An Untidy Holy Life

ἐφοβοῦντο γὰρ

The last two words we know (for sure) belong in the gospel of Mark as originally written (16:8).

They are pronounced something like “eh-pho-boun-to gar.” Two words meaning, “For they were afraid.” Only the literal word order is “they were afraid, for.”

I don’t think it takes a scholar to tell that the traditional long ending and the footnoted short ending (if your translation makes you privy to it) of Mark’s gospel are out of step with the rhythm of the rest of the telling. It’s pretty much apparent to the naked eye. Most scholars that I’ve read also tend to agree (it’s so nice when scholars agree with you, isn’t it? Nice scholars.)

And then the debate begins.

Did Mark really end his telling of Jesus with the untidy conjunction “for”? It seems unthinkable that he or anyone would end a sentence with “for” let alone an entire book.

Early Christian scribes must have agreed, because they worked overtime to provide a fitting ending with appropriate flourish.

And as for the real ending? Most surmise that it is simply lost to us.

This, of course, can play havoc with the idea that such could happen in the ultimate revelation of God in written form from which not one jot or tittle can by any means disappear – let alone the last page or paragraph of a book.

But, you know, I actually like it. Makes the Book wonderfully human, doesn’t it? To my eye and heart there are so many sublime markers of divine DNA in the Book; how refreshing that it’s still so human that we can screw up and lose a page of it!

No, I don’t think Mark intended to end his telling with the words ἐφοβοῦντο γὰρ but how fitting that’s where we run out of road.

Untidy. Unexpectedly truncated. Just like so much of life. Just like us.

Came across this entry from the journalings of Thomas Merton from February, 1953, and it forms an interesting convergence – one that strikes at the core of our desire for and even conviction that our life, particularly our life in God in this world, has a full and fitting ending from which no notes are ultimately missing:

Today we commemorate Blessed Conrad – one of the Cistercian hermits.

I might as well say that in the novitiate I did not like the hermits of our Order. Their stories where inconclusive. They seemed to have died before finding out what they were supposed to achieve.

Now I know there is something important about the very incompleteness of Blessed Conrad: hermit in Palestine, by St. Bernard’s permission. Starts home for Clairvaux when he hears St. Bernard is dying. Gets to Italy and hears St. Bernard is dead. Settles in a wayside chapel outside Bari and dies there. What an untidily unplanned life! No order, no sense, no system, no climax. Like a book without punctuation that suddenly ends in the middle of a sentence.

Yet I know that those are the books I really like!

Blessed Conrad cannot possibly be solidified or ossified in history. He can perhaps be caught and held in a picture, but he is like a photograph of a bird in flight – too accurate to look the way a flying bird seems to appear to us. We never saw the wings in that position. Such is the solitary vocation. For, of all me, the solitary knows least where he is going, and yet is more sure, for there is one thing he cannot doubt: he travels where God is leading him. That is precisely why he doesn’t know the way. And that too is why, to most other men, the way is something of a scandal.

Scandal. Untidy but holy scandal. Like a photograph of a bird in flight – like those women running from the tomb for fear; like me missing my mother’s passing from this earth by a day; missing my father’s by hours. No neat closure. No captured final words. And sometimes perhaps that happens; sometimes there is wonderful and perfect closure with all the punctuation correctly in place and no pages or leaves of the manuscript lost – don’t feel guilty if it does. Be thankful. But most of life, it would seem, has a much more untidy manuscript.

I’m reminded of Pancho Villa’s reported last words (according to this morning’s tea bag): “Don’t tell them that it ended like this. Tell them I said something.”

Yes, such are the books I really like, for

 

Mr. Scott

No, not that Mr. Scott (if your inner Trekkie was automatically taking you to the illustrious engineer — or your inner Dwight to the socially inept office manager).

Mr. Scott is what I shall call the young man who stood before me this past Sunday just outside the bookstore.

“I’m an atheist.”

I was introduced to Mr. Scott through a mother and daughter – not sure of the exact connection. Friend? Neighbor? Boyfriend? Potential boyfriend? (I’m betting on that one.) Perhaps not crucial to know. They had just gotten him a Life Application NLT – leatherlike and thick and black. He looked like he had never held one before. He said he would read it. Wanted to know where to start.

“I’m an atheist. But I’m open to seeing what this is about. But I also have values I’m not willing to give up just because the church says so, like Gay Rights.”

Kudos on not wanting to do what the church, any church, says just because it says so.

But how do you tell a self-proclaimed atheist that you feel the Father’s heart for him? Because I did. In retrospect I would love to have cupped his face in my hands and drawing close said, “I feel the Father’s love for you!” Okay, would probably have been way too freaky and creepy, particularly considering the Gay Right’s comment.

Too much. Too soon. Too close. No doubt.

But I felt it.

What I did, given that he had already been given this rather large Bible, was suggest he start in the Gospel of Mark and go slowly, that Jesus is the primer for all of reality and for all the sprawling story of the diverse, eclectic, ancient library we call “the Bible,” that it’s all about knowing him, that he has accepted him as he is, where he is, with whatever values he presently holds, and that embracing that acceptance will ultimately change him, his values, everything.

I offered to sit with him as he began the journey of reading, to listen to his questions and thoughts, his objections and reflections. I gave him my email and cell phone number (555-5666, of course).

He thanked me. He took the Bible.

And then he returned it to the daughter the next day.

The mom called me to say that he had returned it saying he wanted nothing to do with it.

So now I see him in my mind’s eye, standing there with that thick, black Bible.

I wonder if that big Bible, when he took it out of the box, seemed like nothing more than a huge religious enema, as he no doubt asked himself, “Is this girl worth it?”

Too much. Too soon. No doubt.

I totally believe in, delight in, love this diverse, eclectic, ancient library we call “the Bible.” Totally. I love it as much as it can drive me crazy (kinda like my spouse – in fact, I’ve known both for about the same amount of time). I love the Word it contains and communicates and ultimately points us to in the Living Word who is Jesus who ultimately becomes the freshly incarnated Word in us, shaping us, transforming us, leading us to dance to a entirely new rhythm that is reshaping all existence.

And now I see him holding that big, black Bible.

The picture transforms before me into a symbol, a metaphor of a larger reality. I’m transported back to the Gospel of Mark. Jesus is walking by the lake. A crowd gathers. He sits in a small boat just off shore as the crowd remains at water’s edge. He has no scrolls or books to distribute. He tells stories – the first one being of that farmer scattering seed.

Jesus scattered seed in the form (primarily) of non-linear, abstract stories (we call them parables) in which he never publicly connected the dots.

We tend to drop an entire 50 lb seed bag on what we hope will turn out to be good soil. Images from movies of doomed characters in silos being buried alive by descending grain now come to mind. Or the frequent Monty Python bit of the huge weight falling from above on some unlucky character. Or of emaciated prison camp survivors whose bellies burst when sympathetic liberators provide them with a full meal.

Too much. Too soon. No doubt.

It all just makes me wonder if we wouldn’t better serve Christ and our world if we became better seed scatterers like the Master, and repented of trying to deliver a huge, black enema or to dump a silo full of grain on an unsuspecting, sputtering world’s head.

Yep. Just wondering…

 

Futterwacked

I suppose you could call it something of a dance.

Perhaps more like a combination of skipping and galloping and sidestepping.

Semi-organized stumbling. Futterwacken.

All I know is that it undoubtedly wasn’t pretty to look at for those unfortunate souls that might have seen me do it.

This past Sunday I had something of a Jesus rush. Don’t know how else to explain it. It rose up in me long before I even dressed for the morning or got into my car to drive to work (church). It started in the solitude of my study, while reciting the first three chapters of Mark’s gospel. Doing that doesn’t usually lead to such a rush. But I suddenly found myself quite literally imbibing Jesus.

It’s as if the windblown nature of his life and walk simply seized me. Jesus suddenly appears at the Jordan to be baptized, heaven is torn asunder, the divine breath descends on him, and then that breath blew him right out of the water into the wilderness. For forty days. Then he’s back. He blows into local synagogues, shares the kingdom message, demonstrates it by blowing away demons and healing the sick, and then, refusing to be tethered like a kite to any one place, he blows about all Galilee, showing up now by the lake, now in the house, now on the mountainside, now in the grain fields.

Blowing in like a Messianic Mary Poppins with a twist, he shows up in Levi’s house for a dinner with societal rejects, and answering questions about fasting in between bites of food – or perhaps even better, with his mouth full. I had never recited that story dealing with the question about fasting as if I had my mouth full of food, but that’s how it came out that morning. I could tangibly feel his freedom from all external restraints and censures of potentially somber and serious onlookers.

I didn’t solemnly pray for such windblown spontaneity and freedom. In fact, I don’t know that I prayed at all, or if I did, what I may have said.

I just know I suddenly had something of it. Something of him.

And so I futterwacked my way through the morning, treasuring every moment, every conversation, every greeting, every hug, every encounter, every prayer, every movement. Worship set and sermon were but the soundtrack to the divine play into which I had already been drawn. Even watercoloring during the service was but an outward symbol of the living colors I was sensing everywhere without, within.

Then at day’s end, I read Thomas Merton’s journal entry devotions for that day:

Out to sea, without ties, without restraints! Not the sea of passion, on the contrary, the sea of purity and love that is without care, that loves God alone immediately and directly in Himself as the All (and the seeming Nothing that is all). The unutterable confusion of those who think that God is a mental object and that to love “God alone” is to exclude all other objects to concentrate on this one! Fatal. (Oh amen – amen, amen, amen, amen! That’s me not Merton…) Yet that is why so many misunderstand the meaning of contemplation and solitude, and condemn it. But I see too that I no longer have the slightest need to argue with them. I have nothing to justify and nothing to defend: I need only defend this vast simple emptiness from my own self, and the rest is clear. (Through the cold and darkness I hear the Angelus ringing in the monastery.) The beautiful jeweled shining of honey in the lamplight. Festival!

Yeah. That was it. Merton futterwacked too.

Out to sea – out to lunch, even – without restraints. No need to argue and nothing to defend or justify. The shattering of God as external object to fawn over and glorify in ways deemed suitable by onlookers past and present; as object to be shelved and unshelved at will by our schedule and whim. But instead to know and love him alone immediately and directly in himself as the All.

No formula for this. Nothing here that can be produced or planned or prodded.

It was a wind that blew into my room, unsettling any and all of my own encrusted personal, religious, brooding stalactites and stalagmites.

And I was futterwacked.

Come on, Papa. Do that again.

 

New Year’s Resolution: Better Ecclesiology

Only a theologian would come up with such a New Year’s Resolution.

Or a first class nerd.

Wait a minute, those are actually the same…

But at any rate, this is actually the title of today’s post in one of the blogs I follow (or attempt to) by evangelical scholar Ben Witherington (http://www.patheos.com). The point of Dr. Witherington’s post is that we need better ecclesiology in that we need less hot-dogging and more leadership and accountability above the local church level, citing the case of Bishop Eddie Long (for that story follow the link http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/05/us/eddie-long-beleaguered-church-leader-to-stop-preaching.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha23 )

He raises some good points to consider.

But it got me to thinking in more general terms: what would it mean to have “better ecclesiology” in 2012? Or to put it another way, what would it mean to have healthier church life in 2012? Or to put it in yet another way, what would it mean to experience healthier face-to-face community in Jesus in 2012?

I encourage you to answer that question for yourself – and certainly to ask the question if such a question isn’t begging the question to begin with, considering the opportunities for cyber interactions through social networks like Facebook.

Here are some of my thoughts towards an answer…

A better ecclesiology is focused on more robust and more healthy personal interactions, both spontaneous and planned, with people all over the board when it comes to where they are with Jesus.

Less religious.

Less scripted.

Less predictable.

Less event dependent.

Less boxy.

More free. More flowing. More mutual exchange – because all of us not only have insights to share but also to receive; and sometimes the most meaningful insights will come to us from people not just outside of our box but seemingly from another planet. Yes, as the New Testament bears witness on more than one occasion, the God of all truth speaks through those regarded as pagan poets. Faith is found in a heathen centurion while a synagogue of the faithful turns out to be a spiritual void.

And thinking of that, as I continue my meditations in the Gospel of Mark, I can’t help but ask which provides a picture of better ecclesiology – of healthier “church,” of the kind of face-to-face interaction characterizing the kind of robust community that Jesus loves to hang around: the synagogue where a passive religious crowd watches and evaluates – and where some of them watch to see where he will step out of line – or the phenomena of Levi’s house?

You remember Levi’s house. Jesus summons the outcast, heathen tax-collector to follow him (without even a prior stipulation on expected repentance or needed doctrinal conformity) and the next thing you know Jesus is eating dinner at Levi’s house with all of Levi’s hungry crowd of tax collector’s and sinners. The Pharisees – the self-appointed guardians of truth and tradition – are left peering and sneering through windows on this scandalous ecclesia as Jesus shouts to them that it’s not the healthy that need a doctor but the sick, and he no doubt pats the empty seat next to him because there’s a place for them too.

Better ecclesiology.

Less synagogue.

More Levi’s house.

Less fasting.

More feasting and partying with people hungry for the life and love and joy that Jesus exudes everywhere; people who have given up on finding that life and love and joy in religious events and rituals long ago – but who can now find it, epiphany of epiphanies, right there at their table. And as their eyes are opened to the presence of the one who has been breaking bread with them all along, they suddenly realize that it’s not a matter of them accepting Jesus but the fact that he already has accepted them, as once again he is revealed in the breaking of the bread.

Now that would be not just better, but awesome Jesus-style ecclesiology to see unleashed in 2012 in all kinds of creative ways in unexpected places.

Just sayin’.

 

Behold…the farmer

Some renewed musings in Mark.

After about a month’s break from moving further in memorizing Mark (thank you Joshua – you not only took the land but also took over my life for this past month), I’m getting back into it this week. Feels wonderful. Something in the way he moves.

Mark 4.

Jesus again goes out beside the lake.

Travelling through the gospel with him you see enough set-ups like this for assorted teachings and encounters that I’m left with the clear impression that Jesus really liked that lake. I get the feeling he went into the synagogues because he had to – that’s where people were, and that’s where many things had to be said and done, where he encountered many who needed freedom’s touch.

But his heart was outside. By the water.

So I’m watching him. Opposition has been increasing, his family thinks he’s nuts, people are beginning to swarm in from all points of the compass as word about him has been spreading. The crowds are multiplied. The numbers of disciples sticking with him after the crowds have gone home is increasing. And now with a boat for a pulpit and his congregation lining the shore at water’s edge, he opens his mouth. Momentous words. Mark has had few words from Jesus. Brief snippets, really. No great sermon discourse on a mount. No renditions of Sabbath sermons that always left amazed congregants. Mark has been incredibly reticent.

But now Jesus opens his mouth.

What spellbinding revelations are in store? What deep teachings? What amazing intellectual acrobatics must lie just before us? What, what, oh, what…

Word pictures.

He gives them word pictures.

One.

After another.

And another.

And another.

You gotta love it. And the first one has such a wonderful build up. There’s the burgeoning crowd. There he is in the boat. Okay, on the Temple steps in Jerusalem or at the Forum in Rome or at Carnegie Hall in New York or at least Lakewood Church in Texas would provide a more momentous backdrop than a rustic fishing boat out on a lake with ragged peasants thronging the shoreline. But still, I, the reader, lean forward. I anticipate the words. Leaning forward. Leaning forward (yikes, I almost fell in)…

“Listen!”

The imperative raises the curtain. Here it comes…

“Behold!”

This imperative doesn’t even make it into the NIV which I’m using as a memorization base (I find I wander off base frequently – no surprise there). But there it is in the text. That wonderful word ἰδού. “Look!” “Behold!” Always makes me think of the classic Superman intro: “Look! Up there, in the sky!” Leaning over the rail now, straining to see, what momentous thing is this!?

“A farmer sows his seed.”

How wonderfully…plain and dull and ordinary. Not, “Behold, the cosmic hammer” or even “Behold, the rod of iron” or “Behold, the grand temple” or “Behold, a stately white horse.” No. It’s “Behold, a farmer.” A farmer walking along a path throwing out seed from a bag hanging at his side seems hardly worth an ἰδού but there it is. There he is. The incongruity leaps out at me, the stately “behold!” and the common farmer.

Just a nice reminder in an unexpected place of how such a grand, sweeping, eternal-hued concept like the kingdom of God can be rendered down so simply into the trudging steps and scattering movements of a farmer throwing around seed. Of course, this simple picture is followed by many others – snapshots from daily life that are so humdrum and ordinary that they defy equation with eternal realities.

Which, at its root, serves notice that while we can wax on ever so eloquently about kingdom theology, filling books and shelves with our accumulated wisdom and insight and words, we still cannot improve on the sight of a gardener in his field – that, in fact, the kingdom of God is ultimately found not in brilliantly conceived and inscribed volumes but in the seeming follies and irrelevancies of our everyday lives.

Behold.

 

Of Blustering Religious Blowhards

And the teachers of the law who came down from Jerusalem said, “He’s possessed by Satan! He’s in the grip of Beelzebub himself! By the prince of demons he casts out demons!”

And Jesus called them on it – confronted them directly right then and there. He did it through word pictures. “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.”  Mark 3:22-24 (NIV with a wee bit of help from me)

It’s an ominous development. The almighty Scribes have come.

Mark has already narrated plenty of run-ins with the local religious frat boys, the local law and religion experts sitting there with their internal objections that Jesus has no problem drawing out into the open; the local Pharisees peering through windows at him eating with gays and lesbians – I mean, with tax collectors and sinners – and then accosting some of his disciples as they were either coming or going, “Why does he eat with sinners!”; with local religious purists who fancied themselves the only ones really serious about matters of God who watched his disciples pluck those heads of grain and thereby trample their Sabbath conventions – which, of course, everyone understood were but the to-be-revered-and-unquestioned parsing of divine Sinai oracles.

And now here is the first Jerusalem delegation. This is serious. Can’t you imagine how solemn they looked? I’m not sure how scribes from Jerusalem would have dressed, but it doesn’t take much to imagine pitiable and despised Galilean peasants parting like the Red Sea to let this royal religious assemblage pass.

Oh how intimidated we can be by blustering religious blowhards from whichever corner they creep. I do believe I would have joined the peasants in parting this way and that – just because all too often that’s what I still do.

I recall Shelby Foote telling the story of Grant’s first encounter with rebel forces early in the Civil War in the West. As he led his men up over the last rising hill before the enemy encampment anxiety swelled up in his heart right up to the back of his throat. And then he crests the hill…and sees the backsides of the rebs beating a hasty retreat over the next hill. It suddenly dawned on him that his enemy was just as a feared of him as he had been of them. It was a lesson he never forgot.

Jesus didn’t bow or kowtow or kiss up or make nice with these religious emissaries. Their speech had been sideways, playing to the crowd (some things truly never do change). Clearly they had not come to hear, to consider, to learn, to take in. They were on a mission to discredit, a mission of threat-management, of defusing the latest challenge to their religious security by one who not only didn’t offer his own acceptable credentials but who refused to recognize theirs.

“He is possessed by Satan! He’s in the grips of Beelzebub himself!”

It could have been worse. They could have accused him of introducing Eastern mysticism among the faithful.

They sneer sideways playing to peasants.

Jesus calls them out. He stares them down. No “How do you do, I’m Jesus.” No bowed head with muttered apologies at having offended their royal religious highnesses. He calls them out. Proskaleo is the word Mark uses – it’s an in-your-face summons. Sideways sneers (can’t you just see their blog!) are met with a face-to-face calling them out. And he proceeds to utter what many consider his hardest line in the entire gospel. They would never have forgiveness, they had committed an eternal sin.

Yeah, there’s something here to learn.

Perhaps we can think of it as “Dealing with Religious Blowhards No Matter How Pompous Their Robes or Airs 101.”

Face them.

Call them on it.

Dismantle and mute them with word-pictures that leave them guessing.

Keep it to the point.

Let them feel the point.

And then move on. Just keep swimming.

Keep right on casting out demons and doing the Kingdom business that He has sent you on.

Yeah, I’ll take a little bit more of that, Lord.

 

Not a Wretch, but a Son

Reciting Mark this morning, the first two chapters and into three…

Encountering, loving  Jesus, the Beautiful Outlaw in each story.

Why did I wait so long to do this – to memorize and meditate in and on these stories of him?

I see him looking at the roof above literally coming apart, pieces of dirt and grass and God knows what else falling on him, around him. People in the overcrowded room falling back, making way. Does Jesus stand up? Or does he merely continue to look up – his hand no doubt shielding his eyes – as he looks up with bemusement at the progress of the four sets of hands furiously digging through the roof of the third world peasant home? And now the hole is big and wide and long enough to lower the mat with a paralyzed man.

Has Jesus even bothered to say anything more in this house teaching? I think not. He welcomes the interruption, the intrusion.

Jesus watches. Jesus sees their faith.

As the paralyzed man is lowered right before Jesus, does the man say anything? An awkward, “Hi”? Perhaps an embarrassed apology for the mess and intrusion caused by him and his friends for “dropping in” like this?

We do know what Jesus said. I am struck by the first word.

τέκνον.

Child.

This isn’t condescension. It’s what he calls the twelve in that upper room after three years of walking dusty roads with them. It’s what John the beloved in his twilight years repeatedly calls his community of friends in Jesus. Beloved.  Intimate. Affectionate. Valued.

“Do you know me, sir?” I can imagine the man saying. The paralyzed man. What an apt picture of us all. Paralyzed. Emotionally, intellectually, verbally, relationally, spiritually. Constipated. Stuck.

“Child” is the last word we have for ourselves as we peer up from the mat of our own paralysis.

ταλαίπωρος ἐγὼ ἄνθρωπος.

Those are Paul’s words as he puts himself on the mat of his paralysis, classically translated, “Wretched man that I am.” Yeah, that’s more like it. Those would be the words right out of the paralyzed man’s mouth if he could even overcome his paralysis of speech.

Wretched. Oppressed. Weighed down by so much I can barely lift my head – and I feel nothing in my legs, my arms, my heart. How long? Nothing perhaps except pain. It’s odd, those who bandy about the phrase “I’m just a wretch in his grace” or some such as a religious handle…they have in my experience been some of the most obnoxious people. A contagious false wretchedness masking pride; a religious, poxy wretchedness paraded as a virtue. A whole new level of paralysis of the religious kind. Some of them (called “scribes”) were sitting in that room with Jesus brushing the dust off their heads and tunics (and books) as Jesus says to the paralyzed man, “Child.”

And then, unexpectantly, startlingly, scandalously, and oh so offensively, he adds five more words:

ἀφέωνται σοι αἱ ἁμαρτίαι σου

“They have been forgiven – your sins.”

Did the man even know he was looking for that? Had he asked? Had he mumbled the sinner’s prayer? In one swoop, in six precious words, at Jesus’ initiative he calls forth the man’s dignity for all to see and then equally visibly restores both spirit and body.

“And he got up, took up his mat, and walked out in full view of them all.” No slouching or crouching or cringing or crawling. No worm, no pond scum this. Behold the man. Homo Erectus. Man fully alive. No longer an object of anyone’s pity – least of all his own. “For we have not received a spirit of slavery again leading to fear, but we have received a spirit of sonship by which we cry out, ‘Abba, Father,’” says Paul. “Once you were not a people, but now you are the people of God; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy,”says Peter echoing Hosea.

And so, just when was the last time you heard his tender voice directed towards you with that precious word that captures in one syllable what is truest about you? When is the last time you heard him, while lying on the mat of your paralysis, “Child”?

 

Kicking Against the Pricks

“It is hard for thee to kicke against the prickes…” Acts 26:14 (KJV 1611)

I’ve made it through chapter two of Mark’s Gospel in my daily memorizing and meditating. Five stories (and a prologue) in chapter one; four stories in chapter two. The first five stories show Jesus getting under way – calling friends who will become disciples and “fishers of men,” announcing his presence to synagogue crowds and demons, healing the sick, touching a leper.

Then in chapter two, he becomes a prick.

Okay, before you react and post nasties about me (at least in your own head), before you close the window of this post in a huff, hear me out. (Then you can do all of the above.)

I am struck by how relentlessly Jesus pricks the religious mentalities and sensibilities of his contemporaries.

Witness the paralyzed man lowered through the roof. I don’t know what the homeowner was thinking or saying at that moment, but I think Jesus was highly amused. As I come to the line, “Son, your sins are forgiven!” I simply can’t say it without at least a bit of an initial chuckle at the outrageous determination and creativity of the man’s four friends. I’m also struck by the unique brand of paralysis suffered by the scribes who observed the scene and heard the comment. They weren’t chuckling. They withdrew into a inner world of religious grumbling and complaint: “Why does this fellow talk like this!? This is blasphemy! Who can forgive sins but God alone!?” And I imagine they didn’t even break a sweat on their stoic religious faces as they inwardly began to boil.

“Jesus immediately knew in his spirit what they were thinking in their hearts.” And here’s the kicker. He didn’t say to himself, “Hmmm. They clearly have an issue with that pronouncement of forgiveness. Note to self – be more careful about such pronouncements, and let’s see if we can arrange to have a spot of tea together (because Jesus was English, you know) and try to smooth over this wee religious bump.” No, actually, Jesus chose to expose their inner complaint right there before the whole group. “Why are you thinking these things? Which is easier – to say to the paralytic ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say to him, ‘Get up, pick up your mat and go home’?”

I’m just trying to imagine the faces of these theologian types. Notice there are no recorded words for them. Perhaps it’s because they wished there was a mat they could hide under — or better, that they jump on for an elevator ride up out of the room. But Jesus just keeps pricking away…

“But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” – he turns and says to the paralytic, “I tell you, get up, take up your mat, and go home.” And he got up, took up his mat and he didn’t just go home, he “walked out in full view of them all.”

What a major prick.

Jesus seemed to realize that religious facades can’t be loved away by being caressed or coddled. They have to be pricked. If knowledge puffs up like the proverbial balloon, that balloon has to be popped, and frequently. The only alternative is to leave it alone and let it float on its merry way to deflate or explode on its own.

Jesus’ comment to Saul on the Damascus road tells me that his essential tack with religious types hasn’t changed. Who knows what all creative and provocative ways Jesus employed to prick Saul’s bloated religious exterior (or posterior). But repeated prickings where in fact made. And Saul just kept blowing himself up again. Literally. Until the final encounter on that Damascus road – which wasn’t so much a pricking as a skewering.

So the next time someone inadvertently or even advertently pricks your religious exterior – perhaps the one you’re very proud of not having…like I had mine subtly pricked last night when I was asked to meet with a fellow for a pastoral consult in a drinking establishment (just a bit of a prick – me stepping into the place, not the fellow) – yeah, next time you find your religious exterior pricked, thank the prick that did it.

And don’t be afraid to prick others as needed. They’ll thank you for it. The key is to prick that exterior without being a major prick yourself – to pop the religious exterior rather than puncturing their heart.

Savvy?

 

Bad Company

Having just reviewed Seth Godin’s Poke the Box on the BookCellar website, what do I open to this morning in my ongoing journey through Mark’s Gospel?

Jesus deliberately choosing bad company.

It’s the second and final “calling” narrative in Mark, similar in location and setting to the call of the fishing brothers (the Sea of Galilee, teaching ministry and large crowds) but differing in the subject who is called, namely Levi the tax collector. To call fishermen would be unexpected, a surprise. I can hear the religious elite types shaking their heads and clucking their tongues as they murmured, “Whatever!” But for him to summon a tax collector into the intimate circle of his immediate followers would not only have been unexpected, it would have been completely unacceptable.

As R.T. France observes, to call a telones (tax collector) to join his group was “a daringly provocative action, not only incurring the disapproval of the religious establishment, but also risking giving offence to the patriotic instincts of the common people. Jesus’ disdain for the restraints which scribal convention place on contacts with the religiously disreputable is then put beyond doubt by his going on to join a gathering of other such social outcasts in the house of his new recruit.”

Talk about poking the box!

I love how Levi quite literally just pops into the story. No warm-up. No invitation to a six-month class on church doctrine to see if he would qualify for the group. No. One minute he’s doing his business, collecting tolls and taxes and generally alienating his fellow countrymen, and the next he’s invited to step out and commence a new journey with two simple words from Jesus: Follow me.

Those two words are “akolouthei moi” in the Greek; but it’s the Hebrew equivalent that jumps out at me: “Lek acharei.” You see, those are essentially the same words that Abram heard one night, one morning, one afternoon while he sat at whatever sort of booth he was at: “Lek lecha” – roughly translated “Go” or “Come,” depending on your perspective.

What a kicker to realize that the invitation to follow Jesus as a disciple is nothing more than Abram’s call to go out to a place sight unseen as the trusting friend of God. And what a kicker to realize that Jesus doesn’t care who thinks what about him calling you or him calling me.

What an invitation for us to be equally scandalous in extending God’s grace, to call the unexpected and the unacceptable – an then to join them around their table.

Once more from R.T. France: “The alienation between Jesus and the establishment is not a matter of misunderstanding or misrepresentation on the part of his opponents, but derives directly from his own deliberately chosen stance, which he has no intention of modifying in the face of their entirely predictable objections. Jesus’ acceptance of the unacceptable serves not only the negative purpose of showing up the hostility and narrow exclusivism of the scribes, but also the positive purpose of indicating the revolutionary nature of the new situation in the kingdom of God.”

Yes, Jesus poked the tax collector’s box. Big time. And maybe, just maybe, he’s poking you and me today with his own revolutionary, “Lek acharei” – the call to stop fitting in, playing it safe, rolling over yet again. The call to get up and start – or start again – the Journey.

 

nardy worship

It was now two days before the Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread. And the chief priests and the scribes were seeking how to arrest him by stealth and kill him, for they said, “Not during the feast, lest there be an uproar from the people.” And while he was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he was reclining at table, a woman came with an alabaster flask of ointment of pure nard, very costly, and she broke the flask and poured it over his head. There were some who said to themselves indignantly, “Why was the ointment wasted like that? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii and given to the poor.” And they scolded her. But Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Why do you trouble her? She has done a beautiful thing to me. For you always have the poor with you, and whenever you want, you can do good for them. But you will not always have me. She has done what she could; she has anointed my body beforehand for burial. And truly, I say to you, wherever the gospel is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in memory of her.”  Then Judas Iscariot, who was one of the twelve, went to the chief priests in order to betray him to them. And when they heard it, they were glad and promised to give him money. And he sought an opportunity to betray him. Mark 14:1-11 ESV

Contemplating this passage for the upcoming week’s devotions…

Gospel.

Worship.

Utter either word in our popular culture and there will undoubtedly be assumed churchy connotations of institutional religion of one form or another. How remarkable that what is in many ways the ultimate picture and demonstration of true worship was performed in an outcast leper’s home by someone with essentially no status in the religious institutions of the day. Here was no official sacred space, no formal service or offering by authorized clergy — in fact, the clergy in this setting are in their “church” plotting the murder of Life.

“Like a gold ring in a pig’s snout is a beautiful woman without discretion.” So reads the ancient proverb. You can’t help but wonder how well that proverb catches what happened in that leper’s home in the eyes of all the onlookers.

Except One.

Jesus said it was beautiful. If the proverb had any applicability at all in his eyes, it was to the ugly acts of the religious elite in their beautiful temple and in the ugly judgments erupting into loud protest and complaint from the “chosen ones” — Jesus’ inner circle of disciples.

“She has done a beautiful thing to me.”

The aroma of the outsider’s worship in the outcast’s home filled the house and no doubt followed Jesus right through his imminent arrest and trial and crucifixion. It was a deed that had little to do with practicality or calculation. No thought given to what a “royal waste” of time and resources it would be judged by others to be — in fact, no evidence that any thought beforehand had been given whatsoever as to what others might think or say. It wasn’t so much a matter of logic as it was a matter of love — reckless, passionate, impulsive love. And coming at a time when, particularly during this previous week in Jerusalem, everyone was wanting something from Jesus, this woman did something extravagant and passionate and costly for Jesus. Up close. Messy and sweet. Personal.

And Jesus said it was beautiful.

Has me thinking about what such passionate, up close, messy & sweet, and personal “worship” to Jesus might look like today. I mean like this morning…this afternoon? What is my alabaster jar? What is the ointment? And on whose head — on which of “the least of these” — will it be poured, just because? What will my “nardy” (as opposed to nerdy or gnarly) worship be?