What Do You Hear?

Responsive Reading: Psalm 139:1-6, 13-18

Scripture: 1 Samuel 3:1-10

Nighttime Whispers

As we start off this time of reflection today, I’d like to invite you into a brief time of imaginative play. 

Take a moment and settle into your seat. Then, if your comfort level allows it, close your eyes and focus on your breathing. In and out. Notice where you feel it in your body: your nose…… throat…… chest…… diaphragm……

Now imagine you are lying in bed. The light is out. The day is done. The TV is off. The phone is plugged in and out of reach. And you are alone with the darkness and your breath.

What do you hear echoing from your soul?

• What ideas emerge in the black of night?
• What concepts creep around the edges of your cranium?
• What whispers wander through your consciousness?

It is in this very place you are in right now—this place of racing mind and guilt and memory and uncertainty and solitude——It is in this very place that Samuel begins to hear the voice of God.

Take a deep breath. When you’re ready again, open your eyes—but hold onto that space in the dark of night…… It may be more important to befriend the dark than you realize.

Samuel

At the time of 1Samuel chapter 3, things have not gone terribly well for the Israelites. Sure, they entered the Promised Land with Joshua, but their life after was sadly similar to their life before—a constant cycling between faithfulness and selfishness…… between letting the One True God dictate the values and terms of their life and asserting that control for themselves. 

When things got too bad, they would realize how far they had wandered from the path of Life; and God proved ever-ready to help them at the moment they were willing to let their Creator tell them the best way to live. God would send helpers to guide them back on track, and the people would generally hold the course for a generation or two before slipping back into their old self-centered ways.

As the book of 1Samuel begins, this “slippage” has been going on for a while. This corruption has even infiltrated the family of one of these “helpers,” Eli. The worst offenders are always the pastor’s kids. Eli’s sons were “scoundrels“—that’s the word in my translation in 2:12—and they had “no regard for the LORD” (NRSV). Even though their father confronts them for sleeping around with the pianist and whatnot, they will not listen. And Eli seems unwilling to remove them from their ministry responsibilities.

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Yes, by the time we reach chapter three, the faith in God of the people of ancient Israel was waning, much like the guttering “lamp of God” which “had not yet gone out” (1Samuel 3:3). 

Their ability to see and know right from wrong was dimming, much like the eyesight of the elderly Eli (v.2). 

They had made so much noise trying to make their own way that their ears were deafened to “the word of the LORD” which seemed to be “rare in those days” (v.1).

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Oh, I imagine Samuel had many things on his mind as he lay there staring into the darkness. 

There must have been wonderings about good and bad, about what could be and what would be, about whether there would be a future and what it was like, and so on. But there must also have been wonderings about that day’s events: about the injustices he witnessed from Hophni and Phinehas, about his conflicted caregiving of Eli—this man to whom he was yoked in service, and yet this man for whom he could not help but be losing respect.

And of course, Eli is “very old”—that’s chapter 2 verse 22 talking, not me. By the end of chapter 4 he will be dead, and the language around his death suggests he was not a healthy man. 

As a youth committed to the temple by his parents, Samuel likely had the responsibility of helping Eli do what he could not on his own. That’s probably why he expects it is Eli calling him in the dead of night; in all likelihood, Eli has called out to him many nights for assistance with a drink or a blanket or whatever. As night after night passed with Samuel lying in the dark and listening, he has undoubtedly trained his ears to listen for Eli’s voice. And so, when the invitation of God names him, Samuel understandably misses what is happening.

Qualities of God’s Invitation

I’d like us to focus our reflection today on the invitation of God in this text. And specificially, I want to suggest six qualities of God’s invitation that are present here—and that you will likely experience in the invitations that God extends to you.

First, God’s invitation is always dismissible. How easy would it have been for Samuel to have convinced himself he was just hearing things, rolled over, and went back to sleep? You know how easy—and so do I—because we’ve all done just that. 

We are always looking for God to show up with a 50-foot neon sign telling us exactly what to do and when and how—something so undeniable that even a blind and deaf three-fingered monkey could manage. But friends: God is not inviting a blind and deaf three-fingered monkey into the creative work of reconciling all things to Godself—God is inviting you!

God’s invitation will always be dismissible because God loves you too much to force anything on you. Only in freedom can love flourish, and there is nothing God wants more than for love to flourish in you.

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Second, God’s invitation is easy to misunderstand. And this is exactly what Samuel does—he mistakes the Voice of Creation for that of Eli. And twice Eli mistakes what Samuel hears for a figment of his imagination. 

God’s invitation is easy to misunderstand. We don’t get the voice of Morgan Freeman booming from the heavens, saying: “This is the Lord.” More often, we hear our name whispered in the darkness of our soul as the Lord of Light invites us to rest in him.

Because God’s invitation is easy to misunderstand, it is vital for us to have help. Eli may have made a lot of mistakes in his life—or maybe his only mistake was not firing his scoundrel sons when they started their campaign of terror on the community—but he does this one thing right: he helps train the next generation to hear the voice of God. Friends: no matter who you are, how you mess up, or how your kids mess up, God can still use you to bring up the next generation of leader.

God has built us to rely on each other. In this story, the Word of God is only heard when Samuel’s hearing and Eli’s experience partner together. It takes both people for the Voice to be recognized, received, and heard.

The apostle Paul uses the imagery of a body to talk about this, insisting that trying to do it all on our own results in a monstrous disfiguration of God’s purposes for us. When we take this into today’s reflection on the invitation of God, we must recognize that the community can help mediate our comprehension of God’s voice. Though our paths are varied, they do cross one another—and often those crossings are not the easiest of terrains. This, too, I feel is purposeful, as God invites us to guide one another through seasons we have been before. 

I deeply appreciate the writings of St. John of the Cross. In one place, he writes: 

“Do not look for a director who knows the way out of the dark. Rather, seek out a person who has been in the dark themselves and no longer fears it.”

This is an important part of God’s purpose in community: that we learn we are stronger together than we could ever be apart.

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Even though God’s invitation is always dismissible and easy to misunderstand, we need not despair, for God’s invitation is persistent. Three times God speaks to Samuel before Samuel is prepared to hear. Three times God calls Samuel’s name, only to watch him get up and run the other way the first two. Three times God invites Samuel into conversation before Samuel even realizes there is another Voice to be heard. And I am convinced that if Eli had not put two and two together when he did, God would have continued calling Samuel’s name until he had ears to hear. And so it is for us still.

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Fourth, God’s invitation is particular to each of us. I honestly feel like this could be a whole sermon in itself. Consider the way this narrative centers on Samuel. While perhaps obvious, note that God calls Samuel’s name. God does not call to the priest Eli. God does not call to the priest-apprentices, Hophni and Phinehas. God does not call to the priest in the next Temple over, or send a prophet from some other place. Samuel is the only one in precisely the right positioning for this task. 

God has a message…… a message only Samuel could deliver…… a message only from Samuel could Eli receive it…… a message that would itself mould and shape Samuel into the person God needed him to be in the days ahead: “a trustworthy prophet of the LORD” (1Samuel 3:21 NRSV).

God’s invitation is particular to you too. Only you are gifted and positioned to embody God’s love in the times and places God so invites you. That doesn’t mean it depends on you alone, for God will see God’s will play out. But God wants you to experience the shaping and the joy that comes with being a conduit of love and divine presence.

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Fifth, God’s invitation is never for us alone. I feel like this one is more profound than it sounds on the surface. 

Samuel does not hear the voice of God so he can ascend the pinnacle of spiritual enlightenment. He is not named by the Divine so he will be blessed: become rich…… marry well…… have 2.5 kids, a dog, and a cat…… to say nothing of the house and SUV.

In fact, I don’t think Samuel felt very good about this at all. In v.15 of chapter 3, Samuel is depicted as having been unable to sleep the rest of the night and absolutely terrified to tell Eli what he heard from God. 

The invitation of God that was accepted by Samuel was not for his benefit in any direct way. He received a message to be passed on to Eli…… a difficult message that was also, in its way, a message to all of Israel. 

God does not call you for your benefit alone. In 1Corinthians 12, Paul insists that what we receive from God has been given to us “for the common good” (v.7 NRSV). God speaks to you and invites you into God’s mission of reconciliation so that (quite literally) “God’s-kingdom will come and God’s-will will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And just as Samuel’s service to others in this task formed him into “a trustworthy prophet of the LORD” (v.20), so your service to others similarly shapes you into the image of God’s heart.

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Lastly—and we’ve already talked around this—God’s invitation may be uncomfortable to respond to. When Samuel hears what God is inviting him into, he is terrified. It robs him of his sleep. And how could it not? He’s probably around eleven years old right now. He has just heard the voice of God. And as if that wasn’t enough, the voice of God instructed him to tell his elderly mentor that his sons are going to die, and there is nothing that can be done to prevent his family from being extinguished from the face of the earth. Would you want to say that to the only father-figure you have known?

Now, most of the time God’s invitation to you will not be this extreme. But it might be. 

It will, however, always have the likelihood of being uncomfortable. It must, for responding to God’s invitation stretches us. It’s like: God’s heart presses into us and through us in a way that leaves a mark—like pressing a coin into play dough, or the way wicker impresses its cross-hatching into your arms or legs. 

Though uncomfortable, this stretching is a necessary part of our hearts and our lives being reshaped into the image of Jesus. It is how we are reformed—reborn in the likeness of our Maker.

Outro

And that’s the point, really: our formation. The whole of the journey of faith is not about a destination, but a relationship. It is less about who we will be in the future than who we are becoming in the present. 

Formation is the cornerstone of discipleship. Disciples quite literally aimed to reform their lives to embody their mentor; and the best compliment a disciple could receive was to be mistaken for their mentor. 

That’s still the goal. Not to become perfect—we are better off leaving the perfection to Jesus. No, the goal is to discover how today we are invited into becoming a reflector of the Light of the World. It is the invitation to open ourselves today in ways that let others look through us and see God reaching into their lives with love and light and joy. 

This is what discipling Jesus really means—not going to church or confessing certain doctrines. Discipling Jesus means we enter each day into a willingness to be shaped into his image, to accept the invitations to partner in God’s creative work, to listen and discern together the voice of God, and to learn the love at the center of all things.

Prayer

Beckoning God,

In the stillness of the night you called Samuel into your service. Call us into service with a voice we are able to hear, and give us hearts to come when we are called. 

Help us to learn in humility that we, like Samuel, are more likely to mishear your voice unless we listen in community. And guide us as we learn that you are speaking to us through unlikely persons and situations.

Give us the heart of a disciple, that we may purposefully seek to reflect the light of your love in whatever ways you invite us.

Amen.

Charge

Friends, God is going to say something to you this week.

It might be a whisper in the dead of night……
But it might also be an inward nudge toward someone or something. 

It might come when reading in the scriptures and you find some word or phrase literally leaps off the page at you……
But it might come in a song lyric, or a billboard, or the voice of a child.

Our God is infinitely creative and infinitely persistent.

The charge this week is simply this: Listen. Listen with more than your ears—listen with your heart and your gut and your body. Expect an invitation from God, and expect that it is going to change the world.

The Church Prioritizes the Vulnerable

This is the third sermon in a series exploring foundational texts for the identity and mission of the Church of Jesus Christ. The series will focus on four primary texts:

• Acts 2:1-21
• Matthew 28:16-20
• Luke 4:16-30
• 2Corinthians 5:14-6:10

Responsive Reading: Psalm 19

Scripture Reading: Luke 4:16-30

Theme Verses among the DM&F

Once upon a time, in the early centuries of the Christian church, there was a group of people that we now call the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Some of you have no doubt heard me reference them before. 

These were folks who began to see in their lifetime that Christianity was starting to go mainstream, so to speak. It was more accepted by national governments, it became more influential in politics and society, it accumulated more wealth and power, and in some ways and places was more the majority than the minority.

The Desert Mothers and Fathers were deeply suspicious of all this, and they came to believe that the message of Jesus that thrived on the margins would only be compromised in the mainstream. They believed the message of Jesus of liberation and abundant life would inevitably be lost in the shuffle of social acceptance; and that the efforts of some to make the Kingdom of God into a present, human, political reality would only create its antithesis.

And so they took on themselves radical lives of protest, often selling all they had, moving into rural areas, and committing themselves to living out the simple and abiding truths of Jesus as fully as possible. In fact, for many of these saints, it was common to take on a single teaching of Jesus and devote the whole of their lives—decades!—to learning to live that one instruction out completely. It would become their theme verse, if you will. 

And whether they picked something like:

• “take up your cross and follow me”
• or “do to others as you would have them do to you”
• or “blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God”
• or “the last shall be first and the first shall be last”
• or any of the other radical things that Jesus taught us

they tried and struggled and succeeded and failed in marvelous and manifold ways.

Jesus’ Theme Verses

They were—even in this, I believe—following a pattern that Jesus himself had modeled. For in our scripture lesson today, Jesus announces to his home congregation his own theme verses. 

In the hearing of women and men who were his teachers and neighbors and faith leaders and customers of his dad’s woodworking shop and others who had been witnesses as young Jesus “grew and became strong, filled with wisdom; and the favor of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40 NRSV)——In the hearing of all these who had seen him grow from child to adult in this little backwater town of Nazareth, Jesus stands up in synagogue (in their religious gathering) and he reads these words:

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Jesus read these words before them, and then he said “This scripture is being fulfilled today.” 

Those hearing knew clearly enough what Jesus meant that Luke didn’t feel the need to editorialize in his gospel. That’s why they got so upset. It’s one thing to preach a sermon that leaves everyone with a warm-fuzzy feeling; it’s quite another to prophetically proclaim that God’s focus falls on someone you understand to be undeserving.

Jesus claims his anointing is to bring

• good news to the poor and not to the rich.
• good news to the prisoners but not their jailers
• good news to the impaired but not the whole
• good news to the oppressed but not the oppressors.

And to make sure they don’t miss his point, Jesus then reaches back to their own sacred scriptures and makes reference to God’s “good news” that was brought to foreigners… outsiders… enemies.

It’s no wonder they wanted to kill him. Many a pastors today have lost their jobs for preaching similar sermons. 

The Violence of Selfishness

It is tragic how much we fight other people having good things if we do not also get them ourselves, whether or not we need them. 

There are plenty of places where this shows up in society today, especially around the issues of employment or health care. If a person does not get a certain benefit in their own life—or did not when they were younger—it seems they cannot abide by someone else having that benefit—even if they would have themselves been glad to have received it at that point in their life. Or maybe they don’t even need it anymore, but they will fight tooth and nail to keep someone else from having something they cannot themselves benefit from. 

It’s a kind of selfishness that works its way out of us in dangerous ways, as it did Jesus’ hearers in this story. And so they at first dismissed and discounted him: it’s just Joseph’s boy. 

But eventually, they became so inflamed in their passions that they set upon Jesus with murderous rage—that someone they believed was undeserving would gain liberty and love from God was untenable. And so they pushed and pressed him to the precipice outside town. They intended to see him plummet to his death, but somehow Jesus peacefully passes between them.

But Jesus did not leave these verses behind. This isn’t just a sermon Jesus preaches. It is the life he lived writ large. He took these verses into his heart and into his mind and into his life, and he lived them out, as he had begun to do even before this sermon in Nazareth. 

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me…

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me….”

Yes it is, Jesus, yes it is. And that was recognized even by those he was speaking to as well—even by those who sought to kill him. How could it not have been? 

How could they not have heard rumors of his baptism—of a dove descending and a voice from the sky?—”This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased” (Matthew 3:17)

How could they not recognize it, after what they had heard of Jesus coming out of the desert after his temptation full of “the power of the Spirit”? (Luke 4:14)

How could they not recognize it, having witnessed their wayward son working his way around the Galilean preaching circuit and being praised by everyone? (Luke 4:15)

How could they not recognize it?

because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor.

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…”

The good news Jesus preaches is the same good news that John the Baptist heralded. The good news is that the Kingdom of God is here, that repentance results in a change of state; that whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you have done, whatever the world thinks of you, the Kingdom of God that liberates all to life abundant is coming—and indeed it is already here!

Good news to the poor.

“Blessed are you who are poor” Jesus will say, “for yours is the kingdom of God” (Luke 6:20). And also: “woe to you who are rich for you have received your consolation.”

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor…”

He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives 

“He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives…”

Release to the captives… like the captive woman captured in a sting operation by the local constabulary. She is, as we see in John chapter 8, guilty beyond a shadow of doubt…… caught red-handed. Her captors—powerful men who purpose to pursue punishment for this woman while shielding a man like themselves—they know the law is clear, however selectively they seek to apply it.

But when they brought her to Jesus, they seem to have failed to understand that he purposes to proclaim release to the captives. “I do not condemn you,” he tells this traumatized and victimized woman. “You are free. Begin anew and live a new life.”

You see, “release” is an interesting word. It’s actually the same word as “free” in the later phrase “to let the oppressed go free.” But most of the time in the bible, it means “forgiveness.” To forgive is to liberate. To forgive is to release. In receiving God’s forgiveness, we—like that condemned woman—are released from our mistakes and from our past and from everything that holds us back, and we are liberated into a second chance… a new life… the opportunity to live into more.

and recovery of sight to the blind, 

“He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind.”

Blind folks seem to be attracted to Jesus like ants to a picnic. There’s the man born blind in John 9. There’s the blind man in Bethsaida whose blindness took two attempts and a bunch of spit to heal (Mark 8). There’s the pair that found him together in Matthew 9. And of course the countless multitudes lumped together when we’re told simply that “great crowds came to him, bringing with them the lame, the maimed, the blind, the mute, and many others. They put them at his feet, and he cured them” (Matthew 15:30 NRSV).

Surely “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Jesus, because he has been anointed to bring good news to the poor… to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind.”

to let the oppressed go free

And he has also been anointed “to let the oppressed go free.”

It is vital that we recognize that when Jesus speaks of the oppressed, he means the oppressed. He doesn’t mean that false victimhood used by the majority to solidify power against the minority—a page out of the devil’s playbook that far too many American Christians are following these days.

Jesus was himself a Jew and poor and a minority, and he lived in a land and nation possessed and plundered by a ruthless foreign power. He was no one and nothing to his world, just another nobody with his back against the wall. Yes, Jesus knew oppression in a way most of us in this conversation can never imagine it. 

But what Jesus himself initiates in “letting the oppressed go free” is not political revolution but personal restoration. The government is inconsequential to Jesus except in the way that it prevents people from living into the abundant life of God.

And so Jesus finds men and women—such as the Geresene demoniac formerly known as “Legion” in Mark 5)—and he evicts every impediment to freedom. Encountering this man bound by physical chains, and spiritual chains, and societal chains, and psychological chains, Jesus does not offer thoughts and prayers. Rather Jesus intervenes in the man’s life in a way that both brings restoration and life to the man, and binds their fates inexplicably together—both will be driven away because the community is unwilling to allow the oppressed to go free. They are unwilling to accept that this man who lived in torment might experience a restoration that they themselves do not need.

Yes, Jesus is committed to letting the oppressed go free.

“to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” 

This last part of Jesus’ theme verses doesn’t make him any more popular among us. He “proclaims the year of the Lord’s favor.”

This is most certainly a reference to the Year of Jubilee, prescribed by God for society in Leviticus 25. As God intended for society, a “year of jubilee” was to happen every fifty years in which all debts were forgiven, all property was restored to those who sold it, all those forced into slavery by poverty would be restored, and so on. God did not intend economics to impair the future of anyone. And certainly the misfortunes and missteps of one generation were not to be heaped onto their children. 

This concept of Jubilee—of forgiveness, and restoration, and reconciliation, and healing—it permeates the whole of Jesus’ life. When he is criticized because his disciples don’t fast enough, Jesus responds with hints of Jubilee as he compares his presence with that of a wedding to be celebrated. 

He teaches his disciples to pray “forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors” (Matthew 6:12). Jubilee is written right into the Lord’s Prayer.

And it is how the early Church understood his life. In Colossians 2, Paul says:

“He destroyed the record of the debt we owed, with its requirements that worked against us. He cancelled it by nailing it to the cross.”

Colossians 2:14 (CEB)

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”

Discipling

These theme verses chart the roadmap for Jesus’ own life and activity. They undeniably foreshadow the content of his life’s activity and work.

And that means—friends, Church—that it provides a roadmap for life’s activity and work for everyone who seeks to become a disciple of Jesus.

As Christians, if we are intent on “following” Jesus, we will busy ourselves with the kinds of things Jesus did, and that means participating in these liberating activities within the context of this very present world. 

Is this not what Jesus himself said to us?

“You are truly my disciples if you remain faithful to my teaching.”

John 8:31 (CEB)

Or:

“I have given you an example: Just as I have done, you also must do.”

John 13:15 (CEB)

To believe otherwise (Jesus continues) is to assume that you (the disciple) are greater than the one you are discipling.

Outro

So you see, as his disciples we have to understand that these are Jesus’ theme verses. We have to understand that they set the stage for his ministry in this world while he remained incarnate… embodied… enfleshed… among us and with us. This is the ministry that Jesus engaged in and took on himself. This is what mattered enough for him to devote the whole of his earthly existence to it.

It is what he sought to teach his disciples. And when he sent them out two by two, to the lands near and far and throughout the ancient Roman Province of Judea and beyond, the realities of these verses are what he sought they learn to lay their own hands on, that they (in turn) might teach it and embody it for others.

In doing so, Jesus knew that this world could be changed from bottom to top, from outside to inside, from least to greatest. This redemption… this liberation… this life… is not something that was going to come through the religious establishment. It is not going to come through political gain. It is not going to come when they establish a nation in their own imagining of God. 

Instead, this Kingdom reality would come when people were drawn by God’s love into a life of discipleship and shaping, so that we would learn to do the things that Jesus did. So we would learn to value the things Jesus values…… the people that Jesus values. So that we might learn ourselves to recognize when the Spirit of the Lord is upon us, and that our lives—our whole life…… our every decision… our every activity… our every everything proclaims good news to the poor, liberty to the captive, freedom to the oppressed, and absolution to those chained to debt.

If we are discipling Jesus, then these commitments and these priorities and these activities will be the sum of our life’s content and work, just as they were for Jesus himself. 

And just as Jesus recognized this is work that required the partnership of the disciples, so it is work that we cannot undertake alone. It must be embodied—incarnate—through the ongoing presence of Jesus in the world known as the Church.

As surely as Jesus has set his own priorities, he has set ours as well. The Church of Jesus Christ will prioritize the vulnerable, or it is not the church of Jesus at all.

Good News to a Wall-Weary World

This sermon is the twelfth and final in a series simply titled “Resurrection.” Like the previous series, “Resurrection” was born out of the resources provided by my attendance at this year’s McAfee Preaching Consultation, hosted by my alma mater. One of the speakers at that event, and the originator of this series, was colleague and fellow McAfee School of Theology alumnus, Shaun King. The sermons of my series are largely inspired by and at times follow his own, sometimes roughly and other times more closely. For anyone interested, here is the link to the website of Shaun’s church, which archives his video-taped sermons. A warning: You will no doubt find him to be the superior preacher.

Responsive Reading: Psalm 10:1-2, 12-18

Scripture Reading: Matthew 27:50-54

Divided

It seems that every month or so, word of some new research shows up in my inbox or social media accounts—new research which unwaveringly has proven yet again that we are more divided than ever before:

• the divide between Republican and Democrat
• the gulf between rich and poor 
• the experience of black or white Americans
• the culture of rural versus urban areas
• the ideological breach between generations

And yes, even between and within churches who claim to follow Jesus, for we are not immune to these societal realities and the pressures they exert among us.

Though we human beings were built in God’s image to be in community—for God exists in the perpetual community of the Trinity—we have for generations (millennia even!) partitioned God’s good creation and ourselves into smaller and smaller units. We have closed ourselves…… distanced ourselves…… divided ourselves from creation and from one another……. and even from God.

And yet I believe there is something in us…… In every human being there is some deep inner longing for connection…… reconciliation…… reunion…… a community of togetherness that feels like home.

While the powers and principalities we discussed last week are busy building walls and dividing us from each other and from God, I believe we live in a wall-weary world…… among wall-weary people…… who (despite our weariness) know little more than how to build more walls in our hearts and minds and physical world in an effort to protect what we hold valuable.

But sisters and brothers: the Church of Jesus Christ is intended to show the world something better.

Ephesians

In writing to the Ephesian church, the apostle Paul worked to address divisions that seem to have been just as polarized and aggressive as many we experience today. 

At this point in the story of the early Church, Christians still consider themselves Jews in terms of their religious identity—they just happen to be Jews who believe that Jesus was the coming messiah. If you think changing the color of the carpet in the church building is controversial, try telling everyone that Jesus has already come back and they missed it—see how that works out for you!

To visualize this: try to hold in your mind the two most polarized and aggressive groups you can imagine from our world today, and imagine them in a church business meeting together. That’s what Paul is up against, as he is trying to remind them they have the opportunity to show the world something better. And this is what he says:

“For he [that’s Jesus] is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us.”

Ephesians 2:14 (NRSV)

Beloved, in Christ—in his own flesh and blood—the crucifixion and resurrection is intended by God to demolish every wall we have erected between us. And not just between us: between us and God, between others and God, and even between parts of ourself. Paul says there is in Christ the capacity to erase every perceived wall of division.

Resurrection, the Series

For some time now, we have been noodling on the theme of resurrection. All along the way I have been insisting that we have this audacious claim that you and I actually can experience the true aliveness of resurrection.

But the truth is that many of us will never experience the fullness of life that Jesus intended when he said “I came that they may have life and have it to the fullest” (John 10:10).

Some of us will never experience that because of the reality that we live in a wall-weary world and we keep constructing walls—and the problem is that when we build walls to secure ourself in the midst of a fearful time we build these walls out of the materials of the soul. And if we don’t recognize that even we in the church are building walls against each other, then one day we will wake up and find that the castle of the soul is gone.

Resurrection is intended to break down every perceived barrier between us. Resurrection is not just a one-time event, but an all-the-time invitation to a way of life. 

Matthew Is Weird

A couple weeks ago, we looked to the account of Jesus’ resurrection in the gospel of Mark, and we explored some of its strangeness. Today—on this last week of the resurrection series—we are doing the same with Matthew’s account. And as I hope you will come to see too, this may be the most important resurrection passage of all those we have considered.

If you remember from the reading a few minutes ago, there are some weird things that happen in these few short verses—not all of which are testified to in the other gospels. 

In v.50 of Matthew 27, Jesus cries out and dies. And at that moment or sometime within Resurrection Weekend three things happen whose significance might not have been noticed immediately, but to those early followers of Jesus they spoke volumes about God’s being, and God’s mission, and the priorities and work of all who would follow Jesus.

• “At that moment [we read in v.51] the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.”——that’s #1.
• “The earth shook, and the rocks were split.”—that’s #2.
• “The tombs also were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. After his resurrection they came out of the tombs and entered the holy city and appeared to many”—that’s #3.

It’s weird, right? There’s all kinds of resurrection going on, and a lot to do with walls. We’re told that at Jesus’ death:

• The veil of the Temple was split from top to bottom.
• The earth quaked and rocks split open.
• Tombs burst open.
• And the dead walked again.

Friends, I want to suggest that these verses reveal how the true power of resurrection is that the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus—and the resurrection that is your invitation to be alive—has the capacity to literally, tangibly erase every barrier between us and God, between each other, and between us and our segmented/compartmentalized inner life.

The Veil

Let’s start with the veil.

If you look to the way the tabernacle was constructed—and later on the Temple in Jerusalem as well—its very architecture was constructed to move from plainness to spectacular…… from ordinary to extraordinary…… from mundane to sacred. And in this Temple—in the innermost part—was found the Holy of Holies, the place where it was thought the presence of God abided. 

Even the materials used followed this pattern, with gradations of holiness from ordinary wood on the outside to gold, and ultimately to only the Ark of the Covenant in the Holy of Holies. 

Separating God’s holy space from the rest of the Temple and the world was a curtain. This massive woven veil walled off the holy from the profane…… the sacred from the mundane. This inner sanctum of God was so holy that only one person could enter and only once a year to make sacrifice for the sins of the people. 

With Jesus’ death and resurrection, Matthew says this veil was not just torn, but torn from top to bottom. It didn’t get knocked off the curtain rod by the earthquake and fall down. It was not vandalized during the hours of darkness. There was only one way for that curtain to be torn from top to bottom, and that is for God to have done it Godself. 

That the curtain is torn from top to bottom is a proclamation of God’s doing. God was rendering asunder every perceived separation between humanity and divinity. It is as though God was insisting: I am now accessible to you.

The writer of Hebrews puts it this way:

 “So, friends, we can now—without hesitation—walk right up to God, into “the Holy Place.” Jesus has cleared the way by the blood of his sacrifice, acting as our priest before God. The “curtain” into God’s presence is his body.”

Hebrews 10:19 (MESSAGE)

After his resurrection, the veil being torn from top to bottom was understood to be a statement from God that every barrier between us and God is not something God erected but we did. And God is constantly attempting to tear asunder every perceived separation. God has been, has always been, is now, and will always be accessible to you.

I know it hasn’t always felt that way to you—it certainly hasn’t to me. But our perceived distance from God and our perceived inaccessibility of God are rooted in constructions of this world’s making. God loves you—whether you like it or not.

As Paul reminds us in 2Corinthians 3, when we turn to Christ the veil is removed (v.16). When the veil is removed—when we wake up to the reality that there is no veil between us and God, it is as though God is looking at you and you are looking at God and you are being transformed into the mirror image of God one degree at a time (v.18).

Sometimes we put up walls between us and God, but the resurrection is this constant statement from God: No more!

We may live in a wall-weary world, but the one who made the world and loved the world and sent his son to redeem the world has torn down the wall between you and the one who loves you.

Amen?

The Earthquake

That’s the veil; now the earthquake.

We read in Matthew 27:51 that “the earth shook, and the rocks were split” (NRSV).

Now we might be tempted to believe that this is a detail that gives color to the story but is of no real significance. But I think we would be wrong. I don’t think Matthew tells us anything that is unnecessary. And I do believe that this sequence of the veil being torn, the rocks burst open, and the dead walking is of tremendous significance to the early Church’s understanding of the resurrection of Jesus and the life of discipleship.

So why would Matthew (and the early church) think it is so important for us to understand that where there is resurrection rocks burst open?

….

Have you ever watched anyone mix concrete—or done so yourself? There’s the mix and the sand and the water…… and it has to be stirred and mixed constantly until it is used. The longer you go without stirring it, the harder it becomes. It can concretize right before you eyes.

Friends, in this wall-weary world, if you do not spend time with someone who is not like you, your heart will never be stirred. And it will become hard—inpenetrable!—to understand where others are coming from…… and that is when walls begin to be erected.

In Ezekiel, God tells us that it is possible for your heart to become stone. Here’s what we read there in chapter 36 and verse 26:

“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”

Ezekiel 36:26 (NIV11)

If we insist on living our lives safely and securely inside the walls we build to keep those like us safe from those who are not like us, our hearts will never be stirred to consider to the reality that there are nearly 8 billion people on this planet…… and that means there are nearly 8 billion ways God is attempting to be seen and known and loved even as we speak.

And if I want to be content only knowing God the way I have encountered God—okay, I guess, but my heart will be stone. 

And that is not what God wants for us. God wants to give us a new heart…… a heart of living, beating, compassionate, squishy flesh. And the reason that so many of us so often throw stones at each other is because we refuse to allow God to do a sacred heart transplant—a sacred heart transplant!

And so our hearts can become concretized for so long that it takes the transformation of resurrection for us to open them to God and each other. 

Our hearts are becoming concretized when we start thinking of others as The Other—you know:

• I just don’t understand why they think that way
• How could anybody live like that?
• You have to be stupid to think like that person
• I don’t understand those people at all
• And those people…… and that group…… and that person…… 

These are all clues that the heart is becoming stone. And the only way to experience resurrection is to allow the sacred sledgehammer of resurrection to burst through the heart of stone…… to break it into gravel so God can give us once more a heart of flesh, beating in rhythm with God’s own.

When Jesus was raised from the dead, the earth shook and the rocks split open because that is exactly what God wants to do with me and with you. 

Because can you not feel the earth shaking these days? Can you not feel the rumble of something beneath your feet?

In Romans 8, Paul writes that the earth itself groans with longing for its transformation (v.22ff). Maybe everything we are experiencing and feeling is part of this groaning—meant by the resurrected king to turn our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh?

The Walking Dead

So back to Matthew and the resurrection…… It is not only that the veil is split, and that God removed the perceived separation between us and God. And it’s not only that rocks split open, demonstrating that God desires for us to break open the hardness of heart that we have for one another, so we can live and abide with each other and with God.

The text also says that the bodies of many of the saints were raised from the dead and were seen walking into the city.

Now this is the weirdest part of it all, which is probably why we have largely ignored it completely. And this is the only place in any of the gospels that names it.

• Who were these people? We don’t have their names or stories.
• How are they experienced by others? We are only told they were seen.
• What did they do in the city? We don’t know.
• What happens to them afterward? Where do they go? What do they do? We just aren’t told.

And also: Why is it so important that Matthew tells us that when Jesus was resurrected so were others?

Maybe a hint can be found in Ephesians. This sermon started in Ephesians 2, and if we skip over to Ephesians 4:8 we find this interesting verse:

“Therefore it is said, “When he ascended on high he made captivity itself a captive.”

Ephesians 4:8 (NRSV)

He made captivity itself a captive.

You know what is not surprising about Jesus?—I mean, not if you’ve been around him for very long. He is able to set a person free from a thing. We know this because we have stories—you and me and everyone else—we are living stories about how Jesus has the capacity to set us free from that which holds us captive.

• He can set a person free from fear.
• He can set a person free from addiction
• He can set a person free from patterns of self destruction
• He can set a person free from the wounds of the past
• He can set a person free from hate…… from prejudice…… from racism.

But what may be most powerful about the resurrection——and remember: the resurrection is not just a one-time event but an all-the-time invitation to a way of life—— What is most interesting and powerful about the resurrection is that he sets captivity free. Ephesians tells us that he took captivity as captive. That means he doesn’t just set people free from the thing that keeps them captured, but he sets the entire experience of captivity free. 

Another way of putting this is: he puts death to death. Paul says this in 1Corinthians 15:54: 

“When this perishable body puts on imperishability, and this mortal body puts on immortality, then the saying that is written will be fulfilled: “Death has been swallowed up in victory.””

1 Corinthians 15:54 (NRSV)

The dead walk on Easter weekend because the victory we have in the resurrection is that death no longer wins. Not just his death on the cross, and not just your death (as in your coming death), but the death that you live with every day: the dying, and the decay, and whatever it is that keeps you from perceiving that you can never live fully alive. 

…

For twelve weeks now, you have been listening to me talk about resurrection. 

• From all the way back in the beginning as I quoted Irenaus: “The glory of God is a human being who is fully alive”
• To the constant refrain of Jesus: “I came that they may have life, and have it to the fullest” (John 10:10).

And I know that some of you are working to hold all that at a distance because it seems like too much promise…… like too much hope…… like too good of news to be true. Trust me: I know, because I struggle with these impulses every day. I fight every day against the belief that there is some reason that I am entombed while everyone else is fully alive.

But Jesus—through the resurrection to new life—takes the death that you and I live with every day, and takes the keys of our captivity out of death’s hands.

You were made to be free from the tomb that you live in every day.

This Jesus stuff isn’t about the life to come as much as it is about life here and now. Throughout the gospels—and especially Matthew’s—Jesus insists over and over that the Kingdom that we’re all waiting for has already come. It is here! It begins now! Eternity is right now; forever is right here.

That’s why when these who were dead got up out of their tombs on Easter weekend, the text tells us that “they walked into the holy city.” And of course they do! Isn’t that what the dead have been longing for?—to walk into the holy city?

Isn’t that what we are all longing for?—to walk into the holy city of the Jerusalem of the age to come?

Maybe they are there to remind us of our longing? Maybe they are nameless and story-less because they are us? Maybe the thing we are longing for—the kind of freedom that gets us into the Kingdom is right here and is right now?

And so their resurrection is inviting you to be part of that holy city—not somewhere else and not sometime else— but the holy city of the heart where Christ abides and is alive.

…

How does this sound to your ears today?

It’s possible you’re in a place where it all sounds great. You’d like to live in a wall-less world, but here you are making your way through a wall-weary world, bumping into barriers and partitions everywehre you go. Sometimes the blockade is between you and God and there doesn’t seem to be anything you can do to get around the curtain. 

• Friend, you don’t have to. The curtain is gone. 

Or it’s possible you keep bumping into these partitions because you don’t understand why that group is marching, or that group is posting what they are, or that group thinks this other thing would be a good idea—and the walls you keep bumping into are those separating people from people. Maybe the frustration you feel is the earth shaking beneath your feet because God is attempting to split open a heart of stone so your heart can beat in rhythm with God’s own. 

Or maybe the wall you bump into every day when you wake up is: Today’s going to be the same as yesterday; I’m stuck in this tomb; I’m in the same predicament today as yesterday and every day before me; I cannot escape this tomb, and cannot have the kind of joy or hope or fullness or reconciliation or peace that I see other people have. 

• Maybe you need to hear that that separation between you and life is gone. 

Prayer

Maybe you need to pray this way today:

God, I don’t know what to do. I just know how I feel, and I can’t always trust how I feel.

I know what I think. But my thinking seems to always bring me back into another wall.

So I’m asking you to hear me say: I don’t know what to do without you. And I don’t know what next step to take other than to lay down my hands and to relinquish my own attempts to control or construct my life with walls and separation. 

I need you. I confess to you that I need you to come into my life with a kind of sacred sledgehammer to break up the part of my heart that has resisted you. And if you do that, I will receive you. I’ll let you in. I’ll give you a shot.

Forgive me for all the ways I have built a barrier between me and you, and help me live free……. resurrected…… alive…… 

I pray in the name of Jesus, who tore down every barrier, Amen—may it be so.

8. Outro

Whoever you are, wherever this journey with God is taking you, remember that this life of faith and resurrection is not a path to undertake alone. God built us for community, and it is in community that we learn to live and love and share.

Whatever prayers the spirit has spoken to and through your heart this morning, I hope you will reach out to me and tell me about it. I want to know about what God is doing in you and how this church and I might come alongside you during this season. 

So send me an email, a direct message, even just comment on this video that you’d like me to reach out—I’ll send you a message, and our conversation can begin. 

Remember, God’s rooting for you. And we’re all in this together.

Making a Fuss about Nothing (Easter 2021)

This sermon is the seventh in a series simply titled “Resurrection.” Like the previous series, “Resurrection” was born out of the resources provided by my attendance at this year’s McAfee Preaching Consultation, hosted by my alma mater. One of the speakers at that event, and the originator of this series, was colleague and fellow McAfee School of Theology alumnus, Shaun King. The sermons of my series are largely inspired by and at times follow his own, sometimes roughly and other times more closely. For anyone interested, here is the link to the website of Shaun’s church, which archives his video-taped sermons. A warning: You will no doubt find him to be the superior preacher.

Responsive Reading: Psalm 118:1-2, 14-24

Scripture Reading: John 20:1-18

Headless Chickens

You know, one of the things that has always stood out to me about this story is all the movement. According to John’s telling, there are a lot of people running around, and a lot of things happening.

• When Mary sees that the stone has been moved which had blocked the tomb entrance, she runs and tells Peter and another disciple that Jesus’ body is missing (v.2).
• They, in turn, not just run to tomb but literally race each other there. 
• The other disciple reaches the tomb first, perhaps leaning against the entrance as he catches his breath and looks in at the linen wrappings; and then Peter blasts past him, into the tomb without even pausing. 
• The two of them—having now seen but not understood (according to v.9)—then return to the other disciples, presumably to confirm Mary’s initial report.
• But Mary Magdalene remains rooted by her grief, and so it is to her that the risen Christ appears, and it is to her that the first proclamation of the resurrection is entrusted. 
• Thus ordained to proclaim this mystery of the faith, Mary then travels back to the disciples to bear witness once again.

Isn’t it interesting that all this running around—all this fuss—is really about…… nothing?

• Mary ran, distraught, to the disciples because there was nothing in the tomb.
• Peter and the other disciple sprinted to the tomb, racing each other so they could be the first to see that nothing was there.
• They then return to the disciples to tell them that they found nothing.
• And even when Jesus speaks to Mary, he tells her that he will soon be absent—gone to be with their heavenly Father.

All this enthusiasm as they run around on that resurrection morning—veritable foot races and everything! And what are they so disturbed and excited to see?—that NOTHING is there. They are literally making a fuss about nothing.

Foolish

Maybe I’m having a bit of fun this morning with a play on words, but I think there’s something worthwhile here.

You see, the resurrection (and other anchors of faith) are not things that are easily understood outside of a life lived with Jesus. They don’t seem to make much sense when viewed from the perspective of society’s rules. 

There’s a story I’ve told before about a man who believed his dog was resurrected. The story is true, though I continue to doubt the resurrection. But hearing that story revealed to me  (and reminds me still) how unwilling I am to believe something like a resurrection was possible in the world…… how easily and rapidly I dismiss and explain away the possibility of one of the fundamental proclamations of our common faith in Jesus.

It’s hard to believe in something like resurrection, because we have been taught it is impossible—the world just doesn’t work that way. And while believing in a genuine possibility of literal resurrection may or may not be a big deal in our daily lives, there are many other things Jesus teaches and demonstrates that seem equally impossible and equally dismissible. 

“Whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all.”

Mark 10:43–44 NRSV

“Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone.”

John 8:7 NRSV

“If you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the [gehenna] of fire.”

Matthew 5:22 NRSV

“Everyone who looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”

Matthew 5:28 NRSV

“If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”

Matthew 5:39–42 NRSV

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.”

Matthew 5:44 NRSV

And let us not forget such astounding proclamations as:

“Blessed are you who are poor… you who are hungry now… you who weep now…” you who are hated and reviled and defamed.

These are not the people we consider blessed; these are the people—if we are honest—that we consider cursed: for that is how the world sees them.

Because we have been taught that the world doesn’t work that way, we dismiss these teachings of Jesus just as readily as we do the possibility of resurrection. We spiritualize and dismiss into the future the very realities that Jesus sought to bring into people’s present…. 

• that very real liberation from present captivity, 
• that very real healing of present pains and obstacles to life, 
• that very real freedom from the very real oppression that the powers and principalities have imposed on us for so long we’ve lost the ability to imagine it could be any different, 
• that very real reset and restoration of life and creation within this present sphere (cf. Luke 4:18-19).

These are all things that Jesus said (at the very beginning of his public work) that he was going to do. 

It’s foolishness isn’t it? That’s what the apostle Paul says in 1Corinthians:

“God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are.”

1 Corinthians 1:27–28 NRSV

This is the foolish wisdom we find in Christ, and we have to purposely remember the foolish bit, because that is us. It looks foolish according to the ways of the world. It looks weak and demeaning and distasteful and outright ridiculous—it looks like we are making a fuss about nothing—but that is only because we have forgotten that God is true reality, and everything else is illusion.

Proving God?

Just like “proving” the resurrection was impossible that day for Mary and the other disciples, proving God, or Jesus, or many of the other mysteries of our faith, is likewise just not going to happen: it will always look like nothing to those without eyes to see and ears to hear—to borrow some biblical phrasing. 

I recently came across a couple paragraphs in a book that I want to read today. The book is called Prayer in the Night, and it was written by Tish Harrison Warren—her books are wonderfully engaging and accessible and highly commended. In Prayer in the Night, she writes:

“If the question of whether God is real or not—or of whether God is kind or indifferent or a bastard—is determined solely by the balance of joy and sorrow in our own lives or in the world, we will never be able to say anything about who God is or what God is like. The evidence is frankly inconclusive. 

If the story of my short life and feelings determine God’s character, then he is Jekyll and Hyde. This way of approaching God becomes a never-ending game of poker. For every breathtaking splash of a whale’s breach, I raise you a forest fire obliterating acre after acre. For every monarch migration, I raise you ticks spreading Lyme disease. For every mother enraptured by her child’s first smile, there is another mother whose newborn struggles for his final breath. For ever inspiring act of human goodness, there is another person scheming against the weak. In all our lives, from the happiest to the most tragic, the circumstantial evidence for God’s goodness is divided. There is beauty and there is horror. 

[She continues: ] We cannot hold together human vulnerability and God’s trustworthiness at the same time unless there is some certain sign that God loves us, that he isn’t an absentee landlord or, worse, a monster. But we cannot divine such a sign from the circumstances of our lives or of the world. We have to decide what we believe about who God is and what he is like. We have to decide if anyone keeps watch with us.”

Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night, p.27-28

Later in the book, Warren suggests that the resurrection of Jesus is the only certain sign of God’s trustworthiness and character. She writes:

“Jesus’ resurrection is the sole evidence that love triumphs over death, that beauty outlives horror, that the meek will inherit the earth, that those who mourn will be comforted. The reason I can continue watching and waiting, even as the world is shrouded in darkness, is because the things I long for are not rooted in wishful thinking or religious ritual but are as solid as a stone rolled away.”

Tish Harrison Warren, Prayer in the Night, p.57

As solid as a stone rolled away. 

That’s a great line, isn’t it? But it’s more than a line—it is foundation of everything: the cornerstone, Jesus might have said. 

Without the resurrection, “we are of all people most to be pitied”—that’s the apostle Paul again, this time in 1Corinthians 15:19.

And yet how foolish that all looks: to build our lives on a stone rolled away—on the presence of nothing where there was once something. 

If you don’t get it, you may still feel like I’m making a fuss about nothing. To that, I can only smile and respond: I sure am, because that “nothing” has changed my life forever.

Living Prophecy (Palm Sunday 2021)

This sermon is the sixth in a series simply titled “Resurrection.” Like the previous series, “Resurrection” was born out of the resources provided by my attendance at this year’s McAfee Preaching Consultation, hosted by my alma mater. One of the speakers at that event, and the originator of this series, was colleague and fellow McAfee School of Theology alumnus, Shaun King. The sermons of my series are largely inspired by and at times follow his own, sometimes roughly and other times more closely. For anyone interested, here is the link to the website of Shaun’s church, which archives his video-taped sermons. A warning: You will no doubt find him to be the superior preacher.

Responsive Reading: Psalm 118:1–2, 19–29

Scripture Reading: Mark 11:1-11

Resurrection

Of late, we have been exploring resurrection—particularly those ways in which God wants to make resurrection a part of our daily lives, if only we will choose the narrow way of taking up our cross with Jesus and following him into new and abundant life. 

This week, we both are, and are not, continuing that theme. I think you’ll understand what I mean as we journey together this morning.

Today is Palm Sunday (as those paying attention may have already noticed and heard). It is a day when followers of Jesus remember—and often reenact—this particular story from Jesus’ life: what is often titled his “triumphal entry” into Jerusalem. It is the beginning of Jesus’ last week before the cross. And to be honest, it’s a bit weird—especially in Mark’s telling.

Strangeness

Jesus and some of his disciples are nearing Jerusalem—they’re about two miles away—when Jesus suddenly offers a series of strange instructions:

• You two: go on ahead of us, and as soon as you enter the city gate, you’ll notice a young donkey, tied up and seemingly unattended. Get it and bring it back to me.
• This suspicious activity also comes with a kind of passcode—a sort of code speak they are to respond with if they’re approached by someone asking a particular question—something that seems innocent to someone not in the know, but conveys important information to the right people. He might as well have said “The last swallow of summer is winging his way over the horizon!”
• Well, the disciples are approached and asked the code-question, and they give the answer Jesus told them to say. Based on the sudden presence of such a crowd, I suspect the “code” was an instruction to quietly arrange a flashmob for Jesus’ arrival—to leak information among the common folk about when and where Jesus will be entering the city.
• So then Jesus is riding this borrowed colt into the city, and people are spreading coats and leafy branches across the roadway, welcoming him as a king and shouting his praises.
• And then Jesus arrives at the temple, looks around, checks his watch—O, Me, is it that late already?—and then he turns around and goes the two miles back to Bethany for the night.

It is weird, isn’t it?

Prophecy: General Expectations 

I want to suggest that virtually everything that feels weird about this story happens because of Jesus’ choice to live out particular prophecies about the messiah, and to not live out other prophecies. 

At the time and place in which Jesus begins a human existence, there were some rather developed traditions about who the messiah would be and what the messiah would do. If we wanted to explore these deeply and see all the connections, we could easily spend a couple months parsing out all these developments. But thankfully for us, the gospel writers succinctly sum them up within the framework of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness.

The gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke all name this prolonged period of spiritual conflict (Matthew 4; Mark 1:12-13; Luke 4). But only Matthew and Luke name the specific realities with which Jesus wrestled. It seems that this was a time of vocational discernment for Jesus: what kind of messiah was he going to be? and how would that come to pass?

• Was Jesus going to be a new Moses, feeding the people with miraculously provided bread? Based on their understanding and interpretation of the scriptures, this is what many expected.
• Was Jesus going to be an invincible miracle-worker, stunning all by his wondrous deeds and proving invulnerable to the assassination of the Roman government (the fate of other messiah-figures of the time)? 
• Or was Jesus going to be a powerful ruler—and by association, a powerful military leader—who would not just throw off the yoke of Rome but conquer the world and put the Jewish people on top of it all?

These three “tests” correlate with the three dominant expectations that folks had of the messiah. And not surprisingly so, because they all three correlate with the very real needs and hopes of a vulnerable and oppressed people…… a people who have their backs against the wall.

Their concerns are very real problems to Jesus too. As we see through his ministry, Jesus wants to feed the hungry. Jesus wants to rally the people to hope. Jesus wants them to be liberated from their oppressors. Jesus is one of them, and their hopes are his. 

But Jesus also recognizes the importance of being who he is to God, and not merely what others want him to be.

Prophecy: Specific Expectations

When we look to the crowd that welcomes Jesus into the city, we can discern a mix of these expectations. Contrary to what some of us may have inferred, the shouts of “Hosanna!” and the street strewn with greenery were a fairly ordinary means of welcoming pilgrims into the city—and this is mere days before one of the most important festivals of their religious life. 

The coats, however, are another matter altogether. Spreading their garments on the street was not a welcome to be given to a pilgrim, but to a king. There is a story in 2Kings 9 of crowds welcoming and heralding King Jehu in this precise manner. 

Then there’s the issue of the the other things the crowd shouts. “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!” might reference the messiah in a vague kind of way (Mark 11:9 NRSV). But “Blessed is the coming kingdom of our ancestor David” strongly indicates their belief in Jesus as that heir to David’s throne. 

The crowd clearly expects that Jesus, as the prophesied messiah, has entered Jerusalem as a king who will immanently liberate them from their oppressors and establish a perpetual kingdom of security and plenty.

This expectation—or perhaps Jesus’ intent to counter it—explains that strangeness at the end of the story, as Jesus simply looks around and heads back to Bethany. You see, someone claiming to be this kind of royal messiah (that they expected), someone entering the city to such shouts of acclimation and allegiance——surely this person would plant a banner and initiate a revolution: that would be the whole point of the pomp and circumstance.

But the Kingdom of Jesus does not look like we expect. It is a topsy-turvy, inside-out, upside-down inversion: the first-is-last and the last-is-first. And so we, like the crowd that day, find the ending somewhat anticlimactic.

Prophecy: Choices

Alongside these expectations of others, it is worthwhile to consider the deliberate choices Jesus makes about which prophecies to fulfill and why—and what they tell us about who he is as the messiah.

Jesus enters the city from the direction of the Mount of Olives. This happens to be the east side—the direction of the rising sun, which has royal associations in most every ancient civilization. But this is also the direction that King David left the city after Absolom rebelled. In 2Samuel 15:30, we read that David was “weeping as he went.” This east side of the city, of course, will be the place where Jesus himself weeps over Jerusalem, and where he later will pray with an intensity that seems to wring blood drops out of his soul. Moreover, the prophet Zechariah anticipated the Lord would stand on the Mount of Olives before assuming universal kingship.

Perhaps from these prophecies—these that Jesus chooses to live into—we can see (with the crowd) a connection to the Davidic kingship, though it also begins to become clear that Jesus does not understand that in the same terms as they. The prophecies he embodies may be full of similar symbolism, but they’re from the “B side,” if you know what I mean. They’re the prophecies you don’t hear on the radio.

Then there’s the donkey—the colt, in Mark’s gospel (not even a full grown donkey!). Again, Jesus reaches back to Zechariah’s prophecies. He remembers the prophecy found in Zechariah 9:9 of a king entering the city humbly, and on a donkey—rather than a war horse. That’s what some of the other prophecies anticipated, you see: a regal display of poise and power. 

But instead, Jesus chooses what was the usual beast for riding. That it is young and has never been ridden suggests that it is fit for ceremonial use, as indicated by texts elsewhere in their scriptures (something that perhaps hints at Jesus’ future redemptive work). And also, the fact that Jesus rides at all signals that he is not an ordinary pilgrim, merely arriving for the festival. 

Prophecy as a Choice vs. Destiny

This whole pericope is like much of Jesus’ life in miniature. All those things that Jesus was “tempted by the devil” to do are things that he ends up doing or will do. He does feed many miraculously. He does prove to be impervious to death. He does come as king and will one day reign as king over all the governments of the world. 

Everything he was “tempted” to do early on was simply a distorted version of what he intended to do anyway. The temptations themselves were mere shortcuts—but they would have cut out the most important purposes of the incarnation.

Jesus had to choose who he was going to be. He had to choose which prophecies to fulfill. He had to choose how he would embody God’s heart in the world. He had to choose to respect and love humanity enough to go the long way with us, instead of taking a shortcut past us.

You see, I think we sometimes misunderstand the nature of prophecy and the bible in a way that handicaps our ability to follow Jesus to new life. We imagine that prophecy is like fate—that someone looked into an unchanging future that we are destined to live into whether we want to or not. But thinking of prophecy in this way causes us to fall into fatalism, and it turns Jesus (and us) into automatons who cannot help but go through the preprogrammed motions. We end up at best with a laissez-faire attitude—”what will be will be”—and along the way, we lose the sense of agency in our lives: the ability to change or improve anything.

But that’s just not prophecy as we see it in the bible. That’s not faith as we see it in the bible.

In the bible, prophecy is an anticipation of what may be depending on the choices of free agents such as you and I. The Old Testament prophets are frequently warning of gloom and doom—but only if the people do not turn back to God. These prophets gained an uncanny insight into the natural consequences of peoples’ choices to go their own way. But the people remain free to choose. They can choose to embody what the prophet says they will do, or they can heed the prophet’s warning and choose a path closer to God’s heart.

It’s the same with Jesus and all this messiah stuff, too. We could cherry-pick from the bible dozens of messianic prophecies that Jesus did not fulfill. Does that mean he is not the messiah? No, it means he did not choose to live into those prophecies. Maybe that choice was because he isn’t that kind of messiah. Maybe that choice was out of reach to him as a marginalized person in the first century. Maybe that prophecy didn’t fully understand the nature of God’s heart. There are a thousand possible reasons, but ultimately Jesus recognizes that the scriptures—the prophecies—that others want the messiah to fulfill are not realities that he could take on himself in that time, in that place, in that way. 

But there were certainly others that Jesus did choose with purpose and intentionality. In this Palm Sunday story, he reaches backward into the past…… into the scriptures that he has received and allowed to provide the shape of his life. He reaches back, and he brings them into the present by embodying them all over again. That is how prophecy is fulfilled—through the conscious choice to conform our lives to the stories of the faithful who live into God’s heart.

Living Prophecy Ourselves

I want to suggest that Jesus models here a kind of resurrection that we can choose each day of our lives. 

Since before Jesus himself walked the earth, the stories of the scriptures have provided a kind of shaping to our human lives. We aspire to walk with God as Adam did in the Garden, or to trust like Noah, or to embody the faith of Abraham. Much of Hebrews chapter 11 is intended to inspire us to live out qualities of faithfulness to God that are similar to those characters in the Old Testament stories. 

And that is how Christians more specifically have long used the scriptures: we seek those places of resonance between our story and the biblical stories——both for hope and for leading.

• When we find ourselves depressed and despairing, we might remember Elijah giving up hope and being cared for by God.
• When we find ourselves on the precipice of a new beginning, we might remember Abraham: called to journey into a new land and a new future with God.
• When we find ourselves the victims of unjust systems, we might long for a liberation like the Israelites achieve from Egypt.
• When we face an insurmountable obstacle, we might remember the parting of the Reed Sea or the Jordan River.
• When we find our story in the biblical story, we discover hope and meaning and direction—and we usually discover how God is present with us.

But we can also choose, like Jesus, to embody in the world the stories of the scriptures. 

• We can choose to shape our life toward compassion like the Good Samaritan.
• We can choose to risk something of ourselves for others like Esther.
• We can choose to express trust even in hardship, like the Psalmist.
• We can choose to demonstrate hospitality as Abraham does.
• We can choose to shape our families by a devotion like Ruth.
• We can choose the long and difficult way of the Kingdom instead of the shortcuts the world offers.
• We can choose to model our priorities after those lived out and taught by Jesus the Christ, the Son of God, our savior and redeemer and friend.

In a sense, when we do these things we are living into prophecy, embodying biblical stories and teachings and “resurrecting” them into our present lives.

It is a resurrection because we bring them into being—we make them real—all over again. We bring them back into the sphere of current events, resurrecting them from history—resurrecting them from the past into the present, from story into reality, from dust into life.

But of course, we don’t do this just by forcing ourselves to go through the same motions that they did. We do not live prophecy like Jesus by constraining our lives to a reenactment that is tone-deaf to context and the changes of time and place.

We live prophecy through carefully considering and recognizing where God’s heart is at the present and how we are best able to embody it and identify it. 

Hope to the Hopeless

And the fact that Jesus does not choose to embody all those prophecies of a conquering king is in fact good news. Even here——especially here, on the eve-eve-eve-eve-eve (5) of his death——Jesus is busy teaching us and inviting us into an intimate knowledge and experience of God’s heart.

In this story, the government is incidental.
The religious establishment didn’t get the memo.
The wealthy were busy with their business.

But the crowd—the ordinary, poor, downtrodden, oppressed, unemployed, chronically sick, homeless, widowed, orphaned, those with mental illness—those who need saving: to them, the arrival of Jesus to town was the best news of their lives.

I had a professor in seminary who used to say: “If you don’t find hope in Revelation, you haven’t really known oppression.”

I want to suggest: If Jesus coming to town doesn’t make you shout Hosanna!, you haven’t yet realized how desperately you need saving.

• Jesus isn’t hope to the hopeful; he is hope to the hopeless.
• Salvation isn’t for those who can save themselves, but those who cannot.
• Grace is extended in proportion to weakness, and not strength.
• It is only those who know they need help that can accept rescue.

Such is the way of this kingdom of God:

• wherein a baby, born into insignificance, is recognized as King of Kings and Lord of Lords, 
• wherein the greatest wisdom of all time emerges from the most backwater town, 
• wherein the most earthy of folks are chosen for religious leadership,
• wherein our front-line general is the first to die,
• and wherein the cross provides the roadmap to life.

With this Jesus, there is resurrection.

And yes, there will be resurrection at the end of time, when the dead are raised and we take on bodies like that of the resurrected Jesus.

But God is working resurrection right here right now, for those who take on the invitation to this Jesus Way of life.

An Invitation

If you’re interested in this resurrection—this abundant life that Jesus is offering, or if you are suddenly more aware than ever of the ways your life is not shaped in a way that allows you to truly live; if you need a second chance for the umpteenth time, or if you just need a little hope to make it through another day: I invite you to cast your eyes to Jesus, and pray something like this:

God,
Things in my life are not right.
I’ve tried and tried, but I’m just not getting ahead.
It feels like I’m drowning, and I cannot save myself.

Pull me out of this ditch.
Direct me in the way I should go.
Help me hear my story in those of the bible,
and teach me to live into their stories—
living prophecy and resurrection as Jesus taught.

Grow in my soul a shout of Hosanna,
that rises up to Jesus—
the very Jesus who promises to be my friend.

May I learn to bless his name
through my words and the story of my life,
and all for your glory, O God.

Amen—may it be so.

Friends, I have been praying about this, and I believe that there is at least one person out there who has joined us and who prayed along with me just now. And I have a special message for that person, whoever they may be:

Friend: God loves you. God is for you. God is pulling out all the stops in your life, trying to work with you and others to bring about the kind of change that matters. 

You see, God intends good for you. God delights in you. God’s eyes sparkle when God thinks of you, and there is nothing you can ever do—or that could ever be done to you—that changes any of that. 

God’s love is steadfast, solid in ways that make this world seem a vapor. You matter so much that God decided you were worth dying for. I cannot think of anything that would convey greater importance or love.

If you prayed something this morning—whether for the first or the fiftieth time—I’d like to ask you to reach out to me. Send me a direct message or email, give me a call, join me on the Thursday night zoom, send me a carrier pigeon or a telegraph or anything! I want to hear about what God is doing in you. I want to pray for you and with you. I want to walk with you on the next steps of your tentative journey towards God’s loving heart.

Faith is a journey we were built to take together.

Life Lessons from Jesus: Transformation

For the next few weeks, we will be exploring “Life Lessons from Jesus,” a series conceived of by my brilliant friend Rev. Mindi Welton-Mitchell and based in parables of Jesus in Matthew. Mindi writes up worship resources each week and season that invite creativity and adaptation to ones local context.

Responsive Reading: Psalm 25:1–9

Scripture Reading: Matthew 21:23-32

Intro

I don’t know about you, but I’m still reeling from last week’s parable. And yet Jesus is relentless in his efforts to break the stranglehold that this world has over our lives. He will not be dissuaded from this task of liberating us from slavery to this false way of living, freeing us into the abundant, eternal kind of living we were made to live. 

Before he’s done with us today, Jesus will shake the foundations of what we believe about authority, faith, and transformation. It is transformation which makes up today’s life lesson from Jesus, but we begin where he begins (or at least where today’s story begins): with authority.

Authority

Once again—just as so many times before—Jesus is drawn into conflict. The chief priests and elders—these denominational leaders, if you will—have been trying unsuccessfully to bring this rogue Jesus under their control.

And because to them it is words that matter the most—it is saying the right things that matters more than a changed heart or a changed life—it is with words that they try to trap Jesus. If they can just get him to say the wrong thing, the folks down in PR can spin that to his disadvantage and their advantage, reasserting their control and dominance over everything regarding faith.

So they ask: “By whose authority do you say and do these things?”

Well, Jesus seems to cotton on to the manipulation happening here, so he in turn questions the questioners. What he asks is a theological question, but it too hinges on the question of authority. 

What is most telling in this story, however, is that the religious leaders do not actually debate the answer to Jesus’ question. The truth—if that is even the appropriate thing to call it—is not relevant to them. What is relevant is preventing Jesus from getting a leg up on them. They debate not the answer to Jesus’ question, but how it will reflect upon them. There is nothing here about learning and growing—it is all about power and controlling the perceptions of others.

Retelling the Parable

Jesus realizes this too, of course, and it prompts him to tell another of his stories. It’s harvest time, and dad needs all the help he can get. 

So he calls up his first child and asks him to help out. This son responds with a “no,” but later changes his mind and goes and helps. 

The second son receives a similar request, and he promises to help but then never shows up.

Which of these, Jesus asks (quite simply) in v.31, did the will of his father? It’s an obvious answer that even these denominational leaders cannot evade—the second one.

And so is it with the Kingdom of God, Jesus says. Those tax collectors and prostitutes that believed John are going to be ahead of you in line to enter the Kingdom. The last will be first and the first will be last. 

Authority & Discipleship

I want to make two quick observations about authority before we shift our focus to transformation.

First, Jesus’ authority is not diminished by being questioned, nor does it need defended. Maybe one day I’ll get around to doing a whole sermon on this, but today is not that day. For today, let me suggest that it is worth thinking about how, when Jesus is questioned in this way, he does not feel the need to correct them (publicly or privately) or to protect his authority from their conspiracies. I think this may be because Jesus knew that his authority could not be undermined by the spin of the public relations folks…… that it was grounded in something more firm and secure than the insubstantial fluff his opponents batted about.

Second, I suspect this encounter reveals that Jesus’ authority was rooted in his actions. Unless he lived out God’s priorities and purposes in this world, he would have had no authority to do or say any of the things he did. Jesus actually relates this explicitly in John 5:19, where he says: “Very truly, I tell you, the Son can do nothing on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise” (John 5:19 NRSV). Because of this, Jesus knew that these attempts to erode his authority had nothing to do with him, but they were rather attempts to erode the authority of God’s activity and purposes in this world. And on that, Jesus was quite confident that God could handle Godself.

Shift to Transformation

Notice the way authority works itself out in the parable Jesus tells. The father is the obvious authority, but the two sons have very different responses to that authority. They both seem to have the space in relationship to say no, just as we do to God’s invitation as well (that is an important part of love and healthy relationships in general). 

But one son—and only one—regards the father as an authority whose desires are more important than his own. This would of course be the first son, who “does the will of his father.”

Somewhere between his initial answer and his changed mind, this son has allowed his own priorities to fall into alignment with those of his father. Following in the way of the Kingdom of God, he knows that actions speak louder than words—and so he leaves behind his former way of thinking and follows through on the Father’s priorities.

The second son has a change of mind too. But he decides to focus inward on himself instead of outward with his father. He seems to think the lip service he gave his father is all that is owed to him, and he rejects the father’s priorities in favor of his own.

In the case of each son, their understanding of authority has direct bearing on the transformation they experience.

Transformers

Right now, my son is really into Transformers. You know Transformers, right?—”Robots in disguise.” They are these alien robots who can change into vehicles of various sorts: police cars, semi-trucks, motorcycles—even tanks and airplanes!

Anyway, there are good Transformers and bad Transformers. The good ones are always trying to protect earth, which they now see as their home. The bad ones, predictably, are trying to take it over and control everything, or else destroy it in the process.

The other day, as my son was reading to me out of his Transformers book, and as this parable of Jesus was swimming around in my mind, I started thinking about how not all transformation is good. “Do not be conformed to this world,” the apostle Paul says in Romans 12:2, “but be transformed by the renewing of your minds” (NRSV).

As we journey through life, we will be changed; that is certain. But who changes us, and how? And what does Jesus teach us about transformation—this foundational reality of life?

Two Forces

Just like in the Transformers, there are two forces working to transform us—one working to protect and liberate us, and one working to control or destroy us.

One of these forces leads us to think that our words are all that matters…… that so long as we focus on saying the right things and keeping up outward appearances—so long as we do what the second son in the parable does—everything is good. The other force leads us to see that our actions do matter—and matter even more than our words.

This struggle for our transformation can be seen playing itself out in almost every avenue of life: politics, religion, family systems, economics, social identity, patriotism, justice and injustice, and even conflict resolution. 

• This struggle begins early in life: think of that child who harmed another, insisting “But I said I was sorry!” and not understanding that words alone are not enough.

In every avenue of life, we can find that polarizing pull toward saying the right things or doing the right things.

In every avenue of life, there will be those who think that saying the right things is enough: 

• “Don’t get distracted by the contradictory actions (or lack of action) behind the curtain; just listen to the voice.”

Theological Litmus Test

I attended a baptist college in the Southeast at an interesting time in the Southern Baptist world. There had been, beginning in 1979, an tremendously successful coup by fundamentalists who strategically took over the Southern Baptist Convention, and in less time than they thought possible. But it still took a while for what had been happening at the national level of the denomination to filter down through seminaries and state conventions and begin impacting colleges and local churches. 

As the fundamentalists now leading the Southern Baptist Convention worked to exert more pressure and control on these smaller units of life, regular people found themselves rapidly polarized. A toxic us-versus-them mindset seemed to permeate everything, and people were taught to distinguish friend from enemy through a set of questions—a kind of litmus test for recognizing those “true believers.”

The unfortunate truth is that the denomination at that time did not care whether you had any depth to your relationship with Jesus, whether you practiced any disciplines as you learned to walk with your Savior, or whether you embodied the priorities of the Kingdom of God that Jesus spent so much time talking about.

What mattered was that you used the right words to talk about your faith.

• You had to insist that the bible was inspired and infallible, but no one really cared what you meant by those words.
• You had to insist that the man was the head of the household, even if your spouse managed the finances and the family and maybe earned more money than you did.
• You had to insist that the Penal Substitutionary model of atonement was the only proper understanding of the work Jesus did on the cross, even if you could not have explained it to save your life.
• You had to insist upon and espouse one particularly recent conception of the End Times and Jesus return, even though it isn’t biblical, historic, or consistent with the life and teachings Jesus.

As long as you used the right code-words, submitting to the controlling power of the denomination, you proved yourself a good Christian. 

What an unfortunate perversion of the gospel of Jesus that has been for more than 20 years now.

And Broader…

Unfortunately, recent history has seen the same approach increasingly applied to other areas of life. Many, for instance, have come to approach politics this way. They are after the politician who uses the right code-words…… who says the right things. 

As November 3rd approaches, many will look for the candidate who says what they want to hear about a particular issue or two, but they will never look to the candidate’s actions for follow through, or even at the data to see if the policies espoused are an effective means of producing the desired results. 

Far too often, this too is how many (these last years) approach churches and preachers.

• Do they use the language I want to hear?
• Do they confess the right doctrines, or use the right theological code-words?

Admittedly, these are easier and faster to evaluate than questions like: 

• Am I being invited into and equipped for a deeper relationship with God? 
• How does this group empower one another to serve others? 
• Am I growing in compassion? 
• How much more am I discovering that I have to contribute to the mission of Christ?

These are harder questions to answer, but they matter a lot more than that a preacher use particular terms to refer to the work of Jesus on the cross. In fact—I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that I’m not sure anyone’s life has ever been changed by a list of doctrines, but I absolute know many whose lives have been changed by living out God’s love through acts of compassion and service (I’m one!).

Consider the difference between these two questions:

• What do you believe about the bible?——— versus:
• Tell me about a time a bible passage prompted you to do something specific.

One of these questions focuses on saying the right things…… giving the right answer. The other emphasizes living out one’s faith.

James

Responding to anticipated criticism, the New Testament writer James challenges his opponents to a test: “Show me your faith apart from your works, and I by my works will show you my faith” (James 2:18 NRSV). It’s a strong challenge, but James has already used even stronger language than this in the previous verse, insisting that “faith by itself, if it has no works, is dead” (v.17 NRSV).

James is really just talking about the same reality of transformation that Jesus invokes in the Parable of the Two Sons. 

• One son believed he was justified in his relationship with the father because of his words—he said the right things (professing the right doctrines in “faith,” as James categorizes it), and he believed his actions were inconsequential. 
• The other son believed it was his actions (his “works”) that justified him in relationship with the father, even if his words were wrong. 

Passing the Test

I think it is regularly worth remembering that Jesus never administered a theological examination—never to those who expressed a new desire to follow him, and never to those who had followed him for years. He never makes sure they can correctly articulate a proper understanding of biblical inspiration, the end times, creation, marriage, or even what it means for him to be the Messiah!

What does Jesus say to them?

• Follow me.
• Be born again in the likeness of your heavenly Father.
• Sell all you have and give to the poor.
• Love your neighbor as yourself. 
• Pray with me.
• Love even your enemies.
• Become servants.
• Lay down your life for each other.
• Wash one another’s feet.
• Feed my sheep.
• Make disciples by baptizing them and teaching them to do everything I have commanded.

These are all actions. They are all pieces of how we live out the Kingdom Way of Jesus—things he did not just talk about, but rather things he demonstrated for us so we could see how it is done—and we can know that it can be done.

Identifying the Enemy

The forces vying to transform us may not be called Autobots and Decepticons. And it’s a lot easier to identify those dark forces in cartoons and movies than in real life. But as Jesus teaches us important lessons about transformation, we can learn to identify who is working for whom.

The vain and void repetition of calls to arms and tugs at emotional heart-strings are meaningless without actions proving character. Such things are tell-tale signs of the kind of manipulation by words that Jesus encountered in the gospel reading, that I encountered at college, and which increasingly plagues our world and nation.

In contrast, those growing in the Kingdom life of Jesus let authority rest with God, and they allow their priorities to come into alignment with God’s priorities—for their works to prove their faith, as James suggests.

Bearing Fruit

This recalls another frequent and important teaching of Jesus—and one we will be exploring next week: bearing fruit. Multiple times in the gospels, Jesus insists: “You will know them by their fruits” (cf. Matthew 7:20 NRSV). But there is a certain amount of transformation—a certain amount of maturation—in the Kingdom way of Jesus that will have to happen before such fruits become visible. That’s just the way things work in creation.

Without our actions—without our deliberate submission to Jesus’ authority, to God’s purposes, and to the Spirit’s transformation—the fruit we bear will be bitter and devoid of value to ourselves or anyone else.

But as our desires and priorities are brought into alignment with those of God as demonstrated by Jesus, the fruit of our works—the results of our actions—will provide vital nutrition for a starving world.