Getting Out Alive

If my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will take me up. Teach me your way, O LORD, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies. (Psalm 27.10-11)

Under Siege

So it’s the Second Sunday of Lent and Oscar night, the one time during the year when my two greatest passions—faith and film—nod at each other in passing. (I should clarify: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doesn’t schedule its awards ceremony to coincide with Lent. Still, the two often overlap.) This year I’ve set a new personal best in seeing the nominated films. Other than two Foreign-Language nominees and four Documentary Shorts, I’ve seen everything. And what’s struck me about this year’s slate is the preponderance of movies about survival. It can be said that virtually all of the Best Picture nominees portray individuals dealing with traumatic events that threaten their wellbeing. Not all of them make it out alive. But this theme of facing horrendous odds is even more pronounced in the specialty categories.

• In addition to Beasts of the Southern Wild (my favorite film of 2012), the Live-Action Short Nominees Asad, Buzkashi Boys, Death of Shadow, and Curfew present young people whose lives are irrevocably shaped by trauma, as does War Witch (Foreign Language Film) and Inocente (Documentary Short Subject), which introduces us to a 15-year-old homeless girl whose only hope exists in her extraordinary artistic ability.
•  Literally all the Best Documentary nominees tell survival stories. Two (5 Broken Cameras and The Gatekeepers) ponder the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. How to Survive a Plague recounts the genesis of ACT UP, the AIDS activist group that pressured the government and drug firms to develop effective treatments. The Invisible War paints a heartbreaking—and enraging—picture of veterans whose lives are forever scarred by rape while in the military. Searching for Sugar Man is the redemption tale of a 70s pop star presumed dead after his career tanked and he survived poverty as a day laborer in Detroit.
• Chasing Ice (Best Song) is a harrowing documentary that chronicles climate change’s visible impact on the planet’s survival.

The pulse that races through these films beats with the sense of being under siege. There are no easy answers in these movies. Forces beyond their characters’ control raise seemingly insurmountable barriers and we can gauge how we’re feeling about our predicaments by how few of them earn that old “ triumph of the human spirit" cliché. These pictures have been chosen for the industry’s highest honor because they speak to us in urgent, inescapable ways. And what they’re telling us is not overly optimistic.

Souls at Their Extremes

Perhaps the Oscars’ close proximity has filtered my response to this weekend’s texts. But it seems to me that they, too, present vivid portraits of endangered survival. The Old Testament (Genesis 15.1-18) recounts God’s covenant with Abraham, who’s lost all hope of fatherhood. In Psalm 27, David feels beset on all sides, yet he resists the pressure to give up by declaring, “The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The LORD is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (v1) In Philippians, Paul contrasts the waywardness of those who “live as enemies of the cross of Christ” with the assurance of believers, whose “citizenship is in heaven.” “Stand firm in the Lord in this way,” he says. Then the Gospel (Luke 13.31-35) gives us the poignant moment when Jesus predicts His imminent death and mourns that, had things gone another way, His story might have ended differently. “Jerusalem, Jerusalem!” He cries. “How often have I desired to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you were not willing!”

Everything in these texts feels in flux and uncertain. The voices we hear are weary and confused. There are deeply struck notes of trepidation, conflict, and loneliness. The cries come from souls at their extremes, hanging on to hope against all hope, belief in spite of all evidence that things are not working out favorably. Abraham is too old to have children. David is a warrior king in retreat. The fledgling congregation at Philippi is in danger of being overtaken by heretics. And Jesus is facing certain death because His own people won’t listen to Him. To a one, these people travel rocky roads. They’re struggling to survive. And the vivid emotions that enfold them require turning to the only help they know: a God Who is personally involved in their lives, Who is a Friend that sticks closer than any sibling, Who will go with them to the end. There is optimism in these stories, but you have to look for it, because the situations they describe are bleak.

God is With Us

Reading the texts—my head swimming with movie images of children, families, nations, and a planet at grave risk—the stubborn faith that David proclaims in Psalm 27.10-11 grabbed my heart and lifted it. “If my father and mother forsake me, the LORD will take me up,” he says. “Teach me Your way, O LORD, and lead me on a level path because of my enemies.” While conflicts and confusion that befall us may not achieve the epic scale of Scripture and movies, they nonetheless bring us to points of crisis when we feel our very survival is at risk. Loved ones come and go, often laying responsibility for their departure at our doors. Unforeseen circumstances threaten our inner sense of self, stability, and strength. Time keeps ticking, stacking up regrets and disappointments that erode our hope for the future. Opposing opinions and false ideologies rob our clarity of purpose. The feeling that no one listens to us creates profound grief.

If we are to survive, we have to know that God is with us. Those nearest to us may walk away, but the Lord will take us up. When we place our lives in God’s hands, we pray David’s prayer: “Teach me Your way, O LORD, and lead me on a level path.” God alone is able to carry us over life’s rocky roads. Only God can help us stand firm in the midst of chaos. Only God can provide stability in the time of trouble. If we emulate David’s confidence in his Maker, we will discover the truth at the end of Psalm 27: “I believe that I shall see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living. Wait for the LORD; be strong, and let your heart take courage; wait for the LORD!” Whatever we face, if we place our patience and trust in God, God will take us up. We will get out alive.

Surviving life’s traumas and terrors is the binding theme in this year’s Academy Awards. And we see a similar array of survivors in Sunday’s texts.

In Vitro

Watch for this—a virgin will get pregnant and bear a Son; they will name Him Immanuel (Hebrew for “God is with us”). (Matthew 1.23; The Message)

It’s rather odd that our ancestors settled on late autumn-early winter as the time to enter Advent’s contemplation and celebrate Jesus’s birth. With Advent’s emphasis on expectancy and Christmas’s joyful delivery of the Christ Child, late spring and early summer would seem more appropriate. (Christians who live in the Southern Hemisphere are fortunate to experience this seasonal alignment. And the only clue we’re given in Scripture about the Nativity’s time of year suggests a late spring-early summer arrival. Luke’s mention of shepherds pasturing their flocks indicates green fields; if it were early winter, the sheep would be housed in stables and fed hay.)

Advent is, above all else, a gestation period. It invites us to identify with Mary, who realizes the most amazing event humanity will ever experience is taking shape inside her. We believe the same. Something incredible is taking shape inside us. While our impatience to see what it is—to touch it and hold it in our arms—is nearly unbearable, we know we must give it time. The spring-like Promise will mature and be born into radiant Life. We will call the Living Christ we carry in vitro through Advent’s pregnancy “Immanuel”—“God is with us.”

In The Tentmaker, Michelle Blake writes:

One of the essential paradoxes of Advent: that while we wait for God, we are with God all along, that while we need to be reassured of God’s arrival, or the arrival of our homecoming, we are already at home.

God’s promise to be with us is daily fulfilled by God’s presence within us. The thing we most hope for is already coming to fruition. Like expectant parents, we take time to watch it grow, to sense its movement, to prepare ourselves to welcome it into the home we make for it in our souls. The weather outside may be dark and cold and forbidding. But in our hearts, it is spring. The summer Son will soon dawn. And we will echo the prophet’s song: “Arise, shine; for your light has come, and the glory of the LORD has risen upon you.” (Isaiah 60.1)

For Now

We wait in hope for the LORD; God is our help and our shield. In God our hearts rejoice, for we trust in God’s holy name. (Psalm 33.20-21)

Too often we confuse waiting with idleness. We’re made to believe that things get worse the longer we delay. And often they do. But this is never true in matters of spirit, where God’s timing—not our time—is the governing factor. Our Maker is very comfortable with waiting. Human traditions and to-do lists have never been of any great consequence to God. If the Christmas narrative teaches us anything, it’s that Creator’s vision for us is consistently displayed on a stately scale that cannot be rushed. While we wait, we should rejoice that God is our Help, our Protector, our trustworthy Promise.

In Night Visions: Searching the Shadows of Advent and Christmas, Jan Richardson offers some down-to-earth advice about Advent’s waiting dilemma:

The season of Advent means there is something on the horizon the likes of which we have never seen before… What is possible is to not see it, to miss it, to turn just as it brushes past you… So stay. Sit. Linger. Tarry. Ponder. Wait. Behold. Wonder. There will be time enough for running. For rushing. For worrying. For pushing. For now, stay. Wait. Something is on the horizon.

Christmas will get here soon enough—sooner than we’d like, given how much busyness we impose on it. We are waiting on God. How can that not be worth the wait? 

For now, stay. Wait.

Let It Happen

He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” (Mark 4.26-27)

The Whole Plant Thing

I’m highly amused by Miracle-Gro’s spring advertising campaign. If you’ve not seen the spots, they feature folks who’d love nothing better than being surrounded by thriving plants and flowers but have no gift for making that happen. As they confess their foibles, I laugh out loud, because all of them are me.

The commercials bring back so many failures: the gladiolas I planted along a row and then burned to a crisp by tying them to an iron fence; the lilac I set in the far corner of our backyard to obscure trash cans on the alley, only to love it to death; dozens of ferns I’ve drowned and who knows how many “hardy” houseplants I’ve killed. I can’t really say what I’m doing wrong when it comes to gardening. Is it too much, or not enough? Am I trying too hard, or should I try harder? At times I’ve been too obsessive and not given the plants a chance to make it on their own. But there have been other times when I’ve backed down and not done enough to keep them alive. The whole plant thing is a mystery to me. Which is why Sunday’s Gospel (Mark 4.26-34) gives me great consolation. There, Jesus talks about someone who scatters seed, watches it grow, but has no idea how it works. I have to laugh. This person is just like me!

That Extra Little Something

Of course, Jesus isn’t giving a horticulture lecture. Like so many of His lessons, this one begins with, “The kingdom of God is…” It’s another of Jesus’s attempts to penetrate the minds of His followers, to bring about their understanding of His message and mission. Across-the-board in the four gospels, Jesus is all about the kingdom of God (or, in Matthew, the kingdom of heaven). In Mark 1.15, He launches His ministry by proclaiming, “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent, and believe the good news.” He then spends much of His time explaining what the kingdom of God is. Actually, He keeps clarifying His meaning by suggesting what the kingdom of God is like. It’s like a mustard seed, a child, yeast, hidden treasure, a great net, a merchant searching for fine pearls, and so on. In every scenario, Jesus presents or implies someone whose aspirations exceed his/her abilities. In order to grow seed or find treasure, something ephemeral must occur—that extra little something that entails trust and patience. At a point in the story, the hero has to let go and let whatever he or she hopes to accomplish happen. If the person believes it’s possible, then what she/he envisions will come about. That’s the good news. That’s the kingdom of God.

Jesus makes it sound easy, when He and we know it’s not. He likens God’s kingdom to a planter who scatters seed, goes to bed and wakes up day after day and watches the seed sprout and grow all by itself. Obviously, some tending is required. The ground has to be broken up to receive the seeds. Some watering and weeding will be needed. The planter has to be mindful that birds might gobble up the seed and pests might devour the seedlings, harsh weather might uproot them and poisons might filter into the soil. The key to the parable emerges in the planter’s acknowledgment he really doesn’t know how plants grow. He just lets it happen. And even though he knows what must be done to promote his plants’ growth, he really has no way of predicting what they’ll be. Some may flourish while others fade. They may yield a record crop; they may yield little. All of that is beyond his control. His task is nurturing their growth—not engineering it. To underscore this point, Jesus compares God’s kingdom to a mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds on earth.” (v31) Yet, seemingly against all odds, this tiny seed “grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” (v32) How that happens is anyone’s guess.

Kingdom Seeds

Mark goes on to tell us, “With many such parables He spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; He did not speak to them except in parables, but He explained everything in private to His disciples.” (v33-34) Oh to be a fly on the wall when Jesus spelled things out! One imagines it going something like this. A disciple—Thomas, perhaps, as he’s usually the guy with the questions—says, “Okay. So we get the point about the planter and the mustard seed. What this has to do with God’s kingdom is where everything falls apart.” To which Jesus replies, “Once God’s kingdom is planted inside you, it takes on a life of its own. You don’t need to figure out the hows, whys, and wherefores. Just let it happen. If you do that, you’ll be amazed at what comes of your trust and patience.”

Heeding Christ’s words and following Christ’s example hands us kingdom seeds that we scatter across our lives. While we take care that they’re well nurtured and protected, we leave the mechanics of their growth alone. We don’t know how God’s kingdom takes root and sprouts within us, or how its tiny seeds fulminate into great shrubs. The mystery of this will never be revealed to us. All we need to know is it will happen. And all we need to do is let it happen. Miracle Grow is what God’s kingdom is all about.

We don’t have to figure out the mechanics for God’s kingdom to grow in us. We just have to let it happen.

Podcast link: http://straightfriendly.podbean.com/2012/06/17/let-it-happen/

In the Hiding

Psalm 139.11-12 calls to us today.

If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,” even the darkness is not dark to You; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is as light to You.

Our lives are cumulative experiments. Every day adds more variables to the equation. Sometimes we produce miraculous results of love, joy, peace, and all the other fine things God’s Spirit seeds into our beings. Then there are when everything blows up. We’re caked in ashes of fear, regret, shame, and resentment. We feel life’s darkness descend and, many times, we try to hide in its shadows. We’d rather not be seen. Still, God finds us in the hiding. And with infinite patience and compassion, God grants us a new day, another try, a fresh start.

How High Minds Fall

Some thought that, because Judas had the common purse, Jesus was telling him, “Buy what we need for the festival”; or, that he should give something to the poor. (John 13.29)

The Great Big Middle

This past Monday I joined over 1000 Chicagoans for CROSSwalk, a solemn, four-mile procession that mourned the loss of our city's youth to gun violence. We wore paper bibs that read, “632”—the number of minors killed on our streets since 2008—“more than we can bear.” In the time needed to produce the bibs, the number went up, as several more youngsters met with untimely death. The procession stuck to the sidewalks, where most of these inexcusable murders occur, where safety must be restored. It stopped at several points for prayer and remembrance before concluding at Stroger Hospital, where many of the city’s young gunshot victims are pronounced dead. The hospital’s imposing edifice reminded me of a tomb that was anything but empty. While we pledged to defeat this menace, inside its walls wounded teens and children were fighting for their lives.

The Right Reverend Jeffrey Lee, Episcopal Bishop of Chicago, closed the event with a quote from Martin Luther: “Pray like everything depends on God; work like everything depends on you.” It summed up the unspoken dilemma resting heavily on our hearts: how do we transform our sorrow and outrage into meaningful action? Yet throughout the walk, we were repeatedly told to “listen to what the Spirit is telling God’s people,” and the message rising in our spirits told us, “I’ll be with you to help you figure this out. You can do it.” I sensed none of the jittery impatience that often infects closing rallies at these kinds of events. The urgency to act was swaddled in calm assurance that, step-by-step, with God’s help, we can and will reverse this cruel tide of destruction and grief. Our commitment surpasses rushing to stop violence; we’re determined to eliminate it. That will take time.

Impatience is the natural-born enemy of kingdom work. All but a very few of Jesus’s parables—His lessons about restoring God’s kingdom on earth—involve patience. Seeds must have time to sprout; fruit and grain must ripen; investments must mature; lost children and sheep and coins must be found. In nearly every story, there is that great big middle where meticulous attention to growth must happen. The great big middle where we work and wait, where everything depends on God and us. The great big middle where we learn that time is on our side, offering a chance to tend to details that ensure bountiful harvests and lasting results. The great big middle is such a standard fixture in Jesus’s teaching that we wonder how Judas misses it. But he does. And that surprises us, as he’s the detail guy who keeps the books and manages the money. It’s his job to maintain what's needed to do the work of the great big middle.

Quickly

For obvious reasons, the Gospels downplay Judas’s role in Jesus’s ministry. Prior to his betrayal of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, and Luke only mention him in passing as a disciple. They give his full name, Judas Iscariot, and note him as “the traitor.” John foreshadows his treachery by identifying him as the disciple who protests after a woman anoints Jesus with costly perfume that might have been sold to provide for the poor. We’re not really sure what John’s up to with this. Judas’s complaint at first casts him as a misguided activist. But then John discredits him by saying Judas wanted to bank the money because he skimmed from the coffers. That’s hard to swallow, though, since it seems unlikely he’d be given charge of “the common purse” if he were suspected of thievery. So there’s probably some revisionist shading in John’s accusation.

More reliable clues about Judas’s character surface in his surname, and even then, scholars aren’t sure what it means. Some speculate that “Iscariot” refers to a Judean town of no notoriety, while others believe it refers to the Sicarii, a group of Jewish assassins bent on overthrowing Roman rule. Still others theorize the writers assign “Iscariot” after the fact, alluding to Hebrew words that mean “the false one” or “choked” in reference to his suicide by hanging.

Perhaps the clearest window into Judas’s soul opens during the Last Supper when Jesus tells him, “Do quickly what you are going to do.” (John 13.27) Quickly. The adverb misleads the other disciples to think Jesus is sending Judas on an errand—possibly to buy supplies to celebrate Passover (which begins the next day) or to donate some of their funds to the poor. In retrospect, of course, we know Judas has jumped sides in collusion with those who want to destroy Jesus. His impatience to see change he longs for (whatever that may be) burdens him with a false sense of urgency. Feeling stuck in the great big middle, forced to work and wait for lasting change, doesn’t suit him. His eagerness to speed progress along urges him to switch loyalties. Realizing He’s lost Judas, Jesus tells him, “Do whatever you need to do, and be quick about it.” Jesus has lost patience with Judas’s impatience. Jesus might have warned, “Rushing to judgment breeds injustice. Your plan is doomed to backfire.” Which is what happens. Both will be dead in 24 hours’ time. Only one will rise again.

High-Minded and Shortsighted

Succumbing to impatience with the great big middle is how high minds fall. The compulsion to make something happen soon distracts them from tedious tasks required to get the job done. Everything becomes expendable—ideals, people, loyalties, and even purpose—when the ends justifies the means. And when “any means necessary” becomes the justification for hasty, imprudent actions, we invite chaos and failure to the party.

We talk a lot of big stuff around here: truing our lives to Christ’s example and teachings, loving God and others without restraint, living by faith and not by sight, combatting Christian exclusion, striving for social justice and equality, eradicating violence and abuse, and on down the list of daunting challenges that come part and parcel with life in God’s kingdom. Every personal and social change we seek can’t come quick enough. Every step we make toward progress presses us to move quicker, to put less effort in the tedious necessities and more into giant leaps. We become high-minded and shortsighted and we fall. If, as some suggest, Judas was set on overthrowing Roman oppression, it clouded his understanding that Christ came to accomplish something far greater and more enduring. Jesus had no use for uprooting a regime. He came to plant the seeds of God’s kingdom in the hearts and minds of every human—a kingdom that would grow if carefully, patiently tended. The mission that plays out in His trial, execution, and resurrection is one of reconciliation and redemption, not revenge and replacement.

Faithfulness is lived in the great big middle, where we keep our heads down and do the hard work of God’s kingdom. Is that not Lent’s great lesson? Is it not epitomized in the agony of the cross? Is it not witnessed in the stalwart women who arise early in the morning to tend to Jesus’s grave? Judas teaches us where rushing to judgment and other acts of impatience lead. In our eagerness to reach the empty tomb, let us never forget that the road beyond it is long and difficult, that the work it calls us to do is tedious and time-consuming. There are miles of great big middle that we must travel—as individuals and the Body of Christ—to make good on Calvary’s promise of redemption and Easter’s restoration of life.

While we can’t say with certainty what Judas’s motives were for betraying Jesus, we can all relate to his impatience to act on his compulsions. His high-mindedness leads to shortsightedness and he falls.

Podcast link: http://straightfriendly.podbean.com/2012/04/04/how-high-minds-fall/.