“At that time the word of God came to John in the wilderness.  He went through all the region of the Jordan, announcing a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins.  This is what is written in the book of the words of Isaiah the prophet: ‘A voice shouting in the wilderness: Get ready a path for the Lord, make the roads straight for Him!  Every valley shall be filled in, and every mountain and hill shall be flattened, the twisted paths will be straightened out, and the rough roads smoothed off, and all that lives shall see God’s rescue.’  ‘You brood of vipers,’ John used to say to the crowds who came out to be baptized by him.  ‘Who told you to escape God’s coming anger?  You’d better prove your repentance by bearing the proper fruit!  Don’t start saying to yourselves, “We have Abraham as our father”; let me tell you, God can raise up children for Abraham from these stones!  The ax is already standing by the roots of the tree-so every tree that doesn’t produce good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire.’”

Luke 3:1-9 (N.T. Wright Translation)

Luke writes to a people under difficult social, economic, and governmental times.  He introduces this passage talking about whose in power (of Rome and Judea) and the people he is writing to would have known how these names represented power, abuse, and challenges for life.  In doing, he used John’s story to invite people to turn away from the lives they were living in the former world or way of life and turn towards God’s kingdom and His way of life.  This is a difficult task and one I have been wrestling with for years now.  How do I do this?  Can I do this?  Can I do this alone?  Can we do it together?  It seems the task Luke and John the Baptist are inviting their readers to contemplate and act on is the same one I and perhaps we are invited to contemplate and act on in our own contexts and worlds.  The question is, how, when, and why?  I keep looking to answers and direction to these question.  If you have thoughts and responses to them, I’d be happy to hear them as I need other people to help clarify the thoughts and answers I’ve come to so far…

The ancient philosopher Socrates has a famous statement that says, “The unexamined life is not worth living” and for me, that notion has been particularly present in my life in these last 6 years of journeying through 2 seminary degrees.  Going through seminary for me has not just been or even primarily been about gathering new information.  Yes, I have learned an awful lot and feel more prepared to educate others about what I’ve learned.  However, my seminary journey has been most profoundly transformational for me because it has caused me in so many ways to look at who I am.  Who is this person, Shane, who feels he is called to be a pastor, a counselor, a theologian?  I must say that I didn’t come to Seminary originally thinking I would be asked or even forced to look at myself…I came to learn about ‘information’, i.e., supposedly abstract knowledge taught to me by wise and learned individuals.  Yet, if seminary only would have done this for me, I know I would not be as prepared to go out and be a minister and counselor, even a theologian, as I feel I am now.  In many ways, I have become the most important book I’ve learned to read during these past 6 years.  For some, what I’m saying might sound confusing, wrong, or just odd; for others, it may make perfect and normal sense.  I guess what I’ve learned is that there are reasons we all, as humans beings, choose to do what we do, whether it is follow a vocation, career, choose to get married, have kids, live here or there, do this or that, and as a result, the question of ‘why’ we do this or that is important.  Why did I come to seminary?  What I’ve learned is that my motives were mixed.  I came to seminary to learn about God and learn how to serve him in the world (positive motives?); I also came to seminary to learn how to become a spiritual hero, rescuer, and teacher (negative motives?).  Basically I’ve learned that my motives are almost always mixed in life, work, and even play.  I used to see things so black and white, but now the world, and myself included, seem so much more gray.  The world is not a simple place, God is not a simple being (if He is a ‘being’ as I consider that at all), and I am not a simple person.  The world is complex, God is complex, and I am complex.  I have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides; the question is, can I embrace both sides of myself or not?  If I can, why can I?  If I cannot, why can’t I?  I’ve learned in these 6 years that pretending I don’t have a ‘bad’ side or sides to me causes a lot of trauma and damage to me and to others.  I’ve been taught and trained in this world how to ’split’ myself; be good here and hide my badness so that I will be accepted.  As a result, I get fearful when the thought arises I may have said or done something that hurt another because now they may not like this me that I have presented to them…as a result, I may be rejected, neglected, and unloved.  So I do my best to present the most acceptable version of me that can be presented and hope (with fingers crossed) that whoever I am with (I can put on many different masks to fit different situations) will find this mask and act acceptable.  However, by doing this I keep people from seeing who I truly am, the true me.  Though I have been trained to believe I am a sinner, I have been taught, unspokenly, to reject that outright by pretending I don’t have a dark side that occasionally will cause harm to myself or others.  So, I feel caught, trapped; can I be a sinner or can’t I be one?  Or, perhaps I am both a sinner and a saint?  Perhaps I am loved by God as a sinner and saint?  Perhaps my sins, i.e., the things I say and do and am that break relationship with others and God, can teach me things about myself.  Perhaps I can learn from the times I commit sins and see how they hurt me, others, and my well-being in the world.  Perhaps, instead of hiding from them, I can bring them into the light, as John says in his letter, and trust God in all of God’s graciousness to embrace the complex good and bad me.

All of this presupposes that I have the courage to face myself…me…Shane, the sinner and saint.  The child of God who can at one moment do or say wonderfully loving things and in the next moment, say or do amazingly foolish or hurtful things.  Can I face the fact that I am not God, not perfect, not always right?  Along with this however, can I face the fact that I am created in God’s image as a human and as a result, good, true, and beautiful?  Can I live with the complexity of this arrangement?  For most of my life, I have felt that I am either or, either good or bad…I haven’t felt I could somehow be both and still just be.  Is it possible, however, that I could see myself, Shane, as a sinner and saint whom God loves not because of primarily what I do, but rather because I am His.  Perhaps if I learned this about myself and my life, I could begin to learn to love and embrace others this way, as sinners and saints so that when they do something good I could be thankful but when they do something hurtful, I could seek to understand because I know they are both sinners and saints like me and as a result, not turn away from them but stay close to them, wanting to learn about them and their hurts, faults, frailties just as I am seeking to keep learning about my own.  Perhaps this is what Jesus did and offered in his life and ministry and why he drew people to him so powerfully.  Perhaps he knew himself so well and sought to know others so well that people just felt so embraced in the light of his presence and acceptance.

All this to say, though my seminary journey is nearing its end, my journey of learning about myself, God, this world, and others will not end.  I have fallen in love with the journey of learning and it will not let go of me because I will not let go of it.  God has grasped me and this journey I am on of discovering myself and how I can be His for the world and for myself keeps pulling me forward in new, beautiful, and mysterious ways that make this life so wonderful and precious.  It has been a scary thing to learn about myself, to bring out the parts that I didn’t want to see or acknowledge, and yet, because of this part of my training, I feel I can be for myself, for others, and most importantly for God, what he would most prefer me to be…myself.   As a famous rabbi once said, “When I get to heaven, God will not ask me why I was not Abraham, Moses, or David, he will ask me, why was I not” Shane?   To be able to be myself though, I must learn about who I am and this is why I think Socrates statement is so wise for me and for all…to learn about ourselves so we can truly begin to learn about others and thus be ourselves truly with others.

Starting today, there are 40 days until I graduate from seminary with my master’s in marriage and family therapy degree.  This degree completion will mean a change in the seasons of life for me and as I thought about last night, changes always bring with them both joy and pain, new life and the passing away of old things.  However, I do not feel like I have always been aware of the importance of life transitions like these or how the need to change with them or at least understand that a change is taking place impacts me.  I don’t think our society does a very good job of teaching us, especially young ones, the importance of rituals, symbols, and life transition markers as previous societies used to and as a result, I think we often stay ’stuck’ in a past stage, whether physically, emotionally, relationally, intellectually, whatever and end up struggling with the newer stage we’ve moved into.  In systems therapy, there is an understanding that systems, whether human individuals, families, nature, or what have you, tend to want to stay the same even if staying the same means functioning less well.  What that means is that I would rather tend to keep doing the same things that might have used to work well for me but if a new life stage comes I may choose to keep doing these things even though the new stage calls for me to change my way and level of functioning.  Because I may prefer to stay the same and resist or not acknowledge the change that has taken place, I may end up really feeling disoriented, lost, and frustrated by my lack of progress or functionality because I am used old methods of living in a new stage of life and just expect things to keep working the same way.

With this thought in mind, I was thinking last night that using these next 40 days, the traditional period of testing in the Bible, to prepare myself for the change in my life that is coming up.  What will my life be like after I graduate, how will things change, how will I change?  I was thinking last night that perhaps some of the reason I have a difficult time making changes in my own life, like getting back into working out as much as I’d like to, trying to things in my life, etc., don’t happen because I try to do them out of sheer will instead of integrating them into a new pattern of behavior and actions as I realize they will help me become a new person.  Because I don’t look at them this way, I fall back into my normal systemic way of behaving and acting.  So, there is almost this idea that to become a new person in a new season of life, I need to understand new behaviors, thoughts, and actions as a pathway to helping me become this new person, as difficult as this may feel at first.  Perhaps this will help me continue to move forward with the changes as I mourn certain losses and changes that are difficult while staying away from the white-knuckling attitude of forcing change as in the past.

So, we’ll see how this experiment goes…I find it interesting to think about to say the least.

I’m currently reading theologian Miroslav Volf’s book, Exclusion and Embrace and am thoroughly enjoying it. With the discussion our church is having around racial reconciliation and the ideas my wife and I think about for learning to live in intentional community, the topics he touches on are so important.

One thing he mentioned today was on the topic of how Jesus both worked to liberate the oppressed in the society he lived in while also calling them to repentance. The question of why he would do this seems important sociologically because if they have been oppressed by others, what do they need to repent of? Have they not been the ones abused, taken for granted, harmed? Would asking them to repent not just re-oppress them somehow saying they’ve done wrong? I must admit, this was an intriguing question for me because I’ve wondered this before. Why did Jesus tell the blind man whom he had healed to ’stop sinning or something worse may happen to you’ when this man seems to have been a victim of social stigma and oppression because of his condition? I know there is the basic Evangelical notion that, yes, we are all sinners and therefore, must all ask for forgiveness; but this notion doesn’t seem to fit well for me with what Jesus is asking of him and others in similar occasions. It seems odd that Jesus would tell him or anyone to ‘repent’ when they have just gotten out of a situation of being oppressed that points to no individual sin of the person Jesus is telling to repent. What Volf says, however, to clear this up is the following; that Jesus understood that when oppression is done to someone, that oppression can make its way into the pattern of being, seeing, and understanding of that person even if it wasn’t there beforehand. So, even if the blind man wasn’t an oppressor before he was ‘oppressed by the leaders’ around him, their oppression may seep into his life and begin to turn him into an oppressor of others or them. To make this more simple, take for instance, when abuse is done to a nation, should they find justice or the power to overcome their oppressors, what often happens is they in turn become oppressors to ‘justify’ or balance the scales of what has been done to them. What Volf is saying, however, is that this counter-turn to balance the scales does not fix things, but actually gives into the normal and original evil systems of oppression and thus what ends up happening is not transformation, healing, and reconciliation towards the good, but a fall-back into the negative, oppressive, and evil.

As a result of this, by Jesus’ calling ’sinners’ who were oppressed to also repent, he was trying to help them see that they need to ‘root out of their hearts, minds, and spirits the oppression that they had been exposed to by the virtue of their being oppressed.’ He did this so they might not become oppressors themselves but instead, choose good over evil and transform the original system of evil for evil with good for evil; i.e. ‘love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you.’

This really is an interesting thing for me to think about when it comes to thinking about how I feel harmed in any relational interaction whether at work, in my marriage, in life in general. If I do not repent after feeling harmed, the tendency for me to harm back and maintain the cycle of violence and sin will continue. However, if I do repent, I can weed the sins of destruction, evil, and sin out and replace it with the seeds of forbearance, humility, forgiveness, and love…as Jesus did.

As Volf says; ‘To repent means to resist the seductiveness of the sinful values and practices and to let the new order of God’s reign be established in one’s heart. For a victim to repent means not to allow the oppressor to determine the terms under which social conflict is carried out, the values around which the conflict is raging, and the means by which it is fought. Repentance thus empowers victims and disempowers the oppressors. It “humanizes” the victims precisely by protecting them from either mimicking of dehumanizing the oppressors. Far from being a sign of acquiescence to the dominant order, repentance creates a haven of God’s new world in the midst of the old and so makes the transformation of the old possible.” (p. 116)

I was reading in a book yesterday (’Transforming Spirituality’) about the concept of ‘the good life’. This idea of the ‘good life’ has been a constant thread that has weaved its way through the minds of men and women across history with varying ideas of how to achieve it. This idea of living ‘the good life’ corresponds closely with the idea of ‘living the wise life’ because it carries with it that living ‘the good life’ will show that one has been living ‘wisely’ because the fruit that their life path bears will prove to be good fruit. In the book, one of the authors speaks of two main threads of ideas of what the ‘good life’ is and how one achieves it within the Christian tradition. The author notes that at different historical periods, one thread will be lifted as more important or more ‘correct’ and then it seems the time will come for the ‘other thread’ to be lifted up as more important or more ‘correct’.

The author notes that the first notion of the ‘good or wise life’ is known as ‘Eudaemonic’ and was emphasized by Aristotle ‘which implied the virtuous realization of one’s true potential. In contrast to the private pleasure of the individual, eudaimonia was oriented toward the telos (end) of the good of society or the polis (city). Plato agreed that health and happiness should be connected to moral virtue in the public square. In contrast, the Hellenistic-Roman concepts of health and happiness shifted from virtuous eudaimonia to the more utilitarian and hedonistic notion of ataraxia. Ataraxia implied peace of mind or freedom from disturbance, and the connections to moral virtue and communal concern were divorced from popular construals of health and happiness.

As I think about these two notions, I think I have shifted strongly from one to the other in the last 10 years or so as I’ve tried to form a life for myself and my family that will be oriented towards that which is good and wise. During my college years and early-mid twenties, it seems as if my life, and spirituality as a result, were mostly focused on a more individualistic, ataraxia view of the good and wise life. My spirituality was very individualistic and focused on personal quiet times, individual worship, morality, and salvation. In fact, I used to believe that I could do Christianity without The Church (i.e. being a part of a Christian body of believers/followers). My spirituality was mostly about me being happy with God and Him being happy with me and if these two things were working well, then I was close to having the good or wise life. However, after getting married, going to seminary, and transitioning into the second half of my twenties, my life, and spirituality again, shifted to what I now consider to have been a more eudaemonic form focused on the other, community, and personal virtue development for the benefit of the whole. As a result, I became very engrossed in the ideas of house churches, I moved into the city to try and learn about the city to see how one could help with urban development, and also became very aware of the importance of social justice in my Christian life. During this time, my previous notions of individual spirituality changed to the point where I struggled praying by myself, worshiping by myself, and thinking of Christianity in individual contentedness at all. In some ways, I scorned the idea of a individual view of Christianity that focused on individual contentment and peace.

Having somewhat traversed both of these views of ‘the good and wise spiritual life’, not that I’ve figured it all out, it seems as if I’m now coming to the place that considers, perhaps it is necessary to balance these two views and not just cling to one or the other. In my days of my more ataraxia spirituality, I had good and wise days and many days that were not. In the most recent times of my more eudaemonic spiritual days, I have also had good and wise days and many days that were not. So, perhaps, as in so many things, it is not a black or white issue or right or wrong issue but a balancing of both. I’ve been reading Christian contemplatives and saints a lot recently and it seemed as if they understood this. While they all seemed to be fiercely committed to issues of justice, communal development, and personal growth as a part of their spiritual lives, they also balanced these things with personal devotion to God, in God, and with God. Some of the most profound spiritual leaders and writers in the history of Christianity were both activitists and contemplatives. My hope is that I can learn, in this next season of life, how to balance this better.

As I think of what Paul writes in Ephesians 5:16, ‘Be very careful, then, how you live-not as unwise, but wise, making the most of every opportunity’ I can now try and put that in the concept of living wisely by connecting my own spiritual life in God with and for others under God’s love and strength.

It’s interesting to think about why one would call the day Jesus lay in his tomb a ‘holy’ day just as it was interesting yesterday to think about why one would call the day Jesus died ‘good.’ What, perhaps, is holy about the day that lay between his death and his resurrection? If I was one of the disciples on that Saturday, there probably would have been a number of conclusions I would have made from Good Friday that would have made this day seem anything but ‘holy’. For instance, I probably would have concluded that because Jesus was killed by the Romans, he wasn’t the messiah sent by God to deliver Israel from oppression and slavery. I probably would have thought, since he was crucified on a tree, that instead of being loved by God, Jesus was cursed by God (Gal 3:13; Deut. 21:23). Finally, I probably would have thought that I had wasted my time and these last few years following a false messiah for false messiahs always ended up dead at the hands of the Romans. Thinking of all of these things, that Jesus was a phony, that I had been attached to someone accursed by God, and that I had wasted my time, years, and reputation in doing so, not much would seem to be holy for me I would think on a day like this. I’m amazed in some ways that people like Nicodemus and Joseph of Arimathea would still feel brave enough and convicted enough to want to be attached to Jesus with some of these feelings perhaps running through their thoughts and doubts. “Was it all a lie? Was I deceived, like the chief priests and leaders had been saying Jesus was trying to do to Israel, and led astray? What about all of the miracles, the marvelous teachings, the magneticism of the crowds towards Jesus? What happened? How could we go from marching into Jerusalem triumphantly with the crowds cheering and waving palm branches to honor our leader and us to this; being a despised and rejected group of ragtag outlaws? This could not have been what Jesus wanted or was planning for, was it? Why did he not fight back against the leaders and Romans? Why didn’t he call on God to deliver him and us? Why would he allow himself to be so brutally taken and silenced? Why? Where is God; has he forsaken us; have we forsaken him; are we lost forever? Have we wasted our chance at being reconciled to God by following this man? What now?” I can imagine all or many of these thoughts going through their minds as they sat and pondered what to do on this ‘holy’ Saturday when Jesus lie in the tomb.

In many ways, there are days when I feel this lost, confused, and hopeless, even after the time of Easter and resurrection. There are days when I wonder if I am following a counterfeit leader, teacher, and spiritual guide. There are days when I wonder if what I am giving my life to will be for naught. There are days when I wonder if everything I think I know and understand is all foolishness in the eyes of God. There are days when I wonder if I will be left alone wondering if God has forsaken me or if I have finally forsaken God for good by something I’ve done that is way off base. I wonder about Jesus and his commands; I wonder about my inability to do anything good; I wonder about the Church’s inability to seem to advance his ways and purposes in love and compassion; I wonder…

In the darkness of these kinds of days, perhaps I can think back to what the disciples must have felt and thought during that long ‘holy’ Saturday that didn’t seem so holy I’m sure. And yet, perhaps the darkness of that day and days like that for myself, is one of the true tests of my faith and, as a result, the reason they call a day like that ‘holy’. Perhaps we are most close to that which is holy, when, like Jesus on that dark day at Golgotha, we seem to have been forsaken by God and yet do not let go of hope, love, and faith. Even though everything flies in the face of rational thought, judgment, and reason, we hold on to, not our conceptions, but God himself as tightly as we can. Perhaps when our voices cry out in utter loss, pain, and despair to God and finally realize in those moments that He is truly the only ‘real thing’ we can have and need, perhaps in those moments we find ourselves most close to that which is holy. For, perhaps in those moments we find ourselves alone with God.

So, maybe ‘holy Saturday’ is something that can be celebrated as much as Good Friday or Easter Sunday for on Holy Saturday, the disciples had to go through, in a way, what Jesus had to go through on Good Friday; the feeling of being rejected and separated from God despite all one had done and given away for God? Perhaps we continue to need these kinds of days and moments to bring us back to God as our only source and life. Perhaps, the more we embrace moments like these in life, perhaps we will find the holiness our souls our longing for every other ‘holy’ day…

“The Valley Song” by Jars of Clay…

As I reflect on what today means, I think I realize what a difficult holiday this can be to remember and celebrate. The idea of honoring and celebrating death is so counter-cultural in our society that Good Friday seems confusing to most, silly to others. “Why would we want to call a day when Jesus died ‘good’?” I’ve heard that question asked often and I think I’ve thought it myself before. Perhaps the earlier Christians knew something we didn’t by really understanding the place and power of honoring a day like this. Of course, it seems it is good to honor this day as being good because Jesus’ death leads to our forgiveness, healing, and reconciliation. All of these things are truly beautiful and celebratory. And yet, these things only come it seems this holiday is saying, through pain, suffering, and loss. I’m struck with the idea that death, pain, suffering can bring about something good and redemptive. In a culture where medicine, addictions, entertainment and so many other things are given to us to numb the pain of life or distract us from the pain of life, here we see Jesus fully entering into pain, suffering, and loss because of what it will bring for his followers and the world. Why do we shrink back from pain and loss so much? Why are we afraid to hurt, to ask why we hurt? Instead of facing our fears and wondering about them, instead of examining our pains and sharing them, instead of understanding our losses and being thankful for them, we seem to be told that there is nothing good that can come from these things. What if we understood pain as something that teaches us about what is not going right and instead of hiding from it, chose to learn from it and change? What if we understood suffering not as something to minimize or medicate but as something to endure with patience, hope, and sharing because it may bring about long-suffering, strength, and humility? What if Jesus’ death on the cross showed us that so many good things can come through that which is difficult? Perhaps with this kind of understanding we could find so many things that are Good from the pain of Good Friday and the pain in our lives. I’ll admit, I don’t like to hurt, be lonely, suffer…I often want to do whatever I can to avoid it or numb it. However, in the times when I don’t medicate my hurts but ‘look upon them’ and even share them with God or others; many times I learn something so much more important and even find myself drawn closer to God and others. I pray that God would help me learn something from the pain he was willing to suffer this day and that in the year to come, I would choose to run from pain, suffering, and loss much less than I usually do. Perhaps I will realize that these things are a part of life, and yet God is able to teach, heal, and redeem even in the midst of these things because I am human and must walk through them, as Jesus did, yet God is great and can do that which I could never imagine even as he did that Paschal weekend so long ago.

“Medication” by Derek Webb…

Today is the day we celebrate Jesus sharing in the Passover Meal with his disciples in the Upper Room.  In doing this, he takes the ancient ritual of his fellow Jews and brings all the symbolism and meaning towards himself.  The passover lamb that was sacrificed first when the Israelites were to be delivered from slavery in the land of Egypt so that God would ‘pass over them’ and, as a result, bring deliverance for them from oppression and slavery, would have special meaning for Christians as well as it did for the Israelites.  The difference is that, with this meal celebration, Jesus is saying “I am now the passover lamb that will be sacrificed so that God will pass over your sins and bring you deliverance and rescue from oppression and the slavery of sin, evil, and death for all time.”  This is why he told his disciples to take the Passover meal and apply it to him; now they would eat “his body and drink his blood”.  As the Israelites first ate the meat from the Passover lamb back in Egypt to celebrate God’s coming rescue and as they covered their door frames with the Passover lamb’s blood to act as their covering, now Jesus’ followers would participate in “sharing in his body” through the taking of the bread and “with his blood” by sharing in the cup.  The symbolism here is so rich that I often miss how deep Jesus is drawing us to the importance of what he is doing with this simple meal.  This meal he shared with his disciples, we are now invited to share with him and fellow believers as well to remember, honor, and celebrate the life, death, and resurrection of this one we follow.  And to add to the beauty and symbolism of what he’s already done and said at this meal, he then takes a basin of water and kneels down, to wash his followers feet.  What a symbol of love, humility, compassion, and service.  On this day, Maundy Thursday, I am thankful for people in my life who help me see Jesus the way these symbols and rituals can.  I am thankful that these symbols, stories, and rituals have not been lost over the generations since Jesus lived.  And like the tree overlooking the lake on my picture in my blog, I pray this Maundy Thursday that I would continue to put my roots deep down into the soil of the best of our faith traditions even while my faith and spiritual growth reaches upwards to God and outwards towards others and this beautiful creation of God’s in love.

I’m finishing up reading this fantastic book on Jesus, the Gospel books, and the book of Acts called ‘Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.’  In the chapter on the book of Acts, the author, Thomas Cahill, shares an amazing quote from Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, about the Christian life.  Here is a portion of it.

‘It is no use saying that we are born two thousand years too late to give room to Christ.  Nor will those who live at the end of the world have been born too late.  Christ is always with us, always asking for room in our hearts.  But now it is with the voice of our contemporaries that He speaks, with the eyes of store clerks, factory workers, and children that He gazes, with the hands of office workers, slum dwellers, and suburban housewives that He gives.  It is with the feet of soldiers and tramps that He walks, and with the heart of anyone in need that He longs for shelter.  And giving shelter or food to anyone who asks for it, or needs it, is giving it to Christ…To see how far one realizes this it is a good thing to ask honestly what you would do, or have done, when a beggar asked at your house for food.  Would you-or did you-give it on an old cracked plate, thinking that was good enough?  Do you think that Martha and Mary thought that the old and chipped dish was good enough for their guest?  For a total Christian, the goad of duty is not needed-always prodding one to perform this or that good deed.  It is not a duty to help Christ, it is a privilege.  Is it likely that Martha and Mary sat back and considered that they had done all that was expected of them-is it likely that Peter’s mother-in-law grudgingly served the chicken she had meant to keep till Sunday because she thought it was her “duty”?  She did it gladly; she would have served ten chickens if she had had them.  If that is the way they gave hospitality to Christ, it is certain that that is the way it should still be given.  Not for the sake of humanity.  Not because it might be Christ who stays with us, comes to see us, takes up our time.  Not because these people remind us of Christ…but because they are Christ.

Of course this is can be taken from Matthew 25 and the passage of the ’sheep and goats’ but the powerful wording here just stuns me.  It is not my duty to care for another as a Christian; I am not performing some great act of charity when I do so.  Rather, showing hospitality, giving, caring, being compassionate and merciful; I am to do all of these things to any person who crosses my path because they are all Christ!  I am to treat everyone with the honor, love, and compassion that I would should Jesus come to my front door.  Would I turn Jesus away; I pray not!  So, in caring and welcoming others, I am indeed welcoming Christ and in the manner I care and welcome for them, that is how I care and welcome Christ.  This is something I’ve heard and thought of before, but for some reason, it hasn’t hit me with the power and depth that it does right now.  So, the question is, how do I live believing this?

Today I began reading the book of Matthew again, starting at the first chapter and verse. This first section chronicles the genealogy of Jesus, stretching all the way back to Abraham. Matthew’s purpose seems to highlight that Jesus is THE fulfillment of God’s promise that he made to Abraham and King David and subsequently to all of the nation of Israel that one day, he would give them the promise of peace, blessing, and salvation that they had been waiting on for such a long time. I think what they were really hoping and waiting for was to have a land of their own where they could live in peace with themselves and with others and be able to freely worship God and live with Him as His people. For Israel, this was the kind of ’salvation’ I think they were looking for; a salvation were they would no longer be slaves to sin, to other nations, but rather be free to experience the fullness of life in the beautiful world of creation that their God had made. Jesus is somehow at the center of all of these hopes, promises, and blessings and Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus is meant to prepare us for how the rest of his telling of Jesus’ life will go on to show us this very truth. Jesus is the long awaited Messiah, the second Moses, the great Davidic King, the true Israel, and the full human being whom the Creator God is pleased to smile upon and appoint as Lord over all creation.

Okay, there’s the theology for Jesus; now, what about for me? As I looked at this genealogy of Jesus, I couldn’t help but wonder about my own family’ genealogy. I’ve done some work in the last couple of years to learn more about my past relatives, where I’ve come from, but sadly, my family tree is only able to be followed for a short time. Perhaps I need to do some more work, but it really bums me out that I can’t follow my lineage any longer then like two generations ago. And yet, I’m pretty sure who I am today has been largely impacted by who my ancestors were and what they experienced in the world they lived in.

As I read Jesus’ genealogy, I was also struck with interest at the thought of when my ancestors first took on the name of Christians. How many generations have known Jesus as their Savior, Lord, and friend and in what capacity? What brought my forefathers and foremothers to trust in God for their lives and the lives of their children? Did they become Christians because ‘everybody else was doing it’ or because ‘that’s just what you did?’ There must have been sometime, way back when someone or some people first made a decision to read the Bible, utter a prayer to God, place faith in an unseen Being, and pass that legacy of belief, trust, and love onto their children, family, and perhaps, friends. But where, when, and how did this all happen? The more I think about this, the more intrigued I am to find out how it all came about? It’s been over two thousand years since Jesus walked the earth and yet, his legacy lives on in my family and I really want to know how this came about. I really am not at all sure if I will be able to dig this far back into history and uncover what happened, but I hope so. It feels like if I don’t know how deep the roots of this faith of mine go, then how will I know where the branches will reach to in the coming years? Anyways, just a thought for this Tuesday morning. We’ll see what happens.