Monthly Archives: June 2009

Flat bread. Grape squeezings.

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A few hours after I write this, a handful of people, older than high school (but less than a decade so) are going to sit in a circle and look at flat bread and grape squeezings.

They will have spent  time before that looking at their souls, allowing the God whose job description includes “reminding you what I [Jesus] taught” to point out places where “what He taught” and “what I did” don’t line up. They will have spent  time writing thank you notes to God.  For some in the middle of finishing high school graduation cards, that will be a challenging process. They will have spent time asking God to help their families. For many in this age bracket, that will be challenging as they learn what it means to be on their own.

Then we will sit in a circle and I will remind them of who they say they believe Jesus is. Or more accurately, what they believe Him capable of.

They would say, if asked, that Jesus knows everything. That even when he was walking around with three and a dozen and a hundred and thousands of people, that He knew what people were thinking, what was going to happen. In fact, he predicted it quite well. “You will deny me three times, Peter.”

Knowing what they would do in a couple hours, he sat at a table and gave them flat bread and grape squeezings and told them that this was His body and that it was going to be crushed like this bread and spilled like this wine. He told them that it was for them.

At the time, I think, they didn’t understand.

Later, they did.

They understood that His love didn’t depend on their loyalty.

Take and eat. And be at peace.

listening in the evening.

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I write this on a comfortable evening, sitting on the deck. The wind is blowing the trees. The birds are chipping in their evening voices. I can’t tell whether they are trying to get the kids to settle down or making plans for tomorrow. The robin is on the wire, resting a moment before heading to the ground to find another mouthful for the almost grown children.

I can almost, tonight, picture Jesus calling the crowd to him and starting to tell a story.

He’d start to talk about birds being watched by their heavenly Father. Or He’d look up at the birds carrying food to their children and talk about how they don’t have to plant or plow. Or he’d notice how everything got very quiet just as the hawk flew through the yard. Maybe he’d say something about being vigilant.

The people would follow his gaze up to the birds, or across to the tree where the hawk had gone. As they looked, his words began to work on them.

The stories are succinct. They allow for, they demand, they invite, reflection. You can understand that for some people, they were nice stories about birds or merchants or planters. For some people, they were confusing metaphors. For some people, the ones who stopped and listened and decided that maybe his words were worth considering, the stories of Jesus were life-challenging, life-changing.

Looking at birds tonight, to live as if I were a bird, actually depending on God to put food where I can find it if I look, seems hard. I have to accept that it is not my looking that provides it. It’s not my searching that makes it grow. I have to seek. And I will find.

Like starting to write a story. And finding birds.

the upper left corner

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I am not a formally-trained theologian. I am a formally-trained rhetorical scholar. I look at arguments or explanations or descriptions in the Bible more as conversations than as systematic theological statements.  I want to see the people behind the words, to consider why a person would come to say that.

Yesterday, you read my attempt to think and pray through Colossians 1:15-20. It was hard, because I was thinking it had to be theology.

After I wrote that, a group of guys talked about the original text. On a whiteboard, we listed every title or description or role that Paul uses to describe Jesus. Then we started discussing. It was the kind of conversation that, for awhile, I sat back and listened.

While listening, I was looking at the upper left corner of the board, where I wrote that Christ was “the image of the invisible God.”

I started grinning.

I realized that by trying to think about this text as a theological statement, I had missed the obvious. Paul wasn’t starting with theology. He was starting with autobiography.

Decades before he wrote this letter to a group of followers of Jesus, Paul had been on his way to kill people like them. He was stopped by a bright light and by a voice talking to him.

When Paul talked about what had happened, he quoted Jesus saying, “I have appeared to you to appoint you as a servant and as a witness of what you have seen of me and of what I will show you.”

In obedience, Paul starts this statement of who Jesus is with what sounds complex and laden with philosophy. And it may be. But the upper left corner of who God is, is a simple statement of what he saw: the image of the invisible.

God has a face

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Sometimes when a text is complicated, I have to rewrite it, just for me. That happened when I was looking at Colossians 1:15-20. So I rewrote it. I’m letting you see it, too.

———-

God has a face.

Jesus.

—–

The way the oldest gets everything?

That’s Jesus to creation.

Why? Because he was born first?

Because, as part of God, he made everything.

And I mean everything-what you see and what you can’t see, what’s physical and what’s spiritual. Bodies and ghosts.

He made all of it

And it is all about him (not like our unwarranted selfishness but more like living out a story, a true drama.)

———-

Before everything?

Jesus.

———-

The water (for fish), the air (for us), the milieu (for philosophy types), the suspension (for chemists), the plot (for writers), the context (for understanders), the glue, the one in whom everything is held together?

Jesus.

When we talk about the church as a body, all connected together, he is the head. We all complete each other.

He is the creative initiator of the church (It’s all his idea) and he’s the first one to rise from the dead, which is what the church is all about. (not church, not churches, but The Church).

And why is he the head and the beginning and the firstborn?

The top and the start and the waypaver?

So that it is clear that in every possible way, he is in charge of everything about The Church that is capital letters, that is the way it should be.

Why?

Because God satisfied his desire in two ways.

First, everything that God is, is in Jesus. Permanently. Completely. Living in him.

Second, Jesus brings everything back to God, permanently. Completely.

This happens because the permanently, completely full of God one, made peace using his own blood.

lip service

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It’s a constant challenge. And I think that’s good.

What is?

Checking what we say against our hearts.

It means, of course, that we have to take the blob our words form as they trail out of our mouths and scoop them up and put them on the table. A large table. With a clear, bright light above it. And room to spread them out and look for patterns.

And then, when patterns emerge like the whorls of fingerprints or the spatter of gunshot residue, searching the database of our hearts for a match.

If the verbal fingerprints are a cheery pink, with smooth edges, but the heart prints are fiery and broken, what is on the inside clearly doesn’t match.

The words are a cover for what is really happening inside.

That’s what Jesus was saying about the Pharisees who were questioning him about washing his hands. He dissected their case against him by point out the fractures in their own case, the inconsistencies between their hearts and lips.

And then he brought out an authority they held in honor.

Isaiah, he said, mentioned them.

Of course, they thought, in the latter chapters, the healing chapters, the honoring chapters. But no, he said, right there in chapter 29.

‘These people honor me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me.
They worship me in vain;
their teachings are but rules taught by men.

Let’s go back to the table for a bit, back to our process of evaluation.

If we are willing to stop adding words and look at what’s there, we may find the mismatch mentioned earlier. However,  we may find that the more our hearts resemble Jesus’s, the more our words will match our hearts and his.

When people are serious about following, there is progress.