Jesus wants his disciples to know that death can never stay comfortably on the front page, fenced behind the explanations of what happened to other people. And this is all the more true when Death itself is a power, an agent of those anti-creational forces that are at the heart of every Empire.
Read More“Do not fret yourself because of evildoers.” The Psalmist seems to speak right through the centuries to our moment where, I for one, see a lot of fretting going on. Whether your news source is the daily paper or podcasts, cable tv or social media, we seem to be in a frenzy of fretting.
Read MoreThe Torah, the Way is not simply a cold, impersonal, feature of the world. It is the Law of the Lord, and that Lord is a humble and personal God who will come to instruct and guide, heal and save, God has come to give us life. In this way, the Psalm ends in praise of the God who is “my strength and my redeemer.” If we are to have the energy, the power to join in the pattern of life that the Law provides, we will do so not through our own efforts but by joining in the endless, dynamic energy of God. This is what eternal life is about, not so much an endless succession of days, but a grounding in the very reality that is Life itself.
Read MoreThe author of the Gospel of Mark did not offer us this story so we could look back at the foolishness of those first followers of Jesus. He knew that in his church and all the churches to come, we would continue trying to turn the gifts of God’s reign into projects of power. Mark knew with Jesus that welcoming children as radical gifts in our lives, and greeting them with wonder, is one of the best ways of keeping the church’s priorities in line with God's new social order.
Read MoreWe shouldn’t be part of a church as an identity marker; a dour routine by which we demonstrate that we are among the good people. True faith is about the cultivation of the heart—a drawing forth of love.
Read MoreIn watching Jesus, and imitating those who imitate him, we join in a great chain of discipleship—each of us learning to mix the recipe anew in our own bodies and lives. Like a good baker, who eventually leaves the recipe behind, knowing how to play with the ratios of ingredients, our life as disciples will move increasingly toward new expressions of the many facets of God.
Read MoreI imagine that many of us are like those Greeks in Jerusalem. We are searching for truth, longing for a deeper spiritual life, and we have the means and ability to pursue it, even taking an exotic pilgrimage here and there. None of those are bad things, but we have to watch that they do not shut us off from the total transformation that Jesus is calling us toward, a transformation that requires us to stand before the cross, giving over whatever we are clinging to of our lives so that they will die with him.
Read More“Wait for the Lord,” Isaiah councils. It is waiting that makes walking in the dark possible; our eyes need time to adjust to the illumination of stars. Jesus knew this need for waiting. In the midst of his rising fame and a chance to do the work of healing in the world, he took time to wait in a dark and wild place, away from the fires of the town and the safety of the city. It was into the dark that he went to pray, that most fundamental waiting before God. In prayer he oriented himself, remembering and accepting his dependence on his Father. In the dark he could look into the night and feel the comfort of the Love that made it all; the Love of which his own life was an expression.
Read MorePhilosophers, from Martin Heidegger to Jean-Louis Chretien, have understood the nature of language, or even being itself, as an answer to a call. And this reflects the biblical vision, where light and land, sky and sea, animals and plants are all called into being. The German Renaissance, theologian, Nicolas of Cusa said that: “To call is…to create, to share in being through communication is to be created.” There is something, then, that is created in me as I listen to birds in the pre-dawn dark or strain in a forest to sort through the varied voices, recognizing each as they sing. There is something in each of us that is being created when we wait patiently straining to make out the words of a child or join together in making music through singing. In each act of listening, small or large, we are answering a call; joining in the great communication that is at the heart of the world.
Read MoreThere is much that has been written about God. My shelves are full of books on theology and spirituality, prayer and ethics. And we have the bible, a book we rightly call “The Word of God,” that has over 700,000 individual words in the English translations. But from the beginning to the end, the language of God isn’t about words. The words are only circling a presence, the reality of God’s being with us. And it is this truth that comes to us most profoundly and fully in Jesus, God’s Son.
Read MoreJesus was the king returned, a reality we celebrate on this day, but his manner of life didn’t look much like that of a royal and the truth of his character was recognized by a very few. Jesus was a hidden king, a king who couldn’t be recognized by any of the normal signs of power. And yet his power was such that even death could not contain him, it was power that healed the sick and liberated the poor.
Read MoreThe saints of past and the present are people like most of us, those who are without all the resources of life, who weep and don’t have it all together. They are people who long for justice and often don’t see it. They are those who pray for peace despite the constant onslaught of violence. What makes them saints, those blessed people who make God’s love visible, isn’t the fact of any of these normal human situations or longings. Instead, it was they have turned their lives and longings toward the light of Christ, basking in His radiance and absorbing it into nourishment for the world. It is in this turning toward the light that they provide an opening for the healing love of God against those forces of darkness that seek to undo love and destroy God’s creatures through pride and shame.
Read MoreGod is not just liberating Israel from Egypt, but is also liberating them from the entire pattern of life that Egypt represents. So, to offer a new pattern, one that doesn’t depend on controlling people and exploiting the world, God offers them a strange food, one that can’t be identified according to any of their old ways of knowing or stored up for more than a day’s time.
Read MoreIt is in my inability to speak, the weakness of my words, the seeming failure of my prayers, that the Spirit moves into my heart, hearing its hope and grief, and offering my deepest self to God. The Spirit shares in the loss of words, speaking only in sighs, and yet the Spirit’s groaning on our behalf is understood by God. When we no longer know what to say, the gate to our deepest prayers is opened.
Read MoreReading the story of the binding of Isaac in our age, might strike us as an encounter with a primitive god, a dark picture that bears no likeness to the enlightened faith we’d like to claim. And yet I think we need this story now more than ever. Ours is a world that desires to control more and more, to solve every problem, to heal every wound. And while that might seem good on the surface, it makes it impossible for us to live into the fact of our limits, our vulnerability, the absurd pieces of our life that could never fit in some neat rational system. Faith, hope, and love are not achievable by algorithm or formula, or knowable beyond the risk of faith.
Read MoreHospitality is one of those words that is often overused and underdefined. It would be easy to think of this critical act only in terms of dinner parties and festive receptions, of attentive hosts and lavish welcomes. And all of those things could be a part of hospitality. In its roots, however, we find a more dangerous reality. The word hospitality means, most literally, welcoming the stranger, and the stranger in the ancient world was as often as not an enemy. The word host, in fact, comes from the Latin hostis which means enemy as well as stranger. To the ancient understanding an encounter with some unknown person could end with a curse as much as blessing. And yet, in the vulnerable world of nomads in the arid lands through which Abraham traveled, reliance on strangers was as necessary as it was perilous. Good hospitality, then, was a way of welcoming a stranger so that instead of ending up enemies, both parties left as friends.
Read MoreTo have life without end, for Jesus, is not something we can achieve by possessing the right set of facts, even the right set of beliefs, like some final exam of life. Instead, Jesus is inviting us into the knowledge that is a participation in God’s own self—the relationship of the Father and the Son and the Spirit in which we can become members in a life of love that been in existence from before time. To enter this knowledge, we are called to be students of Jesus, disciples who learn to enter his way of being.
Read MoreIt was on this night, in a celebration of Passover, that having loved his own Jesus loved them to the end. He showed this love by breaking bread and pouring wine, signs of the death that would be his ultimate offering. It was on this night that Jesus humbled himself and washed the feet of his disciples, even the feet of his betrayer. This humble washing was a living parable, an example of the love that was to mark out his disciples in the world.
Read MoreWhat if there was a way that our vision could be trained for more than what meets the normal human eye? That’s a possibility our scriptures introduce to us this morning. From Samuel learning to see as God sees to Jesus showing his disciples that there is more to the world than the systems of sin and shame, we learn that God’s vision of the world contains colors that are invisible to normal sight and yet can be seen by the light of God’s grace.
Read MoreIsaiah’s hope was based not on the fulfillment of a want but on trust—trust in the God of hope he knew would bring life and renewal in the end, the God who loved Israel and sought its good. It’s that kind of hope we are called to practice; a hope rooted in trust. Trust in the God of hope is the only hope that we can rely on, the only hope that even death cannot destroy. Isaiah saw the kingdom of Israel cut down, but he trusted that from the stump of Jesse, from the line of David, a new king would arise—one who would bring about a final healing of all things, a flourishing that would continue without end.
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