Broken Hands Lifted in Praise

"We are not held back by the love we didn't receive in the past, but by the love we're not extending in the present."  Marianne Williamson

Texts:

Psalm 77

Proverbs 30:1-9

Matthew 4:1-11

Proverbs 30:1-9 is its own sermon:

"I am weary, O God, I am weary, O God. How can I prevail? 2 Surely I am too stupid to be human; I do not have human understanding. 3 I have not learned wisdom, nor have I knowledge of the holy ones. 4 Who has ascended to heaven and come down? Who has gathered the wind in the hollow of the hand? Who has wrapped up the waters in a garment? Who has established all the ends of the earth? What is the person's name? And what is the name of the person's child? Surely you know! 5 Every word of God proves true; he is a shield to those who take refuge in him. 6 Do not add to his words, or else he will rebuke you, and you will be found a liar. 7 Two things I ask of you; do not deny them to me before I die: 8 Remove far from me falsehood and lying; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with the food that I need, 9 or I shall be full, and deny you, and say, "Who is the LORD?" or I shall be poor, and steal, and profane the name of my God."

I think the writer's words speak a truth that is powerful, naming with honesty that voice that castigates our humanness, that places us in the mire and the helplessness of realizing it's not about getting it right: right and wrong fade into being wrapped up in the blanket of God.  Make me neither rich nor poor, give me what I need.  Make my abundance a fullness of life, a fullness of being, an honest reminder of who I am.  Do not allow me to take more than what I need, and do not allow me to despise that which I do not have.  Teach me to be happy in my smallness, content with the little pleasures that You bring.  

Teach my voice to tell the truth until the truth becomes who I am.  Teach me to set free that I might unbind.  Teach me to love that I might be loved.  Teach me to surrender that I might be taken up.  Teach me to let go of the things to which I cling that I might receive You.

Showing Up in the Places we Least Expect.

Quote for the Day:
"Know that God is present most closely when He seems to be farthest away, and that He is most merciful and most the Savior when He seems most to be wrathful and to punish and condemn," Martin Luther (LW:27, p.27).
Texts:

Psalm 77

Job 5:8-27

1 Peter 3:8-18a

Who are we, that we should question God?  Who is God, that God should want to hear it?  It is with raised fists and yelling voices that we bring our cases to God.  It is out of this struggle that faith is born, the birth pangs of belief harkened by the soul rattling its cage.

I scream at you,

In case you are hard of hearing..

Can you see me struggling here?

Can you see me wearied of proclaiming,

   fearing I yell at the wind?

I am wakened by the nightmare,

  Your voice is silent within me.

I tell myself your stories, stories of 

  you coming to the aid of your child.

Is the voice within me the voice of evil,

  Or your voice?  Or is it mine, alone?

Will you be silent forever?  Have you no respone?

Is this Word still true,

  Or was it for long ago and far away?

It was once said: "The LORD is gracious and merciful,

  Slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love."

Do not forget me, O God; I have nowhere else to turn.

I tell myself the story, the story that has swept me up

  Into You.

I remind myself of the laughter and the joy

  The Promise of fullness of life.

I know you're still there,

  Even as my complaint blows in the wind.

I see the stars, and I see the ocean, and I am swept up,

  bolstered to see Your work as a testament to Your faithfulness.

I am small, and I am scared,

 the cracking of twigs makes me jump;

The rhythm of creation lulls me to sleep,

 And I will rise another day,

Hoping, trusting, believing, grasping for Your mercy,

That each breath might remind me Your Spirit dwells within.

This Lent, I am encouraging my community of faith to tell the truth: about ourselves, about God, about our tendency to argue with God.  Lifting up our brokenness, lifting up our dependence, lifting up our propensity to try to pull ourselves up by our own bootstraps.  Ours is a dual confession: breathing in and breathing out, we tell the truth of our amazement that God keeps showing up in the places we would least expect.

On the Spirit and the Letter...

Texts:

Psalm 77

Job 4:1-21

Ephesians 2:1-10

"But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ - by grace you have been saved - and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.  For by grace you have been saved through faith, and htis is not your own doing; it is the gift of God - not the result of works, so that no one may boast."  The text goes on to say, "For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life."  What?  All of that about being saved by grace through faith... and that it is not the result of works, and then an indication that we were created to do good works?  How does this work?

I think the distinction here is that it is not our works or our lists of the good we have done or the times we have chosen to do otherwise that bring our salvation.  Though we have been created to live in harmony with the earth and with our neighbors, we are unable to maintain these relationships of our own accord.  We are in need of reconciliation to ourselves, to the earth, to our neighbor, and to God.  We fool ourselves, however, if we think this is something we are able to will ourselves to do.  "By grace you have been saved through faith..." is something Luther comes to again and again in his writing.  He does not gravitate toward this because he is an antinomian (one who is against adhering to the law or keeping the 10 Commandments); he gravitates toward this because, for Luther, anything that would suggest that we are able to make ourselves righteous apart from the free gift of God in Christ trades salvation for self-righteousness.

On the one hand, "It is impossible for someone who does not first hear the law and let himself be killed by the letter, to hear the gospel and let the grace of the Spirit bring him to life," but on the other hand, "Wherever the law alone is preached and only the letter is dealt with, as happened in the Old Testament, and where the Spirit is not preached afterword, there is death without life, sin without grace, and misery without consolation," ("On the Spirit and the Letter," Martin Luther's Basic Theological Writings, p. 83).  To preach both the law and the gospel is to tell the truth about humanity and about God.  The truth is that we often prefer self-sufficiency to relationship, convenient gods of our own making to a God that we cannot control.  It is also true, however, that we have a God who will stop short of nothing to draw us all to Godself.  Knowing we would try to pay for whatever gift we received, God has given it freely in order that we might know what it is to be in relationship, what it is to be sustained, and what it is to be loved.

The Divine Makes Room for the Profane.

Noah and the ark.  Ah, the beloved children’s story and song.  Somehow, some of the most disturbing Bible texts find a way of becoming stories we tell to our children.  After having made creation, God threatens to un-do creation, returning earth to the watery chaos of nonexistence.  The dry land that appeared on the third day of creation gives way to the watery chaos of destruction.  Almost as quickly as humans came into being, they washed away in the flood of God’s wrath.  For 40 days and 40 nights, the sky above and sea below merge into one as the rain falls and the water rises, and the ark is tossed about the waves of the ocean, being swept helplessly from one end of God’s fury to the other.  We do not hear a word from the humans who perished in this flood and we do not hear the familiar voice of God calling us to repentance.  This is God, unleashed.

Before we read of the flood, we read: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart. So the LORD said, "I will blot out from the earth the human beings I have created--people together with animals and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them."  At this point, six chapters into the Bible, I almost want to fling it across the room.  This is the word of hope?  This is the text we have to describe how God interacts with humanity?  Is this the same God who saves us?  How do we reconcile this horrifying passage with our understanding of God as being our Abba, our Father, kind and loving, merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love?  Now, we could cherry-pick verses to suit us and construct a picture of a God who never becomes angry, who is never threatening, who is always patient and kind, but we would miss some of the most beloved stories of our faith.

Of all the people on earth, Noah is found to be righteous.  “Hey Noah…”  “Yeah?”  “I want you to build a really big boat.”  “Huh? What’s a boat?”  “I’m going to destroy everything except you, your family, and the animals you bring on the boat.”  “What’s a boat?”  So Noah builds the boat, with details to a T, nevermind the fact that there were no instructions for a rudder or a mast, no way to steer it, no way to control it, no way to drive it, like placing a little paper-hat-boat on the Mississippi and sending her down to the Gulf of Mexico.  All of Noah’s friends, all of the land that he knew, the way the whole world was, was going to change.

As though the first day of creation, the waters recede and the world is uncovered.  As though the first command to Adam, God commands Noah to “be fruitful and multiply,” receiving not only a command, but the covenant, a promise of God’s faithfulness to creation.

Here, God makes God’s covenant with Noah and with all flesh.  “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth.’ God said, ‘This is the sign of the covenant that I make between me and you and every living creature that is with you, for all future generations: I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh; and the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all flesh.”  This is not simply a promise to humans; this is a promise to all those dwelling upon earth.  Noah is asked to perform no action, he is asked to do nothing in response.  He simply receives the sign of the promise: the bow in the clouds.  In the core of the text for today, we see the same words repeated several times over and over again, and the way the world works has changed.    

We have the sense that something has changed to make the world work this way.  Our sense of right and wrong and our sense of morality lead us to expect this covenant is made in response to a change that has happened to humanity.  But in Genesis 8 we read, “the LORD said in his heart, "I will never again curse the ground because of humankind, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done,” meaning there was no change within humanity.  We were just as big of sinners after the flood as we were before.  If, then, it is not humanity or the earth that has changed, then it would seem that it is God who has changed.  God has bound Godself to an imperfect humanity, to an imperfect world and has made a covenant never to curse the ground or destroy it.  Repeating the words over and over throughout this passage, we feel the rhythm of God drawing near to creation, drawing near enough to fall in love once again with it despite its brokenness.  God doesn’t make a promise to a better version of creation, God doesn’t start over with a better version of humans, God doesn’t make a new Garden of Eden.  God makes room for humanity within Godself, the perfect making room for the imperfect, the infinite making room for the finite, the divine making room for the profane.  Allowing God’s own heart to break, the unlovable are declared “Loved”.

The water, a force of death and destruction, becomes a force of new life.  As 1 Peter states: “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh, but made alive in the spirit, in which also he went and made a proclamation to the spirits in prison, who in former times did not obey, when God waited patiently in the days of Noah, during the building of the ark, in which a few, that is, eight people, were saved through water. And baptism, which this prefigured, now saves you.” 

In Christ, the way the whole world works changes: once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, in order to bring us to God.  Once for all, case closed.  God, who once threatened to undo creation, undoes Godself in Christ.  The promise that God would never again seek to destroy the earth gives way to the promise that God will draw all things to Godself.  Once and for all, God determined the way God would be with humanity would not be a relationship of wrath and destruction, but a relationship of new life and of hope.  Fully acknowledging humans were sinful before and after the flood, God made room to love this broken world.  The promise is not given as a result of our action, as a result of us having earned it, as a result of us deserving it. 

I think this is part of the reason I find infant baptism so powerful.  I think it points to a deeper truth of how God interacts with us.  Before we can commit to God, God commits to us.  Before we can choose God, God chooses us.  Before we have knowledge of our sin, God forgives us.  Perhaps this is why we tell the stories of the Bible to our children.  They may not always be pretty, and they may not always paint a picture of God that is comfortable, but they tell the truth of who we are and the truth of who God is in a way that comes to life before our eyes.  It is bigger than trying to only tell happy stories or stories that won’t leave any questions in our minds.  It is about telling a story that tells the truth, however complicated the truth might be.

This is not just a story for children.  It is a story for all of us.  It is a song that runs much deeper than “The Lord said to Noah, there’s gonna be a floody floody;” it is the song of all creation, of the promises that God has made throughout creation.  The first promise of God is to never again destroy the earth by means of a flood; the last promise of God is that death itself has been destroyed.  Indeed, God has proven Godself to be merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, to the point that God would undo Godself on the cross in order that we might be drawn to him.

Texts:

Psalm 25:1-10

Daniel 9:15-25a

2 Timothy 4:1-5

"They will turn away from listening to truth and wander away to myths..."

The word "myth," I think, has taken on meanings today that it lacked in the ancient world.  Story, truth, and myth did not always have the separation that exists for us today.  With the Enlightenment and epistemological debates, "truth" became confined to demonstrable experience; story and myth were relegated to "un-truth," to "fiction," and, sadly, were placed on the back burner as we set off to pursue the meaning of all that is, forgetting that much of our lives' meaning comes through story, through the narrative we share with others and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our lives.

There is lore that, in an exchange between J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, Tolkien accused Lewis' unbelivingness in not a failure to beleive but a failure in imagination; Tolkien advocated for seeing Christianity as the true myth.  Love of story has wrapped people up in the Judeo-Chrisitan narrative for centuries.

Even as Daniel writes of the confession of sin, he points to the story of the Hebrew people's deliverance from slavery in Egypt, the narrative wrapping up prophets who came several millenia later.  The story points forward and back - forward to God's promise of once again delivering God's people, and back to their forebears' deliverance.  Narrative, story, and myth do something that we cannot do for ourselves: they tell more of the truth than what we give them credit.  Once told, the story expands in the lives of the hearers, becoming a part of their narrative, a part of their reality.

Truth weaves in and out of story and in and out of myth.  Each story holds within it a seed of truth.  It is when we consider the Bible and the story weaved throughout that a pattern emerges: the truth about humanity is that we are no sooner made free than we bind ourselves to something other than God.  The truth about God is that God looses the bonds, again, and again, untangling us from the messes we knowingly and unknowingly create.  The task of story is to tell the truth.  The task of truth is to proclaim a story that is worth believing, that wraps people up in the story, propelling it onward, pointing both forward and back until we cannot see where God's story ends and our story begins, for they are one and the same.

The Subversion of Self

Texts:

Psalm 25:1-10

Daniel 9:1-14

1 John 1:3-10

Daniel's text for today chronicles the people's awareness of their sin and their failure to follow God's commands, whereas 1 John indicates that people who sin are not God's children.  Both of these seem to presume that we are able to will ourselves to be righteous, to will ourselves out of our propensity to curve in toward ourselves in the circle of sin, to simply "decide for God," or, worse yet, that our failure to be righteous is God's decision against us.

"Everyone who commits a sin is a child of the devil; for the devil has been sinning from the beginning.  The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil.  Those who have been born of God do not sin, because God's seed abides in them; they cannot sin, because they have been born of God," (1 John 8-9).

Hmmm... is this the same Son of God that spent his time with prostitutes, tax collectors, lepers, the demon-possessed, the unclean, the women, the fishermen, the poor, the disenfranchised, the losers, loners, and freaks?  "The Pharisees and their scribes were complaining to his disciples, saying, 'Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners?' Jesus answered, 'Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick; I have come to call not the righteous but sinners to repentance,'" (Luke 5:30-32).  Jesus has come that he might become our entire righteousness.  Binding himself to us and to our sin, Jesus "was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil," to destroy the divisions we think we are able to create between righteous and unrighteous.

We have been called to repentance, called to the changing of our minds, and called to change the way we see the world.  Jesus spent time with the people who "knew" they were righteous, who "knew" they were doing the right thing, and with the people who were all too aware of their unrighteousness, their society quick to point it out should they ever forget.  Whereas we bind, Jesus sets free.  Whereas we judge, Jesus is merciful.  Whereas we hate, Jesus loves.  

"See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God, and that is what we are."  The love, freely given, has named us children of God.  It comes as an undeserved gift, to the self-righteous and the shamed alike, reconciling both to God and God's work in the world.  "The Son of God was revealed for this purpose, to destroy the works of the devil;" we should not presume his revelation so small an indication, so confining a freedom, so weak a love, that it would consent to allow human beings to be the purveyors of its reception.  Even as we continue drawing our lines in the sand, Jesus continues erasing them, expanding our hearts, expanding our imaginations, and expanding our notions of what it is to have a God continually creating, continually redeeming, and continually sustaining the earth.  It subverts our notions of self and renders us more beautiful, more deeply loved, and more fulfilled than what we dared to hope or imagine.

Remember You are Dust.

Texts:

Joel 2:1-2, 12-17 

Psalm 51:1-17

2 Corinthians 5:20b—6:10

Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21

Many people have negative impressions of Lent; there are visions of diet plans that masquerade as self-denial.  There are people who give up things they don’t eat or aren’t tempted by anyway.  There are people who will read their Bible more for six weeks and then leave the spiritual practice behind.  Lent is the Christian version, in some ways, of a New Year’s Resoultion.  When we change our practices for Lent, they tend to be things that would be good for us to do year-round, but somehow we don’t have the courage, strength, or stamina to keep it up.  Strangely, I think this is exactly what Lent reminds us of.  No matter whether we give up something or do not, no matter if we take on an additional spiritual practice or not, Lent is facing the reality that, even though we know what is good for us, we choose to do otherwise. 

It is to embrace the reminder that we are dust yet, at the same time, to embrace the reminder that God breathed into dust to create Adam.  We are invited during Lent to embrace a time of tension, a time in which we peer more deeply into ourselves and into the reality of what it is to be human, invited to become uncomfortable with what it is to be human that we can see the wonder of God and God’s love.  It is a time in which we tell the truth about ourselves, about our brokenness, and about our inability to depend on God because we would rather depend on ourselves.

The dust rails against its creator, telling ourselves we ought to simply be able to will ourselves to do what is good for us, that we ought to be able to keep all of the laws so that we can make ourselves righteous.  Rather than treating breath as a gift, we treat it as something to which we are entitled.  Rather than treating time as a gift, we treat it as the enemy.

The truth is that we spend most of our lives trying to run away from being human, to run away from being sinners, only to find we cannot run far enough and fast enough to get away from it.  No more running.  Let’s stop and sit, stop and pray, stop and breathe, stop and listen.  “¹Have mercy on me, O God, according to your steadfast love; according to your abundant mercy blot out my transgressions. ²Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity, and cleanse me from my sin.  ³For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me.  ⁴Against you, you alone, have I sinned, and done what is evil in your sight, so that you are justified in your sentence and blameless when you pass judgment.”  “God, I am done running.” 

Lent is about asking to be made clean because we realize we cannot make ourselves clean: “¹⁰Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.  ¹¹Do not cast me away from your presence, and do not take your holy spirit from me.”  These are the words we say when we cannot bear the person staring back at us in the mirror.  These words cannot come from a garden variety sinner, who still secretly keeps track of good deeds and bad deeds, hoping that if the good column is better than the bad, God will have no choice but to accept us.  These are the words of a person who understands what it is to be dust.

We ask for deliverance because we know the One who delivers us.  We ask for God to open our lips, for God is the One who inspires and enables our praise.  We ask God to accept our brokenness because we know the One who makes us whole.  We ask the impossible and we receive the unimaginable.

¹³Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will return to you.¹⁴Deliver me from bloodshed, O God, O God of my salvation, and my tongue will sing aloud of your deliverance.¹⁵O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth will declare your praise.¹⁶For you have no delight in sacrifice; if I were to give a burnt offering, you would not be pleased.¹⁷The sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.

Out of the brokenness, out of running the other way, out of sin, comes the proclamation.  We preach out of the least likely of places, namely, our brokenness.  It is when we are broken that we proclaim the one who makes us whole.  It is when we realize that we are dust that we realize God is the one who has breathed his Spirit into us and given us life.  The dust proclaims its Creator; the shards of clay confess their Redeemer.

This is what it is to be dust: it is to recognize we are easily shaken.  This is what it is to be broken: it is to recognize we cannot put ourselves back together.  This is what it is to be a sinner: it is to recognize we love ourselves more than we love God or each other.

This is what it is to be human: it is to recognize the One who breathes life into dust.  This is what it is to be holy: it is to recognize the One who knit us together.  This is what it is to be a saint: it is to recognize that it is not our love for God, but God's love for us, that brings our salvation.

During Lent, we behold the mystery of what it is to be human and what it is to belong to God.  We behold the mystery of faith that puts seemingly opposite things together: a God who is present even when we turn away, and a clean spirit with sin, and life with death.  We proclaim that we serve the Judge who was judged for our sakes, the sinless one who bore our sin, the one whose death and resurrection brought us the promise of everlasting life.

Texts:

Psalm 110:1-4

The Lord says to my lord, “Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.”

The Lord sends out from Zion your mighty scepter. Rule in the midst of your foes.

Your people will offer themselves willingly on the day you lead your forces on the holy mountains. From the womb of the morning, like dew, your youth will come to you.

The Lord has sworn and will not change his mind, “You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek.”

Job 19:23-27

“O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me!

1 Timothy 3:14-16

14 I hope to come to you soon, but I am writing these instructions to you so that, ¹⁵if I am delayed, you may know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, the pillar and bulwark of the truth. ¹⁶Without any doubt, the mystery of our religion is great:
He^* was revealed in flesh,
   vindicated^* in spirit,^*
     seen by angels,
proclaimed among Gentiles,
   believed in throughout the world,
     taken up in glory. 

The words of 1 Peter and Job intertwine today, pointing to a picture of the divine that lives in mystery.  For some, the problem of theodicy (why evil happens if God is truly benevolent, omnipotent, onmipresent, etc.) stands in the way of belief.  The propensity for suffering creates a chasm that prevents the ability to see God.  Others, upon experiencing turmoil in their lives, lift their fists to God, demanding a different outcome, as in Isaiah 40:27.  Others still believe we are made righteous or are sanctified through our troubles.  Yet, strangely, whatever our response to turmoil, to challenge, faith remains a mystery.

Martin Luther suggests that God works under the sign of the opposite, operating within creation behind God's divine masks.  The trouble is, though, that sometimes we take the mask for being what is and forget what is behind the mask.  During the times in which we cannot make sense of the way in which God is working, we face the temptation of thinking that God is not working and that we have been left to our own devices.  I think grounding our stories and our narratives in the broader narrative, we aren't able to make more sense of the life of faith, but we are able to proceed with confidence that - no matter how lonely - we do not walk alone.

Under the mask, under the sign of the opposite, the Creator continues beckoning creation forward.

Transcendent Grace

If you have men who will exclude any of God's creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who will deal likewise with their fellow men.
Francis of Assisi
Texts:

Psalm 110:1-4

"The LORD says to my lord, 'Sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.'  The LORD sends out from Zion your mighty scepter.  Rule in the midst of your foes.  Your people will offer themselves willingly on the day you lead your forces on the holy mountains.  From the womb of the morning, like dew, your youth will come to you.  The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, 'You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek."

Exodus 19:4-25 (appointed verses for today are 7-25)

⁴You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings and brought you to myself. ⁵Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, ⁶but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites." ⁷So Moses came, summoned the elders of the people, and set before them all these words that the LORD had commanded him. ⁸The people all answered as one: "Everything that the LORD has spoken we will do." Moses reported the words of the people to the LORD. ⁹Then the LORD said to Moses, "I am going to come to you in a dense cloud, in order that the people may hear when I speak with you and so trust you ever after." When Moses had told the words of the people to the LORD, ¹⁰the LORD said to Moses: "Go to the people and consecrate them today and tomorrow. Have them wash their clothes ¹¹and prepare for the third day, because on the third day the LORD will come down upon Mount Sinai in the sight of all the people. ¹²You shall set limits for the people all around, saying, 'Be careful not to go up the mountain or to touch the edge of it. Any who touch the mountain shall be put to death. ¹³No hand shall touch them, but they shall be stoned or shot with arrows; whether animal or human being, they shall not live.' When the trumpet sounds a long blast, they may go up on the mountain." ¹⁴So Moses went down from the mountain to the people. He consecrated the people, and they washed their clothes. ¹⁵And he said to the people, "Prepare for the third day; do not go near a woman." ¹⁶On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. ¹⁷Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God. They took their stand at the foot of the mountain. ¹⁸Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the LORD had descended upon it in fire; the smoke went up like the smoke of a kiln, while the whole mountain shook violently. ¹⁹As the blast of the trumpet grew louder and louder, Moses would speak and God would answer him in thunder. ²⁰When the LORD descended upon Mount Sinai, to the top of the mountain, the LORD summoned Moses to the top of the mountain, and Moses went up. ²¹Then the LORD said to Moses, "Go down and warn the people not to break through to the LORD to look; otherwise many of them will perish. ²²Even the priests who approach the LORD must consecrate themselves or the LORD will break out against them." ²³Moses said to the LORD, "The people are not permitted to come up to Mount Sinai; for you yourself warned us, saying, 'Set limits around the mountain and keep it holy.'" ²⁴The LORD said to him, "Go down, and come up bringing Aaron with you; but do not let either the priests or the people break through to come up to the LORD; otherwise he will break out against them." ²⁵So Moses went down to the people and told them.

Hebrews 2:1-4

Therefore we must pay greater attention to what we have heard, so that we do not drift away from it. 2 For if the message declared through angels was valid, and every transgression or disobedience received a just penalty, 3 how can we escape if we neglect so great a salvation? It was declared at first through the Lord, and it was attested to us by those who heard him, 4 while God added his testimony by signs and wonders and various miracles, and by gifts of the Holy Spirit, distributed according to his will. 

The holiness of God finds an uneasy home amongst humans.  It seems we spend most of our time struggling between our experience of who God is and our experience of who we are.  Is there evidence that "every transgression or disobedience received a just penalty"?  Or is there evidence that "From the womb of the morning, like dew, your youth will come to you.  The LORD has sworn and will not change his mind, 'You are a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek"?  Can we reconcile these two images of God's engagement of humanity?  

Time and again, God establishes that God's justice and mercy do not work the way in which we understand justice and mercy to work.  Between Exodus 19 and Moses receiving the 10 Commandments, we see apostasy amongst God's people, who proclaimed "Everything the LORD has said we will do."  God threatens to destroy the people of Israel, but Moses intercedes, and "the LORD changes his mind about the disaster he planned to bring on his people," (Exodus 32:14).

Born "from the womb of the morning," we receive breath as gift, we receive spirit as blessing, we receive life as grace.  Again and again, we see God changing God's mind in favor of mercy over punishment, in favor of restorative justice over retributive justice.  Whereas we turn away from relationship, God turns toward relationship, binding Godself to us.  In binding Godself to us, we receive the immeasurable gift: forgiven, springing forth as new creatures, our first breath each morning is our baptism into a new day, in which we walk hoping and trusting in the Promise that it is not our promises our our righteousness that makes us holy, but the alien righteousness of Christ that proclaims the reality of God's grace transcends the reality of human existence and failure.

Texts:

2 Kings 2:1-12

Psalm 50:1-6

2 Corinthians 4:3-6

Mark 9:2-9

Today, we, along with Peter, James, and John, catch a glimpse of God’s glory, seeing him with Moses, the Lawgiver, and with Elijah, the Prophet, has a physical manifestation of Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and of the prophecies, the one for whom the people of Israel have been waiting.  We receive a glimpse of Christ for who he is - the Messiah - the transcendent ineffable God.  I love Peter in this… maybe it’s because I have a soft spot for people who prefer fill awkward silences with awkward speech (I don’t know anything about it personally, of course). Peter has no idea what to say, but he keeps talking anyway, “Rabbi, it is good for us to be here; let us make three dwellings, one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.”  Peter thought he was seeing the whole picture.  The image of glory was so obvious, so tangible, so easy to understand, that it’s easy to make that the whole picture.  And Jesus’ response to Peter: “But Peter, where will you live?”

Peter, Peter, Peter.  He gets so close to getting it right, and then promptly sticks his foot in his mouth.  In Mark 8, which is right before this chapter, we hear Jesus asking, “Who do people say that I am?”  They answered him, “John the Baptist; and others Elijah; and still others, one of the prophets.”  He asked them, “Who do you say I am?”  Peter answered him, “You are the Messiah.”  Peter gets it right.  Then Jesus goes on to foretell his death and resurrection, to tell us the shape of God’s reign in Jesus, and Peter rebuked him.  “Get behind me, Satan.”  We shake our heads at Peter, clucking our tongues at his short-sightedness.  But would we have done any different? 

Peter wants to build three dwellings on the mountain: one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for Jesus.  But Jesus isn’t that kind of Messiah.  Jesus is the sort of Messiah that looks back at Peter and says, “But where will you live?  Peter, my home is with you.”  Jesus is the sort of God that becomes human for our sakes, coming into the world naked and helpless, yet proclaimed as a king.  Jesus is the sort of God that is baptized into the sins of humanity in order that we might be marked with the cross of Christ and sealed by the Holy Spirit forever.  Jesus is the sort of God that wades right into the trash and brokenness and disgustingness of humanity because Jesus is less interested in being the God we want and more interested in being the God we need.

When we’re on top of the mountain, when everything is going well, we think we can see everything.  We think we have figured out how God works.  It would be easy to have the mountaintop experience and think that that was the whole of the experience.  Somehow, it’s a lot easier to point to God and how God works in the midst of victory and glory than it is to point to God and how God works in the midst of brokenness and pain.  It’s a lot easier to have a God that stays on top of the mountain than it is to have a God that comes down the mountain.  This Messiah, the one who is to usher in the New Age, the Age in which the people of Israel no longer live in bondage to the Roman Occupation, no longer in bondage to their exile, isn’t supposed to hang on a cross.  

I think that’s part of the problem.  Our Messiah hanging on the cross is surely a commentary about humanity and the nature of sin that we don’t want to read.  It’s a story that tells a little more of the truth than what we want to hear.  The God we want is the mountaintop God, the God who is obvious and shows up when we expect him to.  The God we want is the one who ties up our messy lives with a neat little red bow and makes them always make sense.  But if we only see God on the mountaintop, where is God when we’re in the valleys?  Where is God when life stops making so much sense? 

He’s making his home with us.  Jesus is with Peter in his moments of clarity, “You are the Messiah, the son of God,” but he’s laying his down life for Peter even as Peter says, “I swear to you, I do not know the man.”  In the depth of Peter’s brokenness, in the depth of betrayal, in the depth of our brokenness, in the depth of our betrayal, Jesus walks down the mountain with us, preaching, healing, teaching, and saving, proclaimed a King even as he hangs on the cross.  And it doesn’t make sense.  But a God that does not know our brokenness wouldn’t know how to save us.  Knowing our sin, knowing our death, knowing our devils and our brokenness, Jesus became our salvation.

God does God’s best work in our brokenness, but we don’t want a God that comes to us in our brokenness.  We want a God who will look at all of our accomplishments, smile, and say, “Yup, that’s my kid.”  But we have the sort of God that looks at us after we have chosen apathy over compassion, hate over love, our own pride and ego over relationship, and our love of self over God’s love for us, and says, “You are mine.  I have named you as my own.”  And God doesn’t say this from the mountaintop; he says this from the cross.

Martin Luther, in his Heidelburg Disputation, states, “Now it is not sufficient for anyone, and it does him no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross.”  Jesus, you are supposed to be the Messiah with the castle on the hill, the one who beats up all the bullies, the one who makes all the bad stuff go away.  Jesus is supposed to be the one we can point to and say, “See what our God can do!”  You’re not supposed to be a Messiah hanging on a cross.

Jesus is not content to stay on the mountain, where there is the illusion of control, where we can lie to ourselves and tell ourselves that we can see everything.  Jesus draws nearer to our reality, nearer to our brokenness, coming down into the muck and trash and disgustingness of humanity, into our brokenness, into the places we hide, into the places that we don’t think we can bear in public, much less bring to church, and comes into the depths of humanity’s darkness because his home is with us.  His home isn’t with us as we are at church, his home isn’t with us when we’re having the mountaintop experience, in which everything seems so clear, his home is with us when we’re broken, when we feel like we have been crushed beyond repair, when we are convinced of our unworthiness, Christ is at home with us.

Walking down from the mountain with disciples that barely understand him, who want a messiah that looks a little more like a superhero than a Roman criminal, Jesus is not the God we want: the God who beats up all the bullies, who makes all the bad things go away, who magically makes us happy people all the time.  Jesus is the God who dwells amongst humanity’s brokenness, who is born to a teenage mother, who is baptized into our sin, who decides we are worth it despite all evidence to the contrary, and journeys to the cross in order that we might see Jesus is the God we need.  From the mountaintop, we think we can see everything, but it’s not until we recognize Jesus in the humility and shame of the cross that we are able to recognize him as our resurrected Lord, who has conquered sin, death, and the devil because He is the God who refuses to be at home without us.    

  

Wrestling with the Dark Night of the Soul

Texts:

Psalm 6

Job 30:16-31

John 4:46-54

Job's gut-wrenching words are haunting:

¹⁶ ‘And now my soul is poured out within me;
   days of affliction have taken hold of me. ¹⁷ The night racks my bones,
   and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest. ¹⁸ With violence he seizes my garment;
   he grasps me by the collar of my tunic. ¹⁹ He has cast me into the mire,
   and I have become like dust and ashes. ²⁰ I cry to you and you do not answer me;
   I stand, and you merely look at me. ²¹ You have turned cruel to me;
   with the might of your hand you persecute me. ²² You lift me up on the wind, you make me ride on it,
   and you toss me about in the roar of the storm. ²³ I know that you will bring me to death,
   and to the house appointed for all living. 

²⁴ ‘Surely one does not turn against the needy,
   when in disaster they cry for help. ²⁵ Did I not weep for those whose day was hard?
   Was not my soul grieved for the poor? ²⁶ But when I looked for good, evil came;
   and when I waited for light, darkness came. ²⁷ My inward parts are in turmoil, and are never still;
   days of affliction come to meet me. ²⁸ I go about in sunless gloom;
   I stand up in the assembly and cry for help. ²⁹ I am a brother of jackals,
   and a companion of ostriches. ³⁰ My skin turns black and falls from me,
   and my bones burn with heat.

I'm not sure I have the story straight, but I believe there is lore that St. Teresa of Avila, once caught in a thunderstorm and her carriage rendered immobile, shook her fists toward the sky and said, "If this is how you treat your friends, Lord, no wonder you have so few!"  Our souls rattle their cages along with Job and St. Teresa.  People of faith are not strangers to the dark night of the soul.  I wonder how many of us, upon reading Job's words, could think of a time in our lives in which we felt we were being wasted away, with one tragedy following on the heels of another, when we thought we could take no more.

Our friends try to help us, wanting so badly to lessen the pain, but their words sound like an accusation rather than comfort.  We tell ourselves we have no right to complain, but our souls continue rattling their cages, demanding an audience.  In all of our screaming and yelling, God draws near.

God comes to Job in the whilrwind in chapter 38, and a debate ensues, with Job taking on his Maker.  Even after Elihu exhorts Job, telling him that God has no need to make a case for Godself, God presents a case to Job: "Where were you, Job, when the darkness gave way to light?"  Of all the power and majesty God points toward, God also points toward knowing darkness, the recesses of the sea, the places where nobody sees.  I love God's response to Job in 40:1 (which is way out of the text for today, but it's hard to get a sense of the narrative without skimming the areas around the text): "Shall a faultfinder contend with the Almighty?  Anyone who argues with God must respond."  God invites Job to respond, invites Job into debate, and invites Job to voice his challenge.

And, turning everything on its head, God rebukes Job's friends: "You have not spoken of me what is right, as my servant of Job has..."  What?!?  After Job's lament and debate with God, it seems God accepted Job's challenge.  It was through the wrestling [with God] that Job came to understand that God is always in the middle, always in the midst of God's creation.  God does not strike Job down for having complained, nor does God refuse Job a hearing.  So often, during times of trouble, we presume God is not listening.  With our ears plugged for fear we will not like the answer, we demand a response.  God's response, to Job and to us, is relationship.  I'm not sure I would say it makes me more comfortable with Job's struggle or God's seeming ambivalence (surely God seems ambivalent as we struggle), but I cling to the hope that, even in our struggles, even when we cannot see, feel, or hear God, God is not ambivalent toward God's creatures or God's creation.  Our Creator, it seems, will not turn away from the creation.