Think And Let Think

Our world runs on avarice - Extreme greed for wealth or material goods. It’s the lie we were fed as children, and it’s the lie that we feed to our children. It is reinforced on every magazine cover, in every instagram post, and with every commercial on TV. Happiness is yours if you acquire this thing. And it’s all a lie.

Jesus doesn’t come just to show the disciples, and us, a new way of life but is, himself, the new way. This can be rather frustrating for the many of us who want Jesus to just be clear about what we should and shouldn’t do. Contrary to what we often hear from the church, Jesus is not waiting around for us to be perfect, but simply says the time has come for us to recognize how last, lost, least, little, and dead we all are.

Jesus is free among the dead - He is the one who, again and again, is with the last, the least, the lost, the little, and the dead. If we want the parable to tell us to imitate the Good Samaritan, which it certainly does, then that’s fine. But if that’s all the Good Samaritan is good for, then it isn’t very good. Instead it leaves people like you and me feeling fine and guilty. We feel fine in terms of thinking about times we have been neighborly toward our neighbors, or it can leave us feeling guilty about the many times we haven’t. When, in fact, the whole story is about how Jesus is the one down in the ditch. That he, the Lord of lords, has condescended himself to our miserable existence and can be found in the place of our own ditch-ness and suffering.

We will never ever be able to enjoy the gift of the resurrection, a gift handed to us for nothing, if we cannot face the absurdity of our own forgiveness.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with wanting to be better - it’s just that in spite of our desires for approval and change and growth, the work of the Lord remains steadfast. Jesus saves losers and only losers. He raises the dead and only the dead. He finds the lost and only the lost. The last, least, lost, little, and dead receive more of Jesus’ joy than all of the winners in the world. And we can’t stand it.

Religion, in the many ways it manifests itself, often only has one thing to say: people like you and me need to do something in order to get God to do something. We need only be good enough, or faithful enough, or merciful enough, until we tip the scales back in our favor. But this kind of religious observance, which is most religious observance, traps us in a game that we will always and forever lose. It’s bad news. But Jesus comes to bring Good News.

The resurrection of Jesus is completely contrary to our way of being. It is completely contrary because we have nothing to do with it. Jesus wasn’t waiting in the grave until there was the right amount of belief in the world before he broke free from the chains of Sin and Death. Jesus wasn’t biding his time waiting for his would-be followers to engage in systems of perfect morality before offering them the gift of salvation. The Good News is that Jesus Christ was resurrected from the dead. But the even better news is the fact that Jesus was raised from the dead whether we believe it or not.

The crucifixion of Jesus puts to an end the religious categories that separate people from one another and unites us under a common banner. We might want that banner to be a declaration of love, or grace, or mercy. But the thing under which we are all included is actually our guilt. We, all of us, are the ungodly. And yet Christ dies, for us.

We Christians are a people forever stuck in the past. And we can hardly be blamed; we only know what we know. But on Maundy Thursday we are compelled to get our sense of time confused. For tonight we do what we do both in remembrance and in anticipation.

There will always be more for us to do, but the one thing we could never do has already been done for us. The work of Christ, life-death-resurrection, provides all the enoughness we could ever really hope for. It is the sign that though we are unworthy, Christ makes us worthy, though we have sinned, Christ offers pardon, though we feel empty, Christ proclaims that we are enough.

The elder brother is so convinced, too convinced, that doing all of the right things will be enough to save him. His refrain is “I did everything I was supposed to. I stayed home. I took care of my responsibilities. I planned accordingly. I was perfect.” And yet his life is anything but perfect. And he cannot stand the idea of his father throwing a party for his brother who deserves nothing. But we all deserve nothing.

The cross is the manure of grace that is spread into and throughout our lives. It is a frightening thing that we’d rather ignore or dismiss, and yet without it we are nothing. And still, the manure that is grace is offered to our lives even when, and precisely because, we are not bearing fruit! We worship a God of impossible possibilities, a God who offers more chances than we ever deserve, a God who willingly drops manure on our lives over and over again. The cross is like manure; it is good and bad and ugly. But it is also our salvation.

There is a great leveling on the hill called Golgotha. Because until that moment, as Jesus says, the house was left to us. And when the house is left to us we, more often than not, like to chose who is able to join us in the house. We like to create our own rules about who is first and who is last, who is right and who is wrong, who is included and who is excluded. But so long as the house is left to us, it will not look like the kingdom of God. Instead it will be a place that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it. It will be a place where longer tables and wider doors lead to more anger, more vitriol, and more violence. It will be a place of our own making, and therefore our own doom.

We are so much a people of the world, rather than the kingdom, that it is nearly impossible to see the temptation story from any point of view other than the devil’s - If you take away the fact that Jesus is the Son of God, take away the fact that we know the end of the story, the devil’s questions sound pretty good... That’s crazy. It’s a crazy thing to realize, here at the beginning of our own Lenten journeys, that the person with whom we have to most in common in this story isn’t Jesus, but the devil.

On Ash Wednesday we gather, we listen, and we faintly begin to grasp that there is quite literally nothing we can do to get God to love us more. We look deeply into our sins, the sins of the church, and the sins of the world and we inexplicably come into contact with the God who extends mercy to us even in the midst of our horrible condition. While we were still sinners, Christ died for us. We can’t earn it. We don’t deserve it. And yet it is given to us.

We started the recent General Conference in prayer and we even had a cross up at the front of the room, but there was one person who was conspicuously absent from the proceedings: Jesus. Sure, I heard a lot about what it says in Leviticus. I heard a lot about Paul. I heard people quote precisely from John Wesley. But Jesus? I honestly don’t know where Jesus was while we were trying to figure out the future of his church. In fairness to our Lord, it felt like he had better things to do than witness the devolution of an institution whose motto is “Do No Harm.”

It is crazy that the United Methodist Church has the potential to go up (or down) in flames in the next ten days all over a debate about what does and what does not count as a sin when every one of our sins has already been taken up in the cross.

Christ died for our sins. He was buried in the ground. He was raised on the third day. To Paul, this was of first importance. Not our behavior. Not even a list of beliefs. But a story. The story.

If God is love, then so is Jesus. Jesus is patient; Jesus is kind; Jesus is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. Jesus does not insist on his own way; Jesus is not irritable or resentful; Jesus does not rejoice in wrong doing, but rejoices in the truth. Jesus bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Jesus never ends. So, we can go and love the people around us. We can even love the people we hate. The world could certainly use a little more love. But there is a big difference between “be love” and “be loved.” The former is the Law. And the latter is the Gospel.

There are many things we can do on our own, but being a Christian is not one of them.