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Rita's Sermons (Jan - June 2005)...
Sacrifice
- 06/26/05 To read more sermons from previous years, please click on one of the following links: July
- December 2004 26 June 2005 Some people say that the Bible is an acronym for Basic Instructions Before Leaving earth. Well, a story like the sacrifice of Isaac makes me wonder if they’ve been reading a different book than I. But that’s how some people view the Bible, as if it’s a set of clear-cut instructions, directions, teachings. Yet if that’s so, what in the world are we to make of the story of the sacrifice of Isaac? What instructions does this story give? What are we being taught? Oh sure, you can make a simplistic teaching from this story, such as: you should always have faith in God. And I’d probably agree with that ultimate view. But that moral misses out on so many nuances of this story, and above all it misses out on the terror of it. In that sense, this story and what we do with it says a lot about how we read the Bible and how we learn from it. Yes, you could read the Bible only for simple instructions, but in doing so, you would miss out on the tremendous depth and challenge and outright terror that the book inspires. This story of the sacrifice of Isaac is one of the toughest ones in the Bible. There are other stories that are touch, but perhaps none is as well known as this one. Throughout history there have probably been as many interpretations of this story as there have been readers. And true to my own form, I’m not going to tell you what this story means – because friends, I don’t know myself! Instead, I’m going to explore some of its meaning, ask questions. And what I hope you learn from this sermon and from this overall series is not so much what the story means as how to read it, to explore it, to question and wrestle with it. Remember Abraham bargaining and arguing with God over the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah. He wasn’t doing that to be contrary. Rather that was the way God wanted Abraham to learn. So let us follow our father Abraham’s example. First of all, let’s place this story within the context of the rest of our story so far. Remember that in the first eleven chapters God is dealing with all of humanity, but in chapter twelve God chose to narrow the focus. Who did God choose to focus on? (Abraham and Sarah.) And what did God do with them? (Make promises – for land and an heir.) And did God fulfill those promises right away? No. It’s been a long time in coming. Abraham and Sarah have had their doubts; they’ve tried to take matters into their own hands. But time and again God has said, “no, I’ll take care of it. These promises will be fulfilled.” And then finally what happened last week? (Isaac was born. Hagar and Ishmael.) Now, between that story and this we get one little tale about some wells, and then we have the story of the sacrifice of Isaac. Our story begins, “After these events, God put Abraham to the test.” God calls Abraham and tells him to take Isaac and offer him as a sacrifice at a place that God will show him. That should sound familiar to us: Abraham called on a journey to an unknown destination, it’s how the story began back in chapter twelve. And what does he take with him on this journey? He takes Isaac of course, and a donkey, some wood and two servants. Who does he not take? Sarah. She’s left behind. Why? Did she know what was going to happen? How did she feel about this? One rabbinic tradition has her helping to pack for the sacrifice in obedience to God’s command. Another has Abraham sneak out in the morning so she won’t know what’s up. We don’t know what the answer is. But the question is worth pondering. Where is Sarah in all this? What is her reaction? The text says that they travel for three days. The place is not nearby. It’s a long walk, with a lot of time to think about it, a lot of time to turn back. At last Abraham lifts up his eyes and sees the place, and he leaves the donkey with the two servants while they are still a ways off, as if wanting to hide this deed from them. And Abraham takes the wood for the burnt offering and places it on Isaac’s back while he himself carries the fire and the knife. Think about that: Isaac carries the wood for his own immolation on his back. Does this image echo in your mind? Jesus carrying his cross to his crucifixion. That word “holocaust” is a technical term for a sacrifice consumed by fire, a burnt offering. But the word has a specific association today with the genocide of the Nazi regime. That is not a mistake. For just as Christians read this story and see the echo of Jesus’ crucifixion in which God offered up her own son as a sacrifice, likewise Jews read this story and see themselves as Isaac, and Abraham as God offering them up for slaughter. Then we have this poignant and chilling exchange. The boy is old enough to understand what is going on, that they are preparing for a sacrifice, and he says, “Here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb?” And Abraham says, “God will provide it.” Is he dodging the question? Is he remaining noncommittal about the whole thing? Or is he perhaps doing a bit of prophecy? Is this his wish, or maybe he already somehow envisions the outcome? They arrive. Abraham builds the altar, arranges the wood and binds Isaac and places him on the wood, and takes the knife to slay him. This story is sometimes called the binding of Isaac – perhaps to shy away from the word “sacrifice,” perhaps as a reflection that in the end Isaac is not sacrificed. But picture the action of these two verses, told with such cold precision – doesn’t your heart recoil? Abraham binds his son and takes the knife to kill him. The Danish theologian Soren Kierkegaard saw this story as central to his faith, and called his book about it “Fear and Trembling.” Isn’t that what you feel? Later in the Bible God will be referred to as the God of Abraham and the terror of Isaac. Can you see why? Yet there is no emotion described here. What is Abraham thinking? What is he feeling? What does Isaac feel? Again there are traditions that fill in the gaps. One says that Abraham wept as he held the knife, and his tears fell into Isaac’s eyes and damaged his sight for the rest of h is life. In Islam, the boy being sacrificed goes willingly, saying, “If it is God’s will, then tie me up, and tie me tightly lest I tremble and mess up the sacrifice.” But the text itself does not say. These are our imaginings. But I ask again: is this really an instruction manual? Or do we lose something of the horror through such a simple reading? Then at last God speaks up and says, “Do not harm the boy; do not even touch him. For now I know that you fear God and would not withhold even your son.” And Abraham looks up and sees the ram instead. “Now I know that you fear God.” Fear God, indeed! One historical interpretation of this story is that it is told in protest of the practice of child scarified. It was in fact a common practice in ancient and even not so ancient days to offer up children as sacrifices. So perhaps Abraham was following this pagan custom, but God taught him to slay animals instead. From a historical perspective, that interpretation has some appeal. Another interpretation is that Abraham was demented, that some demonic force within him told him to sacrifice Isaac, and God intervened. Good interpretations – and yet perhaps in their simplicity they overlook the complexity and depth of this story. This is always our temptation with the Bible, to explain things away, to make them more comfortable, to have them fit better into our preconceived ideas. We cannot fathom how God could ever ask such a sacrifice of Abraham. Even that God would choose such a test, never intending for the sacrifice to take place, is still abhorrent. It’s hard to know what to make of this story. It shocks us. What does it say about God? About Abraham? About Isaac? About Sarah? And most disturbingly, what does it say about us? But let us dare to dwell a moment in that fear and trembling. We do sacrifice our children, don’t we? We sacrifice them on the altar of our careers, our expectations, our hopes. And sometimes the sacrifice is made out of love. Have you ever had to choose between your children, as Abraham did between Ishmael and Isaac? We live in an age of plenty, but past generations have sometimes had to decide which child to feed, to clothe, to save, because the family couldn’t provide for all. Sometimes children were give up for adoption, or abandoned on the side of the road, because the family could not take care of them. But even today, what if you could afford to send only one of your children to college? Or what if one child has special needs, is the other child left on their own? What about children who die? Whether by disease or accident, neglect or abuse? For any parent to lose a child must surely feel as painful as if they held the knife to the neck themselves. Our children are our legacy, our future. But do not all parents ultimately have to sacrifice that, to cut the bonds and let the child go? And Isaac’s perspective. Don’t children know that parents don’t always have their best interests at heart? Don’t they know that their parents have their own agenda? Do not the sins of the parents sometimes damage the child’s vision, like Abraham’s tears blinding Isaac? Do not we fear that God will ask too much of us? Not only a tremendous sacrifice, but even something we see as unethical, immoral, a crime? Is our God too safe? The angel says, “At last I know that you fear God.” Do we fear God? Perhaps we should. And yet how can we trust a God who would ask a man to murder his own son? The
God Who Sees 19 June 2005 The Bible definitely tends to focus on men, but women are by no means left out. We've been talking a lot about Abraham, but Sarah does not get ignored. We saw last week how Abraham had grown impatient with God's progress in fulfilling those promises, but Sarah too tries to take matters into her own hands. It was a crazy enough notion that God would give her a child when she was 65. Twelve years have gone by with nothing happening. Sarah ain't getting any younger, so she figures the Lord helps them that help themselves. So she gives one of her slaves, Hagar, to Abraham to get pregnant. This seems rather shocking to us, but it was a common type of surrogate motherhood in ancient times. Slave women would bear children for their mistresses and then renounce all claim to the infants. But Hagar is not a silent victim in this story. She knows how badly Abraham wants an heir, and she takes pride in being able to provide him with one. People are people, even in the Bible. The emotions and psychology of these folk who lived thousands of years ago are not much different from ours today. Regardless of the circumstances of pregnancy, most women will love their child, and Hagar is no exception. She wants to keep the child, which angers Sarah, as we can well understand. She complains to Abraham, ''You are responsible for the wrong I'm suffering!" (What happened to it being her idea? "Now that she's pregnant, she despises me!" And Abraham, wanting peace in the house, says, "She's in your hands, do whatever you think best." So Sarah abuses Hagar to the point where Hagar runs away. So neither of the two chosen parents is terribly virtuous. They both can be real jerks. Nor do we see any example of female solidarity. Those who are oppressed will more often than not turn right around and abuse those even lower on the totem pole than them. There's no moral here. Instead we see human nature in all its petty glory. Hagar runs away - an escaped slave, pregnant and alone in the wilderness, when God appears to her and asks her what she's doing. Hagar doesn't lie. She says, "I'm running away from my mistress." And God says, "Go back to your mistress and submit to her." I tell you, African-Americans today have a real problem with this story, as do many women. And that's understandable, because Sarah and Hagar's experience was all too common for many women both white and black in the time of slavery. It galls us to hear that God would send Hagar back. But remember, Bible stories are not so much about social commentary as they are about God. We need to be careful about drawing social lessons from the Bible. I don't think the lesson here is that slavery is okay. Rather it's that God looks out for Hagar. What recourse would she have had on her own, after all? She has nothing. She's pregnant. Yet God extends protection to her - a foreign woman and a slave. And just as God made a promise to Abraham and Sarah - the wealthy patriarch and matriarch - God also makes a promise to Hagar, that he will be with her at all times, that her son will also become a great nation. And in response, Hagar gives God a name. Think of the power in that! The power to name God! And the name she gives is, "You are the God who sees me." A powerful name, indeed, one that says a lot about God. Because the farther down on the totem pole you are, the more invisible you become. Ralph Ellison wrote a famous book called "Invisible Man" about a black man who managed to "disappear" because society devalued him so much, people’s eyes would just pass right over him. Think about the people who beg at the street intersection. What do you do? You avoid their gaze, because to look at them is to risk an invitation. People who are homeless say that the most frustrating and painful part of their experience is that others refuse to look at them. Somehow, we need to be seen in order to be human. Hagar, the most invisible of people - a woman, a foreigner, and a slave – knows that God *sees* her. This is the first time in the Bible where God sees someone who is not in a position of privilege. But we know from later stories that it will not be the last. So Hagar goes back to Sarah and gives birth to Ishmael, whom Abraham dearly loves. When God makes the command of circumcision, Ishmael is included, and Abraham hopes that Ishmael will be his child of blessing. Now, the order of events here becomes rather confusing. Supposedly thirteen years pass between the birth of Ishmael and the birth of Isaac. Yet when Sarah runs off Hagar and Ishmael after Isaac's birth, the story describes Hagar carrying Ishmael, and Ishmael crying when he's hungry. He sounds more like an infant himself, rather than a thirteen-year-old. Then, almost immediately on the heels of this story comes the sacrifice of Isaac, in which the child is perhaps around 13 years old. Now, sometimes many years do pass between chapters. But Muslims believe that the child whom Abraham was called to sacrifice was in fact Ishmael. And quite frankly, the way the stories seem to be jumbled together, maybe they’re right. Just as Jews consider themselves to have descended from Isaac, Muslims trace their lineage through Ishmael. The two religions are actually half-brothers, sharing many of the same traditions, beliefs, and scriptures. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Abraham and Ishmael – all of them appear in the Qur’an. So why, then do Jews and Muslims seem to always be at each other’s throats these days? In Genesis 16:12, God prophecies of Ishmael that he will be like a wild donkey; his hand will be against everyone and he will live in hostility toward all his brothers. I daresay that there are many today who would say that’s an accurate description of Muslims. But remember, we have to be careful about lifting social commentary from the Bible. This is the God who sees – the God who saw Hagar, who gave a blessing to Ishmael, the son of Abraham who is revered in Islam not for his hostility but for his deep and abiding faith and trust in God. And the fact of the matter is Jews and Muslims have historically gotten along with each other far better than Christians have gotten along with either one. And yet, people are people. Some Jews and Muslims today fight over who is the child of promise and the rightful heir to the land – or at any rate, they use that as an excuse to fight. But perhaps today we too are looking at it the wrong way, not seeing as God sees. After yet another suicide bombing in Iraq this past week, in which the victims were largely old people and children, I found myself shaking my head and asking, “Why are they doing this, killing their own people? Don’t they see?” Yet in Iraq, there are some who don’t see it as “my own people.” They see Sunnis versus Shi’as, Kurds versus Arabs. They don’t see how they are one people. It is the same with Jews and Muslims who fight over the Promised Land. They don’t stop back and see that they are not enemies at all, but brothers and sisters, children of the same father. The promise God made was originally to Abraham and Sarah. But we see in the story of Hagar how the scope of that promise was almost immediately expanded. God intended to focus on one person and his heirs, but that one person did not exist in isolation. God’s focus does not exclude others. Always there is someone different, foreign, “other”, like Hagar, who clamors for God’s attention, and rather than turn him or her away, God sees them. God blesses them. God makes promises to them. God sees. Maybe one day, we too will be able to see with God’s eyes. Enter,
Rejoice, and Come In 12 June 2005 Last week we talked about the two promises God made to Abraham, and an example of Abraham’s somewhat questionable character. Some six chapters have gone by now, and God still hasn’t fulfilled either promise. Both Abraham and Sarah are starting to get a bit impatient. In Chapter 15, Abraham decides to make one of his servants his heir. This was a practice common in many times and cultures, and not only among childless couples. It was popular among the Romans, for example. Julius Caesar adopted his nephew Octavius as his heir, who later became Rome’s first emperor Augustus Caesar. But when Abraham names someone as his heir, God says, “Hold on there, don’t you think I can handle this? Look toward the heavens and number the stars. So shall your descendants be!” It’s a magnificent promise, but one that seems increasingly unlikely as Abraham and Sarah continue to age. In Chapter 16, it is Sarah’s turn to take matters into her own hands. But I’m going to skip that for now and come back to it next week, so bear with me. Meanwhile, on to chapter 17, which tells us that Abraham is now 99 years old. Twenty-four years have passed since God first appeared to Abraham in chapter 12. Sarah was 65 when all this started. Now she’s approaching 90. Really, the two of them have been very patient. This is probably the point where I should preach about God fulfilling God’s promises in due time, and that’s not a bad sermon to preach. But Abraham and Sarah are starting to see the absurdity of their situation. In chapter 17 God appears and makes the promises again, being all solemn and dignified the way you’d expect a God to be. Here is where God changes their names to Abraham and Sarah, and commands the practice of circumcision. It’s the first Jewish command, although Jews per se did not yet exist. The command extends not only to direct descendants, but also to slaves brought into the household. My research said that circumcision was just a cultural practice until the time of the Babylonian exile, which is when this chapter from the priestly source (P) was written. During the exile, circumcision took on ethnic and specifically religious meaning. All of the solemn ritual in this chapter comes from the P source, who connects circumcision to the very beginning of the Jewish story as a sign of the covenant, even more important than blood relation or ethnic identity. As a further sign of this new covenant, God changes their names officially to Abraham and Sarah, saying loftily, “I will bless Sarah and make her a mother of nations. Kings of peoples shall come from her.” And what is Abraham’s reaction to this magnificent statement? He falls on his face laughing. This is, somehow, *not* the reaction you would expect the great patriarch of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam would have before the Almighty. Yet if we somehow missed the point the first time around, in chapter 18 it’s Sarah who laughs when she hears the promise. Can’t you just see God getting a bit peeved by this reaction? IN fact, I love Sarah’s response; “After I have grown old and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” You get the idea that her skepticism is about more than just fertility! I could get pretty earthy, here, but I’ll leave it up to your own speculation. This is another example of how we are now dealing with life-like characters, as opposed to the more functional characters of Noah and Cain and Adam. In fact, you can almost see the roots of Jewish humor in this story. The Mother and Father reacting in such an undignified way to God Almighty – and the best part is that rather than recanting their reaction, they immortalize it in Isaac’s name. The child of promise is called “laughter,” reflecting that the joke was on Abraham and Sarah in the end. Sarah shrewdly says, “God has made laughter for me; every one who hears will laugh over me.” And wasn’t she right? There’s something wonderfully human about this story – about hope and skepticism, and above all joy. But I want to focus now a bit on the events of chapter 18. It’s a very rich story. Abraham is sitting under a tree outside his tent in the heat of the day. Perhaps you can imagine the setting, though Israel does not have the humidity we do. Nevertheless, shade was their only air conditioning. Abraham looks up and sees three men approaching. It’s one of those odd details that puzzle Bible scholars. Three men? Is one supposed to be God, and the other two angels? Or all three of them angels, and God is somehow an additional presence? The Russian artist Andrei Rublev painted a very famous icon of the three angels visiting Abraham. It is to the Eastern Church what Da Vinci’s “Last Supper” is to the western church. Christians saw the three guests as a representative of the Trinity. But we don’t really know for sure what the Bible writer meant here. The detail is left to our imagination to explore. Abraham is zealous in his hospitality toward these guests. We talked last week about how important hospitality is, but Abraham really goes overboard. He doesn’t give them a little water and a morsel of bread, as he says. Instead, he urges Sarah to take a bushel of flour and make cakes – that’s eight gallons’ worth! Meanwhile, he kills one of his calves and serves milk and curds. This is a great feast. Talk about extravagant welcome! Does he know that his guests represent God? The story is not clear. God’s name is not mentioned until verse 10. As the guests eat, they ask for Sarah, and note that they ask for her by name. Given Abraham’s tendency to disavow Sarah and say she’s his sister, who knows what he was thinking at this point. But now the LORD finally speaks up and says, “I will return in the spring, and Sarah will have a son.” And Sarah, listening at the tent door, laughs. God says, “Why did Sarah laugh? Is anything too hard for the Lord? This exchange, by the way, closely echoes the Annunciation of Mary in the gospel of Luke. Mary reacted with as much skepticism of Sarah, though she had the present of mind not to laugh outright. And the messenger said to her, “With God, nothing is impossible.” Sarah quickly denies that she laughed, and God says, “No, you did.” It is a comic back-and-forth, but there is no implication that God condemns Sarah for laughing. Where is this God’s dignity? Remember how I said last week that it was the start of a beautiful friendship. How does this story sound? What kind of God is it who banters with the chosen ones? And as we see, God gets the last laugh when Isaac is born. But the story continues. Immediately after this exchange, the men depart for the city of Sodom, and Abraham goes with them. Now, we all know this story of Sodom and Gomorrah, perhaps more than we want to. But when we actually read it for ourselves, rather than listening to what everyone says about it, we find some amazing things going on here. As they’re heading toward Sodom, God thinks to himself, “Shall I hide from Abraham what I am about to do? No, for I have chosen him, that he may charge his children and his household to keep the way of the Lord by doing righteousness and justice.” So he tells Abraham the plan. “Because of the outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is great, I will go down and see for myself whether it is true.” This is remarkable! God is basically saying, “I’m going to tell Abraham what I’m doing so he will understand what my justice is like.” It’s a teaching moment. This is what being chosen means – it means God teaching us about righteousness and justice, so that in time the world will know. Remember last week when God gave up on dealing with everyone else. Here we see that it is not that God abandoned the rest of the world to their fate, but rather that God might have better luck teaching on a one-on-one basis. It’s almost like an internship, so that what Abraham is taught will one day be spread through the world by his descendants. But remember too that Abraham isn’t necessarily all that virtuous! We do know, however, that he possesses two good qualities: faith or trust in God, and hospitality, which is compassion and welcome for the stranger. God is teaching Abraham, but also testing him. Abraham was so good to his three guests, who will he react to the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah? So follows one of the most fascinating dialogues in the Bible. It sounds like bargaining, but the effect is to test out the edges of justice. Abraham is learning. “Lord, surely you aren’t the kind of God to destroy the righteous with the wicked? Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” Abraham is not only testing God’s mercy and justice; he is also demonstrating his concern for the inhabitants of foreign citifies. Why should he care about Sodom and Gomorrah? Yet he wants to make sure that true justice is done, even for two cities with such horrible reputations. So
we find that for the sake of as few as ten righteous people, God
will not destroy the city. This theme of ten righteous people continues
to this day in Judaism, which has a tradition that says that the
prophet Elijah, the forerunner of the Messiah, wanders the earth
in disguise, and when he finally finds ten righteous people, then
at last the Messiah will come. Therefore we ought always to be kind
and righteous to strangers, for as the scripture says, "in
doing so, some have entertained angels unaware.'' However, the other
lesson of this bargain is that even God's mercy has limits. If the
number is less than ten, then the cities will be destroyed. Call
and Promises 5 June 2005 Picking up on our story of Noah from where we left off, there is a bit more about Noah that is not as common knowledge as the rainbow and the ark. Noah is named as the first tiller of the soil, and when the floods dried up, he planted a vineyard. However, Noah enjoyed the fruit of the vine a bit too much. One day he got drunk and was lounging around naked in his tent. You may recall that Noah had three sons: Ham, Shem, and Japheth. Ham found his father in this rather alarming state and, as the Bible says, “saw his father’s nakedness,” and went off to tell his brothers, who walked backward into the tent and covered Noah up without looking at him. Now, there’s a lot of commentary and discussion on what exactly was going on here, but this incident results in the “curse of Canaan,” which has caused much trouble ever since. When Noah sobers us, he says, “Cursed be Canaan! The lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers.” Canaan is Ham’s son, and not only was this story used by the Israelites to justify their conquest of Canaan, but centuries later, it was used in America to justify the slavery of blacks, who were sometimes called “the sons of Ham.” Chapter ten goes into more begats, and all the sons are really place names. For example, Ham’s sons were named Egypt, Cush and Canaan. Shem, on the other hand, is the father of the Shemites or Semites. So the various peoples of the Ancient Middle East are incorporated into the Genesis explanation of the world. Chapter eleven tells the story of the Tower of Babel, which we discussed several weeks ago, and then we go into yet another series of begats, which leads up to Abraham. When he is first introduced, he is called “Abram” which means “exalted father.” Abram’s father led his family out of Ur, which is near present-day Baghdad, and they journeyed north to Haran, a city that still stands in eastern Turkey. Then begins Chapter Twelve, “The Lord said to Abram, “Leave your country, your people, and your father’s household and go to the land I will show you.’” Now this move from Chapter Eleven to Chapter Twelve in Genesis represents a very significant shift in the story. The first eleven chapters have a very mythic quality, focused on grand themes and not on individuals. God has been involved with humanity in general, but now in Chapter Twelve God becomes focused on one person, Abram. If we read this like a regular book, it would seem that God has given up on trying to deal with humanity as a whole, and is now going to focus on one man and his family. This marks a transition from myth into history. Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and his sons were probably not real, historical people. But Abram might be real after all. The remainder of Genesis may not quite be history as we usually think of it, describing actual people and events, but they are remembrances of history, like people telling stories about their real ancestors down over the ages. The stories may get exaggerated and embellished, but they have a basis in reality. But remember: the point of the Bible isn’t to tell human history, it’s to tell God’s history. And here we see that God becomes involved in the affairs and business of one man and his family. But here’s an interesting question: why did God choose Abram? The Bible doesn’t say. We go from a genealogy, to “The Lord said to Abram.” By contrast, the Bible tells us why God picked Noah, who is described as “a righteous man, blameless in his generation.” But nowhere in the Bible does it say God picked Abram for any virtue of his own. There’s a kind of randomness to it – and maybe that’s the point. Indeed, we will discover throughout the Bible that God chooses people that others don’t expect. They aren’t necessarily better or smarter or more good than other people – sometimes quite the contrary! Almost capriciously, God picks Abram, gives him a command and makes promises to him. Is this a comforting thought? Or does it upset your concept of merit and reward? We tend to think of chosenness as being on the basis of merit, but that’s not how it is in the Bible. Is this an unfair favoritism? Or does it perhaps represent the ultimate equality, that God could have picked anyone at all? And yet for all that the story starts to impersonally, it does not stay impersonal. We don’t know God’s reasons, if any, for choosing Abram, but this is the start of a long, beautiful friendship, one that is contentious and difficult at times, but is also deep and rewarding. We almost immediately encounter an example of Abram’s less-than-sterling character. When Abram goes down into Egypt, he fears that the Egyptians will try to kill him so they can make off with his wife Sarai. So what does he do? He tells her to pretend to be his sister! Pharaoh sees her and takes her into his harem. And because he thinks Abram is her brother, he pays him off with livestock and servants. And all this time Abram says nothing! Meanwhile, God sends a plague on Pharaoh as punishment for taking Sarai, and Pharaoh finally clues in. He gets upset at Abram, saying, “Why didn’t you tell me she was your wife? Then I would have been spared this plague! Take her and go!” It’s a very strange story. He lets his wife be carted off by this man, and he manages to turn a large profit in the meantime. This story gets repeated in the Bible, once more with Abram and Sarah, and again with their son Isaac and his wife Rebekah. The presence of three almost identical stories is another example of how slightly different oral traditions were all just repeated in the Bible, rather than reconciled into one story. But it’s rather distressing to read it and see what kind of a snake Abram is. You have to wonder about his guy’s moral qualities! However, while God may have chosen Abram for no reason, God nevertheless has one particular expectation of Abram, and that is faith. Not faith as in belief in a doctrine. Rather, faith as in trust. Because God makes promises to Abram, yet does not fulfill them right away. We will see throughout Abram’s story how his faith plays a significant role. And indeed when he is mentioned in both Christian and Muslim scriptures, Abram is above all noted for his faith and trust in God. Now the two promises God makes to Abram are a son and land. In other words, a future and a home. These are two of the most primal longings in the human heart. But God does not fulfill these promises right away. And the first thing God does is send Abram on a journey. “Leave your country, your people and your father’s household, and go to the land I will show you.” So Abram packs everyone up, his wife, his nephew, his servants and his sheep, and heads out. But Abram doesn’t take the direct route! Listen to this itinerary: He started originally in Ur, near Baghdad. He went to Haran in Eastern Turkey, then goes down to Canaan – but he doesn’t stop there. Ch. 12:10 says Abram goes into Egypt, then he returns back to the Negeb in southern Israel and eventually goes on to Bethel and Hebron, both of which are towns that still exist today. Indeed, for a guy who has been Promised Land, Abram spends a lot of his time on the road. The issue of “Promised Land” causes all kinds of problems today, but Abram did not take it for granted in the Bible. He doesn’t conquer the land by the sword and boot out the inhabitants. Rather, he travels constantly. He forms alliances with local political leaders. When Sarah dies, he pays for the land for her tom, rather than demanding it as his God-given right. In fact, despite the promise of land, Abram is known in the Bible as “a wandering Aramean.” In the book of Deuteronomy, when Moses makes his farewell speech to the Hebrews, he gives them what is sort of the Jewish Credo – not a statement of belief, but rather a story, one that beings, “My father was a wandering Aramean….” When God suddenly appears to Abram in Chapter Twelve, he basically calls him to be an immigrant. And that sense of rootlessness, of exile, is ultimately perhaps a far greater concept in Judaism than is the sense of land. Land implies settlement and permanence, but there exists at the heart of both Judaism and Christianity an awareness that land is not permanent, that we are sojourners on a journey. The concept of pilgrimage usually means a journey to a holy place. But it can also have the sense of a sacred journey, in which it’s the path, and not the destination, that really matters. That sense of pilgrimage, of holy journey, is present in both strands of our UCC heritage, with pilgrims departing from England in the 17th century and Germany in the 18th, coming to a new land full of promise. What does it mean, then, to say, “Our father was a wandering Aramean,” to locate our Holy Land not in a place but in a journey? For one thing, over and over in the Bible we will hear God command us to show hospitality to strangers in our midst, for we were once sojourners in Egypt. Many cultures in the ancient Middle East, as they do today, have a strong tradition of hospitality to strangers – but its usually to non-foreign strangers. In other words, people I don’t know, yet who are part of my ethnic group. But the Bible commands hospitality even to the foreign stranger in our midst. In the Bible, all of Abraham’s children are aliens dependent on God’s hospitality, and so we must show hospitality to others. Next week we will hear more about the other promise God made to Abram, of a son who would lead to as many descendents as there are stars in the sky. We will also get to see more of Sarai. May 29, 2005 This summer the Lectionary follows the first few chapters of the Bible, the ones that are probably at least a bit familiar to all of us. Usually we get Bible stories all chopped up and told out of order, but these selections will give us a chance to hear the whole story more or less in cohesion, to hear how these people are related to one another, and how their stories intersect. I’ll even give you homework so you can read the in-between stories as well. A little light reading for your summer! But don’t worry: it’s only a couple of chapters a week, and the homework is optional. It’s important for us to hear these stories, and to hear them as stories. Because our faith is not about a doctrine; it’s a story about people with names who lived in real places that still exist on earth. Did everything happen exactly the way it’s told in the Bible? Probably not. But archaeologists are finding that more of the Bible has a historical basis than some of us skeptics previously thought. But the most important thing about these stories is what they tell us about what God is like, and what kind of community of faith God calls into existence. So let us listen to the old, old stories. These are our ancestors. This is our story. Today, we hear the story of Noah. Probably all of us are at least a bit familiar with Noah. But how did we get here? Chapter one of Genesis is the story of creation. Chapter two is Adam and Eve, who got kicked out of the garden of Eden and went on to have two sons, Cain and Abel. And because much of the first chapters of Genesis have a mythic dimension, we are told that Abel was a sheepherder and Cain tilled the soil. Farmer versus rancher – a class clash, and one that our Texas history is quite familiar with The Israelites started out as nomads following the herds. They didn’t settle onto land they could till year round. So it should come as no surprise that Abel’s offering is preferable to God. Cain, out of jealousy, kills his brother. This story not only shows us how humans are tainted by sin, but how humans are even capable of fratricide. Such is the depth of human depravity, and can any of us today really dispute that? Yet despite the fact that Cain is a murder, God still extends protection to him. Remember that theme, because it will show up again over and over in the Bible. Next comes the famous verse, “Cain knew his wife” – prompting loads of people who think they are very clever to wonder, “Where did she come from?” As if this is one of the great mysteries of the Bible. And we get into the first of the begats. These are boring to read, featuring impossible-to-pronounce names. But all these genealogies help ground the story in reality. While Cain and Abel sound very mythic, the genealogies have the concreteness of bureaucracy. Another thing we discover is that everyone lived a ridiculously long time, and hidden in here in verse 5:27, we find Methuselah. Has anyone ever heard of him? He is the oldest man in the Bible, living 969 years. People sometimes try to come up with logical explanations for the longevity in the Bible, but basically it was a poetic means of saying, “They all lived a really long time.” The way they used to exaggerate people’s height and the size of their armies. More to the point for our story, Methuselah had a grandson named Noah, who at the spry young age of 500 had three sons: Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The story of Noah actually begins first with an account of the sons of God eloping with the daughters of men, resulting in a crossbreed race of giants. Many ancient cultures had tales of giants who lived in a golden age long ago. The Titans of Greek lore, for example. But God didn’t like this crossbreeding and did two things as a result: first, God decreed that the human life span should be restricted to 120 years, and that’s pretty accurate. But secondly, God was so off-put by how wretched and corrupt people had become that he decided to wipe the slate clean. God would destroy the earth, and only the righteous Noah and his family would be spared. Now, you may be aware that other ancient cultures have an account of a flood. The most famous is the Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, which has many similar aspects to the Noah story. Archaeologists debate whether this means the myth has a basis in reality, and you can see many an excellent documentary on the History channel about this. It seems rather drastic for God to destroy the earth. After all, only six chapters ago, God created everything! Only nine generations have gone by since Adam, yet God is ready to scrap the planet, punishing all creation for humanity’s sin. So God tells Noah to build the ark, a story so evocative that it continues to capture our imagination to this day. Perhaps you’ve heard Bill Cosby’s famous version of the story. And kids love it because of the animals. And how many of each kind of animal does Noah take on board? Two of every kind. But wait! In chapter seven it says something different: here Noah is ordered to take seven pairs of every clean animal and one pair of every unclean animal. Now, this presents all kinds of problems. Not only the numbers are different, but this whole clean and unclean business. How can there be any clean and unclean animals yet, when the whole definition of clean and unclean won’t come about until Exodus and the Ten Commandments? And there’s more. How long does the rain fall? In 7:4 it says forty days and forty nights. But in 8:3 it says 150 days. What’s going on here? The Bible is filled with many discrepancies like these, and we will encounter many of them over the course of the summer. It’s like trying to reconcile events in the four gospels. You can’t completely reconcile them because you have four different authors using different stories to make a slightly different point. That’s what is going on here as well, except the authors are all mixed together, rather than being separated into separate books. Scholars have identified four main authors or traditions or strands of storytelling, and these are called J, E, P, and D. J and E refer to the names that the two sources use for God, J for Jehovah or Yahweh, and E for Elohim. The more exciting, earthy stories come out of these two strands. P and D stand for the Priestly source and the Deuteronomist. The Priestly source is concerned with priestly issues like order and keeping close records of things. This source is where we get lists of genealogies and censuses. The first account of creation, with its orderly, systematic progression, comes from the Priestly source. The Deuteronomist is mainly evident in the book of Deuteronomy, which pretty much repeats everything that happened in Exodus, only it does so with very long speeches and sermons, hallmarks of that sources style. We will encounter these different sources often throughout the Old Testament. Two such sources are evident in the Noah story, and they help explain our discrepancies. For we find that the bit about clean and unclean animals comes from which source? The Priestly. Likewise the different numbers of days come from two different sources. The J source loves the number forty, which we will see over and over again in the Bible. But returning to the story itself, when we look at the larger picture, we find that this is basically a second creation story. When the floods come, everything is returned to the watery chaos that existed before Genesis one, when the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the deep. The creation story says, and the Spirit of God moved over the waters. Here once again we find that God causes a wind to blow over the waters to make them recede. And bear in mind that the Hebrew word for wind is the same as for spirit and for breath. Now perhaps you begin to see how these stories are all related, how they pick up and repeat themes and motifs. When the waters begin to recede, Noah sends out birds to look for dry land, which was a common navigational tactic in ancient days. Finally the dove returns with an olive branch, and this has become a symbol of peace that lasts to this day. But if you think about it, why should the dove with the olive branch be a symbol of peace? The dove went out to find dry land. This has nothing to do with peace. Or does it? Perhaps it represents God extend the olive branch of peace to us. Because for all the lovely elements of the rainbow and the animals on the ark, there is a lot in the story to alarm us. This God who destroys the whole earth doesn’t sound very nice. But place it in its historical context, when people believed that natural disasters were caused by God and were a sign of God’s displeasure. For that matter, people still believe that today. Remember the minister who said the tsunami was sent by God to punish Swedes vacationing in Thailand? People today, even us “enlightened” ones – still sometimes can’t resist that notion of sacred violence, the idea that God smites the earth, and that our own judgment against wrongdoers is righteous, a line of thinking that justifies our own smaller acts of murder, when we kill our brothers and sisters as Cain murdered Abel. But there’s an interesting verse hidden in this story: 9:6, “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God has God made man.” Rather than being a call for blood vengeance, this is actually a restriction against murder, a recognition that whenever you spill the blood of another, you spill your own blood. It’s interesting that this appears in a story about God murdering creation! If we can get past some of the more alarming elements of the story, what we find is a radically new view of God – a God who covenants never to punish wholesale, who covenants not to harm the earth and its inhabitants, who rejects sacred violence and extends the olive branch of peace. This, by the way, is the major difference from the Epic of Gilgamesh, whose moral is, “The gods are capricious, and you’re going to die; deal with it.” This story is an early repudiation of the God of violence. That dove, that rainbow, starts to take on new meaning, doesn’t it? This story of Noah and the flood remains active in our imaginations. We know it so well, yet it continues to touch us. Early Christians, like Paul, look back at this story through the eyes of the baptized. For just as Noah emerged anew from the flood to receive a new covenant from God, so do we when we are baptized. It’s an old, old story, told in fresh new ways throughout the Bible, and continuing to speak to us today. Now, as I said at the beginning, I’m going to give you homework, although you don’t have to do it. There is a handout with chapters you can read between the services so you can follow along and get the parts we don’t read in church. You don’t have to do this, but I urge you to. Few of us actually read the Bible like reading a book, all the way through, but if you follow these chapters, we’ll get through the first couple of books. You have my permission to skip the boring parts like the begats. I’d rather you skim through it than get bogged down and stop reading. Universal
Language May 15, 2005 Bonan matenon! Kiel vias? Ni babilu. Does anyone recognize that language? I just said “Good morning. How are you? Let’s talk!” in Esperanto. Esperanto is a created language, made in the late 19th century that drew on several linguistic backgrounds and was mean to be simple and easy to learn. More importantly, it was meant to bring people together. But it never quite took off. Esperanto aficionados would no doubt disagree with me, but I have to wonder if there are more people who speak Klingon than Esperanto in the world today. Esperanto was an early incarnation of a movement in the first half of the last century to unify people, a movement that among other things let to the creation of political organizations like the League of Nations and the United Nations, and religious organizations like National and World Councils of Churches, and the United Church movement, of which our denomination is a part. Global unity was all the rage in the first part of the twentieth century. But the latter half of that century seems, at least at first glance, to contradict that movement. For the latter half saw the crumbling of Empires and the rise of independent nations shrugging off the bonds of colonialism. We saw it in so many ways: the wave of independent African nations in the 60s, the collapse of the Soviet Union and all the many little nations that it fragmented into. Ethnic pride is on the rise, and as an expression of that, more and more people are studying languages that were on the verge of extinction: indigenous languages, the resurrection of Hebrew. Even Vatican II put the mass back into the vernacular. If Esperanto is the language of the first half of the twentieth century, then something like Aramaic is the language of the second half. But if we knew our Bible better, then we might see how the second half of the century flows out of the first half. For the Acts story of the Pentecost is counterpoint to the Tower of Babel story. You may recall this story from Genesis, when the world had one language and few words.” The people decided to build a tower that would reach to heaven. But God came down and saw what they were doing and said, “This is only the beginning of what they will do; now nothing that they propose will be impossible.” So God struck down the tower and made them all speak different languages in order to divide and scatter them. This seems like your standard mythic, world-explaining story. But we have to remember that this story was not written in prehistoric times. In fact, this story was written during the era of the Babylonian Empire. The name of the Tower of Babel is an intentional pun. The tower itself is no figment of the imagination; it’s a ziggurat, the distinctive spiral-shaped towers that Babylon was known for. The Babylonian Empire was at that time the greatest Empire in history, and it was an empire that maintained itself through conformity and bureaucracy. They made all administrators and officials learn their language, and they began a system of what today we might call “ethnic genocide,” whereby they forcibly exiled indigenous people throughout the empire so that they would lose their sense of ethnic identity and literally vanish into the great melting pot that was the Babylonian Empire. You have to admit that there is something very efficient about uniformity, with everyone speaking the same language, having the same culture, and seeing things the same way. Such was the belief of the first half of the twentieth century. And Esperanto has its place. But the Bible story demonstrates the inherent hubris in trying to get everyone to be the same. Which same is it? Which language? Which culture? Which heritage? And when people are made to sacrifice their unique identity in the name of efficiency, then something extremely important is lost. Skip ahead, then, to the Pentecost story in the book of Acts, the counterpoint to the Babel story. We might say that the theme of the Pentecost story is our UCC slogan, “God is still speaking.” But think for a minute: what language is God still speaking in? King James English? Esperanto? Latin, as pre-Vatican II Catholics might once have believed? If Acts is the reversal of the Babel story, then we might expect the Holy Spirit to make the disciples all speak the same language, as it was before the building of that tower. But that is not what happened. Rather, everyone suddenly started speaking in all the languages of the world, languages they did not previously know. And everyone there understood one another, even though they were speaking different languages. The gift of Pentecost, then, is not uniformity, sameness. Rather the gift is understanding. The unity of Pentecost is achieved in the presence of all the wonderful diversity of human culture. What, then, do these two stories of the Tower of Babel and of Pentecost, have to tell us about the community of God? In the church today it is still sorely tempting to see conformity as the true test of our unity. We all must be using the same hymnal and reading from the same Bible translation. Churches should all do things in the same way. Everyone needs to have the same beliefs. It may be more efficient to do it that way, but our Bible stories challenge us to ask what we think we really accomplish by such measures? Does the quest for uniformity come at too great a price? Think about the difference between a traveler who goes to another country and expects everyone to be able to speak her language. She makes no effort to learn local language or culture. She wants everyone to understand her, and when they don’t, it causes stress, resentment, even anger. Then think about a traveler who makes an effort to learn a bit of the language and culture. He is hardly fluent, but his greetings, his ability to say please and thank you, are a demonstration of respect, a gesture of good will. Neither traveler will be able to communicate fluently, but the second shows understanding whereas the first does not. Respect for diversity, good will, a desire to share – these are the hallmarks of Pentecostal unity. I was once able to carry on an entire conversation with a lady in the Italian town of Assisi. She spoke only Italian; I spoke in a pidgin Spanish. We might not have been able to communicate in great detail, but we were able to understand one another because we each desired to know the other without judgment, with only a desire to share. Our languages are important to us. They are more than just words. They are our stories, our heritage, our taboos and our pride. They make up who we are. One of the great injustices of totalitarian regimes is when they force ethnic groups to cease speaking their own language, and instead to speak only the language of the colonizer. This was the long-time policy of the US government toward Native Americans, a policy that has only been overturned in recent years. Native American children were punished in school for speaking anything other than English; they were sometimes taken away from their birth families and given to non-Indian families to be raised. Those wounds run deep. Several years ago at a UCC meeting, we went through a kind of diversity training, and each ethnic group present was invited to tell something of their experience. The whites didn’t really know what to say. But one good German UCCer from the E&R side started talking about what it had been like growing up in the US during World War II, when neighborhood kids would beat him up because of his German last name, teachers would punish him for speaking German, and his church switched to English-only in their worship services. When the man finished telling his story, the Native Americans embraced him, almost weeping, and said, “Brother, we’ve had that experience, too.” Language is such an important part of who we are, and people retain that connection with their language, even after several generations of being forced to speak another’s language. And I wonder if that’s partly why Esperanto never really has taken off: because it has no ethnic history. There are no folktales told in Esperanto, no slang, no off-color jokes. Could it be that God cares about the rainbow of diversity that is humankind more than about efficiency? Might God care more about understanding than uniformity? For whatever reasons, we humans often feel threatened by things that are different. But our Bible stories show that the differences can simply be something to share. The cacophony of languages being spoken on that first Pentecostal day certainly created a scene – noisy, confusing, a mess! Yet each person understood in his or her own language. Languages are human. But true understanding of one another is a gift of the Holy Spirit. So let us not fear the chaos! Following
the Way 8 May 2005 Poor Jesus. Poor, poor Jesus. Maybe the meaning of the Ascension story is a variation of the lament: Poor Jesus, so far from heaven, so close to the disciples. He must surely have reached the limit of his patience by now, as the disciples ask, “So Lord, is this when you’re going to restore the kingdom to Israel?” If you listen closely, can you perhaps hear a bit of snark in Jesus’ reply? “It is not for you to know the time or the periods that the Father has set for his own authority.” I mean, by this point the disciples have been traveling with Jesus for three years. They’ve been through the crucifixion with him, and the resurrection. The resurrected Jesus remained with them for forty days. He’s good and ready to pass the mantle, but they’re still waiting for him to do everything. “Is this the time when you will restore the kingdom to Israel?” They’re like the broken record that is every 6-year-old, “Are we there yet? Now, mommy?” It’s the last gasp of stupidity in the disciples before the transformative power of Pentecost, when they finally seem to get a clue. But for now, they’re still focused on the kingdom of Israel, on worldly power. The irony is that God was never in favor of an earthly kingdom in the first place. The God of Israel is fundamentally anti-king, and has shown a strong aversion to identifying with any earthly power. Let’s recall our Bible history for a moment. For about half a millennium after being freed from Egypt, the Jews had no kings at all. But they looked at the other people around them and saw how pretty their kings looked, and they wanted one of their very own. Again like 6-year-olds, “Please! Everyone else has one!” But God resisted, saying, “Look, didn’t you learn anything in Egypt? Kings are a bad idea! They’ll lord it over you. They’ll charge you high taxes, take your land, and sell your children into slavery. Believe me, you don’t want a king.” But the Jews persisted, “We can’t be the only people in the Levant without one. The other kids will beat us up. Please! We promise to take good care of him!” And reluctantly, despite knowing better, God gave them a king. It’s another example of that mutual submission that God would give them a king even though he knew it wasn’t a good idea. And God, of course, was right. With one or two exceptions, the king thing didn’t work out. Yet here the disciples are still whining for one. This is really about earthly power. Notice they don’t say “the kingdom of heaven” which is what Jesus was always talking about. Instead, they say, “restore the kingdom to Israel.” But Jesus’ vision is so much bigger than that. After his snarky comment, he says, “You’ll receive more than some earthly kingdom. Instead, you’ll receive the power of the Holy Spirit. And your realm will be much bigger than Israel. Instead, you shall be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” This is Jesus’ vision: world domination! But without earthly power. It’s not quite what the disciples were hoping for. Even to this day, earthly power looks awfully tempting. If we had earthly power, if the kingdom was ours, then we could pass laws and make everyone do things our way. Which is exactly what some Christians are trying to do today. It’s easier that way: wait for God to give us earthly power, and then we use it. “When will you restore the kingdom to Israel?” To us? Gimme, gimme! Even as Jesus ascends to heaven, the disciples are standing around gawking up at the sky, waiting for God to do it all for them, and angels have to show up and say, “Dudes, why are you staring at the sky? Look down at the world around you; that’s where the action is. It’s in your hands now.” The whole point of Jesus’ mission was not to do everything for us, but to show us the way. In the Ascension, he’s saying, “Now it’s up to you to follow it.” Alas, Christians throughout history have remained just as fixated on that earthly power as the ancient Jews were. And this brings us back to the conclusion of our letter from Peter, because his letter is an instruction book on resisting that temptation to earthly power and following the way that Jesus showed us. The early church was persecuted, as we’ve been discussing, and one response to persecution is to seek earthly, political power for yourself. But Peter is arguing for a different way. Today there are some Christians seeking earthly power, wanting to pass their beliefs into law in order to shore themselves up against what they see as persecution. We must not fall prey to the same temptation. And remember, despite the somewhat alarming movements afoot in our country today, this is still not a theocracy. Not by a long shot, people. But whether a theocracy or a democracy, persecution can flourish in any government. So let’s look at what Peter advises, about how to follow the way of Jesus. First, he says “humble yourselves.” Humility is not something we Americans are too fond of, and indeed at small group this past week, we were talking about the need to state our convictions loud and clear. But I don’t think humility equates to quiet or wishy-washy. Rather, one of the hallmarks of the UCC is the concept that “God is still speaking,” that none of us has a full lock on the truth, and that we need to each share what God is speaking to us so that we may discern greater wisdom together. This requires a certain kind of humility, but a humility “under the mighty hand of God.” So let us speak the truth as we hear it, and do so with conviction, but let us also acknowledge that we are not the only ones that God is speaking to. Our persecutors say, “There is only one truth, and I know what it is.” We need to say firmly, “No, you see part of it, and I see another part. Together, we see more.” Humility, but under God’s mighty hand. Secondly, “Cast your anxieties on God, because god cares for you.” Last week we talked about the fears that lie at the heart of persecution. It *is* a scary thing, but we must not fear what they fear, and we must not be intimidated. We will have fears and anxieties, but we must give them over to God. After all, even Jesus had fears and anxieties. Think of the agony in the garden of Gethsemane. Imagine what an example we would have if Jesus never felt fear and anxiety! Who could live up to that? But our story says that Jesus did feel fear. So the example for us is not to have no fear, but to cast those anxieties on God, who cares for us even through the worst persecution. Third, “Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.” Now, talk about the devil usually doesn’t do much for me. Sometimes when people say, “Satan made me not do my homework,” it sounds like a cheesy excuse to absolve yourself of responsibility. But it’s interesting that the language here is the old Biblical language of Satan as the adversary, the one who tests us. This fits in well with the discipline theme. Discipline is the same word as disciple, which means student. We must be students of the Way, so we must study the principles and practice the virtues. We must keep alert and be ready for when the testing comes. I also like this because it side-steps the language of “enemy.” When we are persecuted, we are sorely tempted to call our persecutors our “enemy.” But here Peter is saying, “No, it’s just a test of your discipleship.” So if someone opposed you, it’s an opportunity, a chance for you to practice your discipline of the Way. So don’t respond in kind. Rather seize the opportunity to demonstrate your discipleship. For the adversary is looking for someone to devour. And indeed, when persecuted and harassed, we are at risk of being consumed by our resentment and fear and hatred. Peter says, “Resist, steadfast in your faith.” Do not be consumed, devoured. For you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering – in other words, the same testing. And as we practice and practice and get better at it, the true kingdom, not the kingdom of Israel but that of God, the one that belongs to no earthly power – that kingdom comes closer and closer, becomes fuller and fuller, ever more real. And after you have suffered, been tested, Peter says, “God will restore, support, strengthen and establish you.” Not restores and establish some earthly reign of power, but rather will restore and establish you and me. For we are the kingdom of God, not any political power. We are, the way we live with one another. 1 May 2005 This section of Peter’s letter is the conclusion to the household code text that we discussed a couple of weeks ago. You may recall that the theme of those household codes was mutual submission, binding our welfare to the welfare of others. And this passage shows us why we must do so: because we need each other when we face persecution. Now, we Christians can sometimes overdo the whole persecution angle. After all, the reality is that Christianity is by far the dominant religion in our society. Also, we live in a modern democracy where we really do have many basic rights: freedom of religion, freedom of speech, the right to vote and make our voices heard. Many contemporary claims about Christians being persecuted in this country are grossly exaggerated. And yet, we do feel besieged. Precisely because we live in a democracy, we often have to publicly duke it out over our values. And while Christianity is the dominant religion, there are different kinds of Christianity. Persecution sometimes takes place within the Christian family itself. We in the UCC certainly feel under threat these days, with our churches struggling, membership overall in decline, and our particular expression of Christianity often misunderstood or ignored. Since Peter is addressing Christian communities that are being persecuted, we too can gain some words of wisdom from studying his letter. This passage might sound familiar to you. I used this passage in my sermon on confession of hope during Lent. And that, above all, is Peter’s message in the face of suffering and persecution: a confession of hope. If we do suffer, he says, we have this example in Jesus, who certainly suffered in a good cause. He suffered for doing right, not for doing wrong. This is still a hard message for us to hear, especially in our “can do” society, where we think that if you fail or suffer, it must be because you somehow deserved it. In our culture, we trumpet the myth of the “self-made man,” that if you are willing to work hard and be industrious, then you can overcome any obstacle of race, gender, nationality, and so on. So if you fail in our society, it must be because you didn’t try hard enough. We really have bought into that model of success, and we judge ourselves on that basis. And sometimes we wonder if our suffering is somehow God’s punishment. But it is not. The test for us as Christians is not success or the absence of suffering and hardship. Rather the test for us as Christians is faith. And by that I don’t mean our adherence to a doctrine, but rather fidelity. Fidelity and faithfulness to God and to one another. And this is that theme of mutual submission again. No matter what happens, whether we experience success or failure, affluence or persecution, the real question is: are we faithful to our covenant with God and with one another? That is all we have to be concerned with. There is a verse here in Peter’s letter that it seems to me perfectly gets at the heart of the matter when it comes to persecution. He advises believers, “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated.” That’s a powerful thought, and a powerful challenge: do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated. Because fear is at the heart of persecution, isn’t it? From Hitler’s Final Solution to schoolyard bullying, fear is the prime motive and the prime tool of persecution. Bullies rule by rear, forcing us into accepting their worldview, that there are winners and losers, victors and the conquered, success and failures. And it’s our fear of the bully that makes us not want to get caught in the latter category. Sociologists and anthropologists have claimed that this basic phenomenon of fear of persecution lies at the root of human society. But you don’t have to go to grad school in order to understand this. Every elementary school kid can tell you how it works. The PhDs have fancy names for it, like “mimetic rivalry,” but kids know it’s all about cooties. You remember how cooties work, right? What are cooties? They’re bad. But what are they exactly? No one knows. You can’t see them, you just know that they’re bad. But if you can’t see them, how do you know who has them? You know because the other kids tell you. So-and-so has cooties – almost always someone who is marginalized or different in some way. Popular kids never have cooties. But cooties are infectious and can be passed along. Do you remember how you get cooties? By touching or being touched by someone who is infected. However, it is also possible to get rid of cooties by rubbing them off on someone else. That’s the primary social force of grade school: avoiding cooties, which almost means avoiding people who have cooties. The system, based on invisible, non-existent bugs, creates a network by which “undesirable” people are isolated, ostracized and scapegoated. The system works by peer enforcement, by keeping people from identifying with or touching the ones with cooties. It’s a system based on irrational fear, but as any grade school kid can tell you, it’s extremely, brutally effective. This is the way societies work: by dividing people into us and them, and designating “them” as cootie-carriers, and perpetuating the whole system by fear. Early Christians lived in that kind of fear, where their neighbors accused them of atheism, cannibalism, and orgies. We too live in such fear in this day and age. But in his letter, Peter challenges us, “Do not fear what they fear, and do not be intimidated.” The cooties aren’t real, but the effect is very real: isolating people from one another. The real way to overcome the fear of cooties is simply not to play – not to fear what they fear and not to be intimidated. But as any grade school kid can tell you, this is really, really hard. The groupthink of peer pressure is difficult to resist. But as Paul says elsewhere, “When we grow up, it is time to put away childish things.” We must be mature in our faith and not succumb to these fear tactics. The way to do this, as Peter says, is to keep our priorities firmly in mind: “in your hearts, sanctify Jesus as Lord.” Jesus, who is the ultimate cootie-bannisher. Jesus, who came to say that all people are beloved children of God, and no person is unclean. We have been baptized with his baptism, in a ritual that washes away all those cooties forever, and now we are a new creation, made in God’s own sacred image. Therefore we ought to love one another. We sanctify Jesus as Lord, saying that no one else, no schoolyard bully or despot or hate-mongerer, has the power to make us turn against others over imaginary fears. We are Christians. We do not fear what they fear, and we are not intimidated. Rather, we live in faithfulness and love to one another, and not just those in our inner circle of Christians. For we cannot turn our faith into yet another game of “us and them.” Rather, sanctifying Jesus as Lord, we take on his mission as our own: that is, to live by love and not by fear. To reach out to the outcast and the untouchable. Do we face persecution today? It can take on many forms, not only in religious circles, but in our places of work and study, in our neighborhoods, even in our homes. But remember, we are members of a home outside the home. We are members of God’s household, a household that includes all people by virtue of their birth. We are called to be faithful to God and to one another, and we show that faithfulness through our love. Can we do that? If so, then we are mature indeed. The
Household of God 17 April 2005 Admit it. Right now you’re thinking, “What has she been smoking this week?” Our selection today does not come from the Lectionary. I suspect it has been left out not so much perhaps because the Lectionary wants to censor the Bible, but because if a difficult passage like this comes up, the minister pretty much has to preach on it. It’s the kind of passage that cannot go without comment. So the Lectionary resolves the dilemma by never presenting it in the first place – which is certainly understandable! Many of us would probably just prefer these passages be left out of the Bible altogether, these “911” passages that make us clutch our hearts and go *gasp!* And really, Peter’s version isn’t quite as tough as Paul’s in the letter to the Ephesians, which says, “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church. Just as the church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, subject to their husbands.” (Eph. 5:22-24) But if we never study these passages, then we have no response to them. It’s not good faith to just pretend that certain chunks of the Bible don’t exist. And remember, it’s easy for us to sit here two thousand years later and say our ancestors should have known better about women and slaves. For we, like our ancestors, are products of our own culture, with all its biases and shortcomings. Who knows how our descendants two thousand years from now will view our prejudices? So instead of tossing this passage out, or just passing judgment on our ancestors, I want to offer an interpretation passage based on some contemporary theologians (note: I am particularly indebted to John Howard Yoder’s “The Politics of Jesus”). You may not be convinced by this argument, and you certainly don’t have to agree with it. But hopefully it will give you some knowledge to help you in developing your own faithful response to passages like these. The first thing for you to know is that this type of instruction has its own name. It is called the “household code,” and there are similar versions found in the letter to the Colossians, as well as the passage in Ephesians that I already quoted. So this type of code is not unique to Peter. The earliest Christian communities were literally households. Think for example of the Bethany household of the siblings Mary, Martha, and Lazarus. In his letters Paul also mentions a married couple named Priscilla and Aquila who were another such household church. So early instruction to the church was often literally instruction to a household of related members that also included their slaves and servants. On the other hand, sometimes converts lived in non-Christian households. If a head of the household, usually the husband and master, converted, then often the entire household would convert. But sometimes it was the people of lower status who converted – slaves or women – who would then find themselves living in a non-Christian household. An example of the latter is Timothy, who was the son of a Christian mother and a gentile father. It was quite unique for people to convert to a religion different from the head of their household. Perhaps hard for us to imagine, but think about how right there this reverses the conventional social order. Because quite frankly, religion in the ancient world was not addressed to the weak but to the powerful. It was the head of the household who established the religion for everyone else, and it was unthinkable that a slave or a woman would choose a religion for themselves. It wasn’t completely unprecedented: after all, Judaism itself is a religion of slaves, not of kings. But even then who was it that got to study Torah? The men. Not the women. But Christianity in its earliest years appealed not to the powerful, but the lower and middle classes. It took several centuries before people on the top rung began to find this religion attractive. Think for a minute about why that might be. So back to the “household codes.” This kind of literature already existed in the ancient world, particularly among the Stoics. Greek philosophies, such as Stoicism and Epicureanism, were more like what we consider to be religion today – they dealt with ethical questions and the way people ought to behave. But the Christian household codes differed in some significant ways from the Stoic codes. First of all, the Stoic codes were addressed to men of independent means. The code would talk about how a man ought to live out his role as a father, a son, a brother, a friend. But the Christian codes were always listed in pairs: wives and husbands, slaves and masters, children and fathers. In other words, the Stoic code was addressed to individuals, but the Christian code was addressed to a community. The Stoic code is concerned with a man’s freedom and self-determination, and the aim is play your various roles properly, but never to be bound to another person, never to submit your interest to another person – especially to someone of lesser status than you. But the Christian code is always about mutual obligation: wife is to husband as husband is to wife, and so on. The Stoic code as I said is addressed to the man in power – period. It never addresses subordinates directly. But the Christian code is always, always addressed to the subordinate person first: slaves, wives, children. And in doing so, it addresses them as personal moral agents. They don’t just inherit the father’s morality by default. They have their own moral choices to make. This was a radical concept. Morality in the ancient world was the realm of men of independent means, and everyone else was defined in terms of what they owed to those men. But in Christianity, everyone from the least to the greatest is his or her own moral agent. Often today we read these codes as reinforcing the status quo of power: husbands over wives, masters over slaves, and so on. But I hope you can begin to see how in fact the codes in their day reversed the social order by addressing the subordinates first as having moral choices of their own. Now, it is true that the codes call on these people to submit. The household codes do not end slavery or patriarchy. But consider what is not being said, the truth that lies behind these codes. If slaves are being told to obey their masters, then that must mean that slaves were hearing a message in Christianity that told them they were free. And indeed this is the case. We remember that verse in Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, slave nor free, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Or here is another example. Hidden in the infamous passage about “women veil yourselves when you prophesy in church” is the fact that women were prophesying in church. Today we often hear the negative, but there is a positive that stands prior to the negative – and the negative does not in any way cancel out the positive. But much more subtly here: in the codes we do not like to hear these words “obey your master” and “submit to your husband.” But what we risk missing here is that the call is mutual. Slaves obey your masters, and masters treat your slaves like brothers and sisters, for you have one master in heaven. Women submit to your husbands, and husbands honor your wives and give yourselves for them as Christ did for the church. This is NOT the status quo! In fact, please note that whereas in Peter’s letter, the instruction to wives is far longer than the one to the husbands, in the letter to the Ephesians, it’s the wives who only get three verses of instruction, whereas husbands get eight! The codes may not go as far as we moderns might like, but these were radical words in those days. The Christian household codes did not urge the direct overturn of the social order of that day, but keep in mind two points: first, Christians were very much a minority religion when these letters were written, far too small to directly affect major institutions like slavery and patriarchy. In fact, it took Christians 1800 years to overturn slavery, and we’re will working on the patriarchy bit. The first Christians couldn’t do it all at once – nor can we today! And the second point to remember is this: that in first century of the church, they expected the apocalyptic end to come any day. So why try to wipe out slavery when you expect God to show up soon and wipe it out for us? The epistle writers were in effect saying, “Look, just hang on to the old system for now because it will all be changed soon enough.” So with that background in mind, let us now focus on what I think is the key point in these household codes and what it was that defined God’s house-in-exile, as opposed to the household-of-the-status-quo. There are three points to notice, the first of which we have already touched upon. And that is that the codes are addressed to communities, not to individuals. In God’s household, we do not exist in isolation. Rather, we are defined by our relationship to others. Second, in the Stoic order the word for love is philia. Now let’s review our Greek. What are the three words for love? (Eros, philia, agape.) Friendship is a love based on mutual benefit. The idea is that you are each gaining something from the relationship. The Christian code, however, always uses agape, which means selfless or disinterested love. Now there is nothing at all wrong with philia, but it is based on what I get out of the relationship, whereas agape is based on what I put into the relationship. Agape says, “Even when you are a jerk, I still love you,” whereas Stoic love would say, “You know what? I’m gonna look for a better friend.” Jesus had agape for us, because think about it: there’s no benefit to him in getting crucified. Rather his willingness to be crucified was a sign of agape – selfless, self-giving love. It was, if you think about it, a kind of submission, submission to us. And that is in fact the third point of these household codes: submission. It is a word which perhaps makes us uncomfortable because we are modern, independent Americans, and we further know how the concept of submission can be abused. But remember that these codes were mutual: wives submit to husbands and husbands submit to wives. Submission here did not mean, “Put up with their crap because it is your job to obey without question.” Rather it meant submission as Jesus demonstrated – self-giving, generous, agape. So hopefully now we can see the value of this household code without being locked into social roles that are two thousand years old, but rather to see what are the common themes that ought to order our lives to this very day. So instead of tossing out these passages altogether, we ought to ask how we might write these codes today? What would we have to say to children and parents? To spouses and partners? To people in the workplace? Times change, societies change. Hopefully our knowledge grows. But one thing that stays the same is God’s call for us to love one another. For God is love. Prepare
Your Minds 10 April 2005 Last week we talked about how the resurrected Jesus didn’t fire the disciples, despite their incompetence, in the name of the God of as many chances as it takes. We see that theme continued again today. In his sermon in Acts, Peter doesn’t pull his punches. He says things like, “This Jesus whom you crucified and killed by the hands of those outside the law.” Then begins our passage today. The crowds were “Cut to the heart” when they heard this and said, “What should we do?” It’s a question that carries a kind of guilt, perhaps a desire to make amends. “This is who we killed? What then should we do?” But Peter makes no atoning demands of them. Rather he extends an invitation: “Repent and be baptized.” It’s another generous offer from the God of as many chances as it takes. This is the theme of the resurrection, the idea that even if you mess up royally, God will still give you the opportunity to start anew, to rise from the ashes even of your most abysmal failure. We saw last week the effect that the resurrection had on Peter, not as an event to be believed, but as an experience that can transform one’s life. We continue to see that effect in our readings today when Peter offers the crowd the invitation to repent and be baptized, and invitation he expands upon in his letter. Because of the resurrection, we have an inheritance that is imperishable, therefore we must prepare our minds for action. Get ready to act in a new way, Peter says, which means not clinging to the futile ways inherited from our ancestors. Now passages like these can be troublesome because it might sound like Christianity cancels out Judaism. Certainly this passage has often been interpreted that way, unfortunately. But that is not the only way to read this passage. Let’s remember first of all that Peter was himself Jewish. Secondly, scholars believe that the audience of this letter was most likely of gentile background. Now, one characteristic that both Judaism and the gentiles shared was the role of animal sacrifice in their religious life. Peter refers to this practice in the letter when he talks about being ransomed by the blood of Christ, like that of a lamb without defect or blemish. This language of atoning sacrifice through the blood of the lamb may be familiar to us because such language is still used I many Christian circles. But we don’t’ really fully understand what it meant to have a spiritual life based on sacrifice. You offered animal sacrifices to atone for your sins. This was an ongoing process that never ended. All your life you would have to keep slaughtering animals to atone for your sins. And the way it worked, to put it crudely, is that the dead animal would sate the bloodlust of the gods. Your sin was so horrific that the gods – or God – was out for blood. So you sacrifice an animal as a kind of substitute to distract the gods from directing their ire at you. Like in those diamond heist movies where the thief brings along a steak to toss at the Dobermans, hoping they’ll tear up the steak instead of the thief. In this system, to be righteous and holy was to offer all the right sacrifices, with high quality animals that had no defect or blemish, so you could appease the deity and avoid punishment. Basically, it was a religious based on wriggling your way out of your just desserts. You can see then why Peter would call that system “the futile ways inherited from your ancestors.” If you think about it, such a system is based on fear of divine wrath. There’s no love in it. Whatever love does come along is secondary. First is this fear of divine wrath. But now Peter talks about how Jesus ransomed us out of that system, and to what end? To the end that we might trust in God and have our faith and hope set on God. Our trust is not in our ability to make the right sacrifice to appease God. Rather, our trust, our faith, our hope is in God herself, and not in a system of sacrifice designed to keep God’s wrath at bay. And what is the purpose of religion, according to Peter? Since we have been ransomed in this way, what then should we do? We might well ask the question as did the crowd at Peter’s sermon. “Prepare your minds for action!” he says. And what is the action we’re preparing for? “To love one another deeply from the heart.” Think about that for a minute. Again, maybe it’s hard for us to hear how radical that is, because we Christians throw the word “love” around a lot. But remember, love had no particular place in the system of sacrifice. That is not to say that Jews and gentiles in the sacrificial system never loved God or one another. Of course not! We know that the greatest commandment is to love God and one another. But love didn’t save you in the old system. (Jews today , please note, have also grown beyond the sacrificial system, as have the modern-day pagans I know.) But this was still a radical thing in Peter’s day. Remember that in the first centuries of the church, Christians were seen as atheists precisely because they refused to offer animal sacrifice to any God. People just couldn’t conceive of a religion that didn’t involve such sacrifice. But here Peter says that what is asked of us is not animal sacrifice, but rather a sacrifice of genuine mutual love – that we love one another deeply from the heart. You know, as I was re-reading the Emmaus story this week, I was struck by something I hadn’t noticed before. You know the disciples are walking along, and the risen Jesus shows up and starts talking to them. But they don’t’ recognize who he is. Instead, the revelation comes not while he’s talking with them about the scriptures; it comes after they extend hospitality to him. They come to their inn and say, “Stay with us because the night is coming.” Now there might be a certain selfishness in their request. Clearly they enjoy Jesus’ company. But they don’t say, “Stay with us because we want to keep talking with you.” Instead, they show concern for him and extend their hospitality. “Stay with us because it’s getting dark out. Night is falling.” And then Jesus breaks the bread – the bread that the disciples presumably shared with him – and only then to they recognize him. I think this is an example of how the disciples loved this stranger deeply from the heart, and that is when he finally revealed himself to them. It makes me think of that parable in Matthew 25 about the sheep and the goats. “I was hungry and you fed me,” and so forth. And the people say, “Whoa, when did we feed you, because dude, I don’t remember that at all!” We could take that passage and make it into another sacrifice of deeds: feed the hungry, clothe the naked in order to earn brownie points from God and deflect God’s wrath away from our sins. And certainly it is better to do these things than not to do them. But haven’t we all known people who gave to charity but had no love for anyone? Instead, in Matthew’s parable, we get the feeling that these sheep weren’t so much concerned with racking up points in the charity department. Rather, they just “loved people deeply from the heart.” And if you truly love people, you will extend hospitality to them, you will be concerned for their welfare, you’ll make sure they have enough food and clothing and shelter. To repent and be baptized, then, means, to prepare our minds for the action of loving one another deeply from the heart. Another theme we encounter often in Peter’s letter is the theme of exile – the idea that as we live in this world as Christians, we live in a kind of exile. The word here in Greek is paroikos. Oikos means household, and par means beside or outside. So exiles are people who live outside of a household. But hear this: the word paroikos eventually became parochial and parish – in other words, the church. The church, the community of the people of faith, is our home outside of home. It is a home defined by God’s love, not by family blood or territorial boundaries. When we repent and are baptized, we become part of this household of God where we are called to love one another deeply from the heart. It is a kind of exile, but an exile that calls us to love the people around us all the more deeply. This is the kind of exile that we live in to this very day, and it entails certain special responsibilities which we will talk about more next week. 3 April 2005 Perhaps one of the most remarkable things about the stories of the resurrected Jesus, is that he did not fire the disciples. Think about it: these guys had all lost faith. They had all run away as soon as Jesus was arrested. None of them dared show their faces during his execution. They don’t believe the women when they tell them that they found the tomb empty on Sunday morning. And when Jesus appears to them, they’re hiding in a locked room, too afraid to show their faces. They have failed on all counts as disciples. Surely they should get fired, right? Shouldn’t Jesus show up in a state of righteous indignation? Shouldn’t he be reading them the riot act? But that is not what he does. Because the whole purpose of Jesus’ mission was not condemnation, but forgiveness. The God who raised Jesus is the God of second chances. And even third and fourth chances if they are needed. This is the God of as many chances as it takes to get it right. And that is good news indeed for the disciples. I often talk about how the gospels make the disciples look like a bunch of clowns. They seldom get the answer right. When Jesus preaches parables, the disciples are too thickheaded to understand what he’s saying. They’re frequently depicted as squabbling about unimportant issues, everything from where they’re going to sit in the heavenly kingdom to who is going to fetch dinner for the evening. They botch their attempts at healing, they seem to have no clue what Jesus is really about, and then they mess up royally when Jesus is arrested. But the book of Acts paints a very different picture of the disciples. Suddenly they are competent. Peter preaches a sermon in which he eloquently lays out the meaning of Jesus’ life and mission. You’ve got to wonder what happened! But the answer is the resurrection. And no one is a better example of the impact of this event than Peter himself. Peter was Jesus’ star pupil. He was one of the first disciples, and he came closest out of them all to understanding what Jesus’ mission was about. But he also tended to be a bit of a show-off. You remember the story where Jesus walks on water. While the rest of the disciples cower in the boat, Peter hops out and tries to walk on water, too. He is the one who correctly identifies Jesus as the Messiah. He swears up and down at the Last Supper that even if all the others turn away from Jesus, he, Peter, will never abandon him. But he seldom manages to live up to these grandiose claims, and when he fails, he does so spectacularly. Indeed, the passion story illustrates all of Peter’s wobbly qualities: chopping off one of the soldier’s ears, following Jesus to the courtyard of the high priest, yet turning around and denying him three times. “The Rock” doesn’t seem like a good nickname for him at all. “Jell-O” might be more accurate. Yet two chapters into the book of Acts he delivers this eloquent sermon. We know that Peter played an important role in the early church. The book of Acts tells how he heals people and makes converts. Following his vision of the unclean food being declared clean, Peter became the first disciple to preach to gentiles. For a time he was the leader of the church in Jerusalem, but then another disciples, James, took over, and Peter traveled, eventually making his way to Rome, where according to tradition, he was arrested and crucified. He insisted on being crucified upside down, because he did not think he was worthy to die in the same way as Jesus. Peter is seen as the first Pope, and the Basilica in Rome bears his name to this day. But for all that Peter was very important, we know very little of him from the Bible. He appears in the gospels, yes, but after a strong start in the book of Acts, he all but disappears by the middle of the book, eclipsed by Paul and his missionary journeys. There are thirteen letters attributed to Paul in the New Testament, but only two supposedly written by Peter. And even then, scholars argue that he may not have written those letters at all. They may instead have been written by some of his followers, as was the custom in those days. Concrete details about this remarkable man elude us. Yet what little we know paints a remarkable picture. The Lectionary follows the first letter of Peter during this Easter season, and even though this letter might not have actually been written by Peter, it nevertheless is certainly a good expression of his faith. In the letter, we hear an account of the wobbly disciple in the gospels who, through the power of the resurrection, was transformed into the rock on which the church was founded. Our story in Acts comes immediately on the heels of the Pentecost event, when the gathering of disciples received the Holy Spirit. No one understood what was happening, but Peter immediately got up and preached the resurrected Christ. The gospel writer says that three thousand people were baptized that day as a result of Peter’s sermon. Surely it was a great day for the church, full of heady promise. But the good times did not last. Soon the church was beset by persecution, from fellow Jews who did not accept this new Messiah, to Roman authorities who feared the sect, and even from fellow Christians arguing about what should be the faithful way for them to proceed. The Peter we encounter in the letters is far removed from those magnificent days of Pentecost, when he was filled with the power of the Holy Spirit and thought all things were possible. Now he has been through trials as well, and he is writing to encourage the churches in the face of tribulation and hardship. But his faith has only strengthened with time. He has experienced resurrection himself, no doubt many times, and he is able to preach a word of hope through the hardship that the church encountered. What we heard today is the greeting from that first letter, and we can hear the echoes of that Pentecost sermon given so many years earlier. This letter was possibly written in the mid 60s, and the church at that time had not yet faced the systematic persecution by the Roman government that the church would endure a century or so later. The government was keeping an eye on these new Christians, but was trying to hold on to a hands-off policy with regard to them. Rather, the church suffered more from the general scorn and suspicion of their neighbors, much in the way that minority groups are often regarded today. No doubt parents at that time worried that their children might get sucked into that crazy Jesus cult, where the followers had orgies at their “love feast” and practiced cannibalism. To call yourself a Christian in those days would no doubt earn a similar result to someone today calling herself a pagan or a witch. Persecution would have been anything from suspicion to name calling, to outright discrimination and the occasional act of violence. The symbol of the fish was a secret sign denoting sanctuary for fellow believers, not the kitschy car ornament we see today. It might not have been the worst time in history to be a Christian, but it was far from easy, either. And in some ways it was perhaps not too different from the climate we live in now. Granted, we live in the era of Christendom, with megachurches sprouting up like giant mushrooms on all the highways. But it is a Christendom that seems to have allied itself with the powers of this world, with the surrounding culture, with the political forces. Certainly for those of us in the mainline/progressive stream, it seems like our vision of Christianity gets ignored. Sometimes what other people call Christian doesn’t even seem familiar to us. And surely many of us have experienced scorn and skepticism from others about our beliefs, people calling us atheists – much as the first Christians were seen as atheists in their day. Today is not the worst of times to be a Christian, either. But it is no easier today than it was when Peter wrote his letter. So perhaps it is good for us to study this letter and see what wisdom it can give us. Peter starts off his letter by greeting the churches with a grand proclamation: ”Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ! By his great mercy he has given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and into an inheritance that is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, who are being protected by the power of God through faith for a salvation ready to be revealed in the last time.” This is an assurance to the churches that even though things may seem grim, God’s promises are still true. The news is still good. We have a new birth into a living hope, not a hope only in good times, but a hope that lives and breathes, one that can weather the storm. And we have an inheritance that is imperishable. Sometimes I wonder today how much we really trust in that. We seem to think that the fate of the church rests in our own hands. And certainly we need to take our charge as stewards of the church very seriously. But have we forgotten those failures that Jesus called as his disciples? This is the God of as many chances as it takes. Does not the power belong to God? Will God not continue to work with us, working out God’s own purposes? Our inheritance is imperishable. That means even we cannot destroy or lose it. Peter goes on to talk about the role that suffering plays in testing us and strengthening our faith. Now, we need to be cautious here. Suffering is not a good thing. How often throughout history people have taken a passage like this one and used it to tell people that suffering is good and holy and necessary. Usually, however, they are talking about other people’s suffering! And they do so in a way to keep from changing the wrongs in the world. Suffering is not good. But it does happen – and it happens to the good and bad alike. The good news is that God can take even suffering and still bless us. Suffering is not a sign of unfaithfulness, or of God’s disfavor. Rather, we can face suffering in a way that makes us stronger. Again, Peter knows first-hand about this. And this kind of endurance even through suffering can have a purifying quality. I really think that is what resurrection means – it means not being overcome by suffering, but rather emerging through it into life and affirmation of that living hope. Hooligans
for Jesus 20 March 2005 I love crowds. Some people don’t. Some people don’t want to go to parades or Fiesta or the Renaissance Festival precisely because there are too many people packed together, but me – I’m a sucker for crowds. Now, that doesn’t make me an extrovert. Quite the contrary. Invite me to a party where I only know one or two people, and I’m not very comfortable. But a huge, anonymous crowd is another matter altogether. It’s not just that I love people watching, though that is certainly a part of it. But more than that. A crowd is its own kind of creature. There’s an excitement to being in a crowd, especially one that is united for a common purpose. Whether it’s people gathering for fun at Fiesta or whatever. I mean, I’m not a sports fan, either. But in high school some of my friends dragged me along for a school football game. Now, I don’t know the first thing about football, but I had a blast! The band playing, the crowd yelling for our team, those idiotic cheerleaders doing their stupid routines. And I was cheering right along with them. I even learned the school fight song! I couldn’t have told you how well our team was doing in the – district, or whatever it’s called. But I didn’t have to have the foggiest idea what a touchdown was to enjoy it when my school scored one. There’s power in a group. Being part of a group gives you a sense of meaning. It didn’t matter how poorly my school team was in the district (actually, I can tell you this much: I knew we were the worst.) The point was, if you were from Spring Woods High, then you rooted for the Tigers, even though they were lousy. It’s what you do. Because they may be a horrible team, but they are our horrible team! We belong to all kinds of groups. Not only our schools, but the towns we are from (or that we currently live in), our churches, our chess clubs, our place of work, our family. Each of these groups in their own way say something about who we are, they help define our life. Even groups that are large enough to be anonymous can nevertheless impart a sense of purpose. And not only for superficial reasons like the crowd gathered at a Spurs game. This year San Antonio’s Martin Luther King march surpassed 100,000 participants. It’s moving to be in such a large crowd, among so many people gathered for such a purpose. Likewise, certain momentous events can bring us all together, make us all feel united. Depending on your age, some of you remember that feeling at the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Still more remember the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. For my generation it was the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. And of course, who today hears the date September 11 and needs to have a year appended to it to know what it refers to. On each of these occasions, the common experience of those tragedies brought us together. It seemed like all barriers vanished, and we were all Americans. We grieved together and comforted one another. The crowds that gathered, often informally, gave us a way to vent our sorrow. They made us feel connected. They gave us a feeling of transcendence, of being part of something greater than just ourselves. In fact, it kinda starts to sound like…a religion. That’s the power of a crowd united for a common purpose. It imparts an almost divine sense of transcendence, a feeling that our gathering is holy. And that is exactly why crowds can be so very, very dangerous. It can only take an instant for a crowd to be transformed into a mob. And the stronger the sense of purpose, the higher the emotion, the easier it is for that transformation to take place. We see it with those infamous soccer hooligans. We see it in riots. And we see it on Palm Sunday. Oh, the image of the crowds welcoming Jesus into Jerusalem is an appealing one: people shouting “Hosanna!” waving their palm branches, throwing their cloaks out into the street for Jesus to ride over. It seems like a great moment of triumph before the dark days ahead. But we cannot forget that the crowd that welcomed him on Sunday was the exact same crowd that demanded his death on Friday. And no matter how much the high priests conspired and Pontius Pilate plotted, we cannot forget the role that the crowd played in Jesus’ death. So in the light of the events of Good Friday, we must ask ourselves what exactly was going on that Palm Sunday? Was the crowd really behind Jesus? Or did they just take it as an opportunity to thumb their noses at whoever they were annoyed at, whether the Roman government, or their patsies serving in the Temple. How many people in that Palm Sunday crowd were just caught up in the excitement, not even knowing who or what it was they were shouting for? After all, whenever a few people gather to stare at something, more people will gather wanting to know what they’re staring at. The thrill of the crowd can be enough to whip us up into a frenzy for something we otherwise would care nothing about – whether it’s our high school football team, or a rampage of looting and pillaging. It can be a very thin line between mutual enthusiasm, and groupthink. And that is precisely why crowds can be so dangerous. Because crowds unite, and anyone who stands to the side is seen as an enemy. Crowds become mobs when they turn against these bystanders, and ordinary human beings will commit the most unspeakable crimes against their fellows when backed by a crowd. Try to imagine what might have happened on that Palm Sunday if someone had stood to the side and said, “Who is this hick? Some wacko from Nazareth? Messiahs are a dime a dozen! You people are nuts to be getting so excited!” Think about what the crowd’s reaction might have been to that! Can you imagine them turning on this naysayer in anger? Can you see their enthusiasm for Jesus turning into wrath against his critic? Could you see them yelling at him, chasing him, even striking out in violence at him? But the bystander doesn’t have to be opposed to Jesus in order to stir up the crowd’s ire. What if instead she said, “Wait a minute, what are you all getting so fired up about? Have any of you actually listened to anything this rabbi has said? He keeps talking about crosses, about laying down your life for another. Shouldn’t we think about this before getting all riled up right here in Jerusalem? Or this cross he keeps talking about could become a reality.” But crowds hate wet blankets just as much as they hate hecklers. When groupthink takes over, anyone who doesn’t go along is an outsider. And this, probably more than anything else, is what lets us know that a crowd is edging into idolatry. After all, Martin Luther King and Gandhi assembled large crowds, too, but those crowds were marked by discipline. Those crowds were distinguished by their ability to listen to dissenting voices. But an idolatrous crowd, no matter how noble its purpose, seeks to silence dissent. Such a crowd can even turn against the object of their enthusiasm if that person ceases to please – just as Jesus did. This idolatrous aspect of crowds can work at even the smallest levels. After all, haven’t we all known families where everyone always had to appear to agree, to present a united front? Maybe we’re even a part of such families ourselves, where you can’t admit that a family member gets drunk every night, or that behind closed doors there is fighting and abuse. Even churches can become such idolatrous crowds when they demand everyone feel and think and act the same way – and they label dissenters as “heretics” and “sinners.” Jesus moved crowds. He could inspire them and transform them and change them. But even those crowds were capable of this kind of idolatry. And here is the truth that perhaps very few people on that Palm Sunday could have heard: that there is no violence that can be justified in Jesus’ name. If that crowd had attacked the Temple, or set fire to the Roman governor’s palace, or had stoned one lone dissenter to death, then they would have violated everything Jesus stood for. If a crowd, a group is capable of such an action, then it has no part in Jesus’ mission. We may agree to that readily enough. But it goes beyond that. There is no hatred that can be justified in Jesus’ name. We may think we’re ready to agree to that, but are we really? Aren’t there groups we want to hate, people we want to feel justified in hating? What about Osama bin Laden? What about members of the Ku Klux Klan? What about a child abuser? Can’t we be justified in our hatred of them? But Jesus said, “You’ve heard it said to love your neighbor and hate your enemy. But I say to you: love your enemies.” Do we really want to hear this message? Did the crowd on Palm Sunday want to hear it? But it goes further still. There is no condemnation that can be justified in Jesus’ name. Oh, come on now! Is that going too far? Even Jesus knew sin existed! Even he called the Pharisees to task! True, he did. But he never condemned them. Think about that. Can you find a single example in the gospels where Jesus ever said to anyone, “You are beyond even God’s ability to forgive?” Called people to account, yes. Condemned, never. There’s not a single instance in all the gospels. He was constantly reaching out to forgive. That was central to his entire ministry. As John 3:17 says, “For he came not to condemn the world, but to save it.” If Jesus never condemned, then who in the world are we to think we have that right? If we condemn another, then we are identifying ourselves with a group called “the righteous” and identifying that person with a group called “the sinners.” We fail to acknowledge how we ourselves are sinners. We fail to acknowledge how we ourselves are in need of forgiveness. We elevate our group to a divine status, with the right to impart judgment. We declare our group to have the right to send another person to their death – just like the crowd on Good Friday, who shouted, “Crucify him!” Servant
Leadership March 16, 2005 Today we end our Lenten study of Jesus’ farewell speech by going back to the beginning of it. You may recall that Johns’ gospel does not contain an account of the Last Supper. Instead, Jesus washes the feet of the disciples. This is about more than Jesus doing something nice for them after a long day on march. This action, like the raising of Lazarus, is a parable. It’s a way that Jesus teaches us. And this entire speech, lasting four chapters, is place in the context of this act. Footwashing was an important part of hygiene back in those days. If people wore shoes at all, they wore sandals, which only protect your soles and do nothing to keep out dirt and grime. They had no paved roads, no garbage collections and no sewage system. Without going into details, I’m sure we can see how footwashing would be important, especially before a meal. It not only got you clean, it also made you comfortable. Think of when you spent a long day on your feet, whether walking a long distance, or standing for hours. When you’re feet are tired, you are tired! How lovely it would be to have someone wash your poor, aching feet in warm water, maybe with a bit of perfume. To dry your feet with a soft towel, maybe a bit of a massage. Feels wonderful just thinking about it! So in Jesus’ day, this was a common courtesy to provide for your guests. You may recall the story in Luke when a woman washes Jesus’ feet with her tears and dries them with her hair, and how Jesus blesses her for the act, but rebuked his dinner host, who had not had Jesus’ feet washed when he arrived. But while the host ought to have provided for Jesus’ feet being washed, he would not have done the job himself. Footwashing was grungy business, so it was left to the servants. But at this dinner, at Jesus’ Last Supper, it is Jesus – the Teacher, the Rabbi, the Messiah, the Lord – he is the one who washes the feet of his followers. It’s completely unheard of! The disciples would have been shocked. That their beloved rabbi should so debase himself? You recall Peter’s rather comical reaction. He says, “Lord, to you wash my feet? You shall never wash my feet!” Jesus answers him, “If I do not wash you, you have no part in me.” To which Peter, in typical zealous over-reaction, says, “In that case, wash my hands and head, too!” Bless him! Peter is trying so hard to understand the bizarre actions of his master, but he just doesn’t get the parable. But after completing this action, Jesus explains what his action parable means. “You call me Teacher and Lord, and rightly so, for that is what I am. Now that I , your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s’ feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” Now remember, this is Jesus’ inner circle, his closest comrades. Over the course of his speech he’ll talk about how he abides in them, about how crucial they are to God’s salvation plan, about how if they ask for anything, God will surely give it, for they will do even greater things than Jesus himself has done. That’s some pretty heady stuff! He’s giving his power to them, entrusting them to continue his work. When the boss hands over the keys to the executive washroom, how are most people going to respond? Isn’t the temptation going to be to strut around and lord it over others? If you’re suddenly given power, you’re going to want to use it – especially if you’ve been powerless. Because remember, the disciples aren’t junior execs. They’re poor, itinerate students wandering across the land with their teacher. Welcomed by some, feared by others. Whatever jobs they had before, whatever their position in society, they gave it all up to follow Jesus, to wander homeless, with dogs barking at them and children mocking them. Now that they’re being given the power of Almighty God, the temptation will be strong to flaunt it, to show everyone, “See? You laughed at me before, but look what I can do now!” Do you remember what happened with Elisha? He had been the disciple of the great prophet Elijah, and when Elijah was taken up into heaven, his mantle, his power, was passed on to Elisha. One of the very first things that happened was that some boys mock Elisha for his baldhead. He turns around and curses them, and two bears come out of the woods and eat forty-two boys. Pretty intense stuff! But it demonstrates in an exaggerated way how power can go to your head. Jesus needs to be able to count on his disciples. But before he starts telling them about the role they are to play and the power that will be theirs, he gives them this lesson, graphically demonstrating what kind of leadership he expects form them. In short, he expects leaders to be servants of all. This concept of servant-leadership flies in the face of conventional wisdom even today. If you’re got power and authority, then you need to use it! You need to show people who’s boss, so they’ll take you seriously, right? The last thing you should do is humbled yourself you should never put yourself in a lower position. What if the boss shows up at work one day and starts emptying the trash cans? Won’t people think the boss has gone crazy? But Jesus shows us a different way. Throughout his life he used his awesome, divine power to serve people. He responded to people’s needs. Sometimes in dramatic, show-stopping ways like the raising of Lazarus, but also for ordinary, mundane aspects of life, like turning water into wine at a wedding party. He told stories about ordinary people. He didn’t hang out only with the rich and famous, he went to where everyday folk were: fishermen and widows, tax collectors and harlots, crazy people and terrorists. Nobody was beneath him. No concern was beneath his care. And this is what he calls his disciples to do. If we would be leaders in Jesus’ way, then we must be servants. The greatest kind of power we can have is the power to serve one another. And what is service? It is to make people feel welcome, the way an ancient host would wash the guest’s feet. It is to respond to people’s needs, the way Jesus did. Even the most mundane or distasteful task takes on a holy dimension if it is done in service to others. At the church I served in Houston, our youth group for three years learned servant-leadership by going on summer worktrips. Our first year we went to New York and worked in soup kitchens. Now these youth, bear in mind, had it all: they came from well-off families, they had every toy and trinket imaginable, and they probably had never had to do a hard day’s work in their lives. I was shocked to learn they didn’t even know howto wash dishes by hand! They were rinsing the dirty dishes under the tap and then putting them away into the cabinet still wet and unclean! One of the soup kitchens we worked at had a dumpster where they threw out the leftover food. This dumpster had to be cleaned out, and it was disgusting. I won’t go into detail, because it will ruin your appetite for lunch, but just think of what happens to bags of food cooking for days in a dumpster. It gets truly vile! Yet these kids, who had never had to do anything so disgusting in their lives, worked away at that task without complaining. I didn’t even know how bad it was until I saw them taking a break. I went over to scold them for shirking their duty, and they said, “We just needed to rest a minute because the smell is so bad.” That’s when I saw the dumpster and what they had been doing, and I was amazed. Amazed that they had done such a nasty job without griping. They understood that vile as it was, this was something important. They learned what servant-leadership means. And every worktrip after that, the people would say that the kids from my church were the most diligent, responsible kids they’d ever worked with. 9 March 2005 We continue our Lenten study of this farewell speech of Jesus. So far we’ve talked about the importance of abiding in Jesus, and what that means in terms of the cycle of God’s love and the circle of salvation, and last week we talked about how our pain will be transformed into joy, and that whatever we ask for, we will receive, and how important it is that we ask. In our passage today we find a very remarkable verse. That theme of “ask and I will do it” is repeated. Remember, John likes to repeat things in order to make a point. But the remarkable verse is this one: “Whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do, and you will do even greater works than these.” Think about that! “You will also do the works I do, and you will even do still greater things!” I remember when I first really heard that verse – not when and where I was, but I remember the impact it had on me: We will do even greater things than Jesus did! That blew my mind! I mean, Jesus is the Messiah, he’s the son of God. He did all these amazing miracles, feeding thousands of people, healing the sick, even raising people from the dead. He’s the Big Man, right? No one can do what he does! Yet here he tells the disciples, “You will do even greater things than me.” How can it be possible that we mere mortals will do greater things than the Messiah? Yet this is what Jesus says. Here’s an example of what I think this teaching of Jesus means. My father loves to study history: politics, all kinds of things. And he told me once why George Washington was such a great leader. He said it wasn’t what he did in the Revolutionary War. It wasn’t that he was elected president. Rather, the most important thing that George Washington did, what made him a truly great leader, is that he gave up his power. He served as president, but then he stepped down. He passed the torch. George Washington didn’t have to give up his power. There was a strong movement to name him president for life. But he refused. He let others take the reins. He didn’t keep power for himself. He gave it to the people. It was the greatest thing he ever did. And that’s what Jesus does. He was the Messiah, the Son of God, yet he gave his power to us. We sometimes tend to focus on how Jesus saves us, but what we risk forgetting is that salvation is only the first step. Some people seem to think that once you get saved, your worries are over. All you have to do is try to keep your nose clean until you die and enter heaven. But that’s not what Jesus says! Salvation is just the first step. We are saved not for ourselves, but for others. We are saved so that we can continue God’s saving work. Think about the example of George Washington again. It wasn’t enough for him to defeat a tyrant. Our nation would never have been free if we just looked to George Washington to become the next tyrant. He might be a kinder, gentler tyrant, but he still would have been the one wielding the power. But that’s not what he did. He gave the power to us. And that is what Jesus does. He doesn’t hold on to his remarkable power, keeping it from us. Rather, he passed that power – the almighty power of God – on to us. That is why we are called upon to ask. We’re called upon to ask for God’s own power, so that we can continue God’s work of salvation. But that’s a scary thought, isn’t it? If we’ve got the power, that means we carry an awesome responsibility. It means we can’t just sit by idly, we have to do something. But if we do something, we might mess up! It’s easier to just let someone else run the show. Let Jesus be the savior – I just wanna be saved and not worry about anything any more. But that’s not the way God planned it. We have to be part of that salvation circle, or else it’s not going to happen. Jesus can’t hang around and do al all the work for us, we have to step up to the plate ourselves. Surely on that last night, the disciples were terrified at the thought of Jesus leaving. They were used to following him around and asking him question. But Jesus knew the time was coming for him to leave. He had to prepare the disciples not only for that separation, but also for the task ahead. But even while he’s laying this alarming responsibility on us, there is yet another promise. Jesus tells the disciples, “I will not leave you desolate. I will ask the Father, and he will send you another Counselor, who will be with you forever.” This Counselor, of course, is the Holy Spirit. Now, we know about the Trinity, but we don’t really have a firm grasp of what it means. As a minister, I’ve been studying this for years. I took a whole class in seminary just on the Holy Spirit, and I’m still not entirely sure what it means! God the Father I understand – that sense of a great and loving being who exists over all. Jesus, yes I can understand. After all, he’s got a name and a face. But the Holy Spirit – what exactly is that? I mean, the Bible is full of stories about the Father and the Son, but it says precious little about this Holy Spirit. At best we know the Spirit has something to do with fire, from that story we always tell on Pentecost Sunday when everyone is supposed to wear red to church or else you get pinched. Or is that some other holiday I’m thinking of? In John’s farewell speech, Jesus refers to the Holy Spirit four times. Here it is “the Counselor who will be with you forever, the spirit of truth.” In 14:26 it’s, “the Counselor, the Holy Spirit, who will teach you all things and bring to remembrance all that I have said to you.” In 15:26, it’s again, “the Counselor, the Spirit of Truth who will bear witness to me,” and in 16:7, the “Counselor who will convince the world concerning sin and righteousness and judgment.” Jesus always calls the Holy Spirit the Counselor, or the Advocate as it is sometimes translated. The emphasis is on teaching, on guidance, on convincing people of the truth. Notice that the Counselor doesn’t take over for Jesus, doing all the saving while we sit around. Rather, the salvation task falls to us, but the wisdom and teaching and guidance of Jesus continues with us through the presence of the Holy Spirit. We are not left to carry out this salvation task alone. God continues with us in the Holy Spirit. 2 March 2005 Over the past couple of weeks, we have seen how Jesus has urged them to abide in him as he abides in them, because this is all part of God’s circle of love, God’s circle of salvation. But we need to remember that all this talk is part of Jesus’ last speech to his disciples. He is about to leave them, and in the most horrible way imaginable. He will be arrested and killed. Jesus knows that this will cause incredible pain and anguish to the disciples. Despite all this assurance about how they abide in one another, Jesus’ brutal death will feel like a horrible separation to these disciples who have loved him so well. When I was very young, I couldn’t stand the way the story results in Jesus’ death. It was unbelievable to me that the disciples would have let Jesus be carted off to be killed. So my younger sister and I staged rescue operations. We would hop onto our swingset, which was a time machine, and travel back in time to rally the disciples to demand Jesus’ release from Pontius Pilate. I could not bear the fact that the disciples had let their fear rule them, allowing the mob to demand Jesus’ death over Barrabbas’. Yet surely that is exactly how the disciples felt: their wonderful leader, who had seemed capable of anything at all, now arrested; the disciples fearing that they would be hauled off next. Their terror for Jesus just as great as their fear for their own safety. It’s easy for a precocious eight-year-old to look back and be convinced that she could rescue Jesus, but the disciples’ fear is understandable. Those days between Good Friday and Easter Sunday were dismal ones, indeed, the apparent end of all their hopes. So on that last night that Jesus was with them, he tried to prepare them for what lay ahead, so they could last long enough for the gift of the resurrection to burst forth on that Easter. But what exactly is the resurrection? What exactly happened? I believe it was about something much more powerful than a mere miracle of resuscitation. As I said last week, I think it takes more than mere flashy signs and miracles to communicate God’s message to people, because miracles are so easily misunderstood. If Jesus’ dead body really did get up and just start walking around again – a mere physical resurrection – then wouldn’t the disciples be inclined to believe he hadn’t really died? But he did die. They knew he died. It wasn’t his death that they had a hard time believing – it was his resurrection, which says to me that the resurrection is about something much more than a mere physical miracle. After all, Jesus himself had raised people from the dead. Even by Bible standards, it’s not that special. I believe it was something much more -- something that takes an act of faith in order to experience. Jesus was raised, but it wasn’t the kind of thing the disciples might have expected. It was in a sense something that they had to believe in order to see. Leaving aside the question of Doubting Thomas – that scripture always comes up the Sunday after Easter anyway – I want to look at our passage today, because it is very much about the resurrection, even though Jesus never uses that word. He’s trying to prepare the disciples by teaching them how to understand his coming death and separation. The overwhelming feeling in this passage is one of love, of joy. And yet he also speaks of pain, of grief, of deep anguish. We’ve all known the horrible pain of losing loved ones. But the horror of losing a loved one to a tragic, violent death, is almost unbearable. The disciples knew that pain – the violent death of their innocent teacher, their Lord, their friend. Yet the miracle is that Sunday turned their pain into joy. The resurrection did not mean they got Jesus back the way he’d been before. Death is real; our loved ones are gone, and we do not get them back among us, living and breathing again. The resurrected Jesus was not the same as the one who had been alive before. Remember how in the garden Mary Magdalene tried to hold on to Jesus. All of the disciples want to hang on to him, to keep him, as we want to do with our loved ones who have died. But the disciples – and we – must let go at some point. We cannot hang on to the ones we love. Yet Jesus assures them, “Your pain will be transformed into joy.” Love does not end with death, and death does not separate us from the ones we love. This is so hard for us to understand, so hard for us not to turn into a platitude. Part of me still wants to say, Yes, death does separate and divide. But Jesus says, “I will see you again, and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy.” Those are powerful words! Such a powerful promise! No one will take away our joy. This is the resurrection that Jesus speaks of. Can we imagine such joy? But Jesus goes on to say, “On that day you will not ask me anything.” It’s a strange thing for him to say, but I think he means more than just that they won’t doubt or have questions about what the resurrection means. They will believe because their joy will be so complete. And that joy will be so overwhelming that they won’t be thinking of anything else: questions, doubts, requests – nothing else will seem to matter except for this joy at being reunited with Jesus. And yet Jesus urges them to ask: “Ask and you will receive, and your joy will be complete.” These
are powerful, powerful words – far beyond what we might expect
him to say in mere comfort. But we need to understand that this
passage is framed by Jesus talking about the persecution that the
disciples will face. At the end of chapter fifteen and the beginning
of chapter sixteen, he talks about how the world may hate them,
and that if he is to suffer persecution, they will, too. At the
end of chapter sixteen, he says that the disciples will scatter
and leave him alone, and they will have trouble in this world. In
other words, he is not only preparing them for his own death. He’s
also preparing them for their own suffering, even their own deaths.
In the joy of the resurrection, Jesus says, the disciples will not
think to ask for anything, but the day will come when they will
need to ask, in order to endure their own trials. That’s what “Ask, and you will receive” means. It means that no one can make you do anything, because the power of God is in you. You can ask for anything, and God will do it. Because God makes a way out of no way. The world shuts the door, but God opens it. All things – all things! – are possible. But! We’ve got to ask. Because the point is not that we rest snug in our joy while the world goes to hell. If we do that, then God’s salvation plan, God’s circle of love, gets stuck. We have to ask, because we are called to love the world. We are called to abide in the world as God abides in us, to love the world as God loves us, to save the world as God saves us. Not by our own power! But by the almighty power of God. This is why the Bible is the question book – it teaches us what to ask for: the joy that nothing can take away, the power to love the world, resurrection that overcomes all death. Amen! Confession
of Sin 27 February 2005 We come now in our series on “confession” to the confession of sin, which is the one that got me started on all this in the first place. But I’ve placed this confession third, after covenant, which establishes the relationship between us and God and us with each other, and faith, which tells the story of who this God is and who we are. The confession of sin can only come after the first two, because without a relationship of trust with God and one another, we cannot confess our sin. It’s like how a very young child will only confess that she’s the one who broke the lamp, because she knows in advance that her parents love her and will forgive her. Even if she’ll still be punished for it, that confidence in being forgiven is what enables her to confess. Now, confession of sin is one that, like the confession of faith, many people today find problematic. As I mentioned at the start of this series, some people think Christianity, or at least some branches of it, go overboard on this whole “wretched sinner” thing. And we’ve probably all encountered that before, along the lines of the infamous Jonathan Edwards sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” in which we are compared to a loathsome insect that God is dangling over a fire. There’s something pathological about such glee over how disgusting we are. After all, good parents know that you don’t raise healthy children by always telling them how incapable they are of doing anything good. And yet even while we know these things, we also know that there is certainly a tendency in us to sin. We can identify with Paul, who says he knows what is the right thing to do and yet cannot do it. We know that we are in need of forgiveness. So even while the confession of sin may sometimes trouble us, we also know that we need to be troubled by it. Now, I don’t want to go into a grand, overarching definition of sin in this sermon. It’s interesting to note that all the creeds say, “we believe in the forgiveness of sins” and not in sin itself. People have been debating what sin is ever since the word was first invented. Instead, I want to go back to that first story in the Bible, the one about the Fall, and see what light it can shed on our need for confession of sin and forgiveness. The Genesis story can be frustrating for us, because it isn’t long on definitions or explanations. It doesn’t define sin or tell us where it came from. We aren’t told where this crafty serpent came from, or how it is that one of God’s creatures, which in the previous chapter we were told was good, now is tempting Eve and Adam into disobedience. But more than telling us what sin is, it shows us what sin does. And what it does is make us want to hide and cover up. As soon as Adam and Eve eat the fruit, what happens? Their eyes are opened, they see that they are naked, and they cover themselves up. Now, lest we get hung up on those fig leaves, notice that the cover-up theme continues. God shows up for an evening stroll, and they hide. This is a second cover-up. “I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid,” says Adam. And God immediately knows what’s going on. “Who told you that you were naked? Who told you that you had something to hide?” God, like all good parents, knows exactly what’s going on. God doesn’t need to ask the question in order to learn the answer. But God wants Adam and Eve to tell the truth, and not to hide it. When they offer no immediate explanation, God asks, “Did you eat that fruit?” And here we come to the third cover-up, known as diversion. Adam passes the buck. “The woman you gave me: she did it.” And Eve says, “Serpent. It was the serpent.” And the poor snake, like the last child in the family who has no one to pass the blame to, is left without the chance to come up with an excuse. But all their attempts to cover-up are pointless. They weren’t able to hide anything from God, who knows the truth anyway. But as a result of the lies, the trust that had previously existed between them and God was broken. Perhaps that is why they were cast out of paradise, because lies have no place in God’s realm. While the story of the Fall is a bit vague in some of those details about what sin is, it shows the effect of sin very clearly – broken trust, cover-ups, and attempts to shift blame. Ironically, ever since this story was first told, people have stilled tried to place blame. It was the serpent’s fault, it was the fault of our original parents, or worst of all, men blaming women for the whole thing. But the story is not about assigning blame, even to the serpent, as if sin is something that exists outside of us, and we have to be infected by an outside source. Rather, the story illustrates that sin has always been part of us, and there’s no point trying to cover it up, just as Eve and Adam were always naked, though they didn’t realize it. But we abhor nakedness. We do not want to be exposed, especially the sinful impulses that exist inside us. However much we may sometimes feel that the church focuses a bit too much on sin, nevertheless even the most good and generous of us still sometimes feel like miserable worms. Maybe not too many of us have committed major crimes like murder, but surely we have all felt murder in our hearts. We have wished our neighbors ill, we have been envious, jealous, selfish. There are all kinds of ways every day that we fall well short of the mark. Sometimes we act on these sinful impulses, and sometimes we don’t. But either way, our awareness of our negative impulses – what we might even call our depravity – eats away at us. The world may think we’re nice people, but in our heart of hearts, we know better. Those hidden secrets become chains that bind our hearts. But what did we learn through our confession of covenant and of faith? We learned that God is the one who sets us free. The confession of sin does not focus on how wretched we are. It focuses rather on the fact that no matter how awful we are capable of being, God sets us free from our bondage to that sinful nature through the power of forgiveness. That freedom means we no longer have to hide. We no longer have to lie and cover-up. It means that trust is possible once more. But this process of being set free does not happen automatically. The Hebrew slaves had to go on a journey in order to become truly free. So we need to confess our sin in order to experience full forgiveness. Remember that confessio means the testimony of a witness. In the confession of sin, we become witnesses against ourselves. This is something we are loath to do. Even the Fifth Amendment of our Bill of Rights says that no one needs to testify against themselves in court. But the church does not let us plead the fifth. The church, rather, insists that we must testify against ourselves. We must reveal what is hidden, so that we can be forgiven, and trust can be restored. Now if there is sometimes a danger that the church can focus too much on sin, there is also the danger that we can focus too much on the forgiveness. This is what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “cheap grace.” In our eagerness to affirm that we have been forgiven, we run the risk of glossing over the uncovering, the confessing of what is hidden. If you run fast enough to the forgiveness part, you can almost ignore the confession part. This concept is well illustrated in that theological film, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Three convicts escape from prison, and while hiding in the woods, they come across a revival meeting. People are heading to the river to be baptized, and one of the convicts, Delmar, runs into the river to join them. The preacher dunks him in the water, and he emerges, beaming and shouting, “Now all my sins have been forgiven! Even that Piggly Wiggly I knocked over in Alabama!” One of his fellow convicts says, “But Delmar, you told us you were innocent of those charges.” Caught, Delmar freezes. “Uh. Well. I lied. But the preacher says that sin’s been washed away, too. Neither God nor man’s got nothing on my now!” To which his friend replies. “That’s fine, Delmar, but I think the state of Alabama might feel differently.” Delmar might be taking his forgiveness a bit lightly, but on the other hand, it did enable him to admit, at least to his friends, what he had previously kept hidden. Trust can be restored, and we can be set free. It takes regular practice, regular confession, and that sinful tendency will always exist in us, but God gives us the power not to be enslaved to it. This is where the story of Jesus’ temptation can be our guide. Now, the church has spent centuries setting up elaborate schemes to keep Jesus free from the taint of our sinful nature. Doctrines like the immaculate conception of Mary were meant to show that Jesus was born without original sin. But the Bible itself says nothing like that. Yes, it says he did not sin, but it also says he was tempted in every way like us. The story of his temptation by the Devil could be told in a way to show how Jesus will always get it right while we will always get it wrong. But we can also read it as Jesus modeling how to resist temptation, and if he can do it, we can, too. The Devil attempts to seduce Jesus by appealing to desires that must have already been in his heart – uncovering what might be hidden. But at each turn, Jesus repeats the story, those confessions of faith and of covenant. And as he makes those confessions, he is able to remember who he is and what he is supposed to be about. He takes those desires, and rather than denying them or hiding them, he reframes them within the context of his covenant with God. Confession
of Faith 20 February 2005 “We
hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable
Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
How many of you know those words? Where do they come from? We almost
take those words for granted, knowing them so well, but consider
for a moment: Is this a scientific document? Are these “unalienable
rights,” are they facts? If you read the Old Testament all the way through, you will see how that basic story of “We were once slaves in Egypt” gets told and retold, and each time it gives people a way to understand their own lives, and each time they add more of their story onto it. So the story gets elaborated on over generations. But the early Christian church did not have generations to create their common story as the Jews did. Christianity sort of sprang up over night, and all kinds of people were touched not only by Jesus in life, but also by what they saw as the resurrected Christ. Paul mentions that the risen Christ appeared to five hundred people. At the Pentecost story in the book of Acts, three thousand people believed Peter’s sermon that day. With so many people catching the Spirit, Christianity spread like – well, like wildfire. But the stories they told varied in the retelling. So they came to ask questions: What does it mean to say Jesus was the Son of God? Is he a man, or a God, or both? And what does it mean to say he is risen? Did his body get up and start walking around again, as usual? Did he rise, but with a different kind of body? Or maybe his body really stayed dead, and the resurrection everyone is talking about is a spiritual one? It was hard for people to know what the story was. Remember that the New Testament wasn’t even assembled until the third century. There are dozens of other gospels out there that weren’t finally included in our canon. How were people to know which ones were trustworthy? So it was that in the fourth century, a Council of Bishops was called to hash things out and agree on what our common witness was. It’s easy for us to look back 1600 years later and complain about the results. And certainly we are right to point out the abuses, as when the creeds become a tool to condemn others rather than a vehicle for praising God. But we are called to make a witness. It’s part of our covenant. God has done mighty things for us, and we are called to teach our children about it. While we should not confuse a confession of faith with faith itself, nevertheless, we need that act of confession. William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, said, “I do not believe in any creed, but I use certain creeds to express, to conserve, and to deepen my belief in God.” Our confession of faith is not a recitation of facts. It is so much more. It is a story that has the power to shape us, the power even to shape history itself. So we must be careful about the story we tell, that it be a story that gives life and not death. Confession
of Covenant 13 February 2005 We all know the hymn, “Amazing Grace,” but the hymnal I grew up with, the old Pilgrim hymnal, did not include it. I knew the hymn, of course, but we never sang it in church. About twelve years ago, my home church created their own hymnal which included “Amazing Grace,” and we sang it one Sunday. But one of the lines was different. Instead of “that saved a wretch like me,” the line read, “that saved and set me free.” Afterward I commented on the change, which I thought watered the hymn down, and my father countered that he had never liked the hymn because of that line. “I’m not a wretch,” he said, “and I don’t like to sing that.” I pointed out that the man who wrote the hymn had been a slave-trader, and if that wasn’t a wretch, then I didn’t know what was. My dad said, “That’s true. But I’m not a slave-trader, and I don’t want to have to sing about what a wretch I am.” Our conversation – which I am not making up – demonstrates the challenge that the concept of sin represents. While we want to acknowledge human fault and failing, the historic Christian obsession with sinfulness seems to border on the pathological. Some modern Christians resent that focus on sin. The Catholic theologian Matthew Fox developed a theology of “original blessing” to supplant our more negative view of “original sin.” People argue over whether or not a confession of sin is appropriate, or whether all the emphasis on how we’re a bunch of unworthy screw-ups is really does us more harm than good. We find ourselves now in the season of Lent, with its traditional focus on penitence for sin, and indeed the prescribed Lectionary readings for today all focus on sin. I’ve been wanting to address this issue about confession of sin for some time, but I read a book by UCC theologian Walter Brueggeman last fall in which he says that there are a whole lot more confessions that just confession of sin. He says that the Bible also includes examples of confession of hope and confession of lament, among others. We should be confessing, he argues, but more than just our sin. He gave me a lot to ponder, and over the next few weeks we will be exploring some of the varieties of confession that mark us as the people of God. Now the very first thing I learned as I began to consider all this, is that the Latin word confessio originally referred to the testimony of faith offered by a martyr. So Stephen’s death speech as he’s about to get pummeled by rocks is the original confession. To confess in a sense means to bear witness, to testify. There are many things that we as Christians bear witness to, so it might seem like confession of faith should come first in our exploration. But as I studied it, I was led to see another confession as existing prior even to the confession of faith. Because our confessions do not start with us: they start with God. The first step, the groundwork, the basis for all our other confessions is the confession of covenant, the relationship between God and ourselves. Without that covenant, there would be no point in making any other confession. The covenant tells us why we should care about making any kind of confession at all. The problem I have with an entirely depersonalized God, a God who is completely alien and different from us, is why in the world should I care? (I recognize not all of you may agree with me on this point! Feel free to correct me after the service.) If God is so completely incomprehensible, then what does such an enigma have to do with me? But the covenant tells us what God has to do with us, and why we should care. The matter is summed up nicely in this passage from Joshua, when the people say, “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord and serve other gods, for it is the Lord our God who brought us from the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.” That’s it right there. That’s why we should care: because God brought us out of slavery. It’s the basis of everything, even the Ten Commandments. The commandments aren’t just general good rules for everyone to follow. They are tied specifically to this God: I am the LORD your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage. Therefore you shall have no other gods before me.” I agree that in many ways God is unknowable, incomprehensible, alien from us. But this one thing we do confess: God is the One who sets us free. The first characteristic of this covenant that we confess is that it has its source in God. It is rooted in God’s own actions. It is not based on our own merits, but on God reaching out to us. A second characteristic is that it demands a response from us, and not just by signing on the dotted line. The covenant asks changes and consequences in our lives, as in those Ten Commandments, “I am the LORD your God who brought you out of Egypt; therefore you shall do these things.” Confessing and keeping this covenant is not an easy task. So we find this wonderful story at the end of the Book of Joshua. Joshua, Moses’ successor, is the one who led the people out of the desert and into the Promised Land. At each stage on their journey toward freedom, they keep repeating the covenant. It was made early on in their journey at Mt. Sinai, where you may recall they had to make it twice, because they broke it the first time almost as soon as Moses could get it down on those stone tablets. For forty years Moses led them through the desert to the very threshold of the Promised Land, and there as he was dying he made them confess the covenant again. “Behold, I set before you the ways of life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore choose life, that you and your descendents may live.” After Moses died, Joshua took over and led them into the Promised Land, where they began the long process of settling in. By the end of the book, Joshua is about to die, and the people will continue on in their new life without him. So he gets them once again to confess the covenant. But he does it in such a brilliant way. He says, “Go ahead, decide now whom you will serve if not God. But me and my house will serve God.” The people immediately reply, “Oh, we will serve God who did all these mighty deeds.” But Joshua refuses to take their word for it. He wants more than mere lip service, so he says, “You can’t serve God. God is holy. God is jealous. God won’t forgive you if you mess up.” Which is not really true, and Joshua certainly knows it, but he’s trying to make a point. And the people say, “No, no, really we will serve God,” and Joshua says, “All right, then. You are witnesses against yourselves.” And there is that word again, “witnesses,” which in Latin would be confessio, or confession. This is a covenant that has consequences for our lives. Therefore it is not something to be entered into lightly. It is something we must choose, not receive by default. The covenant establishes a relationship between us and God, a relationship in which there are moral obligations on both sides. That mutual obligation is important, because it’s the basis for the other confessions that we’ll be discussing in upcoming weeks. Jesus’ farewell speech to the disciples in the gospel of John elaborates on this theme with the analogy of the vine and the branches. The one depends on the other. The branches cannot bear fruit unless they are attached to the vine – but notice that the vine can’t bear fruit without the branches, either. While we wouldn’t usually think of a vine and branches as living together in covenant, nevertheless we can see the importance of the relationship and its mutuality. This is more than just God speaking and the people obeying. There is a sense of needing each other. But this covenant does not only exist between the individual and God. More importantly, it establishes a relationship among ourselves as a community, as Paul picks up on in his letter to the Corinthians. The context of this letter is that there was a lot of fighting and divisiveness in the Corinthian church. It was more than just not get along: people were so obsessed with their own personal piety that they isolated themselves from others in the community, passing judgment on those who interpreted things differently from them. But Paul makes it clear that the covenant that binds us does not require that we all be the same in order for us to live together in true community. The body, he points out, is made up of many different parts, each with its own purpose and value. No one part can do the function of another. Rather, all are needed for the body to be whole. He even goes into a rather earthy description of the “unpresentable’ parts of the body. God bless Paul! He doesn’t ignore any of the implications of his metaphor! The parts of the body are not all the same, and some may be more presentable than others, but all are needed. If one suffers, all suffer together. If one is honored, all are honored together. In other words, the covenant binds our fate to one another, so we’d better pay attention to how we treat even the weakest and most apparently “undesirable” people in our community. Because if we start hacking off limbs in the name of conformity, then the body will be in big trouble. This is what covenant means for the body of Christ: It means we can’t live without each other. It means all of us have a role to play. The covenant that binds us to God is not passive; it requires mutual responsibility. The same with the covenant that binds us to each other. This is indeed a very tall order, and we might well agree with Joshua who wondered whether the Hebrews were really up to the challenge. But Joshua should have more faith in the covenant. For when one of us is weak, others can be strong. We bear one another up: God and us, and us with each other. Lightweights
on the Mountain Top 6 February 2005 Several years ago there was a series of TV shows on “The Secrets of Magic Revealed.” It was done with typical sensationalism: the magician wore a mask and his voice was digitally altered. With each new show he’d go on about how his fellow magicians were all furious with him, all but implying that he’d received death threats. Both television and print media debated the ethics of the show and the fact that this guy was violating the sacred oath of magicians never to reveal their secrets. Looking back on it now, you have to wonder what the fuss was all about. This was a lot of hubbub over something that was literally no more than smoke and mirrors. All this fuss over the desire to protect an illusion, something that is not real. It reminds me of the words of Peter, “We did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.” For alas, aficionados of magic tricks are not the only people who grow dependent on their illusions. People of faith can do it, too. Think about the magician’s tricks: sleight of hand, smoke and mirrors, the old bait and switch, but above all the art of misdirection, making the audience think that their attention should be on this hand, when it really should be on this one. Unfortunately, these same tactics get applied in many other areas of life where they become “cleverly devised myths” that conceal the truth, especially truths about power. Think of how the bible has been used to justify slavery, saying, “It’s all based on the story of Ham, Shem, and Japheth. You can’t question it.” And religious knowledge is not the only kind to be so abused. Even science was employed to show how black people were inferior to whites. The arguments were given the veneer of unquestionable authority, but in the end it amounted to nothing more than “cleverly devised myths,” smoke and mirrors designed to hide the truth: that slavery was an unjust institution perpetrated against one group of people by another for the benefit of the powerful. Never underestimate the power of “smoke and mirrors,” because I saw the guy on the TV show make an entire elephant disappear that way. Our scriptures today refer to God’s glory. The word in Hebrew, chabod, means weight. It means substance, true substance, real substance. The connotation continues even today in English. Think of the slightly archaic phrase, “Man, that’s heavy” – used to refer to something grave, serious, important. And then think of what it means to take something lightly – in other words, to treat something without the gravity that it deserves. The glory of God on the mountaintop with Moses, and generations later with Moses, Jesus, and Elijah at the transfiguration, is a weighty matter. But Peter misinterprets the meaning. He’s so caught up in the fireworks, he thinks the proper response is to set up a tent and stay on the mountain. In his case, no one was deliberately deceiving him, but he still managed to be distracted from what was really important. Peter is not the first person to mistake the glory of God for mere show, to get distracted by the lightweight and miss the heavy. As I did research for this sermon I found another story about glory – about chabod – from the time of Samuel. You remember Samuel the prophet. As a little boy, he served in the tent of God’s presence where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. Now the high priest at that time was named Eli, and he had two rascally sons that served with him. For example, when people brought meat to be offered to God, Eli’s sons skimmed the choicest pieces off the top for themselves. Sound familiar? Surely you’ve heard of situations where ministers or church leaders skinned off the people’s offerings. Another thing Eli’s sons did was sleep with the women who served at the tent. That kind of abuse, alas, sounds all too familiar to us as well. As a result of this corruption, the Philistine army attacked the Israelites. They killed both of Eli's sons and stole the Ark of the Covenant. When Eli, who was 98 years old, heard the news, the shock of it killed him. The wife of one of the slain sons was pregnant, and when she heard the news, she went into early labor. She gave birth to a son, and she named him I-chabod. Ichabod – no glory – where had God’s glory gone? – the glory of God has departed. But what glory was she really mourning? The loss of the ark? The loss of two worthless men who abused their position of privilege and trust? Was she bemoaning the loss of her “cleverly devised myths” that covered up the abuse of power? Did she truly understand who the glory of God had been lost? Because as the people of Israel came to learn, the glory of God is not located in the Ark of the Covenant. Yes, Moses received the covenant on stone tables on Mt. Sinai, and those tablets were kept in the ark. But the true covenant is written not on tablets of stone, but on our hearts. The presence of God is not in the ark or the tent or the temple; the presence of God is in us. The glory of God is not in a place or a thing, but in our own encounter with God – the real thing, the weighty thing that matters. That glory was lost in the story of Eli’s sons. But it was lost in a cleverly devised myth of priesthood which protected the power of a privileged class who in turn exploited and abused others for their own gain. We today can probably identify with Ichabod’s mother’s feeling of loss. We too are concerned about an increasing irreverence in our world. Our churches seem to be declining; people view organized religion with suspicion, even scorn. We are concerned about the loss of values that this weightlessness represents. And in an effort to halt the loss of glory, some people want to tighten their grip on what they thing is holy and sacred. They insist on a literal reading of the Bible, on beliefs such as creationism or the Virgin Birth, claiming that these are essential truths handed to us by God that we must not compromise on. Or they begin to impose strict rules of interpretation or practice, insisting that all churches in their denomination follow the same standard. But as important as doctrine and practice are, is that really where God’s glory lies? Does God’s glory really lie in church rules? For that matter, does God’s glory really reside in the bible, a book? Could these extreme efforts by churches to impose particular standards, actually be a bunch of cleverly devised myths that conceal the real truth? One wonders as churches fight and squabble over certain social and doctrinal issues, is what they’re really concerned about their loss of members and money and power? Are these denominational studies and votes and arguments – are they sleight of hand and misdirection, smoke and mirrors that obscure the truth? I don’t doubt their sincerity, but I have to ask, is that really where the glory of God is to be found, in church rules and rigid interpretations of the bible? Well, what does the Bible itself say? We heard it last week: what does the Lord require of you? (answers) And what did Jesus saw was the greatest commandment? And the second like it? This is where the glory of God is found. This is the weighty stuff, the true substance. Anything else, however important in its own way, is lightweight in comparison. The glory of God is found in the real encounter with God, as Moses and Jesus encountered God on the mountaintop. The weight of the sacred imprints itself on our hearts in a covenant that binds us to God and to one another, a covenant that is expressed in how we treat one another, that we love one another as we love God. Let us not be Ichabods, attributing ultimate significance to lesser things. Let us not be deceived by cleverly devised myths and sleights of hand that distract us and hide the truth. Let us not mourn the loss of illusion. Is we have lost the glory of God, the good news is that we may find it in our own hearts when we as God’s people gather together in Christian love. God’s glory is never far from us, but our eyes must be open if we hope to see it. Upside
Down 30 January 2005 Our Lectionary passages today are some very well loved ones. Certainly the Beatitudes, so poetic and lovely and moving, and also the Micah 6:8 verse, well loved among social gospel types: “With what shall I come before the LORD, and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old?”… God has told you, O mortal, what is good; and what does the LORD require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God? We love these passages and derive a certain amount of smug self-satisfaction from them. Because of course we are not the kind who place such emphasis on empty religious ritual. We are the ones who focus on the doing justice and the loving kindness and the walking humbly bit. We’re in Jesus’ camp on this. Or so we like to believe. So everyone likes to believe about himself or herself. But it’s hard for us to read these passages very deeply. We know them so well and love them so much that our brains almost slide right off them without going deeper. Yes, yes, “Blessed are the meek.” That’s me, I’m totally meek. I’m a peacemaker, I hunger and thirst for righteousness’ sake. We read through the beatitudes to see which one or ones describe us, as if we’re seeking for God’s blessing for ourselves. And in so doing, we lose sight of the challenge of these passages. Rather, we would do well to keep in mind Paul’s admonition in the letter to the Corinthians, for surely we should read everything in the Bible with this perspective: “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God.” That’s a bit tougher to swallow. It reminds us not to trust in our own sense of wisdom, because we are masters of self-deceit. Let’s take that Micah passage. Oh sure, the images are lovely, but we need to keep in mind that Micah was turning the entire concept of religion on its head. Ancient Judaism was based on rituals of sacrifice in order to atone and be pure. If you’ve ever slogged your way through the book of Leviticus, you’d get an idea of just how important sacrifice was in the ritual life of Judaism. These were supposedly the very commands of God. You couldn’t just decide not to participate in the ritual of sacrifice. If you refused to participate, you were anathema, unclean, cast out of good Jewish society. So for Micah to say, “God has told you what is good, and it ain’t sacrifice” – that was a seriously blasphemous statement. It was all very well and good to do justice and love kindness and all that, but if you weren’t offering sacrifices, then you weren’t Jewish. Period. End of discussion. It’s a bit hard for us to figure out what the analogy would be today. What do we see as the most central, crucial ritual act of our identity? It would probably be our sacraments of baptism and communion. Now, we’ve been talking in past weeks about how those sacraments can sometimes become rituals of exclusion, saying who is in and who is out. But we in this church practice a fully open communion. We do not require people to be baptized in order to receive communion; we don’t even require baptism of church members. This puts us out of step with the vast majority of other Christians. So perhaps we might get a bit smug about that. But again I would urge caution, lest we think we are so very much wiser than everyone else. How do we in our church life at Spirit of Peace possibly embrace worldly wisdom instead of God’s foolishness? How do we let our religious rituals, open as they are, become a bulwark of self-righteousness, keeping us from doing justice, loving kindness and walking humbly with our God? It’s a question worthy of deep reflection, one we should constantly ask of ourselves. I doubt that I have all the answers, but one way I can think of is our acceptance of the culture of wealth and success around us. I think we Americans have a unique challenge, precisely because our country embraces the separation of church and state. Our country at its most ideal embraces good, noble, gospel-sounding principles like equality and fairness and liberty. We believe in equal opportunities for everyone, and have created a pantheon of rights to protect the individual’s “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Sure, we don’t always live up to it, but I really believe in those principles. I believe that the basic cores of American values are good ones. I think this is a great country. But I have to remind myself that it is not the Realm of God that Jesus spent so much time talking about. It seems awfully close, though, and we get fooled by how close it is. But let’s look at those Beatitudes. Ask yourself: how many of these qualities are valued in American society? Let’s take meekness. Are meek people honored in our society? Can you imagine a meek person running for political office? For that matter, what would happen to a meek resume in your workplace? American values initiative, self-confidence, ingenuity. People who give advice about job-hunting or writing resumes tell you by all means, don’t be meek under any circumstances! You cannot be meek if you want to get ahead in this world. You have to be able to compete, to be aggressive. But Jesus says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” That’s not an American principle. “Blessed are the merciful.” We pay lip service to the kindergarten lesson of play nice with others, but what really happens to a merciful person in our society? Are they seen as weak, soft? Unable to respect discipline? Mercy sounds too much like a free ride in American culture. People are expected to work for their reward and take their licks without complaint. But Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” Or “Blessed are the poor in spirit.” Now, you know that Luke has a different version of the Beatitudes, a more earthy version, that reads simply, “Blessed are the poor; blessed are those who hunger.” We in the Micah 6:8, social-gospel type liberal churches tend to like Luke’s version a bit better, but I think we can learn something from both versions, because not all poverty is material. What does “poor in spirit” mean? Hopeless? Despairing? Perhaps it could mean people suffering from depression or other such conditions, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, attention deficit disorder. At least our society now recognizes that these are genuine illnesses, and not a situation where a person just needs to get over it. But what does it mean to be a person dependent on medications in order to be “normal”? How does our society still view people who must take such medications? And how does that differ from Jesus’ promise, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven”? All of the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the pure in heart, blessed are the peacemakers” – they all turn our society’s expectations on their head, just as surely as Micah did to the Jewish concept of sacrifice. These people aren’t just folks you tolerate, Jesus says. They aren’t people to be pitied or tolerated while the go-getters enjoy the spoils of their own labor. These aren’t people to be paid lip service to, while the rest of us scramble in the dog-eat-dog world. These are the people whom God calls blessed. These are the people whom God honors. The ones who mourn, the ones who are persecuted, the ones who are meek and poor in spirit. I’ve no doubt that each and every one of us here embodies at least one if not more of the beatitude qualities. But the gospel isn’t about self-righteousness. It’s about that charge in Micah 6:8, “Do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God.” So think about people you know, where you work or study, where you play and live. Really look around you and see the people, see them as God sees them. Who are the blessed ones? Who are the ones who hunger and thirst, who are pure in spirit, who are peacemakers? Don’t see them as our society does, the ones who will probably never make much of themselves because they’re not tough enough to play the game. See them as God does: the ones who are honored and precious. See them as God does. And for your part, learn the lesson of foolishness that they can teach you. For your part, when you see these blessed ones, ask yourself how you can do justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with your God in the company and companionship of such people? For that is the place of true sacrament, even more than baptism and communion can ever be. 16 January 2005 Our gospel reading today continues from the baptism story, but we jumped from the Gospel of Matthew last week to the Gospel of John this week. That is because in all the other gospels, the first thing Jesus does after being baptized is head into the desert for forty days of temptation. But John skips that part and goes right from the baptism into the calling of the first disciples. Maybe that’s because John doesn’t seem to want to admit that Jesus ever got baptized at all, and therefore he would be hesitant to show Jesus actually experiencing temptation. At any rate, we’re picking up on the call of the disciples right after Jesus’ baptism. And that’s not a bad place to go. For just as last week I talked about how Jesus’ baptism becomes our own baptism, likewise his call becomes our own. In the gospels, baptism and call are related. Now today baptism is often associated with salvation. This is true whether it’s infants or adults being baptized. In traditions that baptize infants, the popular conception is that this keeps the kids out of hell if they die. Now, in my opinion, that’s really bad theology, but it has been the way many people see it. So for example in the Catholic tradition, baptism is the only sacrament that can be performed by anyone, including women. This was because if a child died shortly after birth, the priest might not be able to make it there on time to perform the baptism. So anyone was authorized to baptize in an emergency situation. This view of baptism as a “get out of hell free” card remains strong in the popular mind, and it surprises me how many of my old school friends who are now parents, have expressed a desire to have their children baptized. Even though they are not religious, they want some “after-life insurance” for their kids. The connection between baptism and salvation is even stronger in traditions that baptize adults, where the formula goes: you acknowledge that you are a sinner, you ask Jesus into your heart, you get saved, and then you get baptized. Granted that this is a simplified view of both traditions, but the fact remains that many people associate salvation with “getting out of hell free.” Salvation is seen as an act of relevance to the individual, saving your skin without you having to do anything about it. But the Bible sees salvation more as a corporate act. Yes, individuals get saved in the Bible, but that salvation takes place within a context of community. In other words, once you get saved, you have to continue God’s saving work. It’s not a condition of salvation, but it is a consequence. The connection is seen quite strongly in our psalm for the day: ” I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; see, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O God. I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation;…I have not concealed them from the great congregation.” Over and over in the Bible, when someone gets saved, they are immediately called to a task, a task that involves serving God’s mission of salvation to the whole world. Joseph is rescued time and again from threats to his life in order that he might one day save his people during a time of great famine; Moses is saved from exile after he murdered an Egyptian so that he can go back and lead the people to freedom. People encounter God in Jesus and are called to follow him and continue the work of salvation. So it is for us: we are saved, but not for our own safety’s sake. We are saved so that we can continue God’s mission. This is a tricky thing to do, because it can take on the air of judgmentalism. We all know what it’s like to be collared by a stranger at our door asking, “Have you been saved?” Some people say that since we have been given a “get out of hell free” card by Jesus, we ought also to hand out those cards to other people. And there can be a legitimate place for that, because some people really do need a “get out of hell free” card. But remember, we’re not called to pass judgment on others. We’re not called to say who is saved and who isn’t. We’re called to testify, as the Psalmist does about the glad news of deliverance. Because we have experienced salvation, we are called to bear witness that God is indeed capable of saving us, which is good news indeed in this world. But alas, we do not always want to testify to what God is capable of doing. Churches are especially reluctant to testify on an issue that they deem “too controversial.” And I don’t just mean on the big social issues of the day, like gay rights and the war. But even issues like domestic violence or abusive clergy: things that we all would agree are wrong, yet churches are often strangely reluctant to talk about them, because they might upset people. I can’t tell you how many ministers have told me that they censor themselves in the pulpit. There are subjects they refuse to bring up, refuse to address, because “people in the pew wouldn’t want to hear it.” It’s pretty sad to hear a minister say something like that. And I don’t have to tell you all about how churches often clam up like the three legendary monkeys: see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. That sounds like a wise plan, except that it leaves the church blind, deaf, and mute. Instead, the Church leaves society to deal with the controversial, messy issues of the day, while the Church lags behind in the name of tranquility, only finally addressing the issue when it’s no longer an issue for the rest of society. Certainly it’s understandable that churches don’t want to antagonize people (especially their own members), but we cannot sacrifice our calling in the interest of preserving tranquility. Yesterday was Martin Luther King’s birthday, and we would always do well to listen to him and heed his example. He was man who understood the importance of that call to bear witness, to testify to the saving work that God can do. As a black man in the American South, he could have used a “get out of hell free” card for the hell that was society at that time. He tells about what it was like for him as a child to see his father, an educated minister, called “boy” by whites, to hear his mother referred to be her last name, without the respectful title “Mrs.” It was a society designed to destroy the dignity of blacks. But Dr. King was indeed saved from this hell. His dignity came from his faith, his sense of being a beloved child of God. Like Isaiah, he could say, “The LORD called me before I was born, [God] formed in the womb to be his servant.” He knew that he was somebody. But he didn’t see that salvation as something that existed for him alone. He saw that salvation as inextricably bound to his call to continue God’s mission. Because he knew he had dignity as a child of God, he felt called to recognize the dignity in all other people: and not only blacks, but whites as well. Not only in the south, but also in the north. Not only in this country, but all over the world. He didn’t restrict his call to bear witness. Rather, he always increased his witness, again echoing Isaiah, “It is too light a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.” Thus says the LORD, the Redeemer of Israel and his Holy One, to one deeply despised, abhorred by the nations, the slave of rulers, “Kings shall see and stand up, princes, and they shall prostrate themselves, because of the LORD, who is faithful, the Holy One of Israel, who has chosen you.” But
he knew very well how the churches often shirk their duty to participate
in God’s saving mission. In fact, I want to give you all a
homework assignment. At this time of year, everyone tends to talk
about Dr. King’s dream, but tonight I want you to go home
and look up the Letter from a Birmingham Jail. And what you will
notice when reading it, is that it is not addressed to Governor
Wallace or Bull Conner. It’s not addressed to the Ku Klux
Klan, or the white protesters who held up signs saying, “Segregation
now, segregation forever.” Instead, that letter is addressed
to the white moderate and liberal churches, the ones who acknowledged
that the civil rights movement was a just cause, yet who refused
to say it out loud or act on it. They called Dr. King an agitator
who was riling people up, and they urged restraint and caution.
But Dr. King knew that they were speaking out of fear, not out of
a conviction of God’s saving work. He speaks about his disappointment
in the churches’ inability to take a stand, but he also issues
them an invitation, much as Jesus himself did. For the fate of the
civil rights movement did not rest in the hands of any church, but
of God. He wrote, “I hope the church as a whole will meet
the challenge of this decisive hour. But even if the church does
not come to the aid of justice, I have no despair about the future.
I have no fear about the outcome of our struggle in Birmingham,
even if our motives are at present misunderstood. We will reach
the goal of freedom in Birmingham, and all over the nation, because
the goal of America is freedom…. We will win our freedom because
the sacred heritage of our nation and the eternal will of God are
embodied in our echoing demands.” Anointed
Servants 9 January 2005 In the 1990s, evangelistic t-shirts became quite popular. I don’t see them as much any more, but it used to be you couldn’t go into a mall without seeing scores of kids wearing so-called Christian t-shirts with in-your-face messages. For example, that old classic, “Why is Satan ugly? ‘Cuz Jesus beat him with a stick.” (As in the cross, in case you don’t get it.) Or another one I remember was a burly, macho Jesus wearing a crown of thorns and an enormous cross on his back. He was on the ground, holding himself up by his arms. Was it a depiction of one of the Stations of the Cross on the Via Dolorosa? Or was it an exercise routine? Apparently the latter, because the shirt belligerently proclaimed, “Bench press this!” As entertaining as those shirts were in their own disturbing way, I’m not sorry to see them go. The pumped up, steroid-enhanced Jesus of those shirts bore little resemblance to the suffering servant described in the book of Isaiah. “He will not cry or lift up his voice (or wear obnoxious t-shirts); a bruised reed he will not break, and a dimly burning wick he will not quench.” So much for using the cross as a club for beating up Satan. But the macho, triumphal King Jesus has long appealed to Christians. It’s as if we either fetishize the suffering servant, a la Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ,” or we deny it by focusing on Jesus’ kick-butt qualities. We seem to have a hard time with how Jesus is portrayed in the gospels: powerful, yes, but altogether unlike how the world sees power. And Jesus’ baptism illustrates the conundrum quite well, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. Jesus’ baptism is his anointing. It’s the public act signaling that he is the Messiah, the Son of God. These titles are not unique to Jesus in the Bible. In fact, they are used to describe the king. The story of his baptism says that Jesus is indeed the king, but he is unlike any other king. There is no pomp and pageantry as at a coronation. No golden crown, no display of wealth, no obsequious courtiers. In fact, the gospel writers seem to be rather embarrassed by the event. Mark, typically, is the most straightforward, simply saying that Jesus was baptized by John. Matthew, our gospel for today, issues a disclaimer, having John say, “I should be baptized by you, yet you come to me?” Luke tries to hide it by focusing instead on John’s preaching, and then giving the toss-away line, “Now when all the people had been baptized (and Jesus also was baptized.)” The gospel of John, however, plays so coy with the whole story that it’s hard to tell whether Jesus actually gets baptized at all. One of the rules of thumb of bible scholarship is that if the writers seem embarrassed by it, odds are good that it actually happened. They include the story because it is true, even though they wish it weren’t. I’ll admit to being one of those people confused by why Jesus was baptized. Isn’t he supposed to be sinless? Isn’t he top dog? Why then submit to baptism? It seems totally incongruous. Yet this is the form that Jesus’ anointing took. This is the way his specialness was proclaimed, not through a grandiose display like the kings of old, but through this humble, penitent act, an act not of lordship but of servant hood. Whatever the term “Son of God” means in our minds, here it is being associated with a Jesus who seems fully a part of the ordinary human condition: the condition of being imperfect, sinful, and in need of cleansing forgiveness. The T-shirt Jesus is a tough act to live up to. It’s hard to ask the question “What would Jesus do?” when he’s seen as the supernatural Son of God, with amazing cosmic powers to walk on water and raise the dead. I have a hard enough time just trying to love my neighbors, let alone my enemies. If we have such a glorified image of Jesus, it’s hard to see what he has to do with us. But in the baptism story, Jesus isn’t the beloved son because he is different from us. He is the beloved son because he is just like us. No one can be said to be beneath Jesus, because Jesus stood in the place of the unwashed sinner, the outsider, the one in need of forgiveness. Baptism as John practiced it had at least two meanings. First of all, it was the way by which converts entered into the people of God. To this day, converts to Orthodox Judaism go through a ritual bath. The fact that John baptized in the Jordan River had at least two powerful connotations for the Jews, for it was the Jordan River that the people had to pass through in order to enter into the promised land. And before that, the people had to pass through the Red Sea in order to leave their slavery behind and become the people of God. So baptism is the act by which outsiders become part of God’s people. But baptism as John and others, such as the Essenes, practiced it, also meant a cleansing of sin. Just as we wash our hands or our bodies in order to get clean, baptism represents a cleansing of the soul. All the dirtiness of our sin and brokenness is washed away as we are forgiven and declared pure and clean. We can argue whether or not Jesus ever sinned, but the point is, he went through this ritual as a sign that his ministry was to the outcast and the sinner, to those who were excluded from holiness. This act of solidarity is the one that caused God to proclaim him “the beloved Son.” But the significance doesn’t end there, because this anointing of Jesus through baptism becomes an anointing that we all share. Only a king has a coronation, but all people who have followed Jesus are invited to share in his same baptism. His messiahship becomes our own. Through baptism, we too become the Messiah, the anointed one, the beloved sons and daughters of God. And as such, we likewise inherit his mission, the one proclaimed in Isaiah, “to be a light to the nations, to open the eyes that are blind, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon.” Some of us remember our own baptisms. Some of us chose for ourselves to be baptized, but others of us were baptized as babies, long before we could make that choice ourselves. It might seem like our baptism is less meaningful because we didn’t choose it and maybe can’t even remember it. But the anointed people in the Bible never choose it for themselves. Whether it was the king Saul who tried to avoid Samuel by hiding among the donkeys, or Moses standing on Mt. Sinai saying, “You can’t choose me! I stutter!” Or the prophet Isaiah himself, lamenting, “I am a man of unclean lips!” Over and over in the Bible we see that the ones who are chosen did not volunteer themselves: from the Hebrew slaves laboring in Egypt, all the way up to Jesus’ own disciples. It is always God who does the choosing, and the chosen often resist. God frequently chooses the least likely, the most inept. Yet through them, God brings blessing and healing into the world. So whether we chose our baptism or not is irrelevant. However and whenever we were baptized, the fact is that God chose us. Jesus’ baptism becomes our own. His role as servant Messiah is one that is in turn laid on our own shoulders. It’s a far cry from the T-shirt Jesus, but it’s a Jesus that I for one would want to follow. 2 January 2005 Here we are, at another New Year. I don’t feel like I was done with the old one yet, but the expiration date has definitely passed. So a new year, and that means it’s time for New Year’s resolutions. Did you ever notice how New Year’s resolutions never seem to change? Probably 95% of resolutions are along the lines of: I resolve to exercise more and eat less; I resolve to lose weight, quit smoking or quit drinking; I resolve to spend more time with my family; I resolve to work harder with my job or my studies. The only real mystery about resolutions is how long it will take for us to break them. Yet despite a history of broken resolutions, people keep making them – often making the same ones. Because this year it will be different. This year I’ll really stick with it. And more importantly they are worthwhile resolutions to make. But where does this desire to make New Year’s resolutions come from? What lies behind the impulse? Why do we even think of the new year in terms of turning over a new leaf? It actually reflects a radical way of thinking. The ancients believed that time was a circle. They saw the cycle of the seasons, the path of the sun and moon and stars in the sky, and what they saw was that everything always returns to the same point and then begins the journey all over again. Winter is always followed by spring, which is followed by summer, and then along comes fall, and then we’re back in winter again. There may be the odd warm spell in winter, or a cold snap in the summer, but the general pattern of the seasons remains unchanging. Same with the sky. The sun always rises in the east and sets in the west. The only time it alters from that course is when we’re holding the map upside down. This circular view of time affected how people viewed history and the social world around them. If there is a war now, it will be followed by peace. If we are healthy now, there will be a plague. There is a cycle to things, and we can’t change them, so our purpose is to stick it out through the bad times until the good times come again. This made for a very static society, because if you were born a king, then that was simply your destiny and nothing could change that. If you were born a slave, then that was your destiny and nothing could change that. The purpose of the gods was to keep this wheel of life turning properly, so that everything would unfold as it was supposed to. But the Jews came along with a radically different view of time. They thought time was a line, not a circle. This meant that things could change and progress. God breaks into history and interrupts the circle. There were a group of slaves in Egypt, but God rescued them and made them a free people. Their lot improved. The social order was no longer inevitable. And people’s lives were not inevitable either. People could change. If you viewed time as a line rather than a circle, then people could repent, they could be forgiven, they could start anew, they could resolve to do better. And that, in a very simplistic way, is where New Year’s resolutions come from: the belief that, with God’s help, we can change our own future. But those very New Year’s resolutions contain a kind of contradiction, the paradox that though we can change our future, we never quite manage to actually do so. So we end up repeating the cycle of making the same resolutions and then breaking them every year. Because this is the dilemma of believing that time is a line: we want that line to always go up. We want things to get better, to improve. We want that line to go forward and not backward. But sometimes the line goes down, or backward, and it’s very hard for us not to fall into the old belief that the more things change, the more they stay the same. So why bother trying any more? Life is just a circle. In fact, this sermon sounds like more of the same, too. Has anyone noticed how often I’ve been preaching on this theme lately? This dilemma of: has it really gotten any better? I’ve been struggling with this question all fall, as many of you have. So it keeps coming up in my sermons because it’s what I’m really wrestling with. And I hope it is not completely irrelevant to each of you. But you may be assured that I’ve got a different theme in mind for Lent, so hopefully that will be a nice chance. But in the meanwhile I keep looking at everything in my life and all around me, and I ask myself what is the gospel here? Where is God at work? How is God still speaking? And it occurred to me that a lot of our despair and malaise could be classic signs of the dark night of the soul. This concept was expressed by the 16th century Spanish mystic, John of the Cross. The mystics sought to teach people how to achieve union with God. They presented all kinds of steps and programs and disciplines for cultivating one’s spirituality, with the aim of achieving ultimate union with God. Their view was much like a line, one that ascended ever higher and higher to heaven. But John of the Cross warned that there would come a time in your spiritual life when the line would seem to turn downward. Like many mystics, he used romantic imagery to talk about the soul’s union with God, and when we first start out, it’s like falling in love. You become enamored of your lover. You want to spend all your time with them. Your lover is always beautiful. Everything your lover says is wise or witty. Your lover is the pinnacle of perfection, possessing every grace. And all those feelings of love and joy and delight come easily – they seem to flow directly from your lover. The spiritual analogy would be that of a convert, someone just coming to faith or returning to it after a long absence. You know how converts are: delving deep into their new faith, maybe studying the Bible or reading books, going to church, and taking it all so sincerely. Faith is a joy, because it is so much about discovery, encountering these great truths for the first time. Then you may decide to make a commitment with your lover. Now you have to work at it a bit more. There are preparations to make, plans to execute, counseling and reflection. You have to examine your relationship with your lover and come face to face with some realities that are not always pleasant. But at the same time, you are still filled with joy for the new life that lies ahead of you with your lover. The spiritual equivalent would be the person maturing in faith who now has to acknowledge that there are some flaws in religion. Christians aren’t always loving or just, the Church makes grievous mistakes and sometimes is even on the side of wrong. You acknowledge these flaws, but you are still committed to your faith. But then comes the dark night of the soul. This is like when you’ve been with your lover for a long time, and it isn’t all about romance and stars any more. There are bills to pay, ordinary life decisions that must be made. You already know everything there is to know about your love, so there is no longer any joy of discovery. All the things you used to think were witty, you’ve now heard a hundred times and you’re getting sick of them. The spark of your love seems to have gone out, and you start wondering why you’re still with that person. John of the Cross says that the same thing happens in our spiritual life. We reach a point when our faith no longer gives us the joy it once did. The hymns no longer lift us up, worship no longer inspires us, our prayers seem rote and routine. We don’t feel that spiritual flame we once did. It all seems like a chore. We start to wonder if God even exists anymore. God is not still speaking. Instead, God feels absent. It’s what Jesus experienced when he cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” I think we are in something of a dark night now. I hear the conversations among our church members, and even among others outside our church. We may not phrase it in quite this way, but there is a sense of despair, of things not getting any better, of truth and justice being a sham, unattainable. The line doesn’t move forward, it just goes in circles. Nothing really ever changes, nothing gets better. But John says that far from being absent, God is closer to us in this dark night than ever before. Again, think of our romantic analogy. Are we in love with our lover? Or are we just in love with being in love? Was it the feelings of joy and delight that we desired, or was it our lover? The lover is the same person throughout – but the dark night gives us the chance to understand the true nature of our love. So it is with the spiritual life. Do we want it always to be a high? Do we want to always feel delight and joy in worship? Do we want hope to come easily to us? In that case, what is it we truly believe in? This is of course not to say that joy and delight are bad things: but they are the fruit of faith, not the source of it. In the dark night of the soul, when all the comforts of faith have been stripped away, that is when we finally encounter what it is that God truly has to offer. “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the light of all people. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it.” What God offers is not joy and spiritual ecstasy and a line that is always going forward, always going up. What God offers, what God is, is life itself. A spark of divine light that exists within all of us, always, all the time. That light shines in the darkness – the darkness of despair, the dark night of the soul – and the darkness does not ever overcome it. In this famous prologue, the gospel writer is reaching back to before the dawn of time, and yet also is looking forward to the crucifixion. What he assures us here is that even in Jesus’ crucifixion, even in the apparent death of God herself, that spark of life never stopped shining. Yes, time is like a circle. We’ll go through highs and lows, good times and bad. We might even get crucified. But through it all, we have the divine spark of life to guide us, like a golden thread, a line leading us through those endless circles and showing us the way forward. A light that the darkness cannot ever overcome.
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