Outcasts

 

Outcasts

Outcasts - Audio/Visual 

 

Now the tax collectors and “sinners” were all gathering around to hear him. But the Pharisees and the teachers of the law muttered, “This man welcomes sinners and eats with them.” Then Jesus told them this parable …. There was a man who had two sons. The younger one said to his father, “Father, give me my share of the estate.” So he divided his property between them. (Luke 15; 1-2; 11-12)

When reading the third parable of Jesus’ “lost” trilogies in Luke 15, we tend to concentrate on the flight and return of the younger brother – the so-called, “Prodigal Son.” Though not necessarily wrong, limiting the parable to such a narrow view misses the meaning of the parable. In the parable there are two brothers, each of whom represents a different way to be alienated from God, and a different way to seek acceptance into the kingdom of heaven. And the setting that Luke provides for Jesus’ teaching is crucial to the parable’s understanding.

In the first two verses, Luke tells us of two groups of people who’d come to listen to Jesus. The first were the “tax collectors and sinners.” Jesus used this group of men and women to correspond to the younger brother of the parable. These folks observed neither the moral laws of the Bible, nor the rules for ceremonial purity followed by the religious faithful of their day. They engaged in “wild living,” and like the younger brother they’d “left home” by leaving the traditional morality of their families and society. The older brother in the parable was represented by the second group of listeners, i.e., the “Pharisees and the teachers of the law.” This group held to the traditional morality of their upbringing. They studied and obeyed the Scripture; they worshipped faithfully and prayed constantly.

With great economy Luke shows how very different each group’s response was to Jesus. The progressive tense of the Greek verb translated “were all gathering” conveys the notion that the attraction of the younger brother types to Jesus was an on-going pattern in his ministry; they continually flocked to him. This phenomenon puzzled and angered the moral and the religious, and Luke succinctly summarizes their complaint: “This man welcomes sinners and [even] eats with them.” To the religious, this was a huge moral no-no since to sit down and eat with someone in the ancient Near East conveyed acceptance. In other words, the religious were saying, “How dare Jesus reach out to those people? Why, they don’t even come to church.”

So while many of us gravitate toward Jesus’ teaching about the prodigal, it’s the second group – the scribes and Pharisees – that are really the object of Jesus’ teaching, and it’s in response to their religious attitudes that Jesus shares the parable. The parable of the two sons takes an extended look at the soul of the elder brother, and then climaxes with a powerful plea for the older brother to change his heart. Throughout the centuries the preaching of this text has almost exclusively focused on how the father freely receives his penitent younger son. You can even imagine Jesus’ original listeners’ eyes welling with tears as they heard how God will always love and welcome them, no matter what they’ve done. But we overly sentimentalize the parable if that’s our only takeaway.

The targets of the story are not “wayward sinners,” but religious people who do everything the Bible requires. Jesus is pleading not so much with immoral outsiders as with moral insiders. He wants to show them their blindness, their narrowness and self-righteousness, and how these things are destroying not only their own souls, but the lives of the people around them. It’s a mistake, in my opinion, to think that Jesus tells this story only to assure younger brothers of his unconditional love.

It’s highly unlikely that the original listeners were melted to tears by this story. It’s more likely that they were thunderstruck, offended and maybe even infuriated. Jesus’ purpose was not to warm their hearts, but to shatter their categories. Through this parable Jesus challenges what nearly everyone has ever thought about God, sin and salvation. Jesus’ story reveals not only the destructive self-centeredness of the younger brother, but it condemns the elder brother’s moralistic life in the strongest possible terms. Jesus is saying that both the irreligious and the religious are spiritually lost, both life-paths are dead ends, and that every thought the human race has had about how to connect with God has been wrong. And despite the passage of some 2,000 years since its original teaching, older brothers and younger brothers are still among us; they live in our society, and sometimes in the very same family.

Not to over-generalize, but the oldest sibling in a family is often the parent-pleaser, the responsible one who obeys the parental standards. The younger sibling tends to be the rebel, a free spirit who prefers the company and admiration of his or her peers. The first child grows up, takes a conventional job and settles down near Mom and Dad. The younger sibling, on the other hand, goes off to live in the hip-shabby neighborhoods of Hollywood or Las Vegas.

These natural, temperamental differences have been accentuated in more recent times. In the early nineteenth century, industrialization gave rise to a new middle class – the bourgeois – which sought legitimacy through an ethic of hard work and moral rectitude. In response to perceived bourgeois hypocrisy and rigidity, communities of bohemians arose, like the indie-rock scenes of the 70’s. Bohemians stressed freedom from convention and personal autonomy. It’s no different today.

To some degree, the so-called culture wars are playing out these same conflicting temperaments and impulses today. More and more people consider themselves non-religious, or even anti-religious. They believe moral issues are highly complex and are suspicious of any individual or institution that claims moral authority over the lives of others. Despite, or perhaps because of the rise of this secular spirit, there’s also been growth in today’s conservative, orthodox religious movements. Alarmed by what they perceive as an onslaught of moral relativism, many have organized to “take back the culture,” and take as dim a view of “younger brothers” as the Pharisees did.

So, whose side is Jesus on? In The Lord of the Rings, when the hobbits ask the ancient Treebeard whose side he’s on, he answers: “I am not altogether on anybody’s side, because nobody is altogether on my side …. But there are some things, of course, whose side I’m altogether not on.” Jesus’ answer to this question, through the parable, is similar. He is on the side of neither the irreligious nor the religious, but he singles out religious moralism as a particularly deadly spiritual condition. It’s hard for us to realize this today, but when Christianity first came to prominence, it was not called a religion. It was the non-religion.

Imagine the neighbors of early Christians asking them about their faith. “Where’s your temple?” they’d ask. The Christians would reply that they didn’t have a temple. “But how can that be? Where do your priests work?” The Christians would have replied that they didn’t have priests. “But … but,” the neighbors would have sputtered, “where are the sacrifices made to please your god?” The Christians would have responded that they didn’t make sacrifices anymore. Jesus himself was the temple to end all temples, the priest to end all priests and the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. No one had ever heard anything like this. So in an effort to find a label for this new, religious movement the Romans called them “atheists” because what the Christians were saying about spiritual reality was unique and could not be categorized with the other religions of the world. And Jesus’ parable explains why they were absolutely right to call them atheists.

The irony of this should not be lost on us, standing as we do in the midst of the modern culture wars. To most people in our society, Christianity is religion and moralism. The only alternative to it, besides some other world religion, is pluralistic secularism. But from the beginning, it wasn’t so. Christianity was recognized as something else entirely. The crucial point here is that, in general, religiously observant people were offended by Jesus, but those estranged from religious and moral observance were intrigued and attracted to him. We see this throughout the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life. In every case where Jesus meets a religious person and a sexual outcast (as in Luke 7), or a religious person and a racial outcast (as in John 3-4), or a religious person and a political outcast (as in Luke 19), the outcast is the one who connects with Jesus and the elder-brother type does not. In fact, Jesus said to the respectable religious leaders of his day that “the tax collectors and the prostitutes enter the kingdom before you.” (Matt. 21:31)

Jesus’ teaching consistently attracted the irreligious while offending the Bible-believing, religious people of his day. Tragically, our churches today do not have this effect. The kind of outsiders Jesus attracted are not attracted to contemporary churches, even the most avant-garde. We tend to draw conservative, buttoned-down, moralistic people. The licentious and liberated, or the broken and the marginal, avoid church which can only mean one thing: if the preaching of our ministers and the practices of our members do not have the same effect on the people that Jesus had, then we must not be declaring the same message that Jesus did. If our churches aren’t appealing to younger brothers, maybe it’s because we’re populated by more elder brothers than we’d like to think.

Which one are you? Jesus encourages us to be neither.

Grace,

Randy

Fish for Breakfast

 

Fish for Breakfast

Fish for Breakfast - Audio/Visual 

When they landed, they saw a fire of burning coals there with fish on it, and some bread. Jesus said to them, “Bring some of the fish you have just caught.” So Simon Peter climbed back into the boat and dragged the net ashore. It was full of large fish, 153, but even with so many the net was not torn. Jesus said to them, “Come and have breakfast.” (John 21: 9-12)

By 7:00 p.m. on October 20, 1968, only a few thousand spectators remained in the Olympic stadium in Mexico City. It was almost dark, and the last of the marathon runners were stumbling across the finish line. Finally, the spectators heard the wail of sirens from the police cars and as eyes turned to the gate a lone runner wearing Tanzanian colors staggered into the stadium. His name was John Stephen Akhwari, and he was the last of the 74 competitors. With a deep cut on his knee and a dislocated joint from a fall he had suffered earlier in the race, he hobbled the final lap around the track. The assembled spectators all rose and applauded as though he had won the race. Afterward, someone asked him why he had kept running. His now famous reply was, “My country did not send me seven thousand miles away to start the race. They sent me seven thousand miles to finish it.”

The Bible often compares the Christian life to running a race. The apostle Paul spoke of it on several occasions. Toward the end of his life, he concluded, “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.” (2 Tim. 4:7) And to the believers at Corinth, he posed this challenge: “Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize? Run in such a way as to get the prize.” (1 Cor. 9:24)

But it’s not always easy to finish a race, and any good runner will tell you that the only way to make it through a long run is to take it one mile at a time. I’m no runner so I wouldn’t know, but to think of running all 26.2188 miles, all at once, could be pretty overwhelming. And if you’ve ever read a passage from the Bible that just didn’t seem to make any sense, or had a time in your life when it seemed as though God didn’t come through for you, or you were tempted to just give up trying to follow Jesus, you know that feeling. You’re overwhelmed, and we wonder how we’ll ever hold on to our faith in the midst of the complexities and pandemics of life.

And that’s were Peter found himself. He’d quit and gone fishin’. You know the guy. The one who answered Jesus’ supernatural statements with in-the-natural answers. The one who wanted so badly for his screw-ups to be the secret kind, only to have them aired out for the whole world to see. But there’s another characteristic in this impetuous, impulsive, impassioned fisherman that I really admire: his randomness. You get the impression that Peter may have been a handful growing up; pity his mother trying to get him to do his homework, for instance, or getting him to plan ahead since Peter was pretty much a ready, fire, aim kind of guy.

So here’s the scene from John 21. Jesus has been crucified and raised from the dead. Peter, having denied the Lord publicly, had become a reproach and embarrassment to Jesus and to his companions. But he’d also met the risen Christ and experienced the wonder of being forgiven by Jesus. So what’s Mr. Randomness to do now? “I’m going fishing,” he says. (John 21:3) Seriously? No meditating on the theological ramifications of what they’d just seen and heard? No “I told you so” sermon prep for the Scribes? “We’ll go with you,” six other disciples said. How’s that for discipleship?

And  in a scene right out of a ministry playbook, the boys fished all night and caught nothing. So, as the sun was rising over the Sea of Galilee, a friendly fellow calls from the shore and asks whether they’d caught anything. “No,” they answered. Well, “cast the net on the right side of the boat,” said the friendly voice. Hey, wait a minute…. “It’s the Lord!” John said to Peter, and out the boat Mr. Impulsive flew, clothes and all, leaving the others to haul in the 153 large fish. Eventually, the others get to shore and discover Jesus has the Traeger going, and bread and fish on the barbie. “Bring me some of the fish you’ve caught,” Jesus says, insisting that they have some buy-in to this breakfast.

So, there you have it. And what a breakfast. Don’t you just figure that they laughed with wonder and joy and gratitude and, perhaps, relief? And The Randomizer? This was right up his alley; he ate surprises for breakfast. Funny thing is that he didn’t know that he was in for another one. After bellies were full and the conversation slows, Peter becomes aware of those eyes looking at him again. The last time he’d felt a gaze like that a rooster crowed at his cheating heart, and Simon Peter went from The Rock to the ruined. And now here were those same quiet eyes, fixed on him …. again.

In this scene, Christianity’s most public failure is confronted by a God of mercy and purpose. Three times he’s asked by the one he denied, “Do you love me?” Unfortunately, a little is lost in the English translation. But the language pattern in the Greek is pretty interesting. It goes like this: “Peter, do you love me?” “Yes, I like you.” “Peter, do you love me?” “Yes, I like you.” “Peter, do you like me?” “Yes, I love you.” And the challenge to Peter was always the same: Shepherd my people; feed my sheep; graze my lambs.

Just like Peter, we will all answer to the holiness and mercy of the Lord Jesus for our failures. But the predominant issue to God is always the love relationship we share. You see, God is willing to meet us where we are (“like”), in order to lead us to where we’re supposed to go (“love”). And the calling of God is irrevocable: Peter was still called to lead, even though the idea of his disqualification was of Peter’s own invention, and the priority of people in the heart of the Lord Jesus is to “Feed my sheep;” “shepherd my people;” and “graze my lambs.”

Living in a world of just desserts, Peter would have been permanently branded a failure. But the Random Angler discovered he was living in a different world – the world of Fish for Breakfast. He lived in a world where the Savior he denied and betrayed and failed, was waiting to serve him and eager to point out where the fresh fish could be found. Wanting to hear Peter say what Jesus already knew: “Peter, do you love me?” “You know I do.”

Peter had betrayed Christ three times, and he knew that he didn’t deserve Christ’s love. But Jesus loved him and forgave him. He made him breakfast on the shore and they fellowshipped together. Then, when Peter responded in love and repentance to Jesus’ love, Christ not only forgave him for the betrayal, but put his trust in him by making him responsible for his own sheep. Peter, who betrayed Christ so openly in his worst hour, was not only forgiven, but became a rock of the church he was asked to lead with the help of the other disciples.

I wonder what Jesus knew that we don’t, or maybe what Peter didn’t? Maybe Jesus knew that arrogant shepherds lead sheep astray, but broken and repentant ones have learned where the green pastures and still waters are. Maybe Jesus knew that Satan’s desire to sift us like wheat doesn’t thwart God’s scandalous plan to use Satan-sifted people as pillars in the church. Maybe Jesus knew that, regardless of his failures as a leader, even a follower, but a lover of Jesus, this Random Fisherman was still destined to be a fisher-of-men. And that in just a few short days, this man – who always had something to say – would be ablaze with the Holy Spirit and thousands of people would be asking him, of all people, “What do we do?”

And meanwhile, some Pharisee from Galilee whispers to his scribe buddy, “Wonder what got into him?” “Must’ve been the fish he had for breakfast.”

Grace,

Randy

Love Story

 

Love Story

Love Story - Audio/Visual 

She dropped to her knees, then bowed her face to the ground. “How does this happen that you should pick me out and treat me so kindly — me, a foreigner?” Boaz answered her, “I’ve heard all about you — heard about the way you treated your mother-in-law after the death of her husband, and how you left your father and mother and the land of your birth and have come to live among a bunch of total strangers. God reward you well for what you’ve done — and with a generous bonus besides from God, to whom you’ve come seeking protection under his wings.” She said, “Oh sir, such grace, such kindness — I don’t deserve it. You’ve touched my heart, treated me like one of your own. And I don’t even belong here!” (Ruth 2:10-13)

Two figures crested the horizon of the Judean desert. One, an old widow; the other, a young one. Wrinkles crevice the face of the first; desert dust powders the cheeks of both. Ten years earlier a famine had driven Naomi and her husband out of Bethlehem. They’d left their country and immigrated to enemy territory – Moab. There they found fertile soil to farm, and girls for each of their two sons to marry. But then tragedy struck. Naomi's husband died. So did her sons. So, Naomi resolved to return to her hometown of Bethlehem. Ruth, one of her daughters-in-law, was determined to go with her. No money. No possessions. No children. Nothing.

In the twelfth century B.C., a woman's security was found in her husband, and her future was secured by her sons. These two widows had neither; they'd have been lucky to find a bed at Father Joe’s Villages. And although we may be three thousand years from Ruth, our circumstances aren’t really that much different – hopes the size of a splinter, and solutions as scarce as water in the desert. Drought, doubt, debt and disease. It’s a war zone out there, and we ask ourselves if grace actually happens to sick moms, unemployed dads, and penniless widows from “Moab.”

The women shuffled into the village and set about to find some food. Ruth went to a nearby field to scavenge enough grain to make some bread for herself and her mother-in-law. Enter Boaz. Now picture a guy straight out of GQ: square jaw, wavy hair, biceps that flex, pecs that pop, teeth that sparkle and pockets that jingle. His education? Ivy. Jet? Lear. Farm? Extremely profitable. House? Sprawling and paid for. He had no intention of interrupting his charmed, bachelor lifestyle by getting married. But then he saw Ruth. She wasn't the first immigrant to forage grain from his fields, but she was the first to steal his heart. Her glance caught his for a moment, and a moment was all it took.

As fast as you can turn a page in your Bible, Boaz learned her name, story and eHarmony status. He upgraded her workstation, invited her for supper and told his manager to send her home happy. In a word, he gave her grace. At least that’s the word Ruth used: "Oh sir, such grace, such kindness – I don’t deserve it. You've touched my heart, treated me like one of your own. And I don't even belong here." (Ruth 2:13) That evening, Ruth left with thirty pounds of grain and a smile she couldn't wipe off her face. When she arrived home, such as it was, Ruth told Naomi about her adventure and Naomi recognized the name. And then she recognized the opportunity. "Boaz . . . Boaz,” she mumbled as she drummed her fingers on their meager table. “That name sounds familiar. Hmmmmm. That’s it! Now I remember. He's Rahab's boy! Ruth, Boaz is one of our cousins!" And then Naomi's head began to spin with possibilities.

This being harvest season, Boaz would be eating dinner with the men and spending the night on the threshing floor to protect his crop from thieves. So Naomi told Ruth, "Wash and perfume yourself, and put on your best clothes. Then go down to the threshing floor, but don't let him know you are there until he has finished eating and drinking. When he lies down, note the place where he’s lying. Then go and uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what to do." (3:3-4) Pardon me while I wipe the steam from my readers. How did this midnight, Moabite seduction get into the Bible? Boaz – full bellied and sleepy; Ruth – bathed and perfumed. “He’ll tell you what to do?” Really? What was Naomi thinking?

She was thinking it was time for Ruth to get on with her life. Ruth was still grieving the death of her husband. When Naomi told her to "put on your best clothes," she used a phrase that describes the clothing worn after a time of mourning. In other words, as long as Ruth was dressed in black, Boaz – respectable man that he was – would keep his distance. New clothing, on the other hand, would signal Ruth's re-entrance into society by changing out of her clothes of sorrow. Kind of like a debutante. Of course, Naomi was also thinking about the law of the kinsman-redeemer. Here’s the law in a nutshell.

If a man died without children, his property was left to his brother – not his wife. This kept the land in the family, but it also left the widow vulnerable. So, to protect her, the law required the brother of the deceased to marry the childless widow. If, on the other hand, the deceased husband had no brother, his nearest male relative was to provide for the widow, but he didn't have to necessarily marry her. The law kept the property in the family and gave the widow protection and, sometimes, a husband. While Naomi and Ruth had no living children, they did have a cousin. Boaz. It was worth the gamble.

"So she [Ruth] went down to the threshing floor and did everything her mother-in-law told her to do. When Boaz had finished eating and drinking and was in good spirits, he went over to lie down at the far end of the grain pile." (vv. 6-7) Ruth lingered in the shadows, watching the men wander off to bed, one by one. Soon, laughter and conversation gave way to snoring. And that’s when Ruth made her move. She stepped carefully between the lumps of sleeping men in the direction of Boaz. Upon reaching him, she "uncovered his feet and lay down. In the middle of the night something startled the man, and he turned and discovered a woman lying at his feet." (vv. 7-8) “Startled” is probably an understatement.

This gesture was roughly equivalent to the giving of an engagement ring. "'I am your servant Ruth,' she said. 'Spread the corner of your garment over me, since you are a kinsman-redeemer.'" (v. 9) Pretty gutsy move because Boaz was under no obligation whatsoever to marry her; he was a relative, but not Elimelech’s brother. Besides, Ruth was a foreigner and he was a prominent landowner. She was a destitute alien and he was a local power broker. "Will you cover us?" she asked him. Boaz just smiled.

The next day, Boaz convened a meeting of ten city leaders. He summoned another man who, as it turned out, was actually a closer relative of Naomi than Boaz. And when Boaz told the closer relative about the property, the man jumped at his rights of first refusal and agreed to purchase the property. But then Boaz showed him the fine print: "On the day you buy the land from Naomi and from Ruth the Moabitess, you acquire the dead man's widow in order to maintain the name of the dead with his property." (4:5) The land, in other words, came with strings attached – an old widow woman and an illegal alien. The relative balked, and we have a hunch that Boaz probably knew that he would.

Ruth's story is your story; our story. We all wear robes of death. She buried her husband; we've buried our dreams, desires and aspirations. We're out of options. But our Boaz has taken note of us. Just as the landowner approached Ruth, Christ came to us "while we were yet sinners." (Rom. 5:8) He made the first move. "Will you cover us?" we asked, and Grace smiled. Not just mercy, mind you, but grace.

You see, grace goes beyond mercy. Mercy gave Ruth some food; grace gave her a husband and a home. Mercy gave the prodigal son a second chance; grace threw him a party. Mercy prompted the Samaritan to bandage the wounds of the victim; grace prompted him to leave his credit card as payment for the victim's care. Mercy forgave the thief on the cross; grace escorted him into paradise. Ruth's story is a picture of how grace happens in hard times. Jesus is your kinsman-redeemer. He spotted you in the wheat field, ramshackled by heartache and hurt, and he’s resolved to romance your heart. Feeling marginalized and discarded? Others may think so. Even you may think so. But God sees in you a masterpiece. He will do with you what Vik Muniz did with the garbage pickers of Gramacho.

Not that long ago, Jardim Gramacho was the Godzilla of garbage dumps. What Rio de Janeiro discarded, Gramacho took. And what Gramacho took, catadores scavenged. About three thousand garbage pickers scraped a living out of the rubbish, salvaging 200 tons of recyclable scraps daily. They trailed the never-ending convoy of trucks, trudging up the mountains of garbage and then sliding down the other, snagging scraps along the way. Plastic bottles, tubes, wires and paper were sorted and sold to wholesalers who stood at the edge of the dump. Across the bay, the Christ the Redeemer statue extends his arms toward Rio's million-dollar beachfront apartments along the Ipanema and Copacabana beaches. Tourists flock to the beaches; but no one comes to a dump. No one except for Vik Muniz.

This Brazilian-born artist convinced five garbage workers to pose for individual portraits. Suelem, an eighteen-year-old mother of two. Isis, a recovering drug addict. Zumbi, who read every book he found in the trash. Irma, who cooked discarded produce in large pots and then sold it. And Tiao, who organized the workers into an association. Muniz took photos of their faces then enlarged the images to the size of a basketball court. He and the five catadores outlined the facial features with trash. Bottle tops became eyebrows. Cardboard boxes became chin lines. Rubber tires overlaid shadows. Images gradually emerged from the trash. Muniz then climbed onto a 30’ platform and took new photos. The result? The second-most-popular art exhibit in Brazilian history, exceeded only by the works of Picasso. Vik donated the profits to the local garbage pickers' association, and treated Gramacho with grace.

Grace does that. God does that. Grace is God walking into your world with a sparkle in his eye and an offer that's hard to resist. "Sit still for a bit. I can do wonders with this mess of yours." Believe his promise. Trust it. Cling like a barnacle to every hope and covenant. Imitate Ruth and then get busy. Go to your version of the grain field and get to work. This is no time for inactivity or despair. Off with the mourning clothes. Take some chances; take the initiative. You never know what might happen. Ruth's troubled life helped give birth to grace incarnate. Who's to say yours won't do the same?

Grace,

Randy