grace capacity

Now the wife of one of the sons of the prophets cried to Elisha, “Your servant my husband is dead, and you know that your servant feared the LORD, but the creditor has come to take my two children to be his slaves.” And Elisha said to her, “What shall I do for you? Tell me; what have you in the house?” And she said, “Your servant has nothing in the house except a jar of oil.” Then he said, “Go outside, borrow vessels from all your neighbors, empty vessels and not too few. Then go in and shut the door behind yourself and your sons and pour into all these vessels. And when one is full, set it aside.” So she went from him and shut the door behind herself and her sons. And as she poured they brought the vessels to her. When the vessels were full, she said to her son, “Bring me another vessel.” And he said to her, “There is not another.” Then the oil stopped flowing. She came and told the man of God, and he said, “Go, sell the oil and pay your debts, and you and your sons can live on the rest.” (2 Kings 4:1-7 ESV)

Contemplating the widow and Elisha and all those jars...

A simple but profound (for me) realization, really.

God’s supply of oil is infinite. What was poured out was only limited by the number and capacity of the containers. And so the widow was told to bring “not a few.” When the limited capacity of the containers was reached, the flow of oil stopped. Makes me wonder just how much fine wine Jesus would have made if he had more than those six stone jars (oh that there had been seven!).

Takes me to Paul’s statement in Romans, which I’ll give here twice, first in the ESV:

Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more, so that, as sin reigned in death, grace also might reign through righteousness leading to eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Now in the Message:

Where sin abounds, grace superabounds. God’s grace is only limited by our capacity to contain it. How sad when we realize with a sigh and many tears that, alas, after all, we only have six clay pots and there are no more. Too few! The oil has stopped, the wine expended.

All that passing laws against sin did was produce more lawbreakers. But sin didn't, and doesn't, have a chance in competition with the aggressive forgiveness we call grace. When it's sin versus grace, grace wins hands down. All sin can do is threaten us with death, and that's the end of it. Grace, because God is putting everything together again through the Messiah, invites us into life—a life that goes on and on and on, world without end.

Where sin abounds, grace superabounds. God’s grace is only limited by our capacity to contain it. How sad when we realize with a sigh and many tears that, alas, after all, we only have six clay pots and there are no more. Too few! The oil has stopped, the wine expended.

Oh for just one more jar…

a thin silence

And he said, “Go out and stand on the mount before the LORD.” And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore the mountains and broke in pieces the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. And after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. And after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire the sound of a low whisper. (1 Kings 19:11-12 ESV)

Qol demamah daqah.

“The sound of a low whisper.”

The note in the ESV reminded me that the Hebrew expression could literally be translated “a sound, a thin silence.”

The thought immediately took me to that Celtic expression of “thin places” – places where the border between heaven and earth become very thin, almost transparent. For me it well captures what a real “sacrament” is, those ordinary, earthy intersections where heaven and earth meet and God is encountered – like Moses and his burning bush, Jacob and his stone pillow, or like Elijah and his cave. It was in the cave that Elijah found the thin place he desperately needed – a thin place of thin silence.

Watching his Mt. Carmel experience, I wager most of us would have given our eye-teeth to have been there, to see that kind of 3D IMAX experience in one of the God encounters to end all God-encounters. Nothing very thin about it, actually. Just loud and booming. And loud and booming is good! I like IMAX (3D optional). Mt. Carmel takes me to the booming of Psalm 29…

The voice of the LORD is over the waters;
the God of glory thunders,
the LORD, over many waters.
The voice of the LORD is powerful;
the voice of the LORD is full of majesty.
The voice of the LORD breaks the cedars;
the LORD breaks the cedars of Lebanon.
He makes Lebanon to skip like a calf,
and Sirion like a young wild ox.
The voice of the LORD flashes forth flames of fire.
The voice of the LORD shakes the wilderness;
the LORD shakes the wilderness of Kadesh.

Who hasn’t been called to worship by a raging thunderstorm (or desperate prayer!)? The trouble was that when the fireworks of Mt. Carmel were over and done and the rain was pouring down, Elijah quite literally ran into the unmoved wall of Jezebel and realized that nothing in the world had really changed after all. He thought it was the final scene, but it was evidently only a very impressive preview.

One forty day journey into the desert later, in the cave, he is treated to the same powerful preview. But it’s only noise now. Loud, impressive, booming. Noise. But then the sound of a thin silence turns the cave into a sanctuary in which he encounters God – an encounter that would launch him into the remainder of his journey.

Funny how uncomfortable silence can make us. We have worship sets, but only moments of silence. We thrive on loud and noisy displays, seemingly thinking like the prophets of Baal that God is hard of hearing or that he shares our affinity for loud, for filling up space with impressive incessant sounds. And while heaven indeed does crank it up so much that the foundations of the threshhold are shaken, even in heaven there is silence for half an hour. Try that if you dare.

It all takes me to what is for me a classic text, a constantly beckoning invitation in Psalm 46:10 “Be still and know that I am God.” “Being still” is not just stopping, it is sinking down, letting go, relaxing in the deepest sense; it is to stop fighting and resisting and pushing and holding yourself up, and in the midst of the chaos described in Psalm 46 – the chaos of all around us and in us, and even the tumult of something as awesome as Carmel – in the midst of all allowing yourself to sink down, to lean heavily into quiet and finding your own place of thin silence, to rehear his unforced rhythms of grace.

And in that place to realign, reconnect, reinvigorate, relaunch.

stranger on a bus

Thinking of Elijah and the ravens who brought him food; of Obadiah and the hundred prophets hidden away in the cave for whom he became a raven himself; of three unnamed prophets who had the courage to speak to a “bloody big head” of a king, along with bold Micaiah…
I have no analysis to offer but only a story told by Lawrence Kushner and his comments following (from Eyes Remade for Wonder)…

A light snow was falling and the streets were crowded with people. It was Munich in Nazi Germany. One of my rabbinic students, Shifra Penzias, told me her great-aunt, Sussie, had been riding a city bus home from work when SS storm troopers suddenly stopped the coach and began examining the identification papers of the passengers. Most were annoyed, but a few were terrified. Jews were being told to leave the bus and get into a truck around the corner.

My student’s great-aunt watched from her seat in the rear as the soldiers systematically worked their way down the aisle. She began to tremble, tears streaming down her face. When the man next to her noticed that she was crying, he politely asked her why.

“I don’t have the papers you do. I am a Jew. They’re going to take me.”

The man exploded with disgust. He began to curse and scream at her. “You stupid bitch,” he roared. “I can’t stand being near you!”

The SS men asked what all the yelling was about.

“Damn her,” the man shouted angrily. “My wife has forgotten her papers again! I’m so fed up. She always does this!”

The soldiers laughed and moved on.

My student said that her great-aunt never saw the man again. She never even knew his name.


You are going about your business when you stumble onto something that has your name on it. Or, to be more accurate, a task with your name on it finds you. It’s execution requires inconvenience, self-sacrifice, even risk. You step forward and encounter your destiny. This does not mean you must do everything that lands on your doorstep, or that you should assume every risk or make every self-sacrifice. But it does mean that you must tell yourself the truth about where you have been placed and why.

You do not exercise your freedom by doing what you want. Self-indulgence is not an exercise of freedom. But when you accept the task that destiny seems to have set before you, you become free. Perhaps the only exercise of real freedom comes from doing what you were meant to do all along.

If everything is connected to everything else, then everyone is ultimately responsible for everything. We can blame nothing on anyone else. The more we comprehend our mutual interdependence, the more we fathom the implications of our most trivial acts. We find ourselves within a luminous organism of sacred responsibility.

Even on a bus in Munich.

Jesus Mad!

To snort with anger.


That’s literally what Jesus did when he warned the leper not to say anything to anyone before sending him away.

So why the anger?

And what’s even more interesting is the fact that an alternate reading in some manuscripts has “he was angry” rather than “he was moved with compassion” in verse 41. Scholars are always trying to figure out the reason(s) for different readings in the various manuscripts, and in this case it just doesn’t make any sense. The words aren’t even close in spelling, and it’s much easier to see how “moved with compassion” would be substituted for “he was angry” than the other way around. Nevertheless, most translations stick with “moved with compassion” because, well, why would he have been angry?

It’s clearly not that he was interrupted or that the leper violated etiquette (please!). Some suggest that perhaps (regardless of what the original word was) what we have is a glimpse at the two sides of the same “kingdom” coin: anger and angst at such suffering, at such treatment of leper exiles and the consequent movement of compassion as the hand is stretched out to touch the exile.

I like that and the connection it makes — compassion is offline when we’re unable to get angry at the mess.

Regardless, the anger that seems to bracket this encounter with the leper perhaps hinges on the fact that this does function as a hinge, and Jesus knows it.

The Galilean party was coming to an end.

It was the most popular party on the block — you couldn’t even fit all the partygoers in (next thing you know they’ll be tearing a hole through the roof or something!). If they could just keep it down! And then this partygoer with all the issues gets liberated, and does he quietly exit to get himself a pronouncement of a clean bill of health at the local priestly clinic? No! He goes banging on every door in the apartment complex. He texts all his friends. He posts before and after pictures on Facebook, for crying out loud! Jesus didn’t release those images—not for that. And now there are so many partygoers that Jesus can’t even get into the room.

And worse, now it’s not just partygoers. All the ruckus and commotion has attracted the authorities. The religious police are mixing in the room, looking for code violations, quietly interviewing partygoers, carefully watching what happens next, ready to read the riot act and break out the cuffs.

I’m guessing Jesus became privy to all this as he beheld that leper kneeling before him. As he helped him up, he didn’t just warn, he didn’t just counsel or caution. His face grew flushed. I see him grabbing the former leper by his unclean tunic. I see him breathing hard and hot as he spat out the words, “DON’T...SAY... A WORD!” —knowing that that is exactly what he was going to do. The first “Christ evangelist.” Jerk.

And now he was between the Scylla of popularity and the Charybdis of official opposition. (Forgive me, I've always wanted to include Scylla and Charybdis in a sentence!)

And the party was over.

touching exiles

Just wrote this little ditty for next week's devotions...

The LORD spoke to Moses, saying, “Command the people of Israel that they put out of the camp everyone who is leprous or has a discharge and everyone who is unclean through contact with the dead. You shall put out both male and female, putting them outside the camp, that they may not defile their camp, in the midst of which I dwell.” And the people of Israel did so, and put them outside the camp; as the LORD said to Moses, so the people of Israel did. Numbers 5:1-4 ESV

Leprosy.

Whatever this condition was (and there is debate about that), it was judged to be a cursed blight removing the sufferer from community and fellowship and favor. HIV/AIDS would come closest in our culture — particularly considering how many Christians have responded to it as some sort of “divine retribution” and curse.

Only a handful of instances are recorded of diagnosed, malignant leprosy being cured. There was Moses’ sister Miriam in Numbers 12 and the Assyrian Captain, Naaman, in 2 Kings 5 (and then there was also Moses in Exodus 4 when he put his hand into his tunic and it came out leprous, and then putting it back in under divine direction brought it out whole and healthy. Yikes!).

The fact is the Law could only diagnose after a somewhat tedious process and then pronounce you clean or unclean.

The Law cannot change the leper’s spots.

Some suggest that lepers in biblical culture were not necessarily forced to live in their own “colonies” - that they could live in unwalled villages and even attend the synagogue (behind a screen).

But regardless they were still exiles.

They still had to stay away.

They still had to cover their mouths even as they shouted their own shame, “Unclean, unclean.”

This encounter with a leper wasn’t on Jesus’ itinerary. It wasn’t part of what he’d planned, more than likely, for that day. But there he was, flouting procedure and taboo and running to Jesus, and Jesus, by extending his hand, demonstrated what the kingdom he preached was all about: touching the exile, embracing the unembraceable, and cleansing what the Law can only point to as a malignant spot.

the way out of this maze of myself

I've been reading Story by Steven James - an author/poet who works his way through the biblical Story in his own poetic and storytelling way. Here's an excerpt that seems fitting as we proceed through the assorted kings and dynasties of 1 and 2 Kings...

deep in the center of dawn
the echo returns.
floating on the edge of your words
i hear hope circling around my heart
    "soon, soon, the savior will arrive.
     soon, soon, the king will come."
when will you arrive and show me
the way out of this maze
of myself? i'm feeling more and more lost
every moment i'm here.


splintered.

I heard a story about a king whose brother tried unsuccessfully to assassinate him. As punishment, the king imprisoned his brother in a room with a window facing the sea. The room had a normal-sized door that a normal-sized person could walk through. They must have built the room around the guy, though, because the king's brother wasn't normal-sized at all - he was way overweight.

So all he had to do to be free was lose enough weight to fit through the door. But every day the king's servants brought platters of fine food to him. They set the food in the window. That was his sentence - overcome his addiction or die in that cell.

And he died in that cell.

Just as the king knew he would.

And the person in the story I can identify with most is that imprisoned brother, staring at the gulls and the open water, eating another mouthful of rich food and telling himself that tomorrow he'll deal with his problem and walk out the door. Yeah, he'll start tomorrow. Or someday. Whichever comes first.

But neither did.

Be the House

In the four hundred and eightieth year after the people of Israel came out of the land of Egypt, in the fourth year of Solomon's reign over Israel, in the month of Ziv, which is the second month, he began to build the house of the LORD… (1 Kings 6:1 ESV)

I’ve been musing on Solomon and his temple all week.

Huge stones cut from a quarry.

80,000 stone masons.

Cedar and timber from Tyre, floated south by sea.

30,000 forced workers laboring in 10,000 man shifts, one month on, two months off.

More gold than could be weighed.

70,000 burden bearers.

Elaborate carvings of cherubim and palm trees and open flowers.

Unnumbered Canaanite slaves (survivors of their own holocaust).

And a divine premiere that literally knocked everyone off their feet.

Having toured cathedrals in the UK, and remembering my upbringing in the Presbyterian Church – with vivid memories of special services at the Hollywood Presbyterian Church (the pipes of that organ seemed to reach to the heavens!) – it seems that we have never moved too far from Solomon’s day. Now don’t get me wrong, I like buildings – and those cathedrals were incredible! It’s just that musing about Solomon and his great buildings causes me to ponder our preoccupation and near obsession with buildings as a Christian culture. I remember years ago as a young teen in training for ministry being told that “without a building you have no identity in the community.” So we won’t reach people without a building. Then, added to that was another warning that without the building we internally lose our identity as well and nothing else will happen. And so we build.

But then I look back at Solomon and his building. And after all the animal entrails were mopped up and the confetti swept up, I see him going home, a gnawing discontent eating at him that he can’t even name. And then as he looks around at the house he inherited from his father, he sees a place to channel that swirling discontent. The next thirteen years are spent building a bigger and better building for himself, a palace unrivaled anywhere. But it’s not enough. More buildings, more projects. Fortress cities, stables, elaborate gardens, there seems no end to the possibilities. And he fills them with treasures from all over the world...apes and ivory and peacocks and women…and he forgets who he is, even as the gold of his glorious temple reflects from his face.

Then I look back at that temple and I see it sacked once, and then sacked again. Gold replaced with brass, cherubim covered with images of snakes and foreign gods as consecrated priests bow to the queen of heaven in its inner chambers, insensible to the unseen glory that was departing. But still they cling to it, “The Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord are these.” Identity lost, but still they cling to it, the life-preseverer building that will keep them afloat, that surely must stay afloat itself. And yet it must be torn away from them, torn down, rooted up. Seventy years pass. And though they will return and rebuild what until Herod’s day is only a pathetic shadow of Solomon’s glory, through their exile a deeper building takes place. Each surviving household becomes a miqdash me’at – a little sanctuary; families cluster together in groups of ten forming larger communities (synagogues), gathering to keep the Story burning in memory and in life. And so when the latest temple is again uprooted and torn down, the deeper building forged in exile goes on, reforging an even stronger identity that transcends all space and place.

Some observations:

Our identity as the people of God had better go deeper than our digs. God’s work among and through us had better never be irrevocably bound in our minds to anything that we can build. Build, yes. Build wisely, build inspirationally, build far and wide as the day is long, but hold all such building loosely. Today’s cathedrals are tomorrow’s tourist attractions. Or shopping malls. Or worse.

Also, we must remember the real building that God has always been up to. “You are God’s building.” “In him, the whole building is being joined together, and rises to become a holy temple in the Lord.” In all human building projects, people are merely another resource that makes the building happen (Solomon had thousands of such personnel resources, willing or not) – and that keeps and maintains it. In God’s building people aren’t a resource, they are the Building itself. “In him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.” “Everything is built by someone, but the one who built all things is God…whose House are we.” Anything we build only houses the House. We must remember that God loves the House and not the house; Jesus lives in the House, is glorified in and through the House; his pastors (fellow-builders) minister and serve the House, not the house. To forget that distinction is to convert the house we hallow from a Bethel to a brothel. So build as we may, build as we might – as such building supports his ongoing building of the House. (It strikes me that though Solomon built, we are being built.)

And if you could follow me through that, top it with this final thought. All of the eschatological hype of a new temple being built in Jerusalem notwithstanding, the reality is that the city that is above, our homeland, our mother, the one John saw coming down to earth, has no temple. God is its temple – and the Lamb. And that is the reality Solomon’s temple challenges us all to reflect and walk out in increasing measure. That reality forges an identity that the longest and most severe exile can never erase and that no house we build can augment; an identity as God’s House that, like a city on a hill, cannot be hidden – housed or not.

Be the House.