“You’re on the Air“ - September 1, 2019

Luke 14:12-14

            Of all the television shows and radio programs that have gone off the air, one of those that I miss the most is “Car Talk”, from NPR.  Two brothers who ran a repair shop, Bob and Ray Magliazzi, would take calls about spark plugs and gas additives and body work that would eventually turn into discussions about the caller’s relationship to her mother-in-law or the origins of baking soda or how to talk to the IRS about some overdue payments.  They took calls from anybody.  One time someone called them from the space shuttle.

            So, what would it be like, I wonder, if Jesus had a show like that? 

Jesus:   Hello, you’re in the – I’m mean, you’re on the air. 

Mark:  Hi, this is Mark.  I’m calling from Phoenixville.

Jesus:   Yes, I know.

Mark:  Yeah, sorry about that.

Jesus:   Hey, it’s okay.  The listeners don’t know.  By the way, did you know your number comes up on caller ID as “SPAM”?

Mark:  What?!

Jesus:   Just kidding.  Relax.  What can I do for you?

Mark:  Well, I had this really weird experience a few weeks ago that I thought you could help me sort out.

Jesus:   Which one?

Mark:  The soup kitchen thing.

Jesus:   Oh, that!  That was a good one!

Mark:  Yeah, well…

Jesus:   Go ahead and tell everybody what happened.  I know some of these folks were there, but most weren’t.

Mark:  Okay, so back in July, it was a hot Monday night and we were serving dinner in the basement of St. Peter’s.

Jesus:   Chili, wasn’t it?

Mark:  No, it was hot.

Jesus:   The chili?

Mark:  No, the weather.

Jesus:   Yes.

Mark:  Which?

Jesus:   The chili.

Mark:  What?  The weather was hot.  We were serving chili.  The chili was mild. 

Jesus:   You weren’t serving chili.  You were serving people.

Mark:  Yes, but chili was on the menu.

Jesus:   Does that have anything to do with the story?

Mark:  No, not really.

Jesus:   Then forget about it.  Just go on.

Mark:  Anyway.  When the meal was over, one of the guests just walked into the kitchen while we were cleaning up.

Jesus:   I know him.  He can be a bother, can’t he?  I think he asked you when you would start serving seconds about every ten minutes the whole evening.

Mark:  You do know him.

Jesus:   Hey!  You’re surprised?

Mark:  True.

Jesus:   So go on.  He walks into the kitchen, which is your space, behind the counter that you keep between you and the clientele, so that there’s a sharp division and you can keep some kind of sense of being in charge and convey that to others.

Mark:  Now, that’s not fair.  There would be chaos if everyone could wander around the cooking and serving area.

Jesus:   Am I totally off base?  I mean, totally?

Mark:  Never mind. 

Jesus:   I thought so.  Go on.  He walks into the kitchen.

Mark:  He walks into the kitchen and asks for a pair of pliers.

Jesus:   What for?

Mark:  He didn’t say.  I was just kind of taken off-balance.  I mean, why would I carry pliers with me to the soup kitchen?

Jesus:   Maybe you should.

Mark:  What for?

Jesus:   Just finish the story.  You and I know, but the listening public is waiting with bated breath.

Mark:  Anyway, I told him there were no pliers but asked why he needed them.

Jesus:   There was your mistake.  You went beyond his question.  You connected – always a dangerous moment.  One time there was this guy named Zacchaeus, who had climbed a tree … no, let’s hear your story.

Mark:  This man pulls out a stool from the counter, swings his right foot up over his left knee, and starts waving the bottom of his sneaker around to show me something.

Jesus:   Which was?

Mark:  There was a piece of wire sticking out.  So I took my keys out of my pocket and used one of them as sort of a lever to pull on it.  It came out easily, which made me wonder why he didn’t just pull it out himself instead of waving his stinky shoe all over in front of my face.  The part I had pulled had a rounded end but the part that came out looked like a paper clip that had snapped off when you bend it.  I told him I thought there might still be a piece of wire stuck in the sole of his sneaker and showed it to him.  That’s when he said, no, it was the whole thing, and I looked closer and saw that it was a fishhook.

Jesus:   Those things can be dangerous.  I used to spend a lot of time around fishermen.  I was always relieved that those guys generally used nets.  Peter was incredibly clumsy.  Nobody ever tells you that.  That’s one reason I got nervous about him carrying a knife.  I always told him to be careful he didn’t cut off his finger.  Instead, he ended up cutting off somebody’s ear and I had to reattached it under some very difficult circumstances.  But this fishhook?

Mark:  I didn’t exactly expect a fishhook in Phoenixville.

Jesus:   Why not?

Mark:  I just didn’t.

Jesus:   How did it get there?

Mark:  He stepped on it, obviously.

Jesus:   In Phoenixville?

Mark:  Yes.

Jesus:   So it must not be so unusual.

Mark:  Yes, well, the guy said that he wasn’t surprised because there were fishhooks all over down 

            there.

Jesus:  Down where?

Mark:  I would guess by the canal or the creek.

Jesus:   You didn’t ask?

Mark:  No, I didn’t ask.

Jesus:   Why not?

Mark:  I guess I had heard enough.

Jesus:   You mean that you didn’t want to hear more.

Mark:  Now, come on.

Jesus:   No, you brought this whole thing up.  Let’s finish it.  You had your suspicions and didn’t want to hear more.  You didn’t really want to know more about what this guy’s life is really like, that maybe there are people hanging out under the bridge or someplace in unpleasant conditions, for whatever reason sent them there (and we won’t even go into that right now).  You just wanted to do your good deed for the day because you were tired or whatever, to hand someone some chili and a salad – which is a good thing, don’t get me wrong – but then not to have to deal with the bigger problems that cannot be solved in fifteen minutes and require you to see a person, not just a shoe that makes a weird tapping sound.

Mark:  Why do you always do this?

Jesus:   It’s my job.  Listen, if you really want to get this whole discipleship thing right, here’s how it goes: 

“When you give a luncheon or a dinner, do not invite your friends or your brothers or your relatives or rich neighbors, in case they may invite you in return, and you would be repaid.  But when you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind.  And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you, for you will be repaid at the resurrection of the righteous.”  [Luke 14:12-14]

If you’re doing something to make someone happy and to help people out, that’s great.  Only, you’ve got to do it for them, not yourself, not for the warm fuzzies or anything like that.  And sometimes you may not like what you see, about them or about yourself.  And that’s okay.

Mark:  Okay?

Jesus:   Yes, because it’s not your job to make those calls, and I tend to be more understanding than you are.  And speaking of calls, I think we have a few other folks on the line, so I’m going to let you go.

Mark:  Thanks for your time.

Jesus:   You’re welcome.  Just don’t think I’m letting you off the hook.  Ha, ha, ha!   Take it easy now!  And let’s go to Sunil in Sri Lanka.  You’re in the – on the air. …

"Only" - August 25, 2019

Jeremiah 1:4-8

            A very sad poem came up on my facebook feed this week.  It said,

“I’m very ugly

So don’t try to convince me that

I am a very beautiful person

Because at the end of the day

I hate myself in every single way

And I’m not going to lie to myself by saying

There is beauty inside of me that matters

So rest assured that I will remind myself

That I am a worthless, terrible person

And nothing you say will make me believe

I still deserve love

Because no matter what

I am not good enough to be loved

And I am in no position to believe that

Beauty does exist within me

Because whenever I look in the mirror I always think

Am I as ugly as people say?”[1]

Some people have to fight very hard not to fall into that mindset.  A lot of people slip into it, and then spend a lot of time denying it.  I cannot help but think of Michael Jackson, and the ridiculous and pitiable lengths he went to change his appearance across his lifetime.  Why?  He must have internalized ideas about what someone in his position “should” look like – their hairstyle, skin color, the shape of their nose, the contours of their cheeks.  It’s hard not to say that he was trying to look more European.  If he was, it didn’t work.  In the end, you are who you are, and everyone is made in the image of God, which has nothing to do with physical appearance at all.  When you try to be someone you are not, you make things harder on yourself and, in fact, you may start getting in the way of God’s idea of how things should be.

            The prophet Jeremiah wrote about his sense of God’s calling, which came to him early in life.  Some people have to wait years and decades.  Not him.  As he tells it,

“Now the word of the Lord came to me, saying,

‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born I consecrated you;

I appointed you a prophet to the nations.’

Then I said, ‘Ah, Lord God!  Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only a boy.’” [Jeremiah 1:4-6]

It’s that word “only” that gets in the way. 

            How could the child Samuel have heard God call out to him in the middle of the night while the experienced and capable priest Eli was asleep just in the next room?  Two times, when God called out, “Samuel!  Samuel!”  Samuel responded by waking Eli up and saying, “What do you want?”  Eli, however, was experienced and he was capable, so he knew to tell the boy that it might just be the Lord speaking to him and he should listen.

            Samuel, when he was older, and had followed the path of a prophet of God for many years, was sent to find someone who would become king after Saul had turned out to be a poor choice.  He was sent to the sons of Jesse, and they were introduced to him one by one, from the oldest to the youngest.  The Lord kept saying to him, “Not this one, not that one.”  Finally, he said to Jesse, “Is this everybody?” and Jesse said, “There is one more, but he’s just a kid.  He’s out somewhere watching our sheep.”  Samuel wouldn’t eat or rest till he had met him, too.  The young shepherd’s name was David, and God said, “This is the one.”

            “Only.”  A lot would never have happened if God took that word as seriously as we do.

            When Jeremiah used it, this is what God said to him:

“Do not say, ‘I am only a boy’;

for you shall go to all to whom I send you,

and you shall speak whatever I command you.

Do not be afraid of them,

for I am with you to deliver you,’

says the Lord.”  [Jeremiah 1:7-8]

Because he took the Lord at his word, Jeremiah was off and running.  He would become the major prophet of God for his time and place, not only when he was a child but well into his late years.

            Today we pay special attention to our students, and to their teachers.  They both find themselves in the odd mix of people that we call the educational system.  It includes folks from all kinds of religious background, and many with no experience of God (at least, as they see it).  They may be asked to explain themselves and their beliefs, and think,

“‘Ah, Lord God!  Truly I do not know how to speak, for I am only…’”

They will be with people who are gifted at sports, art, music, math, and languages; but no one who excels at all of those, and most of whom drop back in at least a couple of those.  In the midst of that, too, they have to know that they are never only.  It isn’t those things that determine who they are.  What matters is what God says about them.

“‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you,

and before you were born I consecrated you.’”

Both teachers and students will have to deal with competing demands on their time and energy.  Some of them will face bureaucrats and some of them will be troubled by bullies.  In short, they will be faced with all the complexities of our society.  They have to figure out how to make their way through all of that with integrity.  There will be days that they jump out of bed, eager to get to school, and days that they want to hide their heads under a pillow and pretend it isn’t happening. 

They are also going to be reminded of possible dangers and asked to develop responses to dangerous situations that will probably never arise for them.  They will be taught to fear.  Last week there was an unfortunate incident, that thankfully ended well, when a SWAT team closed off the area around Lincoln Ave. and Hall St., not far from Barkley.  Our building, along with St. John’s and the YMCA, is a designated place of refuge in case of emergency on the school campus down the street from us.  They hold active shooter drills the way that, when I was a kid, we held nuclear fallout drills.  They are the ones who will have to say to the people around them that, no matter what, God offers a safety that no one else ever could.

“‘Do not be afraid of them,

for I am with you to deliver you,’

says the Lord.”

And it is so easy to think, in the midst of all that they face, that there is nothing they can do to make it better, because at the same time we and they constantly hear from advertisers and social media that we have to fit every ideal and have every new gadget and meet every random and constantly-changing criterion of perfection to be worthwhile.  No, you don’t.  God loves you.  That tells you enough right there.  Whose standards could be higher that God’s?  But, once again, let me say this: “God loves you.”  That is a beauty that nothing can touch.

God doesn’t see things the way that the world does.  God doesn’t do things the way that the world tells us to do them.  The world says to look at the appearance.  God looks at the heart.  The world says to get and hold onto all that you can.  God says to share all that you are able.  The world says to get even.  God says to forgive.  The world says to look down on people.  God says to leave the judgment to him. 

That poem that I started this sermon with, let me read it to you again, not from top to bottom, but from bottom to top, in that backward sort of way that God tells us to see things, and to live.

“Am I as ugly as people say?

Because whenever I look in the mirror I always think

Beauty does exist within me

And I am in no position to believe that

I am not good enough to be loved

Because no matter what

I still deserve love

And nothing you say will make me believe

That I am a worthless, terrible person

So rest assured that I will remind myself

There is beauty inside of me that matters

And I’m not going to lie to myself by saying

I hate myself in every single way

Because at the end of the day

I am a very beautiful person

So don’t try to convince me that

I’m very ugly.”

There is nothing only about anyone made in God’s image, sought out by Jesus, and offered all the blessings of the Holy Spirit.

---

[1] Attributed to Abdullah Shoaib at https://www.facebook.com/Thepopularist/posts/2281597288752901

"When Disaster Hits" - August 18, 2019

II Kings 17:5-8, 18-20

            The writer of II Kings was very matter-of-fact when he reported the destruction of the kingdom of Israel.

“Then the king of Assyria invaded all the land and came to Samaria; for three years he besieged it.  In the ninth year of Hoshea the king of Assyria captured Samaria; he carried the Israelites away to Assyria.  He placed them in Halah, on the Habor, the river of Gozan, and in the cities of the Medes.”  [II Kings 17:5-6]

He also gives a very simplistic explanation for how Israel had gone from one great kingdom under David and Solomon, breaking apart into two kingdoms after Solomon’s death in 922 B.C., and then being swallowed up by the Assyrian Empire two centuries later.

“This occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.  They had worshiped other gods and walked in the customs of the nations whom the Lord drove out before the people of Israel, and the customs that the kings of Israel had introduced.”  [II Kings 17:7-8]

That left, he said, only the kingdom of Judah, the land around Jerusalem.  That southern kingdom, however, was on the same track and would fall in 150 years to the Babylonians who had taken over the Assyrian Empire by then.

            The people who lived through all of this were not as calm about it nor did they see the reasons as being so cut-and-dry.  We don’t know that directly from the people who were enslaved when Samaria fell, because they were intentionally scattered around the lands to the east.  They disappeared into time.  We refer to them, if at all, as the Lost Tribes of Israel.  Their homeland was resettled by strangers who knew nothing of them nor of the God they worshiped.

            From the people of the southern kingdom, though, we know a great deal.  Some of the northerners had fled south, and had taken with them the record of warnings that had been given to them by prophets like Hosea and Amos, warnings that had been mostly ignored.  To these the southerners had added the words of their own prophets, especially a man named Jeremiah, who was there at the end, when Jerusalem fell the way that Samaria had done.  He had survived because he was carried away by a group of refugees who ran from Jerusalem at the last possible moment, like the von Trappes escaped Austria or Einstein was rescued from Switzerland.

            Jeremiah survived to write a book we now call Lamentations.  It is a brutal description of what happened to Jerusalem and its people, and it puts into words the thoughts and emotions of anyone who has struggled with the disappointment that comes from suffering and who is angry with God.  Hear what he had to say (and this is only part of it):

“We have transgressed and rebelled,

and you have not forgiven. 

You have wrapped yourself with anger and pursued us,

killing without pity; 

you have wrapped yourself with a cloud

so that no prayer can pass through.

You have made us filth and rubbish

among the peoples. 

All our enemies

have opened their mouths against us; 

panic and pitfall have come upon us,

devastation and destruction. 

My eyes flow with rivers of tears

because of the destruction of my people. 

My eyes will flow without ceasing,

without respite, 

until the Lord from heaven

looks down and sees. 

My eyes cause me grief

at the fate of all the young women in my city. 

Those who were my enemies without cause

have hunted me like a bird; 

they flung me alive into a pit

and hurled stones on me; 

water closed over my head;

I said, ‘I am lost.’”  [Lamentations 3:42-54]

Bitter?  You bet, and with good reason.

            So why keep his words?  Why preserve the thoughts of someone who one minute pays lip-service to the standard explanation for disaster – that somehow the people deserved it – but who really doesn’t accept that and the next moment is accusing God himself of betrayal?  I’ll suggest two reasons.

            First: because it’s honest.  People really feel this way.  If you have never been there, you are truly blessed or truly oblivious.  We all start out with the notion that good actions lead to good results.  Virtue is rewarded and vice is punished.  (With the accompanying belief that says if you are rewarded, you must be on God’s side and if you are not, then you must have done something wrong.)  As you mature, though, you should begin to question that.  Guilty people go free and innocent people do jail time.  There are fights between thugs and bystanders get killed.  Bombs drop on civilians.  People get sick for no reason.  On and on. 

            The second reason is more important.  If you are screaming at God about the unfairness of life and the injustice of the world and the pain people go through, then you are still in relationship with God.  You may be raging, but deep down you have not given up on God and deep down you believe that God has not given up on you.  You believe that there has got to be a reason or an explanation why a God you know is merciful and kind either causes or allows any of this.  It’s in that struggle that the strongest faith is born, because it is the opposite of indifference.  I’m not saying that God intentionally does this to teach us painful lessons – don’t get me wrong.  I’m saying that God can and does bring good things out of the worst, and that he does that just because, when all is said and done, he is God and we are not.

            The one thing I am not saying is that there is one, simple, clear answer.  God is complicated and the world is complicated and we are complicated.  If I cannot understand myself, how can I understand God?  This is not a cop-out.  This is a recognition of reality, which includes human limitation and helplessness.  When tragedy strikes, personal or national or worldwide, that limitation not only becomes obvious, it becomes painful.

            Healing comes with holding on.  The northern kingdom gave up, and was no more.  The southern kingdom held on, and lamented and cried and questioned, and was restored.  It took a generation or more, and the restoration brought a changed and chastened people with lasting scars on their souls, yet they eventually rebuilt their city and their land and found a richer relationship to the God whom they came to know as a Suffering Servant and a Savior as well as a mighty warrior king.

            It works that way across human experience.  William Sloane Coffin, Jr., for many years a chaplain at Yale and later the senior pastor of Riverside Church in New York, had a son named Alex who got drunk one night and ended up driving his car off the road into Boston Harbor, where he drowned.  Coffin was desolate.  He wrote,

“The reality of grief is the solitude of pain, the feeling that your heart’s in pieces, your mind’s a blank…”[1]

He writes, though, of another reality that stands next to that one.

“‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ Yes, but at least, ‘My God, my God”; and the psalm doesn’t end that way.  As the grief that once seemed unbearable begins to turn now to bearable sorrow, the truths in the ‘right’ [and he puts that in quotation marks] biblical passages are beginning to take hold: ‘Cast thy burden upon the Lord and he shall strengthen thee’; ‘Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning’; ‘Lord, by thy favor thou hast made my mountain to stand strong’; for thou hast delivered my soul from death, mine eyes from tears, and my feet from falling’; ‘In this world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world’; ‘The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.’”[2]

---

[1] William Sloane Coffin, “Epilogue: Alex’s Death” in The Courage to Love (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 95.

[2] Ibid., 97-98.

"What Now?" - August 11, 2019

I Kings 13:14-21

The story of Elisha’s death is part of the story of the death of the kingdom of Israel.  Even though the kingdom would hold on for a few more generations (more about that next week), there’s a sense of foreboding that comes with the way Elisha says, “Goodbye,” to King Joash.  

Joash heard that Elisha was terminally ill, and he went to visit.  He fell into tears, and spoke to him the same way that Elisha had cried out when Elijah was taken into heaven, using the same words: 

“My father, my father!  The chariots of Israel and its horsemen!”  [II Kings 13:14]

But Elisha is not swept up in a fiery chariot, and Joash is not the inheritor of his prophetic leadership.  Instead, there is a scene where Elisha seems to be trying to pass his blessing along, as he places his hands on Joash’s and shoots what he calls “the Lord’s arrow of victory” [13:17], but then foretells that under Joash’s leadership it will turn out to be a limited victory, and that it is somehow Joash’s fault. [13:19]  

        What’s more, no sooner is Elisha buried than invaders from the land of Moab to the southeast begin what appear to become annual raids on Israel.  During one of those raids, something truly strange happens.

“As a man was being buried, a marauding band was seen and the man was thrown into the grave of Elisha; as soon as the man touched the bones of Elisha, he came to life and stood on his feet.”

[II Kings 13:21]

Notice a couple of things about this.  One was that this happened long enough after Elisha’s death that his body had turned to bones.  Another was that this miracle was a one-time event; people didn’t start carrying their recently-deceased Aunt Esther or Uncle Jacob to Elisha’s tomb in expectation of revival.  This wasn’t the discovery of a magic cure-all.  It was a message from the Lord to Israel in the midst of their troubles: if they could touch the bones, the core, of what had held Elisha together, and gave him the strength to hold them together, then they would stand up again.

It was the same message that would come, much later, and in a similar way, when the southern kingdom of Judah had fallen to invaders, and even the city of Jerusalem had been destroyed.  The prophet Ezekiel had a vision:

“The hand of the Lord came upon me, and he brought me out by the spirit of the Lord and set me down in the middle of a valley; it was full of bones.  He led me all around them; there were very many lying in the valley, and they were very dry.  He said to me, ‘Mortal, can these bones live?’ I answered, ‘O Lord God, you know.’ … Then he said to me, ‘Mortal, these bones are the whole house of Israel.  They say, ‘Our bones are dried up, and our hope is lost; we are cut off completely.’  Therefore prophesy and say to them, Thus says the Lord God:  I am going to open your graves, and bring you up from your graves, O my people; and I will bring you back to the land of Israel. …I shall put my spirit within you, and you shall live.’”  [Ezekiel 37:1-3, 11-12, 14]

In time it did happen.  The bare bones of the people, those who survived in captivity in Babylon and Persia and refugees who had fled to Egypt and into the Arabian desert, would in fact find their way back to the land and begin – painfully and against opposition, with some infighting and some fears, but steadily and surely – to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem.  Then they rebuilt their Temple.  

        It was during the same years that they took the words of promise that had been given to them by the prophets and the histories of their ancestors that had been written in books of Kings and in Chronicles of their reigns, along with the stories of their earliest forebears and the laws that they had lived by, and assembled the earliest versions of the scriptures.  They reached out for contact with those who had pointed them to faith and to faithfulness.  As a result, they stood on their feet again.

There would be more disasters, but they had been given tools to survive them.  And anchored by the stories of God’s people and the words of the prophets, there grew an even wider hope.  They heard the promise of a savior, and not just a hero like Samson, a king like David, a judge like Deborah, or a prophet like Jeremiah.  This would be someone who would embody all the hopes and dreams not only of a nation but also of all human beings ever born.

        Centuries later, some of the people who were steeped in those scriptures and anchored in the traditions and life of the people of Israel became convinced that that Savior had been born.  They recorded their own accounts of the good news.  They told how he had found them and invited them to go with him.  They had watched him heal and raise the dead, they heard his teachings and saw the glory of God revealed in him when, transfigured, he spoke with Elijah and Moses.  Then his followers watched him, like the entire kingdom of Israel, die at the hands of its own authorities and a foreign occupier.  Once more, repeating the cycle, it was back to the graveyard, and he was hastily buried.  

        Only, when they went back to finish the burial properly, they found him – they thought – gone.  That was when he spoke to one of them, who at first thought he was the gardener.  Then he showed up inside a locked room where other followers were hiding in fear.  He was spotted by two men walking on the road, who recognized him as he shared bread with them and then vanished.  Another time he met his friends on the beach.  Later on he spoke from heaven to a man named Saul who was on his way to arrest some of his followers in Damascus and turned his life around one-hundred and eighty degrees.  To each of these people, one way or another, he brought new life and new hope.  He lifted each of them up and set them back on their feet.

        Yet all his people rise to find themselves right back in the world as it has been.  The man who stepped out of Elisha’s grave still had to face the marauding parties that were attacking his land.  Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead, went right into the arms of his grieving sisters.  Thomas, who doubted Jesus’ resurrection at first, believed when he saw that Jesus’ wounds were real.  To this day, the people he has given new life by his Spirit, find themselves challenged and put in the front lines where the power of God’s love and grace are most needed.  

        Fred Pratt Green wrote a hymn about that.  Given new life through the savior who is the way, the truth, and the life, but faced with a world that leads people astray, teaches them to be content with lies, and to be satisfied with the world’s anger and resentment and violence, what do we do now?  

“The church of Christ, in every age 

beset by change but Spirit-led, 

must claim and test its heritage 

and keep on rising from the dead.

Across the world, across the street, 

the victims of injustice cry 

for shelter and for bread to eat, 

and never live until they die.

Then let the servant church arise, 

a caring church that longs to be 

a partner in Christ’s sacrifice, 

and clothed in Christ’s humanity.”

We do what Jesus did, and trust.  We live by faith.  There's a power that arises from weakness.  It dies, and falls into the grave, and then it springs to its feet again, because on the edge of the loss of everything, we meet the life that has already overcome death.  As Jesus taught, those who would find their life lose it, and those who lose their life for his sake, find it.