Despising ourselves-- On Job, Orlando, and suicide

Job 42:1-6

There are a million ways to say “I’m sorry!” Some of them are authentic, some are not so much, some are kind of even backhanded. My favorite “I’m sorry!” happens after we put Natalie in timeout and she screams usually tries to get off the chair a dozen times before finally pouting and crying for the whole two minutes she’s usually in timeout. Then, when her time runs out, she gets down runs over to Kate and I, gives us hugs and says, “Sorry daddy” and “Sorry mommy.” That’s my favorite, “I’m sorry.”

            But on the long list of apologies I’m not so sure where to put Job’s, because I’m not really sure how to read this, especially this last verse, “Therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.” Other translations read that Job repented of dust and ashes. Like a ton of phrases from ancient languages we just don’t know exactly what that means. Is it ironic? Is it defiant? Is Job hanging on to a little bit of self-righteousness against the God who he still believes took away everything he held dear? Or is this true repentance? Is Job the hero who could repent in a way the rest of us can only hope to emulate?

            Over the course of the book of Job this word for “despise,” the Hebrew ma’as, is used many times. Sometimes it is used by Job’s friends to tell him not to despise the Almighty (e.g. 5:17) or that God will not despise a righteous person (8:20), most often it’s used by Job to talk about how he loathes his life (7:16, 9:21), despises his work (10:3), and even how young children despise him (19:18 and 30:1). Finally, this word, ma’as, is used twice by Elihu, most importantly to tell Job that God does not despise anyone (36:5). In fact, you can trace the way that various characters use this word that’s sometimes translated “despise,” sometimes “loathe,” and sometimes “abhor,” to get an understanding of the frame of mind of each person. Job uses it out of a sense of pity. His friends use it to try to convict him of wrongdoing. Elihu, God’s spokesperson, uses it as a means of freeing Job from his vision of a judgmental God, and, maybe most interestingly of all, God never uses it. God never utters the word: “despise.”

            God despises nothing. Human beings? We despise all sorts of things. Even in repentance, which is one of our most positive traits, we despise ourselves. God just makes things good. We’re the ones who despise it all.

Israelites, Immigrants, and the Imprecatory Psalms

Psalm 83

One of the things we have lifted up this summer again and again is the breadth of emotions that can be found in the Psalms. No matter what you are feeling you can find some word in the Psalms that speaks to that experience: joy, sadness, fury, pain, regret, nihilism, hate, love… you can find it all. Today, that is on full display with a couple of the “hardest” Psalms, since these are Psalms written largely against groups of people. One of the things we have to be careful about doing thus far this summer is putting ourselves in the place of another group of people. Just because you feel upset and Jesus once felt upset does not mean that your anger is like Jesus’, and just because you feel particularly happy today does not mean your joy is like Mary’s Magnificat. It seems kind of obvious but it bears remembering when we read scripture that we are not the Israelites, we are not David, we are not Jesus, we are not Mary.

Just because you feel persecuted about something does not mean that you are persecuted like Israel. When we come across the experience of others it is perfectly normal to try to square their experience with our own. It’s why our first reaction to whatever a person is going through is to say, “I know how you feel” even when we obviously don’t. This tendency toward empathy is fine, but sometimes it goes awry, which happens most often when we put ourselves in the victim’s role, imagining that we are the ones persecuted even when we are not.

Psalm 83 lays down a foundation for what will come with Mary’s Magnificat song about turning the world around, but it comes in a very peculiar form. These are the hardest Psalms because they are imprecatory Psalms, and imprecatory Psalms are songs that call on God to defeat, conquer, even destroy the enemy. This is great for morale for those who are oppressed, but tough for us to deal with today because something inside of us knows that the Israelites are less a world power and more a subjugated minority. It causes us to wonder, “Are we the enemy?” From the first few verses of the Psalm:

One way the Youth Gathering showed me we have a long way to go

This is part 2 of at least 3 (OK, probably just three) posts about the ELCA National Youth Gathering. The first post can be found here.

Many good things happened in Detroit. I'm glad we went and especially glad for the experience so many of our kids had. The event itself is not perfect, of course, and that's not what I'm going to write on today. There's plenty to be said for making some philosophical changes to what we do when we come together as a church, but again I'm not going to talk about that here. The truth is I'm not experienced enough, or wise enough, to come up with an ideal solution.

Instead, I'm going to talk about something that I witnessed leaving Ford Field each evening that left me concerned. No, it wasn't the youth who inevitably don't pay attention to directions and walk down the wrong side of the street, though they left me pulling out my hair all week. Instead, it's something harder to comprehend, deeper, and more problematic.

Why this pastor is FOR same-sex marriage

I've seen too many words in recent days and most of them are the same tired old points. By saying that I don't mean that they are necessarily wrong, just that I've heard them before; I've listened (I really have) and I've been open to being wrong about all of this, but here I stand anyway.

To my mind, this issue of being "pro-gay" or "anti-gay" has everything to do with power. I hope you allow me a minute to explain, because if you stop at this point of saying "Scripture says it; end of story" you're missing the forest for the trees. Scripture has some things to say on the subject. Probably most famously, Leviticus calls relations between two men an "abomination" and, probably most importantly, Romans 1 talks about "exchanging natural intercourse for unnatural" (v. 26-27). Other scripture, like Adam and Eve and Sodom and Gomorrah, could be interpreted in a similar light, but it is most definitely just that--an interpretation (and in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah at least, in my view an irresponsible one).

A bit of context helps: Leviticus is part of the holiness code that differentiates the early Israelites from the other landed people who were a threat to them. For the Israelites it was incredibly important to keep themselves distinct from the dominant cultures; so no shellfish, no mixed fabric clothes, etc., but it was even more important that they procreate and keep the line going. It was so important, in fact, that men were allowed to enter into marital relationships that are not the traditional man-woman model that has been our primary example in the world today. You know, something about "Be fruitful and multiply" trumped everything else, and it's not very fruitful to have same-sex relations--not in that way. In Romans, the context is different. Paul is part of a persecuted Christian sect. All Christians in his time lived that way. They were under the Roman empire and may have been (or, more than likely, would be) jailed or even killed for their beliefs. This Roman culture included many examples of sin run amok: idolatry chief among them, also murder, slander, jealousy, etc., and among those is this business of "exchanging" normal sexual relations for same-sex relations.

OK, so here's where I believe too many American Christians are creating a false equivocation. I think too many of us put ourselves in Paul's shoes as a persecuted minority speaking out against the debased majority when the truth is almost exactly the opposite. I am the majority. I am white, male, and straight. Most of those speaking out most vocally against same-sex marriage also have power by virtue of their race, gender, and/or sexuality. Few of us can faithfully put ourselves in Paul's shoes. Of course, that doesn't mean that Paul is wrong, and it doesn't mean that the holiness code of Leviticus doesn't apply, but it does bring into question whether it applies now in the same way.

Joseph and the importance of just showing up

Scripture: Matthew 1:1-25

Whenever we read about Joseph (the father of Jesus) in the Bible, which admittedly is not often because he only appears in first two chapters of Matthew and even less in Luke, I am reminded of a quote from the 1998 movie, Simon Birch, where one of the boys, Eddie, gloats after being cast as Joseph in the Christmas pageant. He’s pretty full of himself until Simon, the little misfit title character, says, “It's the Virgin Mary, Eddie. What does Joseph have to do with anything?”

Right. What does Joseph have to do with anything?

This really is the question. Joseph is just along for the ride; in fact, it’s his fault they need to make this journey to Bethlehem in the first place. What does Joseph have to do with anything? I mean, how many lines does he get in the Christmas pageant? How many songs are written about him? Nobody cares! And I suppose that’s natural and it’s even kind of funny… until we consider that perhaps Joseph does have a role to play, that, in fact, this story of Jesus’ birth hinges on adoption… and it centers around naming… both of which are incredibly powerful and both of which are Joseph’s job.

I bet most people would say that these verses in Matthew are about the Virgin birth, which is true in part, but I would hazard to guess that we say that primarily because that’s controversial, and our eyes tend to focus on sex if it’s to be found anywhere in the text. If there’s one verse out of one hundred that has to do with sex we’ll pick it out as the most important, because it tends to be one of our big hang-ups. For example, I can all but guarantee that even though this sermon has nothing to do with sex and I’m not going to mention it again after this moment it will show up in a couple of sermon notes. We get so hung up on Virgin birth stuff that we tend to miss the rest of what’s going on altogether. This is a story about Joseph staying in the picture, being the adoptive father of the Son of God, and it’s about the power of naming. It’s Joseph to whom the name of Emmanuel is given, not Mary, though, being the typical guy that he is, he apparently wasn’t listening to the angel very closely because instead of Emmanuel he went with “Jesus.”

Joseph is also important because of his lineage. The first reading today with that overly long list of descendents connects Jesus with the heroes of biblical history. That lineage runs through Joseph. None of those connections exist without Joseph, which is kind of funny if you stop and think about it because it means that Jesus was not actually a flesh and blood descendant of David or Abraham or any of the others. He is only an adoptive descendant of that line. If Joseph goes, so does Jesus’ primary connection with the Old Testament. Jesus’ flesh and blood lineage is through the more-anonymous Mary.

So why does any of this matter?

Know yourself... or else you'll never know why Jesus had to come.

Scripture:Isaiah 42:1-9

I wonder how much we really know ourselves. On the surface that probably seems like a silly thought. Who could you possibly know better than yourself? But we played a little game with our Confirmation students—and I’m going to have you play it wherever you are in a minute. I want you to think about two things--to really think and pore over it--and, if you can, share them with somebody else. The two things are these: #1: What is something you are good at? And #2: What is something you need to work at or improve upon? Take as much time as you need to ponder.

********************************************************************************

Was that easy? I think for most of us it’s a challenge, especially when we get to talking about what we need to improve. Most of us have stock answers to those questions: I really need to work on balancing my time better, or I really need to work on getting out more, or I really need to work on having a more positive attitude, but those answers are often only scratching the surface of what’s really going on with us. We have a hard time being introspective enough to know what we need to work on, because it’s scary to look at ourselves in the mirror so closely. In many ways our families and friends can answer those questions about us better than we can answer them ourselves.

Many of our societal problems are rooted in our unrealistic opinion of ourselves. As Bertrand Russell once said, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” To use biblical language, there’s a lot of pointing out specks in other peoples’ eyes and not a lot of acknowledging the log in our own. And what ends up happening in a world where we don’t know ourselves very well is that we get awfully defensive. Arguments escalate. Since we are not comfortable in the situation—since we aren’t very sure of ourselves—we overcompensate, and we become louder and brasher. We talk over others. We never listen. Listening is weakness, letting others talk is weakness, admitting there are things we don’t know is weakness.

The general rule of thumb is that the person who is loudest knows him or herself the least.

Generational lines, "All Star" clergy, and reaching the aliens

Scripture: Jeremiah 1:4-10, 7:1-11
The following is a transcript

I'm going to start with a little poll. How many of you are subscribers or regular readers of The Lutheran magazine? Anybody here? Alright, we have some people who read The Lutheran. For those of you who do not (or for those that do but did not read this month's issue) they had a big issue on the clergy retirement wave, and the age demographics of clergy (and implicitly also congregations) in the ELCA. This became something of a controversial issue, because never did they say anything negative about the next generation--my generation--of clergy, but they did kind of imply things--like we're in the process retiring the "All Star team" of clergy. That's a message that many of us heard loud and clear, saying "Oh, so we're the minor league team, I guess." What ended up happening was a lot of good discussion already--and I expect more in the future. But what came up more than anything else is a sense of frustration at how easily we fracture along those lines of demographics and age.

So this call of Jeremiah that we read about today is a call to somebody who is extremely young. I think we fool ourselves if we think that God only calls people that are extremely young, but we also fool ourselves if we think that the only people who ever receive worthy calls from God are in their 50s and 60s and 70s. I think that God calls people of all sorts. There's no such thing in God's mind as too young or too old. In fact, in the Jeremiah reading God says that he set him apart before he was even born.

Bike tour, church, and the collision of passion

            And we’re off! Well, almost. On May 8^th I’ll be heading to Turtle River, Minnesota and the start of a week-long bicycle ride across the NW Minnesota Synod of the ELCA to bring attention and raise money for hunger-related causes. It’s been quite the undertaking already. There was route planning and lodging and meals. Then there were the events along the way. We’ll be having concerts, a film screening in a local theater, a hunger simulation, programs on Indian Reservations and local schools, roundtables with local governmental and church leaders, a mini bike tour of Bemidji, visits to food shelves, and worship services all along the way.

            In short, this has been a lot of work even before turning over the first pedal. But it’s also been the best kind of work because it’s been people who are passionate, finding the intersection of things they believe in. In all, we’ve had around 100 people in on planning local events, and many more on the various moving parts of putting the whole picture together.

            For me, it is an important reminder that when we find things that we are passionate about the work doesn’t feel like work. I’ve seen that in the Cornerstone Food Pantry closer to home. The amount of hours that have gone into making that a success and the continuous resources that go into it are difficult to fathom, but it’s where peoples’ passions lie. Nobody complains because there is nothing they’d rather be doing.

            I wish we could be this passionate about everything else we do. It’s tough. I mean, nobody gets as excited for a church council meeting as we do for a bike tour meeting or a food pantry shift and I don’t expect that to be the case. But I wonder if what we do as church shouldn’t be feeding the same kinds of passions. This is no knock on people (least of all those who are already serving!); it’s a knock on the church’s ability to address the serious needs and desires of human beings.

Be a member--why not--but, more importantly, be a follower

Scripture: 1 Kings 8:1-13

            Confirmation is a seminal event in the life of the church. It’s the day that brings to fruition the promises that were made in your baptism, and it is your opportunity to publicly respond to that baptismal promise that your parents and godparents made for you. But first I want to be clear about a couple things, the first of which I say every year and will continue to say every year until I’m satisfied we are a church that doesn’t act like this: confirmation is not graduation. We parade you up here in gowns and applaud for you so it feels like graduation, but it is my profound hope that you are not done with the church even as you are just becoming members. If so, we have failed you.

Confirmation also does not mean that you agree with every detail of what our church confesses. If we honestly felt that way none of you would be getting confirmed. You are all little heretics who think for yourselves, but it’s not a sin to have independent thoughts. To be a member of the church is not to become an automaton who goes through the motions of worship once a week. While we ask that you respect the traditions that have been handed down for tens, or hundreds, or, in some cases, thousands of years, you are free also to respectfully disagree with those traditions. People have disagreed about things as long as there has been a church, and they can do this and faithfully remain a part of the church because we do not worship traditions or theological viewpoints. We worship Jesus. All of our traditions and confessions and doctrines are cornerstones for temple-building, but the temple is not the thing that we worship.

Sin that unites us: On race, diversity and oneness in Christ

Text: Galatians 3:1-9, 23-29

            After reading through the Galatians reading for this week I felt the need to take Harvard’s Implicit Assessment Test again. The IAT is something I first learned about in Malcolm Gladwell’s book entitled Blink. The test is a measurement of our implicit, often subconscious preferences for certain things over other things. This week I took the race IAT, which compares preferences for skin tones, and I did this because I’ve found it to be the toughest to “pass.” The test is on Harvard’s webpage and it takes about five minutes to do. It is basically a sorting test where you put words and faces into categories as fast as possible. There will be light-skinned faces and dark-skinned faces, positive words and negative words. You start by sorting based on faces only; if it’s a light-skinned face you click one letter; if it’s a dark-skinned face you click a different letter, then you sort terms; “joy” would be a good word, “awful” a bad word; “happy” a good word, “evil” a bad word; and so on. Then (and this is where it gets interesting) the light-skinned face and good words go on one side and the dark-skinned face and bad words on the other, and again you sort them as fast as you can. Then, it flips it around so the dark-skinned face is on the side with the positive words and the light-skinned face with the negative words.

            I have taken this test probably fifty times in the last couple years and I have never once come out anything other than favoring lighter skin tones. I say this as a confession but it is one that I share with everybody else I know who has ever taken the test. In Blink, Gladwell wrote that he, too, had a preference for light-skinned faces even though he is half-black. There are certain things—like racial preference—that are just interwoven parts of who we are. You might be wondering why I go through taking this test at all if all it ever does is convict me, but I think the main reason I do it is to remind me that I am not as fair and unbiased as I sometimes think I am. If you happen to think you are a person without biases I challenge you to try it as well; I think it will be an eye-opening experience.

What is Right and What is Easy: Cedric Diggory and the Passover

Scripture: Exodus  12:1-13, 13:1-8

            In the fourth book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the storyline begins to take a darker turn. The evil wizard, Voldemort, returns from being almost-but-not-quite-dead and the first thing he does is murder a boy-wizard named Cedric Diggory. As Goblet of Fire ends, Dumbledore—if you are unfamiliar with the books, Dumbledore is the headmaster at the wizarding school, Hogwarts—eulogizes Cedric before the student body with these words, "Remember Cedric. Remember, if the time should come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy, remember what happened to a boy who was good, and kind, and brave, because he strayed across the path of Lord Voldemort. Remember Cedric Diggory."

            The Passover is to the Israelites what Cedric Diggory would be for the wizarding world—minus the flying broomsticks and butterbeer. The Passover, and accompanying Feast of Unleavened Bread, is about remembering the oppression and cruelty of the past in order to keep from repeating them in the future. It is a tradition that originates out of the Israelites’ slavery in Egypt and the killing of the firstborn that finally led to their exodus. These festivals were instituted by God to remember the cruelty of slavery so that it may not be repeated, but they also serve a secondary purpose: they are an antidote for nostalgia.[1] Those of you who know the story of the exodus well may remember how quickly the Israelites are in need of this antidote. They can practically still see the Red Sea—the site of the miraculous parting of the waters—many of them still have the lashes of the slave-drivers, persecuted by a Pharaoh who did not know Joseph and was therefore unaware of their history, and still those Israelites quickly turn on Moses and wish to go back to the land of Egypt—site of the good ol’ days. Nostalgia, even for times that were not good by any measure, is a uniquely human response to adversity. When difficulty comes, the Israelites need to be reminded again and again that they are fleeing from a broken past and the journey—no matter its challenges—is worth it. The Passover bids them to remember the past in order to set their course for the future.

            The Israelites’ situation is not that different from the one facing the wizarding world when Voldemort returns, or, for that matter, our world today. We need something to rally behind in order to keep from wishing away our lives forever gazing into what has been. Why did the wizarding world need to remember Cedric Diggory? Because they were about to be plunged into internal conflict under questioned leadership. Why did the Israelites need a festival to remember the Passover? Because they were about to be plunged into internal conflict under questioned leadership. Where are we today? In constant internal conflict under questioned political, economic, social, and religious leadership.

            The world turns, but things—whether in the wilderness, at Hogwarts or in Kittson County—hardly change; we face the same challenges and tough choices. We are in need of an antidote for nostalgia. There is much that is wrong with the world today and also much that we are indebted to the past, but we make a terrible mistake when we get our destiny backwards. God’s future for us is just that—in our future, ahead of us. History does not move backwards toward the Garden of Eden. We are always moving forward, like Israel, into a future promised to us, and again—like Israel—our entrance into it will be kicking and screaming and dragging our feet. We want to go back. God pushes us forward.

That is why we must remember. Remember the Passover. Remember the times when we have been persecuted and remember when we have been the persecutors. Remember human beings at their worst—Darfur and Auschwitz, the Gulags, apartheid, slavery, the Inquisition, the Third Reich; it goes on and on. Remember all our Cedric Diggorys. I’m not just talking about issues bigger than what we can control. We need to process together all the mistakes we have made; we need to be unafraid of what we may discover if we go deeper.

What we will inevitably find is that at our base we are all like the Israelites, eager to return to what is comfortable in our past. Left on our own we will do things how we’ve done them before; if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. Even if it is broke, pretend like it isn’t and do it just the same. We will reach back for a past as beautiful and shiny as it is unrealistic and untrue. At our base this is who we are, but in no small part because of the God who leads us forward we are also much more than this. God re-orients us—God reminds us—where our true destiny lies.

At its core that is what festivals are about: remembering something important from our past and remembering who we are; not so that we can repeat that past but so that we can live into the future. Festivals tell us something true about the past in order to tell us something true about the present, and in-so-doing they tell us that the most important moment for the history of the faith is always right now. It’s the only moment that includes all other moments, learns from all moments, and bridges where we have been to where we are going. Festivals are a bridge from the past to the future on which we stand right now with a choice before us—forward or backward; what is right or what is easy.

Remember Cedric Diggory, Dumbledore said, because the time will come when you have to make a choice between what is right and what is easy. Easy, comfortable—words for a time when there is nothing on the line—but the truth is that there is always something on the line. The Israelites teach us that God’s people are not just a generation away from extinction but only a moment away from turning back to the path that is easy. We live in such a world of luxury that we actually value things that are easy. Somehow the good life has been equated with comfortability. The Passover tears that comfort apart.

We are not our own, have never been our own, will never be our own. We are part of a web that stretches back to those Israelites and forward to the advent of the Kingdom of God in which no moment in time matters as much as here and now. We walk alongside the Israelites in the wilderness; we walk alongside all those hurt and broken; we stand for what we believe because of the God who works in and through us today and the God who worked in and through our ancestors before us. There is no separating the past and the present, just as there is no reliving what has happened before. The past is always behind us, reminding us of where we’ve been and tempting us to return, but the Promised Land lies ahead. Remember Cedric Diggory; remember the captivity in Egypt; remember the hurt you carry with you; then, allow that hurt to be the catalyst that pushes you forward.

It won’t be easy. That’s a promise. We have a choice—every day of our lives—between what is right and what is easy. Cedric Diggory bids us to choose well. So does the Passover.

Amen.

---

[1] Katheryn Schifferdecker, WorkingPreacher podcast

Out on a limb

Text: John 15:1-8

Two years ago I found myself accompanying a group of young people from Holy Cross Lutheran Church in Salem, Oregon as they embarked on a mission trip to Idaho Servant Adventures based out of Shoshone Base Camp in the Idaho panhandle. One of the main premises of ISA is that the youth provide the leadership for themselves—the adult chaperones and ISA counselors are there to provide a measure of supervision but not to lead. I can remember walking into a home we were supposed to help renovate when the eight or ten youth immediately looked at me for direction. So, in one of my rare moments of wisdom, I took one of my high school girls to help me get a cooler from the van and while walking back to the house I said, “When we get back you’re in charge. You give the orders and tell people which jobs they should be doing. I’m going to shut up and look at you whenever anybody asks me what to do.” For half a second she seemed concerned and then the worry faded. She could do this. The thing about ISA is that every young person comes away knowing that they can do it.

            One more story that will bring us back around to the Gospel.

On that same trip, later in the week, we were helping to clear a swath of land overrun by brush, vines, and all manner of vegetation—you know, the kind with thorns and brambles and little pokey things that will get you in the eye no matter how careful you are. Again, I was working alongside eight high schoolers wielding power tools and clippers. We were pruning back the forest so that it could be useful; so that it could bear fruit; not the kind of fruit you can eat, but instead the fruit of usefulness; we were turning the land into something that would benefit those who came after us.

            At the same time, the youth were learning (even if they didn’t realize it) that they could bear fruit as well. Today’s Gospel is concerned primarily with this fruit-bearing, and the reason I address fruitfulness from the perspective of mission is because it hits all the right buttons. The most significant reason why we have mission trips—or service opportunities of any kind in the church—is that it is one of those rare moments that combines everything that the church is doing right. First, it is God-driven; its purpose is unashamedly about serving God, and honestly, we don’t get enough of that in our daily lives. It’s not everyday that we go somewhere or do something primarily because our faith compels us. Mission trips are the exception. Secondly, service projects provide unique moments of community. You know what it’s like to live side-by-side with your neighbors, and you also know that often those relationships are really just surface-level encounters with nothing on the line. It’s only when something wonderful or horrible happens that everybody comes together to support one another. The intentionality of mission is again the exception to the rule. And thirdly, mission is about serving somebody else before it is ever about us. Something amazing happens when we put service to others before our wants and desires; suddenly, our wants and desires aren’t gone, instead they are already fulfilled. All the while we thought that the secret to happiness was getting everything that we want when in truth it is giving away what we have for the happiness of others.

            So, here’s where the rubber meets the road for the Gospel.  Jesus is the vine; we are the branches; God is the vinegrower. Sounds good, but it’s challenging for us to tease what it means to abide in the vine. Yes, have faith in Jesus, but the metaphor is so much deeper than that. In order to abide in Jesus, as the Gospel says, you need to be connected intimately with the vine. Everything that we do has to have a clear identity in Christ. The reason I began with two stories about youth is because our young people get it much better than the rest of us. They can sniff out phony from a mile away. So, they understand exactly what Jesus is saying about being the vine and the branches. When they feel plugged into Jesus, everything about being a member of the church makes sense, but when they don’t then no extreme hospitality or outreach will matter. There has to be something on the line.

            What we do has to matter. We are branches—each and every one of us—but we are so often ignorant of the vine. Instead of allowing God to prune our dead weight we get it all backwards. We try to trim the branches ourselves. We see all the things that we do wrong—all the mistakes that we make—and we try harder and harder to fix ourselves. Never mind that the Gospel is about as clear as it can be: you can’t fix yourself. Self-help is a misnomer, because the only way to help yourself is to die to yourself, to give up your little desires for the sake the other. The more time you spend contemplating your own belly button, the less and less fruit you will bear.

On a grander level, this is what the church does when it is at its worst. Instead of bearing fruit by being the church in the best way we can be, which is preaching salvation to the prisoners of sin, justice to the oppressed, care to the needy; instead of imagining who is in need—spiritually, emotionally, and physically—beyond our walls, we have turned inward and examined minute points of doctrine and practice. We’ve concerned ourselves with how it’s always been and how we never have enough: time, money, volunteers—you name it. And all the while we’ve been doing it all backwards. The branches don’t trim themselves. Rather, the branch is dependent on the vine and the vinegrower. It is God’s job to trim the dead weight, not ours.

I keep coming back to that area of wild growth in northern Idaho and those youth clearing the land. They weren’t hacking away at the problems in their own lives, not directly; instead, they were fixing problems that didn’t have a thing to do with them. They were living out the Gospel for the sake of those who were in need, and in doing so their branches were being trimmed without even them ever realizing it.

Our youth have an advantage over the rest of us, and not just because they are still being asked to do intentional service on mission trips. Rather, their primary advantage over the rest of us is that they haven’t yet decided how the world looks. They haven’t found themselves a nice comfy branch on which to rest. They are willing to go out on a limb, to test their strength and flexibility. They have an advantage over the rest of us because they understand their need for support outside of themselves and not merely within. They realize they can’t be both the branch and the vinegrower. Their support has to come from others, and the only difference between our youth and our adults on this matter is that they realize this is true while we continue to put on the charade of autonomy.

Jesus is the vine. All of us are the branches. So rather than making our youth, who understand this better than we can hope, more like our adults, we have to seriously consider how we—the adults—will be more like our youth. How will we put down our machetes and start whacking away at problems other than our own? How will we turn outside of ourselves for the sake of others? And probably most important of all, what do we do that bears fruit? Where is the place in our lives that we turn to remember that we are God’s children ourselves, where we serve others and in-so-doing find ourselves?

These are the questions before us. The answers are up to you.

One Shepherd, One Flock: Jesus on the Foolishness of Prejudice

Text: John 10:11-18

One of the earliest things we learn is how to tell things apart. This begins long before we ever step into a classroom, before Kindergarten or any kind standardized testing. We learn easy things first: this is mom and this is dad; this is red, this is blue; this is cold, this is hot. We need to know these things to stay safe, and just to get by in the world. You need to understand how thing A is different from thing B in order to understand anything particular about things A or B. Then, as we get older the distinctions grow wider and wider. By the time we are adults there seem to be infinite variations on a theme. Creativity is born out of seeing these distinct possibilities. In one famous—perhaps apocryphal—story, Abraham Lincoln once tried to close the US patent office because he believed everything that could be invented had been invented. The following 150 years have told a very different story.

            Making distinctions is crucial to invention, safety and critical thinking, so we tend to think categories are universally good. However, there are limits to their helpfulness. On moral issues, making distinctions can be downright tricky: what is right or wrong, “good” or “bad?” In making distinctions of judgment we need to be careful that we don’t confuse our view of a thing with ultimate truth. It’s one thing to argue over the greatness of sports team but quite another to caricature based on race, gender, or religious beliefs. For instance, we may call a warm day “good” or a blizzard “bad,” but that is a very different judgment than to have positive thoughts about a woman because of her race, or negative thoughts about a man because of his beliefs.

            Jesus gives us a cautionary example in talking about the Good Shepherd. Who is the Good Shepherd? The one who guards the sheep, but also the one who does not make distinctions within the flock. Jesus is the shepherd who protects and saves every sheep. And more to the point, Jesus values his own life only to the extent that he is willing to give it up for the sake of the flock. The sheep are all the same. One shepherd, one flock; and the flock is broader than you might think. Jesus says that he has other sheep that do not belong to this fold. These are not “white” sheep or “black” sheep; they are just sheep. No divisions, nothing to make them distinct. Sheep alone.

            In fact, in the entirety of this John 10 account, sheep are never mentioned in the singular. Never once does Jesus separate us into individuals who receive according to our own goodness or badness. We are anonymous but communal.

            It is we who have made all sorts of suggestions about who is worthy to be a member of the flock. It is we who have taken all manner of stances about a person’s “goodness” or “badness.” These may very well be necessary judgments to keep us safe, but Jesus isn’t talking about life as it is down here. He is talking about life as it one day will be; he is talking about not just an ideal but a reality beyond the veil of our lives.

            Jesus names a reality—he is the Good Shepherd, we are sheep—and he doesn’t care if we are big sheep or little sheep, ugly sheep or pretty sheep, sheep that are black or white, male or female, rich or poor.

            The kingdom of God rejects distinctions, because our primary identity is the body of Christ; not our names, not our memories, not our relationships or our identities.

            So if we believe this is true—that the kingdom of God rejects distinctions, things that separate us from one another, traits that we consciously or unconsciously consider “good” or “bad”—if the kingdom of God is a place where we are united as one flock—one body—then we do a poor job whenever we take sides down here. Our prejudice may take many forms. It may be biases along racial, gender, or class lines, but it is not only these. Anytime we believe ourselves to be of innately greater worth to God than another person we puff ourselves up as if trying to show the Good Shepherd that we’re the bigger sheep.

Notice, please, that Jesus doesn’t care.

This past week the Washington Capitols eliminated the Boston Bruins in game 7 of their opening round series in the Stanley Cup playoffs on a goal by Joel Ward, a forward who happens to be a black man playing a predominantly white man’s game. Within minutes, Twitter had erupted with racially charged epithets aimed at Ward.

It’s easy to condemn the people behind the tweets, and rightfully so. They displayed their ignorance, and worse still some of them remain defensive of their posts, trying to justify that “everyone was saying the same thing.” But behind the vulgarity, there is something in this circumstance that tells us about how we see the world. All of us distinguish between “us” and “them.” Why is it that the first gut reaction we have to Ward is that he is a black man? Because he is a minority in that sport? Perhaps. Nobody, as far as I know, mocked Ward for being from Ontario, or for his stocky build, or for wearing the number “42”. Instead, they saw two things—he plays for the opposing team and he’s black—and from those two details they were armed with enough previously learned prejudice to say some awful things. We all have our own categories for “us” and “them”. It is our associations with a thing—in this case, race and sports team affiliation—that cause us to fall off the boat.

This is important for us because we tend to ascribe to Jesus the same kinds of biases we feel ourselves. Isn’t it funny how the Jesus we believe in dislikes the same people we dislike? The reality, however, is that Jesus defies making even the simplest distinctions. Jew or Greek? Slave or free? Male or female? Neither, says Jesus. Why? Because those things we have created to separate one person from another are not applicable to the kingdom of God. Jesus doesn’t care if you are black or white, athletic or uncoordinated. That much should be obvious.

But what should also be obvious is that we do the kingdom of God a serious disservice when we continue to form judgments based on these arbitrary characteristics. If you think less of a person because they are short or tall, skinny or fat, old or young, black, white, Hispanic, or Asian, or because they are a man or a woman, then how can you have any hope of experiencing hints of God’s kingdom on earth?

Jesus came to break down those walls that separate us one from another, and Jesus died for you and for me and for all of us that can’t help but continue to make distinctions between those things that are good and those things that are bad. Jesus, thankfully, doesn’t care. We are his flock—one flock, one shepherd.

(Chess) master pastor

This is a question that I keep getting as my rating inches higher and higher. Now my USCF is mid-2300s and still going up (as far as I can tell) and my FIDE is going to be up near 2200 and probably still has some catching up to do. Anyway, the question I keep getting is 'What are you going to do when you become a pastor?'

Well, the truth is I don't know. Come May I will graduate and hopefully get a call to some church somewhere, sometime soon. Who knows... and once that happens my time to continue on playing chess will be much more constrained. But here's the other part of this: I've never really traveled to play chess. I basically only play in Minnesota and occasionally adjacent areas. I feel like if I took some time off to intentionally play chess and attempt to make FM or even go after IM norms or something like that I would have a fair amount of success. Could I make IM in a year working toward it? I think I'd have a shot.

But the question I keep coming back to is: Why? Why do I care if I'm an FM, IM, GM, or just a good chess player? It'd be nice to have those titles, but it's not what I want to define myself as. I don't care if I'm remembered as a chess master, but I do think I can do some good for some people in the vocation that I am called to.

Can a person be called to be a chess player? Yes, I think so. But it's not me.

I love chess, love playing it, and I don't think I'm going to love it less even when work and family end up getting more in the way in the future. I'll still play, and I look forward to it more and more all the time. And I'm ok being "National Master" or just chess player or just Frank. Whatever. It's about the challenge, but I am always going to be a big amateur...

And that's just great.