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.

Repression Obsessions

I acknowledged my sin to You, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, “I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,” and You forgave the guilt of my sin. (Psalm 32.5)

The hit musical The Book of Mormon is ostensibly about the comic—and cosmic—travails of a group of Latter Day Saint missionaries who have the bad luck of being assigned to a Ugandan outpost. But in short order, you gather it’s really about people of all walks who suffer from having their religion screwed on a little too tight. You know who I mean. They’re the folks who are terrified of God, terrified of temptation, terrified of Hell, and, most of all, terrified they’ll get caught doing something unseemly by people as terrified as they are. And the only way of managing the terror they’ve chosen to live with is to mask it with manufactured happiness. 

The show quickly dismantles its characters’ clean-cut, cockeyed (and cocky) optimism with “Turn It Off,” a hybrid show tune and Sunday school ditty that says:

When you start to get confused

Because of thoughts in your head,

Don’t feel those feelings!

Hold them in instead

Turn it off, like a light switch

Just go click!

With every conflict a missionary confesses, the answer is, “Turn it off!” Feeling guilty about not protecting your mother from domestic violence? Turn it off! Troubled because you left your dying sister’s bedside to get in line for a new iPhone? Turn it off! Worried about being attracted to your own sex? Turn it off! But what if these gnawing emotions don’t go away? “Then you only got yourself to blame. You didn’t pretend hard enough. Turn it off!" If repression obsessions were unique to Mormons, this cheeky little number would be lamentably tragic. But haven’t we all, at one point or another, been told by someone—parents, ministers, teachers, counselors, you name it—to turn it off?

Repression is no help when confronting confusion and weakness. It’s a defense mechanism against guilt of both varieties, deserved and undeserved, and it’s completely ineffective in overcoming either kind. Repression feeds on guilt. If we stop feeling guilty, the thing we’re trying to conceal has no reason to hide. As long as we keep it hidden, we won’t come to grips with what it actually is. It may be something sinful and unhealthy and offensive to our Maker and those around us. Yet it may also be something holy and life-giving and essential to our God-given identity and purpose. As long as we refuse to examine it, we’ll never see exactly what it is.

The only way we can figure out what’s behind our repression obsessions is by turning the light switch on so we can see what’s really there. We invite God in and say, “Take a look at this. Here’s what worries me about it. If it’s wrong, show me the right way. If it’s what You want for me, grant me the grace to accept it.”

Psalm 32 models this prayer: “I acknowledged my sin to You, and I did not hide my iniquity; I said, ‘I will confess my transgressions to the LORD,’ and You forgave the guilt of my sin.” Repression cannot lead to holiness. Pretending we aren’t struggling won’t open our eyes to truth. If what we’re struggling with is sinful, we need to see that and invite God to forgive our wrongdoing and remove the guilt it creates. If it’s something we’re afraid of, we need to overcome our fear and lead lives of dignity in keeping with God’s plan and purpose for us.

Lent is our great sifting season, when we search our hearts and lay all they contain before God. Whatever’s got us confused and feeling guilty is not to be hidden away in hopes it will go away. For repression to work, it needs the thing it wants to bury and it needs the guilt we carry because of what we’re hiding. None of that is constructive. None of it will improve our lives. “Turn it off” isn’t the answer. “Turn it on—like a light switch.” That’s the answer. If we can summon the courage to do that, we can boldly talk it over with our Maker and bravely heed God's direction for our lives.

Always Content, Never Complacent

I have learned to be content with whatever I have. (Philippians 4.11)

“I don’t like Paul.” I’ve heard several people say this lately. My response is always the same—a sympathetic nod—because Paul isn’t easy to like. On one page, he takes our breath away with eloquent dissertations on God’s grace. On the next, he trips all over himself, snarling at his detractors, belittling women, and mistaking swagger for certainty. But while I too quarrel with Paul’s personality and more than a few of his ideas, I like him very much. I like him because he’s difficult to like. I like him because he’s never reluctant to admit to his messiness. Most of all, I like him because he’s our finest example of a sincere Christian trying to figure out how all of this is supposed to work and what it all means.

I see Paul as a sort of lead investigator in the faith lab. He’s constantly at work, observing new phenomena, combining ancestral beliefs with novel approaches, debunking outdated myths, replacing them with fresh paradigms, and always—always—struggling unlock the Gospel’s revolutionary truths. Paul insists on publishing his findings as he goes, a daring proposition for anyone carving out new territory, let alone someone tasked with establishing the principles and practices of a radical faith movement. As a result, we’re privy to his blunders as well as his breakthroughs. It’s why we see him barrel down a dead-end alley one place—for instance, in his condescension toward women’s roles in the home and church—and then reverse his direction elsewhere, as he does by declaring, “there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus,” in Galatians 3. These flaws attest to Paul’s obsession with figuring things out. Despite his irksome vanity, he’s not interested in proving how smart he is. He’s doing his best to put everything together for the sake of the Gospel. He may not be likeable. But he’s always sincere.

We can get closer to Paul by recalling that, like many of us, he’s the product of a highly prescriptive faith environment. Before Christ charges him to be an Apostle, he already knows the Hebrew Bible by heart and has gained respect as a model seminarian. On top of that, he’s a Roman citizen, a foreign-born Jew of the merchant class, a person of privilege. So he comes from an entirely different place than the other disciples. By the time he’s stopped by a vision of Jesus on the Damascus Road, he’s sure he’s got a handle on how things work. Now he has to start all over again. And one of the key shifts in Paul’s life occurs when he learns to differentiate between complacency and contentment.

In Philippians 4.11-13, we find Paul’s magnificent contentment confession: “I have learned to be content with whatever I have… In any and all circumstances I have learned the secret of being well-fed and of going hungry, of having plenty and of being in need.” And what is his secret? “I can do all things through Christ Who strengthens me.” We can assume Paul’s talking only about his physical and material needs. Yet I’m of the mind it runs deeper than that. I believe he would also add, “I know what it’s like to be religiously complacent and how to be content with unanswered questions. I can remain committed to trying to figure it all out, while conceding it’s more than I can ever comprehend.” Now his famous “I can do all things” statement becomes an epic declaration of faith in the making.

I’m thoroughly convinced that every Lenten desert contains a Damascus Road of some kind—a bracing encounter with Christ that calls us away from shallow lives of religious complacency and leads to the deeper mysteries of faith. We won’t figure it all out. We’ll make blunders and find ourselves backtracking from ideas we’ve embraced in the past. Not everyone will be happy with us. But in our pursuit of right relationship with God we can find contentment. Paul told Timothy, “There is great gain in godliness combined with contentment.” (1 Timothy 6.6) Pursuing God’s will and way inevitably requires us to start over, clearing away ready-made answers to make room for questions we can’t possibly resolve. But when we combine that with contentment, we will gain strength for our journey and discover lives of faith that are anything but complacent.

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.