REITERATING JESUS IN BREAD AND WINE (Part 1)

Posted on by Agent X

(Another Sunday Sermon for Last Church of Lubbock, Texas)
Brothers and sisters of Last Church in Lubbock, Texas, I recently preached to you about finding Jesus more intimately and powerfully in the bread and wine than we are normally accustomed. We made this discovery by taking an unusual stroll through Genesis. If you missed that sermon, I encourage you to go back and look at it now, or, if need be, request a copy so that you can. I think it is worth your while to open your theological imagination to the Bible, to God’s word, to Genesis in this case, and let Jesus come alive there in your heart and mind afresh.
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In that sermon, I made a number of points without calling attention to the fact they were points. Organizing an outline of a message in that way is great for writing research papers, books, and study guides, but in my estimation it makes for terrible preaching. All good sermons should have a point, of course, and most should have good supportive points, but when you outline them (map them out at the start) you effectively shut down further engagement. The sermon, in that case, is a sleep aid, not a wakeup call. Your road map basically sends listeners to all their prefab categories instantly, and they check out of Hotel California with their preconceived notions, no longer sensing the need to listen to you.
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But that sermon is now preached. The new notions and categories are now established. There were a handful of “lessons” along the way. There were new avenues of imaginative and theological exploration opened to you. And depending on the angle of approach, those might be stated as “points” made in support of that overarching “point.” The points were there… but I didn’t make a point of them, and so you experienced the fresh thinking rather than resisting it.
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Hmmm…
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Did you get the point? We looked more closely at the meal Jesus gives us than we are normally apt to do. We found him doing business with God’s creation and with our hearts like never before.
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Did you see the theme of meal tying together all of Genesis (and all of the rest of the Bible with it) in one massive subplot? Why has no one ever pointed this out before? Maybe you heard it before, but I never did. Why didn’t you tell me? I’m betting you didn’t know about it either. Nor really. The sermon opens up new implications we need to explore!
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What if in fact the whole Bible is in a sense a story of eating, of proper table manners (theologically speaking)?
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What if, underneath all the drama of Adam and Eve, Lamech, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and his family is a much deeper story, and what if that deeper story was all about eating from the tree of life vs. the tree of the knowledge of good and evil? Or, what if it was really a deep structure story/theme of bread and wine? Or, what if it was all really about eating Jesus’s body and drinking his blood and therein finding life?
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Oh man! If we could say things like that about Genesis, we suddenly discover whole new and fresh avenues of discovery regarding God’s will! Wouldn’t that be meaningful to a group of Christians? I think at Last Church it would be.
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If THAT, or something like it, were the truly deep and unifying story connecting everything else in the Bible, what would it say about how God brings order to creation? What would it say more intimately about how God relates to you, to me, and to us together?
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My words in today’s sermon remain a tad esoteric at the moment. I know. But if you’ve been on the journey of imaginative reading through Genesis I guided you on in the last sermon, it is time to develop some new categories of thought, to sort data in our mental/spiritual databases. I don’t want simply to stall out in the academics of it, but to package ideas in chunks and categories which we can set on a shelf and retrieve as needed while we go deeper into this deep structure narrative which seems to be holding the whole Bible together. I’m going to map out some new points this time. Please stay awake.
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Can we attempt that?
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So, at the moment (based on our exploration of Genesis from the previous sermon), we are discussing two main points: 1) World order and 2) Engagement of your heart, both with regard to the Lord’s Table.
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Today’s sermon will focus on point 1 – World order with regard to the Lord’s Table. To make this material more manageable, we will break the overarching point of the salvation meal in Genesis tying together all the drama of creation and redemption in Genesis (and possibly the rest of the Bible) into these two main subpoints, and we will deal with the first one in today’s sermon.
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Already, I know, just stating it that way is causing you to yawn a bit. That plus the fact that we will reiterate much of the things said in our last sermon means this will be very challenging to stay awake. But if you caught the last sermon, I figure you found yourself awakened to new possibilities. I assure you this one will light the fuse to the dynamite that will eventually blow your theological imagination wide open. Let me know if you fall asleep before I’m done. But I’m betting you will be wide awake on the other side.
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First, though, we reiterate. We come again to the things said previously, meaning there is some level of review. Specifically, we reiterate that Genesis opens with a meal story (trees of life or of knowledge) and closes with Joseph’s world saving, famine relief meal.
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This is the first point: God orders his world through us as we eat at this Table. 
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Who knew? I grew up in church attending a lot of Sunday schools and Bible studies, but I don’t recall anyone ever making a point of this observation which is really jumping of the pages of the Bible all of a sudden.
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This raises a number of questions I will want us to think about today, but first allow me to preview a moment on the second point. The meal we share with Jesus gets down to business with our hearts and sorts out the lies from the truth in a deeply loving and caring way. And this also raises a number of questions, though not normally as obvious since so much Christian tradition already treats Eucharist as a time of introspection.
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But let’s hold this second point in the back of our mind briefly as we explore the former.
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World order at the Table of the Lord
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Church, if you read Genesis, as we did last time we met, it becomes inescapably obvious that God creates and sustains the world. Creation is his own property to do with as he wills. And what he creates, he loves and judges to be good, very, very good. God is the hero of his story, and though humans are meant to play a role in the world order, they are junior partners meant to do their work through bearing God’s image in priestly worship. Most everything else humans attempt to contribute to God’s reign and salvation pretty much end up missing the mark.
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The tradition in which I grew up never actively argued against this point, but we shortchanged it in numerous ways, some of which we now seem to be rethinking. But in some other ways we are not rethinking it enough. I ask you to think with me now about those shortchanges.
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By way of explanation, consider this: I was raised in the church to believe the point of my life was “to go heaven when I die.” That, in essence, was the point – the overarching point of EVERYTHING. If you are middle aged, like me, and possibly younger (but more likely older), you might recall the standard sermon which asked this most potent question, “IF YOU DIED RIGHT NOW, WHERE WOULD YOU SPEND ETERNITY?”
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Do you remember that one? Clearly, it was designed to get the listener hooked with a sharp jolt of fear. The preacher would put the fear of God into the listener(s) with this terrible question and then outline how to determine the way you can “go to heaven when you die.”
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Depending on which faith tradition your preacher was speaking from, there were a number of different sub points argued about which were meant to support this overarching point, and arguments about the subpoints tended to drive wedges between the faith tradition in which I was raised and neighboring faith traditions. These differences had all the different faith traditions competing with one another for souls (as if God had in mind different churches should compete for the sheep!). Thus the church was divided hundreds of ways.
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Some of these wedge-driving subpoints had to do with proper baptism, prayer, worship practices and so forth. Or we fought about grace vs. law keeping. And then we found pitting these ideas against one another undermined everything in the end since churches began shrinking instead of growing. (And shrinking churches was/is a problem for all the different faith traditions!) The only unifying factor was the deeply mistaken notion that our tradition had the niche market on the right doctrine which would help you “go to heaven when you die.”
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Do I make sense?
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Sadly, none of that was even aiming at the target. No wonder it missed the mark!
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I mean, when I grew up and studied the Bible in the academy, I eventually learned how so much of this stuff did not make sense, but I hope I am making sense of the nonsense now as I spell it all out for you.
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Let me explain it like this: As far as I could tell, both as a kid and even looking back now as an adult, the goal of “going to heaven when we die” was the overarching point both we in the churches of Christ and Baptists (as well as Methodists, Pentecostals, Presbyterians, and even Cowboy church) were all driving at. However, we argued over the subpoints of how to achieve this overarching goal, and thus we wound up splintered into various camps.
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Speaking for the churches of Christ in particular, we believed in NOT using instrumental music in worship, in a specific method of baptism for salvation (rejecting the idea of salvation via a “sinners prayer”), AND had the gumption to believe (borrowing from the Baptists) no matter how good your moral life, you could not please God but must rely on his grace. We also believed that if you were in one of those other churches trying to attain the same goal of going to heaven when you die, that by not adhering to our subpoints, you were in error and doomed to damnation.
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Ain’t that something?
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But all of this hinged on the deeply mistaken idea that we were trying to “go to heaven when we die.”
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What if going to heaven when you die is not God’s goal for your life, but that this creation he made be redeemed and heaven come down to earth, like we read about in the closing chapters of the Bible as a whole?
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Hmmm…
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The tide of opinion and thought on this matter seems to be changing in the last generation. There are a lot of us alive today who have begun rethinking God’s word and God’s world along these lines. Some haven’t, but, of those still remaining in those ever shrinking churches, a lot have. As N.T. Wright so often quotes, “The Lord’s Prayer” teaches us to pray, “…may Your kingdom come, Your will be done ON EARTH like it is in heaven.” God’s will is meant to be worked out here and now where we live, work, play and EAT and not relegated to pie in the sky in the sweet bye and bye.
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Wow!
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Yes, a lot of you have come to terms with that by now. Some of you are still wrestling with that. Only a few of you have yet to be exposed to it.
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It’s a lot to chew on… a lot to swallow.
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This change of direction (a repentance, btw) is so fundamental that it changes EVERYTHING about being a Christian. It doesn’t destroy everything, but everything is impacted. Love for God is still the most important thing, but how that looks and is worked out is changed. Gone is the esoteric notion of spending eternity floating on a cloud and playing a harp!
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Are you still with me, church?
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Stop here and ask questions if you are feeling bulldozed by this presentation. It is possible you are one of the last to know about this tidal change sweeping over the church. But it is far more likely, you have come to new awareness and have wrestled with this notion a long time. It is possibly refreshing for some to find me stating the matter so plainly, finally.
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But there are implications, Last Church, that we have not worked out. There are implications we have yet to even begin to consider wisely. And as part of this first point about world order with regard to the Lord’s Table in today’s sermon, I want to introduce you to such thinking.
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Genesis, as our tradition used to read it, wasn’t a whole lot of help explaining our scheme of redemption. It covered the fall. Not much else. It was all creation and no redemption. The idea I grew up with, the idea which so neatly fit with the going-to-heaven-when-you-die mentality, was that in the coming Judgment Day, God would destroy the earth with Judgment Fire. This world was destined for the great incinerator in the sky. What need have we of ecology? We were all planning on leaving earth. We even called the Bible, the B.I.B.L.E., claiming it was an acronym for Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.
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Wow!
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I hope we were loving God, because we were sure getting the rest of it all jacked up!
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In that worldview, we felt compelled to keep Genesis and use it, but for what?
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Well, Charles Darwin and dinosaur bones needed refuted and explained away, so we mined it for that mostly. And honestly, I still find Christians trying to use Genesis for that kind of program rather than for the revelation of Christ.
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But as our last sermon powerfully depicted, the salvation meal proves to be a deep structure theme in Genesis, framing the whole book AND the whole Bible too. Jesus is everywhere in Genesis, especially in the bread and wine. We saw how all the world’s problems sprouted in the garden when the gardener ate from the prohibited tree! Then we saw Joseph in Egypt, the dream interpreter, mystically and prophetically took the role of the wise gardener storing up food with which to feed the world in seven years of famine!
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That famine had the potential to kill every man, woman, and child, and presumably all the cattle and critters too, ever bit as much as Noah’s flood had done! Yet God provided a way through the disaster, a man this time rather than an ark. This was almost a worldwide destruction not only all of humanity but for also God’s chosen people! God arranged for a salvation meal to sustain his creation by working his divine ironies through these sinful people!
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And even though we see Joe’s dream of stars and hay bales bowing come true, we also see that he in no way engineered any of it in the slightest. At best he was faithful to God all along, but he didn’t plan his way to the palace via a murder plot, being sold into slavery, being falsely convicted of a sex crime, and thought dead by his father for years on end. Nope. None of that was his engineering. Rather, in God’s mysterious ways, he would be so morbidly humbled as to take the form of a slave, the form of a convict, the form of a dead son so that God would raise him up.
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Yes.
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God is the engineer. The engineer is God, the true hero of the story. And God is with Joe in prison, and he shows up in the bread of the baker and the wine of the cupbearer AND calls upon Joe to interpret dreams of bread and wine! There is no “level” in which the meal isn’t center stage or where God isn’t the real hero in any of this story, and in all of it, God is bringing order and salvation to his creation! But we are beginning to blur over into the next sermon a bit with all the interpersonal aspects of Joe’s life. For the moment, we are focusing on the impact of the meal on world order. God wants his earth ordered according to his will ever bit as much as heaven.
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It happens with Jesus in the meal!
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Think of all the other important salvation meals we find all through the Bible! We see this reiterate hundreds of ways all through the Bible! Remember when Esther saves her people? How does she go about it? She facilitates a banquet with the king! Isaiah dreams of a messianic banquet in the Age to Come! Jesus gives his disciples his Eucharist, and I have not yet mentioned the Old Testament’s premiere salvation meal – the meal to which even Eucharist pays homage – Passover!
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Passover is a war meal! While the Hebrew fathers cower behind doorposts covered in lamb’s blood eating in haste with their loins gathered in one hand, their staff in the other, and their children huddled in the other hand (ask me later, that’s too many hands, I know, but somehow they do it), outside in the darkness of the midnight hour, they hear the bone chilling cry in the land like has never been heard before! That’s how they eat that salvation meal inside their huts, and it’s how God crushes an empire out there in the dark!
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That’s world order around a table, y’all!
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Makes you wonder, don’t it? What is going on among the principalities and powers of the air when Last Church sits to eat together the salvation meal of God?
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Oooh! Good question!
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That’s how God, in the Bible, brings salvation and order back to his beloved creation, and the people of God are not the hero in that story. They don’t engineer it at all. They are a sinful lot, barely faithful with ther small part in the action. They face fear, doubt, pain and shame yet find joy, hope, faith, and love in the meal, but again, that is jumping ahead into our next sermon.
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The people of God neither add anything to it nor take anything away, not so much as a jot or tittle!
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Sound familiar, Church?
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Of course it does. And by talking about it as we are doing now, you are drawn closer to God and closer to his redemption. I haven’t even listed off a bunch of rules or morals for you to obey. This is merely God’s heart meeting your heart, and now you are feeling hungry for salvation. You want to feel the power! This could change the world!
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Somebody give me the AMEN!
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For those of you coming to terms with “God’s kingdom come and will be done ON EARTH as it is in heaven,” Genesis suddenly has a lot more insight than explaining away dinosaur bones! This is God’s heart meeting your heart at the Table of Apocalypse!
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You now see how THE BIBLE depicts God’s salvation coming into creation! This is church business in the world and no one else’s! No banking institution, no educational system, no real estate firm, law firm, hospital, governorship, or presidency can touch this mystical power for world order, nor are they suited for it. This is church business. This is, in the words of Jesus, “My Father’s business” of which he must be about even as a twelve year old in Herod’s grand temple! This is, as St. Paul says in Ephesians, the manifold wisdom of God being made known to the principalities and powers through the church!
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Do you think there might be some implications for us to consider?
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Why on earth would a church in God’s good creation, eating his salvation meal at the Table of Apocalypse ever put their faith in a ballot box or a political candidate? Do you think you can vote this into office? Is Jesus on the ballot? How about you eat your ballot? There’s more power of God in the bread and wine, in the revelation of Jesus to you and through you than there ever will be in a ballot!
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I will stop short of calling the church to abstain from voting, but I will get up in your grill and ask you why you would neglect the Table in favor of lesser world orders? Let’s at least – AT LEAST – major in the majors and minor in the minors. No?
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Implications.
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Last Church of Lubbock, You are a group of truly humble people. Not many of you come from elite colleges. Not many of you have powerful or fancy jobs. Not many of you  drive fine automobiles, and not many of you live in a home. You are more humble than most. Since you are a figment of my imagination (also a humiliation in itself), I factor in that a few of you do in fact own nice homes in which the rest of us meet for worship, but those homes and bank accounts are heavily taxed by King Jesus through the love and sacrifice you give. But there’s barely $10 between the rest of us to share, and yet the Spirit of God dwells in us with far more power and value than a grand cathedral with stained glass, bell tower, organ, and steeple.
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We are God’s people finding our strength in him, not us, not in a bank account, and not a ballot box.
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There’s far more for us to talk about in that realm, but, Last Church, this is merely a sermon. One among many. And anyway, we need you to do some thinking through these implications. We need you to reveal what God shows you! Perhaps as we sit at the table and partake of the bread and wine, it would be a good time and place for us to hear from you, the church!
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If God would save the world through Noah and a flood, then turn around and save it again through a dreamer-turned-slave/convict presumed dead by his father, then what is he doing with you, Last Church? What is he doing with you?
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The fact you sleep in a van or under a bridge in no way means you are somehow not in God’s will. On the contrary, in God’s hands, you might be exactly where he has positioned you for his great plans! Is God with you in homelessness? He was with Joe in prison in the bread and wine, and you are now at the Table of Apocalypse!
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Implications? Do you, Last Church, want to consider some implications with me?
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Wow! Anybody falling asleep now?
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Who knew the church was so empowered? What do we really need a flag for? Why would you pledge allegiance to it and not to the Lord of the Table?
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Hmmm…
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At this stage in our visit, I am asking you to consider more carefully than usual your trust in God. Trust his intentions, trust his methods, his commands, his lordship. He created this world, and it is designed to work in a certain kind of way humans do not engineer or fully understand. Lean not on your own understanding, but in all your ways submit to God, and he will make your path straight (Prov. 3:5-6). Let this word from God apply double to his church! We have a God-ordained job to do which he does not give to banks or military installations. We, like Joseph of old, are lifted up in the courts of Pharaoh where the king realizes he needs our otherworldly help running this world. And God has in mind feeding the world through those with proper table manners.
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In the kingdom of God, the two mites of a widow are worth more than all the wealth put into the treasury by the rich! (Mark 12:43-44). God has chosen the poor of the world to be rich in faith (James 2:5), and the Church of Lubbock desperately needs more faith than money.
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By eating this meal, Last Church, through you the world is being saved.
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JESUS IN JOSEPH / JEALOUS BROTHERS AND ME

Posted on by Agent X

A Sunday Sermon for Last Church

Today we come to the table of the Lord to eat his body and drink his blood. This is the most sacred part of our worship, the most intimate moment we have with Jesus as a church. Eating his body and drinking his blood, as he describes in John 6, is a repulsive idea. When I was a kid, it made me think of Count Dracula.
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Funny, maybe. Funny to a kid. But to seriously contemplate eating someone’s flesh is a terrible thing. In 1972, the Uraguayan rugby team survived a plane crash in the Andes by means of such morbid contemplation. For them, and for those of us who find ourselves mortified by their story, it was no laughing matter; it was a somber thing if ever there was one, something to be ashamed of instead. The report of their cannibalism caused a backlash until the survivors revealed they had rationalized it based on their faith and practice of Eucharist.
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The rugby team represents an extreme outlier case of Christian experience. By far, most of us never had that experience and never will. Over the course of my life worship in our tradition attempted to be just as somber but nowhere near as morbid. I never heard a minister officiate the table and remark on the cannibalistic aspect of our worship. On the contrary, I heard many lessons about “discerning the body” and “eating in an unworthy manner.”
This is a concept the church learns in the letter of First Corinthians. We want to take care not to eat judgment on ourselves, and this normally (in my experience) was treated as a matter of proper introspection. I grew up in a church tradition where the observance of communion was a silent practice. The whole church would sit in almost complete silence passing trays of cracker and grape juice back and forth and eating a tiny pinch and sipping a tiny drip. This was reverence, as I understood it.
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In that moment of silence, it is presumed each member partaking would quietly and reverently humble themselves and contemplate the cross of Christ. If your mind wondered away a moment, I suppose that would mean you were eating in an unworthy manner. Heaven help you not get distracted by a buzzing fly! You didn’t want to eat judgment!
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To be frank, I think when I was young, I observed communion more in fear of eternal damnation than in either reverence or joy. It all seemed so important, but I didn’t really know why.
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I would try to visualize Jesus hanging on a Roman cross forgiving my sin. But I’m not sure I always maintained this inner reverence. I thank God it passed quickly, because as an American teenager with a Walkman and MTV, my attention to such formal introspection had a short shelf life. I wasn’t distracted by a fly nearly so much as a pretty girl.
Once I was grown and studied Bible in the academy, I came to a different view of that most holy moment. “Discerning the body” is not some effort at navel gazing, not really. Rather, and this idea totally upends all the silence and the tiny portions, St. Paul would have us discerning the body depicting a meal we share with others, one in which we wait to eat until even the poor and lowly are seated with us.
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St. Paul has such a potent idea that the church be unified! Discerning the body so as not to eat and drink judgment means we take care to share this moment with lowly people among us, that we come together as ONE. Sadly, that is an aspect we were totally corrupting unwittingly all along as a congregation. It was not the distraction of a fly or a girl for one individual to worry about, but a concern we all share as ONE.
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That’s an important concept we don’t generally talk about even to this day. Perhaps it is one we should literally discuss as we sit around a real table and break real bread as we shatter the silence in conversation and song.
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The Heart of Jesus and the Table of Apocalypse
But today I want to take you into Jesus’s heart as you eat this meal at this table. I want to reveal Jesus to you in the bread and wine. This is yet another aspect of communion observance. There is a meditation involved, but it’s not so much your navel in focus as it is Jesus’s heart. Yes, as a group, an assembly daring to become ONE in prayer at table, we can have a heart-to-heart meeting with Jesus. I want you to see him afresh and to hear him anew. I want you to feel what he feels when you come to this table, and that is a notion I never heard anyone preach before.
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How can we know the mind of God? How can we know the heart of Christ?
We can listen to him tell his story.
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We are not the first to get this meal all messed up. What exactly are the proper table manners at THIS TABLE? In order to ask such a question, we must get a proper perspective, and a proper perspective comes into view when first we talk about Adam and Eve at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That sends us all the way back to the beginning of creation, to the Garden of Eden.
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Go there with me now.
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In the garden, God loves his creation. He loves his creatures and places the man and the woman within a good creation. We know this because as Genesis 1 describes it, God creates a little more each day for six days, rests on the seventh, and hold’s Judgment Day court at the end of each day finding the creation to be good. This goodness continues reverberating and coursing through creation as a harmonious peace we call shalom.
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God’s creative love is immense! The proper loving response to this love is simple. It’s not hard to understand at all. Any gullible, naked farmer can do it, and so can we.
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There is one single rule this man and woman simply must obey, and it is truly an easy rule. They can eat from any tree in the garden, including the tree of life, but the one tree in the middle of the garden, the one God designates as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, that tree they are prohibited from eating. If they eat of that tree, they will die, and shalom is no longer pulsating through creation.
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Ain’t that something?
You can literally count the rules on one finger! The consequences, though, well… you can’t count them in a lifetime.
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For our purpose today, we note mainly how the world is ordered (or disordered) with a meal! The man and the woman go around the garden cultivating and ruling over all creation with a dominion given by God and everything is good. The world is at peace. They are like high priests in a ceremonial worship where their tending of flowers, even their nakedness, and in fact even their mere breath, bring glory to God! And at the center of all that worship and honor is a meal with one simple rule.
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The breaking of this one simple rule has had dire consequences ever since. We can sum up those consequences in the word “death.” Every muder, every unwanted pregnancy, every war, cancer, heart attack, and wrinkled up, old age that kills us and every thorn, thistle, weed, or pain, sweat of the brow, fear and curse ever known to mankind sprouted from the moment this meal was not eaten in a worthy manner. Adam and Eve ate judgment on themselves and all their children.
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That is the story at the start of all stories in creation. It is the way the Bible as a whole, it is the way the book of Genesis begins.
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Today, Christians treat Genesis as some sort of theological mine from which to dig up refutations against Charles Darwin and to explain away dinosaur bones. Let us not reduce such an important story to these ancillary matters. Let us find world order and redemption instead.
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In the beginning was a meal. A meal and a tree of life. We find this tree of life returning again at the end of Revelation, the end of our Christian Bible. I would argue, we find it again all through scripture, actually, but that would be an argument for another day. At the moment, I ask you to consider the other end of Genesis, the epic story of Joseph, son of Jacob, a sweeping epic that consumes the last thirteen chapters of the book.
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I ask you to notice how along the way to Joe’s story, things in creation have grown worse, not better. Adam and Eve are no sooner expelled from the garden and their two sons have a jealous dispute about how to worship God, and Cain kills his brother Abel! Within just six generations of sons, Lamech arises, pronouncing curses and claiming he will order the world by killing people who wound him. The shalom seems to be slipping further and further out of reach as death comes to rule over the humans.
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But also notice that our loving God comes to restore and repair his broken relationship with creation. He gives Adam and Eve yet another son, and through his generations raises up Noah, a man through whom he judges the world, mankind, and starts it all over again. This love of God remains even though at turn after turn, his redemption is thwarted.
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After destroying creation and starting again, God promises not to use that method of redemption ever again. Eventually, he calls Abram (soon to be called Abraham) and his wife to bear his promises of redemption. God will be with these people and rehabilitate them and through them bring his redemptive shalom back into the world.
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As we find our bearings in this story of the world, there are two things we need to say to help us make sense of it (actually many, but two for our purpose today): 1) The Bible tells the story first and foremost of God. God is the hero. So even when we read about Abraham or Jacob or Joseph or David or St. Paul, the real hero is not the little boy who kills the giant, but God who guides his stone. And 2) All the problems of our world began with improper eating arrangements. Theologically, at root, our problem is table manners. We got into our mess with a meal – our forebears ate judgment on us – and we get out of this mess as we learn proper table manners.
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We have already noted how the whole Bible is bookended (framed) with the meal at the tree of life, and now we notice how all of Genesis is framed in a salvation meal too.
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The drama of God calling and loving Abraham and his children goes through numerous twists and turns. God makes everlasting covenant-promises to Abe, promises of salvation, of land, and descendants. And God stretches Abe’s faith to the breaking point along the way. Abe and his wife stumble, and he makes a baby with the servant girl, a scandal if ever there was one! But God insists, even this will not thwart his purposes with Abe. When Abe finally gets his promised son, God calls him to sacrifice this gift on the altar, and Abe obeys, which puts this covenant trust in great jeopardy. But God stays Abe’s hand at the last moment.
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But then that boy grows up and has two sons, and like Cain and Abel before them, these two descendants descend into murderous strife. Jacob, whose name means “Liar/Deceiver” manages to appease his brother and avoid murder eventually, but the threat is there and is very real. But along the way, we find God’s promises and love must contend with very deceitful and manipulative people.
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But as the saga unfolds, we are drawn deeper and deeper into the hearts and minds of this family, and as readers we can identify and even share their experience. We see ourselves in them as we find God in them too. Their story becomes our story. And the story follows Jacob and his sons specifically.
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We see Jacob fall in love with Rachel, and like any good love song on the radio, we find ourselves sympathizing. We tap our toe and feel the rhythm of this love song as it twists through the manipulations of Uncle Laban who wants to marry off his older daughter too. So far, it’s all highly understandable, even though it deals with a distant culture from long ago. Leah needs a husband too, and Jacob may as well be hers.
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Ah… but the way Laban deals with this is simply treacherous! Jacob has bound himself to promises he must now keep, and this leads to years and years of sacrifice so that he can love Rachel, but that love now bears the baggage of loving Leah too. And Leah, poor Leah! Who doesn’t feel her pain? Leah, like her daddy (like Jacob too, for that matter) knows how to manipulate people, and taking a page from Abe’s story, she offers her servant girl to Jacob in order to make a baby!
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This is NOT planned parenthood! This is unplanned chaos! The roots of intergenerational jealousy sink deep in the soil of this deceitful garden, as Jacob, his two wives, and their two servant girls make a family, eventually consisting of twelve sons! These twelve sons from Jacob, the LIar, are the patriarchs of Israel! Their drunken debauchery is the spring from which God must work out our salvation!
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And along comes Joseph, eventually, who is Jacob’s favorite son, born in his old age of his true love, Rachel. Rachel, that maiden he met at the well that day long ago and stole his heart! Joe is the son Rachel bears him, and so it’s only natural that Jake loves Joe most.
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And Joe, it turns out, is a tattletale, Daddy’s pet, he gets the fancy sport coat and all the favor. But that’s not all. Joe, also is an arrogant little punk with big dreams of grandeur, and he enjoys spouting off at dinner with the family how some day, when he grows up, all these brothers will come and bow low to him.
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The brothers hate him. They HATE him!
If he were your little brother, you’d hate him too.
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This is a familiar pattern by now. The brotherly jealousy and hate and murder plots have been humming all through Genesis since Cain and Abel. What is God, our hero, going to do with and through this?
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What Joe’s brothers mean for evil, God uses for good.
And this brings us back to table manners.
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Well, not immediately, first we must watch Joe descend into a pit. It’s a grave of sorts. The brothers contemplate murder, but they ultimately relent. Yet, they lie! They jacob to Jacob about this causing their father to think the lad is dead, and then they must face the rest of their days maintaining this morbid lie. Meanwhile, Joe, the dreamer, descends into slavery and a dungeon which for years on end feels like enduring a living death.
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There can be no doubt, Joe’s dreams are crushed, pulverized, and shattered over and over and over again as at each stage of his humiliation, his dreams of grandeur slip further and further out of reach. And if we recall at every step how God is the hero redeeming creation and making promises all through this saga, we should see how the impossibility of redemption is increasingly divine! Only God can do this. But in the narrative tension we must ask: How???
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Where is God in this mess? It can be hard to tell! But the bigger the problem, the more powerful the God who redeems it! Yet, at turn after turn, he keeps working with the least, the humblest, the weakest, and most unlikely people so that he does not share the glory with them but receives the praise due him in proper table manners.
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I know by saying that way, it seems a little out of kilter, but look again. Look carefully with eyes of faith. “Those forgiven much, love much,” says Jesus to Simon eons later. And that little insight helps guide our understanding of what happens here in Genesis.
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Joe is buried under the weight of a foreign empire, completely unknown by Pharaoh. He is buried under the weight of his brothers’ lie, and Jacob believes he is long dead.
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The Bible does not feature this part of the story, but we can presume Jacob mourns Joe’s passing, and every year at the anniversary, he weeps. Every holiday festival when the family comes together, there is an empty seat where the arrogant dreamer sat. The seat is no longer filled with arrogant dreams, but with the lie the brothers are now forced, in order to keep up appearances, they must now maintain. Oh, what a burden they have created for themselves and their father!
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For all we can tell, the brothers are pretty good guys except for this one lie which is no little lie at all. There is no record of them repeatedly treating anyone else like this. They in fact seem completely honest about their dealings when we meet them again later, but they are now burdened with this old lie they still maintain. This one lie disintegrates them, and they have no integrity.
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Meanwhile, God has arranged for a cupbearer and baker to go to jail with Joe. A cupbearer and baker. This isn’t the keeper of the royal flock or the captain of the guard. No. The cupbearer and baker! Think about that. These men work at the royal table! And not only that. They aren’t merely the wait staff, this is the guy who serves the wine and the guy who bakes the bread! These are the servants of Eucharist! In that cup and in that oven are the blood and body of Christ!
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And these guys who covertly bear witness to Christ and to God’s movement far beneath the drama and far behind the scenes backstage join Joe in his imperial pit where that old dreamer listens to, and interprets, their dreams – the dreams of bread and wine! And Joe interprets their dreams quite successfully in what we Christians might think of as almost a prediction of death, burial, and resurrection! For the baker will die, but the cupbearer will be restored. And that is exactly what happens.
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Oh, how the plot thickens! It’s exciting, when you really think about it!
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But we must be patient, and Joe especially must be, for despite one convict’s request of another, (“Hey, man, when you get out, can you do me a solid?”), the cupbearer seems to blow Joe off. That is… until… Pharaoh has a nightmare that troubles him so much, he calls all his wise men to come and interpret it for him. But they can’t.
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Now, when the king calls all his servants to a special session, they take him deadly serious. It doesn’t matter what the issue is, they come running for these special sessions. Normally, convening a special session of congress gets things done, but this is a truly unique problem, and none of Pharaoh’s best advisors can help. This one stumps them all. And this never happens. It never happened before!
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It’s while the court is in a dither on this matter that finally, finally, finally the cupbearer either remembers or finally gets the gumption to speak up on Joe’s behalf. But I would have you notice that by speaking up this way, the cupbearer must confess his own criminal record! Everyone in this story is humiliated in one way or another, and this cupbearer is no exception.
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“Do you remember that time, O King, when you threw me in prison a while back? … ahem… well… I met a guy in the dungeon who interpreted dreams, and he nailed it. His dream interpretations accurately predicted the future of both me and the baker. If you want help with your nightmare, you should consider talking to Joe.”
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St. Paul tells the Philippians that Jesus did not grasp at his deity, but humbled himself taking on the form of a slave, and even more humiliating himself to the point of death, death on a cross, but God raised him up, up and up so that his name was above every name, and at the name of Jesus every tongue would confess and every knee bend.
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And with only the smallest of exceptions, we see God do that with Joe here. Joe plays the Jesus card all the way back in Genesis! Joe seems to have been grasping at greatness back in the beginning, but he was humbled and took the form of a slave and a convict, a forgotten (even dead) convict, but now, at long last, God raises him up, and he interprets Pharaoh’s dream, and then at his presence every knee bends as all the stars and hay bales bow to his!
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And the dream, the nightmare, is explained as a starving world. God’s good creation will be plunged into famine and starvation for seven years. But first there will be a time of plenty, and if a wise gardner were to wisely prepare in advance for this coming disaster, he could feed the world. And Pharaoh senses in his bones that this lad understands, so he appoints the lad to be in charge of this worldwide rescue operation of all of creation!
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Yes, Genesis opens with a meal that brings on disaster and closes with a meal of salvation!
Simply divine.
Don’t you think?
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And we’ve already seen Jesus Christ seething beneath the surface at at least two points along the way, not to mention all the others! Cain and Abel are sinners, but we see Jesus in Abel, as he dies in a jealous murder between brothers, and Pilate knows the Jews hand him over due to envy! (Mark 15:10).
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Esau sells his birthright and is cheated out of his blessing by his baby brother who is a liar, and yet we see Jesus in this liar taking a bride and bearing God’s promises. (What does this say about you and me? Can the world see Jesus in us?)
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The whole world comes to Joseph and bows low, just like he’d dreamed long ago, though the dream comes true like Joe never could have expected. And Joe is stripped of all his arrogance, pride, and dreams long before they come true. So, when Pharaoh calls him up out of that grave – ahem – lyons den – ahem – dungeon, Joe wastes no words or time taking credit for himself, but points solely to God, the real hero of this story.
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And through Joe (or Jesus in Joe), the whole world finds food for life. Life is preserved for every living soul through this man God raises up. And word of this gets out around the world reaching Jacob who sends his sons to get some food so that they might live too.
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Wow!
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And upon meeting Joe, after so many years and so much has changed, the brothers do not recognize Joe in his royal garb, and they bow to him, and the dream comes true! But that old dream is, in the urgency of the situation, merely the poetic justice part. The urgent business of feeding and reconciliation is at hand. And Joe recognizes the brothers though they do not recognize him!
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These brothers wronged Joe. He knows it; they know it. They have been burdened with this lie all this time, both Joe and the brothers, each in their own way. But in the meantime, Joe takes special interest in THESE men. He singles them out to share a meal! They have the work of reconciliation at hand. Redemption doesn’t merely feed the world some calories, it reconciles brotherly hate.
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But Joe does not immediately reveal himself to them. He wants to do some heart-to-heart business with these brothers, and this happens at the table! They must learn proper table manners, theologically speaking. Yet, as they eat, and as the brothers still as yet do not see Joe for who he really is, Joe is overcome with emotion and must retreat to weep!
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Can you feel that?
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That, brothers (and sisters) is the heart of Christ, and as we eat in an unworthy manner, not recognizing him and the movement of God in our lives, this is what Jesus is doing with us. He steps back to weep as his love for us is overwhelming even to him.
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We show up at his table that he has prepared in the presence of his enemies (us), and he loves us in our wayward lies. He steps out to weep.
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Isn’t that remarkable? God weeping over us? There’s a number of emotions tied up in all that, but love is the overwhelming thing here. And God/Jesus weeps sometimes when his love is so moved. We tend to think of God as more detached, more high and mighty and judgmental, even if graceful. But God has feelings too.
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Jesus weeps at the tomb of Lazarus too. It’s the shortest verse in the Bible! (Easy memory verse, if you are into that sort of thing.) But it begs the question: Why? Why does Jesus cry over Lazarus? We all know he is gonna raise him back to life! So why weep? Why not just raise him up?
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Love.
Love takes the time to cry. It’s a heart thang.
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And Joseph washes his face and returns to the table. He proceeds to deal with his treacherous brothers in such a way to work out their demons, to force them to face their lie and talk about it. They don’t recognize their brother is alive and well, that they have now bowed low to him already, yet their old dealings with him come home to roost as they eat this meal with him! The irony is divine!
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The brothers leave the table on mission to get Rachel’s other son and bring him for Joe to lay eyes on, and ultimately to retrieve their father Jake too, and bring him into Joe’s courts as well. Eventually, Joe reveals himself at the table! and we are instantly reminded of those disciples at Emmaus in Luke 24.
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I’m telling you about Genesis today so that when you come to the Lord’s Table and celebrate Eucharist, you will meet Jesus for a heart-to-heart visit. Our reading of Genesis facilitates a new reverence for this table. The world is ordered through our communion observance. And the story of Joseph feeding his brothers who bow low to him at long last reveals to us our position with Jesus as we face our lies and find him weeping over our betrayals.
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Let us surrender our lies to him. Let us find new, deeper trust in God and his salvation as we share this meal. Let us talk about this story and get excited as the plot thickens! Let us look deeper than we are accustomed for the movement of God in the world and in our brothers and sisters joining us in the drama of table manners. The tree of life bears such fruit, and we want to eat it. The joy of the Lord is our strength. The joy of the Lord is hosting his children around his table and singing the songs together of apocalypse and eternity.
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Let us take some TIME, and SHARE this meal, not simply a pinch of cracker and a thimble of grape juice, but real time and a real meal shared with the heart of Jesus today in a worthy manner so that we eat and drink salvation on ourselves. Let’s not reduce this meal to navel gazing and silence, but let’s eat!
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Can I get and Amen?
Good.
Let’s eat.

IN THE WORDS OF FATHER GEORGE ZABELKA

Posted on by Agent X

To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to fail as a Christian and as a priest as I see it …. I was there, and I’ll tell you that the operational moral atmosphere in the church in relation to mass bombing of enemy civilians was totally indifferent, silent, and corrupt at best – at worst it was religiously supportive of these activities by blessing those who did them…. Catholics dropped the A-bomb on top of the largest and first Catholic city in Japan. One would have thought I, as a Catholic priest, would have spoken out against the atomic bombing of nuns. (Three orders of Catholic sisters were destroyed in Nagasaki that day.) One would have thought that I would have suggested that as a minimal standard of Catholic morality, Catholics shouldn’t bomb Catholic children. I didn’t. I, like the Catholic pilot of the Nagasaki plane, “The Great Artiste,” was heir to a Christianity that had for seventeen hundred years engaged in revenge, murder, torture, the pursuit of power, and prerogative violence, all in the name of our Lord.

I walked through the ruins of Nagasaki right after the war and visited the place where once stood the Urakami Cathedral. I picked up a piece of censer from the rubble. When I look at it today I pray God forgives us for how we have distorted Christ’s teaching and destroyed his world by the distortion of that teaching. I was the Catholic chaplain who was there when this grotesque process that began with Constantine reached its lowest point – so far.

(I reproduced this quote as found in Richard B. Hays’s book The Moral Vision of the New Testament pages 318-319.)

WE ARE THE CHILDREN OF OPPENHEIMER

Posted on by Agent X

“Super Tuesday,” they call it. Today Americans whittle down the fight to two cocks, one of whom will be POTUS. For millions of us, voting matters. And even in the last hour, my friends and family have applied pressure on me to get out there and do my part to stop the WOKE from taking over. We must (supposedly) Make America Great Again.

Hmmm…

I elect to pray instead, and giving voice to this dismays my loved ones who feel I have a “Christian civic duty” to block this WOKE agenda. I’m supposed to vote! Why on earth would I not?

Because before we all became children of Oppenheimer, we were (supposedly) children of God. Most of us grafted in. We come to Jesus like little children because the kingdom of God belongs to such as them. We don’t lord it over the gentiles, but we love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

The children of Oppenheimer vaporize our enemies instead.

I was just reading a month ago, the testimony of the Catholic chaplain who blessed the flight that bombed Nagasaki. He gave God’s blessing to the obliteration of two convents of Catholic nuns and the biggest Catholic parish in Japan that day, thinking nothing of it until much later.

When we wish to make America great AGAIN, it is the day Oppenheimer’s flower bloomed that changed us from a humble nation to a proud one. My grandparents were raised barefoot farmers, but my parents were born with entitlement and privilege (as was I).

When I was a kid, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority began flexing a voter/dollar muscle and speaking in arrogance with echoes of fear and hate for our brothers and sisters in Oppenheimer who were drawn to a different light.

Falwell should have led prayer. He led votes instead.

Constantine baptized his troops and then the empire, but he made the Church Great in the empire’s image after that. Germany was a Christian nation when they became Nazi driven and threatened America with an atomic arms race. America was faster at developing the bomb, and we became a new kind of great then.

Oppenheimer is gone now, but his influence remains. The greatest nation on earth wants to be great again, wants to be Christian again, but wants me to vote so we can have those things.

I’m not so sure those things are really the blessing we said they were. Surely better than some of the alternatives, that is hard to argue against, but not godly.

What if we became a godly nation through prayer?

Wouldn’t THAT be a super Tuesday?

Shouldn’t Falwell and the Christians have an agenda to make America humble again?

This kind only comes out with prayer.

MARY MAGDALENE (by another name)

Posted on by Agent X

The original title of the original account (still in drafting stage of development) to which this post refers is (currently) Gomer, Mary Magdalene, and [Special Agent Eleanor].

Yes. We will call her Eleanor in public discourse.

So, here’s the thing:

Just because you don’t see much publish a blog much anymore doesn’t mean I quite writing. Oh no.

I am writing quite a lot, but my life is so pulverized and atomized these days that I write in small five-minute efforts. I do this writing in composition notebooks that I can take with me everywhere. So, if I go to the school waiting for kids to get out when the bell rings, I write. If I sit in the doctor’s office, I write. If I am on the phone with you, I write. And yet hardly a scrap of it is known to anyone outside of myself.

There are a number of projects in the mix, but the big one (at the moment) is something of a memoir of sorts. As I am aging and getting busier than ever, I began to realize that some of my street minister/wanna-be prophet adventures committed to memory are rusting away. If I drop dead tomorrow, much of that will be lost forever.

I’m reaching back for this stuff now. Back before I was into the homeless ministry. Back when the word “prophet” was an archaic idea to me. My ministry went into a prophetic incubation on 65th Drive in the heart of Lubbock, Texas about 20 years ago.

So far in the last three weeks, even at just five minutes at a time, I have filled two composition notebooks with stories from 65th. I am about to the end of the second one now which deals exclusively with Eleanor. I have more to write about her, so I guess she gets multiple volumes.

Hosea had his whore; Jesus had his. Mine we call Eleanor.

I loved her.

(I have blogged just a bit on her in the past. Search this blog if you wish to find more on her.)

I haven’t seen her in many years – about a decade. Writing about her stirs up a lot of feelings for me.

She was not my sex toy. I never “fooled around” with her. Instead, she was like a child to me. Grown up, of course, and not that much younger than me, but like a child of mine, I loved her. I miss her now. And, wow! We had some big adventures! I’m having a blast from the past.

I was a minister when I met her, but Eleanor made a prophet out of me. Giving God’s love to a lady of the evening can do that.

Anyway, I thought I’d let you know what I am up to these days.

Lot’s of stuff, really, but this is the stuff I would share with you if I could.

Thanx

Yo

Posted on by Agent X

I’m still here.

Sorta.

Writing a lot elsewhere, but much less readership than even this gets.

Anyway, not sure when or if I will be back. But for any who care. I am here. I will try to visit other blogs a bit today and tomorrow as time allows.

God bless to all

Oh, and merry Christmas/happy new year. Guess I missed you for that.

Happy Lent!

PRAYER AS A WEAPON?

Posted on by Agent X

P n L (Ch???) Draft 7

November 4

I see faith in your eyes. Never you hear the discouraging lies. I hear faith in your cries. Broken is the promise, betrayal. The healing hand held back by the deepened nail.

                                                                                        –Follow The God That Failed by Metallica

 

 

Our Father in heaven,

Hello Darkness, my old friend. I’ve come to talk with You again. Hear O Israel, YHWH is One. I was born to serve God like a loaded gun. I fire off questions, even the wrong ones. Silence, Your answer, keeps leaving me stunned.

Do You have feelings? Do You know what I mean? How do You heal what the war vet has seen?

Minding his own business, the satan appeared in the midst of Your courts. “Where have you been?” the Judge asked. “Roaming the earth, back and forth,” did he say?  Yes. And You sicked the hounds of hell on Job Your faithful servant, then watched silently as his friends shredded his integrity.

Job, meek and mild as One holy child, who was only minding Your business, suffers forty-two chapters of Bible poetry drenched in the blood of attack! Innocence his crime, spared not reason nor rhyme or one ounce of pain or of lack.

Why?

How do You answer?

Silence. The sound of silence.

Why?

Oh, and I’m the bad guy for asking?

While I’m on it, why do Your people not hold You to account for these things? Shouldn’t Your people more than anyone ask about these matters? Yet they never mention this part in the brochures. Instead, the TV and radio preachers ask for my money and promise You will pay me back in health, wealth, and happiness. But it wasn’t so straightforward with Job, now, was it?

My questions won’t kill God, will they? This isn’t a philosophy course in some liberal institution of higher learning. Surely, God isn’t dead in my prayers! Is my prayer the smoking gun? Surely, God the Almighty can survive a couple questions. No?

It’s not the questions that kill God; it’s the immutable silence. Show us You have a pulse. What has our God done for us lately?

Job. Poor Job. He dared to ask, and his cries were met with silence–except when his friends broke it. The silence was more than they could take, but not You. You strong silent type, You! Your faithful servant languishing on the ash heap defending himself from false accusation, yearning and crying out in faith that surely his Redeemer lives! Crying into the silence, and getting no reply.

Until finally, finally, God deigns to speak. And what does God speak?

Questions. Mostly questions. Questions that shut Job’s mouth.

“Where were you, Job, when I made the world?”

Wait! What?

In the presence of God, knees knocking and brow sweating, Job hushes his mouth, but you don’t answer his questions with answers, but more questions!

Where’s Your feelings? Where’s Your empowerment? Could You not apologize for sicking the satan on him? Inquiring minds want to know!

Am I the only one to talk to You like this? Am I the first to pray this way?

I don’t mean to be out of line; I simply want to know. I don’t know who else has the answers.

I’ll be here waiting for your response until either the silence ends, or I do. Whichever comes first.

Thanks.

Amen.

MY INNER GAZA AND THE PEOPLE OF GOD

Posted on by Agent X

I am not an expert on Gaza, on Palestinians, or Islam. Nor am I ready to pass your pop quiz on Israel of the modern day. So, I am not going to pretend I know stuff I don’t. It’s clear to me, though I strongly doubt to many of my readers, that one man’s “shock-n-awe” is another man’s terrorism.

It should be clear to everyone interested in GAZA and Israel that there has been, is currently, and will be death. No matter how things shake out there, there is dying to do, and it is fearful and tragic. There is a cancer of mistrust there that kills those who come in contact with it, and it can’t be prevented, or so it seems.

I’m no surgeon either, so take this with a grain of salt, but as I understand it, when the cancer patient goes under the knife, the surgeon skillfully cuts out the diseased tissue leaving behind the healthy tissue. It’s important to catch the disease early in the process because if too much vital tissue is too heavily infested with the cancer, then the surgeon either cannot leave enough healthy tissue for the body to function, or the surgeon must not operate.

So far in the analogy, I am fairly confident in it, but I’m a little less confident in saying the surgeon will typically cut as close to the dividing line between healthy and diseased tissue as possible, erring on the side of cutting into the healthy tissue. This method eradicates the disease completely with a little collateral damage (to borrow some dark terminology). On the other hand, if the surgeon errs on the side of leaving some of the diseased tissue in tack, hopefully other treatments will subdue it because the cancer is still not eradicated.

Israel seems to be taking the role of the surgeon erring on the side of cutting out part of the healthy tissue in order to eradicate the diseased part. And, of course, Israel loves this kind of metaphor because as a surgeon, the goal, whether effective or not, is to save the patient. Gaza, in this view, has a Hamas cancer, and Israel is like a surgeon helping Gaza be free of it.

All surgery is traumatic to the body in general and the tissue near the site of cutting particularly. Operating with tanks, artillery, and bombs isn’t as precise as a surgeon’s blade, and terrorists blending with the general population makes such careful work all the more messy and damaging. And I haven’t yet mentioned that both Judaism (if we can call it that) and Islam (if we can call it that) are religious faiths oriented toward the same God! The same God as Christianity, by the way.

We are all the people of the same God.

My expertise, which I already say I lack, ends about there. The terrorism of October 7 is/was intolerable, and I get it. I don’t think Palestinians were simply humming in a vacuum before that attack, but I in no way condone it, AND I think Israel should respond. In fact, I can’t find any ground to stand on from which to tell Israel not to bring their guns, tanks, and soldiers right up to the border of Gaza and stop any more attacks from coming across. But clearly Israel has killed Palestinians before, and clearly Palestinians have killed Israelis before too. And clearly, the cancer of death has not been eradicated by the previous killings.

So, since my expertise runs out right there, I want to change the subject and talk about ME. If anyone reading here finds any relevance beyond ME, I welcome them to think about ME with ME as it might apply to the larger world. After all, I am a devotee to the same God as these combatants, and I have to share this world as well as this God with them. How might a Jesus guy have something to say to and about neighbors that don’t get along?

Let me tell you about my inner Gaza.

It turns out I have evil in me. I’m not pure evil, okay? But I got greed, lust, sloth, and meanness in me among a few other tasty bad things. I’m definitely not pure goodness either. I am ashamed to say it. I wish you could see me the way I do (and especially the way I try to see myself). You would give me a lot more advantage if you did.

Anyway, this evil (which is not pure, but is evil) in me is intertwined with my goodness. I mean, it’s amazing how I can pray on a good thing, plan for it, engage in it, and do pretty good for a while too, only to suddenly get frustrated and blow a fuse. I mean, take my volunteering for instance.

So, I sign up, take the training, then show up at the appointed place and time dressed and ready to build a house for Habitat for Humanity. I show up praying, singing, encouraging others, even sharing donuts and kalaches with the crew. But then as I am driving nails, I bend one, mash my thumb with the hammer, and trip off my stool, all in an instant! The word that comes out of my mouth all of a sudden isn’t “Oh, God!” Wish it were, but I find a totally different one right there at hand like a cancer just waiting amid all my good tissue to infect my good deed.

There. That’s a nice safe example.

All that good I do down there at Habitat, and then THIS! Ouch!! Where did it come from? Hmmm… evil in me isn’t pure; it runs deep though.

By the way, evil isn’t pure in anyone. The only time we speak of “pure evil” is when we excuse our hate of our neighbor, and Jesus wants me to love my neighbor AND my enemies. Peace is made in such ways.

But in the meantime, I am trying to cut the evil out of me. The nice, prudish Baptist lady driving nails four feet away from me is offended by my evil, and she gets snitty with me the rest of the day. She wants to rid herself of that evil be sanctioning me – even being rid of me! I didn’t jump over the fence at her house and kill her kids, okay? But she wants rid of me. I am not her kind of neighbor now, and I pay every little social sanction she can hit me with the rest of the day. She makes me pay in the name of good! But there’s not likely ever a place where she and I will be at peace with one another now. That ship has sailed.

Right?

Just imagine where she and I would be if I had hopped the fence and killed her children. If I did that, she would have your sympathy and I would not.

I MIGHT get your sympathy for after killing her kids like that if I told you she killed my parents before I killed her kids, but probably not. Probably, you would think we are both crazy, and you would want to keep us both at arm’s length.

But let’s back up from THAT terrible fantasy a moment since it is starting to sound and feel like my outer Gaza more than my inner Gaza. Also, there is that whole tit-for-tat thingy about “who started it” about the killing going back and forth, about a whirlpool of inertia pulling more and more life into that vortex of death.

Somehow, I should expect THAT of people who don’t know Jesus. But as one who does know Jesus, I should expect SOMEKIND of imagination expansion where peace comes back into view whether I offend a nice Baptist lady with my foul mouth OR kill her kids. And in that imagination, I DON’T get to imagine myself as a surgeon. I don’t get to imagine myself with a gun. Instead, I must turn to the power of LOVE and dare to imagine how love will eradicate the cancer and make this nice Baptist lady and me be friends at peace.

And IF I can image THAT and devote myself to it, it surely is because of Jesus, involves Jesus personally, and thus means YOU, my Christian reader, must imagine this healing peace with me.

Care to try?

And IF we imagine this together, THEN we together have something new to say to Israel and Gaza other than, “Here’s some more weapons and money” or “Hey! You’re not being fair.” When it comes to Israel and Gaza, there has been, currently is, and will be death. And yet every time I partake the Eucharist, I consider the One who died for me, and I give thanx. And I dare to dream how he changes the world.

Want to think about this with me?

A HOSPITALITY MISSION FIELD

Posted on by Agent X

I wrote a book on Christian hospitality that is nearing completion (barring a sudden editor to help me revamp it one last time, who as yet is unknown to me). I wrote the bulk of it two years ago, and I hope to engage in self-styled guerilla publishing soon (going so far as to not even call it a “book” at all). (Yeah. What else do you call it? I dunno yet, but one blog reader has suggested calling in an “intervention” which sounds interesting to me.)

Anyway, I am not posting today to talk about THAT. However, it is significant to my post, and so I mention it up front.

The thing is this: I already researched, studied, and produced a study of my own on the topic. In my estimation, God dropped the project on my lap. I wasn’t running from it, but initially I had no interest BECAUSE the very idea of “hospitality” was both completely off my radar and beneath my contempt. (Ain’t that a hoot?) But way back shortly before the pandemic broke out, a reader here (who hasn’t visited in a very long time now) suggested, based on the kinds of things I promote, that I read a book called I Was A Stranger by Arthur Sutherland.

To be frank, I was well aware of the passage in Hebrews 13:2, but it was such an independent, free-floating notion to me at the time, I just had not plugged it into my study, work, and experiences in street ministry. (Shame on me! I should have been all over that like white on rice!!!) And, also to be frank, I had the idea that any “study” of hospitality would be something written by older (not younger) Christian women dealing with social graces, home decor, and possibly a bit about the “hospitality industry” if it got serious. I just don’t care if the drapes match the doilies or if your salad fork is on the left or the right.

In the end, I didn’t use Sutherland’s book all that much, but he demonstrated for me quite clearly that there are huge theological implications for biblical hospitality, and I ran to my own library for more. I searched ABD and found John Koenig’s contribution there, and discovered this is central to my cause, AND is already well mapped out in Christian scholarship, but somehow had not surfaced in any of my studies.

I freely confess, I purchased three (maybe four) books on the topic after that, but I found so much hiding in the footnotes and obscure chapters of books I already own, that I was able to cobble together a full research project just in my home office. (Yes, a couple of internet cites too.) And I was kept busy with this throughout the pandemic – precisely when the whole world was shutting out the whole world! (Ironic.)

But, and here is where all that is going TODAY, even though I have a complete project, a whole study on Christian hospitality, complete with my own syntheses, assertions, hypotheses, and conclusions, I’ve had about two years since this project to continue thinking and acting on the things I have learned and wish to share.

Man, I have enough supplemental experience, information, and insight now to write a companion to the original project with still isn’t published.

I’m finding myself turning ideas around and inside out, looking at them with whole new perspectives. I a talking about biblical ideas we are already quite familiar with in OTHER terms, but now with new perspective, they come alive in whole new ways I never imagined. AND neither have you.

Anyone who still reads here (and that number seems to be dwindling terribly) and finds any value in this blog, I ask you to pray on it with me. I have something to offer to my church and to the world, but practically no way to share it. I can’t even get my own family to take this seriously or even read a single chapter of it.

So, this is sorta a shot in the dark. Who are you, the reader I have left? Care to pray with me about this? Do you have any connections or skills that might help?

Okay, so, let me put together one of these new perspectives for you. See what YOU think.

Missions.

Hospitality.

Now put them together.

How do they fit?

Well, for starts, think of Jesus sending out the 12 (or the 72). This is mission. But how are they sent? “Take nothing with you… stay at the home where you are received and eat what they feed you…”

Hmmm… The mission Jesus sends his missionaries out on requires they find hospitality. And when you study hospitality in the Bible and in Bedouin people, you quickly discover how much a host puts their home on the line for guests! There are some deep, life-giving/life-sustaining exchanges going on in this mission/hospitality scenario.

When I was in school, 25 years ago, Gailyn Van Rheenen was teaching us Bible missions students how historically the church had begun setting up fortresses in host cultures. There was a defensive posture in this. A bubble of cultural safety and superiority created behind “mission” walls from which to disseminate the Gospel and charity to the locals. This, 25 years ago, was coming in for review and found lacking.

I’m now seeing what it lacked.

When Jesus sent out those first missionaries, they still had not witnessed a crucified and risen savior! These were not men with Bible degrees, post grad work, medical doctors, or any of that. They did not raise money from contributions or organizations, and they took all manner of clothes, food, and other things with them when they went. There was no interdependence at all.

On the contrary, God revealed himself to both the host family AND THE MISSIONARIES in the breaking of the bread!

How’s THAT? We just had the first segment of this little Bible study, and it is quite revolutionary. Wouldn’t you say?

And after almost four years thinking on these things, I am prepared to tell you it is only scratching the surface. There is so much more to explore here.

Think about your heart for a moment.

We are always talking about LOVE and about your heart. And rightly so! But in our modern, American cultural lens, that sure struggles to represent MORE than a feeling. No?

Where your heart is, there your treasure is also.

Ever heard THAT?

Meet a bum on the street and have a warm feeling for him. Okay! Try it. (Hey! It is a start! and I support THAT!) Give him $5 out of your whole treasure, and call that the love of God if you can. OR, conversely, go to MY church, pay $30 to take a class published by Lupton, Corbett, and Fikkert which will spend weeks outlining to you how sharing your $5 is wrong and damaging to that bum. (Hint: It’s a smoke screen to hide your greed behind, and come Judgment Day, when the King separates goats and sheep, those who gave water, food, shelter, and care (ahem, hospitality) to the least of these, will go with the sheep.)

What does this have to do with missions?

Your heart and treasure are a mission field, bro. YOU are in need of Christ. It’s a two way street, and the roles reverse all the time. Oh, yeah. God is both missionary and host! Ultimately, he is host, but he plays both roles all the time, and he does it IN YOUR STUFF (or the stuff formerly known as yours).

Think about it.

And let’s talk.

Do you want to help me finish formulating this project and guerilla publishing it?

Let’s talk.

Do you want to learn more, perhaps obtain a copy?

Let’s talk.

It’s a two way street.

Hospitality and missions. They belong together. It goes a long way in explaining why/how the first century church met in homes, I expect. And, THAT church was relevant, spreading around the world with power.

I THINK I’M CHANGING MY MIND ABOUT HALLOWEEN

Posted on by Agent X

Should Christians celebrate Halloween?

It’s at least an interesting question in the abstract. Don’t you think?

My Thoughtless Indulgence

This is one of those curious developments in my life that nags me. I grew up in Christian home that thoroughly celebrated Halloween. Us kids dressed up and “trick or treated.” Our church even held Halloween parties for youths as well as grown-ups. We carved jack-O-lanterns and all that.

To be frank, our celebrations were pretty tame. Oh, there might be a witch costume, possibly a vampire or Frankenstein monster, but these were frequently accompanied by superheroes or clowns which were not particularly devilish. I don’t recall any hypersexual costumes in those days, but cross-dressing seemed harmless, and not overly sexualized as much as genderbending. (A hairsplitting difference, but one I expect you understand.)

I’m sure the most dangerous part of celebrating Halloween at church was the undetected, unexposed child molesters! (But that’s another subject for another day.)

I ranked Halloween right in there with Independence Day, Valentine’s Day, and St. Patrick’s Day. These ranked a little higher than Memorial Day or Labor Day or April Fool’s Day, but definitely a little lower than Thanksgiving, New Year’s, and especially Christmas. Each one celebrated in slightly different customs, but definitely ranked in intensity and importance. Yet all of them categorized as holidays we Christians were free to indulge – by far most of them being religious (particularly Christian) in nature.

Easter should have been the highest holiday, but it wasn’t. (That gets explained, sorta, below.)

I had no understanding of All Saint’s Day, and in fact had not heard of that until much later. But Halloween remained the biggest of those not in the Top 3. I became dimly aware of kids in like Detroit (a long way from Texas, California, or Arizona where I grew up) who put a little too much trick into their fun and made TV news. I remember the true fear of the season being some urban legend of the bad guy who slipped razor blades or poison into the candy. Aside from that, I worried more about having to wear a coat over my costume than I did about cars hitting kids in the streets. But it completely failed to dawn on me that we indulged a bit of paganism in our celebrations.

I was grown and married the first time I met someone who didn’t celebrate Halloween on Christian principle. I was confronted by the notion rather suddenly on Halloween night, in fact. And, I must say, I was more reactionary than convicted – at first.

No. At first, I just thought my Halloween-denier friends were radical weirdos. Who took this pagan pageantry seriously? It’s all just a bit of harmless fun! I grew up in a devout Christian home, and we never went off the deep end. I never heard of anyone who had. This was more suspicious than the razor blade in the candy!

Rethinking Halloween

But as I sat with it over time, I really didn’t have a defense for celebrating Halloween. I had my reaction, but not a defense. My reaction wasn’t without reason, but it really wasn’t well reasoned either. It was merely the negative side of reason: Who had it hurt, really? And I wasn’t about to get paranoid about it and think how I and my family had been slow boiling in a pot like a lobster. That’s not enough reason either. Slippery slope? Well, okay, except again, who ever really slipped off the slope? Christian’s weren’t exactly dropping like flies into paganism over this!

My parents never addressed Halloween in this way that I can recall. They had informed me how generations past (maybe my grandparents, but more likely their parents) had resisted the idea of having a “Christmas tree” in their home over vague and archaic religious reasons, that trees were pagan and kneeling before one to take a present was like bowing to a lord. These were the same people who wouldn’t touch a deck of playing cards because of the images on them!

Hmmm…

After thinking on that a minute, it occurred to me my Christian ancestors were concerned about such things as pagan aspects of our Christian holidays and about graven images and the like. That seemed ludicrous before, after all, we had family photos and money with images on it, why the concern about cards and Christmas trees. Besides, the faith heritage I grew up in was always stern about NOT venerating Jesus’s birth, per se, but his death, burial, and resurrection which we celebrated every Sunday, and not just at Easter. Easter, then, was a egg-hiding, bunny rabbit holiday, and Christmas was all about Santa Claus and presents, neither one really about Jesus, in our estimation.

Hmmm…

I began to think this issue was far more insidious than I ever realized! How do you delineate these things? And what exactly is the redeeming value of Halloween, especially as celebrated in America today? Do we really turn it into a “Fall Festival” and thus baptize it? That seems like a practical surrender. No?

But wait, now I am slipping into radical weirdness just thinking about this stuff! Surely I should just let it go!

But you know what?

When you think about Halloween in some theological vacuum, there really is no justification for it. We are made in the image of God, but we dress up in all manner of grotesque creatures he never made and celebrate the fear, which is in total opposition to love! The whole thing is born out of paganism, and bears all the earmarks. It always was the stubborn foothold of pagan celebrations and worship we thought we could just play with like some harmless toy! I know I am starting to sound paranoid at this point, but… but this is reasonable!

What about the principle of eating meat offered to idols? A stronger brother knows the idol is nothing, and it does no harm to his conscience to eat such meat. But there is a love principle which comes in and tempers that. What if a weaker brother who can’t quite live with such a thing sees me eat meat offered to an idol and it causes him to slip down the slope?

But at this point, I don’t know if I am the weak or strong brother? I can’t see any redeeming quality in celebrating Halloween even if I love Jesus and have no desire to betray him. I just want to have a little fun! Right?

Yeah.

I been stuck right about there with Halloween for years. But it didn’t really matter much since I was too old for trick or treating, and I simply don’t get invited to any Halloween dress-up parties. I can simply ignore it, and that of functional reasons independent of any theological issues.

What Do I Do With These Rethoughts?

But now I have kids, kids in school where they do host a Halloween party. And I’m the guy who no longer pledges allegiance to the flag because I would rather devote my allegiance to Jesus and not be confused about it! How do I teach my kids to be true to their beliefs? How do we navigate Halloween? Do I be a fuddy duddy? How does this work?

Well, I have opted not to trouble their minds with this stuff. My seven-year-old isn’t capable of weighing and evaluating these things at all, and the rest are younger than him. But as long as he dresses up like Batman, it’s not devil worship. I’m clear about that. And carving a jack-O-lantern is a must-have experience! But last year, the first year my kids really absorbed the festivities of the holiday, making this year the first year they really anticipate the fun, puts these matters in a new focus for me.

Let me tell you about it (just in case you are still interested).

Rethinking Rethought Thoughts About Halloween

Clearly, I am the sort who gives THOUGHT to such things. Clearly, I am a radical weirdo, and not one of the standard kinds either – a real weird, radical weirdo. And clearly, I give a LOT of thought to image-bearing, Christian theology. Clearly I give a LOT of thought to the homeless and to hospitality as one of the main ways (if not the big ONE itself) for the church to impact the world (and thus the poor too).

I am so weird, even though I live in what has traditionally been a very well established, white, middle-class neighborhood, I ponder frequently how I might make my home stand out as a place of welcome, of genuine welcome, and not some pseudo welcome promoted by a “welcome” mat next to a “no soliciting” sign, an ADT Home Security sign or a Beware of Dog sign. Lots of homes in my hood appear attractive, but between the security cameras, the Neighborhood Watch signs, and all the locked doors with neighbors who rarely (if ever) talk over the back fence, it occurs to me that I am not, in fact, truly welcome in any home but the one where I live.

How would a stranger in need know to knock at MY door?

I have often thought of strategic signs I could put in my yard to subvert the trend. I even thought seriously about putting a park bench out by the sidewalk and maybe a small placard on it instructing a weary soul not only to rest a moment, but to knock and seek comfort and welcome within. How do I buck the trend otherwise? Do I get a neon “Welcome” sign with a small print section that says, “No we REALLY mean it”? (I’d have to fabricate it myself, because I am sure it does not exist.)

Have you ever thought about these things?

Guess you’re not weird. Huh?

Care to give it a try?

Sometime walk out to the curb in front of your house, look back at your door, and imagine Jesus as “one of the least of these brothers” seeking fellowship and a meal among the houses on your street. How would he know to come to your door? Would he need to use his supernatural Devine powers? Would he need to go through trial and error, knocking at every door until he found yours? (Notice, I have assumed you actually want him at all in this scenario.)

And as I walk my own neighborhood this Halloween season, and my little ones I take with me take joy in saying “Hi punkins” to every yard decoration we find, it occurs to me that Halloween, with all it’s “Beware, Go Back” signs ironically breaks through this social barrier! Only skin deep, mind you. I mean front-step deep, but it does welcome strangers, in fact strangers who by virtue of this pagan holiday dress up far stranger than usual!

Spiders are considered pests in most homes, but on Halloween, if I dress up as a very scary and dangerous spider and knock at your door saying, “trick or treat,” you will likely welcome me and give me some candy!

Isn’t THAT ironic!

Only skin deep, but the irony is HUGE!

A redeeming value to this pagan holiday, if ever there was one.

Worth thinking about.