In the Wilderness

Mark 1:12-15

And the Spirit immediately drove him out into the wilderness.  –Mark 1:12

Twice in the frenetic first chapter of the Gospel of Mark, Jesus goes to the wilderness.  After his baptism and before the beginning of his ministry in Galilee, the Spirit drives him there.  Later, after a busy time of teaching and healing, he goes out to the wilderness to pray (1:35.  The same Greek word is translated “wilderness” in 1:12 and as “deserted place” in 1:35 in the NRSV Bible).  Jesus’ first visit to the wild is a time of temptation and struggle (you have to go to Matthew and Luke to get the details, Mark’s version is typically sparse).  Jesus’ second visit always feels much quieter to me. 

I have always loved the wilderness.  From wandering in the woods near my house as a youth, to backpacking and day hiking as an adult, to the wild acreage I lived on during my time in Norman, OK, the wilderness has always been a place of solitude, reflection, and peace for me.  But, three times in my life I have also been lost in the wilderness.  Twice in the woods, once in the desert.  On those adventures, the wilderness was anything but solitude, reflection and peace.  Instead, I experienced it as terrifying, confusing and dangerous.

The wilderness is complicated.  It is a place filled with beasts and angels.  It is a place where we can encounter Satan and God.  It is a place where we can experience temptation and insight, destruction and innovation, threat and salvation.  It is a powerful metaphor for life itself.

These days, it often seems like all the world around us is wilderness.   Another mass shooting, this time in a school in Florida, has ripped our hearts out again this week.  I have spent a lot of time recently with congregations struggling with deep and difficult questions about their own survival.  I encounter people every day who are in the midst of their own personal wildernesses.   To many, including me, life can seem completely out of control and solutions way beyond our grasp. 

In Matthew and Luke’s telling of the “Temptation of Jesus,” Jesus turns to scripture for strength and guidance during his sojourn in the wilderness.  It’s in the stories of God’s steadfast love and faithfulness, even in some pretty wild times, that Jesus rests his faith and enduring faithfulness.  We can do the same.  The consistent and clear witness of scripture is that God stands with us in the wilderness.  That’s at the heart of the whole story of Jesus, who is the very embodiment of God.  That’s the story of the cross and the resurrection.  That’s the story of a God who is constantly bringing hope and healing and new life from suffering and death…  even in the wildest of places where we find ourselves. 

And so, confident that God is with us, we persevere here in the wilderness.  But even more, like the People of Israel and Jesus and many others before us, we continue on.   We continue on, proclaiming the Reign of God’s love in word and deed and in acts of compassion and mercy.  Angels for one another in the midst of the beasts.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Please pray for all those effected by violence, and especially those impacted by the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School this past week. 

The Face of Jesus

Mark 9:2-9

“This is my Son, the Beloved, listen to him!”  --Mark 9:7

If you painted a picture of Jesus’ face, what would he look like?   Artists down through the ages have put brush to canvas, pen to paper and hands to clay imagining what the first century man looked like.  Their visions of the Rabbi from Nazareth are wildly diverse.  This image, one of the earliest (if not the earliest) portrayals of Jesus we possess, comes from a Roman catacomb and is dated around the third century, CE.  Here Jesus is depicted as a young man, a beardless shepherd, carrying a sheep on his shoulders.  

Six days before the event narrated in this week’s Gospel reading, Peter identifies Jesus as the Messiah in response to the question, “Who do you say that I am?”  and then proves he doesn’t have clue what that means.  (Mark 8:29).    Then, on the mountain, the voice of God weighs in on the question:  “This is my son.” The voice says.

Through the centuries, Christians have confessed, as a cornerstone of our faith, that Jesus was and is the Son of  God.  But what does this mean?  Oh, not in some esoteric, theological, ontological, head-trippy way – but to how we live our lives day by day.   Like the painters and poets before us, we can answer this question in a lot of different ways. Paul, in 2 Corinthians 4:6, put it this way, “For it is the God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of  God in the face of Jesus Christ.”   The simplicity of Paul’s confession makes sense to me.  Essentially, Paul is saying, “Look at Jesus.  See God.”   If we want to know who God is and what God is about, study the life of Jesus.  If we want to understand the power of God’s love and grace, look at what Jesus said and did.  If we want to know what God wants of us, look at what Jesus taught and commanded and lived.  Or, as the voice on the mountain put it:  “Listen to him!”

When I look into the face of Jesus, I see a healer  -- in the sense of one who brings reconciliation, wholeness and shalom into human relationships with God and between people.  A person of fierce compassion who reached out to the lost and the lonely, the forsaken and the forgotten, the broken and the rejected, friend and enemy.   I see a person who spoke the life-changing, world-turning truth of God’s love to the powerful and the powerless, and was crucified for it.   I see a person who was committed to bringing life from death and was constantly inviting others into this healing work.  I see in Jesus the face of the God who created the heavens and the earth and you and me, and loves it all – right down to the tiniest sub-atomic particle.   

That’s the picture I would paint.   How about you?

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks for reading!

Love Builds Up

1 Corinthians 8:1-13

“Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.”  1 Corinthains 8:1

In a recent conversation with one of the pastors of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Synod we were discussing the need for a renewal of individual faith practices like prayer, worship and the reading of scripture among Lutherans.  In the course of our conversation, the pastor mentioned Nikolaus von Zinzendorf’s “Order of the Mustard Seed.”  Zinzendorf was a Moravian reformer from the 18^th century who worked passionately for the renewal of the church of his day.  Those in Zinzendorf’s Order made a simple (and not so simple) commitment to one another to (1) be true to Christ, (2) be kind to all people and (3) to take the Gospel into the world.  That’s an Order I think I could join and a commitment that I think is sorely needed in today’s divisive and hurting world. 

Paul’s discussion about eating meat offered to idols in 1 Corinthians 8, I think, is reflected in the core commitments of the Order of the Mustard Seed and more generally in the practice of the Christian faith.   Being true to Christ does not allow us to believe whatever seems to work for us without any regard for it’s impact on others.  Being true to Christ is never, ultimately about ME.  Like the prophets of old, Jesus regularly challenged unhealthy and unholy faith practices that injured, judged and marginalized people.  He demonstrated kindness toward all…  even those who nailed him to a cross.  Now, kindness does not mean ignoring injustice or being nice all the time.  It means engaging the world around us with compassion, with a deep regard for the other’s common status as a creation of a loving God, and, as Luther says in his explanation of the 8^th commandment, to “come to [a neighbor’s] defense, speak well of them and interpret everything they do in the best possible light.”  It means that if eating food offered to idols is going to, in some way, distract, mislead, confuse or hurt another person, we shouldn’t do it.  (Maybe this was the origin of “political correctness”?)  As we live the good news of the Gospel in the world through service, witness, advocacy and invitation, we go with this kind of humility and compassion for all those we meet.  We take the Good News of God’s love, grace, forgiveness and mercy in Jesus Christ into the world to build up our neighbor in love, and to discover together how God’s love is already at work in both our lives.  Paul reminds us that our neighbor is someone for whom Christ died…  just like us…  and because of that, we need to do all we can to value them as much as Christ values us. 

Faith is not primarily about what we know.  It is about how we live – day in and day out – reflecting the love we first received as a gift through Jesus Christ.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

Thanks for reading!

Following the Call

Mark 1:14-20

And immediately they left their nets and followed him.  –Mark 1:18

I have spent the last week or so doing “one on one” visits with some of the rostered leaders of the Arkansas-Oklahoma Synod.   While I have visited individually with our pastors and deacons in the past, this is the first time we (myself and our Director of Evangelical Mission) are intentionally attempting to visit with every rostered leader serving in a congregation or other ministry in the synod.  What a delightful week or so it has been!   While I feel I know the folks I have been visiting, I have learned a lot about them that I didn’t know.  I have heard stories about the significant ministry they are doing and the joys and challenges of leadership in the church today.  But mostly, I have heard stories about peoples’ passion for the Gospel, about people who, like those first disciples, left their nets and followed Jesus in some cases to the far corners of the globe…  including Oklahoma and Arkansas.  Once again, I have been reminded that this is holy work that we are about in partnership with the people the Holy Spirit has called us to serve.  For that, I can only say, “praise God!”

As the baptized people of God, we are all called upon to participate in Jesus’ work of proclaiming the Good News of God and declaring that the Reign of God has come near.  Like disciples before us, we are called to call people to turn to God and believe the good news that God loves them enough to die for them on a cross.  We are called to love God, love one another and love our neighbors as ourselves in Jesus’ name.  This is not meant to be pushy or judgmental or “holier than thou.”  It’s meant to be done with humility, compassion, kindness, mercy, forgiveness and care modeled after the way of Jesus.

Church work can be a fishy business.  But it is also a blessed one.  Churches are far from perfect.  In fact, they are always populated with sinners…  from the person in the pulpit to the newcomer sitting alone in the back row.  But churches, when they are at their best, and sometimes in spite of themselves, can also be conduits for God’s grace. Places where people hear and experience God’s call to follow Jesus out into the world where God is already and always at work loving the very people the Church is called to serve in Jesus’ name.

Peace,

Bishop Mike

I invite you to join me in a prayer of thanksgiving for all those who are called to serve others in Christ’s name.  Thanks for reading!

Speak Lord

1 Samuel 3:1-20

“Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”  -1 Samuel 3:9

Those who know me, even a little, know that I am a person of words.  I love to talk.  I am “verbal processor,” meaning I tend to think things through by talking them out.  I love to write.  I love to read.  So, those who don’t know me so well, might be surprised to find out that my favorite form of prayer is to sit in silence…  listening.  My interest in contemplative prayer began during a “guided imagery” retreat I attended when I was an intern pastor over thirty years ago.  More recently, I have been practicing what is called “Centering Prayer,” a form of contemplative prayer developed by Fr. Thomas Keating in the 20^th century, but rooted in prayer practices that go back centuries.   For me, listening prayer balances the wordy world I inhabit most of the time. 

Sometimes I think that listening for God is a lost art in a world filled with so much noise and so many words.  We are, so often, quick to speak and slow to listen.  God can feel distant, and sometimes belief is hard, not because God is absent, but because we’re simply not paying attention.  We do not see God at work in the world around us because our constant busy-ness has dulled our spirits and weakened our senses.   We fail to grasp what God is saying and doing in our lives because we so often divorce ourselves from the stories of faith found in scripture, the regular practice of worship and the communities of faith who can help us interpret, understand and live into the presence of God’s love for us.   

The story of the elder Eli and the young Samuel has long been one of my favorite stories from the Hebrew Scriptures.  In a secular society and culture like ours, where so many seem to practice a vague, generic “spirituality,” I resonate with the introduction to the story, “The word of the Lord was rare in those days; visions were not widespread.”  (3:1)   Even Eli, an old priest who should have known God’s voice, takes a while to figure it out when God calls to the boy under his tutelage.  But, when he finally does, he gives Samuel sage advice:  “Listen.” 

Samuel follows his master’s direction.  “Speak Lord, for your servant is listening.”  The young prophet says when God calls to him.   It is not an easy word he hears from God.  But that, I have discovered, is often the case.   God’s call challenges.  God’s call often pushes us in directions and pulls us to places we never thought we would or could go.  God’s call can be uncomfortable.   But listening for God’s still small voice in the midst of a noisy, wordy world also opens us to the depth of grace that is ours even before we listen, to a relationship of abiding love that is ours even before we ask for it, and to a presence and power that never abandons us, even on those days when our spirits are dull with doubt, our senses are weak with uncertainty and our ability to listen clouded by troubled hearts and minds.

Peace,

Bishop Mike.

Thanks for reading.