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When I became a seminary administrator, a colleague at another school gave me this advice: "People always act from self-interest. When you approach them with a plan, they’ll invariably ask themselves, ‘What’s in it for me?’ Figure out the answer to that before you propose anything, and approach issues accordingly." Pared to its core, it seemed that my job was to outfox selfish louts bent on advancing their own agendas.

I discovered that my colleague was only partly right. If people acted only from simple self-interest all the time, things would be easy. But it’s more complicated than that. We’re all impelled by a bewildering array of interests, contradictions and passions (self-interest being the friskiest, but not always the strongest), most of which we do not know and never name.

In such a case, you don’t get far psyching people out and playing to what you find. The maze of motives thwarts you every time. The most you can do is make it OK for people to muddle along the best they can, at their own pace, and intervene occa-sionally to keep them focused. The trick is not so much to outfox as to out-wait. Most of the time, the ragged human convoy of divergent perceptions, piqued honor, high-minded posturing, insecurity, good humor and basic generosity will wend its way to insight and accomplishment.

I could have opened my Bible to learn this lesson. Take the story of Naaman in 2 Kings. A proud man muddles toward health, toward a restorative knowledge of God and himself. But he makes progress only by ragged fits and starts. He has a clear self-interest -- a cure for the disease that threatens his career, his place in human company, his very life. The people who care about him appeal successfully to that self-interest, but the pull of other passions almost derails him. Naaman craves respect almost more than he wants health. He is so sure he knows what he needs, he almost refuses what God wants to give.

Almost. But not quite. When he doesn’t get the attention he thinks is his due, God waits, letting him vent and strut. No lightning bolt consumes him in mid-rant, no disapproving angel descends. God waits until Naaman acquits himself of the odd human propensity to work against one’s own good. And when, after stalking off, he relents, we see in him what God has seen all along -- a man of faith.

And so it was all along. We’d be wrong to regard his healing and conversion as something completely new, a miracle. What God waits for in Naaman is the fitful progress of a transformation under way in Naaman even before he sets foot on the soil of Samaria or in the puny Jordan -- a slender opening, first apparent when the great warrior takes advice from women and (how could it have been otherwise?) subdues his disgust at needing help from an enemy’s god.

Grace has established a pulse in him -- irregular, perhaps, but not arrested by his unchecked rage. When he finally gives up, lets go, obeys his servants and washes in the water, there isn’t a lot more healing for the river to do. All that remains is for Naaman to meet, knee-deep, the One who engineers his victories and presides over his life. Awash in the revelation, Naaman, "a great man" from the start, becomes Yahweh’s man for good.

Naaman has come a long, ragged way. The man who derided the stupid river in Israel now packs his mules with Samaria’s dirt so that at home he may worship on holy ground. There’s still a long way left to go. It’s not as if Naaman will never scream or sulk again. For now, however, God seems to think he’s made enough progress. Maybe that’s why Elisha does not invoke Yahweh’s awesome jealousy when Naaman, sensitive to the compromise entailed in serving his king, asks for permission to bow on occasion to his master’s god. It’s as if Yahweh takes whatever Yahweh can get. Given the erratic character of the human procession toward the holy and the deadly pitfalls lining the road, God is not touchy about the now-and-then concession to the status quo.

You could scour this story for more important theological themes, and you’d find plenty. You could also point out that this Old Testament incident is hardly as dramatic or wrenching as, say, David’s nasty detour with Bathsheba. But weighty theological issues and unspeakable depravity are not, thankfully, part of everyone’s daily struggle. Dealing with human weak-nesses is. Muddling along is too. It’s what we do, and we hope God will have mercy on us for it.

We know Naaman. We know all the irritating and endearing, weak and tenacious behaviors in this story -- altruistic aims, big ideas, bad tempers; smelling a rat, taking offense, throwing tantrums, pleading and cajoling, seeing reason, changing your mind, eating crow. We’ve all asked for brazen blessings on unavoidable compromises. So to watch God leave Nan-man alone while never leaving his side is a huge relief. It is also a strong antidote to perfectionism, a reproach to a thousand daily judgmental impulses, a cause for gratitude and praise.

God outwaits us while in weakness healing begins. God outwaits us while we locate the fissures of mercy in the heaped debris of fear and anger -- and learn to breathe the Spirit’s air. We change and grow, believe and love by grace, the best we can. We are going to the river, whatever the reason or unreason that moves us; we are going to wade right in. Knee-deep in unaccountable love, we’ll meet the One who gives us all our ragged victories and presides over our life.

I had a childhood friend whose mother yelled at her a lot. Her mother’s ravings, however, were rarely attached to identifiable offenses. Asked why she was yelling, she’d snarl, "On general principles!" It was a free-form thing. Sometimes she’d yell about real crimes, but Tina was innocent of many of them. Her mother was unbowed. If Tina hadn’t done that particular bad thing, she’d done plenty of others, so the yell would be applied to something Tina had gotten away with.

Once, Tina asked her mom to yell at her for everything, past, present and future, and thus be done with it -- one good yell of five, maybe six days. Had her mother possessed a sense of irony, that could have been a wondrous thing.

Although Tina’s mother was often unfair, my friend and I blame her less now. At 50, an injured attitude is not becoming. At this point in our lives, we have a better understanding of what we’ve done, of the sins we’re capable of committing. This year at Tina’s church, some members want to drop the confession from the weekly service. It’s too depressing, too guilt-inducing, they say. But Tina and I don’t agree with them. We’re willing to say we’re sinners -- not evil, mind you, but habitually self-preoccupied and far less grateful than we should be as people who, although often and deeply hurt, have escaped untold catastrophes.

We’re not guilt-ridden either, although sometimes we feel responsible for everything. Being sinners is just something true about us, not special. It’s a free-form thing, and we have both taken daily to begging God’s mercy, on general principles.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus tells a parable about two men. One is a Pharisee "standing by himself’ in the temple. He’s there to pray, but what he delivers is more a report than a prayer. He’s kept a precise record of his religious temperature and informs God of every change in degree. God is a passive audience whose job is to applaud when the report is done. Overhearing, we learn nothing about who God is, what God does; but we come to know the man.

He believes himself singular: "I am not like the rest." He’s appointed himself monitor of other people’s lives, and when he says he’s not in any way like them, he believes the illusion. His contempt for them is proportionate to his assumption that what he has accomplished, he has accomplished. Full of what he thinks is self-knowledge, he is instead merely self-absorbed; he doesn’t understand that these two things are not the same.

The other man is a tax collector who wants no attention; he stands "far off." Spiritually, he claims no singularity: he’s "a sinner." He lists no deeds, bad or good, for God to punish or approve --although given the profession he’s in, he could easily rattle off dozens of crimes. He could claim that he’s the worst sinner God ever put up with, not like other sinners whose misdeeds are small, hardly worth noting. But he doesn’t mention other people’s lives; he only asks mercy on his.

He is a man who knows himself, what he’s done, what he’s capable of doing. He is, to be sure, abject; but he doesn’t puff himself up with self-loathing, as the Pharisee puffs himself up with self-esteem. All the same, the outward signs of this sinners abjection have real weight; they’re not hollow like the moral man’s overblown speech. Every time the tax collector strikes his heart, he wakes it up a little more from some benumbed illusion. He knows God, too. His unembellished prayer for mercy is a plea for God to act like God.

We are so accustomed to Luke’s ironic reversals that his tag line is almost lost on us. The serious, morally passionate Pharisee goes home on bad terms with God. But this fact remains as unknown to him as his real human condition. The degenerate tax collector goes home "justified." He may not be aware of God’s verdict on him either, but his innocence is the opposite of the Pharisee’s. It’s the holy indifference that transparent people know, the mysterious freedom of the sinner with no secrets from God.

There’s an old saying -- a brazen one, surely -- that people in heaven celebrate their earthly sins throughout eternity. If that’s true, it’s because they know where they’d be without them. (Julien Green’s incisive lines come to mind: "I want to get rid of the sin from my life," says the Christian. "And I will help you," says Pride, "That way, we’ll both have a peaceful time of it.") In the Easter Proclamation at the Great Vigil, Christians praise God not for their good deeds, but for the "happy sin" of Adam -- our sin -- that earned them so great a savior. In the New Testament, even Jesus lines up with sinners for a baptism of repentance, and God declares divine delight in him.

I like to think that the tax collector felt that odd joy in his thumped-upon heart. If we had more imagination in our communities of faith, more irony and more honesty, maybe we would feel the joy too. Then we could be redeemed from our grim failures of Christian instruction in sin and humility -- from an excess or lack of humility that makes us illusion-prone disciples.

Touching can be as routine as a handshake or a high five. It can be as exploitative as lustful pawing, as threatening as a clenched fist. Or, as the Easter account in Luke 24 proclaims, touching can be the means whereby the risen Lord Jesus chooses to make himself known.

After Jesus’ Emmaus appearance, the two disciples hurry back to Jerusalem, where their excited report falls flat. Then Jesus’ sudden appearance scares them out of their wits -- a reaction that would have been ours as well, He shows them his hands and his feet and says, "Touch me and see that it is I myself; for a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have."

Note that none did, however. The story is told carefully, so as not to make faith a tactile matter for a few privileged disciples; instead it conveys a trust in the gospel word of Easter for everyone, for all time.

The resurrected Christ, the text declares, is not the product of the disciples’ overheated imagination. He is no ghost, no apparition. Salvation history has never been woven of gossamer wispiness. In the beginning, as Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel masterpiece portrays it, God touched humanity into being. In Jesus’ ministry the little ones climbed up into his lap in response to his welcoming touch. The lepers, made outcasts by their disease, were restored by his healing touch.

Now comes the crowning work of the Father in raising his Son as "a spiritual body." This reality (described in an oxymoron), which would otherwise confound us and lock us up in endless gnosticism, has become "that which we have seen with our eyes and touched with our hands" (1 John 1:1). Our God is touchable in his Son, who forgives our sins of touch misused as violent assault or loveless abandonment. The Easter Lord gives us back our touch when he invites us to "touch and see."

Touch nurtures. Before birth we were enfolded in our mother’s womb, then nurtured by the milk from her breast, then consoled by a parent’s shoulder, then congratulated on a commencement day. So all of life’s milestones are marked by touch. Many of us take the nurturing touch right into our liturgy, joining hands and embracing others in the passing of the peace of Christ. Never take such touching for granted. Acceptance, encouragement, trust and hope come through in the touch of hand upon hands as the risen Lord touches us through others.

That nurturing touch gets through when nothing else does. I call on Lucille, who can no longer recognize people or speak because of Alzheimer’s disease. But when I touch her hand, she faintly squeezes back. Is it a sympathetic reflex? A sacramental sign that grace still gets through? Both, I think.

Touch reconciles. In Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son, the waiting father does not hold back in tight-lipped reticence, waving a sheet of conditions handed to him by the older brother sulking in the distance. That bear hug of reconciling love says, it all. It speaks of a love strong enough to bear a cross and to say with authority to frightened disciples, "Touch me and see." Through the open arms of forgiven and forgiving people, the deepest wounds are set upon a path of healing.

I see that power at work in pastoral care for those so alienated from each other in faltering marriages that the one can only recoil from the offered hand of the other. These who have shared life’s most intimate and whole-bodied touching cannot touch any more! But signs of breakthrough begin when, after trust is built, each can take my hand as the bearer of Christ’s touch, and allow me to join their hands.

Thus does the Easter Lord keep on inviting, "Touch me and see." That touch surmounts every barrier. Remember the magic moment near the end of the film Driving Miss Daisy: The black chauffeur and the white patrician lady wordlessly clasp their hands in a simple yet profoundly moving gesture. Such moments point to the wonder of reconciliation.

Touch points us to the future. The risen Lord’s invitation to touch and see portends what is yet to come for our bodies. We long for that fulfillment, to embrace the Christ and those long gone from us.

But before all that, our hands are for reaching the hungry, imprisoned, naked, sick and all those in whom Jesus meets us. In prison visits, I see what happens when a visitor leaves the visited. Each places a hand to the glass partition separating them, longing to touch but unable to do so. Seeing that moves me not to take for granted the freedom to clasp another’s hand in the daily rounds of life. The number of hungry folk coming to our church door is rising, and the food pantry boxes in this and other parishes can’t keep up. But ministry moves a notch deeper when there can be a hand on a shoulder and an invitation to sit together and talk about more than a handout. In the hallways of nursing homes across the land, many spend hours wondering if family or friends will ever come to touch their hands. From every side and in the most unexpected ways, the Christ meets us in the call to touch lives that ask so little yet need so much.

Touch sanctifies memory. I have a favorite cup for my morning coffee. It was my mother’s long before it was mine. For years it had its place on the kitchen window sill in my boyhood home. The chip is still on the rim, reminding me of the horseplay my sister and I enjoyed in a time when kids actually washed and dried dishes. My mother’s hands have long since relinquished that flowered coffee cup, but because she was all that she was to me, I can hold it and remember.

We do well to gather our memories around things we can touch, especially baptismal water and the bread and wine of the Easter meal. These sustain us as we journey, hand in hand, with the whole company of the faithful, toward the eternal Easter yet to come..

"Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one."

Jesus prayed these words in the Upper Room on the night of his betrayal, knowing that crucifixion would follow with the coming sunrise. The words are part of his final words, and final words have a history of being intense, focused and passionate. So it was with Jesus. Never before had the disciples heard him pray like this.

That they may be one. For this he would sweat blood, endure mockery and freely lay down his life. To make this brief prayer efficacious, he would rise in Easter glory and in the power of the Holy Spirit be permanently in the world, gathering into "one" the whole people of God. One shepherd, as he had promised, and one flock would follow. The apostolic messengers would proclaim one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of us all, in whom all those made new in the Easter Lord are no longer male or female, slave or free, Jew or gentile, but one in Christ Jesus.

This passage from John is Jesus prayer for what the Father will do for the world through his risen Son through the church. It is not a declaration of what is, but intercession for what shall be. It is not a blueprint for how the oneness will take form, but a plea for the Father’s strong name to protect those who are in the world, hated by the world, yet up to the task (read "sanctified") of doing mission with joy and hope.

Where are we now as we hear that they may be one?

"Are there many Christians out there losing sleep over the scandal of division?" church historian Clifford Nelson has asked. Where are today’s counterparts to the giants who gave us the ecumenical building blocks toward unity in faith and order, life and work of the church: Visser t’ Hooft, Niles, Nygren, Lilje, Newbigin, John XXIII and others who took Jesus’ prayer to heart?

One answer is -- to look in new locations. Look, for example, at Promise Keepers as a demonstration of the Spirit’s pull toward unity in a different way for a different time. Yet another demonstration appears when the Joseph Bernardins of Christendom and the Herman Schaalmans of Judaism publicly seek the common ground of unity that lies in the mystery of the covenants at Sinai and Calvary. And it would be shortsighted to pass over all those ecumenical laborers who work globally and locally in councils and conferences to embody the oneness for which Jesus prayed. 

Nevertheless, that they may be one still haunts as well as inspires. It is wearisome, deadly wearisome, to endure church battles that split not once but repeatedly. The blight of triumphalism, of power games, and the obsession with always being right still throw up huge, offensive roadblocks against Jesus’ prayer. Such sin drags us back to the Upper Room, to dull disciples among whom we now sit, to the grief of our Lord over our tearing apart the seamless robe of unifying love in which he would wrap us.

Yet he comes to us with Easter’s treasure. The tilt of that they may be one is ever forward, toward the coming day when he will bring to fullness the unity we now know in part. Despite the sins which splinter, he protects his own with the Father’s name. The outcome of that they may be one is in his strong hands. There is neither time nor reason for despair.

It is Easter in the church. The Lord Jesus lives to draw us to himself and therefore to each other. We are given signs to read and follow. The ecumenical community at Taizé, that "little springtime" in southeastern France, keeps leavening people across the world for the unity that comes through prayer and worship. The late Henri Nouwen’s ministry brought people together within and outside the faith in the risen Lord he served so winsomely. Madeleine L’Engle’s spiritual gifts are spread wide and deep across every denominational barrier.

Cardinal Bernardin, teacher of life amidst death, was another witness to that they may be one: his legacy blesses us in ways we’ve only begun to recognize. Billy Graham keeps on keeping on as the Word-bearer to millions who enter into Jesus’ prayer by sin confessed and gospel embraced. Above all, week after week in place after place, people gather for the nurture that unifies and equips them for daily mission in the world.

Each hearer and doer of this Easter reading has stories to tell. Mine include 20 years of a weekly gathering with eight or more for breakfast, prayer and an hour with lectionary readings. Diverse as we are denominationally, we attend to the Word and find there a unifying power like no other. My puzzlement over why such weekly oases are not more common was eased when I traveled to another city to preach. There I learned of 17 Protestant and Roman Catholic clergy whose weekly time for breakfast, prayer and textual study is life-giving for ministries that take on poverty, crime, drugs and AIDS.

Such stories beg for hearing and handing on in the mission that is inseparable from the unity for which Jesus prayed. In the name of his Son, God is packing and delivering the power that reconciles and unites what otherwise lies broken.

The prayer that Christ prayed in the Upper Room is still heard. Christ prays ceaselessly for and through the church to the world -- that they may be one, as we are one.

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.. . I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice.

This word of Jesus never grows old, never loses its holding power, even for us of the late 20th century whose closest contact with sheep is the petting zoo for kids. Yes, I know, I know.

I also know that when it comes to speaking one sentence to someone hanging onto life by a thread in a hospital emergency room at 3 AM., "I am the good shepherd . . . who lays down his life for the sheep" is unsurpassed. The Good Shepherd himself makes that word work. He did indeed lay down his life for the world, of his own accord, and has received power from his Father to take it again.

A comment on this text from H. H. Farmer has stayed with voice.me over the years, to the effect that in his suffering and death Jesus was by no means a victim of circumstance, like a windblown leaf whipped about by evil forces. No one took his life from him. He offered it freely. Before the Sanhedrin, Herod and Pilate, he is in control. He declares that they would have no power over him save from on high. He can already see his place at the Father’s right hand of power. These others cannot. They are the excited ones, and thereby the weak ones. With a regal air he speaks of his power to lay down his life and take it again.

Herein lies the power and mystery of the Easter faith, that this risen Lord and faithful Shepherd has done the decisive deed in beating down sin and robbing death of its paralyzing thrall.

He puts his own on the resurrection side of every cross.

I have other sheep that are not of this fold, he said, speaking of the mission in the world. When he spoke these words no one knew of Saul become Paul, or Priscilla and Aquila, or Barnabas and Lydia and Timothy and Stephen and the many more since. But he knew. "They will listen to my voice" is the declarative promise that his good shepherding will open the ears of those who shall hear in faith.

How is that going in our time?

Running through some churches today is the view that the other sheep need entertainment to open their ears. Entertainment evangelism, as currently described, is at best a striving to be all things to all people, at worst an extension of the me-first culture that has little or no room for the question of why the Good Shepherd had to lay down his life for the sheep. He had to lay down his life for us sheep because we wander, fall for phony shepherds and bleat piteously, lost in the far pasture.

Another approach to the other sheep is to straitjacket them. Sheep are, after all, stupid, stubborn and dependent. Pack the whole kingdom and power and glory of the good shepherd into a tight doctrinaire box and stuff the sheep inside, lopping off whatever doesn’t fit. No questions asked and none allowed.

The intention here is not to set up an easy caricature and poke fun at it. It is to warn against the reality of a worldwide fundamentalist impulse bedeviling all major religions. Pat answers to the great questions are attractive in the short term. But they cheapen grace by not asking us to love God and others with the whole mind as well as heart and soul.

Yet one more view of the other sheep is to stereotype them, thinking that church folk all dress, think, talk, act alike. I fall into that trap too. Recently I was called by a funeral director to conduct a funeral where, as he said, three or four at most would be present. I arrived to find the chapel jammed with theater people gathered in remembrance of their fellow actor. Ponytails and lots of leather were in evidence; their stories about the deceased, their songs, verse and readings were done with great style.

After nearly an hour, a woman stepped up to explain why I was asked to come and do what I do. Last summer the deceased man’s mother had died and I had the graveside service. As I was going to another event not far from the cemetery immediately after the committal, I wore a sport coat that is the greenest green I’ve ever seen, let alone worn. The son said to his friend after I left the graveside, "Any preacher who can wear a sport coat like that can’t be all bad; when I die get him for my funeral." So she did.

We’re all given to stereotyping people for purposes of exclusion. But when eyes are fixed on this Good Shepherd who knows that the other sheep are not lost sheep but his sheep, the blinders fall away and the church gets really interesting.

In the past five or six decades a sea-change has occurred in the Christian mission. For the first time since St. Paul answered the Macedonian call and the Christian gospel began its westward spread, the center of balance in the mission is not the West. Black Africa, South Korea, mainland China and Central America have become the new centers of gathering the other sheep.

The mission is everywhere, and we must drop the language of home church and mission field. We do well to listen to the voices of Christians at work in law firms, medical labs, computer research, retail sales, union shops, construction sites, police and fire departments, and cab drivers on nighttime duty to get a feel for what it means in our time that the shepherding Christ has his other sheep in these places and the watering holes where they gather for TGIF. These seriously faithful people know that finding the other sheep is no snap.

But it’s happening, mirabile dictu! And it shall continue to happen, till all the sheep are within the fold of the one Shepherd, the Good Shepherd.

. . . the whole creation has been groaning in travail together until now . . . but the Spirit intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words . . .

In Romans 8, St. Paul’s witness leads into the mysterious depths of the Paraclete’s ceaseless intercession for the church and all creation. Like a woman in labor, both church and creation long for the new life to arrive. How do we begin to understand a truth of this scope?

Recently I was on an island in Lake Michigan. In a house nestled in dense woods, my reverie on the vast sweep of Romans 8 was interrupted by a bat zooming around the room. Instinctively I reached for a tennis racket to zap this black-winged thing commonly regarded as rabid, a blood sucker and a hair nester. I missed with the tennis racket but secured it with a waste basket and delivered it out the door into the nighttime sky

Here was an unexpected moment of exegesis. This tiny creature, part of the whole creation in travail, was guided away from my lethal swats by its sonar. Much of our scientific mastery of echolocation is learned from bats. Their astounding capacity to delay ovulation from fall until spring holds clues about human fertility. Their arteries remain cholesterol-free even though they eat their weight in fatty insects. We humans are the problem for bats and for the rest of creation as it awaits liberation for which the Spirit intercedes, works and groans with sighs too deep for words.

Here is potent Pentecost truth for the church. As Christians, our motive for earth care is the Holy Spirit’s prayer and restorative work on behalf of the earth that supports us, the air we breathe, the water essential for life. Grace embraces nature, as Joseph Sittler kept teaching us. Human sin -- our sin, my sin and the tennis-racket solution for bats -- all spill over to the massive despoiling of nature.

The pleading of the Spirit intensifies as leaky tankers spew millions of gallons of oil into ocean waters. The Spirit’s groaning must be heard above the clang of 2.5 million cans and bottles tossed out every hour, each aluminum can taking 500 years to decompose. In the U.S. alone, we produce enough garbage every day to fill the New Orleans Superdome to the roof twice -- and half of it is recyclable. A cigarette flicked out of a car window sets a forest ablaze and thousands of acres of precious timber go up in smoke. On and on it goes. By a measure and at a pace that would have stunned St. Paul, the whole creation groans and travails.

It is the will of God to put his mighty arm under the fractured, threatened creation -- not just to preserve it from rapacious humans, but to set it free and us with it. This is the saving plan of God already at work in the gospel of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ our Lord. Foolish as it may seem, the risen Lord, through the Spirit, sustains those who are weary, indeed a whole creation that is weary.

The scope of the Spirit’s work is as wide as the universe, yet not so cosmic that it cannot find a home in every heart where the gospel word opens the way. The miracle of Pentecost, with its testimony to the Spirit’s calling, gathering, enlightening and sanctifying people, creates a partnership between church and creation. Now that Pentecost has come, the primal divine command to have dominion over creation requires the church to get on with good stewardship of the earth. We do so not to the neglect of the gospel, but because we believe it and act upon it.

As those baptized into the new creation, we can reclaim St. Francis of Assisi’s vocabulary in speaking of brother earth and sister fire. Psalm 65 sings of fields, meadows, sky, mountains and the fecundity of God’s good earth, teaching us to rejoice over it and praise God for it. Ironically, the Puritans who came to the New World saw the land as a howling wilderuess; it was from those they called "pagan primitives" that they learned to husband its resources. Too often since, the vast richness of our land has been the target of unconscionable greed rather than God’s gift for which we are accountable.

Our calling is to join the Spirit in caring for the creation and praying for faithfulness in a world that both serves and threatens creation with technology. Our view of Spirit-filled people must include Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity, and the 1,300 congregations who join the Spirit’s pleading for decent housing for the impoverished urban poor. Charismatics include not only those gifted with tongues, prophecy and healing, but Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, whose teaching of viable methods of food production in the Third World has spared many from starvation. Arthur Simon, founder of Bread for the World, is another partner with the Spirit. This network of Christians continues to plead, advocate and lobby Congress for butter instead of guns.

The ranks of those who respond to the Spirit’s sighs are never overcrowded, but because it is God the Holy Spirit who silently, ceaselessly works, there is hope. Gerard Manley Hopkins speaks of that hope in his poem "God’s Grandeur":

Abide. It’s an old-fashioned word. Highway motel signs read "Stay here," not "Abide with us tonight." Baseball announcers don’t sum up an inning with "One hit, a walk and two abiding on base." Nor do Northwestern University football fans breathe easier because Gary Barnett is abiding as head coach. Of the 17 uses of abide listed in the Oxford dictionary, eight are obsolete. The word seems to belong to another time.

"To abide" has to do with persevering, continuing, lasting, staying with it. No wonder the term is rare. What it means is rare, in this or any time.

Its absence diminishes us. Friendships break off. So do treaties between nations. Business contracts become tissue thin. Marriage covenants, often begun at altars where this passage from John is heard, are broken in divorce. God alone knows the river of tears and dysfunction set in motion by the absence of abiding in marriage, the foundation of human community.

The Gospel lesson for the fifth Sunday of Easter takes us to the night of Jesus’ betrayal. Surrounding him were the 12 who would, each one, fail to abide with him in his greatest hour of need. Once again, "abide" seemed the last word to risk on Judas, Peter and the rest.

Jesus began his Upper Room discourse with the venerable image of the vine and branches, a favorite reference to Israel in the scriptures he knew. As the prophets so often lamented, Israel repeatedly failed to be fruitful branches that grow from the vine. The disciples would fail too. As do disciples now.

Abiding takes its strength from the Christ who went to the cross for all of us in our sins of perfidy. Now that he is risen, abiding rests on belonging -- he in us and we in him. Everything changes when abiding is not an abstract ideal but a response to his offer. Abide in me as I abide in you! First his grace, then our commitment. It is the ongoing Easter miracle that Jesus works us into the astonishing new creation ushered in by the raising of God’s Son. He abides, lasts, endures, continues, hangs in, holds on, to us and in us. He does so despite our forgetting that we have been baptized into his life. "Abide with me," we sing, and keep on singing, knowing that our flawed staying with him won’t stop his abiding in us.

Abide is a where word. We abide where the Lord gathers us, even two or three of us, in his name. More than most of us realize, the powerful currents of contemporary life, especially those that turn the grace of Christ into one more consumer item, make resilient commitment to him and each other an ever tougher call. Ask clergy and parishioners who have been together over time if abiding through thick and thin in congregations is getting any easier.

All the more reason, then, to anchor our abiding as the community of faith in the Easter gospel proclaimed and lived, and to draw deeply from the well of baptismal grace and the nurture of the Eucharist to meet the hunger for things lasting. Looking back on 42 years of pastoring in the same congregation, with a hundred or more new member classes behind me, I bear witness to the sufficiency of Christ to call and gather his own in our time. As essential as lively biblical, doctrinal and liturgical catechesis is the desire to connect with God and people in ways that have depth and can last. The miracle of it is that those connections take root, grow up and mature into fruitful living that binds people together across otherwise impassible boundaries.

Abide is a when word. It includes times when the presence of the indwelling Christ is known in the wondrous fullness of deep-down joy. That can range from the "Et Resurrexit" of Bach’s B Minor Mass to the hands-raised "Hallelujah" of a storefront revival, from the embrace of reconciled enemies to a glimpse of the world charged with the grandeur of God as the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins caught it.

Along with these radiant moments comes the abiding that is neither towering nor spare but steadily evident in the humdrum and hand-over-hand routines of our waking hours. While it may look uneventful, it is anything but. To abide is to leaven the world with steadiness in one’s calling without sliding into the blight of taking health, sight, hearing, mind and belief for granted. It is remembering what Psalm 121 teaches us: the Lord will keep your going out and your coming in from this time on and forevermore.

There are moments when abiding is sustained through times of numbing grief. Some months ago a young man was lost in Alaska during a terrible blizzard. His parents made the long trip to America’s northernmost town, searched in vain for his body, discovered the shelter that would have saved him, experienced the high of the four-hour funeral service and the low of leaving with wrenching questions left unanswered. They were bone-weary within and without as they started home.

During a midnight layover in the Seattle airport they saw a couple just arriving from China with two newly adopted infant girls. Despite their exhaustion, they offered words of welcome and good wishes to the couple, seeing in the arrival of those infants a sign of what they could see only by a faith that outlasts heartache: their son’s arrival into that life prepared by the Easter Lord. Such faithful seeing comes from faithful abiding.

In a world trying to make it on fitful sound bites and the faddishness of seasonal obsessions, is there a better gift we can offer than abiding, he in us and we in him?

For well over a thousand years November 1, or All Saints Day, has been marked in red on the Christian calendar. The meaning behind the celebration speaks to our time, especially when distinguishing between saints and celebrities, and remembering Karl Barth’s word about reading the Bible with the daily newspaper in hand. The latter tells of celebrities, the former offers saints.

We always have celebrities and heros/heroines with us. Too much with us sometimes, as the glare of publicity reveals more human frailties than media hype can cover up. I live in the Chicago area, where Michael Jordan has been rightly touted as the best at basketball on earth. But all the ruckus about the crumbling Bulls empire makes celebrity status a shaky business.

Celebrities distance themselves from us by their fame, whether it lasts 15 minutes or a lifetime. But saints share our common ground and open a place in the circle of forgiven sinners.

This is the standard New Testament designation for saints: the forgiven who know it, act upon it and live by grace without angling for stained-glass-window status. The late William Stringfellow described saints as "those men and women who relish the event of life as a gift and who realize that the only way to honor such a gift is to give it away.

The marvel is that we imperfect and deeply flawed human beings can be called by a God who alone is holy. From God’s blinding, unapproachable holiness, God has come in the One who is like us in all ways except sin. In Jesus Christ, crucified and risen for the world, saints are in the making -- past, present and ongoing. It’s not hype that sanctifies. The gospel is the power whereby the Spirit of God makes people not just nice but new in heart, word and deed.

The Gospel from Luke 6 offers Jesus’ template of what that difference looks like as his regal sway takes hold. Called the Sermon on the Plain, it is a third shorter than the better-known Sermon on the Mount from Matthew’s Gospel. It contains the "Woe to you" admonitions as well as the "Blessed are you" beatitudes. Here Jesus addresses his followers-who-would-be-saints. It is not a template for how society works. It is the pattern of life where saints are in the making.

The details of Luke’s setting are significant. Jesus had come down from the hills where he was praying. On the plain a great crowd of disciples and a greater crowd of sick and troubled people surrounded him. Picture desperate people jostling, pushing, begging, clamoring, demanding, all reaching for his touch of healing.

It is a sight more alarming than inspiring. There is nothing safe and tidy about people grasping for their only hope to be rid of the pain, the paralysis or the weakness once and for all. Taking his place in the midst of that brawling crowd, Jesus "looked up" at the disciples. Apparently they were bystanders, as I would have been too. They were not with Jesus, kneeling down in the wretched thick of it, but off to the side as onlookers.

Saints are sideline onlookers who are moved to "come down" with Jesus to where the needs are raw and the realities untidy. Saints are not always serene, dauntless and inexhaustible. But those pronounced blessed by Jesus are able to stay with him in the thick of it because that is where he is continually found. The saintly ones remember that the kingdom belongs to the impoverished before God, who hunger for his fullness and weep when his righteousness is spurned. The harsh kickback of reviling and defaming goes with the territory; saints are tough-skinned and can’t be taken completely off guard.

Saints are given a clarity about what passes for the good life but is phony at the core. They can hear Jesus’ pronouncement on those who would appear to have anything but woes: "you who are rich. . . who are full now. . . who laugh now. . . who are well spoken of by all." Why woes on these? The good life portrayed here is detached from its foundation in God. These ideals of life have become idols, ends in themselves which finally bring not blessing but blight. Thus saints are given the backbone to warn with woes as well as uplift with blessings.

God’s people long for a closer look at great souls from the past and the enduring example of their lives. The church must not suffer the amnesia that withholds that treasure. I have seen that interest come alive as I lead lay retreats in which people meet Augustine, Julian of Norwich, Clement of Alexandria, Teresa of Ávila, Martin Luther, C. F. Beyers Naudé, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and others. They keep coming back for more.

Not to be missed and much closer at hand are the saints of the rank and file of daily life. See them teaching in classrooms of public high schools in our cities. See them in hospital emergency rooms, serving with skill and embracing with compassion someone who has just learned that a spouse of 60 years has died on an operating room table. See them in retirement homes, speaking to the fragile ones who sit, mute and staring, in the wheelchair line in the hallway. See them in high school kids who tutor youngsters or rehab slum houses. See them in auto repair shops where customers receive an honest job at an honest price.

And, Deo gratias, see a saint in the face of a forgiven sinner who meets you in the mirror.

Late in Jesus' ministry, the disciples stood with him on Jerusalem’s holiest ground and stared at the stunningly beautiful temple, Herod’s masterpiece of appeasement of the Jews.

It was a sight to stir the soul.. Though the temple has been gone since 70 AD., the site still stirs wonder as the foundation stones remind today’s pilgrims of the splendor that once was there. Anyone with a sense of history cannot view Mt. Zion and yawn.

But Jesus broke into his disciples’ reverie of pious amazement with a real shocker, a blunt, prophetic pronouncement: all the magnificence before their eyes would one day be rubble, he declared. In less than 40 years, the temple would be a smoking ruins.

Jesus turned away from marble stones and golden adornments (Josephus describes opulent vestments for a thousand priests) and spoke of ominous yet hopeful things soon to come, things which would test the soul’s endurance and at the same time help the disciples "gain [their] souls."

Jesus spoke of the soul not as fixed but "gained." The soul, he said, is not a gauzy abstraction fit only for occasional armchair speculation. The soul is that inward capacity in which the divine and human connect in a lifelong process of anchoring and maturing and enduring—enduring that will not flinch in the face of suffering.

The temple tour had turned serious. What began with architectural admiration became a prophetic glimpse of what discipleship would cost those who would bear his name. It would bring public persecution and betrayal by those closest in the circle of family and friends. Six centuries earlier, Jeremiah had stood in the first temple Solomon built on this same site and declared its doom. Now the long-promised Messiah-prophet had

come and taken his place in a temple rebuilt for the third time. His very presence was the visitation of God. To reject the divine reign he brought would be to bring down the judgment of God. To endure under his gracious reign would be "to gain your souls."

Gaining of soul is a phrase that says a lot about discipleship as the year 2000 nears. One perennial temptation for the church is to equate the kingdom with beautiful stonework and adornments.

But another temptation these days, increasingly evident, is the curiosity over signs and speculations about what God is up to as the calendar turns from 1999 to 2000. Computer technology is vexed with the Y2K conundrum. Newspapers report that one bank was so paralyzed by the technical difficulties this raised that the board of directors sold out to a parent corporation. As 2000 draws nearer, Christian theology must walk a line between obscurantist claims and total neglect of millennial themes—a path not always clear.

Several months ago a New Yorker article described the sensation among ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem caused by a Mississippi cattle breeder who noted an unblemished red heifer in his herd, read Numbers 19 and declared that the animal was a sign that the temple must be rebuilt in preparation for the millennial reign of Jesus -- regardless of the escalation of mayhem such exegesis in action would heap upon Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Holy City.

There is a better way, an alternative to the seduction detours posed by the signs against which Jesus warned. Yes, the New Testament has its puzzling apocalyptic passages. But the clear and overwhelming witness is to Jesus himself as the new and living way, whose death and resurrection are decisive. The key to the End Time is the cross, not heifers and stones and rebuilt altars. Disciplined discipleship is what to look for as 2000 comes along, and it will remain the mark to look for in all the years to follow.

The great gain for the soul begins in baptismal dying with Christ to sin and being raised daily with him in faith. Our calling now and always is not to sugarcoat the gospel as entertaining diversion from a writhing world but as the power from God for sharing in its convulsions as people of indestructible hope. Wherever that may lead in daily vocation, in congregational commitments and in costly service to those waylaid on some Jericho road, the outcome is the same: gaining of soul, deepening and building the character which is tested by endurance and drawn forward in hope.

Magnificent buildings. Megacongregations or mini-size. Liturgies old and new. All these, like the temple of old, are impressive and can point in the right direction as long as the right direction is discipleship with endurance.

Jesus is no stranger to the horrific forces still on the prowl in the world we know. Their terror, whether cosmic or personal, is overcome by the assurance that he knows his own, even the number of the hairs on their heads. He went to the cross to make that assurance trustworthy. He holds his own fast through the worst. It is not stoic determination that gets us "gain of soul," but faithful reliance on his promise of grace sufficient in weakness, a grace that works in everything for the gain of the soul.

This End Time truth about gaining one’s soul comes through in these words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer on suffering, written shortly before the Nazis hanged him in April 1945:

When Jesus took his place in the temple, he became the target in a deadly game of "Gotcha."

Those who owned the power rightly perceived Jesus as a threat, and came at him with entrapment questions about his authority. Aided by spies who helped build an atmosphere of hostility, they pressed the loaded question about taxes to Caesar, yes or no. Jesus answered the questions with questions. He had no illusions about the end point of this hypocritical religious hardball. The cross was out there on the horizon.

Next came the Sadducees, with a Gotcha ploy that, ironically enough, turned on a belief they rejected, the resurrection of the dead (cf. Mark 12:18, Acts 23:8). No matter. Any turf will do when the goal is to destroy the opponent.

The Sadducees came out of the priestly cast in ancient Israel, and over time gained control over the rituals in the Jerusalem temple, a position which also made them power brokers in affairs of state. When the temple was destroyed in 70 A.D. they disappeared without a trace.

This was their game. They asked Jesus about the hypothetical widow of a man with seven brothers. When he dies, she marries a brother. When he dies, she marries another brother, and so on, one after another. Whose wife will she be in the resurrection?

That clincher question was asked with a deliberate slowing of the words, each one poison-tipped. It was spoken with eyes narrowed, arms folded in an accusatory pose and an unmistakable sneer across the face. Gotcha is not a game: it’s a weapon.

Jesus answered evenly, speaking important truth about the earthbound nature of marriage which will give way to the greater life promised to the children of’ the resurrection (that beautiful phrase, lost on those with no ears to hear). He added testimony from Moses, who in the presence of the burning bush confessed the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God of the living, "to whom all of them are alive" (v. 38). That is who God is, Jesus says, the God in whom and for whom death has lost its sting forever.

This quelled the Gotcha game temporarily, but it soon resumed in the Upper Room, the Garden, before the Sanhedrin and Pilate, and finally at Golgotha, where the powers of darkness no longer slunk around in the temple but slugged it out with Jesus in the battle on which hung the destiny of the world. Redeeming lose won that cosmic conflict. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the cornerstone upon which the whole household of faith is built then, now and always.

To the great, tragic shame of the church, however, the Gotcha game still goes on. Every time it does, Christ is crucified anew and his body, the church, is wounded.

Martin Luther, who spoke from experience, had a word for this demonic spell the Gotcha spirit casts upon the soul. Anfechtung has no real English equivalent. The Irish speak of the "black hole" of spiritual despair. It must be experienced to be understood. It is a powerful, unrelenting grip on the soul that would defy God’s own strength to break it loose. Anfechtung still attacks, even in the places meant to be holy: the church, the congregation, the denomination, seminary faculties, administrative staffs, clergy gatherings, parish meetings -- wherever power is used to control and destroy the sister or brother for whom Christ died. It is a terrifying reality, and deadly beyond measure because it tramples down the sacred in order to "defend the truth."

Power gone amok in the church as the subject of a classic paragraph written several decades ago by William Dixon Gray, a Presbyterian pastor, when he was caught up in the midst of church battles. Although I cannot find the passage now, the essence of it has stuck with me: So it’s power you want in the church? The godless power to accuse, manipulate and destroy? Then take it. Revel in it. Play its deadly game. Win its hollow, temporary victories. And when you have played its destructive force to the hilt, then suffer its awful consequences coming back at you, the desperate holding on at any cost to what you thought you had secured but which has turned to ashes, leaving in its wake not joy and freedom but the burden of guilt over those you hurt and ruined . . . But why not truth at the outset, and the love which hears, believes, hopes and endures all things? Why not the mind of Christ for the church of Christ and the work of Christ? Why not Christ’s authority which establishes the work of your hands, instead of your own power, which destroys by your hands?

Jesus’ responses to the Sadducees were brief. I learned a lesson from that part of the text when passing through a long, hard season of being caught in the Gotcha game. Supportive friends and family kept a four-minute rule. On no day, regardless of how outrageous the Gotcha game became, would more than four minutes be given over to "the problem." I recommend the four minute rule, lest the Gotcha game become all consuming, fatal to soul and body alike.

The ending of this chapter of Luke is somber, as befits the warning against the malady of Gotcha in the church. The solemnity of that day in the temple must not be lost on those of us who would have ears to hear, who would live under the sword, who would bear with the church in its dark side, penitent over our own sins, holding on for dear life to the gospel which delivers us from Gotcha to glorious freedom as the children of God.