First

God proves God’s love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. (Romans 5.8)

As Lent beckons us to Calvary and our thoughts turn toward the cross, I’m reminded of the hymn that says, “Oh, how I love Jesus/Because He first loved me.” Of all the facets of divine grace exemplified on the cross, the realization that God loved us first is the most dazzling for me. It is a decisive love, a love offered in hopes that it will be returned. But we can never forget that Jesus decides to die a criminal’s death with no promise that His love for humanity will be rewarded. It’s more than a selfless act of compassion. It’s a huge gamble—the most extreme risk a person can take—which makes it the ultimate act of faith.

And we should remember that this sacrifice is not without hesitation. Moments before He’s arrested, Jesus begs God to release Him from this fate. Because we’re governed by flesh, we interpret His prayer to be a plea to save His own skin. Like every human living under Roman oppression, Jesus has seen the horrors of imperial torture and crucifixion. In Jerusalem, Calvary is the site for frequent executions. As with other cities where potential for insurrection is high, the Romans select a spot at the edge of town to erect a grisly display of supreme authority. The crosses of Calvary stand as a warning to anyone traveling to and from the city: there is no mercy for anyone who bucks the system. Jesus knows well what torments await Him after He’s taken into custody. Then, because we know how gruesome His death is, we put two and two together and assume Jesus is asking God to spare Him from the extreme brutality He will suffer.

But might there be more to Jesus’s hesitance than escaping agony? One has to imagine a bigger question looms in His mind. Will dying be worth it? The mortification of an unjust trial, public mockery, being whipped within an inch of His life, and then hoisted onto a cross is supposed to result in our awakening to God’s boundless love. Yet there are no guarantees this will be the case. Given how much derision He’s faced in life, the odds don’t favor such an eventuality. It’s more likely He’ll die and be forgot, like every other troublemaker who meets his end at Calvary. Crucifixions happen all the time. Why should Jesus’s be any different? “Take this cup away from Me,” He prays—as if to say, “Don’t put Me through this for no reason.” It’s a huge gamble.

Jesus’s great assent—“Not My will, but Yours be done”—is more than accepting the price He will pay in His flesh. It’s the acknowledgement of what must be done to prove that God loved us first. The reconciliation at the heart of God’s redemptive plan starts with love and proceeds without any assurance it will be repaid. And the physical agony that Jesus endures cannot begin to equal the mental anguish rising from the possibility it could all be for naught. That is the miracle of the cross. Jesus’s faith in God—even in the terrifying moments when He feels God has abandoned Him to die alone—is matched by God’s unfailing faith in us. To love us without any certainty we will return God’s love, it is more than the human heart and mind can comprehend.

God loved us first. It is almost unimaginable. Yet it is true. And the grandeur of such extreme love becomes the centerpiece of Paul’s attempt to awaken us to this amazing fact: “For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. But God proves God’s love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” (Romans 5.6-8)

As we approach Holy Week, may awareness that God loved us first overtake us. We’re moving toward a moment when we will discover love of unmatched magnificence and trust. The greatest love we can ever know is waiting for us at the cross. But as the Savior comes into view, let’s not forget that God waits faithfully for our love to flow upward. May our song forever be, “Oh, how I love Jesus. Because He first loved me.”

Lived-in Love

Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us, and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (Ephesians 5.1-2)

The saintly (and sainted) sixth-century pontiff, Gregory the Great, wrote:

The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things. But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist.

That’s a sermon all by itself. Love is much more than an emotion. It is the thing that prods us to extend ourselves to others, to make thoughtful sacrifices without a second thought. It cannot be passive, nor can it be held in reserve. Wherever love goes, love flows.

As Paul suggests to the Ephesians, love is the key to becoming more like our Maker, which is one of Lent’s most hopeful intentions. Thus, love becomes the litmus test for holiness in our lives. If the things we cherish lead to loving attitudes and behaviors, they are godly. If our thoughts and opinions move us to put love into action, then they are just.

Lest we get mired into the gooey shallows of sentimentality and romance, we need to disabuse ourselves of Hallmark notions about love. Both Paul and Gregory set high standards for love. Paul defines it by its epitome: the love of Christ, which reached its height in Jesus’s final breath. Gregory says love “works great things.” This is not the kind of love that settles for roses and chocolates. It’s more than kindness and generosity. This is gutsy love—sweaty love, the sort of love that cares more about what it can accomplish than the price of its demands.

The fragrance Paul describes isn’t the smell of flowers and potpourri. It’s the scent that rises from a sacrificial altar, a sweetness comingled with the stench of burning flesh and death. It is an odor that is pleasing to God, but not always pleasant to us. So real love’s purpose isn’t focused on making us happy. Its role is to spur us to self-sacrifice that creates change. It is the love of God displayed in human ways on a human scale that nonetheless reflects God’s epic patience, compassion, and forgiveness. It is decisive and courageous, all-inclusive and farsighted, willing to endure pain and turmoil in its tenacious pursuit of something greater than what presently exists. This is the passion Jesus describes in John 3.16: “God so loved the world that God gave God’s only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life.”

While true love doesn’t seek happiness, it miraculously makes those who truly love truly happy. They don’t need rose-colored glasses to see God’s love at work, because they live in it. Genuinely expressed love naturally gives rise to joy and wholeness. Lived-in love activates a life of rich experience. It turns every thought and deed into an act of worship that pleases God.

Gregory certainly understood this. He devoted his life to reforming worship to stress the nature of God’s love and was hailed as “the Father of Christian Worship.” He lent his name to the matchless Gregorian chant that captures the soul of sacredness. That’s why musicians and singers look to him as their patron saint.

To live in love is serious work. But despite its toil, it inevitably fills us with song.

The Love Fast

Love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself. (Luke 10.27)

In the faith tradition of my youth, it was not uncommon for pastors to call impromptu fasts. He/she would urge congregants to “turn their plates over” and devote time ordinarily spent preparing and eating meals to prayer, Scripture, meditation, and other spiritual pursuits. These fasts were less about self-denial than carving out space in one’s day to commune with God.

That's really what fasting hopes to accomplish. It turns our attention away from our personal wants and needs so we can realign our lives with the things that God requires of us. But how can we know what those things are? The Great Commandment gives us the best place to start. “Love God with all you’ve got,” Jesus says. “And love your neighbor the same way you want to be loved.” In theory, that sounds fairly basic. In practice, however, it gets complicated very quickly, because the actions that Jesus commands us to take require us to make time to do them.

So we look at our days and evaluate how much of them we spend on ourselves—not only the “nice to have” moments of relaxation and pleasure, but also the “have to have” times that require concerted effort and sacrifice to make room for God and others. Can we surrender an hour’s sleep to spend it in loving communion with our Maker? Can we let go of a task that feels so urgent to us that we build our day around it and, instead, devote that time to helping someone else?

And what about our hearts? Can we consciously set aside our need for love and all of its trappings long enough to put God first? Can we harness our soul’s emotions to draw satisfaction from sacrifice, instead of searching for gratification—in some cases, going so far as avoiding emotionally fraught situations—that makes us feel good? Can we reorient our thoughts to realize the love we offer to others is every bit as important as the love we seek for ourselves?

These are hard questions that require vigilant attention. They insist on conscious awareness of opportunities to “turn our plates over”—not merely in the literal sense of a nutritional fast, but in the figurative sense of carving out time and space for God and neighbor. As we continue our Lenten progress, it’s vital that we remember God gets no glory in our sacrifice. The fast is meant to open windows to express love for God and those around us. A love fast that turns away from our needs and desires creates a love feast that will nourish and sustain us long after we depart Lent's season of consecration.

On High Alert

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? (Isaiah 58.6)

It’s Ash Wednesday. Once more we find our way to an altar, where we bow in humility and rise from our knees bearing a visible sign of repentance. As always, there will be a lot of thought and conversation today about what we’re “giving up” for Lent. We will leave the Ash Wednesday rite with the best of intentions and spend the next few weeks struggling to honor them.

To be sure, there is merit in self-denial. It teaches us discipline and retrains us so that we can master unhealthy reflexes and habits. Yet what’s supposed to come out of fasting? In Isaiah, we discover that it’s less about what we elect not to do, and more about relearning what we must do. In Isaiah 58, God says our piety and ritual—our subscription to religious obligation—mean nothing if they don't alert us to sacred obligations to those around us.

Sacrificing meat or candy bars or TV is, at best, a start. We do these things to keep us mindful that fasting is, above all, an act of faithfulness to a God Who desires meaningful change in our attitudes and behaviors. Yet if Lent starts and stops with what we’re “giving up,” we’ve not gone far enough. “Such fasting as you do today will not make your voice heard on high,” God warns. “Is such the fast that I choose, a day to humble oneself? Is it to bow down the head like a bulrush, and to lie in sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast, a day acceptable to the LORD?” (v4-5)

There’s a break in the text, making room for us ask, “If there’s more to this fasting thing than getting off our high horses and wallowing in our guilt, what can it be?” The answer is remarkably simple and direct: God expects our fast to focus on doing better in the here and now—not feeling sorry that we haven’t done so in the past or pledging improvement in the future. Listen very closely to God’s definition of an acceptable fast (quoted at length, because its emphasis cannot be overstated):

Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not hide yourself from your own kin? Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindication shall go before you, the glory of the LORD shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the LORD will answer; you shall cry for help, and God will say, Here I am.

If you remove the yoke from among you, the pointing of the finger, the speaking of evil, if you offer your food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted, then your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail.

If we enter Lent’s desert intent only on adopting an ascetic mindset—grappling with self-denial and its attendant temptations, distancing ourselves from others to relish the benefits of solitude—we fall short of God’s demands. The Hebrew word for “fast” literally means, “to cover one’s mouth.” Thus, it stands to reason if we refuse to placate our hungers, we have more to give. What are we to do with our excess—this food we don’t eat, this extra time we have on our hands, these comforts we sacrifice? God tells us: we surrender them to others in need.

We enter Lent on high alert, extremely conscious that our wilderness adventure will open opportunities to share. Indeed, if we’re doing the real work of fasting, we seek out the less fortunate, the hungry, the afflicted, and the oppressed. We create the means of practicing Lent’s discipline. We look for distressed families we can feed. We extend ourselves to overworked parents and provide them respite by offering to sit with their children while they recharge their batteries. We seek out solitary coworkers or churchgoers and sit beside them. We find the senior who needs help cleaning up the house or running errands. We make time for the sick and grieving among us, assuring them they’re not alone. We embrace the ridiculed and misunderstood. We speak kindly to ears bruised by insults and cruelty. We touch the untouchable and love the unlovable.

We are surrounded by fasting opportunities.

We leave our comfort zones, because fasting should make us uncomfortable. It thrusts us into a desert of strangeness and uncertainty. It tests our wills and purifies our motives, leading us beyond the desire to be holy so that we become holy. Fasting has very little to do with what or how much we “give up.” It’s all about what or how much we give. And if we center our Lenten experience intent on caring for others, our wilderness will explode with new and abundant life.

Your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The LORD will guide you continually, and satisfy your needs in parched places, and make your bones strong; and you shall be like a watered garden, like a spring of water, whose waters never fail. (Isaiah 58.10-11)

Prophetic Living

Then He began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4.21)

In Touch with God

The words “prophecy” and “prophetic” get kicked around a lot—so often that we assume we know what they mean without pausing to contemplate their true definitions. In secular terms, they’re synonymous with foresight. A prophecy is a prediction, plain and simple. In scriptural and spiritual terms, however, it’s something far more complex and urgent. When the Bible introduces prophecy—that is, words delivered by prophets—it wants us to understand God is speaking. Often it’s very specific about this. Dozens of passages are prefaced with phrases like, “The word of the Lord came to the prophet,” and what follows is framed in quotation marks. But more often the prophets speak directly, using their own words to express insight they received while communing with their Maker. And we should be very clear here. They’re not speaking for God, putting words in God’s mouth to serve their agendas. Indeed, it’s the opposite: God puts words in their mouths to serve God’s purpose. Sometimes prophecy comes in promissory form, as God makes covenants or tells the people what’s in store for them. But just as many, if not more, prophecies focus on the here and now: This is what’s happening. This is what led up to it. This is the right response. This is what you should avoid to prevent its recurrence.

So there’s a lot more to prophecy than forecasting the future. Prophecy in its truest, purest sense is God’s revealed word. We can even go so far as saying that prophecy is God’s active presence revealed to us, and in us, through Scripture. As with prophets of old, our communion with God—made possible by prayer, meditation, fellowship, and Bible study—puts us in touch with God. In return, God uses these same tools to stay in touch with the world through us. The closer we get to God, the better we see what God wants us to see, the better we hear what God wants us to hear, and the better we activate God’s presence in our lives. We are all equipped to live prophetically—to think, behave, and speak in keeping with the vision and principles first conveyed in Scripture. Thus, when we speak of “prophecy,” we’re not talking about crystal balls and psychic intuition. Prophetic living happens in the now. And constant awareness of our prophetic ability is vital to the work God calls us to do.

The Way It Always Goes

In Sunday’s Gospel (Luke 4.14-21), we watch Jesus model prophetic living. The scene is decidedly electric. After being away from Nazareth for some time to start His ministry, Jesus returns. Reports of His success precede Him. So the home crowd’s expectations are high. The synagogue is packed. Everybody’s eager to see what Jesus will do. But they’ve not been around Jesus lately and don’t understand that He doesn’t play into the star thing. It’s not about Him. It’s about the God Who sent Him and the work He’s been given. In fact, Luke is very clear that Jesus attends Sabbath services because it’s “His custom” to participate in weekly worship. (v16) There’s no mention of the disciples or an entourage of fans. Jesus enters His local synagogue as He’s always done: alone, unceremoniously, like any other worshiper. Apparently the congregation has invited Him to read a passage of Scripture and He's respectfully consented.

The big moment arrives. Jesus opens Isaiah and reads the first two verses of Chapter 61:

The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.

Then He sits down. He’s done. Show’s over—until Jesus notices everyone staring at Him. This is great theater. The tension is sliceable. He responds with a straightforward comment: “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,” (v21) Unfortunately, Sunday’s reading truncates the story and dilutes its point. If we read on, we get a clearer sense of what Jesus means by how He behaves. The initial reaction is what one expects from people feeling proud of a local kid who’s done well. “How nice!” they say. Then the gravity of His words sinks in. Did He just declare Himself a prophet—and not any prophet, but one on par with Isaiah? The murmuring begins and the most readily outraged in the crowd ask, “Isn’t this Joseph’s son? He’s no prophet!” In what will become a signature strategy, Jesus uses their skepticism to His advantage. He answers, “It’s not enough that I tell you this? Do I really have to work wonders here, like elsewhere, to convince you? That’s the way it always goes: no prophet is accepted in the prophet’s hometown.” He cites two examples of prophets who were obliged to minister to strangers because their own people rejected them. Chaos breaks out. No one realizes that their reaction ratifies His prophetic bona fides. Instead, they decide to throw Him off a cliff and be done with Him. In the ensuing uproar, Jesus simply walks away, leaving them to their hostility and doubt. Now the show’s really over. As far as we know, Jesus never returns to Nazareth again.

Alive in Us

In John 14.12, Jesus tells the disciples, “The one who believes in Me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these.” Jesus’s ability to live prophetically—to know God’s vision, to accept God’s calling, and to make God’s presence known in the here and now—is also available to us. The Spirit of the Lord is upon our lives, too. The same words from Isaiah that define Jesus’s role and responsibilities also define what we must do. We too are spiritually equipped to declare God’s favor to the poor, the captive, the blind, and the oppressed. We too are qualified vessels through which God’s love, truth, and justice flow into a world of hatred, deception, and inequality. This great gift of prophetic living isn’t given to launch us to stardom. It’s not designed to exalt us above those who’ve not yet figured out that it’s possible. Prophetic living is simply allowing God’s Word to come alive in us so that all we think, say, and do activates God’s presence wherever we may be.

One final observation: When we honor our prophetic calling, those who know us best will be the least likely to accept us. They’re too focused on who we are—on our weaknesses and vanities—to believe we can become what God invites us to be. They may even question the legitimacy of our faith with such virulence they’d rather we were dead than doing the work God calls us to do. That’s the way it always goes. But the Word of God tells us differently. The Spirit of the Lord is upon us. God has anointed us to proclaim the good news of God’s love, acceptance, and freedom. Knowing that is enough to drown out the naysayers. Do God’s work. Speak God’s Word. Activate God’s presence. Leave the skeptics to their outrage. Live prophetically.

To live prophetically is to become vessels through which God’s love, truth, and justice flow into a world of hatred, deception, and inequality.