A Good Friday Meditation

So, here we are. Good Friday. Honestly, this is a day I’m no fan of Christianity.

First, I find that little is more annoying about this season than bougie white boy preachers in thousand-dollar sneakers talking about Jesus and “revolutionary love.” Church is full of folks who are no friends of the revolution. “Revolutionary?” They ain’t even interested in abolishing prisons or reducing militarized police budgets, much less “revolution.” Their message isn’t revolutionary. It’s marketing.  

Second, Rome shows you what it does to revolutionaries: it crucifies them. “Crucifixion wasn’t just a form of execution; it was advertising,” says Amy-Jill Levine. A cross was a billboard. Crucifixions were staged near roads, so passersby could see clearly who was in charge and what happens to “revolutionaries.” As Max Weber put it: the state has a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Crucifixion displays the state’s monopoly of violence literally: by splaying human limbs.

According to Josephus, after the Jewish revolt in Jerusalem in 70 CE, soldiers crucified so many people that they ran out of wood. They cut down every tree for miles to line the road with crosses, like flags. Today if you visit the Garden of Gethsemane where Jesus prayed to “let this cup pass from me,” when the guide says, “Some of these trees are so old that Jesus could have prayed under one of them,” you know it’s just stuff they tell tourists. The orchard where Jesus prayed was razed so Rome could have wood on which to nail revolutionaries.

Third, white Protestant support for torture, measured in 2008, was upwards of sixty percent. Six in ten are just fine with torturing folks. Waterboarding. Whipping. Stripping people naked and humiliating them. All the stuff that happened to Jesus? They’d give the green light for it to happen to any Middle Eastern guy with long hair and a beard.

While I’m talking statistics and cutting trees, only 40% of white Protestants believe in human-made climate change. I’m not just picking on Evangelicals, among whom that statistic is only 28%. I’m talking about mainstream “liberal” Protestants. When Roman soldiers cut down all the trees to make crosses, most church folks would be cheering them on in the name of law, order, and domination of the natural world.

So today, when Christians cry crocodile tears while singing how they would “cling to the old rugged cross,” it leaves me feeling a bit cynical. They may be having a genuine spiritual experience when they close their eyes, raise their hands, and sway gently to a Christian rock anthem, but it bears no relevance to Golgotha or the places Jesus is being crucified right now. It rubs me the wrong way when religious people pretend to care about the most famous victim of state violence ever, but don’t give give two figs for Patrick Lyoya or Sandra Bland. When they would cling to crosses, but disparage tree-huggers.

On days like today, I resonate much more with those who have rejected religion altogether, especially if it’s because they could not reconcile the prepackaged answers with today’s most salient questions: Why do bad things happen to good people? Why does God allow the state to have this monopoly on violence? How did the spiritual power of Jesus of Nazareth get hijacked so thoroughly by Christendom? Where is the “Good News” in the destruction of this world and the oppressed people who love it?  

“Good” Friday. The adjective leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The revolutionary I love and follow is still being executed by the state, which has yet to repent of its role in manufacturing suffering. The state, in collusion with the church, will resurrect in his place an agent of white settler colonialism, one who blesses Rome and the priesthood, who tells battered spouses to stay with their abusers in the name of long-suffering love, who persecutes queer kids and tells gay Christians to remain celibate, that it’s “their cross to bear,” an agent who sanctions bullying, who clear cuts forests and pumps oil from the ground to build sprawling highways so that Christians can park their cars at suburban churches on Easter morning and sing praises to an authoritarian king.

Honestly, the only thing that keeps me Christian is that my faith says, “it is God on that cross.” The only thing that keeps me Christian is that I keep seeing Jesus as an actual revolutionary who cares about the suffering of people at the hands of state power, a Jesus turning over the money tables on Wall Street. Jesus keeps showing up on the steps of churches telling preachers that they are whitewashed tombs whose words are full of death and decay. Jesus keeps standing up for queer kids and defending people whose wombs are treated like the property of the state or their husbands. Jesus keeps calling for actual prisoners in real prisons to be set free, and for the people with clubs and swords to put them away because they only lead to self-destruction. Jesus keeps telling people to observe that the birds and flowers—and humans—don’t have to earn a place in God’s economy, that their existence and life is enough to bring glory to God. The powers that be keep trying to silence God’s anointed and he, she, they keep showing up with all their pronouns and ethnicities and genders and refusing to be quiet or disappear from public view.

When I ask, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” she—God in human flesh—looks me squarely in the eye, shows me the wounds in her hands and side and answers, as she always does, with a question: “Are you asking me?” Then she gestures at the world as if to invite me to take up a cross and follow.

Where else can I go? She has the words of life.

So

The Universe, by Hildegard of Bingen, from WikiArt

For God so loved the cosmos;
loved the human world and the more-than-human world,
loved the quarks and the nebulae and
the vast stretches of empty space
between the tiniest particles and between the largest galaxies;
loved tree frogs and beetles,
mushrooms and songbirds,
loved you and me and the space between us;
that she poured her divine self out
and looked out on the world through human eyes in human sockets,
and felt the fleshy vulnerability of her creatures.

With the full, enthusiastic consent of Mary,
(and with no need of a man),
she nurtured in the water of a womb
a child;
and gave her beloved child to us,
and named this child “God saves,”
who was also her Very Truest Self;
because God has always been a giver
a lover
and prone to prodigal excess.

Then her Very Truest Self,
lived as one of us,
loved and taught others to love
(as She has always been doing, as She is still doing)
with the same kind of love that pours out
that sees
that inhabits
in such a way that Justice and Peace would become synonyms,
that they would hold hands;
in such a way that forgiveness would set free instead of perpetuate harm,
in such a way that prisons would be abolished,
(as She has always been doing, as She is still doing)
and the poor would be filled with good things
and the powerful would be brought low,
and the low would be lifted up,
because the abundance of the world is and has always been enough.

But the human world loved its dismal sense of deserving
more than light.
It loved its warring madness,
it loved dominating and colonizing and subjugating;
it loved shaming and putting people in their place,
and measuring out who deserves what,
and taking land and lives,
and crucifying anyone who got in its way.
It loved being important and big and worshiped.
It loved defining the world according to itself,
setting up whiteness as a god
and nation as an idol
who demanded child and elder sacrifice
in exchange for guns and gold.
It loved marketshare and mindshare.
It loved creating scarcity out of abundance,
burning oil to create money,
so that it could have more
by making others have less,
so that it could play games
with the life of the planet,
so that it could bleed the world dry
and strip mine the hills
to open a new strip mall.

It was so crafty at manufacturing suffering,
that after it killed Her child,
it mimicked her grief
and mocked her love
and turned the religion of Her Very Truest Self
into another dominance game
another theology of deserving.
It put crosses on steeples
on every street corner,
as a reminder that anyone who did not follow would be crucified.
It created disciples of hate to wound others in the name of Jesus.
It taught people that the world that God so loved
was disposable
and to pray to God about what comes after death
so that by a counterfeit resurrection
many would be led astray
and teach others to do the same.
And, feigning outrage at the death of Her child,
the One it murdered,
it would continue to burn heretics at the stake
along with witches, and queer people, and scientists, and lovers, and artists
and any saint who dared dream of a better world
for this world
instead of the next.
And all the while,
it would tell its followers:
“Do to them before they do to you.”

Any who dared whisper
“God is love”
would be reminded
of love’s cruelty,
of tough love,
of loving at or loving on,
a love that alters where it finds alteration,
of the Great Chain of Being and the Right of Kings
and that a Man’s Home Is His Castle.

This is why John had to tell us
that She loves differently:
“So loved.”
Her love looks like a person,
and that person looks like you,
and you are made in the divine image of love.

Standing on Mount Nebo,
looking out over the promised land,
filled with burning forests and dead songbirds,
the corpses of insects and frogs who will never again sing at night,
paved roads full of automobiles with nowhere to go that isn’t just like the place they left,
we searching ones look for the breath of the Holy Spirit,
a purifying wind,
to blow away the polluted air,
to push the carbon dioxide back into the ground,
a wind that will animate the dry bones
and desiccated exoskeletons,
to knit sinew to bone
and muscle to sinew
and to cover all with flesh and feather and tentacle and leaf,
the fleshy vulnerability of all of her creatures,
because all of creation
ALL of it
every last bit of it
has been groaning for ages waiting for humanity to wake up
and be born again
to see with new eyes in new sockets,
to recover their original blessing,
their awe and curiosity;
their gratitude and reverence.

She is still looking
like a shepherd on the hills,
still looking
for those who so love the world
just so.

“Except Through Me”

“No one comes to the Father except through me” is one of the most abused verses in the Bible. A dialogue intended to comfort grieving disciples gets weaponized for exclusion and missionary colonialism.We need to read it in context: In John 14,

Jesus has just told his disciples that he’s about to leave them, and they are heartbroken and confused. Thomas blurts out, “What do you mean we know the way to where you are going? We don’t even know where you are going!” (14:5)

Jesus answers, “You know me, bro, and I AM the way.” He’s telling them this isn’t some gnostic secret. You don’t have to solve a mystery. You don’t have to make this harder than it is. You know me, so you know the way, and, most importantly, **we’ll be together again** (hence, “no one comes to the Father except through me.” Don’t worry about losing me; I’m your path, your way.)

Two Paths Diverged… by Ché Lydia Xyang. From Wikimedia Commons.

It’s important to linger here over the FIRST thing Jesus says in response to Thomas’s question. Thomas doesn’t know that he *already* knows the way. He thinks there’s something special he needs to do, some secret map. Jesus says “You already have the map: it’s me.”

Which opens the door for us to wonder: how many people know without knowing that they know? (Throughout John’s gospel, this is a theme—people respond to JC based on the orientation of their hearts.) Jesus sounds very Buddhist here: You already have what you need.

Listen: the disciples are afraid they will lose Jesus. He is telling them that they will be together. They won’t be *missing* Jesus when they get to the place they are going, because they will be traveling through The Way the whole time.

(Also: John’s community is heartbroken over losing him. These words are for them, too. John’s community thought he would live until Christ’s return (see 21:23). When he dies, they feel abandoned. You can hear their grief in Mary and Martha’s words to Jesus: “If you had been here, our brother would not have died!” (11:32))

Jesus then adds the infamous, “nobody comes to the Father without me,” which, again, is intended to be reassuring to the disciples: “I’ll be with you the whole way.” But it’s also in a context: “If you’ve *really* known me, you’ve already known the Father.” (Which also implies it is also possible to know Jesus without *really* knowing him—a fact especially applicable to religious leaders, which I will say more about below.)

He also says, “From now on, you do know the Father and have seen him.” Phillip is incredulous: “Okay, fine, show us the Father and we’ll be satisfied.” Again, he’s expecting that there’s something more he needs to know or do.

And JC slaps his forehead and says “Seriously? I’ve been with you all this time and you don’t see God?” This is the closest he comes to the exasperated Jesus we see in Mark, who says, “How much longer do I have to deal with you imbeciles?” (my paraphrase) So, far from being an exclusivist claim, “No one comes to the Father except through me” is supposed to be a reassuring claim that the disciples are on the right path, that they already know what they need to know, and that JC’s unity with the Father can & will be theirs.

And if you look at JC’s encounters with various folks in John, you see that the people who *really* know Jesus respond to God authentically and immediately: the man born blind, the woman at the well, etc. The man born blind says, “I don’t know much else, but I can see now” (Jn 9:25).

Meanwhile, religious leaders, who are obsessed with being right, are too hindered (“blinded,” in the language of the story) by their own religious exclusivism to admit room for an unmediated encounter with the divine. They can’t see God’s activity in front of their noses, much like today’s exclusivist Christians.

Jesus’s words do not slam the door on other faiths; they blast it wide open: People can know the way without knowing they know the way. “I have sheep who don’t belong to this fold” (10:16). Also, religious people can think they know and be wrong. As he says to the religious leaders: “Your father is the devil.” (8:44)

As a pastor, I recognize the strongest warnings of the gospel are to me: Do not presume to restrict God’s saving and healing activity. As Jesus says, “My sheep know my voice” (10:14). In John, the people working against healing and saving are religious leaders; don’t be like that.

(Caveat: you can use “hidden Christ” language to be a theological imperialist, claiming people of other faiths are simply “secret Christians.” I take JC’s language to be more expansive than that: The Way isn’t subject to human gatekeepers. The Word is loose in the world.)

So if words of Jesus meant for comfort have been weaponized to cause anxiety and exclusion, be suspicious of the religious leaders who wield them that way. Read the whole dialogue. John is dealing with grief & heartbreak. He is not slamming the door on presumed “outsiders.”

The Christmas Mistake

People make a frequent mistake about Christianity, and it’s most often perpetuated by Christians themselves. It’s this idea that the notion of God is self-evident, and that we somehow deduce the divinity of Christ because he checks off the boxes on some pre-determined set of prophecies and characteristics. Works miracles? Check. Born in Bethlehem? Check. Obviously, you *should* believe once we’ve *proved* it to you.

This is baloney.

The biblical authors were not hanging around to see who matched all the checkboxes and who they could declare “The Chosen One.” What happened was that people with a set of religious and political expectations met this character named Jesus, and he stunned them with the way he loved people and moved through the world. And they realized, or rather it was revealed to them, that the character of God *must* be like this dude, or the whole concept of God and religion (among other things) is trash.

(They were *not* completely unique in this experience — there was already plenty of precedent in Jewish tradition that was critical of religion and practice.)

So when I meet folks who believe that the whole concept of God and religion is trash, or who have been convinced that Jesus is made up, my perspective is that *they* *actually* *get* *it* *better* *than* *most* *Christians*. That God is already present and God’s kingdom already active is hardly a self-evident truth. It is not obvious that all the struggle we experience, both as individuals and society, is the labor pain of something new being born in our midst, and when you learn these truths they come upon you not as an insight you’ve worked for and earned, something you’ve gritted your teeth to believe in, but something revealed to you, hidden from the beginning of time.

The forces of domination and oppression in this world—which includes many forms and instances of Christianity—reject this revelation of the character and personality of God, and their goal is to distract, delay, deny, or destroy. (But that’s the Good Friday story.)

This Christmas story is about the incarnation and the image of God. We tell it as if it is frozen, like a snapshot in time. But it is an ongoing revelation, echoed in the birth of every child in the midst of human struggle and in camps that cage refugees, an unfolding that tells us as much about who and what God is *not* as about who and what God is. The Ground of Being, God, our Source and Mother and Father, the Great Mystery which defies definition — has a character, a “personality,” and it has broken through to us in the life of Jesus.

That, from this preacher’s perspective, is the story of Christmas.

(Originally posted on Facebook, December 2019).

Violence and Nonviolence

How quickly Christians forget Holy Week!

“They were trying to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, who thought he was a prophet.” (Matthew 21:46).

They
Feared
The
Crowds.

Do you remember Jesus’ words to the Temple Police?

“Have you come with swords and clubs to arrest me, like a thief? Day after day, I sat in the temple teaching, but you didn’t arrest me.” (Matthew 26:55)

So this is for Christians who moralize about violent protest, who invoke Jesus in order to shame freedom fighters:

It wasn’t fear of nonviolence that kept the Temple Police from arresting Jesus for a whole week.

The only reason they nabbed our man was that, after several days of “disturbing the peace,” he went out of the city to wait for them, where no one would be hurt in a violent uprising, and gave himself up. And they still came out to arrest him with swords and clubs, dressed in riot gear!

So while Jesus deplored the use of violence, he definitely used the authorities’ fear of mob violence to his ever-loving advantage. If he hadn’t, they would have killed him ON PALM SUNDAY.

Nonviolence only has the potential to change things if violence is a possible option. That’s why we call it “non-violence” instead of “helplessness.” Earthly power understands nothing but violent power.

We also have to distinguish between “violence,” which is directed toward human bodies, and “property destruction.” Jesus apparently had no problem flipping tables and destroying merchants’ property in the Temple. He considered property destruction and trade disruption more acceptable that the economic exploitation of the poor. Have no doubt that the Roman authorities would be sympathetic to the statement, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Had they not “feared the crowds,” they would have killed him on the spot.

As he’s being led to his death, Jesus warns the women of Jerusalem about what will happen in a violent uprising: “If they do these things when the tree is green, what will happen when it is dry?” (Luke 23:31)

Jesus was the green way—he was the nonviolent path. And they were still killing him. No, Jesus did not “condone violence.” He recognized its inability to directly cause change. But never for a minute pretend that he didn’t recognize its strategic value in his own ministry in his last week. And in his final warning you need to hear, not a blanket condemnation of violent uprising, but his pessimism about earthly power—about US—ever understanding what it is losing when it rejects the green way.

His pessimism is directed toward those with power, and he speaks this heartbreaking truth to oppressed women and their children—the most vulnerable. Will we who reject kneeling at ball games and the simple assertion that “Black Lives Matter” understand violent protest? Probably not. We crucify prophets EITHER WAY.

If you’re going to moralize about the value of nonviolent protest, please understand what role you are playing in the Holy Week drama. You are not the oppressed women Jesus is speaking to. Do you support the Romans? The Temple Police? Do you even understand when a green way is being offered to you?

Because unless you are fighting for the rights of the most vulnerable, you sure as hell ain’t on the side of Jesus.

Today is only Pentecost. Have we already forgotten Holy Week?

Summary: Critical and Devotional Reading

 

We’ve worked through Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, and followed it up with Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. These were my objectives during the Lenten devotionals and those that followed:

• To show that critical reading and devotional reading can go hand-in-hand. Each begins with a different question. Critical reading asks “What did the original author mean?” Devotional reading asks “What does this text mean to me?” When we come to some of Jesus’s most foundational sayings, I think we need to ask both kinds of questions.
   
• To deepen understanding about the ekklesia. Conventional popular thinking argues, “Jesus never meant to create the church.” That would be a surprise to Matthew and Luke! Matthew’s Jesus clearly intends to create a community of prophets. The Sermon on the Mount is his manifesto for how the church should be “the light of the world.” Luke’s Jesus seems pretty confident that the Holy Spirit will do the job. Both versions of Jesus have no use for personal, private spirituality that doesn’t change the world. He believes our inner light should manifest in society.
   
• To show how different biblical authors interpreted Jesus differently. Both Matthew and Luke are working from the same set of Jesus sayings, but come to different conclusions about how to understand them. What was true in biblical times is true today: we need different theological perspectives to reveal complex truth.

More than one thing can be true at a time! This is part of why, in my preaching and teaching, I try to give people a buffet of theological options. Christian history is deep and diverse, and what works for some simply will not work for others.

I’m going to turn now in a different direction: doing a critical and devotional comparison of the Bible and the Bhagavad Gita. This emerges from my conviction that if God is going to save the world, God must do so with the help of non-Christians. Bill Hybels often said that the church is the hope of the world, that the church is God’s plan A and there is no plan B. I do think that the ekklesia represents Christ’s physical body on earth, and that God intends to create a community that will change the world. But the climate crisis reveals that this salvation community cannot be made up only of Christians. We ain’t gonna save the world by ourselves.

And why should anyone trust us to? The legacy of the colonizing church in the West is a theology of domination and exclusion. It has treated the Earth as a resource to be strip-mined, packaged, and sold in the service of oligarchy. Its theology is far from the interconnected web of life we see in the creation story, where human beings are created on the same day as the rest of the animals, where we are unique mainly in that we are assigned the role of loving and caring for the Earth as God does.

While I believe Jesus intended and commissioned a prophetic community, I also believe that the church does not have a monopoly on truth or on God. Indeed, as we’ve seen in Matthew and Luke, Jesus seemed frustrated with religious posturing and exclusivism. He was less concerned with how people labeled themselves and more concerned with how they put love into action.

We in the church desperately need a different way to frame our role and identity, our very sense of self, to manifest God’s kin-dom in this present crisis. And that’s why I’m going to turn to a different faith tradition to get some perspective on my own.  

 Prayer:
Source of Truth, deepen my understanding.

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Inner and Outer Light

Photo by Arne Hückelheim (click for source)

 

People don’t light a lamp and then put it in a closet or under a basket. Rather, they place the lamp on a lampstand so that those who enter the house can see the light. Your eye is the lamp of your body. When your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light. But when your eye is bad, your whole body is full of darkness. Therefore, see to it that the light in you isn’t darkness. If your whole body is full of light—with no part darkened—then it will be as full of light as when a lamp shines brightly on you. (Luke 11:33-36 CEB)

• First, the context: Just before he says this, a woman says “Happy is the mother who gave birth to you and who nursed you.” He replies, “Happy rather are those who hear God’s word and put it into practice.” Remember this — I’m going to come back to it in a moment. 
• Jesus then talks about how people are often slow to believe and act on the truth. What he is offering, he says, is better than Solomon’s wisdom and more urgent that Jonah’s prophetic mission. Then he makes this statement about lamps and light. 
• There are actually two sayings here that mirror Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount: a) Lighting an oil lamp and b) your eye is the lamp of the body (click the links to see what I wrote about them there). This takes some careful unwinding, because Luke actually uses the oil lamp saying once more in 8:16-19. Again, this illustrates how what Jesus said can be interpreted many different ways—not only by different authors, but even by the same author at different times! 
• In this context, Jesus is talking about why we have trouble seeing and acting on the truth. Jesus says his teaching is like a lamp set on a lampstand. Everything he’s doing is done publicly, in clear sight of everyone. 
• One of the competing spiritual worldviews of this time was Gnosticism. In Gnosticism, those who are spiritually enlightened pass secret knowledge to others. Christianity rejected this system and claimed that salvation was available, by grace, to all, not just to “spiritual elites.” 
• But sometimes people are not able to see the truth because their eyesight is clouded (“unhealthy”). 
• As in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus here tells us that there are two sources of light: external and internal. But there, in Matthew’s gospel, it was about greed and our perception of money. Here it is about our perception of the truth. 
• It’s also about Jesus’s identity, as one who brings light to the earth. For people who can’t see clearly, it doesn’t matter how brightly he shines or how publicly he acts; they will remain in darkness. 
• But the goal is to get the light into you. 
• Remember how Jesus corrected the woman who centered on Jesus’s identity? He pointed back to putting his teaching into practice. It is better to do what I teach, Jesus implied, than to be a blood relative of mine. Light that is hidden is no light at all.  
• I’d go further: It is better to do what Jesus teaches than to call yourself a Christian.

Prayer:
Light of the World, you shine in public, and you shine in me. Help me fill my life and my world with your light.

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How Would You Treat Your Children?

Photo by Dr Sanket Mehta

 

 

Everyone who asks, receives. Whoever seeks, finds. To everyone who knocks, the door is opened. Which father among you would give a snake to your child if the child asked for a fish? If a child asked for an egg, what father would give the child a scorpion? If you who are evil know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him? (Luke 11:10-13)

• Here’s the context: the disciples have asked Jesus to teach them to pray, so he taught them the Lord’s prayer. Jesus followed up with a parable about a man knocking on a friend’s door in the middle of the night. Jesus has said that God is not too comfortable to answer or bothered about when we choose to pray.  
• This saying above is almost identical to the one in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, but it has a different context. 
• One way to translate the first sentence more literally is, “Each who asks receives: the seeker finds, the knocker has the door opened.” We can see this as three separate actions, or we can see that both seeking and knocking are forms of asking. I think part of the emphasis is that people ask and receive in different ways. 
• How would you treat your own children? I’m often amazed that people ascribe actions or attitudes to God that are beneath our own. Would you condemn your own children to an eternity to torment? Would you strike them with hurricanes, plagues, or natural disasters? Would you ignore you own children asking for bread? If not, why would we ascribe such hateful things to God? Jesus is talking about prayer, but I think we can extend it to other things. God wants to give you God’s own breath (pneuma, spirit). 
• Luke is all about the Holy Spirit. In fact, the HS becomes a character in the sequel to Luke’s gospel. Where Matthew says the Father will give “good things” to those who pray, Luke says God will give the Holy Spirit. 
• Unless you are in a Pentecostal tradition, you probably haven’t been taught that you even could pray for the Holy Spirit. “Is that something I’m supposed to pray for?” Luke seems to believe that it is obvious. While I don’t think the primary expression of the Holy Spirit is speaking in tongues or faith healing, I do think we can—and should—pray for the very Breath of God to fill us up. 
• A woman once cautioned me to “be careful what you pray for.” She related a story about a friend who had prayed for something, received it, and regretted it. But if someone gave you something you asked for, knowing it would hurt you, they would be more like the devil than like God. (In fact, Ray Bradbury wrote a creepy story about this very concept. Stories about djinns (or genies) also fit this paradigm). She was expressing a popular idea from folklore, not the Bible, about wishes. This is the passage that contradicts that superstitious reasoning. God is like a loving parent who wants to give God’s very breath to us, or a friend who delights in helping friends.

Prayer:
God, I am your child. Give me your breath. 

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“Asking for a Friend”

Photo by Dmitry Makeev

 

 

He also said to them, “Imagine that one of you has a friend and you go to that friend in the middle of the night. Imagine saying, ‘Friend, loan me three loaves of bread because a friend of mine on a journey has arrived and I have nothing to set before him.’ Imagine further that he answers from within the house, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up to give you anything.’ I assure you, even if he wouldn’t get up and help because of his friendship, he will get up and give his friend whatever he needs because of his friend’s brashness. And I tell you: Ask and you will receive. Seek and you will find. Knock and the door will be opened to you. Everyone who asks, receives. Whoever seeks, finds. To everyone who knocks, the door is opened. (Luke 11:5-10)

Context: The disciples have just asked Luke’s Jesus to teach them to pray. Jesus has taught them the short version of The Lord’s Prayer. He then goes on to tell this parable.

• “Asking for a friend.” I’m not sure why this meme has recently entered our social media consciousness. It’s usually said with a nod and a wink as a way of sharing an opinion or a joke, but we couch it as asking for advice from the general public “for a friend.” 
• Intercessory prayer is asking God to do something for someone. We are interceding, asking for a friend—sincerely. 
• Jesus characterizes prayer as asking one friend to help out another. I think this is a beautiful image. It’s probably not coincidence that Jesus just taught a prayer asking for daily bread. 
• Parables are not simply illustrations of what God is like. The point of this illustration is that God is not like a reluctant friend who is simply too comfortable to get up to help us out. We call this apophatic theology—describing what God is not (Its opposite is kataphatic theology, describing what God is like). 
• The image is supposed to be amusing. The reluctant friend dragging himself to the door, rubbing his eyes. The sound of the door unlocking, opening just wide enough to thrust out three loaves of bread. “Here, take them.” “Thanks so much! Sorry to bother you.” “Mm,” God grunts, shutting the door. 
• Even if he wouldn’t answer out of friendship, he would answer because of his friend’s audacity. This last word is hard to translate, but it seems to indicate, “I can’t believe you’re asking for this at three in the morning.” 
• He will give his friend whatever he needs. Not just bread. The implication is that the friend could ask for nearly anything, and the lesson is that we should not be afraid to ask. 
• “Is this what you imagine God is like? Too sleepy to answer the door?” Jesus seems to be asking. He sets us up to hear the next saying: Ask, seek, knock. 
• This parable isn’t in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, but the “Ask, seek, knock” saying is. You can read about Matthew’s version here. We tend to conflate the sayings, but Matthew’s version has a different context. Matthew is talking about letting people seek their own path. Luke’s version is addressing prayer. 
• Luke goes on to talk further about prayer and relationships. We’ll look at the rest of the saying tomorrow.

Prayer:
Great Mystery, we often project our weaknesses onto you. Shatter our expectations by answering our prayers for your kin-dom, for bread, and for mercy.

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STIITSOTP (Stuff That Isn’t In the Sermon on the Plain): The Lord’s Prayer

Painting by Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato

 

 

Jesus was praying in a certain place. When he finished, one of his disciples said, “Lord, teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” Jesus told them, “When you pray, say:

‘Father, uphold the holiness of your name.
Bring in your kingdom.
Give us the bread we need for today.
Forgive us our sins,
    for we also forgive everyone who has wronged us.
And don’t lead us into [trial].’” (Luke 11:1-4 CEB)

• Much of the material that Matthew put into the Sermon on the Mount, Luke chose to put into his chapter 11 instead of the Sermon on the Plain. If you want to compare Luke’s version to Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, click here. 
• In Luke’s version, the disciples ask for this prayer after they see Jesus praying. “Teach us to pray, just as John taught his disciples.” This is new information! We don’t know what John taught his disciples, but apparently it was a prayer that made an impression on the people who heard it.  
• Daniel Erlander (author of Manna and Mercy) says that this was a common practice among teachers and disciples in the ancient world; when they ask him to teach them to pray, they are asking for a summary of his teaching, the things most important to Jesus. In this prayer, Jesus emphasizes manna (daily bread) and mercy (forgiveness). Erlander uses this prayer as a lens through which to read the whole Bible. Jesus see the answer to the world’s problems as 1) a recognition that everything is a gift from God’s abundance, and 2) a loving, merciful, egalitarian attitude toward our neighbors. It’s a powerful vision, and fits with Luke’s emphasis on social justice. 
• The CEB translates the last word “temptation,” but I think “trial” is better. It is the same Greek word Paul uses in his letter to the Galatians when he says, “Though my poor health burdened [or tested] you, you didn’t look down on me or reject me” (Galatians 4:14). Words can have different meanings in different contexts, and it is possible that “temptation” is the correct reading. Luke may have a different theology than I do! But I prefer “trial” both for theological and textual reasons. Let me point out again: this is a conscious choice on my part. We are always making choices when we read the Bible. 
• If you compare this to Matthew’s version, you’ll see it is shorter. Matthew uses language Matthew likes: lots more “in the skies (heavens)” references. Luke doesn’t talk as much about the skies; he’s talking about what happens on this planet.

Jesus goes on to talk more about prayer, and that’s where we’ll hear some more familiar material tomorrow.

Prayer:
Lord, teach us to pray; teach us to desire the things you want us to desire.

Do you think the world would be better if we read the Bible differently?
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