justice

I've been reading the Old Testament Book of Job.  This is fascinating early literature. Some scholars believe it was among the oldest stories to find its way into the scriptures, or it may date back 15 centuries before Christ to the kingdom of Solomon.  It is an ancient story treating an ancient question that forever challenges the human heart, not to mention every religion created to make sense of the world.

What does justice mean?

This question comes to us in the Book of Job through a character whose worthy behavior does not save him from waves of suffering. The story is set so as to make the Job character's plight the center of a study of justice. Why is it that a man doing his best to be righteous should suffer? Is he perfectly righteous?  Is that what God demands? Even if Job isn't perfect, isn't his righteousness, as he claims, at least greater than that of the evil ones around him who seem to fly through life joyfully?  Where is the justice in that?  Generations of scholars have struggled with these questions, much like the unhelpful friends who try to counsel Job in the blackness of his hopelessness.

What struck me during this reading was not so much whether the relatively righteous deserve better than the aggressively evil, but rather three amazing passages attributed to Job. These passages cry out from the pages of the story, echoing through time and setting the stage for responses that come only thousands of years later.

What we hear in the fullness of time are answers that finally address Job's search for justice.

In chapter 9 Job laments in frustration,

"God and I are not equals; I can't bring a case against him.  We'll never enter a courtroom as peers.  How I wish I had an arbitrator to step in and let me get on with my life -- to break God's death grip on me, to free me from this terror so I could breathe again. Then I'd speak up and state my case boldly. As things stand, there is no way I can do it."

There is then a perfectly beautiful and poignant passage in chapter 14.  Job whispers wishfully to this seemingly punitive and unloving God, imagining a time when their relationship would be different,

"You'll call -- I'll answer. You'll watch over every step I take, but you won't keep track of my missteps. My sins will be stuffed in a sack and thrown into the sea -- sunk in the deep ocean."

How amazing. 

Job imagines a relationship with God that can be personal -- a relationship not based on perfect behavior, but on God's willingness to know everything and yet overlook the imperfections and still love. 

How could a just God ever love like that?

Finally, this beautiful thread can be seen within the fabric of the book just a bit further along.  In chapter 16 Job continues his call --

"There must be someone in heaven who knows the truth about me -- in highest heaven some attorney who can clear my name -- my champion, my friend, while I've been weeping my eyes out before God.  I appeal to the one who represents mortals before God as a neighbor stands up for a neighbor."

We find in these passages glimpses of a coming truth -- that God can know and be known, both personally and tenderly -- that there will be a way for Job, for me, for you, to come before God in safety and assurance -- to stand both fully-known and fully-accepted. Job repeatedly invokes the legal concept of an attorney or advocate -- one in the position to represent me, lovingly, before the force of justice.

In the fullness of time we learn that God provides precisely this attorney, arbitrator, advocate. He is provided in the form of God With Us, Emanuel, Jesus Christ, capable not only of defending us before our just God, but also making us defendable.  This advocate doesn't ask God to ignore our sins -- he acknowledges our sins before the just God --

--but then pays for them himself.

The author of the New Testament Book of Hebrews writes,

"Therefore Jesus is able to save completely those who come to God through him, because he always lives to intercede for them"

In 1 John 2:1-2 we read,

"My little children, I am writing this to you so that you may not sin; but if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the father, Jesus Christ the righteous; and he is the payment for our sins, and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world."

The Bible is a scrapbook -- a collection of samples of many literary forms from many times and places and authors -- fragments intended for many different purposes and different audiences -- but with a coherence that is unexpected. It is in the ancient cries of Job from a time of pain, ignorance, mystery, that we hear, put into words, the central need of humanity -- some way to relate to God.  I am so thankful that the answer comes, centuries later, as we learn the truth. In his majestic love and since before the creation of time, God has been above all else just and compassionate. 

Our God is a rescuer.

11.18.12

homecoming

-->

A week ago we did something unusual. We found ourselves heading back to our hometown on a beautiful breezy fall day. It was a Friday afternoon, and the scenic drive through southeastern Minnesota, the Mississippi river valley, and the rural roads of southwestern Wisconsin was especially striking. Autumn color was past its peak, but the fields of cut hay and baled cornstalks and piles of pumpkins reminded us of our rural upbringing. Geese flew over in scattered formations against clear blue skies.  Cattle seemed especially comfortable strewn here and there across hillsides in the fading sun.

Laura and I were heading back to Madison for two quick nights and the wedding celebration of a rather distant relative.  There would be time with family in our childhood homes, even though our childhood homes were no longer the same.  Laura's home felt different because her mom was away recovering from a hip fracture. My home felt different because my father's failing memory became more and more evident with each visit.

It was also a remarkable trip because of the girls who weren't with us.

Family trips to Madison always involved both girls. Only rarely was one left behind at work or school. This trip was different. Liz and Chris were both happily busy in Minneapolis. We were a couple again. As we drove, our conversation came and went. We were as comfortable in silence as when exchanging words. We held hands across the seat for much of the trip. Laura dozed in the filtered sun. I often looked across at her beautiful face and at the autumn scenery beyond, and I smiled.

I felt a deep sense of blessing, a feeling that echoed back a dozen times on this unusual trip home.

We had laughed when we found that the trip home coincided with homecoming at Middleton High School, where Laura and I had graduated, two years apart, in 1979 and 1981. High School was where we met, I a busy self-absorbed Senior, and she a lovely, tall, blonde and selfless Sophomore who made an instant impression. I love telling people 33 years later that we were High School sweethearts. After professional homemaking, Laura was returning home with me as half of a couple again.

So we found ourselves bundled up and on our way to the high school homecoming football game. We sat on metal seats in a brightly lit stadium overlooking a football field with artificial turf, listening to officials announce penalties using wireless microphones. The halftime dance team offered a fantastic hip-hop routine to booming remixed music that Laura didn't like. There was no dance team when I was in high school.  We saw one or two faces that looked familiar, but no sense of reunion overtook us in the crowd.

Instead I was struck again by that deep feeling of blessing.  As I sat quietly next to Laura I looked up at the stadium lights against the black sky and I squinted, watching the blazing brightness turn into a mass of sparkling rays. I was suddenly aware that there was something familiar about that burst of light rays through squinted eyes.

It was a memory of my first homecoming game at that same stadium when I was a freshman in high school in 1975, exactly 37 years earlier.

I had been fascinated by the stadium lights that fall night too.

In 1975 my life had changed. I had missed some weeks of the fall of my first high school year because of cancer surgery, an ominous diagnosis, and the start of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. I wanted to be in denial, but the combination of abdominal incision, painted X-ray targets on my back and stomach, and nausea from intravenous Vincristine and Actinomycin D made the sense of cancer battle hard to escape. I can only imagine what my parents were going through during those weeks. By the time I arrived home from the daily injections I was barely able to make it into the house before the vomiting began.

When you are at your freshman homecoming game you are supposed to be thinking about friends and girls and the upcoming dance and the spirit competition. You are not supposed to be thinking about surviving.

What small bit of denial I could muster was due to a drug called Thorazine, a narcotic anti-nausea medication whose modern uses are limited to the treatment of schizophrenia.  Thorazine had been key in the treatment of the mentally ill, and had led to the massive deinstitutionalization of the second half of the 20th Century.

Thorazine made me feel good during my homecoming football game back in 1975. I had plenty to worry about, but on that evening I remembered feeling OK. I remembered looking up at the football stadium lights and squinting, watching the blazing brightness turn into a mass of sparkling rays...

My girls have never experienced life-threatening illnesses. I have never found myself begging God to be able to take their place in suffering. Or in death. They have seen their share of tragedy, sometimes unforgettably close, but I have never suffered in the way that a mom and dad suffer when their child is given a dire diagnosis. I now have friends walking that path, a place my own parents walked 37 years ago when they sent their 14-year-old off to a football game, dosed with Thorazine.

It was then in that swirl of memories in that same homecoming stadium that I looked to my right, at my wife. She smiled back, almost shyly, almost like that first time I ever smiled at her, not too far from that very spot.

The feeling of blessing.

I didn't die in 1975. Some kids did. I lived on and came to know Jesus and grew up. I married my beautiful high school sweetheart and lived comfortably with manageable recurrent cancer for decade after decade. I had the chance to pour my life into two lovely daughters and ministry and cherished friends. With the wife of my youth.

Cancer isn't always bad. Sometimes life swallows it up and sometimes, with grace, there is the chance to look back across the years and remember.

And squint. And smile.

For Lydia . For Angie.

10.23.12

Nehemiah

Something like six centuries before the birth of Jesus comes a particularly remarkable story in Jewish history. It is buried in the discouraging saga of the degenerating Jewish monarchy. It is part of that central message of the Bible – the inability of the Jewish people to find any consistency in their covenant with God. The promise of blessing in response to the faith of Abraham had come 20 centuries before Jesus. Moses took his turn trying to lead the Jews six centuries later. David's shaky chapter came one thousand years before Christ. The kings who followed David succeeded only in proving that human beings fail, stumble, and inevitably abandon their God, just like us. By the time of the rise of the Babylonian empire, the two Jewish kingdoms were adrift. Judaism had come to be defined by the existence of a physical temple building, with or without its proper sacrificial rituals to symbolically pay for the sins of the people. The destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 586 B.C. was therefore, in a very real sense, the tangible end of what was left of Judaism. For 60 years most Jews were refugees in Iran and Iraq. There was no temple. This easily could have been the end of the story for just another stumbling local religious impulse.

Then something different happened.

The story of Nehemiah tells us about a man who, though far from home, did not forget his homeland and the idea of a temple to be inhabited, somehow, by his God. It is a story of the rebuilding of the destroyed Jerusalem wall and temple, against the odds. Much of the story seems obscure to us, and except for the idea that this episode preserved Judaism a bit longer, the story may lack meaning for the Christian.

But look deeper. In reading this account, two very pressing and fresh messages hit home. Both are practical, even urgent, for the believer in Jesus Christ.

First, Nehemiah acted without any special call from God.  His passion, his sense of responsibility, his initiative, his creativity, his leadership, all these are described as coming instinctively from the man, unprompted. Though we may be tempted to assume that God actively commissions the pivotal leaders of history, Nehemiah shows this not to be the case. Nehemiah felt compelled to take action, and he took action with intelligence, practical consideration, and cunning. Let us not imagine that we must always wait for supernatural marching orders before we act.

Let us remember that supernatural marching orders have already been issued.

Second, the Christian finds in Nehemiah a startling allegory for the most personal of all issues­ – the revival of a fallen heart. The Jewish temple was the very imperfect picture of God's dwelling place – a picture to prepare us for the time when God's true dwelling place would be made known. In the New Covenant, the sacrifice of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ makes it possible for each believer's heart to become God's temple. As believers who have been once and for all purified, God now inhabits me and he inhabits you.

The temple is inside.

Nehemiah reminds us, however, that like the Jews, like all people, we are still unable to offer God any consistency in our relationship. 

He couldn't love us any more, but we scarcely remember to love him at all. 

Nehemiah grieved for a temple that was in shambles, surrounded by a burned wall.  It was a Jewish humiliation for all who saw it.

And what about the temple in my heart?

Is my temple, the place where God's spirit finds its earthly home, any better than this? Though there may be some impressive walls, isn't much of this temple propped up and in dire need of restoration? Is it much different from the ruined temple that so burdened Nehemiah – a monument not abandoned by God, but by those he had loved and purchased?

The story of Nehemiah reminds the Christian that we are actually responsible for the temple of the Holy Spirit within us. This is what being a disciple of Jesus Christ means. We are to grieve instinctively for its desecration, as did Nehemiah for his temple.  We are to take spontaneous initiative for its rebuilding and maintenance. We are to rediscover the worship that was intended to go on right here inside the heart. 

What Nehemiah accomplished six centuries before Christ was revival.  What we are now called to do is to recognize the urgent need for this same revival in this same temple, now found in the new place that God chooses to call home – a place that is uncomfortably, beautifully close.

10.9.12

here

O Lord you are.
You are here beside me, in me, six miles above the North Atlantic,
in the crowded lanes of Leiden, and in the winds above the city,
and in the ocean currents that swirl in the deep, where only electric eyes can see.
Every atom and every wave equation you inhabit,
and you know each bacterium and each rabbit,
and each person who ever was given a soul to carry into timelessness
where you live.

O Lord you are.
You are at a hillside on Callisto, where the chill ever-dark sky shows a weak sunrise,
where no living creature shall ever stand, you are,
looking, knowing,
across time and space, time-space, you smile and joy ever ripples,
where other sheep lived in a corner of Andromeda for a moment, long ago,
and you made your song true there as well–
a story of your rescue – the only really true story of all.

O Lord you are.
You are not all powerful, but power,
not all loving, but love,
not eternal, but the one for whom all of time is but a fallen leaf on a dappled forest floor,
where I will greet you again for the first time, calling your name,
hearing you call mine,
then holding you,
then holding every person I ever have loved,
and stroking every beloved furry animal, long lost,
then holding you.

O Lord You are.


 6.23.12

Color

I had my wisdom teeth removed when I was a teenager. I hadn't had my driver's license for very long, but I was eager to show off my independence so I drove myself to the appointment in our family's boxy yellow Fiat. The nurse looked at me. "The doctor says you have four impacted teeth. We will need to put you to sleep. Who do you have to drive you home after the procedure?"

I hadn't thought about that.

I explained that I had driven myself.

She told me to have a seat and she disappeared to consult. "You'll have to speak with the doctor about this" she said.

The oral surgeon looked at me skeptically and offered that it was possible to have local anesthesia for the operation. There would be lots of shots in the mouth and plenty of noise and violence during the extractions. I could tell that he wanted me to come back a different day, with some parental drivers.

I was young and naive and too brave for my own good.

"Let's do it."

The next hour was brutal. I never imagined you could have so many injections into gums and jaw. I never imagined how much they would hurt. I didn't realize how much debris flies around in and out of a person's mouth during the process of crushing and picking tooth fragments from unneeded wisdom teeth...and I wasn't expecting the sounds of battle ringing in my ears.

I survived and found myself driving home with a numb face.

As I pulled into my driveway I looked into the rear-view mirror, expecting to see my jaw swollen to twice its size.

I looked normal, except for a mouth brimming with blood. A little trickle was starting to run down the side of my face. I was impressed and shared the effect with my mother as I spit out a cup of blood into the bathroom sink.

The rest of the day was made tolerable by some white pills provided by the doctor. They were rich in a substance called codeine. A human body takes in codeine and the effect is similar to that of morphine, another drug isolated from the same poppy plants. I had never experienced significant doses of these drugs before, and within an hour I began to understand why addiction is possible.

I felt really good.

I lay on a couch in my basement for a long time. I didn't sleep. Instead, I looked at the basement ceiling. I looked at the ceiling tiles. I looked at the way the wall met at the ceiling to form a line. Then, wonder of wonders, I looked at how two walls met at the ceiling to form a point.

I was enthralled.

I think I spent literally four intoxicated hours studying that feature of the architecture of the basement, amazed that the great writers and artists and poets of history hadn't adequately treated this amazing phenomenon in their greatest works.

The corner held me mesmerized for hours...the power of drugs.

That night I went to sleep after a second dose of the magic white pills. I remember the night vividly to this day because it was the first time I dreamed in color.

Like many people, all my dreams are remembered in shades of grey. Not that night. I dreamed of flying high above buildings through gorgeous skies of blue and red, with lush green landscapes spread out below me.

Again, the power of drugs.

I never dreamed in color again, until a few weeks ago.

Unlike that teenage night so many years before, this day had been uneventful. There had been no codeine or other prescription drugs. My own daughters are now past their teenage years and have moved out. Driving myself around is no longer an accomplishment. I'm also less inclined to be brave.

But I dreamed in color.

It was a more amazing experience and a more important dream than the one I had so long ago. This dream was very different, very important. It was a kind of gift.

Now that I am 51 I think more about heaven.

Silly, I know, but still.

I believe in heaven. I know I will share that experience with Jesus, who died to forgive my sins and purchase togetherness forever.

What I don't know is anything else about it.

Maybe existence with Jesus Christ will be so overwhelming that its timeless joy will sweep into nothingness every joy I have yet experienced. Maybe my longing for the joys of this world, my wife, my human relationships, music, the glories of color and sensations is simply a misunderstanding of how vastly superseding will be intimacy with Jesus Christ.

Maybe.

Once, long ago, Jesus was challenged by some of his many detractors to explain how a conscious afterlife would work. How does a continuation of earthly joy play out?

Eugene Peterson's Bible translation (The Message) tells the story from the Gospel of Matthew (chapter 22) this way:

That same day, Sadducees approached him. This is the party that denies any possibility of resurrection. They asked, "Teacher, Moses said that if a man dies childless, his brother is obligated to marry his widow and get her with child. Here's a case where there were seven brothers. The first brother married and died, leaving no child, and his wife passed to his brother. The second brother also left her childless, then the third—and on and on, all seven. Eventually the wife died. Now here's our question: At the resurrection, whose wife is she? She was a wife to each of them."

Jesus answered, "You're off base on two counts: You don't know your Bibles, and you don't know how God works. At the resurrection we're beyond marriage. As with the angels, all our ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God. And regarding your speculation on whether the dead are raised or not, don't you read your Bibles? The grammar is clear: God says, 'I am—not was—the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.' The living God defines himself not as the God of dead men, but of the living." Hearing this exchange the crowd was much impressed.

"... all our ecstasies and intimacies then will be with God"

These are profoundly beautiful words.

Maybe heaven will then be beyond the kinds of sensations we now know. Maybe my very most beautiful earthly experiences of love and empathy and joy will be like walking on a foggy day—the feeling of water as humid air does nothing to prepare us for the feeling of water when we swim.

My reasoning and my study of Jesus' words tell me not to try to comprehend what living with God will be like.

But I still have been wondering more about heaven.

And so I will never forget the second time I dreamed in color.

There were no drugs to explain the experience this time—it was a kind of gift.

I was asleep in the middle of the night but became aware that I was beginning to have color vision. It lasted for only a few seconds, and it was only one scene, but it was one of the most powerful experiences of my life. What is remarkable is that I consciously felt myself opening my eyes in amazement, an experience of wakefulness even within the dream.

My vision was downward onto a patch of ground before me. In an instant I was given the overwhelming sense that I was seeing something of heaven. The impression was so clear, yet there were no words.

Immediately before my eyes, as if I was kneeling and looking closely at the ground, was a bright patch of forest floor, dappled in sun as one would see on an early fall day when trees are mostly bare. I stared. There on the ground were beautiful fallen leaves of many vivid colors, stirring in a gentle breeze.

Sensing my eyes wide open even in my dream, I looked closer. I perceived a loving message—that seasons and cycles and colors and experiences...and life...continue in this place where I will know my Lord even as he now knows me.

And then I saw something small and simple and unexpected.

There between two fallen leaves before me I saw a tiny beetle wander across the heavenly ground.

The scene faded peacefully, a gift.

As I woke in the darkness of my bedroom, my wife sleeping next to me, I found myself crying.

2.12