Friday, July 31, 2009

Do We Believe in Miracles?

John 6:1 – 14
July 26, 2009

Last week we talked about our connection, or lack of connection, to God in this frenzied world. We looked at one thing we can do that might facilitate that connection – which is to keep the Sabbath. Good suggestion for busy folks.

This morning I want to look at another way we might better connect with God. However it’s a bit less conventional in mainline protestant circles than Sabbath keeping. In fact it surprises me a little bit that this is where my study, and hopefully the Holy Spirit, led me this week. I have been wondering if we all might benefit from believing in miracles – specifically the miracles of Jesus.

Hopefully you know me well enough to know that I don’t mean we should ignore science, historical study and the rational world. I could no more ignore such things as I could ignore you sitting in front of me right now. But I want to explore whether there is a way we might “believe” in miracles without leaving the real world of science and rational thought.

Similarly to how the call to Sabbath comes to us in the midst of our busy world, the idea of believing in miracles comes to us in our post-enlightened, rational, trust-only-in-science world. And it is as counter-cultural as the idea of Sabbath keeping in our fast paced society.
In general, the miracles in the bible have lost their power to speak to us and really affect us in similar ways to how they affected, for example, those present at the feeding of the 5,000. We can be, and often are, instructed by these miracles – meaning we look at what we might learn for our own context that will offer suggestions of what we should do. And is not necessary to believe that a literal miracle happened in order for us to find this instruction. But I know that while I can glean some instruction from the feeding of the 5,000, I am not profoundly and permanently changed by this miracle because, to put it bluntly, I don’t believe in it.

There are two reasons, at least, for our disbelief in, and emotional disconnection from, the miracles in the bible. First, we are well on the other side of the Enlightenment. It is a given. In the 18th century there was a massive shift in thinking that challenged how people – including Christians – thought the world worked. For one thing, we found scientific explanations for things that had previously been considered miracles. And the theologians and pastors and scholars of the day who were brave enough to integrate what others were learning with the Christian faith came to trust science over the possibility of miracles. They no longer believed any miracles could happen – including the ones in the bible. And we sit here today as heirs of that shift. Which – by the way – is good, because I suspect had no one integrated the Enlightenment with Christianity, none of us would be here today.

Second, when we post-Enlightenment folk buy into the debunking of miracles in the bible, it is based on an assumption: We assume “miracle” means something that happens outside of the rational world and then we dismiss it because it is outside of the rational world. It is a kind of circular logic. In short, we equate the word miracle with magic. When we read stories like this one where Jesus and the disciples fed the 5,000 people, it comes off as a magic trick...like he snapped his fingers or waved his hand and all of a sudden mounds of food appeared that weren’t there before. Of course that can’t happen – at least not without a scientific explanation. So we don’t believe in what happened that day.

These two things have served to minimize the stories in the bible that include miracles, reducing them to metaphor, or just stories made up by the author to make some theological point. At worst, we belittle the authors for being so naïve as to believe in this “stuff”, making them and the story look silly and irrelevant.

I don’t know how the disciples or early Christians understood or made sense of these events. We can’t know. But what matters in terms of our ability to recover the power of the miracle is the effect the event had on those present. It doesn’t matter whether or not we believe in how Jesus made miracle happen. Rather we need to trust the authenticity of what people experienced at the time, both those present and those who relayed the story for others to hear. It is the effect that is miraculous.

The people of antiquity were not silly to believe in such a miracle; they were eloquent in sharing the effect of that miracle with others, so that we could connect with the power of Jesus to heal and feed and do exactly as he set out to do from the very beginning.

There was a lot of coverage this week of the celebration of the anniversary of the moon landing. I missed it in real life so enjoyed being brought back to that time through the wonders of media. As I listened, I came to appreciate the effect this moment in history had on people.

And I would argue that many rational people believed it was a miracle. I’m sure there was language floating about like, “the miracle of modern technology”. In the wake of Walter Cronkite’s death, they were replaying some of his most momentous broadcasts. One, of course, was the moon landing and first step by Neal Armstrong. When Cronkite was interviewed later about it, he described that moment as a two-fold miracle: The miracle of figuring out how to get to the moon and spend time outside the spacecraft; and the miracle of being able to watch it all live on TV. These were things many would not have thought possible when John Kennedy announced in 1962 that we would put a man on the moon within 10 years.

We learn that miracle can have meaning for our enlightened world because we can see that a miracle can in part be the science that allowed for something like the televised moon landing. It was science that emerged that earlier had not seemed possible. And it matters that miracles have meaning for us. Miracles evoke in people a sense of awe about what is possible. They connect people to their better selves, and connect communities to visions of a brighter future. Miracles are powerful. They change people by their sheer happening.

But it seems like the effect of miracles is destine to wane, even disappear. I wasn’t there when Neal Armstrong uttered those famous words. It just doesn’t affect me the same way. The technology no longer seems miraculous, it just seems like a given. And it seems that even for those alive at that moment, the feeling has diminished.

There was an article this week about the space program that quickly became an analogy for me of the contemporary Christian reality. The article was written by Tom Wolfe and appeared in the New York Times. He was writing about why the space program lost its emotional power with people and thus lost momentum. Wolfe argues that we have lost our connection to that moment in history and with that we lost the belief in other miraculous possibilities in the realm of space exploration.

I don’t know if Wolfe is right or not, but I would argue that Christians may have lost our connection to the events in the bible which has a similar effect…at times we lack motivation to continue the program. We lack belief in other miraculous possibilities.

Wolfe goes on to identify the reason the connection was lost. He says the space program lacked the necessary Word, with a capital “w” – the “word” being the spoken philosophy that would carry forward the power of the event through generations. NASA, he said, had neglected to build a core of philosophers who were affected in the moment and could keep reminding people that what happened in the past could inform the next thing that currently seems out of reach. Instead, the message that took hold after the landing was about the realities of the costs. Or the message became, “we won!”, instead of “what’s next?” The wonder, the awe, the sense of miracle lost out to practical and political considerations.

We Christians also need that core of philosophers – those who believe in the power of the miracles of Jesus and can ask, “what’s next?” Of course, all Christians are meant to be these philosophers for our faith – evangelists, to use another word. We must carry the Word, with a capital “W”, in our time, enlivening people with possibilities of healing and feeding and freeing people, even if these possibilities seem out of reach. We must carry to the world the possibility of miracles. But for most of us this is difficult if not impossible because, in our disbelief, we have reduced the miracles in the bible to quaint stories.

We affirm over and over again in the Christian faith that there is a living Word. The gospel of John is entirely based on this truth. He is the one who begins his gospel not with Jesus’ birth, but like this: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” Jesus for him is the living word. And the resurrection and sending of the Holy Spirit is the guarantee that the Word lives eternally – the Word lives today.

Out of our need to be practical and rational and scientific, might we be poor messengers of this living word? Can we re-connect with the wonder of the miracles we have in the bible? We don’t have the benefit of a live TV stream or tweets from the apostles. But is there a living word, begun in the work of Jesus and carried by the faithful to our time and place that can affect us deeply and emotionally in our post-Enlightenment world?

Remember, this is not the same thing as believing God regularly intervenes to make things happen that are not possible by scientific standards. Rather a miracle can be the revelation of possibilities already present in our midst that we did not know were there before. The miracles may exist in technology not yet invented. They may exist in the hearts and minds of the most unexpected people. We can fully accept the enlightenment and still believe that miracles are possible: that 5,000 people today could be fed by one boy with what look like inadequate resources. I can’t help but think about kids against hunger – started by kids, now feeding millions.

We have the Word. And we have the holy spirit – the living word connecting us to those miracles of Jesus – with the potential to change us through the power of what happened to the people that day. We just don’t always listen. And we don’t always believe. Things get in the way: busyness, cynicism, despair. In addition practicality and the primacy we give to efficacy drain the power of unknown possibilities.

I don’t know where I stand on what the space program should be doing. What I do know is that the question of what Christianity should be doing is far more important. And it’s a program that must continue and continue to be as miraculous as the day Jesus fed those 5,000 hungry and sick people on the hillside. The sick and hungry need us now as much as they needed Jesus then.

Our faith and its miraculous purpose shouldn’t be compromised for seemingly practical reasons. Just because people say it’s unrealistic to believe that war will ever end doesn’t mean Christians can afford to stop believing in that possibility – miracle though it might seem. Just because people think it’s naïve to believe we can have an economy that places people, not capital, at the center doesn’t mean Christians can stop working to make it so. Just because starvation seems inevitable in many parts of our world doesn’t mean we should stop dreaming up ways we can feed everyone with the abundance of food God has already provided us in creation. And just because the systems in this world seem forever entrenched doesn’t mean we should stop trying to build the kingdom of God here and now. We, like the boy, inadequate though we feel, when we are filled with the power of the living word we can confidently do our small part, believing and trusting that when joined with the gifts of everyone else, a miracle will happen.

If we can accept the miraculous nature of the feeding of the 5,000 for those who were there, then we can be the powerful word carried forward proclaiming the possibility of miracles today. So what do you say? Can we believe in miracles? Amen.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Our Restless World

2 Samuel ; Mark
July 19, 2009

My friends and I have a joke: We say that as pastors, part of our hope for people is that they find balance in their lives. We wish this for everyone – well, except our real estate agent and doctor. We want them to be on call 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. Of course, it really isn’t a joke. It is exactly that kind of sentiment that puts pressure on all of us to feel ultra responsible; it creates a culture of expectation none of us can live up to. But, as we all know, we sure do try.

We are, in general, a rest-less people. And we rest less and less every day. To give just one example, I read this week that real wages have remained stagnant for 20 years while corporate profits have exploded and the concentration of wealth has increased. This is what creates the rat race we talk about. We feel like we need to work harder and longer just to stay in the same place. And this way of life is so imbedded in our society, it seems normal for us. We can’t really imagine it any other way.

Today, the words of Jesus come and speak to us in the midst of that culture of expectation: “Come and rest yourselves,” he says. And I have to admit, he probably even means to include my real estate agent and doctor.

In these simple words Jesus speaks to the disciples, he touches on something that hits a nerve for most of us. Our lives are permeated with the belief that the busier we are, the more we are worth. And that’s the nerve Jesus touches. Jesus’ words to the disciples cut to the quick of our lives and our identities. He challenges the pace of our lives, and our belief that the world needs us so much we can’t slow down even for a moment. At first, his words feel cozy – come and rest for a while. But in truth, this is a harsh wake up call to our rest-less world today.

There are two kinds of rest Jesus offers in this passage that apply to two different groups of people. The first is the lack of rest he sees in the people who are crowding him and the disciples wherever they go. These are people who are in need of healing. They are frantically following the disciples and Jesus at the mere possibility that the ailment that has besieged them for so long might be healed. They are desperate, and so they are chasing after Jesus, as if he is an aberration that will disappear at any moment. We have probably all been there in some way at some time, whether with physical ailments or non-physical ones. In the end, for those experiencing this day in, day out, life draining lack of rest, Jesus has great compassion and provides them rest through healing.

The disciples, on the other had, are suffering from a different kind of restlessness. And we all can certainly relate to this as well. Jesus knows that this massive demand for healing by the crowds could easily tempt the disciples into a lifetime devoid of rest. This restlessness is what so many of us deal with and face every day. And Jesus’ response to the disciples is different than how he responds to the crowds. He simply tells them, “go rest”. And in contrast to what must have been such welcome rest to those in need of healing, I truly believe the disciples did not find this idea of rest an easy one to accept.

Here’s the scene: Prior to this encounter with Jesus, the disciples are out doing exactly as Jesus told them to: They are ministering to the lost, the wounded, the sick, the poor. And they have been successful. Mark tells us at the beginning of this same chapter that they “cast out many demons and anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.” That must have been so cool. They meet this guy Jesus, and all of a sudden then can do things they never thought were possible. They can help people in ways that really do make a difference.

And now they are back with Jesus, and the gospel tells us, “they gathered around Jesus and told him all that they had done and taught.” I am sure this “telling” looked nothing like orderly reports we give at meetings. I think it went something like this…One disciples says, “There was this man who was sick and I was able to heal him, and then…” Another disciple breaks in and says, “yeah, and when I talked about the good news you shared with us, people listened and were…” and yet another, “but listen to me, listen to what I did; I worked with a neighborhood to put together their resources and help out this guy who just couldn’t work.” 12 men bursting with excitement, wanting to share it with Jesus. I think it was a pretty restless scene.

They were intoxicated by their success and frantically anxious to do more: because surely more of a good thing is even better. Think of how many people they could cure if they worked 12 hours a day and only slept a few hours at night. The less they worked, the disciples probably thought, the less people they could help. And look at the crowds – they just keep getting bigger. The more they heal the more word gets around and so the number of people coming to them grows – which just increases the need to heal even more, even faster. And Jesus breaks into this frantic mood of the disciples and says, “rest”. I suspect the disciples said exactly what we would say; “That doesn’t make any sense.”

We can all relate to the need to keep on working at the fast pace, producing more, learning more, doing more. Because no matter what it is that we are doing, the more we do it, the greater the results. We are so used to this, it has just become how we live our lives – how we do our jobs, how we parent, how we vacation, and of course even how we minister to this world. More is good. More is better. More is best. More of a good thing can only be a good thing.

The disciples have been working – hard. And they were doing really good, important work. And of course in telling them to rest, Jesus is not telling them to stop and take a week’s vacation in the Caribbean while people all around them suffer. He wants them to stop and worship, pray, support each other, listen to Jesus to find out what’s next.

Obviously we are called to work as disciples as well. We go out from this place each week called to heal people in body, mind and spirit. We go out to serve the poor and break down barriers and resist the consumer culture, and on and on. It does require hard work. That just part of what it means to be people of faith. Yet we are called to rest, even from this good work – just as the disciples were.

Jesus knows that the rhythm of our lives must include this time regularly to disconnect from the pace of the world and reconnect to God. This is why Jesus has the disciples take so many boat rides in the Gospel of Mark. And when you look at the pattern of trips they take across the sea, it makes no sense in terms of efficient travel. In this passage we see why. The disciples just need to rest sometimes and the boat ride gives them this chance.

And this is one way that we follow Jesus’ command to rest – this right here, right now. Our call to worship every week is a call to shift our attention from those things that keep us busy and tired and focused and distracted. “Come away with me to a quiet place,” we heard in our call to worship this morning. The words of Jesus echoing through the centuries call us to stop, take a breath, reconnect with him, rest – what we religious folks call Sabbath.

Our God did not suggest that we rest. It is one of the ten commandments. And it’s not just God giving us permission to take a break from time to time. Rather we are to take the commandment to keep the Sabbath as seriously as the commandment to not kill.

Which leaves us with a fairly important question: What is this rest? What is Sabbath? I don’t think that is an obvious thing in our society. Our rhythm is work-work-work, and then collapse from exhaustion, completely checking out from the world around us. Then we call that collapse “Sabbath”. Watching TV, going on vacation, collapsing in to bed, falling asleep before your head hits the pillow. It all feels like rest, so why is it different from what Jesus tells his disciples to do? Because Sabbath, while removing us from the world, does not mean we are to “check out” from everything.

We are fortunate to have sages in our midst that remind us of what this Sabbath might be. Henri Nouwen was a priest and author who wrote a lot of books on the spiritual life. He also kept a journal on and off over his life, and one time in his journal he was lamenting how bad we are in the United States at “resting”. He writes: “Oh how important is community, prayer, silence, caring presence, simple living, adoration, and deep, lasting faithful friendship.” That is his understanding of Sabbath. Connecting with those spiritual disciplines that get lost in this busy world. This Sabbath is active – it’s just not busy. It is just not imprisoned to the idols of our world. It’s about freedom from the idols of the world and deep human connection. It’s about prayer and connection with the Divine.

Quite the opposite of collapsing, this Sabbath requires us to work in a different way. This work, to be frank, is much more difficult for most of us than our daily…weekly..work in the frantic world. Prayer, silence, simple living; many of us don’t even know where to start to be able to rest in these ways.

The story from 2 Samuel this morning seems an unlikely partner with this passage from Mark. It is about whether or not, now that David rules over a united Israelite kingdom, to build the temple – which was to be the permanent home of God. David says yes. And David’s trusted prophet thinks his plan is great. But as we read on, we know it is not God’s plan.

Here’s the important part – here’s where our stories connect; David changed his mind because he heard God’s word telling him he was off course. And listening for God requires some time away from the demands and voices that fill our every day lives. After the frantic life that the Israelites lived ever since leaving Egypt – a life of wandering and battles and famines and death – God tells David to take a breath before forging ahead with the next thing. “When the king was settled in his house,” our passage begins, “Yahweh had given him rest from all his enemies…” God gave him rest.

It’s only because of that breath that David takes that he was able to hear God and abandon his own plan in favor of God’s. This story shows us the cost of not accepting the rest God allows for and even commands. We are a rest-less world and the cost is our connection to God and creation. Is there any greater cost?

Most of us, I would venture to say, are not great Sabbath keepers. With the exception of coming to worship every week, a full day of “Sabbath” is not a part of our weekly cycle. And if we’re honest we realize that because of the realities of church, there are some each week who are even busy during worship…making coffee, readying the kitchen for third Sunday potluck, making sure everything goes smoothly with the sound and the lights and the music. Sabbath is just plain hard. It doesn’t mesh with the daily realities of our lives.

But here’s the thing: Without the rhythm of Sabbath we can’t help but lose our ability to listen for God. We can’t help but believe that whatever standard of living we have reached, we have to do more just to maintain it. We can’t help but build our identity and measure our worth in terms of how busy we are. We can’t help but stay imprisoned by the needs for money, power, prestige, worth – because we never really rest from those things in order to realize there is another way. And without Sabbath in our lives, I truly believe we can’t help but grow to believe that the world depends on us so much that resting would be letting others down. Not to mention that when we move from one thing to the next, running frantically in place in the hopes that we are moving forward, we stress our bodies, our spirits, our environment and the world. We leave absolutely no space for connecting with God, even when we are doing what we believe God wants.

I want to end with one other sage: Rabbi Abraham Heschel. In writing about the Sabbath, he says, “To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, [a day free] of external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow human beings and the forces of nature – is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for humanity than the Sabbath?” Amen.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

Everything Will Come Our Way

Ephesians 1:3-14 ; Mark 6:14-29
July 12, 2009


I had lunch with a friend this week at the Thai restaurant. Now, I don’t for a minute believe the fortunes you get inside the cookie at the end of the meal mean anything. But, and I know I’m not alone in this, I still look and wonder what it would be like if they did mean something.

Of course, I always assume it will be a good fortune. The eating establishments want your experience to be positive, so they aren’t going to load the cookies with fortunes about how we will encounter great suffering in the week to come. It’s just not good business sense.

So it was with my fortune this week. I opened it up and it said, “Everything will come your way.” Now, of course I don’t believe in fortunes at all, but still, I thought “wouldn’t it be nice if everything I want would come my way?”

That day – my fortune cookie day – was not a good one. It was the day I got back from vacation, and the very first thing I did when I got into work was to start reading my emails. Within 5 minutes, through some technical glitch, or act of the devil – I’m not sure which – I lost my emails of the past 2 years. It was horrifying.

And of course, this little “glitch” meant that I did not exactly get to spend the day as I had planned. I was going to catch up on a number of tasks and check in with a lot of people. Instead, I spent the day doing things that more resembled the work of my previous profession than that of a pastor. To top it all off, my success was minimal, to put it generously. (Perhaps indicating I made a good choice when I switched professions 12 years ago). In the end, I am still missing about 18 months worth of emails.

And there it sat, next to my computer all afternoon taunting me: my fortune. When was the good stuff promised in my cookie going to come my way? Then, one time I looked down at the smug fortune and I noticed something. A word was missing. A word I had supplied but was never actually in the fortune. The word “good.” It did not say, “everything ‘good’ will come your way”, it just said – “everything will come your way.” All of a sudden I thought maybe the fortune was coming true – a huge truckload of everything was being dumped all over my desk. And that truck – like all trucks that dump things in our lives – was truly filled with everything: the good, the bad, the ugly and the sublime. It just so happened that the rotten, smelly garbage is what landed on top of the pile that day.

The letter to the Ephesians opens with such grandiose declarations that it sounds like a fortune cookie. “Praise be to God who bestows on us in Christ every spiritual blessing in the heavens!” Cool. Not a bad fortune. Believe in Jesus and every spiritual blessing will come our way. The letter goes on to say we will be redeemed, our sins will be forgiven, we will be brought together in unity, and we get a wonderful inheritance.

Of course, such a reading taunts all of us who call ourselves Christians because life is anything but a steady flow of wonderful spiritual blessings. But, maybe we’re reading this too much like we read a fortune cookie at a restaurant. Maybe we are seeing things that aren’t there and assuming things that aren’t assumed. Even though “blessing” sounds pretty and nice, I’m not sure the spiritual blessings that are so freely bestowed on us by God are always what we wish they would be. These so called “blessings” look a little less pretty when we read them in light of the story from the Gospel of Mark.

And what a lovely story this is. It’s always nice to start off a Sunday morning with a little beheading. Here is a story about someone who is surely one of God’s chosen – John the Baptist. He spoke truth to power, never veered off course from his ministry or calling. He praised God and preached the good news. And what were his spiritual blessings? Well, he did get to pour sweet honey on his locusts in the desert, I guess. But in the end, it was his head on that platter. What kind of blessing is that?

What the author of the Letter to the Ephesians seems to be describing is something much more fierce than winning the spiritual blessing lottery. The author tells us that when we choose this path of following Jesus, God adopts us. And this is not a “come on in and have some pie at the kitchen counter” adoption. This is the fierce adoption of a child by a mother. Lydia had no choice in becoming my daughter. I chose her and now she is shaped and formed by me as her parent. Who knows, she may like meat. But I have bestowed on her the spiritual blessing of vegetarianism. .

Likewise, God adopts us, and so we become subject to God’s power, God’s visions and God’s hopes. We are brought into a realm where spiritual forces work on us, changing us, shaping us. We’re told in Ephesians that when we are adopted, we’re “marked with the Holy Spirit.” There is something about this idea of being “marked” that sounds more like being a member of the mafia than of a religious tradition. “Marked” with the Holy Spirit? Do I really want that? Once we’re chosen – once we are adopted – we are showered with whatever “blessings” God sees fit. Maybe that will be the blessing of good things coming our way. Maybe that will be the blessing of learning to speak truth to power coupled with the blessing of having a head that looks particularly good when served on a silver platter.

This story of John the Baptist’s death disrupts any idyllic picture we might have of what it means to be Christian – as if Jesus’ death on the cross isn’t enough to do that in the first place. This is one of the lessons of John’s demise. I think there is another equally important thing we can learn from this gruesome text, especially in light of the whole gospel of Mark. We learn that there are more parallels between the disciples and Herod than between the disciples and John the Baptist. In other words, this whole beheading story might be less of a warning about how the disciples could end up like John, and more about how we are all vulnerable to ending up like Herod.

Unfortunately, the story as we have it reads a bit like a Shakespearean tragedy. And so Herod the king comes off as a kind of caricature. But there are some important clues in this passage that point to a much more real and complex human being whose flaws and foibles are more like ours than we are probably comfortable with. When I see Herod as a human being and not a character in a play, I don’t see someone who was innately mean or evil. Herod, we find out, kind of liked John – or at least had a healthy fear of him. But, more than that, he was compelled by what John was saying. Here John had come into his life because he denounced the relationship Herod was having with his brother’s wife. Herod arrested him to silence him, yet Herod kept letting John speak hard truth to him. We’re told Herod even, liked listening to John – the one who was basically condemning both Herod’s personal and political life. Reading between the lines, I have to believe that John was influencing Herod, giving him a picture of the kingdom that Jesus had come to bring – a kingdom in direct conflict with the one Herod currently led.

It was not an easy road John offered, but something must have caught Herod’s attention; just as something about this Christian endeavor captured our attentions at some point, as evidenced by our very presence here today. Herod was deeply conflicted. He lived with both feet in his own kingdom to be sure, but John was speaking of a different way. That way was hard, and didn’t promise riches or power. But it promised something, and I think it was almost enough for Herod…almost. In the end, Herod was not willing to betray everyone and everything hew knew based only on what John said. But the depth of his struggle can be found in how he felt when he chose to have John killed. He was, we read, deeply grieved. The greek word here is quite powerful. It’s the same emotion expressed by Jesus when the disciples fell asleep on him in the garden of Gethsemene. It is a sadness that sits in your gut and leaves you hollow and empty. Herod chose wrongly. But I truly believe he did not choose lightly.

We’re hard on Herod, but the story of John and Herod is sadly predictive of the story of Jesus and the disciples. The disciples were initially intrigued with Jesus. They found his teachings and healings compelling and they followed him. But, when the going got rough, when the consequences of following Jesus became clear, and they were asked to make some hard choices between the life they knew and the life Jesus was calling them to, most of them chose to back off, and one even chose to play the role of Herod. Jesus was killed – betrayed by one of his own – and at the end of the Gospel of Mark, there is no resurrection appearance, no reunion scene between the disciples and the risen Christ. There is just fear and abandonment.

We have to make difficult choices sometimes. It may be hard for us to relate to Herod in this story since none of us actually have the stomach to order a beheading. But, I do think we can relate to those times when the God who has adopted us asks something of us we can’t quite bring ourselves to do. We like to re-tell the Christian story in fortune cookie terms. On some level we all want to be victorious, successful and wealthy. And if someone is willing to tell me that Jesus happens to also want that for us, well, sign me up! That’s good news. Except that it isn’t. It isn’t good news. It’s just tempting news. Jesus knew that. John knew that. And I think Herod knew that on some level.

So, if being Christian does not mean only good things come our way, and even seems to promise some very difficult life choices and experiences, why do it? Why sign up?

Because we are not just adopted by God as individuals to live individual Christian lives. We are chosen by God for community. We are adopted into a family. And if we let that family shape us as a community, our community will play by different rules. And that community is good news. It’s good news for all those who are being crushed under the weight of a world that lives by Herod’s rules. We are Christian not just for ourselves, but for the sake of the world.

The community Paul describes – the one we have been adopted by God into – is, in the end, a beautiful sight. It is a community of inclusion, where non-Jews, like the Gentiles in Ephesus, and non-Christians like so many around us today, have a place without having to convert or conform. All are in and are now a part of something that transcends all religions and creeds. Everything will come our way, and I mean everything. And being Christian is not always easy. But imagine this:

The kingdom of God that Jesus announced and embodied is what life is like on earth. Imagine if God ruled the nations, and not our presidents and prime ministers and dictators and despots. Every aspect of personal and communal life would experience a radical reversal. The political, economic, and social subversions would be almost endless – peacemaking instead of war mongering, liberation not exploitation, sacrifice rather that subjugation, mercy not vengeance, care for the vulnerable instead of privileges for the powerful, generosity instead of greed, humility rather than hubris, embracing rather than excluding.

Choosing this faith requires a counter-cultural choice. And it’s hard because the way things are seems so powerful, so inevitable, while the alternative seems eons, if not dimensions, away. Sometimes we can do it, and sometimes we waver and retreat. But each time we lean into that powerful force of adoption and join the kingdom of God, we are freed a little bit more from our lives as individual pilgrims wandering around subject to the prevailing forces of the day. Each time we choose to live in Christ, we are showered with the spiritual blessings that bring us into a community shaped by God and visible to all. We become, in short, the good news. Amen.