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To Know By Heart

Steve Beckham 3 Comments

John 10:11-18

You are one of a kind.  Even if you have an identical twin there is a lot about you that is unique.  Your fingerprints are unique, of course, but did you know that your toeprints are, too?  Your voiceprint is also unique and can be used to identify you.  The patterns in the irises of your eyes are yours and yours alone, and so are the patterns of the blood vessels in your retinas.  Your gait when you walk is uniquely yours and can be used to pick you out from a crowd.  You can be singled out from a multitude of other people online by patterns in the way you type on your keyboard or move your mouse, a little trick that’s been used, apparently, in espionage.  But here’s a new one—at least it was new to me.  Did you know you have a distinctive cardiac signature?   That’s right.  Your heart beats in a way that is unique to you and can’t be disguised.  The Pentagon has recently developed a laser-based tool called Jetson that can read your cardiac signature through your clothes from 200 meters away.  So now if somebody says they know your heart you might want to ask exactly what they mean by that.

“I know my own and my own know me,” said Jesus, “just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.”   Jesus knows your heart, although clearly not in the same way that the Pentagon’s invasive new toy does.  More importantly, though, we know the heart of Jesus.  We know he loves us and he cares for us enough to lay down his life for us.

Jesus calls himself the Good Shepherd.  I wonder how many of us really understand what he means by that.  I think what comes to mind for a lot of us when we hear “Good Shepherd” is a kind of greeting card image or something from a stained glass window.  We picture Jesus looking pristine in a white robe with a gentle, pure white lamb draped across his shoulders.  Gentle Jesus, meek and mild.  But that image is a far cry from what the people listening to Jesus on that long-ago day in Jerusalem would have been picturing when Jesus described himself as the Good Shepherd.

When Jesus was talking to people two thousand years ago in Galilee and Judea, he used metaphors that were part of their everyday lives.  Many of these metaphors also echoed their scriptures and history.  That’s one of the things that made him such an effective teacher, but it also made him controversial sometimes.  

Even people who had never been outside of Jerusalem’s walls knew about shepherds.  They were a common sight.  They had all seen shepherds bringing sheep into the city for the markets and for sacrifices in the temple.  

The Shepherd was also an image from their faith heritage.  Joseph, one of the 12 sons of Jacob, had been a shepherd.  Jacob worked as a shepherd for Laban so he could marry Rachel and Leah who had also tended sheep.  Zipporah, the wife of Moses, had tended flocks with her sisters.  Moses tended sheep before God called him to lead his people out of Egypt.  King David started out as a shepherd.  

The prophets spoke of the kings and religious leaders or Israel as shepherds—sometimes good, but sometimes not so much.  The prophet Jeremiah wasn’t pulling any punches when he wrote, “Woe to the shepherds who destroy and scatter the sheep of my pasture! says the Lord.  Therefore thus says the LORD, the God of Israel, concerning the shepherds who shepherd my people: It is you who have scattered my flock and have driven them away, and you have not attended to them. So I will attend to you for your evil doings, says the LORD.”

God was regarded as the ultimate shepherd and, through the prophets, often spoke of the people of Israel as “my flock.”   In Psalm 80, the Psalmist cries out, “Give ear, O Shepherd of Israel, you who lead Joseph like a flock! You who are enthroned upon the cherubim, shine forth!”  And, of course, there is Psalm 23 where David sings of his reliance on God with the words, “The Lord is my shepherd.”

When Jesus called himself the Good Shepherd, it brought a particular image to mind for those listening to him, but it wasn’t stained glass and greeting cards.  There was nothing particularly pristine in their picture of a shepherd.  They knew that shepherding was a very physical, dirty, and smelly job.  But they also knew that good shepherds were strong and  brave and tough when they had to be to protect the sheep.  When David was still young, he told  King Saul that he was tough enough to take on Goliath because, as a shepherd in the field, he had already killed a bear and a lion.  

At night, when a shepherd would bring the sheep in from the pasture into the safety of the fold, he would recline across the opening of the sheepfold, making his own body the gate of the sheep pen, a barrier between the sheep and any predators or thieves, so that anything or anyone that tried to get at the sheep would have to do it across his body.

Often several shepherds would bring multiple flocks into a large sheepfold for the night.  When it was time to lead them out again to pasture in the morning, each shepherd would simply start calling out to their sheep with a call that was familiar to their own flock.  Each flock knew their own shepherd’s distinct voice and would follow him and only him out to pasture.  So again, when Jesus says, “My sheep know my voice,” he is using a metaphor that’s familiar to all his listeners.  

So why is Jesus using this powerful image in that time and place?  He’s in the precincts of the temple.  He is already in hot water for healing on the sabbath, bringing sight to a man born blind.  This is all happening during the Feast of the Dedication, Hannukah, the feast that commemorates the rededication of the temple after the victory of the uprising led by Judas Maccabeus over Antiochus Epiphanes in 164 BCE.  Judas Maccabeus was a national hero, someone whom the Jews thought of, historically, as a good shepherd.  The temple was the place that more than any other symbolized the people’s covenant relationship with God.  So with all that as background, the Pharisees and temple authorities are listening to Jesus very carefully.  And what Jesus says is, to their ears, very provocative.

“I am the Good Shepherd,” says Jesus.  Just what is he saying?  Is he comparing himself to Moses?  To David? To Judas Maccabeus? Was he comparing himself to their great prophets and kings, the revered political and military leaders or the past, the heroes who had freed them from their oppressors and enemies? 

Was Jesus equating himself with God, the ultimate Good Shepherd?   Just what did he mean when he said, “I am the Good Shepherd.” They had to be wondering.  

And then he said this: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd.”  Who was he talking about?  Could he be talking about gentiles?  Was he talking about bringing them into the covenant?  Into the temple?  This was both unsettling and provocative to the Pharisees and temple authorities.

Who would those other sheep be for us today?  Who are those who are “not of this sheepfold”—or not of this church, maybe?—who Jesus intends to bring into the flock?

“There will be one flock,” said Jesus.  One flock.  One shepherd.  None of the artificial distinctions we’re so fond of making.  No us.  No them.  The Good Shepherd has gone outside the sheepfold to call in all the sheep who know his voice.  All of them.  All of us.  Are we ready to be one big happy flock with sheep we don’t know? Even if some of them have different kinds of wool?  One flock.  One shepherd.

“I know my own and my own know me.”   I wonder about that statement.  Is it always that straightforward?  Especially the second part—“my own know me”?  The other day I saw a video on Facebook that made me really think about what happens when the sheep don’t really know the shepherd, when they’re not really attuned to the shepherd’s voice.  

The video was shot by a man who was taking a nice leisurely hike through a forest in France.  As he came around a bend in the trail he saw a woman in red shorts jogging toward him and behind her was a fairly sizable flock of sheep.  When she got up to the man, who captured all this on his phone, she stopped to talk to him and the sheep came to a full stop behind her.  He asked her if she always led her sheep through the forest and she told him that they were, in fact, not her sheep.  These sheep had all just been milling around near the beginning of the trail and when she jogged by them, they all just turned and began jogging along right behind her.  When she stopped, they stopped.  When she ran, they ran.  When she finished explaining this to the man, she started jogging back down the trail and the sheep swept past him, the whole flock, running along behind the woman they had mistaken for their shepherd. 

“I know my own and my own know me.”  We think we know our Shepherd, but sometimes we make mistakes.  Sometimes we go jogging off behind other shepherds.  

I know I’ve sometimes been misled into following other voices.  It’s easy to follow the voice of politics or partisanship or moralism or prestige or money.  It’s easy to get caught up by voices that try to flock us together around national or racial or cultural or generational or religious identity.  

It’s easy to follow someone who looks like they know where they’re going or sounds like they know what they’re doing.  It’s easy to be misled out into a forest  full of unseen dangers.  

It’s easy, sometimes, to think you’re following the Good Shepherd when it’s actually someone else mimicking his voice or borrowing his name for their own purposes.  We all saw those “Jesus” signs at the January 6th Capitol Insurrection.  I’m pretty sure that wasn’t really the Good Shepherd inspiring that activity.  We’ve all seen politicians standing in front of churches or holding up Bibles to buttress their authority or polish their image

“My own know me,” said Jesus.  Well, with practice, yes.  I think that’s our never-ending homework—to keep listening, to keep learning to hear the voice of the Good Shepherd in a world that so noisy with other voices, to discern the voice of Christ above all the pretenders and the racket and the misguided or misleading “shepherds” that try to distract us.  

“My own know me.”  Maybe Jesus states this so positively, so affirmatively, so that we have to take it as a goal and not make a liar out of him.  “My own know me.”  Okay, Jesus.  I will do everything I can to make that’s true, to make sure I know you.  

But that first part—that part where Jesus says “I know my own,” –-that’s where the good news is for us.  Even when we have wandered off through the forest following the wrong voice or our own stubborn inclinations, Jesus still knows us. Jesus still says to us, You belong to me.  You are mine.  I know you.  I know your going out and your coming in.  I know your fingerprints and your toeprints and the pattern of your irises.  I know your heart.  I have your cardiac signature.  You are mine.

There will be one flock.  One shepherd…who knows the heart of each and every one of us.  A Shepherd who has laid down his life for us.  That’s the Shepherd we can follow.  That’s the voice we can trust. 

Something to Chew On

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

3rd Sunday of Easter

Every year there are certain things we look for in the early Spring, certain signs that tell us we are entering the season of Easter.  There may or may not be one last big snowfall in the mountains.  We may or may not get soaked by El Niño rains.  The dandelions may or may not suddenly show up in our front lawns and the lilies may or may not bloom in time for our Easter morning services.  But one thing you can absolutely count on as Easter approaches is that there will be a rash of articles showing up in our newspapers, our magazines and on social media debating whether or not Jesus actually rose from the dead.

In 1999, Marcus Borg and N.T. Wright collaborated on a book called The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions.  In an Easter season interview that same year with National Public Radio’s Chris Roberts, the two well-respected scholars summarized their very different understandings of the Resurrection.  

Marcus Borg said, “I do believe in the Resurrection of Jesus. I’m just skeptical that it involved anything happening to his corpse… The truth of Easter really has nothing to do with whether the tomb was empty on a particular morning 2,000 years ago or whether anything happened to the corpse of Jesus. I see the truth of Easter as grounded in the Christian experience of Jesus as a living spiritual reality of the present.”

N.T. Wright responded by saying, “When [the early followers of Jesus] believed in Resurrection, they were talking about what we would call some kind of embodiment. A disembodied Resurrection is a contradiction in terms…We can be completely confident on Easter day that the things we’re saying in church are true. For the very good reason that, historically speaking, it’s actually impossible to explain the rise of early Christianity without it.” [1]

I have to tell you that I really resonate with what Borg says about the truth of Easter being grounded in the Christian experience of Jesus as a living spiritual reality of the present.  Yes.  That should be the Easter experience we carry with us every single day—Jesus as a living spiritual reality alive in our own physical bodies.  

But when all is said and done, I think that Wright is right.  We must explain why the earliest Christians believed in Jesus Christ’s bodily Resurrection and risked hostility and danger to rapidly spread the message that he had been raised from the dead and appeared to them in person.  

People have had doubts about the Resurrection of Jesus from the very beginning, and one of the things I really appreciate about the New Testament is that these early witnesses to the Resurrection take those doubts seriously and meet them head on.  

The original ending of the Gospel of Mark, the earliest of the gospels written sometime around 69 or 70 C.E. during the height of the Jewish rebellion against Rome, plays on that doubt.  The gospel ends with the women finding the tomb empty except for a young stranger clothed in white who tells them that Jesus is risen and that they are to meet him in Galilee.  They run away terrified, which leaves the reader hanging, but also leaves us with the implied message that the risen Christ is out there in the world and we need to go find him. (16:8)

The Gospel of Matthew ends with the disciples doubting even as Jesus gives them the Great Commission.  In Matthew 28:16-17 we read, “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them.  When they saw him, they worshiped him, but they doubted.” 

In the Gospel of Luke when the risen Jesus appears suddenly in the midst of the disciples in the upper room, they believe they are seeing a ghost, so Jesus says to them, “’Why are you frightened, and why do doubts arise in your hearts?  Look at my hands and my feet; see that it is I myself. Touch me and see, for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have.’  And when he had said this, he showed them his hands and his feet.  Yet for all their joy they were still disbelieving and wondering.”  To prove he is really physically, bodily there, he asks for something to eat.  Because ghosts don’t eat.

The Gospel of John, of course, gives us the story of Thomas who refuses to believe that Jesus is risen until he sees him with his own eyes and touches him with his own hands.  Thomas has become a paradigm for reasonable doubt but also for confession of the faith.  He is the one who first bows down before Jesus and says, “My Lord and my God.”

But the very earliest testimony to the Resurrection comes from the Apostle Paul, and he, too, directly addresses those who doubt.  In 1 Corinthians 15, written about 15 years before the Gospel of Mark, Paul wrote: “I handed on to you as of first importance what I in turn had received: that Christ died because of our sins . . . and that he was buried and that he was raised on the third day . . .  and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.  Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers and sisters at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.  Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unfit to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God.” 

Paul testified to his own encounter with the risen Jesus, and to the experience of a surprising number of others.  It’s almost as if he is saying, “If you don’t believe me, fine.  There are lots of others who have seen him, too.  Go ask one of them.”  

Paul goes on to speak to the doubt that some in Corinth are experiencing when he writes, “Now if Christ is proclaimed as raised from the dead, how can some of you say there is no resurrection of the dead?  If there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised,  and if Christ has not been raised, then our proclamation is in vain and your faith is in vain.  We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified of God that he raised Christ . . . If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are of all people most to be pitied.  But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep.”

N.T. Wright wrote, “In the New Testament Gospels’ depiction, the risen Jesus was no ghost, disembodied spirit or vision. Jesus did not have a merely resuscitated corpse but a body with uncanny new properties, yet a physical body nonetheless.”

In that resurrected body, which was the same but not quite the same as the body he died in, Jesus cooked fish on the beach for his friends.  He left footprints on the dusty road to Emmaus as he walked, unrecognized, beside his friends and opened their minds to understand the scriptures so that they could see that everything that had happened to him was in perfect continuity with what God had been doing all along.  They recognized him when he broke bread with his wounded hands.

In his resurrected body with uncanny new properties, he appeared behind locked doors and offered his wounds for inspection.  He ate a piece of broiled fish to prove he wasn’t a ghost, and in so doing, as Debi Thomas wrote, he turned their trauma into communion.

We need the Resurrection.  We need an embodied Jesus because we are embodied.  I love how Debi Thomas expressed this:  

“I know that it might be unfashionable to ‘need’ the resurrection.  Isn’t this the criticism so often leveled at Christians?  That our faith is a crutch, an opiate, a refusal to face the harsher aspects of reality?  But here, too, I will bear witness and insist that I need Jesus’s bodily resurrection precisely because I, too, am embodied.  As the ancient Psalmists and prophets so beautifully describe it, my spiritual life is inseparable from my physical one: my heart melts like wax, my throat grows parched, my bones go out of joint, my tears cover my pillow, and my groans, sighs, and moans reach wordlessly for God.  Every experience I have of the holy is grounded in my body.

“And so I need a Savior with a body like mine — a body that adores, worships, and celebrates, but also a body that fails, ages, aches, breaks, and dies.  A body that carries wounds and scars, visible and invisible, fresh and faded.  A body that is profoundly and often terrifyingly vulnerable to forces beyond my ability to mitigate or control.  A body that is, for the most part, defenseless against injury, violence, illness, injustice, and cruelty.  A body that might die — as Jesus himself died — too soon, out of season, away from loved ones, in random, inexplicable, cruelly traumatic circumstances too frightening to contemplate.  I need a God who resurrects bodies.”[2] 

I know I need Resurrection.  Ten years ago when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer I found myself confronting my mortality, especially since both my mom and my dad died of cancer.  My surgeon assured me that my chances of coming through the surgery and radiation were probably good.  Don’t you love the language doctors use once the “C” word has been spoken?  You hear the word “probably” a lot.  The point is, once the word “Cancer” has been spoken, it sharpens your focus.  Things that had been theoretical either become the life raft you cling to or they get discarded.  I realized during that time that, while I’m willing to entertain and discuss all kinds of ideas and theories about Resurrection, for me personally a psychological or philosophical understanding isn’t enough to carry the weight of my hopes and fears.  I need something with some bones in it, some skin on it.  And I’m not alone in that.

I have seen a lot of death in my decades as a pastor.  I have accompanied people up to death’s door and held their hand as they crossed the threshold.  Resurrection is what has given many of them the courage to walk peacefully and fearlessly through that door.  And Resurrection is what has given me the courage and confidence to walk through the valley of the shadow with them.

And that’s the point.  Resurrection gave the earliest followers of Jesus the courage to risk hostility and danger so they could carry on his work of proclaiming that there was a better way to live, a better way to be community, a way to live in the commonwealth of God’s kindness and justice.

Jesus was a real physical person who was tortured to death in a first-century lynching.  The state and the religious authorities colluded to crucify him, to physically destroy him and in so doing to destroy his opposition to their power.  His crucifixion was a political statement.  What they failed to see and understand, though, was that in Jesus there was a power and authority that dwarfed any power or authority they imagined they had over him.

For that reason,  nothing less than a bodily resurrection would do to nullify their violence and call their power into question.  It was his physical body they killed.  It would have to be his physical body that would proclaim their work undone.  

The resurrection of Jesus was God’s way of saying that violence will not have the last word.  Pain will not have the last word.  Fear will not have the last word.  Anger will not have the last word. Disease will not have the last word.  Suffering will not have the last word.  Death will not have the last word.

The Resurrection of Jesus was God’s way of saying that love, grace, forgiveness, kindness, hope and faith—these things will have the last word.  

The resurrection was God affirming that Life will have the last word.  

And will be the last word. 

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

[1] The Resurrection of Jesus; Religion and Ethics Newsweekly; NPR/PBS, March 26, 1999

[2] Embodied; Debi Thomas, http://www.journeywithjesus.net; April 11, 2021

The Final Truth

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

John 12:20-33

As some of you know, I used to be a musician.  But I don’t listen to music anymore.  I can’t, really, since I have lost so much of my hearing. Music just doesn’t sound the same to me, and it’s frustrating because I know what it’s supposed to sound like.  So I don’t listen to music anymore.  Except in my memory.  

I do have a very good memory for music, and I can still hear a lot of pieces quite well in my mind’s ear, so to speak.  And in my dreams.  I dream in music a lot.  Sometimes in my dreams I hear pieces I wrote.  Sometimes I compose new pieces.  And quite often in my dreams I hear favorite pieces that have been part of the soundtrack of my life.  When that happens, I usually figure that it’s a kind of message from me to me, something my subconscious wants to tell me or remind me of.  Or… it could be the Holy Spirit.  Just saying.

The other morning, as I was still in that lovely place between sleeping and waking—you know, that place where you’re no longer fully asleep but you’re not really awake yet either—while I was still in that dreamy place, my mental mixtape began to play the song Nightingale by Judy Collins, a song that has always had a special place in my heart.  Joshua Rifkin’s orchestration of that song and Judy Collins’ voice are simply exquisite.  But her lyrics—her lyrics in that song are nothing short of profound.

Jacob’s heart bent with fear,

Like a bow with death for its arrow;

In vain he searched for the final truth

To set his soul free of doubt.

Over the mountains he walked,

With his head bent searching for reasons;

Then he called out to God

For help and climbed to the top of a hill.

Wind swept the sunlight through the wheat fields,

In the orchard the nightingale sang,

While the plums that she broke with her brown beak

Tomorrow would turn into songs.

Then she flew up through the rain

With the sun silver bright on her feathers.

Jacob put back his frowns and sighed and walked

Back down the hill.

God doesn’t answer me and

He never will.

As I lay there in bed, slowly waking up while the words and music of Nightingale faded, I thought about how often we are like poor Jacob in that song, our hearts bent with fear, searching in vain for some final truth that will set our souls free of doubt. 

I thought of how often, like Jacob, we walk across the beauty of God’s creation with our heads bent down as we search for some kind of enlightenment in the dark recesses of our own reasoning. 

Or maybe on our phones.  

I imagined Jacob calling out to God for help as he climbed to the top of the hill.  I thought of him watching the wind sweep the sunlight through the wheat fields, how he heard the nightingale sing from the orchard then watched as she flew up through the rain with the sun silver bright on her feathers.  

Lying in my bed, half awake, I thought about how Jacob, in the song, saw and heard all that beauty… and utterly failed to see or hear God’s presence, the answer to his prayer, the final truth that could set his soul free of doubt.

And as I rested in the gentle beauty of that music and the powerful imagery of those lyrics, I suddenly found myself thinking about those Greeks in the Gospel of John who wanted to see Jesus.

Now among those who went up to worship at the festival were some Greeks. They came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and said to him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.”  (John 12:20-21)

We don’t really know anything about the Greeks who made this request.  Were they Greek proselytes preparing to convert to Judaism?  Were they tourists who had come to see the temple?  After all, it was one of the wonders of the world at that time, and what better time to see it than during one of Israel’s most important festivals?  Had they heard that Jesus could work miracles and were maybe hoping to see one for themselves?  Were they interested in becoming disciples?  

Those are all possibilities, but I can’t help but think that maybe they wanted to have some kind of philosophical discussion with Jesus.  Greeks, after all, had a reputation of being philosophical by nature.  As St. Paul noted in 1 Corinthians, “Jews ask for signs and Greeks desire wisdom.”  So maybe that’s what they were looking for.  Maybe they wanted some time with Jesus the teacher of wisdom.  Maybe they were looking for the final truth to set their souls free of doubt.

We don’t really know anything about these Greeks or their motives.  But we surely can understand their request: We would like to see Jesus.  

I would like to see Jesus. Wouldn’t you?  Oh, I know I see him all the time in a Matthew 25 kind of way.  I see him in people in need.  I see him in people enduring injustice.  I see him in people pushed to the margins.  I see him in people whose lives are disrupted by religion or politics or violence or war or the economics of greed.  I see him.  

I do.  

And I see him in a 1 Corinthians 12, Body-of-Christ kind of  way, too.  I see him in the kindness of friends and strangers.  I see him in the ways we support each other and lift each other up and work together to dial up the love and grace and dial down the anger and fear and hate.  

I see Jesus in you.  

I see Jesus in you and that keeps me going.

But sometimes I would like to see Jesus the way Philip and Andrew saw him.  Face to face.  Wouldn’t you?

A few years ago, on the website Journey with Jesus, Debi Thomas wrote,  “I know what it’s like to want Jesus in earnest — to want his presence, his guidance, his example, and his companionship.  I know what it’s like to want — not him, but things from him: safety, health, immunity, ease.  I know what it’s like to want a confrontation — a no-holds-barred opportunity to express my disappointment, my sorrow, my anger, and my bewilderment at who Jesus is compared to who I want him to be.”[1]  

It stings to read that, but it’s so honest.  “I know what it’s like to want—not him, but things from him.”  It makes me think of that African American spiritual we sing sometimes, I Want Jesus to Walk With Me.  “I want Jesus to walk with me; all along my pilgrim journey, Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me;  In my trials, Lord, walk with me; when my heart is almost breaking, Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me;  When I’m in trouble, Lord, walk with me; when my head is bowed in sorrow, Lord, I want Jesus to walk with me.”

I want to see Jesus.  I want Jesus to walk with me.  But am I ready to walk with him? That, right there, is a pivot point of spiritual growth.  Why do I want to see Jesus?  How do I want to see Jesus?  Do I want to see Jesus because I want something from him?  Do I want to see Jesus because my faith is wavering?  Do I want Jesus to tell me some final truth to set my soul free from doubt?

Am I willing to let Jesus be the final truth that sets my soul free of doubt?

Do I want to see Jesus because I want to surrender to him?  Do I want to see Jesus so I can follow him and serve him?  

Those are the kinds of questions we need to ask ourselves when we feel that powerful yearning to see Jesus.  And let’s be clear.  There are no wrong answers here… except dishonest answers.  

We don’t know why those Greeks at the Festival wanted to see Jesus.  What we do know is that as soon as Philip and Andrew came to Jesus with their request, Jesus began to talk about the cost of discipleship and about his own coming death.  

We might be singing “I want Jesus to walk with me,” but Jesus responds with, “Fine.  Walk with me. But this is where I’m going. You might not like it.”

When Peter and Andrew told Jesus that the Greek visitors wanted to meet him, Jesus answered, “Time’s up. The time has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.’”[2]  That’s how Eugene Peterson paraphrased it in The Message Bible.  Time’s up. 

The time for sightseeing is over.  The time for spectator discipleship is over.  Now the Human One will be glorified.  Glorified.  As in martyred.  As in putting the cost of God’s love on full display.

“Listen carefully,” he says. “Unless a grain of wheat is buried in the ground, dead to the world, it is never any more than a grain of wheat. But if it is buried, it sprouts and reproduces itself many times over.  In the same way, anyone who holds on to life just as it is destroys that life. But if you let it go, reckless in your love, you’ll have it forever, real and eternal.”[3]  

Jesus is telling his disciples, then and now, a message that disciples are always reluctant to hear.  If you cling to your life just the way it is, you will destroy it.  If you loosen your grip on life as you know it, if you let go of it in reckless love, you’ll have it forever.  

Reckless love.  Reckless love of God.  Reckless love of yourself.  Reckless love of others.  Reckless love is eternal.  Reckless love is the final truth.  

“If any of you wants to serve me, then follow me,” said Jesus. 

We would like to see Jesus.  But do we want to see him so we can serve him?  Do we want to see him so we can learn to be better followers?  Are we willing to be buried…like seeds…so we can grow into something more amazing than we can even begin to imagine?  

The language that Jesus uses here as he talks to the Greek visitors and his disciples and the crowd and us is all imagery and metaphor. The time has come to be glorified. When a seed is planted.  When I am lifted up.  But all that poetic language is euphemism for the horrifying reality of the cross.  Are we willing to go there to see Jesus?

Beginning next Sunday we will observe again the events of Holy Week, a week that builds to the brutal torture and crucifixion of Jesus on Good Friday.  Attendance at worship on Good Friday is always low.  We want to see Jesus…but we don’t want to see Jesus on the cross.  We don’t want to see Jesus die, especially not in such an ugly, helpless, bloody and brutal way.

We don’t want to see Jesus willingly take on the hatred, the contempt, the violence, even the sheer indifference of this world—taking it all into his own body.  We want to see Jesus, but we don’t want to see Jesus there.  Like that.  

We want to see Jesus in a hundred other ways—muscular super-hero Jesus, miracle-worker Jesus, wisdom Jesus, justice radical Jesus (my personal favorite), social worker Jesus, American Jesus wrapped in a flag.  But Jesus on the cross?

That’s where reckless love takes Jesus.  That’s what he is saying in all that poetic language.  The seed will be buried and dead to the world.

If we want to see Jesus, really see Jesus, we need to look to the cross… because that’s where, in reckless love, he opens his heart and his arms to you.  

And me.  

And the whole world.  

And that’s the final truth.

[1] Debi Thomas, Journey With Jesus, 14 March 2021

[2] The Message, John 12:23

[3] The Message, John 12:24-25

[4] The Message, John 12:26

Pardon Our Disruption

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14-21

Such an intriguing story in the Book of Numbers.  The people of Israel are on the road between Mt. Hor and the Gulf of Aqaba.  They’re complaining.  Again.  This time they’re not happy with the food.  It’s always something.  Anyway, the people grumbled, so the Lord sent poisonous snakes among them, and many Israelites were bitten and died.  That’s how the Israelites tell the story.

Nobody ever tells the story from the snakes’ point of view.  I mean, look at it from their perspective. They were all just slithering around, minding their own snaky business in Snake Land when suddenly the whole nation of Israel showed up with all their arguments, grumbling and complaints and pitched camp right on top of them, driving tent pegs down into their dens, breaking their eggs, chasing them with sticks, throwing rocks at them, hacking at them with swords… So yeah, they bit a few of them.  They were just trying to defend themselves.  They weren’t trying to kill anybody.  Why would they?  The Israelites were too big to eat…at least for those kinds of snakes.  

The text tells us that Moses prayed to the Lord to make the snakes go away.  But maybe the leader of the snakes also prayed to the Lord to make the people go away.  Maybe the leader of the snakes suggested that the Lord could tell Moses to put a big bronze snake up on a pole to remind the people that they were in snake territory, and that the snakes were there first thank you very much, so they should be careful where they were poking around and pitching their tents.  

Well, that’s not the way we get the story in the Book of Numbers, but then snakes never were any good at public relations, and they don’t come off too well in the Bible as a rule.  Still, it’s interesting that in this particular instance, even in the Moses version of the story, God is using the snakes to accomplish God’s business and that includes healing cranky, ungrateful people from snakebite… which they wouldn’t have got bit in the first place if they hadn’t been cranky and ungrateful and gone poking about looking for something else to eat when there wasn’t anything kosher out there to begin with.

So, the moral of that story is be grateful for what you have, even if you’re a little tired of it.  And leave the snakes alone.  

Many, many, many, many, many years later, this story would come up again when Jesus sat down one night with a Pharisee named Nicodemus.  Jesus was trying to help Nicodemus understand some very basic things about living in the love of God.  This was difficult for Nicodemus because he was a very smart and knowledgeable person.  A teacher, in fact.  He knew the sacred writings of Israel backwards and forwards and upside down, but the things Jesus was saying mystified him.  He had a lot to unlearn.  The way he understood things got in the way of him comprehending things…if you know what I mean.  

Jesus was trying to help Nicodemus learn how to see and enter and experience the kingdom of God.  The Commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness.  Nicodemus was trying hard to get his head around it, but what he really needed to do was to put his whole heart into it.  

Nicodemus needed another pathway into the mystery.

“It’s like this,” said Jesus.  “Remember when Moses lifted up that bronze snake in the wilderness?  It’s like that, Nicodemus.  The Human One will also be lifted up.  And in the same way that people were healed when they looked to that bronze snake gleaming in the sun, they’ll be healed when they look to the Human One, only they’ll be healed of something much more deadly than snake venom.

“Have you ever wondered, Nicodemus, what kind of magic was at work in that bronze snake on that pole in the desert.  It was a powerful magic, stronger than any other kind of magic.  When people looked at that snake on the pole, the light flashing off of it pierced their hearts and reminded them that they had complained against Moses and against God.  They had been in a desert, in a land of no food and no water, and God had provided for them!  But they were ungrateful.  There was poison in their hearts and it came out in their words.  The snakes biting them was a kind of metaphor for the way they had been treating each other.  And Moses.  And God.

“When they looked at that bronze snake glinting in the desert sun, they could see a very unflattering image of themselves.  They could taste the bitterness of their ingratitude and the venom of their complaining.  It made them stop and think.  It made them remember all the ways that God had been taking care of them.  They repented.  And they were healed, because they also saw that God loved them enough to put up with them long enough to transform them.  They could stop being snakes, metaphorical or otherwise.  The magic, the power that flowed from that snake on the pole was God’s forgiveness and God’s love and God’s vision of a better way to be. 

“But people forget, Nicodemus.  The lessons they’ve learned don’t always carry over from one generation to the next even when they’re written down and kept in the book of memories. 

“And now the whole world is snakebit, Nicodemus.  People believe they are walking always and everywhere under the dark night of God’s judgment.  They don’t see that they have been always and everywhere in the bright light of God’s love.  They’re perishing.  Their souls are dying because they can’t let themselves believe they are loved.

“Listen, Nicodemus.  God loves the world so much that God has given God’s unique Son so that whoever trusts and follows him won’t perish, won’t fade into an everlasting death and nothingness, but will instead live forever in the light of God’s love.  

“You think God is about judgment, Nicodemus?   I’ll tell you about judgment.  God wants to bring everyone and everything, even the snakes, into the light of God’s love.  But some don’t want to come.  Some want to stay in the dark.  Some want to keep living in the deep shadows of hatred and fear, and us versus them.  Some have a greedy hunger in them that wouldn’t be satisfied if they swallowed the whole world.  Some think they are the whole world and don’t have room in their hearts for anyone or anything else.  They think they’re all that and a bag of chips.  Some, Nicodemus, many really, want to keep judging others, because it’s the only way they can make themselves feel like they have any value, so they just keep living in the shadow of judgment…and the shadow of their own fears.

“But the Son of God is not here to judge, Nicodemus.  The Son is here to make people whole.  To save them from self-destruction.  To lead people out of the shadows.

“The world has forgotten how lovely it is, Nicodemus.  The Son of God has come to help the world remember, to relearn its beauty and its kindness.  

“The world has forgotten that when God created everything God said it was good.  All of it.  Everyone.  Even the snakes.

“The Son of God has come to help people remember Original Goodness.[1]

“When they see the Human One lifted up, Nicodemus, they will be reminded of all the ugly things that happen in a snakebit world.  They will be reminded of how the venom in their own hearts and souls can wound and kill.  And then they will remember they weren’t made that way.  Then they will see the love of God.  They will see that the Son came out of love, not out of need.  And the love of God will transform them.  They will step back into the light of God’s love.”

All of that is what Jesus was trying to get Nicodemus to  understand.  And us.  It’s what he would like us to understand, too.

When you think about it, all of this is about disruption. 

The Israelites disrupted the generally sleepy life of the snakes when they pitched camp in their territory. The snakes disrupted the grumbly and quarrelsome life of the Israelites when they started biting them.  God and Moses disrupted the poisonous dynamics of fear and dissatisfaction when they set up the snake on a pole.  Nicodemus disrupted Jesus’ quiet evening when he dropped by at night for a private interview.  In his conversation with Nicodemus, Jesus disrupted our understanding of theology and the scriptures, especially our understanding of how judgment works.  Or doesn’t.

God works through disruptions to transform things and people. 

Sometimes life is disrupted by things that are completely beyond our control.

March 10, is the anniversary of the Long Beach earthquake of 1933, a disruption that killed 115 to 120 people and caused an estimated $40 million in damage.  That would be more than $800 million today.  Two hundred thirty school buildings were either destroyed or declared unsafe for use.  Out of that disruption, though, came new standards for building safety, including specific codes for school buildings.  New methods of government assistance for disaster response and reconstruction were instituted, too, as people realized that these kinds of resources were needed when damage was too widespread or extensive to expect a city to be able to recover and rebuild on its own.  Essentially, we found new ways to take care of each other.  To love each other.

That disruption has faded into the history books, but there is another disruption that we’re all too aware of, one that is still disrupting our lives in some ways.  

Four years ago this previous week was our last week of “normal” life as our lives were disrupted by the devastating pandemic of Covid 19.

For more than a year we lived in isolation, unable to worship in church together, unable to gather in our sanctuaries.  Our buildings.  But we never stopped being church.  The disruption of the pandemic made being church more difficult in some ways, but it also transformed us in some important ways, too.  Like all disruptions, it taught us more about who we are and invited us to think about who we want to be, who we are called to be, as we move forward.

The Israelites weren’t the same people when they left the land of the snakes.  They complained less and were more grateful.  Life-as-usual had been disrupted.

Nicodemus wasn’t the same person when the sun rose the next morning as he was when he had sat down with Jesus in the dark of night before.  He had begun to understand both God’s love and God’s judgment differently.  Everything he knew, everything he understood had been disrupted. You might say he was being reborn.

We aren’t the same people we were four years ago.  All the patterns of our lives have been disrupted.  In a time when need and circumstances required us to stay physically apart you would think we would have made every effort to find ways to pull together, but all too often, as a nation at least, we let the polarity of our dysfunctional politics pull us farther apart.  We have seen the damage caused by the venom of our fears and anger.  But we have also heard the voice of Christ calling us together and helping us relearn our loveliness,  reminding us of our Original Goodness. 

We have seen the serpent lifted up in the desert.  But also the cross lifted at calvary.  Through earthquake or pandemic, climate disruption or politics…even snakes…  God’s love still flows to carry us through it all.  Together.  The only question is this: will we let ourselves be healed and transformed so we can build something new, or will we just keep biting each other?

In Jesus’ name.

[1] Genesis 1:31

Lifted UP in the Temple

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Before I begin, there is a translation difficulty I need to clarify.  In the Gospel of John, Jesus is often confronted or antagonized by a group identified as “the Jews.”  The Greek word here is Ioudaioi, and it refers to a particular group of self-appointed Judeans who saw themselves as the guardians of the temple, the Torah, and Jewish traditions.  It’s important to remember that almost every character in the Gospel of John, including and especially Jesus, is Jewish. When the writer of John uses “the Jews” to describe those who are challenging Jesus, we are not supposed to think this means the Jewish people as a whole; it is only this one pious and prickly group that is being referred to.   I hate it that this even needs to be said, but, unfortunately, we live in a time when anti-Semitism is once again on the rise and some have used these references to “the Jews” in the Gospel of John to feed their inexcusable bigotry and animosity.   The writer of John was a Jew.  The disciples were Jews.  Jesus was a Jew, and Jesus loved his people, the Jews—even those particular Ioudaioi who were a thorn in his side.

John 2:13         The Passover of the Jews was near, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.*  14 In the temple he found people selling cattle, sheep, and doves and the money changers seated at their tables.  15 Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, with the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables.  16 He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”*  17 His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”*  18 The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”*  19 Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”*  20 The Jews then said, “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years, and will you raise it up in three days?”  21 But he was speaking of the temple of his body.*  22 After he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he had said this, and they believed the scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.

The way you tell a story shapes the way people hear the story.  And that determines how they understand the story.  The way you tell a story also tells people how you understand the story.

If you Google the movie UP, here is how Google tells the story of UP:  “Carl Fredricksen, a 78-year-old balloon salesman, is about to fulfill a lifelong dream.  Tying thousands of balloons to his house, he flies away to the South American wilderness.  But curmudgeonly Carl’s worst nightmare comes true when he discovers a little boy named Russell is a stowaway aboard the balloon-powered house.  A Pixar animation.”

Now, there is nothing wrong or inaccurate in Google’s telling of the story of UP.  But if you’ve seen UP, you know that this is a woefully inadequate synopsis of a truly wonderful movie that will make you laugh and make you cry and in the process maybe even make you stop to think about what’s really important in life.   In Google’s telling of the story of UP there is no mention of the explorer Charles Muntz, Carl’s boyhood hero who later becomes his deadly nemesis.  There is no mention of Dug, the goofy, squirrel-obsessed, talking Golden Retriever, who bonds with Carl and Russell.  There is no mention of Kevin, the giant endangered bird that Muntz is trying to capture and that Carl and Russell are trying to save. Worst of all, in Google’s story of UP there is no mention of Ellie, Carl’s childhood sweetheart and wife, the love of his life whose death left him with broken dreams and a broken heart.

The whole movie begins with the love story of Carl and Ellie.  Their love is a motive force that drives the story, and even though Carl and Russell’s adventures begin long after Ellie has died, she continues to be a presence.  Even after she is gone, she is the gentle current of love in Carl’s heart that opens him to form new relationships with Russell and Dug and Kevin.  That is what the movie is really about.  When all is said and done, UP is a story about the transformative and healing power of love.  And if the only version of UP you ever encountered was Google’s synopsis, you wouldn’t get any of that.

The way you tell a story shapes the way people hear the story.  And that determines how they understand the story.  The way you tell the story also tells people how you understand the story.

So let’s look at the story of Jesus chasing the merchants out of the temple courtyard and overturning the tables of the money changers, a story that appears in all four gospels.  Mark, Matthew and Luke, the synoptic gospels, tell the story pretty much the same way, which isn’t surprising since the writers of Matthew and Luke were almost certainly working from copies of Mark.  But the Gospel of John tells the story of this event very differently from the other three gospels.  

In Matthew, Mark and Luke, the so-called cleansing of the temple takes place close to the end of the gospel during the last week of Jesus’ life, the week we now call Holy Week.   His explosive outburst in the temple courtyard is one of the things that motivates the temple authorities to arrest him and leads directly to his crucifixion.  John, however, places the cleansing of the temple close to the beginning of the gospel, almost at the very beginning of Jesus’ ministry, not at the end.

Why?  What different thing is John trying to do in this telling of the story of Jesus?  Where is John leading us?  What is John up to?  

It’s only in John that Jesus makes a whip out of cords to chase the animal sellers and moneychangers out of the temple.  In the synoptic gospels, no whip is mentioned.   Why?  Is John trying to give extra emphasis to just how angry Jesus was?  What’s up with that?

In Mark, Jesus justifies his actions by quoting Isaiah and Jeremiah.[1] “My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations, but you have made it a den of robbers.”  Matthew and Luke say almost exactly the same thing but leave out “for all the nations.”  In John, however, Jesus doesn’t say anything to justify his actions, he simply orders the sellers, “Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!”  Later, as his disciples reflect on this incident, they will find themselves thinking of Psalm 69: “Zeal for your house will consume me.”  Is that what the whip of cords was about?  

In the synoptic gospels the chief priests and scribes ask Jesus by what authority he is doing these things.  In John, the Ioudaioi ask him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”  And it is only in John that Jesus replies, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up. ”   In both Matthew and Mark when Jesus is on trial before the Sanhedrin he is accused of saying this, but only John reports Jesus actually saying it.

Let’s go back to the question of why John places the cleansing of the temple at the beginning of the gospel instead of at the end.  There is a clue in verse 18 when the Ioudaioi ask Jesus, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”   Their question becomes a literary device that sets the stage for all the signs that Jesus will perform throughout the rest of the gospel.

The first half of the Gospel of John is sometimes called the Book of Signs because within this first half, Jesus performs seven signs or miracles which demonstrate his power and indicate who he truly is.  In chapter 2 he turns water into wine.  In chapter 4 he heals a royal official’s son.   At the pool of Beth-zatha he heals a man who has been ill for 38 years.  He feeds five thousand, he walks on water, he heals a man born blind and, finally, he raises Lazarus from the dead, a miracle so powerful that it scares his enemies and makes them even more determined to kill him.  

“What sign will you show us?” they asked him.  Jesus answered, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”  That left them flabbergasted.  “This temple has been under construction for forty-six years,” they said, “and you’re going to raise it up in three days?”  

And this is where the narrator gives us a little hint about where all this is going:  “But he was speaking of the temple of his body.”

He was speaking of the temple of his body.  

The Greek manuscript for the Gospel of John uses two different words for temple in this story.  The first word is ieron which refers to the temple building and all its grounds. The second word is naos which means a shrine or sanctuary.  Naos is the word that was used to refer to the Holy of Holies in the inner court of the temple, the area sealed off by a great curtain where only the high priest could go and only on certain high holy days.  The naos was the area where God was supposed to dwell.  But Jesus speaks of his body as the naos, the shrine in which God dwells.  Destroy this naos, this shrine, and in three days I will raise it up again.

It’s helpful to remember that the Gospel of John was written long after the Jerusalem temple was destroyed by the Romans.  For the Jews living in exile after the destruction of Jerusalem—and that included the Jewish followers of Jesus in John’s community—one of the most pressing questions they faced was where and how should they worship God.  When there is no temple and no place to offer sacrifices, what do you do?  Where do you go?  Where and how do you come into the presence of God?

Here in the second chapter of John, Jesus answers that question.  God is not out there in heaven.  God is not shut up in a building or a holy place or hidden behind a curtain.  God is in you.  And in me.  As Karoline Lewis wrote, “The temple is no longer necessary (if it ever was).  We are to be the temple of God.  We are to embody God.  You are.  I am.  We are together.”  

When Jesus sat down with the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well, she wanted to talk about the proper place to worship.  “Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain,” she said, “but you all say that the place where people must worship is in Jerusalem.”  Jesus said to her, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when people will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem…  The hour is coming and is now here when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father seeks such as these to worship him.  God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.”

Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly reminds us that he embodies God.  In chapter 14 he says, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?  The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own; but the Father who dwells in me does his works.”  In chapter 17, as he prays for protection for his disciples, Jesus says, “I ask not only on behalf of these, but also on behalf of those who will believe in me through their word,  that they may all be one. As you, Father, are in me and I am in you, may they also be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.   The glory that you have given me I have given them, so that they may be one, as we are one,  I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me.”

“The glory that you have given me I have given them.”   The Greek word we translate as “glory” is doxa, which carries the sense of the Hebrew word kavod.   This is the word used to describe the weighty presence of God, the divine way of being.  Jesus has passed on this divine way of being to us so that we can be one with God and be God’s visible presence in the world.

Alice Walker captured this idea beautifully in The Color Purple in a letter that Celie writes to her sister Nettie where she tells Nettie about her conversations with Shug.  “Here’s the thing, say Shug. The thing I believe. God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. And sometimes it just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for… She say, Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church?  I never did.  I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show.  Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.  And I think all the other folks did too.  They come to church to share God, not find God.”

God is in you and God is in me and God is in us all together.  We are the temple.  God is spirit, and those who worship God must worship in spirit and truth.  You are a shrine.  God is in your heart and your mind and your soul and your body.  We bring God with us and when we share God, we are lifted UP to new heights and new adventures.  We are the balloons that lift the house and carry it to Paradise Falls. And remember, when all is said and done, this story we are part of, this story about God alive and at work in the world in us… it’s a love story.

[1] Isaiah 56:7; Jeremiah 7:11

image © Peter Koenig

The Big If

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

One of my first courses in seminary was an overview of Martin Luther’s life and writings taught by the late, great Dr. Timothy Lull.  

Luther frequently wrote or spoke about his battles with the devil so it was natural that we ended up in a lively discussion in class one morning about Luther’s understanding of evil and Satan.  During that discussion, one of my classmates asked, “Dr. Lull, do you believe in Satan.”  The room was suddenly silent as Dr. Lull paused and looked out the window, deep in thought.  Finally, he turned back to us and said, “No.  I don’t believe in Satan.  But let me explain.  Luther tells us that to say ‘I believe’ is the same as saying ‘I trust.’  I save the words ‘I believe’ for God.  I believe in God.  I trust God.  I would never trust anything opposed to God.  Now, if you want to ask me if I think there is a personal force or entity at work in the world that is bent on evil, a force or entity who is opposed to God and all that God is doing, a force or entity who seeks to undermine and destroy us and the rest of creation, well, I think a good argument could be made that such a force or entity does exist.  But I would never trust it.  I would never believe in it.”

Every year on the first Sunday in Lent, the gospel text is always about, or at least contains, the story of Jesus being tested by Satan in the wilderness.  Mark’s version of the testing of Jesus reads almost like an afterthought, sandwiched between Jesus’ baptism and the beginning of his revolutionary proclamation of the kingdom of God in Galilee.  Matthew and Luke, on the other hand, flesh out the  temptation of Jesus in great detail which includes dialogue between Jesus and Satan and the specific temptations Jesus faced and how he responded.

I suppose the idea behind this focus on temptation is that when we look again at how Jesus responded to temptation we are better prepared to acknowledge and wrestle with our own demons and temptations during this long 40-day season of getting our spiritual houses in order.  It also confronts us with an opportunity to give some serious thought to what we think about evil—what we think it is and how we think it works.

Evil is opportunistic and insidious, but it’s not stupid.  It plays on desires we already have even if we’re not fully aware of them.   It lures us with things that we think will make us whole in some way.  And it finds its opportunities by either prodding us to question our sense of self-worth or by pumping up our egos to inflate our sense of self-worth.

Eric Berne, the Canadian psychologist who created Transactional Analysis, had a theory that by age 5 most of us have developed a “core story” about who we are and our inherent worth.  For far too many people, that story is kind of shaky and not all that positive.  One of the gifts of baptism is that in baptism we are given a new core story.  We are given an identity to live up to, an identity that grounds us and sustains us. As we are immersed into the life and love of the triune God, we hear the same words proclaimed over us that the voice of God proclaimed to Jesus at his baptism:  this is my beloved child.  You are God’s beloved child.

Evil wants us to doubt our identity as children of God…or at least to not remember it or think about it.  When we forget that identity, evil can get a foothold in our psyches by eroding our sense of self.  The very first words the tempter says to Jesus in the wilderness are, “If you are the Son of God…”  That’s a very big “if” and it’s loaded with insinuations.  The tempter is trying to get Jesus to doubt his identity or, failing that, to make too much of it.

Martin Luther once shared in a sermon how his sense of self-worth was assailed as he lay awake in the middle of the night: 

“When I awoke last night, the Devil came and wanted to debate with me; he rebuked and reproached me, arguing that I was a sinner. To this I replied: Tell me something new, Devil! I already knew that perfectly well; I have committed many a solid and real sin. Indeed there must be good honest sins–not fabricated and invented ones–for God to forgive for His beloved Son’s sake, who took all my sins upon Him so that now the sins I have committed are no longer mine but belong to Christ.”[1]

In  Life of the Beloved: Spiritual Living in a Secular World, Henri Nouwen wrote: 

“Over the years, I have come to realize that the greatest trap in our life is not success, popularity, or power, but self-rejection. Success, popularity, and power can indeed present a great temptation, but their seductive quality often comes from the way they are part of the much larger temptation to self-rejection. When we have come to believe in the voices that call us worthless and unlovable, then success, popularity, and power are easily perceived as attractive solutions. The real trap, however, is self-rejection. As soon as someone accuses me or criticizes me, as soon as I am rejected, left alone, or abandoned, I find myself thinking, ‘Well, that proves once again that I am a nobody.’ … [My dark side says,] I am no good… I deserve to be pushed aside, forgotten, rejected, and abandoned. 

Self-rejection is the greatest enemy of the spiritual life because it contradicts the sacred voice that calls us the “Beloved.” Being the Beloved constitutes the core truth of our existence.” 

You are God’s beloved child.  

Is that how you understand the core of your existence?  Or are there voices in your life, maybe even internal voices, that don’t want you to believe that you are seen and loved by God?

The word devil comes from the Greek word diabolos which means “the slanderer.”  When the tempter says to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God…” there is a kind of slander in that little word “if.”  It’s the same slander that comes to us in the voice of our self-doubt.  We hear it saying things like, “You’re not really a child of God.  You’re not really much of anything, are you?”  When that kind of voice gets in our heads we start wanting to prove ourselves, especially if we can do so without really doing anything “wrong.”

The thing that’s so insidious about the temptations the devil lays before Jesus, the thing that’s so insidious about most temptations and a good deal of outright evil, is that these things often look like good things on the face of it.  In fact, evil is often a good thing done in the wrong way or at the wrong time or for the wrong reasons.

What’s wrong with turning stones into bread?  Wouldn’t that be a great way to feed the hungry?  But to do that, you would have to do violence to creation.  You would have to coerce the stone into becoming something other than what God made it to be, something of an entirely different nature.  And to do that, you would have to separate yourself from creation.  You would have to stand apart from creation so you can impose your will upon it.  It’s true that later in Matthew’s gospel account Jesus will feed 5000 people with a few loaves and fish, but he doesn’t turn them into something other than loaves and fish to do it.

What’s wrong with trusting the scriptures so devoutly that you’re willing to believe that angels will catch you when you plunge off the temple parapet?  But where is the love in a shortcut like that?  How would that build relationships that become the foundation of God’s commonwealth of justice and mercy?  How would that be anything but another demonstration of power in a world that is already much too much infatuated with power?

What’s wrong with the King of kings and the Lord of lords assuming control over all the nations of the world?  Isn’t that exactly what the Book of Revelation says will happen at the Great Conclusion?  But how would that be done?  What would happen to free will in the process?  What kind of violence would resist that singular authority being imposed and how many would be lost before all the dust settled?  How would seizing and wielding imperious authority teach the world to deconstruct all the soul-crushing oppression of imperialism?

For Jesus to have done any of these things would have been a denial of his humanity.  Yes, he was and is the Son of God.  But he also was a son of humanity. His favorite title for himself was “the Son of Man” which can be better translated as “The Human One.”  If he had taken the slanderer’s bait to prove his divinity, he would have separated himself from his humanity.

Jesus was able to resist temptation because he had a firm understanding of who he was.  He believed the voice of God that proclaimed him to be God’s beloved son.  He also believed in the essential goodness of his humanity so he was unwilling to separate himself from humanity.  In the end, in the full confidence of both his divine authority and his essential human goodness, he simply ordered the tempter to go away. And the devil departed from him.  

Jesus trusted God.  Jesus believed in God.  Jesus met the devil face to face.  But he didn’t believe in him.  So when you are assailed by that insidious voice that wants you to forget your basic human goodness and God’s divine embrace of you as a beloved child,  be like Jesus.  Just tell that voice to go away.

[1] Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, p.105-6

Listen

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Mark 9:2-9; Matthew 17:1-9; Luke 9:28-36

Have you ever sung in a choir or played in an orchestra?  If you have, you’ve probably had a moment when you realized that you were, for all intents and purposes, part of one large instrument.  Your voice in the choir was like one pipe in an organ.  You were part of a single, large organic instrument comprised of many voices, all being played by the director or conductor.  It’s a wonderful experience to be part of something like that, to know that you’re part of something large and beautiful and organic which, if it’s done right, can, in its magical way, completely transport people.  It’s a humbling feeling to know that you are helping to bring this powerful yet transitory thing into the world, a thing composed only of sound, a thing that was not in the world before the conductor raised their baton and will vanish when they cut off the last note and its echoes die in the hall.  

It’s an amazing experience.  And it all works beautifully as long as everyone learns their part.  And they all follow the conductor.  And they all play or sing the same piece.  All it takes for things to start to unravel, though, is for someone to decide they’re not happy with the conductor.  Little rebellions lead to great ones.  It can start with something as minor as the woodwinds rushing the conductor’s beat.  It could end with the disgruntled first trumpet player playing Trumpet Voluntary in the middle of Mozart’s Requiem. 

That seems to be Peter’s problem when Jesus tells him what lies ahead for them in Jerusalem.  He’s not happy with the conductor.  He had been traveling with Jesus for a while now.  He had watched him feed multitudes of people.  He had seen him walk on the sea.  He had watched Jesus cast out demons and heal people.  So when Jesus asked, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter naturally replied, “You are the Messiah!”  It seemed like the obvious answer.  After all, who else could do all those things?  But Jesus was cautious with Peter’s answer.  In all three synoptic gospels he sternly ordered his disciples not to tell people that he is the Messiah.  “No Messiah talk.  Are we clear?”

That didn’t sit well with Peter.  And then Jesus started to tell his disciples and everybody else that he was going to go to Jerusalem to speak truth to power at the corner of Religion and Politics.  He told them that the Powers That Be were going to reject him and abuse him.  He told them that he would be crucified.  And that on the third day he would rise again.  

No one wanted to hear that.  That’s crazy talk. Peter could not bring himself to sing along with that chorus.  He would not.  He took Jesus aside and rebuked him.  

Think about that a minute.  Peter rebuked Jesus.  And apparently the other disciples were kind of half-way behind Peter on this one.  Both Mark and Matthew write that Jesus turned and rebuked Peter saying, “Get behind me, Satan! You’re not setting your mind on divine things but on human things.”

Jesus had a few more things to say to his disciples and the crowd about what it takes to be a disciple—namely, a willingness to take up the cross.  But Peter and the disciples were silent.

Peter rebuked Jesus.  Jesus rebuked Peter.

And then silence.  Six days of silence.

It’s easy to miss that.  Things move fast in the gospels.  Jesus moves quickly from one thing to the next.  The phrase “and immediately” occurs frequently in Mark’s gospel.  But not here.  

Six days later.  Six days of tension between Jesus and Peter?  Six days of anxiety for the disciples?  The gospels don’t say.  The gospels are silent.  And maybe Jesus and the disciples were, too.

Finally, Jesus decided that Peter needed a “come to Jesus” meeting.  Or a come with Jesus moment.  So he asked Peter, James and John to come with him up the mountain.

And there on the mountain they saw him transfigured—shining white and radiant, light within and light without.   They see who their teacher really is inside his humanity.  They saw Moses and Elijah, the law-bringer and the great prophet, the two most important figures in the history of their people, appear with Jesus and converse with him.  

Peter, whose default mode seems to be talk-first-think-later, babbled out, “Lord, it’s a good thing that we’re here!  Let’s make three shelters, one for you, one for Moses, one for Elijah…”  The gospels tell us he didn’t know what he was saying because he was terrified.  Well you would be, wouldn’t you.  

And then all of a sudden there was a cloud throwing a shadow over them.  All the brightness was dimmed.  And a voice came out of the cloud and said, “This is my Son, the Beloved.  Listen to him.”

And as suddenly as it all started, it was over.  There was no one there but Jesus.  And as they headed back down the mountain he told them not to tell anyone about what they had seen until “after the Son of Man has risen from the dead.”  

It took a lot to get through to Peter.  It took six days of silence and a hike up the mountain.  It took seeing Jesus talking with Moses and Elijah as he was shining like the sun.  It took hearing the voice of God speaking to him from a cloud saying, “This is my Son.  The Beloved.  Listen to him!” 

That’s what it took to get Peter to play the same tune and follow the conductor.

What does it take for us?

There have always been people who try to bend Jesus to their agenda instead of bending themselves to the Way of Jesus.  There have always been people who call themselves Christian who don’t seem to actually listen much to Jesus.

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

So many, like Peter, want a militant messiah.  But that’s not the way God does things.  That’s not the way of Jesus.

Six days before their trip up the mountain, after Peter rebuked Jesus and Jesus rebuked him back, Jesus had this to say to the crowd that had been gathered around them:  “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me.  For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it.  For what will it profit you to gain the whole world and forfeit your life?  Indeed, what can they give in return for your life?”

Jesus was not giving a recruitment speech designed to conjure the rewards and glories of conquest and victory.  He was issuing a realist’s invitation to a subversive movement where participation could have deadly consequences.  He was calling them, and is calling us still, to confront the powers and systems that diminish and oppress and marginalize and antagonize and lie to people wherever we find those powers and systems.  

Following Jesus can be dangerous.  Listening to him can put you at odds with family and friends.  It can complicate your life.  But your life will be meaningful. 

Jesus wanted to make it clear that he was not a white-horse-sword-in-hand messiah.  He wanted his disciples and everyone else to understand that his way of confronting injustice and oppression was to free people from its weight, heal their wounds, and then simply stand in front of the things that assailed them and speak the truth.  That was the music he was bringing.  That was the song he wanted the world to sing with him.  Peter didn’t like that song at all.  He wanted the White Horse and Sword Cantata.  

So six days later, Jesus took him up the mountain to show him who he was really arguing with. So Peter could see him shine like the sun.  And so he could hear the voice of heaven telling him to shut up and listen.

Sometimes we all need to be reminded that Jesus leads and we follow, that he’s the conductor and we’re the players in the orchestra and singers in the choir.  Sometimes we all need to go up the mountain to be reminded of who Jesus is inside his humanity.  Sometimes we all need to be reminded of those words from the cloud: “This is my Son.  The Beloved.  Listen to him.”  

Especially those last words.  

“Listen to him.”

Art: Transfiguration © Chris Brazelton, Artmajeur

Lifted Up

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Mark 1:29-39

“He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up.  Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them.”  Two simple sentences.  And like so much of Mark’s gospel, a surprising amount of action in surprisingly few words. 

After preaching with authority on the Sabbath at the synagogue at Capernaum, then casting out an unclean spirit from a man who interrupted him, Jesus was ready for a break.  So he went to the house of his new disciples, Peter and Andrew.  It happened that Peter’s mother-in-law is sick and in bed with a fever.  They told Jesus about her right away and Jesus went in to see her.

And here is where the translation maybe is not our friend.  “He took her by the hand” sounds much gentler than what it says in the original language.  Kratésas it says in the Greek.  Kratéo is the verb.  It’s not a tender word.  It means to grasp firmly or strongly.  

He grasped her firmly and then it says he “lifted her up.”  Which is fine.  But again, something is lost in translation.  The verb Mark used is egeiro.  It’s the same word Jesus will use when he raises Jairus’ daughter from the dead and says, “Little girl, get up!”  It’s the same word the angel will use to tell the women that Jesus is not in the empty tomb because he is raised up—egeiro.  

So maybe this isn’t quite the gentle scene I had always imagined.  Maybe this is a scene full of strength and energy and power.  Jesus grasped her strongly, firmly by the hand—and hand, by the way, could mean anywhere from her fingertips to her elbow—Jesus grasped her firmly and raised her.  

And the fever left her.

And she began to serve them.

It’s tempting to get a little upset about that last part—she began to serve them.  After all, she’s just been sick with a fever.  And now here are all these guys who come traipsing into the house and because of the expectations of the society they live in, she jumps out of her sickbed to rustle up some dinner for them.  Oh, and by the way, does anybody care that it’s still the Sabbath?

Some commentators have pointed out that she would be happy to serve them because, in a culture where roles are clearly defined, she could now resume her place as matriarch of the household along with all the social currency that comes with that.

That interpretation about her immediately resuming her social position and role is all perfectly fine and no doubt played some part in her rising immediately to serve, but there’s also something going on in the language that deserves a moment of attention.  It’s a little thing.  But, as I’ve been learning, Mark often uses these subtle little things to make big points.  In this case it has to do with the word “served.”  The Greek word in question is the verb diakoneo.  It does mean “to serve” and it is often used in the context of serving food and drink, but it also has another layer of meaning, particularly in Mark’s gospel.

Here’s how Ched Myers explains it in his book, Say to This Mountain: Mark’s Story of Discipleship—

“Peter’s mother-in-law is the first woman to appear in Mark’s narrative.  We are told that upon being touched by Jesus, “she served him(1:31).  Most commentators, steeped in patriarchal theology, assume that this means she fixed Jesus dinner.  However the Greek verb “to serve,” diakoneo (from which we get our word “deacon”)_ appears only two other times in Mark.  One is in 10:45—“The Human One came not to be served but to serve”—a context hardly suggesting meal preparation.

“Mark describes women ‘who, when Jesus was in Galilee, followed him, and served him, and…came up to Jerusalem with him’ (15:41).  This is a summary statement of discipleship:  from beginning (Galilee) to end (Jerusalem) these women were true followers who, unlike the men (see 10:32-45) practiced servanthood.”

So here is Peter’s mother-in-law—sadly we don’t know her name—but Mark identifies her service with a word that implies that there is a sacred aspect to her serving, a holiness that springs not from her sense of duty or social propriety, but from her faith.  

She is a deacon.  

In Mark’s gospel, the men surrounding Jesus are often argumentative and a little dense.  But the women, though not mentioned often, are astute and faithful.  

Astute and faithful women have kept the ministry of Jesus alive and well in this world for more than 20 centuries.  

Think of the women mentioned in the Gospel of Luke who travelled with Jesus and financially supported Jesus and the disciples.  Luke tells us that Mary Magdalene, and Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and Susanna, and many others provided for them out of their resources.  

Some of these women came to be called the Myrrh Bearers because after Jesus was crucified, they were the ones who went to the tomb to anoint his body.  Because they went one last time to serve him in that way, they ended up being the first ones to hear the good news of the resurrection.

Mary Magdalen was known to be particularly close to Jesus and was regarded as an Apostle by many among the early followers of Jesus until patriarchy asserted itself, suppressed her influence, and sullied her reputation in the 6th century by spreading the story that she had been a prostitute.  But it was Mary Magdalen who, according to the Gospel of John, first encountered the risen Jesus.  It was Mary Magdalen who first proclaimed his resurrection, making her the first evangelist.

Another Mary who was part of this group of women disciples, was Mary, the wife of  Cleopas.  Tradition tells us that her husband was the brother of Joseph, Jesus’ foster father, so she was Jesus’ aunt, and sister-in-law of Jesus’ mother, Mary.  She, too, was a Myrrh Bearer and is probably the unidentified person traveling with Cleopas on the road to Emmaus in chapter 24 of Luke’s gospel. That means that she was also one of the first witnesses to the resurrection.

Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward, Chuza, is someone we know a little more about.  We see her later identified in the letters of the Apostle Paul where he uses her Roman name, Junia.  In Romans 16:7, Paul says that she is prominent among the Apostles and that she knew Christ before he did.   Junia was a remarkable person, a woman disciple of Jesus who travelled with him in his ministry,  and continued in ministry as an Apostle, travelling as far as Rome for the cause of the gospel.  Some scholars have suggested that she might be the author of the Letter to the Hebrews.

Priscilla and her husband Aquila are mentioned six times in the New Testament.  Four of those times, Priscilla is mentioned first before Aquila, and it’s clear that she is a full partner in their work together for the sake of the gospel.  Priscilla and Aquila are also traditionally listed among the 70 that Jesus sent out on a mission.  Priscilla, who is sometimes called Prisca, her more formal name, was one of the first women preachers in the church.   Acts 18:24-28 tells us that she, along with Aquila, instructed Apollos in the faith.  Some scholars speculate that Prisca may be the author of the Epistle to the Hebrews.

Phoebe was an overseer and deacon in the Church at Cenchreae.   St. Paul referred to her in Romans 16 as a deacon and a patron of many.  This is the only place in the New Testament where a woman was referred to with both of those titles. Diakonos kai prostateis.  A chief, a leader, a guardian, a protector.  St. Paul had such trust in her that he provided her with credentials so that she could serve as his emissary to Rome, and deliver his letter to them—that letter we know as the Epistle to the Romans.

Lydia of Thyatira, was a wealthy merchant of purple cloth, who welcomed St. Paul and his companions into her home at Philippi where, after listening to Paul’s teaching, she became a devoted follower of Jesus.  In doing so, she helped Paul establish the church at Philippi, the first church in continental Europe.

In that church at Philippi were two women, Euodia and Syntyche who were serving in positions of pastoral leadership.  At some point they got into a disagreement, and in his letter to the Philippians, Paul urges them to “be of the same mind in the Lord” so that their disagreement doesn’t split the church.  In calling them to unity, he notes that they have “struggled beside me in the work of the gospel.”  They were his full partners in ministry in that city.

Jesus took Peter’s mother-in-law in his firm grip and raised her up.  And she began to serve.  She became a deacon.  She began making sure things got done.  Making sure ministry happened.  And it’s the women who have been making sure things get done and ministry happens ever since.

Yesterday we celebrated the installation of a new pastor at Christ Lutheran Church in Long Beach.  If you include the long-term interim ministry of Pastor Laurie Arroyo, then Pastor Nikki Fielder is the fourth or fifth woman to serve Christ Lutheran as pastor.  Another woman, Pastor Jennie Chrien, preached at Pastor Nikki’s installation, and a third woman, our bishop, Brenda Bos, presided.  For several years now, the presiding bishop of our denomination has been a woman, Bishop Elizabeth Eaton.  Having women serve in these important roles in the church has become so normal that it’s hardly worth noting.  But it wasn’t always so.

It was only fifty-four years ago, a time still in living memory for many of us, that our denomination began to ordain women to the ministry of Word and Sacrament.  To be pastors.  On the one hand, it seemed then—and to some people it still seems—like a bold and progressive thing to do.  But when you look at the witness of the New Testament itself and what we have learned about the roles that women played in the earliest years of the church…well let’s just say that our historically recent ordination of women was shamefully long overdue.

I think of the women I’m indebted to in my ministry.  I think of my beloved spouse, Meri, who has always challenged me to look deeper than tradition in my understanding and practice of faith.  I think of all the women teachers I’ve had, like Dr. Martha Ellen “Marty” Stortz, professor of Church history, who opened my eyes to the rich goldmine of our heritage.  I think of the women scholars and writers I turn to for thought-provoking insights in theology and biblical studies, women like Debi Thomas, Barbara Brown Taylor, Rachel Held Evans, Roberta Bondi, Diana Butler Bass, Nadia Bolz-Weber, Heather Anne Thiessen, and Amy-Jill Levine.  I think of my women clergy colleagues who are so amazing and indispensable as we puzzle our way through the week’s texts and the week’s issues, and our life together in the church.

I think of the women in our congregations who make things happen.  Without whom things would not happen.  The Tabithas, the Junias, the Priscillas, the Marys, the Pheobes. The Myrrh Bearers.  The Apostles in our midst.

I think of them all.  And I am so grateful.

Jesus has grasped them by the hand and raised them up.  And they have served.  Showing the presence of Christ and proclaiming the kin-dom of God, or as Diana Butler Bass calls it, “the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy.”  

Jesus has raised them up and we are all richer for it. 

Jesus grasped them firmly by the hand and raised them up.

Because that’s what Jesus does.

He reaches into our fevered immobility and raises us up out of the sickbed of patriarchy and our fearful status quo.  He frees us from the illness of coersive social conventions and oppressive patterns of business-as-usual so we can serve each other, so we can take care of each other and lift up others in meaningful ways that show the world what the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy looks like and how it works.  

He raises us up so we can live together and work together, so we can use our unique abilities and gifts in a beloved community where, as Paul said in Galatians, “there is no longer Jew or Greek; there is no longer slave or free; there is no longer male and female;” and we can add there is no longer gay or straight or queer or trans, “for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

He raises us up so we can show each other the healing love of Christ as we serve each other and work together to make the reign of God a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  In Jesus’ name.

I Will Make You Fishers (of/for/on behalf of) People

Steve Beckham 4 Comments

Mark 1:14-20

Note: Yesterday I read a terrific reflection by Diana Butler Bass based on this same text. In that reflection she took the phrase that has typically been translated as “the kingdom of God” and retranslated it as “the commonwealth of God’s mercy and justice.”  This is, I think, by far the best shorthand understanding of what Jesus was describing and what the original Greek text was trying to convey with the phrase basilea tou theou.  So I appropriated it. After reading DBB’s reflection I went back into my own manuscript to change the kingdom of God to the commonwealth of God’s mercy and justice.  

(singing) “I will make you fishers of men, fishers of men, fishers of men.  I will make you fishers of men if you fol-low me.” 

How many of you learned that song in Sunday School oh so many years ago?  It was a good way to remember the story of Jesus calling Peter and Andrew and James and John who just dropped everything and went with Jesus when he invited them to follow him.  Our Sunday School teacher or pastor always made of point of reminding us that we are invited to follow Jesus, too.  

That song and the gospel text come with a promise—the promise that Jesus will make us “fishers of men” if we follow him.  Well, it used to say “men.”  Which was never really accurate since the Greek word in the Mark is anthropon, which really means humans.  Or humanity.  Basically all people in general.  But singing “I will make you fishers of all people in general” takes some of the bounce out of the music.

This happy little song reminded us in a very simple way that Jesus wants us to be “fishing” for people which we usually understood as a kind of recruitment evangelism.  The unstated understanding is that there is supposed to be something really magnetic—one might even say charismatic— about us as persons filled with the Spirit, as people who love Jesus, as people who find joy and comfort and strength and wholeness in our communities of faith— that we are imbued with a grace so graceful that it makes others want to jump into our boat and join the party.  In other words, Jesus was calling us to be the bait that would bring others into the nets of the church, or get them to jump into the boat with us, where they, too, might come to believe in Jesus and be saved.  

But what if we got it wrong?   Or maybe we didn’t get it wrong so much as we misplaced the emphasis.  Or maybe we just failed to fully understand what Jesus was asking of us.

Historically we—and by “we” I mean the Church—we have focused on believing in Jesus and on trying to convince others to believe in Jesus.  And that’s not a bad thing.  Far from it.  But “believe” is a tricky word for us in our time and in our culture.  For us, “believe” is often a head word.  We use it to describe what we think or, sometimes, what we feel.  On Sunday mornings we recite a Creed that restates the important things we believe about God.  But I think that for too much of our history our belief has stayed mostly in our heads.  And in our churches.  We crafted a whole religion around what we believe when what Jesus has been inviting us into is a whole new way of living—a whole new kind of life, a whole new way of being in the world, a whole new way of being human.  And being whole.

Did you notice in the beginning of today’s gospel what Jesus asks people to believe in, what he asks them and us to trust?

“Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the good news of God and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news.’”  (Mark 1:14-15, NRSV)

That’s how the New Revised Standard Version translates it.  But I think Eugene Peterson’s translation in The Message better captures the power and urgency of what Jesus is saying:

Jesus went to Galilee preaching the Message of God: ‘Time’s up! God’s kingdom is here. Change your life and believe the Message.’”

Change your life and believe the message.  

Jesus calls us to believe that God’s realm, God’s commonwealth of justice and mercy, God’s ethics, God’s way of life… is here.  It’s do-able.  It is in reach.  And how do we get there?  We follow him.  Jesus will lead us into that way of living and being.  Our eyes and hearts and minds are opened to the kingdom of God not by believing certain things about Jesus,  but by following him.

There is only one time in all the Gospels where Jesus asks anyone to believe in him—and even that is open to interpretation and translation.

In John 14:1 after Jesus has told his disciples at the last supper “where I’m going you cannot follow” and Peter objects that he will follow him anywhere, Jesus says, “Do not let your hearts be troubled.  Believe in God.  Believe also in me.”  But that could also be translated as “Trust God and trust me.”  In fact, Eugene Peterson in The Message Bible translates that passage as “Don’t let this throw you.  You trust God, don’t you?  Trust me.”

Now it’s true that Jesus does say a number of positive things in the gospels, particularly in John, about people who believe in him—or trust him—and the narrative of the Gospel of John talks a lot about believing in Jesus.  But when Jesus, himself, is proclaiming the good news, he is not out there announcing that people should believe in him.

One time in all the gospels he says, “Believe in me.”  Twenty-two times he says, “Follow me.”  Twenty-two times.  The fact is, it’s not until his disciples have been following him for quite a while that they begin to really believe in him as the Son of God, as the Messiah.  

We in the church have tried for so long to persuade people to believe in Jesus. Maybe we should focus more on inviting them to follow Jesus—with us, of course—and trust that belief will come in due time.

Follow me.  Live the way I live.  Learn to see the way I see and think the way I think. And love the way I love.

And as we think about what Jesus is saying here about believing and following, it is important to remember that all this comes at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark. This is the gospel written with the Jewish uprising against the Roman Empire clearly in the background.  This is the gospel where Jesus is a nonviolent revolutionary who appropriates the empire’s language to announce his own Good News, his own declaration of victory.  This is where Jesus issues the invitation to enter into a new kind of kingdom. 

When Jesus proclaims that the kingdom of God is in reach, he is not speaking metaphorically.  He is calling for a spiritual transformation, but that is just the beginning because Jesus is also calling for social, political and economic transformation.  The commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy does not operate by the same rules as the empire.

Jesus calls out to these Galilean fishermen and says, “Follow me, and I will make you become (literally) fishers of people.”  The translation here is a little tricky because the preposition is implied.  It could be “I will make you become fishers ofpeople,” or “fishers for people,” or even “fishers on behalf of people.”  But any way you translate it, Jesus is issuing a not-so-subtle invitation to Peter and Andrew and James and John to throw off the yoke of Rome.

In The Galilean Fishing Economy and the Jesus Tradition, K.C. Hanson explained that Simon, Andrew, James and John were only semi-independent.  The Galilean fishing industry was very tightly controlled by the Roman Empire.  Caesar owned every body of water in the empire.  Fishing was state-regulated.  Fishermen had to pay a hefty fee to join a syndicate.  Most of what was caught in the Sea of Galilee was dried and exported at a regulated price and heavily taxed, and it was illegal to catch even one fish outside this system.

So how does it sound now… “Follow me and I will make you Fishers for people.”? Especially when you remember that this is in the context of Jesus proclaiming that the Basilea, the commonwealth of God’s mercy and justice is happening now? 

“I will make you Fishers for People.  For your fellow human beings.  Not just for the empire.  Not just for the elite, the wealthy, the powerful, the 1%. 

And of course Jesus uses a fishing metaphor to issue this commanding invitation because he’s talking to fishermen.  

If he was talking to the builders at Sephora what would he have said?  “Follow me and I will teach you to build for the people.”  What would he say to you?  To the artist, “Follow me and paint the vision of God’s realm.”  To the doctor and the nurse and the therapist, “Follow me and heal broken bodies and souls.”  To the educator, “Follow me and help awaken minds and hearts to the wonders of God’s creation and the beauty of what God is doing in the world.”  

Debie Thomas wrote, “To all of us: ‘Follow me and I will make you…” This is a promise to cultivate us, not to sever us from what we love.  It’s a promise rooted in gentleness and respect—not violence and coercion.  It’s a promise that when we dare to let go, the things we relinquish might be returned to us anew, enlivened in ways we couldn’t have imagined on our own.”

Follow me, said Jesus.

Follow me and I will make you the you that you were meant to be

for the good of all God’s people.

Barbara Brown Taylor reminds us that this is a miracle story.  These Galilean fishermen don’t drop everything and “immediately” follow Jesus because of their extraordinary courage.  They do it because of who it is that calls them.

Jesus makes it possible for them.  Jesus captivates them with his vision and his presence and his words…and the Holy Spirit.  In the same way Jesus can make it possible for us.

Last week we took time to remember Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr, a man who clearly followed Jesus as he led and inspired others to keep reaching for that better reality called the kingdom of God—the commonwealth of God’s mercy and justice.  In a speech at Riverside Church in New York City, exactly one year before he was assassinated, he said this:

Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. With this powerful commitment we shall boldly challenge the status quo and unjust mores and thereby speed the day when every valley shall be exalted, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight and the rough places plain . . .Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world.

Maybe it’s time to take it again from the top…

The Good News, the Triumphant Announcement of God:

The wait is over.  The moment is ripe… Time’s up!  The Reign, the Realm, the Kingdom of God, the Dominion of God—the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy—is within reach.

So change your direction, change your mind, change your life…

And trust that good news.

Believe it.

The Blessing of Ritual and the Ritual of Blessing

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Luke 2:22-49

Welcome to the Sunday of Colliding Traditions!  Today, December 31, is the seventh day of Christmas—seven swans a-swimming—and also the first Sunday of Christmas.  And in the secular calendar it’s New Year’s Eve.

People throughout the world have all kinds of interesting rituals and traditions for welcoming in the new year.  Meri and I have a tradition of eating shrimp on New Year’s Eve.  It seems to work for us, so I was glad to learn that a number of Asian cultures think eating shrimp on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day brings good luck.  Other cultures, however, think eating shrimp brings bad luck because shrimp swim backward—away from the good fortune that’s heading your way.  The same goes for lobster.  

In Ecuador people set fire to effigies at midnight on New Year’s Eve.  These effigies  are stuffed with paper containing brief descriptions of bad situations people want to escape or undesirable things or even photographs of things they would like to be rid of.  And it’s important that the effigy be burned completely or the bad situations will return.  

In the Philippines people try to use as many round things as possible as they celebrate the new year—round food, round clothing, round candies.  The round things represent coins so this ritual is a way to encourage the New Year to bring them greater wealth.

In Denmark people save up old plates all year then hurl them against the front doors of their friends’ houses on New Year’s Eve in a ritual that is supposed to bring good fortune. I have no idea how or why that’s supposed to work.

In Spain people begin to pop grapes into their mouths as the clock begins to strike 12.  The goal is to get 12 grapes into your mouth—one with each chime of the clock—to ensure good luck for every month of the new year.

Buddhists in Japan literally ring in the new year, not with 12 chimes of the clock, but by ringing a bell 108 times.  They believe this ritual banishes all human sin.  In Japan it is also considered good luck to be smiling or laughing as you enter the new year.

In Germany many people enjoy a traditional meal of Silvesterkarpfen (New Year’s Carp) on New Year’s Eve.  It is considered good luck to keep a scale from the carp in your wallet throughout the year to bring wealth and good fortune.  But be careful that the scale doesn’t slip out when you reach for your cash because removing the scale removes the good luck.

In Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil and other parts of Central and South America, the color of your underwear is very important on New Year’s Eve.  Red or pink is for those who hope to find love in the new year.  Yellow or gold ensures prosperity.  Green is for hope and white is for peace.  If you want to really ensure that this charm works, make sure your New Year’s skivvies are brand new.

Rituals and traditions shape us.  Even the odd ones.  Especially the odd ones. They tell us who we are and where we fit in the world.  Joseph Campbell said that in our rituals we enact and participate in our myths, the central and formative stories that shape us as a people. When you participate in a ritual, he said, “your consciousness is being re-minded of the wisdom of your own life.” 

“When the time came for their purification according to the law of Moses, they brought him up to Jerusalem to present him to the Lord.”  Forty days after his birth, Mary and Joseph brought Jesus to the temple in accordance with the rituals and tradition of their people.  Mary came for the rite of purification which required the sacrifice of a lamb or, if the family could not afford a lamb, two turtledoves or young pigeons were offered.  Jesus, as a first-born child, was being presented to be consecrated to God.  Both these rituals were in keeping with Torah, the holy teachings that define what is required of the people of the covenant.  These rituals help define what it means to be Jewish. 

Luke is reminding us here that Jesus was Jewish.  Luke reminds us that the life of Jesus was shaped and enriched from the very beginning by rituals and traditions that were part of the covenant of his people.  He reminds us that Jesus grew up in a house where it was understood that they lived in a special relationship with God and with the people of God, a relationship that came with both blessings and obligations.

In addition to the rite of purification and the rite of dedication which Luke refers to here in passing, Luke also gives us a more specific example of another Jewish tradition, the tradition of blessing.

Luke tells us that about an old man named Simeon who was righteous and devout, and that the Holy Spirit had revealed to Simeon that he would not die until he had seen the Lord’s Messiah.  When Simeon saw Jesus in the temple, he understood that God’s promise to him had been fulfilled.  “Guided by the Spirit,” Simeon took the baby Jesus in his arms and praised God for keeping the promise.

The words Simeon spoke here have been part of my own formative tradition.  We used to say them or sing them in the old King James language at the close of almost every worship service when I was growing up:  “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace, according to thy word: for mine eyes have seen thy salvation, which thou hast prepared before the face of all people; a light to lighten the Gentiles, and the glory of thy people Israel.”

When I was a boy those words sounded like magic.  Listening to them, repeating them, I began to fall in love with the music and richness and power of language.

Simeon gave thanks to God that he had lived to see God’s salvation with his own eyes.  And as he spoke his thanks, he also spoke words of blessing over the child.  

As he gazed at the baby in his arms he had a vision of the child’s future.  He said that the baby would become a light for revelation to the gentiles, that he would become the glory of Israel.  He told Mary that her son was destined for the falling and the rising of many in Israel and that he would be a sign that would be opposed so that the inner thoughts of many would be revealed.  Then, as he lifted his eyes from the face of the baby to the face of his mother, he saw something of her future, too.

Frederick Buechner captured this moment in all its tenderness and heartbreak: “What he saw in her face was a long way off, but it was there so plainly he couldn’t pretend. ‘A sword will pierce through your soul, he said.

“He would rather have bitten off his tongue than said it, but in that holy place he felt he had no choice. Then he handed her back the baby and departed in something less than the perfect peace he’d dreamed of all the long years of his waiting.”

Simeon wasn’t the only person to speak a blessing over Jesus that day.  Anna, an aged widow who was also a prophet was also in the temple and when she saw the baby Jesus, “she began to praise God and to speak about the child to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem.”

Anna and Simeon spoke words of blessing over the baby Jesus.  They looked into the future on his behalf and spoke what they saw for him.  With their words they set a course for him, or at the very least described their hopes for him.

We seem to have lost the tradition of blessing.  We still have the word, but we seldom have the words.  We say “God bless you” or even just “bless you” as if that was the whole thing when it is barely the beginning of a real blessing.  We have lost the art of speaking goodness to and for each other, of using our words to call up goodness and identity and destiny into the present moment and project them into future.   

I wonder what might happen if we began this new year with a blessing.  What kind of healing and wholeness might we bring to the world if we learned to speak our hopes for each other and acknowledge the gifts we see in each other?  

I invite you to try an experiment this New Year.  I invite you to learn how to bless.  I invite you to bless your children, your home, your loved ones and your friends.  I invite you to speak goodness into the world.

So… I’ll go first.  Receive a blessing, a benediction:

As this old year ends, your pains and frustrations will be transformed into wisdom. You will see a way forward with unfinished business. Fear and anxiety will have no hold on you.  Throughout this new year, you will walk in the path of peace and joy.  By your calm presence, you will be a blessing to all around you, and especially to those who are troubled in mind, heart or spirit.  You will shine with the love of Christ and carry with you the peace of God which passes all understanding.  You will walk in the Way of Jesus and speak goodness into the world in his name.

Amen.