Welcome to Pastor Jack Buckley's weekly blog and podcast.
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Wednesday, September 27, 2006
Attitude Adjustment
Psalm 1; Mark 9:30-37
Like kids in the back seat on a long family drive, Jesus' disciples got to fighting over who-knows-what. Well, actually, Jesus knew exactly what. And he was anything but pleased. Since they were being childish, he talked "children" with them, as a firm clear reminder of how God's way with the world works.
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On two occasions Jesus used children as a test case about the character of the Kingdom of God. (Think: People and places in this world where God's purposes are recognized, honored, and obeyed.)
My recent blog post "What the Children Know" described the time he said we'd better all assume the position of a child if we want in on what God is up to. For example, a child is small and powerless, thus somewhat modest and realistic about life's limitations.
This week's story from Mark 9 puts kids front and center for a different reason.
On the road with Jesus, the disciples have been squabbling about who's going to have what kind of honor and power when Christ inaugurates his Kingdom.
I'm reminded of kids in the back seat on a long trip in the family car. "Dad, he hit me!" "Mom, she's looking at me wrong!" On and on it goes, till Dad looks over his shoulder and say, "Don't make me stop this car! You'll be sorry!!"
What Jesus does is much better. He sits down, slows the disciples down, and then he draws them out. "Tell me what you were arguing about," he says. "It must have been really important, hey?"
They're embarrassed and don't want to confess a single word of it.
Then he invites a little boy over, and tells the disciples they (and all of us) need to welcome children into our high and mighty spiritual pursuits. Especially children. "For when you welcome them," he says, "You welcome me. And when you welcome me, you're welcoming God who sent me!"
Now, is that as clear as mud or what?
Well, he also tells them that anyone who wants to be first in line will end up in last place. If you want to be served by others you'll wind up serving instead. It's a spiritual law of life.
Put that together with the accepting children part, and it comes out this way...
To get anywhere with God, you've got to adjust your attitude from grabbing after power and glory, and aim for opportunities to honor and serve each other.
So, for instance, look at anyone who comes your way as if they're a little child -- i.e., powerless, and pretty useless in terms of prestige or advantage. Just a person who can use your support, service, friendship, and such.
In Jesus' day kids were very much better seen than heard. Like the sign on the back of a coffee house highchair says: "Children should be strapped in and never left unattended."
But Jesus disagrees. He knows what happens when children, and childlike people of all shapes and sizes, are treated well.
When you honor a powerless person, you actually give that person power. You're acting as if she actually has a reason for living. You honor him, if for nothing else, simply as another valuable human being.
What happens to you when someone welcomes you with that kind of respect?
Your chest swells up with rightful pride. You stand a little taller. You smile. Because you've been reminded that you really matter.
And here's the kicker... Every time this sort of exchange happens we're dealing not simply with each other, but with God!
The world is full of myths and legends of gods walking the earth in disguise. The Bible says we humans are created in the Image of God, that in a sense God moves among us incognito. That even the least likely people we meet are carriers of God's priceless presence.
So we're simply being smart to treat every other person who crosses our path as if we're meeting God. Even, especially, when it's a little person.
posted by Jack Buckley at
10:54 AM
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
Holy R&R
"Come ye apart," says the King James Version of Mark 6:31.
Imagine Jesus telling his disciples to fall apart! As if most of us would need any help doing that, what with life's usual stresses and strains.
Of course, what he's really calling them to do is,"Come away... and rest a while."
Working hard at the discipleship business, they've earned a well-deserved break. So Jesus takes them off on a spiritual retreat.
That's the model for our church family's annual fall getaway to the redwoods of Sonoma County. We gather at St. Dorothy's Rest, an Episcopal conference center about 70 miles from Alameda. The rustic buildings and pleasant grounds create a happy hideaway where we can get to know each other in new ways. And get better acquainted with God, too, as we sing and pray and study and play our way through the weekend.
It happened again this last weekend. Our teaching leader was Karl Shadley, co-pastor of a multi-cultural church in Berkeley. His theme, "Alive Together in Christ," came from the Letters to the Ephesians and to Philemon. [Pastor Jack says check 'em out!] Youth and children had their own learning sessions on the same theme. All of us, from kids to retirees, got to sing and dance, even muck about with clay a bit, applying right on the spot what it means to belong together in God's new family.
I call our retreat a "getaway," in a "hideaway." It's all of that for sure -- a chance to break away from business as usual for some rest and recreation.
But I hope and pray that "business as usual" will never be a fair description of your life and mine. For we're called to live every new day as an adventure in faith and faithfulness.
It's only human, of course, to organize everything into manageable portions, which all too easily leads into a numbing repetition and meaningless activity. And that's the way we tend to fall apart. Apart from God's purpose... Apart from each other... Apart even within ourselves.
That's what the Bible calls spiritual death. (See Ephesians 2:1-10, "You were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once lived...." Trespasses = doing what we shouldn't; Sins = falling short of what we're meant to do and be. Conclusion = fractured relationships with God and with people!)
Spiritual life, God's free gift just because God loves us, fills all of life with meaning and purpose.
Ephesians 2:14-16 says Christ has re-created us, removing all barriers of hostility and making peace, to reconcile us with God and with each other. I belong to God. You belong to God. Ergo, we belong to each other. So let's make the most of it -- together!
Karl shared stories about how this works in real life, from his experience pastoring a church composed of typical Americans, Chinese immigrants, and several people born and raised in Europe, Africa, and Latin America.
It was their songs and dances we learned over the weekend. It was their growing love for Christ and for each other that we resonated with, re-learning for ourselves what it means to share together "the joy of salvation."
Away those few days from "life as usual," we refocused our hearts and minds on every Christian's everyday baseline commitment: To know God more clearly, love God more fully, and serve God's purpose more gladly every day.
When we share that threefold goal together, a minor miracle happens. We come to know and love and serve each other day by day as well.
posted by Jack Buckley at
11:27 AM
Monday, September 11, 2006
A Dog With A Bone
Mark 7:24-30; Psalm 125
Jesus never ceases to surprise us. Here he begins a miracle of kindness with an ethoncentric insult. He called a foreign woman a dog! Thanks to her dogged determination she got exactly what she wanted. And we get another lesson in God's amazing grace.
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The Bible never mentions Jesus laughing out loud, or even smiling silently.
But I'll bet good money he did at least the latter when this woman delivered her punchline.
She's a foreigner to Judaism, but it's Jesus, the Jewish Messiah, who's out of place this time. He and the disciples are up by Tyre, the Phoenician seaport, looking for some R&R. It's this woman's hometown.
Even so, from the Jewish perspective she's an outsider, "unclean," about as good as a dog.
Uh oh. To any dog lover reading this, please don't get me wrong. In fact, my one and only grandson is a silky terrier named Harry. Even so, I'll vote for people over dogs every time.
When the woman finds Jesus, she throws herself down at his feet and begs him to heal her daughter from the power of a demon (an "unclean" spirit). His answer is abrupt.
"It's not right to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs." Ouch!
Reeling back a step, she shrugs off that racial right cross, braces herself, and leans back in.
"Fair enough. But no good person would keep a dog from snapping up the scraps that fall off the table."
That's when Jesus must have laughed.
"You're good! And so's your faith. Go on home and hug your daughter. She's all well now."
God doesn't seem to care one bit about who you are or where you're from.
This one story explodes any expectation that race, region, or religion ultimately matters on God's scale of values.
I wish the people behind TV's "Survivor" understood that. Instead, this new season will feature teams organized around ethnicity. The dumbed-down reality show's contests of physical strength and social sculduggery have been bad enough for too many seasons already. Now they're going to exploit bigotry in the name of team solidarity. Imagine the water cooler chatter about that.
On this fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, I think this story speaks somehow to our national trauma about that horrible day. The terror that struck our psyches then still reverberates, creating a sort of spiritual camera-shake as we look out on the world. Through the blur, the easy thing is to let differences divide us.
I remember how embarrassed I felt in an airport check-in line a year or so after 9/11/01, watching darker-skinned passengers be pulled out of line for special examination, while I cooled my heels waiting my turn to slip my shoes onto the conveyor belt.
I remember how ashamed I felt when our government defied a world's worth of allies to wage pre-emptive warfare in Iraq with no hard evidence of a justifying cause. Our official words and actions ever since sound more often than not like fear of the "other," rather than reasoned, effectual international policies.
Bombs keep on exploding. Ours and theirs. People keep on dying. Us and them. Words upon words keep on flying. Very few minds really change.
What can today's story possibly say to these things?
At least this...
Neither Jesus nor the desperate woman believed that, in the end, it really matters who you are or where you're from. Then they got close enough to each other to prove it. Tough words gave way to winks, smiles, laughing out loud together, for God's sake. And for their own.
Mutual awareness. Acceptance. Growing understanding. Appreciation. Reconciliation. Peace.
Like the man said, "Go thou and do likewise."
posted by Jack Buckley at
10:30 AM
Tuesday, September 05, 2006
The Heart of the Matter
Mark 7:14-23
Washed hands are healthy; clean hearts are essential. When religious ceremonies mix up the two, you run the danger of losing out on everything God is up to in the world. Check out what Jesus had to say about the problem.
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I recently went to the Monet exhibit at San Francisco's Palace of the Legion of Honor. Absolutely fabulous! And utterly priceless in value!!
The museum had to be loaded with all kinds of security gadgets to prevent anyone stealing the masterpieces.
Each gallery was probably crisscrossed with laser beams and hidden cameras. Were there fire doors to seal off the rooms after hours? How many locks did each entryway have?
The only thing missing, probably, was an electrified fence on the perimeter topped with triple-thick concertina wire. Well, maybe armed guards. Attack dogs. Garlic cloves. You get the picture.
It's a metaphor for the ironic situation Jesus jumped all over in today's Gospel text.
Some scrupulous religious types complained that he didn't make his disciples wash their hands before, during, and after a meal. What kind of spiritual teacher could he be?
The issue wasn't really hygiene. All that washing was simply ceremonial, signifying a person's purity of soul. Kosher laws strictly segregated "clean" and "unclean" foods, dishes, and people.
If you touched a dish that had touched unclean food, then you became unclean. Even if you didn't eat the food.
If you touched a person who was unclean, you also became unclean. Even if you touched that person by accident, let alone held her hand to say grace at the dinner table.
So, in this case, you used very specific ways to wash your hands at very specific points of a meal. Fingers up, fingers down, water poured just so, hands rubbed just right.
It's a case study in how far good intentions can go bad in their effects.
The fundamental law of all biblical laws is this: Love God with everything you've got. Its flip side: Love your neighbor the way you love yourself. (Jesus says so in Matthew 22:37-40, quoting from Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18.)
The contours of that divine kind of love are summarized in the ten commandments (see Exodus 20:1-17). How those top ten ways of loving God and people work out in real life are spelled out in detail in the first five books of the Bible (Torah).
By Jesus' day there were 1001 ways to make sure you didn't violate God's laws, down to how many times and ways to wash your hands at the dinner table.
And so my monkey mind jumps to the image of a fortified gallery whose paintings are so supremely valuable you could find yourself cut off a dozen different ways from ever gettting to see one of them.
So many rules and regulations, all formulated to protect you from breaking the truly big laws -- love God and love people. Instead, we end up so busy doing the right thing the right way that we forget all about loving anybody at all.
"Don't bother me now, son, I'm busy praying for you."
"I'm really running late to that Bible study. Sure hope somebody'll stop soon to help that guy stranded on the shoulder."
"The body and blood of our Lord. Amen.... Is that her? Argh. I still can't forgive her for what she did to me."
"We had to bomb that village in order to save it."
You get my drift.
Jesus said, "It's not what goes into your body that defiles it... food, dirt, germs. It's what comes out of your heart!" Then he delivered a horrible laundry list of vices, all too familiar to our thought life if not our actual behavior.
The antidote to all that spiritual dirt is love. Love for God, love for people. With everything you've got. Just the way God already loves you and all people.
It's not about rules and rituals. It's all about a way of life.
posted by Jack Buckley at
3:49 PM
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