Not so secret Agents of God

Presbyterian Bloggers

Powered By Ringsurf

The most important thing about Job’s silence is that he does not remain alone in it. He is joined by three friends—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—who hear of Job’s affliction and come from far off to comfort him.

“And they lifted up their eyes from a distance but could hardly recognize him. And they lifted up their voices and wept, and each one tore his robe and they threw dust over their heads into the air. And they sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights without speaking a word to him, for they saw how great was his pain. (Job 2:12–13)

Those seven days of silence are surely one of the most influential acts of pastoral care ever performed. The Jewish practice of “sitting shiva” (literally “sitting seven,” when friends come to sit with mourners at home over the period of a week) memorializes the friends’ wise compassion in this long moment of shared grief. More than twenty-five hundred years after the book of Job was written, this one act of Job’s companions is imitated on a daily basis by comforters all over the world. Silence kept with others has a special quality. It is like a fine veil, preserving separateness, yet strangely heightening mutual awareness. Silence requires us to be present to the unexpressed needs of others, needs of which they may themselves not yet know. It is a powerful means of fostering mutual encouragement among us, whom God has entrusted to one another in this wilderness of pain and doubt.

Ellen Davis (Duke Divinity School)

_________________________________________________

Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar

Did a lot wrong

They misrepresented God's justice by claiming 

bad things only happen to bad people, 

Eliphaz literally invented false charges

Saying Job abused the poor, starved the hungry, and robbed widows

All to support his own crappy theology

Bildad said that Job’s children died because they sinned

Zophar insisted that as bad as things were,

Job should have been punished more harshly

With friends like these, who needs enemies

They tried to make sense of it all

They tried to make reality fit their theology 

That good produces blessing

And evil produces curse

And God is harsh and demanding

They created their own reality 

A rather cruel, minimizing, marginalizing

reality

Rather than open their hearts, minds, and souls

To the idea

That life is messy

And that God is love

And that it is all very confusing

And all we can really do is trust God

Embrace the fact that God is love

And take it one day at a time

But before they got scared

Facing uncertainty

Having to move to radical trust

In love and grace

And got all caught up in merit theology 

They did something beautiful

They went to where Job was, and it wasn’t pretty

They went and sat on a mound of garbage

And they just were with him

Present

On the garbage heap

In the dust

With the flies

With the pain and the uncertainty

With God

Sometimes we struggle with God

We get confused and frightened

We don’t understand

Why do bad things happen to good people?

Why does a person like Donald Trump flourish?

We watch as wonderful people suffer injustice at the hands of ICE

We watch children go hungry as SNAP is taken away

We see the elderly lose access to healthcare

And the temptation is there

To try to have it make sense.

But it doesn’t make sense!

We don’t have to make it make sense.

All we have to do is trust that God is love

And then

As agents of God’s mercy and grace

Find the hurting, wherever they are

And sit with them

In Trump’s concentration camps

In the doorways of old buildings

Wherever they are

We should be with them

But going to where they are is not enough.  We break the silence

We reach out

We pick them up

We proclaim that they are beloved children of God

We advocate for them

We do whatever we can to care and heal

To fight for justice

And God will become present

Perhaps through us

God’s voice will be heard, and God’s love will be manifest

It will still be messy

But God will be with us in the mess

One day at a time

Hearing problems

Presbyterian Bloggers

Powered By Ringsurf

 

When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death…

 

My dear brothers and sisters, take note of this: Everyone should be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry, because human anger does not produce the righteousness that God desires.

          James 1

__________________________________

 

There are times

I have trouble hearing.

 

It is not because I need hearing aids (although I do)

It is because my head, my heart, my soul, are crowded

My inner self is noisy and chaotic

 

To the point that there is little room for newness

Little room, honestly

For Jesus

 

I started thinking about this

About what I allow to dwell in my inmost being

 

About how I allow some things to become big, really big

My resentment over this.

My fear about that.

 

I’m like a hoarder

Who has bags of stuff I can’t let go of

Useless, putrid, smelly stuff

 

Piled everywhere

 

My TV is blaring, spewing narratives

Designed to create fear

Intended to offend

 

The influencers on my computer

Feed me half-truths

And outright lies

 

It is stifling

And I can barely breathe.

 

It is my upper room

And if Jesus suddenly appeared

Would he find a place to sit down

 

Would I be able to hear his words of love?

 

Others come with their narratives of fear

With their attempts to make me afraid,

With their desire to shame me

 

They add to the debris

But nothing more

High and deeper

 

They send me running to bar the door, shut the windows and

Pull down the shades.

 

I am left more entrenched than ever.

 

Ah, but the risen Jesus.

That is another story.

 

But I have learned that the Spirit can free me from this prison of my own making.

The Present God can open the windows

And let the wind blow

 

Can open the doors, and let the light in

Can burn away the piles of fear, misinformation and hate

 

Love can set me free

Love alone

 

Why do I think it is different for others?

Why do I think that somehow I, armed with what I believe are “the facts,”

That I, with brilliant arguments

That I, impaired as I am with resentment and anger,

 

Can create understanding,

Dispel untruth

Heal heart and soul?

 

I have been doing it wrong.

I have to lead with love

I have to see myself simply as a conduit through which

Hopefully, prayerfully, God’s love can flow

 

Clearly telling people they are wrong (and I am right)

Doesn’t work

Clearly leading with anger

Doesn’t work

Nor does ridicule

 

I am not going to change any hearts

Only God can do that

And God can only do that

If I am not in the way

 

I am going to have to learn

What it looks like to be a conduit

And not a dam

 

I am going to have to learn what it means

To overcome evil with good

 

And sadly, I am a slow learner.

 

Come, Lord Jesus,

You have a lot of work to do

Starting with me

Choose love

Presbyterian Bloggers

Powered By Ringsurf

Jesus never once quotes from nineteen of the books in his own Hebrew scriptures. In fact, he appears to use a very few favorites: Exodus, Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Hosea, and Psalms.  Jesus appears to ignore most of his own Bible, yet it clearly formed his whole consciousness. That is the paradox. If we look at what he ignores, it includes any passages that appear to legitimate violence, imperialism, exclusion, purity, and dietary laws—of which there are many. Jesus is a biblically formed non-Bible-quoter who gets the deeper stream of God’s unconditional love, the spirit, the trajectory of his Jewish history and never settles for mere surface readings.

When he does once quote Leviticus, he quotes the one positive mandate among long lists of negative ones: “You must love your neighbor as yourself” (see Leviticus 19:18)… Jesus reduces the 613 clear biblical commandments down to two: love of God and love of neighbor (see Matthew 22:34–40).  

He omits troublesome verses with which he does not agree, as when he drops the final half-verse from the Isaiah scroll when he first reads in the Nazareth synagogue (see Luke 4:18–19). As if to make the point, he “rolls up the scroll, hands it back to the attendant and sits down.” We can imagine them glaring at him for adjusting the Scriptures. They know the final line of Isaiah 61:2b is “to proclaim a day of vengeance from our God.” Jesus ends with verse 2a, which “proclaims the Lord’s day of favor,” and better portrays the God he knows.

Generally speaking, Jesus makes use of his own Scriptures to teach a message of radical inclusivity, mercy, and justice, and to negate the predominant religious messages of exclusion, religious righteousness, and oppression of the underdog, the impure, and the sinner.

Richard Rohr

_____________________________

We used to call them “Bible thumpers”

Those people who would zealously pound their Bible

THIS is what God says

This is the WORD OF GOD

I always loved

And love still

Their passion for God

But my problem is that many of these

Intense, well-meaning people

Not only thumped the Bible, but thumped others with the Bible

Weaponizing it

Making it a book of rules and wrath

Making it about obedience and merit

Even grace becomes merit. 

The tension between a religion of obedience and wrath

And a religion of grace and forgiveness

Is inherent in the Bible

Jesus saw it,

And he dealt with it his own way

Defaulting to love

Always

Love 

That is the beginning and the end

The alpha and the omega

The world was birthed in love

And it is not going to “end” 

However we think of “end”

In hate and punishment

In flames

Although there may be hate and flames

Cruelty and violence

Created by humankind

Along the way 

To paradise

When we are asked to choose

Between merit and grace

We must choose grace

I have often thought about 

The time Jesus told the Bible thumpers of his time

You will come to me and point to your zeal for God

And I will say, “I never knew you”

Sounds pretty harsh 

And he tells them away from me!!!

That doesn’t sound like mercy.

But…

I think what Jesus was saying

To these people who were very much alive,

Was this

What have you done with yourself?

I don’t even recognize you.

I can’t see the person of love and mercy you were created to be

You are not reflecting the image of God

Go get yourself together.

Because right now you are hurting a lot of people

Am I playing fast and loose with scripture?

Yeah

Just like Jesus

Just like every Rabbi ever (who is worth his or her salt)

But I think Jesus’ goal was not expulsion

But transformation

From His birth to his death

Jesus was always about radical love

About expansive inclusion

He read the Torah and the law and the prophets through

The lens of radical love

He lived the scriptures through the lens of radical love

He saw the tension

And he resolved it by choosing radical love.

I want to be like that!