Melting the ICE

Now is the judgement of this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself.’ (John 12:31-32)

Two visions collided in my heart this week. One was the image of ICE agents herding supposed criminals onto planes, ferrying them away to brutal foreign prisons without the benefit of hearings or trials or anything but the unsubstantiated claims of self-interested politicians.

The other vision melted my heart, feeding a soul-deep hope that will not die.

It happened on Sunday morning. My pre-service prayer complete, I opened my eyes and immediately knew prayer was not done with me. Look and see, said the voice of the Spirit within me.

The crucifix hanging high above the altar first captured my attention as the congregation gathered. Two Filipino mothers crowded in beside me with five children, black and brown. An elderly Chinese woman kneeled ahead of me.

An African American family sat three rows further up. Across the room, a batik-clad woman and her children looked like they’d just arrived from some west African country. And dozens of Hispanics from several southern nations scattered among folk who are as white as me.

I didn’t see a suit and tie in the place, except for the cantor and organist. More obvious were jeans, tennis shoes, the weathered faces of people who work outdoors, and others, with softer hands, who labor in classrooms and offices and over keyboards like the one beneath my fingers.

Looking at the crucifix above our gathering, it all felt right. Jesus’ words rang truer than ever. ‘If I be lifted up, I will draw all people to myself.’

For there we were, drawn together by the transcendent love of the One who makes the many … into one. That’s what love does, but it is better to say that is what Love does. The God who is Love, whose all-embracing compassion bears the face of Jesus in his suffering, seeks ever more to draw the human family and all creation into one loving union.

This vision held me through the service. I couldn’t stop looking around. What I saw was profoundly hopeful, promising a gracious world of welcome infused with the love of Jesus, whose heart is known in every welcome and act of hospitality whether his name is spoken or not.

But as hopeful as it was to kneel at Divine Savior Church and see what the Savior is doing among us, I was equally engulfed by a profound sadness over the daily reports of ICE raids. However necessary and important their function in society, too often human souls are being indiscriminately swept up and treated like trash—the documented and undocumented, the guilty and the innocent, the citizen, the green card holder and people who look like my brown-skinned grandsons and son-in-law, for whom I worry.

The vision of a world-made-one is a true and deeply Christian vision of God’s desire for the nations, including our own. The vision of ‘one out of many’ is also deeply encoded in the history and DNA of our nation. But it is daily attacked and shattered by the present administration as it stokes anger and fear of those who look like they ‘don’t belong here.’

Tragically, many Christians also have lost sight and faith in the vision of their Lord, who draws the many into one, ironically unaware that such hatred and rejection stands judged by the cross of Christ and the entire Judeo-Christian tradition.

But the vision of a world made new, born of God’s Spirit, does not die. It lives in human hearts and appears in flesh and blood gatherings, like Sunday morning, as we gathered beneath the cross of Christ where the hope of the world was clear to see.

All we needed to do was look around … and see what Love does.

‘I feel good when I fire someone’ … our spiritual crisis

All those who had any who were sick with various kinds of diseases brought them to [Jesus]; and he laid his hands on each of them and cured them. Demons also came out of many, shouting, ‘You are the Son of God!’ But he rebuked them and would not allow them to speak, because they knew that he was the Messiah. (Luke 4:40-41)

I could never produce a convincing reason why Jesus told the demons to shut up when they shouted his identity. But the times we live in suggest an answer. More on that in a minute. First, a dinner party.

Nearly 20 years ago, Dixie and I sat in a suburban living room with several other church members, sharing a glass of wine before dinner. When conversation turned to work, one of our evening companions said he had to fire someone that day.

So sorry about that, another said. The response was immediate, ‘Don’t’ be. I feel good when I fire someone.’  

Two women in the room gasped and objected when he said it, including his wife, but he doubled down. ‘It makes my business more successful.’

That night had not occurred to me for years until the evening news assaulted my consciousness with the sight of Elon Musk prancing across a stage wielding a chain saw.

Gleefully delighting in dismantling government programs, he celebrated throwing talented, dedicated people on the street, all while a roomful of well-heeled sycophants cheered him on, utterly oblivious or willfully blind to the pain of those they’d repeatedly slandered.

Nor did they see, or have the spiritual capacity to see millions of people, in this country and beyond, who are served by the programs being trashed, people like my friend’s son who needs exorbitantly expensive medication to work and stay alive, or veterans who struggle to get health benefits, or special ed kids whose programs are disappearing, not to mention hundreds of thousands … who will die … because of the death of USAID.

But let’s go back to the dinner party. It is a relatively small step from what I heard years ago in that suburban living room to what hits us in the gut every day on the evening news. The only real difference is one of scale.

What is happening in our country has everything to do with the lack of empathy so evident in my dinner companion. Even with further conversation, he evinced no willingness or ability to see or consider the impact of his actions, even if they were necessary, on the mind, heart and well-being of another human soul.

He understood power and how to use it, sometimes employing it to bring people to heel, bending them to his will, a trait evident and celebrated in the MAGA movement in which being dominant is the most important value, trumping all others.

And this may be the great spiritual crisis of our day, the valorization of power, the ability to make others bend the knee, to get your way, to gain advantage or take revenge, to make America great.

And if others are injured or destroyed, killed or just waste away (and make no mistake, they are and will), well, that’s just the cost of doing business. Most of them are just parasites anyway. After all, empathy is a bug in the system of greatness. It just gets in the way.

But power without empathy, power untutored by faith and human values, is blind, deaf and dumb. It makes no friends, builds no relationships and cures no ills as it splinters societies. It sees, hears and attends to its whims and wishes, as utterly oblivious as those cheering Elon Musk’s chainsaw dance.

And this brings me back to Jesus and the demons, who always seemed to recognize who he was when others did not. Jesus wouldn’t let them spill the beans, and now I get it.

They only knew his power. That they recognized, but they didn’t see him and therefore didn’t really know him. For knowing him requires seeing, feeling and knowing his compassionate willingness to suffer in order to free the hearts and lives of those the great ones … would have us ignore.

Fly me home

John answered all of them by saying, ‘I baptize you with water; but one who is more powerful than I is coming; I am not worthy to untie the thong of his sandals. He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire. (Luke 3:16)

I saw them before I heard them, which is unusual for sand hill cranes. Their bugle calls and alto trill carry a couple of miles or more, and they fly so high you can topple backward while craning your neck to find them.

But today they appeared framed in the glass of the patio doors, which I scrambled to open, eager to welcome their joy into my wintered heart. How beautiful are the wings of those who bear hope’s holy promise.

Excitement for an unusually warm March day surely fanned their enthusiasm as they cried high to one another. Calls answered calls, weaving an ecstatic crescendo of delight, faster and louder, shouting over each other like children released for recess, voices over voices in a glorious cacophony of joy, as they made their way home to summer nesting grounds.

‘You came back,’ I whispered to the crystal blue dome of heaven’s splendor, tears of gratitude the best prayer I’d offered in weeks.

Tears are always interesting. They tell you what you love, what you need, what you hope for and when you have been graced beyond your capacity for middle-class composure.

Damn that.

Give me more of those tears, wordless prayers, born of the Spirit’s fire, that baptize the soul and wash away the muck that clings to the heart and paints the world gray.

Tasting the tears of hope renewed, my silent soul thanked the heavens for the utter goodness and total gratuity of being alive, winging my earth-bound heart to join the cranes raptured praise of the Loving Mystery who breathes life’s holy sweetness into every single moment … and begs us to take a breath.

Taste and see that the Lord is good. Surely, the cranes know, their calls and cries, delight in flight and grace in the dance of landing, are a prayer of gratitude for having received a life to live and love, bidding us to embrace the lives we have been given—loving our days as best we can, savoring the graces that come our way, releasing our insistence that our lives and the world should be less messy and confounded than they are.

In the impenetrable alchemy of the Spirit, who wastes nothing and uses everything, the cranes migration carried me home. For at least one blessed moment, my heart and the Heart of Love, who made the cranes to fly and me to praise their beauty, were no longer two but overlapping circles merged as one, one love, loving everything that is, even myself, which can be the hardest of all.

Is not knowing this, feeling this oneness in love, what it means to be baptized in the Spirit’s fire? I think so, or at least that’s what the cranes told me … as they made their way home.

What’s so great?

Lord, you have been our dwelling-place in all generations. Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever you had formed the earth and the world, from everlasting to everlasting you are God. You turn us back to dust, and say, ‘Turn back, you mortals.’ For a thousand years in your sight are like yesterday when it is past, or like a watch in the night. (Psalm 90:1-4)

It’s just a broken piece of pottery, but in this season of ashes—and national turmoil—I can’t get it out of my mind.

It lives in a small basket near my desk where I throw my keys. Sometimes I use it for a paperweight. Occasionally, I trace the grooves worked by ancient hands as they fashioned the bowl or jar to which this fragment once belonged.

I don’t know how old it is, certainly hundreds of years, maybe a thousand or more. The hands that made it are dust, so is every civilization that once occupied this hill, Meggido, in northern Israel, where this fragment was one of thousands scattered from archeological digs.

Meggido overlooks a great valley where two ancient trade routes crossed. Armies trod those routes, too, and this ancient hill rose higher and higher as one power after another built on the ruins of those they conquered. The hill stands hundreds of feet higher than the ancient spring that still flows deep beneath it.

Great civilizations claimed this spot for their own at one time or another—Assyrians, Egyptians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, to name a few, certainly the Israelites as well. Canaanites made burnt offerings here four and five thousand years ago.

All of them are long gone now, no matter how great, powerful or even insurmountable their military and economic might once appeared.

Today, Meggido is a place where tourists and pilgrims gather among the remnants of digs. They climb dozens of steep steps down to the spring that still flows fresh and clean. Maybe they pocket a pottery fragment as they gaze at the beauty of the Jezreel Valley where ancient armies once clashed.

Memories of Meggido proved inescapable for me, this week, as Christians marked their foreheads with ash and heard sobering words. ‘Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.’

There’s no escaping it, not for individuals or civilizations, which is why I picked up my little piece of history in Meggido and keep it near. It puts the lie to every claim of greatness that we, our nation or civilization might make about ourselves.

It calls into question any conception of greatness on which we might spend our lives or our nation’s resources in an effort to claim superiority, as if we could deny what is utterly apparent in the dust of Meggido.

Great nations, powerful leaders, once strode this place. Now, the silent fragments of their existence whisper wisdom, ‘Mortal greatness is an illusion. No matter how pressing or sure it seems, it will fail you.’

And we each are left to wonder, ‘What is truly great; is there anything that lasts, anything to which we might cleave and love and give ourselves to, anything that will hold us when we and all we touched have turned to ash?

Is there?

Yes, says the spring flowing deep beneath Megiddo’s height. There is. Just One. Don't let anyone else fool you.

Heaven’s light

 Now about eight days after these sayings Jesus took with him Peter and John and James, and went up on the mountain to pray. And while he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became dazzling white. (Luke 9:28-29)

I can see this, somehow. There would seem to be no analog, nothing that compares to this moment on the mountain when the inner soul of Jesus filled the fullness of his outer appearance with the glory of heaven’s light.

His interior union with the Father shimmers through his finite, mortal body, unveiling the secret of his identity and revealing, once and for all, what we are intended to know, to feel and to become, one with heaven’s light.

The inner eye of my heart conceives the vision, if only because I have stood in the gaze of souls who loved truly, deeply and beautifully, their eyes glistening with a light that hinted of a world of beauty beneath and beyond all that is, a world more real than the ground beneath our feet or the touch of our beloved’s hand.

Such is the light filling Jesus on the mountain. We desperately need this vision. When we lose it, when we forget it, the triviality of the ordinary, the repulsive violence that fills the daily news, and the smug egotism of the powerful tempt us to nihilistic despair, which may become the great spiritual malady of our era.

When that takes hold, the light in our souls can be eclipsed by the capricious will of the powerful who indulge their whims to shape a world of their choosing, a world where love, beauty, commitment, grace, generosity and other virtues have no place or purchase.

Such is the sordid state of American politics, about which we may feel powerless to change, a state that … if we fixate there … dims the light of Christ in our lives, stealing our joy and shrouding our days in a cheerless, gray cloud.

This is why we so badly need the vision of Jesus shimmering with heaven’s light on the mountain. The light of God shines there, drawing us to come and see and never doubt that heaven’s inextinguishable radiance is not now and never shall be eclipsed.

The luminous glory shimmering in the very clothes of Christ is a vision of eternity. Holding it before our eyes, it fans the flame of faith, hope and love within us. 

Even more, it stirs our desire not just to see heaven’s holy light … but to stand inside that light, enveloped in its shining, so that our hearts are one, united with our Lord, knowing what is in him, tasting the sweetness of eternity.

Standing in heaven’s light, we feel the world of beauty beneath and beyond all that is … where those who mourn shall laugh, where those who want shall be full, where suffering is turned into redemption and the powers of death shatter like glass.

For Colleen … and all who need to feel the fire

But love your enemies, do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return. Your reward will be great, and you will be children of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.  Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful.

I wonder how many of us feel like my cousin, Colleen. ‘I need a hug,’ she wrote, responding to a recent post. ‘I am scared to death every day I wake up. Any specific prayers or thoughts you can give me would be appreciated.’

If only there was a magic prayer to cast out fear and evict our worries and anger, amid the political upheaval that bombards our consciousness every time we watch the news, wondering, good Lord, what next?

For Colleen, the main demon is fear, for me it is anger at the brutal callousness and cruelty to human beings at home and abroad, evident in the actions of the current administration, cutting humanitarian aid and tossing committed public servants to the curb … with utterly no discernment about what is good, just and necessary.

Although our demons differ, Colleen and I—millions more, I suspect—face a spiritual crisis, as anger, fear or other demons like helplessness and despair claim ever-larger swathes of our consciousness.

We need to exercise an eviction notice or, better, perform an exorcism before the enemies of love possess our hearts. Anger, even righteous anger, can quickly metastasize into hatred, fear into immobility, despair into cynicism and helplessness into melancholy and sad despondency.

While I wish I had a special prayer for Colleen … and myself, there is a way of freedom … however partial it feels, at times … a way we can walk, which requires daily attention and maintenance.

Silly, sappy and naïve as it sounds, love is the only road to freedom, the only power strong enough to exorcise the damnedable powers that bind our hearts and tie us in knots.

Love casts out fear, First John 4 says. It does a pretty good job on anger, hopelessness, helplessness and a host of other chains that bind the heart, too. I speak from experience; more significantly, so do saints, mystics and ordinary Christians from any time and place you can possibly name.

The love that frees does not emanate in our souls; although as a gift in our creation and renewed in our redemption, it burns there, too, a living flame of love, to be sought, fanned and tended anew each day.

The deep substance of our souls … is the love God is, Christian mystic, Julian of Norwich, tells us. We forget that … or maybe we never knew. Maybe we thought the surge of warmth, love and tears that bubble up, sometimes at the most unexpected and inopportune moments, is an aberration of little import, as opposed to our souls trying to break free and see the light of day.

Every day, we need to descend from our troubled minds into our hearts, there to find and feel the warmth of the flickering flame yet burning in us. Blow on those flames; stir love’s embers however you can. Savor whatever graces or memories, beauty or common moments awaken your heart.

And pray. Pray all your fears, your hopes and doubts and all the rest of it. Let it go, giving it all to Jesus, who bids you to come and sit in the sweet warmth of his love. You just may find the comfort and rest you need for one more day of loving your life and family and neighbors and this crazy, screwed-up world … and even yourself, which can be the hardest of all.

And Colleen, if none of this works, read Psalm 46, slowly, and remember who, in the last analysis, is still in charge.

Elon Musk meets the silent pulpit

Then Jesus looked up at his disciples and said: ‘Blessed are you who are poor, for yours is the kingdom of God. … ‘Blessed are you when people hate you, and when they exclude you, revile you, and defame you on account of the Son of Man. Rejoice on that day and leap for joy, for surely your reward is great in heaven; for that is what their ancestors did to the prophets. But woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. (Luke 6:20,23-24)

I would have thought it impossible to read these words this week without seeing the image of the world’s richest man, standing in the Oval Office, explaining why it’s okay to starve children and refuse them life-saving medicines.

But I was wrong.

I heard two sermons today, one in a large Roman Catholic Church, another in a prominent Lutheran congregation. In neither case, did the preacher think it was important to mention that humanitarian agencies of their own church bodies were being eviscerated, told to stand down, forced to release staff, while millions of tons of food are wasting in warehouses and ship holds, going to rot, because they have been denied access to USAID food and medication supplies.

Not only that, neither preacher bothered to mention that the very agencies of their church bodies, among the most efficient and effective in the world at feeding the poor and working among the bereft and forgotten, are being denounced, reviled and defamed.

I can only wonder if the reason is cluelessness … or cowardice.

We should have been praising God. We should have been celebrating that we are being reviled and defamed for loving Jesus and loving the people to whom he most directed us. We should have celebrated the work and sacrifices of those who so faithfully labor to be the hands and heart of Jesus in the world’s poorest places.

But what we got … was silence.

I can hardly think of a moment when Jesus’ words about what it means to love and follow him have had more obvious and immediate relevance. The world’s richest man stood in the most powerful office on the face of the earth and declared war on the world’s poor, whom Jesus called blessed, favored, chosen, treasured, the delight of his eye.

But I heard nary a word about this, and I wonder how common my experience was this day.

I wonder if the Western church is capable, whether it remains a fit instrument to bear the message of the Gospel and suffer for it like so many in other places and generations before us.

I wonder if we are so institutionally-bound that we lack the courage to be hated for the sake of Jesus and his kingdom. And yes, I wonder the same about myself. Have I become so acclimated to church as I have known it that I am unwilling to face the challenge of our times?

Contrary to my conversation with one of today’s preachers, it is not enough to exhort people to place commitment to Christ and his kingdom at the center of their lives—without naming the particularity of what that means in the present moment. If the Gospel is not preached in its particularity, it is not preached at all.

Today, the pulpits toward which I eagerly leaned, hoping to hear the word of God in the power of the Spirit, gave me polite, apologetic rhetoric which ignored or tried to explain that Jesus didn’t really mean what he said when he blessed the poor and warned the rich that their benighted ways lead to ruin.

And all the while, people were and are dying … because so many are unable or unwilling to speak and hear the Word of God.

Lord, have mercy.