The Dangers of Protective Love

'Jesus began to show his disciples that he must go to Jerusalem and undergo great suffering at the hands of the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised. And Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him, saying, “God forbid it, Lord! This must never happen to you.” But he turned and said to Peter, “Get behind me, Satan! You are a stumbling block to me; for you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.”

Then Jesus told his disciples, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it. For what will it profit them if they gain the whole world but forfeit their life? Or what will they give in return for their life?

“For the Son of Man is to come with his angels in the glory of his Father, and then he will repay everyone for what has been done. Truly I tell you, there are some standing here who will not taste death before they see the Son of Man coming in his kingdom.”'

--Matthew 16: 21-28

Let’s talk about Satan.  Or rather, let’s talk about Jesus’ use of that word, ‘Satan,’ in our Gospel this morning.  Each time this reading shows up, this statement from Jesus feels like it comes up out of nowhere and often startles us.

 

To give some context, just prior to the start of today’s reading, Simon bar Jonah has just confessed that Jesus is the Messiah.  Being the first of the 12 apostles to do so, Jesus throws some praise his way and gives him a new name, Peter—technically Petros in Greek, or Kephas in Aramaic.  His new name means The Rock, which is a testament to his strong faith in recognizing Jesus’ true nature.  But when Jesus starts to tell the Rock and the other apostles that the destiny of the Messiah is to suffer and die, Simon Peter steps in and says, ‘God forbid it!’  Jesus responds by giving Simon bar Jonah yet another name, saying, ‘Get behind me, Satan!’

 

Does Jesus really mean what we think he means when he says this?  Yes and no, actually.  No, Jesus is not saying that Simon Peter is the incarnation of the traditional depiction of "the devil." Or, as Ulysses Everett McGill put it:

Courtesy of Ulysses Everett McGill in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

What the word Satan means in its original Hebrew is ‘adversary’ or ‘accuser.’  So, yes, Jesus really did mean it when he gave Simon Peter this new moniker.  In that moment he was being an adversary, standing in the way of Jesus’ true messianic purpose.  Anything or anyone that seeks to deflect people from the way of God, any influence that seeks to make folks turn back from the hard path, or any power that seeks to make human desires take the place of the divine imperative can all be described as Satans.  In this way, Simon Peter was being a Satan.

 

Like all of the apostles, Simon Peter had an idea of what the Messiah was suppose to be, and self-sacrificing wasn’t it.  There existed a group within Judaism at that time called the Zealots—even one of the apostles, the other Simon, was called the Zealot.  These were folks who functioned as something like political revolutionaries.  They believed that the Messiah would be a conquering king that would swiftly depose Caesar and expel their Roman occupiers.  Often the Zealots resorted to violent tactics to get their point across, one of which, according to many scholars was Barabas, the condemned man set free instead of Jesus. 

 

This description about the Messiah’s future, one that would lead to a violent death at the hands of the collaboration system between corrupt religious officials and the empire, was just too much for Simon Peter to take.  So, like any of us would do if someone we loved said that they were headed down a path that would lead to their death, he steps in the way.  One possible translation is that he ‘caught hold’ of Jesus, as if to literally hold him back from continuing this journey to Jerusalem and to the cross.  We can almost see the tears in his eyes as he tells Jesus, ‘This must not happen to you!’

 

An Eastern icon of Jesus' rebuke of Simon Peter after the latter's intervention.

And then comes Jesus’ response with the infamous Satan line.  Over the years as I have read this sentence from Jesus I can’t help but consider the tone in his voice. I do not believe it was a harsh one, or an angry one, but rather the voice of someone wounded to the heart, with a poignant grief and kind of shuddering horror because in this moment, Simon Peter is doing exactly what another Satan had done in the wilderness at the very start of Jesus’ ministry. 

 

Remember the days after his baptism, how Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days and nights, and according to the text, he was tempted by Satan.  Those three temptations were for power, prestige, and possessions.  This demonic force, attempting to lure Jesus with a method of escape from this hard path of God, promised to make him ruler over all the kingdoms of the world, tried to assure him that because of who he was the angels would catch him if he jumped off  building, and even tempted his hunger by encouraging Jesus to turn the stones into bread.  Power, prestige, and possessions.  And in this moment, looking into his friend’s eyes, Jesus sees the same look he had seen in the wilderness, and the same temptation to be the kind of Messiah Simon Peter and others wanted, not the one that God had in mind.  Simon Peter, like that other Satan, was promising an escape that Jesus could not and would not accept. 

An unknown depiction of Jesus' rebuke of Satan during the wilderness temptations.

 

Can we really blame Simon Peter for saying what he said?  After all, it came from a place of love.  He wanted to protect Jesus, but in that moment of trying to protect him, Simon Peter tried to control Jesus and take the decision out of his hands.  He seized Jesus’ own personhood.  He could not bear to witness Jesus go down this path, but he also did not understand how his own protective love was doing more harm in that moment than good. 

 

There are times when love seeks to deflect us away from perils and dangers.  Think of a child going off to college for the first time, whose parent wants nothing but to keep them safe and close and so they hinder that move in some—perhaps that has taken on a new meaning nowadays!  Or consider a woman who tells her partner that she wants to finally quit her job and pursue a career as an artist, only to have her partner discourage her from doing so, not because the partner doesn’t support her dream, but because the partner is afraid that the woman will try, fail, and be devastated.  These are examples of protective love getting in the way of people actually living their lives, or to use church language, actually living into their call.  The real love is not the love that holds people back, but the love that sends them out to listen to God’s call, knowing that there may be painful moments along the way, but that this is the path that God has in store for their loved one.

 

Protective love doesn’t really protect the other person at all, but rather it protects the one that embodies it.  Simon Peter wasn’t protecting Jesus.  He was protecting himself from having to watch Jesus go down this difficult path.  The parent or the partner in the examples I mentioned usually aren’t trying to protect the other person so much as they are trying to ease their own fears and concerns.  What I suspect really wounded Jesus was the realization that Simon Peter was speaking with this kind of love in his heart, not the kind that wanted only for Jesus to be his truest, fullest self, to live into the mission that God had set before him.  In the same way, we who have this tendency to tell others ‘You don’t want to do that!’ or ‘I know what’s best for you!’ must learn that even if it comes from a place of love, it does not necessarily mean that it is something nurturing and affirming. 

Calling Simon Peter ‘Satan’ may seem harsh, but in its literal form that’s exactly who we are when we get in the way of people living into their fullest selves and being the people God has called them to be.  We become the accuser or the adversary whenever we insert ourselves into the mix and think we know what’s best for someone else, even someone we love.  This is part of the journey of kenosis, of self-emptying, which Jesus invites the apostles on, but which they can’t accept until he has walked the road to the cross and shown them what it really looks like.  May we have the grace to examine our hearts and the motivations and intentions behind those moments of protective love that we express.  May we seek not to catch hold of or rebuke those who choose a path that may lead to some measure of pain, but support and encourage them and seek to better understand the journey God has called them on.  Let us walk alongside them and love them from a place of encouragement, rather than our own self-motivated protection.

If Jesus Can Change: A Lesson on Being Fully Present

'Jesus called the crowd to him and said to them, “Listen and understand: it is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but it is what comes out of the mouth that defiles.” Then the disciples approached and said to him, “Do you know that the Pharisees took offense when they heard what you said?” He answered, “Every plant that my heavenly Father has not planted will be uprooted. Let them alone; they are blind guides of the blind. And if one blind person guides another, both will fall into a pit.” But Peter said to him, “Explain this parable to us.” Then he said, “Are you also still without understanding? Do you not see that whatever goes into the mouth enters the stomach, and goes out into the sewer? But what comes out of the mouth proceeds from the heart, and this is what defiles. For out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander. These are what defile a person, but to eat with unwashed hands does not defile.”

Jesus left that place and went away to the district of Tyre and Sidon. Just then a Canaanite woman from that region came out and started shouting, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is tormented by a demon.” But he did not answer her at all. And his disciples came and urged him, saying, “Send her away, for she keeps shouting after us.” He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” But she came and knelt before him, saying, “Lord, help me.” He answered, “It is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” She said, “Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.” Then Jesus answered her, “Woman, great is your faith! Let it be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed instantly.'

--Matthew 15: 10-28

Jesus meets the Canaanite woman, and her daughter is healed of her demon by proxy.

We have a very curious and perhaps confusing Gospel on our hands this week.  From Matthew we get two accounts—one of Jesus teaching his disciples about the true nature of cleanliness, and the other of Jesus being confronted by the Canaanite woman.  Oddly, our lectionary leaves the first story optional for us, but we really need it to understand just how powerful the second one is. 

 

The first story appears simple enough.  Jesus is frustrated by the Pharisees and other religious authorities who seem bound up and guided by tradition more than love.  Something that goes into you cannot defile you on a spiritual level because it just passes through you and into the sewer, which is a natural bodily function and therefore ritually clean. It’s what comes out of a person’s mouth that defiles because it is with our words that we often promote injustice, violence, and oppression of every kind.  These authority figures—who are akin to some of the more rigid, fundamentalist Christians of our time—are concerned with theological fights akin to how many angels can dance on the head of a needle.  

But for Jesus, religious purity and faithful discipleship are not measured ultimately by whether we can come up with the right answer to questions like that, or if we earn perfect attendance in online worship.  Faithfulness, for Jesus, is shown ultimately in how much we are being guided by love.  If love is your guide, then you will see that all the God of love has made is good and pure, and you will let go of this obsession with ritual cleanliness.  This is a teaching of Jesus that, I suspect, we can all get onboard with; besides, how good is it to see Jesus call out the hypocrisy of those rigid religious authorities, huh?

 

So Jesus leaves that place where he had engaged in this debate about cleanliness with the Pharisees, and he comes to the region of Tyre and Sidon.  What’s important about these places being named in the text is that they are not part of Jewish territory.  Here Jesus is surrounded by Gentiles, non-Jews.  And as if on queue a woman comes up to him, asking for him to heal who her possessed daughter.  This woman, who naturally goes unnamed in the story but whom tradition has given the name of Justa, is a Canaanite, which were the indigenous people from whom the children of Israel seized their so-called Promised Land.  This makes her a Gentile, and therefore unclean.  Here is a chance for Jesus to practice exactly what he has just preached to the Pharisees!  Is he going to be guided by love or by tradition?

 

When Justa asks for help, the disciples tell Jesus to dismiss her, but he doesn’t even speak to her, instead he emphasizes the nature of his ministry by reminding them that he has come only for the lost sheep of Israel—something he had had said earlier in the Gospel when he directed the 12 apostles to go only to those same sheep and not to any Gentiles.  Nevertheless, she persists.  She comes to Jesus directly and pleads her case.  Here is his chance, again, to do the thing, but this time he tells her that it is not appropriate for the children’s food to be thrown to the dogs; that is, for him—the bread of life—to be given to anyone but his own people. 

 

Some preachers might say that this exchange between Jesus and Justa isn’t as bad as it sounds.  Jesus was just testing her.  But was he though??  He never indicates it’s a test, nor does the Gospel writer say so.  Still, those same preachers say, he didn’t mean dog in a really bad way, it’s better translated as puppy.  That’s not exactly true, and even if it was, dogs were not valued in Jesus’ culture the way they are now, even if they were small and puppyish.  Dogs were scavengers, which is what Jesus equates this woman—and her whole race—with being.  It’s as if Jesus had a prime opportunity to do exactly what he warned the Pharisees with doing and instead offered up the biblical equivalent of ‘do as I say, not as I do.’  Why would act in such a manner?

 

The challenge with this story is that it paints Jesus in an unflattering light, and nearly every good Christian is taught that we should never think of Jesus in such a way.  But this way of reading Scripture or thinking about Jesus effectively removes his humanity.  We would much prefer to think of Jesus as the perfect human, but here’s the thing: thinking of Jesus as the perfect human can often take us off the hook for our own errors and moments of hypocrisy.  How many times have you heard: "What do you expect of me, I’m not Jesus, I’m not perfect?!" It isn’t about Jesus being perfect, though, it’s about Jesus being our model, the pioneer of our faith, as the Letter to the Hebrews calls him.  To be a Christian is be be little Christs ourselves, which doesn’t mean trying to be perfect all the time.  It means something much more meaningful, and at times much more difficult—being fully present. 

 

For when we are fully present, we can hear someone else when they challenge us.  We can better resist the impulse to go to a place of defensiveness, and we can learn and grow.  Yes, even Jesus learns and grows in this moment!  In spite of the fact that he briefly gives in to his own cultural prejudices, Jesus remains fully present and listens to Justa when she turns his own words on him by saying, "Even the dogs eat the food under the master’s table."  

This causes him to pause for a second, as if to say, ‘Well, you got me,’ and Jesus commends her faith—just as he commended the faith of a Roman centurion in Matthew, chapter 8, the only other Gentile to receive healing from Jesus.  Remember last week, how Peter fell when he tried walking on water and Jesus commented on his lack of faith?  Here is a someone who is ritually unclean, who worships idols, and speaks up at a time when women simply did not do that.  This is someone who will not leave Jesus alone, and for that he calls her faith great.  I suspect he does so because, believe it or not, Jesus learns something in that moment, that even he is susceptible to the prejudices of his own culture.

 

There may be some major Scriptural and religious ramifications to the idea that Jesus can learn.  To paraphrase David Lose, a cadre of theological police would patrol the long corridors of our imaginations if we dared say such a thing!  But if it’s possible for Jesus to learn and grow and move beyond his own culture’s shortcomings around who is and who is not clean or worthy of the bread he offers or fit for the kingdom, then can’t we too be reformed?  If Jesus can go from being unclean by his own definition—that is, by spewing an insensitive and derogatory remark toward Justa—to being clean—that is, healing her daughter and commending her faith—then aren't we capable of the same kind of transformation? 

 

And how does Jesus do it?  Be being fully present and listening to Justa’s needs.  He doesn’t cut her off, tell her what she really wants, or try to explain how he didn’t mean the comment as an insult because he has three dogs at home and loves them very much.  He just listened to her.  She offers him the pain and grief of her heart and the hearts of her people, generations of institutional prejudice, and he doesn’t get defensive.  Instead, he hears her when she comes back to him because in the moment he manages to stay present to her and her needs.  

This is a practice in which we are all being called to participate, each and every day.  Who is it in our lives that needs us to be fully present?  What kind of cultural prejudices do we, like Jesus, need to move beyond?  How are we putting tradition ahead of love when it comes to dealing with folks who are not like us, and might we, again, like Jesus, keep ourselves open to the constructive criticism or feedback offered to us, so that we can be changed?  This is what it means to be little Christs, to embody Jesus’ full life—yes, even the parts that are hard for us to consider—and realize that if Jesus can do it, then, yes, so can we.  We can be fully present. We can listen.  We can realize our faults.  And we can change. We need only  eyes to see those who are hurting, ears to listen to them with the intent to learn, and hearts eager for transformation. 

Saint Justa the Canaanite Woman, pray for us.

Being Fed In the Wilderness

'Jesus withdrew in a boat to a deserted place by himself. But when the crowds heard it, they followed him on foot from the towns. When he went ashore, he saw a great crowd; and he had compassion for them and cured their sick. When it was evening, the disciples came to him and said, “This is a deserted place, and the hour is now late; send the crowds away so that they may go into the villages and buy food for themselves.” Jesus said to them, “They need not go away; you give them something to eat.” They replied, “We have nothing here but five loaves and two fish.” And he said, “Bring them here to me.” Then he ordered the crowds to sit down on the grass. Taking the five loaves and the two fish, he looked up to heaven, and blessed and broke the loaves, and gave them to the disciples, and the disciples gave them to the crowds. And all ate and were filled; and they took up what was left over of the broken pieces, twelve baskets full. And those who ate were about five thousand men, besides women and children.'

--Matthew 14: 13-21

So the question on many people’s minds when they hear this story is: did Jesus really feed 5000 people?  I tend to respond to this kind of question with something the late spiritual author Rachel Held Evans once said, which is that I don’t know for certain if such a miracle DID happen, but I believe in a God through whom such a miracle COULD happen.  Whether we believe that the feeding of the 5000 literally happened this way, or whether we believe it is some sort of allegory, the story has a lot to teach us, particularly those of us who have felt cut off from being fed by our rituals and our communities during this pandemic.

An Eastern icon of the feeding of the 5000

It’s helpful for us to put this miracle in its context—and yes, it is a miracle, and I will get into why a bit later.  We don’t get the context in our selection this week, but this event takes place just after word has reached Jesus of the death of John the Baptist, his cousin and fellow proclaimer of the Good News that the kingdom of God had come near.  Several of Jesus’ own disciples—and maybe even Jesus himself—were followers of John, and no doubt many believed that the two teachers and prophets would bring end the Roman occupation and restore the land to the people of Israel.  The first indicator that this isn’t going to happen the way they think is John getting beheaded by King Herod.  We can imagine how such an event would affect those who had put so much faith and hope in John.

The crowds who were following Jesus no doubt included such folks, whom it can be assumed likely wanted to leave and isolate themselves in their grief.  Consider that for a moment:  an event of such great distress and heartbreak, which no doubt caused fear and panic, has occurred, and it has left a large number of people feeling helpless and uncertain about what their future holds.  All the while, these folks out in the middle of the wilderness are getting hungrier and hungrier. Doesn’t that sound a bit familiar?

We may not be able to point to one single event as the marker for the beginning of our suffering—such as the beheading of John was for these folks—but how many of us over the last 5 months have isolated ourselves in our grief?  There are folks who have cut themselves off from online church worship or given up on maintaining connections through platforms like Zoom because these efforts are not only boring and exhausting, but they aren’t providing a whole lot of hope that things will be different. 

This sums up our situation quite well.

This pandemic is an event of great distress and heartbreak, and it too has caused fear and panic, leaving so many of us feeling helpless and uncertain about our future.  Every day the numbers go up, or at least that’s the case here in North Carolina, and every day we just get hungrier and hungrier as we stay out here in this dessert.  We have more in common with that crowd today than we might have first realized.

It’s here that I want to say that I get it.  I’m with you.  All this time I have had to preach and hold church meetings virtually, and talking to a screen is really, really hard.  I don’t know when the pandemic will end, when we can come back together to worship publicly, and like many I see the rhetoric spewed from our leaders and the cries for change to our broken systems, and I want to do something, but I don’t know what that it is, which leaves me feeling helpless, as well.  It’s very easy during these times for me, for all of us I imagine, to just want to cut ourselves off from all of it, retreat into our self isolation, and let the grief and despair consume us.  What is the answer?

For us it’s Jesus.  And because, as the great mystic Teresa of Avila reminds us, Jesus has no hands or feet but ours, the answer is the Body of Christ, the beloved community that Jesus began; that is, each other. We lean on Jesus in our moments of distress, and we lean on each other, who are the very Body of Christ in the world.  And in these moments, we find comfort, strength, and hope for our future. 

This is what Jesus does in the story of the feeding of the 5000.  Looking out upon the grieving and hungry multitude, Jesus told his apostles, ‘You give them something to eat!’ And when the loaves and fish were brought to him he took them, blessed them, broke them, and gave them out, enough to feed everyone.  The distress and pain that had been felt after news of John’s death begins to fade, and to paraphrase Amy-Jill Levine in her Women’s Bible Commentary, the perverse image of John’s head on a platter is replaced by a banquet for the poor in spirit. 

Caraggio's Beheading of John the Baptist

Out of what looked like scarcity, Jesus brought abundance.  When the apostles distressed that they didn’t have enough and the people were so filled with grief, Jesus gathered them together and fed them.  He provides sustenance when all anyone around him can see and feel is deprivation.  That is a miracle, no matter which explanation we choose to believe.  

It is possible, I believe, for such a miracle to still occur.  If we were in a church building together, I would remind you that the actions of Jesus—taking, blessing, breaking, and giving—are reflections of the Eucharist, Holy Communion, the Lord’s Supper, and that when we say that great prayer of the Church, using those same verbs in our remembrance of Jesus’ Last Supper as we share a morsel of bread and sip of wine, we are fed and made one with Jesus, and in that moment a miracle occurs. 

Saying that right now rings pretty hollow begins we cannot share Eucharist together.  Like that crowd, we are getting hungrier and hungrier the longer we are apart from each other and can’t share that meal.But here’s the miracle, brothers and sisters. I believe that such a feeding can still take place, though it may not look like what we are used to.  If you remember another version of this story—the one in John’s Gospel—you’ll recall a young boy who gives the loaves and fish—all that he has—to help feed the people. In that version the boy’s offering, which passes through Jesus’ hands, feeds the people.  

In the same way, each of us can feed one another whenever we bring whatever we have and let it pass through Jesus’ hands.  When we who are the Body of Christ feed others—both in actual food and in spiritual nourishment—it is eucharistic.  When we are able to support one another in our grief and distress and accept the call when Jesus says to us, as he said to his apostles, ‘You give them something to eat!’ then we can be healers and repairers of the breaches.  Out here in this wilderness we’re all just trying to get fed.  While we may not have the rituals to which we are accustomed, those that have nourished us for so long, we can still feed one another, and when we do, miracles happen. 

Mary of Egypt, one of the dessert mothers, never received Communion until the last day of her life, and said that while she was wandering around in the dessert, she was nourished each day by the Word, by Scripture and the presence of Jesus, the Living Word.  So how can we feed one another while we are out here in this wilderness? 

Saint Zosima gives Saint Mary of Egypt Holy Eucharist on the last day of her life.

We all have COVID fatigue and we miss our old routines, but rather than run back into them blindly or retreat into our grief, maybe we can consider how we, the Body of Christ, can be eucharistic people, who take what we have, bless it, break it open, and give it to someone who needs the love, forgiveness, and grace of Jesus in their lives.  If we can do that, then we will absolutely make miracles happen and transform our world.

The Hope We Need Right Now

'Brothers and sisters, we are debtors, not to the flesh, to live according to the flesh-- for if you live according to the flesh, you will die; but if by the Spirit you put to death the deeds of the body, you will live. For all who are led by the Spirit of God are children of God. For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption. When we cry, “Abba! Father!” it is that very Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are children of God, and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ-- if, in fact, we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him.

I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory about to be revealed to us. For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies. For in hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what is seen? But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.'

--Romans 8: 12-25

One of my wife Kristen's and my favorite tv shows is Supergirl.  Of all the entertainment casualties of the pandemic, losing the final episodes of this past season of Supergirl has really bummed us out because it was doing some great things.  The show is smart, witty, faithful to the spirit of its comic book origins, and very intentional with how it deals with contemporary issues.  

Supergirl, like her cousin Superman, hails from the planet Krypton and wears a red and blue uniform with a curvy ‘S’ emblazoned on the chest.  But on Krypton it’s not an ‘S’ but the seal of the House of El, Supergirl and Superman’s family crest.  It’s a symbol that, in the Kryptonian language, means ‘hope.’  Perhaps that is what makes the tv show so good, that despite all of the challenges she faces—both of the alien kind and the human kind—Supergirl always maintains hope, both in people and in the promise of a better tomorrow.  We both said that this is the show we need right now because it offers hope while not ignoring very real challenges that we face today.  And we both highly recommend it.

Melissa Benoist as Supergirl in the CW television series.

Our reading this week from Paul’s Letter to the Romans deals a lot with hope.  We might, at first glance, treat the kind of hope spoken of by Paul or Jesus as some kind of lofty promise that compels us to ignore the sufferings around us.  To be sure, I’ve known my fair share of Christians who look at suffering—either their own or the collective suffering of the world—and say, ‘Well, none of this matters anyway because my hope is in heaven, not here!’  That kind of hope CAN give us something to look forward to, but it does nothing to actually help us face the challenges of our present time.  The hope Paul gives to the Church in Rome is definitely not this kind of hope.  Rather, it's more like the hope that Supergirl gives, hope in something greater without dismissing the sufferings of the present.

Instead of offering some sort of pollyannic escape, Paul acknowledges the reality of suffering, and the pain of that suffering is expressed in groans—labor pains, Paul calls them, pains felt by the whole of creation.  Hope, then, for Paul, is born out of the disconnect between what is and what should be.  The agony of what is does not get denied, but instead is acknowledged, experienced, and lived through.     

Right now it can be said that the whole of creation has been groaning in labor pains for the better part of this calendar year.  COVID-19 came onto the scene, and creation groaned and cried out to all of us to stop what we were doing.  Humanity, meanwhile, has been doing our own groaning, some over being unable to work, some over having to stay stuck in their homes, some over being sick, and some over watching people die.  Meanwhile, all we have is time to sit and watch social media and cable news, and from this space an old, old groan has been heard once again, calling for justice for all of God’s people, and these groans, which were often drowned out prior to COVID, have joined together in chorus with all of the other cries coming from people and coming from creation itself.  These are all labor pains, I believe, and there is, there must be, something on the other side.  This moment right now that we find ourselves in is the moment when real hope is born. 

Desmond Tutu said that hope is being able to see that there is light, despite all of the darkness.  

Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Martin Luther King said we must accept finite disappointment but never lose infinite hope.  

MLK

How could these two modern prophets speak of such a hope, of something that they could not see in their days of apartheid and Jim Crow, respectively?  Perhaps because they believed Paul’s words that we are children of God. 

Being children of God does not mean that we are free of suffering—just look at Jesus! But being children of God means we do not suffer alone or needlessly; we suffer together with one another and all creation, we suffer with a God who has suffered, all the while we live in hope of a redeemed and liberated world.  This redemption and liberation has already come in Jesus, in whom, Paul says, we have seen the first fruits of the Spirit—Jesus’ love, forgiveness, welcome, and grace.  Jesus has already won, already shown us what the fruits of the Spirit look like, but the creation still groans, and there is still hope that needs to be cultivated, still fruits to be yielded.  Yes, it’s the hope for the kingdom to come, but like Archbishop Tutu and Dr. King, it’s also a hope that allows us to look at the way things have been, the way things are, and say, “No!  This is not the way things should be!”  This is the very hope that Jesus gave, the good news he preached to those who were poor in spirit.  It’s the kind of hope that gets cultivated when we remember that we, too, are children of God, and if children, then heirs of the promise of glory that has both already come in Jesus and is still to come.

I believe that glory is on the other side of this suffering, and I take to heart Paul’s words to a suffering community in Rome and lean on them as good news for our country and our world right now.  The sufferings of the present time cannot compare with the glory about to be revealed, I do believe that.  However, we cannot think that the glory somehow erases the suffering or justifies it.  The resurrection did not erase or justify the cruel, cruel injustice of the crucifixion.  We hope for light at the end of this darkness, but we must not succumb to the false gospel that the suffering we have endured is good for us.  

Our prayer right now is to lean on the hope God gives us, so that we may have strength and courage to endure what we are experiencing now and work for a better and brighter tomorrow, one in which we have learned from the sufferings of our past, so that we may not repeat them.  This is the kind of hope that both keeps us from fully falling into despair while also staying away from any kind of apathetic acceptance of the pain we have endured. 

The poet Emily Dickinson wrote that hope is the thing with feathers; that perches in the soul; and sings the tune without the words; and never stops at all.  That sounds a lot like the Holy Spirit to me, perching in our souls, singing without words and never, ever stopping.  The Spirit is God’s agent of hope in a world that, right now, desperately needs it. 

Emily Dickinson

Look around you and you will find hope, but it is not the pie-in-the-sky, high, high hope.  It is the kind of hope embodied by those who refuse to accept sickness, death, and injustice as a “new normal.”  This is the hope preached by the prophets of old and by modern prophets like Archbishop Tutu, Dr. King, and Congressman John Lewis, who died this weekend. This is the hope Jesus gave to the outcast and marginalized.  And this is the hope we need.  There is light in this darkness, brothers and sisters, and there is glory on the other side that will be revealed to us, to which these present sufferings won’t even compare.  Our God has already won and will win again.  And our God has called each of us a beloved child.  

Congressman John Lewis

That belovedness does not keep us from suffering, but it does free us to see that our future does not have to be a repeat of our past.  So let your groans be heard and mingle with the very labor pains of creation, and from those cries may you find the hope to meet the challenges of today and ensure a glorious tomorrow.

Missing the Mark

"I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. But in fact it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me. For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin that dwells within me.

So I find it to be a law that when I want to do what is good, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind, making me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!"

--Romans 7: 15-25a

If you look out the window of the oratory in our home, you will see a large target leaning up against a tree.  That is my wife Kristen’s target.  As some of you may know, my wife is a pretty darn good archer; in fact, one day, after she hadn’t shot her arrows for several weeks, she said, ‘I’m gonna go shoot,’ and she went outside, immediately shot a bullseye, and came back inside and said, ‘Well, I’m done.’

At least we know we won't starve when the apocalypse comes.

When she took up archery, though, Kristen taught me something that I had never known before.  Did you know, she asked, that the word ‘sin’ is an archery term?  As in, the thing that Jesus came to free us from?  Yes, it’s an archery term that was originated by Aristotle.  The Greek word is hamartia, which literally means ‘to miss the mark,’ as in an archer missing the target.  I must say, though, my wife rarely misses her target, so I guess that means she’s not prone to sinning…

All kidding aside, the word hamartia appears 141 times in the New Testament, and each time it gets translated as ‘sin.’  I know that some of you who read this blog have had experiences in church settings where the sermon each week is about nothing else but sin.  Perhaps you've heard sermons that sounded something like this:  Sin was brought into the world by the misdeeds of Adam, Jesus died to save us from sin, but sin continues to exist, and it is up to us to fight it by avoiding what we perceive as sinful behavior and going to church regularly.  Does that kind of message sound like some of your experiences?

But here’s the thing:  the desire to stay away from sin so fiercely is often counterproductive and can unintentionally lead us to sin.  We create lists in our heads of dos and donts, what is and is not sinful, which reduces our faith journey to just being about following a set of rules, and our relationship with God and one another ends up just being legalistic.  God then becomes a great big judge in the sky to fear, rather than a partner with us to love and who shows us how to love.  This isn’t what sin, what hamartia is about.

Of the 141 times hamartia shows up in the New Testament, a quarter of those appearances are in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Paul knew that avoiding sin wasn’t about just following a set of rules, but instead it had to be relational and contextual.  If it’s just about following laws, what do you do when those laws get complicated and confusing.  He says in chapter 7, verse 22 that he delights in the law of God, but he sees in his members another law that is at war with the law of his mind, making him captive to the law of sin.  That’s four sets of laws he’s talking about!  How could he possibly keep track of it all and avoid every single pitfall? He can’t.  Nobody could. 

Saint Paul, who understood that sin was relational, not legalistic.

The harder we try, the worse it gets.  Paul says he doesn’t understand his own actions, that he does what he knows he shouldn’t do, what he doesn’t even really want to do, and he doesn’t do the things that he knows he should do, the things his heart tells him to do.  How often does this happen to us?  Even when we want to do good we end up missing the mark.  Consider a time perhaps when you thought to do something nice for someone, but instead of doing something that they would have appreciated, you did for them something you appreciated—like giving them your favorite DVD as a birthday present. 

Another common example is when you withhold the truth from someone because you think it will protect them, only to realize once they’ve learned the truth that it wasn’t nearly as harmful as you keeping it from them.   In both of these examples, the intention is not to hurt someone, but, as Paul shows us, sin can infect the heart of even the best of our intentions.  In those moments, we very simply miss the relational mark.  We sin.

Take Paul, for example.  His intentions were actually good when he was persecuting the followers of Jesus because of what the law told him to do.  He believed he was doing what was right.  It wasn’t until Jesus knocked him off his horse on the Damascus road that Paul realized how wrong he was.  Just because he thought he was doing good, didn’t mean that he actually was.  Sin is about impact, more than intention.

This is something that I have noticed is quite hard for folks.  How many of you have ever been in an argument with someone you care about after you said or did something hurtful, and your response was, ‘But I never intended to hurt you.’  That may be, but the intent doesn’t justify the behavior, which still has a harmful impact. 

An example from my own life would be that I grew up in a part of the country where the flag of the Army of Northern Virginia—what most of us call the Confederate flag—would routinely fly in people’s yards and appear on my classmates’ shirts at school.  I know from my own conversations with some of those folks that they would say that it was never their intention to promote hatred, but that doesn’t really matter when an entire population of people experience that image as a symbol of slavery and oppression. 

We are seeing those kinds of conversations happening right now, and the more we use our intention as a crutch—or the intentions of our ancestors—the more we miss the relational mark, the more we ignore and silence the voices of those who are telling us that they are being harmed, and the more we sin against one another.

This, I suspect, is what is at the heart of sin: an inability to accept when someone has told us that our behavior has caused harm, which then prevents us from learning from those experiences and growing in relationship with God and one another.  When we think of sin in this way, then yes, we are all sinners because we are all guilty of this on a daily basis.  It isn’t always helpful to just think of sin as the big list of ‘Thou shalt nots’ that we find in the Book of Leviticus because such lists can’t name every context and can’t cover all the relational nuances of every possible situation. Maybe, then, we can start thinking about our sins in those relational terms, accepting that we will miss the mark, but even when we do, there is a solution

What that solution is not, I must say, is shame.  Shame is different from guilt, as Brene Brown reminds us.  Guilt says that we have done something wrong, while shame says that we ARE something wrong, fundamentally.  We can feel guilty without going to a place of shame.  What shame does is make the moment about us, preventing us from hearing the other person and accepting our wrong-doing because it keeps us at the center of everything. If we are to move beyond our sin, we must move beyond our shame, beyond our need to protect our own image. Sometimes our shame can seem overwhelming, leading us to a place of extreme defensiveness. 

Still, for others, shame manifests in an extreme case of beating oneself up because they feel like the worst possible person. Even Paul fell prey to shame—he exclaims in the reading, ‘Wretched man that I am!’  But he follows it with ‘Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!’  Jesus frees us from shame and gives us the gift of grace to move beyond our sins, turning ourselves away from our past behavior and committing to being different.

This is what repentance is about.  The Greek word is metanoia, and it literally means ‘to turn oneself around.’  This is the solution.  We will continue to miss the mark, but we don’t have to hide behind our intentions or go to a place of shame.  This is true for individuals, for the Church, and for our country. 

If we are ever to deal with our sin, both personal and collective, we must repent.  We must accept when others tell us that our behavior has been harmful; we must admit and own that harm; we must turn ourselves around and desire to repair the harm we have done and that has been done on our behalf and work to restore the relationship that has been damaged; and we must embrace the gift of grace that Christ gives each of us.  The news of Jesus is good, the burden of Jesus is light, and all of us who are weary and overwhelmed can come and find rest in him.

How Long?!

1 How long, O Lord?

will you forget me for ever? *

how long will you hide your face from me?

2 How long shall I have perplexity in my mind,

and grief in my heart, day after day? *

how long shall my enemy triumph over me?

3 Look upon me and answer me, O Lord my God; *

give light to my eyes, lest I sleep in death;

4 Lest my enemy say, "I have prevailed over him," *

and my foes rejoice that I have fallen.

5 But I put my trust in your mercy; *

my heart is joyful because of your saving help.

6 I will sing to the Lord, for he has dealt with me richly; *

I will praise the Name of the Lord Most High.

--Psalm 13

 What I love most about the Psalms is that they cover the entire range of the human experience.  Every single emotion that we feel can be found in the Psalms, from the loudest shouts of thanks and praise to the deepest groans and wailings.  Normally, if we were gathered in the church together, we would sing the Psalm, led by a cantor, which is an ancient custom that goes all the way back to even before the time of Jesus.  But whether we sing them or say them, the Psalms are beautiful reminders that all of our feelings and experiences are precious in the sight of God, and Psalm 13 really captures that because it is a Psalm that speaks to where we are.

“How long, O Lord?!” the Psalm begins.  They say that this Psalm was constructed by David when he was running from King Saul, who was trying to kill him.  But this Psalm could just as easily have been written by any of us, am I right?  How long, O Lord?!  How long before we can gather with our church folks in prayer, and song, and Sacrament?  How long until the scourge of COVID-19 is repelled from this land?  How long must we see those sick and dying before people stop thinking only of themselves and start wearing their masks?  How long can we hear the cries of the poor and neglected, the most vulnerable in our society, whom we have been so quick to forget?  How long will young black men have to walk down the streets in fear that they will at best be accosted by law enforcement and at worst killed be for being ‘suspicious’?  How long before our country finally recognizes the sins of its past—which are still systemic in our present—and commits to changing its narrative?  How long, O Lord?!

Psalm 13 is a Psalm of lament, of deep wailing and crying out in grief.  There are many Psalms of lament; perhaps the one best known to some of us is Psalm 22, the one that Jesus himself quotes on the cross when he says, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ These Psalms deepen our faith and our humanity.  They get us to look at ourselves and the world around us and force us behold those things that we don’t really want to behold.  They help us deal with reality by preventing us from ignoring our various existential crises.  These Psalms deal with what Howard Thurman called the “contradictions of life,” because they begin with an acknowledgement of pain and finish with a reminder of God’s goodness and love.  They are examples of faithful prayers that meander, and they inspire our faithful lives to evolve. 

Howard Thurman, author of Jesus and the Disinherited, understood the power of the Psalms.

There is a pattern to Psalm 13, as well as any other Psalm of lament, a formula that they all follow:  the begin with an address, then a complaint, then a petition or prayer, followed by a confession of trust in God, and finally a promise of praise.  This Psalm begins with a strong address—How long, O Lord?!—a cry of desperation.  The complaint that’s raised here is the grief the David feels and the fear of his enemies triumphing over him.  Then comes the prayer for God to look upon David, to answer him and give light to his eyes.  Verse 5 offers the confession of trust in God’s mercy, and the last verse is a promise that David will continue to sing to God and praise God’s name.  This is the pattern of all Psalms of lament, but because of how short Psalm 13 is we can see that pattern quite clearly:  address, complaint, prayer, confession of trust, and promise of praise. 

At first glance this seems pretty simple, doesn’t it?  David offers his pain to God, and then very quickly he moves to a place of praise.  But we don’t know how long it took him to construct this Psalm, do we?  He very well could have written the opening verses that speak of crying out to God and accusing God of forgetting him when he was hiding out from Saul in a Judean cave somewhere, only to not finish it until he was certain his life would be spared.  Reading passages in the Bible often gives us the sense that it happened all at once, but that is rarely the case.  David may have been in that place of deep despair and frustration for a really long time.

Nevertheless, the Psalm comes back to an acknowledgment of God’s goodness and mercy.  In verse 5, after making his complaint and offering his prayer, David says, ‘But I put my trust in your mercy,” as if to say, “Yes, this pain I feel is real.  And yes, right now, God, you seem so far away from me that I am having trouble finding you.  But I still know that you’re real, and I will still sing your praise.”  

Yes, David laments and gives his despair and desperation space to exist.  He gives voice to his worries and complaints and acknowledges his fears and anxieties, while at the same time he keeps moving through all of it, landing at last in a place where he can offer God praise.  This Psalm is a journey, and David—or whoever wrote it—understood that the only way to get out of a place of pain and get to a place of praise is to go through all of that stuff. 

This is what 12-step programs understand and why they repeat the mantra “the only way out is through.”  Personally, I cannot think of any modern institution that understands the spiritual journey like 12-step programs, at least not in the western world.  Anyone who has been through such a group can speak to the importance of acknowledging one’s pain and grief, how it matters that those experiences are given voice, and how wading through the muck is the only possible means by which a person can get to a place of praise.  A great many of us are so stuck in our current culture of shame, where we are always taught that the answer to “How are you?” is “Good,” or “OK,” but never the real truth because who wants to hear that?!  Sometimes we just need the permission to cry out, to be frustrated, to ask God, “Where are you?!” Psalms like this one give that permission and remind us that all of our feelings and experiences are held in God’s hand, even when God feels so very far away.

Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, understood the power of giving voice to our pain.

Right now is a time of lament, and we need some Psalms to sing and cry out in these times.  We need to be able to offer our pain and sorrow to God, for it is only in doing so that our fears can be transformed into hope.  I wonder what might our lament Psalms sound like right now.  Perhaps something like this...

Address:  When will you come to help us, O Lord?!  Complaint:  We are lost, lonely, and in pain, held captive by the dual pandemics of virus and racial injustice!  Prayer:  Give us courage and hope that this is not all there is, that light and love are on the other side.  Confession of trust:  Though you seem far away, yet even still, we love you and put our trust in your healing grace and mercy.  Promise of praise:  We will sing your praises in the midst of our sorrows. 

I just put together a Psalm of lament for these times, and I encourage you to do the same.  Take some time to pour out your grief over everything these last 4 months have brought us, and give voice to your experience.  Cry out to God with your pain, knowing that the only way out of it is through it, and see where it takes you. Maybe you would even like to share them with each other, just to let someone else know they’re not alone in their pain and frustration. 

Psalms like Psalm 13, and the one I've come up with, and the ones you may construct in the coming days, are not just about giving voice to the groans and wails of our hearts—though that is very significant, especially in our time—but they also renew our sense of hope because they always come back to trust in God and the determination to keep praising and loving this God who not only gives us these emotions with the understanding that we will feel them and use them, but who has also felt them, who has also lamented from the cross, cried for a dead friend, and asked for strength to get through a time of trial.  Therein lies the hope, in a God who has gone through all of this and who goes through all of this right alongside us.  

May you take heart this week, knowing that you have permission to lament and grieve, and that your crises do not go unheard by our loving, liberating, and life-giving God!