these ordinary words
Hewn from a tree
To the curve of the foot
Or simply endure
Itself a stone, a hard place
To be in the presence of God
As he dips the bread into wine
Supper of blood and agony
Last…
Supper
Day
Glimpse…
Of who we will be
The first and the last
The last shall be
First.
First you must know
The beautiful feat of God.
It has been almost a decade since my father died after his helicopter crashed on descent.
I still feel flashes of pain when I am reminded of that pain.
Ordinary haunting is a longterm normal for we who grieve.
The death of one man changes the world.
Evoking Jesus.
He took every crash, every act of misery and self-destruction. Drained the cup of history to the dregs of genocide, exploitation, war, famine, epidemic, deadly contagion.
Hell to pay for us. The wrath of holy Love, the grief of God poured out.
For us.
To atone for the transgressions of a single garden-variety human would be unwatchable, unlivable, unthinkable, unbearable– awful.
The ransom for all our billions is so beyond reckoning, we do not try.
But we should.
We should at least reckon the cost and the pain, fear, horror and brutality it took to redeem our ordinary wrongs-gluttony, lust, prejudice, and greed.
We should; we shall.
We will either be defined now by our debt to this Eternal Savior or we will be defined forever by the life we squandered at his great cost.
I told you
This was a two-part answer
Ironically framed
By the disembodied voice
Selling cars in the next room
It’s like calling
A cathedral
A room with four walls
And a ceiling
Huh…
I think as I finish
Stuffing variegated laundry
Into the high efficiency machine
That is true
You my darling
Are no mere room
With four walls and a ceiling
You are a cathedral
And should be treated as such
Tear down this temple
And I will raise it again in three
Days
He said
Evoking all
The foundations in the womb
Baby pictures and toothy grins
Girls whose smiles light up the room
Do not be content to be
Measured the way a man will
Span an ordinary room
Know instead
It takes a lifetime and a fortune
To raise the extraordinary
Cathedral
Flying buttresses
Stained glass windows
Columns and impossible
Arches
All to the altar
Rising incense
Gaze of the Infinite
God
lately I have begun to speculate
About the geographical location of
Peter in the hours of the crucifixion
Because I am a coward too
I want to say I would be
At the foot of the cross
But my feeble heart
Suggests otherwise
Snacking perhaps
On ancient Aramaic Oreos
In some forgotten corner of
The praetorium
During the inexplicable hours of
darkness
I would slide my helpless hands
Along this cavernous darkness/
The wound in his exposed chest
Grief an animal
Grasping for crumbs
In the dark heart of the world
We can say we do not deserve what we get–either lottery or traffic ticket. We can even get quite indignant about it.
And yet if we are to believe the Cross, we always deserve worse than we get. Death, plague, betrayal, are all the carrion birds circling the dilemma of our sin.
We do not want to face what we have earned in our rebellion against love.
Which brings us to our worth.
We are by native value just pennies on the ground. But we have been purchased at such an extravagant cost by the One who loves us.
This extravagant sacrifice is the center longing of every human love story–to be redeemed, raised, and transformed by a love that will not relent or tarnish.
That is Passion. Death by crucifixion passion. Resurrect us in His arms passion.
I-will-never-leave-you-or-forsake-you-love.
I tell
The young man that I have
Fallen a million times
(Felt like it anyway)
A million falls
A million failures
A million times
An arbitrary number
Not as funny as bazillions or gazillions
Arms spread wide to denote the bigness of the thing
God sent His one and only Son
…to fall like this?
Fail like this?
Criminal nailed to a tree?
His falling and my falling, so different
His fall just
To rise to life,
Me in His arms
i love the story of Peter falling into the water.
Oh, wait, that is right–the story of Peter walking on water?
Of all the accounts of Jesus’ miracles, this one most resembles a Mark Wahlberg action movie.
And then Jesus walks out in the middle of a night storm on the sea and they think he is a ghost?
Are you kidding me?!
And then Peter decides that the best way to test the identity of the physics-defying apparition is to get out of the boat and walk to him?
It all feels pretty sci-fi. Until Peter looks down and sees “reality,” panics, and plunges into the pitch-dark stormy water.
There were moments in this story that were both freakishly exhilarating and unnecessarily terrifying.
Jesus does not engineer this event in the lives of Peter and the others simply to give everyone a good fish tale.
He does what he does because he can.
He does what he does because they need to see him the way he really is.
He does what he does because life is scary and dangerous and we all need to know that there is just this one Person who can fish us out of the storm and break the rules of physics to save us.
Think about the time Peter spent in the drink–cold, surrounded by heavy waves, dark, gasping for both life and breath.
Where were the other guys?
Shocked and useless in the boat.
People are wonderful, sometimes gracious creatures, but when it comes to drowning in the darkest storms of life, it is best to keep your eyes pinned on Jesus.
He can do the impossible. And the impossible is what we all need–hope in the storm, life after death…
Walking on water.
when the King arises
He runs to us
These words, weapons, shields
Tokens of splendor
Silver refined in the crucible
(For what is crucible but a fancy word for Cross?)
Gold fired seven
Times this burning
Brighter than the sun
Distill this ghost of a man
Standing close to a lone Word
Strong enough
To call him from the grave
Back to life
We talk about the two roads: (notice there are no others) one narrow, one broad.
I picture the broad one littered with neon signs, carnival-lit and well-paved.
The narrow one is hard to find, off the the side, obscured by overgrown vines and branches. Because, let’s face it: not much traffic.
You climb through the overgrowth to get there and once on the Path the going is any but easy. Rocks, besetting ills, humiliations, and the echoing loneliness of it all.
But always the figure of the Man in front of us. Stick close to Him. After all He is the way itself. The narrow path to life–home waiting at the end.
There we will belong.
I have a bag of parables and pet theories I used to bore my youth group with…regularly.
One of them was the lottery ticket theory, which goes something like this:
If a rude person verbally assaulted you in a parking lot and insisted that they were handing you a winning lottery ticket you might be put off by the assailant, but you would be a fool not to take the ticket and check the numbers.
Jesus is that ticket.
We Christians are absolute morons–rude, pushy, myopic, prejudiced, morally flaccid.
You name it, we flub it.
But Jesus did not. He flubbed nothing. He gives us back our lousy, flea-bitten lives, whole and restored.
Why bother restating an old story from my former life?
Because I believe.
Because I still believe.
Carrying Light 