Category Archives: Discipleship

To Whom Shall We Go?

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He listened to his pastor preach a sermon, as he had many times before.  But this time was different.  The sermon contained some strange — you could even say offensive — ideas.  It left him confused and wondering if his faith was misplaced, if what he thought about God and this prophet of His was not true. 

After the sermon was over, he looked around and saw many in the congregation just up and left, disappointed and possibly disgusted at what they just heard.  They liked much of what the pastor had to say, but man, this talk about eating flesh and drinking blood was a deal breaker.  

His pastor turned to him and asked “What about you?  Are you going to go too?” 

This is what the Bible tells us happened to Peter and the disciples in chapter 6 of the Gospel of John.  

Jesus has just performed two stunning miracles — feeding 5,000 people with nothing more than a few loaves and fish, and walking on water.  The crowds follow him and he resumes teaching, and everything is going great until Jesus says this:

“Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. 

John 6:54-56

At this, many in the crowd turn and leave and Jesus turns his attention to his disciples:

“So Jesus said to the twelve, “Do you want to go away as well?” Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life, and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God.’

John 6:67-69

Translation: 

“I don’t understand what you have just said about eating your flesh and drinking your blood.  It sounds weird and pagan, and icky.  But at the same time I believe you are the Christ.  Maybe one day I will understand, maybe not.  But this discomfort, this tension I am feeling does not outweigh everything else I know to be true about you.  So, no, I will not turn away, but continue to follow, bringing my unbelief with me.”  

This has always been one of my favorite passages in the Gospels because it captures “faith” to me.  There’s lots I don’t understand.  There are things that offend me sometimes, disappoint me so deeply that I want to turn away with the crowd and say, “Nope, you lost me there.”  

I have been through such a season lately, where I have been disappointed with God because He has not met my expectations. I prayed for healing, would have been satisfied with comfort, and received neither. I wrote recently about how I am waiting for my sadness to resolve into praise.  

In this most unhappy of spaces I have been tempted to walk away, but have not.  I have heard Jesus turn to me, just as He did to Simon Peter and ask, “What about you?  Do you want to go too?”

And like Simon Peter, my answer has been, “To whom can I go? You have the words of eternal life.”  And so, instead of turning tail and walking away in search of a more pleasing and accommodating prophet, I have continued to put one foot in front of the other, continuing to walk towards Jesus, dragging my sadness with me. This has not been easy.   

I continued to attend weekly Bible study while feeling that the Word had nothing to say to me.  I continued to attend worship when I “wasn’t feeling it.”  These were painful things.  Painful to sit where I always do, with people I have claimed as my own and to feel utterly disconnected.  Painful to hear music that once moved me and words that I believed to be true, and to feel indifferent.  When the worship leader invites me to recite the Apostles Creed, asking: “Christian, what do you believe?” I open my mouth and the words don’t come.  I look around with envy — not so long ago, I was one of them, hands raised in praise, eager to announce my fidelity, my gratitude, my submission.  I feel utterly lost.  

But where else can I go?  Some part of me knows that this place, these people, this message is my only hope, that this is where one day I will hear the words of eternal life and once again feel alive.

When I say, “Where else can I go?” I’m not shrugging my shoulders and saying, well, it’s better than nothing.  It’s not Pascal’s Wager, commonly (if mistakenly) portrayed as “It’s impossible to know that God exists, so you might as well live as if He does, just in case.”  No, I’m not hedging my bets or even faking it until I make it.  I am holding two contradictory ideas in tension:  both true, yet seemingly irreconcilable.  God is good and loving. God does not always answer me as I’d like.  I am not the first to struggle with this paradox.  It’s as old as Job and as current as yesterday.  And because I am not the first, there is great wisdom to be mined from better theologians than myself.  Consider this from Martin Luther:

“For God’s sake, then, turn your ears hither,

brother, and hear me cheerfully singing,

me, your brother, who at this time is not

afflicted with the despondency and

melancholy that is oppressing you and

therefore is strong in faith, so that you, who

are weak and harried and harrassed by the

devil, can lean on him for support until you

have regained your old strength, can bid

defiance to the devil, and cheerfully sing:

“Thou hast thrust sore at me that I might fall;

but the Lord helped me.’

The last time I was in worship, I was no longer envious of those around me, mourning my loss of certainty and feelings of consolation.  No, somehow, I felt buoyed by their voices, their proclamations of faith.  It was as if they were saying “You are weary. Let us carry you until your strength is restored.” It reminded me of a passage from Luke’s Gospel:

“And behold, some men were bringing on a bed a man who was paralyzed, and they were seeking to bring him in and lay him before Jesus, but finding no way to bring him in, because of the crowd, they went up on the roof and let him down with his bed through the tiles into the midst before Jesus.” 

                                                                              Luke 5:18-19

I always thought it was interesting that we know nothing about the paralyzed man’s spiritual condition.  We don’t know if he had faith in Jesus, we don’t know if he even asked to be healed. All we know is that in their great love and faith, his friends carried him to Jesus, the one they knew could help him. 

And that was enough.  

A Tale of Two Sheep

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I‘ve been thinking about sheep lately.  Two in particular: let’s call them Trevor and Charlie.   

Trevor is the star of a car commercial.  While his flock is contentedly grazing, he takes off in the opposite direction and jumps into an SUV driven by an affluent couple.  He becomes their pet, of sorts, going for walks on a leash, being bathed, enjoying car rides with his head out the window.  The voice over proclaims: “Life just gets better when you break from the herd.”  

We smile as he chooses individualism over stultifying conformity. If Americans had a motto, it would be “You’re not the boss of me,” and Trevor would be our mascot.   

The second sheep is Charlie. Charlie was found wandering the hills in Australia, alone. Like Trevor, Charlie broke from his flock, but he wasn’t living the life of a pampered suburban pet.  

After the initial exhilaration of breaking from the herd, Charlie began to feel the weight of his “freedom.”  Year after year, without his annual shearing, his wool became heavier and heavier until he could barely move or see, and heat stroke threatened to kill him. His “freedom” was slowly killing him and there was nothing he could do about it. 

When he was found after 6 years of wandering, his rescuers sheared 80 pounds of wool from him (about half his own weight).  At first unsteady and uncertain about walking without the crushing weight he had grown accustomed to, soon he was running and leaping and playing with other sheep.  Back in the fold, he found freedom where he once saw captivity.  

We have all been Charlie at one point or another.  If you have wandered off from the safety of God’s herd, in search of your own freedom or adventure or self-determination, know this:  What seems like freedom will one day be a burden you will be powerless to lift on your own.  The burden will grow, year by year, immobilizing you, blinding you, threatening your life. 

Our wandering isn’t always a dramatic leave-taking.  More often, it is small, seemingly harmless digressions. Every time I try to handle pain on my own, I break from the herd.  Every time I go off in search of some shiny object that promises freedom, I wander.

By the way, the enemy of our souls knows this well.  He knows what will tempt us and he knows just as well that once tempted, it will be hard to free ourselves.  As Thomas Brooks wrote, “Satan presets the bait, but hides the hook. “ 

Come Thy Fount of Every Blessing is one of my favorite hymns, in no small part because of this verse: “Prone to wander, Lord I feel it, prone to leave the one I love.”  We are all vulnerable to the “bait” despite our best intentions and resolutions. But this is not cause for condemnation, or despair.  

There is good news:  We will wander, but our shepherd will never stop looking for you or for me.  He is the shepherd who will leave the 99 in search of Charlie and Trevor.  

(Yes, Trevor, too, because he is just as lost.  As happy as Trevor might be at the end of our commercial, it will not last. He will likely break from his new found “herd” in search of something else — someone with a better car or a bigger house.  Perhaps he will long for the company of those in his flock.  Either way, he will search for freedom where it can’t be found.   I am more like Trevor than I’d like to admit.)

When we allow Jesus — our shepherd — to “find” us, he will lift our self-inflicted burdens, not with reproach or “I told you so” but with tender care. Every time.  

“What man of you, having a hundred sheep, if he has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open country, and go after the one that is lost until he finds it?  And when he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing.” (Luke 15:4-5)

Thanks be to God.

Tabula Rasa

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It is 6 a.m. on January 1st. The sun is not up yet, and neither am I.  Until I throw back the covers and my feet hit the floor, all good things are possible and all bad ones haven’t happened yet.  

The New Year is before me, clean and quiet as a new snowfall. There are no tracks left behind by words I regret, no rivers of dirty slush created by hurting someone I love.  I have not yet been petty or proud or petulant. I haven’t disappointed myself or anyone else yet.  I haven’t broken a promise, failed to be kind, or sinned in any number of ways against God or others. 

It is a delicious feeling, being suspended between the past and the future. 

Turning the calendar page allows me to put a bow on last year, with its joys and regrets, and look ahead to what might be.  I can imagine that I will do better this year — be more loving, braver, humble, fruitful. I can imagine that this time, all the discipline and goodness that has so long escaped my grasp will this year jump into my waiting arms and make itself at home.

After all, this is what New Year’s resolutions are all about.  Because the calendar says this is the start of something new, we say to ourselves, “I can be different and I will start now.”  Of course we can do this any month, day or hour of the year, but somehow we don’t.  We wait until an officially sanctioned New Beginning to wipe the slate clean and imagine a new story will be written on it. 

When I was little girl, that’s what I loved about going to Confession. I would go into the dark, musty-smelling box that was the confessional and tell my sins to the old, musty-smelling priest behind the screen.  When I emerged into the daylight, I loved the feeling that I had a tabula rasa — a clean slate.  

Today, when I say the prayer of confession in worship and the pastor declares my forgiveness, I often weep with gratitude. In that sense, every Sunday is New Year’s Day, because it places me on the fulcrum between the past and the future.

St. Paul puts it this way: 

“Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.The old has passed away; behold, the new has come.” (2 Corinthians 5:17) 

This is what we all yearn for.  A fresh start, another chance to be better, unencumbered by our pasts.  I’m grateful that I have that chance every week. 

As I approach the Lord’s Table, I can say that, through God’s grace, “I will be different, and I will start now.”  

Knit, Purl, Me

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Yesterday I took a piece of my life and wrapped it in cotton-candy-colored tissue paper. The attached note, tied on with matching ribbon, declared that in this gift — this prayer shawl — every stitch was a prayer.

This is not exactly true. It is true that when I take up the needles, I pray — if it is someone I know, I pray for the specific ways this shawl will bless them. If it is for a stranger, I pray for God’s peace and love to surround them.

But every stitch a prayer? That’s a bit of holy hyperbole.

You see, woven in with the prayers is my life. Like a second strand of yarn, the pattern also contains whatever spiritual vibe comes from binge-watching Monk. My intercessions are for the friend who will receive this shawl, but sometimes they are also for my anxiety du jour. The steady breathing of the cat who sleeps next to me is as much a part of this undertaking as the sheep who has offered his fine coat to warm another. I fear the frustration of ripped-out rows or the impatience of wanting to get on with the next project also becomes part of my offering.

All of which is to say, it’s not all spiritual ecstasy and choirs of angels. It is simply hour after hour of my life.

Perhaps that is why I feel an emptiness when a project is wrapped in its beautiful paper and given away. I am proud of the beauty I have created and anxious to see it wrapped around someone who needs the joy and comfort of knowing that they have been prayed for. But I also feel like I’ve given away a chunk of my life, hours that do not seem as abundant as they once did. Wrapped in that tissue paper, tied up in that beautiful raffia bow is nothing less than months of prayers and petulance, intercession and impatience, and the discipline and occasional tedium of showing up, day after day, row after row, and committing to the work.

People who have received shawls often comment that they can feel the prayers embracing them. I wonder if they can also feel all the other things that have been absorbed into the strands. I wonder if I am now spiritually connected to this person in ways neither of us can fathom.

Of all the shawls I have made, some stand out.

  • The shawls I gave to my friend Jean when her mother was so gravely ill — one for her, one for her Mom. Jean and her Mom are both gone now, and I wonder where these pieces of me are now.

 

  • The one I gave to one of my oldest friends on the eve of her first chemo. In the months that followed, when I felt frustrated at being so far away, I imagined the shawl was an adequate stand-in for me.

 

  • The one that was left behind on one of the trips to the emergency room that were too commonplace in the last year of my father-in-law’s life. I like to think that part of me still rides around Kansas City in an ambulance with others who are afraid and in pain.

These invisible bonds between knitter and knitee bring to mind Dorcas, a woman we meet in the book of Acts. Dorcas was a seamstress who formed a community with needle and thread. She sewed tunics for “the widows” — women who were vulnerable, forgotten and often in need. And when she died, the widows held her legacy in their hands — all those simple, everyday garments that at first glance were unremarkable. Until the widows told their story — how they were made with love and how they bound Dorcas to them, and them to each other. As I work on my latest project, I wonder if when I’m gone, my “widows” will show their shawls to the other mourners and say, “See how she loved us.”

The story of Dorcas goes on to include a miracle. Their grief was so intense that they sent for Peter, who raised Dorcas from the dead, restoring her to the community, mending the fabric torn apart by death.

When I die, I do not expect to be miraculously resurrected as Dorcas was, at least not right then and there. But I do expect that the same power that brought Dorcas back to life will be active in me today and will allow me to serve others. I do expect that same power that brought her back to life will one day do the same for me.

Until then, I bind myself to people I love and people I will never meet with the softest wool and the smoothest needles, weaving in prayers and To Do lists, fervent intercession and mindless sitcoms. I will sit alone, hour after hour, like a busy little spider creating webs of connection between me and the world.

I will give myself away and find myself mysteriously replenished.

#RESIST

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I don’t care what Merriam-Webster’s dictionary says, “gift” is not a verb. When I hear someone talk about gifting something, I want nothing more than to make them a gift of The Elements of Style and smack them upside the head with it.

I recently discovered that while I have been defending the world against the scourge of nouns-as-verbs, they have quietly made their way into the dictionary. I refuse to acknowledge or acquiesce to such barbarism. In the spirit of the times, I am declaring:

#NotMyDictionary  #Resist

I vow to preach the gospel of #neveraverb as long as I have breath. In the words of Martin Luther, patron saint of resisters, “Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise.”

At the heart of my resistance — of all resistance — is the belief that I know better than The Authority I’m resisting. My defiance denies the authority’s moral, legal, academic or spiritual legitimacy in favor of my own. Now, resistance can be a principled, brave opposition to an obvious wrong. (Think Dietrich Bonhoeffer, William Wilberforce or Martin Luther KIng, Jr.) It can also be petulant, obstinate and self-aggrandizing, like my linguistic jihad against verbified nouns.

If it were only a matter of grammar, I could chalk it up to a charming quirk. But I fear this rebellious streak goes far beyond the Word Wars.

If resistance is substituting my own judgment for an authority’s then I am guilty of resisting God. You probably are, too. It’s OK, we come by it honestly. We inherited it from Adam and Eve.

“So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate.” (Genesis 3:6)

In other words, God said “No”, but I know better.

She knows God has prohibited it; she says as much to the serpent. But she rationalizes her rebellion. It looks good, it probably tastes good. It will make me wise, and what could be wrong with that? Why wouldn’t a loving God want me to have it?” (By the way, I think this last is one of the most dangerous questions we can ask. For one thing, it assumes that if God loves us, He will give us our every desire, even if that contradicts His will and His word. For another, it often precedes an argument that ends in “I know that’s what He said, but He didn’t mean it that way.”)

Eve and Adam’s rebellion — and ours — is rooted in the desire to be the judge of what is good and what is not. Their desire has convinced them that they can ask God to scooch over so they can share His throne.

This is why our resistance hero Martin Luther famously wrote that the root of all sin is idolatry. We never break any commandment without having first broken the first: “You shall have no other gods before me.” After all, once that is abrogated, then the absolute moral authority that undergirds the rest of the commandments becomes just another voice in the din of relativism. And all the while we pile up one rationalization after another for why this is all perfectly fine and God is cool with it.

From that day in the garden to this day at my desk, people have struggled with the radical claim on our hearts and our heads of that first commandment.

1. There is one God, and it’s not me.
2. God alone has claim to all authority and truth.
3. When God’s word is clear, but I think I know better, see #1

When it comes to words, I cling to the notion that I know better than the dictionary. I suppose there is no real harm to this, unless you happen to be on the receiving end of one of my tirades.

But when it comes to God, my resistance reveals a dangerous idolatry.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus asks a haunting question:

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and not do what I tell you?”    (Luke 6:46)

Why indeed.

Meryl Streep is a Pharisee and So Am I

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Let me get this out of the way: Meryl Streep is a phenomenal actress. I admire and respect her talent and have been moved by much of her work. She has the right and privilege of free speech. I am not here to dispute or debate any of these things. In fact, in her acceptance speech at the Golden Globes the other night, she said something that was absolutely dead on.

“Disrespect invites disrespect.” I wonder if she knew how right she was.

After declaring that those gathered were “among the most vilified segments in American society right now,” she warned that if we kicked out all of the “outsiders and foreigners” in Hollywood, “You’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.“ Really? Without Hollywood we wouldn’t have the arts? What about ballet? Music? Theater? Hollywood certainly isn’t the only — or even the best — source of great art around. That she could be at once so self-pitying and self-aggrandizing is remarkable. Yes, the Hollywood she rhapsodizes about can produce great art. But for every “Sophie’s Choice” there is “Ricky and the Flash” which you’d be hard pressed to describe as Great Art.

Second, who’s to say that movies and television are better (that is to say, more refined, more edifying, more civilizing) than sports? Has she ever seen “Marriage Boot Camp?”  How about “Gigli?”  Apparently, instead of “vilifying” Hollywood, we should be thanking it for saving us from a life of low-brow entertainment (at least the kind that doesn’t come from Hollywood). 

She went from celebrating diversity to looking down her nose at any other form of entertainment than her own in seconds flat.

I heard another voice when I heard her say these words. I heard the voice of Jesus. In the gospel of Luke, he tells this story:

“He told his next story to some who were complacently pleased with themselves over their moral performance and looked down their noses at the common people: “Two men went up to the Temple to pray, one a Pharisee, the other a tax man. The Pharisee posed and prayed like this: ‘Oh, God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, crooks, adulterers, or, heaven forbid, like this tax man. I fast twice a week and tithe on all my income.’ Meanwhile the tax man, slumped in the shadows, his face in his hands, not daring to look up, said, ‘God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.’”
Jesus commented, “This tax man, not the other, went home made right with God. If you walk around with your nose in the air, you’re going to end up flat on your face, but if you’re content to be simply yourself, you will become more than yourself.”

Jesus makes plain who the “villain” and the “hero” of this story are. The Pharisee is self-righteous and lacking humility before God; the tax collector was self-effacing and very aware of his sin.

The message was not lost on the Pharisees who were among his original audience: be on guard against the insidious sin of pride.

And here’s just how insidious that sin is. When we read the story of the Pharisee and the tax collector, our natural instinct is to denounce the Pharisee’s arrogance, self-importance and sense of superiority over that sinner over there. We might even say to ourselves, “Thank God I’m not like that legalistic, bombastic Pharisee.” And in doing so, we become the Pharisee ourselves.

In telling this story, Jesus shows us how easy it is — how human it is — to become what we condemn.

I can’t help wondering if my pointing out Meryl’s Streep’s condescension isn’t tinged with a little, “Thank God I’m better than that.”  How easy it is to feel pride over my humility!  All I can do is echo the words of the tax collector: “God, give mercy. Forgive me, a sinner.’”

Meryl, if Hollywood continues to be “vilified”, don’t be surprised. As you so plainly put it, “Disrespect invites disrespect.” May God give us all the humility to break the cycle.

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I shift in my seat.
I grumble and mumble.
I roll my eyes and let out exaggerated, exasperated sighs.

This is how I wait.

I’m not proud of this, mind you. I know that petulance never makes the line move faster or the plane take off any sooner. But man, I hate to wait.

There seems to be only two ways to wait: passively and actively.
The passive waiter is patient, unhurried, easygoing. In other words, not me. No, I take charge and act: I switch lines or switch flights. I make things happen, though often action born of impatience turns out to be ill-advised, unwise and generally not a good idea.

But Advent shows us a third way of waiting.

In Advent, we see a push-and-pull of action and stillness, of active preparation and passive acquiescence that leads to nothing less than a miracle.

Mary and Joseph are able to act decisively and boldly when it is required of them to act. They both actively collaborated with God’s plan when they each said “Yes” to the angel’s proclamation to them. Mary wastes no time hurrying to Elizabeth when she hears of her miraculous pregnancy. Joseph obeys his visions and marries Mary, then takes his family to Egypt to avoid Herod’s murderous rampage.

Yet, they are also able to be still, to rest and allow God to work out his purpose, in His time, in His way. They could prepare for his birth, but nothing they could do — no amount of  impatience — could hasten the birth.  Once their son was born, they would feed and clothe, nourish and instruct him in the the faith. But their actions could not prepare them for the singular challenge of raising the Messiah, for watching Him die, or seeing the glory of His resurrection. For this they could only depend on God’s action, and they did.

Mary and Joseph live in this tension of action and rest, knowing and not knowing. They are able to live “in the meantime”, not with passive inertia nor with frantic, panicked activity.

They know the difference between what is theirs to do and what is God’s.

In Advent we mark the time when we wait for Christ to be born in us.

  With Mary, we ponder how God will use us to bring about his Kingdom.

  With Mary, we wonder how He will make life where there is none.

  With Mary, we hear ourselves say, “I don’t see how you’re going to use me, but I’m willing.”

  With Mary, we do what is asked of us, then wait with patient trust and expectancy.

The first Advent, and every one since, marks the uneasy, uncomfortable, hidden, mysterious, beautiful time when we are asked to act and wait, to be still and to be on the move, to do our part and to leave room for what God will do.

Above all, trust in the slow work of God.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay.
We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability —and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you. Your ideas mature gradually — let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.

Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
                                             (Pierre Teilhard de Chardin)

Division

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THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION OF OUR LIFETIME  … is over.

Unfortunately, nothing has been settled. Oh, we have elected a president, but it feels more like the campaign has just gone to extra innings. People’s antipathies towards the candidates or their supporters didn’t change just because one of them got more than 270 electoral votes. In fact, they have hardened into brickbats that we’re just itching to hurl at each other.

To hear the fake news sites tell it, we have only two narratives to choose from:

  • The benighted, racist, uneducated people in those flyover states have led us down the road to perdition.
  • The arrogant, out-of-touch liberal snowflakes can’t seem to grasp that they’ve gotten their comeuppance and should suck it up and move on.

In the real world — the world where people have to look each other in the eye as opposed to the faceless ether that is social media — things are messier. I have a friend — a dyed-in-the-wool liberal Democrat — who had as much distaste for Hillary as any Trumpster. I know people who voted for Trump, believing as much as any blue-stater that he is at best a vulgarian and at worst a sexual predator. True believers aside, I think many people made a decision that required them to make peace with things they found objectionable, even abhorrent. And many, like me, are angry and resentful about being forced to make such a choice.

Now that the election gravy train has left the station, the media are only too happy to continue the narrative that we are hopelessly polarized. Reactions to the election have dominated the news, from violent anti-Trump protests to reports of attacks (verbal and physical) on minorities. Once more, we are being asked to wade through the muck and discern what is true (some reports have been proven false), and figure out what we will do about it.

“How could this be?” a friend lamented. “Has this river of hate been here all the time? I thought we had made such progress since the days of segregation. Now I think it never really went away.”

If we are surprised by the vitriol we are hearing it is because we have bought into the idea that if we legislate goodness, people will be good. We think that if we make it socially unacceptable to express the ugliness in our hearts, the ugliness will disappear.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
                    Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

We can be frightened, we can be disappointed, we can be angry about the ugliness being manifest in our country. But we should not be surprised. There is a dividing line between good and evil, all right. But it isn’t only between Us and Them. It is also within us — each of us, all of us, no exceptions. This is not something that can be legislated, regulated or reasoned away.

It is not a political problem, it is a spiritual one.

I’m not suggesting that some people are irredeemably evil (as one candidate did) and we should sit idly as we descend into mayhem.  Laws can and should regulate behavior by imposing penalties for actions society deems undesirable. They are necessary, both as a deterrent and as an enforcement of the common will. This is one of the primary functions of government.

But laws cannot change the human heart.

While they can constrain our behavior, no government and no law has ever succeeded in making people good.

With the humility of people who know that the dividing line between good and evil runs through our hearts as well as those we vilify, there are things we can and should do in this most unsettling season:

We can and should look at why, at this moment in our history, the angry beast within us has been awakened, and with such fervor.

We need to ask why we won’t tolerate any views other than our own. Technology has allowed us to construct intellectual bunkers, and in this respect, it has not served us well. Armed with a TV remote and the “hide” button on Facebook, we can filter out what we’d rather not hear. 

Let’s be brave and actually listen to “one of them”. Not agree, not affirm, not encourage. Not try to convince or out-argue (does that ever work?) Just listen, and if asked, state our position with as much grace and love as we can muster.

We need to use every means given to us by our democracy to uphold our ideals of justice, equality, opportunity and freedom:

Vote. Pray. Write letters.  Run for office. Teach.  Be an example of the good you want to see. Pray some more. 

We need to do one more thing. We need to seek God, who alone can change our hearts and the hearts of those who sow dissent and rancor. I think of John Newton, the slave trader whose heart was transformed by the knowledge and love of God. He renounced his wicked profession, went into ministry, and became a mentor to William Wilberforce, who was instrumental in ending the slave trade in England. He also wrote these words:

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

This is what God can do that Congress can’t: make the blind see.

This is what no president or senator or court can do: redeem an “irredeemable” and declare victory over a divided heart.

Who’s Afraid of Election Day?

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This is what this election season has been like for me: I’m trapped in a never ending loop of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf”, watching my hosts savage each other, amazed at their capacity for violence, wondering when it will stop, desperate to go home.

For months, I’ve been saying I just want it to be over, but who am I kidding? I know that on Wednesday, whatever the result, it will not be over. I can’t really believe that we’ll all wake up on Wednesday morning and say, “Well, all right then. It’s settled. Let’s move on.” Our national discussion (if you can call the screeching, fear-mongering and doomsday scenarios emanating from all sides discussion) will simply enter a new phase, with new recriminations, new apocalyptic visions, new war cries.

This morning, as I face Election Day with no small amount of exhaustion and dread, I read Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds. In this story, Jesus tells of a farmer who finds that an enemy has come and planted weeds among his crop of wheat. The problem is, this particular weed is indistinguishable from the wheat. The farmer cautions against trying to pull the weeds lest they pull the wheat with it. Wait, he says, until the harvest, then we can safely separate them. While not the primary meaning of the parable, this scripture got me thinking about what has been sorely missing in this election season: humility.

So many of the speeches, debates, media reports, Facebook posts, tweets and water cooler discussions we’ve had over the last 18 months traffic in absolutes. This is the victim, this is the villain.  We are not satisfied to say others are wrong; they must also be evil.  We give no quarter and we receive none. It’s as if we’re not secure enough in what we believe — in who we believe — to admit any nuance, subtlety of thought or admission of flaws.

But Jesus’ words offer no such binary choices.  Wheat and weeds can look an awful lot alike, and we are not the final judge of which is which. We are asked to make a decision using the information we have, true.  But can we admit that our knowledge isn’t perfect?  Can we leave room for the possibility — however remote it seems — that we could be wrong? 

So, we will vote for what we consider the wheat — the good seed, the desirable outcome. Or, maybe we will vote for the “least objectionable weed.” We will make our choice tomorrow, based on what we believe is best for our country. I pray that we can do this with the humility that says we might be wrong. Without it, we’re just trapped in the dinner party from hell.

Imagine That

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Photo credit: Laura LaSpalluto

With the late afternoon sun at just the right angle, the Creation of the World, rendered in stained glass, had never looked more beautiful. I have worshipped in this space many times, with many of the same people that are here today for an interfaith worship concert. I know that this institution and the people in it believe the church is a force for good in the world, a light in the darkness. That’s why I was so unprepared for what happened.

In this sacred space, a lampstand of the second largest Protestant denomination in the U.S., people got to their feet and cheered the notion that what was wrong with the world was religion.

The song that elicited this Standing O was John Lennon’s “Imagine.” The soloist invited us to “Imagine all the people, living life in peace.” How we ache for that, when the city of Aleppo is reduced to rubble and its citizens dead, starving or in exile. Dare we hope for a world that “will be as one” when terror and mayhem are striking ever closer to home? We wake every day to a cacophony of political distrust and acrimony. It’s no wonder we hear hope in Lennon’s words and we stand and we cheer. Yes. This is what we want. This is what we hope for. We want it so badly that it’s easy to only hear the words of love and peace.

But there are other words that get lost in the sentimental haze of this beloved anthem. They are the words that show us Lennon’s way to this utopia:

Imagine there’s no heaven …
Imagine there’s no countries …

And no religion, too …

We can have the peace we long for if we could just be free from the corrupting forces of political and religious institutions. No countries, no religion, no possessions: this is how we can be selfless, loving and living in pure harmony. This is the thoroughly modern worldview that says people are basically good, and if they’re not, we can blame the government, or the church, or economic systems.

The Christian worldview is very different. Humans are a paradox. We are created in the image of God and declared good by Him, as depicted in the stained glass windows that were the backdrop for this afternoon’s exercise in irony. Yet at the same time, we carry within us the potential for rebellion, selfishness, violence and greed. In other words, we have the capacity for sin.

In this view, we can acknowledge that political and religious institutions have brought pain into the world. Yes, greed keeps some fat and happy while other starve. But these are the result, not the cause of human depravity and violence.

There is disorder in this world that political and religious institutions neither foster by their presence, nor prevent by their absence.

There is disorder in this world because there is disorder in us, and when that disorder is allowed to flourish, we have Aleppo and Orlando. We have modern day slavery and gun violence and every form of suffering a depraved mind can invent.

Ironically, “Imagine” — Lennon’s paean to basic human goodness — reached #1 in the U.S. after his death in 1980. The sources of violence and discord Lennon cites in his song — country, religion, greed — are not what motivated his murder and their absence wouldn’t have prevented it.

No, for that we have to look beyond the easy answers of oppressive systems into the human heart — even into our hearts.

The Christian worldview says that there is a persistent force of evil at work in the world, a force we can either resist or surrender to. To contend that the only obstacles to the peace we long for are political, economic and religious systems leaves us dangerously vulnerable to the most formidable obstacle of all: Sin.

Like John Lennon, the prophet Isaiah had a vision of a world without conflict and pain. Unlike Lennon, in Isaiah’s vision, the root cause of all the world’s pain will be dealt with by a savior with the power to do what we cannot. Our savior, in his life, death, and resurrection began the work of making us selfless, loving and able to live in peace with one another. And in his return, he will complete that good work he has begun.

“A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
    from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.

The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
    the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
    the Spirit of counsel and of might,
    the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
 
and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.
He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
    or decide by what he hears with his ears;

but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
    with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
    with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.

Righteousness will be his belt
    and faithfulness the sash around his waist.

The wolf will live with the lamb,
    the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling[a] together;
    and a little child will lead them.
 
The cow will feed with the bear,
    their young will lie down together,
    and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
                                               (Isaiah 11:1-7)

Imagine that.