saner-than-thou

The Word for today:
Mark 3.20-35

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." (Mark 3:20-21)

I went to a standard church-on-the-corner for about ten years.

What I remember of the place is that the people were so sane and reasonable there that it almost drove me crazy. I mean, it’s not normal for that many people to be so normal.

I mean it. I distinctly remember thinking that the people there were saner than Jesus, and I longed for someone crazy that I could relate to.

But that person never showed up, so I had to look for friends in the Bible, where the crazies are wall to wall:

Noah—the ultimate eccentric
Abraham—faith that real will get you arrested
Jacob—crazy in general, and even crazier about Rachel
Samson—never admitted to polite society
Elijah—bouts of clinical depression
Solomon—where to begin? Let me count the ways…
And finally (dare I say it?) Jesus—

Then Jesus entered a house, and again a crowd gathered, so that he and his disciples were not even able to eat. When his family heard about this, they went to take charge of him, for they said, "He is out of his mind." (Mark 3:20-21)

So he made a whip out of cords, and drove all from the temple area, both sheep and cattle; he scattered the coins of the money changers and overturned their tables. To those who sold doves he said, "Get these out of here! How dare you turn my Father's house into a market!" His disciples remembered that it is written: "Zeal for your house will consume me." (John 2:15-17)

At these words the Jews were again divided. Many of them said, "He is demon-possessed and raving mad. Why listen to him?" (John 10:19-20)

To be sure, there are more sane people in scripture than there are otherwise. And to be fair, the people on the list above are not so much crazy as they are hyper-sane or just misunderstood.

But I do see in the church a higher percentage of saner-than-thous than I can find in the Bible. And I don’t see why, with all these biblical examples to the contrary, we effect the masks of normalcy and consistency and surface sanity to the extent that we do.

So if you’re a little off center, please, please drop the mask. I was looking for you back there on the corner. I looked for a long, long time, until I just had to give up.

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count me the stars

The Word for today:
Mark 3.7-19

mark this:
And he appointed twelve – designating them apostles -- so that they might be with him…(Mark 3:14)




I want to admit to you and to the world at large that I have Apostle Envy. I am otherwise unafflicted by envy, but I’d give my ring finger, the ring on it, and the hand it’s attached to to have been in the company of Jesus Christ for 3 minutes, let alone three years.

The famous and rich and gifted and lucky and otherwise notorious people of our times do not interest me enough to know their names.

And from biblical times, even Moses and David and Elijah and Isaiah and John the Baptist do not stir in me the envy that the Apostles do. I’ll trade you their parting seas and towering Psalms and chariots of fire and cherubim and seraphim and all the locusts and wild honey in Israel for 1000 days of access to Him anytime.

If I were an Apostle, I'd ask the names of all the stars. Since God knows them by name (Isaiah 40:26) and they are, by all accounts, unfinite in number, that would mean that instead of just three years I’d have to hang with him forever just to hear him reply to my sincere question.

I’d sort of entrap God with scams and ploys so that I wouldn’t have to go home anytime soon. If Jesus were to say, “The answer would take forever,” I’d tell him that I’m in no hurry…

I’d sort of leverage his own patience against him. Many scams (and wrestling moves) are based on the principle of using a person’s own virtue (or strength) against him.

I think that’s what was going on when Jacob wrestled Jesus in Genesis. He just wouldn’t let Jesus go, so He had to break his leg to get away.

If that’s the only risk I have to take, I’m taking it. I have a bad case of Apostle envy, so by hook or by crook I’m going to get three years like they did.

When I can no longer detain him with his own patience, then I’ll devise a way to pit his kindness against him. When that runs its course, then I’ll play the empathy card. That oughtta keep him here for a while.

The way I see it, God’s got more virtues than there are stars in the sky. He’s got virtues that we don’t even have names for. I think I’ll ask him to name every one…

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I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet

The Word for today:
Mark 2:13-3:6

mark this:
No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made.
And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the wine will burst the skins--and the wine is destroyed, and so are the skins. But new wine is for fresh wineskins."  (Mark 2:21-22)

When I was a little kid, Easter was not as much about Easter baskets as it was about Easter bonnets.

When we went to Easter Sunday Mass, every single item we wore was brand new! New trousers, new shirt, new jacket, new belt, new shoes, new haircut.

All of this newness, of course, was recorded by my Dad’s trusty Brownie camera, which came out for Easter Sunday and then got put away until the next Easter. (So if you see any pictures of me prior to about 13 years old, our family appears to be quite well-to-do and I am a walking fashion statement. O, how the magic box lies!)

I don’t think my parents actually associated the new Easter clothes with new life in the resurrected Christ.  (If they did, they didn’t tell my brother and sisters and me.) But now I consider the new bonnet to be a far more appropriate Easter tradition than the bunny-in-a-basket trick that we currently practice.

Jesus ushered in a new day and a new way:
For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ. (John 1:17)

This isn’t patchwork, this is revolution.
He came to provide a new garment, the robe of righteousness, for those who do nothing more than trust in Him. He has not come to sew patches on an old garment:
No one sews a piece of unshrunk cloth on an old garment. If he does, the patch tears away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear is made. (Mark 2:21)

I’ve got nothing against bunnies and baskets and jelly beans, but when it comes to meaningful Easter traditions, I could write a sonnet about your Easter bonnet.

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period.

The Word for today:
Mark 1:35-2:12

The story of the leper healed by the touch of Jesus Christ is not, technically, a parable. But let’s make it one, because there is no gospel story more analogous to the cross than this account of when God touched man:

And a leper came to him, imploring him, and kneeling said to him, "If you will, you can make me clean." Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand and touched him and said to him, "I will; be clean." And immediately the leprosy left him, and he was made clean. (Mark 1:40-42)

Leprosy is the Bible’s most complete picture of sin and its effects: Notice that the leper must live outside the camp:

The person with such an infectious disease must wear torn clothes, let his hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of his face and cry out, 'Unclean! Unclean!' As long as he has the infection he remains unclean. He must live alone; he must live outside the camp. (Leviticus 13:45-46)

To “live alone, outside the camp” is a picture of spiritual death, which is separation from God:
Your sins have separated you from your God. (Isaiah 59:2)

But the separation can end at the cross.

It is interesting, in an architectural sense, that the cross is nothing more than an intersection. It’s the place where God, who became man, became sin for us that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

We generally explain the cross in terms that are personal, emotional, and poetic. But let’s see the cross from a geometric perspective.

Intersection is where two lines touch at a solitary point. Were it not for Jesus Christ, we would have absolutely nothing in common with God. Nothing.

We intersect the realm of God at precisely one point, one portal, one Person. Except for Jesus Christ and him crucified (1), there is no point at which my path and God’s path could ever touch.

Except for Jesus Christ and him crucified, there is no point, period.

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(1) 1 Corinthians 2:2

tracing it back to the Source

The Word for today:
Mark 1:16-34

mark this:
They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. (Mark 1:21-22)

 

I can’t remember where I first met Jesus. I can approximate when, but not where. It is wholly understandable that I should not remember such details because when I met him I was at the tail end of a two-decade alcoholic haze.

That does not mean I was less than sober when I first read the gospels. Most chronic drunks get sober every day. The problem is that they are also drunk every day, which puts memories of dates and places into a blender and turns it up to high speed. Memories become unsorted.

But the heart, even of a drunk, is not confused. Hearts remember the who long after the mind has forgotten the when and the where. Thus I remember absolutely everything about Him, right from the start, whenever that was.

I vividly remember having the very same reaction as those, in today’s reading, who are meeting him for the first time:

They went to Capernaum, and when the Sabbath came, Jesus went into the synagogue and began to teach. The people were amazed at his teaching, because he taught them as one who had authority, not as the teachers of the law. (Mark 1:21-22)

The people were all so amazed that they asked each other, "What is this? A new teaching--and with authority!” (from Mark 1:27)

Up to that point, I’d been literary all my life. That sounds sort of pretentious, but I don’t mean it in that way. I mean it in the same sense that if a kid next door sat on the porch all summer picking at a guitar and a banjo, we’d think of him as musically oriented. Or if that kid’s brother was out practicing basketball all day, we’d think of him as athletically inclined. I was the nerd next door with his nose in serious literature all day.

So when I first read the gospels, I was aghast at the injustice of it all! The so-called great authors had all ripped this guy off. Either blatantly or subtly, either in concurrence or in refutation, either consciously or subliminally, they were all cribbing (a polite word for plagiarizing) from this guy.

I could actually feel my eyes growing wider and wider, trying to take it all in. I could actually feel the revelation crystallizing: this is the Source; the seminal ideas in literature could be traced back to him, and no further!

He spoke, as the people were saying, with authority. What that meant to them was that he cited no references, which was the teaching methodology in the synagogues. Whenever a thought was expressed, its attribution was noted: “According to Rabbi Feinstein, whose commentary has been heavily influenced by Rabbi Schoenberg’s analysis of this issue…”

But there were no footnotes in Jesus’ presentation. How could there be? His thought was derived from no one. He was the Source. He was as far back as the stream of thought could be traced!

I knew just enough literature to know that I’d stumbled into the presence of the only author on earth who had never cadged a thought. I was in absolute shock and awe. I’d met the Beginning. And how deftly poetic to wait for the last page of his book before he calls himself that!--
I am the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End. (Revelation 22:13; cf. Revelation 21:6)

Since then, of course, I’ve come to know him as the Source in so many other, more “spiritual” ways. But for me, in those earliest days, he was the fountain of ideas before he became the fountain of life.

In his grace, God met me as I was, with a bottle in one hand and a poetry anthology in the other. I remain convinced that I never would have met the Author of Salvation (1) if I had not met the Primordial Poet first.

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(1) Hebrews 5:9, 12:2

handing over the keys

The Word for today:
Mark 1:1-15

mark this:
Immediately the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness. (Mark 1:12)

and this:
Then Jesus, being filled with the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness. (Luke 4:1)


People of little faith (and zero Bible literacy) make much ado about the so-called “contradictions” in scripture. The tiniest of discrepancies have them saying, “Aha, told you so! It can’t be the Word of God because there’s a mistake in it!”

“But I thought you didn’t believe in God?”

“I don’t.”

“So you’re saying the reason he never makes a mistake is because he doesn’t exist?”

“Well, umhh, yeah…”

“So if he made a mistake, would you then admit his existence?”

“Well, umhh, no…”

“But you’d have to. He’s got to exist to make a mistake!”

***

Usually, such situations can be handled with a bit of light-hearted repartee. But not always.

One of the more serious – and tense -- conversations I’ve had about so-called Bible discrepancies had to do with a verse from our reading today:

Immediately the Spirit drove Him into the wilderness. (Mark 1:12)

I was running with a friend through the small city where I live. As we ran, he asked me about the Holy Spirit. Specifically, he asked how we can be sure that we are being led by the Spirit, like Jesus was.

The answer I gave him (as a rumble of thunder was heard) was that we can’t be empirically sure of matters that are spiritually discerned.  Which, I suspected by the silence that ensued, meant less to him than it did to me.

So I took another tack: “If you hand Him the keys, He will steer.”

“What do you mean, 'Hand him the keys?' "

Just then, the drizzle we’d been running through turned into a dramatic downpour. So we ducked into a nearby bus stop enclosure to wait the worst of it out. Inside the bus stop and out of the deluge, our conversation resumed.

“Jesus was led by the Spirit and driven by the Spirit at the same time. Led implies that he willingly followed the Spirit. Driven implies that he was no longer under his own power.”

At that point, we were interrupted by a question from a loud and unknown voice: “Well, which one was it? Was he led or was he driven?” It was not a friendly voice and he was not alone. He was the front man for a band of five who, trust me, had never been mistaken for accountants or schoolteachers.

As he repeated the question, the tone of his voice escalated from challenging to menacing:

“Which one was it? Was he pushed or was he pulled?”

"Yes and yes," was the smart-aleck retort that I would have blurted in days of yore.  But I thought for a second.  It had taken me a dozen years to learn to wait for the Spirit for that single second.

“When you get on the bus, where are you going?”

“All the way to California. We follow the crops.” They were migrant workers.

“Are you going willingly?”

“Sure.”

“Are you driving?”

“Hell no.”

“Do you think you’ll get there?”

“Hell yes.”

“That’s how it was with Jesus. He made up his mind to hand over the keys and let God steer.”

The front man turned to his group. “Any of you guys ever been to Sunday School?” His cohorts could tell the question was rhetorical. Their leader did not want an answer.

But I wanted one. So I asked him, “Have you ever been to Sunday School?”

The man did not immediately reply. Then his eyes and features softened as his guard came down. “I have now.”

***

I don’t know what became of those men, but I do know that because I’d waited the space of one heartbeat, the Holy Spirit had defused a situation and the Word of God had been heard.

I had been willing, for once in my life, not to blurt out what came to me naturally. So I found myself being supernaturally driven down a path of righteousness for his Name’s sake.

By now, the storm had already blown its way through town. So we set out on our run again. As soon as we were out of the enclosure, my friend spoke first. “Thank God, that was empirical.”

“Yeah.  And Holy Spirit-ual.

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the feasts of Israel: Scripture’s theme parties

The Word for today:
Numbers 33-35

mark this:
These you shall present to the Lord at your appointed feasts (besides your vowed offerings and your freewill offerings) as your burnt offerings and your grain offerings, as your drink offerings and your peace offerings. (Numbers 29:39)



I think I’m Jewish.

I don’t know how this notion entered the thicket that is my brain, but I think I am. It’s really just a feeling with no basis in fact. (As far as I know, not a single one of my ancestors was Jewish or even married to a Jew.)

But I still think, somehow, that I’m connected to the Jew. It may be my admiration for them—their race is loaded with seminal geniuses in science, music, literature, architecture, you name it. Or it may be that I identify with their rejection and their oppression and their history of national homelessness. (I’m probably not supposed to say this, but it’s been a long time since I’ve felt at home in my country and lately I feel more estranged by the day. I used to love her but she left me.)

Or it might just be the gratitude and indebtedness I feel toward them because out of their midst came Jesus, who is the only real difference-maker that I have ever known.

I even went so far as to inquire, informally, about the possibility. I was at a conference once, and went to a presentation by a messianic Jew (a Jew born again through faith in Jesus the Christ.) After his presentation, he was hawking his books out in the hall. So I waited until everyone else had drifted away. Then, glancing furtively around the room, I asked him, in a low voice, “Is it possible to—“

“--Be a Jew and not really know it?”

He’d finished my question for me! Then he continued, “I get that question a lot. What makes you ask?”

“I don’t know…a feeling, an affinity for them.”

“What’s your name?”

“’Pfeil’ -- it’s German.”

“I know—‘Arrow.’ (That’s what pfeil means in German. I was totally impressed!) That name could be Jewish, but who’s to know? Your affinity is understandable. You identify with Jesus like he identified with us. And furthermore, you identify with the authors of your Bible, who were almost all Jews. So you adopted them, as it were, into your family—and in a reverse way that makes you Jewish!”

Then he told me something I shall never forget. “If you want to honor the Jew, to act on your affinity for them, then incorporate some of their traditions into your Christianity.”

“How?”

“Tell me about the Tabernacle.”

I did, and now it was his turn to be impressed. (He didn’t know, yet, that I was a Sunday School teacher who thinks the tabernacle is the foremost teaching method of God, outside of the cross itself.)

“Well done! Now tell me about the geographical progression of Israel from Exodus through Joshua.” So I did.

“I commend you!” he enthused. I was on a roll.

“Now tell me how the feasts reveal God’s plan for both Israel and the church.”

“The feasts? I’m, uhh, not as well-versed in those.” My roll was over.

He guessed that I was a Bible teacher, and told me that we honor the scripture when we teach the elements of the Old Testament and practice them.

“Practice them?”

“Sure. Celebrate the feasts.”

“Can Christians even do that?”

“Certainly. The Jew had to, but the Christian can choose to.”

***

I’ve never progressed beyond the teaching of the feasts, but as I’ve taught them, I’ve begun to understand how powerful it would be for the church to practice them!

Just as my messianic acquaintance said, while it is not required for Christians to celebrate the Jewish feast days, it is beneficial to study them. Certainly it could be beneficial to celebrate these days if it leads us to a greater understanding and appreciation for Christ’s death and resurrection and the future promise of His coming. As Christians, if we choose to celebrate these special days, we should put Christ in the center of the celebration, as the One who came to fulfill the prophetic significance of each of them.



The feasts are prophetic—revealing the future. The yearly cycle of feasts is an abridgement of God’s plan for the ages.

They are messianic—revealing Jesus. Their deepest fulfillment is found in Christ.

They are eschatological—revealing the end times. Three of the seven feasts have yet to be prophetically fulfilled.

And they are meant to be (with the exception of the Day of Atonement) both reflective and festive, all at once. So, cheers!

***

Over time, you will become more and more cognizant of how the feasts reflect the overall Story of Scripture. Toward that end, we leave you with these brief summaries (1) that will get you started—



1) “Passover” (Leviticus 23:5) – Pointed to the Messiah as our Passover lamb (1 Corinthians 5:7) whose blood would be shed for our sins. Jesus was crucified on the day of preparation for the Passover at the same hour that the lambs were being slaughtered for the Passover meal that evening.

2) “Unleavened Bread” (Leviticus 23:6) – Pointed to the Messiah's sinless life (as leaven is a picture of sin in the Bible), making Him the perfect sacrifice for our sins. Jesus' body was in the grave during the first days of this feast, like a kernel of wheat planted and waiting to burst forth as the bread of life.

3) “First Fruits” (Leviticus 23:10) – Pointed to the Messiah's resurrection as the first fruits of the righteous. Jesus was resurrected on this very day, which is one of the reasons that Paul refers to him in I Corinthians 15:20 as the "first fruits from the dead."

4) “Weeks” or “Pentecost” (Leviticus 23:16) – Occurred fifty days after the beginning of the Feast of Unleavened Bread and pointed to the great harvest of souls and the gift of the Holy Spirit for both Jew and Gentile, who would be brought into the kingdom of God during the Church Age (see Acts 2). The Church was actually established on this day when God poured out His Holy Spirit and 3,000 Jews responded to Peter's great sermon and his first proclamation of the Gospel.

5) “Trumpets” (Leviticus 23:24) – The first of the fall feasts. Many believe this day points to the Rapture of the Church when the Messiah Jesus will appear in the heavens as He comes for His bride, the Church. The Rapture is always associated in Scripture with the blowing of a loud trumpet (I Thessalonians 4:13-18 and I Corinthians 15:52).

6) “Day of Atonement” (Leviticus 23:27) – Many believe this prophetically points to the day of the Second Coming of Jesus when He will return to earth. That will be the Day of Atonement for the Jewish remnant when they "look upon Him whom they have pierced," repent of their sins, and receive Him as their Messiah (Zechariah 12:10 and Romans 11:1-6, 25-36).

7) “Tabernacles” or “Booths” (Leviticus 23:34) – Many scholars believe that this feast day points to the Lord's promise that He will once again “tabernacle” with His people when He returns to reign over all the world (Micah 4:1-7).

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(1) The summaries are reprinted from GotQuestions.org.