Eyes for Peace

As He came near and saw the city, He wept over it, saying, “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” (Luke 19.41-42)

There is no after-party following Palm Sunday’s parade. Jesus dismounts the borrowed donkey and goes to the Temple, has a look around at what’s going on, and returns to Bethany. We know what Jesus finds during His brief stop at the Temple upsets Him, since He goes back on Monday to oust moneychangers and merchants who gouge holiday worshippers with inflated prices. He unites two prophetic texts to condemn their criminality, saying, “My house shall be a house of prayer, but you have made it a den of thieves.” And we have a pretty good idea that Jesus returns the next day intent on shaking things up, in part because He’s in a foul mood. On His way into the city, He spots a fig tree that hasn’t yet blossomed. He’s hungry, but the tree has nothing to offer. So He curses the tree and it shrivels up. This is a side of Jesus the disciples haven’t seen—their first indicator that there’s been a shift in the atmosphere. Everybody’s tensed up.

Before all of this happens, however, Luke captures a poignant moment that helps us recognize the sorrow Jesus feels for Jerusalem. He pauses before entering the city and weeps for its decline. Jerusalem, the proverbial city on the hill, whose world-famous Temple sits atop its highest peak, has lost its vision. According to Isaiah 56, God has ordained Jerusalem’s Temple as a site of justice and inclusion. The chapter begins with a divine command: “Maintain justice and do what is right, for soon My salvation will come, and My deliverance be revealed.” (v1) The prophet lays out God’s vision for the Temple, describing a place where eunuchs and foreigners who were previously excluded would be welcomed and given places of honor. This is where we find the “house of prayer for all peoples” declaration. (v7) Gender and ethnic boundaries will be erased. Peace and unity will prevail in the Temple, which shapes Israel’s social and religious agendas. Jesus is entering Jerusalem to offer its people salvation and deliverance. But even before He steps inside the city, He isn’t hopeful. “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes,” He laments.

His reference to blindness invokes God and Isaiah’s displeasure with how the Temple is being run. In verses 10 and 11 we hear, “Israel’s sentinels are blind, they are all without knowledge; they are all silent dogs that cannot bark; dreaming, lying down, loving to slumber. The dogs have a mighty appetite; they never have enough. The shepherds also have no understanding; they have all turned to their own way, to their own gain, one and all.”

Jesus weeps because this is an old, old story. The gulf between the Temple and its people continues to widen. The correctives issued in Isaiah 56 haven’t been obeyed. People are still turned away from worship. The rich get preferential treatment. Preachers and teachers continue to serve up God’s promises, yet they have no vision for what those promises will look like in a “new Jerusalem,”—the place Jesus has spent three years describing as “the kingdom of God.” And here He stands, looking at Jerusalem through tear-swept eyes, the very embodiment of God come to save and deliver Israel from its religious and political oppressors. Their promised Prince of Peace is with them, but they can’t see it.

We can see it, but do we really understand what we’re looking at? The cry from Jesus’s heart mourns the loss of community. God has endowed Jerusalem with power to become a singular place where no one is rejected, where God’s all-inclusive love can reign supreme. Jesus has come to offer this amazing gift to a holy place that has lost touch with what makes it holy. Seeing how many of our own churches reflect Jerusalem’s failure, we too should mourn. But mourning is not enough. We should walk into our places of worship with clear eyes for peace. We should recognize where our leaders and communities have failed and we should decry their resistance to change. God is calling for a house of prayer for all peoples. The redundant embrace—all peoples—stresses the expectation of uncompromised inclusion.

Any church or faith community that compromises God’s expressed vision should be regarded with suspicion. These are blind spots shepherded by people with no understanding. We will not be fed in these pastures. We will not find peace in them, even though they sing and preach in the name of Christ. So why are we there? It behooves every disciple of Christ to seek community among people who have eyes for peace and understand Who Jesus is. The glory of the Temple loses its luster when we realize it’s lost its way. The fancy robes and soaring architecture and showmanship that draw so many inside its walls lose their magic. When churches prefer some above others and deny entry to eunuchs and strangers, the ground they stand on is no longer holy. So weep like Jesus for their blindness. But follow Jesus’s example: declare your displeasure with their error and when they resist you—and they will—walk away. Find a home where people with eyes for peace live out God’s vision in tangibly faithful ways.

Zealous for Peace

The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever. (Isaiah 32.17)

Yesterday our church gloried in the promise of peace. Our guest preacher, Rev. Dr. Edward Campbell—a highly regarded Bible translator and seminarian whose title belies his salt-of-the-earth pragmatism—said something that stuck with me. As we read Scripture, he said, we should remember it’s the story of people figuring out how the world is supposed to work. Thus, the tension that binds together 66 books written across centuries is manifest in a contest of wills: human will and its wantonness versus God’s will and all that God desires for, and from, us. Consequently, we’ve invented an alternate reality to accommodate weaknesses that, as Scripture persistently reminds us, bear no reflection of God’s vision. Nowhere is this discrepancy more magnified than in human proclivity to make war. The Bible, particularly the Old Testament, is rife with war zeal. Repeatedly, we watch Israel engage in military conflicts that lay ruin to its country and other nations. The extreme losses are plain to see. And while it’s true that God sometimes—though not always—intervenes on Israel’s behalf, no stretch of scriptural interpretation can be made to translate God’s role in human combat as a divine sanction of war. When God steps into military conflicts, miracles occur that restore peace. Peaceful cohabitation is how the world is supposed to work.  It is God’s will. Why can’t we figure that out?

I submit we have figured it out. What we’ve not yet resolved are the international, cross-cultural, and political conflicts that cause war. Proverbs 14.31-34 diagnoses our failure when it says: “Those who oppress the poor insult their Maker, but those who are kind to the needy honor God. The wicked are overthrown by their evildoing, but the righteous find a refuge in their integrity. Wisdom is at home in the mind of one who has understanding, but it is not known in the heart of fools. Righteousness exalts a nation, but sin is a reproach to any people.” (Emphasis added.) When we set our hearts to prove our superiority over other nations—when we advance policies and actions that promote poverty, violence, and suffering, whether abroad or at home—we forsake God’s call to righteousness. We will not live in peace. As we’ve recently experienced in a recession largely brought on by reckless war-making, the costs of militaristic bravado are enormous. Conflicts wrought of aggression inevitably exact a huge toll on the aggressors. And the prices aren’t just paid out of pocket: they’re deducted in human lives, bodies, minds, and emotions. War is not God’s will. Why can’t we figure that out?

Isaiah 32.17 says, “The effect of righteousness will be peace, and the result of righteousness, quietness and trust forever.” We are not so naïve to expect global righteousness and its peaceful effects will prevail in our present world. Yet, as Christians, we must also ponder how we can expend our resources to promote righteousness. That we need adequate defenses against malevolent powers is a given. The question is whether we permit our leaders to pursue unrighteous policies of aggression—to foster nationalistic, military bravado that is quick to pull triggers and create undue poverty, suffering, and loss of life. We must be zealous for peace at all costs, as the price of warfare is more than we can bear. We are regularly confronted with the harrowing realities of warfare, yet we cling to the myth that war can ever be just. Military aggression is the way of the world. But it’s not how God intended it to be. It’s time we figured that out.

Sold Out

Do not exult as other nations do; for you have played the whore, departing from your God. You have loved a prostitute’s pay on all threshing floors. (Hosea 9.1)

How did we not see the Great Recession of 2007 coming? Long before millions of Americans lost their jobs and homes and savings, economists warned that the bubble would one day burst. Yet we spent and borrowed like there was no tomorrow. As a nation, we pursued high-cost agendas in retaliation for 9/11. We slept—enthralled by grandiose dreams of wealth—while lobbyists and special interests plied our elected officials with seductive notions about lowering regulatory gates to unleash a tsunami-like cash flow that never materialized. Instead, rivers of riches poured into a handful of pockets, leaving everyone else high and dry. But that was not before we mortgaged our common sense to buy up any and everything that reeked of success.

We became a people deliriously infected with possession obsession. Whatever we wanted, we got, unconcerned about the ridiculous prices we paid to get it. Then tomorrow came. It was a tsunami all right—just not the one we’d been promised. We watched in horror as countless lives washed away because we sold out, doing precisely what Hosea accused ancient Israel of doing: “For they sow the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind. The standing grain has no heads, it shall yield no meal; if it were to yield, foreigners would devour it.” (Hosea 8.7) Whether or not foreign debt existed in Hosea’s time I don’t know. But his words surely must chill us to the bone.

The recession should have ushered in a season of chastening, a time to ponder our error and course correct. It didn’t. Our rebellion persists in willful ignorance of where we went wrong. Meanwhile, we shovel blame and disgust on our leaders for not moving fast enough to set things right. But what does God say? Before we answer, perhaps we should ask if we even care, because we’ve paid no heed to divine warnings not to put faith in material wealth, not to horde treasures, not to measure our lives with spreadsheets and status symbols. To truly believe that the prophets of old speak God’s truth to the ages, we must first deal with our Creator. Hosea 9.1 issues a scathing indictment: “Do not exult as other nations do; for you have played the whore, departing from your God. You have loved a prostitute’s pay on all threshing floors.”

We sold out, as a nation and individuals, wherever it profited us. Like streetwalkers, we traded in false pleasures that betrayed God’s desire that we be a righteous people. We soon will be given a new chance to mend our undoing. Will we sell out to the highest bidders, to merchants who reduce us to commodities that feed their wealth and enjoyment? Or will we be gathered in common effort to restore equity and justice to a land that has turned a deaf ear to precepts that please God?

Second Chances

The LORD passed before Moses, and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.” (Exodus 34.6)

In Exodus 34, Moses is in the worst imaginable predicament. Not long before, God met him on Mt. Sinai, set down some basic rules for Israel, and affixed promises of longevity and a new land as incentives for obedience. Coming off the mountain, Moses discovered Israel had succumbed to idolatry in his absence. In a rage, he smashed the tablets inscribed with God’s laws—and hence literally broke God's contract God with Israel. By all rights, God could say, “That’s that,” and leave Moses to manage Israel on his own. But God calls him back to the mountain and reissues the contract. Rather than dwell on Moses’s anger—rather than turn against Israel for its false worship—when God meets Moses again, the first thing God does is remind him Whom he’s dealing with: a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithful.

When we confront evidence that something’s gone haywire in our society, we must know that God is faithful. Idolatry—of a golden calf, a cartoon villain (as we’ve just seen), or anything else that supplants our love for God—will inevitably result in destruction. Yet God faithfulness is manifested in second chances. Whether on a scale that rivets global attention or in tiny ways that go unnoticed, harms we visit on others and ourselves are not cause for God to abandon us. We will suffer for our wrongs. But we’ll never be left alone. God calls us back to the mountain and reminds us we’re dealing with the LORD, the merciful, gracious, patient, loving, and faithful God of second chances.

Open

Today we sit with Psalm 139.23:

Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.

After reviling wickedness that engulfs him, the psalmist does something very few of us have the courage to do at the end of our rants and pity parties. He opens himself to God. It’s as if he catches himself and confesses, “My heart is no purer, my thoughts no nobler, than those who vex me.” And we must come to grips with this reality. At our best, we’re no better than those we decry. We open our hearts and minds to God, inviting our Creator to look into us, to know us, to test us. Asking God to come in and take a look at us—the real us—insists we take responsibility for unhealthiness we hide. Should we expect God to abide our nonsense? When we open ourselves to our Maker, we bring ourselves to two realizations: we have it in us to be as sinful as any hater and it’s time we did something about that. Search us, O God. Know our hearts. Test us. Know our thoughts.

Our Golden Opportunity

Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and through it many become defiled. (Hebrews 12.14-15)

No Middle Ground

Three-and-a-half years ago, in the final, furious months of the 2008 US Presidential race, my parents sent me an email that opened the whole same-sex marriage can of worms and prompted a lengthy response in these pages (On Marriage, the Church, and the Nation). Although I continue to stand by much of what I said, my basic premise was deeply flawed and the tortured logic I used to support it severely misguided. In attempting to balance marriage as a sacrament with constitutionally guaranteed equality, I fell into a separate-but-equal trap that, despite using Jesus’s own words, reflected none of His teaching and character.


Trying to locate middle ground, I failed to acknowledge that Jesus never settles for middle ground. In every situation—including His marriage discussion in Matthew 19—Jesus always sides with those on the wrong side of disenfranchisement and loop-holing. Mosaic Law says the Messiah is God’s promise to the Jews; Jesus broadens the definition to include people of all ethnicities, classes, and religions. Mosaic Law commands that adulterers be stoned to death; Jesus pardons a woman caught in the very act and impeaches those who would punish her. Religious tradition castigates Samaritans as unfit outsiders; Jesus invites a Samaritan woman—one with a scandalous sexual history, no less—to experience new life.

Search the Scripture for precedents where Jesus defends inequality or settles for compromise. You won’t find one. Jesus views every situation where religious and legal customs categorize people as “other” as a prime opportunity to prove the power of God’s unconditional love, grace, and acceptance. Time and again He sidesteps legal quibbling to press higher principles. It’s never about Samaritans and lepers and adulterers and tax collectors and criminals; it’s always about removing barriers that deny them grace. There is no middle ground, no appeasement, no give and take. Those without receive. Those outside are welcomed in. And Jesus doesn’t get bogged down with defending why this must be, because His actions as God speak for God. And God says, “That’s how it is.”

An Unequaled Chance

Like millions, I was thrilled with President Obama’s declaration that legalizing same-sex marriage is the right thing to do. But while pundits and opponents wasted time trying to decipher political motives for his affirmation, I gloried in the reason he gave. “The thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing Himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule,” he told ABC’s Robin Roberts. “You know, treat others the way you want to be treated. And I think that’s what we try to impart to our kids, and that’s what motivates me as President.” It was so simple, so just, and so incontrovertibly correct.

It was a watershed in American politics—not as a policy statement or campaign strategy, but as an unabashed witness to Jesus’s life and teaching. It was the first time I ever recall a US President overtly leading us back to Christ in a way that purely reflects Christ’s principles. It instantly brought to mind Paul’s sterling statement in 1 Corinthians 11.1: “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.” I wanted to run up and down streets, ringing doorbells and shouting, “Our President just said, ‘Follow me, as I follow Christ!’”

Without besmirching the sincerity of believers and denominations currently opposed to marital equality, I would also challenge them to consider the golden opportunity they’re overlooking. History has presented them with an unequaled chance to witness the radical grace Jesus embodied—to surrender their cloaks and their shirts, as Jesus teaches, to travel a second mile when asked to walk one, to go beyond what’s asked of them and do what’s required of anyone claiming Jesus as his/her Leader.


From Within

To follow Christ in every way is by its very nature an act of faith because it constrains us to abandon what we think is right in order to do what Jesus says is right. It is not easy by design, as it expects us to live out God’s grace in a very particular, completely selfless way. And this is especially difficult for people who confuse the inhabited (and habitual) faithfulness Jesus demands with behavioral codes that divide “insiders” from “outsiders” and “us” from the “other.” They look to external structures and arbitrary rules to define their beliefs, never realizing that faith is witnessed from within. Faith transforms a subjective experience with God into an objective expression of God’s presence in the world. It exchanges seeking divine approval for trusting divine acceptance. It gives without hope of reward. It exalts without regard to presumed status or worth. It ignores what we see in others to evidence what God wants others to see in us.

Resisting the rigors of faithfulness is hardly a modern phenomenon. Indeed, the challenges of faithful living are so daunting for the Early Church that they become the central topic of virtually every epistle in the New Testament. And nowhere is this more pronounced than in the Hebrews letter, where the writer takes extraordinary measures to free Jewish Christians from reliance on legalism and religiosity so that they can actualize genuine faith. “This is a new and living way,” Hebrews 10.20 proclaims (emphasis added), pointing to a faith that sheds obsolete attitudes and evolves in response to its surroundings. It is a faith primed for opportunities to witness God’s unfettered love, grace, and acceptance. It is a faith whose only standard is built on compassion, tolerance, and equality.

In Hebrews 12.14 and 15 we read, “Pursue peace with everyone, and the holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God; that no root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble, and through it many become defiled.” Peace with everyone—not a select few whose beliefs and morals align with our own. Holiness that reveals God at work in us. Ensure that no one is denied God’s grace. Don’t cultivate bitterness and trouble that defile our witness. It is a teaching that compels us to look beyond ourselves to find a better, new, and living way.

All Aboard!

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the great theologian, martyr, and perhaps the 20^th century’s clearest voice of discipleship, wrote, “If you board the wrong train it is no use running down the corridor in the opposite direction.” At the time, he was warning German Christians not to bend to anti-Semitic pressures from pro-Nazi religious and civic leaders. American Christians are handed a nearly identical choice with the marital debate. It asks us to forego religious dogma and personal comfort for the sake of the oppressed and disenfranchised. In the wake of President Obama’s affirmation, all but a very few conceded he was on “the right side of history.” But it’s bigger—much bigger—than that. What we’ve just seen is the temerity of one believer to board the right train. May every believer in this nation follow him, as he follows Christ. May all disciples of Christ come to their senses, get on the right train, and join a deafening chorus of “All aboard!”

The marital equality debate presents a golden opportunity for all believers to become living witnesses to the magnitude of God’s grace.


Podcast link: http://straightfriendly.podbean.com/2012/05/12/our-golden-opportunity/