He Lives!

Lent is now over (feel free to eat chocolate again), and today begins the Easter season...50 days to celebrate that He lives. Note the present tense. He lives. When people challenged Alfred H. Ackley on this point, he wrote a hymn as his answer. In case you're not familiar with "He Lives," the refrain goes like this:

He lives, He lives! Christ Jesus lives today!

He walks with me and talks with me along life's narrow way.

He lives, He lives, salvation to impart!

You ask me how I know He lives?

He lives within my heart!

How will you celebrate this living Savior over the next 50 days? Will you let Him live in your heart, lead you through the stormy blast, see His hand of mercy, and hear His voice of cheer?

I hope you and I will both open our hearts to celebrate Easter for the whole season, and not pack it away with the Easter baskets and plastic eggs.

Happy Easter.

Lent

The story of Easter is complicated and weird. Just try explaining it to someone who knows nothing about Jesus or God. Your story might sound something like this:

Well, Jesus, who was God made flesh, rode into Jerusalem on a donkey, all humble, while people sang hosannas and waved palm branches because they thought he had come to over-throw their Roman oppressors, and then a few days later, he ticked off the Jewish leaders, so they had him arrested and tried by the Roman leader Pontius Pilate. The same crowd that had welcomed Jesus with hosannas a few days earlier now shouted to Pilate to crucify him. Crowds are fickle things, aren't they? Then, Jesus died in the most humiliating way the Romans had devised to save us all from our sins, and after he was buried in a borrowed tomb, he was resurrected and visited his followers a number of times before finally going back to heaven, until he comes again in the final days.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense.

Really?

Even people raised in the faith who celebrated Easter every year with rousing choruses of "Up From the Grave He Arose," struggle to make sense of this reckless, boundless act of love. The idea that God died for us, to cleanse us of our sins, makes sense when put into the context of the whole of the Bible, but how many Christians spend the time studying the full story to see the full scope of God's work that culminates in Jesus? That's a lifetime study, and no blog post can explain all that. I'm not even going to try.

What I do know, in the depths of my heart, is that Jesus was born for every one of us. He died for every one of us. And he had a message for us that gets repeated through John's gospel account of the Last Supper, the Crucifixion, and its aftermath.

1. At the Last Supper with his disciples, Jesus said: "I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another." John 13:34-35

2. While hanging from the cross, "[W]hen Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, 'Woman, here is your son.' Then he said to the disciple, 'Here is your mother.' And from that hour the disciple took her into his own home." John 19:26-27

3. After his death, when he meets his disciples on a beach, he tells Peter three times: "Feed my lambs."

Love each other. Take care of each other. Sacrifice for each other as he sacrificed for all of us. That's the message Jesus wanted to make sure his disciples heard. God so loved the world that he poured love out onto the cross for us. When we accept that unimaginable, complete, and total love, we must pass it on. We can't dam up that kind of love in our hearts...it overflows abundantly.

I wish this were the message of Lent.

Too often, Lent is about giving up chocolate or coffee or Facebook, as if something we can do will save us. Until recently in history, Lent coincided with a time of shortage and conservation of food, a time of hunkering down, doling out wrinkled apples from the cellar, an annual and necessary reduction of consumption while people awaited the early crops. It wasn't so much of a choice back in the day as it is now.

If you find those sorts of sacrifices helpful to prepare you for Easter, certainly don't let me deter you. We all get to the cross differently. But please don't stop with giving some luxury up.

To prepare us to celebrate that free and unearned gift at Easter, we should add something to the world that's starved for salvation. Let's feed the lambs, help our neighbors, love one another in ways that shout to the world that we follow The Lamb of God. During Lent, Jesus' example and words invite us to engage more deeply with his new commandment, to add to the love in the world, to move the world one step closer to kingdom life.

Is there a better season to recommit to sacrificial love all the days of our lives than Lent?

How are you feeding his lambs? Do you need to be more intentional in seeking out and caring for the hungry and those in need of love? Are you listening to the needs of others and responding in love? Pray during this season particularly for a heart like Jesus' heart, one that acts in love and shares the joy of salvation.

Different Practices

As for the one who is weak in faith, welcome him, but not to quarrel over opinions. One person believes he may eat anything, while the weak person eats only vegetables. Let not the one who eats despise the one who abstains, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who eats, for God has welcomed him. Who are you to pass judgment on the servant of another? It is before his own master that he stands or falls. And he will be upheld, for the Lord is able to make him stand. One person esteems one day as better than another, while another esteems all days alike. Each one should be fully convinced in his own mind. Romans 14:1-23

Have you ever experienced someone telling you that you're not doing Christianity right? Perhaps someone has told you that you read the Bible using the wrong translation or a wrong method of interpretation, or you worship wrongly because your church doesn't celebrate communion every week or because your church does celebrate communion every week. Perhaps you don't attend worship service often enough to meet someone's random attendance requirement or you do attend worship but not Sunday School. For shame! Perhaps it's because you drink wine or beer or liquor, or you utter the occasional (or not so occasional) cuss word.

Who, in fact, decides what is right and what is wrong in religious practice?

When it comes to religious practice, I think it's important to figure out what is helpful for us and what is not. If we were raised in a church that strictly forbade tattoos, for instance, we might look upon ink as a defacement of God's creation...or we might rebel against what we're taught, seeing it as just another form of self-expression. Does God really care about a little (or a lot of) ink when people are starving and enslaved and murdered?

I honestly have no idea how God feels about tattoos, nor do I care because I will never, ever have one myself. Needles! Ewww!! But certainly tattoos, as with any form of self-expression, can signal all sorts of things...good and bad. Concentration camp victims were tattooed with numbers on their arms; we can (I believe) safely assume that this was a bad thing done to them, not something that will damn them to hell. We had a baby sitter who had a Bible verse tattooed on her foot...in Greek, no less, which made it a talking point for her to share God's word. I doubt that sort of evangelism will keep her out of heaven. People with swastikas, satanic symbols, and hateful speech tattooed on them likely won't miss out on eternal glory just because they got tattoos, and if they repent of hate and turn to God in love, I think God's grace and mercy are powerful enough to wash clean the stain of sin.

My point: Religious practice is on the outside. God looks inside. If we want to be in right relationship with God, we should figure out those religious practices that keep our hearts focused on Him. These might differ from person to person, and we need to follow Paul's advice and not judge others for doing what it takes to strengthen their faith.

For me, one thing that keeps me growing in faith is regular Bible study in Christian community. I've been attending a weekly class for six years now, and it's transformed my thinking in so many ways, helped me to understand things I didn't understand before, and discover new things in scripture that I never knew or thought I knew but got totally wrong.

Years ago, I listened to a relative vent about Bibles. "People whose Bibles look new aren't good Christians," he said. "Real Christians mark up their Bibles. The more tattered the Bible, the stronger the faith!"

Hmm. Having grown up in the Methodist church, I was taught from a very early age that never, ever, under any circumstances should I mark in or write in my Bible. I should treat it with respect, never put other books or papers on top of it, and never, ever put it on the floor. All these things showed disrespect to God and His Word.

As a result, my main Bible, read and studied so intensively over the past six years, still looks relatively new. It's an Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha in the New Revised Standard Version translation with a soft, oxblood-red leather cover that's soft as butter and smells like a library. My mother gave it to me and had my name put on the front lower right corner in gold. I have other Bibles, but this is the one I use the most. It has the highest quality binding of all my Bibles and lays flat open whether I'm reading Genesis or Revelation.

The gold on the page edges retains its shimmer despite frequent thumbing, and the pages are crisp and clean, definitely unmarked. Okay, yes, there's some wear of that gold edging on the bottom corner where it's rubbed in my book bag, and the fine leather binding has worn a bit on the corners as well. The two ribbon book marks have picked up a bit of oil from sliding between my fingers. But by my Bible-defacing relative's standards, it's hardly been cracked open. By his standards, I'm not a Real Christian.

Who is right?

Does it matter?

Not according to Paul. Let not the one who marks up Scripture pass judgment on the one who does not, and let not the one who abstains pass judgment on the one who does not abstain. We are all weak in faith in some way or another. Whatever we do to bolster our faith, when we do it for love of God or our neighbor, He will be well pleased.

You are invited to share a time when your religious practice was criticized. How did you defend your practice? Did the criticism help you or hurt you or just make you realize we're all different? Do you judge others for their tattoos or type of worship or biblical interpretation? Are there times when that judgment is just?

Another New Year

"Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature:
old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new."
2 Corinthians 5:17 KJV

We crave newness. Unspoiled freshness. New car smell. Peeling the protective plastic off an electronic device. Puppy breath. Baby powder.

Newness feels...hopeful, promising, alive with possibility.

Newness hasn't made mistakes.

Yet.

Newness hasn't been soiled by carelessness or ignorance or cruelty.

Yet.

Newness feels perfect.

I'm the queen of new year's resolutions. I've resolved for years...and failed to follow through a lot of the time. The weight doesn't come off. I still lose patience too easily and too often. My house doesn't stay tidy and organized. It doesn't even start being tidy and organized.

These failures have lead me to rig my resolutions so I wouldn't fail by resolving to do things I already do. Yay, I learned  and created some things last year! Go, me! I won!

The newness we gain in Christ, however, is different. What does this mean..."if a man be in Christ"? Well, it means giving your life to Him, surrendering your sin to Him, opening your heart to be filled with His love and to let His love flow through our hearts and hands and into the world, where it will make other old, broken, hurting hearts new, whole, and healthy.

We don't make anything new. We are conduits of Christ's healing love and grace and mercy in a broken and soiled world.

The purpose of newness in Christ isn't a smaller waist or cleaner home. The purpose of newness in Christ is relationship with Him, seeing the world in His eyes, and relating to that world in a new way.

In Christ, we can do all things that are good and righteous.

How will you see the world through Christ's eyes? How will you be a path for His love to flow into the world? How will your new year's resolutions reflect your gratitude for His salvation, given to you unearned and unmerited, freely and abundantly?

Guarding the Temple Doors

I've stated before that my faith life keeps me far, far away from the politics of the church. Mostly, I'm blissfully ignorant of the issues that agitate and irritate and flair up in Annual or General Conference in my denomination, the United Methodist Church (UMC). My information generally comes from NPR, which hardly ever reports such things unless they involve LGBT issues. On that subject, I feel at least somewhat informed.

What concerns me far more than the big theological or doctrinal issues, however, is what happens to the individual sheep in the fold as a result of faulty theology or doctrine. When is the church as an institution becoming an agent of hate rather than of love? I recently learned, for instance, that a large UMC congregation in our community asks couples who are divorcing to leave. The pastor proudly declares that he will not tolerate divorce in his congregation.

What? The motto of the UMC is Open Minds, Open Hearts, Open Doors. But divorced people aren't allowed in this particular church? Seriously?

Apparently, some churches that have zero-tolerance policies on all sorts of things, with deacons or pastors formally asking members to leave for "sinning." (I thought we all are sinners.) There are pastors who preach that "good" Christians should cut out family members who are gay, who are pregnant out of wedlock, who get tattoos, who drink alcohol, who cuss, who read Harry Potter. They reference Bible verses to support their arguments for ostracism and puff up with pride that these "good" Christians are following the Word.

Never mind that the Word also demands that we forgive others seventy-times-seven times.

Never mind that the Word also tells us to do unto others as we would have them do unto us.

Never mind that the Word also tells us to love one another as Jesus loved us.

Never mind that the Word also tells us that we are blessed to be a blessing to the world.

How can we be a blessing when we're so busy guarding the temple doors to keep the riff-raff out? How can we love when we're so busy judging? Do we really want others to ostracize us for our sin? Are we so perfect in righteousness that we never need forgiveness?

I must be a bad Christian. I sin every day. I fall short. Every. Single. Day.

A pastor once described the horrific conditions of children dying in a famine, and then he deliberately dropped the f-bomb. His point, well taken by some and condemned by others, was that some people were more outraged at his use of that word in the pulpit than the fact that children were dying of starvation.

Which makes you angrier? Have purity laws become more important for you and your church than caring for the least of us? Are you the priest walking past the beaten Jew dying on the side of the road because you're worried you'll get contaminated, or are you the Good Samaritan? Are you guarding the Holy Altar when Jesus' death tore the curtain in two and opened it for everyone?

As we judge, so shall we be judged.

That's the scariest verse in the Bible.

What happens as a result of all this judging and condemning and ostracizing? Individual children of God are cut off from the community of Christ. Sheep are not lost...they are actively thrown out of the flock to fend for themselves against the wolves. They are sacrificed on the altar of self-righteousness for the glorification of a religious institution and its priests, not for the glory of God.

And the King shall answer and say unto them, "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."

Maybe I'm being melodramatic here, but I don't think so. When the law becomes more important than the love, when sheep are actively kept from the Shepherd, we all need to sit up and take notice. In just such times did God become Man, our Shepherd Jesus, to show His sheep how to live as a blessing and to open the Kingdom to everyone.

We're all sinners, but God loves each and every one of us and He wants to be in relationship with each and every one of us. He wants us to be conduits of His Love in the world, not executors of His judgment. We aren't qualified to judge. We are qualified to love.

If you're feeling broken and ostracized, if you've been asked to leave a church or bullied out of one, if you've felt God's people reject you, please keep looking for a Christian community that is full of us bad Christians. Such churches are out there...I attend one. We sinners know exactly how it feels to fall short in the eyes of God, and we know exactly how it feels to have God's mercy and forgiveness and love flow over us each and every day. We need Him, and we welcome you to be a part of His community.

Let's stop being guards at the temple doors and turn into greeters. Let's bring the sheep to the Shepherd so they may grow and thrive in the Life given by Jesus Christ.

Amen.

What God Requires of Us

Original Source

The full verse reads...

He has shown you, o mortal, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly, and to love mercy,
And to walk humbly with your God. Micah 6:8

Yesterday, George told me about a video he saw of a woman stealing a foul ball from a little girl at a baseball game. The woman had fumbled it, and it flew right into the little girl's hands, so the woman snatched it away from the girl and high-fived the men behind her to celebrate.

Act justly.

What does it mean to act justly, or as the translation in the photo says, to do justly? What is just?

The Old Testament gives us a lot of law. God gave Moses the Ten Commandments, and then expanded His law in more detail, including what animals His people could eat and how to treat slaves. When Jesus came, he was born into a world where the Law had taken on incredible levels of specificity and severity, a world in which the Law had shifted from being a blessing from God to man and become a burden and barrier between man and God. The purity laws alone were crushing.

What is just? That which arises from fairness, honesty, compassion, kindness, and generosity. I used to believe that capital punishment was just...a life for a life. But then I learned that most of the people on death row are African Americans from poor backgrounds. A white man from a poor background has a far lower chance of being executed than an African American who commits the same crime, the same level of horror.

That is not just.

Now, I oppose the death penalty, not because I think those who kill do not deserve to die, but because I no longer naively believe that our justice system is, itself, entirely just.

When I was in Madison, I noticed more homeless people than in any previous visit. It feels wrong to walk by them and not respond to their requests for money. I am blessed. I have a home and family and comforts in excess. Many people feel scorn and contempt for the homeless, and believe that they get what they deserve, that they could get back on their feet if they really wanted to and clearly they don't really want to so why help them anyway. If it weren't for their bad decisions, they could live normally.

Love mercy.

So many of the homeless are mentally ill. Of course they make bad decisions. You try making good decisions when there are voices in your head telling you strange things or you think the government is out to kidnap you for bizarre experiments or you are crippled by addiction. Helping people with mental illness is crushingly difficult, crushingly expensive, and crushingly sad. We know so little that truly helps, but we also know handing them money is probably not a good response either. In our helplessness to lift up, it's easier and more comfortable to look away...or down.

Others are homeless because they lived on the margins, in poverty because of birth or lack of education or lack of opportunity, just one disaster away from losing everything...and then the disaster hits. Our church is part of an Interfaith Hospitality Network. We house homeless families for a week at a time while public and private services work to get them back on their feet. The program works for many families. But they still live on the margins, one disaster away from living in churches again.

Love mercy.

Beth Moore tells a story of being in an airport and seeing an old man in a wheelchair. He had incredibly long, messy hair. Moore heard God tell her to brush the man's hair. How in the world does a woman approach a total stranger in an airport and offer to brush his hair?

By walking humbly with her God.

What does it mean to be humble? It doesn't mean thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less. It means putting God always before you, not just during an hour of worship on Sunday. It means putting others' needs ahead of your own. It means paying attention to those needs and meeting them when you should...even if you don't want to or it isn't convenient. It means obeying God even when you don't understand. It means keeping your mouth shut when you'd rather make others listen to you.

Do justly.

Love mercy.

Walk humbly with your God.

Micah tells us to focus on these three things, for they are certainly difficult enough to be the work of a lifetime.



Reflection: Think of times you've succeeded in each of these three things, and of times you've failed. How might you learn to overcome the failures and step out in faith?  

 

My Perspective, for What It's Worth

If you don't read my other blogs, you might not know that George and I are currently in Madison, Wisconsin, so he can do the Ironman race on Sunday. Read about it on Questioning my Intelligence if you dare.

On a religious note, I'm reading a lot of righteous indignation regarding the Victoria Osteen video. I try very hard to ignore theological controversies because I'm too busy trying to follow the red parts of the Bible, which is really difficult because people will annoy me and I will find myself wanting to dope slap them, and Jesus definitely tells us not to dope slap people, no matter how annoying they are.

Anyway, you have no idea the lengths to which I go to avoid the ugly, divisive underbelly of contentious Christianity, even within my own denomination, so I will confess right here and now that I had never heard of "prosperity theology" before learning of this particular controversy. I have no idea if the accusations of heresy being hurled at the Osteens are valid or not, and I am glad that we've come a long way from the days of the Inquisition so they need not fear for their lives at the hands of the righteously indignant.

I believe that, mostly, we're all just trying to find our way through this life as best we can, and we seriously need to love one another because that's what Jesus said for us to do. Love one another and don't dope slap people.

It's in the Sermon on the Mount, I'm sure.

I love Jesus, and because of that, I don't plan on wasting His time by praying for winning numbers for the lottery. Generally, I ask Him what He wants me to do and not what He can do for me. And when I go to church, it's most definitely to worship God because I'm actually perfectly happy sitting at home on Sunday morning in my jammies sipping coffee and pinning stuff on Pinterest.

So I'm going to share my perspective on this issue with a quotation from C.S. Lewis (so you know I'm not alone in my opinion).

We're Christians. Let's choose to focus on Christ, on the red parts of the Bible, on loving-kindness and compassion.

Peace, love, and harmony coming at you from Madison.