Bad Sheep & Good Goats

Ask yourself in a Mother May I sort of way:

1. Have you ever given money to a homeless person?  If so, take 2 steps forward.

2. Have you ever visited someone in prison?  If so, take 3 steps forward.

3. Have you ever passed by someone begging for money without looking at them in the eye?  Take 2 steps backward.

4. Have you ever bought food for a street person?  Take 3 steps forward.

5. Have you ever thought about buying food for a street person but not done it?  Take 3 steps backward.

6. Have you ever given someone your coat?  Take 2 steps forward.

7. Have you ever thought about giving someone your coat but didn’t do it?  Take 2 steps backward.

8. If you’ve never visited someone in prison, take 3 steps backward.

9. Have you ever forgotten to visit someone in the hospital that you meant to visit?  Take 4 steps backward.

10. Have you ever visited someone in the hospital that you didn’t want to visit?  Take 4 steps forward.

11. Have you ever given something to a stranger just because they asked?  Take 5 steps forward.

12. Has a stranger asked something of you and you ignored them?  Take 5 steps backward.

Chances are you’ll end up pretty much where you started.

In a book called Good Goats, the writer tells about doing this exercise with a group of retired nuns: “One sister raised her hand and asked, ‘What about the story of the sheep and the goats? It says right there that the sheep go to heaven and the goats go to hell.’ 

The presenter responded by asking the whole group, ‘How many of you, even once in your life, have done what Jesus asks at the beginning of that passage and fed a hungry person, clothed a naked person or visited a person in prison?’ All the sisters raised their hands. He said, ‘That’s wonderful! You’re all sheep.’ 

Then he asked, ‘How many of you, even once in your life, have walked by a hungry person, failed to clothe a naked person, or not visited someone in prison?’ Slowly, all the sisters raised their hands. He said, ‘That’s too bad. You’re all goats.’ The sisters looked worried and perplexed. 

Then suddenly one very old sister’s hand shot up. She blurted out, ‘I get it! We’re all good goats!’”  

People of God, your God knows you for the sheep and goats you are . . . and yes . . . you are both . . . as am I . . .  

Listening to our scripture text today, ask yourself what difference it makes to how you hear it to know that we are all both sheep and goats. . . all at once . . . all the time.

Matthew 25.31-46 (NRSV)

When It Comes to Banning Guns, What Would Jesus Say?

The truth is I have no idea.  Neither do you.  And the real question is not what Jesus would say or do.  The real question for a Christian is what would Jesus have me do?

It’s always at least a bit cheeky to presume to speak for The One.  That being said, and with (I hope) a big dose of humility, here goes:

1. He would have me listen.  Have you noticed what a great listener Jesus was?  Even with folks who didn’t (seem to) have much to say, Jesus listened.  And he heard.  To hear by listening requires stillness of spirit and mind, the ability to hear with an interior ear that discerns beyond the spoken to the intended.  No one tops Jesus on this, but we are all called, I think, to listen to others – especially, perhaps, to those who care about us least, who understand us least.  Even his words often seem intended not to be The Final Word, but rather to spur the conversation, the engagement, to newer, greater depths of meaning.

2. He would have me take him seriously.  John Calvin held to the notion that a person could even be killed in love.  I think he was wrong.  I think John Calvin, who, at least arguably, took Jesus seriously every waking minute of his life, got it wrong precisely because he failed to take Jesus seriously when it comes to the notion of the parameters of ‘discipline’.  Maybe Calvin chose Paul over Jesus.  But anytime we look at a human being as a disease, we’ve failed fundamentally to believe in the amazing and transformative power of the Risen Christ.   In the spiritual sense of the world, I have no need of protection from you, for you cannot do me lasting harm.  Of course you can hurt me.  But that is not the same as lasting harm.  If I take Jesus at his Word, I am not saved, but safe, from all comers.

3. In whatever context I make a choice, Jesus would have me choose wisely.  That is not always easy.  Nor is it obvious.  Wisdom requires a depth of understanding of all possible attendant consequences.  I seldom, if ever, am in a position to have such powers of observation and discernment.  Yet I am obligated to try.  I am obligated to ask, to seek, to knock at the door of the very heart of God to seek out understanding and become wise, wise in the knowing of God’s providing sufficiency.  Does this mean I am to reenact the posture of the domesticated turkey and simply open my mouth skyward out of a silly belief that God will magically drop food into my waiting mouth?  Of course not.  But I suspect it does mean that I am to take God’s promised providing seriously.  I am to take God’s purpose for my existence seriously.  Was I put on earth to assure that my vision of the nation-state of the US of A prevail?  Or was I put here for something far bigger?

4. I must always examine and reexamine my ‘sacred cows’ to assure that I do not make an idol of my own opinions.  I must perpetually resist the temptation to put my thoughts into God’s mouth, to make myself and my way my God.  I must be humble.  Perhaps that begins with #1 – I must practice being a listener.

5. If I would know what Jesus would do, I might do well to examine what Jesus actually did.  Jesus came wielding not the instrumentalities of death, but the instrumentalities of life.  It was risky, even dangerous.  And the tyranny of the state was the ultimate danger to Jesus.  He did not take Rome lightly.  Rome, I think, was merely beside the point Jesus’ own life and death was making.  Tyrannies know well what to do with force; they simply meet it with a force greater than.  That’s how tyrannies succeed.  Where tyrannies cannot compete is in the arena of ideas whose holders will sacrifice all to live out.

6. The radical proclamation of care for ‘the least of these’ was more than a bumper sticker.  The weak, the vulnerable, the unloveable, were and are Jesus’ table guests, his asylum seekers, his refugees, his beloved.  Thus are they to be mine when I am the strong.

7. Jesus was a Messiah of the now as much as of the not yet.  Repeatedly, Jesus deals with the person before him without regard to any thought to the ‘greater good’.  All I know to take from this is the notion that the greater good is standing right before me.  Perhaps this is as simple as understanding that tomorrow is guaranteed to no one.  Maybe it’s remembering that Jesus himself was killed out of the (misplaced) belief that his death could secure the protection of a nation from its tyrannical ruler.  Maybe it is in understanding that the proverbial terrorist with the nuke (the hypothetical justification for torture) in the right now of life is as important to God as the theoretical (as yet unrealized) harm he would do.

8. A godly life is a life of sacrifice.  At the launch of Sandy Hook Promise, one of the parents posed the question (I paraphrase): what wouldn’t we do for our children?  We inhabit a culture that teaches all around us that force and might are the solutions to our problems.  In this sense, we have become our own greatest enemy when it comes to violence.  One of the few things I hear in the many debates on all sides of the gun violence question is the challenge for us to change, to change fundamentally, as a people.  As hard as it might be to either arm or disarm, it is so much harder to do the work of change.  But do not the claims of so many lives challenge us to become something different – something that does not incubate and nurture violence as a problem-solving technique?

If I become the peace I wish to see in the world; if I do that work, the answers to things like gun control and how to create a safer world, will, I suspect, follow.  The question is whether I am, whether we are, willing to do the work.  I hope so.

Fateful Economics

12-Step Wisdom:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, expecting a different result.

I’m not expert on economics; but like us all, I am my own mini-economy.  And from the lived economy that is me, here’s what I know:

1. Capitalism, to be effective (let alone morally good) presumes that I act out of reasonable self-interest.  That is often not the case, either for me individually (would any sane individual motivated by her own highest self-interest really consume that much Sprite or chocolate?) or us collectively (as in the great Tulip Mania of the 17th & 18th centuries).

2. Unreasonableness or mania is as much, if not more, a collective as an individual impulse (see tulip mania link above).  The theory that collectively, we (the market) will correct each other, is not even theory; it is myth.  Time and again, we humans demonstrate a herd mentality which in hindsight, often defies even our own belief.

3. My own personal ‘success’ has been most actively realized not when I acted out of a motive of profit or gain in material or even emotional or spiritual terms.  The seeming paradox is actually true: she who has/seeks/desires the least has the most.  When I share what I have out of concern not for self but for other, it turns out that I experience the abundance of enough.

4. Ron Paul’s assumption that market correctives are the best way to ‘regulate’ a market or an economy is simply not borne out by the facts.  The better axiom seems to be that left to our own devices, we sink to the lowest, rather than rise to the highest, common denominator.  Markets create a false sense of time and the concomitant perceived time pressure disallows time for reflection and study, thought and thoughtfulness.  Our investing days literally now begin with a bell, as if it were a race.  And the race goes not to the studious, but to the swift, or so the thinking goes.

5. History actually does repeat itself.  We seem to believe, however, that the repetitions of history are somehow because of something inherent to history itself, rather than to the far simpler explanation that we keep doing the same things, making the same mistakes (see Insanity axiom above).  Thus when economic collapse looms, rather than believing that there is something proactive we could have done differently to arrive at a different destination, we seem to believe that it was somehow preordained by history that we would be where we are.  This is a great comfort when it comes to examining the self to see what role we may have played in our own demise; but it is of little value in assessing our reality.

6. Private property is a construct, not a reality.  The reality for all creation is that natural resources exist for the benefit of all.  Water flows freely; the wind blows where it will.  And in my own life, the more I cry ‘mine!’, the less freedom I have, because the thing becomes the thing.  And when the thing becomes the thing, it turns out that the thing owns me, and not the other way around.  That which I hold the most loosely is that which I enjoy the most and ‘profit from’ the most.  The concept of property as mine is a construct of fear, the fear that if I do not ‘own’ the thing, you will take away my ability to enjoy or live from what the thing has to offer.  Fear is no basis upon which to build an economy, let alone a life.

Our economies are not fates simply handed down upon our heads from on high.  Economy is the way we choose to live our lives.  In my time and place, the choice offered seems to be no choice at all: get yours however you can without regard to what it costs others in your doing.  That’s the other thing about capitalism: it has taught me the Great Lie that the consequences of my acquisition and consumption are simply not my problem, because those consequences are presumed to be not within my control.

Jesus saw things a bit differently: what you do to the least of these, you do unto me.  –Matthew 25.36ff.

I don’t have all (or perhaps even any) of the answers; but this I know: I, we, can do better.