August 19, 2010 by djackson.

Syllabi were due last Monday. Faculty orientation was Tuesday. New-student orientation is tonight. My first class of the semester meets next Tuesday. As Calvin Miller says, I am neither a prophet nor the son of a prophet, but I can spot trends. Bottom line: summer’s over.

Not that I’m complaining. At least my new job has a summer. I was a pastor for nearly twenty-five years, and the pastorate doesn’t have summer. Oh, a pastor’s calendar contains those three months between May and September, just like everybody else’s. It’s just that nothing changes: every one of those twelve weeks has a Sunday and every Sunday demands a sermon. In this line of work, it’s different. Though we here at the South Texas School of Christian Studies don’t shut down between spring and fall, things change; the rhythm of our daily tasks shifts; the place quiets down.

One result of this has been an effort on my part to have summers once again - to make ‘em count. It gets harder and harder because, of course, time has accelerated since I was a kid. This is not a conspiracy theory; I don’t think (mind you, I said I don’t THINK) the CIA is messing with relativity to accelerate our progress toward Doomsday or anything like that. Rather, I refer to that old Einsteinian thing about how a minute to a man sitting on a hot stove lid is a long time, and an hour to a man sitting with a beautiful woman is a short time. In short, the older I get, the faster time seems to go, and the less it seems to hold. C. S. Lewis says somewhere (I can’t recall where; probably another sign of advancing age) that he wants to write a novel about Methuselah, the upshot of which will be that the old fellow did most of his real living in the first of his eight centuries because after that the years just whipped by without allowing him a foothold.

Anyway, what I’m getting at is that this summer kind of got away from me. Last year I managed the trick of deciding up-front what I wanted to get done, mapping out tricks and stratagems for reawakening some of the experiences of those seemingly-endless childhood summers. This time around, I felt like a rodeo cowboy who just wants to stay on the bronc’s back until the bell sounds.

Not that it wasn’t a good summer; it was. I got a lot done. I performed my older son’s wedding to a wonderful and talented young woman inside the ancient ruin of a church in the mountains of New Mexico. I taught a summer course on preaching. I went on a short-term mission trip to teach English to Burmese refugees. I spent time with some inspiring folks from the Texas Baptist Retiree Builders who came to remodel our library and classrooms. I celebrated the Fourth of July with Becky’s extended family in San Antonio. I began volunteering as a dog-walker for the local animal shelter.

But that’s just it: the summer consisted of a series of sprints, intense (though brief) bursts of effort toward a specific goal. Time blasted along at a staccato gallop until now I find I must dismount and walk into the fall semester. I never carved out the opportunities for placid staring that slow the flow of chronology.

I did manage one time-retardant strategy: Becky and I went for a two-day sojourn at the Lebh Shomea House of Prayer, a silent retreat in the Wild Horse Desert down by Sarita and one of our favorite hangouts. (Learn more at www.lebhshomea.org.) One evening, I took a stroll through the oak motts toward the old Cowboy Cemetary where generations of ranch hands lie awaiting the return of their Lord. As I strolled through the (relatively) cool evening air and slowed my roll long enough to notice the sights, sounds, and smells around me, I realized that this little spot looked a lot like a stretch of unpaved trail near my home in Sulphur Springs Texas where we lived from my fourth to my seventh years. We called it “Three Bridge Road” because little streams crossed it at the beginning, middle, and end. On a summer morning my buddy Marshal Sharber and I could head out there on our bikes and it would take us an entire day to play our way from one end to the other and back. In that space the Battle of the Alamo, the Second World War, the great cattle drives of the old west and I don’t know how much else all occupied that quarter-mile or so of dirt track. As I pondered all this, I recalled the lyrics of a wonderful old song by the country/western great Roy Drusky.

I’ve been up and I’ve been down I’ve worked the fields I’ve plowed the ground
I’ve taken strain and pressure till I thought I might explode
Now I yearn for childhood days of model planes and lemonade
When the day stretched out before me like a long long Texas road

Chorus:
Yes a long long Texas road bout a million miles or so
When you’re just a child there ain’t no time but now
Must have left that long old road seven hundred years ago
And I’d find it once again if I knew how

I’ve worked in city factories their plastic dirt still clings to me
Monotory near killed me Lord it was a heavy load
Now I dream of comic books and horny toads and fishin’ hooks
When the day stretched out before me like a long long Texas road

Yes a long long Texas road…

So I watch the children play and dream my dreams of yesterday
Don’t tell them to be grateful I’m sure that they’ve been told
If I knew then what I know now that would have messed it up somehow
When the day stretched out before me like a long long Texas road

Yes a long long Texas road…

It occurs to me that Jesus warned us we’ll enter the Kingdom - if we enter it at all - as little children. He also told us repeatedly that the Kingdom of Heaven is “at hand,” a here-and-now implication of the Greek perfect tense that we preachers have pretty much just ignored but that Dallas Willard (among others) has done a marvelous job of resurrecting. And it occurred to me that perhaps, summer or no summer, a lot of living out our salvation involves crying out to Jesus to show us the way back to that million-mile road that we’ve left a Methuselah-lifetime in our rear view. And we may find that road simply by stepping out of the drumbeat of “time management” long enough to stroll to the unmeasured pace of time actually experienced. We may discover it when we quit “killing time” and start living it. It may be, for all I know, a straight and narrow way, not one broad enough to accommodate the wide world of wireless or even airplanes and automobiles. And it may be that, as we meander along, we discover that it is a road, as Robert Frost said, where “even two can pass abreast,” and that one gently appears to stroll beside us, in sandaled feet that half-reveal cruel scars.

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August 13, 2010 by djackson.

In the mid-1850’s the Swiss government shut down all religious houses that could not prove their social utility; the contemplatives were the first to go. The French Revolution, when it wasn’t busy decapitating everyone in sight, suppressed religious communities. Again, the contemplative orders were the first into the tumbril. Austria, Germany, Spain, Italy - the Enlightenment eighty-sixed monasteries throughout Europe around the turn of the nineteenth century. Liberal governments saw such communities as “parasites” who lacked any “useful social function.”

Nor were they alone in this view. C. H. Spurgeon, one of my heroes and a product of the same era, once preached an entire sermon on Jesus’ command to the Gerasene demoniac in Mark 6.19, “Go home to thy friends.” “Why,” the great Baptist thundered,

if I might be allowed to do such a thing, I would seek out the hermit in his lonely cavern, and I would go to him and say, “Friend, if thou are what thou doest profess to be, a true servant of the living God, and not a hypocrite, as I guess thou art - if thou art a true believer in Christ, and would show forth what he has done for thee, upset that pitcher, eat the last piece of thy bread, leave this dreary cave, wash thy face, untie thy hempen girdle; and if thou wouldst show thy gratitude, go home to they friends, and tell them what great things the Lord hath done for thee. Canst thou edify the sere leaves of the forrest? Can the beasts learn to adore that God whom thy gratitude should strive to honor? Dost thou hope to convert these rocks, and wake the echoes into songs? Ny, go back; dwell with thy friends, reclaim thy kinship with men, and unite again with thy fellows, for this is Christ’s approved way of showing gratitude.” And I wold go to every monastery and ever nunnery, and say to the monks, “Come out, brethren, come out! If you are what you say you are, servants of God, go home to your friends. No more of this absurd discipline; it is not Christ’s rule; you are acting differently from what he would have you; go home to your friends!”

Now, I am, if not a Spurgeonolator, at least a Spurgenophile, but I can’t help quibbling here. Introducing the theme of his message, he claims that the text “teaches us a very important fact, namely, this, true religion does not break in sunder the bonds of family relationship.” Well, he might have turned back a page or so and spotted the passage in Mark 3 where Jesus refuses an audience to his own mother and brothers. Or ventured a little farther afield to Matthew 19.29 where Jesus not only commends the abandonment of biological family but promises to make good on the loss. The ace, of course, would be Luke 14.26 where Our Lord positively commands the rejection of family for the sake of the kingdom. It’s not that I’m interested in playing text-tennis; it’s just that I see a need to point out the fact that Jesus teaches that sometimes turning away is the best way of turning toward.

And note Spurgeon’s reasoning: the hermit in his cell, the monks in their monastery, aren’t doing any good; aren’t, in fact, doing anything. They violate what seems to be the Great Commandment of atheism, the Enlightenment, and - strangely enough - modern evangelicalism: Thou shalt be useful.

This raises the question of whether prayer does any good; indeed, of whether praying is “doing something” and, perhaps ultimately, of whether prayer actually IS anything.

I’m naturally sensitive to the issue since my title is “professor of spiritual formation,” a designation which means that it is my job to think about - and, who knows? maybe even to practice - things like prayer. And we Evangelicals continue, as Spurgeon did, to march in lock-step with modernism on at least this one point.

Our cliches, which say so little in themselves, say so much about our hearts. And Evangelical cliches are not kind to the reality of prayer. In his marvelous little play “Fred ‘N’ Erma” Calvin Miller has Stu Johnston, one of the church bosses seeking to fire the pastor, observe that “I’m sorry, but we all think that there’s a time when prayer is action and a time when it is a substitute for action!” He clearly implies that most of the time prayer occupies the latter category. “All we can do now is pray,” people say with a sigh, as if turning to God were some sort of feeble consolation prize for the arm of the flesh.

I don’t plan to move into a cave or take up residence in a cloister, and I certainly have no intention of selling off my set of Spurgeon’s sermons, but the whole thing makes me wonder if we haven’t been so busy battling Darwinism and gay marriage that we let the enemy execute a flank march and cut off our true line of supply. I wonder if we have not let the whole battle shift to the enemy’s ground where our General never promised us victory. As J. Warren Smith of Duke Divinity School has written,

Once we understand that the ascetic life is nothing other than learning to love as God loves then we can understand the disciplines of the monk, - e.g., fasting, selling off possessions, foregoing sleep, living in the desert - not as the heroic pursuit of virtue for its own sake and for one’s own glorification, but as a means of learning how to love God and neighbor rightly. The disciplines of the desert teach us to love because they open us to moments of grace in which God gives us knowledge of ourselves, of others, and of his own divinity -knowledge that arouses longing for God, humility in the face of our own sins, and compassion for fellow sinners whom we find difficult to love.

For myself, I am resolved:

NOT to have a “prayer life,” but to live a life of prayer.
NOT to have a “prayer life,” but to live a prayed life.
NOT to have a “prayer life,” but to live by praying.

And so I huddle at the back of my metaphorical hermitage and (my voice quavering, I admit) say to my hero Mr. Spurgeon, “I cannot edify the sere leaves of the forrest, but the Spirit through my prayer amongst those leaves can edify those I love where my own words might be bullying and belligerent. The beasts can not only adore God whom my gratitude should strive to honor, but can teach me to do so, as Our Lord has clearly shown us. I do not hope to convert these rocks, but among them I hope to be converted.” I think, in short, that prayer is real, perhaps more real than preaching, and that preaching is certainly all the better for genuine prayer.

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August 8, 2010 by djackson.

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June 29, 2010 by djackson.

(Note: Jordan Corona, a fine young man and sometime student of the South Texas School of Christian Studies, preached last Sunday night at my home congregation, Windsor Park Baptist Church. His message triggered some thoughts which I share here with deep gratitude for his inspiration.)

“Put out the light, and then put out the light.” - Othello, Act V/Scene 2

Othello says that just before he strangles Desdemona. He gasses on for a while afterward about how physical light - a candle, say, or a lamp - can be rekindled once extinguished, but a life once snuffed is gone for good. What interests me is Shakespeare’s metaphor of light for life. He seems to equate the two, as if all life gives off light.

Maybe so, but Jesus takes the image in a different direction. “YOU,” he tells the wretched refuse on that particular teeming shore (or hillside), “are the light of the world.” The Greek pronoun is plural and emphatic - nothing about divine sparks in each individual, nothing about humanity in general. These people, this straggling gaggle of the upstarts, the downcast, the outcasts and the inbred posses, in Dallas Willard’s lovely phrase, “a certain radiance.” Christ-followers shine with Christ-light.

That teaching raises at least a couple of questions for those of us who desire to live in the kingdom Jesus here proclaims: Why should we? and Why don’t we? And I might throw in one more: How can we?

Why should we shine? Presumably because we inhabit a dark world and people need to see their way around. To return to Willard, the followers of the Nazarene “make life manageable.” They “are the only ones who can actually make the world work.” People, in other words, need to see where they’re going. Bat-blinded by technology and greed we scuttle across the floors of silent seas and puncture pockets of oil that surge to the surface and slosh death everywhere. Mole-blinded by physical drives we couple mindlessly with random bits of flesh or pixels and carve up our hearts on the sharp edges of emptiness. Cataracts of anger clog our social insight so we trade violence for violence like foolish firefighters who spray gasoline on an oil fire in some hair-of-the-dog-that-bit-me psychosis.

If people could only see what they’re doing, they might not do it. If people could only see what they need to do, they might do that instead. But they can’t, Jesus says, if we don’t bring the light.

Elwin Ransom, hero of C. S. Lewis’ space novel “Perelandra,” finds himself trapped in the subterranean caverns far below the surface of Venus and begins a long, lonely climb upward. “The starvation for light,” Lewis writes, “became very painful. He found himself thinking about light as a hungry man thinks about food - picturing April hillsides with milky clouds racing over them in blue skies or quiet circles of lamp-light on tables pleasantly littered with books and pipes.” Citizens of the kingdom, Jesus promises, can prepare a table of brightness before such light-starved souls in the presence of the defeating darkness.

We need to shine. Our world needs us to shine. Whether as humble candles in tumbled homes or mega-watt metropolises on hilltops, we need to blaze until truth ceases to be controversial and simply becomes the obvious way to live.

We need to shine. So why don’t we?

It costs to let one’s light shine. Jesus has already begun to outline a life that works so backward to the blinded methods of the majority that incandescence looks more like insanity. If we want to shine, we’ve got to burn; if we want to blaze, we’ll wind up singed. We’ll have to bless our persecutors and suppress our appetites. We’ll have to serve Jesus in secret and live poor in public. We’ll have to believe so firmly in prayer that we can live as if God mostly helps those who don’t help themselves. There will be needles’ eyes and narrow gates that only a bulimic downsizing of self can squeeze us through.

To be light, we must burn. It costs to burn; it hurts to be light.

Abba Lot, one of the desert fathers, went to his colleague Abba Joseph with a question. “I’m a pretty good monk,” he said in effect. “I fast off and on, pray, and I’ve memorized a lot of the Bible. I stay away from HBO and ‘Desperate Housewives’ and use canvass grocery bags instead of plastic. What more can I do?” The crazy old holy man stood, and as he spread his gnarled digits skyward his fingers shone like ten candles. “If you will,” he replied, “you could become a living flame.”

If you will; but will we?

Annie Dillard, in her book “Holy the Firm,” tells the story of a moth that flew into her camp sight candle as she sat alone in the woods reading Rimbaud.

And then this-moth essence, this spectacular skeleton, began to act as a wick. She kept burning. The wax rose in the moth’s body from her soaking abdomen to her thorax to the jagged hole where her head should be, and widened into flame, a saffron-yellow flame that robed her to the ground like any immolating monk. That candle had two wicks, two flames of identical height, side by side. The moth’s head was fire. She burned for two hours, until I blew her out.

She burned for two hours without changing, without bending or leaning - only glowing within, like a building fire glimpsed through silhouetted walls, like a hollow saint, like a flame-faced virgin gone to God, while I read by her light, kindled, while Rimbaud in Paris burnt out his brains in a thousand poems, while night pooled wetly at my feet.

Looked at in that light, the question ceases to be “Can we shine?” and becomes instead, “Dare we?” I’ve heard people complain - have done it myself - that no one can actually live the Sermon on the Mount because to do so would be suicidal. Have we never understood that Jesus orders us to take up the cross? Suicide is a meaningless concept to one whose whole life is a long walk along the Green Mile.

The poet Don Marquis anticipates Dillard’s imagery in a poem called “the lesson of the moth.” It begins

i was talking to a moth
the other evening
he was trying to break into
an electric light bulb
and fry himself on the wires.

The narrator queries the insect on this bizarre behavior that seems to define his species. It is not a lack of common sense, the bug argues, but an excess of uncommon sense.

we get bored with the routine
and crave beauty
and excitement
fire is beautiful
and we know that if we get
too close it will kill us
but what does that matter
it is better to be happy for a moment
and be burned up with beauty
than to live a long time
and be bored all the while

The speaker disagrees with the moth (which by now has torched itself into oblivion on a cigar lighter), opting for “half the happiness and twice/the longevity,” then concludes wistfully:

but at the same time i wish
there was something i wanted
as badly as he wanted to fry himself

That’s really the only question that counts when it come to being light: is there anything we want that badly?

Of course, that sort of burn-out is, for the believer, only temporary. Jesus offers us the ignition that taps into eternal resources. “And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever,” promises Daniel 12.3. Better a blazing instant than a boring eternity, but why talk about such a Sophie’s choice when our Master offers both the light and the longevity?

Well, to wrap up: What might it look like for the church so to shine? Probably something less dramatic than we think, nearer to hand and at the same time available only to a Christ-lit imagination.

The First Baptist Church of Battleboro, Vermont, had two precious resources: a Tiffany window that brought light to the sanctuary and a homeless shelter that brought broken lives into the fellowship hall. The one-hundred-year-old window depicted St. John in a garden; the shelter collected lives tossed out with the garbage. The window was worth a lot of money; the shelter lost money. So the church, looking at the thing in the light of her Lord, took a bold step: they sold the valuable window to minister to the unvalued people. They decided to let less of this world’s light into their place of worship so that they could welcome the Light of the World in their place of service. They gave up a picture of John’s body to obey the substance of John’s teaching - love one another.

Let’s be light. Let’s become windows on eternity: not stained-glass saints who gaze through gaudy glazing on comfortable congregations, but open gaps torn through the dim world’s walls that get out of the way of the One who truly shines.

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June 14, 2010 by djackson.

This is a slightly expanded version of the sermon I preached yesterday at the First Baptist Church of Falfurrias, Texas.

The Romance of Redepmtion
Luke 7.36-50

Scottish theologian T. F. Torrance served as a chaplain during the Second World War. He recounts that as he held the hand of a dying nineteen year old soldier, the young man had one question. Later, as he visited the death bed of the oldest woman in his congregation in Aberdeen, she asked the same question: “Is God really like Jesus?”

That, it seems to me, is the one question really worth asking if you are a Christian. Because our only truly unique claim is not that we believe in God – every religion does that, and some believe in a great many more gods than we do. No, our unique claim is that we believe in the God who reveals himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth and that by looking at Jesus, we can know with certainty who this God is whom we will face after death.

And that, according to this little story from Luke’s gospel, is good news! Because Jesus readily receives sinners, which means that we do not need to doubt whether the Father of Jesus will receive us into Heaven. Yet the Bible clearly tells us that not everyone will wind up in Heaven. Why? Well, oddly enough, the problem is not how Jesus receives us, but how we receive him!

You see, we are prone to read this story as if it is about how to treat sinners. We can choose Option 1, the Simon Gambit, and refuse to forgive them. Or, we can choose Option 2, the Jesus Way, and forgive them. But that reading misses the point of the story. As Fred Craddock has pointed out, this is not a story about two different ways that righteous people respond to sinners; this is a story about the way two different kinds of sinners respond to Jesus! Jesus receives sinners because sinners seek Jesus. Seekers reject Jesus because they don’t know they’re sinners.

Jesus sits at the center of this story as he sat at the center of that dinner table, as Simon and the sinner rotate around him. Luke starts with the woman, who does everything wrong. Her actions read like the script of an old episode of “I Love Lucy,” where hair-brained schemes quickly unravel and each effort to repair the damage only makes things worse. In fact, this fiasco reminds me of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

First, she explodes the accepted etiquette. Scholars argue that it was not unusual, in that society, for outsiders to blunder into a private dinner just to see what was going on. Maybe so, but Luke hints that something has gone wrong right from the first. In the King James, verse 37 begins with the word, “Behold,” and that is the correct rendering of the original text. It denotes surprise, at least, if not absolute shock. Though other drifters and hangers-on might have entered without offense, the presence of this notorious sinner clearly offends everyone.

But it doesn’t stop there. I think probably that this woman had no plans beyond wanting to be close to Jesus. In fact, she may have hoped simply to sit at his feet unnoticed. People like her quickly become adept at social invisibility. Remember that in this day and culture people did not sit up in chairs around the table, but reclined on low-slung chaise lounges so that their feet faced away from the table and nearly touched the wall. Thus she had a good six feet of Jesus between her and the rest of the crowd.
But whatever her original intentions in crashing the gate, she immediately launches into a series of missteps that telescope out of one another until the social oil slick spreads like a billion barrels of crude all over the inner circle of the social elite.

Next comes the attempt at a top-kill. “She began to wet his feet with her tears.” This wasn’t part of the plan – if she had a plan at all! She simply found herself so overcome with emotion that she burst into unrestrained sobs which inadvertently soaked the feet of Jesus. Remember that he had not washed his feet (v.44) and now we see the seriousness of that social faux pas: her tears turn the dust to mud and make the Lord’s feet grimier than ever.

Now, her cover completely blown, she goes for the junk shot: she grabs whatever comes to hand to mop up the mess, and it happens to be her hair. Understand, in that society, as in most Muslim countries in the modern world, a woman did not display her hair in public but kept it tightly bound and covered. Hers is the act of a wanton woman, thus re-enforcing the image that everyone had of her already. Not to mention that human hair does not work well as a sponge.

In a final desperate act, she tries to cut the riser pipe. It may be that she had intended all along to anoint Jesus’ feet. That would explain why Luke mentions the vial in verse 37 when he first introduces the woman. On the other hand, scholars tell us that the women of Jesus’ day frequently wore a small sachet of scent on a cord around their necks in order to overcome the rich aroma of human bodies in a hot climate with no running water. It is possible that, surveying the muddy, hairy mess she had made of Jesus’ feet, she smashed the neck of this little bottle of Channel Number Five and smeared it on to of the slick hoping, at least, to cover the smell.

If this is the case, she could not have made a worse move. If exposing her hair was the act of a temptress, pouring out this vial was the gambit of a seductress. The one other biblical reference to this custom comes in the Song of Solomon, that beautiful love poem that has been embarrassing Christians for centuries. Speaking of her beloved the young woman cries out, “A bundle of myrrh is my wellbeloved unto me; he shall lie all night betwixt my breasts.” (Song 1.13) In a room full of biblically literate Pharisees, few people would have missed the connection.

The scene now shifts to Simon the Pharisee. Simon is no stranger to us. He is that person you secretly hate – the woman whose hair never seems to sag beneath the South Texas heat and humidity; the man whose khaki trousers never show a wrinkle; that couple whose kids are always clean, whose bumper is covered with stickers that proclaim, “My child is an honor student.”

Simon, it seems to me, is a seeker. And the problem with seekers is that they misunderstand the burden of proof when they come before Jesus. His whole attitude is summed up in the first word he says in verse 39: “if”. The phrase hints that Simon had been observing Jesus, putting him to the test, attempting to determine if this supposed Messiah was really what Simon sought.

Before this, he has a careful approach to Jesus: he invites Jesus to dine, which he considers such a huge compliment that he feels no need to attend to the common social courtesies: no water for a guest to wash up, no gracious greeting, not even a squirt of liquid hand-sanitizer before dinner. Perhaps he foregoes such attentions until he knows whether Jesus is worth such effort. After this, he has no real interest in Jesus. His, “Say it,” in verse 40 and his “I suppose” in v.43 both indicate a sort of languid indifference to anything this Nazarene upstart might have to tell him.

That’s the problem, really, with all of our talk today about being “seeker sensitive.” Seekers, it seems to me, come to Jesus with a cool sense of superiority, waiting to see if Jesus will deliver what they want.

And Simon decides that Jesus has failed. “If he were a prophet” (which he is not), Jesus would shun the touch of this tainted specimen. Simon lolls back on his little divan, moodily chewing a cheese blintz, and from the towering height of his religious resume rejects Jesus as a decent indicator of the nature of God.

Again, I think this is why seeker sensitive churches don’t tend to major on Jesus’ teachings about giving up all you own or turning your back on your nearest kin. After all, seekers come to church to find out how they can plug God into their own agendas, agendas largely driven by making money and straightening out their kids. Who needs a Savior who is all about lavish displays of clumsy worship?

Now, at this point Jesus intervenes. Jesus, I think, always tends to speak up either when we are at our worst or when we are at our best, either when we’ve made the biggest pig’s breakfast possible out of our opportunities or when we think we have finally found our way to the top of the heap. He tells a little tale about two debtors whose balance sheet differs by a factor of ten. It doesn’t take a certified public accountant to get the point of the comparison: this is Bernie Madoff vs. two missed payments on your Mastercard; this is Fannie and Freddy vs. being a little late with your utility bill.

But don’t miss the point here! Jesus does not ask, “Which one will be forgiven.” He’s already said that the lender forgave both. No, he asks a question about relationship: “Which one will love more?” And that is just the point: the Gospel of Jesus Christ is not about getting God to love us; the Gospel is about getting us to love Jesus!

Simon suffers from what I call the small-sin syndrome. Simon the seeker rejects Jesus because he doesn’t know he’s a sinner. The problem with small sins is that, like small debts, they mount so quickly we don’t see them adding up!

One of my favorite books is C. S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, where Lewis imagines a senior demon (Screwtape) writing letters of instruction to a junior tempter (Wormwood) on how to lead a soul to Hell. At one point, Screwtape tells his protégé that, like all young tempters, he is over-eager to lead his man into spectacular sins. The problem with that, Screwtape hints, is that these sins can awaken a person to the reality of his own damnation and cause him to repent. On the other hand, the expert tempter argues, “the saftest road to Hell is the gradual one – the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

Most of us, like Simon, see ourselves as pretty good people – and we are! Pretty good – but not truly good. If we will stop and ponder, we will see that while we have steered clear of the big-ticket items, we have gone on for a lifetime steadily committing fifty-denarii sins until the total has become staggering.

And there’s one more thing worth noting. Jesus says both men had gone in hock to a ‘moneylender.” Luke here uses a very specific Greek word that means a professional Shylock, a guy who makes a living at it by charging interest. It is a very different verb, for instance, from the one in Luke 11.5 where a friend asks his friend to “lend” him some food to serve an unexpected guest. The idea is that the meter keeps running on what we see as small sins, if we even see them at all!

That great Baptist, John Bunyan, in his immortal work The Pilgrim’s Progress, hints at his own conversion when he has one of his characters, in describing his salvation, employ a similar metaphor: “If a man runs a hundred pounds into the shopkeeper’s debt, and after that shall pay for all that he shall fetch; yet if this old debt stand still in the book uncrossed, the shopkeeper may sue him, and cast him into prison till he shall pay the debt.”

The sinful woman, on the other hand, benefits from what St. Augustine called felix culpa, the happy guilt that drives us to God’s throne of grace. Jesus receives this sinner because this sinner seeks Jesus. The question is not how high she has piled up sin, or how wide she has spread the mess of her mistaken worship, but how deeply she has fallen in love with her Lord. “She has loved much.” It seems to me that all great love stories begin with one who cannot get over the shock of being loved.

When Elizabeth Barrett first met her future husband, Robert Browning, she fell deeply in love but thought there was no hope. He was a dashing and famous poet – a sort of rock star in that Victorian era – and she, six years his elder, was a confirmed invalid whose tyrannous father had promised to cut her off without a penny if she dared to marry anyone. But Robert fell madly in love and courted her passionately for two years until she consented and he took her, aging, penniless, and ill. He spirited her off to Italy where, between his love and the healthy climate, she recovered her health and even bore him a son.

She wrote a series of sonnets during their courtship, pouring out her sense of awe that she could find herself truly loved by so great a lover. When she showed them to Robert years later, he said they were the best sonnets written in English since Shakespeare, and insisted that she publish them. Embarrassed to have such personal emotions made public, she pretended they were her translations of the work of a Portuguese poet and released them under the title of “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” In one of them, number eight, she writes words that could have come from the woman in Luke’s story,

What can I give thee back, O liberal

And princely giver, who hast brought the gold

And purple of thine heart, unstained, untold,

And laid them on the outside of the wall

For such as I to take or leave withal,

In unexpected largesse? am I cold,

Ungrateful, that for these most manifold

High gifts, I render nothing back at all?

Not so; not cold,–but very poor instead.

Ask God who knows. For frequent tears have run

The colours from my life, and left so dead

And pale a stuff, it were not fitly done

To give the same as pillow to thy head.

Go farther! let it serve to trample on.

In 1937 King Henry VIII of England shocked the world when he renounced his throne and his crown in order to marry the divorced commoner Wallis Simpson. Years later, speaking to a group of friends on the secrets of a happy marriage, Edward quipped, “Of course, I do have a slight advantage over the rest of you. It helps in a pinch to be able to remind your bride that you gave up a throne for her.” If we find ourselves lacking in love for our Lord, perhaps it is because we have forgotten that he not only gave up a throne for us, but embraced a cross; that he not only laid aside a crown of glory, but took up a crown of thorns; that he not only abandoned the praise of angels, but embraced the jeers of men.
Oh, that God would give us the gob-smacked grace to see ourselves as the big sinners we are, even if we got to be big sinners one small sin at a time! Then perhaps we could truly sing with the great hymn writer Ira Stanphill,

I work so hard for Jesus” I often boast and say,
“I’ve sacrificed a lot of things to walk the narrow way,
I gave up fame and fortune; I’m worth a lot to thee,”
And then I heard Him gently say to me,
“I left the throne of glory and counted it but loss,
My hands were nailed in anger upon a cruel cross,
But now we’ll make the journey with your hand safe in mine,
So lift your cross and follow close to me.”

And the beauty of this is that when we love Jesus that way, our worship becomes acceptable as an act of that love. This woman has done everything wrong, but Jesus, in front of everyone, makes it all right. Those spilled tears become more precious than the mere water that common courtesy should have offered. Her hair he sees as richer than a mere washrag. Where Simon failed to offer the cheap olive oil that was only good manners, she has invested valuable ointment.

You see, much talk about church these days has led us to believe that we have to do things on a grand, fancy scale. Why? To please the seekers, those church connoisseurs who coolly evaluate our performance and then offer a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Jesus is much easier – and harder – to please, because all he asks is that we act out of love.
Years ago my wife and sons and I all appeared together in a production of Shakespeare’s marvelous play A Midsummer Night’s Dream. I played the part of Theseus, the duke of Athens. We don’t like this guy much; he’s pompous and arrogant and is forcing his bride to marry him at the point of a sword. But he redeems himself at the end. A group of local tradesmen come to the wedding and offer to perform an absolutely terrible play – it is badly written and badly acted and absolutely hilarious. Everyone tells the Duke to skip it, but, as he explains to Hyppolyta, his fiancé:

Where I have come, great clerks have purposed
To greet me with premeditated welcomes;
Where I have seen them shiver and look pale,
Make periods in the midst of sentences,
Throttle their practised accent in their fears
And in conclusion dumbly have broke off,
Not paying me a welcome. Trust me, sweet,
Out of this silence yet I pick’d a welcome;
And in the modesty of fearful duty
I read as much as from the rattling tongue
Of saucy and audacious eloquence.
Love, therefore, and tongue-tied simplicity
In least speak most, to my capacity.

That is why I would rather love Jesus than impress the Simon Seekers of society. That is why I like your worship best when you make your own music. Because out of our disastrous stumbles, out of our embarrassed silence and sour notes and slips of the tongue, Jesus constructs praise and glory that shames the very angels before his throne.
Perhaps the whole of this story – and the whole of anyone’s eternity – turns on the single question of who we think is lucky: Simon-like seekers think Jesus is lucky to get them; big sinners know that they are lucky to get Jesus.

I think that’s really the point: we won’t fall in love with Jesus until we realize how lucky we are that he has first loved us! Or, as the great German pastor Helmut Thielicke once wrote, “I make bold to say that even the most otrthodox churchman will not enter the kingdom of heaven unless he is continually surprised that mercy has been shown him.”
When Eugene Peterson was working on his famous Bible translation, The Message, he came across that famous word “blessed” with which Jesus begins each of the Beatitudes. He wanted to translate it lucky. His publisher told him that he couldn’t do that, that too many Evangelicals think “luck” is a superstitious concept and the work of the devil, so Peterson backed off. But he tells the story of what that seemed to him to be the right word. There was a woman who attended Peterson’s church – just showed up one day. She came from a rough background of open sin and couldn’t get over the fact that Christ had welcomed her – and Christ’s church had done so as well. “I feel so lucky,” she kept telling the pastor week after week. “I feel so lucky to be here.”

So, I suppose, your entire eternity really comes down to a line from a Clint Eastwood movie. As you look into the face of the God of all Eternity, you have to ask yourself: Do you feel lucky, punk?

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