Field Notes On The Jesus Way

Music is a sacrament.~ Bono

For the Christian, pleasure is innocent until proven guilty. ~ Tim Keller

At various times, we all come to a place where we notice something almost sacramental, rich, and holy about the experience of listening to the music of Beethoven or Mozart. Or listening to Johnny Cash sing Amazing Grace.

There is something transcendent about watching a bee pull nectar from the tiny alpine-forget-me-not flower at fourteen thousand feet above sea level. There is something holy about watching a sunrise or the smell of a baby’s hair. There is something packed full of beauty and goodness about the innocent laugh of a toddler. Or the wise, gentle smile of a grandparent.

What do we do with these instincts that this material reality is beautiful, good, and holy? Is it merely neurons firing and synapses reacting in our brains, or is there more going on?

Live in God’s World Playfully

Have you noticed that Christians are some of the saddest, dourest, meanest people on the planet? And yet one of the salient marks of what the Scriptures say is supposed to set us apart from people with God is that we are joyful people.

God made this world, and even in its groaning and marred state, we are to enjoy the creative world God has placed us in.

Will we slow down enough to see the petals of a flower, hear the distinct tone of a songbird, taste the texture of a pan-seared steak, or have a leisurely conversation with an old friend? Will we slow down enough to see, hear, taste, smell, and touch this good earth? How will we ponder and praise the moments of beauty God offers us this week?

Live in God’s World Gratefully

That is one of the great benefits of gathering weekly to worship. When we gather to sing, pray, laugh, study, hear, and love as a gathering of the faithful, we focus all the inarticulate praise of the cosmos and turn it into an expression to the living God. Worship is practiced in gratitude.

This is why it is so important that we determine to be present in a place of worship even when we don’t feel like it. Without the weekly discipline, it is so easy to fall into a default mode of working on the next item on your “to-do list” that we fail to realize we have so much life and grace for which to be thankful.

In worship, we are to slow down long enough to be stunned by the beauty of God and the grace of Jesus and—to say thank you as a people.

Live in God’s World Seriously

We know that this world is both beautiful and broken. God loves this world so stubbornly that He enters it in Jesus to restore and heal it. Each of our lives is supposed to be a signpost to that blessed hope. That means we get serious about serving the world that God loves.

When you work in your yard, when you speak with the clerk at the store you frequent, when you teach a child to read, when you build a house, when you pump gas, when you provide employment for others, when you process transactions at a bank, when you write a story, when you listen to a friend, when you play with a child, when you cook a meal…it is all spiritual.

One of the fascinating restoration projects happening in the world today is happening in Istanbul, Turkey. The church of Hagia Sophia (literally “Holy Wisdom”), built in Constantinople, now Istanbul, was first dedicated in 360 by Emperor Constantius, son of the city’s founder, Emperor Constantine. Today, it boasts the largest unsupported dome structure in the world. It is beautiful, breathtaking, and transcendent. And yet, with all of its grandeur, it is in disrepair.

In the 15^th century, Sultan Mehmed ravaged the city and converted it into a mosque, which it remained until the fall of the Ottoman Empire in the early twentieth century—plastering over the beauty of the mosaics with the ugly of plain plaster. However, in the 1930s, the Hagia Sophia was officially commissioned as a museum and was no longer controlled by a religious entity. Since that time, slowly—week-by-week, month-by-month, and year-by-year—the ancient beauty of that place is being restored. The plain plaster is carefully, gently chipped and peeled away so that the original beauty underneath might reemerge.

What a wonderful picture of what God is doing in this world through Jesus’s apprentices and what the maker of Heaven and Earth is doing with His creation. Through Jesus’s person and work, He is repairing and restoring a ruined cathedral, and He intends—no, insists—that it be beautiful again.

So, dear friends and fellow pilgrims, may you know the maker of Heaven and Earth and learn to live well in His good world.

Kings of the earth and all peoples;
Princes and all judges of the earth;
Both young men and maidens;
Old men and children.
Let them praise the name of the Lord.    Psalm 148:11

(Judas) came up to Jesus and said, “Greetings, Rabbi!” and kissed him. Jesus said to him, “Friend, do what you are here to do.” Then they came and laid hands on Jesus and arrested him. Matthew 26v49-50

One day Ernest Hemingway was having lunch with friends, and they were talking about the importance of writing with brevity.

Hemingway bet everyone at the table ten dollars each that he could craft an entire story in six words.

After the pot was assembled, Hemingway took a napkin and wrote down the following six words:

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Everyone paid up without saying a word.

Saint Matthew does a pretty good job of coming up with his own version of Hemmingway’s barroom story.

Then all the disciples deserted him and fled. (Matthew 26v56)

In this story of betrayal, the disciples desert Jesus. When Jesus called his disciples to follow him towards the beginning of the book of Matthew, these same men “deserted” their vocations, homes, families, and friends to apprentice with Jesus.

Once they left everything for Jesus. Now, they leave Jesus so they can hang on to everything. Everybody in this story is either an enemy, a betrayer, or a disappointment.

Everybody.

And Jesus walks straight into a sacrificial death for all of them.

When Jesus preached his most famous sermon, the Sermon on the Mount, these same disciples were sitting on that grassy hillside on the north shores of the Sea of Galilee in Matthew 5 and heard,

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven.  (Matthew 5v43-45)

You don’t defeat enemies, Jesus says, you love enemies. That’s what Kingdom people do.

That’s what Jesus said in a sermon and that’s what Jesus does in this dark garden in front of a mob of men with torches, clubs, and disappointing disciples.

In this election year, with our unprecedented polarization, it is easy for evangelical Christians to say, “That way is naïve and impossible to live in the real world. If we don’t win this November, we will lose the America I love. We have to fight. We have to win at all costs!”

Bertrand Russell who was a 20th-century atheist and philosopher said, “The Christian principle, Love your enemies is good. There is nothing to be said against it except that it is too difficult for most of us to practice sincerely.” 

He’s right.

You and I, on our own, can’t work up enough moral sweat to live this way. And that is why we have to receive what Jesus does for us into the center of our being.

When Lynette and I were in Israel in 2018, we stood in this garden and one of the things that became clear to me as I stood there facing Jerusalem and the Temple Mount is that Jesus would have been able to see and hear this mob coming for about an hour. He would have had all kinds of time to make his escape if he wanted to.

That isn’t what Jesus did. No fight or flight with Jesus. He watched the people who are coming to kill him and welcomed them.

If evangelicals are ever going to regain the moral authority that we have lost through scandals, political atrocities, and moral relativism, I believe it will happen when the one who welcomed his enemies in a dark garden occupies a deeper place in our soul than our enemies.

If not, we will end up behaving like the world and voting for people who legislate policies and values that veer away from normative and historic Christian values or a candidate who’s behavor is a violent violation of normative and historic Christian values.

Either way, our country deserves a better version of ourselves than what we’ve shown in recent years. If not our country, then the one who loved enemies, betrayers, and deserters.

It’s time to write a different story.

For each one of us, there is only one thing necessary: to fulfill our own destiny, according to God’s will, to be what God wants us to be. – Thomas Merton

I entered a relationship with Jesus that I was aware of when I was seven years old. I can still see my tears falling into the green gold shag carpet in my preacher father’s study where I said “the sinner’s prayer.” And I think I can still hear the tone in my little brother’s voice when he learned that I had been saved, “I hope it takes.”

Two years later my family moved from Texas to Colorado, and I went to youth camp at the Ponderosa Camp just outside of Colorado Springs. It was a week of learning about Jesus, the proper handling of a .22 and making lanyards for our moms.

Every night we gathered in an open pavilion for a chapel service complete with an altar call. On the last night of the week, I listened to the preacher, but I heard from God. I heard him in my heart. I never heard words. It was more like a whisper—but it wasn’t a whisper of words. You might say it was a “calling.” It was very vague, almost ethereal and I was troubled by it.

I eventually became a preacher. It seemed to be the natural progression in my family. My dad was a preacher. My grandfather had been a preacher. Folks at church would always ask me, “Are you going to be a preacher like your dad?” I don’t remember what I said, but I remember what I felt, “I hope not.” I didn’t want to be a preacher.

But that night at the camp, God whispered to me. He wanted me to pastor his people. I was called to my first church in 1984. I was twenty-six years old. I had no clue what to do. I knew how to preach, but I didn’t know how to be a pastor. That was nearly forty years ago. I have a clue now. And the reason is because God’s grace grew me into who he wanted me to be.

There is a movie called Becket that stars Peter O’Toole and Richard Burton. It’s about how two drinking buddies change over time. Peter O’Toole plays the character Henry II and Burton plays Thomas Becket. Becket was a low-level priest and loved his friendship with Henry.

Though a priest, Beckett was corrupt just like Henry II. He was just as hotheaded and sensual as Henry.

Then one day the Archbishop of Canterbury died, and Henry thought, “I’ll make Thomas the Archbishop of Canterbury! Thomas is just a regular guy. He’s not going to tell me how I have to live my life. He will not oppose me in any way. He’s just a regular guy. Finally, I’ve solved the problem of church/state relations.”

So, he makes Thomas Becket Archbishop of Canterbury.

But something happened to Thomas Becket. Thomas is shaken because he knows that even though it has come through Henry for all the wrong reasons, and even though he’s completely corrupt and completely unholy and completely unworthy and completely unqualified, now he is the bishop of England. He suddenly realizes a sense of the call of God in his heart. He realizes how unworthy he is of it, and it changes him.

He becomes a good person. A man of integrity. He begins to represent the gospel. He begins to call out Henry for the things he’s doing wrong. This infuriates Henry. He is filled with conflict because he loves Thomas, yet now he’s so mad at him because Thomas has become a good man. He grew into his calling.

Finally, one night in frustration, Henry says out loud to his knights what he had been thinking in his heart, “Who will rid me of this meddlesome priest?” The four knights look at each other, and they strap on their swords and go to the cathedral.

As the knights approach Thomas with swords drawn and he realizes they are there sent by Henry to assassinate him, he says with no guile, “Poor Henry. Poor Henry.”

The call had made him holy. The call had made him like Christ when Jesus said, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.”

That’s what the call of grace does to our lives. God’s grace qualifies us for God, and it changes us. We spend the rest of our lives living into and out of our calling.

And now you will excuse me because I have to work on Sunday’s sermon.

This is the time to be slow,

Lie low to the wall

Until the bitter weather passes.

Try, as best you can, not to let

The wire brush of doubt

Scrape from your heart

All sense of yourself

And your hesitant light.

If you remain generous,

Time will come good;

and you will find your feet

Again on fresh pastures of promise,

Where the air will be kind

And blushed with beginning.

by John O’Donohue