Author Steve Beckham

How Much Is Enough?

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Luke 12:13-31

There is an odd little detail at the beginning of chapter twelve in the Gospel of Luke that’s easy to overlook.  It could be utterly insignificant.  But, maybe it’s not.  Jesus had been invited to dinner by one of the Pharisees but it turned out to be a pretty unpleasant time with lots of verbal sparring between Jesus and the Pharisees and scribes.  When Jesus left the Pharisee’s house he discovered that, “the crowd had gathered by the thousands, so that they trampled on one another.”[1]

That’s the odd little detail.  They trampled on each other.   I think this peculiar little note is Luke’s metaphorical way of setting the stage for what Jesus is going to say about greed and hoarding and selfishness.  And fear.  

Someone in the crowd yelled out, “Teacher, tell my brother to give me my share of what our father left us when he died.”  Jesus replied, “Man, who made me your probate judge?” Well, words to that effect. Then he turned to the crowd and said, “Don’t be greedy!  Owning a lot of stuff won’t make your life safe.”  And to illustrate his point, he told them a little parable.

A rich man’s farm produced a huge crop, and he said to himself, “What am I gonna do? I don’t have a place large enough to store everything.”  But then he thought, “Hey, I know! I’ll tear down my barns and build bigger ones, where I can store all my grain and all my other stuff. Then I’ll say to myself, ‘Self, y ou have stored up enough good things to last for years to come. Live it up! Eat, drink, and enjoy yourself.’” But God said to him, “You fool! Tonight you’re going to die. Then who will get all your stuff?” 

Jesus paused for a moment to let that sink in then said, “This is what happens to people who store up everything for themselves, but are poor in the sight of God.” 

So what did this man do wrong, this rich fool in the parable?  Is Jesus saying that we shouldn’t save up for retirement or stash some cash for a rainy day when we get a bit ahead of the game?  

I don’t think Jesus is saying that it’s wrong to be rich, and I don’t think he’s opposed to saving for retirement.  But he’s also not a fan of hoarding wealth and surplus and thinking only about ourselves.  

The rich man talks to himself like he’s the center of the universe.  His surplus is all about himself.  In the culture of the people who originally heard this Jesus story, that kind of attitude would be frowned upon… to put it mildly.  Torah, the Jewish law, had some pretty clear things to say about sharing the wealth.  You didn’t harvest to the edge of your field, you left the margins for the poor.  You didn’t pick up windfall fruit in your vineyard or orchard, you left it for the poor.  And when you did harvest, you gave a minimum of 10% in a tithe for supporting the Levites and the poor.  The rich fool in this parable doesn’t even mention these things.  He only thinks of himself.  And he never asks himself, “How much is enough?”

Kurt Vonnegut, the author of Slaughterhouse 5 was good friends with Joseph Heller, who wrote Catch 22.  When Heller died, Vonnegut remembered a conversation they had once had at a party.  He recorded that conversation as a poem and read the poem at Heller’s funeral.  Here’s what he said:

True story, Word of Honor:

Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer

now dead,

and I were at a party given by a billionaire

on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel

to know that our host only yesterday

may have made more money

than your novel ‘Catch-22’

has earned in its entire history?”

And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”

And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”

And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”

Not bad! Rest in peace!”

How much is enough?  

I’ve been asking myself that question for years.  How much is enough?  I like to tell myself that my needs are simple, that I don’t need a lot of stuff, but then I look around my office, my dresser, my closet, my garage and, honestly, I am inundated with stuff.  And a lot of it is stuff I don’t need or even much want anymore.  How did that happen?  

How did I end up with so much stuff?  And it’s not just my stuff.  I have stuff that belonged to my parents and grandparents and my in-laws.  My Beloved Spouse texted me two articles on Thursday on how to declutter.  So I guess we’ll be doing that soon. . . 

On the Sermon Brainwave podcast this week, Professor Rolf Jacobson told us that his grandmother used to say, “Possessions are their own punishment.”  Yep.  Possessions are their own punishment.

We cling to our stuff, and, it seems like our stuff clings to us.  Back in 1981 the late George Carlin had a whole standup routine about all our stuff.

“I bought a house,” said Carlin. “I needed a place to keep all my stuff.  That’s all your house is, a place to keep your stuff. If you didn’t have so much stuff, you wouldn’t need a house. You could just walk around all the time. A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see everybody’s got a little pile of stuff.  All the little piles of stuff.  And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff… All they want is the shiny stuff. That’s what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get…more stuff!”

What George Carlin said in 1981 is just as true today.  Maybe even more so.  Many people don’t have enough room in their houses for all their stuff, so one in 20 households rent extra space for their stuff!  Last year there were 52,301 self-storage facilities in the U.S. according to the Self-Storage Almanac.  That’s right, the stuff storage industry has its own publication.  The Almanac is projecting that in the U.S. alone, the market is expected to grow from $44.37 billion to $49.88 billion by 2029.  We can’t seem to create enough affordable housing for all our people, but we’re going to make sure we take care of all our stuff.  And it’s weird when you think about it because eventually you’re going to die.  And then who’s going to get all your stuff?  And do they even want it?    

How much is enough?  

As a culture, it seems like there’s no end to our desire for more stuff. . .or more money.  Which is really just a more portable kind of stuff.  Congress just recently passed what they called the One Big Beautiful Bill which will give the country’s estimated 900 billionaires a tax break of $60 billion dollars in federal taxes over the next two years.[2]  That averages out to more than $66 million per billionaire!  Nice.  If you’re a billionaire.  But the Congressional Budget Office also estimates that those tax breaks will add $3.4 trillion to the federal deficit by 2034.  And, of course, the bill gutted Medicaid and SNAP benefits to pay for all this largess to wealthiest among us which means that millions of the poorest among us will be without medical coverage or adequate food.

Mahatma Gandhi said that the world provides enough for all our need, but not for all our greed.

Thomas Hendricks, a psychologist who writes for Psychology Today said, “Most people, I believe, would agree that selfishness is not the basis for a healthy, sustainable society.”[3]  He’s got a point.

Stephen Hawking, the physicist, said, “We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity.” 

You want to try a fun little exercise?  Put the words “Greed and Fear” in the Google or whatever search engine you use.  Ninety percent of the results will talk about financial markets, and a lot of them will refer to the Greed and Fear index, a graph they use to tell us if Greed or Fear is driving the stock market right now.  But here’s the thing—what they don’t tell you is that Greed is rooted in fear. 

Greed is rooted in a fear of scarcity, loss, or not having enough, a fear that can drive us in a relentless pursuit of wealth or material possessions.  Greed is driven by a subconscious belief that our worth as persons is somehow tied to how much we have, and if we don’t have much, then we’re not worth much.  That is a story our culture often tells us in many not-so-subtle ways.  Some go so far as to say, “Greed is good.”  That was the unforgettable message of Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie Wall Street.  But the idea that greed is good doesn’t only appear in fiction.  More than a few politicians and financial commentators, Milton Friedman for instance, have talked about greed as a necessary and driving force in the economy.  

Maybe.  But one thing that is for certain is that greed is one of the ways we trample on each other.

“Take care!,” said Jesus. “Be on your guard against all kinds of greed for one’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.”  The Contemporary English Version simplifies it this way: “Don’t be greedy. Owning a lot of things won’t make your life safer.”[4]  It doesn’t get much clearer than that.

The letter to the Colossians tells us that greed is a kind of idolatry.[5]  It’s worship of a false god.  Martin Luther would whole-heartedly agree. “Show me what you trust,” said Luther, “what your heart clings to, and I will show you your god.”[6]

So. . .what do you trust?  What does your heart cling to?  How much is enough?  These are “come to Jesus” questions, are they not?

“I tell you not to worry about your life!” said Jesus. “Don’t worry about having something to eat or wear.  Look at the crows!  They don’t plant or harvest, and they don’t have storehouses or barns.  But God takes care of them!  You are more important than any birds.  Can worry make you live longer?  If you don’t have power over small things, why worry about everything else?”[7]

I hear Jesus say these things and I think, “Yeah, Jesus, I hear you.  I get what you’re saying.  That would be a nice way to live.  But the cost of living keeps going up.  And Elon Musk monkeyed around with the IRS so I haven’t got my tax refund yet.  And we’re still paying for our last vacation. . . And what if one of the cars needs new tires or the water heater blows or the dishwasher floods the kitchen or one of us gets sick or any one of a dozen other expensive things happens?

And then Jesus says this:  “Only people who don’t know God are always worrying about such things.  Your Father knows what you need.  So put God’s work first, and these things will be yours as well.”

Only people who don’t know God are always worrying about such things.  

So I guess that means that if I’m worrying about such things then I don’t know God as well as I think I do.  I guess that means that I need to get to know God better.  To spend more time with God.  To listen to God more carefully. To trust God more.  To love God more fully and freely.

“Do not be afraid, little flock,” said Jesus, “for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.”  

So, I guess what it all boils down to is we need to trust God.  We need to trust that God will see to it that we have enough.  Maybe we could simplify our lives.  Maybe we could make do with less and learn that that’s enough.  And, of course, we should try not to trample on each other.

[1] Luke 12:1

[2] What The Big Beautiful Bill Really Means for Billionaires; Martina Di Licosa; Forbes,  July 9, 2025

[3] Hendricks, Thomas, Ph.D.; Greed and Fear; Psychology Today, August 3, 2017

[4] Luke 12:15 (Contemporary English Version)

[5] Colossians 3:5

[6] Luther’s Large Catechism

[7] Luke 12:22-26 (CEV)

A Prayer for Us

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

A Prayer for Us

Luke 11:1-13

How do you pray?  How do you talk to God?  What name or practice opens your heart to deep communication with the Maker of all things, the heart of Life and Love?    

Once, when Jesus was praying, one of his disciples said, “Lord, teach us to pray as John taught his disciples.”  John the Baptizer had apparently taught his disciples a special prayer for their community.  Jesus responded to this request by teaching his disciples the prayer that we’ve come to know as The Lord’s Prayer, or, if you’re Catholic, the Our Father, but I can’t help thinking Jesus would prefer for us to think of it as Our Prayer.  He gave it to all of us, after all.

The Lord’s Prayer was originally taught and transmitted orally, so it would naturally be remembered with some slight variations from community to community.  That’s probably why the version in Luke differs slightly from the version in Matthew, and both of them differ from the version in the Didache, the late first-century manual on how to do church.  

The most common version used today in English speaking communities is based on the wording that first appeared in The Book of Common Prayer in 1549.  That version was based on William Tyndale’s translation of the Gospel of Matthew from 1526 which is the only translation, by the way, where you’ll find “forgive us our trespasses” in Matthew 6:12 instead of “forgive us our debts.”[1]

I could talk all day about difficulties and variations in translation and transmission of the prayer.  It has even been a centerpiece of controversy a time or two in church history, but for now let’s use Luke’s version to take a deeper look at the meaning of this amazing prayer that Jesus has given to us.

“When you pray,” said Jesus—and the “you” is plural here—so, “when all y’all pray, say: Father, may your name be revered as holy. Your kingdom come.  Give us each day our daily bread.  And forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.  And do not bring us to the time of trial.”  

We usually start a conversation by getting the other person’s attention. We often do that by simply by saying their name or title.  For example, my grandsons call me Pono.  When I hear one of the say, “Pono,” I know they want to talk to me about something or ask me something or sometimes just come sit with me—which is one of my favorite things in life.  It’s the same when we begin the Lord’s Prayer saying, “Father…”  We’re letting God know we would like to have a conversation.  Or that we’re ready to listen.

The word “Father” acknowledges that we have a personal relationship with God.  It’s supposed to help us feel like we’re sharing our hearts with a warm, nurturing, loving parent.  That’s the kind of relationship Jesus had with God and that’s what he would like for us to have, too.  

But the Father image, or for that matter the Mother image doesn’t work for everybody.  Some people have experienced abuse or conflict with their father or mother or both, so parent imagery isn’t inviting for them.  When that’s the case, it’s perfectly okay to address God in some other way.

In her book Help, Thanks, Wow: The Three Essential Prayers, Anne Lamott wrote, “Nothing could matter less than what we call [God].  I know some ironic believers who call God Howard, as in ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven, Howard by thy name.’  

“Let’s not get bogged down on whom or what we pray to.  Let’s just say prayer is communication from our hearts to the great mystery, or Goodness, or Howard; to the animating energy of love we are sometimes bold enough to believe in; to something unimaginably big, and not us.  We could call this force Not Me. . .  Or for convenience we could just say ‘God.’”

Anne Lamott’s advice to call on God with whatever name opens your heart and draws you closer to God might seem contradictory to what comes next in the Lord’s Prayer: “may your name be revered as holy,” or to translate it directly from the Greek, “Let it be sacred, the name of you.”  So, are we treating God’s name as sacred if we call on God as Howard or some other name?  Well, I think that depends entirely on your attitude when you use that name. 

Devout Jews often address God as Hashem in their prayers.  Hashemmeans “the name,” and addressing God as Hashem gives them a way to address God by name, sort of, without actually saying God’s name, which they believe is too holy to be spoken.  In effect, Hashem becomes a name they use for God in much the same way that Pono is the name my grandsons use for me.  

Devout Jews avoid speaking God’s name, the name God spoke to Moses from the burning bush, as a way to ensure that they don’t break the commandment against taking God’s name in vain.  Taking God’s name in vain means a lot more than just saying God’s name at the wrong time or in the wrong way or saying “Oh my God” as an expletive.  

Taking God’s name in vain means using the name or authority of God in a way that draws ridicule.  It can mean claiming the authority of God for purposes that have nothing to do with God’s sovereignty or God’s desires.  It can mean using God’s name or authority to further your own ideas or agenda, to reinforce your own authority, or simply using God’s name or authority for show.  

When we say “hallowed by your name,” we’re saying, “Let it be sacred, Hashem, let it be sacred, the name of you.” When we pray this, it’s a way of saying, “Keep us humble in your presence and keep us honest, God.”

And now we come to the part of the prayer that is truly the most challenging if we really think about what we’re saying.

“Your kingdom come.”  I think sometimes that if we took this petition seriously our knees would buckle.  When we pray “your kingdom come,” we are volunteering to help build a civilization grounded in justice, kindness and love.  

This petition is where the Lord’s Prayer becomes subversive in the best possible way.  When we pray “your kingdom come,” the Lord’s Prayer can no longer be regarded as merely a nice religious artifact or a litany of devotion.  And if anyone wants to suggest that Jesus is telling us to pray for the establishment of God’s heavenly kingdom at the end of time, then I would suggest that they haven’t really read the gospels or understood the teaching of Jesus.  Jesus was not crucified because he talked about heaven; he was executed for proclaiming that the dominion of God was within reach and, in fact, had already begun. 

Your kingdom come is a declaration that we are in favor of radical changes in the way the world operates.  When we pray your kingdom come, we are asking God to work through us to make significant changes in economics, politics, religion and society in order to bring the justice and shalom of God to our everyday lives.  When we pray your kingdom come we are volunteering to live here and now in God’s shalomand also to do whatever we can to bring God’s shalom to others and to all of creation.

Shalom is what the Lord’s Prayer is all about.  Shalom is a Hebrew word that means peace, but it’s not merely a peace based on the absence or suppression of hostility.  The word Shalom comes from the Hebrew root shalam, which literally means “make it good.”  It is a word used to describe completeness and wholeness.  And, while it’s good for us to seek our own inner shalom, the real shalom of God’s dominion happens in community.  The Shalom of God’s kin-dom is a peace that recognizes that we are all interconnected and interdependent.  Shalom is built on justice and fairness and desires peace and well-being for everyone, not just for ourselves.  

Cherokee theologian Randy S. Woodley describes it this way:  “Shalom is communal, holistic, and tangible. There is no private or partial shalom. The whole community must have shalom or no one has shalom. As long as there are hungry people in a community that is well fed, there can be no shalom. . . . Shalom is not for the many, while a few suffer; nor is it for the few while many suffer. It must be available for everyone.”[2] 

When we pray Your kingdom come, we are praying for shalom in our homes, in our towns, in our churches, in our nation and throughout the whole world.  We are praying for peace and justice and fairness for everyone.  And that brings us naturally to Give us each day our daily bread, because in the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness, in God’s shalom, everyone is fed and no one goes hungry. 

Give us each day our daily bread.  There are some variations in the ancient Greek manuscripts here.  Many of them have this petition exactly the way we’re used to hearing it or saying it: give us today our daily bread.  However, the insightful Jewish New Testament scholar Amy-Jill Levine, suggests that a more useful understanding comes from the manuscripts that say give us today our bread for tomorrow.  

In most households in Jesus’s day, the dough for the next day’s bread was prepared the evening before and allowed to rise during the night.  If you were going to have bread tomorrow, you needed to have the ingredients today.  So, “give us today our bread for tomorrow” is a way of asking for something very practical.  We’re asking God to save us from at least a little anxiety by giving us today what we will need tomorrow.  

This part of the prayer reaches beyond our family table.  It echoes a traditional Jewish table prayer called the motzi: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, ruler of the universe, who brings forth bread from the earth.”  It reminds us that God doesn’t just magically put bread on the table. God uses the generosity of the earth and the labor of the whole community to put bread on the table.  

When we pray give us today our bread for tomorrow, we are asking God to care for the land where the grain grows.  We’re asking for clean and gentle rains so the crops can grow.  We are asking God to guard and protect the farmers who plant and care for and harvest the crops.  We are asking God to care for those who transport the grain and mill it into flour.  We are asking God to care for the hands that make the dough and knead it.  We are asking for fuel for the fire in the ovens that bake the bread.  

Bread on the table depends entirely on the well-being of the community and on our relationships within the community.  God brings forth bread from the earth, but it is a team effort.  When we pray for both today’s bread and tomorrow’s we are once again praying for the shalom of God’s kin-dom. The next time you hold a piece of bread in your hand, or any piece of food for that matter, think of all the hands that labored to bring it to your hand.

Shalom is what makes it possible for us to have our daily bread.  But sometimes things we do or say disrupt our peace and fracture the cooperation and mutuality of shalom.  Sometimes our sins or the sins of others rupture relationships and forgiveness is needed to restore those relationships.  And that’s why Jesus taught us to pray Forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone indebted to us.  

Luke says “forgive us our sins.”  Matthew says, “forgive us our debts.”  In both Aramaic and Hebrew, “debt” was another way to talk about sin. This petition reminds us that there is a reciprocity involved in forgiveness.  As Jesus said in Luke 6:37, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.”  Once again it’s about relationships all the way down, which means that this petition is also about God’s shalom.

But let’s go back to the language about debts and forgiving debts. Remember that Jesus was a Jew and he was teaching this prayer to his Jewish disciples.  This language about debts would have been a reminder to them of everything the Torah and the prophets had to say about economic justice.  Jesus is reminding them and us that we are called to live in an economically ethical way.  When we don’t, it’s a sin.  We accrue a spiritual debt.

Living a life of faith as a follower of Jesus means that sometimes we face difficult questions. Sometimes it feels almost as if we’re being tested. And so we pray do not bring us to the time of trial.  

When the Book of Common Prayer was revised in 1604, the phrase “lead us not into temptation” in that version of the Lord’s Prayer caused a huge controversy. The Puritans were quick to point out that the Book of James says, “No one, when tempted, should say, ‘I am being tempted by God’; for God cannot be tempted by evil and he himself tempts no one.” (James 1:13)  This was only one of several complaints they had about the Book of Common Prayer, but it was one they were not willing to compromise.

They had a point.  What the Greek says in both Luke and Matthew is “do not bring us into a peirasmon.  Peirasmon is a time or place of testing, trial or examination.  Temptation may be a kind of test, but not every test is a temptation.  In this petition, we are asking to be spared from any kind of catastrophe or stress, or any situation that would put our faith to the test. 

The Lord’s Prayer, Our Prayer, this prayer that Jesus gave us, is not only one of the great treasures of our faith, it’s also, in its way, a call to radical discipleship.  In this prayer we are asking God to empower us, guide us, and walk with us as we embrace a new way of life with new values and a new vision of what the world can be.  It really is, in six simple lines, a kind of manifesto for life as a follower of Jesus.

In this prayer we are asking for peace, health, and  wholeness for ourselves and for our community.  We are asking God to help us live in the shalom of the commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness here and now.  We are asking God to help us live in the Way of Love.  When we say “Amen,” we are not only saying “Make it so,” we are saying we will do whatever we can to live in that vision and make it a reality for others.  In Jesus’ name.

[1] I’m very grateful to Brian Stoffregen for this bit of history and other insights in his weekly Exegetical Notes.

[2] Shalom and the Community of Creation; Randy S. Woodley

Triangulating Jesus

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Luke 10:38-42

So. . . this one time Jesus was on the road and he stopped into a certain village and a woman named Martha welcomed him, which means she invited him into her home, which was a very nice and generous thing to do since Jesus probably had an entourage travelling with him and it would be rude not to include all of them.  

That village may have been Bethany if this is the same Martha that is mentioned in the Gospel of John as the sister of Mary and Lazarus.  Luke doesn’t tell us the name of the village and Luke doesn’t mention Lazarus, so it may have been some other village and a different Mary and Martha altogether. 

For ages it was assumed that the Mary and Martha of this brief episode in Luke are the same Mary and Martha from chapter 11 in the Gospel of John, the Mary and Martha who lived with their brother, Lazarus in Bethany, about three miles from Jerusalem.  And maybe it is the same Mary and Martha.  But maybe not.  Some scholars are convinced that these two sisters in Luke’s story are not those two sisters in John’s story and that this village is not Bethany.

A few years ago an astute Bible scholar named Elizabeth Schrader Polczer was taking a very close look at some very ancient manuscripts of the Gospel of John as part of her doctoral work and she noticed some odd little smudges and scrapes and overwriting in the text in the papyrus she was examining.  It looked like someone a long, long time ago—like maybe in the 2nd century—had inserted Martha into the Lazarus story.  

Whoever did this long-ago editing may have assumed that Martha had accidently been left out of John’s account.  That’s one theory.  On the other hand, maybe Martha was inserted to downplay the importance of Mary the Magdalene—Mary the Tower.  Mary Magdalene, who is almost certainly also Mary of Bethany, the sister of Lazarus, was a very popular and important apostolic figure in the early church before the patriarchy boys club tried to diminish her influence by tarnishing her reputation.  That whole business about her being a lady of easy virtue?  No basis in fact.  Just some bad patriarchic exegesis with malice aforethought.  I’m looking at you, Gregory the Not-So-Great.

Anyway, another reason why this Mary and Martha in Luke are probably not Mary and Martha of Bethany is that Bethany is very close to Jerusalem, and there is no indication in the 10th chapter of Luke that Jesus was anywhere near Jerusalem or even going in that direction.  At the beginning of the chapter he was denouncing towns in Galilee and in the chapter before that he was in Samaria.  

Another thing to consider is that Mary and Martha were two of the most common names for women in that part of the world at that time.  There are, for example, no less than six different women named Mary in the New Testament.  And while there aren’t so many Marthas mentioned, it’s not much of a stretch to think there could be at least two.

And none of this has anything to do with this particular story.  So let’s get back to the story.

So. . . Martha invites Jesus and probably his ride-along disciples into her home then gets busy providing hospitality.  This was important.  Hospitality was serious business in their culture.  It was a holy obligation backed up by scripture.  Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed with fire from heaven for failing to provide hospitality.  Well, that and also for sexually assaulting the travelers who came through town.  But that counts as a failure of hospitality, right?

In a culture where so many people, even some wealthy and important people, were nomadic, hospitality was one of the most important cultural virtues.  When you invited someone into your home, the very least that was expected was that you would provide a good meal.  So suddenly Martha has a ton of work to do to cook some dinner for Jesus and his companions.  And maybe she needs to work out some sleeping arrangements.  And maybe she’s checking the pantry to make sure she has enough flour to make more bread and dried figs and parched grains to give them all a good breakfast.  The point is, Martha isn’t just busy for the sake of being busy.  She’s doing her best to be a good hostess and to fulfill an important social obligation.  Her busyness is honorable busyness.  Necessary busyness.  

Anyway, Martha’s got her hands full with all the hostess things and she looks across the room and sees her sister, Mary, just sitting there on the floor listening to Jesus.  

Just sitting.  

Listening to Jesus.

Martha tries to get Mary’s attention and gestures toward the food prep in progress on the table, but Mary doesn’t take the hint.  Martha picks up the water jug and tilts it toward the door, pantomiming that she would like Mary to make a quick trip to the well.  Mary doesn’t even see her because she is so caught up in what Jesus is saying.

Finally, Martha has had enough.  She storms across the room to Jesus (as politely as possible) and says, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself?  Tell her to come and help me!”

I wonder how she felt when Jesus said, “Martha, Martha! You are anxious and bothered about so many things, but only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen what is best, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Oof.

So. . . Are you a Mary or a Martha?   Wait, don’t answer that.  The fact is, one of the things I really don’t like about this text is that far too often it tempts us to ask questions like that.  We turn a story of two good people doing two good things into a kind of binary contest with a winner and a loser and we make Jesus sound all judgy in the process.  

Let’s look again at what’s actually happening in this little drama in five verses.  Jesus arrives.  Martha gets busy to provide good hospitality.  She is fulfilling her expected role, what she believes is required of her.  Mary, on the other hand, sits down with Jesus, and listens to him.  She is giving him her time and attention which is also an important social duty.  

Notice that Jesus doesn’t say anything about what either of the sisters is doing—he doesn’t say anything critical to Martha or anything affirming to Mary—until Martha drags him into the middle of the tension between the two sisters.  That’s called triangulating.  

Triangulation happens when a person complains about another person to a third person instead of addressing the issue directly. Triangulation is very common in families, especially among siblings.  In its worst forms it can be abusive.  In its most common forms its used in particular moments or situations to establish or maintain dominance, to confirm who is in charge at least for the moment.

How often do we try to triangulate with Jesus?  How often do we try to draw Jesus in on our side of a dispute?  How often do we assume that Jesus is on our side in a disagreement with our siblings in Christ?  That’s something worth thinking about, so maybe jot that down in your notebook of Spiritual Growth Questions.  It’s a good one for keeping us honest.

When Jesus says to Martha that she is anxious and bothered about many things he is very subtly stepping out of the triangle she tried to rope him into.  He isn’t criticizing her, he is merely describing her state of mind to her.  Unfortunately, that kind of  truth often sounds like criticism, especially if we’re feeling the least bit defensive.  

When Jesus tells Martha that Mary has chosen what is best, he is, again very subtly, telling Martha to stop trying to control her sister, and he is reminding her that giving a guest time and attention is at least as important as all the hospitality duties that Martha thinks are so culturally crucial.  To emphasize this, he makes it clear to Martha that he will not allow Mary’s moment of spiritual communion with him to be taken away for the sake of housework or social propriety.  

These things Jesus says to Martha can sound a bit harsh until we remember that Martha also was free to stop and sit at the feet of Jesus any time she wanted from the moment he entered her house.  The lesson for her and all Marthas might be “before you get busy with all the things, take a moment to be with all the people.”

There were very clear social conventions in their world about hospitality and meals, but Jesus was already famous for disregarding or even criticizing these kinds of conventions, so  Mary and Martha had options.  

I think this little story in Luke wants us to think about our options so we don’t accidentally create tension and anxiety and open the door to triangulation, especially at times when we want to be welcoming and hospitable.  For instance, Mary could have stepped up to help Martha right from the beginning so they could get things prepared faster and then both sat down to a conversation with Jesus.  They could have asked Jesus when he first arrived if he wanted to eat first or sit together and talk first.  Better than that, any and all of them could have stepped in and pitched in when they saw that Martha was determined to fulfill her traditional role as a hostess. And, of course, Martha could have sat with Mary and listened to Jesus and then asked Mary—and maybe also Jesus and his crew, why not?—to pitch in and help make supper.  

There is no really satisfying ending to this very brief story in Luke.  There is no easy moral to take home here.  You can’t just say “be a Mary and not a Martha.”  We need Marthas.  Marthas make things happen in the world, and especially in the church.  Every Sunday when you come in and sit down to worship a crew of volunteer Marthas has already been hard at work.  Marthas chose the hymns and practiced the music.  Marthas prepared and printed the bulletin.  Marthas checked the sound system and the cameras for online streaming.  Marthas made sure there would be bread and wine for communion.  Marthas prepared the altar and lit the candles.  And Marthas made the coffee and snacks for the fellowship time after worship.

We need Marthas.  And we need Marys.  We need the people who listen attentively and ponder what they’re hearing.  We need people who hear the words of Christ, internalize them, and pass them along to others.  We need the teachers and counselors and preachers and theologians who keep us faithful and in tune with the heart of Jesus. 

The fact is that almost every one of us has been a Martha at one time or another and almost every one of us has been a Mary at one time or another.  Both were doing good things.  Both were serving, just in different ways.  Still, when Martha tried to triangulate Jesus into the unspoken tension with her sister, Jesus does say that Mary made the better choice. 

So maybe the message is this: before you get all caught up in the necessary busyness of life, take time to sit at the feet of Jesus.  Listen to what he says.  Internalize his Word.  Breathe in his Spirit.  Then your necessary busyness, and especially the busyness of hospitality, will be motivated by the Spirit of serving and the love of Christ that crosses all boundaries and welcomes all guests.

Oh, and maybe don’t triangulate Jesus into criticizing your siblings.

Inattentional Blindness

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Luke 10:25-37

Have you ever experienced inattentional blindness?   Sometimes it’s called familiarity blindness or perceptual blindness.  Almost everyone has experienced it at one time or another—that condition where you are so familiar with something that you actually stop seeing it.  The upshot of it is that the next time you do take a hard look at that familiar whatever it is, you see all kinds of things that you hadn’t noticed before.  

In my office at home I have a black and white photograph of my grandparents—my mother’s mom and dad.  That picture was taken the year I was born, so I’ve been seeing it my entire life.  My grandmother, the woman in that picture, died nine days after my first birthday, so a lot of my impression of her came from that photograph.  As a kid, I always thought she must have been kind of stern and austere—that was how the picture struck me.  But one day I took a moment to look at it again from a slightly different angle and I realized that she is actually smiling ever so slightly, and her eyes look very loving, gentle and understanding.  Now that I was really looking at her picture, I also realized that there was something strikingly familiar about her eyes, and then it dawned on me that I was seeing my mother’s eyes in this picture of her mother.  That smile, those gentle eyes had always been there in the photograph, but I hadn’t seen them because of inattentional blindness.

I think it’s fair to say that many of us have a kind of perceptual blindness with the parables of Jesus in general and this one we call The Good Samaritan in particular.  Several years ago I read a remarkable book by Amy-Jill Levine called Short Stories by Jesus.  Dr. Levine is a Jewish Professor of New Testament studies, and in this amazing book she revisits the parables of Jesus to help us understand how the first-century Jews who first heard these stories understood and interpreted them. 

Short Stories by Jesus helped me realize that I had a bad case of familiarity blindness where the parables of Jesus are concerned.  The fact is, when we put aside what we think we know about the parables and try to hear them the same way the original audience heard them, we begin to hear these familiar stories in an entirely new way.

For instance, in the very first line of the dialogue that leads up to this story about a man robbed and beaten by bandits there are two details that I never paid much attention to, but they really are kind of important because of the way they frame the rest of the story.  

“An expert in the law stood up to test Jesus.”  

The first thing to notice is that it’s a lawyer asking the question.  Luke’s original readers would have understood that this is not just your everyday scribe, this is a person with expertise in both religious and civil law.  He knows the scriptures.  And he’s testing Jesus.  He’s using a trick question as he tries to trap Jesus in a mistake of some kind.

But Jesus turned the tables on him with a trick question of his own, then amplified it with an even more important question. “What is written in the Law?” he asked the lawyer.  “How do you read it?” Some translations render that second question as “What do you read there?” but “How do you read it?” is a better translation.

That first question, “What is written in the Law,” was a red herring.  Torah, the Law, doesn’t say anything at all about eternal life.  The Law of Moses is not interested in life after death but it is vitally concerned with how we live here and now.  The really important question, though, is the second one Jesus asks the lawyer: How do you read it?   That question is just as important for us today as it was then.  Maybe even more so.  How do you read it?  What preconceptions to you bring with you when you read the scriptures?  How do you read it?

The lawyer knew that there was no good answer to the first question—the Torah doesn’t say anything about inheriting eternal life—but he felt like he needed to say something, so he responded to Jesus by quoting a mashup of the Shema from Deuteronomy and the Golden Commandment from Leviticus: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.”  “That’s correct,” said Jesus, “Do that and you will live.”

The bottom line, here, is love.  Love God, and love your neighbor as you love yourself.  Do that and you will live.  Love is the key to an abundant and fulfilled life.

It sounds so simple.  The problem, though, is that this commandment to love is all-inclusive, and there are some people we really just don’t want to love.

I think the lawyer in this story is honest enough to realize that about himself.  He knows there are some people—you know, “those people”—that he will never love, and he suspects that this is true for everyone standing there listening to Jesus.  

Luke says he wanted to justify himself.  He wanted to make himself look right in the eyes of all those listening.  But he also wanted to maybe find a loophole.  Surely Jesus can’t mean that he has to love everybody, because, you know, there are some people—thosepeople—who have clearly demonstrated that they are not on our side—they are not worthy of our love.  Are we supposed to love them?  

So he asks another question:  “Well… who is my neighbor?”

In the context of law, the question about who is a neighbor has legal merit.  After all, good fences make good neighbors.  But in the context of love the question is irrelevant.  

Jesus wants to take this beyond the law. 

So Jesus redirects with a story.

A man travelling on the road from Jerusalem down to Jericho is violently assaulted by robbers.  They don’t just rob him, they strip him and beat him so badly that he’s half dead. So there he is, naked and half dead at the side of the road.  A priest happens by and does nothing to help the poor victim who is lying there bleeding.  He passes by on the other side of the road.  He gives the wounded man a wide berth.  Next a Levite comes by.  He also passes by on the other side of the road and does nothing to help the wounded stranger.

At this point, the people originally listening to Jesus tell this story would have been shocked and the lawyer had to be wondering where this was going.  For them, it was unthinkable that a priest and a Levite would pass by without helping.  The Law is very clear on this.  They are required to help!  That would be their duty according to the law, and it would take precedence over any other duty or obligation.  Even if the wounded man turned out to be dead, they had a responsibility to care for his body.  That was the law.

The people listening to Jesus were shocked.  But they were about to be utterly scandalized.  Because the hero of the story that Jesus is telling turns out to be… a Samaritan.  

It’s hard for us to imagine how much the Jews hated the Samaritans.  And vice versa.  The antagonism between Jews and Samaritans went back centuries and was all the more intense because they were so closely related.  

We traditionally call this parable the story of the Good Samaritan, but in the minds of those who were listening to Jesus, the words “good” and “Samaritan” would never find themselves in the same sentence.  It was an oxymoron.  Samaritans were the enemy.   The people listening to Jesus as he tells this story might have thought, “If I were the man in the ditch, I would rather die than admit that I was saved by a Samaritan.”  In their minds, Samaritans were something less than fully human.  

So how did things get to be so antagonistic between the Jews and the Samaritans?  Where did all that bad feeling come from?  

Well, centuries before Jesus, in the time of Jacob, Samaria was called Shechem, and it was a Prince of Shechem who raped Jacob’s daughter, Dinah.  In the time of the Judges, the false judge Abimelech, who murdered all his rivals, came from Shechem.  For a time, Shechem became part of the united kingdom of Israel under David and Solomon.  But after Solomon died, the Northern Kindom of Israel—which had been Shechem—broke away and a kind of low-grade civil war broke out that continued for generations.  When the Assyrians swept in and conquered the Northern Kingdom which was now called both Israel and Ephraim, they brought in people from other conquered kingdoms to resettle and then renamed the land Samaria after the capital city.  That’s also when the people of Judah began to refer to Samaritans with a kind of racial slur, calling them “the people with 5 fathers.”  But the thing that the people of Judah found absolutely unforgiveable forever and ever amen, was that when they returned to Jerusalem after their time of captivity in Babylon, Sanballat, the governor of Samaria, joined forces with other people in the region and attacked them to try to stop them from  rebuilding the city wall and the temple.

For their part, the Samaritans called themselves the Shamerim, meaning “guardians” or “observers” of the Law.  They had built their own temple on Mt. Gerizim and they had their own version of Torah, which they insisted was the “true” version.  They believed that only Torah—their Torah, of course—contained the word of God and they did not include the Psalms and other writings, or the books of the prophets among the books they regarded as holy.

For Jews, Samaritans were the ultimate “other,”  so for Jesus to cast the Samaritan as the benevolent hero was almost beyond belief.  It would be like an ultra-orthodox Jew being saved by a Hamas Palestinian.  To bring it closer to home, it might be like one of the Proud Boys being saved by someone wearing a Black Lives Matter tee shirt.  

Who would it be for you?  Who is that ultimate “other” who, in your mind, only just barely qualifies as a real person?  Who is it who, in your mind, seems to be so radically different from you that there’s really no point in even talking to them?  Or maybe there’s someone who sees you that way.  How would you feel if it was one of those people who pulled you out of the ditch?

The lawyer had asked Jesus, “Who is my neighbor?”  Jesus reframed his question.  Jesus wants us to understand that the question is not “who” merits my love or even “from whom” should I expect love.  As Amy-Jill Levine wrote, “The issue for Jesus is not the ‘who,’ but the ‘what,’ not the identity but the action.”  Love—loving God, loving your neighbor, loving yourself—is revealed in action.  Love does not exist in the abstract; it must be enacted.

The Priest and the Levite did not act in love even though their law and duty commanded that they should.  

Shortly before he was assassinated, the Rev. Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr. preached a sermon on this parable.  He had an interesting explanation for why the priest and the Levite did not stop to help the wounded man at the side of the road.  “I’m going to tell you what my imagination tells me,” said Dr. King.  “It’s possible these men were afraid… And so the first question that the priest and the Levite asked was, ‘If I stop to help this man, what will happen to me?’ … But then the Good Samaritan came by, and he reversed the question:  ‘If I do not stop to help this man, what will happen to him?”

The Samaritan gave first aid to the man at the side of the road.  He put him on his donkey and took him to the nearest inn where he could receive more help.  He paid the innkeeper two days wages to take care of the wounded man and then gave him a promise that amounted to a blank check.  “Take care of him,” he said, “and when I come back, I will repay you whatever you spend.”

“Which of these three,” Jesus asked the lawyer, “was a neighbor to the man who fell into the hands of the robbers?”  

The lawyer couldn’t even bring himself to say, ‘the Samaritan.’  He couldn’t let the word sit in his mouth.  That’s how much the Jews despised Samaritans.  I imagine there was a long pause before the lawyer finally said, “The one who showed him mercy.”

Mercy.  It’s an important detail here at the end of the parable,  a well-chosen word.  In both Greek and Hebrew, the word we translate as mercy can also mean “kindness.”  It is a covenant word in Hebrew.  Hesed.  It signifies a shared bond of common humanity in the eyes of and under the Law of God.  It is an acknowledgement that we “are of the same kind.”  

The Samaritan showed mercy.  Kindness, a word that takes us back to the prophet Micah:  “God has told you, O Mortal, what is good.  And what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness…mercy…kindness, and to walk humbly with your God.”

“Go and do likewise,” said Jesus to the lawyer.  Go and do likewise Jesus says to us.  

In our country today, we find ourselves living in a culture scarred by cycles of division, antagonism, generations of animosity, racism and conflict and even violence.  In this parable, Jesus is telling us that these spirals of perpetual antagonism can be broken with kindness.  The question that Jesus wants us to wrestle with is this: Can we learn to treat even our enemies, the “Samaritans” in our lives, in ways that acknowledge their humanity? Can we dare to see them in ways that acknowledge their potential to do good?  Can we can bind the wounds of those “others” and dare to imagine that they would do the same for us?    

When we encounter each other on the road full of bandits and other dangers, will we be blinded to each other by our familiar stereotypes, or will we find the courage and imagination to step outside of the roles we’ve cast for each other so we can give and receive kindness and be the good neighbor?  

Yes, this is a parable about helping those in need.  That’s what good neighbors do.  But more than that, it is a story about learning to see our common humanity in those we have always been tempted to dehumanize.  

Do justice. Love kindness—we are of the same kind.  Walk humbly with God.

Image: The Good Samaritan by Stephen Sawyer; http://www.art4god.com

A People Possessed

Steve Beckham 5 Comments

Luke 8:26-39; Mark 5:1-10

So, one day Jesus decided to take his disciples on a little trip across the lake.  Why?  Because that’s where the Gentiles and Hellenized Jews lived—you know, those “other” people—and Jesus wanted them to know about the kingdom of God, too.  He wanted his disciples to understand that the Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness is not just for Judeans and Galileans.  It’s for everyone.  So they set out across the lake. But no sooner had their boat touched the shore than they were accosted by a naked demon-possessed man who apparently already knew who Jesus was.  “When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him, shouting, ‘What do you want with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?  I beg you, do not torment me.’”  

Just to be clear, there is no record of Jesus ever tormenting anyone, although he has been known to make people uncomfortable with very pointed questions—the kind of questions that can make your soul itch.  So maybe that’s what the demoniac was afraid of.

Jesus paused the exorcism and asked the demon his name.  “Legion,” said the man, “for many demons had entered him.”

Legion.    In a Jewish story that was written in Greek, that Latin word sticks out like a bowling ball on a tennis court.  Legion.  It had only one meaning in their world at that time—a  division of Roman soldiers.  And that gives us a clue that, while this is an exorcism story and a miracle story, it is also a political story—a story about how the oppressive practices of the Roman occupation drove this poor man insane and caused his community to live under a cloud of fear.  

Living under a system where the Romans and the local nobility and the wealthy got the first and the best and the most of everything and got richer on the backs of the poor people who did all the work and took all the risks was more than this poor soul could take.  He didn’t dare to speak out against the multiple injustices that shadowed their daily life because doing so would bring swift and brutal punishment from the soldiers who patrolled the streets, punishment that would be directed not only at him but also at his neighbors.  With no safe outlet for his rage and his pain, he turned them inward on himself.

The late Paul Hollenbach put it this way: “The tension between his hatred for his oppressors and the necessity to repress this hatred in order to avoid dire recrimination drove him mad. He retreated to an inner world where he could symbolically resist Roman domination.”  By casting out the demon, said Hollenbach, Jesus “brought the man’s and the neighborhood’s hatred of the Romans out into the open, where the result could be disaster for the community.”[1]

This is not just a story about how Jesus brought peace to a tormented man in ancient times, it is also very much a story for us in our time.   In an editorial remembrance of Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark who were killed last week in a political assassination, ELCA pastor and author Angela Decker wrote, “American democracy, borne in slavery, enriched in colonialism and genocide, tested in ill-advised overseas wars, is now writhing and twisting, beset by internal illness and self-inflicted wounds.”[2]

If that assessment seems too harsh, consider these events from just this month:

  • On June 8, disregarding the authority and advice of Governor Newsome and Mayor Bass, President Trump deployed 2,000 National Guard troops to Los Angeles to quell “riots” which were, in reality, mostly peaceful protests against the administration’s continuing raids on undocumented immigrants by Immigration and Customs officers. On June 10, the president deployed 700 U.S. Marines to Los Angeles in violation of the 10th Amendment to the Constitution and the Posse Comitatus Act which forbids the use of the military for domestic law enforcement.  On June 17, he deployed an additional 2,000 National Guard troops.  According to The Guardian, these troops “have told friends and family members they are deeply unhappy about the assignment and worry their only meaningful role will be as pawns in a political battle they do not want to join.”[3]
  • On June 10, New Jersey Congresswoman LaMonica McIver was arrested and indicted for interfering with ICE officers who were arresting Newark Mayor Ras Baraka outside a federal immigration detention facility in her state.  Both Congresswoman McIver and Mayor Baraka were there as part of to their official duties.
  • On June 13, United States Senator Alex Padilla was wrestled to the floor and handcuffed by security officers when he tried to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question at her press conference.
  • On June 17, New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, who is also a candidate for mayor, was arrested by ICE agents at a Manhattan immigration court while escorting a defendant out of the courtroom.  He had come to the court in an effort to observe hearings and promote legal services for immigrants.
  • On June 14, Flag Day, Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were shot and killed by a man posing as a police officer.  Their assailant then drove to the home of State Senator John Hoffman and shot him and his wife, Yvette.  Fortunately, they survived.  Later that same day, the president would watch a poorly attended military parade while more than five million people attended No Kings protests all across the country to protest the policies of his administration.
  • June 12 marked the 9th anniversary of the Pulse Nightclub mass shooting in Orlando, Florida in which 49 people were killed and another 68 were injured.
  • June 17 was the 10th anniversary of the racially motivated killing of 9 people who were attending a Bible study at Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina.  
  • In a related note, as of June 20, there have been 37 mass shootings in the US this month alone, bringing the total to 199 so far for the year.

Now add on to all of that the rising international tensions which threaten to involve us, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine and the increasingly violent conflict between Israel and Iran—which as of yesterday afternoon with the bombing of Iran ordered by President Trump now actually does involve us—and  it’s no wonder that politics is having a profoundly negative effect on our collective sense of well-being and our understanding of who we are as a people. 

According to the American Psychological Association, political polarization and a seemingly endless series of national crises have become a significant source of stress for the American people and that stress is taking its toll.  Seventy-seven percent, nearly 8 in 10 adults, report that worrying about the future of our country has become a serious source of anxiety causing symptoms that range from insomnia to depression.  Forty-one percent, nearly 2 in 5 adults, have considered moving to a different country.   

As I read the Gospel for this week with all these things echoing in my heart, I couldn’t help but think that we, the good old US of A, we are the demon-possessed man. We are the man made crazy by fears and anxieties and bigotry and scapegoating.  We are the man howling among the tombs and battering ourselves with blind rage and unreasoned hatreds.

We are the man with a hopelessly divided mind, made bipolar and schizophrenic by a cacophony of opposing inner voices—entrenched political parties with no common ground—conservatives vs. liberals and ne’er the twain shall meet even in the cause of common sense, putting our party identity and our ideology ahead of everything else that’s supposed to define us, making even our faith subservient to our chosen place on the ideological spectrum. 

We are so blinded by the ideological lenses we wear that we see only what we want to see. And since our biases rarely completely align with or truly resonate with the Gospel, our cognitive dissonance creates the first and most stubborn degree of our madness.

Oh, we have our moments of clarity.  But then the rage wells up in us and we explode in violence.

For most of us the violence doesn’t go beyond rhetoric and posturing, but words and attitude can open the door for those who would turn it into horribly tangible violence, death and destruction.

Even among the most enlightened among us, our suppressed  racism, or our discomfort with sexualities that are different from our own, or our anxieties about other religions—all these things creep out in unguarded words or microaggressions, or, most often, simply in awkward silence—a failure to speak, a silence which gives permission to the violence that is always waiting to happen.  We breed the craziness.

We cloak our prejudices in our religions or our patriotism. We project our own disquiet, our own fears and anxieties and hatred onto the most vulnerable and marginalized, scapegoating them with some reasonable sounding rationale to support our bigotry and give us permission to treat them horribly.  We are so blinded by our own warped and fearful reasoning that we can’t see children of God standing right in front of us—especially if the color of their skin or their language or their religion or their sexuality isn’t the same as ours.

We are caught in an epic struggle between love and hate, a struggle that is almost entirely of our own making.

Can you see that if you’re not actively and passionately on the side of love then you are at least passively on the side of hate? 

Can you see that if you are not actively generating the transformational light of cultural metanoia—a radical change of heart and mind—then you are passively brooding in a moonless night of cultural assumptions?

And can you see that we are not just the bedeviled man raving among the tombs?  We are also the craven townspeople afraid of our own shadows, afraid to stand against the madness even as we recognize the insanity of our own inconsistencies.   We penalize the voices that cry out against injustice.  We lock them up and bind them with chains, both real and metaphorical, even though we know, deep down, that silencing them will not bring us peace.

And even when God works a miracle and restores one of us to our senses we respond with more anxiety because that is just so different from our usual experience, and because anxiety has become our go-to reaction for almost everything.

Can we find a way out of all this madness?

Can we learn how to put aside our politics, our ideologies, our biases and prejudices?  Can we learn how to silence the less savory internal voices of our childhood, our inclination for self-protection, our fear of the “other,” our anxiety about a constantly changing world—can we put aside our own demons long enough to see the person in front of us as someone who God deeply loves and cares for?

Can we learn to see each other the way Jesus sees us? 

Instead of a woman with an unsavory reputation, can we learn to see a daughter of God who has been beaten down by the world and had to make desperate choices in order to survive?  Instead of an unhoused nutjob venting his rage on the corner or among the tombs can we learn to see a son of God bedeviled and enslaved by the legion insanity and heartlessness of the world around him?

Can we learn to see that in Christ we are all children of God, that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, gay or straight or trans or bi—no documented or undocumented?   No us or them?

Can you see that we are all going to have to learn to see differently?

No, we can’t afford to be stupid. No we can’t afford to be blind to real threats.  But can you see that first we are going to have to learn to recognize and deal with the real threats that arise from our own hearts and minds and souls?

Can we learn how to stop listening to all the voices that divide us and pit us against each other? Can we find the heart to switch off the news channels and radio voices and web feeds and political voices that want to tell us how awful or dangerous those other people are, who want to tell us that “they” are not the real “us”?

Can all of us, each of us, muster enough humility to have at least one “come to Jesus” moment so he can remove the lenses of our preconceptions and cast our demons into the sea of God’s love?

Can you see that the only way out of our madness is for us to learn to love our neighbors with the love of Christ?  Can you see that the love exemplified and perpetually renewed by Jesus—whether you know that’s where it comes from or not—is our only hope of ever being able to sit down with each other calmly and in our right minds?

If we can learn to see each other the way Jesus sees us, then maybe we can live to see the promise of Isaiah 32 fulfilled:

Then everyone who has eyes will be able to see the truth,

                  and everyone who has ears will be able to hear it.

         Even the hotheads will be full of sense and understanding.

                  Those who stammer will speak out plainly.

         In that day ungodly fools will not be heroes.

                  Scoundrels will not be respected.[4]

Hasten the Day, Lord Jesus.

[1] Hollenbach, P.; Jesus, Demoniacs, and Public Authorities; 1981, JAAR, p. 573; quoted in Meyers, Ched; Binding the Strong Man, p. 192

[2] Minnesota Star Tribune, June 19, 2025

[3] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/12/los-angeles-national-guard-troops-marines-morale

[4] Isaiah 32:3-5, Contemporary English Version

The Power of Three

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Have you ever noticed how many things come in threes?   Our constitution, for instance, give us a government of, by and for the people, with three balanced and equal branches, the executive, the legislative and the judicial.  Well, they’re supposed to be balanced and equal.

Our lives depend on the environmental threesome of land, water and air.  The plants that feed us are dependent on the trio of soil, rain and sunlight.  Native Americans learned long ago to plant a triplet of crops together corn, beans and squash.  They called them the Three Sisters because they worked together in a way that made all three healthier and more robust.  The corn provided a natural pole for the beans to climb.  The beans fixed nitrogen into the soil to fertilize the corn and squash, and the squash spread out its leaves and vines around the roots of the corn and beans to provide shade and preserve moisture in the soil. 

Our planet is composed of three kinds of rock: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic and the elements that compose the stuff of the universe come to us in a triad of solid, liquid and gas.  The nearly infinite variety of colors we see are all built from the three primary colors, red, blue and yellow.

We describe our passage through the day as a journey through morning, noon and night, and as we drive through the city streets our stopping and going is controlled by a troika of green, yellow and red lights.  When we’re on the go, we often refuel with the gastronomic trinity of fast food—a burger, fries and a shake, then we decide who will pay the bill with a quick game of rock, paper, scissors.

When we relate to each other thoughtfully, we realize that the human person we’re conversing with is a complex triplex of intellect, physicality and emotion.  Freud tells us that our psyches are a gordian knot of id, ego and superego.  And in broader, more ancient terms we understand ourselves as body, mind and spirit. 

Jesus told us that he is the Way, the Truth and the Life, and St. Paul told us that Faith, Hope and Love abide, which are the three things we need most as we confront the evil triad of greed, sexism and racism.

Aristotle said that everything that comes in threes is perfect.  Omnes trium perfectum, a statement that may have had some influence on the bishops of the early Church who gathered at the Council of Nicaea.

Today is Trinity Sunday, the one day in the Church year dedicated to a doctrine, the first doctrine adopted by the Church, the doctrine that tells us that God the Father, Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit exist eternally as three persons but also as one God.  In his book, The Divine Dance, the Trinity and Your Transformation, Richard Rohr says that the Trinity is the fundamental reality of the universe, a perfect balance of union and differentiation, and a model for human relationships—God for us, God alongside us, God within us.

It’s not always easy to wrap our heads around this idea.  Martin Luther once said that denying the Trinity might imperil your soul but trying to understand it could imperil your sanity.  The truth is that the infinite God cannot be boxed into our very finite minds.  The limitless God cannot be corralled by our limited understanding.  “’Circling around’ is all we can do,” says Richard Rohr. “Our speaking of God is a search for similes, analogies, and metaphors. All theological language is an approximation, offered tentatively in holy awe. That’s the best human language can achieve. We can say, ‘It’s like—it’s similar to…,’ but we can never say, ‘It is…’ because we are in the realm of beyond, of transcendence, of mystery. And we must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.”[1]

The Holy Trinity, the unity of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, three distinct persons living as one God, is not a puzzle to be solved.  It’s a mystery in which to immerse ourselves.  Frederick Buechner described the Trinity as the Mystery beyond us, the Mystery among us, and the Mystery within us.  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 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’s, 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.  The closest we come to a full statement of Trinitarian theology is at the end of Matthew when Jesus tells his disciples to baptize new disciples in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.  And St. Paul ends his second letter to the Corinthians with Trinitarian language when he says, “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God and the union of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.” 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 very 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 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, though, all three seemed to have been present: Jesus coming up out of the water, the Spirit, descending in the form of a dove, and 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 Jesus people.  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, while they are eternally united, 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.”[2]  He also said, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.”[3]  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.  But they are also Three.  And they are still One.  Three persons, One God.

This disagreement the Trinitarians and the Arians 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 1700 years ago last month, in May of the year 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 and ordered the bishops to formulate an official statement to describe the Doctrine of 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 (as if anybody could possibly know that) and whether they had the same nature.  They knew they were standing at the edge of an enormous Truth about God and they felt 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, they were like children who stand on the beach and think they can fully describe the breadth and depth and power of the ocean and all the life contained in it.  

The bishops created the first draft of what 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 be used to exclude people from the community and the embrace of the Church.

The doctrine of the Trinity continued to confuse a lot of earnest Christians, and, truth be told, it was not universally accepted everywhere even though the Emperor had declared it to be the official stance of the church.  For many people it was just too confusing to figure out how one plus one plus one could equal one.  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 more or less 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.  The love that endlessly flows between, in and through the Father, 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, 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.

We are called to embody this trinitarian flow of love, loving and being loved to carry it out into the world, loving God, loving our neighbor and being humble and vulnerable enough to let ourselves be loved.

In the name of God the Father, in the authority and authenticity of Jesus, and in the power of the Spirit, we are called to practice in what the late Walter Brueggemann called prophetic imagination.  As we are embraced by the wholeness and balance of the Trinity, we are called to speak out, to proclaim the inbreaking of the kingdom of God, to speak truth to power, and to live out God’s definition of goodness—to do justice and to love kindness and to walk humbly with God and with each other.

In his book Interrupting Silence: God’s Command to Speak Out, Walter Brueggeman said, “The church has a huge stake in breaking the silence, because the God of the Bible characteristically appears at the margins of established power arrangements, whether theological or socioeconomic and political.”  He went on to say, “Since we now live in a society—and a world—that is fitfully drifting toward fascism, the breaking of silence is altogether urgent.  In the institutional life of the church, moreover, the breaking of silence by the testimony of the gospel often means breaking the silence among those who have a determined stake in maintaining the status quo.”

We are called to remind the world that God is inherently just.  God’s justice is inseparable from the love, kindness and grace that flows endlessly in the circle dance of the Three-in-One, and from the Triune God to us and through us.  If we live in the trinitarian flow of love, loving and being loved, we cannot remain silent and inactive in a hurting world.  

[1] Richard Rohr, The Divine Dance: The Trinity and Your Transformation

[2] John 10:30; John 14:9

[3] Matthew 28:18

The Breath, The Wind, The Spirit

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

John 14:8-17, 25-27; Acts 2

“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.  And suddenly from heaven there came a sound like the rush of a violent wind, and it filled the entire house where they were sitting.  Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.  All of them were filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in other languages, as the Spirit gave them ability.”

It’s no surprise that this is the text that usually gets all our attention on Pentecost Sunday.  It’s a big, dramatic story.  The language is intense and the narrative is filled with almost cinematic details that light up our imaginations!  Violent wind!  Tongues of fire!  Everyone streaming out into the street speaking different languages!  This outpouring of the Holy Spirit in the second chapter of Acts is so vivid and powerful, so action-packed and full of good stuff for motivating the church that it’s no wonder we return to it every year to be inspired by it and to have our own personal zeal and dedication rekindled. 

This Pentecost story in the second chapter of Acts is an important part of our heritage; many call it the birthday of the church, but Diana Butler Bass reminds us that it’s really the birth of something much bigger.  “It’s the birth of a new humanity, a new creation!”  On the day of Pentecost, as the followers of Jesus proclaimed the Good News in the languages of everyone gathered there, Peter reminded the crowd of what the prophet Joel had said four or five hundred years earlier, “In the last days,” God declares, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”

All flesh.  All people.  As St. Paul reminds us in Romans, “All who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God.”

The Pentecost story in Acts tells the story of that moment in history when the Spirit of God was poured out for all people, not just the insiders.  In fact, the insiders quite literally rushed outside to bring the fire of God’s presence and love and Good News to everyone who would listen.  

But there is another story in the New Testament about the outpouring of the Spirit, and over the past few years I have felt myself more and more drawn to that story from the end of the Gospel of John. 

In chapter 20 of John, the disciples were huddled together in hiding.  It was evening, three days after Jesus was crucified.  The day had been an emotional roller coaster.  Just before sunrise, Jesus’ tomb was found to be unsealed and empty.  Mary Magdalen claimed that she had seen Jesus and spoken with him, but no one else had.  And then suddenly, even though the doors were locked, there he was standing in the room with them!  “Peace be with you,” he said.  “As the Father has sent me, now I’m sending you.”  

And then he breathed on them and said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.”

This is a much gentler and more subdued giving of the Spirit.  It’s not as flashy as Luke’s Pentecost story, but it is very powerful in its own way.  It’s more personal. More intimate.  The Holy Spirit is given and received as the very breath of Jesus.  

This is the culmination of a wonderful play on words that has been going on throughout John’s gospel since chapter 3 when Jesus told Nicodemus that “The wind blows wherever it chooses, and you hear its sound, but do not know where it is coming from or where it is going.  So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”  In Greek, the language in which the Gospel of John was written, the word for wind and breath and spirit are all the same word.  Pneuma.  So when Jesus breathes on them in chapter 20 and says, “Receive the Holy Spirit,” it could also be understood as “receive the Holy Breath” or “Receive the Holy Wind.” 

What does it do to our understanding of the Spirit if we can hear it all three ways: to hear it as the Spirit, the essence of God that resides with us and in us, guiding us and speaking to our spirits; but also to hear it as the very breath of Jesus filling our lungs, empowering our words when we speak; and then to also hear it as the wind of God that blows us where God wants or needs us to be?  Receive the Holy Breath.  Receive the Holy Wind.  Receive the Holy Spirit.

I like the rambunctious giving of the Spirit in Acts 2.  It’s a joyful and empowering picture of the Spirit at work.  And it’s for everyone!  All people!  But as I said, I have been more and more drawn to the way the Gospel of John describes the movement and work of the Spirit.  I find this quieter, gentler “Pentecost” more in keeping with my own experience and more consistent with the ways I have seen the Spirit move and work most often in others.  I find that very often the work of the Spirit is so subtle that it’s not until I look back on the moment that I even realize that the Spirit was at work.

Let me give you an example.  As I was preparing this sermon, I had done my research and gathered all the bits and pieces in my notes, and prayed, so that the only thing left to do was to start writing.  And that’s where I was stuck.  My brain needed more time to percolate all the things I had been reading and thinking.  I guess I was still in sermon-avoidance mode.  So I went online to Facebook just to get the synapses firing and blow out the cobwebs.  As I scrolled through different posts, I came upon a painting of Jesus by Maria Brock.  It is an arresting and well done painting, and there were two things I liked about it immediately.  First, in this painting Jesus looks like a Palestinian.  There’s an authenticity about it that makes it easy to say, “Yeah.  Jesus could very well have looked like that.”  But the thing that was really striking about this picture, at least for me, is that Jesus is smiling.  He looks warm and friendly and understanding.  And loving.  

Staring at this marvelous picture of Jesus, I found myself thinking about our gospel text for today from John 14.  This passage is part of the Last Supper Discourse, also called the Farewell Discourse.  John describes Jesus gathered with his disciples on the night of his betrayal, taking advantage of their short remaining time together to prepare them for what is to come.  

I have always imagined him being very somber throughout this whole discourse, after all, he’s sharing some very serious things with his disciples.  But then I remembered that this dinner took place during the week of Passover, a joyful and celebratory time for the Jews.  And looking at this picture where he’s smiling, where he looks so loving, I began to think, “What if this was his expression as he said all these difficult and necessary things?  What if he was looking at them with deep love and gentleness and patient understanding?”  

As I looked at that painting, I began to hear his words differently.  The tone of voice changed and the words of Jesus came alive for me in a new way.  I could hear Jesus saying with that gentle and loving smile, “Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid,” and those words went to my heart in a deeper way than ever before.

That, I believe, was a Holy Spirit moment.   Finding that picture.  Reimagining that scene of the text.  Opening to the words of Christ in a new way.  That’s the kind of thing the Holy Spirit does for us much more often, I think, than tongues of fire and speaking in unfamiliar languages.

It was a happy and festive season for their people, but it was probably not a happy and festive mood in the room where Jesus had gathered his disciples to give them the new commandment to love each other and to promise them the gift of the Spirit.  They were anxious and afraid.  They had so many unanswered questions.  Jesus had told them that he would be departing from them and it had begun to sink in that soon they would be on their own.  They needed some kind of reassurance.  

In her commentary on the Working Preacher website, Meda Stamper said, “The promise of the Spirit does not come to completely faithful, courageous people, already loving one another and the world boldly, already worshiping in spirit and truth.  It comes in the midst of confusion and fear, which has made them unable to grasp what he is saying, and it is the answer to that.  Jesus makes the promise of the Spirit, emerging from the mutual love of the Father and Son for one another and for us, into which they and we are invited, at the very moment when such grace seems most beyond their grasp and ours.”[1]  

Jesus tells them and us that simply in our love for one another we open our hearts to the Holy Spirit, the presence of God in us and with us, to guide us and make us bold enough love a world which, frankly, is not always loveable—a world that is sometimes threatening—but a world that is always and everywhere loved by God.

Jesus promises that when loving the world and each other feels like a trial, when it seems to be beyond our ability to find one more drop of grace and understanding in what Johannes Buetler called our “lawsuit with the world,”[2] when life, itself, feels like an ordeal, Jesus promises that we will have a Paraclete.  An Advocate.  The Spirit comes alongside us and abides in us in the same way that the Father abides in the Son and Jesus dwelled in the world.  “When the physical presence of Jesus is no longer available, still the way, the truth, and the life are in us.”[3]

This is what the Spirit does.  She comes into us like a breath and carries us forward like a powerful wind.  She reminds us of all the things that Jesus has taught us.  She gives us courage to witness, to convict or convince the world of the presence of Christ and the power of love.  She gives us the energy and the courage to do in our time what Jesus did in his own time—to love each other and the world into health and wholeness.  

“Jesus in John shows us what living love looks like in his own life of making God’s love for the world known,” said Meda Stamper. “He enacts love… in words and works: in dangerously truthful testimony to political and religious authorities; in a ministry of boundary-breaking healing and of feeding the physically and spiritually hungry; and in a life of humility,… friendship, and prayer.  He tells us that we are to follow his example…”

Jesus enacts love and tells us to do the same.  Jesus makes his own life an example of God’s love in the world and tells us to do the same.

This is the quieter Pentecost, the alternative Pentecost, a Pentecost centered in love. This is the Pentecost that empowers us to love God and to love our neighbors as ourselves. The Spirit is breathed into us, dwells in us, advocates for us, and flows through us as a witness to God’s love in a hurting world.  Jesus calls us to live into the fullness of life in this Holy Spirit to bring light and love and restoration to all of creation.

Jesus breathes the Spirit into us to give us comfort and courage and peace.  “Peace I leave with you,” he says. “My peace I give to you,” and the peace that Jesus gives us is the breath of the Spirit.  It is the very presence of God in us.   Do not let your hearts be troubled, and do not let them be afraid.  God is with you and in you.

Whether it’s with tongues of fire and a loud rush of wind, or with a whisper, a breath, or a breeze, may this Pentecost renew the power of the Spirit within you.

May the Spirit of God make you bold to love the world.  May this Holy Spirit, the breath of Christ within you, empower you to be kind, to speak truth, and to stand for justice and fairness.  May your life be centered in love.  And may the peace of Christ, which passes all understanding, keep your hearts and minds in Christ Jesus.

[1] Meda Stamper, Commentary on John 14:8-17, 25-27

[2] Johannes Buetler, Paraclete, The New Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible

[3] Meda Stamper, Commentary on John 14:8-17, 25-27

Rise Up

Steve Beckham 6 Comments

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. Since it’s always on a Thursday, it often gets overlooked, and because the Feast of the Ascension of Our Lord is always on Thursday, and since most of us aren’t in the habit of going to church on Thursday, and since Lutherans and other protestants don’t always pay attention to Feast days anyway, we have the option of observing it on Sunday.  So, it’s Ascension Sunday.  Except that it’s really still the 7th Sunday in Easter.  

The Feast of the Ascension.  It’s almost as if we really didn’t want anybody to notice it.  Ascension?  Uh… right.  Isn’t that mentioned in the Creed?  Ascended into heaven, seated at the right hand of the Father…  and… he will come again with special coupons for everything you need for your Summer barbeque.  No?

I have to confess that I’ve always had a little trouble taking the Feast of the Ascension 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 out of town 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.  It deserves some thoughtful attention. 

The Ascension marks a turning point in the way God engages with humanity—with us.  For a very long time, God engaged with us 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 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 in the covenant of God’s teachings, that God was with them, and that their 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, so to get us back to “love your neighbor as yourself” (that’s from Leviticus, by the way), God entered human history as one of us in 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… 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 consequences 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.  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 if Jesus was still handy in person 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.  “You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you,” he says in Acts.

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 will die by the sword.
  • 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.

Much of what Jesus taught was a restatement of what God had been trying to teach us from the 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 the kin-dom 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, “Men of Galilee, 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 interconnected, intricate, and beautiful web of creation. 

In a month like this past month—a month when we saw basic tenets of our constitution challenged or flagrantly ignored, when rights like habeas corpus and the right of due process were simply disregarded, a month 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 a political party that refuses 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 month 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 disguise like the Undercover Boss,  which means that the work of transforming the world through love and truth 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, 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.  Peace be with you.

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

Seeing Jesus: Bodies on the Line

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

“In a little while, the world will no longer see me,” said Jesus, “but you will see me.”[1]

When Pastor Dave Nagler was nominated to become Bishop Dave Nagler, he told the synod assembly a story about a time he saw Jesus while he was serving as the Director of the Central City Lutheran Mission (CCLM) in San Bernardino.  CCLM has been helping to provide a variety of services and assistance to the county’s most vulnerable people since 1994 and ten years ago, in 2015, they became part of Lutheran Social Services.  I don’t know if they still do this, but when Dave was the director they would have a morning worship service on Sunday, then after the service, people were invited into the fellowship hall for lunch.

There was a boy from the neighborhood named Rudy who had been born in a very small town in Mexico.  He was born with bowed legs and since his town was very poor, there wasn’t any medical help to provide braces or to surgically straighten them.  Rudy loved to hang out at the church, and he followed Pastor Dave around like an eager puppy, running everywhere on his little, bowed legs as he tried to keep up with Dave’s long stride.  Rudy was fascinated by the worship service and was always asking Dave if he could help out.  “Pastor Dave, can I collect the money?”  “Pastor Dave, can I hold the cup at communion?”  “Pastor Dave, can I wash the cup after communion?”    

One Sunday, right after worship when everyone else had filed into the fellowship hall for lunch, Dave was still up at the altar putting away the communion elements when an unhoused man wandered into the church through the side door.  The man was disheveled and obviously a little disoriented, and didn’t seem to be quite aware of where he was.  Dave didn’t think much about it because people like that drifted in all the time.  He figured he would go talk to the man when he finished what he was doing.  Rudy, however, hustled over to the man, took his arm, and led him over to the baptismal font and said,  “Bend over the water,” and without questioning, the man bent over the water.  Before anyone could say or do anything, Rudy poured a handful of water onto the man’s head.  Then Rudy led the man up to the altar and said, “Pastor Dave, can he have communion?”  It was one of those moments when time stands still and the angels hold their breath to see what you’re going to do.  Dave gave the man communion then walked with him over to the fellowship hall to make sure he got some lunch.

Most pastors will tell you that there are times in life, in ministry, when you will see Jesus.  If your mind and your heart are open, you will see Jesus so, so clearly.  There are times when you will undeniably feel the breath of the Spirit filling your words or guiding your steps.  “That day,” said Pastor Dave, “Rudy showed me Jesus.”  

“You will see me,” said Jesus, “because I am alive.  And because I am alive, you will be alive.  The day that you realize that my life is your life and your life is my life, that’s the day you will begin to see that I am in the Father, and you are in me and I am in you.  You who love me will be loved by my Father, and I will love you and make myself plain to you.”[2]  And here’s the thing we need to remember as we hear this:  every time Jesus says “you” here, it’s plural.  All y’all.  His life is our life.  He lives in us, collectively and connectedly.  We who love him are the ones who make him visible in the world.  We are the ones who show God’s love to the world.  Our arms are the arms Jesus uses to embrace the world.  And our eyes are the eyes that get to see his presence.

Former Bishop Andy Taylor said that the main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing, and the main thing is the Gospel—the announcement of God’s love and presence in the world through Jesus.  We are not called just to just preach about God’s love or teach about God’s love, we are called to live into it and let it be alive in us.  We are called to embody it.

Jesus said, “Those who love me will keep my word.”  Richard Rohr once said, “The only way I know how to love God is to love what God loves.”  Loving Jesus and keeping his word means that we get to show people in clear and tangible ways that they are loved.  That means that when someone is oppressed or threatened, we stand up for them, even when it’s scary.  When someone is excluded, we welcome them to the table.  When someone is wounded, we make a safe space for them to be healed.  When someone is beaten down, we lift them up.  That’s what it means to love one another as Jesus has loved us.  That’s what it means to follow Jesus.  And sometimes that means we have to put our bodies on the line.

It was five years ago today, May 25, 2020, that George Floyd was killed by police on the streets of Minneapolis.  In the wake of his death and the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Daunte Wright, Andre Hill, Manuel Ellis, Atatiana Jefferson and too many others, Black Lives Matter organized protests all across the country.  I was part of a group of clergy and other faith leaders who were asked to attend the Black Lives Matter Rally at the Civic Center in Los Angeles.  The organizers asked us to wear our clerical collars and our stoles—symbols of our office, clear and visible signs that we were there representing our various faith communities and traditions.  We were not there to speak.  We were there to witness.  We were asked to perform one simple task, to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other in a line, a kind of human boundary line between the law enforcement officers and the protesters.  We were there to help create a safe space where Black people and other Persons of Color gathered in community could speak their grievances and share their grief.  We were there to help assure both sides that things would remain peaceful.

It was scary to stand there in that line.  It was still early days in the Pandemic and even though we were all masked, we knew that Covid was in the air.  But the really scary part was to stand just a few yards away from a line of fully armed Sheriff’s deputies in riot gear, watching them watching us, and knowing that my stole and my pectoral cross and my clerical collar wouldn’t help one bit if they suddenly decided to move in on the demonstrators.  

As you might expect, my mind was racing.  But then I made a decision that brought me an unexpected feeling of peace.  I decided that I was going to love those deputies.  I was going to love them because God loves them.  Jesus loves them.  I realized that they were in a difficult position, too, and probably didn’t want to be there.  As I stood there across from those deputies with their hands resting on their batons or their holsters, I just kept repeating one thought in my mind over and over:  “God loves you.  God loves everyone here.  We are all children of God.”  And then these words of Jesus came to me: “Peace I leave with you.  My peace I give you.  Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.”  

Those words of Jesus became my prayer that day—my prayer not just for me but for the deputies and the protestors and the faith leaders and the media and everyone else who was there.  Peace.  Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not let them be afraid.” 

Sometimes you have to put your body on the line for the sake of your faith, or just for the sake of what’s right.  This is Memorial Day weekend.  Tomorrow we will pause to remember and honor all those who put their bodies on the line and paid the ultimate price in service to our nation—a nation that has taken pride in its immigrant heritage and its diverse people, a nation that has called itself “the land of opportunity.”  Tomorrow we remember those who put their lives on the line for a nation that has, for most of its history, understood its government to be a government of, by and for the people, a nation that has stood for 250 years safeguarded by the rule of law spelled out in a constitution which declares who will live under its protection with the words “We the People,” a constitution that clarifies the purpose behind its creation: “in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure the domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity.”     

There is so much in our country and in our world that has become oppositional.  There is a real struggle going on between those who believe that a more livable society can be built through empathy and education, through intentional inclusion of our diverse cultures, races and ethnicities, through a more equitable use of our common resources and a more equitable system of financial responsibility.  Others want to impose an unyielding system of authoritarianism and conformity with rigid systems of hierarchy and harshly enforced order. Those positions have boiled themselves down to hardened political polarities and ideologies.  People just aren’t listening to each other.  There is no real exchange of ideas, no conversation, just entrenched positions.  

Jesus is calling his followers, calling us, to step into the front lines of this tension.  We are being called to create a space of grace where people can be heard and their fears addressed, where conversation can begin and the seeds of God’s transformative love can be planted.  

We are called to build a Beloved community, a people who are living into the Gospel, a companionship enlivened by the vibrant love of God.  That’s what church is supposed to be about.  We are called to create a welcoming space where God can love us into something new.  We are called to create a community where people can see Jesus.

There is a beautiful vision at the end of the Book of Revelation, a vision of the New Jerusalem coming down out of the heavens from God.  Some people think this is a description of what heaven will be like.  Some think it is a literal description of what God is going to do at the end of time.  Personally, I think it’s a wonderful metaphor for what the church of Jesus Christ can be and should be right now when we’re at our best.  

The river of life flows in that city[3] and I believe that this river of life in all its fullness can flow in and through us when we immerse ourselves in God’s life and love and grace.  

The tree of life grows in that city with its leaves that are for the healing of the nations[4]—healing for all the different peoples of the world, healing for all the wounds we have inflicted on each other simply because we are different from each other.  I think we can be that tree when we are rooted in the love of Christ.  

Revelation tells us that the people will bring all the splendor and richness of their various cultures and ethnic traditions into that city.[5]  Imagine how vibrant and powerful our worship and ministries would be if we opened our doors and our hearts to all that splendor and richness here and now.

God has given us a vision, a revelation, of the Beloved Community as a loving and healing place where everyone is welcome at the table, a place where the splendor and richness of all peoples and every person is cherished and celebrated.  A place where people are transformed and renewed.  

May the Spirit empower us to make that vision a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  May this church and every church become a place where people can see Jesus.

Peace be with you.  Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Do not let them be afraid.

[1] John 14:19-20

[2] John 14:18-20

[3] Revelation 22:1

[4] Revelation 22:2

[5] Revelation 21:26

Love Story

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

I came across one of the best love stories of all time three years ago when Russia invaded Ukraine.  A man who had managed to get himself and his family out of Mariupol during the Russian bombing told a reporter that they owed their escape to a stranger.  Here’s what he told the reporter:

I left the bomb shelter and saw a car with keys in the ignition near the store.  I watched it for two hours, waited for the owner.  When the owner didn’t show up, I didn’t wait.  I took my family, got in the car and drove to Vinnitsa to stay with relatives.  I found a phone number in the glove compartment and called the owner:

“Sorry,” I said, “I stole your car.  Saved my family.”

“’Thank God!’” he said.  ‘Don’t worry, I have four cars.  I took my family out in my Jeep.  The rest of the cars I filled with fuel and left in different places with the keys in the ignition and the number in the glove compartment.  I received calls back now from all the cars.  There will be peace.  See you.  Take care of yourself.’”

As I said, it’s a love story.  Leaving those cars behind, gassed up and ready to go  with the keys in the ignition so that other people, strangers, could escape the hellish bombing of their city—that was an act of love.  That was God showing up in person.  

“I give you a new commandment,” said Jesus, “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.”

It is not our adherence to doctrine that marks us as disciples of Jesus.  It is not our intellectual assent or understanding of the faith.  Embracing particular ideas about atonement or grace or the nature of Christ is not what identifies us as disciples of Jesus.  We are not known as his followers because of our righteousness or our moral stance on hot-button issues.  It isn’t even “accepting Jesus into our hearts,” whatever that might mean, that tells the world that we are devoted to him.  

“By this everyone will know you are my disciples,” said Jesus, “—if you have love for one another.” 

When Jesus was asked which of the commandments was the most important, he went straight to love.  “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength.  And love your neighbor as yourself.  There are no greater commandments.  On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets. Do this and you will live.”[1]

When some of the people in Corinth got all wrapped up in their charismatic gifts and started to take a kind of conceited pride in their spirituality, St. Paul wrote to them with a word of caution:

“If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.  And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge—if I have so much faith that I can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.  If I give away all my possessions—even if I give up my body as a martyr—but do not have love, I gain nothing.”

A few years later, Paul had more to say about love in his letter to the Christians in Rome:

Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.  The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word.  “Love your neighbor as yourself.”  Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.

Paul’s descriptions of love in 1 Corinthians and Romans are excellent and instructive.  But they’re also rather passive.  When Jesus talked about love, he seems to have had something more active in mind.  Often when he talked about love, he would combine it with action.  “I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”[2]  “Love your enemies and do good to those who hate you.”[3] When a lawyer tried to find a loophole in the commandment to love your neighbor by asking, “Well, who is my neighbor?” Jesus responded with a story about a Samaritan who rescues a traveler who had been beaten up by bandits and left for dead.  Clearly, loving your neighbor involves action.  Love also involves generosity.  The Gospel of John tells us that God so loved the world that God gave God’s unique child to us.  Giving is an act of love.

All people are called to love, not just Christians, but followers of Jesus have been commanded to love so that we can be known as his disciples.   Love is supposed to be the thing that identifies us.  Love is what we’re supposed to be all about…but how do you that?  Especially, how do you do that part about loving your enemies—or even just people you don’t particularly like?

You may remember that the ancient Greek language in which the New Testament was written had four different words for love: agape, eros, philia, and storge.  Storge was a word used to describe duty to family and country—think of it as patriotism.   Philia is friendship.  It meant a lot to call someone your friend in the ancient world.  True friendship, then and now, is a kind of love.  Eros was the most commonly used word for love in the ancient world, at least by writers, poets and philosophers.  Our word eroticcomes from eros, but properly understood there’s a lot more to it than that.  

Agape is the word for love that’s used most often in the New Testament.  Agape is a love that is unconditional.  It has no motive other than to seek the well-being of the beloved.  It can be spontaneous, but usually it is decisional—you simply decide that you are going to love that other person or those other people.  Period.  Agape is indifferent to any kind of reward and it doesn’t seek reciprocity— agape doesn’t ask to be loved in return.  Agapeis the simple yet profound recognition that giving of yourself is a worthy and good thing to do.  It is an unconditional willing of good.  Agape loves the beloved for their own sake, whether they are worthy and deserving or not.

Eros, on the other hand, speaks of desire and longing.  Eros seeks to possess what we find valuable but not to covet or desire a person at the expense of overall well-being.  Edward Collins Vacek defined eros as “loving the beloved for our own sake.”[4]  

Plato thought that eros was a pathway to God.  His reasoning went like this:  I see a beautiful person or thing and I desire them or it, but if I look beyond the person or thing I find that what I am really desiring is beauty.  But what makes beauty beautiful is truth, so if I look beyond beauty, I find that what I really desire is truth.  But truth comes from God, so what I am really desiring is God.  

Ilia Delio reaffirms that the heart of eros is passion or desire.  “Eros,” she writes,  “is that ineffable longing that stretches beyond oneself for the sake of oneself.”  She goes on to suggest that eros and agape aren’t so much in contrast with each other as related to each other and that philia—friendship—is the thread between them.  In philia a person gives themselves over to the relationship.  Philia is expressed in camaraderie and companionship, in life together in community.  In his book Love, Human and Divine: The Heart of Christian Ethics, Edward Collins Vacek says that philia “may be the most cosmic form of love because it is based on mutuality, reciprocity, and cooperation—with the purpose of promoting overall well-being.”  That’s how the Quakers have always understood it, which is why they officially called themselves The Society of Friends.

Agape is the word for love that’s used most frequently in the New Testament, but there are moments when philia comes into the text to give love a meaning that is broader and deeper.  Jesus brings agape and philia together in John 15:13 when he says, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”  No one has greater agapethan to lay down one’s life for one’s philon—those friends who are loved with the deep bond of philia.  He goes on to say, “You are my friends (philia/philon) if you do what I command you.”  And what did Jesus command?—that we should love one another with agape love as he has loved us.  

So how do we love—how do we obey the command to love?  Well to start with, it helps to realize that the kind of love Jesus commands doesn’t have to involve any warm, fuzzy emotions.  You can decide that you will unconditionally envision and work for goodness for others without expecting anything to come back to you.  You can decide to love with agape.  That’s the starting point.

But agape can be a poor kind of love if it doesn’t bloom into something more than just a decision.  If it remains simply a decisional kind of love, it can become rote, individualistic, non-mutual, and even task-oriented.  Yes, agape is patient and kind, it is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude, it does not insist on its own way, it rejoices in truth, it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things, and does not quit—agape has all those qualities that St. Paul pointed out to the Corinthians.  But agape can be all that and a bag of chips and still not be warm enough to bloom into a real relationship.  And God is always inviting and nudging us into relationships.  Love, complete and healthy love at work in a community of faith, starts with a good base of agape, but mixes in a good dose of philia, friendship, and even a dash of eros, to keep us longing for God, for each other, and for the beauty of our relationships.

From the beginning of creation, God has been pouring love into the universe and calling us into relationship.  Love is the force that brings quantum waves together to form hydrogen atoms and then brings hydrogen atoms together to form stars.  Love is the force that drives evolution, overcoming entropy to continually transform biological life into higher, more complex, more aware forms of life—forms capable of loving.  Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “If there were no internal propensity to unite, even at a prodigiously rudimentary level — indeed in the molecule itself — it would be physically impossible for love to appear higher up, with us, in hominized form. . . . Driven by the forces of love, the fragments of the world seek each other so that the world may come into being.”

Love is the motive of creation and the engine of evolution.

We are commanded to love because it is intentional love that identifies us as followers of Jesus, but even more importantly, because love is what God has been using throughout all time to shape and transform the whole of creation.  When we reflect love back to God and to each other in meaningful and tangible ways, we are participating in God’s formative and transformative work.  

Teilhard de Chardin also said, “The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love.  And on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, humanity will have discovered fire.”

Love is patient and kind.  Love does bear all things and believe all things and hope all things, and endure all things.  But love goes beyond that.  Love, real love, becomes action.  

Love joins the picket lines and protests to stand against injustice and to protect the rights of those whose rights are being violated.  Love speaks for those who have been silenced.  Love writes letters to senators and representatives urging them to protect medical care and food programs for the people who rely on those services to survive.   Love rescues.  Love saves.  Love speaks truth to power.  

Love puts gas in the car and leaves the keys in the ignition so that beloved strangers can escape to a new life.  Love promises there will be peace.  

May the Spirit ignite in all of us the bright flame of God’s transforming and saving love in the name of Jesus.

[1] Mark 12:28-34; Matthew 22:36-40; Luke 10:25-28

[2] Matthew 5:43

[3] Luke 6:27

[4] Edward Collins Vacek, Love, Human and Divine: The Heat of Christian Ethics, 1994, pp. 157-158; as quoted by Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, Orbis Books, 2013, p.42