Not Your Ordinary Joe

This post was originally the script of an episode of my short-lived podcast called
Not Your Ordinary Joe.
This one was based on an old sermon.

Many years ago, when my children were… well, children, I crawled out of bed the day after Thanksgiving to be at the local Kmart when the doors opened. The Black Friday sales circular we’d received with the newspaper, back in the days when we received newspapers, advertised a couple of items on my kids’ wish lists, at crazy-low prices. I’m an early riser anyway, so it certainly seemed worth missing a couple of hours of sleep to get a deal.

So, somewhere around 5am, I got into a very cold car with a list. An hour or so later, I returned home…  empty-handed. None of the advertised items were in stock at my local store, and they were not providing rain checks to get those prices later. Clearly, I should have stayed in bed.

One of the things that day emphasized for me was just how quick I am—how quick we are—to move on from Thanksgiving. I didn’t even wait until after my first coffee on the day after Thanksgiving to shift my focus from gratitude to wish lists, wants, what we didn’t have.

While I think we need to temper the seasonal craziness in our lives, this year, I’m going to miss the shopping, the decorations and music in the stores, seeing Santa at the mall, and all the other trappings. Not everything is out-of-bounds. I had a Peppermint Mocha at Starbucks the other day.

But I think we miss out on something vital when we brush by the spiritual discipline of giving thanks and rush off to the next thing.

I have always enjoyed how the season works—we have a day to give thanks for all we have, before we put together our wish lists for all the cool, new stuff we don’t yet have. Thanksgiving is gloriously present-free. Our focus, for the most part, is on intangibles—relationships, health, the ties that bind, family, friends (and food and football).

And this year, all of that has a bit more meaning. We are reminded of how good it is to be together when we can’t be together.

There’s this story in the Bible that always gets me (Luke 17:11-18). Ten lepers, people with skin diseases, come before Jesus asking to be healed. He says, “Go show yourselves to the priests.” Which they run off to do. Along the way, healing occurs!

One of them, when he notices the disease has left his skin, turns around and heads back toward Jesus. Luke reports that he, “praised God with a loud voice,” fell at Jesus’ feet, and thanked him. Seems the least he could do, right?

But he’s the only one who does.

Jesus asks, “Weren’t ten cleansed? Where are the other nine?” (Luke 17:17). The question is rhetorical, but we know the answer. They are off to celebrate. Like a Dad getting in the car at 5 am on a cold, November morning in New Jersey, in a hurry to run off and start celebrating Christmas.

Nine out of 10 just keep running. They do not take the time to say thank you.

I want to be in the 10% that does.

So, my question is about that one. What made him turn around? Why did he, and he alone, turn back to praise God and say thank you to Jesus for his healing?

According to the old sermon I’m using for the outline of this episode, I read Malala, the autobiography of then 16-year-old Malala Yousafzai in 2013 after seeing a clip of her appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.

Malala is a native of the Swat Valley in Pakistan who tells the story of how everything changed when the Taliban began to exert control.

She is a brilliant young woman, as evidenced by these two sentences written about a difficult time:

I tried to distract myself by reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, which answered big questions such as how the universe began and whether time could run backward. I was only eleven years old and already I wished it could. (Yousafzai, end of chapter 12)

Yes, didn’t we all read Stephen Hawking to relax in 6th grade?!! I remember reading Horatio Hornblower novels for my 6th grade book reports.

Malala describes her hometown as a little slice of heaven, with lush hillsides and peaceful small towns. It sounds like it was a wonderful place to grow up. But when the Taliban came to Swat and imposed sharia law—which Yousafzai describes as a distortion of Islam and the Quran—schools were no longer opened to girls.

To a girl reading Stephen Hawking at 11, this was devastating. She and her family who owned the school which she attended, and her friends were thrown into disarray.

Malala soon became an outspoken advocate for girls’ education, writing a diary that was published in an English newspaper, and speaking wherever and whenever she could.

Eventually, the Taliban targeted this then 14-year-old girl for assassination. She was shot in the face coming home from school, on the equivalent of a school bus, and miraculously survived.

You probably know that Malala Yousafzai continues to speak out for education, especially for girls, believing education is the true avenue to peace. This remarkable young woman became the youngest person to ever win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014, at the age of 17.

In an interview with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show—it was that long ago—Steward asked her where her love of education comes from. She begins her answer with these words,

It is part of our human nature that we don’t learn the importance of anything until it’s snatched from our hands. In Pakistan, when we were stopped from going to school, at that time I realized that education is very important, and education is power for women.

You really should watch it. It’s the very beginning of the video. I’ll put a link in the show notes at joeiovino.com.

It is true isn’t it? We don’t learn the importance of anything until it’s snatched from our hands.

That clip is from October 2013, but in some ways, it feels so 2020! Doesn’t it?

So much has been ‘snatched from our hands’ in the past 8 months. And well, it sucks! And if our hearts our open to it, we just might be learning the importance of family, holidays, school, work, and recreation time. Healthcare workers, scientists who figure our vaccines, and so much more.

Maybe that’s why so many of us are feeling so thankful this year.

We’ve learned just how many things we have taken for granted for so long. Things we never expected to lose—like a simple trip to the store, a classroom, or a holiday trip to see family.

Which brings me back to that one leper. He reacted differently than the others. Why did he turn around? What made him grateful? There are a couple of subtle details in Luke’s telling of the story which may point to the source of his gratitude.

Time for a little nerding out, Bible style.

The first comes right at the opening of the story. Luke writes, “On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee” (Luke 17:11). Whenever you come across a seemingly extraneous detail like this in the Bible, it’s a good practice to ask why. Why would Luke choose to include the geographic location of this healing when he doesn’t always do that? To explore this we need a little background.

Luke, like all the gospel writers, is a gifted storyteller who is structuring his writing in ways that help us, his readers, understand who Jesus is and what he is doing. One of the ways Luke does that is by sharing the story in three phases.

Chapters 1 through 9 are phase 1: Jesus’ early ministry—we read about his birth, growing up, calling of his disciples, and his preaching, teaching, and healing that occurred in Galilee.

Then at the end of chapter 9, Luke transitions from “the early years” to a new section with these words, “As the time approached when Jesus was to be taken up into heaven, he determined to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:51). With those words, the narrative shifts, and for chapters 9 to 19 we read of Jesus’ “Journey to Jerusalem,” which culminates with him entering the city riding on a colt on what we call Palm Sunday.

The final section of Luke’s gospel—chapters 19-24—then tells of Jesus’ time in Jerusalem, including his arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection.

This story about the lepers is from Luke 17, part of the “Journey to Jerusalem” section, which Luke is careful to remind us as he begins this story. “On the way to Jerusalem,” he begins. (hmm…). Then comes that interesting detail about location. “On the way to Jerusalem, Jesus traveled along the border between Samaria and Galilee.”

On one hand this makes geographic sense when you look at their journey on a map. Jesus and his disciples are traveling from Galilee in the north to Jerusalem in the south and the border runs from northeast to the southwest, so they are traveling in the general direction one would expect.

But also, as you may remember, Jewish people were so adamant about avoiding Samaria that they would go more than a day’s journey out of their way to travel around the Samaritan region. So traveling the border might make sense in that way too.

But why would Luke include this detail unless something else is going on? And as you might imagine, I think there is.

When we go back to chapter 9 and look closely at the beginning of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem, we read these words, “Along the way, they entered a Samaritan village to prepare for his arrival, 53 but the Samaritan villagers refused to welcome him because he was determined to go to Jerusalem” (Luke 9:52b-53).

Jesus in a bit of a metaphorical no-man’s land—rejected by the Jewish authorities because he isn’t playing by their rules and rejected by the Samaritans because he is mistrusted as a Jewish man heading to Jerusalem. Literally and symbolically, Jesus is traveling in the margins, on the edges, on the border between two people who reject him. It’s there where Jesus encounters ten lepers.

In those days, lepers were forced to live on the edges of society.

In addition to having a debilitating disease, lepers were routinely rejected by society, forced to live in colonies, literally out on the edges of town and the margins of life. Separated from family and friends, they were also told they were separated from God and not allowed to participate in the Temple practices because they were unclean, unholy.

Can you imagine what it must have been like for them to be healed?

In a very small sense, you and I may know what that feels like a little better than we ever have before. We just came through Thanksgiving 2020, a day when we normally travel to be with family and friends to enjoy a meal together and catch up after months apart. But this year we were separate. My family ended up having a Zoom call with three generations in three time zones spending about an hour together.

In recent weeks, we’ve been hearing about the coming vaccines, the first doses are scheduled to be given in a matter of days. It might be months before it is available to all of us, but there’s hope. We’re seeing a time on the horizon when this separation will be over. Surely Thanksgiving 2021 we not be like Thanksgiving 2020. We’ll be able to travel to spend time in the same room again.

Again, in some small part, that’s what’s going on with these lepers. One of the reasons Jesus sends them to the priests is so they can be declared clean and welcomed back into the Temple and allowed to re-enter society. They will soon be able once again to fall into the arms of their families and friends. Nine take off running in their excitement to get the party started. One turns around praising God in a loud voice and falling at Jesus’ feet to thank him. What makes him different?

Luke give us subtle detail number two: “He was a Samaritan” (17:16), a fact emphasized in our reading when Jesus says, “No one returned to praise God except this foreigner?” Interesting. The one who turns around is not just another one of the ten, he is different. He is not Jewish; he is a foreigner, a Samaritan.

Simply by virtue of his birth and no fault of his own, this man would have been considered unclean with or without his leprosy. As a Samaritan, he is deemed an ‘outsider’ by those who understand themselves to be ‘insiders.’ He is believed to have a lesser relationship with God because of his family tree.

I wonder if this outsider status, is what makes him grateful. He’s unable to take his healing for granted.

The nine healed lepers seem to see it differently. When they are healed, they may be thinking God is just doing what God ought to do with people as deserving as they. They are so absorbed by what this means for them, by what they are gaining that they had lost, that they forget to notice what a gift they’d just received.

One man, the outsider, is humble enough to know how undeserving he is. He is the only one who turns around and gives thanks.

Malala talked about that. When taking her education for granted, as something she deserved, she didn’t pause to give thanks. But when the Taliban took it away, she realized what a gift education is, and began to give thanks and share it with others.

When I ran out on that Black Friday so long ago, hoping to provide a magical Christmas for my loved ones, I was so angry at Kmart for not having what I was looking for, what I deserved for my efforts of crawling out of bed at 5 am.

Because of Thanksgiving 2020, I have a new appreciation for Thanksgivings in the past and the ones yet to come. For opportunities to gather around a table and be with those you love and who love you.

I guess it is just human nature. When we lose something, we realize how grateful we are for it. But we can also do that before it’s gone.

Scripture reminds us that everything we have is ultimately a gift from God, and we are humbled and give thanks. May we not be so prideful that we miss seeing all the gifts with which God has so richly blessed us.

So, as they say at the end of the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade as Santa appears to close the festivities, on with the beginning of the Christmas celebration season. But let’s not run off quite so fast that we leave thanksgiving (with a lower-case t) behind. Let’s not forget to turn around from time to time and offer a word of Thanks.

The post Taking Thanksgiving with us appeared first on Joe Iovino.

This post was originally the script of an episode of my short-lived podcast called
Not Your Ordinary Joe

When you live near or around the Jersey Shore, you learn multiple routes everywhere — to work, the grocery story, church… everywhere. Because in the summer, you can expect the major roadways — the Parkway, 195, 34, 35, 37, 70, 72 and just about every other road that will take people from NY or Philadelphia to the beach — to be jam-packed, making your commute unbearable. 

So you learn to travel the backroads — local streets, county roads and any other way around the traffic, crossing those backed up roads rather than trying to travel on them. 

When I lived there, one of my routes to work took me way off the beaten path. I passed a literal “Easy Street,” and enjoyed views of farms and woods. While others were pounding their steering wheels at a near standstill on the parkway, I was slowly moving along a serene pastoral landscape. It felt good to be able to snake my way around, always moving ahead of those who didn’t know the area as well — the tourists, or Bennys as we called them in New Jerse — never really knowing what that meant. 

Along that route, a small non-denominational church was set back among the trees on one of those smaller roads. I don’t remember the congregation’s name, just that it had a giant hand-made lawn decoration — a statue of sorts — of a Bible that had to be about eight feet tall. 

It was a striking site — and, well, more than a little odd. I often wondered what it said about that church. I’m sure they meant it as a sign of their perceived fidelity to the Scripture, but to me, it always looked a bit like an idol — the golden calf the Israelites crafted at the foot of Mount Sinai when they thought Moses’ trip up the mountain to meet with God and receive the Ten Commandments was taking too long. 

Many summer commutes, I passed that giant Bible and pondered the role of Scripture in our faith journeys. Worshipping the Bible to the point of building a large representation of it, certainly didn’t seem right. But what is the proper place of Scripture? How should we think about it? Approach it? Read it? 

Before we go any farther, I want to say that I’m a big fan of the Bible (ok that’s a weird way to say that). I’m a student of the Bible. In my church growing up, I was the Babe Ruth of Bible Baseball. I could answer the most difficult questions. In college, I was once told at a Bible study that I was thinking too hard about the Bible, and in seminary I took just about every Bible class I could find. 

In college and seminary I was on the tail end of the Jesus Seminar movement — the “search for the historical Jesus.” And though I no longer spend much time reading Scripture in that way, I loved it. 

I wanted to know everything there was to know. I wanted to be an expert on Scripture, but I soon learned that there are two kinds of knowing. There is knowing about a subject and knowing a person — being in a relationship with someone. Those two ways of knowing are related, but not the same thing. 

And, quite frankly, you can have all the ‘knowing about’ knowledge possible, be a trivia expert even, and never really know a person the way you know a spouse, a child, a close friend. 

It’s interesting, and honestly a little frustrating, was that like most subjects worth studying, the more I learned and studied, the less I was certain about.

So what kind of knowing should we have for the Bible? 

In an earlier episode (Silence, complicity and LGBTQIA inclusion) I introduced a concept I called ‘the witness of Scripture.’ 

The best way I can think of describing this is seeing the forest and not just the individual trees — to recoup my image of driving the backroads. It’s the ability to hear major themes in Scripture, themes that resonate throughout, the bass notes as Rob Bell likes to say — on which Scripture is built. 

For example, again from ‘Silence, complicity and LGBTQIA inclusion,’ there is the theme of the image of God present in every human being, and how all of creation is a reflection of the creator. That’s one.

There are also themes of the journey of life and the guidance of God, freedom from slavery, wandering in the wildreness and finding our way home — to the land God as promised us. All led by God.

There are themes of wandering away from God, following others, and heroes’ journeys of faith out into the unknown. 

Stories of obedience even when it’s unpopular. Stories of brokenness and healing, summer and winter, death and resurrection, separation and renewal — that’s a major one. 

There are themes throughout, of caring for the those who are often overlooked and under-provided for, loving the outsider and welcoming the stranger — Who knows? You might be entertaining angels without knowing it. 

As I write about these themes, stories come to mind — from Genesis and Exodus, from the prophets and psalms, from the evangelists, apostles, and gospels. They aren’t just one-offs, random verses selected to make a point. They are themes that each tell us something about God, about Jesus and the leading of the Spirit. They inform us about our faith journeys and our place within the history of humanity — from Creation to today. 

And when you approach the Bible in this way, you probably won’t build a giant lawn decoration to it, but other beautiful things begin to happen. Scripture comes alive in us and we enter into a conversation in the present, not just about the past. We begin to see God at work in the ordinary moments of our lives — not just in the things we consider sacred, but in the mundane as well. 

For example, if God was present in the dreams of the Josephs — both the coat of many colors one from Genesis and Mary’s husband from the New Testament — then God may also be present in my dreams. 

If Jacob can sense God’s presence in the wilderness saying, “Surely God was in this place and I did not know it” — can you and I begin to sense God in the places we would least expect? 

If Abraham and Sarah entertained angels without knowing it, could we be meeting angels when we meet a stranger in need? 

And if a bush could talk to Moses and donkey to Balaam — what might God be trying to use to talk to me? How should I be listening for God? 

We could go on and on… Again, there is an amazing conversation that begins to take place between me and the holy, this world and God’s world begin to overlap and blend and the distinctions become a bit more blurred. 

But when we idolize the Scripture — when we build monuments to the Bible and ascribe it to a place nearly equal to God — something else happens. 

We tend to get focused on the trees rather than the forest. We tend to get caught up in the minutia and miss what God is really trying to say to us. 

Here’s what I mean. 

There’s this troubling verse in 1 Samuel 15 where God commands the people of Israel to attack the Amalekites, and God through Samuel says, “Spare no one. Kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys.” When I encounter that verse, it’s pretty easy for me to say, ‘You know, maybe Samuel misheard God,’ or ‘Maybe this is hyperbole to make a point.’ Maybe the person who wrote this down later, blamed the Amalekites for all of Israel’s problems and was interpreting the story through that sinful lens. 

But if you’ve turned the Bible into an idol, you can’t do that. You begin to see all the parts as equal rather than evaluating this tree in light of the forest. And so you begin to understand things about God that actually run counter to the rest of the witness of Scripture. 

And that’s how you get these ideas that the Bible contradicts itself. 

Reading this verse alone, you might extrapolate: Is God really OK with killing those whom he has created? Maybe God likes some people better than others. Maybe racism is OK, even sanctioned by God. 

None of that works within the forest, but if you elevate this tree, you have to make room for that kind of understanding for who God might be. 

And that’s happened to us throughout history. 

For a couple of hundred years Christians in the US found evidence for slavery in the Bible — even seeing it as God sanctioned, even though one of the major stories of the Old Testament is the Israelite’s Exodus from slavery and the repeated refrain to remember that you were once slaves. 

We did it with women clergy because there is a verse that says women are to be silent in the gathering. So we made a rule that ignored all of the evidence throughout Scripture of women in leadership throughout the Hebrew Bible and all the women who traveled with Jesus and are mentioned by Paul as leaders of the early church. 

See how we can lose site of the forest for the trees? Lose the witness of Scripture through the viewing of individual verses? 

We know of God’s love for all of creation — for the outcast, outsider, the one who doesn’t seem to belong, the ‘least of these’ as Jesus says in Matthew 25. So when we read a verse about God saying, “Kill everyone, “ we think, “Hold on! That doesn’t fit.” And we explore that verse. We approach it differently. 

Oftentimes, people like me get accused of making the Bible fit our views. As if we got off the Parkway, the easy way, and got lost on the backroads, ending up in the wrong place.

But what that statement fails to recognize is that those views that I’m supposedly trying to make the Bible fit — the stuff I would stake my life on — were formed by the Bible. It is a reading of Scripture informed by Scripture — not some outside influence. It is a means of allowing the Holy Spirit to speak to me through the text, leading me to God and God’s love and grace. It is an understanding that the Bible is a means to the end of a relationship with the Divine and not an end in itself. 

That’s what I was doing all those years ago. I wanted to know the Bible, but the Bible doesn’t want to be known. It wants instead to facilitate us coming into a relationship with God through Jesus Christ. 

Are you with me? 

If you are sensing in me a bit of bias or defensiveness, I have to own that. But please hear this in the manner in which it is intended… 

I don’t believe that a surface, literal, “plain reading of Scripture,” is taking the Bible as seriously as we do when we think deeply about what we’re reading, times when we have to wrestle with it because something doesn’t fit. There’s that whole meaning of the word Israel as ‘one who wrestles with God’ thing again. 

I think it is far more faithful, is taking the text far more seriously, when we are careful with it. 

For example, as a preacher I always tried very hard to understand what the text in front of me was trying to say before I preached it. I wanted to know what the author had in mind for the original audience. What the original point of the story or parable was, and is. Why did the author choose to tell us this story and not something else. And if we are going to look for clues, let’s stick with this author and not jump around the Scripture as if it has a single author. 

So, for example, I always tried to avoid informing a story from one gospel by quoting from a different one. If we’re looking at a passage from Luke, let’s stick with Luke and not jump to Matthew’s telling of the same or similar story. Yes, both gospels might include it, but due to placement and purpose, they might be trying to tell us slightly different things. 

Sorry if this comes across as defensive. Over the years I’ve been accused of playing fast and loose with the Bible, of hermeneutical gymnastics as some are fond of saying, to get the Bible to say what I want it to say, but that’s never been my intent. 

Instead, I try to use the Bible to hear what the Bible is actually trying to say, and not just look at a random quote and extrapolate a bunch of things that simply are not part of the witness of Scripture. 

No, I want to hear what the text has to say at a deeper level. I want to hear how it is drawing me nearer to the God it tells me about who is in constant conversation with us, forever inviting me to follow Jesus, and not just demanding obedience to a book, a verse, a random thought someone has decided has weight. 

If we weigh it all the same, are we to hammer our weapons into farming tools (Isaiah 2:4) or our farming tools into weapons (Joel 3:10) — because both of those images are in there! 

This is why I talk about the witness of Scripture, about taking the time to study and listen to God through the Scripture. To get a sense of the forest without worshipping the individual trees. 

I don’t want to stop at knowing of the Bible, building a monument to it. I want to lead me to a deeper understanding of God, a growing relationship with Jesus. 

I guess, to push the imagery a little, it takes getting off the highway, slowing down and getting to know the area by traveling the backroads. Taking our time to notice the scenery, getting a sense of what this place is really like — and not thinking we really know it because we hit the highlights, the tourist traps, the beaches the Bennies are rushing toward.

And when we’re talking about the Bible, that means not just knowing the Bible for the Bible’s sake, but getting to know the one about whom the Bible is written. To get a sense of God’s story and to find my place in it. 

While the many in the faith may be stuck on the Parkway, stagnant, looking like they may even be going backwards. I hope I’m still going, still growing on the backroads. Still learning about the one who makes the journey worthwhile. Deepening my relationship with the one who gives all of this starting and stopping, joy and frustration, meaning. 

The post Backroads, monuments and the witness of Scripture appeared first on Joe Iovino.