Being Rickulous

I have a new Biblical hero, one I have never noticed.  Tradition identifies him as a stonemason who, as a youngster in training or as a fully grown adult, had his hand crushed while on the job.  The few things I know about stonemasonry suggest such an event would be a split second accident that would permanently alter a life. When such an accident happens today, a person faces multiple surgeries, casts, excruciating therapy, and maybe reduced capacity but maybe full reconstruction and active duty.  When such an accident happened in Jesus’ day, the result was a dried up hand (the literal Greek rendering).  Atrophy.  And one handed stonemasons were not in demand. The stonemason was in a synagogue that day.  Become that stonemason for a moment. You are in the room.  Maybe you can detect an undercurrent of tension.  Maybe you can feel the glances of the aristocracy in the room and you wonder why they keep looking your way and then peering at the rabbi Jesus. Suddenly the rabbi tells you to position yourself right in the middle, where everybody can see you.  Do you want to do that?  Do you want to become the focus?  People already stare at you with question marks on their faces, or far worse with pity on their faces.  And do you want to become the football in this scrimmage between the rabbi and the aristocracy? You stand there, exposed and uncertain, and Jesus looks at the aristocracy.  He’s mad.  No, He’s furious.  But He’s also sad.  Why is He sad?  And then He challenges them.  Sounds like the tension in the air has to do with what’s good on the Sabbath and what’s bad.  You’re not a scholar, but you know your way around the Torah.  Still, you are a little over your head here. The aristocracy is silent, but you see their faces reddening.  And then it all explodes.  Specifically, Jesus explodes.  Fuming, He looks right at you.  Did you do something wrong?  Aren’t you standing where He told you to stand?  He says, in a commanding and reverberating voice, “Stretch out your hand!” You’ve heard of His healings, but He is nowhere near you.  He has not touched you.  He has not healed you.  He has only demanded that you do the one thing you have been wishing you could do since the accident. Do protests catch in your throat?  Such as, “I can’t!”  Such as, “What will these men over here think of me if I do?”  You are not a complicated person.  You always prefer the most direct line between A and B.  So, as you make eye contact with the rabbi, something new wells up in you.  No, not something new, but something that died a few months after your hand died.  It’s hope.  Hope is back.  Along with it, a suggestion of…trust.  The rabbi is telling you to stretch out your hand, and you came to the synagogue because so many stories have been circulating about what this rabbi can do that nobody else can do. So you do the unthinkable, the impossible, the unimaginable.  You.  Stretch.  Out.  Your.  Hand.  The pain is unbearable; it’s as if bone and tissue are breaking and tearing all over again.  But there is movement.  It’s a different pain.  As intense as your memory of the accident, yet different.  And it’s not the constant throbbing you now bear.  It is as if your arm is being reborn.  Every nerve ending is shrieking, but as this thing rips through you there is no way you are stopping.  Let the pain do whatever the pain is going to do.  Keep stretching! You are sweat soaked.  You are shaking.  And now your hand is stretched out in front of you, 100% restored. Pandemonium breaks loose.  People are mobbing you.  You catch the Rabbi’s eyes, and now His eyes are crinkling.  He nods at you once, and then His disciples are all around Him.  You are aware that something else is happening.  The aristocracy storms out in a menacing cloud of outrage.  But you can’t sort that out.  Your hand is back.  Your arm is back.  Your life is back. Okay, now stop being the stonemason.  Go back to being you.  This is crucial, because it’s the movement from text to heart.  Faith, by its very nature, stretches what is deformed and dried up.  So if Jesus says to you, “Stretch out your _______,” what fills in the blank?  How might you protest?  Sit with that question for awhile.

They were watching Jesus.  This is an edgy Greek word that we translate as “watch.”  It carries the sense of watching narrowly.  Luke was fond of the word.  In Luke’s Gospel the religious leaders sent spies to “keep a close watch on Him,” so that they could catch Jesus in something He said and turn Him over to the government they so bitterly despised (Luke 20:20).  And in Acts there was a conspiracy among the Jews to kill Saul, who had recently converted to faith in Christ.  They weren’t so much watching Saul.  They were “keeping a close watch” on the city gates (Acts 9:23-24).  Under the cover of darkness some followers snuck Saul out via a basket lowered through an opening in the wall. Last weekend I bought a new pair of binoculars so that I could go out to Kauffman Stadium and watch the Royals lose BIGGER.  I can never avoid the childish practice of turning the binoculars around and looking at everything getting smaller.  It makes me laugh out loud like the laugh tracks on Hee Haw. This is precisely what the Pharisees were doing to themselves.  By viewing Jesus through their institutionalized system, they were reversing the binoculars.  Think about it.  Whenever we narrowly watch somebody, we are watching him/her with our minds already made up.  We have filtered him/her through our assumptions or our belief systems.  This person is to be rejected.  This person is a threat. Okay, it is necessary to have filters and belief systems.  But when they reverse the binoculars and Jesus is on the other end, something isn’t right. I really want to watch Jesus without filters.  But, last time I looked, I was a fifty year-old Caucasian middle class Baptist who has lived in the Midwestern United States for forty nine of those fifty years.  I just counted five filters.  And I have many more than that. So is this an impossibility?  Can we ever watch the signs of Jesus’ presence, or watch Jesus move around in the Gospels, in such a way that Jesus is magnified?  Can we hold the binoculars correctly? As long as we are human we will have filters, prisms through which we view God and ourselves and life.  I take tremendous refuge in the truth that it’s not all up to me.  God in Christ is revealed to me.  God knows my heart, and whenever my heart is receptive God makes sure I can see more clearly.  But I must want to see.  I must want Christ’s words and actions to be magnified, not minimized. What is the opposite of “watching narrowly?”  God help us watch You that way.

A few weeks ago I was hijacked.  Well, my Yahoo e-mail account was hijacked.  I am off on Fridays.  Before Carla Sue left for work I asked her for a dollar, to complete the amount McDonald’s would require for two orders of biscuits and gravy to go ($5.17 every Friday).  Soon after Carla arrived at the office she called me saying, “Honey, I loaned you a dollar.  How come you want more money?  And why are you in Africa?” During the night, hijackers had broken into my Yahoo e-mail account and had literally assumed my identity.  Pretending to be me they sent a message out far and wide claiming I was stuck in Africa and needed thousands of dollars right away in order to come home.  Carla Sue spent most of the morning on the phone with Yahoo trying to rescue me, and I spent two mornings at Sprint because the hijackers were in my Blackberry.  I lost all of my e-mail addresses and had to start over with a new e-mail account, this time on Google. It took HOURS for us to undo the damage and reestablish cyber-me, and I will be rebuilding my e-mail contact list for months, maybe years.  It was an enlightening experience, a lesson in the extent to which I have become reliant on technology.  Much of our church ministry is processed online and through cellular wizardry.  Turns out much of my life is processed online and through cellular wizardry.  It’s so helpful!  But how do we know when we have become too reliant?  Is the dog wagging the tail or is the tail wagging the dog? This is a primary issue in Mark 2:18-28.  With good and even holy intentions, the Pharisees had swapped faith as relationship for faith as rule keeping.  They had institutionalized Life, making it predictable and controllable.  Then Jesus came along and began asking why the tail was wagging the dog.  Have you noticed that institutions specialize in sniffing out even perceived threats and protecting their structures?  The remainder of Jesus’ life and ministry would be punctuated by confrontations with the religious establishment because He dared to question the structures AND the institution. Weddings will not tolerate a funeral atmosphere.  Old, faded garments cannot adapt to stiff, unshrunk fabric.  Old, dry wineskins cannot expand to keep up with fresh wine.  The Sabbath was made to serve people, instead of people serving the Sabbath.  The tail was never meant to wag the dog.  These are all ways of asking the same question.  Is a “what” in charge or is a “Who” in charge?” Last Thursday one of our church members came by.  During the course of a seemingly unrelated conversation, he opened my eyes to the correlation between the dynamics of this Scripture passage and our panting dance with technology.  In your network of relationships, how many people have become slaves to their technology?  How many families do the vast majority of their communicating electronically?  Computers and gadgets, when used in perspective, are extraordinary ways to glorify Christ and spread the Gospel.  But the history of the human race provides ample evidence that we can, and we do, take anything too far.  Is a “what” in charge or is a “Who” in charge?”

"The strong/able/healthy don't need a doctor.  Sick people do."  In the Greek language, that word "sick" can mean "miserable, afflicted, made sick by their own evil."  In Matthew 15 it describes someone being tormented by a demon. Then Jesus says, "I have come to call sinners."  "Sinners" refers to people who habitually miss the target.  They shoot, but they do not score.  They have no game. Jesus is clarifying His mission.  And He’s drawing lines in unexpected places.  "I have come to call THOSE PEOPLE, the ones who have no game and keep making themselves sick.  I have not come to call those who know they are already good enough."    We have to be so careful with religion.  Religion can almost effortlessly deteriorate into institutional rule keeping.  Religion as rule keeping is comforting, in a way.  If we can keep the rules, we become good enough in our eyes and in the eyes of each other.  And if we can keep the rules and be good enough, we then get to decide who's NOT good enough.  It's like a cozy little club. In his unsettling and remarkable book entitled The Jesus I Never Knew, author Philip Yancey expresses it this way.  "...the Christian church now attracts respectable types who closely resemble the people most suspicious of Jesus on earth.  What has happened to reverse the pattern of Jesus' day?  Why don't sinners LIKE being around us?" (The Jesus I Never Knew, by Philip Yancey, Zondervan, 1995, page 147.) Jesus says there is no place in the world He's creating for the folks who have it all figured out and who know what to do with "those people."  But for Levi and his buddies, Jesus has all the time in the world. SO MUCH of our faith journey, and SO MUCH of how we do church, comes down to how we think Jesus sees us AND how we see each other.  This passage provides a snapshot of what Jesus is looking for in His church. 

The church is a party.  We gulp down the truth that Jesus sees us and loves us enough to accept us right where we are and loves us too much to leave us where we are.  And we don't keep it to ourselves.  We invite our buddies to the party where Jesus is the center of attention.  And as we spend time with Jesus, we notice we are changing.  That's what happened to Levi, by the way.  In spending time with Jesus, he changed.  Other Gospels call him by a different name...Matthew.  The first Gospel in the New Testament is attributed to him.  Imagine that!  Levi the tax-collecting reprobate, author of one of the Gospels.

The church is a welcome mat.  Jesus sees Levi and is compelled to comprehensively welcome Levi into His life.  How broad and friendly is our welcome mat?  In what creative and colorful ways do we say to people, "We've been expecting you; make yourself at home?"

A few weeks ago we saw courage, even though courage is invisible.  Richard Phillips, captain of the hijacked US ship “Maersk Alabama,” turned himself over to pirates so that his crew would be safe.  I see love, even though love is invisible, as I notice all of the little things my wife, Carla, does for me, because I know why she does them.  Cats see my uncertainty when I am around them, even though uncertainty is invisible, which prompts them to treat me with even more indifference than their manual specifies. Jesus saw faith when the four friends lowered their paralyzed buddy through a hole they had made in the roof.  It is unclear whether Jesus also saw faith in the paralyzed man during that descent.  I choose to think Jesus did.  How would you like to be lowered on a mat through a hole in a roof?  Wouldn’t faith be useful at such a time? And who trusted who?  Did the four friends trust Jesus, or did they trust in their buddy’s insistence that if they could put him and Jesus in the same space he would be healed?  Did the paralyzed man trust Jesus or did he trust that his four friends had good intentions and even better forearms? Fun questions, but I am not sure we need the answers.  It worked, which is hugely encouraging to me as I ponder my own issues as well as people in my little corner of the world who are somehow immobilized. The New Testament is convinced that we need Jesus AND we need each other.  On the vertical plane and on the horizontal plane, invisible realities are revealed through visible behaviors.  May your faith and my faith show up regularly and rigorously.       

Jesus was moved with compassion.  He did not do it to Himself.  It happened to Him, came over Him, impelled Him to do what no person in his or her right mind would ever do.  Jesus contacted with the skin of His hands the contaminated untouchable.  Touch one of “those” and you are asking for it.  The leprosy, that is.  So why do it?  Because the leper needed the tenderness of an uninfected human touch.  Probably that touch began healing him of leprosy’s shame even as the leprosy itself left his body.  What are the implications for people who follow Jesus?  Unsettling at best.  Picture the person, or the type of person, you least want to touch, who evokes an involuntary shudder.  What would it take for you to lovingly place your hands on that person?  No HAZMAT suit allowed.  You would have to be moved by a force much bigger than you, right? Mother Teresa said, “Put yourself completely under the influence of Jesus, so that He may think His thoughts in your mind, do His work through your hands, for you will be all-powerful with Him to strengthen you.”  (Sojourner’s Verse and Voice e-mail, April 13, 2009).  Are we willing to be that moved?

Mark 1:21-28

Their senses became acute.  For a few seconds adrenaline overrode involuntary activities like breathing.  Their jaws went slack while their neck muscles tightened.  They were astonished.  For the citizens of Capernaum, it was not just that Jesus said and did new things.  He WAS new.  There was an obvious difference between Jesus and the religious leaders.  The religious leaders were relaying what had been given to them.  They may have been impassioned and convincing.  But they were couriers, or conduits, which is not so bad.  On the other hand, Jesus not only spoke the message; He was the message.  He internalized the message in such a way that one could not tell where the message ended and He began.  They were also astonished because of the way He took charge of the demonized person.  It was not a performance employed for effect.  Jesus cared about the man, and so He ousted what had gotten into him. When was I last astonished at Jesus?  I am so familiar with Him that I miss some of the astonishments.  Maybe Jesus has become a religious leader for me.  He is like the old striped pullover shirt that I have worn so often that it conforms to my shape even when I am not wearing it.  It could be that I take my shirt and Jesus for granted.  When was I last astonished by Jesus’ words or actions?  Jesus, I invite you into my Capernaum, into my numbed out informality with you.  I do not ask You to astonish me.  I invite You to be Yourself, like You always are.  And once You eliminate the lethargy that comes with familiarity, I too will be astonished.

Mark 1:28

Evangelism has become an industry with seminars, books, videos, and sages galore.  Why not?  But have we over-systemized it?  Nothing can beat the word-of-mouth hype that trails proclamation and demonstration of the gospel.  Following the Capernaum Sabbath, Jesus was The Breaking News.  Astonishment has that effect.  So we do not require more techniques; we need to figure out how to give Jesus plenty of room to do what Jesus wants to do among us, with minimal restraints.   What if Jesus was the Monday morning topic at the water coolers and the photocopiers and the diners and the grocery stores?  And I was just this moment guilty of the industry mentality, because I was considering how terrific that would be for our church attendance.  If we really decipher how to move out of the way and let Jesus loose among us, we won’t have to worry about church attendance.  We’ll be too occupied with our own astonishment and with the swelling quandary of how to keep up with all of the inquisitive and transformed people wanting to know more.

Mark 1:16-20