Number in Series: Second

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

Second in the Series, Seven Stories: Jesus’ Big Story, and the Other Stories by Which We Live

Hey, Friends, spoiler alerts for today’s talk. I’ll be giving away bits from the latest Star Wars film, from a cool bit of storytelling on a New York Times podcast, and the fate of our nation and pretty much everything and everyone else that is built upon violence. So, if you don’t want to hear those things, just close your ears when the time comes. 

Last fall, The New York Times released a fascinating bit of journalism from their bureau in North India. It was called The Jungle Prince of Delhi. It tells the story of Begum Wilayat Mahal, who first came to the public’s attention in the 1970s when she, her two children and a pack of dogs took up residence in a Delhi railway station, refusing to leave, because – she said – she was the last princess of the kingdom of Avadh, a branch of the ancient Muslim Mughal empire that ruled over much of Central and South Asia for centuries, building the Taj Mahal and many other wonders. 

She said her family was never compensated for their losses, dating back to the British Empire, and they weren’t moving until they were given a palace. This being India, they were allowed to remain on this platform for years. Some local governments were embarrassed, tried offering them a small home and other bits of compensation, which were refused. She deserved a palace. And so eventually, a suitable one was found and given. It was the ruins of a 14th century summer palace, in the jungle outside of Delhi. 

The princess and her family accepted and moved in. There they remained for decades, largely shut off from the outside world. 

It turns out the family had lived this strange mix of opulence and squalor. They possessed ancient royal ruins, with an extraordinary rooftop view of New Delhi. In other circumstances, their palace may have been restored as a museum or luxury hotel. 

And yet, the palace was in ruins. No electricity, no water, mostly cut off from the outside, the family lived in poverty and isolation and eventually died one by one, alone. 

And now, the spoiler. Their original claim to royalty isn’t even true. They had a very real grievance, but it was not theirs alone.

The princess wasn’t a princess. She was one of millions of Muslims of North India who fled to Pakistan after the partition of those two countries in 1947. Like tens of millions of Hindus and Muslims, she and her family were exposed to violence and trauma during one of the modern era’s great episodes of forced migration and religious-based violence. It’s a trauma of religion, and a trauma of post-colonial oppression that haunts the region still. 

In the case of this particular family, when the mother returned to India and sought to retrieve her family home and land, she could get no compensation, no justice. When she sought these things, with increased agitation, she was committed to a psychiatric hospital, where she was essentially tortured. Upon release, she either invented the royal heritage to finally get her recompense, or perhaps, after years of trauma and abuse, she had come to believe her own fantasy of grievance. 

The enormous unhealed trauma she endured, and her odd quest for justice, estranged her from one child, who moved to the UK and kept his own traumatic origins a secret nearly til his death. And it led to her other two children each living lonely, empoverished, traumatized lives of their own, until they too died penniless and alone. 

The Jungle Prince of Delhi turns out to be a multi-layered tragedy. It’s a story about the legacy of a lost ancient kingdom. It’s a story about unhealed family trauma. It’s a story about the great South Asian partition, and all the religious violence that has plagued our world for centuries, even millenia. It’s a story about the enormous ripples of suffering created by colonial domination and valiant but usually failed efforts to seek justice and recompense. And it’s the story of unhealed grievances, of the pains of being formed by violence and domination, even if we’re not the ones who started it at all. 

All of this connects to our sermon today, which I’ve called The Myth of Redemptive Violence. It’s the second of six weeks we’re spending telling the story of Jesus from the gospel of Luke and contrasting that story with six other, more common stories that we have been telling, and listening to, and following for far too long. 

This series was inspired by a children’s book by Gareth Higgins and Brian McLaren, which I read last week. It’s called Cory and the Seventh Story. In it, we meet a badger who tries to create a “happily ever after ” story for himself by stealing what he wants from the fox and intimidating everybody else, making sure he can always get his way. That’s the story of domination, us dominating, of being the boss of others. Next, the fox gathers some friends to take the badger down, get back what’s his, and try to make things right in the world through violence. That’s the story of revolution, of us overthrowing them, getting revenge on those who bossed you around. 

Either way, all this violence doesn’t lead to the flourishing Jesus longs for in our lives, a life without us or them, just us. A life that isn’t defined by anyone’s violence or domination, our own or someone else’s. 

There’s a moment in Luke when we get a window into Jesus’ pain over violence, be it the violence of domination or that of revolution. It’s in the 19th chapter of Luke, when Jesus is on his way into the city of Jerusalem, and looks out over it in this moment of clarity and deep sadness.

Luke 19:41-44  (CEB)

41 As Jesus came to the city and observed it, he wept over it. 42 He said, “If only you knew on this of all days the things that lead to peace. But now they are hidden from your eyes. 43 The time will come when your enemies will build fortifications around you, encircle you, and attack you from all sides. 44 They will crush you completely, you and the people within you. They won’t leave one stone on top of another within you, because you didn’t recognize the time of your gracious visit from God.”

Jesus looks out over his beloved city of Jerusalem, the center of his culture’s religion and economy and culture, and he pictures all that being destroyed, and asks: Why? It shouldn’t have to end this way. 

See, Jerusalem then was occupied territory, as it has so often been. Rome had brutally colonized Judea and all the surrounding regions, and during Jesus’ lifetime, there was a growing swell of rage, grievance, and resistance. There was a movement that was tired of the oppression. Tired of all the taxation. Tired of the state violence, and terror, and intimidation. Tired of the humiliation. 

Three or four decades after the vision Jesus has, this movement would surge into a revolt that would briefly force Rome out. Until Rome returned with patience and might and laid siege to the city. It was a time of horrific poverty, starvation, and violence that ended with Rome crushing Jerusalem, scattering many of its residents, and destroying the temple – ending ancient Judaism, in one of that people’s many great cataclysms. 

Luke records Jesus looking out over Jerusalem and seeing all that coming. And thinking I had a way of peace for you. Why didn’t you listen? 

Obviously, Jesus isn’t blaming his people for their coming annihilation. That’s on Rome. They were the colonizers, the dominators, the powerful people who again and again took what wasn’t theirs. Who tried to secure their own happily ever after, at the costs of others’ suffering. Us over them. 

But Jesus laments, thinking still, there were other options. Jesus had a way of peace that was better than giving up in resignation, or returning violence in a failed attempt to redress their grievances. Us overthrowing them.

At least this time, Jesus thinks: they’re going to miss it. So sad. 

We’ll talk in a minute about Jesus’ way of peace, that we’ve seen far too little of over the years.

But it’s one that in many ways, the churches of the first couple of centuries appeared to embrace – not living by the norms and stories of their time, but not violently resisting either. They formed and grew counter-cultural communities of radical love, radical hospitality, radical service, radical inclusion. It may well be the greatest reason for the rapid growth of the Jesus movement in its first couple centuries. 

But think with me for a moment: If Jesus and his early followers, way back two millennia ago, had a problem with violence, what does that say to residents of a country that itself was a product of violent revolution? 

How is the Myth of Redemptive Violence one of our favorite stories in America, and what is it doing to us? 

This phrase the myth of redemptive violence is something that many scholars have been exploring in our lifetimes. They’ve noticed that a lot of societies have very violent stories of how things came to be the way they are today. Stories where the world has always been in chaotic violence. Stories where more violence brought order or peace to the world. Stories where heroes were people who won their victories and accomplished good through yet more violence. 

Societies have long been telling this story, this myth. But it’s not just an old story. Hello, America! This country has has grabbed hold of the Myth of Redemptive Violence like maybe no other people, ever. 

We’re a country born first of violent domination. Colonizers claimed this land by trickery and treaty violations and genocidal war. Colonizers enriched this land through the largest, most brutal, most racist slave trade industry in human history. The legacy of all this unhealed violence of domination haunts us still. 

Not only that, but our country is the product of violent revolution as well – a story we celebrate again and again. 

We’re addicted now to this violence. 

Our films, year after year, celebrate redemptive violence. Good people are done wrong, and they heal their grievances through violent revenge. Their violence restores order and justice to the world and makes them heroes. It’s the plot of most of our heroic films. 

Our most popular, lucrative sport is one of incessant, bone-crushing violence, that seems to shorten its participants length and quality of life.

We own guns at rates of no other peacetime country because we view the right to that potential for violence as sacred to us, essential to our security.

And in our lifetimes, America has seen few problems in the world we think we can’t bomb our way out of. Hurt us, cause us grief at all, and we will break you.

Here’s the thing. The idea that any of this violence is redemptive is foolishness. Redemptive violence isn’t just a myth because it’s an old story, it’s a myth in that it’s a lying story. 

I don’t have anything to say about all our violent entertainment – going off against that isn’t really my jam. But on the guns front, we kill each other and especially kill ourselves in this country at rates that look obscene compared to most of the world. Our guns aren’t making us secure. 

And look at any region in the world that seems angry, unstable, dangerous, a potential breeding ground for terror or war or mass refugees, and you’ll usually see a history of American arms dealing and American violent aggression as part of the back story. 

Our collective addiction to violence, our buying in to the myth of its redemptive possibilities is helping us dominate and redress our grievances in the short run, but it’s stirring up more and more trouble in the long run. 

OK, all this is very macro. But I’ve been thinking about the myth of redemptive violence, and the story of revolution – us overthrowing them – on a personal, relational level too. This used to be more obvious, some places still is. 

But I trust that no one is planning on taking up arms against their enemy tomorrow, or challenging someone to a duel. We’re good there, right? 

I was talking with a few friends recently about where we see this story of us overthrowing them in our relational lives these days. And we all agreed that we knew people that use words to attack people that have hurt us. We know what incessant criticism sounds like. We know what bitterness sounds like.

But we all agreed that what we’ve most experience from people when we’ve hurt them, or what we’ve done most to people that have hurt us, is we cut people off. We shut people out. We call them out, or just cancel them. 

I remember the first person I heard articulate this as a life strategy. When I was first living on my own, I had a roommate who was awful to me. He insulted me, was rude to me in all kinds of ways  and then when I tried to talk with him about it, he said: Listen, I don’t ever want to talk to you again. As far as I’m concerned, I don’t know you. You don’t know me. We will not speak again until you move out.

And stubborn guy that I am, I was like: well, if those are your rules, why don’t you move out? And eventually, he did. Fair enough. I’d tried my best, but there was nothing more I could do.

But, given this experience, when I was talking to another friend about moving in, I told him what had happened. And I asked him: I don’t expect we’ll have that kind of conflict, but what happens if we do have some unforeseen conflict? What would you do? 

And he’s like: well, here’s how it works with me. I trust my friends. I’m loyal. I do the right thing. And I’m not easy to offend. But if someone hurts me once, if someone breaks my trust, then I will never trust them again. I cut them out. It’s over. 

And, given what I just experienced, that concerned me a little, and I was like, doesn’t that pretty much guarantee that you’ll never stay connected to anyone. Cause we all hurt people eventually, even people we care about, right? But you seem kind of anti-second chances. And he was like: well, sorry, that’s the way I am. 

Shockingly, we didn’t stay friends for very long. Eventually, he cut me off for something, I can’t remember what, to be honest. 

Have you seen this in your life? Have people cut you off, cancelled you before? Have you done that to somebody else? 

I was thinking the other day about some of the people that I feel have done me wrong, some of the people I think I’ve done wrong too. And it was surprising and sad to me to remember how many of these relationships ended by one of us essentially ghosting the other. 

Not ending the connection for our own safety or protection. There’s obviously a time and place for that. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about times when we’re offended or hurt, and we don’t try to do the same hurt back per se. Maybe we can’t. But we just move on as quickly as possible. 

As a pastor, I see people do that with their church sometimes. Offended by something or other, caught up in a tricky relational dynamic, and just washing their hands and moving on. 

Maybe this doesn’t do the harm in the world that violent retribution does, but it doesn’t mend or heal either. It doesn’t make us whole. 

As I’ve said, I think Jesus has a better way. 

Listen:

Luke 6:27-31  (CEB)

27 “But I say to you who are willing to hear: Love your enemies. Do good to those who hate you. 28 Bless those who curse you. Pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on the cheek, offer the other one as well. If someone takes your coat, don’t withhold your shirt either. 30 Give to everyone who asks and don’t demand your things back from those who take them. 31 Treat people in the same way that you want them to treat you.

This is maybe the most distinctive teaching of Jesus. Love of enemies is a hallmark of what it means to follow Jesus. Sadly, though, many people have heard this and assumed that Jesus taught resignation, defeatism, just roll over and suck up every awful thing that anyone ever says or does. Be nice, while being a victim.

What Jesus is saying, though, is so much more powerful, so much more original than that. 

A couple years back, Pastor Ivy taught this passage. And she taught the perspective that theologian Henry Thoreau and Mahatma Ghandhi and Walter Wink, and Martin Luther King, Jr. saw in this passage. That Jesus taught the disruption of violence through loving, non-violent resistance. Provocation that breaks the cycle of violence, and begins a cycle of healing and flourishing. 

Roman soldiers slapped Jews, to humiliate them. To punch with a fist was only for fighting your social equals.  And they only used their right hand, as their left was for wiping their rear – and it was socially unacceptable to do stuff with your left hand. So to turn your cheek after being slapped is to force the Roman to treat you as an equal or to humiliate them by making them slap you with their left hand. Weird, but true, I swear. When Ivy taught this, she and her son Reed acted it all out – it was great. Plus, as they showed, to stand as Jesus says to is actually a strong gesture, not a weak gesture. Try to fight back with a Roman – and they’re a solider. They will win. And you will end up in jail or dead. But to not cower in defeat, but to look them in the eye, stand erect, and dare them with your other cheek. That is strength.

That’s what’s going on in all this teaching. Jesus teaches love of enemies by not returning violence, but also not accepting it as the final word. 

The Jesus story, the story of love is not to ask: how do I get back or get even? How do I win? That’s the toxic story of revolution. This obsession with grievances, and redressing them. The story of love is also not to ask: how have I lost again? There’s nothing I can do.

No, the story of love, the Jesus story is to ask: how do I provoke a different dynamic here? How do I stay engaged, but on different terms than the aggressor has set up? When me or mine are done wrong, what power do I have to begin a cycle of healing and justice? 

We see this super-powerfully in the latest, the final Star Wars film. And again, double apologies here. If you haven’t seen it still and care, I’m going to give something away. It’s been out a while, so I think I have the right. And if you’re a Star Wars devotee, I’m probably going to say everything wrong, as I’m more of a casual viewer. So sorry to you too. 

But in this story, Rey is the last Jedi. She’s like the last great hope for goodness and light in the Universe. And her great foil turns out not to be the prince of darkness Kylo Ren, but the old, old evil Emperor, who’s existing in this undead, zombie-like existence, still fueling, empowering all the evil in the universe. 

And when Rey comes face to face with the Emperor, what he wants most is for Rey to hate him, to murder him, to return him violence and kill him. Because if she does that, she will in a sense become him. His spirit, his life force, his evil will then live on through her, the new emperor. 

But what Rey does in this film that is so stunning is that each time she is confronted by evil, she seeks to offer healing. She looks at her enemy and says: what can I do to make him whole? And when with the Emperor, she sees no way to make him whole, what she does is she doesn’t hate the Emperor and doesn’t return him violence. She simply protects herself. She refuses to listen to him or be harmed by his evil. And by not receiving the force of his violence, it turns back on himself, and he self-destructs. 

This is of course exactly what we celebrate tomorrow on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. We celebrate one man, and not just one man, but a whole movement of women and men, who stared down the great evils of racial injustice in our society and said: this evil will not define me. I will not accept or receive it. We will turn it against itself. 

And throughout the 50s and 60s, America watched as the Civil Rights Movement exposed America’s violent racism with provocative, non-violent love. When King was assassinated in the late 60s, he was of course just getting going, turning his attention to the violence of American militarism, the violence of Northern America’s segregation, and classism, and racism. 

Much work remains for us still. 

But King gave us one of our time’s clearest, most compelling pictures of how the story of Jesus exposes the myth of redemptive violence, disrupts our stories of domination and revolution, and opens possibilities for healing and flourishing. 

I wonder what would have happened in Delhi if Begum Wilayat Mahal had stood on that railway platform with her dogs and her family, not insisting she be given a palace, but insisting that all the victims of the partition be made whole. What if she had held a sign that said: I am the partition. And another that said: We are still here. And another that said: Make South Asia whole again. I have no idea. In that case, one can only dream. 

But we can do more. When we’ve been done wrong, and when the people we are sympathetic to have been done wrong, when we have grievances, we can keep being defined by the violent, we can obsess over winning and vindication and how to take them out or take them down. We can ghost those who hurt us too, cut them off, cancel them, and pretend we don’t bear loss or hurt. 

Or we can engage with provocative, non-violent love. I’d love to invite us to try. So we’ll take a couple minutes on our invitations today, if that’s alright. 

Invitations to Whole Life Flourishing

How are you defined by domination and violence, even if it’s your reaction to someone else’s? Where is US/THEM strong in you? 

What would it mean to embrace Jesus’ vision of restorative, healing justice that starts to undo being defined by US vs/ THEM?

Spiritual Practice of the Week

When you think of someone you resent, break the cycle of grievance and violence:

  • name the harm this person is attached to,
  • remember this person is not higher or lower than you,
  • release your attachment to them. “This person does not get to write my story.”

Growing a Life of Wonder

Well, did you all like the first snow of the year this past week? 

I have a lot of reasons to not like the snow. I’m the main shoveller where we live, and it’s heavy. Our church has a big property here, and we pay for plowing and I wonder if all the snow melt is going to seep into our buildings somewhere. I mainly get around by bicycle throughout the year, and the snowy, icy season is by far the trickiest time for that. 

But still, there’s something that happens in me with that first real snow of the year. I was running home from our members meeting last Sunday afternoon with my daughter, and we saw just a few flakes in air, here and there, and my eyes widened just a little bit, as we ran, and I huffed and puffed. My daughter’s not so easy to keep up with any more.

And then later, at home, I looked out the window, and there it was – snow falling from the sky, piling up white on the trees and sidewalk and streets, just falling and falling and falling. Something in me just kept expanding, as time stopped for  a moment, with me starting out the window, transfixed, thinking nothing at all really except: This is so beautiful. 

That experience of being stopped in our tracks, surprised by beauty, arrested by something so new or unexpected or stunning or larger than ourselves, we call that wonder. Sometimes we think of wonder as childlike because kids are frankly best at it – they experience wonder most often, maybe most deeply.

Sometimes when we think we understand more, we are overjoyed and mystified by less. Sometimes when we’ve experienced more, there’s less that still arrests us. 

But the first snow of the year is one experience that always still does it for me and helps me remember that wonder is not just the stuff of children, it’s some of the more important stuff of life. 

The great Jewish thinker Abraham Heschel had a lot to say about wonder. Heschel was a scholar and a mystic. He was born in Poland, became a rabbi and a professor. He barely escaped the Nazi invasion and the Holocaust, and spent the rest of his years in this country, where he wrote, taught, was active with King and others in the Civil Rights and anti-war movments. And he happened to die less than a year before I was born. 

In his book God in Search of Man, Heschel wrote: “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living . What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.” Wonder for Heschel was foundational to a good life, a joyful life, and it was also bound up with the possibility of encountering God. 

So Heschel also wrote: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.” 

Christmas used to do this for me. Partly it was the presents. My parents didn’t have much cash, but they went broke at Christmastime, and one set of my grandparents piled on as well. So I knew that every year, our Christmas tree would be piled with mounds of stuff that would at least for a while surprise and delight me. 

It wasn’t just that, though. It had to do with school vacation, and first snows, and Christmas music, and chocolate appearing everywhere – it seemed – and family seeming a little more present, a little more happy than normal. So much that gave me wonder as a kid this time of year. 

I said last week that Advent – this season of waiting and expectancy before Christmas – is a time making for room, a time for shifting our attention, from turning away from what chokes out joy. Similarly, Advent can be a great time to lift up our gaze, to be surprised and delighted again, and to start growing a life of wonder. 

With talk of childhood and Christmas and first snows, if you’re thinking this will be a sentimental sermon, well it may be that. But I can assure you it will not only be that. Wonder is far deeper and more important than nostalgia or warm feelings. As Heschel wrote, wonder is at the beginning of happiness; wonder is essential to our search for God. To be spiritual is to be amazed. 

With this in mind, let’s travel back in time to our text from the Bible for today. It’s an old, old story in the memory of the Jewish people, and so of the church as well. And it’s a weird story, one chock full of wonder .

It begins after a battle scene in the life of the famous father of faith – for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Abraham – then Abram is returning from a violent rescue mission, when he and his little rag tag army had gone to save his cousin Lot from kidnapping. At the same time, he’d managed to help another local warlord – called the king of Sodom here. But in the middle of their encounter, the story gets super weird. Here we go:

Genesis 14:17-24  (CEB)

17 After Abram returned from his attack on Chedorlaomer and the kings who were with him, the king of Sodom came out to the Shaveh Valley (that is, the King’s Valley) to meet him. 18 Now Melchizedek the king of Salem and the priest of El Elyon had brought bread and wine, 19 and he blessed him,

“Bless Abram by El Elyon,
        creator of heaven and earth;
20 bless El Elyon,
        who gave you the victory over your enemies.”

Abram gave Melchizedek one-tenth of everything. 21 Then the king of Sodom said to Abram, “Give me the people and take the property for yourself.”

22 But Abram said to the king of Sodom, “I promised the Lord, El Elyon, creator of heaven and earth, 23 that I wouldn’t take even a thread or a sandal strap from anything that was yours so that you couldn’t say, ‘I’m the one who made Abram rich.’ 24 The only exception is that the young men may keep whatever they have taken to eat, and the men who went with me—Aner, Eshcol, and Mamre—may keep their share.”

What in the world is happening here?!?

Abram’s returning from battle, and there’s this scene of post-war booty negotiation that is perfectly at home in an epic royal tale from the ancient near east. But right in the middle of all that, with no warning, no explanation, this other king Melchizedek – or is he a priest? – shows up with his bread and wine picnic basket and his basket of praise and prayers as well. 

And then before you know it, before we – or maybe before Abram too – can really figure out what is going on, Melchizedek is gone. And it’s just Abram and his business with the king of Sodom again.

Reading this always reminds me of this other story reading experience I had. When our daughter Julianna was in preschool or kindergarten, I believe, her teacher had kids pair up and tell stories together. The two children would each narrate part of a story, which the teacher would write down, and the child would provide the artwork. Totally charming. And the interesting part of this version of that is that each of two children would provide a page at a time, back and forth, back and forth.

And Julianna was paired up with this boy in her class, I think Jackson was his name. And Julianna began her part of the story with a beautiful princess in a faraway castle. And then we shifted to Jackson, who continued by mentioning a fiery dragon, and a big monster. And then Julianna would pick up her story on the next page, with the princess’ beautiful dress and hair, and then Jackson would go and the dragon and the monster were battling out with swords and fire. 

Back and forth the story would go, not apparent that there was any particular throughline or connection between the two alternating halves of this wild, disconnected plot. 

So delightful, ever surprising.

Who is Melchizedek?

Well, we don’t know – he’s mostly the stuff of legends. But he appears to be another Cananaanite king – like Abram, the head of a small tribal band of folks in this region. But present there first. His name may mean: “king of righteousness.” Melk-zedek – a compound name. 

But his name might also mean “My king is Zedek.” Because in ages past, there was a local Canaanite deity named Zedek. And if this is the case, Melchizedek is a worshipper or priest of Zedek. 

So there’s this king/priest thing going on. Is he one? Is he the other is he both? And if he’s a priest, who is his God? Because he may be named after the local god Zedek, but he seems to worship and offer blessing in the name of a different god, whom he calls El Elyon. El Elyon means God Most High, and in the local Canaanite religions which preceded Jewish religion, El Eyon was the chief Canaanite deity – the head honcho amongst the pantheon of gods. 

When you dig into the Scriptures, by the way, particularly the ones like Genesis whose roots are very old, you always get stuff like this, by the way – weird, surprising mash-ups of many ancient stories and ideas. 

It’s not entirely unparalleled here – this mixing in of ancient Canaanite religion with the newer Jewish worship of the one they call the most high God. In the Psalms too, you get these worship songs to Baal – another important Canaanite god, basically the son of El Eyon. And the Hebrew worship songs appropriate these Baal praises songs a couple times, just changing the name of the god in them, so that they can use this music. 

There’s a lesson here, I guess. Which is that people have been stealing good music  and good poetry forever. And more to our point today, that God can not be contained. God is so much bigger and wilder than our expectations. No person or place or culture, no religion even, can fully contain God. 

So Melchizedek is some Canaanite mystic or royal figure who shows up on the scene.

In the rabbinic, Jewish tradition, Mechizedek is all kinds of other things too. Some rabbis saw the past in Mechizedek, that he represents a mythic or mystic ancestor. That he was Noah of Noah’s ark son Shem, still alive by a different name, now bequeathing the land to Noah’s other distant ancestor Abram. 

Some rabbis saw the future in Melchizedek, that he was a prefiguring of the great Jewish King of Jerusalem, King David, who was a kind of priest as well on the side. Some saw politics in him. Where most priests of Israel were descended from Moses’ brother Aaron, there were a group of priests in Jerusalem, that that party thought Melchizedek legitimized. Others are content to not really know who Melchizedek was or is, but to simply see in him a messenger of God, blessing Abram as he does and giving him the land.

In our translation, Abram gives a tithe, a tenth, of all his war booty to Melchizedek, the priest. But some translation traditions read this old language and flipped it, like Melchizedek was giving a tithe to Abram – adding land rights to his legacy, maybe even adding letters to his name in the balance. 

No matter what, though, Melchizedek is an utter surprise. And in his larger than life authority and spectacle, he evokes wonder. 

This is what Melchizedek does when he shows up in the popular imagination too. 

When I taught writing and speaking and literature to ninth graders, Paulo Coehlo’s little mythic novel The Alchemist was almost always a text we read together. And The Alchemist is a beautiful little parable about a shepherd boy in search of a treasure, and in search of a dream, and in search of himself all at the same time. 

And very early in his search, early in his wanderings, his pilgrimage to the Middle East – in his case the pyramids of Egypt – Santiago, the shepherd boy meets Melchizedek, the king of Salem, who appears to him. And Melchizedek, in his priestly role, blesses Santiago with encouragement, with motivation, and also with a kind of ancient Magic 8-ball to help him make decisions along the way. 

Melchizedek says that when people are searching, as a priest, he always appears to people in one form or another, to encourage them on their search. He lifts their gaze, helps them believe in the impossible, in part through his very appearing, through evoking wonder again. 

Abraham Heschel, again in that same book, God in Search of Man, asked

“How does a (hu)man lift up (one’s) eyes to see a little higher than (one)self? The grand premise of religion is that (hu)man(s) (are) able to surpass (our)sel(ves); that (hu)man who is part of this world may enter into a relationship with (God) who is greater than the world; that (hu)mans may lift up (our) minds and be attached to the absolute; that (hu)man who is conditioned by a multiplicity of factors is capable of living with demands that are unconditioned. How does one rise above the horizon of the mind? How does one free oneself from the perspectives of ego, group, earth, and age? How does one find a way in this world that would lead to an awareness of Him who is beyond this world?”

These questions lead Heschel to wonder. Wonder surprises us, arrests us, delights us, so it takes us outside of ourselves, outside of our narrow gaze, outside of our ego, outside of the narrow confines of our horizons, our identity as we see it, our group as we construct it. Wonder starts to lift our eyes to more. 

After the falling of the snow this week, I began to remember the experiences that have given me wonder. I wrote in my journal, stream of consciousness list-making, of times of wonder I remember. 

The views atop the White Mountains, above treeline. My first time standing on the Great Wall of China. Holding my sons and daughter as babies. Listening to them breathe, watching them sleep. Singing in worship in this place, and feeling the room somehow shrink and expand all at once, with the sense that unseen Spirit of God is with us, upon us, within me and on top of me, all at once. Experiences of delight, of hospitality, of love, or grace that beyond my expectations. 

What I noticed in all this remembrance of wonder is that wonder seems to always come from interruption. Wonder is rarely evoked through our plans or execution, through that which we prepare and make happen. Wonder is an internal sensation – a thought and a feeling, a lived experience – but wonder always comes to us from without. 

Something or someone in this world, or sometimes it seems some presence or person or force from beyond this world makes itself known, and we are arrested, surprised, delighted, and sometimes transformed.  

Because wonder always gives to us. And wonder always asks of us as well. We see this in the story of Abram and Melchizedek, bound up with the blessing and the tithe. 

Melchizedek is giving to Abram – at the very least giving him encouragement. You got this, Abram. This is yours – this victory, to be sure, but maybe this land, maybe this favor of the Most High God. Wonder is the giving and the welcoming of a gift, always.

But wonder asks something of us as well. Read in our translation and in most, Abram is compelled internally to give to Melchizedek – to give a lot, a tenth of all he’s just won. This is one of many places in the Hebrew scriptures that indicate that to find ways to give to God at least a tenth of all we have – income, land, wealth, time – that’s a normal, functional response to wonder. It’s a recognition that all we have is gift; it’s ours to receive and always right then to release as well, as Abram does.

At the very least, wonder costs us our attention. Wonder gently, sometimes loudly insists: notice. Look. Pay attention. There’s something important to behold here, something that will shape you, that will draw something good out of you, make someone good of you perhaps. 

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I began this sermon talking about snowfall and Christmas, and we’re anchored in a strange old, mythic feeling text. But to be clear that we’re not just talking rainbows and sunsets, let me tell you one more story, a story I rarely share, but one that is at the center of how I first began to know God.

It’s a story that reminds me that wonder is at the heart of the good life. And wonder can be found not just in what first most obviously delights us but also at the heart of pain, in the midst of grief, even in the depths of our sin and foolishness. 

I dated a lot when I was a teenager, and my record in these relationships by any measure was pretty up and down. I was not always a great friend. In one of these relationships in particular, the harm I did to someone I genuinely treasured was immense. I tend to keep most of the details of this story private, but I’ll just say that due to problems of my own that I didn’t yet understand, certainly in places I hadn’t yet sought healing, I caused profound hurt. 

At a point when I least expected it, my friend confronted me about the hurt I caused and let me know that I had been wrong, that I had betrayed trust, that I had been a source of harm. And after saying these things, my friend looked me in the eye and said: I also want you to know that I forgive you. My forgiveness doesn’t remove what happened, but I am still setting you free.

Years later, when as an adult, I returned to this person to again apologize and to see if I could make amends, that was appreciated. But I was also assured that forgiveness was real and had continued.

When my friend confronted me, and when that confrontation was accompanied by that forgiveness, I was seared with pain as I’ve been very few times in my life. In some ancient cultures, when people are struck with pain or grief, they tear their own clothes in lament. I didn’t know about that back then, but on instinct, without thinking, I tore my clothes, ripped up my outer shirt I was wearing. 

My folly, my sin, the harm I could do to someone I wouldn’t want to harm, the consequences of my own unhealed, ungoverned wounds — all that hit me with a shock of heavy, overwhelming pain. This was the arresting force not of beauty and delight, but of grief, and guilt, and shame.

But at the same time, to hear truth and love bound together, to see both grief and grace on the face of my friend, and in the tone and content of her words to me, I knew then that I was seeing the face of Christ. I knew then and more as I reflected upon it, that this was my friend, and this was a revelation of the love of God for me in Jesus Christ.

Honest, truthful, utterly non-delusional about everything good and bad in me, all seeing, all knowing – holding grief for my pain and for the pain I could inflict, and holding all that while offering grace. Saying I forgive you. Extending peace and love to me still. 

This too was the force of wonder. Of God’s truth and love, grief and grace meeting me in the face and words of one I’d wronged. 

This gave me a vision of the holy goodness of the living God. This gave me an emotionally, cognitively, deep soul unforgettable experience of God’s disposition toward me. It gave me my deepest yet taste of love and grace.

And yet, wonder asked of me too. This experience was like a giant knocking on the door of my life. How will I respond to this friend? Will I ever hurt someone in this way again, or will this encounter – colored by grace – push me to be a better man? A freer man? A person who is safer? Who does less harm? 

This encounter was certainly part of that journey in me.

And will this love I’d tasted, will this grief and grace I’d seen, shape me, or not? How would I respond to what I’d seen of God?

I’ve heard other stories like this from friends, and from some of you I serve and love as a pastor. I think of them as Jean Valjean moments, after that time early in Les Miserables, when Jean Valjean – an angry, unhealed, bitter man – steals the treasures of a priest, and when confronted is offered mercy, a way forward without carrying the weight of blame for what he’d done. In that moment when the priest gives him freedom, the priest says, “I have bought your soul for God.” He doesn’t need to give the priest anything, no repayment. But there’s a sense in which he’s now asked to see his life – all he is and all he has – as God’s, to let that gift and that obligation echo down through the rest of his life.

And in the story, echo it does, shaping Valjean into a person of justice and mercy and humble walking with God and his fellow humans. As in my own way, my encounter with Jesus is doing in me still. 

Some of you may have be aware that in the Christian mystical tradition, Melchizedek is a version of, a prefiguring of, Jesus Christ himself. In the Bible’s Jesus material, the New Testament, the letter called Hebrews spends a good bit of ink remembering the legend of Melchizedek. And we’re told that Jesus is a priest in the order of Melchizedek. 

That Jesus has appeared to us from God, that Jesus has no beginning or end, that Jesus blesses us and mediates a covenant with us and God. A promise, a kind of holy contract, a new deal. One in which God is in solidarity with us in all our mortality, in which we are known and loved by God, in which our folly is overlooked and our sins are forgiven, in which we are prayed for, welcomed into the family, set free to live with peace and confidence and hope and joy. 

When Melchizedek shows up to Abraham with bread and wine, the Christian mystics heard echoes of communion, saw Jesus showing up to us all, sent from God with his body and his blood, his very self to give. 

To be mortal humans, and to be met in the flesh by a self-sacrificing, all-giving, fully knowing and fully loving God is the great surprise of history. It is the central wonder of the human story. 

The great interruption of our life, to arrest us with surprise, and evoke wonder. 

Jesus’ whole life story pointed to this great surprise, this central wonder-evoking union of humanity and God.

Almost everything that Jesus said and did was utterly surprising. More full of life and wisdom and gentleness and provocation all at once. The only normal responses people ever have to Jesus is when it says people did not understand him, or when they apprehended just a bit and it says: they were filled with awe and wonder. 

And Jesus actually received life on these terms himself. Everything meaningful in Jesus’ life begins as an interruption. 

A tax collector stares at him from a tree, and he engages.

A woman pours her treasured perfume over his feet and wipes them with his hair, and he in turn honors her loving gesture.

Friends break open the ceiling where he’s teaching, to get their buddy some help, and Jesus tends to their need and honors their ingenuity.

A Roman soldier – a representation of his colonizing, oppressive enemies – begs for help for his child, and Jesus heals the child and praises his faith. 

People with points to make, axes to grind, grudges to nurse use people and words to trap and trick Jesus, and he sighs or smiles or says: how dare you? And he uses words and action to liberate, to question, and to love and set free. 

Jesus welcomes every interruption as a container of possibility, as an opportunity for God, as the beginning of something wonder-ful. 

In the Christmas story, it’s much the same. At every turn, if people don’t notice interruptions, God isn’t revealed to them. Joseph could have brushed off his dream that told him Mary’s pregnancy was God’s. Mary could have ignored her dream that her baby was God’s great liberator come to earth. All the witnesses – the magi could have doubted their astrology, the shepherds chalked their nighttime vision up to sleepiness, the elders who blessed baby Jesus in the temple could have marked their wonder at the sight of the child as senility or nostalgia for the days when they had children of their own. 

Every part of the gift of God in Christ was easy to miss, if interruptions weren’t welcomed. 

To find God, we need to look a little higher than ourselves To be spiritual is to allow ourselves again to be amazed.

So friends, sisters, brothers, 

Invitations to Whole Life Flourishing

Make room for interruptions. Treasure them as containers for God’s gift of wonder.

Can you treat every interruption in your life, or even some small portion of them – and I mean our actual interruptions (surprise encounters, waking children, stuff that unexpectedly goes well or badly – for real, all of them) not as irritants or obstacles, but as vessels for God’s work and presence, as the beginnings of holy moments, as means to wonder. 

And… 

Spiritual Practice of the Week

When you experience wonder, notice the gift God is giving you, and try to notice what God is asking of you as well.

 

Action: Jesus Compels Us to Act

We’re talking about Reservoir’s Core Values these days. And I’m so excited to talk about them because I really like these values. Like, this is who we are and what we care about, and how we think it best informs and shapes our faith journeys. Check it out. Here’s what our website says:

CORE VALUES

Jesus captures our hearts, transforms our lives, and makes all things possible. We want to move closer to Jesus in all aspects of our lives. As we do so, our community is animated by these five core values that guide our pursuit of vibrant, inclusive, healthy faith:

  • Connection: We value life-giving connections and are committed to pursuing God’s wholeness, love, and leading in every moment of our lives, transcending distinctions between sacred and secular.

  • Everyone: We seek to welcome people in all their diversity, without condition or exception, to embrace a life connected to Jesus and others.

  • Action: Love for Jesus compels us to act—to seek justice, show compassion, work for reconciliation, and hope for transformation in joyful engagement with the world.

  • Freedom: We encourage honest exploration of faith over conformity of belief or behavior, trusting that the Holy Spirit reveals truth to all who seek God.

  • Humility: We are wholeheartedly committed to pursuing the truth of Jesus through multiple sources, including the Bible, reason, culture, and experience, and we take the posture of learners, recognizing that our understanding of God’s truth continues to unfold.

Y’all, this is so good. For a church to have such words. “transcending distinctions between sacred and secular,” you mean even “worldly” things? Yes it’s all God’s. “Diversity, without condition or exception” For real? Even…? Yes, no matter what. “Trusting the Holy Spirit reveals truth to all who seek God.” Whaaaaat. To all? And “recognizing that our understanding of God’s truth continues to unfold?” WHAAAAAT you mean, we didn’t have it all figured out in 1791?  Can you tell, I’m so excited to be unpacking these values together for 5 weeks. 

At the center, the starting point is Jesus. Jesus captures our hearts. Jesus transforms our lives. JESUS, makes all things possible. Steve kicked us off in the series last week with Connection. Today, I’m talking about Action. I thought about how l’d talk about action. And I was like wait, This is about ACTION. Not, let’s sit here and listen and talk about action. So, I have a gift for you all today. I am going to preach a very short sermon! Praise God! And hopefully give us some time, a chance to take action in whatever way you might need and feel lead today at the end of service. So short sermon, we’ll end early, and I’ll point you to a few ways that you can use that time to open yourself up to even a small action today. 

So let me share just 2 Bible stories and what moved them to Action. 

The reality is that the love of Jesus does not compel us all the same. So here are two ways, two different women reacting to the love of Jesus. Listen

Luke 8:42-48 (NIV)

As Jesus was on his way, the crowds almost crushed him. 43 And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years, but no one could heal her. 44 She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.

45 “Who touched me?” Jesus asked.

When they all denied it, Peter said, “Master, the people are crowding and pressing against you.”

46 But Jesus said, “Someone touched me; I know that power has gone out from me.”

47 Then the woman, seeing that she could not go unnoticed, came trembling and fell at his feet. In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him and how she had been instantly healed. 48 Then he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.”

 

Luke 13:10-17 (NIV)

10 On a Sabbath Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues, 11 and a woman was there who had been crippled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and could not straighten up at all. 12 When Jesus saw her, he called her forward and said to her, “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” 13 Then he put his hands on her, and immediately she straightened up and praised God.

14 Indignant because Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, the synagogue leader said to the people, “There are six days for work. So come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath.”

15 The Lord answered him, “You hypocrites! Doesn’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from the stall and lead it out to give it water? 16 Then should not this woman, a daughter of Abraham, whom Satan has kept bound for eighteen long years, be set free on the Sabbath day from what bound her?”

17 When he said this, all his opponents were humiliated, but the people were delighted with all the wonderful things he was doing.

Two stories. Two women. The first woman,

Picture of cloaked person reaching out a hand to touch the bottom of a red robe. Other figures' robes are visible.

in order for her to touch the edge of the Jesus’ cloak had to kneel, out of desperation, hurl over, in humility and get low to barely touch Jesus. She came trembling, and fell at his feet. The second woman,Image of man in white robe and woman in blue robe bent towards each other, smiling and holding hands.

was already bent over and could not straighten up at all. Jesus sets her free. He liberates her. And she stands up. And while many capture this story with her being bent over, I think as Vernee said a few weeks ago, why do we remember them by their ailments rather than their legacy of healing? I see her more like the strong defiant free woman, like this fearless girl statue.

Photo of bronze statue of girl standing with hands on hips and looking up.

(“Fearless Girl,” statue by Kristen Visbal on Wall Street)

For both of these women, Jesus says, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace.” and “Woman, you are set free from your infirmity.” Jesus says go. You are set free. Not only does Jesus heal them but he releases them. Go. You are set free! In the midst of it, the disciples around are asking questions, they are confused, and the synagogue leaders are indignant and like, but what about sabbath! 

I thought of ending the service early and moving us to action. And a part of me was a bit like, but what about worship? What is worship? Worship is a reaction to a God who loves us. Worship isn’t just sermon, prayer, and praise songs. The provocative message of Jesus was about liberation, heaven on earth enacted now, not observing the sabbath to do religion better, but seeing the people who are in the midst of us, around us, right now suffering. 

Last few weeks we’ve mentioned the Health Equity Team and the things they are working on. And sometimes, as a leader of this church, as a pastor, I do ask myself, hm how do I make the connection. Is it too political to talk about healthcare? Am I focusing on this community organizing to empower them to make a change in their real lives rather than teaching people how to pray? And I realized, I’ve been taught to be that synagogue leader. Sunday worship! Sermon prep! That’s important! But this story has convicted my heart to what breaks Jesus’ heart. Jesus saw her. Do you see her? In fact he calls the bystanders out and say, you untie even your ox or donkey! We don’t even give the crippled people enough dignity of even a dog! We ignore them and go on about our worship in our comfortable beautiful space. Why is that? We don’t see the neighbor that can’t afford a doctor’s visit. We don’t see the kids crippled by the lack of access to good education right here in our neighborhoods. And we’re so concerned with our own lives and our church. What is the church for? It’s to receive the love of God and not keep it for ourselves but open up and release our healing and power to go! Set free! Jesus acts and the woman stands. We act that others may stand. 

What brings you to church today? What desperation, what need, or posture brings you to the feet of Jesus today? Hear the words of Jesus, “your faith has saved you.” Receive it. Believe it. Accept it. And then, Go. Go out in peace. Don’t hear this message as, now go get busy. Some of you actually need to stop doing many things. If you need to sit at the feet of Jesus to drive in deep the love of Jesus, do that. Kneel. Hurl over. Take time to reach out to Jesus and say heal me. Because everything we do, it derives from the power  of Jesus. So let’s sit with him first before we think of any action. And if you heard him, he says stand up. He says walk.

So I’ll wrap up now and we’ll move into the rest of the service with music, prayer, and communion. And after the service has “ended,” let your worship continue. Here are a few ways I invite you to this time, and I invite you to an action of some sort, but per our other values of freedom and humility, asking yourself what you need and as you feel lead and comfortable. 

As I said, Jesus compels us in different ways, and we celebrate diversity, so there’ll be a few different things going on. I invite some of us to hurl over this booklet of spiritual practices. Sit, kneel, lay down if you’d like. These carpets are pretty new and clean. I hope you receive the love of Jesus, just as you are. The band will continue playing and create that space here in this sanctuary. 

And then I invite some of you to move out. There’s the Dome, where the Health Equity Team will be huddling about the Nov 4th action coming up. Talk with them. I’ll also be in the Dome to talk about Neighboring and Justice work our church’s doing.

There’s the lobby and the Cafe. Find someone to connect with for just 10-15 minutes and share what brings you to church. Share what Jesus has said to you through these scriptures or through this worship service. Listen and share what compels you to act. Jesus wasn’t about religion or even social action, but about relationships. In the midst of chaos, Jesus called out saying, “who touched me”, he wanted to know her, and In the presence of all the people, she told why she had touched him. In the face of hurt and pain, Jesus saw her, he called her forward. Last week Steve invited us towards connection. Share your story. Let’s listen to the stories and call each other forward. 

And move even further out. I invite you to walk around the church and our campus. Take a few moments to stare at a leaf. Look up and breath. Pray for this place. Walk around and pick up trash. Pray for our church, the people. Pray for Benjamin banneker school. There’s a guide in how to do that in the Spiritual booklet as well. 

Your faith has healed. Go in peace. Amen. 

On the Brink of Not Much…Not Yet…

Both of my graduations were anticlimactic. College graduation, I got the cap and gown, but the diploma was just a cover. I wasn’t getting the real diploma, yet. As the end of my 4th year in undergrad was coming to a close, when everyone else was interviewing, landing a job, planning to move, I was graduating late because I didn’t have enough credits. In high school, it was easy to keep up and I wasn’t the smartest but still got A’s and B’s without trying too hard. SAT scores were decent enough to get into UCLA. Transition to college was a bit more difficult for me, not just the academic part but socially, emotionally I wasn’t able to balance out everything too well. Each semester I was overloaded and ended up dropping a class here and there. Which is how I ended up at my graduation with about 20 units short and was only “walking”. Everyone was asking each other, “what are you doing after graduation?” Oh, an internship at Deloitte. Grad school at USC. An oversees program with Peacecorp or some other exciting cool gig. It seemed like everyone else was on the Brink of everything, except me. After I “walked” my graduation, I had to take 3 classes in Session A of summer school and 3 classes in Session C, to finish all my classes by the end of summer. 

My grad school graduation also had a damper. After you graduate from seminary, you received a masters in divinity, because apparently you’ve mastered the divine (lol), and then in my little circle of the world, in the denomination of Presbyterians, the order was that you are then “called” by a church and that’s how you get ordained. I, happened to be working at a church that’s of another denomination and didn’t qualify for ordination right then. Folks would ask each other, “where you getting ordained?”. While others were becoming solo pastors at a church or becoming chaplains at a hospital, I had to explain about working at a church that’s not Presbyterian and the whole thing. 

Churches follow the season of the new school year, so it’s a new ministry year for us, and as we kick this time off, we’re doing a sermon series called, On the Brink of Everything, taken from a book by Parker Palmer. The series isn’t particularly inspired from the book, as our head pastor Steve kicked off the series last week talking about being overwhelmed in the midst of being on the brink of every kinds of things, whereas Palmer’s book is mainly about aging and reaching end of life. Palmer got the title actually from a reflection written by a mom as she watched her toddler on the brink of discovery and seeing the world with wonder. And yes, as I see my 10 month old daughter, omg she on the brink of swallowing cardboard, falling head first on a sharp toy, or knocking down any liquid nearby. So, whether we’re 10 months old, or very old, or anything in between really, this is a season for many of us, we’re on the brink of change, launching, possibility. And we just loved the title, kinda poetic, on the brink, of everything! 

But for me, there’s this thing about it, that’s a bit anticlimactic. On the Brink of… not much… not yet…. Not me…. And it feels like everyone around me is on the brink of stuff. They are working on some new cool project. They are starting a company. Their company’s about to go public for ridiculous amounts of money. I’m like, dude, we were in same small group a few years ago! But me, yes, I have recently had many changes, I moved here almost 2 years ago, had a baby. That’s a lot of change. But then like, since then it’s been, diapers, emails, uh trying to eat better, gym, work, ya know. Same ol, same ol. Every weekend we’re like, so….. Uh library? Costo? Burlington mall? Yeah, I know my life might look fabulous on Instagram, but that’s just it. It looks like everyone’s on the brink of discovery and excitement, but there’s this mundane regularness of life that we don’t see. What do we do with this time, the not much of nothing not yet? That’s what I want to talk about today. 

Even for Jesus, the Bible stories about him are his facebook feeds, the highlights, that’s captured and saved forever, but there’s all these early years of his life that we have no record of. Because he was probably doing not much, not yet. The only record we have is when he was 12 years old, when his parents lost him in the temple. Let me read it for us. 

Luke 2:41-52 (NIV)

41 Every year Jesus’ parents went to Jerusalem for the Festival of the Passover.42 When he was twelve years old, they went up to the festival, according to the custom. 43 After the festival was over, while his parents were returning home, the boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. 44 Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. 45 When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. 46 After three days they found him in the temple courts, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.47 Everyone who heard him was amazed at his understanding and his answers.48 When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, “Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you.”

49 “Why were you searching for me?” he asked. “Didn’t you know I had to be in my Father’s house?” 50 But they did not understand what he was saying to them.

51 Then he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. 52 And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

They traveled on for a day? What were you doing for a day without your son you called Emmanuel, Mary and Joseph? He was literally not with you.  Rough childhood. And Jesus, sounds like he was a kind of a problem child, running away and not letting his parents know where he was?! His mom’s like, “why have you treated us like this?” Totally what my mom would say to me, “why would you do this to me?” and I’m like, I didn’t do it to you, you’re the mom! But I digress…. A twelve year old, after 3 days?! WHAT? Can you imagine? And he talks back too. “Why were you searching for me?” And the kid is weird, saying things they didn’t understand. I mean what if your middle schooler, when you’re like, “where you been?” says to you, “Don’t you know that I had to follow the voice of the one who calls me?” You’d be worried. I mean, you bring them to church but you don’t want them to be THAT religious. The writer wrapped it up well, “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.” But man, you don’t know that when all you see is him acting like this! 

It was a time of growth. A time of becoming. A time of not much…. Not yet. 

They call it the gap years. Jesus took a gap year! Years, at that! Because there was nothing extra special about that time probably. The only other reference we have to his backstory is when Jesus was seen doing miracles later, someone was like, “wait isn’t this the carpenter guy from that one town?” When you make it big, someone always does this. And to that, Jesus responded, “A prophet is not without honor except in his own town, among his relatives and in his own home”. So, Jesus was probably a carpenter. Building furniture, maybe houses, a contractor. Not particularly related to a charismatic spiritual leader. 

Even when Jesus finally performed his first miracle, it felt as though it was not time yet. In John 2, it says, 3 When the wine was gone, Jesus’ mother said to him, “They have no more wine.” and Jesus replies “Woman, why do you involve me?” “My hour has not yet come.”

Do you feel like your hour has not yet come? Or not even sure if it’ll ever come. Maybe some of us feel like we’re just on hold. In this liminal space between doing something meaningful or great, or it doesn’t even have to be great, just right. And in the mean time, it feels as though you are stuck. Maybe you’ve been feeling like you’re stuck at a job, you’ve been interviewing and interviewing but nothing’s been happening. Or you’ve had this idea in your mind, and tried to have it become something, but it just keeps hitting a wall after another. Or maybe it’s a season marked by just trying to get by. Just sustaining. Just the day to day. And it feels, mundane. Like you’ve been waiting. Wondering how long this season is going to be. 

Those times after both of my graduations were also times of insecurity and uncertainty. I wasn’t sure who I was, or who I was supposed to be. It felt like I was put on hold. I knew I was capable of things. Sometimes it felt like people didn’t see me. Or recognize my talents. Like I wasn’t even worth being given a chance. There were times at my job when I was moving chairs, coordinating events on emails, and setting up the projector that would not cooperate, I felt frustrated that this is all I amounted to after grad school. Not that I was above those things, those tasks are actually some of the meat work of ministry and I still do them, but I wasn’t given a chance to preach, or teach a class, or lead a group on a topic that I was passionate about. 

I remember one night during those times, I had a sleepover with my 2 bestfriends. Yes, I was like mid twenties having sleepovers where you turn off the lights, lay down and talk to each other in the dark. It was one of those conversations with your bestfriends that just flowed, we were listening, and present, completely still, all in the dark, blankly staring into the ceiling. And we were talking about our lives, post college graduation. And I had this image in my head that just popped up. I wasn’t sure what it was but I just shared it with them. There was this small pink plastic stool with like cheezy flowers on it, like the ones you see at chinese markets. And on top of it was a bowl, an ordinary bowl. The bowl was full of water just about to overflow, and on it was a drip, drip, drip, with each drip, the bowl at the brink of overflowing but not yet. I shared that image and one of my friends said, I can’t remember exactly but something along the lines of, it’s been filling up, slowly, veeeeery slowly, but it’s filling up. And I just filled up with tears in my eyes and my heart swelled up with this recognition, of knowing and feeling exactly what she was talking about. My ordinary, some would even say pretty ghetto life, just makeshift stool and put a bowl on it, ya know nothing fancy, it’s not a chalice on a tiered stand or nothing, but God was filling me up, drip by drip. And I could picture the bowl overflowing, running down the pink plastic stool and spreading all over the floor. It was like a glimpse of the future. When each day felt like only a drip, insignificant, small drips. 

I’ve had this other image, during the times after my seminary graduation. When I knew I wasn’t ready to be killing it. There was this sense of daily grind. Where I was building myself up, and just sharpening knife. At the risk of being just streotypical Asian, I’m about to drop a bunch of asian images here but, I imagined like a samuri, one who learns how to just sharpen his sword. Like a Rocky moment, getting up super early in the morning, in the darkness of dawn covered in morning mist fog, you just faintly see the figure of a samuri kneeling and the only sound you hear, sheek sheek sheek, sharpening his sowrd. Until one day it comes, I don’t know the enemy or whatever, and he just goes, shook shook shook, and kills. 

I’ve kneeled and grinded, next to my dad growing up. More asian stuff coming at ya, while he would write caligraphy, I would sit next to him with a black block in my hand, and you pour a little bit of water on this heavy black stone brick, that literally had a big dragon engraved on it as the lid, and you would grind the block to make ink. And as you do it, you don’t just grind and make ink, you give your focus, your intention, your chi, maybe you’ve heard it I think the chinese call it, in korean it’s called gi, your energy. That is how you make ink. And before you can freely move your brush on about, you first grind the block with you gi. You know like, wax on, wax off, okay, I’m done with the asian imageries. 

We were just on a church-wide retreat together this weekend, friday to Saturday and the theme was mending, with a speaker who literally sewed things together. We were told to bring holey socks. And the thing about sewing things together for me is, man I just don’t got time for it. I remember our sheets started to get these little holes in them and we had literally like just bought them so not wanting it to rip more, my husband was like, can you sew these up? I was like, PSH, uh okay, sure, let me just bust out my sewing kit and put a tiny thread into a tiny hole and do some sewing in my spare time like a proper wife. Just kidding. I don’t talk like that to my husband lol…. I was like, uh yeah sure, I’ll try. But I was thinking, when am I going to have time to do that? 

I did it one day and honestly, it felt so good. It felt like REALLY good. To slow down, just look down and focus on your hands, fixing something physically. I was present. And my husband was pretty happy too. 

Looking back, the timing of things actually were perfect. During those times were times I had the space and time to process some important things in my life. It was during those times that I had the energy to put myself together, to grief, to be angry, to heal and process some of the traumas I’ve experienced in my life. And I’m grateful for it because, if I was preaching during that time, well I would’ve been horrible at it because I was too deep in my own stuff. They were times of slowing down, places I had to weave, thread, reinforce, protect, and mend for me. 

When Jesus finally stepped into his true calling of preaching, healing, performing miracles and eventually dying for what he did, he continued this habit of withdrawing himself from the spotlight and connecting with the Father. It says, “But Jesus often withdrew to lonely places and prayed.” in Luke 5:16. And in Mark 1:35, “Very early in the morning, while it was still dark, Jesus got up, left the house and went off to a solitary place, where he prayed.” 

In between greatness and living out his fullest life, he would, ground himself, go back to the source where he got his energy. When things would happen that was too much, 

13 When Jesus heard what had happened, he withdrew by boat privately to a solitary place. Matt 14:13. 

I actually think this is the brilliance and the magic of Jesus. He was busy. he was fighting the systemic powers of his time. He was able to bring heaven on earth through his very words and his hands, because he would whisper to his Maker and clasped his hands in prayer. Where did he get his power to do what he did? Through seasons of some negative space in his life, where he went on walks by himself. He was constantly stepping away, ducking out, and sneaking off to connect with the One. He claimed to be one with God. And that’s, I believe the secret to Jesus, showing us how to be one with the divine, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. I have given them the glory that you gave me, that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me. Says in John 17:22. I quote these verses, not because they are important because they are in the Bible, but for us to get glimpses of who Jesus was like and why he’s such a big deal. What made him tick. What made him, him. What makes Jesus so compelling is actually counterintuitive to today’s culture of being a big deal and showing the world who you are. He did the opposite. He went down. Lower than anyone expected him to. Unto the depths of shame, and blame, and death. There, from there he rose. That is the way Jesus shows us, that the way down is the way up. When you think not much is happening, that’s the place of incubation and rebirth. 

You know, it seems as though everyone else is achieving greatness, putting themselves out there, making things happen. And like the overused cheesy imagery of a caterpillar, this gross crawling thingy cacoons itself in the darkness. And maybe that’s you, who’s been in a season of darkness. A season of what it feels like a dull chronic pain. A season that feels like God is doing not much…. Not yet… and you’ve been asking, “how long, oh Lord.” If you find yourself there, take heart. God meets you there in the dark, and is sharpening your sword, is grinding your rock, is dripping every blessing and goodness onto you, that you may be filled up and overflow. May that be true for us, our community and the world. 

As we trust God to show up in those places, we can freely allow ourselves to slow down to really get in touch with who we are. And maybe this season that feels like a lull, like a moment of stagnation, is maybe a time of sustenance. We all need such season. Especially if we want to be ready for greatness. We have to be filled up in order to overflow and give and serve those around us. The freedom that comes at the moment of releasing your truest potential, it only comes from a time and place of daily discipline. 

Let me wrap up. Here’s my invitation for life flourshing in a season that may be on the brink of not much, not yet. It’s in the program for you. 

Don’t look around to what others are doing. Look up and dream big. Look down and do the daily small stuff. You do you. Every day. Plug away. 

And a Spiritual Practice to sustain you through this season. 

Find time in your life for refueling your energy, connecting with the divine. Connect with yourself, in solitude. 

Just as Jesus did. Where he got his power, from the source that everflows to nourish you. To be grounded in the abundant love of God that tells you that it’s not what you do or achieve, but here in the stillness of, even in the midst not much, not yet, I love you. You’re beloved. There is your brink of everything. 

 

Finding God in the Wilderness

Exodus 2:15 – 3:4

15 When Pharaoh heard of this, he tried to kill Moses, but Moses fled from Pharaoh and went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well16 Now a priest of Midian had seven daughters, and they came to draw water and fill the troughs to water their father’s flock. 17 Some shepherds came along and drove them away, but Moses got up and came to their rescue and watered their flock.

18 When the girls returned to Reuel their father, he asked them, “Why have you returned so early today?”

19 They answered, “An Egyptian rescued us from the shepherds. He even drew water for us and watered the flock.”

20 “And where is he?” Reuel asked his daughters. “Why did you leave him? Invite him to have something to eat.”

21 Moses agreed to stay with the man, who gave his daughter Zipporah to Moses in marriage. 22 Zipporah gave birth to a son, and Moses named him Gershom,[c] saying, “I have become a foreigner in a foreign land.”

23 During that long period, the king of Egypt died. The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God. 24 God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. 25 So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them.

3Now Moses was tending the flock of Jethro his father-in-law, the priest of Midian, and he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness and came to Horeb, the mountain of God. 2 There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in flames of fire from within a bush. Moses saw that though the bush was on fire it did not burn up. 3 So Moses thought, “I will go over and see this strange sight—why the bush does not burn up.”

4 When the Lord saw that he had gone over to look, God called to him from within the bush, “Moses! Moses!”

And Moses said, “Here I am.”

We’re talking about Wild Places, in this season of Lent. Places of wilderness, that might be an inbetween place, a lost space, uncertain, null, negative space, or even of discomfort or pain. But also Wild Places are places of discovery, of new space, surprised by what’s found in the barren. Most of this season we’re engaging in how we end up in wild places that we might not choose, anxiety, doubt, exile, or suffering. But before we go there, there are some wild places that we might choose to go to. Some wilderness that we may be surprised to lean into. A place that we might not have thought we wanted or needed, but jump into the depths of the wild.

Because maybe, for some of us, things might’ve been green pasture for the most part. For many of us, our upbringing, our time in place and culture, has pretty sheltered us from the rugged wilderness. For a lot of us, here, in United States, in this day and age, in this area, we’ve had the privilege of being safe and protected, and maybe haven’t really experienced a wilderness of sorts. I’m not saying that there has been difficulties, or struggles. We all have each our own. But the reality is that for all of us, it is sometimes easy to be left to our own communities and cocoons that keeps us blind to some wild places others may experience. If we’re not intentional about moving towards the edges of those known comforts, we just might miss out on the whole of human experience that is vast, deep, and wide.

 

Here’s one way to put it causally. This may be why people of privilege love to travel. #wanderlust and backpacking and just getting lost in a new city. As someone who’s moved around alot and uprooted every few years that sounds horrible and stressful to me. But for some folks, maybe born and raised in one place, going outside of their comfort zones gives them a new perspective and new light into the world that you just can’t experience when you stay. Like the movie Lost in Translation, [SLIDE]  so artsy and beautiful, two Americans lost in Japan, trying to find themselves and meaning. Because yes, being lost in a strange land is discombobulating and kind of beautiful. Or like Burning Man, [SLIDE] an event that people go out to the middle of the desert to learn the ”virtue of surviving in the desolate surreal trackless plain of the Black Rock Desert”. It’s extremely dusty, and very hot, and over 70,000 people pay $3-400 ticket to do this every year. And folks who do these, Burners you call em, are like cultic about it, it gives them meaning and life. It’s holy to them. There’s a longing there, a curiosity to experience deeply. The things is, for a lot of folks, traveling or camping is a luxury that you can’t afford and wilderness you don’t need. You’re just trying to make it here, you don’t need to go out somewhere to see if you can survive out there.

 

Moses, was the Prince of Egypt. The origin story of Moses goes, in Exodus 1, that the king of Egypt didn’t like the Hebrews and tried to kill all baby boys. Moses, was miraculously rescued by the Pharaoh’s daughter and ends up growing up in the palace. One day he notices an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, his own people, and so he jumps in, and actually ends up killing the Egyptian. And what’s interesting in the story is that, the Hebrews aren’t necessarily thankful for this young privileged Prince, all of sudden getting woke to his own conscience in the cruelty of the hebrew slaves, deciding to take matters into his own hands and thinks he can solve the problem. It probably caused more problems for the slave actually, to have a murder of an Egyptian in the news. It says verse 13, just a few verses before today’s text, “the next day he went out and saw two hebrews fighting, and he asked the one in the wrong, “why are you hitting your fellow hebrew” The man said, “who made you ruler and judge over us? Are you thinking of killing me as you killed the Egyptian?” AND THEN, Moses realizes what he did, and decides to flee to Midian. Probably in confusion, probably in misunderstanding of the situation and what he did. Maybe ashamed of how he reacted and angry with the system of oppression he sees but doesn’t know yet what to do. So he goes. He goes away to Midian.  For a long time.

 

Verse 15 says that, he “went to live in Midian, where he sat down by a well.” Which, I don’t know if that’s just a weird wording from translation but sounds kind of funny, that he went to live there, where he sat by a well. Maybe that’s what he did, every day, he just went and hung out at the well, without much to do, without much purpose. And when he saw these women, who were trying to draw some water, were getting harassed by the shepherd. Moses of course, decides to jump in again, and rescues the ladies. Sounds like he has a bit of a savior complex but okay, hey at least he puts himself out there. This time, he doesn’t kill the other guy and runs away, he stays and waters their flock.

 

When the daughters’ father asks what happened, they answer, “An Egyptian rescued us.” Moses is called an Egyptian. “He even drew water for us and watered the flock.” And Reuel’s like, who is this guy? “And where is he? Why did you leave him?” Cause something’s going on here. First of all, why would an Egyptian get involved and second of all, what is he doing around here anyways? He’s probably lost or something. Go find him. And I don’t know if Reuel was actually grateful but his response is to invite him to come and “have something to eat”. I love that. Rescuing his daughters is great but let me see and get to know this guy. Let’s sit down and eat together. And so Moses agrees, to

accept the generosity of him, goes into their house, sits down at their table, and eat their food, and stays there, immersing himself into the fold of their lives.

 

And the rest of the story sounds pretty mundane. Almost too normal for a big name like Moses, who later comes to be the leader who frees the the Hebrew slaves out of Egypt. He gets married, she gets pregnant, they have a baby– you know, just life, and a long time passed like that, enough for the king of Egypt to have passed. Moses, mostly spent his days tending his father in law’s flocks. (A side note: a quick textual criticism Bible study, look at the text, in verse 18, he’s first referred to as Reuel, and then later in chapter 3 verse 1, he’s named Jethro. And in other part of the Bible in a book called Numbers he’s mentioned as  Raguel, which pronunciation could be similar to Reuel, but Jethro is a whole another name, so it’s “generally accepted” that Moses’ father in law must’ve went by like 7 different names, apparently. Just a WINDOW into the fact that some stories in the Bible are FAR from our culture and written in different times throughout history. There are discrepancies of who’s who. There’s linguistics at play, Hebrew and Arabic, not to mention later translations of Latin and Greek that could be contributing to the confusion. I just point that out because it doesn’t make the stories FALSE because the details are mixed up, but hey reality is there are mixed up details in the Bible and things ARE lost in translation and I personally think it’s important to note them now, honoring its complexity of the story. You’re sophisticated enough to hold it, so that we don’t have to throw out the whole story of Moses later when we realize that we’re not even sure on the name of his father in law.) Sorry, detour, as you’ll see, detours can be gifts. Moving on.

 

Verse 3 says, “he led the flock to the far side of the wilderness.” There, something caught his attention. He saw a bush. And it seemed to have been on fire. On fire, but it did not burn up. it was a strange, mysterious sight and he was drawn into it. He didn’t understand it but He was captured by it. In awe of it. So he moved toward it.

 

I have a friend who was working at an elite interior design firm at the time. She was successful and establishing a great career. She’s actually designed and decorated a literal palace of prince of a country I can’t remember the name of.  By any standards she should have been happy, set financially and on track to the top But at some point, she felt this longing to turn her head from the ladder she was climbing. And one day she decided to quit her job and go on a Eat, Pray, Love trip. Which is a popular book from some years ago about an american woman traveling to India and finding herself. And yes, it was yoga, she teaches yoga now. It’s a little silly, but not, because people find things, holy things, wholeness, meaning, God in these places, that at first seem like a distraction or a waste of time. For my friend, it’s when she left a high paying job to roam the world freely that she discovered and deepened her spirituality. It’s often when we’re taken out of our usual context and placed in a whole new environment, a retreat, that we find the space to hear something fresh. Sometimes it’s hard to really see, hear, or listen to the divine voice in the busyness of our usual days.

 

For some of us, the season of wilderness comes to us uninvited and catches us by surprise. But for some of us, sometimes life just seems to go on without much disruption and for those of us with lives that’s seem pretty normal and plain, we find ourselves seeking, choosing, and being drawn to places of wilderness that we might experience a kind of breakthrough, a fresh light, out of the shallow, into the deep.

 

Have you ever been pulled by something that caught your attention? Or distracted you from your normal flock tending life. Or a sight of something that demanded your deeper awareness. Made you turn your head. Examine it more. Someone emailed me a quote that they liked this week and they described it as, “this line arrested me with how true it feels”. Has a thing ever arrested you, your mind, your time, your energy?

 

A detour into the wilderness can teach us. Like all the negative space in a good photograph. An open wild space to experience. It might not look so productive sometimes. Like Moses, just sitting by a well. Moses gives up his palace and becomes a foreigner in a foreign land. He’s not in control, but moves with this family’s culture, tending flocks in the wild. And there, he is faced with the holy tree. There he is captivated by a thing he doesn’t understand. There, he is transformed. He’s there and challenged.

 

—

A few years back I was a part of a County Jail Ministry, where we went to county jail and did a worship services there every week. I initially signed up for it because I wanted to help. I wanted to bring church to those who are incarcerated and can’t attend a church on Sunday. And we did do that, share a message, a few songs, prayed together. But the thing that I experienced more when I stepped into that space was, helplessness. I couldn’t do much. Many of them were mothers separated from their children. They were waiting on court dates, not sure of where they would end up next, staying in jail or go back out into the same environment that got them there in the first place.

 

I wanted to fix the system that put addicts into prisons. I wished that I was a lawyer, or wished that I could find them a good lawyer, or try to make any of the situation better somehow. The thing that happened mainly, wasn’t addressing those issues, which weren’t my place to solve anyway, but that I realized that I wanted to make things better so I didn’t have to feel the discomfort of sitting with unsolvable problems. I learned that it was frustrating, mind boggling how long these court dates took, infuriating how this woman got mixed up with a person that coerced them to steal. I got a little glimpse of what it feels like to truly be out of control, caught up in a system as they say, hitting a dead end and not having the resources. I felt and learned empathy. Not just sympathy. And faith. It was uncomfortable leaving county jail and going back to my warm comfortable bed. They lingered in my thoughts. It brought me down. I prayed hard for them, and grieved many things. And It brought me to enter into someone else’s story, without exercising the power to rescue them. I was simply called there, not even to be there for them, but for me to feel and experience and journey alongside those who were imprisoned. Here I am.

 

Their lives are on fire, but they were not burning up. Why. how. They were, “hard pressed on every side, but not crushed; perplexed, but not in despair; 9 persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed.” (2 Corinthians 4:8-9) I wasn’t bringing Jesus to them but they were showing Jesus to me through their lives. They sang with me and cried with me. I couldn’t do anything but feel, discomfort, the discomfort that I had the luxury of avoiding if I really wanted to. At first I did it because you’re supposed to sit with the oppressed right? As a Christian, do community service, do charity, serve. Check. But that wasn’t the point at all. It gave me the space to really look at the systemic suffering in this world. It allowed me the real privilege to see their lives of resilience and strength. I heard a quote earlier this week from a man from Ecuador, quoting Father Gregory Boyle who started a ministry called Homeboy that worked with gangs in Los Angeles, [SLIDE]  “Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.” I got a chance to just witness, what they had to carry, without trying to suggest how they should carry it.

 

Moses gave up being a prince of Egypt and became a foreigner. Jesus gave up “his divine privileges, he took the humble position of a slave and was born a human being, when he appear in human form, he humbled himself in obedience to God and died a criminal’s death on a cross.” According to Philippians 2:7-8. It’s peculiar to me that sometimes we make the mistake of thinking that following Jesus will just make our lives better, our marriages more successful, ourselves happier, to be more good kind people. Actually, I”m sorry, but following Jesus is a bit more deeper/darker than that. I’m not really make it look too appealing as the preacher of christianity am I, but the truth is, following Jesus ist is moving towards the cross, the suffering. And there is hope and resurrection that meets us on the other side. God calls us to the mountain tops but also to the wilderness. Before Moses split the sea, he lived in Midian for a long time not doing much. And after he split the sea, him and his people were lost again in the desert wilderness for 40 years. But God was with them, daily on the journey. The promise isn’t that life is gonna be awesome, but, that it might be a wild ride and I will be with you.. No matter where you go…..

 

Make no mistake though, the journey we’re invited to isn’t so that we can be the Moses or Jesus of the story, acting as if we’re the liberators or saviors. The only resemblance is that God calls us out into the wilderness, Moses, out to the burning tree, Jesus, to be hung on a tree, we just might find ourselves on the far side of the wilderness. And meet God there.

 

Where are you now? Is there a wilderness place God is calling you into, toward, to notice and pay attention to? A place where you have no power to judge or rescue, but to just have to stay and say here I am. Or maybe for some of you, you’re already in the wilderness and you don’t need to go choose it, it has chosen you. Maybe my message today wasn’t for you, for you already know the wilderness too well. For those of you who are there, God says, I am with you. At the far side of the wilderness, whether we choose to go there like Moses, or taken there like the Hebrew slaves, God seeks to meet us there and call us by name. Moses, Moses. Sarah, Sarah. John, John. Lydia, Lydia. May we have the humility to go there, take off our sandals and say here I am.

 

We invite you to consider the wild places in this season of Lent. Some invitations for you in the program, jotted down for you.

 

—Invitation to life flourishing

Move into and embrace a season of wilderness. Dwell and stay there, though nothing may happen for a long time. Perhaps, on the far side of the wilderness, you might experience God there.

 

And a way to

Spiritual Practice: this, to create a space where you might ponder upon some of these things. Maybe try meditating with a tree. [SLIDE]

Maybe it’s a tree in water, and you might wonder why it has not been swallowed up by water. How it stands. I’ll close by reading

A poem to invite you into this practice.

 

TREES

by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest

Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,

And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in summer wear

A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;

Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,

But only God can make a tree.

 

His Banner Over Us is Love

Last week, we started a new, 8 week series called Training in the Studio of Love. It feels so great to kick this new year off looking at love.  It’s a word we hear about, talk about and orient around a lot as people who think about faith—and who try our best to live out a life of faith with Jesus at the center—but maybe less often, consider it something to train for. Our series is inspired by an old friend of our church, Brian McLaren (author, and in the pastorate), who has spent a lot of time thinking about just how we are called to lead a life of love, and he has come up with a curriculum of sorts to help us also think about it!

So last week and this week we will look at what love of neighbor looks like. Steve over the next two weeks will talk about the unselfish love of self, and then we’ll follow with love of the world, and wrap up our series with 2 weeks on the love of God.

If I think back to the first time I remember hearing the word “God”. I also remember hearing the word “love.” “God is love,” “God loves,” “God is loving.” “God loves you.”

And it did indeed feel like God was wrapping me in this “great banner of His love.”  This direct association, that I picked up on at an early age suggested to m, that if I were to become interested in following God, that I, too, might just want to lead a life full of love and loving others. It was so compelling.  And at this young age, it seemed easy enough to do—love seemed like something God gave “freely,” “without an agenda,” “for everyone”—a love that made me feel warm and special (an experience of love).

And this stayed true, until I turned, like… 5. And the unfolding of just how quickly the words “God” and “Love” could become intertwined with structures and systems started to occur in family, organizations and churches—it augmented my original association of “God” and “love,” to something much more complex.     

It seemed to me that that  “His banner over me” as love, became graffiti’d with extra words – extra bullet points of what “love and God” could mean.

At different points along my faith journeyI became entrapped in some of these meanings—but also at points, I ushered the meaning out as gospel:

Love meant I should be passive.

Love meant I should take on a certain set of political and social views.

Love meant following very specific religious beliefs.

Love was meant to be wielded as a weapon.

Love meant truth at the cost of exclusion.

And I learned how quickly words can take on all our human flaws and frailties!

And how quickly the free-floating banner around us as “love” comes crashing down to become a wall—a barrier between just who Jesus calls us to love: our neighbors, ourselves, and even God.

This is why I’m incredibly excited about this series.  Because I’m more and more convinced that we, indeed, are helped by practice and training in this radical love that Jesus professes as the most central meaning and source of life:  to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our being, with all our strength, and with all our mind, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.

It is not a platitude to hide behind, but our most powerful way to live.

Training in this studio of love may just help us resurrect, His banner over us as Love.

We love stories

I have this deep inkling that many of us really like stories. Is that true? Do some of you like stories?  I think we do. We love to tell stories. We love to hear stories. We love to watch stories (insta-stories on Instagram).  For years now this has been the marketing strategy of most advertising firms—put more stories out there for people to connect with a product.  We at Reservoir are not excluded from this with our own “stories” section of our website! (it’s really good you should check it out). We really love stories, and we love to create stories too!

I always thought I was really bad at telling stories. When my kids were little this was often part of our “play” routine or “bedtime” routine. There was always a “tell me a story” request.  I was terribly uncreative in this vein. Most often the bedtime stories I would create were full of the things little kids nightmares are made of: “One day as baby skunk was leaving the house to meet her friend at the playground, Mommy skunk said ‘make sure you go the route by Mrs. Badger’s house so you can water her flowers’ and baby skunk disobeyed and went the short route over the bridge to the playground.”

And then baby skunk got “eaten by a troll”.

The end.

Sweet dreams. Nighty-night.

I wasn’t ever creative enough to deviate from the theme “always listen to your mother,” but I was generous in letting my kids choose their own animal character!

So, it’s actually true, I’m not great at creating bedtime stories.  

But I’m actually creating stories all the time—in my head and subconscious—of the world and people around me.

Last week Steve spoke on Jesus’ radical call to all of us to “Love our neighbor as ourself.” We started with love of neighbor because it stretches us, it pulls us outside of ourselves, and helps us think about what love really is and isn’t.

And we’ll continue today with this love of neighbor and take this greatest commandment to the fullness of it’s design and message—to “love our neighbor”—yes those close to us and the ones we are already in relationship with —but to also love our neighbor who we regard as the stranger, the alien, the one that make us feel uncomfortable, the outsider, the misunderstood,  the outcast and the enemy.  

Actual Neighbors 

*We have neighbors. Physical neighbors, directly flanking us on both sides.

And we’ve definitely had our ups and downs with loving them (some more than others). I’ve spoken before of one neighbor whose small, wire fence I ran over two times, out of anger.

But I’m not going to talk about that neighbor today. We are cool (mostly).

But I want to talk about our neighbors on the other side of us.

These neighbors:  Do not like us and they are mean.
We’ve lived in next to them for 13 years now.

All of our conversations have been prickly, our interactions weird, awkward and laced with assumptions.  

Every ball that has ever gone over our fence into their yard, has never been returned.

They never shovel their piece of the sidewalk.

And so many more examples… in those 13 years.

And I realized I’ve been telling a pretty epic, dynamic story of these neighbors, for a long time.  And I realized this more recently when it culminated in a conversation we had with this neighbor.

Some pieces of information you should know.  We have one chicken. Her name is “Tiny.” She had two sisters originally—but one got eaten by a raccoon and the other met her demise by an errant, but forceful soccer ball kick in the backyard.

This conversation with the neighbor centered around our chicken. Our neighbor believes that all the coyotes in the town of Milton—ALL the coyotes from the BLUE HILLS—migrate to our street because of this one chicken.

WE are the coyote-whispers… because of our chicken “snack”.

And I was just like—these people are crazy. Like actually nuts. And exhausting.
Brian McLaren says that the greatest way to set someone up as your enemy, is to tell their story starting with point #2.  My starting point with this story of my neighbor has always been, (it’s how I told their story to you just now), that “THEY DON’T LIKE US AND THEY ARE MEAN”.

So in the 13 years that we’ve been neighbors, that has been the starting point of my narrative with them, and it has had its consequences, its real effects. We have never invited them into our house, not even in our backyard.

We have all the nice neighbors over that we love on our street—that are easy to relate to  and who we’ve created warm, peaceful narratives of—over to our house.

But I’m clearly entering into their story not at point #1 and that allows me to write/draw conclusions about who these people are.

And then that allows me to set up what “love” looks like for them.

Love looks like I avoid these people.  

And that I keep telling this story of them.

Perpetuate the story of meanness.  Create more distance. And if someone asks, I will tell them that our neighbors are “mean and they don’t like us.” I will do the work of setting up division and dehumanizing our neighbors to others(and to our kids).

And this can feel small scale.

But this seems to be the birthplace of all prejudice, misunderstanding: to create stories, tell stories and listen to stories where the narrative begins at point #2.

And it often starts in these tinier, personal/interpersonal ways—tiny story-tellings. But soon it can become generations of story-telling, communicating a particular narrative,  about a person or groups of people. And that sets up in our institutions and systems as agenda’d ways …….not to “Love”……, but to “other” our neighbors. To put parameters around who our neighbor is… and we start to use words like “safe” and “wise” and “prudent”. …  right? How much can I safely “love my neighbor”? What’s the wise way to love here? And we reduce love down into something that is very far from what Jesus offers us in loving our neighbor. We reduce love to an agenda.

You see in the center of every narrative we create that succeeds in “othering” our neighbor are the seeds of hate. Hate and love both occupy our hearts.  Who knows—their seeds might lie right next to each other in our hearts. Both of them seem to aim to grow into similar ways, with the hopes of multiplying, decentering and taking priority over anything else!

The difference though, is that:

Love isn’t an agenda. Hate is.

When we start putting forth agendas around “Loving our neighbor”—

We are no longer speaking in terms of love; we have intermixed the word “Love” with our agenda. An agenda may be framed in words of “Love,” But really it’s often, the “love” of our rightness—to love the position of rightness that makes us feel superior to someone else, to love our “security,” our “certainty” and “comfort”—but clearly lets no actual effect of love be felt. And isn’t this the test of love—not the stated intention, but the actual effect of that love in action?

With Jesus there’s no agenda in love.  Love is what matters, period. The radical love of Jesus offers us a more durable force, a soul-force that is not as fragile as hate. Radical love means that neither “beliefs nor words, neither taboos, systems, structures nor the labels that enshrined them mattered most.  Love decentered everything else;  love relativized everything else; love takes priority over everything else – everything” (McLaren p 42).

Go and love your neighbor.

So simple, yet so challenging. It’s like doing that exercise—the plank. It seems like laying on your elbows is something I could do for like 15 minutes, but after 20 seconds, my entire body is shaking. This too, is the feeling I have when I try to love to the extent that Jesus calls us to love our neighbor.

But Jesus says, “oh no,  you need to do this to strengthen your core of love!” And this is it, this is your training plan!

I want my coyote-conspiracy theorist neighbor to not fit into the ‘love your neighbor’ command. I want to disqualify the neighbor, to perpetuate the story: “too weird, too scary, unhinged.”  But really, that’s all my self-preserving agenda at work.

And my agenda is nestled in hate. It really is.

Mercifully Jesus is really great at helping us correct narratives that we’ve created, and agendas that we’ve run wild with. 

And here in the Gospel of Luke, the scripture that you find on your program, he spells out a pretty detailed training plan for us:

How do we correct our bad story-telling?  “Love our enemies”.

Luke 6:27-36

27 “But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, 28 bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you. 29 If someone slaps you on one cheek, turn to them the other also. If someone takes your coat, do not withhold your shirt from them. 30 Give to everyone who asks you, and if anyone takes what belongs to you, do not demand it back. 31 Do to others as you would have them do to you.

32 “If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. 33 And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that. 34 And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 35 But love your enemies, do good to them, and lend to them without expecting to get anything back. Then your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High, because he is kind to the ungrateful and wicked. 36 Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

37 “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.

40 The student is not above the teacher.  But all students will, once they are fully trained, be on a par with their teacher”.

These are words of Jesus’ Sermon on the Plain, (compared to Matthew’s account: The Sermon on the Mount).  Jesus is standing on level ground with his newly chosen disciples, and he is writing a new story here—a different narrative than the one that they’ve known!  He’s dismantling and “decentering old things – the religious rules, temples, sacrifice, hierarchies and the like and recentering the tradition on love..” (p. 46).  And tipping it all by saying that anyone who is willing to step into this new training studio of love can become a teacher of it as well! (v. 40): “But all students will, once they are fully trained, be on a par with their teacher.”

It’s a challenging picture of love and we can quickly say, “Oh this is how we love our enemy.” It’s a distinct teaching on this specific way to love.  But I think Jesus could be making the point that this is actually the training guide for how we love, period. That the people we already love or want to love—we can only love them as fully as we can love our enemy. And how we lead a life of love, and it hinges on our capacity to love our enemy.

We are going to need training to “up” that capacity.

I’ve talked before on these verses of “turn the other cheek, give your coat and walk the extra mile” as a passage that is powerful in its context and for us today of non-violent resistance—to uphold human dignity and to strive for justice—not a picture of passivity/doormat quality.

But today—I’d love to draw out two elements that surround these verses, that I think are essential and significant spiritual exercises that we need in becoming teachers of love-in-action that Jesus says we can be. These are: Proximity and Forgiveness.

I heard a story a couple of years back about a white nationalist,  Derek Black and an orthodox Jew, Matthew Stevenson. Maybe you are familiar with this story too… but I think it highlights these elements of proximity and a heart with a generous posture of loving.

Derek Black & Matthew Stevenson

Derek Black was the chosen heir to the white nationalist movement: the son of Don Black, founder of the massive hate site, Stormfront.org and godson to former KKK Grand Wizard David Duke—perhaps the most known white supremacist and racist. Derek himself was the creator of a website for “proud white children” and the founder of a 24-hour radio network for white nationalists.

His ancestry dictated his beliefs.  He embraced the stories he was told, and these narratives became the platform by which he saw and interacted with the world (and how he framed “love”), and how he ran for a political sea—a local committee seat in Florida at the age of 19, running on the narratives that at least from my vantage start far beyond point #1. He ran on the belief that black people were more likely to commit crimes and had lower IQs than whites, that Jews controlled media and finance, that immigration and affirmative action were leading the country toward a “white genocide,” where white people in America are victims, not perpetrators, of racism.  He won the seat, but declined it and went to college in Florida.

Here, it wasn’t long before his ideology was outed—and as a result the campus exploded in outrage with active moves to get him expelled.

The short of this story is that a fellow student, Matthew Stevenson, who is an Orthodox Jew, invited Derek to his weekly, Friday evening Shabbat dinners, which Derek agreed to and attended for 2 years.

After 2 years of these dinners and conversation, Derek wrote to the Southern Poverty Law Center, disavowing his beliefs and renouncing his white nationalist ties.

This is quite a story! It’s a redemption story, a forgiveness story, a brave story—it’s a story of love. And I think we might love “love stories” the most. But we can tend to simplify love stories.

And I can imagine that an easy takeaway from this story is that everything will be hunky-dory if we just have more meals with people. Differences and evil will disappear, and we can move beautifully forward. And I think there’s some truth in this! But there’s more.

Forgiveness

This too, is often how forgiveness is regarded: “I’ll forgive you and then we can just move on and forget”—that’s what Christians do.

Forgiveness, though, is a love story nestled in this great banner of  love. It’s much more powerful than that—not just a sentimental outpouring.

I can imagine that forgiveness was on the table at these Shabbat dinners. I can imagine that Matthew was able to forgive Derek, to recognize that the evil represented in this enemy-neighbor, sitting across from him, might not be his whole narrative. Matthew Stevenson said himself “I had to come to the table believing that the image of the creator might be somewhere inside of Derek.” And he was willing to see if there was a different starting point of Derek’s narrative, and willing to suspend his own agenda.

I think neither Derek or Matthew would say that this story was about forgetting, silencing or ignoring any evil – because of forgiveness.  

Forgiveness is not reconciliation.

Forgiveness is not an invitation to discard our healthy boundaries. (especially when we are speaking on terms of feeling safe).  

But:

Forgiveness is the way forward in the studio of love.

Forgiveness is movement, in our hearts and relationships.

Forgiveness allows more space in our hearts for Jesus’ way of love to take up residence.

Forgiveness allows us to create and build new stories.

Forgiveness releases hateful agendas.

Forgiveness puts the power in the hands of the victim (Swan & Wilson, Solus Jesus). And is the best form of “self-interest, because it allows you freedom to no longer be tied to the one who’s done you harm” (Desmond Tutu).

Forgiveness, in the ways that Jesus shows us in these verses, replaces the in-kind system that we want to enact when we are hurt—an “eye for an eye,” “tooth for tooth,” “Slap on the cheek, for a slap on the cheek”—with mercy, compassion and kindness, even if the offender, as was true of Derek, asserts their innocence.

“Forgiveness  does not mean ignoring what has been done or putting a false label on an evil act.  It means, rather, that the evil no longer remains as a barrier to the relationship.”  Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. says, “each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality, tragically divided against ourselves. Where there is some good in the worst of us and some evil in the best of us”(pg. 45 – Strength to Love). Forgiveness allows us to entertain this—that our enemy might not be completely evil—and that we might not be completely holy.

And forgiveness doesn’t mean that we stop pursuing justice. Derek Black says that he often gets worried that his story will be told as a piece of evidence that the only way to change people’s minds is to have friendly conversations, but he says it’s essential to speak up loudly and to pursue that which you seek justice for.

Forgiveness is not justice.

*Disclaimer on forgiveness:
If you’ve been abused—please know that I’m not purporting that forgiveness is a prerequisite for healing. The ways that you might feel resentment or anger or even loathing for the ones who brought harm to you is normal – and is not a reflection of whether you have adequately “dealt” the abuse.

And all of this takes training—takes practice! Because it goes against the natural instinct to pay back evil with evil.

(Studies show us what our brains look like on revenge: it hits the same spot that a brain who’s thirsty or hungry does when that craving is met. And we need training to help rewire this.)

But Proximity helps in the re-wiring.
The examples Jesus uses in this Sermon on the Plain—to love your enemy— require us to be close enough to feel the hurt/pain and hate (The sting on our cheeks) dealt from our enemy, and close enough for us to demonstrate love (for them to see it and witness it, but also to feel it).  And proximity is so important—Jesus says, “double down on your efforts in that regard” (Give your other cheek, give your shirt too, walk the extra mile). To be a teacher of love, you must be close to your students.

Derek Black was asked what moment transformed him. What made him renounce this hateful ideology? And he said it wasn’t a moment, “ it was 2-3 years of little events,” 2-3 years of intentional, proximal dinners with others,2-3 years where Matthew suspended hate, judgment and condemnation, 2-3 years of potent doses of radical love that probed and dismantled and shook Derek’s heart.  

And he says what shook his heart the most was that he received the pictures of mercy, kindness and love from the one that was ostensibly victimized by his ideology. Closeness matters. And loving those who do not know love matters.

Matthew Stevenson

We are told in scripture that without love, we’re nothing—just a bunch of annoying noise, clanging cymbals—that we can have mountain-moving faith and the strongest of creed affirming doctrines, but without love it has no meaning or value. And the same is true of what Jesus says here, too—If you love where love is already present.  If you do good where good is already present –  what credit is that to you? Beyond upholding your self-preserving agenda of comfort, and certainty? It seems, at least in the story of Derek and Matthew, that it would have come at a cost: a cost of transformation and healing, and growth—spiritual growth—if we don’t come close to our enemies, to truly love them.

We can’t call ourselves teachers of love if we are pouring our love out to students who have already themselves been trained. We need to get proximal with those who have not yet been introduced to the subject!  This is only where love is truly alive.

Derek says “I don’t think I anticipated what impact not being around a bunch of white nationalists would have had.” The fact that this orthodox Jew would go into the realms of where palpable hate is only present—where there was a void of love—is actually the classroom that we as teachers should seek.

Jesus knew that he could take the “in-kind” way of reparation that was written in the Jewish system out of the Law,  but it didn’t mean that it would be rooted out of the culture unless there were close, human interactions that demonstrated this new commandment of love. This is why we need to get proximal, to love up close, to root hate/prejudice/racism out of our culture.

In the Greek language, this radical love of God is expressed in the word agape,  which is understood as “understanding and creative, redemptive goodwill for all people.  An overflowing love that seeks nothing in return.  It is the love of God operating in the human heart.” (p. 46 Strength to Love).

I Facebook messaged Matthew Stevenson to ask him a few questions, like “what’s the take away here?”  

I didn’t hear from him.

But I bet he would say it was this: “That the love of God operating in the human heart” is a force like no other; That at these Shabbat Dinners this is what was witnessed as the only force that is capable of transforming an enemy into a friend. It is the only force that anchors us back to the truest of narratives, that “His banner over us is love!”And this is a Double Victory: “Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” Witness transformation, and we too will be transformed. A double victory indeed.

Training:

Luke 6:40: “All students will, once they are fully trained, be on par with their teacher”. And as we are trained in the way of love my friends – we can witness the power of it’s reach, unleashed across religious, political, ideological and cultural lines.

“We can see how Gandhi in many ways popularized this radical love of Jesus, with nonviolent resistance, which is later picked up by Martin Luther King, Jr., and others, and then spreads to Muslim liberation theology through leaders like Farid Esack” (McLaren, Spiritual Migration)—and is also embraced by neighbors like Matthew Stevenson and, maybe somewhere in that story line, me and you.

This love spreads to a Hindu, then to a Christian, then to a Muslim.  This seems to be the beauty of not reducing Jesus down into a theological formula, but taking on his meaning and source of life as radical love.

This does not deny or compromise the meaning of Jesus, but it extends and grows and moves it forward,  fulfilling the potential of all that this “law of love” can provide.

Training

I’m in training, my friends. Actually, I’m just at the start of drawing up my training program to reorient my heart and mind.

I’m trying as a starting point to observe more of my neighbor—not like creepily, with binoculars, but to pause and take notice with love.

It widens the narrative, and allows me to see them as a human being with human dignity. And this is a great starting point that might just suggest that the neighbor in front of me bears no resemblance to the way I have portrayed them in my script.  

So how many reps/how many sets/how much time do we put into this training?  
All. the. sets. All. the. reps. All. the. time.

Conclusion

The training in this studio of love is intense and yet grows in us this brawny muscle of  love, this soul-force that gets us back to the original narrative of God and Love. “God is love” without limitation or discrimination. So may His “banner over you as love” be less a flag that you have to wave to declare this as true, but rather a way of life that demonstrates that love, and makes it visible to all of your neighbors.

May it be so.

A Tip Whole-life Flourishing

Meditate this week on Jesus’ phrase to you, “My banner over you is love”.  As you go about your days, pay attention to the “neighbors” you normally would avoid or regard as your enemy.  How does this banner of Jesus’ love affect your soul, your heart, your actions?

Spiritual Practice of the Week

Practice the Welcoming Prayer

  • Identify a hurt or an offense in your life.  
  • Name any feelings, emotions, thoughts, sensations and commentaries in your body.
  • Welcome God in all of these, by saying, “Welcome.” This could be anger, grief, sadness, etc.
  • Let go.  Hand over all the pain – yours and the world’s – over to God. Ask God for grace, compassion, forgiveness, or a word that resonates for the pain.

Resources:  Solus Jesus: A Theology of Resistance, by Emily Swan and Ken Wilson

Strength to Love,  Martin Luther King Jr.

Balm for the Soul: Your Spiritual Practices

Last week we started this mini- four-week series, called Your Faith Journey at Reservoir, which I’m really excited about!  Because Pastor Steve and I get to offer some insights—some things about Reservoir—we cherish and think you might too!  And whether you feel new, or stuck, disinterested, or like a wise old traveler along this faith journey, we think these thoughts will be helpful in the expanse in all of your life—far beyond even this community at Reservoir.

The hope is to highlight today how Reservoir can provide options for you to experience our good God that is at the center of all of our lives, and put on display a little bit how you are not only welcomed by Jesus, but actively invited again and again into a life that He hopes for you—a life that would feel abundant, flourishing and whole, and totally do-able.

[Community moment here]

Today we’ll talk a bit about what these good invitations from God look like, and how finding ways to intentionally practice opening these invitations—to experience, trust and know the love of God as an anchor deep within ourselves—can be very impactful.  I’m going to talk about “spiritual practices”—these many, many personal pathways that I feel like God outlays for us in our lives—and how so many have been built in to the deep well of Christian traditions—the Bible, prayer, fasting—and  also how so many of these practices can be found in the non-traditional pathways that are present in our lives at every turn—all of them holding the distinct promise that you will experience God’s love as you become more aware and bold to accept these invitations.


“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases;

   his mercies never come to an end;

23they are new every morning;

   great is your faithfulness.

God your mercies are new every morning”.

My Story:

This phrase, this language of “spiritual practice” seemed to greet me  long before I could utter my own language with much clarity.  

And I realized this, as I’ve mentioned before, through a year-long transformational listening class that we did as a staff facilitated by a spiritual director.  As part of that class every person was to form and share their spiritual autobiography.

This is a spiritual practice of looking at the story of God’s interaction in your life—It’s your own spiritual story line.

I succeeded at punting my time of sharing for the full 9 months of the class.

I like to use the excuse that I’m an “internal processor”, but 9 months is a bit of a stretch to say, “I’m still processing”, so the greater part honestly is sheer procrastination, which is also a really great skill of mine.

But each time that we would meet—listening to others share their own spiritual autobiographies—I realized HOW HARD it was to look back and delineate what in my life was a “spiritual moment/where God was interacting”, and which of them weren’t. SO MUCH as I look back over my life now feels like God was always interacting in some capacity.

So as a result, as I listened to people share, I would be simultaneously writing my own spiritual autobiography in my mind. And each time it was very different, because so many different memories would pop up, along my life spectrum, as being infused with God.

However, one memory that didn’t shift in each iteration of my spiritual story line was this memory, again, long before I had robust vocabulary, and certainly long before any spiritual language—and it was this memory of swinging on a swing in my front yard.

And it stands out as oddly not just a singular memory, but kind of the sense that this was a repeated moment in my childhood—that I did this a lot: a stockpile of similar memories, all in that one picture.

We were poor enough that I didn’t have a functioning swing set, but innovative enough that my grandfather had built this simple post-and-beam frame with a rope hanging down and a wooden seat with notches on the end.  

My memory is likely around 3-4 yrs of age—swinging freely and blissfully and alone on this swing—singing the refrain of a well known childhood, actually pretty church-y song: “Jesus loves me – this I know”.

And while there are more words to that song, I would only sing this refrain over and over again: ”Jesus loves me – this I know…”  ”Jesus loves me – this I know…” ”Jesus loves me – this I know…”

As I look back over my life now, this could have been my first spiritual practice— swinging and singing. But I realized that it has become more than that—I realized that it is the unmovable anchor and root of any spiritual practice that I have engaged with over my whole life.  That these pathways—these spiritual practices—however varied they might be for each of us, will lead us into this very same refrain: “Jesus loves me this I know”.

And this is the compelling act of a spiritual practice:  To discover afresh again and again—as an anchor in our day—in our busy rhythms the piercing love of God for us – in the midst.

This taste of Jesus’ love for me is what has afforded me the most healthy spiritual growth in my life, and has allowed me to incorporate spiritual practices into my days—not as a duty or performance or striving for spiritual greatness, but as a deep soul elixir that softens my posture to one of more humility, perspective and grace.  

And this is super helpful because my spiritual journey is a quest—a hard fought quest—where actually not all of it has felt like swinging blissfully on a swing. Because we all live here on earth, in this nation, in the midst of all the realities of life—the real tugs, the real people that hate, the real sicknesses that rob life, the real disappointments. We need practice!  It absolutely takes practice to keep Jesus’ love in sight given our landscapes. And we need our great teacher, Jesus, to help us do this!

I read recently in a book by friends Ken Wilson & Emily Swann – “that all of us are theologians to the extent that we seek to be students of God”.

And so today I invite you all to practice being students of God—to consider yourselves both life-long learners (with humilty) in the great subject matter of “love”, “and grace” and “trust”, and also to consider yourselves great theologians—that through spiritual practices you will gain a knowing, a knowledge, that goes beyond understanding, that sets up deep in your soul—the greatest knowledge that there might be, that you are an expert in knowing that you are without fail deeply loved by God.

And may the spiritual  practices that we explore today, that are  innovative, alternative and also traditional, be ones that transform you and keep you close to this Jesus that you practice to know.

Our hearts, it seems, need the balm that spiritual practices can offer us—to soothe, to heal, to keep our hearts from shattering into a million pieces, and also to be able to function in the way our hearts were made to be—to pump empathy and compassion and gentleness into the spaces  and people around us.

That’s a lot, by the way.  Can a spiritual practices actually aid in all of that? It seems slightly overwhelming. And it makes me stiffen a little bit internally.

But spiritual practices in all their glory – actually do make way for God to do all those things! And this allows me to relax a little bit by bringing some perspective into my life that helps me see a broader scope of life against my very human tendency to narrow the scope of life when I’m fumbling and feeling overwhelmed.

I’ve seen this perspective-shift play out in my marriage. Scott and I have been married for 17 years, and our conflicts are often about the most narrow/tiny aspects of our lives. Where the landscape though feels ripe for perspective-losing. One long-standing conflict is around how we park our cars in the drive-way: We have small, narrow driveway. I park head-in first, and then Scott will park behind me because he leaves first in the morning. Often, often, often – I do not pull my car all the way into the driveway, which means he can’t pull in behind me (and in our town you can’t park your car on the street overnight).

And this whole scenario is entirely frustrating to Scott, mostly because he sees life as this great opportunity for all of us to make logical choices… and the logical option as he sees it – is that I would just pull my car all the way into the driveway every single time I come home.

For me, it’s an entirely logical and sensible and smart choice, and actually the only clear way-to-pull-my-car-into-the-driveway choice.  Because I pull my car in so that my car door lines up perfectly with the tiny walkway that cuts across our lawn, which is the most efficient route to our front door. Which makes a ton of logical sense because I am often carrying a crap-ton of stuff:  groceries, a work bag or two, a swim bag, a kids backpack. It used to be that I would be carrying a kid or two, a car seat. And so the quickest route to the door ensured that my body would endure the least amount of pain and load.

Over the years, you might be able to see how we’ve stayed in a fairly contentious – pattern around this!

And our different contexts and terms by which we define “logical” set us up for no common intersectionality and no ability to see or hear one another fully.   This built-up/fraught energy  is often the energy that Scott will walk into the house with on any given evening when I’ve chosen/forgotten to not move the car in.  He’s immediately frustrated, feels forgotten, and that his values for logical-ness are overlooked.

The core of this on-going disagreement is, yes, not seeing eye to eye, yes, defining “logical” on very different terms, but also losing perspective/sight of each other’s hearts—that they were made and designed to pump with empathy, compassion and gentleness, which might be the impasse of every dispute that we witness across our familial and national lines.

Very quickly, when I’ve lost sight of Scott’s heart I can take his words like an arrow,  and no longer are we talking about the driveway, but talking about my worth as a human being:  I’m stupid, that the roles that I play and duties I do are of less value, that you don’t care about my aching body, that he doesn’t actually care about me and my heart.  

And likewise, I can stand there and appear to be listening to his reasons for why this aggravates him, but be internally rolling my eyes, and very quickly in the midst of it detach from reality,  lose perspective and see Scott as my rival and maybe to imagine him as a paper version of himself – that I get to take and crumple into a tiny ball and chuck across the room.  For instance.

How we live in our hearts is our real and deepest truth.  Spiritual practices help us get to our hearts and to practice vulnerability and intimacy with Jesus, so that we can do and extend the same with others.

FRED ROGERS

As so I began thinking—who have I encountered that can offer a different picture than this?  Who maybe is calm and level-headed and in touch with reality? And I thought of someone who perhaps many of us have encountered, who shows us such a great picture of the impact of  spiritual practice in their life.

So I’d love to show you a clip of “Fred Rogers Documentary”, who was indeed a priest of our times.

 

 

“Everything that Fred Rogers did was a prelude to – or an outcome of – spiritual practice”.

–The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers by Amy Hollingsworth

Viewing Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood was a spiritual practice in and of itself for so many. His consistent, kind presence, the neighborhood that he created, provided a safe familiarity where viewers could feel close to something good, and that that something good would always be there when they turned on their TV each day.

And all of this—his quirky, hypnotic, very slow speaking-cadence, the bare-bones production set, the inauspicious approach to child entertainment—was cultivated out of Fred Rogers’s own spiritual life .

SPIRITUAL PRACTICES HELP US HAVE PERSPECTIVE, HUMILITY and GRACE:

Excerpts below taken from, “The Simple Faith of Mister Rogers” by Amy Hollingsworth

Fred Rogers’ real life included a sense of ceremony.  His daily practices were deeply ingrained into his rhythm of life—he woke at 5am to slow down, take time and appreciate silence—to engage in prayer.

Each morning he prayed for his family, his friends by name, and to remember those that had passed on.

His prayers wouldn’t end there – but continued into his 7:30am daily swim, where before diving into the pool, he would sing out loud “Jubilate Deo” (you-bee-latte    day-0) (a song Henri Nouwen had taught him from the Taize (TAY – ZAY) community in France. “Jubilate Deo, jubilate Deo, alleluia (“rejoice in the lord, rejoice in the lord – allelulia”).    

As he walked into his workday he would pray,  “Dear God, let some word that is heard today, be Yours”, and not just the spoken words that would be televised, but the numerous decisions that he had to make daily.  This is his biggest concern, that someone would encounter God via his words. Perspective! All others concerns paled in comparison!

I watched countless footage of Mr. Rogers these past couple of days—I watched, I think every commencement speech he’s ever given and also his “Lifetime Emmy Award” speech, and in those videos he would invite entire graduating classes—like BU—and all of the celebrities at the Emmy’s to engage in a spiritual practice as well – he would pose a question, that got them thinking of their own life  – the people in it – give them space and silence to reflect and give thanks – and just like that he gave people the gift of perspective—the gift to relax for a moment and feel a sense of connection beyond themselves—to feel and encounter the warmth of love as they knew it: The very heart of spiritual practice.

Indeed his life of spiritual practice seemed to cultivate a flow of love from his internal space to the external world and usher in the perspective that the “greatest thing you can do is to help somebody know that they are loved and capable of loving”.  These habitual practices allowed him an internal anchoring in his days –  that allowed him to essentially pour out and lay down his life for so many.

John, in his first epistle invites us all to consider this very same lifestyle – with his words (as on your program):

I John 3: 16 – 18 (NRSV)
We know love by this, that Jesus laid down his life for us — and we ought to lay down our lives for one another. How does God’s love abide in anyone who has the world’s goods and sees a brother or sister in need and yet refuses help? Little children, let us love, not in word or speech, but in truth and action.

 

Lay down your life for another?
What are the world’s goods?
What’s truth versus word or speech?

There’s a lot in there!

 

Let me see if I can’t flush this out a bit as I follow up on the story of me and Scott and the parking situation.

A little while ago before I’d fall asleep at night, I started a spiritual practice—not just because of this parking stuff, but maybe an internal tenor of distance that I was  realizing in my heart about our marriage. Each night I started putting my hand on Scott’s shoulder as he slept and saying a short prayer, “God thank you for this person, and thank you for my love for him and your  love for him and the love that resides within him”.

It was a spiritual practice, because it was not the case that every night at the end of a long day I would bound to bed, overwhelmed with radiant, sparkly love for this guy – ehm – it was a spiritual practice because it didn’t always feel natural.

It wasn’t a practice generated by  feelings—it was a practice of intention. I had to remind myself to do it as a habit, and it turns out that Scott was just the focal point of my practice but the practice was really essential for my soul. And how gracious I would find that Jesus is to give our souls just what we need. It proved to be a re-centering.  A prayer that took me back to my own knowing of Jesus and me on the swing: “Jesus loves me this I know”.  A practice that reminded me I didn’t need to defend or fight for or throw up barbs around my value or my uniqueness or more forgetfulness or my mistakes, that Jesus loved me and could be trusted right in the midst. And a practice that helped me not forget grace.  Because without grace I would not experience any life-giving part of relationship in my marriage or elsewhere.

And this helped me live more out of a sense of life and freedom – rather than death. Out of this simple, spiritual practice we now talk across our household with this new language of what it looks like and feels like to be “FOR” each other: to remind each other again and again that we are on the same team.

This is a heroic heart change—and that is the power of a spiritual practice, that it can change and transform your heart at a cellular level. And if we are inclined to talk about spiritual growth – that’s where growth lies! Because the habit of going to God as your anchor each day re-centers you, draws you out of all the real tugs that can vie for your attention, and it ushers in a sensitivity, a generosity of heart that can’t be explained. It stretches and implores you to move with compassion and empathy – even in the midst of disagreements —to lead with love,

So much so that you would as John suggests, “lay down your life for each other”, 

So much so, that you would sacrifice your own very “logical” explanation of parking in the driveway the way you do”,

So much so, that you would sacrifice “having to be right”,

So much so that you would sacrifice your ANGER and frustration,

…and lay it down for a moment to see that Jesus too sings with and loves the person on the other side of your dispute.

And this is the mystical work of Jesus who transforms a way of living out of death into living whole-heartedly with abundance and flourishing.

And this is deep balm to our souls.

The world’s goods—as John speaks of in the verses we just read—I believe are practical resources we have that we should share, like food, clothing, shelter- practical help like Claire mentioned last week – of seeing someone on the side of the road……   and I also believe they are the unseen goods  – the Jesus’ goods that lay about in our world too…  the compassion, the empathy, the softness , the love – that are the gems – the treasures – embedded in the fabric of our world – because they are IN US.   THAT we are implored to share – to our brothers and sisters -as we unearth them through spiritual practices.

 

I absolutely ….still …only remember to pull into all of the driveway FULLY, about a ⅓ or so of the time…..

 

So perhaps spiritual practices aren’t  necessarily designed to make sure we get more things right in life … or that our behavior would become perfection…

 

BUT Maybe spiritual practices allow us to stand in the midst of all that we get wrong in life – the ways that we hurt each other sometimes – and  become as Fred Roger’s says, “the person that is so apparently in touch with truth, that you just want to continually be in their presence.”  

 

I want to be this person.  

and I want to be so in touch with truth… the truth of who I am – and the truth of God’s love – that it attracts people…..

I want Scott to WANT to be in my presence…

I want my kids to WANT to be in my presence…

I want my friends, and strangers and my enemies to WANT to be in my presence…. Because the presence of GOD is so apparent…..and so very, very good.

…

This truth that John advises us to love with – is worth a couple of seconds, I think… because the access to “Truth” is often framed in prescriptive ways – and can become de-personalized pretty quickly…

 

My childhood song, “Jesus loves me – this I know”—if I were to fill out the rest of that verse—prescribes a very distinct way to KNOW this love of Jesus, and that is through studying the Bible: “Jesus loves me, this I know – for the Bible tells me so”…

Now, let me also say this—absolutely this is correct. If you read the Bible you can read of the distinct love that God has for you without a doubt:

  • John 3:16 “For God so loved you – that He gave you His only son”…
  • John 13  “So now I am giving you a new commandment: Love each other.  Just as I have loved you, “
  • Zephaniah “The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.  He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love,”
  • 1 John 3:1 “How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God!”
  • Song of Songs 2:4 “His banner over me is love.”
  • Psalm 119:64  The earth is filled with your love, O Lord…”  

And my goodness, I have spent a great amount of time memorizing and studying and reading commentary of scripture as a spiritual practice, and it has been super meaningful and powerful and a way to encounter truth.

I spent 2 years praying the Psalms every morning—I’d pray through 5 at a time (it’s a great spiritual practice, give it a shot!) and it still even now gives me life.

And yet “Truth” can quickly become a way of saying “there’s really only one way to truth”. But if we, as my author friends Emily and Ken suggest, see truth as Jesus sees it—in personal terms, as a personal embodiment of Truth—truth is a “someone” rather than a “something”.

“And when we can see Truth as a someone – then the aim to encounter truth and the aim of all spiritual practices is involvement with a living, personal Jesus.   Truth coming to us in the form of a person, requires all our personal capacities to embrace:  our senses, minds, hearts and bodies. That means we can feel with Truth as much as we can think with Truth”. P. 74, Solus Jesus

And what a blessing it is to know that our spiritual practices can indeed lead to God in a multitude of ways, including Scripture.

This Fall I have taken on the spiritual practice of stopping and pulling over to capture in my heart the glory of God in these turning leaves.  This is huge for me—because I might be the only person on earth that doesn’t like New England Fall. I feel like the beauty of the leaves is only death in disguise. And I don’t like fake representations, so Fall is often a struggle….

But this Fall I’ve stopped on commutes and adored and let the glow of these radiant colors reflect on my face. And often I feel just simply a sense of peace and awe, an internal anchoring: Perspective and hope for my day. And also sometimes Scripture will come to mind, as I’m intentionally making that space with GOD, and it will be so piercingly on point for what I encounter or am feeling that day.

And so I’m thankful for the ways that a personal Jesus and these personal spiritual practices allow us to have space to be who we are, to make space for what are schedules are, and space for where we are with Him on our faith journeys.  That feels like the only way to get the nourishment/the right amount of balm for our souls.

God’s love is vast and deep and wide. His love stretches our hearts to this great capacity, and it compels us to try more ways and more spiritual practices that help us enter into all those dimensions of His love!

Following Jesus is our ongoing choice—to accept invitations, to consider that our lives take some practice and a lifestyle choice, to intentionally spend our time, money and energy toward these practices that will open your life to the abundance of goodness that God has for you”. But can I encourage you today to see that our spiritual practices are actually crucial and essential and always timely, that it is in some ways urgent for the heartbeat and health of our world that we practice sitting in love, being love and extending love.

Congressman, John Lewis asked a “what if” question as a tool for social alchemy: what if the beloved community were already a reality, the true reality, and we simply have to embody it until everyone else can see it?

What if we could lay down our lives for those near us – what if we could harness the love that is within us – and find that in the trees, in the touch , in the scripture and in the words of a friend or stranger –  world around us?

What if spiritual practices set us up well to help the struggle of humankind?

John Lewis says – we need to do this – and it WILL Take practice – that it’s not something that is natural.. He said we have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence.

Because we are wired to give up  on one another, says John Lewis.

So he says, in the spiritual sense, in the moral sense, we have to be able to practice saying “that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine.  This is why we practice – to see and to say…. “Yes,, you too – are made of love”.

Chapter 4: 19

19 We love because he first loved us.

The simple statement that John makes at the end of the scripture on your program – is one that is not simple at all , because it is stocked high with intentionality, habit and practice – to trust that indeed he does love us… .

Mr. Rogers would say to his TV viewers over and over again – without fail, every episode –  “you are special”, “I am so proud of you”, “I like you just the way you are…. It’s you, yourself, it’s you – I like.”  

We gain in our practices of being with God….  a deep belief that “Jesus loves me – this I know…”, not only that he LOVES me, but that he “likes me, just the way I am”.. That he finds me special, that God is proud of me – and that I have value…    These things I know – .. because I have experienced and practiced trusting the truth and the love of Jesus…

Here at Reservoir we  hope to set the stage for you to take DELIGHT in the abundant life – that you craft with Jesus .   We will give you some opportunities to TRY and engage with that –  but most of all we hope to clear away any impediments to receiving, allowing, trusting and participating in that foundational love.

This week though take some time to reflect – to orient toward God.  Start with:

Whole life reflection prompt:

Take time this week to reflect on the words, “grace”, “trust” and “love”.  As you consider your relationship with Jesus, how do these words resonate? How have you experienced these words with Jesus?  How have you not? When you engage with others, which of these words are easier for you to embody? As you try the below spiritual practice, try each of these words as you sit in the presence of God.

Spiritual Practice:

Light a candle to represent the presence of God’s Holy Spirit. Sit in silence for a few minutes. As best you can, release any thoughts and distractions. Take several deep breaths in and out. Slowly breathe in, meditating on this belief from God to you, “I love you”.  Slowly breathe out, meditating on the phrase “..and I love you”, as a belief from yourself to God – or yourself to others. Sit in silence for several minutes.

Try 2 minutes to start.

“Love is at the root of everything – all learning, all relationships – Consider yourself to be invited to be God’s favorite student and favorite expert as you discover that love together”.

 

Be Kind More Than Nice

I was not always a very good grandson. But then again, not every one of my grandparents were always very good grandparents either.

Here’s how my family tells the story.

One set of my grandparents lived close by to us, and they were like second parents to us. We saw them every week, sometimes several times a week. We slept over their house, raided their refrigerator, spent pretty much every holiday together, and had nothing but kind words for one another.

But there were another set of grandparents that lived further away and that we didn’t see as often. And so the connection of course wasn’t as warm and friendly. And one time, when no one was listening, that grandmother said to me, “Oh shut up, Steven”. And I was so angry. That didn’t seem like a very grandmotherly thing to say. So I held a grudge against this grandma for years. Didn’t want to see her, didn’t want to talk to her.

The problem was, I was the one that looked bad holding this grudge, because this grandma was really nice. She had all the manners. Cooked us big Sunday dinners when we’d visit her. Asked us questions about our lives. Started small talk. Gave us presents. See this was my Southern grandma, from Western South Carolina. So ‘nice’ was all that she knew.

But her niceness didn’t make me feel seen or wanted, didn’t make space for me, certainly didn’t make me want to give up my grudge. Because this kind of niceness seemed perfunctory, obligatory, even a kind of test, like she was waiting to see if I’d be as nice back to her.

Which, clearly, I wasn’t.

This was nice, but it wasn’t kind.

We’re in the second week of a five-week series called The Jesus Model for Everyday Interactions. It’s inspired by a book our church’s old friend Carl Medearis wrote about this topic. And in the second section of the book, Carl says, “So you want to change the world? Try being kind.” He quotes this legendary military man who said that if you want to change the world, you should start by making your bed. Do the little stuff right, and the big stuff will follow.

OK? Then Carl says, well, if you want to be like Jesus, start out by being nice.

And maybe that’s great advice, but I want to quibble a bit today with this interchanging of nice and kind, as if they are the same thing. I don’t think they are. Not at all.

And so today, I do want to encourage kindness. I want to see how a God who is deeply kind to us might also give us the joy of deeply kind lives as well. Kindness is God’s mode of being with us, because God is simply deeply kind. Kindness is also part of the call of Jesus to people who want to follow Jesus. And kindness is simply, but utterly, transformative.

But it is not the same thing as being nice. Not at all.  

When I was in high school, I had an English teacher named Ken Jones. I’ve talked about him before. He made a big impression on me in the way he handled tragedy while I was a student in high school. Both his children died during that era, and his resilience was nothing short of remarkable. We formed an unusually close teacher-student relationship, so I wrote an essay about him when I was applying to college, and the year I left home, we were pen pals for a while.

But what struck me first as his classroom student was that Mr. Jones was not especially nice, but he could be really, really kind. Sometimes, when we walked into class and sat down, Mr. Jones would just sit at his desk and stare us down for a few minutes. He didn’t always seem like he wanted to be there. He could be irritable and kind of depressive. Sometimes he pointed out rude or bad things kids had done somewhere else in the school, and he’d say, Oh, that was person wasn’t trying to bad, but bad people just do bad things, without even thinking about it. This was not nice.

And yet, this man could be quite kind.

We had journals in this class that we needed to write in — a certain number of pages a week, I think — writing about anything we wanted. And we’d turn these journals in every week or two, and he’d check them and give us credit. And at least with my journal, I realized he really read what I wrote. He thought about it. He wrote back to me, engaging my thoughts, taking my 15-year old self seriously, which wasn’t an experience I had had from other teachers. Or really from adults at all.

And that noticing of my thoughts, that valuing of my words communicated to me that I mattered, that I was interesting, that I was worth the attention of someone that seemed more important than me.

And that was kind.

Jesus had this quality about him too. Listen to this short interaction he has on a crowded road when he and his students were travelling together.

Mark 10:46-52 (NRSV)

46They came to Jericho. As he and his disciples and a large crowd were leaving Jericho, Bartimaeus son of Timaeus, a blind beggar, was sitting by the roadside. 47When he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to shout out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49Jesus stood still and said, “Call him here.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; get up, he is calling you.” 50So throwing off his cloak, he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51Then Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” The blind man said to him, “My teacher, let me see again.” 52Jesus said to him, “Go; your faith has made you well.” Immediately he regained his sight and followed him on the way.

 

There’s so much really interesting scholarship around this passage. The meaning of Bartimaeus’s name, the son of Timaeus. The significance of blindness and sight in Mark’s memoirs of Jesus and in some of the other good news accounts as well. The title, Son of David, that this man gives Jesus, and the significance of that being said while Jesus was on his way to Jerusalem, the city of David, where he would both be hailed as a king and executed, in the same week.

This is a really interesting encounter.

But I want to go back to its basics for a moment, the stuff we could march right by in search of deeper meaning.

First off, this is a crowded urban moment. Jesus has arrived in an unfamiliar city and is surrounded by strangers. But his reputation has preceded him and he’s greeted like a VIP. So there are a million reasons for Jesus to keep to himself.

There’s the fatigue of travel, the disorientation of being in a busy, unfamiliar place, the shyness and stress a person from a small town can feel in an urban crowd, and the fact that Jesus is busy and important and on his way somewhere else.

But the somewhere that Jesus is today is the city where the son of Timaeus lives, a man whose disability and his bad breaks in life have left him on the side of the street, begging. And what’s happening in this moment is what we usually do with people relegated to lower status or people whose voice is inconvenient or whose behavior is disruptive… this man’s voice is silenced. His person, his body, his needs are marginalized.

But Jesus centers him. He says: I want to see him. Jesus stops, he stands still, he calls him over, and he asks him, What do you want me to do for you?

It’s not necessarily the smoothest moment. “What do you want me to do?” is an arrestingly direct question. It might not be particularly nice, and so in this, Jesus is more like Mr. Jones than my grandmother. He may or may not be nice, but he is deeply kind – present physically and emotionally to the person in front of him, including the person who interrupts him, deeply interested in the voice and wants and needs of the person in front of him, and eager to help.

And then, in one of these Jesus moments, it happens, the guy can see. But when it happens, Jesus says to him, it wasn’t me, it was you. Your faith, your trust, did it.

I think that Jesus shows us exactly what God is like. Fully present to us, and deeply generous and kind. It’s not the picture of God that our culture or our tradition may have given us, but it’s Jesus and Jesus’ first followers insistence that Jesus shows us the best, the truest picture of God we will ever see.

The God who has time for interruptions. The God who centers the marginalized and hears voices that once were silenced. The God who has time with us, and looks at us and speaks to us kindly.

After all, even when God is seeking change in our lives, which isn’t nice, I suppose, to encourage someone to change, but it can be kind to want more for someone, or to want better for them. But the way God gets us there is kindness. God woos, rather than threatens, encourages, rather than ranting with raised voice. As the letter to Romans in the New Testament tells us, God’s kindness leads to repentance.

Jesus shows us what a kind God looks like.

Jesus also shows us what we can be like – people that mirror God’s kindness to ourselves and others.

So kindness isn’t just a favor to the world – although it is that. It’s not even just a reflection of the love of Jesus to the world – although it is that as well. It’s also us coming into our nature as children of God, made in God’s image. Becoming the kind people we were made to be and that world longs for.

It’s possible, of course, to be both nice and kind. Many of you will know my friend Cate Nelson. She lives in the neighborhood, more or less. She is co-directing our Soccer Nights program for the neighborhood in the last week of June. And she used to be on staff at Reservoir, doing that and all kinds of other things for her work, before she left Reservoir employment to pursue other career interests.

Anyway, when I think of someone who is both nice and kind, one of the first people I think of is Cate. She’s thoughtful, and attentive to the people she’s with, and friendly and good. And she’s especially all these things with children. So if you’ve ever seen Cate with kids, you’ve seen her looking them in the eye and enthusiastically asking them questions. You’ve seen her playing with them and having fun. Perhaps you’ve seen her dancing with them at our church retreat or up near the front at the end of service, in one of our Sundays like today, when our kids are worshipping with us here.

Where so many adults more or less ignore kids, Cate sees them. She doesn’t just say hi and wait for them to move on, but she centers her attention on them, responsive to their person and their voice. If you haven’t seen this before, or if you’d like to learn how to do this, you really need to sign up and join us as a volunteer at Soccer Nights this year. Go to soccernights.org/volunteer and be sure to choose our North Cambridge site, as our church provides some logistical support for a whole bunch of Soccer Nights programs now.

So it’s possible to be both nice and kind, of course. Jesus was nice and kind with kids, and it’s a mark of a follower of Jesus to learn to be both nice and kind with kids. Cate’s one of the people that shows us how.

But if you have to choose just one, nice or kind, pick kind every time. Because niceness is sometimes just politeness. Niceness could be all the appropriate manners of my grandma, with no time or generosity or attention or love under it. But kindness — to see someone, to be interrupted and to give your generous attention and presence and goodness to someone else, well, that kindness is transformative.

My friend Sarah Furste is a pastor at our sister church, The River, in Manhattan, and she was talking recently about the difference between kindness and niceness. And she said this. She said:

“Even though we often exchange the two, there’s a big difference between nice and kind. Niceness is rooted and lack and fear, and emerges from our deepest insecurities. Kindness is rooted in the abundance of love. Niceness ignores the truth of who we are. Kindness emerges from the compassionate essence of who we are.”

Niceness without kindness – social graces, being polite – can actually be a way of avoiding genuine connection with another person. It keeps interactions smooth and unremarkable, which is fine, but not if that’s all they are. That kind of niceness avoids conflict, avoids need, avoids really seeing or hearing or bringing our real selves to the table. That kind of niceness keeps people at bay, because we’re afraid we don’t have enough time or energy. That kind of niceness keeps ourselves closed off, because we’re insecure or disinterested.

But when we’re kind, we’re giving our attention generously, whatever we see or hear. We’re present to the other person with our whole heart and mind, and with all that we are, even if it’s just for 42 seconds. Even small amounts of real, present kindness can be transformative.

I went through the McDonalds drive through the other week, when I was in a rush for lunch. Not the kind of system I want to invest my money into, if you remember that talk from a few weeks, back, and I haven’t gone back to the MacDonalds since then, but there I was.

And I made my order with the disembodied voice through that intercom as you do, and pulled up to the first window to pay, where a young woman smiled at me and told me what I owed. And as I gave her my money, I looked her in the eyes and asked, How are you doing today? A small moment of kindness, right, to be present to a stranger during a commercial interaction.

And then she looked back at me, as she took care of the bill, and she told me, I’m doing really well today, because I’m looking forward to going home this afternoon, and spending time with my mother. She told me that in her country, it was Mother’s Day that day. And so I asked her where that was – her country – and she told me El Salvador. So I told her I hoped she had a great afternoon and wished her mom a happy Mother’s Day.

And then it was time to pull up and get my greasy lunch, and that was the end of it. 42 seconds, tops. Maybe less. But whatever small kindness I may have offered her, I felt like I was the one lifted up by that interaction. I drove away and maybe because it was unexpected, I thought, man, that felt great. Like two real people just connecting for a moment. Her presence, her just being a real person who wanted to connect with me for a moment, was a kindness to me.

Basic human kindness like this, to any person in our purview, this is no small thing, but is at the center of the teaching of Jesus, including what we’ve come to call the Golden Rule.

One more scripture and then we’ll wrap up.

Jesus teaches:

 

Luke 6:31-36 (NRSV)

31Do to others as you would have them do to you.

Treat the customer in the McDonalds drive-through the way you want to be treated. Talk with the retail staff behind the counter the way you would love to have them talk with you.

Treat children the way you wish adults had treated you when you were a kid, or the way you want kids to grow up and treat others.

Talk with your grandchild, or your grandma, the way you want them to talk with you.

Interact with your students or your employees the way you want them to interact with you. Be to your teachers or your boss the way you want them to be with you. But then Jesus continues: Oh, by the way, it’s easy to do this with your friends and family. (Which, for me at least, it’s not. But whatever, Jesus says it’s relatively easy, but this is also the way of Jesus for the people you can’t stand.)

32“If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them. 33If you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners do the same. 34If you lend to those from whom you hope to receive, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, to receive as much again. 35But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked. 36Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

To be like Jesus is to be kind to the people who have nothing to give you but trouble. To give your kind attention to people that don’t deserve it.

When it comes to boldly loving our enemies, niceness just doesn’t cut it. Jesus wasn’t always nice to his enemies either. Sometimes he told the truth to them, and truth telling isn’t necessarily nice.

But Jesus never dismissed them. He engaged their questions, he looked at them and saw them. He did what he could to disarm them with kindness. This disposition toward kindness and mercy is what God is like, Jesus says, and it’s the disposition and life that Jesus is shaping in us too.

Let’s wrap up with four closing invitations before I pray for God’s help with this.

The first is an encouragement to connect with a kind God. Each week in this series, we’re encouraging you to connect with God’s love for you in some way, and also to be present with that love in your everyday interactions.

The cards each Sunday in this series on the table in the dome are two-sided for that reason as well. So pick one up on your way out if you like.

Anyway, the first encouragement:

Try This:

  • When you pray, imagine Jesus gladly attentive to you and your desires – eyes and ears fixed on you.

Likely, if you pray at all, you sit down and start talking to God. Maybe you use your own words first. Maybe you use the words of a prayer you learned. Maybe you sit in a particular place at a particular time of day, as I do. Or maybe you pull out a journal to write things down, or kneel, or take a walk. Or maybe your prayers are mainly spontaneous things you find yourself saying to God while you’re driving your car, or trying to fall asleep, or nursing a baby. All that’s good. God’s available to talk with or think about anytime, anywhere.

But how often to we envision and remember God as attentive and alive and good and interested in us as God really is? If you’re like me, not often enough. So when you’re going to pray, or when you find yourself praying, try stopping for just a minute, and imagining that Jesus is with you and that Jesus is attentive, looking, listening to all you have to say, even the things you’re aren’t sure how to say, with great interest.  

I say the word imagining because picturing Jesus with us is important and powerful, but not because it’s imaginary. Actually, this kind of imaging, which has more often been called contemplation or meditation in the spiritual tradition, is really a way of dialing into a greater reality – seeing God as God is revealed in Jesus, making sure we encounter God as God really is.

  • For a day, or a week, give each person you encounter the 42-second favor of your full attention and kind interest in them.

We’re trying to start the daily things, the small things in this series, because they’re the building blocks to greater things but also because they’re important on their own terms. So really, for as many days this week as you can handle, try simply giving each person you encounter a minute, or even a little less than a minute, of your full, uninterrupted interest and attention and kindness. This is as simple as looking someone in the eye, noticing what you see, maybe asking a small question and engaging the answer. See what this does in the people you encounter, see what this does in you! I’d love to hear your stories. Tell me sometime, or shoot me an email.

  • Adults, see every kid a full-fledged person who’d enjoy your kindness. Kids, the same for the adults in your life.

Love for children seems to be one of the unique hallmarks of Jesus’ kindness, a mark that you’re on the right path. If you don’t have kids in your life at all, consider treating with kindness the ones you bump into or that interrupt your rhythm in public places. Of consider volunteering for Soccer Nights at the end of June, as I mentioned, or contacting our families’ pastor Kim Messenger and asking about serving in our Sunday kids’ programs this summer or fall. Kim@reservoirchurch.org – she’d love to hear from you.

And kids, I think this goes for you too. The adults in your life are likely annoying to you sometimes. Or mysterious, or busy, or grumpy. But let me tell you that adults are people too – with our own strengths and weaknesses, our own good parts and bad parts and problems. So we owe you kindness, we do, but see if you can be kind to the adults in your life as well.

I mentioned that love for kids is one of the unique hallmarks of the way of Jesus with people. But the other, I shared earlier, is love for enemies.

  • Jesus doesn’t call for niceness to enemies, but does insist on love.

Again, it would be easy to go big with this and get intimidated. What do we do with people and situations that frighten us or put us in danger? OR the people we really hate, etc?

But in the spirit of this series, again, I encourage you to start small. The people in public life that you don’t know but really can’t stand, maybe even really hate, you don’t have to like them or be nice to them, but consider praying for them when you think about how much you can’t stand them, that God will bring more love and truth into their lives.

Shiphrah and Puah: The Courage to Say “And”

(This talk was totally inspired by the amazing, courageous stories from women speakers at the Why Christian conference, 2018).

Courage: the Core Virtue

We are in this great new series, called “The Ways of Passion and Courage” – where we are dipping into some stories from the Old Testament – some of which you may have heard before and some less well-known.  

As we were framing this series – my mind raced to the flashy, well-known, acutely courageous stories of the Old Testament. It was easy for me to gravitate to the stories of David & Goliath, or Moses, or Daniel, or Noah. These are undoubtedly courageous stories that are wrapped in moments of history that we tend to remember that involve decrees, and battles and moments of high drama.

But I want to poke at courage from another angle, a courage that looks a little more subtle and a little more present in our ordinary lives – day in and day out. I think this angle on courage – can help us access courage and see ourselves as courageous beings a little more regularly.

Maya Angelou speaks of this kind of courage – that I’m going to get at today i think,  she says:

“I am convinced that courage is the most important of all the virtues. Because without courage, you cannot practice any other virtue consistently. You can be kind for a while; you can be generous for a while; you can be just for a while, or merciful for a while, even loving for a while. But it is only with courage that you can be persistently and insistently kind and generous and fair.”

Courage seems to be the source and steady undercurrent for all the ways Jesus calls us to engage with the world around us.

Courage seems to be the source – and steady undercurrent for all the ways we hope to engage with the world around us.  

 

Sometimes I think that we might be our own stumbling blocks to courage — that our own limits of courage are our definitions of it.  And, even more, that our definitions tend to skew toward a binary way of defining it. Either I’m “with” or “without” courage.  “Courage” is attached to an outcome that looks like success. It leads to a heroic triumph or visible change. And in some cases this is how courage looks, but I think the risk is that we miss a whole lot of moments of courage in-between.

That’s why today I’d love to look at two women — two midwives — from the Old Testament whose names are Shiphrah and Puah, who I think can break open a whole host of helpful ways to think about courage. Their manner of courage isn’t limited to the binary framework of “either/or”, but one that takes over this in-between space — most of their lives — and is anchored to their utter belief in and embodiment of God.

If you’ve never heard the names – Shiphrah and Puah – fear not!  At the beginning of the week I was with a bunch of pastors from this small cohort of churches that we are a part of called Blue Ocean Faith. And when I mentioned that I’d most likely be speaking about these two women, I thought I read a bit of panic on their faces… “who?”…blank stare — “wait – who you are talking about?”

Courage in My Story

So before we get to the story of Shiphrah and Puah, I want to tell you two quick vignettes from my own life. Two that popped to mind immediately as I thought courage in my narrative.

Vignette #1:  Some 20ish years ago I was a Junior in HS and was taking a pretty rigorous math class. I think it was an honors pre-calc class.

It was pretty clear early on in the semester that I wasn’t doing well — like really not doing well — hovering around a D average.

I thought I was the only one.

Turns out aside from 3 geniuses – the rest of the class was failing. Turns out that this was a pattern in this class, over the years, with this particular teacher.

We start to ask for more in-class teaching/explanation.  And after-school time. The teacher thinks that’s preposterous – “It’s the way his system has always worked”.

I think this response is preposterous and I organize a walk-out.

The day following, at the beginning of class, we all get up, pile our textbooks on his desk and walk out of the classroom down the hall to the principal’s office, to talk directly to the principal about some sort of mode of action going forward that might help promote better teaching and learning.

Vignette #2: Just a couple of weeks ago I went to a inter-denominational gathering in NC that invited a myriad of voices to answer the question “Why are you still a follower of Jesus?” Many of the stories we heard that weekend – were stories of deep pain as a result of skin color, gender, sexual orientation and physical sickness, but stories that did not shy away from the REALNESS of Jesus.  Incredibly beautiful, liberated and loving voices that had taken life head on – and were walking upright – it was really inspiring. (Full of agency and power and all the credit to Jesus — wow!) I left wanting to harness this collective courage.

The morning I left – I walked to the hotel check-out desk at 4am.

Right away I noticed the woman who was behind the desk – was being “chatted up” by a man .

As I approached to hand over my key, it became clear that this man was a guest at the hotel, not an employee. He asked where I was headed.  When I told him “Boston”, he quickly did a really poor impression of Mark Wahlberg and then asked me my room number.

I left the desk, headed to get coffee in the side room, mulling over what I should do on my way back through the lobby.

A few minutes later I walked straight by the front desk and to the exit door, where the hotel bell-hop opened the door for me.

As I went through the doorway, I turned to the bellhop/doorman and said “Is she ok?”

OK – I’m going to pause there with these two vignettes and head straight to the story of Shiphrah and Puah, before I fold them back in for what will hopefully at that point make a little more sense.

The Courageous Midwives

Where we often come close to the story of Shiphrah and Puah is with the story of Moses.  Many of you probably have heard the epic story of Moses – this Hebrew baby that was drawn from the water and raised in Pharoah’s courts and becomes not a prince, but a liberator of his people. These peopl are the Israelites, who have been enslaved and considered less than human by the Egyptians. It’s the story of the great exodus from Egypt into the promised land.

This story of Moses is the one we know… But we don’t know the story of  Shiphrah and Puah – the story that sets the stage for Moses to live, and determines the fate of an entire people.


So let’s read the story found on your program:
Exodus 1

8Then a new king, to whom Joseph meant nothing, came to power in Egypt. 9“Look,” he said to his people, “the Israelites have become far too numerous for us. 10Come, we must deal shrewdly with them or they will become even more numerous and, if war breaks out, will join our enemies, fight against us and leave the country.”

11So they put slave masters over them to oppress them with forced labor, and they built Pithom and Rameses as store cities for Pharaoh. 12But the more they were oppressed, the more they multiplied and spread; so the Egyptians came to dread the Israelites 13and worked them ruthlessly. 14They made their lives bitter with harsh labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields; in all their harsh labor the Egyptians worked them ruthlessly.

15The king of Egypt said to the Hebrew midwives, whose names were Shiphrah and Puah, 16“When you are helping the Hebrew women during childbirth on the delivery stool, if you see that the baby is a boy, kill him; but if it is a girl, let her live.” 17The midwives, however, feared God and did not do what the king of Egypt had told them to do; they let the boys live. 18Then the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and asked them, “Why have you done this? Why have you let the boys live?”

19The midwives answered Pharaoh, “Hebrew women are not like Egyptian women; they are vigorous and give birth before the midwives arrive.”

20So God was kind to the midwives and the people increased and became even more numerous.

A little context to where we pick up here: the Israelites had moved to Egypt during a time of famine and starvation. Joseph, who had been sold into slavery in Egypt as a result of his jealous brother’s action, had helped the Israelites land here. Joseph’s time in Egypt was blessed by God, and he worked his way into high standing in Egypt, and the Israelites fared well. And for a while the Israelites and Egyptians coexisted without (that much) trouble.

Soon, though, a new King came in to Egypt, and it says “He did not know Joseph”. This means he didn’t know Joseph’s people or his God, and therefore he looked out at the Israelites with fear and suspicion and saw them as a threat, as the “other”.   

He attempts to limit the growth of the Hebrews, who only seem to grow in number, by dehumanizing them in systemic ways — by slavery, and forced labor, and oppression.  These attempts, however, don’t seem to make a difference to keep them down either.

So Pharoah enacts a fear campaign,  “What if we were attacked by our enemies and these growing number of Israelites join sides with our enemies?” “We would be crushed!” And this fear messaging starts to shift the opinion of his people and there’s more of a widespread buy-in to oppress and segregate.

Pharaoh’s xenophobia pushes him to take drastic measure to ensure these “outsiders” do not one day take over the land, and his latest attempt, as we see here, is calling forth these two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah.  Under government sanctions, Shiphrah and Puah are enlisted to participate in the extermination of Hebrew baby boys — to bring death to the world around them.

Now, the text reads that these women were Hebrew midwives. And yet, there’s a lot of conversation among scholars that suggests that these women were in fact Egyptian, but attended the birth of Hebrew women.  So they were midwives to Hebrew women.

I’m inclined to agree with this take – it makes sense to me that Pharoah would want his own “people” to carry out this decree.

This means  Shiphrah and Puah likely attended both Hebrew and Egyptian births. And midwives were often thought to be women who couldn’t have children themselves, so they were often pushed to the edges of society. Shiphrah and Puah are though to have possibly been Nubian midwives, from now Northern Sudan (reference:  Ebony Johanna), meaning that their relationships — throughout their vocational lives — spanned cultural and geographical lines.

A midwife’s primary role is to usher in life, regardless of status, race or any other defining division — to assist, guide and protect life.

So Pharoah is quite strategic with his newest attempt to limit the growth of the Hebrews. He knows that these midwives are the touch-point to life or death. And he says, “choose death”.

I can imagine that Shiphrah and Puah run through a few scenarios in their minds.  Either we are courageous and we say “no” to Pharoah 1) “we refuse to follow Pharoah’s orders and we likely die and likely our friends and families also die”.

Or we aren’t courageous and we say “yes” to PHaroah 2)“we follow Pharoah’s orders  – we promote the sovereignty of our state – and by the work of our own hands, bring death to the next generation of Hebrew males”.

This either/or choice seems to not be a complete picture of what courage could look like.

Thankfully these midwives seem to know another way to courage deep within their spirit. And I think they utilize this tiny conjunction word: “and”. “Wait!  AND we fear God”.  We revere and love and trust our God.  This “AND” — this belief in God — seems to be a way of harnessing courage, and it seems as though it isn’t only found in this one high-stakes moment with Pharoah – but it’s been built and developed over their lives.

Fearing God helps them see beyond the binary — that courage is far more than a choice of saying “yes or no” to Pharaoh.  It’s instead about saying “and…yes”! to LIFE with God.

These midwives are courageous!  They are divinely defiant! They’re heroically brave in their refusal to kill baby boys,  they’re clever in their explanation to Pharaoh of why baby boys keep being born, “these Hebrew women are so strong and vigorous that they birth their babies before we can arrive!” This is courageous, and smart. That explanation isn’t just an excuse to buy them time – it’s a subversive move to uphold the strength and dignity of the Hebrew people to Pharaoh.

This is the part of the story we would remember — these 4 verses of Shiphrah and Puah — and it is super courageous. It is, after all, what sets the stage for the liberation of an entire people from Pharaoh.

But the subtler courage that let’s them say “and… I fear God” — that type of courage that is developed over time, that isn’t as bold as these few recorded verses — is the version of courage I want in my own life, and what I want to explore more today.

As I mentioned Shiphrah and Puah were likely midwives who attended their own people’s births, but also the births of their “perceived enemies”.

These midwives were involved deeply, deeply at the center of women and their  family’s stories. To just go in and assist at a birth – is not the way of the midwife. A midwife is one who identifies with pain, one who sits with people in pain, and holds hands with pain, and confronts spirits that are full of despair and want to “give up”.  

Day after day, birth after birth, they came along-side the “other” — these Hebrew women, who they should hate. And they take their hands and rub their backs, and they say again and again “and” there’s a way here, “and God”. This breaks open a deep belief that courage wells up from inside of us — that it’s not only found in taking on a piece of armor.  That their God is one who sits alongside of them too, is in their reality — A God who doesn’t just go to the margins to serve someone else – but ONE who LIVES at the margins.

These midwives do this! They live at the margins. And, in their vocation, take on a calling, an oath to “in all ways serve life”. And the courage they dip into is God’s, because they believe that He is truly with them. And they greet pain — the pain of childbirth, and the pain of injustice, and the pain of not being seen with these virtues of God and that Maya Angelou speaks of. This is birthed by courage to say “and my God” – he’s real.

I can wonder if we wrestle with this question in our lives — whether acutely or sub-consciously — does what I do matter?  Does it touch real life? Does it bring forth anything new or courageous into the world?

This midwives seem to encourage us that “yes” — wherever we are, whatever we do, whoever we talk to matters. If we do it with kindness, and generosity, and equity, backed by a God that is real, it all matters.

These thousands of moments where they  offer their laboring and birthing mothers cool washcloths to their foreheads, where they gently turn babies inside of wombs – where they listen closely for heartbeats, where they root for life with their encouraging words, “yes push”, “you are almost there”, “life is coming”.

These times of being so intimately close to life and so close to God flip our ingrained allergy of “both/and”, and re-wire our pathways to see GOD AND LIFE as one — beyond political/authoritative decrees or external circumstances that try to inject fear.

For Shiphrah and Puah, these moments compile and develop a courageous heart — one that doesn’t filter with external factors “Life or no life” or “Egyptian or Hebrew” or “male or female”. Instead the passion for justice and care for all of humanity comes from a posture of  “and” – and GOD.

Omid Safi (a Duke University professor of Islamic studies) said recently that this closeness (to God),  is what allows us to see that the

same love that pours out of God’s own being and brings us here, that sustains us here, that will take us back home. It is this same love that we recognize in other people, who love their babies and their community as we love our babies and our community. When we recognize this same love in one another, we will not stand for having something happen to other people’s babies and community that we wouldn’t want to have happen to ours. That is simply what we call justice — and this work of justice is a task of love. (Onbeing).

The courage to say “and… justice and love” must go hand and hand.  This is the powerful picture of courage that Shiphrah and Puah give us today, one that they still invite us to!

Courage in My Story (Again)

The two vignettes that I shared at the beginning of the sermon  are  interesting to me because they so totally show the ways that I want to categorize myself as being “with” courage or “without Courage”.

I never labeled them in my story-telling as one or the other, but I bet  even you sitting and listening could recognize your own mind categorizing one as “courageous”, and one as “not so courageous”.

In highschool, I was courageous –– I staged a walk out and brought awareness to something I felt was injust at the time. Three weeks ago I wasn’t courageous — I consciously exited a situation where I noticed an awkward dynamic that could have been helped by intervening in some way.

May be very true, but I think it’s a limited view of courage. I’m slowly beginning to realize that the question at hand isn’t either “Am I with courage?” or “Am I without courage?” Because likely on any given dayI am both/and —courageous and not courageous.

The question is, “Can I harness the courage of a God that is always with me?”

If I can tip more toward this – I can see the hundreds to thousands of times throughout my days and my weeks  where courage is live.  It’s then that I can see the maybe quiet, less obvious moments of courage that happen all the time.

Otherwise – I think the threat of disparaging thoughts can take over –  “Am I only destined to be a prisoner to the pharoah’s of my day? Will I ever witness more than pain and heartache ?

But the words of Paul here in Ephesians, fill out my truncated thoughts with the power and realness of Jesus.

He reminds me that, I am not a prisoner of anyone else but of JESUS who wraps me in humility and gentleness and patience, who gives me courage to lean toward people with love with an eagerness of heart that seeks to maintain the unity of the Spirit — this powerful JESUS who makes a way, who provides the “both/and to my either/or” tendencies, for the bonding posture of peace — this I realized is the power of Jesus.

This I realized is the courage that Jesus can offer so many of you;

To stand up – get out of bed, walk into a day, into a society that sometimes in the words of Lucille Clifton, “will do everything it can to kill you”… that’s courage and triumph!

To stand up and get out of bed and meet the reality of your day, in a sick body — perhaps penetrated with disease, infection, cancer, a body that is trying to murder you day in and day out — this is courage.

Courage is to stand up and get out of bed. Period. Nothing else to follow – just that one act.  It is courage that is full of sweat. A courage that says “and” — and today, I will rise.

Because Jesus lives in the “AND” – right?  He doesn’t fit in the binary tracks of either/or… He lives in our reality – which encompasses a whole lot of  both/and!

This picture of everyday courage gives us the freedom to sit down and listen, even when speaking is heralded as a sign of power or intelligence. And also the permission to see that some days courage is to stand up and speak, because you’ve been away from the mic for too long.

Jesus makes way for a courage that is ever-present, running through our veins,  on the tips of our tongues, in the palms of our hands as we touch life around us, and in our feet as we roam this earth.

When we can say “and”, there’s another way here with Jesus, another way to keep helping birth new life, “ I can’t yet see it – you can’t yet see it, but it’s here!” It allows us, as it did for the midwives, to ignite our moral imagination.

Where we have the humility to see the world as it is around us  and the audacity and passion to imagine the world as it could be.

All of us and the Midwives

Us limiting our sense of courage, doesn’t serve the world. We are all called to be courageous.  And to believe that our everyday posture of heralding life in spaces where only death looks apparent, will produce change  somewhere down the line.

The outcome that Shiphrah and Puah witness after making their courageous move to not kill these Hebrew baby boys could have felt disappointing to them, because Pharaoh just keeps marching on with his plans to wipe out these babies, demanding that all his people throw them into the Nile River.

But what Shiphrah and Puah might not realize is that their story — their whole story of being women who courageously live at the margins, and who stand against power and oppression — will continue to be told. Their names will be kept alive and whispered among the Hebrew women, their names will be yelled out in the pains of labor, as sign-posts of resistance and hope, (when their land is vacant of it), and  their courage to say …. “and”… “and I fear God”, would give PHaroah’s daughter, and Moses’ sister and moses’ mother  the courage to protect & hide and find and nurse him to life….

These names of Shiphrah and Puah are recorded! We get to see them written down in the text that we read today! This show us that a lifetime of courage — harnessed with the Divine — is worth 3,000 years of remembrance and legacy, and still worth talking about today. While Pharaoh’s fearful acts of dominating power and authority leaves him nameless and less than 300 years of fame.

Perhaps our role is akin to the role of a midwife — to cherish other life as our own, to stand right where we are in our jobs, and roles, and play, and life — and reclaim these places, places of courage.   And to keep live the courage to say “AND” as we continue to find and preserve and nurture life — wherever we touch it.

Sermon Notes – How Do We Harness Courage?

    1. “Weep with those who weep”. (Romans)
      Come close to those around you – at your job, your neighborhood – LEAN in.As Maya Angelou and Jesus tell us: Humility, compassion, empathy might be the most critical ingredients to a heart full of courage. Because they allow our hearts to be softened to people and their pain.  Just as Jesus does with us.

      Pay attention to your emotions: are you weeping? are you angry? These emotions they might just suggest what you are passionate about

      From there  — where you realize your heart is stirred — you can figure out where to move from there if you want. What are you willing to do about it? Where maybe are you already doing something in your everyday life

    2. Where can you utilize the word “and” ?
      This might mean you have to take some time to realize where you are categorizing life into either/or buckets.  Try out the word “and” in place of either/or this week – and see what it produces. 
    3. Seek wisdom from people who have diversity of viewpoints.
      It’s likely there were a whole bunch of midwives. We get Shiphrah and Puah because they feared GOD, but I imagine there was a lot of conversation that varied in opinion and viewpoints that helped shaped how Shiphrah and Puah would move forward as they did.
    4. Check in each day to see where it is God is real to you.
      This will anchor you in your high-stakes moments and in your everyday moments of courage…When God is more real to us than the powers we see around us and infront of us, we are better able to choose God’s way of courage – with love, life, peace and justice….

      This will help you believe that the “Pharaoh’s of this time and in this land”, will not kill your spirit.

       

    5. Write down the names of the courageous people who come to mind. 

      These are both your forerunners and perhaps your contemporaries.People who die have no control over who tells their stories, who remembers their names. So it’s an important role we play – to keep the narrative of courage alive in grounding, real stories.Shiphrah and Puah likely had a sticky-note stuck to their mirror with the names of their ancestors, Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebecca, Leah and Rachel  – courageous woman whose names were whispered in their ears as flames of hope and movement when we can’t see it ahead of us.

      This is important because it keeps the name of Jesus alive, not just in our memory, but right now, as our unending reservoir of courage and passion.

An Invitation to Pay Attention

Introduction: Reservoir Visits Asha

Hello, I’m Steve, one of our pastors here at Reservoir. I was away last week because I was in India for a week with a few friends from Reservoir. We were visiting a partner organization called Asha that does sustainable community development work in the slums of Delhi, transforming people’s lives and encouraging people to live by what they call the Asha values: empowerment, non-violence, compassion, joy, simplicity, justice, dignity, gratitude, generosity, optimism, and the power of touch. It was awesome. I’m sure any of the seven of us who went would love to tell you stories that inspired us. Let me tell you one.

We spent most of the week in a slum community playing with kids and talking with students and women’s groups, but one day we went to Agra, the city of the Taj Mahal, as tourists. And two graduates of Asha’s youth programs came with us. One was my friend Shiv, who is one of the very few kids from his slum community to not only go to college but to go on to earn a Master’s degree.

Shiv is an upbeat, bright, funny young man. He lives and breathes the Asha values, totally embodies them. In fact, his main hope for a spouse is that his wife live these values as well. Shiv grew up in a slum called Seelampur colony where tens of thousands of people live in small concrete one-room apartments, with no running water and low public sanitation. It’s loud, it’s crowded, there’s trash everywhere. Shiv has a professional job now, but he still lives in Seelampur with his family still, because he’s waiting to move out until his sisters get married and he can take his parents with him.

At one point in our trip, we were driving by a row of middle class apartment buildings and Shiv said, I am so lucky that I grew up in a slum community and not in one of these apartments. Because if I hadn’t grown up in a slum, I would have never met Asha, and my life would be so much worse. Shiv’s life is so full of joy and power that he is grateful he was raised in a community most residents of Delhi won’t let their children even walk through. Because that’s the community where his life started to become spiritually rich. And that’s been the foundation everything else in his life is built upon.

I. It’s Hard to Pay Attention

We’ll come back to Shiv in a moment, but today I want to talk about paying attention. It’s hard to pay attention. It’s famously been getting harder in the time and place we live in. I was talking about this with one of the teachers I supervised when I was a headmaster at Watertown High School, and he said to me: to be honest, Steve, I can’t read a book anymore. I used to love to read, but the Internet has changed my attention span. I can’t focus on just one thing anymore, one thing that goes for hundreds of pages. And I can’t click on the words and have them take me other places. So I look at stuff on my phone, I don’t read books anymore.

This was a high school teacher. But he’s not unusual. Most of us are tethered to our phones. We look at them dozens, maybe hundreds of times a day. They are our companions in our waking and sleeping hours. We are so distracted that a few years ago, a study reported that many people would prefer to administer electric shocks to themselves rather than sit alone with their thoughts. Seriously, folks in this study were given time in a room alone. Previously every single one of them said they would pay money to avoid an electric shock. And yet, with nothing but this electric shocker they were hooked up to, when given 15 minutes to sit there with their thoughts, many of the women and most of the men were so restless and distracted, that they shocked themselves, just to avoid the quiet and the thoughts in their own heads.

It’s pretty funny and kind of disturbing, isn’t it? But what if our distractibility and restlessness aren’t just quirky things about the times we live in but symptoms of a much larger and more serious problem of dis-ease with our lives. When I’m around a person who is as focused and joyful as my friend Shiv, I feel this. Because I wonder what I’m missing out on in my inattention. In my scattered attention to my newsfeed and my entertainment and all things urgent in my life, what currents underneath am I missing?

Today, near the start of our 40 Days of Faith, I’m giving you an invitation to a habit that will undergird anything else good that you access in this season. I’m giving you an invitation to pay attention. To break the regular distracted rhythms of your life to look for the deeper and more important things that are calling out to you.

40 Days of Faith is our version of the six weeks before Easter called Lent, which in churches has historically been a time for just this sort of thing: to make some shifts in our ordinary life to be formed into more mindful people, more spiritual people, who notice and attend to what God is doing.

Last week Ivy kicked off this season so well. I haven’t even listened to her talk yet, but just reading the notes on our website, really just skimming them, I was tearing up, it’s so good. As Ivy was inviting us to name our fears in this crazy-making world of ours, and to embrace some spiritual practices to press into joy in the midst of those fears.

We’ve called this year’s season Children of God in a Fractured World, because we want us all to find this way of life, to be shaped into people who know that a good God is with us in hard times. And who are people who experience ourselves and call others to better ways of being in a fractured world.

So Ivy invited us to the stuff that makes up this season – considering fasting; reading and praying in the daily guide we produce for the season, this year reflections on the Bible’s final book of Revelation; asking God each day for things you and your non-churchgoing friends need; and doing that along with others.

If you missed last week, or haven’t started yet, please do consider joining us from this day forward for these 40 – at this point more like 35 days – of this season. I promise you’ll find it rewarding. It’s not at all too late to start.

Revelation begins with a vision of Jesus. The author named John imagines Jesus as this stunningly powerful and beautiful person – face like the sun with eyes of fire, strong and steady on legs and feet of bronze, wise and ancient with a voice with the power of sword and the sound of many waters.

And then John says this same Jesus is with the churches that gather in Jesus’ name. In fact, Jesus is also a pen pal. He’s writing letters to seven churches in John’s region – this number seven representing completion or perfection for John means this probably represents all the churches in the world then and now. Jesus has things to say to us.

These letter in Revelation have a common format – after reminding that Jesus is speaking, they have an affirmation, then a correction, then a promise, followed at the end by an urge to pay attention.

Let’s read the last of these seven letters. It’ll be the focus of tomorrow’s entry in our Bible guide, so you’ll get a head start here. It goes like this:

Revelation 3 – Laodicea
14“And to the angel of the church in Laodicea write: The words of the Amen, the faithful and true witness, the origin of God’s creation:
15“I know your works; you are neither cold nor hot. I wish that you were either cold or hot. 16So, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit you out of my mouth. 17For you say, ‘I am rich, I have prospered, and I need nothing.’ You do not realize that you are wretched, pitiable, poor, blind, and naked. 18Therefore I counsel you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich; and white robes to clothe you and to keep the shame of your nakedness from being seen; and salve to anoint your eyes so that you may see. 19I reprove and discipline those whom I love. Be earnest, therefore, and repent. 20Listen! I am standing at the door, knocking; if you hear my voice and open the door, I will come in to you and eat with you, and you with me. 21To the one who conquers I will give a place with me on my throne, just as I myself conquered and sat down with my Father on his throne. 22Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches.”

So maybe the word that sticks out most here is “lukewarm.” We here that word and think indifferent – not for or against, just meh –impassionate. But in John’s first century Greek, lukewarm wasn’t an idiom for indifferent. More likely, it meant unhealthy.

Laodicea was about six miles away from some hot springs, whose water trickled down to the city. Those springs were great for drin king or bathing or cooking water, but if you had a hard time getting there, and drank the lukewarm water that showed up outside of Laodicea, you’d get sick. It would be lukewarm, and bacteria-ridden and foul tasting. So you’d want to spit it out of your mouth.

John’s letter to Laodicea, which is the only one that is all correction and no affirmation, tells the Laodicean church community, you are like this. You are unhealthy and sickly. Which would have been weird for them to hear. Because they were not in their minds the church in bad conditions. Their city was not like those slum communities in Delhi I told you about, they were more like us in Eastern Massachusetts. They were one of the wealthier cities of their empire – famous for their banking and clothing and ophthalmology industries. They thought they were rich. But John says you are not – you are poor.

This is a big theme in John. There are five books in Bible’s New Testament that are attached to this name. There’s the memoirs of Jesus called the Good News of John. There are 3 short letters – 1, 2, and 3 John. And there’s this book of Revelation. They were probably not all written by the same author. But they do share common themes and come out of the same tradition or community of authors. And for these authors, that we’ll just call John, this inside-out paradox of what’s on the surface vs. what’s true inside is kind of a big deal. That people who are rich may turn out to be internally poor, and people that think they see so well may often be psychologically or spiritually blind, and people that seem healthy can be very sick deep inside.

And to Laodicea, John is like, Wake up, pay attention.

Now, there are seven letters that capture the range of the audience of this book of Revelation. But many scholars say that churches in the 21st century developed world don’t really get to choose how we read the book. Because by far, we have most in common with church of Laodicea. We too are on the whole materially wealthy. But we are on the whole inattentive, unreflective, and spiritually poor.

II. The Examen – Seeing God-with-us

I’ve been thinking about this recently in my mid-40s. Because I’m not at the top of the chart in pretty much anything in life. Wealth, success, looks, friends, fame – you name it – there are plenty of people ahead of me in everything. Some of you are those people. You are special, people of Reservoir.

But on the whole, I’m rich. I have more clothes in my closet than I can wear. I have a warm, dry, secure place to live with plenty of space for everyone. I’ve got enough food in the kitchen that some of it will go bad before we even get to it. I’ve got an education. I’ve got some money in the bank, friends to talk with, and three children and a spouse who love me. Even if I had half of these things, I’d be rich.

But last year, again and again, I thought of how I wished my interior life was fuller than it is. A friend of mine a few years back talked about all the important things going on with his kids and his career, and said this is a time of life when I can’t afford to drop the ball on anything. It all really matters.

And my life’s like that too – in my work and in my relationships and in the management of my life, there’s so much that’s important that’s going on this season. And yet I’ve been noticing how distracted I am, how cluttered my mind and time can be. How I’m not as present to my life as I wish I was.

So this year, I’m doing something that comes out of the Jesuit Catholic tradition that’s like a 9-month long 40 days of faith. A program of paying attention to what matters and of spiritual transformation for a healthier, richer life.

And at the heart of this program is a twice a day practice called the Examen. It’s a self-examination where you look back on the past day or half day and notice the highs and the lows of life: what in your life right now stirs gratitude and joy, or regret and sorrow. Our daily Bible guide in Revelation each day ends with a short spiritual practice to try, and last week’s entries each day ended with a version of this practice.

And what I’ve noticed practicing the examen more often is that my day is more God-soaked than I ever would have imagined. It is just chock full of joy and expressions of God’s love to me. In my twice a day examen, I think of good food I’ve eaten, kind things people have done, work and play and rest I was grateful for. But I’ve also noticed that life is also more full of lost opportunities than I would have thought. I often remember moments where I was too distracted and lost time or opportunity for something important. I notice moments where I was in a jam and wished I had asked for help, or when I lost my cool or my temper. Or where I had this quick idea to do something great that would have taken courage, and I opted out, didn’t bother because I was too self-conscious or worried about how things would turn out.

The thing about the examen, though, is it’s a constant opportunity to not just pay attention, but to recalibrate for what’s next. Because the examen invites us to say thank you to God for all the good and to say sorry for all the lost opportunity or things done poorly, and then to pray for help and strength for the next day or half day.

And I was doing this once, and this idea came to me. That this couple I was going to run into the next day, who kind of go to this church, but more on the outskirts than integrally involved. I had this idea that when I see them, I should ask them if they would be willing to take off their shoes and let me wash their feet. And to tell them this represented that God and this church and me personally as a pastor were all in their lives to serve and love them. And to pray for them.

Now this wasn’t an entirely random idea. In John’s memoirs, he says that Jesus did this for his students and told them they should all do this for one another, be people who love and serve and empower people to go pay it forward – to love and serve others. But no one I know, like literally does this on a regular basis. Which is probably as it should be. It’s not a normal thing in our culture.

But in this case, in my moment of praying for the next half day, I had this strong sense this was what I was supposed to. So I was like alright. And the next day I saw this couple, and it was kind of a group atmosphere, so I said: do you mind if we have a moment in private. And we went somewhere, and I said, OK, this is a little odd, but would you mind taking off your shoes. And the weirder thing was, they just did it. They didn’t even ask me why. And I then I got down on my knee, and took a cup of water and a napkin I had brought with me, and said, I would like to wash your feet.

It was so weird, I didn’t dare look up and actually look them in the eye. But they didn’t move their feet anyway or say anything, so I poured a little water on each foot then dried them off and then I said my thing. I said I thought God wanted me to do this today to show them that I as a pastor, and this church, and even Jesus was in their lives to love and serve them, and we’ll be here for that. And I asked them if I could pray for them, and I did.

And you know what, weird as this was, nervous as I was when the idea first came to me, I was entirely at peace by now. I felt so connected to this couple, so close. I mean, unless you do pedicures for work, how often do you touch people’s toenails. I don’t wanna know. But I just had the joy of purpose, of doing the exact thing I knew I was meant to do in that moment of my life.

And turns out this was kind of a big deal to them as well. They were more delighted than creeped out by it all, and one of the two opened up to me about something really important they had to say. A way they are alone in life and need more companionship and prayer.

This is what happens in the examen – not necessarily the washing the feet part, that was quirky to me on that day. But the getting of our attention and guiding us to a spiritually rich life – to living in the moment, each moment, with joy and peace, and purpose.

That’s the point of these letters in Revelation. John saying that Jesus – the one who knows all truth, who knows all there is to know about everything, God included, the one that’s been at the heart of the universe since the beginning of time says to us, I am here. I am wanting to get your attention. I’m knocking.

While we are so numb most of the time, so distracted, trying so hard to avoid our lives, Jesus is knocking, inviting us to communion and connection.

That’s what’s going on with the imagery in this letter too. Laodicea again was famous for its gold, for its trade in wool, and for its eye salves – first century banking, clothing industry, and ophthalmology. And Jesus is like, you have all those things, but internally you are poor, naked, and blind. You lack inner wealth.

I think it’s so cool that Jesus knows us so well. Jesus knows our region of Greater Boston, how we are so famous for our universities and hospitals and technology. And yet Jesus gets the places where we lack wisdom and health and knowhow. Jesus sees where we’re distracted and afraid and calls us to a life worth living – a creative, calm, courageous, compassionate life.

III. Breaking the Rhythm

For most of us, to get there, needs correction, reproof, a breaking of rhthym.

Grace, when she’s seen me text or go on the internet on my phone while driving with kids in back, gives me strong words, reproof, correction. This is her wanting to get my attention for my good and the good of the whole project.

This is Jesus for us this season: knocking, urging us – can you break rhythm for a while and pay attention?

Jesus sees our technology driven, hyper-distracted, media-and-marketing-saturated age with more food and clothes and stuff than we can ever use and still more worry than we know what to do with. And Jesus says: stop for a moment, let me guide you to that life you want, that life that comes out of inner spiritual wealth, that leads to purpose, that leads to joy, that leads to a life and a community that can reshape and heal a fractured world.

Some invitations to pay attention

Can I give you just a few specific invitations in this regard? First, begin with 40 Days: take a look at the user’s manua and daily Bible guide. You can also visit a group this week as well.

  • If you haven’t chosen a way to fast yet, break rhythm from one of your distractions.
  • Pay attention when something lights up your mind or heart. Be curious about it.
    • Can be unexpected joy or sadness, an idea that comes to you, even a frustration you can’t shake.
    • The stuff that’s on our mind, and the desires of our heart are often how God is speaking to us, part of how Jesus is knocking. So instead of trying to avoid something that lights up our minds or hearts, or instead of just compulsively acting on it, we can be curious about it.
    • Not judge or evaluate, but just ask, huh… what is that that is speaking to me? What’s it saying? Might something be calling for my attention?
  • And finally: learn to pray the examen one to two times a day.
    • Welcome stillness, welcome God.
    • Review your day – pay attention.
    • Respond with gratitude and confession.
    • Pray for your tomorrow.

(The above is not an exact transcript of the accompanying audio, but the prepared text upon which the talk is based)