Of Immigration and Jesus

What do we do when the law of the land requires us to violate the Gospel of Jesus?

This past week the governor of Arizona signed into law the strictest, some say harshest, law regarding immigrants that exists in our land. Folks from all over the political spectrum are weighing in. Jim Wallis of Sojourners Magazine wrote a brief response. Wallis has built his reputation on his balanced political stances and his careful reading of the Christian scriptures. He has this to say of the new law in Arizona:

“The law signed today by Arizona Gov. Brewer is a social and racial sin, and should be denounced as such by people of faith and conscience across the nation. It is not just about Arizona, but about all of us, and about what kind of country we want to be. It is not only mean-spirited – it will be ineffective and will only serve to further divide communities in Arizona, making everyone more fearful and less safe. This radical new measure, which crosses many moral and legal lines, is a clear demonstration of the fundamental mistake of separating enforcement from comprehensive immigration reform. Enforcement without reform of the system is merely cruel. Enforcement without compassion is immoral. Enforcement that breaks up families is unacceptable. This law will make it illegal to love your neighbor in Arizona, and will force us to disobey Jesus and his gospel. We will not comply.”

Thirty Years of Ministry

April 20th is the 30th anniversary of my ordination. Thirty years! It has taken me around the block a few times. I have made countless visits, dedicated parishioners' children and buried their parents. I have knocked on doors at 2:00 A.M. to inform people a loved one has been killed in an accident, or committed suicide; and I have crawled into car wrecks to pray with people as their life drained away with the gasoline, motor oil and antifreeze. I have preached hundreds of sermons, sat through more committee meetings than I ever want to count, and listened to the most intimate confessions of people who cannot live one moment longer with their burden. I have received numerous notes of thanks from parishioners that made me feel like a million bucks, and I have received a letter so vicious that I felt as though I had been physically kicked. I have cried, and I have laughed a lot because of the joy of it all.

Most of that time I did not pray every day. I was too busy.

Mistake.

The impetus to pray for an hour a day came when I realized that preaching was no longer the piece-of-cake task it once had been for me. Preaching used to be so easy: I was so very confident of my answers-–as confident as my parishioners often were of their questions. I was sure of life, sure of my place in it, sure of my unshakable faith. Then came the news that a sister had been killed in a hiking accident. Then the rape and murder of a friend. Then discovering a lump in my body where there should have been no lump. Then a truck and I (on my bike) tried to share the same piece of pavement (I lost). Oh sure, the searing pain of the losses subsided with time, and the cancer is long gone, but the foundations upon which my world view rested were badly shaken. Preaching became far more difficult, for the simple reason that living became far more difficult. And I won't preach what I don't have the guts or maturity to practice. As I said to my parishioners one Sunday morning, "Preaching is easy. It's practicing that's hard." But then, many of them knew that already.
Thirty years. Both preaching and practicing are getting harder; so I pray all the more. Thirty years, and God keeps whomping me on the head and telling me to keep at it and to love more . . . and to pray more. Thirty years, and I am blessed beyond measure. And prayer is what binds it all together.
Pray for me. I shall for you.

April Fools: Humor in the Bible

The Bible might have a reputation as one of the most humorless books around. I mean, it starts with a bang, but quickly descends into genealogies, massacres, and accounts of obscure kings. The New Testament gospels are pretty interesting, but let's face it, not all that funny. So on April Fool's Day, where's the humor?

There is some, believe it or not. Remember, the Bible is fundamentally rooted in oral culture, and so the kinds of stories that are fun to tell are often the kinds of stories that find their way into the Bible. Those stories are, occasionally, pretty funny. And if you know the original Hebrew and Greek, the text is actually littered with word plays and puns.

I'll just share one example to illustrate the point. The book of Acts is pretty ho-hum from a humor standpoint (lots of traveling and preaching and people getting stoned, and not the kind that makes them giggle). But there's one story in particular that stands out as probably, in my opinion, the funniest in the entire Bible. It's the story of Eutychus in Acts 20:9-12. I recommend reading it on The Brick Testament, and if you click on that link, you'll see why.

Eutychus was listening to a sermon by Paul. They were apparently in an apartment building, and not a house, since they were on the 3rd floor. (You can see a Roman example of the sort of building they were probably in, in the picture up at the top of this post). Paul was in town, and started preaching. He went on, and on, and on, and.......on and on. Finally Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, fell asleep. He fell out of the window, 3 stories to the ground, and when they got to him, he was already dead. Paul had killed Eutychus with his boring sermon.

Somehow, Paul is able to revive Eutychus. Everyone is relieved! Lesson learned, right? Wrong. Paul marches right back upstairs, Acts tells us, and continued to talk until dawn.

See, now that's funny! Who doesn't love a joke about boring preachers who just don't get how boring they are? And it's right there in the Bible! I imagine this as a story that Christians would have told each other for generations, remembering the time Paul, one of the most important and influential Christians of all time, literally bored a man to death.