Hope + Lutheran + Church


a congregation of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

35 Ridge Avenue Homer City, Pennsylvania


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Web Devotions from Pastor Steve

 

Welcome! The devotions below are short pieces I'm writing each Monday through Friday.  We'll keep up the last five days at a time, so if you miss a day, you will always be able to see the last several devotions and get caught up to re-enter the conversation.  Over time, we will engage voices within Scripture and within the Christian community from the past and present--theologians, saints, mystics, and holy fools.  See below for a description of the current series of devotions, or jump right in here for today's devotion. I invite you to read these just as one more conversation partner in your own reflection about faith, life, and the Reign of God who grasps us in Jesus.  I would invite your own contributions to that conversation, too. I would invite your e-mails at pscbond@gmail.com.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

Devotions:  Current Series


The Gospel According to Mark

Starting in June 2011, I am rebooting these daily devotions and taking a trip through the Gospel according to Mark.  This is the shortest of the four gospels in the New Testament, and there is a pretty strong chance that it was the first one written, composed within a generation of the events it tells about.  This Gospel is more than just a record of historical events, but is intended to do something to us as we read--to kindle our faith in Jesus, the Son of God, and to bring us in on the divine conspiracy that Jesus ushered in, bringing about the Reign of God through suffering love and a cross.  Come along with us on this devotional journey as we get to know this Jesus whom we follow through the Gospel of Mark.  You are invited to follow along here on this website, or if you would like to receive these devotions via email, to write to me at pscbond@gmail.com and ask to be added to the list.

 

Today's Devotion:

 

“A Trip to the Movies”—Mark 11:20-21

Originally written for February 9, 2012

In the morning as they passed by, they saw the fig tree withered away to its roots.  Then Peter remembered and said to him, “Rabbi, look!  The fig tree that you cursed has withered.”

This scene in the Gospel of Mark reminds me a lot of Francis Ford Coppola.  Yes, the movie director.  In fact, it reminds me of the endings of two of his movies:  Apocalypse Now and The Godfather.  That’s just what you were thinking, too, right?

See, sometimes a director will make a point by putting two scenes, or two sets of images, right up against one other, or even cut between two events that are supposed to be going on at the same time in the movie.  It’s not just to show us two things that are happening in the same moment in time, but to tell us something about how those two events relate.  They interpret one another.  They give a sort of commentary on each other.  The fancy-pants cinematic word for it is “montage,” but I suppose it’s really the movie equivalent of a parable.

Here’s an example.  At the end of Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando’s character, Col. Kurtz, is finally executed—and that scene is juxtaposed with a scene of the villagers ritually slaughtering a water buffalo.  We’re supposed to “get”—without anyone having to narrate it for us with a voice-over—that there is a parallel between the demise of the animal and the death of the Colonel.  And it’s a pretty obvious connection.  It would really be less powerful if you did have a character or a narrator say, “The water buffalo is a metaphor for Marlon Brando!”

Something similar happens at the end of The Godfather, when Michael Corleone (Al Pacino) is standing is as the baptismal sponsor for his baby nephew—literally, the godfather of the child. And as the baby is being baptized and Michael is speaking the vows to “renounce the devil and his ways,” the movie cuts back and forth to a show us a number of Michael’s enemies being, shall we say, taken out by his henchmen.  The disconnect between Michael’s pious words and the awful, violent actions he has ordered his thugs to carry out is heightened because we see them happening simultaneously.  You could just show those moments as two separate, self-contained scenes, but part of the power is in having them interspersed. 

So, back to the Gospel…

We are actually in the middle of one of those montage scenes in the movie of Jesus’ life that we call the Gospel of Mark.  A few days back, we got the beginning of this scene of the “movie,” where Jesus came upon a fig tree, looking to find fruit, and then after he found none, cursing the tree.  Then, Jesus entered the Temple in Jerusalem, saw the moneychangers and sellers of sacrificial animals, and drove them all out while overturning their tables.  And as we said the other day, Jesus was symbolically destroying the Temple and the whole system it stood for, shutting down operations for the short term, as a way of showing what was in store for all of Israel if it continued to turn away from God and to reject the Messiah, Jesus, that God had sent. 

Well, now we are on the other side of that Temple scene, and the camera pans past the same fig tree from the day before, and now it has withered to its roots.  Mark is jumping into the role of movie director here: he has given us these two events side by side and edited together so that we will make the connection.  Nobody has to say, “Get it?  The fig tree is a stand-in for the whole people of God if they persist in rejecting God and what God has called them to be!”  We get it.  Jesus had cursed the fig tree for refusing to be what a fig tree is meant to be: something that produces fruit.  And in effect, he said, “Go ahead, have it your way—if you insist on turning from life, you can have exactly what you are asking for. And then he turns his attention to the people of God who were doing the same as the fig tree.

But this was never really just about figs.  Jesus was offering one more warning, one more parable, one more plea, to his people, not to turn away from God and the Savior God had sent in him, in Jesus.  Jesus was warning his people, Israel, that if they persisted in their rejection of the ways of life and courted violence as a way of dealing with the Romans, they were going to get exactly what they were asking for, and the Romans would come and destroy their whole city and burn their Temple to the ground.  And that, of course, is exactly what did happen in the year AD 70, when the Roman general Pompey razed Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple, leaving only the foundation wall on the western side of the building, known today as the Wailing Wall.

Like we’ve said before, sometimes the worst thing that can happen to you is to get exactly what you were asking for.

This whole business with the fig tree actually withering up and dying on either side of the Temple scene is pretty dramatic, but it needs to be in order to get our attention, and the attention of the overly-comfortable people in Jesus’ day.  It is the only time Jesus’ power is used in a negative or destructive way, and yet even here, it is meant to serve as a warning for the whole nation, a warning to the people that their persistent turning from God will leave them withered, too.  Jesus has to be dramatic, and even shocking, with this moment, because there are serious consequences, and because the people of God (both long ago and still today) so often let our senses be dulled so we miss what is staring us in the face.  As Flannery O’Connor famously said about her jarring characters and stories, “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures.” 

The amazing thing is that this whole scene, this whole strange montage of the fig tree and the overturned tables in the Temple, is one more sign of the lengths Jesus will go to draw us back to life and away from our self-destructive ways.  Rather than just crossing his arms indifferently or washing his hands of us, Jesus goes to all this trouble, all this drama, to get through to us.  I suppose today, we might ask, too, where Jesus has been shouting at the top of his lungs to our headphone-covered ears, and how we can learn to listen again, and find… life.

Good Lord, help us to see the lengths you have gone for the love of us, and help us to respond.

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“A Fierce Grace”—Mark 11:18-19

Originally written for February 8, 2012

And when the chief priests and scribes heard it, they kept looking for a way to kill him; for they were afraid of him, because the whole crowd was spellbound by his teaching. And when evening came, Jesus and his disciples went out of the city.

I know I have said this before, but it bears repeating (and we “religious” folks are often so forgetful). If your picture of Jesus is someone who would never have gotten people riled up enough to kill him, you have confused Jesus with someone else.  Possibly a mannequin or a cardboard cut-out. 

Sure, everybody knows that Jesus died—even people who have never darkened the doorway of a church may well have picked up that fact just by living in our culture.  Lots of people know that Jesus died on a cross, executed like a common criminal.  We Christians make a pretty big deal about the fact that Jesus died on the cross, actually.  And yet, somehow, we seem to be able to gloss over the logical conclusion that there was some reason people were mad enough at Jesus to kill him.

This seems hard for us to believe, or at least to make any sense out of, because we were all taught to think of Jesus as a “nice” person.  And that’s not wrong, not at all—but there’s more to Jesus than that.  Jesus was (and is!) unquestionably kind, absolutely.  Jesus was recklessly compassionate, too, and often surprisingly gentle.  All of those things.  And yet, nevertheless, Jesus caused enough trouble to make people want to kill him.  Our picture of the rabbi from Nazareth isn’t complete unless we remember he was able to disarm people in the very same moment he was embracing people. 

You couldn’t walk away from Jesus with your old illusions intact, and, frankly, people really like their own personal illusions, whatever they are (some popular ones are, “I can make God love me by my good behavior,” or “I don’t need any help in life,” or “I have pulled myself up by my own bootstraps, thank you very much.”).  And that was just the thing—Jesus had (and has!) a way of changing you if you would dare to get very close to him.  “Grace changes us,” wrote Flannery O’Connor, “and change is always painful.” 

That was the trouble with Jesus:  he insisted on grace, a grace that always turns our world upside down.  We tend to think we would be so much happier, or at least pleasantly numb, if we could just picture Jesus as a smiling bearded man who doesn’t look to close at our broken places and will leave us be, someone who will help us keep up our well-crafted appearances and not probe any deeper to the hurts beneath.  That kind of Jesus wouldn’t have gotten killed, by the way.

Ah, but there’s the rub:  what we need is someone who will see past our illusions, who will shatter them, actually, in order to put things right in us.  We need someone who will overturn the tables in the Temple to get our attention, not someone who lets us think we can pay God off to look the other way from our broken places with a few sacrifices offered and a few prayers muttered out of a book.  We need someone who will raise the dead in us, not someone who will allow us to limp along in a spiritually vegetative state.  Our problem is that when Jesus actually comes along to do just that, we get up in arms and start reaching for our hammer and nails.

It is the holiest and most wonderful of miracles that Jesus, knowing this about us, still comes close to us to heal us, knowing that his coming close is what provokes us to want to get rid of him.

In his book, The Importance of Being Foolish, Brennan Manning writes that Jesus “has redirected reality and given it a revolutionary reorientation. Jesus did not tidy up the world. He brought it to a screeching halt. What he fashioned out of the human stuff of the old order is not nicer people with better morals but brand-new creation.”  That’s the Catch-22 Jesus is willing to endure for us:  we need someone who will make a “brand-new creation” out of us, but we are afraid of anybody with the fierce grace to actually transform us, rather than simply “tidying us up” by sweeping our messes under the rug.  That’s why the cross is where Jesus heads:  we are bent on killing anyone who dares get close enough beneath our armor to really love us into newness, and Jesus refuses to leave us suffocating under the weight of our chain-mail of illusions of self-sufficiency. 

Unlike a world full of pretenders, however, Jesus is actually willing to put his money where his mouth is, to up and die for us, at our hands if it comes to that, rather than just being “nice” if that means leaving us dying in our sins.

So, which will we pick today to be our Lord?  Who is worthy of it, and who can actually save us?  A cardboard cut-out or mannequin will never say anything that will challenge you, upset you, offend you, or pull you out of your comfort zones—it will be “nice.”  But it will not love you back, or love you first, for that matter.  Only Jesus loves us fiercely enough to come in close and raise the dead in us, risking that we will nail him to a cross for doing the very thing that brings us to life. Praise Jesus.

Good Lord, it must be hard loving us. In spite of our defenses, Jesus, come in with your grace and change us.  Bring us to life again, Lord, even if it brings our best-laid plans to a screeching halt.

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“Turning the Tables”—Mark 11:15-17

Originally written for February 7, 2012

Then they came to Jerusalem.  And he entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold doves; and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.  He was teaching and saying, “Is it not written, ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer for all the nations’? but you have made it a den of robbers.”

In December of 1773, a group of Massachusetts colonists made a nighttime raid on three cargo ships in Boston harbor and proceeded to empty more than three hundred chests of tea shipped from India into the cold water below.  Their actions were not only controversial, but downright revolutionary.  And they knew it.

The colonists involved in what came to be known as the Boston Tea Party were making a political statement. It was about rejecting the entire system that the tea represented. The colonists denied that the British government had the right to tax the colonies without their having any representation whatsoever in Parliament. The British had passed a law taxing the tea.  Rather than bow to the British government and concede that Parliament had the authority to impose a tax, the colonists would rather have destroyed all the tea.  And so they did.

Now, here is a point about which we need to be clear:  as far as historians can tell, the colonists didn’t think that Parliament was especially corrupt, or that its lawmakers were vicious or morally evil.  They didn’t particularly object to what the tax money was being spent on, and there were no charges that members of Parliament were pocketing the taxpayers’ money for their own private vacations, home purchases, or secret affairs with their mistresses.  The Boston Tea Party wasn’t about the misuse of their tax money—it was a rejection of the whole system that the British had set up, a system that allowed colonists to be taxed without a voice in the discussion.  It wasn’t about what the tax money was to be spent on, or how it was used, but about stopping the whole system, the whole way of thinking that allowed the British to impose taxes on the colonists.

And, just so we are clear on this as well, the colonists knew that their action was largely a symbolic one.  They were stopping the flow of tea from just one set of shipments.  They knew that more ships would come with more tea, but they had sent a message.  Destroying the tea was symbolically destroying the system, the arrangement of powers, which had sent it to them in the first place, even if realistically it only interrupted the flow of tea for a short time.

Something like this is the way we need to understand Jesus’ actions in the Temple, as he overturned tables and drove out the moneychangers.  Jesus was not just calling for reform.  He was not simply saying that a few bad apples were cheating people in their sale of animals for sacrifice.   Jesus was shutting down operation of the Temple, if only for a short time, in a symbolic act aimed at the entire system that the Temple represented.  Jesus was, symbolically but still with very real consequences, destroying the Temple and the whole system of sacrifices that went with it.

When you put it that way, Jesus’ actions have a much sharper edge to them, don’t they?  Jesus is not just suggesting that maybe there are some simple changes that could perhaps be made to improve the whole experience of purchasers of animals for sacrifice.  Jesus was throwing a monkey-wrench into the whole system.  Like a parable, but with actions instead of only words, Jesus was enacting the destruction of the Temple, because he was instead putting himself forward as a replacement.  Jesus saw himself as the new Temple—the new place of sacrifice, condensed down into one person, one life offered, one death given in place of countless animals and countless prayers from countless priests.  Jesus was offering an alternative that whole system in his death and resurrection, in order to bring us to life.  Nothing less would suffice for our need, and so nothing less than a destruction of the old system would be necessary.

Robert Farrar Capon writes: “Jesus came to raise the dead. He did not come to teach the teachable; He did not come to improve the improvable; He did not come to reform the reformable. None of those things works.”  That is precisely the point.  Jesus was not simply a misunderstood, would-be reformer.  We sometimes try to make him into one, especially in this story, because maybe we get a little embarrassed at the idea of worshiping someone who would have been arrested for disturbing the peace and destruction of private property in our day. 

A reformer is respectable.  And a reform movement is pretty much safe, as long as you’re not really messing with the order of things and the trains still run on time. And a reform movement can let you walk away with your life intact and think that you are doing pretty much all right on your own, thank you very much—you just need the occasional nudge to get yourself back on the right track.

 A revolutionary is a scandal. A revolutionary movement is risky, because it gets to the heart of things.  And a revolutionary movement says that you are in need of something more, something deeper, something radical, to happen and change everything. 

Reformers say “Just try a little harder—you’re almost there, but we just need to tweak a few things.”  Revolutionaries like Jesus say, “You can’t patch this with duct tape. Nothing will fix this but death and resurrection, destruction and rebuilding.  The whole system has to go.”

Can we dare to admit today that we are followers of a revolutionary?  Can we dare to let him overturn the tables within us and start from scratch with us? Nothing less, it turns out, will suffice.

Lord Jesus, we can scarcely imagine how you will rearrange our lives and completely reorder our comfortable routines and rhythms—and yet, we have come to believe we need nothing less. Come, overturn the old systems we lived by, and bring your new order of things, the Kingdom of God.

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“Still On the Anvil”—Mark 11:12-12

Originally written for February 6, 2012

On the following day, when they came from Bethany, he was hungry. Seeing in the distance a fig tree in leaf, he went to see whether perhaps he would find anything on it.  When he came to it, he found nothing but leaves, for it was not the season of figs. He said to it, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again.”  And his disciples heard it.

I suppose the most damning thing that one person can say to another is, “Fine. Have it your way.” 

It is the abrupt kind of sentence that ends a conversation, and sometimes a relationship.  And it does so without the heat of hatred, but with something even worse: the chill of indifference.  Saying, “Fine, have it your way,” has the ring of saying, “Go ahead—do whatever you want.  I don’t care—because I won’t be around to see what comes of it.”  It has the feel of saying, “You made your bed, now sleep in it.”  It is a way of washing your hands of another person and letting them have exactly what they want…because you are just done with their nonsense. As they say, the opposite of love is not hate—the true opposite of love is apathy. I hope you have not been a party to many conversations that ended with the sentence, “Fine. Have it your way.” Such words leave lasting scars.

I say all this because I think we need to be clear about what the worst kind of thing would be to hear from God.  A lot of the time, we think that the worst thing God can do to us is “punish” us, whatever that might mean.  And of course, we have no shortage of imagination when it comes to that, or at least no shortage of blame for God.  It becomes very easy in life to assume that the slow truck in front of you when you are already running late to an appointment has been sent by angelic messenger to “get” you for something you did earlier in the day.  Or that the reason my prayers seem to have gone unanswered is that I must have done something wrong.  Or that the message on the machine with bad news is God’s way of getting his pound of flesh for some offense I have committed. 

There is, I guess, some comfort in the fact that when we do get stuck in that thinking, we are at least in some good company with folks from the Bible. There’s Job, sitting on his ash-heap, wishing he’d never been born, and asking why God is punishing him, when Job doesn’t know that God isn’t punishing him and in fact has been speaking up for Job behind the heavenly curtain.  There’s Jonah, complaining from the belly of the beast about how God has punished him with the great fish, when in fact the animal has actually saved him from drowning alone in an icy sea, and when God’s purpose was really not so much to punish as to re-route Jonah and help him get his head on straight (remember, the fish “vomits” him up in the end, right where God had sent him to go in the first place).  And then there’s Paul, wincing over his “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12) and praying repeatedly that it would go away—only to have God respond to him that this wasn’t a punishment, but a means of God’s gracious presence in his weakness.  “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness,” comes the divine reply, and not, “If you thought that was bad, wait till I find my paddle!”  All three went through suffering, sure.  But the pain wasn’t a punishment from God in any of their cases, really, and for all three of them, God never lost track of them or let them go.

For all three of them, there was surely hurt. But God never said to any of them, “Fine.  Have it your own way.  I’m done with you.”  Remember, says the writer to the Hebrews, that “the Lord disciplines those whom he loves, and chastises every child whom he accepts” (12:6).  In other words, suffering may well be a sign that you are still on the anvil being shaped by the blacksmith, rather than on the scrap heap.  As the book of Proverbs says, “faithful are the wounds from a friend” (27:6). That is, sometimes being loved means getting a needed smack upside the head or a sharp word to get us back on track.  Those are not the worst thing in life.  In fact, those kind of “faithful wounds” can be a much-needed reminder that the people we depend on have not let us out of their eyesight, and love us enough to tell us the truth.

The worst thing in the world is not when we are corrected, disciplined, or even smacked upside the head and yelled at.  The worst thing is the calm, quiet, detached sentence, “Fine. Have it your own way.”  This, it turns out, is what we get a momentary glimpse of in our verse today when Jesus curses a fig tree.  It doesn’t have any figs when Jesus had been hoping for one, and so Jesus says to the tree, in effect, “Fine—you don’t want to be what a fig tree is meant to be?  You don’t want to produce any figs.  Have it your way.  Never produce another fig.  I don’t care.”  He doesn’t lick his lips and come up with a creatively cruel demise for the tree.  There are no threats about setting it on fire, pruning off some branches, or sending a guy with an ax to chop it down.  There is simply the sentence, “May no one ever eat fruit from you again,” with the implied ending, “…if that’s the way you want it.”  But of course, such words have a way of leaving scars.

C.S. Lewis once famously remarked that in the end there are two kinds of people in the world:  those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “Thy will be done.”  In other words, God is not up there salivating at the prospect of zapping us with lightning bolts or sending people to hell; if it comes to that, God gives us only what we ask for.  The worst, most damning, most heart-breaking sentence God could speak is, “If you insist on turning away from me… if you insist on refusing to be what you were meant to be… if you insist on rejecting me, then you can have it your way.”

On a day like today, perhaps the obstinate fig tree is a reminder for us that when we do feel like we are getting a divine smack upside the head, it is a sign to us that God has not spoken that sentence to us.  It is, in fact, a sign that we are still on the anvil, still being worked by the Master.

Lord Jesus, your will be done. We ask for your presence today, even if it is a correcting, disciplining, or shaking presence, that we may know you have not taken your eyes of us for a second.  Keep us on your anvil, Lord.

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“The Calm Before the Storm”—Mark 11:11

Originally written for February 3, 2012

Then [Jesus] entered Jerusalem and went into the temple; and when he had looked around at everything, as it was already late, he went out to Bethany with the twelve.

Chances are, you know what is coming next.  And chances are, so did Jesus.

In another three verses—just the very next day in the story of the Gospel—Jesus is going to enter the Temple in Jerusalem, overturning tables, driving out people and animals, and causing quite a stir.  And as a result, he will be marked as Public Enemy No. 1 by the religious professionals who keep the Temple and its sacrificial system going.  In another seven verses—less than twenty-four hours from the events in today’s verse—Mark will tell us that “the chief priests and the scribes… kept looking for a way to kill him.” The stakes are that high. And Jesus knows it.

In fact, you could also say that Jesus provokes things, pushing them to a head in this last week of his life, the week he spends in Jerusalem.  The parade into the city, riding a borrowed colt while palm branches were waved from the sidelines, was meant as a dig against the Roman parade going on at about the same time.  In other words, Jesus was consciously taking on the power of Rome by offering his own parade as an alternative to the ways of the Empire: the alternative called the Kingdom of God.

Well, when Jesus overturns the tables in the Temple in just a few verses, that will also be a conscious, deliberate, planned action. And it, too, will have a purpose:  the “cleansing” of the Temple is a criticism of the whole Temple-system. It wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment violent rage—it was a conscious act of holy troublemaking.  And just like with Palm Sunday, Jesus was offering an alternative to the corrupted and abused sacrificial religious system of the Temple:  Jesus was offering himself as the new Temple, the new place of sacrifice.

Sometimes we imagine that Jesus just had these random ideas or did everything spontaneously, as if he never knew what he was going to do next. But that’s not the way the Bible itself reports the story. After the Palm Sunday parade, Jesus went into the city and saw all the things going on in the Temple. And he knew what he had to do. He knew that the next day, he was going to drive the sellers-of-religion out and overturn their tables. It was all part of Jesus’ willful, chosen plan, and all part of his Kingdom revolution. On that Sunday evening, Jesus knew what was coming next.

But… Jesus was going to choose his moment. And that meant, for a moment, that he would go back out of the city to rest and to recharge.  It was one of those calm-before-the-storm moments, and since Jesus saw the storm coming, he was going to make the most of the calm, too. 

I sometimes think we forget both of those facts: first, that Jesus’ mission really was radical, provocative, and transformative for human history, and second, even something that revolutionary still wasn’t going to happen in just one day.  As urgently important and life-changing as the way of Jesus is, that way is a marathon, rather than a sprint.

When we forget the first half, that Jesus’ actions really were revolutionary, we slip complacently into playing church rather than living in the Kingdom-life.  We forget that Jesus didn’t come just to give us something to do on Sunday mornings, and that Christianity is not just a hobby.  We forget that Jesus and all of his first followers were willing to risk dying for the Good News of the Kingdom, and instead we decide we can’t be inconvenienced to go out of our way for that same Good News.  We sort of reduce Jesus down to a nice spiritual teacher who taught us to be nice, too, and then we take the Christian life to be just a fun social gathering where I can win the accolades of my friends and neighbors who see me making the occasional appearance at a church function.  That’s playing church, and if that’s all Jesus was about, it’s not worth spending our time on, and it certainly wasn’t worth Jesus dying for.  And as a rule of thumb, if your picture of Jesus is of someone who wouldn’t get the political and religious power-brokers so stirred up they wanted to kill him, you’ve confused Jesus with a cardboard cutout.  We can’t forget that Jesus was—and is!—revolutionary, and he really has launched us into a movement that is turning the world upside down with radical generosity, extravagant welcome and hospitality for the stranger, reckless forgiveness for those who have wronged us, and surprising freedom for the captive.  Jesus did not step into controversies accidentally like a bear-trap.  He chose to enter into the fray like a guerrilla leader.

At the same time, we cannot forget the second half of the scene from today’s verse:  that after getting the lay of the land and setting his sights on the next day’s mission, Jesus went home to rest.  His revolution was not going to happen in a day.  In fact, it is still going on now, some 2,000 years later.  We Christians who are a part of his movement are still in the thick of it, because the Kingdom Jesus has come to bring is too important to do just a rushed, half-baked job for.  We will not feed all the hungry overnight or end poverty and homelessness in a week.  We will not reach everyone with the Good News by the end of the day.  We will not get all the work on our to-do lists done in one day, and chances are that we will not have finished “fighting the good fight of the faith” by the time we lay our heads down tonight.  We are a part of a revolutionary thing called the Kingdom of God, but we are in it for the long haul, too.  We will need moments, and sometimes days or weeks, of rest—not because we are giving up or cashing out our chips, but exactly because we are committed to seeing it through.  Jesus knew the kind of holy troublemaking waiting for him in the morning, and because of that, he got a good night’s sleep to be ready for it. Looking at the new day in front of us, and however God will use us for the Kingdom in it, let’s catch our breath and enter it rested… and ready.

Lord God, renew us and recharge us so that we can be ready for whatever work you have for us in this day, and our whole lives long.

 

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February-March 2012 Pastor's Letter

 

The God-Shaped Hole, Or, In Defense of Lent

“There was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill form all his surroundings…. But these are all inadequate, because the  infinite abyss can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object, that is to say, only by God himself .”  —Blaise Pascal, Pensées

 

“You awaken us to delight in your praise; for you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless, until it rests in you.” --St. Augustine of Hippo, Confessions

 

Lent gets a bad rap sometimes.  For centuries, Christians have marked of a season of forty days (not counting Sundays) leading up to the story of Jesus’ death and resurrection at Good Friday and Easter Sunday, a season we call Lent.  And that season is focused on following Jesus to the cross, turning from our sins, facing our mortality, and cutting out distractions that keep us from Christ.  Admittedly, that isn’t very cheery, especially when there is a whole new slew of reality television shows, sporting events, and other entertainment out there that we could fill our days with frivolously instead of doing all that hard spiritual work.  Maybe most beaten-up of all is the long-standing discipline of giving something up for the season of Lent.  Some people have the tradition of refraining from eating chocolate, or meat, or movies, or something else good. (Note: whatever you might “give up” for Lent, is something you are free to “take back up” again after Lent, as we return to Easter joy. It’s just that you have learned once again that the things you thought you couldn’t live without really do not have to have control over us.)  And in our consumer-driven society, it’s always hard to give things up.

Like I say, this discipline of giving things up can be met with shrugging indifference to downright resistance, with questions like, “Do I have to…?” or “Why give up chocolate if I’m saved by grace?” That’s understandable, since the things we might give up are things we like.  But the point of the Lenten discipline—whether the practice of fasting from something, or intensified prayer and devotion, or renewed commitment to discipleship—is not to rain on our parade and make us dour-faced, miserable people until April. The point is to remind us of what really can satisfy us in life, and what can only make empty promises to us.  Because as many wise saints who have gone before us (including the two quoted above) have taught us, the One we are really longing for in life is none other than the God who went to a cross for us. Jesus goes into the emptiness.

As Pascal says, there is an “infinite abyss”—or as he is sometimes paraphrased, a “God-shaped hole”—inside each one of us, which can only be filled by the presence of Christ.  And we spend a lot of our time, energy, and money chasing after other “stuff” we think will fill that empty place inside us: bigger cars, additions to our houses, promotions at work, money in the bank, new relationships, the envy of our friends and coworkers, newer phones, and on and on and on. The season of Lent—and the whole of the Christian life, really!—are not about saying those things are all bad, just that they are inadequate to fill the vacuum that only God can occupy and still the restlessness in our hearts. The Good News is that the One who is just enough to satisfy our neediness has given himself to us on the cross. This Lent, in whatever ways you do it, let us use this season to peel away the things that will not satisfy, and instead seek after the One who has made us for himself. That is the life-long journey of people of hope and new life.  —Christ’s Peace, Pastor Steve

 

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