Daily Lenten Post, Day 6

I can't find the notes I made for yesterday's post, so that will have to wait until some other time. Here's what I looked at this morning, though. My morning devotional suggested the reading from Romans, but I couldn't pass up saying a little bit about my reading from Acts, too--two very different scripture readings, but both very interesting. I'd like to say more, but it's late...

Romans 8:31-39
This passage is like a verbal fist pump for all of us followers of Christ! What can really separate us from the love of Christ? Absolutely nothing--nothing we can think of or even do actually separates us, even though we're not very well convinced of that sometimes. In verse 18, Paul writes that he is convinced of this. This is, of course, a letter from Paul to people he has never met, but he still had confidence for them of this belief he held so strongly, that nothing can separate us from God. I don't know how to say it any better than Paul did--this is such an uplifting passage of scripture. Nothing can separate us from God--nothing. How often do we need to be reminded of that?

Acts 14:1-20--Paul and Barnabas' first journey continues
This is such a crazy story! God is at work, doing amazing things, and the people go nuts over it. The locals don't know what else to do, so they want to worship Paul and Barnabas. I wonder how frustrated and anxious that made them. But then, just as they're fending off being worshiped as gods, the Jews from their last two stops show up and stone them. Say what?! That would be enough to make a person feel bipolar, I think! I wonder how many of us would have survived what Paul went through...

Daily Lenten Post, First Sunday in Lent

Even though Sundays don't count in the 40 days of Lent (that's why it's the First Sunday IN Lent, not the First Sunday OF Lent), I'll share some thoughts on this morning's scripture reading, anyway...

Acts 13:1-12--Paul and Barnabas's First Journey (Part I)
Verse 2 tells us that the Spirit speaks directly and chooses Barnabas and Saul--how cool is that?! And then in verse 3, they are only sent out after the disciples fast, pray, and lay hands on them. We think those things don't matter as much as action, but they must have mattered to the early church, so why not to us, too?

I think this passage gets a little confusing when people start having two different names. My study Bible has a box explaining the Saul/Paul thing, but I didn't get to it yet. (Sunday morning's time is just a wee bit limited...)

Reading about a false prophet in the book of Acts is kind of surprising. I think of false prophets as sort of Old Testament-y and out-of-place by the time we get past Jesus, but I guess that's only my own idea. Here's one, right here in Acts. How interesting!

I wonder what it was like to see the apostles performing miracles and signs, as well as magicians doing their things. Did they seem like the same thing? I imagine it was difficult to tell the difference between magic and miracles and the Holy Spirit sometimes, but maybe I'm wrong. There must have been something different enough, or maybe it was just the teaching of the apostles and not their signs, because the governor believed. That's a great witness to the work of the Spirit and the apostles.

Daily Lenten Post, Day 4

Acts 12: Herod imprisons Peter

So, we all know anyone named Herod is not a great guy, but in verse 3, it tells us that it pleased the Jews (read: Jewish leaders who opposed the followers of Jesus--not all Jews, of course) when Herod killed James, so he arrested Peter. That's kind of messed up, if you ask me. But then he has a whole bunch of soldiers stationed to guard Peter around the clock. That is really impressive! What kind of threat was it that Peter posed again??

Anyway, Acts is full of so many really cool stories. My study Bible notes that when the angel comes to get Peter and tells him to hurry up (verse 7-8), those are the same words (or similar words) that God spoke to the Egyptians at the Passover--to hurry up and get ready, that there wasn't much time. I had never known that before (or I forgot it--that's always possible...), and that's a really interesting note, as this happens during the festival of Passover.

I'm glad we learn in this story that Peter didn't believe it was really happening until the angel left and he was actually out of prison in the city. Then, the people at Mary's house don't believe Rhoda (incidentally, the only named female servant in Luke-Acts) that Peter is at the gate--after she got so excited that she left him standing outside! It's comical, but it seems real. So often, when I read about how great things were in the early church--everybody got along and shared all their stuff and lots of people joined--it makes it kind of difficult to relate. Did they really all get along that well?? But here, I can relate to being skeptical, to being so surprised as to leave Peter outside. I can understand that!

Verse 15 tells us that the people told Rhoda it couldn't be Peter, it must be his angel. My Common English Bible translates it as "guardian angel," which I thought was interesting. I looked up the word in Greek, and it's just the same word that means angel or messenger, but I guess it's possible that it could also mean guardian angel. I'll have to look into this more...

Finally, even though I was down on the Jews earlier, for being pleased that Herod killed James, I can't help but find Herod's death pretty interesting. He was such a jerk to everyone, killing people right and left, and doing all kinds of bad stuff, so it's pretty interesting that he dies in such a way. My study Bible says this account is fairly similar to the historian Josephus's account of Herod's death, but I wonder if Luke doesn't take some liberties here, just to make a point about ruthless rulers and giving credit to God.

Daily Lenten Post, Day 3

This morning, I read 1 Peter 3:18-22, which is one of the lectionary readings for this Sunday, and my morning devotional suggested reading and reflecting on it. I also read from Acts, but this reading from 1 Peter really struck me. Because it is short, I will post it in its entirety here, from the Common English Bible:

18 Christ himself suffered on account of sins, once for all, the righteous one on behalf of the unrighteous. He did this in order to bring you into the presence of God. Christ was put to death as a human, but made alive by the Spirit. 19 And it was by the Spirit that he went to preach to the spirits in prison. 20 In the past, these spirits were disobedient—when God patiently waited during the time of Noah. Noah built an ark in which a few (that is, eight) lives were rescued through water. 21 Baptism is like that. It saves you now—not because it removes dirt from your body but because it is the mark of a good conscience toward God. Your salvation comes through the resurrection of Jesus Christ,22 who is at God’s right side. Now that he has gone into heaven, he rules over all angels, authorities, and powers.

I'll just jot a few of the thoughts I had on this passage. I may be changing some plans and preaching on it soon. Oh, and I should also say that I haven't done any close study of what comes before and after these verses, which is important, too. I'll have to do some more work here! But here are my initial thoughts today:

• This must be one of the passages that has been interpreted to say that Christ descended to the dead, which I think is a pretty cool idea, but many of us leave that line out of the Apostles' Creed. This passage gives a narrative about the "spirits in prison," that is also pretty telling: that they were disobedient, but then Christ came and preached to them. It's interesting that the narrative about Noah goes straight into a discussion of baptism, not into detail about what happened when Jesus preached to these spirits. Do we assume that they received baptism, or salvation, or something else? (Perhaps I should look into this more--I haven't studied 1 Peter very closely, that I can recall.)
• This passage also gives a very specific understanding of baptism, and I see how people come to strikingly different conclusions about the nature of baptism, from verse 21, specifically. It makes me think of the time that I was trying to explain the practice of infant baptism to people who were familiar with believer's baptism, and the question was posed to me, "So, do you believe that all of those babies who are baptized are saved?" Of course, the answer to that question is way more complicated than I'll go into here, but I understand from this verse better than I have before, where that question comes from.
• So, the first part of verse 21 kind of muddies some waters, but oh, the second part of that verse--"Your salvation comes through the resurrection of Jesus Christ..."--how wonderful! So often, we focus on the cross and the crucifixion, to the detriment of celebrating the resurrection. I've heard of Easter Sunday services that are more about the cross than about the empty tomb, and it makes me so sad. "Your salvation comes through the resurrection of Jesus Christ..." Yay! Both of them--the crucifixion and the resurrection--matter to our salvation. What would it look like if we preached and sang and talked as if both events matter to us? Would that change what people think of Christianity? Maybe...maybe not...what do you think?

What I'm Doing for Lent

I decided that for Lent, I want to put more thought and reflection into my daily scripture reading. The way I'm going to do this is to post here each day (or most days, at least), with some thoughts on whatever I've read that day. I'm reading through Acts during my morning quiet time right now, so I'm just starting right where I've been, which is with Acts 10. Feel free to comment (the comments feature should be turned on...) and let me know what you think, too.

Acts 10:1-48--Peter and Cornelius

It's so interesting that Peter is staying with Simon the tanner, who would have been considered ritually unclean by Jews, according to my study Bible. Why was Peter staying there before he had a vision from the Spirit that convinced him that God shows no partiality?

Anyway, I love this story! One of the important themes of the book of Acts is the work of the Spirit, and this story is right there at the top of the list, showing how the Spirit is mad busy, getting people on-line with this new gospel and the movement called the Way. We've seen Peter screw things up in all 4 gospels, but he's still named the founder of the church by Jesus, and here, he gets a special message that turns some of the new church's world up-side-down! (Not everybody in the Jerusalem church liked it that Peter had this change of heart.) I really wonder what went through Peter's mind, when everything happened just as it did--he was on the rooftop praying, he got hungry, he had this vision, and then the three men from Cornelius's house showed up and the vision made a whole lot more sense to him. And then he just went with them! Did he even stop to be amazed at the situation? What goes through someone's head when the Spirit meddles so much in the midst of things?

I wonder what Cornelius was thinking, too. What's it like to be able to be so receptive that when a holy messenger shows up, you don't just lose your mind? We'd think Peter would be cooler with that than Cornelius, but scripture just says Cornelius was startled, and then he listened to what the angel had to say. He did as he was told, and what an amazing gift of the Spirit, to receive Peter into his home, to see Peter learn this crucial lesson in the life of the burgeoning church, and then to receive teaching from Peter and receive the Spirit and baptism! We don't always know how things worked in the early church, but it's still so amazing when we see that whole families were brought into the church together and received the good news. I wonder what it was like...but I guess I kind of know what it was like, too! How did we respond when we were brought into the family of faith, and when we first understood what all that meant?

Reflections for Ash Wednesday

I like to observe the liturgical calendar. The rhythms and rites of the church year are important to me, so it chafes me that the weather has been so awful this week that I’ve finally given in and cancelled my Ash Wednesday worship service. Aside from Good Friday, Ash Wednesday is one of the most difficult but most important times for worship of the year, in my opinion. Maybe it’s because I tend toward being hard on myself, or maybe it’s because I’m an introvert and the introspection of these two days is actually quite comfortable for me—either way, there’s something very useful in sitting in church with other sad-feeling souls on a Wednesday in the winter…even when there’s good basketball to be watched that same evening. In recent years, I’ve even begun to appreciate observing a time of silence on Holy Saturday—stopping to think about that tomb that I know will be empty the next day, but isn’t, for right now.

All of this is to say that I’m used to church on Ash Wednesday. I’m really good at taking out my sins and putting them in front of me, picking them up and scrutinizing them, and feeling bad about myself. There’s little about confession that I find terribly unsettling, save for the fact that confession itself is supposed to lead to repentance, that turning away from the “bad” and toward the “good” that’s a hallmark of real desire to be a more faithful disciple. I confess that as I’ve contemplated this blog post, I’ve eaten not one, not two, but three honey popcorn balls that are left over from a youth fundraiser this past weekend. I’d even like to eat another! I mean, what else is going to happen to them, anyway? We don’t have any other place to sell them and by the time the weather clears up and we have any kind of event at the church, people will think they’re too old to be eaten. And popcorn balls, even those made with honey, are healthier than eating a bunch of chocolate or something, right?

Well, there you go—I sound like I’m all ready for Ash Wednesday, don’t I? I have my list of sins to confess and I even have good excuses for them! I am set! But what I guess I’ve learned about Ash Wednesday, through the years and even this week, as I began preparing for a sermon the weather rapidly made less likely that I would ever preach, is that all this putting my sins out in front of me and feeling bad about them is not exactly the point of Ash Wednesday. As we begin Lent, it’s not just 40 days to feel bad about ourselves, which it sometimes feels like it is (to me, at least). It’s not just 40 days to feel kind of miserable, so we can be even happier when Easter comes. It’s actually 40 days set aside to put all this stuff before God and let God reckon with us, as we let go of it.

Think of it like this: I was bitten by a dog once, and the well-meaning physician who treated me told me to use a synthetic skin covering on the bite, to avoid bad scarring. Little did he realize that a thick covering, regular antibiotic ointment application, and the strong oral antibiotic he prescribed for me would actually help develop an infection in the wound, rather than heal it more quickly or aesthetically pleasingly. By applying his knowledge of burn wounds to this bite wound, he actually helped mislead me into more misery and suffering (not to mention, the next doctor that looked at that wound became very concerned because, apparently, dog bites very rarely get infected!).

I think that’s how we tend to do Ash Wednesday—and all of Lent, actually. We keep trying to treat our own “badness” in some sort of way, so as to make ourselves feel better (I have lots of good reasons!), or to save face with others (Look at how good I can be!), or even to ignore or downplay it (I’m really not that bad!). And we are so good at this! We have lots of experience—this is what we do 364 days of the year! (Or maybe only 363 or 362 days, depending on our Good Friday and Holy Saturday practices.) If we can take out all our sins for just a minute, put them on display before God for about an hour, say we repent, recite parts of Psalm 51, get a few ashes swiped on our foreheads, and then head on out the door, we’re good—we’ve taken care of things. So Ash Wednesday becomes this day to carefully arrange ourselves so the scratches and bruises don’t look so bad, to bring them in front of God, just a little bit, and then to get the heck out before we really have to deal with them…or with God.

Now, this probably makes it sound like I think none of us is really honest on Ash Wednesday, and that’s not what I’m trying to say. What I think is that most of us aren’t totally honest with God most of the time—isn’t that part of human nature? If nothing else, maybe Ash Wednesday can become the one day of the year when we really, honestly admit to God that we don’t have it all together—can’t have it all together—and really need a little help down here. Like it or not, the way we do that is to stop and admit it, and then take 40 days (plus Sundays) to try to let God change it. Maybe we like to let ourselves off the hook by giving up something that’s not too bad, or by making some miniscule change that we know we can handle for that long. How many of us bother with what the Matthew text for Ash Wednesday talks about (Matthew 6:1-6, 16-21): prayer, fasting, and almsgiving? Two of those three disciplines make almost no sense to most Americans. Why abstain from anything? And why give money to the church and to the poor? What did they do to deserve it? Ick. Who likes spiritual disciplines, anyway?

But one writer on this Matthew passage makes this point: “Prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, the great trinity of spiritual disciplines, have in common the practice of detachment and saying no as a way of discovering anew that God is not simply an extension of ourselves or a means to our own ends. Through these practices we seek to experience and listen to God as God, and to be transformed from our self-centered, instrumental, manipulative, idolatrous religious existence to the true life of faith and the genuine experience of the God who exists in freedom and comes to us in freedom as authentic Other. For this reason, we must perform our ascetical practices in principle, and in fact, ‘secret.’” (Rodney J. Hunter, from Feasting on the Word, Year B, Volume 2)

So, Ash Wednesday is a time for us to get together, to sit down before God and be real, and to commit to trying to let God change us…again…And we do this together (though we won’t tonight at my church because of all this ridiculous snow and cold) because we need each other. We need God to change us, and we need each other to walk with us in person and be God with us, even when we can’t feel God’s presence with us. Jesus suggests in Matthew that we should do these practices in secret, and he gives specific reasons for that—because if we do them for recognition and honor, which was common in his culture, we are doing them wrong.

Let’s be honest. Putting the wrong bandages on our wounds and doing things for the wrong reasons hasn’t helped us at all. Sometimes it even makes us sicker. I think it’s time to let God work on the parts of me that are still so far from perfect, to stop pretending that if God will just wait a minute, I’ll get it all together. I think it’s time I stop eating honey popcorn balls when I’m not hungry and I’m just bored of this weather. I think it’s time I put my wounds out in the open before God, for a little bit of fresh air, and maybe for some fresh dressings that God knows can bring healing. And I think it’s time I ask someone else to keep me accountable to all of this. Honestly, as a pastor, it’s incredibly easy not to ask for anyone to keep me accountable with Lenten disciplines…my job is to ask everybody else how their disciplines are going, right? So, I think I’ll commit to what I’m going to do (if you need some ideas, I have a list of suggestions—or you could try out that old “prayer, fasting, and almsgiving” stuff!), and I’ll ask someone else to be in covenant with me about it…and I’ll actually let God help me get things together. I’ll let you know how it works out!

Oh, and here’s a song that’s been going through my head as I’ve been thinking about Ash Wednesday. It makes me think of all the ways I don’t have it together but try to pretend I do, anyway. God, help me to be more honest about this, and help me to let you work on it because how I’ve tried just hasn’t worked!

"Two Hands"
I've been living out of sanity
I've been splitting hairs and blurring lines
I am a house that is divided
In my heart and in my mind

I use one hand to pull you closer
The other to push you away
If I had two hands doing the same thing
Lifted high, lifted high

I have a broken disposition
I'm a liar who thirsts for the truth
And while I ache for faith to hold me
I need to feel the scars and see the proof

(Chorus)

And if we just keep digging we can reach the foundation
Of our souls
And if we just keep cutting all the chains from our hearts
We'll lose control

And it feels like giving in
It feels like starting over
It feels like waking up, and you know it's coming
It feels like a brand new day
Open your eyes

Thoughts for Epiphany of the Lord Sunday

Sunday, January 4: Epiphany of the Lord Sunday

  

Arise! Shine! Your light has come; the LORD's glory has shone upon you.

Though darkness covers the earth and gloom the nations, the LORD will shine upon you; God's glory will appear over you.

Nations will come to your light and kings to your dawning radiance.

~Isaiah 60:1-3

Read Isaiah 60:1-6

It’s hard to imagine what the trip was like for the magi. We don’t actually know where they came from, or what they expected to find when they got to where the star led them. It’s also difficult to imagine what Mary and Joseph and Jesus thought of the magi’s visit. Surely, we’d think, they had an understanding of the situation (Mary and Joseph, at least—maybe not Jesus, depending on how old he was at the time). Scripture doesn’t tell us a whole lot about what we call “Epiphany,” when some strange men showed up in Jerusalem and were sent by Herod to find the child king. People have wondered for centuries what, exactly, that star was, that the magi claimed to have followed. There’s as much mystery about the story as there is known truth—over time, folks named the wise men, after deciding there must have been only three of them, though the scripture doesn’t tell us that much information. Legends about where they came from have helped us feel as though we have a grasp on what it means that some wealthy foreigners would make a perilous journey to visit this child, born to a poor carpenter.

Though there is much mystery about the Epiphany, when we think on what Isaiah prophesied, that God’s light would shine on all the people, perhaps the questions we have about the whole story dim in comparison to the knowledge that this one, this unassuming child, this simple son of a carpenter, is the light that Isaiah foretold. He is the light people have been looking for in darkness—not just the people of Israel, but people of all nations who have sat in darkness. Thank God the light has shined...in all its mystery—into all the dark places! Thank God that we are called to shine that light, too!

Prayer: Jesus, Light of the World, shine upon us. Let your light shine through us, as it shone to bring mysterious strangers to visit you so long ago. Amen.