The Unfriending

If you're like me, you've lost at least one friend this political season. (And I know that many of you are like me because I'm seeing your social media posts about it.) And we're not just talking about on-again, off-again acquaintances or someone you haven't talked to in ten years; we're talking about persons who are intimately involved in your life, who you have shared your darkest moments with. 

All of a sudden, they want nothing to do with you because of which political candidate you support (or are against). This friend, who you have celebrated birthdays with, grieved losses with, laughed late into the night with, cried in the basement with, gone out to dinner with, swapped Christmas cards with, worshipped with, sends you a message that says, "I can't believe who you really are" when they find out who you voted for and then, poof, they're gone. You're blocked. 

And somehow, both of you are left feeling betrayed.

Of course, you feel betrayed because you can't believe that your friend has forgotten ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years of memories that you have made together and all of the thousands of ways that you've invested love in one another. You can't believe that your friend thinks so little of you that who you voted for is the only thing that is important about you. 

Your friend feels betrayed because they can't believe that as much as you have loved them, you apparently never really loved them because you voted against their interest. They feel like you must have been faking it this whole time, must have been pretending to be something that you weren't. To them, those ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years all feel like a lie. 

What's amazing, and what I think is more true this year than in any year in our past, is how unwilling we are any more to consider that we might be wrong, that this world may not be as black and white as they tell us it is. What I mean is this: four years ago and eight years ago and twelve years ago, I discovered that many of my friends, even close friends, even respected mentors, were on the other side of the political spectrum from me. I discovered they were passionately on the other side of the political spectrum from me. And I also saw that they were full of love being there. What I knew about my friends changed the way that I thought about those across the political aisle. My relationships with them helped me to develop a new frame for politics. 

Today, politics seems to call into question everything we think we know about our friends. Today, we're more likely to think that our friends are not who they seemed to be and instead of letting a whole lifetime of memories of love temper the way we think about politics, we let politics sever some of the relationships that we hold nearest and dearest. 

And we think our friends, not our politics, have betrayed us! 

I say that to say this, to remind us all of this (and I'm speaking not just to those who are doing the unfriending, but to those who are being unfriended) - you are who your lifetime of love says that you are. You are every little moment you've poured out into your relationships. You are more than who you voted for, and the truth is that we all have our reasons for voting the way that we've voted. Anyone who truly knows your story ought to appreciate that. But the politicization of our entire culture has rendered that nearly impossible these days. 

When your friend says they can't believe who you 'really are,' know this: you 'really are' birthday cakes and dinners out and Christmas cards and dark nights of the soul and shoulders to cry on and a partner in crime. You really are everything you've ever invested in someone else out of the depth of your love and your own belovedness. You really are a child created in the image of God with something to teach us all about Him. You really are the kind of life you live day-in and day-out, and you really are a person with the experiences and perspective to vote the way that you did. 

And if we could all, right now, remember the kind of love that we've shared with one another, maybe we'd learn a little something about why that is. But we're too busy being 'right' to be 'real' about anything any more, and that's why we're losing one another. It all just feels, particularly this year, so personal. 

And it is. 

But it's not just your person that gets to feel that way. It is also the persons you love and who have loved you. It gets to be personal for them, too. Remember their love, and you will remember this, too. 

If you are my friend, I treasure that. If you vote across the political aisle from me, that might sometimes surprise me (and sometimes not). But you're never going to lose me over it, unless you choose to walk away. Because I know who you are. I know who you've been. I know what you do with your love on every Tuesday of the whole year, and I trust that you are doing that with your love on this Tuesday, too. 

Be kind to one another, friends. You know who your friends really are; today doesn't change that. Today doesn't change them. Don't let today change you.  

Demons

Sometimes, you open your mouth and your demons come out.

That's what happened in Mark 5 (and a few other places), when Jesus encountered the man in the cemetery. Jesus landed on the shore, and this man came running out screaming at Jesus, likely screaming more than what the Gospels record for us that he said (given what we can imagine about demons and their vocabulary). But here's what's neat about this story: 

When Mark tells this story, he says that the man came running from the cemetery screaming. That's the first introduction we have to this man. We hear him screaming, Mark records his words for us, and we think that might just be who this guy is. Like, wow.

It's only after this introduction that Jesus identifies that this man has a demon and that Mark gives us some of his backstory. It's only after we start to wonder what this guy's problem is that we're told what his problem is. It's only after we've started to form an opinion of this guy that we learn that maybe we were too hasty in our judgment. 

After all, it's not him speaking; it's his demons. 

The same thing happens to all of us, and it happens to those with whom we come in contact every day. Sometimes, someone opens their mouth, and their demons come out. And if we don't understand what's happening right in front of us, we can often misjudge someone created in the image of God. We can often let ourselves form a quick opinion of them that has nothing to do with who they are. 

Now, the world says this isn't possible. The world says that you are what you appear to be, and that at our most unfiltered moments, we reveal the most about ourselves. The more raw we are, the world says, the more likely it is that that's just who we are. The world wants us to judge a book by its cover...and then never read its pages. The world says that once you know who someone "really" is - which seems to always be revealed in their worst moment in the world's ideology - then you can put everything else into that perspective. 

But what if that's not the case? What if the story of Jesus in Mark 5 is actually what happens? What if we aren't revealed most truly when our demons speak, but rather, when we are clothed and in our right mind? 

The truth is that when Jesus walks onto that shore, none of us meets that man; we only meet his demons. And the truth is that the same thing is happening to us every day. 

And sometimes, it's happening to others when they meet us. 

Our demons do influence the way that we present ourselves. All of our experiences and challenges and trials and defeats - they have shaped us. They set our guard up against all kinds of things we might encounter in the world, and we're always on edge about touching darkness any more. So our hackles are up, and there are times we just come out screaming against anything and everything.

Except it's not anything and everything; it's something that we think threatens some kind of peace that we've reached with the broken lives that we live. It's something that poses a risk to the harmony we've found within ourselves. It's something that challenges the rut that we've settled into, just like Jesus pushes up against the actual demons in this man in the cemetery. But at our core, that's not who we are. It's who we've been conditioned to become because we haven't dealt with our experiences in the wholeness of God's healing from them (and sometimes, I confess, we can't on this side of eternity). And yet, all kinds of persons are forming opinions about us because of our demons...and we're forming opinions of them because of theirs. 

So we have to be careful when we interact with one another, both to be mindful of the ways that our demons are speaking through our mouths...and the ways their demons are speaking, too. And we must be like Jesus and be able to proclaim the truth because it was not this man who came out of the cemetery screaming obscenities at Him. And it's often not the man or woman speaking unkindly to us. And it's often not us speaking unkindly to them. 

Sometimes, we just open our mouths and our demons come out. 

John the Baptist

When we talk about great characters of the Bible, we often talk about Moses, Abraham, David, Job, Peter, Paul, and of course, Jesus. Ask us what kind of faith we want to have, and we'll list off any number of these men (and occasionally, women) and declare, oh, what great faith. We would love to build an ark like Noah or slay a giant like David or embody wisdom like Solomon. 

But what about John the Baptist?

John the Baptist gets so very little love, and he's actually one of the guys we should strive to be like the most. 

He was an outlier in his community, refusing the play by the long-standing rules of life. He had a new view on things, a different perspective. And even though he was eccentric by any definition of the word (living in the desert, covered in a coat of fake hair, eating locusts and honey), people flocked out to the boonies to see him. To hear him speak. To be convicted of their sins in a place where they couldn't, by Jewish custom, atone for them at all. It's not the kind of thing that people just line up for, and yet, there were thousands coming out to John's desert. 

Even Herod, a corrupt ruler by any standard, couldn't get enough of John. He even says, in Mark 5, that listening to John the Baptist talk deeply disturbed him, but he always wanted to hear more. He loved talking with John anyway. He just wanted to hear from John all the time, even while John was condemning the kind of life that he lived. 

Meanwhile, we have...far less credibility in our world. 

When we condemn the world's sins, they tell us to shut up. They don't want to hear more about what we (or God) think about their lives. We don't disturb the world in such a way that they can't get enough of us; to hear them tell it, they've already had enough of it. No one told John that he should stop talking to Herod about all of these 'religious' things, but they tell us to keep our religion out of the public sphere. 

And to be honest with you, we can set up our churches right in the middle of town, and the masses just aren't flocking to them to hear us speak. They aren't enamored by us or even intrigued; they're disgusted. 

And that probably means we're doing something wrong.

See, somewhere along the way, I think we decided that we want to be like Jesus. We want to go around declaring the truth and speaking boldly and making all of these wild claims about God and His power and His love. We want to be the authority on all things, and we think that Jesus has put this call on our lives. So we go about trying to be Jesus (at least, the authoritative parts of Him; we struggle with the love and the healing and the grace and, you know, the actual important stuff), a task at which we're failing miserably, and it's no wonder the world doesn't want us. 

But what if we lived more like John? What if we were content to prepare the way for Jesus instead of trying to rack up points for His name? What if we just put out a path before the world and showed them the One whose sandals we are not worthy to tie? What if we humbled ourselves and spoke the kind of truth and promise that John spoke, without condemnation but dripping instead with hope and expectation? What if the greatest achievement of our faith is not to convict the world, but to convince them that something truly amazing is happening among them? What if our call is not to give sight to the blind but to open the eyes of all who would see? 

What if we could speak with the kind of truth and grace of John the Baptist, the kind that disturbs the world but still draws them deeper? The kind they don't like but can't get enough of? The kind where they want to hear more and more and more? The kind that gets them asking questions about Jesus, real questions?

What if we proclaimed the good news in such a way that the world would follow us into the desert to hear it? 

John the Baptist doesn't get a lot of love. So often, it seems like he's just a footnote in Jesus's story, in the real story. But look at the impact that he had on the world. Look at the foundations he laid for Jesus to move in and do the truly remarkable. Look at what everyone had to say about the guy, by their words and by their actions, and tell me you don't want to be like that. Tell me you don't want to be the voice crying out in the desert. Tell me you don't want to be the one preparing the way for the Lord in this world. 

I do. 

Shame

You've probably heard it said that Jesus took away your shame, but what does that even mean? 

We say this when we talk about His death, but we still die, so that's not it. Every one of us will one day be seen only in a box by those we now look at face-to-face. Every one of us will one day be revealed as the same fragile flesh and bones that we've spent our entire lives pretending to transcend. No, it can't be that He's taken death, for we still, every one of us, face it. 

Perhaps it is that He's taken our sin. Our sin will not be exposed in the same way that the Old Covenant exposed it. We don't have to live tied to our sin like the Israel of old. We aren't constantly toting around offerings that proclaim to the world that we've done something wrong, always having to go to the priest and lay our lives bare before him and hope that he's in a forgiving mood to properly atone for our sins in front of God.

And yet, we still feel shame. We still feel that pang of exposure, even if we're the only person in the whole world who knows that we've done something wrong. We look in the mirror and see less than we pretend to be, and it breaks us. So if Jesus defeated our shame in our sin, it's certainly not in our perception of it because the truth is that most of us still spend our lives bound up in shame. 

But there is something profound that Jesus does with our shame, and it is something that cannot be undone, no matter how hard we try. It is not in His death, but in His resurrection. 

He leaves His grave clothes behind. 

It's not like Jesus was wearing anything under His grave clothes. It's not like He had a bunch of outfits in that makeshift tomb to choose from. He had one wardrobe - the cloth intended to wrap His fragile body as it lay there exposed to the elements - and He took that off and walked out of the tomb...naked. 

Remember that all the way back in Genesis, all the way back in the Garden, all the way back in the beginning when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit and dove into the bushes to hide, the Lord did something beautiful and amazing for them - He sewed together fig leaves, the first clothes, to cover their shame. 

The first thing God did when brokenness entered the world was to create clothing to cover shame. The last thing He did in atoning for the world was to take that clothing off. 

So don't think for one minute that Jesus's sacrifice doesn't defeat your shame. That's exactly what it does.

Oh, sure, we may not feel like that. We may still wrestle with our own shame, with our own fear of being found out, with all the things that we know when we look at ourselves in the mirror, but God doesn't see those things about us. God's not wrestling with them. God has stripped off the coverings and entered again into nakedness, showing us what it means to be exposed and unashamed. Showing us that there's no longer anything to cover. The fig leaves? Gone.

Folded and left in an empty tomb. 

Big Faith in Small Ways

There are a couple of stories of women told in the Gospels that we ought to pay close attention to. (We ought to pay close attention to every story in the Gospels that is told, but these two stand out for a very notable reason.) They are the stories of the widow who put two cents in the collection box and the story of the woman who broke the expensive bottle of perfume and washed Jesus's feet with her hair. 

We first have to recognize that we're talking about women here. We're talking about second-class citizens, if you could even call them that. Women were property in this time, and a woman who was not claimed as a man's property was worth even less than that. Men were not to associate with women outside of their own families, except for an initial courtship, and we know how scandalous it was that Jesus even spoke to the woman at the well in Samaria. Much has been preached on that. Much has been preached on the fact that it was women who first went to the tomb. We understand well by this point what it means to have women in the story of Jesus at all. 

And these two stories in particular have so little to do with Jesus, especially the story about the widow and her two cents. Jesus didn't do anything in them. He didn't do anything normal, and He didn't do anything miraculous or spectacular. He was just there. He was just noticing what we going on around Him. He wasn't proclaiming any truths or ushering in any kingdom or teaching any lesson. 

Now, you'd think that if you were going to tell the story of Jesus, you'd want to talk about the things that He did. And there were plenty of those things to talk about. John tells us at the end of his gospel that if you could fill the world with books, it still wouldn't hold everything he could say about Jesus and his time with the Messiah. And yet, in the few short chapters that each of these men took, they keep telling us about these women. 

Because Jesus told them to.

What Jesus says about these women is that their stories will be told everywhere that His story is. He tells His disciples that what these women have done is important. He tells them to take notes and remember this moment because it is essential to the telling of His story. 

But then, He says something curious. He says the stories of these women will be told "in remembrance of them." Read that again. Jesus wants their stories told in remembrance of them, not of Him. 

Jesus wants their stories told with His story. In His story. When you tell His story, you have to tell theirs, too. 

Which means that no only did Jesus recognize and praise these women, but He convinced His disciples that they were worth recognizing and praising, as well. So the question is - is this a story about them or is it a story about Him?

Certainly, it shows us that Jesus recognizes big faith exercised in small ways. That He notices the little things that we do that don't seem to make a lot of sense or that can often go unnoticed by the world. If He hadn't mentioned it, the disciples wouldn't have even noticed a hunched-over old widow putting two cents into the collection box. Judas might even have commented about how she was taking too long, how she was holding up the line, how others had more to put in and she ought to move out of their way. (That was just who Judas was.) The disciples probably sat with Jesus in that temple for hours, looking around and not knowing what they were looking for until Jesus told them. Until He drew their eyes to something. 

And what He drew their eyes to was not His story, but someone else's. Someone marginalized. Someone on the outskirts. Someone they wouldn't notice at all if He hadn't pointed her out. Not only does He draw their eyes to her, He tells them she's important. So important that His story cannot be told without hers. 

That's why we know about this widow two thousand years later. 

The truth is that Jesus keeps saying the same thing today. Jesus has His eyes open to the world, and He's always trying to show us the stuff we're prone to miss. He's always trying to get us to see more than we'd notice on our own. He's always trying to remind us to look around and see one another, really see one another. Because His story cannot be told without theirs. 

Which means we ought to always be learning more about Jesus from those around us, from those created in His image who are living big faith in small ways every day. Honestly, who notices two cents? Who pays attention to a sinful woman making yet another spectacle of herself? Ho-hum. A dime a dozen. Whatever it is. Our world has taught us to look away, that if we don't make a thing about it, no one else will, either. 

But Jesus says...make a thing about it. Take notice. Start telling their stories. At the very least, start noticing them. Because our human stories reveal something about Him. Our human stories show something that we can't afford to miss. His story cannot be told without ours, all of ours, no matter how small or shameful we think they are. Because His story is a story of big faith. Big, big faith. 

And ours are the stories of all the small ways we live it.