A Season of Peace, Week 3: The Risk of Knowing Jesus

 

James 3:13-4:3,7-8a

Mark 9:30-37

I read a newspaper story about a young man named Oliver who had a secret he was so embarrassed about, so humiliated by, that he went to great lengths for many years to keep it hidden. The secret was that he could not read.

When he was in first grade he was suspended for a week, and when he returned to school he felt utterly lost, way behind. His home life was difficult, and school was hard, and he said nobody ever talked to him about why school even mattered. Oliver continued to struggle and never caught up.

Still, he was promoted from one grade to the next, year after year, until he graduated high school – and still did not know how to read.

He went out into the world, looking for a job that wouldn’t require reading skills. He couldn’t read a restaurant menu or a street sign or a text message, and he was ashamed. He lied in order to hide his secret, but his lies were always eventually discovered and then he was fired.

How difficult it can be for us to admit our weaknesses.

It is a little bit painful for us to watch the disciples trying to hide their ignorance when they didn’t understand what Jesus was saying. This is the second time in Mark’s gospel when Jesus tells his disciples that he will suffer and die. Just last week we heard him doing this, trying to help his disciples understand what they were involved in. When Peter had proclaimed the great revelation that Jesus was the Messiah, Jesus wanted him and the others to really understand what it meant for them to say that about him: that he would be rejected by the religious leaders, that he would suffer and be put to death.

At that time, you may recall, Peter – who was feeling quite proud of himself for getting the right answer – took the opportunity to chide Jesus for being such a downer. Jesus let Peter know in no uncertain terms that he was out of line and way off the mark. Still, it seems as though neither Peter nor any of the others really got it. The lessons would need to continue.

So at some point later on their wanderings through Galilee, Jesus broached the subject with them again. Mark tells us they still didn’t get it. And what’s more, they were afraid to say so.

Judging from the conversation, or rather argument, that ensued, I guess they were a bit afraid of being seen as a loser. Isn’t that how it goes? They probably looked around at the others, trying to get a sense of whether or not they were the only dummy in the room who didn’t understand. We all know it takes a certain amount of courage to be the one person who raises your hand and says, “Teacher, I don’t get it. Please explain it to me.”

It was more than Oliver was able to do for many years while he struggled through school, then struggled to survive in the world without the ability to read. Year after year, he was afraid to ask for help; year after year, no one seemed to notice how much he needed help.

And so I could keep it real simple today, end it here, and just tell you there’s no such thing as a stupid question. Just like every school teacher has said at one time or another, it’s always worth asking questions. And while this is important and true, I believe there was something more going on in Galilee. I believe there is another important message for us to hear today.

A very odd thing that happened after Jesus said these things to them: the disciples began arguing amongst themselves about who was the greatest. And I think to myself, were they delusional? Because not a single one of them, up to this point, is looking great. Time after time, they have failed to understand Jesus. Again and again, they have failed to act in a way that would demonstrate they are growing in their discipleship.

I realize that progress often comes slowly. We improve not by leaps and bounds, but by millimeters – at least that’s the way I have felt about my shoulder during all these months of physical therapy – so I want to give the disciples credit for making some progress. If nothing else, they are sticking with him. They are trying. But are they great? Come on, by what standard is any of them great?

I do have to wonder if this is just a distraction for them, a way of denying the things Jesus is telling them simply because they cannot face the possibility that he is speaking the truth. They cannot face the possibility that the teacher they have decided to follow is headed down a path, not of triumph, but of humility.

They weren’t completely positive about this because they didn’t understand what he was saying. But they were afraid to ask because they sure didn’t want to know.

What if following Jesus really did mean taking up one’s cross? What if following Jesus meant letting go of your dreams of power and success? What if following Jesus meant everything you had been hoping for was actually wrong?

What if your standard for greatness was wrong?

Jesus asked them what they were arguing about and once again they were silent. They didn’t want to tell him, because while there were clearly a lot of things they didn’t understand, they did seem to understand that this argument was kind of dumb. Being caught out like this was as bad as having to admit that you didn’t understand his meaning when he talked about what the Son of Man would go through. Actually, being caught out like this was probably even worse.

But Jesus didn’t even say anything about it. Instead, he called to one of the children in the household. And he took that child and hugged him close. And he looked at his disciples and said, “Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me.”

To be a disciple of Jesus is to open your arms to those who have the least to offer. To be a disciple of Jesus is to lift up the ones who are weak. And to be a disciple of Jesus is to know that you, too, are weak.

For it is weakness that will lead to his persecution at the hands of the authorities. It is weakness that will lead to his death. But the thing these men have failed to understand is that in this weakness there is real strength. In this weakness there is true greatness.

What they don’t want to know, eventually will know: really knowing Jesus means knowing where true greatness lies and that it is not in the things that the world finds great. Really knowing Jesus means knowing that humility is a spiritual superpower. To really know Jesus means knowing that peace will never come from bringing the fight, but only from bringing the love. As the letter of James says, the wisdom that comes from God is pure, peaceable, willing to yield.

And it is risky to know these things. It is risky to commit your life to following Jesus in the way of peace, gentleness, humility. The world won’t understand it. They will call you sappy, soft – and those are the nice words they will use. The world might think it is actually kind of sad that you never achieved greatness – because the world does not understand what true greatness is.

The risk that you take in following Jesus is that you will really understand who he is and who he is calling you to be: peaceful, gentle, willing to yield, full of mercy and good fruits, without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.

This is the risk the world is waiting for us to take.

A Season of Peace, Week 2: A Time to Speak

 

James 3:1-12

Mark 8:27-38

I used to have a friend, Jim. He was a kind and big-hearted man with a great sense of humor, but he also knew how to lay down the law. He liked to say, “I prefer peace over justice any day of the week.” Particularly in reference to his three children when they were bickering about something.

Jim was going to get his peace, which for him meant quiet, if those kids knew what was good for them.

We began our study group last Wednesday, talking about Five Risks Presbyterians Must Take for Peace. I asked the group what they thought of when they hear someone say they just want to keep the peace. And they said it means they just want people to be quiet. This is also what the phrase, “Hold your peace” means: Just don’t say anything.

The letter of James has a lot to say about the harm that speaking can cause, such that his message seems like it could be distilled to, “Just hold your peace. Keep your mouth shut.” But could that really be what peace is all about?

Defining peace is so much more complex than the simple notion of holding one’s tongue.

In Mark, as we continue following the story of Jesus and his disciples, we listen in on a fascinating discussion. Last week we left Jesus and his followers at the end of Chapter 7, where they saw Jesus cast a demon from the Gentile woman’s daughter, and then give a man the ability to hear and speak. They bore witness to the power of God working through him, seemingly without limits.

After that, they saw him continue to perform miracles – feeding thousands from a handful of loaves and fishes and giving sight to a blind man. And after all this, he asked the disciples a question: So what are people saying about me? And they told him: They say you are John the Baptist, you are Elijah, or some other prophet. These were all types they had seen before. But then Jesus asks, “But who do you say that I am?” and Peter gave the answer that no one had dared to speak.

Because the Messiah is a dream. The Messiah is the hoped for, but never seen. The Messiah is in a realm beyond anything they know.

For the church, our understanding of the Messiah is specifically as Jesus, as God taking on human flesh and blood, as the fully human, fully divine one. But that is not what it means to Israel.

The word Messiah in Hebrew is the “anointed one.” The Jewish belief in and hope for a Messiah was focused on a human being who would be anointed by God to lead the people of Israel to freedom, to save them from the tyrannical reign of other nations, to reunite the 12 tribes, the descendants of Abraham and Sarah, and usher in an age of peace around the world.

In Judaism, the Messiah would be a man – not God, but a man; the greatest political leader imaginable, descended from King David. And he would be the greatest king Israel and the world had ever known. The Messiah would be the king Israel needed, to fight for them, to bring them justice and peace, the justice and peace they could not realize on their own.

The Messiah was a hope. And now, in Peter’s words, this hope has become real.

Jesus knew what he was hearing Peter say when he called him Messiah. He knew all the baggage this title carried, all the particular hopes attached to it, and so he turned the subject to some considerations that Peter and the others had probably never imagined.

That the Messiah will suffer. That the Messiah will be rejected by the leaders of Israel. That the Messiah will be killed, but after three days he will rise again. Contrary to all they believed about the Messiah as a conquering hero, Jesus is telling them the Messiah will be humiliated and put to death.

Now, for us, the whole gospel of Jesus Christ is the story of why this is good news. Why it is a message of hope that Jesus came bearing love without bounds, bringing wholeness to the broken ones, casting out evil in our midst. Why it is that the way of peace is never through violence, but through humility and love. We know from the gospel that Christ, in his refusal to be a party to evil, would destroy the forces of evil by shaming them. Shaming them.

But Peter, and surely the others too, could not see this yet. And when he hears Jesus’ words about a suffering Messiah, he feels shame for Jesus. Shame for the very notion of a Messiah who would let himself be humiliated and killed. And shame personally to be associated with that. He’s like, Ix-nay on the suffering and dying, Jesus. Not a strong message!

And in this moment Peter shows us a side of ourselves that we might be ashamed to see. When we are asked to confess our own complicity in the sins of the world and we react with anger because we insist that has nothing to do with us. When we are asked to give of our own time and wealth for the sake of those who are in desperate need, and instead we close our fists, we turn away. When we sit with a friend who is suffering in a way that truly frightens us and we can’t suppress our impulse to pat their hand and say, “There, there, it will all be okay,” even though it probably won’t.

In moments such as these we have denied the gospel of Jesus. And while it is undeniable that we will all have moments of weakness – moments when we are unable to live fully into the image of Christ, serving the poor and the weak, loving without conditions, shouldering another’s pain with them – our weakness is not to our shame. But our denial of it is.

Jesus’ harsh words to Peter and all his disciples present this truth to us. The way of Christ is beyond the ways of this world, and if we are not willing to see that, to try and understand that, we are caving to the ways of the world, to evil.

There are moments when we know that the way of peace is to keep silent, to refrain from using hurtful words. and then there are moments when the only way to peace is to break the silence. To speak loudly, even if words offend, as Jesus did. For silence about injustice will never lead to peace.

Take the situation that has found prominence in our politics recently: the accusations that Haitian immigrants are eating pets in Springfield Ohio. I don’t know who started this lie, but that doesn’t even matter. The problem is in how most of us have responded to it.

Many of us have laughed about it because it sounds so ridiculous. And many have mocked it by sharing jokes about it online. Talking about politics can be very uncomfortable, and it is much easier to talk about politics if we treat it as a joke. But this lie is not funny. This lie about the Haitian immigrants in Springfield has threatened violence in that community, creating a situation that endangers people’s lives just because they are immigrants. It’s not funny when people are being terrorized. It isn’t just an online joke when people are in fear for their lives.

The gospel of Jesus Christ insists that we not turn away from this. The gospel of Jesus Christ demands that we speak out against it.

To speak out against lies is a risk we must take for the sake of peace. To acknowledge the injustices in the world, and to speak out about them, this is a risk we must take for peace.

And there are times when it is in our very own neighborhood.

Christians must come together on this. And together we must raise our voices for justice and for peace. Because we cannot have one without the other.

A Season of Peace, Week 1: All Who Stand in Need

Mark 7:24-37

We depend to a great extent on the work of biblical historians to help us understand the scriptures better – to get a sense of the context, the best interpretation of language, and the authenticity of the many ancient manuscripts that are available. And I learned something this week that I have to share with you, something that these historians use in their work: the criterion of embarrassment.

The criterion of embarrassment says this: if a story in the bible is something that is, potentially, kind of embarrassing, then it’s probably true. Some of the stories in the Bible might not have happened quite the way they are written. But if they are embarrassing, then they probably did happen like that. Because why would they make up something that might make Jesus, his followers, or the church, look foolish?

By that standard, I think the story of Jesus healing the deaf man is authentic, because it’s a silly image. Jesus sighs, like he’s on his last nerve, and then does some weird stuff with fingers and ears and tongue and spit. Who would make that up?

And by the same standard, the story of the Gentile woman who schooled Jesus has got to be real.

It is uncomfortable that he stands corrected by a woman, a Gentile woman at that. Just prior to this he was traveling through Galilee with his disciples, taking questions and criticisms from the Pharisees. The Pharisees, who were regarded as the authorities on religious matters, surely felt confident of their abilities in an argument with a common Nazarene like Jesus. But time and again they found themselves on the losing side. Again and again, we learn higher truths when Jesus corrects the religious authorities.

So it is surprising and even hard to accept when a Gentile woman corrects Jesus. But perhaps it really shouldn’t be too surprising.

A clear thread that we see running through the scriptures is that humans are vulnerable to being corrupted by power. We are forever wanting to take power into our own hands, and to assert power over other people, but the story of the Bible, from beginning to end, is that all power and glory is rightly attributed to God. and whenever power is put in our hands, it should be understood, this is through God’s goodness and for God’s purposes.

Yet, it is just so hard to keep that perspective. Power makes us giddy. It makes us greedy for more of it. It makes us say ridiculous things like, “I, alone, can fix this.”

Jesus had the power of God in him. People could see that, and they hungered for it, to meet their needs. They wanted healing and feeding and comforting and salvation. They wanted wholeness. Shalom. They were constantly coming to him, wanting and needing, begging and pleading, because Jesus had the power of God.

But Jesus was tired.

At the moment this Syrophoenician woman found him, he was trying to hide. But she found him, she bowed low before him, she begged him – for the sake of her child. “Take this demon away from her, please.” His response to her is cruel, calling the woman and her daughter dogs. Yet, she, this powerless woman, has an answer to him. “Even the dogs under the table get to eat the children’s crumbs.”

And her words shifted Jesus’ perspective. Now, we know, he is seeing her as fully human, created by God and loved by God.

And this is the Jesus we know and love, isn’t it? The one who colors outside the lines, all the time. The one who shows us there is no boundary on God’s love, and that peace – God’s shalom – belongs to all, not just some.

In truth, there is no peace and wholeness for any, unless it is available to all.

And so as we begin our season of peace this morning, I want to say this one thing: Peace begins when we look at the whole human family as beloved by God and, of course, worthy of our love. Peace begins when we learn to look at another human being who is in need and see a reflection of ourselves.

May it be so. 

Picture from ChurchArt.Com

Faith Rules

James 1:17-27

Mark 7:1-8,14-15,21-23

There was a movie that came out in 1998 called Pleasantville. It was a funny story about time travel. But it’s also about how we decide what is wrong and what is right.

There are two teenagers, David and Jennifer, who are siblings. We see in the first few minutes of the film that their lives are fairly unpleasant.  They’re coping with some of the complications that might confront middle class kids: social status, drugs and alcohol, parents who have their own troubles and are mostly unavailable to their kids.  

Jennifer, who is played by Reese Witherspoon, is navigating these issues with some success, but David, who is played by Tobey Maguire, seems mildly depressed and spends most of his time watching reruns of an old 1950’s sitcom, Pleasantville.  It’s a “Leave It to Beaver” kind of program. Way out of date, but there is something about it David just loves. Life is somehow better in Pleasantville, and when he comes home from a tough day at high school, David just wants to immerse himself in this other world.  

One day, catastrophe strikes – the TV remote control breaks.  

A mysterious TV repairman appears – played by Don Knotts.  No one called him, but he’s there. He’s like this wise, magical imp.  He sees the trouble Jennifer and David are in, more than they themselves can see.  He gives them a new remote control, which magically transports them right into David’s favorite TV show.  Suddenly, David and Jennifer are characters in a black & white 1950’s TV world…

…where life is perfect.  The family all sits at the breakfast table together with huge platters of hot eggs and bacon and pancakes, orange juice and milk. You know, healthy. Everything is perfect. Mom is a fulltime homemaker, Dad goes to his 9-5 job and is always home by dinner, except maybe on bowling night. The kids, David and Jennifer, who are now called Bud and Mary Sue, trundle off to high school in their penny loafers and poodle skirt, where they now have to learn to navigate life in this black and white TV town.  

Where everyone knows their place, everyone knows the rules, and everything is perfect.

But it’s not as perfect as it seemed.

For one thing, there are no bathrooms.  Think about it – did you ever see Donna Reed or June Cleaver step into the powder room?  Nope.  

There are other difficulties too.  David and Jennifer have all sorts of clashes with the people of Pleasantville because they’re not the same. They have been shaped by the real world – the real, colorful, 3-dimensional world. They don’t quite fit in.

But then, we discover, their mere presence in Pleasantville begins to change the place and the people.  They begin to have subtle influences on people, and the influence becomes visible.  In this black and white world, one by one, people begin to show some color, like a rosy flush in their cheeks or lips. The color blooms as they take on some depth in terms of their emotions, their values, their perspectives on the world.

There is, of course, the predictable backlash. Those who have not been colorized lash out angrily against the colored ones, victimizing them. There is definitely a nod here to the real clashes that were occurring in our country around that time having to do with skin color.  But the issue is even broader than that.

It has to do with sexuality, gender roles, openness to cultural differences and new ways of seeing things, doing things.  Books, art, music that are all new to them.  It has to do with becoming more fully human.  And this blossoming into full humanity is threatening for those who can’t understand it.

You might be wondering what this extended recap of the movie Pleasantville has to do with the scriptures for today.  It’s all about how sometimes a new thing can be very challenging or threatening, even while it is ripe with new possibility.  

The people in Pleasantville were learning that there was a whole big undiscovered world outside their town limits.  They were discovering that there were other possible ways of being outside of the well-worn routines of their lives. They were discovering the limitations of Pleasantville.

But at the same time, David and Jennifer were learning to appreciate the genuinely good qualities of Pleasantville.  Again, it wasn’t all black and white.  New things were happening for everyone.

And basically, newness was what Jesus was bringing to Israel.  He had been traveling around the Galilee and surrounding regions teaching, healing, and feeding, and doing these things in radically new ways.  As the Pharisees watch him, they are less joyful about the good things he is doing than they are concerned about the ways he is doing them.  They say to him, “Why don’t you follow the traditions of the Elders?  Why don’t you all wash your hands the way you are supposed to?”  To the Pharisees, their carelessness about this detail is a signifier of what is wrong about Jesus.  

The Pharisees are seeing all these things through the parameters they have set for defining what it is to be a Jew.  Jesus doesn’t fit in these parameters – even though he is as authentic in his faith as a man could be.  It’s the challenge of encountering something new. And figuring out what changes are okay, even good, and which ones are not.

They accuse Jesus, saying, “You are ignoring the traditions.” And Jesus responds to them, saying “But you abandon the commandment of God.” 

The truth of the matter is we often struggle to discern one from another. 

When I lay the story of Pleasantville over the gospel, I see something similar: Pharisees, looking at the world through a black and white lens, insisting that the right way of doing things is the way they have always done things. And then these kids come along, who are just different, and seem to challenge the traditions just by being who they are. They’re not opposed to the rules, in general. But they aren’t willing to be less than who they are, for the sake of a rule. They don’t want to be harmed – or for anyone else to be harmed – because of a rule that maybe doesn’t even make sense.

In the film, it seemed as though when David and Jennifer appeared in Pleasantville, there was an invitation to discernment. Some of the residents of Pleasantville began to reflect on the ways things were done and begin to recognize areas of injustice that they could no longer ignore.

I don’t want to go so far as to imply that the Pharisees were just like two-dimensional TV characters. But I will suggest that perhaps their application of the law was a two-dimensional collection of rules and traditions that had, in some ways, lost their connection to the commandment of God: to love the Lord and one another with heart and soul, mind and strength.

Love is the commandment, and everything must begin with that. As Jesus said, It is the things that come out of a person that matter. Those things can be love or they can be evil. Think about it and learn to recognize the difference.

And, as James says, when we are caring for one another, particularly those who are most in need of care, when we are acting out of generosity and not selfishness, then we are in accord with God’s desire. 

The law of love is the lens through which we interpret all else. Let everything be filtered through love.

Photo by Tim Wildsmith on Unsplash

When Love Offends

 

John 6:56-69

Once I led a group study on the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This was a good group to work with – they were mature in their faith and devoted to studying the scriptures. We were moving right along at a good clip, but they knocked me right off my rhythm when one of them said, “I don’t like this parable. It’s not right.” and everyone in the room agreed. They resented this wayward son and rejected the notion that he should be given such lavish forgiveness. It’s not fair, they told me. It’s not right. It offended their sense of justice.

I once had a conversation with a fellow church member about the Sunday sermon we had both just heard. He told me that even though he usually liked that preacher, he really disliked this particular sermon. He was offended by her interpretation of the Noah story in Genesis – that maybe it didn’t happen exactly that way. It seemed to him that she was saying the Noah’s Ark story we teach our children in the nursery is a lie and did she really think it was okay for us to tell our children lies?

I have learned over the years that people can get a little touchy about the word of God. Sometimes, of course, they love it. But other times they react differently. They are afraid. They find it offensive. And when I say “they” I mean me too. I am not exempt from this. I still have my old high school Bible in which I scratched out a verse I didn’t like. I found the teaching too hard; I simply didn’t know what to do with it. So I removed it with a ball-point pen.

I haven’t tried to remove any verses with a pen in many years. But I have other ways of rejecting things in the scriptures that I do not like. Dealing with this passage from John’s gospel has made me very aware of this.

The people who were listening to Jesus that day were uncomfortable with his words, and Jesus took note of it. He heard their complaints. He felt their reaction in his own body, and he turned to them and asked, “Does this offend you?”

I’m glad he asked that question, because it showed a healthy amount of self-awareness. Honestly, the things he was saying about eating flesh and drinking blood? Yes, they were offensive, and I wish he wouldn’t talk like that.

But he does talk like that. He has actually been going on like this for a little while now. Several weeks in our lectionary, portions of this conversation have been showing up and, frankly, I have been ignoring them. I did not want to talk to you about this stuff.

So I ignored it. And I checked to see what was going on in the Old Testament and in the Epistles. Or the Psalms. The Psalms are usually a safe bet; they can be counted on not to give offense to anyone, except on those very few occasions when they are extremely offensive to everyone.

I will tell you the truth: the scriptures are sometimes offensive, for any number of reasons. They offend our sense of reason, or they offend our sense of what is good and acceptable. They offend our assessment of our own intelligence, or they offend the very foundations of our beliefs. And just as much, when we start talking about them, grappling with these words that are strange or offensive or cringy, trying to reconcile the word of God with our hearts and minds and spirits and experience of life, when we voice our thoughts and feelings we risk offending one another.

Once I began an adult class by reading a passage from the Gospel of John where the resurrected Jesus stands on the shore and calls to his disciples who are out fishing. Peter, who was apparently overcome with excitement, put on his clothes and jumped in the lake and swam to shore. I said to the group, “Peter put on his clothes and jumped in? Does that seem weird to you?” Most everyone laughed and agreed; yeah, it’s a weird image. But one person quietly fumed. “No, it is not weird,” she said, “and maybe if you knew the scriptures as well as I do you wouldn’t think that.”

Part of me felt sorry to have offended her. But I wasn’t really. Because this was a little thing, and if something this little offended her what in the world was she doing with the big things? And there are a lot of big things – we are talking about Jesus, and Jesus has been offending people for two thousand years. This will probably not change.

I am trying to get used to this. Trying to pay attention to how I might cringe a little when I come across an offensive passage. Because, sooner or later, the Spirit will help me recognize that it offends me because it is hard for me. Not necessarily because it is wrong, but because it is hard. Like his followers said to him in this story from John, these teachings are difficult.

So many of them are.

It was difficult when he said to a potential disciple, “Let the dead bury the dead.” It was difficult when he said to a rich young man, “You must sell everything that you own,” and it was difficult when he said to us, “Be perfect.”

It is difficult here when he says whoever eats me will live.

Who can accept such teachings as these? Not many.

I know this because people are beginning to drift away from him. The massive crowds that have been stalking him for a while now? They’ve started thinning out, because the going is getting hard. Because miraculous healings are one thing, but difficult teachings are something else altogether. To be healed, all we have to do is show up, but to be taught, we have to be open to learning something new.

In moments like these I go back to something I learned many years ago about the church’s two essential roles – it is, first, a hospital for sinners; and second, a school for saints. It is where we come to be healed of our sin-sick souls; and, when we are ready, it is the place that will begin to teach us how to follow Jesus, how to be like Jesus.

Both of these roles can be offensive. In so many ways.

When we want to use the powers that we have to draw lines that determine who is acceptable and who is not, Jesus comes along and steps right over those lines. And he says to the people on the other side of the line, “Do you want to be made well?” Jesus built this hospital for sinners and tried to make it very clear to us that it is open to everyone. It was never an easy message because the world he lived in had very clear ideas about who was in and who was out.

The woman with a hemorrhage – out. The man with a skin disease – out. Eunuchs – out. People of other religious traditions – out. The rules were clear. Everyone knew where the lines were, and Jesus was always crossing those lines.

He was always crossing lines that separated the good people from the rest, crossing the lines that separated the sinners from the sanctified, crossing the lines that separated the flawed from the perfect. In all these things he was saying, God did not set these lines. People did, and God will erase these lines.

And he said to us, “Go and do likewise.”

So he created a movement of crossing lines and loving people – even those outside the lines. A hospital for healing sinners, outsiders, untouchables, the broken ones. A movement for schooling up saints, training all of us to grow in love, grow in forgiveness, grow in acceptance of all the others. What Jesus created is a movement to wipe out the lines. Something that was – and still is – offensive.

Because when he says, you should love one another, even your enemies, people are offended. When he says, you should love your neighbor, and everyone is your neighbor – even the Samaritans, and the Palestinians, and the Israelis, and the Iranians, and the Russians and the Ukrainians, and the Democrats and the Republicans, because they are all humans. That offends people.

Sometimes, love offends people.

If you love someone you are not supposed to love – love between two men or two women, love between two ethnicities or races or religions.

People are offended – we hold tight to the lines. Because there is something in us that likes the lines that separate the good people from the bad people. There is something in us that is offended when people start crossing the lines. Any of the lines. Yet, in all these matters, Jesus wipes away the lines.

Rachel Held Evans put it well when she said, “What makes the gospel offensive isn't who it keeps out, but who it lets in.” Rachel was brought up in a church where there was a lot of attention on the lines and keeping people on their side of the lines. But her love for Jesus eventually led her to see things differently. And when she started saying it out loud…then people thought she was being offensive.

Offensive like Jesus. Offensive like the gospel.

When we are so busy tending the lines and getting offended by people who want to mess with the lines, we are probably forgetting something important: all of us are on the wrong side of the line.

But then Jesus steps in our direction. He stretches his foot out and wipes away the line in the sand and he says to us, “Never mind that. Come and be on my side.”

Jesus came for all of us who were born on the wrong side of the line. He came so that we may have life, that we may abide in him, and he may abide in us. And when he says, anyone who eats me will live, this is what it means: take Jesus into your body, your heart, your mind, and your soul. Devour all of him. Absorb everything about him that is good and true.

And when we do this, we may join the company of those who wipe away the lines, those who forgive extravagantly and love abundantly. When we take Jesus into ourselves, we may become the ones who welcome radically and heal deeply and teach wisely.

I just remembered another thing that Jesus said: “Blessed is anyone that takes no offense at me.”

May it be so. Amen.

The Wish

 

1 Kings 2:10-12; 3:3-14

Ephesians 5:15-20

The story of Solomon begins well before the chapter we hear today. It begins with the part we heard a couple of weeks ago, when David saw Bathsheba bathing on her rooftop, and he sent for her. He ignored the fact that she was married to another man and he took her for his own. And from this sin, others followed, like dominoes tumbling down. David atoned for it all, but the words of the prophet Nathan rang true: the sword was a constant presence in David’s household from then on.

The story of Solomon moves on to include deadly fights over the matter of succession. King David had many sons by numerous wives and, unsurprisingly, they were not all in agreement that Solomon should be crowned king of Israel.

Even before David died, there were negotiations in the works. Solomon’s mother Bathsheba and the prophet Nathan approached the king on his deathbed because another of David’s sons had seized power already, apparently hoping to make it look like a forgone conclusion before anyone noticed what he had done.

So David intervened to make it clear that Solomon was his chosen successor on the throne. But his worries were not yet over. He summoned Solomon to his bedside and shared his concerns and his final words of advice, sounding a lot like Don Corleone in The Godfather. “These are the ones you need to look out for; but you should deal loyally with these others.”

“Act according to your own wisdom,” he says to Solomon. “You are a wise man,” he says at another point. But his message is clear: Do as I would do. Do as I tell you to do.

And after David dies, Solomon again finds himself challenged by those who oppose him. And even though he tries not to, he eventually succumbs to the violent ways his father had recommended.

When God came to King Solomon and said, “Ask what I should give you,” Solomon seemed to know already what he needed: Wisdom. Perhaps he knew that with enough wisdom he would have found a way other than violence.

Solomon asked the Lord for the gift of wisdom.

I don’t know how many of us would have asked for wisdom were we in Solomon’s place, because in any given day there are so many other things we are want. We want more time, more energy, more health. We want more peace in our lives, more love in our families, more laughter in our days. We want to wipe away our pain, our worries, our debt. And, yes, much of the time our desires center on material things: a new car, new furniture, a vacation. Personally, I want a lot of things, I will tell anyone who asks. I am full of wishes and wants.

And even if we realize that most of these things we wish for would not be the thing to ask God for, should the Lord come to us and say, “Ask what I should give you,” I still wonder if our inclination would be to ask for wisdom. Because we might wonder: Would wisdom make me any happier? And, wouldn’t wisdom be, perhaps, somewhere down the list below other things like love? Like peace?

However you might answer these questions, it’s important to recognize the long thread of wisdom shining through the scriptures. You could argue it begins in the third chapter of Genesis, where Adam and Eve ate the fruit that was forbidden, for they could see that it would make them wise. Was it a sin for them to want wisdom? No. Their sin, perhaps, was to take it, rather than to ask for it.

There is much written about wisdom in the book of Proverbs, where the very first verse tells us that the book’s purpose is to impart wisdom. Proverbs 8 even says that wisdom was God’s first act of creation. The epistles of the New Testament also have plenty to say about wisdom.

If we still feel unclear about the value of wisdom, we might look closely at this story of King Solomon where wisdom is the centerpiece, and we might wonder what wisdom means in this context.

When we do, what we see is thankfulness. Immediately after his vision, Solomon goes to the ark of the covenant and makes sacrifices of thanksgiving to God. Do you think that thankfulness is wise? Does thankfulness come from wisdom?

We also see a concern for justice. Solomon built the halls of justice in Israel, with a priority for administering laws for the welfare of all the people. Do you think justice for all is a wise thing?

Solomon did so much that was good for Israel, but that is not the whole story of Solomon. As the years go by, for reasons I do not know, Solomon shifts his priorities. The legacy he leaves includes very severe and harsh policies that impoverished and enslaved the people. Cruelty that does not seem to show any trace of wisdom.

The author of the book of Kings seems to know why it turned out this way and tells us in Chapter 11. Solomon lost his way when he lost the ways of the Lord. He built altars to idols, he divided his heart, and he was no longer walking in God’s ways.

Perhaps the most truthful thing to say about wisdom then is that true wisdom is following in God’s ways. And the gift of wisdom grants us the ability to discern good from evil, to discern the true God from false idols, to recognize love and practice love.

Aren’t these things that you would want? If God said to you, “Ask what I should give you,” would you ask for this?

The letter to Ephesians tells us, “Be careful how you live, not as unwise people but as wise, making the most of the time, for the days are evil.”

Make the most of the time by staying connected with one another, caring for neighbors near and far – we hold one another up, sharing our strength when we do so.

Make the most of the time by fixing your eyes on Christ, seeking to carry him in your heart and show that beautiful heart to all the world.

Make the most of the time by staying awake and alert to the needs of the world and the ways of God and holding before you the vision of God’s better world.

There is plenty of foolishness in the world – in the church, too. Foolishness is easy but does no one any good.

And then there is wisdom.

If God says to you, “Ask what I should give you,” choose wisdom.

No Longer Strangers

Ephesians 1:3-14

In 1871 two archeologists found a piece of engraved stone from the Jerusalem temple – the one King Herod built; the one that was destroyed in the year 70 AD. The Greek letters carved on it spelled out a stern warning: “No foreigner is to enter the barriers surrounding the sanctuary. He who is caught will have himself to blame for his death which will follow.”

This was one rule it appears they were strict about. No gentiles were permitted to enter the temple. But it was not the only rule. There were degrees of acceptability in the temple worship of the time. 

The outermost area of the temple was called the court of the gentiles, and it was a large, open, public area. Anyone could come into the outer court, and it was the place where pilgrims could exchange their currency and purchase animals for sacrifice. Within this courtyard there was a low barrier, called a soreg; a few steps past the soreg was a wall that separated the public area from the inner courts of the temple. Immediately beyond the wall was the court of the women, because this was as far as Jewish women were allowed to enter. Further within, there was an inner court, the place where the burned sacrifices were made. Jewish men were permitted to enter the inner court, as long as they didn’t have certain conditions that would make them disqualified. And finally, the innermost region, called the Holy of Holies, where only the purest ones could enter.

This notion of purity doesn’t have anything to do with whether you washed that morning with Ivory soap. It is a religious concept that is laid out in detail in the Old Testament books of Leviticus and Numbers. When you read these texts, you realize that there were many types of people who were restricted from participating in temple worship. Foreigners, of course; non-Jews, who were deemed intrinsically impure, were barred. Women; eunuchs; anyone with a skin disease; these were all restricted from entering beyond a certain point. But additionally, Jewish men who were imperfect in some way were prevented from entering the inner region. The scriptures speak of the blind and the lame, dwarves, and hunchbacks, all excluded. Anyone judged to have abnormalities or deformities, excluded. There were many ways a person could be shut out.

But this is not just a Jewish thing, of course. It is a fact of human nature.

The human mind likes order, and if we can’t find it in the world around us, we create it. We divide people up into categories, and then judge those categories. So, in the end, there are those who are like us and there are others. These others might be frightening to us. They might just be perplexing to us. But often they somehow seem wrong to us. 

In the first century, the church was small but growing fast, and the question of who should belong was still a matter of controversy. Among those who gathered to worship, there were differences in race and culture, differences that really could not be erased. Nonetheless, in the church, the scripture says, there is no longer the circumcised and the uncircumcised. There is one body in Christ.

It was a matter that had been settled, at least in theory, by the Jerusalem Council – we can read it in the book of Acts, chapter 15. Yet, it seemed that the ruling did not manage to erase prejudices, strong opinions that the old way was the best way, that these newcomers just didn’t belong. It was an issue that needed to be addressed in many of the New Testament epistles, such divisiveness was being stirred up in response to the work of the Spirit. 

Like it or not, the Holy Spirit was crossing over boundaries and drawing diverse groups together in Christ – but those people were, maybe, a little averse to being drawn together. They remained preoccupied with their differences, and the ways those differences made them uncomfortable with one another.

There were the poor Christians, some of them enslaved, and there were the wealthy Christians. They had dramatically different lifestyles, obviously. And the wealthy ones were sometimes unable to comprehend the unique challenges the poor ones faced every day.

We are still beset by these kinds of problems. It is hard for us to understand people who are different from us. For those who abide strictly by the law, it is hard to understand anyone who breaks the law. For those who are blessedly free of addiction, it can be hard to understand those who suffer under the weight of addiction. For those who have enough, or more than enough, it can be hard to understand those who don’t have enough and, to our minds, do a poor job of managing what little they have.

Put simply, it can be very hard for us to understand those whose path through life has been different from ours. And what we can’t understand, we judge. Still, while we continue to struggle with acceptance, the Holy Spirit goes on crossing boundaries, the work that Jesus began.

The radical thing that Jesus Christ did in his life was to draw the outcasts to himself. He healed those who had been thrown out of society, giving them a chance at reconciliation, an opportunity to be restored to wholeness. Jesus spoke to the gentiles and listened to them, giving them the respect others might reserve only for members of their own tribe.

The Apostle Paul continued this mission; he went out to the gentile communities. He listened to them and shared with them the good news of Christ Jesus. He told them this was good news for them, too. 

This letter to Ephesians speaks directly to the gentiles, saying you who were once far off, or aliens, have been brought near, by the blood of Jesus Christ. You who were once excluded: the gentiles, but also the women, the blind and lame and deformed, the sick, the imperfect. Now the walls and barriers have been removed, the gates are open. In Christ, all have been brought together.

For in him we find our peace. In him we are given a new identity. And in him we have a whole new way to frame our outlook on the world. 

For we once looked at the world as a framework of lines dividing peoples into groups, separating them from others. We found our identity by focusing on the lines and what they represented: differences in acceptability, differences in belongingness. The lines represented the ways we differed, and we defended the boundary lines because they defined who we were against who we were not: the pure on this side of the line; the impure on the other side. The lines defined us and them, friend and enemy.

But in Christ everything changed. And we no longer look to the boundary lines, but we look to the center, which is Christ. The holy of holies. He is our center, our purpose, what we are drawn to, where we find our peace. He is our peace. 

And so in Christ all come together. The circumcised and the uncircumcised. The slave and the free, the Jew and the gentile, the north and the south and the east and the west, all came together to find their peace in him. Turning our attention away from the lines that separated us and toward the center which now defines us.

We are a new creation in Christ; together, we form a dwelling place for God, with Christ as the cornerstone holding us together. Let me tell you: We need him as our cornerstone, every hour of the day and night, because we surely could not hold ourselves together on our own.

But together we are called to be, and called to live in unity, one body in Christ – a notion so radical it makes 21st century Americans shake their heads in disbelief. “You’re dreaming,” they might say. “Wake up. Get real. Leave that kumbaya stuff in church, you’re in the real world now.”

But, my friends, we have been adopted into God’s family, and that is not an identity we can take on and off at will. We carry this with us in every moment, every place; it unites us with all who are fellow members of this household, whoever and wherever they are. It is a blessing and also a calling, and it challenges us to live in a way that is different from what we encounter every day in the world.

It calls us to see one another differently, as brothers and sisters, all beloved by God, even while we struggle mightily to feel that way about one another. 

It calls us to cross those divisions. To leave behind the old ways of speaking about others. We are tempted to fall back, to use the language that we hear around us – language that comes out of division and aggravates that division. But as members of God’s household, we must leave that behind. We have no right to strip anyone of their God-given humanity.

We cannot call another human being vermin simply because we are on different sides of an issue. We cannot call someone a monster, even if their actions seem monstrous. These ones were created in God’s own image, just as we were. These ones we would call less than human, they are human, beloved by God, just as we are.

The words to the Ephesians are a precious gift, because they tell us we belong, we who were once outcasts, are beloved. And these words are also a calling for the whole church, to see ourselves united in Christ, to know ourselves empowered by the Spirit to carry Christ, who is our peace, with us into all the world.

And to show the world what Christ’s peace looks like, sounds like, feels like, tastes like.

The world says “hate,” but God says no. The world says we are hopelessly divided, but God says no. The world says, “build a wall.”

And God says no. No. I have a better way. And I call upon you to embody that better way.

May it be so.