Category: General

Serving Love

Serving Love

Jesus and his friends were taking a shortcut through a wheat field one Saturday, and as they walked they pulled some of the ripe grain off the stalks to munch on.

We wouldn’t think twice about it – unless we think it was stealing, since they didn’t own that particular field and hadn’t planted that wheat (which should tell us something about our values).

But it wasn’t stealing that concerned the religious leaders who called them out – it was working on the Sabbath.

The Sabbath. Honoring the Sabbath is right up there towards the top of the Ten Commandments. This wasn’t just a technicality; it’s a central piece of what it meant for a Jew to be faithful.

But Jesus didn’t see it that way.

“The Sabbath was made for people, not people for the Sabbath.”[i]

I always wondered what that meant (though I wasn’t sure how relevant it was, since no one I knew actually “kept the Sabbath”).

What does it mean to be “made for”? One way of putting that would be, “The Sabbath was made to serve people, not people to serve the Sabbath.”

But still, how does (did) the Sabbath serve people? We can try to break that down (rest; time for family; time to worship, to focus on God), but I think Jesus is applying a larger principle to the Sabbath. That principle is about the law, all of it – the law was made for people, not people for the law. So how is the law supposed to serve us?

When he was asked about the greatest commandment, Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”[ii]

It’s that last sentence that tells us what it’s all about – relationships. The law serves people by helping us have loving relationships with God and each other.

And when the law hinders rather than promotes loving relationships, it is no longer serving us, we are serving it.

It is love that fulfills the purpose of the law. It is love that sees when the principles of a loving relationship the law is based on are not being served by following it. It is love that covers a multitude of sins. And it is God’s love we are called to imitate – to be perfect in as he is perfect.

As surely as the finger of God wrote the Ten Commandments – the very foundation of the law, the finger of Jesus overwrote them with the law of love in the dirt beside a woman caught in adultery.

Jesus didn’t limit himself to the law as it had been handed down, and I have a hard time believing he intended us to limit ourselves (his body) to his words as they have been handed down. He gave us the Spirit to guide us into “greater things” than what he did. He taught us how to dance with Scripture, not to serve it. It is living, and living means growing. Nothing that’s alive stays the same.

And yet we define the limits of the Spirit’s work by the law. We define the limits of what God will do by what is recorded in Scripture. We say scripture doesn’t change. And while that may be true in some sense of the words we’ve been given, that’s not how Jesus used Scripture. He overwrote the words with deeper meaning. (“You have heard it said…but I say.”[iii]) He pushed for a standard both higher and more rooted in the realities of life and relationships.

It’s easier to follow clear rules. It’s much harder to discern loving well. We know how far we are from loving, and it’s much safer to follow straightforward guidelines that always apply in every circumstance.

Serving the law of love means knowing you’re going to mess up, knowing you’re going to get it wrong. And still serving love anyway. It takes trusting grace, and trusting grace can feel like living without a net. It can take the breath out of you.

The question confronts us every day – will we serve love, or something else? Will we lean out into the wind of the Spirit of love, or stay safely back from the edge?

 

[i] Mark 2:27

[ii] Matthew 22:27-40

[iii] Matthew 5

An Open Door 99 Floors Up

An Open Door 99 Floors Up

It was a first date. We’d never met, but I recognized him from his picture as he waited for me across the street from the L station. It was early December, before sunset, and we were meeting downtown to look at Christmas lights after he finished his shift.

The streets were crowded with shoppers, the Christmas decorations sparkled and twinkled, and we were hitting it off. I liked his deep, resonant voice and we talked in an easy rhythm. He was tall, black Irish with broad shoulders, and there was a spark in his eye I liked.

When he offered to show me the skyscraper where he worked as a building engineer, I was game.

I love these buildings that hold up the sky — I always have. When I walk the city canyons at their feet, they make me breathe deep and feel tall (all 5’2″ of me). I’ll probably never get over walking around like a tourist downtown with my head turned to the sky.

We got in one elevator to take us up to the building management office, and after he picked up some keys, another took us higher.

The 99th floor was filled with machinery bigger than my apartment — all the guts of the building, rumbling away. As we walked around the huge space, he guided me to an ordinary door, turned the key in its lock, and opened a door to the glory of the city at dusk.

The sky was pink and dark purple, and the city glittered with lights. As I leaned out into the view, I could feel a surprisingly warm breeze embrace me. There was nothing between me and the city and sky but the wind.

It was a door to nowhere that opened into maybe the biggest view I’d ever seen. In the end, there were four of them, one on each outer wall of the building, each of them with a completely different but equally spectacular view.

I didn’t have to go up those elevators with him on our first date, and I surely didn’t have to lean out each of those doors. There was obvious risk. But I did go up, and I did lean out, and I saw things I’d never seen before, and I saw familiar things from an entirely new perspective. I felt a wind that I’ll never feel again – the warm wind that embraces the highest floors of that building.

I’ll never forget what it felt like to stand in an open door 99 floors up with nothing between me and the world but the wind.

I’ll never forget what it felt like to lean out into the risk and the beauty. To breathe it all in and feel my world expand to fill it. To hold the impossible fullness of it all.

We talked for over eight hours of walking and eating and more walking that night, but I’m not sure I ever really stopped leaning out into that wind.

Build a Bigger Table

Build a Bigger Table

“To be open to the world is a dangerous way to live.It threatens us with learning things we’ve always been taught to reject.

What we don’t know, we are inclined to fear.

Embalmed in sameness, we lose opportunity to grow into what life means to become…

Hospitality of the heart is what makes the world a tender and lovely place to be.”

-Joan Chittister

Since I’ve moved into the city, I’ve come to appreciate ride shares. Sometimes paying for an Uber or Lyft is both safer than the train late at night, and better than trying to find a parking spot in my neighborhood.

Tonight was just such a night, and my Lyft driver and I started to talking about Chicago and how long we’ve called it home. A refugee from Iraq, he’s only been here two weeks. He told me that back in Iraq, the military police had thrown him in jail when he’d done nothing wrong, until the American soldiers came and freed him. He received refugee status, and an American bureaucrat told him he should get out of Iraq in the meantime. He went to Jordan and waited years to get visas for his family – eight younger brothers and their parents. Now they are here, together.

I told him welcome, that I was glad he was here, and that most all of us in America had gotten here as refugees of some sort originally. He reminded me of how much I have to be grateful for, and I’m happy he can now share in most of those blessings.

Hospitality is a theme that has threaded my journey in sometimes surprising ways. It comes in so many forms – far more than throwing a good party (though that is a form I especially love!).

But maybe true hospitality begins with simple openness to an “other.” With staying with a conversation through language disconnects. With being willing to be uncomfortable, to be stretched and challenged.

An ethic of hospitality has many applications for me, but one of them is very simple:

“When you have more than you need, build a bigger table, not a higher fence.”

A table big enough for the alien and stranger, the refugee, and outcasts of every stripe.

This is something that goes much deeper than politics, though as we see in this election cycle, it certainly has political implications.

And it is, as Sister Joan Chittister has said, “a dangerous way to live.” You may discover you were wrong about things you never thought to question, and that knowledge cannot be undone.

Hospitality will, sooner or later, undo you. But out of what has come undone, it will make a bigger table.

 

Saving Up

Saving Up

Tonight it hit me squarely for the first time – how many years have I spent saving my living up for later?

I was raised in a wonderfully loving and deeply conservative family and community. There are tensions in that combination that can be hard to hold together, but when it’s all you know, you don’t notice them. They taught me to hold on to what’s good, but I also learned to avoid what might be risky. The good things had to be protected from any possible taint. It was a “purity culture” that went well beyond sex. Every choice – even among things that weren’t “bad” – had ramifications for the rest of my life (and eternity), so I had to avoid anything that might compromise my future marriage, vocation, calling, or ministry. If I spent a choice on a date, or piercing my ears, or even my college and major, it might limit the good God could use me to do. So I saved up. I made safe choices.

I began choosing to stop that savings plan in a big way a few years ago, somewhere in the fallout of turning 40. Half my life (if I’m lucky) is gone, and I wanted – needed – something to change. I know it sounds melodramatic, but I’ve never found other words to express the reality I was experiencing: I was slowly dying. Getting smaller. Fading out. There was just…less of me.

And I didn’t – wouldn’t – believe that was all God had for me in this life. I began to think maybe he wasn’t actually waiting for my faith to mature enough, or for “his perfect timing.” Maybe, while I was “waiting on him” as faithfully as I knew how, trying my best not to make a step that might endanger his will for my life, maybe God wasn’t waiting at all.

Maybe God was doing his thing in the world – giving love, creating beauty, and making peace, as my friend Frank Schaeffer would say – and what I needed to do was get out there and find his stuff and dig into all the messy goodness of it.

It didn’t happen overnight – not quite – but it did happen fast enough to leave the heads of a lot of people spinning. It left my head spinning (ten first dates in three weeks can do that!). But every new place I found myself turned out to be grounded in years of lessons gleaned, painful pruning, and hard-won trust. In the unfamiliar I kept seeing Jesus. I had never felt more disoriented in my life, and at the same time, I had never felt more grounded, more connected with who I was made to be.

Sometimes life gives us choices that change everything. They may be as small as picking up a book or choosing to accept that invitation to tag along with a friend to dinner and meet new people, or as big as walking away from a church and community of people you’ve sunk roots in with.

I’ve spent the past few years making those choices without knowing where they might take me. The journey is far from over, but they’ve already taken me to some amazing places and alongside some amazing people who’ve changed me. They’ve cracked my world open, and colors I never imagined have flooded in. Bracing winds and warming sunlight have both found deep places in my heart, and I’ve felt those places bloom open in response.

I plowed through the fear, and its echoes are fading. I’ve preached. I’ve danced. I’ve dated. I’ve leaned out an open door 99 floors up with nothing between me and the world but the wind.

I’ve stopped saving up my living and have found that as I spend it, there always seems to be more than I started with – more than I even knew was possible.

I know there are some who may read this and feel the resonance, like the tone of a bell.

Others may read and think I’m deceived or deluded. That’s okay. You could be right. I might be missing the Kingdom of God altogether. But according to Jesus, the Kingdom of God is going to look at least a bit absurd and messy with grace to us, full of all sorts of questionable characters. I’ll be grateful if I find myself among them, and in the meantime, I intend to love indiscriminately, run towards every glimpse of beauty, and seek shalom with everything in me.

And I’m going to do my best to exhaust those stockpiles of living I’ve been saving up.

-JEO