In the beginning of John’s gospel, in one of the only stories detailing the verbal interactions between John the Baptist and Jesus, John gives voice not only to his belief about the identity of Jesus, but what Jesus had come into the world to accomplish. John, seeing Jesus walk by for the first time since he began his ministry of baptism in the wilderness, turns to his disciples and says, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” (John 1:29, NRSV) In this single exclamation John makes a remarkable claim. This person, Jesus, is the one who is taking away the sin of the world, and the one who would sacrifice all to do so. But what does this mean, the “sin of the world?” 

Often, we think of Jesus’ primary work as that which was done on the cross. We think of Jesus “Taking away the sin of the world” as meaning that he gathered up all of our individual sins, all the things that make us bad and unworthy, all of those actions we have done that put us at odds with God, and took them away, removing them forever, and that somehow this happened on the cross. We think that somehow, in his death on the cross, our sins were destroyed. But is this the vision of the author of John’s gospel? Is this the understanding of John the Baptist? More importantly, where does that leave us now, in a world post-crucifixion, post-resurrection, where there are clearly still sins?

To answer these questions we need to take a closer look at these words from John the Baptist. “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.” The first thing to recognize is that this word sin is not plural. It does not say, “the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” Instead, it seems like John is talking about something more centralized. Not just a collection of each person’s individual poor behavior, John is referencing the sin of the world, singular. As if each of our individual sins is but a symptom of this things that John is calling the “sin of the world.” The sin of the world that we all take part in. It’s something bigger than any one human being, but that at the same time we are all complicit in. So what is this sin of the world?

To answer that question we first need to examine one other significant part of this claim John makes about Jesus’ identity. That he is “the lamb of God” who “takes away” that sin. This makes it sound like Jesus’ work of self sacrifice was the mechanism by which he removed the sin of the world, but is this true, and what are the implications for this idea? This verb in Greek that is translated “takes away” is meant to emphasize the ongoing nature of the action. It is a present participle, and could be translated “the one who is taking away,” meaning that this is not just something Jesus is going to do once and for all when he dies on the cross but is something that was happening then and continues to happen throughout his ministry, not just at its end. 

One other significant thing about this word is that is doesn’t just mean remove or destroy. Like many Greek words, it could be translated in a lot of different ways, but the implication of the word is more about the action of lifting up or raising up than destruction of something. The idea being that for something to be removed it must first be raised up in order to be carried away. So one way we could translate this verse is this, “Behold, the lamb of God, who is raising up the sin of the world.” If we think of Jesus’ work and ministry as raising up or lifting up the sin of the world we get so much more texture and depth to Jesus’ life and ministry than just his crucifixion.

It shows us something significant about what John knew of Jesus’ mission and what the author of John’s gospel believed about Jesus’ mission. Not only that, but this ongoing action of raising up the sin of the world is something that did not stop with Jesus, nor did it stop with his 12 disciples in the first century. It is the mission we are still called to participate in today. So we ask again, what is this sin of the world, and what does it mean to lift it up, to raise it up as a sacrifice? To see it embodied in a modern context, in the way that Jesus embodied this mission in the first century, we need look no further than the person who we will celebrate tomorrow, and who we celebrate every year for his courageous and Christ-like work in the world just 60 years ago: Martin Luther King, Jr.

In his letter from Birmingham Jail, which he penned in April of 1963 when he was confined for his participation in the nonviolent protests in Alabama that spring, King wrote to his fellow clergymen who had been critical of his actions in disobeying the laws for which he was jailed, saying, “Sometimes a law is just on its face and unjust in its application. For instance, I have been arrested on a charge of parading without a permit. Now, there is nothing wrong in having an ordinance which requires a permit for a parade. But such an ordinance becomes unjust when it is used to maintain segregation and to deny citizens the First-Amendment privilege of peaceful assembly and protest.

“I hope you are able to see the distinction I am trying to point out. In no sense do I advocate evading or defying the law, as would the rabid segregationist. That would lead to anarchy. One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty. I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.”

To “arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice,” this is the work of raising up the sin of the world. And we ask again; what is the sin of the world? It has many names and many faces. We can call it oppression, injustice, inequity, the wealth gap, slavery, or any number of terms, but at its core it all stems from the same place. Our one great human sin, that we all take part in at one time or another, is born from the illusion of scarcity. Our own feeling of not having enough, not being enough, and needing to hoard resources, whether they be money, security, power, or any thing else.

We default to oppression because we live into the apparent reality, though illusion, that resources are finite. In a world of finitude, of scarcity, where time and money and resources are finite, we default to a mentality of hoarding that leaves an ever increasing gap between those who have and those who don’t. But Jesus says, wake up! There is something more here than meets the eye. Because in reality there is only abundance! In reality, there are enough resources for everyone to have exactly what they need, including equality of all shapes and sizes. The hatred and oppression and racism that have permeated our world are a product of this scarcity, but it is all an illusion.

Jesus, in the very way he lived his life and moved about the world, was taking part in nonviolent protest to oppression, injustice and inequality, and constantly inviting us to recognize the possibilities of living into the abundance of the Kingdom of Heaven where resources flow freely and no one has power over anyone else. He ate with the rejected, the untouchable, he challenged unjust social norms, he challenged the very power structures of the world he lived in, the oppressive rule of Rome and its many headed system of injustice. He told people to give whatever was asked of them and to not expect anything in return, to fill up the basket of grain until it was overflowing. He took the finite resources of loaves and fish and showed them to be more than up to the task of feeding whoever was hungry. He told everyone over and over again that in the Kingdom of Heaven the first and the last are the same: complete equality and equity. This was the Kingdom of Heaven, the Reign of God that Jesus envisioned.

He moved through the world lifting up the sin of the world for all to see, to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice. He held up a mirror to those power structures, to everyone in power, to show them how they were taking part in this sin of the world. And he became this mirror in such fullness that, as Paul writes in the second letter to the Corinthians, he became sin who knew no sin. He became the very symbol of the injustice inherent in these systems while taking no part in their proliferation. He embodied these systems in all he did and carried them up to the cross, and in his nonviolent embodiment, in his presence on the cross, he changed those very systems by walking openly, lovingly and willingly in resistance to them, not by destroying them outright or dismantling them on the spot, but by exposing them for what they were with his very body.

As King says elsewhere in his letter regarding his decision to move beyond verbal negotiation, “We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community.”

And thus Martin Luther King, Jr. took up his role as a disciple of Christ and raised up the sin of the world, “presenting his very body as a means of laying his case before the conscience of the local and national community.” Lifting it up so high that not a single person could any longer pretend that segregation was not happening, that injustice was not happening, that oppression was not taking place, that assaults on the very dignity of our collective humanity were not being perpetrated every day. And like Jesus, he was killed for it, and his actions and words continue to change the world. He followed in the footsteps of Jesus, he took up the cross of those who had gone before and continued to raise up the sin of the world higher and higher, because he knew that nothing can happen without action.

As King says in response to those who ask him to wait for the incremental change of equality to take place, “Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform our pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood. Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.”

Behold, the lamb of god, raising up the sin of the world. This work that Jesus did 2000 years ago and King took up in this last century is not done, by any means. Jesus knew it, Martin Luther King, Jr. knew it, and we continue to live into an illusion if we do not heed their call and become co-creators with God in bringing about the justice and equity of the Kingdom of Heaven. But, as King warned us, without those with privilege and power taking part, “time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation.” He says elsewhere in the letter, “Lamentably, it is an historical fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily.” It is uncomfortable for those of us with privilege and power to face the truth of this sin of the world, and even more uncomfortable to do something about it. It seems though that Jesus was not much interested in our comfort, but very much interested in justice. A justice that each and every one of us has a role to play in bringing about, recognizing full well our own positions of power and privilege whatever they may be, and living into the discomfort of this mission of God, knowing also that doing nothing is not a neutral act, but is a preservation of the status quo, the sin of the world, that always defaults to the sin of scarcity.

How is God calling you to raise up the sin of the world? How are you intentionally or unintentionally taking part in maintaining the status quo? What does repentance look like in your context, and how can you take part in bringing about the justice and equity of the Kingdom of Heaven in the world today?

A Reflection on the first chapter of John’s Gospel

The Divine Blueprint

We’ve spent the last five weeks leading up to Christmas, including all four Sundays in the season of Advent and Christmas Eve, anticipating the birth of Jesus, the coming of a savior into the world, the arrival of a particular person in a particular place in a particular time two thousand years ago. At the same time though, there has been another anticipation running underneath this one, one that is more cosmic, more universal, one that is still coming, one that is already and not yet. In the stories about Mary and Joseph, Shepherds and angels, Jesus, and eventually wise-men from the east, we have encountered these particular characters, but now, in this first week of the Christmas season, we hear a new perspective from the author of John’s Gospel, one that takes this particular birth story of these particular people, and makes it universal, cosmic, eternal, and brings it right into our midst here and now. Matthew and Luke showed us what was in the beginning for Jesus of Nazareth, John shows us what was in the beginning for the Word.

This Word, logos in Greek, was a term used in Greek philosophy to describe the organizing principle of the universe. The thing that under-girded all of creation, that kept everything in order, made everything make sense. As Richard Rohr describes it, it was the divine “blueprint,” the principle intelligence and wisdom through which all of creation is made, ordered, and sustained. The author of the Gospel according to John, writing some 60 years after Jesus’ death, is incorporating this divine principle of wisdom and intelligence into a theological understanding of Jesus’ life, not just his 30 years on earth, but the cosmic significance of his identity as “the Christ.

This idea that the Word, the logos, the organizing wisdom of the universe became flesh would have been inconceivable and scandalous to first century ears. In a worldview where spirit was the greatest good and flesh was the sinful thing which needed to be overcome in order to achieve the highest good of the spiritual life, the idea that this Word would become flesh would challenge even the most open minded of 1st century thinkers.

In these first 18 verses of John’s gospel, the author is reorienting us to our understanding of God, of humanity, and of creation itself. As we have been anticipating for so many weeks, a savior has been born to us, and what John shows us today is that that savior does not save us by removing us from creation or from our humanity, but by dwelling in it. The savior does not save by removing suffering from creation, but by dwelling in that very suffering, and by suffering with us.
But the implications continue for how we understand this Christ, this Word, this creation. As John says,

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” (John 1:1, NRSV)

This word, this organizing principle of the universe, this infinite wisdom of relationship between all things, is the very thing that we call God.

“And this word became flesh and dwelt among us.” (John 1:14, NRSV)

Not only does this Word becoming flesh tell us something important about creation, but now we can see that since this Word is a life, a life that we can observe, then this life can tell us something about the Word, about the organizing principle that under-girds all of creation. In this particular person, Jesus of Nazareth, the Word dwells, and through the life of Jesus we can see the truth of all creation.

So, what is this truth? We need only look at the truth of Jesus’ life. The blueprint of all creation, of everything that is, and through which all has been made, including all of us, is life, suffering, death, and resurrection. The pattern of Jesus life, the Word made flesh, is the pattern of everything. Each and every part of creation and each and every one of us. Life, suffering, death and resurrection. As John describes the Word in the beginning of the Gospel, we get a glimpse of the depth to which this is true.

“What has come into being in the Word was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” (John 1:3b-5, NRSV)

We think that the darkness is synonymous with evil, with ignorance, with sin and death. But where would the light be without the darkness? There is a way of understanding the darkness that does not dispel its necessity and does not overcome it any more than the light does. John makes it clear that the darkness does not overcome the light, but it also seems clear that the light does not overcome the darkness either.

In the Beginning…

This first chapter of John is meant to bring us back to the first chapter of Genesis, the first “In the beginning….” Where God, speaking the Word of creation, hovers over the face of the formless deep, the great unknown, and in the first creative act utters the Word, “Let There Be Light,” and there is light. And then we are told that God’s next act was to separate the light from the darkness. But what does this mean that God “separates” the light from the darkness? It means that the light and darkness were in some form of coexistence. And then God separated them to make the night and the day, the necessary balance of our biological ecological rhythms, but at the end of this first day is the only time in the creation story that the author does not end the day by saying that it is good. Why is it not good that the light and the darkness were separated?To deny the darkness its due, to deny that it is in itself a place where God dwells and from which new life is created is to deny the Word, the pattern of the universe, that operates in us and in all things.

We are called to live into our darkness, the mysterious, infinite depth of our identity as human beings, and, as Jesus reveals to us in the incarnation, the season we now celebrate, the indwelling of God in those very human depths. It is on the edge of darkness and light that we are called to be. Fully in the dark and we have no direction, we cannot see where we are to move next, but standing completely in the light we are blinded by our own sense of knowing. It is on the edge of the light, at the precipice of the darkness, that things are revealed, that we, and creation, and God come into being.

God (Suffering) With Us

We have in many ways been tricked into thinking that light is the good and darkness is the bad, and John’s gospel contains these seeming dualities throughout as common themes, but to think of them as opposites, as dualities, is to misunderstand their relationship. John, like so much of scripture, is drawing us into the darkness, into the mystery, away from clear black and white dualism, away from the distinction between flesh and spirit, between the Word and God, between human and divine, between light and darkness. There is no light supremacy in John, there is only the divine interplay between co-equal parts of creation, light and darkness.

And it is our job, with God’s help to hold these two together, as they were in the beginning, and let their coexistence in us create new things that have never been before; from life, suffering, from suffering, death, from death, new life, and over and over again the pattern proceeds throughout our lives and throughout creation. The trees blossom and bloom and change colors and drop their leaves and die and are resurrected in the spring and it all happens again. A prairie grows and is burned to the ground and rises from the ashes with all the nutrients that never would have been there without the destruction of the fire. Jesus lives and heals and teaches, suffers with the suffering, and dies, and in three days is resurrected into something both continuous and new, with open wounds that give birth to faith and healing. A seed must die, buried deep in the ground, in the darkness, to bear forth new life.

All of us know this pattern at some level in our lives, and John is calling us through the Word, through creation, to reorient ourselves to this flow of life within us. We all suffer, and in this Christmas season, are invited again to remember that in that suffering God suffers with us, Immanuel, and that the life which is the light, at the edge of the mysterious newness of darkness, is the pattern of death and resurrection through that suffering.

It seems out of place to talk about death and suffering in this season of joy, but we have also been misled to believe that this season is only about happiness and not about suffering. In fact, in this season where we celebrate the incarnation of the Word, we are invited to celebrate not the absence of suffering in our lives, but the presence of God in our suffering.

Can you see God dwelling in suffering in your life? Can you feel this current of all creation flowing in your humanity? How, in this season of Christmas, are you being invited deeper into your human experience, where God is already dwelling?

Continue The Conversation
What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below and keep the conversation going.

(An excerpt from Chapter 6 of “The Beautiful Letdown: An Addict’s Theology of Addiction”)

One of the verses of Scripture most commonly used to summarize the work of Jesus in the world and thus the popular view of salvation is John 3:16. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:16). There are many conclusions about Jesus’ work in salvation that have been drawn from this single verse of Scripture. One is that salvation means saving someone from eternal death and delivering them to eternal life. The other is that this deliverance is dependent on the individual’s ability to believe in Jesus. And finally, there is a clear assumption that God sent Jesus
into the world to die for us.

When we focus too much on a single verse of Scripture we do ourselves a great disservice in missing the larger theological and scriptural context within which that verse lives. There is a lot going on in the Bible, including a vast array of genres all interwoven into this Book of many books. There are layers of cultural context and assumptions, both in terms of the broader societal structures the authors and individuals found themselves in and the various religious contexts within which they were located. For one, most of the writers of the various books in the New Testament were operating from a Jewish worldview, with varying degrees of familiarity with Hebrew Scripture. When we remove this verse from its larger context in the Gospel of John, we lose the nuance of what the Gospel writer is trying to convey about salvation and the work of Jesus in the world.

When we read John 3:16 with the preceding two verses, John 3:14 and 3:15, we see a very different picture of salvation painted by Jesus than what we can glean from just the 16th verse itself. Jesus says, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life” (John 3:14 –16). In adding the context of just these two verses we are met with a dynamic interplay of meaning, implication, and depth of tradition that is far beyond a simple one-step guide to salvation. We find Jesus referencing a story from the book of Numbers in the Hebrew Scriptures in order to put his understanding of salvation and his work in the world into the context of a larger narrative of history. Jesus is using the truth of a story to indicate the truth of salvation, of the saving work he is doing in the world.

The story Jesus is referencing is from Numbers 21:1–9:

From Mount Hor [the Israelites] set out by the way to the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food.” Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

Numbers 21:1-9, NRSV

Israel is the ultimate addict. When faced with the discomfort of transition, of the desert, of the place in between leaving suffering and entering the promised land, they consistently want to return to that which does not work, to bondage and slavery, and to the suffering they know rather than the promise of what might be but is not yet. Sobriety sucks. It feels like death. It is a desert wasteland where you have not yet figured out how to live without your addictive behavior and each occurrence of not partaking in that behavior feels like a punch in the gut. The voice in your head calls out: why did we leave that (drink, porn, drug, etc.) just to wither up and die
out here in the unknown? Sobriety — the first moments of engaging with the wandering chaos of the desert land that lies immediately outside the bondage of addiction — is enough to make you wish for the addiction again, no matter how painful it was.

Jesus is using this story as a metaphor for the spiritual journey he is inviting everyone to follow. The Israelites cry out to God to remove the snakes and take the source of their suffering away. But God does no such thing. Instead of removing the snakes that God sent, God tells Moses to make a snake out of bronze and put it on a pole so that whoever is bitten by a snake shall look at it and live. Rather than removing the source of suffering, God transforms the source of suffering into a source of healing. The snakes are still there, the consequences must be lived with, but God responds to the suffering with a source of healing, that again is not the removal of the suffering, but the healing of it through its very source. By lifting up the serpent on a pole, gazing at it directly, in full view, in the full light of day, in front of everyone, lifting it up in vulnerability, the person is healed.

And thus, Jesus says, it will be with him. There is more to this journey of believing than just professing Jesus as Lord and Savior. Jesus ties this story directly to what is happening in his life, death, and resurrection. Belief here means more than just signing on to a specific tenet of doctrine about who Jesus is or is not. It is about having enough faith in Jesus, believing in him
enough, trusting him enough, to walk this journey that he has set before us. One that clearly includes suffering, uses our very sources of suffering to destroy us, but then uses those same sources of suffering to transform us, to bring us to new life, to bring us back to ourselves, to help us engage with the world and ourselves and God in a new way. It puts us back in touch with
our own depths, which are the same as the depths of God.

Jesus would die on the cross from wounds in his side and hands, but these very wounds were to become sources of healing and salvation for the whole world. We may be afraid of our addictions, our capacity to cause suffering, and the chaos in us and around us, but Jesus sets before us a path not of fear but of joy. Rather than hiding our addictions and wanting to cut out and remove those parts of ourselves that we don’t like, we are called to raise them up high in the light of day, gaze at them, and let them gaze back at us. In doing this we let ourselves be transformed and let those very sources of suffering be transformed in us.

As we see in the resurrected Jesus, those wounds are not healed, at least not in the way we think of healing. Even healing itself has taken on a new shape in Jesus’ saving work. Healing no longer means to close up a wound, to cover up those places of suffering. Healing is the transforming of wounds into sources of healing, where we can touch the very places where
we have been destroyed and find hope. Healing is not the removal of suffering, healing is the transformation of suffering for the sake of our own transformation and the transformation of the world. It is a transformation we can bring about when we allow ourselves to die, to be brought to new life, and to engage deeply with ourselves and the world, through our wounds, the sources of our powerless power. Addiction is not a threat to the world, it is our gift to the world, and a gift we all possess.

(a sermon on the Proper 28 readings at Good Samaritan Episcopal Church, San Diego)

Today Jesus predicts to his disciples the destruction of the great temple in Jerusalem.  This temple had been the center of Jewish life for centuries.  It was the place of pilgrimage for all of the Jewish feasts and celebrations.  The reason that Jesus and his disciples are there in the first place is because they are making their yearly pilgrimage to Jerusalem to take part in the annual remembrance of Passover.  This temple though, was not the first great temple that had stood in Jerusalem, it was the second. 

The first temple had been destroyed over 600 years before Jesus and his disciples made their pilgrimage there.  In the sixth century BC, Jerusalem was sacked by the invading Babylonian armies on their conquest of the Mediterranean world.  The temple that Solomon had built to replace the roaming tabernacle in the years in the desert, that had been the center of Jewish thought and life for centuries, was destroyed and the Jewish people expelled from the land, into Babylon and its surrounding territories, in what we now refer to as the Exile from the holy land.  It was in this time of exile, when the temple had been destroyed, when the center of the life of the Jewish faith had been destroyed, when hope was almost impossible to find, that this section of Isaiah from this mornings reading was most likely written.  The author writes of God’s promise to this Jewish community that had been expelled from their home:

“For I am about to create new heavens

and a new earth;

the former things shall not be remembered

or come to mind.

But be glad and rejoice forever

in what I am creating;

for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.”

God is promising this exiled community a new heaven and a new earth.  A new Jerusalem that will be a joy and a delight to the people.  A Jerusalem that will stand forever, that will be a place overflowing with life and safety for centuries and millenia to come.  A home that will never be taken away again.  In the midst of death and destruction, in the midst of exile, in the midst of being removed from their life source, God promises hope in the confusion, joy in the midst of sorrow, delight in the midst of sadness.  And ultimately the Jewish people are delivered back to their home, and rebuild this temple, and re-create their life as a community.  It is within this second temple that Jesus is standing with his disciples, and telling them that once again, it will be destroyed, that not one stone will be left upon another.

In the year 70 ce, some 40 years after Jesus and his disciples stood in the temple, the Roman empire, much like the great Babylonian empire before them, in a show of force, quelled a Jewish rebellion and sacked Jerusalem again, destroying this second great temple.  The Jewish people were once again expelled, escaping death and destruction, and found themselves spread throughout the Roman empire, in a new exile, a new diaspora, again wrestling with what Jewish life would look like now that the center of it all, the temple, Zion, Jerusalem, was gone.  And this time, forever.  It is in this time that the author of Luke most likely wrote this gospel, and this story of Jesus foretelling the temple’s destruction.  It was this question that the evangelist is dealing with.  What does this destruction mean for God’s promises, for salvation, for faith itself?  Through the words of Jesus in today’s story, God’s promise is re-framed.

But the joy and delight, the hope and newness that Jesus promises are not ones that will be born out of safety, but out of destruction, not out of comfort, but out of persecution, not out of peace, but out of alienation, not out of life, but out of death.  But, as Jesus reminds his disciples, these things must take place.  And not just on a personal level, but on a communal level. On a worldwide level.  On the level of all creation.

He says, “When you hear of wars and insurrections, do not be terrified; for these things must take place first, but the end will not follow immediately.” Then he said to them, “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be great earthquakes, and in various places famines and plagues; and there will be dreadful portents and great signs from heaven.” 

The people who are reading these words from Jesus are living after this destruction has taken place, in the midst of persecution, in the midst of broken relationships, in the midst of destruction and death.  And yet, the promise of a new heaven and a new earth still echos through history.  From the laments of Babylon and the cries of fear from the diaspora, they ring in the hearts these first century communities searching for answers.  And they still ring true for us today.

Later in the first century, the writer of the book of Revelation would renew this promise of a new heaven and a new earth from Isaiah, in this new time of exile and fear:

“Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.  And I saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.  And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying,

“See, the home of God is among mortals.

He will dwell with them;

they will be his peoples,

and God himself will be with them;

he will wipe every tear from their eyes.

Death will be no more;

mourning and crying and pain will be no more,

for the first things have passed away.”

God’s dwelling place will be among the people, the author of Revelation says.  And looking at the temple on this day, Jesus can see this vision laid out before him. Because ultimately the Jewish people would never return to the temple in Jerusalem.  There would never be another one.  But community would continue to be found in the diaspora.  The Jewish faith would grow, and adapt, and God would move in new ways.  Jewish life would move out into the world, and give birth to synagogues, local centers of community, that would take the place in Jewish life of the one temple.  The temple would spread-out over all creation, and people would recognize God’s presence beyond the walls of Jerusalem.  This diaspora would also lay the groundwork for this first century Christianity to spread and adapt alongside its sibling Jewish tradition.  And thus something both new and old would be born, though none of it would have happened, there would have been no newness, no recreation, without this unthinkable destruction, without every stone being torn down. And as Jesus reminds his disciples after these predictions, ““You will be betrayed even by parents and brothers, by relatives and friends; and they will put some of you to death. You will be hated by all because of my name. But not a hair of your head will perish. By your endurance you will gain your souls.”

Another way of translating this last line is, “By your endurance you will gain your selves, your truest identities, your deepest life in God.”  Jesus knows, standing with his friends and loved ones, that not one of them will find their truest selves without being completely broken to pieces.  And that destruction will be painful, it will be death, it will be hopeless feeling, but by their perseverance, as individuals and as a community, their truest selves will be revealed to them.  A new heaven and a new earth will be born.

Jesus tells us today that even in the midst of death and destruction something new is being created.  Yes, the temple was destroyed, but a new temple was born. A temple that burst from the confines of Jerusalem. That burst through the boundaries of Israel. That burst through the powerful empire of Rome.  What was born from the devastation of this great temple was a new one, the temple of all creation. The temple of the new heaven and the new earth.

And thus we can be assured that even when things seem most hopeless, when we feel devoid of God’s presence and love, when everything falls apart and not one stone is left on another, something new is being born in us. It is in these times of fear and trembling that we are forced to co-create with God and a new heaven and a new earth are born. A new way of seeing everything.  Seeing the presence of God everywhere, even and especially in the rubble of those fallen stones.  The new heaven and new earth are revealed to us, not as something that has just been created, but something that has always been there and we had simply never been able to see.  When our delicately constructed walls are brought down by life, we are ushered into a newness that is both ancient and eternal, old and new, life and death, and step by step we are ushered into the kingdom of God, where we can see God in all things, and know that every moment of fear and trembling is moving us closer to the new heaven and new earth. To a new creation, that has always been and yet is still being created.

Where is newness being born in your life? 

What is being destroyed in you?

How is God creating out of the rubble? 

I am what some might call a “millennial.” I’m 31 years old. I grew up in the 90s and 00s. I remember Doug, Rugrats, Xanga, and the beginning of Facebook. I graduated from high school with a flip phone and from college with an Iphone. I am the person who churches can’t figure out how to talk to. And yet, I am bought in. I have been part of the Episcopal Church for my entire life. I have been to seminary, I have a Masters of Divinity, and I work in churches. I am of two minds, a foot in two worlds.

One in the institutional church, with committees and Baby Boomers and pledge campaigns and reverence for the clerics and fear about dying. The other is with my friends, my 20 and 30 year old community made up of people who, on the whole, are not bought in, in a good way. In a way that says, “I don’t care about your institution.” In a way that says, “I am going to need a better answer to ‘Why’ than ‘Because that’s how we do it.” In a way that is inviting the institution to evolve, to grow, and to respond to the actual needs of the world, of a new generation, with a new cultural language with which to communicate.

I am torn between these two perspective. On one side, why should a religious tradition that seems to adhere so stringently to a 2000 year old book have anything to teach me? And from the perspective of the institution, why don’t my fellow young people realize that there is something here for us?

Progress and Liberation

There is a common refrain among people who are not involved with any kind of faith community, or are estranged from one, or even those that are part of one: Christianity has become irrelevant. They say the blind morality, based on antiquated teachings, has nothing to offer a fast-paced world of progress and liberation. But even as I write that sentence, my two-sided brain has a hard time computing this idea. What I know, what I have experienced, is that if Christianity is anything, if the Bible teaches anything, if we can know anything about God, it’s that it is all about progress and liberation.

I get it, though. The church, over its 2000+ year history, has caused more suffering than healing. It has contributed to the oppression of people, and stood completely at odds with that liberation it claims to be built on. Many denominations (or non-denominations) are still doing this today. And, to the detriment of Christianity everywhere, Christian churches have done it all while claiming that the foundation for this oppression is found in the Bible.

The Bible, therefore, has become equally frustrating. It was created in a variety of contexts and cultures that are disconnected from our current cultural experience. They require a lot of background information to fully appreciate, not to mention the fact that unless we are reading these books in their original language or translating them ourselves, we are reading someone else’s interpretation right off the bat. There are layers and layers of manuscript transmission, source criticism, textual criticism, interpretation, translation and other such interpretive hurdles to hold simultaneously every time we open that book of many books. And while this might make it seem more and more irrelevant and out of touch with our current reality with every passing moment, I have a deep abiding sense within myself that it actually is doing the opposite. The more hazy and murky and confusing this beautiful, sacred, scary, weird, frustrating book is, the more it lines up with my equally hazy, murky, confusing, beautiful, sacred, scary, weird, and frustrating life.

A Book of Many Books

While we often think of this compilation of texts we call the Bible as a single book, as is constantly reinforced by references to it such as “The Good Book” or “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth,” it is not and has never been that. This book we call the Bible is a collection of many books, written and edited and curated over thousands of years by who knows how many hundreds of people. Thus we have the common experience of seeing all these contradictions, which make little sense if we think the whole thing is one continuous story written by a single person over the course of history but make a lot of sense if each of these books was written by a different person in different times in different places with different worldviews and different experiences of the world around them and of God.

Not only that, but they aren’t even all the same genre or style of writing. Within the book of many books there is history, poetry, biography, song, wisdom literature, apocalyptic literature, letters, orations, and all kinds of subtle variations on each of these. The Bible is not so much a single book as it is a snapshot of an entire shelf of books in your home, which happen to have all been used by a community of faith over thousands of years and thus have been bound together, but not in order to homogenize them. Just like those books on your shelf, these books are in the Bible because they have resonated truth in a community of faith for long enough that they kept them around, kept reading them, even when they moved, even when the generations turned over, even when the house burned down. They read them on specific occasions, like that summer book you always read on your first day at the beach or the poem you read every time your family gathers for a special occasion.

You see, these books that make up the Bible, and thus the Bible itself, are not true because they have been marked authentic by a high and lofty God with a giant “inerrant” stamp. There is truth in the Bible because it is made up of people telling their own truths about their experiences of God throughout these thousands and thousands of years of history. Yes, we have bound these together and marked them as sacred and holy and authoritative, but this doesn’t mean we stop interpreting them for our current context, in light of our own experience and in light of the interpretation and experiences of those who have come before us. Often, we refer to the Bible as the “living word of God,” but these words are not living if we stop interpreting them. Once they are the set-in-stone, the-Bible-says-it-so-it’s-true words, they are dead. They have no more life to give.

Implicitly Relevant

The Christianity that I am talking about, the thing that Jesus taught the people who surrounded him, the very foundation of the scriptures on which Christianity is built, cannot be irrelevant, because it is infinitely adaptable, always transforming and moving into new eras and contexts and times. A Christianity that is irrelevant, that is dead, that has stopped moving forward, that has stopped working for the liberation of the oppressed, is not Christianity. That is some sort of frozen idolatry subtly or not so subtly adding to the oppression from which, at it’s very core, it is supposed to be liberating people.

Jesus was not creating a new set of laws to which he expected everyone for the rest of eternity to adhere. His goal and his mission was to show us how to adapt in any time and context. How to continue to liberate ourselves and those around us. How to be present with our own suffering and the suffering of the world. How to let ourselves be transformed in that suffering, and know that when there is death, large or small, it is not so much the end of something as it is the resurrection of a new thing all together. Life, suffering, death, resurrection, transformation, and new life.

This cycle, this trajectory of our spiritual journey that Jesus taught is not tied to a time or a place or a culture, though Jesus did embody them in a particular time and place and culture, as had all those many prophets and poets and writers before him. What is true is what lies underneath all the particularity. The particularity of time and context and culture are not meant to limit relevance to that one place and time, but is meant to be the window by which we see the eternal through the particularity. We can see that there is something in our humanity that connects us across time and place and culture, there is a universality at play that manifests in particularity, and it is those particularities, each pointing to the universal, that populate this book of many books, this truth of many truths, that is the Bible, that is the foundation of the Christian tradition.

Thus we are meant to continue the exploration of this universal through our particular place and experience and situation. The Bible is the starting point, the faith tradition is a foundation on which to stand, but our experience of life and of God is just as authoritative and true now as it was for those poets and priests and prophets for so many thousands of years before us. The Bible is relevant, Christianity is relevant, God is relevant, because we are relevant. Rather than standing opposed to the witness of scripture, our experiences, our stories, are meant to extend the witness of scripture. We are the books that follow Revelation. We are part of the canon. We are relevant because each one of us is inextricably and inherently linked to the life of the divine, and that can never be irrelevant.

Where Do We Go Now?

If the Christian tradition is founded on and rooted in this book of many books, many peoples, and many truths that extend from the time-before-time all the way to the here-and-now, then its relevance is rooted in us. If there is something in the tradition of Christianity that is irrelevant, that has died, that no longer resonates, then I hope we can bury it, and thus let it grow into something new as well as something ancient. I know that the church has hurt people, but Christianity is not the church, God is not the church. God, and the truths of Christianity, are both much bigger than an institution could ever hold.

The church, at its best, is a window into God’s grace and healing power, God’s co-suffering with the world and attuned response to each and every need. It is not always, and rarely is, any of these things, but it can be. All of this is in the church’s DNA, but the further away these two worlds get — the ancientness of the tradition and the progression of the now — the less and less we are able to respond to the needs of the world. I need both things. I need the progress of our time, but I need it to be rooted in something deep and ancient, to anchor it to a reality and identity that is greater than my individual one, but is still dependent on my experience to stay alive.

There are churches, there are communities, where this is possible, and all we have to do is re-engage. Gently, cautiously, angrily even, but re-engage nonetheless. And that is our invitation to one another, to these two worlds that I live in, to these two worlds that have been tricked into thinking they are different, but yearn for the same thing: Home.

Continue The Conversation

What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments below and keep the conversation going.

From the Introduction to The Beautiful Letdown

“It felt like everything was gone. All of my efforts to save myself had failed. Those walls of lies which I had built to prop myself up had come down. My delicately constructed defenses crumbled around me and as I fell with them, I felt that I may never land. It felt like I may fall forever. At the same time, that falling began to feel like being ever so softly, ever so gently, held. The falling was in itself a holding. The crumbling was itself a recreation. The death was itself life. When everything was gone – my image, my security, my certainty – the only thing left was the simple fact that I still existed. The object of my addiction, the thing I thought was the most important thing in the world, had let me down. It had dropped me into the bottomless depth of myself: a depth that I never would have known if it weren’t for my fall, a fall that I never would have experienced without being addicted. My addiction was an invitation to something more, to something unfinished and yet whole, to something eternal and always becoming, to something true and still developing. It was an invitation from God, one that I had carried with me for so long, but had never opened – until it opened me.

What if, instead of thinking about addiction as a disease that needs treatment, an epidemic that needs eradication, or a moral failing that implies weakness, we saw it as a hand-written invitation from God? How would we operate differently if we saw addiction as an invitation to union with the transcendent, to knowledge of our true selves, and to spiritual depth and wholeness?    How would we respond differently to those we know and love who are addicted?  How would we treat ourselves differently in the face of our own addictions?  Do you see how this way of thinking can change the way we understand and respond to our own suffering and the suffering of others? 

Addiction is not something to hate, to run from, or to disown. We can no more label the experience of addiction a simple human tragedy than we can label the crucifixion one. There is something more to it than meets the eye. There is a “joy set before” us (Heb 12:2 NRSV), a promise present in this excruciating experience. In all its pain and fear it is something to grasp, to run toward. If we do, it will lead us to vibrant life, to our true selves, and to peace. Each one of us has received this hand-written invitation and now is our chance to examine how we will respond. It is an invitation that we do not discover in our happy times, in our religious devotion, or in our own moral purity. No, it is one that finds us through the very parts of ourselves that we wish didn’t exist, that we tried with every ounce of energy to hide. If our addictions – our sins – are our invitation, how much longer can we afford to throw them away? 

This is the question of our lives.”