Keeping Their Distance

Keeping Their Distance from Joseph Taber on Vimeo.

Our gospel lesson this morning is from the seventeenth chapter of Luke. By the seventeenth chapter, we’ve already heard the story of the Prodigal Son. We’ve already seen Jesus heal on the sabbath. By the seventeenth chapter, we’ve already learned the Lord’s prayer. We’ve already hear the story of the Good Samaritan. By the seventeenth chapter, Christ’s followers have already been sent out to proclaim the good news of God and returned to him. Twice. By the seventeenth chapter, we’ve already been fed alongside a crowd of five-thousand. We’ve already seen the dead raised and the seas calmed.

By the seventeenth chapter, we can probably assume that word has gotten around about Jesus’s ability to work miracles, to heal and to feed God’s people. But knowing that healing is in Jesus’s power, they still keep their distance, as if they are shielding themselves from the rejection they have already faced so many times from so many other people who should have answered their plea to “Show us mercy!”

Most folks have heard that leprosy is the Biblical description for any of many skin diseases, not necessarily just for the chronic bacterial infection we know it as today. Those who suffered from whatever condition had been identified as leprosy were ostracized, kicked out of the social order for the duration of their disease. Their uncleanness was seen as a punishment for some sin for which they had not atoned.

This kind of social separation a way of keeping the community pure, of keeping those who retained their righteousness from being pulled off-course by those who sinned and did not make restoration for it. Jewish Law and custom provided ways for those who were cast out in this way to be reinstated to the community, they had to prove that their disease was gone to a priest, who would then declare them ready to rejoin their congregation. But until that time, they were shunned.

It is no surprise, then, that people would hide their skin conditions as long as they were able, not wanting to be seen as the abnormal sinner, worthy of rejection by their community and their God.

The signs of their need for the LORD are written on their skin, and yet the shy away from one who they know can heal them, because they’ve been shown over and over again that they are only worthy of rejection.

I wonder how much of their fear we can see in ourselves.

Their brokenness is clearly visible, and oftentimes ours is not. Instead of a skin affliction, it’s guilt, or fear, or anger. Maybe it’s just the feeling that we’re only going through the motions of our lives and it doesn’t have any meaning. I think for many people, it’s a fear that people will see that we’re only faking our way through things, and we’re not actually as calm or in control as we seem, we just hope no one notices that we have no idea how to handle a situation.

My dad is a big Simon and Garfunkle fan. We were listening to one of their albums on Dad’s record player one night, and the song “I am a Rock” came on. It sang of a person who isolated themselves because they had been hurt before, refusing the love of others because, in one verse, “If I never loved I never would have cried.” As the song came to and end, Dad held up a hand to emphasize the closing lyrics, “I am a Rock/I am an island./ And a Rock feels no pain./And an Island never cries.” As the music faded, he voiced the implied question, “So why am I crying?”

We tell ourselves that we are the rock, the island, that we are unaffected by what’s going on around us because it protects us from being hurt.

So we keep our distance, because if people could see that our wounds are not skin deep, but have infected the core of our being, surely they would reject as thoroughly as the lepers who find themselves keeping their distance outside a town on the border of Galilee. So we find ways to protect ourselves from the truth of our brokenness, to avoid our weakness.

We spend so long covering up our leprosy that we sometimes begin to believe it’s not there. Or we tell ourselves it’s just a small thing that will resolve itself before too long. Nothing to worry about.

That’s where we find the Exiled people to whom Jeremiah is writing.

Jeremiah was appointed prophet during a disastrous time for the people of Judah. During his ministry, the Babylonian Empire conquers Judah and carries its people away from the Promised Land. What’s worse, they destroy the temple. For the ancient Judeans, everything they have believed about God is under attack, their home is destroyed and they are ripped away from the promise of God. Reality doesn’t make sense anymore, and a number of false prophets try to console the people by saying that they’ll soon return and that everything will be ok again soon.

But the Babylonian Captivity lasts for seventy years. It isn’t over quickly, and in order to survive and remain in relationship with God, the people need to deal with what’s really going on in their world, even though it is a painful process, it is a necessary one.

Jeremiah’s letter to those who have been carried off to Babylon requires the people to face their brokenness on a national level. He tells them again and again that they cannot pretend it will all be over soon, but to rebuild their communities and lives again in the new place to which they have been taken. He tells them to act in faith when everything around them is screaming to react out of fear and self-protection.

The Captives in Babylon have seen in their own lives that nothing about their reality was reliable, not their monarchy, not their temple worship, not even their homes. In a disaster like this one, their identity is totally broken, and the world doesn’t make sense anymore. If any population would have an excuse to withdraw into themselves and not to trust or rely on anyone, it is those who lived through this nation-spanning trauma.

Yet Jeremiah coaxes them out of their withdrawal, commands them to have faith that they have a future again. He tells them to build houses and settle down, To get married and have children, and to tell those children to get married and have children of their own. He even tells them to pray for the cities of those who have carried them into exile. Because their future depends on its welfare.

But they have a future. Though this terrible thing has happened, and more traumas may be in the future, God promises a future. God’s redemptive arm is working even through the violence and suffering of their reality, sending a prophet to heal their community identity, to make sure that they know that although life is not always good, God is.

I recently hear a story from a friend of mine who works in a hospital about a family who had received bad news about a patient, and was reacting angrily. My friend, who was doing an internship with the Chaplain’s office, has a background in the military, three black belts, and ran his own bouncing service for a while before going into ministry. So when one of these family members got into his face, everything in his background screamed at him to hit first, before the guy could hurt him. Had he done so, he would have forever been mythologized as the Chaplain who punched someone.

But he didn’t. He chose to remain vulnerable. An angry, grieving, family member was looking for someone at whom to be angry, and my friend chose to neither hit first nor run away. He had the faith to be vulnerable, as Jeremiah did. To remain open to God’s action in their lives. The people have been so traumatized that they do not even know what they need, but God is there, speaking to and through Jeremiah, because even when we don’t know it, we need the LORD.

I’ve met dozens of people who have claimed to not be in some way wounded by their lives. I’ve met many people who have said that they have been able to handle everything without anyone’s help. I’ve met many people who assert that they are strong enough to build their lives by themselves.

But I have never met anyone for whom that was true. Some folks are really good at hiding their wounds, at masking their darkness, at covering their shame. But everybody has been exiled in some way. Everybody is a leper who fears being cast out. We work so hard to be the rugged individuals of the American Dream, those who faced the world on their own and triumphed on their own strength. But try as we might, we are not those people.

But I don’t think we need to be. I think we need to be the kind of people who can remember that we need each other, and that more importantly, we need God. It’s been said that “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” I hate that phrase. I think it’s another way to pretend we are strong, and to avoid dealing with the real pain in our lives. What doesn’t kill you leaves unfeeling scar tissue. God makes you stronger.

When Jesus saw the lepers, he said “Go, show yourselves to the priests.” As they left, they were cleansed. There’s no bargain, no demand to be paid back. God sees people who are wounded, who are unclean, and heals them without question. They knew their condition, and cried out to Jesus for help. I don’t think they were especially sinful, or unusually broken, I think their particular brand of exile was just easier to see than those of the community members who had cast them out. Perhaps we will be able to recognize, as the lepers did, that we cannot be who God has created us to be on our own. Perhaps we should trade our “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” for “God’s strength is perfected in weakness.” Perhaps we should abandon the fantasy of the self-made man for the hope of the God-centered community.

Then maybe when the LORD comes by we can approach him, confess our sickness, and be healed. Then, without having to run off and prove ourselves, we can join the Samaritan, who was already an outsider, in grateful praise of a God who will be with us even though we cannot be worthy of that presence and love on our own.

That’s the kind of God we have, one who knows our brokenness and whose isn’t stopped by it. Even though that means that we take God’s love to the cross, God will not  exile us for our spiritual leprosy any longer, but when we try to keep our distance, God pursues us to the cross, to the grave, and to resurrection to show that God’s loving desire to be with us is stronger than what separates us.

If it Delays

Habakkuk 2:2-4, 18-20
2Then the LORD answered me and said,
Write a vision,
and make it plain upon a tablet,
So that a runner can read it.
3There’s still a vision
for the appointed time;
it testifies to the end;
it does not deceive.
If it delays, wait for it;
for it is surely coming;
it will not be late.
4Some people’s desires
are truly audacious;
They don’t do the right thing.
But the righteous person
will live honestly.

18Of what value is an idol,
when its potter carves it,
or a cast image that has been shaped?
It is a teacher of lies,
for the potter trusts the pottery, though it is incapable of speaking.
19Doom to the one who says to the tree,
“Wake Up!”
or “Get up” to the silent stone.
Does it teach?
Look, it is overlaid with gold and silver,
but there is no breath within it.
20But the LORD is in his holy temple.
Let all the earth be silent before him.

This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God

Luke 17:20-24
20Pharisees asked Jesus when God’s kingdom was coming. He replied, “God’s kingdom isn’t coming with signs that are easily noticed. 21Nor will it say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ Don’t you see? God’s kingdom is already among you.”

22Then Jesus said to the disciples, “The time will come when you long to see one of the days of the Human One, and you won’t see it. 23People will say to you, ‘Look there!’ or ‘Look here!’ Don’t leave or go chasing after them. 24The Human One will appear on his day in the same way a flash of lightning lights up the sky from one end to the other.”

This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God

Our world is fractured, families are divided, churches are splitting, politicians focus on wedge issues, nations either attack or ignore one another, and nobody stops obsessing over their own rightness long enough to consider that maybe being a people of God doesn’t mean that we defeat or destroy everyone who disagrees with us. Perhaps rather than conquering our enemies, we instead make them our brothers and sisters.

I wonder if some of what we used to call respectful traditions have become so overlaid with gold and silver that we have forgotten that there is no breath in them. I wonder if we’ve gotten lost in the richness of our history. Sometimes our greatest strengths become our stumbling block.

Like the master potter of our Old Testament Passage, who begins to love the product of his gifts more than the God who is their source. In the face of these distractions, we must make our vision plain, like Habakkuk’s tablet. There’s still a vision for the appointed time. A dream that testifies to the end, it does not deceive. There is a vision for a time when a father doesn’t have to choose between divorcing his wife and keeping his children. There is a vision for a time when church buildings are inviting and gracious, rather than austere and intractable. There is a vision for a time when we will no longer have to choose between funding a prison, and funding a school.  There is a vision for a time when our rockets are used to explore the cosmos rather than to rain down destruction as punishment for violence already done.

There is a dream that one day children will not be judged by the color of their skin but for the content of their character. Beyond that dream is a vision of when they will not be judged by the content of their character but by the Grace of God and the Love of Christ Jesus. Because as worthwhile as the dreams of great people are, the vision God has for us is immeasurably more wonderful. It testifies to the end, it does not deceive.

If it delays...

Parents still struggle with marriage and custody issues because some marriages can no longer work, but they never stop loving their children. We still spend more money on prisons than schools because a criminal is more dangerous to society than an uneducated person. Nations still bomb each other because some people cannot understand any language other than violence.

Children are still judged by their skin because we have a history of keeping ourselves separate from those who are different than we are, and those bad habits, though weaker in each generation, still persist.

We do not live according to the vision that God has set for us. We have not learned our role in the kingdom of God. There is still a vision for the appointed time, but we cannot embody that vision on our own.

If it delays...

Wait for it.

God’s not done working on us yet. We don’t have the answers to the complex questions with which we are faced, but we cannot allow our fear of being wrong to either prevent our action or to stop us from listening to those God has placed in our lives. God’s not done working on us yet.

Then the LORD answered me and said “Write a vision, and make it plain upon a tablet.” Remind yourself that you are not mired in this moment, there is a plan for us, an intention. God is not satisfied with the state of the world either, and is intervening in it constantly so that all who are regarded as righteous may live honestly.

The greatest intervention was the person and work of Jesus the Christ. God saw that we could not, can not, live up to the vision of the image of God in which we are all created. God saw the brokenness of humanity and chose to accomplish his ends for us by becoming flesh himself, experiencing the shame and death of the cross, all for the sake of a world that had not yet come of age. God’s kingdom is already among us! But we can not yet live in that new reality. The time is at hand, but the vision is unfulfilled.

If the fulfillment of the vision does not fit our schedule, if the completion of who we are as a people of God works at a slower pace than we hoped for, if our progress in answering God’s call in our lives is set-back, if it delays...

Wait for it.

For it is surely coming.

It will not be late.

That’s easy to hear when we’re comfortable with the order of the world: when our the leaders for whom we voted are in office, when our wealth increases consistently. The vision is surely coming. It will not be late. It’s easy to hear when our churches are growing, when our children are healthy, when smiles come easily to our faces.

If it delays, that’s ok, because my life is basically good. I’m living in comfort and have built a good life for myself. I can wait for the vision.

But many of the people of God live on the other side of that coin. They live constantly worried that they will be able to feed their families, or that they will be able to maintain a roof over their heads. When your best day involves being ignored instead of attacked, it’s tough to hear that the vision is surely coming, and will not be late.

You’re telling me I have to wait for the arc of history to bend back around to justice? What do you mean it will not be too late? It certainly looks like it’s too late for those who were killed during peaceful protests around the world. It certainly looks like it’s too late for the martyrs who seek human rights for all people. How many more people have to suffer under the injustices of fear and oppression before God will do something and bring about that vision! What’s the suffering level got to be before God decides it’s “the appointed time.”

When it feels like you’re winning, it’s easy to run out the clock. When you’re on the losing end of things, being asked to wait, for the help from the Lord is surely coming, is offensive. How many civil rights leaders were told “Wait, your rights will be granted to you, just don’t go too far too fast, let us adjust to this new way of life slowly.” How many church leaders have shied away from changes they know are necessary because they don’t want to change too much, too fast. They know the direction, but feel the inertia of the system drags on them. The vision is there, but just out of reach.

If it delays, wait for it.

For it is surely coming.

Because God’s promise is for all people, even for those who resist being a part of it. The Human One will appear on his day in the same way a flash of lightning lights up the sky from one end to the other. After all the waiting, we will be made one in an instant, and the vision that testifies to the end will be realized.

If it delays, wait for it. For it is surely coming. It will not be late. But some people’s desires are truly audacious, they don’t do the right thing.

Some preachers see the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies in the crisis in Syria. They hear about the potential destruction of the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, Damascus, and call it the beginning of the end times.

Like them, I long for the days of the Human One, when we knew Jesus face to face, instead of through a faith tradition passed down to us from our spiritual ancestors. It was easier then, when we could put our hands in his wounds and experience the wonder of the bodily resurrection. Like those preachers I look toward the moment when God’s vision for humanity is fully realized, and the already surpasses the not yet. But I will not join them when they say of those days “Look there” or “Look here.” God’s kingdom isn’t coming in signs that are easily noticed, wrath and destruction that happens to fall on people we don’t like.

The kingdom of God is already among us in a thousand easy-to-overlook ways. In love for one another, in sharing of ourselves with the least among us, in holy moments that reveal God’s creation to us, God’s creation is already among us. But these require faith.

Paul writes that once we knew Christ according to the flesh, we no longer know him in that way. So our faith is made more difficult, based on spiritual experiences and trust in God’s vision for his people, rather than a physical encounter.

It is difficulty to be faithful to the vision God has for us when we are being pulled in so many different directions by otherwise honorable obligations. It is easy to get sidetracked by the trappings made with our own hands, overlaid with gold and silver, but with no breath within. We get caught up in our impatience when compared to God’s timeless vision, and would rather build a kingdom for ourselves than wait for the fulfillment of the one God has established forever.

God’s kingdom is already among us, the LORD is in his holy temple. But we don’t fit in that kingdom yet. But God’s vision for us testifies to the end.

There is great hope in the idea that God’s vision for us has not yet been fully realized, because it means that God is still working on us to make us more faithful, to make our actions more meaningful. We are validated if we are not satisfied with the way things are, or with the way we ourselves are. If we are happy with how we are, it means that God’s vision for us is better than we can imagine.

The LORD is in his holy temple, let all the earth be silent before him, as he appears on his day in the same way a flash of lightning lights up the sky from one end to the other.

Morning Routine

Luke 13:10-17

¹⁰Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath. ¹¹A woman who was there had been disabled by a spirit for eighteen years. She was bent over and couldn’t stand up straight. ¹²When he saw her, Jesus called her to him and said, “Woman, you are set free of your sickness.” ¹³He placed his hands on her and she straightened up at once and praised God.

¹⁴The synagogue leader, incensed that Jesus had healed on the Sabbath, responded, “There are six days during which work is permitted. Come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath day.”

¹⁵The Lord replied, “Hypocrites! Don’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from its stall and lead it out to get a drink? ¹⁶Then isn’t it necessary that this woman, a daughter of Abraham, bound by Satan for eighteen long years, be set free from her bondage on the Sabbath day?” ¹⁷When he said these things, all his opponents were put to shame, but all those in the crowd rejoiced at all the extraordinary things he was doing.

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

In all the religious art I’ve seen displayed in churches and museums, I’ve not once seen a painting of Jesus getting ready in the morning. I’ve never seen him depicted brushing his teeth, or fixing a cup of coffee, or stubbornly hitting the snooze button on his alarm time after time. But along with being fully God, he is also fully human. I’m sure he woke up with morning breath, or a little sore from sleeping wrong. He went through a morning routine similar to what each of us did today. Every seventh day, wherever he was, his morning routine shifted slightly. Rather than preparing for his work of preaching, teaching, and healing, he went to the local synagogue: that’s what a Rabbi does on the Sabbath.

I don’t think Jesus went into the synagogue saying “I’m going to shake things up around here.” I don’t think Jesus woke up that Sabbath morning and thought “I’m going to change the way people think about the law today.” I think Jesus went through that Sabbath morning routine in much the same way he always did. When he got to the synagogue, he began to teach.

Then he saw a woman who was there.

This woman had been disabled by a spirit for eighteen years. During that time, everything about her life was colored by her disability. People looked at her differently, people treated her differently, the synagogue leader changed his behavior around her. She had to alter herself as well, as once simple tasks became increasingly impossible. Her morning routine now was less about preparing for her day and more about coping with the obstacles her disability brought to her. Though every action is difficult and painful work, she is still able to attend her synagogue on the sabbath. After eighteen years, I cannot imagine she went each week expecting that she would be healed. After almost a thousand sabbaths, she just went because that’s what one does.

Then an unfamiliar Rabbi named Jesus called her to him.

Scripture makes no mention of a cane, a crutch, or a walker. It doesn’t indicate if she’s elderly, or if she has any family to help her. Scripture says she was bent over, and couldn’t stand up straight. When he saw her, Jesus called her to him.

Jesus doesn’t walk over to her and lift her up. Neither does he just heal her from a distance. He sees her, and calls her forward. I wonder how far back in the congregation this woman who had been disabled by a spirit for eighteen years sat. I wonder how long it took her bent body to get up. I wonder how many steps it took her to come from her seat in the congregation to where Jesus was teaching. I wonder how much anxious shuffling, and uncomfortable coughing tried to mask the awkward silence as Jesus waited for this woman who had been disabled to come to him. I wonder if the woman felt afraid that this strange Rabbi would call her a sinner, and say that she deserved her disability, that is was a punishment for some hidden wrong.

The tension in the room builds with each painful step, until Jesus says “Woman, you are set free of your sickness.” Then he puts his hands on her and she straightened up at once and praised God.

The synagogue leader, attending to the behind-the-scenes details of worship leadership, probably didn’t notice what was happening at first. His morning routine had already been disrupted by this traveling holy man who was teaching in his synagogue. After all, when this Jesus character taught in the synagogue in Nazareth, they ran him out of town. The synagogue leader may have only known him by his reputation as one who regularly upended the social order. I wonder if he was lost in his own thoughts and worries about how to make the worship service go as smoothly as possible in the presence of this unknown variable of a Rabbi.

Nothing will get people’s attention as quickly as a sudden silence. Lost in his own thoughts, the synagogue leader is caught off guard by the long dramatic pause in the middle of the service, and looks up just in time to see Jesus touch a woman, and she straightened up at once and praised God.

Where the gospel writer saw a miracle, this well-meaning community leader saw the potential for swarms of sick and suffering people to clog the synagogue asking for healing that was beyond his power, and nobody in the community could come and worship the God of their ancestors, who released them from bondage in Egypt.

I wonder if his statement is meant to prevent that situation, to keep the sabbath holy, and not to be a stage for people to call attention to themselves. Either sick people who just want a quick-fix rather than real healing, or people who claim to have special healing powers can quickly take the focus of a worship service off of God and onto themselves. He makes an announcement to try and protect worship, promising to attend to the needs of the sick as best he can during the week, “There are six days on which work is permitted. Come and be healed on those days, not on the Sabbath day.”

Jesus, on the other hand, will not stand for it. Where the synagogue leader saw a legal snare, or a worship disruption, where the gospel writer sees a miracle, Jesus sees a woman who, after eighteen years, is finally set free from her sickness. So he directs the focus of the moment away from the law, and back to her. “Don’t each of you on the Sabbath untie your ox or donkey from its stall and lead it out to get a drink? Then isn’t it necessary that this woman, a daughter of Abraham...be set free from her bondage on the Sabbath day?” This is not about legal loopholes or keeping your worship time in pristine order, this is about a woman, a daughter of Abraham, who has now been set free.

Brilliant scholars and biblical thinkers, when writing about this passage, tend to focus on either Sabbath law or on the culture of the synagogue. Concerning themselves with unpacking what could be discovered in the first sentence of the passage “Jesus was teaching in one of the synagogues on the Sabbath.” Jesus, on the other hand, seems to pay very little attention to the nuance of the law, and even less to the maintenance of dignified worship. Jesus pays attention to the woman. Christ refuses to look away from this beloved daughter of Abraham, he restores the image of God in her. What’s more, he shows her humanity to the community of faith. “Look!” He says, “This is what humanity looks like, full of praise for God in whose image we are all created! This is what God intends, not bent suffering, but glorifying God and enjoying him forever!”

Because his emphasis on humanity is part of Jesus. It’s easy to look straight to the cross, to see the substitution made on our behalf, or to look straight to the resurrection, and see sin and death defeated for all time. But Jesus also came to reestablish what it means to be human. A human is someone who is cherished by God. That is the root of our identity, not our successes or failures, but the truth that God loves us.

That’s why everything that Christ does in this story calls attention to a woman who is first in bondage, then set free. Jesus restores humanity to people, taking them from their sins and brokenness and completing them, that they may be called Children of the Living God.

This is one of many stories where Jesus points to God by directing focus to the people he meets, and refusing to let them be overlooked any longer. After eighteen years with her disability, I’m sure this daughter of Abraham felt invisible to the faith community. Sure, they may support her financially, but they treat her as a burden, not as a person.

A seminary professor was at the grocery store, and having a rough day. By the time he got to the check out counter, he was already running late to a faculty meeting. He was behind a woman whose payment card had been declined, and who was trying to decide which of her necessary items she would do without this week. He impatiently growled “I’ll pay for it.” And handed the cash to the clerk. As he began patting himself on the back for helping a needy person, he heard the woman say to the clerk with a hollow sound in her voice, “He didn’t even look at me.”

He treated her as a problem to be solved, rather than as a person to be loved. I wonder if that professor felt the same shame as Jesus’s opponents.

The synagogue leader and the seminary professor both focused on the problems with which they were presented. But in so doing, they missed out on the people God had placed in their lives. They stumbled over the obstacles in their morning routine, rather than loving the person they had stumbled across.

Jesus restores humanity to its noble image-of-God origins, rather than the sin-tainted state it had become. Just as he freed the woman in the synagogue from the bonds of her sickness, so he has freed us from the bonds of sin and death. With Christ as the model of what it means to be human, we can see the beauty in a varied and diverse humanity, that irrespective of the differences in our morning routines, we are all created in the image of a God who loves us and intervenes in our lives, even when we cannot see how.

Bring a Towel

Hebrews 11:29-12:1

29By faith [the Israelites] crossed the Red Sea as if they were on dry land, but when the Egyptians tried it, they were drowned.

30By faith Jericho’s walls fell after the people marched around them for seven days.

31By faith Rahab the prostitute wasn’t killed with the disobedient because she welcomed the spies in peace.

32What more can I say? I would run out of time if I told you about Gideon, Barak, Sampson, Jephthah, David, Samuel, and the prophets. 33Through faith they conquered kingdoms, brought about justice, realized promises, shut the mouths of lions, 34put out raging fires, escaped from the edge of the sword, found strength in weakness, were mighty in war, and routed foreign armies. 35Women received back their dead by resurrection. Others were tortured and refused to be released so they could gain a better resurrection.

36But others experienced public shame by being taunted and whipped; they were even put in chains and in prison. 37They were stoned to death, they were cut in two, and they died by being murdered with swords. They went around wearing the skins of sheep and goats, needy, oppressed, and mistreated. 38The world didn’t deserve them. They wandered in deserts, mountains, caves, and holes in the ground.

39All these people didn’t receive what was promised, though they were given approval for their faith. 40God provided something better for us so they wouldn’t be made perfect without us.

12:1So then let’s also run the race that is laid out in front of us, since we have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us. Let’s throw off any extra baggage, get rid of the sin that trips us up, 2and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith’s pioneer and perfecter. He endured the cross, ignoring the shame, for the sake of the joy that was laid out in front of him, and sat down at the right side of God’s throne.

This is the Word of the Lord
Thanks be to God

When I was in high school, every August meant the same thing: Lawn mowers on the football field, lines being carefully measured and painted on a practice field. It meant hours assigning uniforms and making sure that every piece of equipment was in top shape, ready for the first game of the season. It meant drilling and fundamentals and practice after practice. Each August of my tenure at Freedom High School was the beginning of another season in the Marching Band.

Each hot August afternoon was spent on the lumpy practice field in the nearby park as we learned the show we would perform at home games and band competitions. 140 of my closest friends and I would march around in the 90 degree weather while the drum majors and band directors called out commands. We stood at attention while mosquitoes and gnats ate us alive. And when the first year marchers asked us why we bothered with all this unpleasantness, we pointed toward an experience they didn't know yet, and told them to trust us. It was all worth it.

We pointed to the moment at the first home game after we marched onto the field and were called to attention, after the drum major counted us in for our opening number. We pointed to the moment after the thousands of precise steps, after the hundreds of measures of music. We pointed to the instant we finished our last note and brought our instruments down together, when we could hear our last chord reverberate off the brick stands as the applause and cheers of the fans mingled with and overcame it.

At that moment, we are breathless, exhausted, and overcome with joy because we have accomplished something together that none of us could do alone. We have to rely on each other to get through the show, to play the right notes, to watch our neighbors and keep our lines straight. The only way to get through the show and for it to be good, is for us to trust and rely on each other.

Because no matter how talented an individual band member is, they cannot do it all. We need the great crowd of musicians all around us to bring forth that wall of sound that makes the emotional impact of the music so powerful.

In my experience, when we talk about the gifts God has given us, we're talking about the gifts each individual in the group has. God has given you the ability to turn raw materials into a sound and solid structure. God has given you the resources to provide employment for others. God has given you the talent to play a musical instrument. God has given me words that I may speak.

Those are certainly all true, and worth valuing in ourselves. However, the kingdom of heaven is not a bunch of individuals all praising God in whatever way pleases them. It's a community that gathers around a single table. The Kingdom of Heaven is not a bunch of performers all waiting their turn on the stage, it's a dinner party sitting in stunned silence with all eyes fixed on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of our faith, who has told us that this is my body, broken for you.

The greatest gift God has given us is himself, as Jesus Christ. The second greatest gift God has given us is each other: the great cloud of witnesses surrounding us. United  Presbyterian Church is not a building in which individuals gather to be spiritually entertained each week. United Presbyterian Church is a community that shares a history that goes all the way back to the Israelites crossing the Red Sea. It is a community based on faith in the one who endured the cross, ignoring the shame, for the sake of the joy that was laid out in front of him, and sat down at the right side of God's throne.


We often use "belief" and "faith" nearly interchangeably. We start our Affirmation of Faith with "I believe." There's just a tiny difference between the meaning of the two words. There's a significant difference between "I believe it will rain this afternoon" and "I have faith it will rain.

Christianity is not about knowing the right answers or even believing the correct doctrine. Belief is a thought, often a dearly held one. But faith is something more. Faith begets action.

Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson said on Twitter a few months ago that "The good thing about Science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it" If that's not a statement of faith, I don't know what is.

We can spend all day debating the merits of that faith, or the accuracy of its target, but that tweet reflects a faith in the scientific method to discover truth and improve the lives of humanity, and Dr. Tyson has dedicated his life to its service. His faith in science has compelled him to participate in that process.

Our faith, however, is not in our own ability to solve problems, or that greater knowledge will give us greater abilities. Our faith is in the God who is the source of all our gifts. Who intervenes in the lives of his people, who is the way and the truth and the light, whether or not you believe in it. This is our faith, and that of the great cloud of witnesses that surrounds us.

By faith they crossed the Red Sea as if they were on dry land. Through faith they conquered kingdoms, brought about justice, realized promises, shut the mouths of lions,   put out raging fires, escaped from the edge of the sword, found strength in weakness, were mighty in ware, and routed foreign armies.

This history of great deeds is included so that we might know that we have a mighty shared history that spans nations and centuries, all based on faith in the living LORD our God.

These are great heroes through whom God worked great wonders because of their faith. However, faith does not always make for an easy road. It doesn't promise to fix all our problems, and it doesn't always soften the blow of what falls on our path.

Others experienced public shame by being taunted and whipped; they were even put in chains and in prison. They were stoned to death, they were cut in two. They went around wearing skins of sheep and goats, needy, oppressed, and mistreated. The world didn't deserve them.

I'm currently working as a Chaplain Extern at Spartanburg Regional Hospital, and yesterday a tear-stained face told me that "God doesn't give you more than you can handle, but sometimes I feel like I can't handle it, and sometimes I feel like I don't want to." I am certain that she is not the only person who feels that way.

There are people who are suffering from overwhelming burdens. To ask them to carry them alone is to abandon our call to love them. The suffering that many of our brothers and sisters endure is not what God intended for them. It breaks God's heart to see his children suffer in this way. But the suffering is not the end of their story, because our God takes that pain and shame on himself. All these people didn't receive what was promised, though they were given approval for their faith.

God provided something better for us so that they wouldn't be made perfect without us. While we may find ourselves given more than we can handle, I promise you that it is not more than God can handle. Jesus endured the cross, ignoring the shame, for the sake of the joy that was laid out in front of him.

That joy is the kingdom of heaven made real. It's the joy of a family playing a game together where each one of them has a chance for their particular talents to shine through, laughing together and knowing that the game would be less fun if one of them were absent. It's the joy of a long-carried burden being taken up by a loving community of faith. It's the joy of our faith, perfected at last in the resurrection of that great shepherd of the sheep: our Lord Jesus Christ, who took a towel and wrapped it around his waist, and washed his disciple's feet.

The British Science-Fiction author Douglas Adams writes in The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy on the subject of towels. He writes "a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a [non-hitch hiker] discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the [non-hitch hiker] will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have "lost".

A towel is a simple thing, just a bit of woven cloth. In Adams's novel, knowing where one's towel is shows that you've really got your life together. It's a symbol of a life of adventure. For us, it's as symbol that we serve one another, it's an affirmation that we do not have our lives together, but that God keeps us together anyway. God gives us each other, and we love and serve one another because we have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us.

Because we are not meant to run the race that is laid out for us on our own. It is not God's intention that we push our way to the front of the crowd so that we can be first through the gate. It is not God's intention that we go through our lives relying only on ourselves, the perfect self-made person, a pioneer in her field, a perfecter of his technique.

It is God's intention that we go through our lives loving God with our whole selves, and loving our neighbors as ourselves, and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith's pioneer and perfecter.

I cannot do it by myself, and neither can you. There are gifts I do not have, things I do not know. But God has given us each other, so that we don't have to do everything. Though none of us have every gift we will need, each of us does have some gift to offer. We are guided by the Spirit to be a people of God, not just a collection of Godly persons. By faith we are drawn together to be a great cloud of witnesses, sharing in the joyful work of the one who sat down at the right side of God's throne.

Amen

Children of the Living God

Children Of The Living God from Joseph Taber on Vimeo.

Hosea 1:2-10

2When the Word of the Lord first spoke through Hosea, the LORD said to him, “Go, marry a prostitute and have children of prostitution, for the people of the land commit great prostitution by deserting the LORD. 3So Hosea went and took Gomer, Diblaim’s daughter, and she became pregnant and bore a son. 4The LORD said, “Name him Jezreel; for in a little while I will punish the house of Jehu for the blood of Jezreel, and I will destroy the kingdom of the house of Israel. 5On that day I will break the bow of Israel in the Jezreel valley. 6Gomer became pregnant again and gave birth to a daughter. Then the LORD said to Hosea, “Name her No Compassion, because I will no longer have compassion on the house of Israel or forgive them. 7But I will have compassion on the house of Judah. I, the LORD, their God, will save them; I will not save them by bow, or by sword, or by war, or by horses, or by horsemen. 8When Gomer finished nursing No Compassion, she became pregnant and gave birth to a son. 9Then the LORD said, “Name him Not My People because you are not my people and I am not your God.”

10Yet the number of the people of Israel will be like the sand of the sea, which can neither be measured nor numbered; and in the place where it was said to them, “You are not my people,” it will be said to them “Children of the Living God.”

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks Be to God

This is one of those texts that makes congregations shift uncomfortably in their pews. Don’t worry, it’s also one of those texts that makes preachers shift uncomfortably behind their pulpits. It sends us straight to our commentaries to try and explain away why God would command these terrible things. We have been raised on a happy-fun god who has no more substance than the cotton balls our children glue to the pictures we draw of him. The God of Hosea makes us anxious. Because in this minor prophet, God stares down the full measure of humanity's darkness and refuses to blink.

Hosea’s actions are abusive to both his wife and his children. He doesn’t choose his wife because he’s in love with her, or because it was arranged as a good match. Hosea chooses Gomer because she’s the one who comes to his mind when the LORD commands him to Go, marry a prostitute. She is a prop to his prophecy, not even a real human being who will have to suffer through the rejection and abuse that is chronicled in the second chapter of Hosea. As soon as we meet her, Gomer’s husband strips her of her personhood and leaves her an object lesson.

Then the children start arriving, and God tells Hosea to name them terrible things. They’re not people, they’re walking sermon illustrations! Jezreel, the site of a terrible battle. No Compassion, because God is done tolerating our shenanigans, Not My People because we have so thoroughly abandoned God that God no longer even recognizes her covenant people. These are children of prostitution, brought into the world to embody the way that God’s people have deserted him. What chance do they have of making themselves whole when they are so wholly surrounded by brokenness?

Hosea’s story is almost always read with the assumption that Hosea, the man, represents God, and Gomer, the woman, represents Israel. I'm not satisfied with that interpretation. This isn't a story of a prostitute's purifying punishment. This is a story of the redemption of the entire family. God transforms their family’s brokenness into wholeness.

Broken heroes and fallen examples are a motif throughout the scriptures. Noah was a drunkard. Abraham sold Sarah to be another man's wife, twice. Moses murdered an Egyptian. David was an adulterer who conspired to have Uriah the Hittite killed. Hosea is an abusive husband and father, and he needs redemption as much as his wife and children do.

Hosea does not stand in for God in this enacted prophecy. Hosea is a family member and a prophet whose life testifies to the need for a redeeming God. His abuses are inexcusable. "Hosea's treatment of his wife and children has sometimes been used to justify similar actions in modern relationships as well. This is a perversion of the biblical narrative and of the intent of the passage. Hosea 1-3 is not a story about the absolute submission of wives to their husbands, nor does it give license to husbands to brutalize their wives for real or imagined transgressions,"

Abuse is inexcusable, but neither the abusers nor the people they abuse are beyond God’s saving reach. This first chapter of Hosea sets the stage for, and is the promise of, redemption. 

Hosea, Gomer, Jezreel, No Compassion, and Not My People are all living in a world that is distorted by sin, and every aspect of their behavior and identity is colored by that distortion. Nobody in the family escapes unscathed. Some of us find it easier to see that distortion in others. Some of us find it impossible to escape that distortion in ourselves. God gives the children names that reflect their brokenness and that of the community into which they were born. Hosea’s children are wearing the sin of their people as a nametag. They are children of prostitution, for the people of the land commit great prostitution by deserting the LORD. God stares into this broken family’s darkness, and refuses to give up on them.

The story begins with a prophet's family identified as the "sick ones." They are the children of prostitution. They are the ones who desert the LORD. Gomer, Hosea, Jezreel, No Compassion, and Not My People are no doubt ostracized for the sickness in their family. It’s a sort of social quarantine that hopes sin is an infection that will just run its course and then go away. 

We avoid them because if we keep the children of prostitution at arms length, and ignore them, we don’t have to recognize how much we are like them. The way they treat each other makes us squirm in our churches, I wonder how much more we would squirm if they sat in the pew next to us. We can see the disorder in Hosea’s family, and we wonder if maybe our own symptoms are not as well hidden as we thought.

The symptoms are obvious in this family, but the rest of God’s people are just as sick. Even in our church family, nobody escapes unscathed. When an addict reaches again for the dose that makes them feel better even as it kills them, that is a symptom. When a son cannot face his family because he has failed to meet their expectations, that is a symptom. When a woman abandons her nursing child, that is a symptom. When a father disowns his child for the choices he’s made, that is a symptom. They are easy to see, easy to point out, easy to label “children of prostitution.”

But I wonder if our quieter symptoms qualify us to share that label with Hosea’s family as well. Like when we cursed at the person who cut us off driving to work last Thursday. Or when we lied to the person who asked for a little money for food or gas saying “I don’t have any cash”, because we thought they might just go buy booze or smokes with it. I wonder if the fact that these transgressions are acceptable in our society is evidence that we are not oriented toward the ends God has for us. But God sees the darkness from which these actions stem, and refuses to abandon us to it. God is going to transform our brokenness into wholeness.

The Israelites committed themselves to a higher standard, one that glorifies God, who brought them out of Egypt and transformed Israel from slaves into a covenant people. That higher standard is a gift, a reminder of who they are and whose they are. It is a constant reminder that they need God to be active in their lives, and a promise that God is active in their lives.

When Israel cannot live up to the covenant, God doesn't give up and start anew, or just create a new sinless universe like a child who has grown tired of her lego creation. God does not discard us like a writer crumpling a page of an uninspired rough draft.

No, the author of all that exists takes the crumpled paper, and reorders it into a new creation. A creation where Gomer is no longer just a prop in a prophecy, but is once again somebody’s child: Diblaim's daughter. A creation where her children are not rejected, but are embraced by a loving heavenly parent. A creation where Hosea no longer passes on a pattern of abuse, but empowers those around him to hear the Word of the LORD. God promises that we will not be defined by the ways we have stumbled, but as the people whom God has lifted up, even when it means the fabric of existence must be made new.

It is a reality where the addict is no longer known for the substance they use to escape, but for the way she helps others who are also recovering from addiction. It’s a reality where the young man who flunked out of college given the opportunity to succeed, even at something different. It’s a reality where a mother will not forsake her nursing child, where a father runs to welcome the prodigal home. It’s a covenant that is not dependent on our ability to hold the broken bits of our lives together, but on God transforming our brokenness into wholeness.

The new covenant that is promised in Hosea is a covenant where “the number of the people Israel will be like the sand of the sea, which can neither be measured nor numbered.” It is a covenant where God speaks “I will have compassion on the house of Judah. I, the LORD their God, will save them; I will not save them by bow, or by sword, or by war, or by horses, or by horsemen.” Because this is not a covenant of law, or of force, or of money. This is not a covenant of our deserving God’s love, because we could never earn such a gift. This is a covenant of the WORD made flesh in a man named Jesus of Nazareth.

Christ came for the children of prostitution. Christ went to the cross knowing that the people he was saving were the ones who called for his death. Christ died because we were incapable of claiming or even remembering our identities as people of God. Instead we commit great prostitution by deserting the LORD. Christ was crucified because God refuses to part with those whom God loves, even when they reject her. When those whom God loves are too broken to reach out to him, God goes to the cross, giving us a loaf of bread saying “This is my body, broken for you.”

We may have earned the names “No Compassion” and “Not My People.” But that is not how God sees us. The place where it was said, “You are not my People” it will be said to them “Children of the Living God” For God has stared into the depths of humanity’s darkness, and when we could not emerge from it, came to us so that even when we walked in darkness we would not walk alone. Not even death could contain God’s love for us. We are no longer identified by sin of the world but by the righteousness of the risen Christ. Our lives are forever transformed.

The empty tomb has transformed the children of prostitution into Children of the Living God. Amen.

How's That Working out for you? (Acts 15:5-19 and Jonah 4:1-11)

How's That Working Out for You from Joseph Taber on Vimeo.

Acts 15:5-19

5Some of the believers from among the Pharisees stood up and claimed “The Gentiles must be circumcised. They must be required to keep the law of Moses.”

6The apostles and the elders gathered to consider this matter. 7After much debate, Peter stood and addressed them, “Fellow believers, you know that, early on, God chose me from among you as the one through whom the Gentiles would hear the word of the Gospel and come to believe. 8God, who know’s people’s deepest thoughts and desires, confirmed this by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us. 9He made no distinction between us and them, but purified their deepest thoughts and desires though faith. 10Why then are you placing a burden on the shoulders of these disciples that neither we nor our ancestors could bear? 11On the contrary, we believe that we and they are saved in the same way, by the grace of the Lord Jesus.”

12The entire assembly fell quiet as they listened to Barnabas and Paul describe all the signs and wonders God did among the Gentiles through their activity. 13When Barnabas and Paul also fell silent, James responded, “Fellow believers, listen to me. 14Simon reported how, in his kindness, God came to the Gentiles in the first place, to raise up from them a people of God. 15The prophets agree with this; as it is written,

16After this I will return,

and I will rebuild David’s fallen tent;

I will rebuild what has been torn down.

I will restore it

17so that the rest of humanity will seek the Lord,

even all the Gentiles who belong to me.

The Lord says this, the one who does these things

18known from earliest times.

19Therefore, I conclude that we shouldn’t create problems for Gentiles who turn to God. 

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

Jonah 4:1-11

1But Jonah thought this was utterly wrong, and he became angry. 2He prayed to the LORD, “Come on, LORD! Wasn’t this precisely my point when I was back in my own land? This is why I fled to Tarshish earlier! I know that you are a merciful and compassionate God, very patient, full of faithful love, and willing not to destroy. 3At this point, LORD, you may as well take my life from me, because it would be better for me to die than to live.”

4The LORD responded, “Is your anger a good thing?” 5But Jonah went out from the city and sat down east of the city. There he made himself a hut and sat under it, in the shade, to see what would happen to the city.

6Then the LORD God provided a shrub, and it grew up over Jonah, providing shade for his head and saving him from his misery. Jonah was very happy about the shrub. 7But God provided a worm the next day at dawn, and it attacked the shrub so that it died. 8Then as the sun rose God provided a dry east wind, and the sun beat down on Jonah’s head so that he became faint. He begged that he might die, saying, “It’s better for me to die than to live.”

9God said to Jonah, “Is your anger about the shrub a good thing?”

Jonah said, “Yes, my anger is good - even to the point of death!”

10But the LORD said, “You ‘pitied’ the shrub, for which you didn’t work and which you didn’t raise; it grew in a night and perished in a night. 11But for my part, can’t I pity Ninevah, that great city, in which there are more than one hundred twenty thousand people who can’t tell their right hand from their left, and also many animals?”

This is the Word of the Lord

Thanks be to God

Jonah’s story is familiar. It’s one of the most portrayed stories in scripture, and we can probably all recite its highlights. When Jonah get’s the call to get up go to Ninevah, that great city, and cry out against it, He runs away, unwilling to do the Lord’s will, not out of fear, but knowing God’s character well enough to see where this is going to end up.

After a fish-bellied layover, he finds himself back on shore, and this time does as he is told. He goes to Ninevah, delivers a very short message, and the whole town repents of their evil, rather comically dressing even their animals in mourning clothes.

The people living in Ninevah are taking a chance that even though they don’t know the law, if they show some effort, that perhaps God will still spare them from the fate they have earned. Not entirely unlike the Gentile believers in the early church. They knew that the gospel appealed to them, that Christ was the kind of God worth following, even though they had no idea where to start. Church leaders gathered in Jerusalem to discuss what to do with this new group of eager converts to the faith. “Some of the believers from among the Pharisees stood up and claimed ‘The Gentiles must be circumcised, They must be required to keep the law of Moses.’” These new people must be held to the same rules as we have held ourselves! They’ve got to fit in with the old traditions, and if the gospel means enough to them, then they will do things the correct way. You know, our way.

That sounds rather familiar to a 21st century church. We’re here, got a big beautiful building with lots of loving people inside it. There are greeters at the door, programs for the children, and the seats are even pretty comfortable! Come and find us, we’re a very welcoming church!

So long as you know how to use a hymnal, when to sit down and stand up, what to do when you’re praying, what to do when someone else is praying, and don’t mind someone standing at the front and talking to you for half an hour, we’ll absolutely welcome you among us!

I have every confidence that when people come to the typical church, they will like what they find. They’ll find faithful, loving people. They’ll find a community that is willing to nurture them on their journey. They’ll find that we’re not all that pharisaical or judgmental, and that those stories about people getting kicked out of a little old lady’s pew are more folklore than fact.

Perhaps they’ll even learn to love the tradition that feeds us. Eventually the ritual of saying the Lord’s Prayer together will become as familiar a comfort to them as it is to us. Eventually they may even feel their hearts strangely warmed by the “thee’s” and “thou’s” of the King James Version of the Bible.

Perhaps they may choose to live according to the law of Moses?

Like the Pharisees, we often expect others who come into our home to fit into the patterns that are already in place. It’s the way things are done, and it’s our understanding of how we live out who we are. It’s a very specific formula that perhaps doesn’t involve a codified religious legal system, but does have certain expectations about the way one acts in church.

It’s a fact of the human condition that we tend to associate with those who are most like us: our families, with the same backgrounds and habits, even physical features and mannerisms; our friends, with whom we have shared experiences and common interests; our co-workers, who share the pattern of our daily lives; and our churches, who tend to share similar theological ideals, political affiliations, and economic levels within each congregation. Churches tend to be one of the most segregated places in our culture. Those who join us are expected to look and act within the margins of appropriateness, and they may bring their own flavors and variations on the way we’ve always done things, but at some point if they find themselves not fitting in, they’l leave.

It’s only natural then, that churches who want to grow tend to look for people who are a lot like them. Folks who know to come to church at 10:30, who know how to dress for worship, and who know how to carry themselves with an appropriate amount of reverence. I would guess though, that the people who are likely to adhere to those often unspoken traditions already have a church home. So your growth is going to come either from new people moving into the community or church members having babies.

But those aren’t the only people whom God has chosen and called. Christianity isn’t a birthright, it’s a life lived in response to the free gift of God’s grace. There are people in this world who know that there is something out there greater than them, who have experienced God, but don’t have the language to articulate that experience. We use ugly words to describe them, like “unchurched,” and they are not us, unless they become just like us. It’s an “us” and “them” division drawn over who belongs in the club. But being chosen by God is not based on whether or not one attends church. It’s based solely on the will of God, even if that means that we are sent from our Israelite spiritual heritage into a Gentile world.

Perhaps we should heed Peter’s words to the inner circle of the church council in our Acts passage, “God, who know’s people’s deepest thoughts and desires, confirmed this by giving them the Holy Spirit, just as he did to us. He made no distinction between us and them, but purified their deepest thoughts and desires though faith.” The Gentile and Jewish Christians are going to end up doing things differently, but God is not the one who makes the distinction. We are the one’s who point and say “Why can’t you just fit in to what we’re already doing? All of our members are happy with the way we do things now.”

Because God chooses to expand his kingdom without regard to the boundaries we draw for ourselves. The church in Acts sees that God is acting across ethnic and religious boundaries, and chooses to change themselves to unite all of God’s people in Christ. Jonah, likewise, is called out of his homeland to preach to Ninevah, that great city, and goes knowing that God will be as merciful to them as she has been to Israel. 

God does not stop with the law of Moses, or at the boundaries of the Holy Land. Neither does God stop with our church traditions, or at the borders of the United States. The LORD is God of all creation, and chooses whomever he will, even people who are not like us.

Sometimes God chooses people who are very not like us. People who look different, sound different, act different, or express themselves differently than we do. I mean, why would God choose to act through someone who has to be up and moving all the time when she could be acting through me, who is perfectly content to sit quietly and reverently.

I’ve spent a lot of time in my preaching career talking about the wondrous works of God. How when we see the amazing things God is doing in the world, we cannot help but sing praises, and be astounded by the Greatness of our Lord.

I mean, God is the one who spoke creation into existence at the very beginning. God is the one who made Abraham’s childless household into a mighty nation. God brought that nation out of Egypt into a land of milk and honey. Our God sent fire to Mount Carmel to prove Baal a false God, and preserved God’s people through their exile in Babylon, bringing them home again. Then our God became a human being, and walked among us. That same God, who fed the multitude, and performed innumerable healings, died on our behalf, and rose again. I mean, wow! Those are some wonders!

But to use someone who is doing it wrong? Doesn’t God know he has his wonderful servants here at this church to choose from? For generations this way of being the church has ministered faithfully to God’s people. We’ve established thoughtful positions on why we order our worship services the way we do, we’ve considered the needs of our members in our architecture, and now God is going to use someone who isn’t a part of that system? I mean, God is good all the time, but if this is how it’s going to be, I don’t know that I like it all that much. This kind of radical inclusivity, I think that’s utterly wrong.

And so I find myself sitting outside of Ninevah praying with Jonah. ““Come on, LORD! Wasn’t this precisely my point when I was back in my own land? This is why I fled to Tarshish earlier! I know that you are a merciful and compassionate God, very patient, full of faithful love, and willing not to destroy. At this point, LORD, you may as well take my life from me, because it would be better for me to die than to live.”

God responds with, to paraphrase using that classic southern phrase, “How’s that working out for you?” Jonah pouts, and builds himself a hut to watch the city, hoping that Ninevah will mess up, that Jonah’s view of the world, the view of God as depicted elsewhere in scripture as being unapologetically and exclusively the God of Israel, will be vindicated with a good old fashioned smiting of the sinful citizens of Ninevah.

An unnamed shrub grows up overnight, and provides Jonah with some lush greenery. Scripture tells us that it “[provides] shade for his head [saves] him from his misery. Jonah was very happy about the shrub.” Perhaps he interprets this divine providence as a comfort under which he can wait out the coming destruction of Ninevah, that great city. After all, this indicates that God doesn’t intend to take Jonah’s life from him, so surely that means that God has come to his senses and is going to give Ninevah what they deserve. I imagine he smiled smugly to himself right up until “God provided a worm the next day at dawn, and it attacked the shrub so that it died.” 

The LORD God, who is merciful and compassionate, very patient, full of faithful love, and willing not to destroy, looked at his petulant prophet sitting outside the city, and through that comforting shrub reminded him of what was really at stake.

The LORD God is very patient even with his crotchety church. Perhaps the decline of mainline protestantism is a like Jonah’s shrub: a reminder that God can choose Ninevah as well as Jonah, God can choose the Gentile Christians as well as the Jewish Christians, that God can choose both us and them.

Though we never hear Jonah’s answer to the question God poses, the third act of this play is staged in our own lives. How will we respond to God’s question: This thing you “pitied” was not something for which you worked, it’s not your creation, it was mine, and is fleeting.

“Yet for my part, I cannot pity Ninevah, that great city...?” I can’t use these people whom I have created to work my will in the world? I have called them and given them the Holy Spirit, just as I did you, and yet you choose to neglect them? Why then should I not have mercy upon them? They are created by the one God who speaks into being things which do not exist, and exactly as worthy of God’s love as we are.

Because if we are honest with ourselves, we have not done a great job of keeping the commandments we have been given. The fact that the Christian Church is as fragmented as it is testifies to our lack of love for one another across our history. The “good old days” were perhaps not as good as the nostalgic stories we tell indicate. 

Peter, who stuck his foot in his mouth consistently throughout the earthy ministry of Jesus, gets it. “Why then are you placing a burden on the shoulders of these disciples that neither we nor our ancestors could bear?” Because if it were up to us to earn the righteousness in which we are wrapped, we would never even get close. We are David’s fallen tent, a people given a covenant who simply do not have it in them to hold up their end.

I think we sit with Jonah in stubborn judgement over God’s merciful treatment of Ninevah because we are afraid that maybe if God loves people who are not like us, that means that God has noticed how full of sin we are, and has given up on us. We create and us and them to keep those others separate from God’s blessings in case it might run out and we be left up to our own failing devices. They’ve got to earn it, because we’ve convinced ourselves that we deserve it!

Uh-huh, how’s that working out for you?

“On the contrary, we believe that we and they are saved in the same way, by the grace of the Lord Jesus.” Though they will not live their lives in the same way as we do, though they will not worship in the same way we do, and though God has called them to do things differently than we do, God can, and does, cross all those boundaries, for we are united in the Lord Jesus.

These people are out there, filled with the Holy Spirit, willing to enact the works of God, and who are we to say that because they enact them differently that our churches are not where they can have a home.

We act like Jonah because we have forgotten that we are Gentiles, and a sect of Judaism made room for us within their customs. Choosing not to require us to keep their traditions, but rather allowing God to do a new thing among them through us.

When we look at having to change the way we live as the Church, it’s a scary proposition, and we would perhaps rather that God kept us among our own people, rather than sending us to Ninevah that it might know the graciousness of God. For we are Jonah, and Ninevah, and the fallen tent of David, and the Gentiles who belong to God. It is scary to have to change ourselves. So God changes us by putting people who are different from us in our lives. It is our task, then, in gratitude to God who is making a new creation out of us, to seek out those people and invite them in that we may be changed through them, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Crowd Sourced Exegesis: Luke 8:26-39

Proper 7C/Ordinary Time 12C/Pentecost +5C


CSE Luke 8:26-39 from Joseph Taber on Vimeo.


26Then they sailed to the country of the Gerasenes, which is opposite Galilee. 27When Jesus had stepped out on land, there met him a man from the city who had demons. For a long time he had worn no clothes, and he had not lived in a house but among the tombs. 28When he saw Jesus, he cried out and fell down before him and said with a loud voice, “What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg you, do not torment me.” 29For he had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. (For many a time it had seized him. He was kept under guard and bound with chains and shackles, but he would break the bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert.)

30Jesus then asked him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Legion,” for many demons had entered him. 31And they begged him not to command them to depart into the abyss. 32Now a large herd of pigs was feeding there on the hillside, and they begged him to let them enter these. So he gave them permission. 33Then the demons came out of the man and entered the pigs, and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned.

34When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they fled and told it in the city and in the country. 35Then people went out to see what had happened, and they came to Jesus and found the man from whom the demons had gone, sitting at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind, and they were afraid. 36And those who had seen it told them how the demon-possessed man had been healed. 37Then all the people of the surrounding country of the Gerasenes asked him to depart from them, for they were seized with great fear. So he got into the boat and returned.

38The man from whom the demons had gone begged that he might be with him, but Jesus sent him away, saying, 39“Return to your home, and declare how much God has done for you.” And he went away, proclaiming throughout the whole city how much Jesus had done for him.

Hans Frei's book that I mentioned

To leave a comment, type your response in the box below. Choose a way to identify yourself using the drop-down menu, Then click "Publish."