Jesus Invests

November 15, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

My personal theologian and dear spouse notes that the parable of the talents could be construed to offer clues where Jesus might stand on economic issues. Any Keynesian economist would assume that the rich man in this story got rich at the expense of the many who are poor. Yet Jesus appears to approve not only the rich man’s praise of servants whose shrewd investments paid off, but he especially relishes the man’s condemnation of the “wicked and lazy slave” who buried his capital in the ground.

On the surface, this could be the biblical foundation for a Christian MBA program. But let’s not get carried away. It could also be interpreted as a program for keeping your slaves productive and happy. We all know that Southern church folk of yore were skilled at this kind of eisegesis when they claimed biblical justification for fact that they and their missionaries owned slaves.

So we are forewarned that it is wise to read the bible carefully to avoid reading into it messages that are not there. In the parable of the talents, is Jesus praising rich slave owners? Or – as we have been taught in our Sunday schools from time immemorial – is he praising people who make the most of the gifts God has given them?

It’s convenient, at least in English, that the biblical word “talent” is the same word we use to describe those human qualities that make us who we are.

A talent (in Latin, a talentum) is an ancient unit of mass. It corresponded generally to the mass of water in the volume of an amphora, a one foot cube. When used as a measure of money, it refers to a talent-weight of gold or of silver. In Jesus’ parable, no one knows exactly how much money is involved, but it’s clear we’re talking big denari.

Human talent is far more difficult to measure.

Talent is something we regard highly in other people, and those who have a lot of it are objects of sometimes eccentric adulation, as when women scream ecstatically and throw their panties at rock bands. I’ve demonstrated a bit of that kind of fanaticism myself, as those who remember my high school idolatry of JFK will know. My years as a newspaper reporter in Pottstown introduced me to several idols of a different nature, including the late “Smokin’ Joe” Frazier, a gentle Christian man with iron fists.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one, because I tell the story all the time, but in 1992 I was in National Airport in Washington waiting for a flight. I went to an empty gate so I could read without being jostled and opened the paper. Before long a ground agent escorted a tall, slightly stoop-shouldered man to the same gate. The man obviously had the same aim as mine – to sit quietly alone and read the paper before his flight was called. I looked up and recognized him immediately: it was Joe DiMaggio, the Yankee Clipper, one of the most talented players in the history of baseball, who had been in Washington as a part of the 500th anniversary celebration of Columbus’ discovery of America.

The reason we admired Joe, even in his retirement, is his extravagant talent that set him apart from nearly every other player in the game. As Joe sank into his seat, I lowered my paper and stared at the back of his head. Occasionally a passerby my age or older would do a double take as they realized who was sitting at the gate. But we all respected Joe’s privacy, and he sat alone and unbothered for several minutes. Soon, his flight was called and the same ground agent – a woman so young I wondered if she had any idea who he was – came over and to escort to the entryway. He stood and flashed his Mr. Coffee smile and disappeared into the crowd.

I dropped my paper and walked over to Joe’s empty seat. Hesitating slightly as if I was approaching the burning bush, I sat down. I sat down in Joe DiMaggio’s warmth and gurgled with happiness.

My spouse thinks that was more than a little weird. It wasn’t like I could absorb Joe’s talent or essence by sitting in his ninety-eight point six for a few seconds. But, I insist, it wasn’t like I was throwing my panties at him, either. It was an expression of manly obeisance to a genuine idol. And I’m glad I did it.

Talent is also the bread and butter of the theater. There are scores of supremely talented people on stage, but, sadly, there are millions of supremely talented people who never get a starring role or even a recall to audition.

One of the barriers to talent in the theater, I think, is that the key to success is often one’s physical appearance. Beauty is often more important than talent, and actors who would be perfect for the role of Evita or Reno Sweeney or Liza Doolittle will never be cast because someone doesn’t consider them pretty enough.

Thank God for high school and local theater, where there is much more leeway. In Once on This Island, the character of Ti Moune is a petite girl, a girl of color portrayed by one actor as a child and by another as a teenager. On the Broadway stage, the role was played by the beautiful and petite LaChanze, who fits the image perfectly.

In one high school production we saw, the child Ti Moune was portrayed by a lovely African American child, but between scenes she morphed into a tall, 200 pound white woman. This may have been confusing to the audience, but it was a creative way of using the most talented person in a pivotal role. And the equally talented cast was able to sing with a straight face the beguiling lyric, “Don’t you remember your little Ti Moune from the tree?”

Talent is much admired by all of us, but for some of us it is a vicarious admiration. We notice the talents in others but not in ourselves. This is a truth known to every pastor who has tried to recruit people for programs and ministries in the church – greeter, choir, evangelism, Christian education, newsletter, building maintenance – because a dismaying number of people are likely to respond, “Oh, I can’t. I have no gifts. I’m not talented that way.”

Here’s where the parable of the talents slaps us in the face. It seems safe enough to demurely turn away from a task on the grounds we’re not skilled enough to do it, and no doubt the pastor will express polite understanding and look elsewhere. But the still, small voice inside us may remind us of another response: “Throw this worthless slave into utter darkness, where there will weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Oops.

One point of this parable may be to remind us that the gracious modesty our mothers raised us to express may not always be the answer God is seeking when he calls us to do something. And another point seems to be that God has given each of us talents in abundance, no matter who we are. And when God calls us to use those talents and make them grow, God does not want to hear humble excuses.

All of us know people who talents are underestimated, either by themselves or others.

Lately I’ve been thinking of a cousin I haven’t seen for a half century or more. She was the daughter of my maternal grandmother’s brother, Uncle Everett, and his wife, Aunt Wilma. Grace was a little older than my mother and her brother, and the cousins used to play together in Andes when they were children.

Grace still lived with her parents when I was a child and we visited the Closes whenever we were in Andes.

Grace used a wheelchair and she had a severe disability that was never identified. It could have been cerebral palsy. She could not control the movements of her hands, which seemed to be constantly wrestling with each other, and she had difficulty forming words.

Aunt Wilma always dressed Grace in a black dress or flower print dress, possibly because it easier to get off and on, but the dress and the wheelchair created the illusion that Grace was an elderly lady. But she must have been in her thirties when I knew her. My mother said one of the games she and her brother would play with Grace when they were kids would be to hold her by the shoulders so she could pretend to walk like normal people. Grace’s hands would push gleefully against each other and she would laugh delightedly until her exhausted cousins had to put her down.

Grace lived quietly in her room in a farmhouse on the edge of the village of Andes, N.Y. I don’t know if she could hold a book or read, and there was no television in the house. She may have listened to the radio, but I have no idea how she spent her days.

I do know that when we stopped by for visits, Aunt Wilma would greet us at the door and Uncle Everett would go to his chair and sit in silent Yankee taciturnity, which was regarded as polite interaction. But when Grace wheeled into the room, laughing and squealing with delight that visitors had come, the mood changed. Whatever our spirits were, Grace would raise them – by laughter and smiles and undecipherable noises. She didn’t engage in conversations, but when we asked how she was she would nod and smile, making it clear that everything was perfectly fine as far as she was concerned. Given that she spent her life trapped inside a dysfunctional body, her happiness was both uncanny and infectious.

I’m sure no one would have considered Grace to be a gifted or talented person, but this woman to whom nature had given so little invariably gave much to all who met her. She had been given the tiniest of talents, but somehow she reinvested what she had in an attitude that multiplied her gift ten fold.

In my youth I was in awe of supremely talented performers, politicians, and athletes. Heroes like Rosa Parks, Dolores Huerta, and Gloria Steinem were given substantial gifts by their creator, and they invested them with vigor, multiplying them in ways that would make Jesus proud. That’s why the rest of us, not having received the kinds of gifts they had, enshrine them in halls of champions.

At the same time, most of us were given greater gifts than Cousin Grace. If we’re not investing them as vigorously as she did, we should be ashamed of ourselves. For me, she will always be a reminder that we need not make excuses about our weaknesses, or seek to convince ourselves that, given the overwhelming challenges facing us in life, there is little we can do to make a difference in the church, in our households, in our communities, or in our world.

Maybe we don’t have the skills or the gifts to change the church or the world. But God has given us sufficient gifts to make a difference, just as Grace made a difference in the lives of so many people in Andes.

God didn’t judge Grace for not changing the world. But God does judge her as a good and trustworthy servant because she multiplied her gifts many fold. As her earthly life came to an end, I have no doubt of the Lord’s greeting to her: “Well done, good and trustworthy servant; you have been trustworthy in a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master.”

May we all be inspired by heroes we admire. But may we base our lives on the faithfulness of people like Grace, who were given so little but turned what they had into manifold blessings.

Beat it, Dead Beats

 November 8, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

Matthew 25:1-13

Assuming that the unbending bridegroom in this little parable represents Jesus, are you just a little bit bothered by his refusal to admit the dawdling bridesmaids into the feast?

What does he say? “I do not know you!”?

Is this a dark warning from on high that if we stray from the path of righteousness – if we are not unfailingly faithful – God may find us lacking and slam heaven’s door in our faces?

Well, that seems pretty unfair. According to the story, the only mistake the foolish bridesmaids made was to assume the bridegroom would show up on time. Was it their fault that he dilly-dallied so long they ran out of oil for their ceremonial lamps?

Isn’t the bridegroom being a little harsh? Isn’t Jesus?

For those of us who are not sufficiently saintly, the story is more than a little disturbing. If all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God – if we are indeed, as Luther put it, all simultaneously sinners and saints – how can ever be sure if our spiritual lamps are always trimmed with enough oil?

Moreover, if Jesus is warning us he will slam the door in our faces if we fall short, where is the gentle Jesus meek and mild we all love? Where is the Father’s paternal protection for the foolish bridesmaids?

G. K. Chesterton, the British writer, critic, journalist, and theologian, was not surprised that Jesus sometimes appears to have hard edges.

Chesterton writes:

We have all heard people say a hundred times over, for they seem never to tire of saying it, that the Jesus of the New Testament is indeed a most merciful and humane lover of humanity, but that the Church has hidden this human character in repellent dogmas and stiffened it with ecclesiastical terrors till it has taken on an inhuman character. This is, I venture to repeat, very nearly the reverse of the truth. The truth is that it is the image of Christ in the churches that is almost entirely mild and merciful. It is the image of Christ in the gospels that is a good many other things as well.

Our daughter Katie, who is on the Autism spectrum, has a simple faith and an uncomplicated theology. When it snows, she imagines her best friend Joseph, who died years ago, standing happily in heaven and asking Jesus to make it snow or rain or shine as a sign that Joseph and Jesus love her and love all of us. “The weather boy in heaven said it will be cold today, and it is,” Katie will say, almost every day. “Isn’t he a smart young man?”

Katie’s view may not be meteorologically sound but the more I think about it, the less trouble I have with her theology. She sees Jesus as a constant cascade of God’s love on all of us.

She also senses that we don’t always understand what Jesus is saying to us. She listened carefully when her mother preached about Jesus’ rudeness in Matthew when he ignored a non-Jewish woman who approached him pleading for her daughter. When the Syrophoenician woman persisted by shouting at his disciples, Jesus stood his ground, saying, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” That wasn’t the Jesus Katie knows. “He made a bad choice,” she told her mother. And indeed the woman’s persistence seems to lead Jesus to the same conclusion, and – finally – he heals her daughter.

As we read through the Gospels, it seems clear that Matthew’s theology is harsher that that of his fellow evangelists. He uses the phrase “gnashing of teeth” five times to describe the fate of sinners thrown into the eternal darkness. Scholars who believe Matthew is the same person as the tax collector who became Jesus’ disciple point out that Matthew had a powerfully intense view of himself as a sinner. He knew something of the outer darkness and wanted to be sure his fellow sinners knew the need for repentance.

We are reading Matthew’s Gospel this month as we follow the Narrative Lectionary, which is being read in thousands of churches today.

But in other churches that follow the Revised Common Lectionary, a kinder, gentler parable of Jesus is being read – the story of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:11-32.

Most of us can tell this story in our own words: the younger son who went to his father and asked for his inheritance … the wild and riotous sinning of this younger son as he spent his fortune and ended up sleeping with pigs … the younger son’s humiliating repentance as he resolved to go back to his father and beg work as a hired hand … his father’s delighted acceptance of his son’s return, killing the fatted calf and welcoming him back to the fold … the elder brother’s extreme annoyance at his younger brother’s good fortune …

Across the millennia, millions of sermons have been preached about the Prodigal. But on this particular Sunday, when we are meditating about the fate of the five foolish bridesmaids, the contrast in stories could not be more vivid:

The only sin of the five foolish bridesmaids was to run out of oil and be late to the wedding feast, so the bridegroom – a rhetorical stand-in for God or Jesus – bars the door.

The sins of the prodigal son were too numerous and too terrible to mention beyond the phrase “dissolute living,” and if they made a movie about him you’d have to be 17 to see it without an adult. Yet when he came back to his father – a rhetorical stand-in for God or Jesus – he was welcomed with joy, celebration, and forgiveness.

Why are Matthew and Luke so far apart in their stories of sin and forgiveness?

I can only provide the same answer as Tevye when asked why the Jews of his village in Fiddler on the Roof follow their traditions: I don’t know.

We can go so far as to observe that Jesus used literary metaphors to attract our attention, and sometimes he used humor and exaggeration, and occasionally it’s difficult to know exactly what he wanted us to think about his anecdotes. Certainly he expected us to laugh at the notion of a camel getting through the eye of a needle, and he assured us that impossible things – like the rich gaining entry into heaven – are indeed possible for God.

The story of the ill-fated foolish bridesmaids certainly gets our attention and focuses our thoughts on our own spiritual preparedness. But is Jesus saying they are locked out of the feast forever? That would be putting conditions on God’s love for us, and the good news of the Gospel is that God’s love for us is unconditional. And God sent God’s son into the world to die for our sins and keep us in the eternal fold.

C.S. Lewis, the great Christian “apologist” whose radio voice was second only to Churchill’s as a beacon of faith and hope during Britain’s Finest Hour, warned us not to get entangled in seeming contradictions in the Bible. He said Jesus is the foundation of our faith, and his love for us is unconditional. It is that love that undergirds is, and Lewis cautioned against focusing on specific Bible verses that we may not fully understand.

But the most assuring words come from Martin Luther himself, who preached on this passage in Matthew in Erfurt at St. Michaeliskirche in October 1522.

“You heard how the ten virgins with their vessels or lamps went out to meet the bridegroom,” Luther preached. “Five of them were wise, but the others were foolish. Two types of Christians are depicted for us in this parable, namely, true Christians and phony Christians who only give the appearance of being Christians.”

By “phony Christians,” of course, Luther means the Pope and his ilk.

“If God is for us (as I am certain God is), who will do us harm?” Luther assures us. “Faith is stronger than every foe. No one can extinguish our lamps.

“Therefore, let each one see to it that he has these two together: the oil, which is true faith and trust in Christ; and the lamps, the vessel, which is the outward service toward your neighbor.

“The whole Christian life,” Luther preaches, “consists in these two things: Believe God. Help your neighbor. The whole Gospel teaches this.”

Thus Dr. Luther helps us interpret the mysterious metaphor of the oil. The oil in the lamps of the wise bridesmaids is the faith that is a gift from God to each of us, and it will never disappear.

And it is God’s gift of faith that assures us the door of heaven will never be slammed in our faces.

“Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom,” Jesus tells his followers in Luke 12:22.

And in John 14:2, there is this promise: “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go prepare a place for you?”

Have you ever noticed how neatly the Scout motto and law summarize the first 13 verses of Matthew 25?

Be Prepared! And be trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, brave, clean and reverent.

Millions of young women and men who didn’t study Matthew 25 can cite these rules from memory, and thus carry the gist of Jesus’ message in their hearts.

These are the promises that put this message and prayer in all our hearts:

Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning,
Give me oil in my lamp, I pray.
Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning.
Keep me burning till the break of day.

Ask Not For Whom the Bell Bings

November 1, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens. N.Y. 

On All Saints Sunday we pause to remember friends and loved ones who have never really been out of our hearts and minds. Parents, siblings, spouses, colleagues, neighbors, people who were very important in our lives and left a big hole when they were gone.

Possibly – just possibly – not all of these folks were saints who lived exemplary, unselfish, sacrificial lives and went around doing good. There will be no feast days to honor the passing of souls we loved. To go a bit further, some of us had relatives who are, in George Carlin’s reckoning, not smiling down at us but grimacing up at us.

But Lutherans don’t have to worry whether grandpa, who tended to spend Sunday mornings recovering from Saturday nights, had made it into the Good Place. Grandpa was, to put it Latinly, simul Justus et peccator: simultaneously a saint and a sinner. As are we all.

Over my decades as a journalist for church publications and newspapers, I worked under an editorial code. If word of the death of an older person crossed my desk, I would consider it natural causes and pound out an obituary for the morning edition. If, however, the decedent was in his or her teens or twenties, the code was to investigate and report what happened.

If the decedent was a well known person, such as the mayor or police chief, we wrote the obituary years before they died. This is common practice in all media outlets so we would have all the biographical information ready to go.

Every media outlet I know has an obit file so staff writers won’t have to dig all night for facts and sources if the police chief can’t be Heimliched in time.

Macabre as it may seem, even church news offices have files of obituaries of church leaders still breathing. When I worked for the National Council of Churches I was particularly proud of an obit I wrote for Billy Graham years before his death. But Billy lived most of a century and by the time he died I had written statements lamenting his death for three succeeding general secretaries

Pre-death obits are a time-saving device in the age of instant communication. The only problem with keeping them locked and loaded in your computer is the danger of releasing them too soon, as when the reports would be, in Mark Twain’s words, exaggerated. I remember an instance in which the death of the mother of a church bureaucrat was prematurely reported, requiring a retraction reporting she was no longer dead. Sure, the story had a resurrection ring to it, but no one in the church expects to see that kind of thing more than once.

In the halcyon days of typewriters and mimeographed press releases, time seemed to move slower and the risk of premature obits was not as great. On the contrary, sometimes days and weeks passed before the obit saw the light of day.

In the fall of 1972, former President Harry Truman – a Baptist –lay dying. My editor in the American Baptist Division of Communication, Dr. Frank Sharp, asked me to write an obituary of the former president that quoted notable Baptists. It seemed as if Mr. Truman’s passing was imminent so I acted quickly. I called Harold Stassen, a prominent American Baptist who had once been a serious contender for Mr. Truman’s job. Mr. Stassen immediately agreed and the next day I received a nice tribute written in his own hand on lined yellow paper. I typed the quote into the story and waited. And waited.

President Truman lingered for weeks and after a while the obituary sank deeper into my In-Basket. By late December, Truman’s illness had disappeared from the papers and we closed the American Baptist offices for Christmas.

I don’t remember what I did Christmas Day 1972, but I remember December 26. I was awaked at home by a phone call. The baritone voice that never needed amplification was Stassen’s. The New York Times had just called him for a statement.

“Truman’s dead,” Stassen rumbled. “Where’s the darn obit?” (He really said darn. That’s the way he talked. He was a Christian gentleman and, besides, his decibel level didn’t require cussing.)

I drove quickly to the office to pull the obit out of the pile and called the impatient Times obituary editor and read it to him over the phone. Truman’s death, of course, made the front page. I don’t remember if they quoted Stassen or not. But we tried.

Recently, when Patrick Stewart, Dolores Huerta, Susan Saint James, Noah Adams, and Walter Koenig died, their obituaries had already written, filed and ready to go. No one had to lose sleep or drive to the office to pull it out of a dusty file. Those days are gone forever. And I, for one, don’t miss them.

There are, of course, celebrities and politicians of prominence that I hope will be around for many years and it is not pleasant to remember that their obituaries have been written, too. It’s a consequence of the age of instant media. It’s fueled by our need for instant intellectual gratification, the same impulse that has turned “Google” into a verb.

It is a little strange to spend hours documenting a person’s death years before it happens, but perhaps there’s an up-side to that. Motivational speakers make fortunes encouraging us to live each day as if it were our last. Maybe the way to do that is to add a line or two each day to our premature obits. And, of course, remember to leave the obits where an editor can find them.

On All Saints Sunday we pause to remember friends and loved ones who have never really been out of our hearts and minds. Parents, siblings, spouses, colleagues, neighbors, people who were very important in our lives and left a big hole when they were gone.

Our prayers drift up like incense to thank God for the gift of these lives, and for the reminder that the time will come when our obits will be writ, the bell will bing as our name is read out, and we will join these beloved sinner saints in the great cloud of witnesses over heaven.

Orthodox Churches Didn't Need a Reformation

November 25, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.,

When Reformation Sunday comes around every year, I think of an old friend I knew through the National and World Councils of Churches. 

I met Father Leonid Kishkovsky in the 1970s when we were both young ecumenists representing our churches on these councils. 

Back then, Leonid, a Russian-born priest in the Orthodox Church in America, wore a black cassock and parted his long hair in the middle. His beard and dour expression made me think of Rasputin. 

Leonid was a quintessential Orthodox priest. I told him that when I was a young Air Force chaplain’s assistant in October 1967 I visited Rome. 

“That was the time Patriarch Athenagoras I was there to confer with Pope Paul,” I said. 

Leonid raised his eyebrows. 

“The Pope and the Patriarch concelebrated a mass at the high altar,” I added. 

Leonid shook his head. 

“No they didn’t,” he said. 

“Yes,” I persisted. “That’s what the church media called it.” 

“Impossible,” Leonid said. “They may have stood together at the altar but it could not have been concelebrated.” 

I replied that as a Baptist layman I could not have made the word up but he was unmoved. 

Later, during one of the National Council of Churches’ worship celebrations of Reformation, I sat next to Leonid. He leaned over and whispered, “We don’t observe Reformation Sunday,” he said, referring to Orthodox churches. “We did not have a reformation. Didn’t need one.” 

Whether they need reforming or not, in most Orthodox churches, the liturgy, ministry, and requirements for ordination have not changed in twelve hundred years. 

Leonid became an archpriest in the Orthodox Church in America and retired to serve as pastor of a church on Long Island. He became ill and, toward the end, preached in a wheel chair. He died in August 2021, may his memory be eternal! 

For Christians who are not Orthodox, Reformation Sunday, if not a high holy day, is a time to reflect on how the church has evolved over the centuries. 

When the reformers risked their lives to translate scripture into the vernacular, it was a revelation. Nowhere in the bible were references to popes, bishops, priestly celibacy, or Purgatory. Soon, thanks to the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, these truths were spread far and wide. The established church was threatened and the Reformation was on. 

Imagine the amazement of people who were told that good works was the only way to get into heaven when they read this passage in their own language: 

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus, for good works…” (Ephesians 2:8-9) 

We have so much to thank these early reformers for, particularly the realization that we are saved by faith, and that no one – no pope, no bishop, no priest – stands between the individual sinner and God. 

Thus Reformation Sunday is a day for rejoicing and gratitude for those who came before us, including Martin Luther, who never intended to found a church named for him. As Luther famously said, “While I was drinking beer, God reformed the church.” 

But we would be doing these early reformers a disservice if our rejoicing did not include a sobering awareness of what they faced. The penalty for reform was invariably torture and fiery death at the stake. 

It’s difficult for us to fully appreciate what they went through. 

The late British writer C.J. Sansom wrote seven novels that paint a vivid and horrifying picture of the state of the church under the erratic and unpredictable reforms of Henry VIII. The novels offer detailed descriptions of life in medieval England, the smells, the sewage troughs in the middle streets, the multi-tiered caste system from King to peasant. The novels are written in the voice of Matthew Shardlake, a hunchback lawyer who struggles against his disability to solve crimes and brush against such personages as Thomas Cromwell, Thomas Cranmer, Queen Catherine Howard, and Henry VIII himself. 

In his book Lamentation, Sansom draws us into the dark side of the Reformation when King Henry vacillates on what his people should believe, what they should read, and how they must worship. People who guessed wrong what the King wants them to do at any given time face painful deaths. 

One of the most disturbing scenes in the book involves Anne Askew, a 25-year-old anabaptist reformer who claimed the authority of the Holy Spirit over the king. She was arrested by devious officials who plotted to depose Henry’s sixth and final wife, Queen Catherine, because they suspected she was a closet reformer. They tortured Anne Askew on the rack to force her to reveal that Catherine was one of her supporters. 

But Anne never talked. 

Sansom’s description of the rack is not for the squeamish. We hear the groaning of the ropes and the cracking of Anne’s joints and her screams, we struggle to breathe in the hot humidity of the torture room, we smell the foul sweat of the men pulling at the rack. 

Anne Askew was the only woman to be tortured on the rack prior to being burned at the stake because King Henry, in his tender wisdom, forbad women to suffer this fate. For that reason, the torturers were careful to hide their identities. 

Anne’s body was so broken by the rack that she could not stand. She was tied to a chair and taken to the place of execution where she was chained to the stake in an upright position. 

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to smell the acrid smoke and feel the flames as they climbed her body. According to some reports – accepted by Sansom in his fictional account – Anne’s suffering did not last long. In a spirit of Christian compassion her executioners tied a bag of gun powder around her neck. It exploded almost immediately, ending her agony and blowing her head off. 

It all began five hundred and seven years ago this Halloween when Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. We celebrate this relatively benign but courageous fact today. 

But it’s not as simple as that. The truth is, if he had his way, Luther would have nailed a few Anabaptists to the door, too. And Jews. And the Pope. The defacing of the Wittenberg door was the ominous prelude to decades of burnings, beheadings, torture, and other primitive forms of hermeneutical discussion. 

Luther, who spent much of his life hiding from Catholic assassins, would have readily immolated the odd Mennonite or Jew whose theology he found abhorrent. 

Luther was complicated. Among other things, he was a bona fide prophet. God spoke through him with blinding clarity. 

But Luther also spoke for himself, and on those occasions he was often wrong. He was a typical sixteenth century European Christian who bristled with anti-Semitism and xenophobia and he bristled brisker than most. Had his glowering imperfections been less obvious, his followers might have elevated him to the demigod status of Joseph Smith or Mary Baker Eddy. 

Whether Luther actually defaced the Wittenberg door with nails is a matter of dispute, but historians are clear that he sent the theses to his bishop, Albert of Mainz, on October 31, 1517. They were not a demand for comprehensive church reform but a complaint about the sale of indulgences, a papal racket for selling tickets to heaven. 

The Disputation of Martin Luther on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences was the opening salvo of the Protestant Reformation. Pope Leo X, who depended on indulgences to continue living in the manner to which he was accustomed, was alarmed by Luther’s disputation and eventually excommunicated him. His Holiness also dispatched goon squads in search of Luther’s hoary head. 

Ironically, the sale of indulgences has never gone away completely. There are still church fundraisers that suggest a donation of $5 will assure the attentiveness of the Blessed Mother to prayers. And scores of television evangelists, most of whom scorn both Lutherans and Catholics, raise millions by promising that contributions to their ministries will bring “special blessings” that undoubtedly include heaven. 

Luther’s point was that with God’s grace, salvation is achieved by faith alone. That was a revolutionary revelation that relieved a heavy burden from sinners who saw themselves struggling futilely to please a vengeful God. We Lutherans are beneficiaries of Martin Luther’s teaching that only the Holy Spirit can give us faith and we cannot do it ourselves. We are not among those who go around asking each other, “Have you found Jesus?” Through grace Jesus has found us. 

Salvation by faith remains a wonderful idea, and it’s too bad Pope Leo X couldn’t see it. It’s also too bad that the reformers themselves sometimes lost sight of it. 

But times change and we Christians are no longer immolating each other. Today Pope Leo XIV warmly embraces Lutherans and Cardinal Timothy Dolan of New York (who knew he was a Luther scholar?) acknowledges “the church needed reforming” in 1517. One can even see the day in the not-too-distant future when Lutherans and Catholics will share the same communion elements of bread and wine at a common table. 

The ideal result of the Reformation will be when Lutherans and Catholics share a common priesthood, but that day seems far off. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America ordains women as pastors - ministers of Word and Sacrament - and consecrates women as bishops. But the otherwise open-minded Pope is not likely to go there. So for those who believe it is essential for the church to embrace the gifts of all who are called to ministry, regardless of gender, there is still reforming to be done. 

As we look forward to the perfect unity of a reformed church, it may be good to keep in mind that Reformation has always been imperfect, often brutal, and slow to embrace the insight that Luther saw in his more gracious moments: that persons are redeemed by faith, not dogma, and by God’s grace, not priestly intercession. 

True reformation may be a long ways off, but by God’s grace it will come. 

Like the long, slow moral arc of the universe, the arc of reformation bends inexorably toward unity. 

I'll Meet Your Caesar and Raise you a Jesus

 
October 18, 2026, First Lutheran Church of Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

The first time  I remember hearing about Jesus using a Roman coin to make a point about “rendering unto Caesar” (Matthew 22) was in 1956. Our pretty young Sunday school teacher read it to our Sunday school class in the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y. Daisy Jo was nubile and cute and triggered pre-pubescent stirrings in us 10 year old boys. Mostly I remember the way her lips formed the words, “I Would Be True,” which was hymn 180 in our little red hymnals. She’d lead the singing nearly every Sunday and we responded with wistful lisps, as if it were a futile lovers’ pact.

But I digress. The biblical reference to a coin attracted my attention because I knew the value of money. A dime could be exchanged for a thick Superman comic book at Dougherty’s Drug Store, and when I wasn’t absorbed with Daisy Jo’s evangelical wiles I was trying to imagine what a biblical coin looked like. The Indian head nickels in the collection plate were possible clues, but I suspected they looked little like the ancient oinage carried by Pharisees. So I wondered.

Naturally, there was no way to Google the Caesarian coin; Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin weren’t even born in 1956.

But now we live in an age of instant gratification where a few well-chosen keystrokes will fill the computer screen with instructive links. Hundreds of photos of 2,000 year-old Roman coins now appear to satisfy any numismatist’s curiosity, and so do links to thousands of articles about the Caesar who reigned in Jesus’ time: Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus.

Historians refer to him more simply as Tiberius, to distinguish him from his predecessor emperors whose names he acquired to show his superior pedigree.

Daisy Jo never went into this kind of detail and perhaps it was just as well. I don’t know how the other kids imagined Caesar, but my image was of President Eisenhower in a toga: ancient, smiling, bald, and good. When Jesus told the Pharisees to “render unto Caesar,” I didn’t consider that to be a bad thing. My parents rendered their offering unto the collection plate every Sunday and unto Ike every April 15. It sounded like a reasonable plan to me.

But – and it’s a big but – Tiberius may have been a soldier-statesman, but he was no benign Ike. Those of us of a certain age learned all that in 1978, when I, Claudius – a BBC television adaptation of Robert Grave’s two novels on the first Roman emperors – appeared on PBS. Tiberius was convincingly portrayed as a paranoid, dyspeptic, sadistic and homicidal wacko by George Baker, MBE, a British actor and writer who, in real life, was very nice. 

Historians generally agree that Tiberius was not nice, although it’s hard to be sure because accounts of the emperors were written by either their friends or their enemies, both of whom were known to distort their anecdotes for devious ends.

When Jesus was shown a coin with Tiberius’ likeness, he was looking at one of history’s most evil villains. In that context, an invocation to “render unto Caesar” sounds like an encouragement to aid and abet.

The question is whether Jesus’ is saying citizens have equal obligations to the church and their government. The problem is, both institutions are equally imperfect.

Once during the Vietnam War I helped prepare a young man to present a biblical case to his draft board to obtain conscientious objector status. “I told (the board) that Jesus said to turn the other cheek and love your enemy,” the young man reported later. “They said, ‘Jesus also said to render unto Caesar, and military service is how you’ll do that.’”

Throughout history there have been good Caesars and bad Caesars, and it seems unlikely Jesus intends us to render unto all of them.

I was born 16 months after Adolf Hitler died, but he was one bad Caesar whose evil impact endured long after he was gone. To my knowledge, no circulating German coins ever bore his likeness, but he did appear on Reich postage stamps. In fact, so many Hitler stamps were printed that they exist as worthless curiosities. It’s gratifying to note that a stamp commemorating a German pastor who opposed him has greater value.

Pastor Martin Niemöller is well known for this Nazi era statement:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out 
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out -
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me - and there was no one left to speak for me.

The Nazis came for Niemöller in 1937 after he became the leader of a group of German clergy opposed to Hitler. He was sent to the Sachsenhausen and later to the Dachau concentration camps until he was released by the Allies in 1945. He was charged with “not being enthusiastic” in his support for the Nazi regime. The crime was actually a capital offense. His most famous colleague, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was hanged at the Flossenbürg Concentration Camp. But Niemöller never wavered, and he remained under the constant threat of death at Dachau until he was liberated by the Allies in 1945. He became a president of the World Council of Churches when the ecumenical body was formed in 1948.

One of the most powerful tributes to Niemöller is a play written by Gordon C. Bennett, retired professor of language arts at then Eastern Baptist College: God is My Fuehrer, a dramatic interpretation of the life of Martin Niemöller. Written in the midst of the Vietnam era, the play is Bennett’s testimony that a Christian’s highest authority is God in Christ, not governments and certainly not draft boards.

The play is out of print, but its impact on my life has been long-lasting. I took several courses from Gordon between 1968 and 1970, and I recall his research involved a trip to Germany where he met with Niemöller. Gordon has spent his entire life as a witness for peace, rendering unto God the things that are God’s.

I never met Martin Niemöller, but I had colleagues at the World Council of Churches who knew him well. I think what makes him such an impressive figure is his ordinariness: soft spoken, small in stature, with unexceptional aims. He admitted that he supported Hitler when he first came to power, “mostly because I yearned for a return of the Kaiser.” But once it became clear that Hitler sought to take God’s place at the center of national life, Niemöller turned away from Caesar and never looked back.

“Give therefore to the emperor the things that are the emperor’s, and to God the things that are God’s.”

Jesus’ statement reverberates throughout history, not only as an ingenious rhetorical device to avoid a lawyerly trap but as a clear affirmation of what most churches have historically maintained: the state and church must be kept separate.

That way, when the state begins to stray from the commands of God, it is easier to remember that Caesar’s authority is not equal to God’s: not in A.D. 30. Not in 1940.  Not now.

“For it is, and must remain the case,” Martin Niemöller said, “that we must obey God rather than human beings.”

Forget Truth Social. Rejoice.

 October 11, 2026, First Lutheran Church, Throggs Neck, Bronx, N.Y.

“Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, Rejoice.” – Philippians 4:5

“Jesus laughed.”

You won’t find that verse in the Gospels. It should be as prominent as “Jesus wept,” but it’s not there.

I think that must be an oversight on the part of the Gospel writers because, surely, Jesus’ contemporaries who saw him eat, drink, sleep, and weep, also saw him laugh.

Maybe the Gospel writers didn’t mention it because they thought it not Christlike to chortle. Or perhaps they never mentioned it because Jesus’ laughter was so familiar they saw no reason to remark on it.

The problem for us is that the lack of an explicit Gospel reference to Jesus’ fun side makes it difficult for us to imagine a joyful savior. “Did Jesus ever laugh?” a woman once asked in a Bible study class I attended. “You never see any pictures of Jesus laughing.”

That’s true. And part of the problem may be that we have been trained to see religion as humorless.

When I was in college, a popular cereal manufacturer made a feeble attempt at humor by printing funny sayings on its box.

The one-liners began with the words, “Confucius Say.”

“Confucius Say, ‘Best way to save face is keep lower part shut.’”

“Confucius Say, ‘’To make long story short, don’t tell it.’”

“Confucius Say, ‘Last will and testament is dead give away.’”

None of these lines are particularly funny. Perhaps the “Confucius Say” was added so you wouldn’t notice.

I can’t remember the name of the company that used Confucius to shill its products in the sixties, but I remember one revealing reaction to the campaign. I was sitting sleepily in a history class on ancient China when the professor interjected, “What’s so funny about ‘Confucius Say’? Would we find it funny if an ad campaign used the phrase, ‘Jesus Say’?”

Well, back in 1968, probably not. Confucius, who lived 500 years before Jesus, was a respected Chinese teacher, writer, and politician. Like Jesus, Confucius advocated personal and public morality and justice. His teachings were enormously influential in China and throughout Asia. He wasn’t a stand-up comedian and he didn’t make jokes, any more than Jesus made jokes in the Sermon on the Mount.

Unless, of course, Jesus did make jokes in the Sermon on the Mount. Some contemporary scholars claim we miss Jesus’ humor because we don’t understand his times or his audience.

A foolish man built his house on sand? (Matthew 7:26). Jesus’ practical audience would have burst out laughing – just as soon as they caught their breaths following his hilarious lines about giving your kid a stone to eat (Matthew 7:9) or walking around with a log in your eye (Matthew 7:4).

Come to think of it, maybe the shtick has possibilities. “Jesus say: man who eat too much toast get stuck in jam at narrow gate.”

Back in 1968, when Confucius was quoted on cereal boxes, religion was not a rich source of humor. Today, Confucius thrives on the Internet in memes so vulgar they can’t be repeated in mixed company. And Jesus is no longer untouchable when it comes to humor, even in toy stores. Action Jesus rolls up his sleeves next to plastic effigies of GI Joe and The Rock, while bobble headed Jesus competes in stores with bobble headed Barack.

The question is, how much humor are you able to take with your religion?

One Sunday evening years ago I drove into the parking lot of White Plains First Baptist Church. As soon as they recognized my car, two women – mature mentors of teenagers – ran up to me in obvious distress. I asked them what was up.

“Are you familiar with Life of Brian?” they asked simultaneously.

Of course I was familiar with Monty Python’s irreverent movie about Brian, one of many two-bit evangelists who gathered small followings in Palestine at the time of Jesus.

The film pokes fun at the soldiers, Pharisees, and peasants who interacted with false prophets, although Brian’s story is obviously close to Jesus’. Even the Magi briefly attend Brian’s birth until they realize they have mistaken the hovel of the Virgin Mandy for the crèche of Mary. When they realize their error they rudely grab their gifts out of the young mother’s hands and beat a pious path to the manger.

Life of Brian, like all of Python’s offerings, is not for everyone, but the two women were shocked by what they had just shown to the adolescents. Literally wringing their hands, they asked, “Do you think we’re in trouble?”

Life of Brian is only offensive to people who mistake it for a spoof on the messiah, which it is not. In my own view, I think it’s safer to show the film to teenagers than to encourage them to Google the tasteless and generally lascivious offerings of Confucius Say.

Religion and Christianity are no longer hands-off topics when it comes to humor. A popular meme on the Internet shows Jesus annoying a bartender. “Just water please. But put it in a carafe.”

These witticisms show a steady trend toward the demystification of religion and, perhaps, the final secularization of society.

But it is becoming increasingly obvious that the biggest joke of all has been hanging over our heads for two-thousand years.

The punch line is the Messiah himself. The joke is in the vast difference between the Messiah we were expecting, and the Messiah we got.

Rabbis tell us the Jewish concept of Messiah has remained unchanged for 4,000 years: a human warrior descended from David who would rebuild the temple, and enable the world’s Jews to return to Jerusalem and live forever in peace.

The Messiah would emphatically not be the Son of God, because the very idea would be anathema.

The Messiah the people of First Century Palestine were awaiting was a Judah Maccabee on Steroids, a bigger-than-life, pumped-up superhero with a cape and an M embroidered on his chest.

But what did they get?

Ha. They got a vulnerable baby too frail to lift his head.

They got a weakling who would grow to manhood indifferent to the political milieu in which he lived.

They got a gentle philosopher who talked incessantly about the reign of God.

They got a pacifist who called upon enemies to set aside their enmities and love one another.

They got a drifter who lived among the poor, engaged lowly women as equals, healed the sick, and expressed God’s compassion for all people.

They got a wise-cracking jokester who had no choice but to live out the irony he was: a vulnerable, puny, delicate human who personified the Almighty God, very man of very man and very God of very God.

And they got a Messiah who asserted his power in powerlessness, and who declared that God always honored the weakest and the last above the strongest and the first.

If the essence of humor is surprise, the utterly unexpected result of our assumptions and desires, then the coming of the Messiah is the funniest event in history.

For those who were praying for Messiahman the Mighty, the coming of the babe of Bethlehem was a warning to be careful what you pray for.

The coming of the Messiah is so different from all our expectations that all we can do is shake our heads in astonishment and delight.

And what else can we do when we hear the angels singing on high, when we finally get the great joke God is playing on us?

It’s funny. Rejoice. Again, I will say, Rejoice.

And laugh.

God Says Nope. Ten Times.

October 4, 2026, Saint Barnabas Lutheran Church, Howard Beach, Queens, N.Y.

The parable of the wicked tenants continues the story we have been reading for the past several weeks. Again, Jesus responds to the chief priests and elders questioning his temple protest (Matthew 21:12–17).

Who is Jesus in this latest parable? He is the Son who comes to reclaim his Father’s property, is violently rejected by the Father’s tenants, and is vindicated by the Father, prompting judgment on the unfaithful tenants.

By reclaiming his Father’s property, the Son restores creation’s divine order. Jesus’ ministry shows this: the sick are healed, sinners restored, and God praised (Matthew 9:8). He brings wholeness to a broken world, offering glimpses of the “kingdom of heaven”—creation as God intended.

The long process of bringing wholeness to broken world has been the theme of Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament for thousands of years. The Revised Common Lectionary directs us to an unexpected commentary on Matthew 21: the 20th chapter of Exodus and the birth of the Ten Commandments.

Apart from finding the Ten Commandments preserved on brass plates in courthouses, government buildings, and other public places, how have you encountered these sacred rules for life?

On hot summer evenings at Lackland Air Force Base, when we basic trainees were granted a rare night off, we’d adjourn to a small patio that had vending machines and bitch about how tough it was.

It wasn’t really all that tough because the Air Force was reluctant to send out-of-shape young adults to march in the 100 degree Texas heat (we heard there had been fatalities), so we spent many days in air conditioned classrooms memorizing Air Force esoterica. But we thought we were working our asses off, at least compared to the leisurely days of our bygone civilian lives, and we loved the patio breaks. We could sit on hard benches, smoke Luckies, and suck back Dr. Peppers while keeping a wary eye out for psychotic sergeants.

This was in 1964. The Bay of Tonkin incident had happened weeks earlier and, although none of us knew this would trigger a massive U.S. troop surge in Vietnam, we were all wary about the future. We’d smoke as many cigarettes as we could in the time allotted and talk about stuff we thought was important: whether we’d get a pass into San Antonio, whether Sergeant Ellefson was certifiably nuts, whether our girlfriends were thinking about us, whether we’d survive the dreaded basic training obstacle course, or whether we’d be posted to Southern California or to some deadly rice paddy a million miles from home.

We even talked theology. One night I sat smoking with a basic trainee from El Paso while he patiently explained why Catholicism was superior to my religion. My dog tags said I was United Church of Christ, based on a guess I made to my recruiter because my home church was the United Church of Morrisville, N.Y., but I had little idea what the UCC was.

The intense young Texan on the patio assured me his church was the true church because it generated real miracles, including the appearance of the Virgin at Fatima and the inexplicable bloody tears that trickle down the alabaster cheeks of certain saints.

“These things give me such an oomph in my faith,” he said, and all I could do is nod vacuously because my church was not big on visitations or dubious phenomena. The young man (whose name I never knew) did express regret that his church wanted him to remain a virgin until he married and he wasn’t allowed to masturbate. “But wet dreams are not a sin because they are involuntary and I do look forward to those wet dreams,” he said. I nodded realizing we had some common ground and watched as he took a deep drag on his cigarette. He smiled but, unexpectedly, his face darkened.

“The ten commandments,” he whispered. “I’ve broken eight of then.”

I watched him mutely as a sadness crept across his face. I was 18, so it never occurred to me to doubt that a boy so young could be such an accomplished sinner.

“Which ones?” I asked.

He shrugged and looked away.

“Did you kill someone?”

He shook his head adamantly. I tried to remember the other nine commandments. Swearing, lying, having sex, stealing. What else? Not going to church? Worshipping Zeus? Wasn’t there something about coveting your neighbor’s ass, which we used to snicker about in Sunday school? But what was coveting?

We sat in silence. Soon the break would be over and we’d have to retreat to our sweltering barracks for another sleepless night.

I cleared my throat. “What ones didn’t you break, then?”

He shook his head as if he didn’t understand the question, but his mood brightened abruptly again. “Hey,” he said, smiling. “Time’s up.” A sergeant, who had the power of life or KP on us, strutted onto the patio pointing to his watch. Still smiling, the young man winked at me and waved. “God bless you,” he said cheerfully. He was assigned to another barracks and I don’t recall ever seeing him again. I wish I had gotten his name so I could Google him to see if he ever became governor of Texas or a shopping mall sniper or, perhaps, a monsignor or bishop. But he disappeared into the night, and now I wonder if he’d ever found the time to break the other two commandments, whichever they were.

These ancient memories come to mind because I’ve been reading Martin Luther’s Small Catechism, published in 1529 for the training of children. Luther summarized all essential theology into the Ten Commandments, the Apostles Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, the Office of the Keys and Confession and the Sacrament of the Eucharist. The Small Catechism leaves out a whole lot of bible, and the radical reductionism makes me think of a cartoon showing two monks laboring at their calligraphy over two ornately designed bible broadsheets. One monk turns to the other and says with a smirk, “Someone is going to get a break. I’ve left out a couple of commandments.”

As succinct as it is, the Small Catechism is still a lot to chew on, beginning with the ten commandments themselves. When you get to my age, you can’t read the commandments without reflecting on the ones you’ve broken, and how often. Have I worshipped idols? Possibly. Have I disrespected God’s name? Have I misused the Sabbath? Have I stolen? Have I disrespected my parents? Have I lusted – well, let’s stop there.

Sometimes it does seem the law and the commandments are too darn much. This notion was dramatized by the rabbinic sage Mel Brooks, who in his History of the World Part I included a scene of Moses struggling to carry three stone tablets down the mountain. As Moses approaches the crowd, he intones, “The Lord God has given unto me these fifteen …” But one of the heavy tablets slips out of his grasp and falls to the ground in a hundred pieces. Moses thinks quickly: “…these TEN commandments.”

It’s entertaining to speculate what those additional five commandments may have been, but it’s not really necessary. Once the basic ten became a part of Jewish law, they began to multiply like sea monkeys in water. Leaf through your bibles, through Leviticus, through Deuteronomy, through Numbers and beyond, to see what happened. The original ten commandments were annotated, expanded and commented on sixty-fold. Oy vey. I’m wondering how morose my friend at the Texas patio would have been had he been moved to confess, “I’ve violated 585 of the 610 laws in the Pentateuch.”

And well he could have done so. Who can possibly remember all the laws of the bible?

Consider just a handful, arbitrarily chosen from Deuteronomy 22:

You shall not watch your neighbor’s ox or sheep straying away and ignore them; you shall take them back to their owner. If the owner does not reside near you or you do not know who the owner is, you shall bring it to your own house, and it shall remain with you until the owner claims it; then you shall return it. You shall do the same with a neighbor’s donkey; you shall do the same with a neighbor’s garment; and you shall do the same with anything else that your neighbor loses and you find. You may not withhold your help. You shall not see your neighbor’s donkey or ox fallen on the road and ignore it; you shall help to lift it up. If you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long.

And so forth.

The original ten commandments are difficult enough to interpret. The weight of 610 biblical laws is so burdensome most people think they have only one choice: to be crushed beneath them, or stop reading them.

As I was reading though the Pentateuch this week, I remembered something I had read in my youth, an article in Mad magazine. Mad, also a product of rabbinic insight and dead-on humor, noted that President Eisenhower had a tendency to ramble, obfuscate and puzzle the public with musings and non sequiturs. The President probably did this deliberately, as his press secretary, James Haggerty, suspected. Prior to a press conference, Haggerty warned the President that a number of issues were sensitive and he could not afford to make a gaffe. “Don’t worry, Jim,” Eisenhower said. “I’ll just confuse them.” And on many occasions, he did just that.

Mad magazine’s solution was simple: Hire the most laconic and taciturn man in America to serve as an interpreter for the most circumlocuitous president. Their candidate: Gary Cooper. During each press conference, the magazine suggested, after Eisenhower finished speaking, Coop would go to the mike and say, “Ike says, ‘Yup.’” And if the rambling utterance appeared to head in a different direction, Coop would distill it again: “Ike says, ‘Nope.’”

How nice it would be, we say to ourselves, if we had a similar device to help us interpret all the laws and the prophets going back five millennia.

Thankfully, the device is already in our possession – in the words of Jesus.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘ “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’ (Matthew 22:34-40)

You don’t have to be an ecclesiastical lawyer to realize how complicated biblical law can be. The very complexity of the law has led to wide misunderstandings and dangerous misinterpretations. Over the centuries, good Christians have used the law to start wars, burn each other at stakes, trade in slaves, commit genocide on cultures that were considered inferior, relegate women and girls to the status of property, and despise others whose languages, complexions, religions, or sexual orientations are different from ours. All in the name of God’s law.

But lest we be confused, Jesus offers a clarifying note: “God says, ‘Nope.’”

All the law and the prophets can be distilled into two simple sentences, Jesus declares:

Love God.

Love your neighbor.

In the final analysis, it may well be that each of us has broken one or four of the ten commandments. And it goes without saying that the Decalogue is one of the most important documents to emerge from human history, because these commandments constitute the first time basic rules of conduct and morality were written down.

But it would be a shame to follow our ancestors into the maze of confusion that the law became.

Love God. Love your neighbor.

Jesus has shown us the way through the maze, in five unforgettable words.

God grant that we discover the secret of living them. Despite its daunting profundity, the secret can be stated even more simply than in Luther’s Small Catechism.

When God says love everyone, don’t try to figure it out.

Just say “yup.”