I love that Jesus is comparing us to birds and flowers. I love that he seems to even be making fun of us (albeit in a lovingly, big brother kind of way). And I love that Jesus is taking us to task for doing something that we often think makes us mature and responsible:
Worrying.
I love it because I am a chronic worrier. There seems to be a lot to worry about. The older I get, and the more responsibilities start creeping into my life...the more I use worry as a coping mechanism. The general idea is: the more I sit and stew about the things I have to do, the more those things will magically disappear.
Right?
No, Jesus has my number: “Can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life?”
We can’t. Nor can we by worrying add a single dollar to our paycheck, or single point to our credit score, or single...really great line to our sermon I’m writing right now.
As many have said before, worrying is stewing without doing. It does exactly nothing. Nothing good at least. It does give us ulcers, a stiff neck, and a pretty awful feeling. In addition, it gives us a giant obstacle in our journey of faith.
After all, what is worry but a fundamental distrust in the idea that God loves us and wants us to be okay? This is what Jesus is getting at.
You and I are better than birds.
You and I are worth more than grass.
And yet birds eat, and grass grows, and God will find a way for you and me to be okay too.
Often times, after reading Jesus’ sermon against worry, I wonder, How do I do it? I *want* to do it, but often find that I am unable. I’m like a junkie needing my worry fix. How do I get off the drug? What’s my worry-methadone?
This month I challenged the members of Community United Church of Christ to keep a Gratitude Journal, to remember the things you’re thankful for each day. And since I’m the pastor, I thought, Well, I better do it too I GUESS.
So each day, I’ve been posting on facebook three things for which I feel thankful. And it has ranged from the profound to the mundane. Some days I was thankful for deep and mysterious communion with God, other days I was thankful for a sandwich.
And sometimes I felt something when coming up with my three things, other days it was just another check mark on my To Do list.
But I have noticed this month a clear decrease in my urge to worry. Even when Amy and I were going over the family budget - typically the hardest conversation of the month. I usually get all stressed out, and that gets Amy all stressed out, which gets me even more stressed out.
But this time...
I still felt that anxiety that comes up any time I think of money, But I didn’t feel worry coming along to make things worse. I just felt like saying, Well, that’s the situation, and we’ll just have to rely on God to make it work. It seems like just reminding myself of proof that God is taking care of me, removed the need to worry.
Gratitude erases Worry.
So let us give thanks!
For the good news is that...there is good news!
And that reminding ourselves of that brings even better news.
May you notice the clues of God’s invisible hand in your life,
may you give thanks,
and may gratitude multiply your blessings.
Amen.
As a student of the bible, it’s hard for me to escape the conclusion that Jesus was difficult child.
This is the only biblical story we have of Jesus as a kid. Everywhere else, he’s either an adult or a baby. So this is all we have to go on, aside from the writer’s insistence that he was “filled with wisdom”
If kid Jesus was filled with wisdom, he doesn’t seem to be using much of it.
If this story is any indication, Jesus was a tough kid to control.
Let’s review:
Jesus’ parents, Mary and Joseph, take him along on a trip to Jerusalem, a trip they took every year. Jesus is 12 years old here. Old enough to know better. On the way back from Jerusalem, three days in, they discover that Jesus is nowhere to be found.
Now, the first question that springs to our minds is, What kind of parents don’t notice their kid is missing for three days?? In Joseph and Mary’s defence, in those days, they would have been traveling by caravan, with dozens of friends, family, and neighbors around. It was advantageous to travel this way to scare off thieves and survive the harsh desert. And at 12, Jesus would have been much closer to adulthood in his culture.
So it makes sense that he’d be with friends, or uncles, or cousins instead of hanging out with his parents. I’m sure Mary must have asked,”Did someone see Jesus?” and a camel driver or someone would have said, “Oh yeah, I think I saw him helping with supplies,” and Joseph said, “It’s okay he’s a big boy, and Mary saying, “I know, but I’m his mother...”
But by day 3, Mary must have been flipping out. “No one has seen Jesus. NO ONE. He might be dead! Or on drugs! Or dead AND on drugs! And YOU said he was a big boy!”
When it became clear that Jesus was gone, Mary and Joseph would have had to have made the hard to decision to leave the caravan, make the 3 day journey back to Jerusalem ALONE, and search for their son in the largest city in Israel (not to mention finding a way to get back home after that).
They must have been feeling like if Jesus wasn’t dead, they would kill him.
They do find him, in the Temple. Which may have been the first place they looked.Jesus obviously had an interest in the temple, and Mary at least would have know that. They find him sitting with the teachers, listening and asking questions. The bible says that “all who heard him were amazed at his understanding and his answers,” and they must have been if for six days no one bothered to ask, Hey who’s kid is this?
The first thing Mary says to Jesus is, “Child, why have you treated us like this?”
Which is a feeling every parent knows. I love you, I carried you, the vast majority of my life is taking care of you and trying to raise you as a good person. What part of that makes you want to write ‘poopie’ with permanent marker on the hood of my car?
And Jesus’ response... Well, he’s lucky it’s in the bible, because that makes his back talk sound all profound and holy: “Why were you searching for me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father’s house?” Joseph, as a stepparent, must have been furious. Listen mister, God didn’t change your diapers. I did!
The story says “they did not understand what he said to them.” And it truly is hard to understand kids in these moments. When they’ve done something so ridiculously deranged, it’s hard to see the logic that makes perfect sense to them. If you’re a teacher, a parent, or anyone who’s ever worked with kids, you’ve probably had this experience.
The story goes on to say that they made the journey home, Jesus “was obedient to them,” (finally), and Mary “treasured all these things in her heart.”
Wait, what?
I can understand laughing about it twenty years later... But treasuring this experience of anxiety and fear brought about because her son, even after going on this trip twelve times, couldn’t remember where and when to catch the caravan?
There is some advice on teaching kids in the Hebrew book of Proverbs. I love the way the King James Version of the bible puts it: “Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.”
I like that it’s not, train up a child the right way, or, train up a child in the way that all children should act, but “train up a child in the way he should go,” (or ‘she should go,’ as the case may be). Children are all different. Some have a very easy time with the way school is structured, or the rules of politeness we must teach them.
But others don’t. And they can be frustrating to teach. But this proverb tells us each child has an individual Way They Should Go, and that if we honor that, they will continue that path into adulthood.
In other words, we should not be like the father of Todd Marinovich.
Todd Marinovich was a quarterback for the Oakland Raiders. And to say Todd’s father, Marv, had pushed him into it would be an extreme understatement. Marv started his son’s athletic training before Todd could leave the crib. (My research couldn’t uncover what kind of physical training a baby can do. Rattle curls? A medicine ball mobile?) Also as a baby, Marinovich was fed only fresh vegetables, fruits, and raw milk. When he was just 19, Todd’s upbringing was reported on in Sport’s Illustrated under the headline "Bred To Be A Superstar"
But Todd Marinovich ended up in ESPN.com's list of The 25 Biggest Sports Flops, due to some serious substance abuse issues throughout his NFL career. It would have been impossible for Todd’s father to have prepared him any better for a football career, and yet it failed miserably, because clearly Todd didn’t love the life he’d been pushed into.
I find myself thankful that Mary and Joseph didn’t use this strategy on Jesus. Can you imagine Joseph training him to be the world’s best carpenter? Putting a hammer with him in his crib, quizzing him everyday on different types of wood ...and meanwhile Jesus is saying, “But Dad, I really like Tora School...”
Or even if they had trained him for what they knew he’d be: Messiah. Jesus was a very different Messiah than anyone had expected. No amount of training in military tactics or imperial government would have prepared him for the kind of liberating king he would be.
Instead, Mary treasured all these things in her heart.
Even when it drove her nuts, she had to smile thinking of her son hatching a plan to run away, so he could talk to teachers about the bible. She recognized the path her son was on, and prepared him for it.
We just had parent/teacher conferences with Joseph’s teacher this week. He has a great teacher, and it only took one comment to let me know that. She said, “I love to hear him read. He’s so expressive when he reads!” She caught on to my son’s enthusiasm for stories and performing. She could have griped about his inability to sit still, or his tendency to put uppercase letters in the middle of a word. Instead she saw him for who he is, and capitalized on it. She set him on the right path - his path.
That’s a good teacher.
And honestly good teachers are crucial to the wellbeing of our world.
The bible’s first chapter tells us that women and men were created in God’s image. And at that point in the story, God had done one thing: Created. We are like God because we create.
Even if you’re not doing something considered “creative.” Homemakers create loving homes. Police officers create safe neighborhoods. Restaurant servers create a night out for a family. Mechanics re-create working engines. No matter what you do, if it contributes to the world, it’s creative. And this is what good teachers push us toward.
We saw a shocking and brutal example this week of why that’s important, when a group of people carried out a plan to attack innocents, and succeeding in killing at least 129 people in Paris. What made them do this was not their religion. (1.7 million Parisian Muslims chose NOT to commit acts of violence that day.)
No, I suspect what really caused them to do it was a formative person (or persons) in their life who convinced them that their life purpose was not to creatively follow their own path, but destroy. That killing dozens of innocents and themselves was their best path. Teachers of destruction prey on young people who are without self worth or confidence, and shape them into destroyers.
This is why the world needs good teachers.
A good teacher sees, truly sees, their student and that gives them self worth. That gives them the confidence to create. Imagine if the killers had that kind of teacher. A voice in their life that could drown out the volume of voices that say you’re worthless.
So today, let us give thanks for our teachers.
The ones who saw us as an individual, not an obstacle.
The ones who put up with our antics because they saw our promise.
The ones who didn’t see us as lumps of clay to be formed, but formed our environment to put us on the path to our best creative potential.
And let us give thanks to the teachers doing the same thing today with our children and grandchildren.
For the good news is that God made each of us to create a different, beautiful part of the story, and put a few of us in the honored position of helping that story come true, by teaching.
May you
know that you are treasured -
that you are a unique person,
that you have a path,
and that your worth is beyond measure.
Amen.
The purpose of it is to say thank you to the people who have fought for us in our nation’s wars. But how does one properly show gratitude for something that big?
Veterans have lived through the trauma of war, so that others, like me, don’t have to. They’ve gone through things no one should ever have to: They’ve faced death, whether it was their own, their friends, or even the enemy’s, and that affects a person in ways a person like me can only imagine. Above and beyond all that, soldiers often come back from war with any number of heavy burdens.
They face the challenge of civilian life being very different from life in the military, a disadvantage that results in veteran unemployment being twice the rate of the national average.
They come home with PTSD or Traumatic Brain Injury (or a combination of both), and fail to receive the medical or psychological healing they need.
They often face having no help from the very nation they served. The Veteran’s Administration currently has a backlog of nearly 100,000 claims.
All these factors and more compound, resulting in the staggering statistic that one third of America’s homeless men are veterans.
How do we say thank you for that?
I feel very ill-equipped to answer that question. A simple “thank you” seems, to say the least, underwhelming. I think showing support is important, whether it’s giving to veteran organizations, like Wounded Warrior Project, or directly helping veterans in our lives. But after the kinds of sacrifices they’ve made for us, all this seems like no more than the least we could do.
It’s what we owe them.
What else can we do?
I didn’t have an answer. So I did some research. And something I was struck by was how many veterans felt unheard. Either folks bombard them with probing questions, or they awkwardly pretend the experience was no big deal. No one really stops to just listen. Listening without judgement, or questions, or interjections of political beliefs.
Just. Listening.
And I thought, We can do that. We can even do that in worship.
So I went to the internet looking for statements of veterans in their own words. I’ve picked out five diverse voices - different ages, different races, different genders, and different experiences.
And I’d like to ask you to simply read them.
Without judgement, just witness their words, try to see yourself in their boots, and listen.
Here they are:
John Valerio, US Army, Korean War:
[We] went up on...company patrol, and we made contact with the [enemy] while we were there. Unfortunately a few of the guys got killed. One of the the guys got in front of me, and [he] got killed. And I don’t know if he took the bullet that was meant for me, or what.
It’s not an easy thing to forget. As a matter of fact, you never forget. That this guy might have given up his life for me.
... I lost a lot of guys. One guy - [we] trained together and everything else - got killed over there. And you don’t forget it. You just don’t forget those guys. And you do get bad dreams about it, time and again.
... Once we saw one guy, a Korean guy, when he saw the Military Police, he started running... We were chasing him. He had a box with him, but we didn’t know what he had in the box. ... He didn’t have nothing, just sweet potatoes.
We almost killed [him].
... When you see the flag, pray for the flag. Enjoy the flag. ... And when you see veterans, go to them and say thank you. Thank you for what you[‘ve] done for us.
Angela Peacock, US Army, Iraq War:
[My vehicle came alongside a van full of Iraqi men who] began shouting that they were going to kill us. I can remember his eyes looking at me. I put my finger on the trigger and aimed my weapon at the guy, and my driver is screaming at me to stop.
I was really close to shooting at them, but I didn't.
[After coming home,] my husband kept saying, ‘Angie, it doesn’t make a good wife to just do the dishes and make dinner.’ I didn’t understand what he was talking about. My emotions were so numb that I couldn’t be intimate. I was still in soldier mode -- do the dishes, clean the house. But when it came to closeness or intimate feelings, there was nothing.
Thomas Carbone, US Army, Korean War:
Ya gotta tip your hat to a veteran, especially if he gets hurt. ...
When I fought in Heartbreak Ridge, I fought with all Black guys. All black. There was about maybe ten of us when we first got there. But you know what?
Blood is red.
Whether you’re Black, white, green, orange, you always look out for one another.
Steve Kohlreiter, US Navy, Vietnam War:
Veterans Day and Memorial Day mean two different things to me. [On] Memorial Day we’re honoring those [who] made the ultimate sacrifice. I didn’t. I made it back. Everybody I know made it back. Everybody you see at the VFW - we all made it back. We grew up, we had wives and families and kids, and...we’re living our dreams out.
So many guys didn’t.
They died in the prime of their life. It was taken away from them. ... And you wonder why. You question. Especially the Vietnam War, because nobody’s ever explained to us what that war was for.
Craig Hinds, US Navy, Iraq and Afghanistan:
It was very traumatic. The things that I’ve seen, I don’t want to even describe. ... When you see something in the head, you can’t control it. ... Later on you might dream about it, you might think about it later -- the mind plays tricks on you. Especially if you see it again, it might startle you or scare you or give you some anxiety. So I had a lot of nightmares. I saw a lot of things I didn’t want to see. It would be playing in my head. You can’t say stop.
... When I got out in 2009, that’s when I had a lot of difficulties. That’s when I had a real reality check, coming out of the military into -- well, we call it the civilian world, but from the military to the real world, it’s a crash course, it’s really different. For example, to get into the military, they take you away from everyone and everybody and they program you. You know what I mean? Boot camp, no phones, no nothing. This is what it takes to be a soldier. They take away what it’s like to be a normal person, a civilian, they want you a certain way, they train you that way.
Unfortunately, when it’s time to leave, they don’t train you to be a regular person.
You still come out of the military military-minded, used to the military standards and military structure, so when you come out, it’s not as structured out there so it takes a real adjustment period, and it’s really hard finding resources. You ask five people the same question, you get five different answers.
... My compensation still hadn’t kicked in yet, because the VA’s really backed up. I found myself homeless. A lot of people think when they hear homeless veteran, they think of some old Vietnam dude who’s an alcoholic but no, I was only 34. There was a lot of people a little bit younger, a little bit older than me. There’s no age group for it. There’s no age, there’s no race, it affects all of us who come out of the military.
I would like to finish with as little commentary as possible, so I’ll just say this:
The writer of Ephesians reminds us of the power of prayer, that there is a spiritual war happening behind the scenes of what we see.
So let us pray for our veterans,
in Truth,
in Justice,
in Faith,
in Salvation,
in God’s Spirit,
and hoping in God’s peace.
In the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, one would think that the most important part of the story is, well, Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.
This is a big time miracle! Lazarus, four days dead, suddenly coming back to life. Coagulated blood, somehow thinning as his heart pumps back to life! Rotting flesh, rewinding into living tissue! Air gasping into those flattened lungs! Death reversed! life renewed! This is the headline, right?
But that does not seem to be the author’s intent.
In John 11, 6 verses are dedicated to the miracle, while 37 verses detail Jesus’ process of finding out about Lazarus’ death, responding to it, and grieving with others. Thirty-seven verses of weeping, sighing, and asking questions about why.
Why does the author spend more ink on mourning than on the miracle?
When Jesus first hears about Lazarus being sick and close to dying, he makes it a priority to be with Lazarus’s family and friends. This isn’t surprising...until we discover the circumstances. Lazarus’s family is in Bethany, two miles from Jerusalem. The last time Jesus was in Jerusalem, he had people who wanted to throw rocks at him.
He is not a popular guy in Jerusalem.
In fact, when Jesus decides to go, Thomas (one of his students) says, “Let us also go, that we may die with him.” Thomas understands that going so close to Jerusalem at this time means he’s taking a risk with his life.
So Jesus believes that it’s so important to be with fellow grievers that he risks his life to do it.
When Jesus arrives, he acts strangely for someone who’s about to perform a resurrection. I feel like if it were me, I’d come in saying, Turn those frowns upside down, people! I’m gonna bring him back to life! No one needs to be sad! Miracle-man here to save the day!
Jesus doesn’t do that.
He allows people space to be sad. He listens when people have their questions (even when they’re painful, like, If only YOU had got here sooner, couldn’t you have kept him alive?). Jesus even cries.
The man who can raise the dead cries. Because his friend is dead.
There are two stages of Jesus’ own grief that I think are important. First, when Jesus sees Mary, Lazarus’s sister, crying, and the other mourners weeping with her, “he was greatly disturbed in spirit and deeply moved.”
This is one of those cases where our technically correct translation misses the flavor of the original. In the original language, this statement is evocative of being agitated the way water is agitated by a storm, and of groaning from the very depths of your soul.
Feeling that way when you see your friend crying... To me, this is the moment when Lazarus’s death became real to Jesus.
Have you ever been in denial over something? Have you ever not realized you were in denial until one little thing tips the scales for you, and all of sudden makes it real to you?
I think this is what’s happening to Jesus. Seeing Mary cry is Jesus’ tipping point. It’s what moves him to accept the reality of Lazarus’s death.
The second stage comes when Jesus is on the way to Lazarus’s tomb, and he begins to weep. As he’s walking, he must be thinking about his realization. His friend is gone. Even though Jesus believes Lazarus will be back (and back soon!), right now Lazarus is 100% gone. They’re walking to a cave that holds his lifeless body. Jesus can’t talk with him. Jesus can’t laugh with him. Jesus can’t even see him, because he is dead and gone.
What’s going on on the inside - the roiling water, the groaning soul - finally spills out to the outside. Jesus expresses his grief outwardly.
First Jesus accepts the reality, then he processes the pain.
These are two vital tasks of someone in mourning. Accepting the reality of the death, and processing through the pain.
We often try to bypass those tasks. We skip past the reality and pain, and go straight to celebrating the memory. Too often, we do this when someone else is grieving and we are comforting. We say things like She is in a better place, or He wouldn’t want you to be sad. We have good intentions - we just want to get someone to a place of happiness, quickly.
But we can arrive at “happiness” too quickly, when there are still dark and painful feelings just under the surface. These feelings don’t go away until we process them, experience them, walk through them.
Jesus understood that. And that’s why he’s weeping right before a resurrection.
At the end of the story, after the stone has been rolled away from the tomb, and Jesus has cried out, “Lazarus, come out,” Lazarus does come out, but he’s wrapped up head to toe in burial cloth. He’s literally wrapped up like a mummy, and his feet are bound together. It’s a surreal way for this miracle to climax, with Laz hopping out and going, MMFMM MFFFM MMM MM!
So Jesus says the obvious: “Unbind him, and let him go.”
And then what we don’t see (because the story ends here) is this long process of unraveling Lazarus. First his head, so he can see and speak. Then down his body so his hands are free. Then further down until he can finally walk.
And then he’s free. Free to be Lazarus again. A new Lazarus, no doubt. But still Lazarus.
It’s a good metaphor of what it’s like to grieve. When the worst happens, we wrap ourselves in a layer of denial and numbness. This is natural. It’s how we protect ourselves emotionally. But while wrapped up, we’re hindered. We can’t see or talk properly. We sometimes can barely move.
If we ever can get to something like normal, we need to unwrap ourselves. And that doesn’t happen instantly. It’s a process.
We are in our Month of Thanks. But when we’re wrapped up, sometimes it hurts too much to give thanks. But Jesus shows us that it’s possible. In the story, Jesus says, “Father, I thank you,” as he’s about to resurrect Lazarus. But he doesn’t say it until after he accepted the death and expressed his grief. Accepting and weeping made it possible for him to then thank God.
This story gives us hope in resurrection - that our deceased loved ones will live again someday. But that day could be a long way away. Until then, we must mourn, and mourn well.
The good news is that we have a savior who knows what that’s like. We don’t have a Christ that is so holy that he can’t be bothered with human emotions. We have a Christ who missed his friend Lazarus. Who couldn’t believe his friend could be taken from this world.
Jesus wept, and weeps with us when we mourn.
So let us not hold back.
Let us feel the reality of death.
Let us express the pain of death.
And let us move on to a place of gratitude, where we can make meaning of a life ended.
For God became one of us, and cries with us when we cry.
May you be unbound and let go,
feeling the turbulent waters of grief and the groaning soul of mourning,
but never feeling them alone.
For our God cries with you.
The following is a sermon I prepared for the wedding of my dear friends Galadriel and Russ. It’s about Batman.
I am honored to be officiating this wedding. I’ve known Galadriel since junior high, and Russ for nearly that long, and they are two very special people. And I want to thank them the only way I know how: with a sermon.
A very special couple deserves a special sermon. So today I will be preaching from the Book of Batman.
Specifically, The Return of Bruce Wayne, issue 6, panels 1-130.
In an adventure taking Batman to the end of time, he discovers the mysterious Archivists robots. Their responsibility is to archive all the events of the universe, and they are currently archiving the last and greatest story: that of Batman.
Three symbols represent Batman’s story: a gun, pearls, and a bell. The gun of course symbolizes the tragedy that left him alone as a child. The pearls, from his mother, represent the love for others that drives his war on crime.
But what about that bell? What does a bell have to do with Batman?
Most fans know that Batman was born when a bat flew through Bruce Wayne’s window, giving him the idea to be a symbol of terror to criminals. But if you’ve read Batman: Year One, you know that right before that bat flew into Wayne Manor, Bruce out was trying to fight crime without a costume.
And it went very badly.
So before the bat comes, he’s sitting there, praying to his father, bleeding out - close to dying - but refusing to summon his butler Alfred (who could tend to his wounds) until the way forward is revealed to him.
When finally the bat comes, Bruce does summon Alfred...by ringing a bell.
Quoting scripture:
“The first truth of Batman... It had to be one I don’t like to admit. The gunshots left me alone. But something else defined the exact moment Batman was born. The first truth of Batman... The saving grace. I was never alone.”
Galadriel.
Russell.
From this day forward, may you never be alone.
May you be Alfred to each other, when one of you needs healing.
May you be Robin to each other, when one of you needs a partner.
May you be Commissioner Gordon to each other, when one of you needs a friend in a hostile world.
May you be Catwoman to each other, when you need a sexy chase atop the city skyline.
And may you be Superman to each other, when you need to trust someone with vulnerabilities that you don’t share with any other person. (Because of Batman’s kryptonite ring. Inside baseball, I know, but it is a really great metaphor of which I’m very proud.)
In other words,
May you never forget that first and greatest of truths: that you have each other.
No matter what.
Today’s scene could be called “Adventures in Missing the Point, Part III.” (It’s actually called “The Request of James and John,” because the people who write subheadings in bibles aren’t very creative.)
For the third time, Jesus is telling his students exactly how the story will end, and for the third time, they don’t get it at all.
And the stakes are higher than they’ve ever been.
Jesus and his followers are on their way to Jerusalem. Jerusalem was Israel’s cultural and religious capital. The Temple was there, the centerpiece of their religious life. Jesus called Jerusalem the place where prophets go to die. Prophets say things that make kings uncomfortable, so they often died in Jerusalem, where kings could hear them and execute them.
In other words, Jesus’ mission is coming to a head. He’s been playing the smaller towns around Jerusalem, but this is the first time he’s heading to the big city. And since Jesus claimed the title “Messiah” two chapters ago, this is where Jesus’ followers would expect him to take his throne. The Jewish Messiah was a divine king who would defeat the Roman occupation, and usher in a new golden age.
And the story specifies two emotions that Jesus’ followers had while following him into Jerusalem: amazement and fear.
These are of course completely natural in the circumstances. They’d be amazed in an Is-this-really-happening?? kind of way. Are we really marching into Jerusalem to take back our nation? Are we going to finally be victorious?
But the other side of that coin is fear. Jesus was not the only so-called Messiah. Usually Messiahs were violent revolutionaries, and the Roman Empire was very good at ending revolutions. Nailing rebels to crosses is a very effective deterrent. So Jesus’ following is feeling amazed at what could be, and afraid of what else could be.
This is often how we react to Newness. Change brings with it both dread and anticipation. Every new thing can turn out wonderfully great or terribly wrong. On the eve of Newness, we can’t know what to expect.
Newness is Amazing and Scary.
But Jesus knows they’re amazed at and afraid of the wrong future. He’s said twice that his way of being Messiah has nothing to do with their expectations, and he tries a third time, this time being as explicit as he can. I can almost hear him explaining, as if to children, exactly what’s going to happen in as much detail as he can:
“See, we are going up to Jerusalem, and the Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death; then they will hand him over to the Gentiles; they will mock him, and spit upon him, and flog him, and kill him; and after three days he will rise again.”
...make sense? Maybe this time they got it.
Nope.
The very next moment, James and John ask for a favor: “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”
Don’t you hate when someone asks for a favor before telling you what it is?
Jesus isn’t buying it. He asks what the favor is. So James and John say: “Grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your glory.”
Small favor. Just make us Vice President and Secretary of State when you come to power. They just want the best seats in the throne room.
They don’t get the death and rebirth thing. They are still imagining that Jesus’ mission ends with the thirteen of them as conquerors.
I imagine a wry smile on Jesus’ face at this point. “You do not know what you are asking. Are you able to drink the cup that I drink, or be baptized with the baptism that I am baptized with?” “Drinking the cup” and “baptism” were images of dying for the early Christian audience of this story. Jesus is saying, You think you’re asking to be sitting next to me in my boardroom, but actually you’re asking to be buried next to me. Is that what you want? Can you do that?
Well it gets around that James and John were calling “shotgun” on high ranking positions, and the rest of the Twelve get mad. So Jesus calls everyone together for an emergency lesson. He uses the Roman Empire of an example of what they are NOT.
“You know that among the Gentiles those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them.” Here’s the result of a conquering army, says Jesus, another empire takes the place of conquered one. We would be dethroning those oppressing us, only to become the oppressors.
“But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many.”
Jesus has a different vision for his kingdom.
Jesus hopes to avoid the violent cycle of one empire overthrowing another, only to be conquered by another. He wants to do it by subverting the idea of authority. In Jesus’ Empire, you don’t get ahead by smashing others down. To rise up the chain of command in God’s kingdom is to get down on your knees and serve.
Jesus talks about giving his life as a “ransom for many.” That word ransom refers to the price paid for a slave’s freedom. Instead of collecting rights and privileges to signify his authority, Jesus offers a new model: Giving up his rights (even his right to live) to purchase the right of freedom for others.
That’s what gives him authority in God’s kingdom.
That’s Newness.
That’s New Newness.
This New Newness might be more amazing and scary than the old Newness! But it’s amazing and scary in a new way. Instead of being amazing and scary because we don’t know how if it will turn out for good or bad, the New Newness is somehow amazing and scary all at the same time. It is life and death and resurrection. It promises pain, rejection, and death, but ends in new life. It is badness made goodness.
One of my favorite books is still The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. In one scene, when the Pevensie children have just arrived in the land of Narnia, they are at Mr. and Mrs. Beaver’s house and first learn about Aslan.
Aslan is the true king of Narnia and a lion.
One of the children says that meeting a lion doesn’t sound safe to her. Mr Beavers says, “Safe? ...don’t you hear what Mrs. Beaver tells you? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.”
The kingdom of God is not safe. But it’s good.
Paul, a pastor in the early church who wrote much of he New Testament, said that in the face of all sorts of hardship, violence, and oppression, “we are more than conquerors through [Christ] who loved us.” It’s easy to hear that as mere exaggeration. Like, We conquer so hard, we’re MORE than conquerors!
I think Paul means what he’s saying. We’re not conquerors - we’re more than conquerors.
Paul understood Jesus’ kingdom: that living for service and giving up your life in the name of love does so much more than what a conqueror can do. Conquerors merely fight hard enough to become the boss of everyone. Servants love hard enough to be the hero of everyone. Emperors and dictators are a dime a dozen in our world’s history. But people who truly changed the course of history for the betterment of humankind are rare.
An ancient biblical poet wrote a song that begins,
“O sing unto the Lord a new song...”
and ends,
“...with Justice shall he judge the world, and the people with equity.”
God’s kingdom isn’t newness for newness’s sake. It has a goal: A just world where all are treated fairly. Serving each other is how that world arrives. Incredibly, God has made us partners in Thy Kingdom Come.
Are we up to the challenge?
When Jesus asked James and John if they were prepared to to drink the cup he was going to drink, they said, “We are able.” (Clearly still not getting it.)
But Jesus said back to them, “The cup that I drink you will drink;”
Jesus couldn’t have been referring to the near future. Jesus seemed to know a lot about how his story was to end, and it ended with James, John, and the other ten ALL abandoning him when trouble came.
They were not ready to drink the drink. But James, John, and the other Ten did go on to live lives of service, and most of them lost their life for it. In the end, they did drink the drink. Jesus must have saw that in them.
We may not be ready when the New Newness comes. We may continue to bicker and argue about who sits where, or even outright flee. But it appears the New Newness is stronger than our mistakes. The New Newness comes and blows us away anyway. We are not ready for it, but it is ready for us.
Change is in the air.
Our world is changing.
Our church is changing.
Even the leaves are changing.
There will be two ways of adapting to this change. One is to master it. Conqueror it. Pound it down until it succumbs to our will. (Or die trying.)
The second is to experience it. Live through it as Jesus did. To think not about how we can be served, but how we can serve others. Dying daily to our old way of being, and being reborn daily into our new way of being.
The good news is that death doesn’t stop us.
We live a resurrection story.
When we face empires, we face them.
Not oscillating between fear and amazement,
but living in awe and wonder of God’s resurrection power.
May you
live not in fear of a bad outcome,
nor in amazement of a good outcome,
but embrace fearful amazement of the new story God is telling through you.
Amen.
Whenever I read this scene, I’m alarmed at how little we are alarmed by it.
We Christians believe that all people need a savior. But our actions often betray a belief that some people need Jesus more than others. I’ve given sermons at a homeless shelter where the men the shelter served were not invited to dinner until after the worship service, the implication being that (whether they knew it or not) they needed the sermon more than the food.
In my hometown of Utah, I was involved in curriculum to help Mormons come to Christ, the implication being that their religious outlook put them farther away from Christ.
And then there’s this sign:
This sign lists (in appalling grammar) every conceivable type of person who needs to repent.
We have lots of target audiences that we tend to think need Jesus more than us, but... I’ve never seen a protest sign, or a program, or a ministry designed to save the wealthy.
And yet here is Jesus, saying as plain as day, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
Often times, when Jesus says something strange, we can look at the context and discover that he’s not saying quite what we assumed he’s saying. But I’m afraid that even in Jesus’ day, the holes in needles were very small, and camels were huge, lumpy mammals. Jesus is indeed saying it is very, very hard for a wealthy person to be a part of God’s kingdom.
This ought to be alarming to us!
We live in a culture that celebrates wealth. We have reality TV shows dedicated to wealthy families, where the only plot seems to be, Hey, look how rich they are!
But you may be saying, as I would, Hey, *I* am not rich. I struggle to pay the bills every month.
Me too. I get it. But the truth is, from a global perspective, we’re all rich.
There is a website called the Global Rich List, which can compare your wealth to the rest of the world. I entered my humble pastor’s salary into it, and it turns out I am embarrassingly rich. I am in the top 0.2% richest people in the WORLD.
That means that 99.8% of the world is poorer than me. It would take the average laborer in Zimbabwe 58 years to earn my yearly salary. I earn the same amount as 258 doctors in Kyrgyzstan. I am ridiculously wealthy, and probably so are you.
Even if you earn only $11,770/year - the federal poverty rate for a single person - you are richer than 85% of the world. I don’t say that to diminish the challenges that people in poverty in the US face. But the truth is, when we struggle to pay the electric bill, much of the world can’t even imagine having electricity. When we can’t afford to eat out, much of the world can’t afford to eat.
So when Jesus says it is hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God, we, the rich people of the world, should pay attention.
But even then our hearts rebel against this pronouncement that seems really unfair. So we happened to be born in the richest nation on earth! Is that our fault? Are we being punished for being blessed?
It must have been how this man felt, that approached Jesus in all sincerity saying, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
Jesus says, Well, you know the rules right? and starts listing off the Ten Commandments. The man says, “Teacher, I have kept all these since my youth.”
Which is interesting.
This is a guy who has followed all the rules, and still feels unworthy. He’s trying hard...but something’s still missing. He’s basically coming to Jesus and asking, What is it? What am I missing?
The story makes a note of saying that Jesus looked at him, and loved him. That’s important. What Jesus is about to say isn’t out of spite, or class warfare. He loves this man and wants to help him.
“You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.”
And the story says he went away grieving, for he had many possessions.
That’s such an interesting sentence to me. He went away grieving, for he had many possessions. All of his stuff had made him sad. He was sad from stuff.
It still seems unfair. This guy could have bankrolled Jesus’ ministry! He could have used his money to spread Jesus’ message all throughout Israel! But Jesus said, Nope. Get rid of it all. Why?
There is a researcher named Paul Piff who studies how wealth affects us.
One of his studies featured a rigged monopoly game. Researchers took pairs of players, flipped a coin, and gave one player significant advantages over the other: They started with 2x the money. They got twice the money for passing “Go.” And they rolled two dice instead of one. Then they recorded the games with a hidden camera.
The behavior of the “rich” players were pretty bonkers. They tended to move around the board more aggressively, smacking their token around the board as they went. The richer players were more likely to show signs of dominance or celebration, even became rude about their victories. The researchers even set out a bowl of pretzels to measure consumption, and sure enough the rich players consumed more of them.
At the end, when researchers asked the rich players why they had won the game, they talked about what they had done, not the ways in which the game was rigged from the beginning.
That’s not the only experiment Paul Piff and his team conducted. They also tracked automobiles and found that drivers of more expensive cars were less likely to stop for a pedestrian at a crosswalk.
In another experiment, they simply put participants in a room with a jar of candy and told them not to take any, explicitly stating that the candy was for children. Participants who felt rich took twice as much candy.
In all of his research, Piff concludes, “I have been finding that increased wealth and status in society lead to increased self-focus and, in turn, decreased compassion, altruism, and ethical behavior."
Money, it seems, makes us mean.
By no means does Piff’s research suggest that no rich people are generous, or that only rich people are selfish. We of course all struggle with whether to be selfish or selfless, no matter what our income level. But the research does show that, in Piff’s words, “the wealthier you are, the more likely you are to pursue a vision of personal success, of achievement and accomplishment, to the detriment of others around you.” If being generosity is a marathon, having wealth is like running that race with a sopping wet overcoat. It only slows you down.
I think Jesus understood this.
When Jesus spoke about the kingdom of God, he wasn’t just talking about heaven. He was talking about a new way of living. He often said that the kingdom of God is here, right now, and available. But the kingdom is also all about love. Those who cannot love are going to be uncomfortable.
No wonder Jesus looks at this man and loves him. He was able to live a just and loving life, IN SPITE of the burden of money. Jesus’ invitation to him was, Come. Leave all that. See how much fuller life can be.
Often times we’re so shocked by the first part of Jesus’ invitation, “go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor,” that we don’t really hear the second part: “and you will have treasure in heaven.”
Treasure in heaven. Think about what that means.
A bank account in the unseen universe.
Cosmic capital.
That sounds more exciting to me than mundane money.
What is this cosmic capital? I think it’s the kind of wealth that cannot be lost.
Jesus suggests elsewhere that cosmic capital cannot be destroyed or stolen, unlike our stuff. I think Jesus means the things money can’t buy: relationships, trust, unforgettable moments, joy, fulfillment.
Life.
I think cosmic capital is life. A life worth living.
And money gets in the way of that. Jesus compared money to thorns that choke the life out of a good plant. Which is ironic, as we so often see money as the lifeblood that keeps us going.
Jesus sees each dollar as an opportunity to choose greed or generosity. And the more dollars I have, the more I’m tempted to be selfish.
So what do we do? Give up all our possessions and give them to the poor?
Honestly, that’s an option. If you’re brave enough, Jesus says you won’t be disappointed.
Realistically, very few of us are prepared to do that. So I think intentionality is the key. We must be cognizant of our wealth. We must realize that every dollar is an opportunity to bless ourselves or bless others. And that that is not an easy choice.
So must also be willing and ready to part with our money. We cannot view our money as something that keeps us alive. Keeping us alive is God’s job. We probably ought to start seeing it as something that hinders our ability to be good. Less money is just less opportunities to be selfish, and more opportunity to trust God.
For the good news is that our money can be traded for something far more valuable.
Cosmic Capital.
Life. And life abundant.
Amen.
MAY YOU
enter boldly into the new way of being God has for you,
where money is strictly unnecessary.
Amen.
Our job is to convince you that God is real and cares about you, and here’s Job, smack in the middle of the bible, challenging that. The central theme of Job is the one question we religious professionals have never been able to answer satisfactorily: Why do bad things happen to good people?
What is it doing in the bible??
Perhaps it gets to stay in merely because it’s undeniably a great story.
I can’t think of a story with a more interesting opening scene. Our main character, Job, is set up. He is, in every sense a “good person”: “blameless and upright, one who feared God and turned away from evil.” And he’s got a great life: He is financially successful, and has a big family that he cares deeply about.
Then, just as we’re getting comfortable, the author pulls back the curtain and reveals the supernatural world of God and the “heavenly beings.” God holds court with these heavenly beings, the way a king would with his advisors.
Surprisingly, one of those advisors is...Satan.
This is the first time Satan appears in the biblical story, and his depiction in this story often surprises readers. Satan appears to be on God’s side; certainly filling the role of - no pun intended - devil’s advocate, but definitely working with God.
I mentioned in a recent sermon that the word Satan actually means The Accuser. And that seems to be his role in this story - making sure humanity doesn’t get away with anything. God loves humanity - particularly Job, whom God brags about - but Satan offers another perspective:
“Does Job fear God for nothing? Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land. But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.”
Satan proposes an experiment: Take away Job’s blessings, and he’ll no longer be so blameless and upright. Scandalously, God gives the go ahead and plays a game with Job’s life.
This is a demoralizing view of God. God is willing to make Job go through hell, just to prove a point to Satan.
And Job does go through hell: One by one by one, servants appear telling Job that another pillar of his financial empire has been destroyed, until finally, one comes to report that his seven sons and three daughters have been killed in a freak accident. Nearly everything is taken from him in an instant.
Job tears his robe and shaves his head - signs of mourning in his culture - and enters a depression. But, the story notes, “In all this Job did not sin or charge God with wrongdoing.”
So God continues to brag on Job: “He still persists in his integrity, although you incited me against him, to destroy him for no reason.” (Worth noting: God has just admitted to destroying a man’s life for no reason.)
Satan still isn’t convinced: “Skin for skin! All that people have they will give to save their lives. But stretch out your hand now and touch his bone and his flesh, and he will curse you to your face.” The experiment is not yet over in Satan’s opinion. We people will be resilient in the face of loss, but take our health away, and we will crack.
Gods says, “Very well, he is in your power; only spare his life.”
So Satan covers Job in “loathsome sores...from the sole of his foot to the crown of his head.” Job is reduced to sitting on a pile of ashes, scraping himself with a broken pot.
This is a monstrous story. God and Satan, in the heavenly court, making bets on the life of a good person. This good person is stripped of security, family, and health, and God looks on, mildly interested - not in Job’s welfare, but in the little bet made with Satan.
This view of God is scandalous.
But this view of God is also relatable.
If you have never felt this way about God before, I pray you never have to go through something like the things that made the rest of us feel it.
The death of someone we’ve loved dearly.
The health condition that just will not go away.
The series of tragedy after tragedy after tragedy, that reduce us to hopelessness. The good we’ve done or tried to do seems to mean nothing to God, because the bad keeps coming.
Even when it doesn’t happen to you, there is the news. Where once again, we see another senseless mass shooting. These attacks happen far too often, to the point where they are commonplace. We’d be forgiven for asking,
Where is God?
Does God even care?
Let us acknowledge that EVERYONE has felt this. I know this is church and we should appear pious and faithful, but the truth is that everyone experiences this feeling of God’s absence. Mother Teresa, founder of the Missionaries of Charity and the epitome of a good person, had, in the last half of her life, a profound feeling of God’s absence. For 50 years she felt no presence of God whatsoever. In her own words:
Where is my faith? Even deep down ... there is nothing but emptiness and darkness ... If there be God—please forgive me. When I try to raise my thoughts to Heaven, there is such convicting emptiness that those very thoughts return like sharp knives and hurt my very soul
If Mother Teresa can experience this feeling so acutely, so can we all.
So even if the opening scene of Job is terrifying in it’s portrayal of God - something we HOPE is not true, there is nonetheless a huge amount of emotional resonance to it.
But obviously the whole bible doesn’t have this outlook. Compare Job to the 26th Psalm which begins,
“Establish Justice for me, Lord,
because I have walked with integrity...”
This poet seems to affirm the truth that God will defend good people, while the story of Job paints a picture of an indifferent God.
Which is right?
We have a pesky habit of looking at the bible like a constitution.* If we want to establish the truth or falsity of something, we cite a verse that proves our point, and that is that.
This is problematic because, taken piece by piece, the bible can be used to justify anything. Just last week I talked about a community that uses the bible to justify the message that God hates everyone (except them). And the bible has been used to justify slavery, bloody conquest, abuse, and racism. All because someone took one or two verses and pronounced them the final word.
But the bible just doesn’t work like a constitution. It’s mostly stories, not laws. It was written by 40 different authors over roughly 2000 years. And while the bible shows remarkable cohesion, it does not always agree with itself. There are psalms of joy, and then there are lamentations. There are praises of God for being perfect, and there are challenges to God’s perfection. There is “fear not, for I am with you,” and then there is “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Is the bible contradicting itself?
I don’t think so. I think the bible is a conversation.
I think this because the book of Job is a conversation. After the opening, Job is joined by three friends, who offer him advice. All of their pieces of advice are variations on a theme of convincing Job he must have done something to make God mad. Job insists that he has done nothing wrong, and the vast majority of the book is dedicated to this back and forth. In the end, GOD shows up and joins the conversation.
But does God provide answers?
No.
God asks questions.
The whole story ends the way a good conversation does, not with a Well, looks like we all agree on what the truth is, but with a sense of wonder and awe that despite talking it over and over we’ve only scratched the surface of the truth.
By the end of the story, we’re no closer to finding an answer to the central question: Why do bad things happen to good people? Job has to face that he doesn’t know the answer, and never will. So was the whole story a waste of time? No, because Job concludes, “I relent and find comfort on dust and ashes” (Job 42:6, CEB).
Job is changed by the conversation.
The conversation has transformed and comforted him. He is still in dust and ashes, he still has no answers, but he is comforted.
The bible is a conversation.
One of my favorite writers, Brian McLaren, says the bible does not “tell us to shut up and listen, because everything is settled... ...it invite[s] us to be part of the conversation...” Hallelujah, the bible is not a mediocre answer book, but a dynamic conversation that invites us in!!
Before his three friends show up, Job receives some advice from someone very close to him, his wife. She sees Job in his pain and anguish and offers this: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God and die.”
You know you’re having a bad day when your wife tells you to curse God and die.
But think of it from her point of view. She sees her husband struggling against an impossible opponent - GOD - and urges him to give up and be free from the pain of struggle. Because the struggle is the only thing keeping Job alive.
When we are confronted with this world of pain, sorrow, and confusion, and it makes us feel like either there is no God, or that God is a monster, should we just curse God and die?Just give up on the struggle and stop hoping for anything better? Accept that the world is a dark place and God doesn’t care?
That would at least be an answer.
To me, the lesson of Job is that a conversation is better than an answer.
Why do bad things happen to good people? We may never know the answer, but anyone can have the conversation. And it’s a good conversation. It invigorates us, spurs us on, even heals us as it did Job.
I studied film in my undergrad. I took a class on Ingmar Bergman, the great Swedish director. He directed The Seventh Seal and Persona (which unless you’re a film geek, you’ve probably never heard of). Bergman made heavy films that dealt with deep questions, notably, Is there a God? This was an important question for Bergman, and he struggled with it in his own life.
The professor of this class was giving us a biographical outline of Bergman and noted that one point in his career, Bergman stopped going back and forth and became and atheist. Then my professor chuckled to himself and said, “His films became a lot less interesting after that.”
The struggle is, at the very least, more interesting.
We will never have hard evidence that God exists and cares for us. But keeping the conversation going is what makes us alive. Wondering if, and hoping that God is good, is a lot more interesting that the assumption that God is not.
Why do bad things happen to good people?
I don’t know.
What do you think?
The bible invites us into the conversation.
Today is World Communion Sunday. Today we celebrate the worldwide church and the connection we share: that we all have this practice that we call communion, or the Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper, or mass.
Basically we’re united by a practice we’ve decided to call a million different things.
We are quite good at dividing ourselves. By theology, practice, politics, even style of worship. But the bible offers a picture of what it’s like to be together despite differences. Job doesn’t stop being a part of the bible because it contradicts Psalm 26. Ecclesiastes doesn’t start a new bible because it disagrees with Isaiah. The bible exists as dozens of different viewpoints in conversation with and about God.
And so does the worldwide church.
Let us take communion today as a sisters and brothers connected by a common conversation.
May you
Continue the conversation
Through unanswered questions,
Through disagreement,
And through struggle.
May we hope in God and live.
Amen.
*I borrowed the constitution analogy from Brian McLaren. Go buy his wonderful book, A New Kind of Christianity!
The Difference Between Cooking and Just Burning Stuff
Democrats and Republicans.
Christians and Muslims.
Boomers and Millennials.
Black and White.
Bears and Packers.
Us and Them.
Ever since a caveman noted to himself that red berries are good to eat and green berries are bad to eat, we have been creating categories in our minds.
This is a natural thing. Most of the time, it helps us. We need a certain degree of *This = Good, That = Bad* just to function in life. But - like just about everything - it gets more complicated when people are involved.
People are not just good or just bad. We are these fascinating combinations of good, bad, selfish, selfless, lazy, hardworking, violent, gentle, ugly, and beautiful. None of us would be comfortable being labeled as just one thing, no matter how good or bad. We know we are too complex for that.
But our categorizing brains will often put certain people into certain groups for us. THESE people are on our side, but THOSE people are against us. Even when we try to stay open minded, our brains take over and do the work for us.
And honestly, there are good reasons we do this.
Saying They are bad, is an easy way to galvanize Us into a stronger, more passionate group. Having a common enemy brings people together. But it must, by necessity, keep us away from another group. Us vs.Them makes a stronger Us, but at the expense of Them.
It was this kind of thinking that seems to be motivating Jesus’ students in this scene. (Which is a doozy btw. It’s not often you get exorcism, dismemberment, hellfire, and death by milstone in one bible text.) It starts with Jesus’ student John saying to him, “Teacher, we saw someone casting out demons in your name, and we tried to stop him, because he was not following us.”
John and his brother were nicknamed the “Sons of Thunder” by Jesus. You can picture this scene with big, loud John. Hey! You’re not on Team Jesus! Stop doing good things in the name of Jesus!
Jesus rightly sees that this approach is a poor public relations move. He says, “No one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me.” Jesus sees one of his students eager to create sides, to categorize, and says No. If this guy borrows my name to do something good, he won’t be able to talk smack on me later. That’s just practical.
Jesus sums it up this way: “Whoever is not against us is for us.” (As opposed to John’s approach, which was whoever is not for us is against us.)
But for Jesus it goes beyond just creating a network of potential supporters. He really sees something toxic in Us vs Them thinking. He happens to have this little child with him (whom you may remember from last week’s scene), and he says, “If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe, it would be better for you if a great millstone were hung around your neck and you were thrown into the sea.”
It would be better to be thrown into the sea with an anchor strangling you.
(This *might* be something Jesus feels passionately about.)
Why does the Us vs Them mentality evoke such anger in Jesus, particularly when it affects children?
There is a group of people in Topeka, Kansas called the Westboro Baptist Church. If you believe you’re open minded, that you accept everyone you come in contact with, and that everyone truly deserves love, learn a thing or two about the Westboro Baptist Church and get back to me about that.
It’s hard to imagine a more despicable group of people. They hate EVERYONE. They hate gay people, they hate Jews, they hate the president, they hate America, and they really hate soldiers -- even to the point of picketing the funerals of soldiers that died for our nation out of a belief that these men and women had it coming, fighting for such a sinful nation.
Their website is GodHates[word I don’t want to say].com.
These are, by all accounts, nasty, hateful people. They take Us vs. Them to the extreme. For them, it’s Us vs. EVERYONE.
It is easy to dismiss them as a bunch of kooks. Until you realize they have children.
There have been multiple documentaries and news reports made about them, and when you see their children saying that soldiers deserved to die, and holding signs that say “God Hates You”.... Well, it makes my blood boil.
I would be missing the point of my own sermon if I didn’t point out that these are human beings.
And God loves them. They do deserve love, as hard as that is to understand.
But I cannot imagine what it’s like to be them. Being so filled with hate for anyone different, and actually teaching their children the same. That’s a poor way to live. I think it might be better to drown with a millstone around my neck.
Then Jesus starts talking about hell.
Always a crowd pleaser.
He starts talking about how important it is to avoid hell: “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life maimed than to have two hands and to go to hell... And if your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off; it is better for you to enter life lame than to have two feet and to be thrown into hell. And if your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out; it is better for you to enter the kingdom of God with one eye than to have two eyes and to be thrown into hell, where their worm never dies, and the fire is never quenched.”
Pretty nightmarish imagery, but this is one of those times when it is so important to understand context.
The word that gets translated “hell” here is Gehenna, and it was a real place on real earth. It was a garbage dump. A garbage dump where they burned garbage.
To me, this is the simplest meaning of Jesus’ words: Better to lose one part of yourself, than have your whole self be like garbage fit to be burned. Us vs. Them thinking will turn you into garbage.
And I find the dismemberment analogy to be brilliant. Because truly, to strip yourself of prejudices is a hard thing. It may feel like taking off a hand, a foot, or an eye. And like a hand, foot, or eye, Us vs. Them thinking IS useful. Like we’ve said, it can make Us stronger, bring Us together, even help Us to see differently.
But if it turns us into garbage...
Wouldn’t it be better to lose that one thing, and come into the fullness of life without it?
Now, could Jesus be talking about literal hell here? Yes. i would not discount that.
Because literal hell comes from Us vs. Them thinking. Six million Jews killed by the Third Reich is hell on earth. Children conscripted to fight in all sides of civil wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is hell on earth. The lynching of nearly 4000 black people in our own country’s history is hell on earth. These are terrible, monstrous things, and yet they all came from Us vs Them Thinking. So much better to lose one part of ourselves than to cause that hell.
So how do we lose it?
Jesus concludes this teaching saying, “For everyone will be salted with fire.“ Which is a weird statement, even for such a weird lesson. What does it mean to be “salted with fire”?
We’re not even clear that this is what Jesus said, because some ancient copies of the bible say, “every sacrifice will be salted with salt.”
But that actually offers us a clue. Ancient Jews were required to add salt when they sacrificed an animal. The reasoning behind this is not too complicated. Animal sacrifices had two purposes: 1) They were symbolic of one’s devotion to God, and 2) the meat was food for the priests that worked in the temple. The same basic concept works today: One might show their devotion to God by writing a check to their church, and that money also happens to pay the salary of guys like me.
So adding salt was a way to make those burnt sacrifices better in a number of ways. Salt was great in the ancient world. It preserved food, and it brought out flavors. Salt was the difference between cooking food, and just burning meat.
So what I think Jesus meant by, “Everyone will be salted by fire,” is to ask a question: What will you be like when the heat is turned up? Will you be a bland, unseasoned hunk of meat, not far from burning garbage in Gehenna? Or will you add salt and become something nourishing and mouth watering?
Because having "salt" is the key to living in peace: “Have salt in yourselves, and be at peace with one another,” Jesus says. It may feel like cutting something out of us, but really, it is gaining something inside of us.
Finding peace is not about destroying or fixing what’s wrong with Them, it’s about finding the “salt” in Us.
It's not about how bad They are, it's about how good We can be.
Trust me, I know how bad the other side can be. I get very frustrated by people on the other side of my politics, religion, and worldview. It is so easy to see the problem as Them.
But honestly, we can't fix the bad in Them. We can increase the good in Us.
Jesus liked this salt metaphor. “You are the salt of the world,” he says in another story. But if salt isn't salty, what good is it?
We stop being salty when we focus on the faults of others.
We find our saltiness when we think about what We can do to enhance the world.
So let us forget about how They are ruining everything.
Let live not in fear of Them, but in hope of Us.
For the good news is that God has looked at Us and seen saltiness: A unique ability to preserve and enhance this world, to make nourishing, life giving food, in place of stinking, burning garbage.
May you
Be salt:
Preserving what is life giving,
Enhancing what is already good,
And making the world a more sweet smelling place.
Last week I mentioned how much I like the Gospel of Mark just as a story. The writer of Mark knows so much about what makes a good story!
For instance, conflict. Every good story needs conflict. There are no stories about the princess who had a wonderful step-mother, or the young farm boy who was perfectly content with farming.
If there’s no conflict, there’s no story.
The conflict in the second half of Mark is that Jesus’ students must get the point of what Jesus is talking about, before the inevitable happens and Jesus dies.
But they keep missing the point.
Jesus has begun to predict his death. He knows it’s only a matter of time before his enemies find an excuse to arrest him. He also knows that God is going to miraculously use this tragedy for ultimate good. And he’s telling this to his students as plainly as he can: “The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again.”
But his students don’t get it. Obviously the resurrection part is a hard pill to swallow because it’s so unbelievable. But it’s not as if they’re hearing the betrayal and death part any better. Just a week ago, Jesus admitted to being the Messiah - the sent-by-God superhero that was destined to come, destroy Rome, and start a new golden age for Israel.
This seems to have had the same effect on Jesus’ students as mentioning the word “McDonald’s” to my children. When discussing dinner plans, the “M” word must not even be uttered. Kids hear it as an implicit promise. We now owe them happy meals.
Jesus’ students have been the same ever since they heard their “M” word.
They’re gearing up to overthrow the bad guys, and be on the team of the new Liberating King Jesus! There’s going to be a revolution and they have front row tickets. Right now, their brains - full of glory, conquest, and victory - don’t have room for betrayal, death, and resurrection...
Will they get it before the end comes?
Since they don’t get it when he says it outright, Jesus tries another way of teaching. When they get to the next stop on their journey and get settled in, Jesus asks, “What were you arguing about on the way?”
Busteeeeeeeed. Because as it turns out, they were arguing about “who was the greatest.”
This makes sense. Jesus is going to be the new king, and obviously these twelve guys would be his cabinet. But who’s who in this cabinet? What’s the pecking order when things get serious? Who, for instance, gets to be Vice Messiah?
I kind of love that Jesus heard all this arguing and only asked about it when they got where they were going. It’s like that thing where kids know they’re doing what they shouldn’t be doing, but they look over and Dad’s not doing anything about it... so it must be okay, right?
And an hour later “Dad” says, Hey, what was with all the arguing?
This is embarrassing. These guys are fishermen, and tax collectors, and Torah School drop outs. And they’re calling dibs on Secretary of Foreign Affairs. To ask which of them is the greatest is like asking, who’s smarter: Vin Diesel or Hulk Hogan? The correct answer is, Who cares?
So even just broaching the subject kind of puts these guys in their place. But Jesus goes further. Because they’re really fundamentally missing the point. They don’t get what Jesus is really going for: That greatness really has nothing to do with, well, greatness.
Greatness in God’s kingdom is smallness.
“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all.”
To drive the point home, Jesus calls over a child. Children are very celebrated in our culture. We love babies, we love kids, and we love looking ahead to the adult they’ll become.
But in much of our world’s history, children were mostly tragedies waiting to happen. We’ve only recently perfected medical science to the point where children have a good chance of surviving. In the ancient world, children had a good chance of dying before reaching the age of 4. Showing affection for a child was emotionally dangerous. Best not to get attached until they’re older.
So kids were seen largely as nuisances. If you’re not going to allow yourself to fall in love with kids, you’re left with just the annoying stuff. And let’s face it, there’s a lot of annoying stuff. Kids are these unending balls of energy, and what do they do with it? Nothing! They have bottomless personal resources when they’re pretending to be a tiger shark with eagle’s wings that can shoot laser out of its mouth, but try getting them to do one little simple chore. But-but-but... I’m completely incompetent. How do you put a block into a bucket? I am TOTALLY lost...
That and they’re sticky.
I honestly don’t know where all the stickiness comes from.
But Jesus takes one of these adorable, useless monsters, and holds her, and says, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”
Hugging a child is hugging God.
Try hearing that after arguing about how great you are.
This is beyond today’s scene, but Jesus’ students will continue to not get it. They will keep missing the point. Jesus will keep preparing them for a suffering servant Messiah, and They will keep expecting a run of the mill, superhero Messiah.
Why?
When I read this scene, one sentence stands out: “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.” I understand this fear. There are times when I have no idea what someone is trying to tell me, but I nod my head as if I do. I don’t want to look stupid. I don’t want to dwell on what I don’t know. I don’t want to let my ignorance get in the way.
But imagine this story if someone did ask. If they weren’t afraid to look stupid. If they said, Hold on. I don’t get the betrayal, death, and resurrection thing, and I want you to explain it to me until I do.
Could we escape the part in the story when everyone abandon Jesus? Could we skip Peter’s denial of ever knowing Jesus? Could we bypass the painful, dark, Saturday when no one expected him to come back and Jesus was just dead?
I don’t know.
But I do know that children are rarely afraid to ask. Even when it’s obvious. Even when it’s awkward. Even when it’s inappropriate.
In fact, even as I write this, my oldest sone is asking me how old Gandalf the Gray is, and why is he Gray? and how many other colors of wizards there are? how come they’re not in the movie? I DON’T KNOW IT’S SATURDAY NIGHT AND I NEED TO FINISH THIS SERMON
Yeah, but how tall are hobbits?
Kids ask.
Kids look for answers. Kids exhibit open minds and curiosity. Kids are brave that way.
Our story mirrors the biblical story. Just as Jesus’ students will miss the point until it is too late, we risk missing the point while the world deteriorates into fear and hatred. We want to know how to fix the world, but we’d almost rather LOOK like we know how to do it. We’re afraid, and that fear closes us off from new ideas. And in the worst case scenario, we double down on bad ones.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be that way.
We can keep wondering, and questioning, and seeking until the way is made clear to us. We can ask why? why? why? without fear of being told to shut up.
We can fearlessly ask. And God will keep answering until we’re finally ready to hear it.
So as we argue on the way, disagreeing over what our churches should do, what our country should do, and who gets to do it, let us remember that Jesus is listening. Let us anticipate when he asks us, What were you arguing about on the road?
Let our conversations be full of questions, not claims. Let us be open minded and curious, for the divine plan never unfolds as expected.
May you
welcome questions,
welcome openness,
welcome unknowingness,
and welcome God in the form a sticky little child.
Amen.
Something I love about the Gospel of Mark is that its writer knows all the rules for telling a good story.
When I was in college, I took a screenwriting class as an upper division writing requirement, and it ended up being one of the best classes I’ve ever taken. I love stories, and i love figuring out how they work.
Because stories have rules! For instance, Halfway through any movie, there will be some kind of big reveal or reversal. In Star Wars, it’s Luke and the gang discovering the Death Star. In Jurassic Park, it’s the T Rex escaping from the no-longer-electrified fence. In North by Northwest, it’s the famous cropduster scene where Roger Thornhill learns that Eve has betrayed him.
In the very middle of the gospel of Mark lies this scene, where the reveal is that Jesus is the Messiah. Jesus is traveling with his students, and on the way he asks them, “Who do people say that I am?”
Up until now, Jesus has been very cagey about being called the Messiah. He’d occasionally get called the Son of God or something (oddly enough by “demon possessed” people), and he’d always tell them to stay quiet about it. This happens so often in the Gospel of Mark, that biblical criticism folks have a word for it: the Messianic Secret.
So when Jesus asks his students, “Who do people say that I am?” it’s a big question. Jesus has so far avoided the talk about him - now he’s curious about it.
So Jesus’ students explore different takes on Jesus that must have been common... Jesus is picking up where John the Baptist left off, Jesus is like the great prophet Elijah, or maybe he’s just another in a long line of prophets.
But then Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?”
And there must have been tension in the air. Usually he doesn’t like us to talk about it, now he’s asking point blank...what gives??
But as usual in these kinds of situations, Peter is the first to speak up.
And he takes a leap.
“You are the Messiah.”
Now, you have to understand what the Messiah was to Peter and his people. The Messiah was supposed to be Moses mixed with Superman. The Messiah was going to show up, do God’s work (commonly understood as kicking the Roman Empire’s butt and freeing Israel from their occupation), and usher in a new golden age for Israel. To say someone was the Messiah was to say, You are the person on which the fate of our entire society rests. You are THE ONE.
And Jesus says...
“Don’t tell anyone about me.”
(Which is as close to a YES as anyone’s going to get out of him.)
So imagine the high that these guys are on right now. They backed the right horse! They are already in the inner circle of the guy who will be in charge! They’ll get to be a part of history!
It’s a good reveal, right?
But there’s also a reversal.
Immediately afterwards, Jesus turns on a cold shower. He starts talking about how he will soon have to suffer greatly, be rejected by all the people in religious authority, get KILLED, oh, and btw come back from the dead 3 days later (which...is that a metaphor...or something? idk).
So, needless to say, this is weird.
Imagine you’re on the staff of a US Senator, and he announces that he’s running for president. You and everyone else is beyond excited. Everyone cheers but the senator quickly calms everyone down and says, “Okay, okay, but we have a lot to do: Alice, I want you to take some pictures of me with my mistress. Use a telephoto lens. Barry, call as many high ups as you can in our party. I want them all to denounce my campaign. And Cathy, it wouldn’t hurt to hire someone to kill me, see what you can do on that. Finally, Dan, call a press conference, I want to tell the world I have resurrection powers.”
Are you still excited?
This is exactly the kind of dissonance Jesus’ students are experiencing.
My favorite line in this scene is He said all this quite openly. As if to say, Can you believe this guy? If you’re gonna be crazy, at least be subtle about it.
It’s no wonder Peter takes him aside and says, Hey man, what’re you doing?? - “rebukes him,” as most translation of Mark put it.
Jesus does NOT react well to this. He says, “Get behind me, Satan! For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” Now, Jesus isn’t calling his friend the devil, as we would understand it. Satan is a word from Hebrew culture that simply means ‘adversary.’ But still, Jesus is saying, You have gone from being on my side, to the opposite side.
Jesus then says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.” Taking up a cross is pretty familiar religious imagery for most of us. But it wasn’t religious in the slightest in Jesus’ setting. It was a death penalty. A particularly cruel and torturous one. It was reserved for traitors and enemies of the state. If this story was taking place today, he’d probably say, If any want to become part of my movement, let them get ready to spend their life on death row.
And even that doesn’t capture the severity of the statement. Those charged with crucifixion had to carry the very cross they’d be nailed to. Imagine literally carrying your own electric chair.
Is this really what it takes to be on Jesus’ team? Forget the pain and fact that you’re dying; what lower station in life is there than criminal sentenced to die?This is apparently what’s on Jesus’ mind when he thinks of “divine things.”
(It’s okay to take a big, heavy sigh right now. This is heavy stuff.)
What is Jesus playing at? First he admits to being the Messiah, the almighty superhero Israel has been waiting for, then he lays out the path to victory:
suffering,
rejection,
and death.
(And resurrection. But at this point in the story it just seems like delusions of grandeur.)
We all care about how we’re seen. We all ask “Who do people say that I am?” in our own ways. It might be googling our own name. It might be fishing for compliments. It might be striving for a good reputation. But we all hope that when our name comes up, it is respected and celebrated.
But it’s something we have no control over. We can be a good person, we can smile and be polite, we can even put up a false front and be someone totally different. But in the end, our reputation is in other people’s hands. We cannot control what others say about us.
Jesus definitely struggled with this. Earlier in the Gospel of Mark, his own family publicly comes out and says he’s crazy. Religious authorities had a laundry list of complaints about him. And even his inner circle doesn’t seem to truly understand him. Jesus knows the court of public opinion is fickle, even when you’re literally a miracle worker.
And I’d be lying if I said identity and public perception hasn’t been an issue for me lately. I’m two weeks into my new job, and I didn’t fully realize that being a pastor in St Germain brought a mini-celebrity status with it. I’ve had my picture taken for the newspaper twice this week. That brings my grand total of pictures taken for the newspaper up to two. I’ve found myself stressing over everything I say or do, and the ways in which I say or do them. I represent a church now, and don’t take that lightly.
But Jesus seems to have an opposite approach. He even seems to rebuff praise and invite insults.
Why?
I believe the best clue is in the last thing he says in this story: “Those who are ashamed of me and of my words in this adulterous and sinful generation, of them the Son of Man will also be ashamed when he comes in the glory of his Father with the holy angels.”
Jesus looks at two settings: His own time and place, which he unflatteringly calls “this adulterous and sinful generation,” and a future time of hope; the time he and his people have been waiting for, when God comes to make all things right.
He draws a sharp contrast between the two. He suggests that the things people find shameful now will be glorious then, and that the things they find commendable now will be shameful then. Roles will be reversed. Jesus sees his present as antithetical to the future hope.
It could be that that only applies to Jesus’ “adulterous and sinful generation,” but i doubt it. Often times one needs to be a despicable person in order to gain fame and success. Just look at our field of presidential candidates. I’ve often said it’s a shame that to be president, you first need to be someone who actually WANTS to be president. Can you imagine trying to be president Spending your whole life avoiding any kind of “dirt”? Watching your every movement to make sure it’s presidential?
Is it any wonder Jesus says, “Those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for the sake of the gospel will save it?”
“Life” meant a lot of things in Jesus’ culture. It meant life, it meant breath, it meant one’s soul, which contained one’s feelings, desires, affections, and aversions. So “life” meant everything from “life” - are you still breathing? - to LIFE - nothing short of the miracle of everything we experience.
Jesus goes on to say, “What will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life?” But that’s exactly what we do when we “hold on” to our life. We strive for money, or success, or respect...and we miss LIFE.
So we have Jesus as a model of someone who has let go of life. He has a definite sense of identity. He knows he’s the Messiah. He knows he’s been sent by God with a mission. But he also knows that mission has nothing to do with people’s perception of him. And that he’s going to accomplish that mission in a way no one expects. So he doesn’t care what people think.
In fact, he knows that caring would be a hindrance to his mission.
So let us live into the future that Jesus sees: This coming realm where all the titles and honors we’ve cared about seem like silly shadows of nothing. Let us prepare ourselves by dropping the burden of public opinion. Let us live into what we are meant to be so strongly, that what we look like on the outside is nowhere on our mind. Let us be ourselves so boldly that it literally confuses people.
Let us take our minds off human things, trusting God to give us strength and courage to live out the story God has written for us, full of divine things.
May you
be you.
And may we be us.
And may God be God: the one who writes our stories not according to the expectations of the public, but according to the divine plot God has planned for us.
Amen.
When writing sermons, I like following the Lectionary (the calendar that tells pastors what part of the bible to preach on each Sunday). When I looked at the lectionary text for my first Sunday as pastor of St Germain Community United Church of Christ, I thought, Oh goodie, It’s one of the rare moments in scripture where Jesus acts like a total jerk.
In a story in the Gospel of Mark, Jesus is approached by a woman from another country. She asks that Jesus please heal her daughter, and Jesus calls her a dog and tells her to buzz off.
So I get to figure that out for my inaugural sermon.
I have to apologize for Jesus in this passage. He is NOT usually like this. Usually he’s welcoming, charming, generous to a fault, helps anyone who comes his way...
He’s NOT usually telling desperate women that they are dogs.
Which is exactly what he does here. After the woman asks for help, he says, “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
Harsh! Take it easy, Jesus. You could’ve just said No politely.
I don’t know what’s going on with Jesus here. This does not seem to be the Jesus I know from the gospels.
There are a lot of possible reasons he’s acting like this:
The go to answer for a lot of preachers is that Jesus is testing this woman.
(BTW, this woman, like many women in the bible, isn’t given a name. That’s unfortunate, so I’d like to give her one. Let’s call her Basilah, an Arabic name that means “brave”.)
So is Jesus testing Basilah? Seeing if his insult can provoke more faith in her?
It’s possible, but that explanation doesn’t make it any better in my opinion. Even if it’s a test, he’s pretty mean to her. If I call my wife a dog, I don’t get a pass if I follow it up with, Ah, you have passed my little test!
Another possibility is that Jesus is just having an off day. Jesus was, in fact, an actual human, and It’s been a hectic 24 hours for him! He started yesterday by trying to relax, proposing to his students that they get away from it all somewhere secret. But when they got to their secret place of retreat, it was not so secret anymore - approximately ten thousand people had figured it out and came looking for Jesus!
So he teaches for hours and hours, miraculously providing dinner for thousands of people when it gets too late. That evening, the disciples took the boat out without him, so he had to catch up with them on foot...on a lake. When they get to the other side there are people waiting, again. So he heals, and heals, and gets into a debate with pharisees, and I’m sure heals some more. (All of this is in Mark 6:30-7:23 if you care to read it.) After all this, Jesus finally found a house where he thought no one could find him.
That’s when Basilah finds him.
I ask you, if you’d had that kind of day, and someone interrupted your peace and quiet, wouldn’t you want to call them a name synonymous with dog?
I like that explanation. It reminds us that Jesus is human.
But it also seems to reveal some deep seated prejudice Jesus has. Jesus’ issue with Basilah is not that she’s bothering him, it’s that she’s not Jewish. “Let the children be fed first,” he says, implying the Children of Israel. His people. NOT Basilah’s people.
Which leads me to a third possibility that I like a lot: Maybe the lens in which we see this story is Basilah’s point of view as an outsider from Jewish culture.
Jesus’ response to her is exactly what she would have expected. She likely heard of Jesus and his ability to heal, and thought this was the best chance for her daughter. But Jesus was a Jewish prophet speaking to Jewish audiences. So Basilah is taking an awful risk coming to Jesus in this way. She’s not invited. She’s not the type of person Jesus helps.
But she goes anyway.
Armed with nothing but her own quick wit and a whole lot of guts. Something draws her there, perhaps Jesus’ reputation as someone who accepts the unaccepted people of his own culture. But something says to her,
Go after this.
This is important.
This is the journey you need to take.
I’ve felt that kind of draw. I’ve felt it all my life. Sometimes strong, sometimes quiet, but always there. For me it was different; I didn’t have a desperate situation as Basilah did. And the call I felt felt like more than needing to go to church on Sunday, or “finding Jesus.” I felt like...sticking around after I found Jesus. Seeing if he needed any help with anything.
The feeling’s been there my whole life in differing degrees of unavoidability. But there’s been another feeling that’s always been fighting against it: Inadequacy.
When I was younger, the word PASTOR was written, in my mind, with bold, italics, an underline, and all capital letters. You had to be a particular kind of special to be a PASTOR.
There was something about The Robe in particular.
The pastor at the church I grew up in looked GOOD in a robe. Not like sexy or anything. No one can look sexy in a clerical robe. He looked the way one should look in a robe. He had a kind, wise, humble face. And in the robe he just looked like he ate clouds for breakfast or something.
I knew I loved the bible, and thinking about it, and talking about it, but when I thought about myself in The Robe...
...I thought, No. Someone who has as many comic books as I do shouldn’t think about being in The Robe.
Someone who’s favorite movie is Airplane! should not be in The Robe.
Someone who looks up to Weird Al Yankovic as a hero should not be in the Robe (and not just because they don’t make the Robe in Hawaiian shirt flavor).
So eventually I ended up in youth ministry. Because that’s where guys who love Jesus and Ren & Stimpy end up. And although I worked in youth ministry for several years and loved it, I still felt drawn into to do more somehow. I was reading increasingly serious books, thinking about more serious subjects, feeling the desire to teach more serious things, but still...felt inadequate somehow.
Throughout my life I met people who’s own sense of adequacy made me feel more adequate. People who were great at living into Jesus’ kingdom of God, but not great at living into people’s expectation of “holiness.” People who swore, or laughed at inappropriate moments in church, or talked about Jesus like a friend, not a middle school vice principal. I saw God at work in their lives without all the trappings of religious culture.
I met many of these people in a United Church of Christ congregation. At worship they always began with the motto, “Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you are welcome here.” The UCC seemed like a place where maybe I could be a PASTOR. The word was losing its italics, the underline, and most of the capital letters.
I was starting to lose my feelings of inadequacy, but something was coming that would give them new strength.
No one gets married expecting to get divorced, but in hindsight it’s easy for me to see that my first marriage was doomed to fail. It was a relationship that I was trying hard to make work, but wasn’t getting far enough on my own. When I realized I was being emotionally abused by my partner, I knew it had to end.
Divorce is never an easy decision for anyone, but for me it was absolutely gut-wrenching. Fidelity in marriage was (and is) an extremely important value for me. And that voice of inadequacy screamed that the words Pastor and Divorced definitely DON’T go together. I imagined congregations across America saying, Why would we want a pastor that’s divorced when we can have one who’s marriage actually worked?
“Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.”
But when Basilah hears those words, she doesn’t let them define her. She has the boldest, wittiest response I can imagine: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.”
She doesn’t argue with Jesus. She essentially says, Yes, I am all those things you think I am... but don’t I deserve help too?
And Jesus gives her what she asks for. And he doesn’t ask her to convert to Judaism first or anything. She remains who she is and... the voice that first called her there is faithful.
I didn’t have a witty one liner to go along with my persistence, but I followed the voice too. I went ahead and applied for seminary and started the process toward ordination.
I started to discover that the things that made me feel unworthy to be a pastor, actually make me a better pastor.
Even my divorce! A friend put it this way: “Before you were Superman—good, but simple, all primary colors—and now you’re like Batman, with a tragic past that drives you.”
It’s not like I spend all of my time brooding on a rain-soaked gargoyle, but the metaphor makes sense to me. I’m more human now. I can relate better to other people’s dark times. Since my divorce, I’ve been freed from the burden of pretending to be Superman. I’m not perfect. And I’ve been hurt. But I believe in a God whose specialty is turning tragedy into triumph.
Around the same time I met someone who would bless my life immensely: My future wife Amy. When I met her, she was also going through a divorce. And she didn’t just bless my life by being wonderful, but by bringing wonderful people into my life. I got to become step father to an amazing kid named Joseph, who has become my best friend.
And I was able to meet Joseph’s amazing grandmother, Celeste.
Celeste has been a rock for our family over the years. A point of stability when everything else was in chaos. Celeste was not happy about the possibility of me moving her grandchildren to Wisconsin. You’d hardly know it, because she’s been so absolutely supportive of us, but I could tell it was killing her to be supportive of this move.
We came to check out St Germain, and to be honest we had a good idea this was our future home the first day we visited. It turns out Celeste had a hunch about it too, and was feeling a lot anxiety about it. Until she was on facebook and happened to see a picture of me from my seminary graduation
...in a Robe.
And in that moment, she felt absolutely sure that I fit in that Robe. She saw it as a mantle that had descended on to me, making me ready to lead this church. And that gave her peace.
She shared this with us and mentioned the robe specifically as something that cued her in to this revelation. I can’t tell you how meaningful it was to me that The Robe, the same symbol of all my anxieties and feelings of inadequacies, was revealed to her to be a symbol of my capability and authority.
Even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs.
The very thing that makes us vulnerable, makes us successful.
I am so happy to be pastor of St Germain Community United Church of Christ. Not as a pretender, or as someone who really has it all together. But as a human being who likes to talk about the bible, and is honored to be present with people during the best and worst parts of their lives. Thank you, CUCC for calling me as your pastor (uncapitalized). It is my sincere hope that I can help you recognize God’s voice in your own life, and separate it from the voices of inadequacy and fear
May you
hear the still, small, persistent voice of God in your own life,
talk back boldly to the voices in your life that tell you you’re not good enough,
and walk into the amazing life God has for you.
Amen.
As a Christian minister, I don’t believe I’m qualified to speak on behalf of everyone here.
There are not just Christians here today but Mormons, atheists, agnostics, and many others.
But I do feel like I’m more qualified than most to represent God.
My God, at least.
The God of the bible.
The God whose name is so holy it has been lost to time, and who we now just call “God.”
Also happens to be the God who is too often used as moral fuel to demonize Planned Parenthood.
But in this God’s story, this God is consistently depicted as a compassionate God.
A God who cares about the widow, the orphan, and the alien.
It stands to reason that this God is for anything that helps people.
This God is for pregnancy testing for poor women and families.
This God is for diagnosing and treating disease in victims of rape and sexual assault.
This God is for educating women about their own bodies.
This God is for women.
It’s these kind of undeniably good things that make up 97% of what PP offers. 97%!
It’s rare to find a CHURCH spending 97% of their time doing things that make God happy!
Thank you, Planned Parenthood, for doing God’s work.
Opponents of Planned Parenthood would have us believe that God only cares about the 3% of the time Planned Parenthood comes down on one side of a particular morally gray issue.
They assume too much of this God.
This God said, “Do Not use my name in vain.”
They use this God’s name to drive a wedge between compassionate people on either side of the issue.
They use God’s name for their own political gain.
And I am sick and tired of it, as a supporter of Planned Parenthood, but particularly as a Christian.
So let’s stop allowing them to do it.
When they say God is pro-life, let’s say, Yes, and God is pro-woman too.
God is pro-health care.
God is pro-education, even when it involves sex (which, btw, God created and is probably also for).
God is pro-families, and pro-planning them too.
And yes, I believe God is pro-choice. How could a God that gave humans free agency not be?
Opponents of Planned Parenthood do not have a monopoly on the God who cares for everyone.
So next time you hear someone shooting their mouth off about what God hates,
please, tell them from me,
Do NOT use my Lord’s name is vain.
Here’s a speech I did for a #StandwithPP rally tonight!
As a Christian minister, I don’t believe I’m qualified to speak on behalf of everyone here.
There are not just Christians here today but Mormons, atheists, agnostics, and many others.
But I do feel like I’m more qualified than most to represent God.
My God, at least.
The God of the bible.
The God whose name is so holy it has been lost to time, and who we now just call “God.”
Also happens to be the God who is too often used as moral fuel to demonize Planned Parenthood.
But in this God’s story, this God is consistently depicted as a compassionate God.
A God who cares about the widow, the orphan, and the alien.
It stands to reason that this God is for anything that helps people.
This God is for pregnancy testing for poor women and families.
This God is for diagnosing and treating disease in victims of rape and sexual assault.
This God is for educating women about their own bodies.
This God is for women.
It’s these kind of undeniably good things that make up 97% of what PP offers. 97%!
It’s rare to find a CHURCH spending 97% of their time doing things that make God happy!
Thank you, Planned Parenthood, for doing God’s work.
Opponents of Planned Parenthood would have us believe that God only cares about the 3% of the time Planned Parenthood comes down on one side of a particular morally gray issue.
They assume too much of this God.
This God said, “Do Not use my name in vain.”
They use this God’s name to drive a wedge between compassionate people on either side of the issue.
They use God’s name for their own political gain.
And I am sick and tired of it, as a supporter of Planned Parenthood, but particularly as a Christian.
So let’s stop allowing them to do it.
When they say God is pro-life, let’s say, Yes, and God is pro-woman too.
God is pro-health care.
God is pro-education, even when it involves sex (which, btw, God created and is probably also for).
God is pro-families, and pro-planning them too.
And yes, I believe God is pro-choice. How could a God that gave humans free agency not be?
Opponents of Planned Parenthood do not have a monopoly on the God who cares for everyone.
So next time you hear someone shooting their mouth off about what God hates,
please, tell them from me,
Do NOT use my Lord’s name is vain.
Lately, I feel like I have a good excuse. In less than a week, my family and I will be packing up and moving to Wisconsin. I’ll be starting a new job, doing something I’ve never been before - solo pastor at a small town church. We’ve got to change my son’s school, find a new house, cancel/startup the internet, switch cell phone providers, and at this point I have to stop the list or I won’t be able to continue this sermon.
It’s fun, and exciting, but it’s stressful. And I have to admit that I am worried about every little detail.
You probably have a lot to worry about too.
I say that because you have your own life which probably has plenty to worry about, but even setting that aside, I know that you’re here at this church. Unless you’re reading this online. Which you are. But if you need something to worry about, you will find it in the life of a church.
We have to figure out who’s organizing the potluck, and if we have the right candles for Advent, and why is the sound equipment not working? will that cost money? And if none of that worries you, worry about how the youth director is moving to Wisconsin. (That’s me. Again, this is church specific stuff, but it’s pretty good, I hate to cut it.)
And yet we have this scripture (in Luke 12) where Jesus is telling us not to worry. And not in an Eeeeeeh, don’t worry ‘bout it! kind of way. In a Seriously, stop worrying, I command thee kind of way. It’s enough to make one worried...about worrying.
Jesus really gives us the business in this passage. He says, Do not worry about your life, what you will eat, or about your body, what you will wear. It’s not “Don’t sweat the small stuff.” He breaks it down to the two things at the root of all worries:
food and clothes.
I’m worried about my new job because if it doesn’t work out, I’ll get fired, I’ll have no money, and I won’t be able to buy food.
I’m worried about moving because I have to move all my stuff, and if the moving truck spontaneously combusts, I’ll have no stuff, and I’ll be naked.
Anything we can worry about can be boiled down to worrying about how we’ll survive, or how we’re seen. Which puts things into sharp perspective...in a really annoying way.
Then Jesus seems to be making light of our worries:
Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds! And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? If then you are not able to do so small a thing as that, why do you worry about the rest? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith! And do not keep striving for what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. Instead, strive for God’s kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well. “Do not be afraid, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Sell your possessions, and give alms. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
Sheesh. You don’t see birds worrying, do ya? Or grass! Be more like grass! He even calls us “you of little faith.” How patronizing and demeaning is Jesus trying to be?? Jeez, sorry Jesus! I’ll try to be more like those paragons of faith - birds! Birds - known for sitting right in the front rows of every church! And I’ve seen lots of grass outside church, but never inside a church! A little botanical humor there... Hello? Is this thing on?
And then, to top it all off, Jesus suggests we sell everything we own and give it to the poor. Because nothing alleviates stress like a giant yard sale that ends with you owning literally nothing.
Jesus, like he often does, seems crazy. But, as always, Jesus is up to more than being crazy.
I love stand up comedy.
I love that a great comedian can explain something we all know in a way that makes it feel like a new discovery.
Louis CK (objectively the best comedian alive) has a bit about air travel, and how much we complain about it. We say stuff like, “That was the worst day of my life! I had to sit on the runway for 40 minutes!”
Louis responds, “What happened then? Did you fly through the air like a bird, incredibly? Did you soar into the clouds, impossibly? Did you partake in the miracle of human flight?”
We all know deep down that the things we complain about are trivial next to everyday miracles. But it takes someone clever, like Louis, to put it to us in a way that helps us realize we knew it all along.
Jesus’ speech against worry has that quality as well.
I think it’s helpful to think of it as a stand up set.
These are humorous images Jesus is conjuring up: Consider the ravens: they neither sow nor reap, they have neither storehouse nor barn, and yet God feeds them. Sowing, reaping, barns, these were normal, workaday images for Jesus’ audience. It’d be like if we pictured birds punching their time card, filling out an excel spreadsheet, worrying about TPS reports, etc., etc.
Birds aren’t like that, obviously. Birds aren’t known for their high stress lifestyle. You don’t see birds rubbing their head with their wing saying, “Well, I’ll have to work overtime, but I will get that seed to you by Friday. Tweet, tweet.”
And yet...God feeds them. Of how much more value are you than the birds!
The second bit in Jesus’ Worry Chunk is about flowers. Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.
Solomon was a king of Israel, and had 700 wives and 300 concubines. So he was obviously doing something right in the personal appearance department.
Look at that gangsta! He was also king when Israel was at its peak in terms of wealth and splendor.
And yet...compare him to a field of wildflowers:
It’s hard to beat the beauty of field of wildflowers.
And again, it’s funny to picture a flower putting on a hard hat and movin’ drywall, or delivering pizza.
Flowers. Don’t. Work.
They’re lazy.
But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, how much more will he clothe you—you of little faith!
Here’s the funny thing about “you of little faith”: It’s all one word. In the original language it’s one word that literally means “little-faith.”
It’s a diminutive. We use diminutives as terms of endearment, in almost every culture throughout time.
Ever since my son Grayson was born, we’ve called him “Graybie.” It’s not a name we use to ridicule him. Like, HAHA, you’re a BABY. Idiot. We mean it like, Oh, my little Graybie. No matter how big he gets, he’ll always be my little Graybie.
Jesus isn’t mocking our little faith.
He’s teasing us.
He likes our faith because it’s so cute. He thinks our faith is adorable. It’s like a faithlet, or a faithy-waithy. We are his lil’ faithies.
He sees a little faith inside of us, that will grow up to be a big faith.
And what will that big faith look like?
I believe the answer goes back to Jesus’ origin story.
The first story we have of Jesus, in the oldest book we have about Jesus, is about his baptism. As the story goes, just as Jesus was being pulled out of the water by his baptizer, the sky opened up and God’s Spirit came down like a dove. And a voice said, “You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased” (Mark 1:11).
This was literally before Jesus did anything of note.
You are my Son,
the Beloved;
with you I am well pleased.
And then, when people ask Jesus how to pray, he says, “Pray then in this way: Our Father in heaven...”
He tells us to pray to that same loving father that he experienced. The one who says, You are my son, You are my daughter, the beloved; with you I am well pleased.
Now,
many of us learned this in Sunday school, and it made us feel warm and fuzzy, and we got a sticker that said we were special, just like everybody else, and that was the end of it.
But in the stories we have about Jesus, it doesn’t stop at warm and fuzzy.
Jesus seems to be constantly answering the question, What if we really lived like God loved us?
What if, in spite of what the world tells us - that we’re worthless, or we’re only worth what we can produce, that we ought to be afraid and grasp for every bit of bread that falls from the tables of our betters - what if, in spite of all that, we really believed that LOVE is written into our very DNA?
What if we knew that the source of all life calls us daughter? calls us son?
How would we act?
Would there be any room for anxiety?
For fear?
For worry?
Would our lives start looking more like Jesus’?
I got to spend the last week in Alaska, at a beautiful lakeside cabin with my wife’s family. Wide open skies. Rows of trees perfectly mirrored on still water. And stars. (How often do you get to see those anymore?)
But the whole time I worried about the price of truck rentals, and hotels that allow pets, and the never-ending to do list in my head.
And that worry stuck right in my chest. It followed me all the way to Alaska like a parasite sucking on my heart and got in the way of the fullest life I could lead.
So what’s the solution?
Should I just decide not to care about any of it? Just say, Whatever, man! and when moving day comes, say, OH was I supposed to put things in boxes?
Jesus isn’t suggesting that we don’t have problems we need to address. For it is the nations of the world that strive after all these things, and your Father knows that you need them. God knows we have things we need to do.
But first of all,
Worry doesn’t help one iota. And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? My favorite line in this bit! Because we can’t! Worrying doesn’t help anything! Or as noted biblical interpreter Van Wilder said: “Worrying is like a rocking chair. It gives you something to do, but it doesn't get you anywhere.”
But more importantly,
Worrying is a fundamental distrust of the idea that God knows you, knows your problems, and knows they need addressing. So Jesus says, Instead, strive for God’s kingdom, and these things will be given to you as well.
Jesus was not one to shy away from the harsh realities of the world. He knew pain and problems and prices. He’s not suggesting those things aren’t real.
He’s saying they’re not worth worrying about. Because part of God’s plan are all the little things that keep us alive and thriving.
God has a plan for you, we often say. Forgetting that God really has a plan for us, ALL of us, and has contingency plans for when plans A thru ZZZ go awry. God is like an improvising novelist writing a story with 7 billion main characters, each one making their own decisions.
That’s incomprehensible. But if we believe that God loves us, that’s what’s going on.
So why not sell our possessions and give alms? Why not make the story exciting? It’s God’s job to work out the plot holes, not ours!
We spend 99% of our time worrying about things that happen in 0% of stories. There are no stories about Batman doing his taxes. Harry Potter never spends a whole chapter doing homework, and No one cares cares about where Frodo bought his short pants. We invest our hearts in overtime, errands, and imaginary ones and zeros in our bank accounts, and we get nothing in return.
What would the return on our investment be if we invested our hearts in relationships? passions? communities? or whatever part of God’s plan is revealed to your heart?
Jesus calls it a good investment. Make purses for yourselves that do not wear out, an unfailing treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near and no moth destroys. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.
God knows we need to eat.
God knows we need to be clothed.
God knows we need to make money to take care of those things and more.
But what if we took it on faith that once we’ve done our due diligence, God would take care of the forces we can’t control?
What if we refused to fear?
When Jesus says, Do not worry, it’s not an Eh, don’t worry ‘bout it...
It’s a command.
It’s an admonishment.
It’s a dare.
Live without fear.
And find out what your life is really about.
May you be so rooted in a story of God saying,
This is my son. This is my daughter. The Beloved.
that you invest fully in God’s plan,
unshackled by fear,
and live your fullest life.
Amen.
My eyes fail from weeping, I am in torment within; my heart is poured out on the ground because my people are destroyed, because children and infants faint in the streets of the city. (Lamentations 2:11)
A friend of mine - a person of color - posted that on facebook with this commentary: This morning it just hurts.
You probably know why.
Last Wednesday night, nine members of a historic black church were killed by a white guy with a gun. He sat down at their bible study, participated for an hour before he pulled out his gun. When they tried to talk him down, asking him why he was doing this, he said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."
That’s why my friend said, This morning it just hurts.
I am disgusted by this story.
I’m enraged.
It makes me lose hope.
But it didn’t hurt me.
Not the way it hurt my friend.
Not the way it hurt all people of color.
It affected me negatively, for sure. In fact, I’m ashamed to say it annoyed me. People of color certainly weren't merely annoyed by this.
They were reminded of the danger they live in, every day of their life. They were reminded of the history of lynchings, terror, and white on black violence. They were reminded of how little America cares for them.
But not me.
I’m inoculated from the feeling, because I’m white.
In our society - and nearly any other - that makes me very fortunate.
Because I’m white, I’m half as likely to be pulled over when I’m driving than a black driver.
Because I’m white, I’m twice as likely to be called when I submit a resume than someone with a black-sounding name.
Because I’m white, when I buy a car I’m charged roughly $700 less than black customers.
It’s also easier for me to buy a house, stay out of prison, and smoke marijuana without consequence. Doctors more often let me know about life saving procedures, and senators are more likely to answer my letters. These are all things that studies have shown.
My life is demonstrably easier than a person of color’s. If my life were a video game, it’d always be on easy mode. I’d be saving the princess while people of color are stuck on level 1-1. In easy mode, I don’t even have to see that the world is unfair.
I can turn my senses off to injustice. I can ignore problems, because they don’t apply to me. Even better, I can do it without even knowing I’m doing it. I can leave the world the way it is - easy mode for me, super hard mode for others - and not even lose sleep over my inaction.
But that’s also the trouble with easy mode - you miss stuff.
There are video games where you can’t unlock certain features on easy mode. I like to play Super Mario 3D World with my son, because it has ways of helping out players who aren’t as skilled. If repeatedly lose on a level, a power up called the White Tanooki suit appears.
When you get it, you’re essentially invincible and can easily beat the level. BUT there are things you can’t do - like reach all the green stars, get the level stamp, and so on. I don’t experience the whole game, because of my easy mode.
When I remain in easy mode, it’s hard to see the whole picture. We end up saying things like, This was an unimaginable tragedy. It’s not unimaginable, inexplicable, or unfathomable. It’s the violence people of color have learned to expect. Writ large, perhaps. But no less unimaginable.
People of color live in an existence where anyone can take their lives.
It doesn’t have to be a criminal. Between 1999-2014, 76 unarmed men and women of color have died while in police custody. Parents of black children will tell you that they have to have “the talk” with their kids. It has nothing to do with sex. It has to do with the hard truth that police will target them.
I don’t say this to single out police, but to make this point: If that’s the sort of thing that routinely happens to people of color from the people meant to serve and protect them, why would any other random violence be “unimaginable”?
When I’m in easy mode, I can also miss the ways in which I’m complicit with violence. The Charleston killer didn’t rise out of a vacuum. His hatred was nurtured by the ambivalence of my white culture.
No one reading this put a gun in his hand, or nurtured his hate.
But have we confronted the problem of racism?
Have we been willing to leave the comfort of our privilege?
Have we spoken out against the evil system?
The murderer did not grow up in a country where racism is discouraged. He grew up in a country where calling someone racist is usually more offensive than actual racism. In a country where we still haven’t acknowledged what we live out everyday - that black lives matter less to us than white lives.
Ignoring the problem has allowed violence to happen,and can any of us say we’re not guilty of ignoring the problem?
Okay.
That’s the problem.
Is there a solution?
Sometimes I don’t think so. But I do draw hope from the life of a man named Paul. Paul was a First Century Jew who was a leader in the Jesus Movement. The Jesus Movement, when it began, was an exclusively Jewish movement. But it began to explode and non-Jews wanted to join. This was Paul’s specialty. Paul started churches of non-Jews.
This was controversial.
Many people thought that when you became a follower of the Messiah, you should also become Jewish. Which meant you had to follow Jewish laws, like eating kosher, following purity codes, and (yikes) circumcision...
Paul disagreed.
He saw that Jesus was bigger than his own religion and race. So he started churches saying Eat whatever you want, follow your own laws and customs, and do it while following Jesus. That’s controversial.
In fact, a group of well meaning Christians came to a church Paul started in Galatia and tried to fix the church. These men were basically concern trolls. Under the guise of just trying to help, they caused a lot of damage insisting non-Jews should act like Jews.
In reality, they’re abusing their standing in society. They’re on easy mode. They’re Jewish in a non-Jewish community. Being Jewish wasn’t easier in the Roman Empire in general, but in the Early Church? Jesus was Jewish, all the apostles were Jewish, and the whole belief system sprung out of Judaism.
So it is very easy for them to tell these non-Jews that they need to follow these special laws. These are things they’ve done their whole life - They know what not to eat, what not to wear, they got circumcised when they were babies!
So they tell these non-Jews just to play the game better. They have unlimited lives and power ups, and expect the Galatians to play “follow the Torah” just as well as they do. They’re essentially telling these non-Jews that they need to be Jewish. Because being Jewish is better.
So Paul hears about the situation and he. Is. Angry. We have this letter he wrote to the church, and it is so fun to read. At one point, he says that if the trolls are so obsessed with circumcision, he’d love to finish theirs for them.
Paul sends his letter to the Galatians. And while it’s addressed to the people he pastored in Galatia, it’s also subtly sending messages to the trolls. Back then, you would write a letter to a group, send it with a person, and that person would read it out loud to the group. So Paul knows that the troublemakers are there listening. And a lot of what he writes is for them.
For in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. (Galatians 3:26-27)
This says “CHILDREN” of God, but that’s the translators being PC. The word Paul used is Sons - you are all sons of God. There are men and women listening and Paul says they’re all Sons. You’ll see why that’s important in a moment.
I like this phrase that we’re all “clothed...with Christ.” My mind immediately goes to us being a superhero team with matching uniforms. You can use a sports team if you like boring metaphors from the real world. But we’re all wearing the Messiah jersey.
So, to the Trolls - Paul says, these non-Jews are your teammates. It’s not like you’re on Team A and they’re on Team B, You’re all teammates
And he goes on... There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to the promise. (Galatians 3:28-29)
In our community, there is no easy mode. Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female - these were all easy/hard mode categories in Paul’s world.
So two messages:
To gentiles/slaves/women: You no longer need to be held back by your category. We’re all clothed in Christ.
To Jews/free people/men: You no longer get to benefit from your easy mode. Because it would prevent you from coming to know your brothers and sisters in real, authentic ways. We’re all on Team Messiah.
Then Paul calls all of us heirs, which is why the word Sons was important. At this time, women didn’t inherit anything. Sons inherited. So Paul is saying, all of us, regardless of our category, are going to inherit the promises of God.
And then Paul goes deeper into this metaphor of inheritance, saying EVERYONE in the community is an heir that has come of age. This is another message to the concern trolls, because operating under easy mode can make me patronizing. Okay, we’re all on the same team, but we’re the first stringers, right? Like we’re the varsity, and their the junior varsity...right? You think of hard mode people as kids that need to be taught. They only have it hard because they haven’t learned enough yet. Maybe if they weren’t so lazy, or didn’t take drugs, or wore the right clothes..
Paul says No.
You, me, and THEM - we’ve all inherited already. No teams are better or worse, because there are no teams.
And because you are children, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying, “Abba! Father!” (Galatians 4:6) That word Abba is the Aramaic word for “Daddy” We can approach God like a toddler approaches daddy. Totally trusting, arms open.
This is good news for people in hard mode of course. But also for those of us in easy mode. There are times when my 2 year old son gets hurt because he got pushed by his big brother, and comes to me for comfort. There are other times when he comes crying because he just got scratched by the cat...because he was pulling the cat’s tail.
I still comfort him.
Even if he’s being a jerk.
Navigating questions of privilege can be awkward and painful. I think we often don’t do it - in easy mode - because we’re mortified of being called racist. Coming out of easy mode isn’t easy. I’m going to accidentally offend someone from time to time.
And when that happens, I CAN come to God like Daddy. I can forgive myself, and treat my behavior like what it was, an embarrassment. As if my fly were down, I can zip it up, say excuse me, and go on trying to be respectful.
We can learn from Paul’s life.
Paul knew what it was like to live in easy mode. He hits all the boxes for privilege in his setting: Jewish? Check. Male? Check. Citizen of the Roman Empire? Check. And he certainly abused his easy mode. Before he joined the Jesus Movement, he hunted down members of it. Punished people for not doing things the “right” way.
But God came into his life and ruined all that.
Obviously once he joined up, no one in the Early Church trusted him. It didn’t matter that he was a free Jewish male. So he did his own thing. He pastored the non-Jewish communities that most apostles were ignoring. In another letter he says “I have become all things to all people [and] a slave to all” (1st Corinthians 9:22, 18). Paul gives up his privilege to live in community with the underprivileged.
So when Paul says there’s no this nor that, because we’re all one in Christ, he’s not just making something up. He’s lived it! He’s lived like the concern trolls, being superior and going after those who weren’t Jewish. But he’s also lived like those without privilege, distrusted and reviled and kept at arm’s length.
The funny thing is, God did more amazing things with his life once his privilege was swept away!
How do you take privilege seriously after living like that?
But we are afraid of losing our privilege. We don’t want to be too quick to judge whether this atrocity was racially motivated. When we hear people saying Black Lives Matter, it makes us nervous because we’re afraid of what might happen when we lose our privilege.
But racism is a white problem.
Let me say that again, because despite it being obvious, we often don’t get it:
Racism is a white problem.
White people kidnapped Africans and enslaved them.
White people started segregation.
White people kept this hateful machine going for 400 years.
We may not have started the fire, but we haven’t put it out either.
Someone has to take responsibility for this, and it should be me and other white people.
It’s going to be really hard.
But we have to face the original sin of our nation.
When they asked Jesus, “What’s the one rule we should follow?” Jesus said, “Love God -- and that looks like loving your neighbor.”
People of color are our neighbors.
Loving them means listening to them, even when what they have to say is painful to hear.
Loving them means believing them, even when it would be easier to discount them.
Loving them means speaking up, even when it could be unpopular or deemed offensive.
Black lives matter.
That’s such a simple rallying cry, and yet it’s often met with the correction that ALL lives matter (as if we might forget how much white lives matter).
Let’s not merely say that we matter.
Let’s show that we matter.
When I look at my children, I have hopes for them.
My hope isn’t that they save $700 on a car, or that they have a senator write back to them.
My hopes for them are bigger.
I hope that they become adults of integrity and compassion.
I hope they confront injustices.
I hope they live lives that matter.
The black community hurts.
Not just this week, but everyday.
Let us hurt with them.
Let us enter into hard mode with them.
Let our fate be tied up with their fate.
Let us be one with the black community.
Let us abandon our privilege and, together, inherit the promises of God.
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