Coincidence and Transformation

Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed. (2 Corinthians 3.17-18)

God’s Way

The 2013 liturgical calendar barely gives us time to recover from Christmas before catapulting us into Lent. Truthfully, I’m not sure I’m ready. When I opened the lectionary to see that this weekend’s Gospel (Luke 9.28-43) returns to the Mount of Transfiguration—as always happens on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday—a shroud of fatigue and dread settled over me. Was I up for this? I could probably rally, much like I do when I drag myself out of bed in the wee hours to catch an early flight. But that wouldn’t be the right approach to this season. We should come to Lent with eyes and hearts wide open, knowing it will ask more than we expect, yet eager to meet its demands. I wasn’t sure I had enough in me to do that. I told myself, “Better dose up on faith, Buster.” Then I did what I always do when faith is in short supply: I prayed. “God, I hope You’ve got this,” I said, “because I can’t make this journey on my own.”

A few hours later I got an email from a close friend who’s never set much store in “organized religion.” He’d just heard an interview with Gloria Loring (an actress neither he nor I recalled) discussing her autobiography. I’ll let him tell the rest:

Well, she really is a fantastic lady… open-minded, etc. I know you don’t like the word, but amazingly spiritual. Anyway, the most interesting quote is the title of her book, Coincidence is God’s Way of Remaining Anonymous. When I heard it, I just could not stop thinking about it… so simple, yet effective. Well it turns out to be a quote of Albert Einstein’s. I just couldn’t get it out of my head.

I’d never heard the quote and now I can’t get it out of my head, either. A fountain of faith burst through its seven words—from Einstein, no less! I was overcome with reassurance. I’ll be frank: at this moment, I just don’t have the energy for the wilderness that lies ahead. But when Wednesday comes, it will be there, because God is at work. Whether through direct inspiration or the anonymity of happenstance, strength for this journey will arrive. How can I be so sure? Because the Transfiguration story portrays one of Scripture’s greatest examples of how God is revealed in seeming coincidence.

Good for Us to Be Here

The story begins uneventfully. Jesus needs to get away to pray. He takes Peter, John, and James with Him and they climb a mountain, leaving the other disciples behind. Scripture doesn’t indicate why Jesus selects them. In retrospect, we know they become pillars of the Church and what transpires on the mountaintop will be a pivotal moment in their faith lives. Whether Jesus intends for them to see what transpires there we can’t say. We can, however, suppose that from their perspective, witnessing the Transfiguration is purely coincidental. They have no idea if this is a singular event, or if this sort of thing happens regularly when Jesus prays in solitude. All they know is they’re there by seeming coincidence to see Jesus utterly transformed, conversing in spirit with Moses and Elijah, after which they’re engulfed in a cloud of God’s undiluted presence. A voice instructs: “This is my Son, my Chosen; listen to Him!” (Luke 9.35) And there it is: this is no coincidence at all. Peter, James, and John have been brought to this mountain to discover Who Jesus really is. God has chosen this experience to provide them with very particular knowledge in a very particular way. When the veil of coincidence is removed, they have no doubt God is at work in their lives.

After seeing Jesus transfigured—essentially getting a preview of the Resurrected Christ’s appearance—Peter starts to get it. He says, “Master, it is good for us to be here.” (v33) His first impulse is to build three structures, one each for Jesus, Elijah, and Moses, to commemorate the experience. But God dismisses Peter’s idea with the proclamation, because Peter is called to construct something more enduring and significant than a mountaintop memorial. He will the become the Church’s chief engineer, relying heavily on John and James’ assistance as they build the living, breathing Body of Christ together. And when he says, “It’s good we’re here,” he doesn’t grasp the import of his comment. He doesn’t realize that, by watching the changes in Jesus’s person, he too has been changed. Once they leave the mountain, God’s redemptive plan will take shape through a series of apparently random events that, only by hindsight, reveal God’s intentions. A long journey of unanticipated challenges and uncertainty awaits Peter, James, and John. The transformative nature of this experience will strengthen them more than they know. The unshakable assurance that Jesus is God’s Son will sustain them in the coming days, when He’s slandered and persecuted as everything but God’s Chosen Son.

Constantly Being Transformed

Coincidence is God’s creative license. It frees God to move anonymously in the background, bringing us to places where we experience Christ’s transformative power up close and personal. In 2 Corinthians 3.17-18, Paul writes, “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed.” We are being transformed, as we discover God’s glory at every turn—sometimes through deliberate prayer and study, but just as often through ostensibly random circumstances that cause us to say, “Master, it is good for us to be here.”

Perhaps you’re primed for Lent. I pray you are. But if, like me, you’re concerned about mustering stamina for the days ahead, know that God is working behind the scenes to bring you to a place of renewed strength and commitment. Lent’s season of consecration begins with confessing we can’t make this journey on our own.

We don’t have to be Einsteins to discern that God is at work in our lives, moving behind the scenes to bring us to places of renewed strength and commitment.

Led Away

Wise men from the East came to Jerusalem, asking, “Where is the child who has been born King of the Jews? For we observed His star at its rising, and have come to pay Him homage.” (Matthew 2.1-2)

Like all great stories, the Nativity saga gives us just enough information to set our imaginations aflame. Wherever we enter it, we find questions the gospel writers leave unanswered, opening windows for us to see ourselves in the characters they portray. Matthew’s tale of the Magi almost seems purposefully short on specifics about these men. We know they’re “wise,” they come from easterly pagan lands, and apparently they’re well heeled, possibly even renowned, because they have no problem getting an audience with King Herod. Beyond that, their background is vague at best. We’re told they journey from the East, led by a rising star, in search of the newborn King. But what compels them to seek Him out is open to speculation. They want to pay homage to Him, yet the nature of their adoration isn’t clear. Are they believers? Or are they diplomats? Could it be they’re the kinds of people who are always ahead of the curve—who sense a major shift is underway and go out of their way to be the first to show up?

In her sermon “Home By Another Way”, Barbara Brown Taylor imagines the Magi in this fashion:

They were all glad for a reason to get out of town—because that was clearly where the star was calling them, out—away from everything they knew how to manage and survive, out from under the reputations they had built for themselves, the high expectations, the disappointing returns. And so they set out, one by one, each believing that he was the only one with a star in his eye until they all ran into one another on the road to Jerusalem.

No one can say if her intuitions are more correct than anyone else’s. Yet the sensibilities she assigns to these mystery men seem right, as they reflect those we have during Advent. As the Bethlehem star comes into sharper focus, we can feel ourselves being led away. Gladly, we sense everything we predictably rely on—our knowledge and reputations, our ambitions as well as our shortcomings—falling behind us. All we bring to the manger are a compelling need to find Christ and gifts we offer. We start from different places. We’re moved by different ideas, desires, and beliefs. We’re clad in diversity. Yet somehow we run into one another along the way. At first, we are little more than traveling companions, beneficiaries of serendipitous timing. But when we arrive at Bethlehem, we become family, bound together for all time as we behold the splendor of the Word Made Flesh, Who has come to live in us.

Certainty and Its Dangers

How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge? (Proverbs 1.22)

Black-and-White

What makes certainty dangerous is that we seek—and find—it in all the wrong places. Wherever we encounter a patch of gray, our hard-wired survival instinct immediately compels us to transpose it into black-and-white. We formulate an opinion and block out any possibilities there might be another answer, or many answers, to help us decipher what we’re looking at. We crave certainty, because certainty makes complexity simple and simplicity aids decisiveness. And after we distill complex challenges and situations down to a chosen response, we underscore our certainty by claiming it’s “the right thing.” Put that way, craving the reliability and comfort of certainty sounds foolish. Laughing at other possibilities seems reckless and unwise. And in Proverbs 1.20-33 (Sunday’s Old Testament reading), we’re explicitly told such stratagems are indeed foolish, reckless, and unwise. 

In my own life, the tension between craving certainty and living with uncertainty has been most strongly felt in my faith. I come from a tradition that prides itself on iron-clad certainty based on a literal reading of sacred texts and a definitive theology that orders everything in life, from the workings of the cosmos down to minute moral dilemmas. When the need to find community among accepting, supportive believers drew me to the Reformed tradition, I experienced genuine culture shock. I’d never heard ministers and theologians confess they didn’t have all the answers. I wasn’t accustomed to people questioning the validity of Iron Age concepts and customs. Where I came from, one didn’t complicate matters by asking questions. You accepted everything the Bible says as written (based on your reading of it) and you called that “the truth”. Such an approach raises a really big question, however, and introduces an elephant to the room that one must choose to ignore.

When we rely on certainty that reduces everything to black-and-white, we remove faith from the equation entirely and settle for human religion. It’s taken me years to detect the inherent contradiction in professions like, “I know without a shadow of a doubt.” Removing doubt’s shadows—or refusing to acknowledge them—erases any need for faith’s light, a dangerous proposition by any measure, as it diminishes the Holy Spirit’s power to speak to us in new and relevant ways through God’s Word. We must be unwavering in what we believe, but we must never confuse faith for certainty. That’s when we find ourselves reflected in Proverbs 1.22: “How long, O simple ones, will you love being simple? How long will scoffers delight in their scoffing and fools hate knowledge?”

A Cautionary Tale

Sunday’s Gospel (Mark 8.27-38) spins a cautionary tale about certainty’s pitfalls. Jesus and the disciples are in the region of Caesarea Philippi, a Roman outpost not far from Galilee. Everywhere they look they see temples and altars erected to pagan deities, and the sight of such religious diversity may be what prompts Jesus to raise a question out of the blue: “Who do people say that I am?” The disciples rattle off a list of names they’ve heard associated with Jesus: John the Baptist, Elijah, and other famous prophets. Then Jesus asks, “Who do you say that I am?” All of them, save one, don’t know what to say. Only Peter replies, “You are the Messiah.” (v30) In Matthew’s version, his certainty is rewarded. Jesus ordains Peter as the founder of His Church. But we see something very different in Mark. There is no praise for Peter’s certainty. Jesus tells the disciples not to tell anyone about Him. And in short order, we see why this is.

Jesus explains what being the Messiah will entail—and it’s nothing like the picture Jewish teachers have conjured up based on literal reading of the Prophets. There is no divinely ordered coronation in Jesus’s version, no overthrow of oppressive regimes, no end to violence and political strife. In fact, what Jesus describes is the exact opposite of what the disciples expect. Verse 31 says, “He began to teach them that the Son of Man must undergo great suffering, and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed, and after three days rise again.” This rocks Peter’s world. His black-and-white certainty is suddenly blanketed in shades of gray. He pulls Jesus aside and rebukes Him! Jesus turns and looks at His followers, as if to say, “Watch this,” and blasts Peter in return. “Get behind me, Satan!” He hisses. “For you are setting your mind not on divine things but on human things.” (v33) In a mere three verses, certainty downgrades Peter from a divinely inspired confessor of Christ to a foolish simpleton. He scoffs at the idea of Jesus’s death at the hands of the very people who, according to his understanding of Scripture, should hail Him as the Messiah. He rejects the knowledge Jesus lays before him, that death is not the end of the story. Christ’s power will be revealed in bodily resurrection—a concept so alien to Peter that he finds it intolerable.

Nothing’s as Simple as We’d Like

After this decidedly uncomfortable exchange, Jesus calls the crowd around Him and issues a startling edict: “If you want to become My followers, you must deny yourselves and take up your cross and follow Me.” The context is plain. Self-denial in pursuit of discipleship begins by letting certainty go and following Christ by faith. It’s simply not essential that we know the workings of our faith without a doubt. Indeed, from Peter’s example, we learn that certainty is faith’s enemy. It can only entertain possibilities that agree with its limited understanding. It wants to simplify everything so that every detail in life is predictable and clear-cut. And that’s not how God works in the world or our lives. Peter is right to proclaim Jesus as Christ. Where he goes wrong is to confuse faith for certainty, to embrace a set of human expectations of how things should be at the expense of trusting God’s supreme knowledge of how things are.

We can’t know everything for certain and we won’t. All we need to know is that nothing’s as simple as we’d like it to be. What seems laughably absurd to us is serious business to God. And, as Proverbs says, we hate knowing that, because it jettisons us into gray patches that resist black-and-white reasoning. Not having answers is the cross that we, as followers of Christ, must bear. But thanks be to God for all of life’s gray areas and the myriad questions we can’t definitively resolve. Without them, we’d have no need for faith and the wisdom to accept what we can’t possibly understand or explain.

Without questions and doubts, faith cannot exist. 

Discovering Abundance

By the power at work within us [God] is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. (Ephesians 3.20)

Peanut Butter

Years back, I was asked to speak to a group of advertising and marketing students about mapping career paths. Although the invitation flattered me, I was flummoxed by it. I was the last person to tell kids how to succeed in the crazy world of agency politics and client demands, as I’d stumbled into this business with no idea how it worked or how to make it work for me. I was a film and psychology major who spent his first 10 years out of school putting little of his training to use. Before settling on a career as a marketing creative director (which I discovered as a temp typist), I’d tried my hand at dozens of things. “Are you sure I’m your guy?” I asked the professor who tendered the invitation. “I didn’t really choose this path. It sort of chose me. I only got this far because I learned a lot by not having a career path.” He chortled, “That’s why you are the guy.” He’d observed a trend that concerned him. Major agencies were recruiting his students straight out of school and running them through their cookie cutters before they acquired any real-world experience. “That can’t be good for them or our field,” he said with a sigh. I couldn’t have agreed more.

I titled my talk “Learning to Love Peanut Butter,” referring to many times when all I had was a jar of Skippy and some bread. After clocking through my résumé, I told the students that, as far as I could see, there are two types of people: hikers and explorers. Hikers find—or are given—a path and stick to it. They know where they want to go and get there sooner than explorers. Explorers, on the other hand, tend to get lost along the way. Their destination isn’t as sharply defined and the route often takes them to places where they find little clarity or comfort. “That’s how you learn to love peanut butter,” I explained. “If it’s all you’ve got, it’s as good as steak—even better than steak—because it’s all that stands between you and going hungry.” But along with loving peanut butter, explorers learn that success and abundance can’t be measured quantitatively. They’re discovered in what lack of worry about them affords: freedom, endurance, simplicity, and resilience. Reaching deep inside to see what you’ve got is how you discover all you’ve been given. Once explorers master the art of bringing everything they’ve got to the table, success—and its abundance—comes to them, often surpassing that of hikers who’ve stuck to prescribed, “tried-and-true” paths.

Sacrificial Living

Aside from followers of the oxymoronic “prosperity gospel,” most believers get queasy whenever they hear success and abundance linked with Christian faith. Jesus’s teachings are anything but a formula for worldly success. By definition, discipleship is a discipline that aspires to selflessness; its “success” can only be measured by the extent of one’s sacrifice, not one’s gains. Yet Sunday’s Gospel (John 6.1-21) and New Testament (Ephesians 3.14-21) describe how sacrificial living—made possible by departing from proven paths—reaps great success and abundance. Both texts endorse an explorer’s mentality that takes stock of all we’ve been given so that we can bring everything we’ve got to the table.

John tells the familiar story of how Jesus miraculously feeds 5000 by multiplying a boy’s lunch of five loaves and two fish. This massive congregation assembles at a most inconvenient time. Jesus and the disciples are exhausted. He needs some time alone with them to replenish their energy and discuss next steps in His ministry. He whisks them off to a mountainside and no sooner do they get settled than a huge crowd shows up. An ordinary leader would politely greet the uninvited horde and tell them, “I’d love to talk with you, but I’m in a very important meeting. If you go back to the seashore, I’ll get to you as soon as I possibly can.” Not Jesus. He scuttles His agenda—urgent though it is—sensing that most of the crowd has climbed the mountain with little or nothing to eat. Before anything else can happen, they’ll have to be fed. He already knows what He’s going to do. But He tosses the predicament in the disciples’ laps to see how they’ll handle it. They tell Him it’s impossible. There’s nowhere to buy bread and if there were, it would cost a fortune to feed so many people. A quick survey turns up a boy’s lunch and nothing more. Jesus tells the disciples to make the people sit down. After He gives thanks for the loaves and fish, they’re distributed to the people. Not only is His strategy successful. To the amazement of all, it yields an abundance—12 baskets overflowing with leftovers, one for every disciple.

It’s impossible to know if Paul (or the author writing in his name) recalls this story while outlining the principle of spiritual abundance in the Ephesian letter. Scholars date the epistle circa 62 CE, around the time that Mark, Matthew, and Luke pen their gospels and 30 years before John composes his. So Paul may not have even heard of this episode. Yet he is by far the greatest explorer among all the Apostles, the one who discovers success and abundance come to those who quit the beaten path and, for lack of a better phrase, learn to love peanut butter. He prays the Ephesians “may be strengthened in your inner being with power through God’s Spirit, and that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith, as you are being rooted and grounded in love.” (Ephesians 3.16-17) He trusts they will discover “the power to comprehend… what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.” (v18) With this power at work within us, he writes, God “is able to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine.” These statements sound lofty until we reach down inside ourselves and discover what we’ve got is more than enough. If all we have are peanut butter and bread—if the most we can scrounge up would barely feed a growing boy—it’s still an abundance, because we’ve been given power to comprehend God is at work within us.

What’s in Your Pocket?

Of the gospels’ miracle stories, the feeding of thousands—5000 here, 4000 in another instance—strikes me as the most problematic. Living in an age when meteorological and medical phenomena are standard news, calming storms, walking on water, curing disease, and even raising the dead seem, well, not so amazing. (In a way, what we’ve learned from science since these stories were first recorded magnifies their miraculous nature by shifting the focus from their inexplicable outcomes to Jesus’s role as the catalyst that brings them about.) But there really is no explanation for how Jesus transforms one lunch into dinner for 5000. Or so I thought, until I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s exquisite sermon on this episode. In “The Problem with Miracles,” she invites us to imagine most everyone on the mountainside showed up with a little something to eat in his/her pocket. The problem was none of them thought they had enough to share.

They might have been able to keep their own food for themselves if that bread basket had not come around, full of scraps, everyone so careful not to break off too much, everyone wanting Jesus’s crazy idea to work so much that very carefully, very secretly, they all began to put their own bread in the basket, reaching in as if they were taking some out and leaving some behind instead.

Of course, we can’t say with certainty that’s how it happened. Nonetheless, the notion is fully in keeping with how God works. God leads us to places where we discover God’s power to transform the little we have into overflowing abundance. Yielding our meager talents and resources is how we enable God to accomplish abundantly far more than all we can ask or imagine. As we ponder Sunday’s passages, I pray we’ll discover that by learning to love peanut butter, not only will we eat well. Hungry hearts that find us will also be fed.

What’s in your pocket?

God’s power at work in us transforms what little we have into more than enough.

We Have No Idea

Today we ponder Psalm 139.17-18:

How weighty to me are Your thoughts, O God! I try to count them—they are more than the sand; I come to the end—I am still with You.

Throughout Scripture we encounter passages like Isaiah 55.9: “My ways are higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.” And we tend to read them as reminders that God always has a better idea and better way. But Psalm 139’s poet would challenge us to reconsider. He would suggest that God’s thoughts and ways are so completely different from ours that we have no idea what God is thinking and doing in our lives. God’s thoughts are too weighty—too rare—for us; God’s ways are limitless. And though the breadth of God’s creativity is too great for us, the disparity between our imaginations and what God has in mind cannot separate us from God. We run out of ideas, but God is still with us. So we silence human opinion—be that what we think or what others say—and trust God’s infinite wisdom and power. God knows. We trust.

Let It Happen

He also said, “The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how.” (Mark 4.26-27)

The Whole Plant Thing

I’m highly amused by Miracle-Gro’s spring advertising campaign. If you’ve not seen the spots, they feature folks who’d love nothing better than being surrounded by thriving plants and flowers but have no gift for making that happen. As they confess their foibles, I laugh out loud, because all of them are me.

The commercials bring back so many failures: the gladiolas I planted along a row and then burned to a crisp by tying them to an iron fence; the lilac I set in the far corner of our backyard to obscure trash cans on the alley, only to love it to death; dozens of ferns I’ve drowned and who knows how many “hardy” houseplants I’ve killed. I can’t really say what I’m doing wrong when it comes to gardening. Is it too much, or not enough? Am I trying too hard, or should I try harder? At times I’ve been too obsessive and not given the plants a chance to make it on their own. But there have been other times when I’ve backed down and not done enough to keep them alive. The whole plant thing is a mystery to me. Which is why Sunday’s Gospel (Mark 4.26-34) gives me great consolation. There, Jesus talks about someone who scatters seed, watches it grow, but has no idea how it works. I have to laugh. This person is just like me!

That Extra Little Something

Of course, Jesus isn’t giving a horticulture lecture. Like so many of His lessons, this one begins with, “The kingdom of God is…” It’s another of Jesus’s attempts to penetrate the minds of His followers, to bring about their understanding of His message and mission. Across-the-board in the four gospels, Jesus is all about the kingdom of God (or, in Matthew, the kingdom of heaven). In Mark 1.15, He launches His ministry by proclaiming, “The time has come. The kingdom of God is near. Repent, and believe the good news.” He then spends much of His time explaining what the kingdom of God is. Actually, He keeps clarifying His meaning by suggesting what the kingdom of God is like. It’s like a mustard seed, a child, yeast, hidden treasure, a great net, a merchant searching for fine pearls, and so on. In every scenario, Jesus presents or implies someone whose aspirations exceed his/her abilities. In order to grow seed or find treasure, something ephemeral must occur—that extra little something that entails trust and patience. At a point in the story, the hero has to let go and let whatever he or she hopes to accomplish happen. If the person believes it’s possible, then what she/he envisions will come about. That’s the good news. That’s the kingdom of God.

Jesus makes it sound easy, when He and we know it’s not. He likens God’s kingdom to a planter who scatters seed, goes to bed and wakes up day after day and watches the seed sprout and grow all by itself. Obviously, some tending is required. The ground has to be broken up to receive the seeds. Some watering and weeding will be needed. The planter has to be mindful that birds might gobble up the seed and pests might devour the seedlings, harsh weather might uproot them and poisons might filter into the soil. The key to the parable emerges in the planter’s acknowledgment he really doesn’t know how plants grow. He just lets it happen. And even though he knows what must be done to promote his plants’ growth, he really has no way of predicting what they’ll be. Some may flourish while others fade. They may yield a record crop; they may yield little. All of that is beyond his control. His task is nurturing their growth—not engineering it. To underscore this point, Jesus compares God’s kingdom to a mustard seed, “the smallest of all the seeds on earth.” (v31) Yet, seemingly against all odds, this tiny seed “grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade.” (v32) How that happens is anyone’s guess.

Kingdom Seeds

Mark goes on to tell us, “With many such parables He spoke the word to them, as they were able to hear it; He did not speak to them except in parables, but He explained everything in private to His disciples.” (v33-34) Oh to be a fly on the wall when Jesus spelled things out! One imagines it going something like this. A disciple—Thomas, perhaps, as he’s usually the guy with the questions—says, “Okay. So we get the point about the planter and the mustard seed. What this has to do with God’s kingdom is where everything falls apart.” To which Jesus replies, “Once God’s kingdom is planted inside you, it takes on a life of its own. You don’t need to figure out the hows, whys, and wherefores. Just let it happen. If you do that, you’ll be amazed at what comes of your trust and patience.”

Heeding Christ’s words and following Christ’s example hands us kingdom seeds that we scatter across our lives. While we take care that they’re well nurtured and protected, we leave the mechanics of their growth alone. We don’t know how God’s kingdom takes root and sprouts within us, or how its tiny seeds fulminate into great shrubs. The mystery of this will never be revealed to us. All we need to know is it will happen. And all we need to do is let it happen. Miracle Grow is what God’s kingdom is all about.

We don’t have to figure out the mechanics for God’s kingdom to grow in us. We just have to let it happen.

Podcast link: http://straightfriendly.podbean.com/2012/06/17/let-it-happen/