¹⁷I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.
Acts 2:1-21
 
This week we celebrate Pentecost, which some call the birthday of the church. The Spirit is “poured out” on all flesh, just as the prophet Joel had prophesied. This is the same word Jesus uses to describe the cup of salvation at the Last Supper, which is “poured out” for all (Matt 26:28, Mark 14:24, Luke 22:20). In Greek it’s ekcheo, which is to “gush, or run greedily out.” That’s our model for church. We are the “poured out ones.”
 
But in what way are we poured out? Is there a shape to our poured-out-ness?
 

Each week at church growing up, we recited the Nicene Creed (325). Perhaps you did too. Do you remember the rough outline? “I believe in one God, the Father…I believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ…I believe in the Holy Spirit…” And then these words, “I believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic church.”
 
“One, holy, catholic and apostolic.” This is the shape of our poured-out-ness. It is the shape of the new humanity— in Christ. Missiologist Charles Van Engen turns the adjectives into adverbs in order to draw out the implications for mission. We are one (reconciling), holy (sanctifying), catholic (unifying), and apostolic (sending) church. I like that, especially when I consider our rapidly urbanizing world, which is eagerly looking for just such
a sign.
 
One: Because we are “one,” we reconcile. It’s good to remember that our denominations are the many different ways in which we are one. We love our ecclesiastical tribes, or perhaps hate them. Either way, there is only one church, expressed in many forms. Denominations are not the Church, rather they are like clothes to the body. There is only one body— the body of Christ, clothed in many ways, with many styles. In the later stages of faith development, style gives way to substance. We become aware of our oneness, and the heart for reconciliation grows in us. In the end, we can see that we are being reconciled into one body, clothed only with the love of Christ.

Holy: Because we are “holy,” we sanctify. The word holy carries heavy overtones of moralism. Whatever else the church is, it is not morally superior to the rest of the world. Studies consistently show that churchgoers have the same rates of moral failure in every category as do non-churchgoers. What makes us holy is not our moral superiority. We have none. As catholic theologian James Alison suggests, what makes us holy is that we are being forgiven. That is our holiness. It is what unites us with all of creation, which is also undergoing forgiveness. When we participate in the giving and receiving of forgiveness, we are a sanctifying presence in the world.

Catholic: Because we are “catholic,” we unify. I was raised in the Catholic Church, so naturally, I thought the Nicene Creed was our creed. It’s not! The word “catholic,” has nothing to do with the denomination. It means “according to the whole.” In other words, we are all catholic. To be catholic is to be a sign of unity— a unity, as we discussed last week, that is not “over and against” anything, but always “with and for” everything. We are a unifying presence in the world torn apart by division.
 
Apostolic: Because we are “apostolic,” we send. The word “apostle” comes from the Greek word apóstolos, whose root is stéllō, “I send.” The Latin equivalent is missio, from which we get mission. We are sent-ones. An apostolic church is sent into the world as a sign of God’s love made visible.
 
Our cities and their most vulnerable eagerly await a new humanity poured out in the shape of one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church.
 
 
Kris Rocke
Executive Director
Street Psalms

 
When Jesus saw him lying there and learned that he had been in this condition for a long time, he asked him, “Do you want to get well?”
John 5:1-9
 
As we approach the sixth Sunday of Easter, we are continually being challenged to see life by the light of the resurrection, through the eyes of our resurrected Lord. As we read in last week’s WFB post, looking through the eyes of the resurrected Jesus reveals the whole world as a burning bush ablaze with God’s glory. The resurrection is the beginning of our faith journey, not it’s end. The empty tomb invites us to see a life filled with potential and purpose.
 

The Gospel text this week puts us in the midst of a Jesus encounter pregnant with implications for resurrected living. Jesus approaches a man sitting by the pool of Bethesda with multitudes of other “invalidated” people. A place, the text alludes, where this particular man has been lying in wait for healing (resurrection) for 38 years.
 
The man, before and even after the miracle, seems to have no idea who Jesus is, much less an expectation that Jesus himself is the fountain of living water — the one to provide his long-awaited healing. Jesus singles him out of the crowd and asks a seemingly obvious question, “Do you want to get well?” The man’s response reveals the limitations of his vision. He does not answer Jesus’ question; instead, he simply seeks help getting into the waters of the pool at the appointed time. He is certainly open to “partnership” with the able-bodied man standing in front of him if that “partnership” guarantees his immersion in the water – the source of his perceived salvation.
 
I remember once awakening from a dream in a cold sweat. In the dream, I had been walking on the beach of an abandoned island with Jesus. It was a beautiful respite from the rigors of life as a pastor, ministry director, husband, friend and father. However, I found myself getting restless in the dream because I had determined the time of “respite” was concluding, and I needed to get back to the insurmountable importance of my “real world” tasks. The “cold sweat” occurred because, in my dream, Jesus asked me to consider why life on this island with him, in uninterrupted friendship, seemed like such a distraction from what I had determined was the real significance of my purpose on earth.
 
Like the invalid at the pool of Bethesda, I had determined what body of “water” held my healing and salvation. I was willing to partner with Jesus, even to take a walk together on an abandoned beach, if it meant that our partnership would help me to immerse in the waters of ministry success, the feeling of being needed, and the affirmation from others in my role as a caring husband, friend and father. In other words, my relationship with Jesus became a willing partnership of manipulation; Jesus became for me a means to an end. I used him to accomplish what I had determined would save me instead of seeing the fullness of salvation in him alone. I was, and remain, haunted by the words of Thomas Merton who wrote how easy it was to “spend ones whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to discover that when we get to the top, our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.”
 
Jesus seeks to teach the man in Bethesda to open his eyes to a new vision of reality. He rejects the man’s idea of partnership — being helped into the pool. Instead, he says “You do not need help immersing into the water of that pool. Look upon me, as I am the never-ending fountain of Living Water” – “Get up, pick up your mat and walk.”
 
The Gospel not only empowers us to see, but to see from a particular vantage point. It invites us to see from within the reality of the resurrection. From this new perspective, all of life comes into focus and we see and hear the resurrected Jesus.
 
As you move into the sixth Sunday of Easter, do you understand who is directly in front of you, asking the question at the heart of living a resurrected life? Are you learning to see from within the reality of the resurrection? Do you hear the invitation to participate in the ongoing work of creation that results from such empowered living? It takes a while for our eyes to adjust to the light of the resurrection, but when it happens, all of life looks radically different.
 
 

Joel Van Dyke
Director of The Urban Training Collaborative
Street Psalms

 

⁹When they had gone ashore, they saw a charcoal fire there, with fish on it, and bread. 10 Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish that you have just caught.
John 21:1-19

Have you recently been disappointed by someone, or have you been the source of their disappointment? In a week’s time, those following Jesus went from a deep experience of the first to an almost tragic level of the second. Other than Judas, the disciple who likely experienced this shift the most was Peter.
Remember Friday night, standing in the courtyard with the smell of a charcoal fire wafting through the air. Not once, or twice, but three times Peter not only denied being a follower of Jesus, he denied even knowing him. This was certainly related to fear, but it was more than that. When the guards came to arrest Jesus, Peter courageously stepped forward and slashed an ear. Had Jesus yelled “Charge!”, is there any doubt Peter would have been at the front of the attack? Instead Jesus says, “Put your sword away…” and an emotion stronger than fear crept into Peter’s heart—disappointment. “We had thought,” another disciple would later say, “he was the one to redeem Israel….” All those following Jesus believed he was the Messiah, the appointed one. In their eyes, his arrest, crucifixion and death both disappointed them, and “dis-appointed” Jesus from his role as Messiah.

I wonder which Peter smelled first, the food or the fire? The first whetted his appetite while the second killed it. An-tha-kia, the word for charcoal fire, is used only twice in the Bible. Both usages are in the gospel of John, with one being here on the beach, while the other is in the temple courtyard where Peter failed. The beach smoke undoubtedly transported Peter back to that night and perhaps prepared him for punishment. Like a child in trouble waiting in their room for their parent to dole out the consequences, Peter waited. What would Dad bring? Stern words, a paddle or the disappointment speech?

I have been grounded, spanked, flipped off, yelled at, berated and threatened. But the worst punishments of my life sounded nothing like these. Instead, they came in cool, measured tones only one sentence long, “I’m disappointed in you.” Decades removed from those instances and I still feel a little stab in my gut thinking about them. There is incredible power in disappointment. We will move worlds to avoid it and dig our own graves as a consequence.

Peter eats and waits and dreads. Finally Jesus speaks, “Simon son of John…do you love me more than these?” Although scholars disagree on what Jesus pointed to when he said, “these,” I tend to agree with the theory that Jesus was pointing to the fishing net and boat, asking Peter if he loved Jesus more than his old profession. Did Peter love Jesus more than his previous appointed way of life? To which Peter replies, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” Jesus responds, “Feed my lambs.” Then Jesus continues…

 

Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Yes.
Tend my sheep
Simon, son of John, do you love me?
Yes, Lord you know it.
Feed my sheep.

 

Three times Peter denied knowing Jesus and three times Jesus asks Peter where his devotion now lay: in the boat or in Jesus. The word disappointment comes from a 14th Century French word which means to “dispossess of an appointed office.” Peter believed Jesus was disappointed in him and would therefore dis-appoint him from his office. What does he get instead? An invitation to love and a re-appointment to serve. “You did not choose me,” Jesus said earlier, “but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit— fruit that will last.” (John 15:16) Nothing Peter, the disciples, us, or even Judas for that matter, have done can change that appointment.

Is God ever disappointed with us? Many stories in the Bible seem to indicate so, and perhaps it is the case. In friendship, relationship and discipleship, the fear of disappointing is a powerful force. Martin Luther King once said, “There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.” And yet, Jesus’ approach with Peter leads me to wonder if there is an even deeper truth beyond Dr. King’s words. Could it be that it is only deep love that is able to redeem deep disappointment?

Ken Sikes
Board Member, Street Psalms
Pastor, Manitou Park Presbyterian Church

 
⁵Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen
Luke 24:1-12
 
Christ is risen!
 
This week we have tried to recover some of the shock of Holy Week and the truly odd narrative elements that are wildly liberating, but sometimes buried and lost.
 

On Maundy Thursday, Jesus forgives us in advance of our sin. On Good Friday, Jesus declares himself our mother on the cross. On Holy Saturday, the Word goes forth in silence, and wounds become wombs of new creation.
 
Today, Jesus is risen.
 
The women come to the empty tomb, but the Gospel text says the risen Christ cannot be found “among the dead.” The risen Christ has nothing whatsoever to do with death. But there is more. The risen Christ cannot be found at all. No one finds the risen Christ, ever. Nowhere in any of the resurrection accounts do any of the disciples discover or find the risen Christ. The risen Christ always finds us. It is not the disciples who find Jesus. It is Jesus who always finds the unsuspecting disciples. They can make no
claim on being found and neither can we. This is a critically important detail.
 
Moralism is the heavy burden of having to find Jesus. It is like “looking for the living among the dead.” The Gospel is the reverse. It is the inexpressible joy of being found and counted among the living.
 
Confession: I sometimes find Easter the hardest of all the celebrations. Amidst all the cheery hoopla, I sometimes feel the need to engineer my own resurrection encounter. It is a deadening burden. Thankfully, the Gospel is the reminder that the hard work of Easter is on God, not us. It is God’s job to find us, not our job to find God. And when we discover ourselves found, our only burden is the very light and easy burden of joy itself, which is no burden at all. Anything heavier than joy is simply not the Gospel of Jesus.
 
So, relax. The risen Christ is eager to find us and will not stop until he does. Our task, if we can call it that, is simply to be found by the one who is knocking at our door…even now!
 
He is risen indeed!
 
 
Kris Rocke
Executive Director
Street Psalms

 
²⁷Then he said to the disciple, ‘Here is your mother.’
John 18:1-19:42
 
In the Beginning, on the sixth day, on the very first Friday, God created humanity and called us “very good.” Today is another Friday. We call it Good Friday. Today, Jesus recreates humanity in God’s image once again. Creation and the cross — the two are inseparable .
 
I mentioned yesterday that I wanted to recover something of the shock of the passion narrative. Yesterday Jesus insisted that we are forgiven before we sin. Today on the cross, Jesus compares himself to a mother giving birth. I am not making this up.
 

“Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple whom he loved standing beside her, he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.”
 
(John 19:25-27)
 
Of course, the most obvious interpretation is that Jesus is saying to Mary, “Mom, John is now your son, take care of him.” And then he turns to John and says, “Here is your mother.” In other words, “My mother is now your mother, please take care of her.” It is a beautiful act. The cross reconstitutes and recreates the family. We are all family at the foot of the cross. This is a good and fruitful interpretation, but texts like these have many layers.
 
Theologian James Alison points out that when Jesus said, “Woman, here is your son,” he is referring not only to John, but to himself.” In other words Jesus is saying, “Mom, look at me. I am your son, the one to whom you gave birth.” And then Jesus looks at John and says something truly stunning: “John, behold, I am not only my mother’s son. I am not only your friend and brother. I am your mother giving birth to New Creation.”
 
It is not far fetched. Jesus had already compared himself to a mother hen longing to gather her chicks (Luke 13:34). And let’s not forget the first day of creation in Genesis when the Spirit of God (which is the feminine noun “Ruach”) hovers over the deep, like a mother hen brooding her chicks, calling forth life (Gen. 1:2). Yes, the first image of God in Scripture is the image of a mother giving birth!
 
In Jesus’ final act on the cross, “He bowed his head and gave up his spirit” (v. 30). He released the same “spirit” that swept over the face of the deep in the beginning. Jesus released his spirit into darkness and chaos. For three days Jesus’ Spirit hovers and broods like a mother hen, calling forth life from death. In fact, the Gospels tell us, “darkness came over the whole land” at the crucifixion (Luke 23:44). We are back to the beginning!
 
Can we see it now?
 
Today, while we are at our worst, God is at her best — a mother giving birth to New Creation.
 
Behold, here is your mother.
 
 
Kris Rocke
Executive Director
Street Psalms

³⁶As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road. ³⁷As he was
now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen
Luke 19:28-40

Laying down cloaks was an act of homage for royalty. By riding into Jerusalem on the back of a donkey, Jesus was making a public declaration that in fact he was the King and the Messiah that had been prophesied about. People were out of their minds with excitement. They put a cloak on the donkey, put Jesus on its back, and laid cloaks on the ground. As the crowd swelled, people were swept up in the celebration and they shouted,
“Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord”

Their day had come. Finally!

Except that one problem still remained. Who they thought He was, and who He actually was were two different things. Don’t you hate that? Isn’t it frustrating when things don’t turn out the way you thought, or when people aren’t who you expect them to be? The people’s expectations of their Messiah King were going to be completely crushed. He wasn’t going to miraculously free them from Roman rule. In fact, He was about to fail miserably according to their most long-held, dogmatic expectations.

And that was only Day 1 of Jesus’ last week. Every day that follows, Jesus continues to disappoint by turning expectations upside down.

In his last week, Jesus likens the temple to fruitless fig trees, calls out the hypocrisy of temple leaders during the moneychanger’s drama, and lifts up the Samaritan as the example of hospitality and neighborliness over religious leaders who ignore someone in dire need. To top it all off, he affirms the woman who anointed him with expensive perfume as the only disciple in the room who actually knew what was happening; her act preceded Jesus’ washing of the feet. And the list goes on!

When I read the scriptural account of Jesus’ final days, I am left with one prevailing thought— that Jesus was making sure His followers would embrace the “outsider,” the “marginalized,” and the “powerless” as those who have gifts necessary for the community of faith. Jesus put them right in the middle of the discussion— he brought the “margins” into the center of the faith dialogue. And it bugged people. More than once, the religious folk were described as indignant when Jesus went down this road of honoring the dishonorable. This way of thinking is just too threatening and upsetting.

A friend of mine calls it “deconstructing” the status quo. CS Lewis called it “shattering expectations.”

I first heard this CS Lewis quote here at Street Psalms.

“My idea of God is not a divine idea,” CS Lewis says in A Grief Observed. “It has to be shattered time after time. He shatters it himself. He is the great iconoclast. Could we not almost say that this shattering is one of the marks of his presence? The Incarnation is the supreme example; it leaves all previous ideas of the Messiah in ruins.”

Lewis sure was right about that one! The idea of a Messiah who empowers marginalized people by bringing them into the center of the community of faith ruins everything. It could get you killed.

Nobody likes having their ideas about God, faith, or church shattered. Yet, perhaps, we should hold things loosely and consider that maybe, just maybe, these moments of shattering are gifts of God’s grace. They can serve as reminders to not be misled by our own best ideas of who we think God is. In humility, we know that we only see in part. God help us if we think we see it all.

“Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord, who comes to save us.” Save us, Jesus, from our own best ideas of who you are. Shatter what keeps us from seeing you.

Rev. Lina Thompson
Pastor, Lake Burien Presbyterian Church
Longtime Friend and former Board Chair, Street Psalms

 

³¹ “‘My son,’ the father said, ‘you are always with me, and everything I have is yours. 32 But we had to celebrate and be glad, because this brother of yours was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.'”
Luke 15:1-3, 11b-32
 
We continue our trek this Lenten season toward the Cross and our journey this week takes us into a very familiar narrative.
 

Perhaps the most dramatic example in Scripture of God’s abundant, effulgent love is found in the parable of the prodigal son. The word “prodigal” means reckless, extravagant and wasteful spending. When told in its cultural context, however, it is actually the father who emerges as the reckless, extravagant, and wasteful
one – it is the story of a father’s scandalously shameful display of grace.
 
First, the father shames himself when he acquiesces to his youngest son’s request for his inheritance. In Middle Eastern culture, to request an inheritance from one’s father while he lives is tantamount to wishing your father dead.The only thing worse is the father’s willingness to grant the son’s request.
 
The father’s shame becomes community shame in a culture whose strength is derived from the dignity of its elders. Therefore, when the father shames himself for not standing up to the son’s insulting request, he is also shaming his entire village. One of their leading citizens has lost face and his authority as a man of great standing. Consequently, his whole community must unwillingly take on his shame.
 
The father shames himself a second time in front of his village when he rushes to meet his son who, after having exhausted himself on his wild binge, returns to seek refuge in his father’s house. No head of a household worth his manhood would go out to meet his son, let alone run to meet him. Worse yet, he throws himself upon his son with such effusive affection that again his authority and that of the community is completely undermined. No dignified man would kneel to his son’s transgressions. No man would cut short his son’s explanation in order to give his own cloak, ring, and sandals to such a scoundrel. This scene is more shameful than
the first.
 
The father shames himself a third time by throwing a party for his son. The father asks for a fatted calf, which would have fed about one hundred people. In Middle Eastern village culture, the entire community would have been expected to attend such a feast. Refusal would have been an offense. And so the whole village is pulled further into the delusions of a father who refuses to save face and deal with his incorrigible son in the privacy of his own home. This party is not only a shameful party, it is a party for shame itself. By now, even the most calloused and wasteful of sons would have been embarrassed, not for himself, but for the outlandish behavior of his father. There is music and dancing at this party, but it is probable that the father is the only one enjoying himself. The heart of the community turns inward as the father’s heart is poured out.
 
The final act of shame is when the father “comes out” for the second time in this story, but this time it is to meet his oldest son. He does this in full view of the villagers who are likely trying hard to look as if they are enjoying themselves. While the music plays, the oldest son comes in from the fields to discover, to his surprise, a huge party. A young servant tells him about his brother who has come home. True to form, the eldest son is filled with rage at his father’s idiocy. Jealously burns as he hears of his younger brother’s stories. He refuses to enter the party, but stands outside and waits.
 
The party stops. All eyes turn toward the father. We can imagine the guests whispering to one another, “What will he do now? Will he finally demand some dignity and tell his oldest son to show some respect?” But the oldest son stands resolute and we with him. The party, as well as the story, now takes its most awkward turn. The whole community looks on. Even the youngest son, by this time, can hardly watch his old man completely strip himself of all dignity. Heads fall as the father rushes out to meet his oldest son, shaming himself yet again in front of the whole world.
 
Jesus does not tell his hearers the last line of the story. The end of the parable is missing. It is what Jesus fails to say in the story – the missing conclusion – that fully and finally sticks in his listeners’ minds. Like the original audience, we are left to wonder if the eldest son ever goes into the party. Suddenly, we are the eldest son, standing face to face with God’s prodigal grace. We are scandalized by such extravagance and not at all sure we want to attend such an awkward party, let alone befriend such a shameless, prodigal God. It takes courage to celebrate such extravagant grace and build communities that reflect and revel in it.
 
 
Joel Van Dyke
Director of The Urban Training Collaborative
Street Psalms

*Adapted from Geography of Grace: Doing Theology from Below by Kris Rocke and Joel Van Dyke (Chapter 16)

 

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were not willing. Look, your house is left to you desolate.
I tell you, you will not see me again until you say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.

Luke 13:31- 35

Jerusalem was in trouble, and she didn’t even know it. Jesus’ prophetic words here in chapter 13 are dripping with sorrow and regret. Corruption in the temple, spiritual unfruitfulness and willful disobedience cause Jesus to weep when he looks over the City of Peace and laments its impending destruction.
Jesus has a clear picture of what is in his heart for his people, and he reaches for an image to adequately describe his feelings. The metaphor he chooses is instructive— a mother hen whose heart longs for her children.

Here’s what I’ve learned about
mother hens.

When they gather their chicks under their wings, like Jesus is talking about here, it’s usually about protection. Often in the face of danger, hens open their wings, and their chicks instinctively know that’s where they go for safety. No harm will come to them there. This is a surprisingly powerful image Jesus has chosen; it conveys his yearning for a relationship with his people. He longs to save them and protect them from what is coming; oddly, he is acting to save and protect his people from their own ignorance.

Typically (or stereotypically), the God-like attribute assigned to women is that of a “nurturer,” not a “protector.”

This passage suggests something different. Mother hens protect.

I’ve seen this first hand. I’ve seen women fight — physically fight — with men to protect themselves and their children. They’ve hovered over their little ones when violence erupts in their homes or on their streets. This narrative of “women/moms as protectors” is empowering and affirming, though it is probably not the norm in most Christian circles.

This is the kind of protection that Jesus wanted to provide Jerusalem and her children. They were unwilling to receive it because they didn’t know they needed it.

I have come to realize there are people who are willing to receive help and people who are not. I continue to sit in conversations with people about opportunities for job training, drug rehab, a chance to finish high-school, advocacy with health care, etc. After 30 years, it still surprises me when people are unwilling to receive real support and help.

Here’s the thing…

Sometimes I am unwilling, too. I’m unwilling to surrender what makes me comfortable, what gives me affirmation, what gives me power and what gives me security – even if it’s faulty.

I have to remember this paradox. We are all like mother hens – protecting and gathering.
We are also like chicks – scattering and unwilling to receive the grace, acceptance and
safety of Jesus.

Street Psalms is uniquely positioned to help deepen the kind of spirituality that can hold the tension I just described. I am not either/or. Instead, I’m both. The church is also both – called out to protect, love, and shelter, and also called to humbly confess our pride and unwillingness to act in obedience to God’s commandments.

Lent calls us to a deeper reflection on these things as we make our way toward Resurrection Sunday. May God meet you in the journey.

Rev. Lina Thompson
Pastor, Lake Burien Presbyterian Church
Longtime Friend and former Board Chair, Street Psalms

 
And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white.
-Luke 9:29
 
The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being….
-Hebrews 1:3
 
When my daughter Sofia was seven years old, she once unabashedly told me that I was the “best Papi in the world.” In a selfish effort to boost my fragile ego, I asked her why she thought this to be true. She simply smiled at me and said, “because you’re mine.”
 

Our Gospel text this week (Luke 9:28-36) stands as a profound signpost in the narrative accounts of Matthew, Mark and Luke. On the mountaintop where the Transfiguration occurs, we are presented with a definitive answer to a question that is repeatedly posed in the aforementioned Gospels. The question is: Who is this man that wind and waves obey? Who is this man that heals the sick and forgives sins? The Transfiguration becomes the place in each Gospel where the answer to these questions is proclaimed. It is where Jesus turns his face toward Jerusalem, opening the first chapter in the final act of his life on earth.
 
The images we see in Luke 9, of lightning, clouds, glory, and the voice of God, act as a recapitulation of the scene at Mount Sinai during the Exodus; Moses came down from the mountain with his face aglow. He was shining with a reflected light-a reflected glory. Just as the moon radiates with the light from the sun, Moses was reflecting a light from
somewhere else.
 
However, in the brilliance of Jesus’ appearance on the Mount of Transfiguration, there is no glory that comes DOWN on Jesus; rather, glory comes OUT of him. It emanates from him as opposed to being reflected upon him from some other source. Jesus is the source of his own light. The Glory Cloud in the Old Testament was a partial representation of the glory of God, but Jesus IS the glory of God. Hence, the writer of Hebrews states “the Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being….”
 
As a witness to what is unfolding on the mountaintop, Peter is starstruck when he rubs the sleep from his eyes and sees Jesus standing in conversation with two heroes of the faith–Moses and Elijah. The three are discussing the fulfillment of Jesus’ departure. In Greek, the word “departure” is actually “exodus.” The death and resurrection of Jesus is the ultimate exodus. While Moses liberated God’s people from economic and social oppression, Jesus will soon liberate them from sin, and even death itself.
 
As always, the reliably impulsive Peter blurts out his proposal to build a shelter (tabernacles) for each radiant hero, as if the three were equally prominent. However, the voice of God shatters that idea from within the cloud that envelops them. He declares, “This is my Son, whom I have chosen; listen to him.”
 
Jesus is NOT one more prophet in a long history of great prophets headlined by Elijah. He is not one more prophet trying to get near to God; instead, he is the God that all prophets are trying to get near. He is not a new and better lawgiver simply taking over where Moses left off. Jesus is the ultimate fulfillment of the law and the prophets. He is utterly unique!! Jesus doesn’t reflect glory; he IS glory. He is the chosen Son of God, and as such, worthy of total and complete allegiance.
 
My seven year-old daughter never doubted the core identity of the man standing in front of her, nor did she question to whom she belonged. The voice of God in the cloud of glory proclaims who Jesus is-Son, Messiah and the perfect and final representation of God. A transfigured Jesus, a supernatural Jesus, is the only Jesus. You either utterly reject him or totally build your life around him. It’s all or nothing as his face, and ours with him, now turns to what awaits in Jerusalem.
 
 
Joel Van Dyke
Director of Urban Training Collaborative
Street Psalms

 

Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” …Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.”
John 18:33, 36

Most of us in the Street Psalms network don’t live in autocratic political regimes. We catch glimpses in the news every day – Syria, North Korea, ISIS. Given the options we’re glad to live in our democracies, however corrupt and dysfunctional, instead of dictatorships.

I’ve lived in Thailand under the longest reigning monarch in the world, Bhumibol Adulyadej, referred to by subjects as Phra Bat Somdet Phra Chao Yu Hua (“His Majesty the Lord Upon our Heads”). Everyone I knew adored him as a wise ruler, and I did too, which was a good thing because Thailand has among the strictest lèse majesté (violating majesty) laws in the world. Never a hint of critique in the local or foreign press. A biography on my own bookshelf is banned, tourists overheard in bars have been prosecuted, and hundreds of citizens are incarcerated for indiscretions of speech. I met the king once, on his birthday, on my knees. He caught my eye. People around me fainted.

This coming Sunday is Christ the King Sunday as observed in many churches around the world. It is the last Sunday before Advent. The timing is interesting and worth reflection: How did our Lord and King enter this world, and move through his life in it? How on earth does he actually rule?

Closely woven with his way of being among us, Jesus taught us. His central metaphor was the “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven” – used 99 times in the New Testament. For those of us who don’t live under military occupation, the imagery can fall a bit flat and abstract – a theological term to be unpacked. For Jesus’s hearers the term “kingdom” must have elicited a visceral response, and not necessarily a pleasant one. Jesus’s hearers went about their lives under the rule of an emperor, governed by a vassal king, policed by soldiers not shy about brutality, and shaken down by slimy local tax agents. The image of “kingdom” stirred vivid thoughts and emotions.

In this week’s scripture passage Jesus is on trial, exposed. But the tables are being turned. Jesus has come bearing witness to the truth (John 18:37). In so doing he exposes the dominant – and domineering – world system for what it is. The Roman Emperor’s way of power is violence and control, and Pilate is his local stand-in. If that were this prisoner-king’s way of power – the sovereign who arrived in a manger and upon a donkey – his followers would be fighting. If his authority derived from dominance, his crown would not be woven from thorns.

“But as it is, my kingdom is not from here” (vs. 36). The key word is “from,” a translation of the tiny Greek word “ek.” Other translations have it “of” – which makes it sound otherworldly, removed. But Jesus has made it clear that his kingdom is very much for this world: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (Matt. 6:10). Interestingly, “ek” is most commonly translated elsewhere as “out of.” So: “My kingdom is not derived out of the ways this world rules itself.”

“God so loved the world” (John 3:16) in such a way that the world, and humanity, could be shown a different way of constituting itself. Not just shown, but loved to life! Such life will have an enduring and eternal quality, not derived from the world systems of power, control, and violence against rivals. Such systems permeate every level of human co-existence. A biblical word for this is sin. As such, the Roman Empire is exposed as humanity-destroying… but that’s hardly the extent of it. Social systems, religious systems, economic systems, the workings of our inner psychology that rely on dominance and exclusion – all are revealed to be death-dealing and false, in light of the embodied Truth being revealed in this courtroom drama.

A kingdom not from this world, but given in love for this world. Christ the King, Immanuel, enfleshed with us in breathtaking majesty and power.

Peace,
Scott Dewey
Street Psalms

Image: “Headstone at Ingham Norfolk”  by mira66 (CC BY 2.0)

“He sat down opposite the treasury, and watched the crowd putting money into the treasury.”
Mark 12:41

“When he was sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple….”
Mark 13:3

Our Gospel text this week is commonly preached at stewardship time to exhort faithful churchgoers to give their all – just like the widow who put into the treasury “more than all those who are contributing” (Mark 12:43). However, perhaps a look at the context of the story and the posture and positioning of Jesus challenges us to re-examine what might lie behind the comment Jesus makes to his disciples as he watches the widow’s actions.

The passage starts with Jesus warning his followers to beware of those who like to walk around in pompous clothing, high-fiving their homies while they demand seats of honor and offer up pretentious prayers. The cumulative effect of their actions, Jesus says, is that they “devour widows’ houses” (v. 40). That last piece is highly significant because of what unfolds next.

Jesus, sitting opposite (over against) the treasury, watches a bunch of guys wearing expensive clothes take a widow’s last two coins (mites) – all that she has to live on. He makes a comment about the beauty of her actions, but behind his words we can also read a scathing socio-cultural criticism of temple-based economics. In fact, he shows her actions as prophetic in revealing an oppressive system that no longer protects and serves the poor but instead “devours” them.

“Did you see the offering of the widow?” Jesus asks his disciples. “In case you think that the warning I just made about the scribes is unwarranted, this woman has just deposited all she had into an offering used to maintain the very oppressive system that has devoured her house in order to build another.” Could it be that Jesus is calling attention to the widow’s actions not so much for her giving but as a continuation of his pesky habit of pointing out the injustice of the scribes, the wealthy, and the oppressive system of temple-based economics that had been built for self-sustainability by those in power?

Perhaps the focus of this story is not tethered to the significance of her generosity in giving her last two “mites,” but rather in the might of her prophetic action that exposes systemic injustice for what it really is.

The rich give out of abundance while the widow gives out of her poverty. The question before us is: who truly ends up poor and rich in this story? Aren’t the power-mongers who play games of death in the sacrificial cults more impoverished than this widow who reveals the cults’ true nature by throwing in her entire living? She is a prophet; they are not. Their gifts do nothing to reveal the nature of the sacrifice. Her actions, on the other hand, have the prophetic might to reveal what is at the heart of the matter.

In 2005, we held in Guatemala City a consultation on gang violence called Street Psalms. In attendance were some 75 pastors and community leaders from the capital of every country in Central America. In an attempt to talk with gang members and not about them, we gave the first word of the extended three-day conversation to active gang members.

But because many of the gang members we wanted to engage at the event were incarcerated and unable to attend, we had given them an assignment: a month earlier, we asked them to write for us what they wanted to say to the pastors and community leaders. Here is a portion of the “offering” that came from their written communications:

“Frequently we have seen growth in the physical structure of many churches. We see leaders with a competitive attitude choosing, it seems, to compete with other churches while abandoning the needs that exist in prisons, neighborhoods, slums, and rehabilitation centers. The priority of these churches always seems to be focused on the comfort of their respective members so they can feel like VIPs. They have lost, or perhaps just forgotten, the vision of Jesus Christ, who said, “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations.” We don’t want to criticize just for the sake of being critical. [We do want] to stand for the truth that while churches are constructing huge sanctuaries and creating Christian clubs, there are children dying of hunger, gang members killing one another, and prisoners suffering greatly – all the while you Christians comfort yourselves in your nice, big, comfortable churches.”

Are we open to learn from Jesus the prophetic sight to see in the words and actions of the oppressed and marginalized the might to shed the light of truth on corrupt, self-serving systems – religious or otherwise?

Peace,
Joel Van Dyke
Street Psalms

Image: “Widow’s Mite” by Royce Bair (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

“Many sternly ordered him to be quiet, but he cried out even more loudly”

– Mark 10:48

Our lectionary text this week invites us into one of the principal issues for us at Street Psalms – knowing how to see. Ironically, our teacher this week in learning how to see is actually a blind man. Many Biblical scholars have placed this text at the end of a portion of Mark’s Gospel that begins with the healing of a blind man, thus the section starting with Mark 8:22 and ending with Mark 10:52 is bookended by the healing of blind men. In between these two miracles, Jesus is trying feverishly to get the disciples to see and understand what he’s saying about his death and resurrection, but they are blind to his teachings.

In the text (Mark 10:46-52), we are introduced to a blind man sitting by a roadside begging. As far as the art of begging is concerned, this occasion holds the potential for significant income because it’s during a great religious parade of pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem for the Passover feast. Bartimaeus cannot physically see anything as the people pass in front of him, but he discerns something with his heart that seizes his attention. He asks those around him what is occurring and learns that Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.

To the embarrassment of those around him, Bartimaeus yells and screams until Jesus stops to invite him to a meeting in the street. Those around Bartimaeus had tried desperately to shut him up in an attempt to save him from impending shame. Bartimaeus, however, relentlessly pursued an audience with Jesus.

Considering the absurdity of his actions, he becomes a living metaphor that embodies the heart of the conclusion to Last Lovers, a novel in which author William Wharton writes that “perhaps sometimes it is best to be blind, so one can see the way things really are, and not be blinded by the way they look.”

During this encounter in the middle of the street, Jesus asks a beautiful question of Bartimaeus: “What do you want me to do for you?” This kind of beautiful question animates our work at Street Psalms as we explore together what it means to have the ability of Bartimaeus to see with one’s heart the presence of Jesus of Nazareth in unexpected people and surprising places. This is the ability first to discern the presence of the Divine and then the courage to not let the sacred moment pass by without hearing one’s personal “beautiful question” from the lips of Jesus. It is the art of knowing how to see.

In his book entitled Summoned to Lead, Leonard Sweet described a 1999 Panasonic ad campaign called “Leonardo de Vinci: The Art of Seeing.” It centered on da Vinci’s philosophy, summed up in two words: saper vedere, or “knowing how to see.” As a scientist, philosopher, inventor, and artist, da Vinci enlisted the concept of saper vedere to engage the world around him. To him, life was measured by one’s ability to see correctly. He described the almost mystical process of artists as not simply painting what they see, but their ability to see what they paint.

While the folks on that road to Jericho were blind, Bartimaeus was able to see using the eyes of his heart. The temptation to move ahead without saper vedere – before knowing how to see – is strong. But usually when we cave to that temptation, we cause more problems than we solve. Then it is easy to miss the beautiful question rolling off the lips of the Master who speaks through some very unexpected people and in some very surprising places.

As poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in “Aurora Leigh”:

Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God,
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes,
The rest sit round and pluck blackberries.

Peace,
Joel Van Dyke
Street Psalms

p.s. Explore a pop culture illustration of saper vedere, or read how it shapes Street Psalms’s vision trips.

Image: “Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus” by William Blake (c. 1800)

As he was setting out on a journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”

Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone.”

– Mark 10:17-18

We’ll find out in a few verses that “give up your wealth” isn’t what this man wants to hear. But putting aside for a moment the questions about entering heaven with or without our respective riches, or what size holes camels can actually fit through, first let’s consider just one word: “good.”

All three synoptic gospels note that Jesus takes issue with the phrasing of the rich man’s use of the word “good.” And each time Jesus says that only one is good, and that one is God.

This seems a little strange, because the Bible starts with the goodness of everything. Genesis 1:1-2:4 is nothing but God unfolding creation, sitting back, and seeing that it is good every step of the way. Actually, the first thing God calls not good is Adam’s solitude: “It is not good that the man should be alone” (Gen. 2:18).

We know, from scripture and often from experience, that being too long without companionship is not good. But scripture also reveals to us another easily-recognizable facet of human nature: that rivalry is ever lurking beneath or at the edges of our relationships, from Cain and Abel up through this week’s encounter. We have already seen the hapless disciples bickering over who of them is greatest. They wanted Jesus to castigate any ministers working without the proper certification.

And despite Jesus’s efforts, the rivalry will continue. In a thorough essay on envy and jealousy, scholars Anselm Hagedorn and Jerome Neyrey point out that the Gospel of Mark says it explicitly: “For [Jesus] realized that it was out of jealousy that the chief priests had handed him over” (Mark 15:10).

Perhaps we can see Jesus’s somewhat harsh initial response to this man’s question as another in a series of Jesus’s efforts to slow the growing rivalry that will ultimately lead to his death.

The perfect breeding grounds for envy, according to Hagedorn and Neyrey, are: (1) the idea that there is a limited amount of good, (2) rivalistic society, and (3) cultural values of honor and shame. From the time of his humble birth, Jesus has been trying to flip the script on ancient notions of honor, shame, and prestige. As we saw last week when he defended a child from the disciples, his followers’ insistence on clinging to old ideas of power is really starting to make Jesus mad. His crankiness seems to carry over here into his response to the wealthy man.

Maybe he also knows the man’s phrasing is more illustrative then the man realizes. Perhaps for those of us who are not the Creator, the presence of “good” seems to necessitate a “bad.” Like money, there is only so much good to go around, the voice of scarcity tells us.

Which brings us to the rich man’s actual question, and Jesus’s famous answer: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God” (v. 25).

The disciples quickly recognize Jesus’s words are not about the rich man alone: “Then who can be saved?” Jesus is talking about all of us whose attachments to the stuff of this world blind us to the reality of God’s goodness that’s available to everyone.

What if what binds us isn’t just the stuff of this world, but also – and this can be especially tricky for some Christians – attachment to the very idea of personal “goodness”?

One adage of 12-step programs is “let go and let God.” More informally, another truism is that “everything I’ve let go of has had claw marks all over it.”

What do you cling to that keeps you from seeing? As with wealth, could an obsession with the idea of “good” be keeping you from the one ultimate good: God?

Peace,
Stephanie Dunlap
Street Psalms

Image: “envys” by cranky messiah (CC BY-ND 2.0)

 

This week’s lectionary Gospel text, Mark 9:38-50, is not for the faint of heart. The disciples encounter “someone” casting out demons in the name of Jesus. They want to shut down this rogue minister and put an end to his ministry because he’s not part of their inner circle.

But the outsider and his ministry is no threat to Jesus whatsoever. He says, “Whoever is not against us is for us.” The real threat that Jesus exposes in this text is the hidden envy brewing in the disciples’ hearts. Jesus warns the disciples that if they insist on picking a fight with the freelance minister, it is they – not the freelancer – who will end up in hell. Whoa!

By the way, the unnamed “someone” in this text is the patron saint of all those ministers who live and serve on the margins without the right credentials or official ordination from the home mission office. I am tempted to focus on such unsanctioned ministries that are blessing our cities, but this text is primarily about the envy of the disciples. It is about how envy inflames rivalries, and creates what Jesus calls stumbling blocks (skandalizō), from which we get the word scandal.

Jesus repeats the word scandal in verb from (stumble) three times throughout the text. Jesus does not mince words. “If your hand causes you to stumble, cut it off…. If your foot causes you to stumble, cut it off…. If your eye causes you to stumble, tear it out.” In other words, get rid of whatever leads you (and others) into scandal because scandals always produce scapegoats, and that is truly the hell of your own making.

The disciples are green with envy at the unauthorized ministry of this rogue minister. The problem, of course, is that they can’t see it. That’s how envy works. It is obvious to all who look on, but it remains hidden to those who have it. Envy secretly sows seeds of rivalry and rivalries become scandals that produce scapegoats. That is why Jesus says that it would be better for the disciples to cut off their hands, chop off their feet, and gouge out their eyes, than to let envy run its course. The tragic irony is that this is exactly what happens to Jesus on the cross.

This is not the time nor place to catalogue the untold scandals created by competing mission agencies and churches who are each convinced that they have a mandate from God and program from heaven that will save the city from destruction. I’ve seen (and participated in) ministry turf wars that would make rival street gangs blush.

By the time a turf war is full-blown, the competing rivals may look like bitter enemies who are completely at odds, but underneath it all they truly envy one another and are actually very much alike. This is what the disciples are blind to and what Jesus sees with utter clarity. This is precisely what happened in the Garden of Eden. It happens in urban ministry and around office water coolers everywhere.

Scandals have dual energies, as Rene Girard points out. We are both fascinated and repelled by those we envy. Like certain chemical compounds, this dual energy is combustible. For Jesus, envy is the root sin of humanity, which is why Jesus speaks so dramatically, even grotesquely, to make his point. The great writer Flannery O’Connor said, “I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.” This is precisely what Jesus is doing. He’s using the grotesque image of self-sacrifice and self-mutilation to expose the even more grotesque nature of what we do to each other when we burn with envy. A world gone mad with envy will destroy itself.

The only way out this scandal is to let the cross of Christ confront our hidden envy and do what we cannot do for ourselves, which is—forgive us! There is no other way.

Peace,
Kris Rocke
Street Psalms

Image: “Rival” by Dubwise Version (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

He asked them, “But who do you say that I am?”
– Mark 8:29

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.
– W.B. Yeats, “The Second Coming”

Perhaps the most beautiful question Jesus ever asked his disciples is found at the very center of the Gospel of Mark. In ancient Jewish literature, the key to a story’s meaning is often found in the middle of the story rather than the end, as is often the case in Western storytelling. This emphasis on the center is most obvious in Jewish “chiastic” poetry, often found in the Psalms; the very center of the poem gives the main point. For the Jewish storyteller, each story has a “sacred center” that contains its unique treasure of meaning.

The Gospel of Mark contains sixteen chapters, so if we follow the notion of the “sacred center” with our lectionary text this week, something really important might be found around Chapter 8. There we find Jesus in Caesarea Philippi. What is so special about this place, and why does Jesus choose it to ask such a beautiful and important question of his disciples: “Who do you say that I am?”

If you look at a map of the time, it will show Caesarea Philippi to be at the extreme northern border of Jesus’s ministry, and as far as we know, he never ventured further away from Jerusalem than this point. Perhaps there are some questions that can only be asked in certain places? Why didn’t Jesus save this riveting question for Jerusalem, the sacred center of an entire culture? Perhaps because a place like Jerusalem would have elicited a different answer. There, an entire history and culture would have weighed in, making it an unfair place for the disciples to consider the full possibilities of Jesus’s identity. It seems that Jesus knew that his disciples needed to be removed from that context in order to even consider anything other than prevailing viewpoints, unexamined assumptions, and accepted norms.

This is a core principle of the vision trips that Street Psalms hosts around the world. It is this journey to “Caesarea Philippi” for groups from far away places that provide the same kind of space that Jesus gave his disciples before posing his all-important question to them. Perhaps we today, like the disciples 2,000 years ago, simply cannot consider certain questions amid the sacred centers of our personal upbringing or respective denominational camps because those places tend to answer the questions for us. The question of “Who do you say that I am?” sounds very different when asked in a cemetery overlooking 3,000 people working in a garbage dump to scratch out a meager existence than it does from the comfort of a Sunday School classroom.

Jesus saves his highest and holiest question for a place on the northernmost edge of his ministry, furthest away from all that is most sacred to his disciples. In the same way, God takes us through circumstances far “north” of our sacred centers of understanding and experience to pose what may be the most vital questions. God holds in reserve the highest and holiest questions for remote and sometimes dark places at the edge of our own cultural, physical, theological, emotional, and spiritual maps.

Not only in this text, but also in our personal lives and in the dynamics of our communities, we can see the severe mercy of God de-centering and re-centering. When things fall apart – when centers we cherish as sacred and secure “cannot hold,” to use Yeats’s poetic image – there is invariably the possibility for new and life-giving sight.

What does the place of “Caesarea Philippi” represent for you this week? Where is the northernmost place that God has taken (or is taking) you, and how do you answer the question in Mark 8 differently because of where you have been or are going? How has your personal journey opened your eyes to a deeper encounter of who Jesus is?

Peace,
Joel Van Dyke and Kris Rocke
Adapted by Joel Van Dyke, Director of Urban Training Collaborative, from Geography of Grace

Featured photo: View from the cemetery overlooking the largest dump in Latin America (Stephanie Dunlap, Street Psalms)

So the Pharisees and the scribes asked him, “Why do your disciples not live according to the tradition of the elders, but eat with defiled hands?…. Then he called the crowd again and said to them, “Listen to me, all of you, and understand: there is nothing outside a person that by going in can defile, but the things that come out are what defile.”

–  Mark 7:5,14-15

At Street Psalms, as at our longtime organizational partner Mile High Ministries, we lift up a perspective of peacemaking. This week we experimented with this podcast in which we interview Mile High Ministries Executive Director Jeff Johnsen about his take on the 2011 book Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Mortality by Richard Beck.

Richard Beck is Professor of Psychology at Abilene Christian University. On his blog Experimental Theology, Beck writes: “This radical openness to the Other always seems to get undermined in our churches. Why is that?, I mused. After thinking about it, the answer hit me. And it was a simple answer. The same thing that caused the exclusion of people from table fellowship in Jesus’s day is the exact same thing that causes the exclusion today. That is, a group of people is considered to be ‘unclean’ and these people are just not welcome. The reasons for being declared ‘unclean’ might have changed, but the underlying dynamic is still the same. And I began to realize: The logic of being ‘unclean,’ a source of ‘spiritual pollution,’ was undermining Jesus’ radical call to love.”

Listen here, then please let us know what you think.

Peace,
Jeff Johnsen of Mile High Ministries, with Stephanie Dunlap and Brian Rossbert
Street Psalms Community

“I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” 
– John 6:51

Meal From Below rests on a bold and liberating assumption: there is a eucharistic shape to life, not just the Christian life, but to all lives everywhere. Celebrating Holy Communion may be particular to the Christian tradition, but it is not a religious rite that separates us from the rest of the world – quite the contrary.

Our participation in Holy Communion unites us with the world, particularly those people and places in the world with whom we are most estranged. The Lord’s Table is a radically inclusive table that not only makes room for the “least of these,” it gives them preferred seating. These honored diners are precisely the ones who best remind us that the Eucharist is not the property of Christians as it is sometimes portrayed. It is the universal sign of God’s peace for all.

As Christians, we are not only invited to enjoy the feast, we are also called to be table waiters who bear witness to the abundance and goodness of God’s meal, as well as the unlimited seating at the table of God’s grace. Consequently, we don’t own the table. It is the Lord’s Table and we are all God’s guests. Christians are guests who bear witness to God’s goodness at work in all creation.

Peace,
Kris Rocke and Scott Dewey
Street Psalms

Excerpted from Introduction to Meal from Below.

Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven.

For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”

They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.

– John 6:32-35

Throughout his life and ministry, Jesus modeled for us the life-long human liturgy of being taken, blessed, broken, given, and spoken into existence. This week’s lectionary passage continues a series of Gospel excerpts in which Jesus prepares for the Eucharist by proclaiming that he is the bread of life. As we wrote last week, we structured the book of devotionals Meal From Below around the five verbs of Jesus’s Eucharist invitations:

Taken. We feast on God’s love as the foundation of all life and transformation.

Blessed. We drink deeply of the Incarnation and life of Christ as the blessing of God’s presence.

Broken. We taste God’s own experience of suffering on the cross.

Given. We savor life inside the Resurrection and its gift to the world.

Spoken. We digest the living Word that speaks all of life into existence.

As summer reaches its height, we invite you to relax into the poetry of these words. Which speaks to you today?

Peace,
Kris Rocke and Scott Dewey
Street Psalms

Excerpted from Introduction to Meal from Below. 

Photo: “Bread” by Alex Johnson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

He said to them, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while.”
 –  Mark 6:31 

This week our globally dispersed Street Psalms staff gathers to work and to rest through a retreat in the far upper left of the United States (that is, Hood Canal, WA).

As Jesus shows us in this week’s lectionary, even the most devoted disciples need to set boundaries for self-care.

“Daring to set boundaries is about having the courage to love ourselves, even when we risk disappointing others,” says vulnerability and shame researcher Brené Brown. (Her TED talk on “The Power of Vulnerability” has more than 20 million views.)

Vulnerability is also one of what Street Psalms and our partners in the Urban Training Collaborative call our “Manners of Mission.” (Read more about our UTC Training Foundations.)

So we will be vulnerable with you, friends, and tell you that we are tired and we will rest, and we will go fishing and crabbing and running, and we will read some good books, eat good food together, enjoy good conversations, and pray for our next season of good work.

And we pray that this summer, you too find ways to come away and rest.

Peace,
The Street Psalms Team

He called the twelve and began to send them out two by two, and gave them authority over the unclean spirits. He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics. He said to them, “Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave the place.”
– Mark 6:7-10

Having given away or sold most of our stuff, my wife Melanie and I were headed to Asia as community development workers with an organization called Gooddeeds. The name pretty much summed up what we wanted to do. As a young couple we wanted to engage our lives and our faith with the poorest, someplace. Woefully clueless but eager, we cast about for, well, clues. Tips, training, insights – anything to steer us in the right direction.

Decades later I’m immensely glad somebody put us onto Tom and Elizabeth Brewster. Deeply troubled by their observations and experience of Western missionaries’ typical approaches to new cultures, the Brewsters were helping ministry workers of their era imagine a new and better posture of engagement with local people. Their prescriptions were controversial and groundbreaking for their time, though others were calling for even more extreme remedies (“a moratorium on missions,” some Christian leaders advocated). Our world has shifted and some of the Brewsters’s ideas sound quirky and dated, but their core insights might be even more instructive today.

The Brewsters outlined four simple, basic conditions under which outsiders should engage a vulnerable community. In fact, in their own organizational circles, they would not enlist foreign staff or volunteers who were not eager to commit to each of these:

1. Be willing to live with a local family.
2. Limit personal belongings to 20 kilos (44 pounds).
3. Use only local public transportation.
4. Carry out language learning in the context of relationships that the learner is responsible to develop and maintain (rather than enroll in language school).

Oh, and one other thing. These four conditions start from day one, minute one, right off the plane. No guesthouse the first night. No seasoned expat showing you the ropes. No language school or phrasebooks. No posse of teammates with identical T-shirts – just two people at the most, or possibly a couple with kids. Plunk in the middle of family life, usually in a poor community, ideally with not a word you can understand.

Melanie and I were crazy and naive enough to try this. Before the sun rose our second day in an Asian city, we regretted ever having heard of the Brewsters. We were in a riptide of disorientation, utterly helpless. I recall almost whimpering. I couldn’t grasp what had happened or how, and fought for air.

By the second and third day it was… worse. I can’t even say when it was better. Weeks? Months? Surely we had been poorly advised.

What I know now is that we were being born, again. Having watched births, I don’t know how anyone survives it.

Elizabeth Brewster watched a lot of births. A student of infant bonding and attachment, as well as newborn “imprinting” in the animal world, she understood that from the first moments of life, humans bond and belong to those who meet their needs – typically our mothers. If basic needs are provided by hospital staff instead, babies may be imprinted with a surrogate. If by some misfortune needs are not met, babies may fail to bond at all, with crippling and socially toxic consequences.

In other words, infants are profoundly vulnerable. It is a necessary condition of any belonging, and eventually any robust life that will bless the world.

According to Jesus vulnerability is, most counter-intuitively, an absolutely necessary condition of authentic authority.

Of course the Brewsters’s four conditions aren’t absolute, thank goodness. I’ll be in Nairobi shortly, staying in a guesthouse the first night after my Kenyan friends pick me up. But I see now the humble, learning posture these four simple rigors were designed to cultivate. They gave birth to a new form of life that was just not gonna happen by gentle means.

The Brewsters’s crazy ideas weren’t new. Jesus divvied up his raggedy band so they’d be even more raggedy. “No bread, no bag, no money in their belts.” What a strategy! The absolute and necessary conditions of an authority that would astonish all who encountered it. An authority profoundly nourished by the very people and communities among whom the disciples would speak and be the good news of God.

Any other kind of authority has proven tragically to be bad news all over. Youch, don’t ask me how I know. We messed up plenty in that Asian city, and got messed up. But whatever good news I’ve ever been part of – by amazing grace – came with the strangely powerful authority of open, empty hands.

Peace,
Scott Dewey
Street Psalms

 

Photo: “Newborn” by Jlhopgood (CC BY-ND 2.0)

The kingdom of God is like seeds that grow while we sleep and weeds that invade the garden.
– a paraphrase of Mark 4:26-34

Jesuit priest Anthony de Mello said, “The shortest distance between a human and truth is a story.” Arguments rarely do anything but invest us more deeply into our little “truths.” We almost never see Jesus being sucked into a debate. Instead he tells stories and riddles that confuse and disorient his hearers. They are like time-release capsules that work on us from the inside-out. They frustrate our analytical left brain long enough for our right brain to breathe and see things from a new perspective.

In this week’s text Jesus tells two parables that lift up the twin graces of the Kingdom of God – radical abundance and radical acceptance.

Radical Abundance

In the first parable Jesus reminds us of the most elemental truth about the Kingdom of God, a truth that mirrors creation itself. There is a wild fecundity inscribed into the DNA of creation. Creation always and everywhere calls forth life, even while we sleep. The Kingdom of God, like creation itself, relentlessly comes into being – so relax! Take a breath. Take a nap. Interestingly, there are no active verbs in the Gospels associated with the Kingdom of God. All verbs related to the Kingdom are passive. Jesus invites us to notice, accept, receive, and bear witness to the Kingdom, but nowhere does he tell us to build it. We can’t! It already exists and that’s the point. Our job is to see it – to harvest and harness its goodness.

This is especially good news for justice workers who can easily burn themselves (and others) out trying to “build” the Kingdom for the “least of these.” As Martin Luther King Jr. said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” Yes, Christ is the deepest impulse in creation, calling all things toward wholeness! The heavy lifting of the Kingdom is on God’s shoulders, not ours. This is why we can trust what others have called “spiritual evolution.” If we can’t see this, I don’t know how we work for justice and remain sane.

Radical Acceptance

The second parable of the mustard seed reveals the scandalous grace of the Kingdom. It subverts the closed and controlling moral systems that we create in the name of God to protect the in-group from the out-group, dividing the clean from the unclean and eliminating anyone or anything not on our team.

Unfortunately, in a big-box culture like ours where size matters, the parable of the mustard seed is often interpreted as a parable about growth; what starts as a small seed becomes the largest of trees. However, if growth was his main point, Jesus chose a poor metaphor. A fully grown mustard tree is only about six feet. The farmers in the crowd would have quickly recognized the parable was not about bigness. The mustard tree is a weed no farmer wants in the garden. It is an unclean shrub that farmers spend their days trying to eliminate. Small mustard seeds grow into large weeds that attract birds that in turn eat the good seeds the farmer spends his whole life trying to cultivate and protect.

We serve among the mustard seeds that our world is eager to eliminate. But Jesus reveals that these weeds are at the center of God’s kingdom! That which we are so eager to eliminate and judge holds the key to our salvation… always!

Radical abundance, radical acceptance, these are the twin graces of God’s Kingdom.

Peace,
Kris Rocke
Street Psalms

 

Photo: “Brassica juncea wild mustard” by Petr Pakandl (CC BY-SA 2.5)

“He will glorify me, because he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine.”
– John 16:14-15a

Last week in Guatemala City, the work of the Holy Spirit as described by Jesus in John 16 was brought to life in vivid texture amidst a senseless tragedy. Blanca Gomez, loving mother of eight, descended the path into the densely inhabited ravine known as “La Limonada” to bring some lunch to her son. She was caught in the crossfire of two rival gangs and died from multiple gun shot wounds the next day on the operating table.

Pastor Erwin “Shorty” Luna had served as pastor to Blanca and her children for the past several years, and news of her violent and senseless death devastated him.He was so distraught that he himself was admitted to the hospital emergency room with serious respiratory problems. Released after a few hours of care, Shorty would go on to bear the most concrete image of the Paraclete – the Advocate – that I have ever witnessed.

“In Guatemala, even the dead have to wait in line.”
– Pastor Erwin “Shorty” Luna

The day of Blanca’s funeral, there was such a long line at the morgue from people who had died over the weekend that Blanca’s family had to wait in line to receive her body before preparing the internment.

I arrived at the cemetery only to enter the chaos of seven simultaneous funeral processions all lined up and waiting to enter the same small corridor where the caskets would be inserted into the rectangular holes that lined both sides of the walls. I made my way through the throngs of mourners in line around their respective caskets looking for Pastor Shorty and Blanca’s family and friends.

What I discovered will forever be etched into my mind as an image of the way Jesus described the work of the Holy Spirit in John 16. Near the end of Jesus’s life he promises his disciples that while he will not be with them much longer, he will be sending to them the “paraclete.” The Greek word Parakletos is translated from the Greek as “advocate,” “helper,” “comforter” or “intercessor.”

The idea of Jesus’s departure no doubt sparked fear and anxiety into the hearts of the disciples, but in this week’s lectionary passage Jesus promises the presence of His Spirit in another who will be sent.

In the middle of mourning and the wailing of children calling out for the mother who would never again respond to their cries, I saw Pastor Shorty at the head of Blanca’s casket with his arms around the wailing children, crying with them and taking turns holding them up against his broad chest. He said nothing, preached no sermon, read no Scripture. He was just there, and it was obvious to all that his presence was what made all the difference.

Jesus tells his disciples that they need not despair his impending death, for the work of the paraclete who is to come will be to testify by the side of victims, to be their advocate, and to expose that which is wrong.

For the children of Blanca Gomez this week, the “paraclete,” that divine voice of God’s unrelenting presence, was made tangible in the person of Pastor Erwin “Shorty” Luna.

Michael Hardin writes in his book The Jesus Driven Life, “if the Satanic is the human religious impulse toward scapegoating, using violence to cast out violence, then the work of the Spirit (Paraclete) is to defend the victim of unjust persecution, expose the victimizer’s lies and vindicate the victim. The paraclete is directly opposed to Satan. The paraclete will prove the world wrong about judgment, because the prince of this world, Satan, has been condemned. It is the sacrificial process that is on trial, the accuser who is accused.”

As I watched in reverence and deep respect the pastoral ministry of my friend Shorty in the midst of grief this past week, I was struck not only by his presence as balm of healing for wailing children – but also as a deep conviction to the shirtless shooters and their fellow gang members, some of whom had attended the services prior to the internment, and others of whom now looked down upon the scene from atop the corridors.

I have long thought of the Paraclete as a “defense attorney.” But this week I realized that Shorty’s presence with this family was an artful dance of Gospel subversion. His posture in the midst of the injustice in no way felt like a traditional word-centered tirade of defense. Instead, it was a subversive, marked presence that simultaneously offered deep comfort to the victims and deep conviction to the victimizers, both of whom were present. And all that without saying a word.

Peace,
Joel Van Dyke
Street Psalms Latin America

Abide in me as I abide in you. Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me.
– John 15:4

The more closely we examine Jesus’s words in John 15 – among the last words he would speak before his death – the more it seems an awkward mix of metaphors. On the one hand, he uses as the key verb “abide,” which sounds to our ears almost transcendental, serene, relinquished. Something that could happen most comfortably on a couch.

On the other hand, a simple look at the grammar (in original Greek or in translation) shows the verb to be imperative. Something we oughta to keep doing, or at least start doing! Jesus even adds tough words about what happens when the abiding doesn’t happen – cutting, tossing, burning. Seems we should take this seriously and get after it. But how to go after simply being a branch? Especially when, as Jesus says, we already are?

What’s happening here, and which is it? First, a few important observations about background and context…

1. Jesus refers to himself as the true vine (verse 1). Not only is “vine” a familiar image in his cultural setting (the teaching may have even taken place in a local vineyard shortly after the Last Supper), it is a familiar Jewish scriptural expression referring to the people of Israel (e.g. Isaiah 5:1-7). Jesus was reframing and re-locating “the people of God.” The provocative claim likely wasn’t lost on those listening.

2. Jesus employs the even more provocative I am divine identification (verse 1, echoing Exodus 3:14) that nearly got him murdered earlier (John 8:59), and now will bring his death in a matter of hours. “I am the bread of life” (6:35); “I am the light of the world” (8:12); “I am the gate” (10:9); and “I am the way” (14:6). While the Hebrew scriptures do carry themes of God’s desire for nearness with humanity, here we have an intermingling of the divine and human pressed to a degree of oneness that is frankly hard to fathom – then and now.

3. The verb “abide,” in addition to being imperative, is also plural. “You all abide” – together. Further, it shares the same root (in Greek and in English) as “abode,” or dwelling place. In other words, “Y’all make yourselves at home.”

4. At home where? In me. At home how? As I make myself at home in you (15:4). Yes the intermingling is hard to fathom, which is why Jesus actually has lived it together with his followers these many days and years, and will live and die it with humanity in the hours to come.

5. Still confused about this imperative and begging for a more familiar rule-command format? Ok then, Jesus says, here it is: “This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you” (15:12). It’s been quite a journey, this love as I have loved, and will be quite a journey to come. “Pruning,” while a tad harsh to the ear, hardly even begins to evoke the extremes Jesus and his followers will undergo in coming hours, days, and years – “made perfect through sufferings” (Heb. 2:10).

6. But here’s the mystery: what needs to be accomplished is already deeply true. “You have already been cleansed” (John 15:3). The word “cleansed” here is actually pruning lingo; the vine has been nipped and tucked into shape exactly as the vinegrower wishes. Already. Yep, you friends of mine, who as it happens will betray and deny me before the morning rooster crows, are already fully inside the abode of love.

What richness here! What an image of intimacy and vitality! Yet utterly devoid of sentimentality in these last hours. All but essentials are stripped bare, and the stripping experience is frankly quite rough.

Reflecting on Jesus’s multi-layered use of this very simple image of vine and branches, together with our multilayered lives, we can discern a pattern of unfolding stages of life in Christ:

First, our belonging in belovedness. The amazing good news that we already “are” deeply at home in love, and love finds its home in us. “As the Father has loved me” – remember the words at Jesus’s baptism and transfiguration? – “so I have loved you” (15:9). Which is to say, we are deeply at home in God.

Second, becoming alive to love. Together in the humanity we share with Jesus, we may give our yes to love’s invitation, struggle to learn obedience to love’s imperatives, suffer love’s deaths, and awaken to love’s resurrections. We become pruned of whatever is not life, not love. Which is to say, we are becoming alive to God.

Third, simply being. We become love’s very way of flowing, as life-sap flows through vine and branches and fruit, with an effortlessness beyond our efforts. Christ is “in us,” as Jesus puts it here and Paul is fond of saying later. Our experience becomes less about any uncertainty of belonging or any struggle for loving – we are simply part of God’s flow.

In all is grace; “Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11).

Peace,
Scott Dewey
Street Psalms

 

Photo: “Vineyard #2” by Didier Bonnette (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. 
As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” When he  
had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins  
of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain  
the sins of any, they are retained.”  
– John 20:21-23

The resurrection cannot not be explained. It must be experienced!

A few years ago I was sharing about my own experience of the risen Christ. I was speaking in parables and one young man urged me to “explain” myself more clearly. I was tempted to try. And then, in a flash of inspiration (sometimes my “inspirations” go terribly wrong), I paused for a moment and asked if he was married. He was thrown by the question, but he willingly played along and answered, “Yes.” Here’s the risky part… I asked him if he would explain to the group what it was like to make love to his wife. There were a few nervous chuckles and an uncomfortable pause.

And then he began to offer what I sensed was going to be a truly awkward explanation. I quickly stopped him and spared us all. Relieved, we laughed.

When it comes to life’s deepest mysteries, experience trumps explanation every time! In fact, explanation tends to diminish the experience. When it comes to the resurrection the Gospels offer no explanation as to how it happened. There is no privileged insider information. Instead, we are given a series of personal encounters with the risen Christ and these encounters change the world.

What stands out in this week’s text is the intimacy of the encounter. It was evening on the first day of the week (we are in the first day of creation). The disciples hid behind locked doors in fear. Chaos and darkness reigned. Jesus passed through the locked doors and stood among them and said, “Peace be with you.” He vulnerably showed the disciples his wounds. And then the risen/wounded one re-creates the world with a stunning act of intimacy. He “breathed on them.”

The breath of God is the kiss of God that remakes the world. In this divine kiss Jesus is modeling the very core of mission, “As the Father sent me, so I send you.” Can we see? In kissing us into existence Jesus empowers us to do the same – to forgive as God forgives, in a courageous act of union and communion. This is the meaning of the kiss. This is how creation unfolds. If we insist on an explanation, this is it!

Sadly, too many of us have yet to experience the kiss of the risen Christ. As a result we retain the sins of others and spend precious time and energy justifying it. All of creation groans.

Mercifully, the risen Christ continues to enter locked rooms, blowing kisses into the chaos of our lives. All he asks is that we receive them, knowing full well that one who has been kissed by God will naturally and eagerly participate in the ongoing act of Creation itself. Now that’s Good News!

Peace,
Kris Rocke
Street Psalms

 

Photo: “A love birds’ kiss” by jinterwas (CC BY 2.0)

“Take a guard,” Pilate answered, “Go, make the tomb as secure as you know how.”
–Matthew 27:65

“Something strange is happening – there is a great silence on earth today, a great silence and stillness. The whole earth keeps silence because the King is asleep. The earth trembled and is still because God has fallen asleep in the flesh, and he has raised up all who have slept ever since the world began. God has died in the flesh and hell trembles with fear. He has gone to search for our first parent, as for a lost sheep. Greatly desiring to visit those who live in darkness and in the shadow of death, he has gone to free from sorrow the captives.” (From “An Ancient Homily for Holy Saturday” written by an anonymous author in the Liturgy of the Hours.)

Our journey through Lent has almost culminated. We find ourselves this morning in a black hole of silence. We are in the in-between day. The church has no official liturgy in Holy Week for Saturday. If a church body celebrates Holy Saturday at all, it is traditionally simply a day of somber reflection.

On Holy Saturday we enter into the mystery. Today we contemplate Jesus, there in the tomb, dead – exactly the way each of us will be one day, dead. We don’t easily contemplate dying, but we rarely contemplate actually being dead. What is important is that we keep this day holy, and let our “sense” of the mystery of death shape our reflection as it drips into our longing to celebrate the Easter gift of Jesus alive, for us and with us.

Yesterday Jesus was crucified, dashing to bits the dreams and aspirations of all those who had thought he had come as the promised Messiah to overthrow the yoke of suffering and pain. We await tomorrow’s ultimate victory with anticipation – but that is tomorrow’s story. Our present reality is Saturday.

Alan E. Lewis paints a vivid picture of this tension in Between Cross and Resurrection: A Theology of Holy Saturday. He writes, “The second day appears to be a no-man’s-land, an anonymous, counterfeit moment in the gospel story, which can boast no identity for itself, claim no meaning and reflect only what light it can borrow from its predecessor and its sequel.”

The central drama in the Gospel narrative spans just three days – the hinge of salvation history. The first day portrays what humanity did to Jesus and the third what God did for humanity in the resurrection, but the center of the three-day drama is an empty space. The irony of this is that scripture all but completely ignores the middle day of the three. Matthew is the only one of the Gospel writers who says anything about what happens on Saturday, and that comes in a span of just five quick verses (Matthew 27:62-66).

We read here that the silence of Saturday – the day after – is haunting the chief priests and Pharisees. They come knocking on Pilate’s door in great fear of the power of the “Great Deceiver” to win over followers even in death. They express great concern that the “last deception could be even worse than the first.” Pilate bends once gain to their wishes. He assigns them a guard detachment and the power of royal seal to go and “make the tomb as secure as [they] know how.”

As I spent some time with Lectio Divina in this passage, I was blind-sided by the words of Pilate. How often I find myself living like the Pharisees, not able to rest in the holy silence of Saturday, not allowing it to simply be what it is. The silence haunts me and I find myself needing to make some noise. There are doors to knock on and things to secure. I need to do something, anything to help, to protect, to secure. Sitting in silence is a blind acceptance of impotence in the face of circumstance, and that is simply not permissible. I must take a guard and go make things as secure as I know how.

However, in light of Sunday’s promise of hope, the actions of the Pharisees on Saturday were an act of utter futility. The best that they knew how was no match for the Divine, transformative power of resurrection. Oh how I wish I could learn to lean into the silence of today! In so doing, I might actually celebrate my personal impotence in the face of circumstance. I must, we must – and the Gospel demands that we do.

“Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life. For if we have grown into union with him through a death like his, we shall also be united with him in the resurrection” (Romans 6:3-11).

Until tomorrow,
Joel Van Dyke
Street Psalms

 

Photo: Lamentation, or the Mourning of Christ (1304-06) by Giotto

After he had washed their feet, had put on his robe, and had returned to the table, he said to them, “Do you know what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Lord – and you are right, for that is what I am. So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.
– John 13:12-15

Pus.

Sweat, blood, blisters, infected sores… those emerged as central images from the very jazzy riffs of conversation around the 13th chapter of John’s gospel downstairs at Anchor of Hope Church. For my bright kids in children’s church, “pus” struck their imagination around washing grungy feet that might have been a little worse for wear on roads shared with livestock. On the lips of young boys around a table with young girls, we discovered the word “pus” to be simply delicious. Along with the gross-out factor that provided at least five more minutes of attention span, I appreciated the vividness of the scene they conjured up as we talked together.

Today is Maundy Thursday, the traditional commemoration of the evening of the Last Supper. “Maundy” derives from the Latin mandatum, or mandate. It is used of the “new commandment” our Lord gave to his followers: to love one another (John 13:34). This commandment was not introduced in the abstract or engraved on stone tablets; it was demonstrated by an action striking in its human physicality. After rising from the meal he shared with friends, he took off his outer clothing, wrapped a towel around his waist, and began the process we imagined so vividly in children’s church – wet fingers among the toes and calluses, massaging away donkey dung, soothing sores.

Some scholars believe this story forms the narrative backdrop for the Kenosis (“emptying”) Hymn in Philippians 2. The “pouring out” of the water into the basin (John 13:5) parallels the “pouring out” of Jesus in his life and death (Philippians 2:7). The descent and ascent of Jesus in the poetry of the ancient hymn is embodied in the foot-washing story by Jesus stripping and kneeling at the disciples’ feet, performing this most priestly and prophetic task in humility, and then rising to clothe himself again.

For centuries, Maundy Thursday services have been marked by foot-washing. Some traditions refer to this day as “Thursday of Mysteries.” I like that. To me, it speaks of the mystery of flesh and spirit, divine and human, intermingled not only in the blood and wine but in the fluids and flesh of hands moving over feet. In the Eastern Orthodox Church, the liturgy includes this prayer: “Of Thy Mystical Supper, O Son of God, accept me today as a communicant; for I will not speak of Thy Mystery to Thine enemies, neither will I give Thee a kiss like Judas. But like the Thief will I confess Thee: Remember me, O Lord, in Thy Kingdom.”

In remembrance of Jesus’s actions on this last supper night, I have participated in numerous foot-washing ceremonies – with ministry colleagues, with church members, with friends. Perhaps the most memorable times have been in a forest clearing in Romania with teen orphans, some of whose feet actually rivaled my own fungus-infested pair for grossness. There’s always an awkwardness to the proceedings, a fumbling wet mix of touch, shame, and caressing affirmation that seeps somehow through skin into spirit. We are quite unaccustomed to loving our neighbor’s feet in this way, as we love our own. Toweled off and tugging our socks back on, there is a palpable sense of having been both exposed and embraced – perhaps even cleansed – blisters and warts and pus and all.

It is an affirmation and intimacy we will surely need – we cannot remotely know how much – as the gospel story will soon descend into depths.

Peace,
Scott Dewey
Street Psalms

 

Photo by Scott Dewey

It was a case of mistaken identity, but five years ago  “Sugar” – Daniel Antonio Puac Calderón – was riddled with bullets and killed as he was closing up his little store in Guatemala City.

We all knew him simply as “Azucar” (“sugar” in Spanish). Anyone who had ever met Azucar and witnessed the way he sweetened his neighborhood understood immediately the rationale behind his nickname.

After reforming his own life, Azucar had returned to his troubled neighborhood and helped other troubled youth find God and exit the cycle of gangs and violence. Read more of his beautiful story and watch a video on our Magazine story about Azucar.

“Truly I say to you, unless a kernel of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a single seed. But if it dies, it produces many seeds.”
– John 12:24

In this week’s lectionary Gospel reading, Jesus utters these words in anticipation of his own death – and Sugar’s.

Herein lies a solemn statement that illuminates profound truth – we truly must die to self to be reborn. Appropriately, we encounter this text on the fifth Sunday in Lent, just before Palm Sunday and Holy Week. The time is nearly upon us – “the hour for the Son of Humanity to be glorified” is about to arrive.

The judgment of the world will be Jesus on the cross. It doesn’t occur at the end time, and neither Jesus nor God does it. Like Azucar’s killers with guns in hand, we hang up an innocent man. It is a truth that we have always wanted to hide from. We find ourselves trying to keep peace by marginalizing, rejecting, even murdering those we dislike. Nearing now the end of our Lenten journey, we are assaulted by the reality of who hangs on the cross before us and, even more hauntingly, how he got there.

The cross is God’s mind and heart, shattering the window of the world’s values. The gospel of the cross is not one more philosophy to add to countless others the world has to offer. It is, in actuality, the overturning of all of them. The cross says the way up is down. The way to real power is to give power away. The way to real influence is to seek to not be influential. The way to get real riches is to give all your money away, etc. In other words, “seeds need to fall into the ground and die.” Jesus fell into nothingness so that we might be able to fall into him.

Azucar represents the best of the grassroots leaders that we at Street Psalms have the distinct honor and privilege of serving around the world. He will be profoundly missed. In his life we hear the voice of God saying, “I have glorified my name, and I will glorify it again” (v. 28).

Joel Van Dyke
Street Psalms
Latin America

Making a whip of cords, he drove all of them out of the temple, both the sheep and the cattle. He also poured out the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. He told those who were selling the doves, “Take these things out of here! Stop making my Father’s house a marketplace!” His disciples remembered that it was written, “Zeal for your house will consume me.”

The Jews then said to him, “What sign can you show us for doing this?”

Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up.”
– John 2:15-19

Jesus did not “cleanse the temple.” Sadly, most Bibles add this heading to the story. It is misleading.

Rather, Jesus closes it down! Better yet, he creates a new temple in its place – an abode of mercy that is himself. This is the heart of the Gospel!

Several years ago I visited Kolkata, India as part of a doctoral class along with Joel Van Dyke, my wife Lana, and our good friend Tim Merrill from Camden, NJ. We visited Kali Temple, which is the holiest of sites in that great city and from which the name of Kolkata is derived. It sits adjacent to Mother Teresa’s hospice house for the dying.

The day we visited Kali there were throngs of people lined up to perform the ritual animal sacrifice and gain favor with the goddess Kali. It was muggy hot and the smell of blood and incense was intense. When we got close enough to see what was happening, I saw a mother ceremoniously place her child’s head on a bloody chopping block as if to offer her up to Kali. As the priest theatrically lifted the long knife, the mother withdrew the child’s helpless head and a small goat was offered in its place. We gasped and turned away.

One doctoral student in our group snarled in self-righteous disgust. He insisted that we (North American Christians) are above that kind of primitive religious violence. I wanted to believe him, but I had my doubts. To be honest, there was a part of me that preferred the honesty of animal sacrifice to the hidden forms of sacrificial violence that we practice in our culture.

For example, authors/activists like Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow) and Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy) argue convincingly that the U.S. criminal justice system is a sanctioned system of sacrifice of young African American and Latino males. It represents an utter failure of imagination for any more peaceful and productive means of establishing social order.

Currently, one in every 15 black men and one in every 36 Latino men are incarcerated in the United States, compared to one in every 106 white men. Even more alarming, one in every three black male babies born today is expected to be incarcerated. We are creating our own permanent under-caste – or what others call an “American apartheid” – that is creating even greater disparity with each generation.

Particular strains of fear-driven theology conspire to maintain our modern day sacrificial systems. And this doesn’t even begin to count the untold millions who still believe that God, like Kali, is fundamentally angry and on the prowl for God’s next victim. (In a Christian version made popular only in recent centuries, Jesus himself becomes the bloody victim of such a God.) Our ever more sophisticated forms of sacrifice – and the sacrificial logic that supports it – make it hard for us to see and take responsibility for the bloody mess we humans (not God) are making.

This week’s text shows up in all four Gospels, as if God knows we need to hear it again and again! Jesus’s action in the temple is the critical event that seals his fate with temple authorities.

A popular interpretation of this passage is that Jesus was cleansing a corrupt system that needed a bit of spit polish. It was a system that wrongfully excluded the poor, women, and gentiles from participating. Jesus cleansed the temple to open it up and make it a “house of prayer for all nations” (Jer 7:1-11). In this interpretation, Jesus would go on to fulfill God’s sacrificial requirement on the cross, bringing the temple system to its fulfillment with a final sacrifice once and for all. This interpretation signals an end to the temple system of sacrifice, but it also preserves the sacrificial logic by which the temple operates, which is always the problem with sacrificial theology.

Thankfully we are learning to see the text afresh. Notice that when Jesus turns the tables, he drives out both merchants and sacrificial animals (cattle, sheep and doves) alike. He sets both sacrificial victims AND their victimizers free. It is a forceful, dramatic act of profound disruption. It is a beautiful act of liberation.

Can we see? Jesus is mercifully driving out the victims that feed the temple slaughterhouse – and with them, the victimizers who presume they are satiating a vengeful God. Without victims the temple can’t survive and neither can such an image of god. We can hear Jesus shout – standing on the shoulders of the prophets before him – “I desire mercy, not sacrifice!”

These are perhaps the most revolutionary and liberating words the world has ever heard.

Peace,
Kris Rocke
Street Psalms

Thanks to Dr. Thomas Truby’s sermon on this passage that inspired this reflection.

Read our further reflection, including a simple graphic illustration of the shift from sacrifice to mercy.

 

Photo: “doves in flight” by Vince Wingate (CC BY-SA 2.0)  

“At once the Spirit sent him out into the wilderness, and he was in the wilderness forty days, being tempted by Satan. He was with the wild animals, and angels attended him.”
–Mark 1:12-13

This week we celebrated Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Christians worldwide will enter into a heightened time (40 days) of prayer, reflection, and spiritual companionship with Jesus to the cross. At Street Psalms we are grateful for this annual pilgrimage that awakens our individual and collective hearts to our own true desire.

Our lectionary text this week, the first Sunday in Lent, has Mark inviting us to this year’s Lenten journey with his usual economy of words. In rapid fire succession we see Jesus being baptized, immediately sent out into the wilderness, and then traveling to Galilee proclaiming the Good News of God (Mark 1:9-15). While all three elements are worthy of focused attention, it is specifically time in the wilderness that captures our imagination this week as we embark with Jesus on the circuitous path to the cross – the Lenten journey.

In biblical parlance, the wilderness (desert) is that place in Scripture where we go to figure out who is who and what is real. It is the place where souls are revealed. What happened during the “temptation by the devil” and what are the implications for us this Lenten season? Mark, of course, gives us little detail on what actually happened in the wilderness, so we need to visit the accounts of the other Gospel writers to get the full picture.

After traveling forty long days and nights without food, Jesus rests. Exhausted and hungry, he meets the devil – and so do we, for this is not Jesus’s story alone. This is our story too. Jesus carries all of humanity into this meeting or, to be more precise, he carries the fullness of humanity into his divine appointment with the tempter. We are rehashing a conversation that began in a garden so many ages ago and continues to this day.

The conversation centers around three symbols that have shaped the soul of Israel, and the world, since the beginning – the symbols of bread, temple, and crown. Each symbol is packed with meaning and a narrative history that represents a way of seeing the world and God. The bread is an economic symbol, the temple a religious symbol, and the crown a political symbol. Jesus meets with Satan to talk about things of ultimate significance – bread, temple, and crown are about reality itself.

Bread-From Scarcity to Abundance

Imagine Jesus after a long fast and a lonely walk in the desert. He sees a barren landscape, a wasteland – no gardens or streams, no milk or honey, only rocks and sand and the occasional desert fox. The scenery matches his interior, as the land is as empty as his stomach.

It is not hard to imagine Jesus being overwhelmed by the vision of scarcity before him. What kind of God allows his people to starve? When seduced by a worldview of scarcity, the mystery of God’s abundance is not easy to see. Jesus, however, takes another look at the barrenness that surrounds him and listens more carefully to his own stomach. Here, deep in the soil of relentless scarcity, Jesus discerns the seeds of his Father’s abundant and fruitful love.

It takes some time, but eventually he becomes fully present to the reality of God’s abundant love allowing him (and us) to re-imagine the whole of God’s economy as one of reckless abundance. Jesus resists the myth of scarcity and declares God’s Word reliable in the face of deprivation. God is friend, not foe. God can be trusted. There is enough!

Jesus’s fidelity to the “mystery of superabundance” moves humanity from the bondage of scarcity born of fear to the freedom of God’s abundance born of love. There is enough bread for all, if we can only see and embrace it.

Temple: From Violence to Peace

No symbol made greater claims on the imagination of Israel than the temple. What bread was to the body of Israel, the temple was to its soul. The economics of scarcity had produced a religion of scarcity and it followed the same deadly logic. As is always the case with scarcity, violence was its governing principle, hidden under layers of rules and regulations that masked the fear that sustained it. This was the sacrificial system of the temple – it was a highly regulated and sophisticated system of violence that had been given sacred meaning and justified by virtually every religious authority, except a handful of prophets.

In the second temptation, the devil takes Jesus to the top of the temple overlooking Jerusalem. There he says to Jesus, “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down.”Jesus looks again at the meticulously designed religious system with all its rules and regulations and discerns another law at work. It is the law that rules his own heart. It is the inviolable law of love.

Jesus stares the devil down and quotes the ancient text, “Do not put the Lord your God to the test” (Matt. 4:7). Jesus refuses to throw himself into the temple trap and test God’s love with his own act of violence. He opts for another way – the way of mercy – a way that would one day turn the temple inside-out and become the hope of all those who have ever cried out, “Lord have mercy.”

Crown: From Above to Below

The crown is the symbol of the political system, which is concerned with the stewardship of power. While this symbol is not named directly in the temptation narrative, it is clear from the context that we are dealing with the temptation to power. In a monarchial system, the crown is the ultimate symbol of power. As such, it is something of a summary of the previous temptations. The economic, religious, and political systems are of one piece – each needs the other to survive.

Jesus ponders the potential of wearing the crown-the potential for good, not evil; the potential for life, not death. Who better to wear the crown and steward power than a benevolent king who genuinely cares for creation?

However, the glittering gems on the crown being offered are quickly seen for what they are – a crown of thorns. Satan’s twisted view of power is exposed. The whole world is turned upside-down. The cross ascends and Jesus is “lifted up.”

During the next 40 days, we invite you to consider what the implications of bread, temple and crown are for you personally and for your city. Is there enough bread on your life’s “table” for all, or are you deceived by the myth of scarcity and hoarding little crumbs? What would your relationships look like if you were to resist throwing yourself into rivalry with others – rivalry that leads, always, to some sort of violence? How would your view of life change if you were able to look up from below, envisioning power made perfect in weakness as opposed to strength?

May you travel with courage on the way to the cross this Lenten season, and may a careful consideration of the implications of bread, temple and crown be your companion for the journey.

Peace,

Joel Van Dyke

Street Psalms Latin America

Portions of this reflection were adapted from Chapter 7 (Symbolic Universe) of Geography of Grace by Kris Rocke and Joel Van Dyke. We encourage you to read that chapter for a much deeper reflection on the images of bread, temple, and crown of the desert narrative.    

 

Photo by Casey Kiernan (CC0 1.0)

Jesus said to them, “Have you never read in the Scriptures: ‘The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; the Lord has done this, and it is marvelous in our eyes.'”
–Matthew 21:42

The tension has been building, building. If this were simply the story of a nice guy – with kindness for the sick and friendship with the forgotten – things could have been different. Jesus might have flown under the radar. We have instead a story sliding toward violence.

As the conflict stretched to the snapping point between respected religious leaders and this rogue rabbi, we might imagine any number of ways to ease the tension. At this precise juncture Jesus opts for nothing of the sort. Just the opposite; he ups the torque. No longer roaming the desert or the villages of Galilee, Jesus is now approaching the sacred center – geographically in Jerusalem and chronologically with the upcoming Passover.

Without an awareness of what’s at stake here, we might misread Jesus’s reference to Psalm 118 simply as an inspirational quote about making cornerstones from castoff junk. You know the motivational posters in middle managers’ offices… “POTENTIAL: Your Marvelous is Ready to Be Seen.” In other words: a bland, innocuous statement about what might be possible for anyone anywhere with a dose of resourcefulness!

Though Jesus continues to speak in parables and metaphor, the references are becoming more explicit. The “builders” are those who construct and manage the prevailing religious, political, and social systems. “When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them” (verse 45).

Throughout his public life, Jesus defied the architecture of these systems, welcoming people whom the dominant structures rejected and excluded. As we’ve seen in recent readings, these rejects included prostitutes, foreigners, slackers, and lawbreakers. Jesus might now be expected to clarify: “Okay, I’ve been hanging out with this unsavory bunch for strategic reasons – to bring them around for help making my point – but make no mistake, I’m not one of them!” Instead he brings a new clarity: “This is exactly who I am.”

The news isn’t that Jesus has finally managed to wedge himself into the old conventional architecture, finally accepted as the expected Christ. The news instead is an unexpected wrecking ball crashing the very structures that craftsmen take pains to conserve. To put an even finer point on it, not only the buildings but the builders themselves: “Anyone who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; anyone on whom it falls will be crushed” (verse 44). Sound harsh? Earlier Jesus announced that nothing less is required for salvation: “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:25).

Ironically, this is the way of love. It is the way of true life. It is the way of nonviolence and peace, which Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us is not simply the absence of conflict but a new arrangement of reality expressed in the “beloved community.” It is the way of good news for the poor – over which conservators of the old order will stumble and flail – often violently. In each of three “synoptic” gospels in which this cornerstone reference appears, it immediately follows the dark parable of vineyard tenants killing the son of the vineyard owner.

The new comes – a marvel! But as we see the gospel story unfolding, the old will not go quietly. Should we be surprised when it sometimes does not go gently around even our peaceable work in vulnerable urban communities?

Peace,
Scott Dewey
Street Psalms

 

Photo: “Once the dust settles” by Brandon Doran (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) 

“Jesus says ‘For the Kingdom of heaven is like the landowner who…'”
–Matthew 20:1-16

“Pray then in this way…. Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.”
–Matthew 6:9-13

For those of us who wrestle with earning our place – either in heaven or in our office – through good and hard work, this passage about a lavishly generous landowner might not go down easy. This landowner’s economics are not like those we learned in school, or on the streets.

Obviously, this passage tells us that the landowner of the kingdom is concerned for all his workers. The invitation to join in keeps coming throughout the day. When I sit with these words in lectio divina, it appears the kingdom is about giving everyone the opportunity to participate in the life, the purpose, and the work of the kingdom. It all belongs to him and he is generous. It is about how he chooses to love and lavishly pour grace on everyone.

But for a moment let’s place ourselves among the workers. What is our response? Am I the first or the last? Am I the jealous worker who has toiled all day long? Am I the grateful one who joined the team at the last minute and reaped the full benefits?

Or perhaps there are better questions. What were all these workers to learn about themselves and about God as they encountered this part of their individual journeys?

The ones hired in the morning – did they need to work all day and reap the benefits of a full day’s labor?

Those hired at the end of the day – was theirs a gift of purpose when all seemed lost?

So it brings me to think that we all have a place, and I ask myself what else we receive along with our wages. As they stood in line to receive their reward, did workers unwittingly already hold in their hands, and in their experiences of the day, riches that they did not readily recognize? Was that not part of the “your kingdom come, your will be done” plan?

Once I loose myself from the math in which I think that working harder or longer should earn me more, the mystery of the kingdom always strikes me with wonder and comfort. “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord in Isaiah 55:8.

When our thoughts (and feelings!) center on fairness, reward, and ourselves, we are most often looking in the wrong places. As our friend Richard Rohr says, after any true God experience, you know that you are a part of a much bigger whole, as if you are actually inside of a larger mystery.

Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth…

Peace,
Penny Salazar-Phillips
Director of Joshua Station at Mile High Ministries
Street Psalms Community

 

Photo: “Last Light (Avoid Mud)” by Hailey E. Herrera

He said, “Come.” So Peter got out of the boat, started walking on the water, and came toward Jesus.
–Matthew 14:29

I can say from experience that there is a difference between reading a book about childbirth and being present for one. I’m told there’s a difference between being present for a childbirth and actually bearing a child. I’m assuming, though don’t quite remember, that it’s still another thing to be born.

This week’s gospel reading, about Jesus and Peter walking on water (Matthew 14:22-33), clearly makes for better armchair reading than firsthand experience. For instance, there is a tiny little narrative gap between verses 24 and 25. Into that gap slides hours of terror. In the evening, the disciples’s boat was battered by waves and wind, unable to reach shore (v. 25). Skip to the morning, same conditions (v. 26). Can you imagine the night? I can – but conveniently, without retching up my breakfast.

I have also read, in fairly detailed study, about the concept of “the waters” in classical Middle Eastern imagination and mythology. In many ancient literary works, including the Hebrew scriptures, the waters represent untamed chaos and overwhelming danger. True, there is healing and life in water. But the same water when deep and windblown will turn and devour you like a monstrous force. In fact the ancients named an array of terrible sea creatures with supernatural power (Leviathan and Rahab, to name two in the Bible that are mentioned in other regional literature). It makes for interesting reading.

Reading this passage, we can see images and hear echoes of the Genesis creation story – where God moves over the surface of the waters, bringing order and life from chaos. And the terror and rescue of the flood and the ark, and the Exodus story of salvation in the Red Sea. Our story places Jesus precisely on the angry waters, against this backdrop of a God who prevails amid a cosmic battle of powers. Jesus is divine victor and peace-bearer. Not so many chapters later, Jesus will be submerged by these same powers, descending to the depths, with his followers scattered and wrecked. But our story foreshadows resurrection triumph and solace.

On we might go with study and reflection on the nature of miracles and faith and fear and doubt and risk, which is all genuinely fascinating, but the narrative hinges on the moment Peter GOT OUT OF THE BOAT.

Transformation begins when we do too.

Peace,
Scott Dewey
The Street Psalms Community

“The shortest distance between a human being and the truth is a story.”
-Father Anthony de Mello

Our lectionary Gospel reading continues where we left off last week in Matthew 13. This time Jesus’ riddles (parables) focus on mustard seeds, yeast, pearls, and fishing nets.

In a supersized, Big Box culture where dimensions rule, the parable of the mustard seed is often interpreted with the assumption that its meaning is about the Church, and the conclusion is that God wants the Church to be big. The story is familiar. What starts as a small seed becomes the largest of trees. However, if growth is Jesus’ main point, he chose a poor metaphor – so perhaps here again is proof that Jesus was certainly more carpenter than farmer. The farmers in the crowd would have been shocked by this story. It simply makes no sense.

Robert Farrar Capon points out that the mustard tree is a weed no farmer wants in his garden. It may start off as a small seed, but even at full height, it only stands six feet tall. It could hardly compete for splendor with the cedars of Lebanon that filled Solomon’s temple. If Jesus is after size, he picked the wrong shrub. And this is the point he is trying to make. He probably did know, after all, that the mustard tree is a “shrub” – a weed that farmers spent their days trying to eliminate because these weeds grew into homes for birds that destroyed crops. If the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, then who would want it?

In a world where clean and efficient megachurches are often celebrated as clear evidence of God’s special anointing, it is important to consider that not all growth is good growth and not all growth leads to unity. It is reminiscent of what we call the ‘mustard seed syndrome’ that afflicts so much of the church – the unexamined belief that God delights in bigness and that somehow the growth of the Church automatically equals blessings to the world. As a result, we often project our desires onto the Gospel and squeeze into the text interpretative calisthenics that satisfy those desires.

Jesus presses on with another parable. “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened” (Matthew 13:33). This one sentence capstone of Jesus’ teaching is the stone that Israel rejected, and so do we – for good reason. Yeast is a mold that was considered unclean in Hebrew culture. With Jesus using a weed and a mold to illustrate the kingdom, what is he suggesting?

Could it be that the Kingdom of God in our cities appears in forms that our culture, our ideologies, and our theologies have conditioned us to reject? Could it be that the weeds and molds that we have systematically tried to get rid of are the very things that reveal the presence of God and are the keys to genuine community and unity? These texts invite us to move toward a kind of unity that makes room for the “other,” particularly the “other” that we are most conditioned to reject.

Jesus continues his riddles with the image of a fishing net (v. 47-48). The fishing net of that day was a dragnet, which interests me as a wannabe fisherman. When I “pretend” to go sport fishing, I attempt to use specific lures of just the right color and size, and choose just the right test-line for certain conditions – all to land a specific fish during a specific season. (At least this is what I imagine real sport fisherman do).

The fishing culture in Jesus’ day was markedly different. The dragnet was tied to a weight that would go down to the bottom and scrape up everything – from bottom feeders to the fish on the surface and all the sea life that comes in-between. It’s really a crazy, dirty way to fish.

Are we sport fishing for the fish we desire, or laying the dragnet that brings in all kinds? Are we worshiping size and “bigness,” wrongly assuming that growth in numbers automatically corresponds to blessings for the world? Have we become blind to the possibility that the yeast (mold) that we have systematically tried to get rid of might be the very thing that reveals the presence of God and is the key to genuine community and unity? Are we trying to sort our crops before the harvest, or are we trusting the sower to do the harvesting? If we dare to enter such riddles of grace, then mustard seeds, yeast, and a dragnet ministry with a wheat-and-tares discipline can radically broaden access to the one whose cross welcomes all.

Peace,
Joel Van Dyke
Street Psalms Director for Latin America
Guatemala City, Guatemala

 

Photo: Mustard Seedlings by Tess Watson (CC BY 2.0)

And he told them many things in parables, saying: “Listen! A sower went out to sow…  
some seeds fell on the path…  
rocky ground… thorns… good soil.
–Matthew 13:1-9

This week’s text proves it: Jesus was definitely a carpenter, not a farmer. No farmer worth his or her salt would indiscriminately sow precious and expensive seed on all kinds of soil – the good, bad, and ugly. It’s wasteful. It’s bad farming. It is also bad storytelling – unless, of course, the point of the parable is that God is a lousy farmer.

In our eagerness to rescue the farmer from his own incompetence we are tempted to focus primarily on the soil (the soil illustrates our receptivity to the Gospel). But shifting our attention too quickly from the sower to the soil is a dangerous move. Moralism is the death of Christianity. The world has many moral management systems, but only one Gospel, and Gospel is always crazy stuff to those of us who manage morality.

I am reminded of a good friend who tells the story of his visit with a Benedictine monk. He asked the monk what he’d been thinking about lately. After a lengthy pause, the monk replied, “I’ve been contemplating the deficiencies of God.” He offered a few examples. God has a bad memory; God is always forgetting our sins. God is terrible at math; God leaves the 99 to save the one. God is wasteful; God scatters precious seed everywhere.

When seen through the lens of scarcity, God appears to us as the wasteful one. Another word for wasteful is prodigal. Yes, God is the “Prodigal Father” whose squandering makes the “prodigal son” look frugal by comparison.

Bad memory, bad math, wasteful. Imagine if we patterned our lives after the deficiencies of God. Imagine if we were a little worse at remembering the score with those who have wronged us. Imagine if we were a little less calculating with our lives. Imagine if we were a little less frugal in how we give our gifts. Imagine how much better the world would be if we shared the holy deficiencies of God.

I find it interesting that all of the heresies of the early church bent in the same direction… toward fashioning a loftier, higher, and more holy God than the one Jesus reveals to us. I get it. The picture of God that Jesus paints is a portrait (self-portrait) that just doesn’t seem very flattering at first glance and at times is downright offensive. Mercy and grace look like a deficiency to a fearful and violent humanity… until, that is, it is experienced, and then it is the only thing that really matters.

Like all heretics, I too am tempted to “improve” on the picture that Jesus paints. But let’s be clear: with every improvement, the God of our own creation becomes increasingly unreachable, impassable, and unknowable. That God becomes increasingly angry, judgmental, and violent – and ends up looking a lot like us. We are simply incapable of inventing the prodigal God of mercy that Jesus revealed. That’s why we call it revelation!

So, along with the “prodigal” leaders we serve, who are sowing seeds of love with reckless abandon like mad farmers, we invite you to contemplate the deficiencies of God this summer.

Waste more, want more!

Peace,
Kris Rocke
Street Psalms

 

Photo: Seeds of Geranium Flower by Jose Eduardo Deboni (CC BY 2.0)

“Whoever welcomes you welcomes me,
and whoever welcomes me
welcomes the one who sent me.”
–Matthew 10:40

I could tell that every moment of Diane’s hospitality was painfully dissonant for her. I sat on a piece of ragged cardboard and ignored the smell wafting from bags of tenants’ trash piled high in the corner. This room was meant to house an apartment building’s trash, not a human – not Diane. A bag of her clothes, a sleeping bag, her cell phone and charger, and a book or two were all she kept there.

Diane and I lived on the same Cincinnati street. But we might as well have arrived by way of separate solar systems. I had moved from the white, middle-class suburbs to Over-the-Rhine, the downtown neighborhood infamous for its 2001 racial uprising. At the time I was working as a reporter for a local paper. Diane was mostly homeless and long addicted to crack. She scraped by any way she could.

We met through a street writing initiative. She turned out to have a soaring written voice, the kind that can’t be taught. After that, we’d run into each other on Main Street where it turned out we both lived – me in a charming, renovated apartment, and Diane in the trash room two blocks south.

On this occasion, in that room, she read me her poetry. Her voice and her stories, singing of humanity, lifted us above the stuffy air. I think the visit also lifted us both above our narrow ideas of friendship, intimacy, and hospitality.

This week’s lectionary gospel verses speak of hospitality. I have recently been invited to join the Street Psalms staff, and the job description contains this: “As Street Psalms staff, Stephanie will be expected to evidence in her working relationships, both within the organization and with other partners, the ‘manners’ of Street Psalms: generosity, hospitality, simplicity, and vulnerability.”

I have taped those words – generosity, hospitality, simplicity, vulnerability – next to my desk at home. Three of those I grasp naturally and practice imperfectly, but as an introvert, even wrapping my head around “hospitality” can work me into a pretzel. I’d always understood hospitality to mean nice table settings and appetizers before dinner parties, and sometimes that is what it means. But now, I realize it is much broader than that.

I remember that visit with Diane and the reverence I felt for this invitation into her world. Flies buzzed around trash bags as grotesque symbols of her shame. It was not so unlike my own shame, just less hidden. This invitation into her home, however temporary a home – into her all-too-permanent world – was more intimate and vulnerable than any dinner party I’d ever attended. In turn, my role was to appreciate her hospitality, regardless of setting. Luckily, in that moment, appreciation came easily.

I remember, too, a string of days those years ago when I walked home from work sobbing openly. One day when I turned onto Main Street, Diane found me like that.

She put her arm around me and, moving as a pair, she walked me home.

Peace,
Stephanie Dunlap
Street Psalms

 

Photo: Two Women in the Park by Evan Bench

“I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh.”
–Acts 2:1-21

This Sunday we celebrate Pentecost – the gift of the Spirit poured out on “all flesh” (vs. 7).

The primary miracle in Acts 2 is a miracle of the ear, not the tongue. The word “hear” shows up three times in this passage. Yes, the real miracle is the ability to “hear” one another amidst all the differences, and to celebrate that which is held in common. Pentecost is the celebration of a new humanity, a new kind of community made possible in Christ.

In our increasingly pluralistic world, difference is seen as the primary threat. This, of course, is the great lie of our age. The modern marketing machine naively implores us to “celebrate our differences,” as though difference were the issue. Difference is not nearly as threatening (or liberating) as sameness. Yes, it is sameness that we fear, and celebrating sameness is precisely what the Spirit makes possible. In the Spirit we can embrace our sameness without dissolving into an undifferentiated glob or devolving into violent chaos.

At the Tower of Babel, God scattered humanity because the threat of sameness had become too great. The only kind of unity imaginable at Babel was a unity born of fear and violence in which “we” could not exist without an enemy – “them” – to hold our “we”-ness together. Seen this way, dividing and scattering humanity by language was a mercy to protect humanity from destroying itself. At Pentecost the Spirit of Jesus offers a new mercy – a new open source language system by which we can hear one another. She gathers us and makes a new kind of unity possible – a unity that is over and against nothing, but with and for all. It is a unity of “us” that is not dependent on the enemy “them” to hold us all together.

Yes, sameness is the issue! Consider the people that irritate us the most. Almost always the thing that irks us in the other is the thing that we can’t stand about ourselves. Of course, this remains largely hidden to us, but the people we struggle with the most are most like us. Our enemies are more like us than we imagine: they are mirrors of our own soul. This is why Jesus calls us to love our enemies. To press the point further, consider that fact that twins were seen as threats in most ancient societies and were often banished, killed, or sacrificed. Think of the twins (Jacob and Esau) in Scripture. They are depicted as rivals from birth. Consider the fact that King Herod descended from the line of Esau and Jesus from the line of Jacob. Herod and Jesus twins? Yes, Jesus is our twin brother who is completely unthreatened by what we hold in common.

At Pentecost we celebrate that we are all created in the image of God. In Christ, the artificial and heavily-defended boundaries of race, culture, and even religion that seem sovereign and impassible are loosened. Instead of forging community over and against others, in Christ, we are free to form community with and for others (even our enemies). This is the miracle of Pentecost. Inside the Spirit, the artificial differences that we use to separate and divide are gone. In the Spirit, the borders are opened, made passable. We are free to come and go in peace. As the psalmist said, “The boundary lines have fallen for me in pleasant places” (Psalm 16:6). Yes, in Christ, we can enjoy a new kind of unity.

This is why Paul can say, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28).

To be centered in Christ is to hold our boundaries loosely. When we are centered in Christ we can occupy the edges in new and fresh ways. No wonder this week’s lectionary text says the people were, “amazed and perplexed” (vs. 12).

Peace,
Kris Rocke
Street Psalms

 

Photo: Unity by Luz_Spy (CC BY 2.0)

“Very truly, I tell you, I am the gate for the sheep.
–John 10:1-10

“I am the gate.” These words are confusing, if not downright terrifying, especially if you are a sheep near a temple. No wonder the disciples “did not understand” Jesus’ teaching in this passage.

The Sheep Gate (see John 5) was the gate in the wall of Jerusalem through which the sheep were led to the holding pens where they would await their turns to be killed inside the gruesome sacrificial slaughterhouse of the temple. I’ve seen animal sacrifices at a temple. It is loud. It is anxious. Flies are everywhere. People are packed in. It smells of blood, defecation, and death.

The sheep metaphor shows up throughout the Gospel of John. The first words spoken to Jesus in the Gospel of John are, “Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” In this week’s passage (John 10:1-10), Jesus extends the sheep metaphor by referring to himself as both the “good shepherd” as well as the “gate.” Lamb, shepherd, gate. If we are caught inside the sacrificial system and the sacrificial logic that makes it work, this whole passage seems to be condoning the very thing it is dismantling. Yikes!

Consider the possibility that Jesus is actually subverting rather than affirming all forms of the sacrificial system. To enter that system as such (we all do) is to be a thief who “steals, kills, and destroys.” At the most basic level this is precisely what sacrificial systems do – whether on religious or social grounds. Just ask a sheep whose blood feeds it. Ask any modern day victim of societal injustice if we still practice sacrifice.

In the sacrificial system, each of us plays both a victim and victimizer role. We are both sheep and thief. The Good News of Jesus is a severe mercy that unmasks our participation in both roles, and points to our salvation.

In John 10, Jesus is turning sacrificial logic on its head. He transforms the very gate through which he invites us to walk. It is no longer a gateway of sacrifice. Through his own act of passage, it becomes a gateway of mercy. “I desire mercy not sacrifice” (Matt 9:13/Hosea 6:6). Those who enter through the gate of mercy are good shepherds. Instead of locking vulnerable sheep inside holding pens of false righteousness, the good shepherd set us free to “come in and go out and find pasture” (vs. 9). Ahh, this is abundant life!

At Street Psalms we are learning to read Scripture and see our faith through the lens of mercy – not a sentimental kind of mercy, but a mercy forged in the harsh realities of our world hell-bent on sacrifice. Yes, we are sheep among wolves and yes, we’ve seen, helped build, and still benefit from far too many “sheep gates” built and maintained by wolves. Systems of sacrifice still thrive in all cultures and in our own hearts. Let’s face it, the best way to justify evil is to wrap it in righteousness. In fact, righteousness (false righteousness) is the preferred hiding place or “holding pen” of evil, ALWAYS.

And so, the Good Shepherd walks through the sheep gate transforming it into a gateway of mercy. He exposes the system from the inside. The Good Shepherd reveals the system of false righteousness that in the end “steals, kills and destroys” not only weak sheep, but even God. Each time we feed the sacrificial system with one more sheep, this is precisely what we do.” Just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).

Jesus removes the lynch pin that holds it all together – the belief that the system itself is God’s own design and God’s own desire.

“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?
    says the Lord;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
    and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
    or of lambs, or of goats.”
(Isaiah 1:11)

“Whoever slaughters an ox is
like one who kills a human being;
    whoever sacrifices a lamb, 
like one who breaks a dog’s neck;
whoever presents a grain offering,
like one who offers swine’s blood;
    whoever makes a memorial offering of frankincense, like one who blesses an idol.
These have chosen their own ways,
     and in their abominations they take delight;”
(Isaiah 66:3)

Thought Experiment:

Imagine there is a very rich white man who owns an NBA team that is in the midst of a playoff run. Imagine that he is exposed as a racist by his mistress, who is, herself, a person of color. Imagine that he makes a lot of money off the very people he can’t stand and has been known to treat people of color unjustly through his other businesses that have also made him a lot of money. For a culture that is trying to distance itself and wash itself clean of its own racism, it would be very tempting and quite convenient to call for this man’s head – to lead him through the sheep gate to the slaughter house, throw him in a holding pen, strip him of his team, make a public spectacle of him, and crucify him. We’d be worked up into a frenzy, “Crucify him, crucify him!” We’d be justified, wouldn’t we? We’d celebrate our own righteous indignation, wouldn’t we? In doing so, it is also quite possible that we would be feeding the very sacrificial system that we abhor – a system that will one day call for our heads too. That’s what these systems do.

Thought Experiment #2:

Imagine there is a local chapter of a national civil rights organization that has chosen the rich white NBA owner for a lifetime achievement award based on local philanthropy for its causes. After it is revealed that the rich white man is a barely-closeted racist, the organization is in a bind. The chapter president releases a statement referencing Christian values of reconciliation and forgiveness, and suggesting the door might be open for a way forward together. By the end of the week, the chapter president is out of office. From many corners, there has been blame for the organization’s hypocrisy in accepting money from such an appallingly unworthy source for its worthy causes.

Thought Experiment #3:

Might there be a way through the Mercy Gate for the disgraced NBA owner, the disgraced organization president, and the rest of us who carry our own closeted disgraces? How might the Good Shepherd lead?

“Go and learn what this means, I desire mercy not sacrifice”
–Matthew 9:13 / Hosea 6:6

Peace,
Kris Rocke
Street Psalms

 

Photo: Herod’s Gate in Jerusalem circa 1940

Jesus calls us friend today, knowing we will betray him tomorrow. If there is an order to salvation, this is it.

God is love” is a theological statement that is true to the core. But “God is friend” – this is the deeper mystery made real in Jesus.Friendship is salvation. All else is theological pretense and drivel. The Friend who dines with us and washes our feet today will lay down his life tomorrow. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends…. I have called you friends” (John 15:13-15).

“You, heart closed up in a chest, open,
for the Friend is entering.”
– Rumi

Hear afresh these words at the meal of friendship,

On the night that Jesus was betrayed [by his friends from below, and arrested by his other friends from above], he took bread, blessed it, broke it, gave it to his disciples, and said, ‘Take and eat; this is my body, broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way, after supper, he took the cup, blessed it, and gave it for all to drink, and said, ‘This cup is the blood of the new covenant, shed for you and for all people for the forgiveness of sin. Do this in remembrance of me.’

Dear friends of Jesus, who will soon be enemies, we are forgiven – now – completely! May the great befriending of God break our hearts wide open.

 

Photo: By Giotto di Bondone from Ruslan’s Flickr (CC BY 2.0)

“I will bless you… so that you will be a blessing.”
–Genesis 12:1-4a

In the second week of Lent we turn to Abraham’s blessing in Genesis 12.

As we consider Abraham’s blessing, let’s remember that the Lenten journey is not only about our journey with Jesus to the cross. It is also an annual dress rehearsal for our own death. In this sense, Lent is about the practice of “letting go,” dying little deaths so that we are ready for the big one.

These dress rehearsals help us relax into the final “letting go” with the same deep trust that Jesus demonstrated on the cross. Jesus models for us that there is goodness at the base of it all and that God is in no way ruled or run by death, which is why we can pass through death unafraid.

Unfortunately, for many in our network every day of the year is a relentless dress rehearsal. This is why the primal blessing given to Abraham is so essential. Without it we are lost in a sea of anxiety and crippling fear that disfigures and distorts our own mortality. It is in this context that we consider our Lenten blessing.

First, in Hebrew the word “blessing” is berakhah. It means to bow on bended knee and adore something. In the first two chapters of Genesis, God kneels in adoration of three things: the sea creatures (vs.1:22), humanity (vs. 1:28), and the Seventh Day (vs. 2:3). Yes, three primal blessings: creation, humanity and the Sabbath, which is the restful realization that all is good – nay, VERY GOOD. God kneels before all of creation that we might one day do the same.

In this week’s lectionary, God blesses Abraham in the context of a call. God says, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you” (Gen. 12:1). Notice how God’s blessing invites Abraham to let go in two directions – the past (country, kindred, and home) and the uncertain, un-seeable future (“a land that I will show you”).

God’s blessing is a bridge for Abraham. It holds the space between what was and what will be. God’s blessing is the sacrament of the present moment that redeems both past and future. During Lent we are especially attentive to this sacrament.

Several years ago in Guatemala I was a guest at a Bible study on the outskirts of the city. The Bible study leader leaned over and whispered into my ear, “The young lady in the corner wants you to bless her eight-year-old daughter.” He also whispered that the little girl’s father was recently killed and they both were grieving (a horrific past and uncertain future). Her father had been a notorious gang assassin who had murdered more than 200 rival gang members.

We gathered around the young mother, bent our knees, and laid hands on her daughter. Completely untethered from all except the sacrament of that present moment, we blessed the little girl. We blessed her with the same blessing I give my kids at night as I sit on their bed, tuck them in, and trace the sign of the cross on their foreheads, saying,

Christ be with you. Christ within you. 
Christ behind you. Christ before you. 
Christ beside you. Christ to win you. 
Christ to comfort and restore you. 
Christ beneath you. Christ above you. 
Christ in quiet and in danger. 
Christ in hearts of those who love you. 
Christ in mouth of friend and stranger. 

~ St. Patrick

Peace,
Kris Rocke
Street Psalms

Photo: Phil Whitehouse