First Sunday of Lent

Follow Me.  I Know the Way Out.

Hunger, Powerlessness and Inadequacy:  These are the weak spots Jesus struggled with.  Very often, we consider the battle and Jesus’ victory and overlook how the desert affected Jesus.  For us, going into the desert for forty days would involve a backpack full of food; it would be suicide to make such a journey without sufficient food and water; however, we can survive without food for forty days if we are in good health and have adequate water.  Jesus was hungry.  Fasting allowed Jesus to experience the temptation to be independent of needing others to bake his bread as well as the understanding that life is more than the sum total of our physical desires and longings.  On a deeper level, Jesus experiences the profound understanding that, though the Son of God, he needs other people, and that centering one’s life around physical desires is an error (Man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds from the mouth of God). Ultimately, we cannot even rely entirely on human communion, but upon God our creator.

            Jesus’ next vulnerability was his feeling of powerlessness.  Exploiting this, Satan offers Jesus complete domination over the world’s countries if he would worship Satan.  Look at what being submissive to God the Father had gotten him: hunger pangs and feelings of worthlessness.  There is that famous line from Paradise Lost where Satan says “Better to rule in hell than serve in Heaven”.  The desert was a test of Jesus’ resolve for the mission; success wasn’t on Jesus’ terms, they were on God the Father’s.  He replies to Satan quoting again from Deuteronomy “You shall worship the Lord, your God, and him alone shall you serve.”   How often our fear of being powerless leads us to believe getting power is the answer, that realigning our priorities to become powerful is our ultimate goal rather than seeking the Kingdom and serving God.

            The final temptation came in the form quite unlike all the others.  It was the showdown.  In the desert of despair, with no visible sign of God’s presence, and Satan close at hand, the desire to experience God’s care and concern in some manifestation become Jesus’ greatest vulnerability.  Just give me a sign of your love!  Everyone feels this, especially when things are not going well.  Satan’s answer was to call God’s hand and turn Jesus’ test into God’s test.  Now it is Satan who is quoting Scripture:

“He will command his angels concerning you, to guard you,”
and:
“With their hands, they will support you,
lest you dash your foot against a stone.”

Satan quotes from Psalm 91, and Jesus responds with a third passage from Deuteronomy  “You shall not put your Lord God to the test”.  The very source of his reasoning---Holy Scripture—was turned against him.  How often do foes of God’s love and unconditional grace bend scripture to turn it from a source of healing love to a weapon?  This round of Bible Darts over, Satan departs “for a time” suggesting that the tenacity of Satan grows, not diminishes, with defeat.  Being holy and being hounded have a long tradition of being paired, but like Jesus, we may be for a time in the desert; but simply because the journey gets tough doesn’t mean we walk it alone.  At every turn, the community animated by the Spirit joins us and reminds us that we follow Christ into the desert.  As the man standing at the bottom of a deep pit asks the other man who came to help him why he jumped in to be with him, that now they both were stuck.  The man who jumped in to rescue him said “Don’t worry.  I’ve been here before, and I know the way out”.

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Fishermen or Fishers-of-Men?

I wonder how many of us have felt as Simon Peter did in today’s gospel when he complains “Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing . . . .”  Hard work never guarantees success.  In fact, Peter had lent Jesus the use of his boat as a platform for preaching because the crowds along the shore grew so large.  He did this after a long night of unsuccessful fishing. But Peter’s comment that began with despair ended with “…but at your command I will lower the nets.”  What faith!  Jesus wasn’t even a fisherman!  Of course the story ends with the boat being almost swamped with fish, to the extent that other boats needed to assist in recovering the catch.  Jesus remarks that he will make them “fishers of men.” Peter, and the two brothers James and John left their nets to follow Jesus.  What a remarkable morning, and what a remarkable insight into our life in Christ.

Our calling is not to success, but is to a life of faith, to paraphrase Mother Teresa of Calcutta.  Just as last week’s gospel suggested a path of “seeking” rather than “building” the Kingdom of God, this week’s gospel suggests obedience to Christ over obedience to tradition, because tradition wants to use the status quo, to reference the past to guide the future;  the Spirit, on the other hand, wants to use the energy and drive of the present to work with God to create the future; “Behold, I am doing something new” (Isaiah 43:19).  What propels us forward in the life of faith isn’t concern with success, but responsiveness to a lover---God loves us!  We are called to a living, dynamic relationship, where God is asking us to be a part of His creating acts.

Too often our evangelical efforts to be good news become subject to cost-benefit analysis, but such a model is foreign to a God who courts His own creation and actively seeks communion with us who, like the priest of Isaiah proclaims

“Woe is me, I am doomed!
For I am a man of unclean lips,
living among a people of unclean lips;
yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”

What can we do when we have experienced God’s great grace and love and realize we are no worthier than the rest of humanity to merit God’s favor? We love others as God has loved us. We see God’s universal love poured out, in the elegant words of William Sloane Coffin “…universally for everyone from Pope to the loneliest wino on the planet. . . .”(Credo). In this model of love, we don't love from fear or shame, but from the awesome realization of being loved.

The conversion of the fishermen to fishers-of-men didn’t begin with Jesus excoriating them but loving them.  It was from that grace-filled love that Peter and the priest in Isaiah dropped to their knees  Too often the church shames people to their knees; however, God's universal love doesn't send the faithful to their knees out of shame, but out of awe.

The message to the Church is clear: put out into the deeper waters of grace and stop messing around in the tide pools of shame. 

Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Seeking and Building

Belonging is important to all of us.  The need usually seems to surface very early as we play among our friends on the playground; alliances begin, juvenile subterfuge accommodates the many conflicting passions that arise, and alliances crumble only to be reinvigorated by something (or someone) new.  Jesus, in his self-declaration from last week’s gospel, seems to have been such a novelty.  The crowd in the local house of worship responds to Jesus' declaration of "This has been fulfilled in your hearing" with “Is this not the son of Joseph?” , and was quickly followed by a demand that Jesus perform miracles he allegedly performed in another town, Capernaum.  Jesus responds with the adage that a prophet receives honor except at home followed by a list of events in which God worked outside the people of Israel and showed favor to those not part of the club of God’s Chosen Ones.

It is a very compelling narrative to imagine Jesus being run out of his hometown “on a rail” like some freewheeling carpet-bagging preacher, his shabby entourage of fisherman-turned-disciples in dismayed pursuit.  I imagine Peter raising an eyebrow and remarking “Well, that went well” as they headed for the cliff they were being chased towards.

The account of Jesus being run out of town by hostile hometown folk is a metaphor for the rejection of Jesus as Christ and rejection of his liberation gospel; it helps the early Christian community—especially the gentile communities of Luke—understand how the God of the Jews is now courting a much wider audience.  It is a common theme in Luke’s gospel that God’s favor extends to the Gentiles. How does this Good News for the first century Christians become good news for us?

God’s revelation broke into a community already fractured between the Temple authorities and the “grass root” Torah interpreters, the Pharisees, and Scribes.  Under Roman occupation, these tensions simmered just beneath the surface.  Into this mix came folks like John the Baptist, Jesus and a host of itinerant preachers (mostly in the northern sections like the Galilee).  Jesus, however, healed as a sign of God’s favor with those out of favor with all factions of Jewish life.  His miracles were signs of God’s reign, not spectacles to lend him credibility; the authority of Jesus resided in the manifestation of faith by those seeking him for a cure. 

Our community is always in danger of losing the “seeking” attribute of those searching out Jesus for a cure.  We spend so much energy and money “defending” the faith, defining who’s in and who’s out, promulgating laws and doctrine, that it is easy to miss the need to seek continually the Kingdom as a community; we don’t “build” the Kingdom of God, we seek the Kingdom of God as our primary mission.  The “building” metaphor implies the need for walls; the “seeking” metaphor implies the need for humility and community.  The gospels, Paul’s letters, and early Church wisdom is all a product of actively seeking to explain the faithful's encounter with The Christ.  When we sit fat and happy with a well-worn Bible, which we can direct as an instrument of condemnation of the “outsider,” used as a manual of organization rather than a source of inspiration, we mistake the sign for the city to which the sign points, and inevitably lose our way.  But there is another way.

 We can use the image of one walking with a single candle in the dark to understand "seeking".  The candle provides light enough to see a few feet in front but provides us no real sense of where we are going and where we have been.  As folks join us, the area we can see expands and those who follow us remind us of where we have been.  Although we can never see as far as we might like, the path is broad, the company is engulfed in light, and we find our home as we make our way seeking the Kingdom together.