Category Archives: biblical reflection

In a Moment in Time

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redwoodsIn a moment in time, early on this Christmas Eve, I crawled out of bed to greet this new day. In a moment in time, in the morning darkness of my kitchen, I ground beans, boiled water, and made a cup of coffee with an ancient Melitta pour over coffee cone. In a moment in time, I sit in a quiet room watching out the window as the sun peeks over the horizon. Moments of time stacked one upon another in a progression compose an individual life.

In a moment in time Mary and Joseph came to the difficult conclusion that there was no other place to bed down for the night. In moment in time the labor pains could no longer be ignored.  In a moment in time Mary gave birth, not in her mother’s home surrounded by matriarchs and a midwife, but in a cattle stall surrounded by beasts. In a moment in time, a moment marked not by the idyllic tranquility of O Little Town of Bethlehem, but by the terror of giving birth in such a place and the wonder of giving birth in such a place.

In a moment in time the Eternal put on the limiting cloak of chronos.  The Infinite became finite. In a moment in time God entered our world in an utterly dependent baby. In doing so, that moment in time would become the pivot point of all human history. In that moment in time, God took on all that it meant to be human, our tears, our sprains, our sniffles, our disappointments, our dashed dreams, and eventually our death.

The splinters of that crude manger would one day become the splinters of a cruel cross.  The One who entered time would endure death for our sakes. All of this in a moment in time.

God entered our times and our places and our flesh so that we could know God. In the baby of the manger and the crucified man on the cross, we discover God’s true disposition towards us, indeed towards all creation. God entered our world in a moment of time so that we could live in the confidence of divine grace and mercy.

God entered our time so that there are no moments of time in which we are abandoned to our own self destructive ways, to the evil of our lashing out at on another, to the ways of death we seem so determined to follow. We live trusting that even now, God is bringing all things to fullness in Christ.

Regardless of what any particular moments of time may bring, of this we can be sure:  they are embraced and redeemed by a loving and gracious God who at Christmas became one of us. In a moment in time.

Merry Christmas.

 

The Fabric Is Fraying

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EthansblanketThe fabric is fraying.

Maybe it always has been.

Today, I am feeling it acutely.

It’s still too early to know the details of the shooting in San Bernadino, California, but the news outlets are calling it a mass shooting.

These days in Chicago have been tense. The video of the shooting of Laquan McDonald has been public for a week, and it still haunts me. Every day something else dribbles out that ramps up the righteous outrage. Today it was the news that another video has been suppressed, a video of yet another young black man being shot as he’s moving away from police. Another case in which damages were paid, charges were not brought, and the offending police officer is still on the job, over 400 days after the incident.

Arrests were made in Belgium, men allegedly connected to the terrorist incidents in Paris a few short weeks ago.

Since 2011, some estimate that a quarter of a million Syrians have died in the civil war; that’s a bit more than 1% of the 2011 population of 23 million. Close to 12 million — that’s 50% — have been forced from their homes, and more than 4 million have fled.

The fabric is fraying.

Most disheartening to me is the way too many of our national leaders advocate the kind of action that has gotten us here — bombs, boots on the ground, no fly zones, suspicion of the stranger, close our gates, prop up the fiction of our security, change the subject.

The picture looks awful lot like the picture painted in our sanctuary on Sunday morning as the preacher read the gospel lesson from Luke.

Then there will be signs in the sun, moon, and stars; and there will be anguish in the earth month nations bewildered buy the roaring sea and waves. People will faint from fear and the expectation of things that are coming in the world because celestial powers will be shaken. Then they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. But when these things begin to take place, stand up and lift up your heads because your redemption is drawing near.

Though I don’t expect to see the Son of Man coming on the clouds, I feel the apocalyptic character of these times.

What would it mean for Christ to come in the midst of this mess?

The truth is that he does. The One who came to this mess centuries ago comes again now in the midst of our own mess. He still comes the same way, with the power of his gentle love. He walked among us, healed our diseases, calmed our fears, and rode into the Holy City as a king, though his noble steed was an ass and his eventual crown was woven of thorns. When we lift up our heads, we see his crucified body, broken so that we and this messed up world might be made whole again.

When that One who came as God among us spoke of apocalyptic times, he said — quite curiously, it seems to me — that in the midst of the turmoil, the preferred posture is not hunkering down or cowering in the corner. The preferred posture is to be standing, head lifted up. That’s a posture of confidence and action. It’s a posture of defiance in the face of evil and fear.

It’s the posture of those who know they don’t have to save the world; rather they are the ones who get to do God’s work of healing this broken world.

So, stand up.

Lift up your head.

Carry on.

Be open and vulnerable and generous.

Work with joy in your heart.

Refuse to close yourself off to other people.

Refuse fear and violence.

And live with the hopeful expectation that together, we can actually address humanity’s big challenges. Standing together with our heads lifted up.

I wrote this because I need to read it.

“We Thought We Were in Charge”

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dew featherI spent the past three days at the Institute of Liturgical Studies at Valparaiso University. The Institute is an annual conference that explores the intersection of theology, liturgical practice, and music. I always look forward to the Institute and have been attending since 1992. This year’s theme, Sing a New Song: The Cosmos in Praise and Lament, was of great interest to me. It did not disappoint. Larry Rasmussen, a social ethicist, Mary Louise Bringle, a hymn writer and professor of religious studies, and Ben Stewart, a liturgical theologian informed and challenged us in our vocation to care for the earth in deed and in worship.

I had the honor of preaching at the closing eucharist, a service in which we began to explore how liturgy might form us in our work of creation care. The following is the text of the sermon I preached based on 2 Corinthians 6:1-13 and Mark 4:35-41.

You think you’re in charge until you find out you’re not.

Like when you’ve reserved the bouncy house for the church picnic and encouraged all the families with their kids to show up, and it’s 30 minutes before the picnic is supposed to begin, and when you finally reach someone at Bouncy-Houses R Us, you find out they have delivered and set up said bouncy house at Grace Bible Church instead of Grace Lutheran Church. There is a certain terror attached to that scenario, a certain panic, in the long run not that important, though beads of sweat still break out on my forehead when I tell the story.

You think you’re in charge until you find out you’re not.

Like when you get into the boat with Jesus and you’re the fisherman and it’s your boat and you know how to sail this boat and these are your home waters and you know them like the back of your hand and even though it was Jesus idea to go across the sea, it’s your boat and you are in charge. Until you find out you’re not.

When crisis hits, like a storm on the Sea of Galilee, you discover what was really true all the time, that you are not in charge. The winds begin to blow — hard — the waves become overpowering and begin to swamp the boat. And you, wise, experienced, sailing-savvy fisherman see death staring you in the face, because you know that in this moment, the wind and the sea are in charge, and they hold the power of life and death.

The disciples reach out to Jesus in a panic. Not, I believe, a cry of hope, but overlapping cries of irritation, frustration, and desperation.

The terror-stricken disciples have come face to face with the fact that they are not in charge; by all appearances those life-threatening forces of nature are. And then everything changes. Stuck in the jaws of death, they discover that the one in the boat is more in charge than they know. Waking up from sleep, a simple, commanding word from Jesus calms the winds and the waves.  Jesus is the king of the created order. There’s nothing to fear. He rebukes that which threatens life; his word gives the peace that it calls for.

When it comes to life on this small boat of a planet, a boat increasingly storm-tossed— figuratively and literally — just who is in charge?  For a couple of centuries, we’ve believed and acted as if we are. We’ve been quite impressed with our capacity to harness the unpredictable forces of the natural world and steer them according to our wants and needs. It’s been like grabbing hold of the steering wheel of a great planetary BMW M5, a little crazy at times, but exhilarating, the ultimate driving machine.  This exhilarating drive of economic and technological progress, fueled by an astonishingly rapid burn of fossil fuels has led to a life of ease and convenience for those of us in the room, though not for everyone on the boat, certainly not those of the empty chairs [a reference to Dr. Larry Rasmussen’s plenary session on Tuesday, April 14, at which he placed 3 empty chairs on the podium to represent those impacted by climate change who have no voice, namely, the poor, the creatures, and the earth itself]. Until very recently, we thought it could go on forever.  You think you’re in charge until you find out you’re not.

We have let loose a destructive genie that can no longer be put back in the bottle. We — not just the corporations and governments and systems and other easy punching bags that we like to take our swings at — all of us, thousands upon thousands of us with our thousands upon thousands of daily decisions betray our bowing down at the altars of different gods, gods of consumerism and materialism and convenience, a worship that is killing the planet. In a creation full of life, we have been agents of death, because we thought we were in charge.

We should not be surprised. Holy history has shown us that being in charge is a burden we strive for but cannot bear. When we claim control it leads to nothing but death. Our first parents wanted to be in charge of the Garden and so came the fall and the curse. The Children of Promise wanted to be in charge through the 40-year journey to the Promised Land, repeatedly unwilling to trust God’s provision and repeatedly victims of their own rebellion.  Oh, the tragic and painful truth embedded in the first words carved on the stone tablet: you shall have no other gods.

Those words spoken from the boat changed a precarious situation for the disciples in the boat with Jesus. But only for that moment in time. What changed everything for all time and all eternity, was not a word, but a sorrowful and painful silence.  Not in the stern of that wooden boat, but on the wooden crosspiece of a cruel tree came the silence of the dying one as he breathed his last, and the horrifying silence of abandonment. The silence of his death was the death-knell to death itself. Redemption was accomplished and reconciliation begun in his self-giving love. The empty tomb is the exclamation point to God’s lively intentions for you, for us, and for all creation.

Before this little boat ride, the disciples were students at a hillside seminar on faith, illustrated by a series of folksy stories. Now, after the storm, Jesus asks some penetrating questions about the relationship of their own experience in the boat to faith. Why are you so afraid? Jesus asks. Why do you have so little faith?

Faith is the gift of trust within a properly ordered relationship between Creator and creature. Faith is the gift of knowing that the Creator, the one who has given us life in the Crucified and Risen One is faithful. Not only does that faith cast away the fear that is at the heart of wanting to be in charge, it changes our perspective on and relationship to everything, including our work for the care of the earth. The ones in charge say, “This is a commodity. How can it be used?”  Faith says, “This is a sacred gift. How shall it be cared for?”  Faith issues in eucharistic living, giving thanks for the goodness of the One who has given life, who has given new life, and who now empowers a new way of living. Thankful for this gift of life, we cannot help but be agents of that life for all our creaturely neighbors, even for this holy Mother Earth herself.

Now, let’s be clear; we do not sing a song of progressive optimism that ignores the challenges and say that things will just keep getting better and better. Our song and prayer will often be lament.  Paul had a wide-eyed honesty about the difficulty of his work for the sake of Christ. Persecuted, abused, sorrowful, empty, even dying. Yet, in the midst of that struggle, Paul exudes a confident hopefulness, even joy as he gives his life to his holy work.  The work is hard; it is urgent. But eucharistic living knows no other way; not complacency, apathy, or even resignation to a future that holds only death. Eucharistic living works, loves, and cares, for God’s sake and for the sake of all our neighbors.

Eucharistic living flows from the table to which we will soon be invited. The bread and wine which we will offer is the stuff of the earth. The bread and wine come to us as gift of the Creator.  Shaped by our hands, we offer them for God’s use. By God’s word and promise, we receive this stuff of the earth as the gift of salvation. And then we offer ourselves back to God. It is a properly ordered, grace-filled  relationship — Creator, creature, Christ the Mediator offering himself to us yet again. Then we will go from that table to the table of the world, recognizing in the earthly things a sign and sacrament of a loving Creator. What happens here becomes the pattern for what happens out there, reverently, lovingly, graciously and gratefully receiving the things of earth and offering them back to God.

At Faith Church in Glen Ellyn, as part of our formation for our young brothers and sisters to receive Christ in the Holy Communion, they are asked to reflect on that experience of receiving communion. “What will be different for you now that you will be receiving communion?” they are asked. The question is remarkably similar to the question Fred Niedner asked us at the end of the final plenary session, “What difference will it make that you were at this Institute,” and I might add that you have been in this assembly, at this font and this table? Let me tell you how one of our fifth grade theologians answered that question.  “Now I won’t just be hearing the story, I’ll be in the story.”

Which Jesus?

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As young associate pastor in St. Petersburg, Florida, I served at a large Missouri Synod church out in the western part of the city by the beaches. We used to have regular meetings of all the Lutheran clergy in the area, both Missouri and ELCA. One of the the guys who was almost always there was Priit Rebane, an older pastor who served the historic ELCA church in downtown St. Pete. I had the greatest respect for Priit.  He was soft-spoken, theologically astute, and to me, simply oozed pastoral wisdom out of very pore of his being. Priit was the kind of pastor I wanted to be some day. At one of our meetings, he told a story. (Priit, if you ever read this, I hope you’ll forgive inaccuracies; it was 25 years ago, and the particulars are a little fuzzy, but this is how I remember it.) He told about coming out of the seminary, ready for ordination.  He had learned all the theories about the virgin birth, about the resurrection and whether it happened or not, the various criticisms of scripture. By his own estimation, he was a young theological hot shot, headed out into the parish ready to unleash all his learning on some unsuspecting parish. His grandmother sat him down and told him, “Priit, just tell them about Jesus.”

At our Night Prayer service last night, we read from the Gospel of John about some Greek seekers who asked a couple of Jesus’ followers to introduce them. “We wish to see Jesus.”

For those gathering in devotion this week, it’s easy to see ourselves in those wanting to get more of Jesus than a mere glimpse. In our bones, in our souls, to the depth of our being, we understand that what’s happening this week is at the center not only of the Christian faith, but of our own lives with God and of our life together as a community of faith. So, we want to see Jesus.

But what should we tell one another and the world about Jesus this week? In all the conflicting reports of who Jesus was, what he wanted, and what he was trying to accomplish, it doesn’t appear to be as easy as, “Tell them about Jesus.”  By all estimations, he was a good man, a good teacher, a miracle worker, gave his followers an example to follow. Some would argue even that he was a zealot, or a gentle man who inadvertently got caught up in the politics of the times.

In his own words, Jesus invites us to see something different. Last night we read how, as he approached his own impending death, the image he wanted people to behold was his being lifted up, his moment of glory (John 12). He invites us to view the culmination of his whole ministry, the work that he came to do. He invites us to see his enthronement as king of the universe.

Yet that glorification comes as he ascends the throne of the cross. In that cruel, paradoxical enthronement, we are invited to see that in his death life came to us, that his crucifixion removed the barrier of sin and brokenness that stood before a loving God and a fallen humanity and creation.

“And I, when I am lifted up, will draw all things to myself.”  That’s the thing. In his death, he was drawing all people, all things, into the restored unity of God’s love and grace, God’s purpose for the whole world.

I think that’s pretty important in these days when too many of us who identity ourselves with Jesus are seeking to create divides — between the good and the bad, the sinners and the righteous, those who get it and those who don’t, those who stand for biblical values and those who don’t, those who welcome and those who don’t, those who are racist and those who aren’t, those who are Christian and those who aren’t — to pause for a moment and realize that we’re getting it way wrong. His intention was not to create divides, however well-intentioned we might be. His intention was to draw us to God. All of us. Period.

Maybe that’s the Jesus that Priit’s grandmother was looking for. It’s the image that I hope gets burned into our being this week, the image that gets so seared into our minds and our hearts that it starts to issue in the way we behave. That would really be something.

Reflecting on the Flood, Part 2

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rushingwater1In this space last week, I reflected on the story of the Great Flood, suggesting that, above all, it’s a story about God and not about floods and geology and arks and animals. In that post I argued for a view of God that is based, not on God’s anger, but God’s grief over human sin.

When we get to the other side of the The Great Flood, Noah and his family have been spared and God makes a promise never to abandon that which God has created.

One of the startling reports from the Genesis text is that before and after, nothing has changed on the part of humanity. Before the Flood, God “saw that the wickedness of humanity was great in the earth.” (6:5); after the Flood, God still makes the same judgment, “for the intention of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” (8:21)  The cataclysm of a great flood has done nothing to change the inclination of humanity to rebel against God’s purpose and will. If there is any hope for the future, it will not be found in any change in the human heart apart from the touch of the love and grace of God.  Hope for the future depends on God doing something. Human beings are not, apparently, capable of saving themselves. We cannot, in the end, rise above our calculated self-interest.

Yet this humanity that has been created in God’s image is still regarded by God as good. God yet gives an affirmation about the value and the dignity of human life and human work. “Never again,” is what God says. (9:11)  What has changed is not anything in the human heart. What has changed is the heart of God.

What has also changed is the formula. We seem to be hard-wired for a formula that says wrongdoing must exact a proportional punishment.  An eye for an eye, and all that.  But in the Flood story, God breaks the one to one connection between guilt and punishment. Death and destruction are still real; evil has not disappeared. But after the Flood, death and destruction are no longer rooted in the anger of God, and they are not God’s necessary and inevitable response to wrongdoing.

These reflections are particularly timely for a couple of reasons. First, in the church, we are coming close to the annual Holy Week commemoration of the events of Christ’s last week, culminating in his crucifixion, death, and resurrection. I still hear, far too often, about Christ’s death as the punishment wrought by an angry God for the sin of humanity. It’s just not a helpful way to talk about or think about Christ’s death, nor is it consistent with the picture of God that courses through Scripture, going all the way back to what we learn about God from from the Flood.  Christ’s death and resurrection certainly bring salvation to all humanity, but not in the one-dimensional “payment to an angry Father” schema that is so pervasive in popular western Christianity.

Second, I think it’s particularly important to say in a world where violence and retribution hold sway. The picture of God presented here, a picture which finds its fulfillment and sharpest focus in Jesus, offers another way for us to live together. It is not necessary that punishment be meted out in proportion to the crime, especially when punishment is not a deterrent, and when the drive for punishment completely overshadows any thought of rehabilitation. The current world stage is as much proof as we need that retribution solves nothing; in fact, it serves to escalate the violence and increase the suffering and death of mostly innocent people.  Early yesterday morning, two police officers were shot outside the Ferguson, Missouri City Hall. Retribution? You kill one of ours and we’ll kill one of yours?  Who knows? We still haven’t shed our tendency toward violence and bloodshed; it must still grieve God.

For all of that, I’m grateful to be on the receiving end of a gracious God and still hope that in the peaceable kingdom that is coming in our midst, the same grace might have something to do with how we live with each other.

Reflecting on the Flood, Part 1

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rushingwater1The story of Noah and the Great Flood has got to be one of the most iconic stories in the Bible. I went into a toy store over Christmas to get a present for my young nephew in a completely secular, high-end toy store and saw a wooden ark on wheels complete with animals, Noah, and a handy fold-up ramp to get in and out of the ark. Oh, and did I mention the Noah and the Ark lamp that I spied in a Cracker Barrel gift shop a while back?

Aside from the way the world of kitsch has exploited the story, I get equally frustrated at the the tendency to get hung up on the relatively insignificant details, about whether it happened or nor, about the dimensions of the ark, where the ark might have landed and whether it will ever be found, and a hundred other littles that distract us from the heart of the story. It’s not really about Noah, the animals, the ark, or the flood. It’s a self-revelatory story about God.

The story about God reveals something about God that is usually missed in the baggage we bring to it. The conventional plot line goes something like this:  humankind was wicked; God got mad; God destroyed everything.  Except that there’s not a single indication in the entire story that God acted out of anger. Really. Go look. It wasn’t anger. It was grief. The whole thing begins with God’s grief. God had concluded that the good world that God created had betrayed God’s intent. The decision and the will of God had been treated shabbily by a recalcitrant humanity. People had become wicked, evil, corrupt, and filled with violence. In a profound passage that piles on the extent of the corruption, “Yahweh saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.”  (ESV, emphasis mine) Creation had refused to honor God as God.

The indictment is followed by God’s uncompromising resolve to destroy the creation that had refused to be faithful and obedient. God did, does, and always will take seriously God’s own purposes for creation.

Still, the overwhelming emotion the narrative attributes to God is not anger, but grief. It won’t do to picture  an angry tyrant who has a cosmic temper tantrum and sweeps all the dishes off the table, breaking everything to pieces. Instead, there’s the image of a troubled parent who is heartsick over the alienation of the her rebellious child. God is not enraged, but saddened.

That’s an extraordinarily important distinction to be made. The stereotypical, one-dimensional view of God seems to be embedded in our cultural DNA:  God as the angry judge whose sole vocation is to sniff out the sinners and punish them.

The God I see in this story (and not coincidentally throughout the Hebrew and Christian scriptures) is of a much different character; the image is much more nuanced and much more relational.  God’s heart is full of love for what God has created. In fact, God is persistent and determined to draw humanity, indeed, all of creation back into the reach of God’s purpose and will.  God does that through a determined, persistent, dogged pursuit of us in love.

I’m thinking about that view of God in light of the all too present and all too palpable evil in the world. There are too many examples to name, but the one that sticks in my mind is the image of the 21 Egyptian Coptic Christians taken to the beach in Libya and beheaded. Surely God must be grieved, and surely we are grieved.

In my Ash Wednesday sermon, a sermon in which I introduced the theme of forgiveness that is the ground of our parish-wide reflection during these days of Lent, I raised the question of forgiveness for great and horrible communal evil like the beheading. Is it possible to forgive? Is it required to forgive? A parishioner made the comment after the service that our response ought to be to “bomb them back to the stone-age.”

I get that. It seems right. Tit for tat, eye for eye. It’s the human formula balancing the equation that begins with guilt and typically ends with punishment.

But what happens when we see a God whose heart is grieved at evil, rather than angry at evil. It means that the whole guilt and retribution formula gets turned upside down. And that’s good news. In fact, it’s gospel truth.

That’s where I’ll go in part 2. Come back next week and check it out.