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Jesus’ behavior surprises me. Not his challenge of the narrow expectations in his hometown -- an attack on parochialism, nationalism or ethnocentrism fits what we know of him. But I’m surprised by the offensive way he picks this fight.

Hearing his stirring words in the synagogue, his old neighbors approve of him, are proud of him and wonder at the grace of his speech. But then Jesus, who had seemed so gracious, suddenly goes on the attack, putting imagined words in their mouths. He doesn’t wait for these folks to reveal their self-centered worldview, but instead ascribes to them thoughts they have not yet expressed or perhaps even formed: "Doubtless you will quote to me this proverb, ‘Doctor, cure yourself!"’

If Luke wanted us to feel the conflict and the issue here, wouldn’t it have made more sense for him to let the pride and selfishness of Nazareth be seen in its own expression and then be answered with Jesus’ better words and nobler vision? The story doesn’t go that way. Instead Jesus appears as the instigator of the conflict, describing himself as a prophet and his listeners as the sorry compatriots who fail to heed. He lectures them from the familiar stories of scripture, implying that they are fools as well as presumptuous in their expectation (still unexpressed) that he should bless them as he has blessed strangers.

Not surprisingly, his words make them angry. They become like the killers of the prophets of old. They come close to casting him off the cliff. He has successfully provoked them to be what he called them. The analogy may be overstated, but I am reminded of the way some in my generation, when they were young adults, would goad police officers as "fascists" and "pigs" and then see those taunts realized with police rage and brutality.

Jesus is arguably not so unkind or arrogant as that, but there seems nonetheless a similar quality of adolescent rudeness here, a confrontational style that appears almost instinctive, unbidden by the behavior or words of elders. Suddenly, for parent reason, Jesus refuses to be the good boy, the dutiful son of the village, full of grace. He picks a fight. He gives offense. His behavior seems uncalled for, like the argument or resentment of a teenager in a bad mood.

Of course, at this point Jesus is a person of maturity, 30 years old at least, and his apparent ill behavior can be exegeted within the canons of that adulthood. Yet it may be worth entertaining the notion that an adolescent moment is described not for us to dismiss but to understand. We are given no stories about Jesus from late childhood to his adulthood, but maybe this one does speak a bit about adolescence. After all, the issues and behaviors of teenage years often reemerge when adults come back to the homes they have outgrown.

So Jesus is back in Nazareth. But he knows something bigger now, something grander and more urgent. He knows too well the small compass of his own people’s understanding, and how they assume that their own little lives are at the center of the wide world. They don’t see the world he knows, the urgency and reality of God’s dominion elsewhere. So when he tells them about it, they seem to domesticate it, make it something safe and cute. "Gee, what gracious words! And imagine little Jesus, Joseph’s boy, speaking so wonderfully!" They are making it trivial, and focusing on him rather than his message. They don’t get it.

This adolescent impatience with the domestic and familiar is not to be despised. Many of us, especially in northern latitudes, are aware of another form of irritability, the low-grade "cabin fever" of the winter months. Like the teenager, we grow sick of our own home, tired of the known and expected, yearning to bust out and move and live again. Late winter irritability can be a sign of life and hope in us, a proleptic impatience for spring, though it can also bear the bad manners of a surly youth.

And is it not also right that those who see a bigger world should be impatient with life seen narrow and unchanged? Is it not natural that those who have grasped a larger future bristle to cast off the comfortable bonds of the old? It’s a stirring of the nest, to use the wonderful image of Deuteronomy 32, although in this case it appears more the work of the young themselves than of the wise and proactive parent. And if it is God’s talons that tear at the walls of the nest, God tears also at the hearts of

of parents who lose their children to an adulthood and life beyond their own expectation or control.

As we visit with Jesus in Nazareth -- or maybe as Jesus visits us in our own settlement -- ought we perhaps to understand his impatience and perhaps even to feel it ourselves, this irritation with old suppositions and preoccupations? We inhabit a strange culture in which self-absorption and solipsism are mass-marketed, a culture in which our churches participate, compete and cater to please. Its assumptions may sit so deep and unspoken in us that it takes a voice of adolescent anger to put them into words. We shall perish if we cannot see a larger world and understand what we are doing to this globe and to strangers beyond the compass of our lives.

Do we then feel the restlessness, this cabin fever of God’s stirring? Can we at least witness it without getting too scared or taking offense?

"From now on you will be catching people." -- Luke 5:10

This fishing motif has traditionally been regarded as a kind of recruiting slogan. But I confess to thinking that Jesus could have done better. Despite its ghastly ironies, the U.S. Army’s invitation to "Be all you can be" has a lot more going for it. Even a simple "God wants you" or the mysterious authority of "Follow me" seems more stirring. This business of "fishing for people" (Matthew and Mark) or "catching them alive" (Luke’s version) is a rather weak pitch for a vocation of renunciation and discipleship.

Just what does it mean, this offer and vocation? Perhaps its very ambiguity is part of the hook. Perhaps the disciples left their nets precisely because they wanted to find out what these words meant. It may be that it is curiosity as much as any reward or understood promise that draws people down the gospel road.

Or, then again, perhaps this offer is -- as it has especially seemed to Americans -- really a promise about success in evangelism: not just catching fishes anymore but pulling in shoals of people, drawing in netloads of human beings for Jesus. Perhaps we are to think this is the selling point: a promise, quite literally, of attractiveness, to become one of those who would make so great and growing a company from the small band of Jesus’ followers.

Or perhaps, as some exegetes have argued, Jesus is suggesting a more eschatological success: Simon and his mates will pull the nets for the great apocalyptic catch, they will sit to cull the bad from the good, they will be like the angels or the courtiers of God’s kingdom rather than part of the teeming masses to be judged.

Or again, and probably most appealing to my own sensibility, the imagery may speak of that work which gathers and connects, which binds in networks of new and unsought relationships. The church’s nets are often ripped by the strain of so many live fish. Yet the parallel story in John 21 says that the net did not burst, "though the fish were so many." John, so often dualistic, pictures the net as elastic and strong.

Note that Luke does not give us a story of Jesus walking the shore to recruit his disciples with imperative or ambiguous words of call. What engages Simon is not a recruitment slogan, and it may be that all the above speculation on the meaning of Jesus’ words has short-circuited the narrative. "Catching people" may be a powerful description of what Simon will be doing, but it is not what captures him. Luke’s story about the beginning of discipleship is not a story about calling but a story about fishing.

Of course, fish stories are usually stories of prodigious surprise, of unlikely triumphs or amazing brushes with elusive glory. To fish is to depend on the unseen, to be blessed or cursed by what is hidden in the waters. Strange things happen; sometimes the fish disappear, and sometimes the mysterious sea delivers up its bounty where none would have been expected. Sometimes, as in the Johannine version, a foolish suggestion to move a tiny distance can make all the difference.

I am not a fisherman myself, and some years ago my consistent failure in attempts to catch fish prompted me to think that I was not merely up against the operation of ordinary luck; instead it was my fate that was dooming me to catchlessness. This distinction in turn led me to the playful imagination that there might be an even higher or deeper determination, a destiny surprising and sweet enough to overturn the certainty of fate. "Or what’s a heaven for?"

Those who depend upon the sea for their livelihood know the contingency and fragility of life and fortune. Luke 5 is another fishing story about an amazing catch. Yet Simon’s remarkable response to his good fortune is not to exult but to fall at Jesus’ knees in humility. The blessing brings forth his sense of unworthiness. The fish story thus becomes not about luck, but about blessing. It becomes personal, and Simon’s wonder turns from simple and greedy pleasure to deep awe at the unearned gift.

In his lovely book on St. Francis, G.K. Chesterton employs the conceit of Francis as a jongleur, a medieval tumbler, and bids us imagine Francis as someone who sees his world upside down. Such a vision leaves all things the same, except that now they are seen to hang, literally depend, on the grace of God. The very objects that seemed most secure, the heaviest walls and strongest battlements, are revealed as helpless and imperiled. Francis "might love his little town as much as before, or more than before, but the nature of his love would be altered even in being increased. . . . Instead of being merely proud of his strong city because it could not be moved, he would be thankful to God Almighty that it had not been dropped; he would be thankful to God for not dropping the whole cosmos like a vast crystal to be shattered into falling stars. Perhaps St. Peter saw the world so, when he was crucified head-downwards."

Fish stories may be more about contingency than dependency, and Simon is not regarding the whole of the cosmos here. But what he does, like Chesterton’s Francis, is to translate ordinary fortune into humbling wonder. What scary privilege and gift that this should happen, and that I should be here! That translation from luck to grace is what makes a miracle of what might otherwise have been just another fisherman’s tale. And it is, Luke seems to tell us, where the disciple’s vocation begins.

Jesus does not leave Simon on his knees. He bids him leave his fear behind and offers him larger scope for his wonder.

Here it begins: the baptism of Jesus is the occasion of his calling. Even in Matthew and Luke, which begin with stories about his birth and identity, his baptism is the inception of the main narrative. It is here that the adult Jesus shows up on the stage of history.

In this event, baptism means more than repentance and cleansing. Here baptism issues in the anointing of the Holy Spirit, the giving of redemptive identity. God says to Jesus: "You are my Son, the Beloved." Although this epiphany is a public revelation in our telling of the story, the words come intimately to the praying Jesus, not to an audience of eavesdroppers.

Much lies ahead for Jesus from this point. He must live out this identity and meet expectations laid on him. Look how John has been speaking about the anointed one already; remember how the crowds will project their hopes and desires on him.

Jesus’ baptism thus leads us to consider the meaning of "vocation," a word that has lost much of its resonance through repeated use, both secular and churchly. Vocatio means calling, but "calling" often denotes simply job or career, chosen profession or peculiar task. The notion that it is God who calls seems a commonplace piety when we are talking about "church vocations," calls to "ministry" or "the religious life," but it sounds more like an afterthought or theological overlay in regard to ordinary life. Vocations are the way we make our livings, and avocations -- the things we don’t have to do -- provide our recreation.

Of course, some of us have been so schooled in a doctrine of vocation that we know better and would hasten to include any and all virtuous jobs in this world under the heading of God’s potential callings. The work of the waitress and the plumber is as precious to God as the labor of any preacher, physician or scholar. Although this teaching itself is not bad, it often sounds unconvinced and patronizing. Class condescensions and resentments lurk here; this theology can too easily obscure issues and excuse offenses.

The language of vocation is problematic not just in its churchly usage (where the distinctions and congruities of "inner" and "outer" calls can trip us up) but in the more common reality of a multiplicity of calls with competing claims upon the stewardship of our lives. We do not have just one vocation, and we struggle to balance different responsibilities and relationships. Anointing one of our vocations as holier than another may be a dangerous thing. Is my ministry more a vocation than my marriage, or my responsibility as a citizen less than my relationship to my children? The claims of others call out to us, often by name, and often out of genuine need.

And what if vocations seem to change in the course of life? What one once felt called to do or be no longer seems right. What then? Sometimes, of course, the covenants of the past must hold us in faithfulness. But sometimes new callings come and lives are remade in response. What of those who are adrift, unsure of any calling? Our lovely imagery of vocation then seems naïve, better suited for the supposed stability and limited choices of an earlier age.

But consider this: the calling of Jesus is not about a job or a career. It is not a word of mission, sending him into the future. Not at the outset. The word of baptism is first of all about the delight of God in this beloved, this chosen, this child called by name. Not a call to do, but a calling that names.

I was an adult with children of my own when I came across my baby book, the collection of precious trivia and wonder prepared for me when I was new in the world. Among its pages was my mother’s description of how on the day of my birth she held me on her belly and welcomed me to the world. With me there in that hospital room she offered up the great Laudamus in thanksgiving.

As for Jesus, so for us. Our first calling, the baptismal call, is the one that simply loves and names: You are my child. I delight in you. The words embrace us and promise to hold us. This is where it begins, and this is also, we dare claim, the last word, the one that holds our future.

Yet in between that beginning and that end, this baptismal call will often become a call to action. It will mean mission and ministry and all kinds of tasks. Anointing is a sign of blessing, but it is also a commissioning. As for Jesus, so for us.

Not many years after my welcoming into the world, I learned to heed my mother’s voice calling me home from play to meals, homework and chores. If love is unconditional at its root, it entails the desire and expectation of life true to its vision, living up to the good that was seen. My parents and teachers and scores of others called me and sent me to the vocations of my life. These vocations have come through human voices and relationships, institutions and communities; they call to me as a husband, father, son, pastor, citizen, colleague, friend. The calls are many, but their beginning is one.

Not every cry can be answered and not every call is from God. So it is a blessing when we can thank God for the joy of purpose in our lives and for times when the call to a certain task seems clear. Yet even when our callings seem hard to sort out or beyond our ability to fulfill, even in the day of failure and betrayal, I pray to remember again the calling that comes first and last. The tasks and duties do matter, but what abides -- our identity, our belonging, our hope -- is heard here by the waters. You are my child, beloved, delight.

The Word was made flesh . . . " In my childhood, this was the Gospel reading for the morning after, the kind of explanatory imagining that would take place when the sun had risen, the angels and shepherds were gone and all the hushed wonder of the night before was blurring in memory. I recall thinking this passage might have been the musing of Mary when she "kept all these things and pondered them in her heart."

When our family heard these words in church we had already received our presents. We had gotten them the night before, in a candlelit evening that seemed to breathe contentment and awe. Even those children who didn’t open their gifts until Christmas morning had now done so, and would be playing with their new possessions, more or less discreetly, in the pews. So for me, through the iteration of Christmas mornings, these words about word and flesh connected not just with the Christ child but with thoughts about gifts and giving.

The Word was made flesh. . . This seemed to me a mysterious statement, part of that world whose meaning, beauty and sometimes pain still lay ahead in the realm of adults. But it also suggested something I knew about, something illustrated each Christmas and birthday, namely that gifts are forms of communication. Words are written on each package, each wrapped gift carries a message from its giver. Often it’s a little poem, the embarrassment of love made bearable in playfulness, but even a brief phrase can affirm and bless.

And so I found this meaning in my young pondering; Jesus, God’s present to the world, was sent as a messenger; a word-bearer to us. God’s old epistolary strategy, putting words in the mouths of prophets and on pages of scripture, had not sufficed. The urgent words of love and warning had not been heeded. God needed to come closer to get our attention. So God put the message on a gift, the gift of a child. Jesus would grow to speak the needed words, and hearing him would be like listening to the voice of the giver. We would be able to read what God wanted to say to us in the shape of Jesus’ life, in his words and deeds.

For all its naïveté, this thought about the incarnation has some truth and value. Recent quests for the historical Jesus have been driven in part by the desire to find a concrete message in his life and work. The drama of divine incarnation and atonement ought not to be -- as it has easily been -- abstracted from the teaching of Jesus, his proclamation of God’s kingdom made into an incidental preamble to the "deep" and "real" mystery of faith. Then the orthodox language can short-circuit and the high Christology disincarnate Christ.

When we come to his death and resurrection, it matters what it was that brought him there, what he tried to teach and tell and show. It matters for what cause his passion consumed him, and what vision God vindicated by his resurrection. In the Marcan tradition, indeed, this messenger repeatedly pointed away from himself to the message he carried. As prophet, teacher and champion of God’s dominion, Jesus bid us see not himself but the will of God.

But to return to my childish rumination: gifts are not simply the bearers of words. Their message is not just what is written on their wrapping. They also speak their love by their quality, their thoughtfulness, their expense and value. See here how I love you, how I think of you, how much you mean to me! And this quality of gift seems to be part of what has happened at Christmas: the Word itself is made flesh, and so the flesh of Jesus is the message now. God seems to say, "See, this is how much. Now do you know? Do you understand?"

This Word, then, is not simply a message you can put into words. It comes as a person, a life enfleshed and enacted. It has to do with compassion and vision, but there is also something frightening about it, a kind of desperate insistence. If you won’t listen to the law and the prophets, maybe now you’ll see. God, so vulnerable, casting this unphilosophical proposition into our world, this baby, is dependent on our response. Now even the cross that lies ahead begins to seem like an adolescent’s thought of suicide: Then maybe their hearts will be moved, then they’ll know how I love them.

The messenger and the message are thus joined. Even in those tellings of the gospel in which Jesus struggles against this identification, it proves finally to be so. The Word is enfleshed, born to die. In John that identity is simply laid out from the start, majestic in its claim and challenge.

As I continued to puzzle in various Christmas morning pews, I still sensed something wrong in this way of thinking about the Word made flesh. Something was untrue to the sweet grace and exultation of the day.

It came to me one year when I had made a gift for someone I loved: sometimes you don’t care whether they know who gave the gift. Sometimes it doesn’t really matter whether your name is on it, or what it’s saying about you and your feelings. You’re not the point. You just want to make this person happy and to see her pleasure. Gifts -- like words -- are not always and only messages, units of communication. Sometimes they are simply expressive, the exclamations of our hearts and hopes. They may communicate, but the sending of a message is not the intent. In such giving we forget ourselves and just watch. Our delight is in the delight of the other.

So it is with the gift Mary holds on Christmas morning. In desire for us, God has forgotten himself. The words and implications come later; but now, first, the Word is an infant and cannot, need not, speak.

We are building a house. I have noticed that there is some instinctual urge in empty nesters to do that. My husband and I are mesmerized by this project -- reading books and doing Internet searches.

Every time I go through the checkout line at the grocery store I succumb to the siren song of the magazine rack and buy another five-dollar slick-looking publication to join the magazines already stockpiled. At night, when I can’t sleep, I flip through the magazines and wallow in the pictures of happy homeowners cooking like mad (but elegantly) in the perfect kitchen or musing in the perfect study or enjoying wholesome activities in the perfect living room or graciously entertaining casts of thousands all over the blooming perfect place.

In the magazines, they have perfect closets. I flip through pages in the closet sections and my heart sings. Ah, to be the queen of closets the size of small countries! To be the mistress of ample storage with order and room for everything, like stuff I need but just not right this minute or maybe not this decade. Take mason jars, for instance. I have always wanted to be the kind of person who puts up preserves and pickles and jellies. Maybe buying mason jars and storing them will get me going.

I pore over the magazines in the small hours of the night and think, "I will do this. I will build this house with all these closets and store all my goods. And then I will say to my soul, ‘Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry" And then I put down my magazines and drift off to sleep. I have enough for today, and maybe once I have my closets worked out, I’ll stop worrying about tomorrow.

And surely worrying about tomorrow is what keeps most of us awake, flipping magazines and popping pills and surfing the net. We know that no matter the abundance of today, there are endless, potentially dire possibilities for tomorrow. In a time of plenty, say, when the stock market is going gangbusters and unemployment is low and the national budget is in surplus for the first time in years -- in a time of abundance, one needs to look ahead.

I remember how the treasurer of the parish I served in Atlanta would stare dolefully at the parish figures for the year, even in a year of abundance, and say "Well -- OK, maybe it’s not time to worry yet. But I think it’s definitely time to start getting ready to worry.

For some of us it is always time to start getting ready to worry. We generate energy by shifting anxiety from the present to the future. So what else is new?

There was an anxious fellow in the crowd about 2000 years ago. He was consumed by the worry that he was not getting as much as his brother. Of course we are too. How many families have you seen blow up over who gets what? Cain, Abel? Jacob, Esau? Joseph?

At any rate, the biblical fellow is worried about his life, his security. He comes to Jesus for justice and has faith that Jesus has the power to help him. So far, so good. We stand there with him. We too want Daddy’s stocks in our bank boxes, the family pieces in our attics, the silver for the silver chest, and the lace tablecloths in the linen closet. And we don’t like it when one sibling gets more than another.

The worried guy asks for justice. He waits for the answer, and we wait too. We all look at Jesus’ face and slowly get the sinking feeling that Jesus just isn’t very interested. These security issues that are very upsetting to us -- such as fair inheritance -- just do not mean a hill of beans to Jesus.

Evidently the kingdom of heaven does not have a small-claims court. Or a probate judge. Jesus is exasperated. "Who made me divider over you?" Instead of remedying the situation, he tells about the rich man who builds barns to store his abundant harvest, tells his soul to relax, eat, drink and be merry -- and then drops dead.

We gape at the teller of the tale. "Oh," the worried guy says. Jesus looks at him, at us. "So it is with those who store up treasure for themselves but are not rich toward God."

I glance at my magazines -- books in the bible of a culture that considers the accumulation and protection of abundance to be deadly serious, worth the efforts of a lifetime. The magazines effectively market the security for which we all yearn. We strive to build bigger barns every way we can, but what barn can we trust finally? How big is the bank deposit box you need for your soul’s sake? Can you rent a storage unit to hoard abundant life? What kind of insulation will ward off the chill of whatever is coming? Should we get a security system to warn of the inevitable? Will even a steel door lock out the end?

Even in our biggest, deepest closet, we cannot store life. We cannot lock out death. We and our closets float on the Titanic, and we know deep down how the trip always ends. Our endless dilemma is that all our wisdom, all our work, all the days of vexation, all the restless nights -- none of it can store life. Nothing can lock out death. Perhaps, as the teacher in Ecclesiastes says, the whole human endeavor comes down to vanity and a chasing after wind.

Or does it? Is death the last word?

Help us, God, to look up from our house plans and stock quotes and even our church budgets. Help us to listen for the word that refuses to be market-driven. Help us to listen for the Voice who can lead us not into another closed closet but into abundant life. Help us turn, with all the richness of our very being, to you. And live.

"The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners. . ." (1 Timothy 1:15).

This is the time of year when churches wake up from a long summer nap and get cracking. Vacationers return and we are glad to see them and each other. Sunday school cranks back up and the teachers are busy organizing classes and greeting the kids. The choir starts practicing again after winging it through the summer. Committees begin to meet again.

It’s very satisfying to look around and see the church doing what the church is supposed to do. The flock is in good shape. Lots of people are helping out with this or that, taking responsibility and sharing leadership. We are grazing in the green pastures right next to the cool still waters.

Hmmmmm. Then these lectionary readings appear and there’s a problem. These readings don’t celebrate the flock all gathered together, grazing contentedly and doing the church thing. Instead, in Exodus, we hear about the idolatry of the first flock. The faith community is gathered together all right, but while Moses and Yahweh are hammering out the last details of the Ten Commandments, the flock gets restless, insecure and seems ready to worship anything. Aaron comes up with the golden calf idea and the community goes wild, which proves that just because you are in a group of people gathered together to worship God doesn’t mean you won’t end up dancing around with something silly.

That we are gathered together to do church is good. Not foolproof or idol-proof, but good. It is better to be gathered together than to be off alone, perhaps scared or despairing. Surely it is better to be gathered together than to be isolated doing your own thing, perhaps lost in indifference, never thinking about anybody else. Or perhaps lost in power, being controlling and ruthless to those around you.

Now here’s the trick: We are doing church, and that’s good. But we have followed Jesus in here, we have gathered together to be renewed, so that every week we can follow Jesus out of here -- out to the school and the hospital and the bank and the office and the neighborhoods. We gather together here to follow Jesus, then we split up and follow Jesus out of here to seek the lost, the broken, the bleating, the alone.

Jesus seems to care inordinately about the ones who aren’t here. This interest in the absent may seem unreasonable to those of us who show up and keep the institutional church humming, but it is the gospel.

Jesus came to save the lost -- lost sheep, lost coins, lost brothers, lost prostitutes, lost loan sharks, lost jack-asses, lost weaklings. Jesus came all this way looking for them. And those we have given up on or forgotten about or dismissed because of their unworthiness are the very ones that Jesus has headed out to look for. He looks back over his shoulder to see if we are following him. . .

Remember what happens every-time somebody who was lost gets found? Amazing grace. Celebration for all because we are so inextricably bound one to another, church leader to stranger, hungry to full, joyous to meanspirited, faithless to faithful. What happens when the lost sheep gets found is that the joy is contagious. And the 99 sheep have an excuse to throw a party, which is what we come together to do every week.

"Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off?"

Jeremiah 23:23

There was a land of great beauty and promise, flowing with milk and honey. And people wandered there, struggled through the wilderness to get there, were surely led by God there. The people came to form a nation where the stranger would be shown hospitality. They came to build a holy land where children could laugh and play without danger and old people rest and remember in safety. They came to build a just community where the able could work for fair wages, the sick receive care and the frail eat their fill. All of that was promised in this land that God gave to be a light to the nations.

But the people forgot. They forgot that the good life in the promised land depends on promises made and kept to God and to each other. They forgot the first promise: You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind, which is inextricably tied to the second promise: Love your neighbor as yourself. They ignored these promises, which are not just religious lore, but are as much a part of the will and purpose of the Creator as DNA or the law of gravity or the speed of light.

And the ones who were supposed to remind them of the promises -- the leaders, the priests, the ones to whom much had been given -- they forgot too. And so there was no vision, and without a vision the people perish. The weak and poor and marginal perish first but not last, because anger and hopelessness mingle into rage and the perishing spreads.

Into the amnesia came the voices of prophets, those individuals who interpret the past, clarify the present and point to the future. And some of their voices spoke truth, although not whole, not seamless truth.

Nobody likes prophets; there are other, more soothing, more entertaining voices uttering less demanding words. These are the voices of dreams, claiming to speak the will of God but not holding the dreams up to the light of the promise; few people ask if the dreams speak to love of neighbor. Instead they listen to voices of blame raised against whoever is not the listener and voices of painless solutions saying peace when there is no peace, but only cheap grace.

These soothing voices seem to know God very well. They even seem to carry God in their pockets. They preach the god of the nearby, who is a controllable presence. A god who is a manageable commodity.

Jeremiah heard something different and spoke his piece of the truth. And he told the people that God said:

"Am I a God near by and not a God far off? Who can hide so that I cannot see them? Is not my word like fire? Is not my word like a hammer that breaks in pieces?" That’s what God said to Jeremiah, who said it to the people. And they didn’t like it at all. They laughed at him and he kept on. They threw him down a well and he kept on. They put him in jail and he kept on. And all the while trouble was coming from Babylon. So Jeremiah kept talking -- hollering, really -- irritating everybody. Until the trouble came. Then there was weeping and fear and ruin. The land of promise lay desolate, a land that God had forsaken. Or rather a land that had forsaken God.

It turned out that God was not in their pockets or in the corner of the tent. But God was far off because they would not turn back to the promises and to the One who loved them. What word now for the land of promise?

You remember. The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth, but was not soothing, not entertaining at all. Jesus, being the very Word of God, said to the people, "Do you think I have come to bring peace to the earth? No, I tell you, not peace but rather division!" Not soothing at all.

The Word can divide traditions and loyalties long held sacred. No tradition -- even religious -- is as sacred as the one beyond all our traditions. And no loyalty --even familial -- can stand in the way of the promise to love neighbor as self, which is to act with both justice and mercy in the best mix you can figure out at the time. Jesus knew that, taught that, lived that, died that. And out of his very being came the word of promise spoken afresh.

All this happened a long time ago, but not much has changed. Trouble and weeping and fear and ruin come when the people forget the promises of God that bind us inextricably to each other—the hungry to the overfed, the city to the suburb, the innocent to the cynical, the triumphant to the brokenhearted. All over God’s round earth, trouble comes when the people forget the promise. And God is far away

So we try to help each other remember the promises which are our way and our truth and our life. We try to help each other stop expecting faith to be soothing. We stop trying to mostly entertain each other in church, and instead help each other find faith that will deepen into sacrificial love.

We try to help each other listen for truth. We remember the wisdom of humility, which is to claim not whole, seamless truth, but some truth, some vision of the common good.

Finally, we try to point each other toward life, the really good life. Can we imagine ourselves seeking together the good life in this land of promise? Can we see ourselves as a great cloud of witnesses, willing to run the race that is set before us, following Jesus, who is the pioneer and perfector of our faith? Through that dream is the way and the truth and the life of the One who is both very far away, beyond our grasping, and very near, to hold us up and lead us on.

We live in the land of promise.

The most precisely regulated social order that I’ve experienced was junior high school. The building itself was a forbidding, huge, gray concrete thing with tiny windows and permanent streaks down the sides so that it always looked as if it had been in a drizzle. We had heard that it was originally built as a prison. That made sense.

Life had been pretty simple until the seventh grade. Now we had to learn how to change classes, remember locker combinations and adjust to different teachers and to having homerooms. That was hard enough, but the real dangers lurked in the unwritten rules. I remember two major commandments from which, as far as I could tell, hung all the law and the prophets: (1) At all times, except in PE, girls were supposed to wear very pointed, expensive shoes called piccolinos that my mother did not want to pay for and that hurt a lot; (2) seventh graders would be ruined forever if they went into a ninth-grade bathroom, a catastrophe which I fervently wished to avoid. We were warned that if we went in there, we’d be "flushed."

At any rate, the trouble with being a seventh grader is that "they" make the rules before you get there. Your days are spent scrambling to figure out those rules so that you can get yourself accepted. But when you are struggling to find your place, it is hard to have the will or the perspective to decide which rules deserve to be followed. It is hard to know what to care about and what not to care about. So there you are, scrambling, always worrying about making a fool of yourself. Always praying for the day when you will be a ninth grader and get to make other people nervous.

This understanding of social power -- whose power we live under and how to get power and why we need power -- becomes a life stance for some of us.

But there is another way. There is a larger, richer world than my experience at Bailey Junior High. In today’s gospel, Jesus goes to supper with some churchpeople. They are trying to figure him out and decide where he fits in, if indeed he does fit in. They think probably riot, since they’ve heard about all the ignorant and gauche and downright disrespectful-to-the-Sabbath things he’s done. They watch him very closely, but instead of trying to make polite conversation and fit in, Jesus has the gall to watch them.

A small grin plays across his face as he sees everybody jockey for a place at the table. Dining hierarchy is, after all, deadly serious business: priests at the top, then Levites, then other people according to rank. If people eat at the wrong place, then there’s no telling what else will fall apart. (Remember the civil rights lunch counter sit-ins of the 1960s.) After carefully watching guests do their subtle ballet of who should sit higher than whom, Jesus says, "Whoa. Why don’t you try this? Head for the lowest seat available; then your host will say in front of everybody, ‘Friend, come up higher,’ which would be a very satisfying experience."

The dinner crowd mulls it over. They have to admit that Jesus has come up with a pretty good idea. Of course, it is hard to trust Jesus with important issues like supper hierarchy because he is known to have terrible taste in dinner companions. He always sits at the tacky end of the table with those who do not have place cards and are not even on the seating charts. He sits with the low and the left-out and -- what is worse -- he seems to have a ball.

Sure enough. While they are thinking about his suggestion of a new, potentially dramatic and useful approach to dining entrances ("After you"; "No, after you"; "No, really . . .") Jesus comes up with a terrible idea. From the middle of the crowd of rather unsavory-looking characters that he has decided to sit with, Jesus calls out to the people at the best table, "And the next time you have people to dinner, don’t ask those who can pay you back. Don’t ask anybody who can do you any favors. Ask the poor who won’t know how much money you spent on the hors d’oeuvres, only that they are delicious. Ask the crippled and the lame who won’t be dancing around worrying about which chair to choose, but will be grateful to sit down. Ask the blind, who won’t be watching over your shoulder to see who else is coming. Ask the powerless. Ask the empty. You won’t believe what a party you will be letting yourself in for.

The sophisticated crowd, the ones in the black ties using the right forks and saying, "Oh, no more for me. . . I don’t care for any," are appalled. The elegant ones who know their place and know the rules look way down the table at the smiling man in the center of a ragtag party of hungry people feasting, "caring for" every morsel, singing, telling stories, crying or laughing until the tears stream down their faces. The ones who know just what to do and where to be and how not to make fools of themselves, they watch and they wonder. What in heaven’s name is going on at the other end of the table?

Communion is going on. The deaf are buttering the biscuits for the blind. The leper goes to get more strawberry shortcake for the lame. And the poor toast the broken-hearted with fine, full-bodied wine.

The evening grows late. Etiquette lessons are over. Time to move on. Jesus stands up, and the one-eyed, crooked-legged, gap-toothed crowd stands with him. They are having a ball, the time of their lives, and they will follow him on and on because everywhere he is, there is a feast. And there is room for everybody at the table, nobody cares who sits where, and everybody shares in the abundance.

It really does beat Bailey Junior High.

The deacons of a well-off parish announced that they would give grocery vouchers to strangers who dropped by the church office. The vouchers could be used for food, but were "not valid for alcohol, lottery tickets or tobacco." The congregation was thrilled. Cash handouts were making them uncomfortable. No one wanted to see his greenbacks plunked down at a liquor store; no one wanted to be an enabler. But no one wanted to refuse assistance either, and here was a way to help that really helped. Feeling peevish one day, I asked what a deacon would do if a stranger didn’t want groceries but was instead itching to rent The Sound of Music, or tour the city on an air-conditioned bus. What if a guy asks for three bucks for carnations to brighten the corner where he lives -- maybe stick ‘em in a gin bottle some other church had "enabled" him to buy? The conversation went downhill fast.

My fault; there was no need to be flip. The deacons were trying to be prudent. Besides, pastors tell me that needy strangers who drop by their offices rarely indicate a hankering for video rental or sightseeing, and they aren’t into home decorating. They want money. Odds are they’ll guzzle or gamble whatever they get. So, if vouchers nudge even one of them toward leafy green vegetables (and even if the rest scalp those vouchers and head straight to Louie’s), the congregation should feel good about its ministry.

It’s bad stewardship to waste cash on con artists; it’s worse to harm people by supporting addictions -- or, now that I think of it, by omitting red meat from that list of exclusions. The deacons acted with good intentions. And optimistically. It was the thing to do. I can’t help feeling, however, that it was unseemly to be so darned tickled about it. Privileged people (and I don’t mean just the well-to-do) should resist slipping into the habit of self-congratulation. Whenever wherewithal shapes the moral terrain and chooses the terms of compassion toward the "less fortunate," we might at least have the good sense to be a little embarrassed -- do what we think is best, but do it kneeling.

Lazarus was one beggar who really could have used a voucher. He was starving, lusting after Dives’s garbage. Now Luke’s parable lacks the sort of data that people like to have when deciding whether and how to help. It doesn’t say, for example, if Lazarus was deserving or lazy, drug-addicted, mentally ill, or a good Joe down on his luck. We don’t know whether he cornered Dives with pathetic spiels every time he left the house, or whether he just lay there, annoyingly mute, day after day. All we know is that he was at the gate, sick and hungry. And that, Luke seems to say, is all we need to know to predict the reversal ahead.

Not too many details about Dives, either. Did he invite friends over to laugh and point, have his goons lean on Lazarus to scare him off, gag at the sight of the dogs licking his sores? We don’t know whether he was a cold man with habitually averted eyes who never saw the beggar at all or whether he did notice, maybe said a prayer for a sorry case, but stuck to his policy of never giving anything directly to street people. We know only that he was rich, dressed well, ate sumptuously. And that, Luke seems to say, is all we need to know to predict the reversal ahead.

Anyone who reads the Gospels half-awake is not shocked by that reversal: Jesus is unnervingly repetitious about the mortal risks the wealthy run. Finally, in Luke 18, the disciples complain, "But [if what you say is true], how can the rich be saved?" There’s something else in the Lazarus story that seems odd, however: Dives, up to his neck in

flames, hasn't figured out that the reversal is for real and for good. There is no way out, even for him.

Of course, it’s not lost on him that he’s suffering, nor that his fortune and his fine Egyptian underwear have, literally, been shot to hell. Surely he’s sorry now that he’s failed to do right by that beggar. But even unspeakable retribution has not undone the self-beguilement that makes it easy to sin. His wherewithal is gone, but its stubborn residue remains: unconscious entitlement, reflex self-assertion and (ridiculous in the circumstances) a blithe optimism. Privilege clings to Dives, even in hell.

"Send Lazarus to help me," he pleads. It is not an idle line. It betrays habits of control. Dives still believes, remarkably, that he can command and expect a response. His obdurate assumptions about what’s best and who deserves what have made him insensible to his situation. He continues to locate himself and others in the old geography of earned or innate worth. Lazarus is a man he should have helped, but it still wouldn’t be wise to give him cash.

Lazarus is at best a servant. You can send for him with a curt command to refresh a damned but nonetheless important person who, because he is who he is, ought not to suffer, even now, the unrelenting thirst of the unsuccored poor. You can send him off to warn heedless brothers about the fate they’re courting. It’s never too late (God wouldn’t be so cruel) -- a wink of the eye, an exception for folks in the network. . .

But Abraham smashes this illusion; his reply is terrible and true: Some outcomes cannot be influenced. Some chasms cannot be crossed. Some things harden. There is a point of no return. Even Abraham cuts no ice with a God determined to be just.

How, then, can we privileged be saved? Luke has nothing new to say. We have Moses and the prophets and the Spirit to fix our hearts and minds on Jesus, who lives. We could listen to them.

Devout Christians often appropriate the Bible’s language and patterns to frame their spiritual experiences. When feeling dry or abandoned, we speak of exile or desert sojourns. Prodded to an unknown destination, we invoke the memory of a wandering Aramaean. After long vigils, when we finally know, we say we’ve heard a still, small voice. Summoned by a Presence, we talk of Moses and a burning bush. All alone, with dreams of swindled brothers hampering sleep, or when God commands us first to go and then obstructs the way, or in a limping morning sharp with extra light, we speak of wrestling with an angel, of blessings, of brand new names.

This is a good way of taking intimate possession of scripture, but it is not hazard-free. When we use the Bible’s stories like shorthand for the movements of our souls, we sometimes also narrow their concerns and tame their provocations. Once, for instance, during a Bible study, a successful man confided that he was experiencing Job’s despair. Group members braced themselves for the worst. It turned out that the town’s most sought-after preschool had rejected his toddler’s application. Although the man was upset, he should have kept Job’s name out of it.

Thankfully, most people are not so self-involved. And, in the end, the particular way each of us domesticates the Bible to fit our inner lives isn’t the biggest issue. What’s important is that scripture is not meant primarily to fit or foster individual inner lives -- not in the modern sense, anyway. It is meant first for shaping, celebrating, instructing, warning and vexing the life of a people, a community chosen to show God’s glory to the world. To be sure, individuals are commanded to cultivate the holiness breathing in scripture; but that striving takes place in a context larger, longer, more diverse and more vital than the small precinct of a private soul. "Alone to the Alone" is gibberish to the Bible. Its witness is finally corporate, its stories "mine" because its people are.

In an age of self-referent individualism, it’s not often that we get a chance to enter the evocative amplitude of a communal sensibility, that time-confounding solidarity our biblical ancestors presupposed. A friend of mine who teaches world cultures in junior high recently did. His class was studying ways in which personal, familial and communal memories create identity and belonging. In one exercise, he asked students to share their earliest recollection. The answers came as you might expect -- my dog, riding a pony, my mom, the cottage at the lake. But then it was the Jewish kid’s turn. Without pausing, Mark Shapiro said, "Abraham." Angels descending sucked air from the room. Had 12 other kids not been yelling, "Abraham who?," the teacher would have cast himself in terror to the floor. As it was, he hardly breathed. Who knew little Mark was part of a people?

When the authors of Genesis shaped the story of Jacob at Penuel, they did so in part to account for the new name the patriarch received after besting God in combat. "Your name is not Jacob any longer; you are Israel, for you fought with God and humans and prevailed." Jacob’s new name was not just for him. Claimed by his children and their children, it became the spacious name of a chosen people, and Jacob became a "corporate personality."

Thus, as later scriptures attest, Jacob’s contentiousness is Israel’s stormy history with Yahweh. His refusal to let God go is the people clinging to the covenant. God’s blessing is their very existence. However personal it was -- intimate, mysterious, life-changing -- God’s ambush of Jacob at Jabbok was not a private experience. It was also his people’s; or, as one scholar puts it, such stories of the past were "about them in an earlier embodiment." You are Israel, God said to Jacob; and we are too.

When Jacob reached the river and sent everything he had across ahead of him, we were there too -- alone, stripped, agile, ready for anything, and desperately afraid. When a man appeared and fought with him all night, we felt the sweaty grasp of a God mortally engaged, both enemy and friend. And when he hit Jacob with a cheap shot, we too went slack, wounded as much by all our old treacheries as by our going to the mat with God. When Jacob gained the upper hand and the blessing, we prevailed with him, but it was not a victory; we still knew nothing of God’s name. We were lucky just to have survived. And when the sun came up on Jacob and he realized that the face most to be feared was not his brother’s but God’s, we too marveled that the worst that could ever happen was over; relieved, we crossed the river to Esau, dragging our leg like a prize.

And now we know -- because we were there and it happened to us -- that God does not despise us for our supplanting and deceit, but forever ambushes our lives with new chances; that God does not renege on promises made even under duress; that God may slip away at daybreak, but never abandons us; that God can render us vulnerable to all our fast-approaching Esaus, the siblings we robbed of birthrights with whom we must make peace; that the gracious reunion of sinners and sinned-against is the blessing of God.

You are Israel. How our narrowed hearts expand at this announcement! What a long memory we acquire, what panoramas open, what a knowing hope presides over our lives! What deep water we wade in! What a great and rambling house we live in, with our father, ancient Abraham; with Christ, the first-born brother; with mothers and sisters of every faithless, faithful age.