ben bartosik

“Declare to My people their transgression, to the House of Jacob their sin.”

So begins Isaiah 58, the revealing that God’s people are failing to live to the standard of how God wants them to live. These, the chosen ones, the elect, the covenantal community in relationship with the creator God, have sinned. Somehow they have failed in the actual living out of their end of the covenant.

“To be sure, they seek Me daily, eager to learn My ways. Like a nation that does what is right, that has not abandoned the laws of its God, they ask Me for the right way, they are eager for the nearness of God.” (2)

But what can it be? They pray, they seek, they long to sit in the throne room of the Most High, worshipping in the presence of God. Is this not the behaviour of those that God favours? It’s no wonder they cry out in confusion to the absence of God in their worship.

“Why, when we fasted, did You not see? When we starved our bodies, did You pay no heed?” (3)

I honestly think many Christians today can relate in this. These people recognize an emptiness to their worship practices. They’re doing everything they’ve been taught to do and seem to be doing it with a heart that seeks God’s presence. Their sin is not their lack of desire for God; yet God is not answering. God is not blessing their worship.

“Is such the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies? Is it bowing the head like a bulrush and lying in sackcloth and ashes? Do you call that a fast, a day when the LORD is favorable?” (5)

God is calling them out on something that I believe is incredibly relevant for us today: their belief that these religious observances and rituals actually impress God and demonstrate true covenantal obedience. There seems to be a hypocrisy going on that God is about to reveal. However, we fool ourselves if we think that this passage is speaking to insincere hearts. Remember, their hearts seemed to be in the right place, it’s the action that God is unfavourable towards here.

“No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock fetters of wickedness, and untie the cords of the yoke to let the oppressed go free; to break off every yoke. (6)
It is to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, to clothe him, and not to ignore your own kin.” (7)

Their hypocrisy is not that they worship with insincere hearts, it’s that they’ve strayed from the very heart of God all the while thinking that they were glorifying him with their fancy religious prayers and fasting. Meanwhile systems of injustice and oppression are at work in their midst. God’s heart burns against injustice; yet his covenantal people are more interested in their own religious experiences. This is, at its core, selfish. It denies the poor. It denies the oppressed. It denies the other for the sake of the self. This is why God does not answer. This is why their worship is empty.

I think this is what James is hitting on when he writes about the kind of religion that God likes, “to visit orphans and widows in their affliction.” (1:27) God’s heart is not moved by our devout religious practices or elaborate prayers. It doesn’t matter how powerful our worship is; true covenantal obedience is found in mercy, compassion, and justice. This what God wants from his people.

“This is why I have hewn down the prophets… For I desire loving kindness, not sacrifice; obedience to God, rather than burnt offerings. But they have transgressed the covenant.” (Hos. 6) It shouldn’t be surprising that Jesus quotes this passage from Hosea after being questioned by the religious leaders as to why he is sharing his table with tax collectors and sinners. They have, once again, missed the whole point of what the kingdom of God is actually all about.

“Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.” (Mat 21)

We’ve been raised to think of the Pharisees as the obvious enemies of Jesus; that they were the ones who self-righteously missed the point simply because they missed Jesus. The sin of the Pharisees was not that they missed Jesus, it was that they clung to their religious self-indulgence rather than hearing the very heartbeat of God expressed through the life of the one who “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant.” Jesus, the divine and creative power of God in flesh and blood, came to remind us what covenantal obedience looked like.

A life that brings glory to God, true worship, is expressed through God’s mercy, compassion, and justice taking on flesh and blood in this world. When we live that out then our worship and our prayers take on a new life and find favour from God.

“Then shall your light burst through like the dawn and your healing spring up quickly; your Vindicator shall march before you, the Presence of the LORD shall be your rear guard.
Then, when you call, the LORD will answer; when you cry, He will say: Here I am. If you banish the yoke from your midst, the menacing hand, and evil speech, and you offer your compassion to the hungry and satisfy the famished creature — Then shall your light shine in darkness.” (Isaiah 58:8-10)

How can we say we love God and yet fail to love those whom God loves?  How can we thank God for his blessing and yet fail to bless those in need around us? How can we ask for freedom yet actively participate in systems of injustice and oppression through what we eat and wear and buy and enjoy? How can we show up to worship God on Sundays but completely miss the heartbeat of his Kingdom the rest of our week?

“May it be your will, Lord our God, that the place where we stand be a place of light, not darkness.“- Rabbi Alexandri

“We are raised, reconciled, and restored not because we are thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent but because we are dead and our life is hid with Christ in God.” – Robert Farar Capon

“An hour is coming, and is now here, when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live.” -John 5:35

When Jesus said that he had come to bring life to the fullest (John 10:10) he wasn’t just talking about a new life that comes after our physical death. So often our talk of resurrection has this eternal future connotation that seems to have little to do with our present situation. This leads, of course, to a lot of ideas about heaven and hell and our eternal security; but these hold little use when confronted with the realities of our lives in the here and now, something I’m infinitely more interested in than where we go after we die.

If our faith has nothing to do with our present, beyond some sort of eternal security deposit, the death of Jesus on the cross is nothing more than an atoning sacrifice and his resurrection is secondary. We affirm it because the bible says it happened but the cross is really the main event. Here’s the thing though, I believe that what God began in and through Jesus was so much more than making sure our futures are secure. It is the power and mystery of the hour that is-coming/is-now-here. Eternal life then, as Peter Rollins puts it “is fundamentally a transformation in the very way that we exist in the present.”

Our faith has everything to do with our present when Jesus ‘resurrection becomes the main event.

The apostle Paul writes “Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?” (and here I thought baptism was just a public declaration of faith) He continues, “We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.”

There is a reality, a way of living in the here and now that is nothing more than that of the living dead. There’s movement but it’s rotting and falling apart, driven by unsatisfied hungers of the flesh, and a thoroughly gloomy and negative existence. On our own, this is all that we have; death. This is not the full life that Jesus offers. This is not the new life found through resurrection.

There is also another reality, another way of living, made possible with and through and in the death and resurrection of Jesus. One that is buried with him and, like a seed planted in the ground, bursts forth out of death into a new and vibrant life. The resurrected life is not a return to our old self. It’s not a return to death. Resurrection is, after all, a whole new way of living that as Capon writes, “actually works through death, loss, and failure.” It is a whole new life and it is made possible in the present because Jesus has defeated that other reality of death.

There are those of us who cling to death. We refuse to let go of that other reality because it’s all we know and we can’t possibly imagine it ever getting better. Even when the reality stinks of rotting death we hold on to it because the thought of giving it up is scarier than staying in it. We can manage the pain. We can handle the cycles of guilt. We can keep walking on the edge of breakdown. We can justify our selfish consumptions; because we don’t know anything else.

Death, our old self, is surprisingly comfortable.

But that creative, divine, life giving power that brought creation into being and called out Lazarus from the grave is already at work in the world. Jesus was just the beginning; the first-fruits of a whole new creation. A whole new reality. A way of living that offers life where there was once death.

When we embrace resurrection with Jesus we embrace a resurrection that takes place in the here and now that totally transforms our present realities into something new and vibrant and full of life. Imagine what this could do in our world if we all began to bring life to where death exists.

“For there will never cease to be poor in the land. Therefore I command you, ‘You shall open wide your hand to your brother, to the needy and to the poor, in your land.‘” (Deuteronomy 15)

“True generosity lies in striving so that these hands… need be extended less and less in supplication, so that more and more they become human hands which work and, working, transform the world.” (Paulo Freire) 

“Dining together isn’t charity; it’s friendship.” (Rachel Held Evans)*

There’s something truly redemptive about a shared meal.

I can recall times while I was growing up at home when there was conflict or shame wedging itself between my family. We had just been through a fight or one of us had said or done something wrong that the rest of us knew about and the thought of now sitting down and eating dinner together was daunting. The tension would be thick in the air and no one would really know where to look as we took our seats. Unspoken discord was on the menu.

But then the food would come and the silence was broken with humility, “can you please pass the carrots;” and soon forgiveness and welcoming love was extended to all who sat and ate. Eating together is incredibly redemptive.

Or there was the time I shared a meal with some people at an in from the cold program in Toronto. I was the stranger in their community and I listened as they told me their stories and we laughed together and we ate together and they asked me about my life and we compared shared interests. It was transformative for me. Eating together is incredibly redemptive.

This, after all, is sacred space. This is holy life. This is a picture of what what Jesus is talking about when he says, “when you give a feast, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind, and you will be blessed.” (Luke 14) You will be blessed. Not in a feel-good-about-yourself-because-you-did-something-nice kind of blessed; but a deeper and more rich sense of togetherness that will transform and redeem you as well.

Eating together finds it’s power in the extension of dignity and equality that is found around a common table. There is no room for social distinction after accepting this invitation. There is no room for condemnation or false charity after accepting this invitation. Poor and rich, broken and healed; God’s table is for all who choose to sit and eat.

Shared meals, this redemptive power of togetherness, is at the heart of the story of God.

This is a story that we are all invited to join and be a part of through the choices that we make and the way that we live our lives with others every single day; making room at our tables for the marginalized, the hurting, the poor, and the stranger to sit and eat and share.

Together.

________________

* I did a talk in the same vein as these thoughts a few weeks ago and then read Rachel Held Evan‘s chapter in the book Letters to a Future Church and  was amazed to find the similarities. Great book, worth reading, and Rachel’s chapter puts this far better than I ever could.

“How come you don’t care where you’re going?”
“Cuz how you get there is the worthier part.”
(Kaylee and Shepherd Book, Firefly)

A lot of life is a journey. Moving from one place to another, leaving one thing behind and looking forward to what’s ahead. Sometimes these journeys are physical. Actually travelling from one location to another. Other times they are relational journeys, spiritual journeys,  developmental, ideological, or emotional journeys. Some are short. Others are long and arduous. Sometimes we don’t know how long the journey will take; but that doesn’t matter. A journey isn’t really about the destination.

A journey is about the movement.

It’s about the distance travelled. Life in motion. The in-between. In a journey there are no shortcuts because the destination isn’t as important as how you arrived. We spend a lot of time in-between. Between jobs, between relationships, between events, between due dates, between experiences, between pain and healing, between what you’ve learned and are learning, between doubt and faith. These are the times in which we find ourselves having picked up and left from where we once were and travelling into the new and unknown. The journey is not as concerned with where and when we end up as it is about about what happens to us along the way. The kind of stuff that can only happen in the in-between.

Journeys challenge us.

Journeys shape us.

Journeys humble us.

A life of faith is a life lived in unending wonder, awe, joy, trust, and a willingness, like Abraham, to go forth from all that you knew to the place God shows to you. A life of faith is a life of journey.

We stop growing when we decide to remain where we are.

Settling in one place for too long is the surest way to stunt us and confine ourselves to a life of dullness, comfort, and inner-centeredness. We begin to provide for our own needs, pursue personal gain and pleasure, and trick ourselves into thinking “I have arrived.” Self assuredness and entitlement replace our need to trust and wonder. Settling is easy, comfortable, and altogether tempting.

Settling will put an end to any forward movement in your life.

We were made to keep moving. To keep being challenged. To keep pushing, as C.S. Lewis says, “further up and further in.” We were made to step forward in childlike dependence, wide eyed with wonder, discovering more and more about ourselves, our world, and our creator each day. This is journey. This is what we are made for.

The following is an excerpt from a commentary on the Ten Commandments by Patrick D. Miller regarding the fifth commandment, honour your father and mother:

“From my… work with the Hebrew of Exodus 20, two facts are clear to me: the first is that honor is not a synonym for obedience and the second is that the Decalogue is not addressed to children.”

Honouring one’s parents is not a command directed at little kids. It is a command for everyone. This is an active choice made by those who are capable of making it. Which means we can choose to follow, or not follow, the command to celebrate the worth and value of of our parents.

“When a man or woman honours their father and their mother, the LORD says ‘I ascribe it as though I dwelt with them and was honoured myself.”
- Rabbinical teaching

“One of the most important gifts a parent can give a child is the gift of accepting that child’s uniqueness.” – Mr. Rogers

My family likes to laugh. We like to laugh at books and tv commercials and movies and funny stories and good jokes and the things that take themselves far too seriously;
but mostly we laugh at ourselves.
We laugh at one another’s quirks and habits and the insecure and absurd within each of us. We laugh because we understand. We laugh because we relate. We laugh because I think if we didn’t we’d probably kill each other.
Because we choose to celebrate rather than to condemn.

I don’t know, I just think this is a good way to live.

“We are human after all. Much in common after all.” – Daft Punk

In a famous and often overused passage, William Shakespeare once questioned the value of names. Essentially asking: is there any significance at all in what an object or person is called or is there more to identity than a simple title?  After all, coffee, if called by another name, would still taste just as good and still provide me with what I need in the morning to get my brain working. Does being Ben Bartosik hold any importance to who I am at my core or am I more than what my parents chose to call me at birth? I recognize that in our cultural context names are often nothing more than a reflection of the trends of a particular decade or occasionally an homage to a loved one or icon; which is why I believe we need to look cross culturally in order to further consider this question. What’s in a name?

This idea was sparked while I was reading through Ephesians 3 this morning. Paul writes, “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family on earth is named…” Then he goes into this amazing section on the power of the Spirit in understanding the love of Christ and the fullness of God and just breezes right on by those first two verses which become understandably overlooked against the rest of the passage. So that’s where I backed up and got hung on this naming stuff.

In the Hebrew culture a name meant something. It said something about you. [Isaac - "he laughs", Noah - "rest/comfort", Benoni -"son of my sorrow."] Your name was not just something that sounded nice to your parents, it was directly related to who you were. Often it was representative of where you came from. Other times it was something to be earned; to live up to the name your parents gave you. Whatever the case, there is something very important we can understand.

To be named is to be be given an identity.

So what does it mean when Paul writes that we have been named by God? To be named by our heavenly Father?

We find a really amazing picture of someone being (re)named by God in Genesis 32. Jacob is out in the wilderness fleeing his past and hiding from his brother when he has an interesting encounter with God. It says that during the night he was alone and “a man wrestled with him until the breaking of the day.” This man is unable to defeat Jacob and asks to be released but Jacob replies, “I will not let you go until you bless me.” The stranger asks Jacob for his name (who he is) and then says something that changes Jacob’s entire identity.

“Your name shall no longer be Jacob, but Israel, for you have striven with God and with men, and have prevailed.”

Through this encounter Jacob finds a whole new life. He is given a whole new identity. He is changed. He is remade. He is restored. He goes from being called Jacob ["Heel-Catcher" or "cheater"] to being named Israel ["He strives with God"]. And this name is given to him by the very God he struggled with and demanded a blessing from.

I can’t help but enjoy the significance of that. Through struggling with the divine, his father’s God becomes his God and he finds a whole new life in the process.

To be named by God is to be given a whole new identity. It is to be remade into a new person. It is to come face to face with the creator and walk away changed.

So then what is this name that Paul is referring to that God has given all of us?
I think the answer is found in the wording. “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family on earth is named…” God has named us his children. He has named us his heirs. This is who we are. This is where we find our significance and where we find our calling. In being named God’s child we are named his own. This is intimate and personal and life changing kind of stuff. And it means something that should change the entire way we view ourselves.

To be a child of God is to be loved by God.

“Faith comes out of awe, out of an awareness that we are exposed to his presence, out of anxiety to answer the challenge of God, out of an awareness of our being called upon.“ (Heschel)

Learning to see the world in terms of the divine is not easy. Our minds are preoccupied with every distraction and we have been taught to be skeptical in all areas of faith. From childhood we have learned how to answer questions and solve problems rather than bask in the tension that comes from wonder. In doing so we have shut our eyes to the divine mysteries all around us. If we are ever to encounter God, we must begin by recognizing where He is trying to get our attention.

It is out of the miracle that God calls to us.

When Moses drew near to the burning bush in Exodus 3, God called out to him by name, “Moses. Moses!” In this moment the divine act became personal. The sunset hangs in the sky as though it was painted just for you. The rain falls and refreshes you exactly when you need it the most. The gentle breeze comes and fills you with a sense of peace in the midst of a troubled time. The stars strike you with a reminder that God is there listening to your prayers. This is faith; the sense that God is present and calling out to you by name. It’s personal. It’s familiar.

“Moses, Moses!”

This is the call from a God who knows you. It’s a call that invites you to come face to face with the depths of his love that he has just for you. It’s the experience of the bride being called upon by her beloved. “I slept, but my heart was awake. A sound! My beloved is knocking. ‘Open to me!‘” (Song of Songs 5:2) This is the terrifying language of love. As we seek the divine and are drawn towards him through wonder and awe we realize something truly unbelievable. This God is actually calling out to us. This God is seeking us.

This is a God who is pursuing you.

The call of God is an invitation to encounter his presence. It’s an invitation to commune with the creator of the universe who welcomes you as a loved one. It’s an invitation to experience the unending love of God.

Lesson 2: But You Have To Respond.

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” (Rev. 3:20)  We can’t encounter the presence of God if we don’t answer his call to let him in. We have to respond. The scary thing is that this isn’t just surface level belief that we are being invited to. This is the life changing, unrelenting, soul-exposing depths of the  passionate love of God that we are being called to experience.

The lover of our soul is desperately crying out to us for union. “Open to Me!” Inviting us deeper and further into a relationship with this God who says that we have “captivated [his] heart.” (Song of Songs 4:9)

The question now is whether or not you are willing to surrender to his invitation.

“Lift up your eyes on high and see: who created these?” (Is. 40:26)

What does it mean to encounter God? What does it look like? Feel like? How will I know when it happens? I confess I still struggle with these questions even this many years into my spiritual journey. We all go through times of spiritual dryness. Times when, like the Psalmist we can say, “my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.” (Ps 63) So often we desperately need an encounter with the living God because everything else is failing to quench our thirst. It’s often in these desert experiences that we find ourselves humble enough to cry out to the one who we really need.

The experience of Moses in Exodus 3 is one of the best pictures of what it is for the human soul to encounter the divine. The story begins with Moses in Midian. Having fled from his past and seeking safety; he’s now in exile, running from his failures, his sins, and the conviction that his own people are in slavery in Egypt. He’s hiding out in this foreign land and it says that “he sat down by a well.” (Ex 2:15). Sitting by a well. This is a beautiful picture of settling, resting, getting comfortable. It’s here that he finds a wife, raises a family, and gets a job for the next 40 years. And what seems like a perfect ending to a story is actually just the beginning. There is actually a grander narrative taking place.

God is at work to rescue his people.

When Moses encounters God in Exodus 3 we find him tending to a flock of sheep in the wilderness. Presumably this is something that he does often; yet this is important. Moses meets God in a seemingly insignificant, ordinary place. He’s at his day job in the middle of the wilderness and “the angel of the LORD appeared to him in a flame of fire out of the midst of a burning bush.” (3:2) Moses witnesses a divine act, a miracle, but God doesn’t speak until Moses pays attention.

Lesson 1: Open Your Eyes

Moses was able to see the divine act because he had his eyes open. He saw the miracle taking place in the ordinary and named it for what it was. “He looked, and behold, the bush was not consumed, And Moses said, ‘I will turn aside to see this great sight.’” (3:2-3) I am convinced that God is at work doing miracles all around us each day. We are simply failing to notice them as divine acts. We need to open up our spiritual eyes in order to see them for what they are. Abraham Heschel writes,

This, indeed, is the greatness of man: to be able to have faith. For faith is an act of freedom, of independence of our own limited faculties, whether of reason or sense-perception. It is an act of spiritual ecstasy, of rising above our own wisdom… to think in the world in the terms of God. To have faith is not to defy human reason but rather to share divine wisdom.

An encounter with God begins first with an awareness of the divine acts in the ordinary, unexpected places of life. Choosing to wonder in the midst of the miracles of creation and being drawn in by awe and faith is the first step. God is at work all around us. There is this grander narrative taking place and He’s always trying to get our attention and bring us into it.

We just need to open our eyes and see.

“The expression of faith is an affirmation of truth, a definite judgement, a conviction, while faith itself is an event, something that happens rather than something that is stored away; it is a moment in which the soul of man communes with the glory of God.” (Heschel)

I was wrestling my way through Romans 1 the other day and got hung up on the notion that “the righteous shall live by faith.” (v 17) Righteousness [gr. - dikaiosune] means our right standing with God, or our  justification. Faith [gr. - pistis]  is our conviction or assurance that we have been saved by God. What interested me is the idea that our right standing with God is found through our ongoing conviction that we are saved through grace.

The gospel, that Paul writes about previously to this, reveals “the righteousness of God from faith for faith.” We understand the gospel. The good news that we have been saved through Christ alone. We accept this salvation in an act of faith. However, what stands out is that our continued righteousness is found through this same faith.

The faith that saves us also justifies us.

If we are to be righteous, to be in right standing with a holy God, we must live by faith. We must live, each day, in an awareness of our salvation. To live a life of faith is to live a life of daily humility and surrender. To offer ourselves before a God who saves us from ourselves. It’s not obedience that makes us holy, it’s faith. Our obedience is merely a reflection of our daily surrender.

This is why remembering is so necessary to a life of faith. It is through our memories that we are able to relive our need for salvation each day. We recall what it is to need to be rescued and through that we find humility. Then as we surrender ourselves to our rescuer we discover the joy of our salvation all over again. If we are to return to God we must remember what he’s done for us. Our memories serve as our witness and testimony to the gospel of grace in our lives. That we have been saved through the unrelenting love of a holy God who gave himself to make right standing between us and him, and that this is something we can live in perpetual and daily awareness of and participation in. Perhaps this is why our Lord tells us to “pick up our cross daily“; because a life of faith is a daily return to the salvation given freely through the death and resurrection of Jesus.