Field Notes On The Jesus Way

Here is the world.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid. – Frederick Buechner

“How are you doing these days, Joe?” my friend asked.

“I’m doing really well.”

“Well, you are about the only one I’ve asked lately that can say that,” he said.

As soon as he asked me the question, I flashed on the flow of activity on a recent Sunday. It has been a few days since that day, and I am still feeling the afterglow. Would you like to know what made it so good that it echoes down through the corridors of my mind until today?

Thanks for asking.

First, I participated in a few things that are essential to my vocation. Like standing in front of a congregation and leading in prayers, confessions, officiating silence, and sharing God’s Word. I’ve grown as comfortable doing this as making coffee every morning, I’ve been doing it so long.

On this particular Sunday, I experienced what theologian John Claypool calls the “preaching event”. That is when a preacher connects with the Holy Spirit and then reaches out and connects with the soul of a congregation he loves. That moment becomes a “thin place” between heaven and earth—where the distance between the eternal and the temporal is thin as a baby’s breath. It doesn’t happen every Sunday or every sermon, but when it happens the divine spark of eternity ignites preacher and people. The temptation is to try to replicate it as if you could catch lightning in a jar. It can’t be done.

Then, after church, my wife and I were invited to my youngest son’s home for Sunday lunch. He and my daughter-in-love prepared a wonderful and satisfying meal. It was sacramental to sit across the table from my son and hear him say grace over the meal he had prepared in his home for his parents. But, before the meal, I bounced my youngest granddaughter on my knee and gave her so many gray whisker kisses on her little neck that she laughed out loud. Her laughter made my eyes brim with tears.

Sitting on their sofa, drinking rich, dark, black coffee, and putting my arm around my wife while we ate a Haagen Daz ice cream treat made me feel as loved as I have felt in a long time. All was well in my familial world.

As we arrived home to our mountain cabin after lunch it was unusually hot for the mountains. I remember looking at the indicator on the dash of my truck and seeing 88 degrees glow in a garish blue light.

I said to my wife, “I’m going to go into the coolest part of the house, lay down, and see what happens.”

You know what happened. My mouth eased open, my breathing got heavy, and I growled in about 25 grace-filled minutes of sleep that was as delicious as the ice cream I had tasted on my tongue earlier and as satisfying as the laughter of my granddaughter.

Refreshed, I walked out off our deck and into the shadow of Mount Princeton, fired up my wood splitter, and spent the next two hours splitting two cords of green Chinese Elm I had piled up by my woodshed. The rounds were extremely heavy with moisture and the splitter often moaned as much as I did working the rounds into manageable fuel for a future mid-winter fire.

The interior of the split wood was a mixture of streaks of mocha colored layers that gave way to pancake colored swirls. It was warm to the touch inside the damp wood. Fermenting. Like it was preparing for winter itself.

My arms and, more significantly, my lower back began to give way as I counted how many more rounds were left that needed to be split so that they would cure in time to be burned by December. Five, four, three, two, and finally—as the sun slipped behind the shoulder of the mountain, I split the last piece of wood.

I turned off the noisy splitter, walked into the house to get a cold drink.

My wife asked, “Did you have fun?”

A recent Sunday

I winked at her, smiled, and closed the door behind me and with drink in hand, walked out to sit on the deck to admire my pile of firewood and my mountain. I stayed there until the bats came out to hunt mosquitoes. I watched them flit here and there in their erratic flight patterns and said to myself, “Yes, I had fun.”

Vocational fulfillment, love of my family, deep rest, and splitting firewood.

That happened on a recent Sunday. And I am still enjoying it these many days later. I’m doing well, in the midst of a world that is not.

Thanks be to God.

And thanks for asking.

Amazing love, how can it be?
That you, my king. would die for me
Amazing love, I know it’s true
Its my joy to honor you.

If you don’t believe in original sin, I can only surmise that you have never attended a Baptist business meeting or an HOA annual meeting.

Every time I look in the mirror, I am reminded that we need a savior. Every time I watch the nightly news, I am reminded that we need a savior. There is so much hatred and violence that, at times, it can feel overwhelming.

A North Carolina man has been arrested in connection with the shooting death of a 5-year-old boy who was playing in his front yard with his two sisters. Darius N. Sessoms, 25, of Wilson, N.C., has been charged with first-degree murder.

The 5-year-old was identified by family members as Cannon Hinnant.

Cannon was shot in the head while playing outside of his father’s home Sunday, his family said. He died after being taken to the Wilson Medical Center.

The young boy’s father is next-door neighbors with Sessoms.

A woman who said she witnessed the horrific incident claimed Sessoms shot Cannon, then ran back into his own house.

“My first reaction was he’s playing with the kids,” said Doris Lybrand. “For a second, I thought, ‘That couldn’t happen.’ People don’t run across the street and kill kids.”

Cannon’s mother said the boy’s 7-year-old and 8-year-old sisters witnessed the shooting, which police were alerted of at around 5:30 p.m. Sunday.

The racial unrest that white America wants to ignore is on the news almost every night. I recently listened to a podcast featuring African American Willie Jennings.

Willie Jennings is an associate professor of systematic theology Africana studies and religious studies at Yale University. He’s an ordained Baptist Minister and his author of Christian Imagination, Theology and the Origins of Race as well as a commentary on the book of Acts.

I remember my first time—you never forget your first—the first time a white police officer pulls you over.

I was 14 riding a brand-new bicycle that my eldest brother had bought for me on my birthday. I had outgrown the old Stingray bike. I rode all over town this extraordinary gift from my brother that marked my step into young adulthood.

It also marked, unfortunately, the step into the sickening ordinary that would be part of my life.

The police officer yelled from his car get off the bike. I quickly obeyed remembering the words of my father and my brothers when they said, “Stay out of trouble. Do what they tell you.”

“Whose bike is this?”

“It’s mine,” I said.

“Sit on the curb and don’t move,” the police officer said, as he took my bike back to the patrol car and left me sitting on the curb.

I saw people drive by watching me sitting near flashing lights and I wish someone, anyone who knew me, and knew what a good church boy I was, would drive by, stop and help me.

This was the first time I felt that helplessness.

I did not feel helpless because it was nothing I could do. I felt helpless because there was nothing that this police officer could do to me that I could stop in any way. After what seemed like hours to check the serial number on my bike, he told me I could take it and go.

That was it. No apology. No words of advice or wisdom. He just drove off. I have had such encounters with police officers multiple times in every decade of my life since then until now.

Not the same, but exactly with the same dynamic—I’ve been pulled over or stopped on the street or stopped in a store—for doing nothing wrong.

And then I left each encounter with the return that feeling of helplessness.

We need a Savior to do something about the darkness of our hearts. What would change our hearts? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can wash away my sins? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. We are the beast and He is the beauty.

The ancient Scriptures teach us that Jesus became a beast on a cross to transfer his beauty to our lives.

What would be strong enough to hold down the arms of the One who created the stars? What would be strong enough to bind the limbs of the Maker of the universe to the cross? Nails? Chains?

No.

Nothing but his love for you. Jesus’ death shows the depth of his love.

He lost everything. He was crushed. He was marred beyond human likeness. He was the Lord of the worlds. He lost the universe. He lost his glory. He lost his beauty. He lost everything.

He loves you more than the world. He loves you more than the glacier-carved mountains. He was willing to let everything go in order to get us.

As a pastor, I’ve talked to people who were dying. They never say, “I regret I didn’t spend more time at the office.” What do they regret? They always have regrets with regard to relationships and love.

Are you melted by spiritual understandings of how much he loves you? Do you live in the reality of it? Is it a walking reality? Can you breathe it? Can you feel it? Can you taste it? Can you touch it? Do you know how different you’d be if you’d realize the magnitude of his love?

In his book Mortal Lessons, Richard Selzer, M.D., writes:

“I stand by the bed where a young woman lies, her face postoperative, her mouth twisted in palsy, clownish. A tiny twig of the facial nerve, the one to the muscles of her mouth, has been severed. She will be thus from now on. The surgeon had followed with religious fervor the curve of her flesh; I promise you that. Nevertheless, to remove the tumor in her cheek, I had to cut the little nerve.

Her young husband is in the room. He stands on the opposite side of the bed and together they seem to dwell in the evening lamplight, isolated from me, private. Who are they, I ask myself, he and this wry mouth I have made, who gaze at and touch each other so generously, greedily?   The young woman speaks. ‘Will my mouth always be like this?’ she asks. ‘Yes,’ I say, ‘it will. It is because the nerve was cut.’  She nods and is silent.  But the young man smiles.  ‘I like it,’ he says, ‘it is kind of cute.’

All at once, I know who he is. I understand and I lower my gaze. One is not bold in an encounter with a god. Unmindful, he bends to kiss her crooked mouth and I am so close I can see how he twists his own lips to accommodate to hers, to show her that their kiss still works.”

Once upon a time, in the most surprising reversals in the history of stories, the beast in me and the beast in you needed the beauty of the Son of the Living God to rescue us. And at Calvary, God twisted His lips to meet our hideous and disfigured souls–to show that the kiss still works.

Jesus showed them His hands and His side…[and] said to them again, “Peace to you! John 20:20

This story in the life of the first disciples of Jesus is both haunting and hopeful. I know that sentence sounds strange, but it is still true.

Their future was before them and it was exciting. But that was seven days earlier when the thirty-three-year-old Jesus had ridden into Jerusalem and the crowds were singing his praises. On this night, however, they were fearful, uncertain, and hopeless. Their hopes had been brutalized on an instrument of torture and execution. On this night they were huddled together with the doors locked, the windows shuttered, and a lookout posted. On this night they were certain that every clamor of metal on the street below meant that soldiers with swords, shields, and spears were coming to arrest them.

They had possessed such grand hopes just days earlier about the coming of the Kingdom of God. Now those hopes lay on a cold slab somewhere. They must have wondered about how the Kingdom of God was going to come into the world now that Jesus was dead and gone.

And yet, while cowering in fear in that upper room, Jesus appeared in the midst of them. It must have scared them deeply because the first words Jesus said to them was “Peace be with you.” When you are so afraid that you have locked the doors and windows and a phantom of a friend you saw die materializes before your very eyes, I suppose peace would be very necessary because that would be haunting to anyone.

But then Jesus extended his hands to reveal the nail-holes in his wrists and lifted his robe to show a jagged open wound in his side and they knew this was no ghost. This person is their living, breathing, and locked-door-defying friend from Nazareth. They were ecstatic! Jesus tells them again, “Peace be with you.”

Have you ever lost hope and found despair?

There was a time I thought my life was over. I was forty-one and could not see a future. I was so broken, shattered, and lost I was sure that I would never know peace again. I needed to feel the peace of his presence.

One day I was at a bookstore thumbing through an art book and came across a form of art that gave me hope. It’s from Japan and called Kintsugi. It is a process that restores cracked vessels or broken ceramics with gold, leaving the piece even more beautiful than it started out.

The word Kintsugi is Japanese for ‘golden joinery’. The idea behind it is not to hide the ugliness and brokenness but instead to use gold to make it shine; to illuminate and expose the damage. And at the end of the process, the piece is even more beautiful having been broken.

That art reminds me of a stanza from a Leonard Cohen poem that says,

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

What I had to offer Jesus would never be a “perfect offering.” Besides, He did not want my talent, gifting, or abilities. Jesus just wanted me, my wounds, and brokenness. They are his medium. They are his canvas, his clay, his art.

They are his specialty.

Just as the wounds of Jesus were the cracks in which the grace of God came into the world and healed me of my sin-disease, my wounds, and my weaknesses; my scars are the cracks through which Jesus’ resurrection grace will leak out into the darkness. It is his peace that is the mortar that holds my broken life together and brings resurrection art into the world.

So, no matter what you have done in your past or what you have failed to do, no matter the sins, even the self-inflicted ones, bring your brokenness to Jesus and receive his breath of peace into your life.

For his woundedness and our brokenness is his art.

He uses both in this dark world.

That’s how the light gets in.