The Laid Down Life
John 10:11-18
Fourth Sunday of Easter
3 May 2009
Today is Good Shepherd Sunday, which means that in churches across the country and around the world, congregants are reciting Psalm 23, just as we did, and hearing Jesus say again, as we did, “I am the Good Shepherd.” In some of the places where these passages are being read, on the hills of Palestine, or Scotland, or Australia, or in the rural pockets of our own country, listeners will not have to be told very much about what sheep are like, and what it means for sheep to have a good shepherd. They will know, because the pastoral life is their life.
But in pulpits across America, many pastors are having to explain a little more, because most of us don’t have regular contact with sheep. And I can bet that many pastors this morning are saying something like this. Sheep are dumb. Sheep are smelly. Sheep are stubborn. Sheep are helpless and weak. And of course the analogy is that this is who we are: dumb, stubborn, helpless, weak. “All we like sheep have gone astray.”
But I’ll be honest. It’s hard for me to say anything bad about sheep. I’m a knitter. I love sheep. They provide for me the most basic thing I need for my craft. I work with wool every day. I go to fiber fairs and sheep festivals. Sheep are like some sort of icon for knitters. I have very romantic notions about sheep.
The people of Jesus’ day, with more livestock experience than I have, probably did not share my romanticism about sheep, but they were wistful for a certain kind of shepherd. They remembered good King David, who had tended sheep as a boy and then became God’s shepherd of the people as king. They remembered Ezekiel’s prophecy, a promise that came during the long stretch of devastation following the collapse of the Temple. According to Ezekiel, a Shepherd would come to care for them, and it would be no mere human, capable of corruption and susceptible to self-interest. This time the Shepherd would be God: “I myself will search for my sheep, and will seek them out…. I will rescue them… I will feed them… I will make them lie down… I will seek them, and bring then back, and strengthen them.” (34:11-16) This was undeniably good news for people in distress and despair. The people who clung to this promise knew Psalm 23 as intimately as we do, and loved it as deeply: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. They knew their weakness and their need, and they sought One who would tend them.
And then Jesus comes along and says to them, “I am the good shepherd.” And what he offers is what they’ve been looking for, what we are looking for, too. With great tenderness, he speaks of how intimately he cares for his sheep. Just as Ezekiel promised, this shepherd will care for a scattered people, nurturing them, soothing them, and strengthening them.
But Jesus takes the image further than Ezekiel’s prophecy, declaring, “The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” I know people who tend sheep. They love them, they care for them, but die for them? We move now beyond metaphor, and into new reality. One has come who will lay down his life for us. And not just for us – “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold,” he says. “I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.” The shepherd who comes for us, comes for all, and will tend any who listen for his voice.
And then Jesus sets aside talk of sheep and shepherds and speaks directly of what he has come to do. “I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord. I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again.” Jesus is no victim. Not a victim of an angry God, nor a victim of an angry mob. What he did on the cross did not look like power. It looked like defeat. But in John, Jesus is so clear about who has the power. “No one takes my life from me, I lay it down.”
In the early 1300s, a Florentine artist by the name of Pacino di Bonaguida painted an image of the crucifixion that is unlike any other I have seen. It is intended as theological interpretation, not as historical depiction. In it, Jesus climbs a ladder to the cross. The mood of the scene is calm, in contrast to more typical paintings of the Passion. Mary, John, the soldiers, all stand back, passive, watching, letting Jesus do what he has come to do. One onlooker holds a hammer up to Jesus, while another holds a basket of nails. As Jesus makes his vigorous ascent, it is clear that he is making a willing and active sacrifice. He comes to the cross as One with all power, willingly laid down, to be picked up again later in a new way. He is the agent, not the soldiers, or the politicians, or the religious leaders, or us. He gives himself, pours himself out, lays himself down, for our sakes. He throws his life over us like a canopy.
This is not what a shepherd does for sheep. When a pack of wolves threatens a flock of sheep, real shepherds do not throw themselves to the wolves. But the Good Shepherd, facing the wolves of our sin, and our despair, our death, and the darkness of powers and principalities, the Good Shepherd in all power lays down his own life for us and then picks it up again, and picks us up with it.
By his power, and not our own, we belong to him now. We are his sheep, his flock. To be his sheep is to be led to life. To be safe, sheltered. It is to be known by him, and to follow. It is to trust the sound of his voice, and to trust the voice of God that speaks through him. To belong to him does not mean we have all the right answers, or feel all the right ways, or do all the right things. To belong to him means we listen for him, we trust him, we are in relationship with him.
So many voices clamor for our attention. So many voices beckon, and shock, and tempt, and question, and assault. We live in a world that has gone nearly hysterical with anxiety over the economy and swine flu and whatever the disaster of the day is. Some people react with violence, others react with fear, others do whatever they can to close themselves off, to cocoon away from the chaos. We come together to seek another way, and to seek it together, not as a collection of individuals, but as a flock – his flock. We come together to help each other listen, and trust, and follow.
What are you here for, if not that? What are you here for, if not to listen for that voice – the voice of love? [What are you here for, if not to seek that face?] What are you here for, if not to follow him? to have a relationship with him? What are you here for? What are you listening for? What are you looking for?
He is looking for us. Like a shepherd searching for scattered sheep, he seeks us, and calls us. He set this table for us, a reminder that we still need the sustenance and care he offers, the fellowship he makes possible. Most of all we need him, even when we don’t realize it. He laid down his life for us. He prepares a table for us. He makes a way for us. He pours himself out for us, and for all.
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Saturday, January 24, 2009
On Following
On Following
Mark 1:14-20
3rd Sunday After Pentecost
25 January 2008
From a very young age, most of us are taught that being a leader is a most desirable thing. It starts in preschool, with the game “Follow the Leader.” It is mildly enjoyable to follow the leader, but the real fun comes when it’s your turn to lead. You walk around with a string of children behind you, ready to do anything you say. You flap your arms – they flap their arms. You hop on one foot – they hop on one foot. You quack like a duck – they quack like ducks. You realize right away that you can make them do anything. Anything! The possibilities are endless. The power can be intoxicating!
The very young are content to be told when it’s their turn to lead. But if you watch a group of, say, 4 year-olds, you will notice that some of them no longer want to wait patiently for their turn. They will demand to be the leader. It goes from a collaborative game to a competitive sport. In my house, I have even heard the words, “I won at Follow the Leader.” I have asked, “How do you win at Follow the Leader?” I have so far not gotten a satisfactory answer, though I have imagined that if I were to play, winning might look like all the children in my home doing exactly what I said the first time I said it.
Power struggles begin at tender age. And many of us spend the rest of our lives jockeying for position. We are taught that leadership is valued and having power is good. Parents and teachers try to groom children to become good leaders. Teenagers and young adults may even participate in leadership training. College admissions officers look for evidence that applicants have leadership skills and experience.
To my knowledge, there are no equivalent workshops on “followship” training. And while teachers and parents do hope that children learn to at least follow directions, not many speak to their young about being a good follower. In fact, being a follower has a negative connotation in our culture. We fear that in following we may be lemmings, going along unquestioningly with the crowd to our detriment. While not everyone aspires to be a leader, I know of now one who sets out to be a good follower.
I once knew a woman who was a member of a very progressive new church full of people with passion and vision and commitment. She told the story of the first Christmas this congregation celebrated together. They were decorating a large tree in the sanctuary, and they each had been given one Christmon ornament to hang. They all set about putting their ornament on, and when they stepped back from the tree they noticed something startling: every single ornament was near the top of the tree – the bottom of the tree was completely bare. The woman declared that was the perfect metaphor for the congregation – they were all chiefs, no followers.
Choosing to do what someone else tells us to is just not as much fun as doing exactly what we want. More fun still is having other people do what we want, too. And into this tangle of desire and self-will, come these two words from Jesus: Follow me.
The fishermen were casting a net into the sea. They were minding their own business, doing their job, making their living. And Jesus walks by and says, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately they leave their nets and follow. He goes a little further, and there are James and John, mending their nets in a boat. And Jesus says, “Follow me,” and they do, leaving their father and their employees in the boat, as they go.
Can you imagine? A stranger walks up, no introduction, no spiel, no business plan to show them how following him will get them what they want. None of that. Just those words: Follow me. And they do.
A reasonable response would be, “Where are you going?” Or “Who are you?” Or, “Go away.” Reasonable people do not just lay aside their old lives and take up with a street preacher just because he says, “Come on.” But this is not a reasonable story. And his is no reasonable request. He is asking them to drop everything, to leave their families, their work, and everything they know, and to join him on a road that will ultimately lead to suffering and death - and later, to resurrection. This is a mind-bending, life-altering invitation, and they don’t even stop to ask a single question. They just go.
Did they have any idea what they were signing up for? Difficulty. Disappointment. Persecutions. Executions. Later in life they would all four be led where they would rather not have gone. And still, they followed. As if all they knew was that wherever this man was, they wanted to be. So they dropped their nets, their lives, and their plans, and followed.
This story stands at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, immediately after the baptism of Jesus. It is as if to say, no matter what comes next, this is where it begins, keep coming back to this – Follow me. This is everything distilled into two words. Follow me.
And every day, they got up, and followed all over again. None of them stepped forward and said, “Wait a minute. The life I left was better than this one. I liked things better when I was in charge.” Sure, they struggled with selfishness and pettiness. They made mistakes, and sometimes they failed in spectacularly awful ways. But they still just kept on following. One step at a time.
And this is how it works. This is the only way to follow. Just one step at a time. Just each day choosing to drop our own plans and follow the leader we’ve said we’ll follow. Things will happen that we never anticipated or prepared for. We will make mistakes. We will get discouraged and disappointed. We will have long stretches where it feels like we are running down a dark alley or stumbling through a mysterious landscape. We will wish we had a map, or a plan, or anything to tell us how things would work out.
We don’t get any of that. We get what they got, this man with fire in his eyes and thunder in his throat, saying, “Follow me.” And if we can let go of wondering where we’re headed and worrying about how we’ll make it, and instead focus on the One who is calling us, we will be all right. What is true for the disciples is true for us – we don’t have to see all the way down that narrow road in order to make the choice each day to take one more step towards the One who leads. As E.L. Doctorow once said, “The headlights only reach so far – but it’s enough to lead us all the way home.” When Jesus says, “Follow!” there is enough light in him for us to see by.
There’s not denying that it’s hard. It’s hard to be a follower. It’s hard to lay aside self-will. It’s hard to trust. We do not have the power on our own to make it work. What we have the power to do is decide each day, “Yes, today I will follow Jesus.” And then to say, “Jesus, help me with that. Help me let go of my nets. Help me let go of my plans. Help me to die to myself. You’re the one I want to follow, but I can’t do it without your help.”
God knows it’s a big enough calling. It asks for all our strength and all our faith and all our love. It requests radical openness, because we don’t know a fraction yet of who he really is and where he wants to take us. It requires discipline to keep thinking of Christ, to keep looking to Christ, to keep praying, and to keep choosing. And it means the willingness to change and to keep changing.
And we do not follow alone. We follow in a long line of people who have already followed him to another shore. And we follow with each other. His call is not just for you and me, as individuals, but us together, as the church. There is a lot of angst and confusion these days about what it takes to be the church in the new millennium. There are experts who can draw up marketing models and growth plans. But what was true 2000 years ago is still true today. All we really need to know is what we’ve already known: Follow Jesus. Belong to Jesus. Keep our eyes on Jesus. Keep letting go of anything that keeps us from following Jesus. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, and choosing him one step at a time.
“Follow me,” he said. And they did.
What about us?
Mark 1:14-20
3rd Sunday After Pentecost
25 January 2008
From a very young age, most of us are taught that being a leader is a most desirable thing. It starts in preschool, with the game “Follow the Leader.” It is mildly enjoyable to follow the leader, but the real fun comes when it’s your turn to lead. You walk around with a string of children behind you, ready to do anything you say. You flap your arms – they flap their arms. You hop on one foot – they hop on one foot. You quack like a duck – they quack like ducks. You realize right away that you can make them do anything. Anything! The possibilities are endless. The power can be intoxicating!
The very young are content to be told when it’s their turn to lead. But if you watch a group of, say, 4 year-olds, you will notice that some of them no longer want to wait patiently for their turn. They will demand to be the leader. It goes from a collaborative game to a competitive sport. In my house, I have even heard the words, “I won at Follow the Leader.” I have asked, “How do you win at Follow the Leader?” I have so far not gotten a satisfactory answer, though I have imagined that if I were to play, winning might look like all the children in my home doing exactly what I said the first time I said it.
Power struggles begin at tender age. And many of us spend the rest of our lives jockeying for position. We are taught that leadership is valued and having power is good. Parents and teachers try to groom children to become good leaders. Teenagers and young adults may even participate in leadership training. College admissions officers look for evidence that applicants have leadership skills and experience.
To my knowledge, there are no equivalent workshops on “followship” training. And while teachers and parents do hope that children learn to at least follow directions, not many speak to their young about being a good follower. In fact, being a follower has a negative connotation in our culture. We fear that in following we may be lemmings, going along unquestioningly with the crowd to our detriment. While not everyone aspires to be a leader, I know of now one who sets out to be a good follower.
I once knew a woman who was a member of a very progressive new church full of people with passion and vision and commitment. She told the story of the first Christmas this congregation celebrated together. They were decorating a large tree in the sanctuary, and they each had been given one Christmon ornament to hang. They all set about putting their ornament on, and when they stepped back from the tree they noticed something startling: every single ornament was near the top of the tree – the bottom of the tree was completely bare. The woman declared that was the perfect metaphor for the congregation – they were all chiefs, no followers.
Choosing to do what someone else tells us to is just not as much fun as doing exactly what we want. More fun still is having other people do what we want, too. And into this tangle of desire and self-will, come these two words from Jesus: Follow me.
The fishermen were casting a net into the sea. They were minding their own business, doing their job, making their living. And Jesus walks by and says, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people.” And immediately they leave their nets and follow. He goes a little further, and there are James and John, mending their nets in a boat. And Jesus says, “Follow me,” and they do, leaving their father and their employees in the boat, as they go.
Can you imagine? A stranger walks up, no introduction, no spiel, no business plan to show them how following him will get them what they want. None of that. Just those words: Follow me. And they do.
A reasonable response would be, “Where are you going?” Or “Who are you?” Or, “Go away.” Reasonable people do not just lay aside their old lives and take up with a street preacher just because he says, “Come on.” But this is not a reasonable story. And his is no reasonable request. He is asking them to drop everything, to leave their families, their work, and everything they know, and to join him on a road that will ultimately lead to suffering and death - and later, to resurrection. This is a mind-bending, life-altering invitation, and they don’t even stop to ask a single question. They just go.
Did they have any idea what they were signing up for? Difficulty. Disappointment. Persecutions. Executions. Later in life they would all four be led where they would rather not have gone. And still, they followed. As if all they knew was that wherever this man was, they wanted to be. So they dropped their nets, their lives, and their plans, and followed.
This story stands at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, immediately after the baptism of Jesus. It is as if to say, no matter what comes next, this is where it begins, keep coming back to this – Follow me. This is everything distilled into two words. Follow me.
And every day, they got up, and followed all over again. None of them stepped forward and said, “Wait a minute. The life I left was better than this one. I liked things better when I was in charge.” Sure, they struggled with selfishness and pettiness. They made mistakes, and sometimes they failed in spectacularly awful ways. But they still just kept on following. One step at a time.
And this is how it works. This is the only way to follow. Just one step at a time. Just each day choosing to drop our own plans and follow the leader we’ve said we’ll follow. Things will happen that we never anticipated or prepared for. We will make mistakes. We will get discouraged and disappointed. We will have long stretches where it feels like we are running down a dark alley or stumbling through a mysterious landscape. We will wish we had a map, or a plan, or anything to tell us how things would work out.
We don’t get any of that. We get what they got, this man with fire in his eyes and thunder in his throat, saying, “Follow me.” And if we can let go of wondering where we’re headed and worrying about how we’ll make it, and instead focus on the One who is calling us, we will be all right. What is true for the disciples is true for us – we don’t have to see all the way down that narrow road in order to make the choice each day to take one more step towards the One who leads. As E.L. Doctorow once said, “The headlights only reach so far – but it’s enough to lead us all the way home.” When Jesus says, “Follow!” there is enough light in him for us to see by.
There’s not denying that it’s hard. It’s hard to be a follower. It’s hard to lay aside self-will. It’s hard to trust. We do not have the power on our own to make it work. What we have the power to do is decide each day, “Yes, today I will follow Jesus.” And then to say, “Jesus, help me with that. Help me let go of my nets. Help me let go of my plans. Help me to die to myself. You’re the one I want to follow, but I can’t do it without your help.”
God knows it’s a big enough calling. It asks for all our strength and all our faith and all our love. It requests radical openness, because we don’t know a fraction yet of who he really is and where he wants to take us. It requires discipline to keep thinking of Christ, to keep looking to Christ, to keep praying, and to keep choosing. And it means the willingness to change and to keep changing.
And we do not follow alone. We follow in a long line of people who have already followed him to another shore. And we follow with each other. His call is not just for you and me, as individuals, but us together, as the church. There is a lot of angst and confusion these days about what it takes to be the church in the new millennium. There are experts who can draw up marketing models and growth plans. But what was true 2000 years ago is still true today. All we really need to know is what we’ve already known: Follow Jesus. Belong to Jesus. Keep our eyes on Jesus. Keep letting go of anything that keeps us from following Jesus. Keep putting one foot in front of the other, and choosing him one step at a time.
“Follow me,” he said. And they did.
What about us?
Saturday, November 1, 2008
Not Yet Revealed
Not Yet Revealed
1 John 1:1-3
All Saints’ Sunday
2 November 2008
As most of you know, I have been taking a break from the pulpit and other pastoral duties to spend more time at home this last year before the boys start kindergarten. It has been a real gift to them, and to me, and to our family, to get to do this, and I so appreciate your support and your encouragement in this decision, as well as the work Paul is doing to make it possible.
I have had pretty vivid ideas of what this time was going to look like. Our days would be filled with crafts and Candy Land, with books and baking, with parks and puppet shows. The time that had been moving so swiftly would suddenly expand, and slow down. I would find myself able to give my time and my attention completely to my sons. It was going to be perfect. Perhaps it is more accurate to say my ideas were less about what this time was going to be than about the kind of mother I was suddenly going to become. I would be so loving, so patient and so kind. I wouldn’t feel anxious or pressed for time. I would never treat my children as interruptions. I would never hear myself saying things like, “Hurry up,” or “Leave me alone.” The boys would never ask why I was using my grumpy voice. Oh, and my home? It would be a tidy and inviting place of peace and order. In other words, I was not only going to become a better mother. I was going to become a completely different person.
I’m sure it won’t surprise you – and it shouldn’t have surprised me - that things have not been as blissful as I’d imagined. I am impatient. I can be quite irritable. I do sound grumpy. I don’t like playing Candy Land. And my house? Well, let’s not talk about what kind of house I keep. And what I am reminded of, yet again, is that I never ever end up being as good as I set out to be. I never do end up becoming the person I had hoped. I never get things just right, let alone perfect. This is our story. We are not what we meant to be. We are not what we were intended to be.
Sometimes we miss the mark in spectacular and horrific ways. But most of the time, we miss it in smaller, painfully persistent ways. We try, try, try to become better people. We have the sense that we are supposed to be getting better. We have the sense that life is supposed to be about forward motion, about progress. But we never seem to get there. We never really measure up.
Kakfa said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” In other words, our living is shaped by our anxiety, angst, and dread over our finitude. The limitation on life gives it meaning. Today is All Saints’ Sunday, a day for stopping to listen to the clock ticking on all our lives, and what it means. What meaning do our days have, given that they will end?
Our preoccupation with our end starts early. “Mommy, you are sure getting old. When are you going to die?” one of my sons asked the other day. I don’t know. None of us knows, I said. “I don’t want to die. Ever!” Charlie insisted. “Well, sorry Charlie,” Rob responded. “Sometimes it happens.”
Yes it does. Not just sometimes. It’s coming for us all. And we know so little in the face of it. “What we will be has not yet been revealed,” John says in his letter this morning. His words confirm our ignorance. We don’t know. We don’t know when it will come, or how. We don’t know, not really, what the life after this one looks like. We don’t know, not really, what we will become. Not in this lifetime, and certainly not in the next. We don’t know.
But there is such power and such promise in those two words – Not Yet. Those words point forward. They suggest that what we do not know now, what we cannot know now, we one day will. They suggest that what we cannot be now, we one day will. They suggest that the essence of who we are and will become lies in the future – the Not Yet – rather than in the past, where all our failures have stacked up behind us, or in the present, where we still struggle to be who we’re meant to be.
John writes, “What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when [Christ] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” John acknowledges that there is so much we don’t know, so much we can’t know. But he insists that we do know that in the end, we will see Christ, and, seeing him, we shall be like him. Becoming like him will come not from all our trying, not from all our determination, but simply from seeing him, as he is. Just by laying eyes on him, we will be transformed.
These words are meant for our hope. All the ways life has left us unsettled and unsatisfied, all the ways we have let ourselves and others down, all the ways we have missed the mark – they are not the final word. The word now is “Not yet.” The final word is we will see Christ, and we will be like him. We will be fully, finally, beautifully what we were meant to be. All else will be stripped away.
Is this word enough to keep us going amidst our failures and frustrations and flaws? Is it enough for us to know that someday – not yet, but someday – our lives will shine with the light of his love, and completely? Is it enough to know that all our wounds and all our griefs will be healed and all our failures will be erased and all our lives will be only love?
It might be enough, but it’s not all. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God; and so we are…. Beloved, we are God’s children now.” We look forward towards the Not Yet, towards a future that has not yet been revealed. But we have everything we need for now. “Beloved, we are God’s children now,” John says. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God, and so we are. Now.”
What this means is not that we take hold of our longings to have a better life or to be a better person, and then somehow make those desires come true. What it means is that we know who we are – God’s own children, now, and we know what we will become – like Christ, whom we shall see fully. And in the meantime, we give ourselves to the seeking of him. We set our gaze on him now. We seek to see him, to know him, little by little, and so to be made like him, little by little, by God’s grace, and not our own doing. We seek him with our praying, and our serving, our thinking and our giving, our loving and our living.
So much has not yet been revealed. So much of what we long for, what we lean towards, has not yet been revealed. So much of who we will become has not yet been revealed. But in the meantime, don’t we have enough to keep us going on the way of Christ?
Not long ago, I visited a church that had a baptismal pool at the entrance. In order to come into the sanctuary, you had to pass by those waters. And at this church, the water was constantly flowing into that pool, from a source above it. Anyone sitting in that sanctuary would hear the rush of water into that pool. I sat in that sanctuary alone, and the water seemed so loud as I prayed. I was seeking direction, and guidance, and I kept hearing that water. And suddenly I had the strongest sense of something else in that room besides that water. I saw my cloud of witnesses, there, above me. There was my cousin Blake, made whole. There was my grandmother, Edith, and my grandmother, Thelma. There was my brother-in-law David. My father-in-law Nelson, my Uncle Don. There stood my grandfathers, whom I never knew. There was a whole circle of people around that sanctuary and another circle behind them and another behind them. Zella Willis and Laura Barbour and Dorothy Lamerson and Helen Brewer and people whom they had loved and lost, all stand in that circle. And behind them, the circle goes on, and it goes on. The Bible calls it our cloud of witnesses.
Above the sound of those baptismal waters, I perceived that cloud, and those beautiful, beautiful people, who have been made well and whole. And I had the strongest feeling myself that I am headed for that wholeness, too, that all shall be well. I had the strongest, clearest remembrance that they, too, had been laid down in those baptismal waters, and they now stand by the river that flows by the throne of God. We were raised up from those baptismal waters to walk in newness of life. They do so perfectly now. I still struggle. But some day I won’t. And you won’t either. Those faithful ones who have gone on – they struggled too. They made their mistakes. Sometimes they failed us, and themselves. They were not everything they wanted to be. But they are now.
And what are we now? We are God’s own children. We are beloved. We have a cloud of witnesses that has surrounded us with their love and encouragement and example. And we have this table, where Christ meets us and gives us again what we need to keep moving forward in our seeking and our following. We do not come to this table alone, but with each other. And not only with each other, but with all God’s children throughout this world. And not only with all God’s children throughout this world, but with all those beyond this world. They sit now at the great table, at the heavenly feast, completely filled by his goodness and love, and transformed into that goodness and love themselves. Now we take our taste, too. And it will be enough, for now. Until we finally join them, and gaze on the beautiful face of love, and become, with them, like him ourselves.
1 John 1:1-3
All Saints’ Sunday
2 November 2008
As most of you know, I have been taking a break from the pulpit and other pastoral duties to spend more time at home this last year before the boys start kindergarten. It has been a real gift to them, and to me, and to our family, to get to do this, and I so appreciate your support and your encouragement in this decision, as well as the work Paul is doing to make it possible.
I have had pretty vivid ideas of what this time was going to look like. Our days would be filled with crafts and Candy Land, with books and baking, with parks and puppet shows. The time that had been moving so swiftly would suddenly expand, and slow down. I would find myself able to give my time and my attention completely to my sons. It was going to be perfect. Perhaps it is more accurate to say my ideas were less about what this time was going to be than about the kind of mother I was suddenly going to become. I would be so loving, so patient and so kind. I wouldn’t feel anxious or pressed for time. I would never treat my children as interruptions. I would never hear myself saying things like, “Hurry up,” or “Leave me alone.” The boys would never ask why I was using my grumpy voice. Oh, and my home? It would be a tidy and inviting place of peace and order. In other words, I was not only going to become a better mother. I was going to become a completely different person.
I’m sure it won’t surprise you – and it shouldn’t have surprised me - that things have not been as blissful as I’d imagined. I am impatient. I can be quite irritable. I do sound grumpy. I don’t like playing Candy Land. And my house? Well, let’s not talk about what kind of house I keep. And what I am reminded of, yet again, is that I never ever end up being as good as I set out to be. I never do end up becoming the person I had hoped. I never get things just right, let alone perfect. This is our story. We are not what we meant to be. We are not what we were intended to be.
Sometimes we miss the mark in spectacular and horrific ways. But most of the time, we miss it in smaller, painfully persistent ways. We try, try, try to become better people. We have the sense that we are supposed to be getting better. We have the sense that life is supposed to be about forward motion, about progress. But we never seem to get there. We never really measure up.
Kakfa said, “The meaning of life is that it ends.” In other words, our living is shaped by our anxiety, angst, and dread over our finitude. The limitation on life gives it meaning. Today is All Saints’ Sunday, a day for stopping to listen to the clock ticking on all our lives, and what it means. What meaning do our days have, given that they will end?
Our preoccupation with our end starts early. “Mommy, you are sure getting old. When are you going to die?” one of my sons asked the other day. I don’t know. None of us knows, I said. “I don’t want to die. Ever!” Charlie insisted. “Well, sorry Charlie,” Rob responded. “Sometimes it happens.”
Yes it does. Not just sometimes. It’s coming for us all. And we know so little in the face of it. “What we will be has not yet been revealed,” John says in his letter this morning. His words confirm our ignorance. We don’t know. We don’t know when it will come, or how. We don’t know, not really, what the life after this one looks like. We don’t know, not really, what we will become. Not in this lifetime, and certainly not in the next. We don’t know.
But there is such power and such promise in those two words – Not Yet. Those words point forward. They suggest that what we do not know now, what we cannot know now, we one day will. They suggest that what we cannot be now, we one day will. They suggest that the essence of who we are and will become lies in the future – the Not Yet – rather than in the past, where all our failures have stacked up behind us, or in the present, where we still struggle to be who we’re meant to be.
John writes, “What we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when [Christ] is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” John acknowledges that there is so much we don’t know, so much we can’t know. But he insists that we do know that in the end, we will see Christ, and, seeing him, we shall be like him. Becoming like him will come not from all our trying, not from all our determination, but simply from seeing him, as he is. Just by laying eyes on him, we will be transformed.
These words are meant for our hope. All the ways life has left us unsettled and unsatisfied, all the ways we have let ourselves and others down, all the ways we have missed the mark – they are not the final word. The word now is “Not yet.” The final word is we will see Christ, and we will be like him. We will be fully, finally, beautifully what we were meant to be. All else will be stripped away.
Is this word enough to keep us going amidst our failures and frustrations and flaws? Is it enough for us to know that someday – not yet, but someday – our lives will shine with the light of his love, and completely? Is it enough to know that all our wounds and all our griefs will be healed and all our failures will be erased and all our lives will be only love?
It might be enough, but it’s not all. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God; and so we are…. Beloved, we are God’s children now.” We look forward towards the Not Yet, towards a future that has not yet been revealed. But we have everything we need for now. “Beloved, we are God’s children now,” John says. “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called the children of God, and so we are. Now.”
What this means is not that we take hold of our longings to have a better life or to be a better person, and then somehow make those desires come true. What it means is that we know who we are – God’s own children, now, and we know what we will become – like Christ, whom we shall see fully. And in the meantime, we give ourselves to the seeking of him. We set our gaze on him now. We seek to see him, to know him, little by little, and so to be made like him, little by little, by God’s grace, and not our own doing. We seek him with our praying, and our serving, our thinking and our giving, our loving and our living.
So much has not yet been revealed. So much of what we long for, what we lean towards, has not yet been revealed. So much of who we will become has not yet been revealed. But in the meantime, don’t we have enough to keep us going on the way of Christ?
Not long ago, I visited a church that had a baptismal pool at the entrance. In order to come into the sanctuary, you had to pass by those waters. And at this church, the water was constantly flowing into that pool, from a source above it. Anyone sitting in that sanctuary would hear the rush of water into that pool. I sat in that sanctuary alone, and the water seemed so loud as I prayed. I was seeking direction, and guidance, and I kept hearing that water. And suddenly I had the strongest sense of something else in that room besides that water. I saw my cloud of witnesses, there, above me. There was my cousin Blake, made whole. There was my grandmother, Edith, and my grandmother, Thelma. There was my brother-in-law David. My father-in-law Nelson, my Uncle Don. There stood my grandfathers, whom I never knew. There was a whole circle of people around that sanctuary and another circle behind them and another behind them. Zella Willis and Laura Barbour and Dorothy Lamerson and Helen Brewer and people whom they had loved and lost, all stand in that circle. And behind them, the circle goes on, and it goes on. The Bible calls it our cloud of witnesses.
Above the sound of those baptismal waters, I perceived that cloud, and those beautiful, beautiful people, who have been made well and whole. And I had the strongest feeling myself that I am headed for that wholeness, too, that all shall be well. I had the strongest, clearest remembrance that they, too, had been laid down in those baptismal waters, and they now stand by the river that flows by the throne of God. We were raised up from those baptismal waters to walk in newness of life. They do so perfectly now. I still struggle. But some day I won’t. And you won’t either. Those faithful ones who have gone on – they struggled too. They made their mistakes. Sometimes they failed us, and themselves. They were not everything they wanted to be. But they are now.
And what are we now? We are God’s own children. We are beloved. We have a cloud of witnesses that has surrounded us with their love and encouragement and example. And we have this table, where Christ meets us and gives us again what we need to keep moving forward in our seeking and our following. We do not come to this table alone, but with each other. And not only with each other, but with all God’s children throughout this world. And not only with all God’s children throughout this world, but with all those beyond this world. They sit now at the great table, at the heavenly feast, completely filled by his goodness and love, and transformed into that goodness and love themselves. Now we take our taste, too. And it will be enough, for now. Until we finally join them, and gaze on the beautiful face of love, and become, with them, like him ourselves.
Saturday, September 6, 2008
What We Owe
Phew! A bit late getting this one done and posted. I'll come back when I'm less bleary-eyed and add the footnotes.
What We Owe
Romans 13:8-11
17th Sunday After Pentecost
7 September 2008
Who do you owe? And what do you owe them? We think of owing someone in terms of financial debt, but there are kinds of owing that have nothing to do with money. We owe someone an explanation. We owe someone an apology. We owe somebody a phone call or a visit. We owe somebody a thank you note or an invitation. Some of us keep us with all these obligations as if we were keeping a tally – constantly totting up to make sure we are in no one’s debt (or to see who owes us what). Others of us are certain we can never catch up with all our obligations, and so we resign ourselves to live with the constant sense that we are never doing enough.
Paul begins his counsel this morning from his letter to the Romans with words about our obligation. “Owe no one anything,” he begins. I kind of wish he had tweaked it just a bit. How about something like: “You don’t owe anyone a thing.” There now, that’s better, right? He could go from there. “You don’t owe anyone a thing. Just be true to yourself. Be true to what you want. Be true to what you need, what you believe. In Christ you have been set free, you no longer owe a thing.” Oh, I would love to read that in my Bible this morning.
And why doesn’t it say that? In Christ we have been set free! Christ has paid our debts – how is that we owe anything? Why should I feel obligated to do anything, when Christ has done it all?
And it is true – Christ did come for freedom, Christ pay our debts and set us free. We do not live under compulsion, we are no longer under obligation to the law. What this means is that Christ has set us free from ever having to do anything to be made right. Christ has set us free from having to do anything to justify ourselves or our worth. We do not need to do more or do better in order to be loved, or in order to be saved, or in order to be good. We have been set free from all that. We are loved already. We are loved entirely. We have been set right.
This does not mean we no longer have any obligations. It means that how we handle our obligations does not determine our worth. It means that neither our successes nor our failures have the last word on who we ultimately are. It means that we do not need to live under the hissing judgment of should and ought as if such words could save us or damn us. It means we rise to obligations out of our freedom, and with a sense of purpose and grace.
Paul says, “Owe no one anything, but love.” It is love that saved us, it is love that has been given to us, so freely. And so it is love that we now have, in abundance, to share. We owe it not because we are trying to get something, or trying to make up for something. We owe it because we have been given it.
Knowing all of this does not make it all that much easier to do, however. Love is never easy. There are some people in our lives who are certainly easier for us to love. But in the end, love – real love – always demands something of us.
Catholic ethicist Paul Wadell writes, “Love doesn’t sound dangerous until you’ve tried it.” What makes love dangerous? It is dangerous because it is costly. Love, the kind of love Paul writes of, is not about mere affection, or attraction, or compatibility, or mutual enjoyment. It is, ultimately, about self-giving, which means the sacrifice of self-interest. The New Testament defines love in relation to the cross. What is involved when we give ourselves to the obligations of love, then, is something like a death. A death to self.
That’s why it can be so hard. How many times a day can we stand to let ourselves die, and die again, to what we want? Some of the little deaths may be easier to accept – the daily sacrifices a parent makes for a young child are set in the context of the parents’ deep love and commitment. Still, they are sacrifices, and still they can be difficult to accept. Parents are meant to love their children, children are meant to love their parents, spouses are meant to love each other – and yet all of know how fraught with complexity and conflict all of these relationships can be. In her book What We Were Made For: Christian Reflections on Love, Christian ethicist Sondra Wheeler acknowledges, “… loving those near to us well is hard enough, … no wonder a human love that extends to strangers and enemies is hard even to imagine.” And yet that is what we are called to – a love that extends. Such a love pulls us beyond where we’re comfortable. Sometimes it feels like it will break us – to try to love people who aren’t like us, to try to love people who make us anxious or angry, to try to love people we don’t like. It is hard enough to be faithful in loving the people we actually like.
Human beings were created with a powerful need for companionship and community. We were meant for love, we were meant for relationship. And yet it is exactly this deep need that can make love so difficult. Out of our sense of own neediness and vulnerability, distorted patterns of relating arise, patterns that focus not at all on self-giving, but on finding ways to somehow get what we need. So we become manipulative and controlling. Or jealous. Or dependent. We become fearful, self-protective, distrustful. We cling to illusions about ourselves, and about others – illusions that cannot survive the honesty and growth required by real relationship. In so many ways, we are so broken. Love has been poured out for us, over our lives and into our hearts. But it sometimes seems that all the cracks in us make it impossible to hold all that love, let alone start giving it away.
Love is the only commandment, but sometimes it seems impossible to keep. How on earth can we get any better?
For starters, we come here. St. Benedict called Christian community a “school for souls.” Here is where we learn. In community with other people who are both broken and blessed – people who were neither our family nor our friends, but who can now become both, if we allow it. We are here to know and to be known, to learn to love and to learn to be loved. This is our school for souls. It is here that we encounter hope and healing for all the distortions that make loving relationship so hard.
If we have any hope of putting self-interest to death, this is where we start – in community, and in a community that chooses together to point ourselves toward God. To worship at all is to acknowledge and to celebrate that the world is governed by someone other than us. To worship is to say Self is not on the throne, and to say that self-interest will not be in charge. To worship together is to acknowledge how hard it is to do all this alone. Outside these walls, we encounter people at work, people on the street, people in our families that we find difficult to love. Outside these walls, we come up again and again against the supreme difficulty of self-sacrifice. Gathered in this room together, we are reminded that we do not actually have to do any of that alone. We come here to find our shared identity in God, an identity and a security that can begin to release us from fear and distrust. We come here to get honest about ourselves, and our failures, and our need. We come here to pray and to learn to pray, so that we find our first and best relationship with the Source of all other relationship.
And we come here to be fed. We gather at this table, to open ourselves to a God who nourishes and nurtures, a God who wants to fill us up, to satisfy us with good things. We come as we are to this table. Needy, broken, selfish, troubled, bowed-down, puffed-up, disbelieving, or hopeful. We come as we are, to find what we need, together. And what we find is this: we have been given so much. The love of God, the life of Jesus, has been poured out for us. And God wants it to be poured out through us. We find freedom at this table, too. Not just freedom from the things that would push us down, but freedom for – freedom for dying to our old selves, freedom for rising to our new purpose, freedom for getting up and going out, together, to love, and to love, and to love again, and to owe no on anything but love.
What We Owe
Romans 13:8-11
17th Sunday After Pentecost
7 September 2008
Who do you owe? And what do you owe them? We think of owing someone in terms of financial debt, but there are kinds of owing that have nothing to do with money. We owe someone an explanation. We owe someone an apology. We owe somebody a phone call or a visit. We owe somebody a thank you note or an invitation. Some of us keep us with all these obligations as if we were keeping a tally – constantly totting up to make sure we are in no one’s debt (or to see who owes us what). Others of us are certain we can never catch up with all our obligations, and so we resign ourselves to live with the constant sense that we are never doing enough.
Paul begins his counsel this morning from his letter to the Romans with words about our obligation. “Owe no one anything,” he begins. I kind of wish he had tweaked it just a bit. How about something like: “You don’t owe anyone a thing.” There now, that’s better, right? He could go from there. “You don’t owe anyone a thing. Just be true to yourself. Be true to what you want. Be true to what you need, what you believe. In Christ you have been set free, you no longer owe a thing.” Oh, I would love to read that in my Bible this morning.
And why doesn’t it say that? In Christ we have been set free! Christ has paid our debts – how is that we owe anything? Why should I feel obligated to do anything, when Christ has done it all?
And it is true – Christ did come for freedom, Christ pay our debts and set us free. We do not live under compulsion, we are no longer under obligation to the law. What this means is that Christ has set us free from ever having to do anything to be made right. Christ has set us free from having to do anything to justify ourselves or our worth. We do not need to do more or do better in order to be loved, or in order to be saved, or in order to be good. We have been set free from all that. We are loved already. We are loved entirely. We have been set right.
This does not mean we no longer have any obligations. It means that how we handle our obligations does not determine our worth. It means that neither our successes nor our failures have the last word on who we ultimately are. It means that we do not need to live under the hissing judgment of should and ought as if such words could save us or damn us. It means we rise to obligations out of our freedom, and with a sense of purpose and grace.
Paul says, “Owe no one anything, but love.” It is love that saved us, it is love that has been given to us, so freely. And so it is love that we now have, in abundance, to share. We owe it not because we are trying to get something, or trying to make up for something. We owe it because we have been given it.
Knowing all of this does not make it all that much easier to do, however. Love is never easy. There are some people in our lives who are certainly easier for us to love. But in the end, love – real love – always demands something of us.
Catholic ethicist Paul Wadell writes, “Love doesn’t sound dangerous until you’ve tried it.” What makes love dangerous? It is dangerous because it is costly. Love, the kind of love Paul writes of, is not about mere affection, or attraction, or compatibility, or mutual enjoyment. It is, ultimately, about self-giving, which means the sacrifice of self-interest. The New Testament defines love in relation to the cross. What is involved when we give ourselves to the obligations of love, then, is something like a death. A death to self.
That’s why it can be so hard. How many times a day can we stand to let ourselves die, and die again, to what we want? Some of the little deaths may be easier to accept – the daily sacrifices a parent makes for a young child are set in the context of the parents’ deep love and commitment. Still, they are sacrifices, and still they can be difficult to accept. Parents are meant to love their children, children are meant to love their parents, spouses are meant to love each other – and yet all of know how fraught with complexity and conflict all of these relationships can be. In her book What We Were Made For: Christian Reflections on Love, Christian ethicist Sondra Wheeler acknowledges, “… loving those near to us well is hard enough, … no wonder a human love that extends to strangers and enemies is hard even to imagine.” And yet that is what we are called to – a love that extends. Such a love pulls us beyond where we’re comfortable. Sometimes it feels like it will break us – to try to love people who aren’t like us, to try to love people who make us anxious or angry, to try to love people we don’t like. It is hard enough to be faithful in loving the people we actually like.
Human beings were created with a powerful need for companionship and community. We were meant for love, we were meant for relationship. And yet it is exactly this deep need that can make love so difficult. Out of our sense of own neediness and vulnerability, distorted patterns of relating arise, patterns that focus not at all on self-giving, but on finding ways to somehow get what we need. So we become manipulative and controlling. Or jealous. Or dependent. We become fearful, self-protective, distrustful. We cling to illusions about ourselves, and about others – illusions that cannot survive the honesty and growth required by real relationship. In so many ways, we are so broken. Love has been poured out for us, over our lives and into our hearts. But it sometimes seems that all the cracks in us make it impossible to hold all that love, let alone start giving it away.
Love is the only commandment, but sometimes it seems impossible to keep. How on earth can we get any better?
For starters, we come here. St. Benedict called Christian community a “school for souls.” Here is where we learn. In community with other people who are both broken and blessed – people who were neither our family nor our friends, but who can now become both, if we allow it. We are here to know and to be known, to learn to love and to learn to be loved. This is our school for souls. It is here that we encounter hope and healing for all the distortions that make loving relationship so hard.
If we have any hope of putting self-interest to death, this is where we start – in community, and in a community that chooses together to point ourselves toward God. To worship at all is to acknowledge and to celebrate that the world is governed by someone other than us. To worship is to say Self is not on the throne, and to say that self-interest will not be in charge. To worship together is to acknowledge how hard it is to do all this alone. Outside these walls, we encounter people at work, people on the street, people in our families that we find difficult to love. Outside these walls, we come up again and again against the supreme difficulty of self-sacrifice. Gathered in this room together, we are reminded that we do not actually have to do any of that alone. We come here to find our shared identity in God, an identity and a security that can begin to release us from fear and distrust. We come here to get honest about ourselves, and our failures, and our need. We come here to pray and to learn to pray, so that we find our first and best relationship with the Source of all other relationship.
And we come here to be fed. We gather at this table, to open ourselves to a God who nourishes and nurtures, a God who wants to fill us up, to satisfy us with good things. We come as we are to this table. Needy, broken, selfish, troubled, bowed-down, puffed-up, disbelieving, or hopeful. We come as we are, to find what we need, together. And what we find is this: we have been given so much. The love of God, the life of Jesus, has been poured out for us. And God wants it to be poured out through us. We find freedom at this table, too. Not just freedom from the things that would push us down, but freedom for – freedom for dying to our old selves, freedom for rising to our new purpose, freedom for getting up and going out, together, to love, and to love, and to love again, and to owe no on anything but love.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Learning to Praise
Learning to Praise
Psalm 148
Myers Park Baptist Church
24 August 2008
The psalm this morning may seem benign and ordinary. “Praise the Lord!” it begins. “Praise the Lord!” it ends. And we’ve grown accustomed to such an exhortation. It’s what we’re here at church for, after all – to praise. But this is no ordinary act. And this psalm offers no ordinary word.
What is praise, but the staking of one’s whole life on goodness, on the goodness of God? What is praise, but the pouring out of one’s daily living in joy and gratitude for what has been given? In the face of so many forces of darkness, of despair, of violence and evil, there could be no more radical act than that.
But this psalm takes the revolutionary act of praise a step beyond. The psalmist issues an invitation to the entire universe. Everything that is, praises God. Not just “everything that breathes” as Psalm 150 would have it. But everything that is. Not just the angels in heaven. Not just the humans on earth. Every created thing. Animate, inanimate. Sun, moon, stars, rain, earth, fire, hail, snow, frost, wind. Mountains, hills, trees, mammals, sea creatures, creeping things, flying birds. Every cell of the universe, every atom of space, every single bit of creation does one thing in unison – it all praises God.
It is a sweeping and impressive picture – not only of unity of purpose, but of the radical inclusivity of praise. This is what everything was made for. This is what it all does. Every created thing praises the God who created it, simply by being what God made it to be.
Well, maybe all but one.
The psalmist here seems to have great faith that humans will respond to the innate urge to praise God. “Kings of the earth and all peoples,” he declares, “Young men and women alike, old and young together!” His confidence is inspiring. It is endearing. Is it not also a bit unwarranted?
The truth is, while cedar trees and dolphins and goldfinches and stardust all praise God by being beautifully exactly as God created it all to be, we have somewhat deviated. We struggle to give ourselves to God. We have a hard time seeking and seeing the goodness of God all around us, and responding to it.
There are so many reasons we find ourselves blocked from such a life. We are busy, and so don’t notice the pulse of God beating beneath the surface of everything. We are disappointed or disillusioned or grief-stricken, and therefore unable to see how we might give praise without being false. We are tired and drained and sucked-dry by the demands we face, and, finding no way to receive what we most need, we also have nothing more to give back, including our praise.
--
You may have seen the Washington Post story last year. That January, world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell engaged in a little experiment at the behest of a Washington Post reporter. Bell, dressed in street clothes, took his 300 year-old Stradivarius to the L’Enfant Plaza Subway Station. For 43 minutes during the morning rush hour, he performed, playing some of the most beautiful, most powerful, most difficult pieces of music ever written. The concert was videotaped with a hidden camera. Guesses were made ahead of time, about how people would respond, how many people would stop and listen, how much money might be tossed into his violin case. Plans were made to deal with crowd control.
Those plans were not needed. What happened was this. In the 43 minutes that the internationally acclaimed virtuoso played his violin, 1097 people passed him by. Most did not even look at him. Only one person, at the very end, recognized him. A few tossed in quarters or even pennies. And only seven people stopped what they were doing, to stand and listen, at least for a minute.
Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post staff writer who put Joshua Bell up to this experiment, and then reported on it, poses the question in his article: “If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that – then what else are we missing?”
It is a haunting question. What are we missing? What great gorgeous joy and wonder are present in the life God has given us, that we cannot see, cannot open ourselves to? What praise can we not give because we cannot see the millions of reasons to give it?
During Bell’s second piece, Schubert’s Ave Maria, “something revealing happened.” Weingarten writes of a woman and her preschooler coming off the escalator. The mother is walking quickly, needing to get her son dropped off at school so she can go on to work. Her son, however, is intent on hearing the music and watching the musician. On the video, you can see him twisting around to see Bell, even as he is being hurried towards the door. Finally, his mother maneuvers her body to block the child’s view. As mother and child leave the station, the boy can still be seen straining to get a look.
Weingarten writes:
"The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
(Weingarten goes on) "There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away."*
Can you imagine if you had been one of those people who walked past Joshua Bell without stopping? Or if you had been one of those parents, can you imagine how you’d feel when you were told who that was standing there in the subway station fiddling as you dragged your listening child away?
I think I’m that person on a regular basis. I think I’m that parent on a regular basis.
Every morning, the great God of the universe plays the best music ever made for us, and we march forward in our grim determination to get everything done. We scrabble on, trying to get what we think we need, trying to get ahead, ignoring the music of life. Instead of feeling joy, or hope, or gratitude we often feel resentment, or apathy, or resignation. Some of us even drag little ones along behind us, ignoring their innate sense of wonder instead of letting it teach us.
Those people in the subway station that morning thought Joshua Bell was just another street performer. How often do we look at a person and see something less than what is there? How often do we look at a tree, a rock, the sky, the ground, and see something less than what is really there? It is, all of it, glistening with God. How much of that are we missing?
In the midst of the press and crush of life, sometimes one of my children will interrupt me with something that seems very urgent to them – and so irrelevant to me. “Look! An ant!” “Look! The sky is grey!” “Look! Mimi is outside walking her cat! That man just ran by without a shirt on! That fat squirrel is sleeping on the picnic table! LOOK!” Or I will be trying to concentrate so hard on something so important and one of them will just burst out singing for no apparent reason, in words he insists are the right ones: “I hope! I hope! It’s off to work I go!” And it is so loud! And it is so joyful. And it is like they are responding to the music underneath everything, and picking up with a tune of their own in response. And I have a choice with how I respond. I can sigh with impatience, answer with gruff tones, ignore the ant, the squirrel, the tree, and the child, respond in a distracted, “Yes I see,” when I definitely do not. And I certainly have done all of those things. Or I can slow down. Wake up. Pay attention. Listen for God’s music. And be drawn back to wonder, and to praise.
When life has choked out your own poetry and music and praise, find a child. That child might teach you how to see again. And how to sing. Maybe the child you need to find is the one inside you. Jesus once said, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:15). I think by “receiving the kingdom of God as a little child,” this is part of what he meant – the opening of ourselves to the wonder and joy of the moment. Finding our way back to simplicity and a sense of the adventure and magic that lurks in each new day. Getting outside and letting ourselves be schooled in the ways of praise by the dragonfly and the maple leaf, the raindrop and the bullfrog. There is a revolutionary fellowship of praise, right outside our door – can we look up from our computers for a few minutes to really see it, and to participate with it in responding to the God behind it all?
Every day, we have the chance to choose: will I treat this day and its obligations as something to be gotten through? Will I treat people as interruptions, or burdens? Will I ignore anything that has no utilitarian purpose for me? Or, will I give myself to this day and its obligations? Will I treat people as holy, as God-given opportunities to love and to give? Will I treat creation as holy, as kindred spirit and kind tutor in the art of praise? Will I be on the look-out for the tiny shimmering clues to God’s goodness? Will I be listening for the gorgeous notes of God’s great music?
Can you see it? Can you hear it? Can you lift your voice in chorus with brother sun and sister moon? Can your life burn and glow like they do, in praise of the God who created and still creates? The animals, the trees, the skies, the earth, the children, they all give their witness to God’s goodness and truth, and in bearing their witness, they also give their praise. They are playing their music. God is playing, too. Now, what about you?
*Gene Weingarten. Pearls Before Breakfast.
Psalm 148
Myers Park Baptist Church
24 August 2008
The psalm this morning may seem benign and ordinary. “Praise the Lord!” it begins. “Praise the Lord!” it ends. And we’ve grown accustomed to such an exhortation. It’s what we’re here at church for, after all – to praise. But this is no ordinary act. And this psalm offers no ordinary word.
What is praise, but the staking of one’s whole life on goodness, on the goodness of God? What is praise, but the pouring out of one’s daily living in joy and gratitude for what has been given? In the face of so many forces of darkness, of despair, of violence and evil, there could be no more radical act than that.
But this psalm takes the revolutionary act of praise a step beyond. The psalmist issues an invitation to the entire universe. Everything that is, praises God. Not just “everything that breathes” as Psalm 150 would have it. But everything that is. Not just the angels in heaven. Not just the humans on earth. Every created thing. Animate, inanimate. Sun, moon, stars, rain, earth, fire, hail, snow, frost, wind. Mountains, hills, trees, mammals, sea creatures, creeping things, flying birds. Every cell of the universe, every atom of space, every single bit of creation does one thing in unison – it all praises God.
It is a sweeping and impressive picture – not only of unity of purpose, but of the radical inclusivity of praise. This is what everything was made for. This is what it all does. Every created thing praises the God who created it, simply by being what God made it to be.
Well, maybe all but one.
The psalmist here seems to have great faith that humans will respond to the innate urge to praise God. “Kings of the earth and all peoples,” he declares, “Young men and women alike, old and young together!” His confidence is inspiring. It is endearing. Is it not also a bit unwarranted?
The truth is, while cedar trees and dolphins and goldfinches and stardust all praise God by being beautifully exactly as God created it all to be, we have somewhat deviated. We struggle to give ourselves to God. We have a hard time seeking and seeing the goodness of God all around us, and responding to it.
There are so many reasons we find ourselves blocked from such a life. We are busy, and so don’t notice the pulse of God beating beneath the surface of everything. We are disappointed or disillusioned or grief-stricken, and therefore unable to see how we might give praise without being false. We are tired and drained and sucked-dry by the demands we face, and, finding no way to receive what we most need, we also have nothing more to give back, including our praise.
--
You may have seen the Washington Post story last year. That January, world-renowned violinist Joshua Bell engaged in a little experiment at the behest of a Washington Post reporter. Bell, dressed in street clothes, took his 300 year-old Stradivarius to the L’Enfant Plaza Subway Station. For 43 minutes during the morning rush hour, he performed, playing some of the most beautiful, most powerful, most difficult pieces of music ever written. The concert was videotaped with a hidden camera. Guesses were made ahead of time, about how people would respond, how many people would stop and listen, how much money might be tossed into his violin case. Plans were made to deal with crowd control.
Those plans were not needed. What happened was this. In the 43 minutes that the internationally acclaimed virtuoso played his violin, 1097 people passed him by. Most did not even look at him. Only one person, at the very end, recognized him. A few tossed in quarters or even pennies. And only seven people stopped what they were doing, to stand and listen, at least for a minute.
Gene Weingarten, the Washington Post staff writer who put Joshua Bell up to this experiment, and then reported on it, poses the question in his article: “If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that – then what else are we missing?”
It is a haunting question. What are we missing? What great gorgeous joy and wonder are present in the life God has given us, that we cannot see, cannot open ourselves to? What praise can we not give because we cannot see the millions of reasons to give it?
During Bell’s second piece, Schubert’s Ave Maria, “something revealing happened.” Weingarten writes of a woman and her preschooler coming off the escalator. The mother is walking quickly, needing to get her son dropped off at school so she can go on to work. Her son, however, is intent on hearing the music and watching the musician. On the video, you can see him twisting around to see Bell, even as he is being hurried towards the door. Finally, his mother maneuvers her body to block the child’s view. As mother and child leave the station, the boy can still be seen straining to get a look.
Weingarten writes:
"The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.
(Weingarten goes on) "There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away."*
Can you imagine if you had been one of those people who walked past Joshua Bell without stopping? Or if you had been one of those parents, can you imagine how you’d feel when you were told who that was standing there in the subway station fiddling as you dragged your listening child away?
I think I’m that person on a regular basis. I think I’m that parent on a regular basis.
Every morning, the great God of the universe plays the best music ever made for us, and we march forward in our grim determination to get everything done. We scrabble on, trying to get what we think we need, trying to get ahead, ignoring the music of life. Instead of feeling joy, or hope, or gratitude we often feel resentment, or apathy, or resignation. Some of us even drag little ones along behind us, ignoring their innate sense of wonder instead of letting it teach us.
Those people in the subway station that morning thought Joshua Bell was just another street performer. How often do we look at a person and see something less than what is there? How often do we look at a tree, a rock, the sky, the ground, and see something less than what is really there? It is, all of it, glistening with God. How much of that are we missing?
In the midst of the press and crush of life, sometimes one of my children will interrupt me with something that seems very urgent to them – and so irrelevant to me. “Look! An ant!” “Look! The sky is grey!” “Look! Mimi is outside walking her cat! That man just ran by without a shirt on! That fat squirrel is sleeping on the picnic table! LOOK!” Or I will be trying to concentrate so hard on something so important and one of them will just burst out singing for no apparent reason, in words he insists are the right ones: “I hope! I hope! It’s off to work I go!” And it is so loud! And it is so joyful. And it is like they are responding to the music underneath everything, and picking up with a tune of their own in response. And I have a choice with how I respond. I can sigh with impatience, answer with gruff tones, ignore the ant, the squirrel, the tree, and the child, respond in a distracted, “Yes I see,” when I definitely do not. And I certainly have done all of those things. Or I can slow down. Wake up. Pay attention. Listen for God’s music. And be drawn back to wonder, and to praise.
When life has choked out your own poetry and music and praise, find a child. That child might teach you how to see again. And how to sing. Maybe the child you need to find is the one inside you. Jesus once said, “Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will never enter it.” (Mark 10:15). I think by “receiving the kingdom of God as a little child,” this is part of what he meant – the opening of ourselves to the wonder and joy of the moment. Finding our way back to simplicity and a sense of the adventure and magic that lurks in each new day. Getting outside and letting ourselves be schooled in the ways of praise by the dragonfly and the maple leaf, the raindrop and the bullfrog. There is a revolutionary fellowship of praise, right outside our door – can we look up from our computers for a few minutes to really see it, and to participate with it in responding to the God behind it all?
Every day, we have the chance to choose: will I treat this day and its obligations as something to be gotten through? Will I treat people as interruptions, or burdens? Will I ignore anything that has no utilitarian purpose for me? Or, will I give myself to this day and its obligations? Will I treat people as holy, as God-given opportunities to love and to give? Will I treat creation as holy, as kindred spirit and kind tutor in the art of praise? Will I be on the look-out for the tiny shimmering clues to God’s goodness? Will I be listening for the gorgeous notes of God’s great music?
Can you see it? Can you hear it? Can you lift your voice in chorus with brother sun and sister moon? Can your life burn and glow like they do, in praise of the God who created and still creates? The animals, the trees, the skies, the earth, the children, they all give their witness to God’s goodness and truth, and in bearing their witness, they also give their praise. They are playing their music. God is playing, too. Now, what about you?
*Gene Weingarten. Pearls Before Breakfast.
Saturday, August 16, 2008
The Doors of the Heart
The Doors of the Heart
Matthew 15:10-28
15th Sunday After Pentecost
17 August 2008
“It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person,” Jesus tells the crowd in this morning’s Gospel story. I have to say I like the sound of that, given the sorts of foods I indulged in on our recent vacation. Good southern cooking in Alabama, decadent desserts in Georgia, fried shrimp in Florida – I feasted plenty, and the scale agrees: it’s time to get back on the wagon. I would love to think that what goes into the mouth does not defile, but all evidence points to the contrary.
We have made a high art of food rules in our culture, and we know more about the connection between food and physical health than ever before. We would very much argue that what goes in to the mouth definitely can defile. None of that has stopped us from glutting ourselves and suffering the consequences. There is a deep and complex connection between our emotions and our appetites, our hearts and our stomachs. We come up with all kinds of diets and rules to try to do battle with our appetites; some people even make a kind of religion out of dieting.
That leap isn’t far. In truth, food and religion have always had something to do with each other. They both have something to do with sustenance, and with strength. They both have dimensions that are highly personal and internal as well as dimensions that are highly external and communal. Both food and religion can be a source of great connection and community or a source of great division and even hostility. Food is highly pleasurable; religion can have that element as well, though many don’t associate pleasure with faith.
Throughout history, most religious traditions have had celebrations around food as well as rules about food. For the Jews of Jesus’ days, the rules were clear. According to Old Testament law, priests were required to wash their hands before eating (Ex. 30:17-21; Lew. 22:4-7), as a matter not of hygiene but of ritual purification. The Pharisees expanded the requirement to cover everyone, not just priests. We tend to think of Pharisees as purists and zealots, but their beliefs were actually radically egalitarian and democratizing. They believed in the equality of all people before God, and that everyone had equal obligation to devote themselves to the godly life, everyone ought to have the chance to live the holiest life possible. So the Pharisees kept the purity standards for themselves, including ritual handwashing, and they taught that everyone should do the same.
And then Jesus comes along with his disciples, and they do not keep the purity code. Most obviously, they don’t wash their hands before eating. The Pharisees, of course, notice. What kind of Jews are these that do not try to live the holiest kind of life?, they wonder And so they press Jesus, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? Why don’t they wash their hands?” Jesus responds with brevity and force: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”
It is a strikingly freeing word. Ritual is not the way to God. We are set free from the old laws and observances about food and another daily details. Freedom is at the core of what Jesus was about – and that freedom goes far deeper and far wider than we typically dare imagine. But these words about what goes into the mouth and what comes out aren’t only about our freedom. They are also about our need.
What is our need? Scripture says that our most essential need is to be put back in right relationship with God, and therefore with each other and with ourselves. The whole story of Scripture boils down to this one thing – this terrible fracture in relationship and how it can be overcome. This is what the laws in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy were about – they were about healing the breach. The Law was a gift from God, given so that we might find our way back to God. What was at stake when a law was broken was no minor thing, even if the law itself might seem unnecessary in our eyes. What was at stake was further separation from God and from the people of God. This is what it meant to be defiled, this is what impurity was ultimately about – a rupture in the relationship between a person and God.
It is hard to take the Pharisees’ question seriously because the issue of defilement is so foreign to us. We chafe at the idea that our relationship with God could be dependent upon external ceremony. But Jesus does not mock or argue with their concern about defilement – he shares it.[1] Separation from God, from holiness, from each other, from ourselves – this is what Jesus came to mend. We don’t call it “defilement” but that is what it is. Life as God intended it has been spoiled, and our best intentions have been corrupted. Even when we try to do our best, we hurt each other and even ourselves. We find ourselves feeling cut off from God. This is what it means to be defiled.
Jesus shares the Pharisees’ concern about defilement. He also radically clarifies it. “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles,” he says, “it is what comes out…. Because what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.”
Jesus takes seriously the power in our words. According to him, our words matter very much. They seem so insignificant to us – just a little bit of air through the vocal cords, molded by the tongue and the lips, cut off with the teeth. Just a puff – and then the word is gone. That’s part of its power – we can’t take it back. Words are a kind of action: they can build up or tear down; they can encourage or manipulate; they can illuminate or deceive. Words can be the most vicious kind of weapons we have. They can create realities that shouldn’t be and destroy realities that should be. Words matter a great deal.
Most of all, words matter because they reveal the heart. They are like doors that open to show the world what’s inside of us, and who we are. The opening of those doors unleashes our actions for good and for ill. The heart is the place where our motives and intentions are born and take hold. All the good a person musters in life starts as the smallest intention in the heart. And the seeds of all the evil ever sown in the world started in the tiniest darkest places in human hearts. “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart,” Jesus says, “and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person….”
What this means is that the problem is much worse than we like to think. The problem is inside of us. The problem is with our hearts. It would be easier, actually, if the real problem was somehow somewhere out there, outside of us. We could close the doors to our heart to whatever would invade us from out there. We could keep certain laws, do very specific things, to make ourselves pure, to set ourselves right. It would be easier still to believe that because we’d been set free from those laws there was no problem at all anymore. But too often we find, in our freedom, that we feel just as separated from God as ever – sometimes so separated that we aren’t even sure God is out there anymore. And we find we are just as cut off from each other and ourselves as ever. Freedom doesn’t mean anything if it’s not for finding our purpose, our wholeness, our relatedness with God and with each another.
In this passage, Jesus just stops the teaching here (or so it seems). He points out where the problem is – the heart – and then he leaves. Where he heads is Gentile territory, where the people would not be asking the same kinds of questions as the Pharisees – they did not live by Jewish purity codes there. A Canaanite woman approaches him and begs his mercy and his healing for her daughter. He says nothing. The disciples urge him to send her away; they can’t stand her shouting. Jesus responds that his mission is to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but she persists: “Lord, help me.” He insults her, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” “Yes, Lord,” she replies, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Here we are again, talking about food and religion. She doesn’t care a thing about ritual purity, what she wants is the real food this man was meant to bring. “Woman, great is your faith!” Jesus marvels, “Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter is healed. It is a disturbing story – to see Jesus respond to a woman’s distress first with silence, and then with insults. For some people, it is even more disturbing that Jesus is bested in an argument, and by a Gentile woman.
But it’s a marvelous story, too. This woman knows her need. She doesn’t argue that she’s good enough, or that she deserves what Jesus has come to bring. She throws herself on her knees, and she begs for his help. “This is (faith) down to basics: When we are thrown to our knees.” [2] “Lord, help me,” she asks. And she just keeps asking. And he gives her what she needs, and praises her faith.
This story may reframe how we see Jesus. Maybe it could also reframe how we see ourselves. We are supplicants. We are desperate. We are broken and needy. And if we want a fix for our unpure, broken, alienated hearts, then this is what we do. We throw ourselves down before him, and we pray the simplest prayer with her, “Lord, help me.” Help me.
“Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart,” we sang a bit ago. It’s a prayer worth praying every day. “Lord, I want to be a Christian, I want to be move loving, more holy, more like Jesus, in my heart. Lord, here’s my heart, I can’t fix it. I’m giving it to you. Lord, help me.” It’s what he came for – to take our broken hearts and make them whole, to bridge the gap between us and God, to heal the rifts between us and each other, to take up all our faulty, dishonorable words and gather them into his perfect self, the Word made flesh, and then to give us new words to sing and to pray and to live.
[1] This idea from The Sword of His Mouth by Robert C. Tannehill.
[2] Steven Shoemaker. "When Jesus Changed His Mind," preached at Myers Park Baptist Church, 11 May 2008.
Matthew 15:10-28
15th Sunday After Pentecost
17 August 2008
“It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person,” Jesus tells the crowd in this morning’s Gospel story. I have to say I like the sound of that, given the sorts of foods I indulged in on our recent vacation. Good southern cooking in Alabama, decadent desserts in Georgia, fried shrimp in Florida – I feasted plenty, and the scale agrees: it’s time to get back on the wagon. I would love to think that what goes into the mouth does not defile, but all evidence points to the contrary.
We have made a high art of food rules in our culture, and we know more about the connection between food and physical health than ever before. We would very much argue that what goes in to the mouth definitely can defile. None of that has stopped us from glutting ourselves and suffering the consequences. There is a deep and complex connection between our emotions and our appetites, our hearts and our stomachs. We come up with all kinds of diets and rules to try to do battle with our appetites; some people even make a kind of religion out of dieting.
That leap isn’t far. In truth, food and religion have always had something to do with each other. They both have something to do with sustenance, and with strength. They both have dimensions that are highly personal and internal as well as dimensions that are highly external and communal. Both food and religion can be a source of great connection and community or a source of great division and even hostility. Food is highly pleasurable; religion can have that element as well, though many don’t associate pleasure with faith.
Throughout history, most religious traditions have had celebrations around food as well as rules about food. For the Jews of Jesus’ days, the rules were clear. According to Old Testament law, priests were required to wash their hands before eating (Ex. 30:17-21; Lew. 22:4-7), as a matter not of hygiene but of ritual purification. The Pharisees expanded the requirement to cover everyone, not just priests. We tend to think of Pharisees as purists and zealots, but their beliefs were actually radically egalitarian and democratizing. They believed in the equality of all people before God, and that everyone had equal obligation to devote themselves to the godly life, everyone ought to have the chance to live the holiest life possible. So the Pharisees kept the purity standards for themselves, including ritual handwashing, and they taught that everyone should do the same.
And then Jesus comes along with his disciples, and they do not keep the purity code. Most obviously, they don’t wash their hands before eating. The Pharisees, of course, notice. What kind of Jews are these that do not try to live the holiest kind of life?, they wonder And so they press Jesus, “Why do your disciples break the tradition of the elders? Why don’t they wash their hands?” Jesus responds with brevity and force: “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.”
It is a strikingly freeing word. Ritual is not the way to God. We are set free from the old laws and observances about food and another daily details. Freedom is at the core of what Jesus was about – and that freedom goes far deeper and far wider than we typically dare imagine. But these words about what goes into the mouth and what comes out aren’t only about our freedom. They are also about our need.
What is our need? Scripture says that our most essential need is to be put back in right relationship with God, and therefore with each other and with ourselves. The whole story of Scripture boils down to this one thing – this terrible fracture in relationship and how it can be overcome. This is what the laws in Exodus and Leviticus and Numbers and Deuteronomy were about – they were about healing the breach. The Law was a gift from God, given so that we might find our way back to God. What was at stake when a law was broken was no minor thing, even if the law itself might seem unnecessary in our eyes. What was at stake was further separation from God and from the people of God. This is what it meant to be defiled, this is what impurity was ultimately about – a rupture in the relationship between a person and God.
It is hard to take the Pharisees’ question seriously because the issue of defilement is so foreign to us. We chafe at the idea that our relationship with God could be dependent upon external ceremony. But Jesus does not mock or argue with their concern about defilement – he shares it.[1] Separation from God, from holiness, from each other, from ourselves – this is what Jesus came to mend. We don’t call it “defilement” but that is what it is. Life as God intended it has been spoiled, and our best intentions have been corrupted. Even when we try to do our best, we hurt each other and even ourselves. We find ourselves feeling cut off from God. This is what it means to be defiled.
Jesus shares the Pharisees’ concern about defilement. He also radically clarifies it. “It is not what goes into the mouth that defiles,” he says, “it is what comes out…. Because what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles.”
Jesus takes seriously the power in our words. According to him, our words matter very much. They seem so insignificant to us – just a little bit of air through the vocal cords, molded by the tongue and the lips, cut off with the teeth. Just a puff – and then the word is gone. That’s part of its power – we can’t take it back. Words are a kind of action: they can build up or tear down; they can encourage or manipulate; they can illuminate or deceive. Words can be the most vicious kind of weapons we have. They can create realities that shouldn’t be and destroy realities that should be. Words matter a great deal.
Most of all, words matter because they reveal the heart. They are like doors that open to show the world what’s inside of us, and who we are. The opening of those doors unleashes our actions for good and for ill. The heart is the place where our motives and intentions are born and take hold. All the good a person musters in life starts as the smallest intention in the heart. And the seeds of all the evil ever sown in the world started in the tiniest darkest places in human hearts. “What comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart,” Jesus says, “and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person….”
What this means is that the problem is much worse than we like to think. The problem is inside of us. The problem is with our hearts. It would be easier, actually, if the real problem was somehow somewhere out there, outside of us. We could close the doors to our heart to whatever would invade us from out there. We could keep certain laws, do very specific things, to make ourselves pure, to set ourselves right. It would be easier still to believe that because we’d been set free from those laws there was no problem at all anymore. But too often we find, in our freedom, that we feel just as separated from God as ever – sometimes so separated that we aren’t even sure God is out there anymore. And we find we are just as cut off from each other and ourselves as ever. Freedom doesn’t mean anything if it’s not for finding our purpose, our wholeness, our relatedness with God and with each another.
In this passage, Jesus just stops the teaching here (or so it seems). He points out where the problem is – the heart – and then he leaves. Where he heads is Gentile territory, where the people would not be asking the same kinds of questions as the Pharisees – they did not live by Jewish purity codes there. A Canaanite woman approaches him and begs his mercy and his healing for her daughter. He says nothing. The disciples urge him to send her away; they can’t stand her shouting. Jesus responds that his mission is to the lost sheep of the house of Israel, but she persists: “Lord, help me.” He insults her, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” “Yes, Lord,” she replies, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Here we are again, talking about food and religion. She doesn’t care a thing about ritual purity, what she wants is the real food this man was meant to bring. “Woman, great is your faith!” Jesus marvels, “Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter is healed. It is a disturbing story – to see Jesus respond to a woman’s distress first with silence, and then with insults. For some people, it is even more disturbing that Jesus is bested in an argument, and by a Gentile woman.
But it’s a marvelous story, too. This woman knows her need. She doesn’t argue that she’s good enough, or that she deserves what Jesus has come to bring. She throws herself on her knees, and she begs for his help. “This is (faith) down to basics: When we are thrown to our knees.” [2] “Lord, help me,” she asks. And she just keeps asking. And he gives her what she needs, and praises her faith.
This story may reframe how we see Jesus. Maybe it could also reframe how we see ourselves. We are supplicants. We are desperate. We are broken and needy. And if we want a fix for our unpure, broken, alienated hearts, then this is what we do. We throw ourselves down before him, and we pray the simplest prayer with her, “Lord, help me.” Help me.
“Lord, I want to be a Christian in my heart,” we sang a bit ago. It’s a prayer worth praying every day. “Lord, I want to be a Christian, I want to be move loving, more holy, more like Jesus, in my heart. Lord, here’s my heart, I can’t fix it. I’m giving it to you. Lord, help me.” It’s what he came for – to take our broken hearts and make them whole, to bridge the gap between us and God, to heal the rifts between us and each other, to take up all our faulty, dishonorable words and gather them into his perfect self, the Word made flesh, and then to give us new words to sing and to pray and to live.
[1] This idea from The Sword of His Mouth by Robert C. Tannehill.
[2] Steven Shoemaker. "When Jesus Changed His Mind," preached at Myers Park Baptist Church, 11 May 2008.
Saturday, July 12, 2008
The Word That Shines
The Word That Shines
Psalm 119:105-112
10th Sunday After Pentecost
13 July 2008
Most summers growing up, I went to old-fashioned Vacation Bible School at an old-fashioned Baptist Church. Every summer, every night of Bible School started the same. We kids would be lined up outside the sanctuary with three children at the head of the line. One child would carry the American flag, one would carry the Christian flag, and would carry a very large Bible. The three children would lead the rest of the group in a procession into the sanctuary. Sometimes I got to be one of them.
The leaders would stand in the front of the sanctuary while the rest of the children filed into the pews and would remain standing. Then the flag-bearer with the American flag would hoist the flag up and call out, “Attention. Salute. Pledge.” And we would all say the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. Then the flag-bearer with the Christian flag would call out, “Attention. Salute. Pledge.” And we would all say the Pledge of Allegiance to the Christian flag. And finally the child holding the big Bible would open the Bible, hold it out, and say, “Attention. Salute. Pledge.”
And together we would say these words: “I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God’s Holy Word. I will make it a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path and will hide its word within my heart that I might not sin against God.” And then we would all be seated for the assembly. I cannot ever read the words from this morning’s Psalm without remembering that ritual.
These words are only the tiniest portion of this Psalm, which is not only the longest Psalm but also the longest chapter in the Bible. This little verse, though, does reflect the message that is repeated throughout the longer Psalm, which is an extended meditation on the Torah, the Word of God. It is an acrostic of epic proportions, with each of the eight lines of each of the 22 stanzas beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and with every single stanza a meditation on the value of scripture. Almost every verse uses one of eight synonyms for “Torah.” The same message over and over, through 176 verses. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that in seminary he had been taught this was the most boring of all psalms – one commentator called Psalm 119 “a many-coloured mosaic of thoughts which are often repeated in wearisome fashion.” But during Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment by the Nazis, he discovered this to be the richest and sweetest psalm of all – it became his favorite - and he delighted in his long reflections on it. (1)
This psalm celebrates scripture as a beautiful, delicious gift, offering truths and promises and blessings to those who would seek to live by this Word. The psalmist in this Psalm frequently bursts out with exuberant proclamations like “How sweet are your words to my taste! Sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (119:103). Today’s verse is the most famous verse of this long psalm, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”
As a child, I found the image compelling – I could see myself walking a narrow path through a dark forest, just like in the fairy tales, holding this lantern as far in front of me as my little arm could stretch, and the lantern would throw out just enough light for me to see the roots and rocks that would otherwise have tripped me up.
Whatever I would later think about the Bible School ceremony of pledging allegiance to two flags and a Bible, this image has stayed with me as something right and good. It says something simple and something true, and I still find this image compelling – the idea that there is enough light in this Word to see by, enough light to navigate the bumpy and sometimes treacherous road of life, enough light to lead us safely where we need to go.
It is a vastly different image than many of us have these days. We have seen this book used as a weapon – a grenade to launch into battles about everything from how the world began to who is allowed to love whom. We have seen how this book has been used as a kind of shackle, too, to keep people in their assigned place – slaves, women, the poor. We have seen it treated as a science book, a rulebook, and a talisman. We have seen it treated as a god.
Wary of all the ways this book has been used, many of us have backed away from it. Some of us have come to regard it with feelings of confusion or fear or maybe even anger. Others of us have determined to approach it more coolly and scientifically, treating it as something to be dissected and deconstructed. We know things our ancestors didn’t, about the ancient cultures, about the people behind this book, about science, about prejudice, and we have used our knowledge to get a handle on these scriptures, to make them feel less threatening and maybe less demanding, and, in the end, maybe less relevant.
What has all our sophistication gotten us? A deeper sense of truth? A more vibrant faith? Do our souls feel more nourished because of our critical understandings about what Scripture is and what it isn’t? Do our lives have a more vigorous witness? Or are we still missing something? We may think we are done with looking at the Bible as anything more authoritative than a book of fairytales and fables. We may think we are done with it. But it is not done with us.
There is still light in it. There is still life in it. If we approach it with humility and with even the slimmest, most tentative openness, it does still bear the living Word of God. Light does shine.
To say that light comes from this old book, is to say not only that the Source of all light is behind these words, but also that we are living in something like darkness. And this is true. We are people who walk in darkness, in so many ways. We forget who we really are. We cannot see ourselves rightly. We do not see our world rightly. We see the surface and call it “reality.” We listen to the world’s definitions of who we are and of how things work, and we call it “realistic.” Scripture shines a light. It shines a light on our identity, as individuals and as God’s people. It throws its light both forwards and backwards: its stories give us back our memory, and show us a picture of who we’re meant to be. That same light shows how our lives don’t yet match that picture. The light shines on the mess we’ve made of things – but it also “spotlights how the wrongs may be righted by the turning of life, the power of grace to create mercy and justice, (and) new life.” (2) We walk through darkness, we face many dark realities – grief, death, cruelty, violence, injustice, betrayal – but light flashes through the words of this book to reveal glimpses of our hope, which is Christ.
According to the psalmist, the place this light directs itself toward is the ground. “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” This light is not something we sit down and bask in, it’s something we move with. One of the early rabbis insisted that the primary body part for taking in the word of God was not the ears or the eyes but the feet. You learn God, he said, not through your ears but through your feet: you follow. (3) You read the Word, you start following what you find there, and then you begin to receive its meaning. It begins to make a new kind of sense to you, and it begins making a new kind of sense of you.
Another word for that is obedience. John Calvin wrote, “all right knowledge of God is born of obedience.” (4) That word - obedience - makes some of us cringe. But it’s also true – this is how we learn God: we live in active response. We participate in the reality revealed in the book. We lean into it and we open our lives to it.
This is the strange and wonderful difference between this book and any other we might take off the shelf. We are not reading it to get knowledge or facts, or even to solve problems. We open this book, and if we enter it, if we engage it, if we actually try to participate in its truth, we find that the living God is in it. We are accustomed to thinking of the biblical world as somehow smaller than our “real” world. But the mind-blowing reality is that what God will reveal of Godself through these pages is beyond anything we can imagine. Obedience means a submission of our little lives to the big life of God we find there, and a willingness to follow where the light leads.
Maybe you feel stuck. Stuck in a complicated circumstance. Or stuck under a suffocating self-definition. Maybe you are mired in a sin or paralyzed by uncertainty. It can feel like you will never move forward. But there is this little light. Enough light to move with, a few steps at a time.
Or maybe you aren’t stuck so much as lost. Willing to move, but not sure the direction. Or maybe you aren’t lost. You are just propelled forward, moving up and moving on, going as fast and as hard as you can, but something isn’t quite right. Whatever your circumstance, there is this little shining light, radiating from this book. Enough light to help you on the way, enough light to move with, a few steps at a time.
We open the book and find ourselves in the story. We open the book and meet God there. We open the book and listen with our feet. We don’t have to know where we’re headed or how we’re going to get there. A lantern only throws its light a few feet ahead, but it’s enough to get us all the way home.
In the meantime, we let the light shine in. We quit narrowing our eyes in suspicion so much, and start opening them in wonder at what we find there. We read the Scriptures. We pray the Scriptures. We meditate on the Scriptures. If we’re daring, we even try to memorize the Scriptures. Most of all, we take them into our lives. We let their light fall on our path. We let their lamp light up our living. And before we know it, that light has gotten inside our hearts, too. And we begin to shine like the sun, in a world that needs such light as this.
(1) Eugene Peterson. Eat This Book, 64. Quoting from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Meditating on the Word, and Arthur Weiser’s commentary on the Psalms.
(2) Paul Simpson Duke. The Luminous Word.
(3) Eugene Peterson. Eat This Book. 61.
(4) John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. For Lewis Battles. Vol. 1, Chap. 6, Section 2.
Psalm 119:105-112
10th Sunday After Pentecost
13 July 2008
Most summers growing up, I went to old-fashioned Vacation Bible School at an old-fashioned Baptist Church. Every summer, every night of Bible School started the same. We kids would be lined up outside the sanctuary with three children at the head of the line. One child would carry the American flag, one would carry the Christian flag, and would carry a very large Bible. The three children would lead the rest of the group in a procession into the sanctuary. Sometimes I got to be one of them.
The leaders would stand in the front of the sanctuary while the rest of the children filed into the pews and would remain standing. Then the flag-bearer with the American flag would hoist the flag up and call out, “Attention. Salute. Pledge.” And we would all say the Pledge of Allegiance to the American flag. Then the flag-bearer with the Christian flag would call out, “Attention. Salute. Pledge.” And we would all say the Pledge of Allegiance to the Christian flag. And finally the child holding the big Bible would open the Bible, hold it out, and say, “Attention. Salute. Pledge.”
And together we would say these words: “I pledge allegiance to the Bible, God’s Holy Word. I will make it a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path and will hide its word within my heart that I might not sin against God.” And then we would all be seated for the assembly. I cannot ever read the words from this morning’s Psalm without remembering that ritual.
These words are only the tiniest portion of this Psalm, which is not only the longest Psalm but also the longest chapter in the Bible. This little verse, though, does reflect the message that is repeated throughout the longer Psalm, which is an extended meditation on the Torah, the Word of God. It is an acrostic of epic proportions, with each of the eight lines of each of the 22 stanzas beginning with a letter of the Hebrew alphabet, and with every single stanza a meditation on the value of scripture. Almost every verse uses one of eight synonyms for “Torah.” The same message over and over, through 176 verses. Dietrich Bonhoeffer once wrote that in seminary he had been taught this was the most boring of all psalms – one commentator called Psalm 119 “a many-coloured mosaic of thoughts which are often repeated in wearisome fashion.” But during Bonhoeffer’s imprisonment by the Nazis, he discovered this to be the richest and sweetest psalm of all – it became his favorite - and he delighted in his long reflections on it. (1)
This psalm celebrates scripture as a beautiful, delicious gift, offering truths and promises and blessings to those who would seek to live by this Word. The psalmist in this Psalm frequently bursts out with exuberant proclamations like “How sweet are your words to my taste! Sweeter than honey to my mouth!” (119:103). Today’s verse is the most famous verse of this long psalm, “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.”
As a child, I found the image compelling – I could see myself walking a narrow path through a dark forest, just like in the fairy tales, holding this lantern as far in front of me as my little arm could stretch, and the lantern would throw out just enough light for me to see the roots and rocks that would otherwise have tripped me up.
Whatever I would later think about the Bible School ceremony of pledging allegiance to two flags and a Bible, this image has stayed with me as something right and good. It says something simple and something true, and I still find this image compelling – the idea that there is enough light in this Word to see by, enough light to navigate the bumpy and sometimes treacherous road of life, enough light to lead us safely where we need to go.
It is a vastly different image than many of us have these days. We have seen this book used as a weapon – a grenade to launch into battles about everything from how the world began to who is allowed to love whom. We have seen how this book has been used as a kind of shackle, too, to keep people in their assigned place – slaves, women, the poor. We have seen it treated as a science book, a rulebook, and a talisman. We have seen it treated as a god.
Wary of all the ways this book has been used, many of us have backed away from it. Some of us have come to regard it with feelings of confusion or fear or maybe even anger. Others of us have determined to approach it more coolly and scientifically, treating it as something to be dissected and deconstructed. We know things our ancestors didn’t, about the ancient cultures, about the people behind this book, about science, about prejudice, and we have used our knowledge to get a handle on these scriptures, to make them feel less threatening and maybe less demanding, and, in the end, maybe less relevant.
What has all our sophistication gotten us? A deeper sense of truth? A more vibrant faith? Do our souls feel more nourished because of our critical understandings about what Scripture is and what it isn’t? Do our lives have a more vigorous witness? Or are we still missing something? We may think we are done with looking at the Bible as anything more authoritative than a book of fairytales and fables. We may think we are done with it. But it is not done with us.
There is still light in it. There is still life in it. If we approach it with humility and with even the slimmest, most tentative openness, it does still bear the living Word of God. Light does shine.
To say that light comes from this old book, is to say not only that the Source of all light is behind these words, but also that we are living in something like darkness. And this is true. We are people who walk in darkness, in so many ways. We forget who we really are. We cannot see ourselves rightly. We do not see our world rightly. We see the surface and call it “reality.” We listen to the world’s definitions of who we are and of how things work, and we call it “realistic.” Scripture shines a light. It shines a light on our identity, as individuals and as God’s people. It throws its light both forwards and backwards: its stories give us back our memory, and show us a picture of who we’re meant to be. That same light shows how our lives don’t yet match that picture. The light shines on the mess we’ve made of things – but it also “spotlights how the wrongs may be righted by the turning of life, the power of grace to create mercy and justice, (and) new life.” (2) We walk through darkness, we face many dark realities – grief, death, cruelty, violence, injustice, betrayal – but light flashes through the words of this book to reveal glimpses of our hope, which is Christ.
According to the psalmist, the place this light directs itself toward is the ground. “Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path.” This light is not something we sit down and bask in, it’s something we move with. One of the early rabbis insisted that the primary body part for taking in the word of God was not the ears or the eyes but the feet. You learn God, he said, not through your ears but through your feet: you follow. (3) You read the Word, you start following what you find there, and then you begin to receive its meaning. It begins to make a new kind of sense to you, and it begins making a new kind of sense of you.
Another word for that is obedience. John Calvin wrote, “all right knowledge of God is born of obedience.” (4) That word - obedience - makes some of us cringe. But it’s also true – this is how we learn God: we live in active response. We participate in the reality revealed in the book. We lean into it and we open our lives to it.
This is the strange and wonderful difference between this book and any other we might take off the shelf. We are not reading it to get knowledge or facts, or even to solve problems. We open this book, and if we enter it, if we engage it, if we actually try to participate in its truth, we find that the living God is in it. We are accustomed to thinking of the biblical world as somehow smaller than our “real” world. But the mind-blowing reality is that what God will reveal of Godself through these pages is beyond anything we can imagine. Obedience means a submission of our little lives to the big life of God we find there, and a willingness to follow where the light leads.
Maybe you feel stuck. Stuck in a complicated circumstance. Or stuck under a suffocating self-definition. Maybe you are mired in a sin or paralyzed by uncertainty. It can feel like you will never move forward. But there is this little light. Enough light to move with, a few steps at a time.
Or maybe you aren’t stuck so much as lost. Willing to move, but not sure the direction. Or maybe you aren’t lost. You are just propelled forward, moving up and moving on, going as fast and as hard as you can, but something isn’t quite right. Whatever your circumstance, there is this little shining light, radiating from this book. Enough light to help you on the way, enough light to move with, a few steps at a time.
We open the book and find ourselves in the story. We open the book and meet God there. We open the book and listen with our feet. We don’t have to know where we’re headed or how we’re going to get there. A lantern only throws its light a few feet ahead, but it’s enough to get us all the way home.
In the meantime, we let the light shine in. We quit narrowing our eyes in suspicion so much, and start opening them in wonder at what we find there. We read the Scriptures. We pray the Scriptures. We meditate on the Scriptures. If we’re daring, we even try to memorize the Scriptures. Most of all, we take them into our lives. We let their light fall on our path. We let their lamp light up our living. And before we know it, that light has gotten inside our hearts, too. And we begin to shine like the sun, in a world that needs such light as this.
(1) Eugene Peterson. Eat This Book, 64. Quoting from Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Meditating on the Word, and Arthur Weiser’s commentary on the Psalms.
(2) Paul Simpson Duke. The Luminous Word.
(3) Eugene Peterson. Eat This Book. 61.
(4) John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. For Lewis Battles. Vol. 1, Chap. 6, Section 2.
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