It's not that complicated

 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

Thus, the beginning of John's Gospel, known overall as being the impenetrable, mystical one. The Gospel where it doesn't start with the birth of Jesus, or the ministry of John, or the family tree of Christ. All easy things to get your head around. No, it starts with the concept of Logos, the Word, the Word becoming flesh and dwelling among us. 

That sort of mystical stuff is really at the core of what the Christian faith is all about, the nature of God becoming flesh and dwelling in the midst of his people, but this sort of doctrinal content can be accused of being at least semi confusing and baffling, especially to the outside. But there is a separate type of content that is exclusively baffling to people on the inside of the church, namely things like we have in our epistle reading from Sunday. And Christians are notorious for this: having a good grasp of esoteric and arcane aspects of the nature of God, but are very bad at having a firm grasp on things that are so easy that we teach them to children. 

Of course, this isn't exclusive to Christians, but you would be amazed at how easily the average Lutheran at least can wrap their heads around the concept of a six day creation or the real presence. And my standard go-to line is always this: if you can believe that a 2000 year old man is literally there made of bread and wine on the altar at this suburban church, if you believe that "Is means is," then why are you having a hard time with a lot of what the Pauline epistles say about how to behave?

I mean, I know why. We are a Sola people: Faith alone, Grace alone, Christ alone, that kind of thing. And we like to avoid anything related to works righteousness. And the best way to avoid works righteousness is not to do any works, right Lutherans? Can't feel righteous in your works if you didn't do any, you know? Okay, I know I'm being a little facetious, but not much, to be honest. Lutherans resist the preaching of works out of an abundance of caution about self righteousness, but we have to remember who Paul's letters were written to: The Christians in any given area. The church in Ephesus, the church in Thessalonica, the Church in Rome, that kind of thing. These are people, who, like you, are already Christians, already baptized, already washed clean by the Holy Spirit, called by the grace of God, and given life and salvation. But you're not done at that point: There's still a lot of living to do, you know. You believe, you have been baptized, you have faith in Christ, now what? And the answer is what you find in the Pauline letters.

Paul, who wrote the book of Romans, isn't confused about salvation. He's not perplexed about what works and grace are, you know. He wrote that doctrine down, codified it, and made sure that we would know that it is by grace we have been saved, not by works, lest any man should boast. So if that's true, and you trust Paul with that, then why don't you trust him when he tells you not to let any corrupting talk come out of your mouths? 

I know why, of course. A lot of ink has been spilled from not so well meaning philosophers who have gone to a lot of effort to try to convince you that the essence of not just Christian but all morality is for you to do nothing differently from what you would have been doing normally. The goal of the theologian now is not to tell you what God wants you to do, but rather to tell you that God wants you to do what you're doing. 

It just ends up being this: you want to hear from friends, family, acquaintances, even God himself that you should stay the course, and that you're doing super. And you want to have a pastor, a church, a theology that echoes that loud and clear, so that when you church-shop, you're looking for a church that will tell you that what you're already doing is what God wants you to do, no matter what it is.

But that drives you headlong into the salvation problem. For if God desires all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth, then what are you being saved from? If John 3:16 tells you that God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life, what's he saving you from? Jesus can't cheerlead you on with every decision and also save you from your sins. And deep down, you know that you're not supposed to be doing the things you're doing. When Paul tells you what to do, he's shining a light using the law on your current behavior, and demonstrating to you two things:

1 - what good behaviour actually would be, and 

2 - what you need to be forgiven of. 

The combination of those two things means that you have a guide on how to live, that you don't water down the word from Paul, but that when you examine yourself, you will find that the voice that wants you to stay the course, that you're doing super, gets drowned out by the voice that proclaims the grace of God.

Faith and bread.

 Jesus talks to those who are following him around, and tells them that they are following him because they have eating their fill of the bread. This is true. For people will do a lot for those who are supplying them. 

This is true not just in matters religious, but in all matters. You will tend to give loyalty to things and people who provide for your needs. But we're short sighted, by and large, and so we tend to follow around after things that meet our immediate needs. Our needs to unwrap the book for Christmas, not to read it. Our needs to bring home a puppy but not want to walk it. Our needs to have new relationships, money, attention, all that for a moment. And once that moment is gone, we tend to look for what is new, what is exciting, and we pursue novelty, new attention, new blessings. 

The people of the ancient world were no different, because they were people. And as people, they tended to do what people do. Jesus showed up to a world where even bread was difficult and time consuming. There was a reason that His miracle of feeding so many was such a big deal, because back then, you couldn't just go to the store and get a McDouble, even the idea of getting such a thing would have been laughable to a first century middle easterner. Remember in the parable of the prodigal son, how the complaint from the older brother was that the fattened calf had been killed, but that he never got even a young goat to celebrate with his friends? We're at the point now where the average person in Canada would consider eating goat to be beneath them "Goat? No thanks!" And in the Gospels, that was a treat, a treat that the older, obedient son never even got to have. Meat was way off the table for the most part, only for a really special occasion. And bread was the standard of the day. Flour, oil, water, baked in to cakes, as the scriptures say, but that takes time and effort. You don't get to go to the store on the way home and spend 1/6 of one hour's pay on a loaf of bread. If you want bread, you have to make it.

Day in, day out, the same routine, same flour, same oil, same water, same bread. And because it took hours to do, a generous portion of someone's day was going to be spent just keeping the family fed. Slow. Over coals. Every day. When Jesus gets on the scene, and multiplies the loaves and the fish, it's a giant miracle for the people who are following him. Surviving takes work, and lots of it. Just like the BeeGees remind you, over and over again, Stayin' alive. Stayin' alive. 

So when Jesus shows up and makes bread seemingly out of nothing, when the fish multiply without being caught, and the bread is pulled out of thin air, people take notice. Imagine if a quarter of your day was freed up, and the chore that defined your daily routine which, if you didn't do your family would starve, was just taken care of. Imagine that. You can bet that this is something worth paying attention to. But Jesus' work is not to be John Galt and to make an infinite energy loop here. He hasn't come to earth to be a source of food without labor. He's on earth to do bigger work than that, and this is just what the Bible calls a sign.

But signs aren't things. Yes, I took literary criticism in University, and once again, I'm about to make use of that expensive degree. The idea behind a lot of literary criticism and search for literary meaning is to understand that an awful lot of what we think is pre-determined is actually fairly open to interpretation. Not only is the meaning of the story as a whole subject to interpretation, but the language itself is open to interpretation as well. Words aren't anything concrete, they just point to concrete things. But the words themselves are nothing at all, only useful insofar as they point to things. As signs do. In the same way, the miracles of Christ, the signs that they see, work in the same way. They're only useful insofar as they point to what they point towards. 

The people who came to listen to the preaching of Jesus sat down and were filled with bread. Real bread. And their real tummies were filled, all fine so far. But if you stop at the sign, you'll never get where you're supposed to go, you know. If you assume that the sign is the thing, you'll never move past the sign. And the multiplying of the loaves and the fish was there to be a sign to point to the bread of life. But people got focused on the sign, wanted the sign only, and not what the sign pointed to. And you can see what happens, where Jesus does a sign, then tells people what the sign points to, and then they get angry and walk away: "This is a hard teaching, who can understand it?" But your job as the Christian is to understand what are the signs, and what the signs are pointing to. When Jesus talks about himself as the bread of life, he does so as something that will satisfy eternally. That is, the source of eternal life. 

Bread is transient. You labor for it, bake it, it's necessary for life, but you burn it and then need more. That's the cycle. And people of the time understood their relationship to God in the same way. You sin, you need grace, you sacrifice, you go back and repeat. Over and over again. And it never satisfies. Jesus used the hunger in the stomach to talk about the hunger in the heart. You hunger and thirst for righteousness, for life, and that hunger and thirst can be satisfied. Don't follow me because of the bread in the wilderness. Follow me because of the bread of life. 

Heads up!

 "Bring me the head of John the Baptist on a platter."

That's the signing of John's death warrant. He is going to be taken out and killed, based primarily on a whim. Herod promises his stepdaughter that he will give her anything, up to half his kingdom. A rash promise, but this is in a time where your word, you know, meant something. And if you made a promise in front of all your friends, you were going to pay for it. And that's exactly how it went. Herod promised his daughter that she could have anything, and she asked for something he didn't want to give. Bound by his rash promise, he was stuck with the offer he had made. Bad negotiations. 

But if you think about it, Salome who danced for Herod didn't really want the head of the Baptist either. Of what concern was it to her? Nah, the instigator for this murder wasn't Herod, nor was it Salome. It was Herodias, all the way. 

For what reason? It all comes back to John telling her that she was wrong. And that's the kiss of death, really. John had the absolute temerity, the audacity to say that she had done the wrong thing. So she straight up kills him. 

This shouldn't surprise you, of course, because you and I have the rank temptation to do the same thing. But we only do this for things that we are insecure about, that we think we might be wrong about. If someone were to come up to you and criticize you for eating all those vegetables, you'd roll your eyes and walk away chuckling to yourself about how silly that person is. But if they say 'you know, you probably shouldn't have seven beers,' you'll get mad. Why will you get mad? Because you know you shouldn't be having seven beers. And that's what matters. There's a great bit from the movie 'the swan princess' where the the evil sorcerer Rothbart says of his plan to marry the princess 'if you steal something, you have to fight forever to keep it.' If he marries the princess, he can have the kingdom legally. If he steals it from the existing king, he will have to fight to keep it forever, for his rule will always be illegitimate. 

It works the same way with almost all morality. If you are doing something that you know is wrong, if anyone brings that up, it stabs a pin through your self perception. And that's why we do horrible, unspeakable things to each other, in order to keep that self perception alive. We surround ourselves with enablers, yes men who will agree that we have only ever done the right thing. We will always keep up with only so many people, who will back up what we do and say and perpetually echo the refrain we need to hear 'you did the right thing.' And the abandonment that people who disagree with us encounter is legendary.  

But we don't have much power, not really. If you kill someone, you go to jail, so you do what you can, and what you typically can do is to cut them out of your life, not cut their heads off. You don't have tetrarch power, the power of life and death over people. If someone scolds you, or makes fun of you, or tells you that you were wrong in some way, the most you can do is to cut them out of your life completely. Unfriend them, block them, stop talking to them, so that you can preserve that self image. So you can think of yourself that you are good, and have nothing to change. But that comes at a terrible cost. The story of the beheading of John the Baptist is a start warning to all of us, a warning of our fragility, of how little it takes to go to an extreme. And it's a caution to us, who may be horrified and disgusted by the story of the death of John, to reconsider not just his death, but also his words. When John says to us 'bear fruit in keeping with repentance,' part of what he means is that he seeks to make things right between God and us, and between us and each other. To repent is to look sincerely at the life that we've made, and to understand that our boasting comes from Christ, not from ourselves. So when someone mentions to us casually that we shouldn't do what we are doing, which we are well aware that we shouldn't do, we don't have to respond by fighting to keep our self image. We can instead respond that we know we shouldn't and we struggle with it all the time. 

For this is honest, it is repentance, and it is good for us to continue to do. For the sake of ourselves, those around us, and our relationship with God. Heed the words of John, and see what happens if we ignore them. 

Thorn in the side

 It should be clear that a thorn in the side is aggravating. Most of us don't come into contact with thorns that often - this time of year it might be a thistle in some undergrowth, or when you're trying to pick a raspberry, that kind of thing, but most of the time, you're not going to be running into thorns all that often.

Most of that is because for a lot of us, we're not in thorn places all that often. Thorns are for the plant to protect itself against animals that might try to it, or from you for trying to stamp on it, pull it, or get it out of the way somehow. For a lot of human history, you would be navigating through the world through things like old goat tracks, fields, forests, that kind of thing, and not through roads cleared of any kind of natural hazards. In the time of Paul, people would have been moving around on Roman roads, which were a big deal for this reason - cleared of obstacles, cleared of hazards, level and easy to walk on, that kind of thing. Most other routes would have been in varying degrees of overgrowth, tough to make it through easily or cleanly. And if you're navigating these routes, you're going to end up with thorns, thistles and burrs that will poke, impinge on and irritate you. 

Now, if you have a splinter (or sliver) stuck in your skin, how do you get it out? Likely you would sterilize a needle, or get out some tweezers, and pluck that back out again. Do you legitimately think that in the time of Paul, people had access to the tweezers and such that we have now? Not likely. More likely than not, you would end up with a thorn stuck in your flesh, and no real way to pull it out. 

A thorn in your flesh, a pebble in your shoe, it's uncomfortable and unpleasant. Every step is uncomfy, and you really want to stop and remove it. Pebble in shoe, easy; thorn in flesh, harder. The thorn in your flesh digs in, and reminds you with every movement that something is jabbed into you. And this what Paul wants to propose to you as an image of what he has to deal with. He has to deal with weakness in his flesh. What is that weakness? Paul isn't real clear, and it doesn't matter. It's not important what his weakness is, it's important to know that he has a weakness. And his weakness keeps him humble.

Even though he has had surpassing visions, has been able to see Christ, and has had doctrine and grace be communicated to him, even with all that, Paul needs to remain humble. As do we all. One of the problems with what happens now is that things are, for a lot of people, too good. People have money and time, hot and cold running water, access to all the world's information in a second, information beaming into their brains constantly, that kind of thing. And as such, to quote Network - "all necessities provided. All anxieties tranquilized." We have the luxury now of being concerned about missing TV shows, not about surviving until we turn 15. And so when people are asked about their faith in the living God, and their thoughts about the life to come, they are naturally not too concerned about it, and in fact they believe that God owes them an explanation for why things are the way they are. After all, they're the main character. Even God himself should answer to them.

But you're neither Peter nor Andrew, James nor John. You're not Paul, and you're not Barnabas. You're you. And you, like the rest of us, do need to be kept humble. Paul understood his humility as being important, even crucial. A thing that he had to have to stop him from falling out of his need for the love of God. It's easy to think that you're everything, to lose all conception of anything beyond yourself, and to think that you are the measure of everything. So in his wisdom, God occasionally sends to us all a thorn in the flesh. What is it? It could be anything for you, but a reminder, certainly, of your frailty, something to keep you humble, and to remind you of your desperate need for the Lord Jesus, who is there to redeem the frailty of his fallen creation.

lay down your life

 I'm perpetually bemused by cheap grace.

It's a Bonhoeffer concept in which he says that people are in love with cheap grace. The idea that any discussion of law, of sin, can be easily watered down to the point that it doesn't say anything anymore. You, as the Christian, would read the word of God about how you are to lay down your life for the brothers, and your conclusion would be that you should practice self care. This is not an uncommon view, you understand, so how do you get to that point? 

Cheap grace.

The idea that you don't worship a Christ who forgives sins, but rather a Christ who tells you how to live. And the advice that you would get from most people who would tell you how to live is that you should do things like practice self care, drink water, get rest and exercise, that kind of thing. People who want to give you practical advice for life rarely tell you that the best thing for you to do is to lay down your life for someone else. That gets frowned upon in self care circles really quickly. 

But Jesus isn't a self care guy. His advice is to lay down your life for your friends, to show the greatest love you can have. Now, as I mentioned on Sunday, the odds of you having to be killed for your brethren are low low odds. It may come up, and we all have to be prepared for what that would mean, to be sure, but it's not really likely that you would have to literally die for your friends. Rather, what's likely is that your friends may need your help, your time, your input, etc. They will likely at some point need your money. Not a lot all at once of any of those, but they'll sure need a lot over time.

And believe it or not, your time, your money, those things are your life, really. In bite sized formats. That's what your life is composed of, minutes, hours, days, etc. In many ways we like to think of our life as being separate from our lives, which is strange to say, but think about it. You don't think of your day to day (getting up, drinking coffee, taking a shower, eating breakfast, driving to work, etc etc) as your life. You don't think of those things as your life. That's just some stuff. But in reality, that's a lot of your life. And we don't think about how we treat the people we see everyday as indicative of how we treat people, but that is how you treat people. You may think of yourself as being calm and patient because you would totally good samaritan someone that you saw beaten by the side of the road, but for most of us, how you would treat a beaten gentleman is not a very good indicator of how you treat people, given that you typically see almost zero beaten roadside gentlemen in an average week.

The story we tell ourselves is that we would totally spring into action if called upon to do the right thing, but the need for us to do the right thing just never comes up, fortunately for us. We would treat people well in one grand gesture, but won't treat them well on a daily basis. We would absolutely lay down our lives for our friends, but won't pick up the phone when we know they need help moving. That kind of thing. And that line of thought is awfully pervasive in things - we always assume that we could handle an act of supreme sacrifice if called upon, safe in the knowledge that it's not going to be an obligation for us anytime soon. 

But Christ dictates that you should be laying down your life for your friends. And that means that you are going to be asked to die for the brothers, yes, but also to spend your life bit by bit on them. And that will come up on a regular basis. After all, we forget that the injunction from Jesus in Matthew 25 (When I was sick, did you take care of me, when I was hungry did you feed me, when I was naked did you clothe me) apply to the sick and vulnerable but also to those who need your help on a regular basis. Because that's your actual life. The people you need to feed and clothe and take care of on a regular basis, that's how you actually treat people .That's the nature of your sacrifice, the nature of you laying down your life for the brothers. Thinking about this means that the way you treat people on a regular basis is how you treat people. Your life is the sum of what you do on a consistent basis. You can't claim a moral good on how you would act if a grand gesture would come up and you're never required to do it. Rather, you laying down your life for your brothers will be laying down your time and resources for them nice and regularly. 

It seems like a lot, which it is, which is why you need grace as much as you do. Have you laid down your life for the brothers? Probably not as much as you should have. Have you given until there's nothing left? I doubt it. And that's why you need Jesus, who did all those things, and imbues you with that same righteousness. Which is good, because that gulf between what Jesus asks for and what you can do is why you need his grace.

The Good Shepherd

 The goodness of the shepherd is understated. 

Things from the Bible take on a life of their own after a while, one of the more notable is the story of the Good Samaritan. In common parlance these days, we only use the word 'Samaritan' with the qualifier 'Good.' And if someone were to refer to someone as a 'Samaritan,' you would assume that the person in question had done something good or charitable. You would assume that the 'Samaritan' was by definition good.

But hold on, gang, because the reason that the story was so surprising was that the audience was not expecting the Samaritan in the parable to be good. They were expecting the priest or the Levite to take care of their own, to do the good thing. They weren't expecting the Samaritan to do that. So the surprising part of the parable is that the Samaritan is good, though he is not expected to be, though he has no motivation to be. He doesn't owe the beaten man anything, they're natural enemies, but he still does the work to take care of him, nurse him back to health, at his own expense. 

So the Good Shepherd works the same way. We would expect a good shepherd to be good at the job of shepherding. That is, does he keep track of the sheep, does he take appropriate bathroom breaks, does he show up to work on time and give 110% while he's at work? Does he show up 15 minutes before his shift, and leave no earlier than 10 minutes after his shift is over? What a good shepherd. 

We think of a good employee at being good vis a vis his employer. Does he do his job to his employer's satisfaction? Or, we can look at it from the other direction, does the employee give great service to the customer? Is the waiter attentive to the needs of the diners whether the manager or owner cares or not? Where we don't tend to think of it is the question of how does the employee treat the goods? That's a much lesser concern, and one that doesn't factor in to the decisions of big capital. Are you good for the boss or the customer? Not are you good for the product. 

But the good shepherd is set apart for the goodness that he has for the sheep. Not for the employer, nor the end customer, but for the sheep. And that's unexpected, because the feeling of the livestock very rarely factors into decisions. Who cares if the sheep are enjoying themselves? The average farmer or rancher, though caring and conscientious, won't die for the livestock. The livestock are an investment, a store of value, something to help you live your life. They're there to enable you, not for you to enable them. There's no sense in you laying down your life for the sheep any more than there would be sense in you laying down your life for your work truck, or your toolbox or whatever. Those things are there to help you in your livelihood, which is harder to enjoy if you're dead. 

The Good Shepherd is there for the sheep. He cares about the sheep far FAR more than he should. He doesn't view the sheep as a store of value, or as a means to an end, he views them as important in and of themselves. This is much more of the way a person would view a pet than livestock. There was a time where people would view dogs as a working animal only, to live outside and do their jobs. And nobody would lay down their life for that. But perception of dogs changed over time, they became companions and friends, and eventually family. And as family, they were the sort of thing that people would lay down their lives for that animal. Why? 

The dog didn't change. Dogs haven't changed much time since we viewed them as tools, to be sure. But what did change is how we viewed them. We changed our perspective on them, changed our view of what it means to live with dogs, and then changed how we treat them and behave around them. All that was required was a change in our perspective, not a change in the dogs. We decided to view them as family, and therefore they became so. If a shepherd decides to view the sheep as family, as worth more than an financial investment but as family, then he would then treat them as such. If the shepherd declares them as family, they therefore would become family. The shepherd decides. 

So what that means is that you have a rare assessment. The sheep get to decide if the shepherd is good or not. The hired hands are deemed to be bad based on the fact that they would choose to desert, to leave the sheep defenseless. But the good shepherd is viewed as good by the perception of the sheep. It's rare, to be sure, for the sheep to get a vote, but they do. And if sheep could vote on the quality of a shepherd, what would they vote on? They'd vote on whether the shepherd makes them down to lie, leads them beside still waters, restores their souls, leads them in paths of righteousness for his name's sake, etc. It wouldn't be a vote on whether the shepherd is efficient, or prompt, or anything like that. How does the shepherd treat his sheep.

It's rare then as now to consider the possibility that a shepherd would care so much for the sheep that he would die, but that's the difference between a shepherd and a good one. That he would declare the sheep as worth it, and then would act accordingly. 

Righteous anger

 Okay.

We know that Jesus is without sin. That's sort of a definite part of the Christian faith, Christ as a perfect, sinless man, who took on flesh and dwelt among us. If you don't think that Jesus is perfect, that he was sinful in some key way and that his perfection isn't real or important, then skip ahead a few paragraphs, because certain things in the Christian faith remain true whether you believe in them or not.

If Jesus is sinless, which we believe that he is, then what he does is sinless by definition. That is, he can't do anything sinful, since it would be mutually exclusive with his perfection. If he's sinless then he can't commit any sins by definition. Now that we've covered that, we can get into his outrage in the temple. You need to understand that when he is clearing people, sellers, animals out of the temple, he's not doing it calmly and placidly. He's angry. Zeal for the house of the Lord consumes him. It's a matter of him looking at injustice, looking at people standing between humanity and God through exploitation and profit seeking, and did something about it. 

Now, I'd like to offer the following hot take: It was good for Jesus to clear the temple. I know, I said that something Jesus did was good, wow, very brave. But hold on a moment, it's worth discussing that you don't have to make any apologies for Jesus clearing the temple. If anyone says something like 'Jesus was angry and threw people out of the temple by driving them out with whips' your response as a Christian should simply be 'Yes.' 

Yes, Jesus did clear the Temple. Yes it was necessary, and beyond that, yes, it was good. Don't make excuses for it, and don't minimize it. And don't minimize the anger of Christ either. This is one of a very few parts of scripture in which Jesus shows and displays anger, and we should, as the kids say, let him cook.  

If you saw the movie 'Inside out' from Disney, which was a while ago, the essential message was that all the core emotions that you have are good and good for you, they just have to be used correctly. Anger, fear, sadness, joy, disgust, they're all good in the right way, and place. They're all helpful, and none of them are 'bad'. This is true in the case of Christ too. His anger isn't misplaced here, it's a good thing. He is rightly angry at the division between God and humanity, and sought to address that injustice by driving out everything that would stand between people and God. 

But then what?

That's the big question that lurks at the base of it all, isn't it? The big question that lurks behind everything is the question of what does Jesus do after he's done driving everyone out? He doesn't just cast them all out with whips, once he's done that, he stays in the temple to teach. And that's a real difference right there. This is what law and gospel looks like in practice. If there is sin, it has to be addressed and corrected. This is the law part, and this should be the best reminder to anyone that it's not as though old testament God is mean, and new testament God is nice. In the New Testament, there is still law. God, in the form of Christ, is present, and rightly angry. He wants to see the behavior stopped, and stopped hard. But he doesn't replace that bad behavior with nothing though. He replaces it with gospel, which is the point. 

Jesus sits down in the temple and teaches from that point on, you know. He teaches about grace, the Gospel, forgiveness and life. The purpose of anger isn't anger for its own sake, rather the anger is to remove what divides, and to replace it with reconciliation and forgiveness. The problem these days is that you're told to just keep everything under wraps, to not have discussions of any topic that matters, and to let people drift away if holding the relationship together becomes too difficult or taxing. But anger isn't a sin, you know. It's not inherently sinful. But it should be used for a good and fruitful purpose. That is, your anger should be used to move through sinful behavior, and towards reconciliation. Reconciliation that would not be possible without the anger.

Do you think for one moment that if Jesus had been passive in the face of the commerce in the Temple that they would have stopped? His anger was right and justified, and served to put grace back in the temple where there had been only works before. Properly considered the anger is the surgeon's scalpel, the dental drill, the thing that removes the death and rot so that healing can happen. Your anger hopefully is the same. Anger isn't a sin, but it is supposed to drive forgiveness, grace and reconciliation. You're supposed to be angry but not sin, to be impelled to make things right, to insist that forgiveness is there, even though sins have to be repented of. As Christians, you're not supposed to ignore injustice, nor to dismiss it, or claim that it doesn't matter. You're supposed to deal with these things head on, and to be angry where anger is required. But that anger must lead to repentance, and that repentance must come with forgiveness. This is a Christian absolute. And if that's the case, you're not going to be as tied up in knots about whether anger is or is not sinful, but to ask what the purpose of that anger is, and to ensure that it moves into a good direction.

Never Lord

 The interesting thing that happens is that Peter rebukes Jesus when Jesus says that he's going to have to take up his cross and die. Jesus in turn rebukes Peter by saying to him that he has in mind the things of man, and not the things of God. And that seems to be the breakdown between God and humanity. Peter does not have in mind the things of God, but is that a problem unique to Peter? When Jesus says 'get behind me, Satan,' is this an issue that Peter has, or is it a bigger problem?

Honestly, if we were able to have in mind the things of God, we wouldn't be in the situation that we're in. I'm more convinced than ever that a lot of issues that are at the root of our problems are formed in a complete inability that we have to see things from each others perspectives. That is, you will be fighting about where someone left a plate, or whatever. Both sides believe, sincerely, that they're being perfectly reasonable, whereas the other person is being completely unreasonable. That problem is brought forward by the inability of the other party to seriously engage with the viewpoint of the other. There was a semi-viral blog post out there that had the title of 'she divorced me because I left dishes by the sink.' That blog post, whether you agree with the content or not, encapsulated the issue perfectly by illustrating a matter that was irrelevant to one party, of great consequence to the other, and the inability of each person to see and understand the perspective of the other person. In other words, the husband at the time said 'I don't think this is a big deal, so you shouldn't either.' And that line of thought is a real, genuine issue to be pondered. Can you, not as a husband or wife, parent or child, but human being in God's creation, ever really have in mind the things of another? Is it possible for you or I to effectively see things from someone else's perspective to the point that it adjusts our behavior, or are we likely to filter their experience through our own to the extent that we will view the other person's needs only in relation to our own.

That's why when the Lord Jesus Christ discusses morality in what we would call the Golden Rule, he does so by using our own perspective, turning that from a liability into a benefit. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Jesus knows what is in the heart of man, and therefore he is going to work with the material as it actually exists, not as we would hope it exists. So he's not going to say to you 'you should treat people the way they want to be treated' because that would run things through our own perspective anyway. But that perspective you have is supposed to influence how you treat other people. If your wife says that she would rather you not leave dishes by the sink, you're not supposed to say 'she shouldn't care,' but rather 'If I voiced a concern to someone, how would I want them to respond to me?' Then you act accordingly. 

We can, and should, do this with one another, but what about when it comes to God? When it comes to the Lord God, can we default to the golden rule? Not really, for God doesn't need anything from us. We aren't living in a universe where we can treat God the way we want to be treated. Our job is not to behave that way, but to be obedient, to listen, and so on. But part of the reason that we can't have in mind the things of God is because God is utterly alien to us, as high as heaven is from the earth, so far are his ways than our ways. The end of the book of Job is simply a big long discussion of how difficult it would be for Job to possibly understand how God operates. Job is a man of dust. He can get sick and hungry, he can weep when his children die, he can starve when his crops get stolen, that kind of thing. God cannot. It's real hard to have in mind the thing of God when you're starving, or grieving, or hungry, or just living in the world. The great wager between Satan and God was that Job would curse God if his human condition became bad enough - Satan believed that Job would only ever be able to view his relationship with God through his own lens as a human.

So, once again, if we were able to do a good job of having in mind the things of God, we wouldn't be in the mess we're in. But if we can't have in mind the things of one another, if our morality must, by necessity be run through a filter of ourselves, then God is going to have to bridge the gap for us. He's not going to wait for us to have in mind the things of God, because we're never going to get there. But what he will do is to say 'if you're not going to have in mind the things of God, then God will have to have in mind the things of man.' A great part of the incarnation is understanding how close God has to get to us in order for us to have any kind of relationship with him at all. This ain't 50/50. It's not even 70/30. You're looking at a world in which for any kind of relationship with God to happen, he's going to have to do all of it. We're not going to have in mind the things of God, so he's not going to make that a condition. He's going to instead have in mind human beings, their lives and relationships, their weaknesses and frailties, and to do all the work of redeeming them, because they're just not able to do that on their own.

In disguise

 I don't like to get too bugman on stuff, but there is a real utility to talking about Christ in terms of super heroes. That is, an awful lot of super heroes operate in normal society as regular people, with what we call 'secret identities.' Some don't but a lot do.

Thor, for example, is just Thor. That's it. He's an Asgardian alien who has the ability to lift 100 tons, can fly, is immune to disease and so on. He had a secret identity back in the day, Dr. Donald Blake, but that was retconned away as an illusion, because it was deemed to be unnecessary. After all, if you can lift 100 tons, can fly, are immune to disease and damage, why would you need a secret identity? Nobody can do anything to you, not much point in ever being in disguise, right?

So why Clark Kent? 

Surely Superman and Thor have very similar powersets, yes? Surely they have similar powers, abilities, invulnerabilities and so on. They can both fly, lift over 100 tons, are immune to disease and damage, that kind of thing. So why does one have a secret identity and one does not? The explanation is to be found not in the power sets, but in their origins. Thor comes to earth as an Asgardian exile, but as a fully grown adult. His secret identity was to blur his recollection of his Asgardian roots. The Clark Kent secret identity, though, was given to Superman by his Ma and Pa Kent parents who raised him from a baby that they found in a rocket. Superman is invulnerable to all damage that mortals could do. You could shoot bullets at him, stab him, run him over, and it wouldn't do too much. But Ma and Pa? Lois Lane? Jimmy Olson? Lana Lang? Those are all flesh and blood humans, who aren't immune to damage. Shoot Superman and the bullets bounce right off. Shoot Lois Lane and the bullets go right through.

A large part of the plots of Superman stories is not about him being in any real peril, after all, outside of kryptonite there's not much you can do to him, but the stories tend to be about the vulnerability of those around him. Can Superman save everyone? He's not at risk, but boy, the people around him sure are. So in that case, Superman has a Clark Kent secret identity not for him, but for them.

And that brings us to Transfiguration. At the mount of Transfiguration, Jesus is preparing to descend into a world of mania that will end with him being killed. And this dangerous world has knives and daggers, nail and whips everywhere. It's a world of death and destruction, and a world into which Jesus must descend, to be killed. But at the mount of transfiguration, the disciples get to see him without disguise. The secret identity is revealed only to a select few, three in fact. This tracks with this information, which has a select few people, 20 in all, knowing the secret identity of Superman. Not everyone knows, as this is a secret identity. If the vast majority of people know Superman as Superman only, then his human family is safe, his colleagues are safe, and so on. But if they know that Superman is also Clark Kent, then everyone is in play, and nobody is safe. And like it or not, Superman can quit being Superman a lot easier than he can quit being Clark Kent.

The secret identity isn't for the super, it's for the normals. Jimmy, Lana, Lois, they're the ones who need that secret identity, if they don't have it then they're shot. And when it comes to Christ, the veiling of his identity isn't for him, it's for the disciples, it's for us, it's for the normals. The people who would want Moses to veil himself so that the reflection of the divine would not trouble or alarm us. The people who need God to show himself in approachable ways. The people who need and crave a closeness with God, but who would find the grandeur and majesty of the ineffable God to be overwhelming, and which would reflect badly on our own sinfulness. 

Which is why there's a secret identity. To know Jesus is to know God, but through a lens that we can wrap our minds around. He speaks with a mouth, washes feet with his hands, breathes on his disciples, eats fish, bread and wine, and weeps at the tomb of his friend. Through that lens, we can start to see the eternal God, and at the Transfiguration, as he heads back to die, we can count on his ability to save the world because it is God, and man, who is mighty to save.

Everyone is looking for you

 I like our Gospel reading where the disciples are the best kind of correct - accidentally correct.

A lot of the time, our idioms are imprecise. What do I mean by that? I mean that when you say 'nobody is available tonight,' what you mean is that none of your employees are available. When you say that you have 'nothing to eat' at home, what you mean is that what you have at home isn't what you want to eat, but I would wager that there are a lot of things you could be eating. You just don't want to.

Now, when we talk about our Gospel reading, the disciples come up to Christ and use a similar idiom - 'everyone is looking for you.' This is standard exaggeration, you understand, the disciples mean that everyone in that house, that village, that area is looking for Jesus. They surely don't mean that everyone everyone is looking for Jesus. But they're accidentally correct. They are right in ways that they can't really imagine.

What I mean by that is that the hyperbole of saying 'everyone is looking for you' is shockingly correct. Everyone is absolutely looking for Jesus. Whether they know it or not. Why is everyone looking for Jesus? They're looking for him precisely because he offers a solution to all the problems. Usually, we want to treat the symptoms, not the cause. We're good at trying to deal with the symptoms of our sinfulness without dealing with the underlying causes. We want the fighting at home to stop, but aren't willing to address what got us into that mess. We want to still talk to our friends, our family, our neighbors, but are unwilling to deal with why we're squabbling with one another. What's driving these wedges and schisms betwixt us? 

Ultimately, it comes right down to the truth of a simple sentiment - all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. There is none righteous, no not one. The difficulty usually lies in you or I thinking about what the other people need to change. A lot of the time, when people come to talk to me about broken relationships, problems, hangups, all that stuff, it revolves around them telling me how much everyone else needs to change. 'Pastor, you need to call my mother and tell her to talk to me.' 'Pastor, you need to tell my kids to be nicer to me.' 'Pastor, you need to get my friend to listen to me before it's too late.' 

You know, I bet that's the case. I bet that your mother / child / friend should really smarten up, and there's almost certainly a ton of truth to it. I guarantee that's true, without doubt. But that's not the issue, really, or I suppose it's half of the issue. The issue, really, is that there are two people (minimum) who are at odds, and who are both flawed but viewing themselves as flawless. And that's the trouble. In these disagreements, we tend to view ourselves as being good and right, and the other party as being generally wrong, and we expect and seek for the opposition to conform themselves to our views as though that was right. But we're actually expecting and asking for the other party to move from being wrong in their way to being wrong in ours. But that's still wrong, folks. It's just wrong in a way that benefits us. 

So ultimately, things keep on being wrong, as long as both parties continue to view themselves as being right, their opposition being wrong, and there being basically no middle ground to find. But your job as someone who is a human, and a human who is frequently in conflict, is to treat the cause, not just the symptoms. It's real easy to treat the symptoms, to excise picky pushy people, to squabble further and to try to get family and friends to see things our way, to dig in our heels and force, but it's much much harder to do the work of seeing our own role in the dispute, and our position as the one that needs to change. As both do. 

If you're both sinners, then you both need to repent for what got us to this point so far. And if you both do, then we can get to some sort of resolution, because you're not both sitting there waiting for the other person to smarten up. Rather, you're in the position where both you and the other party have the same flaw, and will have to work together to find common ground. Normally, the first person to admit weakness is seen by and large as the weaker of the group, but in reality, as Christians, admitting weakness and fault is a given. That's the basic position. And if you've wronged somebody, you have to ask for forgiveness. And they have to forgive. It's a system that cuts to the core of what's wrong by exposing the fact that all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. And you forgive the other party, and they forgive you, not because of the greatness of spirit that you have, but that we forgive as we have been forgiven. We love because he first loved us. 

If this is true, and is the path towards reconciliation, then what the disciples said is accidentally very true indeed. Everyone is looking for Him.

All at once

Wednesday's service had the verses that are all about a combination of the transfiguration and the burning bush. These readings have strong themes of holiness of place attached to them. Moses is told to take off his sandals, as he is standing on Holy Ground. In the same vein, when on the mount of transfiguration, Peter wishes to build shelters to stay on that mount, one for Jesus, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

But that misses the point of what the incarnation is all about, really. The idea of holy ground is a topic that you'd think would make perfect sense - you go somewhere to find God. God holds court somewhere, and it is the job of humanity to tread very carefully around sanctified ground. But that implies that there is a place, or multiple places on earth, where the presence of God is more fully manifest or realized. There is a place you can go, somewhere, that the holiness of God is not just more fully felt, but more fully is. If you're looking for God, you can literally find him there. Now, is he everywhere else as well? Maybe. But not absolutely. And that's the issue right there, which is that if there is a place where God is, then there are places where he is less. Those places where he is less would be the vast, vast majority of places. And that' the trouble, isn't it? 

We are people who have a lot of trouble finding God. He isn't as easy to track down as we might want. For a lot of time, experiences of the numinous are rare, and few and far between. That is, the dreadful mundanity of life really shows itself early. So much of life is taken up with general, bland mundane activity, and very little of that is rapture and bliss of encountering the divine. It's like it is with everything else, too. When you get married, everyone is in their absolute finery, they look terrific, they are eating great food and dancing the night away. Will this be every night of your marriage? No, it won't. It won't be any night of your marriage, really. But the deal with your marriage is that you carry the finery and majesty with you for the rest of your marriage. Because you carry your spouse with you.

When you get married, it's not the party that makes your spouse special, rather it's the spouse that makes the party special .And you can test that, because you've been at weddings that weren't your own, and nice as though they may have been, they didn't fundamentally change everything about your life. Your own wedding did. There's a good chance that your spouse may very well have been your plus one at those weddings that you attended, but even though you and your spouse both attended the wedding, it wasn't a life changer to the extent that your own wedding was.

And that's the key. The act of being present at the wedding ceremony isn't what makes it important. The location, the food, the party, all of that is nice, but it's not what makes it important. What makes it important is that it's your wedding. And that makes everything about it special, and the fact that you bring your spouse home from that wedding is what changes your life. So, holy ground, as described in Scripture, isn't where God lives, but it's where Moses encounters God. But from that point on, God goes with Moses, throughout his journey from Egypt all the way to the holy land. Part of what is so profound about the story of the Exodus is that God liberates the people of Israel from slavery, but not because Israel is where God lives. It's clear that he is operating right the way through the book of the Exodus, whether the Israelites are in Egypt or not. This is true to the text, unless you think that someone else was parting the Red sea, turning the Nile to blood, and causing darkness and hail in Egypt. It seems pretty clear that even though Moses meets God up on the mountain at the burning bush, it's not as though God stays or lives there. God is present everywhere. 

Like Moses, we tend to have certain spaces set aside in which we can experience the divine. Churches, cathedrals, monasteries, these are places set aside for that purpose, where our spiritual batteries can be recharged, where we have time and space for God to speak without interruption.  But this is for our benefit, not for His. It's not as though he's bound by the doors of that space, and that you will only find him there. Rather, it's a situation in which, like at the mount of transfiguration, you can see and experience Christ with astonishing clarity, but then he goes down from the mountain with you.

Peter wanted to stay up there, where there was clarity, where there were Moses and Elijah, where there was a voice from the clouds and where Jesus was dazzling in his divinity. But when the prophets were gone, and Christ looked the same as he did before, he came down from the mountain with his disciples and continued his ministry alongside them. As said before, that's the nature of worship as a Christian. Where you can see God with clarity is great for you, but don't forget that there's nowhere that he isn't.

New Year, new you?

 The new year is something that is both arbitrary, and not, at the same time. What I mean by that is that there is objectively a point at which the earth completes a revolution around the sun, yes, but based on what as the starting point? There are multiple cultures that measure the new year in multiple ways. Hopefully by now you've heard of Rosh Hashanah, which is the Jewish New Year, taking place in late summer or early autumn. Or you're aware of Chinese New Year, taking place between the end of January and the end of February.  These are different in terms of dates to our New Year taking place on January 1st, but are functionally identical. That is, a year has elapsed, even though the start date and end date of the year differ. 

So what that means is that the New Year as a concept is empirical, and immutable. But the new year start and end is arbitrary, and you can start measuring, well, whenever you want I suppose. If you decide that the new year begins on March 10th, then every year you can count down on March the 9th, and it's every bit as valid, because a year has elapsed in the meantime. 

Now that's an important concept, because as a society we have determined that the end of a year, the beginning of a new one, is a good time for introspection, change, resolution and so on. But there are a lot of good resolutions that get made at this time of year, a lot of them get broken, and people become disheartened, and call the year a wash, waiting for the next year. But in the Christian faith, we are encouraged to do something else. Introspection and resolution. In the church, though, it's called 'silence for reflection on God's word, and for self-examination.' |And that right there is a much much faster way of slicing through the issues. For you don't need to wait until January the first to figure that out. Say you're at January 3rd and you've already blown through your resolution. I know, seems unlikely but bare with me. You can either shrug, say you've blown your resolution and wait for 364 days until you can make another one, or you can be introspective now, and deal with you missing the mark today.

People like to talk about guilt in church as a big problem and a great failing, but it actually isn't guilt the way you would think it would be. Rather, what you have in church is a way out of guilt, not a means of being mired in it. It is a way for you to deal with your sins, your failings as they arise and to not internalize them as a problem integral to yourself. It's arbitrary, yes, it's not based around the change from one year to another, but it's crucial for your own individual growth that you not just give up on January 10th and say 'this is just who I am now.' You have a chance every day to give up the consequence of your sin and to divorce that from yourself completely. Once you've realized that, then you'll work out that the church insistence on pointing out your sins isn't to give you more guilt, but to take your guilt away. 

Otherwise, you end up with resolutions made, broken, and abandoned. Not wanting to feel guilty about a lack of progress leads to you excusing every last bit of progress not made. No, the law highlighting your sin leads to you having a chance to get the guilt gone. And that opportunity is available every week, constantly, every time confession and absolution is offered, it's a chance for any of us to be introspective constantly, to be able to say 'what I have done so far will not govern my future simply based on the fact that it was me that did it.' If you do that, then you can take resolutions, whether made at the beginning of the year or on the spur of a moment, and say 'these were good things to do. Good resolutions to make. And it was the right thing to do to follow through with it.' 

Will that increase your chances? Maybe, maybe not, but it certainly will allow you to make the decisions you want to make, not the ones that you feel bound by.