Easter Unfolding

A sermon based on Psalm 116 and Luke 24:13-35 preached on April 30th, 2017

Sermon audio

The ability to see is granted gently.

Throughout scripture, God’s very presence is described as light. The kind of light that overwhelms us, the kind our eyes are not built to withstand or make any sense of.

When God comes to His people, it’s always with a blinding truth that none of us are able to handle. Think of Moses at the burning bush. On fire but not consumed. Think of Sinai, the mountain that only Moses could ascend. He climbed into God’s radiating company. After those mountaintop conversations with God, Moses had to cover his face with a veil, or else the afterglow of God was enough to blind the Israelites.

I imagine every time he stood atop Sinai, Moses shook all over from a reverent fear—an overwhelmed and overwhelming sense of the Holy that not one of us are built to witness. Not many of us could withstand such a sight.

God knows this about us. God was careful with Moses, and God is gentle with us, too. God grants us the ability to see, but He grants it to us gently. Our eyes adjust slowly to new rays of light. That’s why Easter comes not all at once, but over all these days and weeks after Jesus’ resurrection. God unfolds the Truth of Easter slowly. One sign at a time, and only when our eyes and ears, hearts and minds are ready to see it.

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No one has ever found Emmaus. Thousands, perhaps millions, of maps have been unfolded, unearthed, and unrolled from their ancient containers, combed over with magnifying glasses in case its name has faded away, but Emmaus has never been discovered. Perhaps it was never a place—or at least no place in particular.

And Cleopas. Who’s Cleopas? We don’t know really. He wasn’t one of the Twelve, but he was a disciple of Jesus all the same. He and his unnamed traveling companion—they were walking away. Away from Jerusalem. And toward who knows where or what. Maybe they didn’t even know. All they knew was that something they had given their lives to had come to an end. It all had unraveled in the course of the last three days. Along the way to Emmaus, they recounted their time with Jesus to each other. All the places He had taken them.

Wouldn’t we like to know all they were saying to each other. They must have recounted His words. His teachings. They must have laughed at themselves for never understanding any of His parables. What was Jesus trying to say, anyway?!

They must have had conversations along the Road about all the healings they witnessed. The way Jesus talked about God as if He knew God’s own heart—or had God’s own mind. What’s not to be astonished by? How could they ever forget?

They must have recounted that last week with Jesus over and over again while they walked away. The conflict in the Temple. That last meal together. The words Jesus had spoken around that table—this is my body broken;  this is my blood poured. Those sleepy moments in the Garden of Gethsemane when their Master went off on His own to pray. The two of them must have poured over every detail of what happened next. The arrest. The chaos of it. It all happened so fast. The next time they saw Jesus, He was hanging on a cross. Then the burial. How many tears were shed along that road as these last few days unfolded again and again in their memories? How do you walk away from all that?

They were going back to their old lives. They were walking away from the last three years of following Jesus. All of it having unraveled into nothing right in front of them.

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It’s in the thick of their grief, the fog of all this loss, that Jesus comes along. Appearing to them as a fellow companion along their journey away. Anonymous. Just a stranger keeping them company. He walks with them slowly. Nobody’s in a rush here. There’s nowhere specific to go now—nothing left to do anymore, or so they thought. This is slow time along a lost and dusty road. Jesus had so much to share with them. So much to prove to them, but Jesus is patient with them. God grants us the ability to see, but He grants it to us gently. Our eyes adjust slowly to new rays of light. Jesus knows this about us.

It’s along a road like this, with stories shared like these, that the truth of Easter should strike us not as an event that occurred, but a path on which we stand. A journey we take. A direction we walk. Easter, as well as the resurrection that comes with it, they are not one-time events frozen in place along a timeline. They are a constant unfolding of truth that takes place right in front of us. Easter resurrection is a way for us to encounter Jesus no matter when or where we are.

Emmaus maybe be a lost destination so far as maps are concerned, but we know where it is, because we’ve been there before. Emmaus is all the in-between places in our lives. It’s the ground we stand on when we don’t know exactly where we stand or what we stand for. There are many Emmauses. It’s in the middle of these Emmaus moments that Jesus arrives.

What are you discussing as you walk along?

He says.

Jesus companions with us in these places, but He doesn’t reveal himself—not at first, not in any obvious way—because He knows that our faith cannot yet handle a revelation. We aren’t yet ready for that. Faith cannot be forced upon us. It cannot be coerced. Faith—that is, having eyes to see and ears to hear Jesus—does not come all at once. It must be gradually unfolded in front of us. We are brought to sight slowly. As poet Denise Levertov puts it, every step we take is a sort of arrival. God is patient with His people.

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There are moments in our lives when we feel like we’re headed in no specific direction at all. When we lose sight of our purpose and our path. So, we walk away. Away from life as we knew it before. In our grief and hurt, we think that every step forward—away from a life that once was—will distance us from our past.

Jesus knows us better than we know ourselves. That first question He asks the two along the road is Jesus’ way of reminding them of who they are and whose they are. In effect, Jesus comes along and says,

Let me re-tell you your story. It’s God’s story, too.

Jesus won’t let them walk away. God’s story is the biblical story, and we have been a part of it from the very beginning. Jesus won’t let them walk away because first and foremost, this is a story of a God who relentlessly pursues us. Who will not let us go. Who will not let us forget our story. And that’s when Jesus takes over. He tells the two everything that God has been doing. He starts with Moses—all that God has done for His people as God guided them away from slavery in Egypt and into the freedom and abundance of the Promised Land.

Jesus didn’t stop there. He told them about all the prophets who came along after that to guide God’s people in the right direction. Throughout history, those who lose their hope in God—who forget their salvation story—they walk away. But over and over again, God pursued them, retaught them their own story, and set them back on right paths again.

Along the road to Emmaus, as Jesus unfolds God’s story for the two disciples, their hearts are kindled inside of them. Brought to flame. And with each one of Jesus’ words, the two disciples begin piecing back together what they thought was forever broken. Maybe the Jesus story does have a future. Who are we to say that God’s story has an ending? Maybe there’s more.

Easter slowly unfolds in front of these two disciples along the Emmaus road. They start gaining eyes to see some vague notion of a future for themselves. Their hearts are brought to flame as the Holy Spirit speaking into them. But they needed more nudging. We all do. Our eyes are never opened fully. The Easter news of resurrection is too big for us to see all at once. There’s always more that needs revealing. It was only when they stopped and gathered around table, as Jesus broke bread with the two, that something in them was shaken awake.

How many times had they gathered around table with Jesus and shared bread with him? How many times had Jesus hosted a meal with them, inviting the hungry and the lost to be nourished, to recover who they are while sitting around table? This happens over and over again. Countless times. It was around table that their eyes were opened. When bread is shared, all heaven breaks loose.

They recognize Jesus right then. In table fellowship. This should remind us of Communion, of course, but I don’t think that’s the only thing that Luke intends here. After all, it was the two disciples who invited Jesus to stay and eat with them. Jesus was their guest. With hearts burning inside of them, they couldn’t yet let go of this mysterious traveler. They wanted more time with Him. Having been invited to their table, though, Jesus quickly becomes their Heavenly Host, taking bread and breaking it in front of them. It was then, in that moment when Jesus took bread and broke it, that their burning hearts were broken open and they could see!

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Friends, Easter is still unfolding right in front of us. There is no end to God’s story. Salvation is still working itself out right in front us, with every step we take along the Way. Emmaus is nowhere in particular. Emmaus is everywhere. Emmaus always happens. Easter is always unfolding in front of us. In all of our journeys, do we have eyes to see Jesus with us?

All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful!

Alleluia! Amen.

Birthmarks

A sermon based on 1 Peter 1:3-10 and John 20:19-29 preached on April 23rd, 2017

Sermon audio

It’s Easter evening. The disciples are huddled together in a room too small for them. They’re sweating because the air is stagnant. They’re fearful for lack of courage or purpose. Three days ago, their courage and purpose had been crucified on a cross just outside Jerusalem. His name was Jesus.

Yes, there were rumors about. Earlier that morning, the two Marys had run back to the locked room they were huddled in. Out of breath from running, but also from whatever it is that happens to us when fear mixes with joy, they told the disciples that Jesus was alive. Walking, talking, breathing. Having conversations with them. But, for those first disciples, rumors and stories, conjecture and hearsay were good for nothing. How can anyone believe that Jesus is alive without first having seen Him? That’s the deep Easter question we have, isn’t it, friends?

Sometimes faith is easy. There are moments, perhaps many of them, when believing in that which we have not seen with our own two eyes comes effortlessly. But there are also moments when our faith lacks the strength to carry us very far—out of our own locked rooms.

There they were—Jesus’ disciples, who knows how many of them—certainly more than 11—hiding behind locked doors, whispering to each other out of fear of being discovered, certain that if they made too much noise or emerged out of the cubbyhole of a room they were in, they’d end up on a cross just like their Master had.

It’s a wonder that the Jesus movement was birthed at all. For their faith to take on life, those first disciples had to emerge from the grave of that small, locked room. In a sense, they had already buried themselves inside those 4 walls. They had barred the door shut—it was locked from the inside—that door was like a tombstone they had rolled in front of their own grave. All indications would lead us to think that they were calling it quits.

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Whenever we read this passage in worship or in Sunday School class, or a bible study, the word doubt inevitably becomes a part of our conversation.

But there’s something much more sinister at play here. Doubt we can handle. We can live with doubt. In fact, it’s hard for us not to. But hope. Hope is something that none of us can survive without. If all we see wherever we look are walls, barriers, locked doors that keep us in, that hold us prisoner—especially when those doors are locked from the inside—then we’ve given up hope. And what else is there if we do not have hope?

Whenever fear takes up more space in our lives than hope, death wins. Life grows smaller. The walls around us get thicker, they move in closer. And there we are, cramped with fear. As good as dead. We all know what it’s like to be stuck in place; it feels like dying—or at least a sort of smaller death.

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It is right in the middle of this cramped space, this room filled with fear and death and hopelessness, that we hear a voice we recognize:

Peace be with you!

Jesus says. Heads turn. Mouths fall open. The women were right! Jesus is standing among them. He speaks real words from His real mouth. Looking at the disciples through His real eyes. There He is standing among them in the middle of that cubbyhole of a room. And whether it actually happened or it just felt like it, the walls of that room retreated. The space inside grew bigger, fuller. And suddenly, the disciples could breathe again. In that tiny space, life quickly replaced death.

Peace be with you!

And after saying those words, Jesus breathed on them, inflating their lungs again, reviving their hopelessness, giving new energy—God-energy to their bodies worn down and failing, bringing new birth to their dying spirits. In that moment, everything seemed to expand. Walls. Eyes. Lungs.

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Let’s dive a little deeper.

Did you ever notice how many times Jesus’ hands and side are mentioned in this passage? Three. Three times in 11 short verses. This should get our attention.

The first and last time, it’s Jesus who brings up these scars of His. The second time Jesus’ scars are mentioned, it’s Thomas who brushes aside the witness of his fellow disciples. They have told him that they had seen the Lord, and in his stubbornness, the first thing that Thomas brings up is that he needs to see those scars—the nail marks in Jesus’ hands, the lash marks in his side. That’s a curious thing! Have we ever thought about that? What’s so important about Jesus’ marks—these scars He had—that they’re the first thing Thomas says he needs to see, the first thing Jesus shows to His disciples, and the first thing that Jesus shows to Thomas a week later?

There seems to be no question about it: Jesus’ disciples were waiting to see the marks. It’s the most important detail of Jesus’ identity now—that His body now has scars. If we ever had the notion that the body of the resurrected Jesus would be blemish-free—glowing in radiance, white with light, healed by God, then we are assuming too much. In fact, we’d be assuming the opposite of what those first disciples assumed. The resurrected Jesus—the One high and lifted up—the One who is with us now in the power of the Holy Spirit—is perfect, but even in His perfection, He has scars. And these scars aren’t just something left over from His life on earth; these marks He has make Him our Lord and our God.

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Our bodies bear witness to the brutalities of this all-too-human life of ours. They’re marked up all over. Our skin tells our stories for us. Our bodies are our best diaries. Written upon them is every bit of our past. Over the landscape of our own bodies we encounter the countless moments of our lives. Our bodies are living signposts marking where we have been and what we have accomplished. They remember where we have stumbled, but they insist on getting back up onto our feet to try again—which in a way is its own tiny resurrection, or if that’s too much, it’s at least resilience, our hope becoming stronger than our fear. Our bodies are living testaments to the God-filled conviction that says: no matter what this world throws at us, we have within us completely resilient spirits. Our marks—physical, spiritual, emotional—do not make us less than human; they are the very things that show forth God’s power to bring us to new birth.

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Friends, we belong to a Wounded Healer. Jesus’ scars—the ones in His hands and sides—are not incidental. They are the story He has to tell. They are God’s story.

Jesus isn’t our Lord without those wounds. What He endured for us on the cross shall not be erased. We do not forget his crucifixion, because without Good Friday, there is no Easter. Without the marks, we would not be here. Without the holes in His hands and sides, we would not be whole. The Church was birthed by those marks on Jesus’ resurrected body. And without them, the Church would have died before it ever came to life.

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Do you know what this means, friends? It means that our faith is birthed from Jesus’ marks. So, the only way to be Church—to live our lives authentically and in witness to the crucified and resurrected Christ—is to bear our marks. To go out from this place, and into all our places, and show the wounds in our hands and sides. By so doing, we show others that Jesus’ church is far from being a group of people who celebrate their own perfection or holiness. Instead, we are people who are willing to roll up our sleeves and show others the side of ourselves that’s filled with wounds—wounds of body, heart, spirit, and soul. They will know we are Christians by our marks. Our marks make us fully alive! God-alive, Jesus-alive, Easter-alive!

And if we do that—if we are willing to be as vulnerable as Jesus was when He entered into that room appearing to his people, wounds and all, then we will bring light to darkened hearts, hope to fear-filled souls, life to people living their lives half-dead, and maybe, hopefully, lead them to recognize Jesus in much the same way that Thomas did that evening.

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Thomas’ eyes were opened when he saw Jesus. And from his mouth came the most profound statement of faith that we have in any of the gospels:

My Lord and my God!

he said.

The Church was given birth that night with those words from Thomas. It is with that declaration of faith along with the breath that Jesus breathed into those disciples—both, bringing them to life—that the Church still has its life.

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Friends, we still have limited vision and blinding doubts. We’re often crippled by the same kind of fear that those first disciples had, and that fear causes us to do the same thing it did to them: to keep all held up inside, to keep our faith hidden by these four walls, to hesitate to take the Good News of Jesus-alive out with us—to share it and wear it. To live our days, hours, minutes in witness to our resurrected Lord. It is into our anxiety—that thing that tells us over and over again that our faith is a private thing—that Jesus speaks those same words He did to those first disciples:

Peace be with you.

Jesus says it over and over again. Three times in this passage, and many more times to us. And he’ll continue speaking peace to us until we finally understand what He’s trying to tell us. Christ’s peace is a whole lot more than something that calms our fears. This is Shalom. This is a peace that empowers us and drags us into maturity, wholeness, completeness. Jesus breathes this peace into us. With His breath, Jesus gives us life—He births the Church in the same way God brought creation to life when His Spirit swept over the waters and stirred the cosmos to life.

With this Shalom, we catch our breath and are made into new beings. This is the breath that marks us for second birth. And once we catch Jesus’ breath, once we’re birthed by the Holy Spirit—given our vitality and our mission—we go out from this place and bear witness to our Lord by bearing His marks in all we say, and in all we do.

All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful!

Alleluia! Amen.

Cross-Alive, God-Alive

A Holy Monday meditation on John 3:1-21 preached on April 10th, 2017

The holy city of Jerusalem came alive for a week. It was Passover. And even though the Palm Sunday parade was over, the festival was just getting started. They say that Jerusalem grew by 150,000 people at Passover. It was a city whose walls bulged at the seams. Inside those walls, people packed in shoulder to shoulder. Imagine Disney World, but with a Temple at the center instead of a castle. The place was teeming, loud, chaotic.

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The Jerusalem Temple stood tall and mighty in those days. It was a huge structure, Herod’s Temple was the central symbol in a city full of God-symbols. And that week, somewhere in that Temple complex was a Pharisee—a very important man—whose name was Nicodemus.

Most of our gospels make no mention of the Nicodemus. He’s nowhere to be found. But he is mentioned three times in John’s gospel. Here in his most well-known place in John chapter 3, but he surfaces again in chapter 7, and then one more time near the very end of John’s gospel, in chapter 19.This is interesting. Captivating, really. John, the one who wrote the fourth gospel, must have thought so, too.

Three mentions of this man, Nicodemus—once at the beginning, then in the middle, and another at end of his gospel. We should be curious. Could it be that Nicodemus—this Pharisee—is doing something quite like what we’re doing here at the beginning of Holy Week? Is Nicodemus chasing his way to Jesus?

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In our passage for today, we have an account of Nicodemus’ first—and most likely, only—conversation with Jesus. And it doesn’t go well. For the whole conversation, from verse 1 all the way to 21, Jesus and Nicodemus seem to talk past each other.

Nicodemus comes to Jesus under the cover of darkness, curious about who He is, but scared to death He’ll get caught being curious about Him.So he slinks to Jesus. He tip-toes up to Him at night. And for the whole conversation, Jesus talks way over Nicodemus’ head. Being a Pharisee, Nicodemus lives a life built out of rules, facts, head-knowledge. It’s a very cerebral existence. Nicodemus makes a living inside of moral and religious law. So, when Jesus starts in with a metaphor—this talk about being born again—poor Nicodemus gets lost real fast. He has no clue what Jesus is saying. Nicodemus slinks back into the cover of darkness, completely confused by his cryptic conversation with Jesus. Whatever questions he had of Jesus were never answered. His curiosity was left unsatisfied. If we were to guess, we might say, “Well, that’s the last we’ll hear of that guy!” Who would ever come back for more after such a frustrating conversation?! But Nicodemus keeps popping up.

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The next time he’s mentioned, is at the end of chapter 7. Just a brief cameo.

The Pharisees send temple guards to go arrest Jesus and bring Him in for questioning. The temple guards don’t do their job. They supposed to take Jesus captive, but instead they get captivated by Jesus’ teaching, and they find no reason to carry through with their orders. They come back without Jesus in hand-cuffs and get chewed out for their insolence. It was right then that Nicodemus speaks up and says,

Does our law condemn a man without first hearing him to find out what he has been doing?

Very interesting. In some round-about way, Nicodemus seems to be sticking up for Jesus.

Makes you wonder what sort of spiritual journey he’s been on between John 3 and John 7. This sounds like a man whose heart is changing. Do we sense a glimmer of discipleship, a hint of faith in this question he asks? Is Nicodemus slowly but surely coming out of the dark? Were Jesus’ former words about being born again starting to make some sense to Him? All that talk about being born again—Nicodemus thought then that Jesus was talking biology, but could it be that those words have been working on Nicodemus, coaxing him to grow, to come to life, to be born just like Jesus said?

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The third and final time Nicodemus is mentioned, He’s standing next to his friend, Joseph of Arimathea, at the base of the cross—Jesus still hanging from it, his dead body limp. Nicodemus is holding 75 pounds of myrrh and aloes and spices in his arms. The two men take Jesus’ body down from his cross, they embalm it, they wrap it in strips of linen, and then they bury Jesus in a garden tomb.

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Here in John chapter 3, Jesus wasn’t trying to confound Nicodemus’ mind; He was trying to jumpstart his heart.

We see no immediate signs of it here, but it happened. Gradually. Slowly but surely, Nicodemus woke up to God alive. He woke up from the darkness of that covered his tracks back and forth to Jesus that first night. He woke up slowly but surely from the slumber of his dead, Pharisaical, crusty religion—the one that diluted God down to facts and rules, religious laws and head-knowledge. His heart had been jumpstarted—coaxed alive by Jesus. It took some time, but it happened.

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Friends, could the same be true for us? Can we spend this week—this Holy Week—walking closer and closer to Jesus? Just like Nicodemus can we move from out of the darkness that keeps our life with Jesus a secret we thing we keep to ourselves, and take the same steps Nicodemus took: steps out of the dark and toward the Cross of Christ?

Can we too, walk out into the daylight where everyone can see us as He walks His way toward the cross this week? Can we also tend to Jesus as he hangs there on that tree? Can we, just like Nicodemus, wake up to Jesus this Holy Week—can we become cross-alive? God-alive?

All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful!

Alleluia! Amen.

A Christian’s Way

A sermon based on Deuteronomy 30:15-20 and Matthew 7:13-20 preached March 26th, 2017

Sermon audio

I learned a new word yesterday: Funambulist.

A man named Jean-Francios Gravelet, born in 1825, was perhaps the greatest of them: he was a tight-rope walker. His most spectacular feat was walking a three-inch thick tightrope across a 1,000-foot chasm over Niagara Falls.

Newspapers from all across the country followed him to the Falls that day—most of them speculating how bad his inevitable plunge into the raging water would be. It was a vertical drop of 165 feet. Right before he began his 1,000-foot dare-devil walk, he offered to carry a volunteer over on his back. Surprisingly, no one took him up on it.

He made it across. The walk took him a little over 17 minutes. He stopped to rest at one point. He also decided it would be fun to stand on one leg for a bit, which drew cheers from the gathered crowd. It was almost as if he was playing around out there. Loving every minute of it. Like what he was doing wasn’t a matter of life and death, but more like child’s play. As he was planning his walk, he said once that he considered it an easy task. By all accounts, he made it look easy, too.

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As we make our way through Matthew chapter 7, the final chapter of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, let’s not forget where we started.

That first step we took, those first words we heard from Jesus. The Beatitudes, that series of blesseds, spell out a decisively new way of walking. The rest of the Sermon on the Mount is a fleshing out of the bones that are the Beatitudes. Since we’re weeks and weeks along now, with only the closing words left to go, it would be very easy for us to divorce these words about wide and narrow gates, false prophets, and good and bad fruit from good and bad trees, from the very first words of the Sermon, the ones about meekness, hungering and thirsting for righteousness, and how we should be glad when the rest of the world persecutes and insults us for not living in the world’s ways.

We started our sermon series on the Sermon on the Mount on a fifth Sunday. We were gathered in the Chapel that morning, and we went from one Beatitude to the next. And when we got to that last one: Blessed are you who are insulted and persecuted, I said that this last beatitude doesn’t really apply to us because we don’t suffer persecution for our faith. But, I think I might want to change my mind. Or at least respond to it in a more nuanced way.

It’s easy being Christian in America. The word not only doesn’t get any of us in trouble. It actually makes our way easier. We trust a Christian. All a politician needs to do is call them self a Christian, and all the sudden we stop asking hard questions about what they believe and how and why it matters to them. Being a Christian is easy. But following Jesus—that another matter entirely.

We live in a time when being a Christian and following Jesus are two different things. Anybody can call themselves whatever they want, but like Jesus declares in another translation of this passage, even wolves can dress themselves up in sheep costumes. You can dress yourself up as a healthy tree, but it’s the quality of the fruit you bear that will give you away. Calling ourselves Christians—that’s easy. Following Jesus is hard.

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Some people talk about a flash moment in their lives when all the sudden they were saved. A moment when time split into two—before Christ and after Christ. There’s nothing particularly wrong with a conversion like this. I have a story that goes a bit like that. Maybe you do, too. But if these words from Jesus have anything to do with it, a moment is not what matters. There may or may not be a moment in your life when you became Christian, but these words from the latter part of the Sermon on the Mount put much more emphasis on what happens after that. How we follow is much more important to Jesus than anything we call ourselves.

Following Jesus isn’t a one-time choice. It isn’t an event. It’s a movement along a path. It’s a step forward, and then another, and then a million more after that. And each step is a choice—a choice about how we will walk through this world, this life, this hour, this minute. It’s a call to look at the right things while we take this journey. A choice about what we will carry in our hearts, in our minds, in our mouths along the way. The words we use, we direction we move. And at the heart of this journey, this constant following after Jesus, step by step, is holy discernment. This is what separates followers of Jesus from those who merely call themselves Christians and leave it at that.

Being Christian takes a decal for the back of your car. Following Jesus takes discernment. The way of discipleship—the Jesus Way—is narrow. It’s a 1,000 foot walk across a tightrope. Every step a measured one, a prayer-filled one. According to Jesus, the Way isn’t safe. It’ll be treacherous, and hard, and confounding. You might lose your balance and fall down and have to get back up again, but maybe falling is exactly how you know you’re on it—because walking this Way is not easy.

If Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, as He calls Himself in another part of scripture, and if the Way is narrow, then it cannot be up to us to walk it. If we choose to give ourselves to the Way—a way of speaking and thinking, imagining and praying—we cannot follow Jesus any which way we like. There are many ways to walk these days. Lots of paths to give ourselves to. Is the route we take, the way we talk, the way we treat each other—the way we do everything—is it congruent with the Way of Jesus?

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Deuteronomy is one of the greatest books of the bible. All thirty chapters of it is Moses, Israel’s leader, preaching his last sermon to his people.

Moses brought them out from the way of slavery in Egypt and then through the desert, and now to the Promised Land. Their way had been difficult. At many moments, the Israelites—thirsty, hungry, and tired—wanted to give up, go back to Egypt, willingly give themselves back to the way of slavery. If it hadn’t been for Moses, they might have done so. Deuteronomy is Moses’s last moments with his people. His time has come to an end. He will ascend a mountain, look out at the vista of the Land God has promised, and die. But before that, Moses reiterates the Way. He says to the Israelites,

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. Choose.

Choose not once, but over and over again. If your hearts turn away, if you leave the narrow Way, destruction is certain. So, pick your way carefully.

The wide way, according to Moses, is a way filled with death and curses, but it’s more enticing, and it’s certainly easier to walk. But don’t do it. You might not get lost, but you’ll certainly lose yourselves in it. Instead, hold fast to God. Love the Lord your God. Listen to His voice. Hold on for dear life to the narrow way. Prayerfully discern each and every step forward.

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Friends, we can find salvation anywhere. It’s offered to us a million times a day in a million different ways. One thousand new religions bloom every day. But all of them are a part of the wide way—the way leading to destruction. If we give ourselves to those ways, those voices, we will quickly get lost, but the dangerous thing is we’ll never know we’re lost. We might even think we’re found. That we’ve figured out salvation. But really, we’ll be far from it.

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So, how do we know where we are? Which way is the right way—the narrow way—and how do we find it? For that, we should turn to 1 John chapter 4.

Dear friends, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, because many false prophets have gone out into the world.

This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, but every spirit that does not acknowledge Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you have heard is coming, and even now is already in the world.

The author of 1 John goes on to say that most people speak from the viewpoint of the world, and the world listens to them, and they listen to the world. This is the wide way.

Test each and every spirit, discern everything you hear, everything you say, everything others say and do—compare it to the Way of Jesus. Hold it up to the Way of Jesus, and if it doesn’t fit, if it isn’t cross-shaped, reject it. Run far away from it. Do not give yourselves to it. Not only will it be a waste of your time; it will also lie to you, unravel you, bully you into conforming to its ways. And its ways may be far different than the Way of Jesus.

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The way of Jesus has certain qualities to it. We need to know those qualities in order to discern our way—to test the spirits.

The litmus test to it all is the Cross. The cross is the way of Jesus We are to walk the way of the cross. This is the Way of death that leads to real life. Death to self leads to life in Christ. It’s completely counter-cultural and lop-sided, but the Way of Jesus is the way of servanthood and humility, that will lead us to true freedom. Freedom in Christ.

Try convincing your next-door neighbor of that one!

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The truth is we will constantly mistake the wide way for the narrow way—life on our terms is much easier than life on God’s terms.

But for every one of our missteps on this high wire act of walking the Way, may God’s grace be there like a net below us to catch us, make the landing a soft one, and set us back on the Jesus Way.

All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful!

Alleluia! Amen.

A Christian’s Authenticity

A sermon based on Amos 5:21-27 and Matthew 6:1-6, 16-18 preached February 26th, 2017

Who are you being for Lent? That’s not the usual question we ask each other in these days just before Ash Wednesday, is it? That’s the kind of question we ask in the weeks leading up to Halloween.

Who are you going as?, we might put it. What costume are you wearing? Who will you turn into? What mask will you wear? Those are Halloween questions.

When I was in seminary, the student counsel threw a costume party in the student commons. There were other meetings going on in the building that evening, and our Dean of Students, Edna Baines, walked in wearing her pants suit and her name tag. One of the party-goers walked up to Edna, pointed to her name tag that said Edna Baines on it, and said,

Wow, you look just like her!

Who are you being for Lent? I think that’s the right question after all. Our habit is to do something during Lent. That’s what we’ve been told, anyway.

So, we ask each other: What we you doing for Lent? Or even more specifically, What are you giving up for Lent? But I think the Lenten invitation is much bigger than giving something up or taking something on. As we make our way into this first week of Lent, with Ash Wednesday in just a few days, I think this passage from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount has something to speak into us. Something specific to tell us about the message at the heart of Lent. The invitation of Lent isn’t at all about doing or not doing. It’s about being. For now, let that question tumble around in the back of your mind: Who are you being for Lent?

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Hypocrites, back in Jesus’ day, were play actors—performers on stage. The word had a different meaning than it does today. In any given play, there were more parts than there were actors, so at the end of a scene, the actors rushed backstage, threw off one mask and put on another, then walked back on stage as different character.

Jesus’ first lesson for His disciples in this part of the Sermon on the Mount is, when you give to the needy, when you do something for someone else, don’t make a stage play out of it. Don’t cause a scene! Keep a low profile. Don’t be so dramatic about it!

Back then, though, that wasn’t the norm. In that day, if you gave a quarter to a leper, they might throw a parade in your honor. Buy a few bricks for a new building, and they might name the whole thing after you.

Jesus stomps on the customs of His day and ours when He asks us to turn the pride parade down a notch whenever we give from our wallets or from our hearts. Practice a bit of humility. See that your giving goes unnoticed. God cheers whenever we do these sorts of things, and that’s all the attention and reward we should need.

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The same should be true about prayer, Jesus says. Back then, people were cheered on for making a great show out of their prayers, if we can imagine that. The louder you prayed, and the more you contorted your face while you did it, the better. It was prayer for show! Street theatre each and every time. People cheered. I have a hard time imagining all that, but then again, I’ve flipped channels on a Sunday morning and found TV preachers doing something similar.

Jesus says prayer for show isn’t really prayer at all. It’s dead before it even hits your lips. Prayer like that never gets off the ground. As the Prophet Amos declared in our first passage for the morning, God doesn’t want to hear it. The problem with it, of course, is that none of it was authentic. Whether one gave a quarter to a blind man or said a prayer at the top of their voice out on the sidewalk, it’s not the action that makes it right or wrong, authentic or counterfeit. It’s the motive behind it. Want to give a few quarters to a poor man? That’s great, but make sure they don’t clink when they hit the bottom of the jar.

Prayer isn’t a soliloquy made for the stage, but a dialogue made for the dressing room. That’s what Jesus thinks. It’s not the action that can go wrong, it’s the disordered reason behind why we do it that usually makes a mess of things. Motive matters. It’s the over-inflated chest that needs bursting. It’s the overly-proud thoughts that sometimes come with these good deeds that need to be chased away.

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I have a friend who told me the story about what happens to one of her co-workers every Ash Wednesday. She says that every other day of the year, her co-worker stays in his office and keeps to himself, but he’s a completely different person on Ash Wednesdays. Those mornings, he goes to his Catholic church before coming to work to have ashes imposed on his forehead, and he spends the rest of the day going around from one office to the next, sticking his head into each door, making sure everybody takes note of the black smudge on his face. My friend says he’s only annoying on those days. I have a sneaking suspicion that this co-worker of hers completely misses the point of Ash Wednesday. It’s this sort of look-at-me-ism, this “take note of my super abundance of piety,” this “check out how modest I am,” that gets in our way of being in real, authentic, relationship with God. God can spot insincere faith and disordered motives from lightyears away.

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If these stage-almsgivers and performance-prayers from Jesus’ day and ours are the height of hypocrisy, then who might we look to as a model of its opposite, authenticity or genuineness? My thoughts go first to John the Baptist. John the Baptist’s whole life can be seen as a prelude to Jesus’ life. His entire existence and vocation was nothing more than an opening act for Jesus. John was no stage actor, he was a roadie for Jesus. He pointed the way. John was a street sign, a direction-giver, a lamppost to light the way to Jesus. And when Jesus came on the scene, John took his curtain call. He bowed out.

After me,

John declared,

comes the One more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.

In turn, Jesus spent His entire ministry as a street sign, pointing past Himself to God. Jesus was the light of the world who revealed God, the Way itself who gave way to God. And in the end, and all along, it was the cross Jesus was hung upon that pointed the way to the power of God.

All this should tell us that the first sign of authentic Christian living is humility. Pastor Max Lucado said as much.

True humility is not thinking lowly of yourself, but thinking accurately of yourself.

When we’re full of ourselves, there’s no space left for God to fill. But when we empty ourselves, God has a vessel He can use.

Living a life of Christian authenticity means forever and always pointing beyond ourselves and toward Jesus. There’s the desire to be noticed, and then there’s the desire to be known. Our desire to be known by God and to have others know God should be much bigger than our desire to be noticed. Every day and always, we must let go of ourselves more and more, so that Christ might be displayed in us more and more. This is what it is to live an authentic Christian life.

At the heart of this passage is the question of motivation. Those religious people who, in Jesus’ day and ours too, make a show of their piety—who love to point out to others how faithful they are—who pray for applause, aren’t so much interested in the holiness of God, as they are in their own holiness.

The truth of the matter is that our actions can be both hidden and revealing. We can live our faith out loud without making a show of it. We can live and speak in such a way that we reveal to others—family, friends, neighbors, strangers, and enemies alike—the God who wants to be Lord of our live and theirs. We can give voice to our faith, speak to others about, and live it out in public without making a spectacle of it all. As long as all the glory points away from ourselves and toward Christ. Our faith is authentic when we’re willing to get out of the way and point the way to Jesus.

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Wednesday marks the first day of Lent. And we start by marking ourselves with ash. If it’s understood rightly, that smudge of ash placed upon our foreheads will make us disappear.

Lent is a 40-day disappearing act. A 40-day pointing away from ourselves and toward God. But it’s really no act at all. Throughout these 40 days, we are invited to tell the truth about ourselves: that we are a people called toward a cross. Called away from ourselves and toward a more Christ-like life. And in the Christ-like life, the cross is central. All of Lent is a journey of body, mind, heart, and soul toward the cross. That’s the way of Jesus. Crossward.

This Lent, you and I are invited to live into the Christward and Crossward life. To trade our motivation that so often points toward ourselves for one that points toward Jesus. To undergo a motivation transplant.

Part of what those performance-pray-ers from our passage got wrong was that they were so much more concerned about how their words sounded than with what their words meant. Can we relate to that? If we’re asked to pray aloud in front of others, doesn’t that become our first concern—let’s try to make it impressive-sounding. What should be our true motive for prayer? Should it be to make them sound good? Or is it to stay in conversation, and share space, with the God who made us? Prayer that’s a part of authentic Christian living is always truthful, stuttering, down and dirty conversation with God, never slick performance art. The same goes for how we give. It’s never for show, but always for God.

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So, who are you being for Lent? I’m not interested in what you plan to do for Lent. I’m interested in who you want to be for Lent. How about being authentic for Lent? How about living in such a way that every single one of our words, our actions, our relationships is a way that points not to self but to Jesus. Crossward.

How about living in such a way that when people see us, they recognize Jesus and say to themselves,

Wow! You look just like Him!

All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful!

Alleluia! Amen

A Christian’s Love

A sermon based on Leviticus 19:1-2, 9-18 and Matthew 5:38-48 preached on February 19th, 2017

Sermon audio

For the last several weeks, we’ve been feeling our way through Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, this world-defying, upside-down, backward-seeming collection of Divine wisdom that, on the surface, sounds a whole lot like foolishness. But that’s exactly why we’re spending so much time in it: because it is only with careful and deep attention to each word of it—every Divine notion in it—that our hearts can be reshaped into this new likeness, that our very lives, and every aspect of them, stand a chance of being recast into God-shaped form.

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Nowhere in the entire Sermon on the Mount is the challenge greater than in this passage.

If we think Jesus asked too much of us last week when he recast the meanings of murder, divorce, adultery, and oath-making, then what He has to say here should seem to us nothing less than superhuman.

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Pastor Jason Byassee pressed the voicemail button on his phone as he was stumbling into his kitchen with armfuls of groceries after a long day at work. His daughter, Erin, then 10-years old, had left a message:

Dad, I’m the liturgist at church Sunday, and I have the passage where Jesus says, ‘Turn the other cheek.’ You know that passage, right? …Do the other gospels have that same passage? Is it different in the other gospels? Could you let me know, because… well, no offense, Dad, but I think Jesus is wrong.

Erin’s objection to this passage is quite like our own, isn’t it? We go through all sorts of efforts to finagle our way out of what we know it says. The mental gymnastics we do to excuse ourselves from practicing the way of love described in these words would earn all of us a gold medal at the Theological Olympics.

I don’t disagree with 10-year-old Erin. This business about turning the other cheek, giving away the clothes off our back, and walking the extra mile sound like the worst advice ever, and if that wasn’t enough, then comes the part in the middle where Jesus asks us to love our enemies, and the part at the end where Jesus encourages us to become perfect, both of which sound reckless and stupid. Who can actually love their enemies? No one does that. And who can be perfect? No one stands a chance. Besides, if we did any of these things, wouldn’t we be doormats? Is this what Jesus is getting at? Are we supposed to be doormats for Jesus? We live in a cruel world. Is Jesus saying that we’re supposed to stand there and take it?

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A thousand or so years before the time of Jesus, the law on the books was referred to as exact retribution. This was the Old Testament law that clearly stated that what was perpetrated on others would be the punishment right back at the perpetrator. You poke somebody’s eye out? Your eye is coming out, too! Tooth for a tooth. Life for a life. Exact retribution. A few hundred years later, the Israelites did away with the exact part of retribution, and established a system of penalties and payments for damages inflicted upon others. Here, in this part of His Sermon on the Mount, Jesus speaks against both methods or retribution. Forego retribution altogether, Jesus declares. Renounce your right to retaliate. Do not ask that revenge be exacted upon your opponent. Don’t fight fire with fire. Entire civilizations are burned to the ground that way. Instead, fight fire with water.

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The march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge from Selma to the state capitol of Montgomery, Alabama was the turning point of the black Civil Rights Movement. On March 7^th, 1965, a day now referred to a Bloody Sunday, state troopers attacked an estimated 500-600 unarmed marchers with billy clubs and tear gas after they passed over into Dallas County.

Televised images of the brutal attack on unarmed citizens presented American and international audiences with what was, for most of them, the first images of such brutal violence. The TV audience that day was in the millions, each one of them safe in the sanctuary of their own living rooms. They saw the protestors throw no punches—not even for their own protection. Gunfire was not returned for gunfire. Brutality was not inflicted by the Civil Rights marchers, but inflicted on them. And an entire world sat staring at those images, horrified. It seemed like the heart of an entire nation was changed that day. Eight days later, on the evening of March 15^th, 1965, President Lyndon Johnson held a historic, nationally televised joint session of Congress to introduce his Civil Rights bill, and ask that it be passed into law. The violence, as we know, did not end that day. But due to the marchers’ commitment to non-violent action, an entire nation woke up to injustice.

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Some say that non-violent action, the kind that Jesus speaks of in this part of the Sermon on the Mount is some sort of strategy. Some kind of peaceful weapon wielded against an opponent. It is not. It isn’t the point of non-violent action to humiliate, or degrade a violent adversary. Love is not a weapon. It does not have ulterior motives. Refusing to hit a person who has hit you may show heroic restraint, but that heroic restraint isn’t a method. Love is not a strategy; it’s straightforward, it’s a way of life, a choice we’re asked to make over and over again. We cannot and do not hurt the ones we love, it’s impossible.

So, when Jesus asks us to love those who oppose us, He’s not talking about implementing a strategy, or practicing a non-violent defiance. He’s actually telling us to act and react with love. And love does no harm, even to an enemy. Love is a power far greater than any other. And love’s commitment to compassion speaks far louder than any form of retaliation. Responding with love is a wordless way of saying to our opponents,

I do not fear you, therefore I refuse to engage you in your violence.

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Fear is the real opposite of love, by the way. So often we think love’s opposite is hate. It is not. We will not understand what Jesus means by love if we think of it as the opposite of hate. Pastor William Sloan Coffin, ordained as a Presbyterian minister but serving the United Church of Christ, had this to say:

Fear destroys intimacy. It distances us from each other; or makes us cling to each other, which is the death of freedom. Fear has so many ways to destroy life. Love alone can hold onto and recreate life…Love, and you are a success whether or not the world thinks so. The highest purpose of Christianity—which is primarily a way of life, not a system of belief—is to love one another.

And then he quotes the first letter of John chapter 4, verse 18:

There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.

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Pastor Kerry Bart down the way at First United Methodist Church had a sign last week that read:

Love your enemies. It will confuse them.

Exactly. Love diffuses our enemies. It sends our opponents away stewing in their own frustration. Spinning in their own webs of irritation and annoyance. But in all that stewing and spinning, we hope our love might wake them up to a better way. There’s nothing more defiant than a commitment to the way of love. But, at the same time, we don’t love in order to confuse, frustrate, irritate, or annoy.

The love that Jesus is talking about isn’t the passive aggressive sort where we put a smile on our face that’s only there to hide a belligerent and stubborn underside. This isn’t an “I-told-you-so” sort of showy love. The love that Jesus is talking about is authentic, straightforward, and complete. It has no ulterior motives. We love for the sake of love itself. Because, when it comes down to it, that’s the only kind of love there is. And this love is not easy. It’s never a feeling. It’s not passive. It never comes easy. It’s not a natural notion. This kind of love is of the unnatural sort. It takes effort and discipline, practice and determination, every bit of our energy and every bit of our courage. And finally, this sort of love is culture-defying. It makes no sense to the world. You will not find it out and about. It’s not a part of our everyday cultural vernacular. That’s because our culture doesn’t understand why anyone would dedicate them self to a way of being and doing that ultimately costs or compromises, inconveniences, or willingly puts their self in 2^nd place.

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When Jesus was praying in the Garden of Gethsemane, His disciple Judas Iscariot was leading a band of Roman soldiers to arrest Him. That night, Jesus was insulted in every single way imaginable. Betrayed by His own, beaten, mocked, stripped, and later hung out to dry. But all the way, He loved. There was not one moment when Jesus lost His self-control. He held His peace even though He was treated so violently. Throughout, He maintained His dignity, displaying at every turn a total refusal to retaliate, to trade blow for blow, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, insult for insult.

Friends, love, this Divine love that Jesus challenges us to undertake, it has a surprising dignity to it. It defies human nature. It’s a love we have to learn. It does not come naturally. This sort of love takes all of our moral strength.

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This teaching on retaliation-defying love is the peak of Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. Jesus is challenging that part of our human nature that would rather be right, unyielding, proud and headstrong and out of relationship than amicable, merciful, humble, and soft-hearted and in relationship.

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So, the question for you and I, friends, is this: when others look at us—family, friends, neighbors, strangers, and enemies, all—what do they see? Do they see a person scared to death, willing to trade blow for blow, insult for insult, fire for fire; or do they see Jesus inside, a disciple who at all costs and in all circumstances is willing to forego their pride and place to show forth the costly love of Jesus? Will we have the courage to love?

All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful!

Alleluia! Amen.

Who Are You Expecting?

A sermon based on Isaiah 35:1-10 and Matthew 11:2-11 preached on December 11th, 2016

On the cover of our bulletin this morning, there is a collage of many different renderings of Jesus that have come from many different countries and many different times.

You might recognize some of these renderings. There’s a few from 8^th Century Coptic artists, some from the European Renaissance (those are the ones with a pasty-white Jesus). There are some from Africa.

The most recent of renderings comes from the movie Dogma, that’s the one on the top line, second in from the right. The movie refers to that depiction as Buddy Jesus. The rendering on the bottom left corner is a white English Jesus from the movie Jesus of Nazareth. And in the middle row, second in from the right, is an archeologist’s computer rendering of the historical Jesus—what he most likely looked like: dark olive skin, black hair with tight curls, a prominent jaw line and bulbous nose. Certainly, for every one of these depictions of Jesus, we could find thousands more that imagine someone completely different looking. I bet we all could take a guess about where in the world each of these interpretations of Jesus came from—what the artist looked like.

See, whether we’re artists or not, we all like to paint Jesus in our own image. We all have a notion of who He was and is now—and that notion is an amalgamation of many different things: the Jesus our parents prayed to, what we’ve heard in church from one Sunday to the next and one year to the next, those in our lives who have taught us about Jesus and reflected His care through their presence in our lives. The images thrown at us about Jesus by voices in our culture—and it doesn’t much matter whether those images are accurate or completely off the mark, they still stick. Sometimes we’d be much happier with a version of Jesus that was something other than the Christ we encounter in the Gospel.

There’s a statue of Jesus on the cross in South Korea that’s become quite the internet sensation.

He’s got muscles for miles. Twenty-four-pack abs, colossal shoulders. His upper arms are bigger than my waist.

This version of Jesus drank a protein shake at the Last Supper. His face is distorted in a wince—not one that portrays the pain of crucifixion, but one that makes it seem like he’s about to break the cross He’s hung on into splinters by just the sheer force of his strength. Why portray Jesus in such an absurd way? What was this South Korean sculptor thinking? I wonder if that’s the sort of Jesus that gains his attention and adoration: Jesus as Mr. Universe?

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Maybe if we had our way, we’d all worship the Jesus that we want rather than the Jesus we were given. That’s where we find John the Baptist in our passage this morning—at a crisis of faith, really. A cross roads. In this moment, behind the bars of a prison cell, John paces back and forth with anxiety—his mind full of questions. John has been arrested for treason—for preaching a doctrine that threatens the reign and power of both the Jewish and the Roman empires.

John is used to being in trouble. From the very first moment he began baptizing in the Jordan River, he’s been in confrontation with the powerbrokers of his day. This may not even be the first time he’s been thrown in jail. But this time—this imprisonment is different. John has always been a fireball of a prophet. A leader the people flocked to because there was never an ounce of doubt or uncertainty in him. His voice never shook. He always stood tall and confident, and that’s what drew the thousands to his side. But prison does funny things to a man. The silence of a cell haunted John the Baptist. Thoughts arose inside of his head that began to plague him with doubts. The metal of those bars not only held his body, it also held captive his Spirit.

John’s followers came often to visit. They reported to him all that was happening on the outside. They must have brought a few reports about Jesus—what he was up to, what he was saying, doing. And John was concerned. This Jesus was supposed to be the Long-Awaited One—the Messiah who would rise up against the powerful people of the day.

Jesus, if He is indeed the kind of Messiah John expected him to be, was to confront the Empires in place, to raise up a rebellion among His people—the forgotten and dismissed among Him, and topple all of it with the power of God. That’s what everyone expected out of the coming Messiah. A big, broad-shouldered fighter who would gather an army of discontents together. They would depose every Emperor and every King in their wake until the government belonged not to the rich and haughty, but to the commoner. So far, Jesus wasn’t fitting the bill.

John was a wrecking ball of a man; Jesus… well, He just wasn’t. The words Jesus preached were much too soft. His eyes too compassionate. His physical presence not dominating enough. He didn’t intimidate. Left to his own thoughts, John wondered—did he get this wrong? He was so sure Jesus was the One that he gave his entire life to clearing a way for Him. Was it all a waste? A hoax? Is this the way a Savior acts?!

John sends word by his disciples a question for Jesus. And it’s the most anxious and heartbreaking question in all of scripture:

Are you the One who is to come, or should we expect another?

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Friends. this is the question that haunts all of us. John was the first to ask it, but how many thousands or millions throughout history have had the same question, maybe not ever asked aloud, but rattling like a pinball way down in the depths of their hearts and minds.

Are you the One who is to come, or should we expected another? Is this a Messiah I can live with?

And let’s look at how Jesus responds. Verses 4-6:

The blind see, the crippled walk. The lepers are cleansed. The deaf hear. The dead are raised to life. The poor are comforted with Good News.

What kind of answer is that?! Those are all excellent things, Jesus, but what do they have to do with anything! John the Baptist, in the cold and echo of his prison cell, must answer his own question because Jesus refuses to. Jesus, in his trademark clever way, turns John’s question right back at him, forcing him to discern all these things for himself.

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We know the feeling. Advent is a time packed tight with these sorts of questions, these longing, searching, soul-shaking questions. Jesus, who are you really? Why have you come? What did you accomplish, Jesus? Anything? What are you still accomplishing? Isn’t the world just as dark as it’s ever been? Maybe even getting darker by the day?What gives!?

And who am I, Jesus? We ask that, too, don’t we? Just like John the Baptist must have. What am I for? What’s my purpose? All these questions, you see, are tied together. If we don’t know who Jesus is, we don’t know who we are.

Whether he knew it or not, all those times when John the Baptist looked Jesus in the eyes, he was staring into the very face of God his Creator—the One who shaped him and every one of us into our being. Advent is a time of Divine encounter. A time to search our identity, every aspect of our lives, inside and out. To ask these questions and search for these answers.

God, who are you, really? And, who am I? The answer to that second question depends on the answer to the first. We do not look to ourselves to find out who God is. That’s backwards. We don’t get to shape Jesus in our own image! That’s the mistake John the Baptist made. It’s the mistake we all make, and we make it all the time. If we want to do this right, we start with Jesus, and from careful focus on who He is, we find out who we are!

God, who are you, really? And in light of who you are, who am I?

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There was another man thrown behind bars who asked himself such questions. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a Lutheran pastor, theologian and anti-Nazi dissident. Hitler’s dictatorship demanded the public’s unconditional obedience, and it tolerated no criticism or dissent. All organizations and individuals refusing to conform with Nazi ideologies were destroyed. Even Christian churches openly supported Hitler’s regime. But not Bonhoeffer. He took to the radio and spoke against the rise of the Nazi Party. He was arrested and held captive for his public dissent. It was in prison where he, like John the Baptist, was forced to look deeply inside of himself. Ask all those haunting questions the busyness of our lives does a great job of distracting us from.

Bonhoeffer kept a diary while he was imprisoned. He wrote letters to his wife. Prayers and papers and poems. One of his poems, entitled Who Am I? is regarded his best, certainly his most famous. He wrote it late in his imprisonment, knowing he would be executed by the Nazis.

Who am I? They often tell me

I stepped from my cell’s confinement

Calmly, cheerfully, firmly,

Like a Squire from his country house.

Who am I? They often tell me

I used to speak to my warders

Freely and friendly and clearly,

As though it were mine to command.

Who am I? They also tell me

I bore the days of misfortune

Equably, smilingly, proudly,

like one accustomed to win.

Am I then really that which other men tell of?

Or am I only what I myself know of myself?

Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,

Struggling for breath, as though hands were compressing my throat,

Yearning for colors, for flowers, for the voices of birds,

Thirsting for words of kindness, for neighborliness,

Tossing in expectations of great events,

Powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance,

Weary and empty at praying, at thinking, at making,

Faint, and ready to say farewell to it all.

Who am I? This or the Other?

Am I one person today and tomorrow another?

Am I both at once? A hypocrite before others,

And before myself a contemptible woebegone weakling?

Or is something within me still like a beaten army

Fleeing in disorder from victory already achieved?

Who am I? They mock me, these lonely questions of mine.

Whoever I am, Thou knowest, O God, I am thine!

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Bonhoeffer achieved a strange victory, one not easily recognized by the world’s standards. John the Baptist would not escape death either. Jesus did not, either through brute force or the through the power God within Him, reduce the cross to a pile of splinters. In his own strange victory, he died upon it instead. Jesus refuses to be whoever we want him to be. Instead, this Advent, we ready ourselves to be reshaped by Him.

Who are you expecting this Christmas?

All praises to the One who made it all and finds it beautiful!

Alleluia! Amen.