There is a song on Mumford & Sons' record Prizefighter called "Conversation With My Son (Gangsters & Angels)." Marcus Mumford has said he wrote it as a kind of letter to his son — words for a boy who has to grow up in a world that can feel like it is living under threat. I cannot hear it without thinking of my own children, and of the thing every parent eventually runs into: the discovery that he cannot hand his child a world that is safe. Two parts of it will not leave me alone.

The place where we are right

The verses convict me before the refrain gets its chance.

The song leans, almost from its first breath, against the sin of being too sure of yourself — the person so settled in his own rightness that he has stopped being able to hear. I feel the pull of that immediately, because certainty is the thing I have always trusted least. Show me someone who has every question perfectly answered, who has never once been ambushed by a doubt, and I will show you a person I instinctively hold at arm's length.

And there — right there — is the trap the song is quietly setting for me. Because I am quickest to judge the ones I have decided are judgmental. I look down on people for looking down on people. I am proud of my humility and certain about the dangers of certainty, and I love most freely the people who already love the way I do. The Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai has a poem that says flowers will never grow in the place where we are right; the ground there is trampled hard. And the hardest, most trampled patch of all is the little rise I like to stand on when I feel right about not being like those people.

Jesus met this posture more than any other, and he was never once taken in by it. When a crowd was sure enough of itself to reach for stones, he stooped and wrote in the dust and said that the one among them without sin should throw first — and the certainty drained out of the oldest men first, because they had lived long enough to know better. He told us to pull the log out of our own eye before reaching for the speck in someone else's, and said that only then would we see well enough to help. Paul says it flatly to the respectable reader: in judging another you condemn yourself, because you do the very same things. The gospel does not merely forbid us to judge; it kicks away the platform we were standing on to do it. There is no high ground. There is only the level ground at the foot of the cross.

Crooked hearts

Which is why the song's next turn is so much wiser than mere tolerance.

It reaches back to a hard old blessing of W. H. Auden's — the charge to love our crooked neighbour with our crooked heart — and sets it against all our machinery of self-justification. We would sooner be ruined than be changed, the song confesses; we will nurse our dread before we let mercy undo us. It is the truest thing about the human heart I have heard in a popular song in years. We do not resist grace because it seems too good to be true. We resist it because it asks us to stop being right.

And the song knows what the alternative costs, and what it looks like, because it says of the finest person the singer ever knew that he was someone who owned nothing and gave it all away. That is not the description of a strategy. It is the description of a Man. Though he was rich, for our sake he became poor, so that by his poverty we might become rich. He emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, and went as low as death. The best any of us has ever met had nothing and gave everything away — and it was the giving, not the having, that saved the world.

There is a line buried in the verses that says it more starkly still: I get higher and higher, the lower I go. It sounds backward until we remember whose life it describes. In John's Gospel the cross is never only a descent; it is a lifting up — and I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself — one phrase holding the crucifixion and the exaltation at once, and drawing all of us to it: tumblers and beggars, gangsters and angels alike. The way up ran straight down: down into the dust, down to the dirt of a borrowed grave, as low as death can go — and it was precisely there, at the very bottom, that God highly exalted him. It is the whole logic of God turned against ours: what looks to us like weakness and folly is his wisdom and his strength, for the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. We climb to get higher, and measure ourselves by how sure and how strong we have become. He got higher by going lower, and made the descent itself the throne.

To love a crooked neighbour with a crooked heart is only possible on the far side of that. As long as I imagine my own heart is straight, my love will really be inspection; it will arrive with conditions and a faint air of rescue. It is grace — being loved while still crooked — that finally lets me climb down off the platform and love another crooked person as precisely what I am: a fellow patient, and not the doctor.

Where heaven starts

And then the refrain, which is where I come apart.

For most of two minutes the song does almost nothing but repeat one thing: a reaching across the distance between two people, over and over; a hand laid over another's heart; a vow to stay to the very end. And it makes an astonishing claim about that reaching — that heaven does not begin somewhere else, or someday later, or after the world finally stops breaking, but here, in the reach itself, in the place where the line between where I end and where you begin goes soft.

I once thought a refrain that plain, repeated that many times, was a failure of imagination. I have come to believe it is the opposite. Some truths do not develop; they repeat, the way a heartbeat repeats. I am here. I am here. I am here. You cannot argue a frightened child into peace. You can only stay, and keep saying it, until the saying has become the thing itself.

And this is the whole gospel, hidden in plain sight inside a lullaby. The entire story of God is a reaching across an unbearable distance. While we were still sinners — while we were still crooked, still sure of ourselves, still hiding the real face — Christ reached across and died for us. The Word became flesh and moved in next door; God did not call out directions from a safe distance but came near enough to lay a hand over the heart. And the last thing the risen Christ says to his terrified friends is that refrain in other words: I am with you always, to the end of the age. That is where heaven starts. Not in being right. In being with.

With you till the end

Which brings me back to a father, and a son, and a world that can feel like danger at every edge.

Every parent reaches, sooner or later, the end of what he can fix. I cannot make the world safe for my children. I cannot hand them certainty — and if I am honest, the certainty I could hand them would probably be one of the counterfeit kinds the song is warning against. What a father can actually give — the one thing that holds when everything else is shaking — is his presence. Where you begin, I am. My hand is over your heart. I am with you to the end. That is not a small consolation offered because the great rescue failed to arrive. It is the great rescue. It is the shape of the only love that has ever finally helped anybody.

And it is a shape we did not invent; we can only pass it on. We can say it to our children because it was said to us first, and is being said still, by a Father who reached across every distance, whose hand is over our heart, who has promised — over the gangsters and the angels, over the whole tilted world — to be with us to the end. The song is a father comforting his son. Which is precisely why it can bring us to tears: because underneath the father's voice, faint and unmistakable, we can hear our own Father, saying the very same thing, over us.

There is a kind of story that gets the shape of the gospel almost exactly right, and then, at the last moment, curves it back inward. It reaches toward a rescue that would have to come from outside us — and then, at the end, rests its whole hope on the self and its own daring instead. The loop closes. The arrow that seemed to point up and out turns and points back at the hand that drew it. Such a story stays, in the phrase Ecclesiastes keeps returning to, under the sun — sealed inside the closed circle of what this world alone can supply. The Greatest Showman is one of those stories. We can love it and still notice where its light bends back; loving it well may even mean noticing, because the places where it reaches for what it cannot quite grasp are the places where it tells the truth about all of us.

It is worth saying plainly at the start, because it is the reason a film like this can leave us in tears in a dark room: the beauty that undoes us is not something the movie manufactures. It is borrowed light. When a scene of welcome or belonging pierces us, it is not because the story is so clever — it is because, for a moment, it lets through a beam of something the world itself does not contain, and we feel the old homesickness of creatures made for a country we have not yet seen. So this is not an attempt to stretch a musical into a sermon, or to smuggle a message into it that isn't there. It is the opposite. We only mean to follow the beam back toward its source. Half the time the movie is already pointing somewhere truer than it knows.

[[pull]] "If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world." — C.S. Lewis

It is, on its surface, a musical about P. T. Barnum: a poor tailor's son who claws his way up out of nothing and builds a spectacle. But the film is not really interested in commerce, or even in fame. Underneath the sequins it is asking one question, the oldest and most human question there is: Who will have me? And it answers that question, for most of its running time, with a beauty that is hard to watch dry-eyed.

The ringmaster's welcome

The most gospel-shaped thing about the film is who Barnum goes looking for.

He does not recruit the beautiful and the celebrated. He goes down into the parts of the city where people are kept out of sight — and he gathers them. A bearded woman working as a washerwoman, hiding her face. A man the world has decided is too small to matter. Brothers and sisters the age called "curiosities," which is a polite nineteenth-century word for people we would rather not look at. He knocks on their doors, and he asks them to come out, and to come alive.

It is impossible for a Christian to watch that sequence and not feel a shock of recognition, because it is nearly a scene from the Gospels. Jesus tells a story about a man who throws a great banquet, and when the respectable guests all make their excuses, the host sends his servant out into the streets and lanes and says, Bring in the poor and crippled and blind and lame — and still there is room, so go out again, and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled. The gospel is not a story about the deserving being rewarded. It is a story about the overlooked being sought — about a God who goes down into the lanes where we are hiding our faces and says, come out, there is a place set for you.

[[pull]] "Grace is something you can never get but only be given." — Frederick Buechner

We know, in our better moments, that this is what we most need to hear. Not you are impressive. Not you have earned it. Just: there is room, and it is for you. The film knows it too. That is why the recruiting scenes land like grace. Somebody with authority walks into the life of somebody the world has thrown away, and instead of a verdict, offers a welcome.

This is me

And then there is the song.

When Lettie Lutz — the bearded woman who has spent her life behind a curtain — plants her feet at the center of the room and sings, the whole film turns. It is not a song about being fixed. It is a song about being seen, and refusing, finally, to apologize for existing. She has been told, by strangers and by her own family, that she is a thing to be ashamed of, and in one blazing chorus she stops believing them.

There is something in that moment that reaches right down into the oldest wound we carry. Because the wound is not mainly that we are imperfect. The wound is that we suspect we are unwelcome — that if the curtain were pulled back and the real face shown, the room would go quiet and turn away. Almost everyone is walking around protecting some version of a hidden face.

Scripture speaks to exactly this, and more tenderly than we expect. When God chooses a king, he tells the prophet not to be fooled by height and handsomeness, because the Lord looks not on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart. The gaze we are all so afraid of — the one that sees the real face — turns out, in God, to be the gaze that loves us most truly, because it sees furthest in.

But here is the deeper note, the one the film touches without quite naming. We are welcomed by a Savior who himself came with no beauty that we should desire him. Isaiah, centuries before, described the coming Servant of God: he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him… despised and rejected. The one who gathers the outcasts is not standing above them in his finery. He has been outside the curtain himself. He knows what the averted eyes feel like. When Christ welcomes the disfigured and the ashamed, he does it as one of them — which is why the welcome can be trusted. It is not charity from a safe distance. It is solidarity from inside the wound.

This Is Me is, in the end, an anthem of self-acceptance, and self-acceptance is a real and good thing as far as it goes. But it cannot go quite far enough on its own, and we will come back to why. For now it is enough to say: the ache the song names is real, and the gospel names it too, and answers it not with accept yourself but with something sturdier — you are already accepted; now you are free.

A love the world had forbidden

There is a second love story folded into the film, and it carries the same ache in a sharper key. Phillip Carlyle, a man of the respectable class, falls for Anne Wheeler, the trapeze artist — and the world, both his world and the paying crowd, has already decided that a white man and a Black woman are not allowed to love each other. The film does not pretend the cost is small. In Tightrope and Rewrite the Stars, we watch two people reach across a line the age has drawn in stone, and flinch at what it will cost to cross it.

We should not stretch this into a lecture; the film doesn't. But it is impossible to miss the shape of it. Here is a love the powers of the day have declared illegitimate, insisting on belonging anyway — and something in us rises when it does. That instinct is not merely modern sentiment; it is a rumor of the kingdom. The New Testament makes the scandalous claim that in Christ the oldest wall of hostility has been broken down, that the divisions the world treats as final — neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free — no longer decide who belongs to whom. A love that crosses a forbidden line moves us because it echoes a table where those lines have already died.

And here, too, the film's hope bends inward at the last. Its answer to the stars written against the couple is to rewrite the stars — to overcome the verdict by sheer daring. The daring is real and lovely. But it is a heavy thing to ask two people to out-will the entire weight of a culture. The deeper hope is not that we are strong enough to rewrite the heavens, but that the One who hung the stars has already written, at his own cost, a family in which the old walls are rubble — where we do not have to earn our way across the line, because he crossed it first, toward us.

The greater calling

Watch what happens to Phillip, the partner, and you see the whole argument of the film in miniature.

He begins as its most respectable man — a playwright of good family, a career, a name to protect. Everything in him has been trained to want the very approval Barnum is chasing. And he walks away from it. He trades the inheritance and the applause of his own class for a tent full of people the world calls freaks, and for a woman it says he may not love. When his parents make plain that this will cost him everything he was raised to want, he does not flinch. He has found something his upbringing never offered him: a joy, and a family, worth more than his name. He discovers, in other words, that this — not the theater, not the pedigree — is his real calling.

That is a quietly radical thing for a film to say: that a person's greatest calling might be a love the world counts as a step down. It is the very thing Jesus keeps insisting on. The kingdom, he says, is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up, and then in his joy goes and sells all that he has and buys that field. Notice the words: in his joy. Not grim duty, not sacrifice merely endured — joy. He sells everything not because he must, but because he has finally seen something worth more than everything. Phillip has seen it. His deep gladness has met the world's deep hunger, and he will not go back.

And then the fire. When the building burns and Phillip believes Anne is still inside, he runs into the flames after her — and it is Barnum who goes in after Phillip and drags him out. For a moment the whole ledger of the film is overturned: the showman who spent the story straining to be great is finally great in the one way that counts, walking into the fire for the friend who cannot save himself. There is no verse the scene reaches toward more plainly than one: Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends. We were not, in the end, made to be admired from a stage. We were made to be carried out of a fire. And the reason that image can undo us is that it is precisely what has already been done for us — a Rescuer who walked into our burning house, and did not walk back out of it alone.

A home

The other beauty the film gets right is that belonging happens in a home.

The troupe does not become a marketing category. It becomes a family. They eat together, fight together, defend one another, take one another in. And the film is honest that this is costly and ordinary and unglamorous — it is not the roar of the crowd, it is the small loyal love of a few people who have decided not to leave.

Barnum himself begins there, too. Before the spectacle, there is a boy and a girl on a rooftop dreaming, and then a marriage, and two daughters, and a love that is at its best when it is domestic — a home built out of almost nothing, held together by imagination and fidelity. Some of the most moving frames in the whole film are not on the stage at all. They are in a kitchen, or on a rooftop, in the light of a love that does not need an audience.

This is worth pausing on, because we are tempted to think the gospel is mainly about grand moments. But Scripture keeps locating belonging in the language of household. We are told we are no longer strangers and aliens but members of the household of God. The church, at its truest, is not a spectacle we attend but a family we are grafted into — a table where the bearded lady and the tax collector and the respectable and the wrecked are all, scandalously, kin. The film's instinct that the misfits become a family is not sentiment. It is ecclesiology in greasepaint.

Never enough

And then the light bends.

Because Barnum, who found belonging in a home and a troupe, cannot rest in it. He wants the one thing the misfits can't give him: the approval of the people who threw him out. He wants the father-in-law's respect, the critics' blessing, the applause of the class that once looked through him. And so he goes chasing a purer, higher form of validation — the celebrated European singer whose voice can win over the very people who despised his circus.

The song at the center of that chase is called Never Enough, and it is the most spiritually honest moment in the film, though the film may not fully know it. Because never enough is the exact diagnosis of the human heart apart from God. We are built for an infinite welcome, and so no finite approval can fill the space. Every ovation dies down. Every summit reveals a higher one. The applause we thought would finally quiet the question only teaches the question to grow louder.

[[pull]] "We are far too easily pleased." — C.S. Lewis

The Preacher of Ecclesiastes walked this whole road ahead of us — the wealth, the works, the fame — and gave it one word: vanity of vanities… all is vanity, a word that in Hebrew means vapor, breath — here and gone before a hand can close on it. And Augustine, remembering his own long chase, said it in the sentence everyone half-remembers: our heart is restless until it rests in Thee. Barnum's tragedy is not that he wanted glory. It is that he went looking for an infinite thing in finite hands. And so the more he got, the emptier he grew, until he had nearly burned down — literally, in the film — the home and the family that had actually loved him.

This is the point the film's own hope quietly breaks down, and the breaking is the truest thing in it. Because the resolution This Is Me offered — I accept myself, that is enough — turns out not to hold when the pressure comes. Self-acceptance is a good floor and a poor foundation. When the crowd turns and the money fails and the marriage cracks, "I am enough" is a candle in a wind. The film has diagnosed our disease more sharply than it can cure it. It knows the applause is never enough. It just doesn't have, on its own terms, anything sturdier to offer than a return to the same fragile self that started the chase.

From now on

To its great credit, the film does not end in the spectacle. It ends in the return.

Barnum comes home. He walks away from the higher glory and back toward the smaller, truer love he nearly threw away — the wife, the daughters, the ragtag family under the tent. The final movement, From Now On, is a song of repentance in everything but name: a man saying I chased the wrong thing, and the thing I was looking for was already mine, and I am going home to it. It is genuinely beautiful. It is the prodigal, turning around on the road.

And yet — gently, because we love the film — this is where its horizon closes. The hope resolves back into a human love. The turn is real, but it terminates in a family that is itself mortal, in a self that is still, at bottom, the hero of its own story. The film can get the prodigal as far as the road home. What it cannot quite show us is the Father running — the older, wilder love that was out on the road first, that welcomes not because we have finally rewritten ourselves but because it never stopped waiting. The circle of the film's hope is warm, but it is closed. It ends where our own hopes end when we build them well and honestly: in a good human love that is not, finally, enough to carry the weight we keep placing on it.

The bread we were looking for

Which brings us, at last, back to the hungriest image the film keeps circling — the longing to be taken in, welcomed at a table, fed by hands that do not flinch at our face.

There is a scene, I think, that every viewer half-writes for themselves out of the film's own materials: someone the world called ugly, offering and being offered something to eat, in a room where no one turns away. Whether or not it is on the screen, it is on our hearts, because it is the thing we were made for. And it is the thing the gospel does not merely gesture toward but actually gives.

For there is a Showman greater than Barnum, who did not gather the outcasts to make a spectacle of them but to make a family of them — and who, on the night he was betrayed, took bread and broke it and said, this is my body, given for you. He is the one who says to the exhausted and the never-enough, come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. He is the one who called himself the bread of life, and said that whoever comes to him shall not hunger. The welcome the whole film aches toward — to be seen, named, fed, kept — is not a dream we manufacture by believing hard enough in ourselves. It is a table already set, by a host who went out into the lanes to compel us in, who had no beauty that we should desire him, and who rejoices over the ones who come with singing.

The Greatest Showman is right that we are all, in some hidden way, standing behind a curtain, waiting to hear whether the room will turn away. It is right that belonging happens in a home. It is right — most piercingly of all — that the applause is never enough. And it is only wrong, if it is wrong at all, in thinking that the welcome we need is something we finally give ourselves.

The better news is the news the film keeps almost telling: the welcome is already spoken, from outside us and before us, by One who knows the whole face behind the curtain and does not look away. That welcome is the country we were homesick for all along; it is the beauty the film could only borrow. No wonder it makes us weep — the tears are not sentiment, they are recognition. This is me, we sing, hoping it will be enough to hold us. And a voice older and kinder answers, over the noise of the greatest show: Yes — and this is my body, given for you. Come in. There is room.

Some passages of Scripture seem to contain the whole Bible in miniature. They aren’t merely stories among other stories, but places where, if you linger long enough, the whole story God has been telling begins to come into view — and, almost before you realize it, you begin to see your own life within that story. For me, Luke 15 has always been one of those passages.

It’s my favorite chapter in Scripture, and the parable of the prodigal son my favorite story within it. At one point I taught six consecutive Bible studies on Luke 15 — much to the chagrin of my college friends.

And yet familiarity plays its quiet trick even on the texts we love most. Like a favorite song — we might get so familiar with the melody, we no longer hear the story it once sang to our hearts. Scripture can be like that. We know the stories, but they stop resonating within us. When that happens, they lose the ability to transform us.

Recently, several writers drew me back to the story. They allowed me to slow down, to linger over every phrase, and to ask better questions of the text than I’d ever asked before. The deeper I studied it, the deeper it became. The story has helped me hear what I can only describe as the heartbeat of God.

Four men, in particular, helped me hear it anew: a scholar of the Middle East, a Presbyterian pastor, a bruised former priest, and a Dutch priest sitting quietly before a painting in a Russian museum. Each, in his own way, slowed me down enough to notice something I’d overlooked; Together they helped me hear what I had somehow missed. And I had the rare experience of hearing the story — again — but for the first time. Together they made me hear its ache, too — how unfinished the story is, and how far it is from finished with us.

[[pull]] The God who has been pursuing His people since the garden has a face. And He is running.

Scandal, Not Sentiment

Start with the scholar. Kenneth Bailey handed me a new pair of glasses.¹ What he showed me was faintly embarrassing: I had been reading Luke like a twenty-first-century American, and missing almost everything that mattered. Today, we are inclined to hear it as a feel-good, homecoming tale. Its first audience, Bailey says, heard something much closer to a scandal.

Consider how the story opens. The younger son asks for his share of the estate while his father is still alive. In that world, Bailey notes, this was perilously close to saying, “Father, I wish you were dead.” You simply did not liquidate family land to fund a living son’s spending money — especially not then. The wealth of the land was generationally collective. Yet the father grants the request, absorbing the insult without retaliation and allowing the boy to leave. It's our first reminder that love always has a cost.

What follows is a slow unraveling: the far country, reckless living, the famine, and then the detail Jesus’ audience would have heard with particular horror — a Jewish son feeding pigs. He had not merely become poor. He had become ceremonially unclean, publicly disgraced, and, by every appearance, beyond reconciliation. The pieces of his mess were too broken to be mended.

Then he “comes to himself,” and here are words I’ve often rushed past too quickly — his speech. He rehearses it on repeat: “Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you. I am no longer worthy to be called your son. Treat me as one of your hired servants” (Luke 15:18–19). Read it closely: it's certainly a confession, but it is also a proposal.

He's not coming home to be restored as a son. He is coming home to negotiate employment. He believes the relationship is based on usefulness — that if he works hard enough, perhaps he can earn back a place in the household. He cannot imagine sonship as a gift; he only knows wages. He took an advance and now he wants an opportunity to pay it off.

Tim Keller observes that although the younger son’s repentance is sincere², it's still shaped by a transactional understanding of his father. He has left the far country, but he has not yet abandoned the belief that acceptance must somehow be earned. Even on the road home, he's still trying to save himself. That may be one of sin’s deepest wounds: it does more than entice us to run from God — it teaches us to misunderstand Him. We begin to imagine a Father who keeps ledgers instead of throwing feasts, who waits for repayment instead of longing for reconciliation.

The son arrives and starts his speech, but the father never lets him finish. Before the son can negotiate the terms of his return, the father is embracing him, kissing him, and calling for the best robe, the family ring and a feast. Grace has very little interest in our attempts to bargain; it arrives before the negotiation is heard. Grace never waits for the speech to end.

But why does the father run? Most of us assume it’s simply because he can’t contain his joy. That’s almost certainly true, but Bailey suggests there’s something even more remarkable happening: the father isn’t only running to his son; he’s running for his son.¹

Bailey points to an ancient village custom known as the kezazah, a ceremony few modern readers have ever heard of but one Jesus’ audience may have known well. If a Jewish son squandered the family’s inheritance among Gentiles and dared to return home, the village could gather before he reached his father’s house. A clay pot would be smashed at his feet as the people declared him cut off from his family and his community. The relationship was broken beyond repair — like the shattered pot, it could never be put back together.¹

Whether every village practiced the custom exactly this way is less important than the world it reflects. Honor wasn’t merely personal; it belonged to the whole community. The son’s disgrace wasn’t his alone. He had brought shame upon his father, his family, and his village. Home was no longer waiting for him as though nothing had happened. Instead, judgment stood open-armed with its stony embrace.

Suddenly the father’s sprint down the road looks different. He’s not simply overcome with emotion; he’s intercepting shame. Before the village can pronounce its verdict, the father reaches the boy, his arms closing around him in full view of everyone. He takes upon himself the humiliation of running as a man of status in this culture — his robes gathered up in his fists; the whispers of the crowd, and the scandal of welcoming back a son no one believes deserves to come home.

But Jesus isn’t merely telling us a story about a son. He’s revealing a Father.

Two Lost Sons

If Kenneth Bailey helped me see the scandal of the father’s welcome, Tim Keller helped me see something more. I had always assumed the younger son was the story’s focus. Keller convinced me Jesus also had another son in mind — and maybe even more profoundly.

The younger brother’s lostness is obvious. He demands his inheritance, abandons his father, and disappears into the far country. The elder brother never leaves home. He rises each morning, works his father’s fields, obeys the rules, and remains exactly where everyone expects a faithful son to be. If Jesus had stopped the story before the feast, no one would have questioned which brother loved his father more.

Then the celebration starts, and the elder brother refuses to go inside. Standing outside, he finally gives voice to brooding thoughts captured and counted resentfully over unending days in the fields. “Look," he complains, "these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command, yet you never gave me a young goat…” (Luke 15:28–30).

Listen to what fills his speech. He doesn’t speak of love. He speaks of service. He speaks of obedience. He speaks of what was never given to him. The language is almost painfully transactional — it sounds less like a son talking to his father than an employee arguing with his employer after years of faithful work.

The younger brother rehearsed his speech on the road home; the elder brother had likely been rehearsing his for years — bitterness growing in his heart.

This is Tim Keller’s observation that unsettles me. The younger brother wanted his father’s wealth and tried to obtain it by leaving home; the elder brother wanted the same things, but sought them by staying home. One rebelled; the other obeyed. One was irreligious; the other deeply religious. Yet both related to their father in remarkably similar ways: both wanted the father’s gifts more than they wanted the father himself. Neither son truly desired the father. Both had found the father useful; neither had found him beautiful.

The younger son’s mistake is easy to recognize because it just looks and feels like sin. The elder brother’s mistake is harder to see because it looks so much like faithfulness. Tim Keller draws the line precisely: “Religious people are lost because they don’t think they’re lost; irreligious people are lost because they don’t know they’re lost.”² Both have the same heart condition. Beneath the surface, both sons are asking the same question: What do I have to do to get what I really want? One believes the answer is rebellion; the other believes it’s obedience. Neither has yet discovered that the greatest gift in the father’s house was never the inheritance. It was the father himself.

Keller concludes that the elder brother is lost not despite his goodness, but because of it. His obedience has become another way of avoiding the intimacy his father desires; he has learned to keep every rule without ever learning how to enjoy his father. The younger brother asks to become a servant. The elder brother, without realizing it, has been living like one all along.

That realization landed harder than I expected, because I recognized myself in it. For years I naturally identified with the younger brother; it's easy for me to relate to his failures. But the longer I’ve walked with Christ, the more often I’ve found myself sympathizing with the elder brother instead — keeping score, quietly believing that years of obedience should count for something, resenting grace when it seems too freely given ... to someone else. Recovering younger brothers, it turns out, make remarkably convincing elder brothers.

Jesus leaves the story there. We never discover whether the elder brother goes into the feast. It is one of the most deliberate silences in all of Scripture: the music playing, the door open, the father pleading in the dark — and the son simply standing there as the curtain falls. I think Jesus withholds the ending because he means for us to feel that it hasn’t ended yet — that the story is still being decided, in a yard, in the dark, in us. Instead, our eyes are drawn back to the father once again. Just as he ran to meet the younger son on the road, he now leaves the celebration to plead with the elder. One son had run as far away as he could; the other had never left the property. Yet the father actively seeks both.

And this is Keller's main nuance. Jesus never called this story The Prodigal Son. Keller suggests one might more aptly call it The Story of Two Sons.² But the word "prodigal" does not mean sinful or lost. It means wastefully extravagant — profligate, even. Yes that could be said of the younger son, but all the more of the father himself. As much as a diagnosis of the heart conditions of each son, this story gives us a glimpse of the Father himself — his extraordinary, extravagant — and we say again here, costly — love for his children.

Cancel Culture and Kezazah

Bailey’s description of the kezazah kept bothering me long after I closed his book. Not because I was fascinated by an obscure Middle Eastern custom, but because I couldn’t shake the feeling that we never really abandoned it.

The word kezazah means “to cut off” or “to sever.” Every culture develops its own version. Ours just happens to fit comfortably in our pockets.

We no longer gather with clay pots. We gather with phones. We cut people off with screenshots instead of shattered pottery, pile-ons instead of village assemblies, permanent digital records instead of public ceremonies. The technology has changed. Human nature hasn’t.

Wayne Francis recently wrote, “Cancel culture has made people disposable in a world where everyone is desperate to feel needed and known.”³ I think he’s right. But beneath our modern vocabulary lies a much older temptation. We still want to decide who belongs. We still enjoy drawing lines that leave us safely inside while someone else remains outside. Every generation finds new ways to break the pot.

That’s the elder brother’s temptation.

It’s also ours.

Grace has always offended the part of us that keeps score. It offends every instinct that insists love should be earned, forgiveness should have limits, and restoration should wait until justice has had its say. If the father’s welcome in Luke 15 doesn’t unsettle us at least a little, we may not yet understand how extravagant it really is.

Before the village can break the pot, the father has already crossed the distance. Before the crowd can pronounce its verdict, the Father’s arms are already around His son. Before shame can speak, the Father has already spoken.

The verdict was interrupted by an embrace.

Good News for Ragamuffins

Which brings me to the third man — the one who spent his whole life insisting the news was even better than we let ourselves believe.

Manning's best-known book is called The Ragamuffin Gospel.⁴ A ragamuffin, he tells us, is a person in rags — ragged, unkempt, a beggar at the edge of respectable society — and the subtitle reads almost like a guest list: Good News for the Bedraggled, Beat-Up, and Burnt Out. Manning knew that territory personally. He was a recovering alcoholic who had failed publicly and often, and he refused to pretend otherwise. Out of that honesty came a single, stubborn conviction: “God loves you unconditionally, as you are and not as you should be, because nobody is as they should be.”⁴

Read that line against the younger son’s careful speech and something breaks loose. The boy came home to renegotiate the terms — make me a hired servant — and Manning’s gospel is that there are no terms. “Repentance,” he wrote, “is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven.”⁴ The son turned toward home to earn a place; the father was already running before a word of the speech left his mouth. The turning did not buy the welcome. The welcome had been there the whole time, watching the horizon.

Manning’s ragamuffins are simply the people who have stopped pretending they belong in the yard with the elder brother — “the wobbly and the weak-kneed,” he said, “who know they don’t have it all together, and who are not too proud to accept the handout of amazing grace.”⁴ That handout is the whole thing: a robe you did not buy and a ring you did not earn. And still it is the hardest thing in the world to believe.

The younger son’s speech is our speech. We have all rehearsed some version of it — the quiet inventory of what we owe, the terms we are prepared to offer, the usefulness we hope will earn us back. We assume, almost without noticing, that acceptance must be paid for. It is the native language of the human heart, and we go on speaking it fluently even after grace has already interrupted us once. Grace does not wait for the speech to end — not his, and not ours.

But grace this free raises a hard question, one Manning’s own wreckage made impossible to avoid: how does a holy God simply absorb the shame and wave the guilty into His house? The answer isn’t in the parable. It’s in the true elder brother to whom the parable points.

Notice who never goes to the far country after the younger son. In that culture, it fell to the elder brother to go — to search for his lost sibling and spend himself bringing him home¹ — and the elder brother in the story refuses. So no one comes. The younger son sits among the pigs in a country far from home, and the road that should have carried a brother out to find him remains empty.

Then, quietly, across the greater story of Scripture, another Brother steps onto that road.²

Jesus leaves His Father’s house and enters our far country. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). He is the True Elder Brother Keller describes — the Brother who does what the elder brother in the parable never would. He goes looking for the lost, not because they deserve to be found, but because love always goes.

Now the road to Jerusalem begins to look different.

When we watch Jesus riding toward the city on a donkey, we are watching the Brother who willingly walks the road left empty in the parable. Remember the younger son, lost beyond the edge of the village, ceremonially unclean and seemingly beyond reconciliation? That is precisely where Jesus’ road leads. Hebrews tells us that He “suffered outside the gate” (Hebrews 13:12), beyond the place of honor, beyond the walls of the holy city, where the unclean were cast aside and refuse was burned. Isaiah had already described Him as the One who would be “cut off from the land of the living” (Isaiah 53:8).

The younger brother deserved to be cut off.

Jesus chose to be.

The father runs because he knows something the son does not yet know: forgiveness is never free. Someone always bears the cost. The son assumes it will be him. The father knows it will be himself. And behind even that costly embrace stands the greater Story still — the God who has always intended to bear the cost of bringing His children home.

In his remarkable little book Forgive, Tim Keller reminds us that every act of forgiveness leaves someone absorbing the debt.⁵ Someone bears the wound. Someone pays the cost. The gospel is the announcement that God chose to bear ours. Keller argues that only as we meditate on the staggering cost of our own forgiveness do we become capable of extending forgiveness to others. The vertical always precedes the horizontal. Only hearts transformed by the beauty of Christ’s rescue mission can absorb another’s debt without demanding repayment.

That is the cost hidden beneath the celebration.

The robe was free to the boy because someone else had already chosen to bear the cost of bringing him home.

Taking Hold of His Hands

And thus we come to the fourth man. In 1986, captivated by a poster he had once seen in a friend’s office, Henri Nouwen sat for hours in the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg before Rembrandt’s The Return of the Prodigal Son. He noticed what most of us hurry past: the father’s hands.⁶

Rembrandt painted the two hands to be unlike each other. One is broad and strong — a father’s hand, firm and sinewed, the hand that works and defends and holds a household together. The other is softer, slighter, almost feminine — a mother’s hand, the hand that soothes and gathers and will not let go. Two hands, and both belong to one father, resting on the same weary shoulders, on a back ruined by hard life away from home. “The true center of Rembrandt’s painting,” Nouwen wrote, “is the hands of the father.”⁶

Everything the father absorbed out on that road — the shame, the exposure, the undignified running — comes to rest in that single touch: two hands laid on a son who came home expecting wages and received an embrace.

Nouwen lingered there, and I think we should too. The strong hand and the tender hand belong to the Father; and here it is — the love of the One whose heartbeat we are meant to hear is indescribably stronger than any single title — father or mother — can hold on its own. Scripture keeps insisting as much. The God we call Father is the same God who says, “As one whom his mother comforts, so I will comfort you” (Isaiah 66:13); who swears that even if a nursing mother could somehow forget her child, “yet I will not forget you” (Isaiah 49:15); whom Jesus likened to a hen aching to gather her chicks under her wings (Luke 13:34). A single hand could only ever tell half the truth about this love; Rembrandt gave the Father two — one strong, one tender — because we cannot see Him whole in either alone. The Father is not less than a father — He is the fullness of everything our fathers and mothers, at their fiercest and their most tender, can only ever image — and only in part. At their best they are but an echo of the Father who runs, their hands — one to fight, one to heal — passing along some small measure of His love.

By now, I had begun to notice those hands everywhere in Luke 15. They are the hands that gather up the father’s robes as he runs down the road, the hands that interrupt a rehearsed speech with an embrace, the hands that dress a ragamuffin with the best robe, press the family ring onto undeserving fingers, and prepare a feast for a son who expected only wages. The whole parable seems to move toward those hands.

But Nouwen will not let us stop there — safe in the father’s arms, forgiven and home. That embrace is real; it is simply not the destination. His book unfolds in three movements, meant to be a journey. First we recognize ourselves in the younger son, who must come home. Then — the movement most of us resist — we find ourselves in the elder brother, standing outside the celebration, unable to comprehend a love that keeps no ledger. And then comes the invitation: “Though I am both the younger son and the elder son,” Nouwen writes, “I am not to remain them, but to become the Father.”⁶

The point of the parable, then, is not simply to be forgiven. It is to be so thoroughly loved that we become the kind of people who run — who take the shame, who throw the party, who welcome home “those who have been hurt and wounded on their life’s journey,” as Nouwen put it, “with a love that neither asks nor expects anything in return.”⁶ We are loved until we begin to love like the One who first loved us. We are forgiven until we become forgivers. We are welcomed until we become people who welcome. We stay beneath the Father’s hands until our own begin to resemble His. We become, by grace, people who run.

Nouwen closed his own book looking at his aging hands: they “have been given to me,” he wrote, “to stretch out toward all who suffer, to rest upon the shoulders of all who come, and to offer the blessing that emerges from the immensity of God’s love.”⁶ The Father ran so we could stop running away; in the end it is gratitude, not guilt, that walks us home. But grace does not leave us seated at the table. The Father still holds out His hands — first to receive us, then, slowly, almost imperceptibly, to reshape our own — until the call is no longer only to be found but to join Him in the finding: to hike up our robes and run toward the next son still a long way off, to absorb rather than return shame, to bear something of the cost only the true Elder Brother could pay.

The Father holds out His hands. I can no longer look at them without seeing another pair — opened wide, and nailed, and holding nothing back. And those hands, once taken, become our own.

It was an old Duke Law Journal article written by Arthur Allen Leff in 1979 (Unspeakable Ethics; Unnatural Law) that got my mind spinning on the subject. Leff was a professor of law at Yale Law School. His article focuses on whether a 'normative morality' or sort of universal law can exist without God. Interestingly, Leff was an agnostic and asked the question of whether there is some “findable” law that “ought” to dictate human behavior. Asked another way, is there a human law that points to pre-existent Law? I am fascinated by and continue to struggle with some of Leff's arguments but I am also awed by his intellectual and philosophical honesty. Mixed with his agnosticism, he struggled with a sense of absurdity that humans might dictate rather than find it—but nonetheless present that law as the “Great Ought To.”

Leff's conundrum would read something like: If law is not from a supreme source, then can it be a supreme law? Or if there is no findable law then don't we make ourselves “gods” in dictating a law? Leff did not assume God but he almost argues for God's existence through of a shared notion of universal “rights” and “wrongs” across time. Yet, true to his intellectual rigor he winds up concluding that there is no proper claim to call anything truly right or wrong. My conclusion is different, but I think Leff builds a strong framework on which to build the case—if not for the existence of God per se—then at least for the grave consequence of his absense.

So….Is God above the law or beneath the law?

The question presupposes a proper God, but for the purposes of this discussion, “god” can be thought of in non-specific terms—i.e. a higher power/intelligent designer, etc. You will probably see there is a problem with both of the options presented. On the one hand, if God is above the law, then the law is arbitrary. That is, should the Designer have made A 'right' instead of B, B would indeed prevail. Or, this Designer could change his mind and though A was 'right' yesterday, He might say B is 'right' tomorrow. The natural conclusion here is that nothing is actually True in a cosmic/permanent sense, except at the whim of their god.

On the other hand, if God is below the law, then God is himself subject to the law. But if that being is subject to the law then the law itself has become God. For in this event, the rules would rule the ruler, becoming themselves the ultimate ruler. You might still posit an intelligent Designer, but its hands would be tied by a Law that supersedes it. We are left with a cosmic Truth, but a toothless god—an omnipotent Law with a weak chief executor. Further, we might wonder whether the law is “good” or if it “has our best interests in mind” for it would be faceless, nameless and I think somewhat cold to the feel.

It's interesting to note that in either event, something is True, a salient point in a world that has become definitively relativistic. If we accept some sort of Supreme Being, it's hard to reason that such a God would have no view of right and wrong. If above the law, He might change right and wrong over time, but it would be at His discretion, not our own. If beneath the law, there is an inalienable, faceless truth that would be unchanging. So in order to conclude the absence of some unassailable truth at any point in time, one, I think, has to argue that there is no God—regardless of the fashion in which it exists.

As Leff argues, one of the great ironies of life is that humans seem to yearn so strongly to be free, and yet cannot deal with the consequences of absolute freedom. We want to rule our own lives and define our own truths and yet find the implications terrifying. Post modernism suggests the notion of Absolute Truth is archaic—that we have 'progressed' to higher philosophical grounds. Relativism rules the day. Relativism is appealing because it allows us to define our own truth. It allows us to be polite and to embrace others and their beliefs without any uncomfortable questioning. But I think we realize that in so doing, we are letting go of one of our greatest hopes—that something is True, that something is Good. Or perhaps even more importantly, that there are things that are wrong.

For in the absence of such an Absolute, we are forced to conclude that we cannot apply standards to others. Relativism suggests that what is right for any person or group, is right for that person or group and what is right for me is right for me. The one thing a person cannot do, though, is to apply her own sense of right and wrong to others. Therefore, if I accept relativism, can I really say it's wrong to kill? Can I say Hitler was wrong, the 9-11 hijackers? Can I say that rape is wrong? I would argue that I cannot. The natural conclusion of relativism is that everything is true and therfore nothing is True. I find this to be a terrifying conclusion and I think relativists must often reach into the abyss searching for some laws that are inalienable, even if they can't describe from whence those laws might come.

The Biblical answer to the conundrum is that the Biblical/Judeo-Christian God is, in and of himself, the Law. This means that God is Truth and that Truth is unchanging–that the Law is not arbitrary but is, rather, an expression of God's character and very essence. It follows that in understanding what is True, we understand God Himself. And to the extent we can know God, we will know what is True and right. If we advance this logic forward, we arrive at a God whose character defines a spiritual universe (that is subject to that spiritual law), just as his actions created a physical one (that is subject to physical law—think Newtonian Physics). As there are physical truths (e.g. you will hit the ground and hurt yourself if you fall from a window) there are also spiritual truths (e.g. you will damage your relationship if you lie to a friend). God did not make it so, he has expounded on it for us so that we know it is so. It IS so, because it is consistent with God's character. And we know that the Law is Good because it expresses the essence of God'. He is not above the law, having decided that you should not lie. Rather, it was always wrong to lie, before the dawn of time, but God allows us to know that law. God's law then is not to arbitrarily rule over us, but to help us live more fulfilled lives—jump from windows less, if you will. It's an instruction book, not a to-do list.

Leff begins his article:

I want to believe —and so do you— in a complete, transcendent, and immanent set of propositions about right and wrong, findable rules that authoritatively and unambiguously direct us how to live righteously. I also want to believe —and so do you —in no such thing, but rather that we are wholly free, not only to choose for ourselves what we ought to do, but to decide for ourselves, individually and as a species, what we ought to be. What we want, Heaven help us, is simultaneously to be perfectly ruled and perfectly free, that is, at the same time to discover the right and good and to create it.

He concludes:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves, and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor love, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us “good,” and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should. Only if ethics were something unspeakable by us could law be unnatural, and therefore unchallengeable. As things stand now, everything is up for grabs. Nevertheless:

Napalming babies is bad.

Starving the poor is wicked.

Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin, and Pol Pot —and General Custer too— have earned salvation.

Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

There is in the world such a thing as evil.

[All together now:] Sez who?

God help us.

While I have posited previously in this space that the question of Easter's empty tomb is the most important question one must answer in life, there is a question that in most cases precedes it—the question of the meaning of our lives. Do our lives matter? Can we effect change? Will anyone remember us?

Philosophers dating back at least to King Solomon have pondered it, but I suspect most of us have either altogether, or at points in our lives, ignored the question. We either fear we can't answer it with any certainly or fear what the answer might suggest for our lives. Sadly, we are more prone to spend time contemplating the destination of our next vacation or the location of our next dinner date than asking whether any of it matters.

The answer set is binary—we are either temporal or eternal beings—but the implications are infinite, literally.

Solomon explores the issue in Ecclesiastes (Verses 1-18):

The words of the Teacher, son of David, king in Jerusalem:

“Meaningless! Meaningless!” says the Teacher. “Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless.”

What does man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun?

Generations come and generations go, but the earth remains forever.

The sun rises and the sun sets, and hurries back to where it rises.

The wind blows to the south and turns to the north; round and round it goes, ever returning on its course.

All streams flow into the sea, yet the sea is never full. To the place the streams come from, there they return again.

All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.

Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new”? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.

There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.

I, the Teacher, was king over Israel in Jerusalem. I devoted myself to study and to explore by wisdom all that is done under heaven. What a heavy burden God has laid on men! I have seen all the things that are done under the sun; all of them are meaningless, a chasing after the wind.

What is twisted cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted.

I thought to myself, “Look, I have grown and increased in wisdom more than anyone who has ruled over Jerusalem before me; I have experienced much of wisdom and knowledge.” Then I applied myself to the understanding of wisdom, and also of madness and folly, but I learned that this, too, is a chasing after the wind.

For with much wisdom comes much sorrow; the more knowledge, the more grief.

And though it may sound like Solomon is answering the question, I rather believe he is asking it—offering us a logical argument and forcing us to wrestle with its natural conclusions. Solomon says that if what's under the sun is all there is—if we came from nothing and are going to nothing—there can be no meaning. We exist as inconsequential players in the cycle of temporal life, like the stream that flows to the sea, never filling it and only recycling again. We can do nothing new, cannot add or subtract anything from the world around us. Meaninglessness fills our days and surrounds us, and our lives will end in it (Tim Keller, Problem of Meaning; Is There Any Reason for Existence?, May 31, 1992).

I find it interesting that many modern thinkers are perfectly content with the assumption that there is nothing except that which is under the sun, yet refuse to come to the conclusion of meaninglessness. Philosophers have created three main frameworks whereby we can claim to profit from our lives or gain significance in them. Humanism suggests we achieve meaning by fighting for justice to help an evolving world-order reach its potential. Hedonism admits nothing we do has eternal value and concludes that we should profit by drinking in the pleasures of life while we can. And Existentialism posits that our significance is demonstrated by our individual ability to bring justice and nobility to “…an apparently meaningless and absurd world” (Wikipedia) (Help from Tim Keller here also).

I would argue that in each of these, the original question has been either left unanswered or answered without sufficient logical support. Humanism is aptly compared to rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic; if the ship is going down, what have we achieved by fixing the place up a bit? Besides, by whose standards are the changes considered progress (see Are all truth's equal?)? Hedonism at least attempts to acknowledge its presupposition of temporality, but does anyone think “eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die” is sufficient to sate our desire for significance? It's a chasing after the wind. As Solomon points out, almost in anticipation of the hedonists:

All things are wearisome, more than one can say. The eye never has enough of seeing, nor the ear its fill of hearing.

And existentialism claims that individuals can somehow derive a form of justice or nobility in spite of the inherent absurdity of the world. It acknowledges there is no order, but then suggests that we can demonstrate one—they, like the humanists must ask, whose standards determine nobility in a world without it.

What is twisted cannot be straightened; what is lacking cannot be counted.

In spite of our best philosophical efforts through centuries I would argue that if all that exists is under the sun, we must conclude that it is all meaningless—it utterly devastates any hope that we can find significance regardless of where we look.

We can promote some ideal we judge to be good, but we have no measuring stick by which to judge between notions of goodness. We can pursue pleasure and personal gain through money, sex, power, wine—even family, children, relationships, romance, etc…, but none of those things fill us (and actually leave us wanting more & more). Or we can stand against the absurd, meaningless world as beacons of nobility, but to what end? Who is the Arbiter to judge our sanity over the world's insanity? Who can say the role we played meant something? And even if it seems significant today, the next philosophical iteration may render it folly. Either way, when the ship goes down, will moving the chairs around have helped? We will not be remembered.

There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.

The natural conclusion is the lowest view of the value of life and of the world we live in. We are insignificant and our toil does not matter—we can add nothing to a world that spins on in cycles and forgets with each generation, until it too is gone.

Unless….

What if the philosophers could be partly correct instead of all wrong? What if we could construct a worldview in which things do matter? What if we come from something and have a future? What if there is something beyond the sun?

Jesus' best friend John (Gospel of John 1-14) claimed that:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning.

Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. In him was life, and that life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not understood it. […]

He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world did not recognize him. He came to that which was his own, but his own did not receive him. Yet to all who received him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God—children born not of natural descent, nor of human decision or a husband's will, but born of God.

The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Do you see it? John is making the claim that there is Something that preceded—the Something beyond the sun turns out to be the very God who created us and calls us His own. It is the One who was here already, long ago; here before our time. And He made us no less eternal than Himself.

You have made known to me the path of life; you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand. –Psalm 16:11 “Then they will go away to eternal punishment, but the righteous to eternal life.” –Mathew 16:46

In the end, the philosophers are all partly right.

For humanitarians, the Word means that there is a Standard by which to measure our deeds—there is a New Order that we can help usher in (see Upside-down, Inside-out). For hedonists it means there is finally something that quenches. For existentialists it means we can stand for order in a world designed for it—that has lost it only temporarily.

What we do in this life matters. Humans are eternal creatures. But there's more.

We learn the following in Revelations 1, verses 1-3:

Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse.

Not only are humans eternal, but so too is the world itself. The Biblical picure of heaven is a city! The world will not fade or disappear—it will not freeze with the inevitable cooling of the sun that warms it, but will instead be renewed by the God whose hand placed it into orbit. Our destiny is not extinction and devastation but renewal. God's eventual Kingdom will not take us from the earth to some ethereal heaven, but rather God will renew this earth to its state of Grace and Shalom—removing the curse. The nations will be healed not relocated.

Sadness and disease will be gone, laughter will replace tears, singing will replace gnashing of teeth. Everything sad will come untrue.

This is the highest view of the value of life and of the world we live in.

Our toil does matter, and what we do here can be accretive to the New Kingdom. It is the ultimate expression of being created in God's image—that we can be co-creators with Him—that what we do here will echo into eternity. Therefore, art matters; architecture matters; investment banking matters; music matters; learning, teaching, discovering, inventing, constructing, everything matters!—for all will stay with us in some form as we move to the renewed world—it will be perfected, not lost.

While it may go without saying, I would feel remiss if I did not point out the implication for the value of humans and of relationships.

As C.S. Lewis observes in Mere Christianity, “Christianity asserts that every human being is going to live forever. […] If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years is more important than in individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important, but incomparably more important for he is everlasting (pp. 74-75).

Any one of us will outlast the longest surviving civilization. We'll be around to see the sun burn out!

So we would do well to remember that all the people in this world—those we pass by and those we never will, those we get to know and those we ignore—are eternal beings also.

We may not be important or powerful people in this world but we are eternal people and our actions will resonate forever, in other people and in this world that God promises to heal.

I realize I have allowed a fair amount of Biblical presupposition in this case. We can (and should) argue apologetics (the defense of Biblical validity and truth) over time, but here we see the logic of a Biblical worldview is the only one that holds up to review. The logic of humanism, hedonism and existentialism fail outright. They claim no basis for meaning but then suggest we can find it. It's a nice idea, but it can't be applied–it can't be lived! Furthermore, each philosophy is inherently unable to justify its own presuppositions—for it is far more difficult to prove God does NOT exist—that we came from nothing—than to point to evidence that He does exist.

So the philosopher is asking you to wrestle with the natural conclusions of a worldview based on a closed system with no God above it. Or as Tim Keller put it once…

“The philosopher is pushing you to show you there is no middle ground. Listen, either there's a God; there's a life above the heaven…either there is a God who created you, and a God who sustains you and a God who will judge you and there's an afterlife, an eternity…either there is a God or else everything is utter futility and there is nothing in the middle…How could this modern secular mindset work that says yes, there is no God; yes we're accidents; and yes, eventually we're going to annihilation? In other words, my origin is insignificant, my destiny is insignificant but while we're here we've got to work for human rights…every human being is valuable, we have to work for human dignity, we have to work equal rights and for justice for all….come on!”

“If my (your) origin is in insignificant, and my (your) destiny is in insignificant, have the guts to admit that your (my) life is insignificant…Either there is life above the sun and there's meaning or there's no life except that which is under the sun and nothing means anything.” (Tim Keller, Problem of Meaning; Is There Any Reason for Existence?, May 31, 1992)

In the end, I think intellectual honesty forces us to conclude either nothing matters at all; or everything matters greatly.

I take the high view of human worth and of the significance of our lives and look forward to the day when everything sad will come untrue. More than that, as C.S. Lewis puts it: “God is not merely mending, not simply restoring status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity (Miracles, Chapter 14, para 21).

There is much for which to hope as we toil under the sun

…after a hail of gunfire doesn't stop V

Creedy: Die! Die! Why won't you die?… Why won't you die? V: Beneath this mask there is more than flesh. Beneath this mask there is an idea, Mr. Creedy, and ideas are bulletproof.

—Taken from Alan Moore's V for Vendetta

I was watching a favorite evening news/commentary program this week, when one of the most opinionated and partisan hosts on television denied the accusation of being an ideologue. It got me thinking….

To be perfectly honest, I didn't really know what the term ideologue means. It occurred to me that its root must be “idea”—a word with innocuous or even positive connotation—and yet my sense is that ideologue is most often used in a pejorative context. I've never heard anyone claim to be one, but have heard people deny it.

A William Safire article confirmed my hunch as it recounts Ralph Waldo Emerson's observation in 1847 that ideologue was “a word of contempt often in his mouth.” Safire claims the term ideologue is synonymous with “dogmatic”, “doctrinarian” and just short of “zealot”—labels virtually nobody wants ascribed to them. In 1957, the critic Clifton Felton summed it up: “An ideologue may be defined as a mad intellectual. He is not interested in ideas, but—almost the exact contrary—in one idea” (Language: The Evolution of the Ideologue, New York Times, 13 November 2005).

Safire goes on to suggest the term idealist may be construed more positively than ideologue, the former connoting a “high-minded, visionary, if somewhat impractical”—idealist coming from the root ideal, versus ideologue coming from the root idea…a “model of perfection” instead of “a concept” (ibid). Though I'm sure his history is correct, I don't believe there's much of a distinction in today's town square—I think both labels are used to diminish.

It was not always so:

Before the French Revolution, the philosopher Etienne Bonnot de Condillac took an empiricist idea from John Locke that knowledge came from experience and sensations and not, as the rationalists believed, from innate ideas. Condillac's disciple, Destutt de Tracy, was known as an idéologiste espousing idéologie after the Revolution (as quote by Safire).

So while ideologue may have originally been a label of esteem—noting the value ascribed to knowledge from experience in place of innate ideas—this would eventually reverse. Today, the most feared individual in the public square is the one who believes in innate ideas—the ideologue.

(Chorus gasps as villain enters!)

The hero of this production (life's sociopolitical drama) is of course the free-thinking, moderate pragmatist (also very handsome), who does not kowtow to these innate ideas. Innate ideas are a collar that the hero throws off—so he can move the lines where our modern sensibilities suggest they belong, rather than letting it be determined by some archaic and esoteric idea. He is able to take inventory of what the world needs now (love, sweet love) and thus make recommendations on how to proceed. He offers hope for what we can achieve.

The hero's idea is that an ever-evolving humanity should let human history inform its future goals and aspirations—the way we govern and set up our societies. We can correct so much of what we've gotten wrong.

Many of today's heroes, for example, believe religion was the worst construct ever (while often protecting votes by paying lip service to its value). Sure religions filled a need for ancient people (the logic goes)—helping them construct an understanding of the world and maybe giving them a basis on which to organize communities and care for the disenfranchised. But look at all the war and death they have brought—hatred between nations and peoples. Plus, now we're sophisticated enough to know they're mystical and nice, but none can actually be true—certainly not any more than another. Clearly, any new society would want to exclude them; particulay those that make a unique claim to truth.

This type of analysis continues through all aspects of society and culture, driven both by the hero and his focus groups. For example, in our generation advanced Western states have often concluded that religion, nationalism and personal charity should be diminished. State run programs and multinationalism should replace them. The list goes on.

So with the very idea of innate ideas rejected, we move the line to a place where it suits us.

The hero's new idea simply creates a new ideology—a new set of truths; it's called relativism. We believe it's freeing but we're really just escaping from innate truths, only to bind ourselves with constructed truths. Most often, we're trading ideas for the hope of desired results (see here); and assuming the means will justify the ends. As those desired results change, so moves the new ideology. So moves the line.

Right now, the prevailing wisdom of Western civilation is that a man should be able to do whatever makes him happy—that no one should impose his ideas on another.

I often wonder how this ideology works, because it seems to create some very difficult conundrums.

What happens when your happiness start to infringe on mine? What happens when a behavior starts to compromise social order? What happens if I still love my religion now that we've decided that the new order will exclude it? What if my nationalistic pride comes off as arrogance in the new (superior?) multinational world order?

And assuming we can answer these questions and implement the plan, will we like all the consequences?

At the state level, in the most constructive cases, the result of rejecting innate ideas tends to take the form of social engineering. This is the ultimate reversion to the mean, where focus groups determine allocation of resources, values, standards and laws. It strangles outliers with its fraternal embrace—saying: “Believe anything you want, except the existence innate ideas—believe what you will, as long as it maintains no claim to being uniquely correct”. If you make an absolute truth claim, you will be labeled an ideologue—and you will be demonized.

In the more tragic cases, it has resulted in oppressive fascism; but in reality only a fine line separates the two. Personal liberty and freedom diminish in both, and it's a short jump to fascism once the will of the people is softened by its mild despot (a.k.a. The State).

Neither is a result I think we want.

But even at the moral level, I'm not sure we really accept the natural conclusions of relativism. If Nietzsche was correct in his claim that “there are no facts, only interpretations”, we are left to ponder how we can defend an Idea that we know in our hearts is right and how we can reject behavior that we know in our hearts is wrong (see Are all truth's equal?).

On what grounds will we defend the value of human life? Many in history have drawn a line that allows for genocide to achieve some “greater end”.

How will we defend the right to personal liberty? Today, Iranians peacefully protesting a rigged election are being killed in the streets.

And on what basis can we condemn the mass murders and rapes of Darfurian civilians or the Iranian regime's unwillingness to recognize the voice of its people?

These Sovereigns have drawn their lines as we have drawn our own. In the absence of innate ideas, I would suggest all we can do is advance our own interests. Who cares what happens to them?

…But then again, I'm an ideologue.

I understand that scares people, and admittedly not all ideologues are Good. It all depends on what that one idea is.

My idea is a Man.

He started an upside-down, inside-out Kingdom where glory comes only through service. A Man who lived this out by dying to win his great victory—a victory that demonstrated the value of human life and the dignity of each person. And it guaranteed the ultimate restoration and Shalom of this fallen world.

Consequently, I believe what we do on earth matters, both in relation to each other and in relation to the created world. I believe in human dignity, the right to personal liberty and the obligation to defend the defenseless, to enfranchise the disenfranchised. And I believe that we are not granted the privilege of ignoring any of the above in the interest of pursuing other personal or national interests.

I'm interested in lots of ideas, contrary to what Mr. Felton might have suspected, but I will not forsake the above for any other. No end is greater than what is required by this Idea.

By the way, I think John Locke was right, at least halfway. We should have a worldview that is informed by experience and sensation. Truth should not only be right, it should feel right (we know this in our hearts)—it should be consistent with what we see around us. But his argument does not offer logic that allows us to reject the notion of innate truth.

We're left to ask, what if there are some ideas that are innate?

True, many are the claims of innate truth; and they are different in nature. But shouldn't we at least understand what those claims are before rejecting even the possibility? I can tell you this; they wouldn't go away just because we thought them inconvenient. They wouldn't die just because we wanted them to. Ideas are bulletproof and innate ideas are eternal. An idea can still change the world.

Evey Hammond: Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the Gunpowder Treason and Plot. I know of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason should ever be forgot… But what of the man? I know his name was Guy Fawkes and I know, in 1605, he attempted to blow up the Houses of Parliament. But who was he really? What was he like? We are told to remember the idea, not the man, because a man can fail. He can be caught, he can be killed and forgotten, but 400 years later, an idea can still change the world. I've witnessed first hand the power of ideas, I've seen people kill in the name of them, and die defending them… but you cannot kiss an idea, cannot touch it, or hold it… ideas do not bleed, they do not feel pain, they do not love… And it is not an idea that I miss, it is a man… A man that made me remember the Fifth of November. A man that I will never forget.

—V for Vendetta, Alan Moore.

As a rule, only very learned and clever men deny what is obviously true. Common men have less brains, but more sense.

—William T. Stace

When they saw the star, they rejoiced with exceeding great JOY—Matthew 2:10

In a book series focused on the church calendar (Fullness of Time), Tish Harrison Warren points out that, as other calendars are winding down, the start of Advent (the 4th Sunday before Christmas) is the church's New Year's Day. The word Advent means “coming." It's meant to be a period of yearning for God's presence and activity in our midst. So as the church starts its year, it does so in a posture of expectant anticipation. Of waiting.

I have a friend who asks the best questions (shout out PDub). I mean, sometimes they get weird like “What color is your soul right now?” But for the most part, they're wonderful. The guy makes you think. One of the things I've learned from his barrage of curiosity is that, if you don't think too hard—if you don't filter—you can learn something about yourself. So when he asked what I was waiting for this Advent, I blurted out—“Nothing. I'm just going to be JOYFUL.” His question was the second Christmas gift I received this year.

The first was a song.

When I came across Cageless Bird's “Oh The JOY”, I wept. Its delicately threaded ensemble of voices and haunting chord progressions are a beautiful backdrop for its elegantly simple lyrics. Together they knit a tapestry of the first Christmas where, if we look closely, we spy heaven bending low as with a sacred secret; and we catch a glimpse of the first Yule Gift.

Oh the joy, the joy of a humble beginning, when there was no room for him, but his heart opened wide;

Oh the joy, the joy of shepherds and angels, singing in reverence, filling up the sky;

Oh the joy, the joy of a promised savior, piercing the darkness, lifting our eyes;

Oh the joy, the joy of a God that's generous, giving extravagance, He's my sunrise.

I wept because it's beautiful. I also wept because, as I listened to it, I felt close to a JOY that too often eludes me. I wait for it. But not expectantly.

The gift of the Advent inquiry was more than a question asked in love by a friend. I learned from my spontaneous response that while hopeful anticipation is a healthy posture before God, we're not meant to wait for JOY. JOY is waiting for us right now. In like fashion, Cageless Bird's gift to me was more than a song. It reminded me of a key for unlocking that JOY: Find something beautiful and meditate on it (Phil 4:8).

After all, "Any beauty in the world is, in some degree, a pointer to God. Beauty has this in common with goodness and truth” (C.S. Lewis). Those things worthy of our admiration somehow pluck a base string in our souls that reverberates upward to heaven and connects us, if only abstractly, to the Transcendent. To behold beauty is to see a shadow of the God of JOY—to feel Him resonate within us.

All of us have stepped into these awesome moments of JOY— had brief, shimmering glimpses of God. The problem is that each flash of His beauty awakens more longing. And longing brings us back to waiting.

What we wait for during Advent—almost unthinkably—works in reverse. If beauty is a ladder for peaking at heaven, the God of JOY isn't waiting for us to scale the skyfold. Thankfully, mysteriously, the ladder works for descending too; and knowing we could never reach Him, He came down to get us. So on that first Christmas, heaven bent low enough to deliver its King—the Transcendent condescending to be one us. It must mean, among a myriad of wonderful mysteries, that in spite of our flaws, we are beautiful to God, too. That we are His JOY.

Now we find, as we behold the babe in the manger, we're face to face with heaven's Gift—Him who would trade his royal privilege and perch for our presence; Him in Whom our longing is fulfilled. When we expectantly wait for Him each year, the waiting itself becomes JOY; the eyes of our hearts are filled with wonder as we recognize the face of the true Beauty to which all beauty points. When we see His light piercing the darkness, we can't help but join the angels, singing in reverence, “Oh the JOY!”; for He has found us.

So let's lift up our eyes and see Him this Advent; make room for Him in our hearts and meditations. He comes to bring JOY.

“Oh The Joy” may or may not impact you as it has me these past weeks, but I pray every year that in the humble collection of songs I curate, you would find something beautiful—something that brings you JOY and points you to the God who's coming, who has come and who is with us now. May you and your family receive His extravagant love this Christmas and look full in His wonderful face.

JOY to the world, the Lord has come.

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1. This Christmas Pageant is always worth watching.

If the season of Lent failed to focus us on our Sin and mortality (as I think it's meant to), then perhaps the Good Friday will serve us. It's the story of 3 convicted men dying on crosses.

The thought of Jesus on the cross hits each of us differently. It can move us emotionally. It can confuse or bewilder us. I propose the most important thing we can do is to understand its meaning. The dialogue between these three men should help us.

The words of the first man show us the easiest mistake we can make as we encounter the cross. “Aren't you the Messiah,” (he says) save yourself and us.”

Jesus was mocked by virtually everyone, wasn't he? The Romans didn't believe a king could be nailed to a tree and the religious people didn't believe the chosen one could be crucified. This may be the only thing all the crowds throughout history ever agreed on: The cross is stupid – it's foolish.

Be careful, when everyone agrees on something. It's easy to be swept away by the crowd – and I think maybe this first guy was. He mocks Jesus. He's making demands. He doesn't seem to understand his positioning before God.

Sadly, I think this guy is more concerned with his skin than his soul.

If we want to understand the cross, we may have to get away from the crowd, maybe even be willing to look foolish. Remember, the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom.

The second man makes the hardest admission in the world. “We are punished justly,” he says “for we are getting what our deeds deserve. But this man has done nothing wrong. Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

Like the first man (and like us), this second man has an existential crisis – death is coming, quickly! But Instead of saying, get me down from this cross, Instead of a demand, he does the hardest thing one can do: He acknowledges his sin and guilt before God. And with that confession, he adds only this: Remember me. A plea for mercy.

Somehow, in the presence of Jesus, this guy has become more concerned with his soul than his skin.

Jesus responds to the plea, not the demand, “I assure you.”, he says, “today you will be with me in paradise.”

Is he promising heaven in response to the plea? I think so. It's fascinating because this guy is literally hours from death. He will never serve Jesus on earth. He can't turn his life around. He can't tell anyone about Jesus' mercy. Forgive the irreverence, but he might be the Bible's most useless convert.

It's the perfect picture of grace, isn't it?

Yes, I think Jesus promises heaven to this man. But when he does, he's promising us—you and me—so much more. Today you will be with me, he says. Do you see it? Jesus' promise is his presence.

Paul tells us in Ephesian 2 that God made us alive with Christ … and seated us with him in the heavenly realms. Seated us, with him – past tense. Jesus is telling us that whether or not we die today – before and after we die, whenever that may be – we can be with him. And he wants to be with us.

How can this be? We're as guilty as the criminals on either side of him. In this particular case, this man could be with Jesus, because Jesus was with him on the cross. The cross is the key. It's the axis mundi, the point on which all history turns

And this is its meaning, the thing we must understand (I also think its the thing we most desire in our hearts). Jesus' death opens the door for sinners to enter the heavenly realms. This is the profound wisdom of God.

So to those who make a plea for mercy from the King, to those who acknowledge their guilt before the chosen one, He promises this: Today you will be with me in paradise.

I'm no expert on this, but I am fairly certain that nearly every time an angel appears in the Bible, the first thing he says is "Do not be afraid." Funny really—the presence of an angel of God provokes, not peace or joy, but more fear. (As Linus famously recites in Charlie Brown Christmas. "And lo, an angel of the Lord came upon them and they were sore afraid."). Most angels are merely messengers, so it probably stands that the presence of god himself could provoke crippling terror. I think many of us assume if there is a god, his presence would be devastating. Game over maybe. The end.

In Rick Warren's book On This Holy Night, he asks: "What happens when you've been following a star and it leads you to a stable? What happens when all of a sudden, after thinking that something grand and glorious would be at the other end, you end up in the backyard of a barn? And there instead of a palace and a king on a throne, you find a little baby held by his mother?"

Whatever our expectations of god, I pray this Advent that neither our strivings (proverbial stars) nor our assumptions of who he is would keep us from what the shepherds found—a little baby held by his mother. In the presence of This Wondrous Newborn, we find joy instead of fear.

I speak into my own fears something of the Christmas story—Do not be afraid. I bring you good news that will cause great joy for all the people. Today in the town of David a Savior has been born to you; he is the Messiah, the Lord. This will be a sign to you: You will find a baby wrapped in cloths and lying in a manger. Luke 2:11-12

I pray that you may find joy in the presence of the Christmas Child. Instead of an end, a new beginning. A place where your fears resolve. And as ever, I pray that you and your family would enjoy A Very Brune Christmas 2023 this Advent season.

With Love, Merry Christmas, Inkling-s

A Very Brune Christmas 2023

— A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life, William Law

On Sept 8, 1860 there was a shipwreck on Lake Michigan, daunting waters that have seen many disasters over the years. This particular boat went down near Evanston, Illinois—where Northwestern University is located. The big steamer, the Lady Eljin ran into a schooner during the night—carrying union soldiers back from a campaign speech for Stephen A. Douglas. The Hundreds on board suddenly found themselves in the frigid waters of Lake Michigan, in the dark of night, and in search of a hold on flotsam and jetsam in hopes of surviving the night. To this day, this is the 2nd worst disaster in the history of lake Michigan—over 400 people lost their lives.

Northwestern, as it turns out, had the only lifesaving station on the edge of the lake at that time. One of the young men on the life saving team was a ministerial student at the University. His name was Edward Spencer.

In the wee hours of the morning, after news of the disaster had begun to spread around campus, it found its way to Mr. Spencer who then found his way to the lake's edge—grabbed a life preserver and waded into the freezing cold waters. He searched until he found a woman clinging onto a wood plank for dear life. He delivered her safely to shore. Then waded back out. Over the next several hours he went out over and over again, rescuing 17 people from the frigid waters and from near certain death.

In the process his health was permanently damaged, and he was not able to enter the ministry as he had planned and for which he was studying.

Decades later at the very end of a conference in Los Angeles—now with white hair—an aged Mr. Spencer was asked a final question by the panel interviewer:

“Mr. Spencer, so much has been written and said about your heroic efforts on that day, what is the one thing you walk away with—the thing that stands out more than anything else?”

Without missing a beat he replied: “In all these years, no one has ever said 'thank you.'

Ohhhh THANKSGIVING.

Merriam Webster defines Thanksgiving as: “A public acknowledgment or celebration of divine goodness.”

Saint Paul beseeches us in 1Thessalonians 5—Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you.

The will of God in Christ Jesus for you—to give thanks in all circumstances. It's a tall order, isn't it? Who can do this? These 17 people didn't find it within themselves to thank the man who gave so much to save their lives.

I propose if we want to take Saint Paul seriously, we have to get a handle on Thanksgiving.

But first, I have a confession.

When I agreed to preach this weekend – well, first of all I was told I could phone it in—that there'd only be 4 of you here. So good on you -- getting here on a holiday week!

But more seriously, I thought to myself – 'Great—Thanksgiving—oh, that'll be an easy one.' Almost immediately, I had a clever sermon name and an outline on the back of a napkin. Then I went to the Bible for some Scripture to support my message

I figured all I needed was a few hours to pull it all together. But after 2 full days of preparing, the message was in shambles. It didn't make sense. The logic wasn't there. And it just didn't feel right.

Moreover, as I ran into some of you in the neighborhood, saw some of you at parish group and heard from others via email and phone, I realized something: while we may have much for which to be thankful, we're still struggling.

We're sad, lonely, anxious, uncertain. We don't get everything we want in our lives. We're sick and we're scared. Even some of the things that bring us joy, bring with them matching sorrow.

In her book, Prayers in the Night, Anglican priest Tish Harrison Warren tells us that her Church congregation is “…beautiful and ordinary, but in that one room each Sunday, there's enough sadness to make the heavens silent”.

As far as I can tell, our congregation is no different.

And there it is: Thanksgiving is not easy, In fact, Thanksgiving can be very hard. But it's also consummately important.

God was showing me my assumptions about Thanksgiving were wrong. My message didn't come together because it was just that—it was MY message. It was the message I brought to God and asked him to co-sponsor.

That's just not how it works.

God was telling me he's a person who wants to interact with us. He wanted me to prayerfully listen to His Word, rather than come to it it with my agenda. He wants us to seek his wisdom.

So I had to go back to the basics and start over—hopefully hearing better what God had for us today.

Paul implores us to rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances. If this is God's desire for us, we need to figure out how to show up for Thanksgiving.

But how do we do that?

I think I found some answers from the 10 lepers in the account of their healing in Luke chapter 17 (verses 11-19).

On the way to Jerusalem he was passing along between Samaria and Galilee. And as he was about to enter a village, he was met by ten lepers, who stood at a distance and lifted up their voices, saying, “Jesus, Master, have mercy on us.” When he saw them he said to them, “Go and show yourselves to the priests.” And as they went they were cleansed. Then one of them, when he saw that he was healed, turned back, praising God with a loud voice; and he fell on his face at Jesus' feet, giving him thanks. Now he was a Samaritan. Then Jesus answered, “Were not ten cleansed? Where are the nine? Was no one found to return and give praise to God except this foreigner?” And he said to him, “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

Let's unpack this story together. I propose we can learn at least three things about how to make it to Thanksgiving.

1. We must go to Jesus in our sorrow

2. We must go to Jesus in our joy

3. And we must go to Jesus JUST as we are

First, we must go to Jesus in our sorrow. We start with ten lepers in Luke 17. Ten men are healed in this story. Though we don't get to know their stories particularly well (funny how the bible has so much detail on some things and so little on others). But at least a few things are clear about these men.

For starters, we have 9 Jews and a Samaritan – 9 from the religious set joined by one from the hated neighboring race, apparently not far from his home. That they are even together – Jews with a Samaritan – speaks to how outcast they are collectively. Had they a choice, the Jews would likely never have suffered the presence of this other man.

Jesus and his disciples come upon them about 20 miles north of Jerusalem. The lepers are standing outside of a village—keeping their distance from everyone – announcing themselves loudly as “Unclean unclean!!” as they're required to do by custom and the Levitical law. Together, they are 10 miserable helpless men.

How do we know this? Well, we read between the lines a bit. But we know some things about leprosy and its effects—especially in Biblical times.

Leprosy is a long-term bacterial infection that often leads to damage of the nerves which tends to result in a lack of ability to feel physical pain. Then simple cuts and scrapes—unnoticed and untreated—often lead to the loss of body parts.

So ironically, lepers don't feel pain—body parts falling off—but in Biblical times at least, they must still feel the fear and disgust everyone feels toward them. The isolation of not having a place in society. The loss of their families & friends. And the terror of knowing the their deaths are approaching.

In the Bible, leprosy was also used as a picture of sin in our lives. Like sin, Leprosy is incurable, contagious, isolating, cured by priests not doctors—and ONLY through sacrifice.

These men are struggling. They are desperate. They are sorrowful.

Let's pause here for a second… I think there are some great lessons here for us on Thanksgiving—believe it or not.

First, something about us—sometimes the hard things in our lives keep us from God (don't they?). Our Struggles, disappointments, loneliness – even our own sin. Disappointment with life and our world is one of the main reasons people say they don't—even can't—believe in the God of the Bible.

But these men were somehow different. When Jesus approaches, they manage to belt out a prayer, begging for mercy. Maybe there was a ray of hope that only they could see. Maybe only one lifted his voice at first, then another echoed—until a passerby could hear all 10 of them shouting with all their might (I don't know!).

What I do know is this – 10 men had death sentences when they woke up that day. But when Jesus came 'round, all were given new life, another chance.

Which takes us a couple lessons about God. First, he is willing to go to the outskirts to find those who are struggling. He wasn't in the temple this particular day, He wasn't in Jerusalem, he wasn't even inside the gates of whatever town they were visiting. He was outside, where lepers linger

Secondly, he loves to bless us—to pour out life. See, miracles are really just setting things back to rights. It's the need for miracles that is not as it ought to be. Miracles in a sense are the most natural things of all. And Jesus couldn't turn a deaf ear to the pleas from these men for a miracle to set their lives right.

It's important to see here that healing began with a cry for help. Then—on Jesus' word—they took a step of faith. Notice, nothing had changed in their circumstances. An arm maybe still falling off here, blindness still setting in there, open wounds everywhere – shouting “unclean, unclean” as they went.

I don't mean to make light of it but – still outwardly falling apart – they walked together to the priest. I have to think they wondered as they walked: “Will anything be different when we get there?” And yet, they took small steps of faith. And when they arrived they were healed

If you hear nothing else today, please hear this:

• There is no place you can go, where Jesus won't come to find you

• There is nothing you can do, that will stop him from loving you

• There is no depth of sorrow, or grief or despair that He is unable to lift you out of—or unwilling to walk through with you

This story begins in misery and isolation but ends in healing, community and forgiveness.

We learn from our 10 friends in the story that Thanksgiving begins when we call to God in our sorrow and are willing to take a small step of faith. He loves to pour out life to those who call him.

So first we must go to God in our sorrow with whatever faith we can muster. But we must also go to him in our joy.

9 guys missed Thanksgiving but I don't think they weren't thankful. They had a lot for which to be thankful—all the good that had been restored to them. They could now return to their families and communities. They could embrace those they loved. They could hold their children again. As I said, we don't know a whole lot about these guys

But if I was to bet on one thing, I'd bet on this. After they were healed, I bet they went home.

They went back to their lives, families and communities. They returned to attending and serving in their temples. Ungrateful? I doubt it.

Our suffering can keep us from God; but you see, sometimes, our blessings also keep us from God. Our gifts and abilities, money and accomplishments. Friends and family. Little league, birthdays and bottles. Even religious services and missions.

What?! Religion keep us from God? It can—absolutely…

Church and parish group and leadership roles and missions—all the things we're doing FOR God – they can actually keep us FROM God if we're not careful

And I think we're meant to see that here.

Presumably all 10 of these guys had some faith, as that was generally a prerequisite for Jesus' healing. But the Samaritan is the only one who returns to Jesus. The cultural and religious outsider is the only one who doesn't miss thanksgiving. That has to tell us something.

Could it be that the Jews thought it was more important to return to family and temple? To all the good things in their lives? Is that so crazy?

St. Augustine famously stated that “The essence of sin is disordered love.”

It's not that we love gifts and blessings too much. It's that we love God too little relative to those things. That is, we tend to love good things more than the giver of those things.

It's easy to judge the 9. But I suspect if we do, we'll miss this point: Until we learn to love most the Giver of Gifts, the gifts themselves will only keep us from him.

But how can we be sure to order God first in our hearts, amidst all his blessings? If disordered love is at the heart of sin—and I believe it is—this is something we should all be praying about. I wish there was a silver bullet against this “werewolf of blessing idolatry.”

But maybe the best we can do here today is to try to learn something from our Samaritan friend. Only He went to Jesus in his overwhelming joy, thanking him and praising him loudly. Do you see it friends? THANKSGIVING.

We are meant to see that in the very act of Thanksgiving he is elevating Jesus in his heart.

Praise and thanksgiving are disciplines and liturgies, not moods and feelings. Do we have patterns in our lives where we practice them? Journaling maybe? Meditation on God's divine character and goodness? Reciting thanksgivings around the dinner table with our families? Are we embarrassed to gush about God in public?

I'm convinced of this: we need regular practices for praise and thanksgiving in our lives.

We must go to him in our sorrow, go to him in our joy; and finally, we can go to him exactly as we are.

At the very end of the story, Jesus says to the Samaritan: “Rise and go your way; your faith has made you well.”

What may be most interesting here is the Greek word translated "made you well.'

It's not a medical phrase exactly – although it was used to describe the safe delivery of a baby. This is the Greek word, "so-zo" which means, "saved.” The Greeks used it to describe one who escapes a dangerous situation. Sailors surviving a storm at sea had been saved, they said. They are Sozo.

When Matthew began his gospel, he started with the Christmas story. The angel told Joseph to name his son "Jesus," because that name meant that he would "save people from their sins." He would sozo the people.

It seems clear to me—and the commentators tend to agree—that in the conclusion of this story, we see the Samaritan received deeper healing than the others. In fact, I think we can assume that this was a salvific encounter with Jesus

That is, as he comes to Jesus in Thanksgiving, he receives eternal life—his soul now healed along with his body. He was sozo. So there seems to be real power in this man's Thanksgiving. But how?

The words translated “Thanksgiving” or “Give Thanks” are in the Bible 173 times. In the Old Testament “Thanks” is mainly the translation of the Hebrew word: spelled “ydh” (I won't try to pronounce it). It means: “Acknowledging what is right about God in praise and thanksgiving”—so essentially praise.

Get this—It can also mean: “A right acknowledgment of self before God in confessing sin”—so essentially repentance.

In the New Testament—thanks is mainly the translation of the Greek word “eucharisteo”. It means “To show oneself grateful, to be thankful”—essentially just Thanksgiving – as in Jesus giving thanks to God for the bread and wine during the last supper (that's why we call it Eucharist).

Here's the takeaway from all this language mumbo jumbo: “praise”, “repentance,” “thanksgiving of his divine goodness” — Thanksgiving is more about who he is than it is about our circumstances. Thanksgiving is more about God than it is about us.

And this sheds light on the story of our Samaritan friend. Physically healed—Luke tells us he returned in Thanksgiving. He returned because he wanted more of Jesus; not because he wanted more from Jesus.

I'm not convinced he had any idea what he really needed. But when he gets to Jesus, he finds he is bowing before the man who loves to forgive maybe even more than he loves to heal.

Just healing isn't enough for Jesus. See, healing— was easy for him. The Bible seems pretty clear that it's no biggie for Jesus to heal leprosy, restore sight to the blind, stop hemorrhaging, even call out demons. After all, he's just setting things to rights.

But the Bible is equally clear on this—deeper healing, forgiveness of sins – sodzo… Well, that has a cost.

The Samaritan needed this deeper healing. Unfortunately, we—all of us—need this deeper healing too. The forgiveness of our sins, the healing of our spiritual leprosy…. remember—it's cured by priests not doctors—and ONLY through sacrifice.

You may recall earlier in Luke, Jesus healed a crippled man with the very words “your sins are forgiven”?

The religious leaders immediately identify this as blasphemy (Jedidiah talked about this last week). Only God can forgive sins, they said. They would soon crucify him for these alleged blasphemies.

So now when we find look at the cross seeing him—not long before his death—imploring God to forgive us; perhaps we come to better understand the sacrifice our sin requires – the antidote for our sickness is nothing less than the blood of Jesus.

Forgiveness always has a cost.

And reflecting on this— the single greatest act of love in history—we find here – The source of all Thanksgiving. The final sacrifice. The lamb of God

It's at the cross that we see we can now approach the great high priest even in our sickness and sin. Like the Samaritan, We can go to him exactly as we are – bringing nothing but praise and thanksgiving. For by his wounds, our souls are healed.

I'll finish with a quick story. While on a mission trip in 1996, Pastor Jack Hinton, from New Bern, North Carolina, was leading worship at a leper colony on the island of Tabango. There was time for one more song, so he asked if anyone had a request. A woman who had been facing away from the pulpit turned around.

Hinton later described her this way

It was the most hideous face I had ever seen. The woman's nose and ears were entirely gone. The disease had destroyed her lips as well.

The woman lifted a fingerless hand in the air and asked, 'Can we sing Count Your Many Blessings?'"

Overcome with emotion, Hinton left the service. He was followed by a team member who said, "Jack, I guess you'll never be able to sing that song again."

"Yes I will," Jack replied, "…but I'll never sing it the same way.

Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances

To the degree that we understand the unfathomable Love God has for us—as shown by the cost he paid on the cross—we will make it to Thanksgiving

And Now as we go forth into advent season—let's Go to him—go to the one Matthew describes in his Christmas story…. He has sozod the people—saved us from our sins.

Father God, we praise and thank you for who you are and for your great love for us. Help us to take, even small steps of faith toward you, the one who LOVES to pour out life— Help us to come to you…

• In our misery and isolation.

• In our joy and blessings.

• Help this truth to penetrate deeply in our hearts—that because you gave everything for us, we can come to you with nothing—just as we are.

Thanks be to God

Amen

“In all created things discern the providence and wisdom of God, and in all things give Him thanks.”

—St. Teresa of Avila

“When we were children we were grateful to those who filled our stockings at Christmas time. Why are we not grateful to God for filling our stockings with legs?”

—G. K. Chesterton

Thanksgiving comes from above. It is the gift that we cannot fabricate for ourselves. It is to be received. It is freely offered and asks to be freely received. That is where the choice is! We can choose to let the stranger continue his journey and so remain a stranger. But we can also invite him into our inner lives, let him touch every part of our being and then transform our resentments into gratitude. We don't have to do this. In fact, most people don't. But as often as we make that choice, everything, even the most trivial things, become(s) new. Our little lives become great—part of the mysterious work of God's salvation. Once that happens, nothing is accidental, casual, or futile any more. Even the most insignificant event speaks the language of faith, hope, and above all, love. That's the Eucharistic life, the life in which everything becomes a way of saying “Thank you” to him who joined us on the road.”

—Henri Nouwen

I was out for a walk with my daughter on a beautiful early spring day when I noticed it.

The neighborhood was being reborn. Restaurants, closed for over a year, were full of patrons sitting outside. Boards were being removed from storefronts, brown paper torn off the windows, presumably by new optimistic owners. A profound sense of resurrection enveloped me—not just the city's but my own. This surprised me.

In retrospect, I hadn't realized how much I had died.

My family has been very fortunate through the pandemic and our faith has provided a beachhead for nourishment and joy in the midst of so much death. Frankly, I may also be a “stiff upper lip” guy when it comes down to it. But in that moment, on that walk, I experienced more acutely some of the death of Covid-19. I experienced it through the lens of resurrection that was bursting forth all around me. It reminded me that resurrection after death is not a one-time event we witness only in the first Easter. Rather, creative destruction is a pattern sewn into the universe by the Creator God.

It made me think of some areas in which we've experienced destruction over the last 18 months. It has been a valley of dry bones. Some of us have felt deeply isolated; some of us have suffered injuries to relationships or careers; some of us have lost our sense of security, safety and well being. Some of us are experiencing mental health issues, including health care workers afflicted with PTSD from serving through the crisis. Many of us have lost loved ones or mourned with those who have. Our afflictions are diverse and very personal. But it has been a long, dark climb for everyone—I think even those of us who don't realize how deeply we too are affected. I am learning I should own my suffering and loss better. After all, even know all that would happen, Jesus wept over Lazarus.

And yet.

Lazarus lives. Resurrection follows death.

So as I reflect on the pandemic, I realize I should perhaps weep more with my friends, and over the condition of our city, our country and our world. But I am also reminded by the resurrection of our neighborhood that:

The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom (Isaiah 40:28).

And I cling to the hope that He is recreating us daily, especially when we sense the most destruction in our lives.

This is what the Sovereign LORD says to these bones: I will make breath enter you, and you will come to life (Ezekiel 37:5).

I mentioned to my wife this week that Christmas is over and Epiphany has begun. She surprised me by rattling off the fact that 3 Kings Day is on January 6th—which marks the start of the Epiphany season. She went on to tell me that “El Dia De Los Reyes”, as it is called, is a traditional holiday in Spain and Latin American… something she and her family celebrated when she was growing up.

Both now curious, we looked together and learned that 3 Kings falls on the twelfth day of Christmas and celebrates the day the three wise men finally arrived after their journey to worship the baby Jesus. In thinking about this event, I began to wonder about these wise men…

Why did they go? All we really know is, they saw a new star, dropped everything and went after it. At first, this felt so mysterious to me. But the more I thought about it, it occurred to me, We're all enamored by new things, aren't we?

And to these star gazers, a NEW star could mean everything

I want to suggest to you that we live in a time perhaps more committed to newness than any other in history. We fear the traditional and desire the chic, the cutting edge— progressive.

The word “new” generally means “young”. It can mean a young idea or progressive development. We love:

• New philosophies

• New medicine & technology

• New political platforms

New can also imply beautiful or robust. To capture this fleeting newness we use cosmetics, get plastic surgery; we exercise.

Our commitment to newness—I think borders on an obsession, WHY? Well, maybe we simply enjoy the experience of beauty. After all, we love museums and nature—there is something admirable and rare in the truly beautiful. Or maybe we maintain a hope that the next New Thing could save us from our greatest afflictions—personal, or corporate.

But I think we want even more than that. As CS Lewis observes:

We want so much more—something the books on aesthetics take little notice of, but the poets and the mythologies know all about… We do not want merely to see beauty...We want something else which can hardly be put into words—to be united with the beauty we see, to pass into it, to receive it into ourselves, to bathe in it, to become part of it.

I think what Lewis is saying is that we want to be a part of something bigger. We want to connect with the eternal. We want to BE eternal—that if we look underneath our obsession with THE NEW and the BEAUTIFUL, it's an acknowledgment that we're fading away. The Lion King tells us death is natural—just a part of the circle of life— but deep down, we know better. Dylan Thomas may be closer to expressing our collective angst as he implores us:

Rage, RAGE against the dying of the light.

We're afraid of the looming darkness

So we seek eternity often in the most ethereal places. Novel ideas, youth and beauty preservation aren't doing it. We need a new KIND OF NEW. We may find some help in the book of Revelation, where Jesus promises a New City.

Let's read Revelation 21:1-7, 22:1-5 together

[21:1] 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. 2 And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. 3 And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. 4 He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”

5 And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new.” Also he said, “Write this down, for these words are trustworthy and true.” 6 And he said to me, “It is done! I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end. To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life without payment. 7 The one who conquers will have this heritage, and I will be his God and he will be my son.

[22:1] Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb 2 through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. 3 No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. 4 They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. 5 And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.

My dear friends, this is the word of the Lord. Thanks be to God.

Please pray with me. Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in your sight, O LORD, my rock and my redeemer. AMEN

Thy Kingdom Come

In August I shared some thoughts with you about living in the pandemic. As a brief reminder we talked about the exile we've experienced as a result of Covid-19—suffering less access to the City—which as New Yorkers is kind of our home—and living under foreign rules or new regulations

As an analog, we explored the Jewish exile in Babylon in which the people of God faithfully wept over those things that weren't as they ought to have been but also remembered God's faithfulness. We stalked about the need to build altars to God—signposts to God's past faithfulness—as a way of moving forward with hope into an unknown future.

We talked about our role as the City within the City, like the Jews were called to be in Babylon, a people who use our resources to serve the City of Man. We hinted—I think—at something we could not fully explore last time. The fact that the city within the city—as we referred to it—is really a pointer to a city that is yet to come.

We see here in today's reading, in the last chapters of the last book of the Bible, that when God has ordered everything just as He wants it, it's a new city—a city as it ought to be. History began in a garden but it ends in a remade city. Let's ask the text 3 questions about THE NEW JERUSALEM.

1. What is it?

2. What does it mean for our lives?

3. How do we become citizens?

Let's look together, First, what is it?

It's important to notice, that the New City COMES DOWN from God. That's what John tells us, as he records Jesus' words in this Revelation. I expect most of us have heard this before—but WOW!!—what an image, right?! What a strange truth!

The world doesn't actually END as so many speculate. Nor is it replaced by a heaven up UP THERE (somewhere). Our world is neither decimated nor abandoned. Heaven is coming down TO US. This isn't just poetic imagery. This is our future I wonder…. how much thought have we put into this?—what this will be like or what it means for us now?

I don't want to downplay the wondrous imagery in today's reading. No doubt we can learn a great deal about our future Kingdom from the beautiful details in Revelation. We just don't have time to touch on everything here. But taken as a whole I think it evokes in us an overwhelming sense of beauty, alignment and wholeness that clearly points us to a place we already know something about: The Garden of Eden. Look, we see:

• The Tree of life and the river of life

• God dwelling with his people

• And nothing is cursed

• There is no more mourning or weeping or suffering.

• Everything as it OUGHT TO BE

• It's what Adam & Eve experienced before the Fall

Dylan Thomas captures so powerfully, that we despise the fading light, the drawing of the curtain. But we see here in Revelation that the best is actually yet to come.

The new Jerusalem is coming down and it's going to be, in some way, like the pre-fallen world. These are epically beautiful promises of our guaranteed future. But—if we're honest about our own lives—we still mourn and weep and suffer. How can we hold together the disparity between these promises and our present experience? This takes us to our second point.

What can it all mean?

To answer this question, I suggest we need to first consider what the text teaches us about the timing of God's promises. Which means, we may have to look at some grammar. And in this case, the verbs are the most helpful!

Look with me….

• He will wipe away every tear

• Death shall be no more

• I will give from the spring of the water of life

• I will be their God

All future tense.

• And (a little different here) he who was seated on the throne said “Behold. I am making all things new”.

This is present progressive tense—I am doing now. I am renewing now.

So while Paul tells us in Philippians 3:20 that we are citizens of God's kingdom—right now — present tense...in Revelation we find that the Kingdom is coming but has not yet fully come: so is God's New City now or not yet?

I suggest, if we take seriously what the Bible tells us, the answer is...it's both.

We can be utterly certain right now:

• That in Jesus, God's Final victory has been accomplished

• That we are utterly loved and accepted by God right now

• And that the world will end in the renewal of all things.

But the world is not yet perfected. We are not yet perfected. I am going to refer to this as the “now and not yetness” of God's Kingdom. It's an important aspect of our faith that I think can be tricky to understand and difficult to apply in our lives.

I'm sensitive that there's an element of this that may like nose bleed theology. I don't mean for this to seem like word play so let's see if we can make it practical.

If we know who we are as citizens of God's Future City, and we know God is also working NOW in our lives and in our world, we have at least three incredible resources:

• Hope in our struggles

• Meaning for our lives AND

• The Promise of ultimate victory

Let's talk about how now and not yetness affects our lives in these three areas: first, we have hope in our struggles.

Because we are citizens of God's New City now, we can face the fact that we are not yet finished products. Notice ch 21 v.5. It is God on His throne—the King—who is making all things new. That includes us and that's good news.

We haven't fully dealt with God as King, have we? We have not yet fully made him King in our hearts. We still have idols and struggles and addictions. So we are not yet finished products. We need to come to terms with the fact that we are more sinful than we dare imagine, but more loved than we could ever hope.

Repentance means going to the throne. It means bringing the truth of his love and forgiveness into contact with our struggles, and the sin in our lives. It's asking Him to be King in our hearts.

Friends, do we get down on ourselves instead of approaching the throne? Anxiety is an area of struggle for me and it often results in a lack of joy in my heart—sometimes anger. I know my anxieties are underpinned by sin and lies that I allow myself to believe—about myself and about God—but I am often not inclined to bring this before the throne. It shows my heart lacks understanding of the now and not yetness of the Kingdom.

God loves me just as I am. He does not expect a perfect record from me. He expects me to come to His throne of grace. The joy I need can only be found there and when I am before the throne, he continues his loving work of renewing my heart. Paul reassured the Philippines on this very point, telling them:

And I am sure of this, that he who began a good work in you will bring it to completion on the day of Jesus Christ. That is—when the new Kingdom is here, we will be finished products.

Do you see how this works? We can use this logic for any of the areas in which we struggle. We can be honest with ourselves and honest with God. God loves you just as you are, and too much to leave you that way. And he will finish the work he started in each of us.

So the first application of now and not yet is: go to the throne as you are. The God of grace awaits you.

Secondly: Our lives are BURSTING with significance

Some believe that Christianity is the opiate of the people, that it asks us to ignore our present moment as insignificant or even meaningless as we look to a future reward in heaven. This couldn't be farther from the teaching here in Revelation.

If the New City is coming here (and it is), All of creation must be eternal. That means, nothing was made without purpose. Nothing was designed for the fire. So what we do and create must matter—this is why God calls us co-creators

Therefore, as we discussed last time, we weep and mourn all that is not as it ought to be and fight for its remedy. Here is perhaps my favorite take on living that out, from Nicholas' Wolterstorff's book “Lament For a Son.” In reflecting on the Beatitudes, he writes:

One can understand why Jesus hails those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, why he hails the merciful, why he hails the pure in heart, why he hails the peacemakers, why he hails those who endure under persecution. These are qualities of character which belong to the life of the kingdom. But why does he hail the mourners of the world? Why cheer tears?

It must be that mourning is also a quality of character that belongs to the life of his realm. Who then are the mourners? The mourners are those who have caught a glimpse of God's new day (sound familiar?), who ache with all their being for that day's coming, and who break out into tears when confronted with its absence. They are the ones who realize that in God's realm there is no one hungry and who ache whenever they see someone one starving. They are the ones who realize that in God's realm there is no one falsely accused and who ache whenever they see someone imprisoned unjustly. They are the ones who realize that in God's realm there is no one who fails to see God and who ache whenever they see someone unbelieving. They are the ones who realize that in God's realm there is no one who suffers oppression and who ache whenever they see someone beat down. They are the ones who realize that in God's realm there is no one without dignity and who ache whenever they see someone treated with indignity. They are the ones who realize that in God's realm of peace there is neither death nor tears and who ache whenever they see someone crying tears over death.

The mourners are aching visionaries.

So we work to mold the world more into the shape of God's future realm, but it doesn't stop there. What we create also matters.

• Culture and art matter

• Science and technology

• Business and investing

What we create here will be renewed, perfected—not replaced or destroyed. We will dance our dance of worship in the New City, and it will finally be perfect

So we've seen that now and not yet means we can face our sins, and that how we spend our days is infinitely significant. Lastly, it means we can face our worst tribulations.

Because we hold fast to the promised Victory of the New City to Come, we can face—really anything.

Jesus' testimony in Revelation was recorded to help early Christians face violent persecution and the threat of often gruesome execution. Understanding its teaching, Christians lived boldly in faith and many martyrs went to their deaths with poise and dignity, singing praises to God—even with the flames beneath their feet—bolstered by the certainty of the Coming Kingdom.

When we hold fast to the promise of God's final victory as they did. We too can endure suffering. We can have hope in apparent hopelessness. We can have peace even in the shadow of death. And if we look hard enough, we can see as one of my favorite Hobbits did...that:

Far above…though the night-sky is still dim and pale… a white star twinkles.... And smote by its beauty, looking up out of this forsaken land, hope returns … (as) the thought pierces us that in the end the Shadow is only a small and passing thing: there is light and high beauty forever beyond its reach

Look, either The King is on his throne and our lives have meaning and purpose and will end in victory and justice or the throne is empty and nothing matters at all.

But we know that history is unfolding as it should, justice will prevail in the The City to Come and we will all drink from the Water of Life at no cost.

So, we face our sin, knowing we are justified. We face our days as co-creators and aching visionaries and we face our tribulations as victors over everything, even death. THIS is the new kind of new we need.

This week I kept thinking about the Wise Men and their Star. They were experts on stars and would have known all the knowns. This one was new. They must have been deeply thirsty for something new. Seriously, they dropped everything and just took off

Did they sense it represented hope and high beauty—something eternal? All we really know is they were thirsty enough to make the journey. Then I noticed Rev. 21:6: “To the thirsty I will give from the spring of the water of life.” And so I realized what the wise men teach us—that the only way to God's throne is to be thirsty.

Don't miss this. It's not the morally orthodox or the religiously chaste who come to worship the baby King. It's those who notice the star and thirst for the eternal All you need is need. The wise men had it. Do we?

They had little else to go by—only a star and a glimmer of hope. But we have the benefit of knowing the baby they worshiped … as a man. And in reflecting on the Man, I can't help but notice Chapter 22, v.3—“No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it.” Do you see it?

The Lamb of God is on the final throne.

So when we to come worship Him, we worship not only the baby Jesus, but the man who died on a tree—the Lamb of God. And we reflect that he climbed this tree of death to give us the Tree of Life.

We remember that on the tree, he was thirsty. Because of his Cosmic thirst, we get the river of life

We believe that at midday, the sky went dark. Because he experienced eternal darkness, we receive the eternal light

And we understand what Galatians 3 explains—that Jesus was accursed by God. He took the malediction so that we could receive the ultimate benediction: I will be your God, and you will be my people.

“It is finished”, Jesus proclaimed on the cross, with his dying breath. And Jesus says here again in Revelation - “It is done.” He had unlocked the door to the New Jerusalem

The requirements for citizenship are merely to be thirsty and to desire the presence of the King.

The Ancient of Ancients is making all things new.

So we are free to approach the throne of Grace with empty hands and without merit. And there, kneeling with the wise men, we claim this promise:

We who hope in the Lord

will renew our strength.

We will soar on wings like eagles;

We will run and not grow weary,

We will walk and not be faint.

15 On the seventh day, they got up at daybreak and marched around the city seven times in the same manner, except that on that day they circled the city seven times. 16 The seventh time around, when the priests sounded the trumpet blast, Joshua commanded the army, “Shout! For the Lord has given you the city!

20 When the trumpets sounded, the army shouted, and at the sound of the trumpet, when the men gave a loud shout, the wall collapsed; so everyone charged straight in, and they took the city. Joshua 6:15-16,20 (NIV)

I have been reflecting about how challenging it is for me to trust God's promises. If I am honest, I tend to reach for every weapon I have as a first line of offense, and use God as a fall back plan. First I work harder, think of new solutions, throw money at the issue - I reach for every tool I have. Trusting God comes hard for me.

This issue has felt relevant to me in light of Covid-19. So much is unknown. It feels like I'm a little trapped. I have the sense that I can do little very to help. I can look busy, kicking up dirt around me, but I feel helpless. I can't even protect people I love, let alone visit with them. My normal weapons are useless. I am forced to acknowledge that the control I believe I wield over the universe is illusory. I don't know that the post-pandemic world will look like.

In light of these uncomfortable realizations, I keep thinking about God's promise in Exodus 14:14 - The Lord will fight for you, you need only be still. It's a promise to God's people during the Exodus when we find the Israelites with a sea in front of them, and an army behind them. Trapped.

Being still in an emergency is anathema to me. In another translation, it reads to be “silent”. Be still, be silent. The Lord will fight for you. What can it mean?

During our parish group last week we talked about God's promises. I think we somewhat agreed that it's possible all we are sure of is that in the end God and his people prevail. We are saved by the work of Christ on the cross. I find that some of the other promises can be much more difficult to understand.

That discussion prompted me to reflect this week on what likely is not meant by this promise. I think we see it in Moses' full response to the Israelites. God is not asking for the silence or stillness of fatalistic resolution. Surely He requires our silence and stillness at times; but he also requires our willingness to fight beside him in co-creation and toward the realization of his justice and grace.

I think the stillness is meant to be inside our often anxious hearts so that our work in God's kingdom can be rooted in the firm confidence of his promised kingdom.

“Do not be afraid. Stand firm and you will see the deliverance the Lord will bring you today. The Egyptians you see today you will never see again. 14 The Lord will fight for you; you need only to be still.”

When we were children, we used to think that when we were grown up we would no longer be vulnerable. But to grow up is to accept vulnerability…To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle

I was struck during worship this week when our pastor, in challenging us to be generous during these uncertain times, spoke about the generosity of sharing our needs with one another. For me, vulnerability rarely feels generous. It reminded me of a tough period in my life.

Some years ago, a moral failure caused me to step down from leading a fellowship group. I put myself under the authority of my pastor (one of my worst fears) and we agreed that I would ask one of the other participants to lead our all men's group. I had been leading the group for about 18 months. In explaining the change of leadership, I shared everything with these friends.

Our men's group crossed an invisible barrier that night, on the other side of which, somehow, we could all be vulnerable with one another. We shared our fears and failures, open wounds and scars in a way we had not before. Decade-long friendships that now persist across time and geographical divides are evidence of how God transformed us through our shared honesty.

This week's sermon was about “Doubting Thomas”, to whom Jesus proved his Divinity through vulnerability. Jesus' scars were his calling card. And they were well earned when He opened his arms to His father's will and carried out the unthinkable assignment of death on a cross.

It leads us to a mystery. Vulnerability, sharing our wounds and scars, somehow re-orients us to one another. But more than that, it re-orients us to God. In seeing Jesus' scars, Thomas was convinced of the resurrection - God's power. I think there's even more there for us. When we see his scars we see both his love for us, and his willingness to enter into our wounds with us.

Thomas asked, but we all need to touch Jesus' wounds. And as his love for us, demonstrated by those wounds, seeps into our hearts we are able to love others in like fashion. I am convinced that appropriate vulnerability with one another does not come back empty.

If God on the Cross is God shamming a human tragedy, it turns the Passion of Christ into the Farce of Christ. The death of the Son must be real. Father Martin assured me it was. But once a dead God, always a dead God, even resurrected. The Son must have the taste of death forever in His mouth. The Trinity must be tainted by it; there must be a certain stench at the right hand of God the Father. The horror must be real. Why would God wish that upon Himself? Why not leave death to the mortals? Why make dirty what is beautiful, spoil what is perfect?

Love. That was Father Martin's answer.

• Yann Martel, Life of Pi

2 But as for me, my feet had almost slipped;

I had nearly lost my foothold.

3 For I envied the arrogant

when I saw the prosperity of the wicked.

13 Surely in vain I have kept my heart pure

and have washed my hands in innocence.

14 All day long I have been afflicted,

and every morning brings new punishments.

16 When I tried to understand all this,

it troubled me deeply

17 till I entered the sanctuary of God;

then I understood their final destiny.

25 Whom have I in heaven but you?

And earth has nothing I desire besides you.

26 My flesh and my heart may fail,

but God is the strength of my heart

and my portion forever.

28 But as for me, it is good to be near God.

I have made the Sovereign Lord my refuge;

I will tell of all your deeds.

Covid-19 can feel like the latest in a long string of divine failures, layered on top of generations of sickness, war, hunger, loneliness, graft, greed, abuse of power, racism, loneliness and suffering. And for generations, people have been angry at God - angry about how their lives are going; and if not that, angry about how the world is going.

I thought I had overcome this anger. Then my daughter arrived. And with new eyes I now grieve the world anew. I dread watching her inevitable suffering. And it forces me to realize I have largely used stoicism and fortitude to avoid confronting God on these issues - not faithfulness. I accept my suffering, but I cannot abide hers.

I think we should be angry. It's the most loving response to observing suffering and one of the most honest responses to experiencing it. But how can we keep our foothold on the very God who allows it?

Tim Keller contends that one of great challenges in making sense of the world is our proximity to it. We are too close to our problems. Truth, he says, is a cube - not a square, it's three-dimensional not two. So we must somehow gain perspective, circumnavigate, elevate. But how?

The answer, the psalmist tells us, is to take our anger into the sanctuary of God - but what did he find there? He would have heard Scripture and seen ritual sacrifice - animal blood shed on repeat to wash the iniquity his own hand washing could not clean. It somehow brought him near enough to God to lift him above his despair – something to grab onto before his foot slipped.

But God was not content to reveal himself in written word only. His incarnation is a three-dimensional revelation - Jesus Christ - who promised to destroy and rebuild the old sanctuary. Through his death and resurrection he achieved it.

In His sanctuary we find these truths. The necessity of God's death means we are more sinful than we ever dare imagine; his willingness to do so tells us we are more loved than we ever hazard to hope. His resurrection promises that restoration, not suffering will have the final word - that the pure in heart triumph, not the arrogant. This sanctuary somehow comforts us in our brokeness and fortifies us to serve our suffering world. And it also reminds us that we are the incarnation for others - God's still small voice to the afflicted and His arms opened to the outcast.

I pray that my daughter finds her refuge in his presence. I pray my own feet will not slip.

...with mouths apt to laughter, and to eating and drinking. And laugh they did, and eat, and drink, often and heartily, being fond of simple jests at all times, and of six meals a day (when they could get them). They were hospitable and delighted in parties, and in presents, which they gave away freely and eagerly accepted...Nonetheless, ease and peace had left this people still curiously tough. They were, if it came to it, difficult to daunt or to kill; and they were, perhaps, so unwearyingly fond of good things not least because they could, when put to it, do without them, and could survive rough handling by grief, foe, or weather in a way that astonished those who did not know them well... -J.R.R. Tolkien, “The Hobbit”

ver·ti·go | ˈvərdəɡō |

noun, Pathology.

a dizzying sensation of tilting within stable surroundings or of being in tilting or spinning surroundings

In a recent Veritas Forum, David Brooks reflected on the Spanish Flu of 1918 as a comparison to our particular moment. He observed that the historical blight that killed 675,000 Americans left almost no cultural imprint - no books or movies and very little discussion or reflection - probably “because people were ashamed of how they behaved...” Brooks further opined that its net cultural effect, though perhaps not widely discussed, was a pervasive sense of meaninglessness.

Vertigo. Emotional dislocation. Beyond certainty.

These were among the heavy laden terms panelists used to describe our collective experience of the flu pandemic of 2020. They expressed concerns regarding the likely damage to our economy writ large - that is, our cultural, economic and social exchanges - and about the loss of our culture, our collective song. I was reminded of Israel's lament from exile, after the Babylonian conquest threatened the continuity of its own rich culture.

How can we sing the songs of the Lord while in a foreign land?

Then a Veritas panelist asked: “Was normal that great?”

And suddenly a great outflow of hope was expressed that unlike the pervasive sense of meaninglessness that followed the Spanish flu, the net result of Covid-19 could be unification and redirection toward pursuit of meaning, even faith.

The stakes feel extraordinarily high. What bridges the gap between hope and hopelessness; faith and faithlessness; silence and song?

In my reflection, something struck me about the definition of vertigo. Though the sensation is dizziness, weak knees and nausea - rough handling by grief, foe and weather; the reality is stability, that the good things - eating, drinking, laughter, gifts - have not been lost. Though we are off kilter, God's eternal promises are no less true. We, the Church, know that “history is still unfolding as it should” and “everything sad [is] going to come untrue.”

God's people may experience vertigo and dislocation but we are never beyond certainty.

Saints throughout history have clung to this truth and rallied in the darkest of times. The church has been at her best under duress. We have died serving the sick, added to our membership in conditions of greatest persecution, come together in grief and hardship and from little made much. The existential experience of grace in the face of all manner of evil is rooted in the deepest realities of the Biblical God.

As we celebrate the season of Lent in anticipation of Good Friday and Easter, we would do well to imagine the ultimate moment of Christian emotional dislocation and vertigo as we see our King executed outside the city like a common criminal. The hopes and dreams of the faith community crushed - overwhelming feelings of tilting or spinning. Ultimate meaninglessness knocking on the door.

The losses we are experiencing are real and should never be diminished. We have absorbed tangible losses, fractured community, emotional dislocation, severe vertigo. As my pastor observed in a recent sermon, we should be grieved and outraged at these forms of evil and pain and at death itself. But he also spoke of hope. Was normal that good?

Then it happens. Easter comes. Resurrection. A new song of the Lord.

Our certainty is that God always bridges the gap. Under the reign of this bruised King, we cling to the promises that mourning will be turned into dancing, grief will be turned into joy, the meek will inherit the earth and God will raise his own who have fallen asleep. The saints continue to march because even in our exile, He calls us to join him in this work:

...seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which I have carried you into exile. Pray to the LORD for it, because if it prospers, you too will prosper.

But how do we do this in our current exile of isolation? I think God will open those doors if we seek Him but a few things come to mind. We should listen to those who are grieving, sit next to them on their mourning benches and point one another to the hope and truth of Christ's redemptive and restorative work, to the house on the rock.

Tolkien only hints at the source of hobbits' fortitude, suggesting they drink so deeply of God's goodness that they remain sated through periods of rough handling by grief, foe, or weather. I pray that our experience of God's goodness would be as rich and satisfying and that we would trust to hope that the song of the Lord will again pierce the silence.

Let's sing to Him until we sense we're singing with Him - for each other, for our friends, for our city and for our world - and maintain the march of the saints toward the ultimate resurrection.

It is a quotidian mystery that dailiness can lead to such despair and yet also be at the core of our salvation. . . . We want life to have meaning, we want fulfillment, healing and even ecstasy, but the human paradox is that we find these things by starting where we are. . . . We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places. -Kathleen Norris

As “Bang Bang” by Dizzy Gillespie flooded our Brooklyn apartment last night, my wife and I were dancing in the dining room, our 3-month old baby girl in our arms. As it turns out, the baby LOVES Dizzy (which makes me unrealistically hopeful she and I will one day bond over music). If this sounds romantic or cute, rest assured, I knew we were mere moments from an evening meltdown, either hers or ours (or both).

But it's true we often dance during this witching hour of sorts, stretching to get to PJs, a big nighttime bottle, a book, kisses, and bed. We pray with the baby, then pray for the baby, that she sleeps long enough for us to get some rest as well.

Our baby came on Christmas last year and while she was the best gift for which we would ever have dared ask, her arrival changed everything.

For several weeks, she slept a lot. I mean a lot. And when she wasn't sleeping she was extremely mellow. We'd heard all the stories that babies meant sleepless nights, but in our naiveté we had delusions that our experience would be different.

We were quickly disabused of our blissful ignorance through a process that was less than blissful. Soon the three of us were up for hours on end at night, for round the clock feedings punctuated by gas that kept her crying. It wasn't long before we decided it was in everyone's best interest to begin sleep training.

As a new parent, I have learned that sleep training can go hand in hand with “scheduling” to solve not only the werewolf problem, but also add structure and rhythm to the daylight hours.

This has reminded me that the importance of schedules, structures and rhythms is not limited to infants, but also has weighty, often unseen effects on adults and families, even on whole communities. As Tish Harrison Warren points out:

Most of our days, and therefore most of our lives, are driven by habit and routine. Our way of being-in-the-world works its way into us through ritual and repetition...We don't wake up daily and form a way of being-in-the-world from scratch, and we don't think our way through every action of our day. We move in patterns that we have set over time, day by day. These habits and practices shape our loves, our desires, and ultimately who we are and what we worship.

In a very real sense, our habits and routines are a form of liturgy, or as Warren calls them, “thick practices”. Liturgy positions us in proper postures before God--praise, confession, silence, communion, repeat -- in the hopes that these practices will carry into our lives and become reflexive. Thick practices are routines that we may not realize have become liturgies. As Warren completes the above:

...the question is not whether we have a liturgy. The question is, “What kind of people is our liturgy forming us to be?

We are practicing liturgies ceaselessly. They are simultaneously becoming reflexive and shaping our reflexes, powerfully influencing who we love and what we worship. These liturgies fill our days. And, as appointed by God, days fill up seasons. There are rhythms to both.

We are collectively in a strange season now. Our normal rhythms have been thrown into chaos; and perhaps worst of all, access to our communities, families and support systems is diminished. It is a somber time with great uncertainty ranging from financial to medical to economical to political to sociological, and everything in between. In the midst of these extraordinary times, still we must live our ordinary days.

One could reasonably receive Warren's message as a prompt that we must be more deliberate in the daily routines that both form and reveal our loves. This would be a fine takeaway and would also likely offer many benefits. By all means, I hope we honor God with thick practices that shape us more and more into the people of God -- directing our loves and worship to God -- and filling us with longings for His beauty and graces. This season may give some of us unique opportunities to re-order our days in the hopes of properly ordering our loves.

I am loath to add burdens in a season already wrought with grief, anxiety and emotional fatigue. But I don't think that's what we're called to here. The call may not be to add yet more practices, but to see the ones we already have as transcendent.

Warren is serving as a herald who directs us to the God of the Ordinary. She is shining a light on the One who “moved into our neighborhood” to seek and to save those burdened with grief, anxiety and emotional fatigue. She is calling our attention to something too little considered in the miracle of incarnation. In his life as a human, Jesus lived in the ordinary. He woke up in the morning and had to gather his bearings. He got hungry, misplaced things, sometimes had bad breath and knew the feelings of fatigue and grief.

We know ordinary moments are sacred because the Divine has animated them. Therefore, we can live with longing for and wonder at the beauty and grace of moments, small and large, in this time and place where we spend our lives. THIS time and place. “We must look for blessings to come from unlikely, everyday places”

Warren gives us some examples that have revealed God's truth in her life...

• Making our beds as an act of co-creation

• Drinking tea as a reminder of God's sanctuary

• Phone calls or texts with a friend as a revelation of the beauty of community

• Waking up as a reminder of being loved by God before we have done anything at all that day. The Lord says in that moment, “Good morning.” Opening your eyes is revealed as a liturgical act of love and worship!

So maybe during this difficult season we can focus less on re-inventing our routines and more on finding God in them, remembering that God Himself took on the ordinary—including the sad, the repetitive and the dull. Because of that we can surely find Him in those things. And we are also assured that life's seasons ultimately end in the extraordinary -- a feast, where “...we arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” We will be home and all will be restored.