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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.
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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
“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.
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
