Tend the Fire, Part Four | Hills, Gulleys, and the Big "O" In Between

In my last post, I told a story about discovering a mysterious, unfamiliar spiritual craving in my twenties, finding the remedy for it in an unlikely hiding place (in the words and pages of the Bible[i]), and learning how to get filled up on a meal-to-meal basis for the journey down our proverbial “narrow roads”[ii] – ultimately to carry us through the foretold “time of trouble” coming on the horizon.[iii]  The fact that I got to tell that story using potatoes, micro-bugs, fog banks, neon signs, and Firelit lamps was definitely frosting (for me at least).[iv] If you’re just tuning in, this is the sort of person to which you are lending your ear. But read on! There’s truth in the potato soup.

That being said, to leave the story where I did, at the point of leaning back after a good meal of honey-kissed manna with a full spiritual belly and drooping eyelids, would be ultra-irresponsible on my part. You know what I’m going to say. There’s a flipside to getting filled up on spiritual food. It’s not all about scarfing down the good stuff, lounging in comfy chairs, and drinking foofy-coffee. It’s more like breathing – there’s inflow and outflow in the spiritual life, and the breathing-out part helps keep a person centered on the narrow road every bit as much as the breathing in.[v]

If I’m going to talk about the breathing-out part, then I’m going to have to use the word...  COUGH-obedience... Don’t swipe left! (Or is it right?) I know that’s nobody’s favorite word but, if you’re someone who is still investigating the claims of Jesus, you need to know that the definition of obedience, when it comes to a relationship with God, has been drastically changed since Jesus came and did what he did.[vi]

(For those still investigating: Accepting Jesus’ blood payment for sin on your behalf means that he lifts the impossibly heavy “yoke” (of trying and failing to meet the standard of God’s law[vii] ) from your shoulders (because he fulfilled it on your behalf), and puts his “light and easy” yoke upon you instead.[viii] It means that you can now rest in the fact that you are fully forgiven and made righteous in God’s eyes because of Jesus’ righteousness covering you. You can rest in the confidence that God’s Spirit will help you and transform you, from the inside out, into Jesus’ likeness. It also means going wherever Jesus leads you, and doing whatever he asks of you, through the troubles, trials, and persecutions that will come for bearing his name.[ix] All in all, it means moving through life loving God and loving people his way, in his power,[x] because that kind of love is the fulfillment of the law.[xi])

All of that said, I need to push the punchline to the front end today. Forgive me if it sounds a bit more like making a case than telling a story:

I am entirely convinced that our commitment to rightly-understood obedience to Jesus is the only way to successfully navigate our narrow roads through the “time of trouble” coming on the horizon – even if it means facing into great suffering, loss, persecution, and even death to do it.[xii]

It’s the “rightly understood” part that I’m most concerned about, and most prone to getting wrong. And it’s the “rightly understood” part that I believe Jesus was addressing in the Sermon on the Mount.[xiii]

Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain fell, the torrents raged, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because its foundation was on the rock.

But everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain fell, the torrents raged, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell—and great was its collapse!”

                                                                        Jesus, Matthew 7:24-27 (emphasis mine)

In other words, “Now that you’ve heard my words, you have two choices in front of you. Make the wise choice, and your “house” will remain standing when the storms come and rage and blow and beat on everything you’ve built. And they will come.” I may be stating the obvious, but this seems ultra relevant in the current climate we’re living in.

The “therefore” at the beginning of those verses points to everything Jesus said just before them as he sat on the mountainside, teaching his disciples and the crowd below.[xiv] The shocker, for those listening, was that he came out of the gate blessing those whom the Jewish culture considered to be cursed by God, and correcting those whom the culture presumed to be blessed.[xv] More accurately, Jesus called out the religious leaders, those in positions of religious authority, who had entirely missed the point of Law, causing them to misinterpret, misuse, and override it with their own “traditions” in ways that endorsed and, at times, forced disobedience to God.[xvi]

The truth is, I’m really no different than the religious leaders or the common folk. It’s rightly-understood obedience that I continually struggle to keep straight and/or resist tweaking to my own liking. This being acknowledged up front, the Sermon on the Mount is the map I feel most compelled to spread out on the royal kitchen table of late, to ask questions of the Person to whom I’ve sold myself into obedience,[xvii] before I walk any further into the storm.  

Finally, it’s time for a story...

When I was old enough to develop a little complexity of thinking, I started trying to make sense of right and wrong, and my perceptions of them in the context of my growing-up experiences. I knew what the ten commandments and kid-friendly Bible stories had to say about it from Sunday School (and my conscientious grandmother). As a child, right and wrong seemed simple in theory. But looking out over my real and experienced social landscape, the world seemed to have a much different approach to the subject – a different way of sorting out who was “good” and who was “bad,” and arranging and relating to them according to that judgment.

The sorting was not favorable for me (Grandma M’s custom cut and curl and the annual giant box of hand-me-downs from someone a half-dozen years older... things went downhill from there). I began to imagine something like hills and gulleys – invisible high places and low places where people congregated according to their socially assigned value, or lack thereof. In my observation, people gained access to the “good people” hills based on the possession of one or more desirable attributes – beauty, popularity, coolness, style, athleticism, talent, wit, intelligence, wealth, and the list goes on.

Conversely, a person slipped (or was pushed) into the “bad people” gullies for the perceived lack of any such attributes, or for their unwanted opposites. Out of sheer resilience, I reasoned, the gulley people found alternative ways to celebrate themselves – like being a darker kind of cool, tough, rebellious, intimidating, risk-taking, and even criminal; or a more reserved approach – being unapproachable, unaffected, unresponsive, uninterested, un-feeling, un-needing, or simply invisible.

Having a human lineage, I quickly learned to how to play the game, because no one wants to be pushed into a gulley. In truth, no one who plays the game actually knows whether there’s a bottom or if you just keep falling, into the burning abyss... Anyway, play I did, putting on masks and acts to please people “up there,” criticizing and picking fights with people “down there,” and generally making one-up/one-down thinking a strategy for life.

A sad story, I know. But take heart! Jesus sealed that bottomless pit beneath me with a cap of concrete, and signed it with his blood. Thank you, Jesus! Being able to roll on it, dance on it, or stomp on it without fear of falling through enables a person to put down the masks, the weapons, and the pain killers and focus on the enjoyment of life as it was intended.

Not surprisingly, my youthful observations of the world weren’t far off from what I saw when I started reading the Bible. It's easy to see the reflection of the violently jealous (literal and metaphorical) hill-and-gulley mindset in the stories of Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Sarai and Hagar, and dozens of other biblical stories.[xviii] But it took years for me to recognize the thematic prevalence of it that runs throughout the Scriptures, or the fact that Jesus directly confronted and replaced it.

In Jesus’ time and culture, the imposing, all-consuming “hill” to be climbed, and/or gulley to be feared, was a malfunctioning religious system that permeated every aspect of Jewish life. Of the original awe-inspiring, God-designed worship system of Judaism (fast-forward through a major family split, several sackings and exiles for both family branches, a string of murdered prophets, and centuries of utter failure on the people’s part to be obedient to their God), what now remained was a busy but empty shell, a tradition-bloated shadow of what was originally intended.

Again, in a hill-and-gulley style nutshell, and the context of the Sermon on the Mount: The religious leaders of Jesus’ day had taken advantage of their high position and over-estimated their claim on God’s holy hill (!!!). They misunderstood its purpose and drew a false line between who deserved to have access to God and who should be relegated to the Sinners Club down yonder. (But remember, we’re all cut from the same natural, itchy, uncomfortable cloth.)

But Jesus... stood on proverbial level ground, cut a path right down the middle between the wrongly claimed hill and the wrongly populated gulley, and gave everyone access to himself – and, therefore, to the triune God of Israel. He called his people out of every kind of judgment, high or low – not just God’s, but one another’s as well – to walk with him, on level ground, together, in full acceptance, on the basis of faith. The narrow road can only be traveled by faith.

Another story, not my own: Three of the four gospel writers tell a story that poignantly illustrates Jesus’ response and solution to this problem. The story is of Jesus walking through a dense crowd, encountering a religious ruler whose twelve-year-old daughter is on the brink of death, and a woman who has been subject to bleeding for twelve years. The meaning of the shared twelve-years mentioned three times: It’s a set-up. Pay attention to the intersection. I’ll condense the telling for brevity’s sake.

Two people, coming from opposite ends of the social spectrum, cross paths with Jesus at the same time – their life-and-death needs for healing pressing on them to break the social rules for their respective societal positions in order to make contact with the healer.

The religious leader is faced with a daunting downward step of faith that could cost him everything his life is built on, since public identification with Jesus was cause for expulsion from religious houses of worship -- for him, meaning his family occupation, his entire social circle, and his dignity and respect. [xix]

Conversely, the woman has lived for twelve years as an untouchable, barred from temple life and societal inclusion, even subject to the humiliating requirement of yelling, “unclean!” whenever anyone comes within a certain distance of her.[xx] She has a terrifying and costly upward step of faith to take, from her miserable (but at least familiar and predictable) life of exclusion – to press into a dense crowd of people in order to touch the person she discerns to be, at the very least, a prophet of God.

I believe, in order to make a clear and undeniable point to all present, the Holy Spirit prompts Jesus to leave the religious leader to wait in desperation while Jesus engages, restores, and declares God’s love for his untouchable daughter – an astonishing act for those watching! Don’t misunderstand. It wasn’t that Jesus preferred or prioritized one person over the other. The problem in need of correction was access. This was the Holy Spirit’s way of leveling the ground between the two, demonstrating equal access for all to Jesus, and to Father God, in the eyes of everyone in the crowd whom he came to heal.

(Lightbulb! Being a servant of all, like Jesus was, doesn’t mean sitting at the bottom of a gulley like a doormat, waiting on an ocean of other doormats. It means standing on level ground with an open hand and willingness to serve those needing to find their way up, or down, to a level place of faith, health, and maturity.)

So... All of this is playing out in my mind and my emotions as I look at the world out my window and on display on my smart screen, and those claiming to stand for the Name of Jesus making their presence known in all sorts of ways – high, low, and everything in between. To be honest, sometimes my clamped-down-upon carnal instinct looks like biting my tongue every 10 minutes, mentally chastising the partially-informed, exclusionary rule-makers, while aching with empathy for those sorted off and silenced for their failure to adhere to one set or another of recklessly curated qualifications. But, in doing that, am I not just sitting on my own hypocritical hill, formed by my own partially-informed curation of rules?[xxi]

At the end of the unpacking, I still don’t have all the answers. But here’s what I know:

I know that no matter how many different ways the world invents, we invent, to sort the good from the bad and put them in their presumed place, the narrow road that Jesus cut down the middle of it all, on level ground and accessible to all, stands.

How shall we respond to this? As for me, I have to always acknowledge my human propensity to sort people in such ways. But then I want to set my face to walking the narrow road in faith, with my fire-kindling tools in my backpack, my book of manna packed and ready to – a smile on my face and light shining through the cracks in my broken jar; ready to turn the other cheek, carry someone’s load, and forgive until it hurts. I want to be ready to give an answer to anyone looking for a hand up, or a hand down, in search of the One who can bring to life what is dead in them.

I want to teach people how to dance on their new, blood-signed concrete floor, laid over the bottomless pit they once dangled over...

Maranatha.

To be continued...

[i] Hebrews 4:11-13

[ii] Matthew 7:13-14

[iii] Matthew 24:3-51; Mark 13:3-37

[iv] https://www.oneleggedsojourner.com/post/tend-the-fire-a-book-a-bowl-and-a-treacherous-road

[v] 1 John 2:1-6

[vi] Colossians 2:6-15; John 6:28-29

[vii] God’s Law: the Torah or the Law of Moses, as represented in the first five books of the Bible.

[viii] Matthew 11:28-30

[ix] 2 Corinthians 4:7-18

[x] Romans 7:1-6, 8:1-11; Galatians 3:23-29; Colossians 2:6-15; Matthew 22:34-40;

[xi] Romans 13:8-10

[xii] Matthew 16:21-28; Mark 8:31-38; Luke 9:18-27

[xiii] Matthew 5-7

[xiv] Matthew 5-7

[xv] Matthew 5:1-12; Matthew 5:17-6:24; John 9:1-3; Mark 10:23-31

[xvi] Matthew 23

[xvii] 1 Corinthians 6:12-20

[xviii] These stories reflect, not only the inherent violent and self-serving nature of unredeemed humanity, but also foreshadow the new and better covenant that Jesus, the second Adam, established in his blood, canceling our debt under the first covenant of the Law. (Romans 5:12-21; Hebrews 12:18-24)

[xix] John 9:22

[xx] Leviticus 7:21; 12

[xxi] Matthew 7:1-5