8-24-23 - Keys To the Kingdom

You can listen to this reflection here. Sunday's gospel reading is here. 

I’ve always pictured an oversized key, like an honorary Key to the City. But I don’t think that’s what Jesus had in mind when he said to Simon Peter, “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

He has just called Peter the “rock on which I will build my church.” And now the keys to the Kingdom? We can only guess at what he meant – that is how theologians and biblical scholars make a living, after all. But we might get a hint of what he intended when we think about what keys do. They lock things, and they open them. They make them inaccessible and accessible.

The Kingdom of God is a reality that Jesus described through image and metaphor, and demonstrated through healing, teaching, and transformative actions that look to us like miracles. It is the realm of God, the reality of God, the Life of God as it unfolds in our own plane of reality. It is power and energy and boundless grace. To be given the “keys” to this reality is to be given power to unlock, release the energy of heaven – or to withhold it. Hence, “…whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

We are heirs to this gift, this promise, this frightening spiritual authority. We can keep the realm of God, with all its power and promise and peace, locked up simply by not talking about it, or not exercising the power we’ve been given. Or we can use these keys to open it to everyone who is thirsty for God.

We can keep people bound by withholding forgiveness, and loosed by exercising grace. Jesus gave us these gifts not to be locked away in a safe deposit box, but to be spent, drawn down, exhausted… only to find the them constantly replenished, like a waterfall.

In prayer today, imagine sitting with Jesus and having him hand you a set of keys. What do they look like? What do they open? Who has the keys to your heart?

There are some things that need to remain bound, I suppose – the power of evil to wreak destruction in our world, for one. Racism, materialism, consumerism, nationalism… there are a few. And so many more things and people and communities that need to be released, set free. I believe God wants us in the “loosing” business, one lock at a time. That's what the keys to the kingdom are for.

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7-4-23 - Home of the Free

You can listen to this reflection here. Sundays readings are here.

Today is America’s Independence Day, which many will celebrate by being freed from a day at work. Independence means something different in the Christian life than it might politically. The kind of liberty Jesus calls us into is strongly inter-dependent. He invites us to be tethered to God, to one another and to serving the world, not because we are forced, but by our free choice.

Paul writes in Romans that we have been set free from sin so as to be enslaved to God, being made holy (“sanctified”) in the process. Would we voluntary enslave ourselves to anything? Well, yes. Our lives are full of ways in which we yield our freedom – on a limited basis – to achieve a goal. We become employees working under the policies and procedures of our employers; we pay personal trainers large sums to make us perform painful and arduous exercises; we follow certain diets.

And we voluntarily take on the yoke Jesus offers, which he says is easy. Which it is, when we truly trust him; it is only when we pull away that we find it chafes.

I believe God’s greatest desire for us is freedom, to be free from all that holds us back and makes us less than who we were intended to be, less than who God already knows us to be. That freedom does not make us independent, however – it makes us interdependent.

We are asked to become more dependent on God, to throw all our weight and trust on this One we cannot see but discern in our lives, and around us. As we grow in that relationship, we learn the ways that God is depending upon us to be the vessels by which her/his transforming love and healing power are enacted in the world. We cannot do it without God; God will not do it without us.

We are also invited to become interdependent with others in our communities of faith, and with those whom we would serve. And we are interdependent in service to the world, willing to be served as well as to serve. We will see peace and justice reign when we truly understand that to seek the good for our neighbor will create good and security and plenty for us. Even better will be the day when we don’t think in “us” and “them” terms at all – as U2 sings in Invisible, “There is no them; there’s only you, there’s only me.”

Today I wish you a day of perfect freedom and fun – with the prayer that, as we celebrate the unfathomable liberties many – though not yet all – of us enjoy as a nation, we find a pattern of “tethered freedom” in Christ that allows us to be truly free.

To receive Water Daily by email each morning, subscribe here.  Here are the bible readings for next Sunday. Water Daily is also a podcast – subscribe to it here on Apple, Spotify or your favorite podcast platform.