In 1867, Mark Twain joined a group of religious pilgrims and boarded the Quaker City, a retired Civil War side-wheel steamer with auxiliary sails coming off commissioned duty by the Union Navy in the War Between the States. When the war ended, the ship was retrofitted as a cruise ship for a five-month cross-Atlantic journey that visited various ports of call along the Mediterranean Sea until it reached Palestine, its ultimate destination. Not yet Israel, not even British Palestine, what we call “the Holy Land” was mostly populated by Muslims and Arab Christians and was still a part of the fragmenting Ottoman Empire.

My friend Kyle Childress wrote of the story of what happened when one of his town’s football heroes was drafted and went off to serve his country in Southeast Asia. Kyle remembered him as one of his boyhood idols and he felt particularly close to him because that young man had been in his father’s Sunday School class before going to war. The young man had lost a leg in battle and was discharged and came home a hero. But the young man also came home with a message. “God told him,” he claimed, “that the war was wrong and that his church and town should change their hearts and minds about racial segregation.”
 
Being the town’s local hero, he had ample opportunities to spread his message and the results were predictable. Some said the war messed up his head. Others said this or that. Not surprisingly, not many believed in him because of his message. But one Sunday, Kyle’s father said he didn’t know whether the young man had mental problems or not but that didn’t mean he was wrong. It wasn’t long before Mr. Childress, a member of the school board, pushed for integration.
 
Had the story in Luke 4 stopped with Jesus’ reading the scroll from the prophet Isaiah and had Jesus been content to simply make his one-line pronouncement that this scripture was being played out before their eyes, I think it would have been an ideal launch pad for the rest of the story. But as we read, you can’t put a big bow on his trip home because the story was spoiled when Jesus poked a hole in their ideas of religious nationalism. In other words, he took a risk and meddled with their Jewish understanding of their exclusive covenant with God. And for that they threatened to kill him by throwing him off the precipice in order to silence him.
 
As ones called to preach, we must face the music eventually although to do so is to invite trouble. Most preachers weaken and tremble with the thought they must say a word on a delicate topic thus caving in to our ministerial Achilles heel of wanting to be liked by everyone. Our temptation (our weakness) is to plow down the middle and not say a word driven by conviction. But if we’re to preach the heart of the radical nature of the gospel, we must come to terms with the notion that the good news of Jesus is not meant to sanitize our provincial view of the world.
 
Jesus came to turn things around and seldom missed an opportunity to stir the bottom of the pot. He adopted an agenda that came from the Hebrew prophets to care for the poor, to set free those held captive, to heal and to fight oppression. Ultimately, he came to inaugurate the year of Jubilee (a holy season only God would ever dream up) dedicated to righting all that had gotten tangled in our relations with one another.
 
In Walter Brueggemann’s Finally Comes the Poet, he writes that the task of the preacher is be “a voice that shatters settled reality and evokes new possibilities.” Brueggemann claims most sermons instead support the settled reality by not questioning, “the way things are.” Pastors tend to color compliantly inside the lines and seldom risk saying anything that unsettles that safe ground. One wise old social activist said if you preach and live out the prophetic call of God, “you had better look good on wood because that is where you’ll end up.” 
 
What do we do with those who speak against the grain? Ultimately we get rid of them. We malign them by calling them misfits or that hated word, “liberal,” meant to neutralize them and scare people away.
 
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a 20th century prophet who delivered a message of racial reconciliation by challenging segregationist attitudes as racism. He was a passionate prophet who preached boldly and eloquently about the Beloved Community, a community not meant for blacks only but wide enough to include the world. God bless Dr. King, he held nothing back. He said it all and he continued to hold a mirror of love up to our faces and made us look deeply within at our abuse of others based solely on race. King’s struggle with the church was its consistency in being on the sidelines for some of our most perplexing issues such as the struggle for racial equality, poverty, and against the war in Southeast Asia. The dominant culture controlled by the white community held him up as a dangerous agitator and most would consider his assassination the result of white anger and distrust. Maybe things haven’t changed all that much in two thousand years for how the settled reality considers those who speak against it.
 
In his opportunity to read from the scriptures Jesus chose this passage from Isaiah 61 and with it he made a statement to his home congregation that clearly declared to all of them just what kind of person he had become in recent days. He wanted them to know that his life was headed in a new direction. Then he silently rolled the scroll back up and handed it to the attendant who solemnly made sure the scroll was put back into its container. All eyes were fixed on Jesus who sat quietly until the attendant sat back down. Then, in a measured way of speaking, Jesus straightforwardly announced, “Today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
 
By reading Isaiah 61:1-2, Jesus announced what his messianic role was to be: The fulfillment of an ancient prophecy. The phrase from this ancient servant song, “He has anointed me,” meant, “He has made me the Christ or Messiah.” When understood literally (as Jesus meant them to understand it) the passage said that the Christ was God’s servant who would bring to reality the longing and the hope of the poor, the oppressed, and the imprisoned. It meant that Christ would usher in amnesty, liberation, and the restoration associated with the proclamation of the year of Jubilee.
 
But Jesus’ first sermon among his own kin received an evocative response:  Some were filled with open admiration … some wondering … some doubting. Some scholars wonder if what followed was Luke’s confusion over two visits, one received happily and the other received angrily. However it happened, Jesus provoked an angry response by quoting two well-known proverbs:
 
“Physician, heal thyself”
“No prophet is acceptable in his own country”
 
The proverbs help us understand that Jesus realized the people would be expecting a demonstration of the ministry he had been doing over in Capernaum. Maybe the people expected more because he was the “hometown boy.” Maybe they assumed privileges would be theirs for having known Jesus all his life. Perhaps there was a secret resentment of Jesus because he had already taken those favors and miracles to others beyond Nazareth (Capernaum was said to have had a heavy non-Jewish population.).
 
Jesus defended himself by offering two Old Testament stories: Both Elijah and Elisha, prophets in Israel, took God’s favor to non-Jews. That these stories were in their Scriptures and quite familiar perhaps accounts in part for part of the intensity of their hostility. When faced with the truth of these stories, anger and resentment were sure defenses. In truth, they were victims of their own scriptures.
 
For Luke, the tension that erupted here was not between Jesus and Judaism; it was between Judaism and its own Scriptures. Consequently, their very own Jewish Scriptures caught Jesus’ family and friends on the horns of a dilemma. This passage points out a fatal flaw among them:  They read the scriptures as the exclusive word of God to them only … as an exclusive covenant with them. Jesus as a prophetic voice of provocation couldn’t let that idea go unchallenged and so the subtext to the reading of his inauguration text from Isaiah 61, he drew the line in the sand that he would not be associated with that kind of exclusive form of love. He understood his mission clearly and did not flinch from the political fallout that came from his first encounter of substance. And because of that we get a foreshadowing of his fate when the people of God hung the Son of God upon a wooden cross. Jesus was too dangerous to ignore and considered a political and theological threat to the settled realities of his time. In their great anger, they carried him up to the brow of the nearest hill and were ready to destroy him.
 
A gangly seventh-grader in the youth group of her small Baptist church ran track in her junior high school and when a track meet was cancelled one Saturday and re-scheduled for the following Saturday it ran into conflict with the commitment she had made to join with her youth group on a one-day mission adventure. So she went to her track coach and described her dilemma. She was told her fellow track mates were depending on her to compete and the coach expected her to be there. She went home in tears. The next day she broached the subject once more and the coach said it more bluntly:  Either show up or turn in your track uniform. The next day, she went to her coach a third time with her uniform and walked away.
 
It generated the typical range of responses from the parents who knew about this situation. Some of the church parents were surprised she caved in to the coach’s demands and seemed supportive that she should have cancelled on her wish to serve on the mission project with her youth group. So they were surprised when the girl said back to them, “This is about God.”
 
The God-called prophets always see things the rest of us don’t see. Standing up to the Jr. High track coach is not the same as the standing for more important issues such as race relations or the death rate of children in war or the dire needs in a country like Haiti, but it’s a beginning.
 
When Jesus read the text and sat down, he was saying in the plainest of terms: “This is what I’m about … this is who I am. All of this is coming true right before your eyes.” In doing so, he was bearing witness to what God was calling him to say and do on behalf of the kingdom of God. What is it we will do with this one we’ve pledged to follow? Will we follow him and his agenda of challenging the settled reality?

After his presidency had ended, Ulysses S. Grant once gave a friend a fine cigar. The gift was an extension of his friendship and esteem. Realizing the cigar was a valuable memento from a famous person, Grant’s friend saved the cigar rather than smoking it and kept it dutifully in his humidor under ideal conditions. It was thus handed down to his son who kept it who gave it to his son late in life.

Some seventy years later, the man’s grandson decided to smoke the illustrious cigar at a public ceremony honoring a historic occasion in the grandson’s life. He proudly lit up the cigar that had been given to his grandfather by President Grant and puffed away importantly … whereupon the cigar blew up in his face! Grant had given his good friend an exploding cigar as a joke, but it took seventy years for the joke to deliver the power of its punch line.

How many unexploded cigars lie around us? Maybe they’ve been in the form of ideas and dreams that have come to us in the night we’ve not had the courage to explore. Maybe they’ve been an inner impulse to do more or be more. Most of us have an urge to make more out of the little we’ve received. When I think of the future, it comes to me in the form of dreams about all that we could do or be.

For myself …
I want to live more open to the adventure of life by being more conscious and by living in the energy of the moment. I want to embrace life as it offers itself to me and not shirk the moment by withdrawing. When an opportunity arises that demands something of me, I want to see past my hesitancy and to see what new thing might be enjoyed. I want to savor the moment, drinking in all flavors of life I can by tasting, touching, hugging and loving. I want to throw open the windows of my soul and my mind as an act of gratitude to the God who made all things. Gratitude for others, gratitude to God and gratitude for the gift of this moment … all of these I want to savor.

For my family …
I want my family to be my centeredness to the world and a constant reminder that I have people to whom I live in debt for love and friendship. I want to see my children as my extension into the future and my parents as my link to the past. I want to see my life honestly along the arc of a life’s span, whatever days may be left for me to live. I want to live deeply by being connected to my family. I want to break free from the ironic tendency to live as though my family is there to serve my needs of self. I want to celebrate their joys and share their burdens out of the pure and simple sense of loving them, no matter what happens.

For my community of faith …
I want my church to be a community where people of all ages who find it to be a wholesome, healthy place where real needs are taken seriously and met. I want my church to be accepting and engaging. I want those who feel alienated from life to feel and experience a sense of God’s blessing. I want my church to see itself as agents of change and where our members feel authorized to do and be what Christ would do and be. I want us to be willing to meet one another in the spirit of Christ who loved and changed destinies. I want the outsider to feel a sense of “coming home.” Loneliness is a powerful and degrading emotion that causes one to feel empty, lost and devalued. I want us to be a place where dreams and visions are honored … expected even! I want my community of belief to have a holy sense of the drama God has led us to engage in this world and in our community. I want us to have big dreams and a commitment to something larger than we can do on our own.

What do we have to lose? Let’s light our cigars and take our chances!

The coffee shop may be the last place you talk openly about sex, but with Birdie as your friend, all things are possible. The table talk can be at the mid-range of acceptable decibels for a normal conversation in a public eatery, but just say the word ‘sex’ and every head snaps your direction. That snapping motion is not gender specific because every woman’s head turns too. There must be a special decibel for the ears that includes words that make for good gossip because everybody knows a noisy coffee shop is a fabulous place to catch up on the latest skinny.

Gossip’s so powerful, we’ve given thought to adding to our church website a special members-only page where the latest news can be added. No names would be used in this chat room, only initials. You know, of course, that whoever puts a patent on the software for this idea will make a killing because every church needs this. In fact, we’ve considered putting that idea on the table of our next missions committee meeting as a fund-raising idea for foreign missions. We could call the software, “Bear One Another’s Burdens.”

Birdie sat coyly across from me swirling her coffee spoon ever so slowly. The cream had just been added and for the briefest of moments there was the two-toned psychedelic look of dark roasted coffee giving way to the soothing effects of the cream. Birdie was over-spooning the coffee yet she was relishing the soothing circular movement of her spoon going round and round waiting for me to ask the question she so desperately wanted me to ask.

I followed my cue. “Okay, it’s obvious you have an agenda for our conversation. Why don’t we cut to the chase and you tell me what it is you want to talk about?”

“No games, preacher. Just questions. You’ve been to the seminary and you’ve even studied the subliminal where all the sick stuff from inside occasionally bubbles to the surface so here’s my question:  What gives with the sexual obsession of the faculty at Southern Seminary? It seems every time I pick up to read the latest news story involving one of their faculty, all I read about are goofy opinions about sex or procreation that are passed off to the rest of us as gospel. A while back, I read about their weird view on singles who wait until they’re in their late 20’s or early 30’s to marry. Seems they’re being disobedient to God by waiting. I also read where couples that choose to delay having a family until they feel ready sin against God by not having children early and often as a sign of their commitment to God. Pardon me, but it seems these are two ideas only men who feel threatened by sharing control in the bedroom would think up!”

The heads seated nearby turned suddenly because Birdie didn’t have a volume control on her voice. Even the hard of hearing are amazingly good at hearing when the word ‘sex’ and ‘bedroom’ are said.

“Birdie, you’ve raised the right question but could we keep this talk more private? You said the words ‘sex’ and ‘obsession’ in the same sentence and that group of businessmen sitting next to us even stopped talking about football. You’re talking loudly about the oldest sport known to man and you may need police protection getting out of here because the women look like they’re ready to slice and dice you.”

“Preacher, you know I don’t give a rat’s clacker about them and their sordid thinking.”

“Well, Sister, you have successfully put your finger on the central question. Why are those guys so obsessed with these weird views on sexuality and procreation? Notice who’s missing? Notice there are no women in the dialogue? Notice the Women’s Missionary Society hasn’t put out their own press release that says, ‘Amen, brother! Preach on!’ Only men are doing the talking here. But that’s not all … what’s so strange about those issues are how they link them to the numerical rate of growth among Evangelicals. ‘Fewer babies make for fewer Christians,’ they say. Wives need to submit to their husbands without resistance and bear as many babies as God gives them so the men’s quivers can be full … Lord, it’s even known as quiverfull theology, of all things! Pardon me, but I thought church growth came through evangelism, not procreation.”

Birdie jumped in. “On top of that, you’ve now got this bizarre discussion the seminary president’s zany speculation about an imaginary gay gene and that if we did learn that homosexuality is caused genetically would you choose to zap your child’s DNA to ensure they were straight? That’s not only ignorant and offensive; it goes against almost every other thing they’ve said about the ethics of genetic experimentation. I keep thinking about Nixon campaigning on a law and order platform only later to be forced into a corner where he said, ‘I’m not a crook!’”

“Hmm,” I exhaled. “Sex is weird enough on its own without the weird advocating for the weird.”

“Hmm…”

While it doesn’t happen all that often, it’s interesting how a person can be linked to a place almost as if we can’t think of person and place apart from one another. Think of Neil Armstrong leaving behind the first footprints on the surface of the moon or Ernest Hemmingway and his tropical ties with the Florida Keys. Think of Calcutta and most of us remember a humble little nun known as Mother Teresa ministering on the desperate streets of a place our minds can barely imagine. Or in movies, how about Tommy Lee Jones portrayal of a West Texas county sheriff in Cormac McCarthy’s No Country For Old Men? His weathered face alone looked like a map of that hardscrabble country and his voice drawled authentically in the style of the old-timers of that harsh land. Think of Marilyn Monroe and our minds wander to an iconoclastic scene of her standing over a subway grate in New York City … or at least its honest to admit our minds do wander.

So when it comes to John the Baptizer, no doubt we have to think of the Judean wilderness and the fiery personality of someone so wild and untamed, living in a place so stark one is hard pressed to label it sustainable. John’s only occasion in Scripture to reside in the city is in a prison cell where he gets his head cut off and presented on a platter for saying to the king what no one else would the king’s wrath to say. Raised in Jerusalem in the shadow of the Temple, John left to save his soul and lived as an outsider. Yet the people of the cities sought him out on his turf – away from the bright lights and the carnality of city-life. John preached out in the wilderness where it was harsh and arid. It was a place where his message made sense.

Poet-storyteller John Shea described John the Baptizer this way:

There is another pointer of the way, a map of a man, who when you try to read him, reads you. Unexpected angels are pussycats next to this lion, a roar that once overrode Judea. You may not heed but you will hear, his insistent, intruding, unsoothing voice. Some say this thunder is because his father stumbled mute from the Holy of Holies, tongue tied by an angel who was peeved by the old man’s allegiance to biological laws. The priest was silenced by the temple because he thought flesh could stop God. The son of the priest shouted in the wilderness because he feared God would stop flesh. His open mouth was an open warning.

[John Shea, “The Man Who Was a Lamp, Starlight, NY: Crossroads, 1995]

Jesus and John were the sun and moon to one another. One paved the way; the other came as promised from ancient days. “Behold, the lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world!” John announced boldly (John 1:29, KJV) when he saw Jesus approaching. They argued on the river’s edge over who should baptize whom and Jesus pressed John with Hebrew prophecy of centuries before. They were the oddest of couples, this sun and this moon in orbit together.

Shea describes the two as linked in the holy story:

Opposite of the sought-after child in every way. The child is round, this one has edges; The child nurses on virgin’s milk, this one crunches on locusts; The child is wrapped in swaddling clothes, this one is rubbed raw by camel hair. Yet they know one another, even exchange smiles. They share a mystery, this hairy man and smooth child.

Jesus came out of John as surely as he came out of Mary. John was the desert soil in which the flower of Jesus grew. John was the voice in the wilderness who taught Jesus to hear the voice from the sky. John would push sinners beneath the water and Jesus would resurrect them on the waves. John was the fast who prepared for Jesus the feast.

The man John was formed and haunted by the Judean wilderness east and south of Jerusalem. The wilderness spoken of in the Bible was a desert. Not a desert like the sands of the Sahara in Northern Africa but a desert more like of the southern border of the United States … a wilderness marked by arid and rocky terrain. In the wilderness, the voice of God came and spoke to many of the Bible’s main characters. It was the place where God had been creatively at work through the silence and the waiting. Will Willimon described the desert as, “the place where Israel lost its way; lost its way and bowed before alien gods … (The) wilderness is not a place … it’s a state of mind … a metaphor to describe a terrifying situation where wild beasts lurk. There are no clear paths, and chaos, temptation and bewilderment reign.”

John encountered the God of his fathers out in the wide and silent desert. Out there, the calling of God for his life became clear. The wildness of the desert became for him a place of revelation. It was a place of conversion and a place of transformation. And like all revelations, it was a disturbing event because it demanded a response from him. In a sense, it was disturbing because if called for an inner revolution. It involved being “made over,” in being made new, in being “born again,” if you don’t mind me using that kind of language.

For John, the transformation had to go down into his bones, into the marrow of how his life was being lived in order for him to fulfill his calling as a messenger. John had to be the message in order to deliver the message. The message of the desert is that all of us must submit to the revolution and submit to the transformation God has in store for us.

To make sense of this, Richard Swanson reminds us of an ancient and deep truth about the world … something John’s tough message carries … the world is upside down and needs righting. What God is up to in our time, John claims, is that One is coming who will establish a new world where the wrongs of the world will be turned around. Did you hear John’s prophetic warning? “Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth; and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.”

Swanson rightly points out that this is a central and insistent perception of Jewish faith, namely, that the world is upside down. Richard Wilson reminds us, “Peace is not about maintaining the status quo. Peace is about striving to be empowered and transformed by the presence of God in our midst. To speak in favor of peace always is to find a dissenting voice, a voice that articulates what could be – what should be – for followers of Jesus.”

On the promise side of John’s preaching, we can recall the history of the ancient Jews who had received God’s promises long before John came along, the people “who sang the song” as they held onto those promises. So John began his career by singing the old song again, by holding out the old hopes, even six hundred after those words were first delivered by prophets of another era.

Our work today, is to sing another verse of that ancient promise clinging to the possibility that God is still at work laboring to make the promise come true. Jesus came to us with a purpose and during Christmas, our temptation overcomes us every time we live as though there’s another purpose.

Once more, poet John Shea helps us …

Legend says, the cave of Christmas where the child of light burns in the darkness is hidden in the center of the earth.

Access is not easy. You cannot just amble to a mantle, note the craft of the crib child, and return to the party for more eggnog. You may see a figurine this way, but you will not find the child of light. The center of the earth is not the surface. You must journey and, wayfarer, you need a guide.

An Advent Meditation From Luke 21 & Jeremiah 33

David Buttrick tells the story of the poor black woman deep in the bayous of Louisiana who had raised over a dozen children over the years – most of them adopted and foster children. When a newspaper reporter asked her why she had done this considering her own meager resources, she replied, “I saw a new world coming …”

The feeling of expectation can be a powerful thing. No doubt the feeling of expectation can be an incredibly powerful force in our lives. Expectation can force new directions or create new habits. It can keep us steady when everything else is flying off into different orbits. Or, it can take the form of the expectation of relief or the hope of healing. Expectation can force us to consider a new path as in the expectation of an answer to some vexing problem we’ve been facing. Perhaps it’s simply the expectation that God will intervene in your life, making a way that did not exist because of your own efforts.

The season of Advent has two faces, two orientations. First it has a look to the past, a way of seeing backward in time to that time in the revelation of God when a savior was hoped for. It is an orientation to the past in the sense that it is a recapitulation of the longing of a long ago time when women and men of faith anticipated the coming of God’s Messiah. The Hebrew prophets had a strong sense of the coming of God to save God’s people. In the midst of strong oppression and suffering, there was the anticipation that God would most surely enter into human history and actively work for the freedom of Israel.

But Advent also looks to the future in an attitude of expectancy over what God has yet to do in history. Consequently, we have a Sunday in the season of Advent dedicated to thinking in future tense about the coming of Christ in judgment and power and glory. In today’s reading from Luke’s gospel, we have the strident message of the second coming of Christ to the world. It is an apocalyptic message of harsh and harrowing words warning all of us:  “Be on guard …”

Abraham Heschel claimed a prophet was someone who knew what time it is.  Six centuries apart, both Jeremiah and Jesus stood on the streets of Jerusalem and proclaimed to those who heard them that the city would be destroyed. The message was so disturbing they both shed tears over their own words.

When Jesus put on the mantle of prophecy, he turned to Jeremiah for inspiration and drew upon Jeremiah’s prophetic imagery in his words. Jeremiah’s message was spoken under the shadow of oppression and it’s a word we have to hear as though we’re dispossessed slaves living under the control of others who control every aspect of our lives. In fact, those who share in the power systems of the world should hear these words and tremble. People who run banks, people who work in city governments, people who have profited from the status quo, should twitch nervously whenever apocalyptic language is used because it means a change is coming which will likely reverse the conditions for those who are oppressed by their oppressors.

How about this example from history? Columbia, South Carolina, Mary Chestnut’s diary of March, 1865:  “Sherman marched off in solid column, leaving not so much as a blade of grass behind. A howling wilderness, land laid waste, dust and ashes.” Her comments record the devastation to the Old South whose glory was built upon the old plantation system where slaves from Africa tended massive acres of economically viable crops that created wealth for the slaveholders. It was no small matter, then, that Mrs. Chestnut failed to mention in her tale of devastation and woe that the slaves were dancing in the streets. Hearing apocalyptic news is more about one’s position in the world and how the reversal that’s coming will affect their place in the old systems.

There was a fierce gleam in Jesus’ eye as he said these words. Most of us have had experiences with churches that had the message of judgment down pat. We know what it means for the judgment of God to be preached. But like everything in life, we need balance … a little of this and a little of that. God’s grace and God’s judgment are both forms of faith we should hold in tension ever so carefully.

Will Willimon told of when he pastored a large church in the South and the church focused its pastoral attention on the family that lived next door to the church. The yard of that home was always a mess and the children were poorly cared for. Rumors in the neighborhood were that the husband was drunk on most weekends, abused his wife and cursed his children. The church decided to help him so Willimon visited the family next door. The youth group invited the kids to go with them on their retreat to the mountains. The women’s group asked the mother to join them at their annual Day of Prayer. The man and his family came for a few Sundays, and then quit coming altogether. That was the last anyone heard of them until nearly a year later when the pastor met the man on the street. At first he didn’t recognize him because he looked different. “Joe, is that you?” the pastor asked him. “Yeah, it’s me,” he said with a big grin. “At least it’s mostly me. I’ve changed.” His change was obvious because his whole appearance had changed – he looked great! Come to think of it, his yard looked better than anyone recalled it ever looking. What had happened, the pastor wondered?

The man told Willimon how a few months ago, a group had come by to prayer with him after they heard he had been on a drinking binge. They were a church group, but not from Willimon’s nice, middle-class Methodist church. They were from a fundamentalist church, the one across town, the one in the pre-fab metal building … the premillenial, fire-baptized, Bible believing, washed in the blood Baptist church. They told him if he didn’t stop drinking and beating his wife he was going to die and burn forever in Hell. They told him God was going to get him and that God was mad.

That got his attention … got him to church where they prayed for him by name when he showed up in worship and asked God to let him live just a little longer ‘till they could get him saved. He got saved, turned inside out, upside down, … redeemed.

Willimon said something about how he was sorry his church had been unable to meet the needs of his family, but he was glad their church had. “Preacher,” the man said, “don’t feel bad. Your church gave me aspirin and I needed massive chemotherapy.”

We need to hear the sweet gentle message of the coming of a savior into the world. But we also need to hear the message to live expectantly as if Christ’s coming means something right here and now where we live faithfully on his behalf.

So the schoolteacher says to her class, “Now class, I am going down the hall to the principle’s office for a few minutes. I certainly hope I can trust you to act like responsible fifth graders. But just in case, I’m leaving the door open. I’ve asked the teacher across the hall to listen for trouble. I hope you will show me how responsible you are. I’m leaving now. I had better not hear a word out of you. You have work to do while I’m gone …” And with that she softly leaves the room. The anticipation of her return lingers in the quiet classroom. In our hearts, we long for Jesus’ presence, for we are at our best when the Master is with us. The trick to all this is to hold in our mind’s eye a vision that’s on its way … but not yet here.

As John was imprisoned on the Island of Patmos, he was visited by God in a vision that helped him and all those persons of faith in the tormented times of the first century understand what God was doing in a world that was wrought with violence and oppression. His vision contained these lines that speak of the coronation of Christ:  “Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come … Look! He is coming in the clouds; every eye will see him, even those who pierced him; and on his account all the tribes of the earth will wail. So it is to be. Amen. ‘I am the Alpha and the Omega,’ says the Lord God, who is and who was and who is to come, the Almighty” (Rev. 1:4b, 7-8, NRSV).

The one who is and was and is to come was John’s answer to the harsh realities of his time. John’s vision was a word of hope about all that is in our time that is set against the reign of God. There is hope that the world and all its myriad problems are only a mirage in light of the eternal power and hope of God acting in history to bring all this into line with the values of the kingdom that Christ has come to bring.

Our faith is a historical faith grounded in the particularities of time and space with the revelation that comes from God to specific persons in history who have encountered God and have told the divine story. Unlike other world religions, we’re not separated from the historicity of an obscure being who has no real connection with the world and its inhabitants. The biblical story is told to help us understand that God is integrally involved in the world and time is pointed towards God’s eventual reign of it all.

Imagine the scene in our gospel reading; Pilate met the angry Jewish crowd just outside the praetorium. The crowds pronounced their judgment and pushed Pilate with all their might. Then he retreated inside where he met this Jesus, face-to-face. “Are you the king of the Jews?” he demanded.

“My kingdom is not of this world,” Jesus answered. “My kingdom is from another place.”

“You’re a king, then!” mocked Pilate.

“Yes, you are right in saying I’m a king,” Jesus responded.

With this, Pilate went back outside and declared Jesus innocent. Then he had Jesus beaten, flogged and humiliated him by adorning him with purple robes and fitted a crown of thorns upon him as a sign befitting a man whom he calculated was politically-minded but who had lost his base of power to the point that he was more to be pitied than feared. “Hail, O king of the Jews,” he railed.

But trouble still brewed outside where the crowds hounded him at the point of his weakness:  “If you let this man go, you are no friend of Caesar! Anyone who claims to be a king opposes Caesar,” they shouted.

Pilate found himself sandwiched between the two political realities between angering the crowd and betraying the emperor. So he caved to the pressure as all politicians eventually do. “Here’s your king … shall I crucify your king?”

Knowing Pilate better than he imagined, the crowd responded, “We have no king but Caesar!”

So Pilate had his soldiers affix a sign on the cross of Jesus written in Aramaic, Greek and Latin, which said, “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Maybe that was the slight he knew would provoke them and perhaps a way he could get in the last word on the matter. They objected, of course. “Don’t write ‘The king of the Jews,’” they clamored, “but that this man claimed to be king of the Jews.”

It was too late and he was not of the mind to let them edit him, so he said, “What I have written, I have written.”

We struggle with the idea that we serve another kingdom if we’re to be faithful followers of Jesus. When Jesus insisted his kingdom was “not of this world,” he didn’t mean it was merely spiritual nor relegated to a future age just over the horizon of time or even that he was speaking of heaven where all things are eventually made right. He was speaking of a reign that runs counter to most of what we experience in life no matter what your political persuasions. Jesus was talking about the push-pull we feel whenever we attempt to make Christ king in our hearts and lives. It’s that tension we feel whenever we realize the kingdoms of this world are empty of meaning and limited by sin.

Daniel Clendenin says, “In its simplest terms, the kingdom of God that Jesus announced and embodied is what life would be like, here and now, if God were king and the rulers of this world were not. Imagine if God ruled the nations, and not (the world’s leaders as we know them). Every aspect of personal and communal life would experience a radical reversal. The political, economic, and social subversions would be almost endless – peacemaking instead of war mongering, liberation not exploitation … mercy not vengeance, care for the vulnerable instead of privileges for the powerful, generosity instead of greed … embrace rather than exclusion, etc. The ancient Hebrews had a marvelous word for this kind of life, shalom, or human well-being.”

Walker Knight wrote a wonderful sense of this in a thing he wrote some twenty-five years ago, “Peace, like war, must be waged”:

Peace plans its strategy and encircles the enemy.
Peace marshals its forces and storms the gates.
Peace gathers its weapons and pierces the defense.
Peace, like war, is waged.
But Christ has turned it all around:
the weapons of peace are love, joy, goodness, longsuffering
the arms of peace are justice, truth, patience, prayer.
the strategy of peace brings safety, welfare, happiness
the forces of peace are the sons and daughters of God.

Maybe you’re sitting there thinking all this is a pie-in-the-sky way of believing not grounded in reality. That’s okay. If we took up this way of thinking, things would have to change. We might have to give up some important piece of my life in ways that we simply can’t or won’t do. It’s too much for many believers who continue to live in the world that Christ came to change.

I hear you because the only way I can name your weakness is to identify mine. But it’s the way of Christ, we must admit. If I changed and you changed, it would make a difference. If you and I changed and we convinced others to change, what could happen? It would be a revolution of the kind that Jesus came to start.

Maybe then the subversive prayer of Jesus can be prayed by all of us, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Maybe, just maybe, that’s why Jesus stood before the government’s man and let him talk till he found the justification he needed to fend off the political accusations of weakness the Jews used to make him do what they wanted.

“Perhaps the heightened sense of God’s presence is best seen outside the sanctuary, where Jesus is king, not in places of power, but in places where people try to serve him. Perhaps we will see him most vividly, not among those who choose violence as a solution, but among those who practice peace-filled solutions. Yes, Jesus is king, not where people seek advantage, but where people seek to be helpful, not where people seek security, but in a working and breathing community. This is good news! If Jesus is king, not just once a year on a throne but throughout all of time and in every place, then we don’t have to be king, or seek another king. We no longer have to judge one another. We don’t have to control what other people think and feel or force them to fit our expectations. When that happens, the kingdom of God is here and now, here in our hearts, here among us—and out there wherever we carry it. It’s a liberating idea if you think about it.”

And liberation from the old way of doing things is what Jesus was all about. It’s God’s answer to the brokenness of the world.

Out of the vast throngs of the people of faith in our Hebrew and Christian scriptures, Hannah, the mother of Samuel, stands out as a model for spiritual wishfulness. The ancient Rabbis described her as the composer of the first prayer. The Rabbis of the Talmud cited her prayer as a prime example of sincere worship. As such, the Bible presents Hannah as a model worthy of emulation for living the faith-life. Like Ruth and Naomi from the last two weeks, she is a strong and vibrant woman for whom faith is the organizing principle that gives her power and a sacred sense of knowing who she was as a woman in a world of men.

No spirituality is of much value without the struggle of soul that is demanded to make it real. In our honest moments, we must confess that faith, like life, is difficult. An old Okinawan proverb says simply:  Pain makes you think. Thinking makes you wise. Wisdom makes the pain bearable. Most of us who seriously attempt to live our lives in relation to God and in partnership with God can testify that faith calls for the deepest commitment we can muster.

The story of Hannah is dear for many reasons. It’s a tender love story as the story paints love with the quiet, loyal affection between Elkanah and Hannah that ignored the social order of the day, as Hannah was unable to bear Elkanah a male child. In the Bible, barrenness is a common theme and perhaps it’s the metaphor that speaks to us of our many failures and shortcomings before God as we come to learn we have failed to birth God’s goodness in our own habits of being. We, like the childless mothers of the Bible, are failures in bringing life to the world born out of our love for God and God must intervene if that goodness is to emerge.

But the romance and dedication between Hannah and Elkanah created a contentious issue between Peninnah and she. Peninnah had birthed a male heir but did not receive Elkanah’s tender affection, as did Hannah. Love is strange and resists easy explanation. Why is it we love one but not the other? Why is it our heart tells us we have come home in the presence of one but feel strangely unmoved by another with whom we might have many things in common but lack that certain spark that brings us together? Bonnie Raitt sang soulfully of this:

Turn down the lights, turn down the bed
Turn down these voices inside my head
Lay down with me, tell me no lies
Just hold me close, don’t patronize; don’t patronize
Cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t

You can’t make your heart feel something it won’t
Here in the dark, in these final hours
I will lay down my heart and I’ll feel the power
But you won’t, no, you won’t
Cause I can’t make you love me if you don’t

© 1991 Lyrics, “I Can’t Make You Love Me,” M. Reid/A. Shamblin, Almo Music Corp/Brio Blues Music/Hayes Street Music, ASCAP

But there’s more to this than just the love story Hannah shares with Elkanah because Hannah feels desperately in her bones there’s a role she must play if that something more is to occur and so she prays as though prayer is her last resort. Sometimes prayer is simply tossing heavenward to God our deepest wishes, hoping to God that someone will hear and answer. Piety aside, sometimes we pray so fervently Paul’s notion of “groans too deep for words” describes the desperate kinds of prayer we utter.

Sometimes prayer is an exploration of our inner emptiness. Like the campfire that teaches us that the spaces between the logs are as important as the logs themselves. St. Hilary once observed, “Everything that seems empty is full of the angels of God.” So Hannah sought God. Hannah’s desperation was apparent just as it is with those of us who have wanted something desperately enough to step out and act as though it matters more than anything else in the world.

Ever think of prayer in terms of such desperation you would cut any deal you could with God in order to get an answer? Whatever you call it, “cutting a deal with God,” begging or pleading with the Almighty to act on your behalf, prayer is a form of wishful thinking about how things are and about how they should be if we were in charge of things. Hannah took her plans to God, asking God to intervene and do something new with her. What do we pray in those moments? What do we ask of God when certainty is elusive and we dangle wondering whether to be so bold as to ask God for what is in our hearts?

Marcus McFaul has been my good friend for these last few years. Here’s a metaphor he suggested that might help us with these questions as he did this past year in helping his church understand how the winds of God were changing direction in his life. Marcus acknowledged God often speaks to us as in the Hebrew language: A language made up only of consonants but no vowels as in the name of God, Y-H-W-H, a name the Hebrews considered too holy to even be uttered. In this construct of language, God supplies the consonants and we the vowels. With all the faith, imagination and hope we can muster, we must choose the vowels appropriately. So in life, here come the consonants God provides: S-T-P. Having only the consonants, by faith we ask, do we place an O between the T and P, interpreting God as saying STOP? Or do we insert an E, so we interpret God as saying STEP?

McFaul adds, “So we pray, think, listen, discuss, discern – seeking to figure out where God is leading, calling, and we fill in the vowel and trust in God wherever that path leads. Earlier doors have opened and I sensed God’s word to me to be STOP. (On other occasions), to the best that I can know, what I believe is that God (was) saying STEP.”

A similar theme emerged unexpectedly in the concert Wanda and I attended Friday night in Lawrence from one of the lyrics of a sweet Pierce Pettis song titled, “God Believes in You.” Pettis takes the notion of how we limit our faith by imagining it’s up to us to hang on to God as if God has no role to play in faith. So Pettis flips that on its head so we can understand that God is very active in holding onto us in the dynamic relationship of faith:

When you start to doubt if you exist
God believes in you
Confounded by the evidence
God believes in you
When your light burns dim, when your chances seem so slim

And you swear you don’t believe in him
God believes in you
When you rise up just to fall again
God believes in you
Deserted by your closest friends
God believes in you
When you’re betrayed with a kiss, and you turn your cheek to another fist

It does not have to end like this
God believes in yo
When you’re so ashamed that you could die
God believes in you
And you can’t do right even though you try
God believes in you

Blessed are the ones who grieve, the ones who mourn,
The ones who bleed in sorrow you sow but in joy you’ll reap
God believes in you

©  1997, Pierce Pettis, Polygram Music Publishing

Hannah took hold of faith and made her request earnestly to God. It was all she had and she put herself into the fragile faith position where faith and faith alone could make the difference. The inspiration of Hannah is ours to savor and love – it’s also ours to emulate as we seek to follow God, filling in the gaps of what we know with the substance of faith … and so we do.

The Hebrew heroine story of Ruth and Naomi makes us question our assumptions that the Bible was written solely by men. I suspect we’ve grown up thinking that all the writers of Scripture were men. Perhaps it was never said outright, but I think we’ve bought into the idea that it was so. The reason all of this seems pertinent to the story of Ruth is that some scholars think a woman may have written the Book of Ruth. Think of it, why else would this obscure story have been saved? Or better yet, is it even possible that a man would write a story such as this? Imagine with me what’s in this womanly tale…

First, the story revolves around a family. But it’s not a story about the men in the family; it’s about the women and what happens to them. There are men in the story, but recognize the place the story gives them. They’re just window dressing. They have names but we know nothing about them. Besides, in the prologue, the men all die leaving the story to describe what happens to the women. Let’s be historically honest:  When women are mentioned in the Bible, most often it’s because of their role and relationship with men as mothers, lovers, or wives. There are some notable exceptions, but they are the exception rather than the rule. Would this be the focus of a story a man living in patriarchal times would have bothered to tell?

One commentator describes this story in terms of the passage of time. In the first half of the first chapter, time sweeps by quickly. Large events take place with little detail about how the characters in the story are feeling or thinking. But as soon as the men clear the stage, the pace of the story comes to a creeping halt and the women are the main actors on the stage for the remainder of the story until its conclusion. As the narrative pace slows down, the story becomes more and more relational. So after noting all this, could it be possible that this story came from some wonderfully gifted woman Jewish storyteller?

Second, this is a refugee story. Subsequently, the women are on the verge of starvation and annihilation. They are like the refugees in Victor Hugo’s masterful epic story of destitution, Les Misérables. Naomi and Ruth are “the miserable ones” who have little hope of surviving. When you visualize these women, don’t let your mind’s eye put any additional flesh on their scraggly bodies for they are starving. The hair on their heads is falling out and their ribs are protruding from their formless chests. They are gaunt and on the verge of starvation as a result of their malnutrition. They more resemble the victims of the Holocaust than the well-fed images of the Sunday School pictures we were shown as children.

Naomi bravely leads them on the first steps of a long and possibly impossible trip back to Bethlehem where, when they finally succumb to death, they can at least be buried among her own kinsmen and not dumped in some meaningless grave in a foreign land. But on the first day of the journey, she recognizes they will probably die before they ever get back and so she tries to run them off, hoping to send them back to their families. Perhaps if they go home they will have a chance of marrying again and therefore surviving. Orpah, perhaps the more practical of the two, accepts her offer and leaves but Ruth refuses to leave. What is it in Ruth that prevents her from leaving this hopeless cause to do something to save her? All we know about her inner thoughts come from what she says to Naomi:

Do not press me to leave you or to turn back from following you!
Where you go, I will go;
Where you lodge, I will lodge;
Your people shall be my people, and your God, my God.
Where you die, I will die…
There I will be buried,
May the Lord do thus and so to me, and more as well,
if even death parts me from you!
(Ruth 1:16-17, NRSV)

They are surely some of the most beautiful words written in the Bible. They are achingly beautiful words of fidelity and the truest feelings of one suffering soul for another. What more can we say this morning? What else can we add to the deep emotions expressed by this foreign daughter-in-law to her destitute and hopeless mother-in-law?

The Bible makes it clear there is more to this story because they do not die together. They survive. They make it back to Naomi’s homeland. Surely it’s Ruth’s strong commitment to Naomi that saves them. Surely it’s what Ruth loaned to Naomi that allowed them both to survive. Out of the resources of this Moabite woman, both of them cross the desert and return to the tiny village of Bethlehem where they find their salvation.

Out of the despair of their story, can we find the words of hope for our own salvation? Robert Capon reminds us that the formula for redemption comes in small, obscure ways and not in the dramatic, sensational ways that we expect. Capon says that salvation throughout the Bible comes to those who are least or little. It comes to those who are lost or last. Salvation ultimately comes to all “the miserable ones” who look to God alone for salvation. And redemption comes whenever we recognize that we are powerless to bring about our own salvation. In other words, we must become like Ruth and Naomi. We must come to our wit’s end and have only one place to look for the strength to continue.

Ruth, a stranger, a woman, a foreigner, becomes our model for faith in her willingness to take what strength of character she has and to join it with Naomi’s need. Ruth, the outsider – Ruth, the Moabite woman – Ruth, the foreign wife of one of Naomi’s sons … Imagine that! Ruth became the salvation-bearer for all of God’s chosen ones! Maybe this is a story only a woman would be brave enough to suggest. Maybe a woman who had nothing to lose but to tell a tale of salvation could suggest an ending as heart warming as this one.

Ram Dass tells the story of a rabbi, who in a overwhelming fit of religious passion, ran into the synagogue and fell to his knees and began to cry out, “I am nothing! I am nothing!” The cantor of the synagogue saw this model of spiritual humility and was so moved he fell to his knees beside the rabbi, and cried, “I am nothing! I am nothing!”

Now the sexton, the building superintendent of the synagogue, was walking through the darkened synagogue couldn’t refrain himself either, and fell to his knees beside the rabbi and the cantor and cried out with all his heart, “I am nothing! I am nothing!” At this, the rabbi nudged the cantor and complained, “Look who thinks he’s nothing!”

No matter how hard we try, we just can’t seem to escape thinking of ourselves and our relationships in terms of position and power. No matter how old we are, or what status of life we achieve or fail to achieve, there’s always an inner awareness we have of where we stand in the world.

A vignette from Mark’s gospel tells us a not-so-complimentary conversation held between the disciples to determine who would be granted the roles of power and influence among Jesus’ first followers. James and John sidled up to Jesus and stated their request, “Teacher, we want you to do for us whatever we ask of you.”

It’s hard to fill in all the details with certainty what then happened among the other ten disciples. Was it an indication Jesus’ first group of followers were a group of ambitious and aggressive young bucks that were naturally sorting out the pecking order among them? Was it a power thing between James and John to settle between those two alone to determine which between them held the reins of power by knowing who would serve on Jesus’ right, the true place of power, and who would serve from the lesser position on Jesus’ left? Or was this a larger issue as these two brothers joined together in a power coalition against the other ten leaving only the decision as to who would serve as first in charge and who would serve as second in charge leaving the other ten with no real power to wield?

Naturally, overhearing all this the other ten were furious with them! “What nerve! How could they possibly think they might be the only ones considered for those positions?” Restated: “Why didn’t I think of that first?”

So Jesus had to settle this petty sibling rivalry and so too we might consider their struggle for power simply recognizing we are power brokers when it comes to life’s relationships. Some give their power away afraid of its demands and questioning whether they think themselves worthy of it. Others overreach taking power and privilege away from those around them as a show of their own undernourished ego.

Jesus addressed it squarely, “You don’t even know what you’re asking for. Are you able to drink from the cup that I am to drink from? Are you willing to be baptized with the baptism I am soon to be baptized in?” meaning likely the baptism of death on a cross. As Jesus and the disciples were deliberately traveling from the area around the Galilee south, climbing towards Jesus’ certain suffering in Jerusalem, only Jesus seemed to be in touch with the reality of what was to take place there. Centered in his thoughts were surely the struggle between power and the right to protect self and the suffering of body and soul that would be the death of ego itself.

If we are to understand the words and the example of Jesus in kingdom matters, we must address the power-lust that it a part of whom we are and recognize our need for healing. Only when we find the way of humility and seek to serve and not to be served will we be able to be what Henri Nouwen calls, “wounded healers,” servants of God in this world. By that he means only when we recognize our own woundedness and the ways we have been broken can we be able to extend the hand of help to people. It’s our brokenness that enables us to remember what it means to be alienated from God. Only when we are in touch with our own alienation can we offer reconciliation.