Reckless Love – 3: Lavish Love

Ed Doherty, my father-in-law, Linda’s dad, died Feb. 8 at the age of 98. He lived his last years in an assisted living center. As our family sat with him in his final hours, staff members frequently came by to comfort us and to let us know much they appreciated knowing Ed.

Ed went out of his way to get to know the staff personally. He knew everyone by name, and he knew some of their children by name, even if he had never met them. And some staff members who had never met us nevertheless knew enough about us from talking with Ed that they could figure out who we were, just at a glance.

It’s not that Ed wasn’t occasionally demanding. He could grouse with the best of them, especially about the food. But he was not unpleasant about it. He didn’t treat the staff as servants or wait persons. They were friends.

I only wish that I might act with such benevolence toward everyone I encounter.

“Benevolent” is one of those words we sometimes toss around without fully taking its meaning to heart. To be benevolent is to have “good will” toward others. It’s that feeling that’s so pervasive in the Christmas season – you know, as the angels said, “peace on earth, good will to all” (Luke 2:14).

Good will is agape. It’s one of the four kinds of love mentioned in that “love commercial,” where it’s called “the most admirable” kind of love because it’s love in action. It’s love toward others not because of anything they’ve done or you hope they will do, but solely because they are.

In his book Reckless Love, which we are studying for Lent, Tom Berlin calls it lavish love. It’slavish because it’s so much more than you might expect. If love is lavish because it’s is more than you expect, you might wonder if your expectations are set too low.

Certainly in America today, our public discourse has become so corrupted by partisanship and the vicious put-down of others that we have very low expectations of how people should behave.

Pass someone on the street, and instead of a smile or a nod, you’re likely to get a glare or a snarl. Wave at someone when they drive by, and you risk them chasing you down and demanding to know what the blank you thought were doing gesturing at them.

Boy, have we got it all wrong.

One of the greatest minds of the modern era was Martin Buber, who died in 1965. One of the greatest books of the modern era was Buber’s book I and Thou, published in Germany in 1923.

Buber was widely known as a philosopher and theologian and teller of stories about Jewish life. He humbly contended that all he did was write about relationships, chiefly about human relationships with God, as shown in their relationships with other humans. If you think that sounds like Jesus, you’re right; it does.

I and Thou is maddeningly difficult to read. Buber says that’s because he wants to challenge people to think, not merely accept what he says without question. Here is one of his challenging assertions: “In the beginning was the Relation.”

Actually, Buber did not capitalize the “R” in “relation,” but I think that’s how he understands it. Buber maintains that to talk about God is idolatry. You can only talk to God.

You can’t talk about God because God is not an object you can observe. God is a subject you must encounter. To even speak of God, you must have a relationship with God, because God is the ultimate relation and the source of all relation.

All of life is encounter, Buber says. The chief task of human life is to become “holy” – that is, to have a genuine relationship with God.

Buber describes two kinds of encounter.

First is “I-It.” This is the kind of relationship you have with an inanimate object such as a tree or a chair. You can also have this kind of relationship with people. For example, when you buy something at the store, you may exchange pleasantries with the cashier, but you don’t establish a real relationship with that person.

Most of the time, you might just as well be using an automated check-out where you interact only with a machine. Your relationship with the cashier is instrumental. It’s transactional. It’s limited to the task at hand. Your encounter is brief and generally impersonal. Outside of an occasional glance, or maybe a smile, there is no genuine relationship here.

It’s different if you know the cashier from outside the store, of if you’ve done enough business with the store that you have started to form a friendship with the person. The relationship may no longer be “I-It.” It may be closer to “I-Thou.”

The chief difference is that now you experience the other person as a genuine human being. The cashier is no longer an object you encounter but someone who is a subject just like you. The cashier is someone who has a personality and a past and hopes and dreams and all those other things that define persons as persons.

The cashier is no longer an It. The cashier is now a Thou. Actually, the cashier is not a Thou but a You. When he saw the English translations of his book, Buber wasn’t happy with the King James English. He thought the language was too formal, too distancing, and put an unnecessary barrier between people. I also want to depose King James. To me, you are not a Thou. You are a You, and I want to relate to You as openly as possible.

And it is through recognizing you as a You that I become more fully myself. My life has meaning only in my relationships. “All real living is meeting,” Buber says. I can find wholeness only through encounter with You and others like You.

And the more whole I become through encounter with You, the closer I can come in relationship with God, who is the Eternal You, the Eternal Thou, the Relation who was there from the start of things.

You want to cultivate I-Thou relationships because those are the relations that give your life meaning. But you cannot live without I-It relationships.

I-Thou relationships also have their I-It moments. Imagine yourself at the Price Chopper and you’re behind a person who is having a half-hour catch-up conversation with the cashier. The Price Chopper checkout may be a time for brief acknowledgements of deeper connection, but it is generally not the place for deep engagement with another person.

If you engaged in nothing but I-Thou relationships all the time, you would never get anything done besides talking and hugging. But if all your relationships are I-It, your life would be an emotional desert. You move between I-It and I-Thou relations all the time.

I think here of Fred Rogers, host of the longtime children’s TV show “Mister Rogers Neighborhood.” One of the things that made him such an extraordinary person was his ability to focus entirely on another person.

If you saw the movie, “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” you may recall a couple of times when he literally stopped what he was doing to devote his time and full attention to someone. I-Thou relations with Mister Rogers could be intense. When he engaged you one-on-one, he didn’t just give you part of himself. He gave you all of himself.

Even he couldn’t do that full-time. Perhaps no one can. Perhaps only Jesus could. Maybe that’s one of the things that attracted people to Jesus and held them by his side. Whether he was talking to one person or twelve or a thousand, there was never any question where his focus was. It was on those he was facing. It was on you.

Don’t you hate it when it’s clear that someone is paying only partial attention to you?

In the spring of 1982, I flew from Michigan to Kansas City to interview for a copy editing job at the Kansas City Star & Times. I was introduced to one of the top editors. He stuck out a hand and said, “Good to meet you.” But even as he was shaking my hand, his eyes already were moving from me to someone else, and even before we were done shaking hands, he was starting to move away to talk to that other person.

I’m sure he was busy. Fatally busy, I would say. I told myself, “I do not want to work for this guy.” I did get a job there – but, happily, not working for him or directly with him. A few weeks later, when I had started to work there, I re-introduced myself to him, and he appeared to have no memory of me at all. Why should he remember me? I was never anything more to him than a piece of furniture – job applicant, desk, lamp, same thing.

You’ve probably heard the maxim: “Use things, not people. Love people, not things.” Yet how often do we treat people instrumentally, as instruments of our will, to be used for our personal advancement and set aside when they’re no longer useful.

I’ve always had trouble at Chamber of Commerce coffees and similar events. When the ribbon cutting or other program is over, you’re all invited to mingle and network – that is, you’re supposed to make or renew contacts that might be useful to your business.

I’m terrible at this kind of networking. It makes my inner shy boy very uncomfortable. I feel like I’m walking up to someone and saying, “What can you do for me?” On the other hand, I’ve discovered that if I show a genuine interest in another person without an agenda, I can have a great conversation and maybe even make a new friend.

When you treat someone as a Thou, as a You, they most likely will treat you the same way. And isn’t that what Jesus said you should do – treat others the way you want to be treated? (Luke 6:31, Matthew 7:12)

No one wants to be treated like an It. Each of us wants to be treated as a Thou, as a You, as a valued human being and as a friend. That doesn’t mean that you must have an in-depth conversation with every person you know every time you run into them. Sometimes it’s enough just to say, “Hi, how are you?” But if the conversation moves past the superficial, be prepared to listen with both ears open.

Listening is one of the ways you love others as your love yourself. Be a good listener.

I was once in a checkout line at a Wal Mart in the days approaching Christmas. Yeah, I know; not a good time to be at Wal Mart. The guy ahead of me in line was furious about something, and he yelled at the cashier. It was not something she had done, or could do anything about, but he was mad, and she was a convenient target, so he took it out on her.

As she was checking me out, I said something about being sorry she had to endure such treatment. She sighed and said, “Some days it’s hard working at Wal Mart.”

I doubt that anything I said made her feel any better about her day. But at least I didn’t make her feel worse. A little kindness can go a long way in a world like ours. Benevolence is all the more valuable because it is so rare.

Jesus tells us not only to love God and ourselves and our neighbor but also to love our enemies. Some people seem to have a lot of enemies. In fact, the whole world seems to be lined up against them. Or is it that they love no one, not even themselves, and they are taking it out on the world by making so many others their enemies?

When we speak of lavish love, we ought to realize that it’s really not lavish at all. It’s the way love is supposed to be.

Love begets love, Henri Nouwen says. But Tom Berlin reminds us, “All God’s children have to be taught to love.” It’s also true that all God’s children have to be taught to hate. Which are you teaching to those you encounter day by day? Do you treat people like an It, or do you try to love people as a Thou? Remember how God loves you, and do likewise.

This message was delivered March 15, 2020, on the Third Sunday of Lent, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, from Mark 5:43-48. Because of the coronavirus outbreak, it will be the last message delivered “live” and in person until April.

Reckless Love – 2: Expand the Circle

When you’re a kid, or you feel like a kid, and you get together with a bunch of friends to play a team sport, what’s the first thing you do? You choose up sides! The captains of the two teams stand over there, and all the players stand together over here, and one by one the captains choose who they want on their team.

Depending on how good you are, or how popular you are, this may be the best or the worst part of the game. Ever been the first one chosen? You get to high-five all those chosen after you. Ever been the last one chosen? Humiliating. No high-fives left for you.

With me, it mostly depended on the game. If we were playing basketball, I was one of the last chosen. I couldn’t dribble. Well, I could dribble, just not while running. Major handicap for a basketball player.

Softball or baseball, I was an OK pick. I didn’t have a strong throwing arm, but I was a good hitter. You could depend on me to get on base, and I was a fast runner.

You know the dynamics of the team selection process. Each team captain has to choose the best first, or the other team captain will get them. You can play nice guy and choose friendship over ability, but every time you pick a loser, you forfeit the chance to add a winner to your team. The object is to build a team with the strongest players on the field. You want all those on your team to be winners, so you can smoke the other team and claim bragging rights.

If those factors go into selecting a team for a pickup game in somebody’s back yard, what more must go into selecting a team to help save the world? When you look at the 12-man roster Jesus chose for his team of disciples, you may wonder what he was thinking.

Consider the some of the variables. What kind of person would you choose to proclaim that God’s kingdom is coming right here and right now? What kind of person would you choose to proclaim that God’s love is all that matters in the world, and however important other things are, this is the most important?

What kind of person would you send out “like a sheep among wolves” to represent you and heal people and drive out demons in your name? (Matthew 10:1, 16) What kind of person would you choose to learn from you and carry on after you when you know that your message is going to get you killed and probably will get them killed, too?

Is there one special kind of person you would choose to be your disciple? Or are there several kinds of personalities and temperaments you might want to include? And how do you get these very different people to work together, not only when you’re leading them but, maybe more importantly, after you’re gone?

From the stories we read in the gospels, it appears that Jesus purposefully enlists five of his disciples and chooses the rest from a crowd of hopefuls. He goes to a mountaintop and spends the night in prayer. Next morning, he calls up all the disciple wannabes, and from them he chooses the final 12 who will be his closest followers.

The number 12, of course, is highly symbolic. It’s the number of the original tribes of Israel. Jesus begins his mission calling all Israel to repentance, so that number is important. The 12 seem to represent not only Israel but also some of its major religious and political factions.

The first four personally enlisted by Jesus are the Johnson brothers, Andrew and Simon Peter; and the Zebedee brothers, James and John. They’re all commercial fishermen on the Sea of Galilee.

All Galilean fishermen are under great pressure from the local despot, Herod Antipas, who taxes them heavily so he can build a big new seaside resort named after the emperor Tiberius.

That makes the fifth disciple enlisted by Jesus a very interesting pick. That’s Matthew, also called Levi. He’s a tax collector. He’s got a kiosk right on the lakeshore, and he charges a tax on every fish hauled out of the water. Some of it he gives to Herod and Tiberius; some of it he keeps for himself.

It’s an understatement to say that he is not well-liked, especially by fishermen – maybe especially by the Zebedee brothers, whom Jesus calls the Sons of Thunder, as if they were part of a motorcycle gang.

The remaining seven disciples are a mixed bag. Simon the Zealot is called Zealot because he wants to fight the Romans. Judas called Iscariot is a special kind of Zealot, a Sicarrii. He and his buddies specialize in cozying up to someone in a crowd, sticking a knife in them, and then quietly disappearing. You can bet both of those guys really get along well with that tax collector fellow.

Thomas is a staunch loyalist to Jesus, but he’s such a literalist; he demands proof of everything. There’s a second James, sometimes called James the Younger. He’s a brother of Matthew/Levi. The brothers are cousins of Jesus, sons of Alphaeus, who is the brother of Jesus’ foster father Joseph.

About the last three, Philip, Bartholomew and Thaddaeus, we know little if anything beyond their names. Perhaps they represent the major sects of Judaism at the time: the liberal Pharisees, the conservative Sadducees and the ultra-conservative Essenes.

We don’t know what makes these 12 potential winners. All we can be sure of is that Jesus wants all of them on his team. He has not chosen them willy-nilly. He has given careful thought and much prayer to each one. And I haven’t even mentioned the female disciples who follow with them. They may represent constituencies of their own.

Viewed politically, it looks as if Jesus is building a team of rivals. That’s what historian Doris Kearns Goodwin calls the cabinet that President Abraham Lincoln forged to guide the Union through the Civil War. The men in Lincoln’s cabinet represented very different viewpoints and were rivals in many ways. A couple of them really wanted Lincoln’s job, too. It was Lincoln’s genius not only to get them together in the same room but to get them to work together productively.

Viewed theologically, Jesus is creating what theologian Scot McKnight calls a “fellowship of differents.” That’s the word “different” with an “s” on the end. It’s a fellowship of very different people. Though the disciples spend much of their time with Jesus not listening very well and often missing the point entirely, all but Judas eventually become of one mind when it comes to proclaiming who Jesus is and what the kingdom of God is all about.

That suggests that Jesus chose them more for their strength of character than for their ability to get along. In fact, you might say that he intentionally creates a team of people who rub against each other. He knows that they will stretch each other, if they didn’t kill each other first. And stretching one another is one of the major goals of Christian fellowship.

So says Tom Berlin. His book Reckless Love is guiding our study this Lent. This is the second Sunday of Lent and the second message in a series inspired by the book. (You probably thought I’d never get around to announcing that.)

Living God’s way means loving God’s way, Berlin says, and that means loving recklessly. To love recklessly means to enter every situation and human encounter with love. Loving recklessly means expanding your circle of love – loving more people, especially those who are not at all like you.

When we think of love, we tend to think of it as a precious resource that is limited in supply – sort of like your favorite pie. When you cut up a pie, it gets smaller with every piece you give away. But you don’t have to divvy up love to share it. Love involves multiplication, not division. Love multiplies exponentially. When you love, your share of love doesn’t diminish. It expands in explosive fashion. There’s always more than you started with. Don’t you wish pie were the same way?

Expanding the circle of love starts with you. Remember, Jesus says you should love the Lord your God with every fiber of your being, and love your neighbor as yourself. It has to start with you. You can’t love your neighbor the same way you love yourself. But you can’t love anybody if you don’t love yourself.

Fact is, a lot of us don’t even like ourselves, let alone love ourselves.

Maybe it started with one or both of your parents. No matter how hard you tried, you were never good enough. Nothing you did earned praise or affirmation, only criticism. You yearned to hear those simple but powerful words, “I love you.”

Relatives, friends, teachers were all the same. Your extended family saw you through your parents’ eyes. Your friends were always asking for something but never giving much in return. From the first day of school, your teachers put you in a box labeled “hopeless.”

As you got older, it didn’t get much better. You were always “less than.” Even when you got married, you never felt secure. You were burdened by shame and guilt over minor things – maybe even shame and guilt over some big things you did to get attention, any attention, from anyone who would pay attention.

You know the hardest person in the world to love? Yourself. You know the hardest person in the world to forgive? Yourself.

Whatever your story is, you can love yourself and forgive yourself because God does. Any capacity for love that you have springs from God’s love. You can love only because God loves you first. (1 John 4:19)

If God loves you and God forgives you, who are you to keep beating up on yourself? You are a valuable human being. Live like it. Be the wonderful person God created you to be. Bust out of the cage others have built around you. Bust out of the cage you have built around yourself.

“Come to me,” Jesus says. “Come to me, all you who are struggling and carrying heavy loads, and I will give you rest.” (Matthew 11:28)

Jesus wants to set you free of your burdens. Jesus wants to set you free to love God, yourself and others. And that he will do. By loving you and forgiving you, Jesus removes the barriers between you and God. By loving and forgiving you, Jesus heals the inner turmoil that alienates you from your very self. By loving and forgiving you, Jesus drives away the fear that keeps you from embracing the other.

Fear of the other is what keeps us in homogeneous camps, surrounded by people who look like us, eat like us, act like us, hate like us – who for all purposes are just extensions of our fearful ourselves. But to be fully ourselves, we need to expand ourselves. We need to expand our circle of love and spend more time rubbing against others who aren’t like us at all.

Sure, it can be kind of scary, especially at first, when it feels like everyone rubs us the wrong way. But quickly we learn that others are more like us than not like us, and if we have a common goal, we can work together as a team.

Maybe that skinny kid can’t dribble, but he sure can sink one from the outside. That big kid moves slow, but nobody gets past him. There could be a place for both of them on God’s team. There could be a place for you, too.

God’s team isn’t limited to 12. Its circle is constantly expanding. If your circle is expanding, too, those circles could come together in a new and much larger circle of love. Ask yourself: Who’s on your team? Whose team are you on? On God’s team, everyone’s a winner!

This message was delivered at Edgerton United Methodist Church, in Edgerton, Kansas, on March 8, 2020, the Second Sunday of Lent, from Mark 2:14-17 and 3:13-19.

Reckless Love – 1: Begin with Love

When you hear the word “love,” you may first think of romantic love, or some other kind of love that can be conveyed with a heart-shaped Valentine.

More than a thousand pop songs have the word “love” in their title, and thousands more tell stories of loves found and lost. “All you need is love,” the Beatles assure us. Love makes the world go ’round, another song says. Love is central to the plots of movies and plays and novels and poems and TV commercials.

About the last place you’d expect to find a heartfelt and sober-minded appreciation of love is a commercial that appeared for the first time a month ago during the Super Bowl. But there it was, plain as day: a slow-paced, carefully worded message from, yes, a life insurance company – New York Life, to be exact.

If you haven’t seen it, Google “love commercial” to find it. As the commercial shows various scenes from several stages of life, the narrator says:

The Ancient Greeks had four words for love.

The first is Philia. Philia is affection that grows from friendship.

Next is storge, the kind you have for your grandson or brother.

Third is Eros, the uncontrollable urge to say “I love you.”

The fourth kind of love is different. It’s the most admirable. It’s called Agape, love as an action. It takes courage, sacrifice, strength.

On its website, New York Life says Agape stands out above all the other kinds of love. Why? Because it inspires us to put the needs of others above our own. It’s about doing what’s right, being the best person you can be, building better futures. Since 1845, the company says, “we’ve been helping people put their love into action for their families and loved ones.”

There are lots of ways of doing that beyond buying more life insurance. We’ll be looking at some of those ways for the next six weeks, throughout the season of Lent.

The focus of our study is a book by Tom Berlin titled Reckless Love: God’s call to love our neighbor. Tom Berlin is pastor of a large United Methodist Church in Virginia. He’s co-author of several good books on church growth. As a key figure in UMCNext, he represented several progressive groups in the recent negotiations that led to the Protocol for dividing the church.

If you join the small group discussions that follow worship each Sunday during Lent, you’ll see video presentations by Tom. He is not a slick presenter. He is a thoroughly real guy who struggles with what it means to love God by loving your neighbor.

That New York Life ad is right about several important things. Agape, love as an action, is hard. It takes courage, sacrifice and strength.

It’s not that other kinds of love don’t involve action, and may not also require courage, sacrifice and strength. It’s that Agape love is special because it is not directly motivated by personal interest in, or affection for, the one you love.

That’s why Jesus can command you to love not only God and yourself but also your neighbor. And who is your neighbor? As Jesus makes clear in the parable of the Good Samaritan, your neighbor is anyone you encounter who needs the help you can provide.

That’s also why Jesus can command us to love even our enemies – because agape love is radically inclusive. It covers everyone, whether we like them or not, whether they like us or not, because we’re all made in the image of God and we’re all precious in God’s sight, no matter how messed up we are.

Agape love may involve emotion but it is not necessarily motivated by emotion. It is simply wishing the best for another. It is willing good for another. It is acting for the best and for the good of another.

Wishing, willing and acting. We’re talking about an attitude of the heart that finds expression in our actions.

There is no way that this is remotely easy. That’s why we’re talking about it during Lent, which is a season of repentance, a season of turning from one attitude to another.

During Lent, we hope to turn away from the way the world does things and turn toward the way God want us to do things – and, don’t you know, those two ways are so often diametrically opposed.

During Lent, we hope to turn away from the world’s way and turn toward the Jesus way. As Tom Berlin says in his book, there ought to be a difference between the way you think and act and live and love Pre-Jesus and the way you think and act and live and love Post-Jesus. If meeting Jesus doesn’t change you thoroughly, you haven’t met the real Jesus. You’ve met an imposter.

Being changed by Jesus and learning to love God’s way is the primary commitment of your life, Berlin says. Being changed by Jesus and learning to love God’s way is the only way you’ll break out of the vicious circle of life the world’s way and find your way into the virtuous circle of life the Jesus way.

Loving God and loving neighbor are intertwined. You show your love for God by the way you love your neighbor. You can’t see God, the first letter of John argues, so you must show your love for God by the way you treat those you can see.

That’s why the great Hebrew prophets are always railing against pious shows of devotion and phony shows of religion. These are all hypocritical and meaningless unless they reflect a genuine love for the other whom God loves just as much as God loves you.

OK, love is hard enough. What’s all this about “reckless” love? Love sounds reckless enough. Why make it worse?

Obviously, the word “reckless” has many negative connotations – reckless driving, reckless gambling, reckless living in general, the way we imagine the Prodigal Son lived in that parable Jesus told. Now attach the word “reckless” to the word “love,” and you might conjure up all sorts of visions of wild sexual encounters.

The kind of reckless love God is talking about is nothing like that. God’s reckless love is not eros, or attractional, sexual love. It’s agape “wishing the best for another’ love that crosses conventional social boundaries. It crosses boundaries of race and ethnic origin, language, social status, income, where you live and so on. Cross the wrong social boundary and some people will think you’re weird, at best – at worse, subversive and dangerous.

God’s reckless love also crosses boundaries of personal convenience. Am I the only one, or are there just some people you cannot get along with; people who are so hard to deal with that you would just as soon avoid them altogether?

Tom Berlin issues this warning. When you try to love recklessly, you will encounter so many difficult people that you will start to think that God is messing with you. And the truth is, he says, God is messing with you. God keeps putting you in contact with difficult people so that through loving them you will learn to love everyone, and therefore you will grow in your love of God and neighbor.

We’ll spend the rest of this series of messages looking at the various kinds of difficult people you can encounter, and how you can best deal with them in a recklessly loving way.

Here’s a powerful thought from the great Episcopal preacher Barbara Brown Taylor. She says that loving another person “as is” is the hardest spiritual work in the world. Why? Because, she says, when you meet someone, you want to “use, change, fix, help, save, enroll, convince or control” that person.

You don’t want to accept anyone “as is.” You want to change them. But the only person in the world you can change is you. If you truly want to help someone, you have to let God change that person. To do that, you have to give each person you enough freedom and personal space for God to act.

Theologian Tom Wright says that you have to not only accept each person as other but also affirm and celebrate that otherness. You have to want everyone to become not who you want them to be but who God wants them to be.

You have to cherish and yet let go. That sounds a lot like parenting, doesn’t it? Treating someone that way is truly reckless and radical love.

Tom Berlin reminds us that love is not a principle we believe in or an aspiration we hope to achieve but an orientation to life that sets the course of everything we do. It’s an orientation to life that has to be renewed moment by moment. We have to begin every day and begin every encounter with love on our minds.

How can you do that? Let me show you a way. As I list some encounters you might have in a common day, please respond to each with the words, “Begin with love.”

When you wake up in the morning, what do you do? You…

When you first encounter your spouse or your housemate or your dog or your cat, you…

As you head out to buy groceries or run other errands, you…

When you’re accosted by a grouchy clerk at the store, you…

When you dread the meeting you have to attend, or the task you have to do at work, you…

When the lights go out or the cable service fails, even before you dial the help number, you pause to remind yourself to…

When the person trying to help you is in a noisy call center in India and you can barely hear him, let alone understand him, before you start yelling, you…

When you’re watching the news on TV and some politician says something blindingly stupid, before you scream in outrage, you…

When your spouse, or another person you value highly, unthinkingly says something so hurtful that your eyes sting, you…

At the end of the day, when you’re trying to lift up the good in your thoughts and set aside the bad, how do you pray? You…

And as you drift off to sleep and your mind wanders, what attitude journeys with your thoughts? You always …

Whatever happens day or night, you always…

When you do that, don’t you know, love does make the world go ’round.

Amen.

A message delivered March 1, 2020, the First Sunday of Lent, at Edgerton United Methodist Church in Edgerton, Kansas, from Mark 12: 28-34a.

Follow – 4: Transfigured!

“Six days later…” That’s how our story begins. You may wonder, “Six days after what?

What happened six days ago that makes it so important to mention now? What’s the connection between what happened then and what’s about to happen now?”

What happened six days ago was the story that we’ve explored for the previous two Sundays.

It begins when Jesus takes his disciples on a retreat, to the region of Caesarea Philippi, in Gentile country north of Galilee. There, he asks them two questions. First, “Who do people say that I am?” Then, “Who do you say that I am?”

Ever quick with an answer, Simon Peter says, “You’re the Messiah!”

Jesus charges them not to tell anyone. Then he begins to teach them that he will be arrested and killed, but on the third day he will rise again.

Peter objects, “This can’t be so!” and Jesus silences him harshly.

Then he says something truly startling. He says, “If you want to be my disciple, you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me.”

He says that to his 12 closest disciples, plus whoever else is on hand. Now, six days later, he takes aside his inner circle of three disciples, and they ascend a high mountain on a quest that’s somehow related to what happened earlier.

The three are James and John, the Thunder sons, and Simon Peter, one of the Johnson brothers. Where’s Andrew, the other Johnson boy? It is my theory that Jesus leaves him in charge of the other disciples while he and his core leadership team are gone. Given the fractious nature of the team Jesus has assembled, keeping them in line is not a small task, but Andrew seems to be a capable guy.

We don’t know whether they are still in the region of Caesarea Philippi or whether they’ve returned to Galilee, so we don’t know what mountain they have ascended.

If they’re in Galilee, it must be Mount Tabor. It’s formidable enough, jutting up from the plain nearly 2,000 feet. That’s half again higher than the Empire State Building in New York City.

If they’re still up north, it must be Mount Hermon. It’s more than 9,000 feet high, and its peaks are often covered by snow.

Tradition favors Mount Tabor. Jesus is known for a lot of things, but mountain climbing isn’t one of them. Still, ascending even 2,000 feet in elevation will leave you panting. Whether the three disciples know it or not, the climb has primed them for a new revelation – and that’s exactly what they get.

Standing before them, Jesus is transfigured. His appearance is changed. Whatever color his clothes were before, now they are dazzling white, as white as snow, whiter than you could hope to ever bleach them. And, according to another telling of the story, his face shines like the sun.

Suddenly standing with him are Moses and Elijah, Moses the great teacher and lawgiver, Elijah the great prophet. Together they represent the entirety of God’s revelation though the Hebrew scriptures. Through the presence of these great men, long dead, God is testifying to the importance of Jesus.

The disciples are rightly terrified by this vision. Peter begins to babble. He says, “Lord, it’s good for us to be here.” Mark that down. It may be the only time that Peter deals in understatement rather than exaggeration. Then he shoots over the top: “Let’s make three dwellings here, one for each of you.”

The Hebrew people always were good at erecting rock monuments to mark special events on their journey with God. Ebenezers, they were sometimes called – rock cairns that say, “The Lord brought me safely thus far.”

Peter proposes something similar, though who knows precisely what it is. Maybe he wants to erect booths the way you might at Sukkot, the Feast of Booths. Maybe he’s thinking of something longer lasting, some holy site that might draw thousands of pilgrims to the top of this mountain. Or maybe not, considering how inaccessible it is, even today.

Whatever Peter is thinking, it’s clear that he wants to hold on to this moment. Even if he doesn’t know exactly what it means, he wants to preserve the essence of this revelation. And it’s not over.

A cloud has overshadowed them – do you know how scary it is to be on a mountaintop that’s suddenly covered by clouds? – and from the cloud comes a voice: “This is my Beloved Son. Listen to him!”

They have seen Jesus exalted. Moses and Elijah testify to his greatness. Scripture points to him. The voice of God says: “Listen to him!” What a fabulous experience!

Then, as suddenly as it began, it’s over. No one is there but Jesus, and he appears quite normal again. Show’s over. Time to go. On their way down the mountain, Jesus tells them to keep quiet about this until after he has risen from the dead. Well, what could they say? It’s hard enough to describe what they’ve just seen. How could they ever explain it? And what can it possibly have to do with rising from the dead?

Years later, in the second New Testament letter that bears his name, Peter will say, “We didn’t just make this up. We were there. We saw this.” (2 Peter 1:16-18) But what exactly did they see, and what can it mean?

I’ve heard the Transfiguration described as a threshold event, a doorway between two states of existence.

On the Christian liturgical calendar, it’s a doorway between seasons. It’s the climax to the season of Epiphany, and it leads us into the season of Lent. Epiphany is about revelation of who Jesus is. The Transfiguration is an epiphany itself, the peak revelation of the season.

One a deeper level, the Transfiguration is a threshold between levels of understanding. Once you step over this threshold, you can’t see things the way you saw them before. Your vision has been altered. Your understanding has been changed.

But to appropriate this in your life, you’ve got to step over the threshold, and that’s harder than it sounds. The problem is making an epiphany last, keeping this new understanding firmly in your mind. The problem with epiphanies is that they can be ephemeral. They can fade away like smoke. If they are remembered at all, they might easily be misremembered.

The best description I can give you comes from the mystery novels by Andrew Greeley. Greeley was a Catholic priest who was both a sociologist and a somewhat racy novelist. His greatest literary creation, in my opinion, is Bishop Blackie Ryan, a Chicago priest who feels most at home wearing a Chicago Bears starter jacket.

Blackie is a crackerjack detective who has a knack for solving the most unsolvable mysteries. But even he is baffled until that precious moment when all the pieces fall together and everything suddenly makes sense.

He describes it as seeing the door of an elevator open. Inside is the solution to the mystery. He glimpses the solution, but then the elevator door closes. He glimpses the solution, but he hasn’t seen it clearly enough to understand. Only when the elevator door opens and stays open does he know whodunit.

It’s the same with the Transfiguration. It seems so simple, so obvious. And yet, the meaning of it is somehow elusive.

The disciples see Jesus transformed in a way that is so fantastic it’s almost unbelievable. They see great figures from the past testifying to his greatness. They see the identify of Israel as revealed in its scriptures testifying to his greatness. Even a voice from God says, “This is my Son!”

But seconds later, it’s over. The light that transformed the figure of Jesus is gone. The great figures from the past who testified for him are gone. The voice from God is not even an echo any more. As the great Swiss theologian Karl Barth says, all they see now is the same Jesus they saw before. They glimpsed his greatness, but that vision has faded away.

And when they come down off the mountain, they discover that Andrew hasn’t been able to keep the other disciples out of trouble. Instead, they’re at the center of a village brawl. That’s another story entirely.

Here’s a simple point, made many times by commentators on this story. Mountaintop experiences do not last. They cannot last. You cannot live on the mountaintop. There’s no food there, no water and – sorry, Peter – no shelter either. Mountaintops offer incredible views, but they are not hospitable to human occupation.

Hiking in the woods and mountains is one of my favorite pastimes, though I do far too little of it. I’ve been to the top of many peaks higher than either Mount Tabor or Mount Hermon. I can testify that the view is magnificent, and the cliché is true: You feel on top of the world! But then comes that nudge. The wind comes up. A cloud passes by. It’s as if the mountain is saying: “Time for you to go.”

Mountaintop experiences cannot be sustained, and perhaps they shouldn’t be. But maybe they can be internalized. Maybe they can be remembered well. Maybe you can take that vision down from the peak and keep it alive in the plains and valleys below.

What’s the vision we need to take away from this Transfiguration experience? When we say it today, it sounds so ordinary, so much a cliché. Jesus is Son of God. The Word is not only with God, the Word is God.

Last week I saw a video of a preacher who waltzed through the books of the Bible, finding a new title for Jesus in every book, 66 titles in all, but none higher than this one. Jesus is Son of God: present at creation, present with us in all ways at all times, Alpha and Omega, King of kings and Lord of lords. At his name, every knee shall bend and every tongue confess his glory.

If that’s the takeaway, how do we take it away with us? How do we internalize this mountaintop high? You know already. This is not rocket science. This is Christianity 101, the basics of following Jesus. We rely on the classic means of grace, those lines of power from God to us that we only have to plug in to activate.

In the Wesleyan tradition, we see them first as works of piety, works that strengthen our love of God.

These include reading, studying and meditating on scripture; lifting up our whole selves to God in prayer; fasting and other acts self-denial; attending worship regularly; sharing holy communion frequently; sharing our faith with others always; and engaging in holy Christian conference with one another.

There also are works of mercy, works that strengthen our love of neighbor. These include refusing to harm others; instead, doing good to all as often as we can; visiting the sick and the imprisoned; feeding the hungry – and that dangerous task mentioned in our baptismal vows: resisting evil, injustice and oppression in whatever forms we encounter them.

Resisting evil and seeking justice can get you killed. That’s why Jesus’ call to bear the cross leads, six days later, to this vision of Jesus as divine. Without divine help, we couldn’t bear the cross. Without divine help, we won’t do it.

Need I also add that these means of grace are also the themes of Lent? Lent is all about bringing us closer to God, making us better followers of Jesus.

The call of Jesus to discipleship leads here. It leads to a mountaintop experience that confirms our wildest hope: that Jesus is God incarnate. And it leads to the sudden realization: that even after this revelation, the Jesus we worship is the same Jesus we saw before. He’s God in human form, calling us to follow him to a new life, calling us to be transfigured with him in glory.

Amen.

A message delivered February 23, 2020, Transfiguration Sunday, from Mark 9:2-10, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, Edgerton, Kansas.

Follow-2

Some kingdoms have no physical boundary. The Chiefs Kingdom, for example, has a geographic center, and that is Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City – which is in the state of Missouri, not Kansas, don’t you know.

Despite the geographic center, the Chiefs Kingdom has no geographic boundary. It exists wherever there are fans of the Kansas City Chiefs.

Similarly, God’s kingdom has no geographic boundary. It exists wherever there are followers of Jesus Christ. Though he is no longer the physical center of God’s kingdom, Jesus is always its center.

It’s unlikely that his first disciples understand that. They know Jesus as a physical presence, and they expect him to be the center of a physical kingdom. Their expectations are obvious in today’s gospel story. It’s also obvious that Jesus has other plans.

As today’s story opens, Jesus is tired of being mobbed by crowds in Galilee, so he leads his disciples north, out of Galilee, into Gentile territory, where he won’t be as well known. Perhaps there they can snatch a few moments of quiet time together.

It’s obvious that something is on his mind, something he wants to share with them privately. Finally, an opportunity comes, and he asks: “Who do people say that I am?”

They provide the standard array of answers. If Jesus had a social media profile assembled by publicists, it might speculate: “Could he be John the Baptizer raised from the dead? Or maybe Elijah or one of the other old-time prophets, come back to usher in the new age. Maybe even a new prophet – who knows?” (See Mark 6.14-16.)

Clearly dissatisfied with such answers, Jesus asks: “What about you? Who do you say that I am?”

Apparently only one of them is bold enough to speak up, and of course that’s Simon called Peter, whom Jesus has nicknamed Rock. He knows who Jesus is. He’s known all along. He blurts out, “You’re the Messiah!”

In the version of this story that’s recorded in the gospel of Matthew, Jesus praises Rock for his insight and says, “On this rock I will build my kingdom.”

Then he tells them to be quiet about it. If anybody asks, you don’t know a thing. This is just between us, OK?

Why is he so secretive? It’s one of the mysteries of the gospels. Scholars have called it the “messianic secret.” And it’s not just his identity that Jesus wants to keep under wraps. It’s also his healing ministry, which is a sign of his identity and a sign of the dawning of God’s kingdom.

So many times, especially early in his ministry, whenever he heals someone, Jesus says: “Don’t tell anyone about this.” But of course everyone he heals run out and blabs to everyone they know, so that Jesus’ reputation as a healer grows by leaps and bounds and so many people crowd about him and his disciples that they don’t even have a chance to eat. (Mark 6:31)

Why is he so secretive? Because he knows that if word gets out that he thinks he’s the Messiah, he’ll be dead in a week. We call him Jesus Christ today, but if we’d called him that back then, it would be like signing his death warrant.

Christ is the Greek form of the Hebrew word Messiah, which means “God’s anointed one,” which means “king.” In the first-century world dominated by the steel might of Rome, a “king” is a dangerous revolutionary. A “king” is someone whose existence cannot be tolerated. “King” means dead on arrival.

It’s not that Jesus doesn’t want to be known as king. He just doesn’t want his identity revealed prematurely. He’ll make a public announcement at the proper time.

Until then, don’t tell anybody. And here’s why. He says: “When the time comes, I’m going to be rejected and suffer and die. But on the third day, I’ll rise from the dead.”

It’s a totally unexpected twist. “Yes, I am Messiah, but don’t tell anyone, because when word does get out, I’ll be killed.”

Whoa, whoa, Jesus. Hold it right there. Let Peter the Rock explain something to you. First, Messiah doesn’t die. Can’t happen. See, Messiah is God’s anointed one, and God’s anointed one is not a loser. He’s a winner. Failures die. Messiah doesn’t die. Messiah rocks, get it? Messiah destroys the oppressor. Messiah leads Israel to victory. Messiah wins. Most importantly, Messiah does not die. Got that, Jesus?

Jesus gets it, all right. And that’s another reason he wants to keep all this a secret until he can lead his disciples to deeper understanding of his mission. The world expects Messiah to be a warrior king, but that’s not the kind of king Jesus will be. So the first thing they have to get straight is that violence will not bring victory. Violence will only breed more violence. God’s way is different.

Jesus looks at his disciples, one by one, last of all Simon the Rock. Then he says, in the harshest voice they may have ever heard him use: “Get behind me, tempter! Don’t lead me astray! Fall behind me as my disciple! You are not thinking God’s thoughts but human thoughts.”

Moments before, Jesus praised Peter for his insight. Now he calls him Satan, the accuser, the tempter, for getting it wrong. Peter must feel crushed. But maybe that’s a necessary step to understanding.

Out of the blue we’re told that there’s a crowd of people nearby, and Jesus calls them over to teach them. What he teaches is an extension of what he’s said privately to his disciples, but it must strike fear into everyone who hears it.

“If you want to follow me, you must deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me. If you want to save your life, you’ll lose it. But if you lose your life because of me and because of the gospel, you’ll actually save your life.”

Couldn’t we just go back to keeping it all a big secret and forget the rest? That must be what the disciples are thinking about this time, and maybe those of us in the crowd, too.

“If you want to follow me, you must deny yourself.”

We’re approaching the season of Lent, when many people traditionally engage in symbolic acts of self-denial such as giving up chocolate or liquor or video games or other inconsequential things.

I understand the impulse, and I’ve even helped promote it, but it has never moved me. It’s as if I might say, “For Lent, I’m giving up my yacht.” Or, ”For Lent, I’ll deny myself use of my private plane.” Oh yes, I’m happy to give up inconsequential pleasures, especially imaginary ones. But deny myself for Jesus? What’s that about?

Jesus’ original followers are mostly the poor, the marginalized, the least of society, the ones noted in their high school yearbooks “Least likely to succeed at anything.” When they hear, “Deny yourself,” they take it to heart. What little they have to deny is even more precious because it is so little. And though they must be shocked to hear him say, “Take up your cross and follow me,” they know exactly what he means, and they shudder.

Kyle Idleman is the young pastor of a megachurch in Louisville. Nine or ten years ago he wrote a book titled Not a Fan. A fan is enthusiastic admirer, he says. Jesus doesn’t care much for fans. Jesus is looking for followers.

Fans collect T-shirts and ball caps and swag and doodads. They love to tailgate and party and celebrate victories. Fans are happy to cheer for Jesus as long as it doesn’t require major change in their lives or have negative implications. But following Jesus has a cost. Fans admire Jesus from a comfortable distance. Fans don’t follow Jesus. There’s little chance they’ll ever be covered by the dust of their rabbi, they are so far behind him.

I’ve never been much of a fan. I have one – count it, one – item of Chiefs clothing. I bought it to wear last week on Super Bowl Sunday. I watched the game with great interest, but I never for one second considered going to the victory parade. I didn’t grew up with posters of athletes or rock stars on my bedroom wall. I don’t mourn when famous actors like Robin Williams or famous athletes like Kobe Bryant die. I’m just not a fan.

I am a follower of Jesus. Sometimes I think I’m not much of one. I do try to put others first. Sometimes that works; sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes I feel like a hypocrite, in the sense of the word as Jesus uses it.

In first-century usage, a “hypocrite” is a play actor, a person who performs a role on the stage. You wear a mask, you see, to show which character you’re playing, and sometimes you wear multiple masks in the same play because you play multiple roles. But it’s always you underneath. You never change, just the mask you wear. And the mask is never the real you. The mask covers up the real you.

I want to take off all the masks and be the real me, and I want the real me to be a dedicated follower of Jesus.

That question Jesus asked his disciples is truly the question of the ages. More urgently, it’s the question of every hour. It’s the defining question of our lives. Who is Jesus? More specifically, who is Jesus to me – and who am I in relation to him?

Is Jesus my king? Am I part of his kingdom? Am I a fan, or a follower of Jesus?

We’ll continue to pursue these questions next Sunday, when we focus on one question: What does it mean to take up your cross to follow Jesus? A hint: probably not what you think it means.

A message delivered Feb. 9, 2020, at Edgerton United Methodist Church, from Mark 8:27-35.