Washing Feet

(Some housekeeping matters first… This is the last of the 2016 Lenten Devotionals. Going forward, I will be posting thoughts on various topics once a week. I encourage you to check back here and become a part of the discussion. Also, it has come to my attention that those who access the blog on their mobile devices have a hard time finding the +Follow button. I realize it takes some effort but it’s there. The benefits of following the blog is that the blog comes to you, in your email, every time I post something. If you are interested in following the blog but don’t want the hassle of looking for that pesky button, comment on this post with your email and I will make sure you get them in your email going forward. Your email will be kept secret and your privacy guarded, I promise. With that said, Happy Easter to all of you, my dear friends. Now read on!)  

Today is Maundy Thursday, or Holy Thursday, if you prefer. I prefer Maundy Thursday myself. This is another one of those holy days leading up to Good Friday and of course, Easter morning. What is Maundy Thursday you ask? It’s the remembrance of what Jesus did for his disciples before instituting the last supper. The word ‘Maundy’ originates from the Middle English word ‘maunde.’ This is related to the Latin ‘mandatum’ which means command or mandate. Jesus washed his disciples’ feet, explained his actions action and encouraged, ‘mandated’ that his disciples do the same for each other (John 13:12-17)

Truth be told, this act of foot washing, now heralded and recognized as one of the most intimate and pivotal moments in Jesus’ life and in his relationship with his disciples, only occurs in John’s gospel. Matthew, Mark and Luke don’t even mention it. Perhaps this is because washing someone’s feet dirtied by walking on dusty roads was a task so menial that even slaves were not required to perform it. In writing their gospels, First Mark, then Matthew and Luke focused on the ‘larger than life’ Jesus who was portrayed in a divine light. But John knew a different side of Jesus and was determined to tell us about it.

Peter knew Jesus, or saw him, as a figure of might and power. One who commands the seas and elements to obey him, drive out demons, and intimidates both the Romans and the Jewish leaders. Judas saw Jesus as a meal ticket and a way to rise to the top of the food chain. The other disciples had their own expectations and saw Jesus as a figure of their own design. But John saw Jesus differently. John saw Jesus for the person he tried to be. John saw the loving, compassionate, humble Jesus, who lowered himself to the point where Peter (who saw the powerful and mighty Jesus) protested such a humiliating, servile act.

What makes Maundy Thursday maundy is that Jesus, according to John, gave his disciples and example to follow and told us to do the same. Obviously, this doesn’t mean that we wash each other’s feet literally. It’s what it represents. It’s what the Christian faith represents. That’s the point of Maundy Thursday.

The Christian faith is all about service, even to the point of humiliation. It’s a faith that asks not ‘what’s in it for me?’ or ‘what have you done for me lately? #JanetJackson. Instead it asks, ‘what have you done for others’ in need lately?’ How do our actions reflect the loving, compassionate, humble Jesus? To be a Christian or a person of faith is to be like Jesus, who sought neither fame nor power, but lived to show others the way to life, freedom and peace. He washed his disciples’ feet for crying out loud! Isn’t it about time that we practice what Jesus practiced ourselves in doing works of justice and works of righteousness? Given the climate of today’s culture and recent politics, this may be hard to grasp and even harder to practice, but this is our Maunde, our Mandatum. Go wash someone’s feet.

“Lord, make me an instrument of thy peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
Where there is sadness, joy.

O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console,
To be understood as to understand,
To be loved as to love;
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
It is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life.”

– Francis of Assisi

 

 

Forgiveness for Lent

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

A few days from Palm Sunday, heading into Passion Week let’s turn our attention to forgiveness; a necessary and vital component of our existence. Suffice it to say that without forgiveness, we would NEVER experience peace. It is so critical to our survival like food and water that it’s a wonder why we don’t obsess about like we do what we eat or what we drink.

Forgiveness is what makes relationships at its most basic level possible. Hence, one could make a very strong argument that the concept of forgiveness is what made civilization possible. Forgiveness at some level, paved the way for people to look past differences, grievances and conflicts to see the benefits of building communities for protection and mutual profit. Look at what wild animals do. If you’re a lion or lioness, caught in another pride’s territory… it’s kill or be killed. It’s that simple. Understanding strength in numbers, early nomadic tribes became communities, cities, and eventually states.

Admittedly, laws played a huge role in maintaining peace in these communities. But let’s not forget that laws were basically rules of engagement for the sake of protection, even today. So in the bible we read…

“Now suppose two men are fighting, and in the process they accidentally strike a pregnant woman so she gives birth prematurely. If no further injury results, the man who struck the woman must pay the amount of compensation the woman’s husband demands and the judges approve. But if there is further injury, the punishment must match the injury: a life for a life, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a wound for a wound, a bruise for a bruise.” Exodus 21:22-25

The law’s function and purpose is to encourage equanimity, provide protection, and restore balance and justice. It’s need is established by the fact that if left up to our own devices we would extract MORE than an eye or a tooth, inflict MORE than the number of burns, wounds and bruises we suffer. If we were the cause of others’ suffering, the law would protect us from revenge that would leave us with no eyes, no teeth, etc. etc. In short, the law forces us to practice constraint as the wounded and as a perpetrator.

Underlying all of this is forgiveness. The offended must legally forgive the offender beyond the compensation allowed by the law. Imagine what the world would be like without forgiveness even at this, most basic, level. None of us would be here. If we were, we would all be blind and toothless.

But while laws protect us from others and they from us, there are no laws unfortunately that protect us from… ourselves. Isn’t that ironic? There is this assumption that we don’t need protection from ourselves. This is not true. I can understand the difficulty with such laws. How would they even be enforced? Here’s what I’m getting at. People are ugly to each other yes. But some of the worst offense done to a person is what we do to ourselves. We forgive others, but have a hard time forgiving ourselves.

What bothers me sometimes about spirituality is the understanding that it helps us to forgive others. While that is all true, it’s not the complete picture of spirituality. The saying is ‘love your neighbor AS you love yourself.’ This can be taken two ways.

One, it implies that you love yourself already (not narcissistically, but in a ‘healthy self image’ way), in which case, forgiving yourself shouldn’t be a problem apart from the occasional self loathing or criticism. Generally, you are good to yourself and can move on from a minor infraction. Two, you are growing in your love of yourself. So while you’re not quite good at forgiving yourself yet, you’re on your way. Either way, you’re supposed to love yourself, which means forgiving yourself as you forgive others.

What does it mean when you ‘feel’ you can’t accept others’ forgiveness or forgive your self? Well this could mean that you’re really proud of your unworthiness. Declaring that you’re TOO unworthy to receive or accept forgiveness of any kind puts you in a category entirely unto yourself (and others like yourself). This is a very, very special category! Why, there must’ve been only a hundred or so people like you in all of history! It’s an exclusive group so special that forgiveness doesn’t apply to you. Honey/bro, no one is THAT special. Come down from your tower and grace us lowly, humble people with your presence.

There is some sick sense of prestige that comes from thinking we’re so unworthy. No offender is worthy of forgiveness. But it is given so that there may be peace. And when given, the only reasonable and rational response is to accept the grace offered to you. Receiving grace for ourselves is where it starts if we are to ever offer it to others. As we head into Passion week keep in mind that it is forgiveness that we’re after. Forgiveness in our families, our relationships, our politics, our culture, and forgiveness for our… Peace.

Pain & Death

In the last post, We discussed Fear. We touched briefly on what people are generally afraid of; ‘the fear of the unknown, fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of ridicule, even the fear of not being in fear.’ Let’s define this a little more to help us see the big picture. Fear, as an evolutionary tool of survival, basically kept us from being eaten, mangled, or torn apart by our enemies and wild animals. Fear basically kept us alive. In that vein of thought, I think it would be safe to say that what we’re afraid of is death, literally and metaphorically.

Let’s play a little game. Identify a fear you have, any fear. Then say to yourself; I’m afraid of ‘A’ (your fear) because ‘B’ (what that fear implies). I’m afraid of ‘B’ because of ‘C’. I’m afraid of ‘C’ because ‘D’. You see where this is going. Ride that train of thought. Now, your train may be shorter or longer than others’ but no matter who you are, you will eventually end up where everyone else ends up. At the end of the day fear is a mechanism designed to keep us alive. It’s all about survival, i.e., avoiding death and/or pain at the very least. Getting to the point, isn’t pain/death what we’re all afraid of? Our fear of pain and death manifests in different, and oh so very creative ways, but essentially we’re all trying to avoid pain and death, both literal and metaphorical.

So we turn to faith, religion, and spirituality to calm us and give us peace. But where so many are wrong is in thinking or believing that our faith is there to help us avoid pain and death. This kind of thinking or faith is counterintuitive. The practice of avoidance is not only counterintuitive but also counterproductive. The meatheads at the gym (and I use this term with the utmost respect for meatheads) understand this better than many people of faith. They grunt and sweat the words ‘no pain, no gain.’ So true, so true. If you want to grow and get better, pain is an essential part of the process.

So, Faith is not about avoiding pain and death. It’s about trust to help us overcome our FEAR of pain and death. We pray asking God to help us avoid the pain, or at least take it away when we’re experiencing it. Pain is a part of pleasure as death is a part of life. They’re just different degrees of one experience. For example, the pain that the aforementioned meatheads experience at the gym is real, but is deemed ‘pleasurable’ even desirable, because of the benefits and results they hope to see from it. It’s all the same thing on opposite ends of the experience spectrum.

We expend so much energy in seeking out the ‘pleasurable’ and as much energy if not more, in avoidance of the ‘painful.’ Remember, God never said there would only be sunny days. Into each life a little rain must fall, or sometimes a lot of rain. Sometimes they’re of our own doing, other times as a consequence of others’ doing. Either way, the question is not ‘how do I avoid this cup?’ but ‘what is it that I can learn as I endure it?’

It is human to attempt avoidance of pain and death. But faith teaches us not to avoid the ‘valley.’ It teaches us to trust that we are not alone as we go through it.

Faith teaches us, ‘Fear not, for I am with you. I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ ‘Yea, ‘tho I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.’ ‘And lo, I will be with you even unto the end of the age.’ Pain and death comes to everyone. It’s foolishness to think otherwise. We do not have to deal with it alone tho. And that’s the point of having faith.

Seeing and Believing: Blessed are those who have not seen…

The thing that I think most people get wrong about faith is the part about believing. Most people think believing has all to do with acknowledging something’s or someone’s existence. For example, according to pewresearch.org about 90% of Americans believe in God. Additionally, what most people mean by a ‘profession of faith’ is that, not only do they believe in God, but 1. That Jesus is the Son of God, 2. That he came to die for our sins and did so on the cross, and 3. If we believe this event actually took place then our souls will go to heaven after it leaves behind this mortal coil, the stuff altar calls are made of.

But I ask you, what does believing in these assertions have to do salvation? Without trusting that they are true, what does it matter? What people fail to realize, and what churches fail to teach is that, at the end of the day it’s not the veracity of these assertions we are claiming faith in, it is the hope they give us that make us ‘believers.’ And it matters little that they are factual or historical without trust. Faith is not ‘believing in,’ but ‘trusting in’ these assertions.

When the ‘faithful’ begin to doubt in the literality of these assertions and question them, they are, all of a sudden, deemed ‘unfaithful.’ The good news (the gospel of Alec, haha!) is that the historical accuracy of these assertions and our faith, as trust in God, are not mutually inclusive. What that means is, Christian spirituality has very little to do with historical facts, and more to do with the decision to live our lives in imitation (obedience) of Jesus. People get hung up on historicity, because of a popular but erroneous notion that all must be literally true or else our faith is void. That’s just simply not true, and the ‘Christian faithful’ are misled.

No one knows, nor will ever know, and fewer people care, for that matter, whether these events are true. Those who believe them, simply do because they choose to, not because they are ‘true.’ The truth is, we don’t know very much about what actually happened in the life and ministry of Jesus, if we know anything at all.

Perhaps Jesus understood the nature of trust, the basis of all relationships, better than we know; to Thomas who proclaimed “I won’t believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them, and place my hand into the wound in his side”, Jesus said, ‘blessed are those who have not seen me and yet believe.’ (John 20:24-29)

Faith is not about Seeing then believing, it’s really the other way around. It’s about Believing then seeing.

The Gospel: Part 2

The gospel that most people are familiar with, the popular one, is the one involving the third chapter of John’s sixteenth verse; “For this is how God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son, so that everyone who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life.” (New Living Translation) I can’t even begin to tell you how misinterpreted and misunderstood this verse is (That’s for another blog post).

How did we get away from Luke 4:18 where Jesus himself tells us what the gospel really is? It really started with Paul. Paul never met Jesus, he was just a dude who took on the mission of killing his followers until he himself ‘met’ Jesus on the road to Damascus and was convinced he was playing for the wrong team. But when he went to the Christians he wanted to kill just days before, they taught him about Jesus. Remember, there was no writings about Jesus at the time; no Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. All he had to go on was the oral teachings of Jesus that was being passed around at the time. One of the prevalent messages that the first century Christians shared was the imminent return of Christ (John 21:23)

Armed with this belief and his new found zeal, Paul set out to save as many people as he could before the second coming of Christ. For Paul it was about believing that Jesus was the Son of God, the Messiah, the wisdom of God. Paul began to preach the gospel, his gospel, the good news about Jesus. But the gospel of Jesus, the one he came to preach was good news for the poor. It was not about himself.

To live out the gospel of Jesus Christ is simple; care for the people Jesus cared about. To me, a true disciple of Jesus is one who lives the life Jesus modeled, and makes disciples who do the same. It’s those who do works of justice, who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and imprisoned, those who are a voice for the voiceless, strength for the weak, who stand for those who cannot stand up for themselves. It’s people like Mother Teresa and Martin Luther King Jr. They lived out the gospel of Jesus, while others such as Billy Graham and other so-called ‘evangelists’ preach Paul’s gospel about Jesus.

If we’re going to be a disciple of Jesus, shouldn’t we focus on imitating Jesus and living out his gospel, rather than Paul’s gospel about?

The Gospel: Part 1

When people hear the word ‘gospel’ the verse that comes to their mind first (if anything comes to mind at all), is probably John 3:16, thanks to the weird guy with those signs at sporting events. I want to clarify the meaning of the word ‘gospel.’ The etymology of the word itself, in its English form is a synthesis of two old English words ‘god’ (gōd, or good) and ‘spell’ (news or story). In Greek the word is ‘evangelion’, (εὐαγγέλιον) which also means ‘good news.’

Now, without getting too complicated, let’s address the difference between the Gospel of Jesus, i.e., what Jesus himself preached according to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, and the Gospel about Jesus, consistent of most of what follows in the rest of the New Testament (Let’s not even get into Paul’s gospel here. Books have been written about this topic. Go read one of them).

 

 

The Gospel of Jesus is found in Luke 4:16-19 where it says;
16 When he came to the village of Nazareth, his boyhood home, he went as usual to the synagogue on the Sabbath and stood up to read the Scriptures. 17 The scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where this was written: (Isaiah 61:1-2a)
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
    for he has anointed me to bring Good News to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim that captives will be released,
    that the blind will see,
that the oppressed will be set free,
19 and that the time of the Lord’s favor has come.” (New Living Translation)

Hence the Gospel of Jesus has these 5 components:
1. Jesus came to preach Good News to the poor
2. Captives will be released
3. The blind will see
4. Oppressed set free
5. The time of the Lord’s favor has come

This is his message to the people of Nazareth and to the world; that Jesus cares about and identifies with the poor, that those living in real and virtual prisons will be released, they will find wisdom, and the abused, neglected, abandoned, marginalized, ostracized will be set free from their pains, and the time of the Lord’s favor (Year of Jubilee, Leviticus 25) has come for them, which happened once every 50 years, in which slaves and prisoners would be set free, debts would be forgiven and the mercies of God be realized by all.

THIS is the gospel of Jesus.

It’s what Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine calls the (Christian) Nazareth Manifesto. Here, in this excerpt from a 2008 interview with Krista Tippett on her podcast ‘Speaking of Faith’ Jim Wallis says,

“Jesus’ first sermon at Nazareth. I call it his mission statement. He says, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me,” it’s His Nazareth manifesto. “Because He has anointed me to preach good news to the poor.” That’s what it says, “good news to the poor.” And so, I want to say, whatever else our gospel is, … if our gospel is not good news to the poor, it’s simply not the gospel of Jesus Christ. Conservative Evangelicals in America have created a Jesus who is pro-rich, pro-war, and only pro-American. That… is a distortion, a misrepresentation of the Jesus of the Bible.” (to read the full transcript or to hear the podcast click here)

God is not an American! (God is Korean! Haha!!)

Christians are disciples of Jesus Christ, and no other not Paul, not prosperity. As disciples, we are supposed live out the gospel Jesus preached; the gospel of hope, healing and wholeness. If we are living out some other gospel then we cannot say that we are disciple. But sadly, this is not where the Christian church is today.

(Part 2, this Thursday)