THE PASSION AND SUFFERING

And he said, "The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, chief priests and teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life."  Then he said to them all: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will save it. (Luke 9:22-24)

During the days of Jesus' life on earth, he offered up prayers and petitions with loud cries and tears to the one who could save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverent submission. Although he was a son, he learned obedience from what he suffered and, once made perfect, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him … (Heb. 5:7-9)

Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us. Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. Consider him who endured such opposition from sinful men, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart (Heb. 12:1-3)

  Our relatively comfortable life makes it hard for us to connect with passion themes. For most of us, suffering and tragedy are aberrations—things that happen to others. They come as rare exceptions that prove the rule—that life for us in this world is basically good because we belong to God, who has a wonderful plan for our lives.

  Perhaps beginning with 9/11 and now most recently with a series of catastrophic natural calamities we have been jolted to better senses, to more biblical wits, at least for a while. We became acutely aware of the painful realities that make up daily life for many in the world. The tragedy we saw, and in varying degrees felt, was from the world’s perspective simply the rule to which our reality had been a curious, alluring, but deceptive exception.

  That suffering comes as a fact of life is not news to most of the world’s peoples. This majority may be in the better position to appreciate the wonder and depth of meaning of the Lenten season: first, that God should enter our painful human history and identify so completely that God suffers and dies; and second, that our infinitely smaller degrees of suffering are not beyond redemption. That, in fact, God takes the worst and enfolds it into his gracious plan to bless and eventually to restore the human enterprise to original glory.

  So it is that God uses especially the hard and harsh realities of our lives to make us bearers of his glory. I’m wondering these days whether Jesus didn’t have this in mind, at least in part, when he called the first disciples to follow him, a call that now comes to us. Certainly, the radical obedience that embraces self-sacrificing love on behalf of others often incurs at least static from the culture’s alien atmosphere, if not outright opposition. Add to that the “stuff” that happens to us no less than to others as we shoulder cross and put one foot in front of the other.

  But how often have I regarded that “stuff,” and the mild opposition I’ve met, as a hindrance to my journey with Jesus! In fact, however, I’m learning that the “stuff” may become a powerful means of grace. I’m learning that the brokenness and the pain can drive me to a desperate dependence upon God, and God’s ways at work in the world. Only at such times am I likely to cry, with Jesus, “Father, into your hands I commend myself,” to exclaim with Paul, “to me to live is Christ, and to die is gain,” and to keep my eyes firmly fixed on Jesus.

 

ENVISIONING THE CHURCH

Richard Stearns, President of World Vision, writes: “the world we live in  is under siege—three billion are desperately poor, one billion hungry, millions are trafficked in human slavery, ten million children die needlessly each year, wars and conflicts are wreaking havoc, pandemic diseases are spreading, ethnic hatred is flaming, and terrorism is growing.  Most of our brothers and sisters in Christ in the developing world live in grinding poverty.  And in the midst of this stands the church of Jesus Christ in America, with resources, knowledge, and tools unequaled in the history of Christendom.  I believe we stand on the brink of a defining moment.”*

I agree.  I envision a church that reclaims our design and destiny as created in God’s image and participates in God’s plan to reclaim, restore or recreate all that is.  I envision a church that reflects the beauty of that image in the person of Christ, and that God empowers by his Spirit to carry on the very ministries of Christ.  I envision a church that follows Jesus Christ to the people, to all the people, in such desperate need, a church that finds a way to speak and act to address and eliminate the siege Stearns notes above.  I envision a church that understands the call to holiness and to make disciples in just these terms because that is most consistent with the clearest picture God gives us of what God has planned—the person of Jesus himself!

Such a church will step up, meet the challenges of the present moment, and give the world cause to wonder whether the message we preach isn’t good after all!

*Richard Stearns, The Hole in our Gospel, p. 238.

LIVING ON THE FAULT-LINE, PART 2

In the aftermath of great tragedy, of human or “natural” origin, if we have eyes to see it, we realize that the powers that seem to hold everything together are losing their grip; they are not to be trusted, no matter what they promise.  Life on the fault lines of the present age is shaky through and through.  So, Jesus urges, repent—turn and run for your life!

 

In Luke’s gospel Jesus begins his ministry by reading Isa 61, and then making the astonishing claim that he himself fulfills the prophetic word.  The prophet had said:

 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor." (4:18-19 NRS)

 

As we see him doing in Matthew and Mark, Jesus announces that God is setting up his kingdom.   The Spirit is brooding over the chaos of this world in and through Jesus, with new creation in mind, and this creative work is particularly for the poor, vulnerable, and the weak.  Jesus announces God’s saving work especially on behalf of those most vulnerable when the earth quakes and when shoddy construction causes the place to collapse on them.  He speaks especially for those most endangered when the mighty want to make a show of their power by crushing the weak.

 

In Jesus, God who is king and Lord of all is setting up his kingdom in full and final ways.  And when you look at this kingdom of God you see that it turns the present age upside down and then pulls it inside out. Top become bottom, floor becomes ceiling, solid becomes soft, strong is shown to be weak, secure suddenly looks scary, outside comes inside and inside goes outside.

 

This kingdom Jesus brings strikes the kingdoms of this world like the mother of all earthquakes!  And it makes sense to run for your life.  “Unless you repent, you’ll all likewise perish.”

 

In other words: Jesus, the Messiah, shows up to say, “What you’ve been waiting for your whole life has come within reach here and now!”   What good news! 

 

But then as he begins to elaborate, you realize Jesus is talking about a totally different way of living that makes no sense according to the Standard Operating Procedures of this world.  Some examples:

 

* Jesus’ kingdom is ordered by love, especially for enemies, expressed in non-retaliation in the face of hostility and aggression, and generous acts of care instead. 

 

Imagine a foreign policy or your own interpersonal relationships operating on those terms!  Jesus even claims that it is this way of love that will, in the end, achieve the victory! 

 

* Jesus insists it is more blessed to give than receive.  Imagine an economy ordered by that!  Imagine a standard of living driven by that understanding of blessing!

 

* Jesus taught the way to live life to the full is to lay it down, to give it up, even to the point of death.  It is to lose self in pursuit of God’s best for others.  You take care of yourself, by forgetting yourself. 

 

Imagine the empty shelves at book stores if people believed that were the rule!  Imagine the ratings implosion for all the talk shows if that rule prevailed!

 

To be clear: Jesus’ kingdom envisions following him both in understanding and living life in such ways.  Thus, the longer you listen to Jesus explain what he’s up to, what this kingdom is about, the more you realize you can’t have it both ways, or multiple ways.  If you’re going to live His way, you can’t live in those other ways.  Indeed, the more Jesus talks about kingdom, the more you see why Jesus urgently calls people to repent, to run for your life, and come in to this new way of being human he’s showing us.  It’s because this age is passing away, the kingdoms of this world cannot and will not stand.

 

In Port au Prince, Haiti everyone is living on the streets or at best in temporary tent-shelters.  Everyone.  Those few who lived in mansions before and those who lived in small apartments with large extended families—all of them now live on the street or in tents.

 

When you live on a fault-line, you have no more security and ultimately no greater prosperity in a mansion than you do in a mud hut, once the earthquake strikes.  If you think your home or your bank account or your connections to people of means provide you security, rest assured when the earth quakes the truth will demonstrate otherwise.

 

But here now is the opportunity we all have, in the relative calm before the earthquake.  We can run for our life and we can run to our life. We can turn from what offers no real security to the One who does. We can invest ourselves in the Person who is even now at work to make right all the wrongs that earthquakes painfully reveal.  We can build our life around his solid person and his sure path and plan, which alone will prove secure and provide a future.

 

The call of the gospel to each of us is this: here and now, on the fault-lines of this world, come, enter in, run for and to your Life, solid, sure, and safe.  Receive His kingdom, enter into His ways, become rooted in a kingdom which cannot be shaken.

 

I am amazed by the incredible witness of our bros and sisters in Christ in Haiti and Chile and I am amused to watch as the news people are stunned when they interview them.  They can hardly fathom how the Haitians seemed not to be defined by the earthquake rubble!  They don’t get it.

 

Listen to Jesus on this: if your life is defined by stuff, it will be defined by stuff during and after the earthquake.  It will be the same basic stuff after the quake, just in a different form! 

 

You’re life is either defined by this present age and its stuff—which is passing away, shaky all over the place, or your life will be defined by the age to come which, by the way, is already here when you walk with Jesus in his ways!

 

There is also a word for us as a people and a church, for those with ears to hear it.  Jesus follows his call to repent with a story: a man planted a fig tree in his vineyard and year after year, three in a row, at harvest time went looking for fruit.  But never found any.

 

This so exasperated the owner that he decided to cut the tree down.  The gardener, however, said, let’s give it one more year.  Let’s give special attention …  Let’s see what happens, (see Lk 13:6-9 for the story).

 

This way of speaking was familiar in Jesus’ day.  Israel had often been described as a vine or plant or tree that the Lord planted, intended to bless the whole world.  But repeatedly Israel didn’t bear the expected fruit.  In Israel, the tree began to believe that it existed simply for its own sake—after all, the Lord planted us and will protect us.  Israel received the blessings of God, but forgot that blessing received had to be shared to remain a blessing.

 

But what Israel refused to do, Israel’s Messiah, Jesus, now is doing.  Now in Jesus, Israel has its chance to bear fruit for God. Israel can accept God’s kingdom and live as citizens of God’s kingdom through Jesus.  Israel can participate in the kingdom blessings meant for the entire world.

 

Will Israel now bear fruit?  That was the question Jesus put to his first hearers?   Will Israel give itself for the sake of the world, participate in Jesus’ mission?  Bear fruit?

 

The same question now comes to us as Church.  Will we bear fruit? Will we display in credible ways what God’s kingdom is really like before the 21st century world that seems oh so shaky these days?  Will we view our worship and service for the Lord first for the sake of the Lord’s world, for the sake of the others who are not yet with us? Will we welcome people who need good news in the worst ways? 

 

Even more, will we follow Jesus who brings his kingdom to our world?  Will we go to them—however opportunity presents itself to us?   Will we show and tell others what God is up to in our world?

 

 

 

LIVING ON THE FAULT-LINE, PART 1

Where were you on 9/11?  No doubt you can remember as I can.  It was an event that etched itself into our collective as well as individual memories.   I also recall my shock and dismay when I heard one prominent Televangelist say that the 9/11 attack on the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center was an act of divine judgment.  He was claiming that it happened because people were really, really bad. 

Can you also recall where you were you on 1/12/10 when the earth beneath Haiti broke, breaking most of what was on top of that part of the earth as well?  From where I was, I sadly experienced some déjà vu when I heard: that the same TV clergy had (again) concluded that God was clearing the land of all that voodoo.  So, again, when the buildings collapsed it was because some were really, really bad. Now, it’s Chile.  But, thankfully, no word from our TV friend—yet! 

Well, not only is he wrong, he’s quite unoriginal.  People have long loved to speculate in this way.  Some in Jesus’ day told him about Gov Pilate’s slaughter of people in the very act of worship and Jesus knew what they were thinking: someone was really, really bad.  Jesus also knew what they thought of the poor folk recently crushed when the tower in Siloam fell on them: God was judging some really, really bad people. (see Luke 13:1-5 for the story).

Jesus likewise knows how easily our minds go there; how it seems we are hard-wired to utter such assessment of tragedy.  When we experience or see some tragedy, why else would we wonder, “What’d I do wrong?”

Jesus objects with strong prophetic urgency.  “No, that’s not what’s happening.  That’s not the why of it.  Knock it off!”  Ok, so I’m reading between the lines here, but what we know for sure is this: in response to these outrageous instances of suffering which squash righteous and unrighteous alike, which break our hearts and shatter all the categories that normally make sense of life, Jesus calls those who weren’t squashed to repent. Then he warns that the alternative to repentance is total, comprehensive destruction:  You will all likewise perish. 

He doesn’t say: “They should have repented, because as you know they were really, really bad.  (And, if they had repented maybe it wouldn’t have happened!)  So, as a lesson, you must be sure to repent should it ever happen that you make a mistake.”  No, he tells the people who weren’t squashed, who assumed they were basically OK and certainly not really, really bad—he tells them to repent. 

 He speaks to them as though they’re not OK.  And, they conclude Jesus must not be OK.

What is Jesus doing here?  Why does he tell them that when the earth quakes in Haiti or Chile we should repent? 

I suggest that the heinous crimes of Pilate, the tragic collapse of the tower in Siloam, and the devastation of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile all of these reveal the sobering fact that we are living on the fault lines of this present age. (You get my imagery: An earthquake happens when sections of the subsurface earth separate and shift.  The seams where the shifting occurs are the fault lines)

People who live on the fault line must do something about that—otherwise they are likely to be swallowed by disaster when the earth moves again.  Let me explain a bit.

Jesus’ call to repent repeats a basic theme of his entire life.  In gospel of Matthew and Mark he begins his ministry by saying:

“The time has come, God’s kingdom is present, here & now—so, repent!”

God’s rule and God’s will at work in, among and through His people now breaks into this world.  It is gaining a foothold with a view to one day reclaiming and returning the cosmos to the very good condition it had in the beginning.

Another way to say it is: Something is now afoot; the ground underneath us is shifting.  All of a sudden it seems we find ourselves on a fault line of the world as it now is.  So, it’s time to find solid ground, to move to a place that will bear not only your weight and that of other people, but also the weight of a born-again universe!

In calling us to repent Jesus uncovers the shaky, fragile, insubstantial basis on which people & the world live apart from the God he reveals as Father and king of all.  When Jesus says repent, he’s saying, “Can you feel it, the rumbling?  The ground is moving.  It’s time to run for your life, to run from what is shaky to what is solid.”   The earthquake tells us the whole earth is broken, along with everything on it. 

When towers fall, or tyrants terrorize, it tells you the powers that seem to hold everything together are losing their grip; they are not to be trusted, no matter what they promise.  Life on the fault line is shaky through and through.  So, repent—turn and run for your life!

Lent is the season when we are made more keenly aware that we live precisely on the fault-lines of this shattered and shaky world.  We consider the “footholds” we have and perceive how precarious they are.  We turn from these and run to the One whose community cannot be shaken.

More next time!

 

WHY I NEED LENT

We have just entered the season made sacred by Jesus’ urgent invitation: “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross daily and follow me” (Luke 9:23). I confess my need of Lent—that time of the year when the mind’s eye and the heart’s ear give acute attention to the sin that necessitated the cross of Jesus, to the diabolical stratagems of denial and dismissal that would minimize our own and maximize other’s complicity in that sin, to the continuing need all Christ-followers have of remembering the sacred story and, in remembering, reenacting it, and to confess the desperate, never-ending need we all have for mercy and grace.

 

I need Lent even when I do not feel the need. Centuries of faithful following of my spiritual forebears convince me that “not feeling” the need actually signals the depth of my need. How foolish to allow my present insensibility to trump the persistent witness of countless brothers and sisters who have “felt better” than I sometimes do.

 

I need Lent for reasons not unique, but common to all who desire the company of Jesus.

I forget the way of the cross that Christ trod for me, or at least I allow that way to recede into the background, even though the call is to take up the cross daily. Forgetting almost always leads to diminishing, diminishing the cost of cross-bearing for Jesus, and therefore the grace of assuming that cost for me. Diminishing can even lead to trivializing, so that the cross becomes a trinket—whether literally merely a piece of jewelry to wear or figuratively as only a familiar concept with which I am conversant. In both forms, cross-as-trinket “proves” my orthodoxy even as it imperils my soul. So, I need this time to recall, to re-envision Jesus’ painful path, to let his torturous way for me sink into my soul, and to lay me low in my unworthiness only to lift me into the arms of LOVE! Once lifted, great gratitude displaces conquered pride and the energy of new resolve joins with spiritual power for the next steps on the journey.

 

I need Lent because I truly long to walk in closer and unhindered fellowship with the Living Lord. He has invited me to walk with, as well as follow after, him. We have a relationship, the two of us, though it is not exclusive and private, rather reaching out to others who would join us. Because we’re all bound by blood-bought and love-laced relationship, rather than some sort of legal contract, our interaction becomes close, inevitably leading to irritation and offense. I do not normally intend to hurt people, certainly not our Lord, nor others, and God’s grace and Spirit have restored much within me that has often hindered my expression of loving intention. Still, within these relationships I sometimes hurt others. And, since I usually do not intend to hurt, I easily rationalize, minimize, or even deny the hurt. But hurt is hurt, and hurt hurts! If I am involved in hurting anyone in any way, I must own it, confess it, repent of it, and seek restoration and deepening of the relationship with the other person and my Lord. The weeks of Lent provide special opportunities to consider the hurting that may be part of my relationships. And the season is long enough that this consideration could become holy habit.

 

I need Lent because I am so eager to get past the cross to the glory. I am keen to take up my cross once for all and be done with it. I am often dull to the fact that this call is daily, on going, and simply the way of all Christ-followers. I am charmed into thinking that glory somehow exists independently from, or at least beyond, the cross. When, in fact, cross and glory always go hand in glove. In fact, the victory and power I’ve imagined as somehow beyond cross-bearing finds its normal and supernatural habitat precisely in cross-bearing, in denying the idolatry of self, in a death to the lust of flesh, pride of life, and lure of the devil. How am I to know victory over these enemies of God’s kingship in my life? Only as the Spirit of God frees me and empowers me to take up the cross in the particulars of my daily life. What are those particulars? Where am I most vulnerable? Where have I compromised, given in to the seduction of an easier way? How have I made peace with some rival to the pre-eminence of Christ? What needs to be nailed to the cross, to the glory and good of his Kingdom? Ah, this is the season when such questions press for answers. Shouldn’t they always? Of course, but again, the season encourages habits that are helpful and holy.

 

I need Lent because though I have some sense of recurring need (as I’ve indicated above), I cannot know fully and finally all that I need. What grace I find in seasons of the year when I allow Another to diagnose my needs! How often the Spirit addresses needs I knew about, only to uncover and point to things that had escaped my notice. Indeed, the latter are sometimes the most important.

 

Jesus solemnly declared that those who seek to save themselves will lose themselves, and he promised that those who lose themselves will find their true selves and real life. Implicit in the declaration and promise is the truth that I do not know what I need without help, which comes only be relinquishing myself to the care of Another. Perhaps that relinquishment is itself my most basic need!