All in a Day's Work

 What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil.  – Ecclesiastes 3:1-14

If there is a mean old nasty brute named Satan, I’m pretty sure such an individual would find that, rather than encouraging us to do evil, it would be far more efficient and successful to merely convince us to do nothing. Entropy is easy to slide into and hard to overcome. If we believe the insidious lie “I am powerless,” great potential goes unrealized, and the world persists in not being as blessed a place as it might be.

But I think an even smoother Evil One would find a way to take all our joy out of work by making it obligatory. Just think if we turned all of the good we ever did into a price we have to pay to earn our way into paradise, soon, rather than the Kingdom, we’d be building resentments toward our God and the people God forces us to reach out and help.

But I think the smoothest One Who Opposes of all would jump on the cheap-grace/sloppy-agape bandwagon and try to lead us to believe that social and economic justice efforts were unnecessary, even undesirable traits of an immature faith. “We’ve received this gift through pure grace,” the thinking goes. “To fight for the cause of the destitute orphan and the hopeless widow is somehow less than faithful.”

The problem in all of this is simple: We mess up when we place God off somewhere away from us, up on some cloud swatting at those persistent little cherubs buzzing around his head, peering down from afar to see if we pass the test and will be allowed into the celestial party.

Jesus told us so many times that the “Kingdom of God” was a party about to get started right nearby, among us. He was all about doing the right thing because we like it, accepting and forgiving others because we love them, and seeing God’s work in every scrap of society and creation. Why else would Jesus, when asked about paradise, tell stories about sheep and wheat and housewives and flowers?

“Wherever two or more are gather in my name…” is a promise of presence among us. What if, instead of seeing our day’s work as buying a ticket to visit some far off deity once we’ve bit the big one, we recognized God moving through our hands and tongues. What if we saw ourselves as extensions of a very present God, reaching out to other extensions of that same God? What if God lives and loves in the open space between and within us?

In the story of the rich young man, this eager kid has implicitly followed all the ten commandments all his life, but is dying to find what else he must do to buy himself eternal life. Jesus recognizes the flawed thinking: that God’s love must be earned, achieved and owned through our own power and skill. He therefore tells the young man to remove the one obstacle between him and fully recognizing that God is already swimming all around him. “Your wealth seems to be blocking your view. Get rid of it and come with me.”

And the man turns and leaves, unwilling to surrender who he has become to become who he most wants to be. I see no evidence that Jesus told every rich man to give it all away. He is not fighting wealth, but a spiritual myopia that makes us blind to God and godliness all around us.

God can be in every breakroom conversation. Angels can sing through every chance meeting and simple gesture. If you want holy bliss, it is all in a day’s work.

It's Academic -- And a Matter of Life and Death

It happens over and over again.

Fairly often I cross paths with some shell-shocked Christian spouse (almost always a wife) who is running for her life without leaving her house. She’s continually torn to shreds emotionally, sleeps with her eyes open if at all, can’t bear the sound of the car in the driveway, and now the beatings have begun. She is bruised strategically in places that won’t show. She is wracked with shame, pain, fear and confusion…and she can’t leave because Jesus, the Bible and her pastor tell her God will be angry with her and hold it against her if she abandons her marriage.

Mark 10 is almost always quoted…Matthew and Luke as well.  And misguided fools convolute Paul’s concept of being a prisoner for the Gospel into the Gospel is a prison.

It is at times like these that I thank God for my academic training.  Dr. Hermann Gunkel and Sitz im Leben save lives. Dr. Gunkel, the son of a Lutheran pastor, really got the ball rolling with some of his colleagues when he insisted on digging for history in and around Biblical texts, and developed the concept of form criticism as well. He was instrumental in our looking at where a text “sits in life.” What were the day-to-day realities of the writer and speaker? What social, political and theological realities of the day are shaping and spurring the incidents and actions described and how they are described? How do they compare to our social, political and theological realities?

It is all marvelously academic, but the practical application of his work is such that I can confidently, faithfully tell abused and abuser alike that Jesus railed against divorce to all these heartless men questioning him because in those days women had no rights at all, and their husbands were their only protection from poverty, depravity and an ugly death. Jesus, in so firm an answer, was doing his best to intervene to save women from abuse! That being the case, why would Jesus suddenly support injustice and fight against peace 2000 years later? Whatever happened to “the same yesterday, today and forever?!?”

 Ah, the same yesterday, today and forever, to some means attempting to lock us into primitive societal standards of thousands of years ago, as if those standards are somehow Godly because they happened to be prevalent in the time of Christ. Some of those standards killed Christ and caused much of the great suffering he had worked to alleviate. It is perverse to suggest preserving those standards somehow serves him.

Trust me. I don’t go all academic on people in crisis. I go all academic in my own studies that I might be prepared to do Jesus’ bidding in the face of the same sort of stupid, persistent crap that passed for authoritative teaching in his day. Jesus is about human evolution, not man-made institutions. All the evidence of this fact is laid out for us right there in the big book, for those who have eyes to see and minds to think.

And for those who insist on a supposed “literal” interpretation of scripture that flies in the face of compassion and justice in a world so far advanced from that of Jesus’ day: In striving to be fools for Christ, there is always the danger of falling a bit short and succeeding only in being fools.