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Fifth in the Lenten Series, “Why Did Jesus Die?”

The first time I stood on the Great Wall of China was a revelation. I thought I knew what it was. I remember in elementary school, a teacher said that the Great Wall of China was the one human-made structure you could see from space. It turns out this is not at all true, for more than one reason. But it sounded amazing to me, that people could make something so large and so big. I’d seen many, many pictures over the years after that, of the wall and the verdant, mountainous scenery surrounding it. I had even read bits of history about the great Qin dynasty and Emperor Qin Shi Huang, under whose brutal but powerful rule the wall construction really gathered momentum. 

I thought I knew the Great Wall of China.

But standing there for the first time, on a summer day at the start of this millenium, I was speechless. It was larger and steeper than I had imagined. Even on a grey, rainy morning, the views from its peaks were more breathtaking than I had expected. I knew that this wall was long, but seeing it wind through the distant mountains, I just remember having this extraordinary sense of awe at what natural beauty, human engineering, back-breaking labor, and historical preservation had together made possible. 

Thanks for reading about my relationship with the Great Wall. In this year of endless cancellations, the most painful for me was the cancellation of our family’s plans for our kids’ first ever trip to China. Our family is a beautiful interracial mix of my wife’s family’s Chinese roots and my family’s mix of Northwest European heritage, and our kids are all teenagers and getting ready to head out into the world on their own soon. The biggest thing we wanted to do together first was to go to China. And a clear must-see for all was the kids’ first trip to the Great Wall themselves. 

There’s a reason, though, that I tell this story as we explore why Jesus died. Most sane people throughout history have acknowledged that when it comes to our thinking about our Creator, the Spirit or being above or within all things, some humility is called for. We have rightly viewed who or what we call God with mystery.

And yet, we have often assumed that more or less, we know what God is like. By way of vision or tradition, story and rumor, we have imagined that the force behind the sun and the rain, life and death, our great hopes and fears, to be called God. We have, our human family, called God the creator, the power behind all power, the cause beneath all causes, the force of life that has brought all life into being. And it’s not that none of this is true.  But our sense of God has remained murky and far too often a cosmic reflection of the best and the worst of our own muddled conceptions and experience of love, power, fear, and violence. 

Something interesting happened, though, in the collective thoughts and imaginations of the first followers of Jesus. Their memory of the life and teaching of Jesus, how Jesus provoked and inspired them, and even how their sense of the unseen Spirit of Jesus continued to move them, made them think that for the first time, people had seen God face to face. God had walked among them, spoken to them, and shared meals of bread and beans and fish with them. 

God looked like Jesus.

They said this in different ways. Here are three, just as a sampling, all from the late Eugene Peterson’s poetic translation he called The Message.

“No one has ever seen God,

        not so much as a glimpse.

    This one-of-a-kind God-Expression,

        who exists at the very heart of the Father,

        has made him plain as day.” (John 1:18)

No one had ever seen God, until Jesus made God plain as day.

“We look at this Son and see the God who cannot be seen. We look at this Son and see God’s original purpose in everything created.” (Colossians 1:15)

In the history of the earth, the human species has been the closest approximation of the creative mind and vibrant love that God is. In Jesus, this approximation becomes the real deal, the accurate reflection of God, the original purpose. 

“We heard it with our own ears, saw it with our own eyes, verified it with our own hands. The Word of Life appeared right before our eyes; we saw it happen! And now we’re telling you in most sober prose that what we witnessed was, incredibly, this: The infinite Life of God himself took shape before us.” (I John 1:1-2)

We now have an eyewitness sighting of the infinite life of God. God looks like Jesus. 

In their hope that God looks like Jesus, his followers to this day are not limited to how Jesus died, but our vision does continue to center there. Because in Jesus’ death, we see what the best writing and worship about God had always hoped might be true: that God is self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love. 

God shares and gives all the best that God has and is. God is by nature kind and forgiving, eager to see the best and heal the worst in us. And God is present in compassion with all who suffer. 

Jesus on the cross then becomes a kind of litmus test for all of our screwy traditions, opinions, hopes, and fears about God. Does what our parents or church or anyone else told us about God look and sound like Jesus? Maybe then it is. But if not, we can forget about it. 

This is another reason then that Jesus died, to cut through the pile of rumor and report of all we have thought about God, and to show us what God is like: self-giving, radically forgiving, co-suffering love. 

Fourth in the Lenten series, “Why Did Jesus Die?”

A friend of mine recently told me about a conversation she’d had in the early weeks of the coronavirus crisis we’re facing right now. Let’s call my friend Anne. Anne and a friend of hers were making plans to go out to eat, and she suggested a place in Chinatown. Anne’s friend told her she would go to any other neighborhood in the city, but not there. She then described her view of Chinatown – that it is dirty and a hub of illegal immigration and likely very virus-infected right now. Anne and her friend both grew up in America, but Anne’s ancestors are East Asian, and her friend’s are West African. Anne tried to reason with her friend, that Chinatown hadn’t had any documented cases of coronavirus, that the restaurants are great, and that they are needlessly hurting for business right now because of people’s negative associations with all things Chinese. But the only thing that changed Anne’s friend’s perspective at all was when Anne reminded her how awful some people treated her during the Ebola crisis a few years back, when some people associated West Africans with their fears of disease. 

My friend’s conversation is not unusual these days, or really throughout human history. Right now, there are widespread reports of stigmatizing of and violence against Asian Americans. Humans have often done this kind of thing in times of fear and outbreaks of illness. Shamefully, many 14th century Christians blamed the Black Plague on Jews, spreading lies that they had poisoned wells. There is something in our species that longs to find blame for our problems outside of ourselves, and that looks for external scapegoats to punish or ostracize when we face fear or tension. 

There is a whole field of study of this phenomenon. It is called scapegoat theory. The term dates back to the Levitical law, where there is provision for a priest to symbolically place the blame for the whole nation’s sins upon a blameless goat. That goat was cast out into the wilderness, symbolically removing the blame and shame of the people from their midst. 

Twentieth century literary critic and historian Renee Girard and other scholars have helped us to see the universality of scapegoating in the human experience. Ancient legends and founding stories of societies often include tales of violence, through which evil is averted. Sacrifices of animals and gods and sometimes even children are nearly ubiquitous in ancient religious practice. There is something in us that needs to externalize our fears, and find blame for what threatens us outside of ourselves and our people.  

Of course, there are some serious downsides to this habit of ours. But let me name just two – it doesn’t work, and it is a horrible moral evil.

Scapegoating doesn’t heal. When nations blame members of an ethnic group for the spread of a disease, no one gets healthier. When insecure pre-teens tease peers who seem vulnerable or different, they don’t suddenly find inner peace and security. Kill all the animals you want, and you don’t produce more life, health, or safety for your species. Scapegoating produces a strong, sometimes exhilarating, sense of relief for a community. At last, a cause of blame and an outlet for aggression is found! But like most highs, it passes quickly, and the problems remain.

More importantly, scapegoating is violent, cruel, and unjust. It might start with labelling a virus after an ethnicity, a simple change of a word that takes our fears of sickness and economic loss and places the blame far away, on a global adversary. From there, though, businesses and people are avoided. Then they are spat upon, and eventually beaten or worse. This is the current impact of the use of the phrase “Chinese virus” and in various forms, it has been the story of Christian scapegoating of Jews for centuries. Call someone a Christ killer, and it’s not long before you start killing them yourself. 

But the thing is, we are either all Christ killers, or none of us are. From a purely forensic point of view, the Roman empire and its machinery of criminal injustice killed Jesus. From a theological perspective, though, we all did, and perhaps God did as well. The gospel of John and the book of Revelation represent Jesus as a sacrificial lamb, an innocent victim who removes humanity’s sin and blame. The New Testament letter entitled Hebrews understands Jesus to be the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. We could read this from God’s perspective – that our creator requires sacrifice to find peace with humanity. Sometimes the Bible implies this might be true of God. Yet at other times, it mocks this perspective. Why would God need us to kill a cow or a lamb – let alone a person? 

We do better when we read all this sacrifice from a human perspective. What if we’re the ones that needed all that death and bloodshed? What if our consciences and fears cry out for a place to lay the blame for our guilt and death? From this reading, God condescends in empathy to our need, first in the sacrifice of animals and eventually in the sacrifice of Godself. 

When our very God becomes our scapegoat, some radical shifts occur. Pretty much nobody – believer or not – looks at a crucifix and thinks: that Jesus got what he deserved! Rightfully read, the gospels shift our sympathies from the fearful, scapegoating mob to the innocent, scapegoated victim. They don’t just let the scapegoated speak, but align the falsely accused with the divine. Jesus the sacrificial lamb cries out: Do unto God, what you need to stop doing to one another. 

Devotion to a scapegoated God opens up three healthier postures for our insecurity and anxiety. 

When things are worst in us and in our world, when we most need someone or something to blame, the memory of Jesus’ death invites us to believe that God has not abandoned us but is with us still. Devotion to a crucified God dares us to in some sense lay the blame for all our problems on God’s shoulders, rather than casting about for a human scapegoat. Morally, God may be innocent, but emotionally and psychically, God would rather bear the blame for our problems than having us continually blame one another.

Secondly, when God becomes our scapegoat, we are freed to turn our energies inward. We can practice Jesus’ teaching to stop trying to pull the speck from our neighbor’s eye and spend some time on the planked lodged within our own. Scapegoating always fosters simplistic, other-focused blame for our shared problems. Our sickness, our lack, our anxieties must be some far-off politician’s fault, or the fault of some far-off country or people group or social class. But what if all this fault-finding gets us nowhere? What if a more nuanced, introspective, humble way forward in life is more likely to move us toward health and peace? 

And lastly, when Jesus becomes our scapegoat, there is an invitation, even a command, to break the cycle. Through his solidarity with all innocent victims, Jesus’ blood cries out: No more!  When we blame others for our problems, when we curse them or wish or do them harm, we have ourselves become what we call others: an infection, a killer of God and others, and a scourge against our own human race. It’s time to stop. 

From Steve’s sermon last Sunday:

“…not all of us have known fathers, or mothers for that matter, to be full of love and forgiveness, or very good at expressing it. A few of us have known outright cruel parents. Most of us have known parents that tried their best and never wanted to be cruel, but were cruel on occasion nevertheless, sometimes cruel without wanting to be, sometimes cruel without even realizing that was the effect they were having.

Jesus seemed to get this, when he said, you parents are evil. (And I’m paraphrasing here, but only a little – it’s in Luke 11 and Matthew 7.) …How much more, Jesus says, will a perfectly loving parent like God give you all that you need, especially the kindness and compassion and forgiveness that you need. 

God’s not a crueler or meaner parent than us. God is not obsessed with punishment and blame, bound by the need to satisfy his own anger before he can associate with us. Our instincts that tell us this can’t be true, and so does Jesus.”

Meditate on God as the ultimate Forgiving Parent – through the image of Dutch painter Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son” in Week 1 of the Lent Bible Guide

Reflect on how character Chidi’s words from the hit TV series “The Good Place,” resonates with our wrestling about justice, cruelty, and forgiveness.

When we ask the question, “Why did Jesus die?” it’s tempting to start with the snarky but true response, “Because people killed him.” Jesus was kind and gentle and amazing to just about everyone he encountered, except for the religious and cultural and political elite of his age. When he wasn’t calling them flamingly cruel hypocrites, he ignored them and undermined their authority and messaging. Of course, they’d conspire to silence or eliminate him. Jesus seemed to know his ministry would end this way. 

The cross at first seems like a pretty specific version of our cultural lament: This is why we can’t have nice things.

We could end our inquiry with this tragic observation, except that Jesus and his first followers didn’t cast Jesus as a victim. They saw the cross as part of the plan, in fact, a central part of Jesus’ destiny. Jesus death there wasn’t the end of his impact on earth, but the heart of its beginnings. 

So let’s make our question a little more specific. We’ll ask not just why Jesus died, but why Jesus thought he had to die as he did. What was God doing or showing us on the cross? And why does that matter still? 

There are many theories and metaphors that all partially answer these questions, and I find four of them especially powerful. We’ll look at the first of those four today, and follow with three others in the weeks to come. 

Jesus died to show us where God is. 

More specifically, Jesus died because God’s love compels God to be in solidarity with humanity’s greatest suffering. 

Let’s follow three very different thinkers who explore this – the great American theologian James Cone, the Catholic priest and gang intervention leader Father Greg Boyle, and the folk-rock American icon Johnny Cash.

In 2011, the late great theologian James Cone published a little book titled The Cross and the Lynching Tree. I’ve heard it said that it is the most important book about God ever published in this country. I’ve read it a couple of times now, once with the staff at Reservoir, and I can’t disagree. It’s a book of horror and of devotion. Cone pulls together the two symbols that have most terrorized African-Americans. There’s the cross, the flaming version of which has become an emblem of White supremacy. And there’s the lynching tree, the means of death for thousands of African Americans at the hands of White American racists. And Cone asks how these symbols speak to one another. How do we approach the cross of Christ through the American experience of the lynching tree? This might sound like painful or morbid work, but Cone argues that an American can’t faithfully respond to the Jesus who died on the cross, without making the comparison to our nation’s most similar practice of execution.

After all, under Rome, the cross was a tool of violence, wielded by the powerful to terrorize, humiliate, and subjugate the less powerful, and often ethnic and religious outsiders in particular. The scriptures evoke this mode of death in poetry that resonates in this context, saying of Christ, “Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree.” 

The Cross and the Lynching Tree has a lot to say, but it starts with the inarguable implication that Jesus is closer to the experience of Black American suffering than White American religion. The God who is revealed to us in the person of Jesus, whose biographies climax in his death on a cross, suffers with those who have (as Howard Thurman put it) “their backs against the wall”, and especially with those who suffer terror or violence at the hands of the powerful and privileged. God is in loving and powerful solidarity with Black Americans, and with all people whose lives and heritage and resilience are born of oppression.

Depending on your perspective and experience, this can be profoundly comforting and liberating, or profoundly unsettling. 

How do you react to this God of the cross? How do you respond to the God of solidarity?

James Cone shows us that where you find God is in solidarity with your suffering, you can trust and love this God, and you can hope in this God for your liberation. The story of the cross after all doesn’t end with a dying Jesus, but one who rises from the dead, with a Roman empire that eventually outlaws and banishes crucifixion, and with an image of shame become an image of redemption. 

Where your life has included shame or humiliation, suffering or grief, I hope that the cross tells you that God is profoundly with you there, that Jesus has brought God into your suffering to accompany you, to liberate you, or to reframe your story beyond the victimization that others may have intended for you. 

And where those of us are troubled, or confused, or provoked by the God of solidary, we can hear an invitation to join God where God can still most be found. God is not on the side of oppressors, and God is not on the sidelines. God is with the oppressed. This is the insight of two very different American religious voices I’ve been listening to lately – Father Greg Boyle, the Jesuit priest who founded Homeboy Industries, and Johnny Cash, the American country/rock singer born of depression-era rural White Southern poverty, but who became the Man in Black, friend to American prisoners and addicts and others who suffer. 

Father Greg Boyle’s life work is among poor, traumatized gang members, coming alongside them for their healing and liberation. He insists he does this not to save gang members, or bring God to them, but to be saved by them, and find God with them. Boyle reminds us that when Jesus says we love Jesus by loving those who are poor or imprisoned or estranged, Jesus is saying that he is with those people and the ones being saved aren’t them, but the people who love them. Those who are marginalized are the best spiritual guides for those of who are less so. Greg Boyle’s teaching has been challenging me to consider what radical kinship the human family means for me. 

I’ve also been listening to the music and message of Johnny Cash, thanks to psychologist Richard Beck’s fascinating little book Trains, Jesus, Murder: The Gospel According to Johnny Cash. Beck explores why Cash couldn’t stop singing about murderers and convicts and all kinds of American stories of suffering, and why he loved to sing these songs to American prisoners in particular. 

Beck writes, “This is the gospel according to the Man in Black: drawing near to and loving the lost, unnoticed, unremarkable, excluded, powerless, broken, condemned, and despicable. Solidary is a love that grows warmest in the coldest places.” (32) If we want to find more faith, or more of God, we’ll most reliably do that in loving connection with those God lives with most. If you want more hope, go where God is stirring hope among the hopeless. Put more crassly, “Hope is where your ass is.” (33)

I am not an expert in solidarity, so I can’t teach us how to do it. I’m a relatively wealthy, privileged, White American middle class pastor. I’m just finding my way. But this is why I’ve started to spend some time in jail. This is why I’m learning to organize with and on behalf of disempowered residents of our state. This is why I’m trying to learn a new relational lifestyle of radical kinship. I can’t tell you how, but I welcome you on the road with me. 

Let’s find the God of the cross together. 

Some Perspective and Humility:

Last week, we looked at one theory that has been very influential in some of the Christian traditions that shaped a lot of American spirituality and religion. Its technical name is rather unfortunate: penal substitutionary atonement theory. To break it down word by word, 

• Penal: this theory posits that our many barrier to God is our rebellion and evil that angers a just God, who requires punishment.
• Substitutionary: God punishes God’s child/God’s own self, Jesus, by killing him/letting him be killed by humans.
• Atonement: And that punishment satisfies God’s anger and justice, so that God can forgive those that put their trust in this process for their eternal salvation, enabling people to at peace with, one with, God again.

Last week, I shared the experience of many parents realizing they could never teach this theory to their children. It has concepts of justice and punishment that many of us have come to understand as toxic. (Why is punishment central to justice? How does any punishment – especially murder – heal harm or injustice?) We also noted more fundamentally that this picture of God seems both arbitrary and mean, not one that many of us wanted to share with our children or with anyone else. 

And that left us wondering: why did Jesus die? Are there other explanations? How do we interact with such a central part of the story of the life of Jesus and what seems to be an important part of a Jesus-centered faith? 

Well, I have got some great news for us here, even if this week, it might seem a bit overwhelming. As it tuns out, there are dozens of metaphors and images that the Bible uses to engage us in reflection on the meaning of Jesus’ death. And over the past twenty centuries, churches and theologians have engaged with and proclaimed several different ideas (called “theories of atonement”) over the centuries. 

For instance, the psychologist Richard Beck has this beautiful little book called Unclean: Meditations on Purity, Hospitality, and Morality. In it, he identifies twenty-two different metaphors the New Testament uses to discuss sin, grace, and salvation. That’s right: twenty-two! And even that list isn’t exhaustive. One of these metaphors is legal: sin is crime that calls for forgiveness and punishment. But there are twenty-one others. There’s the military metaphor. Sin is war, and we need Jesus to bring peace. Or the metaphor of slavery. Sin is slavery, and we need Jesus’ help for liberation. Or the metaphor of our biological cycles. A state of sin is to be asleep, and God’s grace awakens us. Or one more: the familial metaphor. 

I love this range of metaphor. It gives me so many options to think about what’s wrong with the human condition and how Jesus can be at the center of making it right. It also reminds me that when we get super-focused on a single metaphor, a single way of understanding the center of our faith, than we’re missing the point. It would be like watching one minute of the Oscars and thinking you knew what the point of it all was. It would be like analyzing a pine cone and thinking you understood the ecology of its forest. It would be like reading this one sentence, and thinking that you understood what this whole blog was about. Lots more metaphors here – I hope you see my point. 

The legal metaphor that tries to get at one aspect of God’s work on our behalf in Christ is too small and too limited to carry the meaning of something as large as the significance of the life and death of Jesus, and the saving work of God on our behalf. 

This metaphor also hasn’t always been the dominant view of Christians in the past, and still in many circles isn’t today. In the early centuries of the church, there was a take on Jesus’ death called the ransom theory. It used economic metaphors familiar from ancient economies around slavery and land rights. In this theory, humans are trapped in this cycle of unhealthy, wayward living and death. And on the cross, Jesus’ death is like a ransom payment from God that frees us from our debt and captivity. It’s not clear who God is paying off. The devil? Death personified? Super-weird, I know, but for many thousands of believers for many centuries, it was compelling. 

Different times and places, different cultures seem to call for different ways of understanding life’s central questions. And as it turns out, the story of Jesus has been durable and powerful enough to keep speaking effectively to us in different ways.

Over the next four blogs in this series, I’m going to briefly explain four different ways of understanding the meaning of the death of Jesus. Each of the four has some scholarship and history behind it, some decades and others many centuries. I find each compelling to me and others in my time and culture. Each has biblical roots. Each is simple and sensible enough to be explained to a young child. And each of the four is complex and deep enough to seem worthy of a beautiful and eternal God.

They’re not the only four ways forward, but they’re ones I want us to keep talking about.  

Meanwhile, if nothing else, I hope that people who see things differently can have the grace to hold their own ideas with humility. So many religious people weaponize and throw around words like “orthodox” and “biblical” to indicate that their tradition, and their point of view is the only faithful or viable or worthy one. Which from a historical or philosophical or just common sense perspective is just rubbish. 
Let’s listen more, persuade less, and see if our faith and theology can bear more fruit of mercy, justice, and humble and loving walk with God and our fellow humans, shall we? 

Revisiting a Troubling Question:

A while back, after a Sunday church service, a friend of mine sought me out for some parenting advice, in the religion department. Her elementary school-aged daughter had asked her, “Mommy, why did Jesus die?” And as she was about to answer the question, she realized that she didn’t want to share the only answer that she had to offer. 

See, my friend had been taught some version of this story about Jesus: All people sin. Some of those sins may seem small (say, not praying enough, or lying to our dentist about how much we floss), other sins big (the axe-murderer and genocidal tyrant sin divisions) but all of them reveal our human depravity that offends God and cries out for punishment. God, being both loving and ingenious, but hell-bent on punishment still, devises a plan. God’s only Son, who shares God’s identity and nature, is born a human being, and in his unjust death, is punished instead of us. In Jesus’ brutal, violent death, the punishment and estrangement from God that our evil merits is experienced by Jesus as a substitute on our behalf. Trust God that this transaction works, and be free from punishment. God will look at you and love you, because when God sees you, God will now see Jesus instead.

But my friend, just as she’s about to explain this to her daughter – God punished Jesus so God won’t have to punish you! – stops herself and is troubled. 

There are many reasons she might be troubled. So many. I mean, my friend thinks: when my daughter needs punishment, it’s usually not an execution-worthy punishment. She’s a pretty good kid after all. And aren’t we learning that the point of parenting is to teach and nourish and guide, more than punish? In short, she’s wondering: is God meaner than I am? If God is so good, how is it that I seem more loving than this God? 

A theologian and podcaster named Tripp Fuller puts my friend’s question on other terms. Christian trinitarian theology teaches us that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit share the same nature and qualities – one essence in three persons. And the scriptures teach that no one has ever seen God, but Jesus has made God known. God looks like Jesus. Which is why Tripp likes to ask, “God should be at least as nice as Jesus, shouldn’t he?”

The understanding of Jesus’ death that my friend didn’t want to tell her daughter is technically known as penal substitutionary atonement. This theory says that the main human problem is guilt that requires punishment, and that Jesus was punished by God on our behalf, so that we can be forgiven. It is not the only theory of why Jesus died, and it isn’t the oldest one either. 

This theory has roots in medieval Christendom and even earlier, but it was really developed and popularized by John Calvin, Swiss Christian reformer who – unsurprisingly – was trained as a lawyer and so thought a lot about crime and punishment, and saw God partly on these terms. 

This theory of penal substitutionary atonement, whatever its strengths may be, has caused so many difficulties. A few:

• Many of us don’t want to share it with our children. It seems to portray a vindictive, violent, punishment-obsessed God, a God who would also kill his child to save others. 
• It may not have borne the best of fruit in the Prostestant Christian-influenced Western world. Worship of a sometimes violent God has usually made it easier for people to do violence on one another. Christians with this view of God have happily colonized, enslaved, and executed others in the name of this God.
• A belief that punishment requires justice has helped us make peace with things like mass incarceration. But we have learned that most of our conceptions of punishment aren’t just and don’t seem to heal or change the world for the better.
• This theory doesn’t sound like good news to most of us, and the story and life of Jesus – including his death – is supposed to be good news to us all. 

So why did Jesus die? 

Our good news for today is that there are other ways of understanding this. We’ll return to those next week. 

Ivy Anthony:

We are entering into an election year where loud, frenzied voices will take even more of center stage – reinforcing just how simple our stories should be – how obvious and justified it is to discount, ignore and disengage with the stories around us that don’t complement our own. However, our stories are much more complex and layered than the powerful voices of our day would have us believe.

The news and political leaders of all stripes can train us to summarize stories into neat, concise paragraphs – trim to one main theme, and identify the protagonist, the antagonist and plot. We’ve learned this approach of course in educational and classroom settings – but we also utilize this approach as a way to skirt some of the complexities of the people and the world around us.  It is so much easier to tell ourselves an abridged version of what we see, classify a person or groups of people as “other,” to justify and direct our actions, feelings and words.

It’s no wonder that we feel exhausted, down-trodden, and hopeless – not just because we are witnessing a divisive and fractured nation, but because our stories don’t fit into a one-page template.  We are in fact carrying around volumes and volumes of stories in our bodies and souls. Some that we’ve lost track of, or been lost in, some that we’ve dead-ended too soon, and some that we’ve paused waiting for the next chapter to begin – but all of our stories are complex and multi-layered. Stories that demand attention and time and patience to be fully told.  And yet the resources of time and patience are scarce in the landscape we read, and survival is more an immediate tug, so we shelve anything that could grow or be unwieldy, (our feelings, our hearts, our imagination, our understanding), alongside the only things that can tame them – isolation and separation. 

The story Jesus tells to “love God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and love your neighbor as yourself,” (Luke 10:27), has made us fumble a bit as we attempt to apply our well-trained literary skills to this story.  Jesus’ seemingly simple story, to “love,” is a bit unruly and gangly when applied in real life, and refuses to be summarized into a trite quip, or fall into predictable character types of “us v. them”.  In fact what Jesus’ story does point to, is the very thing we try to evade and ignore in our own story-telling: that our lives and our world are messy, and when we try to press them into stream-lined narratives it actually denies the power of our heart, soul, and mind  – the very sources of strength from which we love.  

You may have heard me share in church services that I grew up in a small, central Maine town where people’s stories centered around and were fueled by a large paper mill.  Success, happiness and loyalty were easy themes to skim off the top of this story. However, layered underneath were generational story-lines of deception, denial, poverty, weariness, and decay.  These under-stories emerged as the link between the paper mill’s waste and the poisoning of its surroundings rose, (bodies of water, air, land and human bodies). But there was no place for these hard, messy stories to go, in an environment where people summarized their lives as, “just fine” and “never been better.”  You see, as governing authorities began to regulate and catalyze changes, the paper mill began to close many of its jobs. As jobs were lost, so were people’s ways of living, identity and purpose – and another byproduct appeared – fear.  Fear and its “twin sons of thunder – anxiety and despair,” as Howard Thurman said. (Jesus and the Disinherited, 37).  Fear and isolation became the new accepted protagonists of this town’s story, writing its plot into the visible decay and suffocation of it’s human beings, town and state. 

What does this have to do with our nation and election year? Isolation, anxiety and despair permeate and are killing us. “In the 1960s, Americans had among the highest life expectancy in the world. Today, we rank near the bottom of major developed nations. Neurosurgeon Dr. Sanjay Gupta suggests we have an epidemic of self-inflicted deaths of despair on our hands,  from drug overdose, chronic liver disease and suicide – this rise in the U.S. mortality rate can be seen as a symptom of the toxic, pervasive stress in America today.” (Gupta, “Why is the US Death Rate Rising? Dr. Sanjay Gupta Looks at the Deadly Effects of Despair”)  A stress and anxiety that erodes relationships and connection and instead suggests that “going it alone,” with a story-line of isolation is survival.

We are so scared of unearthing our under-stories.  We don’t think we can survive the messy stories, the unspeakable stories of our hearts; of fear, of being wrong, of vulnerability, of perceived failure.   So we isolate, separate ourselves from one another. Yet we don’t realize that when we draw away – we leave ourselves in the most vulnerable of states. At the mercy of our own fears, judgement and thoughts, that grind and churn in our heads..which in isolation are the only things that grow.

It’s one long, hard, flat story. 

These are stories that are very easy to write.

These are stories that permeate our nation – it’s endemic –  all across America.

We see it wherever lines of difference are drawn, politically, culturally, racially, generationally, religiously, and economically 

This isn’t just a story about sickness and disconnection and poverty, it’s a story about our tendencies as human beings to isolate.

It’s a story where the summaries written are, “no one cares,” and “go it alone.” 

It’s a story that is a “church” story, a “religion” story, a “family” story,  a “work” story – as much as it is a “mill town story”.

And it is the story that reigns as some kind of gospel – to so many who are heart-sick and “poor in spirit,” and straight up poor, those who are bereft and mourn the state of our world, who are weary from efforts of justice-seeking, who are afraid, who have just worked so hard, for so long. 

It’s our story.
Jesus invites us to tell the gospel story that starts with “love” and ends with “love.”  To regard the words, “love one another as we love ourselves” not just as a nice set of words to live by, but words to act, create and build upon.  Perhaps these are the only words that will help us unearth the complex, messy stories of one another and give us the patience this election year, to gather at tables where we find there is no “them,” there is only “us.” 

After our hometown New England Patriots just suffered an early playoff loss, there was much talk that this may be the end of a stunning two decade run of excellence. Perhaps this could be the end of American football’s greatest dynasty. (If you’re not a sports fan, or a football fan in particular, hang in there for just a moment – we’re taking this somewhere else soon!) 

Many New Englanders love the Patriots because of their excellence. Once they were bad to mediocre, but recently they have been dominant. Their talent and efficiency and strength have been predictably great, while the particular ways they have repeatedly triumphed have surprised and delighted us. They’ve given us a winning story, one that many of us in some way feel is a story about our region, even a story about ourselves.

You may know, though, that many people around the country have seen the Patriots with different eyes, and read a different story in the team’s success. For many, the Patriots are a story about ruthlessness, heartlessness, and winning at all costs. Your reaction to this team’s rise to dominance, and the possibility of their decline, depends on the story they tell you, and what you think and how you feel about that.

It turns out this is true about just about everything. 

Be it the sports we watch or the products we buy, the public figures we root for or the neighborhoods we live in, we make many of our choices based on the stories they speak to us, and the stories we’re trying to tell about our own lives. This is why successful marketers and politicians and artists and even religious leaders are all storytellers. 

As it turns out, though, a lot of them are telling the same few stories. 

Two people I appreciate – Gareth Higgins and Brian McLaren have created a project about our stories. They’ve called it The Seventh Story. They’ve identified six stories people have been telling each other for ages. These stories are: Domination. Revolution. Isolation. Purification. Victimization. Accumulation.

Being the boss of others.

Getting revenge on those who bossed you around.

Running away afraid.

Turning on those who look different.

Giving up in helplessness.

Taking pride in having more than others.

So much of the time, these are the stories we live by: our families, our friends, our companies, our churches, even our nations. Pay attention, and you’ll see these stories being told in the ads you see online, the words and actions of our politicians, the movies we love and hate, the social media of our friends and ourselves, and, well, pretty much everywhere.

Higgins and McLaren think, though (and I agree!) that these stories don’t end well. They don’t heal us, or the earth, or one another. They don’t make for flourishing. 

They notice, though, that there is a seventh story people have been drawn to, a story that binds us together, a story that heals us, and a story that promotes well-being for us all. It’s a story of liberation and reconciliation. And it also just happens to be the story of Jesus – the story Jesus lived, and the story Jesus told.

This winter at Reservoir, we want to tell the story of Jesus, as we do, and explore what it looks and feels to live this story as well. And to do so, we’re going to contrast it with these six other stories we’ve been telling, and listening to, and following for too long. 

Join us on our podcast or website sermon feed, or join us in person on Sundays from January 12 through February 16, as Pastors Ivy and Lydia and I tell the seventh story. 

In this year’s advent, the season in which we remember, welcome, and hope for Jesus’ arrival, I’ve been thinking about what we are hoping for and how to make room for it.

Depending on the tradition through which you learned of Jesus, you may have heard that Jesus is our great Liberator or our great Forgiver. Jesus the Liberator stands in solidarity with the poor and oppressed, and with all people as they grieve and suffer and die. Jesus the Liberator delivers us from the harm done to us and gives us courage to seek justice and mercy in our world. Jesus the Forgiver is the revelation of the perfected and whole human that none of us are today and welcomes us as we are into transformative relationship with God. Jesus the Forgiver extends compassion, mercy, and welcome to us in our folly, freeing us from guilt and shame, and enabling us to live with new peace and purpose.

It’s become obvious to me over the years that both of these promises are part of the same story. Jesus’ story is reconciliation and liberation. And in the weeks before Christmas, we’d do well to lament our lives’ pain and injustices and to confess our sins and turn away from the things that choke out joy and life in us. 

Think of the life and teaching of Malcolm X. We decided to introduce our children to Spike Lee’s great 1992 film, and since it’s so long, it’s become an Advent project in our home. As a young adult, Malcolm’s had by his own admission become a mess. He was an addict, a thief, and a philanderer. When he found Islam, he sought mercy and redirected his life, with the help of God and friends. And yet as my kids watch the film, that was not at all their main impression of Malcolm’s childhood and youth. They see how Malcolm’s family was terrorized by White Christian racists, how his father was killed, he and his siblings removed from the custody of their mother, diminished and abused in foster care, and left parentless to fend for himself in a country which stood against his very existence, let alone his rights. My children watch his story and they rightfully assess that the story of Malcom X’s youth is of what a raw deal our country gave him, how he was in need of justice and liberation. 

Likely none of us will impact history as Malcolm X. Perhaps none of us faces such staggering oppression and injustice in our lives as he did either; I don’t know. But follow this need for healing and justice, for forgiveness and liberation, for freedom within and freedom without into our lives and times.

Bruce Rogers-Vaughn is a psychologist who teaches at Vanderbilt Divinity School, and he has a book out called Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age. His analysis, born out of cultural critique and thousands of hours of patient care, is that our current form of capitalism is eating away at social, interpersonal, and psychological health.

On a recent podcast, I heard him say, “We call (our society) meritocracy… and the merits are … ambitiousness, enthusiasm, drive, talent, and intelligence.” And if you’re not deemed to have these talents, “too bad for you.” Inequality is also a “central feature of late capitalism, or neoliberalism.” “Three men hold as much wealth as the bottom fifty percent of the population of the United States. So here’s what happens…. We emphasize the responsibility of individuals to manage themselves, including their feelings, and then we deprive them of the resources to do it. I would call that demonic.” Demonic has long been a religious word to refer to the destructive spiritual power of accusation. 

If you’ve stuck with me for all this theology and cultural analysis, you may be wondering what this has to do with Christmas, and with waiting for and making room for Jesus. 

Here it is: We all need greater health and freedom. Likely your life has degrees of compulsion and stress and strain you wish weren’t there. You likely also have less gratitude, joy, wonder, and connection than you wish you had. You are not alone. In fact, all of us are being robbed of those things. And in varying degrees, our violent, disordered world or our own jacked-up lives and mentalities are doing the robbing. 

Jesus is interested in your freedom. A quick google search of the New Testament for the word “freedom” will show you how important this is to the good news of Jesus. Jesus also, I believe, wants to visit you, as Liberator and as Forgiver, in this Christmas season, to stir joy, wonder, gratitude, and connection in your life again. 

So make room.

When Mother Mary heard that Jesus was coming, she told God she saw the evil, unjust systems of our age and called out confidently for a change. Join Mary and lament the ways that your circumstances or our world at large are crushing you. Ask Jesus to sit with you in your frustration, and to visit you and all of us with hope and power. 

And when Papa Joseph dreamed of Jesus, he heard that Jesus would save us from our sins and be Immanuel, God with us all. So join Joseph in turning away from your most life-draining habits and welcoming Jesus’ forgiveness, redirection, and the experience of God with us that he brings. 

Let Jesus know how it is you need to see God again this Christmastime, how it is you long for freedom, and keep your eyes out to see if God won’t come to you again. 

With Thanksgiving this week, and the Christmas season around the corner, let’s take a moment to get ready. At its best, the holiday season can be a time for  gratitude, wonder, joy, and connection. But to welcome something good, we need to make room for it. So let’s first take a moment to notice the stress, the shame, and the violence that can choke out our joy, wonder, gratitude, and connection.. 

I spend a lot of time around fellow working parents, people who when I ask how they’re doing, they start by sighing. There’s probably nothing that new to this – midlife has always been a time when responsibilities and burdens tend to pile up. What’s new these days is how many kids feel the same. Ask your nearest teenager if they’re stressed out and see what they have to say. Many of us are stressed out a lot these days. 

Before we think about solutions, it helps me to remember that the system we’re living in is getting results for which it was designed. If you didn’t listen to the New York Times podcast 1619 this year, I highly recommend it. Remembering 500 years since the start of slavery in this country, the podcast explores some of the legacy this part of our country’s history. In the second episode, “The Economy That Slavery Built”, we learn how America’s burgeoning cotton industry rocketed the American economy toward wealth in the early 1800s. The three keys to this story of American wealth: technological innovation, stolen land, and enslaved workers. By 1850, three million African descendants are toiling in this country – without pay, without rights, living under brutally violent conditions. They’re working on land taken from displaced Native Americans. And this land and labor is enriching a relatively small number of wealthy American descendants of European colonizers. It was in this context that American capitalism found its legs. 

I’m not an economist. So I have no argument to make for or against capitalism. But in our 21st century American economy, in which the richest three Americans hold more wealth than half of this country’s residents, I find it relevant that  American methods of producing and growing wealth involved began with practices like slave-backed mortgages, stolen capital, and unpaid labor. Relentless, poorly paid, and unpaid work as a source of wealth and convenience for others wasn’t invented by Amazon or Walmart. And an economy that produces wealth and ease for people at the top and center, while pushing violence and costs out to its edges and bottom is nothing new. 

It’s as participants in this economic system that most of us have more debt and less savings than we want, that most of us are busier and lonelier than we want to be, and that most of us hit the holiday season tired and stressed out. We absorb constant messages that we do not have enough, and that buying more will bring us joy. And we are constantly told that we are not enough, and that if we work harder, we might become worthy. These messages are saturated in idolatry – false promises of security – and packed with lies. 

The systems we live in are bigger than all of us. I don’t have a plan to change all this. But as a pastor in the good news of Jesus tradition, I do want to invite us toward freedom. I want to invite you to walk away from some of this crushing stress so you can make room for joy, gratitude, wonder, and connection. 

So can I suggest three practices to consider through Thanksgiving and Christmas? These are three practices that might open up some space and perspective, that might give us more freedom, that might open up space for the gratitude and joy we would like to experience more? 

Play “What’s Not My Fault”
It’s healthy to take responsibility for our lives. But it is also liberating to name the problems we think we have that aren’t really problems, and the other problems we have that aren’t our fault. Our economy, our culture, and our inner critics shame us when we have problems, even when they’re not our fault. And shame chokes out joy and wonder.;

You can play this by yourself, but it’s even better with a friend. The way it works is you write down five problems you have that stress you out – ten if they come quickly! And then next to each problem, you write down if it’s mainly your fault or mainly not your fault. Half and half is not a choice; make a call one way or another. For instance, with three teenagers, I might write down: probably can’t afford their college education. And with Thanksgiving around the corner, I might add: relative or two I don’t know how to talk to anymore. In each case, I contribute to the issue somewhat, but in both cases, it turns out these are mainly not my fault! College educations have become ridiculously expensive, and I don’t control my relatives or how we’ve all changed over the years. 

Discovering many of our problems are not our fault doesn’t take them away, but it does lift shame and make some room to not take it personally, to pray, or to just let it go for today. And there’s freedom in that. 

This Holiday, Tell Stories of Thanks and Tell Stories of Resilience
Secondly, during the Thanksgiving weekend, take an opportunity to share stories. Though the American myth of Thanksgiving has a troubled and violent backstory, at its best, this weekend gives us the opportunity to eat a big meal and to be thankful. 

For years, I’ve been in the habit of sharing something I’m thankful for over the past year, both with family and with friends. I think this is a great habit; share a story of gratitude this weekend. And suggest to your friends or family that you share a second story. Share a story of resilience – a time when things were hard, but you got through. You overcame, or even just survived. These stories of resilience remind us that with the help of God and friends, we are strong. There is enough. Telling and hearing these stories encourage us and strengthen us. 

Participate in Buy Nothing Day (or Week, or Month!)
And thirdly, participate in the phenomenon of Buy Nothing Day. On Black Friday this year, don’t spend a single dollar. Or see if you can go a week or even longer without making a single purchase, even online. To survive and flourish these days, almost all of us need to make and spend money. But to fast from spending money for a bit – when our culture is going crazy spending – is to say the life and joy are not to be found in the accumulation of possessions or costly experiences. The greatest gifts we can give to others involve our time and attention. Making, and spending, and having more tend to make us far less happy than we think it will. If we take Jesus’ teaching seriously, we’ll need to consider that all of this may just make us more anxious. 

By opting out of this consumer culture, even just temporarily, we make space to consider what satisfies us most deeply. We open up time and space to consider what a more joyful life might look like. We may even open up attention to wonder how we can participate in the creation of a more just and peaceful world. At the very least, it will help us end the month with less debt and more peace – two pretty good things on their own terms. 

Happy Thanksgiving, friends! May joy, wonder, gratitude, and connection be yours abundantly in this season!