James’ and John’s Terrible Interview Skills

My exegetical life began very early.

When I was little, I frequently heard in church about Jesus “sitting on the right hand of God.”

And when I was about 5 years old, I asked my father, “Dad, doesn’t God’s hand get tired if Jesus is sitting on it all the time?”

I may have been a literalist, but you have to admit it’s a good question.

Of course my five-year-old self was not only anthropomorphizing God to an extreme, but also did not understand the cultural significance of sitting at God’s right hand.

This was an allusion to monarchy. When the king sat on his throne, someone sat immediately to his right and immediately to his left. And those people were his trusted aides and agents.

We still hearken back to this custom when we call someone “my right hand man.”

The people seated to the left and right of the king are second only to him in authority and power. When they go out into the world, they speak with the voice of the king. They act on his behalf.

And they are treated with the same dignity, pomp, and circumstance as the king, because they are his hands and feet in the world.

James and John, in our gospel story today, definitely understood this. In fact, they were counting on it. Continue reading

Kavanaugh, Empire, and Confession

I’ve come to a new understanding this week of how the wrath of God can be comforting.

Now that’s a pretty scary statement, isn’t it?

Well, I’m just trying to make sure you’re awake, and after all, Halloween is only a few weeks off. Let me explain what I mean.

I don’t mean “the wrath of God” as in God dangling people over a lake of fire and taking delight in punishing them for their sins.

What I mean is that there comes a time when human beings really lose their way, when they elevate petty, selfish goals over ideals like truth, defending the oppressed, and protecting the vulnerable.

We do that as individuals, and most of all we do that as a body politic.

And when that happens, in the church and in the world, we lose both the ability and the credibility to articulate justice.

At moments like that, we need something more and something higher than humanity’s best attempt at righteousness. We need God’s righteousness.

We need the searingly clarifying reminder that the other pole to God’s mercy is God’s justice.

Mercy always triumphs, but justice creates the conditions for mercy to flourish. Continue reading

What To Do When You Don’t Like What the Bible Says

I came very close this week to doing something I have never done before.

I came very close this week to cheating and not preaching on the assigned scriptures for the day.

There’s no way around it, they’re just awful.

But I’m not one to run away from a challenge, so let’s see what we can make of them. Even if we come out of this only having learned that there are some parts of the Bible that just do not feel like Good News, at least we will have engaged honestly and asked the Holy Spirit to reveal to us why we had to read these lessons today.

Job is a deeply problematic text.

People for generations have found comfort in Job’s stoicism through suffering.

I admire Job’s stubbornness, but God in this text?

As Virginia Woolf said, “I read the Book of Job last night. I don’t think God comes out of it well.” Continue reading

Arguing the Way

One of the courses I’ve put together in my teaching ministry is called “Questions of Jesus.”

In the gospels, Jesus asks 307 questions and only answers 3.

He clearly has a lot to ask of us, not only in terms of what he’s calling us to do, but in terms of what is going on in our hearts and minds—he wants to know.

What I do in the “Questions of Jesus” course is present Jesus’ questions with no context at all, no indication of the story, the situation, and the surrounding verses.

Then I let folks wrestle with them, individually, in small groups, and as a large group.  It’s always a fascinating process.

Jesus’ questions, taken apart from their familiar contexts, have a way of cutting right through our customary b.s. and assumptions, like a laser to the heart.

And the question he asks today is one of my favorites.

“What were you arguing about on the way?”

It’s a heck of a relevant question to us right here and now. Continue reading

Who Is Jesus Preaching To?

For words that are in fact so familiar to us, words like “Messiah” and “followers” and “cross,” they are hard to wrap our heads around, hard to implant in our lives, hard to make real.

This gospel contains some of Jesus’ hardest teaching, but even in our knee-jerk despair that we’ll ever be able to live up to this lofty calling and high destiny of which he speaks, we sense how important it is.

We can feel how grand the story is that Jesus is telling. We understand that he is inviting us to be part of events that change the world.

And the spark of the Holy Spirit within us leaps with excitement and possibility and hunger for living out the justice and love of the Christ-follower and the cross-bearer and the life-giver.

But a much louder part of our minds reminds us that we are also the person who routinely leaves the gas cap undone and is jealous of that one person at work and snaps at the kids when we’re tired.

How can there be room for someone like that in the group that recognizes Jesus as the Messiah and bravely follows him to the cross even at the cost of their own lives?

I noticed something about what was happening to Jesus in this moment.

Jesus’ words are strong and his manner is powerful. We are left in no doubt as to who he is, what he is determined to accomplish, the price he is prepared to pay for it, and the expectations he has of us as his followers.

But I think that his very intensity can reveal to us something very tender and real about Jesus in his humanity in this moment, something that might actually give us the courage to live and give as boldly and fully as we are being called.

But before we get to that moment, we begin in an interesting place. We begin with questions, questions that Jesus asks.

“Who do people say that I am?” he asks.

And then the follow up: “But who do you say that I am?”

The gospel story does not begin by saying, “Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he told his disciples, ‘I am the Messiah.’”

It says, “Jesus went on with his disciples to the villages of Caesarea Philippi; and on the way he asked his disciples, ‘Who do people say that I am?’”

Jesus wants to know what we think. Continue reading

Jesus Repents of Racism

Have you ever been new at something and just really wanted to get it right?

You’ve been given an unprecedented opportunity and all you can think is, “Don’t screw it up.”

It happens to me all the time.

Even though I’ve been working at St. Francis for two years and been ordained a priest for almost ten years, every day I pray to God, “Dear Lord, please don’t let me turn this dear lovely church into an ecclesiastical train wreck.”

I see other people engaged in new endeavors doing the same thing. A friend of mine and her husband are preparing for their first baby, due to be born at the end of November.

Of course, my friend Sara is nervous, wondering if she can handle the pain of labor, wondering if her child will turn out to be a ballet dancer or a serial killer or whatever.

But her mom is also a friend of mine, and talks to me about whether or not she’ll be a good grandmother.

Sara’s mom, Nancy, will tell me she’s planning to offer no parenting advice to Sara because she doesn’t want to be overbearing and interfering, while five minutes later Sara will be telling me she’s so glad she’ll be able to rely on her mom’s parenting advice.

The two of them get so worked up I start to wonder if I’m being too blasé about being a godmother for the first time.

Is it possible to negatively influence an infant in Iowa all the way from Indiana?

Could I singlehandedly turn him away from God and the Church and the Kansas Jayhawks and everything else I love if I don’t do everything exactly right?

Whether it’s a new job or a new baby or a new church, we all feel nervous when we’re venturing into the unknown and the stakes are high.

This is the situation in which we find Jesus in our Gospel today.

Jesus has traveled very far from his home in Galilee. He is ministering in Tyre and Sidon, what would feel to people in his time like a foreign country.

He is not among the Jews, he is in a country of Gentiles, Syrians and Phoenicians, foreigners with whom Israel has rarely been on good terms. Continue reading

Mirror, Mirror, On the Wall

Listen to these three quotes and tell me which one is the most familiar to you.

“For if any are hearers of the word and not doers, they are like those who look at themselves in a mirror; for they look at themselves and, on going away, immediately forget what they were like.”

“For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face.”

“Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?”

I’m guessing that in that order, those quotes go from least familiar, to somewhat familiar, to very familiar.

That’s right, in order of importance, or at least exposure, a Disney movie takes number one, followed by the First Letter to the Corinthians, and then our text appointed for today, the Letter of James.

That verse from James captured my attention this week, and I’ve thought a lot about mirrors.

Human beings have always longed to know what they look like, how others see them.  The seeming magic of being able to see one’s reflection has led to myths connecting mirrors to the soul.

Different cultures have attached different superstitions to mirrors, for example that breaking one creates seven years of bad luck, or that all the mirrors in the house must be covered when someone dies so that the departing soul doesn’t get trapped in one by the Devil.  Vampires, the undead, supposedly lack a reflection in a mirror.

The ancient Greek myth of Narcissus tells the story of a beautiful youth who, upon glimpsing his own likeness in water, falls in love with his own reflection and wastes away to death.

Narcissus is where we get the modern psychological concept of narcissism, which is all too relevant in our current social and political climate. The ancient Greeks, as much as both they and the Romans loved mirrors, saw their dangers. Continue reading

Things We Don’t Talk About: Jesus and Depression

Have you ever found a scripture that changed your life?

I did, and it’s not even Jesus who said it. It’s not from the gospels or Paul.

It’s actually our psalm today, Psalm 84.

Take a look back at it in your bulletin if you’d like—sometimes the psalm can kind of speed past us in the service and we don’t always absorb it—and I’ll tell you how Psalm 84 and I began our journey together.

I’ve dealt with clinical depression all of my adult life.

There were signs that it was emerging in high school and then it really crashed in on me catastrophically my freshman year in college.

The bottom dropped out of my mind and spirit quite abruptly.

Those of you who have dealt with this yourselves or walked this with family members know what it’s like to see the world in grayscale, as though your body has somehow biologically lost the ability to see color.

You know what it’s like to have to fight every single day to get out of bed, to struggle to fulfill the most basic responsibilities, to feel your world shrinking smaller and smaller around you.

You know what it’s like to feel suicide creeping closer and closer, tempting you with the idea of such blessed rest and peace, until the only things holding you back are the pain of your friends and family and frankly, the effort it would actually take to kill yourself.

Most people who have suicidal ideation have one specific temptation for how they would go about it.

For me it was driving my car into the supports of an overpass on the freeway.

At one point my junior year I had to give my car keys to my roommate because I didn’t trust myself not to do it.

I know I’m not the only one who’s been there. Continue reading

Becoming a People of Wisdom

It’s been an amazing week of discovery, learning, and fellowship at Senior VBS. I am so grateful to this congregation for taking this crazy idea of mine and running with it.

Our lay leaders have been tremendous in helping get this program off the ground, and although I can only speak for myself, I think we all had a lot of fun.

The main theme of our time together was discernment of call, a theme I preached about to the whole congregation last week and what I wrote about in my newsletter article this week.

I’ve been hitting that theme so hard because today is Welcoming Sunday, when we sign up for all the ministries we’re going to take part in for the next year.

I wanted us to spend this conscious time in spiritual reflection on vocation and call because as one of our lay leaders, Nicole Seiler, I think, said, the actual day of Welcoming Sunday is no time to be in discernment.

It’s a crowded, happy, festive day, with ice cream and conversation and noise and kids running around. It’s fabulous, but it’s not a time for deep reflection on your vocation in ministry.

That needs to come before Welcoming Sunday, and I hope over the last couple of weeks we’ve provided you with the tools, including the Ministry Guide, to have that conversation with God and your family about your call to ministry this year.

So we talked a lot about vocation at Senior VBS, and about how to build holistic practices of health and sustainability that make us able to answer our call. We talked about health, law, finances, grief and loss, caregiving—the full spectrum of life that affects us as ministers of the gospel.

But the Holy Spirit loves to throw me a curve ball now and then, and I felt deeply led as I began the program on Sunday to include another strand of reflection for which I had done no preparation at all.

And that theme was this: what does it mean to be an elder? Continue reading

A Message From An Angel: “Get Up and Eat.”

I love this passage from 1 Kings because it has to be the most endearingly prosaic theophany in the Bible.

Many times in scripture, people’s encounters with God or God’s messengers are grand and stirring.

There are flashing lights, wheels in the sky, chariots of fire, angels walking around inside fiery furnaces, or a multitude of the heavenly host in the skies proclaiming the glory of God.

Not for Elijah.

His angel functions something like a cross between a rude alarm clock and a nagging parent.

No “Greetings, highly favored one,” like Mary got, or, “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God of Hosts,” like Isaiah heard.

Elijah’s angel says, “Get up and eat.”

That’s the entirety of the message.

Elijah, worn out, downtrodden, and ready to give up, lies down to die. To be fair, he is being slightly melodramatic.

But the angel of the Lord is having none of it. “Suddenly an angel touched him and said, ‘Get up and eat.’”

Part of why I love this text is that neither Elijah nor we want God to communicate with us like this. We want the lights and the fireworks, or at least something poetic and beautiful.

Give us a gorgeous sunset and the words of the 23rd psalm at least.

Give us an overwhelming sense of eternal love and “Behold, I am with you to the end of the age.”

“Get up and eat?”

That’s hardly reassuring, or even encouraging. It’s so…normal. So basic.

God might as well remind us to quit losing our car keys and take out the trash while God’s at it.

It reminds me of a parishioner who once told me she wished God would quit hinting that she mop her floors more often. Continue reading