The Power of the Imaginative Story: Matthew (part 5)

In the movie Minority Report, the minds of three young seers are tapped to give future law enforcement authorities the ability to stop crimes before they actually happen. These glimpses into the future allow the police to thwart wrongdoing—especially murder—when the acts are nothing more than possibilities bubbling in the perpetrators’ minds.

Jesus said some startling things about guilt, sin, and righteousness—things that didn’t allow for the disconnecting of the mind from the body, of intentions from actions, of the state of the heart from the committing of the crime. He showed that the apparent outward righteousness of certain religious leaders—specifically the Jewish scribes and Pharisees—was a smokescreen that obscured the hidden realities of their inward realities. He wasn’t shy in his attacks against their hypocrisies and would say things like,

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth.” (Matthew 23:27)

As Jesus sat with his followers on the side of the mountain, he must have shocked them with the contrasts he made concerning what they had learned from their childhoods in home and synagogue against the deeper way of thinking about life that he was laying before them. He challenged them with seven brain-twisting examples drawn from the law of Moses and also from conventional folk wisdom:

Murder

Adultery

Divorce

Oaths

Retaliation

Love for the enemy

Giving of alms

Jesus brilliantly reminds his followers about what they have heard about each of these topics, and then moves behind the veil and reveals the heart that birthed each action. Are people free from the sin because they haven’t committed murder or adultery? No, because the reality of anger and lust in the human heart binds all people together under a shroud of guilt where the seeds of destruction and violation are planted, sometimes sprouting and sometimes not.

Are people safe when they build walls against one another through the legalities of divorce, the craftiness of contractual language, rules allowing for revenge, and the acceptability of hatred? Jesus collapses them all, and draws his listeners into ways of engaging with others in the completeness of love that comes only from God.

It was probably easy for people in Jesus’ day to allow social, religious, political, and military frameworks to provide artificial safety zones in which to live. It’s just as easy for us to do it as well. It’s easier to label other people as sinners when we deny the realities of our own hearts. It’s easier to allow the boundaries and borders of nation-states to define the word “neighbor” than it is to see all people as co-humans made in the image of God. It’s easier to crush others under religious dogma than it is to listen deeply and find where God is already at work in the lives of those who are not like us.

There are many areas of life and thinking where Jesus rightly declares, “You have heard that it was said . . . .”

It’s more important for us to hear, “But I say to you . . . .”

[See Matthew chapter 5 for the details of Jesus’ words to his followers]

The Power of the Imaginative Story: Matthew (part 4)

The ancient laws chronicled in the Old Testament often confound people. It’s not just the Ten Commandments, but also the myriad of dietary/social/economic laws that fill the pages of books like Leviticus and Deuteronomy (not most people’s preferences for devotional reading). The laws seem to us to be mostly irrelevant in our time and provide us with clear evidence of the fruitlessness of legalism when it comes to pleasing God.

Or, could it be that something else is going on here?

Imagine the ancient Hebrew people as they suffered through generations of slavery under the yoke of the Pharaoh in Egypt. After their rescue under Moses’s leadership, they wandered in the wilderness for a long time before landing in a place that would become their homeland. What was going on for them in that long sojourn?

They were being reformed.

The lens through which the people saw the world would be colored by their experiences of captivity in Egypt. Their religious views would be as permeated by Egyptian mythology as much as it was by early Semitic worship practices. How would they move from a people oriented around slavery to a people with a destiny crafted and energized by the God of the universe?

They would be reformed by adherence to laws that would reorient every aspect of their lives. They would be required to think in new ways about human relationships and interactions, the nature of life-giving work, the purpose and effects of communal worship, and care for the world around them. It would take a great deal of reorientation to extract the mentality of slavery from the people and to reorient them around the presence of the God who had rescued them from Egypt.

And Jesus sits on the side of the mountain and tells his disciples, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.”

It appears that, for Jesus, the law and the prophets were not static propositions but rather signs and wonders that continuously directed the people into the living presence of God. Yet the law had become rigid and life-draining in Jesus’ day, framed by the religious elite as measurements of personal righteousness, a righteousness attained by disciplined adherence to the ancient code of Moses.

And Jesus must have startled his followers when, after affirming the authority and purposefulness of the law and the prophets, he warns of a distortion that was evidenced in the Jewish religious leadership of the day:

“For I tell you, unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven.”

And what comes next will shake people’s understanding of righteousness for centuries to come.

Ordinary Time - Jesus and Reorientation

Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues and proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing every disease and every sickness among the people. So his fame spread throughout all Syria, and they brought to him all the sick, those who were afflicted with various diseases and pains, demoniacs, epileptics, and paralytics, and he cured them. And great crowds followed him from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea, and from beyond the Jordan.
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain; and after he sat down, his disciples came to him. Then he began to speak, and taught them . . . (Matthew 4:23-5:2)


For me, the gospeller Matthew is a master storyteller. My imagination opens up when I read Matthew’s account of Jesus, and I see in my mind the story as it comes to life, hopefully in a way that comes sort of close to where the author intended.

In the passage just before the one above, Jesus goes around making new friends and inviting them to journey with him—to follow him. Then, he immediately draws them into the work he has come to do—proclaiming the good news of God’s kingdom and healing the sick, both of which were signs of God’s present and future intentions for the world.

Once he sees crowds of people responding to his work (and why wouldn’t they?), he heads up the side of a mountain and his friends follow him there. At first it seems like a very private meeting, one that is separated from the drama of the crowds below, but then you get to the end of chapter seven and you find out that the people were all astonished at his teachings. Apparently Jesus’ words weren’t limited to just his twelve new friends. Maybe the side of the mountain served as his pulpit as he spoke to the crowds as they gathered below.

The words that Jesus speaks in the text that follows—what we call The Sermon on the Mount—are a message of reorientation. He knows that the people, by and large, come with a preset way of thinking about life, human relationships, God, justice, and so on, but that their mental lenses for looking at reality are flawed, marred by legalism, guilt, shame, misinterpretation, and tribal preferences. So he does quite of bit of “You have heard . . .” contrasted by “But I say to you . . .” stuff in his sermon.

This is kind of like what happened to the ancient Hebrew people when God, through Moses, rescued them from the Pharaoh’s grasp. They had spent generations as slaves in Egypt, and their identity was completely wrapped up in that categorization. When they are given the Law—not just the Ten Commandments, but the entire Levitical code with all of its rules about dietary restrictions, social relationships, worship, and justice—they find a new way to live together that is oriented toward God rather than toward Pharaoh, and it brings life to them.

But by Jesus’ day, that liberating, reorienting Law had become soul-breaking legalism, and he brings a fresh word to the people, revealing God’s intentions as they always had been. This is not a new kind of law that Jesus brings; it is a new and life-giving way to orient one’s life toward God.

I think that we who claim to follow Jesus need to revisit this business of reorientation every so often. I know that I do. It’s easy to get smug and decide that we’ve pretty much got things figured out and then quit thinking too deeply about whether we’re right or not. I think we need to hear Jesus say, “You have heard . . . but I say to you . . .” once in a while so that we remember that our confidence doesn’t come from getting everything right, but rather that it comes from following close to Jesus.

There are a lot of issues right now tearing the Christian church to pieces—like the place of gay people in the life of the church, immigration reform, economic justice, and how we closely we align our faith with our political preferences. Most of us engage in these conversations with perceptions of rightness that come out of our personal histories. We have made past decisions, we’ve studied, we’ve argued, and we’ve heard. We often believe that we’ve got it all right.

But maybe these difficult conversations are an opportunity for us to listen anew to the voice of Jesus say,

“But I say to you . . .”

And we might be astonished.

A Lenten Reflection for March 14, 2013

“No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.” (John 6:44-45)

Likewise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but that very Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. And God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God. (Romans 8:26-27)


It is interesting how we think about the ways that we approach God. We are an independent, free-will kind of people, and we know how to make our choices. So we choose to get up on a Sunday morning and go to church. We choose to take a particular seminary course because it fits our schedule. We choose to come forward to take communion, even though we’re not sure we really need to.

I’ll bet that Moses thought that way when he approached the burning bush. But he didn’t choose to be on holy ground—God summoned him there and then told him to take off his sandals.

I don’t believe in free will anymore. Will, yes. But not free will. My will just isn’t all that free. It’s polluted by all kinds of outside forces that have formed me over time and is influenced even now by voices and events around me. There is no purity of will to be had.

So I don’t think I can approach anything having to do with God as though I am a being with pure, unadulterated will. And perhaps, like Moses, when I think I am choosing in my freedom to engage with God on some level, I am actually responding to his summons. And by the time I realize where I am, he tells me to take off my sandals.

In all our fussing and worrying about choosing what will please us and stressing over things like our devotional life, it might be helpful to stop and consider that we don’t come to anything related to Jesus except that the Father has drawn us. And in our weak lives of prayer, it is the Spirit of God who steps in and intercedes on our behalf, not condemning our weakness, but carrying us through it.

The God of the Bible is not an abstraction. He is engaging, summoning, participative, purposeful. And having been summoned by him to worship, serve, learn, pray, love, and dine, how do we respond? Do we keep our sandals in tact because we choose to do so? Or do we remove them in obedience to the One who has always been calling us to stand at his flame?

Whom have I in heaven but you? And there is nothing on earth that I desire other than you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (Psalm 73:25-26)

A Lenten Reflection for March 13, 2013

“Everything that the Father gives me will come to me, and anyone who comes to me I will never drive away; for I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me.” (John 6:37-38)

There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. For the law of the Spirit of life in Christ Jesus has set you free from the law of sin and of death. For God has done what the law, weakened by the flesh, could not do: by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and to deal with sin, he condemned sin in the flesh . . . (Romans 8:1-3)


Our story of faith seems to move from the singular to the plural, from the particular to the universal. It moves from Abram to his descendants to all the families of the earth; it moves from Moses to the Hebrew slaves to the nation of Israel; it moves from Jesus to his followers to the church and to the world.

Paul tells us that Jesus came deal with sin. John tells us that Jesus came to be the savior of the world (1 John 4:14). The issue of sin moves easily from the particular to the universal and back again. Sin may be about me, but it’s about me in the context of us.

When we read the narratives of the gospels, it is a bit shocking to see how this dealing with sin comes about for Jesus. It comes about by sin having its way with him. The story culminates in sin winning the day, parading Jesus’ perfect, broken body around like a macabre trophy. Sin wins and Jesus suffers and dies.

I suppose that’s part of the reflective lament of the season of Lent. We hover over the passion narrative and watch tragedy unfold. This one sent as savior of the world, whose words and works rolls across the cracked and wounded skin of Israel like a healing salve, is suddenly despised by his own people and brutally, shamefully, executed. Somehow, in that sad drama, Jesus deals with sin.

It isn’t just that Jesus takes my sin and your sin away. It’s that Jesus allows the systemic, violent sin of the world to focus its fury on him on a particular day in a particular point in human history. In that particularity, in and through Jesus, God takes both sin and death into himself. He doesn’t heap sin and death on us; he embraces them willingly in order to rip out their teeth and ultimately destroy them.

We don’t see the turning of the tables until Easter. Yes, sin and death win on Friday. But their power is unraveled on Sunday. Yes, in the world there is still sin and, yes, we will still die. But neither sin nor death gets the last word in the story. God’s word is the last word.

And his word is Jesus.

A Lenten Reflection for March 11, 2013

I will sing of your steadfast love, O Lord, forever; with my mouth I will proclaim your faithfulness to all generations.
I declare that your steadfast love is established forever; your faithfulness is as firm as the heavens.

The heavens are yours, the earth also is yours; the world and all that is in it—you have founded them. (Psalm 89:1-2, 11)


When the people saw the sign that he had done, they began to say, “This is indeed the prophet who is to come into the world.” (John 6:14)


The Bible begins with a story about creation: “In the beginning God created the heavens and earth.” But the first hearers of that story did not listen from a theological vacuum. Before they were the people of Genesis, they were the people of the Exodus.

The ancient Hebrew people were encountered by God (not the other way around) when they were rescued from their slavery in Egypt. God continued his redemptive work by leading them through the wilderness and to a place that would be the land promised to them by God. They first of all experienced God as their redeemer, their rescuer.

And then the opening chapters of Genesis connect some stunning theological dots: The God who rescued the people from slavery is also the God who created all things. This wasn’t the act of a territorial god who just happened to outsmart the Egyptian deities. There were, in fact, no other gods. The God of the Exodus, the I AM of the burning bush, the God whose steadfast love and faithfulness is celebrated by the psalmist, is the one, true God. This same God created the heavens and the earth. The redeemer God and the creator God as one in the same.

The people experienced Jesus in a similar way. Their understanding was not very theological and it clearly wasn’t framed by scientific inquiry. They experienced Jesus as redeemer, as the one who rescued them from demonic oppression, sickness, hunger, marginalization, and even death. Like the people of Moses’ day, the theological dots wouldn’t be connected for quite some time.

I can attempt to know God through theological and scientific inquiry, but I won’t encounter him that way. God, however, is the one who initiates encounter with me, and it comes as he determines. My inquiries just might produce revelations along the way, but they won’t serve as stepping stones up the tall mountain where I just might locate God.

Sometimes people chafe at the particularity of Jesus. Why, as Christians insist, would God reveal himself in that one person at a specific point in history and in a backwater location at the fringe of the Roman Empire? Why not to all people everywhere at the same time?

It seems, however, that particularity is the way that God does his redeeming work. To act universally would be to act outside of history. God works with real people in real human existence to redeem and rescue in real time. And through God’s particular, redeeming work, a universal call comes to the world.

A Lenten Reflection for February 15, 2013

“It was this Moses whom they rejected when they said, ‘Who made you a ruler and a judge?’ and whom God now sent as both ruler and liberator through the angel who appeared to him in the bush. He led them out, having performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and in the wilderness for forty years. This is the Moses who said to the Israelites, ‘God will raise up a prophet for you from your own people as he raised me up.’ He is the one who was in the congregation in the wilderness with the angel who spoke to him at Mount Sinai, and with our ancestors; and he received living oracles to give to us. Our ancestors were unwilling to obey him; instead, they pushed him aside, and in their hearts they turned back to Egypt, saying to Aaron, ‘Make gods for us who will lead the way for us; as for this Moses who led us out from the land of Egypt, we do not know what has happened to him.’ At that time they made a calf, offered a sacrifice to the idol, and reveled in the works of their hands.
But God turned away from them and handed them over to worship the host of heaven, as it is written in the book of the prophets: ‘Did you offer to me slain victims and sacrifices forty years in the wilderness, O house of Israel?” (Acts 7:35-42)


When the ancient Hebrew people grew frustrated with their wanderings in the wilderness, they decided that following after the mysterious God who had rescued them from their slavery in Egypt was just too uncertain. They wanted gods more tangible and predictable than this One who Moses claimed to obey. It felt more familiar and comfortable to turn their worship to the “host of heaven”—most likely the astral bodies of stars, planets, moon, and sun. They even threw in a golden calf, which would reflect the light of the sun. After all, the sun was the top level divinity in Egypt—why not out there in the middle of nowhere?

Worshipping the heavenly bodies wouldn’t be so bad, would it? This rescuing, redeeming God of Moses was up there and out there, and the lights in the sky we also up there and out there. So worshipping them was close enough, right?

Our worship can also be “close enough” to suit us. There are all kinds of respectable things that seem to be in close proximity to God: Dynamic churches, charismatic speakers, favorite writers and books or preferences for music. We can even turn our worship to our well-constructed systems of faith (“You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder.” James 2:19) or to the Bible itself (“You search the scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that testify on my behalf.” John 5:39). Worshipping the God who is simultaneously unchanging and mysterious can be too unpredictable at times. It is much easier to have certainty in what is tangible or quantifiable than to have confidence in the God who redeems and rescues on his terms rather than on ours.

Forgive me, Lord, when I turn my worship to my own heavenly hosts.

A Lenten Reflection for February 14

“Now when forty years had passed, an angel appeared to him in the wilderness of Mount Sinai, in the flame of a burning bush. When Moses saw it, he was amazed at the sight; and as he approached to look, there came the voice of the Lord: ‘I am the God of your ancestors, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.’ Moses began to tremble and did not dare to look. Then the Lord said to him, ‘Take off the sandals from your feet, for the place where you are standing is holy ground. I have surely seen the mistreatment of my people who are in Egypt and have heard their groaning, and I have come down to rescue them. Come now, I will send you to Egypt.’” (Acts 7:30-34)

Lent is a time when we intentionally put on the brakes. We’re mostly a people in motion, a people in a rush to get here or do that, a people in a blur like it’s eternally 5:00pm at Union Station. Lent slows us down and causes us to look around us, inside us, and beside us. It’s a time to become re-attuned to the voice of God.

Moses ran from his destiny as the one who would lead the Hebrew people out of their slavery in Egypt. He had killed an Egyptian slave driver and then took off to start a new life, one hidden from the drama of Egypt, one that would drop him into anonymity and safety. But in the course of his daily and predictable routine, he encountered the burning bush, through which God spoke to him. Moses had turned away from the suffering of the Hebrew people in Egypt, but God had not. Nor had God forgotten about Moses.

It is interesting to note that God did not point Moses toward the spot designated as “holy ground.” He didn’t say, “Look, Moses—take four steps left and two steps back, jump over that rock and then you’ll find my holy ground.” Instead, Moses was already there without knowing it. When God summoned Moses into his presence, that which moments earlier was mundane and predictable became holy and purposeful. It was only after Moses’ immersion in God’s holiness that he removed his sandals.

Are we who follow Jesus already standing on holy ground? Has God summoned us by his burning-bush voice and yet we seek only the safety of our perceived anonymity? Where are the ones who suffer, the ones who have not escaped God’s notice, but have missed mine? Has God called me to respond to the cries of the wounded and marginalized, and yet I have excused myself to chase after an errant goat?

God forgive me. God forgive us. Let us remove our sandals. The ground beneath our feet is already holy.

Religion, Slavery, and the Mission of God

There's an interesting article on CNN's Belief Blog titled "How Religion Has Been Used to Promote Slavery." It ponders the idea that ancient religious leaders like Moses, Jesus, Paul, and Mohammed didn't outrightly (if at all) condemn slavery. It addresses the historic variances in the types of slavery that existed in the ancient world, but also the way that more recent (i.e. American) pro-slave cultures have used religion to validate the enslavement of human beings.

I wonder if Jesus and his earliest followers didn't make a political stand against slavery because they didn't see the work of God in the world as the equivalent of political power, as we too often do in the US.

When Jesus said that the kingdom of God was near, it was clear that this kingdom was breaking into a particular point in human history that operated in specific ways—like normalizing slavery. Rather than speak about how things ought to be, Jesus seemed to be more about introducing a new reality with his entire self. He touched the untouchable, embraced the excluded, broke the power of pain and death, and then allowed all the powers of evil have their way with him. There was nothing theoretical or abstract about his life and work.

And he did this in a real world with real problems.

Rather than rail against the institution of slavery, Paul offered a new way of relating for slaves and masters, who would now see themselves as brothers and sisters in Christ. Slaves flocked to the newly-emerging Christian movement and found new life there.

I believe that the Bible's lack of clear opposition to slavery is not an endorsement of slavery or even a benign acceptance of it, but rather the revelation that God's mission takes place in a real world and engages that world right where it's at. When Jesus cites Isaiah 61 as he speaks in his hometown synagogue, he claims that he has come, among other reasons, to set the captives free. It appears that he does that, but not in the way that most people expect. Jesus did a lot of things in ways that most people didn't expect, and still don't.