Cast Out

Scripture: Matthew 8

The end of Chapter 8 of the Gospel of Matthew brings us a surreal and disquieting story.

In his travels, Jesus encounters two individuals who are possessed by demons. They are terrifying and fearsome creatures, so daunting that anyone who meets up with them turns back. But Jesus does not retreat when they confront him. Instead, He casts their demons out, sending them into a nearby herd of swine. The possessed swine rush down a steep bank into the sea, where they perish.

Just when you think this story could not get much stranger, it does. The swineherds who had been tending the flock rush into town and tell the story of the miracle Jesus performed. The entire population of the town gathers and goes out to meet Jesus. Do they praise him? Worship him? Celebrate his victory over evil? Quite the opposite: "and when they saw him, they begged him to leave the neighborhood."

This statement is so unexpected, so at odds with the narrative that comes before it, that I suspect many people read past it without noticing the disconnection, in the way we sometimes incorrectly finish someone else's sentence based on what we wrongly anticipate they are about to say. To the extent readers do notice the abrupt shift, many of them may think that it signals nothing more than that the people from this town were a singularly clueless and ungrateful bunch.

Perhaps that is the intended punchline: "Clueless and Ungrateful People Reject Jesus, Again."

But I don't think so.

It is risky to make too much of the organization of the chapters within the gospels. Still, it seems to me significant that Chapter 8 is overwhelmingly about one common theme: healing.

The first four verses describe how Jesus healed a leper--an utterly powerless and alienated outsider under the norms of his society.

The next nine verses offer a pointed contrast, describing how He healed the beloved servant of a centurion, a member of one of that society's most powerful and influential classes.

The next two verses briefly note how He healed someone connected with his inner circle--a relative of Peter's.

And, again offering a marked contrast, the sixteenth verse observes that He healed a collection of complete strangers. Indeed, it says that He "cured all who were sick" and who came to him.

So I think the first thing to understand about the story of the demons is that it is really a story about healing. And this means that it is fundamentally a story about love and compassion.

This is clear from another detail in the story that we may miss: the possessed individuals ask Jesus to cast their demons into the swine--indeed, they beg him to do so. Granted, the story may feel different to us because it is set up as a battle between Jesus and the forces of evil. But we shouldn't miss the parallel with the other healing stories: the leper asks Jesus to heal him; the centurion asks Jesus to save his servant. In other words, this is a story about how Jesus, out of his limitless care for others and infinite grace, responded to a plea for help.

And this brings us to a second point. The demons are not simply overcome and cast out by divine power. They are conquered by a specific kind of power, the power that comes not from vengeance or wrath or retribution but from love and compassion. Even for these people, the cursed of the earth, Love shows up. Love battles for them. And Love prevails.

Now, what does this say about the disaffected townspeople who want Jesus out of their midst? Well, it could say a number of different things. One obvious possibility--the one I entertained earlier--is that these folks were just another example of the clueless and ungrateful people who we run across in the gospels with unnerving frequency.

But I would like you to consider another possibility. What if they did understand? What if they got it? What if they grasped the overarching and unrelenting Truth that the most powerful force in the universe did not call them to conquest and victory and triumphalism but to quiet courage and empathy and healing--all in the name and through the upending offices of the living God?

Think about how an honest engagement with this reality would challenge them, would demand new things of them, would throw them in unanticipated directions. Think about how it would require them to make deep and lasting changes in their lives.

Think about how it would scare the hell out of them.

And, if you can imagine all these things, then you can imagine why they would have encouraged Jesus to hit the road.

These aren't bad people I'm describing. At the risk of a flagrant anachronism, I'm imagining decent men and women who just want to go back to their living rooms, their television sets, their laptops, their minor disciplines of brushing their teeth and taking a bit of exercise, their children, their favorite restaurant, their safe corners in a perilous world.

These are not clueless and ungrateful people whom we should feel free to judge.

These are our friends

our families

our neighbors

ourselves.

You see, I do not think that the reaction of the townspeople detours us from the central point of this story. I think that it is the central point of this story. I think that it is intended to draw us into some hard questioning of our own choices--or, more pointedly, of the things we do not choose.

And so we must ask ourselves:

What does the Love look like that would compel to live differently--radically differently?

Where have we already met it?

When will we stop sending it away?

Amen.

Gradually, Then Suddenly

Scripture: Matthew 4:18-22

It is the beginning of Jesus's ministry. He finds four fishermen at their work. He asks them to follow him. They "immediately" drop everything and do so. "Immediately," the text pointedly says. "Immediately."

It doesn't seem very plausible, does it?

There is no evidence that the fishermen knew Jesus. He had nothing of material value to offer them. And these were not dreamy-eyed seminary students waiting around for some holy mendicant to happen along and offer up a little enlightenment. These were fishermen, practical guys who worked for a living and who had no time to waste. And, having been invited, they didn't think about it or talk about it or delay.

They just went with him, the story says, immediately.

You might think that the story doesn't make much sense and so is probably untrue. That's a dangerous line of reasoning in light of the senselessness that constantly surrounds us. As Mark Twain said: "It's no wonder truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense."

Well, if the story is true, then why would they do it?

That question is often answered by focusing entirely upon the person of Jesus. This scene, the argument goes, tells us something important about what it must have been like to stand in his presence. Those who encountered him must have been overtaken by his radiant holiness, his overwhelming grace, his divine light, his irresistible charisma, and so on and so on.

I do not doubt for an instant that encountering Jesus must have been an experience beyond anything that I can imagine. But the argument that the fishermen went along with him because no one could resist his sacred pull seems to me deeply problematic for at least two reasons.

First, many people did resist Jesus's influence. Indeed, in this very scene we also meet the often neglected Zebedee, father of two of these fishermen, who decided to stay home with the boats. Also, the disciples themselves went through periods where they pulled away from Jesus. And, of course, whole crowds of people wanted nothing to do with him but to crucify him.

Second, this argument deprives the fishermen of their human agency. It turns them into automatons who threw down their nets and followed Jesus because he pushed the right button. And, by making them less than human, this argument misses a profound truth about human behavior that is embedded in the story and that can help us understand how major changes in our life often occur.

So let's shift our focus a bit and imagine ourselves in the skin of one of these fishermen.    

These were not recreational fishermen--they fished for a living. That cannot have been an easy life. The hours were almost certainly long and tiring. The work was probably often tedious. Every day, they hauled the heavy nets out to the sea and then hauled the heavier, wet, burdened nets back into the boats and to shore. They were at the mercy of the elements. And, of course, the catch could be disappointing. As my father used to say to me when we'd have an unproductive day on our boat, "there's a reason they call it 'fishing' and not 'eating.'"

If you want to talk about something implausible, try this: it seems to me completely implausible that these men never questioned how they were spending their hours on planet earth. Surely, as human beings, they must from time to time have asked themselves the same questions we ask ourselves: Is this what my life is to be made of? Is this all there is for me? Is there nothing more, nothing greater, nothing more meaningful to come?

Of course, these are not just questions that a fisherman might ask himself. Over the years, I have heard the same questions from the lips of doctors, lawyers, judges, professors, teachers, successful businessmen ... indeed, just about everyone.

And then there comes a moment. Some turning point presents itself in life and we take it. And we do so because we have been spending most of our life getting ready for its arrival--whether we knew it or not.

There is a wonderful scene in Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises where one of the characters asks another how he went bankrupt. He replies: "gradually, then suddenly."

I have come to believe that these are some of the wisest words ever written. They perfectly describe how many of the worst things in life happen to us: financial ruin; alcoholism; drug abuse; the slow descent and ultimate crashing of a relationship. Gradually. Then suddenly.

But they also perfectly describe how many of the best things in life happen to us. Many of us fall in love gradually, then suddenly. We come to insight gradually, then suddenly. We find happiness gradually, then suddenly. We discover meaning in our lives gradually, then suddenly.

Paradoxically, these words also describe how we often transform some of our hardest experiences into some of our most powerful. We are working toward finding greater meaning in life; a terrible illness comes along; we suddenly move to a place of higher enlightenment. We are striving to have a more generous heart and to resist petty squabbles; we lose a loved one; our capacity to focus on what matters suddenly improves. I suspect that all of us have either had this experience or know someone who has.

There is, of course, no way to know for sure how to understand the story in this scripture. The text does not expressly tell us why the fishermen followed Jesus. But it is in the nature of the mysteries of sacred texts that they invite us not only into their words, but into the human heart, into our own hearts.

Why did the fishermen follow Jesus? No one knows for certain. But I suspect that it is because they had become ready for him before he ever appeared on the shore.

Perhaps you are at a time in your life when you are asking those hard questions I mentioned earlier. If so, then I think this passage has an important, if subtle, message that may help.

This passage tells you that those questions should not, must not, leave you in despair. Those questions are the process of preparing for the thing that comes along that changes everything.

Those questions, and the introspection they inspire, are the gradually.

Now, watch, my friends, for the suddenly.

Watch.

And watch.

And watch.

And, when it comes, throw down your nets.

"Immediately."

Amen.     

Beyond the Boundaries: On Limits, Love, and Lanyards

Scripture: Psalm 51:10; Mark 1:21-28

       I had a vision that I had passed to the next world and found myself standing before St. Peter at the gates of heaven.  Peter stood behind an ornate golden table that held two stacks of paper, one consisting of just a couple pages and the other about three feet high.  Peter said, “Well, Len, before we make any final decisions we will need to review both the strengths and the limitations that you displayed during your time on earth.”  He gestured toward the small stack as he said “strengths” and toward the very tall stack as he uttered “limitations.”

       Deeply concerned, I thought a little show of humility might help my cause, so I said “Well, why don’t we start with my limitations?”  Peter frowned at the giant pile of papers before him, shook his head, and responded, “I don’t know.  We’ve only got eternity to get through them all.”

       Victor Hugo wrote: “There is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is the human soul.”  Often, when we refer to the infinite capacities of the soul, we mean the immortality that frees us from the bonds of death.  But, because our faith has at its center the promise of redemption, we must believe that even in this life our soul has “prospects greater than the sky,” vast, limitless.  When the Psalmist cries out “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me,” he leaves us with only two possibilities: either we think him a fraud or a hopeless dreamer, or we take seriously his testimony that the Lord can remake us right down to our very heart and spirit. 

       Despite these assurances, however, I suspect that each of us sometimes feels that no dimension of our infinite potential is so fully realized as our potential for messing up.

       Our faith offers us abundant consolations in this respect.  But it also poses some serious challenges.  And, in this sermon, I want to suggest that one of those challenges is that our faith demands that we keep two very different thoughts in mind at the same time, all the time.

The first of these thoughts is that God loves us in a measure beyond our understanding despite all of our weaknesses and shortcomings.  The second is that God nevertheless wants us to change: to know the Father more clearly; to follow the Son more closely; to experience the Holy Spirit more completely.

       And, to complicate things still further, our faith calls upon us to use these two disparate thoughts in order to free us from our limitations, even though we often use them to facilitate our limitations.  I’ll have more to say about the freedom these two ideas can afford us in a minute.  But let’s start by noting some of the perverse and regrettable ways in which we allow these ideas to place boundaries around us.

       Let’s be honest.  Confidence that God loves us just as we are can encourage a brand of self-conciliatory complacency.  We sit mired and stuck in our angers, our jealousies, our biases, our prejudices, our judgments, our false certainties, our indifference to injustice, our inaction toward poverty and hunger and homelessness until we start to feel—oh, dreaded word!—guilty.  We ponder the possibility of change or repentance or renewed dedication.  But then we remember that God loves us—even in all our messiness and inadequacy—and we settle back comfortably into our happy inertia.

       Of course, occasionally we actually make a little progress on one or more of these fronts.  Being human, this typically prompts a bit of self-congratulation, even if spoken to ourselves silently and in the secrecy of our own hearts.  I suspect that God, who misses nothing, takes notice of our modest progress and forgives us our brief flash of pride.  But I wonder if God weeps a bit when He sees how quickly we stall out, declare that we have done what we can, and place stingy boundaries around our efforts to make His kingdom come to this tired old world.

       This past Christmas, Lisa gave me the book Aimless Love: New and Collected Poems by Billy Collins, who was Poet Laureate of the United States from 2001 to 2003.  I highly recommend the book, which brims with wonderful poems, including a personal favorite of mine called “The Lanyard.”  In that work, the narrator remembers attending summer camp as a child and learning how to braid a lanyard, which he gave to his mother as a gift.  The poem continues:

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard
or wear one, if that is what you did with them,but that did not keep me from crossing
strand over strand again and again
until I had made a boxy
red and white lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard.
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips
set cold face-cloths on my forehead,
and then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim,
and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.
Here are thousands of meals, she said,
and here is clothing and a good education.
And here is your lanyard, I replied,
which I made with a little help from a counselor.
Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth,
and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,
and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.
And here, I wish to say to her now,
is a smaller gift—not the archaic truth
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took
the two-tone lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless, worthless thing I wove
out of boredom would be enough to make us even.

I do not pretend to know much about God.  But I suspect that God treasures every lanyard that we offer up to Him.  Nevertheless, I think we have to ask ourselves: do we use our confidence in God’s boundless and generous love as an excuse to limit ourselves and to call things “even” when our halting work has really only just begun?

       Alas, we are capable of using the idea that God wants to change us as a limiting principle as well.  This happens in a variety of ways.  For some of us, the magnitude of the work that needs doing serves as an excuse not to try.  We read the words of Jesus and we say:  “Wait a minute.  I am supposed to turn the other cheek to the jerk who offended me, love the enemy who has done me wrong, forgive people not on seven occasions but on seventy times seven, give away my hard-earned money, refrain from judging, have faith that moves mountains, visit the sick and imprisoned, work for peace, serve the poor, and pray with humility?  I—who do not even have the self-discipline to keep my New Year’s resolution to eat fewer potato chips—I am expected to do all of this?”  We declare such a transformation impossible, which, of course, fulfills our prophecy of failure.

       Others of us, daunted by this challenging project, will turn to living life in the passive voice.  We say: “I pray that I will be given courage, strength, clarity of purpose, a generous spirit, a forgiving heart, and all the other stuff I need to do God’s work.  I pray that I will be made into the sort of person God wants me to be.  Here I am!  Use me!”  Sometimes we sound as though we have a sentimental fondness for the good old days when we were inert lumps of clay laying around waiting to be fashioned by the hand of the Lord.

       Through all of these persistent and very human habits of thought we limit ourselves.  We place boundaries around our infinite souls.  We let ourselves off the hook.  Let me be the first to confess: I have not done this seven times.  But seventy times seven.  Times seven.  Times seven.

       And this is a divine and human tragedy, because these two ideas—that God loves us as we are but wants us to change—are given to us for precisely the opposite purpose: to free us; to break our bonds; to help us do things and feel things and know things beyond our most extravagant dreams.

       That God loves us just as we are liberates us from the chains of self-loathing and self-condemnation.  It compels us to love ourselves even when we feel fully persuaded that we do not possess a single loveable characteristic.  It moves us out of the crabbed and confining space of human judgment into the vast and unbounded realm of divine promise.  Because who are we—who are we—to loath this person whom God adores and for whom God gave His very son?

       And that God wants us to change offers still greater freedom.  It assures us that the daunting project ahead does not fall entirely on our shoulders.  We will get some help.  We will get some aid from the one who fashioned the vast seas, and the vaster sky, and that most vast thing of all—our soul.

       Now, as I have suggested, we have a role in this and God’s grace and generosity do not excuse us from trying as hard as we know how.  But do not be surprised if, at some point, God steps in to give you a good, hard yank in the right direction.  This happens, and sometimes it happens despite our resisting and kicking and yanking back.

       I take that to be one of the central points of the story we read together this morning in the Gospel of Mark.  I find it a remarkable story, particularly because of a critical way in which it differs from so many of the other healing stories that appear in the New Testament.  After all, in most of those stories, we encounter someone who pleads for Jesus to heal them, to restore their sight, to let them walk, to make them well.  I am sure that all of us have, at one time or another, prayed in that voice.

       But in this story we encounter a different voice—another voice that also may sound familiar to us.  It is an obstinate, resistant, settled-in-its ways voice.  It is a voice that says: “What have you to do with me?  Why do you want to change me?  How can you hope to destroy what I fear I really am?”  Boundaries?  This man is nothing but boundaries.  And Jesus will have none of it.  He looks inside of that man and he finds the source of that voice and he says, with the power of God Himself behind it, Get out.

       Sisters and brothers in Christ, what boundless potential does Jesus see within you?  What are you doing to see the same infinite promise within yourself that He sees?  How are you helping Him to move you from that which you are to that which you might become?  Are you prepared to discover things about yourself that you never imagined?  Are you ready, like the witnesses of two thousand years ago, to be amazed?

       My friends, there is a prospect greater than the sea, and it is the sky; there is a prospect greater than the sky, and it is within you.  For it is there, Jesus tells us, that we will find the very kingdom of God.

       Praise Him that it is so.

       And the people said hallelujah.

       And the people said amen.
 

The Fear of God

Scripture: Acts 2:1-4, 12-21

An old story told by trial lawyers goes like this.  A brilliant expert witness had testified on behalf of the plaintiff in a case.  The lawyer for the defendant then faced the daunting task of trying to cross-examine him.  The attorney had given this a good deal of thought in advance and had come up with a plan.  So, when the judge nodded in his direction, the lawyer pulled a book from his briefcase and walked confidently toward the witness. 

“Sir,” he began, “your testimony today is contradicted by a leading authority on the subject.”  He slowly opened the book and smiled.  “That authority is you.  Here, on page 250 of the textbook that you wrote, you say the exact opposite of what you have testified to today!  How do you explain that?” 

The witness asked if he could see the book and took it from the lawyer.  He calmly studied it for a moment and then—to everyone’s astonishment—tore the page out of the book.  “Here,” the witness said, handing the volume back to the lawyer.  “This is the revised edition.”

I suppose that all of us create similarly ragtag “revised editions” of the Bible.  We run across passages we love and treat those parts as if they were written in all capital letters, printed in red, and underlined.  We encounter passages that we do not understand or that conflict with our theology and we push those parts to the margins—or excise them altogether.

As you probably know, Thomas Jefferson—who had one of the most brilliant and perplexing minds ever to inhabit planet earth—embarked upon a literal version of this project in the latter years of his life.  Jefferson took a Bible, a razor, and some glue, and cut and pasted the four gospels so they consisted of a single text to his liking.

This volume reflected the moral philosophy of Jesus, but omitted any references to his divinity or to supernatural events.  Jefferson was intrigued by the resulting book.  You may find it less interesting, however, if like me you have developed a certain fondness for the miracles that Jesus performed and, not incidentally, for his resurrection.

Still, I don’t want to criticize Jefferson for doing to the text physically what most of us do to it mentally.  In this respect, permit me to offer a personal example.  A phrase appears repeatedly in the Bible that, for most of my adult life, has made me unhappy and uncomfortable whenever I have stumbled upon it.  As a result, for many years I intellectually and emotionally edited it out of the Bible with the same ruthless precision shown by Mr. Jefferson and his razor.  That phrase is: “the fear of God.” 

Now, if the phrase “the fear of God” troubles you then you will spend a lot of your Bible-reading time feeling troubled.  Phrases that are commonly translated as “the fear of God” appear throughout the Old Testament.  The words appear in the first book of the Hebrew Bible (Genesis) and in the last (Malachi).  Verses in both Psalms and Proverbs describe the fear of God as the very foundation of wisdom.  Prophetic books, such as Jeremiah and Isaiah, include numerous references to the fear of God—and, of course, the prophets strongly suggest that we would be better off if we had a lot more of it. 

The phrase appears throughout the New Testament as well.  We find it in Mary’s magnificat—her beautiful song of praise in the first chapter of Luke: “His mercy is for those who fear him from generation to generation.”  It appears in several of Paul’s letters.  And the book of Acts tells us this about the state of the church at the time of Paul’s conversion: “[T]he church throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and was built up.  Living in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it increased in numbers.”

Many biblical scholars have observed that “fear” is not a particularly good translation of some of the Hebrew and Greek words that are used in these passages.  They suggest that those words are closer in meaning to “reverence” or “awe” than they are to “fear” as we ordinarily understand it.  Indeed, a number of translations of the Bible—such as the New International Version—make a concerted effort to find better ways to express what the ancient texts seem to be getting at. 

Whatever words we choose, however, it seems to me that two things are clear and important.

The first point is this: the experience being described in these passages is completely consistent with the idea that God loves us, comforts us, and wants us to know a peace that passes all understanding.  Many of these passages make this plain by explicitly linking the “fear of God” with those ideas.  So, as you might have noticed, the passage I quoted from Acts a moment ago describes believers as living in both the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit.  Or consider this passage from the eighth chapter of Isaiah: “[T]he Lord of hosts, him you shall regard as holy; let him be your fear, and let him be your dread.  He will become a sanctuary for you …”

This juxtaposing of the overpowering and intimidating with the protective and caring appears throughout the scriptures.  One of my favorite examples is a subtle one, from the fourth verse of the beloved 23^rd Psalm: “I fear no evil, for you are with me, your rod and your staff—they comfort me.” 

The “staff” referred to here is, of course, the long hooked pole (sometimes called a “crook”) that shepherds used to prevent sheep from wandering too far from safety; it was an instrument of help and comfort.  In contrast, the “rod” to which the psalm alludes was a weapon—a club of such strength and size that it could be used to beat back large wild animals.  You might recall that a shepherd by the name of David once remarked—on his way to fight a Philistine named Goliath—that he had killed both lions and bears while tending his flocks.

Now, please permit me a digression—although a pointed one.  Over the years, I have seen dozens of printed versions of the 23^rd Psalm that featured decorative images.  In almost every case, the image used to illustrate the psalm was that of a shepherd.  I’ve seen lots of “23^rd Psalm shepherds” with crooks; but I’ve never—ever—seen one with anything that looked like a weapon.  It is as though, in our eagerness to reaffirm God’s love, we have taken the club out of His hands and made Him less scary and intimidating.  My concern is that, in the process, we have also made Him less powerful.

But the scriptures tell us over and over again that there is nothing inconsistent in the notion that God is both infinitely powerful and infinitely loving.  To the contrary, the scriptures insist—insist, mind you—that we recognize both of these qualities; that doing so is the beginning of wisdom; that failing to do so is an initiation into despair.

My friends: the knowledge that “God is love” saves me and comforts me, over and over again, day in and day out.  But the knowledge that God wields a power beyond my wildest imaginings saves me and comforts me, too—even if it also intimidates and unsettles me a bit.  Yes, when I enter into the valley of the shadow of darkness, I want to walk with a God who is love.  But, as the psalmist says, I also want to walk with a God who wields a club—a God whose voice shakes the wilderness, whose lightning lights up the world, whose gaze melts mountains like wax, in the magnificent words of the 97^th Psalm.

And this leads to the second point that I think is clear: sometimes our closest and most intimate encounters with the divine will be unsettling and disquieting—perhaps even frightening.  The scriptures tell us this, too, over and over again.  Consider the women who discovered the stone rolled back before the empty tomb and who encountered an angelic presence.  What was the first thing they experienced?  Well, it wasn’t the joy or excitement or triumphalism that we share on Easter Sunday.  The gospels tell us they were terrified.  Not reverential, not awestruck—terrified.  And if we reflect on their experience we can understand why.

Every once in a while in this life in these mortal skins we get a glimpse of who God is.  Sometimes those are flashes of insight into God’s compassion, forgiveness, direction, and love.  We feel comfort and reassurance settle in on us like a calming afternoon rain and we think to ourselves: “Yes.  There.  I see it.  That is who you are.  That is who you are.”

But sometimes those glimpses are insights into God’s power, grandeur, wildness, and unpredictability—especially in our encounters with the natural world.  We stand on the shores of Lake Superior or the Atlantic Ocean and watch the vast waters roll and roar.  We see a big red-tailed hawk dive dramatically in pursuit of its prey or a stallion break into an unstoppable gallop.  We feel thunder shake the floorboards of our home.  We witness the incredible creative power of birth.  And we think to ourselves: “Yes.  There.  I see it.  That is who you are.  That is who you are, too.”

The great Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggeman described God as “wild, dangerous, unfettered, and free.”  But in our need to find comfort in Him we tend to tone him down a bit—pardon me, a lot.  The novelist Dorothy Sayers worried that the church has “very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah,” making him “a fitting household pet.”  John Eldredge, in his wonderful book Wild at Heart, tries to rescue God—and Jesus—from this image.  He writes:

Jesus is … no pale-face altar boy with his hair parted in the middle, speaking softly, avoiding confrontation, who at last gets himself killed because he has no way out.  He works with wood [and] commands the loyalty of dockworkers.  He is the Lord of hosts, the captain of angel armies.  And when Christ returns, he is at the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a white horse, with a double-edged sword.

In the gospels we meet a Jesus of infinite love, compassion, and forgiveness.  But I want to suggest to you that if this is the only Jesus we meet then we’ve created our own versions of Mr. Jefferson’s Bible.

With all of that said, think now about the Pentecost experience described in the second chapter of Acts.  Here were the apostles, feeling a bit lost and confused, longing for certainty and direction.  No doubt they wanted to experience something calming, comforting, and gently reassuring.  But that's not what they got.

A sound of violent, rushing wind filled the house.  Tongues like fire descended upon them.  They spoke in strange languages--hold onto that idea: God so seized them that they spoke in unexpected and unfamiliar tongues.  Before everyone’s eyes, they were transformed.  People were overcome with bewilderment and perplexity and, no doubt, some measure of fear. 

I think that this is the fundamental message of Pentecost.  That God does not always come to us as that still small voice of peace and comfort.  That God will sometimes confront us with an awesome display of power, not for its own sake, but because that is what it takes to make something happen. 

And, above all else, the something that God wants to happen is our awakening, our rebirth, our transformation, our resurrection.  Yes, God can work those changes slowly and peacefully—like a sunrise; like the mist burning off over the mountains; like the gentle progress of the tides. 

But, make no mistake about it, God also knows how to change you with thunder and lightning, with an abruptness that will rattle your soul, at a full gallop, in an instant.  A famous self-help guru once said something like: “It doesn’t take long to change; you can change in an instant; what takes a long time is to get ready to change.”  Well, sometimes God says: “I’d love to wait around, but I need you to be ready, right here, right now.”

So this is what I would say to you: listen carefully for those Pentecost moments in your own life.  Listen attentively for those moments when God so seizes you that out of your bitterness comes the unexpected and unfamiliar language of forgiveness; when out of your grieving comes the unexpected and unfamiliar language of hope; when out of your cynicism comes the unexpected and unfamiliar language of faith; when out of your divisiveness comes the unexpected and unfamiliar language of peace; when out of your protests and persecutions and prejudices comes the unexpected and unfamiliar language of love.  And, in these moments, listen very carefully not just for your own voice, but for His.

If you do, then I think you will hear Him say: “Yes.  There.  I see it.  That is who you are.  That is who you are.”

Amen.

Of Faults and Secrets and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

Scripture: Psalm 19

I wonder whether anyone has ever had a keener understanding of human nature than Mark Twain.  Consider his observations on unproductive anxiety: “I’ve lived through terrible things in my life; some of which actually happened.”  On happiness: “Grief can take care of itself, but to get the full value of joy you must have somebody to divide it with.”  On maturing—and perhaps also on parenting: “When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around.  But when I got to be 21 I was astonished at how much [he] had learned in seven years.”  On shame: “Man is the only animal that blushes—or needs to.”  On moral purity: “A clear conscience is the sure sign of a bad memory.”  And on New Year’s resolutions: “Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.”

We are not a full month into a new year and yet many of us can already see the wreckage of our resolutions strewn about us.  I recall one January 1^st when I discovered that in the course of that first and single day I had laid asunder all three of my New Year’s resolutions—to lose a little weight, get more exercise, and watch less football on television—by engaging in a ten-hour-long marathon of college bowl games interrupted only by stuporous excursions to the refrigerator for more French onion dip.  This was, shall we say, an inauspicious beginning. 

And, of course, the higher we aim the harder we fall.  So if we find ourselves in February or March without a perfect record of keeping our checkbook balanced or sending birthday cards to relatives or reading the New York Times from cover to cover then it is possible that we will feel a tad of frustration—but unlikely we will experience a sense of deep personal disappointment.  We may, however, take our failures harder if our pledges involved making truly profound changes in ourselves: to be more loving, more generous, more grateful, more patient, more forgiving, more faithful, more selfless, more like followers of Jesus Christ.  In such circumstances, we may cry with Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Of what use to make heroic vows of amendment if the same old law-breaker is to keep them?”

For many of us, this emotional struggle is made worse by the fact that we don’t feel comfortable talking about it with other people—perhaps even those who are closest to us.  After all, our “heroic vows of amendment” often involve a battle with an inner demon, and demons tend to be scary, unattractive, and alienating—not exactly the sort of thing you want to show off in front of your friends, your family, your co-workers, your partner, or your children. 

Yet again, Mark Twain understood perfectly.  “Everyone is a moon,” he declared, “and has a dark side which he never shows to anybody.”  Trying to bring light to that long-hidden and darkened territory is daunting and challenging stuff, particularly if we think we need to go it alone.

We find references to this problem throughout the scriptures.  One of my favorite examples appears in the seventh chapter of Romans, where we hear Paul’s full-blown exasperation with his own failures of resolve. “I do not do the thing I want, but I do the very thing I hate,” he laments in verse 15.  But he continues.  In verse 18: “I can will what is right, but I cannot do it!”  And in verse 19: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do!”  Now, notice this: amidst all this confession, Paul still keeps the details of his transgressions to himself.  “Everyone is a moon,” indeed; even our sainted friend, Paul, who in these passages sounds an awful lot like the rest of us.

Of course, the obstacles are still more imposing when we cannot, or do not, or will not see the faults we need to work on.  This is the special genius of those wonderful lines in Psalm 19, thrown in so casually they are almost thrown away: “But who can detect their own errors?  Oh, cleanse me from hidden faults.”  These verses offset the psalm’s theme of praise with one of humility—we may not even know what we don’t know—that presses straight through to those magnificent closing verses: “Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable to you, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer.”

This morning, I want to try to persuade you that this dilemma—how we go about working deep changes in ourselves given our fondness for our faults, and sometimes our blindness to them—is a solvable one as long as we do not engage in three different kinds of mistaken thinking.   If we fall into those errors, we run the risk of convincing ourselves that we are stuck in the mud of our old habits and that our efforts to live differently amount to nothing more than wheel spinning.  But, if we can see those errors for what they are, and move past them, then we have good reasons to be confident that we can shed our old skin and put on some new.

The first error occurs when our self-doubt, prior failures, or observations of the struggles of others convince us that we cannot change—a self-fulfilling prophecy that prompts us to abandon the project.  My friends, this is simply wrong.  Indeed, it is twice wrong.

It is wrong as a matter of human psychology and development; we human beings are hardwired for change—more change than we tend to believe.  Just a few weeks ago, a team of psychologists, led by Dr. Dan Gilbert of Harvard, issued a new report finding that people generally underestimate how much they can and will change.  Based on a study of more than 19,000 people (ranging from ages 18 to 68), Dr. Gilbert and his colleagues concluded that we are inclined to think of who we are as a relatively settled thing—even though later we see how much changing we still had before  us.  Dr. Gilbert says: “[We often look back on our earlier selves] with a mixture of amusement and chagrin.  What we never seem to realize is that our future selves will look back and think the very same thing about us.  At every age we think we’re having the last laugh, and at every age we’re wrong.”

Dr. Daniel McAdams, a psychologist at Northwestern University who has studied the same phenomenon, offers this example to illustrate the point.  In the 1980s, at the height of the craze over Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Dr. McAdams had a conversation with his four-year-old daughter.  When he told her that someday the Ninja Turtles might not be her favorite thing in the whole wide world, she resisted—indeed, she refused to entertain the possibility.  Of course, eventually other things did indeed come to take their place in her heart, but here’s the most interesting point: this illusion is not limited to four-year-olds; studies show that it appears throughout young adulthood, middle age, and even our later years.  (John Tierney, “Why You Won’t Be The Person You Expect to Be,” The New York Times, January 3, 2013).  It goes with the territory of being human.        

More significantly, though, a belief that we cannot or will not change is inconsistent with the central tenets of our faith.  If we cannot change, then the calls we hear to do so from Moses, Jeremiah, John the Baptist, Paul, and Jesus of Nazareth amount to nothing more than a cruel joke.  And our faith does not just subscribe to the idea that we can change; it adheres, with a sacred confidence, to the belief that in our searching encounter with God we are already changed.  As Paul says in his second letter to the Corinthians, “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation; everything old has passed away; everything has become new.”

This reminds me of one of my favorite passages from the writings of C.S. Lewis: “I pray because I can’t help myself.  I pray because I’m helpless.  I pray because the need flows out of me all the time, waking and sleeping.  It doesn’t change God.  It changes me.” 

So the first error—which, as I say, is wrong both psychologically and theologically—is thinking that we cannot and will not change.  We can.  We will.  By the holy grace of God, we are doing so right now, at this very instant.  

The second error occurs when we think—and therefore behave—as though our faults are hidden.  I think that this, too, is twice wrong.  I suspect that more people know more about our weaknesses than we would like to believe.  But, more importantly, God knows about them, every last one of them, no matter how vigorously we have labored to conceal or deny them.

Indeed, the Bible is so absolutely clear on this point that it makes it two times in its first four chapters.  As we all know, in Chapter 3 of Genesis, Adam and Eve try to hide their disobedience from God, and, in Chapter 4, Cain does the same—and all of them meet with the same level of success.  God is not fooled and, at the risk of an extravagant understatement, is not amused.  Proverb 15 tells us that “the eyes of the Lord are in every place,” and that includes all the places in ours hearts, minds, and souls—even the darkest places.

So the second error lies in believing that we can keep our faults and our need to address them to ourselves.  We cannot, at least with respect to God.  Indeed, God already has a very good grasp on those issues—thank you very much—and already knows, infinitely better than we do, what needs to happen next.

Well, that leads us to the third error, which occurs when we think that we have to effect deep changes in ourselves alone and on our own horsepower.  This, I want to suggest to you, is the biggest mistake of all.  And, to get at just what a whopper it is, I want you to think about what it would mean if it were true.

If this were true, then there would be no reason for God to know what is in our hearts that has anything to do with love.  God would just be like some kind of omniscient CIA agent, spying on us and collecting data and turning us over to the proper authorities when we mess up—as we invariably do.  God would embody the most sinister version imaginable of those unsettling holiday lyrics: “he knows if you’ve been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake!”

No, no, and no.  God sees our faults and understands what we need to do differently in these sloppy rag-tag lives of ours.  But God puts this perfect knowledge of us to work on our behalf.  God uses it to bless us, to move us, to illumine us, to inspire us, to connect us, sometimes even to block and tackle for us, always to change us.  And, while we may give up on ourselves, God never gives up on us.

Toward the end of her book “Help, Thanks, Wow: Three Essential Prayers,” Anne Lamott writes this:

“God keeps giving, forgiving, and inviting us back.  [A friend] says this is a scandal, and that God has no common sense.  God doesn’t say: ‘I have had it this time.  You have taken this course four times and you flunked again.  What a joke.’  We get to keep starting over.  Lives change, sometimes quickly, but usually slowly.”

If you are like me, your own change probably seems the slowest and most halting of all.  But I suppose we can take some consolation in a God who could say “You think you’re a tough nut to crack?!  Let me tell you about some guys named Moses and David and Peter and Paul.  And how they struggled!  I know; they talked to me about it ... all the time.”

Sisters and brothers in Christ, ours is a God of hope and love.  And, where hope and love are possible, change is possible.  That is not just good news; it is, for our sordid and stubborn old hearts, the best news—ever. 

Amen.

A benediction: When I look out my window on this icy and frozen day, I can see no evidence that God is busily at work on spring.  And, yet, I know that He is.  Go forth into this good day knowing that--even when you cannot see it--God is also busily at work on you, with you, for you.  And know that you are blessed that this is so.

He Loves to Tell the Story

Scripture: Acts 9, 22, and 26

You may have heard a joke that goes something like this:

A man who had driven to an important business meeting couldn’t find a parking space near the building where the meeting was being held. He drove around and around, growing more and more frantic, and running later and later. He imagined missing the meeting, losing his job, and suffering through all the hardship that this would mean for him and his family. So, desperate, he called out to God: “Oh, Lord. I pray that you might help me find a parking space. If you do, I’ll give up swearing and smoking and drinking. I’ll go to church every Sunday. I’ll give generously to charity. I’ll read ten chapters from the Bible every morning of my life!” At the instant he stopped speaking, an amazing thing happened: a car pulled out of a parking space right in front of the building where the meeting was just about to begin. The man smiled, looked up toward heaven, and said: “Never mind. I’ve got one.”

The Bible is full of stories where God intervenes in someone’s life—usually more successfully than this—in a sudden, dramatic, and unmistakable way. One of the most famous of these stories concerns the experience of a Roman citizen named Saul while he was traveling to Damascus to persecute Christians on behalf of the empire. A Hollywood version of the experience would include a lot of special effects: there is a blinding flash of light, a violent fall, a disembodied voice, and—perhaps most remarkably—a changed man. Saul becomes Paul, and one of our faith’s most formidable personalities enters history—and changes its course forever.

It is a really good story. Indeed, it is such a good story that it appears in the book of Acts three times. It appears in the ninth chapter, where we hear it in Luke’s narrative voice. It appears in the twenty-second chapter, where Paul describes the experience to a mob that has seized him and thrown him out of the Temple. And it appears in the twenty-sixth chapter, where Paul shares it with King Agrippa, the descendent of Herod appointed by Rome to rule Judea.

Luke loves to tell the story. And he has reasons.

At first blush, we might think that those reasons have to do with the dramatic nature of the event. After all, Luke is a master storyteller and there is plenty of fodder here for masterful storytelling—the fireworks, the voice-over, the body crashing to the ground, and so on. You don’t need to be able to write like Luke, or paint like Caravaggio, to make this interesting.

Still, all this drama may distract us from the details that make this story not just a good one, but an extraordinarily important one for each and every one of us. Those details show that this is not just a story about what happened to Paul on the road to Damascus. Rather, this is a story that says something about all of us as we go down our respective roads and meet God along the way.

That is why Luke loves to tell the story. And that is where things really get interesting.

Let’s start with this detail: the Lord calls Saul by name—indeed, twice by name. And the Lord does not ask “why are you persecuting those who believe in me?” but “why are you persecuting me?” This detail holds true in all three versions of the story so it seems fair to treat it as an important one—and, indeed, it is. After all, this language does not portray the Lord as a distant and abstract entity with whom we can only have a theoretical relationship. To the contrary, this language describes a God with a human voice, with the capacity to feel the pain of persecution, and with whom we can have a real and personal relationship.

I realize that talk about a personal relationship with God has become a cliché. But I am not alluding to the saccharine sweet version of this idea that shows up on bumper stickers and t-shirts. I am referring to the powerful, sublime, and occasionally frightening expression of this idea that appears in the scriptures.

I am referring to the repeated instances in the Bible where people talk with and argue with and engage with God—and God responds in kind. It is tempting to say that these people behave as if God were right there with them, but this misses the point because the scripture makes clear that God is right there with them. I certainly do not agree with everything written by the prominent theologian Paul Ramsey. But I think he got it exactly right when he observed that, throughout the Bible, “[people] meet God, not simply a conception of God.”

The second detail I want to emphasize is a bit subtler—it concerns something that’s missing from the story. Of course, we ordinarily think of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus as a conversion story—indeed, the ultimate conversion story. We might even admit to a little conversion envy, puzzling over why our experience of faith lacks the flash and thunder of Paul’s.

And, yet, in these lines Paul says nothing about having a change of heart or mind or spirit. In other words, what’s missing from this conversion story is any evidence that a conversion occurred. We’re told that Paul was blinded; we’re told that Paul fell to the ground; we’re told that Paul heard a voice. We’re not told that Paul became a different man.

There is a good reason for this: it does not need to be said, and if it were said in the context of these isolated events we would have no reason to believe it. That Paul has changed is not revealed by this story but by what comes next. It is revealed by what Paul stops doing and what he starts doing. It is revealed in how Paul spends every waking hour for the remainder of his life.

I think this reflects a deep psychological truth. Experiences that have a profoundly transformative effect on us do not need to be declared. Their significance will be shown and known in what comes next.

The third detail I want to focus on relates to the differences in the versions of the story. In his book, What Paul Meant, Garry Wills summarizes them nicely:

“In one version, bystanders fall down when Paul does. In another, they stay standing. In one, the bystanders see a light, but hear no voice. In another, they hear a voice but see nothing. By the third version, what the voice says is considerably expanded in length as well as intention.”

Luke loves to tell the story. But he never tells it exactly the same way twice.

Commentators have offered various explanations for these discrepancies. Some suggest that these variations relate to the different narrative voices heard in the text. This makes sense. After all, we would expect Luke’s description of what happened to Paul to differ from Paul’s description of his own experience. Some suggest that the story changes not because of the speaker but because of the audience. This makes sense, too. For example, Paul offers a more expansive version of the story during his discursive, indeed oddly relaxed, meeting with King Agrippa than he does during his confrontational encounter with the angry mob.

Still, I don’t find these explanations completely satisfying. Differences in who sees the flash of light and who hears the voice don’t seem to have much to do with variations in speakers or audiences. So I’d like to offer another possibility—one that calls for no elaborate reinterpretations of the text, that fully embraces the discrepancies, and that seems to me completely consistent with what we know about human beings and believe we know about God.

Think of it this way. Something remarkable happened to Paul on the road to Damascus—something powerful; something disorienting; something incapable of being expressed through the coarse filters of human understanding and memory and language; something deeply and wonderfully mysterious. All encounters with God must have some such mystery to them. More than a dozen centuries later, the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke captured this same sense of mystery when he praised God as “the gentlest of ways,” “the forest that always surrounds us,” the “song we sing in every silence,” the “great homesickness we can never shake off.”

Sometime we confuse mystery with distance and convince ourselves that God is mysterious because God is remote. But this ignores the mystery that inheres in so many things that are close to us. Indeed, those things may strike us as the most mysterious of all. As poet W.S. Merwin observed, the “mystery is no more lucid for being near.”

Perhaps no one ever understood this beautiful mystery of our relationship with God better than Paul, the one who reminded us that in this life we see “through a glass, darkly.” The story of Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus, therefore, resists surgical precision and perfection of detail. It is not that kind of story.

So Paul’s encounter with the Lord has three characteristics. First, it is highly personal. Second, it is deeply transformative. And, third, it is profoundly mysterious. We have a word for a relationship that is highly personal, deeply transformative, and profoundly mysterious. We call it love. And that is what happens on the road to Damascus. God showers divine love on—of all people—Saul of Tarsus. And Paul begins to fall in love with God.

The more amazing thing, though, is how Paul stays in love with God. Twenty-two books follow the book of Acts in the New Testament. Thirteen of them are traditionally attributed to Paul. They are letters, of course—efforts by Paul to provide guidance to the communities of Christians that sprawled across the empire. But they are also Paul’s love letters to God.

They are letters in which Paul celebrates a love that is patient and kind; that is not boastful or arrogant or rude; that rejoices in the truth; that bears all things and believes all things and hopes all things and endures all things; a love that never ends. They are letters in which Paul demonstrates his dedication to Jesus’ commandment that we should love God with all our heart and soul and mind and strength.

Along the way, Paul struggles. He struggles with divisive elements within the far-flung Christian communities; he struggles with a world still filled with suffering and sickness and sadness and sin; he struggles with his own weakness. Nothing new here: he struggled from the beginning. As we have seen, he even struggled in his efforts to describe what happened to him on the road to Damascus. That story proved too personal, transformative, and mysterious to lend itself to precise expression. But it doesn’t matter. It is one of the greatest love stories ever told. And he loves to tell the story.

You have a story, too. It may not feature bright lights or big voices or ecstatic tumbles to the ground. But that’s not surprising. You see, to reverse Paul Ramsey’s trenchant observation, God meets us—not simply a conception of us. So God embraces us in ways that we will find personal and transformative and mysterious.

Some of us will get knocked off the horse. Some of us will slide off slowly. Some of us will cling to the reins and resist. Some of us will be grabbed by the lapels and shaken. Some of us will be gently tapped on the shoulder. But all of us will be touched.

And then there’s the other half of the story—the story of your love for God. How will you life reflect that love? What comes next? How will your love be shown and known? What will this personal, transformative, mysterious experience do for you, and to you, and through you?

Once you have the answers, won’t you love to tell the story?

Amen.