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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 |
