Looking for an Encounter with the Living God

    A couple weeks ago, something I wrote on Facebook went viral. Well, sort of. It was a comment on a post in a group called Grown & Flown for parents of emerging adults, and it received more than 2,500 reactions and almost 200 comments. Which probably isn’t truly “viral” as these things are measured, but it was still a bigger audience than anything else I’ve ever done on social media. 

    The original post was anonymous, from a member of Grown & Flown, a Facebook group for parents of teenagers and young adult children, who was struggling with the fact that her young adult children had not embraced the faith that was so important to her. From the many responses, it’s obvious that she’s not alone. Indeed, one-third of Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2010) describe themselves as being of no particular religion. 

 

    How did they get there? We often blame Sunday sports for keeping kids away from church, or parents who embraced the sacraments but not a lived faith, or even clergy and Sunday School teachers for failing in our solemn duty to teach the next generation. And it’s likely all of those have played a role. But my experience with my “viral” comment and with my own children suggests something deeper may be going on.

 

    The Grown & Flown member was not someone who had the baby baptized and somehow expected faith to take root and grow with no further effort on her part. She was a regular churchgoer and was intentional about making sure her children received instruction in the faith.  She had talked about her faith and why it mattered to her. There was no obvious clash between the Zoomer generation’s core values of inclusion and tolerance and her church’s teachings. But still, her 17-year-old and 19-year-old were not interested in the faith she had tried to instill.

 

This is what I wrote in response:

 

As an Episcopal priest, I often tell parents that our goal is not to make sure our children understand God the way we do, but to give them the kind of foundation that when they find themselves longing for God’s presence, they know where to look. The rest is up to the Holy Spirit. 

You feel sad because you want your children to have the kind of relationship with God that you have found so powerful. This is not a desire to force them to follow your path, but rather the offering of what you see as a most precious gift, and finding the recipient has returned it to the store because it wasn’t their style.

The good news is that this is a gift that will be there waiting when/if the day comes when they wish they had kept it. It will be available in different colors and styles to fit the person they are, and the person they will become. It will fit perfectly, even if it looks nothing like the gift you thought you were giving.

As for you, pray for them. Pray your love for them. Ask God to look after them and lead them. Ask God to reveal Godself to them. And then entrust them to God’s care, knowing that God loves them even more than you do, but God sees more than we do. For encouragement, the Bible offers us many stories of people who trusted God — reluctantly, doubtfully, uncertainly, fearfully, but still decided to trust. Read and meditate on Abraham and Sarah, Rebecca, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, Elijah, Peter and Jesus. Rinse and repeat, which is the essential core of growing faith. 

And sympathy — I have a son who is agnostic and a daughter who is faithful but not interested in church. I trust them and God to find their paths, as it right for them. For as Paul says in his letter to the Romans, there is nothing that can separate us from the love of God.

 

    My response comes out of my own lived experience, but I tend to think most good theology does. After all, that’s where all our theology is grounded – in Bible stories of people who encountered God and shared what they learned about God. And this is what I have learned about God – God is trustworthy and God is love.

 

    Those two things, God’s trustworthiness and God’s love, is what my whole faith is built on. They are affirmed again and again in the pages of scripture, as God works in partnership with people to call forth the world envisioned by the Creator and shared through the prophets. They are embodied in the life and ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. And if God is trustworthy and God is love, then God is not disappointed in my children any more than I am. 

 

    My daughter openly claims her Christian identity; she loves God and values Christian community. But she’s at an age where she’s moving every few years, and the thought of searching for the kind of church community she longs for—a church where everyone is deeply valued and no one is left behind, young or old, black or white, gay or straight, cisgender or trans, where all means all and God’s love is lived out, however imperfectly, over blueberry muffins at coffee hour – feels overwhelming. It shouldn’t be hard to find, but she is daunted by too many stories shared by people who were hurt by churches whose welcome was limited to those who agreed with them. And she knows that even if she finds a church, she’ll only have to leave it behind when she turns the next page in her life. 

 

    Meanwhile, my son the agnostic is still waiting for God to reveal Godself to him. He understands and lives the fundamental tenets of Christianity more fully than many who loudly proclaim their Christian faith, but the universe is a big and strange place, and he finds many of Christianity’s claims unbelievable. He’s open to the idea of God, but is doubtful God is what others have claimed God to be. Like Thomas the Apostle, he needs to put his finger in the wounds of Christ before he will believe; like Saul of Tarsus, he needs a personal encounter with the Risen Christ before he can believe that the stories are true.

 

    Judging from the thousands who responded with love and like and gratitude for my words, the Grown & Flown member and I are not alone. We are living in a world where our children do not automatically follow in our footsteps in their careers, or their choice of spouse, or where they choose to live. They are expected to forge their own path in every other aspect of their lives, so  why did we think their religious faith would be any different? 

 

    And why would we think this would anger God? God, who called Abraham to leave behind everything he had every known to become the father of nations and a light to the world. God, who sent the prophet Isaiah to reassure the Israelites living in exile in Babylon with this promise: “Forget the former things;    do not dwell on the past. See, I am doing a new thing! Do you not perceive it?” And God in Christ, who stood on the shore in Galilee and said, “Follow me, and I will make you fish for people” to four men who immediately put down their nets and followed him into a new and very different life than they had ever imagined. I wonder if this is how Zebedee felt, watching his sons walk away from the boat. Surely, he must have felt very similar to how we feel, watching our children walk away from our churches. Is it possible they are also answering a call that we did not hear and do not fully understand? 

 

    When I think about my children, and about the children of all those who clicked the little thumbs up on my comment, I think it is entirely possible they are. The Barna Group, an organization devoted to tracking the role of faith in American life, says that it’s not Jesus this generation is rejecting, just the church. While a sizable majority have a positive view of Jesus, half or less have positive views of local churches and pastors. And if we are honest with ourselves, it’s not without reason.  It is undeniably true that we in the church have not always loved one another as God has loved us. We have not loved our neighbors as ourselves. Our churches have fallen far short of being outposts of the Kingdom of God, and our children are right to be disappointed. 

 

    It is natural that those of us who love our churches and have found great meaning and comfort in our faith communities should leap to their defense. But what if we didn’t? What if, instead of telling our children why they need us, we invited them to help us make the church more like what it was intended to be? What if we really, truly meant it, and took their advice and embraced them as leaders in our communities? Even more boldly, what if we followed them out of the church and into the community and lived out God’s love and God’s trustworthiness there? 

 

    Andrew Root, in his book Churches and the Crisis of Decline, writes about the challenges the church faces in a secular age. “Westerners hold onto the idea of God (most of us “believe” in God at least in America) but few of us are sure we can encounter this God,” he says. “Most people, even in our churches, would not claim that church is for encountering a living God who speaks and moves in the world.” 

 

    But this is exactly what our Episcopal tradition assures us the church is there to offer – the Real Presence of the Risen Christ, received in bread and wine and joining us together as the visible Body of Christ in the world.  And it is exactly what so many of our children are looking for – an encounter with the Living God.  

 

    There is no guarantee that if we invite them to church they will have precisely the experience they are looking for. But what we can do is be people who hold open the space for such things to happen. We can practice love and forgiveness for one another, confessing our mistakes and listening to the voices of those trying to tell us we got it wrong. We can teach one another and others how to recognize the Holy Spirit when She shows up. We can practice faith that genuinely seeks to see Christ in everyone who comes through the door – where all means all and love doesn’t depend on conforming with a particular set of standards and expectations. We can learn humility, so that when God surprises us by showing up in ways we didn’t expect and really didn’t want, we’re open to the movement of the Spirit. We can tell our own stories about the trustworthiness and love of God and listen to theirs.

 

    I don’t know if that will save our institutions or not. Maybe like the Israelites in Babylon, we will need to forget the former things so that we can perceive the new thing that God is doing. Maybe the children we think have walked away from our boats are actually moving closer to God and someday will come back with stories of Resurrection, ready to invite us to join them as they begin something new. 

 

    All we can do is trust that God loves our children at least as much as we do, because as John wrote to the early church, God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God in them. God is not finished with us or with the world, and the only thing I am sure of is that the Good News will continue to be good news to a generation yet unborn, even if it is in ways I cannot imagine. 

Keeping the Sabbath

The Lord said to Moses: You yourself are to speak to the Israelites: “You shall keep my sabbaths, for this is a sign between me and you throughout your generations, given in order that you may know that I, the Lord, sanctify you. … Six days shall work be done, but the seventh day is a sabbath of solemn rest, holy to the Lord…  It is a sign forever between me and the people of Israel that in six days the Lord made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day he rested, and was refreshed. (Exodus 31:13, 15a, 17)

Everyone is tired.

Two years of pandemic have worn us out. Wherever you go, people are saying they are tired. In church meetings, on social media, in community groups, over and over again I have heard the same refrain. We are so tired. We are worn out by all the unfamiliar things we have had to do, by trying to do more with fewer resources, by never having enough help. We are exhausted by worry and fear and loneliness. We have cared for the sick and the vulnerable until we have nothing left. 

We are overdue for a rest. But the grind goes on, the daily needs never cease, the nightly news gives us new fears and worries. Somehow, now is never the time. There are too many things that need to be done, too much that requires our attention. Maybe later? But later never comes. 

When was the last time you observed Sabbath? Not just by rushing off to church to squeeze in an hour of worship before you tackled the day’s to-do list, but really, truly took a day of rest?  Not sure? Yeah, me too.

But God’s command to God’s people to observe the sabbath is not ambiguous. God thought rest was so important he included it in the Ten Commandments: it actually appears higher on the list than the prohibitions against murder, adultery and stealing. In Exodus, God calls it a sign forever between God and the people of Israel. The punishments outlined for failure to observe the sabbath were harsh.

In his book Sabbath as Resistance, Walter Brueggemann argues that this command to observe the sabbath calls the People of God to a radically different identity than that given us by the consumer culture that surrounds us, one that is rooted in gratitude to God and love of neighbor. Observing the sabbath turns us away from restless productivity and consumption and toward our life-giving God. 

“Sabbath is the opportunity to recall Egypt and Pharaoh and then to remember YHWH and exodus,” he writes. “Those who remember and keep Sabbath find they are less driven, less coerced, less frantic to meet deadlines, free to be, rather than to do. Because Sabbath is the great festival of freedom, when Pharaoh and all coercive expectations are dismissed…Moses, in Deuteronomy, imagines that Sabbath is not only a festival day but also a new social reality that is carried back into days one through six. People who keep Sabbath live all seven days differently.”

Like the Israelites in Egypt, we have found ourselves in the last two years constantly challenged to do more than less. We have labored heroically to make bricks without straw. But Sabbath-keeping reminds us there is a limit to what we can do and invites us to turn aside from the restlessness of a system that prizes productivity above all else. It provides time and space to breath deep and reclaim God’s liberation of us from anxiety and fear. 

In this post(?)-pandemic moment when we are all so tired, our bishops have called upon us to take some sabbath rest — to turn aside from the daily grind, from the constant need to keep things going, and rest. As Bishop Alan said to me, he’d like to be able to require this for everyone, everywhere, but his authority is limited. So he, Bishop Gayle, and our Diocesan Standing Committee have asked us to be role models for others, to bear witness to the importance of sabbath rest in our own communities. We cannot declare a sabbath for everyone  around us, but we can extend it to clergy, staff, and volunteers in our churches and in doing so bear witness to the goodness of God who calls us to sabbath rest.

At the urging of our bishops, St. Mark’s and Trinity Chapel have declared May 10-23 a post-pandemic time of Sabbath rest. During this time the office will be closed, no meetings will be scheduled, and our Sunday Worship will be a simple Morning Prayer service shared equally by all, with a simple pot-luck fellowship hour afterwards. There will be no Sunday School programming: instead, families are encouraged to participate in Morning Prayer or to enjoy family time at home. Most of all, the entire community is encouraged to set aside time during these two weeks for rest and renewal, for unhurried time for reconnection with family and friends, for prayer and reflection, and for rest. We look forward to returning to our regularly scheduled activities in the fourth week of May with renewed vigor and excitement for doing the work God has given us to do.

Personally, during this time I plan to avoid driving more than a few miles from home, to tend to the earth in my garden, and to read one of the books on ministry in changing times that I never seem to find the time or energy to begin. I will spend time with family and friends who have been somewhat neglected due to the demands of the pandemic. For this brief time, I will step away from leading public worship, where so much of my energy normally goes, in order to sit in silence in the presence of God, listening instead of speaking. 

I invite you to use this time to claim your own sabbath rest, as you most need it. Whether it’s gathering for prayer at Trinity or St. Mark’s on Sunday morning or sitting in the garden listening to the birds sing; whether it’s a nap or time spent with family and friends, I hope you will step away from the relentless demands of the appointment calendar and the to-do list to remember that our God is a God of abundance, and that there are limits to what we can do. 

Wishing you all a holy sabbath rest. 

Suzanne

Choose Life

 I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. ~ Deuteronomy 30:19-20

There are times when the choice is plain. 

 

When Moses spoke to Israel as they prepared to cross the Jordan into the Promised Land, there was a clear choice for the people to make. They could live by the Covenant they had made with the God who had saved them from slavery, or they could reject it. Choose the former, and their success in their new home was guaranteed; choose the latter, and disastrous consequences would follow. 

 

Most of the time, our choices in life aren’t quite so binary. Whether we take a particular job, go to a particular college, move to a particular city, there will be good things about it and bad things. When we are very sick, we often have multiple treatment options, and it’s not always clear which one is best. When we marry, we cannot be sure that the relationship will remain healthy and strong for a whole lifetime, no matter how firm our commitment at the outset. Most of the time, we live within the ambiguity of Robert Frost’s poem: “I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.”

 

But every now and then, we get a choice between life and death, blessings and curses. Every now and then, we receive an answer to a prayer that is so exactly what we prayed for, our next step should be obvious. 

 

For over a year, I prayed for God to send us something that would allow us to turn aside the threat of the novel coronavirus. Because I have a basic understanding of how viruses work, I prayed for scientists to receive insight in their quest for a vaccine and for wisdom for elected officials as they figured out the best way to use our resources so we would be ready to get it to millions of people as soon as we had that answer. 

 

And lo and behold, my prayers were answered. It turned out that scientists had been studying this kind of virus for many years and thinking about how they could use new technologies to make vaccines. They were able to put all those years of study to use to develop a vaccine for COVID-19 faster than had ever been done before. (Surely, God had a hand in inspiring them to study such things even before they knew what would be needed?) Elected representatives and public health officials made bold bets that such efforts would pay off and spent millions of dollars gearing up to manufacture a vaccine that they couldn’t be sure would even work. (Surely, God gave them the courage to risk public anger and professional ridicule if their confidence was misplaced?) And praise God, when the vaccines arrived, they proved to be miraculously effective, turning a deadly illness into something closer to a nuisance for almost everyone who receives the vaccine.

 

When the vaccine proved to be everything we had hoped and prayed for, I expected that our only challenge would be getting it to everyone – that everyone would want the blessing God had given us. I expected there to be massive disappointment and frustration when people couldn’t immediately get the vaccine, because it takes time to immunize millions of people. I expected to have to reassure and comfort those who couldn’t get the vaccine for medical reasons and to have to remind my brothers and sisters in Christ that we still needed to be careful for their sake. I expected, after everyone got their shots, to have to urge the now-protected to act just as urgently to get the vaccine to those outside our communities and beyond our borders who still did not have access to it.

 

I did not expect to have to persuade people to receive the blessing of the vaccine. I did not expect that after all we have been through, so many people would have to be convinced that getting vaccinated was not just in their best interest, but in the interests of their family and friends and neighbors. I did not expect to have to explain that getting the vaccine is a moral imperative for all who are able to do so. 

 

And yet, here we are. So like Moses, I call on heaven to witness that I set before you today life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life, so that you and your descendants may live.

 

The vaccine has proven remarkably safe and effective. But you don’t have to take my word for it: go to your primary care doctor and ask them. Do not listen to the false prophets on the Internet who want to plant fear in your heart – go and talk to the person you have trusted for years to advise you on how to stay healthy.

 

Do not believe people on Facebook or in the grocery store who assure you catching COVID is no big deal: talk to the people who have cared for the sick and the dying for the last 18 months. Listen to the doctors and nurses who are still holding the hands of unvaccinated patients as they gasp for breath and as they say good-bye to those they love, knowing that many who are intubated never get to speak to their families again. Trust the funeral directors and the clergy who are still caring for the bereaved, when they speak of the deep regret so many feel that their loved one did not get the vaccine while there was still time.

 

But if those stories do not convince you, consider this: our faith teaches us that even if you remain certain that you are taking a risk when you get the vaccine, the clear benefits to others make it a moral imperative to get vaccinated anyway. In the gospels, we are told that that no one has greater love than to offer one’s life for one’s friends; that Christ’s commandment is to love one another as he first loved us; that to be followers of Jesus, we must be willing to take up our own crosses. If we are to follow Jesus, we cannot refuse to take steps that we are assured will save the lives of others because we are afraid there is a slight risk to ourselves.

 

In June 2019, before anyone knew about the new virus just over the horizon, the Executive Council of the Episcopal Church passed the following resolution:

 

Resolved, That The Episcopal Church has long maintained that we are guided by faith and reason, and that scientific evidence helps us to better understand God’s creation, our place in it, and ways to alleviate suffering and pain. …

Resolved, That the proper and responsible use of vaccines is a duty not only to our own selves and families but to our communities. Choosing to not vaccinate, when it is medically safe, threatens the lives of others.

(You can find the complete text of the resolution here: https://www.episcopalarchives.org/cgi-bin/executive_council/EXCresolution.pl?exc_id=EXC062019.12)

 

This vaccine is no different from any other, except perhaps in the urgency of its use. Whatever unknown risks there might be, the known and verified benefit of lives saved from a deadly disease that continues to result in devastation and death among the unvaccinated makes the choice to receive the vaccine a simple one, between life and death, blessings and curses. Like the Israelites as they stood on the banks of the Jordan, gazing into the Promised Land, we must grapple with a future that is not perfectly clear, and may contain dangers we cannot currently see. But the God of Life has answered our prayers. God has provided for us in the wilderness and led us to this moment. And now it is up to us to choose: will we reject the blessings God has bestowed upon us and return to the wilderness? Or will we choose life, and trust God to continue to save us and sustain us in this new landscape? 

 

As Moses says: Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days.

 

Psalm 137

Psalm 137 starts as a gentle lament. 

By the rivers of Babylon we sat and wept

    when we remembered Zion.

There on the poplars

    we hung our harps,

for there our captors asked us for songs,

    our tormentors demanded songs of joy;

    they said, “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”

How can we sing the songs of the Lord

    while in a foreign land?

If I forget you, Jerusalem,

    may my right hand forget its skill.

May my tongue cling to the roof of my mouth

    if I do not remember you,

if I do not consider Jerusalem

    my highest joy.

                        Psalm 137: 1-6 

The longing for what has been lost is as piercing now as it was 2,400 years ago, sung by Israelite captives in exile in Babylon. The unimaginable had happened: Jerusalem had been ransacked by the invading Babylonians, its splendid temple to God burnt and left in ruins. The captives, the elite of Israel, had been marched hundreds of miles to Babylon as a means of controlling the territory. Without leadership, the remnants of Israel would be more easily governed by the Empire’s agents. It is a song of a captive people who still remember their homeland. 

This poignant hymn is rarely used in worship though: one Sunday in three years, and that as one of two options appointed for the Sunday nearest to October 5, when many churches instead celebrate the Feast of St. Francis and the blessing of the animals. And the reason is it doesn’t end with verse 6. 

Remember, Lord, what the Edomites did

    on the day Jerusalem fell.

“Tear it down,” they cried,

    “tear it down to its foundations!” 

Daughter Babylon, doomed to destruction,

    happy is the one who repays you

    according to what you have done to us.

Happy is the one who seizes your infants

    and dashes them against the rocks.

                                    Psalm 137: 7-9

Maybe we should have read this Psalm in worship more often. Perhaps if we did, the eruption of violent anger across the country in the wake of George Floyd’s death would have come as less of a surprise. 

White America has been too willing to mourn and lament over the horrific injustices of racism in this country, and not willing enough to act. We have been willing to offer thoughts and prayers, but not to do the hard self-examination that uncovers the racism that is as much a part of us as our instinct to put our hands over our hearts when someone plays the Star Spangled Banner. We have not wanted to admit that our experience might not be “normal,” that people of color have a very different experience of law enforcement than white people. We have not wanted to consider even the possibility of implicit bias in ourselves, and have elected leaders who call white supremacists “very fine people.” 

We have constantly demanded that our black and brown brothers and sisters sing the songs of Zion for us. When Colin Kaepernick began kneeling at football games to draw attention to the ways in which out country has failed to live up to its promises, we directed our outrage at the man who hung up his harp rather than sing along with us.  When protesters shouted, “Black Lives Matter” we declared back “All Lives Matter” and patted ourselves on the back for being so inclusive. The lives of innocent black men and women continued to be snuffed out at a frightening pace. Camera phone videos of their violent ends were shared on social media, accompanied by momentary outrage that never seemed to change anything. 

And when lament and mourning boiled over into rioting and destruction, we smugly dismissed the demands, saying, “violence accomplishes nothing.”  Over and over again. 

Warning Israel of their failure to live into the covenant with God, to establish justice in the land, a failure which would result in defeat at the hands of the Babylonians, the prophet Isaiah offered a word from God: 

Woe to those who call evil good

    and good evil,

who put darkness for light

    and light for darkness,

who put bitter for sweet

    and sweet for bitter.

Woe to those who are wise in their own eyes

    and clever in their own sight.

Woe to those who are heroes at drinking wine

    and champions at mixing drinks,

who acquit the guilty for a bribe,

    but deny justice to the innocent.

Therefore, as tongues of fire lick up straw

    and as dry grass sinks down in the flames,

so their roots will decay

    and their flowers blow away like dust;

for they have rejected the law of the Lord Almighty

    and spurned the word of the Holy One of Israel.

                                    Isaiah 5:20-24

The warnings of the prophets fell on deaf ears then and now. In times of prosperity and leisure, we were too comfortable to do the hard and uncomfortable work of confronting our nation’s original sin. We have been too willing to express vague support for equality and anger against protestors who shut down streets and made it difficult to get to our jobs on time. And when tongues of flame start licking at the tinder, we are as shocked and surprised as the people of Israel when Babylon appeared at their gates. 

The Babylonian Exile proved to be a fruitful time in the life of Israel.  The need to find a way to sing the songs of Zion in a foreign land led to a new, rich theological tradition and spiritual practices that would sustain the Jews across generations and around the world for thousands of years to come. The exiles would, one day, return to Israel and rebuild their temple, but their greatest legacy would be the promises of restoration and the words of the prophets urging new generations towards justice and peace for all. 

Comfort, comfort my people,

    says your God.

Speak tenderly to Jerusalem,

    and proclaim to her

that her hard service has been completed,

    that her sin has been paid for,

that she has received from the Lord’s hand

    double for all her sins.

A voice of one calling:

“In the wilderness prepare

    the way for the Lord[a];

make straight in the desert

    a highway for our God.[b]

Every valley shall be raised up,

    every mountain and hill made low;

the rough ground shall become level,

    the rugged places a plain.

And the glory of the Lord will be revealed,

    and all people will see it together.

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”

                                    Isaiah 40: 1-5

God uses moments like this one. The prophets attest again and again to God’s power in turning death and destruction to the seeds of a new commitment to justice and peace. Exiles always seem more inclined to listen to God’s voice than prosperous people comfortable in their certainty that God loves them more than anyone else. New beginnings built on the ashes of the old destruction can lead to new possibilities. 

Christians will remember that it was Jesus’s death on the cross that led to a salvation offered to the whole world and good news carried far and wide by the poor and marginalized. The fires of anger and violence consuming our country today call for lament, and for a soul-deep commitment to the work of reconciliation and renewal that we are given in our baptism. Our baptismal covenant makes it explicit: “Will you strive for justice and peace among all people, and respect the dignity of ever human being?” The work belongs to each and every one of us. 

. 

Will we take up the task, or will we continue to demand our brothers and sisters of color play us songs of joy, songs of Zion, while stubbornly refusing to hear how the song ends?

Loving Our Enemies

In case you were wondering, the words President Donald Trump said he wasn’t sure he agreed with at yesterday’s National Prayer Breakfast are from Matthew 5:43-48:

[Jesus said] “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.  If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?  Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” 

I’m not writing to point out what a bad Christian Donald Trump is. He is a bad Christian, but so am I, and so are all the Christians I know, faithful and lapsed alike. The Sermon on the Mount, which St. Augustine described as “a perfect standard of the Christian life,” includes some pretty challenging stuff.  Loving your enemies is hard enough, but there’s also instructions to turn the other cheek, not to get angry with your brother, and to rejoice while being persecuted, among others. God knows I fall short on something found in these passages on a weekly basis. I don’t know anyone who manages to be perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect. We are all bad Christians. 

But that doesn’t mean we aren’t supposed to try.  The Sermon on the Mount doesn’t end with Jesus nudging Peter and saying, “Ha! I really had you going there! Just kidding!” Yeah, loving our enemies is tough. Watching some of my brothers and sisters in Christ cheer the president on as he brushed aside Jesus’ call to love our enemies made my blood boil, and it’s taking all my willpower not to shout, “You fools!” at them, thereby putting myself in danger of the fire of hell. (Matthew 5:22)  So I get why the president would find the notion of loving one’s enemies unappealing, and even absurd.

 One of those pastors should pull him aside, though, and tell him Jesus wasn’t joking. Jesus lived that way, and yes, he expects us to live that way too. After all, Jesus called on God to forgive those who crucified him as he was dying on the cross — pretty much the ultimate in loving your enemies. If he can do that, surely we can at least try to speak with compassion instead of shouting angrily, to speak words of forgiveness and reconciliation instead of vengeance, to pray for those who have hurt us instead of trying to hurt them back.

I have no doubt Jesus knew perfectly well his followers would not live up to the standard he laid out in the Sermon on the Mount — the human inability to turn aside from sin is, after all, why he died on the cross — but that doesn’t give us permission to laugh and do the exact opposite.  Our failure should leave us grief-stricken, not triumphant, and when we see someone acting in ways contrary to Jesus’ teachings, we should correct, not applaud. 

Being perfect, as our heavenly Father is perfect, may be out of reach, but it should always be our goal. We may struggle to love our enemies, but that doesn’t mean we should feel free to hate them.  We don’t get to dismiss the words of the Gospel just because it’s hard to live up to them. Instead, they should remind us that we are bad Christians, and prod us to try to do better living into them, through the grace of God. 

Love One Another As I have Loved You

 

I sat at my desk this morning and cried over the death of a parishioner.

That doesn’t happen very often. It’s not that I do not care deeply for the people I pastor as rector of my little Episcopal church. I love them, all of them, although any honest pastor will admit that it is easier to love some than others. But the work of a pastor is loving within healthy boundaries, so you can see clearly in ways that you cannot when your heart is fully entangled with another’s. It’s not love like you love your children, or your parents, or your spouse, or even your friends. The Greeks probably had a special word for it: they seem to have had a special word for all the different forms of love, so they must surely have had a particular word for pastor-love. 

Pastor-love is deeply rooted in faith in the Resurrection, because it is love that is offered so often in the midst of suffering and loss. It is love that accompanies to the gates of death. After a spate of funerals, people often ask me how I can bear to do this work, sitting regularly as I do at bedsides waiting for death and burying people I care about. I answer that it’s because I really, truly believe in the power of Resurrection. My love is paired with an absolute certainty that life is not ended, but changed, that those I love are now part of the great cloud of witnesses around the throne of God. This is not a rational belief, a carefully cultivated theology that explains away death and minimizes loss. It is, instead, an experience of trust in God welling up from within, which stands with me at the grave and says, “Alleluia!” even in the midst of grief.  It is a gift from God, a blessing given, I can only assume, so that I can do the work God has called me to do. Pastor-love means I can love without being overwhelmed by grief. 

So why am I crying for Mary this morning? 

It’s not because i have any doubt about the power of Resurrection, or the slightest concern that Mary was not eagerly welcomed into God’s  presence. Indeed, I smile when I think of Mary arriving at the gates of heaven, attired in rainbows, joyously greeting her beloved husband, and finally getting to ask Jesus, who she always loved, the same question with which she so often greeted me: “I’ve been reading my Bible, and I have a question: Why would God ask people to do so many terrible things?”  I trust she has finally received an answer that truly satisfies her. 

But even as I rejoice in the eternal life I am sure Mary is experiencing, my grief wells up as tears,  and I realize that somehow, Mary slipped under and through those healthy boundaries, into something beyond pastor-love. Not in any inappropriate way: she never asked or expected of me anything other than my pastoral care and love for her, and I never offered anything else. Our relationship was always that of pastor and parishioner, nothing more, nothing less. And yet...

I am crying today because I was loved. It was evident in the way she would send me little notes, suggestions and ideas that she wanted to share, but gently and kindly, careful not to embarrass me in front of others. The way she would hold my hand, patting it with her free hand, and laugh gently at something I said as she left the sanctuary. It was in her warm welcome when I visited, and her thoughtful, insightful conversation about everything from the Bible to church attendance to the joy of watching the birds from her porch. I am crying because her last words to me, after I had come and read scripture and prayed and offered her communion for the last time, words important enough to be forced through even though every word required herculean effort, were “I love you.” Just to be sure I knew. 

The tears are Mary’s last great gift to me —  a gift of love that fulfills of the commandment Jesus gave his disciples on the night before he died, that they should love one another as he loved them. To be loved that way breaks open the heart in unexpected ways; it draws to the surface our best self, the one that can give of itself to others without being left empty, because it is renewed by the love we share with God.

This Easter, as we gather for Maundy Thursday and hear again Jesus' last words to his disciples, as we wait grief-stricken at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, and we rejoice with Mary Magdalene to greet him at his Resurrection on Easter, I’ll be thinking about my Mary, about the gift of love, and the way grief and love can mix together into something holy.  I will wonder if that’s what the disciples felt, as they watched Jesus break bread and again when he appeared before them in that upper room, offering his pierced hands to their wondering examination. I will imagine their eyes filling with tears and their hearts overflowing with joy, simultaneously. 

“As the Father as loved me, so I have loved you,” Jesus told them. “Now remain in my love.” Thank you, Mary, for the gift of love.  May you, and all who love you,  know the peace and joy that comes of being one with the source of that Love, until we meet again. 

Why are we reading these stories?

It was a strikingly honest question. “Why are we reading this?” 

My Wednesday morning Bible study has spent most of the past year working its way through the stories of the Old Testament, using an abridged Bible  called “The Story: The Bible as One Continuing Story of God’s People.”  Even in this modern-reader-friendly format, the stories we are reading have been, at times, shocking. For those who generally think of the Bible as a source of encouragement and comfort, the stories of Abraham and Jacob, Moses and Pharaoh, the liberation from Egypt and the conquest of Jericho, do not align comfortably  with modern expectations of a God who reliably rejects violence and offers a big warm and fuzzy welcome to everyone. The question, “Why are we reading this?” was the dismayed reaction to the story of Samson, in which every time the Holy Spirit comes upon the hero, a horrific slaughter follows. 

The Bible is both wellspring and challenge to faith. It is impossible to imagine being a Christian without the Bible. How could we be faithful without the Gospel stories to teach us about Jesus, or the guidance offered by the letters of Paul? How could we be authentic Christians without the poetry of the Psalms, the promises of the Pentateuch, or the warnings of the prophets to help us turn our lives in a Godward direction?  The Bible is the root and ground of what Christians believe, an unshakeable foundation in an uncertain and unsteady world. A Christian who does not read the Bible is, in the words of Jesus, like a seedling that springs up in shallow soil, unable to survive, much less thrive, when conditions are less than ideal. 

But the Bible is also a product of another era and a very different world view. The people who first shared these stories had never encountered archeology or geology; they had no written records to verify even such basic facts as the date and place of someone’s birth; they had no idea what made people ill or why some people got better and some didn’t. They lived in a world where violence was common, nature was unpredictable, and everyone assumed that good fortune came from pleasing the gods and bad fortune from angering them. The stories they told reflected the way they made sense of that reality and the way they encountered God in the midst of the world they inhabited. The differences between their world and ours can leave us wondering whether the God they encountered has any relevance to us, or even whether those divine encounters were really just a product of their ignorance of bacteria and plate tectonics. 

The temptation is to respond to those challenges like Thomas Jefferson, and excise the parts we find unbelievable or difficult, to turn the Bible into a collection of inspiring and uplifting quotes by removing the stories that depict God in ways we find unpalatable and alarming. But doing so removes the necessity of confronting difficult questions about our faith and our relationship with God, and leaves us unprepared for times of loss, pain, and anger, when a warm-and-fuzzy understanding of God is not sufficient. 

In her book, The Rock that is Higher: Story as Truth, Madeline L’Engle recounts how in the immediate aftermath of an accident in which she was severely injured, it was the stories of her Christian faith that gave her strength to endure. Reflecting on the gospel accounts of Jesus’ betrayal and death, and especially Jesus’ crying out from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” she writes, “This is the story that gives meaning to my life, that gave meaning to those draggingly difficult days in the hospital and if it isn’t story it doesn’t work. The life-giving, lifesaving story is true story that transcends the facts. … In the hospital in San Diego I didn’t get much comfort from facts.” Faith is necessary for the part of the story that stretches our credulity — a story of the Creator of the universe being born as a tiny baby, “totally human and simultaneously totally divine.” But it was this incomprehensible, incredible part of the story that gave her what she needed in the midst of pain and loneliness. “Who wants a comprehensible God in the aftermath of an incomprehensible accident?” she writes.

The Bible gives us not just happy stories of people whose prayers have been answered, but also stories of people whose cries of anguish seem to have gone unheard. It gives us stories of blessings and abundance, and stories of famine and suffering. It shows us people sure of their path, and people wandering lost in the desert. No matter how blessed we are, sooner or later one fo those stories of loneliness, loss, and abandonment will be relevant to each of us. Life involves as much struggle as joy, and if the only stories we read and treasure are the ones that assure us of God’s presence when things are going well, how will we know where to look in life’s barren moments? 

But finding the value in some of these stories isn’t easy. Take that story of Samson, for example. Not only does Samson come across as a Grade A idiot, the Holy Spirit’s primary contribution seems to be to drive Samson into a frenzy of violence. Far from the ideal emissary of a gentle God who urges us to love our enemies, Samson is a brutal and violent man, whose violence is not only excused but sanctioned. How are we to find any redeeming value in such a story? Surely the ancient storyteller was wrong, and the Holy Spirit had nothing to do with any of this, because how could anyone think God would sanction that? 

A couple weeks later, though, I watched the 2018 movie Samson, from PureFlix. The movie itself isn’t going to win any awards: the acting is pedestrian and the plot predictable. But it reminded me that context matters. Sure, Samson still comes across as a young idiot, but his foolish decisions are cast into the context of a young man deeply in love, thwarted and humiliated by a cruel and arrogant man. While the book of Judges tells us that “the Israelites did evil in the eyes of the Lord, so the Lord delivered them into the hands of the Philistines for 40 years,” it doesn’t describe the circumstances in detail.  The moviemaker, however, has imagined the situation as slavery to cruel masters, who torture and murder the innocent at will.  In that setting, Samson’s violent responses to the Philistines’ various evil acts are those of a freedom fighter refusing to submit, a war hero mowing down the enemy in order to save the men of his platoon.

The movie raised at least as many questions for me as it answered. The movie portrays Samson’s pacifism as resistance to God’s will for him: can violence really be God’s chosen solution, ever? How do we tell?  What about Jesus’s teaching that we are to love our enemies? Are the Philistines really more evil than the Israelites, or are they equally oppressed by unjust leaders? If the latter, do they deserve death and destruction?  But at the same time, it also made me realize that I would hear this story very differently if I and my family lived under the constant threat of torture and death. A hero miraculously given the power to destroy those who tried to kill me and my children would, indeed, be God-sent. 

It is my deep and fervent hope that Samson will never really speak to me, or anyone around me.  I pray for a world in which Samson is always horrifying, to everyone, everywhere.  But to simply throw the story away because it doesn’t speak to me here and now is to ignore the many oppressed people over the centuries who have found in it encouragement that God is present in the midst of their oppression, and will act to free them. Who am I to say that God is not, even now, lifting up a champion for a people unable to fight back against their oppressors, a hero who will overthrow those who cruelly misuse their power by might of arm? Wouldn’t that be a life-giving, lifesaving story for those who have no hope of rescue?

I don’t know for sure. But I do know that because the Bible is full of stories, it is adequate to the whole of human experience — the uplifting and beautiful and the desperate and despairing and everything in between. Unearthing its wisdom requires discernment, and a willingness to consider that possibility that while Timothy may be right that "all scripture is inspired by God and useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness" (2 Timothy 3:16),  some parts of it may not be for us, or our particular situation. Sometimes we should hear warning where others hear encouragement, and vice versa.

And I am confident that we need to read these stories, if only to keep us from complacently assuming that God loves us best and will never let anything bad happen to us, no matter how badly we transgress. The very stories we least want to read are probably the ones we should study most carefully, lest we forget that while God loves us all, we are promised judgement as well as mercy. These stories might stop us from continuing to do evil in the sight of God while we reassure ourselves with words of comfort meant for those we have harmed. 

At the Museum of the Bible, one of the exhibits invites vusitors to write a word on a digital tablet to describe how reading the Bible makes them feel, which are then projected onto the walls in a collage reminiscent of end-of-year word montages on social media. Most of the words floating around the room the day I was there were words like, “peaceful,” ‘happy” and “encouraged.” After a few minutes, I added mine: “challenged.” And I think that’s a good thing.