9-29-23 - Get In Line

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

Nobody likes waiting in a line, especially not when people cut in ahead of you at the invitation of someone further up. So imagine how thrilled the Jewish religious leaders were to hear, “Truly I tell you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you.”

This was how Jesus summed up the parable of the two sons. The tax collectors and prostitutes presumably represented that first son, who said he wouldn’t work for his father, but then changed his mind and did. Sinners who repent, Jesus suggested, are closer to God’s heart than do-gooding, self-righteous holy people who feel they have nothing to repent for. As he saw it, the scribes and Pharisees were more like that second son, who mouthed the right words but didn’t give his heart to the father’s vineyard.

The leaders saw their fidelity to keeping the Torah, the Law, as evidence that they were more righteous than anyone. But Jesus had a different angle – for him what mattered most was how they responded to the revelation he brought, which he said was in line with what John the Baptist taught, and what the prophets for centuries before him had foretold. “For John came to you in the way of righteousness and you did not believe him, but the tax collectors and the prostitutes believed him; and even after you saw it, you did not change your minds and believe him.”

He knocked the religious leaders for their refusal to recognize that God offered righteousness through his Son, a redemption of the heart much deeper and longer-lasting than mere law-keeping could ever bring. They thought they’d be first in line by virtue of how well they stood in line! Jesus suggested that God was more interested in those who genuinely recognize their faults and need for God’s mercy.

Our culture is filled with people who have not been raised with church or a knowledge of Jesus or God’s transforming love. In our age, churches are often seen as smug, rigid, prejudiced, oppressive, not to mention dull and irrelevant.

Yet the Church, flawed as it can be, is God's primary tool for mission. We need to help turn our churches inside out, making them incubators for new life, spiritual growth, transformation and healing. We need to make it easy for people with no church background whatsoever to find meaning and life in our midst. That means rethinking the way we worship, give, govern, preach – everything. What would you do differently at church to make it comfortable for the non-churched to encounter God's love?

I’ve always been amazed at the Iftars I attended during Ramadan. (Iftar is the meal at day's end in that season of fasting.) Though most of the Muslims present had had no food and water since daybreak, and had provided most of the food, the leader always told his congregants to go last in the food line, to let us non-fasters fill our plates first. This is the kind of grace to which we are called.

As far as we know, everyone who wants to be a part of God’s worldwide, time-and-space-encompassing community of love, is welcome. We’ll know we’re steeped in God's love when, no matter how long we’ve been in line, no matter how hungry we are, we’re delighted to let someone get to that feast ahead of us. There will be plenty, and to spare.

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7-20-23 - Avenging Angels

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

Jesus didn’t talk much about angels, but in his stories they’re anything but comforting. They’re fierce and on a mission – and in the story he tells of the wheat and the weeds, that mission is executing God’s final judgment.

“…the harvest is the end of the age, and the reapers are angels. Just as the weeds are collected and burned up with fire, so will it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send his angels, and they will collect out of his kingdom all causes of sin and all evildoers, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Who wants to dwell on the prospect of a final judgment? Many Christians remove the judgment from our God story, preferring to emphasize God's mercy and acceptance. I am a huge fan of God’s mercy and acceptance… but these are pretty cheap commodities without judgment. We’d have to excise much of what Jesus taught and lived if we’re going to take judgment out of the picture. Our claim as Christians, at least traditionally, is that God's judgment awaits us, but that we will experience it as righteous, redeemed sinners because of what Jesus did for us. We are received in grace because we are one with Christ, not only because of God's great love.

This is only one of the stories Jesus told that include an Ultimate Sorting, with unrepentant, unredeemed evildoers meeting an unhappy fate – here a furnace of fire, "where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Why is there teeth-gnashing in Jesus’ images of hell? Did dental problems cause him to conceive of aural and dental torture to go along with the fire? Puts a new spin on his humanity...)

The ones doing the sorting in this tale are angels, who serve as God’s messengers – in this picture, we might even say henchmen. Is fire the fate we would wish upon the weeds sown in the field, those who despise God and seek to destroy the goodness of God’s creation and creatures? Shouldn’t the judgment be aimed at the enemy sower?

That is a matter for us to pray about. If some manner of torment awaits the completely destructive, whether it’s physical pain or separation from God, that should drive us to pray fervently for them, asking God to have mercy, and do our best to share with them our own hope. Do you suppose that’s what Jesus meant by “pray for your enemies?” Might we even spare a prayer for the Enemy of Human Nature?

Could we do such a thing in our prayer time today? Think of the worst sort of “weeds” we can, and pray for mercy for their souls? And that somehow that mercy would become real to them, working its way into stony hearts to reawaken love and compassion and hope?

Maybe you or I are called to show God's mercy to a particularly nasty sort of weed. Mercy can catalyze conversion and healing. We may just lighten some fearsome angel’s workload.

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6-29-23 - God's Free Gift

You can listen to this reflection here.

For the rest of the week we turn to Sunday’s passage from Roman, which is such a deep and complex work of theology, it’s a hard to just take a quick dip in it. But let’s jump in anyway, because it contains a beautiful invitation to freedom in Christ – freedom both from sin, and from the effort to claw our way into God’s good graces.

Thus far, Paul has been unfolding an argument to support his contention that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, not through our own efforts. It is Christ’s sacrifice that sets us free, not our own will-power or ability to modify our behaviors… indeed, behavior change comes as we accept with relief the free gift of forgiveness and grace: But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.

In order to truly receive the free gift of God’s eternal life – which begins now, not just when we die – we need to allow God to free us from sin. Paul is concerned lest his listeners think this extravagant grace invites us to more sin. “Should we sin the more, that grace may abound?” he asks rhetorically, offering a resounding “No!” to the question. Rather, we should allow the gift of God’s grace to loosen sin’s grip on us.

“Sin” can be defined in many ways, but one way Paul uses the term is to name the purely human, self-oriented nature that exists in us. All those things we label as “sins” grow out of that basic orientation toward self that can cause us to see other people as objects for our gratification, and God’s creation as something to be exploited. When Paul says we have been freed from sin, that is an “already” gift, given at baptism, secured by Christ’s sacrifice, made real in his resurrection. As we let that reality seep into our bones we are freed to choose the Spirit-led life Jesus won for us. The fancy word for that is “sanctification," becoming holy.

Paul adds, provocatively, that we exchange one bondage for another, as we now “become enslaved to God.” Yet such a voluntary relinquishing of our self-will and prerogatives invites us into a freedom unlike any other. It is a freedom that allows us to love beyond our capacity, to forgive more than we think possible, to walk into God’s dreams for mission, to offer healing and ministry in Jesus’ name that enriches our lives beyond measure and transforms others. That’s the free gift of eternal life we have already received in Christ Jesus. Let's not leave it on the closet shelf.

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10-20-22 - Justified

You can listen to this reflection here.

How do you feel when you put on an elegant garment? I find it changes the way I think about myself. That is one way of understanding justification.

Jesus, in ending his story, clearly sides with the repentant sinner, saying, “I tell you, this man went down to his home justified rather than the other…” Why was the more “sinful” tax collector justified and the self-righteous Pharisee not? What does Jesus mean by “justified?”

Justification is key to understanding what it means to be saved by God’s grace. It has to do with being “set right.” Take a clue from how we format our documents – left, right- or center-justified, where they are aligned. As a theological term it means to be made righteous, aligned to God’s will. It is not something we can do for ourselves – it is God’s work. It's not even our own righteousness that is conferred on us, but Christ’s. That’s why the “sinful” man was justified – in his humility he was able to receive grace, where the contemptuous, "righteous" man could not.

Martin Luther had a wonderful image for this – he called it “The Glorious Exchange,” in which Christ, the King and Lord of all, left his glory and took on our beggars’ clothes, our sin and self-orientation. But in this Exchange Christ does more than take on our lowly status – he gives us his. He takes our rags and dresses us instead in his royal robes of silk and velvet, his perfect righteousness. We get clothed in his holiness; it covers us, redefines us. That is how God sees us, through Christ, as already holy.

How would it feel to put on a royal robe? Imagine it, in prayer. How might you walk differently today, knowing you are secretly royalty? How might you talk differently?
What do you pray about, knowing you have received a cosmic make-over, that you have handed off everything that mars your inner beauty? What would it take to believe we have received such a gift?

We are not recipients of a hand-out, but beloved children of God, reclaimed and redeemed at great cost. God didn’t send a check for us – He sent a Son, whom we know as Jesus the Christ; who came so that we might know Life. As we receive the gift, we become like Christ, his Body, his hands and feet and eyes and voice bearing light to a world that needs it.

We can’t earn this gift, or repay it – we can only receive it. Rumi, the 13th century Persian poet, theologian and Sufi mystic, wrote: “God accepts counterfeit money.”
And God exchanges it for gold: You. Me. Infinitely precious, forever justified.

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