The Filet Knife

(this one looked Pinteresting)

Matthew 10:26-39

About ten years ago, I took an internship for a youth group near Portland, OR. My former youth minister hired me to help his new church’s youth ministry out for the summer.  An unbridled 22-year-old, who was theologically trained at a place called the Honor Academy, led the youth group.  The Honor Academy was a pl  Participants studied the bible and went through an actual military style boot camp.  This may sound odd, but theologically, the Honor Academy believes the world is a battlefield, where Christians are engaged daily in spiritual warfare.  Sin must be sought out and destroyed, and community is focused on allegiance to a, less than  

ace that trained young people to be both seminarians and soldiers.
metaphoric, Lord’s army.

My Episcopal youth group can't believe
I used to sing this every Sunday in church

This couldn’t have been a more imperfect place for me to spend my summer.  My hair was long, I rarely wore shoes, and I kept a copy of Thoreau poems in my backpack.  I was a zealot for my new college identity, and a self-declared pacifist… you know… to match my outfit.

Somewhere between arbitrary boycotts of companies, a secular CD smash, and the overuse of video clips from the Passion of the Christ to make sermon illustrations, I spoke up.  I sat in the youth minister’s office and said rather boldly, ‘you know, I think Jesus was against violence.’  I mentioned the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus tells us to turn the other cheek and when Jesus told Peter to put his sword away.  The bleach blond youth minister grinned at me across his desk, opened his bible and pointed to Matthew 10:34.  “So how do you explain Jesus saying he came with a sword?”  

The Gospel according to Djesus

“It doesn’t say that…”

“Well he probably meant…”

“Maybe somebody…”

“…I don’t have a response”

Almost ten years later… I finally have a response:

NT Wright describes passages like this as Jesus turning up the volume.  We as Christians often times settle in and are lulled to a celestial sleep by passages about not worrying, fearing not, and turning the other cheek.  Picking through these passages like a biblical buffet can lead one to make the assumption that being a Christian means being a passive-ist.  I just need to keep my hands clean, stay out conflict and show kindness to others.  But then passages like Matthew 10:34 come along and the volume on the little lullaby gets turned up so loud the speakers begin to distort and vibrate and Jesus shouts over the top of the noise, ‘Are you still paying attention?’

Vinyl bro... vinyl

To understand what the Gospel writer meant in Matthew 10:34 we have to start with the original Greek.  The first thin  The word for peace is eirēnēn.  It is the same word used in the Ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew bible, the Septuagint (one of the oldest translations we have today), for the word shalom.  For the Jews, shalom meant more than just peace or tranquility.  Shalom was about hope, wholeness, and oneness with God.  It was about inner peace, relational peace, political peace, and harmony in the creation all at once.  It was understood that when the Messiah comes, it would be the era of shalom.  For Jews it was all about shalom; not dying and going to heaven or saving my soul from hell, in the end there was just shalom. 

g that’s troubling is Jesus said he ‘didn’t come to bring peace.’

This is where the passage is problematic.  Jesus isn’t bringing shalom but a sword?  But didn’t he just say don’t attack the Romans?  Didn’t he just say going to war against them would be a failure?  Is Jesus now declaring war and if we read further into the passage is Jesus declaring war on families?

Back to the Greek: The word translated, bring, is balló, when it is conjugated in the active voice, like it is here, it can also be translated: to cast, throw or rush.  In other words, Jesus said, ‘I didn’t come to jam Shalom down your throats.’

I feel like from here we can sit back and enjoy the lullaby again, like Jesus’ love, shalom isn’t going to be forced on us.  We have free will, etc.  But this business about bringing a sword distorts the pleasant sounds and Jesus’ hyperbolic ways gets our attention again. 

One more bit of Greek:  If we keep going with this interpretation, Jesus is essentially saying, I didn’t come to force shalom on you, but rather I came to force the machaira!  This word is not typically used to describe the weapon kind of sword, the word most commonly used for a sword used in battle is rhomphaia.  A machairas is probably better described as a smaller knife.  It was not uncommon for people to carry machairas on their belt and it was usually used to skin animals or gut fish.  A machaira was like a filet knife.

Google: Macharia Blade

In other words: Jesus didn’t come to force peace on the world, he didn’t come to solve the problems around you, to make that relative you have a grudge with go away, to make the addict in your family stop using, or pay off your credit card debt.  No, no matter how much you love Jesus, you are still utterly powerless over the behavior of others and the unintended outcomes of your choices.  Jesus never promised to absolve you from consequences or make your circumstances better. 

Instead, Jesus promises his followers will be cut wide open.

Denial is a powerful lie.  It is the delusion that says, ‘if so and so would just change, then I would be happy/safe/healthy/stress free/fine.’   

When I moved to Nashville in the summer of 2005, I was angry.  My parents were recently divorced and it became a bitter badge of honor I displayed proudly.  My depression, my financial troubles, my string of dysfunctional relationships, or my emotional volatility could all be excused because my parents marriage was so ugly.  A friend of mine once remarked, ‘you complain a lot.’  And I looked her in the eye and said, ‘well I have a lot to complain about.’  And I meant it.  My problems were based on my circumstances, my world was out to get me, and if all of these factors would just change, I would be happy.  Also during this time my mother’s drinking became unmanageable, my badge shimmered brighter and my denial grew out of control.

I was really good at recognizing the evil all around me.  I would condemn it, and distance myself from it.  It was really important that my friends had the same opinion about people as I did.  It hurt my feelings when my friends would hang out with my enemies.  For a time, I really had nothing nice to say about anybody.  I couldn’t understand how people could love that person and me.  But as I continued to eliminate the threats around me, my life didn’t get any less chaotic or painful.  In fact, as I got older, my brokenness compounded.

In C.S. Lewis’ Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Eustace’s greed and resentment leads him into a cave where he is turned into a dragon.  In order to be turned back into a boy he must shed his dragon skin.  Like a snake, he tries to gently shed his skin layer by layer but this only makes the dragon skin grow back thicker and tougher.  It takes Aslan’s help.  The lion’s claw cuts into him so deep that Eustace thinks the lion is ripping into his heart.  When the skin is off, Aslan throws Eustace into a lake to be cleansed and he describes such agonizing burning and pain.  However, after a moment, he realizes he is free and back to being a small boy and the joy of that freedom is far more intense than any pain he feels.

Jesus said, ‘do not fear those who can kill the body but cannot kill the soul!’ (Matthew 10:28a) and ‘whoever loses their life for my sake, will find it’ (Matthew 10:39b). 

The life you will find in the midst of this kind of suffering will over shadow any pain you feel or will feel.  The pain may never go away, however, pain isn’t such a bad thing.  But oh to find life, Jesus says, is truly wonderful.

Two years ago, I went to my first al-anon meeting.  For years, people recommended I go, but I was stubborn and thought 12-step meetings were for weirdos.  I hit rock bottom as the shame and fear and loneliness I carried around was becoming unmanageable.  I’m not sure why I dragged my feet so long in going, I think it was fear of facing my deepest discomforts or perhaps it was fear that if I tried this and it didn’t help I’d be out of options.  

That first meeting was heavy, I felt like Eustace being thrown into that pool.  But as I listened to other people tell their stories that were so similar to mine and I saw the way that shame and guilt and fear and hurt and sadness no longer had power over them; that despite the brokenness of the people around them they were able to find some sense of this shalom Jesus is talking about… I was overcome with such a painful humility.  I have so much work to do.  I felt like a little boy.  But for the first time I had a vision for my freedom.  It was quite painful but I experienced my pain with such joy! 

...but you promised!!!

In the time since that first meeting, I’ve gotten married, bought a house, and have learned how to be there for my mother.  Life is currently wonderful and I often find myself settling into that old lullaby.  But the more I seek the Kingdom of God, the more I try to expand my capacity to love and be loved, the more I realize how much work I have left to do.  Like the time my wife and I planned to go to the movies and she got sick.  I threw a tantrum like a spoiled child because I wanted to go to the movies.  Yeah…I wish I were a better man sometimes.

In a world where we are so utterly powerless over what other people think, feel and do.  It is imperative that we face our pain head on because that is a choice we can make.  Our actions, thoughts and feelings either disrupt or bring harmony to the world around us.  There is no middle ground.  Growing up in a dysfunctional family it was easy to blame my parents but that blaming didn’t make my problems go away.  After taking a moral inventory of my own life, deeply contemplating my sorrows and conflicts, I realized that although some of my circumstances weren’t my fault, I had a responsibility in all of them.  The more I allow God to cut me open, the better I can understand and articulate what those responsibilities are and that wonderful shalom builds a Kingdom of God in my soul.  But it doesn’t stop there, it begins to spill out to the world around me and things begin to heal and become whole again.  It is in this space and only this space, I finally have something to offer the world.  I finally have something to share with those in need.  I have time and energy for my loved ones.  I have the energy and courage to reconcile relationships.  And in those times when I get irritable, tired, overwhelmed with anxiety, or lonely I return to Jesus’ machaira: I rest, I get some exercise, I talk it out, and/or I go to a recovery meeting.   Then Jesus opens me up again and it hurts… but oh it hurts so good.

God’s shalom is very near, may you have the courage, strength and communal support to receive it.

The Kingdom of God begins with you

Find yourself in the crowd this Palm Sunday

Have you ever wanted something so bad it didn’t matter how much it cost?

In Matthew’s Gospel, ‘the crowd’ is one of the characters in the story.  This character is written like a child sitting at the feet of an instructor.  They listen to his Sermon on the Mount.  They are astounded by his healings.  They wonder about his ‘messiahship’ when he casts out demons.  They watch as he miraculously divides bread and fish.  For the three years of Jesus’ ministry the crowd observes, contemplates, and talks among themselves.  

So it comes as a huge disappointment when we observe the way they respond to Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem.  This is because after all that they saw and heard, they welcomed the messiah like they weren’t paying attention. 

Do you ever wonder why the people put palm fronds down on the road when Jesus came to Jerusalem?

The irony of the whole situation is that Jesus came in, rather humbly, on a borrowed donkey to begin the festival of Passover, which is the festival for the Jews to celebrate their freedom from Egyptian slavery.  The palm frond is a symbol for the festival of Sukkot.  Sukkot, or the Feast of Booths, is a Jewish festival, where the faithful sleep, pray and eat in tents, (or booths) covered with palm fronds, to remember their days of living in the wilderness. 

Knowing this makes the whole palm frond thing more confusing.  Why would the crowd do Sukkot things to welcome a messiah during Passover?  The whole thing is actually quite political.  You see, centuries before King Solomon, built the first temple.  The temple was a symbol of great accomplishment and dominance as a Kingdom in the region.  King Solomon explained the temple as a symbol of prosperity and rightness with God.  (Despite what the prophets might have said, were saying, and would continue to say to the contrary)

It was during Sukkot that Solomon dedicated the first temple.  Therefore, as much as the festival of Sukkot was about remembering the wandering in the desert thing, it became celebrated as an incredibly patriotic holiday.  It was the first holiday celebrated after Judas Maccabeus declared war on an earlier group of Romans, recaptured and restored the defiled temple in the second century BCE. 

 

You see, for the crowd, the temple was a symbol of their liberation.  To have Roman soldiers occupying it, was an abomination and the festival of sukkot was their visible display of hope that God would act.

But God didn’t come to earth in the flesh to fulfill the festival of Sukkot.  In John’s Gospel, Jesus literally sneaks into Jerusalem to attend the festival of Sukkot, saying ‘it’s not my time yet.’  During that same festival when the high priest pours ‘living water,’ onto the altar asking God to cast judgment on all the nations, Jesus jumps up and shouts to the crowd, ‘I am your living water!’  Jesus seemed to be quite clear that his messiah-ship had nothing to do with Sukkot.  In other words God wasn’t very interested in building temples or empires.  Jesus chose the festival of Passover to make his entrance because Jesus is the Messiah of Passover, not Sukkot.

Passover, is the festival the Jews grieved.  It was the night all first born in Egypt were struck with a plague, but everyone who painted their door posts red with actual lamb’s blood was spared.  It was God’s final act of punishment on Pharaoh that immediately led to the release of the Hebrew people from captivity.  It was the night the people remember the lambs that were slain and the cost of freedom.  Out of great suffering came liberation for the Hebrew people.  This is the message Jesus was trying to convey by making his humble entrance.  He did not enter on a warhorse with a sword.  He did not bring an army.  He didn’t even have someone announce his coming.  Jesus came in like the lamb being led to slaughter.  It was the crowd that day, by laying palm fronds on the road, declared war on the Roman occupiers.  And set in motion Jesus’ execution. 

A few weeks ago I watched the movie 12 Years a Slave, and I wondered, (like I do with most movies about white people oppressing people) if I’m being totally honest, which side of history I would have been on.  Most of us have the privilege of being abolitionists in hindsight.  However, in this movie, the villainous slave master is so violent and so evil, that it was quite easy to distance myself from his worldview.  Matthew’s Gospel doesn’t let us off the hook so easily.  By making ‘the crowd’ a character in this story, we don’t get an opportunity to be so privileged. 

From Matthew’s perspective, we all would have been the crowd.  And perhaps the challenge and discipline of Matthew’s is to contemplate and see yourself as a member of the crowd. 

What’s important to remember is that the crowd isn’t necessarily the bad guy.  It might be easy to jump question, what are we doing to crucify Jesus?  What could possess us to do such an evil thing?  However, I believe it’s much much more subtle than that.

It seems that people who followed Jesus from place to place had one thing in common: they didn’t understand how the messiah didn’t come to declare war.  Whether it was Peter trying to protect his leader from death or the crowd wanting to push Jesus off a cliff for saying trouble was coming.  I believe it’s because they held on to tightly to this Sukkot paradigm.

This Palm Sunday, as you focus in on your place in the crowd, ask yourself: What is the one thing I am holding onto so tightly that I’m missing God’s movement happening right in front of me.  An addiction?  Bitterness?  Financial ambitions?  The need to be in control?  Fear?  Anger?  Longing?  What dream is God asking you to let go of to receive God's dream with open arms?

The litmus test for this generally involves the choice that leads to struggle and suffering.  However, as we will find out on Easter Sunday, suffering in the name of God’s will promises resurrection.  Stay tuned.

Let Go and Let God, my friends.  And may it bring you peace and oneness with God’s will. 

Shalom.

Shame

Growing up in a Christian home, there were only two cardinal sins: drinking and having sex.  It was what separated the good kids from the bad kids.  I don’t think I was the only one who saw the world this way, because it seemed that sex and alcohol were the lines in the sand when I attended my Christian college as well.  From what I saw, once my friends started drinking, they drifted; drifted to different friends and a different kind of party.  The Faithful were betrayed by the rebellious majority and new communities surfaced, without me.  My friends partied because they found loopholes in their guilt complexes and were celebrating their new liberation, free from their Christian guilt and throwing it in my face.  And of course, I didn’t drink and fornicate because I was still being true to who I was.  Faithful.  Loyal.  Righteous.  At least that’s how I interpreted this whole thing.

The first time I got drunk I was 20.  It was at my friend’s wedding.  At the beginning of the wedding, one of my best friends from high school bluntly asked me, ‘do you want to get hammered with me tonight?’  By that point I had been fighting the so-called good fight for several years now and I was growing weary, tired of being left out and beginning to feel lonely.  Without much hesitance, I decided to join him.  We drink and drink and drink and I made a complete ass of myself that night.  The next morning I woke up, feeling like I had ruined something.  I felt ashamed.  The worst part of my shame that next morning wasn’t focused on who I had hurt or that I took advantage of my friend’s family’s hospitality.  No, I felt bad because I may have changed people’s perception, my reputation, and my identity.  I honestly didn’t know who I was on this side of the sin.  For so long my identity was wrapped up in being well behaved; so who was I now?

I continued to make mistakes, hurt people, and myself over the next couple of years; most of the time it was lubricated with alcohol.  I could have learned from that night, realized drinking too much brought with it trouble and been more responsible.  But the pendulum swung and I was no longer in the league of the morally upstanding, I was one of them and they behaved like this.  I became careless.  My shame had won.

The power of shame is not in the gut.  It is in the mind.  Granted, the guilt that comes with shame smolders in the gut like a tire fire but it’s the voice of shame that truly destroys.  It’s a voice telling me that I am not a person who made a mistake, but instead I am a mistake.  I can never go back to being blameless, pure, innocent or whole.   

In the beginning God gave Adam and Eve simple instructions, to take care of the garden (Genesis 2:15). Very suddenly, however, a small piece from the creation, a garden snake, got out of line and began confusing the narrative: God isn’t trying to protect you, God is oppressing you, God is keeping you from great joy.  A confusing conversation between a woman and a snake led to a bad decision, which led to the realization of nakedness, which led to hiding, which led to a separation between people, God and the creation. 

Shame.

The most common misinterpretation of this story is that evil entered the world the moment Eve tasted the forbidden fruit.  It says in the story that the fruit from the tree was pleasing to the eye and good for food.  Which leads me to wonder: why would God create in us a desire for something we shouldn’t have?  Are my own desires evil?  Or are the choices I make the problem?  Furthermore, what’s so bad about acquiring the knowledge of good and evil?  Maybe, God just wanted them to acquire the knowledge a different way?

Perhaps, what we desire and the experimentations that ensue from trying to quench our thirst, and the mental gymnastics we go through to justify our actions, although they bring with them great consequences, isn’t the thing this story is warning against.  Perhaps, the most important take away from this story is ‘they saw that they were naked and hid.’

I don’t believe the point of this story is to tell us to obey God or bad things will happen.  The consequences of our sins are part of the natural order of things.  When we act selfishly we hurt people.  When we lie, we are mistrusted.  When we drink too much we do foolish and sometimes violent things.  When we make sex a casual encounter, hearts get broken.  For the majority of us, our conscious, and God-given desire for justice, encourages us to make right what we have done wrong and discourages us from doing it again.  So isn’t the message, ‘do the right thing,’ obvious? 

In the narrative that is your life, you will make a mistake.  Your good, God given desires for love, intimacy, connection, and acceptance will be twisted and perverted and you will make a bad choice or find yourself in a bad situation.  The television will say you need to buy something you can’t afford.  A family member will let you down and you’ll act out.  That magazine cover will tell you aren’t beautiful.  Or (in my case) your friends will start hanging out with other people and you’ll become deeply insecure.  These are the disordered and chaotic broken pieces of this creation that whisper lies and twisted truths about the way the world is and what you have to do or become to be apart of it. 

The question at the end of all of this is: when you find yourself naked and alone will you look for God or will you hide?  Will you believe the voice that whispers ‘if anyone found out about this, no one would understand you, forgive you, or accept you’?  Will you let shame win? 

This Lent, embrace your nakedness, push back on your shame.  When you feel exposed, when the dust settles and you see the wrong you’ve done, the most important thing is your next decision.  Confess you sins.  See what happens.   Step into a community, a support group, and/or a friend who will receive you, listen to you and love you simply because you are God’s creation.  What you decide to do in the midst of your shame is what turns a curse into a blessing; distance into intimacy; brokenness into wholeness; death into life.

When we refuse to give power to shame, there is space to give power to grace.  Grace restores us to sanity.  Being sane means knowing the truth.  And the truth is: no matter what I’ve done, I am fully capable of being loved.  May you receive grace and have the courage to stand firm in your shame.  Because grace my friends is all God’s been trying to give since he’s been looking for a naked couple hiding in a garden.

Shalom.

(Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7)

  

Listen to Love

God invited Moses to the top of mount Sinai to visit him and asked him to be there (Exodus 24:12).  This is a peculiar phrasing.  Why would God ask someone to come to him and be there?  Isn’t this implied?  Why is the request to come and then be?  I imagine a parent asking their child to come over for dinner but he also requests that his son have the meal in the same room.  Isn’t the latter just understood?  It makes me wonder how many times we’ve been summoned by God to a place only to miss something truly spiritual because we didn’t mind the other part of the invitation.

 Now I could go on about the importance of being present, of how being still and listening to the space I’m in connects me to the living God in this moment, but I won’t.  Instead, I want to point out that perhaps God is lonely. 

In the beginning was God and then God created a creation and was together with that creation.  But then people began to rebel against God and this led to a separation and God’s been working tirelessly to be united with us again.  Generation after generation, people were called to help set things to right.  They were holy listeners going to mountaintops to relay a message from a disenfranchised deity.  A deity whose presence in the broken creation was so powerfully painful the very sight of God’s face could kill a man (Exodus 33:20).

Jesus calls Peter, James and John up to a mountain to come be with him.  Jesus transfigures and the three disciples find themselves in the midst of a moment of heaven and earth becoming one again.  Unfortunately, the focus shifts immediately to Peter’s distraction, making plans to stay a while.  And God, in an attempt to save this gloriously tranquil moment, blurts out from heaven, ‘this is my son, the beloved; listen to him!’  God’s outburst terrifies the disciples.  Face down on the ground they tremble, and in an instant, this precious moment of shalom has evaporated.

I am heartbroken for our lonely God, who longs to simply be reunited with us.  A God, who has every bit of strength to break through the invisible barrier separating our realms but cannot because it would be too much for our little frames to bear.  A creator, who has a plan to rescue us from a path of destruction and death but struggles daily to find a proper method of relaying the message effectively.  Yes, this is Yahweh and my heart wrenches when I try to empathize.

“This is my son, listen to him!”

God stepped out into our realm, risking the cosmos, to deliver this message: Jesus is my son, listen to him.  In fact it was so important he said it twice (Luke 3:23).  What does it mean to listen to Jesus?  In John’s epistles we are told that the only way for people to know God’s love is in the love we share with each other (1 John 4:7) because God is love.  To listen to Jesus, we listen to love.  

Author Gerald May says, that our true desire and reason for being is to love and be loved.  He says that love is the fundamental energy of the human spirit.  When we love and receive love we are whole.  Why?  Because if God is love, then when we have love, we have God.   

Unfortunately, we live in a world that causes us to become skeptical.  The voices in our world that tell us we are not beautiful and loveable creep in, get louder and louder and finally drown out the most precious sound of the voice of God telling us we are beautifully and wonderfully made.

Listen to love.  Ignore the voices of criticism and terror.  Stop giving power to the voices that only want to steal your goodness.  Surround yourself with people who love you and listen to them.  Be present to your loved ones, heed their advice, and learn their stories.  Share space and time with the ones you love in sacred ways.  When we allow the voice of love in and release noises of hate and fear, then we find ourselves with God on the mountain, being there.  And God is no longer alone.