The Gospel We Don't Like to Hear

Having determined to offer myself up to the Gospel of Luke this year, my progress (such as it has been in my episodic fidelity) arrived this morning at the story of Jesus returning to the community of his childhood and gathering with his neighbors for worship.  According to the account, he went to the synagogue, “as was his custom,” and read.  His selection – whether chosen or assigned – was from the prophet Isaiah about being inspirited – anointed – to preach good news and liberation and healing. 

 

It would have necessarily been a familiar passage. The community would have heard it read countless times in their faithful attendance.  It was, after all, not merely a passage from the scroll but a part of their story.  But it is likewise apparent that they hadn’t really heard it.  The sound of the reader’s voice had passed into their ear canals, vibrating their eardrums, and rippling the cochlear fluid, rustling the hairs covering the basilar membrane – the physiological process of hearing.  

 

But the ears within them hadn’t heard.

 

And I wonder how many readings, how many instructions, how many sermons, how many truths the hardware of my ears has processed, but the rest of me has ignored?  It’s a question my wife can probably answer.

 

Even here I don’t think I have ever really heard this story – not so much the reading from Isaiah, but the account of Jesus with his neighbors.  Somehow the impression I had taken away from prior encounters with this passage was that the townsfolk took offense at what they deemed to be Jesus’ presumption – his suggestion that somehow the prophet’s words were being fulfilled in their hearing that very day.  That isn’t, of course, what the story says, but it is apparently what I had heard.  No, what the story goes on to report is that Jesus’ childhood friends applauded and thought well of him at this point.  It wasn’t until Jesus suggested that such blessings – good news, liberation, healing – wouldn’t be confined to their parochial tent that matters turned violent. 

 

As it turned out, Jesus survived that day; but neither the disapproval nor the violence has gone away. 

 

Whenever a church marshals the organization, the money and the people to send a mission team to some impoverished country to dig a well or build a house or construct a school or provide medical care, the complaint is invariably raised, “Don’t we have poor people in our own town, in our own country?”

 

Whenever our country sends relief or development aid to some war-torn or disaster-devastated country, the same disapproval is voiced.  “Don’t we have our own fire/flood/hurricane/riot damage to clean up?”

 

“America First,” became the over-shouting cry!

“Us First.”

“Me First.”

 

To which Jesus responded, “Well…that’s just not the way God thinks – or acts – or wishes for us to behave.”

 

And that’s when it got bad.  That’s when they tried to throw him off a cliff --  

 

-- when he hinted at what he would later make plain:  that the “first” will be last, and the “last” will be first.  

 

It would take them awhile, but they would yet get him thrown off that cliff.  They would eventually accomplish their assassination.  

 

It’s a slogan that rallies a crowd, alright, but not in the way intended.  And it’s hardly winsome enough to print on a cap.  It isn’t a platform for a political campaign any more than it was for a messianic one.  But, then, Jesus had already turned his back on that kind of motivation when he refused to take a knee to temptation, or throw himself off the pinnacle of the Temple.  

Because while "us first" might make us popular, it never gets us right.  Mirrors routinely get us into trouble, while windows open to us the Reign of God.

 

Jesus, exampling the face of God, was content to open his own face to the wind of the Spirit, and thusly anointed, to be blown by it into the work of holiness.  

 

As, reading both the prophet and the one who read the prophet…

 

…could we.

In Gratitude for Powerful, Holy Words

Vocal God, you who spoke a world into being and called it good; 

who spoke a Son into birth and called him love; 

who spoke eternity into our hearts that we might hunger for it, 

we give you thanks for the light of this day and the sound of your voice.  

We give thanks that, somehow – through some divine inflection – we have heard our particular name on your lips, and answered with our own voice calling out to yours.  

Lost, you spoke us home.  

Broken, you spoke us whole.  

Confused, you spoke us clear.  

Diminished and empty, you spoke us full.  

 

Forgive us, then, when we close our ears and turn away.  

Forgive us when we prefer the sound of our own voice to the music of yours.  

Forgive us when we fail to hear you speaking through the lips of others and the accents of strangers.  

And forgive us for those times when we prefer the loud and presumptuous voices of the popular, the prestigious, the pretentious, the temporally powerful.  

Here we attune ourselves again and attend to the sound of your still, small voice.  

 

As your receptive people.  

As your redeemed people.  

As your obedient people.  

May your creating, healing, comforting word take shape in and be heard through us, we pray, whose supplicating words we take from your son, who taught us to pray in the first place.

(Prayed with the disciples of Runnells Christian Church, January 23, 2022)

Prayer for a Troubled Family

We are a troubled family, O God.  Surely you must shake your head in dismay at the way your children bicker and fight.  Muslims and Jews – older brothers who were always competing, always running away and coming home, and still hostage-taking and dying in each other’s arms; and Christians, younger siblings always flouting their coat of many colors and winning few sympathies with our smug self-assurance; red and yellow, black, brown and white sisters and brothers constantly wrestling and accusing each other of rifling through our closets and drawers, stealing our favorite sweater and socks; constantly asserting that our parents love us the most.  

Forgive us we pray.  Heal this household so jealous and estranged.  Continue to raise up bridge-builders like Martin Luther King, jr whose birthday we recognize this weekend; peacemakers like Desmond Tutu we recently lost; prophets and poets who name aloud our sin and vividly remind us of and call us back to your vision for all creation.  Heal your troubled family, we pray.

 

Bridge builders, peacemakers and prophets in our own way, may we ever more contagiously model the household you intend – yes, in our own families, but in this household of faith that is your church.  Nudge us in fresh and compelling ways.  

• The covenant still needs binding; 
• the commandments still need following; 
• the gospel still needs preaching; 
• the apostles’ wisdom still needs teaching; 
• community still needs building; 
• your Way still needs exampling “on earth as it is in heaven”... 

...and we would be your people living and serving and bearing witness in precisely such discipling ways.    

 

And so use us, we pray - one small part of your family seeking the kind of household your heart longs for – siblings, no longer spitting in each other’s eye nor dying by each other’s hands, but gathered around your table.  

Reconcile us, heal us, stir us...

...for heaven's sake.  And our own.

Amen.

(Prayed with the disciples who are Runnells Christian Church, January 16, 2021)

The Nostalgia Act That Is America

 

Once upon a time, the story has been told, a man was lost in the woods. He turned this way, then that, only to be confronted with more trees. Every direction seemed only denser and more formidable than the prior turns. After days of searching but only finding a deepening sense of panic, the sound of approaching footsteps stilled the lost man. Anxious, but hopeful, he waited and then watched as a bedraggled human shape emerged from the trees. 

 

“Can you show me the path that leads out of the forest?” the lost man implored.

 

“No,” responded the stranger, “but I can show you a hundred paths that lead further in.”

 

And so it is. Surely we, as a country, have arrived at a point where we can forthrightly admit that we are lost -  culturally, politically, economically, spiritually. Where we are is not where we thought these paths would lead, but we don’t know where else to go. And so we keep playing out the oft-quoted definition of insanity – doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results.  

 

But for the life of us, we can’t bring ourselves to try anything different.

 

I often reflect on the classic rock show I attended several years ago at the State Fair. Musical performers from my adolescent years replayed the songs that had made them famous. And it was fun. Everyone in the audience knew all the words and tunes and sang along. But there was something disquieting about the experience. When had these talented artists decided to face perennially backwards instead of forwards?  When had they stopped writing new songs, contenting themselves – and their audiences – with the old ones?  When did they decide to become an “oldies act”?

 

And when did we?

 

Now almost 250 years into this social experiment in democracy and capitalism, surely we can acknowledge the flaws inherent in both. Surely we can recognize now with sobering clarity where democracy leads when taken to its logical extreme.  It becomes the manipulative, obstructive, predatory, narcissistic power-play we are witnessing today that bears only the thinnest, most superficial resemblance to the common-good give-and-take imagined by the drafters of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.  I can’t help but think they would be embarrassed and ashamed. And angry.

 

And just as surely we can tally the toll that unfettered capitalism takes on the economic landscape, the people who are both its fuel and its engine, and the enterprises that inevitably become as commodified as their products.  In its indominable drive to cut expenses, increase profits, ever more quickly, the vision horizon gets truncated to the nearest quarterly report, and any interest in intrinsic quality gets bludgeoned by the insatiably churning gears of “faster,” “bigger,” “cheaper,” “more”.  It is routinely claimed that, “a rising tide lifts all boats,” and while that may well be oceanically true, the trope has long since been proven false in the lives of common people.  In the real world, the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer, and nothing remains in-between.

 

And religious communities – at least an increasing number of the Christian ones – just look increasingly cartoonish in their own attempts to translate discipleship into the “biz” of capitalism.   Owing more to their political leanings than the kind of community that Jesus actually sought to manifest and engender, progressives and conservatives alike leverage their energies and increase their volume in pursuit of market share.  Who knows, maybe a private equity fund will buy them out, carve them up and sell their assets for a profit.

 

Once, the probing philosophical question was, “Does ‘can’ imply ‘ought’?”  Just because we can do something, does it necessarily follow that we ought to do it.  But that question has been rendered irrelevant by the fact that ‘can’ now simply implies ‘will’.  We have largely abandoned the various moral, social, or forward-seeing considerations that once constrained us.  If we can do something, there is very little to inhibit us, no matter how craven, short-sighted or relationally deleterious the choice might be.

 

“Fine,” someone will say (because someone always says it), “these aren’t perfect systems; they are simply better than any of the alternatives around.”  I won’t dispute that.  I have no interest in emulating any of the equally failed and depraved systems experimented with throughout history.  Fascism and Communism have no alternative appeal.  Socialism looks promising on paper, but it, too, is flawed. 

 

My only question is when and why did we collectively become an “oldies band”?  When did we decide as a country that we would no longer write anything new, content to just keep playing the favorites that sound increasingly trite and (to employ a very anachronistic metaphor) scratchy?  What is to prevent us from speaking the truth, both to ourselves and to the lost ones approaching us in the morass, that no, we don’t know the way out.  

 

The most we can say is that we know a hundred paths that lead further in.  

 

Maybe then we could join forces, explore some innovative thought, and come up with newly creative alternatives.

 

 

Building a Day Instead of A Year

 

“I think in terms of the day's resolutions, not the year's.”

~Henry Moore

Years ago, while attending a family education session at the Mayo Clinic on helping loved ones manage chronic pain, we learned the importance of “building a day”.  The practice honors the reality that strength comes in limited quantities, that energies are rapidly dissipated, and that without intentional planning, physical resources can easily be scattered among the “pebbles” rather than leveraged on the “big rocks.”  Little things, often extraneous things, get accomplished while leaving little stamina available for more consequential concerns.  “Build the day,” the doctors taught us, by thinking through at breakfast time what the priorities will be for that day – in truth, the ONE priority for that day – and privileging that highest value in how the day gets organized and used. Depending on one’s situation, that might simply be dressing oneself, or it might be getting to the store to gather groceries for the evening meal.  The one thing – or maybe two.  

 

“This I will get done today.”

 

I recall that wisdom today, New Year’s Day, all these years later,  echoing the practice of Henry Moore cited above.  Today.  I’ve never been that interested in New Year’s Resolutions.  It’s not that I’m never successful with them.  I have, as resolved, written all my holiday thank-you notes by Epiphany.  I have established new exercise regimens and work habits, and managed to sustain them over time.  I have checked some resolution boxes through the years.  I like the sound of the annualized idea, and am certainly in favor of setting goals.  But my resolutions rarely seem to rise to the profundity or significance the word suggests.  There is, after all, an inevitable downward pressure applied to the resolving when the main objective is accomplishing it.  Make them smaller and smaller.  Lighter and lighter.  In order to succeed.  But that which takes little effort or comes to little consequence doesn’t really demand much resolve.  And those aspirations that run counter to this downward pressure tend so toward the grandiose and abstract that the vagaries and vicissitudes of time and opaqueness of circumstance easily and almost inevitably puncture and deflate them.

 

The reality is that I do not know what this nascent year will come to birth, in the

course of its months, or bury.  I have no idea what obstacles it will impose or opportunities it will occasion.  A calendar with its pre-inserted special days is a delusional seduction.  I am not, after all, delivered a year in a package already populated with “givens”, and invited to fill in the available spaces.  And while it is similarly true that neither am I delivered an entire day, a single day is closer and more promisingly within my reach.  

 

And so how will I build it?  What are the one or two “big rocks” I want to make sure I lift?  That, but since a day well-built is as much about growing as accomplishing – life being more, after all, than mere utility – how will I intentionally feed and frame this day?  How will I curate what goes into my mind and soul, and in what order and proportion?  What are the spiritually signifying and animating frames I want to maintain in good repair, and what are the disciplines that contribute to such sturdiness?  And since I am a whole being with mind and spirit, yes, but also a body, how will I move in ways that honor and tone my physicality?  

 

All that, but still more.  How will I reverently pay attention?  It’s snowing outside just now, and science has taught us that water molecules that form the flakes are not new, but have been part of Creation’s respiration since the origin of time and matter – descending as precipitation, ascending as evaporation; endlessly, constantly coming and going, singing “hello,” whispering “goodbye.”  Where all have they gone; who all have they touched; what thirsts have they slaked; what fingers have they bitten with frost; what river banks have they filled – or overflowed?  And how will they wet me on this particular day, these holy tears of sometime sorrow, sometime joy?  

I want to pay attention to such facts and fascinations - the snowflakes and their reincarnations; the subterranean conversations constantly underway among trees through their roots; the alchemical magic within leaves to convert light into life; nature's perennial conversion of waste into fertility.  And wonder how I might participate in it all.

 

More presently, then, than the year’s resolutions, how will I use wisely and well this particular 1/365^th of it?  

 

And then the next similar fraction?  

 

This smaller piece, it seems to me, is the larger question as I finish my breakfast, as the snow falls and fills this day that, in some manner, will become tomorrow and all those others that will become the fullness of 2022.  This year, in other words, I resolve to live each day.