|
Congregational Support & Development Sermons |
|
Reverend
Rita's Sermons (July - Dec 2005)...
O
Holy Night - 12/24/05 Once a year that special time comes around. You know what I'm talking about. It's when soft rock 101.9 changes its format from sappy easy listening music to all Christmas, all the time! I never listen to that station except in December. Ah, Christmas music! You love it and hate it at the same time. We all have songs that just drive us to distraction, we loathe them so much. And there are others we just can't get enough of, no matter how much they may make other people sick. Me, it's "Holly Jolly Christmas" I never get tired of. Good ol' Burl Ives just belting that song out, as straightforward and cheesy as you can get. Ooh yeah, gimme that old time religion! There's a new song I hadn't heard before, "Mary Did You Know." It's sung by some American Idol person, I don't know who. It's got a pretty tune, kind of wistful and haunting, wondering if Mary knew what Jesus would grow up to do. "Mary, did you know that your baby boy would one day walk on water? Did you know that your baby boy would calm the storm with his hand?" It's pretty, but somehow it leaves me a bit cold. It's all about the fantastical miracles of Jesus, and as I heard this song over and over and over again, it's message really sinking into me, and I thought, where's the Immanuel bit in this song? You know, "God with us"? This song is all about Jesus' supernatural powers. Now, we all know about people with superpowers. We've seen "Spiderman." People with superpowers have secret identities. They live in a bat cave, and they wear a mask. Yeah, they fight villains, but they never get to date Mary Jane because of the whole "I have a special destiny" schtick. Isn't the whole point that poor old Tobey MacSpiderman doesn't get to have an ordinary life? There's no "God with us" in the superhero story. So as pretty as that song is, I feel like there's something important that gets left out. Compare that song with another one about Mary that starts, "la virgen lava panales." Does anyone here speak Spanish? "The virgin is washing the diapers." It's not a hymn you hear that often on 101.9, and that's a shame. It's an old Spanish Christmas carol, and leave it to the Spaniards to celebrate the mundane in the miraculous. I mean, what could be more earthy than the virgin washing the diapers? It's funny, but it somehow seems more true to me. Honestly, "Mary, did you know that your baby boy would give sight to the blind, raise the dead?" I'll grant you that new mothers – and fathers – often have rather fantastical dreams for their little bundle of joy: maybe my kid will one day discover the cure for cancer. Maybe my kid will win a gold medal, or maybe even win on American Idol! Sure, parents have these dreams for their babies. After all, somebody's kid grew up to be Mozart. It could happen to my kid! But the real wish in every parent's heart is much more ordinary than that. Every parent holds their child and prays, "I want my baby to grow up, to be healthy, to be happy." That's what people want for their baby more than anything else, and Mary is no different. That's the mundane in the midst of the miracle, and I'm grateful to those Spanish carols for reminding us: "Boy, you may grow up to walk on water, but right now you're making a mess in it!' But you know, another problem with superheroes is that they end up doing all the hard work themselves. You know how it is: you always gotta be saving those damsels in distress, pulling those babies out of the burning building. In the superhero story, humanity always ends up standing around like that stupid kid just staring dumbly at that out-of-control truck barreling down the road. This idiot kid who doesn't even have enough sense to get out of the road, and the superhero has to swing down and drag him to safety at the last minute, causing the truck to swerve and crash into something and blow up. Is that all we are in the Super Jesus story? Are we just that dumb kid in need of rescue? Is that what makes this night holy? Ah, now there's a Christmas song, "O Holy Night." Maybe if I was a musician, I would understand why it is that that tune is so beautiful. I don't think it's just a matter of taste: there's something just empirically beautiful about that song. Yet somehow I only ever seemed to have heard the first verse of it, and maybe the second. But there's a third verse that I've never heard before last year, actually. It goes like this: "Truly he taught us to love one another. His law is love and his gospel is peace. Chains will he break, for the slave is our brother, and in his name all oppression shall cease." That's not about a superhero coming in to save the day. There's something different going on here. Humanity doesn't stand passively around while Jesus does all the work. We change. Our world changes. Truly he taught us to love one another, and in his name all oppression shall cease. The song has always brought tears to my eyes from its sheer beauty, but when I hear that verse, I just weep: sweet hymns of praise in grateful chorus raise we! My heart is broken open and I see the world around me differently: the slave is my brother! Oppression shall cease! Now that's a miracle! And in all our lovely Christmas story that we know so well, with all the fantastical events and the cast of characters, that verse of "O Holy Night" makes me think above all of those shepherds. I mean honestly, folks, what's up with those shepherds? Why in the world would Luke put them in his story? Shepherds weren't the dregs of society, but it wasn't exactly a noble profession either. Shepherds were just the ordinary, everyday yokels. I'm a city girl, so I only know sheep by reputation, but from what I hear, they aren't exactly the smartest animals in the barnyard. Sheep are dumb, they're smelly, they require constant tending. You know, maybe they're not that much different from the dumb kid who can't get out of the way of the truck. We sometimes feel inclined to romanticize the shepherd's life, out there in nature where sheep may safely graze, playing on their little flute, but it's hard work. Out in cold rain and hot sun, far from your family, from daily life. We all feel like that sometimes, don't we? Who among us is the wise men, or King Herod? No, it's the shepherds we can relate to: we all have times when we feel like our work is tedious and hard and thankless. We all have times when we feel cut off from our loved ones, alone, surrounded by a bunch of stupid beasts. And they're the ones Luke picks to receive the good news. Here are these shepherds, huddled together on a cold Bethlehem night, when out of the darkness comes celestial voices. Now we've all seen those movies, too, with the aliens showing up in the sky, and they immediately start shooting lasers and blowing up national monuments. No wonder the shepherds quake at the sight! But the voices share a different message, "Peace on earth, good will to all people." This, they say, is what "God with us" means, "Greetings, I come in peace." "Chains will he break, for the slave is our brother, and in his name all oppression shall cease." And yet, is it really true? Forget the superhero miracles, can we really even believe this one? Have we really learned to love one another? Certainly oppression has yet to cease! But there's at least one carol that acknowledges that, in a verse that all too often gets left out: "Yet with the woes of sin and strife the world has suffered long, beneath the angel-strain have rolled two thousand years of wrong: and we, through bitter wars, hear not the love-song which they bring: O hush the noise and end the strife, to hear the angels sing." Two thousand years of wrong, yet still we gather year after year, and tell this story of Immanuel, whose law is love and whose gospel is peace. That's the real Christmas miracle: that we still hope. We still believe that our babies will grow up to be healthy and happy, and we'll learn to love one another, and oppression shall cease. This holy night, hush and believe. Believe. For lo, the days are hastening on, by prophet bards foretold, when with the ever-circling years comes round the age of gold, when peace shall over all the earth its ancient splendors fling, and the whole world send back the song which now the angels sing. Merry Christmas, dear, dear friends. And happy new year. 11 December 2005 You can always count on "The Simpson’s" for good social commentary. There's a Christmas episode where the family goes to shop at their local discount megamart, Try'n'Save, which bears a huge sign reading, "In honor of our Savior's birth, Try'n'Save will be open 24 hours on Christmas Day." I couldn't help but think of that episode when I heard that there are some Christian groups that are boycotting certain stores like Sears and Target, complaining that their advertising has dropped any overt reference to Christmas, instead using the more ecumenical "holiday season." I don't quite get it: they want stores to use Jesus' birth for commercial purposes? I'm always a bit annoyed by the mix of business and religion: stores that display the Christian fish on their sign, my local Curves franchise plays Christian music for our workout. A restaurant near me flashes "Jesus Loves You" on their marquee on Sundays. It comes across to me as people using Jesus to sell their business, whether to attract a Christian clientele, or to satisfy so-called Christian tastes, and if people of other faiths don't like it, then can go to – well, you know. But in all fairness, I do understand how these people probably see it themselves. They really believe that Jesus is good news, and they want to share that news with others. They aren't forcing anyone to patronize their business; it's not the Spanish Inquisition. Rather, they are using their resources to get the word out, to let their light shine for all to see. I can even sympathize with their zeal, but their tactics still disturb me. Playing Christian music in your store might indeed inspire some people of lukewarm faith to go back to church. Or perhaps it could even reach someone who grew up with no religion at all. But sometimes we forget that not every non-Christian is a blank slate when it comes to the faith. What about Jews who remember too many years of brutal oppression at Christian hands, or Muslims who hear Christian preachers denouncing their religion as terrorist, Hindus being told they worship pagan idols and Buddhist being told they don't worship anything at all? It seems to me that these guerilla evangelism tactics are at best shallow, and at worst they perpetuate ill will and even hatred toward people of other faiths. Yet the Bible does call us to share the good news. And we wouldn't even have a winter break if it weren't for Christmas. Jesus is the reason for the season, even if our secular society is making it more generic. Are we losing sight of the Christ in Christmas? How do we proclaim the gospel in our multicultural society? Well, Jesus lived in a multicultural society, too. So let's revisit that Christmas story and see how it can enlighten us. The Christmas story, we know, is about God reaching out to us. So picture, if you will, God sitting in her heaven and looking at the world. [I know it's anthropomorphic; I'm talking mythical, here. Remember what Marcus Borg said, "I don't know if it happened this way, but I know this story is true."] So picture God, looking at the world. What does she see? People fighting with one another. Abuse in families, persecution in societies, prejudice, war, people using the earth as a trash can. Things aren't going very well, and it's not at all how God had hoped things would turn out. But hang on: how did God want things to turn out? What does our story tells us? Remember this summer when we talked about Genesis and Exodus. God created the world, and said that it was – [good.] There was a certain harmony in Eden, the peaceable kingdom. But we also saw how rapidly things went downhill, and how God tried several approaches to get us back on the right track. But none of them seemed to take, so at last God decided to pick one family and work on them until they got it right. And recall that God picked Abraham and Sarah so that "they might charge their children and their household to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice." And what constitutes righteousness and justice for God? Time and again we see throughout the Bible: hospitality to the stranger, justice for the orphan, compassion for the weak, welcome for the outcast. But this plan hasn't worked out as well as God had hoped, either. Some people got the point, but others have used their expertise in God's "righteousness" to pass judgment on others, to set up a powerful structure of religion called the Temple and the priesthood and holy law, and they declare who is out and who is in. Their intention is good, but they condemn those whom they deem to be unholy, and in doing so, they commit the sin of Cain, murdering their brothers and sisters spiritually, and sometimes physically. For when people start passing judgment on one another, they substitute their own self-righteousness for God's compassion. But God never gives up. So she decides to reach out to us in a special way, to become one of us, to walk among us and bring the message in person. [The less mythological among us can look at it the other way and say there was one person who really truly got it right, who embodied a true spirit of holiness in a special way. But people don't spring up from no where. They come from their parents, from their people with a history and a heritage. Indeed, that's the model God chose with Abraham and Sarah. So the Gospel of Luke tells Mary's story before getting to Jesus.] So God contacts Mary to tell her this good news. [Or we could say Mary had a special epiphany about what God's justice and righteousness really was.] And while Mary is a bit doubtful at first, as soon as she commits to this course of action, she opens her mouth and begins to sing. And friends, what a shocking song she sings! "God has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, and put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree. God has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich have been sent away empty." This isn't the song of the establishment, the elite – the Temple and priests and kings. No, this is the song of the outcast, a song of welcome and triumph. Mary doesn't sing about a God who is on the side of the self-righteous and judgmental, but about a God who is on the side of those whom the self-righteous and judgmental exclude. Think about it: wouldn't it have made more sense for God to work through someone who had worldly power and authority? Like a pope or a president? But Jesus was born a poor nobody, and he never traveled more than 90 miles from his hometown, a town that was in the north, far from the center of power and near to those heretical Samaritans. It would be like God choosing a poor black man born in the projects of Detroit, or a Mexican girl from southside San Antonio. A poor carpenter was the last person anyone would listen to. Why would God do that? It doesn't make sense! Unless…unless that was part of the message itself: that the Holy One isn't to be found where we expect, with the religious establishment. Rather, the Holy One shows up in the last place we would expect, in the ultimate outcast. Mary understood this when she sang, "God has sent the rich away empty, and filled the hungry with good things." The rich have their reward, but those who are hungry, whether spiritually or physically, will be filled. It's a song not of self-righteousness and judging your neighbor, but a song of welcome, of joy, of justice and peace. That's the reason for the season. That's the good news we are excited to share. So to go back to our original question: how do we share it? One way, like the restaurant near me, would be to flash on our marquee, "Jesus loves you!" To play that Christian workout music and to display the fish on our sign. And it's a good enough message – but what about the folks who don't know Jesus? What about the folks who hear God speaking through Muhammad or Buddha, or another prophet? Sometimes there is a subconscious message in "Jesus loves you" that says, "I'm saved and you're not." Ironically, in trying to be welcoming – by using language that we already know – we may in fact be making others feel unwelcome and excluded. And friends, I don't have to tell you that there are in fact Christians who are unwelcoming and exclusionary to those who do not share their faith. But what if we said instead, "I love you in the name of Jesus." This is what Corrie ten Boom did when she and her family hid Jews in their attic and helped them escape the Nazis. It's what those peacemakers who have been taken hostage in Iraq were doing. It's what millions of Red Cross workers throughout the world do. To say, "I love you in the name of Jesus" reminds us to be loving in our witness, not be flaunting our holiness, but by welcoming the stranger and the outcast. Like the song, "They'll know we are Christians by our love" – not by our fish symbol or by our stores advertising Christmas as opposed to the holiday season – but by our love. Friends, I don't think it's the job of any business or chain store to proclaim that gospel. It's our business as people who have been touched by God through Jesus Christ. It is our business to spread the news that the angels came to share, of peace on earth and good will to all people. That is a message that's worth singing about. God
Still Speaks 27 November 2005 About a year ago, the first of the UCC TV ads was launched. By now hopefully all of us are familiar with the “God Is Still Speaking” identity campaign. Many churches through out the UCC have embraced it, the Gracie Allen quote, the red and black colors, the comma. The best thing is that it’s not just a slogan. There’s actually some theological depth we need to unpack in this quote. The phrase “God is still speaking” is one that continually invites to think about what it means, to call us into more and more insight. It engages and challenges us. So now we’ve been living with this phrase for a year, and we’re heading into a second year with it. This advent season is a good time to think again about what does it mean: “God is still speaking”? When I was home over the holidays, we were talking about the book “Under the Banner of Heaven,” about some Mormon fundamentalists who believed God was still speaking to them, telling them to murder their sister-in-law. The brothers refused a lawyer in their defense, claiming that God would speak for them. They were prophets. End of discussion. And one of the questions the book raises is whether or not saying that God speaks to you is in and of itself enough to qualify you as insane. Which raises interesting implications for our identity campaign! So what do we mean when we say, “God is still speaking”? Is this merely a metaphor, that we don’t literally mean God speaks to us the way another person does? Or can it sometimes be literal? And if so, what does that mean? How does God speak to us? I don’t have to tell you how tricky it is to define the difference between God speaking, and the voices inside my head. How do I know it’s really God speaking, and not just me talking to myself? How can we tell the difference? And another complication is that we so badly want God to speak. We look for meaning, for a guiding voice to show us what to do, to teach us what we need to know. The world is so mucky and complicated sometimes, and clarity is a good thing. We just wish Someone would explain it all. Surely even the most skeptical among us sometimes wish the Celestial Referee would step in and settle things for us. This is what Isaiah is talking about in our reading today, “Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and make yourself known!” The book of Isaiah is not written all by one person in one time and place. Rather, it’s written by Isaiah and his later disciples, covering a period of many years, and these disciples lived during a terrible time for Israel, when a foreign power came in and conquered them. So the book of Isaiah spans to time before, during, and after the exile. This section comes from the time after, when the Israelites were allowed to go home after years abroad. They came back to find the land itself changed, the Temple destroyed, everything they had once known and loved gone. The prophet cries out, “Our holy and beautiful house where your ancestors praised you has been burned by fire, and all our pleasant places have become ruins.” (v. 11) It is a sense of deep loss and grief that prompts the prophet to cry out, “Would that you would tear open the heavens and make your name known to your enemies!” In Mark’s gospel, too, Jesus talks about a time of loss and uncertainty. Last week we heard the story of the sheep and goats, which was Jesus’ last speech in Matthew. But this passage here in Mark is the last speech before Holy Week and Jesus’ death. At first hearing, this passage sounds like it, too, is full of all kinds of apocalyptic stuff, and people just love that kind of thing. These days it seems to be particularly popular with all these “Left Behind” series and so forth. And I have to confess that with all the global tragedies we have experienced this year, it kinda sounds like the trials and tribulations that Jesus seems to be talking about in this sermon. It’s hard not to see it all in an apocalyptic light, to see God’s hand somehow in these tragedies of tsunamis and earthquakes and hurricanes. It sounds like Isaiah’s cry to rend open the heavens with such a graphic display that everyone notices. If we’re looking for God to speak, the Bible seems to imply that this is exactly the kind of thing we need to pay attention to, right? Except maybe not. If we read this speech more closely, we find that in the midst of all the horrors Jesus describes, he never says that God causes these things to happen. In fact, the chapter begins with the disciples admiring the Temple, and Jesus scoffs, “You think that’s impressive? Not one stone will be left upon another; it will all be torn down.” Sounds apocalyptic, right? So the disciples ask him, “What will be the sign of this happening?” But the first thing Jesus answers is, “Do not be deceived.” People will come, he says, claiming to be the Messiah, claiming that God is speaking to them, claiming to be able to interpret the signs of God’s presence in all these disasters, but beware. These will lead you astray, Jesus says. God is not speaking to them. Instead, if we read this chapter carefully, we find that all these nasty things Jesus talks about are not signs of God rending the heavens and coming down in a blaze of glory. A tsunami is just a tsunami. A hurricane is just a hurricane. Avian flu is still just a flu. None of these are signs of the apocalypse; it’s just the way things are. Natural disasters happen. Even “wars and rumors of wars” (which sounds a lot like the Bush administration!) are not signs of God’s disfavor but are human responses, human disasters. God is still speaking, Jesus says, but the problem is that we’re listening for the wrong thing. We think God is in the apocalypse, but we’re just being led astray. We have to keep alert, like the doorkeeper on the watch, but we have to be careful that we don’t get distracted by the wrong thing, that we don’t mistake something else as God’s voice. And what is the sign of God’s presence? How does God rend open the heavens and come down? We’re in that season right now: advent, when we anticipate the coming of God in a newborn child. Even here we’re tempted to get caught up in the wrong thing. Don’t let all the lovely stories of wise men and guiding stars and shepherd distract you. Because the whole point of the incarnation is that Jesus was a nobody. There were no apocalyptic signs at his birth. He was just a regular newborn, born to insignificant parents in a tiny hamlet. He wasn’t a king or a priest. He was not part of the establishment of power. He was the son of a carpenter and his wife. This squalling baby would grow up to do mighty things, would grow up to share God’s good news with us, but all these things didn’t happen because of guiding stars and angels. If we’re looking for fantastic signs, then we risk missing God’s actual appearance among us in an event quite ordinary and quiet. That is how God speaks. Not in something extraordinary and loud. God speaks in the wail of a tiny infant. So don’t be led astray by wars and rumors of wars, by catastrophes and disasters. God isn’t there. Do not be caught unaware. Let us watch and wait, let us listen and learn. God is still speaking. Culture
of Christ 20 November 2005 Sometimes words in the Bible don't translate well into modern terms. Like last Sunday's parable of the talents. Today we certainly don't use that word as a unit of money! Or how about "ark"? We can guess that Noah's ark is a boat, but then what in the world is the ark of the covenant? It's not a boat, so what is it? Sometimes it seems like you need to be a biblical scholar just to even know what a story talks about. There are other terms that we know, but they don't have quite the same association. Take "Christ the King." Today, the last Sunday in the church calendar, is actually "Christ the King" Sunday. Now, we know what a king is, but it has different associations for us today than it did for folk in biblical times. After all, we fought a war to get rid of kings. I don't know about you, but being the red-white-and-blue blooded American that I am, I tend to think of kings as tyrants. So to refer to Christ the King is not necessarily a good thing for me. But then, what other term could we use – Christ the President? Not only does it lack a certain ring, but, well, you can probably see the problems with that concept. But it goes beyond what we're used to. Think about it: in Bible times, to call Christ "King" was to take over a title that someone else was already using. It was to say Henry VIII or Constantine aren't really the king, Christ is the real king. There was something kind of subversive about it in the old days. Oh sure, there were kings who tried to say, "I am the king in Christ's place, so you all have to obey me the way you would him," but there was always this subversive undercurrent warning kings, "You can't fool us; we know who the real king is around here, and you aren't it." So what language can we use to get that same concept across today? Christ the President isn't satisfactory. Christ the Chairman of the Board? Christ the CEO? Christ the Scout Leader? None of those really work. I mean, Jesus isn't really about titles anyway. Take our parable here, what separated the sheep and the goats wasn't the title they used for Jesus. After all, none of them even recognized Jesus! Rather, it was about the way they acted toward others, the way they responded to the people around them. And in his teachings, Jesus didn't spend a lot of time talking about himself. Rather, he talked about the kingdom of God. Again, we don't relate to kingdoms any more than we relate to kings, but what Jesus was talking about in those parables was a way of looking at the world and at one another, a way of being and doing and thinking that was in contrast to the way people usually acted in the world. Something more like...a culture. Oooh. That sounds kinda good. We do talk about culture today – being multicultural, or about culture wars. Hmmm. Maybe we're on to something there. I went to the dictionary, and it talked about "the training and refining of the mind, emotions, manners; the habits, skills, and concepts of a particular people in a particular time; improvement or development by study and training." That's starting to sound pretty close to what Jesus was about, I think. The culture of Christ, a new way of living and being in Christ. Yes, that sounds good. And it has that subversive aspect to it, too. We all live in a culture, even a multicultural one, but this says we're in a new culture in Christ. And how might the culture of Christ be different from the culture of the world? What is the world's culture? [responses] That's a huge topic in and of itself, but why don't we start out by taking a look at what's on the TV? Commercials: consumerism, buying stuff, getting ahead. How about the TV programs? I got hooked on "Lost," about the survivors of a plane crash – but dude, all these people are young and good-looking! What kind of a plane were they on? Reality shows about competition (again between young, good-looking people), lots and lots of sex. The news is all about "home invasions" and car crashes. Of course, the TV isn't our only source of culture, and there are good things in our culture. We do have concepts of fairness and equality, and helping each other out. But ultimately I don't think our culture looks too much like the culture of Christ. Think for a minute about Jesus' parables. What is Christ's culture like? [responses] Like our parable today – I don't think it's talking about charity, cleaning out our closets and giving our old clothes to Katrina victims, or tagging an extra dollar onto our bill at the grocery store for the food pantry. I think it's talking about generosity, sharing what we have with each other. What John Thomas calls "extravagant welcome." Joy, embrace, celebration, reconciliation. There's something almost foolishly bountiful about Jesus' parables: the guy sells everything he has to buy the field with the treasure in it. The father kills the fatted calf for his boy who ran off and squandered his inheritance on sex, drugs, and rock and roll. The mustard seed becomes an enormous sequoia that shelters all the animals. The fish and loaves that not only feed everyone, but have baskets and baskets left over. Crazy. Abundant. Bountiful. Does that sound like our culture in the richest nation in the world in which millions of children go to bed hungry every night and our war veterans can't afford medical care? Doesn't sound like it to me. In our parable today, I never noticed this before one of the commentaries I was reading pointed it out: it's the nations that assemble before the judge. It's not individuals who are separated into sheep and goats, but nations – cultures. I suspect that every culture in our multicultural world is based on the notion of scarcity: there's not enough to go around so we have to horde what we've got, or fight others either to get more for ourselves or to keep them from taking it away. I have to protect what I have or there won't be enough for me. But the culture of Christ is about abundance: there's enough to satisfy everyone, and baskets more left over besides. Friends, if we really believed that, would we live differently in this world? Would we treat one another differently? What would we be like? This week we celebrate Thanksgiving. It's when we celebrate the bounty of the earth that yields its fruit in its season, and we give thanks in recognition of the truth that ultimately everything we have is a gift. Oh, there's a dark side to Thanksgiving as well. We know that even while we're stuffing ourselves, there are many people who do not have food in this world. Even as we celebrate the pilgrims, we know that the history of whites and Indians in this land is largely one of tragedy and injustice. We know these things, and it is good to remember how we have too often lived that culture of scarcity of the world. There's an old Thanksgiving tradition of placing five grains of corn next to your plate to remember the first hard winter that the pilgrims endured, and it's good for us to continue that tradition, to remember those who have been left out of the bounty. Those five grains stand for the culture of the world, which says there are those who have and those who have not. But this Thanksgiving, at the end of the church year, let us remember that ultimately we belong to the culture of Christ, the culture of extravagant welcome, of abundant life, where our cups overflow, and there is always more than enough to go around. Believing
Makes It So 13 November 2005 This is the last parable Jesus tells in Matthew's gospel. After this comes the Passion Week and Jesus' death. So maybe that explains some of the harshness of Jesus' final parables – he knew what he was about to go through and it put him in something of a bad mood. These are tough parables to deal with, because even if we make a morality tale out of them, like this one with the talents and say, "This is a stewardship lesson about using the gifts God gives us," which is a good enough lesson – but we're still left at the end with the master being so harsh to the third servant. I mean, the master is supposed to be God, right? And we are the servants? But the third fellow says, "I know you're a hard man, reaping where you don't sow, so I was afraid." I mean, that doesn't sound like God, does it? Worst of all, the master doesn't deny it! What the third guy did doesn't sound so bad to me. The master still got his money back. And after all, he hadn't even told the servants what to do with the money, so it doesn't seem very fair. And this ending: those who have will get more, those who have not will get it taken away. Sounds like compassionate conservatism to me! But maybe we miss something when we rush to moralize this story. You know me: I don't like to just gloss over the troublesome parts. I like to wrestle with them and see what blessing can be found. "Master, I knew you to be a hard man, and I was afraid!" In Luke's version, the master replies, "I will condemn you out of your own mouth!" Let's look at this for a minute. How do we know what the third servant says is true? After all, the master is pretty generous to the other two fellows, and while he doesn't deny what the third guy says, he doesn't exactly agree with it, either. So how do we know the third guy is right? Well, let's try telling the story another way. There are three churches, each of them small and struggling to meet their budgets. The first one says, "We don't have a lot of money, but we're called to help others," so they generously give to missions projects. They don't give huge amounts, but they are known throughout the community to support many programs and never to turn away anyone in need. And despite its small size, the church flourishes and is alive. The second church says, "We don't have a lot of people, but God can always use an extra pair of hands." Whenever there is a need in the community, the people from that church show up to help. Maybe only two or three of them, but folks know the members of that church will always show up. And this church, too, is filled with joy and excitement. The third church says, "It's a hard world. What little time and money our members have to give, we need to spend just on keeping this church going. So they give only a few dollars to support one or two missions, and they always ask Second Church to come help clean out their gutters, but they never do anything in return. They live in constant fear that they'll have to close their doors, and sure enough, in time it comes to pass and the church is no more. Now, is the third church being punished? The world appears to be as hard as they thought it was. It appears that they had good reason to fear for their future. But I wonder if they really had the right take on things. Are they being punished, or are they getting exactly what they expected? It seems like I hear a lot of people talking about how God is just waiting to smite us. Pat Robertson, for example, who seems to see God behind every natural disaster. As if God is just sitting around waiting for us to slip up so She can send a hurricane at us, or hit us with some disease. To hear Pat Robertson talk, God is all about punishment and vengeance. Oh sure, he believes that God will be good to the righteous and shower them with rewards – but I suspect Pat's list of the righteous is a very short one. According to him, the precious few will be carried up to heaven while the masses of sinners will get burned up in a lake of fire, or some doomsday scenario out of a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. Pat seems to believe that God is hard – can't show no mercy to no sinners. But I wonder.... Does he have the right take on the situation? Is this hard God Pat talks about really the God of Jesus? It doesn't sound like the God I read about in the Bible. Now some people might say I'm a bit Pollyannaish. The world is a hard place, isn't it? They might say I'm too soft on sin, too permissive. But for all that Jesus sometimes preached about people being cast out into the outer darkness where there is much weeping and gnashing of teeth – but here's the thing: the parables end with people being cast out and rejected and punished, but in the Jesus story who is the one who ends up being cast out and rejected and punished? Funny thing – it's Jesus! Jesus, who is "reckoned among sinners," abandoned by his friends, condemned by his enemies, given the worst death sentence that the Roman Empire could dole out, hung on a cross with murderers and thieves. Yet Jesus used his last breath to forgive his killers. Jesus, who said over and over again, "I come not to condemn, but to save;" who said to the woman caught in adultery, "Does no one condemn you? Then neither do I." Jesus who said, "You must forgive seventy times seven times." Does this sound like a guy who would toss hurricanes at New Orleans because of Mardi Gras revelry? The truth is that the good news is a message of absolute grace, everlasting love – not of punishment. But some people just don't want to believe that. They know that God is hard, and so they are afraid, and so their bury their gift of grace because they're afraid God is gonna get them. They withhold forgiveness from others because they fear otherwise there will be no forgiveness left over for them. They judge other people's sins harshly, hoping that it will distract everyone from their own sins. But the measure they give out is exactly the measure they receive in return. They show no grace, and so they receive none in this world. They forgive no one, and so in this world they receive no forgiveness, and their souls are cast into the inner darkness of punishment and fear. Not because God is really so vengeful, but because they can't imagine any other kind of God. Fortunately for us all, the end of the parable, with its harsh master and its weeping and gnashing of teeth, is not the end of the gospel. Jesus takes the place of the condemned servant, and he gives the power of the resurrection to everyone who lives in fear of judgment and punishment. We are all redeemed, redeemed to live in the light of grace and mercy and love. And if we really, truly believe that, then we don't horde those talents, we share them freely, we invest them in the people around us, and we receive back double what we gave. Friends, to those who have, more will be given – not as a reward, but because love multiplies the more you share it. And to those who have not, even what they have will be taken away – not as a punishment, but because love will shrivel up unless it is spent. This is the challenge of this parable. More than a call to steward ship, this parable challenges us to imagine a master who calls us into joy, a master who is generous and loving. This master is not hard at all. So let us believe, and let us hope, and let us dare. Amen. The
Greatest of These Prayers for
Justice and Compassion Odds are good that our scripture reading is familiar to you. It's a popular one to read at weddings, so it's probably quite appropriate that we should hear it today at this gathering, where we are all so concerned about equal marriage rights. But the very popularity of it is perhaps its downfall. We perhaps get a bit lulled into a kind of hallmark version of this "hymn to love" and we end up missing how radical it really is. First thing to know is that this passage is not talking about marriage; nor is it talking about romantic love. Paul, who wrote this letter, was writing to a church in conflict. People were arguing about everything from church doctrine and scripture, to how believers ought to behave. And everyone was claiming righteousness on their side, and saying that the other side was a bunch of godless heathens, and only the people who voted for a certain candidate have family values, and.... Wait a minute. Am I talking about the church 2000 years ago, or the one today? So Paul is trying to address this conflicted church, but he doesn't take either side. Instead he says, If I speak in tongues – that is, speaking messages straight from the mouth of God – but have not love, then I'm just a bunch of noise. If I have all knowledge and can quote Bible verses and scientific studies, and even if I have the greatest, strongest faith in the world but have not love, then I am nothing. That's some pretty strong language Paul uses, and it's not the way our debates today tend to get phrased, is it? Instead, we hear, "God told me..." or "The Bible says..." or even "Scientific studies say...." But Paul says that prophecies and knowledge and doctrine will all pass away, because we don’t have perfect understanding. We always have more to learn. Science is a bit better at this than religion, because in science everything has to stand up to testing. So over time theories develop and evolve and change as new knowledge comes to light. Alas, religion tends to say "everything we need to know, we learned back in the beginning, when humanity was in kindergarten, and all new knowledge and insight is a threat." So they point to the book of Leviticus, compiled over three thousand years ago, and say, "End of discussion!" But not everyone sees religious truth that way. In the United Church of Christ we say, "God has more light and truth yet to break forth from God's holy word." Or in more modern lingo, "God is still speaking." Our understanding of scripture changes, our understanding of society and sexuality and yes, even marriage changes because we always have more to learn. So it is important for us at this particular moment in history to pause and remind ourselves of this truth. The next nine days are going to be intense for us. We have great hopes for this election, but I also know we all have secret fears. I'm not even going to say it myself. But isn't it a bit sad, that the best we're hoping for right now is for things not to get worse? This election isn't about legalizing gay marriage after all. It's just about trying to keep things from getting worse. I hate to say it, but it's really kinda pathetic. And that's why we need to hear these words from two thousand years ago, why we need to pause now and place this election in its proper context. Because quite frankly nothing is going to change one way or another with this election. This it not the beginning or the end, it's just a point on an ongoing journey. Whatever happens on November 8, one thing will remain, and Paul tells us what it is: love. Friends, it feels like dark times. But every age has its challenges. Every age has its own hatred, its own form of prejudice and discrimination. In the past it was slavery and colonialism, women's rights and the labor movement. And it's not like we have solved all those problems. Freedom is a never-ending struggle. Today it's gay rights, and sometimes we get discouraged because it seems like we make no progress, that we even go backward. But friends, no matter what laws get passed or defeated, God still remains. I'm not talking about religion. We know religions are flawed. GLBT folk in particular know how people can do the most hateful, violent things in the name of religion. But we also know that there is something transcendent, greater than us, that some of us call God, and some give other names, but whatever we call it, it is an unshakable truth, an undefeatable love. And this truth, this love remains. This truth, this love still calls to us, and it will triumph. God still lives. God calls to us and extends to us a charge. And the voters in the state of Texas cannot take that away from us. Because the true task is to change people's hearts and minds. And you can't pass a law to change people's hearts and minds – although laws have their place. Martin Luther King said, I can't make you accept me, but I can pass a law to keep you from discriminating against me. But the ultimate task is to change people's hearts and minds, and we do that not through laws, but through love, a force which is even more powerful than law. So in the coming days – and weeks and months and years and the rest of our lives – I want you to remember that sacred calling. And here is how we live out that calling: the first thing we must do is to lament. Yes, to lament. We heard two such laments, one from the psalms and one from the present day. Lamentation, mourning, grieving, is important because it's our outcry against the fact that things are not as they should be. Lament is draining, we'd rather be happy. We think lament is negative thinking, or depression or admitting defeat. It's none of these things. Rather, sacred lamentation is to recognize that all is not well, and to call on God to do something about it. "Oh, that you would tear open the heavens and come down! Do not keep silent, O God! Hear our cry!" It's right to be angry, even at God, and GLBT folk know all about that, too. But what enables us to lament is faith. So the second step of your calling is to have faith. I don't mean 'get religion.' Faith does not mean believing in a doctrine. Faith means trust. Having faith in God means trusting in that transcendent truth. Trust that justice will prevail. Trust that love really is stronger than hate. The universe bends towards justice. It really does. Oh, sometimes it bends in the wrong direction, but the trajectory is always to greater justice, greater freedom, greater equality. Friends, you know this. Once that closet door is opened, it can never really be closed again. In my generation, people came out in college. Now they come out in middle school. The day will come. It really will come. So even as you lament the way things are, have faith, trust, and dare to hope that they will get better. But above all in your calling, remember what Paul said: the greatest of these is love. And we heard earlier in the service why love is so important, why it must be primary. Because no one has ever seen God, but when we love one another, God lives in us and God's love is made perfect in us. Think about that! God needs us to love each other so that God herself will become perfect. So I order you to love. Love whom you love. Your partner, your children, your family, your friends. Start by loving who you love, and remember that loving is holy, sacred work, and no one can take that away from you. Love comes from God, and against this there is no law, not even the state constitution of Texas. But secondly, love your enemies. Bless those who persecute you. Bless and do not curse. That's hard, but it's the only way we move forward. After all, everyone loves whom they love, but not everyone has the courage to love their enemies. It may seem a bit unfair that you should endure such hate and be expected to love in return. And maybe you aren't strong enough to do it, and that's okay. God knows your heart. But I challenge you. You're stronger than you think. For when you love your enemies, then you become unstoppable. Nothing, nothing can defeat you. You will win. Because when we love our enemies, hearts and minds are changed. When we love our enemies, then no one loses. Cry out against injustice. Keep the faith. And always, always love. Amen. Choose 23 October 2005 When is a religion not a religion? Or to put it another way, what makes a religion a religion? Is it beliefs, doctrines? Or is it the practices and rituals? Is it the way the people pray or worship their god? Does there even have to be a god for there to be religion? Is it the presence of priests and temples – holy people and holy places? What might a religion look like if it had no doctrines or rituals, no priests or temples? Could such a thing exist? Would it even be possible to call it a religion? Or let's look at it yet another way: is there a difference between religion and spirituality? Now we are perhaps getting a bit closer. Spirituality seems to be something a bit more personal, doesn't it? More about a personal relationship with God or with the sacred. Not really about doctrines or priests, but something internal, even private – intimate and profound. I think we can all agree that there is a difference between the two, and Americans as a whole prefer the latter to the former. Polls consistently show that some 95% or more of Americans profess belief in a deity, but we tend to be much more wary of organized religion. You may be familiar with the prayer, "O God, save me from your followers!" Most people admire Jesus; it's just Christians they can't stand. We tend to make a sharp distinction between religion and spirituality, emphasizing the latter while downplaying the former. After all, it's much easier to find the hypocrisy and abuse in doctrines and rituals, priests and temples. And we all love to condemn hypocrisy! But we forget sometimes that spirituality has its own problems. Spirituality, that internal communion with holiness, when it is totally detached from outward forms like we see in religion, can end up as so much navel-gazing. When we're sitting around being Zen with God, what is there to challenge us, to push us to grow? What is there to remind us of our duty to others? Spirituality runs the risk of becoming totally private, removed from everyone else and the world around us. Spirituality and religion are best when they go hand in hand, when that internal communion is embodied in outward signs. But how do we understand this relationship? How can we keep religion from being too formal, and spirituality from being too informal? Let us remember that all religions have their basis in spirituality, and let's look at two examples from the Bible about how the one is founded in the other. We come now to the end of the first five books of the Bible, called the Torah in Judaism. The Lectionary conveniently skipped over all the rules and laws that Moses brought down from Mt. Sinai. Now after their forty-year journey, the people are standing at the threshold of the Promised Land. Moses is 120 years old and is about to die. However, he still has enough breath in his lungs to give a thirty-three chapter long speech before expiring. He recaps everything that has happened to the Hebrews during their journey, reviewing many of the (625) laws that he carried down from the mountain. And now he enters into his final remarks. Any good lawyer, politician or debater knows that this is when you pick your most important point and drive it home. Now, many of the laws Moses handed out had to do with priests and rituals and temples. But that's not what he emphasizes at the end. Instead, he says something rather remarkable. "The commandment I'm giving you today is not too hard, it is not far off – up in heaven or beyond the sea. It's very near you: in your mouth and in your heart, so that you can do it." Think about it: this is somehow not how we tend to view religion. We tend to view religion as requiring special priests to go fetch that knowledge from far away, to bring it to us in particular rituals and doctrines. Religion is usually seen as something too important to be entrusted to the mere lay person. So the sacred texts are written in an ancient language that the average person can't understand. You have to receive special training in order to carry out the sacred duties and interpret the sacred texts. Even in our good old Protestantism, we often say that only ordained (i.e. specially chosen and trained) ministers can perform the sacraments, and of course if there is a minister in the room, then no one else would dream of leading a prayer! Oh we claim to believe in the priesthood of all believers, but even we tend to venerate the clergy as members of a special "holiness club." But that's not what Moses says: It is in your mouth and in your heart so that you can do it for yourselves. In fact, that starts to sound a lot like spirituality. But then he goes back to rules. "I have set before you life and good, death and evil. If you obey the commandments which God has given, then you will live." Now if you recall, they got those commandments by someone specially chosen who went up – maybe not all the way to heaven, but who went up on top of a mountain – and brought the rules back down to them. So this seems to contradict what Moses has just told them about it not being hard or far off. And much of the last three books of the Bible have been concerned with these elaborate and very detailed rules. So people throughout subsequent history have been tempted to say, "See, religion is all about following the rules, obeying these commands that were handed down to us by the great priest." And indeed we see that going on today, in which gay marriage is just the latest example: people pointing to these ancient and specific rules as if in and of themselves they contain the secret to holiness. They point to those Leviticus laws about "a man shall not lie with a man," etc., as if such rules mean something in and of themselves. We're just supposed to follow those rules without question, even if that means we categorically condemn entire groups of people as incapable of being holy. But any rule, no matter how well intentioned, can be abused. Moses knew that, the prophets knew it, and so did Jesus. When he entered Jerusalem for the final act of his ministry – much like Moses delivering his sermon in Deuteronomy – Jesus focused on the key point of his message. The Pharisees, who were paying very close attention to him, wanted to test him. Now the Pharisees are not quite the bad guys that we tend to see them as. The Pharisees were the popularizers of their day. They took Moses' teaching that it's not hard or far off to heart. They said that any good Jew could keep all the commandments for themselves, and didn't have to rely so much on the priests and temple rituals. They wanted to make Judaism available for all. But as often happens with organized religion, the medium sometimes became more important than the message. In their zeal to have every Jew follow the commandments, they could get a bit judgmental about how those commandments were followed. So Jesus shows up in Jerusalem, and the Pharisees want to know if he is on their side or not. They test him out by asking, "By what authority are you doing these things?" And Jesus responds with some very provocative parables, about the man with two sons, and the vineyard tenants who attacked the landlord, and the wedding banquet. They quiz him on taxes and marriage laws – not unlike what Christians today worry over. And finally, because they love those commandments so much, they ask him which one is the most important. And you know what he says, "To love your God and to love your neighbor." Now the Pharisees ought to have known that too. And they *did* know it; they acknowledged that Jesus was correct. But somehow his answer didn't quite satisfy them, because they wanted to focus on laws and holiness, and Jesus said the answer is just love. The greatest law is love, and anytime we do anything that's not loving, even when we're following all those 625 laws, then we're not following God's commandment. Today there are a lot of people who talk about Biblical values. But funny thing: they really seem to be referring to rules. It's all about how people shouldn't get divorced, and women should submit to their husbands, and gay people shouldn't love each other. They seem to only hear the part of Moses' speech about obeying all God's commands. But they miss the part about the greatest commandment being love. In Jesus' day, he was accused of being anti-religious, because he placed love and forgiveness over following the letter of the law. He wasn't anti-religious. He saw the fulfillment of the law as love. Choose between life and blessing, death and curse, and what is it that gives us life and blessing? It's not laws, it's love. The laws, the commandments, the rituals and the religion are all there to help us follow that way of love. All laws must be interpreted through that lens of love. Does our religion make us more loving? Does it lead us to love God and love our neighbor? Then it is good, infused with the necessary spirituality to breathe life and blessing into our rituals and yes, even our rules. But if we let those laws become more important than love, then we are in fact following the path of death and curse. You want Biblical values? They are not too hard or far off. It's in our mouth and in our heart. The greatest Biblical value is love. Holy
Land or Living Stones? 16 October 2005 It was very late when the young woman's plane finally landed. The passengers disembarked from the plane the old-fashioned way, by a rolling staircase that had been pushed up next to the door. As she descended the stairs and set foot on the tarmac, she thought, "I'm in the Holy Land. I'm in Israel." But something seemed off about her arrival. Shouldn't she feel some kind of sacred shiver? Shouldn't there be a holy perfume in the air? But the only incense that greeted her was gasoline fumes, No angel choruses, no guiding stars – other than the illuminated "international arrivals" sign. This might be the Holy Land, but the airport looked like any other on earth. She followed the crowd of weary passengers into the terminal. The plain, concrete building bustled with activity inside. Most of the people there looked quite ordinary, too, not unlike the people she'd left behind in her own country. But some things were different. Seated on an uncomfortable plastic chair, a woman wearing a long, shapeless gown and a headscarf held the hand of a little girl in a pink taffeta dress. Next to a row of vending machines, a group of men talked together, wearing overcoats and black hats, long curled locks of hair at their ears. And all around was the rather disturbing sight of young people in military uniform, striding with automatic weapons tucked under the arms, the way other people packed the latest John Grisham novel. The men wore tiny yarmulkes stuck to their heads with plastic hair clips. At last she spied a young skinny man, scarcely older than she was, holding a sign with her name on it. He turned out to be the nephew of the Christian Arab Palestinian Israeli priest who had invited her to come. Their exchange of greetings seemed to exhaust his knowledge of English. He took her suitcase from her and let her out to the parking lot where his car was waiting. She got into the front seat and he fired up the engine. Immediately the cassette player blared Madonna, but not the religious one. "Living in a Material World" seemed like a strange anthem for Israel. The priest's nephew flashed her a grin, and they were off. She eyed the speedometer. 160 kilometers per hour. She wasn't sure what that was in miles. In fact, she'd rather not know, given that the someone had removed the seat belts, perhaps figuring that the excess weight would slow the car down too much. As they drove through the night, she stared out the windshield at the twenty feet of asphalt visible in the headlights, and wondered what she was doing there. She'd met the priest a year ago, when he was speaking about the school he'd founded for Jews, Christians, and Muslims, Palestinians and Israelis alike. Playing on the American fear of terrorism, he'd held open his jacket and said, "See? No bombs!" His story had moved her deeply, and when she'd asked what she could do to help, he said, "Come visit my school in Galilee. Tour groups come and look at the dead stones, but I will show you the living stones." So she had come. She liked to think that she had dropped her fishnet and answered the call of this holy man the way the disciples had done two thousand years ago, not far from where she would be staying. But that seemed a little arrogant. "This is Israel," she thought as she stared at the highway unrolling before her. "I'm in the Holy Land." But if it really was holy, why did she have to keep reminding herself of it? The next morning she was woken bright and early by the sound of children's laughter echoing off concrete. She pulled aside the curtain of her window and looked down in the courtyard below. She was staying at the school in a guest room, and gathered below were the children enrolled in the summer program, chasing each other, kicking a soccer ball back and forth, and acting like any other group of kids. "What do you do at the summer camp?" she asked the priest at breakfast. It was the Holy Land, after all. Summer camp must be the ultimate Vacation Bible School. "Oh, we play games," the priest said. "Do crafts, take field trips. I hope you brought a bathing suit, because today we're going to the swimming pool." She had not brought a bathing suit. She hadn't considered that the Holy Land might have swimming pools. She'd expected to be doing something more, well, holy while she was here. Isn't that what you did in the Holy Land? But her lack of a suit did not excuse her from the field trip, and she boarded the bus with all the kids eager to practice their English on her. "Hello! Good morning! How are you? What is your name? Where are you from?" And sure enough, they arrived at a swimming pool, concrete painted blue, water chlorinated enough to burn your eyes right out of their sockets. The boys showed off for her, vying for the attention of this exotic foreign woman, while the girls sat around laughing at the boys, covering their giggles with their hands. They played in the pool and ate a picnic lunch, and afterward they all stretched out on the grass for a nap, including the priest, who lay flat o his back, his belly round from shish kabob, his salt and pepper beard curled around his neck like a blanket. And she was left to wonder again, is this what I came here for? These living stones that play in the pool and drink Coca-Cola? And she couldn't help but feel a little bit disappointed. The rest of the week was much the same: dancing with kids at a party, roasting potatoes in a bonfire, and visiting people. Everyone invited her to their home, where extended families of aunts, uncles, cousins, and sibling would gather in the parlor or on the porch. and sit around smiling at her. Apparently no one spoke English, and she spoke no Arabic. They served her coffee in tiny cups, brown sludge so thick you could stand a spoon in it. She'd never had coffee before, but the sportingly drank those tiny cups down the last dregs of fine grounds layered in the bottom of the cup like silt. Her hosts took this as a sign that she really liked the stuff and filled her cup again. What was she accomplishing here in these awkward visits where everyone smiled and no one spoke? She didn't feel like an ambassador of peace. She wasn't learning anything about the local culture. And the priest didn't want to take her to any of the holy sites. It felt like her special trip was being frittered away with these social niceties. What would Jesus do? Surely something more than sitting around drinking Arabic coffee. After a week of this, she said to the priest, "I don't mean to complain, but I'd really like to go to Jerusalem and see at least some of the sights. I may never come here again. I don't want to waste my chance in the Holy Land." He studied her in silence for a moment. Any longer, and it would have felt disapproving, but he quickly smiled and agreed, "I have to meet with the bishop there anyway. I'll take you tomorrow." So she rose the next morning, very early while it was still dark. Surely she'd read something like that in the Bible somewhere. At last she would see the sacred places! David's city! The streets where Jesus walked! She could scarcely contain her excitement. The priest dropped her off at the Damascus gate entering the old city. Such a romantic name! Such a beautiful sight, the yellow limestone walls glowing in the morning sun! She skipped down the worn steps to the great stone gate. However, no sooner had she stepped through the gate than she found herself once more in a place that resembled Madonna's material world more than any holy pace. Vendors lined the streets selling everything from cooking utensils to t-shirts reading "Hard Rock Café – Jerusalem." She felt like Jesus in the Temple with the moneychangers. The narrow streets wound through the old city like a deep, meandering canyon. Somewhere above, the sky was blue and clear, but down at street level it smelled like sweat and overcooked lamb's kabob, and things she didn't really care to identify. After several wrong turns, she found her way to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, housing the place where Jesus was crucified and buried. The Holy of Holies at last! It was an old boxy building, shoulder to shoulder with the houses around it. It scarcely seemed gig enough to hold both Calvary and the tomb. She was enough of a skeptic to doubt the location anyway, but generations of pilgrims had made it a tradition. She escaped the heat and slipped into the cool shade of the church. Here at last was the incense, so think it choked her and stung her nose. As her eyes slowly adjusted to the darkness, she saw candles everywhere, and dark shapes of orthodox monks moving among the more colorful tourists like black ghosts. Icons stared down from the walls, blackened by centuries of candle smock. She wandered around in the crowded sanctuary, confused about what this place was supposed to be. Instead of tranquility she found clutter. Instead of holiness, smog. At last she found herself in a particularly dark corner staring up at a large, flat tin Jesus, decorated in garish gold leaf. A small plague on the wall, almost hidden by the icons, read "Calvary" in seven different alphabets. She stared up at the tin Jesus, his eyes rolled skyward as if begging God to take him away from this dark and crowded place. She remembered the blue sky and fresh air of Galilee, and felt a bit sorry for him. Nearby a monk placed some fresh incense on a brazier, sending a cloud of noxious smoke wafting through the church. She'd had enough. Shouldering her way through the crowd, she made it back outside to the familiar sent of roasted lamb kabob. The crowd swept her up and carried her back to the Damascus gate, where she bought a key chain that read "souvenir of the Holy Land." It seemed the thing to do. She lowered herself onto the steps, giving her tired feet a rest, and watched the people coming and going through the ancient gate, carrying the day's shopping home. A honking car horn interrupted her vigil. It was the priest, come to take her home. As she got into the car, he asked, "So what did you see?" "Dead stones," she said. The priest nodded. "Well then. Let's get back to the living ones." Moses said, "Show me your glory, I pray." And God said, "I will make all my goodness pass before you, and will proclaim before you my name. I will be gracious on whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy. But you cannot see my face, for no one can see me and live." She stood in a cleft in the rock, only a narrow strip of the outside world visible to her. Kids playing in a swimming pool, people who could scarcely speak her language but who welcomed her into their homes, and more lamb kabob than you could eat in a lifetime. She could not see God's face, but she could see the faces of God's people. She did not find the Holy Land, but she found mercy and graciousness in the bottom of a cup of thick, sweet coffee. The glory of God was there all the time, but you have to drink the coffee to find it. Calvary: http://world.std.com/~rickter/israel/365.jpg Church of the Holy Sepulcher: http://www.dfms.org/images/IS_holy_sepulchre_tn.jpg, http://www.christusrex.org/www1/jhs/JHS-yard.jpg Galilee: http://www.twilliam.f9.co.uk/General%20Photos/Galilee/images/Galilee%20View.jpg The priest, Elias Chacour: http://www.firstpreswheaton.org/news/chacour/Chacourw.jpg The school: http://www.p2pezine.com/entry1.jpg The
living stones: 9 October 2005 We’ve all been in this situation. People are discussing a moral issue of the day, and someone says, “Well, I’m a Christian, and I believe…” or “I’m a Christian, and the Bible says….” No matter what the issue, it gets presented as if there is a Christian view, and a non-Christian, or even anti-Christian view. Even those who are not Christian know what the Christian view is. What’s the Christian view on abortion? Opposition. On prayer in schools: approval. On giving Creation Science or Intelligent Design equal time with evolution: approval. On gay marriage: opposition. The assumption is that these are the Christian positions. So what then about those of us who are Christian and yet who hold a different view? Well, you know how it goes: you’re put in a position of having to explain how you as a Christian can hold a secular, anti-Christian view! You’re told that if you were really a Christian, you’d read your Bible and know exactly what it says. If you were really a Christian, you wouldn’t be swayed by so-called political correctness, letting yourself be influenced by whatever is the current secular fashion. These ardent crusaders don’t listen to you, they don’t want to hear how you base your position on your own faith, on your own reading of the Bible. In fact, they don’t try to persuade you to their perspective. Rather, they try to convert you. “If you knew Jesus, then you’d understand.” The problem with this way of thinking, of course, is that it assumes there is only one Christian view, only one right view. And that view is God’s; it’s absolute; it allows for no discussion or debate. That way of looking at things is so antithetical to our practice in the United Church of Christ that it sometimes makes us UCCers wonder if we’re really Christian at all. Even we sometimes concede that their view is Christian, Biblical, orthodox – but then where does that leave us? It seems to leave us outside the faith. And that’s precisely the problem, because whenever we come to think that there is only one correct view, and when we identify that view with God’s, then we view all those who disagree with us to be on the side of the devil. And this absolute view, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, gives us license to wage holy war against these blasphemers. We are free, even obligated, to use any means necessary to cut down these anti-Christs, because God’s (read: our) view is righteous. Unfortunately, there are many stories in the Bible that seem to support such an absolutist view, and we’ve heard some of them today. Let’s look first at our Exodus story. Moses was up on the mountain, receiving the Ten Commandments, or two plus corollaries. Then several chapters go by of Moses receiving all kinds of other rules, about what to do when people let their goats graze in someone else’s field, and God’s decoration plans for the tent of the holy presence. Moses spends so much time up there that the people start to get worried. They ask Aaron to make a god for them, and they all have a big feast and a party. In the Charleton Heston version of the story, they people all engaged in drunken revelry and orgies like something out of “Animal House,” and that has been the common interpretation of this story. But that’s not what the Bible says. All it says is that they “sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play.” Keep in mind something else: Moses had not yet come down with the commandments. They hadn’t yet heard the stuff about “no other gods and no graven images.” Rather they were worried that Moses had disappeared, and they wanted to worship God and keep on track, so they did it the only way they knew how: from what they’d learn from the Egyptians. They were wrong, but in their own defense they had not yet learned anything otherwise. Meanwhile up on the mountain, God, who knows everything, knows what is up downstairs. God gets furious and rants, “I’m gonna wipe them all out and start over again with just you, Moses!” in much the same way that God had done back in Genesis 12 with Abraham. Forget everyone else and just focus on one person. But Moses talks God out of this plan. Remember what I said before, about how the Bible still contains stories of a violent and vengeful God, but that we must look at the larger picture of the Bible to see that that’s not really who and what God is. God is the greatest good that we can imagine, not this hot bloodthirsty killer. So Moses appeals to God, “Hey, this isn’t what you are! You were going to make a name for yourself throughout the world: a God of justice and mercy, not a God of revenge and violence!” And God repented of the evil God had thought to do to the people. That’s the real God right there: the God who repents of evil, not the god who smites everybody. Our Lectionary selection ends there, but there’s more to the story, and it’s very significant. Moses goes down the mountain to confront the people, and the very guy who has just talked God out of violence now takes on that wrath himself. His anger “burned hot,” he smashed the tablets, tears into Aaron, and then calls out, “Who is on the Lord’s side? Come to me! God has said that everyone should grab a sword and “slay every man his brother, and his companion and his neighbor.” It’s the sons of Levi, the priestly class, who answer this call, and they kill three thousand people that day. And Moses says, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the LORDkeach at the cost of his son and his brother.” Now hold on! Just what in the world is happening here? God had just repented of violence, and now Moses is claiming God wants this bloodbath? And notice that he doesn’t call them to kill the wrong-doers, he just calls them to go out and kill people – even their own brothers, repeating Cain’s sin, even their own sons, repeating Abraham’s. Is this inconsistent? If you read it literally, it seems to be. If you read it literally, then you end up with a God who initiates random violence. But is this our God? Is this the God who repented of such evil? Another way to read it is that Moses was acting on his own initiative. He took that role of God’s vengeance on himself – a role that God actually rejected. He committed a horrific crime, setting brother against brother, neighbor against neighbor, and he gave it the aura of sacred violence. Friends, we’ve seen this before, countless times throughout history. People projecting their own views, their own hates on God, and wreaking holy vengeance in the name of this false God. The Bible itself sometimes succumbs to the temptation, yet it also holds this alternative theme, of a God who repents of such violence. The Bible itself tends to reject such a vengeful idea of God. And here's another clue about this alternative view of God: Moses dies before reaching the Promised Land. The reason given in the Bible is that it was punishment for Moses' arrogance at Meribah, where the people cried for water. God told Moses to strike a rock with his staff, and water would flow out. But Moses twisted God's command, making it look like he himself worked the miracle. Now this seems like a rather piddling thing to earn him such severe punishment – but isn't that the exact same sin he's working in this story of the golden calf? Moses, who talked God out of wrathful vengeance, takes God's vengeance on himself, calls on the Israelites to murder each other. He usurps God's rightful place, and does so by unleashing one of the most horrific crimes imaginable. Now that, it seems to me, is a great enough sin to perhaps merit keeping him out of the Promised Land. One more clue, lest we think that Moses and his band of thugs were justified. The people who answered Moses' call were Levites, members of the priestly tribe. This might look like what they did was holy, and so Moses seems to say at the end. But back in the book of Genesis, at the end when Jacob gives his final benediction to his sons, this is what he has to say about Levi: Simeon and Levi are brothers; weapons of violence are their swords. May I never come into their council; may I not be joined to their company – for in their anger they killed men, and at their whim they hamstrung oxen. Cursed be their anger, for it is fierce, and their wrath, for it is cruel!" So the underlying message of this apparently brutal and bloodthirsty story is that God repents of such evil. And if God repents of it, then for any of us to take on such vengeance in God's name is to commit a horrible sin: to violate those two commandments we talked about last week, to love God and love our neighbor. We don't usually encounter such severe misuse of people killing others in the name of God – though it certainly does happen, and even in this country. But we do encounter it quite frequently in this milder form: of people passing judgment on one another, condemning the people who disagree with them. The fact of the matter is, Christians of good faith differ on just about every subject under the sun: on how to conduct baptism, for example, or who should receive communion. If we disagree over such ritual questions, why should it be any surprise, then, that we disagree over theological and social issues, like abortion, the death penalty, and gay marriage? The Bible itself reflects conflicting views on all kinds of issues, so why should the community of faith not continue to do so today? It is no sin to disagree. It is no sin to take opposing viewpoints. But it is a sin, and a very grave one, to condemn others solely for disagreeing with you. It is a sin to pass judgment on people with a differing view. And it is a horrible, evil sin to kill anyone in the name of God's vengeance, for God repents of such evil. So next time you find yourself in a situation where someone is trying to claim that your position is not Christian, stand up for yourself. The
Greatest Commandments 2 October 2005 Next month the people of Iraq will be voting on a new constitution. Whatever you may think of our President or the Iraq War, if a democracy can emerge from it, that is a good thing. But Iraq is a grand experiment: how can people who have lived under tyranny learn democracy? How can people who have never had free choice, who have never been allowed to determine the course of their own future, learn to make such decisions? Modern-day Iraq, of course, is not the first time a people has been faced with such a difficult task. Moses encountered it, too, with the group of slaves he brought out of Egypt. We’ve already seen how they were sorely tempted to turn around and head right back into slavery where at least they knew when their next meal was coming. Moses needed to find some way, using this mysterious God “I Am” to teach these people how to be something different, how to act and think and live in a different way – as free people. His attempt at it has been preserved to us as the Ten Commandments. The stone tablets on which they were originally inscribed are long worn down into dust, but those ten commandments remain with us to this day, whether they hang on the walls of public schools and courtrooms or not. While I do believe in separation of church and state, the Ten Commandments are surprisingly non-religious. Yes, there’s the bit about “no other gods” and not taking the Lord’s name in vain, but these really aren’t doctrinal statements They don’t talk about beliefs, and the only ritual practice mentioned is to observe the Sabbath – which you observe by doing nothing. If Moses if founding a new religion here, he’s being surprisingly non-religious about it. In fact, these Ten Commandments can even be further condensed into two: the first one and the last one. I’m not going to quiz you on all the commandments, but I bet you can name the first one. [You shall have no other gods before me.] The next three – or four – can be seen as an elaboration of that one: no graven images, don’t take God’s name in vain, honor the Sabbath, and even honoring your parents. What it all boils down to is giving God the respect that is God’s due – and honoring nothing else with that same level of reverence. The point of the “no other gods” command is to keep us from putting anything else, anything less worthy, on God’s level. Hang on to that thought, because we’ll come back to it later. First let’s go on to the remaining five. Does anyone remember what the very last commandment is? “Do not covet.” More to the point, do not covet your neighbor’s house, spouse, servants, livestock, or anything else belonging to your neighbor. Now think about this: if the first commandment is the sum of the first five, the last commandment is the sum of the last five. Not sure about that? Then just think about what would happen if we all freely coveted the things that belonged to our neighbors. Adultery, theft, telling lies about each other, even murder. What lies at the root of all those crimes is desire for what our neighbor possesses. We humans are creatures of imitation. Instinct is one thing: we all have instincts for food, shelter, sex, and so forth. But if that were all, then we would all be content enough so long as those needs are met. But wants are something different. We want more. But how do we know what to want? We learn it from the people around us, our neighbors. We can see this clearly illustrated in those miniature humans known as preschoolers. Sally is playing in one corner of the room with some blocks, and Billy is playing in another corner with some crayons. What happens? Billy sees Sally playing with the blocks and wants to play with them. He goes over and takes them away from her. Fortunately preschoolers seldom engage in murder and adultery, but theft and false witnesses is something they know all about. But what if Sally willingly gives up her blocks to Billy and goes off to play with the crayons instead? Billy will want the crayons. We want what our neighbors have. This is the fundamental principle that drives the marketing business – indeed, that probably drives all business. They show us images on TV of happy, good-looking people using Lysol pine cleaner, and we all want it. Keeping up with the Joneses. Coveting the Joneses’ goods. It’s basic to human life. So it is that slaves covet the Egyptians’ leeks and onions and melons; and they covet each other’s share of manna and quail. So Moses laid down these two great commandments: do not elevate anything else to the level of God, and do not desire your neighbor’s things. But we are still creatures of desire. It’s not enough to tell us not to want something: we can’t help it. So it is that Jesus took Moses’ commandments to the next level. He turned them around, stated them positively. And according to Jesus, who himself got it from Moses, what are the two greatest commandments? To love God with everything you’ve got, and to love your neighbor as yourself. He wasn’t kidding when he said these two are the sum of the law. To love God with all you’ve got is to love nothing else more than God. To love your neighbor as yourself is to want nothing at the expense of your neighbor. Instead of copying our neighbor, wanting what they want, Jesus advises us to copy him, want what he wants, and what Jesus wants is what God wants. We are to copy imitate Jesus, the way he imitates God. But hang on – isn’t this a potential problem? How do we really know what God wants? There was a study released this past week that claimed that religion may actually be incompatible with western democracy. This study looked at Europe and the United States, comparing the rate of church-going with various social problems like poverty, unemployment, crime, and so forth. Unfortunately, they found that the most church-going country, the United States, was also the one with the most social problems. Perhaps, the study suggested, religion really doesn’t make us better people. Maybe in fact it makes us worse. Well, I’ve got some problems with that study. I’m not sure there’s a causal relationship there. I don’t think religion supplies us with our hates. But it is certainly true that sometimes people use religion to justify their hates. And religion does not always make us better people. Perhaps it’s rather that religion makes us more of what we already are. Let’s go back again to that first commandment, about having no other gods before God. The French mathematician Rene Descartes said that “God is that than which nothing greater can be imagined.” In other words, take the very best that we can imagine, go one step further, and that’s God. A German theologian named Feuerbach said something similar: he said that God is the projection of all our highest values. [Now I know some of you folk at Spirit of Peace don’t like to make any absolute claims about God. But even you more theistic types surely can see that human beings are capable of imagining great good. So think about God in that way: that God is the greatest good that we can imagine.] What happens, then, if we put something else above that greatest good? What happens if we see the wrong thing as the greatest good? What if we put our own prejudices in place of God? Our own selfish desires, our own selfish interests? People certainly do that with religion, but according to both Moses and Jesus, that would be idolatry. We have to be very careful what we revere as God. And those two commandments are a check on one another: Love God, and the second is like it, Love your neighbor as yourself. You can’t do one without the other. If you think you can, then you’re committing idolatry. We have to be very careful about what God we serve. How do slaves become free? By learning to strive for something better. Do not revere anything above God, the greatest good we can imagine. Do not covet what belongs to your neighbor. Rather, love God with all your being, and love your neighbor as yourself. Imitate Jesus in imitating God, who is the greatest good we can imagine. Be the best that we can be. That is God. Simple commandments, but three thousand years later, we’re still working on them. 18 September 2005 I was recently reading a contemporary theological magazine, National Geographic, and I came across an article about a group of Hasidic Jews that had settled in a small town in Iowa. (Yes, I actually read the articles; I don't just look at the pictures!) The article talked about the challenges involved when Hasidic Jews from New York and Nordic mid-western Protestants collide, but in the folks learned how to work things out and get along. The article closed with one of the Hasidic men saying, "Until the Messiah comes, I'm staying right here." That statement really struck me. "Until the Messiah comes." There's an interesting tension there, between an expectation that the Messiah could show up at any moment and change everything, and an awareness that until then we have to deal with the real world. Whether it's Jews expecting the first coming of the Messiah, or Christians looking forward to the return trip, both are looking for God to show up "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye" and – well, to take care of everything. To clean up all the muck and messiness or ordinary living. To save us. And the Bible shows us glimpses of this coming rapturous age. "The wolf shall lie down with the lamb, and a little child shall play with an asp." Or the slightly more realistic, but I suspect equally unattainable promise, "They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and their spears into pruning hooks, and neither shall they learn war any more." Such lofty visions run right up through Revelation, with its riders of the apocalypse, evildoers thrown into the lack of fire, and a magnificent city of jewels where God will wipe away every tear and death shall be no more. When God intervenes, this is kind of what we expect to happen. God is perfect, so that salvation should be perfect, too. We won't have all this disagreement and confusion, different denominations, controversial church pronouncements, or even a two-party political system or long lines for the public restrooms. Like the angels, we will all fit into a single Honda. Oh sorry, I mean, we will all be in one accord. (Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.) Even the great reformer Martin Luther fell under the spell of this messianic idealism. When he translated the Latin Bible into the vernacular German so that everyone could read it for themselves, he thought they all would see clearly what the book meant, and religious harmony and united would ensue. [Stop. Scratch head.] Yeah. Didn't quite work out that way. But the truth is, these lofty messianic visions are only a small part of the Bible. The vast majority of the Bible is concerned with the reality of that man quoted in National Geographic, "I'm staying right here." The Exodus story shows us salvation in the real world, and it is not nearly so harmonious and unifying as Martin Luther hoped. Here God has rescued the people from slavery, with mighty feats of nature, has delivered them out of the hands of their enemies with their chariots of iron. They sang their great song of faith – and all that singing made them thirsty. Literally, the first thing that happens after the songs of Moses and Miriam is that the people look around for a drink, but the water they find is bitter, and they balk at it. They complain to Moses, and Moses complains to God, and God makes the water sweet. Then they complain about the lack of food. "Would that we were back in Egypt, when we sat by the fleshpots and ate bread to the full!" But it's still early in that forty-year journey, so they are rather easily appeased by a bit of manna and quails under glass. Sweet eating compared to the fleshpots and bread of Egypt, and for a while people were contented. However, it doesn't last. The water problem comes up again two more times in the story, and the food issue reappears in Numbers 11. By now many years have gone by, and tempers are short. The people are weeping from the steady diet of manna and complain once more that they had it better in Egypt. Moses gripes to God like one parent to another, "Did I conceive all this people? I can't carry them around like toddlers. If it's gonna be like this, then kill me now!" And God responds, but not like the beneficent God we would expect. "You want meat? I'll give you meat! Not just one or two days, or ten, or twenty, but for a whole month until it comes out of your nose and you're sick of it!" This is not what we expect to happen in that great gettin'-up mornin'. People whining, people backsliding, people disagreeing, people wanting to give up on the whole enterprise. But that's the way of the world – even a world in which God is present and active. And that's the great lesson of the Bible – that those Messianic fantasies, beautiful and poetic and inspiration as they are, are fantasies. The wolf lying down with the lamb is so much science fiction. Any time we try to actually achieve, or worse, enforce such a utopian ideal, it ends badly. Everything from the first pilgrims landing on these shores, to the idealistic communes of the mid-nineteenth century, from the social gospel movement to George Bush's apocalyptic war on terror – it's all a fantasy, unattainable. And when we try to impose our vision on others it results in oppression, persecution, violence – we beat our ploughshares into swords and our pruning hooks into spears to wage a holy war in which our enemies are allied with Satan while we're on the side of God. But recall again the words of our Hasidic Iowan, "Until the Messiah comes, I'm staying right here." There's a tension there that we can hold on to. A worthy but unattainable dream combined with a down-to-earth realism. The Exodus story is fundamentally not messianic. It's a real journey toward something better in this world. Freedom from slavery isn't quite as easy as people thought it would be. It's hard work organizing folks, feeding all those mouths, keeping people from fighting. They're going to disagree on which path to take, and who should get to make the rules, and how they're going to cook that quail. God does not show up and solve all our problems for us. But we can work to solve our own problems, both ordinary and sublime, and do so with God's presence, inspired always by that messianic vision of something better. Horse
and Rider, Thrown into the Sea 11 September 2005 All the horrible plagues have run their course, and despite Pharaoh's hardened heart, he has finally let the people Israel go. This at last is the "exodus" or going out from which the book gets its name in Greek. But this is only the twelfth chapter. There are twenty-eight more chapters to go, just in this book alone! And that's not counting the 64 other books in the Bible. So there's a lesson to be learned here: the story of the Bible never really ends. You reach a terrific stopping point, but the story goes on. Fictional stories do have an end. We're familiar with the end that goes "and they lived happily ever after." But real life does not have tidy little ends like that. Even death itself is not really an end. Life goes on. Certainly there are pinnacles in our life, moments where we accomplish some task or maybe even achieve a great insight – but then time has a relentless way of marching on, and a new task presents itself to us, or that insight we gained gets a bit fuzzy around the edges. There's always some new challenge to face, some new foible to encounter. And so it is with both Pharaoh and the people of Israel. In fact, there's an interesting little hint that God knows what will be the theme for the rest of the book. In the middle of the thirteenth chapter, when the people are lining up for their exodus, the text says, "God did not lead them by the way of the land of the Philistines, although that was nearer, for God thought, "If the people face war, they may change their minds and return to Egypt." So God led the people by the roundabout way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea." [Which is another Greek typo. It is not the large body of water that we know of today as the Red Sea; rather it is a reedy marsh, a reed sea, which is part of the Nile delta.] In other words, God took them the long route, because She knew that if the people encounter obstacles, they would want to go back. And that is, of course, exactly what will happen over and over again. But for now the people are content to follow behind this pillar of cloud by day and pillar of fire by night, like a tour guide holding up a pink umbrella for the tourists to follow. Instead, it is Pharaoh who repents first, which should be no real surprise to us after the way he behaved during the plagues. Pharaoh sees all of his lovely impressed labor force marching out of the country happy as you please, and says, "Waitaminnit! What have we done, letting Israel leave our service?" So he packs up his chariots and his army and heads out to get his cheap workforce back. And as Pharaoh drew near, the Israelites looked back and saw him coming on all his chariots, and they cry out, "Was it because there were no graves in Egypt that you have taken us away to die in the wilderness? [Which is kind of funny, considering that today we know Egypt mainly for its elaborate tombs.] Why did you bring us out of Egypt anyway? Didn't we tell you to leave us alone? We'd rather be slaves in Egypt than die in this desert!" Okay, I'm mocking the Israelites, which is very easy to do. But really, they are in a terrible spot. They've got a sea on one hand, and Pharaoh's army on the other. And not just an army, but chariots! Chariots were the Weapons of Mass Destruction in their day. Any military historian can tell you that a guy on a horse can single-handedly take on scores of guys on foot, and win. A guy in a chariot is even more invincible. Indeed the Bible often repeats the phrase "chariots of iron" as a kind of code to describe how powerful an enemy army is. It's a terrifying thing to see: this rag-tag bunch of escaped slaves, on foot, carrying all their possessions with them, faced with this terror – enormous chariots moving faster than any human can run, wheels churning up dust, the horses' hooves pounding the ground, creating a horrific thunder, with spears and arrows and swords for lightning. It's no wonder the people were so afraid. Remember what I talked about last week, how the theme is who is in control. The Israelites see Pharaoh's chariots of iron and instantly they think he must be the one who is in control. Indeed, even to this day, don't we tend to think that the people with the biggest guns are the ones who rule the roost? But that is not how Moses sees it. At the sight of the approaching chariots, he urges the people, "Do not be afraid! Stand firm, and see the deliverance that the LORD will accomplish for you today. For the Egyptians whom you see today, you shall never see again. The LORD will fight for you, and you have only to [stand firm.]" It's not Pharaoh who is in charge, says Moses, it is God. All we have to do is stand firm. But that is not easy to do when you've got the sea at your back and an army of thunderous chariots bearing down on you. We might wonder why the Israelites don't have more confidence in God at this point. But all the plagues were natural wonders – frogs, gnats, boils, and all. Even when nature proves how powerful it can be, as we've seen to such horrible results in recent weeks, we still seem to think that humans are yet more powerful. Surely chariots trump gnats. But Moses holds his arm out over the sea, and a strong east wind turns the sea into dry land. This sea of reeds is a real place in Egypt, and this phenomenon of the wind turning it into dry land can be observed to this day. The miracle here is not in God doing something that nature cannot – somehow transcending or altering nature. Rather the miracle is in God using the ordinary forces of nature in his own time, to save these people against the man-made threat of chariots and armies. The idea that God is somehow behind the forces of nature is very disturbing to us in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. But I don't think that's quite the point of the story. Pharaoh thinks with his army that he can impose his will on God. But God uses the ordinary to trump Pharaoh's pride. Think about a marsh, a swampy area. People traveling on foot can get through what heavy machinery cannot. Pharaoh relied on his iron will, his iron chariots. He thought he could crush these slaves on foot. But his very pride traps him in the mire. Their chariot wheels get clogged, they get stuck in the mud, they fall off. And when the tide comes back in, Pharaoh's mighty army is destroyed. The chapter concludes, "Thus the LORD saved Israel that day from the Egyptians; and Israel saw the Egyptians dead on the seashore. Israel saw the great work that the LORD did against the Egyptians. So the people feared the LORD and believed in the LORD and in his servant Moses." Up until now they haven't really known who this God is. They haven't known if they can trust her. But now they see with their own eyes, how God will fight for them, how it is God's will and not Pharaoh's that matters, and for the first time they believe. And when they believe, they sing. First the lengthy song of Moses, and then the much shorter song of Miriam, his sister, also a prophet. These two songs are believed to be the very oldest surviving texts in the entire Bible, dating back three thousand years. Miriam's song sings with concise joy, "Sing to the LORD for he has triumphed gloriously. Horse and rider he has thrown into the sea." And Israel keeps singing this song throughout the Bible. Psalm 20 exults, "Some take pride in chariots, and some in horses, but our pride is in the name of the LORD our God. They will collapse and fall, but we shall rise and stand upright." Later prophets will look back on this song and sing it again in a new way. When Israel has become a nation, and another empire threatens them with destruction, the king of Israel will ironically seek a treaty with Egypt that will lend them mighty chariots. But Isaiah will rebuke the king, saying, "Alas for those who go down to Egypt for help and who rely on horses, who trust in chariots because they are many and in horsemen because they are very strong, but do not look to the Holy One of Israel or consult the LORD! Yet God too is wise and brings disaster; ... The Egyptians are human, and not God; their horses are flesh and not spirit. When the LORD stretches out her hand, the helper will stumble, and the one helped will fall, and they will all perish together." Echoes of the Reed Sea. Perhaps this is worth reflecting on: the extent to which today we rely on our technology, our modern-day "chariots of iron" to preserve us. I'm not for one instant saying that God sends natural disasters like hurricanes and tsunamis and earthquakes. But the fact is that there are limits to the extent that we humans can impose our will on the rest of the world. Yet the lesson of Exodus is still true: that even in the face of disaster, whether human-made or natural, God still has power to save, to lead us out. And God's power works through ordinary means, above all through disparate people coming together as one, standing firm and aiding one another. History is filled with examples of people coming together for a purpose, standing firm in the face of those chariots of iron, and accomplishing miracles. The pillar of fire and cloud is ready to lead us. All we must do is stay together and step out in faith. The
Great Teacher 28 August 2005 You have no doubt heard that description of Moses' resume, "Escaped murderer, stutterer," and so forth, illustrating that Moses doesn't exactly seem qualified for the job of "National Liberator." Moses continues the venerable tradition of unlikely candidates inexplicably called by God to a sacred task. Certainly his life was very colorful, and loaded with qualities that we wouldn't consider to be pious. The Old Testament spends more time with Moses than with any other person, even King David. He is attributed as the author of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, and he is known to religious history as the founder of monotheism, the Giver of the Law, the great teacher. Yet outside of those five books, Moses is scarcely mentioned in the rest of the Bible. The Passover Haggadah does not even mention his name. In some ways, we could say that Moses is to Judaism what Jesus is to Christianity and Muhammad is to Islam, yet Jews, while giving him due respect, nevertheless downplay Moses in a way that Christians and Muslims do not do with their founders. This is because for Jews, the emphasis is placed first and foremost on God. Or more to the point, on the relationship between God and the people. That relationship is central, and every other individual, even Moses himself, must be placed within that context. Nevertheless, Moses is a fascinating character in his own right. And while his story is obviously beefed up and exaggerated by later writers wanting to make everything look suitably epic, we can still see glimpses of genuine personality in the biblical portrait of Moses, a personality that is not always pleasant. Last week we saw Moses' origins, his birth, the dramatic escape on the Nile, and his rescue by Pharaoh's daughter. But even in that brief introduction, mythic as it is, there are ambiguities and inconsistencies. Who is Moses? Is he Hebrew, or is he Egyptian? In the text, Pharaoh's daughter gives him the name Moses, which the text relates to the Hebrew word mosheh, meaning "to draw out" as she drew him out of the water. But why would Pharaoh's daughter give him a Hebrew name, especially since all Hebrew boys were supposed to be killed? The name Moses is actually Egyptian. It means "son of," and was always attacked to the name of a god. Thutmose, Ahmose, Ramses. It was a king's name, expressing the king's dedication to this or that god whose attributes the king shared. Thus Ramses is the son of or embodiment of the sun god Ra. But Moses' name stands alone. "Son of" a god who is not named, a god with no name. From an academic standpoint perhaps we shouldn't make too much of that, but from a religious standpoint, it is rich with meaning, considering what we will later hear about the God who sends this Moses on a sacred task. But this mystery surrounding Moses' name prompts scholars to debate his real identity. No less a figure than Sigmund Freud claimed that Moses was actually an Egyptian, not Hebrew at all. We just can't know beyond what the Bible itself says. But the first thing we hear about Moses as an adult is that he "went out to his people and saw their forced labor." Whatever his ethnicity, Moses identified with the slaves, which was remarkable enough for a prince of Egypt. One day he sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew, as the Bible says, "one of his kinfolk," again showing Moses' identification with the Hebrews. Moses looks this way and that, and seeing no one, he kills the Egyptian and buries him in the sand. This remarkable little episode, taking place in only two verses, has been interpreted all kinds of ways. Some say that Moses looking both ways and hiding the boy implies concealment and cowardice, that Moses didn't want anyone to know what he had done. Others say he looked both ways to se if there was anyone else who would intervene, and seeing no one, he steps up to the plate and takes actions into his own hands. Still others say his deed here is a precursor to his latter actions as Israel's liberator. I could probably do a whole sermon on this story alone, but I'll just pique your interest as to the depth and range of meaning that can be found in two short verses. Getting back to the story, though, we find further meaning in what happens next. The next day he sees two Hebrews fighting and tries to break up the scuffle. But rather than be grateful, one of the men taunts, "Who made you ruler and judge over us? Will you kill me as you killed the Egyptian?" Of course, Moses will become ruler and judge over the people, and appointed so by no less an authority than the Lord God. But he has not yet been so appointed. Even though his intentions are good, he is acting on his own, and acting rashly. He does not yet have the authorit6 from God. So Moses becomes afraid, Pharaoh seeks to kill him, and he flees for his life into the wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula. Incidentally, the New Testament echoes this story by reversing it with the flight into Egypt of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus. There, in a scene that should be familiar to us by now after Genesis, Moses encounters some women at a well. In fact, according to rabbinic tradition, it's the same well where Isaac met Rebekah and Jacob met Rachel! We don't have to go to such extremes, however. The main point is that once again the well is an indication of hospitality. Some shepherds drive the women away, but Moses fights them off and then watered the women's flock for them. The women turn out to be the daughters of a local priest, and they not only take him home with them, he ends up marrying one of them, named Zipporah, and they have two sons. So Moses is in apparent wedded bliss living as a shepherd in the wilderness, and chapter two ends with these words: "After a long time the king of Egypt. Died. The Israelites groaned under their slavery and cried out. Out of the slavery their cry for help rose up to God. God heard their groaning, and God remembered his covenant with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. God looked upon the Israelites, and God took notice of them." One of the commentaries I read pointed out that God didn't save the Israelites out of the goodness of his heart. It wasn't just because they were suffering; it was because out of their suffering they cried out to God. There is a sense of obligation here that to us Christians might seem a bit blasphemous, as it's been emphasized over so many years that God didn't have to save us because we're all rotten sinners. But Judaism focuses on that covenant, as I said last weekend – the relationship between God and the people. It's a relationship that holds mutual obligation: us to God, but also God to us. So when God heard their cry, God remembered the covenant and acted. And what is it that God does in response? Chapter three opens with God calling Moses to be the people's liberator. And God calls Moses through the memorable burning bush. Moses sees it, but doesn't know what it means. It is mere curiosity that draws him to the bush at first, "I must turn aside and look at this great sight, and see why the bush is not burned up." In fact, it's not at all clear in the story if Moses knew anything whatsoever about the Hebrew God. He didn't even know he was supposed to take off his own shoes. God has to tell Moses who he is: "I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob," and only then does Moses hide his face because he is afraid to look at God. But notice that this little speech also tells Moses who he is himself – that he is the son of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. We have already heard that Moses knew enough to call the Hebrews his kinsfolk, but what does he really know about being Jewish? What does he know about this God? So far he has not mentioned God once in his life. But in showing his ID, as it were, God is also claiming Moses, identifying him, placing him within the context of a history, a people, a family. So that even though our story has taken on a universal scope, it is still grounded in that one man God chose so long ago in the twelfth chapter of Genesis. Do you see how these old threads and themes keep resurfacing, how all the Bible is woven together? But now we will be learning something new about this God, something we have not yet heard in Genesis. For when Moses asks God's name, God answers, "I am who I am. Tell them that I AM has sent you." Why would the Hebrew slaves recognize this name that we have never heard before? Thousands of years of commentary have expounded on the meaning of this enigmatic name. In fact, translators can't even agree what it ought to say: I am who I am; I shall be what I shall be, or maybe a combination of I am what I shall be. It's based on the verb "to be" – that's about all anyone can agree on. But what is "to be"? It's not a noun. It's not even a verb that does anything. It's almost like a placeholder: I am not a name, I AM. Absolute being. Absolute presence. Remember what I said earlier about the name of Moses – meaning "son of," but the God is not named? Perhaps he is the son of the God who has no name, who simply is. Well, I could easily do an entire sermon just on the name alone. To me it is very rich with meaning, and perhaps that in itself is the meaning of the name: that it's not something you can grasp, but rather it is an invitational mystery, one that calls us to wrestle with this God as Jacob wrestled the angel. But I want to make one final point here. When God issues this call to Moses, stating the plan for liberating the people from Egypt and sending them on to a promised land that God will show them, Moses' first response is to refuse. "Who am I that I should got to Pharaoh and bring the Israelites out of Egypt?" In all, Moses will try to back out of this call no less than five times! This is not what we would expect the great hero to do, to cry out, "Not me! Send somebody else!" But just as the Exodus story of liberation becomes the core story, the template for the whole Bible – and indeed becomes the way that we tend even to this day to interpret everything in our lives and around us, even though we don't know it; likewise this exchange between Moses and God becomes the template for the call of all prophets, for all religious calls. God appears, God calls by name, and God appoints a task. Then the prophet refuses, citing their unworthiness. But God insists and promises to be with them. This is a particularly Jewish way of placing the emphasis on God rather than on the prophet, and it's a story that we Christians have also inherited in our story of saints of the church who likewise refused God's call initially. Even the new pope had to ritually refuse the post. It's a way of saying that we can accomplish nothing truly great in this world without God's help. But it's also a way of finding the courage and spirit to attempt things that we otherwise might believe are impossible. After all, who *could* really believe that an escaped murderer become shepherd could really march into Egypt and liberate an entire people from slavery? It would be a foolish dream, the height of pride for a mere mortal to attempt it. But this was God's mission, and suddenly the foolish becomes possible. That is something well worth remembering. We cannot grasp the God Who Is, but with this God, all things are possible. In
Every Generation 21 August 2005 How does God act in the world? If we got our theology from best-selling novels like the “Left Behind” series, we would believe that God always acts with tremendous miracles and signs – wars, explosions, Armageddon, much like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. And the book of Exodus does have its sensational moments: plagues, burning bushes, manna raining from heaven. But above all the story of Exodus is a very ordinary one. This is not a tale about God working a miraculous, super-natural change in the world. Rather it’s about God acting within history, within the natural world. It’s not about some rapture in which people are whisked off to heaven, but about “ordinary people walking on their own two feet through this world to a better place within it.” When we read this story, we can see ourselves in it, we can recognize our own times. Countless oppressed people across the globe and throughout history have recognized themselves in the Exodus story. At the Passover Seder, Jews say that in every generation a new Pharaoh arises; people face a new form of oppression and must once again undertake the journey to liberation. Yet for all its ordinariness, there are parts of this story that will horrify and offend our modern sensibilities, not only in the way that people behave, but also how God behaves. God can sometimes appear harsh and bloodthirsty. But we need to remember the time when this story was told. Exodus is about an oppressed, enslaved people, and it is unique in the ancient world in depicting a God who defends and protects the weak. That is the greatest miracle of all. The book begins by enumerating the sons of Jacob who went into Egypt. In all, 70 people make that journey. But numbers in the Bible are almost always a code. Bible writers believed that there were 70 nations or peoples in all the world. So when Exodus begins by talking about these 70 descendents of Jacob, it is saying that even though this story is about the Israelites, they are standing in for all the people of the world. Once in Egypt they prosper and multiply. But their very prosperity makes them an object of fear to those around them. There arose a new king who did not know Joseph, and he said to his people, “Look, the Israelites have become too numerous for us.” Now, why should Pharaoh care about how many Israelites there were? He only worries about them because he sees them as “other,” as people different from himself. So we see that the distinction between “us” and “them” leads to oppression, for Pharaoh says, “Let us deal shrewdly with them.” Shrewdness, however, does not mean any clever bargaining or negotiating. Rather it means Pharaoh forces the Israelites into labor and puts slave masters over them. They were not slaves in the sense seen in ancient Greece or Rome, or even in the US, where slaves were property owned by individual masters. Rather their slavery was a form of pressed labor, where they were forced to work for the state. Yet they continued to multiply, so the Egyptians oppressed them even harder, “working them ruthlessly, making their lives bitter with hard labor in brick and mortar and with all kinds of work in the fields.” That phrase “hard labor” has a specific meaning in Hebrew, “rigorous labor.” It means work without purpose, without limits of time or endurance. It’s work that exhausts and degrades. So it’s not just hard work, it’s meant to wear people down, to wear them out. The Egyptians are using this labor to keep the Israelites from becoming too numerous. They are literally trying to work them to death. Alas, history is filled with examples of one group of people oppressing another exactly in this way. While there are definite parallels with the backbreaking, degrading work of American slavery, under that system slaves were nevertheless seen as valuable. A better parallel for the Israelites situation is of people conquered in a war, where the purpose of forced labor is twofold: one, to have an endless supply of labor that you can make work without regard for the care and health of the workers, and two the labor is meant to punish, oppress, and exterminate a people. So for example when Europeans arrived in the New World, they forced the indigenous people to toil endlessly in excruciating work. The Indians died by the hundreds of thousands because of the labor, and in fact Africans were brought here precisely because they were believed to be hardier. Within a few years of Columbus’s arrival, the indigenous people of many Caribbean islands were completely exterminated because of this rigorous work. There are countless other examples throughout history, including labor camps in Nazi Germany, in Soviet Russia, in the Killing Fields of Cambodia, and other places. But this method of controlling the Israelite population was not enough, so Pharaoh decrees that all male children will be put to death. Now, this order seems a bit confusing because if you want to reduce a population, you kill off the girls, not the boys. But from a military standpoint, it makes sense. You kill off the boys who could grow up to fight, and take the girls euphemistically for “wives” and assimilate them through their children. This too is a tactic used today in more places than I’d care to recite. It seems outrageous to us that anyone would systematically murder infants, but this shows how tyrants devalue human life. Tyrants are at heart cowards, and it is always the most innocent and vulnerable who are attacked. This is no parable; it’s a sad fact of life. Furthermore, remember how I said last week that Jesus is the new Moses? The story of Herod murdering the male children to protect his power is meant to echo this murderous act of Pharaoh. That doesn’t mean it’s fiction. On the contrary, this story is all too real. But in the midst of this horrific genocide, we also see the world’s first recorded act of civil disobedience. Two Hebrew midwives, whose names are recorded for all history, and who are the first names we hear of this new generation; Shiphrah and Puah. Pharaoh orders them to kill the male babies as soon as they are born, but the Bible says that they “feared God and did not do what the king ordered them.” They tell Pharaoh, “The women are too strong and give birth before we can get there!” Notice that they defy Pharaoh in a subtle way, preserving their own necks. This too is repeated throughout history, as oppressed people sabotage the plans of the masters, destroy property, protest through slow of shoddy labor. You may recall in the film “Schindler’s List,” where Schindler’s factory was forced to produce armaments for the Nazis – but he made all the bombs defective. Not all resistance is overt. For their bravery, God was kind to the midwives and blessed them with families of their own. In this first chapter, the story is told in a general way. But now in the second chapter we hear about one family in particular, descendents of the tribe of Levi. The wife gives birth to a son, and for a time is able to hide him. When she can conceal him no longer, she puts him in that famous reed basket and gives him to fate on the river. This part of the tale is filled with ironies: the Egyptians have been ordered to drown the Hebrew boys in the Nile, and yet the Nile becomes the vehicle for Moses’ salvation. This hated Hebrew boy is adopted by Pharaoh’s own daughter, who not only ends up hiring Moses’ mother to serve as her own son’s wet nurse, but who pays her for the service. And so it is that despite all of Pharaoh’s attempts to crush the Israelites, not only does he end up sheltering one of them as his own grandson, but that very boy will be the one who will one day lead his people out of the house of bondage. And this is the central lesson of Exodus. For all tyrants are marked by their hubris. They believe that they can control everything: people, destiny, even their own fate. But it is all a lie. God is the one who controls everything. Not in the sense that God is like a puppet master who pulls our strings. At times in Exodus God does appear that way, as when it says, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” But there will be plenty of other examples where we see that God can’t make people do what they don’t want to do. But the book of Exodus does say that God is in control, that God has a purpose, and that God will work on behalf of that purpose. There was an old hymn that said, “God is working his purpose out as year succeeds to year. Nearer and nearer draws the time, the time that shall surely be when the earth shall be filled with the glory of God as the waters cover the sea.” God’s purpose, says Exodus, is liberation for the oppressed, freedom to the slave. And even though we may think we can control things otherwise, that we can oppress and rule people for our own ends, God will take all our attempts to thwart God’s plans and use them to further God’s own purpose. That is the greatest miracle God has to offer. 14 August 2005 The story of Joseph and the coat of many colors is another endearing classic of Genesis. How many of you knew this story as a child? For that matter, how many of you have seen the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical? In my Sunday School growing up, I swear the story we learned the most was Joseph. Most of the Genesis stories are quite short, small episodes that are strung together about particular characters, with little sense of progression or flow. My sense of the Joseph story is that it's much longer than the others, but that's not actually true. It just seems longer because it's a coherent tale, sort of a mini-novel by Genesis standards. The scenes flow from each other, and there are overall themes that get played out over these fourteen chapters. Whereas the other Genesis stories are told in fits and starts, Joseph's story is written more like how we are used to stories being written. I have to confess I don't really know why that is. My research did not indicate that the story is more recent than the other tales in Genesis, but somehow it is more polished. It stands out against the rest of Genesis, and I suspect that's what helps make it so memorable. But for all this story's differences, the Joseph tale is still closely woven to the rest of Genesis, and it provides the set-up for the next book of Exodus. That is what I will focus on in my sermon, but before I go any further, it's time for a pop-quiz! Quick review of Genesis to remind ourselves about the story line. In the beginning, God created the world including the first two humans named Adam and Eve. They had two sons named Cain and Abel. Cain killed his brother, thus becoming the world's first murderer. Things went downhill from there, so God decided to scrap the whole creation except for one man named Noah and his family. Bonus points for naming his three sons: Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Ham and his son Canaan bore a curse that was later used to justify slavery. God made a promise never to destroy the earth again, and instead of trying to deal with the whole world, chose to focus on one man Abraham and his wife Sarah, to whom he promised two things: descendants and land. Sarah gave birth to Isaac. Bonus point if you know the name of Isaac's elder half-brother: Ishmael. Isaac married Rebekah, who gave birth to twins Esau and Jacob. Jacob stole Esau's birthright and blessing, and ran away from home, having many adventures and marrying two sisters named Leah and Rachel, who between the two of them and their servants had twelve sons named – no, I won't make you do that! Instead, open your Bibles to the bottom of page _21_ and quiz me! Can I name all twelve? After wrestling with God, Jacob's name was changed to Israel. His favorite son was Joseph, who was sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt, where everyone eventually followed him, thus setting the stage for the book of Exodus. And here's the secret, people. All of this book of Genesis is just set-up. It's the introduction, the prelude, meant to familiarize us with the players, most notably God, and the issues, most notably the covenant between God and the people. Because the real deal, the thesis statement of the Bible, the central story of the Jews and also the Christians, is Exodus. You could get rid of everything else in the Bible including the New Testament, and if you kept only Exodus, you'd have all you really need. If you got rid of Exodus, then nothing else in the entire Bible including the New Testament, would make sense. But! We're not there yet. So let's go back to Joseph and see how he caps off the introduction. This is a terrific story, full of all kinds of wild characters and terrific adventures and dramatic episodes, but due to my vacation I have only one Sunday to cover it. Not fair, I know, but may this be further incentive for you to read your Bible homework. And as I said, this is one of the easiest stories to read in Genesis. You don't need me to tell it to you. Instead, let's look at genealogy. Not the whole thing, but let's recall. Joseph is Abraham's great-grandson, born to that trickster Jacob and his beloved wife Rachel. He was the eleventh of twelve sons, and he was Jacob's favorite. Now hear that: Joseph was Jacob's favorite. Joseph, who was the youngest son, just as Jacob was the younger and Rachel was the younger. For that matter, Isaac is the younger of Ishmael. Whenever something gets repeated in the Bible, it's on purpose. The younger son is favored. But there's something deeper going on here. Remember that story of Isaac and his two sons, and which one did Isaac favor? Esau. And you recall what effect that had on Jacob, to know that his father loved his brother more than him, how desperately Jacob craved his father's blessing to the extent that he would cheat and steal to get it. He knew from personal experience how badly things can go when a father favors one son over the other, yet here he does the same thing. He favors Joseph over the others – over ten others. He even gives Joseph a fabulous coat. (Footnote: the Hebrew says a coat with long sleeves. The coat of many colors is based on a Greek typo. Whatever – it means Jacob gave Joseph a really rad zoot suit.) Now friends, let us pause for a moment of weeping, wailing, and gnashing over teeth. O, Jacob! Didn't you learn what happens when you favor one son so obviously! And Joseph isn't too smart. He's the youngest and smallest, but he runs up to his brothers and says, "Dudes! You won't believe this dream I had. You all bowed down to me! Isn't that awesome?" If I was his brother, I'd have wanted to kill him, too! And so because of sibling rivalry and brothers breading murder, Joseph like his father before him is exiled and sent away to a foreign land. Joseph didn't leave voluntarily, but there is a s definite parallel here between father and son. And like his father before him, Joseph succeeds and flourishes because of his wits. Or let's be more accurate: Jacob was a rascal who succeeded because of his wits. But Joseph succeeds because of his wisdom. Finally, after an entire book full of jerks, we come to Joseph, who for all his lack of tact, is a genuinely good guy: moral, upstanding, wise, intelligent, pious. In fact, he stands out in the entire Bible as being one of the few moral characters. But recall one of our Genesis themes, the one that happened in chapter twelve: the idea that god gave up on trying to instruct the entire world, and instead focused on just one, Abraham. And recall in the Sodom and Gomorrah story where God said, "I have chosen him so that he may charge his children and his household to keep the way of the LORD by doing righteousness and justice, so that all the nations of the earth shall bless themselves by him." Remember it? Want to write it down? It's in Genesis 18:17-19, on page 12. Remember also that God didn't pick Abraham because he was better than anyone else. On the contrary, Abraham was as big of a jerk as anyone else. So look at it: Abraham, jerk. Isaac, less of a jerk but still a jerk. Jacob, world-class jerk. Joseph – tactless, yes, but definitely not a jerk. It took four generations, but eventually that "way of the Lord of righteousness and justice" somehow managed to sink in. Because here's the deal: Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob pretty much all looked out for themselves alone. But Joseph prospers for others. Because of his intelligence and capability and fairness, he advances to head of Potiphar's household, and eventually becomes the Pharaoh's manager. And those dreams about the fat cows and the lean cows – it's Joseph who comes up with the plan that not only prepares Egypt to survive the famine years, but also helps all the people in that region. Because of Joseph's wisdom, nations streamed to Egypt to get that grain during the famine. The nations were blessed, were saved, because God chose to focus on one family that through four generations managed to produce one person who got it right. But Joseph is not just a great guy on a national level. He's also a great guy on the personal, human level. Like his father before him he finally reconciles with his estranged brothers. He goes through a very elaborate plot in order to do so, but the reconciliation is no less sweet in the end. Who can fail to be moved by Joseph's cry, "I am Joseph! Is my father still living?" And Joseph weeping so loudly that the Egyptians can hear him in the next room. People have come a long way from Cain murdering Abel in the fourth chapter of Genesis. Oh, they still murder each other, but they have also learned how to forgive and reconcile. So we began the book with Eden, and forbidden fruit, and we end with a new paradise, Egypt, a land of wealth and prosperity flowing with milk and honey. Everything seems to be going well for the descendants of Abraham and Sarah. But on his deathbed, Joseph tells his brothers, "God will surely come to your aid and take you up out of this land to the land he promised to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, and then you must carry my bones up from this place." For the story is not yet over. As I said, it's only the beginning. The stage has been set. The players have been introduced, the theme of the plot exposed. So we await the real action, and the next book opens with these ominous words, "Now there arose a new king over Egypt, who did not know Joseph." Fortunately, there is a God who remembers. 31 July 2005 There are two stories in the bible about a wastrel son who leaves his father and brother and goes into exile, where he experiences all kinds of adventures before finally crawling home again, a changed man. One that we’ve just heard, and the other is the famous parable of the Prodigal Son, as told my Jesus. It’s interesting to compare these two tales. Both center on a rather worthless son who makes off with the father’s patrimony, leaving behind a loyal but bitter brother. The prodigal son left with wealth, while Jacob left with nothing but a blessing. The prodigal son returns after having spent all his money. He has nothing, not even his pride left. Jacob, by contrast, returns with all the family and wealth that the stolen blessing promised him. Yet for all this prosperity, Jacob’s spiritual state is a lot like that of the prodigal son. He realizes now the harm he did when he left home. Now he returns, prepared to crawl and grovel as much as the prodigal son, and like his counterpart, he’s very worried about what kind of reception he will receive. Twenty years have passed, but for all he knows, his brother Esau is still breathing murder against him. For that matter, the fact that Jacob is returning with such ample evidence of the stolen blessing doesn’t’ seem like it will weigh in his favor. Jacob tries to help his cause by sending servants ahead with a message for Esau. The messengers return with this rather ominous report that Esau is coming out to meet him with four hundred men. The Bible rather succinctly says: Jacob was greatly afraid and distressed. He takes all of his livestock and splits it into two groups, hoping that if Esau attacks one, the other will be able to escape. Next he offers a prayer to God. It’s an interesting prayer that echoes all his negotiating at Bethel. I’m paraphrasing here, but nevertheless this is the tone of his prayer to God: “O God, you are the one who told me to come home. You said you’d bless me! O God, I am not worthy, etc., etc., but please deliver me from the hand of Esau! I’m so afraid he’s gonna kill us all! But remember, you did say you would protect me and give me descendents without number. Remember? That can’t really happen if I’m dead, can it?” After making this rather desperate prayer, he divides his livestock again, this time sending them ahead in waves as gifts to Esau. It’s a literal battery of gifts: first an onslaught of goats. Then backing them up come the sheep. Next is a platoon of camels, followed by a battalion of cows, and finally bringing up the rear, a heavy artillery of donkeys. All of these being offered as gifts for Esau, meant to dazzle him and butter him up so that he’ll be in a party mood by the time Jacob shows up. But having sent the four-legged troops ahead, Jacob is still not quite ready. He sends his family and all his remaining possessions across the river, and he waits behind, having put goats and donkeys and children and wives and a river between himself and his brother. He sits on that riverbank as night falls, alone, with nothing, just as he was when he left home two decades earlier. And in the dark, with no one else around, Jacob is attacked by an unknown assailant. A stranger appears and falls upon him, no words no threats no warning, attacks him and wrestles with him all night long. Who is this mysterious attacker? Is it a thief, a robber? Is it some kind of river guardian, like the troll and the three Billy goats gruff? Is it Esau, come to finish the job he wanted to start all those years ago? Could it even be Jacob wrestling with himself, his own inner demons? The story doesn’t describe this assailant, and Jacob does not know. But even though he is filled with worry and fear, Jacob wrestles for his life, fighting hour after dark hour. He’s cut himself off even from his own servants who might have been able to help him. But they are too far off to hear him if he cries out, and only the moon and stars witness this struggle. On and on they fight and grapple, but neither opponent can gain the upper hand. At last the man strikes Jacob leg, putting his thigh out of joint – an injury he will carry for the rest of his life. Yet despite this painful injury, even after a full night of combat, Jacob still does not let go, does not stop fighting. Truly he is the man of whom God told Rebekah so many years ago: two nations strive together within your womb. This man, who before he was born fought with his twin brother, grasping his heel even through the pains of childbirth. These themes of struggle have marked Jacob all his life, and they are present now in this batter: his fighting nature, his grasping, his refusal to let go – and his constant desire for blessing. For when the stranger finds he can’t get away and tells Jacob to let him go, Jacob says, “Not until you give me a blessing.” Why in the world would Jacob ask a blessing of this stranger he’s been fighting with all night long? But this is what he has grasped for all his life. Even having stolen the blessing from Isaac, having struggled with Laban, having gained wives and children and goats and donkeys, he still seeks a blessing. But instead, the stranger gives him a name: From now on your name will be Israel, for you have striven with God and with mortals, and have prevailed. As dawn breaks, the stranger at last gives Jacob a blessing before vanishing with the night. And Jacob realizes what has happened. He knows that he has seen God face to face. Limping from his injury, Jacob crosses the river to his family. He raises his eyes and sees Esau approaching with those four hundred men. He is exhausted from his nightlong struggle, but the battle is far from over. He must prepare himself for whatever might happen. So he puts his wives and children behind him: first the servant wives, then Leah and her sons, and last of all his beloved Rachel and Joseph. Last night he had sent them across the river to be a buffer between himself and his brother, but now he’s got his priorities straight. He goes before his wives and children, heading toward Esau, bowing to the ground not once, but seven times in humble deference. His injured leg twinges at the movement. He leaves the back of his neck exposed for the blade if it should fall. He puts himself in a position of submission and weakness. For the first time ever in his life, Jacob has no trick planned, makes no attempt to fight and struggle. For the first time ever in his life, he places himself at another’s mercy. And while he is still bowing, his head low so that he cannot see, Esau runs to meet him. Quoting from the Bible, Esau “embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.” It’s almost exactly the same as the reception the prodigal son received: “While he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.” This is not just welcome. Not just forgiveness. This is celebration – joy – elation! For he was dead is alive again! The one who was lost is now found! And Jacob is changed. Now he understands what it is he’s been seeking for all his life, when he sought blessing, when he alienated himself from his family and distanced himself from God. Now he receives the greatest blessing of all from the brother he had wronged, and it is Israel, not Jacob, who says, “Truly, my brother, to see your face is like seeing the face of God.” The
Trouble with In-Laws 24 July 2005 The next couple of chapters show the gradual change in Jacob’s personality following his encounter with the God who blessed him at Bethel. Indeed, after that episode, Jacob starts referring to “the God of Bethel,” no longer distancing himself so much from the God of his father and grandfather. Now this is the God who has blessed him and made promises to him, and Jacob is beginning to take that to heart. Following his mother’s advice, Jacob returns to the old ancestral home, to the land of Rebekah’s brother Laban, who is also Abraham’s nephew. In fact, it’s interesting to contrast Jacob’s arrival there with Abraham’s servant. Remember the story of the courtship of Rebekah, and how Abraham sent a servant to his homeland to seek a wife for Isaac? That episode started off with an encounter at a well, with Rebekah offering to draw water not only for the servant, but also for all his camels. Chapter twenty-nine of Genesis also begins with an encounter at a well – the same well, in fact, as those of you who did your Bible homework know. Jacob meets a group of shepherds who are waiting to water their sheep. You see, there is a great stone that covers the well – to keep anyone from hoarding the water. The stone was so heavy that it took several people to move. It was a way of enforcing cooperation among the local shepherds. But Jacob does not offer to help move the stone. Instead, he questions the shepherds about the whereabouts of his local relatives, and when they point out that Laban’s daughter Rachel is approaching the well, he basically tells them to buzz off. It’s only when Rachel arrives that he helps move the stone. He then waters Rachel’s flock, the way Rebekah watered the servant’s sheep. Rachel takes Jacob home to meet her father, who greets him, saying, “Surely you are my bone and my flesh!” But if Laban was expecting another wealthy servant from Canaan, bearing gold and camels, he was sorely mistaken. Indeed, it later becomes apparent that Laban is none too pleased to have this penniless, fugitive relative show up on his doorstep. When he realizes that Jacob won’t be leaving any time soon, he says, “Because you are my kinsman, should you therefore serve me for nothing? Tell me, what shall your wages be?" This seems generous at first, until you realize that he’s basically putting Jacob into the role of servant. In fact, the issue of wages will be an ongoing source of contention between the two of them. But Jacob’s eyes are full of love for Rachel, the younger of Laban’s two daughters, and he offers to work for Laban seven years in order to marry Rachel. His labor will supply the bride price. Perhaps Laban is remembering Abraham’s servant who had arrived with all that gold for Rebekah. Sure, he gets a lot of service out of Jacob, but who doesn’t love gold? So Jacob works the seven years, and on the wedding night comes the infamous switch, where Laban sends the elder daughter Leah in to Jacob instead. I love to make jokes at Jacob’s expense about the fact that he didn’t realize until morning that he had married the wrong daughter, but think about what Laban has done. There is an interesting parallel among the two sisters, as there was among the twins Jacob and Esau. In both cases, the younger is favored over the elder. It is not poor Leah’s fault, but Laban cheats Jacob in a way that causes ongoing grief for everyone involved. Because it’s Rachel that Jacob truly loves. He agrees to serve another seven years in order to marry her as well, and the two sisters will carry out a rivalry for Jacob’s affections for the rest of their lives. Remember that theme of God favoring the barren women? It shows up again here, as God sees that Leah is not loved by Jacob. So God gives her all the children. The next chapter covers the fertility wars between the two sisters, as Leah bears several sons, then Rachel gives her servant to Jacob to have children with, as Sarah had once done with Hagar. Then Leah gives her servant to Jacob, and at one point, Leah even purchases Jacob’s services for the night by paying Rachel in mandrakes. If this isn’t an argument for monogamy, I don’t know what is! Rachel gets so angry over this, she starts yelling at Jacob as if it’s all his fault that she has no children of her own. Remember dear, sweet Isaac praying to God to remember his barren wife? That’s not what Jacob does. He snipes back, “Don’t blame me! I’m not God!” Um, nice going there, Jake. Way to win over the affections of your wife. Indeed, Jacob doesn’t seem to be suffering too much, because between Leah and the two servants, he has now fathered ten sons. At long last, God shows favor to Rachel, and she gives birth to Joseph, he of “coat of many colors” fame, whom we will get to know much better in a couple of weeks. Finally with Joseph’s birth, Jacob is ready to return to his homeland. It’s been some twenty years now since he fled his brother’s wrath, penniless and alone. Now he has a large family, and he wants to go home. Laban has prospered with Jacob as his servant, yet Laban conspires to cheat Jacob of his just wages. There follows a comical tale of spotted and striped goats which I won’t relate here. You all know it anyway, from having read your Bible homework! But here we begin to see how Jacob has been changed by his encounter with God. Jacob has finally learned honesty, yet Laban cheats him – the way he himself cheated his brother. This time Jacob uses his wiles to get around Laban’s attempts to cheat him, and finally Laban concedes defeat. He figures it’s wiser to just let Jacob go with his wives, his children, and the goats that Laban owed him as his just wages. He makes a vow with Jacob, and there’s not a lot of familial love in it. Basically, he calls on God to witness that Jacob is to stay the heck out of Laban’s way. Jacob doesn’t seem to win too many friends! So Jacob sets off to make the long journey home, to confront at last the brother that he had cheated so many years ago, and that is where we will pick up again next week. What, then, are we to make of such a story of deception and manipulation? Remember, the point of the Bible is to tell us what God is like. So what does this tale tell us about God, who on the surface seems largely absent? But God is not absent. A seed was planted at Bethel. Jacob, the trickster, who didn’t need anyone, certainly not the God who was the terror of his father Isaac – this Jacob who received a blessing from God and yet bargained with God for his loyalty – this Jacob was nevertheless changed by his encounter. Jesus tells us that the kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed; it’s like leaven in the dough. It is tiny, almost insidious: it permeates from within and spreads and grows, like a germ of goodness in the midst of the selfish manipulations of Jacob and Laban, of Leah and Rachel. The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in a field, like a merchant in search of fine pearls, like a net that gathers fish of every kind. Truly whatever faithfulness lay in the hearts of the ancestors was deeply hidden, indeed! And yet God searched diligently, tirelessly for it, like a merchant in search of fine pearls. The net is thrown wide, and it gathers all kinds of fish, the good, the bad, and the very ugly – the Jacobs and Esaus, the Rachels and Leahs. Perhaps the lesson here is that favorite theme of mine: that God can take the worst screw-ups and make something of them, that God can take a situation of oppression and violence, of dysfunction and betrayal, and somehow bring hope out of it. The kingdom of heaven is like love, hidden in one very messed up family. It is the tiniest of seeds, hidden like a treasure buried in a field, but it spreads like leaven throughout the family until it finally grows into shelter for all. It is truly a miracle, and it is very, very good news. 17 July 2005 What
exactly is Jacob’s ladder? It’s one of those biblical
references that most people have heard of, but few know what it
actually means. If it weren’t for the old spiritual, we probably
wouldn’t even have heard of it at all. But one of the benefits
of this bible series is that you have me to do the obscure research
for you! And what I learned is that the Hebrew word is more accurately
translated as a “ramp.” So Jacob dreams of a ramp ascending
to heaven, with angels going up and down it. This ramp, it turns
out, is a reference to those ancient Mesopotamian temples called
ziggurats that had ramps leading to the top, toward heaven. Cast
your mind back several months ago to the Tower of Babel story that
we heard. If you recall, that tower is itself supposed to be a ziggurat,
which the people built in order to ascend to heaven.
That kind of ramp is what Jacob sees in his dream, except this one contains some important differences. First of all, it is built by God, not by mortals. Jacob did not build the ramp out of vanity to ascend to heaven. Rather, God built it to connect with earth. Secondly, the angels on it are both ascending and descending. The traffic isn’t one way – it’s both ways, representing the transcendence and immanence of God. The vision shows that God dwells above us and our petty concerns and lives, but also dwells with us, exactly where we are. And the real focus of this story is not on the trippy ladder, but on where Jacob is. And where is Jacob? Right before this vision takes place, Jacob has stolen the blessing from Isaac. He has deceived his father and cheated his brother. If it’s family values you’re looking for, you might want to avoid the bible! His mother Rebekah has counseled him to run away to her old homeland and hide out with her nephew Laban and his family. So where is Jacob? He’s on the lam – exiled, fleeing for his life, with only a stone for a pillow. The latest heir to the promise doesn’t seem to be doing too well for himself. Let’s review again: what are the two promises God has made? An heir or descendants, and a homeland. But Jacob is now alone, cut off from his family, and literally going backward, retracing Abraham’s steps away from the Promised Land and back toward the old neighborhood. But let’s take it to a more personal level. Remember what we talked about last week, how Jacob envies Esau and desperately craves his father Isaac’s blessing. It’s one thing to talk about grandiose promises from God, but in the story of the theft of the blessing, there’s a very moving scene where Esau learns of the theft. Three times he asks for a blessing of his own, finally crying, ”’Have you but one blessing, my father? Bless me, even me also, O my father.’ And Esau lifted up his voice and wept.” I can’t read that passage and think Esau only cared about material prosperity. How many children cry desperately for a blessing from their parents? I knew a woman in seminary who I greatly admired. She had been married at a very young age, and then divorced a few years later, left to raise two sons on her own. While taking care of them, she put herself through college, taking night classes for sixteen years. Then she felt a call to ministry and put herself through seminary, despite the objections she’d heard all her life that women shouldn’t become ministers. I was in awe of how much this woman had accomplished, both for herself and her children. But her mother continued to berate her and criticize everything she ever did. Nothing she did was good enough for her mother. My friend was like Jacob, craving the blessing of a parent who constantly withheld it. It was a horrible thing to see. Perhaps you’ve experienced that lack of blessing yourself, or have seen it in others. The greatest thing parents can give their children is a blessing, one that says, “I love you, I’m proud of you, I wish all good things for you.” In a sense they’re just words. Yet they do make a material difference in our lives. In the absence of that blessing, Jacob has become a deceiver, wily, manipulative. He’s exiled and on his own. And as we saw last week, he had distanced himself from God, the God of Abraham, the terror of Isaac, but never his God. This is where Jacob is in Chapter 28. A liar, a cheat, irreligious and impious. He seems like the last person you would expect to receive a visit from God, and he is certainly not seeking God. But as he rests his head on that hard stone, God comes to him. This is the first time in the story that God ever appears to and speaks to Jacob. And Jacob, who has sought his father’s blessing all his life, hears these words: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go. I will bring you back to this land, for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” That’s what he hears. No recrimination. No scolding – though heaven knows he deserves it. No. He hears the blessing he has longed for all his life. A message of unconditional love. A message of unbreakable commitment. A message of blessing. Pause for a moment. Can you feel the power of it? Do you get a shiver down your spine? I do. And so did Jacob. He wakes up, and is it any surprise to hear him say, “Surely the LORD is in this place, and I did not know it!” I really believe that if children feel loved by their parents, then they can weather anything. But if they feel judged, measured and found wanting, then they will struggle all the rest of their lives. Friends, this is how God loves us, no matter how shifty and sneaky and worthless we may be. This promise God makes to Jacob is the promise God makes to all of us. This blessing from God changes us. It makes us better people. But that isn’t to say we have to behave in order to keep the blessing. It’s an internal change based on what God does, not an external change based on what we do. Jacob is clearly moved by his vision, but in many ways he remains the same old conniver. He offers a conditional contract in response to God’s unconditional offer. “If you really do all this for me, then I’ll give you a tithe back.” And yet even this is okay with God. God doesn’t rescind the offer just because Jacob is kind of petty about it all. But keep in mind, this is all Jacob knows how to do. It’s as if now that he’s been given the blessing he has always craved, he doesn’t quite know what to do with it. He doesn’t quite trust it. But that’s all right. God has patience, and Jacob will indeed learn. It takes a lifetime! But Jacob will learn. He will change. And he will grow into a worthy heir of the promise. And so it is with us, too. We may not have received a blessing from our parents. Equally as bad, we may not have been told growing up about God’s unconditional love for us. But all of us could stand to listen closely to the blessing: “Know that I am with you and will keep you wherever you go. I will bring you back… for I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” That’s a promise that is yours to keep forever. Sibling
Rivalry 10 July 2005 If you haven’t been keeping up with the Bible homework, I strongly recommend you think about it now. We’re heading into the story of Jacob, who is one of the most colorful characters in the entire Bible, the man whose name will eventually become synonymous with the children of Abraham and Sarah, the heirs of the promises of God. Up until this point in Genesis, we haven’t gotten much of an interior look into the people. The Bible is concerned more with people’s action than their emotions. But Jacob’s personality is so strong that it bursts forth I the story. He’s a rapscallion, a trickster. He’s deceptive, vengeful, but also capable of great loyalty and love We’ll only be touching on some of the highlights in his life, so I urge you to read the chapters between the sermons. We read last week about Isaac and Rebekah. Here we learn that Rebekah, like her mother-in-law, is barren. God certainly seems to enjoy a challenge, promising countless descendants to couples that can’t have children! But this motif of barrenness appears frequently throughout the Bible. Jacob’s wives will also have trouble conceiving, as did the prophet Samuel’s mother Hannah, and John the Baptist’s mother Elizabeth. Even Mary fell into this category of childless women who find favor with God. In biblical times, a woman’s crowning achievement was the ability to bear children, especially sons. A childless woman was seen as all but worthless, overlooked or scorned by others, put aside by their husbands. While we resists this identification of a woman’s value with her reproductive ability, nevertheless have we not known the pain of a woman who cannot conceive? It’s a genuine cause of suffering and anguish, even when women don’t pin their sense of identity on it. We sympathize with women who will go to great lengths medically in order to conceive. So even though there is a patriarchal bias in these biblical stories, we need to know that this God is the one who picks women who society looks down on. And God picks them not only to bear sons important to the promise, but also gives the women a significant role to play. So Rebekah’s barrenness is part of a larger biblical tradition. But her barrenness does not last long. It only takes one verse for Isaac to pray and then for her to conceive, as opposed to the 26 years or so that Sarah waited for her reward. Rebekah conceives twins, and they struggle together within her. I’ve never been pregnant myself, but I can only imagine what it would be like to carry two active children inside me! Poor Rebekah probably can get almost no sleep. And perhaps that pain and discomfort is what prompts her to say, “If it is to be this way, then why do I live?” It’s one of those verses that is so easy to overlook. I myself have ever even noticed it before, but some of the commentators picked up on it. The original Hebrew is uncertain and difficult to translate, but the commentators say that it reflects a conflict within Rebekah herself. She senses a struggle within herself and is asking what role she will play in the future. “Why do I live?” Isn’t that the question everyone asks? Yet for Rebekah it has a cosmic dimension. She is the wife of the child of promise, Isaac. The children she carries are not mere boys; they are two nations struggling against one another. The conflict is within her own body. What does a mother feel whose children are set against each other? What does a mother feel when her two sons always fight? She might well be asking if she’s doing the world a favor by bringing two antagonistic nations into it. But there’s more. God speaks to her and says, “One shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger.” This upsets the typical order of things in which the eldest son inherits everything. This theme also gets repeated in the bible, of God favoring the younger over the elder, God reversing what people would see as the proper order. Rebekah seems to think that this means she must make a choice between the sons. Remember two weeks ago when we talked about the sacrifice of Isaac, and parents who choose one child over the other? For that is exactly what happens in this family. Patriarch Isaac chooses Esau, the elder. Matriarch Rebekah chooses the younger. And which choice proves to be the one favored by God? But the matter is further complicated by the fact that Rebekah bears twins. Twins were significant in ancient times. They were seen as having great power, but they were also viewed with suspicion, as if something demonic conspired to make there be twins. Think of the legendary founders of Rome, Romulus and Remus. The one brother murdered the other. Well might Rebekah worry! Jacob and Esau are presented as opposites: Esau is hairy while Jacob is smooth, Esau likes hunting and the great outdoors, while Jacob “dwelt in tents” and did the cooking. Jacob is very clever, perhaps too clever for his own good, whereas Esau – Esau is too dumb for his own good. They are opposites, yet they are deeply bound to each other in a way that perhaps only twins can be. Esau is born first, but Jacob comes close behind, clutching at Esau’s heel. That is how he gets his name: Jacob, the heel-grasper. But we will find that Jacob continues to follow after and grasp at Esau all his life. Though Jacob is the one favored by God, it’s always Esau that he covets. He wants Esau’s birthright, he wants the blessing that belongs to Esau. Years later he will covet Esau’s pardon. The Lectionary skips the companion story of Jacob stealing Esau’s blessing – all the more reason for you to read your bible homework. But let’s look at the two stories. The birthright that Esau sells is his right to the inheritance, or what was called “primogeniture” in the old days. The eldest son gets the greatest portion. We moderns can understand why Jacob would want that birthright. But it’s harder to understand the struggle over the blessing. In biblical times, the blessing had an almost magical power. It was believed that a blessing had a material effect on people’s lives, just as a curse did. It was not mere words: it was something tangible and real. Once given, it could not be taken away. We’ve already encountered a few other curses: the curse in the Garden of Eden, the curse of Cain, or Noah’s curse of Ham and Canaan. On the positive side we still see examples of the blessings that Jacob bestows on his twelve sons, and that Joseph bestows on his two sons. Yet the blessing goes even deeper than that. Remember again that issue of parents sacrificing one child for another, choosing one child over the other. What does it mean that Jacob desires his fathers’ blessing so desperately that he’s willing to cheat in order to get it? What does Isaac’s blessing mean to him? Jacob is not ignorant of the potential hostility that can exist between father and son. His father Isaac was almost murdered at the hands of his own father Abraham. Indeed, it is Jacob who will later refer to the “God of Abraham and the terror of Isaac”. What image of fathers has been passed down to Jacob, and how does he view God as a result? Jacob has a tendency to distance himself from God. He often says to Isaac, “your God has done these things” or he refers to the God of Abraham, but he does not say my God. Perhaps this stems from his experience as the disfavored son, the one that his father did not choose. Maybe his very deceitful nature arises from his experience of how Isaac prefers Esau to him. But Rebekah is also part of this dynamic. She does favor Jacob, though whether it is because of the prophecy God made to her, or because of her own feelings. But if only one of her children is going to be the true heir to God’s promise, shouldn’t it be the one who recognizes the value of a birthright and shows initiative in order to get it? How much can we really respect Esau when he’s willing to trade his entire inheritance away for a bowl of stew? Rebekah knows that Isaac will bestow that crucial blessing on a son who doesn’t seem to have the strength of character for it. She is the one who convinces Jacob to deceive Isaac and gain the blessing. She hatches the entire plot, and when Jacob frets what will happen to him if he’s discovered, she says, “Let the curse fall upon me instead.” Remember her question, “If it is to be this way, then why do I live?” There’s a struggle within her, and she makes a choice that shapes destiny. She sacrifices one son for the other, in a move that could result in fratricide. Indeed she fears so much for Jacob’s life that she sends him far away. And the saddest thing is that her choice means that she will never see Jacob again. She dies before he finally returns many years later. It has often been said that the book of Genesis is basically one long story of a very dysfunctional family. And as I have also been saying, it’s hard to see this book a simple set of moral instructions for us. But the complexity of a character like Jacob, and the complexity of what the promise of God is and how it gets lived out, mirrors the complexity of real life. We might well hesitate to adopt any of these people as role models, but at the same time surely we can see a bit of ourselves in all of them. Jacob did not spring out of nowhere. He comes from a family that already has a long history with this God who created the universe in six days. The shaping of Jacob the Patriarch reflects the shaping of the people of Israel, and the shaping of all of us as modern-day heirs to the promise of God. Let us read these stories and learn, finally, about ourselves. 3 July 2005 Isaac, in contrast to his father Abraham, his son Jacob and his grandson Joseph, doesn’t get a lot of press time in the Bible. There are only about five stories of him: the sacrifice, the story of Rebekah (in which Isaac hardly appears), a repeat of the “she’s no wife, she’s my sister” comedy of errors which we’ve already heard twice with his mother and father, some drama about wells, and finally Jacob duping him and stealing the blessing meant for Esau. That’s it. What with being almost murdered by his father and then being duped by his son, Isaac might well lament, “I don’t get no respect!” Poor guy. He’s all but overlooked amidst his more colorful family. He seems incredibly passive, to the point of being taken advantage of by almost everyone around him. For my part, in this sermon series, I’m struggling to come up with anything to say about him! Above all, though, my impressions about Isaac come from this tale of what we might call the courtship of Rebekah. When I was a little, we had a children’s bible that used to belong to my grandmother. It had retellings of selected Bible stories, illustrated with pictures of fat, ruby-cheeked children with seraphic golden curls – probably not very accurate historically! I particularly liked stories about children and women: Ruth and Esther, young Samuel at the Tent of the Presence and young David with his flock of sheep. And this story of Isaac and Rebekah was one of my favorites, too. It had all the good things: marriage, camels, gold bangles. That may not sound very sublime, but that’s precisely why I liked the story. Certainly the great heroic tales have their appeal, like the girl Esther saving her people, or young David going up against Goliath. But it’s good to know that there’s room for the ordinary in the Bible as well, so that an entire chapter is spent on this down-to-earth tale of the courtship of Rebekah. Now in many ways this chapter ought to be very alien to us. For one thing, there is they style. Our Lectionary reading skips through the chapter in order to give us the abbreviated version, because the story basically gets repeated twice. Events happen, and then the servant goes and repeats the whole thing to Rebekah’s brother, Laban. For us modern readers it gets a bit tedious, but this was an effective method of storytelling back in the days when the Bible was recited around a campfire. And it appealed to me as a child, too, giving the story a bit of a fairy tale feel. But another potential problem with this is story is how different a style of courtship this is to us. Abraham commands his servant to go fetch a wife for Isaac, as if a bride is something you pick up at the market. Then there’s the method the servant uses in order to identify the right woman: she shall be the one who offers water both to him and to his camels. I suppose this test could show a woman who is hospitable and generous to strangers, which as we have seen is a very important quality in the Bible. But it could also be a more practical test of strength. Just imagine having to draw enough water to satisfy all those camels! Once Rebekah passes this test, there follows a negotiation between the servant and Laban. A bride price is paid, and Rebekah rides off, away from her family and homeland. When at last she spies Isaac, rather than running to meet him, she demurely draws her veil over her face so he can’t see her. It is not at all the kind of romance that we think of today. Yet the tale ends saying, “Isaac took Rebekah and she became his wife, and he loved her. So Isaac was comforted after his mother’s death.” The Bible, as we’ve already seen, does not talk a lot about people’s emotions. But this succinct verse seems to convey a lot, a kind of sweetness and gentleness that we don’t encounter too often amid the more heroic stories in the Bible. And that sweetness, that human level, is what makes this story so appealing to me, to a point that I sort of forget how alien a form of courtship this is. I’ve said it before, but Biblical marriage is vastly different from our concept of marriage today. The institution of marriage has changed drastically, and I say thank God! These days we are again debating what marriage means and how to recognize it in our laws. But folks, this kind of argument is nothing new. Throughout history there have been all kinds of restrictions placed on whom is allowed to marry. And every time we go through one of these changes, some people holler that the change threatens the very institution of marriage itself. We forget that at some point in history these ideas about marriage were new: the idea for example that people should be free to choose their own spouse and not who their parents choose for them; or that the age of consent should be raised, or that slaves could marry, or that people of different races could marry. Today the issue is gender. Oh that may seem radical and new, but we forget that we’ve already had this discussion many times before. Forty years ago, the idea that black people and white people should marry was just as shocking to some. The institution of marriage does in fact change over time. Yet some things remain the same no matter how that institution embodies it. So while I have cautioned us about being too simplistic in drawing social lessons from the bible, it might nevertheless be worthwhile to look at what doesn’t change. And what doesn’t change regardless of arranged marriage, age, race, or even gender is love. OH, marriage is certainly about many other things too: economics, children, and even political alliances. But the core is love. We don’t get to choose our parents, our siblings or our children. But we do choose our spouses, our partners. We choose someone who is *not* our relation, someone who is somehow different from us. Perhaps a different race, a different age, from a different background or nationality or religion. Maybe a different gender – or maybe not. But the point is that it’s a bond formed of love, in which we come to love someone to whom we are not blood-related, to take this stranger as our family. Indeed, the marriage bond is the root of all other family bonds, isn’t it? And this bond of love is so powerful that it infuses even the way we think of God. For who is more different from us than God? The Bible often uses the bond of marriage as an analogy for the bond between God and God’s people. The prophets speak of the idolatrous people as a wayward spouse and call them to renew their vows with God. But the analogy takes its most earthy form in the Song of Songs. This fascinating little book is a collection of love poems, celebrating the love between an unmarried couple. It’s full of passion and tenderness, celebrating physical beauty and desire. The book was only included in the bible because it was seen as an analogy of the love between God and the people, or Christ and the church. But it’s hard to see the spiritual meaning of, “Behold, you are beautiful, my love. Your eyes are doves, your hair is like a flock of goats, your lips are like a scarlet thread.” And yet the Song of Songs does lift up romantic love in all its earthly, physical glory as being holy and sacred. This most ordinary of human emotions is also one of its most sublime. And surely is there not something holy in the famous verse, “ Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, it would be scorned.” Now, again I need to caution against making too strong an identification between love and marriage, and our covenant with God. While it’s true that God will never divorce us (thankfully!), on earth it’s a different matter. We are human, after all, and not divine, and the institution of marriage is finally an earthly one, with earthly limits. Divorce was a reality in biblical times just as it is today, and sometimes it is a very good thing.
|
