Crucial Decisions

For our sake, God made Jesus to be sin Who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God. (2 Corinthians 5.21)

Our word “crucial” is rooted in the Latin word for “cross”—the same word from which we get “crucifixion.” Over time, “crucial” has been diluted to mean “urgent” or “essential.” But in its strictest sense, it implies the right to choose. The geometry of the cross mirrors that of a crossroads, or intersection, at which the traveler must decide which way to go. She/he can either continue down the path of origin or go a different way. Choice is what makes the decision “crucial.”

The Holy Week narrative is riddled with crucial decisions. Faced with the option of entering Jerusalem anonymously, like any other Passover celebrant, Jesus chooses to ride into the city to the acclaim of His followers. He chooses to purge the Temple of thieving merchants. He chooses to return to the Temple throughout the week, where He teaches in an open forum, almost taunting the authorities to arrest Him. He chooses to expose Judas’s treachery at the Last Supper and then decides to facilitate His own arrest by taking the disciples to pray in Gethsemane. During His trial, He chooses not to defend Himself, allowing the crowd’s hatred and suspicion to run its course. Even while on the cross—where the skeptical thief challenges Him to save Himself—Jesus meets death at the crossroads and decides to die.

But all of these choices are a subset of a far greater crucial decision God makes in advance, a choice that ultimately brings us to a crossroads where we face crucial decisions about the direction our lives will take. In 2 Corinthians 5.20-21, Paul defines the terms of this decision, saying, “We entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. For our sake God made Jesus to be sin Who knew no sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” When faced with the prospect of remaining estranged from us due to our waywardness, God provided a means of reconciliation through the cross. We've been given a choice.

At Christmas, we marvel at the Incarnation, when God voluntarily takes on human flesh to live among us, as one of us. That is also a crucial decision. Yet today, as we rehearse the agonies of the Crucifixion, we see Jesus as more than “one of us.” The brutally maimed Savior has now become all of us. God made Jesus to be sin in its entirety—each of us at his/her worst and weakest—so that every one of us might become the righteousness of God. This was inconceivable before Good Friday, because such a choice was unavailable to us. So, while Jesus remains the central figure in the Crucifixion narrative, this gruesome story is ultimately about us, and our decision to be reconciled to God. We stand at a crossroad that that asks us to choose how we will live. Will we continue down a path that takes us farther and farther from God’s plan for our lives? Or will we turn away from selfish, unhealthy living to follow God’s way?

Because of Calvary, no one is denied the right to decide. Romans 3.22-24 assures us, “There is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God; they are now justified by God’s grace, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.” Our right to choose isn’t based on the nature or extent of our failures and weaknesses. Since we’ve all sinned, we’re all given the gift of choice—to be reconciled with God or to pursue paths that distance us from God’s love and acceptance. No one is excluded.

Standing before the cross hands us crucial decisions that we make every day we live. If we allow the power of what we see to come alive in us, we will make the right choices.

Remembering

All the trees of the field shall clap their hands. Instead of the thorn shall come up the cypress; instead of the brier shall come up the myrtle; and it shall be to the LORD for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. (Isaiah 55.12-13)

As I write this, PBS is showing Jerusalem: Center of the World, a detailed history of the city. Much attention is being paid to the sacred sites—for Jews, for Christians, and for Muslims. It’s fascinating to hear about the need to memorialize key events in each religion’s story. No one can say for certain if this or that place is actually where a famous event occurred. The words “legend has it” carry tremendous weight in the absence of scientific proof. So it is that claiming Jesus died here, was buried there, ascended over here, and so on—without any reliable evidence—inspires faith and worship. Does accuracy of the claim really matter? Not really, as long as its identification with specific moments in Jesus’s life encourages belief.

This concept of memorializing our faith interests me. We do a great job of memorializing our lives. We take many pictures, we return to spots where events transpired, we etch our names into trees and scroll them into wet cement. But do we recall where we were when belief in Jesus started to make sense? Do we remember our baptism or confirmation or first communion—or any other rite that solidified our identity as part of God’s family? Where were we when we decided a cursory relationship with Jesus wasn’t good enough? What brought us to the place of need for God—and what was that place?

Every time something significant happens, the ancients memorialize for it. Sometimes it's nothing more than a pile of rocks. Sometimes it's an elaborate altar. But the point is very clear: this moment is not to be forgot. Of course, we’re moving toward the ultimate of all memorials: Mount Calvary and the site of the empty tomb. But we all arrive there from many different places. We bring an infinite range of personal experiences. And in our individual pasts, each of us has moments in time that belong to only us, yet exemplify something universal and powerful and incontrovertible in their evidence that God loves us.

In Isaiah’s prophecy of God’s intervention, thorns give way to cypresses and briers are swallowed up by sweet myrtle. The trees of the fields surge in applause for God’s love and grace. This miraculous turn of events, of course, presages Calvary’s tree and its restorative power to reunite humanity with God. The prophet says, “It shall be to the LORD for a memorial, for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off.” (Isaiah 55.13)

Holy Week isn’t only about what happens at Calvary. It’s about what happens in us. Our hearts are sacred sites. Our lives are sacred stories. As we stop by the signature sites of Holy Week, let us pause to revisit our own memorials. We have, all of us, come a very long way, led to faith and called to love by God’s sweet Spirit. There are moments and people and places that we associate with grace’s miracle in our lives. We can close our eyes and recall when thorns vanished and mighty cypress trees rose up, when briers disappeared and lovely myrtles took root in us. These are our holy places, our memorials.

As we press closer to the cross, may we cherish the holy moments and places that brought us here. Thank God for grace, for forgiveness, and for faith’s determination. 

The Test

He had to become like His brothers and sisters in every respect, so that He might be a merciful and faithful High Priest. (Hebrews 2.17)

In Miracles, C.S. Lewis repeatedly returns to the Incarnation as the standard by which all other divine manifestations are measured. “Everywhere the great enters the little—its power to do so is almost the test of its greatness,” he writes. As one ponders his statement, the “almost” becomes inescapable. The greatness of love borne in Mary’s womb cannot be exaggerated. Yet its arrival in the tiny frame of a vulnerable, speechless, Infant is dumbfounding. Surely there must be a bigger test that captures the scale of God’s power. We want something larger than life to prove the enormity of God’s grace and faithfulness—something so utterly overwhelming and definitive that we can’t possibly mistake it for anything else.

But the Incarnation epitomizes God’s baffling ability to display unequaled mercy and might as “the great enters the little.” If we are ever to know—as the angel tells Mary—that nothing shall be impossible with God, we have to recalibrate our expectations of how God works and moves and reasons. God does great and wondrous works in little, ordinary ways. What looks like a newborn is God’s offer of new life. The little Child who seems so reliant on us at first will redeem us and reconcile us to our Creator. The powerless Babe with no home will establish God’s kingdom on earth.

Almost—we almost get it. But we can never fully comprehend the simplicity of God’s great plan. We’re wonderstruck that God would choose so tiny a vessel from which to pour out unconditional love and unfathomable forgiveness. The test for us is whether or not we truly believe what we’re seeing.

Saying Grace

Clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony… And be thankful. (Colossians 3.14-15)

Hassles and Anxieties

Last Sunday, our pastor showed us a scene from Meet the Parents, in which Ben Stiller, hoping to impress his future in-laws, offers to say grace at the dinner table. The results are less than sterling.

She followed the clip with a few questions about why we often feel so awkward when praying aloud in the presence of others—why the desire to sound sincere tends to backfire, and our words quickly become stilted and grandiose. Her observations about prayer “performance anxiety” got me thinking about how the Stiller clip will replay itself at Thanksgiving tables around the country. For many, this will be one of very few times that families will fellowship around their tables. For many more, it may be the only day of 365 that they pause to express gratitude for goodness they’ve received. And while I know of no hard data to support this suspicion, I’m thoroughly convinced the erosion of both traditions—family dinner and saying grace—significantly contributes to social decay we currently wrestle with. Conceding the “inconvenience” of spending time around the table subjects us to more inconveniences than we realize. How much harder our lives have become now that orchestrating family dinner is too hard and taking 30 seconds each day to give thanks demands too much! The hassle of family dinner and performance anxiety associated with saying grace are nothing compared to hassles and anxieties that have grown up in their absence.

Universal Compulsions

So I wondered, where do the customs of eating together and saying grace come from? While other species gather for meals, by and large, proximity to one another and ready availability of food shape their communal dining habits. Humans are rare—if not unique—in their concept of “breaking bread” as a social necessity. Until very recently, the family table was indispensible. It was where family conflicts were resolved, milestones were celebrated, cohesion as a household and membership within the larger community were secured, the lore of identity and kinship passed from one generation to the next, moral character was established, and futures were assessed. In other words, humans have always approached the family meal expecting more than nourishment. We bring big questions to the table, which get answered indirectly through the behaviors and conversations that transpire during our eating rituals. (The first Christians certainly recognized the power of sharing a common meal, which is why they placed a table—rather than an altar or idol—at the center of their worship.)

Thus it seems our compulsion to break bread together is hard-wired and can only be overridden by conscious neglect. But pairing times of nourishment with expressions of gratitude also appears to be a universal human compulsion. Virtually every world religion endorses the practice of giving thanks at mealtime. In all of its forms, “saying grace” boils down to what it sounds like: taking a moment to rehearse examples of unmerited grace and undeserved favor. No prayer more clearly captures the purity of this impulse than one we learn as children: “God is great. God is good. Let us thank God for our food.” To say grace is to invite God’s goodness to our table—to lay the gifts of life-giving food under the canopy of God’s supreme love and care for us. Saying grace isn’t a religious obligation. It’s an intentional act that makes God’s abundant presence felt in our lives—a sacred opportunity to confess faith in our Maker and Provider.

Four Thanksgivings

As Christians, we inherit grace-saying from our Jewish forebears. In Judaism, Birkat Hamazon (“Blessing on Nourishment”) is comprised of four thanksgivings: for the food; for the land of Israel; for the holy city of Jerusalem; and finally, for God’s goodness. We typically collapse this structure into a single statement that focuses on the first and last parts. (“Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty.”) Yet, whether preparing our hearts for tomorrow’s Thanksgiving feast or simply reaching for words before a daily meal, the Jewish blessing can be very useful in easing anxieties about giving thanks to God aloud. We do this by expanding on the Jewish prayer’s basic principles.

Let us thank God not only for our food, but also for being alive and healthy and able to digest it; for the gift of labor that supplies our tables; for senses that relish what we eat; for fellowship occasioned by gathering at the table.

Let us thank God not only for where we live, but also for freedom to make that land our home; for the security of having a place in the world; for the wealth that grows out of belonging to families and communities that strive to live and prosper in peace; for the traditions and heritages that enrich our lives together.

Let us thank God not only for our holy places, but also for the promises they house; for hope that will not surrender to pessimism; for spiritual sanctuary in a world governed by greed and injustice; for beacons of righteousness that shine forth from the citadels and steeples of God’s dwelling places.

Let us be thankful, not only for God’s goodness, but also for the unmerited love and mercy it contains; for relentless blessings we enjoy and too often overlook; for daily guidance and protection given to us; for awareness that if it were not for God’s grace, we would be lost.

I pray a meaningful and rich Thanksgiving Day for all who celebrate the holiday in the US and an equally abundant blessing for those outside the States—reminding all of us of the wisdom imparted in Colossians 3:14-15:

Clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. And let the peace of Christ rule in your hearts, to which indeed you were called in the one body. And be thankful.

Amen.

Walk With Them

Ruth said, “Do not press me to leave you or turn back from following you! Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God.” (Ruth 1.16)

The Compassion Principle

Not long ago I heard an illuminating talk about compassion. The speaker began by breaking down the word’s Latin roots, pointing out that it literally means, “shared suffering.” Then she said the best definition of compassion she’d ever heard came from a Benedictine nun, who told her to be compassionate is to walk beside people in trouble—actively participating in their journey, meeting them where they are, and supporting their efforts to move ahead. Thus, compassion is an intentional work of grace that collapses the distance and differences between those in need and us. It is not sympathy, which attempts to provide solace from a polite remove. Nor is it empathy, which professes to know and understand another’s situation. Compassion surpasses feeling and transpires in the doing. Our sorrow for others means nothing if it stops short of investing our all to alleviate it. Without committing to walk with them in their distress—to make their suffering our own—we’re merely well-wishers, sympathetic viewers from the sidelines.

The more we study God’s Word, the more we mature in our faith, the more convinced we are that compassion is the core Christian value. This belief is inherited from our Jewish forebears, who filled Hebrew scripture with texts extolling compassion as one of God’s defining traits. Numerous times the writers link God’s compassion with divine faithfulness, as we see in Nehemiah 9.17: “You are a forgiving God, gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abounding in love. Therefore You did not desert them.” Compassion becomes the central theme in Jesus’s message as well, not only in His depiction of God, but also in the expectations He sets for us. Most famously, Jesus marries compassion for others to love for God in the Great Commandment, which we hear in Sunday’s Gospel: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength,” followed by, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mark 12.30-31) Then, in Galatians 6.2, Paul underscores compassion’s centrality to our faith when he writes, “Bear one another’s burdens, and in this way you will fulfill the law of Christ.” Bearing the burdens of others, sharing in their suffering, walking beside them, meeting them in their need—we cannot misconstrue the compassion principle as a call for kindness that keeps its distance. It is the law of Christ that places very specific demands on our attitudes and behaviors toward one another. Compassion, first and foremost, is an act of obedience.

Relentless

There’s a relentless aspect of compassion that we all too often—and easily—overlook. Compassion is an act of faith we carry out by faith, ignoring conventional wisdom, social mores and taboos, and political expediencies that would advise against walking with others. We see the full extent of compassion in God’s unyielding covenant to love and accept us despite our failures and deficits. But we also observe its relentless nature in dozens of biblical characters who are moved to bear the burdens of people around them. None of these examples is more vivid than Ruth’s. Here is a woman dealing with extraordinary loss, whose future is anything but certain, and who stands to lose everything she treasures if she embraces another’s sufferings as her own. Yet that’s precisely what Ruth does. She’s relentless in her compassion for Naomi, the mother of her recently deceased husband, and commits herself—despite her mother-in-law’s protests—to walk with Naomi, to bear her burdens, and to face life’s uncertainties alongside her.

Ruth’s story is familiar to most of us. Yet we risk undervaluing its gravity by underestimating its complexity. Sunday’s Old Testament text (Ruth 1.1-18) introduces her saga with a detailed background that brings Ruth’s dilemma into sharp focus. Ruth and Orpah are two Moabite women who marry the sons of a Jewish couple who relocate to Moab after famine descends on their home in Bethlehem. Despite ethnic, religious, and cultural differences, both marriages prosper. Then the father-in-law dies, as do both sons, leaving three widows with no viable means of support. With no blood relatives to provide for her, Naomi has no choice but to return to her extended family in Bethlehem. Going home is no guarantee she’ll be accepted. Her sons’ marriages to pagan women casts shadows over her and her return no doubt will give rise to resentments about having to care for a woman who’s not contributed to the family coffers for many years. Ruth and Orpah do have a way out, however. They can return to their families and resume the lives they knew before marriage. It won’t be easy. They too will confront prejudices and disdain for marrying outsiders. But they’ll have a safe home and provisions to ensure they won’t starve.

Reluctantly, Orpah assents to Naomi’s wishes. Ruth refuses. It’s inconceivable to her that Naomi should return to Bethlehem alone. So profound is her compassion that she voluntarily severs family, cultural, and religious ties to walk beside Naomi into a strange world, to live among strangers who despise her, to adopt strange customs, to speak a strange language, to worship a strange God. Ruth has absolutely nothing to gain by bearing Naomi’s burdens. That’s why the compassion conveyed in her resolve takes our breath away. “Do not press me to leave you or turn back from following you!” she insists. “Where you go, I will go; Where you lodge, I will lodge; your people shall be my people, and your God my God. Where you die, I will die—there I will be buried. May the LORD do thus and so to me, and more as well, if even death parts me from you.” (Ruth 1.16-17) There’s no pause to consider what’s “appropriate” or “feasible.” There’s no lengthy hug, followed by a tender fare-thee-well and reminders to “call if you need anything.” Ruth doesn’t promise, “I’ll be there for you.” Ruth is there and refuses to be anywhere but there. Ruth is relentless.

Admonishments and Promises

Stripped of relentlessness, compassion is reduced to sentiment—an affect that has little effect in a harsh world. As believers who seek to reflect God’s nature in all we do and followers of Christ compelled to honor Christ’s commands, we are wise to take Ruth’s example to heart. And that begins by removing the filter of self from our eyes. Especially for American Christians participating in our national elections, this passage comes at a critical time. We cannot of good conscience enter the voting booth alone. We must take those we walk beside with us—those presently struggling with poverty, hunger, homelessness, violence, broken families, and every other form of social neglect. Beyond what may be best for us, we must consider what’s best for them and, if necessary, place their needs above our wants. We must subvert conventional wisdom, social mores and taboos, and political expediencies—many of them endorsed by religious leaders—to demonstrate true compassion in all of its relentless glory.

In Psalm 112.1-5 we read, “Blessed are those who fear the LORD, who find great delight in God’s commands. Their children will be mighty in the land; the generation of the upright will be blessed. Wealth and riches are in their houses, and their righteousness endures forever. Even in darkness light dawns for the upright, for those who are gracious and compassionate and righteous. Good will come to those who are generous and lend freely, who conduct their affairs with justice.” (NIV) May we listen closely to these admonishments and promises, and like Ruth, trust God above all else in our commitment to walk beside those in need.

Compassion goes beyond promising to be there. It is there and refuses to be anywhere but there, walking beside those in need, bearing their burdens, and sharing in their suffering.