Awake, Alert, and Attentive (Ephesians 5:14, Luke 10:25-37)

A painting entitled “At Dawn” by Belgian artist Charles Hermans caught my eye this week.

Completed in 1875, “At Dawn” captures the essence of the era that history remembers as The Gilded Age–a time of explosive wealth and riches for the privileged few and back-breaking poorly compensated toil for the many.

“At Dawn” shows us something like a snapshot from the time–an early morning scene on a city sidewalk.

Bleary eyed and well-dressed revelers pouring out of a club dominate the scene.

The men wear black suits and top hats; the women, long and brightly colored gowns.

The group is obviously drunk, unsteady. They look like they might tumble into the street at any moment.

In contrast, the figures on the remainder of the canvas stand sober and upright.

They are workers and laborers at the start of a new day.

They’re dressed modestly, practically.

They appear to be yielding the sidewalk to the revelers.

None of the figures make eye-contact with one another, but they definitely see each other.

A reveler glances toward the workers as he descends the club’s steps.

Is it contempt in his eyes, or shame? Disgust with the common folk or with himself?

A working class mom on her husband’s arm stares at a woman’s dress.

Maybe she’s jealous. Maybe she recognizes the flowers the woman carries.

Her son also takes in the scene while his father looks at him.

What must the young boy be thinking?

What thoughts are on the father’s mind?

The contrast between the two groups is the painting’s greatest source of energy.

Hermans keeps the two, who are emblematic of the proverbial “haves” and “have nots,” at a distance from one another, yet fills the space between them with tension, a tension that was a hot topic of conversation and commentary in Europe and the U.S. as he painted.

At that time, people were beginning to wonder if such incredible inequality was compatible with the basic functions of government, Christian virtue, or any notion of a civilized society.

Many believed it wasn’t and that what they were living through was unsustainable.

Writing just a few years after the painting was completed, for example, Henry George, one of the era’s best selling authors, wrote in Progress and Poverty,

In our time, as in times before, creep on the insidious forces that, producing inequality, destroy Liberty . . .It is not enough that men should vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities and means of life; they must stand on equal terms with reference to the bounty of nature. Either this, or Liberty withdraws her light! Either this, or darkness comes on, and the very forces that progress has evolved turn to powers that work destruction.

At its premier, “At Dawn” caused a stir. It was controversial and some of Hermans’ peers wondered if the piece “had a socialist reach.”

The artist always denied that charge, however, noting that he had only painted a scene that he had witnessed one morning on a city sidewalk.

He remarked,

I tried to be as sincere as possible, while avoiding being both too sentimental and too realistic. The workers of the foreground, refreshed, peacefully go to work in the morning, while the dissolute, dressed in black, stagger noisily out of the golden pleasure-shacks where they spent the night….I never thought of ennobling the worker by showing the decline of [the] debauched. (quoted by Arthur Chandler)

While he might’ve resisted being pigeon-holed politically, I think it’s clear that Hermans wasn’t just an indifferent observer.

He had a point of view.

Whatever his politics were, the artist saw value in the stories of, or in his case, pictures of, the working class, and in an era when the rich and powerful regarded themselves as the rightful Masters of the Universe, just bearing witness to the humanity and dignity of those who worked was an inherently political and moral act.

Maybe there’s even a clue about the artist’s perspective right there in the title.

“At Dawn”--sure, that’s when the golden pleasure shacks close and the work day begins, but that’s also the time when many people wake up.

Perhaps the artist sensed it was time for the sleeping world to open its eyes.

Last Sunday I began a sermon series based on the favorable comparison Jesus made between his disciples and salt.

“You are the salt of the earth,” said the Lord.

I told you that we’d be building an acronym using the letters in salt (s.a.l.t.) to put a spotlight on qualities and characteristics that are intrinsic to the discipleship Jesus desires.

Last week we heard that S is for Surrender because surrender is what Jesus is talking about when he tells us to take up our cross and follow him. Today, A is for Awake because Jesus needs awake, alert, and attentive followers to share Good News in a hurting world.

Awake, O sleeper, rise from death, and Christ shall give you light;

so learn his love, its length and breadth, its fullness, depth, and height.

That’s the lyric of a hymn based on Ephesians 5:14 that invites us to note the connection between our spiritual posture or positioning and our effectiveness as disciples.

Called to reflect God’s light into the world, we must, first, be in alignment with God’s love.

Pastor Sammy Alfaro of Iglesia Nuevo Dia in Phoenix explains,

The mission [given disciples in Ephesians 5] is not to change the world through our own efforts or wisdom. But rather, believers reflect the light of the gospel into a dark world by allowing Christ, who is the Light, to shine on us!

You know it to be true that a mirror kept in a dark room will remain as dark as its surroundings, but when it is brought into the light, it can shine with the brightness of the sun.

Awake, alert, and attentive souls, therefore, will engage in truth telling, wisdom seeking, forgiveness practicing, peace making work in order to place themselves and their Church in the best position to powerfully reflect God’s light.

This, I think, gets at what it means to be “awake” in the New Testament sense of the word.

It’s about understanding that we are the best, most radiant, most effective, most faithful, “saltiest” version of ourselves when we are awash in the light that shines from Jesus, then, equipped with such understanding, doing whatever we can, working with God’s grace, to be where Jesus is, blessing who he blesses, and serving as he serves.

One way to read the Parable of the Good Samaritan is to see it as a wake up call for people who are sleeping on this point.

The story of a wounded traveler who was ignored by two members of his own community, yet who received lifesaving help from one of his community’s supposed enemies–a Samaritan–is one of the most beloved stories Jesus ever told.

The parable emphasizes generosity, compassion, and mercy, and it is, justifiably, revered for these reasons.

But there’s more to it than that, a message bound up in what prompted Jesus to tell the story in the first place.

Luke tells us,

An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus. “Teacher,” he said, “what must I do to inherit eternal life?” He said to him, “What is written in the law? What do you read there?” He answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind and your neighbor as yourself.” And he said to him, “You have given the right answer; do this, and you will live.”

But wanting to vindicate [or justify] himself, he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?” (Luke 10:25-29)

The man’s self-serving question revealed to Jesus that something essential was potentially missing from his understanding of life with God.

Even though he knew the right words to say and the right scripture to quote, he seemed to lack an awakened heart that would make that knowledge useful or efficacious.

He was acting as though all of this was about a set of propositions to be affirmed, rather than a humble disposition before God to be lived.

In other words, he was asleep and the parable was his alarm clock.

Jesus asked,

Which of these three, do you think, was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?” He said, “The one who showed him mercy.” Jesus said to him, “Go and do likewise.” (Luke 10:36-37)

Hearing this wake up call, it’s also time for you and me to open our eyes.

Trying to be a Christian or a Church without tending to a deep connection with Jesus is about as useful as a mirror kept in a dark room.

But our destiny, our calling, our mission, our duty is to come into the light and shine.

Awakened souls will do whatever they can, therefore, working with God’s grace, to be where Jesus is, blessing who he blesses, and serving as he serves because we are the best, most radiant, most effective, most faithful, “saltiest” version of ourselves when we are awash in the light that shines from him.

A is for Awake.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Image: Hermans, Charles, 1839-1924. At Dawn, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

I Surrender All (Matthew 16:24-25)

‘You are the salt of the earth, but if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled under foot.” (Matthew 5:13)

In this passage from the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus compares his disciples to salt, and he meant it as a compliment. Salt, after all, is intrinsically useful. In Jesus’ day, salt was used in medicine, industry, agriculture, and was an incredibly valuable commodity, not to mention that it made food taste better and last longer.

Salt made people’s lives better.

But salt would lose its effectiveness if it got mixed up with other stuff. In the scene Jesus describes, it’s salt getting mixed up with dirt or sand or so much of some other substance that it becomes good for nothing–incapable of adding flavor, preserving, helping.

In a similar way, Jesus would teach his disciples that they could lose their effectiveness by getting mixed up with worldly concerns and vices.

Greed, materialism, self-righteousness, anger and violence–it’s not much of a stretch to imagine Jesus saying, “When your faith gets mixed up with things like these it’s no longer good for anything.”

In fact, he basically does say that in the sermon’s takeaway line,

But strive [or seek ye] first for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. (Matthew 6:33)

Today and for the next three Sundays we’re going to use the comparison Jesus made between his disciples and salt as our starting point for a deeper look at what qualities or attributes might be lacking from our life with God or what we might need in greater measure.

Remembering salt’s usefulness, we’re going to look at some of the ways good discipleship can make our lives and the lives of people around us better.

In order to help us maintain our focus and organize our thoughts through this series, I’ve created a simple acronym for salt or s-a-l-t.

Each week we’ll examine a quality of discipleship that begins with the corresponding letter in salt. For example, today, week one, it’s something that begins with the letter “s,” in week two, a quality that begins with “a,” and so on and so forth.

All the while, we’ll be looking for positive connections between our life with God, our inner life, and our life with others.

So let’s begin.

S, S is for Surrender.

An old gospel hymn introduces us to this elusive, yet powerful mark of Christian discipleship.

All to Jesus I surrender, all to Him I freely give;

I will ever love and trust Him, in His presence daily live.

“I surrender all.”

I remember singing those words in church as a child. I didn’t really know what they meant, but I remember singing them nonetheless.

Actually, to be fair to little-kid-me, I wasn’t totally clueless. My parents, grandparents, and some of the saints I’m remembering today, worked hard to teach me the difference between right and wrong. They taught me that I should always try to do good, but that they and God would always love me and would forgive me when I messed up.

“To surrender,” in that context, was almost synonymous with asking for forgiveness.

“I surrender all to you, Jesus. Please forgive me for the wrong that I have done, the sins that I have committed.”

I can picture myself sitting in Sunday School circa 1982 in a hand-me-down suit with a clip on tie, bowing my head and praying a prayer that sounded a whole lot like that.

Maybe you have similar memories about the beginnings of your faith journey–baisc lessons, simple lessons, about Jesus’s love and the power of forgiveness.

That’s not a bad place to start, but our faith, like our understanding of self, grows and changes over time.

So does our understanding of life’s complexities and the web of motivations that often leave us confused, broken, and adrift.

If only the challenges and stresses of life were always about the decisions we make when faced with clear cut choices between right and wrong, then maybe we’d have a shot at figuring things out.

Instead, despite our best efforts, we often make a mess of things, hurt the people we love, and find ourselves discovering, like Saint Paul, that ”we can will what is right, but we cannot do it.” (Romans 7:18)

Our understanding of surrender, therefore, should change and evolve, too.

You see, it’s not that surrender isn’t about forgiveness, it’s just more than that.

Surrender is an inner disposition, a spiritual posture.

It’s not unlike the way Jesus talks about the crosses that he and his disciples must carry.

If any wish to come after me, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. (Matthew 16:24-25)

Now it is, of course, true that Jesus’ death on a cross is a catalyst for and a sign of the forgiveness offered by God to all people.

But, as Jesus reveals in these words from the Gospel, carrying crosses is just as much about how he lived as it is how he died.

Carrying the cross is a way of life that is deeply rooted in selflessness, in sacrifice, in love, in surrender.

If you ever start studying about how Christians understand surrender, you will soon find yourself reading memoirs and reflections written by people who are working the 12-steps of recovery and sobriety.

There’s something about realizing your old way of doing things has led to rock bottom that can really make you consider an alternative operating system.

Holly Whitaker is one such writer.

She addresses the evolution of her thoughts about surrender in her memoir “Quit Like a Woman”

Whitaker writes,

I’d always considered the word surrender to be blasphemous. Surrender was never a possibility to consider; it wasn’t something self-respecting, self-reliant folk like me do—we scheme around and bulldoze through whatever stands in our way. That all changed, abruptly, on that day in 2012 when I finally ran out of options and did the thing I thought I could never do—concede.

Whitaker was struggling with depression, bulimia, and alcohol, among other things–but grief can take you to that moment, so can any kind of trauma–a job loss, a breakup, stress about money–anything that makes you feel like life is spinning out of control, slipping from your grasp, or shattering into a million pieces.

Experience shows that many paths have led people to the moment of surrender.

Considering this, Whitaker continues,

In A Return to Love, Marianne Williamson says,…“The moment of surrender is not when life is over. It’s when it begins.” It is entirely cliché, but this was exactly my experience. The moment I finally let my knees hit the floor was when I finally stopped playing at life, and every bit of good that’s come to me since then stems from this reversal of opinion on surrender. (The Power of Surrender — Center for Action and Contemplation)

In much the same way, rockstar Bono describes his friend and bandmate Adam Clayton’s sobriety as “long obedience in the same direction,” saying, “I’ve had the honor of watching “surrender” work through this man’s remarkable life and times. I’ve watched this most elusive word become flesh in a series of good decisions that gave Adam back his life.” (Surrender, p. 540)

Surrender is long obedience in the same direction.

It takes our knees to the floor so that we stop playing at life and really live.

It becomes flesh, in us, through a series of good decisions.

It’s what Jesus is talking about when he invites us to take up our cross and follow him.

If you and I are to be useful and effective like the salt of the earth–if Asbury Church is going to make the lives of people all around us better–then we need to discover the wisdom, beauty, and power of surrendering ourselves to God’s love, to God will, to God’s grace.

We need to learn what it means truly to sing, “All to Thee, my blessed Savior, I surrender all.”

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Image: Dubravko Sorić SoraZG on Flickr, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Improper Estimates of My Importance (Luke 18:9-14)

It’s the week of Halloween, so I thought I’d begin this morning with a chapter from my favorite ghost story, Dante’s Divine Comedy.

The Divine Comedy is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri (Al-uh-geary) in the 14th century. Like the ministry of the Prophet Jeremiah, it is a story shaped by exile—the reality of Dante’s political exile from his hometown–Florence, Italy–and of the more common experience of losing one’s way in life—a sentiment expressed beautifully and memorably in the poem’s opening lines.

Midway along the journey of our life I woke to find myself in a dark wood, for I had wandered off from the straight path. (I.1-3)

For Dante, the journey back to the “straight path” was an imaginative trek through the afterlife which, inspired by his 14th century Catholic faith, included a slog through Hell, an ascent through Purgatory, and, ultimately, a vision of God’s glory with an assist from the Blessed Virgin Mary.

Along the way, he meets and converses with souls numbered among the damned and souls counted among the saved—learning, accordingly, of their pain and torment, their joy and peace.

The Divine Comedy is one of history’s greatest literary works and, although a masterpiece of fiction, insofar as it points its readers to deep realities of life and faith, it is true.

Take for example Dante’s emphasis on the problem with pride.

Dante wove warnings about pride throughout his work, but there’s a particularly memorable scene in volume one, The Inferno.

Travelling through the region where the proud and violent received their punishments, while Dante and his guide, the Roman poet Virgil, were making their way across the ghastly River Styx, a tormented spirit reached up from the muck and mire to block their way.

Shockingly, Dante recognized the “slimy shape” of a figure. It was one of his family’s most bitter rivals, the man who had taken Dante’s home and possessions when he was forced into exile, the same man who worked to ensure the poet would never be welcomed in Florence again.

Dante wasn’t exactly moved with pity by his old foe’s miserable condition and he shouted a curse.

“May you weep and wail, stuck here in this place forever, you damned soul, for, filthy as you are, I recognize you.”

With that, the spirit reached out his arms and advanced, as if to pull Dante into Hell’s river, too, but Virgil pushed him aside, and left him howling with rage.

In the aftermath of the encounter, Virgil, noticing that Dante still had a lot to learn about pride, underscored the moment’s significance by sharing with his charge a bit of wisdom.

Offering Dante a blessing, Virgil said,

In the world this man was filled with arrogance, and nothing good about him decks his memory; for this, his shade is filled with fury here. Many in life esteem themselves great men who then will wallow here like pigs in mud, leaving behind them their repulsive fame. (VIII.46-51)

Like history’s best ghost stories, Dante has a way of using suspense and twisted imagery to deliver his message.

In this case, he uses a once proud Florentine left raging in Hell to bring to mind words Jesus spoke about pride.

“All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

That was the main idea behind the parable Jesus told about two people praying in the Temple.

Here’s how Luke recounts that story.

[Jesus] also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and regarded others with contempt: “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax collector.

Now what you and I need to understand is that the Pharisees were generally regarded to be devout and meticulous followers of the Jewish law. They also detested the Romans and, for that reason, had a very low opinion of tax collectors, who were Jews who aligned themselves with the Romans in order to get rich by collecting taxes from other Jews.

Pharisees, therefore, judged tax collectors to be greedy, morally corrupt sellouts and traitors.

In other words, Jesus set up his story with an easily identifiable good guy and a bad guy.

Or so it seemed.

The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’ But the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me, a sinner!’ I tell you, this man [the tax collector] went down to his home justified rather than the other, for all who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.” (Luke 18:9-14)

I like how Eugene Peterson paraphrases this final verse.

He writes,

Jesus commented, "If you walk around with your nose in the air, you're going to end up flat on your face, but if you're content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself." (The Message)

If you’re familiar with the stories that Jesus tells, then you’ll recognize this as an example of the kind of plot twist that Jesus loves.

He has a way of upending our preconceived notions of how situations are going to play out, how people and even God, for that matter, are going to respond.

In this parable—the case of a pious rule follower versus someone who was willing to cash in their virtue in order to make a profit—the storyline seems so predictable at first.

But what Jesus reveals is that there were things going on within these characters that weren’t so obvious.

One had a proud and arrogant heart and was so satisfied to compare himself with others that he didn’t even know how serious his condition was.

On the other hand, I’m not sure that the tax collector even saw the Pharisee in the Temple with him, and even if he did, it just didn’t matter.

He had more important business to attend to.

He was in the Temple because somewhere, somehow, he had learned how important it was to take a good hard look at himself, and when he did, he did not like what he saw.

“God,” he prayed, “be merciful to me, a sinner!”

The tax collector knew that "if you walk around with your nose in the air, you're going to end up flat on your face."

You and I are heirs to a Methodist movement that placed a high priority on following the tax collector’s humble example and of doing the work of self-reflection that leads to confession and to a deeper experience of God’s grace.

An entry from the journal of our church’s namesake, Francis Asbury, demonstrates his commitment to such practices.

There Asbury discloses,

I am not so humble as I should be; and it may be I am in danger of forming improper estimates of my importance…My body is weak, but my mind is kept in peace: I desire to trust God with my body and soul.

May we be so attentive to the “improper estimates of our importance” that stroke our egos and fuel our pride.

Like the tax collector in Jesus’ story, like the room to grow Virgil saw in Dante, like Asbury and all others who show us the way of holiness, we aim to be and to see who we truly are so that we might become what we are meant to be.

This brings us back to another memorable moment from Dante’s ghost story.

After making his way through the Inferno, Dante began to ascend a great mountain.

Leaving perdition behind, he now encountered the songs and prayers of the redeemed.

It was a totally different scene, one filled with music, art, and color, but the souls Dante encountered there revealed the greatest difference of all.

Pilgrims on this mountain were honest, humble, and willing to take responsibility for their own actions.

This was where the weight of pride was cast off, and it was there that Dante’s growing edge finally burst through.

Breaking down the wall between author and audience, he delivered a message that is as relevant in our day as it was in his.

O prideful Christians! Sluggish and miserable. Your inner vision is distorted, and you put your trust in things that hold you back from God. Think of this, instead: we are worms now, but each of us will be transformed into a heavenly butterfly that soars upward to God. (Purgatorio, X.121-126)

You and I must aim to be and to see who we truly are so that we might become what we are meant to be.

Jesus said, “All who exalt themselves will be humbled, but all who humble themselves will be exalted.”

May we forever be counted among those who see God’s love and our hope in his words.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Image: Cuyos, Stephen. Humbled, exalted, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN.

Well Past Schadenfreude (Jeremiah 31:27-34)

By the rivers of Babylon—there we sat down, and there we wept when we remembered Zion.

On the willows there we hung up our harps.

For there our captors asked us for songs, and our tormentors asked for mirth, saying, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!” (Psalm 137.1-3)

The opening verses of Psalm 137 bear witness to the immense trauma exiles from Judah faced in Babylon.

They were a conquered and defeated people–mocked and abused.

Disoriented and displaced, their memories of better days offered little comfort as bitter tears overwhelmed their spirits.

A passage from Richard Friedman’s book, Who Wrote the Bible?, summarizes well the exiles’ plight.

Friedman writes,

In short, the Babylonian destruction of Judah had brought horrors and tremendous challenges and crises to this nation. They were forced to reformulate their picture of themselves and of their relationship with their God. They had to find a way to worship [God] without a Temple. They had to find leadership without a king. They had to learn to live as a minority ethnic group in great empires. They had to determine what their relationship was to their homeland. And they had to live with their defeat. (p. 155)

Their old world was shattered leaving the exiles from Judah with the unenviable task of rethinking and reevaluating everything that they once believed and treasured.

They had to ask themselves big existential questions about who they were and who they were going to be.

“What is the point of all this?”

“How do we understand who we are, who God is, and what difference does it make, anyway?”

“What legacy will we leave behind for our children and our children’s children?”

If we continued reading Psalm 137, we would find out that one of the possible answers to the big questions they were asking themselves was to become an embittered and violent people who gave their hearts over to seeking revenge on their enemies for the wrongs that had been done to them.

You see, that chapter of scripture that begins with a riverside lament ends with one of the most jarring expressions of a desire for vengeance and bloodshed found anywhere in the Bible.

Raging against the Babylonians and calling out Judah’s neighbors in the kingdom of Edom who cheered as Jerusalem fell, the psalm concludes with these graphic and disturbing lines.

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites the day of Jerusalem’s fall, how they said, “Tear it down! Tear it down! Down to its foundations!”

O daughter Babylon, you devastator!

Happy shall they be who pay you back what you have done to us!

Happy shall they be who take your little ones and dash them against the rock! (Psalm 137:7-9)

It’s really a shocking passage that puts us in touch with the savagery of the moment.

If it’s true that an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind, then some of the exiles were at least wondering if there was anything worthwhile left to see.

While the Church has a bad habit of ignoring difficult passages like this, I think there’s an important connection between Psalm 137 and the ministry of Jeremiah that we’ve been following for several weeks.

But first, it needs to be said that while the psalm is an honest expression of the exiles’ rage and anger, it doesn’t indicate that God blesses the people’s bloodlust.

No holy spirit is whispering in any one’s ear saying, “Do it! Go get your revenge!”

And that absence of a divine mandate for violence is significant for us as readers of the scripture because it shifts the focus from interrogating the nature of God to raising questions about our human condition.

Psalm 137 doesn’t beg the question “Why is God so violent in the Old Testament?” but it should get us thinking about the way those ancient fires still burn within us.

It invites us to see the ways that rage, revenge, and violence impact our communities and infect our lives.

It shows us how important it is to be honest about the anger that we carry.

So let’s be honest.

There’s some horrible, unfair, gross, and detestable things that happen in this world, and—even though we worship a loving God, even though we follow the Prince of Peace–you bet we’re angry about them.

How can it be that the rich continue to sow division and heap scorn upon the poor, just like they did in Jeremiah’s age?

Why is it that those who abuse and denigrate their neighbors appear to be shamelessly creative, while the well intentioned seem hopelessly hamstrung and flat footed?

Why racism?

Why war?

Why, in the name of all that is Holy, are we living in a timeline when people are trying to increase their influence and further their careers by praising the likes of Hitler and the Nazis?

I’m not saying we’re Psalm 137 angry, but we’re well past schadenfreude.

Also, to be fair, while we might like to believe that we only get angry when our sense of justice is offended or because of our righteous indignation, sometimes our egos get bruised, our patience grows thin, and we just get pissed off like everybody else.

That’s why hearing the exiles’ honest expression of their anger is so important.

In Psalm 137 the exiles’ honesty becomes an invitation to God to hear them out and to sit with them in their rage.

That encounter, then, becomes the point of contact where God’s Word is heard and healing and transformation can begin.

“Rage belongs before God,” notes theologian Miroslav Volf, because “by placing unattended rage before God we place both our unjust enemy and our own vengeful self face to face with a God who loves and does justice.” (Miroslav Volf on Psalm 137)

Volf continues,

Hidden in the dark chambers of our hearts and nourished by the system of darkness, hate grows and seeks to infest everything with its hellish will to exclusion. In the light of the justice and love of God, however, hate recedes and the seed is planted for the miracle of forgiveness.

Volf gives us some beautiful theology and biblical interpretation here that resonates with the vision Jeremiah shares with us this morning.

Confronted by a broken world filled with broken people, pressed between the cruelty of the powerful and the promises of God’s mercy, aware of the same violent sentiments expressed in Psalm 137, if not feeling that way, too, Jeremiah preached about a new thing that God would do, a new way of being with God and one another that transcended dislocation, rage, and violence.

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant that I made with their ancestors when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt—a covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, says the Lord. But this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord, for I will forgive their iniquity and remember their sin no more. (Jeremiah 31:31-34)

Sitting with Jeremiah’s words, I’m struck by how the actions that he describes God taking in days that “are surely coming,” came to pass and, even to this day, define what we would call genuine religious devotion, or at least what our Wesleyan / Methodist tradition calls genuine religious devotion.

A covenant written upon the heart–this speaks to an inward change and inner disposition toward God that we recognize as essential.

This is also why it’s vitally important to note that from Jeremiah’s perspective, in the Hebrew idioms and metaphors that he understood, the heart wasn’t just an individual’s emotional center. The heart was also the intellectual center, the personality, and the center of intuition and motivation.

It’s not all that far removed from what we would describe as one’s true self.

And that’s where God wants to get to work on us, not around the fringes of our identity, not with what’s leftover after we’ve spent ourselves chasing lesser and fading things, not with the pious corners of our lives that we’ve convinced ourselves aren’t really that bad.

God wants it all and has gone to the greatest lengths in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ to give us new life from the inside out.

“Do not be conformed to this age,” wrote Saint Paul, “but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect.” (Romans 12:2)

“The true, living, Christian faith…is not only an assent, an act of the understanding,” preached John Wesley, “but a disposition, which God hath wrought in [the Christian’s] heart; "a sure trust and confidence in God, that, through the merits of Christ, [their] sins are forgiven, and [they are] reconciled to the favour of God." (The Marks of the New Birth)

This is, I believe, consistent with what Jeremiah envisioned and prophesied—an experience of God, a relationship with God, a covenant with God in which there was nothing superficial, nothing artificial, just a deep, earnest, honest, transforming communion–something strong enough to endure heartbreaks and rages, steadfast enough to hold on when hearts wander and stupidity wins the day, powerful enough to let go of privilege and to choose mercy, forgiveness, and love.

“I will put my law within them,” says the Lord, “and I will write it on their hearts, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”

Confronted by a broken world filled with broken people, pressed between the cruelty of the powerful and the promises of God’s mercy, aware of the same violent sentiments expressed in Psalm 137, if not feeling that way, too, you and I have been entrusted by God with Good News that transcends dislocation, rage, and violence.

Through Jesus Christ, God came into our lives, holding nothing against us, to write upon our hearts a transformational story of love, forgiveness, and new life.

May all that we have and all that we are–our words and our actions, our joys and our lamentations–bear witness to this story.

And may we always give thanks to God for it. Amen.

Image Attribution: De Morgan, Evelyn, 1855-1919. By the Waters of Babylon, from Art in the Christian Tradition, a project of the Vanderbilt Divinity Library, Nashville, TN. https://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/act-imagelink.pl?RC=57161

Beyond Power and Privilege (Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7)

A story told by Will Willimon about an event from his adolescence sets the stage for our encounter with God’s Word this morning.

Confessing that “it may sound trivial,” Willimon is tempted to believe that a world changing seismic shift happened in his town one Sunday evening in 1963.

He writes,

Then, in Greenville, South Carolina, in defiance of the state’s time-honored blue laws, the Fox Theater opened on Sunday. Seven of us–regular attenders of the Methodist Youth Fellowship at Buncombe Street Church–made a pact to enter the front door of the church, be seen, then quietly slip out the back door and join John Wayne at the Fox. (Resident Aliens, p. 15)

Some of you may be familiar with the kind of blue-law Sunday restrictions Willimon describes, but you can be forgiven if you’re not. Apart from Chick-fil-a’s closed on Sunday policy and some restrictions in some places on when you can buy alcohol, they’ve largely disappeared from the culture. It’s worth noting, though, that even until the not so distant past, businesses and all manner of cultural and civic groups treated Sunday differently, or were required to treat Sunday differently, by imposing sometimes draconian limits on what people could do on the first day of the week.

Here are some classic examples.

In colonial Boston, Captain John Kemble was arrested and put in stocks for two hours for kissing his wife on the Sunday that he returned home from three years at sea.

In 1789, President George Washington was on his way from Connecticut to attend church in New York when he was charged with a blue law violation for unnecessarily walking or riding on Sunday.

[And in 1917, after the “New York Giants and Cincinnati Reds played the first Sunday major league baseball game at the Polo Grounds, [the managers of both teams were arrested for violating the blue laws.] (Gotham Gazette)

A little closer to home, I grew up playing youth baseball in southern Indiana when it was inconceivable that any game would ever start before noon on Sunday, and, while I don’t remember legal restrictions being in place in my hometown, I do remember the astonishing moment when my grandmother decided that it was ok to stop by the grocery after church and pick up something for the family’s Sunday dinner, breaking her own, long-standing practice of not buying anything or doing any business on the Lord’s Day.

Now of course there’s a big difference between an individual or even a private business choosing to forgo certain activities on Sundays and having those same limitations imposed on them under penalty of law.

The Bible calls for the faithful to “honor the sabbath and keep it holy,” but bringing the coercive force of the law and fear of punishment into the situation really does change the relationship, doesn’t it?

For a very long time, many religious leaders and institutions in this country understood themselves as benefitting from this set up. Simply stated, it was thought that creating an environment in which there was nothing else for people to do on Sunday morning was good for the Church. But the reason I started with Willimon’s story this morning is his willingness to point out what might’ve been good for attendance was ultimately bad for discipleship.

Far from pining for the return of aggressively regressive blue laws, Willimon describes these pressures as something like a crutch whose removal after years–even centuries–of depending upon for support, left the Church with atrophied muscles and a halting gait.

Again, he writes,

On that night, Greenville, South Carolina…served notice that it would no longer be a prop for the church. There would be no more free passes for the church, no more free rides. (p. 15-16)

In other words, with its crutches and props removed, the Church would have to learn to stand and walk on its own.

Unfortunately, old habits die hard and the legacy of the Church’s once privileged position still shapes so much of what does and doesn’t happen in our congregations and denominations.

Evangelism strategies that once filled church pews, are no longer intelligible, much less effective.

The notion that we can count on people to learn the basic Bible stories almost by osmosis just by existing in this culture is folly.

The assumption that births, and deaths, and weddings will bring families back to “their church” for an opportunity to renew connections as the community grieves or celebrates together is quickly fading away, if not already gone.

This is how Brad Brisco, a church mission strategist, describes the contemporary situation,

At the same time, the church is less and less effective at reaching a changing world, many in the church continue to believe the church maintains a central role in the life of culture. So instead of leaning toward the missionary vision of the church…we default to church as a “place where certain things happen,” and we wrongly assume that those outside the church will be interested. But…that simply isn’t the case.

We need to admit that it’s been really hard and kind of scary for the Church to get used to walking, or marching, or even getting on our knees and praying without our old crutch.

That’s the reality into which the prophet Jeremiah speaks a word of truth to us this morning.

We’ve reached the point in Jeremiah’s ministry when even the Kingdom of Judah’s most optimistic–even sycophantic–supporters had to admit defeat. The armies of Babylon had swept over the land and carried thousands of Judeans away.

Any hopes that they were in control of their own destiny, that they were owed a privileged place in society, that a military, or economic, or even a miraculous crutch would appear to save their limping kingdom had been dashed.

They were on their own, exiles–strangers in a strange land.

These are the words of the letter that the prophet Jeremiah sent [to them]...Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat what they produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.

I’m struck by the simplicity of this word to the exiles.

It’s like God is telling them to take baby steps or giving them their first set of exercises post-surgery.

It’s a total reset of life and faith, almost like learning to walk again.

Build houses, and gardens, and families, the prophet writes. In essence, start putting your life and your community back together. Tend to the relationships that matter. Do the things that help you get stronger, more stable, more secure, and remember that it’s ok to find happiness, to be glad that you’re alive.

“Multiply there, and do not decrease.” This is no time to give up, says Jeremiah. It’s time to be reborn.

And then–and this is such an important message to a people who had forsaken justice, who had come to see relationships as self-serving transactions, as opportunities to grift—“seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”

This new beginning is going to require a new way of doing things, so set aside the pride and greed that made you believe that it was all about you, that the world should cater to you, that your neighbors, especially the poor, were there to serve you.

Get rid of that and start finding yourself in the ways of service, of elevating a common good rather than personal privilege, of learning to pray for people that you don’t even like.

That was Jeremiah’s message to the exiles, and, when we stop to think about it, it’s not all that different from what Jesus would one day tell his disciples as they struggled to learn how to rebuild their lives in the space beyond power and privilege.

“Whoever wishes to be great among you,” said Jesus, “must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be your slave, just as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve and to give his life a ransom for many.” (Mt 20:25-28)

I like to think of Jeremiah as a preacher of rock bottom grace because he understood that when you’ve fallen as far as you can fall, your only real choice is to plant your feet, kick up, and start your way back to the surface.

Or, to return to Willimon’s image, maybe it’s time to set aside your crutches and learn to walk again.

That was the substance of Jeremiah’s message to Judah’s exiles, but it still resonates with those who have had their hearts broken, their lives turned upside down, or who hear the news each day and ask, “what is this strange place and how did I get here?”

It’s also a message for limping churches.

This is no time to give up. It’s time to be reborn.

Through the prophet, God told the people to take baby steps and gave them their first set of exercises post-surgery.

It was a total reset of life and faith, like learning to walk again, only this time, they would walk on a path that leads beyond power and privilege.

They would walk on the path God was building to their true selves, to their neighbors, to one another, to a future with hope.

May it be the path to always travel. Thanks be to God. Amen.

The Things that Never Were (Lamentations 1:1-6)

Have you ever heard of the Mandela Effect? It’s a term used to describe the phenomenon of a large group of people misremembering a detail about an event or item in popular culture.

For example, do you remember the iconic scene in Stars Wars: The Empire Strikes Back when Darth Vader said, “Luke, I am your father.”

No, you don’t remember that, because that’s not what he said. The actual line is “No, I am your father.”

What about “Life is like a box of chocolates,” the famous line from Forrest Gump.

Nope. Momma always said, “life was like a box of chocolates.”

Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw had a lot of sex in the city, but her show is called “Sex and the City.”

Jiffy peanut butter doesn’t exist. Skippy peanut butter does, though, and so does Jif.

And what about that classic cartoon starring Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty–is that the Flinstones or Flintstones? It’s Flintstones, with two ts.

Now of course unless you’re really into copyright law or are passionate about intellectual property, none of these are matters of great significance. I mean, maybe they can score your team a few points at your next trivia night, but that’s about it.

And for heaven’s sake, don’t be the guy who corrects the little kid in the Darth Vader costume on Halloween.

Ultimately, the Mandela Effect just places a label on something that we all do and that we’ve all experienced. Capable of taking in an incredible amount of information, our brains also sort that information, assess it, file it away, and from time to time, fill in missing gaps. As a consequence, we sometimes get a detail wrong, or we forget it, or we conflate it with something else, or maybe we just kinda make it up.

It’s a bit like an optical illusion, a trick of the mind.

A misremembered movie line or a forgotten detail about a cartoon character from your childhood is usually the stuff of light-hearted fun. It’s not a big deal.

However, individually and collectively, we’re also capable of weaving misremembered facts and details about our lives into a story that can, indeed, become very important.

Sometimes the way we sort, assess, file away, and fill in information says more about our hearts and souls than our attention to detail and memory recall.

What I mean specifically is that we’re all capable of creating a story or even a myth about ourselves that can become an impediment to personal growth and faithful discipleship.

Perhaps we misremember the truth about ourselves and who God created us to be and come to believe instead that we can do no wrong, or that we can never be right.

Instead of finding purpose and meaning in the Good News that we are made in God’s Image, created for community, and, by God’s grace, forgiven, loved, and free, we become convinced that we’ve wandered too far away from God to ever be welcomed home again, that we’ll always be unlovable, or that grace is for losers and we’re doing just fine on our own, thank you very much.

It’s like the Mandela Effect, except all information is filtered through either a self-serving or self-sabotaging lens, and we fill in the gaps accordingly.

There’s the person who was born on third base and thinks they hit a triple, the one who believes that the circumstances of their birth sets them apart from others as being morally superior, destined to lead, a master of the universe.

There’s somebody else who hears so many degrading things said about them and is surrounded by so much negativity that they take it for granted that they’ll always be second class, inferior, a nobody.

“The mind is a wonderful thing,” writes Leo Babauta at the website Zen Habits. “It’s also a complete liar that constantly tries to convince us not to take actions we know are good for us, and stops many great changes in our lives.”

And when more and more people believe the same lie, the lie spreads and gains power.

White supremacy and its progeny are the most obvious and impactful of these mass misremembering in our nation’s history, but there are others. Misogyny, homophobia, Christian hegemony, the notion that might-makes-right, that wealth imbues one with wisdom or virtue, the list goes on.

Any combination of arrogance and power that stifles dissenting voices and refuses to admit, much less, repent of and correct its wrongs–these are the destructive stories, myths, and lies that faithful hearts must leave behind.

The ministry of Jeremiah the prophet helped God’s people leave behind what they could no longer carry.

His was a clear-eyed reality check that invited the people to grieve their losses and, when they began to see the light again, to walk into a new day as a changed people.

We’ve read several passages from the Book of Jeremiah recently, that despite being twenty-five hundred years old, are as contemporary as our most recent text messages. These are passages filled with worry, grief, and disillusionment.

Jeremiah lamented personal losses, losses in his community, losses that fundamentally challenged everything he thought he knew.

Homes, dreams, freedoms, loved ones, even God’s own Temple–all gone.

But today, a reading from Lamentations, the Book of Jeremiah’s companion volume, shows us how Jeremiah also helped the people to let go of what never was, to leave behind the misremembered stories they believed about themselves that could block their path to a future with God.

In fact, one section from our passage speaks directly to this challenge.

How lonely sits the city

that once was full of people!

How like a widow she has become,

she that was great among the nations!

She that was a princess among the provinces

has become subject to forced labor.

Now here’s the line that caught my attention.

She weeps bitterly in the night,

with tears on her cheeks;

among all her lovers,

she has no one to comfort her;

all her friends have dealt treacherously with her;

they have become her enemies.

From Jeremiah’s perspective, the abandoned lover was the Kingdom of Judah who, despite compromising its covenant with God and sacrificing its understanding of justice in order to pursue alliances with other nations, still found itself all alone when hard times came.

Again, according to the prophet, this was the fallout of a people who changed who they were and what they valued in order to gain the affections and protections of neighbors who were happy to take what they wanted, but couldn’t be counted on to give anything of substance to the relationship.

Jeremiah wanted the people to know that trying to secure a future by compromising themselves and casting aside their God-given distinctiveness would always be a fool’s errand. It was an empty promise, a lie, a myth, and now they needed to consciously walk away from it.

Only acknowledge your guilt,

that you have rebelled against the Lord your God

and scattered your favors among strangers under every green tree

and have not obeyed my voice,

says the Lord.

Return, O faithless children…(Jeremiah 3)

Today God’s Word invites us to an essential task–to commit ourselves to recognizing and leaving behind the lies about ourselves and others that we’ve accepted as true–lies that hold us back, or puff us up, lies that convince us we’re unlovable, or that we’re just so great why would be need anything like grace or mercy anyway?

God invites us to leave behind all of this, the things that never were, and to come home.

After all, we’re all capable of creating a story or even a myth that can become an impediment to personal growth and faithful discipleship, but God says come back to what is true, come back to the Good News that you are made in God’s Image, created for community, and, by God’s grace, you are forgiven, loved, and free.

Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.

Cries of the Heart (Jeremiah 8:18-9:1)

“My joy is gone; grief is upon me; my heart is sick.”

The first verse of the passage we read this morning from the Book of Jeremiah reminds us that while the failures of Judah’s kings and the violence of Babylon’s invading army drives the book’s plotline, the prophet’s story is ultimately one of human loss and grief.

After all, Jeremiah was a spiritual leader to a people who were witnessing the destruction of everything they held dear.

Homes were destroyed, freedoms stolen, lives lost, and even though Jeremiah saw God at work in those events, he still gave voice to the hurt and pain he and his neighbors were experiencing.

O that my head were a spring of water

and my eyes a fountain of tears,

so that I might weep day and night

for the slain of the daughter of my people!

Sentiments like these are about as far removed from weak sauce optimism as one can imagine. This is, instead, a lament born of the love for, solidarity with, and the shared experience of a people in pain.

Jeremiah is one of the Bible’s most prolific authors of lament–he literally wrote the book on the subject, Lamentations–and lament is one of the Bible’s most prolific forms of prayer.

A lament is a prayer characterized by anger, grief, or sadness, that often includes questions of God, often stinging questions, questions like; “Why hasn’t the health of my people been restored?”, “How long will you hide your face from me, O Lord?”, “My God, why have you forsaken me?”

Above all, lament is honest. It’s prayer that doesn’t pull any punches, but lays it all out there for God to hear, usually as a variation on this theme–“I’ve heard it said and have come to believe that you are a loving and powerful God, but if that’s true, then why does what we’re going through hurt so much?”

Laments are cries of the heart and they are the backbone of our Faith. Without them, there’s no covenant, communion, or relationship with God, only fate and fatalism.

A community without lament, loses its sense of right and wrong and grows deaf to the call to “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.”

As Walter Brueggeman notes, “when lament…is censured, justice questions cannot be asked and eventually become invisible and illegitimate.” (p. 107)

Weak-willed and insecure tyrants only want to hear praise, but the Almighty God revealed in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ invites real and honest catharsis.

“Pour out your hearts to God,” instructed the Psalmist because God welcomes our laments.

As common as prayers like these are in the Bible–as many as 65 of the 150 Psalms are laments–a lot of faithful people really are not good with the idea of giving honest expression to their struggles or with being around people who are. It makes them uncomfortable and elicits a misplaced or even idolatrous effort to fix everything.

I remember with gratitude the number of friends and family members who were just “there for me” when my wife Laura died, who didn’t try to say too much, who created a loving space where I could just do the work of grieving. That support meant everything to me.

Less meaningful were platitudes that, even if well-intentioned, came across to me as “Your grief is making me uncomfortable so please don’t do it anymore.”

“God just needed another angel.” I only remember hearing that one time and thinking to myself, “What kind of S.O.B. god would take my son’s mom just to add one more to an infinite multitude of angels?”

That, I would argue, is an example of the weak sauce optimism that Jeremiah wants us to avoid.

I read an essay by a woman named Krys Burnette this week about the death of her mother. Her words resonated with me, especially what she took away from a discussion with her mom’s pastor.

Krys explained how the pastor asked her and her brother if there would be any children at the funeral. “Since when are kids a deal breaker at funerals,” she wondered, but after talking to him about the way children grieve, Krys realized that rather than keeping them out, the pastor wanted the children in the family to attend.

His question was ultimately a question for self reflection — what are we protecting children from? Are we protecting them or are we, the adults, avoiding the difficult conversations about death? Are we the ones afraid to speak about our feelings, to show emotions, or become vulnerable in front of the children in our lives?

She continued,

The Bible and Christianity teaches us about the life and death of Jesus and that death, no matter how someone dies, is the most natural, and most certain part of life for all living things. Like anything in life, he said, the younger we learn these lessons, the further we can carry them through our journey in life. The more compassion we can have for each other, the more understanding we can have for each other as we grow.

Krys summarized this experience with the wit woven throughout her work.

Sure [the pastor] was talking about a child’s experience of death and mourning, but I mean, come on. Let’s copy/paste and put that right into our manual for “adulting” am I right?

Of course, she was right, and not just about “adulting” and grieving, but about a bedrock principle of Chirstian community.

“Weep with those who weep,” wrote Saint Paul, because when we silence the cries of hurting people, when we try so hard to protect those we love from life’s sorrows that we impede their ability to truly live and grow, when we allow propriety, or discomfort, or emotional fragility to short circuit the grieving process, we cause harm and fall short of the abundant relationships God’s grace makes possible.

I often repeat something my ethics professors in seminary once said, “Whenever I hear an old married couple say that they haven’t had an argument in years, it tells me that somebody gave up a long time ago.”

The same, I think, can be said about lament and prayer.

Whenever a Church makes no room for honest expressions of lament, or anger, or heartache, whenever a wounded soul is told “your grief is making me uncomfortable so please don’t do it anymore,” it’s evidence that that Church gave up on prayer a long time ago.

But if we’re willing to enter into lament’s crucible, if we’re willing to be honest about the brokenness within us and to bear witness to the brokenness we’ve observed, if we will “pour out our hearts” to God, then gracious mercy can flow through this covenant, this communion, this relationship between Creature and Creator.

“Where the cry is not voiced, heaven is not moved and history is not initiated,” wrote Brueggemann, but “where the cry is voiced, heaven may answer and earth may have a new chance.”(p. 111)

The promise of the Gospel is that, through Jesus, who wept with his friends Mary and Martha when their brother Lazarus died, God enters into and heals the human experience, all of it, even death.

There’s a reason we sing “Where, O death, is now thy sting?” on Easter Sunday.

You see, the breadth of that promise is greater than the notion that, as believers, you and I get to go to heaven when we die.

Rather, the promise of the Gospel anchors us in God’s steadfast and abiding presence and invites us to be our honest and authentic selves–to be a people who will lift our hearts in praise, who will bow our heads in prayer, who will open our hands in service, and who will bawl our eyes out in sorrow and anguish for this hurting world and its hurting people.

When we silence the cries of hurting people, when we try so hard to protect those we love from life’s sorrows that we impede their ability to truly live and grow, when we allow propriety, or discomfort, or emotional fragility to short circuit the grieving process, we cause harm and fall short of the abundant relationships God’s grace makes possible.

But when we confess our need to lament and choose to “pour out our hearts” to God, mercy may flow, heaven might move, and a new creation will be born within us.

Let it so be with us today.

Thanks be to God for this Good News. Amen.