The Case of the Renegade Exorcist

When people think that getting rid of religion would eliminate most human conflicts, I have to ask myself what universe are they living in? Besides the objective fact that the Encyclopedia of War has found that only 7% of all wars were caused by religion, there is the obvious fact that people will fight over anything: race, politics, sexual orientation, personal or national honor, and on a less lethal level, sports teams, favorite foods, even which actor to play James Bond is the best. (It was Sean Connery.) My point is that people see things differently and will argue over matters both important and trivial. 

It's not hopeless. We can and do work together with and even marry people of different political affiliations, races and religions. Oddly enough, it is often within political parties, within religious denominations, within fandoms that we see the most vicious fighting. Groups that have the most in common seem to react the most strongly to internal differences.

Sometimes the controversy  is over essentials. This was true of the Gnostics, who saw all matter as evil and so said the creator of the world is evil and that Jesus represents a different, totally spiritual God. They taught that Christ did not really become a man but only appeared to. Our Lord did not actually live as one of us or nor did he die for us. That lead to radically different notions of what is good and what is evil, as well as what our attitude toward creation, our own bodies, and everyday life should be. Some Gnostics taught that, the body being evil, one should live a very ascetic life and be celibate. Other Gnostics taught that, since the body is matter and therefore irredeemable, it didn't matter what one did with the body. For them, promiscuity was permissible as long as one's mind stayed on things above. The church as a whole decided to hold to the Biblical teachings that we find in the Apostolic and Nicene creeds: that, as paradoxical as it seems, Jesus is fully God and fully human, the coming together of the creator and the creation, which God pronounced good and is working to restore.

But often the disagreements are about less crucial matters like emphasis, or specific ways of doing things. It gets serious when we use these differences to decide who is "us" and who is "them." As someone said recently in an NPR piece about a political party at odds with itself, "We've got to decide if we are a church that welcomes converts or one that expels heretics."

So it's not surprising that this problem arose even in the earliest days of Christianity. John the disciple tells Christ that when they saw someone casting out demons in Jesus' name, they tried to stop him "because he was not following us." That's pretty remarkable. It means news of Jesus' healings have become widespread. It means people realize that the there is something special about Jesus' power. There were other Jewish exorcists in those days. The only way to make a spirit leave a person was to command it in the name of someone more powerful. Usually a Jewish exorcist used the name of God. By using Jesus' name, this renegade exorcist was recognizing that Jesus was more powerful than the evil spirits.

It also means this man really believed in Jesus. In Acts 19, we hear of how the sons of a Jewish high priest tried to drive out a demon by using the name of "Jesus whom Paul preaches." The evil spirit says, "I know about Jesus and I'm acquainted with Paul but who are you?" The mentally ill man leaps upon and beats the exorcists into submission and they escape him naked and wounded. Jesus' name is not a magic word. Calling upon him only works if we trust him, if we have a relationship with him. Otherwise it would be like going up to a stranger, calling him Dad and asking for lots of money. You need a real relationship with the person to ask for things in his name.    

So this fellow knew of Jesus and trusted in him. But he wasn't one of the people who was traveling with Jesus. There is no indication that the disciples recognize him as one of the Seventy to whom Jesus granted power and sent out to heal. But he is healing people in Jesus' name. So the Twelve tell him to stop.

Jesus' reaction must have shocked them. "Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able to speak evil of me for a while. Whoever is not against us is for us." To Christ the important thing is that the man did good in his name. Even allowing for the fact that he may turn against Jesus at some point, it's not going to happen anytime soon. Right now, this guy is an ally. And we need all the allies we can get. There's a war on.

What war? The war on the less fortunate and powerless. 16% of Americans are living in poverty. 1 in 5 children has no assurance that he will eat today. Though decreasing slightly, more than 600,000 people are homeless. The number of homeless families increased by 20% or more in 11 states. 49.9 million Americans have no health insurance, including 7.3 million children. That's appalling in world's most prosperous nation.  

When people come to me seeking help from the church, I do what I can from my discretionary fund. I give them Winn Dixie gift cards for food. I might help them with bus money to get to Key West to take care of their Social Security or other governmental matters. But I explain that we are a small church and that I cannot, say, pay their entire rent. Nor can I help them more than once. I do refer them to the Food pantry at the Big Pine United Methodist Church or Catholic Charities at St. Peter's Roman Catholic Church. I don't disparage the other churches over any doctrinal differences our denominations have. As a Methodist down here on an Emergency Relief Mission after Hurricane Georges told me, "Doctrines may divide but service unites."

But wait! Didn't Jesus get into debates with the Pharisees, which were a separate school of Jewish thought? Yes, but it was over what they did ethically. He even told people that as the scribes and Pharisees were custodians of God's law, one should do as they said but not as they did. Why? They were much too focused on ceremony and ritual and things like not healing on the Sabbath, and they were not paying attention to what was important, like justice, mercy and faith. They liked people's adoration rather than God's approval. They piled burdensome lists of rules on people's backs but wouldn't lift a finger to help. They blocked the way into God's kingdom for others and killed the prophets God sent. They were hypocrites who scolded Jesus for eating and drinking with disreputable people, not recognizing that he was bringing these people back to God.

Jesus was concerned with the fruit that people produced, whether what they did was good or bad. A Samaritan, whom most Jews would view as a heretic, was nevertheless for Jesus a good example of following the commandment to love one's neighbor. A Roman soldier telling Jesus that he could simply heal his slave by distant command was a better example of faith than Jesus had found among his own people. Tax collectors and prostitutes were repenting and entering God's kingdom ahead of the religious leaders.

This is not to say people are saved by their works but that if one puts one's trust in Jesus, that faith will find expression in good works. If you are sick, you will display symptoms, like a fever or shortness of breath. If you are healthy, you will display signs of good health, like a normal temperature or a good lung capacity. Sins are symptoms of poor spiritual health; good works are a sign of good spiritual health. Like temperature or the ability to breath deeply, it's not the only sign but it is a major one.   

The man's ability to heal folks in Jesus' name showed Christ that he was spiritually healthy. He trusted in the God revealed in Jesus Christ. The disciples had not realized that. But as the Celebrate bulletin insert says about today's Gospel, "the circle we form around Jesus' word must be able to value good being done in ways we wouldn't do it, by people we can't keep tabs on."

The church has not always be kind to renegade Christians. They expelled Martin Luther, John Wesley, General William Booth, and others. In more shameful actions, reformers such as Jan Huss and William Tyndale were burned at the stake.

We don't do that any more. But churches still split over matters both essential and not. This dilutes our impact in the world. We dilute it partly by our acting towards fellow Christians in ways that are very unloving. Younger people are not hung up on denominational distinctives and they don't understand why Christians speak or act negatively toward other Christians. Small wonder a large percentage of young people leave the church and many young people are reluctant to join churches.

Another way schisms dilute our impact on the world is by creating more churches that then compete with one another in ministry. And it's not like we can afford to do that. The average church in the U.S. has 100 members or less. That's true for all denominations, even the larger ones. The mega churches may have more people but they are less numerous. In small towns, churches are closing every day. At a recent Episcopal clergy conference, we were being told the way we do ministry must change. We were told that a church needs a budget of at least $250,000 to afford one full-time clergy, a minimal staff and the ability to do ministry. If a church has a budget of $150,000 or less it is at risk of ceasing to be able to continue. That's disturbing because our church budget is not even close to that.

At the recent synod ministry conference, Bishop Beneway spoke of how the way we do ministry is changing. With such a large number of small churches, clergy need to expect to have either a secular job in addition to their ministry or to have more than one church. And Pastor Paul Lutze singled out what we are doing on Big Pine as a great example of ecumenical cooperation. I spent practically every meal answering questions from colleagues about how our two churches functioned together.

In view of these trends, it will no longer be feasible for Christians to disdain other Christians. It will no longer be reasonable for us not to work together. It will no longer make sense to treat each other as enemies or rivals. We must become allies. Or, more accurately, we must recognize each other as fellow citizens of God's Kingdom, as in fact, brothers and sisters in Christ. Like all siblings we are different and yet all bear a family resemblance. We are unique and yet we are one in Christ. Unity is what Jesus prayed for on the night he was betrayed. Our love for one another is how the world is supposed to identify us as his disciples, he said. Not, mind you, our complete agreement on all doctrinal matters, not our uniformity in ritual, nor our political leanings. It is our love for one another that marks us out as Christians.

This is not to say families don't have squabbles and disagreements. But the members of healthy families continue to love each other and work with each other and help each other out. The older brother might act as if he's a parent rather than a sibling but he is loved. The youngest might seem a bit wild and immature but she is loved. The middle child might feel overlooked but he is loved. They know how to push each other's buttons and sometimes make each other madder than they've ever gotten at anyone outside the family. But in strong families, they apologize and forgive. They never forget they are joined by blood.

We Christians are joined by Jesus' blood, on the cross and at the Lord's table. There we partake of Christ's body and become his body on earth. In our bodies, we recognize that their different parts still belong to one body. We need to do that with the various parts of Christ's body. We need to recognize that they don't all look the same or function the same. Some are better suited for some tasks and some work better at other ones. But they are all necessary for the good health of the body. And so it shouldn't surprise us that when one part of the body of Christ is in pain, the rest of us feel it. And we should respond as quickly as possible to help the injured and support the ailing part.

Jesus didn't let his body be broken so that God's creation should continue to fragment. He died to draw all people to himself. He died to heal this broken world and commissioned us to continue his ministry of reconciliation. That means no criticizing fellow Christians doing good in Jesus' name. Instead we should ask, "Need some help?" and pitch in. When in doubt do the most loving thing. And the world will know we are Christians by our love.

Dividing Desires

The primary passage examined is James 3:13-4:3, 7-8a, with a brief look at Mark 9:30-37.

As the Rolling Stones remind us, you can't always get what you want. So what's the remedy? Cheat, apparently! In a survey of more than 40,000 high school students the Josephson Institute of Ethics found that almost 3/5 of them admitted to having cheated. But 4/5 of them said their ethics were above average! Studies of college students find that the majority will fib--usually just a little--when asked to take a test for money, grade it themselves, shred it and then tell a researcher how well they did so they may be paid accordingly. And if they got paid in tokens which could be traded for money, making their larceny one step removed, they cheated twice as much. (The experimenters knew who was cheating because the shredder was set to shred only the margins of the test papers.) When similar studies were done outside academia, they found adults cheated to the same extent. The percentage of cheating was even higher among--big surprise--Wall Street bankers!

The shredder tests were done by psychology professor Dan Ariely, who wrote "The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone--Especially Ourselves." In a Wall Street Journal piece, he writes of a student who locked himself out of his house. He called a locksmith and was surprised that the man didn't rigorously try to confirm that he belonged in the house. The locksmith said 1% of people never steal. 1% always steal and a lock wouldn't stop them. A lock protected you against the 98% who might steal from you if they knew your door was unlocked. Locks keep honest people honest.

The locksmith was closer to the truth than he knew. Professor Ariely has found that most people will lie or cheat a little. Surprisingly, fear of being caught didn't stop them. In some studies, they paid themselves from a bowl outside in the hallway. In one, they simply told a researcher who was obviously blind. They still cheated by only 1 or 2 questions. Nor did the amount of money motivate them. In the studies, the amount offered for each right answer was varied from 50 cents to $10 and yet didn't significantly increase the amount of cheating. In fact, when they offered $10 per right answer, the cheating decreased. Ariely thinks that it was harder for the subjects to think of themselves as basically good guys if they took too much. The real conflict is between our desires for money or glory and our desire to see ourselves as honest and honorable people.

The ability to rationalize was, therefore, an important factor in influencing people to cheat. Other factors were conflicts of interest, creativity, being drained by a difficult mental task, a past history of dishonesty, having others (like your teammates) benefit from your dishonesty, watching other behave dishonestly, and a culture that gives examples of dishonesty. (Which makes my enjoyment of the show "Leverage" a really guilty pleasure.)

They found that what actually decreases dishonesty is supervision, moral reminders, honor pledges and having people sign tax or insurance forms at the top (before they fill it out) rather than the usual place at the bottom of the form (after they have already committed their lies to paper.) If they asked the subjects to recall the 10 Commandments or the school honor code before the test, no one cheated. At one school, they reminded students of the honor code and it worked even though the school didn't have an honor code! In an even more surprising experiment, they had self-identified atheists swear on the Bible, and no one cheated!

While it was rare for anyone to brazenly cheat by a large margin, the professor says his researchers lost thousands of dollars to the majority of people who cheated just a little. The problem, as Ariely sees it, is not the outrageous outliers but the "small but ubiquitous" cheating by the rest of us.

Bad behavior is contagious. Because we are social animals, we tend to take our cues from others. If people see bad behavior practiced in a school or a company or a society, they take it as acceptable conduct. "Everybody else is doing it" is an excuse we learn as kids. There is no other way to explain how whole towns participated in the lynchings of blacks in the American South or how Germans and non-German citizens of occupied countries cooperated with Nazi policies that made people turn in their Jewish neighbors.

But the desire to "fit in" or "go along" is not the only motive for bad behavior. Generally speaking, we are motivated by 3 things: our needs, our fears and our desires.

Sometimes, needs can drive bad behavior. My wife says when she worked at the public defender's office a lot of their cases were about homeless people shoplifting sandwiches from a local supermarket. One of the inmates I visit regularly at the jail was transferred for 10 days to the high security/corrective unit for taking 2 hard-boiled eggs from the kitchen and hiding them in his sock. When you are hungry, when your needs aren't being met, you are willing to break the rules.

Some fears are legitimate: that of fire, falling from a height, of disease and of pain. Some fears are phobias which, if they really interfere with everyday life, need to be treated. The problem is that fear literally bypasses the areas of the brain that handle critical thinking. Which is why disproportionate reactions to fears can lead to bad behavior. Shooting a foreigner in a Halloween costume for merely ringing your doorbell, as happened in Louisiana 20 years ago, is a bad response to fear. Rounding up Asian Americans and putting them in camps during World War 2 because we were fighting, among other nationalities, the Japanese, is a bad response to fear. That was worse because it required a lot of time and thinking to execute and so cannot be attributed to a split-second panic reaction.

Desires, as James reminds us today, can lead to bad behavior as well. Some desires are good: to excel at a sport or an art, to learn, to have a family. Some desires are evil: to possess what belongs to another, to see someone suffer, to get out of an essential duty or obligation. But even good desires can lead to evil if they are frustrated by people or events or if they are pursued ruthlessly. It's not wrong to want to win a contest or competition but if you resort to cheating, sabotage or deceit, your otherwise good desire can lead to evil. We are slowly coming out of an era in which many sports records are going to be either erased or marked with an asterisk because of the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs.

Sometimes the desires of a group or a nation may be considered so important that they feel that they should be allowed some moral slack in realizing them. For the good of the many, the rights or health or lives of the few may be taken away. It happens in slavery, when one race or class has absolute control over another and uses them as a labor force. It happens when rich countries exploit poor ones, taking their materials or using their cheaper labor to make products that can be sold for high profits back home. It happens when nations go to war, figuring their national interests justify the violating those of another nation. And the bloodshed, of course. The ends always seem to justify the means.

James is thinking less of national conflicts than of personal ones in our passage but the same principles apply. He mentions bitter envy, selfish ambitions and cravings at war within us. Our desires drive us to bad behavior and ironically to unhappiness. Getting what you want doesn't always leave you feeling good, especially it puts you at odds with family, with friends or with yourself.

Another religious thinker felt that at the root of suffering lay our desires. For the Buddha the answer was to stop desiring, to free oneself of attachment to anything. For James, there is a different way.

The Book of James is the closest thing the New Testament has to wisdom literature. And sure enough, James' solution to the problem of being driven by desires, either bad ones, or good desires taken too far, is wisdom from above. This heavenly wisdom is first of all pure. It is not mixed with self-interest. If some way of thinking, speaking or behaving is bad for others, it is bad for us as well. Too often we excuse in ourselves things we condemn in others. We don't like it when others put themselves first but feel we are entitled to certain perks because of how hard we work. We don't like it when others get angry but we deserve to vent because of the stress we're under. James reminds us that godly wisdom is without a trace of partiality or hypocrisy.

God's wisdom is peaceable. That is, its goal is peace--peace with God and with others. If your primary objective is peace, as opposed to getting your own way, the odds of achieving it are higher. And God's wisdom leads us to use methods that encourage peace. In James' first chapter, he tells everyone to be "quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger." Keeping your ears open, you mouth shut and a lid on your temper is a good way to keep the peace.

God's wisdom is gentle. A lot of Christians forget this. They like to thunder on at people about their sins. Oddly enough, that rarely wins them over. When Jesus talks to the Samaritan woman at the well, he doesn't start with her checkered sexual history. He is more focused on getting her to desire the living water that will quench her spiritual thirst. That comes first. If she doesn't want what Jesus offers, she won't change her life.

The wisdom from above is willing to yield! The Greek word here could also mean "open to reason." Righteous folks are often caricatured as rigid, stubborn people who can't be reasoned with.  But refusing to hear the other person out means they are unlikely to hear our witness. Notice the word doesn't mean "open for anything." It doesn't mean we back down when God's wisdom is clear. But, as James said, we should be quick to listen. Since all truth is God's truth we need not be afraid of anyone's input. We may receive a new insight. We may, on the basis of what they tell us, find a way to persuade them. We in turn must be genuinely open to persuasion ourselves. If we aren't willing to consider what they say, why should they reciprocate?

God's wisdom is full of mercy. Part of getting people to open up is to be non-judgmental while we listen. If we keep interjecting "Well, that was stupid!" or "Wrong, wrong, wrong!" as they open their hearts the conversation will be over very soon. When listening to inmates, I sometimes have to suppress expressing horror or shock. I don't say "I wouldn't have done that if I were you." I'm not them. And I am there to offer God's forgiveness and grace. If the person seems to be punishing himself for what he's done, I don't need to help him beat himself up. I need to remind him that Jesus has already taken the punishment for all our sins and if the inmate accepts that, he can stop torturing himself and start following Jesus out of gratitude for all he's done and all he plans to do with that inmate's life. We are to be merciful as our Father in heaven is merciful.

God's wisdom produces good fruit. If the wisdom you are following isn't producing good things, you have to ask if it is really working. If being angry and judgmental and rigid and loud and rough isn't bringing more people to Jesus, then why not try God's wisdom instead?

A theme that underlies all of this is humility. We know we can't always get what we want. We know that's true of everyone. But we feel we should be the exception. And that's where James' advice meshes with that of his big brother Jesus. In reaction to his disciples squabbling about which of them was the greatest, Jesus said, "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all." The essence of what he is saying is put others first. I'm reminded of George Bailey of "It's a Wonderful Life" who puts his community and town ahead of all the plans he had to travel the world. And, of course, the ultimate example of this is Jesus himself, who, despite wanting the cup of suffering to pass him by, gave his life for the world.

If we really desire something, rather than fight others for it or cheat, we should simply ask God, says James. He is clearly recalling Jesus' promise that if we ask, we shall receive. And if we ask and don't receive, James observes, it's probably because we are asking wrongly, selfishly. No loving parent gives his kid everything he ask for, but uses his wisdom to decide if it is good for his child. Sometimes God says, "Yes," sometimes "No," sometimes "Not yet," and sometime his answer is "I have something else for you, something ultimately better."

In the end , the key is to submit to God, James writes. Accept his wisdom. Ask but be open to an answer you may not have expected. And if we receive our desires, we should be careful. You may rue the day your parents gave you a smartphone if you wreck your car while texting. In the same way, God's gifts are meant to be enjoyed but used properly and not abused. And a gift from him  is always to be seen as a way to bless others as well. 

As always our chief desire should be for God himself. He is the source of all goodness and love and wonder and joy and understanding and mercy and compassion and beauty and song and wisdom and hope. Only he can fill the bill of being our true heart's desire. How do we get him? "Draw near to God and he will draw near to you," our passage concludes. Cause you can't always get what you want. But if you try God, you get what you need.

The Question and the Choice

The gospel referred to is Mark 8:27-38.

Remember reading the story, "The Lady or the Tiger?" In 1882 Frank Stockton wrote of a semi-barbarian king who comes up with a unique version of trial by ordeal to solve questions of criminal guilt. The accused is put in an arena in which there are two doors. Behind one is a hungry and ferocious tiger; behind the other is one of the most beautiful women in the land. If the accused chooses the door with the lady, fate has declared him innocent and he must instantly marry the woman, despite his current marital status. If he chooses the door with the tiger, fate has obviously judged him guilty and being torn apart is his sentence.

A problem arises when the king finds out that his daughter has a lover who is a commoner. The man is put into the arena. The king's daughter has used her wealth and power to find out which door conceals which fate. Her dilemma is that she knows and hates the lady behind the door and doesn't want to lose her lover to her. Is she jealous enough to want him dead instead? She loses him either way. So when he looks at her from the arena, she quickly and subtly indicates the door on the right. He strides right up and opens it. And the story leaves us with the question of which fate did she consign her lover to: the lady or the tiger?

The question has become proverbial. There are times when we must make momentous decisions with incomplete information. And we know the consequences of our choices may be good or bad. Should I keep my crappy job or take a chance on one that may be better--or worse? Should we try to keep mother living at her home or move her into a nursing home? Should I accept my boyfriend's offer to move in with him though we haven't known each other very long? Occasionally, but not often, the choice is a matter of life and death, as it is in the short story. Unlike the story, such a decision is seldom that stark nor does it present only a single clue. In fact, rarely do we have as little information as the young lover in the story does.

Of course, the story would not be so memorable were the choice offered not so dramatic. The title would not be quoted today if the man was choosing between taking up a habit that would eventually kill him or a date with an average girl who may or may not make a half-way decent wife.

But it would be more realistic. Most of the big choices we make have consequences that play out over the years. Nobody would smoke if it killed you immediately. Nobody would have sex outside marriage if the result was you might have a kid the very next day. Any idiot would make the right choice in such a simplified world. The problem is most foolish or bad choices have an immediate reward, usually in the form of a good feeling, and adverse effects may not emerge until years later. Wisdom consists in seeing the value in certain actions and choices where it is not readily apparent and avoiding actions that will have unacceptable negative consequences down the road.

The Bible makes much of the desirability of wisdom. It usually leads to prosperity, good health and a long life. Fools usually will get their comeuppance and suffer a painful and shortened life. Notice that I say usually. We all know wise people who have been overtaken by circumstances beyond their control and who did not achieve or who lost wealth and health. The Book of Job is a big reminder that bad things can happen to good people. And we know of people who make bad and foolish choices and yet somehow continue to prosper for many years. I keep wondering when a certain real estate mogul will run out of people who are willing to be partners with him in ventures, from vodka to airlines to mortgages to casinos, that frequently underperform and repeatedly lead to bankruptcies and his either being bought out or losing control of properties that bear his name. Yet people think of him as a financial genius. Although, considering the quality of thinking displayed by Wall Street, this should not surprise us.

Still, in the majority of cases, living wisely has rewards and living foolishly will lead to bad outcomes. And the Bible points this out again and again. Small wonder the disciples are flummoxed by what Jesus says in today's gospel.

The Gospel of Mark begins by declaring Jesus the Son of God. It ends shortly after the centurion overseeing his crucifixion says the same thing. And the whole gospel builds to this passage, the exact middle of the book, in which Jesus asks "Who do you say I am?" To which Peter responds, "You are the Messiah." That word is loaded. On the surface, it simply means the anointed, which in Greek is Christos. But there were 3 vocations for which the Jews anointed people: prophet, priest or king. The Messiah could be anyone of the three (or all three) but in his day most people saw him as God's anointed king. And that's probably what Peter and the disciples thought.

As Mel Brooks famously pointed out, it's good to be the king. And a divinely appointed and anointed king should have no problem making short work of the oppressors of God's people. Jesus was a descendent of David, who was a holy warrior king. All Jesus needed to do was give the rallying cry and his fellow Jews would flock to him and follow him into battle against the godless pagans. That was the popular idea of what the Messiah would do: defeat the Romans and inaugurate a literal Kingdom of God on earth.

Which is why the disciples were totally unprepared for Jesus' next words. Right after Peter correctly identifies Jesus as God's anointed king, Jesus says that he would suffer, be rejected by their religious leaders and killed. He would rise again after 3 days, if that was any consolation.

This was definitely not what the twelve expected Jesus to say. This was crazy talk. The Messiah triumphs. He doesn't suffer and die. As for the resurrection, that's way off at the end of the present evil age. What Jesus is saying to them makes no sense. And Peter, never reluctant to speak up, tells Jesus so. Nor does he see any irony in telling the guy he just declared to be God's Anointed that he is flat out wrong.

Jesus' rebuke is pretty harsh, even taking into account that Satan in Hebrew means "adversary." Peter is going against what God intends to do, making him, if not The Adversary, an adversary. But Jesus needs to nip this kind of thinking in the bud. Even if they don't totally buy the idea that he has to suffer and die, he needs to emphasize it enough that come Easter, they will recall it and it will make sense looking back. If they continue to harbor ideas about a political uprising, they will misinterpret his cleansing of the Temple, overlook his response to the inquiry about paying taxes to Caesar, and just generally see everything in an adversarial, us-against-them, can't-wait-to-fight kind of way. As hard as it was to hear, Jesus needed to plant the idea of his death and resurrection in their minds so that they would at least recognize what happened at the right time.

But it was not just the idea that he would die that he had to get across; it was the idea that they might have to as well. His way of triumphing through not fighting back was to be adopted by his followers. He meant all that "turn the other cheek" talk. General Patton was not revolutionary in his idea that wars are not won by dying for your country but by having your enemy die for his country. He may have only been unique in stating it that nakedly. Ironically, Old Blood and Guts has paved the way for modern warfare in which one side sits at a video screen in safety and sends a drone to take out the enemy by remote control. Some military leaders are afraid this ability to make others die with little risk to one's own side is going to make wars more likely rather than less. Because there will be less casualties for those who use drones and robots. Until, of course, the other side catches up and it escalates into a world where nobody under the sky is safe anywhere.

Jesus is the true revolutionary. He says that in following him you should write off keeping your life first. That's a better understanding of what Jesus was saying than the traditional translation of "deny oneself." It's not like giving up chocolate for Lent. It's more like "disown yourself," "give up all rights to yourself," "relinquish your life and self." As usual Eugene Petersen's loose but astute translation, The Message, really captures the essence of what Jesus said. "Anyone who intends to come with me has to let me lead. You're not in the driver's seat; I am. Don't run from suffering; embrace it. Follow me and I'll show you how."    
 
The only thing Petersen misses is the element of not just suffering but death. Jesus said, "take up your cross." That's like saying "get prepared to walk the last mile to the electric chair." Or "bring along the poisons for your own lethal injection." Or "carry the bucket of water with which you will be water-boarded to death." It was that harsh. Harsher, really, because everyone then had seen real crucifixions, slaves and traitors hanging naked by their nailed wrists and ankles on stripped trees along the road side. The Romans did it that way to say, "This is what happens if you defy the Emperor." The Roman Emperor was called King of kings and Lord of lords; he was worshiped as a god. Jesus was saying, "If you follow me, you're going to run afoul of that; be prepared for the worst."

Not much of a recruiting speech, is it? "Follow me to a likely death." And what's more it goes against the usual outcome of being wise. Follow wisdom and you are probably going to have a long life with appropriate earthly rewards. Jesus is saying, "You can forget about that." But does that mean that following Jesus is the opposite of wise? Does it mean being a Christian is foolish?

Certainly there were those who thought that way. Paul said that "we preach Christ crucified: a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles." Jesus on the cross was so far from the triumphant Messiah expected by Jews that many just couldn't get past that. And Gentiles, for whom humility was not a virtue, thought any person so foolish as to be executed in such a humiliating way by the Emperor was no example to emulate. So, yes, following Jesus was not considered something a wise person would do.

So on what possible grounds could following Christ be considered reasonable? Jesus says, "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and the sake of the gospel, will save it." For this to sound like a smart thing even to consider, you have to accept that Jesus was who Peter said he was: God's Anointed Prophet, Priest and King. If he is the person our creator has designated as the ruler of creation, then it makes sense to do what he says, no matter the cost. Then it makes sense to spend your life serving him and not yourself. Then it makes sense to choose Jesus over every other earthly allegiance.

And if Jesus is the one to restore all things corrupted and distorted and deformed and infected by our sins, our self-inflicted wounds, then what Jesus says next makes sense, too. "For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give to in return for their life." The Greek word translated "life" here in the NRSV can also be translated "soul" and I think that better states what is at stake. Listen to how Petersen translates these 3 verses: "Self-help is no help at all. Self-sacrifice is the way, my way, to saving yourself, your true self. What good would it do to get everything you want and lose you, the real you? What could you ever trade your soul for?"

One big reason to follow Jesus is that he is the image of God unmarred, not ruined by sin and self-will. God made us all in that image but we now resemble God the way a fun house mirror reflects us or the way a vicious political cartoon resembles a political leader. And we realize that, deep down, we are not the person we could be, that we should be. We feel the loss of the person we used to be, before fears and desires and ambitions and lusts and disappointments and cynicism changed us. By connecting our lives to Jesus, the very embodiment of the Spirit and image of God, we can get that back. We can begin growing again, in the right direction, becoming more and more Christlike and, paradoxically, more and more ourselves, the selves God intended us to be.

Let's make it clear. If you don't buy into Jesus being God's son and the one God anointed as our king, then this is all nonsense. Following Jesus would be a very foolish thing. Giving up all rights to yourself would be stupid. You might as well look out for yourself. Oh, yeah, you can be reasonably good, good when it serves your purpose, good to a certain extent and only until it costs you more than you're willing to pay. But if trouble comes, if people stand in the way of your dreams and desires, if all the other individuals looking out for themselves thwart you,  then to hell with them. And to hell with you. Because that's how you will feel eventually, when you've chipped away enough of that image that it doesn't even look like God anymore, when you no longer can feel his Spirit, when you are just a lump of flesh, a mass of wants and demands and grievances and regrets, hardly human and definitely not divine. That's damnation: the decay of the soul, the deterioration of the self, into something less. 

But if you want to be more than just a brief occupier of space and time, if you want to be the real you, freed from the depredations of sin on the self, if you want to be connected to the true life that nourishes the soul, that renews the mind, that refreshes the heart, that grows the person, then you need to dispossess yourself, take up the rough unyielding cross on which the old you will die and follow Jesus. Unlike "The Lady or the Tiger?" you are fully informed of the choices before you. Both sooner or later lead to death. But one leads beyond that, to a new you with a new life in a new world, where crying and sorrow and pain and death are no more. Because Jesus the Anointed, God's son, has taken those upon himself and given us in their place his joy.

Full Armor

When you're a preacher, you never know what in your environment will spark your next idea. With me it is often pop culture, like TV and movies, but sometimes it comes from my various careers, and rarely from my family. For which my family is grateful. Nobody likes embarrassing moments from their childhood used as fodder for a sermon. A few weeks ago, prompted by a slip from our sermon suggestion box, the homily revolved around my work as chaplain at the local jail. It's become the second most popular post on my blog. But today we get a sermon from a prisoner. Paul was writing his letter to the Ephesian church while a prisoner of the Emperor. And for our current passage he probably got his inspiration from something he saw everyday: the armor of the Roman soldier to whom he was chained.

The most anxious time for an inmate, I've found, is the period leading up to one's trial. The next most anxious time is that leading up to one's sentencing. The reason for this is obvious: you don't know how things are going to turn out come those dates. In the first case, you may be acquitted or you may be convicted. In the second, you have been convicted but you don't know the sentence. It could be probation, it could be months in jail or years in prison. One inmate I visit is facing either life in prison or the death penalty.

That was Paul's predicament. Would the Emperor dismiss the charges Paul's enemies made against him? Would he have Paul imprisoned further? Or would he have him executed? We know from Philippians that Paul was prepared to die for the gospel. As he put it, "For to me, to live is Christ and to die is gain." But he also realized he would be leaving behind these churches he had planted. He wanted to leave them some last advice and encouragement. And as he dictated the last part of his letter to the church at Ephesus, his eyes lighted on his Roman guard. The man was in state-of-the-art body armor for that time. Paul thought, "I don't want to leave these Christians feeling defenseless." And taking some imagery from Isaiah chapters 11, 52 and 59, plus his guard, he wrote of how God equips his followers to face what threatens their spiritual lives.

"Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power." Unlike the world, we are not stuck with whatever personal physical power we happen to have. Our strength comes from our union with God. We derive our power from his boundless might. Whenever we are defeated by the troubles of this world, it is probably because we were trusting in our own strength instead of his. We are not superheroes. But that doesn't mean we are undefended. 
  
"Put on the full armor of God so that your may be able to stand up against the stratagems of the devil." As a geek, I can't think of armor these days without thinking of Batman. The recent movies have transformed his fanciful costume into very cunning body armor, including his cape which allows him to hang-glide. But Batman doesn't rely on any one piece of his arsenal exclusively. Different  situations call for different defenses and each of his "wonderful toys," as the Joker calls them, comes into play as needed. Paul, looking at his guard, realized that each piece of his equipment had its function. As Christians, we can't afford to be one-trick ponies. So Paul urges us to arm ourselves with the whole panoply. (That English word comes from the Greek one used here.) Because our adversary will use a range of methods (which derives from the Greek word usually translated "wiles" here) we need to be prepared for all of them.

"For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places." We cannot emphasize enough that Christians do not physically fight other people. When an ordinary warrior is finished, he hopes to be surrounded by the enemy's dead. At the end of our wrestling with darkness, we hope to be surrounded by former enemies made alive in Christ. As the U.S. has discovered in our two most recent wars, you need to win the hearts and minds of others if you really want to end a conflict. Jesus knew that. That's why he rebuked Peter when he drew his sword to fend off those arresting Jesus. That's why he reattached the severed ear of the man Peter struck. Jesus didn't harm people; he healed them. He knew the battle was spiritual, as Paul tells us here.

How do we protect ourselves against the hateful ideas and the twisted thinking that prevails in this darkened age, against the worship of power and the philosophies that hold sway in this world? Paul once again emphasizes taking up the whole armor of God "so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm." Notice that Paul is not emphasizing advancing into enemy territory or any aggressive action. He is concerned that the church not lose ground. We are to resist and withstand the assault of evil. We are to make sure that we are still standing after evil has done its worst. We are to hold our ground, the solid rock of Jesus' words on which wise men build.

"Stand, therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist." We use belts to hold up pants but people didn't wear pants then; they wore tunics. The reason for a belt was to make sure such a loose garment didn't get in the way or get snagged. You don't want to give the enemy anything to grab. It made you more mobile, which, for a soldier, is important. And being girded with truth makes a Christian more nimble. Lies trip people up. They give your enemy something to latch onto. Don't give up the advantage of basing your defense of the faith on truth. Don't use pseudo-science or dubious history or sophistry to defend Jesus. Belts also give you something to hang other things onto, like your sword. Everything should hang on the truth of who Jesus is and what he has done for us.

"…and put on the breastplate of righteousness." Righteousness has gotten a bad name because people confuse it with self-righteousness, an attitude based on justifying yourself. But Christians are justified by God's grace through faith in Jesus, who expects us to be righteous, unimpeachable in our behavior. A lot of high profile Christians have been taken down when it turned out their behavior was anything but righteous. The soldier's breastplate kept his torso and vital organs safe. You could survive superficial wounds, but not a stab to the heart or a gut wound. Righteousness protects your core. So don't give the enemy any ammunition. Don't be a hypocrite. Keep your life clean. Be honest, faithful, trustworthy. Confess your sins to God and ask for his aid in overcoming them, even if it means getting professional help or joining a support group. Protect the vitality of your ministry with righteousness.   

"As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace." Once I tried to take my morning walk while still wearing the slip-on sandals I wear at home. They were not designed for a 2-mile hike and my feet made their displeasure known even after I put on my shoes. Bad footwear will hobble you, with blisters or insufficient support. Smart soldiers make sure they have firm yet comfortable boots on, which will not hinder them in doing their duty. Paul probably saw his jailor checking out and repairing his sandals scrupulously. So he translated this into the preparation and readiness a Christians needs if he or she is going to proclaim the gospel. Can she define what she means when she says Jesus is the Christ, God's Messiah? Can he answer the most common objections critics use to discredit Christianity or made it look ridiculous? Can she relate the good news of Jesus to a friend or acquaintance who comes to her seeking a spiritual solution to a personal problem? We need to be ready to present the gospel to those who need the peace it gives. And notice that it is the "gospel of peace." It is about peace with God and peace with other people, not strife.

"With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one." The Greek word Paul uses for shield is not that of a small round shield, but the 4-foot long rectangular leather-covered wooden shield that Roman soldiers carried. They soaked the leather in water to quench the burning arrows of the enemy. And it worked especially well when in formation. The front-line soldiers would overlap their shields to present the enemy with a solid wall, while the soldiers behind would hold theirs over the head. This turtle-shell of shields made it hard to get Roman soldiers to flee under a barrage of arrows. Just so, a strong faith will protect the Christian from inflammatory attacks by the enemy. It's better to face such fiery rhetoric with a cool calm that comes from a substantial trust in God's love and goodness. And a united front of faith works best.

"Take the helmet of salvation…" Along with your torso, your head is a crucial area to protect. I have probably told you how my father, as part of the Marines' 3rd Division, helped take the island of Bougainville from the Japanese in the 2nd World War. A sniper in a tree fired 2 shots at him. One was stopped by a can of beans in his pack. The other was stopped by his helmet. The other Marines were amazed and told him he should see the impact. My dad, however, wouldn't take his helmet off till nightfall and only when he felt safe did he remove his headgear and pull out the bullet. He kept his head because he kept his head and kept his helmet on it.

A headshot is bad news outside physical warfare as well. So are psy-ops, psychological warfare meant to mess with the minds of enemy soldiers. And it looks like some diabolic mind games have been used to disorient and distract Christians from their primary mission. As medicine is about restoring people to physical health, Christianity is about our salvation by Jesus Christ. If you want to neutralize the church, taking its mind off this, its top priority, is the best way to do it. Like getting Christians to go on crusades over things that are not part of the gospel. The actual Crusades were about taking control of the land where Jesus was born from the Muslims. Not a lot of evangelization took place at that time, except at the point of a sword. Hardly the gospel of peace and not what Jesus meant when he gave us the Great Commission. Jesus wanted us to go out into the world and bring people into the Kingdom of God, not conquer bits of real estate.

In the Renaissance through the Enlightenment, witch trials were the obsession of the church. Today it's evolution, abortion and homosexuality. None of these are things Jesus talked about, nor are they at the center of the gospel. When they dominate our thinking, they crowd out what's essential and distort the way we express the gospel. The message of Christ is about salvation by grace through faith; when we keep that in mind, we approach people differently. They are not seen as enemies of ourselves or of God but as people like us, in need of Christ's love. That helps us stand firm, at our post, rather than deserting on quixotic quests.

Paul next tells us to take up "the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God." Notice that this is the only offensive weapon Paul mentions. The word he uses is that of the short, 2-foot sword that Roman soldiers carried on their belt. Why does Paul, in this grand metaphor, make Scripture a sword? Not because it is for wounding but, as it says in Hebrews, "the word of God is living and active and sharper than any double-edged sword, piercing even to the point of dividing soul from spirit, and joints from marrow." This makes it sound more like a surgeon's scalpel. If our enemies are not flesh and blood but spiritual, then the sword is not to bisect people but to dissect ideas that twist and distort the truth, splitting what is true from the half-truths, errors and outright falsehoods. I recently watched a sensationalistic documentary that, by picking and choosing various verses and presenting them out of context, made Jesus and John the Baptist say things contrary to what they meant. It made them out to be political revolutionaries. On the other hand, a letter to NPR was read on air by hosts of Planet Money correcting their common misquote that "money is the root of all evil." I was glad to hear the correct translation that "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils." The sharp distinctions of Scripture's truth were restored.

A study done a few years ago, revealed that most Christians don't know their Bible very well. Much was made about the fact that atheists did better at the quiz. But it turned out that Christians who regularly attended church and read the Bible regularly knew more than either atheists or the average self-identified Christians. Duh! Sadly, most people who call themselves Christians don't make knowing the very book from which they derive their faith a high priority. It's not like this is the Middle Ages, where the general populace can't read, and the only local copy of the Bible is chained to the pulpit of the church! Most churches will give you a free Bible; there are dozens online and there are at least 25 free Bible apps available for smartphones. There are hundreds of translations in English alone. Therefore we must conclude that the only reason more people haven't read the Bible is that they don't want to. Whereas I know several inmates who have read it cover to cover. They realize how vital it is. They are living on the front lines of the battle between good and evil.

So once we are equipped like this, what are our rules of engagement, as one commentator puts it? "Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication." Keep your lines of communications open. Keep connected with command, which in this case is God. And we are to pray in the Spirit. Paul says in Romans 8 that "the Spirit helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how we should pray, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with inexpressible groanings." People often tell me, "I want to pray but I don't know how." I give them a simple structure but remind them that they needn't worry about how they say it. God knows what is on their hearts. He is so close to us that he can, like a close friend, complete our sentences for us. The Spirit, who dwells in all who accept Christ, can communicate with our Heavenly Father when words fail us. He knows what we need and will supply us. To that end Paul reminds us to remember the needs and supplications of others when we pray. If you notice that a fellow Christian is missing a piece of his armor, ask God to supply it.

Finally, Paul reminds us to be alert. The word is the same that Jesus used when he told his disciples to keep watch. We need to be awake and aware so that subtle attacks don't get past us or harm a fellow Christian. And we need to be alert for the opportunity to use that readiness to proclaim the gospel of peace. Jesus interrupted a synagogue service to heal a man. He was ever alert for the opportunity to heal, forgive and help anyone who needed it and thus glorify God. Remember our struggle is not against flesh and blood. We are called to eliminate our enemies by loving them and turning them into allies of the Prince of Peace, who shed his blood so we need not shed each other's.

Deep Wisdom

The lectionary texts include Proverbs 9:1-6: Psalm 111; Ephesians 5:15-20 and John 6:51-58.

Ever so often the people who compiled the Revised Common Lectionary, apparently accidentally, put together 4 readings that are about the same thing. Today is just such a rare moment and it makes my task a whole lot easier. The subject is wisdom, something rare, both in the past as well as in the present.

The Oxford Dictionary of English defines wisdom as "the quality of having experience, knowledge, and good judgment." That's a very good summary. Wisdom is not merely knowledge. You can have a lot of knowledge and not know what to do with it. We've seen it when companies hire MBAs right out of college to manage people who have worked for decades in the industry and have practical experience that theory can't teach you. A few years ago, when an oil company was doing a review after a refinery fire, they discovered that nobody at the refinery in question had worked there any longer than 5 years and that included the management!

Wisdom is not merely experience, either. You can have experience and not draw the right lessons from it. After the Great Depression of the early 20th century, Congress examined the causes and passed the Banking Act of 1933, popularly called the Glass-Steagall Act, that, among other things, separated commercial banks and securities firms. Then, in 1999, those provisions were repealed by Congress. And in less than 10 years we had a Great Recession, due in large part to banks creating and selling securities so risky that several clever firms bet on them failing. As George Santayana said, "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."  

The key component to wisdom is using good judgment to critically evaluate and then act on what knowledge and experience yield. Knowledge and experience will tell you what has been done and what can be done; wisdom tells you whether it should be done at all, and if so, how to do it so as to produce the maximum good with the minimum amount of bad side effects. Knowledge and experience will tell you what the price of something should be; wisdom tells you whether it is worth the cost to you and others. Knowledge and experience will tell you what most people value; wisdom tells you what should be valued.

In Psalm 111, we are told that fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. A lot of people today do not like that idea. Why should we fear God at all? First of all, the word used in Hebrew has the idea of reverence in it. It is not "fear" in the sense of "dread" or "irrational phobia." It means something more like a healthy respect. In this sense you could say a fear or a healthy respect for the sea is the beginning of good seamanship. Those who go out on the water with too casual or neglectful an attitude towards the sea will usually come to a bad end. A healthy respect for God and his principles will similarly benefit a person, as opposed to someone who is so arrogant as to assume he always knows best and who has no respect for the rules. My wife and I have noticed that the most arrogant chefs on the cooking competition show "Chopped" are inevitably the ones who lose. They are the ones who defend their poor decisions or bad-tasting dishes before the judges. God also condemns arrogance. In Proverbs 8:13 we see it as the opposite of the fear of the Lord.

Humility towards God and deference to his principles is the start of being wise. Why? Well, for one thing, he created us and the universe. He knows how it works and how we work and what's best for us. If you read the biographies of great men who came to tragic ends you realize that they could not be better parables for the fruits of the sins the Bible deplores: arrogance, lust, greed, rage, overindulgence, deceit, betrayal, and folly. Even if these things account for their rise in the world, they also carry the seeds of their downfall. Hitler's arrogance may have fueled his rise from head of one of many fringe political groups in post-World-War-1 Germany but it also led to his military blunders which lost him a war which many historians say his generals could have won. The inability to control one's appetites, desires, emotions or mouth has spelled the fall of people both great and small. Wisdom teaches us the importance of following God's laws, his principles for living in this world of cause and effect, of short-term actions with long-term consequences. People who ignore the law of God seldom fare better than those who ignore the law of gravity.

This doesn't mean that in every instance following God's ways will bring you wealth, comfort and acclaim. When you are moving against a general rush to be the first to jump off a cliff, you will be bruised and battered. Jeremiah was. So was Elijah. To which we can add John the Baptist, Stephen, Paul and, of course, Jesus himself. The wise person follows God even when there are few social and material rewards for doing so. Because he knows that, whatever the temporal penalties, the eternal, spiritual and moral benefits are greater.   

There are worldly parallels. Nouriel Roubini was one of just a handful of financial analysts who said the housing bubble of the early 2000s was going to come crashing down and take the economy with it. Roubini was usually brought on financial talk shows to provide them with some novelty and as an object of ridicule. They called him Dr. Doom. That had to be hard on the Yale economist. And then everything he predicted happened. But while vindicated, I'll bet he wishes that the people who could have made the right changes had listened to him before everything came tumbling down.

Giving warning to those who are heading for disaster is actually a Biblical duty. In Ezekiel 33, God uses the metaphor of the watchman, whose duty it is to blow a trumpet to warn the people against an approaching army. If he fails to warn them, though the people are killed by the army, God says he will hold the watchman responsible for their deaths. Then God tells Ezekiel "I have made you a watchman…When I say to the wicked, 'O wicked man, you must certainly die,' and you do not warn the wicked about his behavior, the wicked man will die for his iniquity but I will hold you accountable for his death. But if you warn the wicked man to change his behavior, and he refuses to change, he will die for his iniquity but you will have saved your own life." That puts Ezekiel on the spot. And us as well.

Before I let inmates speak to me I warn them that I am legally bound to report any confessions of a crime, whether past or planned for the future. I am also bound, as a nurse, as clergy, and as a decent human being, to report any suicidal talk. Contrary to popular thought, people usually talk about harming themselves before they do it and so all such talk has to be taken seriously. It turns out they often talk about harming others before they do that as well. So if a disgruntled coworker or classmate talks about shooting up your workplace or school, don't dismiss it, especially if he is also very knowledgeable about weapons.

But the mandate in Ezekiel makes us uncomfortable. We all know people who are engaging in risky behaviors health-wise, like drinking too much or eating too much or smoking. And we are often quiet about those because we are afraid of their reaction if we nag them about such behaviors. Does this mean we also have to bring up the things they do that negatively affect their spiritual health, like their sexual promiscuity, their unforgiving attitude towards their relatives, or their habit of talking about everyone behind their back?

I don't recommend standing outside their house with multi-colored Westboro Baptist-like signs denouncing them. But if you know the person well-enough to talk to them about personal things, and if you are alone with them and if it seems appropriate, like they have just had a major problem with their behavior, and are looking remorseful or reflective, you could ask if they want to talk about anything. And if you were willing to listen to them and really hear them out, and share a little about you facing a similar problem, they might be open to some friendly advice. But only if it's truly done in the spirit of friendship and not from a holier-than-thou position. And if they respond positively, you have saved your friend as surely as if you had convinced them not to drive drunk.

But you won't get far if you are being hypocritical. Jesus paints the satirical image of a person trying to get a splinter out of his neighbor's eye while walking around with a log in his own. His point: fix yourself before you presume to fix others. And a lot of Biblical wisdom is about that--about how the individual should conduct himself morally. It's about controlling your tongue and your behavior. It's about being honest and faithful and generous and hard-working and chaste. It's about not starting arguments or being violent or lying or getting drunk or being lazy or hanging around with bad people. Much of it is basic. But then so is much of sin and folly. Outside of movies, evil masterminds are rare. The insidiousness of evil is that it is often banal.

There are more subtle insights in the Bible's wisdom literature. The Book of Proverbs offers some tidbits. Like the fact that the righteous care about the welfare of their animals. That the naïve believe everything while the wise consider each step they take. That hard work brings a profit but not mere talk. That fools are often both arrogant and careless. That wise words heal. That it is better to have only a little but have a healthy respect for the Lord rather than have a lot of wealth with needless turmoil thrown in.

The closest the New Testament has to wisdom literature is the Book of James. It is full of pithy sayings and common sense. Such as we must be doers of the word of God and not just hearers who deceive themselves that they are doing God's will. Such as the fact that faith that does not result in good works is dead. Such as the fact that the church should not treat the rich differently than they do the poor. Such as comparing the tongue to a flame that can get out of control and burn down a forest.

There is another kind of wisdom in the Bible and that is the profound kind we see in our passage from John. This is not the "a prudent person behaves this way" sort of wisdom. This is about pulling back the veil and getting a glimpse of how God saves us.

The last few Sundays we've been reading about the aftermath of the feeding of the 5000. The people are ready to make Jesus their king, the conventional understanding of the Messiah. Jesus doesn't want people following him for mundane reasons like he makes a great fish sandwich. He wants them to realize that what they really need him for is their spiritual life. And so he tells them that in the most graphic manner possible.

John's gospel is known for not showing certain key events in Jesus' life. As the last to write a canonical gospel, perhaps he figured he didn't need to rehash what the others covered. And while he tells us of events immediately before and after the Last Supper, he doesn't have the words of institution. But that doesn't mean the sacrament of the Lord's Supper is missing. Here we get a fuller explanation of what Jesus meant when he said "This is my body" and "This is my blood."

How does the death of the Jesus give us eternal life? We are speaking of God and things that are really beyond our ability to totally comprehend. And so, just as we do when explaining relativity or quantum physics, we use metaphors. Usually we use legal metaphors to explain how Jesus took the death penalty for us. But, taken too far, the metaphor breaks down and it sounds like God is trying to save us by pulling a sneaky legal trick that requires the death of his son.

But the connection between Jesus' torn body and shed blood and our life in him is more essential than that. Life requires food and drink. That's the metaphor Jesus uses here. "If you're going to live my life, eternal life, you need me. You need me like you need food and drink." And Jesus doesn't pretty it up. He's going to die in a particularly gory way. It's a necessary part of the process, the way a heart donor must die and be cut open and have his heart removed for someone else to live. And Jesus must get into us, as a transplanted heart must get into the recipient. But for that time and place, the idea of eating a sacrifice, the Passover lamb, whose blood must be shed to save others from death, whose body nourishes those freed by God, was more accessible to his audience. And they still didn't get it.

Throughout the Bible, we get metaphors for what God is to us--Father, Shepherd, Husband, etc. All of them capture some part of the essence of that relationship. This picture of Jesus' flesh as our food and his blood as our drink is the most disturbing one but it is absolutely vital. Food is not optional. The fact that all food was once living, either plant or animal, is inescapable. But that is how vital God to us. If we do not feed on him, regularly, our spirits will weaken, sicken and eventually die. The world is hungering for what God offers in Jesus Christ. And yet, most people would rather do without. We like our spiritual junk food that fills us and yet leaves us empty of true nutrition. Or we are like anorexics, starving for the Bread of Life, but loathe to allow more than a few crumbs of God into us.

Worldly wisdom says, "What you see is what you get." A piece of bread is just ground, baked grain. Wine is just fermented juice of the grape. It's just matter and it doesn't really matter in the long run. True wisdom doesn't stop at appearances. It knows the difference between the form of something and how it functions in our intellectual, emotional, social and spiritual lives. God's wisdom knows that reality has layers and meanings that don't show up on an electron microscope or in a chemical analysis. If we have a healthy respect for God, for his living Word and his Wisdom Incarnate, if we open up and take him into our life, if we draw our spiritual sustenance from his life, we will be able to see that which is not apparent to the eye but which is now written in our hearts and we will live our lives according to his deep wisdom.

All The Rage

The Scripture being examined is Ephesians 4:25-5:2, with a reference to John 6:35, 41-51.

When I do my marriage preparation classes with couples, the first part consists of what we can learn from the Bible and the second part is what we can learn from all the scientific research on marriage. And what's remarkable is how much of the latter is consistent with the former. There's a reason why people still find the wisdom contained in a 2000 year old compilation of Ancient Near Eastern books compelling and relevant. And while I cover the 4 main issues that couples tend to get into major fights about, namely sex, money, children and in-laws, I really stress communication skills. To deal with any major issue in a relationship you need to be able to discuss it in as reasonable and sensitive a fashion as possible. You have to listen and you can't clam up. You have to learn to fight fair.

A lot of the principles, both psychological and theological, that apply to marriage apply to any community. And in our passage from Ephesians, Paul masterfully lays out just what we need to do and not do if the church is to function as Christ's body in the world.                  

He starts by emphasizing the need to be honest. We need to put away any lies. The last role I played for the Marathon Community Theatre was George in Edward Albee's excoriating play, "Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?" As the play unfolds you realize that the 2 couples' marriages are based on lies. In the case of George and Martha, it is an imaginary son onto whom each originally projected their dreams but which they now use as a weapon against each other. When Martha goes too far, George decides to kill off the illusion. At the end of the play the characters face the possibility of building a marriage based on truth and the audience is left to wonder if they can make it.

Dishonesty poisons relationships. Mutually agreed upon fictions can work in the short term but if not dealt with, they can eat away at the trust that must underlie any enduring relationship. So Paul, quoting Zechariah 8:16, says "each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor." What's interesting is that in verse 17, Zechariah says, "let none of you imagine evil in his heart against his neighbor." Often when someone does something we disagree with, we imagine all kinds of evil motives for what their actions.

We see this in the current election cycle. Both sides are imputing the most evil motives they can imagine onto the other candidate or party. They make their rivals out to be Bond villains, plotting to plunge this country or the world into chaos and destruction. I think it's more accurate to say that each candidate wants what is best for this country. Where they disagree is on how to accomplish that and what the best for this country might look like. Those are points for legitimate disagreement and debate. But if you start thinking that your fellow American is evil incarnate, you are a short step from the neo-Nazi who shot up the Sikh temple in Wisconsin. He ceased to see the Sikhs as human beings trying to do what they thought was right. He saw them as evil beings to be eradicated. Some of the rhetoric being spewed onto the airwaves and the internet on political and even religious issues has bordered on a similar demonization of the other side. No good can come of that.

We are to be truthful because, Paul says, we are members of one another. We are all part of something bigger; in this case, the body of Christ. We are called to be part of the ongoing embodiment of God's Spirit in this world. And if one member of the body is in pain, the other parts need to take note and get to the bottom of it. If not, the cause of the pain will fester and the problem will become bigger. In practical terms, the member of the body of Christ who is hurting will get angrier and will either cause a big blow up or leave. That's why Paul, quoting Psalm 4, says, "Be angry but do not sin."

Isn't anger a sin in itself? Not always. Jesus got angry at the hardness of heart he found in the Pharisees who would rather let a man with a withered hand suffer than let Jesus heal him on the Sabbath. He famously got angry at the money changers in the temple. Anger at the conditions in which some people live often leads to reform. But, if allowed to get out of hand, it can lead to war. Rage, uncontrollable anger, is one of the seven deadly sins. Paul does not use the Greek word for rage at this point. So it is possible to get angry without crossing the line into sinning.

In fact, Aristotle said something very wise about this subject: "Anyone can become angry. That is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose in the right way--that is not easy." Anger is powerful. It can make you ready to handle a situation that frustrates you or is harmful to you or those you care for. It can help motivate you to rectify something that is wrong. It can also make things worse, especially if you brood on the perceived injustice until it builds to rage.

How can we avoid letting our anger grow into sinful rage? Paul says, "do not let the sun go down on the cause of your anger." That's the NET Bible's translation and I think it fits the original Greek better. Here Paul does use the word for rage but in the literature of the time, it referred to the "provocation" or external cause of the rage. What Paul is saying is deal with the issue when it first arises. Get at the cause and work on fixing it before another day passes or it will grow into rage.

Now that doesn't mean that you should broach the subject when you're both angry. You may have to wait a few minutes or hours until you can deal with the issue calmly and civilly. But don't let the matter slide. Or, as Paul points out, you will make room for the devil. You will miss the opportunity to accomplish something constructive and give your anger the opportunity to become destructive.

So after cooling down and being able to discuss things rationally, the thing to do is to deal with the cause of the anger, as Paul says. Now there may be an actual sin at the root of the conflict. Paul talks about thieves giving up stealing. Was that a problem in the church at Ephesus? It's possible that some members were misapprehending Paul's teachings on grace. They may have thought that since we are saved by grace through faith and not through works that they needn't clean up their act. Some parts of Romans imply that people in the church thought they could go on sinning that grace may abound. And if some members of the church were stealing you can see that such behavior would trigger real and justifiable anger on the part of others. So Paul echoes the first word in the good news Jesus proclaimed: Repent. Following Jesus means turning you life around, leaving behind your sins and changing the way you think and act. In the case of thieves Paul says they need to work to give to those who are in need. They must change from a lifestyle centered on fulfilling their own desires and live one centered on filling others' needs. 

But what if the cause of the dispute isn't a sin on someone part? What if it is a misunderstanding? If you listen to the other person tell their side, you may find that you can see their point.  And if you repeat it back to them to make sure you're understanding them correctly, you may find that one or both of you were not making yourselves clear. It may be that you are substantially in agreement with them. You might even be saying the same thing in different ways. The difference may be in your methods of doing things or in your emphasis on what's important.

When we get angry we tend to exaggerate or making sweeping statements that overstate the nature of the problem. And when we are angry we are often more interested in fixing the blame than fixing the problem. So Paul says, "Let no rotten word come out of your mouth but only what is good for building up what is needed, so it gives grace to those who hear it." Don't say that nasty thing that you've been saving up so long it's gone bad; use constructive words that will fill the need of the occasion, words that bestow grace on everyone within earshot. Good communication means not saying things that will inflame the listener but only what will enlighten the situation. In my marriage classes we speak of the Four Horsemen of Martial Apocalypse: criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling. Avoid criticizing or accusing the person, especially by saying "You always…" or "You never…" That's rarely true. Don't get defensive; don't get focused on circling the wagons when you are supposed to be listening to the other person. Don't express contempt for the other person; it's the clearest predictor of divorce and, I would imagine, of a person leaving the church. And don't stonewall; don't clam up or else refuse to actually engage in the dialogue, like saying anything just to end the whole discussion. That doesn't help matters. Those are the most rotten things you can say or do in an argument. Others include blaming, bossing, name calling and threatening.

When you say and do such things you grieve God's Holy Spirit. You wouldn't call someone a dirty name in church; don't do it anywhere, especially to a fellow Christian. The Spirit dwells in both of you. His presence, says Paul, is like the wax seal a merchant would put on a jar of oil or wine, to say that it was his and the contents were pure. We should not do anything to break that seal. It marks us as God's own when the day of our complete redemption comes. 

So Paul tells us to put away all such grievous acts and attitudes: bitterness-- brooding over past injustices until you have poisoned your present--and being quick-tempered and being hot-headed and yelling and slander along with malice--the desire to harm others. We are instead to be kind to one another. We are to be tenderhearted, compassionate. We are to be forgiving of one another, as God in Christ has forgiven us. As we are reminded in the Lord's Prayer, being forgiving of others and being forgiven by God are linked. If we refuse to forgive others, we can't expect God to forgive us as we continue to sin in maintaining our unapologetic resentment towards our fellow human beings.

Then Paul raises the bar. We are to be imitators of God. Obviously we can't create universes (except fictional ones) but we can imitate his character. We are to do it as beloved children do. Kids will imitate their parents. Or caretaker. My little patient will grab a Kleenex, hold it to his nose and blow a raspberry in imitation of my loud nose blowing. He also says "Thank you" a lot, a habit of mine I'm glad he picked up. We, in turn, are to imitate God's love and forgiveness.

Furthermore we are to imitate Christ who loved us and gave himself up for us, an offering and sacrifice to God. While pagan moralists sometimes told people to imitate the gods, their gods showed no humility and never gave up their lives to save others. The true God, the God of love, whose purest expression we see in Jesus, does. And as his followers we too are to love others unselfishly. Which precludes giving free range to our anger.

Human anger, James reminds us, does not lead to God's righteousness. Jesus said if you are angry with a brother you are liable to judgment, if you insult him you are liable to the council and if you call him a fool you are liable to hell. Sadly, there are some Christians who didn't get the memo. They seem to always be angry and/or to provoke anger in others--deliberately. God's Word inevitably angers some people but I don't think we should go out of our way to rile people up. When Jesus clashed with his critics it was over essential things, like putting the healing and wellbeing of people ahead of nitpicking rules, or the nature of his mission as Messiah, or his authority to forgive sins. He didn't get into unnecessary arguments about taxes and politics, though others tried to draw him into such hot button issues. What made Jesus angry was callousness towards the sick and poor and powerless. But when the authorities came for him, he didn't resist. He rebuked the disciple who fought back and healed the person his disciple harmed.

Why do we usually want to imitate the anger of Jesus and seldom his restraint and gentleness? Because, as Aristotle says, it's easy to be angry. And it's easy to convince ourselves that our anger is moral, that it's not just human irritation but righteous indignation. But that's merely self-justification. People get angry all the time. And everyday we see what happens when people get angry. They fight and kill one another. Even if they don't get physically violent, they yell or act nasty to each other and everyone gets their back up and nothing but damage is done. That's not how you run things. That's not how you save the world. That's how you destroy it. And Jesus came to save.

We can't totally eliminate anger. If you care about people and they are threatened with harm, or if they are so stupid or selfish as to harm themselves, you will get angry. God's anger does not arise out of hate but out of love, as any parent would get angry if he or she saw her kids hurting one another. But what he ultimately does is absorb our anger and turn our worst act of violence, the murder of God's son, into the reversal of death and destruction for all. He shows us the ultimate result of our rage and then he doesn't get angry; he gets creative. Torn flesh becomes spiritual sustenance; shed blood becomes eternal life flowing from God into humans. No more sacrifices need to be made; no more lives need to be taken; no more revenge need be exacted. When Jesus cried from the cross, "It is finished," he meant it.

The Kingdom of God doesn't come from out of a gun or out of the belly of a bomber or out of the rage that makes people strap bombs to themselves or march into theaters or temples with weapons. It won't come out of following Bin Laden or Hitler. The Kingdom of God comes out of forgiveness and healing and turning the other cheek and walking the second mile and disowning ourselves and taking up the cross and following Jesus. It comes out of divine, self-sacrificial love, imitated by beloved children, trying to be just like their heavenly Father.

He's In the Jailhouse Now

When the elevator opens, you enter a long room with benches on the wall. The officer takes you into a smaller room and sits you at a table. Here they start filling out your paperwork and check your identity and see if you have a record or outstanding warrant. Then they take you back into the long room with benches where a nurse takes your vital signs and notes every scar, injury and anomaly on your body. The nurse then asks you pages of personal medical questions, with special emphasis on certain communicable diseases, addictions and whether you have in the past or are now contemplating hurting or killing yourself. If your injuries from crashing your motorcycle or from fighting with your drinking buddies and/or the officers are severe enough, the nurse will tell the officers to take you to the ER to get patched up or checked out further before they can bring you back. Depending on your behavior, your handcuffs would be removed either before or after the nurse's exam. All of your clothes will be taken and every one of your possessions catalogued, signed for and put in a large stapled shopping bag, and you will be given some very unattractive scrubs to wear. Unless you are taken directly to the sickbay for detox or psych observation, you will then be put in a holding cell, which is basically an empty well-lit room with the biggest windows you will see in this place. You will photographed and be allowed to make one phone call. You will be issued a change of uniform and taken to whatever unit you are assigned. Welcome to the county detention center.

The county jail doesn't look anything like that of Sheriff Andy Taylor's nor like the hellholes you see in films. It is a large concrete building painted in  those bland colors that institutions must get a discount on because no one would use them on a place they loved. There are no bars anywhere. All the doors are heavy metal with a narrow but thick window and every section seems to work like an airlock, with 2 doors separated by an antechamber. Certain officers have keys but most staff don't. They push a button under a speaker beside every door, wait until a voice says "Control," identify themselves by title and state where they are going and then wait till the door buzzes before they can open it. To get anywhere within the jail means stopping at a half dozen doors at least.

The bigger units are huge triangular concrete rooms with all the tables and stools bolted to the floors. The cells line the 2 longer walls of the triangle and are on 2 levels. Each cell is roughly the size of our church kitchen, with  2 metal shelves that serve as beds, a metal shelf that serves as a desk, also used by the prisoner on the top to climb to his bunk and a combination toilet/sink/drinking fountain. The only things not bolted down are the blue mattresses. The door is metal with a vertical slit of a window.

The whole place is loud, due to the total lack of soft surfaces. The main part of the unit has 2 moderate sized flat screen TVs bolted to a wall or pillar. People play cards or write letters at the various tables. There are long horizontal slits of windows high up on some walls. In one corner is the bath and shower room with a screen high enough to shield your torso from view but letting the guards at their desk observe legs and heads. You have lost, along with your freedom, any expectation of privacy. What you do have is time: time to read, time to scheme, time to reflect, if you can hear yourself think over the din of the Tvs, the inmates, the radios and shouted orders of the guards. You will be told when to get up, when to shower, when to eat and when to sleep. It's like a monastery in which the rule of silence is treated as heresy.
  
A few years ago I worked as a night nurse at the jail. Now I am serving as chaplain there. There is a contrast between the jobs but it is more than merely treating the body or the soul. The hardest thing for me to learn as a nurse there was to turn away patients. At the hospitals and nursing homes I've worked, you pretty much have to take anyone they send you. But the jail's infirmary is more about health maintenance and management. If someone was brought to intake with anything that required more than the most basic kind of first aid we were to send them to the ER. At intake once a gentleman with a very high blood pressure told me he had no such problems previously. And I believed him, putting it down to the shock of being plucked off his cruise ship vacation for an old but still outstanding warrant. Such things are often picked up during the authorities' routine check of the identity and records of  everyone entering the port of Key West. I was reprimanded about not sending him out to the hospital to be treated for his possible chronic hypertension, though when I rechecked his blood pressure later it had returned to normal limits. While they have crash carts and emergency protocols, in a serious medical crisis the jail infirmary is not really designed to do more than immediate intervention. We're kind of like school nurses, albeit ones who can test and treat you for pregnancy, STDs, TB, HIV and a scary alphabet of diseases.

When you are responsible, even within limits, for the physical and mental healthcare of over 500 inmates, the time you can spend with any one of them is extremely limited. I used to grumble about the fact that I could legally be assigned up to 40 patients in a nursing home. In the jail I routinely poured and passed meds for anywhere from 150 to 190 inmates in a shift. Like an assembly line, the emphasis was on speed, accuracy and quantity. Offering more than a basic level of human consideration was frankly impossible.

As a chaplain the reverse is true. I usually only have 2 or 3 requests to be seen on each of my visits and so I can take the time to listen. When I have no appointments and just tour the units and dorms, one or two inmates in each will ask me a question about the Bible, or about God, or ask for a Bible, a rosary or a prayer. And so comprehensive are the safety rules that listening to and praying with and for the inmates are about all I'm allowed to do. But in the cacophonous and regimented world of the inmate, having someone take the time simply to hear you out is precious.

It is my experience that those who send for me, for the most part, really need my attention. There was the young woman who was grieving for her grandmother, whose funeral she could not attend because she was in jail. There was the father weeping over the fact that he was most likely going to be shipped off to prison and worried if whoever got custody of his little girl would be willing to bring her to visit him. There was the woman who wasn't there when her sister gave birth. There was the inmate who could not be at the bedside of a friend who was in a bad car accident and the one who wished she could be with her sister as she underwent chemotherapy. The reality of being in jail, of being taken out of the everyday lives of your family and friends, hits these inmates hard. I do a lot of grief counseling at the jail, helping people deal with the loss of lives, relationships and dreams.

More than 55% of inmates are abandoned by their families while they are in prison. Jail time tends to be less but I still hear tales of boyfriends, roommates and even spouses throwing out the inmate's stuff and washing their hands of them. Often a prisoner will talk of the one family member still on speaking terms with him or her. A surprising number will admit their responsibility in destroying these relationships. One inmate said he has learned there are no rewards or punishments for his behavior, only consequences. I might quibble a bit with his thinking one set of terms excludes the other but the basic idea is true. You reap what you sow. 

No one has told me he or she is innocent. More often they feel their arrest or sentence is out of proportion to their offense. But for the most part they do admit they have screwed up their lives. Only a few try to feed me a line of B.S. and I can be a bit more direct with my questions and advice. After a while, illusions wither and die under the harsh light of prison life.

Faith is heartier and while some inmates may just be shining me on, others really look at their lives and decide they need God in their lives. And while the chaplain's office has enough New Testaments to last till Jesus returns (and, thanks to those who contributed, enough Spanish New Testaments and rosaries to last a while), I have a definite lack of books on living the Christian life. So I typed up a basic outline that covers the main spiritual disciplines of following Jesus on a 2-sided sheet. Then I followed it with another two-sided sheet of helpful Bible verses and prayers for addiction, anger, bitterness, depression, fear, grief, guilt and peace. These I use, not as a substitute for a visit from me, but as a supplement and follow up to a visit.

According to one source, 95% of inmates in this country are incarcerated on alcohol and/or drug related charges. Another source says as many as 85% of prisoners have mental health problems, with a large overlap of these being  addictions. After 30 years of nursing, I'm convinced that a lot of  substance abuse problems start as attempts to self-medicate. Alcohol and other drugs do not so much help you deal with emotional pain as avoid it. In jail, you either learn other methods of denial or you finally face the demons that drive you. Since I started out as a psych nurse, I can usually tell which people need to talk to the psychiatrist. But when it is not a disordered brain but broken spirit which bedevils an inmate, then I can be of help.

When I was a nurse, I had one inmate in Alpha, the heavy security unit, who used to verbally abuse me. He wasn't even one of my patients but for some reason, though we only saw each other's faces once, he would rail at me from behind his closed door and covered window the entire time I passed meds to those who were ill in Alpha. That has not happened to me as a chaplain. I even sat down with a shackled Alpha resident who told me that after a life of being someone who just went to church because his mother or his girlfriend or his wife did, he wanted to get more serious about following Jesus. He was my impetus to write up my two-sided sheets.

I'm not naïve. I know that 3 out of 4 inmates return to prison. I know many have a hard time staying out of jail because of several factors from their childhood: poverty, abuse, humiliation or neglect as a child, having a parent who is an addict, early use of alcohol or drugs as a child, and a single parent childhood, especially if the father was absent. I also know that to stay out of jail an inmate ideally needs 6 conditions. He or she needs good mental health. He needs a spouse. He needs higher education than the average 5th grade education most inmates have. He needs to be at least 28 years old. He needs a job. And finally, he needs to believe in something outside himself.

That's where I can help. The inmates know a lot about Christianity but have trouble with the practical parts. And by that I mean faith, hope and love.

Faith is trust and a lot of these men and women grew up in unstable and chaotic homes. It's hard to learn trust when your parents are untrustworthy, when they may use any cash they get to buy drugs for themselves rather than food for you. Or when you come home to find you've been evicted again. Or when your parent's partner changes every few months or years. If you don't have a good father or any father, how can you learn to trust God as Father?

I try to teach trust by being trustworthy myself. I don't make many promises and those I do I keep. Trust was seldom modeled for these men and women in their families. I do what I can to put a face on trust.

More importantly, I teach trust by trusting God. I never know what I'm facing when I enter the jail. Will I be answering a technical question about the Bible or listening to a tale of horror while trying to maintain an expression of non-judgmental understanding? How do I broach the subject that when a man pulls a gun on his family it's going take a lot of hard work over a long time before he can expect them to want to see him again? How do I tell a woman to look for God's hand at work in her life when her life has gone downhill from the time her aunt's boyfriend raped her as a child? I have to trust God that his Spirit will give me the wisdom to not only say the right words at the right time but also to know when to say nothing.

Hope is the future tense of faith. We trust God not only with the present but we hope that he will lead us into a better future. However, if your past has left you bitter and your current reality isn't much better, your future is apt to look dark. I see those whose outlook is wry at best and grim at worst.    

How do you keep hope alive in a place where you only see the sky through the chainlink fencing that covers the top of the exercise courtyard? I point out how many of God's people spent time in prison: Joseph, Peter, John, James and Paul. I point out that they were able to serve God even in jail and that for Joseph his time in prison actually led to a better life and greater service to God after he was released. If you let God work in your life, your past, no matter how bad, need not determine your future.

Love is the hardest thing to communicate. I'm forbidden to pass messages from inmates to family and friends outside, or vice versa, or from one inmate to another. I'm forbidden to give inmates any gifts or money or do them any favors. I'm forbidden to give them my phone number or address. I'm forbidden to touch them except by handshake. All I have are words: my words, the words of prayer, the Word of God. With those I have to convincingly communicate God's love to people who chiefly know humanity's hate and neglect.

Love is basically wanting the best for another person. So I listen to their needs, desires and fears. I jot down their names and the names of their loved ones. I offer to pray for them and their families. I tell them that 2 churches will pray for them but will only have their first names because God knows who they are. I give whatever wisdom, psychological or theological, that seems appropriate. I ask them to tell me how things work out.

As a nurse there, I could give a pill or an ointment or a bandaid, something tangible, to help an inmate. Here I have only words. But the right word, rightly received, meditated on and applied, will last longer than any pill, cream or bandage. The right word will encourage the dispirited, enlighten the confused, comfort the bereft, redirect the lost, strengthen the faltering, and inspire the enduring. The same word, passed on, can even help others.

A jail or prison ministry is largely a ministry of presence. At times all you can do is be there for them. But I am not alone. There are more than a dozen volunteers who minister at our jail. They provide worship, Bible studies, uplifting movies. They are Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Baptist, Pentecostal, Jewish, Seventh Day Adventist, Jehovah's Witness, and non-denominational. We are there to serve those who have been wronged and who have done wrong. We are there, sinners helping sinners, because we believe in a God of mercy and redemption.

In Matthew 25, in his parable of the last judgment, Jesus says, "I was in prison and you visited me." And when the righteous ask when this happened, Jesus says, "And the king will answer them, "I tell you the truth, just as you did it for one of the least of these brothers or sisters of mine, you did it for me." When my friend, the Rev. Don Roberts, said he was retiring as chaplain at the detention center and asked if I would succeed him, I thought of this verse. Jesus did spend time imprisoned, on the night before he was crucified. When I was in Israel, I went to a Catholic church that was built over what archeologists think was the house of Caiaphas the high priest who condemned Jesus. I saw the excavated room they think was the cell where Jesus was held after his interrogation by Caiaphas. The Son of God wouldn't have been there if it weren't for us and our sins. I am in the jail because of him. He is the God who is always there for us. How can I do less for those who really need to know in a concrete way that though society has quarantined them and separated them from those they love, God has not given up on them? We serve a God whose faith, hope and love never quits. And neither should we.