This question is at the heart of the Easter story. Setting aside for now all the technical and theological aspects inherent in the Passion story, the essence boils down to finding and assimilating and celebrating life. Easter focuses the attention on expectation, disappointment, hope, and the kind of certainty that is present in true faith.
At the end of this Year Of Death, where now will we find life? Has death overcome it? The disciples came to look for Life in a cemetery, and specifically, in a tomb. They were scolded. They had received enough instruction that they might have known better. But the reality of what they had seen, overcame the reality of what they could not yet see. Being certain of what their eyes and experience told them, they acted as they did. They came to do homage to a dead body.
It is thankful that their faith wasn’t the cause of God’s acting. Else, Jesus would still be buried behind that stone. Because they had none. No, they had been invited to believe in the Faith that God has in Himself to achieve what He achieves, with or without our believing. Their failure to give credit to what they had been told, more than to what they had seen, did not constrain God in the slightest.
But, it did cause them to look in the wrong place. And once there, this reliance upon their own ability to see caused them not to recognize Life in the form of a gardener. I guess if we must see something in order to believe it, then even when it is presented to the eyes, we won’t recognize it for what it is. Where have you been looking for life? What do you have to see to know if you’ve found it?
A gardener knows the secret to Life is patience. He is not a day-trader. He knows that there is much more going on beneath the surface than what can be seen above it. He knows better than to trust his eyes for determining truth.
Yesterday’s post posed the question: would you accept a salary that would meet all of your needs for the rest of your life? I then discussed some pitfalls pursuant to chasing wants.
My morning ritual involves coffee, a quick run-through of automated reminders about bills due, and a quick check of banking software to assure the resources are available for the bills, lest I should need to move funds.
I start each day making sure that I have the financial resources on hand for that day’s financial needs.
But what other resources do I need for today? And can they be stored up? Can they be transferred from account to account?
I’ll need breaths. Lots of them. Even more if I can squeeze in a walk or bike ride. I dare not try to store them up.
He’s gonna need a much larger bag, no?
I’ll need Grace. Lots of it! That can’t be stored either. Grace is deposited via the conduit of Faith on an as-needed basis and must be spent immediately.
I’ll need my heart to keep beating. I don’t have any way to put the needed beats in an account that I can withdraw from if I start to run low.
I need all the neurons and axons and dendrites in my neural cortex to fire correctly all day long. No neural storage banks either…
Anyway…made me think.
The most valuable things I’ll need for today, I’ll have to receive moment-by-moment as the need arises. Like the manna of old, I’ll have to gather only what I can use today. Attempting to store more than a day’s worth will spoil and breed worms.
I think maybe that’s what Jesus meant when he said, ”Take no thought for tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about its own things. Sufficient for the day is its own trouble.”
The things we take for granted, like breaths, and heartbeats, and mental processes are where the really important things reside. While we spend our energy and our time chasing and storing up, ”bread that does not satisfy.”
Have a nice day! It’s the only March 29th, Two Thousand and Twenty-One that you’re ever gonna get.
Call it what you will, there is a universal acknowledgment that not only our actions, but our intentions will have repercussions that in the unfolding and endless cycle (circle) of life will find their way back to us.
A quick look at the etymology of Karma shows that it derives from a Sanskrit word meaning simply, ”action”. There is no ethical implication attached until much later.
When it comes, it connotes the familiar western idea, found in the laws of Isaac Newton, father of Physics, that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. The idea of causality mingled with that of reciprocity.
This is the basic idea hidden in the simple word Karma, but the meaning transcends the merely physical world of Newton’s laws, and suggests that it is an all-encompassing truth, affecting not just bodies at rest, or in motion, but everything, in all worlds, everywhere, in all time (whatever that is).
Truth is found when the seedling erupts from the soil, then it doesn’t matter if you thought you were planting corn. If you planted tomatoes, tomatoes grow for harvest. The truth of what was planted becomes evident.
In life, it doesn’t matter what you tell yourself to justify the seeds you sow and the actions you take, the harvest, when it comes, will show plainly what you actually planted.
Hampton Coliseum: This Hell in a Bucket became my Altar of Remembrance.
Like the Old Testament figures who faced a crisis, had an encounter with God, and erected a pillar of stones to commemorate the place, this day on the calendar is my altar of remembrance.
Today marks 35 years since I was lost enough to let myself be led, to borrow words from my favorite Rich Mullins song, Hard to Get.
Two questions and one answer forever changed the trajectory of my life and have given me these thirty-five years, quite literally, on the house.
Question one: Are you having that much fun?
Question two: How much are you worth?
Answer: God thinks you’re worth the death of His Son.
Thirty-five years in, and I’m as amazed today at how and where Jesus found me as in the hour I first believed.
I’m certain many people are looking for God. They just don’t know they’re looking for Him.
Many, like my 21-yr-old self, think they’ve already found Him. He’s the all-inclusive, Grand Cosmic Guru running everything, hidden in everything, maintaining everything, right? He’s the One conducting the Acid Tests. He’s the One encouraging you to Be Here, Now. He’s the one that’s totally cool with you as long as you don’t hurt anyone else, right? Not considering that a life spent groping around in a dark room when there’s a light switch on the wall, hurt’s everyone else…right?
And believing they already know Him at least as well if not better than the slick, well-dressed TV professionals; carnival hawkers pitching a snake-oil version of God, they aren’t looking in the traditionally right places. Because, face it, most of those places are oh-so-stuffy-and-judgmental, and frankly,…dead.
They know instinctively God must be bigger than that. And so, rejecting the organizational part of religion, they feel themselves adrift, looking for something in the next port, the next experience, the next drug.
Bobby Weir, 3-19-86 singing the lyric that led to the Question one. You don’t have to be a televangelist to be used by God.
They can’t say why they’re pushing every envelope, testing every limit, hopping the fence at every boundary. Like me, they don’t know why they think every door they open, will be THE DOOR of the universe. They just know there must be more to all of this than what the world is selling.
Let me just say, I feel ya!
But sometimes in all your manic searching you can get yourself so inextricably tangled up and lost, that you’re ready to hold out your hands and take a Day-Glo green pamphlet from a hippy chick you’ll never meet again, read it, and like a snake shedding it’s skin, walk away a different person.
The switch clicks, the Light comes on, and you get found by the One who has been holding you in His outstretched hands. And the only appropriate words, even thirty-five years later, are simply, Thank You.
The outside of the tract said, How Much Are You Worth? God thinks you’re worth the death of His Son, was written inside the tract…with an image like this one.
A few years ago, I wrote out this version of my testimony . I re-read it this morning. It could benefit from some edits, and it’s kind of long, but if you have any interest in whether or not Jesus goes to Grateful Dead shows, it’s there for the reading.
One of my favorite NT passages is in Luke chapter 8. Jesus is with his disciples and decides to go to ”the other side” of the Sea of Galilee. They get into a boat and off they sail. Jesus falls asleep in the boat on the way across, leaving the navigation in the hands of accomplished fishermen, many of whom have grown up around this lake and made their livelihoods from it.
But, a storm of high wind comes down on the lake, sunken as it is in the topography of the region, and the boat begins to fill with water, threatening to swamp the boat miles from shore.
These seasoned fishermen, who have undoubtedly been in boats during storms on this body of water before, decide that now is a good time to wake up the carpenter from his nap to tell him, Master, we perish.. And the carpenter from Nazareth rebuked the wind and the waves so that the lake became calm again. Then, in my favorite part of the story, he turns to the disciples and says, ”Where is your faith…”?
Luke’s narrative says, ”then they were afraid…”.
Excuse me?
Then…they were afraid?
They must have been at least troubled, if not outright terrified, to have awakened Jesus to tell him the boat was filling with water and they were going to drown. And now that the wind and water are calm again these seasoned fishermen are afraid?
You’d think that the act of waking him up would have shown their faith. It seems that Jesus would have had no need to ask where their faith was. They called on him, after all. But apparently, they had done so just so he wouldn’t sleep through the tragedy. Clearly, they were astonished by what he had done to save them. They sure hadn’t expected this. Now they are more afraid of the solution than they had been of the problem.
Not exactly fear inducing, eh? Or is it?
I try to see my place in this story. This small vessel is so tossed by wind-whipped waves out on the open lake that it is taking in water, yet Jesus is asleep? That would have been one heckuva rolling, bucking little boat, but he was undisturbed. Would that have inspired me…or angered me? Would I have remembered that at the start of the journey he had said, ”Let us go to the other side” and since we weren’t yet at the other side the journey wasn’t over? Would I have thought he didn’t care? (In another gospel, they did think that). When he finally does wake up to calm the situation just by speaking, would that have changed my life forever? Would I have finally realized who this person is, and in light of that, how foolish my fear is?
Like all of us, these men had placed their faith somewhere. Maybe in themselves and their seamanship. Maybe in their ability to predict the weather. Maybe in general circumstances. Maybe they knew they were good swimmers. I can’t know. I’m sure Jesus’ question was rhetorical. He knew that all of us put faith in something, but in a pinch, it may not be the right thing.
I suspect that Jesus knew these men were rugged, working class, tough, and pretty fearless. I suspect he knew they were self-reliant, independent, and resilient. They would have needed a pretty close brush with mortality, even though this was likely a very familiar occurrence to many of these men. But not at this magnitude. Not with wind at this ferocity.
Jesus knows how to bring each of us to zero. He knows how to bring you to the end of yourself. He knows that as long as you’re trusting in you, you cannot be simultaneously trusting in Him.
Not far from where this little boat eventually made safe landfall, Jesus said, Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs in the Kingdom of God. Only those who recognize their bankrupt spiritual state are fit for the Kingdom. He has a way of breaking all of us who say we want to follow Him. Even if it means we’re in the storm of our lives, and it looks like He’s sleeping through it and completely oblivious.
Typical NYC alley. Similar to the one in this story.
I’ve heard God speak to me on a number of occasions. I’m not claiming to be unique in this. In fact, I don’t think anyone can have a genuine relationship with Him without hearing him speak directly.
Now, I’ve never heard Him with my ears, unless it was when He used someone else’s voice. Most times, I didn’t need ears. Ears aren’t the part of us that hear anyway, anymore than eyes are the parts that see.
One such occasion was in New York City in 1995. I was engaged in full-time street ministry in Charlotte. I went to spend a week learning from the best at Times Square Church, the ministry founded by the late David Wilkerson, author of The Cross and The Switchblade. They had a program encouraging visiting clergy to come and learn by participation.
In 1995, TSC was running several food trucks to serve hotdogs, street food, and the gospel to homeless locations throughout the five burrows. It also ran a permanent, physical location off of 5th avenue in what was then known as ”Crack Alley”. This ministry was well known on the NYC ”street-sheet” for homeless and impoverished people. It was housed in a three story building situated in a row house in what was a very, seedy, high crime area at that time.
I was used to being alone in bad neighborhoods in Charlotte, but I was not used to being in an architectural canyon that felt very much like a one-lane trap. I was told to arrive by 10 am, two hours before the mid-day lunch would be served. Getting there meant my first trip on a train from across the East River in New Jersey, then my first subway trip, and then a stroll down a garbage-strewn block that seemed a mile long. I looked over my shoulder so many times while trying to get to the correct number, it’s a wonder I didn’t have a crick in my neck.
Finally, I reached the address I’d been given. It was unceremoniously identified by a hand-lettered cardboard sign on the outer wall by the heavy steel door, ”Upper Room Ministries”. I rang the buzzer, waited for a long minute, and heard a voice in a Brooklyn-tinged accent over the scratchy intercom, ”Yeah, who are yous?” I gave my name, told them I was a visiting minister from North Carolina, and that I was there to minister for the noon service.
The door gave a heavy clank, unlocked from within and popped open an inch. I pulled it open and stepped inside onto a three square foot landing of chipped black and white tile that looked like a dirty, miniature checkerboard. Directly to my front was a steep stairway covered by gray, industrial, non-slip treads leading straight up from the street. As soon as I cleared the door, it swung shut and locked behind me. Serious security, I thought to myself.
I had been involved in several outreaches with other ministries in Charlotte that served soup and sandwiches, hotdogs and potato chips to the homeless. But an aroma wafted down to greet me as I traversed the narrow stairway lined with ancient dark-stained bead-board walls. I wasn’t smelling vegetable soup or chili. It smelled like I was climbing up to the dining room of a five-star restaurant!
I got to the top of the stairs to a small vestibule where the door had been propped open. I stepped in to a room with a long hallway to the right, a large room to the left, and a wall of windows on the opposite side from where I stood. Glancing down the hall to the right, I could see restroom signs beside some doors. The huge room to the left seemed to take up the whole floor. A couple of people were unfolding metal chairs from stacks along the left-hand wall, dragging them across the linoleum and forming them into rows. They gave me cursory nods without speaking and kept at their task. ”Yankees,” I thought to myself. There was no dais, only a simple wooden lectern at the far end of the main room. On the far wall, behind the lectern, was a large screen for an overhead projector. I could see one set up on a small table in the midst of the chairs.
The windowed wall across from the entry allowed for some daylight, but only provided a view of the dingy building across the narrow street. Folding tables lined the wall beneath the windows. On the tables were baskets and containers of plasticware, napkins, and straws. To the far right end was a small city scape of stacked plastic and styrofoam cups. I walked in that direction and saw there was a large opening at that end of the room. It was from here that the aroma was coming. That was the kitchen.
I walked into the kitchen where two grandmotherly ladies were bent over their tasks tending to the mouth-watering food that was in the two ovens. I saw no soup pots on the stoves. On the prep tables were baking pans filled with chicken breasts and pineapple rings. There were a couple dozen buttered french loaves sitting on sheets of tinfoil on another table, ready to be wrapped for their turn in the ovens.
Peering over the shoulder of the nearest lady, I said, ”Hawaiian Chicken?” in a tone of evident delight and surprise. I thought maybe it was being prepared for the ministry team and that was why I had been told to arrive two hours early. I was salivating from my walk up the steps and now seeing the delicious food, I was hoping they were preparing for the team to eat.
She finished fussing over the pans of caramelizing chicken in her oven, stood up to wipe her hands on her apron, and stated matter-of-factly, ”Only the best for souls.”
That was lesson number one. It was a lesson I saw demonstrated many times over in my week there as a visiting minister. Times Square Church, housed in the fabulous old Heller Theatre, former venue of ”Jesus Christ Superstar” at 51st and Broadway, was all about souls. Period. It existed as a way to bring church to the unchurched, to bring salvation to the lost, to bring Jesus to the world.
On this particular day, I had another important lesson to learn.
As more of the ministry team filed in, after first providing their bonafides into the street level intercom before being buzzed up, I began to wonder when I’d be told how long I would be given to speak to the crowd of homeless and hungry that would soon be arriving. Usually these messages are kept pretty short so the food doesn’t get too cold, but I’d never been at one that served anything but soup or peanut-butter and jelly, so I didn’t know what the format might be.
I figured I would be told when I’d speak when the time was right, so I pitched in to help with the chairs, and had helped arrange chinet plates on the long tables. The ladies even trusted me enough to cover the chicken with foil and place it into warmers further in back of the kitchen. But I had come to ”minister the Word” and I was getting a bit anxious to know when I’d get to preach. I mean, no one had really even asked my name to that point.
Finally, I got up enough nerve to ask the powerfully built, jean-jacket clad black man who seemed to be in charge if they served the meal before or after the message so I would be ready. He looked at me quizzically, the way I’ve looked at my wayward children, with a look of bemused curiosity. His large brows raised and seemed to pull up the corners of his mouth into a huge grin. ”Oh, pastor Proffit, we thought we’d let you serve today by offering juice or coffee to the people as they come in.”
”Juice or C-coffee?”, I stammered.
”Well, actually, we serve that to them ourselves, what I meant was you’ll offer them juice or coffee and then give them a plastic cup if they want juice or styrofoam if they want coffee.”
He peered at me to make sure I understood, and when I hesitated a moment, he said, ”You can put your bible over on the table next to you. It will be fine. Just stand there next to the stack of cups, ok? When the people enter they will be coming right past you to get to their seats.”
I nodded, tucked my tail, and went to my station. Plastic or styrofoam, I never.
A little before noon, the buzzer from the street started sounding. They sent someone down to stand sentry and to keep the assembling crowd from pushing the button over and over until it was time to come up. By this time there were a couple of musicians tuning guitars at the front, and ”Mr. T” in a jean-jacket was praying, pacing back and forth behind the lectern.
Finally, he called us all to attention and led us in a prayer that God would use us all for His Glory, that he would speak to the people present for the service, and that people would see and experience a living demonstration of Jesus. We all said ”Amen” and took our places.
I was surprised by the throng of people that burst through the vestibule doors when they were finally allowed upstairs. I kept up pretty well asking each visitor their drink preference as the filed by my station on their way to take a seat.
It was an orderly, organized process with several people acting as ushers gently, but firmly guiding the comers into the first rows, filling from front to back as they went. Other teams carried pitchers of juice and coffee, serving and pouring as the people found their seats.
I heard languages of every sort around me and the English I heard was often heavily accented by a foreign flavor, not just the Yankee-fied English of New Yorkers. It was delightful to see such a turnout.
As the chairs were filling, I noticed a black couple come in near the end of the line. A tall and unhealthily thin man wearing dirty jeans and worn out Nikes and a woman almost as vivid as he was gray. His eyes were downcast, the lids drooping. When they got closer I could see that his hair was patchy and I noticed his skin was scaling around his temples.
”Aids”, I thought to myself, having seen its ravages before.
He was leaning heavily on his female companion. I could imagine the toll the climb up the stairs must have taken, but he obviously needed the meal. The woman had a bright floral scarf with coral accents tied around her head. I could see rivulets of geri-curled black waves flowing from underneath it. Her dangling gold earrings would have put Dionne Warwick to shame. They nearly touched the shoulders of her lime green summer dress. The combination of colors and jewelry reminded me of the characters you might see on the label of a bottle of rum.
When they got near enough, I asked, ”Juice or coffee?” as I had for all the others previously.
The woman answered for both, her boyfriend or husband or lover too out of it to acknowledge my question.
”Cawfee”, came the answer in the deepest voice I had heard that afternoon.
I glanced up in alarm, and then noticed the prominent Adam’s apple framed by the lime green V-neck of the cheap polyester dress. My stomach lurched and involuntarily flipped on itself. Gathering my composure, I gingerly pulled two styrofoam cups off the top of the stack and handed them over to ”her”. In my imagination, I was trying to extend my arm as far as I could reach, holding the cups by the very tips of my fingers to avoid any possibility of contact and contamination. She gave a curt, clinking, nod of appreciation and moved on as I let out what felt like was an audible sigh of relief that they had passed.
It was then that I heard God.
”Do you think I love them any less than I love you?”
I stood in stunned silence as the musicians started singing an old hymn. Then the tears started.
”There is fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins.
And sinners plunged beneath that flood,
lose all their guilty stains.”
”Lose all their guilty stains,
Lose all their guilty stains,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains.”
I had come to minister, to preach the Gospel, to bring Jesus to the lost, and hope to the desperate, but I had been deemed qualified for the job of handing out cups.
And it was there, beside the plastic and styrofoam that God, My Savior, reminded me that His Grace is Sufficient, and taught me afresh of His own confidence in His both His ability and willingness to Love a sinner out of sin by Grace and not by judging them out of it, by law. The way He was continuing to do for me.
Over the course of the past year, I have changed my mind about many things, political in nature, that are still surprising to me.
Before I explore any of those particular changes over the next couple of days, I am obliged to state that I do not believe that any political system can provide the cure to what really ails mankind. I believe there is, at root, an underlying spiritual problem producing all the bad fruit that renders the enactment of governments necessary.
One of my favorite Christian thinkers, St. Augustine, famously said, ”Love, and do as you please.”
One of my favorite secular thinkers, Henry David Thoreau said, ”Is a democracy, such as we know it, the last improvement possible in government? Is it not possible to take a step further towards recognizing and organizing the rights of man?”
I believe they are saying the same thing. There is no law against the law of Love, for none is necessary. A nation comprised of the practitioners of love would be a nation whose cup would overflow with both liberty and charity.
However, we do not live in such a nation. We fail at love ourselves, and are surrounded by other co-equal failures. We therefore appeal to a government for protection of some of our rights, while we relinquish others.
We comfort ourselves by assigning the submission of our liberties high sounding phrases like ”social contract’, and ”Constitutional Federal Republic”, and ”consent of the governed”, but as citizens, we have reserved no ”safe word” for those times that usurpation of individual liberties exceeds the boundaries of our consent.
Get ready Dorothy, this ain’t gonna look like Kansas anymore…
”You will know the Truth and the Truth will make you free.” ~ John 8:32
I’ve been thinking about this verse a lot. My life was turned around nearly 35 years ago when I bumped into the Truth. I found out that Truth is a Person. I had erroneously thought that truth was an accumulation of facts and knowledge, but it is so much more than that.
The NT was written in Greek. In this language, the word truth is the same as the word reality. I am fascinated by this. I try to think of truth and reality and the person Jesus as equivalents.
The verse above indicates that knowing truth can set one free.
But just what can it set you free from?
Only from a lie, right?
The interesting thing about being enslaved by a lie is this. If it is clever enough, subtle enough, and deeply imbedded enough, you won’t even know you’re enslaved by it. That was me. Think of Keanu Reeves character Neo in the Matrix before Lawrence’s Fishburne’s Morpheus gives him that red pill and he takes it.
The verse implies that a person desires to be freed from enslaving lies. It implies an implicit value of truth over lies. It implies that truth should be loved, and sought, and applied, specifically for its power to make one free.
I am not afraid of truth. Even the most uncomfortable ones. Like Neo, I’d rather eat gruel in reality, than eat steak in an illusory fantasy of my own creation.
I am not a believer in socially or culturally relative ethics. I believe that ethical standards are based on principles that are more absolute. There are behaviors that are wrong in all worlds and at all times. People smarter than I am disagree about this.
The ”golden rule” is a statement about ethical behavior that has widespread support across many religious traditions and cultures. Simply stated it enjoins a human to treat all other humans the way they want to be treated.
Most people who consider ethical behavior at all think of it in terms of the restraints it imposes on behavior. They see ethics in the same light as religious systems, intent on the negative aspects, focusing on what ethics or a religion tells them not to do, and what to avoid.
There are two related versions of this basic ethics that come from the Judeo-Christian tradition. – One says, ”Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”
– and the other, ”Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
These two are nearly identical. Interesting that the verbs in both versions are proactive and positive. Interesting that neither one tells us what not to do, but rather what to do.
Also of note is that neither says, ”Think kind thoughts about your neighbor…”.
Now ”doing” may involve thinking, but it doesn’t stop with thoughts alone, right? This has some implications a lot us haven’t fully considered.
What if we looked at the golden rule as a positive? What if each of us has the ability to knit the fabric of our social net more perfectly together? What if the simplicity of consistently, actively, doing good to your neighbor is the greatest possible thing you can do to change the world?
It occurred to me today that the first murder recorded in the Bible was the killing of Abel by his brother, Cain. I’ve read the story many times, but it never registered that this was the first mention of homicide. More interesting to me today, was the realization that this was a religiously motivated murder.
So, combining the concepts, there is a lot going on. There’s fratricide, religious murder, and the first homicide all rolled up into the same event.
People have many different views of the Bible. The inclusion of this story has many lessons for the reader, no matter what view may be taken.
One is this, all murder is fratricide. We’re all members of the same human family.
Another is that a person who tries to earn favor with God by works (as Cain did in bringing an offering consisting of the works of his own hands), will be outraged when those works don’t secure the righteousness they think it will.
That rage can be multiplied and converted to murder when coupled with jealousy towards one who is deemed to be righteous, not by working for it, but by believing for it, as Abel was.
It is curious to see the relationships between religious works, disappointment, jealousy, anger, and murder. It is sadly curious that the combination of these is stronger than blood.
This thread runs through the Bible (and human history) and culminates with the crucifixion of Jesus Christ by the religious rulers of his day. Let’s take heed and try to treat each other with decency and respect, we’re family after all.
