Tag christianity

Rise and Shine

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

When Jesus Started Working from Home

Rise and Shine

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

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

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

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

So, it deserves some thoughtful attention. 

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

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

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

And to teach us not to be afraid of God.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Loving Jesus

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Loving Jesus

John 14:15-21

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sometimes he was even laughing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you see him as Emmanuel—God with us?

Can you love him?  

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

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

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

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

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

If you love me you will keep my commandments.

And what are those commandments?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who could ask for more than that?

[1] Isaiah 53:2-3

The Gate Versus The Gatekeepers

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

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

John 10:1-10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Jeremiah 23

[2] Ezekiel 34

Hope–Alive and In Person

Steve Beckham 3 Comments

Sometimes you need more than a vision.

Luke 24:36b-48

Since many have undertaken to set down an orderly account of the events that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word,  I too decided, after investigating everything carefully from the very first, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the truth concerning the things about which you have been instructed.[1]

 This is the beginning of the Gospel of Luke.  It is, in the writer’s own words, an orderly account.  He is reporting what has been told to him by those “who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.”  Luke wants you to know that he investigated everything carefully.  So if Luke tells you that shepherds watching their flocks at night heard angels singing and that an angel told them to go to Bethlehem to see a baby in a manger, Luke wants you to know that he is reporting the story exactly as it was told to him by at least one reliable person.

Luke likes details.  Luke locates the story of Jesus in history.  It began when Tiberius was emperor.  When Quirinius was governor of Syria.  When that first census was taken—you know, the one everyone hated so much because it stuck us with that annual tax of one denarius per person.  

Luke keeps things physical and human.  This gospel doesn’t spiritualize practical or justice issues.  For Luke, it’s “Blessed are the poor,” not “blessed are the poor in spirit.”  Yet Luke does emphasize the presence and work of the Holy Spirit—Jesus is conceived by the Spirit (1:35), and anointed with the Spirit (3:22; 4:1, 14, 18), people are filled with the Spirit (1:15, 41, 67) and inspired by the Spirit (2:25–27),  God gives the Holy Spirit to all who ask (11:13), and Jesus promises the disciples that they will be “clothed with power from on high”(24:49), which is clearly a reference to the Holy Spirit who will make a fiery appearance in the Book of Acts, which is really volume 2 of the Gospel of Luke—but for all that, the Spirit usually seems more practical than ethereal in Luke.

And then there’s the eating. 

Luke’s gospel seems to have an unusual interest in food.

In the Magnificat, Mary sings that the poor will be fed and in Luke’s telling of the Beatitudes, Jesus says those who hunger will be fed.  In Luke’s gospel, Jesus talks about table etiquette three times. There are five banquet parables.  Jesus is present at nineteen meals.  Five times he is criticized for eating too much and with the wrong people.  But it is after the resurrection that food plays its most important role in this very earthy gospel.

On the afternoon of the resurrection, the risen Jesus joins a couple of heartbroken travelers who are returning from Jerusalem to their home in Emmaus.  These two, let’s call them Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas, are two people who know Jesus well.  In fact, if Cleopas is the same person as Clopas mentioned in John 19 (and most scholars think he is), then these two Emmaus travelers might be Jesus’ uncle and aunt.   Tradition identifies Clopas as the brother of Joseph.  So they know him,  but as he walks with them and talks with them they aren’t aware of who he is.  Luke tells us “their eyes were kept from recognizing him.” It’s not until he sits down with them and breaks bread that they realize who he is.   Breaking bread—food shared at the table—becomes the sign of recognition.

Mr. and Mrs. Cleopas rushed back to Jerusalem to tell the disciples huddled in the upper room about their encounter with Jesus.  But just as they started to tell their story, Jesus himself stood among them and said to them, “Peace be with you.”  

And here is where Luke, the realist, the reporter, is at his best.  He tells us, “They were startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost.”  Well you would be, wouldn’t you.  Startled. And terrified.  If you had seen someone killed in a brutal and horrific way and then entombed but suddenly that person was standing right in front of you, you would probably think you were seeing a ghost, too.  Or maybe you would question your own sanity.  

Before their minds could be totally blown or wander too far into the fog of speculation, Jesus brought them sharply to the reality of the moment.  “He said 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.”  

Once again Luke puts emphasis on the physical.  Touch me and see.  Luke is making a point.  A ghost does not have flesh and bones.  

Naturally the friends of Jesus, when suddenly confronted with his unexpected, risen presence, feel a tangle of emotions.  And once again, Luke is the realistic reporter.  He tells us they were joyful and disbelieving and wondering all at the same time.  So Jesus asks for something to eat and they give him a piece of broiled fish.  This is the physical proof that seals the deal and silences all doubts. Ghosts do not eat.

The realism is important here.  This is not merely a “spiritual” resurrection.  This is not merely a vision.  And this is certainly is not an elaborate mythic metaphor for springtime.  Luke wants to make it absolutely clear that this is flesh and bones Jesus returned to life, Jesus physically, bodily raised from the dead. 

Why does Luke make such a point of this and why does it matter for us?

In the original ending of Mark’s gospel, there are no post-resurrection encounters.  There is an empty tomb and a strange young man clothed in white who gives the startled women the cryptic message that “he has gone ahead of you.”  It has been suggested that the empty tomb in Mark symbolizes that ultimate love in our lives, the love of God, cannot be crucified or killed.  

Well okay.  That’s not a bad message as far as it goes.  It’s an easy idea to carry in your head.  It sounds somewhat sophisticated and enlightened.  But does it move your heart?  Can that symbolic interpretation carry the full weight of your hopes and fears when you’re faced with a crisis?

We are called to share the Good News of Christ risen, Christ alive, Christ with us, Christ at work in the world.   We are called to bring hope—a real hope that speaks to the real needs of the real people who live in real crisis in our real world.  Does “the empty tomb is the triumph of love in the midst of suffering” do that?

And again, that’s not a bad message.  It is part of our message.  But is it enough?

Twelve years ago when I was diagnosed with prostate cancer I found myself confronted by my own mortality.  I was more scared than I cared to admit because both my mom and my dad died of cancer.  Sometimes a diagnosis or a crisis can really sharpen 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 or purely mystical  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 more than a few times and held their hand as they crossed the threshold.  I will tell you right now that, in my experience, those who believe in the resurrection of Jesus have been the ones who have departed most calmly, most readily, and most willingly.

I will also tell you that those I’ve known who can proclaim their faith with quiet conviction have also usually been those who have believed in the physical resurrection of Jesus.  Though I’ve read his words many times, Frederick Buechner’s statement of faith still moves me:

“I can tell you this,” he wrote, “that what I believe happened and what in faith and with great joy I proclaim to you here is that he somehow got up, with life in him again, and the glory upon him. And I speak very plainly here, very un-fancifully, even though I do not understand well my own language. I was not there to see it any more than I was awake to see the sun rise this morning, but I affirm it as surely as I do that by God’s grace the sun did rise this morning because that is why the world is flooded with light.”

The testimony of faithful people is a good and powerful reason to believe in the bodily resurrection of Jesus.  That’s why Luke, at the beginning of his gospel, makes it clear that he is reporting events  just as they were handed on to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.  

But there is also another good reason to trust the accounts of the physical resurrection of Jesus, a reason that’s both practical and theological:  something transformed the disciples of Jesus.  Something inspired this frightened band of misfits who had been timidly hiding behind locked doors to become apostles who carried an impossible message into an empire that was openly hostile to them.  Something gave them unbreakable courage.

Pinchas Lapide was a Jewish theologian and historian.  He was not a Christian, but he believed that God raised Jesus from the dead.  For him, the proof of the physical resurrection could be found in the changed lives of the disciples.  In his book The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective he wrote: 

“When this scared, frightened band of the apostles which was just about to throw away everything in order to flee in despair to Galilee; when these peasants, shepherds, and fishermen, who betrayed and denied their master and then failed him miserably, suddenly could be changed overnight into a confident mission society, convinced of salvation and able to work with much more success after Easter than before Easter, then no vision or hallucination is sufficient to explain such a revolutionary transformation.” [p. 125]

Jesus was a real physical person who was tortured to death in a first-century lynching.  The state and the religious authority 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 there was a power and authority in him that dwarfed any power and 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 power and authority of Jesus was rooted in his deeply loving relationship with the God he called Father, the God who raised him out of death into new life.  His resurrection was a victory of God’s dominion of love and life over the death-dealing oppression of empire.

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 grace, forgiveness, faith, hope and love—these things will have the last word.  The resurrection was God affirming that Life will have the last word.  

Through Jesus Christ, our Lord.

[1] Luke 1:1-4 NRSV

This Year is Different

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

John 20:19-30

We know this story, right?  Every year on the Second Sunday of Easter we get the same Gospel text from the 20th chapter of John.  Year in and year out.  Every year, one week after Easter we hear “The Doubting Thomas” story.  That’s what we call it, which isn’t really fair to either Thomas or the text because there is a lot more going on in these twenty-one verses, and some of the most important things in the text, arguably, have nothing to do with Thomas.   But still, having said that, this story is so familiar that even non-church people know it.  Doubting Thomas is a cultural touchstone.  Right?  

We know this story, do we not?

I wonder.

This year the story sounds different to me. This year, when I read the first line of this story it hit me in a way it never has before.  

“When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews…”[1]

Stop there for a minute.  Throughout the Gospel of John, Jesus faces opposition and antagonism from a particular group of conservative  Judean religious leaders.  These were the leaders who collaborated with Roman authorities to help keep a lid on things, particularly in Jerusalem.  John’s gospel simply refers to this group as “the Jews.”  This was never meant to be understood as “all” Jews.  Jesus was a Jew.  His disciples were Jews.  So, throughout the gospel of John, when the writer talks about “the Jews,” he is referring to this particular group of antagonists, and not Jews in general.

Except, maybe, in this one instance.  

After Jesus was arrested, the disciples fled back to the room where they had shared the last supper.  And that’s where they have mostly stayed for three days and nights, huddled together behind locked doors.  

Put yourself in the room with them.  It’s evening.  The sun has set.  Someone has lit a small lamp or two but those lamps seem to fill that large room with more shadows than light.  In those shadows your mind keeps replaying the events of the last few days—Jesus being arrested in the garden, Jesus being dragged away in chains, the crowd that had shouted Hosanna a few days ago now shouting for him to be crucified.  And yes, you see that picture in the shadows, too—Jesus  being tortured and crucified.  Jesus laid in the tomb.

Everyone in the room with you is grieving.  You all have very good reasons to be afraid.  The world outside those locked doors is not a safe place for you.  You know that there are people out there who would do to you what they did to Jesus, your teacher, your friend.  

You are grieving.  You are afraid.  And you are in turmoil because earlier in the day, Peter and another disciple erupted into the room all in a lather to say that the tomb was empty and the grave clothes were all neatly folded and set aside.  On top of that, Mary Magdalene is telling you that she has seen Jesus and spoken to him… and all you can think is that her grief has made her delusional.

And where is Thomas?  Where did he go?  What is he doing?  Why isn’t he in the room with the rest of you?  The last time one of your companions slipped away somewhere by himself it was Judas, and we all know how that turned out, don’t we.  

So there you are, huddled together in a room full of fear and grief and shadows.  And of course the doors are locked.  You don’t know who you can trust.  You don’t know who might make some deal to hand you over to the authorities.  You are afraid of your own people.

Six years ago we all heard this text behind locked doors.  We were all afraid of our own people then.  Well, not so much the people as the virus one of them might pass along.  Our doors were closed to protect all of us from all of us.  

This year, though, is different.  This year I think we understand a little more clearly that what we are seeing in this passage from John’s gospel is a scene of political terror.  We are seeing a small community traumatized by state violence, a community that has every reason to think that more violence may be coming their way.

This year the story resonates more profoundly and directly. This year we have seen heavily armed “agents” wearing masks conducting sweeps through our communities, disappearing our neighbors from their work, their cars and their homes, even from courthouse hallways and steps.  This year we have seen our neighbors spirited off to detention camps or deported to foreign countries without anything like due process.  This year we have seen people killed while protesting these actions.

This year we all know someone or know about someone who is living in grief and fear behind locked doors, not knowing who they can trust, afraid of their own people. 

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.”

Jesus showed up behind their locked doors, emerging from the shadows of their distress to free them from the fear and grief that were paralyzing them, to unlock and open for them a whole new understanding of life and death and God, and to empower them to continue with the work of proclaiming the counter-imperial commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness.  

Jesus does the same thing for us.  Jesus appears inside our locked up spaces.  Jesus passes through the shadows of our fear and unbelief to come and stand beside us and among us, to show us that he is alive—and to teach us how to live in a new reality.  If we will believe.  If we will trust.

When Jesus steps into the locked up places in our hearts and minds, when Jesus steps through our fears and unbelief to stand before us, to stand in the midst of us, he does it for a reason.  The living Jesus stands in our midst not just so that we can resume the same old relationships with God and with each other that we had before, but so that we can begin an entirely new relationship with God and with each other.  

Jesus does not just want us to learn about him.  Jesus wants us to learn from him so we can live in unity with him and continue his work of making the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy a reality on earth as it is in heaven.  

We are not united to a dead, historical Christ who lives only in the pages of the gospels.  We are united to a living Jesus who stands here among us, who meets us at the table of companionship. We are united with a living Jesus who meets us in disguise on the streets, who comes to us hungry and thirsty, unwell and unhoused, who encounters us as a stranger, a refugee or an immigrant.  

But Jesus doesn’t just show up.  Jesus knows that there’s something more that we need so we can rise out of our pain and fears and unbelief to do the work he calls us to do.  Jesus knows we need a spirit of courage that will make us brave enough and bold enough to love each other and love the world, a spirit of joy and wonder that will keep us from slipping into cynicism or despair in a world that is all too often indifferent when it isn’t being downright nasty.  Jesus knows that if we’re going to help heal the world’s angst we need to be free of it ourselves.  So he gives us the antidote.

“Peace be upon you,” he says.  Shalom aleichem.  Put away your anxiety.  Let go of your fear.  Put away your disagreement.  Stop trying so hard to be right.  Try, instead to be loving.  Stop the finger-pointing.  Stop investing so much energy and emotion in nonsense and things that don’t really matter.  “Peace be upon you.” 

This is not the peace of empire, the Pax Romana, the Pax Americana, a peace enforced by force or coercion, a peace procured through the art of the deal.  This is the shalom of God, the peace of wholeness, the peace of mutuality.  This is a peace that embraces diversity and fosters equity and strives for inclusion.  This is the peace that works for justice, loves kindness and walks humbly with God.

“Peace be upon you,” said Jesus.  And then he showed them his hands and his side. “Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”   They recognized him by his wounds.  His wounds proved that he was the real Jesus.  His wounds convinced honest and reasonable but skeptical Thomas that he was truly the risen Christ.

In Wounded Lord, Robert Smith’s commentary on the Gospel of John, which he completed shortly before he died, he wrote: “Those wounds will never go away.  The exalted Christ has not passed to a sublime existence immune to suffering.  Even after Good Friday and Easter, God continues to turn to the world through the wounded Christ.

 “To believe in this Jesus means to take him, wounds and all, into our own lives.  To believe means to participate in Christ’s own suffering on behalf of the true life of the world.”

Our Christ, our God, is not some transcendent deity who sits in heaven far removed from the pain of our existence.  Our Christ, our God is wounded from embracing the world, wounded from loving the world.  We can sing about victory all we want, but the reality is that we are still in the struggle, and the Good News, the really Good News is not that our Messiah, our Commander is immortal and impervious, but that he has a Purple Heart.  The Good News is that his wounds were fatal, but his fatality was not.  His wounds mean that our wounds may kill us, but that won’t stop us. 

“Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” 

This is where we go from being disciples to being apostles.  Now we have the same mission Jesus had.  We are not supposed to just sit still and happy in our own little pool of peace.  We are being  sent.  We have to go out in peace.  And withpeace.  We have to be grounded in the Shalom of God—the blessing of well-being—but on the move, carrying the shalom of God with us, sharing it and spreading it.

“When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit.  If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained.”

In the original Greek it says that he breathed into them.  This is  such a profoundly intimate moment, a moment of physical closeness.  The word that’s used in the Greek, emphisao, is the same word that’s used in the Greek version of Genesis 2 when God breathes life into the human that God has made out of earth.  This is the breath that gives life.  Jesus breathes the Spirit of life into them…and into us.

Breathe.  Take a deep breath and inhale the Spirit of God that is being breathed into you. Right now, right where you are.  Breathe.  Breathe in the Holy Spirit, the breath of Christ. 

Now breathe out.  Let everything holy in you, the Christ in you, the love and goodness in you fill the room.  

And now, think about this.  This new life that you are inhaling and exhaling—it has a purpose.  You are being sent.  

“As the Father sent me, so I am sending you,” said Jesus.  You are being sent to teach forgiveness to a world that is addicted to the poisonous drug of retribution. You are being sent out to bring the shalom of cooperation to a world that is obsessed with competition.  You are being sent out to bring a breath of fresh air to a world that is gasping for the love of Christ and the breath of the Spirit.  

So take a deep breath.  And go.  The world needs the breath of Christ.  This year more than ever.

[1] John 20:19 (NRSVue)

Painting: Deep Breath by Melody Weidner

Playing the Same Tune

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

Sometimes even saints need a come to Jesus meeting.

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.  Or the piece.  Or their part.  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 put your life on the line and 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 both Mark’s and Matthew’s gospels.  But not here. 

Six days later.  So what was that like?  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 withJesus 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 bright and radiant, light within and light without.   They saw 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 shrines, 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, wrapping them in a fog.  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, issue-based moralism, 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-o-hell-free card and not as a way of life in the beloved community.  It has co-opted the name Christian and Christian language and symbols, but it has not learned to do justice, to love kindness or to walk humbly with God.  It has not learned to love the neighbor as oneself. 

So many, like Peter, wanted 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 but 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 it will also give your life meaning and purpose. 

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 between them and 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 Concerto for White Horse and Sword.  

So six days later, Jesus took Peter up the mountain to show him who he was really arguing with. So Peter could see him shine like the sun.  And so Peter 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.

Salt and Light for the Healing of the World

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Stay Salty and Be Lit, all y’all

Matthew 5:13-20

“You”—and that’s you plural, all y’all—”You are salt of the earth,” said Jesus.  He was giving his followers, and that includes us, a new identity.  He was calling his disciples to live their lives as a visible counter-narrative to the status quo of the culture surrounding them, calling them to live by an ethic that was in stark contrast to the dynamics of empire which pitted neighbor against neighbor in an endless competition for the basic necessities of life.

You all are the salt of the earth.  Salt, sometimes referred to as “white gold” was and is one of the most useful and valuable things in the world.  “By Hercules, then, life cannot be lived humanely without salt,” said Pliny the Elder. “It is such an essential substance that its name is transferred to powerful mental pleasures too. All the charm and the greatest humor of life along with rest from work are called salts (sales)—it rests on this more than any other.”

Because salt was so valuable, the empire exercised significant direct control over salt production and distribution.  The Roman state operated or regulated many saltworks and heavily taxed the production of mines and saltworks that it did not directly control or operate. 

Salt has always been used to bring out the flavors in food.  You all enhance the flavor of the world around you.  You all bring out the distinctive nuances of uniqueness in every group you are a part of so that the savory essence of our individuality doesn’t melt away in a puddle of insipid sameness.

People have known since prehistoric times that salt is a biological necessity.  Our bodies and the bodies of almost all animals use salt, the electrolytes of sodium and chloride, to absorb and transport nutrients, to maintain blood pressure, to maintain proper fluid balances, to transmit nerve signals and to contract and relax muscles.  So you all maintain the flow and balance of life’s necessities for the health of the world.  The world cannot survive without you all.

Salt has been used since ancient times to cleanse and disinfect wounds.  So you all are the disinfectant of the earth.  You cleanse the wounds of abuse and oppression. You sanitize hearts and minds infected with lies and old hatreds.  You neutralize unhealthy appetites and desires that could lead to serious disease. 

Salt has been used since ancient times to preserve meat and fish and other perishables.  You all are the preservative of the earth.  You preserve the things that feed, nourish, sustain and energize the world.

Salt, for the ancient Jews, was a symbol of the permanence of God’s covenant. Grains of salt were placed on the lips of 8-day old babies during the rites of purification.  So you all are the living reminder of God’s permanent promise to and presence with the earth.  

Salt was believed to offer protection against evil spirits.  So you all are the guardians of the goodness of the earth who stand against evil.

Salt was sometimes as valuable ounce for ounce as gold so it was frequently used as money.  Roman soldiers received part of their wages in salt.  That part of their compensation was called salarium argentum or “salt silver,” and it’s where we get our word salary.  So you all are money, baby.  You all are the currency of the earth.

You all are the salt of the earth, but salt that simply stays in the shaker doesn’t season anything, so sprinkle yourselves out there to bring out all the good flavors of the world.

You are the salt of the earth, but salt that never leaves the box doesn’t heal any wounds or preserve anything.

You are the salt of the earth, but salt that simply sits in the sack won’t clear ice off of the roads and sidewalks to make the way safer for everyone, so shovel yourselves out there.

You all are the salt of the earth.  That’s how essential and valuable Jesus wants us to be in the world.  And just to make sure we get the point, he shifts metaphors.

“You”—and again, you is plural, all y’all—“You are the light of the world.”   

Cicero, the great Roman statesman who tried to preserve the Roman Republic during the rise of Julius Caesar described Rome as “a light to the world.”  At the time the Gospel of Matthew was being written, the Roman poet, Statius, described the emperor Domitian as “the light of the sun in the palace, a divine shining radiance that casts abundant light everywhere.”  

“Not so fast,” said Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew, “Rome is not the light of the world and neither is the tyrannical, violent emperor.  Au contraire.  You all are the light of the world.”

You all bring the light of truth to a world that all too often likes to obscure its real motives in the shadows of untruth, half-truth, treachery and duplicity.

You all are the light of goodness and generosity that can keep the world from stumbling off a cliff in the moonless night of narcissism, greed, selfishness, self-indulgence and self-absorption.

You all are the light of faith and hope that keeps the world from crashing onto the rocks of despair. You all are the light of love that guides the world toward a brighter day.

Let your light shine, said Jesus—not with spiritual arrogance or ostentatious piety, but with the simple brightness of caring for each other.  Let your light shine by speaking up for each other, especially for those who have no voice.  Let your light shine by standing up for each other, especially when you are standing up for what’s right  and fair and decent.  You, together, are the light of the world.

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish,” said Jesus, “but to fulfill.” Jesus was mobilizing us to live a visible life of righteousness in this world—to be a visible sign of God’s righteousness alive and at work in this world.  

Righteousness is a central theme in the Gospel of Matthew, but righteousness is also understood in a particular way in this gospel.  

“I tell you,” said Jesus, “unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”  That sounds pretty daunting.  After all, the scribes and the Pharisees were famous for being fastidious in keeping the law;  they were the public face of legalistic righteousness.  But Jesus, in Matthew’s gospel, had a different definition of righteousness.

The Greek word for “righteousness” is dikaiosyne.  It’s a compound word formed from dike which means “just” or “fair,” and syne which means together.  In Matthew’s gospel, righteousness doesn’t describe intransigent moralizing, it describes instead a sense of justice and fairness rooted in compassion.  The word has a communal character—it describes an ethic rooted in community.  

In the first chapter of Matthew , Joseph is called righteous because in his compassion for Mary he did not want to expose her to public disgrace.  In chapter 3, when John the Baptist tries to prevent Jesus from being baptized, Jesus replies, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”  Jesus immersed himself in the waters of John’s baptism of repentance not because he needed to repent, but in order to show that he was united with and in solidarity with all those who do repent. It was a righteous act.  

In chapter 25, in Matthew’s description of the final judgment, the righteous are the ones who feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, clothe the naked, house the homeless stranger, and care for the sick and visit those in prison.  These are the people who hear Jesus say, “‘Come, you that are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.” (25:34)  

When Jesus tells us we are the salt of the earth and the light of the world, he is calling us to be living examples of God’s kind-hearted, compassionate, and frankly practical righteousness.  He is, in short, telling us to take care of each other.  He is telling us to treat each other like friends.  And he is telling us to do it in a way that is visible to the world around us.

Being salt and light is what helped Christianity grow from a small and often despised fringe movement into a major force of transformation for the empire and, eventually, for the world.

In The Rise of Christianity, sociologist Rodney Stark put it this way: “Christianity revitalized life in Greco-Roman cities by providing new norms and new kinds of social relationships able to cope with many urgent urban problems. To cities filled with the homeless and the impoverished, Christianity offered charity as well as hope. To cities filled with newcomers and strangers, Christianity offered an immediate basis for attachments. To cities filled with orphans and widows, Christianity provided a new and expanded sense of family. To cities torn by violent ethnic strife, Christianity offered a new basis for social solidarity. And to cities faced with epidemics, fires, and earthquakes, Christianity offered effective nursing services.”

A lot has changed in the world since the days when Domitian was the emperor and Matthew was writing his gospel, but in too many places the shadow side of human nature is still spilling pain and suffering and death on the vulnerable.  It seems sometimes that we will never see the end of the three great destroyers—greed, racism and misogyny.  

The world still needs salt to highlight its diversity, heal its wounds and preserve its life.  The world more than ever needs light to guide it in the way of truth and lead it out of the endless darkness of selfishness.

You are the salt of the earth.  You are the light of the world.

It’s our time to heal.  It’s our time to shine.  In the name of Jesus.

Withdrawing to Galilee

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Matthew 4:12-23

“Now when Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.” 

In Matthew’s telling of the life and work of Jesus, the arrest of John is the trigger that launches Jesus into his ministry of proclamation, teaching, healing and non-violent resistance.   John’s arrest sets him on a path that will eventually lead him to his death in Jerusalem.

When Jesus launches his ministry, the timing is political.  The arrest of John the Baptist is the catalyst that sets him in motion.  Herod Antipas had John arrested because John had been speaking out forcefully against Herod’s abuses of power and other moral failings, including his adulterous marriage to his sister-in-law which was forbidden under Jewish law.  As he railed against Herod, John had been attracting hundreds of followers, which made him dangerous.  So Herod did what authoritarianism always does.  He silenced the inconvenient voice of truth and criticism.  He disappeared the leader of the potential resistance.

When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.   “Withdrew” is an interesting word choice here.  It’s an accurate translation, but one that’s apt to give us the wrong idea.  Jesus isn’t retreating.  He’s pivoting.  He is intentionally relocating to a more strategic position.

Why Galilee?  Matthew saw Jesus fulfilling a prophecy from the 9th chapter of Isaiah, but there were other very good reasons for Jesus to begin his work in Galilee. 

Historically, Galilee had been a hotbed of anti-Roman and anti-Herodian sentiment.  Long before Jesus arrived, Galilee had given rise to episodes of armed resistance and tax revolts.  In 37 BCE Hasmonean insurgents from Galilee waged a 2-year guerilla war against Herod and his Roman  overlords, hiding out in caves in Galilean hills between engagements.  In 6 BCE, Judas of Galilee led a revolt against the Quirinius census.   The city of Gamla, near the Sea of Galilee, had become a stronghold for Zealot extremists who had no qualms about using violence in their ongoing fight against the empire.  Galileans even practiced economic resistance when, beginning around 4 BCE, they initiated a 70-year boycott against mass produced clay lamps and red-slip pottery tableware which was used everywhere in the empire and taxed to help support the Roman military machine.

“Galilee of the Gentiles” had an ethnically diverse population.  Jews were the dominant group, but in an attempt to subvert Jewish resistance, the Romans had offered economic incentives for people from other parts of the empire to settle there.  Matthew tells us that Jesus made his home in Capernaum, a bustling, multi-ethnic hub from which other Galilean towns and villages could easily be reached either by boat or by road.  Because it was a garrison town and customs station, Capernaum had a highly visible Roman presence which meant that it would also give Jesus more opportunities to encounter travelers and settlers from other parts of Palestine, Syria, Greece, Egypt, Gaul and elsewhere.

“From that time Jesus began to proclaim, ‘Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has come near.’” (4:17).   That’s the good news, the gospel, that Jesus proclaims from his strategic base in Capernaum. 

“Repent” really is not a good translation.  “Repent,” in English, has overtones of penance and sorrow and regret, but the Greek word Metanoia means a change of heart, a change of thinking, a change of direction, a change of behavior.  Metanoieteis the word Jesus speaks in the Greek text.  It’s a command.  An imperative.  From that time Jesus began to proclaim, “Time for a change.  The commonwealth of God’s justice and kindness has come near.  It’s in reach.  Change your heart.  Change your thinking.  Change the way you do things.”  

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

As he walks by the Sea of Galilee, Jesus sees Peter, Andrew, James and John casting their nets into the sea.  He 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 of people,” or “fishers for people,” or even “fishers on behalf ofpeople.”  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%, the people who reap all the profits but do none of the work.”

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

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 kindness 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.”

“When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.”  That sentence at the beginning of today’s gospel reading sits heavy in my heart.  It would be easy to write off John’s arrest as just one more authoritarian act of oppression in a land where authoritarian oppression was the norm.  It would be easy to skim past it and go straight to the calling of the fishermen, a story we can easily spiritualize if we don’t think too much about what it is that they gave up to follow Jesus and what it cost them and their families.  It would be easy, even, to just not see it.  But it is the thing that sets the work of Christ in motion.  

It would be easy to think, well that was then and this is now—that’s just how things were.  But this week, this month, while the streets of our cities are filled with armed and masked federal agents who are kidnapping and killing our neighbors, while resistance to authoritarian thuggery in Minneapolis and elsewhere is met with violence it is simply not possible to ignore that sentence.  Where do we withdraw to?  Where is our Galilee, our place of resistance? Where do we go to stand up with Jesus and say, “Time for change.  The Commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy is at hand.”

When Jesus heard that Rene Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three had been shot and killed, he withdrew to Galilee.  

When Jesus heard that Liam Conejo Ramos, a 5-year-old preschooler in a blue bunny hat had been abducted outside his home, he withdrew to Galilee.  

When Jesus heard that Alex Jeffrey Pretti, an ICU nurse was shot and killed by government agents who are long on hostility but short on training, he withdrew to Galilee.  

When Jesus heard that 100 clergy had been arrested at the Minneapolis airport while protesting the presence and tactics that government agents are using to oppress our neighbors, he withdrew to Galilee.  And stood with them.

Minneapolis is our Galilee.

Chicago is our Galilee.

Portland is our Galilee.

Wherever our neighbors are being assaulted and oppressed, that is our Galilee.  That is where we hear Jesus calling us to follow him, even if it means stepping away from life as we’ve always known it.  

Jesus is telling us it’s time for a change.  The kingdom of heaven, the commonwealth of God’s justice and mercy is in reach.  “Now let us begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter — but beautiful — struggle for a new world.”  

Taking the Plunge

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

One Sunday morning when a newborn baby was being baptized during the worship service, there was a little five-year-old girl who was watching everything very intently from the front pew.  She was utterly fascinated by the baptism ceremony, but didn’t really understand what it was all about, and as pastor began to scoop water from the font and pour it onto the baby’s head, she turned to her father and in a very loud voice asked, “Daddy, why is he brainwashing the baby??”

Baptism isn’t brainwashing, of course, but over a lifetime it is supposed to change the way you think, the way you see the world, and the way you interact with the world.  We baptize people, including babies, as a sign that they are included in God’s grace and in God’s mission to transform the world.  We baptize because Jesus told us to baptize.[1]  And we baptize because Jesus, himself, was baptized.

The baptism of Jesus is covered in all four gospels.  Sort of.  John’s gospel has a scene where Jesus is at the river while John is baptizing, and  John says he saw the Spirit descend on Jesus like a dove, but the Gospel of John never actually describes Jesus being baptized.  

My favorite version of the Baptism of Jesus is in the Gospel of Matthew because it starts out with John and Jesus arguing.  Can you imagine it?  There they are, hip deep in the water, and Jesus says to John, “Do you have to dunk me all the way under?  Can’t you just scoop up a handful of water and pour it over my head?” And John says, “Dude!  No!  Are you crazy?  I’m John the Baptist, not John the Episcopalian!” (rim shot)

Actually, what they were arguing about was that John didn’t want to baptize Jesus—at least according to Matthew’s account.  Jesus came to John to be baptized, and Matthew tells us that John would have prevented him.  It didn’t feel right to John.  It didn’t feel appropriate to him because he knew that Jesus was more important than he was.  For him to baptize Jesus seemed upside down and backwards.  “I need to be baptized by you!” he told Jesus.  

I need to be baptized by you.  That’s an interesting choice of words.  The wording in Greek implies that John felt he was lacking something that he thought Jesus could give him.  What could that be?

Jesus finally persuaded John to go ahead and baptize him when he said, “Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness.”  Today’s English Version translates that as “Let it be so for now. For in this way we shall do all that God requires.”  The Contemporary English Bible says, “For now this is how it should be, because we must do all God wants us to do.”

Basically, Jesus was saying to John, “let’s go ahead with this because it’s the right thing to do.”

So there’s another reason we baptize:  it’s the right thing to do.  It’s what God wants us to do.

The word “baptism” comes from the Greek verb baptizein which means “to dip,” or “to dip frequently or intensively, to plunge or to immerse.”[2]  It’s also the verb that’s used to describe putting dressing on a salad, though, so you could say it also means “to sprinkle.”  

Because early Christian baptisms were usually by immersion, some have insisted that you have to be fully immersed or it’s not a real baptism.  But The Didache, a manual for good church practice written in the late 1st or very early 2nd century said, “If you have not living water (running water, such as a stream or river), baptize into other water; and if you cannot in cold, in warm. But if you have not either, pour out water three times upon the head into the name of Father and Son and Holy Spirit.”  

That practice of pouring out water on the head is called afflusion, by the way, and as The Didache attests, it has been one of the ways the church has baptized people since its earliest days.

Yes, our word baptism does come from the Greek verb which means to immerse.  But what is it that we are immersed into?   The water is an important sign.  It speaks to us physically, spiritually and psychologically in a powerful way.  But even if there is only a little water poured onto our heads, we are being immersed, plunged into the life and love of the Triune God, the vision and mission of Christ.

Martin Luther said that the amount of water is never an issue.  Water is the physical sign of what God is doing in baptism; it is the Word of God that makes baptism effective.  One drop of water is enough because it’s the  Word of God that has all the power.  The water and the Word together become a sign of what Christ has done and is doing for us.  

Luther described baptism as one of the means of grace through which God creates and strengthens “saving faith.”  He borrowed language from Titus 3:5 to depict baptism as a “washing of regeneration” in which infants and adults are reborn.  In that rebirth, said Luther, we are clothed with the righteousness of Christ. 

“Baptism, then,” he went on to say, “signifies two things—death and resurrection, that is, full and complete justification. When the minister immerses the child in the water it signifies death, and when he draws it forth again it signifies life. Thus Paul expounds it in Romans 6: ‘We were buried therefore with Christ by baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.’ This death and resurrection we call the new creation, regeneration, and spiritual birth. This should not be understood only allegorically as the death of sin and the life of grace, as many understand it, but as actual death and resurrection. For baptism is not a false sign.”

In other words, as Luther describes it, we actually die and are resurrected in our baptism.  Life—baptized life—is a brand new life.

Baptism is not a sign of my decision for Christ, it is a sign of Christ’s decision for me.  It is a sign of God’s grace—the grace that gives us life, the grace that sustains our life.  By the presence of Christ, the living Word, and by the power of the Holy Spirit who lives in us and works through us, that one drop of water can make all the difference in the world.

Baptism isn’t an event, it’s a way of life.  But if our baptism makes one drop of difference in our lives, then we nurture that new life so it can grow and mature. That’s what church is for. That’s what education is for. That’s what prayer and contemplation are for.  But church, prayer, education—these things are not our mission—they are things that prepare us for and empower us for our mission.  

The late Thomas Troeger who taught preaching at Yale Divinity School once said,  “When we follow Jesus into the waters of baptism, we are making a statement, a witness to our desire not only for a new life for our individual selves, but a new life for the whole world. We are renouncing Herod’s action of shutting up John, of shutting up hope, of shutting up the transformation of this world. We are affirming the opening of heaven, the opening of hope, the releasing of God’s renewing power into the world. 

“Every time we have a baptism in our churches, we are making a statement of the same good news that John preached. It is not good news to the Herods of the earth. It is not good news to those who want to shut up the transforming power of God, including those who do it in the name of narrowly doctrinaire religion. But it is good news for everyone who yearns and hungers for a new world, a new creation. When we follow Jesus into the baptismal waters or when we reaffirm our baptismal vows, we are giving testimony that the opening of heaven is greater than any human effort to shut up the power of God.”

What happened for Jesus in his baptism also happens for us in our baptism.  The heavens are opened to us so there is no barrier between us and the presence of God, no barrier between us and each other.  We are told that we are loved.  We are named as children of God in a world that wants to call us all kinds of other names, a world that encourages us to label ourselves in ways that alienate us from each other and to name others in a way that alienates them from us.  But baptism reminds us that we are all God’s children.  We are all in this together.

In a world full of bad news, baptism makes us the Good News people.  In our baptism we are called beloved.  In our baptism we are named children of God.  The Spirit of God descends on us and into us to empower us and to open our minds and hearts.  And our ears. In baptism we are given a new identity; we hear God proclaim You are my child.  I am pleased with you.  I like you!  Now…let’s go out and heal the world!

[1] Matthew 28:19

[2] Anchor Yale Bible Dictionary

Fleshing Out the Story

Steve Beckham 2 Comments

Could it be the most important idea in history?

John 1:1-18

I deeply and truly love Christmas, but the sheer enormity of it is almost overwhelming   I’m not talking about all the shopping or all the hustle and bustle and preparation at home and at church.  I’m not even grumbling about the over-the-top commercialism or all the different greeting card interpretations of the “true meaning of Christmas” which can put you in a psychological sugar coma if you try to swallow them all at once.   

The thing that is almost overwhelming for me is the daunting task of trying to convey the real true meaning of Christmas, the task of sharing a genuine and meaningful understanding of The Incarnation, the theological claim that Saint Francis thought was the most important doctrine of the church—the mind-stretching assertion that the mystery we call God, the Maker of Everything, came to us as one of us—the idea that God “became flesh and lived among us” from gestation to birth to death as a particular person in a particular place and in a particular time so that we could begin to more fully understand that God is with us in all persons, in all creatures, in all creation, and at all times.

That thought, that idea, that reality that we call The Incarnation is so enormous and mind-boggling that it’s really tempting to retreat into the less cosmic halo of ideas that hover around that manger in Bethlehem, ideas like innocence and love personified and new beginnings.  Those are all good, true and valuable things.  They are meaningful parts of the package.  But the goodness, truth, new beginnings and love we see in that holy child become even more potent when we begin to truly understand what God is doing in that manger in Bethlehem.

When the early followers of Jesus began to write down their understanding of who Jesus was and what he was about, when they began to explain what meant to them and what they meant when they called him Christ—Christos—the anointed one, it’s clear that they saw him as something more than just a great spiritual teacher or religious leader.   You don’t have to read very far in these early writings to discover that these followers of Jesus thought there was something of cosmic importance about him.  Early on they called him the Son of God but that description didn’t seem to be enough for many of them.  It didn’t seem to fully capture the all-encompassing  fullness of what they had experienced in Jesus the Christ.  

“He is the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being, and he sustains all things by his powerful word,” said the writer of Hebrews.[1]  “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of creation,” said the author of Colossians, “for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible…all things have been created through him and for him…for in him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven…”[2]

Late in the first century, a writer we’ve come to know as John sat down to write his account of Jesus.  He wasn’t interested in creating just another chronicle of the life of Jesus as others had done; he wanted to explore the meaning of Jesus.  He wanted to make it clear that Jesus the Christ was not someone who could be defined, contained or constrained by geography or time or even philosophy, because the God of all geography and time and philosophy was and is somehow present in him.  

John began his gospel like this:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and that life was the light of all humanity.  The light shines on in the darkness, and the darkness has not understood it…. And the Word became flesh and lived among us, and we gazed on his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.

The language of this prologue is pure poetry.  But it’s also philosophy.  And in a strange, farsighted way, John was brushing up against physics. 

The Greek word we translate as “Word” is logos.  Logos was a word that ancient philosophers loved to play with and because of that we have numerous ways to translate it.  One of the oldest meanings of logos was story or narrative.  Where does your mind go if you hear In the beginning was the story, and the story became flesh and lived among us?  

Logos could also mean content or reason or statement.  Other philosophical meanings included, order, idea, blueprint, primordial template, primal thought, or intention.  

Logos became flesh and lived among us.  The metaphysical became physical.  If that sounds too esoteric, consider quantum physics. 

 Energy moves through quantum fields as abstract mathematical wave functions.  When wave functions are observed, they tend to collapse into particles.  Particles continually move through patterns in a kind of quantum dance, always moving toward closeness, joining, partnering, combining.  Fermions dance with bosons.  Neutrinos, muons, gluons, leptons and quarks assemble themselves into protons, neutrons and electrons which assemble themselves into atoms which assemble themselves into molecules we call elements.  Hydrogen and carbon molecules dance together to form the four essential organic compounds: nucleic acids, proteins, lipids and carbohydrates.  And out of all of this comes life.  The Word, the Story, the Pattern, the Intention, the Thought becomes flesh and dwells among us.  

The great British astrophysicist James Jeans wrote: “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.  Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the field of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as a creator and governor of the realm of matter… We discover that the universe shows evidence of a designing or controlling power that has something in common with our own minds.”[3]

This is The Incarnation.  The great Thought of God expressed in the whole universe condensed itself into a singular human life and lived among us.  And why would God do that?  

Love.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin saw love as the driving force of the universe. “For Teilhard, love is a passionate force at the heart of the Big Bang universe, the fire that breathes life into matter and unifies elements center to center; love is deeply embedded in the cosmos, a ‘cosmological force.’”[4]

God is Love, we read in 1 John.  “God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them.”

Love became flesh and lived among us.  And still lives among us.  And within us.  And around us.  And beyond us.  

Love…God… was not content to be an abstract idea or a mere sentiment.  God, the Author of Life, the One in whom we live and move and have our being is Love with a capital L.  Love Personified…and Love is all about relationship.  Christmas is when God, the Love that founded the universe, showed up as one of us in order to show us in person just how much we are loved and in order to teach us to love each other more freely and completely. 

Love became flesh and lived among us so that we might learn to love God with all our heart, mind, soul and strength and love our neighbors as ourselves. 

Love didn’t come to us as a king or potentate to lord it over us.  Love came as a poor baby among a poor and oppressed people far from the centers of privilege and power in order to show us that “the fire that breathes life into matter and unifies elements center to center,” is alive in and breathing life into all of us and wants to unify us with each other center to center and heart to heart.  

It’s an enormous idea, this thing called Christmas, this Incarnation.  This idea that the Word became flesh encompasses everything we see and everything we don’t see.  It speaks in poetry then carries us into the depths of philosophy and physics and biology.  It warms the heart and boggles the mind.  It is, quite literally everything.  And the beating heart of it is love.

To even begin to understand the Incarnation, we have to open our minds and our hearts.  As another early follower of Jesus wrote: “I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.”[5]

Merry Christmas

[1] Hebrews 1:3

[2] Colossians 1:15

[3] James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe, as quoted by Ilia Delio, The Unbearable Wholeness of Being, p. 40

[4] Ilia Delio, ibid., p.43

[5] Ephesians 3:18-19