Apophatica

Ah, ’tis that time of year again.  The air is cool and crisp, leaves are falling on the ground, and the winter clothes that have been in hibernation since April are making a reappearance.  What’s that you say?  What season do I speak of?  Autumn?  Yom Kippur?  No!  Football season, of course!  It’s only the most frustrating time of the year.  Regardless of the team we root for (Da Bears!) ahem, sorry, we all go through the same process.  Our QB is supposed to be better than over and has worked out his kinks in the offseason.  Our running back is in top shape and ready for another big year.  We have picked up some key receivers and a stud of a linebacker and we can’t be beat!  Until the first game or two, that is.  Then the frustration begins and we wonder why we are contributing to an industry that pays people hundreds of millions of dollars just to drive us crazy.

As most of you know, my sons are also playing football.  Neither one of them are having a very good year.  My oldest is on a team loaded with talent and great coaching, but for some reason just can’t seem to get things going.  Almost every game begins with the same expectation and ends with the same disappointment.  It’s easy to say “it’s just a game”, but when you have a pony in the race, so to speak . . . .

How many other things are there in life that we allow to have control over us?  How many “teams” do we root for that may give us temporary elation, but most of the time just break our hearts?  They may not immediately come to mind, but if we really think about it, there are plenty of cases where we give control to someone else in our lives.  What if we had that much excitement and devotion over being the church?  What if we got as pumped up when helping a person in need as we do when we see the team coming running out on to the field?  Ah yes, good ‘ole priorities.  Sure, the person we help may disappoint us in the end, too, but at least we are doing what we have been called to.

So, should we quit watching sports and stop rooting for our favorite teams?  No way!  Let’s just remember that in the end, it really is “just a game.”  Ok, time to bust out my Urlacher jersey and ready the Pepto-Bismol!

In his book, Telling Secrets, Frederick Buechner aptly says that when Peter said he didn’t know Jesus, he was right.  He said “It was a denial, but it was also the truth.  Peter really did not know who Jesus was, did not really know, and neither do any of us really know who Jesus is either.  Beyond all we can find to say about him and believe about him, he remains always beyond our grasp, except maybe once in a while the hem of his garment.”

Many preachers will tell you that unless you have a “personal relationship” with Jesus or “know” Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, you are doomed to the fires of hell.  This is a pretty tall order to fill.  If we are honest with ourselves, we will admit that most of us do not even know ourselves, let alone Jesus.

As human beings we are wandering nomads.   Most of our identity consists of who we perceive others wanting us to be.  I have recently been consolidating email addresses.  When I realize how many email addresses I had at the time and over the years, it is baffling.  Many of them were from businesses that I “had” (many never much got past the website and advertisement stage) and the rest were accounts that were the name of my aspiring profession at the time.  For example, bengoshi79 (lawyer in Japanese) or kaikei79 (accounting in Japanese).  Yep, you can say I was a regular chameleon.

It takes a lot if time, solitude, meditation, and most of all – honesty, to figure out who we are.  Somewhere deep in our souls there is a place that has clearly written who we are and who we are called to be.  When we try to go in a different direction, we feel the pangs of dissonance because somehow we know that is not who we are.  When we do heed that still small voice, however, we experience that peace that passes all understanding.

I have a Japanese saying held by a magnet on my whiteboard.  It says basically, take who you want to be and subtract it by who you are now.  The difference is the work you still have left to do.  I’d say that pretty much sums things up.  First, we have to find that place inside where the truth resides.  Then, we have to be honest about how much work and of what sort we have to do.  Sometimes we just have to scrap it all and start over.  The good thing is that all of our experiences and the narrative that we have created throughout our life will be useful as we become our true selves.

Oh yeah, and knowing Jesus?  Well, if the only way to know ourselves is to be ourselves, then maybe the only way to know Jesus is to be as much like him as possible.  Maybe with each touch of his hem we can get a little more understanding and move ourselves toward that likeness.  After all, to know ourselves, is to know the one whom we are to strive to become the most like.

When I was growing up, we didn’t have, as they say, a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of.  My mom tried for the most part, but didn’t make much money and not having my dad around meant that there was little to go around.  In our house, the doors were falling off their hinges, there were holes in the walls, and even a gaping hole in the kitchen floor that was a one-way ticket to the dirt-floored basement below.  Down in the basement there was a wall dug out and since there was a bank behind our house, I thought more than one person must have tried digging in to the bank vault.

Needless to say, I made a vow with myself never to be poor.  So, when I was 12, I started working for my grandfather greasing the zerks on his excavating equipment, measuring grade with the laser, and driving the pickup to job sites while he drove the grader or the turnapole.  Unfortunately, he died that same year, so I began bussing tables and occasionally waiting at the local restaurant.  It was in Ripley’s Believe it or Not for being the only restaurant in the world completely surrounded by railroad tracks.  It burned down when I was 16 and by then I had wheels so I tried the obligatory two week stint working at Mickey-D’s, but I wasn’t really into that.  So, by my senior year, I was working third shift at a truck stop.  I would go to my grandma’s in the morning after work for breakfast and then head up the street to school.  I would get out at 3, do my extracurriculars, meet my girlfriend for a bit, do my homework, and get about 3 hours of sleep before I had to get up and make the 10 mile drive to work.

When I moved to Japan, I had no idea about “brand” goods. Wally World was always good enough for me.  I noticed how other kids would be wearing Gap and Eddie Bauer clothes, but it didn’t get to me too much.  But when I got to Japan, my mother-in-law would buy me Ralph Lauren, Fendi, Coach, Brooks Brothers, and boy was I hooked!  There was no such thing as mediocrity, I had to have the best!  I went to law school, got my MBA, started businesses and started making as much as I could.  Of course when it came time to buy a car, it had to be a Cadillac.  I didn’t so much as allow anyone to sneeze in that car!  But for some reason, I never was happy.  I knew in the back of my mind as I had since I was about 17 that I was supposed to be heading for ministry, but I wanted to make money instead.  Boy, is life different now!

You know how sometimes a goofy thought gets in your head that makes you laugh?  I have this vision of a great way to teach my kids about money and anxiety.  If they assume that the person with the nice Jaguar has no worries, I want to tell them, “Watch this” as I walk up to the car at the gas station holding my key up and tell the driver, “I want to show my kids something.  Don’t worry, I won’t scratch too deep.  I just want to show them that there is a nice thick coat of paint under this top one”  And watch the driver either go ballistic or faint!

As I look back on who I was back then, I can’t help but laugh.  I always thought the more I had, the less worrying I would do because I would want for nothing.  But it wasn’t true.

The more money we get, the less compassionate we are, for the most part.  I recently heard on NPR that the richer people get, the less they donate as a percentage of their income.  People get removed from the lives of the poor.  They hang out with other rich people and live in communities for the rich where they never have to see poor people.  They develop an “us and them” mentality and forget about what it was like when they didn’t have so much.  All compassion is lost, and they become self-absorbed and only concerned with maintaing their wealth.  I’m not saying that the love of money is the root of all evil or any of that kind of misquoted and inaccurate scripture babble.  No, I’m saying that Jesus was teaching a valuable lesson here.  The more stuff we have, the more money we need to maintain it, and therefore the more anxiety that comes as we worry if we are going to have that much money.  We create anxiety when we chase the person whom we aren’t and were never meant to be.

Many times when we come across this passage, we see it as Jesus telling that God will always take care of us and that we should never worry.  Some who preach this text even go as far as to say that it is sinful to worry and not trust God for anything.  Apparently those folks have never lost a child to leukemia or a husband to a drunk driver.  Is Jesus telling us that everything will be hunky dory so don’t fret?  No!  It would have been hypocritical to tell us not to worry about anything.  After all, he is the one who eventually said, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”  We only have to look around us to see suffering.  It’s everywhere.  There will be worries.  There will be anxiety.  Jesus is just telling us in this passage that we don’t have to create any more worry than we already have.  Like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, just be.  Be satisfied.  Be you.  Don’t worry about tomorrow for tomorrow will take care of itself without adding more to be worried about.

                In 1796, my first ancestor to come to North America, Jacob Mueller, left the Mueller Castle in Prussia at the age of 20 and went to Canada.  He was the son of the King of Prussia and as such, he was required to lead the Prussian army.  At this time that was quite a prestigious task.  Prussia all had but conquered Europe at that time and being the leader of the Prussian army was to rule a good portion of the civilized world.  Jacob had no interest, however, and did not have the taste for war that his father had.  So, he and his brother took their inheritance and left.  Over the years, Jacob made numerous attempts to reconcile to his father through letters but they went ignored.  The King as such had a sense of entitlement.  How dare anyone, let alone his own son, disobey him.  So, they never reconciled and not only did they lose the opportunity to share their lives, but their extended family members and descendants would never have the chance to interact with one another.

One does not have to go far to find messages of entitlement.  All we need to do is open the newspaper, log on to the internet, turn on the TV, or look up at a billboard to see just how darn special we are.  Every day we are bombarded with messages that puff up our ego telling us how much we deserve only the very best.  Go ahead and buy that car that you can’t afford because you’re worth it.  Get that $30,000 watch because you deserve the very best.  Or one of my favorites, buy this shampoo and then “don’t hate me because I’m beautiful.”  After a while these messages sit on our brain and get us to actually believing them.  We start to get needs and wants confused and before you know it, we are disappointed when although we have plenty, we don’t have best there is.

The worst part about all of this is that we lose sight of what the word “entitled” really means.  We see a person who is hungry and in the food line at the shelter or the person who is on food stamps and we tell ourselves that those lazy people have a sense of entitlement – entitlement to our tax dollars.  Food is a need.  Water is a need.  A roof over your head, a warm place on a cold day and a cool place on a hot day are needs not wants, not something resulting from a false sense of entitlement.  So we end up using the same word in different contexts and argue over one another’s heads.

I would love to believe that this is only something that happens in the secular realm, but we all know that’s not true.  God forbid that it should happen amongst us, the people of God.  A few years back at the Church of the Good Shepherd in Pennsylvania the church had been growing and the need for a new building was beginning to become apparent among some folks in the congregation.  There were already three services and with 800 people, they were to their max.

Their senior pastor, Gary, was called to be district superintendent for their denomination and so he left and a young pastor, Randy, was hired to “lead the church into the future”.  They had hired Randy to be a visionary and affect change within the church and so he started to do so.  It didn’t take him long to see the need for a new building to meet their growth.  He started the conversation up again within the congregation and was quickly met with resistance.    Randy suggested they have a congregational meeting to discuss the issue amicably and upon this suggestion, was told by Sam, the former council moderator, that if he even brought it up for discussion he would be met with fierce resistance.  You see, Sam felt that the Church of the Good Shepherd existed for its own people and should just focus on shepherding the existing flock and meeting their needs.  At the time, there was about 30% of the congregation who supported Sam’s position.

Randy went ahead and called a congregation meeting anyway.  The meeting was ugly from the start.  People were yelling and getting frustrated at one another and eventually the moderator got up and walked out.  So, Sam feeling it was his place to step in and run the meeting as former moderator wasted no time in taking the microphone and turning to Randy and saying, “I warned you that if you did this things would not be good.  So, I also want to inform you since you did not heed my advice that we have gathered the required consent to bring a no-confidence vote against you right now.”  Sam called the vote and to many people’s surprise, the vote passed and Randy was no longer their pastor.

Randy left and the fighting and backbiting continued for months until many people lost faith in the idea of church and left.  The remainder of the people split and went to different churches and in a matter of months, I church of 800 vanished into non-existence.  It is easy to hear this story and just sort of shrug our shoulders because such things happen all the time.  There are plenty of churches out there and plenty more are being created, so what?  It is easy to say so what if we think that church exists solely for those people inside the church’s walls.  The so what is that if we really believe that church is a place to do the things that Jesus taught us to in the world, then that day that the Church of the Good Shepherd ceased to exist was a very sad day indeed.  Think of all of the lives that were supposed to be touched out in the community that would never be touched.

We live in a day that most call Post-Christendom.  This is a time when people don’t feel that they have to go to church just because it is the thing to do.  They need a reason.  And so this conversation about the emerging or emergent church occurs but many from the old guard (for lack of a better term) maintain their sense of entitlement because they have been around and put so much time into the church that they should be able to direct the conversation or decide if a conversation should even take place.  I think this is what Jesus was talking about.   Just like the older brother, so many of us are missing the party.  We are missing the point that we are ALL the prodigal and we are ALL the older brother and we ALL need to learn to be like the father.

Imagine if just right here in Hanover township each church just donated $50.  Not $50 per member. $50 per church.  Imagine if each church would have just half of their membership out volunteering in the community.  Imagine if each member would just donate one food item per month.  Imagine if people who have certain skills and knowledge would just take one hour a week to teach those skills to others in the community.   We would be on the cover of the Wall Street Journal.  I can just see the headline now, Chicago Suburban Community churches partner together and eradicate hunger and poverty in their communities.

But, this could never happen.  Churches setting aside their ideologies to do what Jesus taught them to do?  Haha, it’s more likely that the Cubs will come back and win the World Series this year.  How could we even start such a thing?  How can we get all of the churches to a point when we can all get together and have a party and celebrate the truly important things?  Well, maybe it starts here. Maybe we have to get decorating and get those invitations out.

            My God fails me every day.  Every time I expect something to happen and have faith that things will go my way, they don’t.  My God never fails to fail me.  If we are truly honest with ourselves I would imagine that we all have the same experience.  Whenever I count on my God to deliver me from some sort of suffering or to give me something that I want and maybe even think I need, I can pretty much rely on the fact that my God will not provide.

Am I down on God?  No way!  I have gotten used to it and come to even expect it.  Why?  Notice that I said it was my God who fails me.  What else could I expect?  If I am going to create God in my own image and develop an idea of God that is not real, then I should plan on being disappointed.   There are so many things in life that we create attachments to such as a cold drink on a hot day, a good day at work, a smooth traffic-less commute, a call from the HR person where we interviewed for a job, and so on.  More often than not, we throw “up” a prayer to God to let us have what we want.  When this wish does not come to fruition we get frustrated and assume that God is letting us down once again.  It’s an amazing thing that along with the mundane parts of life that we could create attachments even when it comes to God.

When God lets us down enough times we start to develop a view of God that tells us that the Divine is uncaring, or even worse – malicious.  It occurs to us that God may not have our best interests at heart and is not even concerned with our well-being.  If we stop and think, however, it becomes apparent that this God who constantly “lets us down” is a God of our own creation.  Money.  Cars.  Houses.  Status symbols.  Even health.  They all become attachments that we create and equate with happiness and well-being.  Let us picture in our minds even for a moment how our lives would be if we did not have so many things that we “had” to have in order to enjoy life.  Imagine if we were just satisfied to have our daily bread.  Wouldn’t at least half of our suffering and discomfort disappear without those unnecessary attachments?   This seems to be what the contemplative Trappist monk Thomas Merton discovered when he penned these words:

“For I knew that it was only by leaving [my attachments] that I could come to You: and that is why I have been so unhappy when You                   seemed to be condemning me to remain in them.  Now my sorrow is over and my joy is about to begin: the joy that rejoices in the deepest    sorrows.  For I am beginning to understand.  You have taught me and consoled me, and I have begun again to hope and learn.”

I would like to propose another way of approaching God.  How about we just let God be God?  Not the God that we create in our minds, but instead the God that actually is.  Perhaps God is not the personage that grants magic wishes that we have made God out to be, but rather is the ever-present solace within us that reassures us that regardless of what the outcome is, we are going to be ok.  There is no question that it is extremely uncomfortable and sometimes almost painful to sit and wait for the response to a job interview or the outcome of a doctor’s visit.  It is much easier to beg God to deliver us from our tension and give us the answer that we seek.  Unfortunately, although there are prayers that are somehow answered, it seems apparent that God does not always work that way.  Instead, we are reassured that God dwells with us and in spite of the wait or even the bad news, God will never leave us nor forsake us.  Perhaps that is why the scripture does not say that we should understand God, but instead, to “Be still and know that I am God.”

In his book Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales, Peter Rollins writes a parable about a community of people in the desert far outside of Jerusalem.  These people were present during Jesus’ crucifixion and left after he died.  Their descendants had been living there for over a hundred years when missionaries showed up and shared with them the “good news” that Jesus had been raised and was in heaven with God.  The people left Jerusalem after the crucifixion before the resurrection story began to spread and only knew that Jesus had died.

One of the missionaries noticed that the elder of the community had been missing for some time and upon looking for him, found him “crouched low in a small hut on the fringe of the village, praying and weeping.”  The missionary was amazed that the elder could be sad at such a time as this having heard the great news that Jesus had not remained dead.   The elder informed the missionary that they had lived as a community despite the fact that they understood Jesus to have been defeated by death and that “death would one day defeat” them also.  The elder then “looked the missionary compassionately in the eyes” and said the following:

Each day we have forsaken our very lives for him because we judged him wholly worthy of the sacrifice, wholly worthy of our being.  But now, following your news, I am concerned that my children and my children’s children my follow him, not because of his radical life and supreme sacrifice, but selfishly, because his sacrifice will ensure their personal salvation and eternal life.

 The people of this community had been following and being like Jesus, not because they expected a reward, but because this was what Jesus had taught them to do.  Where many of us see the resurrection of Jesus as a great thing, this elder was afraid that it would in fact become a stumbling block for the people who had been so successfully incarnating the teachings of Jesus.  Having no knowledge of an “eternal hope” the people lived in compassion toward one another despite having only a temporal hope that could only come by them creating it here on earth.

After I read this, I happened to be walking a labyrinth and thinking about the church calendar and where it placed Easter and Pentecost.  Suddenly, it occurred to me how brilliantly it was laid out.  I realized as I walked the seemingly endless circles of that sacred maze that Easter gives us the opportunity to celebrate a cosmic hope of resurrection while Pentecost actually was that resurrection.  I can just imagine how the community of believers who had been dejected and saddened by the death of Jesus were filled with the spirit of hope once again and decided that despite Jesus’ death, they were going to live their lives in community modeled on the life and teachings of the one whom they had been mourning.  During the church calendar, we get to pray and ponder the hope of resurrection during Eastertide, but it is at Pentecost that we celebrate the actual resurrection that still takes place around us!

I realize that this is all easy to say and that it is not necessarily easy to envision what such a resurrected community would look like as it does life and is the church.  Rollins does not paint much of a picture, but makes it clear that we are not called to do church, but rather to be the church as we do life the way Jesus taught us to.  Fred Craddock, (the eminent preacher and professor) however, paints a very vivid picture of what this community would look like.

In his book Saving Jesus from the Church, Robin Meyers recalls a story told to him by Craddock about a community of folk in Appalachia that Craddock was working with who would do their baptismal services en mass at the banks of a river at sundown.  This was a small rural mission that contained some of the poorest people in the United States.  The candidates would be baptized and then would come out and get dried off to share in a large meal that was cooked along the banks of the river.  A fire would be lit to warm them and before dinner, they would all gather around the fire.  The other members of the community would gather in a large circle around them and would one by one introduce themselves to the newly baptized.  With their introduction, they would state what they could do for those people when in need.  “My name is . . . and if you ever need somebody to chop wood . . .”  “My name is . . . and if you ever need someone to repair your home . . .”   Afterward they would all share a large meal and have a huge square dance. When Craddock was asked by the city folk whom he was telling the story to what he called such a thing where he came from, he said, “I don’t know what you call it where you come from.  But where I come from we call it . . . church.”  May God grant us the strength, compassion, and wisdom to be that church.

On Thursday night, my theology class was talking about the different views of atonement.  In other words, what did Jesus dying on a cross really do for us?  Was this a payment to God on behalf of us?  Was it a payment to the devil as the ruler of this world for our redemption?  Was it an example of complete sacrifice that we should learn from and therefore practice humility?  Numerous theologians came up with numerous views.  Those views that did not agree with the majority, i.e., the church universal (Catholic) were deemed heretics.  In the above picture, we see one of those “heretics”, Arius.  Arius believed that Jesus was not necessarily divine, but he was God’s greatest creation.  The church (in the 2nd and 3rd centuries) argued that God and Jesus were of the same substance and that they BOTH existed since the beginning.  Arius argued that there was a time that Jesus (the Son, the Logos) did not exist.  This got him branded as a heretic by the powers that be.

Because there were so many different theologies around, the church made an official statement that they would be the ones to decide what was right and what was wrong.  As the church universal (the right and true church) they would dictate what was true about God and what theologies were tolerable.  They claimed that through apostolic succession their authority came all the way from Jesus.

One would think that such heavy handedness would be long gone by now in a world with so much diversity and so many different voices.  Unfortunately, however, we can still see the church (numerous local churches and denominations) claiming that they held the truth and everyone else be damned.  A perfect case in point happened during the theology class that I mentioned above.  One of the views of atonement was set forth by a man named Socinius.  His view was that Jesus was not divine, but rather a prophet that taught love and forgiveness.  He believed that Jesus dying and being resurrected was a beautiful example of dedication to God.  This view shows Jesus as doing what Micah 6:8 calls for: to do what’s right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

The professor went around the room and chose people at random to see which of the seven theories of atonement that had been introduced the student most adhered to.  Luckily (or unluckily) I was not called on.  The professor said that “of course” no one would choose the Socinian view because it was just too ridiculous.  Well, then, call me ridiculous.  Apparently we still live in a time when those of us who do not agree with the main stream are heretics.  It makes me wonder what it is they are so afraid of.  It seems like a sort of religious xenophobia because God forbid people should believe differently (and even worse!) what if there is some truth to what they believe!?

If you Google or check on You Tube for “Emergent church” or ”Emerging church” you will find as many rants about how wrong and evil it is as there are actual samples.  How can the church be relevant if it does not even acknowledge the changes that are taking place around us?  People have given up on the theology that tells us a ruthless God will wipe us out eternally if we do not believe that he killed his son.  Ok, I’m admittedly being harsh here, but I think it is time for a worthwhile dialogue between those who claim to hold the keys of truth and those who have moved on.   It’s my prayer that this conversation will happen soon and that society can once again see that church is a safe haven where people can be different and seek the Divine in community without worrying about our differences.  Rather, we focus on our likeness – that of God and the desire to do right by one another, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.

I knew a leper once. Not in the sense that his skin was flaking off or that he had a contagious disease, but in the real sense of the term – he was estranged from the community. Nobody in my generation wanted to be near him and I think those of my parents’ generation and beyond had forgotten him. I was born in and went to high school in a small town of about 9000 people and I lived about 10 miles north of town in an even smaller town of about 150 people. The only time I would get a chance to see people then was when we went to town for groceries or when I was walking around at lunch time during high school. I would occasionally see this man who was slightly hunched over and had a strange voice. He would walk with his elbows pushed back and there wasn’t one of us who hadn’t imitated him at one time or another. The girls would run away and scream when they saw him and would say things like “Ooh gross!” He generally slept at a rundown motel near the high school. If you have ever seen Sling Blade with Billy Bob Thornton, he was kind of like that.

Whenever I would encounter him he would be perfectly pleasant and ask how I was doing. I think he even asked me for money once so that he could pay his motel fee that night. It was not until around my Sophomore year when I was at a community recovery meeting with my grandmother in a kind of Bible study/ 12-step recovery group. Kind of like Bill W. meet Billy Graham when I started to wonder who he was. Until then I had thought he was just the town Quasimoto and I didn’t really care who he was or what his story was. We would go around taking turns reading from the Bible and I have to admit that in kind of a snarky way I was looking forward to when it was his turn to read. I wasn’t even sure if he could read. I half expected him to pass when it was his turn. He took the Bible, ran his finger down the page to find where the last person had left off, and there it was. I couldn’t believe it. He read it in as normal and clear of a voice and just as succinctly as anyone else. I still can’t explain it and I don’t put any meaning behind it, but I still think it was the strangest thing.

When I got home I asked my mom about him and she knew right away who I was talking about. She said, “Oh, that’s Dennis Swanson. I used to have such a crush on him. Then again, so did all the girls.” I just looked at her thinking, “Way to go mom. Way to keep those standards up there.” I asked her if he was born like that and she said no, not hardly. You see, Dennis Swanson had been an all-state wrestler. Oh, so he was a jock. Not necessarily ever too bright. I see. No, no, she told me. He was our valedictorian. What!? I could hardly believe it. What happened to him? Well, she told me. He got too popular, too good, and he thought he was untouchable. He started dabbling in drugs (it was the early 70s, after all) and ended up getting a bad batch. Someone had thinned the product out to make more money and had used some chemical that wasn’t made for human consumption. It fried Dennis’ brain and he became the town leper. Just like that. Most liked, respected, and envied guy in town and over night he became an outcast – estranged from his community. Everyone wants to hang out with you when you’re cool, but as soon as your brain turns into a fried egg on a skillet, the party’s over.

I wonder if that’s how it had been with Naaman. We know that he was a top dog. Commander of the Aramean army, subjects under him, only answered to the king. Then, something happened that estranged him from the rest of the community. Was he too big for his britches? Did he alienate the wrong people? Who knows? The text doesn’t tell us that. What we do know is that Naaman thought pretty highly of himself, so it is plausible that it was his pride that alienated him from everyone else. We know people like that, don’t we? Usually they are the insecure ones who always brag to get affirmation from those around them but all it does is make people tired and not want to be around them. The next thing you know, the person who thought he was better than everyone else is an outcast.

One day Naaman decides, ok, this has gone far enough. It’s time to be healed. I’m tired of the situation. So the young girl from Israel suggests that he go see the prophet in Samaria and he does. We quickly see, though, that although Naaman wants to be healed and reconciled, he doesn’t want to deal with that that got him estranged in the first place. Elisha seems to know what it was though. He doesn’t even come to the door when Naaman arrives and believe me, Naaman notices. Elisha sends a messenger to tell Naaman to wash himself seven times in the River Jordan and he would be good as new. Does he do it? Of course not!

Infomercials tell us that we can make easy payments, software and apps are created to make our lives easier, car dealerships tell us how easy they are to get to, and even Staples has an Easy button. I’m not sure about that one. Maybe a fairy pops out and waves her wand making everything easy. When things are actually easy though, we feel like they’re not complete like we should have to work for the real stuff. Naaman apparently feels this way because he complains that his waters back home are so much better and Elisha didn’t just come out and wave his hand and make him better. I don’t have to tolerate this. Doesn’t he know who I am? I’m going home. But his officers say hey, we’ve come this far. If he would have told you to do something difficult you would have done it – to show how great you are and how it was through your own doing that you were healed. What the heck, why not give it a try? Here. Here’s the Easy button. And so he does, and so he is healed. The key here is that he seems to get what had made him this way in the first place. He submits to God and asks that he not have it held against him when he bows with his king at the altar. Finally, Naaman sees why he got where he did.

After being healed, the job wasn’t over. Naaman had to go back to Elisha. Just like in the Mark passage Jesus tells the leper to go to the priest after he heals him. The priest has to declare him ritually pure so that he can be reconciled and reintegrated into the community. The text there in Mark says that Jesus was moved to pity and healed the man, but you may notice an asterisk. The Greek word here may have been mistranslated and what Jesus felt was not pity, but in fact anger! Why? Maybe it’s just because Jesus was trying to rest and have the crowds not bug him. Perhaps it’s because Jesus realized that the man wasn’t really dealing with the issues that got him there in the first place. Jesus tells him to keep his mouth shut and go to the priest so that he can be declared ritually clean so that he can be reintegrated into the community. There are rules to live in society and at that time the rules were the Law of Moses. Instead, the man chose not to follow the rules and went and flapped his jaws anyway and Jesus was angry because he knew that the man was not really willing to do what’s right and that he would be right back where he started. But notice that the ones who have the affliction are steered clear of, but the purest one, Jesus, is the one that they all flocked to.

We are left in the dark in these two stories because we assume that somehow these two – Naaman and the other leper in Mark – broke the rules of society either with their pride or something and became outcasts, lepers. There is no complete evidence so we just have to guess. But wait. You see, the lectionary cuts off the story at 2 Kings 5:19 when Naaman goes home. But the story actually continues and I think the writer of Kings makes his point here. Gehazi is the servant of Elisha and he gets a bright idea. Elisha had turned away all of the gold and silver and robes that Naaman brought to him, but Gehazi thinks, hey I can get those for myself. So he chases after Naaman and says, you know, on second thought, we’ll go ahead and take those off your hands. Elisha busts him and curses him. Now YOU are the leper. You and your descendants will suffer NAAMAN’S leprosy forever. He broke the rules and became an outcast.

The man that Jesus healed refused to follow the rules and we can assume that he wasn’t completely reconciled to the community that he had been cast out of. Naaman got it. He got healed AND realized what had caused his leprosy in the first case and made amends. Isn’t that the most important thing? Isn’t that the key? Realizing what caused the estrangement in the first place and making amends there. Gehazi? He lost his chance to make amends. What about Dennis? Well, I think Dennis is a perfect example of the fact that it is not always the sick, the outcast, the leper who has to make amends. Sometimes it’s the community around him who needs to realize that none of us is perfect and that if someone is different, even by fault of their own, sometimes it’s the community that needs healing so that they can except that brother or sister back in. This shows how much of a community event healing is rather than an individual one. One of my classmates said it best when explaining how she had been healed of an illness, but took issue when the healing was mentioned publically because she felt somehow her privacy may have been violated. She said, “I admit that I am still dealing with how to reconcile its (the healing’s presence as a story of wonder in our community—that, partially, because God was involved in the healing of my body, it is a story that belongs to the community, for the betterment of us all seeing God at work.” It couldn’t have been said more beautifully.

Advent. D.D. Murphy calls it the “three-fold coming (adventus) of Christ – as baby refugee, as Word and Sacrament, as glorious Lamb of God”. We think of this season as one of hope. Hope for a persecuted people whose messiah was someone they never dreamed of born in a way they never imagined. Hope for the forgiveness of sins for the entire world after dying and raising from the dead. Hope for a warrior on a white horse who will defeat evil and eradicate death and tears from the Earth forever. Hope for each of us that somehow when we wake up Christmas morning things will all be different. It won’t be just the presents under the tree that we stayed up all night wrapping for the kids, but that there will be something there for us, too. Maybe something in the form of peace in knowing that we have made right choices or that everything is somehow going to be ok. But this isn’t our first advent and we’ve seen this movie before. In fact, we’ve played the leading role.

Come Christmas morning everything will still be the same. The same doubts and fears. The same uncertainty and foreboding that we went to bed with the night before will still be there. Somehow the bills will still need to get paid and our loved one’s prognosis will not have changed. We’ll wonder when all of these magical promises will come true and when our prayers will be answered and everything will be alright. When will this man who died and rose come again and take away all of the pain from the world? We find ourselves then in a place where there is no hope and we feel like we have been lied to and made the butt if a cruel joke. What if, though, we just read the story wrong? What if the key was not in the stuff about a sweeping victory that we have to wait for to come some day, but instead the key was in the talk of loving our neighbor and letting our works be the proof of our faith? What if Jesus wasn’t just speaking in parables when he said whatever we do for the least of these we do for him? Maybe then, there is a much greater hope for us this advent – one that we don’t have to wait for in painful expectation. Instead, it is a hope that can be realized right here and right now by living the example set by Jesus in feeding, clothing, and loving one another.

Yes, everything will be the same. Or will it? This advent season, let’s prepare and make way for a new and real realization of our hopes brought about here in our time by the hands and feet of Christ. Let us wake up this Christmas morning with a smile on our faces and reassurance in our hearts that Jesus is doing what he said he would – through us – one broken heart at a time.

Since I have been doing my blog at http://www.thecrossingchicago.org, I am not sure if anyone is still reading this blog, so if you are, please let me know. Thanks! 🙂

I have always been guilty of polarized thinking. I am usually too absolute and extreme in my logic which leads to a great reduction in perceived possibilities. Those things that are left then after some mental sorting can sometimes then seem daunting. For example, if I am considering a job, but really have my heart on starting a business, I may come to the conclusion that if I work full time, I won’t be able to build the business. This leaves me in a position where I think I either need to sacrifice my dream or go through a tough financial period until I get the business up and running. In reality, having the job will give me more capital to get the business running faster and will force me to use my time more wisely as I do it which will undoubtedly pay dividends in running the business.

So, why do I say all of this? Many people are now unemployed or are in jobs that they no longer have a passion for. Some ask themselves on a daily basis – How is the world a better place because I am selling vacuum cleaners? How am I making a difference crunching numbers at a desk all day? Possibilities abound anywhere you turn and it is never necessary to limit them. Regardless of where you are at in your life’s journey, don’t make the same mistake that I occasionally do and pin yourself into a corner. We may not be able to attain our dreams tomorrow, but if we are always making measurable progress toward a specific goal, we will eventually get there. It will not be the quickest path, but on the journey we will learn and be aware of so much more than we could have if we rushed through it.

Just a thought . . .