there is no safe gospel

"Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a net that was thrown into the sea and gathered fish of every kind. When it was full, men drew it ashore and sat down and sorted the good into containers but threw away the bad. So it will be at the end of the age. The angels will come out and separate the evil from the righteous and throw them into the fiery furnace. In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth." (Matthew 13.47-50)

I read this in a room full of light, warmth trickling across my palms on the table. I'm wearing a favorite grey dress. I'm in a circle of thoughtful and kind people, and we are bending our heads in morning prayer, coffee cups nearby, open notebooks. I've been asked to read the Gospel lesson.I read that there will be a separating of the righteous and the evil, that there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.And the warmth seems to evaporate from me as I let the words spill forth, proclaimed into the spaces between our rolled up sleeves. The Word of the Lord is living and active, we say - and I speak and Jesus stops me, my comfortable dress, my comfortable coffee, my comfortable posture in a comfortable room full of light.This is an uncomfortable parable.I start to pray in something between a condescending and a wishful-thinking tone of voice, something he is unamused by. I tell myself I am just asking why he preaches to us in stories. But the truth is I'm asking, Why did I have to read that parable? Why couldn't I have gotten to read the one about the pearl of great price or the mustard seed or the treasure in the field? It isn't just that I wonder why he teaches in parables -it's that I don't really want to proclaim the teachings that I don't like or understandthat I don't really want to be linked to something uncomfortablethat I don't really want to be that close to some of the teachings because speaking them out makes me uncomfortable.Jesus just looks back at me.My junior year of college I memorized the first chapter of John in French, a project for a French class. I recited it in a brightly lit room in the morning, wearing a comfortable dress. If I close my eyes now, the words can sometimes still appear - my favorite sentence -Le lendemain, il vit Jésus venant à lui, et il dit: Voici l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde. Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.There is no safe Gospel. There is no encounter with the Word that will leave us comfortable. Comforted, perhaps, but only first through the upheaval of our worlds, the collapse of our presuppositions, the relinquishing of our desire to have the easiest story to tell. We cannot claim Behold, the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of world if we are clinging to a tamer, easier version, without the uncomfortable parables or the uncertainties or the radical promises or the hardest questions. The power of the declaration is in how unsafe it is, how transforming, how world-shaking.I cannot say, Voici l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde if I am always searching for a way to make Jesus safer, or find Gospel passages easier to read in a brightly lit room in morning prayer.I have to give up my search for the safe Gospel.I'm still wrestling the parable of the nets, still going back again and again for an explanation, for understanding, for the right way to read it.And in the midst of that wrestling, not on the other side of it, not beyond it, not anywhere but the sweating tired mess of giving up the idea that I'll wake up to a comfortable, non-radical Jesus, and trying to learn what it means to preach this unsafe and life-changing Gospel in my life, in my heart, in the world -Voici, l'Agneau de Dieu, qui ôte le péché du monde. Behold.Love,hilary

the gift is given

It's a slow morning, the kind that you take a long time to wake up fully, not sure if your dream has shifted into sunlight or if you're still in the midst of it. There is a quiet to this kind of morning and an unrest, too, and the heart is full, always, achingly, full.I've been trying to sit with the Bible more lately. I'm a lover of the liturgy, prayer book guidance to the Word. I'm more likely to trust what someone else appoints for me to read than I am to trust my gut telling me where I need to go. So when I sit, alone for a few moments, on the familiar porch, and God says, read about washing the disciples' feet, I'm almost too quick to resist it.Isn't that always the giveaway? We find a reason not to, a reason it's out of order or our sermon series has us meditating on something else, we must consult a calendar and a guide to be in the Word the right way?So I slink towards John, chapter 13.And Jesus got up from the table.He got up from the table and took off his outer robe and took a basin and knelt and washed their feet. These, whom he loved until the end, these, whom he cherished. These, who knew so little about what they had seen. These scattered sheep. He washed their feet."You do not know now what I am doing, but later you will understand."I am only the first few steps along the cracked cement of understanding, and I'm holding my arms out to balance myself as I read out loud these words.So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another's feet. Is there anything more beautiful?Is there anything more precious than this? That we were taught by his way of living. That we were known in the washing of our feet, and this morning I need Jesus to wash my feet again.I need Jesus to show me how he will come into the midst of everything that is still a mess inside me and he will hold it tenderly, he will change it, he will do this wild act of grace on my heart and set me free. I need Jesus to make the lesson alive in the doing of it, not just the thinking or the idea-making or the understanding-seeking that so often and so quickly becomes misunderstanding. It wasn't about the prayer book appointed reading today, it was about Jesus coming to me and taking off his robe and washing my feet.And I do not understand one thing about this love but that it is gift and it has been given to me.These mornings I go to the Word because the Word is life because the Word is a lifeline in the days where the joy meets the ache and it collides in my heart. These mornings I sit and shrink away but I keep going back because I am sold out to this Jesus, who washes the disciples' feet, who tells us again and again to love as he loved us, we whom he calls friends, not servants. I go back, again and again, to King Jesus because King Jesus is life, because he is freedom, because he is the fullness of beauty, because he knows me.And I do not understand one thing about Jesus' love but that it is gift, it is washing my feet, it is meeting me on my familiar porch, with such tenderness, with such freedom. It is gift, and it has been given.Love,hilary

go free, prisoner

I find myself looking at Jesus out the window of the borrowed Highlander in the midst of Waco.He is there clearly in my mind, maybe car windows can be like the iconostasis some days, that piercing window into heaven, that stirring up of your spirit to meet the Spirit.It's just a few days before Pentecost.I have been in the midst of telling Jesus that I am trapped in my mind, lost in the sea of obligations. I have been telling Jesus with the bold and arrogant assumption more often made by the accustomed Christian that Jesus is mild-mannered and so tolerating this rant, and that eventually the emotions will subside and I'll go on, and Jesus will go on, both of us mostly unchanged.Let me tell you something: that is not Jesus.Instead I hear the thought ripple - no, that's too gentle - rip into my mind, hurricane wind, not just a little bit of fire in the voice. I am telling you, go free, prisoner. I don't know what you're talking about, Jesus, the easiest lie, the lie of pretended incomprehension, because a God that we say is so beyond our knowing surely cannot be speaking so clearly to us, to me, as I stare out the car window hoping against hope that I can find my way around the words.I am telling you, go free, prisoner. It takes nothing less than the Spirit to shake us out of our assumed ignorance back into the obvious truths, the who we are before and afters. Because I am so much of the time a prisoner rattling the iron walls when the door behind me is swinging open and it is Jesus who stands there, arms open, waiting. I am the too busy noticing my own struggles to see that the shackles are at my feet, that the sun through the window is the first day of the week and I'm living in the time of the resurrection.I do this with the story of how eating became harder, or how I don't know how to stand up for myself, or how I am too people pleasing or too quick to worry or how I don't know when to allow myself to feel grace because I worry that if I give myself room to not be perfect I'll collapse altogether. I rattle the walls of the prison of I should be better or I should do more or I am not good enough at and then there is Jesus, calling for me - go free. Me, in that car, driving through Waco, and there is Jesus, caring so much more than I imagine he does. Not mild-mannered, not indifferent, not unconcerned. No, I meet Jesus who says, Go free, prisoner, and who keeps calling out to me, who is relentless in the message that my heart is no longer bound anymore, but freed. That there is no need to rattle the walls because the door is opened, because life is beginning.Just a few days before Pentecost I hear again the old story, the Gospel of the radical concerned grace of God - that God will not be mild-mannered or indifferent with us, but come to us, driving through Waco or when we are in front leading worship or as we glance back at the iconostasis, and Jesus will keep saying, go free, prisoner. I have loved you, I have freed you, you are urgent and important to me, you belong to me. Oh, how the Gospel needs preaching again and again to this tired heart.And oh, how good God is, to still come shout it over me.Love,hilary