Tag God

Goodbyes Are Never Easy

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

John 14:1-14

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All along the Way there are places to abide.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Frederick Buechner put it this way:

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gate Versus The Gatekeepers

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

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

John 10:1-10

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[1] Jeremiah 23

[2] Ezekiel 34

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

Who Sinned?

Steve Beckham Leave a comment

John 9:1-41

The gospel text for this Sunday is the entire ninth chapter of the Gospel of John. That’s a very long reading and there is a lot to think about in those 41 verses, so this week I’m going to combine the reading of the text with my observations instead of our usual practice of standing for the reading of the text followed by the preaching a more conventional sermon.

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

Chapter nine of John tells us the story of Jesus healing the man born blind.  In the Gospel of John, unlike the synoptic gospels, Jesus makes four or maybe five separate trips to Jerusalem.  This story is takes place during his third trip which starts in chapter seven when Jesus travels to Jerusalem in secret to celebrate Succoth, the Feast of the Tabernacles.  His presence doesn’t remain a secret for very long.  Throughout chapters seven and eight, while he teaches in the courtyards of the temple he has several heated disputes with his antagonists and it is clear that they are looking for an excuse to kill him.  And that’s where things stand when we come to the beginning of chapter nine.

John 9:1   As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?”

When something tragic happens or when we see or experience misfortune, there is something in us that wants to know why.  We want to know who or what is responsible.  Random unfortunate things happened in life in ancient times just as they happen today and when there was no immediately discernable cause or observable reason to pin the blame on someone or some circumstance, people figured that God must be responsible.  Some people still think that way today.  And since God is good and wouldn’t do anything hurtful without a very good reason, then those who think God has created the unfortunate state of affairs as a punishment circle back around to blaming the victim or victims.  

In the minds of the disciples, in their frame of reference from their culture, if a person was born blind or with some other disability, it had to be because God wanted them to be disabled or, if their thinking is a little more nuanced, it happened because someone’s sin interfered with God’s good design and intentions.  That’s why the disciples asked Jesus, “Whose sin caused this man to be born blind?  His sin or his parents?”

This was the common understanding in their world, but it was a pretty unhealthy and unhelpful way to think about God and, frankly, about life.  Understandable, but not helpful.  Jesus wants to change their perspective.  He wants them to understand that God is not in the business of inflicting suffering and that disabilities are not the result of someone’s moral failure. 

In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner said, “God does not cause our misfortunes. Some are caused by bad luck, some are caused by bad people, and some are simply an inevitable consequence of our being human and being mortal, living in a world of inflexible natural laws. The painful things that happen to us are not punishments for our misbehavior, nor are they in any way part of some grand design on God’s part. Because the tragedy is not God’s will, we need not feel hurt or betrayed by God when tragedy strikes. We can turn to Him for help in overcoming it, precisely because we can tell ourselves that God is as outraged by it as we are.”

So, back to the Gospel text:

2 His disciples asked him, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” 3 Jesus answered, “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.”

And this is where we come to a translation problem.  In verse 3, the NRSV has Jesus saying, “He was born blind so that God’s works might be revealed in him.  We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work.”  Some translations read, “This happened so that God’s works might be revealed…” But here’s the problem: the words “he was born blind” or “this happened” are not in the Greek text.  They are an insertion that makes it sound like the man’s blindness was predestined by God just so Jesus could come along and demonstrate God’s power.  It reads like God set up this poor blind man as a stage prop.

But that is not what the original text says.   So what does it say?  What does it sound like if we follow the actual Greek text and re-work the punctuation, which, by the way, was also added by translators and was not part of the original text?  

It reads like this: “Neither this man nor his parents sinned.  So that the works God might be revealed in him, we must work the works of the One who sent me while it is day.  Night is coming when no one can work.”  That’s what the original text actually says.  The Contemporary English Version paraphrases it pretty nicely this way:  “Because of his blindness, you will see God work a miracle for him.”  There is no implication in the text that God made this poor man blind as some kind of punishment or for any other reason.  On the contrary, through Jesus, God is going to give him his sight.  God’s works will be revealed in him.

Back to the text:  4 Jesus said, “We must work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming, when no one can work. 5 As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.”

The theological theme of light and darkness is a thread that runs through the Gospel of John from the very beginning.  John 1:4 tells us, “In him was life and the life was the light of all people.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.”  In John 3:19 we read, “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”  In John 8:12, just one chapter before Jesus encounters the man born blind, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.  Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

This theme of light and darkness is personified in the man born blind, a person who has literally lived his life in the dark.  In this gospel, light and darkness symbolize belief and unbelief and when Jesus gives sight to the blind man as the story unfolds we see him move from the darkness of unbelief to the light and life of belief.

We continue with the text:

5 As long as I am in the world,” said Jesus, “I am the light of the world.  6 When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man’s eyes,  7 saying to him, “Go, wash in the pool of Siloam” (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see.

The Gospel of John echoes the book of Genesis in several ways, and a number of early Church Fathers saw Jesus’ act of mixing the mud as a repetition of God creating humans from the dust of the ground in Genesis.  Irenaeus, Basil the Great and John Chrysostom went so far as to say that the man Jesus healed had been born without eyes and that when Jesus spread the mud on his eyes he was actually creating new eyes for him.  That detail is not in the Gospel text of course, but it is a tradition that is almost as old as the Gospel of John, itself. 

So how did people respond when they saw that their neighbor had been miraculously given his sight?

8 The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, “Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?” 9 Some were saying, “It is he.” Others were saying, “No, but it is someone like him.” He kept saying, “I am he.” 10 But they kept asking him, “Then how were your eyes opened?” 11 He answered, “The man called Jesus made mud, spread it on my eyes, and said to me, ‘Go to Siloam and wash.’ Then I went and washed and received my sight.” 12 They said to him, “Where is he?” He said, “I do not know.”

The neighbors, the people who passed by this man every day had a hard time believing that he had been given his sight.  It was the kind of thing that just didn’t happen in the world as they understood it. Their response reminds me of an old Calvin and Hobbs cartoon from years ago where Calvin says, “It’s not denial.  I’m just selective about the reality I accept.”

13   They brought to the Pharisees the man who had formerly been blind. 14 Now it was a Sabbath day when Jesus made the mud and opened his eyes. 15 Then the Pharisees also began to ask him how he had received his sight. He said to them, “He put mud on my eyes. Then I washed, and now I see.” 16 Some of the Pharisees said, “This man is not from God, for he does not observe the Sabbath.” Others said, “How can a man who is a sinner perform such signs?” And they were divided. 17 So they said again to the blind man, “What do you say about him? It was your eyes he opened.” He said, “He is a prophet.”*

What, exactly, was the problem the Pharisees had with Jesus healing the blind man on the Sabbath?  In this particular instance it wasn’t the healing so much as how Jesus did it.  In Exodus 35:2 the Torah says that the people are to refrain from creative work on the Sabbath.  But because the Torah does not spell out exactly what qualifies as creative work, the Sages had developed a list of 39 creative acts that were forbidden on the Sabbath.  Number 10 on that list was kneading dough, which had been expanded to include working with clay.  So when Jesus made mud to heal the blind man’s eyes, they saw it as a violation of Sabbath law.  But they also were not ready to believe that the blind man had been given his sight, or even that he had really been blind in the first place.

Back to the text:

18   The Jews did not believe that he had been blind and had received his sight until they called the parents of the man who had received his sight 19 and asked them, “Is this your son, who you say was born blind? How then does he now see?” 20 His parents answered, “We know that this is our son and that he was born blind, 21 but we do not know how it is that now he sees, nor do we know who opened his eyes. Ask him; he is of age. He will speak for himself.” 22 His parents said this because they were afraid of the Jews, for the Jews had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue. 23 Therefore his parents said, “He is of age; ask him.”

Fear has been an undercurrent of this story since the blind man received his sight but this is the first time it is named.  The man’s neighbors are anxious because to acknowledge the miracle would mean that they would have to reevaluate who they think Jesus is and also, no small thing, how the universe works and how God works.  The Pharisees are anxious for the same reason, so they not only try to deny the miracle but to disqualify the miracle worker, Jesus.  The man’s parents are nervous for all the same reasons, but also because the Pharisees could bar them from the synagogue.  And that is no small thing.  

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.  The synagogue was the center of community life and being thrown out or banned could be both economically and socially disastrous. 

So fear, anxiety, makes everyone except Jesus and the formerly blind man reluctant to acknowledge the extraordinary thing that God has done in their midst.  Before we get judgmental, though, it’s important to remember that everything that happens in the gospels happens with the oppressive might of Rome in the background.  Everything Jesus does has to break through the atmosphere of fear that the Romans relied on to enforce the peace.

24   So for the second time they called the man who had been blind, and they said to him, “Give glory to God! We know that this man is a sinner.” 25 He answered, “I do not know whether he is a sinner. One thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” 26 They said to him, “What did he do to you? How did he open your eyes?” 27He answered them, “I have told you already, and you would not listen. Why do you want to hear it again? Do you also want to become his disciples?” 28 Then they reviled him, saying, “You are his disciple, but we are disciples of Moses. 29 We know that God has spoken to Moses, but as for this man, we do not know where he comes from.” 30 The man answered, “Here is an astonishing thing! You do not know where he comes from, yet he opened my eyes. 31 We know that God does not listen to sinners, but he does listen to one who worships him and obeys his will. 32 Never since the world began has it been heard that anyone opened the eyes of a person born blind. 33 If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.” 34 They answered him, “You were born entirely in sins, and are you trying to teach us?” And they drove him out.

In their anger, frustration and fear, the Pharisees resort to demonizing the formerly blind man.  Without facts or justification they move him to the category of “sinner,” even insisting that he was born “entirely in sins.”  If he’s a sinner, they don’t need to deal with him except to exclude him.  They excommunicate him from the community.  

35   Jesus heard that they had driven him out, and when he found him he said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?” 36 He answered, “And who is he, sir? Tell me, so that I may believe in him.” 37 Jesus said to him, “You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” 38 He said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him.

The Gospel has taken us from blindness to sight, from darkness to light, from unbelief to belief.  Throughout this story the Gospel has shown us that the ones who are really blind are those who choose not to see the goodness of God at work.  And now the story of the man who received his sight concludes with one last word of judgment.  “And this is the judgment, that the light has come into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.”

39 Jesus said, “I came into this world for judgment, so that those who do not see may see and those who do see may become blind.” 40 Some of the Pharisees who were with him heard this and said to him, “Surely we are not blind, are we?”  41 Jesus said to them, “If you were blind, you would not have sin. But now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

That is how this chapter ends, but there is one more thing for us to see here. Throughout this story, John never tells us the name of this man that Jesus healed.  He is called a sinner.  He is referred to as a beggar.  But most often he is referred to as the man born blind or the blind man or he who had been blind.  He is identified by his disability.  

That’s a thing we still do far too often to those among us who live with disabilities. We see them, we identify them in terms of the disability instead of as whole persons in their own right.  We see the challenge they live with instead of all the other traits that make them who they are.

The man Jesus healed was more than just a man born blind.  He had a name. And the church, thank God, has remembered his name even though it wasn’t recorded in the Gospel of John where his story is told.  His name was Celidonius which means “little swallow.”  According to the tradition of the Eastern Church, Celidonius stayed with Jesus and became a disciple after he was given his sight.  Years later he is said to have established the first Christian church at Nimes in Gaul and he is remembered in both the Roman and Eastern Churches as Saint Celidonius.    

Lent. Again.

Steve Beckham 4 Comments

Lent. Again.

Still humming a clinging scrap of Christmas,

still squinting through the bright winter light 

bouncing off the shining gifts of Epiphany,

suddenly the wind shifts and you get a face full of

Ashes. Deep sighs and ashes and those somber words

no one likes to say or hear, those words that make you 

think of all those friends and relatives who

were swallowed by history far, far too suddenly 

and too soon,

those words that taunt you, making you wonder 

if the 25-year warranty on your new gizmo or thingamabob

is just so much paper irony 

or a chuckle from heaven.

Remember that you are dust. 

Ashes and dust. And let me just mark it here

on your forehead so you don’t forget, right here

where all the world will see it and

the well-meaning busybodies in the grocery store

will awkwardly try to do you the favor 

of letting you know that there is 

a crossing smudge of mortality on your face.

Lent. Again.

Forty days, not counting Sundays, 

of wondering about wandering 

in deserts of every kind,

of negotiating multi-level interchanges from one 

high road to another,

inching along on thoroughfares

that never allow their advertised speed,

forty days to be mindful of inattentiveness,

forty days to ponder why a fast goes so slowly.

Forty days to unpack and weigh the stuff you carry,

to gingerly avoid jagged edges

as you sort through, evaluate and discard because

you have begun to learn the wisdom

of traveling light or simply

because your legs and your soul

are not as strong as they once were

and why take a risk of 

tripping before your time and 

falling face first into the dust and ashes?

Lent. Again.

Forty days of all things tempting and tempting all things,

forty days of analyzed appetites, considered cravings,

delusions diluted and dispensed,

forty days to wonder if you have spent your life 

constructing a coffin or creating a chrysalis,

forty days bedeviled by the seductive suggestion

to do and be merely good

when the broken heart of heaven is

spending its last erg of strength

and last drop of blood

to trudge uphill

and endure the messy, 

agonizing business

of making you new.

Lent. Again. 

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.”  

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

Our Down To Earth God

Steve Beckham 1 Comment

Then an angel of the Lord stood before them, and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were terrified. –Luke 2:9 (NRSV)

It’s funny how you can look at something a hundred times or more and then one day someone will point out something you hadn’t noticed and the whole thing looks different to you.  That happened to me a few years ago when a colleague pointed out one simple word in Luke’s Christmas story that had always just flown right by me.

Stood.  That was the word.  Stood.

The angel stood before them.  On the ground.

In all the years of reading or hearing this Christmas story I had always imagined this angel and the multitude of the heavenly host hovering in the air.  I think the Christmas carols taught us to picture it that way.  Angels we have heard on high.  It came upon a midnight clear, that glorious song of old, from angels bending near the earth.  

But that’s not what it says in the Gospel of Luke.  The angel stood before them.

If you were a shepherd in a field on a dark night, it would be pretty unsettling to have an angel appear in the air above you making announcements, but at least if the angel is in the air there’s some distance between you—a separation between your environment and the angel’s.  But if the angel suddenly appears standing in front of you, standing on the same ground you’re standing on, shining with the glory of the heavens… well I think my knees would turn to rubber.  And then imagine what it feels like when the whole multitude of the heavenly host is suddenly surrounding you and singing Glory to God.

Angels in the air feels slightly safer than angels on the ground.  Slightly.  If the angels are above, that means that they came from above.  It means that heaven is “up there” somewhere.  It doesn’t mess with the way we understand the spiritual cosmos.  But if the angels appear standing in front of us or behind us or around us, what does that say about heaven?  Could it be that heaven, the dwelling place of God and the angels, is not just “up there” but also here, with us?  Around us?  Could it mean that the angels of God are standing near us all the time and they simply choose not to show themselves?  Or that we’re just blind to their presence? Could it mean that this ground we walk on and build on and live on is also part of the dwelling place of God—so holy ground?

The angels didn’t bend near the earth.  They stood on it.  

We have this tendency, we humans, to want to separate the material from the spiritual, the divine from the physical.  We are such binary, black and white thinkers in a universe that’s full of colors and shades of gray.  We want here to be here and there to be there.  We want to put borders even on the oceans and talk about territorial waters!  We want to draw a clear and well defended line between our country and the country next door.  So it’s not surprising that we’ve assumed that there is a border between heaven and earth.

We seem to be most comfortable when there’s a little distance between us and angels, a little distance between us and God.  That seems to be the way most people talk about it, anyway.  “Put in a good word with the man upstairs,” they say.  And then there’s that song: “God is watching from a distance.” 

But that’s not what Christianity says.  That’s not what Christmas says.  The Word became flesh and lived among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth.  In him the fullness of God was pleased to dwell.  Not from a distance, but right in front of us.  With us.  As one of us.

We have trouble seeing the presence of God, seeing Christ in creation.  We have trouble seeing Christ in each other.  We even have trouble understanding Christ in Jesus.  How can Jesus be both divine and human?  We struggle to wrap our minds around that idea, so we have a tendency to make him either all human or all divine.  We picture that baby in the manger with a halo, and it doesn’t cross our minds that he might need to breastfeed and be burped and he might need his diapers changed.

Christmas, the mystery of the incarnation, tells us that God is not a bearded old man watching us from the clouds, a deity who is willing to give us what we ask if we are really good or strike us down with a thunderbolt if we’re bad.  That’s not God.  That’s Santa Claus.  Or Zeus.   

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 created 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 how to love each other more freely and completely. 

“We need to see the mystery of incarnation in one ordinary concrete moment,” wrote Richard Rohr, “and struggle with, fight, resist, and fall in love with it there. What is true in one particular place finally universalizes and ends up being true everywhere.”  In other words, God is present everywhere, in, with, and under everything.  Including you.  And me.  And all those people we’re inclined not to like. But to really grasp this idea, we need to first see God fully present in one particular person.  We need to see God in this particular baby.  This human baby

That, in the end, is what Christmas, the incarnation, is trying to tell us.  Christmas is God’s way of teaching us that there never really was any distance between heaven and earth, between the divine and the human, between the spiritual and the material.  Christmas is God proving once again that Christ is in, with, and under all the things—all things—including all the things we think we oversee and all the things we overlook.  Christmas is angels standing on the earth singing to shepherds and surrounding them with the glory of the Lord to remind them that they, too, are spiritual beings immersed in a human experience.  

Christmas is God’s love made visible.  Pope Francis said, “What is God’s love? It is not something vague, some generic feeling. God’s love has a name and a face: Jesus Christ, Jesus.”  I would add that, if you open your heart and your mind to it, God’s love can have your face, too.

Love is vulnerable—and what’s more vulnerable than a baby?  God comes to us as a baby because it’s easy to love a baby.  It’s easy to be vulnerable with a vulnerable infant.

Christmas is homey and concrete and vulnerable.  It enters the world surrounded by the earthy aromas of animals.  It needs to be fed at a mother’s breast.  It needs its diapers changed.  It cries when it’s hungry and shivers when it’s cold.  It spits up a little bit on your shoulder.  It looks out at the world with brand new eyes and tries to see and understand what it sees.  Most of all, it reaches out to be picked up and held close to your heart.  Christmas wants to be loved and to give love.  

Christmas is our down-to-earth God made manifest.  Yes, gloria in excelsis deo, glory to God in the highest, but glory, too, to God on earth where the angels stand to sing to shepherds, because the Spirit of God is in them, too, and God loves them like crazy.  Just like God loves you.

My prayer for you this Christmas is that you would enter deeply into the concrete, down-to-earth, human and divine mystery of incarnation.  May your eyes and ears be opened to the angels who stand upon the earth and minister to all God’s children.  May you come to see Christ incarnate, permeating all creation.  May you come to see that you are always and everywhere standing on holy ground.  May you dispense with artificial borders in your heart, in your mind, and in this lovely world.  And may you come to see yourself and all the others who share this world with you as spiritual beings immersed in a human experience.  Most of all, though, may you know that you are loved. 

May Christ be born anew in your heart this day and every day.  In Jesus’ name.