called Immanuel...

Readings: Isaiah 7:10-16; Psalm 80:1-7, 17-19; Romans 1:1-7; Matthew 1:18-25

No story begins so humbly as that of God’s incarnation.

An engaged girl of probably meager origins and of marriageable age, which two thousand years ago probably meant an early teen, conceives a child, but not with her fiancée. There’s potential for scandal. Her fiancée, not wanting to humiliate her but needing to be “honorable” within his social context, plans to quietly disassociate himself from her. The girl risks disgrace. But into the story is introduced a figure in a dream who assures the girl’s fiancée that he hasn’t been betrayed, that, in fact, his fiancée carries a child of the Holy Spirit, and that she accordingly fulfills an old prophecy—that a young girl would conceive and bear a son, and call him “Emanuel” (Isaiah 7:14, Matthew 1:23).

With the exception of the dream: the story doesn’t sound like a likely setting for the entrance of a person meant to be the hope for all of humanity.

Perhaps our readings this week revolve around precisely that: divine defiance of expectations. Our passage from Isaiah, long interpreted as a prediction of the arrival of Jesus, mentions the child called Immanuel as a coming sign of God: “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14).

This sign lacks the grandeur of other signs, those found in eschatological predictions and elsewhere, those which carry with them hints of the miraculous as evidence of holiness. There appears nothing grand or awe-inspiring about a pregnant young woman. But Isaiah also says that this child, who will dine on curds and honey, would grow to “refuse evil and choose good,” even in a period of great political distress (Isaiah 7:15). “Immanuel” would be a person who, with apparently superhuman consistency, would always choose the hard and righteous path.

Ahaz, in Isaiah, didn’t wish to trouble God for even this small sign: he was enjoined to ask of God a great sign, but declares “I will not ask, and I will not put the LORD to the test” (Isaiah 7:12). Isaiah, apparently sympathizing with Ahaz, declares that Israel shouldn’t weary God with demands for evidence of God’s interest; the only sign to be offered is that of the child borne of a child who will grow to be principled beyond expectation. No grandeur; no fireworks; no miracle, really, unless we’re to cynically declare that principled people are so rare as to become equal to miracles.

Our Psalm reading entreats God for grand signs, of precisely the sort which Ahaz avoided asking for. “Let your face shine, so that we may be saved,” it repeatedly asks, and reminds God that, without the visible presence of God, the people have been wont to drink their tears, and consume their sorrows (Psalm 80:19, 7, 5). The promise of a virtuous child borne of a young girl doesn’t seem a measured response either to these complaints, or to the requests they give way to. Yet Isaiah, though familiar with Israel’s tribulations, predicts that the child will be the sign. The whole sign.

Romans imbues Isaiah’s prophecy with certain characteristics which it doesn’t seem to obviously hold, among them the notion that the child will be descended from the line of David, and that he’ll be a powerful figure. We find Paul conflating noble Immanuel with messianic notions which don’t seem inherent to the Isaiah prophecy. We find him turning the child into a majestic figure, the virtuous boy into a prince among men.

How do we want to look at Jesus? We hold that he is our salvation; we catalogue and cherish his many great deeds and lessons as evidence of his greatness. We believe that he is the son of God. And yet we do all of this remembering his humble origins. We view him without needing to place a crown upon his head; he requires no such validation. We remember him without desiring that he should have overturned whole kingdoms; he was great without such temporal victories.

Instead our focus is upon his birth. We turn our eyes to his mother Mary, the otherwise ordinary young girl who we now treat with reverence and longing, because God chose her as God’s own mother. Though a child, she accepted the decree of an angel and became pregnant with a gift of the Holy Spirit, risking almost certain social irruption to do God’s bidding. Loving God, she risked her entire reputation and position. She gave birth to a child of mysterious origins, one who would become the sign of God predicted in Isaiah, one who would eventually offer hope, and salvation, to all of humanity.

Those who still had their eyes to the sky awaiting magnificent signs might have missed the one sign that superseded all others, the sign who was Jesus; looking for conventional grandeur, of the impressive sort which catches the attention of all, they might not have noticed the boy born of a virgin, raised to eschew all evil and exemplify all good, who grew into a person worthy of being called God’s son.

Our readings remind us that humble origins don’t guarantee a humble existence. God showed God’s face to humanity through the person of Jesus—through one guy in one historical place, whose mother seemed an ordinary enough woman of faith, who was raised by a stone smith while his actual paternity remained “unknown.” God chose him as the entry point into our world; he chose a young girl to give him life, and humble disciples to eventually give his teachings life beyond his own death. God armed him with a simple message: that love of our neighbors is at the heart of the law. God made that the compass by which good could be discerned from evil (Isaiah 7:16).

Perhaps we focus upon Mary and the manger in this season to remind ourselves to look for God in unexpected places. Not in palaces or wearing silken roves; not paving our lands with roads of gold and infusing our lives with wealth and comfort. God instead entered our world through a child, and made gifts through him of wisdom and grace. The awesomeness of this was not of an ostentatious sort. The awesomeness of this was that it happened through people who we might think of as “just anyone,” in a time that was essentially “just anytime.” The sign was that God came to us on God’s terms; the suggestion is that it could happen again, anywhere and through almost anyone. God might arrive through any of us. We can look for God everywhere, and find the divine easiest to detect when we stop expecting divinity to come within certain parameters. God knows no limitations and bends to no social conventions.

God is beyond us, but is also in an ordinary young Jerusalem girl, and is in the ear of her concerned fiancée. God’s signs are great, but greatness includes the wonder of an apparently ‘ordinary’ child growing to be compassionate and a healer, a moralizer and a savior. God’s domain remains mysterious and eventual, but it is also always here and everywhere, and God can choose to become apparent through it anytime.

Our readings this week remind us that even the spaces where we forget to look for God are God’s spaces, and that even those people who we forget to think of as God’s are God’s people. God’s own willingness to be humble, shown by God’s becoming like us and loving us always, is the true “miracle” of the Gospels, is the revelation of divinity in an unexpected place. Through the girl Mary we begin to glimpse eternity. Into a stable enters our whole hope.




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Sparks in the Darkness

Readings: Isaiah 35:1-10; Psalm 146:5-10; Luke 1:46b-55; James 5:7-10; Matthew:2-11




Our readings this week are filled with images which we’re made to find wondrous, occurrences and people who we’re encouraged to think of as extraordinary. In the deserts of Canaan: flowers spring into bloom. In seats of high power: the mighty are brought low. Jesus praises John the Baptist as the best to ever walk among humans, and yet: we’re told he’s nothing like those in Heaven. Desperate situations are reversed, and grandeur even beyond imagination is spoken of as real.

Much of what is detailed exists outside of current time. These things are written of with utter confidence and faith, but also are spoken of as coming, are in gestation and as yet unseen; nothing has come into fruition yet. We’re meant to be inspired. We're asked to believe in the awesome power of God, who alone can bring about such things, and also to know that behind the even the most obvious-seeming situations, there’s potential for great transformation.

Our readings, coming to us during Advent, are likely meant to spark multiple responses. They're evocative, and in layered ways.
On one level, there's the example of Jesus himself. The mild irony of Jesus speaking, in the Gospel, of John the Baptist as the greatest man ever born of a woman is, of course, that we are aware that the distinction more clearly belongs to Jesus (Matthew 11:11). Perhaps Jesus gives the honor to John because John is still merely born of humans, whereas Jesus’ own background is both human and divine; and yet the Incarnation still depends upon Jesus being born among human beings, and of a human mother. God is drawn out of humanity. All of our future hope is concentrated upon one moment, upon the subject of a humble birth in a nondescript place in the desert. The miracle, the wonder of that, cannot be underestimated. It’s greater still than phenomena like burning sands becoming pools, or dumb tongues bursting into joyous song (Isaiah 35:7, 6).

But more personally, readings like these prompt us to demand great things of ourselves. Along with the standard examples of reversals of vices and virtues and their standard costs and rewards—the proud scattered; the humble fed; the despairing sated—illustrations such as lame creatures suddenly leaping, and holy pathways being laid out leading to God on which no unfit feet will travel, lead us to wonder about the untapped resources within ourselves.

We are enjoined to be patient and to strengthen our hearts for the coming of the Lord (James 5:8). We are told that happiness comes to those who place their hope in God (Psalm 146:5). We are made to rejoice in the salvation offered through Heaven (Luke 1:47). Via all of this, we become like the desert crocuses of future Zion, which, Isaiah tells us, will bloom in abundance, and (an odd image) rejoice in joy and singing (Isaiah 35:2).

The attribution of such very human (non-floral) characteristics to inanimate living things suggests to us a hidden layer to the images: humanity behind them; the potential for miraculous human transformation. Behind the mundane is grandeur. Behind the façade of limited human capacities is the reality that our potential is limitless. Behind our everyday responsibilities is the enormous and divine task with which we are charged: to become as magnificent as sating streams in the desert, as gardens bursting into bloom on the arid sand. We’re meant to bring beauty into being, even where it seems unlikely to take root.

The Advent season usually comes across to most of us as an excellent opportunity to be on our best behavior. We shelve some of our vices or lazier inclinations, become extra-generous; we increase our donations to churches, or perhaps buy gifts for strangers.We're less reticent to make donations when they're asked of us. We resume correspondence with those who we otherwise rarely talk to, sending kind words and overdue hellos. We try a little harder.

 These seem to us measured responses to the miracle of Christmas, somewhat adequate ways to express our gratitude for what God did for us through Christ. And acts of kindness are, indeed, great things. But prompted like this, having become so rooted in our annual routines, they fail to parallel the fantastic images we find in our readings. God loves our little kindnesses--they cannot be validly decried; but he also equips us for so much more.

As we delve further into Advent, and draw closer to commemorating that desert birth eons ago, we should explore the ways in which we might, ourselves, seek greater majesty beyond our regular deeds. We can adopt good behaviors which are temporarily outside of our ordinary processes; but what can we do that more nearly approaches miraculous? What can we seek in ourselves that doesn’t seem readily available or likely? What unimagined resources can we try to tap into, and what magical fruitions can be drawn forth? And how can we do this continuously, beyond the Christmas season?

We should always be mindful both of our unimagined and fantastic potential, and of the necessity of maintaining mindfulness always. A desert spring which bursts forth for a moment and then recedes wouldn’t be a miracle that makes the pages of prophecy; it would be a mere anomaly, a tease (Isaiah 35:2). Our deeds should be better than that. A John the Baptist who retreated from his wilderness ministries to a royal palace to don soft robes would not have found his name at home on the lips of Jesus; there’s no comfortable rest to reward us now for being 'good' on some days (Matthew 11:8). The Holy Way Isaiah speaks of is no occasional road (Isaiah 35:8). We aren’t promised easy; we aren’t told to awe over sometimes-behaviors.

Our readings this week ask us to look beyond. They also assure us that, if we do, we’ll encounter things unimagined, things which take our breath away—things that even wait to be discovered in ourselves.

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Unlike Any Other

Readings: Isaiah 11:1-10;  Psalm 72:1-7, 18-19;  Romans 15:4-13;  Matthew 3:1-12

The great British novelist Salman Rushdie once claimed that the retired gods of the pantheon, or other foregone gods of polytheisms, remain more appealing than any divine being hailed by a monotheism. As a reason, he said that the many-gods reflected relative humanity: sometimes they displayed questionable proclivities, or tendencies to falter; they seemed to be absolutely, consistently fallible. But singular gods, he said, including presumably the Christian God, “moralize”; a one god is not “fun,” exactly, or, in Rushdie’s understanding, relatable.


Yet we might instead say that our God has lasted (where others could not) precisely because of God’s transcendence. The many-gods of old might have been more “relatable”, but being human-like also means being subject to life within a span. They were also like us in that they could not last; there’s no god among the Greek pantheon, for example, who could claim our love in the way that God does. Our early Advent readings this week remind us of why.

We’ve never wanted our God to be “like” us: subject to faltering and mistakes, prone to anger or pettiness. The God we love is a figure we aspire to be like, maybe. Our God is one who warrants our love precisely because all of our faults wash away in the figure of God: human imperfections don’t exist in heaven. What is able to remain is divinity, a creator who loves us; a figure who doesn’t exactly moralize, but who instead, in godly love, inspires us to aspire to be more god-like. Such aspirations don’t imply reaching for great power, or grandeur above others; it’s what’s “moral” in God that we love and want to emulate.

The prophet Isaiah anticipated a salvation figure arising among men who was almost god-like. Some have called this anticipated person the messiah. Isaiah offers some bold specifics, including the Israelite house—the house of Jesse—from which this future figure would come (Isaiah 11:1). But other qualities are drawn more generally, and with a much more hopeful stroke: the spirit of God would rest in this person; they would be a person who would fight, with diligence, on behalf of justice for all who are oppressed; their advent would mark, also, the advent of the end of all strife, the coming of a period in which “the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard…lie down with the kid” (Isaiah 11:2, 4, 6). The age which this person would usher in was anticipated as one in which all kingdoms would bend ears to hear the word of God, to walk in God’s ways and do righteous deeds. A perfect imprint of God, this “shoot from the house of Jesse” would then not alienate us, but by their very presence make us better, make us want to be godly.

We know how Isaiah has been interpreted; in it, the churches have been inclined to see an anticipation of Christ. That’s why Isaiah comes up in our Advent readings, in the season during which we look forward to the “birth of Christ” part of the Christian story. Whether this interpretation is strong or not almost does not matter: Isaiah has seasonal relevance because, in the person of Jesus, all of these grand qualities came into being. Jesus encouraged justice; Jesus encouraged peace; Jesus did his best to incline the world’s ears toward God.

The 72nd Psalm we receive with the same breathless awe, seeing in the future it anticipated the Christian future. The God we want, the Jesus we love, is one of whom we say, both with longing and confidence, “may [God] judge your people with righteousness…defend the cause of the poor…give deliverance….[and] crush the oppressor” (Psalm 72:2-4). We want that, and believe that, God will nourish us like a gentle rain; we believe that a godly age would be marked by a flourishing of peace, by a joyous calm among the nations (Psalm 72:5, 7). Much different from the gods humanity once believed in: the God we know and love is not arbitrary in dolling out demands and decrees, but rather constant in peace and equanimity. This is who we anticipate. This is who we adore.

Romans sees Jesus as the fulfillment of the Hebrew Bible prophecies, anticipating in the flourishing of Christ’s kingdom all of the wonders which that Bible spoke of. Jesus is the one who leads to the “glorification of God,” who “became a servant” to bring to fruition the “promises to the patriarchs” for the world, entirely (Romans 15:12, 9, 8). Our gospel reading, too, anticipates rather than involves the person of Jesus: John the Baptist informs those who question him that a person is coming who “is more powerful…he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire” (Matthew 3:11).

We expect our God to be great; we love God partially because, through the person of Jesus and the mystery of incarnation, the divine was able to prove that divinity IS great. We know this because of Jesus, who fulfilled all of the lofty goals of the prophets: who cleared a path for people to treat each other well, for justice to take root, for human good will to be the guiding principle of all behaviors.

God is not, in fact, unappealing because God is moral, or even moralizing; rather, the gods who did not last, the phantasms who lived in stories and passed away with the closing of ancient empires, are unappealing for worship because they didn’t bother to be moral, or to moralize, or to offer any sort of guiding rule to better our humble human lives. Perhaps we think of them now and again, when we need to tell a rich and engaging story; perhaps the line from Matthew which says that “every tree…that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire” recalls them for us (Matthew 3:10). Those gods were interesting, but fruitless; so our God is humbling, and awesome, and we’re called to be the fruit which the divine bears.

Our advent readings are a reminder of God’s greatness, and of the wonder of the person of Jesus. They’re perhaps even “moralizing” words, as they encourage us to walk in ways which suggest godly ways. They speak of a perfected world in which God’s people play a significant part, and they know all of us to be those people, and demand of all of us those high deeds. They don’t expect us to do them out of deference, or obligation; rather, the terms in which the gospel and biblical morals are drawn make us, in their beauty, almost want to be more moral, more God-like. “God-like” stirs in us something primordial, something eternal and joyous; “gods-like” never could, and so the thought of it faded into myth.

We’ve entered a season of anticipation. Plenty around us will cynically claim that the holiday season no longer carries this, that “god is dead” within it; but as we encounter Advent passages, we know that this isn’t true. We look forward, with longing, to warm family gatherings; we include, in our shopping lists, strangers and families in need; we make peace with those we’ve maintained subtle feuds with; and all of this hints to the coming kingdom. God flourishes within our seasonal behavior. God becomes apparent in the places and spaces wherein we remember to look for what is fantastic about Heaven, and all its luminaries. God is; God remains; and the wonder of that doesn’t diminish, but only grows stronger as we await the rebirth of Jesus.

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As in Heaven

Readings: Isaiah 2:1-5;  Psalm 122;  Romans 13:11-14;  Matthew 24:36-44

It’s easy to get caught up in the rhetoric which surrounds us…easy to invest in social and political positions which don’t entirely mesh with our religious commitments. It’s easy, too, to place our daily needs above the needs of our spirits, to make concessions which we wouldn’t make standing before Christ, to choose a compromised position which makes all momentarily feel simpler.

The manifestations of choosing the easy way are many, and we’re certainly all guilty of it at points. Perhaps we sit on the sidelines of fights for social and economic justice, finding the actions which activists take too idealistic, too stringent to fold easily into our own lives. Perhaps we participate in political polemics which villainize some in ways which claim to protect the rights of others. Perhaps we stand silently by while others are hurt, or face derision, or tread through “dark nights of the soul.”

After all, what does it matter if some face temporary tribulations, or if systems are unfair, or if some are still marginalized, or if skirmishes occur in distant corners of the globe; what ultimate significance do such things carry if we’re all promised heaven in the end? What more can be asked of us than that we do our best to behave well in an imperfect world?

This week’s readings shun such middling positions. They all hold precious the notion of a coming, perfected kingdom of God, in which injustices will surely be done away with, in which people will live in peace and harmony, but they far from suggest that we should pencil that unknown date into our calendars as, simultaneously, the day on which we ought to begin behaving in a godly manner.

Heaven doesn’t abrogate now; it doesn’t render all of the ills of this age insignificant. And we’re assured that sitting back and waiting to be delivered, rather than doing the work of preparing God’s way now, would prove a mistake in the end: we leave our spiritual “homes” unlocked to moral intrusion if we opt to anticipate forever rather than involving ourselves with improving now. This is articulated best in Matthew’s famous verses, which inform us that “if the owner of the house had known in what part of the night the thief was coming, he would have stayed awake and would not have let his house be broken into; therefore you also must be ready, for the Son of Man is coming at an unexpected hour” (Matthew 24:43-44).

What does Matthew mean by the imagery of the thief in the night? The parallel to Jesus, coming as the Son of Man, seems to be that we can’t anticipate a “when” for his arrival, so safeguarding selectively doesn’t work. What’s required is moral diligence—not even anticipating Jesus’s return as imminent and therefore something we should bend our lives to, but anticipating it as a reality, as something that began to be realized at the moment of his assumption. The imperatives of the gospels aren’t distant imperatives; they’re required of us now. We already have to gird ourselves against invaders who would tell us that our immediate needs are more important. Our primary “immediate need” is to be Christ-like, to work toward realizing improved situations now.

We can derive suggestions from our readings for living in a way that mimics the heavenly realm. Isaiah tells us that when God’s house is built, all nations will stream towards it; that globally, all peoples will bend their ears toward God and let the divine dictates become their own, and that they’ll “beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks,” so that all instruments which aided discord among them will become instruments of peace and mutual flourishing (Isaiah 2:4). If this is NOT simply an ideal to be waited for, we can assume the work of realizing it now. We can stop pretending nationality is a definitive human quality; we can treat people as people, and forego anger in favor of fidelity, mutual care and kindness, even intimacy. In the States, doing so would have immediate implications upon how we treat our immigrant communities; abroad, it would require of us greater vocality when people are oppressed by other people. Difficult work, certainly, but if we read the Bible as truth: godly work.

The 122nd Psalm speaks of the whole community—by which we can presume the psalmist means Israelites alone, or read Christianity into that grouping, or, more pertinently, read “our” as inclusive of all—standing at the city gates and doing good. This may be intentionally vague; good encompasses so much in God’s law. But what is certain is that all are involved, the work does not fall upon a select few, and the anticipated kingdom isn’t considered complete without the full participation of this enigmatic community. They should “give thanks to the name of God,” they should “pray for peace” and seek justice—and that ‘they’ is Jerusalem, and if we take ourselves to participate in Jerusalem, that ‘they’ becomes ‘us’ (Psalm 122:4, 6, 5). We are they who must “seek [God’s] good” (Psalm 122:9); by doing so, we begin to realize the eventual participation of all.

Romans speaks of coming into godly living in metaphors of arising from a deep sleep—as if we’re only fully conscious, only fully alive and active, when we do the work which God requires, love in the ways God asks us to love, work in the ways God asks us to work: “let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy” (Romans 13:13). Paul requires, in this letter, that we abandon fleshly notions. This would require shelving and forgetting all preoccupations which tell us that we don’t have to do what is right YET—that we don’t have to fight for the rights of others today, that working on behalf of peace and justice is not work we have to do right now. Romans assures us that “salvation is nearer to us” when we forget the things which we allow to become more important than God, and God’s word, and instead put God first (Romans 13:11).

We don’t want to risk sleeping through the realization of all of God’s dreams and anticipations for us; we don’t want to fail to become the people God formed us to be because we’re too busy doing our stuff, and are not quite ready, in the meantime, to do the hard work of being Christians, of being fully “Christ-like.” If we wait, we leave the door untended; we invite thievery into our hearts without, maybe, being conscious of the invitation. We risk losing access to, or perspective of, what is good by choosing to put off “good” until a later date.

The work we have to do, then, is that of diligently watching the “door”—of making sure that sin isn’t allowed to permeate the world we hope to make God’s home. Sin cannot enter in if we refuse to sit idly by while things are widely done which we know to defy God’s will. We’re to clothe and feed the needy—let’s begin by doing that now. We’re to welcome foreigners among us—let’s extend that invitation immediately. We’re to view “us” as a term which excludes none—let’s stop pretending that Christianity is exclusive, that it can be isolated either among pockets of people or in select activities (at designated times) in our lives. Being Christian means assuming tremendous responsibilities—let’s not wait to do that work.

We should be ready for heaven when it comes, and not because we’ve spent our lives dreaming of it. Rather, we should be ready for heaven when it comes because we’ve spent our whole lives making heaven real among us, bringing it to light by the deeds that we do and through the love that we offer to all. Heaven should feel like home because we’ve lived it.

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Light of our Lives

Readings: Jeremiah 23:1-6; Luke 1:68-79; Psalm 46; Colossians 1:11-20; Luke 23:33-43

Our readings this week act as a meditation on the radical availability of God, first made visible by the relationship of the divine to the people of Israel, then evinced by God’s incarnation in the person of Jesus. Let these chapters serve as a counter to anyone who wants to argue that God is a distant, uninterested figure. To the contrary: the suggestion is that God is not only interested in, but is deeply engrossed in our lives, and that history winds toward a moment in which we’ll all be drawn back into divinity. The preparations for this reunion, we’re told, began even before we did.


In the Jeremiah reading, the metaphor of God’s people as sheep, with God as the shepherd, is used. There is divine assurance that any person who wrongs God’s people does so in a necessarily limited sense. All ills inflicted upon them are ultimately thwarted; God’s people, no matter how tried, no matter how tormented, will ultimately find their salve in being drawn back into God’s company. Via Jeremiah, God says, “I myself will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the lands where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply” (Jeremiah 23:3).



Following is the anticipation of the return of a Davidic king, a messiah who will seek justice for all God loves. These promises, in consideration of what the nation was facing, can leave one breathless at their breadth, at the seeming audacity of what they propose: it would be no small feat to collect, from all ends of the Earth, the Israelites of the Diaspora. Some sheep, some of the people, we might otherwise think, seem certain to be lost—the thought of so many, across such an expanse, and with individual wills, seems to work against the idea of total return. And yet Jeremiah assures us: each and every soul will return. All will fold back into the community which they inherently belong to—God’s community, Israel.

Colossians arises in a different historical situation, but faces, similarly, the threat of fracture: the burgeoning Christian communities are saddled with the difficult task of defining their “borders,” of determining what Christian means, who it includes and who, ultimately, it excludes. Are they a continuation of the people of Israel, a branch of that family, or something radically different, promised decidedly different relationships to God? And, a more pressing question: what happens to this delicate, still ill-defined community when it faces, wholesale, persecution from nations which won’t wait for it to define and secure itself before undermining it?

Paul is addressing communities which anticipate very real, and very potentially divisive, circumstances. And yet he assures us, as did the author of Jeremiah, that whatever happens to God’s people in the short term, in the long term they’ll all be gathered to God. Through the person of Jesus, in whom all are justified, Paul says that “God was pleased to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, by making peace” (Colossians 1:20).

So both books, from both testaments, assure communities which feel themselves to be God’s communities, even perhaps in an exclusive way, of their eventual total assumption into God. Yet we can’t help notice, from a critical distance, that the two communities are, in actuality, at least a little different. Does this call into question the exclusivity of either?

This perhaps leads us to an interesting realization: God undertook specific and particular relationships with these particular communities, imbued with intimacy and familial love; but the particularity of those relationships does not amount to exclusivity. Rather, that both communities are engaged, and that both engagements are real and assured, indicates that God’s particular love for us extends beyond subtle definitions: it is available to all, who can call themselves almost anything without compromising that love.

Luke finds that the relationship of Christians to God is a continuation of the covenantal relationship of God to Abraham, saying that the promises made to him were, in fact, made to us as well, and that “us” is inclusive. “By the tender mercy of our God, the dawn from on high will break upon us, to give light to those who sit in darkness and in the shadow of death,” the Gospel says; all who are God’s, all who face the pains of humanity—in the end, a radical all (Luke 1:78). It’s therefore understandable that God is celebrated everywhere, and is manifested everywhere: “Be still, and know that I am God! I am exalted among the nations, I am exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10).

Both Jeremiah and Colossians give us a correct picture of who will be gathered back to God; both could be misread as envisioning a somewhat exclusive eternity; but both actually anticipate a wider salvation, one which is available to all mankind. God’s love, manifested in special ways in the Israelite and Christian communities, isn’t given to them alone; it’s an effusive love, a ubiquitous love, one which seeks and finds all.

God’s love is radically available, and radically assured. We can note in Jeremiah that the sheep whom God shepherds don’t collect themselves back to him, necessarily; even if they stray, God collects them back, taking the care and time to seek, and find, each one. How does God know which belong to the divine, we might wonder, if we don’t yet understand that all are God’s.

But we can intuit, and assume: just as we take pride in the beautiful and unique things we do, just as we thrill in or maker’s marks upon our own works (in the corner of our paintings, in our fingerprints upon the meals we make for families and loved ones, in our names scrawled across the back of hard-earned checks), God must delight in seeing the divine light given into each and every being made by Heaven’s hand. God knows us because we are God’s; and all are God’s, regardless of individual self-identifications.

Our Gospel reading puts us at the foot of the cross. Jesus is surrounded by persecutors who revile him, and who, by his death, appear to have won. But Jesus takes pity: “forgive them, for they know not what they do,” he prays (Luke 23:24). He’s mocked, he’s cast in with criminals; he’s taunted with demands that he save even those who persecute them, if he’s so able. Jesus both answers these derisions and doesn’t.

He doesn’t address the rabid crowd directly; he prays on their behalf, though, and he anticipates their return, which is alluded to when the criminal beside him comes to the realization that Jesus is divine. To him, Jesus promises “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43). And we know, in view of all of our readings, that that “today” is as every day, just as the criminal is like every individual who has faltered and fallen down; we’re all people who haven’t exactly earned God’s love. We’re sinners, we’re fallible and imperfect; but even in our imperfections, we’re beloved, and given to anticipate paradise.

God loves radically. God invests his love in particular places; God’s love is simultaneously invested everywhere. God forges complex relationships with individuals; God seeks complex relationships with all. And when we begin to realize this, we come to understand that, if we’re ourselves like the sheep waiting to be brought back into the fold, so are the people next to us—they, too, are justified by God’s love. The light of God is in us as we love; the potential for it rests in our neighbors, too, and in their neighbors. And when God eventually calls—when the work of shepherding us back begins—the divine mark in all will come to light, and we’ll all shine in synchronicity.

God’s radical love, if it’s radically and everywhere accepted, will lead to a beauty and a harmony in creation that we can hardly anticipate.


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A New Heaven, a New Earth

Isaiah 65:17-25; Isaiah 12;  Malachi 4:1-2a;  Psalm 98; 2 Thessalonians 3:6-13; Luke 21:5-19

Faith, the inner inclination toward God, the choice to believe, may happen in a flash or develop over time. It’s a feeling, a tendency, an inner movement. But we frequently find that, after the initial moment of epiphany or the first measured decision to believe, faith is something which must be cultivated by continual, conscious action. That action is the basis of our religion, of the moral and ethical organization in our lives which ties us to the holy: to God, His son, and to the Holy Spirit.


Religion is revolutionary. Entering into it is transformative. Our readings for the week certainly exemplify this. They speak of the ruptures and renewals which characterize religious life. The effects of entering into religious traditions, which within Judaic and Christian circles are built upon a notion of communion and relationship with God, are nearly always extreme. Thus Isaiah is able to speak of an eschatological future which is simultaneously a metaphor for entrance into religious tradition: “I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind,” God says through the prophet (Isaiah 65:17). Living in faith means entering into just such a new world, wherein all is considered possible, all possibilities are imbued with purest hope, and hope is sustained by faith.

The biblical promises and potentialities given through God can initiate a kind of euphoria, can lead us to delight in the possibilities of the kingdom of God. God speaks of that kingdom in the highest, most idealized terms: it’s a place without distress, a place of perpetual youth, and a place wherein death has been conquered by life. People who enter into the kingdom live long, are continually sated, and are able to enjoy innate intimacy with God: “before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear,” God says (Isaiah 65:27).

It’s probable that Isaiah didn’t have only a distant future in mind. The relationship between God and Israel was predicated upon a number of covenantal “conditions,” which existed almost as a map to living wholly in relationship to the divine. If those in the earthly kingdom were able to direct their lives with covenantal and Torah prescriptions in mind, the heavenly kingdom would be, to a degree, actualized, or at the very least mimicked, on earth. In this new kingdom, in the new and perfected Jerusalem, God will rejoice “and delight in [his] people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress” (Isaiah 65:19). Such predictions are common throughout scripture, and yet continually enticing: a world so free of distress and so bursting with joy would, indeed, strike us as a “new” world.

The scriptures do not, and could not, suggest that religious transformation is solely characterized by the new ease of living with God and in God’s image. There’s certainly delight to be found there. But the journey from living without God to living in him is hardly a brief one, and it’s certainly not one we make simple. Even as we hunger for the fulfillment of prophetic promises, we sometimes resist the work required to move toward them. Faith, and religious life, is disruptive; it requires rejecting the empty promises of secular circles, of the world which doesn’t feel inclined toward God. It does not aspire to ultimacy, neither does it exhaust much time imagining ultimacy at all. But because all promises have their glitter, rejections of worldly visions don’t always naturally take root, or appeal to us easily.

Our readings from the gospel and Paul remind us that choosing to live in God is not always a choice the world understands. Jesus does not promise a graceful or pain-free transition from worldly living to Christian living. To the contrary: he assures his followers that “[non-believers] will arrest you and persecute you; they will hand you over to synagogues and prisons, and you will be brought before kings and governors because of my name” (Luke 21:12). Societies, he warns, tend to rally against religious living; they tend to want to dismiss and repress it. And he warns that it’s not a condition limited to particular times. To be faithful is to set oneself up as different, to proclaim aspirations beyond the world’s immediate inclinations.

Jesus assures his listeners that even families are not safe from the disruption which moving into faith initiates. Rather, believers will find themselves “betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and…some [will be put] to death” (Luke 21:16). They’ll be hated and despised; all daily pleasantries previously taken for granted will no longer be available.

Our readings vacillate between these two poles, both assuring us that believers will enjoy unimaginable delights, and that the radical decision to believe will lead to strife, grief and innumerable disruptions. And yet they both articulate the same truth. When we decide to believe, and when we elect to form our lives around that belief, our former lives do, indeed, pass away; they dissipate into a now unavailable space. And that can be difficult; it can mean losing familiar access to the people who don’t accompany us. But what awaits us on the other side—the delight of living in radical communion with God, in intimate relationship to heaven and ultimate truth—is itself a new world, and can mend whatever pains are initiated by the disruptive decision to believe. God both requires us to break our hearts a bit, allowing the old to pass away, and promises to fill them with the light of total truth which comes in knowing him. He requires us to leave behind that which is not of him; he also promises us new and limitless homes.

Religious life is a choice. It’s a movement from the comfortable uncertain to radical, unfamiliar spaces of divine truth. Tears may fall along the way; change is never easy. But the space beyond them, the infinite vistas of eternity, are promised as a space wherein tears have no place, wherein life is spent as it was meant to be: in loving God, and in the gift of being perfectly loved by him in return.

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Here and There

Readings: Haggai 1:15b-2:9; Psalm 145:1-5, 17-21; Psalm 98; Job 19:23-27a; Psalm 17:1-9;  2 Thessalonians 2:1-5, 13-17; Luke 20:27-38

There exists a reality beyond what’s immediate and most apparent. The scriptures speak of it repeatedly, from apocalyptic writings of the prophets to Jesus’s own discourses in the gospels; as time beyond this time, as the truth beyond current events. Frequently this is how the biblical authors confronted situations which might otherwise lead to despair: they sought reason to rejoice and take comfort, even when circumstances didn’t make it easy.


I know plenty of people who have faced difficulties in their own lives, or who have witnessed tribulations in the lives of those around them. The burdens we bear don’t always undergird the idea of a loving God. When all is going well, it’s easy to invest in concepts of benevolence: the sun shines on us, and it’s easy to feel blessed. But what about dark days? As someone I know articulated it recently, “how can I believe in God when…?” We can fill that “when” in as we choose. When wars follow one another in endless succession. When natural disasters claim the lives of innocents. When bad things do, indeed, happen to good people, and with alarming frequency. If there’s a God and that God loves us, why doesn’t He stop it all? Where is our peace?

Responses which guarantee that God does love, and is invested, probably don’t always strike us as sufficient. We want something more immediate, something more obvious, than the assurance that God is with us in our pain. We want concrete solutions. Yet the scriptures don’t conflate God’s love with the granting of all our wishes. They promise an eventuality wherein pain no longer exists, wherein petty unpleasantries cease to rule us; but that eventuality is always either in a future spot, or is to be found in inner sanctuaries, in a spiritual peace and confidence which must be cultivated.

In Haggai, the prophet is positioned in a historical place wherein waiting ruled. The exiled Judeans had been permitted to return to the land following the fall of the first Temple, and had been granted a mandate to rebuild. During the time of the prophet, that rebuilding had yet to be completed. Yet the prophet knew the time approached: “greater will be the future glory of this house than the former”, the people are assured, and in the meantime, “‘I am with you,’ sa[id] the Lord of hosts…’my spirit continues in your midst’” (Haggai 2:9, 4, 5). Even when the land is stark and the promises of the past seem to have been broken, God persists. What is immediate is symbolic; the grandeur of God’s love defies circumstances.

Job, too, anticipates a future season, enigmatically speaking of a time wherein “after my skin has been… destroyed, …in my flesh I shall see God” (Job 19:26). This seems contradictory—how can Job see God in the flesh if his earthly body has been destroyed? But the joy Job anticipates, the moment of revelation, has nothing to do with earthly bodily existence; no matter what Job endures on Earth, he can look forward to a heavenly existence which makes earthbound concerns seem miniscule, even like conceit.

Again and again, we hear echoes of these promises for the future. The seventeenth psalm is given in a period of persecution, yet through despair, the psalmist asks that God “keep me as the apple of [his] eye, hide me in the shadow of your wings,” and has confidence that God will show his “wonderful love” (Psalm 14:8, 7). Paul, in 2 Thessalonians, assures his church that persecutions are endurable precisely because they initiate the apocalypse, the revelation of the one true God who brings peace: “the day of the Lord is already here,” he asserts, and the churches can know this because “the rebellion comes first and the lawless one is revealed, the one destined for destruction” (2 Thessalonians 2:2,3). Rome persecutes; but Rome is, ultimately, ephemeral, and the persecuted will be vindicated.

The gospel passage, too, waxes on this peculiar theme, as Jesus uses the example of marriage and remarriage to display how what we consume ourselves with here is insignificant in consideration of heaven: “the children of this age marry and remarry,” he says, “but those who are deemed worthy to attain to the coming age and to the resurrection of the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. They can no longer die, for they are like angels…” (Luke, 20:34-36). We are both of this world, and more than it; we both persist within it and await assumption into God’s love in a mysterious beyond.

Jesus isn’t encouraging people not to invest in now. There is no assumption in the verse that people will stop marrying, or remarrying, or otherwise engaging in the world, simply because they’ll someday be ‘like angels’. On the contrary, most of his imperatives are concerned with now. He consistently enjoins people to make the world better, taking special care to elevate the despairing and disadvantaged among them. Engagement is a given.

But so is a God above it all, who watches with interest and love as we navigate this confusing world. Who is pained when we are pained, but who doesn’t stop pain. At least not as it immediately occurs. At least not when it is transitory. And perhaps this is because He’s a God who lovingly anticipates the moment when we become like angels, who knows that we’re more than our individual situations..that this reality is not the only reality.

It’s easy to see how this “answer” may be received as a non-answer. Traditionally, telling someone who is experiencing pain, or who is facing injustice, that ultimately their pain is dwarfed by God’s love isn’t terribly helpful. Understandably. Such news comes across less like a warm embrace than a frigid wall, even a slap in the face. But then, it’s not our job to deliver such news. It’s our job to comfort, as Christ comforted. And we’re even entitled to our own pain, as it comes.

What we feel here is real. Injustice is a reality. Joy is as well, and so is God’s love. All that we experience might not seem like proof that God exists, and cares; but it’s not our responsibility to formulate proofs. Our job is to remain steadfast in faith, to maintain a glimmer of it even when what we’re faced with doesn’t seem to cohere with our belief.

Most often, attempting to answer the question for others is a mistake…at least, in words. There’s no great response to “how can I believe in God, when…?” Our responsibility, rather, is to be the living witnesses of a loving and higher power; to respond to the precepts He gave us and treat others with the utmost respect and consideration. We can’t prove that God exists; but we can be a comfort to those who are burdened with real fears that He does not, or does not care. Not answering the question overtly, but simply being there for people with a Christ-like love, gives people the space to rediscover the reality of God’s love for themselves. And, hopefully, others who believe will be able to do the same for us when we’re in our own moments of pain, or despair, or doubt.

For every instance of “how can I believe in God when…?”, there’s someone doing the work of “mak[ing] a joyful noise to the LORD, all the earth; break[ing] forth into joyous song and sing praises” (Psalm 98:4). There are those who evince that there’s a reality beyond transitory pains, and that love permeates, and that God is always.

That life fluctuates between emotional and experiential poles doesn’t make things easy. It would be most convenient to exist always in the glow of love, and to not have to worry about moments that lead us to question. Convenient, but not characteristic of here.

God is beyond, as much as He is here. His will isn’t always easy to discern. It’s not always necessary to discern it. We have to rest in the knowledge that it’s waiting; that all which seems to obscure it is finite; and that nothing lasts as long as it does.

Beyond this reality stretches a brighter one, unscathed by tempestuous earthly occurrences. We must strain our hearts toward its light, even when reasons seem hard to come by; peace awaits us there.


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Seeking New Heights

Readings: Habakkuk 1:1-4; 2:1-4; Psalm 119:137-144; Isaiah 1:10-18; Psalm 32:1-7;  2 Thessalonians 1:1-4, 11-12;  Luke 19:1-10

Living in faith sometimes means confronting grey areas. It is not always so obvious what we should do as Christians; the connections between believing and acting are not always easy to discern. Our readings this week frequently encourage a useful technique for coming closer to determining the “right,” or godly, things to do: start by modifying your perspective.


Being a person who believes in God is a journey with an imperfect guidebook. Throughout scripture, we learn that adhering to the recommendations we find on the page alone is an erroneous move. There’s comfort to believing responses to all situations are pre-defined, but acting without thinking is never sufficient. This is why we find, in books like Isaiah, condemnations of mere “legalism.”

In this book, the prophet confronts the people of Israel, all of whom face tremendous political strains, and encourages them away from acting emptily and hoping for a gracious divine response. There is some suggestion that many of them have been compelled to act frenetically in accordance with what they think God demands, but have forgotten to infuse their actions with true faith. They offer sacrifices by the many; they rigorously observe festival dates; they bombard God with proper “action,” but forget that all of these dictates were given as an expression of love. The prophet channels God, who scoffs: “what care I for the number of your sacrifices?...new moon and Sabbath, calling of assemblies, octaves of wickedness, these I cannot bear…they weigh me down, I tire of the load” (Isaiah 1:14, 13).

The lesson, simply, is that the people cannot perform “acts” of faith in any perfunctory way. If they’ve been living out the laws which undergird the covenants, but without feeling or internalizing them, all they’ve done is ultimately empty. God’s love and allegiance isn’t warranted by automatons; the law must be lived, its precepts met with joy. For what God commands, from Sabbaths, to festivals, to the treatment of one’s neighbors, is all centered in his love for humanity. None of it can be done without a willing spirit; a Sabbath observed without graciousness is not observed at all, even if “rules” are perfectly followed.

And so we read, again at again, that God’s love is available; that it cannot be earned, but must be humbly accepted. And how is this done? Isaiah suggests that simply the admission of sin leads to its receipt: “though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow,” if only one learns “to do good, make[s] justice [their] aim: redress[ing] the wronged, hear[ing] the orphan’s plea, defend[ing] the widow” (Isaiah 1:18, 17). The 613 laws of the Hebrew Bible were designed to so orient people: if they’re internalized, and lived out with love, such behavior will become intuitive. This goes far beyond the trade model—“my dutiful behavior for your glorious reward”—that Isaiah suggests people were actually living out. The model which, if we’re honest with ourselves, we’re frequently tempted to adopt today.

We must not “forget God’s precepts,” the psalmist says, for the true servant knows that all edicts of God are “promises” proven “by fire,” promises which are “forever just” in basis, and lead to living fully (Psalm 119:141, 140, 144). Ignoring the spirit of God’s commands, and attempting to adopt them hollowly without troubling their meaning, is akin to singing them silently—the worshipful praise they should represent goes unvoiced. “Responding” to them like that leads to an atrophying of spirit: “as long as I kept silent, my bones wasted away; I groaned all the day…my strength withered in the dry summer heat” (Psalm 32:3-4).

Each reading proposes such a simple solution: shift your perspective. If you’re living dutifully but seeing no results, rethink what duty means. Our duties to the scriptures are NOT simple. Articulating “love thy neighbor” in appropriate situations is not sufficient; we have to articulate it in our deeds, to live it out, to do the actual work of engaging intimately our fellow humans. Saying that justice should be done is not enough; we have to work on justice’s behalf. Decrying situations which leave some in poverty, or sick, or at the margins is not sufficient; we must literally bring the afflicted in, and love them back to health. The scriptures assure us, after all, that it’s not just their health at stake: as long as one person is forgotten or rejected, the community is not whole.

In the gospel reading, this perspective shift is a literal one. Zacchaeus, a “chief tax collector and also a wealthy man,” is in town one day as Jesus is passing through (Luke 19:2). He’s deeply curious to find out who Jesus is, but is humble in stature, and can’t glimpse him above the crowd. And so he has the brilliant inspiration to climb a tree and get a better view—he’s determined to discover Jesus for himself, despite the din, despite all of the swarms of people who are, unlike him, so certain they can already answer the question of who Jesus is.

Jesus sees, and rewards, this act of faithful curiosity. Zacchaeus is called down from the tree and Jesus comes to stay with him for the night. This man—this sinner, this tax collector, this rich gentlemen among so many poor—is so inspired by what he learns of Jesus that he “sa[ys] to the Lord, ‘behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone I shall repay it four times over’” (Luke 19:8). His whole life, his whole internal perspective, changes, and all as a result of the one moment of inspiration that led him to seek Jesus above the crowd, to see him clearly and for himself.

This week’s readings encourage us to consider how we are like Zacchaeus, or like those who burdened God with empty burnt offerings, perfunctory petitions without heart behind them. Do we know what is necessary for our own salvation? Are we absolutely sure? Or might we dare to climb to some vantage point beyond the crowd, with all of its various recommendations, and see if we can’t determine that for ourselves?

It’s possible that, even after gazing from a different viewpoint, we’ll discover that what we always thought we knew of Jesus is true. In such a case, no risk is involved, and we even may find our relationship with God, and our confidence in that relationship, deepening. But it’s also possible that our relationships to God and his word could always benefit from considering new perspectives. If we take time to think about how much is said of Jesus these days, and how much is built upon those assumptions, it’s only healthy to question how much of it strikes us as true, or is relevant to our own lives in faith.

Maybe, for a day or two, we can dare to forget the crowds. Maybe we can push aside the innumerable declarations of others concerning what Jesus would do in this situation, or that. Maybe we can approach such questions independently, and with the humility the scriptures encourage. We’re justified by faith, but we remain sinners; we love who God is, but we can always stand to learn more about Him. And we do that, first, by admitting our shortcomings, as did David in the Psalms: “I declared my sin to you; my guilt I did not hide. I said, “I confess my faults to the Lord,’ and you took away the guilt of my sin” (Psalm 32:5). We do that by admitting that our ability to see is necessarily limited if we’re standing amidst crowds of people who are all certain they can see perfectly. We do that by asking God, and God alone, to fill in the blanks, the spaces in our hearts and minds where questions still exist, where the formulas in place don’t seem to go far enough. We can seek our own sycamore trees; we can climb to the tops of them, and we can wait in happy expectation, knowing that “the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint” (Habakkuk 2:3).

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Raindrops Keep Falling...

Readings: Joel 2:23-32; Psalm 65; Jeremiah 14:7-10, 19-22; Sirach 35:12-17; Psalm 84:1-7;  2Timothy 4:6-8, 16-18;  Luke 18:9-14

A mere week ago, the city was awash. Rain fell in torrents, ceaselessly, for days, coupled with a merciless wind which wreaked havoc on umbrellas, so that not even that flimsy respite could be offered. Among the people I know, most of us confronted this seasonal tempermentality grimly, determined only to endure it. We were tolerant at best, and at our worst moments, were reduced by it to bundles of nerves. I would venture to guess that had anyone proposed we respond to this weather with gratitude, most of us would have responded with incredulity. Gratitude? For what? Isn’t a rainy day pure misery?


Yet this week’s texts remind us that there are immemorial qualities about our world which, though we’re inclined to either take them for granted or resent them, were once held as proof positive not only that God existed, but that he loved us dearly. Rain is one of these. In the context of arid Israel, bounded by deserts and at the mercy of the skies for the cultivation of the land, rain was a blessing.

God’s love is repeatedly explained in terms of the gift of water: in Psalms, believers find refuge in God, and this manifests itself in “springs of water to drink,” as “from pools the Lord provides water for those who lose their way” (Psalm 84:6, 7). The imagery here suggests a separation between spiritual yearning, which is akin to wandering, and divine shelter, which is as an oasis among the chaos and inconsistencies of the broader world: the faithful can retreat, draw deeply from God’s spiritual wells, and so sustain themselves. In the Ancient Near East, this must have served as a very powerful metaphor.

But it is rain image is the most persistent throughout these passages—the sudden gift from the heavens of water upon the people. Rain is how God nurtures the land, and thus the people of Israel: “with showers [God] keep[s] the ground soft, blessing its young sprouts,” until God’s paths “drip with fruitful rain” and “the untilled meadows also drip; the hills are robed with joy” (Psalm 65: 11, 12, 13). Psalms suggests that this living, fluid, abundant joy is responded to be people everywhere as a marvel, and as an indication of great blessing.

Joel, too, rejoices over the gift of rain: “rejoice in the LORD, your God!...he has made the rain come down before you, the early and the late rain as before” (Joel 3:23). This foreshadows abundance in the land; moreover, it’s a wonder which asserts God’s presence in the land, and the depth of his special concern for it.

And when Jeremiah fears that the Lord has rejected Israel, it’s the lack of rain which stands as evidence: “Judah mourns, her gates are lifeless; her people sink down in mourning [and] cry in anguish…they find no water…there is no rain in the land….[and the people] cover their heads” (Jeremiah 14:2, 4). In Joel, God’s presence was attested by the presence of water; in Jeremiah, when there is drought, the LORD is missed in the land, and seems a stranger to it.

The people of Israel, it seems, are a thirsty people; but the desire they feel is not merely for the material sustenance which water provides. Indeed, they are a people who thirst for God’s presence; their own bodily well being, and the physical well being of the land, becomes tantamount to an expression of the covenant’s well-being, so that spiritual health is tied up in the health of the earth. Literally, they are a people whose eyes are ever turned skyward, waiting; but this directionality evokes the Temple, and the literal presence of God, on high as much as it anticipates the actual gifts from the sky. They thirst for God’s love, and rejoice in any manifestation of it, and water becomes a significant trope. Quench our desire, they beg; as much as the cultivation of the fields and of their beasts, what God offers to quench that thirst will lead to a deepening, and a continuation, of the relationship of God to the people.

Perhaps these readings are a reminder, to us, to look skyward, or, more specifically, to look to God to fill us where we remain in want. We’re lucky in that our blessings abound; what was scarce to the Israelites is not to us. But this is also a potential trap, because when such necessities are readily available to us, we forget to receive them as gifts. Rain becomes a nuisance, and not a promise that we’ll eat well in coming months; and why seek a distant oasis when we can flick a wrist and turn on a faucet? But if we wish to cultivate the same kind of intimate relationship with God which he shared with the people of Israel, we cannot receive things so easily. What the earth gives us remains a gift; we should try to remember, at least in scattered moments, to shelve our grumblings and turn our faces to the rain, and offer the same kind of thanks, with the same sort of joy, which we see in Joel and the Psalms.

The temptations are great to continue to take things for granted; after all, it’s so easy to do. But it’s dangerous to stock, and zealously count, our blessings as though we always warrant them. God’s generosity deserves gracious receipt.

Our chapter in Luke this week reminds us that gratitude is, in fact, necessary. We can brush aside blessings impatiently, or refuse to acknowledge them as such; we can sap up greedily that which is scarce for our neighbors, and never think twice about it. But then we defy Jesus’s parable, and become like the errant Pharisee, the fool whose prayer to God runs “’O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity—greedy, dishonest, adulterous’” (Luke 18:11). This preening ‘prayer’ has no value in God’s Temple, for it is built on the absurd premise that any of us can claim separation from, or innate superiority to, the rest. Jesus warns that all who so “exalt themselves will be humbled” (Luke 18: 14).

Yet a hopeful alternative exists, here in the figure of the tax collector. He won’t “even raise his eyes to heaven,” won’t even look for the blessings which God bestows, but instead humbles himself and prays, “’O God, be merciful to me, a sinner’” (Luke 18:13). The gospel tells us that it is he who will be exalted. He confronts a human condition: that he is somewhat “unworthy” of God, as a sinner, as we all are. But because he expects no reward for this, he’s better positioned to receive any gift God sends earthward. By being humble, by not expecting, we prepare ourselves internally for joy.

I suspect that, unlike the tax collector, we do need to presume to raise our eyes a bit, if only because we’ve gotten used to ignoring the source of our blessings. He knew what we forget: that what happens here proceeds from Heaven, and that thanks for the gifts which we sometimes thoughtlessly store needs to be directed there. We have to engage in actively remembering that gifts are gifts, even before we begin the work of receiving them humbly. It’s a great task in our busy lives, but undoubtedly, a valuable one. If we now and again dare to cast aside our umbrellas, and all other tools which enable us to avoid feeling God’s gifts, and thinking about his graciousness, perhaps we can move toward living in the continual joy exemplified in these chapters of Scripture.


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Wrestling Doubt

Readings: Jeremiah 31:27-34; Psalm 119:97-104; Genesis 32:22-31; Psalm 121; 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5; Luke 18:1-8

The two most prominent characters in this week’s readings are Jacob and the persistent widow. Both face unsettling situations and yet respond to them, with some variations in style, with faith.


This particular chapter of Jacob’s story is one of the most puzzled over passages in Genesis, if not the Hebrew Bible. Jacob, journeying home to rejoin the brother he betrayed, encamps overnight with his family. Seemingly out of the blue, he gets up in the night and begins wrestling with either an angel, or a ‘man of God’. The figure is mysterious; some have suggested that this enigmatic holy man may have been God personified. Jacob is injured, but persists, and at the end of the encounter is renamed “Israel,” for he’s “contended with divine and human beings and has prevailed.” (Genesis 33:29)

This story almost requires individual interpretation. Is the wrestling a metaphor, or is Jacob supposed to have actually physically wrestled with some divine being? If the wrestling is literal, with whom, and why does it begin? If metaphorical: is the struggle internal, and what is Jacob, all wrapped up in human impulse and flaw, wrestling against which is more ‘divine’?

In conjunction with the other readings for the week, and keeping in mind that it’s so difficult to know which interpretation is “better,” it may be interesting to consider the struggle as a metaphor. In the chapters which precede this week’s Genesis reading, Jacob had been engaged in a bit of brotherly competition with Esau. Perhaps this is to put it lightly: Jacob, from a young age, continually defied and tricked his twin, cheating him out of his land, swindling him out of his birthright, until, eventually, the tension became so great that he had to flee. Jacob is now returning to his home, at tremendous risk of being welcomed not quite warmly. Esau has sent word that he’ll ride out to meet Jacob and his party with four hundred men; were Jacob to receive his “just deserts,” this could, in fact, be the end.

Jacob comforts himself with reminders of God’s promises: “’You told me, oh LORD, ‘go back to the land of your birth, and I will be good to you.’’” (Genesis 32:10) Jacob recognizes that he hasn’t always warranted such generous treatment—he says, in fact, in prayer: “I am unworthy of all of the acts of kindness that you have loyally performed for me.” (Genesis 32:11) And yet he anticipates one more act of kindness: that God will help him to cross back into the land promised as his, safely and with all of his new family.

It’s in the night following these prayers that Jacob struggles with the angel. He’s to meet his brother, and all of his brother’s assembled men, in the morning; he’s hoping that the meeting will go well, for his own sake, and for his family’s. Odds are against him. There’s no reason to believe that it will go well for him, especially if all details are left up to only Esau’s sense of justice. In the quiet of the night, he waits. And somehow meets, and struggles with, either an angel or God.

The result of Jacob’s struggle is that he prevails, and is renamed. His renaming essentially reinforces God’s promises to him, ensures that he and his family will be able to enter the land safely and live there until they are “as numerous as the stars.” It reinforces God’s covenant, or reaffirms it. But if the struggle is metaphorical, perhaps the real affirmation is that, despite Jacob’s flaws and lack of obvious worth, the covenant had always been available, and God was always true to it. Jacob had to struggle toward that realization. He had to prevail against all of his self-doubts and ready himself to receive that grace. He had to, in short, trust enough in God to persist, despite odds.

The parable of the persistent widow is similar, although she’s able to “prevail” in her struggle with less self-doubt: the judgment she anticipates is a just one (Luke 18:5). She lives in a town which is presided over by a judge who “neither fear[s] God nor respect[s] any other human being,” and as such, would be the perfect person to test the strength of any sort of covenantal promises passed between God and man. God promises justice, but how does justice work if the system which is supposed to exact it is presided over by those who neither respects heavenly precepts, nor care much for the well-being of individuals? There is reason for the widow to despair. This judge could be the exception to the absolute rule of God’s fairness; he could defy it by refusing to be moved by the persuasiveness of good.

In the end, in fact, he is ‘immovable’, at least in such terms. It’s not fear for his own integrity that sways him; it’s not insecurity before God, and the realities of eternity. In fact, he only bends and renders a just verdict because, inexplicably, he fears the persistent widow—he worries that she “will finally come and strike” him (Luke 18:6).

But Jesus tells us that there’s more to this fear than meets the eye. It’s not that the widow is a particularly fearsome figure. Likely, this wronged woman obsessed with justice is more of a curiosity in such a town than a threat. I imagine a woman of unimposing stature, an earnest and vulnerable person who it would be, very realistically, easy for a heartless, powerful man to dismiss. And yet he cannot. She haunts him, in faith, follows him about seeking the justice that her trust in God tells her must come (Luke 18:7).

Jesus hints to us that it’s not the widow herself who eventually moves the judge to render justice. Rather, it’s God backing her. It’s God who answers her prayers and compels her to persist, filling her with the confidence to continue. It’s God’s work on her behalf that “secure[s] the rights of [those] who call out to him day and night”, God who sees “to it that justice is done” (Luke 18:7, 8). It does not matter that the cruel judge thinks he does not believe in God; this does not negate God’s power over him. It does not matter that the widow is not obviously intimidating; that she represents justice, and that she’s backed by a just God, is what makes her imposing.

In these chapters, God promises that those who have faith will be blessed. Sometimes it’s not obvious why such people are blessed, as with Jacob; sometimes it’s quite clear that they “warrant” it. But the real message of the week’s readings is that we never really warrant God’s love, which is so great that it’s beyond human pursuit. It’s a powerful and moving force that works almost against logic. God gives his love freely and always; not because human beings ever particularly deserve it, but because he’s promised to do so, and is true to his promises.

Our readings teach us that the answers to all misgivings and tribulations lie in the promises God has already made. Even when we think that there’s no reason that it should, help comes from God, “the maker of heaven and earth,” who won’t allow for things to become truly impossible, or impassable (Psalm 121:2-3). God does not sleep; he always guards his beloved creations, affecting and protecting them silently, sometimes so silently that they miss evidence of it (as with the unjust judge).

These are not injunctions against any pain: it is certain that neither the widow, nor Jacob, lived the rest of their lives completely pain or hardship free. It’s only a promise that God is there, if we seek him. And if God is there, we’re somewhat impervious to permanent damage, or persisting injustice. Relief will come, even when situations seem hopeless: “by day the sun cannot harm you, nor the moon by night. The LORD will guard you from all evil, will always guard your life” (Psalm 121:7-8).

These passages are difficult to internalize. Any one of us can offer stories about times in our lives, or in the lives of loved ones, which seem proof that justice does not always prevail. We can read stories which seem to assert such “realities” in the paper, or see them broadcast in any newsreel. But our readings attempt to assure us of a broader justice, a covenant that remains strong despite daily arguments against it. They encourage us to keep faith, and trust that there will be relief. And of the tendency to believe that, because there is pain, there must not be a loving God, they say only that such inclinations are “myths” which divert our attention from “the truth” (2 Timothy 4:4).

Sometimes faith is not convenient; sometimes it would be easier, even look more sensible, to abandon it. Our readings prompt us to resist those desires as facile, and empty. “Be self-possessed,” they enjoin us; eventually, the reward will be in our own “renaming,” in our own assumption into a new and eternal realm of God’s love. If we wait, and believe, and persist: justice will come, and our lives lived in faith will have been, properly, evangelization.

The Imperative to Love

Readings: 2 Kings 5:1-3, 7-15; Luke 17:11-19; Psalm 66:1-12; Jeremiah 29:1-7.

I once knew a pastor who was ruined by his accent.


Actually, that’s scapegoating: it was not the accent that destroyed him, but his congregation’s reaction to it. As national debates heated up surrounding issues of citizenship versus illegal residency, his congregation began to complain, with increasing fervor, about his Columbian accent. They couldn’t understand him, they claimed, and so he couldn’t possibly really understand them. The communication gap, they believed, was too great.

Oddly enough, these complaints hadn’t really existed in years previous, and so it came to seem that their problem with him was not really that they couldn’t understand what he was saying; it was more that they didn’t want to. He came to represent the Other, the foreigner, the person against whom they must rally. They forgot he’d been their trusted spiritual leader. And, sadly, the overarching leadership caved, and the pastor in question was relocated to an area more likely to react favorably to the fact that he was Hispanic.

I’ve been very angry at his congregation over this for awhile now. It seemed self-evident, to me, that a Christian community should not react this way to someone, particularly a spiritual leader, based on negligible, even imagined, differences. They let themselves get too caught up in the ideas of proper “citizenship” and nationality, and in the process lost a really good pastor, one who had cared for them and done his utmost to exemplify Christian ideals. His “other”ness was not the problem; theirs was. By rejecting him based on his origins, they made themselves “other” to the Scriptures.

Our readings this week are full of aliens, sojourners, foreigners. They are not what we’ve come to expect from people shouldered with such terms. Indeed, the common rhetoric here, in our time, is that he who is the Other must be villianized and kept at a distance. “Other” is considered dangerous. But in biblical contexts, “others” are those who often surprise established nations or groups by being more faithful, more committed to God’s message, than those charged directly to live it out.

In 2 Kings, Naaman, a chieftain of another nation, is encouraged by an Israelite to go to the king in Jerusalem and petition the king’s prophet to have his leprosy cured. Doing so means deviating from all which he’s always known to be true. Yet he listens to the Israelite child and goes before the Israelite king. He is told to perform a simple act of faith—“wash seven times in the Jordan, and your flesh will heal, and you will be clean”--in order to become well (2 Kings 5:10).

Naaman wrestles with himself internally, but eventually decides to show this faith, and is rewarded by becoming healed. And, the text tells us, “he returned with his whole retinue to the man of God. On his arrival he stood before him and said, ‘Now I know that there is no God in all the earth, except in Israel’” (2 Kings 5:15). A hefty concession for any Israelite whose faith was daily tried; a grand one for a foreigner, of whom belief was not required.

In Luke 17, we read again of an afflicted foreigner, this time a Samaritan. He goes before Jesus as part of an ailing group. They beg to be healed. Jesus, never one to put too much stock in silly boundaries, of course heals them—as an act of love, as any creator would do for his created. And the Samaritan who is cured, one of many cured, the only foreigner among the cured, is the only to offer thanks: “realizing he had been healed, [he] returned, glorifying God in a loud voice; and he fell at the feet of Jesus and thanked him” (Luke 17:15-16). Jesus comments on this, affecting perhaps not entirely genuine surprise that this devotion comes from one not bound, by covenant, to Israel’s God: “Ten were cleansed, where are the other nine? Has none but this foreigner returned to give thanks to God?” (Luke 17:17-18)

The message that can be derived from these readings is not that sometimes, some foreigners surprise us by being better than we’d expect; rather, it’s that the notion of “foreigner” is entirely absurd in the context of faith.

Anyone can live out Christian principles. As such, we are required to love all people as our neighbors, not just those who “officially” belong to our communities. The communities mean nothing unless they’re built on values of inclusion.

We cannot rest in notions that, because we have been privileged, because we live in times and locations which are very blessed, we are ourselves blessed over and against other peoples. God loves all; he hears all petitions. And if we fail to welcome into our communities the “foreigners,” those who outwardly seem to be “Other”, we fail to do the work of being like Christ.

Before God, we are all slightly “other.” It is not until we begin the work of faith, of living out Judeo-Christian principles, that we become more of what God envisioned and designed us to be. By appropriating faith into all aspects of our lives, we begin the cautious approach towards accepting God’s grace. It waits us always, regardless of our locations—as the 66th Psalm tells us, shouting “joyfully” to God is a task enjoined of “all…on earth”, who “fall in worship before” God, singing and worshipping. The events in the land are evidence of this love; the mercy and favor they represent is available to all, in all lands.

We are charged, as were the Israelite exiles, with the responsibility of living amongst our neighbors with love. Even if they seem different from us. Even if their “ways” aren’t always easy for us to understand. They, too, are God’s—this is what binds them to us, what makes loving them an imperative. We are to “build houses to dwell in; plant gardens, and eat [shared] fruits,” and the welfare of the ground which we share is essential—our own rests upon it (Jeremiah 29:4, 7). We’re promised joy if we do this—not the joy of living without tumult, in a state of sustained tolerance, but the joy of living truly well, in the borderless community envisioned in scripture.

I worry for us, travelling along these paths we’ve designed. Our communities become less and less hospitable to those who we deem unlike us. This has not become a place where it is easy to be the “Other”. If we’re truly invested in the notion that we’re a nation built upon Judeo-Christian principles, continuing to alienate “aliens” does our foundations an inconceivable injustice. It becomes, in fact, absurd.

We cannot refuse to engage in spiritual communion with people who have different accents, or are differently acculturated; we cannot reject human beings without having even tried to understand them. A Christian community which is only open to some is, it would seem, closed off to Christ. We must counter such trends by doing work which is Jesus-like, which starts at the most basic levels of human communication. We must seek to engage one another, on ground which we find is shared despite our resistance, from a position of faith. All are beloved by God; living in his image, so must we love all.

Photo Credit here

Faith Unbroken

Lectionary Readings: Lamentations 1:1-6, 3:19-26; Habakkuk 1:1-4, 2:1-4; 2 Timothy 1:1-14; Luke 17:5-10

[Photograph: prayers in the Western Wall]

This week’s readings are populated by believers who have experienced or witnessed deep, unexpected agony—agonies ranging from loss to the threat of faithlessness, from exile to persecution. What is significant throughout them is that, despite afflictions, our believers remain believers, despite conditions which most of us cannot realistically imagine. The question that emerges as we move through the readings is colored, perhaps, by incredulity: how do they manage this? How, even, can they be expected to?


Our Hebrew Bible readings present us with prophets who are trying to grapple with Jerusalem’s destruction at the hands of the Babylonians, a considerable blow to any faithful Judean convinced that the city, and temple, of God could never fall. What are they to do, feel and believe when calamities can befall even the place which houses the presence of YHWH? And our New Testament figures, though dealing with more personal upheavals, must confront the same kinds questions: faced with doubts, what assurances can they draw either from the present Jesus (in the case of the apostles) or the memory of Him (in the case of Paul) to ever “increase their faith” (Luke 17:1)? Even with God before us, it seems, faith is not always easy to come by. And yet in each of these passages, we find that faith is worth maintaining. It is something to work toward ever diligently, never seeking the rewards of utter and total assurance—it is a relationship between God and His people.

Lamentations is the clearest expression of grief in this week’s readings. Composed sometime after the fall of Jerusalem, it is presumably the account of a witness to Judah’s destruction, one who mourns, with the rest of the nation, for the lost holy city: “Bitterly [Jerusalem] weeps at night, tears upon her cheeks, with no one to console her,” (Lamentations 1:2), for Jerusalem’s people have been driven into exile. The despair the witness feels is almost palpable, as he takes careful account of treasures lost: Judean religion cannot be practiced in Judah, enemies to it rest easily within the city, and exiled Judeans find no peace (Lamentations 1:3-5).

As is typical of exile era wisdom literature, the witness assumes the brunt of the guilt for the unimaginable loss of the city: “the LORD has punished her for her many sins,” he suggests. And yet with all of this considered—the grief of the loss, and the tremendous contrition for it—the lamenter makes an interesting move: rather than abandoning faith in the relationship between God and His people, he recalls that, at its healthiest, that relationship meant that God would always redeem, and he takes heart.

Though being forced to remember Jerusalem in exile is “wormwood and gall,” the lamenter finds reason to hope: “the favors of the LORD are not exhausted, his mercies are not spent” (Lamentations 3:21-22). In fact, he calls these coming mercies acts of faithfulness on God’s part, perhaps faith that the Judeans can remain true to the covenant and seek return; in any case, it is clear that, despite great hardships, confidence in the relationship remains. And for what reason? What causes this witness to hope? Little more than the memory of the city of its best, highly traveled by pilgrims and awash in God’s love; the mere recollection of that is enough to make him “put his mouth to the dust,” as a kiss, for despite ashes, despite all destruction, “there may yet be hope” (Lamentations 3:29).

We find this hope solidified by the time of Habakkuk, a prophet very likely able to remember the destruction himself, who had been living in an extended state of misery with the exiled Judeans, who heard them cry out to the Lord with no seeming response—the wicked seemed to grow wickeder, and injustice seemed to multiply, despite the faith of the people (Habakkuk 1:2-3). The oracle he delivers, the only cause for hope, is that God does hear, and enjoins them to wait, and believe: “the vision still has its time, presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint; if it delays, wait for it, it will surely come, it will not be late” (Habakkuk 2:3). If one refrain, one heart of a philosophy, can be drawn out of these works, penned during periods of tremendous hardship for God’s people, it seems to be: wait. God doesn’t afflict us with more than we’re equipped to handle. Relief comes. Wait.

If these exiled prophets and believers can do it, so should the apostles be able to, particularly considering that they’re direct witnesses to God embodied—he stands before them, incarnate, and still they implore Him for reasons to believe.

Imagine the frustration of Jesus, petitioned for more and yet more by his followers, always demanding clearer sight; it seems to us, the removed readers and recipients of these gospels, that they have greater cause than any to take heart and be steadfast. Yet they insist of Jesus, “Increase our faith” (Luke 17:5). We’ve already heard, in our readings, of followers of the Lord who, their worlds collapsed around them, no end to persecution and exile in sight, manage to maintain, and even increase, their own faith; what are we to do with these complacent disciples who seem to bumble, incomprehensibly, before the Lord?

It is perhaps not wise to be too hard on them; throughout the gospels, the disciples frequently misunderstand Jesus, but they are the ones who carry His message forth after His death, and who are left to grapple with the tremendous implications of the incarnation and crucifixion. They do their best, and the metaphor of the mustard seed may not imply, after all, that they didn’t have enough faith; maybe it signifies that they didn’t have enough confidence in the power of that faith. Certainly, they aptly move “mountains”, both theological and political, in the years following Jesus’s crucifixion, and we must therefore assume that the worries which they present to Jesus in Luke are somewhat unfounded.

They’ve been witness to the life of God, embodied, and yet have no confidence that they’ll be able to properly remember what they’ve seen, or felt, or known in His presence. Similar to worries in budding relationships when two people are faced with sudden extended periods apart: perhaps they fear they won’t be strong enough to remain true to Christ and His mission—will what seems so real to them now seem as real, and as true, when Christ isn’t there to reassure them? Are they in danger of faltering, and returning to their pre-Christian existences? Can’t Jesus do something to ensure, or to reassure them, that no such departures could occur? But Jesus promises them no relief; He will not tell them that they already believe "enough".

The parable Jesus delivers seems to suggest that the work of a believer is never done, regardless of how spiritually substantial and ultimately meaningful one day, or another, in the life of a Christian seems to be. The relationship between a believer and God is an intimate one, and therefore no one can ever rest easily in it, or take undue respite from the work of it; it must be cultivated, fed both by gratitude for, and confidence in, the gift of God’s love, and by a constant awareness of what life would be like if the relationship broke down.

God commands a steadfast heart; the disciples, though they’re sure they’ve given this, cannot expect for the relationship to become suddenly easy, for is a master “grateful to [a] servant because he did what was commanded?” (Luke 17:9) No; rather, work for the servant is as faith for the Christian follower: absolutely imperative and never promised as easy.

It is a form of love that cannot be rested in or taken for granted, and once given, must be re-given, just as God constantly regenerates love for His people: both God and disciple say, at the end of the day, “we have done what we are obliged to do.”

And, lest this be thought a rather demanding imperative for a loving God to make, we learn in Timothy that, just as God never afflicts us with more than we are equipped to bear, God never makes demands of us which we are not uniquely suited to fulfill. For “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control,” which makes even seemingly minute helpings of pure faith sufficient, so that we need never ask for “more”—a seed of faith will sustain, despite odds which seem too incredible. Indeed, Paul assures us, the perfect grace which God displays in making us precisely so that we can always persist in faith is implicit in creation: “He saved us and called us to a holy life, not according to our works but according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus before time began” (2 Timothy 1:9).

And so we are reminded this week that in our darkest moments, we can rely on faith, even if the burdens pressing down on us seem too unimaginable to bear. We are meted out just enough faith to endure any strain. And when times are less tempestuous, and faith seems too accessible to be substantial, we must work in the knowledge that it has already sustained us, and must “exercise” faith to keep it strong. The reward of such devotional work is not the return of God’s love, which is always assured, but the awareness of it: a love that demands, and sustains; that persists, and towards which we must persist. That love is the temple that will never fall, even if the earthly image of it must, at times, undergo some reconstruction.