Embracing Interruptions

I said in a sermon recently that Jesus’s love made him open to constant interruptions from the people around him. I didn’t mention any specific examples of that, but it wasn’t because I couldn’t come up with any.

Think about the story of Jairus and his daughter in Mark 5:21-43. Jesus has just gotten off a boat when a man falls at his feet pleading for help, because his 12-year-old is sick and at death’s door. So, Jesus immediately goes with him (interruption #1). On the way to Jairus’s house, a woman who’s been bleeding for over a decade pushes through a crowd to touch Jesus’s clothes, and she’s healed. Jesus can sense that something happened, and he stops to talk with the woman (interruption #2). After this delay, a messenger brings word that the girl has died—but Jesus goes on with Jairus anyways, and restores his daughter to life.

Or take this story in Mark 10: “One day some parents brought their children to Jesus so he could touch and bless them. But the disciples scolded the parents for bothering him. When Jesus saw what was happening, he was angry with his disciples. He said to them, ‘Let the children come to me…’ Then he took the children in his arms and placed his hands on their heads and blessed them.” (10:13-14, 16) He was more than happy to pause his plans for those kids.

Another time, Jesus was traveling to Jericho, and a blind beggar beside the road started shouting “Son of David, have mercy on me!” Christ’s entourage yelled at the man to be quiet, but when Jesus heard him, he stopped. He had the man brought over and asked, “What do you want me to do for you?” (Luke 18:35-43) Jesus's knee-jerk reaction wasn't "I'm busy," but "How can I help?"

In all of these scenes, Jesus isn’t bothered by the people looking for his time and attention. He came here to give people his time and attention! The disciples might have seen these things as interruptions, but Jesus just saw people—and he loves people. He embraced the interruptions.

Embracing interruptions may be the secret sauce of loving your neighbor well. Other people will always make demands on you. Whether a driver cuts you off on the road, a friend asks for a ride to a doctor’s appointment on a hectic week, or your kid needs a few minutes of attention when you’re in a hurry, people are constantly interrupting our plans, our mood, and our busyness. Those are the moments when your love can be most easily extinguished, or when it can shine most brightly.

For me, parenting has been like one long bootcamp for learning to embrace interruptions. A child reminds you, relentlessly, that your time is not your own—it belongs to others. That was a hard pill for me to swallow at first (and still is, sometimes), but I’m learning to share myself. I’m learning to love.

Where do you struggle to embrace the interruptions? With a co-worker, or a parent? With a sibling who’s struggling, a neighbor who’s alone and aging, a customer who’s demanding? Who are you still learning to love?

Whenever you’re having trouble reacting to something in a Christlike way in the heat of the moment, all you can do is try to prepare yourself ahead of time. Some preparation is slow and gradual, years of growing in patience and understanding. But some preparation can happen right before you walk in the room. Maybe you need to adjust your expectations. Maybe you need to remember that you're dealing with real people, who have real needs and feelings, whom Jesus really expects you to love.

What has worked for you? Or how might you start anticipating and preparing yourself for today’s interruptions? 

You can listen to this week's devotional right here!

Come, Holy Ghost

The Pentecost window at Duke Divinity School.

Back in the 1700s, Charles Wesley wrote thousands of hymns for the early Methodists, some of which we’re still singing three hundred years later, like “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” and “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing.” One of his less well-known hymns is “Come, Holy Ghost, Our Hearts Inspire.” It was written to be sung before the reading of scripture in worship, but it also makes a great text to ponder around Pentecost.

One of my favorite verses is:

Expand thy wing, celestial Dove,

brood o’er our nature’s night;

on our disordered spirits move,

and let there now be light.

Wesley’s bringing together the image of the Holy Spirit appearing like a dove at Jesus’s baptism and the creation scene in Genesis 1. In the very first words in the Bible, Genesis says,

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and empty, and darkness covered the deep waters. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters. Then God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

The Spirit, it says, was “hovering over” the waters, the way a bird hovers over its young (see Deut 32:11) or broods over a clutch of eggs. God’s Spirit was incubating new life out of this formless, empty world. But in the hymn, it’s not the earth that’s dark and empty: it’s your and my nature, our spirits. Wesley combines the bird-terminology in Genesis with the dove in the gospels, and asks the Holy Spirit to work in our lives like the Spirit worked at the beginning of the world. Brood over us, incubating new life in us. Start creating in us, heavenly Dove, speak to the dark places in our hearts: “Let there be light!”

The song calls on the Holy Spirit to recreate our hearts and lives, to make us new. When you sing it, you’re praying that Paul's words in 2 Corinthians 5 will be fulfilled: “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” (5:17) Genesis 1 all over again, but in your life.

Everybody faces that darkness somehow.

Maybe you’re plagued by attitudes and feelings that smother your faith and your hope: anxiety over your finances, as that bank balance hovers around zero; depression brought on by a death, an empty nest, a lost job, or your own brain chemicals; bitterness from the divorce, or over all the years and hard work that haven’t brought the life you expected.

Or you’re caught in some bad habits—constantly, automatically hitting that “Buy Now” button on Amazon; the “innocent” flirtations with a married co-worker; those knee-jerk criticisms that your child, your spouse, or your employee won’t ever forget; time hidden away gorging your eyes and mind with pornography.

And you want to be made new. You want God to “create in me a clean heart… and renew a right spirit within me.” (Ps 51:10) You want to be a new creation.

So, invite the Holy Spirit to come in and make something new in your life. Invite the Spirit to “let there be light” in the dark in your heart and your head. Make time when the Spirit has your attention and you’re open to challenges and change. And make that your prayer: “Come, Holy Ghost, my heart inspire. Expand your wing, celestial Dove, brood over my nature’s night. On my disordered spirit move, and let there now be light.”

 Listen to this week's devotional right here:

More Harm than Good

In 1 Corinthians 11, the apostle Paul offers the Corinthians some instructions on how to practice the Lord’s Supper together, but he opens with a blunt accusation: “Now I don’t praise you as I give the following instruction because when you meet together, it does more harm than good.” (11:17)

What was going on in Corinth?

In Paul’s day, there were no church buildings like we see on every corner. Believers gathered in homes. Wealthy Christians with larger homes would have hosted the gatherings. And, apparently, these hosts treated church gatherings the same way they would a dinner party in that culture: your closest friends and most important guests received more and better food than everyone else, while those at the bottom of the totem pole, like slaves or freedmen, would receive even less than others, maybe nothing at all. So, the way the Corinthians shared this meal together amplified the social and economic divides in the church and embarrassed the needy members of the congregation (11:22). That’s what had Paul so upset with them. What should have been a unifying experience of encountering Jesus together (10:16-17) was instead tearing the Body limb from limb. “When you meet together, it does more harm than good.”

As I read this chapter recently, I couldn’t help wondering: when do our meetings “do more harm than good”? What do we do together that can weaken faith and fuel division rather than connect us to Christ and spur us on to love and good deeds? (Heb 10:24)

I came up with a few culprits, though maybe you can think of some more:

• When the things we say in our gatherings are incongruent with the things we do in our lives, our meetings reek of hypocrisy and do more harm than good.
• When individuals or groups get the impression that they are unwanted, unwelcome, or unworthy to be there—because of a cold reception or a rigid insistence on conformity—our meetings do more harm than good.
• When our gatherings form us in the wrong direction, making us more suspicious, angrier, more inward-focused, more polarized and combative, or when they reinforce a desire to be served rather than to serve, to be entertained instead of transformed, our meetings do more harm than good.
• When we think that our gatherings are enough—that we don’t need to do the individual work of drawing near to Jesus, because we dutifully assembled once or twice a week, or that we don’t need to meet needs and bandage wounds in the world because we’re already fulfilling our Christian responsibility on Sunday mornings, then our meetings do more harm than good.

If you read the rest of the chapter, Paul’s instructions for the Lord’s Supper paint a picture of proper Christian worship. It’s a gathering of the church of God where no one is forgotten or ignored, all are honored, the gospel is recounted, and the presence of Jesus is anticipated.

Again, I can’t help but wonder… when do our meetings look like that? I don’t ask that cynically. Sometimes, that is what church looks like. So how can we emphasize and amplify those aspects of our gatherings, to give everyone an edifying, life-changing experience of the presence of Christ in God’s Church?

You can listen to this devotional right here: 

Not an Enemy, But I Really Don’t Like Them

I really don’t think of anyone as my enemy.

Maybe you’re the same way. You may have grievances against him. She may have hurt you. Y’all may be years into a rivalry. There might even be a few people you can’t stand and go out of your way to avoid. But you still don’t consider them your enemies.

And so, you maybe feel a bit impervious to Jesus’s teaching in Matthew 5:

“You have heard the law that says, ‘Love your neighbor’ and hate your enemy. But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!… If you are kind only to your friends, how are you different from anyone else? Even pagans do that. (5:43-44, 47)

If I don’t have any enemies, then this is one line in the Sermon on the Mount that doesn’t really apply to me. There’s a gap between “friend” and “enemy” that leaves some comfortable wiggle room, where I can keep living my life and treating people I don’t like the same way I always have.

Therese of Lisieux, a saint in the Roman Catholic Church, reflected on this in her autobiography, The Story of a Soul. Therese lived in a convent in northern France, where “of course, one has no enemies.” There were, however, nuns that you liked more and nuns that you liked less. “One feels attracted to a certain sister and one would go out of one’s way to dodge meeting another.” (I’m sure you’ve worked with people, gone to church and school with people, and shared Christmas dinner with people like that.) But, for Therese, Jesus’s words took on new meaning in a place like that: “Jesus tells me that it is this very sister I must love, and I must pray for her, even though her attitude makes me believe she has no love for me.”

Therese had no real enemies, but she refused to inhabit the comfortable wiggle room between “enemy” and “friend.” She was bound and determined that Jesus’s teaching would change her life.

Later on, she tells a story about all of this. There was a sick, elderly nun, called Sister St. Peter, who needed someone to take her from evening prayer to their dining hall every night. Therese did not want this job, because “it was hard or rather impossible to please this poor sick nun.” So, of course, St. Therese offered to help. “It was a great chance for me and I did not want to let it slip,” she said.

So, each evening, at 5:50, under Sister St. Peter’s nitpicking gaze, Therese would pick up and carry the older woman’s stool (and St. Peter was very particular about how this was done). She would then walk slowly across the convent with her sister, holding the woman’s waistband to keep her steady. If Sister St. Peter stumbled, Therese was blamed. If Therese walked too quickly, or too slowly, she was scolded. She then carefully helped her sister into a chair at the dinner table and helped roll her sleeves up. (She was very particular about the sleeves, too.)

Why? Why did the young nun volunteer to do all of that every single day?

Because she concluded “that I should seek the company of those sisters for whom I have no natural liking and be like the good Samaritan to them.”

Because she wanted Jesus’s words to her to be a blessing to others.

And because, sometimes, that’s what “love your enemies” looks like.

If you "don't have any enemies," who is it that you need to stop avoiding and start seeking out to show them the indiscriminate love of Jesus?

You can listen to this devotional right here! 

Samson and Spock

I’ve been watching a lot of Star Trek: The Original Series with my oldest here lately. One of the classic episodes of the original Star Trek is called “Mirror, Mirror.” It tells the story of Captain Kirk and a few others being transported to another universe. This universe is a lot like their own, but twisted. Everything is flipped on its head. 

The Enterprise no longer explores the galaxy - it violently enforces the will of the empire. 

Any mistake by crewmembers is brutally punished. 

Assassination attempts on the captain by power-hungry officers are common. 

Strange new worlds that won’t comply with the starship’s demands are utterly destroyed. 

Mr. Spock has a goatee. (I guess those were ominous in 1967?)

A few weeks back, I pointed out how Samson’s dying prayer for vengeance (Judges 16:28) is the complete reverse of Stephen’s dying prayer for mercy on his killers (Acts 7:60). Stephen looked like Jesus (see Luke 23:34), but Samson is, you could say, the “Mirror, Mirror” version of Christ and Stephen. He lives by a twisted version of Jesus's teachings and example. Samson is Spock with a goatee. 

You also see this in Judges chapter 15. After Samson abandoned his Philistine bride in chapter 14, her father gave her to be married to someone else. When he learns this, the judge falls into a fit of rage, lights a few hundred foxes on fire (I kid you not), and lets them loose in the Philistines’ crops. “He burned all their grain to the ground, including the sheaves and the uncut grain. He also destroyed their vineyards and olive groves.” (15:5)

As retribution, the Philistines burned the woman and her father to death.

In response, Samson “attacked the Philistines with great fury and killed many of them.” (15:8)

The Philistines, seeking revenge, sent an army to the land of Judah, where Samson was living. The people of Judah, terrified, sent a delegation to Samson.

They said to Samson, “Don’t you realize the Philistines rule over us? What are you doing to us?”

But Samson replied, “I only did to them what they did to me.” (15:11)

“I only did to them what they did to me.”

I can’t hear those words without thinking of Jesus’s teaching, “in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you.” (Matt 7:12) Samson’s behavior is the “Mirror, Mirror” version of the Golden Rule. He doesn’t treat others the way he would want to be treated. He treats others the way they treated him. He makes sure they get what’s coming to them.

And, as it unfolds, Samson’s story reveals how destructive that kind of behavior is. His life is a perfect illustration of what Martin Luther King, Jr. warned about in his book Where Do We Go from Here?: “Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that.” Samson rages, the Philistines retaliate, and violence multiplies.

Samson’s feelings and reactions are extreme, but they’re also natural and understandable. Who doesn’t want to get even when we’re wronged? Who doesn’t have a hard time offering forgiveness and making peace?

But Jesus, by his teachings and his example, showed us another universe, where everything is flipped on its head. It’s the complete reverse of Samson’s “Mirror, Mirror” story.

In Jesus’s Kingdom, people turn the other cheek and love their enemies.

In Jesus’s Kingdom, you treat others the way you want to be treated, not the way you were mistreated.

In Jesus’s Kingdom, Spock doesn’t have a goatee.

In Jesus’s Kingdom, light drives out darkness.

And Christ invites us, in everything, each day, to seek that Kingdom, to make that Kingdom come, on Earth as it is in heaven.

Listen to this week's devotional here: