Water Daily

3-10-22 - Stoning the Prophets

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

Jesus’ observation on the outskirts of Jerusalem – often depicted as taking place on a hillside overlooking the city – is seen by many as a compassionate lament for the great city which had been for many centuries the center of Israel’s religious life. Maybe it’s that repetition of “Jerusalem,” and the hen thing, that make it sound that way.

But when we look at what he actually says, and what’s going on at the time, we can detect a more forceful, thwarted, even angry tone. Jesus is passing judgment on the ancient city, which he says has always excelled in missing the point, often violently so. After noting – with sarcasm? – that “it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem,” he goes on:

“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it! How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing! See, your house is left to you.”

Israel’s history was replete with stories of prophets whose dire warnings of judgment to come went unheeded, who were rebuked, imprisoned, tortured and sometimes killed by the powers against whom they ranted. Prophets were considered holy men who spoke for God – unless their message was too harsh or unpopular, or perhaps conflicted with the message of another self-acclaimed prophet. Who’s to know who to believe? People will generally stay with the one whose message is most palatable, much in the way Americans can now choose which media from which to get their news, and what friends’ opinions are likely to show up on their Facebook feeds. We didn’t invent the closed feedback loop.

It’s awfully hard to know who is a true prophet until after the fact. But we have been given a fullness of revelation in Jesus Christ, and it’s not so hard to know him. Some who knew him in the flesh ultimately turned away from him, rejecting, betraying, even condemning him. What would we have done? Would we have recognized him as a true prophet or rejected him as one more disappointment, one more person out of touch with how the world really is, one more would-be prophet distorting God’s word? Go back and read the words of Jesus in the Gospels this week. What is he really saying? Do we accept his hard teachings, or dismiss him?

Jesus may have been uttering judgment upon Jerusalem, so soon to repeat its pattern of death-dealing, but we would be foolish if we thought this lament doesn’t apply to us too. Jerusalem was and is a place with a particular history and customs, but in the Bible it is also a symbolic place where God and humankind meet. The Book of Revelation speaks of the “new Jerusalem, coming down from heaven like a bride adorned for her husband.” Jerusalem represents the hope of reconciliation, of fidelity and obedience, of that mystical place where God himself will dwell, “and they shall be God’s people and God himself shall be with them.” (Revelation 21:1-4)

We can choose which Jerusalem we will be – the one that kills its prophets and stones its messengers, or the new Jerusalem where heaven and earth can truly meet. That is a place of courageous truth-telling and peace-making.

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3-9-22 - Jesus the Brood Hen?

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

Those who are concerned about gender-inclusive language and imagery in the Bible often face a slog finding maternal or feminine terms. There is Spirit language that can skew feminine. Late Isaiah has a startling passage in which the restored Jerusalem is likened to a nursing mother, in quite graphic language. Paul writes about having been like a nurse or governess to a community he has been mentoring. But references are few and far between. So people tend to go nuts with this remark of Jesus’ about Jerusalem:

“How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings…”

This is hardly a maternal scene, though. Jesus may desire to gather the children of Jerusalem like a hen gathers her brood, but he’s just noted their penchant for killing God’s messengers, and what follows this lovely, nurturing image is a stark negative: “…and you were not willing!”

If Jesus is expressing maternal feelings here, they are those of a mother who’s been rejected by her offspring (much as he brushed off his own motherwhen she tried to persuade him to stop all this foolishness and come home?). This is a thwarted mother, whose invitations to loving embrace have been rejected, who knows her beloved children are more than capable of turning on her next. Hardly the nurturing feminine imagery we are looking for.

Yet, a thwarted mother is not a bad way to convey God’s experience with a faithless people, and a good deal less jarring than the way the prophet Hosea depicts God, as a cuckolded husband. Most of us can relate to times when we pushed away our mothers or fathers and tried to go our own way. I still wince at how mean and “I can do it myself!” I was to my parents the day they drove me to college. Sometimes it’s the only way we can attain independence.

Whatever the context in which that phrase is uttered, the image has life for us: Jesus’ desire that God’s people would consent to be brooded over, to be gathered under God’s almighty wings. In that image, we are little fledglings, not fully able to take care of ourselves or protect ourselves. We like to think we’re big and tough and self-sufficient, but look at us from God’s perspective: we are barely hatched, trying to figure out how to move in a straight line. And Jesus desires to gather us in community, and hold us in his love.

Puts a whole new spin on Easter chicks, doesn’t it?

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3-8-22 - The Day After Tomorrow

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

If the Pharisees’ warning to Jesus about escaping Herod’s clutches was meant to scare him, it didn’t work: He said to them, “Go and tell that fox for me, ‘Listen, I am casting out demons and performing cures today and tomorrow, and on the third day I finish my work. Yet today, tomorrow, and the next day I must be on my way, because it is impossible for a prophet to be killed away from Jerusalem.’”

We've been told that Jesus is on his way to Jerusalem; the Pharisees seem to be trying to divert him. But he will be moved neither from his itinerary nor his agenda: the work of proclaiming and demonstrating the inbreaking Kingdom of God. His work of healing and deliverance is the work of the moment and the near future. And on the “third day” he must finish that work, showing the most complete revelation of God’s love to the world in what looks like complete defeat.

If they think he’s going to be swayed by threats of death, he makes it clear: the death he is to undergo – which, he says, could happen nowhere other than Jerusalem – is part of the work. I’m sure it made no sense to anyone listening to him, but it wasn’t the first time he’d said such things.

I’m intrigued by this repetition of “today, tomorrow and the third day,” “today, tomorrow and the next day.” It focuses our attention on time. For Christians the phrase “third day” always carries echoes of Easter Sunday. But here it may rather refer to living in the rhythm of God’s mission, which always has a future-bound momentum.

We are to be about the work of God today, the day in which we live, in which we trust for daily bread. We are to plan for tomorrow – we’re not just adrift in time. And the day after tomorrow – which we cannot really predict with any accuracy – we finish the work God has given us to do. But by that time, it’s today. The sense I get is of living in a wave which starts, builds and then dissipates, by which time the next one is already building.

This phrase suggests to me a constantly forward-rolling movement of present ministry, future planning and then release into God’s hands. Every ministry we undertake, small or large, must get “finished” and a new one entered, one which is already underway, because it comes from God and is completed in God.

This way of seeing our engagement in God's mission makes us less generators of work than surfers of God’s movement – and surfers know how to relax and ride the wave. The day after tomorrow maybe we'll see what God was doing through us today. Gnarly.

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3-7-22 - Hypocrites?

You can listen to this reflection here.

I’m not exactly sure why the lectionary presents this passage from Luke’s Gospel for next Sunday; it’s short, not really a story, and somewhat inscrutable. (At my churches, we will do a Lenten series, “A Season for Growing,” which riffs on trees…). But let's see what gems we might mine from it. It begins with a warning to Jesus:

At that very hour some Pharisees came and said to him, "Get away from here, for Herod wants to kill you."

On the face of it, this would appear to be a benevolent act, to warn a man that he’s in trouble with the political powers. But let’s not forget who’s issuing this warning: the religious powers with whom Jesus has been publicly tangling. Are they looking to spare his life? Or to get him out of their way, so they no longer have to put up with his insults and skewering of their hypocrisies?

I rarely engage in word study (or any study, for that matter, several degrees notwithstanding), and I have forgotten what little Greek I acquired during seminary, but I’m told that the Greek word from which we get “hypocrite” means simply “actor, or one who plays a part.” Jesus was always accusing the Pharisees of proclaiming one thing and doing another, of acting the part of deeply holy men while they benefited from the charity of those they oppressed. If anyone might have wanted Jesus out of the way, it would have been this party. Did they take the act a step further, feigning concern?

From his response, it doesn’t appear that Jesus thought they had his best interests at heart. In replying, he manages to further inflame them, ensuring their enmity if it wasn’t already there. So now Jesus has enemies in the temple courts as well as in the palace.

And maybe that was okay with him. He knew that as he continued his mission of deliverance and healing, going head to head with the source of evil, and calling out injustice, he was going to rattle a lot of cages. He knew to put his trust only in his heavenly father and a few followers – and soon found he couldn’t even fully rely on the followers.

So why are we reading this? Perhaps as a reminder that when we’re truly about the work of proclaiming freedom for captives, and justice for the oppressed, and sight for the blind, and new life for the dead, we’re going to make enemies. There are many forces invested in the status quo. Few are more hated than peace-makers - that's why so many are assassinated. Of course, we still need to proceed with humility and discernment – too many false prophets have cited resistance to their message as proof of their rectitude. We know it’s not that simple… And yet, I want to say this:

If we’re not making anybody mad, are we really living the gospel?

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3-4-22 - Round One

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

In Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, the devil is depicted as a grey, slithery, humanoid creature with malevolent eyes, lurking at the edges of the scenes of Christ’s passion and death. He is there in the Garden of Gethsemane, as Jesus confronts the agony he is about to endure and even dares to wish he might be spared before once more laying down his will before his heavenly Father. He is there as Jesus is paraded down the streets of Jerusalem, and on the hillside where Judas commits suicide. Was Jesus constantly having to do battle with him?

At the end of his trial in the wilderness, Jesus seems to have bested his foe. But Luke writes these fateful words, “When the devil had finished every test, he departed from him until an opportune time.” You can just about hear the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

We don’t know if the devil was constantly seeking to trip up Jesus – we do know that Jesus saw much of his work of healing, forgiveness and deliverance as setting people free from the power of Satan. So one can imagine his enemy would have been riled up.

But what about us? Do we need to worry about the devil – in whom many modern Christians profess not even to believe? I am ever challenged by the disjuncture between our doctrinal assertion that Jesus has vanquished the devil, and evil’s seemingly unfettered destructive power so widespread in the world. The devil may not be behind our temptation to eat more ice cream than is good for us, but wherever evil is done, violence perpetrated, terror wrought and destruction unleashed, we can be quite sure that some person has lost a battle with temptation. (Another reason to pray for our enemies!) If God has given human beings the free will to choose, that must mean that God will not protect us from making choices. And much of the pain we suffer and inflict comes from choosing the wrong instead of the right.

So yes, the enemy of human nature continues to snap at the heels of God’s beloved, and often to dominate those who say they believe in nothing. We should be aware of the choices beneath the choices of our actions. But we need not fear. As Martin Luther wrote so memorably in his hymn, A Mighty Fortress, “His craft and power are great…” but “One little word shall fell him.”

That word is simply the name of our Lord Jesus Christ. He is the only protection we need. When we feel tempted to despair or to try to control a situation or to impose our will upon another, or find ourselves beset by negative emotions, or up against evil in a more clear and threatening way, we need only remember whose we are and say, “Thank you, Jesus, for being my shield and protector.” As St. Peter wrote, “Rebuke the devil, and he will flee from you.”

Jesus did win the war. And the more people know and believe that, the less foothold the devil has in this world. There’s another reason to share our faith.

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3-3-22 - Security

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

I have always placed the devil’s third temptation of Jesus in the category of security, God’s protection. But, other than Psalm 91, which the devil quotes at Jesus, the Bible contains no promise of physical protection for God’s people. And a quick look at the sufferings of saints throughout history, not to mention the passion of Christ himself, should quickly disabuse us of the notion that God made any such deal with us. What the devil is doing here is tempting Jesus to test his value to God as an asset. “Surely, he’s not going to let you die? Before your time, that is...?”

Then the devil took him to Jerusalem, and placed him on the pinnacle of the temple, saying to him, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down from here, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you, to protect you,’ and ‘On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.’” Jesus answered him, “It is said, ‘Do not put the Lord your God to the test.’”

If God has not promised to protect us, why do we continue to pray for protection? And why do we so often court damage to our bodies, minds and spirits by living in ways that we know can hurt us? While not quite in the category of risk as throwing oneself off the pinnacle of the temple, we don’t always treat ourselves as the precious assets we are. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.”

Where in your life do you push the boundaries of good sense and healthy self-maintenance? What do you consume too much of, or too little? What is your relationship with exercise, and rest, and play? Mine could use some improvement.

Lent is a great time to examine where in our lives we put the Lord God to the test, expecting God to save us from ourselves, as well as from other people. I don’t mean to make light of the dangers in the world – they are real, and I will continue to pray for physical protection for me and those I love, and even total strangers like the Ukrainian people. But I also intend to become more aware of the ways I contribute to my own destruction, and invite the Spirit of God to help me live into the promises God has made: if not protection, then presence always, power, and peace that defies understanding. Those we can count on.

3-2-22 - Worship

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

They say in advertising it’s important to know your audience, especially their vulnerabilities. You’d think the Tempter would have done better market research on Jesus before he tried to sway him by offering him adulation and authority. Jesus showed very little interest in such things.

Then the devil led him up and showed him in an instant all the kingdoms of the world. And the devil said to him, “To you I will give their glory and all this authority; for it has been given over to me, and I give it to anyone I please. If you, then, will worship me, it will all be yours.”

This is like trying to sell somebody a priceless work of art they had donated in the first place. Did the devil did not know that Jesus had had all authority in heaven and earth, that he had voluntarily given it up in order to enter into human nature and submit himself to our condition? He wasn’t interested in that kind of glory, especially not at the price of worshipping the enemy of human nature. Jesus answered him, “It is written, ‘Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.’”

Does this suggest that when we stray from the presence of God, when we go against God’s will and choose our own gratification, that we are worshiping the devil? No – but it does mean we have turned our worship away from the Living God. Whatever it is that tempts us away from the Lord – whether a behavior, or a commodity, or letting a feeling run riot in us – in that moment that becomes the object of our worship. We don’t think of it as worship, but that’s what it is. We have placed that thing or person or condition at the center of our life and oriented ourselves around it. If it’s a big temptation, it becomes all we can see.

Thanks be to God, it’s not difficult to turn back. We need only become aware that we’ve redirected our attention to an unworthy object, and turn our gaze back toward the God who loves us. The Greek word for repentance is metanoia, which suggests turning, turning away from what is less than life-giving and turning back to the Source of our life. Worship means worth-ship – ascribing worth to someone or something. When we turn back to God, we once again ascribe all worth to God.

If you go to church today for the Liturgy for Ash Wednesday, you will be invited into a lengthy and thorough confession of sin and repentance. There is no one who can avoid being snagged by at least one part of that litany. So let’s go through it aware of how we have turned toward some of these things we confess, and see how they've become central. And let’s enact this repentance with joyful hearts, for God delights in seeing us turn back toward him, which we do, over, and over, and over again, until at last we are Home and there is no more turning to be done, for we are in God. A blessed Ash Wednesday to you.

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