bleeding out loud

One of the things that most frightens me about being a pastor is the experience of teaching on a subject that for all intents and purposes I have no business teaching on.

I’ll never forget administering ashes at our first Ash Wednesday service. People shuffled forward and knelt at the bench, and I’d make the sign of the cross on their foreheads and say, “Remember, from ashes you came to ashes you’ll return.” Many of them wept, being sure to look you in the eyes and say, “Thank you” with such sincerity that it would bring tears to your own eyes.

With every sign of the cross I felt my own inadequacy and need, and then out of the mass of people in line a man stepped forward and knelt at the bench. When he lifted his head up to be “ashed,” I came face to face with my former employer. I hadn’t left on good terms, and the moment took us both by surprise. There was nowhere for either of us to run, no way to avoid the moment, and as I spoke the words and marked the sign of the cross on his forehead I had the overwhelming sense that God was saying to me, “Do you see how serious I am about repentance?” I knew that putting ashes on his head would mean letting go of the grudge I’d been holding against him.

It seems odd administering the medicine you need so badly yourself.

Later this week I’m supposed to teach a group of interns/residents about our community’s value of wholeness, which I feel inadequate to talk about.

More often than not my life feels like a pendulum swinging back and forth, dictated mostly by circumstance. When things are going well, I feel good. When things fall apart, I feel bad, and it’s embarrassing how little it takes to move me from one to the other-an email, a facial expression, even boredom. Wholeness is the exception. Fragmentation is the rule.

When I think of wholeness, I think of people I’ve met who are so thoroughly at home in their own skin that it’s like they’ve found something in themselves that the rest of us live most of our lives searching for. They’re centered. They’re enlightened. They’re self-actualized. Call it whatever you want to. When I meet these people I have the sense that they are tapped into something that I’m not. If only I could get whatever it is that they have.

This, I think, is why I struggle with becoming whole: I think of wholeness as something to be attained. Wholeness isn’t something you attain. It’s something you realize and claim because it’s the truth of who you are. Before wholeness is a value or a practice, it is first and foremost an identity.

As we like to say, the Bible begins with Genesis 1 & 2 not Genesis 3, and Genesis 1 says that the earth was formless and void, which is another way of saying that it was without shape and chaotic. Then the Spirit of God entered the chaos and brought order, structure, and shape. Things began to find their place. And all the while God keeps looking in on his creation and calling it good. The word appears 12 times in the first two chapters of Genesis. Whoever wrote the book wants to make sure we understand that the first word about you and me and this world we live in is that it’s good. Then, Genesis 2 ends with one of the best foreshadowing lines in the history of human storytelling: “And the man and his wife were both naked, and they felt no shame.

A world without shame. Can you imagine?

So before there are any serpents or fruit or shame or hiding or blaming or feelings of inadequacy or false self, there is completeness, order, wholeness, goodness, beauty and true self. Those things are the deepest truths of who we are, and, as it happens, all of those words are descriptors for the Hebrew idea of shalom, which we translate as peace.

Peace between God and people.
Peace between people and each other.
Peace between people and creation.
Even peace between people and themselves.

How is it possible that wholeness is our true identity when what we feel nine times out of ten is formless and void? How do you grab hold of something you already possess?

“Listen to your life,” was Frederick Buechner’s advice, and it’s great advice because I believe our lives are trying to tell us something. Listen.

When I was a kid, my mom would always say to me, “You’re a leader.” I hated it. Every time she said it I became more determined to be a follower. Now, thirty some years later, I regularly get handed projects and responsibilities, and when I ask, “Why me?” The response I get is the same: “Because you’re a leader.” And it’s true. Whether I like it or not, it’s what I am. It’s in my bones, but I never would’ve come to that conclusion on my own.

Identity is bestowed, it’s something that is given. You are made in God’s image. You bear the glory of God in a unique way that only you can (thank you Dan Allender), and because identity is bestowed, I think that most of us have to be told about our true self. A mother says, “Oh yea, you’re a leader.” A boss says, “You keep getting this stuff because you’re a leader.” A friend says, “That’s not the Brad Nelson I know. The Brad Nelson I know is…” If you want to know about your true self, ask the people who know you best and they will tell you. Parents, by the way, have the holy and terrifying responsibility of helping their children understand who they were from the very beginning.

The journey of wholeness isn’t just an inward one. It’s also an outward one. We don’t just need to be told about our own true self. We need to be the kind of people who tell others about their true selves, who can look into the tangled mess of another person’s life and see the whole picture and call out the goodness that is the first word of who they are.

Several years ago I found myself in a conversation with a family member who was pissed at another family member. This particular person just went for it, listing all of the things the other had done as if that somehow justified it. It was late and I was feeling cheeky. It was probably the wine, but when this person finished the litany I said, “In my experience, the things we hate in others are really reflections of what we hate in ourselves.” There was a moment of silence (I swear I can hear a record player screech to halt in these moments), and finally this person said, “Yea, I guess it’s hard to love your neighbor as yourself when you don’t even love yourself.” What followed was a kind of reverse litany, all of the things this person hated in their own life.

We went on to have one of the holiest conversations I’ve ever been a part of. “That’s not the person I know,” I said, and proceeded to call out the goodness of this person, naming specific characteristics and habits and truths that I had seen and known. This was a dimension of human togetherness I would never have been able to access unless someone else had done the same for me.

We go inward so that we can go outward.

Another way that we can claim our true self is by asking ourselves what makes us come alive? I love St. Irenaeus’ words that “The glory of God is a person fully alive.” If we can start to wrap our arms around that question, then I think we’re well on our way to claiming our wholeness.

“Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”
Matthew 5:8

One of the most awe inspiring things about Jesus’ ministry was his ability to communicate world altering ideas with so few words, sometimes with no words at all.

Eleven words. That’s how long this blessing is. Eleven measly words, and yet there is an entire world within them-a world that Jesus’ listeners would have been very familiar with. Jesus was using a method of teaching known as remez, in which a teacher would quote half of a passage of Scripture, knowing that his audience would know the other half by heart and therefore be able to complete the thought. A remez is a hint.

Once when my wife was giving our daughter a bath, she said, “Mom, give me that cup,” and pointed to a cup that she liked to play with in the tub. Wanting to teach her manners, my wife said, “That’s not how we ask for things. We say, ‘Hand me that cup_______,’” and she leaned forward as if to prompt her to finish the sentence correctly. My daughter leaned in with a confused look on her face and said, “Give me that cup…Now?”

“No, no. We don’t say hand me that cup now. We say, ‘Hand me that cup_______,’” and again my wife leaned in to prompt her to finish the sentence correctly. Once again she leaned forward with a look of confusion on her face and said, “Give me that cup…In the life of Jesus?”

“Please!” my wife blurted out. “It’s hand me that cup please! Not ‘now.’ Not ‘in the life of Jesus.’ It’s ‘Please!’” By prompting her to finish the sentence, my wife was doing remez. She was giving a hint, and Jesus is doing the same thing in this passage.

What Jesus’ listeners would have recognized was that Jesus was quoting Psalm 24. “Who may ascend the mountain of the LORD? Who may stand in his holy place? Those who have clean hands and a pure heart, who do not put their trust in an idol or swear by a false god” (Psalm 24:3-4).

Psalm 24 is a purity psalm. For the Jew, nothing was more desirable than to stand in God’s presence. To stand in God’s presence was what you hoped and longed for in every moment, every conversation and every interaction. And standing in God’s presence was not something you did casually because God is holy.

For many, holiness is a word with all kinds of religious baggage. We think of people being “holier-than-thou,” a kind of religious snobbery. But holiness is a word and an idea that needs to be reclaimed. Holiness is blazing. The word holy comes from the Hebrew word kadosh, which means “set apart.” Holiness is the radiance of something that is different than everything else because it is set apart. Holiness shouldn’t ever cause people to feel judged. Holiness should inspire people to wonder, “How do I get in on that?”

Now because God was holy you would never think of treating God’s set apartness as if it were ordinary. In fact, to treat something that is set apart as if it were ordinary is what it means to profane something. So, for the Jew, in order to stand in God’s set apart presence, you needed to go through a process by which you set yourself apart: Purification. Thus the purity words of Psalm 24: “Who can stand in God’s holy place? Those who have clean hands and a pure heart.”

So for the Ancient Jewish people, purity became a central way of being in the world. It was about being prepared, at any moment, to stand in God’s presence. It was about everything being in its rightful place. For Israel, God’s exclusivity or set apartness required that God’s people also be exclusive and set apart. This purity understanding led to an elaborate system of purity boundaries that dictated who was in and who was out, what was clean and what was unclean.

In 2002, El Al airlines changed the flight path of its Jerusalem to New York flight because it passed over a cemetery en route. Many Jews believed that the defilement (read uncleanness) of the cemetery extended all the way to the heavens. Under Jewish laws, priests are forbidden to enter a cemetery. So, when some Jewish passengers of priestly descent learned that the flight passed over a cemetery, they wrapped themselves in plastic to “deflect” the uncleanness of the cemetery and remain pure.

This obsession with exteriors and the maintenance of purity was one of the religious ideas that Jesus took issue with during his ministry. In Matthew 23:25-28 Jesus says to the Pharisees, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You clean the outside of the cup and dish, but inside they are full of greed and self-indulgence. Blind Pharisee! First clean the inside of the cup and dish, and then the outside also will be clean. “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of dead men’s bones and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness.” To Jesus, many of the highly devout, religious people of his day were missing the point of purity. When Jesus says to the Pharisees, “On the outside you appear righteous but on the inside you’re full of hypocrisy and wickedness,” he’s essentially saying, “You’re getting it all wrong! Purity has always been about the capacity to see God. In your obsession, you’ve made purity about how you will be seen by others.”

He uses a fascinating word to make his point. The word hypocrite is the Greek word hupokrites. It was an acting term referring to someone who appeared differently on the outside than they really were on the inside. It referred to someone who played a part to the crowd, a part that wasn’t consistent with their true identity.

Think about all of the ways this inner/outer divide plays itself out in our world. One night last year, after putting my 4 year old to bed, I snuck downstairs to play a video game. I openly confess to being a twelve year old in a thirty-year old body. Not only did I have the game, I had an earpiece and was playing online with friends. We were talking to one another thru the earpieces about strategy. “You go around the back and I’ll come in through the front.” That kind of thing. Caught up in the game, I didn’t notice that my daughter had snuck out of her room and was standing behind me. Suddenly I heard, “Daddy! Why are you knocking those dudes down?” Of course everyone I was playing with heard her squeaky little question through the earpiece, and they burst into laughter. She heard them all laughing, and then got a big smile on her face and asked the question again. Several days later I was getting after her for not sitting at the table and finishing her food. In the midst of my parental lecture, she held up her hand, smiled and said, “Daddy, why are you knocking those dudes down?” At the age of 4, she was already learning to play to the crowd, to conform her actions and behaviors in ways that won affirmation and acceptance.

Students learn very quickly that success in the classroom is directly connected to their ability to know what the teacher wants to hear and then give him or her that very thing. In some cases, actual learning takes a back seat to giving the teacher what they want to hear. Because the message our world sends is that giving the teacher what he or she wants to hear is the thing that really matters. We inadvertently train students to play to the crowd, to maintain the gap between the inner and the outer.

And as we get older, the game just gets more sophisticated. We learn what it is that people want from us and then become very good at delivering in order to win their approval, acceptance, and all of the benefits that come with it. Trouble is, when you get really good at giving people what they want, what do you they ask you for? More. And the more disconnected our “performance” is from what’s really inside of us, the easier it becomes to resent the crowd you’re playing to. And so our world is full of people who appear successful and self-confident on the outside, but on the inside they’re full of resentment and anger because they’ve gotten ahead by being really good at living from a divided heart.

And when you get really good at this game, it’s a short jump from “giving people what they want” to “manipulating others to get what I want.” So some people learn what it is that makes everyone around them tick, and then use that information to further their own agendas. We become chameleon-like, skilled at adapting and changing how we present ourselves in order to win everyone around us to our own agendas.

Does this sound absurd? Or does this sound like the world we live in? Who’s wrapping themselves in plastic now? If the gap between our well-kept exteriors and our very different interiors is any measure of hypocrisy, then all of us fit the bill. One of the great challenges of being fully human is learning to be who we have been all along, to be at home in our own skin. When we learn to stop living in obedience to the perception of others and become people whose exteriors and interiors are divided no more, we taste something of heaven here.

So when Jesus says, “Blessed are the pure in heart for they will see God,” he’s making a profound connection between what is in our heart and our ability to behold God. The Greek word for heart is the word kardia. It’s where we get the word cardiac. We tend to think of the heart as the seat of human emotion, but in both Hebrew and Greek thought “heart” referred to the seat of our will, our thoughts, and our desires. Whatever is in your heart, whatever it is that’s rattling around inside you will either enable or prevent you from seeing God. Let me show you what I’m talking about.

Several years ago I had some vacation time that I needed to use before the first of January. So I went to rural Southeast Oklahoma to visit family. To say that I was out of place is an understatement. It was hunting season, and it seemed to me like I was the only person in the community not wearing camouflage and knee high rubber boots. Because my uncle is an officer I decided to ride around with him on duty. We were driving through one small town when out in front of us pulled an early 90’s model Chevrolet Astro Van. What caught my attention was that someone had taken the time and effort to cut a hole in the back panel door of the van and install a window unit air conditioner. I laughed at loud and told my uncle that he had a moral responsibility to pull this person over and write them a ticket for being a hillbilly. It remains one of the funniest most random things I’ve ever seen in passing.

When I returned home from the trip, I came to church. The teaching that Sunday was about the judgment we harbor in our hearts. It was about naming the dark and twisted ways we think about “those people.” At the end of the teaching, everyone was invited to kneel down and read together a prayer of repentance. As I knelt down I wasn’t thinking of anything in particular, but as I spoke the words of the prayer the image of the Astro Van came to mind. And before I could even form a thought I sensed what I can only assume was the Spirit of God saying to me, “Did it ever occur to you that the window unit air conditioner might be there because that van is the place the driver calls home?” And before I could choke out a breath, it continued. “You looked at poverty and you laughed, and it was you I was talking about when I said that I was among you. I was naked and you didn’t clothe me. I was hungry and you didn’t feed me. I was right in front of you, and you laughed.” What is in your heart either enables you to see God or it prevents you from seeing God.

Jesus’ blessing on the pure in heart is an invitation to become the kind of people who know our hearts. It’s an invitation to name and do business with what’s in us so that we can behold God and live an undivided life. It’s an invitation to take inventory of our thoughts, our wills, our desires, and our motivations. Are we caught up in the game of playing to the crowd? Are we living in obedience to the perception of others? Are we living as something that we’re not based on the people standing around us? Are we living divided in order to manipulate? Jesus wants to free you from being a slave to the perception of others. You don’t need to live with a divided heart anymore. Jesus wants to free you from the need to control or manipulate others. God wants to liberate you from the responsibility of managing, controlling, and changing everyone around you. God is inviting you to become a non-manipulative presence.

The beauty is that this invitation to know your heart and live from it is not a one-time affair. The Greek word for pure is the word katharos, and it’s where we get the word cathartic: Intense emotional releases that leave us feeling restored, renewed, or remade. This is why we say things like, “It was so good to laugh.” Or “I really needed to cry.” Purity isn’t just a quality. It’s also a process, one that Jesus invites us to again and again and again.

The invitation is to know our hearts and live from them because when we do, we find that we are swimming in a world drenched with the Divine. The question is whether or not we have a heart open to accepting to invitation?

Props to Mark Baas for helping bring this together.

“To the angel of the church in Thyatira write:

These are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first. Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols. I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.

Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan’s so-called deep secrets, ‘I will not impose any other burden on you, except to hold on to what you have until I come.’ To the one who is victorious and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations—that one ‘will rule them with an iron scepter and will dash them to pieces like pottery’—just as I have received authority from my Father I will also give that one the morning star.

Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”

If you are anything like me, right now you are asking yourself, “What did I just read? These are supposed to be the words of Jesus. “Cast her on a bed of suffering?” “Suffer intensely?” “Strike her children dead?” This doesn’t feel like the Jesus I learned about in Sunday school. Where on earth is the peace, the redemption? The grace?

One thing is very clear about this letter, Jesus is not happy. Something has gone awfully wrong in Thyatira. When we read something like this we have to ask ourselves if this is the only time we’ve seen Jesus this way? At first glance I said to myself, “Yes.” This is a first. But the longer I thought about it, I remembered the temple.

In Matthew 21:12 it is recorded that “Jesus entered the temple area and drove out all who were buying and selling there. He overturned the tables of the money changers and the benches of those selling doves.” It’s the same anger. Jesus rushes in like a bull in a china shop announcing, “This is my father’s house, and I will not see it abused in this way.”

This wasn’t what the temple was for. This wasn’t what the temple was supposed to be about. Who had made the decision to turn this holy, set apart place into another version of the marketplace? Judging from Jesus’ response, I think it’s safe to say that whoever made that decision had misused their power.

So, is there a connection between Jesus’ anger in Matthew and Jesus’ anger here?

To answer this question we need to first look at what we know about the historical context of Thyatira. Thyatira was a city full of merchants. In the book of Acts, Paul meets a woman named Lydia, a dealer in purple cloth from the city of Thyatira. Because there were so many merchants in Thyatira, there were also all kinds of trade guilds. There were guilds for wool-workers, weavers, tailors, linen-makers, leather-workers, shoemakers, potters, blacksmiths, bronze-smiths and the list just keeps going. Some historians speculate that there were more trade guilds in Thyatira than anywhere else in Asia, and some historians even go so far as to say that the city’s government was organized according to guilds rather than tribes.

Guilds were something like unions. Everyone was welcome in a guild: laborers, owners, freedmen-even slaves. But the guilds weren’t just about government and economics. They were highly religious. The guilds of Thyatira recognized Apollo, the sun god, as their patron. In order to become an official guild, a group needed a license from Rome. It wasn’t long before the guilds were worshiping Caesar as Apollo’s son: the son of god. Guilds would regularly hold guild feasts, wild meals involving idolatry and ritualistic sexual immorality. A guild feast was the ancient equivalent of a weekend in Vegas.

If you lived in Thyatira, you didn’t have to be a member of a guild, but if you wanted to make a living, it was a good idea. A union is a powerful thing to begin with. Now mix it with government, economics, and religion and you’re starting to get the picture of just how powerful the guilds were, and just how much pressure was on the Christians in Thyatira to join in. You’re in a guild or your family goes hungry. You’re in a guild or you’ve got no voice. You’re in a guild or you don’t belong.

This background starts to make sense out of Jesus’ confusing words. Jesus’ anger is pointed at one specific woman named Jezebel. Her name probably wasn’t actually Jezebel. Jezebel is a code name, something that happens quite a bit in the book of Revelation. Whoever this woman in Thyatira was, Jesus saw her as the personification of the Jezebel of the Old Testament. Queen Jezebel lived in Israel eight hundred years earlier, and was the wife of Ahab, one of the most wicked kings in Israel’s history. 1 Kings 16:31 suggests that Jezebel was responsible for influencing King Ahab and other Israelites to worship the Canaanite gods. Jezebel ended up dying one of the most gruesome deaths of anyone in the Bible. She was thrown down from a wall and her body trampled by horses. It was prophesied that her remains would be eaten by dogs, a Hebrew euphemism for extreme shame.

The fact that Jesus uses this name to describe the woman teacher in Thyatira suggests just how angry he is with this woman. Whoever this woman was, she appears to have been teaching Christians that it was possible to maintain your faith and also participate in the guilds and the guild feasts. Like the Jezebel of the Old Testament, she was encouraging people to engage in idolatry. If you were a follower of Jesus in a city where the guilds were as powerful as they were in Thyatira, Jezebel’s teaching would have been very appealing. Join in. Indulge.

What is fascinating is the way that the guild feasts stood in stark contrast to the love feasts of Christians. When the church was beginning to grow shortly after Jesus’ death, Christians would gather together and break bread with one another. They shared possessions. A meal wouldn’t start until everyone’s needs were met.

A guild feast was about indulgence. It was about gratification and excess.
A love feast was about restraint. It was about pouring out your self for the sake of others.

For Jesus, the church is the means by which the good news is embodied in the world. If you want to see resurrection, if you want to see hope, look no further than the community of people pouring themselves out for others. For Jesus, the church was God’s voice of hope in the world, a kingdom of priests. Sound familiar? This is what Jesus charged Israel to be, and throughout the Old Testament, God’s anger was triggered by the priests’ misuse of power and authority. They failed to care for people. They thought more about their own power, influence and well being than they did of others. The story of the Scriptures is clear: If you want to tick God off, stop caring for people and start thinking only of yourself.

This is the reason Jesus is so incredibly angry at what he sees in Thyatira. The church is failing to take care of people and becoming just like the rest of the self-indulgent culture. The church is God’s response to injustice. When the church stops being a counter-cultural, subversive force for hope, it actually stands in the way of God’s love being poured out for the world.

This raises all kinds of questions. Did the church in Thyatira feel trapped? Did they feel that things were so dark, so corrupt that you had to conform? Was the darkness so entrenched in the life of Thyatira that you had to compromise in order to make ends meet? This seems to be one of problems that a subversive, counter-culture faces. Things are so entrenched. Things are so thoroughly “the way they are” that nothing can be done.

I heard someone recently say, “Well, that’s just life.” And everything inside me revolted having heard it on someone else’s lips. That’s just life? That’s it? It just is what it is? No, no. I reject that. When you read the creation poem of Genesis 1 you get this picture of God speaking life into existence, breathing into it, bestowing it with dignity, honor, and potential. The sea teems with creatures. The fields sprout up plants. And God gives all of it this charge to be fruitful and multiply. The poem is chock full of explosive, fertile possibility. Life is happening. It springs up here or there like grass in the cracks of the sidewalk. No matter what you lay over it, life relentlessly grows up from underneath. One of my favorite authors says “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.” That’s the life I’m interested in.

That’s just life? No. We’re living inside a bigger story, a story that precedes guild feasts. A story that precedes the power structures of our world. It’s the story of God creating a world and then marking it with goodness and order and shalom, and the relentlessness of this God to put things back together when the world fell apart. So this God sends a people to help put the pieces back together, a people who embody a defiant refusal to accept the status-quo; a people who refuse to give death and self-indulgence an inch. In the church God has sent forth a people of imagination, in order to “out-imagine” the status-quo and to work for a new world, God’s new world right here and now.

There is an old Quaker saying that is quickly gaining new meaning for me. It says simply, “Let your life speak.” This raises a whole host of questions for me, and, I think, for us.

What are our lives speaking on God’s behalf to the world around us?
Are we trying to live with one foot in the guild and one foot in God’s new world?
Are our lives a compelling, hopeful, imaginative alternative to what’s on offer in the rest of the world?

Jesus seems to believe that all of this is possible. Do we?

In the letter to the church at Philadelphia in the book of Revelation, Jesus commends the “patient endurance” of the Philadelphians. It’s the Greek word hupomone, which literally means “the capacity to hold out or bear up in the face of difficulty.” Sometimes it gets translated at perseverance, but it has both the sense of patience and endurance.

Patience is a fascinating phenomenon.

Two weeks ago, my wife and two daughters all came down with the flu at the same time, and things went into crisis lockdown mode at our house. Being the only healthy one, it was on me to hupomone. Things got so out of hand that I began keeping a tally of the madness. Between 8pm Wednesday night and 6am Thursday morning I gave three emergency baths, changed four sets of pajamas, changed three sets of bed-sheets, washed eight puke buckets, changed somewhere between ten and fifteen diapers, and did seven loads of laundry, all with the smell of stomach grease wafting up to greet me…hupomone…hupomone…hupomone. Somewhere along the way the toilet needed plunging and I suddenly found the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus, shall we say, difficult to embody? I lost my patience. I got angry. Doors were slammed. Words were muttered under my breath. A Plunger was thrown (out of doors, mind you).

This is the cadence of life, is it not? Imagine a different scenario. The litany is not sickness this time but finances. Groceries are more expensive with each passing month. The heating bill seems to be getting higher and higher. Then there is a downsizing or a lost client. Then the car breaks down. At some point, it moves from unfortunate to unlivable. Whatever mastery of anger we possessed when it all started, we “lose it” as the expression goes. We fly off the handle. Hupomone turns to anger and contempt.

It’s not hard to look at this cadence and find it somewhere in our lives. No matter how hard we work at shaping, ordering and controlling our world, life continually defies our efforts. Life keeps happening. And we lose our patience. We try to bully things into submission with anger, but it rarely works. Anger only begets anger. It only creates fear in those around us, and anger itself is rooted in fear: the fear that we can’t shape the world according to our own purposes. Flying off the handle is not a pleasant rhythm of life.

Patience is one of those qualities or virtues that most everyone would agree we ought to have more of. Most of us would say that we want to be more patient. And yet so much of our world is ordered around impatience. Samsung recently ran an advertising campaign for a new phone. The campaign was called “Impatience is a virtue.”

It describes life this way:

We hate waiting.
Waiting misses the flight, loses the match, never gets round to it.
Waiting doesn’t ask for the pay raise, doesn’t get to the front.
Waiting never finishes first.

Then there’s impatience.

Impatience is in first. On top. At the front.
Impatience wants more and more and more.
If the movie’s boring, then leave.
If the meeting’s dull, then walk out.
If your job sucks, quit.
Patience is knowing you’re bored and doing nothing about it.

All of this suggests that patient people are weak. They get taken advantage of. They get walked all over. They live a frustrating, anemic existence. But the story of the Scriptures suggests something very different. “It’s the meek,” Jesus says, “that will inherit the earth.” It’s those who hupomone that will overcome. Think about some of the most patient people you know. Think about patient people historically. Would you describe Martin Luther King Jr. as weak? Did he live a frustrating existence? Sure. Did the way he met that existence forever change the world around him? Absolutely. And what about Jesus? Is his life a picture of weakness or is it a picture of strength in the midst of weakness, strength under control?

Patience is the recognition that life will always defy our attempts at control. Plug one hole and eventually a new leak will spring up somewhere else. At some point we’re confronted with a choice: We can stop the maddening game of plugging holes and flying off the handle every time a new leak springs or accept the fact that life keeps happening, that chaos is part of the journey, and acknowledge that the only thing we can truly control is how we respond.

Patience is a choice.

Patience is the profound wisdom of knowing what can be controlled and what can’t.

Hupomone is also about endurance. Endurance is something you build. It’s the result of making the choice again and again and again. Runners only run seven-minute miles after they’ve run months of ten-minute miles, nine-minute miles, and eight-minute miles. Take an extended break from training and endurance weakens and must be built up again. Two nights ago, I played in my first soccer game in over a year. I was on the field three minutes before I was calling for a sub. My teammates laughed. I heaved for air with my head between my knees and asked if I was bleeding from my mouth?

Building endurance isn’t pleasant. It requires ache, but the longer you choose to make the choice, to endure, the more the ache begins to feel right, to feel healthy and good. It’s a sign that you’re headed in the right direction. And, of course, once you stop training, the absence of the ache somehow feels wrong.

So Jesus tells the Philadelphian church, this rag tag group of people who were beat down, whose city was ravaged by earthquakes, who were barely making it, to “hold on.” He tells them to keep making the choice.

And then to keep making the choice.

To keep making the choice.
To keep making the choice.
To keep making the choice.

Keep making the choice. And may the patient endurance of Christ come alive in you and forever change the world around you because of it.

This is an excerpt from the writing I’m doing at Mars Hill.

The Treasure & The Pearl | Matthew 13

One of the themes running throughout Jesus’ kingdom parables is the theme of hiddenness. Despite the fact that Jesus was constantly telling people the kingdom had arrived, few people saw it because they were looking for something else. The hiddenness of God is one of the greatest frustrations of a life of faith. Where is God when you need him most? Why does God speak so freely and clearly when things are just fine, but suddenly go silent when things blow up and we desperately need to hear from him? Yet as Jesus points out in these two parables, the kingdom, although hidden, can be found-stumbled over, in fact, if you aren’t careful.

Some people discover the kingdom at the end of an exhaustive search like a merchant looking for pearls. You know the experience. You search and search for something, and the searching goes on for what seems like an eternity. Maybe it’s something you lost. You rack your brain. You retrace your steps, and when you don’t find it, you wonder in exasperation, “Where could it possibly be?”

Or maybe it’s something you never possessed to begin with and your entire life has felt like a searching after you don’t know what. Only you have a deep sense that whatever it is, you’ll know it when you see it. Then, after weeks, months, or even years, you find whatever it is you’d been searching for: your keys, your phone, an old friend you’d lost touch with, a community of people you feel that you can finally belong to, or maybe the one person in all the world you can belong to. Whatever it is, the experience of discovering what you’ve been searching for is pure relief and indescribable joy.

Not everyone has to search for the kingdom though. Others simply happen upon it by accident like a man stumbling over treasure in a field. Maybe it’s better to say that it finds them.

Sometimes you find the kingdom. Sometimes the kingdom finds you. Either way, the result is the same: pure joy.

Joy is an interesting word. In Greek it’s the word chara. It means a state of joy, gladness, or great happiness, but in many languages, joy is expressed by action: “My heart is dancing” or “my heart shouts because I am happy.” That’s because joy is active. It wells up. It overflows. No one ever simply possesses joy and stays the same because it does something to whoever possesses it. You know joyous people when you see them. They either delight you or annoy you because it’s impossible to be around them and not get some of their joy on you. It’s parasitic. It jumps off of one and onto another.

In both of Jesus’ stories the joy comes because of the discovery of something incredibly valuable. In the ancient world, people buried treasures in the ground as a way of safekeeping. Likewise, pearls were one of the most sought after commodities. Finding these things was like hitting the jackpot.

What’s ironic is that most people win the lottery and start spending. Even if they choose to invest their newfound fortune, the end goal is still to put the money to work in order to acquire more. There are endless stories of people whose lives have been ruined by winning the lottery. More money. More problems.

The joy of discovering the kingdom leads the characters is Jesus’ parable to do the exact opposite. Instead of buying, they start selling. They hit the jackpot and start getting rid of everything. Why? They behave as though they’ve found the one thing that matters most. Like they’ve finally found what they were created for. Life as it was meant to be. Ultimate reality.

Sometimes we have the privilege of catching glimpses of this ultimate reality. There are moments when a window opens up and we see, ever so briefly, the world as God must have imagined it. We catch a flicker of the same beauty and possibility that God must have felt when he spoke the world into being.

A few years ago, some very close friends moved to China. We were sad to see them go and knew that things would be very different no matter how we tried to stay in touch. After a year or so, we got word that they were coming home for Thanksgiving. So we managed to plan a meal with them and ten or eleven other very close friends. It was a meal I will never forget. We sat together at the table and ate and drank and laughed and cried. We caught up. We told stories. Conversation floated along. It went on for hours, and we all lost track of time, and at the end of the night no one wanted to get up from the table. There was a real sense that we hadn’t just shared a meal, we’d shared life. I walked away hoping that every meal I would eat for the rest of my life would be like that one. That was what God meant for meals to be like. But this wasn’t just about a meal. This is what relationships were supposed to be like. This was heaven. Only it had just taken place in my friend’s dining room.

The odd thing about catching glimpses of the kingdom of heaven is that it’s easy to begin thinking that the kingdom is random. It may show up here or there in a momentary flash, so you’d better pay attention. Paying attention is good, but the kingdom of heaven isn’t random. Paying attention assumes that the kingdom is something happening external to you. But as Jesus points out in Luke 17:21, “people won’t say, “Here it is!” or “There it is!” because the kingdom of God is within you.” Jews used the phrase kingdom of heaven and kingdom of God interchangeably, but Jesus’ point is that the kingdom isn’t somewhere out there-It’s somewhere in here-not beyond your reach but within your grasp.

A kingdom is about rule and authority. Each of us possesses a degree of rule and authority in our own lives. There are certain things we have say over. The philosopher Dallas Willard calls this “the range of our effective will.” We can choose to do whatever we want with our possessions, our bodies, our behaviors, and our relationships. The things we have say over are our kingdoms, and we are free to do with them as we wish.

The kingdom of heaven refers to the rule and reign of God, which is any place where things are as God intends them to be. And the reason we only catch glimpses of this kingdom rather than long, uninterrupted views is that it is in constant competition with all of our individual kingdoms. There is what God intends and then there is what we intend. What God intends is right relationships between God and people, between people and one another, between people and creation, and between people and their own selves.

Every time we make the choice to align our intentions and actions with God’s intentions, heaven shows up. Not randomly, not magically but as the direct result of partnering with God and allowing his rule and reign to be the guiding force behind all of the things we have say over.

So the kingdom isn’t hidden after all. Maybe it’s better to say that it is hidden in plain sight like a person who searches for their keys only to realize that they’ve been in their hand the whole time. The kingdom isn’t in some distant future. It’s here and now, in living rooms and cubicles and checkout lanes and minivans and family reunions and difficult conversations and broken social systems. And it’s not random. It’s deliberate, brought about by a dynamic partnership between God and people.