Return of the King

Reign of Christ  |  Matthew 25:31-46

     Return of the King

Christ Pantocrator - icon from St Catherine's Monastery, Sinai
Christ Pantocrator – icon from St Catherine’s Monastery, Sinai

Everyone is in a great throng, bigger than any rock concert, a slow moving herd of humanity, everyone there is, all in one place. When the sorting starts — the finger of God pointing left or right as each of us gets close enough for scrutiny — we don’t understand. This doesn’t match our expectations.

For one thing, everyone is still here. Wasn’t there supposed to be some kind of rapture? There were movies about it. Nicolas Cage was in the remake, wasn’t he? All of this judging business wasn’t supposed to happen yet, and not like this. All of the good folk were already supposed to be taken, not left behind, but here we all are, like sheep, or goats, depending on which way the finger of God points.

If this is a picture of how the second coming happens, somebody must have painted it wrong. It doesn’t match what the Left Behind folks tell us.

And one more thing.

All the attention is on the lives everyone led here on earth, before the angels and the throne of glory showed up. Jesus keeps talking about how everyone treated the hungry, the poor, the sick, and the oppressed — all from here in this life. How about the streets of gold and the lake of fire part? Can’t we hear more about that?

Call me crazy, but it sounds like Jesus is not really interested in streets of gold and lakes of fire. He keeps talking about how we live our lives. These lives. Right here. Now.

And in case anyone missed it, this isn’t the second coming of Christ. To hear Jesus tell it, this is something like the sixth or seventh return, or maybe the hundred billionth.

You don’t think so? Count them up. Jesus says that we found him hungry, and thirsty, and alone, and naked, and sick, and imprisoned, and we did nothing to help him. That’s six appearances right there, not counting that time when we crucified him. Doing nothing was an improvement when you think about it, but still.

Where Jesus is concerned, some of us don’t have a very good track record.

RoundSunriseJesus is saying that he already came back. He keeps on coming back. Every day. Every time we see a homeless person, he’s back. Every time we meet someone who needs food, or clothes, or a place to stay, there he is. When our coworker needs encouragement, there he is. He looks like a refugee woman from Syria, a family crossing a river out of Myanmar, a couple staring at the ruin of their home after a hurricane. We just fail to recognize him, because he doesn’t look the way we expect him to look — which makes us sort of like those first disciples after the resurrection. According to the Gospels, they had trouble recognizing Jesus as well. They spent years together, and he still didn’t look like they expected him to look, didn’t appear the way they wanted him to appear.

But those people he is talking about, they aren’t the real Jesus, are they? It’s sort of like settling for a Santa’s helper at the mall because the real Santa is too busy. That lonely old woman isn’t really Jesus. That’s just somebody we might help so that we can get on the Nice list instead of the Naughty one. Right?

Except that isn’t what Jesus said. He said what we do to the old lady, we’ve done to him. Really, truly. It’s not like Jesus voodoo dolls — do something nice for the old lady, or not, and you do something nice for Jesus, or not. He’s saying that on some level, the old lady is Jesus. Even if she doesn’t know it. Even if we can’t see it.

Maybe we’ve just learned not to see Jesus. We can walk right past him sitting on the sidewalk, because that’s not Jesus, that’s just someone who should get a job. We can overlook him in his disguise as a child without a coat, the kid whose cheeks are a little too thin. Jesus doesn’t look anything like that woman in a Syrian refugee camp, or like those people in tent hospitals. Jesus never had ebola, never had his house destroyed by a storm, never lost his family in an earthquake. He never looked like that, or smelled like that, or dressed like that, and he was never so foolish as to be born on the wrong side of a border. Jesus never looked anything like our neighbors, certainly not anything like our own family.

We would have done fine things for Jesus, if we could have found him, but we’re surrounded by a bunch of goats.

Oh, what does he look like? Jesus looks like a king, of course. You can’t miss him. And one day we’re going to walk on streets of gold and wear white robes and sing songs together. It’s not a metaphor, you say? What do you mean? Heaven is real, and you’ve got a ticket, eh? If people know what’s good for them, they’ll go get themselves a ticket as well? That’s what matters, after all. None of this here and now stuff. This is just a momentary thing. Isn’t that what it says somewhere? Come to think about it, if this life is so temporary, why is Jesus making such a fuss about it?

In the meantime, where did all of these poor folk come from? They look sort of familiar.

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Photos by Granny ™ (except the icon from St Catherine’s, of course)

 

The God Problem

The God Problem  |  Matthew 25:14-30

In the parable of the talents, we hear about three people who are entrusted with wealth. We know the story. It gave the English language the word ‘talent’ as we use it today—a gift or ability that one may use and improve upon, or not.

Two of the servants went off and doubled their money. When their master returned, he was very pleased with their use of what he had given them. The third servant, more conservative, or less bold, or perhaps afraid of his master, buried his money in a hole in the ground. It was safe when the master returned, but the man was not. For failing to use what the master had given him, the master took everything away and threw the man out.

Ok, we get the idea. Use your talents. We might not do it, in real life—we might be distracted, or busy, or afraid—but we really do get it. We understand that gifts are to be used. Not to use a talent is the same as wasting it, and hiding an asset away is no better than squandering it.CoinsfromJarVert

If we stop there, fine. We’re good with it. We’ve got a meaning we can apply to our lives. Fine. We can walk away.

There’s a problem, though. For all of us who walk away from this parable with a good grasp of the central point, at the back of our minds there’s a God problem. Sure, the guy who buries his one talent in a hole in the ground could have done better, but he doesn’t squander it, does he? He doesn’t go and spend it all. He keeps it safe, which isn’t nothing, right? And his reward? He loses everything. He is thrown out. With nothing. Not even with the one talent he had kept buried.

And there’s the God problem.

“Lord, I knew you, that you are a hard man, reaping where you did not sow and gathering where you did not scatter.” The master in the story does not deny any of it, and if the master in the story represents God, there’s our problem. Matthew seems to be painting a portrait of God as demanding, avaricious and cruel.

It’s not even the only time he does it. Try Matthew 22:1-14, the story of the king and the feast. (Here’s an earlier post on that story: Whims of God.) There Matthew gives us a king who’s vengeful and capricious, and once again the king represents God.

So what do we make of that? Did Matthew have God issues?

It is hard to reconcile Matthew’s images of a demanding, harsh master with the Johannine idea that God is love. (1 John 4:8,16)

Maybe we’re reading too much into it. Literally. The parable of the talents is just that, a parable, a story with a point. It is not an allegory, where each element represents something else, at least not completely.

We still see the figure of the master as telling us something about God. We just don’t like what it says. We especially don’t like it because we suspect that out of the three servants, we are most like the one stuffing his talent into a hole in the ground. We’d prefer a story where the master takes the moldy little coin, wipes it off, and praises the poor fellow for at least keeping it safe.

God does not meet our expectations. Matthew describes a God who acts in unexpected ways, outside our social norms, in ways that we find disturbing.

It’s unsettling.

That was the point. This entire portion of Matthew, starting with Jesus sitting in the Temple to teach, is about upsetting our understanding of God. It’s about undermining any complacency we may have about our notions of God.

If we made up the idea of God, if God were made in our image, then we could be happy with the concept. If God is just an idea that humans created, then we can change God, or even throw God out. Who needs to carry that kind of baggage?

FireCloudsIf we didn’t make God up, if God is really God, then we may need to throw out some different baggage. Maybe God does have expectations. Maybe God’s expectations don’t match our own. Maybe we don’t understand as much as we’d like, probably about anything.

So now what?

I think about my grandfather. Like many men of his generation, he had been disappointed by bank failures and limited opportunities. From time to time, he would wrap up some money, or put it in a Mason jar, and bury it for safekeeping. It was prudent. Given what he had seen in his lifetime, it was even wise. If he left the money buried long enough, though, there was the danger that he would forget where he put it. Instead of keeping it safe, he might have lost it for good.

We need to get out our shovels and start digging. How’s that for a Gospel message? If we start growing into the people we can be, we’ll have no cause to worry about God’s expectations of us. Never mind the sweet by and by. Get digging, and the kingdom of heaven is Diggingalready within us.

Maybe our jars don’t hold as much talent as some others.So what—better a small talent that is used than a great one left buried. Regardless of God’s expectations, we will become better people, and those around us will enjoy richer lives, if we go ahead and use the talents we have, great or small. It is true, and it makes our lives better, whether or not we believe in God—an ironic insight from the Gospel.

And Matthew’s story?

We have encountered an image of God that makes us uneasy, but complacency with God would be dangerous. A God that we made up would always meet our expectations, but that would not be a God worth a second thought. Matthew tells us that the God whom we did not make will not always meet our expectations. This is a God who acts in unanticipated ways, at unexpected moments, unbound by our religious rules.

Buried talents and made up gods are safe. An applied talent and a live God are not safe—either one may turn out in ways we do not anticipate, with results we have not dreamed. Start digging.

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Photos by Granny™

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God Doesn’t Talk to Me

God doesn’t talk to me. At least, not in ways that are distinguishable from the voices of conscience, or reason, or empathy, or indignation, or anger, or love.

So do I believe in God?

I think sometimes that I have lost my faith and that I would be happier, that my inner dialogue would be simpler, if I eschewed the supernatural in favor of the natural, if I dropped faith in God and embraced a life approach centered in reason and the scientific method.

SurfAnd then I find myself talking to God. Praying. Having one sided conversations. Short whispered statements. Expletives. The sorts of things that one is presumably not supposed to say to God. If there is a God. Still, so long as I keep talking, praying, whispering, muttering to God, I must suppose that I have faith, that I am conversing with someone other than me. Suddenly, faith appears much more like mental illness than I am comfortable contemplating, but there it is.

Faith. Science. Mental illness.

When I hear about evolution and biology and the meditations of astrophysicists (and listening to Stephen Hawking describe black holes is pretty close to a spiritual exercise,) I embrace all of it. It is wonderful. It is inspiring. It makes perfect sense. And it still falls short somehow.Running on Beach

Let me explain. Take the story of Noah and the ark, or the two creation stories that open the book of Genesis. Do I believe these stories literally? Of course not. These stories are myths, in the very best sense of the word: stories that are imbued with truth about our lives. A story need not be true to convey truth. The creation cycle of Genesis? Everything came to be, all at once and then over time, evolving more or less in the same order that scientific theories have conjectured, an interesting thing in itself. The expulsion from the Garden of Eden? That story captures the moment when humanity became human: self aware, understanding the consequence of choice, realizing the mantle of moral responsibility for the world around us, a responsibility we carry simply by weight of being in the world. We learned that we would work and we would have children, and sometimes both would be hard and painful, but we would do these things anyway because our work and our children are what we leave behind us when we are gone. Our work and our children mark our passage, our having been here. They make our lives worthwhile.

MalachiSo do I believe the Bible? Yes. Clearly not in the same way that many people choose to understand it, but yes.

When I look at the world and listen to the science that explains it, I still feel that there is something overlooked, something unexplained, something missing. Science can explain to me how my dog came to exist, with his size and features and inclination to co-exist with me. Science does not explain why I love him, or why he loves me. Yes, I say that I love him, and it remains a matter of observation and of faith or self-delusion that he loves me. Still, at the end of our science, there is something else that makes us what we are. Each of us. All of us. Everything that is.

There is a gap between our knowledge and our universe. Right now, I fill that gap with faith. It is the God-gap, the missing spark that changes biology into living, chemistry into love. One day, our science may grow to the point that there is no gap, no way to distinguish what once were matters of faith and matters of empirical truth. On that day, I suspect that we will find that faith and science will have come full circle so that there is no difference between the purview of the one and the findings of the other.

Meanwhile, I am still talking to God. And no, God still does not talk back. That may make me a fool, or delusional, or it may make me a person of faith. It may simply make me human. Whatever it makes me, I will take it, and I will still look for that spark that separates being alive from merely living.

Sparks

God by Lamplight

God by Lamplight  |  Matthew 25:1-13

Ten maids there were. Five of them were foolish, and five were wise.

As stories go, it is a wonderful beginning. We hear these lines and know that the story might go anywhere. It is as though this is a Jesus version of Once Upon a Time. As with all great fairy tales, we do not think this is a true story, but we do believe that the story is made of truth. Anything might happen, anything at all, but we know that nothing good will come to the five foolish girls.

Most Christians hear this story, or the others like it, and think that it is about something called the Second Coming, the return of Jesus, the moment that evangelical Christians point to as the future and hope of humankind. They are probably right.

What if that isn’t the point, though? What if this story is about something different?

Let’s put it another way. How about the Trinity? Given much thought to the Triune expression of God as Father and Son and Spirit? Ever tried to explain it to a third grader? Ever tried to explain iThreeDuckst to a grownup?

What am I talking about?

Suppose we work with the basic notion of God the Father, the pre-existent Other-That-Is-God, before and after and beyond us—the aspect or expression of God that is untouchable, unknowable, unapproachable. And suppose that we consider God the Spirit, the expression of God who is or can be everywhere, at any time, within and behind and around and through everything everywhere, all the time. And, of course, there is God the Son, who as the incarnate Christ was fully God and fully human.

All three aspects are God. All the time. Everywhere. So what makes us think—in the Kingdom of the Triune God—that we are only waiting and watching for Jesus? How about the Father? How about the Spirit?

Might not God the Father break into our lives? Certainly Moses would argue that it might happen. Might not God the Spirit blow across our lives? Certainly Elijah would say so.

Jesus promised his followers that he would return, that is plain. The manner and timing and form of his return was left less clear.

When the five wise maids take their lamps and flasks of oil to go and wait for the bridegroom to arrive, they don’t know how long they might have to wait. (Even these wise ones fall asleep—a word of hope for us.) Why were they wise? They were prepared to see.

We seem to insist that God appear to us in the form we expect. In that, we act as though we have never read the scriptures. In all of those stories, when did God ever do anything the way anyone expected? Why do we think that this surprising God will appear in our lives in the form and in the way that we are expecting?

WatchingIf we open our eyes to see, we might be amazed at how often God appears, and in what forms. Today, God may have shown up as a child wanting a smile. Yesterday, we might have lost our temper with God when we thought we were only speaking to a waitress, as if anyone were ever only anything. Tomorrow, the Spirit might burst into our lives by way of a job, an illness, a flood, a gift, a stranger or a friend, and we will not see because God has not met our paltry and limited expectations of how, when and where God is supposed to appear, or how often, or to whom.

Once upon a time there were God the Father, God the Spirit, and God the Son. And with that beginning, anything might happen. Anything at all. Anywhere. Anytime. To any of us. Whether we are prepared to see or not.

Beasts of Burdens

Beasts of Burdens  |  Matthew 23:1-12

When Jesus finished the tirade that fills this chapter of Matthew, you can almost imagine him walking out of the temple to the sound of the Rolling Stones’ “Beast of Burden”.

Ok, almost.Lioness

It takes little imagination to understand that this is a tirade, though. The entire chapter is one long unrelenting indictment. Jesus declares no less than seven ‘woes’ upon the religious leaders for the burdens that their expectations lay upon the faithful.

If you have been around churches (or, I expect, synagogues, or temples of almost any established faith) for any length of time, then you know what Jesus was talking about. You will also have come to expect the usual twist in the exploration of such a passage—that we are invited to apply Jesus’ words to our own hearts, to our own expectations of those around us, and to the unwanted, unfair and unbearable burdens that our expectations place upon them.

Only slightly less anticipated is the interpretation that we should examine our own expectations of ourselves. We not only try to carry the unnecessary burdens of meeting the expectations of other people, but we also stumble under the weight of our own self-criticism, collapse under the burden of our self-expectations, and go wobbly-legged from the unmerited idea that we have no intrinsic worth, value, or strength.

There is one over-arching trajectory to be found in Jewish and Christian scripture, and that is the movement of God toward humanity. From the Old Testament images of God as smoke and fire, untouchable, unfaceable, and unknowable, to the Christian revelation of the physical incarnation of God in the person of Jesus the Christ, Messiah, the only unwavering message is one of God loving, valuing, treasuring, restoring, and redeeming all of humanity, each one of the teeming crowd of humanity, and all that we have touched and that has touched us.

Horses on the hill

So let’s consider Jesus’ tirade from the point of view that it could apply to our cruel criticisms of other people, our unrealistic expectations of the people around us. There’s a lot to learn from that exercise. And let’s consider Jesus’ tirade from the point of view that it could apply to our own inner dialogue, the cruel criticisms and unrealistic expectations that we lay on our ourselves. There is a lot to unpack right there, and all of it is useful.

While we’re at it, let’s also consider the possibility—the slight, often overlooked possibility—that Jesus was yelling at precisely the people he meant to yell at. Maybe, just maybe, we ought to allow the Messiah, God incarnate, that much credit. God yelled at whom God wished to yell: the leaders, the teachers, the people with credentials. People like me who presumed to say something about faith. The people who claimed to know something about God. The people in charge.

Jesus is saying we should question authority. What? Did you think they thought that stuff up in the 1960s? There is nothing new under the sun. (Wait, did someone already say that?)

We get to question the people who claim to teach us and those people who presume to preach to us. In particular, we need to question the teachings of anyone who doesn’t like our questions. The ones who are worth listening to are the ones who will welcome your questions, even your differing views.

Matthew portrays Jesus, just prior to embarking on this scathing criticism of the religious leaders gathered around him, sharing the greatest commandment. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” That is not blind faith. It is open minded exploration. It is bare souled honesty. It is walking toward God with eyes wide open. It is tossing out all of the things we thought we knew about God in order to know God. It is realizing that our preconceived notions of God are rubbish. It is realizing that if God is real, if anything we understand about God is at all true, then this is a God who already knows more bad things about each and all of us than we ourselves realize or can admit, and yet who keeps loving us.

Relentless. That is what God’s love is. Relentless. Interminable. Unceasing. Tireless. Endless. Ruthless. And therefore it is also unfathomable. Incomprehensible.

Question anybody who leaves you wondering what you might do to get God to love you. There isn’t anything you can do. It is not about what we do. It’s about Who God Is.

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