To the Cross - Redeeming Our Failures

Preached on Wednesday, February 28, 2018; the 3rd Wednesday of Lent

Scripture readings: Psalm 51; Matthew 26:69-75

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like a failure before?

It really isn’t very hard to do.

Walking along Columbia River at Desert Aire, WA
February 2018

But it’s about the very worst thing that you can admit to, in this twenty-first-century-America of ours.

Failure is a hard experience to get through and if you try to explain to others what you’re feeling, you’ll probably get told one of two things. You may be told that you’re wrong. On the other hand, you might get told that the only failure is the one who thinks that he or she is a failure. Well neither brands of advice are very encouraging or helpful. In our own time and place in history, even the church misses the point of failure.

This is a Bible. It’s God’s word: God’s story; God’s message to you and me. It says exactly what God wants it to say for God’s own very specific reasons. God wants to show himself and God wants to speak himself to each one of us to give each of us the knowledge and the true understanding of God, and the knowledge and the true understanding of ourselves.

It’s so hard for each one of us to truly understand God and to truly understand ourselves. And we’re not so likely to be interested in truly understanding other people because (although we may sometimes want to help other people) we usually want to blame other people, or judge them.

God’s happens to be keen on us not going that direction, so God doesn’t waste his time or his word helping us to understand other people. So, God hasn’t designed his word to tell you about me, or to tell me about you.

God wants to speak directly to you about your own life, and your own need. He doesn’t do this in order to make you think that your life is all about yourself. God Doesn’t like that either. God simply wants to crack through our own stony brains.

God wants to let you and me know, without giving us any room for escape, exactly who we are. And, so, God has filled his word with failures.

Given a garden full of options, Adam and Eve made the one choice that they were told not to make. Noah, the only truly righteous human being on earth became a drunk after the flood. Abraham, who is the source of all God’s people of Faith, (whether Jewish, or Christian, or whatever) didn’t have enough faith to keep him from lying about his wife being his wife. The story of failure goes on and on.

In the New Testament, Jesus (who is God in the flesh) is continually scolding his disciples about their failures of faith. He scolded their failure to let the children come to him. Jesus scolded their failure to trust that if he asks them to feed a crowd using only a few morsels, that he himself will make it possible. They found that trust as hard the second time they fed the crowds as they did the first time. Even after the resurrection and Pentecost, they often didn’t get things right.

The Bible is a book about failures and it’s about the God who loves failures and never leaves them and never gives up on them. The Bible is about the God who never leaves the failures alone until he fixes them and recreates them, or until they come into his presence for the final great new creation.

Maybe you have never been a failure; but, if you ever have been, then, this book is for you; and the God of this book is for you. And the God of this book is the God of the Gospel, which means God’s Good News for you. The greatest wisdom in this world comes from knowing this truth.

Jesus was in a room of the High Priest’s big house, getting slapped, and punched, and spat upon because of the new creation he was bringing to Peter, and to us, and to the world. We read about Peter denying that he even knew who Jesus was, even though, when Jesus asked his disciples to tell him who he was, Peter was the only one who could put it into words: “you are the Christ, the Son of the Living God”. (Matthew 16:16)

In a few minutes Peter would run out of the gate of the High Priest’s house weeping hot, bitter tears of failure.

Peter wasn’t the worst. Judas sold Jesus for thirty silver coins. The other disciples had already run away to hide. Peter denied Jesus with his words, but the others denied Jesus by their absence.

John tells us about one disciple who went with Peter to the trial of Jesus. The one other disciple left on the scene got Peter into the house because the High Priest and his staff knew this disciple and his family. This one disciple was the one that John tells us “Jesus loved”: not because he was special, but because John felt too loved even to give his identity away when he did the right thing.

The nameless disciple, named John, was the bravest of them all because the Priest and the staff already knew that he was a disciple of Jesus, and so (if he did get in trouble because of following Jesus) going to the High Priest’s house could make things any worse. So, he was there to watch Peter’s failure happen.

John could have named himself here, to make himself look good. But I don’t believe that he thought of himself as a success, and so he hid his name from us. Practically the only one in the Bible who isn’t a failure doesn’t want us to know it. And we’re really only guessing when we claim that we know that he was John.

This Book, and this God who shows himself to us in Jesus, knows who you are, and what you will do, and what you will say, before you do or say it or even think about it. Before he sent Judas off to do his work, Jesus said, “One of you will betray me.” (Matthew 26:21) When the Passover meal was done, he said to all the rest, “This very night you will all fall away on account of me.” (Matthew 26:31) To Peter who claimed that he would never fall away, Jesus said, “I tell you the truth, this very night before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” (Matthew 26:34)

Jesus knows our every weakness. Jesus knows all of our failures before we do.

Jesus also knows that what he will do for them (and for us), on the cross and in the resurrection, will make all of us into new people who will follow, and even be willing to fail, in order to keep right on following and taking up our crosses with Jesus.

Jesus hinted at this when he said, “But after I have risen, I will go ahead of you into Galilee.” (Matthew 26:32) He knew that they would keep on following, even when they had seen the worst. Jesus knew that they would keep on following, even at the risk of failure.

Those who go ahead on the road of the cross, or the road of the love of Jesus, and keep on this road for love of the world and their neighbor, knowing that they will fail, and knowing that failure won’t keep them from succeeding: those are truly the people of Jesus.

Jesus died as a tortured and cruelly executed criminal. People would curse his memory. People would curse his followers. People may curse us. What looked like a curse in the form of a cross was and is, really, an infinite love that is stronger than any sin, stronger than all evil combined, stronger than Hell and all its forces, stronger than death, stronger than the universe.

The cross and the resurrection of Jesus turn failure into victory and salvation. Carry that on your back. Carry that in your heart. Do it, and you may change lives even because you fail.

True forgiveness is infinitely greater than the words that say, “You are forgiven”. Forgiveness is power, and healing, and life. The blood of the cross is stronger than any failure and Jesus calls to us to come to his cross and be forgiven. Come to the cross and be healed. Stop living by what you think of yourself. Start living in the life that comes from that cross. It’s new every day, every moment.

When I was twenty I wrote a poem a little bit about this. I’ve made some changes. But here’s how it goes.

“IF I SEEM TO FAIL” 

Lord, if I seem a fool, disaster-prone,

And powerless to hold true to your will,

To keep that faithful path you’ve given me,

Inherit all the joy that I’m assured

Can be mine if I’m faithful to the end;

If I, in folly, trip along the way,

Fall face down in the dust along the road

And seem, to all the world, cut off from you;

By my sad failure severed from the prize;

Yet, Lord, I pray that, by some mystery,

Your humbleness would take my vanity,

Transforming it to something like your cross,

Which fooled the world by looking like defeat,

And yet redemption brought. You seemed a fool…

Make me a fool for you.

Dennis Evans, written in spring 1973, revised.

To the Cross - Where Life Imitates Christ

Preached on Ash Wednesday, February 14, 2018

Scripture readings: Micah 6:6-8; Mark 12:28-34

There are six-hundred-and-thirteen commandments in the Jewish Torah (our first five books of the Bible). They all had to be followed and kept. Six-hundred-and-thirteen commandments: It’s a mind-numbing number, or else it makes for a wonderful puzzle or game.

Walking along the Columbia River at Desert Aire
Late afternoon, January, 2018

I know some of you love puzzles. You love putting each of a thousand things in their proper place. But there was a wonderful puzzle or game that the Jewish rabbis and the Pharisees loved to play. It was the game called: “Which is the most important commandment?”

You can see the game way back in Micah. Out of a dozen nearly impossible and terrible possible requirements, what does the Lord really require of you? Of course, Micah wins the game by cheating. He gives us three requirements: Do justice (or live justly); love mercy (which is also translated as kindness); and walk humbly with your God.

The Pharisees played the same old game with Jesus. “Which is the most important requirement?” Jesus also wins the game in the time-honored way of Micah: by cheating. Jesus makes the greatest commandment into two; or the two greatest into one.

But what does he say about these two? Matthew expands (a little bit) on what Jesus actually said about the two: he says that they are alike. (Matthew 22:34)

They are alike! But how can loving God and loving your neighbor be alike? How can they be the same, or nearly the same? The very teacher who started the game agreed with Jesus, and strung them both together into one single commandment.

Both commandments are about love. Both commandments together have a way of putting all the ways of love into one single love-package.

Some people try keeping the two apart. You’ve met people who talk about their love for the Lord, but they’re not very loving to people.

I knew a girl in college who quoted the apostle Paul for her motto in life. She went around “speaking the truth in love.” (Ephesians 4:15) That’s what she claimed that she was doing. Well, she certain spoke the truth all the time: all the time! And when you were around her very much, because she was very pretty, you wanted to wince and tell her, “Please, Christy! Please stop doing that.”

I’ve known some who separated their love in the opposite way. They loved people (or said they did) and they hated God. God didn’t nearly live up to their standards.

Micah makes God’s three requirements into one single love-package as well. You need to know that the words for judgement and justice have two sides to them. There’s a justice and a judgement that is punitive. It punishes wrong-doers. Then there’s the kind of justice and judgement that is restorative. The judge restores what has been taken, or lost, or deserved.

Punitive justice makes some people very happy. If what was taken, or harmed, or lost cannot be restored, then victims often take the side of punitive justice.

In the brutal Middle East, some of the most brutalized and bereaved Christians are famous for forgiving the perpetrators of the violence around them. Of course (to the perpetrators) forgiveness is a sign of weakness. No amount of love can excuse an infidel for their irreverent claim that God has a son named Jesus, and that God is simply like Jesus: not even if those Christians truly succeed in the discipline of acting like Jesus.

In Micah’s love-package, the justice must fit the pattern of mercy (which is also translated as kindness). Justice must conform to mercy and humility, so it’s probably all about righting the wrongs done to people, and forgiving all of the wrongs done by people, by restoring what has been lost, or by healing what has been broken.

God’s restorative judgement was carried out on the cross, where Jesus forgave us, and where Jesus also forgave his enemies, just as he asks us to do.

Micah’s three requirements are a love-package in three parts: the restorative justice looks backwards and heals and replaces the past with healing, grace, life, love, fullness, newness. It makes your abominable past into the productive past of a child of God. Kindness and mercy look forward to the future. It’s like the title of the sad movie “Pay It Forward.” You send your mercy and kindness, shown in the present, to do its work in the future. So future and past are both held together by the humility, and the grace, and the joy of the kingdom of God: walking humbly with your God.

Sometimes it almost kills me to be a forgiver. And that’s right because forgiving the sins of the world killed Jesus on the cross. You have to swallow your pride and it almost gags you to do it.

Swallowing your pride is how you walk humbly with your God. Swallowing your pride doesn’t mean hating yourself. Humility means loving God more than yourself, and loving others as yourself. It could mean simply to love fully, and not to measure any of your loves at all. To love without measure is the humblest love of all.

Lent, and the road to the cross, and to the empty grave of Jesus, is this discipline of walking humbly with God. If we know anything about God, we Christians know that God is like Jesus. “He who has seen me has seen the father.” (John 14:9)

We take up our cross and follow a Jesus-like God. This is what Lent is about. It’s the discipline of walking with Jesus to the cross. It’s also about the Jesus-like God who’s Holy Spirit empowers us to walk so humbly with our God.

The ashes of Lent and the Lord’s Supper are the love-package of Jesus. It holds everything together and there is so much in that package that it fills you up when you receive it: but only if you receive it all.

Lent - The Awakened Ear

Preached on the Wednesday Lenten Service, March 2, 2016

Scripture readings: Isaiah 50:4-7; Matthew 13:10-17

I had a friend in seminary whose name was Roger. Roger couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket. If you were beside him in chapel, while we were singing, you would hear the music go up and Roger would go down. The music would go down and Roger’s voice would go up.

Walking along Lower Crab Creek
North of Desert Aire/Mattawa
February 2016

Roger honestly confessed that he really didn’t think that he heard notes at all. At least he was sure that he didn’t hear them the way other people hear them.

The interesting thing was that Roger loved music and he loved to sing. Music, he said, was something he felt inside him.

I think that’s a very good observation of what music is and does. It’s a very good observation of what hearing is and what our ears do for us. I sometimes think that seeing goes inside us to our brains, and that hearing goes somewhere deeper, to what we call our heart.

What would you miss, if you had no ears, or no hearing at all? What are the things of the heart that you would miss?

What about the ears and the hearing of other people? What would you miss if they couldn’t hear you? What would they miss, if they couldn’t hear you?

(I love you. I need you. You are wonderful. I hurt inside. I am so very sorry. I am grieving. I am afraid. I love you too. I feel happy. God be praised and thanked!)

We walk in the sight of beauty, but we don’t see it. We walk in the sound of love, but we don’t hear it.

What would you miss, if you couldn’t hear? What would others miss, if they couldn’t hear you?

There is a form of deafness that comes from stubbornness and the refusal to hear or listen. There is a form of deafness that comes from pride. There is a form of deafness that comes from our own sufferings, our own injuries, and our own burdens and (in this deafness) we will not hear because we have not shared our suffering, and injuries, and burdens with others. We have not learned to say, “Help me!” Or else we have said, “Help me,” and no help seemed to come.

Jesus gave the treasure of his kingdom, and his healing, and his help in the form of stories called parables. Some people heard Jesus, and they knew exactly what he meant, and his treasure gave them joy and hope. They wanted to follow Jesus. For other people, the stories were no better than their own deafness; no better than the silence they lived in.

Jesus didn’t tell stories in order to shut some people out, or punish them, or keep them trapped within their own silence. I believe that Jesus preserved and prolonged their silence in the hope that their silence would heal them.

Sometimes we need quiet in order to heal. When we have had enough quiet, we become strong enough and willing enough to ask for help.

I believe that if we learn to ask for help, help will come. Somehow we will be heard. If no human help comes, God will hear us, and come. Jesus will come.

I have prayed long, exhausting prayers in a vast silence, and Jesus came to me in that silence. He was also absolutely quiet. He didn’t say a word, but his silence surrounded me with love.

God’s listening silence became his arms around me. It became his presence with me. In such hours and moments as those, I didn’t need anything more. It was enough.

It’s a hard thing to put silence into words. Think about that. And it’s hard to put God’s listening and healing silence into words. You have to be there.

In Isaiah there is a voice that says, “The Lord God has given me the tongue of those who are taught, that I may know how to sustain with a word him that is weary. Morning by morning he wakens, he wakens my ear, to hear as those who are taught. The Lord God has opened my ear, and I was not rebellious, I turned not backward. I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to those who pulled out the beard; I hid not my face from shame and spitting.” (Isaiah 50:4-6

Do you realize that the prophet Isaiah is giving us the voice of Jesus, here? God came into our world, in Jesus, to be a baby who learned to hear. Jesus was taught (as we all are) by what he heard. He was a baby crying and silent.

God came into our world, in Jesus, to be a man, speaking and silent. He came to be a man tortured and killed on a cross for us; crying, and praying, and as silent as his final sigh.

God came, in Jesus, to a world full of crying and silence to be the one who could hear you and come to you. He learned, as a human being, what he knew from the beginning, as God: how to be present, and how to listen.

Our first break-through in the art of hearing comes when we learn the way that Jesus listens to us in silence. Then we will know how to listen to him.

Then we will know how to simply be in the presence of others who need us to be lovingly silent. We will find other people who need us to be that person who can be present, and quiet, and hear them, and listen.

Lent - Our Eyes and Jesus' Eyes

Preached for the Lenten Service on Wednesday, February 17, 2016

Scripture readings: Isaiah 42:5-9; Acts 9:1-19

Paul was full of anger at his own people when they turned to Jesus. He was mad at Jesus too. Jesus had tried to reach him and Paul had tried with all his heart to not be reached. Paul had tried with all his heart to not see Jesus.

In later years Paul recalled his change of heart, and he remembered that one of the things Jesus had told him, in this vision of light and glory was, “It is hard for you to kick against the goads.” (Acts 26:14)

Apparently a young ox in training, pulling a plow or wagon, would try to kick its way free from the burden and from the plowman or driver behind it. When training a young ox, a wagon would have spikes put on the front to keep it from kicking. A plowman would carry a staff with a spike to do the same thing. Paul must have been kicking at Jesus for some time. But it was hard work.

Paul was afraid and angry at the thought of Jesus leading his people astray. Jesus claimed that God’s kingdom was based on the forgiveness of sins and even the forgiveness of enemies. Jesus claimed that God’s kingdom was based on the surrender of one’s own claims and one’s own advantages.

This seemed dangerous to Paul and his friends. This seemed like a huge weakness, if God’s people were going to survive in such a world as this.

For Paul, the kingdom had to be built on the laws that held God’s people to God. The kingdom had to be built on ridding the world of God’s enemies and the enemies of God’s people. Jesus took none of this seriously, and now it was claimed that his execution was for the sins of the world, and that Jesus had risen from the dead to rule a kingdom of forgiveness, and mercy, and grace.

This thought angered and frightened Paul and his friends. But the greatest anger and fear came from something that haunted Paul’s thoughts. It seems that Jesus had his eyes on Paul and Jesus was reaching out to him through the blindness of his anger and fear. Paul worked hard to kick against this thought, until he saw Jesus.

Once Paul had seen Jesus, the only choice that was left top him was the choice between blindness and Jesus. In some strange way Jesus decided to teach Paul (and us, through Paul) about true blindness and true seeing.

This world is angry and afraid, and (often) so am I. Anger and fear make us blind to a God of love and purpose who is not shaped by our angers and fears.

We want a God who respects our angers and our fears but there is a God who will not do this. There is a God who will not grant us a right to our angers and fears. Jesus is where we meet this God. It is strange that we seem to love our own blindness more than a God who would set us free from all that.

Have you ever tried to make an angry child laugh? When I was a child, my parents would try to make me laugh when I was angry or crying, and I simply hated that. It made me madder still.

Grown-ups are just the same, only they won’t admit it. We would rather be blind and mad than seeing and gracious. And so we miss a lot. We hold onto our blindness and we miss seeing anything that is real to God.

The whole grown-up world has been like this since the beginning, and horrible things have come of it. There is nothing grand, or majestic, or heroic behind the tragedies of this world. It is nothing more than the sad and pitiful preference to be blind that is the cause of it all.

It is a tragedy to miss seeing anything.

When I was ten years old I got glasses for the first time, and realized that I had seen trees, but not the leaves on them. I had seen grass, but not the blades of them.

When I was ten I could see trees but not the leaves unless I held them in my hand. I could see the grass, if I was sitting on it, but not the waves of grass blowing on a hill. I could see the sun and the moon in a fuzzy way, but I couldn’t see the stars.

Was I missing anything important? Was I missing anything you wouldn’t want to miss? If I told you what I could see, and that it was OK with me, and don’t make me wear glasses, would you have believed me, and left me alone, and not told my parents that something needed to be done? Did I know enough because I thought that I knew what I could see, and I was content with that?

As a 10-year-old, putting on my first pair of eyeglasses, I wept for the loss of what I had not been able to see, and I wept for the joy of seeing what I had never seen before.

As an adult, have I really grown up because I don’t know how to cry for what I still don’t see? Do you know how to cry for what you don’t see? Do your friends know how to cry for what they don’t see?

It is a tragedy not to see what God would give us: Jesus, the life and the cross and the resurrection that change everything, a love bigger than ourselves, a new self, a rescue from exile. It is a tragedy to not see what such a new life would make us care about: the depth of need of those around us, the world of need to which we could give our tiny gifts, or our whole life and love as small as those seem in comparison.

In Jesus we receive a new life with new eyes that see the world as he does. But, on the other hand, it is easy to see why people prefer to be blind. If you don’t have the eyes of Jesus, you don’t have to see your enemies with the love of Jesus. If you don’t have the eyes of Jesus, then you don’t have to see a world in which God offers himself in sacrifice and calls you to do the same.

The truth is that you either see this or you don’t. You can’t choose to be a near-sighted ten-year-old. You have to either see or else you have to live blind in this world that God has made to be seen; in this world that God alone rules. The only eyes that will truly see anything are the eyes of Jesus: the eyes that saw Paul, the eyes that see you and me, in a world of anger and fear.

Paul let himself be given the eyes of Jesus, and so he became able to see what Jesus sees. Jesus offers those same eyes to you and me.