Life Among the Weeds

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Matthew 13:24-30, 36-43

He put before them another parable…

Have you ever wondered why Jesus did so much of his teaching with parables?   When his disciples asked him about that he said that he spoke in parables because people are not very good at listening.  “The reason I speak to them in parables,” he said, “is that ‘seeing they do not perceive, and hearing they do not listen, nor do they understand.’”[1]  When he was teaching about God’s commonwealth of justice and kindness, he knew that people would not retain what he was saying if he simply gave them factual information, so he told them enigmatic little stories that he knew they would take away with them.  

Parables are living stories.  They are stories that use real-life examples to shape the way we think.  Since so much of what Jesus was teaching was about envisioning a whole new way of life with very different values, he wanted people to spend time with the ideas he was sharing.  So he gave them parables that hinted at his deeper message—stories that they could carry away with them so that they could feel some ownership of the vision when they worked out the riddles for themselves.  

The stories and symbols of a parable almost always work on more than one level of understanding.  The parables of Jesus were brilliant in that they often work on three levels—they point to a cosmic interpretation, a community interpretation, and a personal interpretation.  When Jesus talks about “the kingdom of heaven” in these parables he is pointing to the ultimate cosmic reign of God and the beloved community of faith and  the internal life of the individual believer.  He wants his followers to understand that the Empire of Heaven is not only a longed-for future waiting to be fulfilled, it is also a very present vision that shapes the life of the beloved community as it transforms the hearts and minds of each individual follower of Jesus.  The kingdom is future.  But the kingdom is also now.

The parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat is one of four consecutive “organic” parables in Matthew which almost pile up on each other when you’re reading them: The Sower, The Weeds, The Mustard Seed, and The Parable of the Yeast.  Taken together they have a common theme.  In these stories the kingdom is organic—it doesn’t just suddenly appear out of nowhere.  Instead, it grows slowly and steadily, unobserved, often in unexpected ways and places and even in spite of opposition and challenges.  But while these stories share this basic idea, each one has its own distinct message about different aspects of life under the rule and reign of God, so it’s important to give each one time to percolate. 

The Parable of the Sower and the Parable of the Mustard Seed are in all three synoptic gospels, Matthew, Mark and Luke.  The Parable of the Yeast is in both Matthew and Luke.  But the Parable of the Weeds Among the Wheat is only in Matthew.

So with all that in mind, what is Jesus teaching us when he says, “The kingdom of heaven may be compared to someone who sowed good seed in his field;  but while everybody was asleep, an enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and then went away.”    

On the surface the message of the parable is fairly simple:  Jesus is telling us that there’s bad stuff in the world mixed in with the good that God intended.  Why?  “An enemy has done this.”  Literally, in the Greek it says “a person who was hostile” did this.  So right there we are invited to think about that dynamic on at least three levels.  On the cosmic level, who or what is hostile to God’s Domain?  More locally, who or what is hostile to the community of faith?  On a personal level, who or what is hostile to your own spiritual growth?  This is a bigger question than just “Who is the enemy?”  The door is open for us to think of any number of persons or entities or systems who might be hostile to seeing the love and generosity of God become sovereign in the world and in our community and in each of our own lives. 

 One of the details we’re likely to miss if we just read this parable in our English translations is just how hostile this act of sowing weeds in the wheat field really is.  Jesus is describing a situation that is potentially deadly.  This is not just any old dandelion that the enemy has scattered in the wheat field;  in the Greek text, Jesus says it is zizania.  Farmers today know it as Bearded Darnel.  Australians call it “sleepy wheat,” and botanists know it by its Latin name: Lolium temulentum.  

This weed looks so much like wheat that it’s easy to mistake it for wheat and vice versa.  But learning to spot the difference is critically important because the fungus that lives in Bearded Darnel’s seeds produces a potent neurotoxin.  Eating just a small amount of this grain can cause dizziness, trembling, weakness, ataxia, confusion and delirium.  Eating more can kill you which would be a relief since that would put a stop to all the nasty gastrointestinal misery this weed would be giving you.    

It’s no wonder the landowner’s servants in this Jesus story want to pull up this noxious weed as soon as they see it, but the landowner says no.  The landowner knows that the roots of the darnel will have tangled themselves in the roots of the wheat.  You can’t pull up one without pulling up the other.  The landowner also knows that as long as the weeds are in his field it’s contained.  He can keep an eye on it and keep it from spreading.

Matthew was writing his gospel in a community that was living under incredible stress.  Clues in the text tell us that this was a community of Jewish Christians who were struggling to faithfully live our both their Jewish heritage and their new identity as followers of Jesus, but their belief that Jesus was the promised Messiah led to conflict with their friends and family in the synagogue and Jewish community.  Their communal life as believers also created tensions with their Gentile neighbors who were trying to avoid being noticed any more than necessary by the occupying Romans.  These Gentile neighbors were trying to keep their distance because when Matthew’s gospel was being written the Roman Empire viewed Christians with suspicion.  The Romans viewed Christians as a troublesome, defiant and anti-social splinter group because they publicly refused to worship the emperor and the Roman gods, which was considered a sacred civic duty.  The Empire saw the Christians as weeds in their field.

Matthew probably included this parable in his gospel because it spoke directly to the community’s questions, concerns and anxieties.  On the cosmic level it addresses the question of theodicy, the problem of evil—

  • If God is sovereign, why is there evil in the world? 

Answer: because there are forces at work in the world that are hostile to God’s sovereignty.  

  • What is the nature of evil?  

Answer:  It can be a counterfeit good.  It mimics the good and grows alongside it until it becomes difficult to root it out without damaging the good.

  • Why is there conflict in the community?

Answer: Because often the counterfeit is mistaken for the real thing.  What one group thinks is wheat another group thinks is weeds and there are people on both sides who want to rush in and pull up what they think are the weeds.

In his Augsburg Commentary on Matthew, Robert Smith said, “In Matthew’s day and in every generation it takes little talent to finger members of the community who look like bad seed.  Where do they come from?  It is easy to lose confidence in the way God runs the universe.”[2]  

It’s an unfortunate trait of human nature that we tend to identify people and ideas we don’t like as poisonous weeds in our otherwise lovely and wholesome field.  We see this every day in politics.  We see it at school.  We see it at work.  We see it in science and medicine.  We see it everywhere human beings are interacting with each other.  We see weeds in our field and we instinctively want to yank them up by the roots.  It’s like there’s some old hillbilly song stuck in our brains: “Life would be almost perfect, dontcha know, if we just got rid of so-and-so.”

Jesus says to let the weeds grow.  The reapers will take care of them when the time comes.  But almost from the beginning, the church seems to have not been listening to that particular instruction.

You’ve all heard the word heresy, right?  It comes from the Greek heiresis which means “to take or choose for oneself.” In Greek debate it was used to describe “a differing opinion.”  In the church it came to mean “a belief or opinion that is contrary to orthodox doctrine.”  Unfortunately, it also has often meant, “Look!  Here’s a weed!  Quick, let’s pull it!”

In 431, at the Council of Ephesus, the teachings of the British Monk and theologian, Pelagius, were condemned as heresy.  Fortunately for Pelagius, he had died in 418 or he might have been in for a rough time, not that he hadn’t been roughed up a bit while he was still alive.  After all, you don’t go toe-to-toe with powerful bishops like Augustine and Jerome without getting a few bruises to your reputation.  Or your body.  Theologians played rough in those days.

In 1415, Jan Hus, a Czech academic theologian,  philosopher and priest was burned at the stake as a heretic for condemning indulgences and crusades and for advocating that the scriptures should be translated into the languages of the common people so that everyone could read them for themselves.  The Church said that was heresy.

In 1431 Joan of Arc was burned at the stake for heresy and cross dressing.  The case against her for heresy was weak, and Joan answered the inquisition’s questions with such pious intelligence that the English bishops hearing her case were ready to dismiss the theological heresy charges. But they had her dead to rights on the charge of dressing like a man.  Plus, they felt she needed to be punished for being such an inspiring military leader and a brilliant military strategist, talents that were not appreciated in a woman.

In 1521, Martin Luther was condemned as a heretic and sentenced to death for his widely circulated writings insisting on church reform.  Some of the reforms he advocated had been proposed by Jan Hus a hundred years earlier.  Luther had developed a large popular following and his denunciation of indulgences hit the church right in the wallet. Fortunately, because he was under the protection of Frederick the Wise, the powerful duke of Saxony, Luther’s opponents were never able to capture him and execute him.

In 1633, Galileo Galilei was declared a heretic and forced to recant his assertion that the earth moves around the sun and not the other way around.  He died under house arrest 9 years later, but 359 years later in 1992 he was vindicated when Pope John Paul II admitted that Galileo was right, the earth does move around the sun.  And in the year 2000, a mere 8 years after admitting that Galileo was right, the Church held a ceremony in which they issued him a formal apology.  Galileo, who had been dead for 358 years at that point, was unable to attend.

In his book Parables of the Kingdom, Robert Farrrar Capon reminds us that the enemy who sows the weeds doesn’t have any real power over goodness. The wheat in the parable is already sown.  The reign of God is already in the world and there’s nothing the enemy can do about it.  But, “he can sucker the forces of goodness into taking up arms against the confusion he has introduced, to do his work for him. That is why he goes away after sowing the weeds. He has no need to hang around. Unable to take positive action anyway—having no real power to muck up the operation—he simply sprinkles around a generous helping of darkness and waits for the children of light to get flustered enough to do the job for him.”[3]

All these heretics, all these persons with differing views, were seen in their time as weeds in the field.  Some were pulled and burned, ignoring the advice of Jesus: Let both of them grow together until the harvest.  He tells those who are eager to yank up the weeds that they’re likely to pull up the wheat, too.  Jesus also leaves a cautionary question hanging in the air, a question that echoes through this parable and our history: What makes you so sure you know the difference between weeds and wheat? 

Today, a fair number of theologians are thinking that maybe Pelagius wasn’t entirely wrong and maybe Augustine wasn’t entirely right.  Jan Hus is commemorated as a martyr whose ideas planted seeds that flourished in the Reformation.  Joan of Arc has been canonized as a saint and nobody much cares that she wore pants.  Martin Luther is acknowledge as a titanic figure who not only ignited the Reformation but set the stage for the Enlightenment.  And Galileo opened our minds to the notion that religious dogma should not stand in opposition to the empirical observations of science.  

Time and time again throughout our history, persons and ideas that were thought to be weeds in the field turned out to be wheat after all.

So if you think that some person or some group are weeds in the field and need to be uprooted because their ideas or habits or opinions differ from yours, maybe it would be best to leave them alone, to live and let live, and leave the judgment to the more far-sighted understanding of God.

Let both of them grow together until the harvest; and at harvest time I will tell the reapers, Collect the weeds first and bind them in bundles to be burned, but gather the wheat into my barn.

Do not judge and you will not be judged.  Don’t be in such a hurry to yank those ideas or persons you think are weeds out of God’s field.  Grow and let grow.  Because that’s what Jesus said to do.

[1] Matthew 13:13

[2] Augsburg Commentary on the New Testament: Matthew; Robert H. Smith, 1998, p.178

[3] Robert Farrar Capon; Parables of the Kingdom, Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1991.

Whole Grain Goodness

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

You reap what you sow…

Matthew 13:1-9, 18-23;  Isaiah 55:10-11

A sower went out to sow…  I have a special fondness for this parable which I’ll explain in a moment.

The parable of the sower, which appears in Matthew, Mark and Luke with slight but important differences, is an allegory, and when his disciples ask him to explain it to them Jesus tells them what the different elements represent.

In Luke, Jesus says that the seed is “the word of God.”  In Mark he simply calls it “the word.”  But Matthew is more specific.  The seed, says Jesus, is “the word of the kingdom.”

Then he talks about the different soils. 

The seed that falls on the path and is eaten by birds represents those who hear the word of the kingdom but don’t understand or take time to consider it “so the evil one comes and snatches away what is sown in the heart.”  

The seed that falls on rocky ground represents those who are initially enthusiastic but there is no depth in their response so the word of the kingdom doesn’t take root in their lives.

Some of the seed is choked by thorns.  Jesus tells his disciples that thorns and weeds represent the cares of the world, the lure of wealth, the busyness of maintaining a certain standard of living.  These things suck away all the energy that would sustain commitment to God’s kingdom.

And then there’s the good soil which produces a bountiful yield.  But what is that soil exactly?  A rich spiritual life?  A pious life? A life devoted to religion and evangelism?  What?

In all the years I’ve preached this parable, I’ve usually asked people to reflect on what kind of soil they are.  That’s a pretty common approach to this parable:  What kind of soil are you?  And what kinds of changes would you need to make so you could be more productive for the seed Jesus is sowing?

What kind of soil are you?  That is worth thinking about but it’s not the only way to place yourself in the parable.  When I really think about it, I know I have played other roles in this parable.

I think there have probably been times when I might have been a big, flat, underground rock in somebody else’s field.  I think of all the years I worked with young people and led youth events.  I remember the energy and enthusiasm of all those kids, and then I think about how few of them are still part of the church now, and I wonder—did we introduce them to a faith that was too shallow?  Did we give them too much flash and not enough substance?  Did we—did I— do something that somehow blocked their roots?

I know there were times when I was a weed.  I know there were times when my mere existence probably restricted someone else’s spiritual growth—if for no one else then at least for my parents.  I know that sometimes I was the “cares of this world” for them.   But maybe I was a burden and busy-ness weed that choked the growth of others, too.  It’s hard to live in any kind of interdependent relationship without bringing some of the cares of this world with you.  Relationships, especially family relationships almost always include pressures about time and money and other resources.  If you have kids or a spouse or a partner, then “the cares of this world” are just part of the package.  And once you get used to a certain standard of living and to making sure your loved ones enjoy certain advantages and opportunities, those things just automatically become part of your way of life and you don’t think too much about how all that might be affecting your relationship with the rest of the world or your relationship with God.  So maybe being the weeds or thorns in somebody’s field is just unavoidable if you have any kind of life at all with other people.

Let’s look at the Sower.  We usually think of the Sower as God or Jesus.  Maybe that’s humility on our part, but it’s also a pretty effective way to make sure that our own role in this parable remains passive.  And I don’t think Jesus is ever calling us to be passive where the kingdom of God is concerned.

As I reread and rethink this parable, it seems pretty clear to me that Jesus is inviting us to think of ourselves as the sower.  In fact, if we’re living in the imitation of Christ, it really is our job as followers of Jesus to be spreading the word about the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness out there in the everyday world.  We’re supposed to be out there in the world scattering the seeds of Christ’s alternative reality everywhere we go.  It’s part of our discipleship.  In fact, you’ve probably already been the sower more times than you know.

Which brings us to the seed.  Just what is this seed that we’ve been sowing?

Assuming that in some way, shape or form you are indeed living out the gospel in your everyday life, just what Good News are you proclaiming with your life?  What is the seed that you are sowing?

As I said earlier, I have a special fondness for this parable.  It brings back some really great memories for me.  When I was growing up, almost every summer, as soon as school was out we piled into our 1960 Impala and drove from Long Beach straight to my mom’s family farm in Kansas so we could help with the wheat harvest.  

Harvest was a lot of hard work but it was also a lot of fun.  I remember how my dad and my mom’s cousin, Frank, who did the actual year-round farming, would talk for hours in the evening about what kind of seed should be planted in the Fall.  It was always a Hard Red Winter wheat but there were a lot of different strains so there was always discussion about which variety might give us the best yields and best quality and best price per bushel. 

I remember how several of the different varieties had Native American names like Pawnee, Wichita, Ponca, Comanche, Scout and Bison which seemed fitting since our farm was part of the great plains where buffalo had been hunted by Native peoples long before my Swedish great grandparents first broke the soil with their plows.  

There were all kinds of factors and decisions that determined how successful your next crop would be next year, but it all started with choosing the right seed.

For the past 20+ years, religion in general but Mainline Christianity in particular has been in decline.  There has been a lot of analysis of why that’s happening, but one thing seems clear:  it’s not for a lack of Sowers sowing the seed.  There are still a lot of evangelists out there in the world using some of the most sophisticated tools in history.  There is no shortage of church outreach and church growth and church invitation programs.  So why aren’t we getting results?  Has the whole world turned into rocky or Hthorny soil?  Is it all one hard-packed foot-path of cares and worries and pursuit of wealth where the Good News simply cannot take root?

Maybe.  Certainly there seems to be a lot more of all that.  But maybe we have a different problem altogether.  

Maybe there’s a problem with the seed we’ve been sowing.

Let’s go back for a minute to all that seed that falls along the path.  People hear the word of the kingdom and they don’t understand it.  It doesn’t connect with them.  It doesn’t get their attention.  So it doesn’t take root.

Now let’s stretch that metaphor.  What if it’s the seed that’s the problem?  What if somewhere along the way we substituted a sack of hybrid seed for the original seed that Jesus was sowing.  

And let’s say, for the sake of argument, that this hybrid seed worked pretty well for a very long time but now it doesn’t.  What if, even when that seed is falling on fertile ground, people understand the message but it just doesn’t make sense to them anymore so they reject it.

For a long time, we’ve been sowing a seed of what Brian McLaren calls “carrot on a stick” theology—talking about our faith in Christ as if it’s primarily about going to heaven when we die.  Sometimes that’s called fire insurance theology.

Here’s Fire Insurance theology in a nutshell:  

  • First, we’re all doomed to Hell; Hell is the default afterlife because “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”  God is deeply offended by sin.  But sin is inescapable.  It’s part of the human condition.  So we’re all doomed.
  • Next, God demands compensation for the offense of our sin and the way we have become a blight on the perfection of God’s original creation.  “The wages of sin is death.”  Right?  So, Jesus is sacrificed on the cross to appease God and save us.  Jesus takes the punishment we deserve and pays the debt we owe for our sin.
  • Finally, if we accept what Jesus has done for us and invite Jesus into our hearts, then God forgives our sin and we get to go to heaven

You’ve all heard this theological story, right?

Fire insurance theology doesn’t work anymore.   It’s not that people don’t understand it, it’s that they do understand it and it doesn’t make sense to them anymore.   And truthfully, it never really did make sense, even in a world where every culture and every religion practiced sacrifice in some way, shape or form because the gods needed to be pacified. 

Fire insurance theology doesn’t work anymore because the flaws in its internal logic have been laid bare:  

  • It’s a theology that talks about a God of infinite love one moment but then sanctifies bloodshed and violence the next. 
  • It describes a God who is satisfied if we agree to an intellectual transaction rather than a God who is passionately interested in living with us, working through us, and loving us as we work to realize God’s vision of the world as God intended it to be. 
  • Fire Insurance Theology portrays Jesus primarily as a cosmic dealmaker who goes through hell to buy our way out of eternal misery rather than as Emmanuel, the very presence of God with us, who teaches, inspires and leads us as we undergo a complete transformation of the heart, soul, and mind so that God’s vision of shalom for the world can become a reality “on earth as it is in heaven.” 
  • Fire Insurance Theology leads to what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace”—a way of thinking that says “since I’ve accepted Jesus as my personal savior and he’s paid the price for my sins, then not only is nothing more expected of me, but anything I do from here on out is okay.  It’s all forgiven in advance.”  
  • Fire Insurance Theology focuses on personal salvation so it numbs us to our systemic cultural sins like racism, greed, oppressive politics and economies skewed to favor the wealthy—all these things the prophets railed against for centuries.

Fire insurance theology has been the church’s primary theological story for a long time now.  But that’s not the Good News that Jesus preached.  That’s not the seed he was sowing.

In Matthew’s version of this parable, Jesus calls the seed “the word of the kingdom.” That’s what the sower is sowing.  In The Divine Conspiracy, Dallas Willard said, “The Gospel is less about how to get into heaven after you die and more about how to live in the kingdom of heaven before you die.”

Have you noticed that in the gospels Jesus does four basic things:  

  • He announces that the kingdom of heaven is arriving.  It is within reach;
  • He describes what that reign of God looks like and how it operates.  That’s what the beatitudes and all the parables are all about.  When Jesus preaches and teaches, he is casting a vision of a new reality, a reality that, with his help, is achievable if we will live as he lives;
  • He liberates the spiritually oppressed so they are free to participate fully in this new reality; 
  • And he heals people.  He makes them whole.  

When Jesus sends his disciples out on their mission he tells them to do those very same things—announce the kingdom, put a stop to whatever is bedeviling people, and heal the sick.

THAT’s the seed the Sower went out to sow.

That’s the seed we should still be sowing.

The gospel is not just about your personal salvation—or anyone’s personal salvation—but it does include our personal salvation if we really understand what salvation means.  

For too long we’ve understood “being saved” simply to mean “being rescued” –-having our fat pulled out of the fire.  But that’s only one of its meanings.  Its older, deeper meaning is “to be healed, to be made whole.”  So when St. Paul says, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” another way to hear that is “work out your healing” or “work out your wholeness” with fear and trembling. (Phil. 2:12)  

So here’s the Good News.  Here’s the seed we can sow, the seed Jesus was sowing:  

God loves us and wants to heal us and make us whole.  You, me, all of us. Collectively and individually.

God wants to heal your body.  God wants to heal your soul.  God wants to heal your anger and your fear and your doubt and your brokenness.   God wants to find that place in you that’s turned hard and stony and soften it with love.  God wants to touch that place in your heart that feels like it will always be wounded and bathe it with compassion and joy.  God wants to clear the weeds from the garden of You.  God wants to heal your relationships.  And that includes your relationship with yourself.

God wants to heal you, body, mind and spirit.

But it’s even better than that.  God doesn’t want to heal just you.  God wants to heal everything.  You.  Your family.  The community.  The culture.  The environment.  Our politics.  The nation.  The world.  

It’s true, the soil has changed.  Fields we thought were fertile might not be and the good soil might not be where we expect it—but then the Sower in the parable doesn’t go looking for fertile soil.  He just casts the good seed all around and trusts that some of it will land in fertile ground and grow.  

Weighed in the Balance

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Matthew 11:16-19, 25-30

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Inspiring words.  Cherished words.  But I struggle with these words from the Declaration of Independence, especially this weekend as we observe the 250th birthday of our nation.  The semiquincentennial anniversary of our Declaration of Independence.  Semiquincentennial:  it literally means half of five hundred years.  The word itself sounds like a thing unfinished, which is appropriate.

And that’s where I struggle with the Declaration of Independence.  On the one hand, the words and the sentiment they inspire are noble and revolutionary in every sense of the word, especially the self-evident truth expressed in that core five-word phrase “all men are created equal.”  On the other hand, I almost reflexively want to change “all men” to “all persons are created equal.”  But that’s not what Mr. Jefferson wrote and it’s not what he meant.  For him and Ben Franklin and John Adams and all the others who signed this declaration “all men” meant “all white males who owned property.”  Women were certainly not included in that phrase in 1776 and neither were the 500,000 enslaved persons who made up more than 20% of the total population.  Forty-one of the 56 men who signed the Declaration owned slaves and another 7 profited directly from slavery either by trading slaves or supplying goods to slavery camps.  And, of course, no one at the 2nd Continental Congress was giving any thought to the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness of the Native Americans on whose ancestral lands this new nation was being established.

There’s an anonymous meme that keeps popping up in social media that says, “Studying history will sometimes disturb you.  Studying history will sometimes upset you.  Studying history will sometimes make you furious.  If studying history always makes you feel proud and happy, you probably aren’t studying history.”

Still, having said all that,  I have to tell you I love this Declaration of Independence and I love the country that has grown out of it.  I still believe that, on the whole, despite all our faults and failings, the United States of America has been a powerful force for good in the world.  On the whole.

The men of that 2nd Continental Congress were creatures of their time, but within the paradigm of their time they were prophetic enough to plant within the Declaration seeds of vision that would set goals and standards for future generations.  Take, for instance, the idea that “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” are unalienable rights and that governments are instituted to secure those rights.  Not to control us, not to fleece us, not to oppress us, but to secure our rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness with a capital H.  No one had ever said anything like that before.

Or take the idea that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and that “whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government!”  Right there, in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, is a warning to would-be tyrants, authoritarians or despots of every stripe and in every age that the People have a right and a duty to remove them when they interfere with the People’s rights.  

The idea that “all men are created equal” was a spiritual truth that became an defining aspiration for us as a nation.  We have lurched toward it in fits and starts and we have often failed to realize in either law or in practice that we are all created equal.  In his 1963 I Have A Dream speech, Dr. Martin Luther King said that where Black people were concerned, the Declaration’s promise of equality was “a promissory note,” a “bad check” marked “insufficient funds.”

In his book The Fire Next Time, James Baldwin said that America is “guilty of the crime of innocence.”  When Tripp Fuller asked Cornel West what Baldwin meant by that, Cornel West said, 

“It’s Peter Pan.  You know, you never grow up.  You grow rich, you grow powerful, but you never grow up.  The benchmark of maturity is not just humility but unflinching, unequivocal engagement with reality.  And when you’re innocent, you evade reality, you avoid reality.”[1]

The reason some people want to quite literally Whitewash our history and perpetuate the illusion of our innocence is that confronting all our sins and shortcomings all at once feels like drowning.  Thinking of our nation always and only as “the good guys” or “the shining city on the hill,” is a coping mechanism.  It protects us from the pain of feeling guilty, but it also keeps us from growing up as a people.  This conflict between those who want to perpetuate the illusion of American innocence and those who want us to acknowledge and deal with our sins is one of the main sources of our political dysfunction.  The path of truth is painful, but it is the better way.  Denial always sows the seeds of its own destruction.

And that brings us to today’s Gospel text on this sixth Sunday after Pentecost.

While John the Baptist was in prison, Jesus had just been visited by some of John’s disciples, so John was very much on his mind.  In their proclamation of the kingdom of God, both John and Jesus were change agents, disrupters of the status quo, so those who were afraid of rocking the boat found reasons to object to both of them.  That’s what Jesus is reacting to when he says,  “But to what will I compare this generation? It is like children sitting in the marketplace and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn.’ For John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.”

When Jesus talks about “this generation,” genea is the Greek word here, he is not talking about the Jewish people or even any particular chronological generation of people.  “This generation” is meant to identify any people of any place or time who decide to blame the messenger when God’s truth cuts too close for comfort.  Derek Penwell says that “this generation” is “the spirit that tolerates prophecy only as long as prophecy minds its own business.  When it refuses to cooperate, that spirit reaches for whatever tools of silencing are available:  stones, crosses, prison cells, budget cuts, deportation orders, or whatever is close at hand.”

Jesus likens “this generation” to children who play games in the marketplace but can’t agree on which game to play.  These aren’t innocent, sweet natured children from your Bible storybook, these are petulant, quarrelsome kids who refuse to play at all when they can’t have it their own way.

Our designated text then skips over verses 20 through 24 where Jesus chastises “the cities in which most of his deeds of power had been done, because they did not repent.”  It’s very much a variation on the same theme.  He has harsh words for these cities because they had preferred to maintain the illusion that everything was fine—or at least manageable—rather than face the reality of their situation under Rome’s domination.   The influencers of those cities decided it was safer to slog along under Rome’s thumb and Herod’s watchful eye than to embrace the kingdom of God that Jesus was announcing.

When Jesus had finished venting his disappointment, he prayed saying, “I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the intelligent and have revealed them to infants; yes, Father, for such was your gracious will.”  

When Jesus says that God has “hidden these things” from “the wise and intelligent” he may be speaking indirectly about the scribes and Pharisees who frequently challenged him.  These were generally the most well educated and well situated members of the Galilean community but, as with smart people everywhere, their knowledge of how things are supposed to go and how things are supposed to happen and who is authorized to make changes ran headlong into Jesus who didn’t fit any of their preconceived ideas.  Instead, Jesus says that God has revealed the vision and knowledge of the kingdom to nepios.  Infants.  This term usually refers to a young child, but here it is used to refer to those with no credentials or recognized status among the well-educated.  This term is akin to “little ones” which Matthew often uses to identify the economically marginal, the politically irrelevant and the socially disposable.  The point here is that God’s wisdom often comes to those whom the world fails to notice.

Jesus ends with an invitation: “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest.  Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.  For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”

Just about everybody in Galilee was weary and carrying heavy burdens. Galilee was rich in agricultural production and the Sea of Galilee was a goldmine for fishing.  But everything was heavily taxed by Rome and Herod.  Priestly tithes and temple dues added to the economic burden so that Galilean families paid out about half of what they produced in taxes and tithes.

When Jesus talks about the yoke they were laboring under he is using a standard Jewish metaphor.  The rabbis often spoke of “the yoke of Torah.” Sirach 51 invites the reader to “put your neck under the yoke of wisdom.”  Zugos, the Greek word for yoke, also referred to a balancing scale, the kind used in the marketplace, so there is a kind of double meaning here.  He is telling people who stagger under the yoke of Imperial systems and centralized religious authority that his yoke involves a different way of life, laboring for a different kind of world and weighing the world around you with a different kind of balance.

Jesus tells us that his yoke is easy.  That’s the traditional translation, but a better translation might be to say benevolent or kind.  The word that’s used here carries a feeling of goodness and generosity.  The yoke of Christ is not effortless, but it is humane, merciful and life-giving.  Those who take that yoke upon themselves will find rest for their souls.  This is the deep Sabbath rest promised by Israel’s scriptures—a rest from busyness and anxiety, a rest from endless competitiveness. 

The ministry of Jesus and John the Baptist was a disruption of the Empire’s business as usual.  Jesus invited people to acknowledge the truth of their situation and visualize with him a better way.  

In the same way, the Declaration of Independence was a moment of disruption.  The revolution it ignited was, in Cornel West’s words, “the beginning of an anti-imperial movement against the largest empire of the day.”  Tripp Fuller says it was, “a courageous wager that ordinary people could build arrangements where each person carries equal worth and dignity.”  That, too, is part of our reality, part of our truth on this semiquincentennial weekend in our celebration of unfinished business.  Can we make arrangements where each person carries equal worth and dignity?  Our track record is kind of spotty, but I’m willing to wager that we can…if we weigh our choices with the yoke—the balancing scale—of  Christ.

[1] Guilty of Our Own Innocence with Cornel West; processthi@substack.com

A Blessed Antidote for a Dystopian World

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

While Jesus was having dinner at Matthew’s house, many tax collectors and sinners came and ate with him and his disciples.  When the Pharisees saw this, they asked his disciples, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” When Jesus heard this, he said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’  I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”[1]

For a long time now we have seen a strain of pseudo-Christianity in this country and around the world that has little to do with the teaching of Jesus as we encounter him in the gospels.  It is based on triumphalism, issue-based moralism, and a theology of glory.  It worships and celebrates power and ignores the call to enter into the world’s trials and suffering the way Jesus did.  It walks hand-in-hand with extreme nationalism and, often, racism.  It sees baptism as a get-out-o-hell-free card and not as a way of life in the beloved community.  It has co-opted the name Christian and Christian language and symbols, but it has not learned to do justice, to love kindness or to walk humbly with God.  It has not learned to love the neighbor as oneself. 

In Matthew 25, Jesus tells us up front the criteria by which we as a people are being judged.  The final test, it turns out, is a practicum. “I was hungry and you gave me food.  I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink.  I was a stranger and you welcomed me.  I was naked and you gave me clothing.  I was sick and you took care of me.  I was in prison and you visited me…Truly I tell you, just as you did it (or did not do it) to the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”  The nations that have fed the hungry and brought water to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, health care to the sick, the nations that have welcomed the stranger—these nations inherit the kingdom.  The nations that did not practice these basic caregiving duties of our common humanity are accursed and relegated to the eternal fire prepared for the devil and all his angels. [2]

So, what will be the judgment for a nation that cuts off medical aid to people around the world and makes medical care unaffordable for its own citizens?   What will be the judgment for a nation that stops food aid to dependent people in other lands and even curtails food assistance for its own citizens?   What will be the judgment for a nation that fills its streets with masked and armed agents who kidnap immigrants and deport them without a hearing or a trial or locks them up in overcrowded detention centers?  What will be the judgment for a nation that closes its doors to refugees who are fleeing from violence and oppression?

On Thursday the United States House of Representatives voted to cut $141 million in funding from the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children, a program that provides fruit and vegetables to poor pregnant and postpartum women and nearly 5.4 million children here in the United States.  The shutdown and dismantling of USAID last year has already led to more than 750,000 preventable deaths worldwide[3] and researchers warn that if the funding cuts are not reversed, the reduction in access to healthcare, nutrition, and sanitation could lead to more than 14 million preventable deaths by 2030.[4]

Last year, Elon Musk posted a meme on X that referred to the poor as “a parasite class.”  Musk’s philosophical guru, Curtis Yarvin, has “joked” that the poor should be melted down into biodiesel.[5]  Jesus, on the other hand, says that the poor are blessed and the kingdom of God is theirs.

The late Tony Campolo said, “If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over North America today.”  So how do we stay faithful to the teaching, love and ethics of Jesus while living under the shadow of a political culture that seems intent on dismantling and destroying so much that is good and helpful and life-sustaining in our country and in the world?  

The Beatitudes of Jesus are a good diagnostic tool for measuring our spiritual health, both collectively and individually.  Looking at how we understand these core teachings of Jesus and how we apply them—or how much we ignore them—can tell us a lot about what kind of Christians we really are.  

In his book, A Man Without a Country, Kurt Vonnegut said, “For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course, that’s Moses, not Jesus. I haven’t heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere. ‘Blessed are the merciful’ in a courtroom? ‘Blessed are the peacemakers’ in the Pentagon? Give me a break!”

As Vonnegut pointed out, the Beatitudes of Jesus are mostly conspicuous by their absence.  Now more than ever.  And that tells us something important about what we as a people really think about living in the Way of Jesus. 

In both Matthew’s and Luke’s versions of the beatitudes, Jesus was proclaiming a vision of the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy that completely subverts the common understanding of who God favors and how the world works.  

Heather Cox Richardson has said that the stories we tell about our world shape our culture.  When he preaches about the kingdom of God, he is telling a story about a more whole and healthy culture.  He is helping us imagine a new world of compassion, justice, integrity and peace, and he wants us to understand that in this new world God prioritizes those whose need is greatest and not those who are already doing just fine thank you.  He starts by helping us to reimagine ourselves, to see ourselves as blessed.  

I wonder sometimes how much of the divisiveness, anger, greed and general dysfunction we experience today arises from the stories we tell ourselves about our world, a world we often picture as an arena of scarcity where we compete for survival.  We have forgotten how to bless each other—how to imagine and pronounce a positive vision and future for each other.  For all of us.  What might happen if we learned to give that gift to each other and the world?  That would be gospel.  That would be Good News.

When is the last time someone blessed you?  I don’t mean the hasty “bless you” that we say when someone sneezes or the “well bless your heart” people sometimes say in a way that sounds like what they’re really saying is “well aren’t you a curious little specimen.”

When is the last time that anyone spoke a real blessing to you?

When is the last time you felt like someone had spoken a powerful and prophetic word to tell you that you matter and that you live in the heart of goodness… 

When is the last time that someone told you 

that you are consecrated…  

that your life is sacred…  

that you are holy?

When is the last time someone told you that God sees you and loves you even when you’re not feeling it?  Especially when you’re not feeling it?

When is the last time you spoke that kind of blessing for someone else?

When Jesus looked at his rag-tag disciples, when he looked out over the crowd, he could see them in the deepest and most meaningful way.  He knew them.  He knew who they were and what they were.

He saw how life had broken them.  He saw their longing to be made whole again.  He saw their yearning to be told that their lives mattered, that their struggles mattered, that their pain mattered.  He wasn’t recruiting followers, he was just meeting people in the everyday reality of their lives and telling them the truth about themselves.  Just like he does for us.  

He told them who they were.  But he also told them who they could be.  His words were not just descriptive, they were prophetic.  Just like they are for us.

He looked out at them and told them they were blessed.  Just like he tells us.  Just like we should tell each other.

Blessed are the poor and the poor in spirit.  Blessed are those who doubt.  Blessed are those who struggle with believing.  Blessed are those who wonder if they have enough faith.  Blessed are those who feel spiritually malnourished and spiritually drained.  Blessed are those who are far from certain about who God is and what God does and how it all works.  Blessed are those who find all the old answers unsatisfactory or troubling.  Blessed are those whose minds and hearts are open to new information, new ways of seeing and new ways of thinking.  Blessed are those who sometimes feel lost in the mystery of it all.  Blessed are the poor in spirit.  They shall see things others do not see.  They will ask questions others do not dare to ask.  They will use their imaginations in ways that others find daunting.  

Blessed are the poor.  Blessed are those who are running on empty.  Blessed are those who are down to their last nickel.  Blessed are those who can’t make the rent or buy the medicine.   Blessed are the unhoused.  Blessed are the poor.  God sees them.  God walks with them.  Even when they can’t see it or feel it, heaven is all around them and within them.  And they are blessed.

Blessed are those who mourn.  Blessed are those for whom grief is an inescapable prison.  Blessed are those whose lives have been hollowed out by loss.  Blessed are those who live in the shadow  of death.  Blessed are those who weep.  Blessed are those whose tears have dried up but whose pain has not.  Blessed are those who have learned the hard way that grief is love persevering.  Blessed are the brokenhearted.  Blessed are those who are crumbling inside but hold themselves together to keep everyone around them from falling apart.  Blessed are those who mourn.  Their tears are sacred.  God carries their pain and walks beside them.  Blessed are those who weep.  Someday they will laugh.

Blessed are the gentle, the meek, the nonviolent.  Blessed are those who look for ways to compromise and cooperate instead of making life a contest or a competition.  Blessed are the strong who restrain themselves. Blessed are those who do not fight back, those who would rather take it than dish it out. Blessed are those who go unnoticed, the ones who sit alone at lunch, the unimpressive, the unemployed.  Blessed are the janitors and sanitation workers and fast food workers.  Blessed are the people on the street whom we fail to see because we pretend they are invisible.  Blessed are the meek.  God sees them.  God loves them.  They will inherit the earth.

Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.  Blessed are those who were born with an acute sense of what is fair and what is not, what is right and what is not.  Blessed are those who have a passion for justice.  Blessed are those who work to overcome injustice even when the injustice has nothing to do with them or their lives.  Blessed are those who are wrongly accused.  Blessed are the undocumented.   Blessed are those who stand against the bullies.  Blessed are those who confront racism and work to dismantle it.  Blessed are those who march in the streets and speak truth to power.  Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.  God sees them.  God loves them.  God will nourish them with justice and their cup will be filled.

Blessed are the merciful.  Blessed are those who fill the world around them with kindness.  Blessed are those who are generous with forgiveness.  Blessed are those who are just plain generous.  Blessed are those who are slow to judge and condemn because they understand how much grace they have been given.  Blessed are the merciful.  God sees them.  God loves them.  They will receive mercy.

Blessed are the pure in heart.  Blessed are those who have retained their innocence and are just plain good.  Blessed are those who have recovered their innocence and cling to it.  Blessed are the honest.  Blessed are the truthful.  Blessed are those who love with no agenda.  Blessed are those who are in recovery, who are living out the twelve steps, who are cleansing their bodies and their souls and making amends.  Blessed are those who refuse to be cynical.  Blessed are the pure in heart.  God loves them.  God sees them.  And they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers.  Blessed are those who bring food to those who are starving.  Blessed are those who bring medical attention to those who are in peril.  Blessed are those who work to disarm a weaponized world.  Blessed are those who encourage us to seek common ground.  Blessed are those who care for the planet and work to heal the earth.  Blessed are the peacemakers.  God embraces them as God’s own children.

Blessed are those who are persecuted for doing the right thing.  Blessed are those who are disrespected and taunted for being compassionate.  Blessed are the woke.  Blessed are those who are scorned because they speak out for a better world and work for the shalom of God.  Blessed are those who are battered or imprisoned because they protest against all the things that dehumanize and oppress people.  Blessed are those who are persecuted for doing the right thing. The commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness belongs to them.

Blessed are you when people revile you and persecute you and say all kinds of untrue and evil things against you because you have embraced the Way, the Truth and the Life.  Blessed are you when people spread lies about you because your integrity exposes their duplicity.  Blessed are you when people criticize you for being awake to the pain and injustice around you.  If you only knew how great your reward is in heaven, you would be dancing with joy.  God sees you.  God loves you.  And remember, they persecuted the prophets in the same way, so you are in good company.

You are blessed.  

You are consecrated.  

You are holy.

You are set apart to bring a blessing and to be a blessing in a world that thinks it is cursed.

You are consecrated to help others see the beauty and sacredness of our life together in this amazing God-made world.

With all your faults—and God knows them better than you know them yourself—you are loved by God more than you can begin to imagine so that you can spread the love of God to others.

God is blessing you.  God is loving you.  God is transforming you.    

You live in the heart of goodness.

Blessed are you. 

Now…go bless the world… in Jesus’ name.

[1] Matthew 9:9-13

[2] Matthew 25:31-45

[3] ImpactCounter https://healthpolicy-watch.news/the-human-cost-one-year-after-the-us-took-a-chainsaw-to-global-health/

[4] UCLA Fielding School of Public Health

[5] Reported in The Cottage by Diana Butler Bass, 02/15/2025

Painting: Das Mahl mit den Sündern (The Meal with the Sinners) by the German priest-artist Sieger Köder

You Are Invited to Dance!

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

You Are Invited to Dance

One night when I was about 14 years old, I saw something that was almost indescribably beautiful, something that left me completely spellbound.   My mom and dad had gone out for dinner, just the two of them.  I don’t know what the occasion was, but they had dressed up for it.  Mom was wearing a black cocktail dress and Dad was wearing his best suit and tie.  

A few hours after they left, I was in my bedroom doing homework when I heard the front door open and then close and a moment later I heard music.  Soft, captivating music.  When I didn’t hear anything else for a minute, I padded down the hall to poke my head into the living room and make sure everything was okay.  And that’s when I saw it.  

Mom and Dad were dancing.

Glen Miller’s Moonlight Serenade was playing softly on the stereo, and my parents were dancing.  They weren’t just dancing…they were dancing beautifully.  They moved together perfectly.  They didn’t just sway together in time to the music, they knew The Steps, and they did them together flawlessly, as if they had practiced this every day for their entire lives.   

My parents were dancing, and it transformed them.  My dad was no longer the stocky guy with a short temper who, frankly, scared me a little—he was suddenly Gene Kelly, elegant, athletic and graceful.  My mom was no longer the brainy little elf with her nose forever in a textbook—she was suddenly Cyd Charisse, fluid, weightless and willowy!  They were no longer two separate persons, they moved as one, united by the music, their synchronized steps, and their embrace.

So why am I telling you this very personal story about a very personal moment between my mother and father?  Well, this is Trinity Sunday, and for one brief moment when I was 14, I saw a nearly perfect analogy of the Holy Trinity: my Mother, my Father, and the Holy Music united together as one.

Nearly perfect.  And also, not even close to perfect because even the very best analogies break down at some point.  They break down because they are trying to describe something that is too vast and deep and intimate to fit into human words.  Martin Luther said that to deny the Trinity imperils our souls, but to try to explain the Trinity imperils our sanity.

And that makes sense when you think about it.  Can you explain you?  Could you give a concise yet comprehensive description of everything that makes you you?  You are not an intellectual construct to be defined and understood.  You are a person to be befriended and loved.  The only meaningful way for someone to “understand” the mystery that is you is to relate to you—to be in a relationship with you.

When I saw my parents dancing that night, all those years ago, it was an epiphany for me, but it was by no means the final epiphany.  I had a new understanding of who they were together and what they meant to each other, but it was by no means a complete and exhaustive understanding of the mystery of their relationship.  Much of their relationship would remain a mystery.  In the same way, no matter how many epiphanies we have about the relationship, the oneness of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, there will always be more that remains a mystery.

Frederick Buechner described the Trinity as the Mystery beyond us, the Mystery among us, and the Mystery within us.  The Holy Trinity, the union of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons united as one God, is not a puzzle to be solved;  it is a mystery in which to immerse ourselves.  

You don’t solve mysteries, you explore them.  You enter into them.  You participate in them.  Maybe instead of calling this day Trinity Sunday, we should call it Mystery Sunday.

Richard Rohr said that when something is a mystery, especially when it’s a God mystery, that doesn’t mean that it can’t be understood, it means that it can be understood endlessly.  There is always more to see.  There is always more to relate to.  There is always more to understand.  There are always new steps in the dance.  

And it is a dance—or at least that is, historically, one of the best descriptions we’ve ever had of the Trinity.  But how did we come to have the Doctrine of the Trinity in the first place?  There is no passage in the Bible that specifically describes or defines God as Trinity, though there are some passages that hint at it.  As my colleague Heather Anne Thiessen once said, the Trinity isn’t spelled out in scripture, but it’s there in kit form.

Early followers of Jesus had a problem.  Like the Jews—and remember, the first followers of Jesus were Jews—these early Jesus followers believed that there is only one God.  But they also believed—or at least most of them did—that Jesus was divine in nature and that he was somehow completely one with God whom he called Abba or Father.  On top of that, they had received the Holy Spirit—the very breath of God, who they also experienced as a divine person because the Spirit often seemed to exist and act independently of Jesus and Abba.  At the baptism of Jesus, all three seemed to have been present: Jesus coming up out of the water, the Spirit, descending in the form of a dove, and the Abba, speaking like thunder.  So how do you reconcile three divine persons but hang onto the idea that there is only one God?

Well, you don’t, said one group of Christ followers.  These people were called Arians because the main proponent of their theology was Arius of Alexandria.  The Father is God, said Arius.  Jesus, the Son is a slightly lesser god.  He was created by the Father in the first millisecond of creation and all his authority and power comes from the Father, but he is separate in substance and stature.  And the Spirit is a slightly lesser god than Jesus, the Son, and also of an ever-so-slightly lower stature and substance.  What the Arians were saying, more or less, is that there are really three gods and the Father is the first and most important God, the one with all the power and authority.   

Hang on a minute, said the Trinitarians.  Jesus said, “The Father and I are one.  You who have seen me have seen the Father.”  After the resurrection, Jesus breathed the Holy Spirit into the disciples.  The Spirit is in his breath.  It’s his Spirit that flows in us.  When the prophets would say, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me”  they were talking about the Father’s Spirit.  So, the Three have to be One.  They are Three.  But they are also One.  Three persons, One being.

This disagreement had started to become violent and threatened to completely and irreparably divide the church which had only recently really begun to come together in a meaningful way.  So 1701 years ago this month, in May of 325, the Emperor Constantine, who had recently declared himself to be a follower of Christ, decided that this question had to be settled for the good of the Church and the good of the empire.  He called for a Council and ordered all the bishops to meet at Nicaea to debate the matter.  After much argument, Constantine declared that the Trinitarians had won the debate. 

Constantine ordered the Council of Nicaea to formulate a statement of Doctrine to describe the Trinity.  This was the very first official doctrine of the whole Church, by the way, and the bishops and presbyters argued heatedly over the words they would use.  They argued about whether the Father and the Son were made of the same substance and whether they had the same nature.  They felt that they were standing at the edge of an enormous Truth about God and they sensed it was vitally important to get all the details exactly right even though there was no possible way for them to know or even see all the details.  In some ways, despite their tremendous intellectual capabilities, they were like children who stand on the beach and think that they can fully describe the breadth and depth and power of the ocean and all the life contained in it.  

They created the first draft of the creed we now know as the Nicene Creed and decided that adherence to this statement of faith would determine if someone was a true Christian or not.  Ironically, their very useful insight about the all-loving, all-relating God who exists eternally in the expansive community and relationship of the Trinity led them to formulate a faith statement that would all too often be used to exclude people from the community and the embrace of the Church of Jesus.

For all its official status and authority, the Council of Nicaea wasn’t quite the final word that Constantine and others had hoped it would be. Even though the emperor and the majority of bishops had endorsed the Trinitarian formula, Arianism didn’t just quietly fade away.  It has popped up repeatedly throughout history in various forms and can still be found today in some denominations such as Jehovah’s Witnesses.  

Part of the problem is that some people have trouble wrapping their brains around the One plus One plus One equals One math of the Trinity even though nature abounds in living examples.  Leaf plus trunk plus root equals tree, for example.  Life is chock full of trinities when you stop to really look.  Still, God as Trinity isn’t exactly intuitive and can be a hard idea to accept for some.

Fortunately, about 50 years after Nicaea, the Cappadocian Fathers, Basil, the bishop of Caesarea, his younger brother, Gregory, the bishop of Nyssa, and Gregory Nazianzen, the patriarch of Constantinople came up with a better description of how the three persons of the Trinity exist as one God.  The model they used was a circle dance, and the fancy theological name they gave their idea is perichoresis, a Greek word which pretty much literally means circle dance.  The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, they said, exist as one in an eternal circle dance of love.  The Trinity is an eternal, joyful, radiant manifestation of love, loving, and being loved, and that love which endlessly flows between, in and through the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit creates and sustains the universe.

One of the beautiful things about this idea is that there is no hierarchy in it.  The Father and the Son and Holy Spirit are equal in their eternal love for each other and for their creation, which includes us.  Another wonderful thing about this idea is that it describes God as always in motion.  God as a verb, and not as a static noun, exists as an endless flow of love.  But perhaps the most powerful thing about this idea, at least as far as we are concerned, is that we are invited into their dance.  We are invited to participate in the endless flow of love, loving, and being loved.  The Holy Spirit, who dwells within us, carries us into the loving embrace of the Father and the Son and invites us to learn the steps of the dance.

When I saw my mom and dad dancing on that long-ago night, they had lost themselves in each other and the music.  They were still themselves, but they had become something more, and that something filled up the whole room and spilled out into me and my sister and the dog.  It’s like that with the Trinity.  The eternal dance of love spills over to create the universe and fills that universe with love.  

You and I are invited into the dance.  Never mind if you don’t know the steps.  The Spirit will teach you, and as you learn, the dance itself will carry you into the heart of Christ.

Painting: Women’s Wisdom Dancing by Sister Mary Southard, Sisters of St. Joseph

Conspiring With God

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

When you think of all the things the disciples of Jesus saw and experienced in their three or so years with him—exorcisms, healings, subduing storms, raising people from the dead, and then his own crucifixion and resurrection—it’s a wonder they didn’t become unhinged.  Maybe they did a little.  I think it’s safe to say that conspiring with Jesus had fundamentally changed their understanding of reality.  They had seen things.

The Book of Acts tells us that Jesus stayed with his disciples for another 40 days after his resurrection, teaching them about the idealized society of justice, kindness, diversity, equity and inclusion that he called kingdom of God. He told them to stay in Jerusalem and wait for “the promise of the Father.”  “John baptized with water,” he said, “but you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit not many days from now.”  And while he was saying all this “he was lifted up and a cloud took him from their sight.”  Strange as that was, things were about to get even stranger.

On the sixth day of Sivan, seven weeks and one day after the Feast of Unleavened Bread, on the day of Shavuot, which the Greek speaking Jews call Pentekosta, the streets of Jerusalem were teeming with people from every tribe and nation, from the far reaches of the empire and beyond, some even from Cush, Iberia and Ethiopia, from Scythia and the Parthian Empire.  Jews and proselytes, curious gentiles and ambitious traders had come from everywhere to be in the Holy City for the festival of the first fruits of spring and to commemorate God giving the Torah to Moses.  

The disciples of Jesus were there, too.  They had stayed all together in one place, in one room, waiting as Jesus had instructed—waiting for a signal, praying for whatever God might do next.  Suddenly the house was filled with a sound like a hurricane.  It filled the house and drove them to their feet while something that looked like tongues of fire danced between them until a flame seemed to alight on the head of each one of them.  They felt a presence swell up inside them as they were captivated by the Holy Spirit. 

They poured out into the street where they began to speak to the crowd in languages they had never learned, the Spirit speaking through them, proclaiming the love and grace of God as it had been made known to them in Jesus the Christ.  They spoke of God’s works of power through Jesus, his feeding of multitudes, his healings, his teaching.  They spoke of how he welcomed strangers and touched lepers.  They spoke of how he challenged the self-righteous and embraced the neglected.  They spoke about his vision of a whole, healthy and peaceful world, the dominion of God.

On the day of Shavuot, the Festival of Harvest which was also called Pentekosta, the day on which Moses had been given the Law, the Holy Spirit began to spread the good news of the Reign of God through Jesus, the Christ, to people from every corner of the empire of Caesar and places beyond.  

That day, that Pentecost, is often called the birthday of the church.  We sometimes think of it as the day that the Holy Spirit entered the story, but the Spirit had been part of the story from before the beginning.

When Jesus was baptized, the Spirit descended upon him in the form of a dove.  That’s why the Spirit is usually depicted as a dove.  In Celtic Christianity, though, the Spirit is often portrayed as a wild goose.  

When you think about a dove, you think of something graceful and gentle and sweet.  It’s easy to ignore a dove.  Their cooing is soft and quiet.  It can lull you to sleep.  A wild goose, on the other hand, is a different bird altogether.  Geese are loud and intrusive.  They can be downright aggressive.   There is no complacency with a wild goose.  If a goose wants you to move, it will find a way to move you.  A wild goose isn’t safe or tame.  And neither is the Holy Spirit.  If the Spirit wants you to move, she will find a way to move you.  

The Holy Spirit is sometimes depicted as fire.  The Apostles experienced tongues of flame filling the room then resting on them.  The prophet Jeremiah said that when he tried to be silent the unspoken word of God, inspired by the Spirit, “is like a fire shut up in my bones.”  John the Baptist had told people, “I baptize you with water, but the one who is coming will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire.”  

The Spirit is sometimes understood as wind or breath.  The Hebrew word for Spirit, ruach, also means breath or wind.  It’s the same with the Greek word for Spirit, pneuma; it also means wind or breath.  In the Genesis story of creation, the Spirit is the ruach of God—the breath of God or wind of God that hovers over the waters, bringing order out of chaos.  When the prophet Ezekiel had a vision of a valley full of dead and dry bones, it was the ruach breath of God that filled those bones with life.  In the Gospel of John, the resurrected Jesus surprised the disciples in the locked room where they were hiding then breathed out his breath on them—pneuma­­­­—and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”  

The Spirit inspires us to envision God’s utopia on earth as it is in heaven, and energizes us to work to make that vision a reality.  The Spirit inspires our imaginations, giving us visions and dreams of the better world that God is calling us to build, and she makes us impatient with the violence, selfishness and injustice of our world as it is.  

Our word “inspire” comes from the Latin word spirare, to breathe.  We breathe in the Holy Spirit, acknowledging that the life and power of God are in the very air we breathe.  We breathe in and call it inspiration.  When we die, we expire—ex (out of) spirare (breath)—we give up our breath, our spirit.  And in all of this, in all our life of faith, we are called to conspire with God. Conspire, con-spirare—to breathe with.  The Holy Spirit invites us to breathe as one with God, to change our understanding of reality, to learn to see the world through God’s eyes and love the world with God’s heart, to bless the world with God’s presence flowing through us.

It is by the Holy Spirit that we can say that Christ is in us and that we are in Christ.   It is the Holy Spirit who opens our hearts and opens our eyes to the presence of Christ in, with, and under all things.  It is the Holy Spirit who guides us to the future that God has envisioned for all of us.

When we conspire with God, the Spirit takes root in our lives to produce the fruit that builds and sustains community. Love inspires us to invite and welcome others, to create a place of safety and comfort where we can belong to each other.  Goodness makes us trustworthy and moves us to treat each other well.  Peace creates openness so that we can know each other more deeply.  Faithfulness ensures that we are deeply loyal to God and the Spirit’s calling. Gentleness shows that we care for God’s creation, that we will treat each other, and animals, and creation, itself, with care and respect.  Joy keeps us from sinking into cynicism or bitterness.  It keeps our hope alive and flourishing.  Joy is proof of the presence of God within us, a manifestation of our participation in the life of God.  Kindness   shows that we understand that we are all of the same kind—created in the likeness and image of God and that sometimes we all need a little help, a spoonful of understanding, grace and love. Patience isthe inspired virtue that demonstrates our awareness that every one of us is learning and growing at a different pace and that life is teaching us different lessons.  Self-Control means that, with the Spirit’s help, I can restrain both my appetites and my temper.  It means I keep a lid on the things that interfere with my ability to bring the fruit of the Spirit[1]—love, goodness, peace, faithfulness, gentleness, joy, kindness, and patience—into the world around me.

We sometimes say—I’ve said it myself—that the church needs a new Pentecost, another outpouring of the Holy Spirit.  I think what we really need, though, is to revisit and reaffirm the ways that the Spirit is even now alive and moving in our midst, and to open ourselves more fully to the wind that’s already blowing and the fire that is already glowing.  We’ve been happy with the quiet cooing of the dove;  it has sustained us and calmed our anxieties.  But maybe it’s time to wake up the wild goose and stir up the flames.

Symeon the New Theologian, writing in the late 10th or early 11th century said, “When you light a flame from a flame, it is the same flame that you receive.”  Through our baptism we have received the flame of the Spirit as it has been passed down through the centuries from generation to generation and person to person. That flame shines all the way back to the Apostles.  It’s the same flame that danced on their heads on that day of Shavuot so very long ago.  

This same Spirit has been waiting for an invitation to dance on our heads and in our hearts.  She[2] has been opening our eyes and minds and hearts to enlarge our vision.  She has been nudging us to conspire with God to subvert the domineering paradigms of greed and fear and coercion as she guides us to enlarge the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness and love and generosity on earth as it is in heaven.  

In his letter to the churches in Rome, Saint Paul said “all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God… When we cry ‘Abba! Father!’ it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God.”  In other words, you are God’s child.  I am God’s child.  And Paul went on to say that all creation has been waiting with eager longing for us, the children of God, to be revealed so that we can get on with the business of freeing, healing and restoring God’s beloved world.[1]  

The bottom line of Pentecost is this:  God has a whole new way of working in the world.  As children of God, we are employed in the God family business.  God is transforming the world in us, with us, and through us.  We cannot be afraid to change things—because God has called us and empowered us to be the change that all of creation has been longing for.  (Romans 8)  

God has empowered us with the Holy Spirit so we can walk the Way, speak the truth and live the Life of Christ as we confront the economic, social and political systems of empire with the vision and reality of God’s commonwealth of justice and kindness.


In his book, God’s Politics, Jim Wallis tells about the time he was attending worship in St. George’s cathedral in South Africa during the days of apartheid.  Bishop Desmond Tutu was preaching when suddenly the service was interrupted by South African security police who marched into the cathedral to intimidate Bishop Tutu so he would not speak out yet again against the apartheid government.  

When the Security Police filed into the building with weapons, tape recorders and cameras, Bishop Tutu stared them down then said to them, “You are powerful. Very powerful. But I serve a God who will not be mocked.” Then with a dazzling, warm smile he said to them, “Since you have already lost, I invite you today to join the winning side.” 

Immediately the congregation was transformed.  The spell of fear that had gripped them was broken and the people began to dance.  They danced out into the streets where even more security forces were waiting to intimidate them, but the police ended up standing aside and letting the people dance in the joy of the Spirit.

When the forces of intimidation showed up at church, Bishop Tutu unleashed the wild goose of the Spirit and stared them down with a dazzling smile.  That’s our weapon.  That’s our most powerful tool in the God Family Business—the business of transforming the world:  a dazzling smile fully loaded with all the fruit of the Spirit—love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness,  gentleness, and self-control.  

Our job right now is to pray for the Holy Spirit to fall on us and light us up in a big way so that we are brave enough and whole enough to embrace our identity as children of God.  We are the ones we have been waiting for.

So take a breath.  Breathe in the Spirit that Christ is breathing out on you.  And then go, Child of God.  Chase the wild goose and breathe love out into the world.

[1] Galatians 5:22

[2] I know that some people object to using a feminine pronoun to identify the Holy Spirit, but there is a long tradition of using feminine language and imagery for the Spirit which is rooted in both the original languages of the Bible and in theology.  In Genesis 1:27 we read that humanity was created in the image and likeness of God, “male and female he created them.”  The Hebrew word for Spirit, ruach, is a feminine word.  Another name for the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament is Wisdom—Sophia—another feminine name and word.  Then there is the Shekinah of God, another term for the Presence or Spirit of God which falls upon or rests upon the prophets and others.  Shekinah is not only a feminine word, but has always been understood to be a feminine aspect of God.  Pneuma the Greek word for Spirit, is gender neutral. 

[1] Romans 8:14ff

Rise and Shine

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

When Jesus Started Working from Home

Rise and Shine

The Solemnity of the Ascension of Jesus Christ, also called Ascension Day, was on Thursday.  It’s always on a Thursday because it always comes 40 days after Easter.  And since it’s always on a Thursday, it often gets overlooked because most of us aren’t in the habit of going to church on Thursday, and Lutherans and other protestants don’t always pay attention to Feast days anyway.  So, we have the option of observing it on Sunday.  Ergo, welcome to  Ascension Sunday.  And as a bonus, it’s also the 7th Sunday in Easter.  

The Solemnity of the Ascension of Jesus Christ.  Ascension Day.  It’s almost as if we really don’t want anybody to notice it.  Even Google says that “Ascension Day is widely considered one of the most overlooked or ignored major feasts in the Christian calendar,” despite the fact that it is a distinct article in the Creeds.  “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father…  and he will come again with special coupons for up to 20% off on everything you need for your Memorial Day barbeque.”  Well, that last part’s not in the creeds.

I have to confess that I’ve always had a little trouble taking the Ascension of Jesus seriously.  The way Luke and Acts describe Jesus ascending always felt a little cartoonish to me.  In my imagination I keep seeing it like a Terry Gilliam animation from Monty Python with Jesus suddenly rising up from the ground then catching a ride on a nearby cloud.   

I realize that’s not the best way for a pastor to be thinking about a significant event in the life and ministry of Jesus, an event so significant that it is included in the Creeds, so I’ve made an effort to think about it more seriously.  After all, the Ascension of Jesus has real significance for those of us who are followers of Jesus.  The early church saw the ascension as the necessary conclusion to the resurrection, an exaltation that raised Jesus to his heavenly throne.

So, it deserves some thoughtful attention. 

The Ascension marks a turning point in the way God interacts with humanity—with us.  For a very long time, God seemed to engage with us relatively infrequently through prophets like Moses, Jeremiah, Isaiah and Micah.  Moses gave us Torah—the teachings—with some very good basic information we needed to build good relationships and a just society.  The prophets chimed in from time to time with occasional corrective advice and direction.  And encouragement.  Or sometimes to scold us.  Worship in the temple and reading the scriptures in the synagogue were formative community experiences that reminded the people that they lived together under God’s leadership and in the covenant of God’s teachings, that God was with them, and that healthy relationships with each other and with God were important. 

But, good as the law and the prophets were, people kept finding loopholes or subverting their intent, or just ignoring them.  There was a lot of ignoring. So, to get us back to “love your neighbor as yourself” (which is from Leviticus, by the way), God came to us in person and entered human history as one of us in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ.  

Jesus interpreted and expanded the teachings of the law and spoke in the tradition of the prophets to confront human systems based on greed and oppressive power dynamics, to renew our relationship with God, and to expand our understanding of God.  

And to teach us not to be afraid of God.  

Richard Rohr says, “Jesus didn’t come to change God’s mind about us, Jesus came to change our mind about God.”  Most importantly, Jesus came to proclaim that the reign of God had begun—that a human society structured on God’s values of love, kindness, diversity, inclusion, equity, justice and generosity was being inaugurated and was within reach.  That was the Good News that Jesus preached and taught everywhere he went: the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness is within reach.  God has a better way of life in mind for all of us and it’s doable.

So after going to all the trouble of incarnation and living a fully human life from start to finish, after challenging our religious and political and economic systems and suffering the most extreme backlash for doing that, after training disciples, after being crucified and then resurrected—after all that, why would Jesus just up and leave?  

I can think of two reasons, and they’re connected.  First, I think Jesus ascended, returned to his trans-dimensional life, because it was time for the kids to grow up and go out on their own.  The kids being us.  Humankind.  

God decided it was time to engage with humanity in a new way.  Instead of working and speaking primarily through only a few select prophets, God was now going to engage the world through a multitude of persons by endowing every open and loving person with the Holy Spirit.  And for that to happen, Jesus had to step back so we could step forward.  His disciples and followers would never fully take the responsibility of renewing and transforming their world—our world—if Jesus was still available for Facetime to arbitrate disputes, point the way through dilemmas, and make all the tough decisions.  

Jesus had prepared them for this.  Luke says he opened their minds to understand the scriptures.  He reaffirmed the key points of what he had been teaching them, telling them that repentance, metanoia—a conversion of heart and mind that changes how you see and approach the world—metanoia and forgiveness of sins was to be proclaimed to all peoples.  Then he told them to go back to Jerusalem and wait for his signal.  “Stay in the city until you have been clothed with power from on high,” he says in Luke.  In Acts he says, “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.”  Which is the same thing just worded a little differently.

During that time of waiting in Jerusalem, the disciples prayed together, sang together, worshiped together, and ate together.  Acts says that they shared all things in common.  They created a model for the followers of Jesus that we still follow in some ways.  This life together was part of their preparation for the work that lay ahead.  Through all this they continued to remind each other of their discipleship experiences with Jesus, sharing what they had learned and imagining how they might apply that knowledge.  Though they probably didn’t realize it, they were building a foundation of community to fortify their relationships with each other and to build the mutual support that they would rely on to carry them through the challenging days ahead.

The long and the short of it is this: Jesus ascended so we could take up the baton of transforming the world.  We are empowered to do this work and guided by the Holy Spirit who enriches us through our life together.  

I think the second reason Jesus ascended is that he had taught us everything we need to know to live a whole, healthy and helpful life.  These were the same lessons that we are called to share with the rest of the world:  

  • If someone lashes out at you, let it go.  Turn the other cheek. 
  • Don’t curse your enemies, pray for them instead. In fact, don’t stop there—love your enemies. 
  • Forgive and you will be forgiven.  
  • Do not judge and you will not be judged.  
  • Treat others the way you would like to be treated.  
  • Share—if you have an extra coat, give it to someone who doesn’t have one.  If you have 5 loaves and two fish pass it around to the multitude in front of you.
  • Give something to everyone who asks.  Yes he really did say that.  (Luke 6:30)
  • Don’t make yourself crazy worrying about how you’re going to get by.  God knows what you need.  Trust that you and God together will find a way to muddle through.  
  • Don’t embrace violence or the tools of violence.  Those who live by the sword—or the gun—will die by the sword.  Or gun.
  • And most important of all, love God with all your heart, soul, mind and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.  That’s what the law and the prophets were all about.  Love each other.  Full stop.

Much of what Jesus taught was a restatement of what God had been trying to teach us from the very beginning.  Jesus, himself, said he had come to fulfill what the law and the prophets had been saying all along.  He embodied what the prophet Micah had said 700 years before him, “God has told you what is good, people.  And what does God require of you but to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with your God?”  

What else was there to teach?  All the bases had been covered.  So it was time for Jesus to return to the place he called “My Father’s House.” As one of my friends said, “The Feast of the Ascension celebrates the day that Jesus started working from home.”  

Jesus started working from home.  But he promised that we wouldn’t be left like orphans.  Yes, the work of enlarging God’s domain was now in our hands, but we wouldn’t have to do it alone.  He promised that the Holy Spirit would be with us and in us to guide us and prompt us and remind us of what Jesus had taught us.  “I have said these things to you while I am still with you,” he says in the Gospel of John.  “But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you. Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. … Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.” 

The book of Acts tells us that while the disciples were gazing up toward heaven and watching Jesus ascend, two men in white robes suddenly stood by them and said, “You Galileans, why do you stand looking up toward heaven?  This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven.”  

Why do y’all keep looking up toward heaven?  Your work is down here.  Jesus will be back when the time is right.

Our work is down here.  And God knows we could be doing better.  War is still erupting all over the world because people are greedy or sometimes because people are so convinced that their way of seeing the world is the only way and that people who see it another way must be eliminated. Or conquered.  Or controlled. People are still turning to self-medication in huge numbers because life for many is meaningless and painful or frightening…or just plain boring.   Whole groups of people are oppressed by other whole groups of people because we have made gods of power and competition and money instead of following the God of love and cooperation.  The planet itself is crying out in pain and becoming less habitable because we have trashed it instead of loving it and taking care of it and learning our proper place in the intricate, interconnected and beautiful web of creation. 

In a year like this past year—a year when we have seen basic tenets of our constitution challenged or flagrantly ignored, when rights like habeas corpus and the right of due process have been simply disregarded, a year when we saw life-sustaining food and health programs being torn away from the poorest among us so that the wealthiest could pay less in taxes while saddling the country with an additional $3.5 trillion in debt[1], when once again  political powers that refuse to compromise managed to ignore the overwhelming voice of the people and impose legislation that will make life in this country more tenuous for all of us—in a year like this it’s really tempting to gaze up to the heavens and hope that the next cloud that floats overhead will be carrying Jesus back to us to fix everything once and for all.

But that doesn’t seem to be happening.  That is not, apparently, the plan.  At least not for now.  Jesus is still working from home, or walking among us in a Matthew 25 disguise like the Undercover Boss,  which means that the work of transforming the world through love and truth and grace is still very much in our hands.  

“A Christian,” said St. Augustine, “is a mind through which Christ thinks, a heart through which Christ loves, a voice through which Christ speaks, and a hand through which Christ helps.” 

It’s time for us to rise up.  It’s time for us to ascend, not to a cloud that will take us away from it all, but to our feet taking us into it all—into the world with the ministry of love, healing, kindness and transformation that Jesus has left in our hands.  

God has told us how to live and what to do.  Do justice.  Love kindness.  Walk humbly with God and with each other.  Love God.  Love your neighbor.  Love yourself.  Love the world that God has given us.  Love it into peace and wholeness one person at a time.  And listen to the Holy Spirit reminding us of everything Jesus said.  Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid. Peace be with you.

[1] Congressional Budget Office, reported by Robert Reich.

Loving Jesus

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Loving Jesus

John 14:15-21

A new student asked her yoga instructor, “Can you teach me to do the splits?”  “Hmmm,” said her instructor.  “How flexible are you?”  “Well,” said the student, “I can’t come on Tuesdays.”

A man called the obstetrician in a panic and yelled into the phone, “My wife is pregnant, and her contractions are only two minutes apart!”  “Is this her first child,” asked the doctor.  “No, you idiot!” yelled the man.  “This is her husband!”

The way we hear things is important.  The way we hear things can make a huge difference in what we understand and how we respond. 

In his wonderful book The Magnificent Defeat, Frederick Buechner wrote:

“WHEN A MINISTER reads out of the Bible, I am sure that 

at least nine times out of ten the people who happen to be listening at all hear not what is really being read but only what they expect to hear read. And I think that what most people expect to hear read from the Bible is an edifying story, an uplifting thought, a moral lesson—something elevating, obvious, and boring. So that is exactly what very often they do hear. Only that is too bad because if you really listen—and maybe you have to forget that it is the Bible being read and a minister who is reading it—there is no telling what you might hear.”

“We don’t see things as they are,” said Anias Nin, “we see things as we are.”  

The same goes for hearing.  We don’t always hear what someone is actually saying.  Sometimes that’s because we don’t really want to hear it.  Sometimes it’s because we think we’ve heard it before.  And sometimes it’s because we’re already thinking about our own reinterpreted version of what we think they’re saying.

“If you love me,” said Jesus, “you will keep my commandments.

How do you hear that?  What does it mean to love Jesus?  What does it look like for you—to love Jesus?  

Mark Allen Powell wrote a profound little book called Loving Jesus which takes seriously the idea of what it means to love Jesus.  The title is kind of a giveaway.  In the forward to Loving Jesus, he wrote this: 

“Becoming people who love God is the only reliable path to being more spiritual.  Loving God transforms people from within and connects them to something eternal and ultimate.

“The Christian faith is not just a religion (a system of rituals and beliefs), but arelationship—a relationship of love with Jesus Christ who is risen from the dead.  When this basic point is missed, the Christian religion becomes hollow and staid.

“When Christianity is not, first and foremost, a relationship of love, it becomes a matter of works and toil and patient endurance—all worthwhile, perhaps, but a far cry from the spiritual experience of joy and peace that it is supposed to be.”

So, what does it mean to love Jesus?  What does that look like?

How much is your love for Jesus affected by your mental picture of Jesus, the picture of Jesus you carry in your head and in your heart?  And how does that picture affect the way you hear Jesus?

Recently, Tripp Fuller’s Homebrewed Christianity podcast featured an educational unit called The Many Faces of Jesus which focused on different cultural perceptions of Jesus. The promo for the unit showed twelve different depictions of how people from different eras, cultures and ethnic groups have imagined Jesus.  https://www.homebrewedchristianty.com/2025/03/29/themanyfacesofchrist/

Do any of these look like the Jesus you’re talking to when you pray?

Can you hear the words “I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you” from any of these faces?  Is it easier to hear it from some than from others?

Here’s what Jesus looked like to me as a kid—the classic Warner Sallman painting of Jesus standing at the door and knocking. https://www.warnersallman.com/collection/images/christ-at-hearts-door/

That’s what Jesus looked like in my childhood mind.  That’s who I talked to when I prayed.  And in my mind he sounded like Victor Mature.  A serious baritone voice with ponderous cinematic music in the background.  And, of course, he spoke in King James Bible English because that’s what we heard in Sunday School, even though we didn’t understand half of it…  “Philip saith unto him, Lord, shew us the Father, and it sufficeth us.”  Come again?

Later we switched to the RSV in Sunday School and I saw other pictures of Jesus, so I began to hear him differently, too.

As time went on, more new translations were published—The New English Bible, The Good News Bible, The NIV, the NLT, the NRSV, the CEV, The Message—and with each translation the words changed, usually just a little, but sometimes a little change in wording meant more than a little difference in meaning and understanding.

When I was a teenager, new pictures of Jesus began to emerge.  Sometimes we saw him depicted as younger and hipper looking.  Sometimes he looked a little more rugged, like someone who really might be walking everywhere he went and living out in the elements.  

Sometimes he was even laughing.

It didn’t occur to me until years later, though, that in all of these pictures he was pretty much Anglo.  White.  Like me.  And my dad and my mom and almost everybody I knew and went to church with.  He might have a good tan from being outdoors so much.  But give him a haircut and dress him for church and he’d fit in just about any pew in any predominantly white church in America.  In fact, starting in the late ‘70s you wouldn’t even have to give him a haircut.

How does “Blessed are the poor” sound coming from Jesus in an Armani suit?  

There has been an increasing trend over the past few decades for different cultures and ethnic groups to portray Jesus as one of their own.  Black Jesus, Asian Jesus, Latino Jesus… 

On the one hand, this can be a useful way for people to hear Jesus speaking to them more clearly and directly within the context of their own life and culture, especially since so many of the images of Jesus we’ve had for so long have been white Northern European looking.  It’s easier for people to relate to and embrace a Jesus who looks like them.  That’s why, historically, the northern European church made so many images of a northern European-looking Jesus to begin with.  And it’s important to remember that the wide dispersion and normalization of those images had everything to do with colonialism and nothing at all to do with how Jesus actually looked.

So yes, culturally diverse images are a good and necessary thing.

On the other hand, it’s easy for any culture to commit the same kind of small idolatry that White America has committed and White Europe before us.  It’s easy to fashion Jesus in our own image.  When we do that, when we appropriate him to our race and our culture, some of the things he says, especially the things that critique us most directly, may lose some of their power.  Many of the things he said resonate all the more powerfully because he spoke as a member of a marginalized class in an occupied nation of oppressed people.

And that brings me to this image.  https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/12/15/jesus-face-recreated-scientists-skulls_n_8809466.html

In 2001 a team of Israeli and British forensic anthropologists and computer programmers used skeletal remains from first century Galilean peasant men to construct a composite portrait of Jesus. Let’s be clear NOBODY is saying that this is what Jesus looked like.  What they are saying, though, is that he probably looked a lot more like this than like any of the other paintings or depictions we’ve ever seen.

Look at that face.  Dark olive skin.  Curly, somewhat kinky hair.  Dark brown eyes.  If he was typical for the region, he probably stood somewhere between 5’1” tall to maybe as tall as 5”7”, and weighed about 110 pounds.  He would have been short, wiry, spare and strong—and most likely nothing special to look at.  

Now… can you hear him saying, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments?”

Are you willing to let him give you a commandment—even a gentle, grace-filled commandment?  

Can you hear him saying, “I will not leave you orphaned” and promising us the companionship of the Holy Spirit?

Can you see him as Emmanuel—God with us?

Can you love him?  

I ask you this because this portrait has been haunting me ever since the first time I saw it.  When I first saw it, I confess that I recoiled from it a little bit.  More than a little bit.  This face is so different from the Jesus I had always imagined.

On the other hand, this face fits perfectly with what the Prophet Isaiah said in Isaiah 53: “He had no form or majesty that we should look at him, nothing in his appearance that we should desire him.  He was despised and rejected by others…and we held him of no account.”[1]

This face haunts me.  This is the face that I see more and more in my mind’s eye when I read the words of Jesus in the gospels.  This face challenges me.  This face makes me confront my own latent racism.  This face makes me confess my own petty idolatries.

Can I love him?  Can I love a Jesus who looks nothing like me?  Can I see him as Emmanuel? 

When I see this face speaking the familiar words of the gospel, the words themselves are no longer familiar.  They are new.  They have sharper edges.  They penetrate my expectations in extraordinary ways and surprising places.  To my surprise, I have also found that this Jesus comforts me more than any of the Jesus pictures I knew as a child.  There’s an earnest, honest sincerity in that face, the kind of sincerity that we tend to experience a little more readily from those who have “nothing in their appearance” to otherwise distract us.  He feels more present, less abstract.  His words feel more personal.

If you love me you will keep my commandments.

And what are those commandments?

Well there’s just one, really, but he repeats it twice:

John 13.34 – I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. 

John 15.12 – “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. 

The way we show that we love Jesus is to love one another.  He gives us the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of truth, to give us the courage and will to love each other.  He gives us the Holy Spirit to help us get over ourselves so we can see Christ in each other.

It’s a true thing in life that some faces are harder to love than others. 

Some of the faces we face stir up unpleasant memories for us.  Some of them express unpleasant attitudes.  Some just seem unapproachable.

But in every face we face, Jesus wants us to find their true face, the face he knows and loves—and even beneath that, he wants us, in some way, to see in them the image of God.  Which is why Jesus gives us the Spirit of truth—to help us love him and find the face we love in each other.

Sometimes you have to look hard and deep into a face to find the face you can love, the face that remembers it was created in the image and likeness of God.  And sometimes you have to adjust the way you’re seeing.

There’s a wonderful scene in the movie Hook (1991) where Peter Pan, played by Robin Williams, returns to Neverland after having lived for years as a grownup in the grownup world.  At first the Lost Boys don’t recognize him and are downright suspicious of him.  But then Pockets, one of the smallest boys, gets up close to him, looks at him through Peter’s own upside down glasses, squinches up Peter’s face in his hands, and suddenly recognizes the face of his old friend.  He sees the face of the boy who left Neverland hidden in the grownup face of the man who has returned.  And in that moment all the love comes flooding back.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt-O1ReOPOQ

Within every face we face, Jesus wants us to find that person’s true face, the face he knows and loves—and beneath that, even in some way, to see in them the image of God.  In every face we face, Jesus wants us to search for his face.

“Those who love me show it by loving others,” says Jesus. “And God loves those who love me. And I love them.  And I will reveal myself to them.”

Who could ask for more than that?

[1] Isaiah 53:2-3

Goodbyes Are Never Easy

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

John 14:1-14

Goodbyes are never easy, especially when you are on the receiving end.  When you suddenly realize that someone you have counted on, someone you have relied on for years, someone you have loved, someone you assumed would always be there—when you suddenly realize that this centrally important relationship will soon be irretrievably changed, maybe never to return to what it was…ever…it can be devastating.  It can feel like the world as you know it is collapsing around you, like the ground is shifting beneath your feet and you can’t find a solid place to stand.  

I think most of us have felt that at one time or another—the anxious, disheartening, disorienting dismay of suddenly learning that the future is not going to be anything like the future you envisioned or expected.  It can knock the wind out of you.  It can leave your heart troubled…to say the least.

I think it’s safe to say that this is what the disciples must have felt when they heard Jesus say, “I am only going to be with you a little while longer. . . Where I’m going you cannot come.”  

That evening as they sat down to dinner, he had washed their feet and told them they must learn how to serve each other.  Hard on the heels of that teaching, he had told them that he was about to be betrayed by one of them.  But before they could really take in that troubling news, he gave them a new directive:  “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another.  Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.  By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”  

And that’s when he told them he was leaving. “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now; but you will follow afterward.”

So they were upset.  They were confused.  They were anxious.  Their hearts were in turmoil.  Their world was falling apart right before their eyes.

 “Do not let your hearts be troubled,” said Jesus.  “Believe in God; believe also in me.”  

That’s how it reads in most of our translations.  What it actually says in the Greek, though, is slightly different:  

Do not let your (plural) heart (singular) be troubled.  

It’s possible that this is just a quirk of the language, but it’s more likely that Jesus is reminding his disciples to be unified in their love for one another and for him, to be so united in love and purpose that it would be as if they had one heart.  And he wants that singular communal heart to be at peace.

You, plural, do not let your singular heart be troubled.

“Believe in God; believe also in me.”   Again, that’s how many of our translations render it, but it really would be better translated and more to the point to hear him say, “You trust God.  Trust me.”  The Greek word at work here, pisteuete, can be translated either way—believe or trust.  

Believe or trust.  They have similar meanings but they’re not exactly synonyms.  Believe is a head word, an intellect word.  Trust is a word with guts.  A word with heart.  A word with legs.  Belief is isolated and cerebral.  Trust is a relationship.  I may believe you’re strong enough to hold the rope that keeps me from plunging into the abyss, but it takes trust for me to actually put that rope in your hands. 

Jesus is telling them that, come what may, they can trust him.  Trust God, he says, and trust me.  Trust me to the end.  Trust me to beyond what looks like the end.  Things are about to get more horrible than you can imagine.  There will be betrayal and painful, ugly, humiliating death.  There will be astonishing, joyful, unexpected resurrection.  There will be mysterious and baffling ascension.  Those are just stops along the Way.  Keep following me.  Keep going.  Trust God.  Trust me.

“In my Father’s house,” says Jesus, “there are many dwelling places.”  

I feel a lot of sympathy for the translators here because the “dwelling places” are not really places at all.  And I have to say that the King James translation has done us no favors by telling us that in God’s house there are many mansions.  Jesus is not promising his followers an eternity of earthly wealth and prime real estate.  He is promising, instead, that in the ongoing journey of eternal life we will always find a place in the endless life and love of God. 

The Greek word translated as “dwelling places,” monai, comes from the same root as the word for “abide.”  Meno, to abide, is the Gospel of John’s favorite and most frequently used word to describe being in a relationship with Jesus.  It’s the word Jesus uses when he tells Philip, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me—abides in me—is doing his works.”

When Jesus tells us that there are many dwelling places in God’s house, he is not giving us a tableau of heaven;  he’s not painting us a picture of the great reward at the finish line.  He’s giving us a travelogue.  Jesus is telling us that faith in him is, in fact, a journey with him.  He’s telling us that as we follow him through God’s house in this world and into what comes next, there is no end of places to stop and catch our holy breath.  He’s telling us that there are a lot of places to pitch our tent along the Way, a lot of places to enjoy our companionship, to tell stories and sing songs and make s’mores on the pleasant evenings or to huddle together for warmth and comfort and moral support when things are cold and dismal.  

All along the Way there are places to abide.

“If it were not so,” said Jesus, “would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.  And you know the way to where I am going.”

Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?”  Good old Thomas.  He speaks for us, doesn’t he?  Well he speaks for me anyway.  Throughout the Gospel of John whenever Jesus sounds like an esoteric Zen Master, Thomas is the one who speaks up to say, “I don’t get it.  Explain it to me like I’m five.”  

“You know the way,” said Jesus.  “You know me.  I am the way. And the truth.  And the life.  No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Too many Christians have pulled this last statement out of its context and turned it into a proof text to claim that believing in Jesus is the one and only way to get to heaven.  Not only does this reduce faith in Christ to nothing more than a ticket to paradise, it is completely contrary to the spirit and intention of the other “I AM” statements Jesus makes in John.  

In the seven “I AM” statements in John, Jesus is telling us that he is the ultimate source of abundant life and grace.  When Jesus says, “I am the bread of life” or “I am the light of the world ” or “I am the gate” or “I am the Good Shepherd” or “I am the true vine,” these statements signify the very presence of God.  Jesus, himself, makes that clear when he says, “If you know me, you will know my Father also.  In fact, you already know him and have seen him.”  

This is an echo of what he has already said to them at the end of chapter 12 when he said: 

“Whoever believes in me believes not in me but in him who sent me. And whoever sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the world, so that everyone who trusts in me should not remain in the darkness. I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world.”

“I am the Way the Truth and the Life,” said Jesus.  “No one comes to the Father except—through  me/because of me/with me—those are all legitimate ways to translate that versatile little Greek preposition dia that indicates Jesus is the conduit into God’s presence.  Jesus isn’t saying that you have to make some formal statement of spiritual allegiance to him or accept certain doctrinal principles about him.  Whether you do these things or not, he is the one who brings you into the presence of God because he is the presence of God.

Frederick Buechner put it this way:

Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me.” He didn’t say that any particular ethic, doctrine, or religion was the way, the truth, and the life. He said that he was. He didn’t say that it was by believing or doing anything in particular that you could “come to the Father.” He said that it was only by him—by living, participating in, being caught up by the way of life that he embodied, that was his way. 

“Thus it is possible to be on Christ’s way and with his mark upon you without ever having heard of Christ, and for that reason to be on your way to God though maybe you don’t even believe in God.”

It is possible to be on Christ’s way without ever having heard of Christ.  It’s possible to be walking the way of Jesus if you are a Muslim or a Jew or a Buddhist or a Hindu or a Taoist.  It’s possible to be living in the Way of Christ even if you are agnostic or an atheist. 

If your life is centered in love for God’s people and for God’s creation, if Truth is your highest value and it pains you to see truth devalued, if you believe that Life is a gift to be entered into deeply, a gift to be treasured and enjoyed and shared, then whether you know it or not, you are walking in the Way of Jesus, a Way that leads directly to God’s presence…even if you don’t recognize it.

“I’m going on ahead of you,” said Jesus, “and I know that right now it feels just devastating.  But trust God.  Trust me.  Keep walking in my Way.  Keep speaking Truth with uncompromised honesty.  Keep empowering and sustaining and being grateful for Life and immerse yourself in it.  Our pilgrimage into the infinite heart of God is endless and there will be no end of places for us to meet up along the Way.” 

Do not let your (plural) heart (singular) be troubled.  We’ll travel this Way together…in Jesus’ name.

The Gate Versus The Gatekeepers

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

The words don’t change. The way we hear them does.

John 10:1-10

The Revised Common Lectionary, which most pastors and preachers follow in our tradition, repeats every three years.  The texts don’t change, but the way we hear them is different every time so I always assume that God wants to say something through these texts to this people in this place at this time and in these current circumstances.  The text doesn’t change, but the circumstances do.

When John 10:1-10 came up three years ago on the 4th Sunday of Easter I was only a few weeks away from retiring.  As I prepared my sermon, knowing that the time was very near when I would be leaving The Little Church with a Big Heart, a congregation I had served for twelve years—a congregation that I deeply loved, a congregation that had loved me back in more ways than I can begin to tell you—I kept coming back to the part where Jesus says, “The gatekeeper opens the gate for him, and the sheep hear his voice. He calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” 

The gatekeeper was opening the gate and I was being led out.  That meant that the time had come for the congregation to listen carefully to the Shepherd’s voice so they could discern who was being called to serve as their new sheepdog, which is what pastors really are if they’re listening to the Shepherd.

Six years ago, when this gospel text came up for the 4th Sunday of Easter, we were still in the very early days of the Covid 19 pandemic.  Hearing Jesus say, “I came that you may have life and have it abundantly” seemed like the apex of irony when we were locked down in our homes and hearing about thousands of deaths every day.  But in many of our faith communities, our abundant life together continued in spite of our enforced isolation.  We found ways to worship and hold classes online and even discovered that our after-worship fellowship time had an unexpected bonus because everyone was able see everyone and speak to everyone all at once on Zoom, taking turns in the conversation.  It really was remarkable.  Plus, there were no complaints about the coffee because everybody made their own.

The words of Jesus are the same every time we hear them, but we hear them differently each time because of what is going on in our lives and in our world.  

What’s influencing the way you hear the words of Jesus in this text this year?  Now?

One of the downsides of preaching the lectionary is that sometimes the selected text is isolated from its fuller context.  The fourth Sunday of Easter, for example, is traditionally known as Good Shepherd Sunday, so each year the lectionary gives us a different fragment of the shepherd and sheep imagery that Jesus is using as he verbally spars with the Pharisees and temple elders who are challenging him.  The thing we miss, though, is that all these fragments are parts of a larger unit, a larger story being told in John, a story that takes up all of chapter nine and more than half of chapter ten.  

Today’s gospel text is a continuation of the story of Jesus healing the man born blind. The events of that healing and the confrontation that follows all play out in chapter nine but they give meaning and weight to the shepherd imagery Jesus uses in chapter ten.   

When we read that story today, we don’t always look too far beyond the miraculous healing of the blind man—whose name by the way, according to both Eastern and Roman tradition, was Celidonius.  Maybe we pay some attention to the themes of light and darkness and true sight and spiritual blindness which are also part of the story, but what is not so readily apparent to us is that this is also a story about fear and boundaries and how people use and protect power.  Which raises the question: how were the people in this story hearing the words of Jesus?

Poor Celidonius had barely been given his sight when he was almost instantly confronted by the same group of self-appointed, conservative Judeans who had been repeatedly antagonizing and challenging Jesus.  Like detectives interrogating a criminal, they made the formerly blind man tell his story over and over again.  When some of them suggested that maybe he had never really been blind, his parents were brought in to affirm that yes, he was born blind, and no, they didn’t know who gave him his sight, and by the way he’s an adult and this has nothing to do with us.  When, after all this, they asked him to retell his story one more time, Celidonius was just plain exasperated. “I have told you already,” he said, “and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?”   

That question really pushed their buttons.  They were supposed to be the authorities on all things sacred, and the suggestion, even if it was a bit facetious, that they might become disciples, students, of this Jesus who dared to do questionable things like healing on the Sabbath?  That really set them off.  They doubled-down on their commitment to Moses and Mosaic law, then circled back to their cultural assumption that Celidonius was born blind because of sin.  “You were born entirely in sin,” they said.   And then they expelled him from the synagogue.

Fear is a significant undercurrent in this story.  The blind man’s neighbors were anxious because acknowledging the miracle would mean that they would have to reevaluate who they thought Jesus was and also, no small thing, how the universe works and how God works.  The Pharisees were anxious for the same reason but with more at stake, so they not only tried to debunk the miracle but to discredit the miracle worker, Jesus.  The man’s parents were nervous for all the same reasons, but also because the Pharisees could bar them from the synagogue.  And that was a very frightening prospect to consider.  

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, there were 394 synagogues in Jerusalem in the early first century.  These synagogues were places for religious study and debate but they also functioned as community centers and economic centers.  Business deals were hammered out in the synagogue.  Workers were hired in the synagogue.  Marriages were contracted there.  The synagogue was the center of community life and being thrown out or banned could be both economically and socially disastrous. 

So fear and anxiety made everyone except Jesus and Celidonius reluctant to acknowledge the extraordinary thing that God had done in their midst.  Before we get judgmental, though, it’s important to remember that everything that happens in the gospels happens under the watchful eye and oppressive shadow of the Roman Empire.  Everything Jesus said or did had to break through the atmosphere of fear that the Romans relied on to enforce the peace and the paranoia of the Jewish leaders who tried to prevent open rebellion by keeping a lid on the messianic hopes of the people.

Jesus made these Jewish leaders nervous when he was merely preaching and teaching.  When he did works of power like giving sight to a man born blind, he just plain scared them.  When he started talking about the sheepfold and the gate and the shepherd and bandits and thieves, he infuriated them.

This was their own symbolic language, but it had a very sharp edge when Jesus was using it.

The sheepfold was not private property.  It was a piece of communal economic infrastructure, a shared space that was crucial to the economic survival of a village.  In reality and as a metaphor it was a symbol of interdependence.  Several families would herd their flocks into the sheepfold to keep them safe through the night.  Shepherds took turns serving as the gatekeeper, often lying down or sitting stretched across the entrance of the sheepfold as a living gate, guarding the entrance with their bodies. The gatekeeper wasn’t just guarding his own sheep but all the sheep of the village.  A thief or bandit who might climb over the wall was threatening an entire community’s common life and security.

Shepherd imagery had political weight.  The Shepherd was a familiar political metaphor long before the time of Jesus.  Emperors, kings and religious leaders referred to themselves as shepherds to emphasize their claim that they guided and protected the people.  Prophets referred to these same powerful people as shepherds when they were critiquing or criticizing them.  On the other side of the same coin, the Shepherd was a messianic metaphor.  David had been a shepherd and it was commonly understood that Messiah would be a “Shepherd” from the line of David.  

When Jesus began to address his opponents with shepherding imagery, confronting them with the metaphors of the sheepfold and the gate and gatekeepers and thieves and bandits, his opponents, the gatekeepers of propriety who had just expelled Celidonius from the synagogue, undoubtedly heard his words as a sharp criticism. They would have remembered Jeremiah saying, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture.”[1]  They would have remembered Ezekiel saying, “Woe, you shepherds of Israel who have been feeding yourselves!  Should not the shepherds feed the sheep?  You eat the fat; you clothe yourselves with the wool; you slaughter the fatted calves, but you do not feed the sheep.  You have not strengthened the weak; you have not healed the sick; you have not bound up the injured; you have not brought back the strays; you have not sought the lost, but with force and harshness you have ruled them.”[2]

The words of Jesus in the text don’t change, but the way we hear them changes every time.  We hear them through the filter of our circumstances.  Sometimes we hear comfort.  Sometimes we hear criticism.  How do you hear them?

“My sheep know my voice,” says Jesus.  Whose voice are you listening to?  What news sources do you read or watch or listen to?  What kind of message are they giving you about the world?  About yourself?  What kind of messages are you letting into your heart and mind and soul? 

Are they messages rooted in faith, hope and love?  Or are they messages rooted in fear?  Do they seek to enlarge your heart or shrink it?  Do they seek to open your embrace of others or do they tempt you to close yourself off from everyone who isn’t a whole lot like you?  

Who or what are the bandits in your life?  Who’s climbing over the wall to steal your peace?  Who or what is killing your joy?

Who is the gatekeeper for your heart and mind and soul?

“Very truly, I tell you,” said Jesus, “I am the gate for the sheep.  All who came before me are thieves and bandits, but the sheep did not listen to them.  I am the gate. Whoever enters by me will be saved and will come in and go out and find pasture.  The felon comes only to steal and kill and destroy. I came that you may have life and have it in all its fullness.”

The words are the same but we hear them differently every time.

Nine years ago, for instance, today’s gospel text spoke to me powerfully and deeply in ways I could never have foreseen.  

Only two days before preaching on this text, I presided over a memorial service for a young woman named Meghan, the daughter of some our closest friends, a young woman I had watched grow up as an extended-family sister to our kids.  

I had officiated at Meghan’s wedding two years earlier, which gave her death an extra layer of pain for me and a feeling of something like guilt, because she was killed by her husband, the man I had united her to in marriage.  

Nine years ago, when I came to the part of today’s gospel where Jesus says, “The thief comes only to steal and kill and destroy…” it just wrecked me.  I had to stop and take a long, deep breath before I could read the rest of what Jesus says here: “I came that they may have life and have it abundantly.”

As those words hung in the air, I thought about Meghan’s memorial service.  I thought about the church, our “home” church where I had met her parents when we were all teenagers, our church where she and her sister and our kids were all baptized, our church where our kids grew up together to become lifelong friends.  I thought about our church where so much life has happened—I thought about that church filled to capacity with people who had been touched by her, whose lives had interconnected with hers and with ours.  I thought about how they had all come “back to church” for her, back to the Christ-centered starting point where all our relationships and stories had begun.  

I thought about how in that service, despite the pain and anger and sadness that had brought us there, we experienced the joy and comfort of the abundant life we had all shared over the years.  And I realized that, despite our grief and pain, our abundant life continues.  I realized that Meghan’s abundant life continues, that she lives on in the hearts and memories of her friends and family and in the loving presence and heart of Christ.

On the 4th Sunday of Easter, nine years ago, I realized that, while it was Meghan’s tragic and untimely death that had brought us all together that day, it was Jesus, the Good Shepherd, who had originally brought us all together in the first place.  We had all met each other in the very beginning because we had come to church.  We had met in the company of Christ.  We had followed the voice of the Shepherd who called us all together into one great big flocking family—a family that is bigger than any one church building or any single congregation or any denomination, a family that is, truly, bigger than any one religion.  

Abundant life. Overflowing life.  This is the gift Christ gives us in our life together.

[1] Jeremiah 23

[2] Ezekiel 34