Think And Let Think

If you don’t have one already, Holy Week will give you a low anthropology. It shows us at our worst. It’s not just the story of good vs. evil. It’s also the result of such human sentiments. Disagreements, jealousy, moral posturing, denial, betrayal. It’s not an easy thing to reckon with, that when God in the flesh comes to spend time among us, we nail God to the cross. Hence the great Lenten prayer of confession: Lord, we have erred and strayed from thy ways like lost sheep. We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts. We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those thing which we ought not to have done; there is no health in us. Have mercy upon us, miserable offenders. Perhaps that’s why Martin Luther said, “If I were God, I’d kick the world to pieces.” But, thankfully, Luther wasn’t God. God is God, and God doesn’t kick the world to pieces. No, God so loves the world! God keeps entering into the world, marching into our little fickle Jerusale

There are these threads in the scriptures that if you just start to pull on one of them you’ll begin to see how the whole thing is bound together. And the same happens in our relationships. How we spend our time, how we speak, think, and move, who we eat with, are very real examples of where we find our hope. And I know these might seem like really small things. What can a dinner party really accomplish? Can a card in the mail, or an handshake in the pews, or a unexpected phone call do much of anything? How does reading this scriptures, singing these songs, and praying these prayers bear fruit in our lives and in the world? Well, little things repeated over time can have a major and forming impact. It’s why so many people remember things like the Lord’s Prayer and Jesus Loves Me even when they cannot remember anything else. It’s why we lose track of time when we’re sitting at a table with friends. As the great theologian Saint Winnie the Pooh once said, “Sometimes the smallest things take up the most

Little things matter! Everything we do, whether we realize it or not, enfolds us and those near us into a vision of what we might call “the good life.” We are habituated by our habits and rituals toward the importance, or unimportance, of community, friendship, and faith. How we eat, how we speak, how we spend our time is a very real expression of where we find our hope. At some point or another we will find ourselves feeling like one of the sons in Jesus' parable. We will yearn for something that isn’t ours, or we will grow angry over perceived slights... But God, the author of salvation, is training us, habituating us, litugizing us, to see the Good News of the Gospel. Like the prodigal father who is filled with nothing but love, there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any more and there’s nothing we can do to make God love us any less. No matter what we do or leave undone, there’s always room for us at the party.

Our God is nothing if not incarnational. That is, despite what others may say, we have a very materialistic faith. God takes on flesh and moves into the neighborhood. Which means God meets us where we are, and not where we ought to be. We might imagine that to get close to God we have to do all sorts of things like sit idly by while the flood waters rise high. We might imagine that in our despair, pain, and brokenness that we’re got to cure ourselves, heal ourselves, and put ourselves back together before we can get together with God. That’s not the Gospel. God isn’t waiting for us to get it all figured out. God shows up in our lives right where we are to help re-figure us...

Amazon, Instagram, and Facebook (just to mention a few) are frighteningly good at captivating and capturing our imaginations as we spend our days exploring the digital architecture of the modern mall we call the smart phone. That why I really love that one line from the prayer of confession I shared earlier. “We have followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts.” It’s amazing how prescient a line from 1662 can be today. For, the devices we carry in our pockets absolutely drive the desires of our hearts, and most of the time we don’t even realize it, we don’t notice the water we’re swimming in. Hence, the remarkable quote from Charles Baudelaire: The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist. These forty days between Ash Wednesday and Easter are some of the most countercultural and subversive days in the entire church year. While we swim in the water of a culture driven by success, power, winning, God uses Lent to repent us, to turn us back around to the On

Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of The Little Prince, explains the power of the heart over the mind like this: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” And "teaching the longing" is exactly right. For love is a habit. We, of course, may imagine that love strikes like lightning, without explanation or warning. But we are actually habituated toward our loves. We are shaped by habits that present those things that are worth our love. Love, in short, takes practice. Our hearts are calibrated through imitation and immersion into practices that, overtime, curate our hearts to particular ends. We learn to love not primarily by acquiring information about what we should love but rather through practices that form the habits of how we love. Rituals train us to love rightly. In the church we have a different word for ritual: liturgy.

Will Willimon tells of having once served a church where there was a long standing tradition in which lay leader would rise at the conclusion of the sermon to offer a prayer. And, one Sunday after preaching a tough sermon on a difficult text, the lay leader stood up and prayed a simple, clear, and direct prayer. “Lord, today we’ve heard your word. And we don’t like it.” We don’t like this Word of the Lord because it cuts right to the heart of our faith. It’s impossible to live like this, we think. How could we ever really love our enemies? They’re our enemies for a reason! Shouldn’t we be doing the opposite of love toward them? Have you ever tried to pray for those who mistreat you? Better to run away and never think of them than to pray for them! It’s impossible, what Jesus wants us to do. Thankfully, though, nothing is impossible for God...

Robert Jenson once said, “It is a great achievement to know yourself a sinner.” It sounds paradoxical, but to know you’re a sinner puts you (and me) in a place to really listen to what Jesus is saying. Hence the parable of the publican and the pharisee. The dirty rotten scoundrel of a tax collector leaves worship justified, rather than the do-gooding religious adherent, because only he is able to confess that he is a sinner. It’s not easy to receive this sermon from Jesus (particularly the woes) but somebody has to say such things. One must really know the people to which these words are delivered lest we leave thinking the preacher is talking about other people. Bashing people with the law achieves nothing unless the one preaching is the One who comes to fulfill the Law. Martin Luther reminds us that “God receives none but those who are forsaken, restores health to none but those who are sick, gives sight to none but the blind, and life to none but the dead. God does not give saintliness to any but

People always assume that the church’s primary business is to get people to behave themselves, to teach morality, and then keep them on the right track. Which is fine, except it often leads people to feeling more overwhelmed than they were before they walked through the door. Jesus doesn’t meet Peter by the lake and clobber him with calls to righteousness and goodness and the law. He doesn’t belittle him for his lack of fish or for his lack of faith. Instead he invites him to a new reality, an adventurous life, filled with unbelievable beauty and wonder and grace. So, open you ears and eyes and hearts to what Jesus says to Peter and what Jesus says to you. Jesus comes to your life, sits down, and says, “I am with you. I will never leave you. I believe in you. I see possibilities that you can’t even imagine. I have plans for you, I’m going to show you what makes the Good News so good, or I’ll die trying.”

There’s nowhere Jesus goes without outsiders becoming insiders. That’s part of the mission. But it’s nothing new! Over and over and over again in scripture God commands the people to care for the people no one else cares about. Open your eyes, God says, to the plight of your neighbors who have no bright hope for tomorrow. Open your ears, God says, to the anguish of your enemies. Open your hearts, God says, to the very people who drive you crazy. If the gospel isn’t good news for everybody, then it isn’t good news for anybody...

Whenever there is deliverance, liberation, recovery, and release, there is the preaching of the Gospel. In other words, preaching isn’t just for preachers, it’s also for all of you. Preaching doesn’t just happen in church. It happens in our words and actions in the classroom and at the grocery store. Preaching happens at the bank and in the backyard bbq. Preaching happens in the hospital and in the home. Preaching happens whenever there is deliverance and liberation, recovery and release. It’s as if Jesus is preaching to us through scripture today and he says, “Things are not as they ought to be. People are afraid. They don’t have hope. Well, I’m here to bring good news to the poor, to announce pardon to prisoners, to include the excluded, and to set the burdened free. Who’s coming with me?”

Robert Farrar Capon said, “Whatever the church is, it should enable us to realize we are at a party of outrageous proportions; and, at the same time, it should make us want nothing so much as to shout the invitation to that party at the top of our lungs.” Is that how we feel about the faith? Is that how we feel about church? Does all of this feel more like a funeral, or a wedding? What John points to in Cana, what we are being called to see, is the glory revealed in Jesus Christ. The party that is salvation is right here and right now. We have been invited to the marriage Supper of the Lamb and we didn’t have to do a thing except show up for the festivities. Just as Jesus commandeers the wedding and becomes its host, so too Jesus has conquered the world and now rules at the right hand of the Father. This is what glory looks like. The author of the cosmos condescends to our existence and opens up the doors and clears the dance floor and says, "The time has come to celebrate!"

With the magi and the manger we discover how the kingdom inaugurated in Jesus extends even to the Gentiles. And with the baptism in the Jordan we learn that we do not have the righteousness we require to acquire the kingdom, but that’s okay because Jesus fulfills all righteousness. In other words, the heavens open at the river not just for Him, but also for all of us.

The wild proclamation of the Gospel, made manifest in a baby in a manger surrounded by some certainly strange gifts, is that God knows everything about us, the resolutions we keep and break, and chooses to be with us anyway. You see, this odd God delights in getting down in the muck and mire of life to dwell among us. This odd God speaks and heals and teaches and preaches and reveals the truth that we all need but struggle to believe. This odd God even goes to the cross on our behalf, manifesting the paradoxology of the Gospel: There’s nothing you can do to make God love you any more, and there’s nothing you can do to make God love you any less...

The strange and serious proclamation of Christmas is that though things change, we’re always in the moment of Christmas. Even when we snuff out the candles, and get in our cars, and go to bed, we’re still in Christmas. Because Christmas is the miracle of God making time for us...

Here’s the truth of Christmas, the great proclamation of the Gospel - God makes time for you and me. And not only that, but God has given us all the time in the world, redeemed our time and our foolish use of it because Christmas is the reminder of the lengths to which God was and is willing to go to give us the one thing we really need. The wonderful word of Christmas is "with." God takes on flesh in Jesus Christ and moves into the neighborhood "with" us. There is, of course, elements of “for” in Jesus’ life: Jesus is for us when he teaches and heals. Jesus is for us when he dies on the cross and rises on Easter. Jesus does for us what we can’t do for ourselves. But the power of what God does for us is made manifest because God is with us.

Mary praises God through song for cracking open the heavens and pouring out justice on a world thirsty for it. She points to the power of the Spirit because her Son will relieve the proud and powerful from their self-righteousness, and He will fill the poor with more than money can buy. And she sings of it already having happened because time is different with God. The incarnation is not God’s last minute hail Mary to fix the world. It is, was, and always will be God’s decision to dwell with us. In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God. God was always going to dwell with us because God always dwells with us and God will always dwell with us...

Willie Jennings says that Joy is an act of resistance against despair and its forces. Again, it’s not living in denial, it’s not pretending things are better than they are. The joy we speak of in the church is the knowledge that, like the crowds who gather to hear J the B, we really are a brood of vipers. Seriously, according to the witness of the Word we’re all on the naughty list. But the axe is lying at the root of the tree because God is cutting down our sin and using it for the divine bonfire the banishes the darkness forever.

John the Baptist appears in the middle of nowhere and says to the gathered people, “Here comes the Lord! Get ready to change direction, be surprised, all shook up, and turned upside down. Hills are coming down and valleys are filling up!” In other words, when J the B shows up he says, “You can’t stay the same!” God is up to something! God is on the move! And God is going to get what God wants. We, of course, can certainly put up a fight and make a mess of the whole operation. But God’s cut-and-fill operation is already among us...

Jesus is reminding us that no matter how broken things seem, nothing is so broken that God can’t make something beautiful out of the brokenness. There is no soil so ruined that God isn’t willing to toss another seed on it. There is no sinner so sinful that God can’t make a saint out of them. Frederick Buechner said that the grace of God is the declaration that beautiful and terrible things will happen but we need not be afraid because God will be with us, always. Advent, as we’ve been saying, is the time when time gets confused. We look backward, forward, and everywhere in between. But one thing that endures through time is the hope we have in the Lord. It’s that hope that sustains us through what is coming upon the world. The time being really is the most trying time of all, but we can look straight into the darkness because we know the dawn will break from on high.