Yikes!  That useful and evocative word is on a coffee mug of mine, one that I got at Magic Mountain, the amusement park north of Los Angeles where I took my San Jose church youth group once on our way to a mission trip to Mexico.   On the mug, in addition to the “Yikes,” is the face of a cartoon figure, upside down and moving fast, strapped in to a roller coaster (Magic Mountain is famous for them).  I bought the mug because it perfectly conveyed how I sometimes felt about youth ministry, and all ministry now that I think of it, and as a matter of fact, it captures how I often feel about life. 

I have been drinking out of that mug a lot lately.

The “yikes” (yikeses?) I’m feeling about life range from ongoing little farm tasks that still aren’t done, all the way to generalized anxiety about the state of the world.  The “yikes” I’m feeling about the blog, of course, is that I haven’t posted anything in three weeks.  So here I am, Thursday morning, starting over once again. 

It’s ironic (and isn’t it always?) that this Sunday I am preaching on the question, “How do you decide what is the right thing to do?”  It’s actually been interesting for me to think about this sermon topic.  And the most fun I have had with this is that a few weeks back I sent out a text message to a bunch of friends and family, asking them if they would help me out with this sermon by answering that question from their own perspective.  Every person I asked said “yes,” which is interesting in and of itself.  And beyond that, the responses themselves have been fascinating.  If you want to know more about those, you can find the sermon on line at the church website next week.

But here is what I am realizing as I write this sermon (and as I am living my life): it is one thing to know what the right thing to do is, and it is another thing entirely to actually do the right thing.  The blog is a simple and pretty inconsequential example.  I want to post every week.  I intend to post every week.   And because I said I would do it, it seems like the “right” thing to do.   But still, here I am, with three weeks between me and my last post.  Yikes. 

The real ethics, of course, are much more complex and much more significant.  I know that living in a sustainable way is the right thing to do. And yet, my lifestyle is not a sustainable one.   I know that working for justice for all in our world is the right thing to do.  And yet, I am often content to settle for my own comfort, and the comfort of my own community.  I know that peace is the only hope for the future of humanity.  And yet . . . .  YIKES!

So I am concluding that any complete ethical system has to take into account the “yikes” factor.  And thus has to also take into account the “starting over” factor.   I’m not sure exactly how to articulate it, but I need a grace that helps me move forward and not get stuck in my “yikes.”  Maybe I should get a mug with a very humble cartoon character on it, no longer zooming along upside down, but taking a step forward, as if it were the very first step taken, and that says underneath, “Beginning again.”

What is Jesus up to in my life?

There he has been, here he is:

Pushing, cajoling, reminding, 

Challenging, calling me out of all the STUCK PLACES I too often call my life.

Calling me back to what I too often forget and walk right away from.

It’s this Whispering Love calling me back to this ground of Love deep within, deep within us all.  Be Love.  Believe it.  Share it.  Break it Open with the Stranger.

It’s this Beckoning Love.  Calling me to go to the Hard Places I would just assume forget and where I find Him.  To stop and talk to the homeless man at the corner, to have that hard, truthful conversation, to put down my busywork and see you, there, standing at my door. 

It’s this Demanding Love calling me to take a stand, to know where my true heart and allegiance lies.

It’s this Saving Love reminding me I don’t have to do it all, be it all.  I can’t take care of it all, and hold it all.  That’s not my work.

What’s Jesus Up To?  Whispering, Beckoning, Demanding, Saving, Calling me back to this Way of Life I find in him. 

This Way of Life, of Love, that I want to live.

I love this quote from Albert Schweitzer:  “There is no historical task which so reveals someone’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.”  Schweitzer said it in his book, A Quest of the Historical Jesus, written over one hundred years ago, and I did read it back in seminary (and that was not one hundred years ago, despite what the guy on the ferry this morning who called me “granny on a motorcycle” might have thought).  But I actually came across this particular quote in the book Jesus Through the Centuries, by Jaroslav Pelikan.  The central thesis of Pelikan’s book is that Jesus and “the meaning of Jesus” changes through time as different issues from different eras arise.  Thus, Jesus is cast as rabbi, bridegroom, Lamb of God, King of Kings, Prince of Peace, great moral philosopher, liberator, and on and on, according to the needs of any particular generation.  I once heard a preacher point out that there are over one hundred names for Jesus in scripture.  He went on to say that no one name captures all that Jesus is, and the whole list of names does not say all there is to say about Jesus.  Wow.  No wonder “which Jesus?” asks as much about, “who am I?” as it does, “who is Jesus?”

What this invites me to, in my discipleship (that is, in my following of Jesus), is careful self-examination and deep self-awareness. What I said to the children (and thereby to everyone) in worship last week is that our picture of Jesus is like a puzzle.  No one of us has the whole picture, but we are all holding pieces of the puzzle.  When we connect as a community and figure out how those pieces fit together, we get closer to a true picture.  Of course, the converse could also be true.  The more we isolate ourselves, either as individuals or as communities, and hold tightly to our own image of Jesus as the only true one, the more we will find we are only holding on to an incomplete puzzle at best, or a distorted and misleading caricature at worst.  And if you want to see how bad it can get, read Stealing Jesus, by Bruce Bawer.  He emphasizes the danger of such isolation with the verb in his subtitle: “How Fundamentalism Betrays Christianity.”  Strong language.  But it does remind us that our picture of Jesus, mixed up too much with our lack of understanding of ourselves (and our unexamined assumptions about life), can betray our faith.

I don’t think that means I cannot say anything about Jesus.  It simply means I need to understand that when I encounter Jesus (and I do believe that I encounter him) I am also encountering myself.  And that means I need to understand my assumptions, sort through my own presuppositions, let myself be known in community, and always proceed with care. 

So, what can I say?  When I look at Jesus, I see a teacher, a revolutionary, a compassionate “spirit person” (Marcus Borg’s term, and at this point I would also cite his book, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time), a healer, a social prophet, a brilliant strategist, a feminist(!), a fearless world-changer.  And as a Christian, I also say that I see in Jesus all that I know of God.

I do realize that in these words I am also telling you about myself (and so I could have added “good shepherd,” although I’m not so sure how good a shepherd I am, and at least I didn’t say that Jesus was a democrat!)   But I am telling you about myself as I have been shaped by an encounter with Jesus, which could seem like circular reasoning.  Except that I do believe that where Jesus lives and where God works is in the encounter between my vulnerable self and the “out there” realies-  of Jesus as described in Scripture, of faith explored in a community where I have opened myself to others, (and listened carefully to their stories as well), and of whole wide world.

Which Jesus?  The elusive one who is beyond any label, and keeps calling me to transformation.  The one I am getting to know on my own journey, and the one I am getting to know in this community of faith on the journey with me. The one who names me, and tells me I am a “beloved child of God.”  And then reminds me that it is not just about me- we all are beloved, and not just all us humans, but all of creation.  The one who convinces me that love is stronger than hate, or even indifference, and then calls me to live in that reality. 

Now you tell me.  Which Jesus?

For years I had gone to the retreat and not paid any attention to it. 

Why in the world would he bring that icon of Jesus here of all places?  We’re not Russian Orthodox.  We’re UCC.  And we don’t pray with icons. 

But then there was that year. 

The year something happened and Jesus spoke to me.   I know it sounds weird but I don’t know how else to put it.  This Jesus I met here in this icon, captured my attention.   I couldn’t stop looking at him.  I spent most of that day on retreat sitting here with him. 

Others noticed, including the leader who brought the icon.  At the end of the retreat he ended up giving it to me.  “I consulted with Jesus and he said that it was okay for me to pass him on.  Someday you may pass him on to someone else…”    I took Jesus home and for the next three years I spent every morning sitting and listening with Jesus. 

I never would have chosen this practice.   But something about this icon, something about this Jesus that I met here had chosen me.   Now years later, I have come to accept that all the ways the Holy has come to me have never been of my own choosing.  Instead, it has been about letting myself be moved, be met.  Often in ways I never could have imagined. 

My years of praying with the icon of Jesus changed me.  I “got” things about Jesus I had never experienced before.

I looked into his eyes – one soft and tender, the other dark and demanding.  I experienced something, felt something of this powerful force, this presence between us.  Followers of Jesus first called themselves, “Followers of the Way” and one of the most important things about meeting God in Jesus is about meeting that which happens between us.  God is not only “out there” somewhere but also right here, right now.  Between us in this palpable presence – this relationship, this bond.  God is what happens between us.  That’s what I “get” from Jesus about our relationship to God that I have got in no other way. 

Writers about praying with icons speak of the icon as a “window” through which one is brought into the presence of God.  Jesus is that window for me.  A window into the heart of God I experience in reading the Gospels.  A window into the heart of God I experience as I contemplate this Way that he calls us to follow.  A window that I experience as I step out in my own life to follow this Way.

And now, as  I looked into Jesus’ eyes, something happened.  I felt something, was brought into a presence  I had never “felt” before.  It felt like love.  Like peace.  Like acceptance.  At times full of challenge and demand.   I could hold out my arm and keep myself braced and away from feeling it.  I could breathe it in, and just allow this presence to come in to me and move in me.    And in this way, we met each other. In this way of being with Jesus, I would ask things and I got to understand things.  Sometimes I knew that he was asking something of me and waited for my response.    

Sometimes I felt that I could not stop looking, didn’t want to stop being here.  I would sit for twenty minutes, half an hour, just being in his presence.    

Then one day, Jesus looked back at me and said, “Don’t cling to me to tightly”. 

And the icon that had been my window to the presence of God became once more a mere piece of wood with a picture pasted on it.  It stopped speaking. 

For a time I was quite lost.  Not knowing if and how a way would open for me to commune, to relate with God, meet God again.  And I wondered where Jesus had gone.      

In the years since, what I have learned is this:  if Jesus is found anywhere today, he is to be found everywhere.  If Jesus is the word become flesh and if now, we are his body, he is to be found everywhere in our relationships with all of creation.  Including the very real flesh and blood people we call friends and spouses and strangers and enemies and neighbors.  

I have learned about paying attention to this force, this presence here between us in all of the relationships in my day.  Just sitting and paying attention to these words I am typing, this person I am sitting with, this breath I am taking.  I have grown more comfortable just sitting with, being with others.  Less inclined to jump in to fix, more able to sit and be.  Sometimes a little less fidgeting through my day and the often wild ride of emotion and feeling. 

And I am still learning.  About meeting this Jesus in the here and now in the thousand ways that the Word becomes Flesh and dwells among us.  This incarnate word.  This living relationship here in and between us all. 

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For more on meeting God “between us” see the Rowan Williams marvelous little book, Where God Happens.

The poor student. 

She had found me on the web and wanted to interview me for her paper on homosexuality.  “I just don’t understand”, she said,  “You are a pastor and you are gay.  How can you reconcile being gay with what the Bible says about homosexuality?”   

I don’t know what she expected but she probably didn’t expect me to launch back with a ten minute tirade on HOW we use the Bible (and misuse it), what it is and is NOT as a sacred text, the ways we have used a sacred text to justify our beliefs etc. etc…..

All that before even getting to the question about HOW to read and understand in our context what I think the Bible “means” when it speaks about same-sex relationships.      

I looked at my watch.  Apologized for going on so long without taking a breath. “You can tell I feel passionate about this topic…” 

And I do.  And sometimes I just get tired.  Get tired of having this question about what we think the Bible says about same sex relationships thrown at me – sometimes in honest inquiry and sometimes in pure spite.  Sometimes I just get tired of it.  We seem to be VERY INTERESTED in what the Bible says about SEX (about which is says darn little and yet which we take very literally) and very BORED by what the Bible says A LOT about including Sabbath, Money, Sharing Possessions, Loving your Enemy, Justice for the Poor, etc. etc. 

I get wearied of how we use a sacred text in unholy ways.  Tired of how we use “The Good News” in the “Good Book” to clobber each other. 

I want to take the Bible back.  I want to take it back to what it was made to be – a sacred text of a sacred community which seeks to hold it and use it in holy ways. 

The invention of the printing press led to many good things.  It also led to taking the Bible out of the hands of the “church” and putting it into our hands.  Combine that with a strong dose of American Individualism and the advent of late 19^th century Biblical literalism and you’ve got problems.  What happens when you set free a sacred text into the hands of the likes of you and me and tell us that we have everything we need to read it, interpret it, understand it, and apply it to our lives.

It’s just a weird way to hold a sacred text – and often a dangerous one.   For sacred texts are not “my” texts but “our texts”.  They belong in and to SACRED COMMUNITIES.  COMMUNITIES who are entrusted to hold them in care and interpret them in and through the whole sweep of scripture, the “way” of Jesus (for Christians) and their life together.  COMMUNITIES who hold sacred books in the CONTEXT of other SACRED WAYS the Holy comes to us – in our experience, reason, traditions of the community.   To hold all of that in tension with each other.   We can’t do that work alone – we need each other to do it.  All of us – lay and ordained.  All of us, reading and seeking understanding together. 

We don’t so much “read” sacred texts as they “read us”.  They tell us something about the human condition, our longing, our passions, our failures to understand, find and connect with the Holy in our midst.   

I want to take the Bible back.  To set it free again to be a LIVING WORD for a HOLY PEOPLE.  A WORD of LIFE.   

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For more on the way we use the Bible for our own ends see Stanley Hauerwas, Unleashing the Scriptures:  Freeing the Bible from Captivity to America.

When, for our “I Wonder as I Wander” summer preaching series, the question was asked “Aren’t we just picking what we want to believe from the Bible?” I was intrigued.  As soon as I begin to answer, I find that I am  touching my deepest assumptions about truth.  What, if anything, lies beyond my own consciousness?  How do I connect with it?  (Of course you who are reading this who, I believe, do indeed exist beyond my consciousness may already be wondering what on earth I’m talking about.  I hope you keep reading.)

When I went off to seminary, over thirty five years ago now, I held a very objective view of “truth.”  Not only did I believe that Truth existed pretty much completely outside myself, I also believed that Truth was “revealed” in the Bible.  I believed my life task was to discover what that Truth was and to follow it to the letter.  I believed that if I did not do that, I was putting my very soul at risk.   Of course I felt sorry for folks who did not have access to the Bible, or for people who misunderstood it and so were in trouble with God, but I figured I would let God sort all that out.  I would just study hard enough to stay on God’s good side.

For example, I believed that the Bible taught that to be a Christian one must be baptized.  As a believer.  By immersion.  That was True.  And that belief worked fine at the Baptist seminary I was attending in Louisville, Kentucky.  Though they did not teach that baptism was essential for salvation, they at least taught that believer’s baptism by immersion was an important expression of one’s Christianity, which I figured was close enough. 

Then I took a class at the Presbyterian seminary across the road.  Not only were there good, non-immersed Presbyterians there who sure seemed like Christians to me, there were also four young men studying to be Catholic priests who had come over from St. Meinrad’s in Indiana to take the same class.  I experienced a crisis of faith.  At the time, it was seriously frightening.  I did not know then, at age 22, that a “crisis” of faith can be a very positive thing.  It can be the sign, in fact, of a growing faith. 

As I came to see  that very good, sincere, and in fact brilliant people could arrive at very different conclusions about what the Bible teaches, I realized that my life’s quest to “get it right” was doomed to failure.  And as I came to see, much later,  that very good, sincere, and in fact brilliant people could actually find Truth in scripture other than the Bible (like, say, the Koran), or even outside the rubric of faith, I had to re-examine my whole understanding of who God is, and how I connect with God.  I did not know it at the time, but in that seminary class long ago, I was taking my first steps toward the United Church of Christ and their deep belief in a still-speaking God, who is beyond my knowing, and who I connect with not through the strength of my own understanding, but by grace. 

Along that line, let me say that I have watched with interest as congress has wrestled with this question in a slightly different way in their confirmation conversations with Judge Sonia Sotomayor.  She has been asked over and over if she will apply the Law without regard for her own feelings or experience.  As if anyone can do that.  In fact, I think there is great danger in the assumption that anyone can achieve complete objectivity in the search for truth.  That stance, at its most extreme, allows us to ignore our own unexamined presuppositions (prejudices) and limitations, and gives us permission to ignore the voices that disagree with us.  And the problem I see in the uproar over Judge Sotomayor, I also see in those who think they know exactly what the Bible is saying, and are eager to make others comply with their version of it.

I still look to the Bible for the stories that shape my faith.  And I still “pick and choose,” just like I always have.  The difference is that long ago, I assumed I was not picking and choosing, but simply “studying.”  Now, I try to pay attention to what is behind my picking and choosing.  When I listen to the words of Scripture, I know that I am listening for the Word of God, and in doing that I have found that the words open up to me (and I open up to them) in ways that let them reach to my very soul.

God is still speaking…

When we love each other, sacrifice on behalf of another, embrace those in need.

When we challenge injustice, take to the streets, empty our pockets, open our homes.

In the rustle of birch leaves, the sweet tang of fresh cherries, the smells of summer.

Amidst hatred and war, calling for forgiveness and peace.

In abundance and in lack – inviting us to trust, generosity, contentment.

In ancient Sacred Stories, and Letters, and Poems, and Laws – showing us our own humanity, pointing the way to relationship and redemption.

Into ears and minds and hearts that seem forever closed to newness AND into ears and minds and hearts which are open wide, always seeking.

Which one am I right now, I wonder?

Will I be one who listens both in stillness and in everyday chaos for the Holy One?

Will I be one who embodies the call of that voice?