me. Last week, Nancy and I went to see our newborn grandson Liam and his parents at their home, and I almost jumped off the front steps leading up to the door—there was a snake stretched across the handrail. Nancy just laughed—she already knew it was there, she had stopped by their house before, she knew it was a rubber reptile, and she let me know that its purpose was to keep birds from flying against the window by the door. We know how easily birds confuse the reflection of the sky on glass with the open sky itself. I noticed two more snakes, resting on top of the trimmed hedge like sunbathers, and I had visions of unsuspecting delivery people tossing boxes of pizza or diapers up in the air and running back to their vehicles, terrified.

My fear of snakes—or call it healthy respect—isn’t rooted in lived experience; I suspect it’s programmed into my DNA, a gift from ancient ancestors. Along with this fear, they have also passed on their fascination with serpents. The snake appears in the myths of peoples around the globe, and its image is among the oldest symbols humans have used. Our ancestors have been particularly intrigued by the snake’s ability to shed its skin, to quite literally slip out of it like some worn-out piece of clothing, and they associated powerful ideas like renewal and rebirth with it.

In Scripture, the serpent has a prominent role in the story of the garden of Eden, and a less prominent one in Exodus. There we read how God called Moses to go back to Egypt, and to tell God’s people that God had observed their misery, and knew their sufferings, and would deliver them from the Egyptians, and bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey.

In the course of the conversation that follows that call, Moses says, “Suppose they do not believe me or listen to me, but say, ‘The Lord did not appear to you.’” And the Lord responds, “What’s that in your hand?”

“A staff.”

“Throw it on the ground.”

So Moses threw his staff on the ground, and it became a snake. Moses, with healthy respect, drew back from it, but the Lord said, “Reach out your hand, and seize it by the tail”—so he reached out his hand and grasped it, and it became a staff in his hand.[1] That’s strong imagery, and it’s tempting to think that Moses’ crook was imbued with magical power or that Moses himself, the reluctant but faithful servant of God, possessed powers to divide the waters by simply stretching out his hand over the sea—but the power was God’s, and God’s alone.

What Moses did have, and God’s people did have, was the courage to trust God’s promise of liberation and land, good and broad land, flowing with milk and honey. And so they walked out of Pharaoh’s Egypt, into the wilderness—with joy, with hope, with confidence. But when the wondrous deliverance at the sea led only to more desert and hunger and thirst and one kind of trouble after another, they started complaining. “The people became impatient on the way,” we read in today’s passage from Numbers. Can you blame them? It’s one thing to hear stories about their wanderings, it’s another to do the wandering. And forty years of wandering is a very long time.

What happens to a promise when the horizon keeps moving from one line of dusty hills to the next without ever opening up to that good and broad land? The words that once had the power to inspire courage and hope slowly turn into mere talk without resonance or response. Regret and resentment set in, faith erodes. “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness?” they said to Moses. “For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” To some they may sound like spoiled children, but forty years of wandering is a very long time. Forty years means that early on some of them had to make peace with the thought that they themselves might not ever set foot in the land of promise, but perhaps their children or their children’s children.

When the poisonous snakes came among them, and bit them, so that many of them died, the people immediately assumed they were being punished for speaking up, that giving voice to their frustration after years of wilderness wandering was an offense to God and to Moses. “Pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us,” they said to Moses. It is painful to think that God would act so punitively, but we know that this is where our hearts and minds can take us when trust in God’s faithfulness erodes. Don’t complain, or God will send snakes, the implicit theology seems to be. Just keep walking, eat your manna, don’t complain.

In the book of Psalms, though, we hear a very different voice:

How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever?

How long will you hide your face from me?

How long must I bear pain in my soul, and have sorrow in my heart all day long?[2]

My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?

Why are you so far from helping me, from the words of my groaning?

My God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.[3]

With the Lord one day is like a thousand years,[4] but God knows that for God’s people forty years can feel like a lifetime, and “just a few more weeks” can feel like entering the homestretch or like “no end in sight.” God knows that to God’s people justice deferred can be indistinguishable from justice denied. God knows that to God’s people the promise delayed can feel like the promise broken.

Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” The Lord didn’t smite the serpents or send them to a different part of the wilderness to bother the Canaanites or the Edomites, which suggests, to me at least, that their presence was not a punishment, but simply their presence. The serpents were there because they lived there, because there were plenty of rodents for them to eat there. They simply occupied their place in God’s good creation.

So the Lord didn’t take away the serpents from them as the people had asked Moses to pray, but neither did the Creator tell Moses to give the people a lesson in wilderness ecology. In fact, the Lord, who is very partial to speaking as a mode of communicating the divine will, and very critical of graven images because of their potential for encouraging idolatry, the Lord did a very risky thing by telling Moses to make a serpent and put it upon a pole for all to see—so that whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live. The power was not in the bronze sculpture, nor in the pole, nor in Moses who made and assembled the piece. The power was God’s who both visualized and fulfilled the promise of life in the very thing God’s people could only experience as yet another deadly threat. God assured them through the power of healing that the promise was not vain—and that was enough for them to resume the journey.

They carried the pole all the way to the promised land where it was given a home in the holy of holies for generations. The last time it is mentioned in the Old Testament is in 2 Kings, where we’re told that “[King Hezekiah] broke in pieces the bronze serpent that Moses had made, for until those days the people of Israel had made offerings to it.”[5] The symbol of God’s faithfulness had become, in Cameron Howard’s words, “a bronzed, domesticated, manufactured idol.”[6] The image had ceased to point to the living God; it only pointed to itself. Any object, of course, any building, any ritual or idea is in danger of becoming a mere idol, a bronzed or gilded dream.

Jesus, according to the Gospel of John, picks up the broken tradition of the serpent in the wilderness. He picks it up to speak of his own being physically lifted up on the cross as well as of his being lifted up in exaltation by God, for the sake of life. From our perspective, the cross is torture, a violent assertion of imperial power, a triumph of sin, a moment of complete humiliation and defeat. But from Jesus’ perspective, his crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension are a single movement of exaltation. And just as Israel was “paradoxically required to look upon the very thing that brought death in order to receive life, so we are asked to look upon Jesus’ ‘lifting up’ in humiliating crucifixion” and see it, recognize it as God’s glorification of Jesus and the salvation of the world in the embrace of this love and life.[7] In the embrace of this love, life in fullness is both the promise that draws us into communion with God and God’s creation, as well as its fulfillment. In the embrace of this life, we already participate in the fullness we await. May God continue to bless your journey.

[1] Exodus 4:1-5

[2] Psalm 13:1-2

[3] Psalm 22:1-2

[4] 2 Peter 3:8

[5] 2 Kings 18:4

[6] Cameron B.R. Howard  https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-numbers-214-9-3

[7] See Lance Pape https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-john-314-21-3

Life and promise rhyme

He was 75 years old when they left Haran;[1] she was 65 then. They packed their portable belongings and left, following the call and promise of God. “The land that I will show you”—that was all God told them about their destination. And there was the promise that God would make of them “a great nation.”

Twenty-five years later they had journeyed far and wide, but Sarai was still childless. Abram had a son, Ishmael, with Hagar, a slave who served Sarai; the boy was a teenager when God appeared to the old man and renewed the covenant promise, saying, “I will make you exceedingly numerous. You shall be the ancestor of a multitude of nations. I will make you exceedingly fruitful; and kings shall come from you.”

The old man took it all in—the extravagant promise, the new name, Abraham, the detailed instructions about circumcision—but when God mentioned Sarai, and that her new name would be Sarah, and that she would give birth to a son and that kings of peoples would come from her—that’s when Abraham fell on his face and laughed. He was a hundred years old and she was ninety, and God was talking about a baby, their baby.

This is the first time in the Bible somebody breaks down laughing. Not that for generations there wasn’t much to laugh about, but this is the first time laughter erupts in the text—and Abraham didn’t just laugh, he fell on his face and laughed. I imagine he was laughing so hard, he had to hold his sides. You may think that’s not appropriate somehow, that one is to show reverence and awe when God speaks, that such laughter smacks of disrespect—but God apparently didn’t see it that way. God kept speaking to Abraham and reiterated, “Your wife Sarah shall bear you a son, and you shall name him Isaac”—that’s Yitzhak in Hebrew, meaning “he shall laugh.” And in due time, Sarah gave birth to a boy, Abraham named him Yitzhak, and Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.”[2] It was no joke, and it wasn’t that God, like the worst kind of bully, was having fun at an elderly couple’s expense, no—at first their laughter may have been tinged with disbelief, but when Sarah was showing, they were laughing with hope, and when the little one was born, they couldn’t stop laughing with unbridled joy. Psalm 126 begins, “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy.” When life and promise rhyme, God’s people laugh.

Curiously, “aside from general appreciation that laughter is good for us… we know little about laughter itself,” one scholar wrote. “Laughter typically appears in human babies around 3-1/2 to 4 months of age, but we know little about the details of the developmental process.” We do know that people around the globe laugh, ha-ha-ha or hee-hee-hee or ho-ho-ho, and nobody laughs ha-hee-ha or hee-ha-ho, but we don’t know why. We do know that “it is pleasurable to laugh at or with people, [and] quite unpleasant to be laughed at. … Court fools and presidential aides learn early in their careers that it is safer to laugh with the boss than at him or her.”[3] According to wikipedia,

Laughter is a physical reaction in humans consisting usually of rhythmical, often audible contractions of the diaphragm and other parts of the respiratory system resulting most commonly in forms of “hee-hee” or “ha-ha”. It is a response to certain external or internal stimuli. Laughter can arise from such activities as being tickled, or from humorous stories or thoughts. Most commonly, it is considered an auditory expression of a number of positive emotional states, such as joy, mirth, happiness, relief, etc.[4]

Joy, mirth, happiness, relief—when life and promise rhyme, God’s people laugh: they chuckle, titter, giggle, chortle, cackle and snicker, they snort and roar and guffaw. When life and promise rhyme.

Again and again, in Genesis and Exodus, and in all of Scripture, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah face obstacles to the realization of God’s twofold promise of a new generation and land: childless women, migrations out of Canaan, enslavement in Egypt, desperation in the wilderness, corruption in Jerusalem, exile in Babylon—and again and again the question is raised: Will God—can God—keep God’s promises? Will God remain faithful despite the near constant stumbling of God’s people, despite idolatry and greed and abuse of people and land and all living things? Will God remain faithful despite our stubborn refusal to do justice and love kindness and walk with God?

We are entering the third week of Lent, and the words are sinking in that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.[5] And we tremble at his words, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” We tremble because our lives are so entwined and infused with his, and he calls us to follow him to the cross. He calls us to follow him on the way of radical hospitality and life-giving compassion, aware that his divine mission elicits rejection and violent antagonism from those invested in maintaining the status quo. We tremble as he announces with utter clarity that he must be killed, that his faithfulness to God’s mission of healing and redemption will inevitably result in his death, because his commitment to God and to us will not falter.[6] We tremble because the execution of this faithful one is the ultimate obstacle to the realization of God’s promises. He will be crucified by the empire—and who can actually hear the words “and after three days rise again”?

We know the ways of empires, it doesn’t take great imagination to understand their simple logic of domination. Empires win every time—until they fall and other empires take their place. But a crucified man rising again after three days? The prospect of that is about as likely as a ninety-year-old woman having a child with a hundred-year-old man. Preposterous. Ridiculous. Fall-on-your-face laughable.

But the day came when Sarah put little Yitzhak in Abraham’s arms and they laughed.

The day came when the Hebrew slaves walked out of Pharaoh’s brick yards and they laughed.

The day came when their children crossed the Jordan and with the taste of milk and honey on their lips, they laughed.

The day came when the exiles once again trekked through the desert and returned to the land—their mouth filled with laughter, and their tongue with shouts of joy.

And the day came when the women returned from the grave and told the other disciples, and none of them could decide whether to laugh or cry until it sank in that God had indeed raised Jesus from the dead. That’s when their cautious, very restrained and doubt-filled laughs branched out and bloomed and burst—and waves of joy filled and lifted them. And they were braver than they had ever been or thought they could be; and kinder; and more committed to true community. It was as though the realization of God’s unshakable faithfulness made them not just want to be, but actually be more faithful followers of Jesus.

To be in covenant, I have learned from Walter Brueggemann, means to be a “partner in the practice of loyal solidarity.”[7] It means to recognize God’s loyal solidarity with us, and to become in its embrace new human beings who embrace others—especially those at the bottom and on the margins of the worlds we create—in loyal solidarity. It means to resist the idolatries and power dynamics of the empire with the liberating practice of the kingdom of God.

Today we receive a special offering for Week of Compassion, which is one of the many ways in which we seek to live in loyal solidarity. Week of Compassion helps us multiply our impact in disaster relief here in the U.S. and around the world, in sustainable development projects that empower women and marginalized communities, in supporting refugee families and immigrants, and in building relationships with ecumenical partners. This year’s theme is, Let Love Flow. There’s a river flowing from the heart of God through every part of creation, every cell, every leaf, every living thing, every person, every ocean and forest, every planet and star. Love wants to flow so life can flourish.

In Kenya this means, quite simply and wonderfully, assisting local partners in building water supply systems at the village or neighborhood levels. This means better drinking water. This means girls can go to school instead of hauling water over long distances. This means more productive gardens and fields. This means growing incomes.

I’ve looked at so many pictures from Kenya, and although they’re silent visuals, I can hear the boys laugh and scream with delight, and I can hear the women laugh and talk about new possibilities while they fill large canisters at the community fountain. I can hear and see, almost taste, what happens when we let love flow. And I begin to imagine what else loyal solidarity would allow us to be and do. For whenever we let love flow, life and promise rhyme.

[1] Gen 12:4

[2] Gen 21:6

[3] Robert R. Provine, “Laughter” American Scientist 84. 1 (Jan-Feb, 1996): 38-47. http://cogweb.ucla.edu/Abstracts/Provine_96.html

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laughter

[5] Mark 8:31

[6] See Ira Brent Driggers https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-mark-831-38-5

[7] Walter Brueggemann, Isaiah (WBC, Vol. 2), 114.

A revolution in the heart of God

“Never again,” God said to Noah and his family, “never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”[1] The story of the flood, a story from our mythic past, was never meant to be a children’s story, but that’s how many churches have treated it in recent years, sanitized and illustrated. The story is a very serious and disturbing reflection on humanity’s capacity for evil and the challenge this presents to the Creator. It’s a story of heartbreak and regret.

The Lord saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the Lord was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, “I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created—people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.”[2]

And the Lord brought a mighty flood upon the earth,  and with it came death and devastation. Flood waters have a way of wiping out everything—homes and businesses, roads and bridges, animals of every kind, gardens, fields, forests and orchards. The rain doesn’t stop, the rivers roll out of their ancient beds, the oceans rise—the flood strips us of everything, even the land to stand on. Everything is washed away, goes under, disappears in a violent undoing of creation.

The only reason we get to hear and tell the story is that in the midst of that raging chaos was a small vessel, and on it were a family and animals, two of every kind—and God remembered them. God made a wind blow over the earth, the waters subsided, and the pioneers of a new beginning stepped out of the ark: Noah and his family, and every animal, every creeping thing, and every bird, everything that moves on the earth.[3] That’s when God made a promise never to commit that kind of global destruction again, never again to look away and allow chaos to take over.

The Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.”[4]

What had changed? The inclination of the human heart still was and is as evil as it had been before the flood. But the devastating flood effected an irreversible change in God’s  commitment to humanity and the rest of creation. Ever since the flood, God’s relationship with humanity has been marked by patience and forbearance. Nothing about the inclination of the human heart has changed; what has changed is God, and that alone is why the post-flood situation is decisively different. Walter Brueggemann calls it “a revolution in the heart of God,” a revolution that changes everything.[5] Evil has not been eradicated from creation, but the relation of Creator to creature is now defined by committed compassion and unqualified grace:

“I am establishing my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the domestic animals, and every animal of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.”[6]

Nothing is said that would explain what might have evoked that conversion in the heart of God—and nothing is said about what human beings should promise to do as part of some kind of mutual post-flood agreement. In this covenant, all of the obligation rests with God. God saw that the wickedness of humankind was great on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart—and this covenant, this revolution in the heart of God, meant that such divine suffering would continue. Terence Fretheim says,

This kind of divine response means that God has chosen to take the route of suffering relative to sin and evil rather than [destructive] power. For God to decide to endure a wicked world, while continuing to open up the divine heart to that world, means that God’s grief is ongoing. God thus determines to take suffering into God’s own heart and bear it there for the sake of the future of the world. The cross of Jesus Christ is on the same trajectory of divine promise.[7]

We begin this season of Lent by remembering the first covenant which redefines humanity’s relationship with God. And we remember that this covenant includes all living creatures and the earth itself. We remember that God’s commitment to the flourishing of creation is unshakeable—while we struggle, continue to struggle, to know how to live well, how to be fully alive without robbing neighbors and fellow creatures of fullness of life. And this is where Mark draws our attention away from ourselves and toward Jesus who was baptized by John in the Jordan. A scene by the river, a scene in the wilderness, and a scene in Galilee, and in each of them, all the attention is on Jesus. One moment we see him coming up out of the water, and we hear the heavenly voice call Jesus “my son” and “beloved”—and suddenly we see him, still wet, driven by the Spirit, walking into the wilderness.

Mark tells the story with urgency. Wilderness. Forty days. Satan. Wild beasts. Angels. Forty days in five quick strokes. We hear “wilderness” and memories flood in of Hebrew slaves stumbling toward the promised land, of Isaiah singing of a highway for the exiles to come home from Babylon. We hear “forty days” and our imagination takes us to Moses on the mountain and to Elijah on the way to Mount Horeb. “Wild beasts”—that sounds ominous, a little dangerous even, and perhaps you imagine hyenas laughing in anticipation of a good meal or lions prowling around the solitary man in ever closer circles. But perhaps you can also hear echoes of Isaiah’s prophetic poetry of peace, of days when the wolf lives with the lamb and the leopard lies down with the kid. Perhaps you remember Adam and Eve in the garden, surrounded by animals, delighting in naming them, unafraid. Perhaps you sense a promise of peace in this forty-day communion of human being, wild animals, and angels.

Mark tells the story with urgency, but let’s linger a little where the angels wait on Jesus. The story of Elijah comes to mind, the prophet who had fled into the wilderness from the fury of Queen Jezebel. Elijah who was tired of calling God’s people to repentance, tired of feeling like he was the only voice of resistance in an idolatrous culture, tired of fighting. “It is enough,” he said, exhausted in body and soul, before he fell asleep under a tree. He woke up when an angel touched him and said, “Get up and eat.” There was a bread and a jar of water. Elijah ate and drank and went back to sleep. The angel of the Lord came a second time and waited on him, saying, “Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.”[8] Mark shows us Jesus alone in the wilderness, and by mentioning that “the angels waited on him” he lets us know that Jesus is being nourished for a long, demanding journey.

In the wilderness, it’s only you and the great silence; you and your thoughts and all that gets stirred up by the great silence. Wendell Berry wrote,

True solitude is found in the wild places, where one is without human obligation. One’s inner voices become audible.

The forty days are about those “inner voices.” For Jesus, the forty days were about remembering and completely trusting the voice from heaven calling him my son and beloved. In Scripture, Satan is the name given to voices that can whisper with seductive charm, scream with blunt intimidation, or argue with chilly reason—but, regardless of tone or volume, voices that only speak in order to silence the voice from heaven that calls God’s children beloved. In the wilderness, says Berry,

One’s inner voices become audible. One feels the attraction of one’s most intimate sources. In consequence, one responds more clearly to other lives. The more coherent one becomes within oneself as a creature, the more fully one enters into the communion of all creatures. [9]

We do struggle to know how to live well, how to be fully alive without robbing neighbors and fellow creatures of fullness of life—but we are not alone. We are in the company of Jesus who faced all that we face in our loneliest, hungriest, and most exhausted moments, who unfailingly responded to other lives with clarity and love, and who lovingly draws us into the communion of all creatures that life is meant to be. Mark doesn’t tell us how Jesus stopped Satan’s chatter, but in the very next of the Gospel’s fast-paced scenes we see Jesus back in Galilee, proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.”

We enter the season of Lent remembering the revolution in the heart of God: In the covenant made with the descendants of Noah and all living creatures,

God has chosen to take the route of suffering relative to sin and evil rather than [destructive] power … to endure a wicked world, while continuing to open up the divine heart to that world, [and thus] to take suffering into God’s own heart and bear it there for the sake of the future of the world.[10]

We recognize this revolution in its full depth in Jesus on his way from the wilderness to Jerusalem. We recognize this revolution in its full depth in Jesus, and we step into the wide space he opens for us to repent, and we let ourselves be made whole in his image and likeness.

[1] Gen 9:11

[2] Gen 6:5-7

[3] Gen 8:1, 18-19

[4] Gen 8:21

[5] Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1982), 84.

[6] Gen 9:9-11

[7] Terence Fretheim https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent-2/commentary-on-genesis-98-17-2

[8] 1 Kings 19:1-8

[9] Wendell Berry, “Healing” (1977) in What are people for? (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2010), 11.

[10] Fretheim, see note 7.

Light shines

“When day comes,” the young poet had us ask ourselves on that Wednesday in January, “where can we find light in this never-ending shade?” She spoke with passion of the possibility of America and we listened to her confident voice, and with tears in our eyes we watched her face, her hands, her fingers—and our spirits soared. At the end of the poem she so powerfully performed on Inauguration Day, Amanda Gorman returned to that opening phrase and declared,

When day comes, we step out of the shade, aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it.
For there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.[1]

Brave enough to see the light, and brave enough to be it—she lifted up ancient themes pondered by our ancestors and passed down in the Scriptures, reminders that seeing what illumines the world is no simple matter and that being part of that illuminating presence takes just as much courage as perceiving it.

Jesus asked the disciples, “Who do people say that I am?” And they told him that some thought he was John the Baptist, and others, Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets. Jesus got people’s attention, and they saw connections, but they didn’t quite know who he was. So Jesus asked the disciples. They had been following him for a while, they had heard him teach and watched him heal more than anyone else. “Who do you say that I am?”

And Peter said, “You are the Messiah.”[2] Which was a great answer. Jesus, though, ordered them not to tell anyone about him. Which is odd, because you’d expect that the Messiah announcing the nearness of the kingdom of God would want the word to get out. It appears Peter gave the right answer, but he may have given it too soon. The amazing teachings and astonishing healings were not the whole story, and Jesus began to tell the disciples about the road ahead; he told them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected, and be killed, and after three days rise again. And Peter wouldn’t hear it; he took Jesus aside for a little constructive feedback, something along the lines of “You’re not serious, are you?” Because in Peter’s book, suffering and death were not included in the job description for God’s Messiah.

Peter gave the right answer, yet still he got it wrong. He thought he knew the playbook for God’s Messiah. He didn’t yet grasp yet that declaring Jesus to be the Messiah meant that no one but God and Jesus himself would determine what that declaration meant. Peter was first to learn that to follow Jesus doesn’t mean watching him live up to our expectations, but having him shape and transform our lives.

In the next scene, Jesus taught any who would follow him what it means to say to him, “You are the Messiah.”

If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. [3]

To follow Jesus is to trust that the way of the cross is indeed the way to fullness of life, and that kind of trust has little to do with knowing the right answer and everything with seeing Jesus for who he is.

At about the halfway point of Mark’s Gospel, suddenly there’s this mountain. Don’t go looking for it on the maps in the back of your Bible. This mountain, as Tom Long reminds us, “juts out not from the topography of Galilee, but from the topography of God. This is the mountain of revelation, the mountain of transformed vision, the mountain of true seeing.”[4] There, Mark tells us, Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James and John. It was like light bursting through the seams of Jesus’ clothes—his face and hands and feet shining with luminous beauty—and everything was bathed in this glorious light. It was as though time had collapsed—Moses and Elijah appeared, the great prophets of old, and they talked with Jesus. It was as though the veil separating everyday perception from what’s really real had been lifted.

A cloud overshadowed them, and from the cloud came a voice, saying, “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” It is not enough to say that Jesus was transfigured on the mountain. It is our perception of him that is changed. In this glorious moment of recognition, we see who he really is: God’s beloved Son. And we’re given this glimpse before his way takes him and us from Galilee to Jerusalem. We’re given this glimpse, because after his baptism we could never have guessed that he was beloved by anybody. Admired perhaps, after those moments when he drew huge crowds and astonished them, but otherwise misunderstood by his followers, rejected by folks in his hometown, drained of his power by scoffing neighbors, and plotted against by the authorities. Beloved? Hardly.  And now he was on the way to Jerusalem where a violent storm was gathering.

“This is my Son, the Beloved,” the heavenly voice said. “Listen to him!” The three looked around and they saw no one with them any more, but only Jesus. But now everything looked different because of him. Now they looked at the world in his light, now they looked at each other and themselves in his light. Now what they had seen on the mountaintop permeated what and how they perceived in the dimmer plains of everyday. Our journey with Jesus doesn’t take us out of the world and into lofty realms of pure spiritual splendor where we dream of dwelling for good—the journey takes us down the mountain to the plains below and the dark valleys where the whole world is longing to be transfigured. Down the mountain where life is broken and the shadows are long and deep; down the mountain where people languish in crowded camps and flimsy shelters, where too many experience life as though they were the playthings of demons, where corruption is rampant and courage, rare. Our journey with Jesus doesn’t take us out of the world, but deeper into it—as servants of the kingdom of God, as people who dare to believe that the way of Jesus, the way of radical hospitality and courageous compassion that led him to the cross, is the way of life. Not because we know the right answers, but because in the company of Jesus we have caught glimpses of what love can heal, and every glimpse has changed what and how we see. Every glimpse has transformed us.

We know that Lent is only days away. We know that the other hill we climb in the company of Jesus is the one they call Golgotha. And on Golgotha, there is no bright cloud overshadowing the scene, only thick darkness. On the mountain, Jesus’ clothes became dazzling white, but under the cross soldiers tear them into souvenir rags. On the mountain, Moses and Elijah spoke with Jesus, but on the cross he is taunted by bandits. On the mountain, a heavenly voice spoke truth, but on Golgotha a hostile crowd shouts ugly insults. On the mountain, our friend Peter wanted to stay and build dwellings, but at the crucifixion he is nowhere to be found. The contrast is startling and stark. On the mountain, we reflect on our desire to see and be with God, but at the foot of the cross, we kneel in awe as we begin to perceive the depth of God’s desire to be with us.

Peter said to Jesus, “You are the Messiah,” but he didn’t know what he was saying. On the mountain, Peter saw Jesus transfigured and heard the voice of God declaring, “This is my Son, the Beloved.” But only after he had failed repeatedly to stay awake and pray with Jesus in Gethsemane, after he had denied Jesus three times, and after he had fled from the cross was Peter ready to follow the Messiah who suffered, died and was raised. It was not on the mountaintop, but at the lowest point of his life that Peter truly saw who Jesus is. When there was nothing left but hopelessness and the love of Christ, and love prevailed, that’s when Peter knew the Messiah and when he knew himself as his Beloved.

And so we pray, wherever we are on the journey, for the light of God to shine in our hearts that we might be filled with the knowledge of God’s glory shining in the face of Jesus, as Paul so beautifully put it.[5] We pray for the transfiguration of the world and for our own complete transformation in the image and likeness of Christ. And we pray that we may see in the face of every human being what is really there: one of God’s Beloved.

In her novel, Gilead Marilynne Robinson tells the story of John Ames, a minister in a little town in Iowa called Gilead. The novel takes the form of a letter this old man wrote to his young son, and just before the letter ends and the novel closes, we read these words: 

It has seemed to me sometimes as though the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of creation and it turns to radiance for a moment or a year or the span of a life and then it sinks back into itself again and to look at it no one would know it had anything to do with fire or light. … But the Lord is more constant and far more extravagant than it seems to imply. Wherever you turn your eyes the world can shine like transfiguration. You don’t have to bring a thing to it except a little willingness to see.[6]

The young poet declared with confidence that

there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it.
If only we’re brave enough to be it.

Whether you think of it as being brave enough or bringing a little willingness to see—the deep truth the old man and the young poet both point to is that there is always light because the Lord breathes on this poor gray ember of creation… constantly… extravagantly. And when our leaders aren’t brave enough to be the light or can’t bring even a little willingness to see it—our eyes have been opened to the fierce and unsentimental love of God, and we are not afraid to step out on faith.

[1] https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/culture/a35276230/amanda-gormans-poem-the-hill-we-climb/

[2] See Mark 8:27-30

[3] See Mark 8:34-35

[4] Thomas G. Long, “Reality show,” The Christian Century 123, no. 5 (March 7, 2006), 16.

[5] 2 Corinthians 4:6

[6] Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004), 245.

Serving with Christ

All they could remember when the story of her healing was told and retold was that the woman was the mother of Simon Peter’s wife. Nobody remembered her name. We can identify her only through her relationship to Peter, a man whose name the church never forgot. He was among the first ones Jesus called to follow him. We know his name, along with the names of his brother Andrew, and the brothers James and John. The church even remembers Zebedee, the old man James and John left behind in the boat — and that’s all we know about him, that moment and his name. “It was a man’s world, what do you expect,” many have said, and some have added, “It’s not like things have changed that dramatically since then.”

In the verses before today’s passage, Mark tells us about a man with an unclean spirit, a man in the grip of the demonic, whom Jesus liberates, and the scene takes place at a synagogue, a very public place. Following that he tells us about a woman with a fever, whom Jesus heals, and the scene takes place in the privacy of a friend’s house. Mark, some readers have noted, has carefully arranged the scenes so that those who hear the story would know right from the beginning that Jesus brings liberation and healing to both men and women, in public and in private. I can see that, and it all takes place on the sabbath day; it’s like two thumbnails that together offer a preview of the whole big picture. The two brief scenes are an opening announcement of the day of life’s fulfillment, that longed-for, long-awaited sabbath day when God’s people, liberated from oppression and healed from every fever, fear, and sickness, rejoice in God’s gift of life and share it. I like that thought, I like that perspective on the opening scenes of Jesus’ ministry, but I still wish we could remember the mother of Simon Peter’s wife by name, because in contrast to her famous son-in-law, she was the first person to participate in Jesus’ mission. She was the first who got it.

Here’s the scene: Jesus and the disciples left the synagogue, walked across the street and entered Simon’s house where she was in bed with a fever. The next sentence is composed of plain, unadorned words, nothing that immediately stands out as quotable, just simple, descriptive terms for simple actions: He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.

It’s the kind of sentence that easily disappears on a page, slips by amid the many words that tell the reader what happened next, what happened that evening, at sundown, and the next morning, the next day. But when the reader’s eyes or the storyteller’s voice just keep going, line to line, down the column, we’re likely to miss the lovely weight and significance of these three actions: this scene by the woman’s bed reflects the whole work of Christ. Jesus came to take us by the hand and lift us up. Jesus came to give power to the faint and strength to the powerless. Jesus came not just to make people feel better, but to take us by the hand and lift us up to new life, fullness of life in his name. Listen again to Mark’s words:

He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.

What does this have to do with new life? Sarah Henrich says,

It was her calling and her honor to show hospitality to guests in her home. Cut off from that role by an illness cut her off from doing that which integrated her into her world. Who was she when no longer able to engage in her calling? Jesus restored her to her social world and brought her back to a life of value by freeing her from that fever. It is very important to see that healing is about restoration to community and restoration of a calling, a role as well as restoration to life. For life without community and calling is bleak indeed.[1] 

Jesus restored her to her place in the household and in the village, a place of dignity and purpose—but isn’t that the life she had before she got sick? What is new about a life where she goes back to the kitchen to fix supper for Simon and his guests, and wait on them? What is new about a life where a woman’s place is in the kitchen while the men eat and have deep conversations about the kingdom of God? Is it real healing when all Jesus does is restore and affirm the status quo? Is it real healing when Jesus helps us “return to normal” without lifting up and renewing what we called normal before the pandemic? These are important questions the text helps us raise, but it doesn’t mention the kitchen, nor does it say anything about her returning to her household chores. It says, she began to serve them.

In Mark, the word to serve first appears a few verses earlier: Jesus was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan, and the angels served him. Then the word is used in this scene at Simon’s house and again a few chapters later, where Jesus says, “Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant” and “The Son of Man came not to be served but to serve.” In Mark, serving is something angels do, and something Jesus came to do. The last time the word is used in Mark is immediately after the account of Jesus’ death.

There were also women looking from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and provided for him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem.[2]

Evidently a good number of women had left the kitchen and followed Jesus to Jerusalem. They provided for him sounds a little like they made sure he had enough to eat, but the word is again to serve: they did what the angels did for him in the wilderness, and what he himself had come to do. Serving is something followers of Jesus learn to do from him, and Simon’s mother-in-law was the first who got it; that’s why I wish the church had remembered her name.

He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. 

These simple words describe the whole work of Christ, as well as the work of those who follow him: he serves, and we serve him in love and gratitude, and we serve with him in proclaiming the good news of God’s reign.

Lawrence Wood tells a story about some remarkable women he’s been blessed to know, “women,” he writes, “whose names may never be written large in church history, even though their influence has been widely felt.” Every summer, Sharon, Muggs, Wanda, and Joretta would help to put on a church dinner. One year, one of them couldn’t be there to help, having just had a hip replacement. Lawrence went to check on her a day before the dinner.

“They’re not using boxed potatoes, are they?” she said, clearly more worried about a starchy side dish than her hip. “The people who come expect potatoes made from scratch.”

“They’re planning to peel potatoes all morning,” he assured her.

“And the ham? Did they get a good dry ham, or the watery kind?”

Lawrence didn’t know, told her it was probably the same ham as always. And before she could inquire about the quality of the green beans, he asked if she had always enjoyed cooking. To his surprise, she adamantly said no, that cooking was a big chore.

“Really? I thought you enjoyed doing this.”

“I don’t love the potatoes,” she said—and then there was a brief pause, just long enough for him to know that he was about to hear words of considerable weight and significance.

“Really, young man, you should know I love Christ, and there are only so many ways a body can do that.”[3]

And so she did it, she began to serve as she could. And she peeled the potatoes, even though it was a big chore. Soon others joined her; they came together as one body to prepare for the feast. And together they discovered a new way to think and talk about their service: We love Christ, and there are so many ways a body can do that. They dropped just one little word from her initial statement, the word only, because as a body, gathered into one by Christ’s love for them and their love for Christ, they could do all that was needed to proclaim the good news of God’s reign.

The mother of Simon Peter’s wife got it before anyone else did. Jesus took her by the hand and lifted her up, and she began to serve. That evening, Mark tells us, at sundown, they brought to Jesus all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And Jesus proclaimed the good news of God’s reign. He took them by the hand and lifted them up, and we don’t know how many of them, filled with joy and gratitude, simply returned to their former lives; and we don’t know how many there were who, in grateful response to the healing and liberating love of Christ, began to serve.

In the morning, Mark tells us, while it was still very dark, Jesus got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed.  And Simon and hiscompanions hunted for him. The need for healing and liberation was still great in Capernaum, but they didn’t know what to do about it. “Everyone is searching for you,” they said, evidently utterly unaware that they too had a part in Christ’s proclamation of God’s reign.

And Jesus said to them, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also.” You know he didn’t move on because the work in Capernaum was done. He knew he could move on because in that town, in a house across the street from the synagogue, there was one woman who got it—don’t you wish we knew her name?

[1] http://www.workingpreacher.org/preaching.aspx?commentary_id=1200

[2] Mark 15:40-41

[3] https://www.christiancentury.org/article/2009-01/first-deacon

Jesus is in the house

“No one can enter a strong man’s house and plunder his property without first tying up the strong man; then indeed the house can be plundered.”[1] Jesus said that. Makes him sound like a master thief, doesn’t it? It’s a rather curious way to describe the mission of Jesus, and yet, this is how he himself sees it. He has entered the strong man’s house.

Following his baptism, Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days, tempted by Satan, and now he’s back among people, proclaiming the good news of God. He has tied up the strong one, and now the house can be plundered. It may sound like burglary, but in truth the mission is to invade the house and free its residents from foreign occupation. Forces of evil have taken up residence in the house, keeping in thrall the people who live there, manipulating and controlling them. But now Jesus has returned from the wilderness. Now Jesus is in the house.

He declares that the time if fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near. And when he teaches, people are astounded — they half-recognize a kind of power their learned teachers, preachers, and legal scholars don’t possess. It’s not like listening to somebody talk about God, but like hearing somebody give human voice to divine speech.

Jesus is in the house, and the anxiety level among unclean spirits and demons is high: they know who he is and they know the purpose of this intrusion — to silence them and throw them out. “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?” they shriek. “Why are you picking this fight? Couldn’t you have just left things as they were between us?  We know who you are, the Holy One of God.” Jesus is in the house, their time is up, and they know it. They cry, they whimper, they taunt, but they can neither evade nor resist the authority of Jesus. He rebukes them, saying, “Be silent, come out,” and the man is free. To spread this freedom, throughout all of creation, is the ministry of Jesus. He is not just another teacher or preacher; Jesus is a Holy-Spirit-empowered invader who reclaims the house of creation that has become a playground for demons.

“What is this?” people ask with astonishment. “A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” A new teaching—not in the sense of fashionable ideas that are exciting today and forgotten tomorrow—no, a teaching that brings about newness like the voice that spoke to Moses at Mount Sinai. Jesus is not just a terrific new teacher who moves and inspires us, surprises and astounds us, and satisfies our hungry hearts and minds—he does all that—but he speaks with the voice of the Holy One who brings light and life into being. He speaks, and it comes to be. He speaks, and the oppressed are unburdened, the possessed are unshackled, the wounded are healed, and the shunned are forgiven. He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.

“Mark wants us to know, here at the outset of Jesus’ public ministry — that Jesus’ authority will be a contested authority,” writes Matt Skinner. “Jesus’ presence, words, and deeds threaten other forces that claim authority over people’s lives. These other authorities have something to lose.”[2] They have everything to lose, and yet they have already lost, because when the unholy coalition of church and state, mob and court betrayed, accused, condemned, tortured and executed Jesus, God vindicated him. These other authorities that have everything to lose can try and crucify the kingdom, but they can’t stop it from coming. They can’t silence the voices that declare its nearness. They can’t deport those who discover again and again, that with one foot they’re already standing in the kingdom, on solid ground: beloved, forgiven, free.

Mark depicts Jesus as the one uniquely sent and empowered to declare the reign of God and reveal its characteristics: It is intrusive, transgressing boundaries that benefit other kinds of rule; it liberates people from the powers that afflict them and keep life from flourishing according to the will of its Creator. Jesus comes from a place of blessing, where in baptism he was filled with the Holy Spirit and a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.” And Mark contrasts this affirmation and claim with the man in Capernaum, possessed by an unclean spirit, a spirit that will never tell him that he is beloved of God or a delight in the eyes of God. But now Jesus is in the house, and he’s here to end the occupation.

The first century world was full of demons and spirits; they regularly interfered in human life, often capriciously. It was common knowledge that they did control human behavior because they were more powerful than human beings. Most of us no longer use this kind of language; we don’t think of the world as occupied by demons and other spirit beings. But that doesn’t mean we no longer experience powers in our lives that are stronger than ourselves, ungodly powers that oppress and enslave us, individually or collectively.

I used to think that demons were little more than an imaginative way to understand mental illness or oppressive conditions. But I keep returning to pre-scientific notions of the demonic when I reflect on the terrifying fact that Germany under self-inflicted authoritarian rule murdered six million European Jews. Sure, there are historical circumstances to take into consideration, and political reasons, economic causes and cultural factors, but those kinds of explanation attempts can try to grasp what is truly unfathomable only from a high altitude, and to me, such distance often feels like betrayal. To face the demons and name them, and to tell them—and reminds myself—that their occupation will not stand, I need Jesus who has tied up the strong man.

Robert Lifton was a psychiatrist who conducted interviews with Nazi doctors who had worked in the death camps. He talked about this work with Elie Wiesel, a holocaust survivor.

We were discussing Nazi doctors—I had begun to interview them and he had observed a few from a distance in Auschwitz—when he posed this question to me: “Tell me, Bob, when they did what they did, were they men or were they demons?” I answered that, as he well knew, they were human beings, and that was our problem. To which Elie replied, “Yes, but it is demonic that they were not demonic.” [3]

In the face of evil, explanations will not do. In the face of evil we need a different kind of knowledge, one that can ground us in the presence of God the redeemer. There is no room in the house for demons, but they are here because we are here. We need the living Christ, because in his presence the demons become anxious and jittery and they start screaming. And when he speaks, they quickly lose their grip on power. He speaks, and the oppressed are unburdened, the possessed are unshackled, the wounded are healed, and the shunned are forgiven. He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.

I have struggled to understand QAnon and other conspiracy theories and the hold they have on people.

In the summer of 2017, Lenka Perron was spending hours every day after work online, poring over fevered theories about shadowy people in power. She had mostly stopped cooking, and no longer took her daily walk. She was less attentive to her children, 11, 15 and 19, who were seeing a lot of the side of her face, staring down into her phone. It would all be worth it, she told herself. She was saving the country and they would benefit.[4]

One day, though, she had the first nagging feeling that something did not add up. Five months and many more inconsistencies later, Ms. Perron finally called it quits. “At some point I realized, ‘Oh, there’s a reason this doesn’t fit,’” she said. “We are being manipulated. Someone is having fun at our expense.” Sabrina Tavernise wrote a lengthy article about Ms. Perron, because she wonders, like many of us,

what will happen with the followers of QAnon and other anti-establishment conspiracy theories that have been bending Americans’ perceptions of reality. There are signs that some have lost faith ... But others are doubling down, and experts believe that some form of the QAnon conspiracy theory will remain deeply embedded in the nation’s culture by simply morphing to incorporate the new developments, as it has before.

Ms. Perron said, “Q managed to make us feel special, that we were being given very critical information that basically was going to save all that is good in the world and the United States. We felt we were coming from a place of moral superiority.” People who tried to talk her out of the conspiracy theories by sending her factual information only made it worse. “Facts are not facts anymore,” Ms. Perron said. “They are highly powerful, nefarious people putting out messaging to keep us as docile as sheep.”

Eventually, though, she left, and she felt a lot of shame and guilt. But she has come to appreciate the experience. She has talked to her children about what she went through, and has learned to identify conspiracy dependence in others. There are many. Ms. Perron volunteers as a life coach, and recently was working with a 40-year-old man who had lost his marriage and was falling asleep at work. At some point, he began texting her Q links. She realized he was staying up all night consuming conspiracy theories. “I was watching his life fall apart,” she said. “I had no way to penetrate it. I could not even make a dent.”

Not even a dent. What are we to do? Reason doesn’t penetrate the massive walls of suspicion that surround elaborate structures of fear. How can we embody the liberating and healing presence of Christ? We must trust the good news that the strong man has been bound. We must love fearlessly and serve those whose lives are far from whole, whether they are estranged family members or more distant neighbors. We mustn’t tire of seeking ways to remind them of their true identity and dignity as God’s beloved. Humbly and courageously, we must do our part in casting out the demons that feed on our fear.

[1] Mk 3:27

[2] Matt Skinner https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/fourth-sunday-after-epiphany-2/commentary-on-mark-121-28-3

[3] Robert Jay Lifton, Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir (New York: Free Press, 2011) p. 240

[4] This quote and the following from Sabrina Tavernise https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/us/leaving-qanon-conspiracy.html

Nineveh shall be overthrown

Jonah and Nahum are literary neighbors, they live on the same block in the Bible, as it were, but they can be hard to find. Each book is only a few pages long, and flipping through the prophets you can easily fly from Obadiah to Habakkuk as though Jonah and Nahum weren’t there.

In addition to living close to each other in  the same scriptural neighborhood, the two also share an intense relationship with a city, Nineveh. Nineveh was the capital of the Assyrian empire, a middle eastern super power that destroyed the northern kingdom of Israel and held the southern kingdom of Judah as a vassal for almost one hundred years. In Israel’s imagination, Nineveh had become a symbol of violent oppression, and Nahum’s entire proclamation is infused with rage against the hated city.

Ah, city of bloodshed,

utterly treacherous,

full of violence,

where killing never stops!

Crack of whip and rattle of wheel,

galloping steed and bounding chariot!

Charging horsemen,

flashing swords and glittering spears!

Hosts of slain and heaps of corpses,

dead bodies without number—

they stumble over bodies.

Because of the countless harlotries of the harlot,

the winsome mistress of sorcery, [Nineveh]

who ensnared nations with her harlotries

and peoples with her sorcery,

I am going to deal with you—

declares the Lord of Hosts.[1]

I am going to deal with you; violence for violence. The city must fall. Toward the end of the 7th century BCE Nineveh was totally destroyed and never rebuilt. It’s easy to see how, for many people suffering under brutal regimes, the hated city’s fall from glory became a source of deep satisfaction. For those living under oppression, the prophetic proclamation of the Lord who declares, “I am going to deal with you” and brings down the mighty, has long been a source of hope.The book of Nahum ends with a question, directed at Nineveh: “All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?”[2]

The book of Jonah also ends with a question, but it presents an utterly different narrative. It begins, “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah son of Amittai, saying, ‘Go at once to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim judgment upon it; for their wickedness has come up before me.’”[3] And Jonah set out, but instead of heading North and eventually East for Nineveh, he went West as far as his feet would take him, until he arrived on the beach near today’s Tel Aviv where he dipped his toes into the water of the Mediterranean Sea. And apparently this wasn’t far enough. Jonah found a ship going to Tarshish, a port far beyond the horizon, at the end of the known world, as far away as he could from the presence of the Lord. Jonah ran away and got on a boat to go where God was not, only to find out that there was no such place. The Lord hurled a great wind upon the sea, and in the storm Jonah asked the frightened sailors to throw him overboard, and the Lord provided a great fish to swallow Jonah. And after three days, the fish vomited Jonah out upon the same beach where his sea adventure had begun.

There he was, covered all over with stinky fish slobber, and the word of the Lord came to him a second time. “Get up, go to Nineveh, that great city, and proclaim to it the message that I tell you.” And this time, Jonah went. Not a word is said about how he felt or what was going through his mind. All we’re left with to ponder as he makes his way to the city is the realization that it’s not merely really, really hard to escape God’s presence and call, but impossible — something I find both terrifying and immensely comforting.

Next thing we hear is Jonah, a day’s walk into the city, crying out, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” That’s just eight words in English, five in Hebrew. Without a question one of the shortest and least poetic prophetic utterances in all of scripture. Jonah doesn’t scold or accuse his audience nor does he give any reasons for his announcement, he just makes it.  And not a word is said about what a hard assignment this was given the size of the city and its evil ways. No, Jonah makes his announcement and the people hear it and they repent like nobody’s ever seen: the whole city, from king to cattle, put on sackcloth and sit in ashes, fasting and praying. “Who knows?” we’re told the king wondered. “God may turn and relent and turn back from his wrath, so that we do not perish.” And God saw what they did, how they were turning back from their evil ways. And God renounced the punishment he had planned to bring upon them, and did not carry it out.

And Jonah? Jonah who just witnessed the most fantastic response anyone tasked to declare the word of the Lord on the face of the earth could ever even dream of? Jonah is angry. He does not like what he just saw, does not like it at all. “Isn’t this just what I said when I was still in my own country? That is why I fled beforehand to Tarshish. For I know that you are a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, and ready to relent from punishing these people.”[4] Jonah is so mad, he declares he would rather die than witness a moment longer how God extends to Israel’s enemies the very compassion Israel has always depended on for its own salvation. We know the feeling: let them taste relentless justice — and grant us your mercy. We know the feeling and we get to laugh at it, laughing at our silly selves as we laugh at silly Jonah.

Dr. King urged us not to forget that in the struggle for liberation from the powers of oppression,

the attack is directed against forces of evil rather than against persons who are caught in those forces. It is evil we are seeking to defeat, not the persons victimized by evil. Those of us who struggle against racial injustice must come to see that the basic tension is not between races. … The tension is at bottom between justice and injustice.[5]

It is so easy to confuse unjust systems with the people caught in them and to forget that when godless, sinful, violent systems fall — and fall they must — the people caught in them are human beings made in the image of God.

We are deeply divided, and it is easy to forget that we are not called to fight those on the other side of the divide, but that which divides us so deeply. We are called to dismantle the old walls and the unquestioned assumptions that separate us. We are called to step into Jonah’s shoes and walk into the city of bloodshed, into the heart of the system that eats people, and to tell the truth that such a city, such a nation cannot and will not stand. And we care called to step into the shoes of the Ninevites and listen to this nobody from nowhere who dares to tell us that our city, our nation cannot and will not stand. We are called to repent — to turn around, to turn to God and to each other, and to let the Spirit of truth inspire and empower us.

It is awfully easy to imagine vengeance and retribution, human or divine, and to say with Nahum, “All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you. For who has ever escaped your endless cruelty?” It is awfully easy until we have the courage to consider our own cruelty, our own lovelessness, our own entanglement in oppressive systems and structures, our own complete dependence on the mercy of God.

At the end of Jonah’s very curious story, God has the final word, and God leaves us with a question, “Should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left?”[6] Countless people who are so lost they don’t know their right hand from their left — those are my people, stuck in deadly myths of supremacy and inferiority, steeped in lies, and yearning to be free.

“All who hear the news about you clap their hands over you,” Nahum declares, imagining the applause after Nineveh’s fall. I am grateful for the hilarious and very serious counter testimony of Jonah who dares us to imagine, against his own inclinations, the world’s laughter and applause after Nineveh’s repentance. Laughing with the redeemed, I clap my hands, and this joy gives me the courage to hear the whole truth and to tell the truth and, again and again, to turn to the mercy of God.

[1] Nahum 3:1-5a

[2] Nahum 3:19

[3] See Jonah 1:1-2

[4] Jonah 4:2-3

[5] From an article in the Christian Century, 1957; reprinted in A Testament of Hope, 8.

[6] Jonah 4:11

True repentance

“Look at ships,” I read in the book of James, “though they are so large that it takes strong winds to drive them, yet they are guided by a very small rudder wherever the will of the pilot directs. So also the tongue is a small member, yet it boasts of great exploits. How great a forest is set ablaze by a small fire! And the tongue is a fire.”[1]

I listened to the radio on my way home from Mount Olivet cemetery on Wednesday afternoon, and only after a few moments of confusion and disbelief did I begin to realize what had actually happened at the Capitol. I was very upset, but I wasn’t surprised. Words matter. Words have consequences. And I can’t remember a day during the past four years when government leaders, beginning with the head of the administration, didn’t lie to the American people or insist on presenting “alternative facts” while denouncing any media that didn’t parrot their caustic narrative as “fake news.” I thought about the Senators, Representatives, and others who for weeks had kept repeating lies about the election for political gain.

Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said to those of ancient times, ‘You shall not swear falsely, but carry out the vows you have made to the Lord.’ But I say to you, Do not swear at all … Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’; anything more than this comes from the evil one.”[2]

Our representatives swear, many of them with their hand on the Bible, to protect the constitution, but apparently those are just words when political calculations make an assault on the constitution the preferable career move. Many of them love to appropriate the Ten Commandments for their purposes, but knowing or observing them is a different matter. You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor, the ninth plainly states.[3] And in Exodus 23, in what reads like a commentary on this commandment, it says, “You shall not spread a false report. You shall not join hands with the wicked to act as a malicious witness. You shall not follow a majority in wrongdoing.”[4]

Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her newsletter how, at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday,

heavily armed guards escorted the lawmakers back to the Capitol, thoroughly scrubbed by janitors, where the senators and representatives resumed their counting of the certified votes. The events of the afternoon had broken some of the Republicans away from their determination to challenge the votes. Fourteen Republican senators [, among them Sens. Blackburn and Hagerty from Tennessee,] had announced they would object to counting the certified votes from Arizona; in the evening count the number dropped to six: [Ted] Cruz (R-TX), [Josh] Hawley (R-MO), Cindy Hyde-Smith (R-MS), John Kennedy (R-LA), Roger Marshall (R-KS), and Tommy Tuberville (R-AL). In the House, 121 Republicans, more than half the Republican caucus, voted to throw out Biden’s electors from Arizona. As in the Senate, they lost when 303 Representatives voted in favor. Six senators and more than half of the House Republicans backed an attempt to overthrow our government, in favor of a man caught on tape just four days ago trying to strong-arm a state election official into falsifying the election results.

Prof. Richardson, a historian, ended her newsletter with the words, “Today the Confederate flag flew in the United States Capitol.”[5] She didn’t mention “that if Black people had [breached the Capitol like this], the hallways would be red with their blood.”[6] She didn’t mention that this happened the day after Georgia had elected its first Black senator and its first Jewish senator. She didn’t mention that someone had set up a noose outside and that “a few of the marauders wore T-shirts that said ‘MAGA Civil War, Jan. 6, 2021.’”[7]

Many have declared that “this is not who we are”, that “this is not America” — but what else would this be? Somebody else’s country? Someone else’s history? Some kind of alternate reality we accidentally fell into? Roxane Gay wrote, “This is America. This has always been America. If this were not America, this would not have happened. It’s time we face this ugly truth, let it sink into the marrow of our bones, let it move us to action.”[8]

Wednesday was the feast of Epiphany, when churches of the East celebrate the birth of Christ, the manifestation of God in human flesh, and churches of the West, the visit of the wise men who come to Bethlehem in response to this birth. The word epiphany has connotations of seeing something shine forth, seeing the full reality of an event, its truth; and in that sense, the events of Wednesday, bringing to a head multiple chains of events and developments, have epiphanic potential — if we have the courage to face the reality they show us and let it sink into the marrow of our bones.

In the Gospel of Mark, there is no Christmas story at the beginning. There’s the long-awaited messenger who appears in the wilderness. There’s John who calls people to repent and be baptized. He calls them to orient themselves toward God’s future: the promise of liberation, the promise of redemption, the promise of the kingdom. And he calls them to repent. Repentance is our capacity to see who we are and where we are, and to turn away from habits of thinking and doing that we know go against God’s will for human kind. Not that our capacity for, or our track record of, repenting are great, but there is promise in holding the gaze of the prophet, or our own when we look in the mirror and see who’s there, who’s really there, and not turn away until we let the truth sink into the marrow of our bones. It’s the beginning of not bearing false witness.

According to Mark, people came to the Jordan in droves to be baptized and to be prepared for the coming of the stronger one who would baptize them with the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth and life. They came from Jerusalem and from the Judean countryside, city folk and rural folk; they were all headed down to the banks of the Jordan to listen to the wilderness prophet and be baptized by him. One by one they stepped into the water, said what needed to be said, and let him plunge them beneath the surface, into the silent depth: Long ago, their ancestors had entered the promised land crossing this river. Like them, they wanted to begin anew. They wanted to live as God’s people on God’s land as though they had just crossed over. They prayed that the mercy of God, like a river, would wash away their wrongdoings and their guilt and the terrible shadows of all they couldn’t undo. They prayed they would emerge from the chilly depth with their lives scrubbed clean as new, prepared to face the holy One who would renew all things in righteousness.

Jesus came like the rest of them had come, walking on dusty roads, waiting in line in the heat of the day, and finally stepping into the water, like the rest of them. He began his ministry where sinners gathered, ordinary people who were ready for a fresh start and needed a space where they could be honest with themselves. So many were gathered at the river, you couldn’t have picked Jesus out from the many faces, and the way Mark tells the story, neither could John. Standing in the water, he didn’t realize that his arms were holding the one whose coming he had been announcing. He plunged him beneath the surface like the rest of them, into the cold silence, down into the darkness at the bottom.

As Jesus was coming up out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.”

This is the first, big epiphanic moment in Mark’s Gospel. The beginning of the good news of Jesus is like the beginning of creation: the face of the water, the Spirit, and the voice of the One who creates, beholds, and names. In Genesis we read,

In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth darkness covered the face of the deep and a wind from God swept over the face of the waters, and God said: Let there be light! And there was light. And God saw that the light was good and called it Day.

There’s the face of the water, the Spirit, and the voice of the One who creates, beholds, and names. God saw everything that God had made, and indeed, it was very good. God was delighted. And when Jesus emerged from below the face of the deep, God was delighted. It was a new beginning for the world, a new day. In this man’s life, Mark proclaims, God has come to us, stepped into the river with us, in loving solidarity with humankind, disappearing in the deep not to be washed, but to drown and rise. The moment Jesus stepped into the river, he made us all his own. Because of him, we emerge from the water affirmed in our identity as beloved children of God, assured of our kinship with God and with each other and with every last one on the river banks who longs for new life. Baptized into Christ, his death becomes our own and his life ours. As we come up for air, his Holy Spirit becomes our breath.

True repentance takes honesty and courage, and all who want to hear rousing words of healing and unity must first know that we won’t get there without telling the truth — not about them, whoever they might be in our self-centered worlds, but about ourselves.

My hope, when I’m able to cling to it, is rooted in God’s faithulness. I cling to the hope that love frees us to be truthful and humble.

[1] James 3:4-5

[2] Matthew 5:33-37

[3] Exodus 20:16

[4] Exodus 23:1-2

[5] from Heather Cox Richardson’s “Letters From an American” email newsletter at https://billmoyers.com/story/today-the-confederate-flag-flew-in-the-united-states-capitol/

[6] David Brooks https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/capitol-riot-republicans.html

[7] Michelle Goldberg https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/trump-capitol-attack.html

[8] Roxane Gay https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/07/opinion/capitol-riot-trump-america.html

Stream of blessing

The letter to the Ephesians begins with a deluge of blessing and praise, washing readers and listeners in a downpour of poetic, hymnic exultation.[1] The great challenge the letter addresses is as old as humanity: how to live together, given our many differences. But the author doesn’t begin with a good, hard look at the various lines that have long divided us – Jews and Gentiles, women and men, rich and poor, blue collar, white collar, citizens and migrants. The letter’s sender addresses as a Jew a largely Gentile audience with the good news that in Christ God has “made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”[2] Living with differences requires real effort, and the author acknowledges that it takes humility, gentleness, and patience[3] — but the first words are not words of congregational analysis and pastoral admonition: the opening sentence is an outpouring of blessing and praise, with all the attention given and directed to what God has done in Christ.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing… and what follows is just one breathtakingly long sentence, phrase after phrase naming what God has done to bless us and why we in turn are to bless God. “The rambling form of the sentence … seems to have trouble finding a place to stop,” one commentator observes, adding, “This is the grammar of worship more than it is the grammar of … argument, and it is no surprise if we are left struggling to keep up.”[4] It is like standing in a river of praise, a stream of grace washing over and around us like waves, and through us like a cosmic current originating in the heart of God. Blessed be God who has blessed us in Christ… choosing us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be God’s people, without blemish in God’s sight, full of love… destining us to be adopted as God’s children through Christ… redeeming us through his blood… making known to us the mystery of God’s will… as a plan for the fullness of time, to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth. The whole world and all who live in it… Earth and heaven… the entire universe washed in this grace… All things reconciled to God the Creator, Redeemer and Sustainer of creation… All things reconciled to God and to each other in the wide embrace of Christ on the cross…

The letter begins with a deluge of blessing and praise, washing us in a downpour of poetic, hymnic exultation, and inviting us to begin our year, our moments and our days by entrusting ourselves to this stream, floating in it, singing.

Praise doesn’t come easy in these days of twittered rage, mournful lament and cautiously leashed hope. Full-throated rejoicing may feel premature or insensitive to those who live their days far from joy — and there is much grace and love in such hesitation — but the stream is there to carry us, and the right words will come when the time is right.

The letter to the Ephesians reminds us, in poetry and prose, that in Christ we participate in a new humanity, wherein everyone and everything in heaven and on earth is reconciled to God and one another. In Christ, even our deepest and proudest divisions come to an end, and we greet and embrace one another as kin. Augustine, who became Bishop of Hippo at the end of the 4th century, said in a sermon on the feast of Epiphany,

Now, then, my dearly beloved [children] and heirs of grace, look to your vocation and, since Christ has been revealed to both Jews and Gentiles as the cornerstone, cling together with most constant affection. For he was manifested in the very cradle of his infancy to those who were near and to those who were afar – to the Jews whose shepherds were nearby; to the Gentiles whose Magi were at a great distance. The former came to him on the very day of his birth; the latter are believed to have come on this day. He was not revealed, therefore, to the shepherds because they were learned, nor to the Magi because they were righteous, for ignorance abounds in the rusticity of shepherds and impiety amid the sacrileges of the Magi. He, the cornerstone, joined both groups to himself since he came to choose the foolish things of the world in order to put to shame the wise and “to call sinners, not the righteous,” so that the mighty would not be lifted up nor the lowly be in despair.[5]

Luke tells us of the shepherds and Matthew of the wise men, but when we put together the Nativity set, year after year, we put the whole world in and around the stable — Jews and Gentiles, poor working folk and star gazing royal figures, locals and outsiders, ox and ass, sheep and camels — the vision of peace is for all of creation. And all because the one in the cradle “came and proclaimed peace to you who were far off and peace to those who were near,” as we read in Ephesians. And now it doesn’t matter anymore how we determine who or what is “near” or “far off” because the one who went from the cradle to the cross brought us all near in the wide embrace of his love. “So then [we all] are no longer strangers and aliens, but … citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God.”[6] Members of the household of God. One life, shared by all. The purpose is no longer hidden, but revealed in Christ’s embrace of the world.

Left to our own devices, we can’t escape our tendency to rend asunder what God has bound together. Catherine of Siena, speaking in the voice of God, said, “I could easily have created [human beings] possessed of all that they should need both for body and soul, but I wish that one should have need of the other, and that they should be my ministers to administer the graces and gifts that they have received from me.”[7] Left to our own devices, we keep trying to grasp for ourselves all that we should need both for body and soul, and in the process we create alienation, distrust, suspicion, and hostility. Left to our own devices, we make a world where unless you are like me, I have no need of you; unless you are with me, I have no need of you; and unless you are useful to me, I have no need of you.[8] But this proud dismissal, “I have no need of you” was never an option for human life; it became a reality only because of the power of sin.

The letter to the Ephesians begins with an outpouring of blessing and praise, because we are not left to our own devices: Christ has conquered sin so we might live in the community of his making, reconciled to God and one another, in the blessed conviviality of creation, to the praise of God’s glory.

We live in a new day, because God chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love. Christ has made us his own, and because we belong to Christ, we are part of God’s great enterprise of reconciliation and the healing of God’s broken world.

God said about us humans, according to Catherine of Siena, “I wish that one should have need of the other, and that they should be my ministers to administer the graces and gifts that they have received from me.” And Brian Doyle once said to a friend, “We’re only here for a minute. We’re here for a little window. And to use that time to catch and share shards of light and laughter and grace seems to me the great story.”[9] The creation and redemption of the world is God’s great story, and for you and me, Doyle suggests, it’s the dailiness of catching and sharing shards of light and laughter and grace.

Doyle spoke of God as the “coherent mercy” that cannot be apprehended but may be perceived by way of “the music in and through and under all things.”[10] To the writer of Ephesians the music in and through and under all things is Christ, and from that lovely tune our praise erupts — because God has made known to us the mystery of God’s will: to gather up all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth, all of creation made complete in him. All things reconciled in Christ. All things healed and whole in Christ. All things — even the wounds of our hostility and our broken hearts. All because of God’s relentless determination to bless the world.

We live in a new day, not because Earth has completed another course around the Sun, but because Christ is come. Thanks and praise be to God.

[1] Eph 1:3-14

[2] Ephesians 2:14; see Susan Hylen https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas-2/commentary-on-ephesians-13-14-12

[3] See Ephesians 4:2-3

[4] Brian Peterson https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/second-sunday-of-christmas-3/commentary-on-ephesians-13-14-9

[5] Augustine, quoted in Connections, Year A, Vol. 1, 153.

[6] See Ephesians 2:17-19

[7] Quoted by Stephen Boyd, Connections, Year A, Vol. 1, 139.

[8] In addition to Catherine, see 1 Cor 12:21.

[9] From a collection of Doyle’s essays, One Long River of Song: Notes on Wonder, quoted in https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/20/opinion/impeachment-trump-pelosi.html

[10] Margaret Renkl https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/books/review/one-long-river-of-song-brian-doyle.html