Atomic: Trust

Who do you trust to give you guidance when it comes to faith and spirituality? Given how pervasive church baggage, and even worse, abuse are, it’s not always easy to figure out. It turns out, it’s not a new question. In fact, I think it’s the question that lies behind Jesus’ stories in John 10.

It’s a long, meandering passage, so, to save some space, I’ll let you give it a read on your own. Even if you don’t read it, you’ll likely recognize the main image Jesus uses: the good shepherd. He tells a series of stories and metaphors all about sheep, shepherds and thieves, most of which his audience doesn’t get.

If I’m honest, I don’t really blame them. The stories are all over the place. He keeps changing the metaphors and dodging questions that pop up. As storytelling goes, Jesus does a terrible job.

That’s probably because it’s not a modern story. It doesn’t fit our way of thinking. We expect stories to be clear, linear and with no wasted words. But Jesus’ stories are Semitic stories. They have their own way of working. They wander instead of being linear. They work on different levels rather than having one point. You have to walk around them for awhile. Often, you’ll walk in with one understanding and walk out with a completely different one.

So, to do Jesus’ shepherd stories justice, we have to walk around them. We’ll see what pops up and how it helps us know who to trust when it comes to faith.

Level One: Fight or Flight

There’s one level of the stories that speaks to one our most basic evolutionary tendencies: fight or flight. What kind of spiritual leader should we run from and/or resist? Wisdom on this pops up all throughout these shepherd stories.

First, check out the context of what comes right before John 10, when Jesus is talking to the religious leaders:

Jesus said to them, If you were blind, you wouldn’t have any sin, but now that you say, ‘We see,’ your sin remains.

John 9:41

Essentially, what Jesus is saying is that when it comes to spiritual insight, if you think you have a lot of it, you probably don’t. Jesus probably didn’t know it, but he was on to a pretty helpful principle of social psychology called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. This principle says that in general, people who think they have an area of life figured out rarely actually do. The more know you about or have experienced something, the more you realize you don’t know about it.

This is what Jesus is saying about spiritual leaders. If you meet someone who thinks they know everything about God, they’re probably not worth trusting with your spirituality.

Next, Jesus gives us an obvious, but vital insight:

I assure you that whoever doesn’t enter into the sheep pen through the gate but climbs over the wall is a thief and an outlaw.

John 10:1

This image is almost insultingly simple. If a spiritual leader looks like they’re being shady, they probably are. Trust your gut here. In religion, we write off our gut and let leaders get away with all sorts of sheep related shenanigans. Because it’s church, we give them the benefit of the doubt. Or if they’ve been helpful to us in the past, we think there’s no way they could be doing something out of line. Or everyone around us seems to be ok with what’s going on.

Sometimes we need a jarringly simple image to wake us up. If it seems like someone is breaking into the sheep pen, there’s a good chance that’s what’s happening.

Jesus has one final, and brutal, insight about poor spiritual leaders:

The thief enters only to steal, kill, and destroy.

John 10:10

Steal, kill, destroy. That’s some strong language. While those things certainly happen in church, don’t get caught up in the literal list. Poor spiritual leaders use others for personal gain.

People are objectified and expendable. This may happen maliciously, or it may be that a leader hasn’t dealt with their own wounds or pain. Some leaders simply want to see their institution or system survive, and they’re willing to sacrifice others for it. Whatever the reason, it’s toxic and certainly not worth our trust.

Level 2: Follow

Jesus’ shepherd stories speak to another basic need of ours: having someone to follow. At various stages of our lives, we need guides to show us how to move forward, and our spirituality is no different. So, the shepherd imagery speaks to the kind of leaders that are worth following, and how Jesus embodies those values.

This first place this pops up is easy to miss:

Jesus was in the temple, walking in the covered porch named for Solomon.

John 10:23

So Jesus liked porches. What does this have to do with who we can trust? Well, Solomon’s porch was an important place. It was the last place in the temple complex that everyone was allowed: men, women, Jew, Gentile. Everyone.

Jesus doesn’t wall himself off from anyone. When we think about who to trust, we should ask if everyone is allowed in their spaces and systems. If their spirituality is based on exclusion, then they’re probably tapping into some sense of superiority, not something sacred.

Next, Jesus says something pretty unique in religious circles:

If I don’t do the works of my Father, don’t believe me.

John 10:37

In a world of people shouting, “because God says so,” Jesus says, “If I’m not embodying something holy and worth following, you shouldn’t believe me.” He invites critique and expects authenticity from anyone who would offer spiritual guidance.

He does this right as some of the crowd wants to know if he has the qualifications to lead Israel. He doesn’t seem particularly interested in their titles though, and instead tells them to just look at what he does. And if it’s not from God, everyone should walk away.

Lastly, he gets to the heart of spiritual leaders worth trusting:

I came so that they could have life—indeed, so that they could live life to the fullest.

John 10:10

Jesus’ ministry was in service of something bigger: life to the fullest. He suggests he can be trusted because he’s just a means to the end that is a big, connected, deeply rooted life.

He also picks this up when he switches metaphors and calls himself a gate. He’s meant to lead us somewhere: the sacred.

At the risk of oversimplifying it, we can figure out if someone is worth trusting simply by asking, “Are they connecting me to the sacred?”

In church, we normally stop here. Trust Jesus. We’ve been told that’s the whole deal. But there’s more. There’s at least one more level here.

Level 3: Freedom

We tend to miss what was really revolutionary in these shepherd stories. What was controversial wasn’t that Jesus was trying to claim the authority of the religious leaders. It’s that he was trying to give it to everyone.

Check out these very similar sounding lines:

Whenever he has gathered all of his sheep, he goes before them and they follow him, because they know his voice.

John 10:4

I know my own sheep and they know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father. 

John 10:14-15

For Jesus, being connected to God comes down to knowing. He’s not talking about cognitive knowledge, like we often think. Semitic knowledge was experiential. It was mystical. It meant trusting your experience.

Who do you trust when it comes to connecting with God? You trust you. Trust what you know to be true about God, not what you’re told. At the end of the day, that’s the only thing that’s going to stick anyway.

I don’t think we choose what we believe or find compelling about God. We may be able to blindly defer to spiritual authorities and traditions for awhile, but those beliefs don’t have roots. When life gets hard, they’ll get pulled up.

This has been true in my life. My faith has changed a lot, but what I’ve known – deeply known – to be true and compelling about faith hasn’t changed. At the core of every meaningful faith experience has been love and awe. There were times where I falsely accepted the limits of fundamentalism to those things. I put conditions on my ability to be loved or to love others, like my LGBTQ neighbors. But, at its essence, what I’ve always known to be true in my spirituality hasn’t changed, only my understanding of it has.

So trust your experience. As a friend of mine says, we’re busy trying to show how much faith we have in God, but God is trying to show us how much faith s/he has in us.

But Jesus wasn’t done. Right when the crowd was about to kill him because they thought he was equating himself to God, he throws this out:

Jesus replied, “Isn’t it written in your Law, I have said, you are gods? Scripture calls those to whom God’s word came gods.

John 10:34-35

Jesus radically rethinks the divine human relationship by going…back in history? He quotes Psalm 82:6, which says, “You are gods, you are all sons of the Most High.”

He’s essentially saying, “If you’re going to stone me, you better stone everyone.” He reaches back into their collective history and levels the playing field. He’s not just saying he’s especially connected to God. He’s saying everyone is.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that we are literally God. Please don’t go start a cult. It’s that we all have access to the sacred. So much so that the Psalmist, and Jesus, are willing to label us “gods.”

Now, before we all get big heads, there’s one more helpful insight that pops up:

I have other sheep that don’t belong to this sheep pen.

John 10:16

If we’re tempted to think that Jesus’ radical message of divine connection makes us and our tribe special, Jesus stops us in our tracks. He says he has other flocks. Spirituality is always bigger than we think.

While Jesus may call you a “little g” god, it doesn’t mean you’re the expert on spirituality. It means you have a piece no one else has. Your connection to the sacred can’t be replicated. And neither can your neighbors’. So we come together with our collective pieces of and perspective on God to get a bigger picture. We’re neither deferring to spiritual authorities, nor acting like we are one ourselves.

When we bring our collective insights, something really beautiful happens. We begin to experience what Jesus was leading us to all along: life to the fullest.

Questions to think about…

1. Who are the people on your personal advisory team?  Who do you trust to give you relationship advice?  Parenting advice?  Financial advice? Medical advice?  Movie advice?  What convinced you that these people were worthy of your trust?

1. Who are the people you trust to guide you in your faith and spirituality?  What convinced you that these people were worthy of your trust?

1. Jesus was essentially slamming the Jewish leadership, saying they were not worthy of trust for a range of reasons.  One of the first things Jesus noted was that they were know-it-alls.  The Dunning-Kruger Effect understood from modern psychology essentially validates the idea that when people act like they have mastered something, it likely means there is much they don’t know.  When have you experienced being around a know-it-all?

1. How do you determine if a person is a know-it-all versus a person who knows a lot?

1. Jesus later advises his audience against following leaders who don’t pass the “smell test” – there’s just something fishy about them.  Have you ever experienced this with a person you trusted?  How did you know something was up?  How early did you realize something was amiss?

1. Jesus shifts to more a more positive approach, speaking into the types of leadership criteria that warrants trust.  First, Jesus led by example, hanging out on Solomon’s Porch where everyone was welcome.  Why would this be a sign of someone worthy of following?

1. Later, Jesus essentially told people to look at the actions of the leaders they are considering following to see if their behavior matches what we know to be true of the character and nature of God.  What would that include?

1. How do you relate to Jesus comment about the sheep knowing the shepherd’s voice?  What do you suppose he means?  How has this been true for you?

1. How do you make sense of Jesus’s statement about some sheep knowing his voice?  Who do you think he is referring to?  What would this have meant to the original audience?  What do you think it means for us today – what do we do with this?  What is the criteria for determining who is included?  Is there a criteria, or does this simply mean “everyone” is the same, or?

1. Reflect on all of the questions we’ve pondered here.  What is the stickiest take-away for you today?

Study Notes (Gail O'Day, New Interpreters Bible)

The image of Jesus as the good shepherd has a perennial hold on Christian imagination and piety. Some of the most popular pictures of Jesus are those that depict him as a shepherd, leading a flock of sheep. This picture of Jesus has influenced the church’s images of its leaders, so that in many traditions the ordained minister is referred to as the “pastor,” and ministerial care of the congregation is referred to as “pastoral care.” Behind both of these understandings of ministerial vocation is the sense that the minister is called to lead in the image of Jesus’ leadership, to be the shepherd as Jesus is shepherd. Because these images play such an important role in the life of the church, it is critical for the interpreter of John 10 to distinguish among the various uses of shepherd imagery in the NT. The move to pastoral images of ministry, for example, belongs more to other NT texts (e.g., John 21:15–19; Acts 20:28–29; 1 Pet 5:2–3) than to the interpretation of John 10. The pastoral images of John 10 are primarily christological and ecclesiological, focusing on Jesus’ identity and his relationship to the sheep.

Because the picture of Jesus as good shepherd has such a rich tradition in the life of the church (for other NT examples of this image, see Heb 13:20; 1 Pet 2:25; 3:4), there is a tendency to read John 10 as if Jesus’ self-revelation as the good shepherd is the only christological image in the discourse. As a result, the christological imagery of the gate (vv. 7–10) is subsumed into the imagery of the good shepherd (vv. 11–16). This move runs contrary to the text itself, however. The two “I am” statements of John 10 present the reader with two christological images whose theological integrity must be preserved. When the shepherd image is emphasized in isolation from the gate image, the picture of Jesus in John 10 becomes too easy to appropriate and loses its christological edge. When the gate imagery is dropped, the christological focus of the shepherd imagery can become anthropocentric. That is, Jesus as the good shepherd becomes a model for other shepherds who would lead the “sheep.” The text becomes as much about “us” as leaders as it is about Jesus as the shepherd. When the gate imagery is retained, however, this slide from the christological to the anthropocentric is more difficult.

The heavy concentration of OT pastoral images in this discourse, particularly images associated with God in the OT texts, points the reader to the discourse’s christological heart: Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promises to God’s people. Yet Jesus is more than the good shepherd for whom Israel waits (Ezekiel 34), because he is also the gate for the sheep. Jesus is the way to life (the gate), and he leads the way to life (the good shepherd). While these are closely related, they are not the same thing. Jesus is the way to life because he is himself life (v. 10; cf. 14:6). Jesus leads the way to the life because he lays down his own life (vv. 11, 14–15). These are non-transferrable attributes; they derive from the heart of Jesus’ identity as the one sent by God.

The “I am” statements of John 10, then, deepen the array of images of Jesus available to the church. The images of Jesus as the gate and the good shepherd are intensely relational; they have no meaning without the presence of the sheep. These “I am” statements do not simply reveal who Jesus is, but more specifically reveal who Jesus is in relationship to those who follow him. The identity of Jesus and the identity of the community that gathers around him are inextricably linked.

The relational dimension of the christological images provides the bridge to the ecclesiological dimension of this imagery. The identity of the community is determined by the shepherd’s (Jesus’) relationship to it and its relationship to the shepherd (Jesus). There is, then, an anthropological dimension to the shepherd discourse, but it is an anthropology completely dependent on the discourse’s christology and expressed exclusively in communal terms. For the community of faith, human identity is determined by Jesus’ identity. Who Jesus is with and for the community determines who the community is.

What image of community life does this discourse present? Nowhere in this discourse are any who follow Jesus depicted as shepherds or even assistant shepherds. Rather, all who gather around Jesus receive their identity as members of the flock. The community that gathers around Jesus are the ones who share in the mutual knowledge of God and Jesus, whose relationship to Jesus is modeled on Jesus’ relationship to God (v. 15). Listening to Jesus’ voice is the source of its unity (v. 16). By taking Jesus as its point of access to God, the community receives abundant life (v. 10).

Most important, however, the community that gathers around Jesus receives its identity through Jesus’ gift of his life for them. In the end, to be a member of Jesus’ flock is to know oneself as being among those for whom Jesus is willing to die. The christological and ecclesiological images of the shepherd discourse become one around the death of Jesus. The death of Jesus also holds together the metaphors of gate and shepherd and shows how Jesus can be both things. In the freely chosen act of his death, Jesus shows the way to life (gate) and offers abundant life by the example of his love (shepherd). It is important that Jesus says he lays down his life for the sheep, not for his sheep (v. 15), just as in 6:51 he speaks of giving his flesh for the life of the world. It is an inclusive, rather than an exclusive, gift, just like God’s love for the world (3:16). Jesus makes the love of God fully available by expressing that love in his death (vv. 17–18).

The shepherd discourse thus provides the contemporary church with the occasion to reflect on several critical theological themes. First, it asks the church to attend to the christological heart of its identity. Who the church is cannot be separated from who Jesus is. Reflection on church identity, then, always needs to be part of a serious christological conversation, a conversation that takes Jesus’ gift of his life as its starting point. Second, this discourse provides an occasion to reassess the assumptions that accompany the use of shepherd and pastoral imagery within the church, particularly about the church’s leaders. When that imagery sets the church’s “shepherds” apart from the rest of the sheep, the power of the pastoral imagery of community in John 10 is diminished, if not lost. Jesus uses pastoral imagery in this discourse to depict the lives of all believers, not just some, in relationship to him.

Finally, the discourse provides the church with a fresh vantage point from which to reflect on community practices. What does it mean for the church to live as Jesus’ sheep? What does a church that understands itself as Jesus’ sheep look like? How will its identity be manifested in the world? Jesus the good shepherd chose to make his identity manifest to the world through his death. The shepherd discourse calls the church to live out its life according to the model of community envisioned here by Jesus, a model grounded in the mutuality of love embodied in the relationship of Jesus and God. This model of community will be developed further in the Farewell Discourse, but the first glimpse of the community for which Jesus gave his life is available in this text.

John 10:22–42 brings the interpreter face to face with the decisive theological issue of this Gospel: the relationship of God and Jesus. As the commentary has shown, this passage says nothing about this relationship that has not been said before, but it says it in direct and concise formulations: “The Father and I are one”; “the Father is in me and I in the Father.”

There is a temptation to interpret these words according to the norms of later trinitarian doctrine, to read them according to what they became in the life of the church, rather than what they say in their own context. To do so, however, is to distort and diminish the theological and christological witness of this important text. The Gospel of John was an important resource for the theologians of the second and third centuries as they struggled to think through the interrelationship of the three persons of God, but their questions were not the Fourth Evangelist’s questions, nor were their intrachurch controversies his. As the Commentary on 10:30 shows, John was talking about the functional unity of God and Jesus in their work and power, not a metaphysical unity of nature and person. Later christology expressed this unity metaphysically by speaking of the one nature or substance, categories absent from John. The Fourth Evangelist’s primary concern was to articulate the relationship of God and Jesus in the context of Jewish-Christian relations, not Christian-Christian relations in the debates over christology.

The most important difference between the discussions of the early church fathers and the Fourth Evangelist about the relationship of God and Jesus is that the church fathers were developing doctrine and the Fourth Evangelist was telling a story. This does not mean that the Fourth Evangelist’s reflections are inherently any less theological, but because they are cast in a story, they have a very different theological intent. John 10:30 and 38 thus belong to John’s story of Jesus and cannot be abstracted from that context without altering their meaning. When Jesus says, “I and the Father are one,” it does not come as any surprise to the Gospel reader, because that reality has been acted out throughout the Gospel narrative. Jesus has done the works of God, spoken the words of God, identified himself with the I AM of God. The relationship of God and Jesus is not a metaphysical puzzle for the Fourth Evangelist, but evidence of God’s love for the world (3:16–17). The wonder of the incarnation is that God is palpably available to the world in the person of Jesus, that those who believe in Jesus, who see the works of God in Jesus, have access to God in ways never before possible (14:7–11).

The question of the identity of the persons of God and Jesus would make no sense to the Fourth Evangelist, because he is clear throughout that Jesus’ incarnation and presence in the world are wholly the result of God’s initiative: God gave; God sent. The two distinct characters, God and Jesus, are essential to John’s proclamation of the gospel. In fact, much of the trinitarian conversation about natures and persons would probably sound to the Fourth Evangelist like the “Jews’ ” erroneous charge of blasphemy in 10:33, a conversation that misses the point about the unity of God and Jesus.

One non-negotiable point that John and the early framers of doctrine have in common, however, is that Jesus’ relationship to God is the crux and stumbling block of Christian faith. For the Fourth Evangelist, that relationship is the dividing line between Jews and Christians, and hence is the focal point of most of the controversy between Jesus and the religious authorities. For the second-, third-, and fourth-century theologians, it was the dividing line between orthodoxy and heresy. For contemporary Christians, it is the source of Christians’ distinctive religious identity in their conversations with one another and with people of different religious faiths.

In the Fourth Gospel, Jesus does not claim to be a second God or somehow to replace God or to “make himself” God. Rather, Jesus claims to know God as no human has ever known God, to be one with God in will and work for the salvation of the world. This truth, and the believer’s experience of it, is the ultimate shaping factor in the Fourth Gospel narrative. Everything, from the hymnic beginning (1:1–18) to Thomas’s confession at 20:28, works to show forth the incarnate presence of God in Jesus.

It thus requires a significant amount of interpretive imagination and effort to allow John 10:22–42 to speak to the church about the relationship of God and Jesus in its own voice, and not in the voice of church doctrine. In order to understand Jesus’ claims in 10:30 and 38 about his relationship with God, it is critical that the interpreter keep them grounded in the whole story of the Fourth Gospel. Jesus’ acts of healing and giving life, his words of teaching all demonstrate and embody the presence of God in the world. Taken out of that larger context, the theological and christological claims of John 10:30 and 38 become doctrinal propositions. Within that narrative context, however, they have a life and vitality that they cannot have as doctrinal propositions. They serve to guide the reader back into the story of Jesus, to remind the reader of the shape and character of the “grace upon grace” (1:16) that is available when Jesus makes God known.

Atomic: Q&A (John 9)

Think about some of the key things you have learned to do in your life that you can remember.  Riding a bike.  Driving a car.  Learning to play a musical instrument. Picking up a hobby.  Playing sports.  In every case, there is an incredibly awkward phase that makes us feel very insecure, with seemingly every part of us freaking out.  We’re usually lousy at the early stages and have to work through our insecurities, face into our ignorance, trust the new thing, and move forward with more and more learning. 

Q: How do you recognize this pattern in the types of learning described above?

Deeper things are like this as well.  Marriage-level relationships, adult parent-child relationships, workplace relationships – all of these come with learning new things about ourselves, discovering things we need to unlearn, embracing the new despite our fears and opposition (internally and externally), and moving forward.

Q: How have you lived out this pattern in the types of relationships described above?

Read John 9.

In the Gospel of John’s telling of the story of the man born blind who gets healed by Jesus, we see the same pattern emerge.  This story is more than a “simple” healing story – it is one that we can all relate to on one level or another.  For instance, we recall that the Johannine community of Jewish Jesus followers was ousted from the synagogue because they had learned and believed Jesus’ teachings which in some cases were very unorthodox.  The status quo didn’t tolerate the “new” ideas of Jesus and, as it nearly always goes with systems, the system kicked out what didn’t fit.  This had to be absolutely heart-breaking for this community.  They were being told, essentially, that God was not truly with them in their interpretation.  While they were being judged as ungodly and unwanted, they were experiencing the presence of God – they knew God was with them, despite what the “system” was telling them.  This pattern happened repeatedly in the early Christian movement (and with Jesus, of course): the new insight comes that challenges the previous ways of thinking (and all who believe in it), followed by tension, followed by the system trying to kick out the new thing (which often goes “binary”), and, if the system cannot absorb and integrate the “new”, it is kicked out into the cold to survive on its own, if possible.  Lots of good ideas and movements die there.  We have all been the blind man in the story in one way or another.  We all have known what it is like to face a system that doesn’t want to change.  Maybe it’s internal – like riding a bike when your body is telling you you’re an idiot – or perhaps it’s much more complex – like learning to literally marry two systems into one when you commit at the highest level of covenant relationship.

Q: What are some of your experiences of being the “new” in a system?  How did it go?  How does knowing that this is the way systems work affect your thinking and feeling about it?

The story, of course, is not just about systems theory – that concept wasn’t formalized until our current era.  This story of systems change is imbedded in a story about Jesus, a story that was probably a mish-mash of many stories represented by this one single story about the power of God at work through Jesus (thus providing legitimacy), and about one man’s awakening to the implications of his new capacity to see.  It starts with trusting what Jesus was saying and living into it.  It’s not as if Jesus and the disciples dog-piled an unsuspecting blind dude so Jesus could “punk” him by smearing the spit-mud on his eyes!  The blind man was a willing participant.  Nothing in the system had really been working for him his whole life (except that he was still alive, I guess).  That doesn’t mean there wasn’t something to lose in saying yes to Jesus’ invitation.  There surely was.  This might have represented the 100th time someone had a miracle cure – could he handle one more round of dashed hope?  Moving even toward health and faith is a legitimate risk.  We are used to the system that we’re in.  It’s home for us, even in terms of faith.  There are variables that help us move forward: inner conviction that change is needed, a sense that the future is worth the risk, and someone to be with us on the journey, among others.  This man evidenced great courage, his capacity to see was in play, and he was supported by Jesus (who would have been renown for healing by that time).  It worked!  He could see!  In truth, he saw everything differently.

Q: How have you had moment(s) like this when you “saw the light”?

Over the next hours he began to see more and more differently about the system he had been in, what Jesus had invited him into, and who he was becoming.  All wrapped in a story about faith.  In perfect form, the system challenged the “new” even though it was legitimate, because it was going to challenge the health of the system.  Even though it was a sick one, it was working and did not want to die.  It fought back.  It kicked the man out.  Jesus returned to him, reintroduced himself (!), and invited him to keep moving forward in following him. 

Q: How have you experienced the backlash of even faith systems after you started living out of your new vision?

This one story of a blind man’s restored sight is the metaphor of life and faith.  In terms of faith, there is much to see here.  While I don’t think we are born blind, I do believe we all have grown up in systems that train blindness and support our blindness.  The same Spirit of God that was at work in Jesus – the “Christ” part of Jesus Christ – is always inviting us to see, to trust, to follow toward healing.  Always.  When we say yes, my experience has been that it truly does open our eyes.  There is a reason why the first verse of Amazing Grace ends with “was blind, but now I see” – this is the way spiritual renewal, realized resurrection goes.  The “born again” thing from John chapter three is another way to articulate the same thing.

I know personally and as a pastor for nearly 25 years that we share the blind man’s path as we face the system that do not want us to change.  It fights back in myriad ways, even on good, healing things of God.  For many, this is an insurmountable impasse, and they shift back into their former state, the new vision fading to black over time.  For a relative few (honestly) the inner conviction, dream of a brighter future, and a sense of being supported coalesce into breakthrough.  New life and new vision propel the person forward to their next phase of resurrected life.  We stay there until we are invited again (and again and again and again) to trust once more to see anew, because we will find ourselves in more systems in which we find great comfort and stability.  The process continues.

Q: How do we know if we are stuck, blind once again, in need of saying yes to the perennial invitation?

To paraphrase a friend of mine who pastors a church in Santa Clara, Jesus was never interested in creating Christians. He was inviting people to simply follow him.  We as a church should not care much about making Christians.  We should, however, be clear on inviting people to follow.  The old-school word is disciples – learners and followers of Jesus.  For us it is the same.  The Spirit of God that inspired and informed Jesus is still coming alongside, still inviting us to trust and follow.  For our whole lives.  For our lives.  For all people’s lives.  For our healing.  For the healing of the world.  And so the invitation is before you…

Q: Do you want to see?

Study Notes:

Beasley-Murray (Word Biblical Commentary)

q  Sins of the parents visited on children a common thought, and even scripturally affirmed (Ex. 20:15; Dt. 5:9) 154

q  Some thought was present about children sinning before birth, using Jacob and Esau as examples of a struggle in the womb. 155

q  Light of the world reference is that Jesus is such for all humanity. 155

q  Saliva, especially that of a first-time father, was thought to have healing powers. 155

q  The washing in the pool of Siloam (Shiloah) may have been a fulfiment of scripture affirming Jesus’ position as the Messiah: “The scepter shall not depart from Juday until Shiloh comes (Gen 49:10). 156

q  The interrogation by the man’s neighbors signifies that something significant happened.  Interestingly, Jesus, who is absent from these discussions, is the centerpiece.  156

q  Jesus’ decision to perform this on the Sabbath created the dilemma: he broke Sabbath law (Dt. 13:1-5), but how could a sinner perform such signs? 157

q  The blind man was slowly beginning to see more and more – Jesus was a prophet, which was tied to Messianic prophecies. 157

q  The parents’ fear of the Jews was tied to the prophecy piece.  Being a miracle worker wasn’t too disruptive, but agreeing with their son that Jesus was a prophet may have meant expulsion from the synagogue. 157

q  “Give glory to God” is a demand to confess his sin of lying about his blindness and subsequent healing, and to admit the authorities are right and Jesus is a sinner. 158

q  The Pharisees illumine the disappearance of impartiality: they have made up their mind about Jesus, because they made up their mind about Moses – they know where Moses came from. 158

q  The amazing thing is the unbelief of the Pharisees, which the man is pointing out.  The Pharisees condemn themselves by noting the sinfulness of the man born blind, and therefore the truly miraculous nature of Jesus in healing him.  He is getting more and more bold with those who are opposing Jesus.  159

q  Jesus reveals himself as the Son of Man – the Messiah.  Compare the Samaritan woman.  The man’s response is to fall prostrate and kiss his feet.  159

q  Judgment is concomitant to grace.  To those who desire to see, Jesus gives light.  To those who do not, Jesus condemns to their chosen darkness. 160

q  This narrative exemplifies the progression from sight to insight, and also to judgment. 161

q  For those in contexts that are unreceptive to the Light, this text serves as comfort. 162

Borchert (New American Commentary)

q  For children with symptoms of sin, it was the parents’ obligation to confess on their behalf. 313

q  Jesus shifted the focus from placing blame on God to the grace of God in the face of need. 313

q  Jesus’ day/night discourse has a double meaning which the disciple’s do not yet grasp. 314

q  In giving the man specific instruction, Jesus makes the connection between experiencing God’s power and obedience. 315

q  Siloam=sent.  This is indicative of Jesus’ mission and his command. 315

q  Pool is also the source for water for Jerusalem, and specifically for the Feast of Tabernacles.  Even in times of siege, the pool provided water (Hezekiah). 315

q  The original intent of the text was not to support baptism, even though it was used later. 316

q  The crowd was looking for quick and easy answers to complicated questions. 316

q  Not wanting to give more attention to Jesus, the Pharisees shifted their attack to the man. 319

q  The man’s statement “This I know” is akin to a sworn testimony. 321

q  The man’s backlash on the Pharisees is because they failed to recognize the healing of congenital blindness, and the healer. 322

q  “This statement (30-33), therefore, is the man’s affirmation of the need for authenticity with God and his testimony was that the healer must be a God-authenticated person.” 323

q  Irony is that the Pharisees missed the point of the Tabernacles – hope and joy – and were, rather, still in a spirit of bondage as were those who died in the wildnerness even though they crossed the sea as a result of the Passover. 323

q  Believing meant the active commitment of himself to the Son of Man.  He had already believed without seeing, itself a sign of the believers who were to come after the resurrection. 324

Brown (Yale-Anchor Study Bible)

q  Blindness in the first century.  Popular theology held that people blind from birth had lost their sight because of sin on the part of their parents.

q  Washing in the Pool of Siloam.  Water as a miraculous agent was not unknown (Elijah and Naaman).

q  Confession of faith.  I once was blind, but now I see.  This simple confession was likely used by the early church as they celebrated baptism.

q  Light of the world.  Jesus was indicating that what was really being played out was a battle between good and evil, and that he would overcome.

O’Day (New Interpreter’s Bible Commentary)

q  “In the Fourth Gospel, “sin” is not a moral category about behavior, but is a theological category about one’s response to the revelation of God in Jesus (8:21, 24; 9:39-41; 16:9)”. 653

q  Jesus’ making clay was significant, because kneading was one of the thirty-nine categories of work forbidden on the Sabbath. 654

q  The interrogation provides the opportunity for the formerly blind man to bear witness to the healing. 656

q  The progression of the man’s ability to see is related to faith.  The point is that our belief must develop similarly. 656

q  Part of the man’s boldness was in his refusal to play the Pharisee’s game of legal interpretation.  The man kept at this original scheme, simply repeating what had happened to him. 659

q  The Pharisees get the tables turned on them, and they become the interrogates, bring much joy to the contemporary readers of John. 659

q  “For the Fourth Gospel, faithfulness to the grace and truth available in Jesus, not faithfulness to the law, is the decisive mark of true discipleship.” 659

q  Jesus not driving anyone away who comes to Him is in contrast to the attitude of the Pharisees. 660

q  Man’s belief progression: the healer, the prophet, the Son of Man. 661

q  His worship of God ironically fulfills the Pharisees’ request that he give glory to God. 661

q  Contemporary readers would recognize that “their confession of Jesus will secure them in community with him at the same time it excludes them from their former religious home.” 661

q  Jesus redefines sins as not the presence of an illness, nor the violation of the law, but as one’s resistance to Jesus. 661

q  “The story of the blind man has been used as a symbol of faith and new life throughout the history of the church.  The healing of the blind man appears as a baptismal symbol in second-century frescoes in the catacombs in Rome (as do the stories of the Samaritan woman and the healing of the man in John 5).  These same stories were used in Lenten baptismal liturgies dating at least as far back as the fourth and fifth centuries.  The blind man’s movement from darkness to light and his confession of his faith in Jesus provided a vehicle through which the church could celebrate the power of new life that begins in baptism.  The blind man’s word in John 9:25 also offer eloquent testimony to the transforming power of God’s grace in the hymn “Amazing Grace”: “I once was blind, but now I see.”” 665

Atomic: Truth

I was listening to a Radiolab podcast this week called “Loops”.  In it the story of three mathematicians’ work was briefly described.  Gottlob Frege was as much a philosopher as he was a mathematician.  He was convinced that math could inform logic, and logic could essentially eliminate the need for intuition and mystery in life.  Everything was explainable if you just worked your pencils hard enough.  He was largely overlooked during his life, but was later celebrated for his contribution by other well known mathematicians, including Bertrand Russel, who valued Frege deeply even though he came up with a scenario that Frege’s axiom could not handle, illustrated in the story of a town where all the men were clean-shaven.  Those who did not shave themselves were shaven by the town’s barber.  The logic works for every many in town but one: the barber.  If the barber shaves himself, he does not get shaved by the barber.  Wait a second…  Another mathematician/logician, Kurt Gödel, worked to address the unsolvable with mathematical references.  For instance, it is a held mathematical truth that every even number is the sum of two prime numbers.  And yet, it is impossible to know for sure because we can never get to the end of numbers to test the theory!  Like the Barber story, he simplified the problem with a single sentence: This sentence is untrue.  See the problem?  His work opened the door for thinking in news ways with the freedom that some troubling axioms cannot be disproved.

We humans like to keep things nice and orderly.  It helps us feel like we’re in control.  We’ve done a lot with this regarding religion.  Gödel was a theist who read the Bible every Sunday morning.  He said that he thought religion itself was good, but that religions were bad.  Why?  Likely because religions have a way of defining themselves so clearly that they leave no room for God.  Jesus was devout in living out the Jewish faith, and yet it was the living out his faith that eventually got him killed.  He favored religion over religions; he had room for God to be God – a great freedom that eluded the many who were content with their defined, exclusive religions.

In one dense exchange, Jesus spoke with a mix of Jewish people in Jerusalem – some who believed in Jesus and others who did not.  One thing he said makes its way now and again into graduation and political rally speeches alike.  It’s a good stand-alone statement, but, as is the case nearly always, knowing the context brings greater understanding and depth.  See if you can pick out the phrase in the exchange:

     Jesus said to the people who believed in him, “You are truly my disciples if you remain faithful to my teachings. And you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
     “But we are descendants of Abraham,” they said. “We have never been slaves to anyone. What do you mean, ‘You will be set free’?”
     Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave of sin. A slave is not a permanent member of the family, but a son is part of the family forever. So if the Son sets you free, you are truly free. Yes, I realize that you are descendants of Abraham. And yet some of you are trying to kill me because there’s no room in your hearts for my message. I am telling you what I saw when I was with my Father. But you are following the advice of your father.”
     “Our father is Abraham!” they declared.
     “No,” Jesus replied, “for if you were really the children of Abraham, you would follow his example. Instead, you are trying to kill me because I told you the truth, which I heard from God. Abraham never did such a thing. No, you are imitating your real father.”
     They replied, “We aren’t illegitimate children! God himself is our true Father.”
     Jesus told them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, because I have come to you from God. I am not here on my own, but he sent me. Why can’t you understand what I am saying? It’s because you can’t even hear me! For you are the children of your father the devil, and you love to do the evil things he does. He was a murderer from the beginning. He has always hated the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he lies, it is consistent with his character; for he is a liar and the father of lies. So when I tell the truth, you just naturally don’t believe me! Which of you can truthfully accuse me of sin? And since I am telling you the truth, why don’t you believe me? Anyone who belongs to God listens gladly to the words of God. But you don’t listen because you don’t belong to God.” – John 8:31-47 (NLT)

Like so many in John’s Gospel, we see once again a group of people who aren’t on Jesus’ wavelength.  This particular group has become comfortable in their understanding of religion as being secured by the results of their 23 and Me results – they are genetically Jewish.  Moreover, since they follow the traditions of Judaism, they are surely legitimate.  Yet Jesus here is calling them to see themselves differently.  He is suggesting that they have adopted a different father than the one of their genes.  Rather than following God, they have unwittingly been following the way of the world.  The way of the world was “home” to them – they had built their identity on it even though it was a false one.  Unfortunately, because they associated their nation and their faith with God, and assumed God endorsed both, they naturally felt quite justified in whatever they did.  Kind of like some in our country who are so convinced that the United States is a Christian nation, so that God must surely be blessing us wherever we go and in whatever we do, even if that means horrible things for the people we meet.  Slavery, genocide, imperialism, followed by systemic inequality and inequity for select “browner” citizens – all endorsed by God?  I don’t think so.  I don’t think Jesus thought so for his contemporaries, either.

Of course, we must remember that this Gospel was written from the perspective of a group of Jesus followers who had been ousted by their Jewish community.  Surely that informs their remembrance!  From their vantage point, they understood at a different level just how prescient Jesus’ words were about the truth revealed in their killing him.  Their religion would lead them to tear Jesus apart instead of honoring the heart of God who longs to brings things together, to re-ligament – the true goal of religion.

It’s not that Jesus was anti-religion; it was that he understood that God was the point of it all, and where religion was supposed to always point.  Sometimes, however, religion itself makes itself the focal point of worship.  When that happens, a whole lot of ugly follows.  The historical examples of this are too numerous to recount here.

What was Jesus getting at, then, with his Abrahamic conversation?  Abraham wasn’t devoid of cultic practices, but he did sense a call from God to leave his comfortable homeland behind him to start something new and different.  He was trusting the voice of God who was leading him, not a script or the orthodoxy he was leaving behind.  This new thing was based on a relationship with the Divine who was not bound by geographical constraints. God was faithful everywhere.  God was with Abraham everywhere.  God was faithfully good everywhere.  Following the voice of God led to good things for him and those under his care.

Jesus was living out a similar reality.  The truth that set him free – and anyone else – is that this God is deeply with us, in us, for us, guiding us, energizing us, comforting us, and so much more.  This inner relationship led to faithful expressions on Jesus’ and Abraham’s part.  Jesus’ practice of the Jewish faith had things in order – the religion was made for humanity to become more connected to God.  Humanity was not made for religion, as if it was ever meant to be the constraining straight-jacket so many find it to be when the cart gets before the horse.  This is why Jesus was so often in trouble with religious folks who recognized his breaking rules.  Jesus was called by God – a higher authority than the Law.  To freely live the way Jesus lived, however, means we become more open, more stretchy in our understanding of God, relying on the indwelling of God to guide us.

The Apostle Paul never met Jesus, but he surely encountered Christ.  He understood that they whole point of religion was to connect people to God in relationship, not religiosity, not dogma, not exclusivism.  Read some of the things Paul said:

     In this new life, it doesn’t matter if you are a Jew or a Gentile, circumcised or uncircumcised, barbaric, uncivilized, slave, or free. Christ is all that matters, and he lives in all of us. – Colossians 3:11 (NLT)

     But when God, who set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me by his grace, was pleased to reveal his Son in me so that I might preach him among the Gentiles, my immediate response was not to consult any human being. – Galatians 1:16 (NIV)

     Examine yourselves to see whether you are living in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not realize that Jesus Christ is in you? – 2 Corinthians 13:5 (NRSV)

Paul was beaten repeatedly for daring to live in this new reality.  Freedom always challenges forms of oppression.  When we let go of our limited thinking about God, we find life.  More from Paul:

     …recognize that God is a living, personal presence, not a piece of chiseled stone. And when God is personally present, a living Spirit, that old, constricting legislation is recognized as obsolete. We're free of it! All of us! Nothing between us and God, our faces shining with the brightness of his face. And so we are transfigured much like the Messiah, our lives gradually becoming brighter and more beautiful as God enters our lives and we become like him. – 2 Corinthians 3:17-18 (The Message)

If we aren’t paying attention, our relationship with God (as with other important relationships) will drift into mechanics and lose the heart, the life that we once enjoyed.  We will find ourselves going through the motions, still caring, but not animated like we once were.  When we find ourselves there, we will be comfortably at rest in religion, which is not the same as being alive in Christ with Christ alive in us. 

Where are you in this regard?  How do you monitor your spiritual health?  Do you know that God is within you?  How are you living as though it were true?  How are you allowing that reality to change the way you see yourself, value yourself, care for yourself?  How are you letting the reality that God is also in the people we encounter affect you?  How are you thinking and behaving is if it were true? 

Bob Goff let this reality really sink in, and it changed him.  Because it changed him, incredible good is happening in more and more people around the world.  In a chapter about making the most of the time we have with people – even if only three minutes at a time – he offers the following insights:

     When we draw a circle around the whole world like grace did and say everybody is in, God’s love gives us bigger identities than we used to have.  With our newer, bigger, identities, we can draw even bigger arcs around people’s lives. We start to see that our time here isn’t meant to be spent forming opinions about the people we meet.  It’s an opportunity to draw the kind of circles around them that grace has drawn around us, until everybody is on the inside.

     We don’t decide who in line is in and who’s out, and we don’t need to waste any more time engaging in the kinds of arguments some people get sucked into. People who are becoming love don’t swing at every pitch. We start by meeting people just three minutes at a time. – Bob Goff, Everybody Always

To conclude, a benediction from Paul:

Oh! May the God of green hope fill you up with joy, fill you up with peace, so that your believing lives, filled with the life-giving energy of the Holy Spirit, will brim over with hope! – Romans 15:13 (The Message)

Reflections from Gail O’Day (New Interpreters Bible)

John 8 presents the reader of the Gospel of John with some of the Gospel’s most difficult interpretive issues. The Jesus who emerges from these verses speaks with staggeringly sharp invective to his opponents and holds nothing back in his attack on his theological adversaries. It is very difficult to harmonize this picture of Jesus with the images of him that shape our theological imaginations: Jesus as the one who eats with outcasts and sinners, who cares for the lost sheep, who is the model of how we are to love. Complicating this picture of Jesus is the fact that he speaks this scathing language to a group John identifies as the “Jews,” so that Jesus’ words in this chapter have become a pivotal text in discussions of Christian anti-Semitism.

Because this text has played such a controversial role in shaping Jewish-Christian relationships, it is the interpreter’s moral responsibility to look the language of this chapter and the image of Jesus squarely in the face. It does no good simply to whitewash the intensity of the invective, nor does it do any good to continue to treat the anti-“Jews” language in this text as if it were license for anti-Semitism. The interpreter is called to ask hard questions of this text in order to discover what it is saying and what it is not saying. The interpreter must work diligently and carefully to understand the text in its original social and historical context in order to avoid making simplistic and destructive extrapolations to contemporary church settings. The commentary has attempted to provide the interpreter with some of the historical, social, and cultural contexts necessary to begin this work. This Reflections section will begin by reviewing the historical and social data as they pertain directly to the appropriation of this text and then, on the basis of this review, to examine the critical issues with which this text confronts the interpreter.

Two historical/social issues bear directly on the appropriation of John 8: the relationship of the Johannine community to establishment Judaism and the role of invective in first-century intra-Jewish debates. As has been noted many times in this commentary, the relationship between Johannine Jewish Christians and Judaism is one of the decisive issues for the shape and perspective of the Fourth Gospel. Throughout the Gospel, Jesus’ antagonists are regularly identified as the “Jews.” The work of J. Louis Martyn and others has helped us to see that a rupture(s) with the synagogue occurred sometime in the last quarter of the first century that decisively changed the fabric of Johannine Christians’ religious lives.

Prior to the decisive break, Johannine Christians were able to hold together their participation in the liturgical and cultural world of Judaism and their faith in Jesus. (It is important to note that this joint identity was not unique to Johannine Christians. For example, in Acts 2, Luke depicts the developing Christian community as participating in temple worship as well as conducting their own worship services.) The exact course of events that led to the break cannot be charted, but the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE was one of the pivotal factors.

Without the Temple, Judaism was forced to reconstitute itself around a different center, and the Jewish Scriptures became that center. The synagogues, therefore, took on more importance, because they were the sites where Scripture was taught and preached. Moreover, those Jews who professed faith in Jesus also took the Scriptures to be of the utmost importance, because they understood Jesus to be the fulfillment of God’s promises as made known to God’s people through Scripture. The conflict was joined, therefore, around the question of who could lay claim to God’s promises and to the status of God’s people. This conflict is apparent in the adversarial language of Matthew 23, for example, but the group of Christians who seemed to have experienced this conflict and struggle most intensely in their day-to-day lives was the community of Christians for whom the Fourth Gospel was written. The Fourth Gospel makes repeated reference to Christians’ being cast out of the synagogue (9:22; 12:42; 16:2) and the fear and danger this produced in the community’s life.

The Johannine Christians thus understood themselves to be outcasts, people whom the Jewish establishment no longer considered to be Jews, a community forcibly removed from its roots and the symbols that formed its identity. Their self-identity was as a marginalized community that stood powerless in the face of the power of the dominant religious group, the Jews. The Gospel of John contains many attempts by the Fourth Evangelist to reclaim his community’s relationship to its Jewish roots. The Fourth Evangelist makes repeated references to Jewish feasts and demonstrates the ways in which Jesus is the true fulfillment of those feasts (e.g., 7:37–38; 8:12). Most of the Fourth Evangelist’s primary metaphors and images are drawn from the language of the Jewish Scriptures, and John 4, 6, and 8 revolve around comparisons between Jesus and Jacob, Moses, and Abraham, respectively. The wealth and depth of Jewish scriptural allusions in the Fourth Gospel show that the Fourth Evangelist is not antagonistic to Jewish traditions. Rather, he is antagonistic to the Jewish power structures and political forces that have attempted to cut his community off from these traditions.

The virulent language of chap. 8 must be read against this backdrop of being cast out of the synagogue, of being excluded from the religious centers that had once helped to define one’s religious and communal identity. The language of this chapter is the language of the minority group spoken in protest to the majority culture. The Johannine Jewish Christians had no way to back up this language—that is, they had no power to take any actions comparable to their own exclusion from the synagogue. They were outnumbered by the Jewish community and had no political resources at their disposal. Their only “power” rested in the force of their rhetoric, in their ability to denounce those who had excluded them.

In the Commentary on 8:44–47, Qumran texts were cited in order to place the invective of these verses in their full cultural context. The Qumran community, too, used very strong language to speak against other Jews whom they sensed were depriving them of their religious heritage and polluting God’s promises to God’s people. One important difference between the Qumran sectarians and the Johannine community is that the Qumran sectarians initially chose to exclude themselves from the Jerusalem community, whereas the Johannine community was forcibly excluded. The persecution that the Qumran community endured after their separation, however, was not of its choosing and positioned them as a community oppressed by establishment Judaism, like the community for which the Fourth Evangelist wrote. The Qumran analogue is important, because it helps the interpreter to see how the language about the Jews in chap. 8 functions as intra-Jewish invective in its own cultural and historical setting.

What is the significance of this historical context for the contemporary interpreter of John 8? First, it reminds the interpreter that one must attend to the specific situation of a biblical text in order to make the move to potential contemporary appropriations. The issues in John 8 have a very specific cultural context, and the only way that this text can have a place in the life of the church is if the specificity of that original context is honored. One must understand the originating context and then look for modern analogues to that context. That is especially critical with a text, like this one, that has had such a disturbing place in the history of interpretation.

Second, attention to the historical and social contexts of John 8 compels the interpreter to work more carefully at assessing the function of the negative language for the original readers and thus assists the interpreter in distinguishing among the many painful issues with which this text confronts the modern reader. It helps the interpreter to see that simple condemnations of Johannine anti-Semitism, for example, do not begin to touch the complexity of this text. In order to honor the complexity of this text, the interpreter must begin to think separately about two distinct issues that are often treated as one issue in contemporary conversations about this text: (1) the relation of John 8 to Christian anti-Semitism; and (2) the social function of religious invective. It is to the contemporary dimensions of these two issues for the life of Christian faith that we now turn.

1. As the historical review made clear, the Fourth Evangelist understood his community to be persecuted by the power and theological politics of the Jewish establishment. Moreover, this community was itself without power in the face of what it understood to be its oppressors. The harshly negative language about the Jews in this chapter, then, needs to be taken first and foremost as the language of a group without the means—economic, political, military (note the references to the police sent by the Pharisees in 7:32, 45; cf. also 18:3)—to act out its virulence. It is the language of a Jewish-rooted minority that is no longer allowed to claim its Judaism, speaking against those who have denied them their heritage.

When the words of John 8 become the weapons contemporary Christians use in a crusade against Judaism, this critical social fabric is overlooked and, indeed, distorted. First, contemporary Christians have come a long way from the intimate ties with Judaism that shaped the Johannine community. The majority of Christians today are Gentile by heritage, not Jewish, and so the language of John 8 belongs to a context foreign to contemporary Christian experience. When Jesus speaks about the Jews the way he does in John 8, giving voice to the Johannine community’s needs and anger, it is intra-family language. Contemporary Gentile Christians who use this language against Jews are not members of the family and hence their language carries a different weight. Contemporary Christians have not been hurt by the Jewish religious establishment the way the Johannine Christians perceived themselves to be, rejected by those they took to be their brothers and sisters in faith, so that the pathos that drove this language in its own context is missing in ours.

Second, and more crucially, Christians, particularly in North America and Europe, are no longer the minority group, rejected by the Jewish religious establishment because of their beliefs, but are the majority group whose religious practices and values dominate contemporary culture. The balance of power between Christians and Jews is the exact opposite of the situation in which the Fourth Evangelist lived and wrote, and for contemporary Christians to point to John 8 as justification for their attitude toward Judaism is a false and dangerous appropriation of the biblical text.

The danger of the misappropriation of the Fourth Gospel’s type of invective in a situation where the power relationships between Christians and Jews are reversed was tragically evident in the actions of the Third Reich toward Europe’s Jewish population. In that situation, the Germans had the military, economic, and political power to act out the language of hate. It was no longer a question of a minority group’s using strong language to defend its right to exist and worship as it chose, but the majority culture’s exercising its might to exterminate a less powerful group it found offensive and falsely perceived as a threat.

For the Fourth Evangelist, the situation was one of a spiritual and theological battle, in which the Jewish religious authorities were dictating the shape of the Johannine Christians’ faith lives. No such situation holds today; Christianity is not at risk because of Judaism, and for contemporary Christians to overlook this critical social distinction is to do misservice to the gifts and promises of God that Jews and Christians share. The Fourth Evangelist experienced his community as being on the verge of losing access to those gifts, and so the Johannine Jesus speaks with intensity about the Christians’ claim to those gifts and promises as distinct from Jewish claims. Jewish-Christian relations are completely different today, however, and the Fourth Gospel’s invective against the Jews has no meaning in a world where Christian claims and practices rest secure.

2. When the questions of anti-Semitism and religious invective are distinguished from one another, it becomes possible to look at the social and theological function of the language of John 8 as an issue in its own right. One then can ask how this language serves the needs of this religious community. What does this language accomplish? What are its implications for contemporary Christian communities?

As noted earlier, the primary theological function of the invective in John 8 is to defend the Christian community’s claims against the perceived assault of the Jewish religious establishment. Its closely related social function is to establish the identity of this faith community over against those who deny the community’s right to exist. The absolute character of this language and the sharp lines it draws between those who share the community’s beliefs and those who do not are frequently pointed to by scholars as evidence of the sectarian quality of Johannine faith. That is, the Johannine community understood itself as a minority religious group at odds with the dominant religious culture. If Johannine sectarianism is perceived as a primarily intra-Christian phenomenon, then the description is not altogether apt, because Johannine christology and theology are not wholly distinct from other early Christian traditions. If, however, Johannine sectarianism is perceived as Jewish sectarianism, as the above discussion would suggest, then the designation is both apt and helpful in clarifying the social function of the invective in John 8. The way in which the minority, religiously oppressed community of the Fourth Gospel grounded its identity was to reject those who had rejected them first and so establish the boundaries of their community.

The social intent that drives the invective of John 8 is not an isolated phenomenon. On the contrary, the rigidity of community identification it reflects and the language of hate that often accompanies it is evident across the globe in racial, ethnic, and religious conflicts. The divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland is an excellent example of the odd mix of religion, power politics, and community identity that fuels the invective of John 8.

The invective of John 8 confronts the interpreter with very disturbing questions—questions whose answers may be even more difficult to determine than the questions about John 8 and the “Jews.” The primary question is this: Is it necessary to exclude others so absolutely and hatefully in order to establish community identity? This may have been the only avenue that presented itself to the Fourth Evangelist and his community, but is it the only avenue available to us? The NT contains a variety of models of community formation. Paul, for example, who also struggled earnestly with the relation of the developing Christian community and Judaism, developed a model of community formation that attempted to break down barriers rather than to strengthen them (e.g., Gal 3:28). Contemporary Christians, therefore, have a rich set of options as they think about their identity as a faith community, options that move beyond the strident language of John 8.

For an oppressed community like that for whom the Fourth Evangelist wrote, the language of John 8 may have restored a sense of their own power and dignity in the face of persecution. It may be that for communities in similar situations, this language still presents a viable model of community. Yet even when the language is contextualized that way, one still feels a sense of pain and regret at the damage that language like that found in John 8 can cause. The invective found in John 8, and the misuse that later generations of Christians made of it, may bear its most powerful witness as a cautionary tale for present and future Christian communities.

Welcome, LGBTQ, and Everyone Else

In light of the recent United Methodist Convention decision to exclude LGBTQ people and punish pastors who are or officiate same-gender marriage ceremonies, it seemed wise to remind whoever listens to this that there is another way to study and interpret the Bible that offers plenty of room for inclusion. The same interpretive method (hermeneutic) makes room for equality and equity for all who have been kept down some. Women, immigrants, people of color, divorcees - all are welcome at the table AS EQUALS at CrossWalk. Spread the word!

Note: This teaching was offered in March, 2015, which was similar to a message given in 2009. In November 2018, Pastor Pete officiated a same gender marriage ceremony and was subsequently released from his leadership role with the denomination’s region, Growing Healthy Churches, which is part of the American Baptist Churches, USA. Not long after, we were encouraged to leave the region., which we did. We are still part of the very broad American Baptist Convention, and will tie in with a like-minded region in the near future.

Atomic: Sinless?

In this teaching, Steve Lewis offers rich perspective on a very familiar Jesus story that provided the oft quoted, "You who are sinless among you, cast the first stone." Enjoy!

Atomic: Eat!

Why do you practice your faith the way that you do?  Have you ever practiced part of your faith because you thought that doing so would get or keep God on your side?  Or perhaps to encourage God to answer a prayer?  It’s pretty normal to practice faith this way.  But it comes with an undercurrent that might go unrecognized that could lead to some surprising, negative results.  Gratefully, Jesus came to offer a different orientation…

After a dramatic narrative where Jesus heals a lame man on the Sabbath, followed by a heated exchange with Jewish leaders and a soliloquy discourse of sorts in John 5, we find another incredible story in John 6, followed by an interesting exchange and another soliloquy.  Here’s how it went down:

     After this, Jesus crossed over to the far side of the Sea of Galilee, also known as the Sea of Tiberias. A huge crowd kept following him wherever he went, because they saw his miraculous signs as he healed the sick. Then Jesus climbed a hill and sat down with his disciples around him. (It was nearly time for the Jewish Passover celebration.) Jesus soon saw a huge crowd of people coming to look for him. Turning to Philip, he asked, “Where can we buy bread to feed all these people?” He was testing Philip, for he already knew what he was going to do.
     Philip replied, “Even if we worked for months, we wouldn’t have enough money to feed them!”
     Then Andrew, Simon Peter’s brother, spoke up. “There’s a young boy here with five barley loaves and two fish. But what good is that with this huge crowd?”
     “Tell everyone to sit down,” Jesus said. So they all sat down on the grassy slopes. (The men alone numbered about 5,000.) Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks to God, and distributed them to the people. Afterward he did the same with the fish. And they all ate as much as they wanted. After everyone was full, Jesus told his disciples, “Now gather the leftovers, so that nothing is wasted.” So they picked up the pieces and filled twelve baskets with scraps left by the people who had eaten from the five barley loaves.
     When the people saw him do this miraculous sign, they exclaimed, “Surely, he is the Prophet we have been expecting!” When Jesus saw that they were ready to force him to be their king, he slipped away into the hills by himself. (John 6:1-14 NLT)

The feeding story shows up in all four Gospels, which is a pretty good indication that the story stuck in the minds of the earliest communities of Jesus followers.  It’s a pretty amazing story, for sure.  Who wouldn’t remember it?  How could anybody forget such a miraculous display?

Depending who you read, however, determines how you understand what miracle took place.  At face value, it appears that Jesus took five dinner rolls and a couple of sardines, said one hell of a prayer, and voila – the loaves and fishes multiplied like the trouble with tribbles on Star Trek (anybody with me?), producing way more than was needed.  John tells us that this was around the time of year that Passover was celebrated, which would bring to the mind of all good Jewish people on the hillside the time in their history when God provided the bread-like manna from heaven as the people made their exodus from Egypt toward Israel.  They would see in Jesus a reflection of Moses, the first to be used of God to pull off some pretty amazing miracles of God’s extraordinary breaking into our ordinary lives.  Bread was once again coming from heaven!  What an endorsement of Jesus’ identity!  And the bread was made of barley, considered a “sinners offering” – what a communication about grace for all!

There is a different interpretation that focuses the spotlight on a different kind of miracle, which has God doing something amazing in a different kind of way.  Have any of you ever gone to the coast for the day?  Maybe Bodega or Stinson or Goat Rock?  Let’s say you leave Napa around 9:30 or so, and you plan to head back around 3:00.  What do you pack?  If you say a swimsuit, sunscreen, and a beach umbrella, that tells us all that you are a tourist.  A parka?  Hand warmers?  Insulated boots?  Now we’re talking NorCal beaches…  I digress.  You would pack whatever beach gear suits you.  What else?  You would likely bring something to drink and something to eat, right?  Or at least money to buy food and drink on the way?  Jewish people in antiquity were apparently known for their lunchboxes.  It’s what the boy was carrying.  A small basket just big enough to hold enough for the day, carried by a strap over your shoulder.  What do you think?  If people are going to spend the day listening to Jesus talk on a hillside by the lake, do you think they would go without packing food?  Of course not!  In this view, the miracle is that they shared with each other instead of holding onto their resources for themselves alone, encouraged by the generosity of the kid who gave up his lunch.  The crowd was generous enough to allow for the leftovers to be collected – 12 lunch baskets full.  A nod to provisions for the 12 disciples?  A metaphor for the feeding of the 12 tribes of Israel?  Or one basket for every inch of a footlong Subway sandwich?  Okay, nobody thinks the last one has merit…  Our nature is to hoard, not give.  It’s still miraculous, the stirring of God in their midst.  Maybe this miracle is more like one needed today where there is more than enough food to feed all the people in the world, and yet one in seven people do not have enough food for a healthy life, and one third of available food is wasted. Do it again, God!

Miracles are never the point in and of themselves – they are meant to point to something else.  The crowd, in this case, got ahead of themselves and wanted to run with the little they knew – they had a miracle worker in their midst! – and needed to slow down, take a deep breath, and go deeper.

Jesus followed up with them:

“I tell you the truth, you want to be with me because I fed you, not because you understood the miraculous signs. But don’t be so concerned about perishable things like food. Spend your energy seeking the eternal life that the Son of Man can give you. For God the Father has given me the seal of his approval.” (John 6:26-27 NLT)

Jesus goes on to build on what he is saying here, but they don’t get it.  He talks of the importance of eating the bread as a symbol of his body.  People freaked out. We would, too, if we took him literally.  What he was getting at was deeply connected to spending energy on seeking the eternal life he came to proclaim – a life infused by the eternal Spirit of God, not heaven after life is over.  What he was getting at is actually quite profound, and it has to do with who is eating.

Have you ever wondered why primitive cultures lit up burnt offerings in worship to God?  Grain offerings.  Birds.  Goats.  Cows.  Sheep.  Humans.  It was to appease the gods with a meal of sorts, something to satisfy the gods’ wrath by satisfying their hunger for vengeance. Literally.  That’s how people thought.  That’s still how a lot of people think.  Maybe we don’t literally burn stuff, but we are very naturally transactional in our thinking about God, largely related to our lizard brains and religious traditions which continue to perpetuate the view.  So, we wheel and deal to get what we want.  We even buy a line of Christian orthodoxy which erroneously boils things down to saying the magic words to insure you get into heaven.  Hint: it’s off point and against everything Jesus was actually about.

When Jesus was saying that we had to eat the bread as if it were his body, he was turning the tables on the whole paradigm.  Instead of us sacrificing stuff to get God to not kill us or perhaps help us, God is wanting to be taken within us, to be ingested, to become a part of us as intimately as possible.  Actually, the Spirit of God is already intimately part of us – the bread is perhaps a reminder for us to believe it and live in its truth.  Stop trying to get God to not kill you – that’s never been God’s intent.  Stop trying to win God’s favor – you’ve always had it.  Live in the identity that God is forever with you, loving you, longing to restore you when you’re a wreck, celebrating when you reach new heights.

What does that look like?  The story itself gives us some examples to work with.  First, we have Jesus, who simply raises the consciousness of the disciples with a good question.  Philip let’s everybody know they’re running short on cash to clarify what won’t be happening.  Andrew recognizes what is available, what might be built on.  He brings a kid to Jesus.  The nameless little boy offers his meals for the day – was he there with his family to listen?  Now he simply offers what he has on center stage.  Crowd members respond in kind, inspired by the kid’s act of love born out of something within he cannot yet articulate.  All characters stirred by the same spirit operating within them to do their part to make something beautiful happen.

What can you offer?  What questions can you raise to bring awareness to the needs around you?  How can you be helpful in bringing clarity to the situation?  How can you be used to bring someone else into the equation who might love getting involved?  How might you offer what you have in faith, something you may deem insignificant yet might make a world of difference?  How might you be someone in the crowd who “gets it” and responds to the prompt of the spirit to do the inspired thing?

To eat the bread – to really eat the bread – is to accept the very real presence of God anew in your life while at the same time embracing the opportunity to respond with the love you’ve been given.  Take and eat, and then use its energy to draw others to do the same.

Stuff to think about…

1.       How do you interpret the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000?  Why?

2.       What is the message of the miracle if the loaves and fishes literally multiplied before everyone’s eyes?  What is the upside of this interpretation?  What is the downside?

3.       What is the message of the miracle if the loaves and fishes did not multiply, but rather the hearts of the people miraculously opened up?  What is the upside of this interpretation?  What is the downside?

4.       How did you resonate with the characters in the story?  Which one seems to hit home right now for you?

5.       What do you learn from the other characters in the story?  How do they inform your sense of what God might be calling you to do?

Select Academic Notes…

Gail O’Day, The New Interpreters Bible

6:5–15. The miracle story proper contains elements standard in the miracle story form: an introduction (vv. 5–9), the miracle itself (vv. 10–11), the aftermath and results of the miracle (vv. 12–15). The miracle is initiated by Jesus (v. 5). Just as Jesus initiated contact with the Samaritan woman (4:9) and initiated the healing of the man by the pool (5:6), so also here he anticipates the hunger of the crowd. His question, “Where are we to buy food?” is asked to test Philip (v. 6). Jesus knows the answer to the question—he knows what he is going to do—and he wants to discover whether Philip does. As noted earlier, the whence of Jesus’ gifts is an important christological question in the Fourth Gospel (e.g., 2:9; 4:11); if one knows the source of Jesus’ gifts, one comes close to recognizing Jesus’ identity (cf. 4:10). Neither Philip (v. 7) nor Andrew (vv. 8–9) is able to answer Jesus’ question, however. Instead of seeing that Jesus’ question is about himself, the two disciples interpret the question on the most conventional level and so give conventional answers: There is neither money nor food enough to feed so many people.

This exchange between Jesus and his disciples prepares for the miracle in several ways. Philip’s and Andrew’s responses communicate how daunting the size of the crowd is and hence the huge quantity of food that would be required to feed them. More important, the disciples’ answers show how traditional categories cannot comprehend in advance what Jesus has to give. Conventional expectations offer no solutions to the crowd’s needs; Jesus alone knows how to meet those needs.

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The gathering of twelve baskets full of fragments (v. 13) is standard in the tradition (Matt 14:20; Mark 6:43; Luke 9:17) and serves to emphasize the prodigiousness of the miracle; not only did the people eat their fill, but there were leftovers as well (cf. 2:6; 4:13–14). (Seven baskets of fragments are collected in Matt 15:37 and Mark 8:8). Jesus’ words in v. 12 are unique to the Johannine version of the miracle and make an important connection between this story and the manna story of Exodus 16. In Exod 16:19, Moses asked that the people not leave any extra manna around, but the people disobeyed Moses and the leftover manna “bred worms and became foul” (Exod 16:20 NRSV). Jesus’ words in 6:12 seem to caution against a repetition of Exodus 16. The connection between the feeding miracle and the manna story, so pivotal to 6:25–59, is thus introduced early on.

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In v. 15 Jesus displays his omniscience (cf. 1:48; 2:23–25; 4:16–18) by knowing in advance the crowd’s intent. The people’s desire to make Jesus king by force resolves the ambiguity of v. 14 and confirms that the people’s response cannot be trusted. The kingship of Jesus is an important theme in the Fourth Gospel, first introduced in 1:49. Israel’s desire for a king is part of its messianic expectations, the hope for a second David. Jesus will be “king” in the Fourth Gospel, but he will be king according to his definition of kingship (18:36–38), not forced to fit the world’s definition. The kingship theme reaches its resolution in the crucifixion narrative of John 18–19. (See Reflections at 6:16–24.)

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Jesus’ words in v. 20 are the key to understanding the miracle of 6:16–21. The words “I am [ἐγώ εἰμι egō eimi]; do not be afraid” are found in all three accounts (Matt 14:27; Mark 6:50) and hence belong to the common fund of oral tradition, but they have a particular meaning in the christological context of the Fourth Gospel. A good case can be made that egō eimi should not be translated as a simple identification formula (“It is I,” NIV and NRSV), but should be translated as an absolute egō eimi saying, “I am” (see Fig. 10, “The ‘I AM’ Sayings in John,” 602). As Jesus walks across the water, he identifies himself to his disciples with the divine name, “I AM.” The background for this use of the divine name can be found in the LXX of Second Isaiah (Isa 43:25; 51:12; 52:6). The Fourth Evangelist portrays Jesus as speaking the way Yahweh speaks in Second Isaiah. This reading of egō eimi is supported by Jesus’ second words to his disciples, “Do not be afraid.” These words, too, are spoken by Yahweh in Second Isaiah. They are the words of the salvation oracle, words of comfort spoken to end the distress of God’s people (e.g., Isa 43:1; 44:2, 8). “Do not be afraid” is also a standard element of theophanies (e.g., Gen 15:1; Matt 28:5; Luke 2:10). Jesus’ words in v. 20 confirm that his walking on water is a theophany and that this “manifestation of the divine” is the source of the disciples’ fear.

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…The Fourth Gospel does not narrate the stilling of the storm (cf. Matt 14:32; Mark 6:51) because John 6:16–21 is not a nature miracle, a demonstration of Jesus’ power over the forces of nature. It is a miracle of theophany, of the revelation of the divine in Jesus.

The theophanic focus of this narrative is confirmed by the density of OT allusions and images in this passage. In addition to the echoes of Second Isaiah in v. 20, the story builds on a variety of OT texts that describe God as the one who walks upon the water (Job 9:8 LXX) and who makes a path through the sea (Isa 43:2, 16; Pss 77:19; 107:23–32). God’s dominion over the waters of chaos is a symbol in the OT of God’s sovereignty and care, and in John 6:16–21 that symbolism is applied to Jesus. This story thus illustrates the truth of John 5:19–20: Jesus shares in God’s work and identity. Many of the sea allusions in the OT texts that form the background of vv. 16–21 also contain allusions to Israel’s safe crossing of the Reed Sea at the exodus (e.g., Isa 43:2), and those exodus allusions are appropriate for the setting of this miracle in John 6.

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Reflections…

The two miracles of John 6:1–15 and 16–21 present the interpreter with two vivid enactments of the revelation of God’s grace and glory in Jesus. On the one hand, this grace and glory are revealed outside conventional human experience and expectations—in the miraculous feeding of over five thousand people with five loaves and two fish; in Jesus’ miraculous walking on water. On the other hand, the occasions where Jesus’ grace is offered and his glory revealed are familiar occasions of human need—the need for food, the need for safety and rescue from danger. The fears and needs that Jesus’ miracles meet belong to the common fund of human experience.

As in the healing of 4:46–54, Jesus’ grace is not revealed in a “spiritual” gift, but in a tangible, physical gift. A hungry crowd sat on the grass and ate bread and fish. Their spiritual needs were not the presenting problem for Jesus; their physical needs were (6:5). The interpreter, therefore, needs to be careful lest he or she adopt a purely symbolic interpretation of John 6:1–15 and cast its corporeality aside. The miraculous feeding dramatically demonstrates that Jesus has gifts and resources to meet the full range of human needs. He supplies the daily bread that people need to sustain life (cf. Matt 6:11; Luke 11:3). The feeding of the crowd thus confirms that Jesus is the source of life (cf. 6:33, 35, 58).

Jesus’ feeding miracle so impresses the crowd that they declare him to be a prophet (6:14) and intend to make him king (6:15). The crowd’s reaction shows how difficult it is to receive Jesus’ gifts on his terms without translating them immediately into one’s own categories. Jesus’ gift of food, the offer of his grace, provided the crowd with a glimpse of his identity, but they immediately tried to twist that identity to serve their own purposes. To make Jesus king is to take his grace and twist it to conform to pre-existent systems of power and authority. To make Jesus king is to judge him according to human glory (5:44) rather than to see in him God’s glory. When Jesus withdrew from the crowd (6:15), he showed that he would offer his gift of grace without claiming worldly power. In that moment his glory was revealed, because true glory has nothing to do with worldly power. In John 6:1–15, Jesus’ gift of grace thus becomes the vehicle for the revelation of his glory.

In John 6:16–21, by contrast, the revelation of Jesus’ glory is the vehicle for his gift of grace. If the crowd’s intention to make Jesus king distorts Jesus’ glory, then Jesus’ walking on water and his words to his disciples (“I am; do not fear”) counterbalance that distortion with a true picture of his glory. In 6:16–21, Jesus reveals himself to his disciples as one with God, sharing in God’s actions (e.g., Job 9:8; Isa 43:2), identifying himself with God’s name (e.g., Isa 43:25), speaking God’s words. Yet this manifestation of the divine in Jesus is not bravura, not a moment of glory for the sake of glory, but a moment of glory for the sake of grace. Jesus reveals himself to his disciples in order to allay their fears, to ensure their safe passage, to remind them that God has been, is, and will be their rescue. Jesus’ glory is not revealed for power, but for grace-filled pastoral care.

These two miracle stories raise important questions about the balance between grace and glory. In 6:1–15, the heart of the story is Jesus’ grace, Jesus’ extraordinary, unprecedented gift. Yet the crowd is intrigued by the possibilities of glory, and they want to force Jesus to be king. John 6:16–21 narrates the most dramatic self-revelation of Jesus to this point in the Gospel; yet it occurs in the solitude of his disciples’ fears. Jesus will not allow his grace to be controlled by the crowd’s desire for glory, and so he hides himself. But he will not hold back his glory from those in need, because this is his mission: to make God known (1:18). How believers hold the grace and glory of Jesus in balance is critical to the life of faith. The grace is destroyed if one tries to harness it for false power and authority, and the glory is lost if one does not recognize its presence in the quiet places of Jesus’ grace. Both the grace and the glory are essential to God’s revelation in Jesus: “and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14).

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Figure 10: The “I AM” Sayings in John

Absolute “I AM” sayings without a predicate nominative:

4:26                     Jesus said to her, “I AM, the one who is speaking to you.”

6:20                     But he said to them, “I AM; do not be afraid.”

8:24                     “I told you that you would die in your sins, for you will die in your sins unless you believe that I AM.”

8:28                     “When you have lifted up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and I do nothing on my own, but I speak these things as the Father instructed me.”

8:58                     “Very truly, I tell you, before Abraham was, I AM.”

13:19                   “I tell you this now, before it occurs, so that when it does occur, you may believe that I AM.”

18:5, 7                 Jesus replied, “I AM.” When he said to them, “I am,” they stepped back and fell to the ground.

“I AM” sayings with a predicate nominative:

6:35                     “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.”

6:51                     “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”

8:12                     “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will never walk in darkness but will have the light of life.”

9:5                       “I am the light of the world.”

10:7, 9                 “Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.”

10:11, 14            “I am the good shepherd.”

11:25–6              “I am the resurrection and the life.”

14:6                     “I am the way, and the truth, and the life.”

15:1, 5                 “I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinegrower.”

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George Beasley-Murray, Word Biblical Commentary

The Feeding of The Multitude (6:1–15)

That the event was an act of compassion on the part of Jesus is not mentioned by John (contrast Mark 8:2–3), but may have been assumed. The Christological emphasis within the chapter is emphasized from the outset in the initiative taken by Jesus (v 5), his knowledge of what he intends to do (v 6), and even his distribution of the bread and the fish (v 11; no mention is made of distribution through the apostles).

The statement as to the nearness of the Passover (v 4), the identification of Jesus as the prophet who should come (cf. Deut 18:15), and the discussion on the bread from heaven within the discourse (vv 31–33) combine to indicate that the feeding miracle is understood as falling within the fulfillment of the hope of a second Exodus. This flows together with the thought of the event as a celebration of the feast of the kingdom of God, promised in the Scriptures (Isa 25:6–9). The eschatological significance of the sign is thus doubly underscored, and is part of its fundamental connection with the Lord’s Supper, which also is eschatologically oriented (cf. especially Luke 22:16, 18, 20, 29–30; within the discourse vv 39, 40, and esp. 54).

14–15 That the feeding was not a purely natural event, prompted for example through an encouragement to share available resources, but an act of God is assumed throughout the narrative, and underscored by the response of the crowd described in vv 14–15. It is scarcely to be doubted that the Evangelist viewed the attempt to make Jesus king as causally connected with the sign. The step from a prophet like Moses (v 14), the first Redeemer and worker of miracles, to a messianic deliverer was a short one for enthusiasts in contemporary Israel to make. Horsley has traced popular messianic movements in Israelite history that reflected the continuity of the hope among the populace, especially the peasantry, of a king who should lead them in a movement of liberation from their oppressors—from the kind of tyrant that Herod was, as well as from the Romans in the time of Jesus. Josephus speaks of leaders of popular revolts in this era, who “donned the diadem” or “claimed the kingship” or “were proclaimed king” by their followers; these, comments Horsley, were “clearly messianic pretenders, to be understood against the background of longstanding Jewish tradition of popular anointed kingship” (“Popular Messianic Movements around the Time of Jesus,” 484). Montefiore, in an article linking these expectations to the feeding miracle, suggested that the falling away of the disciples in 6:66 is strongly connected with this feature; Jesus’ refusal to accede to the multitude’s demands must be reckoned as one of the turning points in his ministry, for from this time Jesus and the crowds parted company (“Revolt in the Desert?” 140–41). Dodd strongly supported this understanding of the event; he suggested that the danger of Jesus being made a leader of a movement of revolt by the turbulent Galileans was a feature that the evangelists preferred to gloss over, but which John chose to preserve (Historical Tradition, 213–15, 221–22). In that the Evangelist did choose to mention it, the function of the discourse to reveal the nature of Jesus’ messiahship and his function as giver of spiritual bread of the kingdom of God is very much in place. This may well have contributed to the Evangelist’s decision to place the sacramental teaching in this setting and not in the Upper Room.

The Walking On The Sea (6:16–21)

The reason for the disciples’ departure alone is not stated by the Evangelist in v 16, but it is fairly evident: they were sent by Jesus out of the dangerous situation described in v 15. The disciples, too, were Jews, sharing their contemporaries’ understanding of the Messiah and his work, and they needed to be prevented from becoming embroiled in a threatened messianic uprising.

19 Contrary to Bernard (185) and many others since his writing, we are not to understand that when the disciples saw Jesus walking ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης, he was walking beside the sea. Certainly we read in 21:1 an appearance of the risen Lord ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης, where the context makes it plain that Jesus was on the shore (21:4 states that Jesus stood εἰς τὸν αἰγιαλόν “on the beach”). Mark 6:47 uses precisely the same wording as the Fourth Evangelist, following the declaration that the boat was “in the midst of the sea” (6:47); Matthew writes first that Jesus was walking ἐπὶ τὴν θάλασσαν (accusative), then that he was walking ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης (Matt 14:25). Had our Evangelist wished to correct an earlier misstatement or misunderstanding of the event, he could easily have written that Jesus was walking παρὰ τὴν θάλασσαν (so Giffort, “ἐπὶ τῆς θαλάσσης,” 36; for examples of that phrase cf. Mark 1:14; Acts 10:6). In reality he was concerned to do something quite different, as v 20 makes plain; there he records Jesus as appearing to his disciples on the sea with the words Ἐγώ εἰμι. He may have had in mind Job 9:8, but more obviously Ps 77:16, 19, which speaks of God coming in powerful theophany to the aid of his people at the Exodus: “The waters saw the, O God, they saw the and writhed in anguish.… Thy path was through the sea, thy way through mighty waters.…” The Evangelist was describing an event in which he saw Jesus as the revelation of God coming to his disciples in distress—in the second Exodus!

20 For the meaning of Ἐγώ εἰμι, see the lengthy note of Bultmann, 225–26, in which he conveniently summarizes the ways in which the phrase was used in the ancient world. He distinguishes four chief usages: (i) as a presentation formula, which replies to the question, “Who are you?” and in which the speaker introduces himself as so and so; (ii) as a qualificatory formula, which answers the question, “What are you?”, to which the reply is, “I am that and that”; (iii) as an identification formula, in which the speaker identifies himself with another person or object; (iv) as a recognition formula, answering the question, “Who is the one expected, asked for, spoken to?”, to which the reply is, “I am he.” In this last, unlike the previous three, the ἐγώ is predicate, not subject. In Bultmann’s view, the Ἐγώ εἰμι statements of John 6:35, 41, 48, 51; 8:12; 10:7, 9, 11, 14; 15:1, 5 employ the recognition formula, while those of 11:25 and 14:6 are probably an identification formula.

The absolute use of the expression is particularly striking (in 6:20; 8:24, 28, 58; 13:19). While it is clear that in 6:20 Jesus is identifying himself to the fearful disciples, the usage in the passages just mentioned indicates a unique relation to God, recalling the divine name in Exod 3:14 and the affirmations of Deutero-Isaiah (e.g., 43:10–11; 45:5–6, 18, 21–22). In these affirmations of Jesus we find not identification of himself with God, but an expression of himself as “God’s eschatological revealer in whom God utters himself” (Schnackenburg, 2:88). The combinations of Ἐγώ εἰμι with various symbols (Jesus as the bread of life, light of the world, door (of the sheep), the good shepherd, the resurrection, the way, the truth and the life, the vine—seven utterances!) may be said to summarize his role in revelation and in salvation. For further discussions Isa 43:10 is particularly significant in this regard: “You are my witnesses, says the Lord … that you may know and believe me and understand that I am he.” This last phrase, in Hebrew אני הוא (anî hû), is rendered in the LXX as ἐγώ εἰμι. In this context “I am he” is an abbreviation for the expression in the next line, “I, I am the Lord”; not surprisingly אני הוא “I am he,” can appear as a substitute for אני יהוה (anî Yhwh), “I am the Lord.” There is indeed evidence that the expression אני הוא came to be regarded as the name of God. Isa 43:25, “I, I am he who blots out your transgressions” appears in the LXX as ἐγώ εἰμι ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ἐξαλείφων τὰς ἀνομίας σου, “I am ‘I Am,’ who blots out your transgressions.” There were other related developments in the use of the divine name among the Jews which must be noticed later; it suffices here to observe that there was a direct line from אני הוא through the LXX ἐγώ εἰμι to the ἐγώ εἰμι of the Fourth Gospel (so E. Zimmermann, “Das absolute Ἐγώ εἰμι,” 270–71). The occurrences of ἐγώ εἰμι in sayings of Jesus indicate not an identification of himself with God but a solidarity or union with him, expressions of himself as “God’s eschatological Revealer in whom God utters himself” (Schnackenburg, 2:88). The combinations of ἐγώ εἰμι with various symbols may be said to summarize his role in revelation and salvation. For further discussions concerning the expression see E. Schweizer, Ἐγώ εἰμι (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck, 1939); D. Daube, “The ‘I am’ of the Messianic Presence,” The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism, 325–29; Dodd, Interpretation, 93–96, 349–50; H. Zimmermann, “Das absolute Ἐγώ εἰμι als die ntliche Offenbarungsformel,” BZ NF 4 (1960) 54–69, 266–76; Brown, 533–38; Schnackenburg, 2:79–89.

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Atomic: Courage

Lauren Ng offers today’s teaching. What a difference having courage in one’s identity, in the one who we serve, and in the one who sends us can make in our lives on in the world!

Atomic: Blind

Someone once said that people don’t see things the way they are, they see things the way they are.  When the disciples passed her on their way back to Jesus from a nearby village, they saw a very lost soul.  A heretic, actually, defined by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “a person who differs in opinion from established religious dogma.”  If they had been forthcoming with their biases and prejudice, they may have made it known that they actually loathed her based solely on her faith.  In their opinion, she was loathsome, rejected by God, not worthy of respect (or even acknowledgement).  When they passed her, they were undoubtedly silent.  Little did they realize that she was coming from where they were going – a Jewish historical site – Jacob’s Well in the middle of a country that was no longer their own: Samaria.  They would soon discover that they had seen things as they were, but not as they were.

Jesus had just finished speaking with her – a conversation he initiated.  A triple foul by all accounts.  First, she was a woman, and he was recognized as a Rabbi.  In First Century Israel, that didn’t happen.  Second, she was a woman who was Samaritan – a people group ancient Jews loved to hate because they wove the religion of surrounding cultures into their version of Judaism, creating a hybrid religion that won them the term “bastards” in every Jewish circle.  Half breeds.  Thus, the silent treatment on the part of the disciples.  Third, she was a woman, a Samaritan, and one with a difficult past.  A past so disturbing that it resulted in her being at the well at the wrong time of day, and all alone.  Alone because the women of the village did not welcome her earlier in the morning when it was cool, when they all traveled together in community to get water for the day.  She knew she wasn’t welcome.  All they could see was her checkered, questionable past – multiple husbands, and now living with a man to whom she was not married.  So many reasons to distance themselves from her, to exile her to the hellish heat of the day to labor in isolation.  To everyone else, she was a label, or labels, as it were.  Because people saw things as they were.

Jesus saw things as they were, however, through a lens corrected by God.  A woman?  Yes.  Samaritan faith?  Check.  Hard past life?  Yep.  But so much more than that, Jesus saw a sister, a beloved human being made in the image of God.  Inherently worthy of respect.  Innately valuable beyond measure. This holy one deserved the honor of being recognized as present with him, not to be ignored.  This child of God was worthy of being included in conversation, not condemned in silence.  This daughter was meant to be embraced, not exiled.  Seeing her with the eyes of God, his words, tone, and heart followed suit.  He broke the ice, asking for water, which took their chat to deeper things of God and life.  Reading everything about her clearly, he gave insight into her life, which signaled to her that she was dealing with someone with a bit more God going on than most.  Wanting to shift attention off of her painful past, she decided to talk religion, taking a shot at a central contentious issue dividing the two religious perspectives.  As their conversation ensued, Jesus respected her (and himself) enough not to engage in theological battle, but to agree on truth they could both believe in.  Much more than avoiding a fight, Jesus cultivated shalom as he showed her tremendous honor in sharing with her the nature of God and what God desires for everyone: people living in and by the Spirit of God, worshiping God in their lifestyle, in their attitude, and in their behavior.  Not an argument about who’s belief is more right, but a shared striving toward believing in the right way – a more genuine orthodoxy than most dared to voice.  To top it all off, Jesus let her know that he was the one anointed by God to bring this good news. He was the Messiah, the Christ many were hoping for, and she was the first person he told according to John’s Gospel.  She had come crawling to that well thirsty for life and love.  She left more hydrated than she could have ever dreamed – when she ran back to the village, she left her water jar behind.  She was so full of life that when she told her hateful and hurtful village what happened, her charisma overcame their prejudice and led them right to the feet of Jesus to hear for themselves and eventually believe.

When we see ourselves through the eyes of Jesus, we are no longer bound by the blindness of our own self-loathing or the lens of the cultural context that shapes our sight.  Shame gives way to grace.  Loneliness finds itself in the company of God.  The mourning of a painful past is given in exchange for the gladness of hope.  When we give into such love, we claim the words of the prophet: God gives beauty for ashes, strength for fear, gladness for mourning, peace for despair (Isaiah 61:3).  We you and me and the collective we embrace this love that is always available to us, and is there waiting for us without condition.  We are blinded by the Light of God to finally see ourselves as we really are: glorious and beloved.

When we choose to see things as they are – as God sees – empathy moves us to love deeply, across party, cultural, religious, and gender lines with great love, respect, and dignity.  When faced with people of differing ethnicity, religious beliefs, and life experience, may we see so clearly as Jesus did, and may we love so dearly.  All moved by the Spirit of our faith, because, as Bob Goff noted in his book, Everybody Always, “loving people the way Jesus did is always great theology” (72).  When we choose to see through the eyes of Jesus, we are blinded by the Light of God to finally see others as they really are: glorious and beloved and worthy of our love and respect.

Atomic: Stretch

The encounter between Jesus and Nicodemus in John 3 is rich, deep, and full of linguistic surprises for English-readers. The first surprise is that the highly educated member of the Jewish leadership council (the Sanhedrin), came to Jesus in the dark. More than an indication of the time of day, this was telling us about his level of awareness and consciousness.  He knew a lot, and yet was not yet awake to what Jesus was seeing.  The ensuing conversation was going to serve as a wake-up call.  Nicodemus likely hit the snooze button many times en route to his awakening – as we all do.  This presents an opportunity for all readers to ask themselves, how awake are we?  In my experience, honestly asking the question is the first and greatest step toward becoming more awake and staying awake.  When we don’t ask the question, we are very likely to settle into the cozy comforter of where we currently are.  We may never even hit the snooze button, because we won’t even hear the alarm.  I used to have trouble waking up – particularly in high school.  I set up a mechanical timer to turn on my stereo at my wake-up time, which would force me to get out of bed to turn it off.  If I had to physically get out of bed, I would stay up.  Hitting the snooze button was too easy – I needed help waking up.  How awake are you?  Or are you setting yourself up by your lifestyle to remain asleep in the dark?

Nicodemus heard the alarm with Jesus’ words: “Unless a person is born [again, from above], it's not possible to see what I'm pointing to—to God's kingdom.” The Greek word, anōthen, is where we get the English word for “again”.  But Greek doesn’t always translate easily into English, and things are missed.  In this case, anōthen could be translated as either “again” or “from above” – two very different renderings.  In his darkened state of mind, Nicodemus was stuck on the former understanding, while the enlightened Jesus was referring to the latter.  Nicodemus was going to be stuck from the get-go because nobody can literally re-enter the womb, as he notes.  Jesus was talking about a new perspective that hails from something more than what meets the eye.  God is Spirit.  To see God requires a new kind of eyes.  This gives all readers pause to ask, which eyes are we using in our faith?  Are we focused on flesh-and-blood when we really need to develop more spiritual vision?

After reminding Nicodemus of what he surely knew but hadn’t recently accessed, Jesus gave the most succinct statement about what faith is all about than anywhere else in scripture: “This is how much God loved the world: He gave his Son, his one and only Son. And this is why: so that no one need be destroyed; by believing in him, anyone can have a whole and lasting life. God didn't go to all the trouble of sending his Son merely to point an accusing finger, telling the world how bad it was. He came to help, to put the world right again” (John 3:16-17, The Message).  To put it in a very short statement, Jesus is telling us to believe in love if we want to really, truly live.  This may sound more like a Coke commercial, but it is actually deeply theological and infinitely practical.  Once again, our English language does not serve us well in translating the Greek.  The central subject is love – God’s love (agapaō in Greek), which is the highest source of all love.  The goal is a quality of life (aiōnios in Greek) that is heavenly – the best we can hope for.  The means by which we experience that life is in believing.

The Greek word, “pisteuō”, is what gives us “believe”.  In our modern understanding, we generally equate believing with intellectual agreement.  For many Christians, believing means agreement about orthodox positions about Jesus.  The Greek word, however, actually has three facets of meaning.  Like a three-legged stool, in order for the word to stand, all three legs have to be in place.  Intellectual agreement is the first of those legs.  A second is emotional assent, and the third is vocational.  The emotional leg has to do with a gut-level conviction, a passion about the subject of belief. Think of being in love with a person.  On paper, the object of your love may not be any different than 6M other people, yet there is something about that one that stirs your heart.  That’s what we’re talking about.  The vocational challenges our tendency to settle for lip service.  Back to being in love with someone…  When we are in love with someone, or someone is in love with us, we know it not because of a rational argument or strong feelings of passion.  We know it because of action.  The love notes, the hand-holding, the new priority of our time and energy – all are expressions of our intellectually founded and emotionally impassioned love.  None of my college friends had to wonder if I was in love when I met Lynne.  They knew it because they rarely saw me anymore.  Why?  I was in love.  This is how we need to think about believing in God.

How do we fall in love with God?  How can we fall in love with someone/thing so abstract?  The love referred to is the Greek agapaō from which we get agape love.  Agape is the highest form of love – it simply exists.  It is the foundation of all other loves, in a sense.  In a later letter to the churches, John says that God is love – that God’s character and nature are that love.  So many times in the Old Testament, when a person would experience God they would give God a new name that described their experience.  Many of those experiences and subsequent names reflect that love, and it was nearly always a surprise.  Isn’t that really how falling in love works?  It’s more than sex appeal.  At some point, we begin to see someone in new ways, with new eyes, with new appreciation.  When we’re open to it, we see beauty all over the place in this person, which takes us deeper into love.  I would submit to you that creation itself – and all people in it – reflect the creative force we call God.  Incredible beauty.  When we sow into what we know is love, we see lovely things come from it, which only motivates more love.  This God-as-Love is bigger than the universe, yet more intimately infused in us than we can ever really appreciate.  God is both far away and as near as can be.

What happens when the three-legged-stool of believing is focused on the source of life itself?  A life that is more and more infused with the same life-giving nature of love that is the generating force of creation itself.  Why is it a whole and lasting life, as Eugene Peterson’s translation suggests?  Because the life is rooted in that which lasts forever, and love, by its very nature, is interested in being whole, not fragmented.  If you want a life that is rich, deep, whole, and ties into the very fabric of the universe (which means it makes a positive difference for all of creation), Jesus is telling us to follow in his footsteps that bring all three legs of belief into motion.  It is not always aligned with the surrounding culture, but it is good and works for everyone.

If you read the full text of John 3, you will come across some very negative language, and the use of words like condemnation, judgment, and wrath.  It’s not as ugly as it sounds.  First, realize that the eternal life promised in John 3:16 has nothing to do with afterlife – it’s all referring to life lived on planet earth.  Same with the negative stuff.  If we’re not sowing into life and love, then we’re not going to reap the fruit of life and love.  Instead of harmony and wholeness, we’re stuck with discord and fragmentation.  No need for God to meddle – this is just common sense.

A final note about light and darkness.  As noted, Jesus’ most succinct statement of what faith is supposed to be about is wrapped up in John 3:16-17.  It’s predicated on understanding God as agape writ as large as the cosmos itself.  But we are lizard brained creatures, and we easily resort to more fear-based faith where God is a judge waiting to bring down the hammer on all the evildoers.  Both messages exist in the entire Bible because the authors of all the books of the Bible are human beings who struggle with the tension.  Nicodemus was in the dark in part because he was rooted in that fear-based faith.  Are we?  Is our motivation to be faithful based on the fear of God’s retribution if we fail?  Or is our motivation for faith based on our increasing love and appreciation for the countless expressions of God and love and life that call us to engage it all in loving, life-giving ways?  The former cowers in shadow.  The latter dances in the light.  Which one are you choosing?  Which one is stretching you?

Atomic: More

There is so much more to the story of Jesus turning water into wine than a really cool – and apropos – party trick.  The writer of the Gospel of John, of course, using different source material for his remembrance of Jesus, is the only one with this story and, since he writes with greater theological depth using symbolism throughout, we must take time to notice.  Not to do so would be akin to walking as fast as possible through the Louvre in an effort to see it all.  In the end, you may have seen everything, and yet you didn’t really see much of anything.  This Gospel is a masterpiece.  Rush if you wish, but know that if you do, you are only opting for the most obvious and basic gift it offers, and are missing the heart of the book and in fact, the reason for its writing.

There is so much more to this story than meets the eye in a casual reading of John’s second chapter.  The context of a wedding that brings to memory and imagination not just this moment, but THE moment to come at the consummation of history when the great marriage finally takes place between the Creator and the Created.  The entrance of Jesus just when the wine was running out, when joy was running out, just in time – at the right time – to help and send a message to all about the hopeful presence of God.  Mom/Mary who brought the shortcoming to consciousness, and then instructed the servants to be faithful to Jesus’ instructions.  Faithful servants who found themselves in the miracle – not just bystanders.  A head waiter who probably needed to tell the bridegroom that Jesus’ label was finer than the Charles Shaw that ran out.  An unknown number of guests who were responsible for the wine running out who were now enjoying great wine unawares of its origin.  This was all part of the first sign.  A sign that communicated great hope when it seemed to be running out – more than more-than-enough.  Inherent statements not just about the focal point, Jesus’ connection to the Spirit of God, but about how we engage and interface with the Spirit working in our midst.  It seems experiencing “more” is an option.  We can get in on it or we can just stand around and suck (wine).  But wait, there’s more…

John’s Gospel then brings a strange twist: Jesus going nuts in the Temple, overturning tables and causing a great mess.  John is the only Gospel that puts the story at the beginning of Jesus’ ministry instead of the end.  Most contemporary scholars agree that John probably was off on the timeline, but did so purposefully to provide a allusion to what was to come: conflict with the Temple’s leadership.  Spoiler: Jesus ends up getting killed thanks to the Temple leadership’s scheming.

Why include this story here, so closely tied with the wonderful, joyful wedding at Cana?  It’s because Jesus wasn’t just about keeping the good times going at a wedding – he came to get the good times going for all.  Jesus was an underdog.  Jesus was a champion of the underdog – the poor, the foreigner, the outcast, the judged, the widows, the children – all of whom were in their own way at risk.  When Jesus cleared the Temple, he was sweeping away a filthy expression of human greed in the most inappropriate space.  The Temple was supposed to be a space where people could feel connected to God.  It had become a “den of robbers” where the poorest of the poor were taken advantage of to line the pockets of those in power.  Jesus’ ministry was much more than a feel-good campaign with free food and great wine.  His ministry was deeply political and provocative all for the sake of calling out injustice and standing up for those who couldn’t stand up for themselves.  Jesus’ mission wasn’t simply about getting people to heaven, it was much more than that – it was about helping as many people on earth experience as much heaven here and now as possible.  An experience of equality and equity, of being loved and respected, of being given dignity.  This is an intractable part of what Jesus was about. To not see this and not accept it as part of the package Jesus came to offer is like entering a marriage only for the purpose of procreation.  Sex.  It’s like saying to Jesus, “I’m a yes so long as we’re only talking about sex (and on my terms) – I’m not really interested in anything beyond that.”  I’m afraid the popular cultural understanding of what it means to be a person of faith – to be a Christian – is like this, where we essentially want God for our enjoyment alone, with little regard for relationship or wanting to be involved with what God wants. Just give me some more wine, please, and please stop saying things that upset the status quo. We know we’re not guilty of such spiritual hedonism when we join God in God’s work in the world out of love for God and the world.

I hope you see that Jesus is so much more, and invites you into so much more.  The Good News is that God is with us now and forever, bringing joyous hope where we thought it was running out, and inviting us to get in on the action so that we can experience it all more fully.  Bringing that hope means bringing it to those who don’t have so much hope, which draws attention to such a reality, which also draws attention to the system which allows and perpetuates the disparity to continue.  Sometimes that means flipping some tables.  Yet that’s where Jesus is, because that’s where the Spirit of God is, because God’s heart is for everyone, and when the deck is stacked against some, God moves in their direction.

Some of you have opted for more already.  You’ve chosen to be like the servants who filled the water jars and took the new wine to the emcee.  Some of you are like the emcee, who let people know what they were tasting because they might not otherwise.  Or you are like Mary who encouraged faithfulness on the part of others.  Maybe you’re even like Jesus, being used of the Spirit to bring hope and joy and equality and equity where it was needed.  Or maybe you’re just standing around sucking.  I hope you always choose more.

Atomic: Seeing

Have you ever had a truly life-altering experience that changed the way you looked at literally everything?  Have you ever tried to share your new insights with people who have not shared your experience?  Have you ever felt like there was no room for your perspective?  Have you ever been removed from a circle you once thought would always welcome you?  Have you ever come into the company of people who have shared your experiences, who understand and welcome your perspective and insights?

For the faith community that is represented in the Gospel of John, every one of the above questions would be answered with an emphatic “YES!”  This group of devoted Jewish men and women – likely living in the city of Ephesus where Judaism was well-represented and supported – were eventually kicked out of their faith community because they experienced something life-changing from the Spirit of God as they lived their Jewish faith from the insights of their fully Jewish model, Jesus.  By the time the oral traditions and scraps of written remembrances were recorded, the close of the first century C.E. was upon them.  Their experiences of God and that of their former community deeply informed what was written and why.

The Gospel of John begins with a poem that would have piqued the interest of any Jewish person as it would recall the opening of Genesis: In the beginning… The Word to which John’s Gospel refers is more than speech – it represents the logic, the mind of God, the ethos of God that provided the impetus for all of creation from the beginning: love.  An ethos which stood in stark contrast to many reigning beliefs that saw the gods and God very differently: vengeful; barely tolerant of the puny, noisy, messy, foolish human beings running amuck on the earth far below.  The view of God as the generative, creative, loving, life-and-light-giving Ground of Being created a very different foundation from which to build a life.  This perspective, which embraces the idea that everything and everyone everywhere is imbued with the Word means everyone and everything has inherent worth and deserves to be treated with dignity by virtue of being a reflection and repository of the presence of God.  Such an idea is dangerous to those who would prefer to measure the love that God has for others based on their personal biases and desires.  Human beings are innately aware of threats.  Our reptilian brains kick into gear when we sense that our security is being challenged – even the security of destructive systems that are themselves a threat to our potential for life.  To weather the storm that reaction-based fear brings from deeply-entrenched systems tests mettle.  What made the Johannine community so steadfast even as they endured the intense pain of being kicked out of the family?

I was born in Missouri, the Show Me State.  When someone says they’re from Missouri even though they’ve lived in Napa their entire lives, they are saying that they need to be convinced in the veracity of what they are being invited to consider.  They need to see for themselves whether or not a thing or idea is true before they buy in.  In a sense, everybody is from Missouri, but we generally don’t know it until we come upon something that, to embrace, would truly challenge our security.  John’s community had experienced something so compelling that they could not not believe and embrace following Jesus.  Individually, they had life-altering experiences that caused them to see everything differently.  Once seen, they couldn’t “unsee” it.

What they saw was what John’s prologue poem was communicating: the Word came to give light and life to everything and everyone.  The Light they saw could not be understood by those who had yet to see; nor could it extinguish the light.  This enlightened perspective was there to stay for this community of faith.  So powerful was their experience that being ostracized from their faith family of origin – and even death because of their new way of seeing – could not and did not dissuade them.  They carried on in hope, proclaiming what they believed as best they could, spreading the Word, bearing light, sharing life.

I think there is merit to a “seeing is believing” way of life.  Apparently, this was a key piece in John’s theology as well.  In the first fifty verses of his Gospel, references to seeing show up twenty-three times by my count.  What they were seeing changed the way they believed.  What were they seeing?  The very Word of God at work before their eyes – a different kind of seeing than simply that which our optic nerves and surrounding components can perceive.  They experienced God.  It is possible to forget even the most incredible experiences of God – that’s a fact (see The Transforming Moment by John Loder). If you are placing yourself in the community of other people who have had similar experiences of God, however, the odds are good that you will not only maintain your belief, but that it will grow as your experience is supported by mutual sharing.  (Side note: Coals grow cold when separated from the fire.  They stay red-hot when in the company of others.  Beware trying to practice your faith in isolation!)

Seeing is believing leads to believing is seeing – we begin to see what was always there, now visible because of our belief.  Those in John’s community (and beyond) began seeing God in their midst in everything and everyone because of their belief.  This only served to increase their faith – and resolve – as they moved forward with their lives in community.  They experienced Light shining even while surrounded by the worst forms of darkness and all its violence and death.  This is the vision of faith John wants us to see from the very beginning, because this ethos has been around since the very beginning, because in the beginning, there was simply the Word, the ethos, of God.

The great question for us as we dive into John is this: have we seen the Light?  You will be faced with this question in different ways throughout this Gospel, which was the intent of the author.  During my pre-adult life, I thought I had it – I thought my faith was what it was supposed to be.  A good knowledge of the Bible after having grown up in the church, and a pretty good understanding of the ethic of the Christian faith.  The point was to live according to the precepts of the faith as taught and lived by Jesus.  I only discovered that what I had was only religion after I saw the “more” possible in someone else.  Not that religion alone is all bad – it’s just that it misses out on so much more.  The relationship piece is a real thing, and this reality makes an enormous difference in one’s understanding of the religion and how to employ its ethics.  I think it is fair to say that the Gospel of John is surely on board with this way of thinking.  That belief would allow people to become children of God is a nod to saying that we can experience and be more, but that “more” is predicated on seeing – that’s where the greater power lies.  John the Baptist and the new disciples of Jesus all saw, and their lives were forever changed.

Seeing requires an atomic change.  Very small yet very big at the same time.  The smallest, simplest shift, yet so difficult because of how much we rely on the eyes of intellect and reason so much more than any other receptor.  It’s not that the faith is anti-intellectual or unreasonable – quite the opposite, really.  It’s just that seeing the movement of God requires us to let go of our need to control or understand fully before allowing ourselves to see.  I think it is somewhat akin to various aspects of love.  Love is unreasonable, and yet once we love someone – various types of love for various types of relationships – we know we do.  Our love is not necessary logical or reasonable, yet it is there in all of its power just the same.  Seeing is like that.  We have to lower our guard to be open to Someone else.  Once we do, we have a greater shot at seeing the Divine in our midst.

I have no formula for you – only encouragement to be open to it and pursue it.  It has changed my life over and over again for the better.  It has changed the lives of countless others as well, including the Apostle Paul, who is noted as the author of a letter to the church in ancient Ephesus where he wrote:

     All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly realms because we are united with Christ. Even before he made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without fault in his eyes. God decided in advance to adopt us into his own family by bringing us to himself through Jesus Christ. This is what he wanted to do, and it gave him great pleasure. So we praise God for the glorious grace he has poured out on us who belong to his dear Son. He is so rich in kindness and grace that he purchased our freedom with the blood of his Son and forgave our sins. He has showered his kindness on us, along with all wisdom and understanding.
     God has now revealed to us his mysterious will regarding Christ—which is to fulfill his own good plan. And this is the plan: At the right time he will bring everything together under the authority of Christ—everything in heaven and on earth. Furthermore, because we are united with Christ, we have received an inheritance from God, for he chose us in advance, and he makes everything work out according to his plan…

     Ever since I first heard of your strong faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for God’s people everywhere, I have not stopped thanking God for you. I pray for you constantly, asking God, the glorious Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, to give you spiritual wisdom and insight so that you might grow in your knowledge of God. I pray that your hearts will be flooded with light so that you can understand the confident hope he has given to those he called—his holy people who are his rich and glorious inheritance. – Ephesians 1:3-11, 15-17 (NLT)

May you find yourself truly seeing this week as you open your eyes to the “more” which has been in front of you, in you, around you the whole time, longing to be seen and believed.

Atomic: Introduction

James Clear had a dream to play professional baseball like his dad, who played in the minor leagues for the St. Louis Cardinals.  But that dream was severely challenged the last day of his sophomore year in high school when he got hit between the eyes with a baseball bat that flew from a classmate’s hands after a full swing.  At first, he seemed surprisingly okay.  But as swelling set in, he found himself struggling to stay alive.  He made it through the worst night of an induced coma, which allowed him to be signed off for surgery.  He discovered that his injury was going to make daily life very difficult for a long time.  Cognitive ability was diminished, large motor skills had to be relearned, he temporarily lost his sense of smell, and when he blew his nose, one of his eyeballs nearly popped out.

But James was determined not to let his injury keep him down.  He worked his tail off and made his varsity baseball team his senior year.  Somehow, he got picked up by Denison University to play baseball for them, which felt like a great achievement in and of itself.  He knew that if he hoped to play, it would require a series of tiny decisions to make the dream of playing college ball a reality.  In many ways, he became “opposite freshman” – he got to bed early to develop good sleep habits, kept his room neat and tidy, and integrated study habits that allowed him to get straight A’s.  Six years after his injury, he was selected as the top male athlete at Denison University, named to the ESPN Academic All-America Team which was bestowed upon only thirty-three students nationwide, and received the President’s Medal – the university’s highest academic honor.

While he never played professional baseball, he did begin going after a new dream.  He began sharing his insights about forming tiny habits that make big differences in an online newsletter.  In a relatively small amount of time, he had hundreds of thousands of people subscribing to his work.  That led to the development of his company which trains leaders to develop better habits that impact their work and life.  It also led to the writing of his book, Atomic Habits, which details his strategy and offers practiced insights into developing tiny habits that create the possibility of significant benefits.  One of his convictions is that willpower is overrated.  We blame our lack of willpower for not sticking with things like dieting, exercise, financial habits, etc.  While it does play a modest role, Clear’s findings suggest that we are more behavioral than we’d like to think, and that our habits actually dictate our lives more than we would care to admit.  For him, then, if we change our habits in tiny ways, we change our path, our stripes, everything.  He uses the example of a plane taking off from SFO headed for JFK.  If the plane is off course by only three percent – imperceptible at the beginning – the plane will end up landing at Dulles in D.C. instead of New York.  Tiny changes in our habits make big differences.  Change our habits, change our lives.

Habits are routines or behaviors that we repeat regularly, and in many cases automatically.  I would bet that most of us repeat a similar set of habits every day in our morning routine. Without giving you more detail than you can stomach, my mornings usually include feeding our dog, Banjo, making and eating breakfast, downing my first cup of coffee while reading, getting cleaned up for the day, and away I go.  The order in which I do these tasks is now habitual.  I don’t even think about them.  They work for me.  Some habits, however, are not so good.  I have been known on occasion to overeat unhealthy-yet-delicious food when I’m under a lot of stress.  Or find myself getting distracted with “shiny things” when I need to focus.  Or binge Netflix to the neglect of household projects that need to get done.    Some habits are very good and healthy.  Lynne and I take walks pretty frequently – almost daily when the weather is good.  That’s a good habit.  When we walk, we nearly always hold hands, which is good for our relationship in many ways.  All of these are habits that we have intentionally or otherwise cultivated.  Very small things, really, that have their affect on our lives.

Jesus developed habits – some were instilled in him and others he put in place.  Before he began his adult ministry, we read that he “grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and all the people” (Luke 2:52 NLT).  Wisdom – he learned.  Stature – he matured. Favor with God – he was in the Spirit’s flow. Favor with people – he was well liked for the best reasons.  In the Letter to the Ephesians regarding roles played in the church, we read that pastors and teachers have the responsibility “to equip God’s people to do his work and build up the church, the body of Christ” (Ephesians 4:12 NLT).  My hope is to help you follow in the footsteps of Jesus, that you would grow in wisdom, stature, and in favor with God and all people.  There are lots of things I do as pastor, but this is my highest priority.  There are habits that can be cultivated which will foster such fruit, and one in particular that I want to encourage you to integrate now, or perhaps tweak what you are doing for a six-month experiment (which sounds big, but is actually quite tiny, and may only require a couple of minutes). 

There is one habit in particular that may have more impact than others in creating healthy, vigorous soil which can then allow for healthy growth in terms of your faith development, which is really your life development.  Some of you already do it, some have tried it but don’t anymore, and others have never tried it for some very good reasons.  The one habit I’m talking about is devoting time to cultivate your relationship with God in a very particular way.  It will do much to help you in every aspect of your life, and it will be slightly different than what you’re used to doing.  It will require some tiny habits to be formed.

In what we call the Old Testament we find the story of a young boy named Samuel who was under the care of Israel’s priest, Eli:

     One night, Eli, who was almost blind by now, had gone to bed. The lamp of God had not yet gone out, and Samuel was sleeping in the Tabernacle near the Ark of God. Suddenly the Lord called out, “Samuel!”
     “Yes?” Samuel replied. “What is it?” He got up and ran to Eli. “Here I am. Did you call me?”
     “I didn’t call you,” Eli replied. “Go back to bed.” So he did.
     Then the Lord called out again, “Samuel!”
     Again Samuel got up and went to Eli. “Here I am. Did you call me?”
     “I didn’t call you, my son,” Eli said. “Go back to bed.”
     Samuel did not yet know the Lord because he had never had a message from the Lord before. So the Lord called a third time, and once more Samuel got up and went to Eli. “Here I am. Did you call me?”
     Then Eli realized it was the Lord who was calling the boy. So he said to Samuel, “Go and lie down again, and if someone calls again, say, ‘Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.’” So Samuel went back to bed.
     And the Lord came and called as before, “Samuel! Samuel!”
     And Samuel replied, “Speak, your servant is listening.” (1 Samuel 3:2-10 NLT)

I find it incredibly interesting that the words were included, “Samuel did not yet know the Lord because he had never had a message from the Lord before.”  Of course!  This has little to do with Samuel’s level of commitment to God or his giving assent to the Jewish faith.  It has everything to do with the level of familiarity in his relationship with God.  When I first saw Lynne, I was devoted!  But I didn’t know her voice until I spent time with her.  Surely there are voices you hear and within a split second you know who you’re listening too.  Samuel needed to be instructed on how to develop the relationship with God, to learn God’s voice.  God was speaking, but Samuel didn’t know it yet. You cannot recognize the voice if you never know the voice. 

One of the enduring, time-proven methods of learning to recognize God’s voice is through a practice called Lectio Divina, a Benedictine approach to the Bible which translates “Divine Reading.”  I want to encourage you to develop this habit, with a twist.  Normally, this approach avoids academics, and opts for God to speak through the text itself even if what is being received has nothing to do with the text’s original intent.  That’s what I want to tweak just a little bit.

The Apostle Paul told his protégé, Timothy, to keep up the practices which would form his faith:

     But you, Timothy, certainly know what I teach, and how I live, and what my purpose in life is. You know my faith, my patience, my love, and my endurance. You know how much persecution and suffering I have endured. You know all about how I was persecuted in Antioch, Iconium, and Lystra—but the Lord rescued me from all of it. Yes, and everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will suffer persecution. But evil people and impostors will flourish. They will deceive others and will themselves be deceived.
     But you must remain faithful to the things you have been taught. You know they are true, for you know you can trust those who taught you. You have been taught the holy Scriptures from childhood, and they have given you the wisdom to receive the salvation that comes by trusting in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is inspired by God and is useful to teach us what is true and to make us realize what is wrong in our lives. It corrects us when we are wrong and teaches us to do what is right. God uses it to prepare and equip his people to do every good work. (2 Timothy 3:10-17 NLT)

I am asking you to build a routine of Lectio Divina Plus into your life with the help of tiny habits.  I’m asking you all to read just a portion of scripture together, hopefully every day.  Not a lot – the whole exercise might take as little as 10 minutes (or even two!), yet you might find yourself making room for more.  The text I’d like you to read is the text that I will speak on the following week.  So, for this week, I am asking you to read the first chapter of the Gospel of John every day.  It will take you around six minutes.  Before you read, use Eli’s advised quote, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.”  Read the text slowly, highlighting what jumps out at you along the way.  After you read it, jot a note about what jumped out at you – not an academic question, but rather what your take-home message might be.  What you are doing is trusting that the Spirit of God is at work in the process, speaking to you through nudges and impressions from the scripture itself.  By the way, I did this my sophomore year in college.  Every day it seemed like something new was jumping out at me.  It works.

Here’s the twist, though.  There is room for study and academics.  At my Wednesday PraXis gatherings, I will share with you key insights from academia that will help you see the text more deeply.  I will also make those notes available online, so if you can’t make it, you still get the goods.  Note: I did my doctoral thesis out of the Gospel of John – I know it pretty well!  We will truly learn from each other on Wednesdays, and your input will shape what I bring back to you on Sundays. 

When you approach the Bible in this way – Lectio Divina first and research second – you get the most bang for your buck.  You’re allowing the Spirit to speak into your life however God wants and needs, and you are also honoring the intent of the author in appreciating what he wrote in context.

To build this routine into your life is going to require messing with current habits.  Here are some quick tips from Atomic Habits to help you get and stay on track.

·       Set the time you are going to do this each day.  According to a research project conducted in Great Britain on the subject of exercise, your likelihood of actually doing this more than doubles simply by writing down when and where you will do this.  This is called implementation intention.  Write down something like this: “I will do Lectio Divina at “X” time daily for at least 10 minutes.” 

·       Stack this habit onto a preexisting habit.  When we attach our desired habit to a preexisting habit, we create a cue to encourage the new one to stick.  For me, attaching Lectio Divina to my first cup of coffee makes the reading even easier, plus, since I love my first cup of coffee, it adds a built-in reward.  Add writing a few notes to the exercise, and you’ve got yourself a nicely stacked set of habits.  It might look like this: pour coffee > Lectio Divina > write down reflections.  You are employing the Diderot Effect.

·       Set your tools out where you’re going to do this to make it easier.  Placing a reminder of what you want to do in plain sight has proven to be incredibly powerful in getting your habit to stick because you’re are reminded of it and you have made it easier to make routine.

James Clear was able to excel in college (and in baseball, too) because he made tiny shifts that allowed bigger changes to take place.  There is no greater resource at your disposal than your life.  Being connected to the very source of our lives and the well from which we draw wisdom will mature us in all the best ways, help us be in lockstep with God, and make a positive impact in the world.  Or we could stick with our current habits and remain unchanged: keep doin’ what you’re doin’ to keep gettin’ what you’re getting’!

A Christmas Carol: Keeping Christmas

Before Ebenezer Scrooge was done with his visit from the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, he pledged to keep Christmas the whole year through, and to keep all three ghosts with him as well.  The evidence suggests that he lived up to his commitment given the way he behaved in the final scene of Dickens’ classic novella: charitable, humble, generous, penitent, joyful, gracious.  Scrooge is a fictitious character, of course, but Dickens tells us that his transformation stuck, presumably for the rest of his life.  What might he have done to ensure that he remained born again?  What might we do?

I think a clue Dickens may have given us is Scrooge’s statement that he would keep the ghosts with him.  I wonder if Scrooge reflected regularly on the visits of the ghosts and the lessons he drew from them.  For the Ghost of Christmas past, I wonder if he may have journaled something like this:

     There were choices others made that affected me.  My father, for so many years, left me to the care of my boarding school – even over the Christmas holiday.  This is not what I wanted.  I was hurt, alone, and felt abandoned.  In my apprenticeship years, Fezziwig made a different choice than my father.  My old boss was generous and joyful at Christmas – what a time we had!  During that time in my life I even fell in love – I made the choice to make room for Belle.  But over time, my fear of being poor won the battle over my priorities, and I slowly and surely let my relationship with Belle – my love – die.  I chose who I became.  So I choose to be mindful of the forces that came together to form me: the choices others made that affected me deeply both positively and negatively, and the choices I made that set me on my course.  I choose to be mindful of the choices I make.

There would be times when Ebenezer would have been tempted to revert back to his old ways.  Fears would creep up of being left alone and he would perhaps find himself in spaces of low self-esteem that would trigger his self-protective modes of being.  Or the market might stumble and his fear of poverty would trigger his miserliness to come to the surface.  At those moments, having a journal entry like the one above might just help him remember where he had come from and serve to help him keep Christmas.

For the Ghost of Christmas Present, I wonder if his journal entry might have included a variation of this:

     While I walked around the streets of London, I saw that everyone was in a festive mood, enjoying each other and the season in every way.  Good cheer all around.  At Bob Cratchit’s home there was only love, even though the feast was meager.  Even though I gave no reason for receiving honor that night, Bob granted it anyway.  Tiny Tim, who had every reason to be bitter, was instead full of love and faith.  My Nephew Fred and his friends were carrying on with great joy at the dinner I was invited to.  Meanwhile, that very night I was cold and alone in my room; bitter, angry, and suspicious of the world around me, guarding the wealth that was not serving me or anyone else.  I was the one missing out on life and love and joy.  That was the choice I was making.  It was hurting me, and it was refusing blessing on those closest to me. In truth, I could have made Bob’s Christmas so much the merrier, and I could have brought joy to Fred by accepting his invitation.  I hurt myself, and I hurt them.  I will choose to live in the moment, to choose joy and love, and to offer what I have for the joy of others.

There would come times in Ebenezer’s life when he would wake up on the wrong side of the bed, or get discouraged because it wouldn’t feel like his changes were making any real difference, or maybe the people he helped disappointed him in some way.  Fred might forget to be so cheery, or Bob might buy an expensive toy for himself when his family’s needs were not yet met.  At those moments, going back to what he experienced that night with the Ghost of Christmas Present just might serve to strengthen his resolve even when he didn’t feel like it.

For the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, perhaps his diary had these words within it:

     What an awful visit this was – a clarion call to pay attention to what my apathy was causing and perpetuating.  No more Tiny Tim because Bob couldn’t afford the medical care he needed.  No more me, and no one mourning the loss of my life.  I learned that the life I led was a dead end.  I didn’t take my wealth with me, didn’t do anything with it, and the world was no better for it.  All due to choices I made.  I woke up determined not to make those same choices.  I choose to stay awake today.  I will use what I have to make a difference in the world – with those I know and care about, and with those who I don’t know.  I will be generous with what I have for their sake and mine.

There would come moments for Scrooge when he would forget that his days were numbered and that his wealth would not move with him into the next life.  He would forget that death comes for everyone and that our legacy will not be in our titles or possessions, but rather what we did with our titles and possessions beyond self-indulgence.  In those moments of forgetfulness he may have been less inclined toward generosity and selflessness.  Being able to turn back and remember what happened that night and the insight he gained would perhaps serve to correct his vision and get him back on track.

Put yourself in Scrooge’s shoes.  Imagine taking the same journey with the same ghosts.  What do you imagine your visits being like?  What would you be journaling after each?

There is an interesting note in the Christmas Story in Luke’s Gospel.  After Mary gave birth, the shepherds who were tending their flock came to visit, recounting their angelic visit.  Luke tells us that “Mary kept all these things in her heart and thought about them often” (Luke 2:19).  I think she was onto something here.  And I think we need to learn from her.  I am sure there were many moments going forward when Mary would remember all that had happened along her journey.  Her reflection undoubtedly kept her centered as she followed Jesus through his highs and lows, not always certain which experiences Jesus thought were highs or lows.

The idea of remembering one’s identity with great intention was and is a key practice in our (and every) faith tradition.  It appears that we human beings have a tendency to forget who we are and who we are called to become.  We get tempted by the pressures of the moment, or the day, or the season, and find ourselves off track.  In the Hebrew scriptures the remembering is directed in two ways.  First, especially when the people got off track and found themselves in a mess, the prayers of the people were asking God to remember who God was, primarily so that God wouldn’t resort to being too harsh on the people God claimed to love!  Remember your children, remember your people, remember your promise, Oh God! 

Remembering was also a part of the rhythm of the life of faith directed to help people recall who they were and where they had come from.  The intention required to set aside time for personal prayer and reflection, time to gather with others in the faith to remember we’re not alone, time to do things we don’t otherwise do – take communion, sing songs, learn, meditate, give away our time and money – all of these and more serve to remind us of who we are so that we can keep Christmas.  Keeping Christmas is bigger than December 25th, bigger than it’s twelve days, bigger than Advent, bigger than the gift-giving marketing that begins showing up at Walmart in August.  Keeping Christmas is a reminder to keep the Christ part of our daily mass, our daily lives.  God didn’t simply break into our world in Jesus on one particular day.  The point of that was that God breaks into life everyday in every situation.  God cannot not break into life because the presence of God is interwoven into life itself, into the creation that was sourced from God somehow in the beginning.  Keeping Christmas is about remembering, re-membering, keeping whole and together that which might otherwise get fragmented.  Religion’s real purpose is to re-ligament, to keep things connected that would otherwise fall apart.

There is great value in pondering.  Reflecting on our lives as we live life helps us maintain perspective, stay centered, and choose wisely.  We are more likely to make choices that help us become who we long to become and live out of our True Selves.  In light of Scrooge who surely must have been intentional about remembering where he came from, and in light of Mary who pondered things in her heart, how are you going to keep Christmas?

Questions:

1.       How are you keeping Christmas?

2.       How are you keeping the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come with you?

3.       How are you pondering deep things in your heart as you move forward in life?

A Christmas Carol: Christmas Day Reborn

The final scene from Charles Dickens’ classic novela, A Christmas Carol, gives us a lasting testament to the changed life of the central character, Ebenezer Scrooge.  The contrast could not be more pronounced from the opening scene where, you may recall, Scrooge literally and figuratively “Bah Humbuged” everything that hinted of Christmas specifically, and by extension all things that resembled human compassion and decency in general.  The harsh, rude rejection of his nephew Fred’s invitation to Christmas dinner, the insensitive and inhumane attitude toward the men collecting funds for the poor, and the cold, willfully unaware mistreatment of his underpaid struggling family-man employee, Bob Cratchit all painted a picture of a man who was interested entirely and solely in himself.  No hint of charity appeared to exist in the lonely old man.

A visit from the ghost of his seven-years-dead business partner, Jacob Marley, warned him of three spirits who would be visiting him soon: the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come, all with the goal of waking Scrooge up to himself, everyone else, and what makes life worth living.  With each visit Scrooge’s assumptions and biases are highlighted and challenged by the ghosts, and with each encounter, Ebenezer’s heart slowly softens as his vision gets corrected. By the end of the last spirit’s exchange, our hard-nosed curmudgeon declared himself to be a changed man who would not be the same.  His lips communicated that he was a changed man.  Would the new dawn serve to give testimony to a truly changed heart, mind, and life?  How would we know if he was really a changed man?

The final chapter begins with Scrooge realizing that he is not dead, but alive – really, really alive – and for the first time in forever, even giddy with joy.  He soon discovers that he has been reborn in time for Christmas morning.  His first order of business?  He spends money on an excessively large gift for Bob Cratchit and his family – a large prize turkey for the poor family’s dinner.  Ebenezer even provided a financial incentive for the boy who arranged it, and cab fare for the poulterer to cover delivery.  His first act of the day gives us an allusion to what would follow.

As Scrooge enters the world as a new man, we stroll the streets of London with him, noting his entirely changed mood.  He sings with the carolers he earlier no doubt scorned and wished a “Merry Christmas” to all he passed.  He happened upon the same men who had asked him the day before for a charitable contribution.  They were not particularly delighted to see him given their first encounter.  Ebenezer did more than announce his intention to provide a generous gift: he also acknowledged that he was aware that his name was likely not music to their ears, and that his gift included many-a back contribution from Christmases long passed.  A gift with a confession.

We continue following our born again companion and witness him working his way into his nephew’s home to give Fred a gift – the gift of himself at Christmas dinner, which is the only thing he ever wanted from his uncle.  Dickens included a subtle, additional gift in his written work.  He didn’t assume that he would be welcome.  He asked, “Will you let me in, Fred?”  This simple question communicates volumes about the attitude which was born from a changed heart.  The question itself is a confession – he knew he had been a pig (film adaptations include Ebenezer apologizing to Fred’s wife for his cold-heartedness).  Fred and the rest were more than delighted to let him in.  The festivities commenced, and Scrooge’s participation gave further evidence that his words that morning still rang true.

A final, beautiful scene follows the very next morning where we find Scrooge at his office – early – to make sure he is in his seat before Bob Cratchit arrives.  Bob arrives late due to too much merriment the night before, we learn, and Ebenezer lets him know of his tardiness.  But instead of a reprimand, Scrooge informs Bob that he is to be given a raise, that he will find support for Tiny Tim in him, and is ordered to immediately go buy more coal so as to appropriately heat the office.  Cratchit is dumbfounded.  Once again, we hear from the employer’s mouth a confession that he was making up for many years of humbug.  Two gifts dovetailing into an unmistakable testimony of his changed heart, mind, and life.  A narrator’s voice concludes the story sharing that Scrooge made good on his word in every way and more, that he became as good a man as was ever known in London, and became like a second father to Tiny Tim.  Ebenezer Scrooge stayed reborn.  He truly kept Christmas in his heart the whole year through.  He lived with the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Yet to Come as constant companions which produced fruit of a continually changed heart that changed his mind and behavior.  Or was it his changed behavior that altered his mind and heart?  Or was it his changed mind that transformed his behavior and heart? Yes, yes, and yes.

While the story of the Wise Men is often depicted as part of the Christmas scene in the nativity scenes we place in our homes, they actually would have showed up much later – sometime within a couple of years of Jesus’ birth.  Anachronistic for sure, they still offer some insight for our story today.

     Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the reign of King Herod. About that time some wise men from eastern lands arrived in Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the newborn king of the Jews? We saw his star as it rose, and we have come to worship him.”
     King Herod was deeply disturbed when he heard this, as was everyone in Jerusalem. He called a meeting of the leading priests and teachers of religious law and asked, “Where is the Messiah supposed to be born?”
     “In Bethlehem in Judea,” they said, “for this is what the prophet wrote:
          ‘And you, O Bethlehem in the land of Judah,
          are not least among the ruling cities of Judah,
          for a ruler will come from you
          who will be the shepherd for my people Israel.’”
     Then Herod called for a private meeting with the wise men, and he learned from them the time when the star first appeared. Then he told them, “Go to Bethlehem and search carefully for the child. And when you find him, come back and tell me so that I can go and worship him, too!”
     After this interview the wise men went their way. And the star they had seen in the east guided them to Bethlehem. It went ahead of them and stopped over the place where the child was. When they saw the star, they were filled with joy! They entered the house and saw the child with his mother, Mary, and they bowed down and worshiped him. Then they opened their treasure chests and gave him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.
     When it was time to leave, they returned to their own country by another route, for God had warned them in a dream not to return to Herod. – Matthew 2:1-12 (NLT)

These star-gazing scholars from the East looked to the heavens for signs of God’s activity.  They received their own heavenly visitation announcing Christmas – a new star – which in their way of thinking meant that a new king had been born.  Their thinking led to action: at great expense and with effort from an entourage, they made their journey toward Israel, one which would take many weeks or months to complete.  Along the way countless discussions would have ensued about who they were going to visit, and as they learned more and more about the Roman Empire’s occupation of Israel, their hearts most surely began to stretch as they considered what a newborn king might mean about the movement of God.  Upon discovering where the baby was to be born and finding him living in deep poverty, perhaps what happened to them was similar to Scrooge – their eyes, mind, heart, and hands opening further and further?  The gifts themselves were confessions.  All gifts that were appropriate to give to royalty – of great value – they each carried special meaning.  Gold fit for a king.  Frankincense used in priestly ways to connect God and people in prayerful worship.  Myrrh saved for proper burial – a prophetic gift needed in due time.  Gold, frankincense, and myrrh for a man who would be seen as a prophet, priest, and king.  Thoughtful gifts that confessed an intentional mind at work.  Heartfelt gifts that evoked passion in the preparing and giving.  Expensive gifts that required extra care in handling to insure they arrived safe and sound.  More than simply tangible gifts, the confessions imbued in them added great depth and nuance that could not have been missed by Mary and Joseph, by us, or especially by them!

There is much present within these two dovetailing stories for us to chew on.  On a very practical level, as you give gifts this Christmas, I wonder if it might be wise for us to take a moment and reflect on what we would like to confess with the giving of the gift.  While the tangible expression is itself sometimes important, I wonder if we, as givers, would benefit much more from the giving if we dialed into the deeper “why” behind the what we give.  My hunch is it might enhance everything about the giving experience for us and the recipient.

Ebenezer Scrooge pledged to keep Christmas the whole year through.  The Magi kept Christmas their entire journey back to Baghdad and likely the rest of their lives.  At times I believe this keeping of Christmas is effortless.  When we are reminded of the most important things in life, we often find ourselves at our best, deepest, and most thoughtful.  At other times, however, I think we need to be more intentional, setting reminders, carving out time, placing triggers to make sure we stay centered when life’s busyness seems to distract and derail us.  James Finley, on speaking about meditation in an every day mindfulness sort of way, offers this:

     Perhaps by trial and error, with no one to guide us, we find our own way to respond to the unconsummated longings of our awakened heart. We, in effect, discover our own personal ways to meditate. By meditation I mean, in this context, any act habitually entered into with our whole heart as a way of awakening and sustaining a more interior meditative awareness of the present moment. The meditation practice we might find ourselves gravitating toward could be baking bread, tending the roses, or taking long, slow walks to no place in particular. Or we might find ourselves being interiorly drawn to painting or to reading or writing poetry or listening to certain kinds of music. Our meditation practice may be that of being alone, truly alone, without any addictive props or escapes. Or our practice may be that of being with the person in whose presence we awakened to what is most real and vital in our life. . . . We cannot explain it, but when we give ourselves over to these simple acts, we are taken to a deeper place. We become once again more grounded and settled in a meditative awareness of the depth of the life we are living.

For Ebenezer Scrooge and everyone everywhere for all time, Christmas is more than a day.  Christmas is a mindset, an opportunity to live fully conscious and as present as possible to the life we are living in cooperation with all other people and the entirety of creation itself – all in a never-ending dance with God who created it all, who showed up in the most peculiar place so long ago, reminding us to pay attention, because you just never know where God might show up next.

A Christmas Carol: The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come

The last Ghost to visit our softening central character is the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.  Dickens paints the picture of this phantom borrowing from popular images of the Grim Reaper.  A dark, shadowy, hooded, silent, larger-than-life character with long bony fingers that merely point in the direction where attention should be given.  This journey revolves around the death of two people and the responses elicited.  Hospitality workers who were under one of the deceased’s employ, along with his undertaker are witnessed pawning off some goods they lifted from the dead man’s home and person.  No remorse at his death – only a little hope that from it they might profit.  Another scene shows men Scrooge knows at the Stock Exchange, speaking of the death of a man they all knew.  Not one of them felt or displayed any remorse, and they joked that the only reason they might attend a funeral would be to gain a free lunch. Yet another scene depicts a young couple who were in great despair because they were late in paying their mortgage debt, which could very well mean that they were headed for debtor’s prison.  The husband speaks news to the wife: the man servicing their loan died!  They had more time to get their money together while a new mortgage servicer was determined.  The man’s death was truly good news for it meant life for them.  Scrooge, not amused that not one person could be found with any remorse that this unknown man’s life was over, asked to be shown someone who truly mourned the loss of another’s life.

Scrooge recognized Bob Cratchit’s house from the previous ghost’s visit.  Inside that home there was no shortage of mourning.  Not for the old man who died, but for Tiny Tim.  The whole family wept.  Eavesdropping on the scene, we learn that Scrooge’s nephew, Fred, expressed condolences to Bob, and even offered to help set up his older son with an apprenticeship.  Scrooge himself was overcome as well, before heading to a final scene in a run-down, overgrown cemetery, where Scrooge was directed toward one grave in particular.  Before he dared look, however, he had some questions to ask of the ghost:

     “Are these the shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of things that May be, only?... Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me!...

     Spirit! Hear me! I am not the man I was.  I will not be the man I must have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I am past all hope!...

     Good Spirit, your nature intercedes for me, and pities me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you have shown me, by an altered life!”

The story of Jesus’ birth features a visit from a different Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come.  Mary and Joseph, in particular, were both visited separately with unwelcome news.  They were going to have a son, but not in a way that brings with it baby showers and well-wishers.  Mary’s visit went like this:

     In the sixth month of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, God sent the angel Gabriel to Nazareth, a village in Galilee, to a virgin named Mary. She was engaged to be married to a man named Joseph, a descendant of King David. Gabriel appeared to her and said, “Greetings, favored woman! The Lord is with you!”
     Confused and disturbed, Mary tried to think what the angel could mean. “Don’t be afraid, Mary,” the angel told her, “for you have found favor with God! You will conceive and give birth to a son, and you will name him Jesus. He will be very great and will be called the Son of the Most High. The Lord God will give him the throne of his ancestor David. And he will reign over Israel forever; his Kingdom will never end!”
     Mary asked the angel, “But how can this happen? I am a virgin.”
     The angel replied, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. So the baby to be born will be holy, and he will be called the Son of God. What’s more, your relative Elizabeth has become pregnant in her old age! People used to say she was barren, but she has conceived a son and is now in her sixth month. For the word of God will never fail.” – Luke 1:26-37 (NLT)

Joseph’s experience went like this:

     This is how Jesus the Messiah was born. His mother, Mary, was engaged to be married to Joseph. But before the marriage took place, while she was still a virgin, she became pregnant through the power of the Holy Spirit. Joseph, to whom she was engaged, was a righteous man and did not want to disgrace her publicly, so he decided to break the engagement quietly.
     As he considered this, an angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream. “Joseph, son of David,” the angel said, “do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. For the child within her was conceived by the Holy Spirit. And she will have a son, and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Matthew 1:18-21 (NLT)

For Joseph and Mary, the forecast was a genuine mixed bag.  Good news for humanity that required them to embrace some very bad news personally.  Bad news that was going to exact a heavy toll on their lives yet would be better for them and everyone else in the long run.  In each case, they both expressed their intent with their lips: Mary uttered her beautiful, simple, pure faithful vow, “I am the Lord’s servant. May everything you have said about me come true.” Joseph chose to not speak words of rejection to Mary but welcomed her instead.

Joseph and Mary, like Scrooge, were faced with questions only they could answer: what do I want my life to mean?  Will my life have made any real difference?  Will anyone mourn my passing?  Worse, will some be glad I’ve died?

These are excellent questions for every person to entertain throughout life.  Last week we laid to rest Barbara Springsteadah, a wonderful woman of faith who was remembered for more than being an avid Niners fan, Warriors fan, and Cheetoh’s fan.  One phrase prevailed to describe Barabara: “unconditional love.”  She did not live a life of luxury or wealth.  Yet her life deeply impacted those she touched, and her example lives on as one to follow.  Especially toward the end of Barb’s life, you would hear about the hope that drove her: she was looking forward to where she was going next.  Somehow Barb’s belief in the love of God was so complete and real that she didn’t live marked by fear, but rather compelled to love.

Sometimes we are won to faith out of fear of what will happen after death.  Obviously, fear is a huge motivator for all living creatures, and has definitely been used by people of faith to inform decisions from the beginning of time.  Jesus and his disciples used a mixture of fear and hope in their rhetoric to wake people up to the most important questions of life.  I would encourage you, however, to move away from a fear-based faith as fast as you possibly can.  Fear begets fear, not love.  Instead, I would encourage you to immerse yourself in the love of God that compelled Jesus and his disciples to love others radically and in some cases recklessly.  Scrooge came face to face with the reality of his impending doom, but much more than that, he finally saw clearly how shallow and self-centered his life had become, and what little and poor legacy it left behind.  This story is about a shift away from being motivated by fear, and more and more about being motivated by love.  When love is the driving force, everything changes.  The way we think about ourselves, our resources, and our legacy changes. The way we treat others changes: those who work for us, those we work with, those we call family, even those we don’t know yet – we think of them differently when motivated by love.

Nancy Rynes was an atheist, not believing at all in anything beyond the grave.  But then she came face to face with death when she was struck by an SUV while riding her bicycle.  She had an out-of-body experience where she saw herself under the SUV, writhing in pain.  But she also experienced what she believed to be the presence of God which was marked by warm light and deep love (hear her tell her story here). She was so overwhelmed by the experience that it changed her life and belief.  Knowing that what is to come is love beyond limits and imagination, she is now choosing to live in more deeply loving ways, and is choosing not to live motivated by fear.

What and Who we call God is the very source of Life, our Ground of Being.  God’s character and nature, more than anything else, is described as love in great depth.  Love is our birthplace.  Love is our destination.  Love is what generates life. Love is the legacy worth leaving behind. 

What are you building your life on?  Are you more motivated by love or fear?  Who are the people who work for you?  Who are the people you work with?  Who do you call family? Who are the people you do not yet know but are connected to you?  In each of these cases, how are you relating?  In light of where you’ve come from and where you’re going, what is your response to the vision cast by the Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come?  May it mirror our transforming protagonist:

     “I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.”

A Christmas Carol: The Ghost of Christmas Present

It’s easy to get frustrated.  And incapacitated.  One study suggests coffee is bad for us.  Another says it will ward off dementia and Alzheimers.  What’s a sleep-deprived man to do?  Coffee is just the beginning, of course.  There are even more pressing issues (if you can believe it).  Like global warming.  Or border control.  Or Black Lives Matter. Or affordable housing.  Or Income disparity. Or gender inequality. Or discrimination based on sexual orientation. Or…  Lots of issues, all of which are incredibly complex.  It is easy to get frustrated, which can easily lead to doing absolutely nothing (with a grumpy expression on our face).  A Christmas Carol is a story about a very frustrated older man.  In this week’s episode, we encounter the second of three spirits who visited the crusty curmudgeon.

The second spirit to visit Scrooge was the Ghost of Christmas Present, which brought us from the past directly into Ebenezer’s daily reality.  From the first look, we got a clue about what kind of ride our primary character was in for.  The Ghost was wearing a massive green robe with white fur fringe, bare-chested to boot.  This dude is clearly ready to party!  He’s got great hair, too, and charisma that will bring joy to any room.  He carried a torch that imbued a special, sweet smoke wherever he directed that immediately lightened the mood.  Hmmm.  Apparently a giant doobie…  More than simply being the Life of the party, there is one detail that is so intentionally included that we must notice it: “Girded round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.”  What a peculiar addition.

I think Dickens gave us this detail as a reminder of whose birth we are celebrating on Christmas Day:  the Prince of Peace.  Before he was even born, a Jewish priest uttered a prophecy about the one to come: “Because of God’s tender mercy, the morning light from heaven is about to break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, and to guide us to the path of peace” (Zechariah, in Luke 1:78-79 | NLT).    The angels referred to this quality when they gave the birth announcement from heaven:

     That night there were shepherds staying in the fields nearby, guarding their flocks of sheep. Suddenly, an angel of the Lord appeared among them, and the radiance of the Lord’s glory surrounded them. They were terrified, but the angel reassured them. “Don’t be afraid!” he said. “I bring you good news that will bring great joy to all people. The Savior—yes, the Messiah, the Lord—has been born today in Bethlehem, the city of David! And you will recognize him by this sign: You will find a baby wrapped snugly in strips of cloth, lying in a manger.”

     Suddenly, the angel was joined by a vast host of others—the armies of heaven—praising God and saying, “Glory to God in highest heaven, and peace on earth to those with whom God is pleased.” – Luke 2:8-14 (NLT)

Eight days after Jesus was born his parents took him to the Temple to be circumcised – a Jewish ritual that extends nearly to the beginning of the faith.  An elderly, devout Jewish man named Simeon happened to be hanging around when they were there.  He experienced God telling him that he would not die until he laid eyes on the Messiah, the anointed one who was going to bring redemption to Israel.  When he saw them, he said, “Sovereign Lord, now let your servant die in peace, as you have promised. I have seen your salvation, which you have prepared for all people. He is a light to reveal God to the nations, and he is the glory of your people Israel” (Luke 2:29-32 |NLT).

Peace was perhaps the greatest gift that this child came to bring.  A moment of rest – a day off – but more than that.  Peace with God translating into peace with each other.  A day off of violence to choose love and joy instead.  The Apostle Paul spoke to his audiences about this peace that passes understanding.  A peace that enters during our lifetimes during the worst of times, giving us hope of Peace to come.  The scabbard didn’t hold a sword, and it hadn’t from the beginning.

The test of this peace came at Bob Cratchit’s home on Christmas Day.  His whole family would eventually be present, which gave him great joy.  Everyone tried to look their best, even though they were very, very poor.  Mrs. Cratchit did the best she could, as most Victorian women in England would: only being able to afford one dress, they would wear them inside out when the wear and tear exacted its toll.  On this day, she adorned her dress with bows to hide the stains and sections that were threadbare. 

Bob attended a mass before coming home for Christmas dinner, taking his youngest son, Tiny Tim, with him.  Asked how the lad did in the service, Bob shared with welled-up eyes:

     “As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.”

After a great dinner together the Cratchit family gathered around the hearth to tell stories, sing songs, and raise a glass.  Bob Cratchit even chose to toast his stingy, mean boss, Ebenezer Scrooge, as the founder of their feast.  His wife vehemently protested.  Bob’s response?  It’s Christmas. A day when we walk around with rusty, sword-less scabbards.

Dickens paints the scene as the evening wore on: “There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes were far from being water-proof; their clothes were scanty; and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside of a pawnbroker’s. But, they were happy, grateful, pleased with one another, and contented with the time; and when they faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings of the Spirits torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.”  The love and warmth in that scene began to affect Scrooge’s icy heart.  He wondered about Tiny Tim’s fate:

     “If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race,” returned the Ghost, “will find him here. What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

     Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit and was overcome with penitence and grief.

     “Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked can’t until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”

The message sunk in for Ebenezer.  After the Cratchit home the spirit took them to his nephew’s home where dinner was commencing – the same dinner Scrooge refused to attend.  Speaking of his uncle, Fred remarked, “He’s a comical old fellow, that’s the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be. However, his offences carry their own punishment, and I have nothing to say against him… I am sorry for him; I couldn’t be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers by his ill whims! Himself, always. Here, he takes it into his head to dislike us, and he won’t come and dine with us. What’s the consequence?”

Some things were beginning to clear up for old Ebenezer.  Like Paul’s blindness falling like scales from his eyes, Scrooge was beginning to see just how poorly he had been seeing.  His attitude and perspective – his vision – was coming into greater clarity.  As has been noted, people don’t see things as they are, people see things as they are.  As Scrooge was seeing his employee and his family, and his nephew and friends with reborn eyes, he was also beginning to see himself for who he was, for who he had chosen to become.  He began to appreciate just how cold-hearted he was as the spirit swept him to places where it would be easy to be hardened – a miner’s settlement and a ship at sea.  In both truly bitter environments the inhabitants there sang their songs of Christmas, of joy, of peace.

The closing scene of this stave brought with it a tragic visual hiding within the spirit’s robe:

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling, wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where graceful youth should have filled their features out, and touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shriveled hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has monsters half so horrible and dread…

“They are Man’s,” said the Spirit, looking down upon them. “And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers. This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the writing be erased. Deny it!” cried the Spirit, stretching out its hand towards the city. “Slander those who tell it ye! Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse. And bide the end!”

     “Have they no refuge or resource?” cried Scrooge.

     “Are there no prisons?” said the Spirit, turning on him for the last time with his own words. “Are there no workhouses?”

Ebenezer was truly humbled.  And that was a good thing.  Dickens was hoping that the humbling would extend beyond his fictitious character to the real-life Scrooges who hid behind their rationalizing why they needn’t lift a finger to help those who suffered.  Some would do it claiming to be Christians all the while.  To those the spirit gave comment:

      “There are some upon this earth of yours who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge their doings on themselves, not us.”

The world Dickens was addressing is reminiscent of the world into which Jesus was born.  While Simeon was beyond joyful that he could die in peace having seen Jesus with his own eyes, he spoke truly prophetic words to Mary – allusions to what lay ahead for this child who would one day wear a rusty, empty scabbard as well: “This child is destined to cause many in Israel to fall, and many others to rise. He has been sent as a sign from God, but many will oppose him. As a result, the deepest thoughts of many hearts will be revealed. And a sword will pierce your very soul” (Luke 2:34-35 | NLT).

Both stories sting.  Dickens’ wonderful novella caricatures a part of us we all try to manage, to keep under wraps, yet sometimes emerges from our respective shadows.  Surely his original audience recoiled a bit at the suggestion that they were part of the problem.  Surely the same happens today when we think of some of the great challenges we face in our current time.  The point of the work was to help people see, to move them, to wake them from the slumber of their comfortable state. To open their eyes with the aid of an engaging tale.

In Victorian England, as in First Century Israel, information was hard to come by.  It was difficult to gain broad perspective on what was happening because so much information was inaccessible.  The lack of information created a feeling of being truly stymied. Today we have a different problem but the same feeling.  Now we have so much information, it’s hard to know what to believe.  And, with our political leaders constantly leveraging their binary rhetoric to their advantage, or even calling into question our ability to know anything for sure, we may feel overwhelmed in our sense of incapacity.  We know so much we don’t know anything.  So we don’t do much of anything. And we feel kinda guilty yet a little justified at the same time because of our overstimulation.

But to do nothing – especially at Christmas – is to ignore Christmas itself.  Except for some nods to rulers for the sake of dating the story, nearly all of the key characters in the birth narratives of Jesus are very, very poor.  The Good News of Jesus’ coming came to an elderly couple (powerless), young woman (powerless), a young man (the news of which was emasculating), and a bunch of lowest-rung-on-the-corporate-ladder smelly late-shift shepherds (POWERLESS!)!  All poor.  The only wealthy people of note?  King Herod, who was threatened to the point of calling for infanticide, and the wealthy Wise Men from the East, who were insightful enough to approach such an impoverished newborn king with great humility and deep generosity.  The shepherds ran to see the scene and tell their part of the story.  The Wise Men traveled for weeks or months to pay homage.  They didn’t sit back and do nothing because they just weren’t sure what to do.  They took the next step.

This stave was crafted to show us ourselves and call us on the carpet.  To not let us off the hook because it’s hard to understand due to a lack of information, too much information, or unreliable information.  And this chapter was offered to push us beyond feeling guilty about the status quo.  It calls us to respond with reflection.  Contemplation followed by action.

This story is about more than a stingy man learning to loosen his purse strings.  A Christmas Carol is about a boy that grew into an older man who, along the way became something much less than anyone’s dream.  He only had financial wealth – and even that he didn’t enjoy.  This story is about the hope of birth, and rebirth.  Through innumerable moments throughout his life Ebenezer chose to be more closed than open, more rigid than flexible, more fearful and angry than hopeful and loving.  His world got smaller and dimmer every year, leaving him literally cold and alone.  He needed the Ghost of Christmas Present to open his eyes to what was there all along.  Bob Cratchit wasn’t simply an employee he had to pay, but a husband and father who loved his family and managed to stay out of debtor’s prison even with the extra care a special needs child demanded.  Even though mistreated by his employer, Bob still raised a glass to Scrooge – a great sign of maturity and grace.  Ebenezer needed to see his nephew, Fred, for more than a fool who spends too much money on a Christmas Feast – funds that could have been invested.  Instead, he found a genuinely warm, mature man who intentionally took time to celebrate life with those he loved, who even committed to loving his uncle every year despite the near-certain rejection.  Ebenezer needed to see black-dust-encrusted coal miners and sailors soaked to the bone from the cold sea waves they fought – all of whom sang songs of Christmas, songs of hope, songs of love breaking into the world.  On that day love prevailed and showed itself for what it is: the very source of Life.  The Source Scrooge had been trying to live apart from the majority of his life.  It had caught up with him.  He didn’t know how much until he saw with new eyes what was always there.

I’ve had this experience along numerous lines throughout my life.  Not really understanding at all the feel of racial prejudice until my friend Adolphus Lacey and I roomed together during a choir tour in Iowa.  Simply put, I was clearly treated with great respect and trust, and he was looked upon and spoken to with fear and a hint of disdain.  He and I were both headed toward becoming pastors.  I can say the same for gender equality, having witnessed incredibly sharp women getting overlooked simply because they were women.  I’ve been given new eyes regarding poverty as I have come to see the issue as deeply complex which cannot be addressed with generalities about laziness and evil “users of the system”.  I have, with the help of a ghost in all of these and the ones to come, been given new eyes with which to see religion itself – so often diminishing its call to loving service and instead opting for rigid moral policing.  Over many years my lenses have been corrected in regards to homosexuality.  There was a brief period of my life – as a pastor – when I thought homosexuality was inherently sinful and needed to be categorized like we might do with alcoholism.  Some people are born predisposed to alcoholism and have to manage it their whole lives – I thought the same regarding sexual orientation.  It was easy to adopt such a view when surrounded by people who believed the same and interpreted biblical verses to validate their views with God’s stamp of approval.  But over time which allowed for deep study of the biblical texts, theological reflection, listening to those who struggled, discernment, and experience, my understanding changed.  My eyes saw things I simply couldn’t see before.  My understanding turned into action.  First simply sharing what I learned.  Then taking a stand.  Then living out my stated beliefs in action as I officiated a same gender wedding ceremony between two CrossWalk members who could not have been better candidates to provide me this first opportunity.  Of course, living out this belief caused serious backlash from my broader faith community which does not see things the same way.  With my action came the loss of a fairly prestigious leadership position with our denomination’s regional entity and the income that accompanied it.  Strained relationships, of course, came as well.  I have no regrets about my decision and am, in fact, proud of it and even grateful for it.  And yet I mourn and grieve even though in the long run it will all turn out for the best.  This is the more regular course for most of who do not get all three ghosts in one night.

The greater truth of Dickens’ classic is that we all are visited by the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present, and Future all the time. Some traditions refer to the Spirit of God as the Holy Ghost.  I believe this Spirit is constantly with us, urging us to see through the eyes of God, through the eyes of Love, that we might truly live full and free.  Deeper than a feeling, Love is the undercurrent of creation itself, and was manifested in the birth of a child in the most peculiar circumstance over 2,000 years ago.  Those who can see even a little still sing of it.  Perhaps the continual singing will foster new seeing as well.

What are you going to do to understand the complexities of the serious challenges we face today (and have faced with limited success since the dawn of humanity)?  Poverty.  Income disparity. Immigration. Undocumented immigrants. Racial prejudice. Gender inequality.  LGBTQ discrimination.  The list goes on.  What are you doing to gain a fuller perspective?  What are you doing in response to what you are learning?  How are you being Christmas – being and bringing Good News to our real-life characters who inhabit our world who need to know that the heart of God beats for them as it did when Jesus was born?

A Christmas Carol: The Ghost of Christmas Past

CrossWalker and local hospital chaplain Dr. Steve Lewis offers today’s teaching on the interplay between Dickens’ classic and the Christmas story.

A Christmas Carol: Marleyed

What kinds of causes are really easy for you to be generous toward?  Seriously – think about this for a moment.  There are lots of good causes that ask for our financial support – what are the ones that move you to action?

It’s easy for me to give toward Furaha Community Center – the work we support in the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, where mostly orphaned kids attend school and get a couple of meals that truly make a life or death difference.  It’s easy for me to be generous toward victims of disaster – wildfires, tsunamis, tornadoes, floods, hurricanes and the like.  Shelters for domestic violence victims that house women and children (both here and Tijuana) move me to action. And, of course, CrossWalk – a truly unique church that welcomes those who have been outcast from other churches due to their gender, sexual orientation, or incessant questioning of doctrine; a community that seeks to be generous toward Napa and beyond with a wide range of resources including food, legal help, space for recovery (and more).  That’s easy.

What is it that ties all of these together?  It could be a range of things.  They are all good causes.  For each need that I try to support, the management of the funds used is wise – there’s not a lot of administrative waste.  Each project gets results, too, which makes it easier to support.  But I think the bottom line difference is that I see what is before me, clearly, and cannot be idle.  There are, of course, different levels of seeing.  We can casually glance and see problems everywhere as well as problems with how the problems are being addressed, which are sometimes so problematic that it presents a real problem for us to do anything at all!  The kind of seeing I’m talking about is different.  It’s deeper.  It’s seeing with more than my physical eyes.

When people take a trip to see Furaha, they are forced to see.  Extreme poverty on that scale does not exist in the United States.  There is a scent in the air in the slums that says it all.  Once there, it is hard to unsee – only time and distance soften what once was a clear view of the horrors of humanity.  Perhaps because Furaha is not on our soil, and not familiar, and not tied to our own politics and culture and country, we can see things for what they are as less biased observers. 

Similar experiences happen at our own Food Pantry at CrossWalk.  When you walk people through our pop-up grocery store and look into the eyes of the recipient, a lot of assumptions about those who are resourced challenged melts away into a different glimpse:  One of shared humanity.

Seeing – really seeing – is what captures our attention, our hearts, and triggers our instincts to move with compassion.

In Charles Dickens’ Victorian classic, A Christmas Carol, readers are transported into new vistas as they join Ebenezer Scrooge through four sessions of vision correction.  In the first Stave, we get a view of Scrooge.  He is a stingy, mean-tempered older man who treats his poor clerk in ways that are dehumanizing – not caring for his physical needs while also creating a hostile work environment.  His disdain extends even to a family member, his jovial and generous nephew, Fred, who invites him yet again to Christmas dinner (in vain), met with harsh words and criticism.  Finally, we see Scrooge interact with two men making the rounds to collect donations for the poor and destitute in London.  Scrooge responded, “Are there no prisons?  And the Union workhouses – are they still in operation?  The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigor, then? I was afraid… that something had occurred to stop them in their useful course.”  The men, in response to Scrooge’s clear insistence that the taxes he paid were all he was interested in providing, and that the recipients had better use what is already available to them, the charitable hawkers stated a reality of the day – many among the poor would rather die than be subject to the awful conditions provided by “the system”.  “If they would rather die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population,” Scrooge shot back. “It’s not my business.  It’s enough for a man to understand his own business, and not to interfere with other people’s.  Mine occupies me constantly.  Good afternoon, gentleman!”

Surely Scrooge was not alone.  We know this to be quite true, in fact.  At that time in London, it was especially bad to be poor.  Should you run up your debt and fail to pay your creditors, you might find yourself in debtors prison where you would be forced to live and work (with your wife and kids) until your debt was repaid.  Your job?  The Treadmill – you would become a beast of burden to turn the milling wheel.  Dickens was intimately familiar with “the system”.  His father, a military veteran and father of eight (Charles was the second), found himself and his wife thrown into debtors prison.  At a very young age, Charles was forced to work putting labels on boot-black, at one point on display on a busy street.  Humiliating.  Unsafe.  And – by the way – this was a privatized system.  Part of Dickens’ agenda in writing this tale (among others) was to highlight the plight of the poor to rouse those with power to do something to make a change.  Those who held power were fine enough with the status quo because frankly, they were fine and didn’t have to see the system or their part in it if unless they were intentional about taking a look.  Scrooge was quite intent on not looking.

That very night – Christmas Eve – Scrooge was visited by the ghost of his former business partner, Jacob Marley, who came to inform Scrooge that he would be visited that night by three spirits – all with the purpose of opening Ebenezer’s eyes to reality past, present, and future.  Marley had his own message to share – a warning not to live the life Marley lived, which was the life Scrooge was living.  Such a misused life resulted in deep regret and untold damage to his fellow human beings:

     “Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,” cried the phantom, “not to know, that ages of incessant labour by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of regret can make amends for one life’s opportunity misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!”

     “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself. 

     “Business! cried the Ghost,” wringing its hands again. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!”

     “At this time of the rolling year,” the spectre said, “I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted me!”

A Christmas Carol was written in 1843.  Unfortunately, the plight of the poor has been a human-created reality since we hit the planet.  In the first half of the first century C.E., Jesus lived in Roman-occupied Northern Israel near the Sea of Galilee.  In our time and place, we are familiar with income disparity communicated with the vernacular of the 1%, suggesting that one percent of our population owns and controls the purse strings that impact the remaining 99%.  If we shared such information with Jesus and his contemporaries, they might respond, “Oh, what would it be like to see such an improved state!  In our time, 99.9% of the population is controlled by just one tenth of one percent!”  Similar realities existed in Jesus’ day.  If you were poor and couldn’t pay your debt, you might be enslaved until your debt was paid. Mothers and daughters simply trying to put food on the table might find themselves resorting to prostitution, which carries a much higher price than that at the point of sale.

Jesus offered a parable to help people see themselves and their context more clearly:

     "There once was a rich man, expensively dressed in the latest fashions, wasting his days in conspicuous consumption. A poor man named Lazarus, covered with sores, had been dumped on his doorstep. All he lived for was to get a meal from scraps off the rich man's table. His best friends were the dogs who came and licked his sores.
     "Then he died, this poor man, and was taken up by the angels to the lap of Abraham. The rich man also died and was buried. In hell and in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham in the distance and Lazarus in his lap. He called out, 'Father Abraham, mercy! Have mercy! Send Lazarus to dip his finger in water to cool my tongue. I'm in agony in this fire.'
     "But Abraham said, 'Child, remember that in your lifetime you got the good things and Lazarus the bad things. It's not like that here. Here he's consoled and you're tormented. Besides, in all these matters there is a huge chasm set between us so that no one can go from us to you even if he wanted to, nor can anyone cross over from you to us.'
     “The rich man said, 'Then let me ask you, Father: Send him to the house of my father where I have five brothers, so he can tell them the score and warn them so they won't end up here in this place of torment.'
     "Abraham answered, 'They have Moses and the Prophets to tell them the score. Let them listen to them.'
     "'I know, Father Abraham,' he said, 'but they're not listening. If someone came back to them from the dead, they would change their ways.'
     "Abraham replied, 'If they won't listen to Moses and the Prophets, they're not going to be convinced by someone who rises from the dead.'" – Luke 16:19-31 (The Message)

Jesus made some bold statements with this parable.  First, the scene was shocking: the state of Lazarus was horrific, and the indifference of the Rich Man was unconscionable. What happened after they died was equally shocking: the one society revered due to his wealth ended up not being impressive at all to God, and the one everyone in life assumed was surely cursed by God was welcomed and honored in death.  A great reversal that surely prodded listeners then and now to wake up and smell the coffee.  The final point is not to focus our attention on our potential afterlife residence, but on what we are doing with our lives now to care for those who have serious needs we can help meet.

According to Gallup Research, the average American will spend more than $800 on Christmas gifts each year, with 30% of us spending more than $1,000, and six percent of us still paying off Christmas debt by next October.  Scrooge seems timely when he says, “What’s Christmas time to you but a time for paying bills without money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but not an hour richer… If I could work my will, every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” Apparently, the more things change the more they stay the same. Scrooge could easily say the same of us today. And yet we know from Dickens’ story and Jesus’ parable that while overspending on ourselves is not good, not being generous to those in need around us is also bad.  We need to see things more clearly.  We need perspective.

Ebenezer didn’t just wake up one day and decide to be Scrooge.  He became the epitome of what his name has come to represent.  His response to the circumstances of his life slowly and surely shaped the lens through which he ended up seeing the world.  The visits of Marley and the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future all came to redeem Ebenezer’s vision of himself and the reality of the world in which he lived.  His hardened heart affected the way he saw everything.  The eventual Christmas morning which presents us with a born-again Scrooge required new ways of seeing his past, insight into his present day, and a vision for what his future could look like.

We see the world in large part because of how our eyes have been shaped by our responses to our experiences up to now.  We all have biases that move our hearts in certain directions more than others and also keep our hands and feet and wallets from helping more than we do.  This series has as its goal the redemption of our vision, the healing of our eyes, so that we might see more clearly the world in which we live and the people with whom we share the same breath.  That we will find redemption and healing of past wounds and present biases. That we will recognize our potential going forward to perpetuate great harm or propel humanity toward greater good.  The greatest hope is that we would all wake up renewed, refreshed, and reborn on Christmas Day to live fully and well not just for our own benefit and pleasure, but with generosity toward those who need help all around us.

We are generous toward certain causes because we have truly seen them.  When we truly see, we can genuinely care.  When we genuinely care, we are naturally generous.  Scrooge needed renewed eyes.  So do we.

Me Free 12: What Comes Around Must Go Around

Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics, and to practice these principles in all our affairs. – Step 12

"Simon, stay on your toes. Satan has tried his best to separate all of you from me, like chaff from wheat. Simon, I've prayed for you in particular that you not give in or give out. When you have come through the time of testing, turn to your companions and give them a fresh start." – Jesus, Luke 22:31-32 (The Message)

I am well named.  Technically, I was named after my grandfather, Pieter Smit.  I do carry some of his resemblance both in appearance and in passion.  But I think I’m more like the disciple Peter.  Unfortunately.   I think this is true because my journey has been one of ongoing sifting, learning the hard way – from failure, from putting my foot in my mouth, from hitting the wall time and time again, for getting in my own way.  This list goes on.  I wonder, is your name Peter, too?

Jesus changed Simon’s name early on to Peter.  Isn’t it interesting that in this scene, Jesus refers to his given name?  It’s a nod, I think, an allusion to the fact that what Peter is going to be going through will be akin to starting all over again, choosing to follow Jesus all over again.  What an incredible principle Luke gave us here.  The journey begins anew.  Jesus even brings Satan into the equation, essentially saying that the disciples will be experiencing some serious temptation – which they did.  Don’t get stuck on the Satan figure here – when we get overly caught up in this personification we can lose sight of the bigger picture of evil in our world.  We can be blindly giving in to some horrible ways of life and belief while we’re looking for the dude with the horns, tail, and pitchfork.  Evil lurks in systems all over the world in plain sight – how are you doing in the face of those temptations?  Power, Fame, Success, Prestige, Wealth – all of these temptations loom for us.

The bright side here is that Jesus said he prayed for his disciples that their faith wouldn’t fail them.  This tells us that we can have confidence in this faith thing not to give way.

Jesus finishes this little episode by instructing Peter to look to his companions and encourage them, giving them a fresh start.

In brief, Peter could expect a new cycle of learning to be a Jesus follower which would be challenging in a sifting kind of way yet would not be the end of him.  Once the struggle passes, he is told to help his brothers in their similar struggle.

Start over, and help others in their journey as you cross paths.

This is a tough pill to swallow, I think.  We’re also not wired to think this way.  Our culture is upward-oriented thinking.  To go backwards is a sign of failure.  Nobody wants to be demoted.  Sometimes people would rather move to a lousy new location and maintain their status than to weather the storm on their pride that a demotion might bring.  What do you think about this?  How do you feel about the notion of perpetually working the Twelve Steps throughout your life?  I bet some people are thinking “hamster wheel” – lots of effort to get to the exact same place you’re running from.  Who wants that?

Perhaps our perspective needs to change on this?  Parts of our lives may reel against anything but moving upward, but our natural lives actually have this built in whether we like it or not.  Aging is a thing, apparently.  Our bodies really do change with time.  When they change, we are forced to think in new ways – a form of starting over.  Relationships change.  The way we relate to our kids changes.  The way we relate to our spouse changes from the first few years to the later years.  It’s not necessarily better or worse, just different.  New.  Starting over.  This is just the normal reality of life.  Perhaps the sooner we get our brains around that, the more we can enjoy the ride, and the more helpful we will be with those we run into who need what we have.

As it turns out, part of our success working this spiritual transformation process is dependent on helping others wherever we can.  Do you know who learns the most in any given classroom?  Not the star pupil.  Not the least interested.  The teacher.  The teacher is the one who has to learn the material well enough to pass it on, and the teacher is the one who experiences the greatest depth of learning as they share it with someone else.  Our personal and spiritual health is dependent on our giving away what we know.

Have you ever met a spiritually constipated Christian?  They are no fun to be around, let me tell you.  I met one of these miserable persons a number of years ago.  He really wanted my help.  He felt dead spiritually.  He couldn’t understand why.  He was constantly reading the Bible, listening to Christian radio for music and 24/7 preaching.  He only watched wholesome TV shows.  And yet he felt so distant from God.  After thinking about it awhile, I let him know what I thought.  He was constipated (spiritually).  Lots coming in.  Nothing going out.  The thing he needed most was to practice all the stuff he knew was good, as the need arose right in front of his face.  But he couldn’t imagine such a thing – all the people around him were stupid jerks and fools, he said.  Hmmm.  Another sure sign of constipation.  You know I’m a doctor, right?  Nevermind what type, just roll with me here…  If you suffer from a stagnant faith, if you feel like you’re surrounded by a bunch of no-good heathens, and if you are able to identify a hundred things wrong with everyone around you from a hundred yards away, I’ve got troubling news for you.  You are likely spiritually constipated.  Your faith isn’t doing much for you, and it certainly isn’t doing much for anybody else.

A vital spiritual life requires our doing what we know to do.  Jesus noted this in one of his parables that he used to close his greatest sermon:

     "These words I speak to you are not incidental additions to your life, homeowner improvements to your standard of living. They are foundational words, words to build a life on. If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit [and wildfires and cancer diagnoses and mass shootings and divorce and pink slips and market crashes and drunk driving and…]—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock.
"But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don't work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards." – Jesus, Matthew 7:24-27 (The Message)

Jesus’ brother, James (or his disciples), thought the same when he wrote:

     But don’t just listen to God’s word. You must do what it says. Otherwise, you are only fooling yourselves. For if you listen to the word and don’t obey, it is like glancing at your face in a mirror. You see yourself, walk away, and forget what you look like. But if you look carefully into the perfect law that sets you free, and if you do what it says and don’t forget what you heard, then God will bless you for doing it. – James 1:22-25

The Apostle Paul lived this reality of starting over and over and over and helping others in their journey.  He saw the real beauty in it:

     All praise to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. God is our merciful Father and the source of all comfort. He comforts us in all our troubles so that we can comfort others. When they are troubled, we will be able to give them the same comfort God has given us. For the more we suffer for Christ, the more God will shower us with his comfort through Christ. Even when we are weighed down with troubles, it is for your comfort and salvation! For when we ourselves are comforted, we will certainly comfort you. Then you can patiently endure the same things we suffer. We are confident that as you share in our sufferings, you will also share in the comfort God gives us. – Paul, 2 Corinthians 1:3-7

If you want to be successful in the program, start over, and over, and over.  By the time you are done you will be a different person with new challenges to mature through.  The fantastic news is that as you move through the steps, you will meet people who need what you know.  The more you give love away, the more you have.  You can’t lose.  As a CrossWalker recently shared a way to think about this that is more attractive to our Western sensibilities.  Starting the 12 steps over isn’t regression, she said. Completing the Twelve Steps is the first rung on a ladder.  The next Twelve Steps workout is the next run up.  I like that a lot – definitely works with my Enneagram #3 way of thinking.  Going through the steps again and again is an intentional act to become more mature, more self-aware, and more God-aware as well.  That’s all good.

Especially since we’re in Thanksgiving week, I encourage you to take time to reflect on how God (or your faith) has helped you in specific ways recently and also in your past.  Simply slowing down to think about these things will do some amazing things in your life.  First, you will realize that God has indeed been at work in your life, which is amazing.  This will build you into a more grateful and gracious person.  It will also keep the incredible power of God to change lives at the front of your mind, so that when the Spirit’s wind blows you and another into the same air space, you just might have opportunity to be just what they need at just the right time.  When that happens, it’s magic.  It’s God.  It’s vitality.  Constipation alleviated.  The frown gets turned upside down. 

May you dare to recognize where you’ve grown and give thanks to God for being with you.  May you hear the invitation to start over for even deeper life and love.  May you be open to serve knowing your experience may be just what someone needs.  May you give thanks again when you get to make a difference along the way.

*This teaching summary is part of a series that dovetails the deep spiritual components of Twelve Steps and the rich insights of the time-tested Enneagram.  Understanding your Enneagram Type can provide helpful insight into how you “do life”.  There are several free tests that will surely narrow things down for you, but the Enneagram Test from the Enneagram Institute by far offers the best assessment and provides the richest feedback (look for the RHETI test).  In addition, we will be drawing insight from two books as we follow Jesus through these steps.  You can get Richard Rohr’s Breathing Under Water (and its companion journal) and Christopher Heuertz’ The Sacred Enneagram online and in digital formats.  CrossWalk will have a limited supply of the books on hand.  In addition, you may find songs for different types helpful in understanding what you’re working with, as well as the story behind the creation of the songs at the Sleeping At Last podcast (search for “Sleeping at Last” on your podcast app).  Also, search for the “EnneApp” for your phone – a great on-the-go option for your mobile devices.  Also, look through 12Step.org for tons of helpful resources from the recovery community.

Me Free 11: An Alternative Mind

We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, as we understood God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out. – Step 11

“Be still, and know that I am God.” – Psalm 46:10

“You must put aside your old self which has been corrupted by following illusory desires. Your mind must be renewed by a spiritual revolution.” – Ephesians 4:22-23

In the morning, long before dawn, he got up, left the house, and went off to a lonely place to pray.

 Jesus used parables to teach great, deep principles about life and the Kingdom of God – the way things work in God’s economy.  It drove (and still drives) some people nuts.  Here’s one that stumped his disciples:

At about that same time Jesus left the house and sat on the beach. In no time at all a crowd gathered along the shoreline, forcing him to get into a boat. Using the boat as a pulpit, he addressed his congregation, telling stories.
     "What do you make of this? A farmer planted seed. As he scattered the seed, some of it fell on the road, and birds ate it. Some fell in the gravel; it sprouted quickly but didn't put down roots, so when the sun came up it withered just as quickly. Some fell in the weeds; as it came up, it was strangled by the weeds. Some fell on good earth, and produced a harvest beyond his wildest dreams.
     "Are you listening to this? Really listening?”

The disciples came up and asked, "Why do you tell stories?"
     He replied, "You've been given insight into God's kingdom. You know how it works. Not everybody has this gift, this insight; it hasn't been given to them. Whenever someone has a ready heart for this, the insights and understandings flow freely. But if there is no readiness, any trace of receptivity soon disappears. That's why I tell stories: to create readiness, to nudge the people toward receptive insight. In their present state they can stare till doomsday and not see it, listen till they're blue in the face and not get it. I don't want Isaiah's forecast repeated all over again:
     Your ears are open but you don't hear a thing.
     Your eyes are awake but you don't see a thing.
     The people are blockheads!
     They stick their fingers in their ears
          so they won't have to listen;
     They screw their eyes shut
          so they won't have to look,
               so they won't have to deal with me face-to-face
                    and let me heal them.
     "But you have God-blessed eyes—eyes that see! And God-blessed ears—ears that hear! A lot of people, prophets and humble believers among them, would have given anything to see what you are seeing, to hear what you are hearing, but never had the chance.

     "Study this story of the farmer planting seed. When anyone hears news of the kingdom and doesn't take it in, it just remains on the surface, and so the Evil One comes along and plucks it right out of that person's heart. This is the seed the farmer scatters on the road.
     "The seed cast in the gravel—this is the person who hears and instantly responds with enthusiasm. But there is no soil of character, and so when the emotions wear off and some difficulty arrives, there is nothing to show for it.
     "The seed cast in the weeds is the person who hears the kingdom news, but weeds of worry and illusions about getting more and wanting everything under the sun strangle what was heard, and nothing comes of it.
     "The seed cast on good earth is the person who hears and takes in the News, and then produces a harvest beyond his wildest dreams." – Matthew 13:1-23 (The Message)

This passage relates to Step 11 very well in my mind, and raises three questions:

What soil describes what you started with?

What soil describes what you’re working with now?

What soil do you want going forward?

Vigorous soil.  About a month ago I arranged for a colleague of mine to visit Monticello Winery and get a tour from CrossWalk’s own Stephen Corley.  Even though I have been there many times, I still enjoy the tour because I learn something new each time.  My friend and his family really enjoy gardening, so they were very interested in the ins and outs of growing the vines.  Stephen dropped a word that my friend and I had not associated with gardening before: vigor.  Stephen was explaining that his brother, Kevin, who leads up the growing side of the business, tests the soil for vigor, to see if the soil has enough vigor, or energy, to allow the vine to grow and produce good fruit.  If the soil isn’t good, it’s a waste of time and money to plant.  So, assuming you want a good life that grows though all of your seasons and produces fruit for yourself and others, let’s talk about what it actually takes to reinvigorate your soil.

Steps for Reinvigorating Soil

1.       Pull any dead or dying plants from the previous season. Remove all weeds and garden debris, including fallen leaves and branches.

2.       Squeeze a handful of the soil into a tight ball to verify the soil is ready to work. Flick the ball with your fingers. If it falls apart, the soil is dry enough to work. If the ball retains its shape or only develops a slight dent, the soil is too wet and must dry for an additional time before you can revitalize it.

3.       Turn the top 6 to 8 inches of soil with a spade or hoe. Break up any large clods as you loosen the soil. Remove any old roots. Alternatively, use a power tiller to turn and loosen the soil in a large garden bed.

4.       Spread 2 to 3 inches of organic matter over the soil, using compost, aged manure or leaf mold. Turn the organic matter into the top 6 to 8 inches of soil with the spade, incorporating it completely. Work in 1 inch of organic matter for each 3 inches of soil depth you are working, so if you loosen and work the soil to a 6-inch depth, apply at least 2 inches of compost.

5.       Sprinkle 1 1/2 pounds of 5-10-10 fertilizer over every 50 square feet of soil. Turn the fertilizer into the top 6 inches of soil so plant roots can easily absorb the nutrients after you replant. Alternatively, apply a suitable fertilizer at the correct rate for the specific plants you grow.

Things You Will Need

·       Spade or hoe

·       Power tiller (optional)

·       Compost, manure or leaf mold

·       5-10-10 granular fertilizer

Tips

Cover the bed with plastic sheeting or 2 inches of mulch if you aren't replanting right away so weeds don't invade the fertile but empty bed.

Although an existing bed doesn't require a soil test before replanting, performing a test can verify soil pH and fertility. Perform the test at least four weeks before planting and follow the test recommendations when choosing fertilizer and amendments.

You’re welcome.

Soils and Seeing.  Maintaining vigor in our soil requires intentional effort.  While our innermost being, our True Selves long for all that God has for us, our culture does not lend itself to the necessary work required to keep our soil healthy.  This makes the shift to soil maintenance not just work, but hard work, because culture is pervasive, shaping our eyes and hearts in ways we don’t recognize until we take measures that help us recognize it.  As many have noted, people don’t see things as they are, they see things as they are.  Because our prayers are shaped by what we are seeing, and what we are seeing says more about us than anything else, our prayers may at times be off base.  Rohr notes:

     At early-stage praying, there has usually been no real “renouncing” of the small and passing self (Mark 8:34), so it is not yet the infinite prayer of the Great Body of Christ, but the very finite prayer of a small “body” that is trying to win, succeed, and take control—with a little help from a Friend. God cannot directly answer such prayers, because frankly, they are usually for the wrong thing and from the wrong self, although we do not know that yet… People’s willingness to find God in their own struggle with life—and let it change them—is their deepest and truest obedience to God’s eternal will. We must admit this is what all of us do anyway, as “God comes to us disguised as our life”! Remember, always remember, that the heartfelt desire to do the will of God is, in fact, the truest will of God. At that point, God has won, and the ego has lost, and your prayer has already been answered. – Breathing Under Water, 79

This is the heart of Step 11, isn’t it?  This step isn’t interested in grocery list prayers – though not all things on the list are bad – they are often very good – but we remember that there is something that must come first in our prayerful pursuit – the heart and will of God.  The goal of prayer in its depth is to match our steps with God’s, to find ourselves walking to the beat of God’s drum, to discover ourselves continually immersed in God’s loving presence and the power it brings.  With this deeper goal in mind, we are invited to a deeper form of prayer and thus transformation. 

Understanding our Enneagram type can be instrumental in guiding us in our pursuit of creating healthy soil.  Christopher Heuertz, in his book, The Sacred Enneagram, notes, “A contemplative approach to the Enneagram invites us to resist the reductionism of inner fragmentation; to realize we aren’t as bad as our worst moments or as good as our greatest successes—but that we are far better than we can imagine and carry the potential to be far worse than we fear” (137).  A deep prayer life, then, helps us see both our greatest potential and threats – both related to our particular type.  This prayerful process is just that, a process, as Heuertz explains:

     “The pilgrimage home to God involves three phases: a construction phase of identity, followed by an earth-shattering deconstruction of who we thought we were, which finally brings us to the necessary reconstruction of something truer… Fundamentally what we are doing here is excavating our essence, our True Self, from the lies, programs, and temptations we’ve wrapped around our identity. We do this by practicing presence, by showing up with our whole self to the God who lovingly seeks to shape and restore us. Being truly present requires establishing a particular prayer posture in contemplative practice” (143).

As you may recall, there are three major centers referenced in the Enneagram: Instinctual, Heart, and Mind.  In terms of approaching contemplative prayer, each center has its own goal and need.  Those types within the Heart center (twos, threes, and fours) need to appreciate solitude, since their seeing is so often related to others.  Those within the Mind center (fives, sixes, and sevens) need to focus on silence, as they tend to constantly think their way through everything – the churning needs to be quieted.  Those in the Instinctual center (eights, nines, and ones) need to focus on stillness, since these types are constantly working to advance their cause.  Even more specifically, each type needs to approach their center-specific emphasis with a particular mindset related to their respective triad in the enneagram.  Twos, Fives, and Eights need to consent – a way of intentionally agreeing to look at acknowledge and address their particular need.  Threes, Sixes, and Nines need to engage their particular mindset as an intentional act of being present.  Ones, Fours, and Sevens need to rest in their mode of prayer as an intentional act of suspending their crusade in order to take stock.  Obviously I cannot do justice to this complexity here, but merely want to open your eyes to the reality that there is much to discover about how your type needs to inform your prayer life, your soil management, your fulfilling Step 11.

In terms of specific forms of prayer, Heuertz offers several suggestions, all of which have served countless people for centuries.  These enduring traditions of prayer include the following: Centering Prayer, The Examen, and Welcoming Prayer. Each of these can be discovered in a variety of resources, and each is nuanced in a particular way.  Working with each of these may be helpful in different seasons of life, too.  I offer a reference to these forms of prayer as an encouragement to firstly recognize that there are different forms of prayer than what you may have known.  Realize a hallmark of each of these – they all require being alone, quiet, and still.  If you are serious about deepening your relationship with God, with soil management, and with Step 11, you will not get there without engaging, consenting, or resting in some form of contemplative prayer.  Our culture does not support or encourage such a waste of time, which means you will feel a constant pressure to dismiss it.  But we’re talking about your life, here.  Perhaps its time to take the time…

Watch your thoughts; they become words.

Watch your words; they become actions.

Watch your actions; they become habits.

Watch your habits; they become character.

Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

*This teaching summary is part of a series that dovetails the deep spiritual components of Twelve Steps and the rich insights of the time-tested Enneagram.  Understanding your Enneagram Type can provide helpful insight into how you “do life”.  There are several free tests that will surely narrow things down for you, but the Enneagram Test from the Enneagram Institute by far offers the best assessment and provides the richest feedback (look for the RHETI test).  In addition, we will be drawing insight from two books as we follow Jesus through these steps.  You can get Richard Rohr’s Breathing Under Water (and its companion journal) and Christopher Heuertz’ The Sacred Enneagram online and in digital formats.  CrossWalk will have a limited supply of the books on hand.  In addition, you may find songs for different types helpful in understanding what you’re working with, as well as the story behind the creation of the songs at the Sleeping At Last podcast (search for “Sleeping at Last” on your podcast app).  Also, search for the “EnneApp” for your phone – a great on-the-go option for your mobile devices.  Also, look through 12Step.org for tons of helpful resources from the recovery community.