Maundy Thursday: Love

                 I’ve been preaching on Encountering God for 5-ish weeks now, and we encounter a whole lot of God in Maundy Thursday’s Gospel

—Here in chapter 13 Jesus is receiving, holding, in his hands all that God has given him.
He is fully aware of his origin from God and that his destiny is a return to God.
Similarly, the glory of God—the heavy presence of God—is pointed to by Jesus.
Look, the fullness of God, past, present, future,
God with us in a most radical way…
Jesus is utterly full of God
—and his immediate response is to empty himself in other centered serving love.
This is mind blowing!
God’s fullness, fully emptying before our eyes and changing us forever
—that’s the truest theology—God Talk—that I can think of…
that’s the kind of stuff that makes for Christian Songs,
because just saying it doesn’t do it justice.
In fact, one of the earliest Christian Hymns (found in Philippians 2) sings this very song:
“Christ, who, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God as something to grasp.
Christ, who emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave…”

It goes on—magnificently so—but that’s the thrust of it.
When God is fully present, God steps back, and only love remains.
Or to borrow from still another Christian letter, 1^st John—“God is love.”

Beloved friends
—Love is what we need,
love is our only tool,
and love is our singular goal.

Prayer

                Love is what we need, love is our only tool, and love is our singular goal.

                We need love,
the whole world does,
but all you need to do is look around,
to know that we lack love.

                Perhaps we lack love
because we are disillusioned or greedy,
convinced that love is just a scam,
and there are better scams to run.
Better ways to get what we want, what we need
—failing to realize our ends and our means ought to align.

                Perhaps we lack love
because we’re confused or our life has gotten disjointed.
We mistake strong emotions,
with the strength of loving action.
Or maybe it is a little more technical,
we just don’t know how.

                Perhaps we’ve traded love in for hatred or indifference.
Famed Author and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel called the latter,

“A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between 
light and darkness, 
dusk and dawn,
crime and punishment,
 cruelty and compassion, 
good and evil.”

Perhaps the world struggles to love
because we cling to scarcity,
are scared, cramped in a timid crouch,
or have been scarred one to many times,
and just can’t risk it again.

God help us all. We need love!

 

Love is more than an emotion,
but crucially, an action
—a tool to get through this life alive,
even after we’re dead!

Jesus doesn’t just give us a command, he seeds our imagination—love.
Love in a way that is transformative,
a way that uplifts the other,
a way that is humble,
a way that gets in the muck!

He takes on the position of the slave,
strips down to working clothes in the middle of an important feast.

He does the task of washing feet,
in a “sword and sandals” world,
that’s not just symbolic,
that’s dirty work…
and that’s the sort of work he calls this community to when he says, “Love one another.” Not just feel good about each other,
not just romanticize the community,
not just have a sense of belonging—family even
—but practice other centered serving love!

Such love:
moves mountains,

maintains and gains trust,
creates community,
and blesses the seekers and the meek ones.

Love is our only tool

 

Our magnetic north is love. It is our right direction and our guide in troubled waters. Love constitutes both our values and our goals.

                Jesus’ farewell actions
—atypical for John’s way of telling the Gospel
—precede Jesus’ farewell words.

He grounds the disciples,
this earliest of church,
in love.

In his deeds he is saying, “I’m leaving, but you are to continue this, this is the foundation of our community. A washing!
A washing that is call to service,
the care of relationships,
an ongoing collective life of interconnected ministry.
Ministering to one another,
loving each other.

                A community of love,
that was the first-place resurrection was seen,
and it will continue to be so even today!
If you want to see new life, look here!
A New Creation is breaking out with-in the Body of Christ!

                Love is our highest value, and our true goal.
As we are ambassador of love,
we are also pursuing love…
love, which, ultimately, pursue us,
kneeling, washing, cleaning, caring.
Our love for each other becomes Christ’s love for us
—just as surely as the bread and wine we partake of is his body.

Love is our singular goal.

               

                When we encounter God, we find love.

Love is what we need,
love is our only tool,
and love is our singular goal. Amen.

Encountering God at the Grave

 

                Here we are, already, the last Sunday in Lent. Five weeks deep into this “Encountering God” sermon series.
-We’ve encountered temptation, in order to see its opposite,
-for Nicodemus encountering God was like Night/Birth/Water/Spirit/life,
-we’ve been surprised beside the Samaritan woman,
-and had our definitions shifted on us with the man formerly blind.

                Now today, God encounters a whole family
—a choir, a chorus—Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.
They encounter God at the Grave, and they are met with:
mutuality, relationship, friendship
—a conversation, a duet, a harmony.
Encountering God resounds with echoes of love and is an entrance into conversation. (God wants to have a back and forth with us!)

Let us pray

 

                First Martha rushes out and meets Jesus,
and she says what will become a refrain,
“Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

                One of those unanswered questions
—a heavy statement
— for folks after they lose a loved one.
“Why God? You could have done something Jesus.”

                And the conversation spins around a bit,
and Martha names a general truth, “On the last day”
and Jesus pulls her into the present,
from the general to the particular, “I am the resurrection.”
And she calls back, “I believe it! I trust you.”

                Gospel isn’t a generalized propositions,
but a poignant proclamation to the present
—here is the good news for you! Now!

                C.S. Lewis famously went on a bike ride and, at the start of it,
the Gospel was a good bit of folklore,
but by its end it had become true and pertinent good news for him!
Similarly, my Confessions professor tells the story of his mother riding a bus home from church, and realizing somewhere along the line, that the Gospel and the Sacraments she’d received at church were “for her.”
For you Chris Halverson…
“For you WX.”
“For you YZ.”

                Encountering God is a conversation,
drawing us into the story,
giving us the lyrics to sing along.

 

                Then Mary is called over,
followed by the crowd,
to Jesus.
She too repeats the refrain, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”

                And a chorus of mourners join her
—weeping left, right, and center.
“Come and see him laid in the tomb!”
Come and hear our sad song!
This throng, singing away, moves Jesus
—breaks him thoroughly.
Just as Martha was brought to the present and the particular
—now Jesus is brought there—brought low,
Lo! While resurrection will certainly glorify God
—his friend Lazarus is in the tomb
—as Jesus will be soon,
just a few chapters later,
and a short walk from Betheny.

                This weeping becomes true and poignant for Jesus too
—yes encountering God is entering into a conversation
—a back and forth
—a Blues Duet,
between Mary and Jesus.

                The Unmoved Mover,
moved by the music of mourning,
moved by the pleading sincerity of dialogue
—a heart-to-heart that can break your heart!
He weeps with the full breadth of the emotion
Anger, crisp crisis,
the topsy turvy wrenched guts of moments like these.

 

                Lastly, a solemn pause, an unspoken refrain,
“If you’d been here, I wouldn’t be in the grave.”
Lazarus’ silence.
Silent in the grave, silent as the grave.

                Lazarus’ stink as well,
once the stone was rolled away.

                That glory,
that glory in the midst of the depths
—you need it.
We need it! “Come out!”

                A mummy-like man, comes out.

                That choir of mourners get to the strange work of unbinding,
releasing this man,
released from death’s deep grasp.

                The conversation that surely had a period at it,
has a semi-colon instead.
The music,
surely at its last refrain,
receives instead a Da Capo,
a repetition mark.
Encore, encore!

 

                Encountering God is joining a song,
it is a dialogue.
God talks back:

Lazarus will lean against Jesus at his last meal.
And his resuscitation foreshadows Christ’s resurrection,
it will crescendo,
an early echo of Easter!

                Mary, always at Jesus’ feet,
will bring perfume,
meant to bathe her brother’s corpse,
and wash Jesus’ feet with it.
A loving action Jesus emulates,
washing his disciple’s feet.

                Martha, identified as a Deacon,
one who serves at table,
will become the example of Christian love
—"Love one another”
If the Lord is the servant,
so too siblings,
serve one another.

                Do you hear what I’m saying
—the conversation is not done,
the song is still being sung.
When God encounters us,
we are brought into the song,
the conversation is more complete,
the back and forth with God,
we know it starts at Baptism,
but thank God it is unending!

Amen.

Encountering God Rewrites Definitions

 

             If you’ve been following my sermons the last few weeks you know that we’re asking one of those big questions: What does it mean to be found by God, to see God, to encounter God?
And part of what happens when you encounter God is that you get your definitions changed on you!

            Think of the famous experiment—the Slit experiment.
Put poorly, light behaves differently if it is observed or not observed
—it can be defined as a wave or a particle, depending on if we’re looking at it or not.

            So too, an encounter with God
—like the encounter the blind man had with Jesus
—can mess with, change, our definitions. Encountering God changes our definitions.

Let us pray

 

            When God encounters us—meets us in life,
it wrecks our categories and destroys our definitions,
it upends what we think we know about our world.

            When the blind man encounter’s Jesus redefinitions fly
—everything from who is the insider and who is the outsider to the nature of Sin to the Blind man’s very identity, change.

 

            It begins with, an unexpected encounter
—the Disciples want to talk Sin,
Jesus insists upon healing.
The man is left healed and unrecognizable; his sight, make everyone else blind.

            He starts off as an object lesson,
an example of intergenerational sin,
a son with no autonomy of his own,
a disability, a condition,
“The Blind Man.”
But on the other side of things Jesus has removed him from these boxes people have hemmed him into.

That which crippled him doesn’t have the last laugh, instead God laughs with him, joy bubbles up,
because God upends his pain
—when God encounters us we’re all broken jars glued back together with gold,
our scars reveal majesty!

He answers for himself, instead of simply as so-and-so’s son.
His subjective reality—his witness to what God has done—overcomes all that objectifying they’ve been doing to him his whole life long.
He’s a Son of God!
No other definition matters!

           

            The very Laws of God get re-defined in this encounter. He’s healed on the Sabbath
—well, what’s the Sabbath for if not for healing?
That back and forth, already present in Genesis and Deuteronomy, is on full displace—is Sabbath about Liberation or Rest?

What is the purpose of the Sabbath?

“Can the captive truly rest?”

“No,” says Jesus.

Only the Free can Rest.

Only the Liberated can Relax.

 

            At a certain point,
Jesus’ intervention upends questions of authority
—who is speaking, teaching, rightly about God?
The powers that be question this Man so often, that he eventually has to ask, “You don’t want to become his disciples too… do you?”
You’ve expended so much energy and words wondering what happened to me… six times this man recounts his encounter:

-“The man called Jesus made mud…

-“Then I washed…

-“He is a Prophet…

-“I was blind, now I see…

-“…Do you also want to become his disciples?

-“…If this man were not from God, he could do nothing.”

            In each retelling his faith and his authority are transformed
—that’s the power of sharing our faith with others
—it strengthens and develops our own faith! Through such actions our faith seeks understanding.

 

            The starting assumption
—the working definition
—is that this man is “born in sin from head to toe.”
An assumption based on an if/then universe:
-If you sin, then you are sunk;
-if you fly right, then God will bless you.

You are in the driver’s seat,
you are in control
—God simply reacts to you like Pavlov’s Dog
—salivating at a bell,
saving at your say so.

            But Jesus, he insists that Sin is something different
—God is at work in the world, encounter Him and be changed!
A because/therefor sort of God.

-Because I love you, therefore you are lovable.
-Because God see his suffering, therefore the Blind Man gets to see the Jesus

-Because God acts for those in need, therefore their needs are met.

            If you say, “We see” and you have not seen
—shame on you.
Sin is ignoring the works of God,
refusing to come to terms with the uncontrollable grace of God.

            Sin is not recognizing a God found amid suffering.
A God driven out from the city walls. Out here with us.
Jesus is driven out here with us.

 

            Yes, Jesus is out there, with the man once blind
—outside the gate, driven away from his home.
Expelled by his community, something miraculous happens,
he finds himself among the community of the expelled…

            Let me say that a second time for those in the nosebleed section
—This man is expelled by his community and finds himself among the community of the expelled
—and that’s where Jesus is.

-Jesus too is labeled a sinner,

-Jesus too is grilled by the religious authorities,

-Jesus too is weighed down by questions about his identity and his origins,

-Jesus too is driven out,

…Jesus, crucified outside the gates of Jerusalem.

            Who knew that when the insiders expelled this outsider, the whole system inverted
—the insiders are outsiders and the outsiders insiders.

 

            Truly, encountering God changes our definitions. Amen.

The Surprise!

                 What does it mean to witness, to notice, to encounter, God?

What is that experience like for us,
when the one who is for us,
reveals himself to us?

                That is the fundamental question we’re circling around in this sermon series, “Encountering God.”
And today, I would like to lift up one of those perennial experiences of God—surprise!
Surprised by the stranger,
surprised by goodness,
surprised at being moved.

The surprise of the Samaritan Woman

Let us pray.

 

                First, she is surprised by a stranger…
There Jesus was resting on the wrong side of the tracks,
the bad part of town,
a gay couple accidently attending a service at Westboro Baptist,
a Jew in Samaria...
have you ever felt out of place
—that’s this moment!

                She’s a Samaritan, he’s a Jew.
She’s a woman, he’s a man.
The wrong gender, the wrong religion and ethnicity
—for this encounter.

                This stranger asking for water, even that is indelicate
—crossing these barriers, visible and invisible
—its hard, it can be scary,
but it also is one of those places where the invisible God can become visible,
in our common humanity,
in a leap of faith,
reaching out in hope to the other side.

                In this case, the Samaritan woman is surprised, “My goodness, I’m talking to a prophet!”

                So, she brings up explicitly, one of the main tensions between her people and his
“God desires to be worshipped on Mount Gerezim,
why do you insist on Mount Zion?”

                And he unfolds a different reality,
moving off holy mountains and revealing himself as Messiah
—the one who will proclaim all things
—revealed on that clear and sunny noon day
—Spirit and Truth.

 

                This stranger named, in a roundabout way, the Samaritan Woman’s vulnerability
—you’ve had 5 husbands, plus the new guy…
of course everyone jumps to adultery,
that’s what people tend to do when there is a woman involved…
but more likely it is abandonment,
left again and again and again
—five times over.
Naming that she is left to fend for herself, excluded and isolated,
only safe to come out in the heat of the day,
the noon sun,
carrying her own water.
Left to grow hard.
Women go to the well when it is cool out, not at noon
—unless you are an ostracized, unwelcome, out of place, woman.

 

                And in this predicament of hers,
named clearly by the stranger Jesus
—this woman sees him
—the disciples often don’t see
—but she sees this stranger for who he is,
the one offering living water
—sees and receives the blessing of it.
Yes, the surprise of goodness and blessing is all the more poignant
when painted on the canvass of her struggle.

                He offers her living water
—Have you heard of living water?
The Rabbis recommend it for ritual baths.
The Early Church will recommend it for baptism.
Fresh and clean.
Bubbling, clear, living!
From God’s good earth—a sign of God’s goodness.

Think of it!

To be filled with a life flowing!

Flowing from God’s good earth

You, a sign of God’s goodness!

A living, clear, bubbling life

Fresh and clean.

                It is what some theologians call “Original Blessing,”
when we experience those words recorded in Genesis,
“O’ Yes, this is good and very good!”
The miracle of the ordinary and the familiar touched by the divine
—the experience of providence.
That too is an encounter with the divine!

 

                And then comes the last surprise, the surprise of being moved
—hearts strangely warmed,
a sure confidence,
a trusting faith.

                She goes back to her people and testifies,
“He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
And that question mark does a heck of a lot of work
—like a shepherds’ crook, leading her listeners
—the question mark acts as Moses’ staff, and her words like Miriam’s song at the river’s edge,
“I have found the one who fills the water jar—fills it forever.
The one who saw me in the noon sun and sees me still!”
Come and see!

                These words are sewing hope,
a field of faith for which the disciples do not labor, but will reap.
For the Samaritans will go and see, as she insists.
And when they meet Jesus

 they too are moved,
caught by that original blessing, that living water,
that encounter with a stranger, that becomes an encounter with God.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

 

“Any decision for war must be a mournful one."

              For the fourth time in my nearly 15 years of ministry, I have to speak on matters of war and peace and insists, along with the ELCA’s 1995 social statement “For Peace in God’s World”, that “any decision for war must be a mournful one.” Declarations of war—or kinetic responses, or whatever euphemism we are using today—ought not be like celebrating a sporting victory or bellicose bragging, but instead conducted in sackcloth and ashes, followed up by the words Kyrie Eleison—Lord have mercy.

              I would ask you, if you are a praying person, to take a moment to pray this prayer from our Hymnal:

“Gracious God, grant peace among nations. Cleanse from our own hearts the seeds of strife: greed and envy, harsh misunderstandings and ill will, fear and desire for revenge. Make us quick to welcome ventures in cooperation among the peoples of the world, so that there may be woven the fabric of a common good too strong to be torn by the evil hands of war. In the time of opportunity, make us be diligent; and in the time of peril, let not our courage fail; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

              In light of our attack on Iran, with the stated goal of regime change, it is incumbent upon Christians living in a democracy to ask some stark questions of ourselves and our government. For two thousand years we Christians have been struggling with being faithful in the world as it is, in situations of persecution, famine, feast, might, and war. And those struggles have given us a rich tradition of thought and action, something much deeper than the knee-jerk reactions of TV pundits and political intellectuals.

              In the early days of the Church, Christians were known for being pacifists. In fact, the Society of Friends (Quakers) and Mennonites still are pacifists, they see refusing to go to war as a witness to the world that the Prince of Peace, Jesus Christ, reigns. Other Christians, such as us Lutherans, follow a tradition that includes Just War Theory. This theory requires that we answer well the following questions, before taking any military action:

Have we given all non-volent options a try before going to war?

By what authority are we going to war?

What is the reason, the justification, for this military action?

What does success look like in this war? Is that outcome likely?

Will it all be worth it? Will the peace on the other side of this action be better than the peace that existed before the action?

Will we use more violence against Iran than they have used against us or those we are protecting?

What are we doing to ensure that we aren’t hurting or killing civilians?

              In addition to these questions, here are a few statements from the aforementioned “For Peace in God’s World” document, which particularized our understanding of Just War Theory to the challenges of the 20^th and 21^st century. Here are a few stand out statements:

            “Wars, both between and within states, represent a horrendous failure of politics. The evil of war is especially evident in the number of children and other noncombatants who suffer and die.”

            “Helping the neighbor in need may require protecting innocent people from injustice and aggression. While we support the use of nonviolent measures, there may be no other way to offer protection in some circumstances than by restraining forcibly those harming the innocent. We do not, then--for the sake of the neighbor--rule out possible support for the use of military force. We must determine in particular circumstances whether or not military action is the lesser evil.”

            “From the posture of the just/unjust war tradition, the aim of all politics is peace. Any political activity that involves coercion should be held accountable to just/unjust war principles. They are important for evaluating movements, sanctions, embargoes, boycotts, trade policies to reward or punish, and other coercive but nonviolent measures.”

            And as I began, "Any decision for war must be a mournful one."

Excerpts from Hearty Masculinity

 

Here is a list of all the excerpt from my upcoming book Hearty Masculinity.

How do I figure out what my values are?

Why should men go to the doctor?

What’s the difference between reacting and responding?

What is the good life?

What is the difference between guilt and shame?

What sort of man is Jesus?

What sort of man is Jesus?

 

A final excerpt from Hearty Masculinity.

A savior who rides a donkey, a savior who makes this world right by wooing it, not through force or brutality, ideological scheme or overwhelming rhetoric, but by faithfulness and love. That’s who Jesus is.

              This line of thought, perhaps, sounds scandalous to you. After all, most role models for men offered to us from the Bible are antithetical to what I’ve just laid out. “Consider Adam” while he maintained dominion over the world and over Eve, he was alright. “Consider Moses” be a patriarch Law giver and a law follower, surely that flows from the faith. “Consider David” he is a man after God’s own heart, you too ought to be a King like him. “Consider those verses that pop up and prop up preconceived notions of masculinity predicated on predatory power, stoic self-sufficiency, covetous sorts of prayer, misreading biblical mistakes as models of leadership, and airing ancient prejudices as God’s advice for men.”

              Just as reading two-thousand-year-old mail is tricky, so is reading any ancient text.[1] If someone is trying to convince you that “The Bible is clear” on some modern issue or problem, they either aren’t showing you their work, or haven’t done the work.[2] Whenever we apply the Bible to our life,[3] we’re doing interpretation, we’re making a call, we’re making our faithful best guess. Pretending otherwise is being a bad witness to the God pointed to by scripture.

              All that to say, when a 3,000-year-old prayer about increasing farmland is used to sanctify a particularly suburban understanding of capitalism—I’ve known men who use the Prayer of Jabez as justification for remodeling their kitchen cabinets, when “Biblical Manhood” involves monster trucks and sword swallowers, when we make boy bibles and girl bibles, one with camo[4] and one with rhinestones, we’re not being more biblical people, we’re doing a distinctly Christian form of Performative Masculinity.

              But some of those places where we try to grasp at Biblical models of masculinity are worth fleshing out a bit. Consider David, Moses, and Adam. All of them, types of Christ. Just as the first man Adam falls, the second man Jesus rises and justifies. Just as Moses brings the Law, Christ this law fulfills—truly his yoke is light. Just as David is God’s chosen King, Christ’s presence is the Kingdom come and the only example of true authority we have.

              A wise dear friend and colleague offered me this image that I now pass on to you. Think of David, watching Jesus in action. He would be shocked and say something like, “Wait, ambiguously identify with outsiders, but then when a kingdom is on offer, stay outside the city gates, remain with them even when it means utter abandonment! I didn’t know you could do that! I fought alongside the Philistines, until it was to my advantage to side again with my own kin against them. Wait, instead of a grasping greedy sexual love destroying the objects of my affections, hold fast to a voluntary celibacy like the Prophet Jeremiah as a way to focus on a singular calling. Wait, instead of my lacky Joab doing my dirty work, so I at least appeared clean, Jesus was betrayed by those who knew him best, rather than let them convince him of their vision of Messiah and Lord. In total, he walked a path that I most certainly couldn’t trod, but oh how I wish I could have.”

              Or consider how Jesus hangs all of the Law, the Torah of Moses, on love, and how he insists that rules are made for humans, not humans for the rules. When actual living people are caught up in the consequences of adultery, crushed by the burdens of disease, cut off from community in so many different ways, he consistently interprets the Law as bending toward mercy and human flourishing, restoration of community and revival of life so nearly lost. Instead of pollutants and curses being catchy, healing and blessing overflow and become fellow travelers for all those he encounters.

              Or even Adam, what kind of Man was he, what was the center of his being? Earthling from the Earth, he kept this creation and labored with joy. But when things went bad, he turned to blame. Think of that strange scene, God asks the Earth-man “What happened?” and he responds by pointing to the woman, who then points to the snake, who does not have fingers to point and scapegoat elsewhere. But Jesus, he allowed everything to point at him, allowed himself to be the scapegoat, only to reappear, wresting the power of scapegoating from our arsenal forever.

              Surely, these models of masculinity mean something different if Christ is indeed Lord. Power and authority are wielded authentically when centered in humility. Life and the rules of the game are interpreted with a predisposition toward blessing. Blame is relativized by responsibility and forgiveness.

---

[1] Just think about it, none of the folk in the Bible had a modern sense of the self, or Penicillin.

[2] A Truism from seminary that is pretty darn catchy is: “A text, without a context, is a pretext.”

[3]Or someone elses, though that is probably less in the spirit of what I am offering to you.

[4] And to be clear, nothing against camo. When I was a kid I set a goal of one day living in castle painted camouflage… I thought it came out of a paint can in that pattern.

Encountering God: Nicodemus

 

Last week’s sermon,

where we moved from encountering Temptation to encountering God,
was a sort of preview of the coming sermon series
—spread out over, potentially, 15 weeks; we’ll be paying close attention to God encountering
—meeting, confronting, comforting
—everyone, from Adam to Thomas to the vast crowd on Pentecost. Stories of encountering God.

            Stories just like today’s story.
How do you meet God, how do you encounter him?
After all, “No one has ascended into heaven except the one who descended from heaven.”
We can’t climb up to see God, we can only meet
the one who abides with the Father,
the one who comes down for us.
And that’s who Nicodemus encounters, the Son of Man—Jesus the Christ, and in encountering him, he encounters God.
God reaches across the barrier between the Infinite and the finite,
to be there with Nicodemus.
Nicodemus’ conversation with Jesus tells us what it can be like to encounter God
—it is like night!
It is like being born!
It is like Water & Spirit,
my Lord, it is Life!

Let us pray

 

            Nicodemus arrives at night,
and he starts off with the right words, a good assessment of who he is speaking to:
he calls him Rabbi and Teacher,
he even insists that Jesus is from God,
and that God is present with him
—that in some way Nicodemus does not yet understand,
he is encountering God in this teacher from Galilee.

            And Jesus’ words, which can be read as a trap, a back-and-forth conflict between two people,
can also be read as an invitation:
“You’ve seen correctly,
you have noticed the nature of my relationship with God
—come and experience it!”

 

Here, in the night,
name both the known and the unknown,
that you too might be drawn into the heart of God.

            The night where Nicodemus can embrace his vulnerability,
where he can walk by faith and not by sight,
where he must lean into trust.
Encountering God always means encountering the unknown
—we’re creature, God is Creator
—God has a freedom and strangeness that is always surprising to us.
Holy literally means: different/strange/set apart
—apart from the ordinary experience of life.
In the night we walk with God,
trusting that he’ll lead us and guide us even if every other helper, even the good ones, fail.
We admit our limits and follow after the one who is beyond limits.

 

            “Be born again.”
That’s how you see God’s relationship with the world… Or is it?
That word that our Evangelical and Pentecostal siblings get all worked up about
—means a little more than expressed by a surface reading.
Born—Again/Anew/from Above.

            Born again, sure.
This is the time of year when I re-watch the Rock Opera Jesus Christ Super Star, and there is a poignant song the Disciples sing to Jesus when the enormity of Jesus’ last few days strikes them, “Could we start again, Please?”
This doesn’t seem right,
we’ve gone off track somehow,
could we return to the point before things became fearful or dangerous or painful or beyond the pale? Before the breaking point.
There is something of Lent in that, isn’t there? Being born again.
Repentance, returning to the font, recommitment to a right path.

            Born Anew.
I don’t just want to go back! Transform me!
That’s what encountering God does
—makes you something new.
Think of Adam, a man out of dust, there was lifeless, then breathed into, there was life!
Or the universe—there was chaos, and then there was Creation.
Something new born, something that could only come from outside
—Holiness coming into the ordinary
—Jesus’ invitation into eternal life!

            Born from Above.
Nothing short of an intervention of God will reveal the Kingdom.
Only God can cross that bridge, all attempts on our part are hubris and destined to fail.
Thanks be to God, Christ comes down to lift us up.

 

            Nicodemus doesn’t quite get it, at first.
He gives a sort of “Benjamin Button” example
—the old grow young.
Then he offers the awkward image of re-entering a mother’s womb
—like the in utero-prenatal combat between Jacob and Esau that the Women’s Group studied a few weeks back.

            No Nick!
—when you encounter God
you are born from above, anew, again.

           

            You are born of Water
—yes, your Baptism!
Also the living water that quenches
and comes from the source.
Your sustenance and nurture.

            You are born of Spirit
—the peace Christ leaves with us.
The breath that awakened that Earth-Man Adam.
A new creation, a rebirth
—both astonishingly uncontrollable and like rescue breathing, CPR
—you were dead, but you shall live!

 

            Live! Have eternal life! The Life of the Ages—life aware of God.
Are you living, Nick?
Are you living, siblings in Christ?
A life aware of God, God with us, both in the here and in the hereafter! That’s Kingdom, that’s Salvation
—this ongoing connection through Christ with God.

            A life of trusting confidence, that is salvation.
Life where we really believe that God desires our salvation,
not a crisis of alienation or despair,
but walking in the dark,
held by a loving parent,
a return,
an utterly unique spark of something new,
an intervention on our behalf,
sustenance and rescue.
I wish that for all of us, desperately so!

 

            And for Nicodemus—this encounter is a slow one, probably even a little painful.
-He begins with these questions for Jesus—the awkward fumbling we read today.
-Then he turns around and insists to his fellow religious leaders—hey, give Jesus a fair shake. Don’t dismiss this message out of hand—wrestle with it, like I am.
-Then, finally, on the other side of the cross, he joins the followers of Jesus in anointing the body of Jesus—the body that will rise—lifting us up to eternal life.

Encountering God
—it is night and birth and water and spirit and life! Amen.

What’s the difference between guilt and shame?

 

Another excerpt from Hearty Masculinity: Of Body and Spirit:

              I’ve found that shame hangs heavy on many men. They’ve elevated one moment of failure or one bad habit or one broken relationship, and transformed it into something more than it is. This is the Grand Torino problem. In that movie the Clint Eastwood character elevated a sin he once committed, kissing someone who was not his wife at a Christmas party, into a base element of who he is and allows it to warp every other relationship he has. So too, many men have confused guilt for shame, have moved from “I have sinned” to “I am an unredeemable sinner.”

              There are several things wrong with this way of thinking. Firstly, it condemns you to despair. Secondly, it conjures up an awful excuse that keeps you from the hard work of forgiveness. Thirdly, it is just categorically incorrect.

Shame is about a person’s being, not their doing. Shame takes a discrete act and plunges it into your heart. When you sweep a guilt into your very self, identify so strongly with a wrong you have done, or even that has been done to you, you claim that you are irredeemable. Shame takes an instance of little lowercase plural sins, and puffs them up into what’s off about the whole world, the singular uppercase reality of Sin. Who would not crumble in the face of such an evil force, who would not feel defeated if they believed they were facing Sin in their very being and all alone? But, dear friend, Christ Jesus has already faced that curse and left it on the cross.

Shame wants to stay with you, stick to you like cat hair to Chapstick. It knows that if you confront it for what it really is, guilt, it can be excised. The Tutus’ fourfold path of forgiveness, and other practices like it, can crack it open, and cure what ails your conscience. On some level, seeing your guilt as your shame, can become an excuse for inaction, it can be easier to say, “I’m fundamentally broken,” than to look the past square in the eye, and begin to take steps to move beyond it.

              Finally, there is this confusion of categories. Shame is a chapter 1 problem—My why is that I kissed someone who was not my wife; who am I? An adulterer. Guilt is a chapter 3 problem—I need to repair my relationship with my wife. Sin is about a breaking of a relationship, not the breaking of a rule.

Sin is not a discrete action that God disapproves of, it is the breaking of relationships—with God, neighbor, and self. Start with that, and there are ways to make things right. That’s why sin is always a question of guilt, not shame. It’s harder, being forgiven by God—lightened and enlighted by the Spirit—and then called to a life of ongoing repentance and reconciliation, mending what is broken. But it is truer to the human condition than a lightened heart and no follow up or acknowledgement of what has been broken and who has been wrong, harder, but it is the way of the cross.

Paul writes in Romans 8:38-39 that nothing in all of the universe can separate us from God’s love found in Jesus Christ. Shame does not trust that to be true, it elevates something else as able to overcome God’s love. It gives a piece of creation power that it doesn’t rightly have. It creates an idol out of a sin or assumption, it creates a barrier that isn’t naturally there within us. But, thanks be to God, the Cross smashes every idol, God tears down every wall, builds bridges, and elongates tables, so that there might be plenteous forgiveness and grace.

Let us pray: God, deepest mercy and sweetest grace, replace all thoughts and feelings of shame, with the identity that claimed us at the font. Give us courage to face our failures and fears, even old terrors and those things that Sin uses to overwhelm us. Guide us on the path of reconciliation, a lifetime of turning again and again to you in whom we may always trust, confident in the love we find in Jesus Christ. Amen.

What is the Good Life?

 

Another excerpt from Hearty Masculinity.

              When you read through some of these men’s books, they like to attach themselves to religion, Christianity in particular, in one of two ways.

On one hand, these folks often make the case that religions empower civilization, and that Christianity[1] in particular is the “juice” that keeps western civilization moving. They’re saying that affirmations of right Christian belief and the hierarchical structure of the church, fused to masculine virtue, is the only thing keeping the Western world from utter collapse.

On the other hand, there is a sleight of hand that some of these guys do,[2] sometimes even in the same breath that they affirm traditional Christian Orthodoxy, where they present themselves as a Jungian/Bultmann-esque[3] shaman-like figure who can crack open what all those silly Christians are saying and get to the meat of it, which is… whatever program they’re selling. Christianity is actually about overcoming your dominant father. Christianity is actually about re-writing your own story through native American or Egyptian archetypes. Christianity is actually about owning your own property and marrying a trad wife. In short, if you squint at the Christian story, you’ll see Christians have gotten it wrong for 2,000 years and -insert guru here- alone has the magical key to unlock the real meaning of the faith.

Whenever I run into this type of thing, I ponder and puzzle over their focus being either on orthodoxy, even when they’re affirming some pretty out-there and heterodox stuff, or the hierarchy and structures of the Church. To my way of thinking, top down authority structures and a ridged set of beliefs, aren’t the stuff of life—and Christ comes that we might have life and have it abundantly. These aspects of religion that the manosophere fixates on might make you more susceptible to joining a cult, but they’re not going to lead to a good life. They’re not going to help your life flow with meaning and purpose and joy.

So, just as I offered you a different perspective—that of a man with a heart condition—in the first half of the book, I’ll be doing the same here. Instead of structure or belief as the starting point, what happens if we begin with practice? Instead of heady orthodoxy, let’s be grounded orthopraxy; instead of the heights of hierarchy, let’s notice the connection points between worship and life!

I’ll begin by giving you a basic sense of what is going on in worship, specifically that there are seven things Christians have consistently done in worship since we started describing worship. Then I want to tell you how those things have made me a better man and point out how its absence has made our world worse—I’ll be making the case that these worship practices are good both individually and societally. Next, I’ll take a little time to ground the Seven Central Things in scripture, as people often accuse liturgical churches of skimping in that area. Finally, I’ll get to the heart of the matter and name some ways each of these seven movements of the worship service point you to the good life, wrapping each one up with a question that might be useful for you.

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[1] Paul Kingsnorth, Against Christian Civilization in First Things, January 2025 is an excellent reflection on why this line of logic goes against that man we find preaching in Galilee and crucified on a Roman cross.

[2] I’m looking at you Jordan Peterson.

[3] Jung a psychologist who focused on archetypes. Bultmann a theologian known for “demythologizing” the Greek New Testament.