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When I was a much younger baseball player, if you made the last out or the error that cost the game, you were the “goat”. I never really thought about what that meant until now. You see that is a clear religious expression about the “scapegoat” that the Hebrew people used to get rid of their sin.

Have you ever been the goat? I have, in all of its pure meaning. In ancient times, the Hebrew people would bring a goat to the priest and they would lay all of their sins on the goat and force it into the wilderness and that is the origin of scapegoating. So, in baseball terms, you are blaming one person for the faults of the whole team. It happens a lot. It happened to me when I was the CEO and the Board decided that every thing that had ever gone wrong was my fault. It doesn’t feel real good, I can tell you.

Why didn’t they use a lamb? Or a sheep? I have thought about that and the sheep were always highly prized, deeply valued for their sustaining of life for the people. The goat is much more independent and apparently a bit smarter. So, in ancient times, the goat, the self-sustaining and independent one was used to carry away the sin. A sheep would always try to return to the flock and thus bring the sins back.

Now that just wouldn’t do would it, send all of the sins away and yet they come right back. But Christ wasn’t a goat, he was the Lamb of God. We took the totally trusting and loving Lamb, put all of our sins on Him but he did not go to the wilderness, he stays right here among us, silently bearing our sins, for us to see. This picture is much more personal and humbling for me. Every time I go my own way (sin), the silent Lamb lovingly remains in view, as a reminder of the price that is paid every day.

I love these words: Christ did not come to change God’s mind about us. God never had to change God’s mind about us. Christ came to change our minds about God! We are the scapegoats/sheep now, we forgive our enemies, love the unloveable ones all while standing among all of life. We are called to bear in our bodies, the sins of the world. We Christians are the living Eucharist of the World.

TMM

What are you afraid of? For me, I have had a lifelong fear of falling. No, really, of falling. I am not afraid of heights, I love to see the view from 35,000 feet or from tall buildings. But if you ask me to stand at the very edge and look down, uh, nope not going to do that. I have never like climbing trees for the same reason, but I love tree houses, you know the kind with steps up to the house.

Fear kills our ability to think and our ability to react. The “deer in the headlights” is the response between fight or flight, it is just frozen in place. Fear has its place, of course. If you fall from a high place you get hurt. Fear discourages you from putting yourself in danger. It can literally keep you alive. But what about irrational fears? There are many in mental health that are irrational, even one that is the fear of the number 13. Really, afraid of a number? It is no less real to the person who has this than my fear of falling is to me. It is irrational only because seeing and touching the number 13 will not cause physical damage.

What about the fear to think for oneself? That is the one that does the most harm. In church life, quite often the church tells us what to think about various issues. When did becoming a Christian cause me to “lose my mind” and not think for myself? Over the years I have seen the fear of thinking for oneself do so much harm to so many. Two hundred years ago, letting someone else think for them allowed the slave trade to be justified. One hundred years ago, letting someone else do the thinking demeaned women and taught that they could not be pastors and ministers. Today, the issue is about LBGTQ persons.

What we never seem to learn is that it is always bad to let someone else tell us how to think. It is always unhealthy to be paralyzed with the fear of thinking for oneself when it comes to God. God is so much greater than all of our fears, including thinking about God. Letting someone else tell us how to think has hurt so very many people. Has led to us acting contrary to the love of God in Christ.

It is time, dear ones, to decide to think for ourselves. To think about what it means to follow Christ. To unlearn what we have been told to think. To think from the “heart”. To let love lead us to treasures we would otherwise miss. My daughter’s church has a motto that I love: Free to think, Bound to serve. This congregation, at this writing, has been ongoing for 175 years! Let’s think about that history. In all of those many years, always free to think. May we each know that same freedom.

TMM

We must atone for our sins. I have heard this all of my life in the church. Christ was that atonement, that sacrifice for what I have done wrong. This makes God the supreme punisher who is out for blood. Someon have to pay. Blood is the only acceptable coin of the realm in this case.

It has taken awhile but I cannot fathom a god who is actually out for revenge. And, revenge for what? This is punitive justice and if this is really what Christ did for us and we are to behave as Christ did, then we should punish everyone until they make a “profession of faith in Christ”. Before you laugh, think this through: Christ was punished for our sins because a price had to be paid. We are to imitate Christ, so we should die for the sins of those around us or hold them to a strict justice until they repent. Please don’t scoff at this, look around our society today and you will discover exactly this behavior going on in churches everywhere.

This is the only way we can ignore the poor, the homeless, the children and all of those in need. You see, we have a system that says you have to earn our kindness, our handout, our tax dollars. And how to those with no money earn anything? Why that’s simple, they have to be “good people”, whatever that means. And, that means someone else gets to decide what goodness is. This is not the Christ or God I choose to follow.

Instead, to borrow a phrase from Richard Rohr and others, I believe in a restorative justice. Jesus walked this earth and did not demand anyone become good, or earn his love, or even be particularly nice. Instead, he just healed people because he loved them. If we are really becoming “christians” (little Christs) then shouldn’t our lives look like his?

For too long, we as Christians have bought into the societal view that people should be punished and people should be good enough to receive assistance. Thanks be to God that this is not how God does things. I would never be able to be good enough for God’s love. And yet, this is what we do to all who are different, who are poor, in prison, addicted, hurting, or disabled. It is somehow their fault and they must earn or at least deserve to be helped.

How long will we choose to be this way? How long will we let our society teach that this is the only way to think. Let’s start with ourselves. Let’s provide restorative justice to ourselves and others. As Rohr says, let’s call it at one ment. That we are one with God every moment, every day.

TMM

“Oh, grow up!” You may have heard it or said it at some point in your life. I teach human growth and development and there are certain things we all go through to grow up. We used to call these stages but that has changed mostly because it is not a simple step by step progression. Instead, we often go through one stage ahead of the one we should be going through. Still, stages help us to understand how things progress in general.

We have known that psychologically and physically we go through certain stages. Why have we not discovered that we do the same spiritually. Fowler, a number of years ago, wrote a book about the stages of spiritual development that is often read in seminary but rarely shared with people in church. I get it, many have not read the book but we should know better.

Why have we not taken the new testament words to heart, “when I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child…” Paul said this but few churches develop Sunday school classes to address the stages we go through spiritually. Fewer still are the preachers who “grow” their congregations by addressing stages of development. If we did that, then I would not have had to unlearn or redevelop my spiritual life as I have grown into contemplation.

When we have “new” Christians, why don’t we assume that they are babies in the faith and explain things to them that will set them on a course of healthy growth? Instead, new Christians are expected to listen to sermons and Sunday school teachers and catch up on what they have missed out on. This means that old and tired platitudes and dogma are used. We teach them the rules but not the substance. We teach them either/or but never both.

Examine your own spiritual life. If it was healthy development then the very first thing you learned was how loving and caring God is and that God doesn’t punish or hurt people but instead stays right there with them in the midst of the pain and hurt. Be honest though, weren’t you taught that you needed to be saved and then you needed to follow the rules so you would be a good person? Doesn’t that skip a few steps?

Christ said come as a child would, with total love and total trust. No rules mentioned, no sins mentioned, just trust, which leads to deeper love. We start kids (in some denominations) with confirmation classes, when they are around 10 and that is important to learn the rules of the faith but seriously, why do we wait ten years? And if you are an adult, you don’t really get confirmation classes at all, though some churches provide such classes to all.

Beloved ones, how can we go wrong if we start with every new Christian at the point of trust versus mistrust and love? We should start at: the Creator of the Universe cares for you deeply and personally and is trustworthy to never leave you. Start at love and trust, after all, the Psalms express this very thing over and over again. That is a healthy foundation to build on, one you can always come back to, that God loves me unconditionally and if that is true, then I can learn how to love God back and love my neighbor.

And, you know what, it is not too late. Each of us can go back to the first stage and examine what went right or wrong there. We can start over again with Love and grow from there. We can return to child-like wonder and then build on the love and wonder to be healthy children of God.

TMM

When I was a kid, my brother loved to tease me. It was easy for him because he was 8 years older. Now, don’t get me wrong, my brother loved me fiercely, but he teased me. One of those was, “you have a face only a mother could love”! That was so mean but it was my brother, a teenager at the time.

Let’s consider that idea though, “a face only a mother could love”. This presumably mean statement is actually a statement of how we all are, we need to put a face to things. Have you not had conversations with people and said, I just can’t place his/her face. Or you meet someone and say, now I have a face to put with your name. One of the great enhancements to the internet and to online education has been the addition to video, so we can put a face with a voice.

I read recently that this is the reason God came to earth as a person named Jesus. The Divine knew that we were having trouble putting the name of God with the face of God. So, in the darkest time of our world we celebrate the very human face of God coming to us. Now, when we want to love God, we have that face that only the Father can love! We have that baby face/adult face named Jesus.

The living God among us, Jesus, put aside every ounce of divinity to give us a face of God we could love. But friends it does not stop there because once we have met God, we are the new face of God to the world. Think of what this means: are we living a life that gives the world a glimpse of God? And, do we see the human face of God in every person we see? We should, because we are called to see the world as our loving God sees it, “and it is good”.

TMM

I am old enough to know these words from a song that Sammy Davis Jr. sang a number of years ago. The old joke is that the only sure things are death and taxes. What has never been sure is who we are supposed to be. Most of us spend a lifetime trying to discover and then be who we are truly supposed to be.

I think the problem is that we are told who we are supposed to be so often growing up that we never really sit and consider who we “gotta be”. I know in my life, there have been too many times that I tried to be who others thought I should. This was especially negative from my childhood of never being good enough! It has followed and at times haunted me for so many years.

As a contemplative, I have learned of what Merton and others called the “false self” and “true self”. The first is who we believe we are supposed to be. Mind you, for many good Christian folks, they are trying so hard to be who they believe they are supposed to be as Christians. They are not evil, they are doing what church has told them they should be for many years. The problem is that is the “false self”. And, it is sinful. No, it is not bad or evil it is just “missing the mark”, which is what sin is.

We are called to be and embody love. To become the living “Christs” that God needs in the world, to reach the world. This is the essences of “take up your cross daily”, to put who I think I should be aside and be what I am, my “true self” in God. I am to be love in the world, Agape love, unmerited favor, to be given away to all who need love.

I get it, this is not easy and I work at being love every day. I often fail but it does not keep me from trying to be who I am called to be in God, the living Christ. That is not arrogant or trivial for me to say, it is instead incredibly humbling. I am going to make the effort to sing Sammy’s song in a different way. I need to sing each day, “I gotta be the True me”. Come on, you know you want to sing this song with me! If we are our True Selves, can you imagine what our world would become? Sing loud.

TMM

“That’s very risky”. “Do you really want to risk it?” “Take a risk for once”. All of these are phrases that are used daily in conversations. The real question should include what is being risked. It can be money, prestige, relationships and more. It can be positive or negative as in what if I risk this and fail? Or, if I take this risk I might end up with….

Have you ever risked anything? In my life, I have taken more than a few risks. None of those were life threatening, but some were life changing. It has been said “the greater the risk the greater the reward”. That can be true when money/wealth is involved or prestige. In my life, I have learned to take risks on others.

When my daughter was much younger, it always felt risky to let her find her own way. As a professor, I take educated risks on all of my students. The risk comes in the form of trusting them or letting them fail or excel without interfering with the process. It is risky because if too many of them fail, then my teaching or my program gets called into question. I am pretty sure if all of them excel, that is good for me and the program.

Here is a deeper question: Has anyone ever taken a risk for you? In my life it was a baseball coach, a school counselor and a Dean of Admissions. These were the first to take a risk on me. I won the position on the field and I graduated from Baylor University. It feels dangerous to take a risk on someone else (basically to trust them and God). It is humbling when someone takes a risk on us.

Who have you risked it for? Who has risked it for you? It seems to me the Creator of the University risked it all for us from the very beginning. The moment the Creator gave every human being free will, the greatest risk in all of history was taken. How can we not take a risk here and there for the betterment or development of another? It was done for us after all.

TMM

Okay, I will admit it, I am a bit of a nut about Christmas. I want to start playing Christmas carols before Thanksgiving, I want to put the tree up on the Sunday of Thanksgiving weekend. Most of all, I want to start putting up the lights. I don’t want the ten thousand lights and everything tuned to music so that they flicker on cue. I want lots of lights tastefully done.

As a child, because of allergies to some kinds of evergreens, we had the quintessential aluminum Christmas tree with a color wheel. What can I say, it was the sixties. As false as that was, I still loved watching the lights change. Nowadays, I line the fences, sidewalks, driveway and the house with lights. I simply love that warm, welcoming glow that the lights give. I want it always to look like an invitation to come visit, not to drive by and just look.

I don’t stop with Christmas though. The sidewalk up to the front porch has lights along it. There are solar lights along the fence and the deck has lights to, again, create that warm inviting glow. I even like to have a fire pit so that the light is there to enjoy.

Christ said, “I am the light of the world” and that is why I think I love the lights so much. That warm and inviting glow of the lights speaks of His presence. I also believe that each day on the Christian journey, we are absorbing more of his light. That is how the idea of not hiding you light under a “bushel” makes sense. We cannot just absorb the light that Christ gives us on the path, we have to let it out.

We are to become him, become the Light ourselves. And as we are doing that, we cannot hide it, we must let it shine. Are some lights brighter than others? Of course they are. But each is still a light. The light within us all is the living Creator of the Universe. And, all that the Creator desires of us is to let the light grow and let it out. We are called to let that light out and we do that by learning simply to be the Light.

Shine on my friends,shine on.

TMM

These days, the word wall is getting thrown around non-stop. It is supposed to keep unwanted people out and protect those who are inside the wall. There are walls everywhere, around homes, abbeys, and castles too. They are intended to keep folks out, but don’t they also keep folks in?

A wall keeps things in. A retaining wall in yard or garden keeps the dirt from being washed away. It keeps dirt out. In Ireland, you can see ancient stone walls everywhere, though rarely more than about 4 feet high. Those walls separate one field from another and keep the sheep in that particular pasture. These walls, however, rarely block one’s vision of the surrounding world, they only serve to retain or delineate something.

In our own lives, we build walls between ourselves and those who might get too close to us. We hide behind those walls and think we are safe. We are not safe, we are trapped! Anything that keeps us from seeing the world around us traps us into one way to see things. We all have these walls, we build them emotionally when we are hurt or afraid. We just cannot let that happen to us again, whatever hurt or scared us. The problem is that we are trying to wall up something that simply cannot be walled up. Our feelings and emotions will come out, leak around or overflow the wall every time.

When Christ died on the cross, it was said that the veil in the Holy of Holys was torn apart. It had been used to hide the priest and God from the rest of the world. That simply won’t work with Christ. He was, He is God and there can be no veil, no wall between God and us. It can be frightening to take down a wall. In my lifetime, the Berlin wall was erected and then taken down. Tearing it down made it simple for people to see each other again but it was scary to tear it down, to let in (or out) the unknown.

What walls have you built? What is it that you don’t want to get to you? Or who is it you don’t want to get to you? Maybe, just maybe, those walls are keeping you trapped and not protecting you like you might think. In Christ, no walls are needed since they interrupt the flow of love within us and through us to the world. Take a breath and start tearing down the walls between you and the rest of the world. Do it one brick at a time if you need to, but let the light in and see the world. By the way, if you have tried to build a wall between you and God, I have good news…God has been inside the wall with you always.

TMM

My name actually means “lover of horses”. Now, I don’t hate horses and have a healthy respect for them but love them? No, I don’t love horses. We often name children haphazardly and that can be a real problem too. It has been said we should give a child a name they can live into. I am not sure that works all that well. If we look in the New Testament for my name, we find a doubter and a questioner of nearly everything……hey, wait a minute maybe this live into our name thing works!

Seriously, though, as I write this, the scripture from the lectionary is describing the baptism of Jesus. I have always wondered why a person without sin needed to be baptized for the remission of sin. Is it possible baptism means something else? Many are taught that we are “buried with Christ in baptism, raised to walk in newness of life”. I think that is true, except how do we know he was baptized by immersion?

I don’t think the how matters much, for all I know the Jordan River where he was baptized might not be all that deep. Raised to walk in newness of life does work. My favorite pastor (okay my daughter if you must know) delivered a sermon recently that I believe captures the point: Jesus’ baptism by John was that moment when Jesus’ real name was pronounced by God, Beloved.

Now this makes sense to me, baptism teaches us who we really are, the Beloved of God. Since we know forgiveness and sin were resolved at the Cross, perhaps we have been seeing baptism incorrectly. Maybe when we are called to “remember our baptism” during church, we are to remember who we are and whose we are. We remember that we are Beloved,our true name.

TMM